Grist

Google has come up with a way to better map Earth’s disasters, predict them, and be able to track which communities and ecosystems are going to be harmed. If you want to find out what’s straining the environment in your neck of the woods, all you have to do is ask.

Google Earth AI, a fusion of Google’s Earth and Gemini AI systems, was introduced in July. Part of that effort is an AI model called AlphaEarth Foundations, which turns terabytes of satellite data into useful data layers tracking the history of what happens across the surface of the planet.

The combined system lets users parse historical landscape data that can reveal great shifts in the climate over the years. For example, users can look at rising water levels in flood zones, chart changes in surface temperatures across regions of the planet, or see the effects of clean air policies by studying changes in air pollution.

Now, Google has revealed new capabilities coming to its Earth AI platform. Users can now interact with the AI model by asking it questions like you would with a chatbot. An example Google gave was asking Earth AI to “find algae blooms” to help monitor water supplies. The system will search satellite images and its troves of collected data to give a list of results.

Text searches access multiple data layers in Google Earth to fetch a list of results. Courtesy of Google

To run these queries, Google is using a Gemini-powered geospatial reasoning model to combine Earth AI models with other models tracking weather, population data, imagery, and historical data to identify patterns in how disasters or other widespread events affect the world. The hope is that the model will be able to predict not only where a hurricane is headed, but also which communities are most likely to shoulder the effects.

The new chatbot capabilities will only be available for users on Google Earth’s professional subscription plans, which Google introduced this month. The Professional tier, which lets users access more advanced data layers like surface temperature and elevation contours, starts at $75 per month. The Professional Advanced tier is $150. Some core Google Earth features, like the ability to see a time-lapse video of certain parts of the globe, are available on all plans, including the free standard version of Google Earth.

This release marks the latest effort by Google to show off its climate-awareness bonafides. The company has previously partnered with satellite manufacturers to better monitor disasters like wildfires from low Earth orbit. The company has also joined up with researchers to create a database logging the activity of the world’s power plants. Maybe Google’s efforts to curb environmental devastation will eventually offset the impacts of AI’s ever-growing energy needs.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Google Earth gets an AI chatbot to help chart the climate crisis on Nov 1, 2025.

Last June, record flooding swept through the rural town of Rock Valley, Iowa. As the wall of water began to overtake Chelsie Ver Mulm’s 10-acre plot of land, she rushed into action, rapidly evacuating her family’s gaggle of cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses, and goats to higher ground. When the floodwaters receded, Ver Mulm returned to find much of her family’s farm, equipment, and pasture destroyed. In the days and weeks that followed, over a dozen animals died from stress and diseases contracted from the flood. 

From there, the costs of rebuilding continued to climb. Because the flood had ravaged the surrounding areas, Orange Creek Farms also lost many of its customers, who were grappling with damages of their own and could no longer afford to buy local food. All the while, Ver Mulm kept applying to emergency USDA loans and disaster relief programs — only to be denied again and again, as the tiny operation confronted burdensome application issues and eligibility restrictions. 

Because of the steep costs of recovery, the farm has fallen behind on its bills, and caring for a bigger herd became too expensive. Now, Orange Creek Farms is down from 40 cattle to just four. All told, the flood put the business in a “really, really bad spot,” according to Ver Mulm. So in April, almost a year after the flood, she made a last-ditch effort to turn things around, applying for a USDA Rural Development grant that she was hoping could help them offset their losses and keep the business afloat. 

When the government shutdown began over a month ago, the USDA furloughed the vast majority of the its workforce that was left, and brought most services to a sudden halt. Ver Mulm still hadn’t heard back about her application — and now the waiting is itself becoming the problem.

As the shutdown nears a historic, yet grim, milestone, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it has already created financial losses of at least $7 billion for the U.S. economy. Battling some of the most consequential impacts of these losses are those who grow and sell the food we eat — especially the farmers and ranchers also dealing with the compounding effects of extreme weather and an eroding federal safety net. 

Approximately 20,000 Department of Agriculture staffers have lost their jobs this year — a rapid and radical transformation of the agency resulting in administrative struggles, overworked employees, and significant delays in processing of payments and financial assistance applications. This summer, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released a controversial reorganization plan that experts expect to result in further staff reductions and a skeleton workforce. The USDA announced last week that approximately 2,100 county-level USDA Farm Service Agency offices would be reopened beginning Thursday, October 23, with two staffers reinstated per office, to help farmers get access to $3 billion in aid from existing programs, though further details about what programs, payments, and services will be resumed and to what extent remain unclear. 

All the while, small farmers and ranchers have spent the last ten months facing off against mounting pressures wrought by major administrative changes to food and agriculture policy that have exacerbated the nation’s exceedingly volatile farm economy. 

Read Next The shutdown is poised to deepen hunger in America — just as the Trump administration stopped tracking it Ayurella Horn-Muller

The impact on producers, whose businesses require advance planning — in a time of the year normally filled with finalizing future growing plans, buying seeds and other resources, and shoring up winter reserves — will only grow the longer the shutdown persists.

And so will the broader economic and societal ripple effects unfurling nationwide: President Donald Trump’s administration declared that it would not use billions of congressionally appropriated emergency funding to maintain the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, during the shutdown. Without that emergency funding, the USDA has said that SNAP benefits, which are used by nearly 42 million Americans who struggle to afford groceries, will be suspended on Saturday, November 1. (Money from SNAP is also a crucial source of income for many small farmers.) A cohort of more than two dozen states sued the Department of Agriculture on Tuesday, seeking to preserve funding of SNAP during the shutdown by tapping into USDA contingency funds reserved to fund operations when regularly appropriated monies are unavailable. Two federal courts ruled Friday afternoon that the agency must tap into those contingency funds to cover at least some of the food program’s benefits for the month of November. The Trump administration is expected to appeal the decision. 

Prior to the rulings, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins blamed Democrats for the shutdown and possible loss of benefits for millions of Americans, while stating that the department does not have the legal authority to distribute the agency’s contingency funding. In a Friday press conference, Rollins criticized SNAP, remarking that the shutdown exposed a program that, under the purview of the Biden administration, became “so corrupt.” 

The USDA did not immediately respond to Grist’s request for comment. 

Meanwhile, Hill policymakers have continued to sling accusations across both sides of the aisle in their budget standoff over federal healthcare. Trump has urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the shutdown by getting rid of the filibuster, an unprecedented move by the president, though many GOP Senators still remain in support of the rule. If Congress is still at an impasse come early next week, it would mark the longest-ever shutdown in U.S. history.

Every day of delay brings more prolonged uncertainty to farmers like Ver Mulm. Even if lawmakers manage to vote to reopen the government in the near future, the second-generation Iowa farmer worries that the backlog USDA staffers will be facing after all the time spent furloughed, compounding with the already-strained workforce, will translate to further bottlenecks. 

Over the last year, Ver Mulm has drained her savings to stave off having to sell the farm, living off of credit cards. Now, her credit score is shot, and Orange Creek Farms is on the cusp of insolvency. And with each day that passes with the government remaining in limbo, the small window to save their farm gets smaller. Ver Mulm is emotionally preparing herself for what’s to come — a growing likelihood that her family will soon need to close the chapter on feeding their community. 

“We’ve exhausted all of our options,” she said. “This grant is our last chance to keep the farm going. It’s our last lifeline.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For a struggling Iowa ranch, the government shutdown may be the last straw on Oct 31, 2025.

As world leaders prepare to meet for the 30th annual United Nations climate change conference, or COP30, in northern Brazil later this month, a new report has found that climate change is already killing millions of people every year. The “Countdown on Health and Climate Change,” which is compiled by researchers around the world, has been published every year since 2015 by the British medical journal The Lancet.

The missives have grown increasingly dire over that decade. In 2020, the report warned that climate change threatened to “undermine the past 50 years of gains in public health.” Five years later, the same document suggests that this erosion is well underway.

“Climate change is increasingly destabilising the planetary systems and environmental conditions on which human life depends,” the countdown’s authors wrote.

Extreme heat now kills one person every minute, according to the report, noting that the rate of heat-related deaths has risen 23 percent since the 1990s — a trend the authors attribute in large part to planetary warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The vast majority of the heatwave days endured worldwide between 2020 and 2024 would not have occurred in the absence of climate change.

But it’s not just extreme heat: The risk of death due to inhaling dangerous particulate matter in wildfire smoke and the spread of infectious diseases such as mosquito-borne dengue fever are also on the rise. The number of deaths linked to wildfire smoke inhalation in 2024 was 36 percent higher than the baseline established from 2003 to 2012. More severe droughts and heatwaves spurred by rising temperatures were also connected to 124 million more cases of moderate or severe food insecurity in 2023, compared to a baseline average from 1981 to 2010.

A young girl gets treatment for dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness, at Mugda Medical College and Hospital in Bangladesh on October 3, 2023. Munir Uz Zaman / AFP via Getty Images

In sum, the report paints a picture of populations ill-equipped to cope with the shifting environmental parameters of a changing climate. “This Lancet report is a devastating global health audit,” said Harjeet Singh, founding director of a nature advocacy group called the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, who was not involved in the assessment. “Our fossil fuel addiction is killing us by the millions.” 

Identifying the extent to which any isolated factor affects human health is no easy feat. A person’s wellbeing is linked to myriad behavioral, environmental, and social threads. In the past few decades, researchers all over the world have sought to isolate the role climate change plays in amplifying existing health trends and spurring the movement of disease. The process is not unlike how climate scientists seek to understand how the qualities of a particular hurricane or drought can be attributed to above-average sea surface or land temperatures. 

But because humans are so variable, attributing health impacts to planetary warming is an imperfect science. Reporting from the frontlines of climate hot spots in the world’s richest countries shows that illness and death that could be linked to climate change — heat stroke in Arizona emergency rooms during record-breaking heatwaves, for example — are rarely recorded as such. Conversely, top-down efforts to calculate the extent to which climate change may be influencing the spread of diseases such as tick-borne Lyme potentially overstate the effects of climate change by inadvertently underweighing the effects of urban sprawl, outdoor recreation, and other factors that put people in contact with ticks. 

The difficulty of separating signal from noise is what makes The Lancet’s annual report so important; it’s one of the only global efforts to make sense of the wide landscape of research at the intersection of climate and health. It tracks how 20 “health indicators” such as air pollution, food insecurity, days of extreme precipitation and drought, among others, have changed over the preceding 12 months. The 2025 report found that 13 of the 20 indicators tracked have grown more severe. 

As world leaders arrive in Brazil next month, much of the momentum for coordinated worldwide action to reduce emissions appears to be waning. Fossil fuel giants such as BP and ExxonMobil have reneged on their climate commitments. At President Donald Trump’s direction, the United States, the world’s biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, has begun the process of withdrawing from the Paris agreement and the World Health Organization.

“Paradoxically, as the need for decisive health-protective action grows, some world leaders are disregarding the growing body of scientific evidence on health and climate change,” the report’s authors wrote in a thinly veiled critique of Trump. “There is no time left for further delay.”

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

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘A devastating global audit’ shows how climate change is undermining the health of millions on Oct 31, 2025.

As Kristen Moreland waited for the livestream to buffer, her thoughts drifted to the years she’d devoted to defending Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the northeastern sweep of Alaska where the mountains give way to the coastal plain. On screen, the chatter of aides stilled as men in dark suits gathered behind a lectern. Then Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced plans to open the area, roughly the size of South Carolina, to drilling. 

It marked another round in the decades-long tug-of-war over developing one of the country’s largest remaining protected areas — an effort that came to a head during President Donald Trump’s first term, and ground to a halt when President Joe Biden took office. Burgum also restored seven oil and gas leases that a state-funded corporation bid on during the final days of the first Trump administration, and that his successor later revoked.

Moreland, a Gwich’in leader and executive director of the tribal committee dedicated to protecting the Nation’s sacred coastal plain, sat stunned as the YouTube stream continued. The place she grew up — where generations have lived on the tundra alongside the caribou, weaving their history into the land — had been reduced to a line item on someone’s balance sheet. When Burgum said opening the refuge would benefit northern communities, “it felt like a slap in the face,” she said. 

“They’ve never reached out to us to listen to how this would affect our livelihood,” she said. Moreland fears development will drive the herd that the Gwich’in rely on out of range and contaminate rivers in a region where hunting and fishing are a matter of survival. For her, it felt like erasure. “It’s another disrespectful action from decision-makers,” she said. “It ignores our voice as Gwich’in and violates our rights as Indigenous people.”

As the fight over development in the Arctic continues, federal officials are racing to fulfill Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. Though the government is shut down and many employees are not getting paid, officials continue approving permits for extractive industries. In a wood-paneled Beltway office, Burgum framed his “sweeping package of actions” as a declaration that “Alaska is open for business.” 

To that end, the administration also signed permits for the controversial 211-mile Ambler Road to mineral deposits, including one owned by Trilogy Metals — which the Trump administration now holds a 10 percent stake in — and authorized a land exchange that will allow for construction of a road through Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, at the tip of the Alaskan Peninsula. “I told the president it’s like Christmas every morning,” Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy said. “I wake up, I go to look at what’s under the proverbial Christmas tree to see what’s happening.”

Last week’s announcement may not end up being the gift the governor is hoping for. 

The fight over drilling in the refuge began almost as soon as President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the site, once called Arctic National Wildlife Range, in 1960. The most recent volley began in 2017, when Trump signed a tax bill requiring two oil and gas lease sales there within seven years. When the first sale was held in 2021, the state corporation Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA, was the only major bidder. It hoped to keep drilling prospects in the region alive, despite weak industry interest. The sale ultimately generated less than $12 million — a fraction of the nearly $2 billion projected by the Tax Act for the last decade.

The Biden administration later found the leasing program’s environmental review inadequate. It conducted a new analysis, then canceled the leases in 2023, citing “fundamental legal deficiencies” and its failure to “properly quantify” greenhouse gas emissions. The second mandated sale, in early 2025, received no bidders. Compounding the challenge, major banks and insurers have refused to finance or underwrite projects in the refuge, citing environmental risks. Oil majors have also steered clear: In 2022, Chevron and the company that took over BP’s leases on private land within the refuge paid $10 million to walk away from them. That same year, Exxon Mobil told shareholders it has “no plans for exploration or development” there.

Still, this spring Trump issued an executive order calling for the reinstatement of AIDEA’s leases, and a federal court ruled that their cancellation was handled improperly. The state-funded investment firm remains the sole holder of leases in the refuge. 

The problem is AIDEA doesn’t have the capital or technical expertise to build out these areas on its own. It has authorized spending nearly $54 million to develop them and move permitting for Ambler Road forward. That includes hiring consultants for seismic testing to map oil and gas deposits. But first it must get permission from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to harass polar bears, something that has sparked viral protests in the past. AIDEA authorized another $50 million for Ambler following Burgum’s announcement.

Ultimately, the state corporation is spending public money on infrastructure that private firms would normally fund, while sidestepping oversight, said Suzanne Bostrom, a senior staff attorney at Trustees for Alaska. The watchdog legal organization accused AIDEA of having redirected money toward refuge leases and Ambler from accounts within its Arctic Infrastructure Development Fund, and later its Revolving Fund, to avoid the need for legislative approval. Randy Ruaro, AIDEA’s executive director, wrote in an email that it was not legally required to seek authorization.

All of that aside, AIDEA’s track record is pretty grim. Financial records suggest the corporation lost at least $38 million on its last oil and gas venture, the Mustang field on the North Slope west of the refuge. After oil prices fell in 2020, the corporation foreclosed on the project. The state provided another $22 million in a 2023 bailout before AIDEA sold the field for an undisclosed sum. Bostrom says AIDEA has “no actual plan for seeing a return” on its spending in the refuge. In fact, the people of Alaska often lose money in its deals; one analysis found that almost half of the agency’s investments have been written off as worthless. The economists who crunched those numbers found the state would have come out about $11 billion ahead if that money had been put to work elsewhere.

In an email, Ruaro called the analysis a “hit piece” and said the corporation has  recorded its best financial performance in six decades over the past two years. He said that analysis “failed to account for the billions of dollars generated in economic benefits” by the Red Dog Mine, which produces lead and zinc in northwest Alaska. The corporation poured $160 million — about one-third of the project’s startup costs — into infrastructure to support the operation. At the same time, AIDEA’s own consultants concluded that the mine would be built regardless, and the investment was unnecessary. “AIDEA loves to point to the Red Dog mine as a shining example of their success,” Bostrom said, but even taking those claims at face-value “doesn’t erase that AIDEA still has no viable financial plan in place to cover the cost of building the Ambler Road.”

Ultimately, any plans for the refuge and Ambler Road — which the Bureau of Land Management has said would harm Indigenous and low-income communities — raise questions about who benefits from such development. AIDEA has, for example, proposed financing the private Ambler road through Gates of the Arctic National Park with bonds repaid by tolls, a plan critics call unrealistic, given the cost could hit $2 billion. “It’s hugely problematic for the state to issue bonds with no viable plan for repayment,” Bostrom said. “That’s not a good investment decision.” 

But Ruaro wrote that is only one of several options, and that he is “confident the mines … have billions of dollars in minerals needed by the nation.” He also said AIDEA now estimates the cost at $500 to $850 million, and said the road can be built in phases. 

Even with prudent financial strategies, the economics of extraction remain precarious — especially as domestic oil prices dropped below $60 a barrel this summer. Given the average breakeven price of $62, new Arctic production may not be profitable — though it would extend the life of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that carries crude from the North Slope. The U.S. is already the world’s top producer, and more output won’t necessarily lower consumer fuel prices, says Boston University’s Robert K. Kaufmann, because OPEC and other nations still influence global markets. (As to the “energy emergency” that Trump declared, Kaufmann said, “I want what he’s smoking.”) Instead, the leases will bring more production online when “any rational scientist is calling for reducing carbon emissions.

Despite the risks, some communities in the region support new oil and gas projects. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sits within North Slope Borough, which is larger than 39 states. Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat — a nonprofit funded by the regional Alaska Native Corporation — notes that 95 percent of the borough’s tax revenue comes from the industry, funding things like schools and clinics. Fossil fuel royalties directly benefit Indigenous communities like Kaktovik, funding essential services. “When Uncle Doug [Burgum] calls, I answer,” Josiah Patkotak, the borough’s mayor, said in a statement praising the Interior secretary’s announcement.

Indigenous communities and scientists fear that development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will drive away the caribou central to Gwich’in and Iñupiat culture.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / Getty Images

It can be difficult to disentangle genuine local support from efforts quietly backed — or directly compensated — by the industry itself. During a legislative hearing earlier this year, state Representative Ashley Carrick said one person who testified as a community advocate was paid by AIDEA, something Ruaro confirmed to her that it routinely does. This can create the impression these projects are widely embraced.

“There’s this wide consensus that [Iñupiat] people all want the oil and gas projects. It’s not true,” said Nauri Simmonds, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic. Many of those adversely impacted by drilling stay silent for fear of losing work or social standing, she said — and some who have spoken out have faced threats and violence.

Simmonds says what might be lost by developing the refuge can’t be counted in dollars. AIDEA now holds leases in a part of the refuge where the Porcupine caribou herd gathers to bear its young. The Gwich’in name for the region, where cool coastal winds protect the newborns from insects and heat, translates to “the sacred place where life begins.” Beyond its shelter, calves are 19 percent more likely to die. Scientists and Indigenous peoples fear the clamor of development will drive the herd away, severing a bond that has sustained people and animals alike for millenia. Even as climate change reshapes one of the country’s last undisturbed ecosystems, it is political forces that now endanger it most.

“One of the most wounding pieces is that this wouldn’t be something that the companies would have gone after on their own,” Simmonds said. “It is the enticements from Alaska, from the corporations, from the political landscape, that creates the appeal.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump officials say Alaska is ‘open for business.’ So far, no one’s buying. on Oct 31, 2025.

Earlier this month, scientists announced that humanity has kicked off the first major “tipping point” — in which an Earth system dramatically transforms, often permanently — as warm-water corals die en masse due to relentlessly rising temperatures. Think of such events like driving off a cliff: There’s no reversing back up to the edge, and the impact will be terrible.

For all the attention these disastrous milestones get from scientists and the media — and rightfully so — less discussed is the fact that they also work the other direction. Positive tipping points can unfold on a wide range of scales, from a community garden helping a neighborhood eat healthier, all the way up to the global energy system switching from fossil fuels to renewables. An individual person can even reach one, like if they decide to do more and more walking instead of driving. 

People can influence communities, communities can influence cities, and cities can influence nations. These critical junctures, then, can spread like a contagion — in a good way. “It’s rather a mirror opposite of the damaging Earth system tipping points that we want to desperately prevent,” said Steve Smith, a researcher at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, who studies how to encourage the phenomenon. “Because the positive tipping points are changes that we really need to promote.”

What makes environmental tipping points so insidious is that they self-perpetuate as threats amplify other threats — in the case of corals, high temperatures combining with ocean acidification and marine pollution. Luckily, their happier counterparts also accelerate under their own momentum and feedback loops, as benefits beget other benefits. There are many ways that cities, for instance, can encourage the adoption of green technologies like electric vehicles, according to a new report from C40, a global network of mayors tackling the climate crisis. “It is possible to move pretty quickly, at the moment, because of the wide availability of these technologies,” said Cassie Sutherland, managing director of climate solutions and networks at C40. “You can actually get — with a kind of dedicated intervention — quite a significant and ramped-up change.”

By wielding both carrots and sticks, policymakers can juice these social and technological systems to get things rolling. In the parlance, a “pull” policy makes a sustainable technology more affordable, accessible, or attractive using incentives like tax rebates, drawing people toward it. It’s carrots made of money, basically, that can create unstoppable market momentum. The stick, by contrast, is the “push” policy that, say, makes fossil fuel technologies more expensive, less convenient, or unavailable, like banning new natural gas hookups in buildings. Push and pull policies are not mutually exclusive, and indeed policymakers can use them in concert for maximum effect.

Cities are uniquely positioned to do this kind of work, Sutherland says. Globally, they’re home to more than half the human population — and rapidly growing — yet are responsible for 70 percent of carbon emissions. But they’re also much more nimble than national governments because they set building energy efficiency codes, manage public transportation systems, and pursue their own targets for reducing emissions overall. By contrast, the U.S. government is now actively hostile to climate action, so it’s up to cities to increase their ambition. “They’re the crucibles, the test beds, the ones that have the ability to go further, faster, and particularly go first,” Sutherland said.

Municipalities, for example, have the power to embrace — and ideally push to a tipping point — one of the more powerful climate solutions: the e-bike. Pedaling instead of driving slashes greenhouse gas emissions, alleviates urban congestion, and improves public health, both because of the additional exercise and reduced air pollution. (E-bikes also require less exertion for people who might struggle on a traditional two-wheeler.) In a given city, a vocal group of dedicated bicyclists might start out advocating for basic infrastructure, like dedicated lanes. “Bike commuting has a big positive feedback effect,” said Cameron Roberts, a social scientist at Carleton University in Canada, who studies active mobility. “Once they start winning victories, this leads to better road regulations, better infrastructure, which brings out more cyclists, which then snowballs.” The data backs this up: Bike commuting in Washington, D.C., and New York City doubled in four years, in part because of improved infrastructure.

Which is not to say that cities can’t also encourage the switch from gas to electric vehicles, like Oslo, Norway, has done with extraordinary speed: In just the past decade, the market share there for new EV sales grew from 13.6 percent to 95.8 percent, C40’s report notes. (Ironically, Norway is one of the world’s biggest exporters of fossil fuels.) That was thanks to the government providing financial incentives, thus making EVs more affordable, then mandating that all new car sales be zero-emission by 2025. (Cities can do this with public transportation, too: Mexico City, for instance, gave operators of gas-powered buses an eight-year heads up that starting in 2025, it would only procure electric versions.) Oslo then layered on top of that sweetener by expanding charging infrastructure, thus making it more convenient to own an EV. “It’s cities that have a lot of the control over the bits that make it accessible and attractive,” Sutherland said.

Oslo did much the same for heat pumps, which are now in 63 percent of Norwegian households. Instead of burning fossil fuels, these electric appliances extract heat from even frigid air and pump it indoors, then reverse in the summer to cool a space by expelling indoor heat to the outside. To encourage their adoption, Norway slapped a carbon tax on heating fuel, making it increasingly expensive not to go fully electric, and provided financial incentives to make the switch. Oslo, once again, layered on its own subsidies, streamlined the permitting process for installing the devices, and implemented stricter energy efficiency standards for buildings. (In the U.S., market share has been growing too, as heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces. States have also formed a coalition to accelerate adoption.) 

Read Next Heat pumps are expensive. What if billionaires bought them for everyone? Matt Simon

Policymakers can push emerging technologies to tipping points, too. For instance, last year in Framingham, Massachusetts, Eversource Energy commissioned the nation’s first networked geothermal neighborhood operated by a utility. This technology also exploits heat pumps, which use liquid coursing through a network of underground pipes to cool and heat homes. Other states and cities could encourage more projects like this with the stick approach, like by banning natural gas in new buildings and continuing to pressure utilities to switch from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies. With the carrot, they could provide financial incentives for communities to transition to networked geothermal, which remains expensive. 

Thinking bigger, the various parts of the global energy system must tip from fossil fuels to renewables. Whereas oil and gas are a stagnant technology, renewables benefit from “economies of scale” and “learning by doing,” meaning the more you make something, the cheaper and better it gets. Accordingly, the price of solar panels has plunged more than 99 percent since the 1970s. The explosion of wind power, too, enabled the United Kingdom to pass a tipping point as it rapidly retreated from coal, helped along by the country putting a price on carbon. “The price of coal just became quite quickly uncompetitive and uneconomical, to the point where last year the final coal-fired electricity generator was shut down,” Smith said.

The rapid development and adoption of renewables, Smith added, is due in large part to a “positive tipping cascade” made possible by batteries, which get better and cheaper year after year. That’s created a domino effect that is boosting all kinds of sectors: electric vehicles and trains, home energy storage, and the grid, which uses huge packs to store solar and wind power for when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing. Utilities are also experimenting with “vehicle-to-grid” technology, in which EVs both draw power and send it back to the system, providing a vast network of backup energy to further accelerate decarbonization. These intertwining market forces behind renewables and batteries are so powerful that the Trump administration can only hope to slow the green energy revolution in the U.S., not stop it. 

But cities and nations can’t just encourage positive tipping points and call it a day — that needs to happen alongside the urgent mitigation of the pollutants that are causing warming in the first place, said Kiff Gallagher, a climate strategist and founding executive director of the Global Heat Reduction Initiative. Carbon dioxide gets all the attention, but humanity can dramatically and quickly reduce warming by tackling “superpollutants,” greenhouse gases that are dozens, hundreds, even thousands of times more powerful than CO2. 

Food waste rotting in landfills, for instance, as well as fossil fuel infrastructure, produce clouds of methane, which is 80 times more potent, yet disappears much faster from the atmosphere. (Agricultural waste, like corn stalks, is often left to rot too, so increasingly farmers are turning it into biochar, which instead captures carbon from the atmosphere and improves yields when applied to fields.) Ironically enough, heat pumps are essential for weaning off of fossil fuels, yet a common refrigerant that lets them work their magic is 2,000 times more powerful than CO2. So the industry is transitioning to more sustainable alternatives, even using CO2 itself as a refrigerant because it doesn’t cause as much harm in the unlikely event of a leak. “These short-lived climate pollutants cause almost 50 percent of the warming, but they’re only receiving 5 percent of climate finance right now going to directly address them,” Gallagher said. “So that could be an amazing high leverage point for the world.”

Tipping points, then, are both an environmental curse that we desperately need to avoid, and an essential phenomenon we need to exploit to keep more of Earth’s systems from tipping. Individual sectors can positively tip, and in turn influence other aspects of the clean energy economy — momentum building upon momentum. “Once those tipping points have then been reached,” Sutherland said, “and there’s the positive feedback loop, you’ll start to see the other elements of the solutions of the system clicking into place a bit more easily.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Good news! These ‘positive tipping points’ will help save the world. on Oct 31, 2025.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.

Georgians are currently voting in rare off-year elections for two seats on the Public Service Commission, or PSC — the only statewide races on the ballot this year. More Democrats are expected to turn out to vote because Democratic strongholds like Atlanta are electing a mayor and city council members. In June, about twice as many Democrats as Republicans turned out for the party primaries. 

Republicans see a risk of losing seats they’ve held for two decades and opening the door to further losses. Both parties are looking ahead to next year, when the governor’s office and a U.S. Senate seat are on the ballot, and see the PSC race as something of a bellwether. That all has Republicans showing some nerves.

Recently, some of Georgia’s top Republicans gathered in Forsyth County, about 40 minutes outside Atlanta, for a show of party unity and patriotism. Local and state officials stood on risers behind the podium while longtime Public Service Commissioner Bubba McDonald led the small crowd in a rendition of “God Bless the USA.” 

McDonald and his fellow members of the commission charged with regulating Georgia’s largest electric utility, Georgia Power, are all Republicans. Standing behind a sign reading “Don’t DEM the lights in Georgia,” the evening’s speakers urged the crowd to keep it that way.

“We are all united in one goal, and that is to send the message that Georgia is closed to the Democratic party,” said state party chair Josh McKoon.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp speaks at an event rallying Republican support for the Public Service Committee election. Directly behind Kemp are incumbent commissioners Fitz Johnson and Tim Echols. Emily Jones / Grist

Focused as they were on the broader party politics, the Republicans rallying their base in Forsyth County also shone a spotlight on the PSC’s role in determining the cost and sources of energy in Georgia — critical positions that traditionally operate in relative obscurity. 

“You hear everybody talk about how important it is that our state continue to be the number one state to do business, raise a family, have a job,” McKoon said. “The backbone of that is reliable energy.”

For the Republican incumbent commissioners, reliable energy means fossil fuels. Last year, they greenlit new gas-fired turbines and earlier this year, they voted to approve a Georgia Power plan that would keep coal plants open past their previously approved retirement dates, both to meet rising demand that comes mostly from data centers.

“If these two Democrats get elected, they are going to be at war with our fossil plants, and we have a lot of them,” Commissioner Tim Echols told the rally crowd. “These fossil plants are absolutely critical to our reliability, and we can’t allow anyone to take the helm of the Public Service Commission and shut these things down.”

Read Next A quick guide to Georgia’s 2025 Public Service Commission elections Lyndsey Gilpin & Emily Jones

Echols has championed solar, nuclear, and other alternative energy sources since joining the commission in 2010, but sees natural gas in particular as an important part of the state’s overall energy mix.

Fellow Commissioner Fitz Johnson had similarly dire warnings about the potential consequences of Democrats joining the commission.

“We are not gonna let them California our Georgia,” Johnson said after pointing to large rate hikes in states like California and New York.

But Johnson and Echols have voted to raise rates in Georgia, too. Georgia Power bills have gone up six times in the last three years: three times as part of an overall rate hike, twice to pay for new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, and once to cover high natural gas prices. Earlier this year, the commission voted unanimously to freeze base power rates for the next three years — though bills will still be adjusted next year for fuel prices and hurricane cleanup costs, which could mean a further increase.

The state Democratic Party is focused largely on these rate hikes in its bid to unseat Echols and Johnson.

“These two Republicans that are running right now never once said, ‘No’ — not one time — to a rate hike request,” said state party chair Charlie Bailey. “We view that as frankly not even a partisan thing. That is — those folks ought not to be in office.”

The Democratic National Committee made the unusual move of sending a top official and fundraising for the Georgia PSC elections, which the party sees as a rare chance at statewide victory. Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

Both Democratic candidates view expanding renewable energy and exploring alternatives like better management of energy demand, installing rooftop and community solar, and working with neighboring utilities as keys to both meeting rising demand and stemming skyrocketing costs. 

Those options, said Democratic candidate Peter Hubbard, are “woefully underrepresented in the current planning process.” 

“What fills that gap is gas-fired capacity, extensions of coal plants, and generally things that are less affordable and less reliable,” he said.

Democrat Alicia Johnson favors similar solutions as both affordable and reliable — and as a protection against climate-fueled weather disasters like last year’s Hurricane Helene, which took down major parts of Georgia’s grid and left some areas without power for weeks.

“We need to invest in a smarter, more resilient grid that’s capable of handling the extreme weather that Georgia experiences while also expanding that access to clean energy,” she said. “I believe that we could be promoting the use of micro grids and energy storage in vulnerable and rural communities to protect against outages.”

To spread those messages and try to capitalize on the calendar quirk that could boost their party’s turnout, the Democrats are also investing in these races in a way they haven’t before.

“The state party’s never spent any money on a PSC race. Period,” said Bailey.

This year, they’re running phone banks, sending out thousands of mailers, and knocking on doors. The Democratic National Committee has gotten involved too, fundraising and deploying vice chair Jane Kleeb to campaign in Georgia.

While the political stakes of the PSC races have overshadowed the climate stakes, the outcomes are no less consequential for Georgia’s future, and perhaps the nation’s. For Bailey, the fight over these obscure seats is a sign Georgia is still in battleground territory. The state narrowly voted for Biden in 2020 and for President Trump last year by 50.7 percent.

“A close election is yet another piece of evidence that this is a battleground,” he said. “A battleground by its very definition can be won, and it can be lost.”

And both parties have decided they’re out to win — this year and next.

More resources for understanding Georgia’s PSC

• A quick guide to Georgia’s 2025 Public Service Commission elections

• Decoding a Georgia Power bill

• Want clean energy? These are the overlooked elected officials who get to decide.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This obscure Georgia election is about so much more than your power bill on Oct 30, 2025.

As the end of 2025 approaches, regular folk take stock of the past year, and maybe ponder their New Year’s resolutions. Climate scientists, on the other hand, have been busy parsing mountains of data from the last 10 months, ranging from global temperatures to measurements of polar ice to the costs of extreme weather. Accordingly, their goal for 2026 might be to somehow make world leaders understand that humanity is running out of time to avert catastrophe.

A sobering tally of what the year’s data reveals about the state of the planet makes one thing clear: “We are hurtling toward climate chaos,” writes an international team of researchers. They add that recent climatic developments “emphasize the extreme insufficiency of global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mark the beginning of a grim new chapter for life on Earth.” 

Language from scientists doesn’t get much more alarming than that — and they’ve got good reason to be frightened. In 2023, for instance, the ability of the land to absorb our carbon emissions dropped significantly. The report confirms that last year was the hottest on record, and was likely the hottest in at least 125,000 years. This year, Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice mass hit record lows, and extreme heat in the oceans drove the largest coral bleaching event on record, with over 80 percent of the world’s reef area affected. Accordingly, earlier this month another team of researchers announced that the world has reached its first major tipping point — in which an Earth system dramatically changes, often irreversibly — as many coral ecosystems pass a point of no return. And in September, still more scientists declared that we’ve hit the seventh of nine planetary boundaries — thresholds that keep our world hospitable to life — as ocean acidification continues to worsen. Taken together, the developments show that humanity is pushing critical Earth systems toward collapse. 

Which is not to say that there’s nothing we can do to stop the runaway deterioration of Earth’s systems. The prices of renewable energy and batteries, for instance, have fallen so precipitously that it’s even taken experts by surprise, meaning ditching fossil fuels makes excellent economic sense. We just need politicians to get serious about decarbonization: Next month at the COP30 climate conference in Brazil, nations will have to redouble their efforts to reduce emissions. “It’s really serious, but it’s not game over,” said R. Max Holmes, president and CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, which wasn’t involved in the report. “There’s still hope. There’s still stuff that we can do, and that’s what we need to lean into.”

Still, the report makes it clear that the severe consequences of climate change, which scientists have long warned about, are here. “The main message is that the planet’s vital signs are flashing red,” said William J. Ripple, a professor at Oregon State University and co-lead author of the report, in an email to Grist. “Twenty-two of 34 tracked indicators are now at record extremes, from ocean heat content to global wildfire extent and Antarctic ice loss. We’re witnessing accelerating warming and a worsening of almost every key Earth system trend.”

Driving this is humanity’s failure to dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, energy-related emissions rose 1.3 percent last year, the report notes. That’s due primarily to a lack of ambition from governments to switch to renewables, but may also reflect a feedback loop: The hotter it gets, the more people need to run energy-hungry air conditioners to stay healthy, which results in more emissions and more AC use. 

At the same time, Earth’s systems are struggling to save us from ourselves. Normally, oceans and forests absorb CO2, as marine phytoplankton and terrestrial plants sequester the gas as they grow. But scientists have found a significant loss of phytoplankton in many parts of the sea in recent decades. And in 2024, the planet lost the second highest amount of forest on record. That’s due to deforestation and ever-fiercer wildfires that obliterate ecosystems — warmer temperatures and worsening droughts prime vegetation to burn catastrophically — instead of smaller, less intense blazes naturally resetting them for new growth. 

All told, loss of primary forest last year produced the equivalent of 8 percent of humanity’s emissions. And 2025 hasn’t brought any relief. Canada is suffering through a historic wildfire season, with the second largest area burned on record. That’s been consistently pouring smoke — likely infused with toxic metals from mining operations — across the country and into the United States, leading to extremely unhealthy air quality. 

This smoke initiates another feedback loop, as more carbon spews into the atmosphere, which causes more warming, which in turn worsens wildfires and produces more carbon. Those extra emissions could be helping push other systems to points of no return, further accelerating warming. That, in turn, could set the stage for a “hothouse Earth” scenario, in which the planet keeps warming even if emissions fall. “We’re edging closer to a chain reaction of feedback loops and tipping points including melting ice sheets, thawing permafrost, and forest dieback that could push Earth into a self-sustaining warming path,” said Ripple, who is also the director of the Alliance of World Scientists, which focuses on the climate crisis. “The risk now is that even if emissions fall later, the climate system may keep heating on its own. We might be dangerously close to triggering climate feedbacks that humanity can’t simply switch off.”

Indeed, the report notes that global warming may be speeding up. That could be partly due to an environmental victory, ironically enough: Air quality regulations have been reducing the emission of aerosols, which improves public health. But those aerosols normally reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space — and help brighten clouds to bounce still more energy — so losing them leads to more heating. “We’re seeing the planet heat up faster than expected,” Ripple said. “Surface temperatures are increasing more steeply than past trends would suggest.”

The cascading effects of this warming are getting worse by the year, because each bit of warming, disasters grow deadlier and more expensive. The hotter the ocean gets, for instance, the more fuel for monster tropical cyclones: Last year, Hurricane Helene killed 251 people and caused $79 billion in damages, and early indications are that Hurricane Melissa caused catastrophic destruction as it rolled across Jamaica on Tuesday. In January, the Los Angeles wildfires caused at least $250 billion in damages. And according to one group of researchers, the fires didn’t kill 30 people, as the official tally states, but more like 440 when you factor in those who may have died from the effects of smoke. Separately, last month researchers calculated that wildfire smoke already kills 40,000 Americans each year, which could jump to 71,000 by 2050 if greenhouse emissions remain high. 

All of these findings point to one conclusion: Without a drastic course correction, we’re on track to reach as much as 3.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — miles above the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping it below 2 degrees, and even more ideally, 1.5 degrees — by 2100. The costs of climate change will be astronomically greater than preventing that warming by investing in renewables, fighting overconsumption, and protecting the ecosystems that naturally sequester carbon. “Our message is clear,” Ripple said. “We need to act boldly and act now. Every fraction of a degree matters. Delays only magnify suffering and costs.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Scientists have a dire new warning about the state of the planet on Oct 29, 2025.

In January 2020, Danny Ray started a complicated job with the Oklahoma agency that regulates oil and gas. The petroleum engineer who’d spent more than 40 years in the oil fields had been hired to help address a spreading problem, one that state regulators did not fully understand. 

The year prior, toxic water had poured out of the ground — thousands of gallons per day — for months near the small town of Kingfisher, spreading across acres of farmland, killing crops and trees. 

Such pollution events were not new, but they were occurring with increasing frequency across the state. By the time Ray joined the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the incidents had grown common enough to earn a nickname — purges. 

When oil and gas are pumped from the ground, they come up with briny fluid called “produced water,” many times saltier than the sea and laden with chemicals, including some that cause cancer. Most of this toxic water is shot back underground using what are known as injection wells.

Wastewater injection had been happening in Oklahoma for 80 years, but something was driving the growing number of purges. Ray and his colleagues in the oil division set out to find the cause. As they scoured well records and years of data, they zeroed in on a significant clue: The purges were occurring near wells where companies were injecting oil field wastewater at excessively high pressure, high enough to crack rock deep underground and allow the waste to travel uncontrolled for miles. 

Purges are caused when injection wells shoot oil field wastewater back underground at high pressure. This can fracture a hard layer of rock meant to contain the fluid. It can also push wastewater up through Oklahoma’s large number of inactive wells that have not been properly plugged with cement. Haisam Hussein for ProPublica

By November 2020, at least 10 sites were expelling polluted water, according to internal agency emails obtained through public records requests.

The number of purges has grown steadily since. A Frontier and ProPublica analysis of pollution complaints submitted to the agency found more than 150 reports of purges in the past five years. Throughout that time, state officials were aware of the environmental and public health crisis as Ray and others at the agency investigated the proliferating purges and uncovered a complex stew of causes. 

Ray often likens his home state, where oil has been drilled for more than a century and is a major industry, to a block of Swiss cheese, punctured with the nation’s second-highest number of “orphan” wells — inactive wells whose owners have abandoned them without properly plugging them with cement. The state has catalogued about 20,000 orphan wells, but federal researchers believe the true number may be over 300,000, based on historic industry data and airborne imaging techniques that identify old wells underground. These old wells provide easy pathways for the injected wastewater to zoom up thousands of feet to the surface, contaminating drinking water sources along the way. 

Ray particularly worried about the volume of wastewater being crammed underground by high-pressure injection — tens of billions of gallons each year, enough to fill the Empire State Building over 300 times. Oklahoma’s vast landscape of unplugged holes combined with its large number of injection wells operating at high pressures creates conditions ripe for purges.

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} .injection-well-table td:first-child, .injection-well-table th:first-child { width: 27% !important; word-break: break-word !important; white-space: normal !important; padding-right: 8px !important; line-height: 1.3 !important; } .injection-well-table td:nth-child(2), .injection-well-table th:nth-child(2) { width: 38% !important; text-align: right !important; padding-left: 4px !important; padding-right: 4px !important; white-space: nowrap !important; } .injection-well-table td:last-child, .injection-well-table th:last-child { width: 35% !important; text-align: right !important; padding-left: 4px !important; padding-right: 8px !important; white-space: nowrap !important; } .table-wrapper { margin: 0 -5px; width: calc(100% + 10px); overflow-x: hidden; } .injection-well-table-title { font-size: 24px; margin-bottom: 20px; } .injection-well-table-subtitle { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 20px; } .injection-well-table-note, .injection-well-table-source, .injection-well-table-chart { font-size: 12px; margin-top: 10px !important; } } Number of injection wells in top oil-producing states

Oklahoma has the third-largest number of injection wells in the country, much more than other prolific oil states, because of its long history of oil and gas extraction and distinct geology.

State Injection wells Oil production rank

Sources: Environmental Protection Agency / Energy Information Administration

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But Ray would come to learn that at the commission, identifying the causes of the purges was one thing. Stopping them — and preventing new ones — was a very different matter. 

“I don’t know if we’re ever going to fix it or not,” said Ray, 72, who resigned in frustration three years later. “They don’t want to listen.”

A yearlong investigation by The Frontier and ProPublica reveals that the Oklahoma Corporation Commission did not mandate that responsible companies clean up the pollution belowground, as state law requires “when feasible.” Regulators say that once tainted by oil field brine, polluted groundwater is virtually impossible to treat. That makes preventing purges all the more critical — something the commission also failed to do, according to current and former employees. At times, records show, agency leadership sidelined employees who criticized the agency’s response. 

Field reports from agency staff referred to individual incidents as “a threat to the environment and the safety of persons” or “a hazard to the ground water.” These notes describe orphan wells spewing toxic water near homes or into streams, leaving scars of salt residue. A homeowner reported that his grandchildren often play near a purging well. Ranchers have lost calves, which, drawn to the salty water, died after drinking it. But the full scale of Oklahoma’s purge problem — and state regulators’ awareness of it — has never previously been reported.

Purges often occur at abandoned, unplugged oil wells as a result of high-pressure injection. Obtained by ProPublica and The Frontier

Officials with the agency’s oil division acknowledged in an interview with The Frontier and ProPublica that overpressurized wells are contributing to the purges. They say some of these incidents are a result of historic pollution in a state where oil and gas was extracted long before modern regulations, beginning in the 1960s, required companies to protect the environment and plug inactive wells with cement. They noted that the state has taken steps to reduce injection pressures on new wells in recent years and is committed to “doing the right thing, holding operators accountable, protecting Oklahoma and its resources, and providing fair and balanced regulation.”

“I am also confident that every employee and every view is heard and considered,” said Brandy Wreath, who as director of administration for the commission is responsible for the agency’s operations, in a follow-up statement. “We will continue to be committed to protecting Oklahoma and supporting the state’s largest industry to perform its role in a safe and economic manner. These goals are not mutually exclusive.”

To Ray, those efforts were not enough in the face of a much bigger problem. If thousands of gallons of water was reaching the surface, he reasoned, that meant an incalculably greater amount was dispersing below ground. The thought scared him. Oklahoma relies on groundwater for over half of its annual water use. 

“We have so much damage underground that we don’t even know about,” Ray said.

State regulators have direct authority over the pressure at which companies inject oil field wastewater.

But while investigating purges over the last five years, oil division employees have found hundreds of wells that were injecting more fluid than their permits allowed or at pressures above the legal limit, as indicated by the pressure gauge on each well and regular reports from companies to the state. During his tenure, Ray and others also discovered purges caused by wells operating within the pressure boundaries noted on the well permits. Oklahoma’s rules, they concluded, were part of the problem. 

In a November 2020 email to a handful of employees, Mike McGinnis, deputy director of the oil division, described an abundance of overpressurized wells near a purge as “self-inflicted.” 

“It looks like some of the approved injection pressures were set high in the permit,” he wrote. “May be hard to put that genie back in the bottle.” 

Reducing permitted injection pressures was exactly the solution Ray felt was necessary.

The state approves the pressure at which companies can inject oil field wastewater based on whether injection would fracture a hard layer of rock meant to contain the fluid. Ray believed purges could be prevented by lowering pressure limits to the point where injection would not crack the softer sandy layers where most oil and gas is found.

Soon after starting his job, Ray began distributing long memos and dizzying equations calculating the pressure at which different rock formations break. 

Ray’s efforts helped yield some short-term success. As new purges emerged and existing ones continued to flow, oil division officials in 2020 lowered injection pressures on a case-by-case basis. Regulators added layers of scrutiny for proposed injection wells and more frequently asked for maps showing wells that the pressurized water might collide with as well as data on the pressure at which rocks crack, according to agency officials.

But lowering injection pressures across the state proved impossible. In meetings, oil and gas industry representatives pushed back on proposed rule changes that Ray considered incremental. That same year, he had proposed a rule that would significantly reduce injection pressures statewide to Robyn Strickland, the oil division director at the time. Ray said Strickland cut him out of subsequent rule meetings.

“I never got an invitation to go back,” he said. 

Strickland did not respond to requests for comment.

Oil field wastewater flows up from the ground on a farm near Enid, Oklahoma. Abigail Harrison

As 2020 came to a close, several purges in oil fields roughly 2 miles outside the small town of Velma in southwestern Oklahoma made the pressure problem impossible to ignore. Old wells were regularly expelling toxic salt water, one at a rate of 12,600 gallons per day, roughly enough to fill a backyard swimming pool.

Ray and other members of the oil division discovered that some nearby wells had been injecting at pressures that were too high or were shooting more wastewater into the earth than legally allowed,according to agency emails. 

The owner of the injection wells, Citation Oil and Gas Corp., one of the largest operators in Oklahoma, agreed to plug some of the purging wells. Ray likened this approach to “Whac-A-Mole”: With so much injected water underground, plugging a few old wells wouldn’t reduce the likelihood of purges; the water would simply find a new outlet.

Citation did not answer questions about the Velma purge. 

The agency reduced injection pressures for some of Citation’s wells and temporarily shut down others, but Ray believed that to permanently stop the purge, all injection near Velma needed to be halted indefinitely so the amount of fluid and pressure that had built up underground could be lowered over time. But he said his bosses didn’t agree and, in the Velma case and subsequent purges, allowed companies to continue injecting — or to restart after a short pause — at times near active purges.

“They would say things in our meetings, like, ‘Well, the operators might not go for that,’” Ray said. 

“Hell, you’re supposed to be regulators.” 

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Wreath denied that the agency was overly lenient with oil companies and said that Ray advocated for changes that the oil division could not implement on its own.

“Danny may not have gotten things as fast as he wanted to, but he was heard,” Wreath said. “People were working on it and doing what they needed to do to do it properly and legally. We just don’t have the big stick of government to walk out and say, ‘Boom, you’ve got to start doing this.’”

Charles Teacle III, regulatory affairs chairman for the Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance, an industry group, said most purges “tend to occur in areas that have a very long history of historical practices that do not represent how the industry operates today.” He did not specify which practices companies no longer engage in. Teacle said that when purges can be connected to a particular company, regulators work with the company to “develop a plan to address it and allow the operator to resume operations if possible.” 

Several of the recent purges threatened to violate federal clean water laws, according to Environmental Protection Agency reports, so federal officials began conducting field inspections alongside state oil division employees. The EPA regional office in Dallas noted in a 2020 review of Oklahoma’s injection regulations that “inappropriate” injection appeared to add “pressure to an already over-pressurized system.”

The following year, Ray took his complaints about his agency’s injection pressure regulations to the EPA.

“I have been trying for more than a year to convince everyone that this is a major problem in Oklahoma,” he wrote in a memo to the head of the EPA’s regional office.

The EPA did not respond to questions.

In August 2022, the Velma purge exploded to the surface again, more than a year after the agency’s initial investigation began. Thousands of gallons of oil field wastewater poured down a forested hillside, forming a “field” of water and flowing into a creek, according to an email from an agency employee. The agency discovered the fluid was 56 times more concentrated with salts and chemicals than the EPA’s standard for drinking water. 

Contaminated water erupts from the ground during a purge in Velma, Oklahoma, in 2022. Oklahoma Corporation Commission, obtained by ProPublica and The Frontier

This time, oil division officials shut down all nearby injection. But a week later, wastewater flowed out of the ground at an even faster rate, a result of the pressure that had built up over time. A week after that, a mile away, another purge began. 

As before, Ray chafed at what he saw as the agency’s reactive stance. 

If an across-the-board pressure reduction was impossible, Ray hoped that the oil division would wield one of its available tools: legal action against companies creating the pollution. The oil division could take companies to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s administrative law courts, where judges could issue rulings that fine companies or enforce cleanups, as long as the three elected commissioners approved.

Agency leadership appeared to support this strategy. In an October 2022 email, field operations manager Brad Ice wrote that if pollution were found, the agency would order the company to halt injection and take steps to clean the area. And if the company disagreed or pollution continued, the agency would “file contempt for failure to prevent pollution” against the company. 

But no contempt cases have been filed for purges in the last five years, according to commission spokesperson Trey Davis. Nor has the agency fined any companies for purges during that time, he said. 

Davis identified two cases in administrative law court during that time in which the agency formally ordered companies to stop injection after a purge and to clean up the pollution — though he said the commission prefers “to lead with a handshake instead of a hammer.” 

Despite creating purges, companies did not face punishment if they subsequently complied with agency requests to shut down injection wells, pump wastewater off the surface and restore the landscape, Davis and other agency officials said. 

“We’re not a fine-driven agency,” said Wreath, adding that extended injection well shutdowns cut into oil company profits, making additional fines unnecessary. He noted that pursuing enforcement can take longer and cost taxpayers more than getting companies to cooperate voluntarily. 

That cooperation, however, almost never involves cleanup of water resources tainted by purges. Oil division officials were able to identify just one time since 2020 that their agency approved a plan to clean up groundwater pollution caused by a purge. Removing pollution from underground water sources is incredibly difficult and very expensive, McGinnis, the agency’s deputy director, said.

Read Next Inside the rough-and-tumble race to clean up America’s abandoned oil wells Will Peischel

By the fall of 2022, other agency staff had begun voicing frustration at what they perceived as the commission’s lack of action. 

“I believe it is unconscionably reckless on our part as a regulatory agency not to act swiftly, while knowingly and willingly allowing the continued operation of activities under our jurisdictional control that are contaminating groundwater and presenting a potential endangerment to the health and safety of persons and the environment,” wrote Everett Plummer, at the time a supervisor at the agency’s oil division, in an October 2022 email to another supervisor that was forwarded to Ray and agency leaders, including Strickland.

“We are not addressing the root cause of the problem,” Plummer went on in the same email. “That root cause is overpressure.”

Less than a year later, Plummer sent another email, this time to Ray and another colleague, lamenting that Strickland and other agency leaders “won’t offer any help or technical input or solutions.” 

Neither Strickland nor an agency spokesperson responded to requests for comment on Plummer’s email. Plummer declined to be interviewed for this story.

Some oil and gas companies know when their injection wells are operating at excess pressure and fracturing rock, allowing toxic water to disperse below ground, in violation of state standards, according to a hydrogeologist who worked in saltwater disposal for a large Oklahoma oil company. He pointed to wells he had worked on that were injecting 10,000 barrels of wastewater a day — more than the rock layer should be able to absorb. “You’re thinking, ‘Damn, where is it all going?’” he said. 

The hydrogeologist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works in the industry and fears repercussions, said he worries the result is pollution the state doesn’t know about — until it breaks the surface. 

“It was so disheartening to me,” he said, “because you should be able to go to OCC to actually address this stuff.” 

As Ray pushed his agency to respond more urgently to the purges, oil field wastewater was seeping into aquifers and drinking water sources scattered across the state.

In 2021, John Roberts, who works as an oil field pump truck driver, and his wife, Misty, asked the state to test their water. They live near the 500-person town of Cement in southwestern Oklahoma, where a series of purges encircled the town for nearly four years. One gushed a few hundred feet from the high school, just beyond the softball diamond. 

For residents whose private water wells pulled from the local groundwater, these purges posed severe health risks in addition to killing grass and other vegetation on their land. When the state tested water from the Roberts’ well, samples showed levels of salts well above the EPA’s recommended maximum. Their well water also contained benzene, a notorious carcinogen linked to leukemia and other blood cell cancers, at six times the EPA’s limit for drinking water. 

In these images taken by staff of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, salt residue covers the ground after a purge. Oklahoma Corporation Commission, obtained by ProPublica and The Frontier

 

Subsequent agency investigations near Cement found a tangle of problems. Several wells were injecting at pressures far beyond the fracture point of the rock. A study commissioned by the state found that, within a few square miles, 22 of 28 injection wells were operating at pressures outside legal limits, were injecting into the wrong geologic formation and potentially causing cracks, or had an incomplete permit. 

These wells were also injecting near more than 100 old wells that had been plugged with mud. Unlike a proper cement plug, mud is not strong enough to prevent the pressurized fluid from bursting out of the well. 

Many of the injection wells were again owned by Citation, whose high-pressure injection had been shut down by the agency near the Velma purge about 60 miles away. Company representatives downplayed the number of purges, referring to them as “alleged” in emails to the agency. They maintained that the pollution was a remnant of historic oil and gas activity. But agency engineers pulled well records and field staff tracked oil field wastewater flowing less than a half mile from a church and a Dollar General on the edge of town. The state report analyzed water samples and injection data and found that the cause was overpressurized injection.

In 2023, the Robertses sued Citation in federal district court, alleging that the company’s injection was causing “new pollution and contamination on a daily basis.” Citation denied the allegations and argued that the case ought to first be decided by the commission’s administrative law court. The federal lawsuit is on hold until the administrative case with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission concludes.

Misty Roberts told The Frontier and ProPublica that the couple has installed filtration systems, which require upkeep to keep toxic chemicals out of their drinking water. “It’s a headache just knowing that if our filters get bad, it could come through if we don’t get them changed in time,” she said. 

She said that Citation recommended that they pay to hook up to city water, but their neighbor refused to offer them an easement to dig a water line. 

The company did not answer questions about the lawsuit. 

“Citation Oil & Gas Corp. continues to work cooperatively with the OCC to further investigate the sources and causes of these alleged purges,” Bob Redweik, the company’s vice president of environmental health and safety and regulatory affairs, said in a statement.

The oil and gas industry’s toxic legacy can endure long after production has ceased. 

Read Next How abandoned oil wells plague the Osage Nation Naveena Sadasivam, Lylla Younes, & Allison Herrera

For rancher Tim Ramsey, the pastures where he runs cattle in northeastern Oklahoma are littered with orphan oil and gas wells. Hiding in the tall grass or shaded by stands of oak and elm, many of the wells are leaking oil. Others regularly purged oil field brine. One, according to Ramsey, periodically blasted salt water and oil 40 feet into the air with a loud “SHHHH” sound. Ramsey has been submitting cleanup requests to the state for years. The state plugged the purging well last winter, but many more unplugged wells remain, according to state data. 

The 67-year-old spent decades as a coal miner. The oil industry’s pollution angers him. Regulators’ failure to prevent that pollution angers him even more. He described the state as “so slow at doing anything.” 

“My biggest beef,” he said, “is why did you let them get away with it to begin with?”

Tim Ramsey’s ranch land is littered with orphan oil and gas wells. September Dawn Bottoms for ProPublica

Tim Ramsey’s ranch land is littered with orphan oil and gas wells. September Dawn Bottoms for ProPublica

Tim Ramsey’s ranch land is littered with orphan oil and gas wells. September Dawn Bottoms for ProPublica

Tim Ramsey’s ranch land is littered with orphan oil and gas wells. September Dawn Bottoms for ProPublica

Similar disappointment ate at Ray in his final months at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. Despite his urging, the oil division did not pursue court cases against companies, even as the crisis seemed to be worsening. In spring 2023, he said he reviewed an internal spreadsheet identifying 42 purges, most of which were still actively flowing. 

By August 2023, Ray had had enough and resigned. 

Around the time of Ray’s departure from the agency, the oil division hired a prominent environmental consulting firm, Halff, to help settle disputes among its employees on how the state should respond to the purges. 

The Frontier and ProPublica reviewed reports prepared by the firm about major purges. In each one, they had drawn the same conclusion as Ray: Overpressurized injection wells were causing purges, a dynamic intensified by the number of orphan wells and years of lax regulation, according to the reports. 

But tensions remained. Shawn Coslett, manager of the pollution abatement division, became increasingly vocal about what he called a “culture problem” within the commission when it came to holding companies accountable for pollution, according to emails he sent to his managers and other colleagues. 

Since 2023, Coslett had been pushing the agency to pursue Citation in court for its role in a major purge outside Ardmore that gushed wastewater on and off for years. In May 2024, Citation’s vice president of environmental health and safety emailed his team to let them know that Ice, the agency’s field operations director, agreed to hold a meeting between the company and the agency’s oil division with “limited attendance.” 

“Shawn Coslett and his team would not be invited,” Redweik wrote. 

The role of Coslett’s team in the purge investigation was subsequently reduced, according to internal documents. The agency marked the purge as “resolved” in April 2025.

Coslett declined to be interviewed for this story. Neither Ice nor Redweik responded to questions about Coslett’s work on the Ardmore purge.

Last December, Coslett also urged the agency in several emails to take action on a purge expelling 1,300 gallons of salt water daily on Choctaw Nation land in southeastern Oklahoma. It had been flowing intermittently for four years.

Coslett wanted the agency to create a sampling plan for barium, which had been found in the purging water at high levels, as well as other metals. In a December email to an oil division manager, he wrote that runoff from the site could eventually make its way into the headwaters of Lake Wister, a public water supply that serves tens of thousands of people. 

The oil division did attempt to make some changes. In closed meetings with industry representatives last year, agency officials suggested requiring companies to test the fracture point for each injection well — exactly what Ray had recommended years before. But industry groups vigorously opposed the idea, agency officials told The Frontier and ProPublica, and it was not included in the formal proposal to change state rules for injection pressure that the agency submitted to the commissioners last September.

Wastewater from an orphan well shoots into the air. Obtained by ProPublica and The Frontier


In January, the commission ultimately approved a revised formula to calculate maximum injection pressures. But the new rules, effective this month, only apply to new wells. Retroactively reducing pressures would require action by the state Legislature. The higher pressures for Oklahoma’s more than 10,400 existing injection wells remain unchanged, allowing the problem that Ray identified to persist. 

Coslett left the agency in March. Two weeks later, a new director arrived to lead the oil division: Jeremy Hodges, a former financial analyst and project manager for Continental Resources, the Oklahoma City-based oil and gas giant. He replaced Strickland, who recently took a job as chief projects officer for the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, a quasi-governmental organization that often advocates for industry interests.

In the weeks immediately before and after Hodges took over the oil division, the agency marked nearly 20 purge cases as “resolved,” including some of the most damaging and persistent pollution events, according to the agency’s database of pollution complaints. 

In a September public meeting, Hodges sought to reassure the agency’s commissioners: Purges were under control, he said.

But interviews with current and former agency staff and oil and gas officials suggest that Oklahoma is still dealing with dozens of purges. One of these incidents killed about two dozen cattle in September after toxic salt water filled a creek leading to Fort Cobb Lake, a public water supply. That month, the state increased testing at the lake and said the public supply has not been impacted. Nevertheless, in October Gov. Kevin Stitt declared a state of emergency and called it “a serious threat to public health and safety” as thousands of gallons of wastewater continued to flow each day.

Agency officials said field staff periodically check for signs of new activity at purge sites that they considered resolved. They did not comment on the purges near Lake Wister or Fort Cobb Lake. Hodges, who participated in an interview with The Frontier and ProPublica, did not provide comment beyond what other agency officials said. 

In late August, Ray, who has returned to consulting for oil and gas companies, took a reporter to visit a purge site on a ranch in southern Oklahoma where the agency had closed a pollution complaint around the time Hodges took office. 

That afternoon, in an otherwise dry streambed flanked by steep red-dirt walls, puddles sat baking in the sun, though it hadn’t rained in weeks. A film of oil shone on the water’s surface, bands of green mixed with purple and bright blue. On the banks, white salt scars showed the outline of old wastewater spills. 

“It is hard to believe that anyone would turn their back on this problem and just pretend it simply does not exist,” Ray said as he surveyed the scene.

Farther up the gulch, the water formed a pool, which gave off a rank chemical smell. The oily surface appeared calm at first glance. But on closer inspection, bubbles were breaking the surface in several places. The water was coming up from beneath the ground. 

Oil field wastewater bubbles into Wildhorse Creek in February 2025. Abigail Harrison

To report this story, the Frontier and ProPublica reviewed thousands of documents, obtained through public records requests, that include communications about the purges from the regulatory agency’s oil division leadership, elected commissioners, state legislators and the Environmental Protection Agency. The news organizations interviewed more than 30 people, including current and former state employees, Oklahoma oil and gas industry employees, and citizens whose water and land was damaged by injected oil field waste.

Reporting grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources helped fund this reporting. This work was supported by pro bono legal assistance from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. 

Mark Olalde of ProPublica contributed reporting.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Toxic wastewater from oil fields keeps pouring out of the ground. Oklahoma regulators failed to stop it. on Oct 29, 2025.

As the Trump administration deletes climate data and shutters resources that track the impacts of a warming world, nonprofits, state-level governments, and independent scientists are rushing to preserve the information. 

Last week, Climate Central resurrected one of the most prominent of those lost records: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s billion-dollar disaster database. The tool allowed policymakers, insurers, and regular people to track how hurricanes, floods, and other catastrophes are growing more expensive — until the agency said in May that it would no longer update the database “in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.” The move was part of the administration’s broader effort to roll back climate action and push more of the cost of disaster monitoring and response on to states.

Those changes come alongside a shift in who controls the facts about the climate crisis. With federal agencies no longer submitting emissions data to the United Nations, terminating climate experts, and taking down websites, and taking other steps to roll back climate reporting, a patchwork of nonprofits and states is trying to fill the gap — creating an ad hoc parallel system for tracking the risks Americans face.

Climate Central, which analyzes climate and extreme weather data and explains its impacts to the public, unveiled the updated database on Wednesday. In the first six months of 2025, the nation recorded 14 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters costing $101.4 billion. That’s already far above the annual average of nine. Four of the five costliest years on record have occurred since 2020. 

“We know climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of some types of extreme events,” said climatologist Adam Smith, who led the database under NOAA and is doing so again at Climate Central. “And we know more infrastructure in harm’s way to those extremes results in higher damages. Data and information products like this help us understand how to build a more robust, resilient future.” 

In September, a group of Senate Democrats led by Peter Welch of Vermont introduced a bill to restore the dataset under NOAA, arguing that the information is too vital to be subjected to political whim. His bill, however, hasn’t gone anywhere, and in the meantime, Climate Central hired Smith. He has 20 years’ experience working in climate and extreme weather data analysis and was happy to see the data, which combines and analyzes information gleaned from 16 public and private sources. When the Department of Government Efficiency came to NOAA determined to slash spending, “it seemed pretty clear where they were headed,” Smith said. He resigned “in line with tens of thousands of other federal workers” and looked for a place to continue his work. Climate Central allowed him to “make an apples to apples comparison” with the work he did at NOAA — even the interface looks similar. 

According to the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, Trump’s second term is outpacing his first in terms of how much climate data is being deleted. Nonprofits like Climate Central — joined by the likes of Public Environmental Data Partners, The Data Center, and the Climate Data Collaborative — are, in Smith’s words, “triaging, and trying to re-establish a baseline moving forward of what can be done scientifically and what can be maintained.”

Data deletion is not just a problem for researchers and insurers, but for local and state authorities who rely on resources like the billion-dollar disaster database to make the case for building resilient infrastructure. Officials in Asheville, North Carolina, for example, depended upon the tool when deciding to rebuild the dam at North Fork Reservoir. That work is believed to have kept the structure from breaching during Hurricane Helene. 

When Carly Fabian, a policy advocate at Public Citizen, talks to policymakers about climate disaster, “the statistics and data from the billion-dollar disaster database were one of my go-to statistics,” she said. “It’s been really strange not to have that go-to figure.” Policymakers tend to be motivated by specific dollar amounts, not vague predictions of future crises, she said. “That number will only go up, regardless of whether we’re tracking it or not,” she said. “Tracking it just makes it easier to understand the problem.” 

Some states are working to build their own databases of climate and weather hazards they face: California, for example, moved to build a public wildfire catastrophe model in early October. And as more states follow their lead, nonprofit efforts like the reborn billion-dollar disaster dataset are “just one piece of the puzzle,” Fabian said. 

“In the long run, it really should be the government collecting this data,” she said. “But at the same time, right now, it’s so important not to lose that information and not to have a lag there.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump killed a crucial disaster database. This nonprofit just saved it. on Oct 29, 2025.

A new kind of gold rush is sweeping the West, and this time the prize isn’t minerals but megawatts. From Phoenix to Colorado’s Front Range, data centers are arriving with outsize demands for power and water. In a new report, the regional environmental advocacy group Western Resource Advocates (WRA) warns that without stronger guardrails, the financial and environmental costs could fall on everyday households. 

Across Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, new data centers are expected to create a surge in resource use, raising consumers’ power bills while jeopardizing climate goals. By 2035, the surge in new data centers could send the Interior West’s electricity demand soaring by about 55 percent, WRA warns.   

The unprecedented extent of the industry’s energy requirements risks derailing decarbonization goals in several states. Energy experts say the astronomical power needs may keep fossil fuels like coal and gas in use longer. NV Energy, Nevada’s main utility, now expects its carbon emissions to rise 53 percent over 2022 estimates because of new data center growth. 

Deborah Kapiloff, a clean energy policy advisor with WRA and an author of the new report, highlights the incredible scale of the additional power needed for the region’s tech infrastructure boom. By her calculations, within the next decade, the West’s planned data centers will burn through enough electricity each year to power 25 cities the size of Las Vegas.

Who covers data center power costs?

In some cases, the industry is outsourcing these energy costs to the public. Kapiloff explains that consumers are likely to shoulder the burden of expensive new power infrastructure, because typically utilities spread construction costs across all users. With the unprecedented demand of power-hungry data centers, that logic breaks down. “When the customer is this large, the old assumption that ‘growth helps everyone’ doesn’t hold,” she said.

In Colorado, regulators are struggling to keep up. John Gavan, a former Colorado Public Utility Commission member, says that utilities in his state may need to roughly double total power production within five years to cope. “The scale here is mind-boggling,” he says. “A single hyperscale data center could consume 10 percent or more of the entire state’s load.” 

A recently constructed QTS data center just outside of Denver in Aurora, Colorado. RJ Sangosti / Media News Group / The Denver Post via Getty Images

Officials say that current pricing rules could push higher electricity costs from new data centers onto residential customers. Joseph Pereira, the deputy director at the Colorado Office of the Utility Consumer Advocate, says this may mean rate increases of 30 to 50 percent for households — and those costs could double or even triple in the long term. 

Pereira also emphasizes the risks of building new power generation and transmission for data centers that may never be constructed. “If we build the infrastructure and then data center loads don’t show up, somebody is left holding the bag (for the costs),” he says. “Today, that’s existing customers.”

Water on the line

Data centers also bring heavy demands on water. Near Tucson, Arizona, a proposed data center in the Sonoran Desert of Pima County has become a community flashpoint because of the project’s heavy demands in an already water-stressed region. Initial designs suggest the controversial Project Blue will require “millions upon millions of gallons,” says Pima County Supervisor Jennifer Allen, although the official numbers were not disclosed. 

“Tricking people out of their water is a clear line that, even in this divided country, people agree on,” said Duke University teacher Allegra Jordan. As a community advocate on data center projects, she’s repeatedly seen local authorities asked to approve developments without key information on their impacts.

Community members gather at the Tucson Convention Center on August 4, 2025 for a public forum to discuss the proposed Project Blue data center. Wild Horizons / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In Arizona, community backlash against Project Blue forced a redesign, and the developer now asserts that the new plans will use little or no water, though Allen says she hasn’t seen any documentation to support that assertion. Kapiloff notes that transparency around water use is a common problem. “We have a lack of information about how much total water data centers are using — it’s a big black box,” she says. 

Where the potential water needed for new data centers can be estimated, the scale is sobering. In Nevada, for example, currently proposed new data centers will consume an estimated 4.5 billion gallons of water in 2030, if built with conventional cooling. That number rises to 7 billion gallons by 2035 — the equivalent of water for nearly 200,000 people.

Fast-tracked deals, facts under wraps

Yet the speed and secrecy of data center development deals often keep even officials in the dark. During the first phase of Project Blue in Arizona, Pima County Supervisor Jennifer Allen says that she and the rest of the board of supervisors were asked to vote on the proposal without having access to the project’s full information, due to NDAs signed by county staff that extended to elected officials. “Shrouded in secrecy was the game,” she says.

Jordan believes that communities deserve informed consent on the impacts that data centers will have on their power bills, water use, and environmental impacts. “The moral issue is whether or not people should have consent in whether or not their power bills go up, or how their water is being used,” she says. 

She also points out that, lured by the promised fiscal gains, local government entities sometimes don’t fully disclose what’s being given away in data center incentives and exemptions. “Often the data center proponents say, ‘this will bring in new property taxes and jobs,’” she says. “But many communities don’t actually understand what they’re giving up. And while the community government is the entity that gets that money, the people paying, in terms of larger electric bills, are everyday citizens.”

Building better: A playbook for responsible development

In response to these mounting pressures, some communities are stepping in with safeguards. After the Project Blue debacle, for example, the Pima County Board of Supervisors implemented new regulatory requirements, including NDA limits and a “sunshine period,” where findings must be made public before votes. Other potential interventions WRA recommends include energy-efficiency requirements, ending tax incentives for data center development, and prioritizing data center projects that commit to renewable power generation.

Consumer advocates like Pereira are also working to ensure that large-load customers pay their own way, helping keep existing customers off the hook if proposed data centers are never built. WRA’s report highlights key tools like specialized rate classes designed to make sure large or unusual customers pay rates that reflect their unique impact, and requirements that data centers pay for their forecasted power needs, even if demand declines or never materializes. Clean transition tariffs, or special electricity rates that help big energy users switch to cleaner energy, could help fund renewable projects to power data centers. Finally, creating standards that keep loads to off-peak hours can help protect both ratepayers and resources.

Energy efficiency best practices and “behind the meter” approaches can help, too. In Europe, innovative models include a cluster of data centers under construction in Finland that will use the heat generated to warm approximately 100,000 homes in Helsinki, and a data center in Norway that provides heated water to support aquaculture nearby. Those techniques can work in the United States too: A new development in San Jose, California is seeking to become one of the most sustainable data centers in the world, embedding energy sources onsite and using waste heat to power equipment chillers. 

While tools like these can help, without swift reforms, even the best planning policies won’t prevent the impacts of rapid data center growth. Many communities are facing aggressive data center prospectors and still lack enforceable guardrails and transparent rules that shield ratepayers from costs and protect the environment. 

As Kapiloff says, “When you have some of the most highly capitalized corporations in the world building these data centers, does it make sense to have that cost be borne by everyday folks? I think the answer to that is a resounding no.”

Western Resource Advocates is a regional nonprofit fighting climate change and its impacts to sustain the environment, economy, and people of the West. The organization is driving state action to advance policies that create a healthier and more equitable future for all communities. As the go-to experts for more than three decades, WRA’s on-the-ground work deploys clean energy and protects air, land, water, and wildlife.

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toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The West’s new gold rush is the data center boom on Oct 28, 2025.

They don’t build many basements in Breezy Point anymore, but Ed Power’s got one. Breezy Point is a remote stretch of New York City along the coast of the Rockaway Peninsula, colloquially known as the “Irish Riviera.” A longtime firefighter who retired as a deputy chief, Power grew up in the neighborhood and raised his kids there. For decades, his basement caused no problems.

But over the last 15 years, it’s begun to flood regularly, the water line moving steadily higher. Breezy Point was decimated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but Power stuck it out and returned. “The only reason I’m here is because of the ocean. I can see it, I swim in it,” he said. “And the water continues to rise. Another Sandy and I’m out of here.” 

Now Power sees a different threat to the beach: the Williams Company’s Northeastern Supply Enhancement, or NESE, pipeline, which has been revived and fast-tracked over the past few months. The pipeline would add to a 10,000-mile network that runs all the way to Texas, carrying fracked gas from Pennsylvania through New York Harbor and terminating off Rockaway Beach, where it will connect to an existing pipeline off the coast of Long Island.

“Everything about this is a horror,” said Power. Since 2018, the NESE pipeline proposal has been rejected three times because it failed to meet New York’s water quality standards. The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC, warned that its construction would dredge up mercury, copper, and other decades-old contaminants dumped off the coast of the city, endangering marine life and the health of local swimmers.

Despite this, Williams recently resubmitted essentially the same proposal, frustrating pipeline opponents who are concerned that the new head of the DEC, appointed by New York State Governor Kathy Hochul in May, could reverse course.

That’s because the White House has stepped in and said that it expects Governor Hochul to do just that. In April, President Trump’s Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, ordered a halt to a $5 billion wind energy project off the coast of New York, but the administration made an abrupt turnaround a month later. The administration says they cut a deal with Hochul, asking her to allow the pipeline application to proceed in exchange for them allowing the wind project to go forward.

Governor Hochul has denied any quid pro quo, although Anders Opedal, chief executive of the wind project developer, told the Financial Times that the pipeline was “very helpful” in restarting the offshore development. Hochul had called him on May 18 to tell him she’d found a solution to the federal stop-work order; the order was lifted the following day. Though no deal was ever confirmed, Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit, filed a formal complaint calling the alleged deal a “lurid political shakedown.” 

Governor Hochul’s office and the Williams company did not respond to requests for comment by a Monday evening deadline. A representative from the DEC said that it was “committed to protecting public health and the environment and subject all permit applications to rigorous review process.” They did not clarify whether or not it was planning to deny the resubmitted pipeline application.

The Williams pipeline proposal was fast-tracked in early July, when the DEC announced that it would be holding a 30-day public comment period with no hearings, which experts say is unusual for a project of this scale. (Previous applications included a public comment period of 45 days and two public hearings.) The public comment period was extended to 45 days after an outcry from environmental groups, but the decision on hearings was final. 

As of press time, the pipeline remains in limbo. Environmental activists worry that the abbreviated process is a sign that the administration has changed its mind on the proposal, in spite of the evidence previously used to justify striking it down.

“The water quality impacts of the pipelines are the same, the science is the same. The climate science is the same or worse. The pipelines are still an expensive [piece] of infrastructure that would be paid for by ratepayers and then become stranded assets when they have to be phased out thanks to New York’s climate law,” said Laura Shindell, the New York State Director of Food and Water Action. “The question is: Is the governor going to knowingly build something that’s been determined to be dangerous, expensive, and unpopular?” 

A report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, or IEEFA, found that the NESE pipeline would cost ratepayers an estimated $1.25 billion and provide no permanent jobs; only 9 percent of temporary construction jobs would be located in New York. National Grid, a U.K.-based company that serves as New York’s gas utility operator, claims that the pipeline is necessary to ensure a reliable gas supply during extreme weather, citing a cold snap during 2022’s Winter Storm Elliott, during which New York City came close to outages.

National Grid also pointed to an increase in energy needs from the massive data centers being planned by the country’s largest tech companies, as well as vague plans from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a data center at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. But much of the data center hype may also be overblown; across the country, utilities are dealing with duplicative requests and the IEEFA report estimates that as many as 50 percent of projected data centers may never materialize. 

“I can’t argue that these data centers don’t need energy. But that’s how you’re going to justify polluting my water and killing my firemen and warming the planet?” said Ed Power, the Rockaway Beach resident. “Not in my eyes. I can’t argue that point.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In New York, a pipeline proposal that just won’t die on Oct 28, 2025.

When automobiles first started tearing through American streets a century ago, they weren’t exactly welcome. One of the main problems was that they were killing children: in 1921 alone, 286 children in Pittsburgh, 130 in Baltimore, and 97 in Washington, D.C. Cities memorialized the dead with monuments and solemn marches. A safety council in Detroit commemorated traffic deaths by ringing bells at city hall and churches; another in Brooklyn put up a “Death-O-Meter” near a major traffic circle that kept a running tally of those injured or killed.

It wasn’t just in cities. At the beginning of the 20th century, rural residents revolted as drivers of “horseless carriages” rammed into their livestock and their neighbors. Across the country, they threw stones and dung at cars, shot at them, and trapped them in ditches dug across roads, or with ropes and wires strung between trees. 

The arrival of automobiles was at first greeted with skepticism that they could ever replace horses and then shock at the dangers they posed. Newspapers in the early 20th century called drivers “killers” and “remorseless murderers.” Cars weren’t seen as necessities but rather the dangerous playthings of those wealthy enough to afford them. Today, media coverage defaults to the passive voice and to calling crashes “accidents” even as they continue taking lives — more than 39,000 people just last year in the United States.

This history of hostility to cars has been largely forgotten. “There’s the myth that the Model T rolled off the assembly line, and it was love at first sight,” said Doug Gordon, co-author of the new book Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile. Gordon wrote the book, an accessible account of the collective damage the automobile has brought to the world, with his fellow hosts of “The War on Cars” podcast, Sarah Goodyear and Aaron Naparstek.

Read Next Walking America’s car-centric hellscape Eve Andrews

It’s part of a growing opposition to car culture in the literary world — a trend that suggests more people are willing to entertain these criticisms than in previous years, at least by publishers’ estimations. September brought the release of Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship With Cars, a philosophical book arguing that cars don’t represent freedom, as we’ve been told, but constraint. Depending on cars drains our bank accounts, limits our transportation options, and locks in damage to our health and the environment. Roadkill was published the same day as Saving Ourselves From Big Car, a condemning investigation of the way automakers, oil companies, and related industries gained control of the road to rake in profits, no matter the consequences.

The facts about cars are alarming: Far more Americans have died from car crashes than from all the wars the United States has fought. The average driver in the U.S. spends more than three-quarters of a million dollars on cars in their lifetime. If the fleet of SUVs around the globe were a country, they would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind Russia and ahead of Japan. 

None of these problems are new — in fact, people have been warning us about many of them for decades. So why is it so easy to ignore these glaring flaws? 

A tableau featuring the Grim Reaper and an auto collision serves as a reminder to all personnel at a military base to drive with care over the Labor Day weekend in 1954. Bettmann / Getty Images

One theory is that growing up in a world dominated by vehicles puts them in a collective blind spot. In other words, car culture changes your brain. “It’s so endemic, it’s so pervasive, it’s so ubiquitous that people don’t recognize just how much it is all around them,” said Ian Walker, an environmental psychologist at Swansea University in the United Kingdom. “And if it’s all around you, it’s shaping your perceptions.”

Walker coined the word “motonormativity” to describe this bias, which causes people to apply laxer moral standards to driving than to other activities. Take the matter of air pollution. In 2023, Walker’s research found that 75 percent of people in the United Kingdom agreed with the statement, “People shouldn’t smoke in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe in the cigarette fumes.” But when two words were swapped — “People shouldn’t drive in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe in the car fumes” — only 17 percent agreed. 

The bias can come from a conscious love for cars or it can be learned subconsciously as people go about their days living in places clearly designed for driving, as opposed to those built to make walking or biking easier. Walker’s study earlier this year found that people in the Netherlands, where biking is encouraged by urban design and much more common, have lower levels of pro-car bias than those in the United States or United Kingdom.

The reality is, without great transportation alternatives available, most people find it easier to ignore the risks of getting in a vehicle. “Driving a car or being a passenger in a car is by far the most dangerous thing that most of us do on a daily level,” said Sarah Goodyear, a co-author of Life After Cars (and a former Grist writer). “If you allowed yourself to think about how dangerous that is, it would be debilitating.”

As cars began to dominate the road — pushing out bikers, horse-and-buggy drivers, streetcar riders, and children playing in the street — the early critiques of them mostly faded away. But they never entirely disappeared.

A 1939 issue of the Superman comic book shows the superhero smashing cars after a reckless driver killed his friend. He terrorizes Metropolis’ mayor into rigorously enforcing traffic rules and confronts an auto company executive about prioritizing “profits at the cost of human lives” before wiping out his automobile factory. A few decades later, Ralph Nader’s 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, uncovered how the auto industry resisted safety features like seat belts in favor of making flashy, visually appealing cars, sparking a national conversation that led to President Lyndon B. Johnson signing into law the first mandatory federal safety standards the following year.

Car companies poured a lot of effort into overcoming criticism. The auto industry spread the term “jaywalking” in the 1920s through a campaign to shame and blame pedestrians for traffic deaths, which included Boy Scouts reprimanding people who crossed the street wherever they wanted. In 1939, the same year Superman launched his war on cars, General Motors introduced a utopian vision of skyscrapers and seven-lane highways at the World’s Fair in New York, Futurama, which proved to be the most popular exhibit. It wasn’t long before those highways got built, and cars were sold as symbols of freedom and prosperity, with ads of families riding into the sunset on road trips. Even the phrase “America’s love affair with cars” was an industry invention, first coined in a Chevrolet ad in 1957. 

Automakers still spend billions on advertising every year. Every football game on TV is punctuated by trucks rampaging through fragile deserts, woodlands, and streams, often accompanied by Will Arnett’s husky voice-over. What’s rarely seen is the reality of being stuck in traffic. “The industry isn’t just selling cars with those images,” write the authors of Life After Cars. “What they’re really hawking is a fantasy veiled in chrome and steel, the fantasy of power and control and independence. The American dream on wheels, no matter where in the world one lives.”

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Cars have become intertwined with our lives, not just a practical way to get around but an aspirational one, tied to our social status and identity. It’s a tough combination to break free from, one that would require overhauling the system that feeds us a message of car dependency: the design of streets, the laws that encourage driving, the advertisements, and more. “Until especially the public and the policymakers recognize there is actually a problem, I think we’re pretty stuck,” Walker said. 

Walker has found that his idea of “motonormativity” resonates with people trying to make the transportation system more sustainable and more welcoming to other modes of travel, but not so much with the general population. (Street engineers, he says, are especially hard to convince.) 

Getting people to listen to criticisms of cars may feel as daunting as ever, but Goodyear and Gordon say there are some promising signs. “I would say more people are ready than you might expect,” Gordon said. 

Recent years have given people a glimpse of how the transportation system could change: The burst of outdoor dining after COVID-19 presented a picture of what streets could look like when cities didn’t prioritize cars. E-bikes, too, have become increasingly common, offering another way to get around. Drivers may find themselves open to other options as they struggle to pay for their vehicles, especially as more of them fall behind on their car payments. Policies are changing, too: Earlier this year, New York implemented a congestion pricing plan that put a toll on driving in lower Manhattan. Already, it has led to less traffic, more transit riders, fewer car crashes and cleaner air.

Taken together, these trends help explain why books like Life After Cars are now on bookstore shelves for the public to peruse, not just marketed to bikers and transit nerds. “It’s almost impossible to imagine this book coming out 10 or 15 years ago from a major publisher,” Gordon said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What we lost when cars won on Oct 28, 2025.

History is unfolding in the Atlantic Ocean right now. Hurricane Melissa has spun up into an extraordinarily dangerous Category 5 storm with maximum sustained winds of 185 mph, and is set to strike Jamaica this afternoon before marching toward Cuba. This is only the second time in recorded history that an Atlantic hurricane season has spawned three hurricanes in that category. Melissa has already killed at least three people in Haiti and another in the Dominican Republic.

The threats to Jamaica will come from all sides. The island could see up to 40 inches of rain as the storm squeezes moisture from the sky, like a massive atmospheric sponge, potentially causing “catastrophic flash flooding and numerous landslides,” according to the National Hurricane Center. Melissa also will bulldoze ashore a storm surge of up to 13 feet — essentially a wall of water that will further inundate coastal areas. “No one living there has ever experienced anything like what is about to happen,” wrote Brian McNoldy, a hurricane scientist at the University of Miami.

It will take some time for scientists to determine exactly how much climate change supercharged Melissa, but they can already say that the storm has been feeding on warm ocean temperatures made up to 800 times more likely by global heating. This is how climate change is worsening these tropical cyclones overall: The hotter the ocean gets — the seas have absorbed 90 percent of the extra heat that humans have pumped into the atmosphere — the more energy that can transfer into a storm. “The role climate change has played in making Hurricane Melissa incredibly dangerous is undeniable,” Marc Alessi, a climate attribution science fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. 

Scientists can already estimate that climate change has increased Melissa’s wind speeds by 10 mph, in turn increasing its potential damage by 50 percent. “We’re living in a world right now where human-caused climate change has changed the environment in which these hurricanes are growing up and intensifying,” said Daniel Gilford, a climate scientist at the research group Climate Central. “Increasing temperatures of the atmosphere is increasing how much moisture is in the atmosphere, which will allow Melissa to rain more effectively and efficiently over the Caribbean, and could cause more flooding than otherwise would have occurred.” 

Making Melissa extra dangerous is the fact that it’s undergone rapid intensification, defined as a jump in sustained wind speeds of at least 35 mph in a day, having doubled its speed from 70 to 140 mph in less than 24 hours. This makes a hurricane all the more deadly not only because stronger winds cause more damage, but because it can complicate disaster preparations — officials might be preparing for a weaker storm, only to suddenly face one far worse. Research has shown a huge increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore, thanks to those rising ocean temperatures, with Atlantic hurricanes specifically being twice as likely now to rapidly intensify.

At the same time, hurricanes are able to produce more rainfall as the planet warms. For one, the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more moisture per degree Celsius of warming. And secondly, the faster the wind speeds, the more water a hurricane can wring out, like spinning a wet mop. Accordingly, hurricanes can now produce 50 percent more precipitation because of climate change. “A more intense hurricane has stronger updrafts and downdrafts, and the amount of efficiency by which the storm can rain basically scales with how intense the storm is,” Gilford said. Making matters worse, Melissa is a rather slow-moving storm, so it will linger over Jamaica, inundating the island and buffeting it with winds.

As Melissa drops rain from above, its winds will shove still more water ashore as a storm surge. The coastlines of the Caribbean have already seen significant sea level rise, which means levels are already higher than before. (Warmer oceans have an additional effect here, as hotter water takes up more space, a phenomenon known as thermal expansion.) All of this means the baseline water levels are already higher, which the storm surge will pile on top of. “Just small, incremental, marginal changes in sea level can really drive intense changes,” Gilford said. 

Jamaica has an added challenge in its mountainous terrain. Whereas water will accumulate on flat terrain, it behaves much more unpredictably when it’s rushing downhill because it easily gains momentum. “When you get a storm like this that is approaching the higher echelons of what we have observed, it’s harrowing, especially because it is pointing at a populated island with complex terrain,” said Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona. “You’re dealing with a funneling effect, where that water, as it falls, will then join other water that’s coming down the mountainside and exacerbate the impacts.”

Maybe the only good news here is that the National Hurricane Center was able to accurately predict that Melissa would rapidly intensify. And in general, scientists have gotten ever better at determining how climate change is supercharging hurricanes, so they can provide ever more accurate warnings to places like Jamaica. But that requires continuous governmental support for this kind of work, while the Trump administration has slashed scientific budgets and jobs. “We couldn’t do this without continued investment in the enterprise that supports advances in not just science, but forecasting and communicating the outcomes of those forecasts,” Wood said.

Update (October 28): This post has been updated with Hurricane Melissa’s current wind speeds and estimated landfall time.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Hurricane Melissa got so dangerous so fast on Oct 27, 2025.

The city of Clyde sits about two hours west of Fort Worth on the plains of north Texas. It gets its water from a lake by the same name a few miles away. Starting in 2022, scorching weather caused its levels to drop farther and farther. Within a year, officials had declared a water conservation emergency, and on August 1 of last year, they raised the warning level again. That meant residents rationing their spigot use even more tightly, especially lawn irrigation. The restrictions weren’t, however, the worst news that day: The city also missed two debt payments.

Municipal bond defaults of any kind are extraordinarily rare, let alone those linked to a changing climate. But with about 4,000 residents and an annual budget of under $10 million, Clyde has never had room to absorb surprises. So when poor financial planning collided with the prolonged dry spell, the city found itself stretched beyond its limits.

The drought meant that Clyde sold millions of gallons less water, even as it imported more of it from neighboring Abilene, at about $1,200 per day. Worse, as the ground dried, it cracked, destroying a sewer main and bursting another quarter-million dollar hole in the town budget. Within days of Clyde missing its payments, rating agency Standard & Poor’s slashed the city’s bond ratings, which limited its ability to borrow more money. Within weeks, officials had hiked taxes and water rates to help staunch the financial bleeding.

“There’s more to a drought than just the cost of water,” said Rodger Brown, who was mayor at the time and is now interim city manager. “It tanks your credibility.”

Drought, of course, isn’t the only climate-driven disaster hitting places like Clyde. Hurricanes, floods, and fires are bankrupting cities across America. After flames ripped through Paradise, California, in 2018, the town’s redevelopment agency defaulted on some of its obligations. Naples, Florida, resorted to selling $11 million in bonds to rebuild its pier after Hurricane Ian in 2022. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had a harder time raising money after massive fires swept the city. Kerr County, Texas, is in the midst of raising taxes after devastating floods in July. 

Each episode underscores how climate shocks once seen as exceptional are now straining local budgets. But drought may be the most insidious of these threats. Compared to other types of disasters, it often hits everyone in a community, affects large areas, and can last months, if not years. There are also fewer defenses and relatively limited government assistance. Experts worry that drought could ultimately prove an enormous risk to the $4 trillion municipal bond market that underwrites everything from roads and schools to the water running through millions of taps.

“I personally think this is a dark horse in the conversation right now,” said Evan Kodra, the head of climate research for the financial data company Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE. “It should be a bigger deal.”

This year alone has seen droughts in at least 43 states, from Vermont to California, affecting 125 million people. And ICE projects that more of the currently outstanding municipal debt will be located in areas prone to drought by 2040 than hurricanes, floods, and wildfires combined. The financial effects of prolonged water woes can mount in ways not seen in one-off events, said Jeremy Porter, the chief economist at First Street Foundation, a nonprofit climate research firm.  

“Drought is one of those things, if there is an impact, there’s a step-function impact,” he said. “You just don’t have the capacity to cover the risk.” 

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Average weeks per year in severe drought conditions

30-year change in drought risk

Increase in severe drought weeks from current conditions to 2055

Source: First Street Foundation Clayton Aldern / Grist (function() { const INIT_KEY = '__grist_drought_maps_initialized__'; if (window[INIT_KEY]) { return; } window[INIT_KEY] = true; })();

Droughts are particularly difficult for cities to guard against. While building codes and insurance discounts can encourage homeowners to raise their houses, use wind-resistant shingles, or clear brush to slow fires, the options for making sure people have enough water are far more limited without curbing development. 

Also unlike with its headline-grabbing cousins, drought has a much weaker federal safety net when something does go wrong. The Department of Agriculture offers some aid to farmers, but there’s little funding for individuals or municipalities. The Federal Emergency Management Agency hasn’t issued a drought-related emergency or disaster declaration in the United States since 1993, despite states requesting aid. “There is no adapting to drought,” said Porter. “The federal government is probably not going to come in.” 

As the planet warms, the dry conditions that sent Clyde into the financial abyss are only set to become more frequent and more intense. Intercontinental Exchange researchers found that even in a “best-case” climate scenario, drought, heat stress, and water stress will place billions of dollars of municipal bonds at risk by 2040. Under a worst-case situation, that number could reach hundreds of billions. While Clyde’s default was relatively tiny, municipal debt is the bedrock of everything from hedge funds to retirement accounts, making a string of such events potentially catastrophic for the economy.

But well before dramatic rolling defaults, the financial pressures of drought will likely alter daily life in many regions. That’s already the reality for one community in Arizona, where the rush for water has turned into a years-long financial and political standoff.

Rio Verde Foothills lies on the outskirts of Scottsdale. Residents there have been trucking water in from its larger neighbor ever since the unincorporated, “wildcat” development was founded in the early 2000s. The arrangement worked well until 2021, when a severe drought gripped the area, and Scottsdale decided it could no longer spare the dwindling resource. Cut-off residents of Rio Verde scrambled and eventually signed a $12 million contract with the state’s largest private water company, Epcor Utilities, to build a permanent supply line.

Three years later, though, the feud continues. Scottsdale agreed to keep providing water through the end of this year while Epcor Utilities built new infrastructure. But construction is months behind schedule and Scottsdale is sticking to its deadline — leaving the foothills once again facing a cutoff. (Epcor remains confident this won’t happen.) 

Even when the new line is connected, Rio Verde Foothills residents could see their water bills double or triple. Hikes like that are going to be a far wider concern across the West than outright disconnection, says Sara Fletcher, an environmental engineer at Stanford University who works on water scarcity issues. “Water prices are going up, and up, and up,” she said. “They are going to go up much faster than inflation for the past decade.” 

City of Clyde, Texas

The irony of drought is that as people conserve water to combat it, there is less money for the utility, whose costs remain relatively fixed. That results in “drought surcharges,” or other fees, for customers. It’s a cycle that was on full display in Clyde. 

By August 2023, the wave of aridity that hit West Texas had stretched for months, and officials in Clyde declared a stage 2 water emergency, which targets a 20 percent decrease in demand. By the following year they raised it to stage 3, or a 30 percent decline — one step below mandatory rationing. The measures worked, but at a cost. “Water sales are one of the main things that a city, almost any city, has,” said Brown. “That’s big for a city’s revenue generation.”

According to Clyde’s financial statements, it sold 7 million gallons less in 2023 than the year prior. It also had to import water from nearby Abilene at a premium of around $3 per thousand gallons. While Brown didn’t know exactly how much Clyde bought, he said it wasn’t as much as in some previous droughts but still significant. The bigger blow came when the parched ground split, shifted, and ruptured a major sewer line. The roughly $250,000 repair bill turned the cracks in the town’s finances into crevasses.

“You can’t have people out here without the services. So we had to fix it,” he said. These new liabilities and dwindling income came on top of millions of dollars in debt that Clyde had amassed over the years, despite having kept taxes or utility prices relatively flat. It created what Brown called a “perfect storm.”

On August 1, 2024, the city missed two bond payments — one for $354,325, another for $308,400 — and filed a claim on its bond insurance to cover them. By the end of the year Clyde had failed to meet a total of $1.4 million in liabilities. Standard & Poor’s slashed the ratings of the bonds with missed payments from A- to D, and the city’s creditworthiness to B, moves that will raise future borrowing costs for the city. 

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While drought wasn’t the whole story, Brown called it a “significant reason” for Clyde’s woes. Whatever the cause, the fallout rippled quickly. The city council raised property taxes by 10 percent and tacked a $35 surcharge onto monthly utility bills. “We have people in this very room who have to decide already, do I buy medicine [or] do I buy groceries?” pleaded one person at a city council hearing. “This is reality in Clyde. You can’t raise their typical water bills any further.”

So far residents have absorbed the added costs, which has allowed the city to continue to operate. But the spiral from expensive, inaccessible, or nonexistent water could have been much worse. High bills can lead to compromises in daily life, whether that be letting parks wither or skipping showers. Over time, those inconveniences could make a town a less desirable place to live, which, in turn, might result in lower property values, a dwindling tax base, and, consequently, more financial troubles.

“If you don’t have water, if you don’t have a functioning city, there is a vicious cycle dynamic that could come into play,” said Kodra at Intercontinental Exchange. “Once your property tax base is decently lower than it was, then it’s harder to borrow money to dig out of that hole.”

Read Next Why it’s more expensive for Black towns to borrow money Jake Bittle & Siri Chilukuri

First Street Foundation estimates that 11.1 million Americans are expected to move due to strained water resources by 2055. While it didn’t isolate drought specifically, the analysis also found that property values are slated to drop by $1.47 trillion over that same time period due to climate risks. 

“We haven’t hit the point yet where people can’t get access to water,” said Porter. But there are inklings of that future, especially in the West. In Arizona, for example, water supply requirements for new developments are already beginning to halt some new construction.. According to Fletcher, “the fraction of the population that will face unaffordable water in the future is likely to increase unless we do something major.”

First Street also provided Grist with county-level data showing how the risk of prolonged water scarcity will change over the next 30 years. Of the 10 counties with the largest jump over that timeframe, seven are in Texas and three are in Florida. By 2055, more than 20 counties across the West will have a one in five chance of being in severe drought for at least 11 months out of the year. Over 500 counties could see six or more months. According to Fletcher, “the fraction of the population that will face unaffordable water in the future is likely to increase unless we do something major.”

Solutions won’t be easy to come by, and certainly won’t be painless. One logical conclusion might be that municipalities that are at risk of climate impacts — like Clyde with drought or Tampa Bay with hurricanes — should simply pay more for their debt. In most sectors, risk and interest rates traditionally correspond but, according to multiple studies, that’s not the case with municipal bonds. 

“Climate poses a systemic credit risk to the municipal industry, of which it has never experienced,” said Thomas Doe, founder of Municipal Market Analytics. “[But] the marketplace is not pricing climate risk into bonds.”

The conundrum arises from the fact that people primarily buy municipal bonds to receive tax-exempt dividends. Demand, therefore, isn’t particularly sensitive to the price of the bond, but rather the risk of default, which remains extremely low. Another major bulwark against climate pricing has been the federal government, which pumps billions of disaster aid into communities across the country — money that would have otherwise come out of state or municipal budgets. 

“Bonds initially dip in price on the news of the event. Then they end up recovering because the federal government essentially rebuilds,” explained Doe. That support is in jeopardy with President Donald Trump’s deep cuts to government spending, and that could eventually trickle into the municipal market. In the absence of aid, Doe says, bonds could start being priced in accordance with the risk.

Not all climate debt, however, is bad. 

This fall Norfolk, Virginia, is planning to break ground on a $2.6 billion flood protection system, featuring a nearly 9-mile long seawall. The city is responsible for roughly $1 billion of that cost and is expected to issue new debt to help cover it. But Doe says that this type of climate-adaptation debt is generally considered good and should be encouraged, explaining that “if it’s proactive, credit ratings look favorably.” 

While you can’t build a wall against drought, the same principle applies for the admittedly limited tools that are available. Cities could, for instance, spend money making their water system more efficient, or building gray water recycling projects. Green infrastructure can also help keep rain from running off. More drastic steps might involve relocating people or repurposing especially dry land for other uses, such as clean energy.

Although Clyde isn’t yet at a point where it’s climate-proofing its infrastructure, Lake Clyde is spilling over this year. That has provided the city a respite during which it can financially heal. Brown says the city has repaid its bond insurer, is back on track with debt payments, and is slowly rebuilding its emergency funds. The hope is that higher prices making the city’s recovery possible will mean less pain the next time the water runs low.

“We haven’t dug completely out,” said Brown. “But we’re still digging.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Drought is quietly pushing American cities toward a fiscal cliff on Oct 27, 2025.

The Trump administration moved last Monday to slash federal jobs across two key environmental and conservation agencies, targeting employees who work on scientific research and the enforcement of anti-pollution laws. 

At the Environmental Protection Agency, staff received a new round of furlough notices as funding dwindles amid the government shutdown. The Department of the Interior disclosed plans to permanently cut more than 2,000 positions, according to a court filing by its chief personnel officer. 

The Interior Department layoffs, also known as a “reduction in force,” are at the center of ongoing litigation over President Donald Trump and his administration’s efforts to further gut the federal workforce.  

Monday’s filing came in response to a judge’s order requiring the Interior Department to disclose its layoff plans for unionized employees. The administration said it intends to eliminate 2,050 Interior Department positions, a decision made before the government shutdown began.

That timing contradicts Trump’s recent claim that government layoffs stemmed from the shutdown. 

Most of the planned cuts would hit the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service’s regional offices, and Interior’s main headquarters, according to the filing. 

The Interior Department manages national parks, wildlife refuges, and other public lands. It oversees environmental and wildlife conservation, fulfills trust obligations to Alaska Natives and Native American tribes, and conducts scientific research on endangered species, water resources, and natural hazards like flooding and wildfires so officials can better respond to them. 

Read Next Why Trump’s purge of ‘negative’ national park signs includes climate change Kate Yoder

Those research positions would be especially hard hit by the planned layoffs, including projects focused on the Great Lakes ecosystems and the USGS Columbia Environmental Research Center in Missouri, where scientists study toxic contaminants such as PFAS, a class of chemicals Trump’s health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has pledged to address. 

Asked for comment, the White House referred questions to the Interior Department, which did not respond. 

Environmental groups described the move as part of a broader campaign by Trump and his administration to eliminate research and data collection on environmental contamination after carrying out what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the largest rollback of environmental protections in U.S. history. 

“This plan would eviscerate the core science that every American depends on,” said Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the conservation group the Center for Western Priorities, in a statement about the new Interior Department cuts revealed last week. 

Rokala said the planned cuts “would devastate scientific research across the Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, and Great Lakes,” while harming workers who “make our parks and public lands the envy of the world.” 

Rokala also said that Monday’s filing revealed only the planned layoffs for unionized employees: “We don’t know how many non-union offices and positions are also on the chopping block.”

At the EPA, the new furlough notices arrived as the agency’s funding dries up. Earlier this month, Trump said the shutdown was an opportunity to dismantle “Democrat programs that we want to close up or we never wanted to happen.” He has repeatedly cast environmental protection, conservation, and related public health issues as “woke” and left-wing. 

Some of the country’s key environmental protections, and in fact the EPA itself, date back to the Republican Nixon administration.

“Only Trump’s EPA would lay off the people who protect our kids from breathing polluted air and drinking contaminated water but keep the pesticide office open to greenlight more poisons,” said J.W. Glass, EPA policy specialist at the conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity.

Glass, in a written statement, accused the administration of using the shutdown to dismantle the EPA, leaving “our communities paying the price.”

EPA press secretary Carolyn Holran said in a written statement that the suggestion that the furloughs are part of a deliberate campaign to dismantle the EPA “is both inaccurate and unfair to the dedicated EPA employees who continue working to protect human health and the environment.”

Holran blamed Democrats for the government shutdown and said the EPA was taking a “calculated approach” to ensure “that we remain able to deliver on presidential priorities and avoid actions that directly impact or harm the American people.” 

Asked for details about the number of furlough notices sent and which offices they impact, Holran called it “a ridiculous question to ask.” 

In a written statement, Peter Murchie, senior director at the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network and a former EPA official, called on Congress to intervene and stop the “systematic dismantling.”

“The health harms facing American families — cancer, childhood asthma, infertility, organ failure — don’t pause for politics,” Murchie said. “When EPA’s expert staff are sent home, large parts of the agency’s work simply stop.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump targets federal employees working on conservation and environmental protection on Oct 26, 2025.

Mosquitoes have been found in Iceland for the first time as global heating makes the country more hospitable for insects.

The country was until this month one of the few places in the world that did not have a mosquito population. The other is Antarctica.

Scientists have predicted for some time that mosquitoes could establish themselves in Iceland as there are plentiful breeding habitats such as marshes and ponds. Many species will be unable to survive the harsh climate, however.

Studies have shown that the Arctic region is warming at four times the rate of the rest of the planet, and Iceland has experienced record heat this year. Glaciers have been collapsing and fish from warmer southern climes, such as mackerel, have been found in the country’s waters.

As the planet warms, more species of mosquito have been found across the globe. In the U.K., eggs of the Egyptian mosquito (Aedes aegypti) were found this year, and the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) has been discovered in Kent. These are invasive species that can spread tropical diseases such as dengue, chikungunya, and Zika virus.

Read Next A deadly mosquito-borne illness rises as the US cuts all climate-health funding Zoya Teirstein

Matthías Alfreðsson, an entomologist at the Natural Science Institute of Iceland, confirmed the findings there. He identified the insects himself after they were sent to him by a citizen scientist.

He said: “Three specimens of Culiseta annulata were found in Kiðafell, Kjós, two females and one male. They were all collected from wine ropes during wine roping aimed at attracting moths.”

The species is cold-resistant and can survive Icelandic conditions by sheltering through winter in basements and barns.

Björn Hjaltason found the mosquitoes and posted about it on the Facebook group Insects in Iceland. “At dusk on October 16, I caught sight of a strange fly on a red wine ribbon,” Hjaltason said, referring to the trap he uses to attract insects. “I immediately suspected what was going on and quickly collected the fly. It was a female.”

He caught two more and sent them to the science institute where they were identified.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mosquitoes found in Iceland for first time as climate crisis warms country on Oct 25, 2025.

Every year, United Nations member states gather together at the Conference of the Parties, better known as COP, to negotiate international climate agreements and assess global progress toward emissions reduction. The 30th annual COP will begin November 7 in Belém, Brazil, a city of about 2.5 million on the edge of the Amazon. Depending on who you ask, COP is either the world’s best attempt to date at collective climate action or a massive forum for greenwashing: At last year’s COP29, the human rights NGO Global Witness found that oil and gas lobbyists significantly outnumbered negotiating officials from the 10 countries most threatened by climate change.

“We genuinely believe that COPs have been co-opted by the fossil fuel industry, to such an extent that we’re seeing thousands of lobbyists turn up each year,” said Patrick Galey, the head of fossil fuel investigations at Global Witness. “And they are not lobbying for green energy.” 

One long-running argument for giving oil and gas companies a seat at the table at COP has been that, as the providers of the lion’s share of the world’s energy, they must be partners in global decarbonization. “Coalitions have to include the incumbent energy companies, and specifically the oil and gas companies,” Ernest Moniz, who was energy secretary under former president Barack Obama, told CNBC at COP28 in 2023.

But a new study in the academic journal Nature Sustainability appears to bolster Galey’s side of the argument, by demonstrating exactly how little fossil fuel companies are investing in renewable energy. The study’s authors analyzed data from Global Energy Monitor, an open source database that tracks oil, gas, coal, and renewable energy use worldwide, to figure out just how involved major fossil fuel companies are in the deployment of renewables. 

The researchers fully expected measures of fossil fuel producers’ investment in renewable energy to be low — but not this low: Of the 250 largest oil and gas companies, they found, only 20 percent were operating any renewable energy projects at all. Overall, fossil fuel producers own only 1.42 percent of global renewable energy projects, and those projects are responsible for a measly 0.1 percent of their total energy production. 

Marcel Llavero Pasquina, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona who authored the study along with Antonio Bontempi, admits that he was surprised by how little renewable energy activity is supported by oil and gas companies, despite going into the research with low expectations. “They’ve been hammering this message that they are part of the transition, that they are an ally in the fight against the climate crisis for so long,” he told Grist. “I was expecting [oil and gas companies to own] around 5 percent.”  

Llavaero Pasquina said that he hoped his research would be used to support excluding fossil fuel producers from any role in setting international climate goals.

The research comes as the World Meteorological Association announces that planet-warming carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have reached record highs this year. It also arrives on the heels of the oil major BP’s decision, earlier this year, to cut renewable energy investment by roughly 70 percent. 

“We continually see fossil fuel producers over-promise and under-deliver when it comes to renewable energy spending,” said Galey from Global Witness. “Every COP we have that continues to allow thousands of people who are advocating for the continued use of oil and gas puts the Paris Agreement goals further out of reach. Every COP we allow them to infiltrate incurs a debt to future generations that will be paid in climate impacts.” 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Fossil fuel companies say they support the energy transition. New numbers suggest otherwise. on Oct 24, 2025.

As Paramaribo, Suriname, flooded with shin-high water during a rainstorm in June, hundreds of taxis jostled for space on a recently paved street on the outskirts of the capital city. Passengers in suits disembarked alongside an overgrown canal. The visitors, some of whom had come from as far away as Texas and Malaysia, were there to commemorate this small country’s entry into the ranks of the world’s major oil producers.

Paramaribo sits on the northeast coast of South America, at the edge of a relatively undisturbed section of the Amazon rainforest. This massive jungle covers more than 90 percent of Suriname’s landmass, making it the world’s most forested country by percentage. It also allows Suriname to claim itself as “carbon-negative,” meaning that the nation absorbs more greenhouse gases than it emits.

Sources: USGS / NaturalEarth / NASA. Offshore project location courtesy of Staatsolie. Jesse Nichols / Grist

As a result, Suriname is one of the few countries that can make an unimpeachable claim to being on the right side of the climate crisis. But all that is about to change.

In 2028, the country’s first offshore oil platform will begin pumping almost a quarter-million barrels of crude each day, roughly enough to supply the daily needs of all the drivers in the state of Colorado. In its first year alone, this project from the French oil major TotalEnergies is expected to generate billions of dollars of revenue for the government and billions more in private spending, causing the country’s economy to grow by more than half. More offshore rigs are expected to follow.

The air at the fifth annual Suriname Energy, Oil, and Gas Summit in June buzzed in anticipation of this coming prosperity. Hundreds of oil industry figures and Surinamese politicians crowded into the conference tents. They drank rum cocktails and sampled canapes, gabbed at trade show booths with representatives from drilling companies and construction firms, and then took taxis to after-parties where DJs shouted out conference sponsors such as the consulting firm EY.

Cars drive along a busy street in central Paramaribo. The capital city’s urban infrastructure can struggle to handle rainfall and floods during storms.
Juan Barreto / AFP via Getty Images

All the while, they celebrated what they saw as a global shift away from aggressive climate policy. A speaker from Shell praised the emergence of a “balanced energy transition” approach, while those from development banks and market analysis firms spoke about a new emphasis on “energy addition,” rather than “transition.” As the attendees saw it, there was nothing odd about the spectacle of a carbon-negative country hosting a celebration of new oil extraction — amid damaging floods only likely to become more frequent with more global warming. 

From one angle, the launch of Suriname’s oil industry is a retelling of a familiar story: A massive oil company wins over a country with the promise of riches, enlisting it in an effort to produce more of a commodity that is destroying the world. But from another, it’s the story of a country seeking to balance its economic growth with the welfare of the planet, in the absence of global infrastructure to help it develop in other ways. 

To hear Suriname’s leaders tell it, the oil project would allow the nation to uplift its citizens without harming the climate. 

“The new dawn … means that Suriname is given a new chance for sustainable development,” said Chandrikapersad Santokhi, the country’s outgoing president, in his opening remarks at the conference. “The development of the oil and gas industry and carbon offsets go hand in hand in our country. We are not pursuing growth at any cost.”

A statue in Paramaribo celebrates the 25th anniversary of the founding of Staatsolie, the state oil company of Suriname. Jake Bittle / Grist

Up until now, Suriname’s coveted “carbon-negative” status has been inextricably linked to its underdevelopment. Its slice of the Amazon sequesters more carbon than the country can emit only because its citizens by and large cannot afford the energy-intensive lifestyles that much of the world takes for granted. The average resident earned less than $500 per month in 2024.

Now, Suriname’s leaders want to alleviate that poverty without becoming a net source of carbon. The plan is not just to make money and employ people, but also to use oil as a financing mechanism to build an economy that will someday become independent of fossil fuels, according to senior government officials who have served across the country’s recent administrations. 

This means a host of new infrastructure projects and social welfare programs that check the boxes of sustainable development: Suriname will seed green industries such as ecotourism and climate-smart agriculture, build mangrove sea barriers and storm-drain systems to stop flooding, and transition away from the use of imported bunker fuel and toward solar and hydropower.

Elsy Poeketie collects water at her daughter’s house in Paramaribo after heavy rainfall.
Ranu Abhelakh / AFP via Getty Images

But it also means allowing Total, the world’s sixth-largest oil company by market capitalization, to pump around 750 million new barrels of oil — more than will come from a massive oil development such as ConocoPhillips’s Willow project in Alaska. And that’s the bare minimum, assuming that no other multinationals strike crude and drill their own rigs.

“We have to diversify,” said Marciano Dasai, Suriname’s former environment minister. “We can say, ‘OK, we’re going to do the oil and gas,’ or we can say, ‘OK, let’s do the oil and gas … to get us out of debt and do the transformation to a green economy.’”

Suriname’s history reads like an argument against the idea that exploiting natural resources can bring about prosperity. When the country gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975, the U.S. aluminum firm Alcoa had been mining a mineral known as bauxite in the country for decades, but it offshored most of the profits. Since independence, the government has helped develop gold mines and two small onshore oil fields, but living standards are still low and inequality high. 

In the years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, Suriname sank into a debt spiral, the result of excessive household power subsidies and low prices for commodities such as gold that are its main source of export revenue. The country owed around half a billion dollars to China, $88 million to the Paris Club, and another half-billion to private bondholders that had lent money to the government to help it prop up public budgets. In 2020, the government defaulted on its sovereign debt, leading the International Monetary Fund to step in with strict curbs on government spending. 

But as this debt crisis unfolded, seeming salvation was waiting offshore. In 2015, Exxon Mobil made a major oil discovery off the coast of neighboring Guyana. Drilling studies soon found that the offshore ridge near Suriname contained billions of barrels’ worth of oil, much of it lightweight and easy to extract, plus vast stores of natural gas. A half-dozen firms started exploring in Suriname’s water, and in 2021, Total struck oil.

A discovery such as this often leads to disaster through the so-called resource curse: When poor countries become reliant on new fossil fuel revenue, it leaves them vulnerable to global price fluctuations, and their governments sometimes embezzle or misuse oil money rather than sharing it with citizens. 

A companion phenomenon, known as Dutch disease, occurs when a country’s overwhelming focus on one new industry leads to a decline in the rest of its economy, as Suriname’s former colonizer experienced after a gas field discovery in the 20th century. Countries including Cameroon, Guyana, and South Sudan, to name a few, have developed oil projects over the decades that never delivered broad prosperity.

The new headquarters of TotalEnergies rises above the outskirts of Paramaribo. The French supermajor plans to extract hundreds of millions of barrels of oil from an offshore platform starting in 2028. Jake Bittle / Grist

In theory, Suriname is in danger of falling into this trap. The country has a history of corruption, and until 2020, it was ruled by Dési Bouterse, a former soldier who staged a military coup in the 1980s and was later elected president. But it also had a secret weapon in its negotiations with Total. Because it had already developed a small onshore oil field in the 1980s, Suriname had a public oil company called Staatsolie, which operated relatively independently. While it had nowhere near the resources needed to drill for oil offshore — Total’s revenue was two thousand times greater — the state-owned company’s leaders had more fossil fuel expertise than those in most small countries.

Led by a mild-mannered engineer named Annand Jagesar, Staatsolie drove a hard bargain with Total: The smaller company insisted on a royalty rate of 6.25 percent, more than twice what Guyana was able to negotiate, as well as a 36 percent corporate income tax and a guarantee that Total would hire locals. Staatsolie also secured a $1.6 billion loan from development banks, which allowed it to take a 20 percent stake in the project. In all, Suriname will get up to 70 percent of the revenue from Total’s oil. 

The talks were so tense that at one point, Total threatened to walk out. But Staatsolie held firm, and the larger company came back to the table.

Total “was not nice in the beginning, and we were not nice in the beginning, but I must tell you, this project is one of the best projects in the world,” Jagesar said at the conference in June. (The company did not respond to interview requests.)

Even before the Total deal was final, Suriname used the promise of future wealth to reverse its debt spiral. In 2023, the government restructured its Wall Street debt, and it passed legislation the following year to divert a chunk of oil revenue into a sovereign wealth fund modeled on Norway’s. 

The turnaround was remarkable. Just a few years after defaulting on its debt, Suriname was on a path to being debt-free. Other major oil companies such as Chevron, Petronas, and Shell were staking out developments, encouraged by Total’s success.

Last October, Total made its final decision to proceed with the oil project, which the company called GranMorgu. The name was a pun — it is the name of a wide-mouthed fish that is native to Suriname’s offshore waters, but in the unofficial national language of Sranan Tongo, it means “new dawn.” Given the scale of change that the oil project would bring to Suriname, the name seemed more than appropriate.

A mural in the offices of Staatsolie celebrates the career of Rudolf Elias, one of the state-owned oil company’s former directors. Jake Bittle / Grist

This oil project is good news for Suriname — its people are poised to get higher-paying jobs, more foreign business, and far better public services. But in the eyes of many of the world’s climate advocates, it’s a disaster, particularly at a moment when governments are supposed to be turning away from fossil fuels. 

“As a sovereign state, we do have the right to exploit our resources in the way we see fit,” said Gina Griffith, the head of the Suriname chapter of Conservation International, a leading environmentalist nonprofit. “But it’s so contradictory.”

That Suriname has championed a new oil development is symptomatic of the impasse that plagues global climate policy. The 2015 Paris Agreement enshrined a principle known as “common but differentiated responsibilities”— in essence, the idea that rich countries, which got rich in part by producing the lion’s share of carbon emissions, must do more to fight climate change than poor countries. Wealthy nations have agreed in principle to not only reduce their own emissions but also to help protect poor countries against climate change and develop their green economies.

But rich countries have lagged on both tasks, particularly the responsibility to aid green development. They have failed to provide poor countries with anything like the money that would be necessary for “sustainable development,” or economic growth without fossil fuels.

This aerial view shows the coast of the Weg naar Zee resort in Paramaribo. Suriname faces severe challenges from flooding and coastal erosion.
Juan Barreto / AFP via Getty Images

The reason is simple: Such development is expensive, even more so than paying for infrastructure to protect against disasters. There have been isolated efforts by rich countries to create so-called just energy transition partnerships, or investment consortia that would help speed up decarbonization in certain countries, but these have largely failed to achieve deep carbon reductions — despite channeling huge amounts of money toward places such as South Africa ($8.5 billion), Vietnam ($15.5 billion), and Indonesia ($20 billion). The Colombian government is struggling to raise money for its own proposal to build a post-oil economy. 

So countries fall back on the old models of development. This rush toward fossil fuels in places such as Nigeria and Senegal often elicits a lecture from wealthy countries that are decarbonizing, but the truth is that these countries don’t have much of a choice. President Donald Trump’s second administration, and in particular Energy Secretary Chris Wright, have argued that this is good, that ending “energy poverty” through coal, oil, and gas development is ideal even if it harms the climate. The administration has cut foreign aid, withdrawn from the Paris climate accord, and slashed funding for the United Nations and other bodies, which will make financing green development harder for the rest of the world.

Suriname’s leaders argue that they have found a way to thread this needle. The country is building out a fossil fuel industry, with two big caveats. First, it is taking every possible step to reduce the emissions from its oil infrastructure while protecting its rainforest. Second, it is only developing oil as a means of building a low-carbon economy and raising the living standards of its citizens. Essentially, Surinamese officials say they are using oil revenue to do the development that rich countries won’t pay for.

“A lot of countries say, ‘How can you do oil and gas, and then you have this forest? This is something that is contradictory,’” said Dasai, the environment minister. “We say that in this phase, especially now, the climate financing mechanisms are not working yet.” Given that the massive wealth transfer promised under the Paris Agreement has not happened, developing countries such as Suriname must both raise the living standards of their citizens and work to prevent harm to the global climate.

A view of the Staatsolie oil refinery in Wanica. Even as Suriname builds out a fossil fuel industry, it is also branding itself as a climate leader.
Ranu Abhelakh / AFP via Getty Images

Total could be a good partner for such an effort, as perhaps the only supermajor oil company that has not retreated from its climate commitments. During the conference in June, Total executives pointed to plans for an offshore rig that will cut down on carbon emissions. The entire rig will be electric, and Total has agreed to reinject almost all natural gas that comes to the surface, flaring it only in emergencies. (Electricity use and gas flaring account for a large share of the emissions associated with getting oil out of the ground.) Suriname’s carbon ledger will technically remain negative overall.

But the center of this mitigation effort will be the rainforest. Suriname’s relatively pristine Amazon jungle is the source of its carbon-negative status, but new mining and logging developments claim more of it each year. The country has lost about 1.5 percent of its forest cover since the turn of the century, according to one watchdog group. If left unchecked, deforestation could threaten the country’s carbon-negative status sometime in the next decade. So even as the country sells oil on the global market, it also wants to sell so-called carbon offsets, or monetized guarantees that the forest will stay intact. Many countries and companies purchase these credits on international exchanges to help counterbalance their own emissions. 

The carbon offset industry is rife with fraud and negligence, and many offset projects around the world have fallen apart, but most experts anticipate that demand for these offsets will grow over the next few decades. For Suriname, rainforest credits could act as a companion product to barrels of oil, allowing foreign countries to buy both the fuel that they need and a counterweight to that fuel’s emissions. For Suriname, the credits could be a way to replace the financial benefits of destructive sectors such as mining and logging.

“The world has everything to gain from Suriname protecting its forests,” said John Goedschalk, a policy consultant who advises Suriname’s new president on climate finance. Total has offered to buy $50 million of Suriname’s potential carbon credits to appease its climate-conscious shareholders, and countries including Japan and Singapore have expressed interest in purchasing credits as well. (The country has not yet made a deal with any of these parties.)

An aerial view of the Suriname River at Pokigron. More than 90 percent of Suriname’s land is undeveloped rainforest, which makes the country one of just a few carbon-negative nations on Earth.
Michael Runkel / Getty Images

For attendees of the fifth annual Suriname Energy, Oil, and Gas Summit, the promise of low-emissions drilling and carbon credits were enough to allay the potential climate guilt that the rum cocktails didn’t assuage. Everyone present, from Santokhi and his ministers to the senior Total executives, insisted that developing an offshore oil project would not threaten Suriname’s carbon-negative status, and that it was consistent with a world where fossil fuel growth slows relative to the explosion in renewable energy — a world, in other words, where “transition” takes place at a comfortable pace for all parties. 

However, this claim about carbon-negativity relies on imperfect arithmetic. Countries only tally the carbon emissions from within their borders. For Suriname, that means that it only has to count the emissions that come from pumping oil out of the ocean and loading it onto tankers for export; it does not have to worry about the emissions that come from burning the oil itself. 

Just counting in-country emissions, it’s true that Suriname can build GranMorgu without becoming carbon-positive. But Scope 3 emissions, from actually burning oil in trucks and planes, account for as much as 90 percent of the emissions produced by an oil company such as Total. The project will produce around 80 million barrels of oil per year, and burning all those barrels of oil will create more than 30 million tons of carbon dioxide — dozens of times more than Suriname’s rainforest can sequester. The project may not add much to Suriname’s own side of the carbon ledger, but the oil will still be burned somewhere.

Yet not all barrels of oil are created equal. As long as the world continues to use crude, it will find that crude from somewhere, and Suriname’s leaders argue that their oil is better for the climate. It is far cheaper and cleaner to extract than oil from places such as the Canadian tar sands, and GranMorgu will produce far less methane leakage than oil infrastructure in places such as Iraq. If global oil demand flattens or declines, Suriname could, in theory, outcompete and displace oil from other places, with marginal benefit for the climate.

A view of fuel tanks operated by GOw2, a local fuel company in Wanica, in September 2022.
Ranu Abhelakh / AFP via Getty Images

In a scenario where demand falls fast due to rapid deployment of renewables and electric vehicles, Suriname may end up producing oil instead of rich countries rather than alongside them. Then, it could make a case for itself as a pragmatic climate leader, a country that is leveraging its resources while causing minimal new damage to the planet.

This was what gave the country such allure for Total, Chevron, and the other majors that staked out the conference. Even in 30 years, if oil prices fall and countries get picky about where they import from, GranMorgu and other projects will still be marketable. The European Union will impose a carbon tariff on oil imports by 2030, slapping an extra fee on dirtier barrels, and Total will be well-positioned to sell oil into the continent’s new climate-conscious market. 

Of course, if demand doesn’t fall — if countries scuttle their climate policies and keep using more fossil fuels — then Suriname will be taking the same path as other developing countries before it, compromising the world’s future for the sake of its economic development. Even the bullish oil executives and market analysts in Paramaribo acknowledged that oil demand could not go up forever, but the world’s experts are divided on when this peak demand will arrive: The International Energy Agency expects a peak as early as 2029, but BP expects demand to continue rising well into the 2030s. OPEC no longer forecasts a peak at all.

The trajectory of oil demand is critical for the future of the planet, but Suriname’s leaders couldn’t wait around to see whether and when the curve starts to fall. With no other pathways toward development and the rich countries of the world still lagging, they had no choice but to start pumping.

The other big uncertainty is whether Suriname will achieve the green development that its leaders have promised or get stuck in a fossil fuel rut.

Suriname’s leaders had only just begun to answer that question this year when the country held a national election in May. Santokhi faced voter ire during the campaign for cutting the fuel and power subsidies, which contributed to a cost-of-living crisis. In his reelection pitch, Santokhi unveiled an oil royalties program that promised every citizen a one-time dividend of at least $750, equivalent to about six weeks’ wages. This model is similar to the long-running Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays out regular oil dividends to state residents. 

Voters still spurned Santokhi’s party, depriving him of a majority. Jennifer Geerlings-Simons, whose party won the most seats, formed a coalition in July and became the country’s first woman to serve as president. Geerlings-Simons is seen as level-headed, but her populist party had serious baggage — it was the party of the disgraced Bouterse, who died in exile after being convicted of assassinating political opponents and trafficking cocaine.

Jennifer Geerlings-Simons, the leader of the National Democratic Party attends a rally in Paramaribo in May. This summer, Geerlings-Simons became Suriname’s first woman to serve as president.
Juan Barreto / AFP via Getty Images

In Paramaribo, many Surinamese expressed skepticism about the new government. They said they trusted Staatsolie to regulate oil production but worried that elected officials would mismanage or embezzle new public revenue.

“If you look at the way the government has done things, there’s a lot of corruption,” said Jonathan Blackman, a vendor at a Javanese market in central Paramaribo. He said he wants the government to improve health care and road infrastructure in tangible ways rather than handing out cash. “They need to … make sure people have a better life,” he said. “Then they can keep the $750.” (Earlier this month, Geerlings-Simons’ administration paused the oil royalties program, saying it would instead invest future crude income in building a sustainable economy.)

Jonathan Blackman sells phone accessories and other products in the Javanese market in central Paramaribo. He hopes that the Surinamese government uses oil revenue to build new industries and expand social services. Jake Bittle / Grist

There is no shortage of ways in which the government of Suriname could improve people’s lives. One of the most urgent investment needs is for projects that help Paramaribo adapt to the floods that clog the city almost every time it rains. The government could use oil money to expand drainage networks, extend sewer systems to fortify Paramaribo against rainstorms, and restore mangrove forests to protect outlying communities from sea level rise and saltwater intrusion. It could also improve its roads and airports to stoke ecotourism, or build schools and hospitals to upskill workers and improve health outcomes. The government is already partnering with the Inter-American Development Bank to plan new investments in renewable energy, which will help the country end its reliance on the imported bunker fuel it burns for electricity. New revenue from Total’s crude could — somewhat paradoxically — help further those transition plans.

In the long term, the government will need to use oil profits to build an economy that plays to Suriname’s other strengths. Government leaders and climate experts in Suriname cite industries like rainforest ecotourism and sustainable agriculture as potential growth areas. Yet again, marketing carbon credits will be a centerpiece of this strategy: If the country can become an ecotourism destination, develop a thriving farm sector, and generate tens of millions of dollars a year through the sale of rainforest offsets, it may not need oil revenue by the middle of the century. 

To arrive at this outcome would take careful planning, but it can be done. Santokhi had only just begun to confront this dilemma when he was ousted. In February, his administration released a “green development strategy,” naming several options for what “green development” might look like. But the government drafted no formal plan for how to spend oil money, held no public engagement on the subject, and hasn’t managed to sell a single rainforest carbon credit, despite international demand. 

“There is no discussion being held, no national debate, about what we are going to do with our oil revenues,” said Griffith, of Conservation International, during the June conference. “We’ve been doing gold for the past 50 years and we’re still poor. I just think that we have been focusing too much only on the extractives and not diversifying and looking for other means of income.”

In her inaugural address, Geerlings-Simons said that her government has “the task of ensuring that the profits from the oil and gas sector improve the standard of living for every Surinamese.” Implicit in this promise was a recognition that it is not enough for the oil boom to improve Suriname’s dire finances. The country must also build a new economy with the consent and participation of its citizens. This will require ample public engagement, long-term planning, and transparency, none of which are hallmarks of the country’s recent past.

Suriname’s leaders have a cautious optimism that they can avoid the fate of other countries that have developed oil without planning for the energy transition and escape a legacy of corruption and instability. If Geerlings-Simons and her fellow leaders succeed, they will have done more than make the best of a bad hand — they will have gone a long way toward solving a problem that the rest of the world has failed to tackle. But if they fail, they will leave their own country dependent on the whims of the global oil market. They’ll also leave the world a little hotter and a little closer to catastrophe.

“If we do this right, then Suriname could become like a Valhalla,” said Goedschalk, the climate consultant, who will likely advise Geerlings-Simons on green development issues. “There’s so much to do, and a big part of what there is to do is to build an economy, because that was never done.”

A replica of an oil pumpjack in Block 58, a new oil-themed bar in central Paramaribo. The bar takes its name from the offshore zone where TotalEnergies will soon be pumping oil. Jake Bittle / Grist

The optimism is starting to catch on among some residents of Paramaribo. Down the street from the conference hotels, a computer technician named Jerry Goercharn runs Block 58, a bar that he’s named after the offshore section where Total found oil. Goercharn opened the bar a year ago amid the first news about the Total project. He filled the walls with maps of Suriname’s offshore oil and bought a model pumpjack for the entranceway, a sign of his optimism about the future.

“It’s definitely good, though it all depends on how the government will spend it,” he told me on an afternoon before the conference.

But it was too early to tell what Suriname’s future would look like, or to predict how the country would use its newfound wealth. Even as the sun set and dinner hour approached, the bar was still empty.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why one of the world’s greenest countries is betting its future on oil on Oct 23, 2025.

With relatively little fanfare, the first-ever global carbon tax was poised to be formally adopted as an international agreement this year.

The International Maritime Organization, or IMO, the United Nations agency overseeing global shipping, had drafted a net-zero framework to move the sector toward cleaner fuels — a crucial step in the energy transition, since the industry that handles around 90 percent of global trade also accounts for 3 percent of the world’s emissions.

The framework would require shippers to pay a fee per ton of greenhouse gas emissions if their emissions rose above a certain threshold. The fees would then be pooled into a fund and distributed to support the development and uptake of alternative fuels and decarbonization in developing countries. The shipping industry, which had been seeking a consistent regulatory environment and level playing field, was largely supportive of the plan. So were the vast majority of U.N. member countries.

Then, in April, the Trump administration abruptly withdrew from IMO negotiations. As a vote over the framework approached this month, the administration began pressuring other nations to abandon the deal. The administration also released a statement, warning that the U.S. was considering additional tariffs, visa restrictions, additional port fees, and sanctions on officials from countries that voted for the framework. President Trump himself took to Truth Social, calling the proposal a “global green new scam tax on shipping.”

The campaign succeeded. Last week, at the tail end of negotiations, Saudi Arabia abruptly called for a vote to adjourn the IMO meeting for one year without making a decision on the net-zero framework. Since IMO rules dictate that a call to adjourn precedes all other considerations, the proposed delay was voted on immediately and passed with 57 countries in favor and 49 against. (Twenty-one countries abstained from the vote.) That means that it will be another year, at least, before the framework can be officially inked.

Close observers of the IMO’s decarbonization efforts told Grist that U.S. obstruction was a decisive factor in preventing the framework’s adoption. 

“It’s fair to say that the retaliatory measures and punitive threats that were shared by the U.S. administration in advance of the meetings played their part,” said Em Fenton, a senior director at Opportunity Green, a U.K.-based climate group that has been closely tracking the IMO negotiations. “The outcome last week is a devastating blow for climate multilateralism.”

The IMO has been inching toward emissions rules for several years, but the effort ramped up in 2023 when the agency’s 176 member countries agreed to a greenhouse gas strategy that would commit them to net-zero emissions by about 2050. In order to reach that goal, countries began negotiations on legally binding measures that included a standard capping the carbon-intensity of fuel used by shipping companies, as well as an economic measure to enforce that standard, which could take the form of a levy or carbon trading mechanism. 

On the economic measure, countries were split. An ambitious coalition of more than 64 countries, including European Union countries, the United Kingdom, Pacific and Caribbean nations, and African countries, proposed a relatively high flat tax on all maritime emissions. Under their proposal, every ton of their greenhouse gas emissions would be priced at the same level across the board. Another set of countries led by China, however, were in favor of a carbon trading mechanism that allowed countries to offset their emissions through carbon credits. (China and other emerging economies are large exporters, and a flat fee, they argued, would hurt businesses and reduce their competitiveness.)

Ultimately, the countries landed on a compromise with a two-tier system: High emitters in the top tier could engage in some amount of carbon trading. Those in the bottom tier would pay the levy based on a fee per ton of emissions. And those who comply with the zero or near-zero emissions fuel requirements would receive financial rewards. This approach became the net-zero framework that was supposed to be voted into effect this year. 

The shipping industry largely welcomed the framework. For one, the industry has had record profits in recent years. A report by Opportunity Green found that 139 of the world’s largest shipping companies, which make up more than 90 percent of the global fleet, made $340 billion in profits from 2019 to 2023. The 10 largest companies were effectively taxed at less than 10 percent on average — far lower than the average global corporation tax rate of 21.5 percent. 

The industry was also eager for regulatory certainty. Ahead of the meeting last week, a group of trade organizations representing the shipping industry issued a statement calling for the adoption of the framework. “Only global rules will decarbonize a global industry,” they noted. “Without the framework, shipping would risk a growing patchwork of unilateral regulations, increasing costs without effectively contributing to decarbonization.”

With the framework now in jeopardy, the path forward is unclear. Although the shipping talks won’t resume for another year, Fenton said countries should push for additional technical clarity during other interim meetings to reach a consensus and ensure the framework is adopted next year. 

Meanwhile, cities and ports across the world have been taking steps to green their infrastructure. Alisa Kreynes, a director of the ports and shipping program at C40, a global network of mayors taking climate action, pointed to various initiatives already underway to reduce carbon emissions from the shipping industry. Cities have built green shipping corridors, which are trade routes where ports and other partners work together to transition to zero or near-zero emission fuels. Ports have also begun establishing stricter emission standards for trucks, and supported the development of offshore wind. 

“The way we are reacting is that cities continue to deliver a just maritime transition, despite what happened at the IMO last week,” Kreynes said. “The cities will continue to push forward with advancing equitable port and shipping decarbonization.”

But those measures won’t put a significant dent in the industry’s primary source of emissions, which is the massive, fuel-hungry boats that crisscross the globe delivering goods. And the collapse of IMO negotiations rings as a warning about the fragility of international cooperation. The dynamic could continue at COP30, the international climate conference taking place in Belém, Brazil, next month. 

“The sort of playbook of delay-and-obfuscate is more likely to be on the table and visible at COP30 than it would have been if it had not prevailed here at the IMO,” said Fenton. “And that is hugely disappointing.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The entire world was ready to reduce shipping emissions. Then Trump stepped in. on Oct 23, 2025.

The largest herds of caribou in the world make their homes here. Polar bears give birth to cubs in dens dug into this soil, some of them more than 200 years old. And birds like the Arctic tern fly north every summer, some from as far south as Antarctica, to breed and lay their eggs.

The Hudson Bay peatlands in northern Canada, a 90-million-acre area stretching from northern Manitoba to Quebec, are a haven for biodiversity, home to more than 1,000 species of plants and 175 species of birds. But the secret of this unique ecosystem lies below the surface, in a buildup of water-saturated mosses called peat.

Though it looks like little more than fibrous dirt, peat has near-magical properties.

Acidic and anaerobic, it can preserve artifacts, food, and even human remains for centuries or more. And because the process of decomposition slows down in such environments, they trap carbon dioxide and keep it out of the atmosphere, slowing the process of climate change.

The Hudson Bay peatlands in particular store five times as much carbon per acre as the Amazon rainforest, Janet Sumner, executive director of the Wildlands League, a Canadian conservation group, told me. Indigenous nations around Hudson Bay call the area “the breathing lands.”

“It’s the world’s temperature regulator,” said Valérie Courtois, executive director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which works on Indigenous-led conservation efforts in Canada. “It’s like we have a big fridge on top of the planet that is helping keep everything the way that it should be.”

Bright green sphagnum moss growing in Lindow Moss, a bog in Wilmslow, England. Anna North / Vox

But now, the fridge is hanging open.

Though they cover only 3 percent of the earth’s surface, peatlands store nearly one-third of the world’s carbon. And these ecosystems around the world are vulnerable to development and destruction. Today, only 17 percent of the world’s peatlands fall within a protected area, according to a recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The world’s peatlands are increasingly at the center of conflicts over resource extraction, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

In northern Canada, one of the biggest fears for peat conservationists is mining for rare-earth minerals. Part of the Hudson Bay peatland sits atop the Ring of Fire, a mineral deposit containing nickel, chromium, and other metals used in clean energy technologies like electric vehicle batteries. Some experts see the minerals there as key to Canada’s clean-energy transition and a crucial part of the fight against climate change. And it’s true; minerals like the ones found around Hudson Bay are necessary for solar panels, batteries, and other technologies we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

But in the process of mining them, we may just destroy a crucial climate regulator.

The government of Ontario, where the Ring of Fire is located, sees mining in the area as necessary for Canadian energy independence, especially amid President Donald Trump’s trade wars. “This is how we make ourselves less reliant on the United States,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said this summer.

Peat looks like little more than fibrous dirt, but has near-magical properties. Anna North / Vox

And already, the area’s peatlands are at risk from mining expeditions, which experts say have disturbed the ecosystem even though no mineshafts have yet been sunk. First Nations and conservation groups are working to protect the lands around Hudson Bay, but it’s a race against the clock as mining exploration ramps up with support from the Canadian government.

The carbon stored in the Hudson Bay peatlands took thousands of years to build up, said Lawrence Martin, director of lands and resources for the Mushgewok Council, a group representing several First Nations in the area. If it’s released now, it could take thousands of years to replace. And if humans want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we don’t have that kind of time.

“These are the lungs of the earth,” Martin told me. “If you start tampering with that, you have to be really, really careful.”

The power of peat

Peat is a kind of soil that forms whenever organic matter builds up faster than it can decompose, said Dan Zarin, executive director for forests and climate change at the Wildlife Conservation Society. The bogs of northern Europe, famous resting places for uncannily preserved bog bodies, are made of peat. But peat can also be found in the United States, in the Adirondacks of upstate New York and the huge Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.

The soil also forms in the tropics, often in damp, forested areas where layers of different plant species stack on top of one another. In Panama, for example, peat can form giant domes, several meters deep and thousands of years old.

In colder climates like northern Canada, peatlands are usually created by colonies of sphagnum moss — a simple, easily overlooked plant that’s also a climate hero.

The structure of sphagnum includes large, empty cells that make the plant into a kind of sponge, absorbing up to 20 times its weight in water. Moss was so well-known for its absorbent properties that First Nations peoples once used it for menstrual products and diapers, Courtois said. That absorbency helps create the wet, low-oxygen conditions that slow down decomposition and aid in carbon capture.

Layers of peat can build up many feet high. Anna North / Vox

There’s more carbon stored in peatlands than in all the trees in the world — or about two-third of the world’s petroleum reserves — Zarin said. The peatlands in the Congo Basin store the equivalent of several years’ worth of carbon emissions for the entire world. That’s why peat is so critical to the world’s climate future, Zarin said, and yet, “it’s not really getting anything near the attention it deserves.”

Around the world, ecosystems like tropical forests and mangroves are much more likely to be protected than peatlands, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. And nearly a quarter of peatlands are under heavy pressure from human development.

In Indonesia, for example, forested peatlands are being cleared, drained, and planted with palms to feed the rapidly growing global demand for palm oil, a common ingredient in products from toothpaste to peanut butter. In Patagonia, they’re threatened by urban development, Jorge Hoyos-Santillán, a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, told me. Around the world, peat is harvested and sold for use in potting soil — an 8-quart bag retails for less than $10 at U.S. hardware stores, where Americans can purchase it for their berry patches and flower beds.

And now, increasingly, peatlands are at risk, as governments and private industry seek new sources of the minerals needed for the batteries and related technologies that will likely power the world in the future.

Why damaging peatlands is so dangerous

Around Hudson Bay, conservation groups are watching with concern as mining companies begin to survey fragile wetland ecosystems. “People focus on the mining, but there’s a lot of damage that occurs before mining,” Sumner of the Wildlands League told me.

Mining exploration requires test drilling and the use of heavy machinery on a sensitive landscape, which can change its hydrology, causing areas of peatland to dry out, Sumner said.

When peat dries out, its carbon-storing superpower becomes a liability.

As water leaves the environment, decomposition starts again, and the soil begins to release all the carbon it’s stored up over thousands of years. You can think of it like the burning of fossil fuels, Julie Loisel, a professor of geography at the University of Nevada, Reno, told me. “It took a long time to put that carbon down into the soil, and then you really quickly release it back to the atmosphere.”

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Drying peat also turns it into a frighteningly powerful fuel for fires — in fact, communities in Ireland and elsewhere have long burned peat as an alternative to coal. Today, peatland fires can be especially insidious, because even when they appear to be extinguished, they can continue to burn underground for months and re-spark — a phenomenon known as a “zombie fire.”

Peatland fires can release 100 times the carbon of a wildfire and produce large amounts of noxious smoke. In Indonesia in the 2010s, peat fires released as much carbon in a single day as the entire emissions of the United States, Zarin of the Wildlife Conservation Society told me. Fires are already burning in the peatlands of northern Canada, spurred on by climate change, and experts fear they’ll only become more devastating if the landscape isn’t protected.

And now, research indicates we may have entered a new age of fire — where massive blazes around the world will be more frequent and destructive. It’s even more urgent to prevent peatlands from drying out and becoming fuel for these conflagrations.

“We want to keep the peatlands doing what they do, which is breathing for the planet,” Sumner said.

Protecting the world’s climate regulator

The carbon calculus involved in trading peatlands for EV batteries is a complicated one.

But conservation groups say mining in Canada’s Ring of Fire is less important for the clean energy transition than proponents have claimed. One issue is the remoteness of the area: the mining sites are currently accessible only by ice-road or float-plane, and a plan to build a major road to the area could take a decade, Sumner said.

Other sites in Ontario have more critical minerals, are more accessible, and are located in areas that are already environmentally degraded, Sumner said. Mining in the Ring of Fire “feels more like a dream than it does a reality, and it’s not going to meet the need for energy transition in any short timeline, which is what we need,” Sumner said.

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Meanwhile, First Nations have been at work for years on their own plans for the Hudson Bay lowlands. The Mushkegowuk Council is leading an effort to establish an Indigenous-led conservation project in northern Ontario that could protect peatlands and other ecosystems as well. The Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation has also proposed a protected area including peatlands around the Fawn River in northern Ontario.

“What makes an Indigenous approach to planning is that you look at what you need to keep in those ecosystems as opposed to looking at what you can take,” Courtois of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative said. Under such an approach, Indigenous leaders can also identify less vulnerable areas where activities like mining could occur.

“The more that provinces embrace the practice of land use planning — or land relationship planning as we like to call it — the better the conditions are for the exploration of potential development,” Courtois said.

Representatives of the Mushkegowuk Council have also said mining could potentially coexist with conservation. “You do need to reach into the ground to pull out the resources necessary to keep us fed,” the Council’s Martin told me. “But we need to do this with great conscience.”

The fate of the conservation project remains unclear, however, and Martin said the Council is still working to get the Ontario government on board.

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Meanwhile, peatlands around the world remain at risk, as lack of knowledge and political will collide with economic development. In some parts of the world, they’ve “been treated as wasteland areas,” Zarin said. Indeed, the swampy bogs of the global north are a common setting for horror stories, seen as a place humans should avoid and fear.

The first step toward changing that is a better understanding of peatlands, experts say. These ecosystems are often in remote locations that are difficult for humans to navigate, and since peat lies beneath the surface, it’s often invisible even to researchers. The peatlands in the Congo Basin, for example, were only documented by scientists in the 2010s, and their full size — as big as England and Wales combined — was revealed only in 2023. Those discoveries have helped drive funding and conservation efforts to the area, said Hoyos-Santillán, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Beyond understanding, people around the world need an appreciation of peatlands and their value, conservationists say. “My hope is that the province of Ontario and other places that have these sorts of landscapes look at them not just as some sort of breadbasket for the development of the province, but also see it as a feature of who they are,” Courtois said.

“You can’t destroy everything for capitalism,” Martin said. “You have to be able to save enough for your children, for your future generations, for them to enjoy life.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The humble plant that could save the world — or destroy it on Oct 22, 2025.