Grist

A federal agency will offer tens of thousands of acres in northwestern Colorado that the nation’s largest elk herd relies upon for migration, foraging, and winter habitat to oil and gas companies for lease in the state’s biggest such sale in modern history.

More than 100 parcels included in a June 16 lease sale by the Bureau of Land Management encompass elk, pronghorn, and mule deer migration corridors that extend into southern Wyoming. Many sit in Moffat County, which bills itself as the “Elk Hunting Capital of the World” and relies on the pastime in part for its economic stability.

About two-thirds of the acreage in the 156,000-acre lease sale is just south of Dinosaur National Monument, a remote park that’s among the country’s over 40 certified International Dark Sky Places — areas with exceptionally dark night skies. Tourism officials in Moffat, who saw inquiries drop by more than half this spring, voiced concern that bright lights and truck traffic that accompany fossil fuel extraction could imperil this hard-won designation.

“Things like that could put that status in jeopardy,” said Tom Kleinschnitz, the county’s director of tourism. “In the long run, I think it’s important to keep these areas as pristine as possible.”

The record June lease sale contradicts the Bureau of Land Management’s stated strategy for the national monument, as well as the 2024 amendments to area plans for northwestern Colorado that strengthened habitat protections for ungulates like elk and deer and at-risk birds such as the Gunnison sage-grouse.

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Risks to big game and Dinosaur National Park are just a few examples of what’s at stake for the environment, the economy, and public health. A 2,360-line spreadsheet compiled by Denver-based nonprofit Rocky Mountain Wild enumerates 17 rare plants and endangered species whose habitat could be imperiled by fossil fuel exploration and extraction. 

These include the black-footed ferret, wolverine, boreal toad, and Colorado pikeminnow, and threatened plants such as the Colorado hookless cactus and Parachute penstemon. The lease sale includes acreage relied upon by other species such as the Columbian sharp-tailed grouse, greater sage-grouse, ferruginous hawk, and swift fox — all identified by state wildlife officers as being of special concern.

The June event is one of four large lease sales in Colorado since Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed a bill in 2025 that included provisions to encourage drilling on the nation’s public lands. This agenda lies in stark contrast to the pattern of leasing activity during President Joe Biden’s term — with just six sales in Colorado during his four years in office. Just several hundred acres were offered during that period.

The 2025  H.R. 1 legislation prioritized fossil fuel extraction over other uses such as recreation and conservation; mandated that federal officials hold a minimum of four lease sales each fiscal year in Alaska, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming; shortened public comment times; and reduced the discretion land managers hold over whether to offer acreage for lease or not.

The law also decreased oil and gas royalty rates, making it cheaper to extract fossil fuels on public lands and reducing the share of profits from such natural resources to taxpayers. Colorado alone could lose $148 million in revenue from future production from about 81,000 acres that sold in 2026, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog organization.

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The push to lease tens of thousands of acres to oil and gas companies comes as bipartisan polling conducted as part of Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project found a majority of voters in eight Western states want their congressional representatives to prioritize conservation over energy development on public lands.

About 21 million acres of public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management are leased for oil and gas development already, according to fiscal 2025 statistics on the agency’s website. Only 12 million of those acres are actually producing fossil fuels. 

This discrepancy underscores a concern of conservation groups that during the decade that energy companies hold federal oil and gas leases, the parcels by law cannot be managed for other uses such as sensitive habitat, wilderness character, or recreation.

“Folks need to understand the long-term impacts of a rush to lease so much public land,” said Peter Hart, legal director of the Wilderness Workshop, which works to conserve wildlife and the wilderness. 

“Once those leases are issued they are very hard to get rid of — they stay on the land for a long time, even if they aren’t developed.”

In response to issues raised in a 106-page comment letter filed March 13 by the Wilderness Workshop and 17 other organizations, the Bureau of Land Management wrote in an environmental assessment that it would conduct additional site-specific analysis of each parcel in the Colorado sale if a company files for a drilling permit. 

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The agency also pointed out repeatedly in its 646-page report that “risks are reduced through the careful review of drilling and completion plans for proposed wells by both the BLM” and Colorado’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission.

Federal officials removed four parcels and reduced a fifth, for a total of about 4,800 acres, from the initial sale offering, citing a recent decision by the Interior Board of Land Appeals. These parcels included habitat for the greater sage-grouse and Columbian sharp-tailed grouse as well as high priority habitat for big game. Numerous other parcels with similar characteristics remain in the sale.

The environmental assessment also noted that agency officials would apply stipulations to leases issued for sensitive parcels aimed at protecting animals, plants, cultural resources, and fish.

Even so, conservation groups that closely monitor what’s at stake in oil and gas lease sales said that federal land managers have significantly less leeway at the permitting stage to move oil and gas operations, add conditions of approval, or to cancel a lease altogether. Together with these limitations is an inability for these officials to remove parcels that were deferred from past sales because they included habitat for sensitive species.

“During the first Trump administration, there was a sale that was initially proposed to be much larger than this and the state Bureau of Land Management was able to use its discretion to defer parcels that were inappropriate because of greater sage-grouse conflicts,” said Alison Gallensky, a conservation geographer at Rocky Mountain Wild.

“Now, they are being forced to offer a much larger sale than that one turned out to be,” she added.

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Greater sage-grouse are very sensitive to oil and gas infrastructure — even if it’s moved farther away from their habitat — and intuitively sense a winged predator could land on such equipment. They won’t breed if they feel that they are in danger, Gallensky said.

In addition, provisions developed to protect the birds listed in the environmental analysis for the June lease sale, such as requiring an oil and gas company to build a pad farther away from nesting locations, relies on operators to follow through — something that the federal government isn’t always staffed to monitor, she said.

Acreage included in the June sale also marks the continuation of a trend that began with last year’s federal oil and gas lease sales in Colorado. Typically, such sales offer public lands to energy companies in more remote parts of the state. 

Yet in September, the agency leased a parcel near the Aurora Reservoir, which is bordered by a densely populated Denver suburb, for about $5.6 million. The acreage is part of the Lowry Ranch Comprehensive Area Plan — a more than 150-well project approved by state regulators and strongly opposed by nearby residents.

Many of the more than 340 individual comments the agency received for the June sale urged the agency not to lease similar parcels near the reservoir. Residents and conservation groups wrote that emissions from oil and gas development on this acreage would worsen pollution in an area that’s already out of compliance with federal air quality rules.

In addition, the agency estimated in its analysis for the June sale that several parcels listed in Weld County, home to the state’s largest and most productive oil field, could result in up to 150 wells. Emissions from these wells would worsen smog in a region that already fails to meet national standards, conservation groups wrote.

“BLM’s implication that this lease sale ‘would result in no emission increase’ or that emissions are not reasonably foreseeable enough to perform a conformity determination are thus entirely baseless,” said numerous organizations in the March 13 comment letter to the agency.

Federal officials responded in the environmental analysis that the agency would conduct a “project-specific emissions inventory” if companies file for drilling permits on the parcels after leasing them. Permit requests would include details such as how many wells are proposed, a drilling and completion schedule, and a list of the equipment to be used, allowing the agency to conduct a more thorough analysis, officials wrote.

In Moffat County, on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains where much of the acreage in the June oil and gas lease sale is concentrated, community representatives noted a need to balance pollution and environmental concerns with the economic reality that rising grocery and gas prices are hitting rural areas hard. Some residents in this sparsely populated region, where 80 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump in 2024, rely in part on royalties from drilling to make ends meet, said Kleinschnitz, the county’s director of tourism.

“Many people in outfitting have agricultural businesses, and hunting is incredibly important to keeping people on those landscapes,” he said. “And some of them make royalties from oil and gas and have benefited greatly from having those.”

Copyright Capital & Main 2026

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Federal agency to open tens of thousands of acres of Colorado wilderness to oil drilling  on Jun 6, 2026.

In an increasingly divided nation, Americans agree on at least two things. For one, politicians across the political spectrum are scrambling to get more housing built, which happens to be an accidentally powerful way to fight climate change. And two, Americans love their parks: A recent poll found that 88 percent of them visited one in the past year. Nearly 90 percent of people who voted for Kamala Harris, and 80 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump, consider these spaces critical infrastructure in their communities. 

That alone should encourage elected officials to build as many of them as possible. But a new report finds another, potentially even more motivating, factor for American cities: For every dollar invested in parks and recreation, communities reap $3 in local economic benefits each year. “You really do get so much goodness out of them,” said Will Klein, director of parks research at the Trust for Public Land, which produced the report. “People are healthier, people connect with each other. They drive business activity, especially for small businesses.”

Parks aren’t as much about land as they are about people. In an increasingly commodified world, they’re one of the few remaining public places where folks can roam without the pressure of spending money. That makes them a critical kind of “third place,” somewhere to gather beyond the workplace and the home. Whereas people must pay a premium to use a gym, they can use a park or rec center for free.

This brings huge benefits, and cost savings, to public health. The new report notes that the United States spends $5.3 trillion annually on health care. Physical inactivity, which greatly increases the risk of chronic problems like cardiovascular disease, costs the country more than $200 billion a year. “Our polling this year showed that the most popular place in America in 2025 to run around and play and exercise are parks and public spaces, much more popular than private gyms,” Klein said. “That physical activity has real health and economic benefits, about $2,000 per person in health care savings each year.”

Parks boost mental health as well. Simply being among greenery boosts positive well-being, research has shown. Parks also foster social interaction and reduce loneliness, which is a public health crisis of its own. This kind of commerce-free third place is especially important for the elderly, who may be living on fixed incomes and can’t afford to frequent cafes and the like. “There’s movie nights in the park, concerts in the park,” Klein said. “Just playing on the playground, talking to neighbors, having barbecues — all that stuff allows people to afford that higher quality of life.”

Even though they exist outside of the frenzy of capitalism, parks provide major economic value. The crowds they attract, for example, filter into surrounding neighborhoods, buying food and drinks for picnics or perusing mom-and-pop shops and boutiques. Famous green spaces — New York City’s Central Park, Chicago’s Millennium Park, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and newly minted Sunset Dunes — attract tourists, too. The Trust for Public Land says that the Florida Gulf Coast Trail, the 420-mile greenway it’s helping develop, will bring $200 million in economic activity in Sarasota County alone by attracting bicyclists and other recreationists.

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Even if you own a home near a park but never visit it, you’re benefiting economically in a way. “People want to live near green spaces,” Klein said. “So you see increased property values, which supports a broader tax base, which can be reinvested into community benefits through the increased property tax revenue.”

The trick is ensuring everyone — not just those who can afford condos and single-family homes — can enjoy the aura of these jewels. While new housing developments might seem at odds with green spaces, the two can exist in harmony. Even if they’re crammed into the densest of cities, affordable complexes can incorporate pocket gardens, which have the added benefit of reducing increasingly unbearable urban temperatures. Some developers are even building communities around working farms, known as agrihoods, which bring yet another benefit of local food production.

Any additional green space will also help cities adapt to one of the stranger consequences of climate change: It’s raining a lot harder. City sewer systems were designed to handle the rainstorms of old, but are overwhelmed by the additional water falling today. By soaking up some of that liquid, parks help save money in two ways: They reduce the amount of water that a city has to pay to manage, and they help prevent the surrounding neighborhood from flooding, avoiding property damage. 

More so than ever before, then, the humble green space is a surprisingly powerful way to solve a bunch of problems at once — improving mental health, helping cities adapt to climate change, and supercharging economic activity. “Parks,” Klein said, “are actually one of these solutions hiding under the feet of all these local leaders.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Your local park is bringing in the green (and by that, we mean money) on Jun 5, 2026.

A gentle shower fell as four people in rain gear made their way deep into a spruce-fir forest high in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Ducking beneath bright green underbrush and stepping away from the road, a hush took over.

Just a few steps in, they came across an aging yellow birch tree covered in moss.

But it wasn’t just moss. James Hollinger, a retired computer scientist turned amateur lichen scientist, leaned closer and spotted a rare, spongy lichen that has been documented about a dozen times in the park. As far as he knows, it does not appear in any botanical guidebooks.

“So, we could, right here right now, come up with a common name for it,” Hollinger said excitedly, as fellow volunteer and lichenologist Laura Boggess unfolded her magnifying lens. Counting carefully, she found more than 17 other moss and lichen species on just one side of the tree. 

Every square foot of the Smokies teems with life that most visitors never notice: lichens clinging to bark, fungi hidden in fallen logs, and salamanders darting beneath damp leaves. Scientists and volunteers say paying attention to those small creatures — and returning often enough to notice when they change — has grown increasingly urgent as climate change alters the park’s ecosystems and federal agencies see deep cuts that threaten long-term monitoring and biodiversity research.

Hollinger, Boggess, and the others in the group call themselves the Gang of Retirees in Search of Life’s Diversity, or “GRISLD.” Not all are retired — Boggess is beginning a teaching job at Warren Wilson College in the fall — but they share a habit of spending hours moving deliberately through remote corners of the park, documenting species few people will ever see. Connected through a listserv and their keen interest in the Smokies’ rich biodiversity, the group quietly contributes to a long-running project called the all taxa biodiversity inventory, or ATBI, conducted in partnership with the park. 

The Great Smoky Mountains are the most biodiverse site in the national park system. Every square foot of the park teems with life, much of which park visitors rarely see. Katie Myers / Grist

“We’ll hike into these places that other researchers don’t have the resources, the funding to,” Hollinger said. “We watch all these things and keep an eye on how things are changing.”

The Smokies project is one of the oldest and longest-running all taxa biodiversity inventories in the country, one of several decades-long efforts to document biodiversity in dozens of ecological hotspots around the world. That work has taken on increasing urgency in the Great Smoky Mountains, the most biodiverse site in the national park system and a global hotspot for salamanders, fungi, mosses, and other less-studied forms of life.

The mountains’ varied elevations and countless microclimates may help some species survive a warming world by providing pockets of cooler habitat. But climate change is also reshaping the park in visible ways, from an increase in invasive insects and dying trees to more frequent floods, fires, and violent storms. The inventory is conducted with the park and managed by the nonprofit Discover Life in America, where Will Kuhn — one of the hikers threading through the wet forest that morning — leads scientific research.

“We’re up to over 22,000 species of everything that has been documented here in the Smokies,” Kuhn said. More than 1,000 of them documented since 1998 are new to science, a number believed to just scratch the surface.  “That is maybe a third to a quarter of the actual diversity here.” 

Finding a new species might seem like a rare joy, but it happens regularly, Kuhn says. Larger, charismatic species are well documented, but little ones, such as mites, mosses, and microscopic plankton-like rotifers are often understudied.

Much of the park’s biodiversity data is collected during spring and summer, when academic researchers tend to visit, Kuhn said. Volunteers are there year-round, however, tracking species that are active in colder months or, like many birds, pass through while migrating. “The park’s really known during that time of the year, but what about the things that are off-period?” Hollinger said, turning over a log as a red-cheeked salamander scampered into the wet leaves. 

A red-cheeked salamander scampers under a log. Volunteers take photos of every species they log and upload them to iNaturalist, a citizen science database. Courtesy of Will Kuhn

Although the Park Service grants permits to academic researchers, its relationships with local nonprofits and tourism-dependent communities allow it to support ecological work it cannot manage on its own. Those organizations can also raise money in times of need, in one recent case helping to keep the park open while salaries were on pause during the 2025 government shutdown. 

“Ultimately, we’re able to spend money on things that benefit the park but that a federal agency just can’t do,” Kuhn said.

Retired biologist Paul Super coordinated research in the park for over two decades. He’s interested in lichens, mosses, insects, and other small creatures in part because of the way they hold moisture, keeping the mountain cool and foggy. If they die, the water cycle will change. 

“Regulating the moisture in these high elevation areas is pretty important because we’re at the top of the watershed, and everybody’s drinking water is downhill from here,” Super said.

In the decades he’s spent in the park, he’s seen long-term changes unfold. Warming temperatures are rippling through the food chain, making way for invasive parasites like the woolly adelgid. The tiny insect, which is native to Asia, has infested and killed thousands of the park’s hemlocks, a towering tree sometimes called the “redwood of the East.” Other pests have attacked Fraser firs, elms, and white and green ash trees that keep streams cool for temperature-sensitive aquatic species like the beloved brook trout.

The high-elevation ecosystems of the Smokies are “sky islands” –  isolated pockets of unique species that depend upon cooler, wetter conditions. When the climate warms, there’s nowhere else to go. Some may disappear before anyone even knows they’re there.

To Super, logging these species is about noticing the minute, day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year changes that become earth-shattering over time. “The visitor coming here for a day or a week is not going to notice things and know that this is not what it used to be,” he said.

Laura Boggess was born and raised in western North Carolina and drawn to science through a lifetime love of climbing the region’s remote cliffs. She considers these data-gathering trips a critical way to monitor the changing climate from the ground up. “The small ways, the paying attention, the naming of a species, which isn’t a small thing, but it’s like an accumulation of small, cooperative creation,” she said. “It is even more important as we enter into even more rapid change.”

There is so much to see in the park that it took the volunteers about two hours to go half a mile. Even as they left the trail and returned to the road, they found a rare parasitic fungus. The magnifying glass came out, and everyone slowly leaned in for a good look.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In the Smoky Mountains, a volunteer effort aims to document every species — before it’s too late on Jun 5, 2026.

When Trish Leigey’s taps started running brown and foul in late 2019, she had an uneasy suspicion about what was tainting the once-clear mountain water. 

Tests later confirmed her hunch. Bovine DNA had infiltrated drinking water supplies in rural Loganton, Pennsylvania — contamination her lawyers linked to Nicholas Meat and its practice of spreading liquefied animal waste on nearby fields.

That may not have surprised many of Leigey’s neighbors. Most of them were well aware of the desiccated animal parts occasionally strewn across local roads. Not many gave a second thought to trucks spraying a cocktail of blood, urine, water, and other slaughterhouse refuse over local farmland. But few wanted to accuse the company of wrongdoing, given that it employs over 425 people — about as many people in all of Loganton — and by some estimates processes 10 percent of the state’s beef.

Leigey, a single mother who works three jobs, decided she had to speak up, for herself, her family, and her neighbors. “I just want a simple life,” she said. “I don’t feel like I should have to be emotionally, mentally, financially, and physically exhausted because some millionaire wants to dump blood on fields because it’s a cheap way to dispose of it. It’s not right.”

 A crew cleans slaughterhouse waste that spilled along a rural road in central Pennsylvania in 2021. Courtesy of Nidel & Nace P.L.L.C.

A jury agreed and in December held the company liable for causing a nuisance and trespassing on neighboring properties by fouling their air and water. Leigey and three others who joined her in suing Nicholas Meat were awarded $145,000, a surprising victory in a state where lenient right-to-farm laws make such cases difficult to win.

Still, the verdict is not expected to change how operations like Nicholas Meat do business. There’s no compelling reason for them to.

Nicholas Meat is much smaller than giants like Tyson Foods, but it’s a big player in central Pennsylvania. What started in 1987 as a family business handling a couple dozen cattle each day bloomed over the decades into one of the county’s largest private employers. It slaughters about 1,000 cattle each day, according to the lawsuit, and has been the biggest business in a town so small it doesn’t have a traffic light. That makes the case against Nicholas Meat more than a neighborhood dispute. It illustrates how the economic pressures of industrial meat production can push environmental risks onto surrounding communities.

Across the state, waste from slaughterhouses, farms, and the like is routinely spread on fields as fertilizer. Spreading these “food processing residuals,” as the mixture is known, is legal, lightly regulated, and cheaper than transporting and treating the waste elsewhere. At least 900 farms and food-processing operations across the state participate in it. Many farms are eager to receive the waste as a more affordable way of fertilizing fields. “There is a place for it, especially as a replacement for synthetic fertilizers,” said Michael Kovach, president of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union.

The problem is scale. A small butcher, like the one Kovach works with, might kill and package a few dozen animals a day. Slaughterhouses handling hundreds or thousands generate waste at an entirely different level. The lawsuit estimated that Nicholas Meat produces at least 200,000 gallons a day, with the capacity to store 1 million gallons on-site and another 4.3 million elsewhere. Aside from mixing and aerating the slop, there is no treatment before disposal — something the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, said is typical.

An aerial view of Nicholas Meats, as seen in 2005 and 2026, shows the operation’s growth. Google Earth / Grist @media screen and (max-width: 767px) { .topper .topper-headings::before{width:100%;} .juxtapose-wrapper { overflow:hidde, max-width:100%; } } .juxtapose { font-family: "Basis Grotesque Pro", sans-serif !important; margin-top: 1em; } .jx-knightlab { opacity: 0; } .jx-slider { color: #f0f0f0; } .jx-controller { border-radius: 9px; color: #e6ffa0; } .juxtapose-caption { margin-top: 0.5em; font-size: 0.95rem; color: #666; text-align: center; }

Nicholas Meat, which supplies supermarket chains like Giant and fast-food restaurants like Burger King, spreads and injects its waste on fields that Eugene Nicholas and his son, Doug, own or lease in Clinton County and across the county line in places like Antes Fort. Since the state considers it fertilizer, there is little oversight on how food processing residuals are applied.

“There’s nowhere that there’s a law or a regulation involved with the type of farming that we do,” Eugene Nicholas said during the trial. His son, Doug, now largely oversees the Loganton slaughterhouse. The Nicholases and their attorneys did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Pennsylvania does not require a permit to spread food processing residuals, which includes everything from potato skins and dairy waste to slaughterhouse remains. The practice is governed by guidelines published in 1994. They do little more than require farmers to outline details like how much could be used for various crops, and warn people not to dump it near waterways or drinking water sources. 

Regulators investigate complaints of unbearable odors or polluted runoff, but DEP records dating to 2013 show people near the slaughterhouse would often wait days for a response. “There is really no oversight by anyone except residents,” said Angela Harding, a Clinton County commissioner who represents the area. “We don’t necessarily know what the long-term ramifications of this process will be.”

The lawsuit states that Nicholas Meat began spraying its waste on fields after it reopened in 2010 after a fire. It estimated that it sprays 10 million to 13 million gallons of waste over “hundreds” of acres annually. Reports from a Clinton County Conservation District employee presented during the trial revealed that the company was “way over applying blood” to farmland and the practice was “continuous for 8-10 hours a day.” One farmer quoted in a report said he couldn’t drive a tractor on his fields because they were saturated with waste. Evidence presented during the trial showed the company sprayed on barren, wet, and even snowy fields, creating the risk of runoff that could pollute other locations.

Food processing residuals from Nicholas Meat’s slaughterhouse are applied to a field near Trish Leigey’s home in Loganton. This photo was used as evidence in her lawsuit against the processor. Courtesy of Nidel & Nace P.L.L.C.

Local geography and geology add to that danger, particularly for those who depend upon wells. Springs and sinkholes are common in central Pennsylvania, and the cracks and channels in the rocky soil make it easier for contaminants to flow into aquifers and wells, said Brandon Fleming, a groundwater specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey Pennsylvania Water Science Center. He was not involved in the trial.

A 2017 U.S. Geological Survey assessment of Clinton County groundwater, conducted to establish baseline conditions ahead of potential fracking, found that more than half of 54 private wells, including Leigey’s, contained fecal bacteria, including E. coli, which appeared in about 25 percent of them. The study did not determine the source of the contamination. But evidence and testimony presented at the trial revealed that Nicholas Meat knew sinkholes dotted the fields where it sprayed and injected waste. That bloody mixture would have flowed into them and could contaminate groundwater, a groundwater expert testified.

Bovine DNA from blood or tissue, along with human fecal markers, also were detected in water samples taken from three homes near disposal sites in Sugar Valley as part of the legal case against Nicholas. Such pollutants can cause gastrointestinal illnesses resembling food poisoning, including diarrhea and severe abdominal cramps.

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Meat processing waste can expose people to viruses, bacteria, parasites, and chemicals associated with health risks ranging from gastrointestinal illness to methemoglobinemia (sometimes called blue baby syndrome) and cancer. The threat can be compounded by cleaning agents and antimicrobial drugs often found in such refuse, said Christopher Heaney, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the trial.

Even exposure to airborne particles can cause or exacerbate respiratory problems like asthma, while persistent noxious odors — which Leanna Rockey, a retired nurse who sued the slaughterhouse alongside Leigey, described as “rotting flesh and blood” — can also lead to high blood pressure, stress, and other psychological impacts.

For those living near one of these sites, those impacts are part of daily life.

Leigey said her youngest daughter, Alaina, who is now 15, suffered debilitating headaches from the stench, something her neighbors described as often inescapable. It could get so bad that they’d seal themselves indoors despite the summer heat. Many neighbors stopped hanging their clothes out to dry years ago. For Rockey, it has meant investing in a water cooler and regularly hauling clothes to the laundromat so they aren’t stained by fouled water.

“We still don’t drink our water,” Rockey said. “I never dreamt in a million years my little piece of heaven would be turned into a dumping ground.”

The two-week trial lasted longer than most cases heard in Clinton County, which has just two judges. Craig P. Miller, who presided over the case, joked about Nicholas’ “team of 950 lawyers” from the high-powered firm of Fox Rothschild descending on the rural area. Leigey skipped work and her daughter missed school, and a handful of neighbors attended the trial to provide moral support. Much of the testimony focused on whether Nicholas Meat had a right to apply the waste. Jurors deliberated for several hours before returning a verdict that Nicholas’ attorneys appealed on May 5.

Even so, the victory may do little to change the underlying system. The $145,000 that jurors awarded will help cover what Leigey and her neighbors spent over the years on bottled water, laundromat visits, and new wells. But the jury did not award punitive damages, and nothing about the verdict requires the slaughterhouse to change how it operates despite the history of environmental violations revealed during the trial.

“There’s no disincentive for him to do this,” said Chris Nidel, Leigey’s lawyer. Based on the volume of waste produced, he estimated the company saves $4,500 an hour spreading it locally rather than hauling it to a wastewater facility. “They can make that money up in less than a week.”

This 2019 image of Trish Leigey’s tap water was introduced as evidence in a trial that found Nicholas Meat guilty of trespassing and creating a nuisance through the land application of slaughterhouse waste. Courtesy of Trish Leigey

But unless state regulators pursue an investigation or adopt new rules, accountability remains elusive. Cases like Leigey’s can be difficult to prove if defendants can create enough doubt by pointing to other possible sources of contamination — another farm, a leaky septic tank, or past agricultural use. These cases are usually “a catch-me-if-you-can situation,” said Dani Replogle, an attorney with Food & Water Watch who was not involved in the lawsuit.

The same pressures play out nationwide in a $161 billion beef industry built on processing vast numbers of animals at low cost to meet high demand. 

“The more animals you have in one location, the worse the environmental problems are going to be,” Replogle said. Stricter regulation is the only way to negate that, she said. “That is just not happening. There’s a really powerful lobby standing in the way of that.”

That pressure is reinforced locally. Nicholas Meat employs a significant share of the region’s population. Neighbors may be employees, relatives, or landowners connected to the operation, leaving communities tied to the facility responsible for the pollution. That leaves few people willing to complain.

Kovach, the president of the farmers’ union, believes the case reflects a broader shift in agriculture: Livestock production and processing have become concentrated in the hands of fewer, larger operators. “What we need is a lot fewer plants that can handle 600 to 1,000 [cattle] a day and more that can handle 100 a day,” he said.

Michael Kovach, president of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union and a small-scale farmer, takes a selfie with one of his young turkeys. Courtesy of Michael Kovach

Regardless of whether the industry makes that shift, state Representative Paul Friel said the rules need to change. He has introduced legislation to tighten oversight and hold polluters more accountable because some “bad actors” are turning “farm fields into unregulated landfills.”

“There has to be a distinction between normal farming practice and industrial waste disposal,” he said. “There’s not a path forward to manage this without legislation.”

In the months since Leigey won her civil suit, the air around her house has been crisp and fresh. The pungent smell of rotting flesh has waned, but that’s largely because Nicholas Meat is spreading its waste on other fields across the Sugar Valley of central Pennsylvania.

She spent around $10,000 having a deeper well dug in 2021, and although her water now runs clear, she worries how long it’ll stay that way. Her lawyer hopes the lawsuit might inspire others to take a stand and force the industry to change, but Leigey and her neighbors wonder whose well might be the next to run rank.

“Innocent people should not have to suffer for the greed of other people,” she said. “I’m still going to keep an eye on it. Sometimes bad habits are hard to break.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Blood in the well: One town’s fight against the slaughterhouse polluting it on Jun 4, 2026.

Nearly six years ago, during Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, the president signed a piece of bipartisan legislation introduced to phase out the rampant use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are potent greenhouse gases commonly used in commercial cooling equipment in grocery stores and air-conditioning systems. 

At the time, he praised the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, created in line with an international agreement to tamp down widespread use of the “super pollutant,” as something that would benefit U.S. manufacturers working to produce alternative and less environmentally harmful refrigerants. The Environmental Protection Agency would then spend the next four years under former President Joe Biden working to implement a series of rules to help enforce the law, which set the goal of phasing out production and use of the pollutants by 85 percent by 2036.

Now, Trump has reversed his position. At a White House press conference last month, he announced the administration would be loosening two of the EPA’s refrigerant rules, delaying the deadline required for grocery stores and air-conditioning companies to begin reducing their use of hydrofluorocarbons, and exempting transport companies from repairing HFC leaks in refrigeration equipment. 

Flanked by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and a handful of the country’s biggest grocery chain executives, the president assailed both the rule and the very law he signed, promising Americans the move would have no environmental consequence and bring down supermarket bills. Trump estimated that U.S. businesses and families will save more than $2.4 billion under the new rule changes, while expressing his desire to get rid of the underlying law altogether.  

“Thanks to today’s reforms, the American people have lower grocery prices, cheaper transportation of goods, lower costs of air conditioning at no detriment to our country,” Trump said.

There’s just one problem — that’s just not true. Economists and former EPA officials say the rollbacks are more likely to raise prices than reduce them. Some industry groups warn the administration’s sudden turnabout would result in ramped up demand for equipment that use the most climate-damaging HFCs, which the sector had been steadily scaling back. Even Trump’s EPA has acknowledged in an internal assessment that the rule change could achieve the opposite of its stated goal — rather than lowering costs, the supply and demand dynamics it may create could elevate them. 

Read Next Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher. Frida Garza

“It just doesn’t add up. There’s just no plausible way in which relaxing these rules is going to generate any meaningful reduction in the costs of food people purchase,” said Chris Barrett, an economist at Cornell University. 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Dollar data, which is widely considered the best breakdown of costs that go into an American consumer’s grocery bill, food retail, transport, storage, and energy costs together amount to roughly 20 percent. But refrigerants, according to Barrett, are not a meaningful slice of that share. “We’re talking about a maximum reduction of a percentage point in your grocery bill,” said Barrett, who added it’s much more likely to amount to a fraction of a percentage point. “For a consumer who’s spending $200 a week on groceries, maybe it will save you a dollar or two, at the maximum.” 

HFCs are incredibly powerful greenhouse gases that are primarily used as cooling agents in everything from supermarket freezers to slushie machines. Commercial systems using HFCs are prone to leaking, too — the EPA has estimated that U.S. supermarkets alone leak an average of 25 percent of their refrigerants every year. Though the super pollutants don’t stick around in the atmosphere for too long, their global warming potential is hundreds to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. 

The 2020 law signed by Trump initiated a gradual phaseout of production and use of HFCs in alignment with an international deal known as the Kigali Amendment. The result of years of negotiation by parties to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone pollution, the Kigali Amendment aimed to prevent up to 0.5 degrees Celsius of added warming by the end of the century, which scientists warn will have enormous consequences for agriculture and the global food system. Though Trump did not send the deal to the Senate for approval during his first term, the U.S. formally ratified the amendment in 2022 under Biden. Inside Climate News reported that a recent EPA assessment estimated that loosening the national phaseout deadlines is likely to increase emissions by 68 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2050.

Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation during the Biden administration, suspects that Trump’s cost-savings messaging around the rollbacks are nothing more than a “gimmick” to appease disgruntled voters struggling with soaring inflation ahead of midterms. Part of what Trump and Zeldin are doing with these changes, he said, is “wanting to create some grocery-price theater.” 

The administration argues that alternative materials to high-global-warming-potential HFCs are not sufficiently available, making the deadlines set by the rules for the phaseout too aggressive and expensive for food companies — costs, they say, that will be passed down to consumers. But critics have countered that U.S. businesses have spent the last several years investing billions into new refrigerants, equipment, production lines, and staffing. Chemours and Honeywell have already developed alternative refrigerants sold domestically and worldwide. Groups like the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute and the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy have also denounced the idea that the market needs more time. 

“We heard that argument, I would say, three years ago,” said Goffman. “It’s almost, by definition, arbitrary for the Trump EPA to say, ‘We’ll come along and make these changes,’ as if the EPA hadn’t already received a lot of information and worked through these issues.”

While several major supermarket chains and grocery trade groups have spoken out in support of the rule changes, the administration’s claim that savings will flow through to grocery consumers remains unsubstantiated. As they stand, the EPA’s rule amendments carry no mandates for grocers to lower their prices, and it is unclear whether companies would voluntarily use any presumed savings from the rollbacks to lower their prices, rather than relieving pressure on their own bottom lines.

Read Next Wild blueberry farms across Maine suffer as climate change upends growing seasons Sydney Cromwell, Inside Climate News

Food prices are shaped by many dynamics, but the dominant forces are demand and supply. Over the last few decades, food demand has only continued to grow, fueled by rising global populations, higher incomes, and urbanization. Supply has struggled to keep pace, and food prices have been climbing steadily as a result, punctuated by sharp spikes from recent shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran. 

But Barrett says the overwhelming persistent stressors behind steadily rising food inflation for most of the last six years has been extreme weather and climate-related shocks coupled with lagging productivity growth in food production. Americans are actively seeing this play out with skyrocketing beef prices nationwide, largely driven by persistent and prolonged droughts and heat waves that have decimated cattle herds and created severe supply shortages. “The evidence is very clear,” said Barrett. “Climate change is predictably driving the growth of supply down, and therefore driving prices up in due time.” 

By that logic, the administration’s rollback of the refrigerant rules, intended to mitigate planet-warming emissions, won’t, then, abate rising food inflation but stoke it.   

“So, if relaxing these rules aggravates climate change, and gives us more severe and more frequent episodes of extreme weather that hurts productivity in agriculture, we’re actually going to increase grocery prices down the road,” he said. “It just seems very hard to see how this administration is doing much to help relieve consumer food price inflation concerns.” 

“Who’s really benefiting from these empty promises?” he said. “We all need to start asking that question.” 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline No, rolling back these environmental rules won’t lower your grocery bill on Jun 4, 2026.

Last week, New York became the first state in the country to weaken a mandatory climate law passed by its own legislature.

The change comes at the behest of Governor Kathy Hochul, a moderate Democrat who has often criticized climate action for increasing consumer costs. After months of backroom negotiation, the legislature reached a deal that weakens the 2019 law in several different ways — most notably by giving the state an additional decade to meet legally-required emissions targets.

The original law, one of the most ambitious in the U.S., required the Empire State to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent before 2030. (The state used its 1990 emissions as the baseline for comparison, per standards set by the United Nations.) Thanks to the law’s uniquely strict accounting rules, the only way for the state to meet this target was to shift away from natural gas, which provides most of the state’s electricity and almost all its heating fuel. 

But as the 2020s progressed, New York failed to wean itself off of gas. The reason for that depends on who you ask. Some argue that President Donald Trump’s attacks on renewable energy have slowed the state’s progress, and others believe that state politicians have backed natural gas when they could have invested in more clean energy. Either way, the state fell way behind schedule, and it stood no chance of meeting its 2030 goal without dramatic action that would have taxed or banned consumption of fossil fuels.

Besides delaying the 2030 deadline by 10 years, the deal will also change the law’s accounting to give less weight to natural gas, and it will slow the rollout of a cap-and-trade system, which would force polluters to bargain with each other to stay below a hard limit on total emissions. Hochul has defended these changes as an attempt to protect New Yorkers from rising costs, blaming Trump for the state’s slow progress. She has warned that meeting the state law’s ironclad emissions target — something a court ordered her to do last year — would require huge pollution taxes that would end up inflating utility bills and gasoline prices, imposing thousands of dollars on the average household. (The budget deal also includes language that would require the state to consider the impact of its climate regulations on household budgets.)

Legislators and climate activists who support the original climate law said Hochul pushed the changes without giving lawmakers a chance to discuss a path forward for climate action in the state.

“This really came out of nowhere, it was sprung on us, and it was difficult even to understand what was happening,” said Marcella Mitaynes, a progressive state assembly member who represents a swath of waterfront neighborhoods in Brooklyn with many working-class residents.

Some experts who study decarbonization in New York said that the state’s legally binding emissions target had become virtually impossible to hit given broader headwinds against a national or global transition away from fossil fuels.

“It was going to be really difficult to meet, because the economy wasn’t cooperating,” said Al McGartland, who served as the chief economist at the Environmental Protection Agency from 2005 to 2025. McGartland, an expert on carbon taxes, said that the change to the law is “not all bad because I think it does buy time to think this thing through carefully, and do it right.”

The biggest change is delay. The budget deal sets a new target of reducing the state’s emissions 60 percent by 2040, a number that the governor’s office says is far more achievable than the 40 percent originally required by 2030. It also delays the launch of a “cap-and-invest” system, which was supposed to launch last year, until 2028. This system would assess new fees to polluters such as power plants and oil terminals and would funnel that revenue toward climate projects such as electric-vehicle chargers and heat pumps. Many climate experts believe such systems are the most efficient way to nudge an economy away from fossil fuels, but Hochul had grown concerned that the system would raise gas prices and utility bills at a time when many consumers are already struggling with fuel prices. 

The deal also makes two important changes to the way the state counts its emissions. Under the old system, New York had to account for the climate pollution associated with extracting the fossil fuels that it imports from other states. For instance, when a natural gas field in Pennsylvania leaked planet-warming methane before piping the gas to New York, the latter state had to count those leaks as its own pollution, in addition to that caused by burning the fuel for energy. Most other states don’t do this. Once New York makes this change, it will reduce its apparent emissions by about 15 percent overnight — a result of the fact that the state imports most of its natural gas.

This dynamic was compounded by the fact that the state’s old accounting system also gave extra weight to methane, which is the second most common greenhouse gas after carbon. Methane warms the Earth about 80 times faster than carbon dioxide, but it disappears from the atmosphere after around 20 years. Most countries evaluate their greenhouse gas emissions by considering the warming that will take place over 100 years, but New York only considered 20 years of warming, which makes methane look much worse compared to carbon. 

The 20-year outlook benefited certain polluting sectors and disadvantaged others. Under the new system, for instance, the warming impact attributed to the state’s livestock industry and its landfills will fall by two-thirds. Unlike the accounting change for imported fuels, however, the change to a 100-year framework can be defended as ultimately more climate-conscious: The 100-year framework is the standard used by the United Nations climate secretariat that administers the Paris Agreement, and many climate scientists have criticized the state’s 20-year framework for distorting the true costs of warming. (The reason, in short: If you have a system that prioritizes methane over carbon, you may limit some warming in the short-term while baking in much more in the long run.)

But even with these changes, the state still won’t be on track to meet its original 2030 goal. That’s because it has made little progress on the biggest sources of carbon: cars, power plants, and residential buildings. 

Natural gas provides around 50 percent of the state’s electricity, and it is the heating fuel for almost all the big apartment buildings in New York City and its suburbs. In order to fully ditch fossil fuels, the state will have to convert all those buildings to electrical systems like heat pumps. And then it will still have to replace all its natural gas-fired power plants with emissions-free sources like wind and solar.

These are both very difficult tasks. For one thing, electrifying a place like New York is expensive. The cost of replacing gas boilers with electric heaters in a century-old apartment building can run into the tens of millions of dollars, and landlords have been struggling to find that money without bankrupting their tenants. The New York City Council has passed its own law, Local Law 97, that requires large buildings to make the switch by 2030 or face steep fines. But some building owners have said the fines might still be cheaper than the cost of making the switch.

The law’s 2030 target provides an powerful spur to decarbonization even if some buildings will struggle to meet the deadline, said John Foley, an executive vice president at First Service Project Management.

“The goals may be difficult to reach, but they’re important to have,” said Foley, whose firm handles construction projects for a large portfolio of multifamily buildings. He said that while new heat pump technology has made decarbonization easier for some buildings, meeting the Local Law 97 target will depend on the state’s grid.

“The solution seems to be going towards electrification a lot more, and in order for electrification to be the answer, then you have to produce energy in a cleaner way,” he said.

Steam rises from the smokestacks of the Ravenswood Generating Station, the largest power plant in New York City. The state has struggled to build out enough clean power to replace its natural gas power plants. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images

Finding clean sources of electricity to replace gas-fired power plants has also been an uphill battle. A new transmission line carrying clean power from hydropower dams in Canada down to New York City will come online this month, but it was delayed for years by litigation and environmental permitting. Two major offshore wind farms, Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind, will also come online this year, despite the Trump administration’s attempts to block them. But they will only displace a fraction of the state’s gas supply, and won’t provide much power in the summer when demand is highest. (Coastal winds tend to be calmest in the summer when the oceans are hot and there are fewer storms.) Plus, developers have shown little interest in building more offshore wind farms due to Trump’s opposition.

Some of the challenges, however, are of the state’s own making. The state made its own electricity grid much more polluting when it closed the Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2011 due to environmental concerns. After the plant closed, the state had to import more gas to make up the loss.

The borough of Brooklyn, where residents who live near seasonal power plants complain of asthma and respiratory conditions, shows just how difficult this transition is. The state has been trying for almost a decade to close the particularly dirty “peaker” gas plants that turn on to provide power during the hot summer months when electricity demand is highest and not enough power is available from other sources. But even once the new Hudson transmission line and Empire Wind come online, the state’s independent grid operator says New York City could still need those peaker plants to avoid blackouts come 2031. 

“To me, the heart of the climate law was really to invest in our communities and reverse this legacy of pollution,” said Mitaynes, the Brooklyn assembly member who represents residents who live near such peaker plants, like the Gowanus Generation Station. She said that the delayed cap-and-trade system would have funneled 35 percent of its revenue toward disadvantaged communities. That money could help address poor air quality and support the buildout of an offshore wind manufacturing facility on the waterfront. “This law really set us up as leaders, and [Hochul] has taken this opportunity to dismantle it,” she said.

Hochul spokesperson Ken Lovett said the changes are “commonsense reforms” and that the governor “remains committed” to climate action.

“Governor Hochul has made clear her top priority is keeping the lights on and costs down for all New Yorkers,” he told Grist.

The state is still making investments in decarbonization: One state agency is investing heavily in large batteries that could store clean energy and thereby replace some natural gas capacity, and another will purchase $100 million in new renewable power this year. The state budget also increased a tax credit for New York City landlords that electrify their buildings. The budget deal also ups the proportion of future cap-and-trade revenues that will go to disadvantaged areas.

But other than that, Hochul has shown little interest in a plan for the state’s transition off of gas. Indeed, she appears to have decided that the state will need gas for the long run. Last year she approved water permits for a new Trump-backed pipeline project that will carry natural gas from Pennsylvania to Queens. The pipeline endorsement was part of a deal to protect the Empire Wind project from Trump’s interference, but Trump’s Interior Department attempted to stop Empire Wind a few months later anyway.

The new gas pipeline broke ground in April at a ceremony in Brooklyn attended by Trump administration Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin. Hochul herself did not attend.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New York backtracked on its climate goals. Here’s why. on Jun 3, 2026.

This story is made possible through a partnership between Grist and The Flatwater Free Press, Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories.

Standing before the Otoe County Board and a room of neighbors, Wynee Benedict ticked through a long list of concerns.

Do we have enough water for them? Who pays for their power? What if they create a heat island?

The source of Benedict’s worries: data centers. Since learning earlier this year that their county, south of Omaha and a little east of Lincoln, could become home to a new data center, Otoe residents have been abuzz with questions and concerns like Benedict’s, leading some residents to call for a temporary ban on the industry. 

That’s effectively what the board did last month, voting to suspend the permits needed for a new data center for up to a year, according to commissioner Chuck Cole. The pause is intended to give county officials more time to study how the developments fit into the county’s future plans and to update its regulations accordingly. 

Around the country, opposition to data centers is growing. The massive, resource-guzzling buildings needed to power artificial intelligence and our digital infrastructure have emerged as a galvanizing issue. Local governments from California to Maine have adopted or are considering temporary bans. And at least 14 states so far this year have weighed statewide moratoriums.  

Elsewhere in Nebraska, Madison County set requirements for data centers to get a special permit, which allows added oversight and public input. In Gage County, the planning and zoning commission will hold a hearing on a data center moratorium later this month.

And more will likely follow suit thanks to a recent change in state law forcing counties to make a decision on certain development projects within a specific amount of time, said Jon Cannon, executive director of Nebraska Association of County Officials. The goal, according to the bill’s supporters, was to prevent counties from needlessly delaying projects. But the law could have an unintended consequence. 

“I think that you’re likely to see a number of counties that say, ‘We need to get our regulations in order,’ and … they may put moratoriums on a lot of things, not just data centers,” Cannon said.

Read Next A look behind the scenes of what could be Google’s biggest test of carbon capture Anila Yoganathan

Data centers are just the latest in a long line of controversial developments, like wind and solar, that counties in Nebraska and other states have grappled with. And much like those other developments, attitudes toward data centers could vary from county to county, Cannon said. He advises developers to communicate with residents in rural Nebraska early and transparently about large projects.

“When people are aware of something coming to town, because, ‘Oh, my neighbor told me that he just signed this big contract for a right of way’ — when people find out that way, they get very excited, and not in a good way,” Cannon said.

From an environmental standpoint, it’s hard to know how much data centers are impacting Nebraska. There’s no centralized information source for their location, ownership, and water usage. 

Read Next data centers” class=”js-modal-gallery__hidden” srcset=”https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/GettyImages-2236721497-e1763760608494.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1022w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/GettyImages-2236721497-e1763760608494.jpg?resize=330%2C186&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/GettyImages-2236721497-e1763760608494.jpg?resize=768%2C432&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/GettyImages-2236721497-e1763760608494.jpg?resize=160%2C90&quality=75&strip=all 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/GettyImages-2236721497-e1763760608494.jpg?resize=150%2C84&quality=75&strip=all 150w” sizes=”(max-width: 1022px) 100vw, 1022px” height=”575″ width=”1022″ loading=”lazy” decoding=”async”> How to make data centers less thirsty Naveena Sadasivam

But that is expected to change. 

Lawmakers approved a bill this year aimed at increasing transparency. It requires data centers to annually report the names of their owners and developers, physical size, location, annual electricity demand, annual water usage, and any sales and use tax exemptions and incentives they receive. 

That information will likely be helpful to local officials, like those in Otoe County, as they weigh regulations. 

Other Otoe County residents echoed the concerns expressed by Benedict, who referenced reporting by the Flatwater Free Press and Grist about a proposal by Google to build a massive new Nebraska data center. The proposed data center could require more than triple the electricity the entire city of Lincoln uses during the hottest months of the year, when electricity use spikes. 

The proposal, detailed in documents shared at a private utility meeting in January, did not identify a specific location. However, Flatwater reported that a potential partner in the overall project — the Omaha-based private energy developer Tenaska — had optioned large chunks of land in southeast Nebraska, including Otoe and Gage counties. The news sparked discussions in both counties.

However, some residents who spoke at the Otoe County board meeting appeared to have different views on whether to temporarily ban data centers.

“We have said ‘no’ to a lot of things, almost a knee-jerk reaction. Maybe we need to say ‘yes’ to a few things,” resident Jim Nemec said at the meeting, adding that he understood the need for a temporary ban to study the issue. “But I also worry about the intention or impression it gives. Are we sending out the impression that business is closed here?”

In the end, Benedict is happy that the commission voted for the moratorium. Now, she and her neighbors are turning their attention to researching the consequences these developments may have. “We needed regulations on the books prior to a data center coming to this county,” Benedict said. “We don’t want to have to play catch-up and regulate something that’s already here.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nebraskans are taking a hard look at data centers on Jun 3, 2026.

The Trump administration is promoting multibillion-dollar funding packages to help states and disadvantaged communities secure clean drinking water as part of its promise to “Make America Healthy Again.” There’s just one catch: The federal dollars were previously promised under a climate and infrastructure law passed by Congress during the Biden administration.

Last month, the EPA announced a $1 billion commitment to address drinking water contaminated by PFAS, a class of synthetic compounds commonly referred to as “forever chemicals.” Two days later, it announced $2.9 billion to help track down and replace lead pipes, which can leach lead — a potent neurotoxin that can cause irreversible cognitive, cardiovascular, and reproductive harm — into drinking water. 

“The Trump EPA is committed to Make America Healthy Again by ensuring clean air, land, and water — and by taking on PFAS,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in a statement. In a separate statement, EPA Assistant Administrator Jess Kramer said that the “Trump EPA is committed to tackling lead exposure” and that the funds “will help protect current and future generations across America by accelerating local efforts to find and replace toxic lead pipes.”  

But both funding streams were appropriated well before Trump took office. Congress originally passed the bipartisan infrastructure law, also known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA, in 2021, promising to deliver more than $50 billion over five years to revamp the nation’s water infrastructure — the largest investment of its kind since the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act. Billions of dollars for lead pipe removal and PFAS contamination were tucked into the Biden-era law and scheduled to run out this year.    

Approximately $15 billion of those funds were set aside specifically for removing lead service lines, which deliver drinking water to homes and businesses. For the past five years, the EPA has been distributing these funds based on the share of lead lines in each state. The nearly $2.9 billion that the agency announced last month is the fifth and final of the annual disbursements required under the IIJA. Another $5 billion was set aside for PFAS cleanup.

But this year’s funds for lead pipe removal fell short of what Congress originally pledged. Republican lawmakers repurposed $125 million from this year’s appropriation for wildfire prevention, and the Trump administration initially delayed releasing the $2.9 billion allocated for 2025. The EPA only released the funds after pressure from Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi and six other Illinois lawmakers, who alleged that the funds were being withheld from Democrat-led states. 

The Trump administration has also proposed cutting the EPA’s budget in half in 2027, including a 90 percent reduction in long-standing funding for lead pipe replacement. Federal rules require that most water utilities remove all lead pipes across the country by 2037. Reductions in funding could jeopardize their ability to meet those targets. 

Scott Berry, a senior advisor on policy and external affairs with the nonprofit US Water Alliance, said those funding cuts are occurring at a time when states are trying to clean up lead pipes.

“As of now, there are no plans to increase the funding or even maintain IIJA levels, despite the fact that there is a massive need for investment,” Berry said. He added that deferring water infrastructure spending could ultimately cost homeowners more, potentially increasing utility bills by an additional $1,000.

In a statement, the EPA press office told Grist that the agency has taken “significant actions” to protect American families and children and “is following the law and disbursing funds appropriated by Congress.” The agency did not respond to questions about projected funding for drinking water infrastructure.

Nationwide, the EPA estimates there are approximately 4 million lead service lines buried across the country that are still in use. Illinois leads the nation, with about 1.5 million lead pipes. More than 400,000 of the state’s lead service lines are in Chicago as a result of the city’s building codes, which required lead connections up until 1986. As a result, Illinois received about 10 percent of the federal dollars — the largest allocation among all 50 states.

“[We] will work hard to secure our fair share, but there is no determination yet about how much Chicago will receive,” according to a statement from Megan Vidis, spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Water Management.

Due to the funding reductions approved by lawmakers this year, Illinois will receive approximately $15 million less than originally expected. 

“If the federal government is serious about getting the lead out and modernizing the nation’s aging water infrastructure, then it must sustain bipartisan infrastructure law investments and be committed to strengthening — not scaling back,” said Chakena Sims, a senior policy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s clean drinking water plan is being rebranded as MAHA on Jun 3, 2026.

The Potter Valley Project, which dams Northern California’s Eel River, isn’t doing very much right now. Its reservoir is clogged with sediment, and drought often empties it out. The project once supported a hydroelectric power plant that could produce about 9 megawatts of electricity, which is about 1 percent of a typical fossil-fuel-fired plant, but it has not worked in years. Plus, some of its infrastructure may be at risk of collapsing during an earthquake.

Like thousands of other small dams across the U.S., it is now more trouble than it’s worth. That’s why the utility that owns the project, Pacific Gas and Electric, moved last year to demolish it and undam the river. PG&E has wanted to abandon the project for decades, but a final removal agreement required years of careful negotiation. The dam project currently supplies water to vineyards and cities in Sonoma County, and it’s the sole water source for the rural farm community of Potter Valley. 

The final agreement was a delicate compromise: The Round Valley Indian Tribe, which has senior rights to water from the Eel, agreed to let some water flow from the river to farmers through a diversion tunnel, and the farmers agreed to accept about half the water they had received in past years when the reservoir was full. Supporters say that dam removal will restore natural water flow for vulnerable fish that have long inhabited the river. 

But now, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins appears determined to blow up the deal.

An aerial view of the Potter Valley Project. Kyle Schwartz / CalTrout

The longtime ally of President Trump has joined a small group of local residents in mounting a public campaign against the deal. She may well succeed — she’s already identified an obscure Southern California water agency that suggests it’s open to taking control of the dams.

The intervention is just the latest in a series of efforts by Rollins to turn conservation issues into culture-war fodder. Under her leadership, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, has targeted federal funding for sustainable farming practices as well as programs that broaden farmers’ access to USDA support — terminating billions of dollars worth of grants on the grounds that such initiatives are what Rollins has called “woke” holdovers from the Biden administration.

Supporters of dam removal have reacted to Rollins’s intervention with incredulity.

“It’s not really even the federal government [opposing the agreement]. It’s a couple of MAGA extremists who happen to be government actors,” said U.S. Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat who represents the area in Congress. “It’s sort of political theater masked as some sort of policy move that purports to be about taking over and operating this project, which is pretty preposterous.”

Rollins’s attempt to derail the Potter Valley deal has thrown the region’s future into question. Without an agreement, the Eel River and its surrounding environment will likely continue to deteriorate. The Round Valley tribe could sue to claim its senior rights over the river’s water, leading to prolonged litigation that could jeopardize water availability for nearby farms and cities. And water deliveries from the degraded reservoir will likely continue to be meager. More broadly, the development threatens a recent trend of negotiation and compromise in vulnerable watersheds across the country. The Potter Valley project is the latest in a series of dam removal agreements, from the Juniata River in Pennsylvania to the massive Klamath River dam removal on the California-Oregon border. These bipartisan agreements are fragile even in the best of times, but by politicizing the issue, Rollins may have made a permanent truce impossible.

Even though many farmers who receive water from the Potter Valley Project support the dam removal agreement, there are many local landowners and conservative residents who oppose it. One of the most vocal is a ranch-animal veterinarian named Rich Brazil, who lives in the small town of Potter Valley, just south of the main project dam. Brazil’s daughter, Keely Brazil Covello, is a filmmaker who writes a blog called America Unwon that advocates for farmers and ranchers. Her blog, which is ranked 44th on Substack’s “Climate & Environment” leaderboard, has publicized the perceived downsides of the deal and framed it as an existential threat to Potter Valley. 

“This will change the face of that area,” said Covello, who now lives in Southern California. “People need to know what’s happening.”

After PG&E secured the dam removal deal, Covello began writing frequently about the deal. In early September, Rollins retweeted one of Covello’s posts about Potter Valley with the caption, “I’m on it.” That month, Covello and her father helped organize a letter addressed to Rollins and seven other leaders in the Trump administration that urged the officials to reject the agreement as “inadequate, noncompliant with federal law, and dismissive of community and environmental consequences.” Rollins and Covello later engaged in what appeared to be a coordinated messaging campaign about the dam removal effort.

In the following months, Rollins held a series of meetings with Covello, Rich Brazil, and other local dam removal opponents, and posted to social media about how the state legislature and Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom are putting “fish over people” — a standard attack line used on environmental activists in California. In December, Rollins published a letter to the editor in a local newspaper, The Mendocino Voice, condemning the dam removal effort for its threat to farmers and ranchers in the region. 

Later that month, the agriculture secretary also filed a notice to intervene in the project proceedings as well as comments to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the nation’s independent dam regulator, requesting that the commission suspend PG&E’s formal request to surrender its license for the dams. “If this plan goes through as proposed, it will devastate hundreds of family farms and wipe out more than a century of agricultural tradition in Potter Valley,” said Rollins in a statement. “This plan would put countless USDA investments at risk and leave families even more vulnerable to drought and wildfire.”

Multiple current and former USDA staffers and officials told Grist that the USDA’s arguments in its request to FERC appear to omit the conservation and environmental priorities of the agency’s mission areas. In it, the agency argued that the dam decommissioning would cause adverse impacts to many of USDA’s mission areas, claiming impacts across five of the USDA’s subagencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins delivers remarks to farmers from the Truman balcony of the White House as President Donald Trump looks on in Washington, D.C. Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images

Erin Foster West, a former NRCS staffer who is now executive programs director at the National Young Farmers Coalition, said that while the NRCS and Forest Service have historically managed and worked to support very small dams, the Potter Valley Project appears to have no obvious connection to USDA’s operations. 

Gloria Montaño Greene, who served as deputy undersecretary of the USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation mission area during the Biden administration and was involved with the Klamath Dam removal, said these processes typically unfold very differently than the administration’s current approach — slowly, across multiple administrations, with a wide range of stakeholders at the table. The USDA’s public intervention here, she suggested, looks nothing like that. 

“What’s the NRCS saying? What’s the state of California saying? What are the tribal leads for the area saying? There are many voices in the conversation,” she said.

Answers to these questions have remained elusive, and the story has only gotten stranger. Covello, Brazil, and the other dam removal opponents met with USDA officials in January at the Farm Bureau convention in Anaheim and in Washington, D.C., a month later. Then, in late April, Rollins announced that an entity had emerged to buy the dams from PG&E: the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, a water service provider some 500 miles away in Riverside County. A member of the Elsinore Valley board appeared on Covello’s podcast and declared her ambition to take over the dams, framing it as an altruistic gesture that will protect water supply for all Californians.

“All of California benefits when there’s water and all of California is harmed when there’s not,” said Darcy Burke, the Elsinore Valley board member, when asked why she wanted to acquire the project. She admitted that “there might be no benefit” to her district and said that “we are just interested and doing our due diligence.” Burke added that she first learned about the dam removal deal when she read an X post from Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff who is running for governor as a Republican.

Policymakers and environmentalists have blasted Elsinore Valley’s involvement as at best a political stunt and at worst a plan to siphon water from Northern California and deliver it farther south. There is no infrastructure that could convey water from Potter Valley down to Elsinore Valley, making a direct water transfer physically impossible, but that has not quelled suspicions. Huffman’s office has begun a formal investigation into Elsinore’s involvement. 

For Rollins, the political frenzy around the dam removal may be part of the point, according to Alicia Hamann, executive director of the environmental advocacy organization Friends of the Eel River.

“The involvement of this water district, nearly 600 miles away from the project, with no tangible connection to the power or the water associated with the project, is really bizarre,” said Hamann. She suspects that the administration could be using the case to appeal to farmers ahead of November’s midterm elections. Farmers, despite voting overwhelmingly for the GOP, have been increasingly dissatisfied with the administration’s trade policies and geopolitical conflicts roiling America’s farm economy. 

In response to inquiries from Grist, a USDA spokesperson reiterated Rollins’s position, saying that dam removal “is expected to create severe, lasting consequences for the region’s agricultural producers and surrounding communities.” The spokesperson added that removing the dams would harm water quality and compromise drinking water supplies, reduce firefighting capacity, and put groundwater wells at risk “while jeopardizing substantial USDA investments tied to loans, insurance programs, conservation work, and rural development.” The spokesperson also pointed to other “unresolved issues” but did not clarify them.

Rollins’s intervention has fractured the delicate consensus around the dam removal agreement, but no one involved seems to have any clue what will happen next. PG&E’s proposal to decommission the dams is still pending before FERC, and neither USDA nor Elsinore Valley has submitted a formal proposal to take them over.

In the meantime, the two sides of the debate have begun to exchange legal barbs. Friends of the Eel River and other environmental organizations submitted a public records request to the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District on May 5. The request, a copy of which was shared with Grist, cites concerns that the water district’s decision to explore purchasing the dams from PG&E violates the Brown Act, a California law that requires local legislative bodies to conduct their business in public.

Elsinore Valley appears to be pushing back. That same week, the water district and the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank cofounded by Rollins herself in 2021, began to file a torrent of their own public records requests to organizations that were involved in dam removal talks. While some of these were governmental agencies that are legally required to respond to such requests, others were private sector actors that are typically not subject to the law, like the conservation nonprofit CalTrout. The request to CalTrout, a copy of which was shared with Grist, sought all electronic communications concerning the Potter Valley Project; all records, internal documents, and funding applications; and all communications shared with a variety of related entities and agencies. 

“We are not a public agency. So we were really confused we got it,” said Charlie Schneider, a project lead at the nonprofit. “What are they even after is hard to understand, right?” 

Just days later, however, the America First Policy Institute rescinded its request. (The Institute declined to respond to a request for comment, instead directing Grist to the nonprofit’s public comment submitted to FERC opposing the dam removal.) 

The most important local player in the Potter Valley conflict is the Round Valley Indian Tribe, which has senior rights to the water from the Eel River, meaning it could, in theory, assert a claim to the water that farmers and cities who rely on the Potter Valley Project are now using. The tribe has been pushing dam removal for generations, and the PG&E agreement was only possible thanks to their cooperation. They will allow farmers who got water from the dams to receive some of their Eel River water through a new diversion tunnel, and in exchange, the farmers will give the tribe money for ecosystem restoration. 

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In an interview with Grist, tribal president Joseph Parker vowed to claim his tribe’s water rights if USDA continued to block the removal deal. This would mean a lengthy adjudication of the Eel River’s water rights, which could block Elsinore or any farmers downstream from taking water from the dams even if they did stay in place.

“We talked to USDA, we told them our story, and they listened, but you could tell they didn’t want to listen,” said Parker. “[The farmers] have been getting free water this whole hundred-plus years. Hopefully they know that we aren’t backing down and that we’re here for the long fight.” The tribe has addressed letters to both Rollins and Elsinore warning them about “the potential liabilities that any successor owner of these dams will likely face, and the resolve of our people to oppose their retention.”

Meanwhile, locals who have come to support the agreement argue that there’s no alternative to dam removal now that PG&E has decided to offload the project.

“If anybody had asked me ten years ago what would happen if [the Project] was gone I would have said it would be disastrous,” said Janet Pauli, a grape and hay farmer who is one of Potter Valley’s largest landowners and the head of the irrigation district representing most of the area’s farmers. “But that was then, and this is now.” Pauli helped secure the 2025 agreement in exchange for water diversion that would supply farms and cities downstream from Potter Valley during the winter.

Livestock graze on a patch of field not flooded by a swollen Eel River in Ferndale, California, in 2024. Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Pauli also argues that it’s possible to mitigate the negative effects of dam removal for local farmers in Potter Valley by expanding a nearby dam on the Russian River and building other water storage projects in the valley. She said that opponents of dam removal haven’t been advocating for those projects, which would make the area more self-reliant.

Covello and the other opponents of dam removal don’t believe that those replacement projects for Potter Valley will ever be built, or that the winter water diversions from the Eel River will come to fruition. She also said she’s heard from both tribal members in the area and employees at PG&E that dam removal will offer far fewer benefits than proponents claim.

“It’s not gonna happen, and it’s not gonna work,” she said. “What we have works right now, and California can’t build anything to save its life.”

A spokesperson for PG&E said the utility had tried multiple times to find a buyer for the dam and is moving forward with decommissioning. The spokesperson said that there has been “misinformation” about the utility’s role and the availability of alternatives to dam removal. “There is a significant difference between an entity inquiring about the Potter Valley Project and actually submitting a proposal to acquire the project,” the spokesperson said in an apparent reference to Elsinore Valley’s overtures. 

Keeping the dams up would be an enormous challenge, even if Elsinore Valley succeeds in acquiring them. By all accounts, the Potter Valley Project is in terrible condition. The hydroelectric power house broke down in 2021, and the diversion tunnel from the dams sits on a seismic fault zone capable of triggering a major earthquake. Furthermore, the dams are out of compliance with federal environmental laws around fish passage and water quality. Upgrading them to meet all these conditions would take hundreds of millions of dollars.

FERC, for its part, appears to be moving forward with the Potter Valley dam license surrender and decommissioning in lieu of any viable alternative. On May 22, the agency kicked off its environmental assessment of the Potter Valley removal project by releasing its first National Environmental Policy Act scoping document. That document calls dam retention “infeasible” because of seismic stability concerns, fruitless past efforts to find an operator for the project, and PG&E’s preferred alternative to remove the structure. 

“FERC is saying, ‘There’s nothing else in front of us to assess,’” said CalTrout’s Schenider. “It’s certainly helpful [in] understanding where things are actually at.” 

Even though they’re on opposite sides of California’s traditional conservation debate, which pits environmentalists who want to keep water in rivers against farmers who want to use it, Schneider agrees with Pauli, the local grape and hay farmer who thinks dam removal is the best path forward for the community.

“For USDA, some funding support for those farmers … strikes me as a much better use of their time and energy than trying to save 100-year-old dams that are eventually going to fill with sediment,” he said.

Kyle Farmer, a farmer and rancher who lives in Potter Valley, said the truth is far more nuanced than the fish-versus-people framing that Rollins has adopted. He once fought to preserve the dam, but now he views the big challenge in Potter Valley as finding a way to make farmers and residents whole once the dams inevitably go down. 

“It would be great if this was a fish-versus-farmer problem, because there is a lot of precedent on how to handle those,” he said. “What we haven’t made much progress on is how to replace aging infrastructure. This is more like a town whose bridge is failing.”

This story has been updated to include Darcy Burke’s full name and affiliation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why is this Trump official dead set on saving a failing California dam? on Jun 2, 2026.

Electric vehicles offer many opportunities to save money: on gas, on oil changes, on engine maintenance. But, it turns out, insurance isn’t one of them. In fact, the latest data shows that EVs typically cost $3,159 per year to insure — nearly $1,000 more than gas-powered cars. It’s an added burden that could make the payback period on EVs significantly longer. 

On average, the insurance gap between electric and internal combustion engine, or ICE, vehicles was 42 percent, according to a report released today by the insurance-comparison marketplace Insurify. But it varies drastically by state and model. The most expensive locale was Washington, D.C., where coverage cost $6,394 versus $4,124 for ICE cars. Maine was the cheapest at $1,476, just $184 more than a conventional car. The difference was most pronounced in Rhode Island, which has a 73 percent spread.

Generally speaking, luxury brands like Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, and Audi are particularly expensive to insure, with premiums on many models topping $4,000. Volvo, Chevrolet, Ford, and Hyundai offer cars at the lower end of the spectrum. Insurify wouldn’t disclose which insurers had the most expensive rates, but did say Lemonade, Root, and GEICO offered the most affordable EV coverage. 

“Insurers were charging those higher premiums to balance their risks,” said Julia Taliesin, an economic analyst and insurance agent at Insurify, who wrote the report. It is based on more than 235 million quotes in Insurify’s proprietary database. Seven states — Alaska, Hawai‘i, North Dakota, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming — are excluded due to lower quoting volume. But high insurance expenses means it can take more driving before an EV pays for itself through lower fuel and operating costs. Even if electricity were free and gas stays at $4 per gallon it translates to at least 5,800 more miles a year compared to a car that gets 25 mpg. 

A primary reason for the disparity is that EVs cost more to fix. 

“We do see that there is a delta in the cost of repair for electric vehicles compared to ICE,” said Ryan Mandell, a vice president of strategy and market intelligence at Mitchell, a company which provides data and software related to car repairs. He pegs the difference at about 15 percent, noting that batteries are relatively expensive to fix and for mechanics to work around and that EVs have complicated electronics. But there are more fundamental factors as well, like the lack of an engine. 

Mandell gave the Ford F-150 as an example. From 2022 to 2025 an electric version of the pickup truck, called the Lightning, was available alongside gas-only and hybrid versions. When Mitchell subjected the gasoline and EV models to a front-end crash test the engine in the traditional model actually absorbed quite a bit of the impact. Because it doesn’t have that additional structure, Ford designed the Lightning with additional reinforcement that cost around 30 percent more to fix.

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“The Lightning had more crash parts on the front of the vehicle,” said Mandell. He also noted that Ford requires removing the battery before doing any work, which increases labor costs. “It adds up.”

Repair costs, however, are not the only factor insurers consider. Insurify’s data showed insurance rates for the two trucks are roughly the same, which Taliesin said suggests driver demographics and behavior play a role, too. “One of the most significant is personal driving history and credit history,” she said. Given the Lightning’s much higher cost, the credit scores of owners could potentially be higher. And Insurify’s data shows that the ticket and accident rates for Lightning drivers are about half that of traditional F-150s.

“Factors like climate risk, vehicle theft rates, population density, insurance regulation, repair infrastructure, and EV adoption levels contribute to regional cost differences,” the Insurify report stated. In several states it cited climate-driven extreme weather, such as hurricanes and flooding, as drivers of high costs. 

This EV insurance story isn’t unique to the United States. In 2024, BloombergNEF found about the same spread in the United Kingdom and Germany. France saw double the disparity. Overall, though, American EV owners still paid 87 percent more for insurance than Europeans. 

“Several model-specific factors have driven the wider cost gaps in the large and SUV segments,” said Aleksandra O’Donovan, head of electrified transport at BloombergNEF, pointing to the Tesla Model Y as a particularly extreme example. “[The U.S. price] is nearly triple the insurance rate for the same vehicle in Germany.”

From 2023 to 2025, the EV insurance gap in the U.S. grew from 29 percent to 49 percent. But this year, it came down slightly, which Taliesin said is among a few good signs for EV drivers. Another is that the disparity among cars made in the last two years was only 18 percent — compared 42 percent across all years. 

That drop is partly because auto insurance prices fell across the board in the last year. But Taliesin also said that ICE cars are catching up to EVs in terms of how complicated and expensive they are to fix. The cost of EV batteries is also trending downward, too. As EV sales have grown, there is more data for companies to base their prices on and more incentive for them to court EV owners.

”We’ve been seeing a ton of insurance-shopping behavior as insurers have been dropping their rates to compete for business,” said Taliesin, who is bullish for consumers. “That’s definitely a welcome reprieve.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The hidden cost of owning an EV: Expensive insurance on Jun 2, 2026.

Born and raised in Colorado, Cory Kreft began working on a honey farm at 15 years old. He returned to beekeeping after college, eventually buying the business from his former boss. But in 2021, his bees suddenly began dying. He lost 85 percent of his hives. The losses continued the next year, and the next. After extensive testing, he identified the culprit: a relatively new class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, often shortened to neonics. 

These chemicals are commonly used to coat crop seeds before planting, ostensibly to protect the plant from pests and insects during early growth. Thanks in part to a federal regulatory loophole, the use of neonic-treated seed has quietly exploded in recent years, with little regulation or oversight. Almost all conventional corn and more than half of soy seed in the U.S. is now treated with neonics. 

A legal loophole called the treated article exemption allows companies to apply these toxic chemicals to products like seeds without registering them separately as pesticide products. The seeds then fall into the same class as antimicrobial toothbrush coatings or treated lumber sold at major home improvement stores, with few legal limitations around how they are monitored, used, or disposed of. “Anyone can legally go buy this pesticide-treated seed, dump it in a river, and then contaminate the entire water system,” Kreft said.

Promised to be safer, but still toxic

Neonics were first introduced in the 1990s with the promise of being safer than older pesticides. “Neonics are neurotoxins, and they work by attacking critical parts of insects’ nervous systems,” says Jennifer Sass, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. The chemicals target neural receptors that are more common in insects than mammals. 

Neonics are systemic, so they move from treated seed into the tissues of the entire plant, including the pollen and nectar, and the fruits and vegetables that people eat. Manufacturers and government regulators claimed that these properties would make neonics relatively harmless to wildlife and people, and reduce soil and water contamination, since they claimed the pesticides would stay within the plant. 

Those claims didn’t hold up, says Sass, who has been researching pesticides for over 25 years. “They were supposed to be safe for people and wildlife. But none of that turned out to be true.” 

Since then, research has shown that neonics pose profound health risks for pollinators, ecosystems, and likely also people. The pesticides persist in the environment long after application and can travel via wind or waterways, contaminating ecosystems and communities miles away from where they were originally used. Overall, the amount of land treated with insecticide has continued to increase.

Research on seed coatings has found that they don’t typically help corn farmers’ bottom line either. Treated seeds have shown little or no impact on crop yield, so farmers are also paying more for unnecessary chemicals. Even so, pesticide-treated seeds have become so ubiquitous that it’s often hard for farmers to source untreated seed, and many use neonic pesticide-treated seed when they’re not needed. 

Neonics have become nearly impossible for pollinators and people to avoid. “They’re everywhere,” Kreft said, noting that he now buys food to place inside his hives during the summer months to keep the bees from foraging contaminated plant material. “They’re in the corn pollen in Colorado and the Midwest, and almond farmers in California are injecting neonics into their trees and putting them into irrigation systems. There’s absolutely nowhere we can go that our bees won’t be exposed to them.” 

When bees encounter neonic-contaminated pollen, the neurotoxin disrupts the neurological functions they rely on to navigate, forage, and survive. The hive then slowly declines and dies. “Over the last five years, we’ve seen between 60 to 85 percent hive mortality each year,” said Kreft. “It’s about a million dollars in losses for us annually.” 

The impacts of neonic pollution

The regulatory loopholes around neonics don’t end at the seed sales stage. They extend to disposal, too. Judy Wu-Smart, an entomologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has devoted her career to pollinator research. In 2017, she and her team made a disturbing discovery when they checked their beehives at a research site near Mead, Nebraska: The bees in every hive were dead. The pattern continued year after year. “We had almost 100 percent mortality from 2017 through 2020,” she said.

The team discovered that an ethanol plant called AltEn was operating near their research site. Major agrichemical companies use facilities like this to dispose of unpurchased seed before it spoils. The AltEn plant, Wu-Smart said, was processing much of North America’s surplus neonic-treated corn seed, contaminating surrounding ecosystems. Because neonic-treated seed is exempt from many rules that normally govern similar pesticide products, the facility was not subject to the same regulation and oversight as other pesticide disposal locations.

At the same time, residents in the nearby town of Mead began experiencing troubling developments: dead wildlife, sick family pets, and mysterious health problems. The seed disposal plant was selling ground-up pesticide-treated seed residue as a soil conditioner to nearby farms. Farmers were unknowingly applying high concentrations of neonicotinoids to their fields. 

After mounting scrutiny, the AltEn ethanol plant closed in 2021. But Wu-Smart notes that now, no one knows where excess neonic-treated seed is going for disposal. “It’s a big black box,” she said.

A growing push for stronger regulation

While the harm neonics inflict on pollinators is well documented, their effects on humans remain less certain. A recent study found that over 95 percent of pregnant women had neonics in their bodies. The chemicals have been linked to neurological, reproductive system, and developmental harms. Because neonics are now so widespread in food and water, Sass said, exposure has become nearly constant. “It’s everywhere now,” she said. “It’s in breast milk, tap water, even in baby food.”

Sass highlights research showing links to autism and learning disabilities among children from families living and working around farm chemicals like neonics. “I want people to understand that neurotoxic chemicals are bad for our brains, especially with fetal or early childhood exposure,” she said. “Early life exposure is more likely to cause permanent harm, much like lead or mercury.” 

Yet while research into human health effects continues, the regulatory gaps around neonic-treated seed are enormous. Wu-Smart said that when her bees were dying, neither state nor federal agencies could intervene, since there was no clear legal pesticide violation, like using a product in a way that contravenes its label instructions or other rules. Instead, the bees were being exposed through neonics that had spread into the surrounding environment — something current pesticide enforcement mechanisms were not designed to address. The same loopholes that allow treated seed to avoid full pesticide oversight also have created regulatory gaps around storage, disposal, contamination, and exposure well beyond the farm fields the pesticides are intended for.

Advocacy groups like NRDC have turned to state-level legislation. In Colorado, lawmakers recently considered the SEED Act, which would have expanded farmers’ access to seeds without insecticide coatings, while limiting unnecessary use.  The bill highlighted how a handful of major agribusiness companies have dominated the seed market, leaving many farmers with few options beyond chemically treated seeds. 

During the SEED Act hearings in the Colorado Senate, the act’s opponents argued that the legislation could increase costs and administrative burdens for farmers, while supporters highlighted the data showing limited benefits from pesticide-treated seeds and the evidence of the harm that neonics cause to pollinators and human health. They argued that the bill would protect pollinators, waterways, and public health, while also giving farmers more choice.

The act was ultimately defeated in Colorado, but similar laws have passed in New York and Vermont, and neonic regulation proposals have emerged in other states, including Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Hawaii.

Commonsense solutions

There’s an urgent need to close the gaps around neonic regulation by advocating for policies that limit unnecessary neonic use, expand seed options without harmful insecticides, and shift agriculture away from default chemical use. Since most neonic seed treatments are not actually needed to address pest problems, and typically provide no overall benefit, critics say that farmers should not be automatically using the pesticides. Instead, they propose a need-based model that preserves farmers’ ability to use treated seed when truly necessary, while restricting unnecessary use that spreads pollution. Quebec adopted this approach in 2019, with striking results: Neonic treatment for corn seed went from near universal to near zero in just a few years.

Those protections can’t come soon enough. In Mead, Nebraska, the environmental damage from neonic-treated seed did not end when the plant closed in 2021. Wu-Smart said that the pesticide contamination still lingers. “We’re still seeing high amounts of neonics in the honey from our hives in the area,” she said. “I wouldn’t eat it.” 

In Colorado, beekeeper Cory Kreft is not sure he can continue his honey farm. “There’s so much work that goes into beekeeping,” he said. “If I can’t keep my bees alive because this pesticide is everywhere, why would I keep doing this?”

Seed We Need is a coalition of farmers, scientists, educators, and advocates working to change the system. We support eliminating unnecessary neonic use in Colorado and bring safer, more transparent seed options to the table because our land, our health, and our future depend on it.

Join us in fighting for safer seed and a healthier Colorado. 

LEARN MORE

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The fight to protect pollinators and people from the ‘pesticides that are everywhere’ on Jun 1, 2026.

The latest addition to Seattle’s already impressive public transit system opened to great fanfare this spring when more than 200,000 people rode the Crosslake Connection light rail line.

Its March 28 debut was second only to the parade that followed the Seahawks’ Super Bowl victory as Sound Transit’s busiest day ever. Trains now glide across Lake Washington on what is believed to be the world’s first electric rail line that spans a floating bridge, linking the city with Bellevue and Redmond, and doubling the frequency of stops in the heart of Emerald City.

Those same tracks will carry tens of thousands of fans downtown to Lumen Field for the six World Cup matches the city will host between June 15 and July 6. Kirk Hovenkotter, who leads the transit advocacy organization Transportation Choices Coalition, has no doubt that Seattle’s sustained commitment to public transit helped it become a host city.

This summer’s spotlight follows an earlier snub. When the World Cup came to the United States in 1994, Seattle hoped to host matches at Husky Stadium but came away empty-handed.

In the 32 years since, the metropolitan area has grown from 2.5 million people to more than four million. Its transportation infrastructure has boomed as well. Steady investment that began with voter approval of the Sound Move transit package in 1996 helped launch light rail in 2008 and turn Seattle into one of the country’s most ambitious builders of public transit. This summer’s World Cup became the deadline for opening the Crosslake Connection.

“Our region hasn’t been preparing for the World Cup for 18 months,” Hovenkotter said. “It’s been preparing for 18 years.” 

Seattle is one of 16 cities, 11 of them in the U.S., that will host matches in a tournament FIFA, the sports’ sanctioning body, expects to draw more than five million fans. Several are using the event as an opportunity to open rail lines, redesign bus networks, and make other changes that will benefit residents long after the final match. Some cities used the tournament as a deadline. In others, it helped build support for projects or push delayed efforts over the goal line. 

These investments come as rail and bus systems nationwide continue recovering from the steep ridership decline sparked by the pandemic while confronting aging infrastructure and a dire financial outlook. In a country that is less supportive of mass transit than other nations, the World Cup has become an unusual catalyst for change.

Plenty of stadiums remain disconnected from public transportation, of course. But what’s happening in places like Seattle and Atlanta shows that a mega-event like the World Cup can strengthen transit systems — if the investment starts long before kick-off.

The World Cup’s infrastructure legacy has often been more cautionary than celebratory. Past tournaments have raised questions not only about human rights violations and environmental harm, but about whether host cities deliver the public benefits they promise. Brazil and South Africa, for example, failed to fulfill the mass transit commitments they made.

Such disappointments often reflect a broader problem: Host cities plan first for the event, then for the people who live there, said Simon Kuper, who wrote World Cup Fever and has attended nine World Cups. He likens it to hosting a wedding. “Let’s say it’s at the house,” he said. “You paint the house, you fix the toilet, you fix the door that wasn’t working, you redo the kitchen.” 

But the transit needs of 80,000 fans differ from those of residents. “You risk overinvesting in the route to the stadium and not in what makes residents’ lives better every day.”

Seattle followed a different plan. The $1 billion Crosslake Connection was not built for the World Cup –– the money came from a funding package voters approved in 2008, 14 years before Seattle’s selection as host city ––  but Sound Transit used it as a deadline for finishing a project that was three years behind schedule.

“It was like, ‘We’re going to do everything. We’re going to move heaven and earth. We’re going to be working every shift to make sure that when the world is here, our flagship bridge and our double capacity are ready to run passengers,’ and they were,” said Henry Bendon, a public information officer with the agency. 

The $1 billion Crosslake Connection was not built for the World Cup, but Sound Transit used it as a deadline for finishing a project that was three years behind schedule. Courtesy of Sound Transit

Building infrastructure matters, but so does helping people use it. Brian McCullough, who lived in Seattle from 2014 until 2020 and is now an associate professor of sport management at the University of Michigan, said communication will be key to the system’s success. 

Here, too, Seattle has a blueprint. When it hosted the 2018 Special Olympics USA Games, McCullough helped with a campaign encouraging athletes, coaches, and caretakers to use alternative transportation. The plan included providing them with free rides on the city’s expansive light rail system. It worked: Initially, 78 percent of participants planned to rent a car, but in the end, only 7 percent did. Sound Transit has an extensive messaging campaign geared toward soccer fans, including signage in the languages of the countries playing in Seattle.

That lesson is shaping preparations for the World Cup that could further benefit residents, too. Sound Transit expanded its airport bus service to provide 24-hour rides to and from Seattle. The Legislature funded an intercity bus between Pasco, a city in the state’s rapidly growing southwestern corner that is hosting a tournament event, and Spokane, which is hosting an Egyptian team with one of the sport’s biggest stars. It also increased frequency on other routes throughout the state. Hovenkotter hopes those improvements are here to stay. 

“It’s going to be hard to disinvest in this once these start running and people start benefiting from it,” he said.

Some 2,600 miles to the southeast, another city is preparing for an influx of soccer fans. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, or MARTA, is rolling out a major redesign of its bus network and preparing new railcars with expanded capacity, moves that will move more people more often during the event — and long after it.

Like Seattle, Atlanta did not make the list of 1994 World Cup host cities. But two years later, it faced a bigger transportation challenge: the 1996 Summer Olympics. MARTA added 7 miles of rail to ensure everyone got around efficiently. 

Today, the system, which typically carries more than 5 million passengers per month, has 48 miles of track and more than 1,500 miles of bus network.

Soccer fans will discover a system overhauled first and foremost to serve residents. Beginning in 2021, MARTA started working with the community on the first revamp in 40 years. The remake launched in April, and although it cut the number of bus lines from 113 to 81, the agency said the change increased the number of residents who live within a quarter mile of a stop. It also nearly tripled the number of residents living near a route with buses that arrive every 15 minutes, according to MARTA.

MARTA also added a rapid transit line in downtown Atlanta and introduced 12 on-demand “microtransit zones” in which vans provide short rides within each zone.

Among other things, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority overhauled its bus system in a makeover that nearly tripled the number of residents living near a route with buses that arrive every 15 minutes. Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority

The rail system saw similar changes. MARTA plans to update all 224 train cars, some of which have been in service since the 1980s, with more spacious interiors starting in June. Each four-car train will carry 752 passengers, a 13 percent increase. That will be a boon during the tournament, given that four stations are within walking distance of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. 

The World Cup provided an incentive to move quickly. “Folks around here figured out if I want to get my projects some priority … I need to say ‘I want to do this for the World Cup,’” said Rhonda Allen, the agency’s deputy general manager. 

Not everyone is convinced these projects will benefit the community, however. Bakari Height, co-founder of the transit advocacy group MARTA Army, said transit has stagnated since the Olympics, with only two stations added. He called the new trains a “subtle upgrade” and the bus redesign a “sour point” because it cut routes. He doubts the system will handle the World Cup. 

“I don’t know if they’re really ready,” he said, “and for sure, not ready for these crowds.”

In some cities, the changes are smaller, but still practical.

The Massachusetts Bay Transit Agency will open an expanded station near Gillette Stadium in Foxboro this month. The $35 million project adds an additional platform that improves accessibility and allows the station to handle more cars. Caitlin Allen-Connelly, executive director of the advocacy group Transit Matters, said the upgrades will benefit people headed to New England Patriots games and concerts long after the tournament ends. “There was definitely a need to make beautification and accessibility standards to be able to accommodate this level of service for the World Cup,” she said.

That said, moving all those soccer fans around will impact residents.  The MBTA is also reducing commuter rail service on most lines during the tournament. The transit agency said it has “made some minor reductions and adjustments” to service on non-game days to account for the need to reconfigure trains and make other changes to suit the influx of riders to the stadium to watch matches.

Kansas City Streetcar extended its southern service by 3.5 miles last fall and opened a 0.7-mile northern extension in May. While the line does not reach Arrowhead Stadium, it will help soccer fans reach the “Fan Fest” events that accompany matches. Shuttle buses will carry fans from there to the stadium. Tom Gerend, executive director of the Kansas City Streetcar Authority, said the city highlighted the growing system in its host-city bid and that the tournament provided additional pressure to finish projects. “We’re certainly using the World Cup as motivation to make progress and to have these services up and running in time,” he said.

Whether transit projects for the World Cup provide lasting gains often depends on who pays for them — and whether cities keep investing after the tournament ends.

So far, the federal government has done little to help host cities with this. The Department of Transportation allocated $100 million in March, or roughly $10 million per city — far too little to transform most transit systems. FIFA does not contribute anything toward transportation costs. That’s forced cities to seek funding elsewhere, including the fare box. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority plans to charge $80 for round-trip train tickets to each World Cup match in Boston, while NJ Transit will charge $98 for round-trip tickets to games in New York.

Balsam Nehme, director of sustainability at Sidara Collaborative, a firm that advises on large-scale infrastructure and sustainability projects, said the World Cup can bolster greener transit if cities use it to test new ideas and accelerate existing plans. That can mean short-term fixes like shuttle buses or long-term investments like light rail, she said, so long as they fit broader sustainability goals. The priority, she said, should be “long-term system-level thinking.”

For Gerend, the most important question was what would be useful after the fans left. Kansas City, he said, avoided spending big on permanent event services with little long-term value. That meant using the World Cup as a deadline, not a blueprint. “Let’s invest our resources in permanent solutions that are part of a long-standing, regional plan that will have staying power.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline US host cities made transit improvements a World Cup goooooooal on Jun 1, 2026.

Power lines across the country weren’t designed for a changing climate, with much of the nation’s grid built more than half a century ago. Today, stronger storms and heavier precipitation cause hundreds of outages a year, many because of trees falling on above-ground power lines.

In northern Michigan, some utilities want to change that.

In March 2025, a devastating ice storm hit the region, knocking down trees and snapping utility poles. Thousands of people lost power for weeks.

During the blackout, Lewiston, Michigan, resident Wanda Whiting suddenly had to get her husband, Dave, to the hospital. He was having heart trouble. The side of the highway was littered with downed wires and broken poles. The streets were so dark, she said, that she got lost on familiar roads.

“I still can’t get over how astonished I was, how much we rely on street lights,” Whiting said.

At one point, she had to drive over thick cables that had fallen across the road. Downed wires are dangerous; they can still be live even if the power is out. The couple made it to the hospital and Dave Whiting recovered. But the power in the area didn’t come back on for another two weeks.

Wanda and Dave Whiting stand outside their home in Lewiston, Michigan.
Vivian La / IPR News

For Michiganders, the ice storm was a reminder of the power grid’s vulnerabilities during severe weather. The state already sees some of the longest power outages in the country.

Climate change could make that worse. Research suggests northern Michigan will see more freezing rain instead of snow and possibly more destructive ice storms. Communities need to plan for a different future, said Richard B. Rood, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who studies climate change adaptation.

“You can’t think of what we’re experiencing as, ‘This is how it used to be, and this is where it will be,'” Rood said. “You are right in the middle of the change here.”

The biggest challenge to undergrounding power lines is cost. Consumers Energy, one of the largest utilities in Michigan, says it hears from customers “consistently” about burying more lines. The company estimates that undergrounding 1 mile of line in the state can cost $400,000. In some urban areas that cost can swell, with estimates ranging from $2 million to 3 million per mile, according to a report from the Michigan Public Service Commission.

In contrast, installing overhead lines is typically a fraction of that cost.

Instead of undergrounding existing wires, burying new lines during construction is generally easier and cheaper, because crews can install power lines alongside other utilities like water or gas.

Tony Chartrand, director of electric engineering and operations for Traverse City Light & Power, which serves around 42,000 people, said utilities face a balancing act. “Part of that solution is undergrounding lines,” he said. “But it’s not necessarily undergrounding everything.”

Tony Chartrand, director of electric engineering and operations for Traverse City Light & Power, stands next to a conduit containing an underground wire in Traverse City. Vivian La / IPR News

Great Lakes Energy, the state’s largest electric co-op serving 26 counties across northern Michigan, has announced plans to bury all new power lines. The new policy came in response to last year’s ice storm, which caused more than 66,000 power outages for the electric co-op and cost about $150 million in damages.

Even so, burying new lines will be expensive, said Shari Culver, chief operating officer for Great Lakes Energy. It can cost 3 to 5 times more than putting up an overhead line, and costs will be passed onto ratepayers. But, she said, “I think there’s reliability benefits for our membership, because it’s going to help prevent outages over the long term.”

The utility isn’t planning on burying all its existing overhead lines. That’s when expenses for construction, labor, and materials can add up quickly.

Besides the cost, there are other challenges with burying power lines. Any problem often requires digging up sidewalks to reach wires, Chartrand said. For utilities, that can be a balancing act.

“Part of that solution is undergrounding lines. But it’s not necessarily undergrounding everything,” he said. “It’s trying to balance that cost with the benefit.”

Michigan utilities aren’t alone in addressing the problem of downed lines during intense storms. Across the country, Americans are experiencing longer and more frequent power outages due to severe weather.

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

Utilities nationwide are looking to bury more lines, said Andrew Phillips, vice president of transmission and distribution infrastructure at the Electric Power Research Institute.

But expensive electricity bills are another concern, as utilities balance upgrades to an aging grid and increasing demand.

“If the utility wants to make any investment, this money doesn’t come from nowhere,” said Tao Sun, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University who studies the impact of extreme weather on power systems. “They have to pass on those costs to their customers.”

That can be a hard sell.

Sun said utilities need to plan ahead, identify the areas that would see the most benefit from undergrounding, and get buy-in from local communities for rate increases — ideally before any major disaster.

Right now, he said, those changes typically happen after disaster strikes.

Electric poles and wires along M-32 near Gaylord, Michigan. Wanda Whiting recalls that poles like this were snapped in half during the March 2025 ice storm.
Vivian La / IPR News

“We will only take actions after local customers feel or experience those events that are really severe or disrupt their lives,” Sun said.

For instance, California’s largest utility, PG&E, is in the middle of the country’s largest undergrounding project — in response to destructive wildfires.

A year after the devastating ice storm in northern Michigan, residents like Wanda Whiting are still recovering. There are now new poles and wires near her home. But Whiting can’t help wondering how these power lines will hold up in the next storm — and whether there’s a better solution.

“If it means going underground,” she says, “Then by God, go underground!”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A simple — yet expensive — way to climate-proof the grid: Bury the power lines on Jun 1, 2026.

Leah Atwood was rattled. It was the tail end of March, and for days she and her colleagues at Agroecology Commons had been fielding dozens of emails alerting them to grant terminations targeting a $300 million U.S. Department of Agriculture program. One after another, within a single week, 49 of the 50 grantees received notices from the USDA informing them that their grants were canceled. 

By the end of the month, Agroecology Commons still hadn’t gotten a notice from the USDA. While their peers were figuring out how to pick up the pieces, it seemed as though their $2.5 million grant, structured largely to help farmers of color acquire and sustain land, remained untouched. All they could do was wait. Resignation settled in — after all, they’d been in this position before.

Shortly after President Donald Trump returned to office last January, his administration launched a sweeping campaign to eliminate initiatives it has deemed wasteful or misaligned with its political agenda. At the USDA, that has meant slashing billions in grants and gutting a mix of newer and longstanding federal programs that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly framed as the administration’s attempt to “stop wasteful spending.”

During the administration’s first year, Agroecology Commons lost multiple grants amidst the USDA’s funding purge. In response, the nonprofit filed a joint lawsuit against the agency, claiming that the grants were terminated unlawfully. In August, a judge granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction that restored their access to some of the money until the court makes its final determination based on the merits of the case. 

All 49 other recipients of the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access grants received termination emails from the USDA during that week in March. In their written cancellations, which gave grantees two business days’ notice, Steven Peterson, the associate administrator of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, explained to the grantees that their programming didn’t align with the agency’s priorities and that its funding structure was not in keeping with the intent of Congress. He used the same language about cutting waste and discontinuing DEI efforts that had become routine for the administration. But whereas the administration tended to be vague about its claims of waste and fraud, Peterson’s letter was surprisingly specific. 

“Instances of excessive or frivolous expenditures,” he wrote, “such as purchasing gazebos, massages, a camper/RV, and oversized office supply budgets (in one case, over $130,000) — instead of land are an affront to taxpayers.” 

Through it all, Agroecology Commons still hadn’t heard a thing. 

Questions swirled throughout the grantee network, but no one could explain why Agroecology Commons’ project alone was spared. Atwood’s team presumed their grant wasn’t terminated because of the ongoing litigation. Now, they continue to wait to see whether their funding will abruptly disappear, too. 

“We are trying to accomplish as much as we can in the time that we have, because we don’t know when it’s going to be canceled,” said Atwood. “It’s a strange reality.” 

Read Next Following the USDA’s food and farm funding: Here’s what’s been canceled and frozen, and resources for those affected Ayurella Horn-Muller & Lyndsey Gilpin

Neither Agroecology Commons nor any of the other grant recipients that Grist spoke to seems to know who may have made those expenditures. 

Kavita Koppa helps run RAFI, a farming organization based in North Carolina that was one of the 49 grants that was canceled; they’d been awarded $8.5 million to help agricultural producers in North Carolina, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

Koppa says RAFI was just about halfway through its five-year contract with USDA and had spent roughly $1.1 million when the termination notice came. From the beginning, almost $2.3 million of their total award had been set aside for grants to support farmer land acquisition and market access, with around $400,000 of that set aside for RAFI to acquire land parcels on behalf of farmers. Another $1.9 million was budgeted for project management costs, which included the fees associated with verifying financial compliance in federal audits, attorneys for farmland acquisition, and translation fees; and then $350K for a bucket of miscellaneous project activities, such as paying guest speakers at workshops, contracting report writers, and mass distributing hard copies of farmer resources. The last $3.9 million was budgeted for technical assistance, a figure that encompassed the full budgets of the five subawardees that RAFI was working with on the project. 

“Under the guise of increasing land access for producers, the ILA program included no minimum requirement for direct producer support,” a USDA spokesperson told Civil Eats in March. “Instead, the program permitted the abuse of federal funds, including expenditures on the purchasing of a barbeque smoker, construction of a gazebo, massages, and for one awardee, a $20,000 budget for ink pens alone. To no surprise, a peek behind the curtain of this Biden-era program revealed the egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars to the tune of nearly $300 million dollars.” 

Koppa says she has never seen the budget items that the USDA cited. “The details were shocking,” she said. “We didn’t do those things. Why are we being treated as if we did something unethical or wasteful?”

Breanna Horsey, executive director of Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, who led another land access project working to expand Iowa’s fruit and vegetable farmers ability to secure permanent and affordable land access, is also adamant that her $1.8 million grant had no carve-outs for the expenditures detailed in their termination notice. Viva Farms’ Anna Chotzen, project manager of another ILCMA project that was awarded a $2.5 million grant to help beginning and historically underserved farmers in two Washington counties access farmland, said the same. Her team has no idea where those budget items came from. All she knows is that it wasn’t them.

Gloria Montaño Greene, former Deputy Undersecretary of the USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation in the Biden administration who helped oversee the creation of the ILCMA program, questions the validity of the excessive spending claims. 

“If that dollar amount for $20,000 in pens was put in there, did they show proof of that?” said Montaño Greene. “Show the proof, right?”

Read Next Inside the program cuts, workforce purges, and secretive reorganization of the USDA Ayurella Horn-Muller

Throughout April, at least 45 of the 49 terminated grantees — including two subgrantees — filed appeals against the termination to the National Appeals Division, an independent office of the USDA, Grist has learned. According to Amanda Koehler, a consultant on the land access program, all but two were informed that their award terminations are not appealable because the decision to terminate “was a matter of general applicability and not based on the individual application of specific program criteria.” (The outstanding two, said Koehler, have not heard back yet.) 

That finding by NAD should put the USDA’s justification for cancellation under closer scrutiny, she added, because it “underscores, in my opinion, that terminations were not based on anything the awardees did or didn’t do.” To her knowledge, none of the grantees — including Agroecology Commons — had budgets that included any of the claims USDA has made concerning wasteful or fraudulent spending. 

“This termination doesn’t seem like it was rooted in anything about our conduct with this grant,” said RAFI’s Koppa. “It seems to be part of some sort of larger motivation where we were not being treated fairly.”

JohnElla Holmes, who oversees the Kansas Black Farmers Association, which was awarded a land access grant of $8.4 million to help Black producers acquire farmland across Kansas, Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, says that roughly 62 percent of the organization’s grant was intended to go directly to farmers. She alleges that, following the administration change, the USDA took nearly a year to supply her team with the necessary approvals required by the grant’s built-in budgetary structure to award payments to farmers. Last November, Holmes says they finally heard from FSA staffers who requested changes to their paperwork. Over the next two months, she worked with them to submit all the revisions and additional documentation the agency asked for. Then, after another period of waiting on USDA, the grant was canceled.

Other grantees and sources close to the program also say that the USDA obstructed the distributions of funding to farmers with its scarce and severely delayed communication, lack of institutional support, and, crucially, the absence of necessary budgetary approvals over the last year. 

The USDA declined to comment for this story. 

On Tuesday, 24 other ILCMA grantees joined the lawsuit that Agroecology Commons filed last year. The plaintiffs are seeking another preliminary injunction, with the aim of reversing the grant cancellations and restoring grantees’ access to the funds. 

While it still has its money, Agroecology Commons plans to move forward with the land access grant. Atwood’s team, though, is proceeding cautiously — holding off on making longer-term investments into hiring or programming, and scrambling to fundraise against the possibility of a sudden cutoff. 

“When you talk about wasteful spending — the years and years that went into getting this program to even exist, and then to just terminate it,” Atwood said incredulously. That, to her, “seems like the real waste.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The USDA canceled $300M in farm grants, citing fraud. Did it make up the evidence? on Jun 1, 2026.

At first, he thought it was smoke.

Jackie Onsurez was driving the bustling New Mexico highway between his home in Loving and nearby Carlsbad last Tuesday evening when he thought the smoke didn’t look right. As he pulled closer, he saw that the 70-foot plume was actually a roaring geyser of toxic oilfield wastewater, commonly called produced water, spewing from a pipe at a site operated by NGL Energy Partners. 

Onsurez, who until recently was running for the state’s lieutenant governor position, said he called NGL, 911, the New Mexico Environment Department and others. He was at the site for a few minutes when an oilfield roughneck arrived in a pickup truck and tried to stop the spraying water but couldn’t. 

Stills from video footage of a geyser of oilfield wastewater at a site operated by NGL Energy Partners in southeast New Mexico. Courtesy of Jackie Onsurez

He said the man then “started to haul ass out of there. He said, ‘Get out of here. There’s gas coming out. I don’t know what’s there. Get out, get out!’”

Onsurez didn’t leave, though. He is an engineer and serves on the New Mexico State Emergency Response Commission — the day before, he had attended a commission meeting on hazardous materials spills. The serendipity wasn’t lost on him. 

“I was able to observe firsthand the equipment and the training and everything else that’s needed for here [in the oilfield],” he said. “The only people that had protective gear was the fire department when they arrived.”

The fire department cordoned off the area a few minutes after the roughneck fled. NGL representatives arrived soon after and shut off the shooting water. By that point, Onsurez had been at the site for about a half hour. He didn’t know how long it had been spewing before he arrived.

The contaminated water flowed across the road and ran into a nearby drainage ditch. Onsurez had also called Alisa Ogden, a farmer and rancher and member of the Carlsbad Soil and Water Conservation District, to let the group know of the spill. 

“I said, ‘Ms. Ogden, I hate to bother you, but it looks like this might be getting into your acequias,’” Onsurez said, using the common Spanish term for the traditional Southwest water system.

Read Next Oil companies accused of massive accounting fraud in New Mexico Jerry Redfern, Capital and Main

“If you don’t know what happens, you can’t do anything about it,” Ogden said later. “Gratefully, Jackie let us know immediately when he saw it, and we got right on it and were able to keep the produced water … from flowing down towards the Pecos River,” she said.

“It doesn’t keep us up at night, but with the oilfields out here, it’s always a hazard that it could happen,” Ogden said.

According to a report filed by NGL with the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division, a one-inch nipple broke on a high-pressure water injection line, leading to the blowout. The report said 40 barrels of produced water escaped, 10 of which were recovered. The remaining 30 flowed into the nearby ditch.

Sidney Hill, the public information officer at the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, which oversees the Oil Conservation Division, said that NGL collected samples from the ditch, and “We expect to receive them sometime this week.”

“Accidents do happen,” Ogden said. “We’ve all had accidents occur. It’s how you react to ’em.”

She said NGL is responsible and has agreed to do the cleanup. “They did everything they could at the time,” she said. “Once we get all the samples back and everything, then we’ll come up with a plan on what they need to do.”

Read Next The Colorado River is nearing collapse. It’s Trump’s problem now. Jake Bittle & Rebecca Egan McCarthy

NGL did not respond to phone and email requests for comment.

In December 2024, an inspector from the state’s Oil Conservation Division found a pump leaking wastewater on the wellsite’s cement slab. Asked by Capital & Main about a scheduled three-month follow-up visit that didn’t appear in the well files, Hill said, “Thank you for pointing out the past due compliance. We will investigate why it isn’t closed out, but it does not seem associated with the current release.”

NGL transports oil, gas, and wastewater around oil basins from the Gulf Coast, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico. It also has a growing business disposing of produced water in deep injection wells like the one just north of Loving. In its annual report, the company claimed to be the largest independent wastewater transporter and disposal company in the U.S., handling nearly a billion barrels of the toxic water across its operations last year.

In the greater scheme of wastewater spills in New Mexico, NGL’s accident was notable for being visible, not for being big. Between Jan. 1 and May 19, 48 companies reported 356 spills, losing 15,335 barrels of wastewater across the state. The biggest was a 2,000-barrel spill in January by Hilcorp Energy Company, just 1,300 feet from a neighborhood in north Farmington. Devon Energy Corporation reported the most wastewater spills so far with 93, compared to three for NGL.

But last week’s briny geyser highlights one of the fastest-growing controversies in New Mexico’s oil and gas industry: what to do with produced water. In 2025, oil producers brought up more than 800 million barrels of oil and 2.7 billion barrels of wastewater in the state. Those barrels of wastewater increase as oil and gas production grows, and the total has doubled since 2020. There is little agreement on what to do with all of it. 

Read Next ‘A fraudulent scheme’: New Mexico sues Texas oil companies for walking away from leaking wells Mark Olalde, ProPublica & Nick Bowlin, Capital and Main

The water occurs naturally in oil and gas formations and is highly saline, laced with petroleum-based chemicals. It is often radioactive and can include the chemical cocktails that companies inject into wells during the fracking and production processes. The recipes for those cocktails are often protected trade secrets and can differ radically from well to well. Basically, the water is toxic, and its use outside the oilfield for anything but testing is forbidden in New Mexico.

Wastewater can be used to drill new wells, but the most common disposal method is underground disposal wells — like the one near Loving — where the water is reinjected into rock formations under extreme pressure.

The report filed by NGL with the Oil Conservation Division said the broken nipple was on a pipeline charged to 2,600 pounds per square inch. But the state is running out of injection locations as the rock formations fill and shift under the intense pressure of the injections, resulting in swarms of earthquakes across the Permian Basin in both Texas and New Mexico. In addition, high-pressure wastewater deposits have breached old oil and gas wells, leading to brine leaks and geysers.

A proposal put forward by the industry group Water, Access, Treatment and Reuse Alliance to allow wastewater to be treated and used outside the petroleum industry is once again before the state’s Water Quality Control Commission. It was knocked down last year following a fracas where Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham appeared to pressure the commission to overturn a recently instituted ban on using the wastewater outside the oilfield. Earlier proposals argued that treated water could be used by other industries or possibly discharged into lakes and streams, a highly controversial use in a state that continues to suffer from a decades-long drought. 

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In separate interviews, lead lawyers from each side of the debate tackled each other’s arguments.

Matthias Sayer, co-founder of the alliance, said he views treated water as “a new source of water supply and as a reduced burden on the current management system.”

Sayer said, “Spills happen because oilfield [waste]water management is massive, constant, and operationally complex … That does not excuse spills, but it explains why a system built around moving very large volumes of high-salinity water will continue to experience [spills] unless the state improves infrastructure and creates better incentives for treatment, recycling, and beneficial reuse.”

Tannis Fox, senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center and a lead attorney against the reanimated wastewater proposal, said, “The main argument that industry is making is that reuse of produced water is one solution to the water scarcity problem. And with that, we disagree. It’s not a silver bullet.” 

Sayer said a “robust body of science” shows that oilfield wastewater can be treated and safely reused. “The question is not whether it can be done, but how to craft a rule that appropriately manages the risk,” he said. “That question is answered by engaging the science and the experts behind it.”

Fox said, “There is, of course, a significant debate about what the science is telling us.” She and others are skeptical that new water treatment processes can reliably clean what’s coming out of the ground. Water testing generally starts with looking for known, likely contaminants in the water. 

But, she said, “We don’t know all the constituents in produced water because the hydraulic fracturing fluids that industry uses are protected by trade secret rules.” In addition, basic water chemistry and salinity vary widely across the state. The lack of clarity about what’s in the water “is a problem for emergency response workers if you don’t know what’s in those fluids,” she added, with a nod toward the Loving spill.

In addition, Fox said there hasn’t been large-scale testing. “There have not been studies at scale. There has not been discharge at scale. There has not been treatment at scale. Reuse of produced water at an industrial scale is not there yet. So it is not a solution to water scarcity tomorrow,” she said.

“If the [Water Quality Control Commission] approves a rule, the system will necessarily ramp up organically,” Sayer said. “This is a runway, not a light switch.”

Fox said, “It is by its nature a dirty industry, and obviously the world needs energy, and the sooner we get to clean energy, the better.”

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 70-foot wastewater geyser reflects New Mexico’s latest oilfield challenge on May 31, 2026.

A sea of solar panels is rapidly engulfing one of the world’s largest salt deserts. By 2029, nearly 60 million panels will cover 280 square miles of India’s Rann of Kutch, extending right up to the border with Pakistan. The Khavda solar park is set to be the world’s largest and most powerful supplier of electricity from the sun, with a generating capacity of 30 gigawatts — 30 times the size of a typical coal or nuclear power station and enough to power Austria. 

With India’s economy now growing faster than China’s, Khavda epitomizes the country’s breakneck rush to electrify with solar power. Installed solar capacity in India has been growing by 40 percent a year. In March, it passed 150 gigawatts, and by 2030 is set to double again. 

Analysts say the world’s most populous nation is on the verge of becoming the first major country to power its industrialization predominantly with solar energy. 

Cheap solar is “enabling India to develop without the long fossil-fuel detour taken by the West and China,” said Kingsmill Bond, energy strategist and director at Ember, a U.K.-based think tank that tracks the world’s transition to renewable energy. “China built on coal; India is building on sun,” he said. “And what India is doing could also be mirrored in other emerging economies.” 

India’s solar revolution comes as a surprise. Just a decade ago, apart from rooftop installations and a few microgrids serving remote rural villages, solar power was virtually unknown. The government seemed hell-bent on industrializing with coal, unleashing a rising tide of carbon dioxide emissions and supercharging climate change.

Sources: Ember, Energy Institute. Yale Environment 360 / Made with Flourish

In 2015, shortly after taking office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to double coal output by 2020. And at successive international climate negotiations, his ministers pushed back angrily against demands that the country renounce the fossil fuels that drove industrialization in Europe and North America. 

“How can anyone expect that developing countries make promises about phasing out coal [when they] still have to deal with poverty reduction?” Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav asked angrily at COP26 in Glasgow five years ago, before sabotaging the conference’s planned declaration on eliminating coal from the global economy. 

But back home, policy was already changing. The country’s sunny climate made it a natural home for solar energy, and the cost of solar panels was falling fast. Ever since the Glasgow conference, India has been introducing solar energy at an accelerating rate. Last year, for the first time, more than half its installed generating capacity was from non-fossil fuel sources. 

As booming India’s electricity demand continues to grow by more than 6 percent each year, the solar trend is set to continue. According to the International Energy Agency, or IEA, about half the growth anticipated between now and 2030 will be met by solar power, and another 25 percent from other low-carbon sources, mostly wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear. 

Leading the solar surge is the country’s largest private power producer and the world’s second largest solar developer, the Adani Group. Founded in 1988 initially as a commodity importer by Gautam Adani, a long-time confidante of Prime Minister Modi and reputedly now Asia’s richest person, it is widely regarded as having benefited from Modi’s patronage. 

Eyebrows were raised in 2023 when long-standing military protocols banning all construction within 6 miles of the border with Pakistan were set aside weeks before Adani gained control of that land for the Khavda project. And in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Adani executives of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain lucrative supply contracts for its solar energy and hiding this from potential investors. The case was dropped this month after Adani made offers to invest in the U.S., though U.S. officials denied any link. 

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Still, the fast-growing Khavda solar park, which had an installed capacity of 9.4 gigawatts as of April, is the jewel in the Adani crown. Its panels are attended by robots that dry-clean them at night to remove desert salt and dust without requiring precious freshwater. The project also includes wind turbines in the windy coastal region on the shores of the Arabian Sea, which should secure nighttime power for the grid.

India still has a long way to go to break its dependence on fossil fuels. Coal still delivers most of the country’s baseload and fuels about 70 percent of total power generation. It helps make India the world’s third-largest carbon dioxide emitter, after China and the U.S, and is a major cause of the country’s urban smogs, which are the worst in the world. But the target to double coal mining output has been quietly forgotten, and construction of coal-fired power stations has been much reduced. Coal’s share in the energy mix is set to fall below 50 percent by 2035, according to the IEA.

Still, with its enormous generating capacity, coal remains deeply entrenched. And there are other constraints on how much solar power can contribute to keeping the lights on in India. While solar last year made up 28 percent of the country’s total installed electricity-generating capacity, it accounted for only 9.4 percent of the electricity put into supply. 

Why the difference? There are two reasons. 

The first is that the country’s outdated grid cannot yet transmit all the solar power being captured in the deserts of western India to where it is needed in the urban heartlands. At times last year, almost 40 percent of the country’s solar power output did not reach customers. 

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Charith Konda, an India-based energy researcher for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, attributes this to the rapid growth of solar facilities, which has outstripped grid development. “Solar plants typically take 18 to 24 months to build, while transmission projects usually take about five years… The grid is trying to catch up.” To that end, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has committed to spending more than $100 billion on expanding the national grid by 29 percent by 2032, through a series of green energy corridors linking solar hubs to major industrial and population centers.

But a revamped grid is only part of the answer, said Debajit Palit, who researches the country’s energy transition at the Chintan Research Foundation in New Delhi. Solar also underdelivers because India lacks the infrastructure to store renewable energy to meet demand after the sun goes down and during the cloudier monsoon season.

One solution being hurriedly adopted is to use water as a battery — so-called pumped storage. This involves linking two storage tanks or reservoirs, one higher than the other.  When the grid has surplus power, that electricity is used to pump water from the bottom tank to the top tank. Then, when the grid needs extra power, it can be generated by dropping the water through turbines to the lower tank. 

Starting later this year, a 1.4-gigawatt project is expected to pump water from one of India’s largest hydroelectric reservoirs, the Gandhi Sagar on the Chambal River in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Another, with a capacity of 3 gigawatts, is set for completion near Mumbai in 2030. In January, the country’s Central Electricity Authority identified 120 potential pumped-storage sites with a combined capacity of 180 gigawatts.

Another solution to the storage problem is lithium-ion batteries. World battery prices are falling dramatically — down 58 percent since 2023, said Ember’s global electricity analyst Kostantsa Rangelova, “making round-the-clock solar electricity increasingly viable.” 

Recognizing this, the Indian government has since last year required new solar farms to install battery storage so they can supply more constant power to the grid. Adani is currently assembling the country’s biggest battery storage system at the Khavda complex — enough to discharge over a gigawatt of power to the grid for three hours every evening. 

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An additional concern is that India remains heavily dependent on China for the technology behind its solar push. While it now manufactures most of its solar panels, the silicon materials that make the photovoltaic cells largely come from China, as do three-quarters of the lithium-ion batteries essential for energy storage. 

The Indian government is working to address this reliance on its northern neighbor for the supply chain for its renewables technologies by boosting domestic manufacturing. A more long-lasting constraint may be land. 

Solar panels require a lot of space — a difficult issue in a densely populated country that has more people than China on little more than a third of the land area. In a few places, solar companies are offering farmers the option to continue cultivating below raised solar panels, so-called agrivoltaics. But elsewhere, solar facilities are evicting peasant farmers, creating angry protests. 

Occupying areas empty of people, such as the desert salt flats of Khavda, avoids disturbing people but may put wildlife at risk. The Khavda complex abuts the Rann of Kutch Wildlife Sanctuary in Pakistan, which is home to threatened species such as striped hyenas, desert lynx, jackals, and desert foxes, as well as critically endangered great Indian bustards and migrating waterfowl following the Central Asian Flyway from Siberia to the Indian Ocean. 

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Despite such drawbacks, optimists believe that mass deployment of batteries should one day allow India to meet 90 percent of its electricity demand from solar energy. “The question is no longer whether solar can power India’s electricity system,” said Rangelova, “but how quickly it can scale.”

Not all of India’s booming industries can easily banish coal and hook up to solar-powered electricity, however. One logjam is the steel industry, which requires coal to produce the intense heat needed for blast furnaces and to convert iron ore into pig iron and then steel. India has the most ambitious plans of any country in the world for increasing steel manufacturing, aiming to double production in the coming decade. “Steel is the elephant in the room for India’s decarbonization,” said Palit. 

But in other sectors, the news is better. The country is electrifying its transportation system, for instance. The 42,000 miles of broad-gauge track in India’s vast railway network have been almost entirely electrified in the past decade. Meanwhile, electric road vehicles are moving into smoggy city streets. Most rapidly, India’s ubiquitous motorised rickshaws, often called tuk-tuks, are being electrified. Some 60 percent of sales of motorized rickshaws are now electric, making India the world leader. 

The choking of oil and gas supplies from the Middle East in recent months will only further accelerate the country’s shift to electrify its transportation sector, said Konda.

Whatever the drawbacks, the rapid advance of Indian solar power continues, and marks a sharp difference from the energy path chosen by China and, until now, what has been seen by many countries as essential for their economic development. 

For years, China was notorious for building a new coal-fired power station every week. But India is avoiding that path. Its coal use is only 40 percent of that in China at a similar stage of economic development, according to Bond. Instead, it is installing solar generating capacity at almost the same rate as China once built coal plants. 

With India’s leaders aiming to complete the country’s transition into a modern industrial economy by 2047 — the centenary of its independence from Britain — this matters for the world. India’s current per capita use of electricity is only a third of the global average, a fifth of that of China, and less than a tenth that of the U.S. Closing that gap by burning coal would be ruinous for the world’s climate. Achieving it with solar power could go a long way toward saving the planet.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A first among major nations, India is industrializing with solar on May 30, 2026.

Katelynn Delos Reyes thought she knew what to expect when Typhoon Sinlaku slammed into Saipan last month. As a lifelong resident of the island, Delos Reyes had survived frequent storms, including Supertyphoon Yutu, the second-strongest in U.S. history. Eight years ago, Yutu’s 170-mph winds devastated her village in the southern end of Saipan. Just three years before that, she survived Typhoon Soudelor. 

But Sinlaku was different. “At the beginning, it was OK. But later on it wasn’t,” said Delos Reyes, who is Chamorro, Indigenous to the Mariana Islands.

A few days before it hit the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or CNMI, on April 14, Sinlaku had tropical-storm winds. That made it what is known in the Marianas as a “banana typhoon” because such storms level banana trees but leave others standing. Then over the weekend, the typhoon rapidly intensified by 75 mph in just 24 hours before becoming a 185-mph monstrosity and the strongest storm on Earth so far this year. 

Delos Reyes and her family had done what they could to prepare. They boarded up the windows. They bought gallons of drinking water and filled plastic drums to use in the shower and toilet. 

Then the storm hit, and Delos Reyes grew scared. The winds, which had weakened to 150 mph, ripped the wood from a window. Rainwater gushed through the ceiling and soaked their belongings, including Delos Reyes’ mattress. She and her partner, her mother, her daughter, and their two dogs hid in her mother’s room, where its concrete roof and walls would keep them safe. She heard sections of the roof tumbling away. Eventually, Sinlaku slowed to a crawl, forcing tens of thousands of others to remain sheltered for days. “How long is this storm going to be with us?” she prayed. “I think, Lord, maybe it’s enough, you can go and finish it elsewhere.”

More than a month after Sinlaku tore across the Western Pacific, families in the Northern Mariana Islands and beyond are still grappling with a lack of electricity and clearing debris as they pick up what’s left of their homes.

Debris litters Garapan, the center of Saipan’s tourism district, in late May, more than a month after Sinlaku hit the island. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

The region-wide death toll — including Guam and the Federated States of Micronesia — has ticked up to 17, making Sinlaku the deadliest storm in the Micronesian region of the Pacific since 2002. The deaths include a couple on Guam who succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning while running their generator indoors, as well as six crew members of the cargo ship Mariana, which was caught in the storm when its engine died. 

In Chuuk State in the Federated States of Micronesia, the storm killed nine people, including a baby whose pregnant mother couldn’t reach the hospital due to fallen trees. Other deaths were attributed to a boat capsizing and a tree falling on someone.

Strong storms are common in the Micronesian region of the Pacific but rarely this deadly. Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at Climate Central, said Sinlaku’s sudden escalation happened over ocean waters 0.6 degrees Celsius warmer than average — temperatures made 70 to 100 times more likely due to climate change, which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels like oil and gas. Scientists have long warned that rising marine temperatures can enable storms like Sinlaku to get stronger faster and hold more moisture, leading to increased flooding. “In general, climate change is making events like this more intense at their peak intensity,” Winkley said. Sinlaku was named for the Kosraean goddess of breadfruit in the Federated States of Micronesia — a cultural staple also threatened by climate change.

A https://www.climatecentral.org map rendering of Category 5 Super Typhoon Sinlaku southeast of Japan in April 2026. FrankRamspott / Getty Images

The Pacific is home to many Indigenous peoples who have contributed relatively little to greenhouse gas emissions, yet are already bearing its disastrous effects, ranging from stronger storms to rising seas. Their nations are increasingly calling on major polluters like the U.S. and China to be accountable for their carbon emissions and help bear the cost of the extreme weather wreaking havoc on their communities. The Federated States of Micronesia was among 140 countries last week that voted in favor of a United Nations resolution affirming that state governments have a legal obligation to protect the earth from the harm caused by greenhouse gases, and nations that fail to do so must pay climate reparations. The U.S., which claims sovereignty over the CNMI and Guam, was one of just eight nations that voted against the resolution. 

The latest available report from emergency officials in Chuuk State, the part of the Federated States of Micronesia hardest hit by the typhoon, estimates that the storm destroyed or severely damaged more than 7,000 homes in Chuuk and Yap and displaced more than 13,000 people. “Access to safe water is critically compromised, food reserves are depleting rapidly, and the outer islands face growing isolation as maritime supply lines remain constrained,” the report warned. 

U.N. agencies such as the International Organization for Migration, along with nonprofit organizations and countries like the U.S. and China, have been providing typhoon relief for Chuuk. The growing Micronesian diaspora in the U.S. has also mobilized to send food and money. “They’re going to need financial support to rebuild their houses. They’re going to need chainsaws to cut down trees,” Josie Howard, head of the Honolulu-based nonprofit We Are Oceania, told Hawai‘i Public Radio. 

Fallen trees line the road leading up to Marpi in the northern part of Saipan more than a month after Sinlaku devastated the island. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

In the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, officials are still counting the number of homes destroyed and people displaced. But as of last week, piles of debris still littered roadsides, and the entire island of Tinian remained without electricity. Families opened their windows to catch breezes, seeking relief from the humidity and 80-plus degree weather. Indigenous fishermen caught ti’ao, or goatfish, to feed their families fresh dinners in the absence of refrigeration. Residents of Guam bought so many battery-powered Ryobi fans to send their loved ones on more affected islands that the Home Depot ran out. In both the CNMI and Chuuk, children were missing school because their schoolhouses had been severely damaged and, in some cases, destroyed, with many not expected to return for months. 

On Saipan, people waited an average of two to three hours at the local recovery center to talk to Federal Emergency Management Agency officials about applying for aid. As of last week, more than 9,000 CNMI residents had applied for federal disaster assistance, and the recovery center was serving an average of 300 more each day. “It’s a snake, kind of like the lines at Disneyland,” JD Reyes, a CNMI Commerce Department official who has been managing the recovery center, said of the rows of dozens of waiting families, some of whom had brought their children.

The families were from all over the island, Reyes said. “Soudelor hit the north, and Yutu hit the south,” Reyes said. “This just hit everyone, and what made it worse is it just sat on top of us for more than 24 hours. So it really made sure, if you’re not affected, you will be.” His wife was working at the hospital during the storm, so he stayed home to watch their two-year-old and mop up the water that flooded their house in northern Saipan. Just before dawn, his neighbors ran to his house for shelter because their roof had blown away. “We actually are very fortunate; we just had our flooding, damage to personal property,” he said. His village went without electricity for more than five weeks. “But at least we have a roof over our head, no windows destroyed, just damage to the car.” 

For Delos Reyes and thousands of other residents, recovery remains uncertain. The deadline to apply for FEMA disaster assistance in the CNMI is June 22. Delos Reyes’ family in southern Saipan is one of more than 450 families who have so far received emergency tents or temporary roofs. A FEMA tent now sits in her yard, and a tarp partially covers her missing roof. 

For weeks after the typhoon, Delos Reyes dragged her rain-soaked mattress into the yard to dry slowly in the hot sun. The first thing she and her family did was clear the debris from their driveway so an ambulance could reach her mother in an emergency. Delos Reyes is a caregiver for the 94-year-old woman, who has dementia and has been bedridden for seven years. That’s one reason why, no matter how bad each storm gets or how many times she needs to repair her house, Delos Reyes doesn’t plan to leave. 

“One day at a time,” she said. 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pacific Islanders slowly recover from the strongest storm of the year on May 29, 2026.

Dear Leslie, 

A lot of my work in therapy for anxiety has focused on recognizing catastrophic thinking and assessing what is more realistic. How would you suggest adapting this for a world where reality itself is increasingly becoming more catastrophic, and science suggests things will get worse in the future? 

—  Anonymously Anxious

Submit a question for a future Ask a Climate Therapist column

Dear Anonymously Anxious,

Your question points to something I’ve had to reckon with in my own practice as a therapist. Before I became more aware of the impacts of climate change, I used the same framework you describe — I helped clients recognize their distorted thinking and recalibrate toward what’s realistic. 

But as I came to understand the actual science, I had a striking realization: For climate-aware clients, their anxiety isn’t distorted at all. It’s a healthy response to real destruction and the inadequate efforts to address it. Shifting toward “what’s realistic” isn’t what we’re after to manage climate anxiety. Instead, it’s about navigating high-stakes uncertainty by developing new skills — helping people stay grounded and functional while channeling their distress into meaningful action with others. 

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

I think part of what you’re asking is how to distinguish a clear-eyed view of the climate crisis from catastrophizing. First, we need to understand the human tendency to catastrophize. Part of what shapes our perception of reality is something less visible than the daily news. We all have cognitive biases operating mostly beneath our conscious awareness. One in particular is relevant here: the negativity bias, which causes us to register threatening situations three to five times more intensely than positive ones. That might have been useful for our evolutionary survival, but it can also have a distorting effect — especially in the age of doomscrolling, when it’s altogether too easy to overwhelm ourselves with bad news.

That’s why a balanced view also requires staying current on the real progress being made: dam removals, renewable energy growth, youth litigation wins, communities building resilience. This kind of news often gets less attention, so finding it can take some effort. But seeking out these stories may help to remind you that there are answers to the problems we face.

Still, these advances don’t diminish the urgency of the genuine crisis we’re facing, and for now, our climate problems are still outpacing solutions. Watching that unfold, watching the status quo persist, can be agonizing. In therapy terms, the cognitive goal has to shift from “accurate assessment” to “functional clarity.” Accurate assessment asks, “How bad is it?” Functional clarity asks, “Given what I understand, what can I do?” The first question keeps you spinning while the second moves you forward. It can help you channel your emotions into motivation — to get involved with a local organization, lobby your elected officials, or change your own behavior.

Learn to distinguish between threat awareness, which is necessary and healthy, and threat rumination, which exhausts without informing. When your mind is cycling through worst-case futures with no path forward, that’s your signal to use the tools you’ve been building in therapy: Take a walk, do a breathing exercise, seek out a story about climate progress.

This is also where therapy offers something that information alone can’t. Climate anxiety lives in the body as much as the mind. Therapeutic tools (somatic practices, working through grief, reining in the runaway thoughts that keep you up at night, and building confidence to act) strengthen your capacity to stay present with the shifting climate reality without being overwhelmed by it. That’s not “coping” in the familiar sense of managing symptoms until life returns to normal. It’s developing the inner resources to keep showing up, keep caring, and keep acting with an open mind and heart. That kind of resilience makes sustained engagement possible.

In this with you,
Leslie

I’m Leslie Davenport, a licensed therapist, educator, speaker, consultant, and internationally recognized voice on the emotional and psychological dimensions of climate change. If you’ve got a question about climate and mental health, please consider submitting it for a future column. Submit a question for a future Ask a Climate Therapist column More from Ask a Climate Therapist

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Ask a Climate Therapist: Is it still ‘catastrophizing’ if the threat is real? on May 29, 2026.

As a college sophomore with an internet connection during the Obama era, I was instantly intrigued by the promise of the new direct-to-consumer clothing brand Everlane. I don’t remember how or when I found out about the fashion startup exactly; I just remember getting the emails. Launched around 2011 with venture capital funding, Everlane styled itself in a sort-of minimalist, pro-consumer ethos. The idea was simple: sell beautiful clothing made really well — so-called “modern basics” — at reasonable prices. The company made it all the more enticing by amping up the exclusivity factor; like the early days of Gmail, you needed an invitation to shop.  

By forgoing brick-and-mortar stores, Everlane, co-founded by Michael Preysman, advertised itself as cutting out the middleman and allowing the consumer to reap the benefits. Initially, Everlane promised its wares — it started with boxy T-shirts — would always be priced at less than $100.

The company embodied a decidedly millennial spirit: the idea that change was not only possible, but possible via simply buying better things. I spent hours pouring over the brand’s email marketing and clothing collections. I got off the waitlist in the fall of 2011 (“You’re one of the first in the door!”, the email read), but for months, I just browsed. Even at their heavily discounted prices, I wondered if $25 was too much to pay for a pocket tee, when Urban Outfitters was just down the street — or if the quality of a $15 box-cut tee would hold up, especially if I couldn’t see or touch it before buying. In the early days, by Preysman’s own assessment, Everlane was operating almost as more of a branding exercise. “I have seen, candidly with Everlane, we’ve had periods where we had okay product when we launched, and the brand carried all the weight,” he told a business podcast in 2024. “Then we had great products, and we had really high engagement.”  

From the author’s email inbox. Frida Garza / Grist

Indeed, over time, the company’s aesthetic and business model shifted as it grew in popularity and reach, and its price point changed with it. In 2017, Everlane announced that its first brick-and-mortar store would open in New York City, where shoppers can still browse $148 jeans and $268 cashmere sweaters today. Its mission also became more ambitious: Everlane announced plans in 2021 to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The company sought to “empower people to live their best lives with the least impact on the planet — and leave the apparel industry cleaner than we found it.” In its latest sustainability report, Everlane stated the company has reduced Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by 60 percent since 2019, and reduced per-product carbon emissions by 42 percent. 

The brand has signaled its commitment to the planet in other ways throughout the years, including its focus on using certified organic cotton and attempting to eliminate virgin plastic from its supply chain. Additionally, the company has taken the public inside its factories, publishing glossy-looking photos from its facilities in Vietnam, China, Italy, and other countries and tracking which ones use renewable energy and pay living wages. 

For these and other reasons, the company mystified consumers last week, when it was sold to the e-commerce giant Shein, which ranked as the biggest polluter in fast fashion last year. Shein offers clothing, jewelry, home goods, and accessories, all for sometimes shockingly cheap prices — the true cost of which is its carbon-intensive supply chain. The sale was orchestrated by L Catterton, the company’s majority owner, according to fashion reporter Laura Sherman who broke the story. (Preysman, who stepped down as CEO in 2022, wrote on LinkedIn that he “found out at the same time as everyone,” and has since announced he would launch another Everlane-esque business with no venture capital or private equity money.) Fashion magazines balked, asking if Everlane’s acquisition spells the end of the fashion industry’s sustainability aspirations writ large. But the sale of Everlane to this particular buyer should turn the inquiry around: Of what use are sustainability goals in the face of hyper-consumerism? Put another way: Was it ever the case that simply buying (more) different things would ever yield a more livable planet?

Consumers, it seems, only want to shop sustainably if it means they can, in fact, keep shopping: A study from 2025 found that even when shoppers are buying secondhand fashion, they’re also still buying new clothes. 

The companies’ offerings are, of course, different: Preysman famously told the New Yorker magazine, “You do not get laid in Everlane.” Shein, meanwhile, is a one-stop shop for plunging necklines, revealing cut-outs, sheer fabrics, and ruffles on ruffles. And the methods are different, too: Shein is less of a fashion brand and more of an everything store — a no-man’s land of AI-powered nanotrends — akin to Amazon or Temu. Hop on over to the Shein website, and you can just as easily find a halter top that makes you look like a ladybug or a pair of oversized jorts or buckets of slime. But, for all the hoopla around the acquisition, there are glimpses of Shein’s story in Everlane’s initial pitch, now adjusted for a new generation of shoppers accustomed to ultra-convenience. 

They were both, at one point, online-only stores offering clothes people wanted at seemingly unbeatable prices. And Shein has also apparently taken pages out of Everlane’s marketing playbook, by offering limited glimpses into its factories — albeit, heavily filtered through its influencer-fueled PR machine. In 2023, the platform invited a group of content creators on an all-expenses-paid trip to tour its facilities in Guangzhou, China. One influencer documented the visit in a video, noting that at least one worker was “surprised” about the rumors that Shein factories’ poor working conditions. (The video has since been deleted.) The publicity move was immediately met with criticism for attempting to sanitize Shein’s reputation. 

Everlane’s store in San Francisco. Liz Hafalia / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

In fairness, fifteen years after it launched, Everlane is nowhere near the scale of Shein, which reportedly produces 10,000 new items per day. But the question around whether the fashion world can ever truly become sustainable is something of a red herring, and even Preysman knows this — or knew it, at one point. “The word sustainability has been completely greenwashed,” he told Forbes in 2021. He went on: “Show me a fashion brand that claims it is sustainable, and I will show you a fashion brand that is not honest. One can be ‘more sustainable’ but nothing is truly sustainable.” In the end, the future of fashion retail relies on consumers buying more clothes. 

I did eventually buy multiple things from Everlane: a canvas backpack that held up really nicely for years; a silk button-down I wore just as much to graduate school classes as I did on vacation. I bought a pair of bootcut jeans after a long, painstaking discussion with a salesperson and a third woman in the dressing room who butted into the conversation. 

But I never shop at the Everlane store or website anymore, and that’s because I don’t have to — the thrift stores of New York City are filled with the brand’s clothes. It’s not the only one: On the racks at Goodwill, I can always dependably find at least one Shein top these days.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Everlane, Shein, and the myth of sustainable fashion on May 28, 2026.

They never thought the fires would reach them. They lived in cities, after all, far from the parched, combustible wilderness.

There’s the woman who never expected to have to grab her 1-year-old out of her bed in the middle of the night, shielding her soft head from a hailstorm of flaming embers as she dashed to the car. Or the mom of two who wound up on the beach holding her youngest, a 9-week-old baby, wondering how she would swim if the fires bearing down on her from the hills above forced her into the ocean. Or the pregnant asthmatic who had to decide where to put her air purifier as suffocating smoke blanketed her neighborhood — in her own bedroom, or the bedroom of her eldest child. The women don’t know each other, but they share the same instinctive feeling that they didn’t know enough — and didn’t do enough — to keep their children safe.

As urban sprawl encroaches on wilderness — and as the planet grows drier in many places and hotter almost everywhere — wildfires are becoming more dynamic, unpredictable, and far-reaching, affecting broader and broader swaths of the world’s population. On the east coast of Australia and the west coast of the United States, two of the planet’s most densely populated wildfire hotspots, millions now find themselves in the midst of a public health crisis that is not yet fully understood. Even fires that are limited to wilderness can blanket major cities in levels of pollution that are without recent precedent, leaving residents to guess how to protect themselves and their families. And when wildfires push through city limits, they incinerate synthetic materials, vehicles, and buildings, producing a mix of pollutants more toxic than the smoke that comes from burning vegetation. 

None of this is theoretical. It’s been six years since Australia’s so-called Black Summer coated the country’s east coast in choking smoke, three years since 100 million Americans were exposed to deadly pollution from Canadian wildfires, and just one year since fires decimated neighborhoods in Los Angeles, destroying about 13,000 residential properties and killing 31. But Australian and U.S. public health systems are ill-prepared for the inevitable return of such blazes. Nowhere is the lapse more clear than in the paucity of guidance provided to pregnant people. Scientists are just beginning to study how pollution from fires affects babies in the womb, and warnings from public officials and doctors consistently fail to account for the most vulnerable. 

Years after prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke during pregnancy, parents are left wondering whether asthma, developmental delays, and other health problems suffered by their children began with what was in the air before they were born — and whether it’s safe to raise a family in a place where every summer brings the same threat back to their doorsteps.

Smoke shrouds the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the Australian bushfires in November 2019. Bai Xuefei / Xinhua via Getty Images

Anneke French was excited for her maternity leave. A nurse at Canberra Hospital in Australia’s capital city, French was in her third trimester in the spring of 2019. Many in her tight-knit group of childhood best friends were also preparing to give birth or already had babies of their own.

“We were really looking forward to getting out and having lots of free time to go and have ladies’ lunches, or do some things by ourselves to treasure our time before we had a newborn to care for,” she remembered.

But by the time her leave began, French was preparing for a very different kind of summer.   

Earlier that year, in the depths of Australia’s winter, parts of Queensland and northern New South Wales began to burn — an ominous start to what is typically the country’s quietest fire season. By spring, new blazes were flaring along the east coast, feeding on vegetation desiccated by years of drought. Strong winds pushed flames across parched forests and grasslands, while dry lightning strikes sparked new fires faster than crews could contain them. Summer brought unprecedented heat waves; temperatures rose higher than most Australians had experienced in their lifetimes, cresting to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius) in some areas. Hundreds of fires broke out across southeastern Australia, burning millions of hectares of land. More than two-thirds of Australians were exposed to flames or smoke, making it the most far-reaching environmental disaster in the young nation’s history. 

While fire never touched central Canberra itself, the city endured some of the most prolonged and suffocating air pollution in the country, at times registering the worst urban air pollution in the world. Any air quality reading above 300 is considered hazardous, the index’s highest category of warning. Canberra’s reading exceeded 5,000 on New Year’s Day 2020.

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Throughout the crisis, pregnant women and new parents in smoke-affected areas, tasked with the responsibility of protecting both themselves and their infants, were largely given the same public health guidance as other sensitive groups (the elderly, asthmatics, and people with diabetes): Stay indoors as much as possible. 

Even French, a nurse, couldn’t find reliable guidance on what more she could do to protect herself and her baby from the smoke. At a prenatal appointment several weeks before her due date, French’s obstetrician told her to avoid going outside. She stayed indoors as best she could, preparing the house for its newest arrival. But the smoke worried her. “The smell was strong enough that it felt dangerous,” she said, “like you would feel if you were too close to a bushfire and felt it was time to evacuate.”

One night when she was a little more than 35 weeks pregnant, French felt a stabbing pain in her stomach so severe she could hardly take a breath. She and her husband, James, rushed to the hospital, where their obstetrician quickly discovered that French had a placental abruption, meaning the placenta was partially or fully removed from the walls of the uterus, cutting the baby off from its source of oxygen. The condition is usually preceded by either sudden trauma like a severe fall or chronic maternal cigarette smoking. French had not fallen, and she didn’t smoke.

She was rushed into an operating room for an emergency cesarean. 

Stephen Robson, French’s obstetrician, smelled smoke in the operating room that night and realized that the pollution from the fires had penetrated through to the very center of the hospital, into the rooms that doctors are trained to keep sterile at all costs.

French’s daughter, Margot, was born nearly five weeks early and underweight. It wasn’t until later that French began to wonder whether her placental abruption had anything to do with the bushfires surrounding Canberra. She was never told that the smoke might affect the timing of her birth or the health of her baby. She was never given a mask to use. 

As the summer continued and the fires only got worse, French began to notice the smoke in her home as she cared for Margot. She could see blue bands swirling beneath the overhead lights in her house. And even when she couldn’t see it, the stench was always there.

Margot’s birth wasn’t the only abnormal delivery Robson witnessed that summer. He remembers seeing smoke floating in the beam of light cast by an overhead medical spotlight during what was otherwise a routine birth. “It looked like the bat signal,” he said. “It was truly extraordinary.” 

It’s not just the placental abruption that bothers French now, six years later. She had two more children in the years after giving birth to Margot, none of whom endured the kind of bushfire season her firstborn weathered in utero in 2019. Margot is the only one of the three who struggles with asthma, a chronic, non-curable respiratory disease that afflicts neither French nor her husband, and eczema, an itchy and recurrent skin condition. 

Many of the children born to French’s friend group during the Black Summer have also developed asthma and eczema. “Her early months of life were in the Black Summer, and I worry about that for her as she grows,” she said. 

Anneke French sits with her daughter Margot. French worries that early-life smoke exposure may have contributed to some of Margot’s health conditions, like asthma. Jess Davis / ABC News

The evidence connecting chronic conditions suffered by babies born during the Black Summer to the smoke their mothers inhaled is largely anecdotal. That’s part of the problem; the scale of smoke exposure in recent years is unprecedented, so evidence-gathering is still in relatively early stages. But treating the harms of wildfire smoke as an open question is less about waiting for the science to settle, and more about ignoring what we already know about the risks of very similar pollution. In other words, not preparing for wildfire smoke is a policy choice.

General air pollution from trucks, factories, and other industrial sources is one of the most extensively studied environmental health risks in the world. It’s been the subject of sustained scientific inquiry since the 1970s, when governments began regulating and measuring air pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide. This research shows that fine particulate matter seeps deep into the lungs and circulates through the bloodstream, touching nearly every organ system in the body. 

The resulting inflammation, clotting, and blood vessel damage is linked to coronary heart disease and a higher risk of stroke and heart attacks in adults. Lungs chronically exposed to air pollution are more likely to develop cancer. Brains show signs of neuroinflammation, cognitive decline, and dementia. Immune systems are more fragile and susceptible to disease. In total, the World Health Organization estimates that indoor and outdoor air pollution from all sources combined kills some 7 million people every year — more than the number of people who die from diabetes, tuberculosis, and in car accidents combined. 

In pregnancy, fine particulate matter is particularly damaging. A baby developing in the womb is uniquely vulnerable to disruption. Every organ in the body is rapidly developing. The health of the person carrying the baby is closely connected to narrow developmental windows; reduced lung function in the mother, for example, can restrict the flow of oxygen that’s crucial to brain development and overall growth. Studies show that particles in polluted air can enter the bloodstream and migrate across the placenta and even into placental tissue, where they disrupt oxygen and nutrient exchange with the fetus. Across large epidemiological studies, higher exposure to general air pollution has been consistently associated with increased risks of preterm birth, low birth weight, and stunted fetal growth — outcomes that already affect millions of pregnancies worldwide each year. 

“The exposures in utero, during gestation periods, have an impact on life and the development of children when they’re born,” said Sotiris Vardoulakis, director of the Health Research Institute at the University of Canberra. “It can have consequences for many years — the rest of their lives.”

Sotiris Vardoulakis, director of the Health Research Institute at the University of Canberra, holds an air quality monitor in his office. While fire never touched central Canberra itself, the city endured some of the most prolonged and suffocating air pollution in the country, at times registering the worst urban air pollution in the world. Any air quality reading above 300 is considered hazardous, the index’s highest category of warning. Canberra’s reading exceeded 5,000 on New Year’s Day 2020. Jess Davis / ABC News

There is some early evidence that wildfire smoke — which also contains fine particular matter — carries similar risks for babies and their mothers. A 2024 study that looked at a large cohort of births in the southwestern U.S. found that particulate matter from wildfires was linked to higher risk of preterm birth and low birth weight. An Australian cohort study of pregnant asthmatic women found that exposure to bushfire smoke was associated with asthma in their babies. Two studies published this year using large sample sizes provided by hospital systems in California found a novel connection between wildfire smoke and autism diagnoses in children exposed in utero. 

Examining the health consequences of breathing in wildfire smoke remains, however, a nascent area of scientific study — largely because, until recently, wildfire smoke was viewed as a periodic byproduct of disaster rather than a chronic public health threat that could match the scale of other sources of pollution. In the U.S., for example, wildfire smoke is still treated differently than other sources of air pollution by the Clean Air Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency considers pollution from wildfires as natural “exceptional events.” The agencies tasked with air quality protection in other countries, including Australia, largely view the issue similarly. 

But the research landscape is changing as global warming lengthens the frequency and intensity of fire weather and wildfire smoke starts to affect more people. Exposure to wildfire smoke, while variable year to year, is trending upward in the U.S., Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Europe, Russia, Canada, and parts of South Africa, among other places. In the U.S., smoke from wildfires has contributed up to a quarter of the total particulate matter pollution nationwide in some recent years, unraveling the air quality gains the country has made since 2000. Some research indicates that wildfire smoke might be more damaging than general air pollution — up to 10 times more harmful than the compounds in car exhaust, according to one study.

Luke Wright takes a rest after putting out spot fires at his brother’s home near Sydney in December 2019.
ABC News

Emergency department records in areas affected by fires show that these intense episodes have the same consequences as background air pollution, but on shorter timescales. They boost hospitalizations for respiratory stress and cardiovascular conditions, and cause premature death. More than 400 people died from indirect smoke inhalation during the Black Summer, and several thousand more were hospitalized. Asthma-related emergency department visits across New York state spiked 82 percent at the peak intensity of the Canadian wildfire smoke event in 2023. Emergency room visits for heart attack symptoms rose 46 percent in the three months following the Los Angeles wildfires. 

The problem is set to get worse as the world moves deeper into the 21st century. Already, particulate matter from forest, grass, and peat fires kills an estimated 339,000 people a year worldwide. And climate-driven wildfire conditions are expanding across Australia, South America, Europe, and boreal Asia. A recent analysis found that millions of people at the edges of Australia’s biggest cities could experience urban wildfires similar to the devastating blazes that beset Los Angeles in the winter of 2025.

The Black Summer was a golden opportunity to extract valuable information about the health effects of wildfire smoke on major population centers, but Australia’s government at the time appeared more interested in downplaying the severity of the crisis. “We’ve had fires in Australia since time began,” Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, leader of the right-wing National Party of Australia, said as the fires burned in 2019, calling the push to study the role climate change may have played in fueling the blazes the “the ravings of some pure, enlightened, and woke capital city greenies.”

The federal government ultimately committed just 5 million Australian dollars for bushfire-related health research across nine projects: AU$3 million for smoke exposure, and AU$2 million for the mental health consequences of the event. The sum was only enough to scratch the surface of the work required to understand the full scope of the smoke’s effects. (A single large epidemiological study in the U.S. can cost $3 million alone.) The health ramifications of the Black Summer were quickly eclipsed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck as the fires were ebbing. The biological samples — blood, tissue, placental cells, and other clues that could have laid the groundwork for long-term analyses of the health consequences of smoke exposure — were never collected and studied. 

“Initially, we had grand plans of going and getting blood samples and doing respiratory tests,” said Christopher Nolan, an endocrinologist in Canberra who conducted surveys of pregnant women in 2020 to assess the impact of the fires on maternal and fetal health. The onset of the pandemic complicated those plans, and Nolan never ended up getting funding at the scale necessary to collect samples. After a series of public meetings, the Australian Parliament published an interim report in 2020 concluding that “long‑term funding and research is needed to more definitively determine the impact of hazardous smoke exposure and inhalation on individuals and the community.”

“We had a missed opportunity in Australia to invest in [understanding] the long-term consequences,” said Arnagretta Hunter, a cardiologist based in Canberra who is part of Doctors for the Environment Australia, a network of medical professionals that advocates for climate action. 

Robson, the obstetrician who was working at Canberra Hospital during the Black Summer, feels similarly. “When babies were born, I noticed many of the placentas had changes that often you only see in severe disease, like severe blood pressure, or women with immunological diseases,” he said. “It was striking and it occurred for months afterwards, because I presume women had been affected by the smoke when it was there and it played out across the rest of the pregnancy for them.”

Stephen Robson worked as an obstetrician at Canberra Hospital during Australia’s Black Summer wildfires.
Jess Davis / ABC News

Both Hunter and Robson say they fear Australia’s capacity to respond to smoke events hasn’t improved since. Robson envisions a protected area inside the country’s hospitals that can keep smoke out — a sort of citadel deep inside medical facilities where surgeons and other specialists can do their work without fear of smoke creeping in. Hunter would like placentas and other biological samples that may have been preserved in hospital freezers from that time to be thawed and studied. But the institutional will to take that on hasn’t materialized.

“I don’t think we’re any better prepared to deal with an environmental catastrophe like this than we were the last time around,” Robson said. 

Arnagretta Hunter, a cardiologist based in Canberra, looks at lung scans.
Jess Davis / ABC News

Even in the U.S., the country that produced the bedrock research on fine particulate matter underpinning global air quality standards, the dynamics of fire are changing so quickly that parents are still being left in the dark. 

Irene Farr could hear cars exploding somewhere in the distance on the night of January 7, 2025, near her house in northern Pasadena, California. When she poked her head out of her front door, she smelled thick smoke in the air. There was a red glow in the sky around Eaton Canyon, a nature preserve a few miles to the east. Farr thought she might get an alert telling her to evacuate or see fire trucks racing down her street. But the neighborhood was eerily quiet. Her neighbors were indoors. It seemed like just another night in Pasadena.

Reddit, the social media site, told a different story. People were putting pins on a live map that showed where flames were erupting. Every time Farr checked the map, the pins were closer to her house. At 3 a.m., she reached her breaking point. She roused her daughter, Azul, and rallied her husband, David, and his parents, who live on the same property. They drove to David’s brother’s house half an hour away and stayed awake the rest of the night, wired and anxious for news about their neighborhood. The sun never rose that morning; the smoke was so thick that 6 a.m. looked like midnight. 

Smokes and flames overwhelm a commercial area during the Eaton Fire near Altadena, California, on January 8, 2025.
Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images

The Eaton Fire, one of two devastating wildfires that struck the Los Angeles area that January, ultimately killed 19 people and destroyed 9,000 buildings. Most of the deaths occurred west of a prominent north-south thoroughfare called Lake Avenue, where Farr’s house is located. Evacuation orders from the city arrived late — hours after residents on the east side of Lake Avenue had been told to leave. 

The Farr’s house was spared, but more than a year later the family still hasn’t moved back home. Azul was just 11 months old when the fires broke out — too young, Irene figured, to risk her being exposed to whatever the fires left behind. Schools, hospital clinics, supermarkets, warehouses, appliances, and plastics had been burned to ash. People online were saying that the affected areas would be toxic for at least a year. 

“We decided that we would wait until we had more data and information,” Farr said. “What ended up being a two-week wait ended up being a one-month wait, ended up being a three-month wait …”

Whenever she went back to check on the old house, Farr felt a burning in the back of her throat, a “bubbling up.” There was something lingering in the air, she thought, but she didn’t know what it was.

Irene Farr holds her daughter Azul. They evacuated their home during the Eaton Fire in January 2025.
Zoya Teirstein / Grist

Frankly, no one knew — not even local air pollution researchers who have spent years studying the health dangers of wildfire smoke in the American West. “It was unprecedented,” said Yifang Zhu, an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Air monitoring stations across the country installed by the federal government are often designed to monitor general air quality. They take measurements every few days, data that helps states determine whether they are compliant with federal regulations. When the fires broke out, stations in Los Angeles continued to collect routine data on urban air pollutants, but the sensors weren’t equipped to capture the novel mix of compounds produced by burning cars, buildings, and asphalt. Many of the sensors were themselves lost to the fires.

“One big lesson we learned is if something gets burned that’s not a traditional wildfire compound, if you don’t specifically look for it, you’re not going to find it,” Zhu said. “It’s as if it didn’t exist.” The problem is that designing and deploying air quality monitors that can capture the heady mix of pollutants released by urban wildfires is expensive and requires a lot of technical expertise. 

Yifang Zhu is an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Zoya Teirstein / Grist

Zhu’s colleague Mike Kleeman, an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Davis, drove around the Los Angeles burn zone in April last year, when cleanup crews were hauling away material, and took air samples with an expensive specialized air sampling instrument. He was looking for hexavalent chromium, a very toxic form of chromium used in industrial welding and manufacturing that’s linked to lung cancer. Air monitoring stations, and even air pollution research laboratories like Zhu’s, don’t measure the toxin because it requires unique equipment and it’s unstable, meaning you only have a short while to get it to the lab before it disappears. 

Kleeman found hexavalent chromium in the samples he collected at levels that were 200 times higher than they would be on a normal day in the city — not high enough to warrant a public health emergency, but illuminating for air pollution researchers who quickly realized that these urban blazes had introduced a new set of unknown variables.

“We are facing an entirely new challenge when wildfires burn into major cities,” Kleeman said. 

Zhu and Kleeman are members of the Los Angeles Fire Human Exposure and Long-Term Health Study, a collaboration between eight universities across the U.S. aimed at studying the short- and long-term health effects of the Los Angeles fires. The collaboration, funded by the Spiegel Family Fund, a philanthropic foundation formed by the creator of Snapchat, collected some of the biological data that researchers in Australia largely couldn’t obtain during and after the Black Summer. 
An initial study found peculiar trends in sodium and protein levels in the blood of people affected by the fires, an outcome experts still don’t understand. More research on those abnormalities and other findings is coming. Researchers involved in the initiative were focused initially on measuring the contaminants the fires produced and recruiting cohorts of people to study. Now, they’re turning to the work of investigating the long-term health impacts of the fires on those people, including subgroups like first responders and pregnant women.

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• Rising heat, failing kidneys: Climate’s hidden toll on migrant workers
• In Bangladesh, thousands of volunteers are battling climate-fueled disease at its source
• A hotter, wetter South is becoming a breeding ground for mold
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But the funding that rolled in from ultra-wealthy Los Angeles philanthropists in the immediate aftermath of the fires is starting to dry up. The federal government, beyond failing to fill the void, is cutting resources needed to understand the conditions that fuel wildfires in the first place. In April, the Trump administration announced a reorganization plan that includes closing 57 of 77 Forest Service research stations across the country, many of which study fire risk. 

There’s not much more momentum in Australia. Despite a change in government in 2022, no new major federal funding has been earmarked for bushfire smoke exposure research since the Black Summer, perhaps in part because a smoke event of that scale hasn’t happened since. 

As countries around the globe begin to grapple with the health consequences of smoke exposure, tens of millions of data points are entering the public record. But the way researchers in different countries conduct research — even the way scientists define the term “smoke exposure” — is highly variable. Some scientists use satellites to study smoke exposure, while others use computer modeling. For pregnant populations, some scientists choose to analyze smoke exposure by trimester, others look at the total number of “fire days” pregnant women live through. Efforts to identify long-term health trends are often scrambled by this lack of standardization, delaying the kind of unequivocal findings that prompt hospitals and governments to quickly implement new policies. 

The American and Australian co-authors of a 2024 global meta analysis of the research on wildfire smoke exposure in pregnant women found just 31 studies of a high enough caliber to include in their review. Their analysis was inconclusive because the studies, conducted in various countries with different methods, couldn’t be appropriately compared. In the end, the authors were forced to conclude that they had found “suggestive evidence of harm from exposure to wildfire smoke during pregnancy” and that more research was needed. 

Nolan, the Australian endocrinologist, thinks there should be a scientific protocol that experts all over the globe use as they conduct research on the effects of smoke exposure on natal health. A universal standard that harmonizes datasets would allow researchers to share data between institutions and hone in on the biggest risks more quickly. “[When] different groups around the world collect the data the same way, well, then you get statistical power,” Nolan said. 

Epidemiological standardization is what formed the basis of general air pollution regulations. The World Health Organization created global air quality guidelines in 1987 and established a benchmark for particulate matter pollution in 2005. Researchers were then able to draw concrete conclusions: A 2015 study, for example, found that for every 10 micrograms per cubic meter increase in fine particulate pollution, all-cause mortality rises by 4 percent. 

We know that wildfire smoke is bad for pregnant women. But answers to more specific questions — should women evacuate when particulate matter reaches a certain threshold? How many days of smoke exposure meaningfully increase the risk of preterm birth? — are still out of reach 

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It’s not a matter of if the fires will come again, but when. Much of the American West just had one of its warmest winters on record. More than half the region is in a drought at a time of year when snowpack should have hit its peak, priming the landscape for fire. “We are facing a very challenging fire year,” Mike Morgan, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, said in April. “Our resources will be tested not only in Colorado, but across the West.” 

Earlier this year, southeastern Australia experienced the most intense heat wave it has seen since the Black Summer — an event made five times more likely by climate change. The heat fueled a spate of bushfires across the state of Victoria that burned hundreds of homes and killed one person and thousands of livestock. 

In Canberra, where temperatures approached 110 degrees F, the smell of smoke from prescribed burning this fall brought French back to 2019. “As soon as you see that plume of smoke or smell it on the air, you want to know: Where? How close? Is it in control? Is it accidental?” she said. 

French can find the answers to those questions on the Australian Capital Territory Parks website. But there is nowhere she can go for resolution about the long-term effects of the Black Summer on Margot’s health.

“I don’t know how that will affect her,” she said. “I still don’t know.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfire smoke engulfed their cities. Did it make their babies sick? on May 28, 2026.