Grist

Across much of the U.S., people have little way to know when the air they breathe turns dangerous.

Over recent decades, federal funding for public air monitoring has declined, the number of monitors has fallen, and much of the remaining equipment is aging or located far from major polluters.

Now, the stakes are rising: Wildfire smoke is reaching more communities, data centers are adding pollution, and climate-driven heat waves are worsening ozone levels. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has delayed and rolled back requirements meant to hold companies accountable for their emissions.

As the public monitoring system has weakened, communities have increasingly turned to an alternative: low-cost sensors they can use themselves. 

But a Floodlight investigation finds industry is moving to restrict that option, too.

A scientist discusses an air-monitoring car with Louisiana Environmental Action Network staff. The Trump administration canceled the group’s air monitoring grant last year. Zachary Kanzler for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network

Since 2024, lawmakers in Louisiana, Ohio, and Kentucky have passed strikingly similar bills — backed by chemical or manufacturing trade groups — that curb the use of community-collected data in enforcement actions.

The bills share a common thread: They block regulators from using air-quality data for enforcement purposes unless it meets EPA-approved standards. Similar bills in West Virginia have yet to pass. 

In case after case, proponents have made the same argument: Community monitoring isn’t reliable enough for regulatory enforcement. 

Yet when lawmakers in West Virginia offered a version of a bill designed to ensure accuracy, industry resisted. 

The bill “essentially codifies what we are trying to prevent,” an official at the chemical giant Chemours wrote in an internal email.

An early-warning system in decline

Thousands of small, often-unremarkable instruments serve as the nation’s early-warning system for dangerous air — detecting pollution that people can’t always see or smell.

Some sit inside shelters the size of garden sheds. Others are mounted on rooftops or tucked into fenced compounds. Together, these monitors measure pollutants ranging from ozone and carbon monoxide to carcinogens such as benzene and vinyl chloride.

The network grew out of the 1963 Clean Air Act and transformed the way the nation tracked air pollution, giving regulators data they could use to identify dangerous conditions and hold polluters accountable. Since then, air pollution has fallen dramatically across much of the U.S.

But today, the network is “showing its age,” said Chet Wayland, who led EPA’s Air Quality Assessment Division for nearly two decades. “And it’s getting smaller over time.”

For example:

• Leaks, termites, and ants plague monitoring stations in one state while officials in another have resorted to shopping on eBay for discontinued parts, according to a 2020 congressional watchdog report. 
• Adjusted for inflation, federal grants to support the network have fallen more than 35 percent over the past two decades, while the Trump administration tried unsuccessfully last year to eliminate them entirely — and is trying again this year.
• The number of government air monitors nationwide fell by nearly half over the same 20-year period, according to EPA data.

The decline was especially pronounced among air monitors that track toxic chemicals, including those linked to cancer and other serious health effects. 

For example, the network monitoring vinyl chloride — the carcinogen at the center of the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — shrank by more than half from 2004 to 2025. So did the network for chloroprene and benzene.

Floodlight analyzed the largest industrial sources of air pollution in Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, and West Virginia — where the monitoring legislation was introduced — and compared what each one reported releasing against what public monitors in those states are capable of detecting.

For 71 of the 100 facilities examined, the chemical they release most isn’t measured by any government monitor in the state. 

Hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, methanol — no air monitor currently reporting to the EPA measures those toxic chemicals. 

Nelson Roque, an assistant professor at Penn State, co-authored a 2025 study that found nearly six in 10 U.S. counties have no public air monitor at all.

Such gaps matter most in communities already facing higher risks. Black and low-income people bear a disproportionate share of elevated cancer risks from air toxics, according to the EPA. 

“We’ve realized the value of other infrastructure, and yet not this one,” Roque said. “Last I checked, we all breathe air.”

The shrinking public network has set the stage for another fight: who gets to measure the air, and whose data counts.

Louisiana: A monitoring gap, and the fight to keep it

Public air monitors in Louisiana — a national hub for oil, gas, and petrochemicals — are often located miles from major industrial polluters and fail to test for some of the most dangerous chemicals, a recent Floodlight investigation found. 

Community groups have tried to fill that gap. A $500,000 grant awarded under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act would have allowed the Louisiana Environmental Action Network to establish air monitoring in 27 communities it identified as pollution hot spots.

But the group was able to install monitors in only four communities before the Trump administration canceled the grant last year. 

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“It’s like having your legs knocked out from under you,” said LEAN executive director Marylee Orr.

In 2024, meanwhile, Louisiana became the first state to restrict the use of community air monitoring data. 

The Louisiana Chemistry Association helped draft the Community Air Monitoring Reliability Act (CAMRA), which cites the need for “science-based standards” and bars the use of air pollution data in enforcement or regulatory actions unless it’s captured by EPA-approved monitors. That equipment typically costs tens of thousands of dollars.

In a previous statement to Floodlight, LCA president David Cresson defended the law, saying it ensures “data used to enforce our state’s environmental protection laws complies with minimum U.S. EPA standards” and doesn’t stop residents from monitoring air quality for their own information — only from using unregulated methods for enforcement purposes.

The same period brought other rollbacks, some sought by the chemical industry’s most powerful national lobbying group. The American Chemistry Council — the LCA’s national counterpart — spent more than $22 million lobbying in 2024, ranking 10th among 9,200 organizations tracked by an independent watchdog group. 

The ACC and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers last year requested a blanket two-year exemption from Biden-era regulations meant to cut certain toxic emissions by nearly 80 percent at roughly 200 chemical manufacturing plants. They didn’t get the blanket exemption — but individual plants that applied did.

So far, President Donald Trump’s EPA has granted more than 60 petrochemical facilities exemptions from the rule, and the agency is now weighing whether to rescind it entirely. 

The ACC also successfully lobbied against federal rules that would have required about two dozen chemical plants to conduct fenceline monitoring for ethylene oxide, a carcinogen that contributes substantially to the elevated cancer risk in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley.

The national trade group did not respond to Floodlight’s questions about its lobbying or its involvement in Louisiana’s CAMRA law. Nor did it explain its role in promoting similar legislation in other states. 

But in an emailed statement, the ACC said it has invested in community air-monitoring projects and “publicly advocated for expanded access to credible air quality information.” It said it supports monitoring that produces reliable, transparent data and gives communities and regulators information they can use to make informed decisions.

Kentucky takes a page from Louisiana 

Odors from Rubbertown, an industrial complex that housed tire and synthetic rubber plants during World War II, have long bothered residents in west Louisville, Kentucky. So, in the early 2000s, the city’s Air Pollution Control District, the EPA and others launched a study that confirmed what residents had long known: The air had unacceptably high levels of toxic pollutants. 

A plan was enacted, regulations were revised, and the air was continuously tested. More than 15 years later, regulators announced toxic air contaminants in the Louisville metro area were down by almost 80 percent — with the most dangerous chemicals cut by 96 percent.

Despite the success of expanded air monitoring in Louisville, Kentucky lawmakers have moved in the opposite direction. In March 2025, 10 months after Louisiana’s CAMRA law, they passed House Bill 137, which also restricted how air-monitoring data can be used in enforcement actions. 

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Lloyd “Rusty” Cress, executive director of the Kentucky Chemical Council, told the Kentucky Lantern that the bill was similar to Louisiana’s community air monitoring legislation.  The law says air needs to be tested with “scientifically defensible” methods — echoing a phrase used in an ACC blog post in 2023.

The ACC, the American Petroleum Institute, Dow Chemical and Chemours all lobbied for it.

Jess Loizeaux, a Chemours spokesperson, said the company doesn’t object to community air monitoring. “We object to community air monitoring results being used for enforcement decisions without first verifying the validity and accuracy of the data through official tests performed by trained technicians at the appropriate regulatory authority,” she told Floodlight.

Kentucky’s political push unfolded against a backdrop of major gaps in public air monitoring. Only one of the state’s 25 largest air polluters is close to an air monitoring station that measures the top toxic chemical it emits.

Fewer than a quarter of the state’s counties have an air monitoring station. 

Ohio’s restrictions meet with legal challenge 

Ohio’s new air monitoring rule was tucked into last year’s budget bill with no named sponsor.  It, too, stops regulators from acting on air-monitoring data collected by community groups. 

“When we take away the ability for those folks to have a reasonably priced monitor … for their own protection, we’ve just taken any tool they had right out of their hands,” said Miranda Leppla, an attorney who sued the state over the new rules last year on behalf of environmental groups.

The lawsuit also challenges another provision in the budget bill that instructs state regulators to remove Ohio’s “air nuisance rule,” which allowed citizens to take legal action against companies whose emissions endanger public health.

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One of the plaintiffs, Donna Ballinger, lives in Middletown, Ohio, hundreds of feet from a steel manufacturing plant that frequently rains down black, white, and gray particles onto her house and yard, she said. Fumes sometimes burn her eyes and throat, she said, and she often holds her nose when walking between her house and car. 

“My fear is cancer,” Ballinger told Floodlight.

She has an air monitor mounted in her front yard. But Ohio’s new requirement has made it impossible to use the data such monitors collect “as evidence of the nuisance conditions,” the lawsuit says.

The Ohio Chemistry Technology Council backed the measure. The group did not respond to Floodlight’s requests for an interview.

Tony Long, general counsel for the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, said businesses are concerned that uncalibrated air monitors will spread misinformation.

“Given our litigious nature in this state, we think that the guardrails make sense,” he told Floodlight. “You don’t want to be stopped for speeding on an uncalibrated speed gun.”

With more than 90 public air monitoring stations, Ohio has a more robust air monitoring network than some states. Yet none of Ohio’s 25 largest air polluters are within 20 miles of a public air monitoring station that measures its top toxic emission. In fact, no air monitor in the U.S. measures the chemical that 10 of them release most.

Ohio’s Syensqo Specialty Polymers plant, which makes a resin used in plastics, released more than 130 tons of volatile organic compounds into the air last year, according to Ohio regulators.

The nearest air monitoring station is about 4 miles away — in West Virginia — and doesn’t measure VOCs. 

Industry resistance stalls West Virginia efforts 

West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection runs just 14 monitoring sites in 12 counties. The other 43 counties have no state monitoring stations at all.

None of West Virginia’s 25 largest air polluters has a public air monitor within 25 miles that measures the pollutant it releases most. For 17 of the facilities, no air monitor anywhere in the U.S. measures their top toxic emission.

In 2024, a state bill backed by the West Virginia Manufacturers Association would have barred community air monitoring data from use in regulation, enforcement and lawsuits; it passed the House but died in the Senate — partly because industry couldn’t agree on what to include.

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A compromise version of the 2024 bill, drafted to address the concerns of some lawmakers, would have let regulators use community data if the monitors met manufacturer standards. Industry refused to support it. 

In emailed comments about the compromise bill, West Virginia Manufacturers Association Bill Bissett said it “neuters” the measure and was “now toothless.” Chemours’ Jeff Fritz wrote, “I do not like this draft,” and said the bill “essentially codifies what we are trying to prevent,” according to emails obtained by Mountain State Spotlight. Neither Bissett nor Fritz responded to requests for comment.

Subsequent bills, introduced in 2025 and 2026, also failed.

Why monitoring matters 

Evidence shows that better monitoring can reduce pollution — and potentially save lives. 

In 2018, the EPA made refineries begin monitoring benzene along their fencelines, and within five years, the number of refineries above EPA’s benzene action level dropped by half, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project.

While some states have made it difficult to know what’s in the air, others have been proactive: 

• California is funding equipment and training for residents in fenceline communities to monitor for things like pesticides, hexavalent chromium, and other toxic chemicals. From 2017 to 2025, the state budgeted $1.4 billion to help communities that have historically been overburdened with air pollution.
• Colorado required four industrial plants to install fenceline monitors that measure hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and hydrogen cyanide in real time. The state also bought two mobile vans that regularly sample the same pollutants in surrounding neighborhoods. 
• The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and its contractors operate 33 automated gas chromatographs — sophisticated equipment that collects air samples every hour and provides near real-time readings of volatile organic compounds. 

But in much of the U.S, those who live near industrial plants still have little way to know what they’re breathing.

An unanswered question

Reonda Victor lives in Louisiana’s heavily industrialized corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where flares from industrial plants often illuminate the night sky. 

Her mother, grandmother, and sister all had breast cancer. Concerned about her own risk, she underwent genetic testing, which showed no predisposition to the disease, she said.

The closest public air monitoring station to her home — which lies in an area where air pollution poses one of the highest cancer risks in the country — tests only for lead. 

Did industrial pollution cause the illnesses that struck her family members? She can’t say. But proper air monitoring could help answer that question, she said.

“Without information, we don’t know.”

Kentucky Public Radio contributed to this investigation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline America’s air monitors are disappearing. So is your power to expose polluters. on Sep 13, 2026.

Homeowners in Hispanic and Black communities nationwide are paying a disproportionate share of skyrocketing home insurance costs, according to a recent report. The disparities leave communities of color at greater risk as climate change increases the frequency of billion-dollar disasters.  

The report, released in July by the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit representing nearly 250 consumer groups, concluded that homeowners in predominantly Hispanic ZIP codes pay on average a 30 percent higher premium ($950 more annually) compared with homeowners in white communities. In predominantly Black ZIP codes, homeowners pay, on average, a 16 percent higher premium ($500 more annually).

The findings were based on an analysis of identical policies across communities, eliminating the possibility the inequities were related to differences among homeowners, their homes or what they chose to insure, the report said. Local risk factors could be responsible for some of the disparities, although even when such factors were accounted for the gap remained large.

“We’ve talked a lot about our insurance affordability crisis,” said Sharon Cornelissen, director of housing at the Consumer Federation of America and a co-author of the report. “What we haven’t really talked about is sort of the racially inequitable impacts of that, and that Black and Hispanic homeowners are particularly struggling.”

The inequities add up to at least $28,500 in additional insurance costs over the span of a 30-year mortgage for homeowners in Hispanic communities and $15,000 for homeowners in Black communities, according to the report. The situation points to a legacy of redlining in home insurance that continues to challenge communities of color when it comes to homeownership and exposure to risk, although the discrimination today may be inadvertent.

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The historical practice of redlining involved the designation of certain neighborhoods as “hazardous” for mortgage lending, based largely on the race of residents. People in these neighborhoods were denied home loans, leading to lower home values and less homeownership. Although redlining ended in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act, the practice has left a legacy of segregation and disparities in these neighborhoods that endures today when it comes to health care, education, incarceration, access to nutritious food and public investment in infrastructure. The inequities also have left these communities more vulnerable to climate impacts such as heat. 

Mark Friedlander, spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, said premiums are based on risk and not race or ethnicity and that the system used to establish premiums is actuarially grounded and heavily regulated.

“Using race, or any proxy for race, to set insurance rates is illegal in every U.S. jurisdiction, and state insurance regulators review and approve the rating factors insurers use precisely to guard against that,” he said in a statement provided to Inside Climate News. “Many of the communities cited in reports like this are located in areas with objectively higher catastrophe exposure or higher costs to rebuild and repair after a loss.”

The report found the most acute home insurance disparity among homeowners in predominantly Hispanic ZIP codes in Florida, where they pay on average 58 percent more ($5,014 annually) for the same coverage as those in white communities. In the next four states, the gap was pronounced, but smaller: 20 percent ($431) in New York, 18 percent ($278) in Washington, 16 percent ($244) in Massachusetts and 15 percent ($633) in Kansas.

The inequities in Florida, where homeowners have been particularly hard-hit by insurance costs, represent “an enormous amount of money,” said Moira Birss, senior fellow at the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank. “And so when we’re thinking about how we’re having an affordability crisis in this country … that’s unconscionable.”

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When it comes to predominantly Black ZIP codes, the inequities are greatest in Michigan at 74 percent ($1,768 annually), followed by Pennsylvania at 57 percent ($1,048), New Jersey at 22 percent ($332), Massachusetts at 20 percent ($321) and New York at 19 percent ($417).

Meanwhile, the cost of insurance for the typical homeowner jumped by 24 percent between 2021 and 2024, according to the report, based on previous research by the Consumer Federation of America. Greenhouse gas emissions, primarily those associated with fossil fuels, are heating the global climate, shifting weather patterns and leading to more extreme disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires. That risk is moving insurance companies to raise rates.

Insurance companies have provided fewer and more expensive options in communities of color compared with white communities, the report said. It highlighted a $17.5 million settlement from the 1990s over a lawsuit alleging the insurance company Nationwide discouraged agents from selling coverage in Black neighborhoods, labeled Black ZIP codes as undesirable and used racial profiling to deny insurance to Black homeowners. American Family Mutual Insurance Company similarly agreed to pay more than $16 million in a settlement to Black homeowners who were provided inferior policies and, in some cases, denied coverage based on race.

More recently insurers have adopted new proprietary methods for determining premiums and claims payments, including some incorporating artificial intelligence, that raise concerns about possible discrimination, according to the report. For instance, previous research by the Consumer Federation of America found that homeowners with lower credit scores pay an average penalty of $1,996 annually, or 99 percent more, for insurance, a concern considering longstanding structural factors that have meant communities of color tend to have lower credit scores.

“I’m not saying that they have some secret race factor that they put into their model,” Cornelissen said. “A lot of this bias can kind of creep in if they’re not paying attention to potential unequal impacts. A lot of this could be through AI models or other factors that have a disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic communities.”

Friedlander said the best way to make insurance more affordable and equitable is by reducing risk through resilience efforts such as strengthening building codes and increasing mitigation funding. 

The report called on states to enforce fair housing laws and demand more transparency and accountability.

“Unless the insurance industry wants to give us more information about why this is happening,” Birss said, “it’s pretty hard not to interpret this as pretty serious racial discrimination.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As extreme weather worsens, Black and Hispanic homeowners are paying more for insurance on Sep 12, 2026.

The Department of Energy overstepped when it ordered an aging coal-fired power plant in Michigan to stay open past its planned retirement date last year, a federal court ruled on Friday. 

The J.H Campbell plant is one of seven fossil fuel plants around the country that the Trump administration has forced to stay in operation, despite the pollution they cause and the enormous costs of keeping them online. Just before it was about to close last May, Trump’s Energy Department invoked short-term emergency powers under the Federal Power Act to keep the 64-year-old plant running, arguing that the threat of outages, along with the need for more energy to power data centers, constituted an emergency. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected that argument, with Appeals Court Judge Cornelia Pillard writing that the emergency statute “is essentially a narrow, last-resort backstop.”

When he declared a “national energy emergency” on his first day in office in 2025, President Donald Trump instructed federal agencies to use whatever emergency powers they had to increase energy production — specifically for fossil fuels. This ruling represents one of the first successful legal challenges to how the administration has used its “energy emergency” powers.

It doesn’t overturn the idea that there is an energy emergency, said Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. Clean Energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, one group involved in the lawsuit. But it does limit its practical implications. 

“You can say there’s an ‘energy emergency’ as much as you want — even if you’re the president,” Kelly said. “But what you can actually do depends on what the real facts on the ground are and what the law actually lets you do in different situations.”

Of all of the coal plants that the Trump administration has forced to stay open, the Michigan plant has emitted the most pollution, according to Kelly. Since it was forced to stay open, it has emitted 1,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, and 140 tons of particulate matter as of the end of June. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that mix of pollutants could contribute to about 100 new cases of asthma for the 3,000 people that live near the plant in West Olive, Michigan. Its continued operation since May last year has cost $259 million, which the utility, Consumers Energy Company, is seeking to recover from its customers in Michigan and 10 other states.

The court order doesn’t mean that the plant has to shut down immediately. Kelly hopes that the Trump administration voluntarily backs down, or if that doesn’t happen, that the court could force a shutdown. But the administration could challenge the ruling, delaying action by asking for a re-hearing or for a review by the Supreme Court, said Gavin McCabe, senior litigating counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council, another environmental group involved in the lawsuit. 

Either way, the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling sets a precedent that there has to be a true emergency to keep these plants open. Several lawsuits against the other fossil fuel plants have been on hold as courts waited to see how the federal court ruled on the case, and the legal arguments there are pretty similar, Kelly said. 

It’s hard to square the idea of an “energy emergency” with the Trump administration’s actions against renewable energy: By mid-August, the administration had committed about $4 billion in payouts to companies to stop offshore wind projects that could have, altogether, powered more than 15 million homes.

“Why would the administration be blocking sources of energy that are ready to come online in favor of keeping online something that has been set to be retired?” McCabe said. “I mean, there appears to be a pretext that the president wants to help coal industry supporters. And this is one of the ways to attempt to do that.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A federal judge just told Trump there’s no ’emergency’ to justify keeping a Michigan coal plant open on Sep 11, 2026.

On Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, a small band of activists marched past the gates of a sprawling plant nursery in Leicester, North Carolina, outside of Asheville. The sun beat down on rows of steamy greenhouses where workers moved through aisles of houseplants ready for sale. The activists were on their way to deliver a petition to Costa Farms, the world’s largest grower of indoor houseplants. 

Oscar Rozo, an Episcopal clergy member who works with Spanish-speaking immigrants in Western North Carolina, was among the leaders of the group. Their petition calls on Costa Farms to ensure that plant nursery workers have sufficient protections from extreme heat, including access to water, shade, and paid breaks. “We’re part of the community,” Rozo said to the Costa Farms managers present. “The nursery industry has been part of Asheville’s economy.”

As the activists lined the hallways, workers in the plant nursery looked up curiously, but kept their distance.  

Rozo and the other activists were taking part in a multi-state action organized by WeCount, a worker-led labor and human rights group, targeting the five cities in the U.S. where Costa Farms operates nurseries. “We consider this a very historic day of action,” said Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount, who earlier that day helped deliver a petition to a different Costa Farms nursery in Apotheke, Florida. “And we know this is only the beginning.”

Since 2021, WeCount has been advocating on behalf of outdoor workers who lack meaningful protections from extreme heat. Based in South Florida, WeCount previously campaigned for a municipal heat standard in Miami-Dade County, where deaths from heat exposure are estimated to spike by 600 during extremely hot periods. But those efforts were cut short in 2024, when industry groups complained and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passed a law preempting local governments from enacting their own heat standards. (DeSantis said such regulations could cause “a lot of problems.”)

Planting Justice, WeCount’s new campaign to protect outdoor workers across the South, aims to bring corporations like Costa Farms to the table and create consumer awareness around where their plants come from — and the human cost of growing them. 

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This model of mobilizing for stronger workplace protections is known as worker-driven social responsibility. WeCount’s campaign is heavily inspired by the Fair Food Program, which farmworkers have successfully used for years to boost their labor conditions and is considered the highest standard of labor protections for farmworkers in the U.S. The Fair Food Program, launched in 2011 by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, has proven effective as a framework for workers to continually surface and address their needs. For example, while access to drinking water is one of the core tenets of the program, this year, workers won the right to electrolyte beverages or supplements year round.

“We know that every year this crisis is getting worse,” said Londoño, referring to how summer temperatures climb year to year, driven by human-caused climate change. “But increasingly, legislative avenues are more and more limited.”

Heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather. In the U.S., official counts of deaths from extreme heat exposure vastly underreport the scope of the problem, as a two-year investigation by Boston University and NPR recently demonstrated. For years, labor advocates and community groups have pushed for the creation of a federal heat standard — a set of guidelines that would apply to employers across the country designed to reduce workers’ risk of heat illness. While the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — or OSHA,  the nation’s workplace regulator — seemed to be making progress toward such a rule under the Biden administration, those efforts have since stalled out. Meanwhile, agricultural workers, a category that includes plant nursery workers who handle the greenery directly, are excluded from federal collective bargaining protections under the National Labor Relations Act. And yet, agricultural workers are also more than 35 times more likely to die from heat-related complaints than workers in other industries.

Katie Myers / Grist

In a statement, Costa Farms told Grist it has received multiple awards for the quality of its workplace protections. “We have a full-time, on-site nurse with a functional medical clinic and our robust heat protection policy is aligned with the proposed OSHA heat safety rules,” said Ariana Cabrera de Oña, the company’s senior vice president, general counsel, and head of human resources. After Hurricane Helene struck North Carolina, Costa Farms rolled out a policy of holding daily five-minute meetings for workers and supervisors to discuss potential health and safety risks, including extreme weather forecasts. When certain wet bulb temperatures are reached, workers are also provided with “increased break frequency [and] additional hydration stations,” according to the company.

The goal of the Planting Justice campaign is for Costa Farms to sign onto a code of conduct developed by workers. The agreement outlines relatively straightforward demands: educating workers and supervisors on the signs of heat illness; providing access to shade, water, and rest breaks; and creating systems for monitoring and responding to heat stress. 

Organizers believe the agreement would help directly address issues that workers themselves see on the job. For example, while Costa Farms reports that the company provides access to hydration stations on very hot days, workers have reported water with a strong chemical smell, as well as seeing mold in water coolers, said Londoño. 

Alejandro Gonzalez, a Costa Farms nursery worker originally from Guatemala, told a Florida rally that the summer days have topped 110 degrees Fahrenheit on occasion. “They don’t give us cold or clean water,” Gonzalez said emphatically, in Spanish. “They don’t provide any breaks or shade.”

Eighty-six percent of Costa Farms workers who responded to a survey by WeCount reported dangerous incidents on the job, stemming from heat illness, pesticide exposure, and workplace accidents. Over two-thirds reported being entirely denied breaks and days off. The visa conditions of many houseplant workers – dependent on H2-A or other visas, or entirely undocumented – leave them with few rights to recourse, often entirely dependent on their employers for housing, and unable to rely on much of federal labor law for support should they speak out.

WeCount sees Tuesday’s action as just a start. The group is also calling on major retailers – like Home Depot and IKEA, that buy plants from Costa Farms – to only work with growers who agree to this code of conduct. 

Soon after they walked into the Leicester office, Costa Farms’ management asked Rozo and the other activists to leave the premises. They delivered the petition and walked out.

Correction: This story previously misstated the year the Fair Food Program launched.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline America’s houseplants come at a steep price for greenhouse workers on Sep 11, 2026.

States that voted for Trump are leading the country in solar adoption. In recent years, Republican opposition to solar has mounted, with the Trump administration making it more difficult to build solar on federal land and Congress scaling back federal tax credits for the industry. But a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association has found that states that voted for Donald Trump in the last presidential election counted for eight of the top 10 solar-building states in the country in the first half of the year. 

“At least at the macro level, Republican-led and governed states are not only open to but embracing solar energy as a technology,” said Tim Pawlenty, CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association and a former Republican governor of Minnesota. 

Altogether, solar construction in Trump-supporting states has buoyed an ongoing explosion in national solar deployment. The country added more than 11 gigawatts of solar power in the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 45 percent compared to the same period in 2025. States that supported Trump in the last election made up close to three-fourths of that growth.

Texas and Florida, the two largest Trump-supporting states by population, were ranked first and third, respectively. Those Sun Belt states have been consistent leaders in solar construction, as have Indiana, Ohio, and Arizona, which have also remained in the top 10 solar-building states since 2024. Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan, and Utah also reached the top 10 in some, but not all, of those years.

Those red states are fostering solar development through their general pro-business attitude and booming electricity-hungry industries, even if they don’t support solar for climate-related reasons. Republican-leaning states tend to have more available land and easier permitting processes for energy projects, Pawlenty said. That attractive business environment has also drawn electricity-consuming industries, like manufacturing and data centers, to red states, producing demand for quickly constructed, cheap energy sources like solar.

“Red states, as a general proposition, have sort of a pro-build mentality. They want to build things,” Pawlenty said.

But the future for solar in red states is more complicated. After Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, energy companies investing in solar projects and homeowners buying solar for their rooftops received tax credits for their investments. But last year, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and brought an early end to the credits. Credits expired for most uninitiated solar farms on July 4, 2026. As a result, solar developers rushed to start construction before the deadline, helping create a bump in solar installations in the second quarter of 2026. The lack of tax credits could make solar growth less certain in the future, especially for rooftop solar projects, which have already begun declining in 2026, the solar industry report notes.

The nature of this uncertainty is not the same for all solar-investing, Trump-voting states. While Texas has remained a titan in solar development, earning the top spot in 2024, 2025, and the first half of 2026, other states are just beginning their solar booms. Michigan, a politically mixed state where a majority of voters chose Trump in 2024, reached the top 10 for the first time this year. The state has climbed steadily from 23rd place in 2024 to fourth in the first half of 2026. 

Whether Michigan, which lacks Texas’ year-round strong sunlight, can maintain that solar energy growth after the end of federal tax credits is another question, said Michael Craig, an associate professor in the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. Solar farms may remain economically feasible to build without the credits only in areas with the right weather. 

“The economics of solar largely depends on your solar resource,” said Craig. ”The better the resource, I’d say the less important the tax credits are.” 

Without federal tax credits, Michigan’s solar industry will likely fall back on state clean energy goals, which create demand for solar by mandating that utilities build renewable power sources. Though Michigan voted for Trump in 2024, the state has a Democratic governor and Democrat-led state Senate. The state established a law that utilities must generate 50 percent of their power from renewables by 2030. That requirement, in combination with data center electricity demand, is likely a large factor in the state’s rapid solar rise, Craig said. 

Nonetheless, some strategists have argued the solar industry needs tax credits less than it needs an easier federal permitting process and continued power demand to support growth. Even if Congress never reinstates the tax credits, those structural factors could push the industry forward, especially because solar requires relatively little time to build compared to other power sources. Regardless of cost, tax credits, or even geography, that speed still counts for something, said Rachel Skaar, communications director for Solar Energy Industries Association.

“Solar and storage can deploy so much faster than other technologies,” Skaar said. “So when we talk about the need for energy right now, solar and storage can provide it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline More than 70% of new solar is being built in states that voted for Trump on Sep 10, 2026.

Diesel prices hit an all-time high on Friday. Then another, and another. 

According to AAA, the average price of diesel as of September 10 stands at a staggering $5.98 — about $2.31 more than in late February, when the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran. The jump has been even higher in some states, such as California, where a gallon of diesel currently costs $7.91. 

Most Americans don’t buy diesel fuel, but they pay for it. It powers the trucks and ships that move everything from milk to lumber, and the costs are embedded in the prices people see at stores. The last time consumers saw diesel prices climb to such heights was in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and they hit $5.82 per gallon. 

This year, the Iran war has largely closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which 10 percent of seaborne diesel once traveled. This has sent prices soaring, and consumers are increasingly feeling the impact. 

“Early on, much of the cost increase gets absorbed along the supply chain through existing freight contracts and retailer margins,” David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, told the Associated Press. “But as contracts reprice and fuel surcharges take hold, more of that cost makes its way to the grocery store.” 

All told, the rising price of diesel has cost U.S. consumers an additional $46 billion, or about $350 per household, according to a Brown University tracker. That’s slightly less than the impact of rising gasoline prices — at $55 billion — but the 61 percent jump in diesel prices has outpaced the 41 percent increase in gas. 

“Diesel right now is caught up in more of a geopolitical turmoil than gasoline,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy, an app that lets consumers track fuel prices. In addition to the Iran war, Ukraine’s increasingly successful attacks on Russian oil refineries have also applied upward pressure. 

“Russia is no longer supplying the global market,” said De Haan, and U.S. refineries are already at full capacity, giving them little ability to pick up the slack. Domestic inventories are at their lowest level since 1982, according ​to data from the Energy Information Administration.

“We’re entering a key period for diesel consumption with the lowest inventories on record for early September,” David Russell told Reuters. He’s the global head of market strategy at the brokerage service TradeStation. “Farmers and truckers typically use more diesel in the ​autumn, which raises the stakes for the current crisis and increases the risk of sharper price increases.” 

Winter is likely to bring more problems. Because heating oil is also essentially diesel, the millions of U.S. households that still rely on it can expect unprecedented bills. This comes as President Donald J. Trump’s administration has threatened to eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps households afford their fuel bills. 

“If you’re in the Northeast, then this is much more burdensome than anywhere else in the country,” Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, told Axios. “Families are getting hit by both gasoline and heating oil.” 

These surging costs are hitting consumers just before the midterm elections, when the economy is at the front of voters’ minds. Normally, fuel prices are a somewhat downstream factor in the voting calculus, but Kevin Book, head of research at energy consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners, told Axios that this year could be different. “In cold weather states — particularly those that rely on fuels other than natural gas,” he said. “It could be a very big deal.”

Even if the wars in Iran and Ukraine were to end tomorrow, it would take weeks or months for fuel prices to come down and diesel supply to recover. 

“After both of those are solved, then once the flow normalizes, that will start to help global inventories recover,” said De Haan. “Only after inventories have recovered do diesel prices really see a full decline.”

This post has been updated to reflect the current price of diesel fuel as of September 10.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What the record-high cost of diesel means for you on Sep 10, 2026.

For years, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has been working to make the state a welcoming home for clean energy manufacturing — EVs, solar panels, batteries for storage. The state went all out with tax breaks and a worker training program to attract EV and battery makers — and for a while it was working. 

Georgia-based bus manufacturer Blue Bird started selling electric buses commercially in 2018 and built an expanded factory for electric buses in 2023. In 2022, Hyundai built a plant near Savannah that it said would be dedicated to making EVs. In 2024, Kia started making EVs at its West Point plant. And in 2025, Rivian broke ground on its manufacturing plant near Atlanta. The Hyundai and Rivian operations are two of the biggest economic development projects in Georgia history. The state has also worked to attract other parts of the EV and clean energy manufacturing sector, including battery makers and recyclers and solar panel companies.

Under the second Trump administration, the economic outlook for these companies has been destabilized. In addition to ending federal EV tax credits, the Trump administration has imposed tariffs on battery packs, charger hardware, and other components; loosened rules around emissions from gas-powered cars; and ended the Biden administration’s push to make government vehicle fleets electric. And a year ago, federal immigration agents raided an electric vehicle battery plant and arrested more than 400 people, most of them South Korean workers there to help get the new factory off the ground.

The past year and a half has been a grim moment for what was a booming industry in Georgia. But the EV makers are still forging ahead, even if that means making some adjustments.

At Kia’s plant in West Point, a long and constantly varied line of vehicles moves steadily forward on the assembly line, step by step gaining all the trimmings that turn metal shells into driveable cars. But this plant functions more like a short-order cook than a traditional assembly line. Instead of producing big, uniform batches, Kia has designed the plant to manufacture cars according to unique specifications — each one a different model, color, trim, or even drive train — that is, gas-powered, hybrid, or electric. Kia says it has done this to make more of the cars people most want to buy at any given moment. Right now, that means hybrids.

“What we’ve seen is a transition back away from maybe full EV vehicle building to this kind of a middle-of-the-road opportunity,” said factory CEO Stuart Countess.

Electric cars are still the future, he said. But for several reasons, including price and charging access, consumers just aren’t there yet. Changes to federal policy are a major factor, too.

“We had a tax incentive credit that did go away,” Countess said. “Sales were really moving in the right direction, but once it went away, it became a much different environment.”

Just as Kia has ramped up hybrid production, its sister company Hyundai has added hybrid production to the lineup produced at its massive plant near Savannah, which was originally built to make EVs. 

“It’s kind of a messy period we’re in right now,” said Stephanie Valdez-Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. “But I think the manufacturers are adjusting.”

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At the same time, battery makers throughout the state have started shifting to producing storage batteries for electricity in addition to ones made to power vehicles.

“The state continues to have a lot riding on the success of both the electric vehicle but also the battery market,” said Stan Cross of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, or SACE. 

Georgia leads the region in EV and battery manufacturing, but the growth has stumbled, with layoffs at SK Battery earlier this year. More than $4 billion in investment has been canceled or scaled back in the last year across the Southeast, according to SACE. 

That’s dwarfed, though, by the nearly $74 billion in manufacturing investment that’s moving ahead. Still, one open question, Cross said, is whether Georgians will buy the hybrids and EVs being made in the state.

Despite actively pursuing EV manufacturing, Georgia doesn’t have incentives to encourage EV adoption like some other states. In fact, there’s an extra registration fee designed to make up for lost gas taxes. And the thorny politics may extend beyond state policy and the now-ended federal incentives. “When it comes to electric vehicles, Georgia politics remains utterly confused,” Cross said.

Private investment continues, though. Kia and Hyundai are part of a charging consortium called IONNA that has installed several charging stations around the state, including one at the Kia factory site in West Point. Electric utilities are investing more in vehicle charging too. Across the region, EV-related investment by utilities increased by 14 percent this year, according to SACE.

“Though we’re not seeing a lot of activity on the legislative side, we do see potential on the regulatory side and really are encouraging Georgia Power to step up and help kind of fill the void that policymakers in the state are creating,” Cross said.

Valdez-Streaty believes that, over time, making EVs in Georgia will likely lead to more people in Georgia buying them.

“It’s like that familiarity, right?” she said. “People have jobs at those companies and familiarity with those products.”

Though shaky for the last 18 months or so, she said the EV market is starting to stabilize — and the auto industry is still going electric, it’s just taking a little longer.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Georgia bet big on EV manufacturing. Trump pulled the plug. on Sep 9, 2026.

Wendell Berry made his choices and stuck to them. He did not have a computer or a smartphone. He wrote more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, mostly with a pencil and paper, from his farmhouse in Henry County, Kentucky. By the time of his passing last week, the 92-year-old had lived many lives — as a farmer, teacher, philosopher, environmental activist — and inspired several generations of writers, farmers, and advocates in turn. From these varying perspectives, Berry grappled with humanity and the natural world. 

His answer to the fundamental question of how to live right was to start small — to revere the Earth’s endless beauty, and to work a little, each day, to reverse the harm we’ve caused. 

“There is no public crisis that is not also private,” Berry wrote in his essay “Think Little.” Written in 1972 as the environmental movement emerged, the piece marked a conflict of Berry’s: Despite strong environmental convictions, he sometimes despaired of the movement’s focus on bending the ear of politicians, without individuals healing the rupture between modern life and the land. “The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living,” Berry wrote. 

He extolled this approach in one of his most well-known poems, “Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front”: “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant.”

The language of activism was often at odds with Berry’s worldview. It seemed to warn of a coming apocalypse, but to Berry, the world had no end and no beginning. To move in nature’s time meant to think in cycles of death and rebirth, not a straight line leading toward destruction or salvation. 

That didn’t stop Berry from engaging with activism even when it frustrated him, said Jeffrey Bilbro, an English professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, who’s written several books on Berry. 

Berry was arrested in 1979 for protesting a nuclear plant in Indiana. In 2011, he was arrested again during a sit-in inside Kentucky state government offices while protesting mountaintop removal coal mining. He remained active in the fight against coal throughout the 2010s, helping to block the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C., and pulling his papers from the University of Kentucky after the school accepted a $7 million donation from Alliance Coal.

After Berry wrote his essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer” in 1987, some called him a Luddite. As a Grist article in 2014 pointed out, he was, in perhaps the truest sense, taking after that early 19th century movement, when textile workers at the advent of industrialization destroyed machinery to protect the dignity of their work. Berry refused, as much as he could, to let technology alienate him from his work. For this, he was sometimes criticized or called a curmudgeon.

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His views didn’t fit neatly into modern politics. He believed that marriage and family strengthened community ties, but didn’t believe the government had authority to legislate such things. The law of nature, he said in one essay, was universal kinship and kindness, and Biblical stories and Psalms supported that. Berry was religious, but didn’t always like church, calling himself, according to Bilbro, a “bad weather church-goer” because he preferred to spend nice Sunday mornings walking in the woods. He hated dualisms — between humanity and the natural world, between body and soul, between person who believes x and person who believes y. This lent him broad appeal across the political and class spectrum, especially to those who felt that capitalism and industry had moved humanity away from a more honest way of life, whether through agriculture or other means.

“For an uncompromising person or a person of convictions, I think he recognized the need in a fallen world,” Bilbro said. “Our hands are all dirty, and we’re making these compromises, and it’s better to be honest about the necessity to do so and try to do what we can to live right, even if we can’t attain the purity that we might wish.”

The environmental crisis, according to Berry, takes hold in our lives and evinces itself as a sort of social decay. But living isn’t an unforgivable sin in itself, if we can only leave things better than we found them, knowing that the strip-mined mountaintop where we plant spruce, aspen, and wildflowers might not become a lush forest again until long after we’re gone.

In the poem, “A Discipline,” Berry imagines apocalypse: “it approaches / on every side, there is no other place / to turn.” 

And yet, the poem continues, nothing ever really goes away: “It is the time’s discipline to think / of the death of all living, and yet live.”

Only the hard work of tending the land and learning its rhythms again can heal it, he believed. In coming into relationship with the smallest handful of earth, you can understand what it means to fight for change almost too enormous to fathom. To Berry, by tending a sprouted seedling in the ground, you can recognize you are it, and it is you.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wendell Berry’s life on Earth on Sep 9, 2026.

On August 26, the side of a mountain near the border between Nepal and Tibet collapsed. Seven billion cubic feet of glacial ice and rock, enough to fill 100 football stadiums, crashed roughly a mile straight down into the river below. The impact created a muddy wall of water that swept through the valley as fast as 100 miles per hour, destroying villages dozens of miles downstream and killing more than 1,300 people. Thousands more remain missing. 

The scale of the disaster is extraordinary, even for a region accustomed to deadly floods and landslides. It will take months for scientists to confirm exactly what happened. But, they warn, one thing is already clear: As climate change melts icy landscapes worldwide, tragedies like this are more likely to happen. They are also incredibly hard to predict.

“Glacial loss destabilizes slopes in many far-reaching ways that are often unpredictable and catastrophic,” said Mark Carey, a professor of environmental studies and geography at the University of Oregon who leads a lab that studies glaciers. Proactive research and monitoring have saved lives in some parts of the world, Carey said, but in a place like the Himalayas, where thousands of glaciers are spread over vast areas, “it’s impossible to predict everything and establish early warning systems everywhere.”

The world’s glaciers have shrunk by about one-fifth in the last century and are expected to lose at least another quarter of their mass by 2100. Each fraction of a degree of warming makes them vanish faster, with hundreds of billions of tons of ice lost each year.

The downstream effects of this disappearing ice are complex and varied. Glaciers often buttress the sides of mountains and, as they retreat, newly exposed silt and rock can become unstable. The soil itself is also often glued together by a frozen layer known as permafrost, which helps lock slopes into place, but thaws when temperatures become too warm. Glacial meltwater can eat into the cracks in the bedrock, weakening it over time. All of these processes can result in sudden avalanches or rock slides — like one that caused a 1,500 foot tsunami in Alaska last summer, or possibly like the collapsed mountain slope in Nepal.

It’s also common for retreating glaciers to leave behind ridges of dirt and rock, known as moraines, that trap meltwater and rain. These natural dams can release enormous amounts of water if they break. 

Glaciers themselves can behave as dams, too. In Juneau, Alaska, glacial meltwater has triggered flooding every year since 2011. Just north of the city, a glacier-dammed valley, known as Suicide Basin, fills with meltwater and rain throughout the year. When it becomes too full, the ice holding back the water lifts up, releasing billions of gallons at once. But while the yearly flood causes plenty of property damage, it has never killed anybody. That’s because it’s carefully monitored, said Eran Hood, a hydrologist and professor of environmental science at the University of Alaska who studies the basin.

“Every single cell phone in Juneau goes off when the lake starts to drain,” he said. “We have a lake in a known location, we have cameras all over it, we have a laser measuring the elevation of the water, and we have the ability to make drone maps every few weeks to update our estimates of the volume of water in the lake.”

Close monitoring and engineering has successfully prevented disaster in Peru as well. The country has spent decades draining dozens of high-risk glacial lakes across the Andes, “no doubt saving tens of thousands of lives,” said Carey, who wrote a book, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers, about these measures. And last year, Swiss authorities were able to evacuate 300 residents from the Alpine village of Blatten just days before a glacier collapsed and engulfed it in an avalanche. 

But success stories like these stand in stark contrast to what happened in Nepal, Hood said. While early-warning systems in the Himalayas monitor water levels in some high risk rivers and lakes, there is no regional system capable of continuously watching for the kind of sudden rock-and-ice collapse that triggered the disaster. Doing so would require intensive research and surveillance across a vast, remote, and difficult-to-access landscape where resources are limited.

“There’s really no effective way to monitor all these glaciers,” Hood said. “When you’re dealing with something that releases immediately and moves downslope so quickly, how can you find a way to provide people with any warning?” 

The village of Blatten, Switzerland, in May 2025 after a glacier collapse.
Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images

Emerging or repurposed technology may be able to help fill some of these gaps, said Dan McGrath, a glaciologist and associate professor at Colorado State University. 

In places like Mexico City, seismic early-warning systems have sometimes given residents more than a minute to prepare before strong earthquake shaking arrives. Scientists are now wondering whether these same networks could be used to detect landslides and floods caused by glaciers. The glacial-break in Nepal caused readings equivalent to a 5.2 magnitude earthquake that traveled as far as Alaska, leading authorities to initially assume a seismic event had caused the disaster. There, too, just a few minutes of warning was shown to make all the difference. After warnings of the flood reached a school downstream, the principal was able to evacuate 900 students to safety before the torrent submerged it. 

Researchers have also recently experimented with laying fiber-optic cables across a glacier in Switzerland to detect “icequakes,” or tiny fractures in the ice that generate seismic vibrations and could provide clues about changes in a glacier’s stability.

A new satellite, recently launched jointly by the United States’ and India’s space agencies, also holds promise. Known as NISAR, it was designed to detect subtle changes in Earth’s surface, like shifting glaciers, and can capture detailed information about ice and snow cover while seeing through cloud cover in ways that previous satellite sensors were not capable of. Recent analysis of the satellite’s data showed that it had recorded slumping on the mountain slope in Nepal several weeks before it collapsed. 

But still, there’s no silver bullet, McGrath said. “Many of these mountain ranges are at a tipping point,” he said. “Freezing, or not freezing, is binary. And as temperatures warm above that and permafrost thaws, that is undoubtedly going to lead to an increase in disasters like this.”

Matt Simon contributed reporting to this article.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why it’s so hard to predict a tragedy like Nepal’s glacier collapse on Sep 8, 2026.

This summer was more than uncomfortably hot — it was record-breaking, with many countries reporting their highest average temperatures yet. Western Europe, for example, sweated through five grueling heat waves this year that sucked moisture from the soil, turned vegetation into wildfire fuel, and shrank rivers until the fish ran out of water. Emergency rooms and ambulances were overwhelmed. Early estimates found that at least 35,000 excess deaths were recorded as temperatures soared — and that only accounts for the first four heat waves in about half of the continent.

But all this, the World Health Organization said, was just a “dress rehearsal.” The coming summers are bound to be even hotter. 

Two factors in particular could push global temperatures even higher in the coming years: El Niño and human-caused climate change. El Niño is a climate pattern that brings extra warmth around the globe every two to seven years. We’re in the early stages of the current cycle, which is on track to be the strongest in a millennium. 

And then there’s the problem of Earth’s atmosphere increasingly filling with heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Addressing climate change requires countries to drastically move away from burning fossil fuels and invest in alternative technologies, such as solar and wind power. In 2015, nearly every nation in the world entered a voluntary commitment to try to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, with a more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). But a new United Nations report released last week found that we are certain to overshoot the latter goal within the next few years. This means that even more severe heat, drought, fire, sea level rise, and glacier loss is headed our way. 

As the effects of climate change and El Niño converge, scientists predict 2027 is very likely to be the hottest year ever recorded.

“There really is nowhere that is terribly well adapted to these very extreme events,” said Kristie Ebi, a lead author of the U.N. report and professor of global health at the University of Washington. Poor countries are the most vulnerable to climate change, but even wealthy countries are failing to adapt fast enough, the U.N. report found.

Some countries have found ways to reduce suffering and death from heat, even as the climate has warmed. After a 2003 heat wave claimed 70,000 lives across Europe, countries took steps to protect people, instituting early warning systems, establishing cooling centers, and helping hospitals prepare. France made an aggressive national plan that mandated air-conditioned rooms in nursing homes, instructed health workers to check in on older and frail people during extreme heat, and developed green spaces in cities to help cool them down. 

The Paris Fire Brigade displays a heatstroke kit to Minister Laurent Nunez and the press in Paris, France, on June 28, 2026, as part of measures to protect the population against the heat wave.
Daniel Perron / Hans Lucas via AFP via Getty Images

“A given heat wave is now actually much less deadly in France than it was before,” said Christopher Callahan, a climate scientist who studies heat, health, and economics at Indiana University. Still, the world is already at 1.4 degrees C of warming and counting, and scientists expect that at some point, “the heat waves will become so intense that they will sort of outstrip that adaptation progress,” he said. If countries continue to adapt to heat at the rate they have in recent decades, it would only prevent about 1 in 10 deaths that would be expected, according to one of his studies.

Ebi said that health officials have failed to keep up with the pace of change, such as more heat waves occurring outside of the traditional mid-May to mid-September season, and have overlooked extreme scenarios such as the record-breaking heat waves seen in Western Europe this summer. “The temperatures were just so high, much higher than the heat wave early warning systems were designed to manage,” Ebi said. 

The fact that the world is struggling to adapt to the amount of warming that’s already arrived is a troubling sign. Studies in recent years have suggested that the threshold at which heat becomes hazardous for the human body is lower than previously thought, with the danger zone starting with temperatures as low as 26 degrees C (79 F) when combined with high humidity. In addition to causing heat stroke, increased temperatures can put lethal amounts of stress on organs such as the heart, lungs, and kidneys.

“When 1.5 was decided, there was an assumption that 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial [temperatures] would be relatively safe,” Ebi said. “And I would say, today, that Europe does not think 1.4 degrees is relatively safe. For most of the U.S., it does not feel like 1.4 is relatively safe.”

A heat wave pushes temperatures in Granada, Spain, past 40 degrees C on July 7, 2026.
Alex Camara / Anadolu via Getty Images

So what will it mean for the world to overshoot its climate goals? The U.N. report warns that there “are no good outcomes above 1.5 degrees C” and the updated best-case scenario for global temperatures ends up peaking at 1.8 C. It lays out potential paths to slowly bring average temperatures back down to safer levels after that peak, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean a return to present-day conditions. At that point, it may be impossible for dead coral reefs to thrive again, or for all the melted ice to be refrozen. But it could still help with extreme heat.

To prepare for hotter conditions, Ebi said it’s important to “stress test” possible disaster scenarios, just as banks and militaries conjure worst-case scenarios to see how they’d play out and better prepare for them. Otherwise, communities will be forced to discover the devastating effects of extreme heat in real time, such as when Portland, Oregon, was struck with 116-degree F temperatures during the heat dome in June 2021. Under those unprecedented conditions, roads buckled, bridges warped, the power cables on the streetcar melted, and the light rail’s overhead copper wires expanded and sagged.

“There are a million different ways in which we can imagine making our society resilient to this kind of threat,” Callahan said, “and we just aren’t there yet.” 

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

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world is adapting to extreme heat — but not nearly fast enough on Sep 8, 2026.

Dan Dallas had defended these communities before. The little towns on the Karuk tribal land are nestled in a gorge along the Klamath River, amidst a million-acre wilderness of Northern California conifer and hardwood that makes up the Six Rivers National Forest. This time, August 2023, a fusillade of lightning strikes had ignited the web of steep canyons south of the town of Orleans in two dozen places, and as the fires expanded, they merged.

As an incident commander for the U.S. Forest Service, Dallas wasn’t called up until fires got big. On the drive from Colorado, he considered the recent experiences that had begun to trouble him.

“I’d been to multiple places, two, even three, sometimes four times,” he remembered in a recent interview. On each fire, he’d followed the Forest Service playbook. Keep the fire small. Contain it quickly. Box it in by throwing hardware at it, bulldozing the ridgetops, and dropping fire retardant slurry or water from planes and helicopters. Don’t light the fuse on a megafire that could reach the nearest town. But he was starting to realize: Even if you don’t light the fuse, you still have the bomb.

“Finally, I figured out all I’m doing is deferring risk to this place,” said Dallas, whose day job is director of renewable resources for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region. “I’m going to come back and protect it again.”

When he got to the Six Rivers, he found the local forest supervisor and the Karuk Tribe had been percolating the same idea he had. It had rained in those mountains, and the conditions were mild. Fog was rolling in from the coast in the mornings, settling in the canyon bottoms. “It actually had gone from being fire weather to basically prescribed fire season,” Dallas remembered.

What if, instead of tearing up the Six Rivers to attack this fire, they allowed it to creep along the forest floor as long as they could? There’d be less fuel to burn the next time a fire came through, and it wouldn’t burn as hot even if the weather was bad. Fifty thousand acres of fire; fifty thousand acres less fuel to burn next summer.

Incident commander Dan Dallas gives a briefing on the Divide Complex Wildfire in the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest in 2021. Photo courtesy of Brenda Bowen, Rocky Mountain Team 1, Fire Information Officer

The strategy was a success, but a fleeting one. The opportunities to let wildfire do its job are being increasingly extinguished by hotter, drier conditions that last longer throughout the year. The Trump administration has also returned to “full suppression” — shutting down every fire, even when it doesn’t threaten human life and property — after three decades of federal policy that, at least on paper, encouraged a friendlier approach to wildfire.

The problem with putting out all fires, said Dallas, is the same one that troubled him on that drive to California. You’re leaving fuel there that could stoke the next megafire you can’t manage, or even stop. “We keep going back to the same places, and it’s more often that the fires are more severe,” Dallas said. 

Over the past decade, so-called megafires — characterized not only by their size, often bigger than 100,000 acres, but by their severity, speed, and impact — have become more common. They now account for the bulk of the money spent on firefighting, with the federal government spending 10 times more on suppressing wildfires than it did 30 years ago.

This summer’s fire conditions have already been extreme. Nearly 73 percent of the Intermountain West is experiencing severe to exceptional drought, with temperatures breaking records across the country. Add to that last winter’s meager snowpack, which has left forests ready to burn. So far in 2026, the U.S. government has reported more than 53,000 wildfires that have burned over 8 million acres — about 3 million acres more than average over the past decade. 

The onslaught is straining firefighting resources, with many requests for help going unfulfilled. An August 11 memo from the National Multi-Agency Coordinating group, which handles logistics for firefighting across the federal government, warned that “resource availability remains critically low, with commitments approaching all-time peak levels.”

Wildland firefighting is increasingly facing an intractable reality: We’re stuck in a vicious cycle. A doom loop.

In 2013, the U.S. Forest Service quietly convened a panel of futurists to imagine the arc of wildfire over the coming decades. The group included luminaries in futures studies — the science of systematically gaming out distant outcomes — a couple of wildfire experts, and a science fiction writer. 

Over three weeks of conference calls, the futurists grilled the wildfire experts — John Phipps, a regional research station director who helped make national wildfire policy for the U.S. Forest Service, and Sarah McCaffrey, a social scientist with the agency who studied the human aspect of how it worked. Together, the group imagined possible trajectories for the American wildfire saga — carrying it forward beyond the scope of a presidential administration, longer than the span of any individual government career. Where, they asked, was all this really going?

U.S. Forest Service firefighters monitor the Line Fire near San Bernardino, California, in 2024.
Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

They released their final report, “Wildland Fire Management Futures: Insights from a Foresight Panel,” in 2015. The one big takeaway: We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. “As conditions change over time,” the report reads, “the existing fire suppression approach will fail across the whole range of plausible future conditions.”

If we don’t change course, the futures panel wrote, “risk will continue to escalate until fuel-filled landscapes eventually reset catastrophically.” Translation: Much of the West will burn. Today’s children will see forests converted to grass or shrublands in their lifetimes. Biodiversity will be irreversibly destroyed, along with thousands upon thousands of American homes.

This isn’t pessimism. The science behind it has been well-established for decades. In any combustible ecosystem, fire periodically clears away all but the strongest plants, allowing them to thrive and reproduce. The process enriches the soil and opens the understory to new growth. On the other hand, if you suppress fire on the landscape for a century, as the United States has done, leave trees and brush to pile up in a continent-sized pyre, then heat up the planet and take away the rain, everything’s going to burn at once. Windy, hot days and lightning strikes and accidents are bound to converge, and our expanding settlements are bound to be in the way.

It’s not that firefighting doesn’t work; federal firefighters are able to contain more than 98 percent of wildfires. The vast majority of damage to human infrastructure is done by the 2 percent of ignitions that get away, said Matt Hurteau, a forest ecologist at the University of New Mexico. The top 1 percent are responsible for more than a quarter of the total acreage burned. But those megafires happen under nightmare weather conditions — hot, dry, and windy — and escape control quickly. “There is no doubt that our federal fire suppression apparatus is effective, that’s why we’re in the predicament we’re in,” Hurteau said. “It’s only under the most extreme conditions that things escape, and it’s been that way for decades.”

The more climate change extends the fire season, Hurteau said, the more chances for megafires to start. The more small fires we put out, the more fuel there is for megafires to eat up on the way to our towns. This is what the futures panel meant by “escalate.”

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With the build-up of fuels that constant fire suppression causes, their report concluded, “we are self-selecting for fires we cannot control and do the greatest damage.”

Thirteen years after the futures panel, interviews with more than 20 experts in the field of wildland fire — foresters and firefighters and bureaucrats and scientists and even a lobbyist, from varying positions on the political spectrum — painted a stark picture of where our fire policy is taking us. Several of them had the same question: “What the f**k we are doing here?”

The way out of this quagmire is widely agreed upon: Somehow, we have to get rid of all that extra fuel, and once a semblance of balance is restored, make friends with natural, lower-severity ground fires by hardening human communities against them and letting them be. This plan has, in one form or another, been entrenched in federal policy since the mid-90s.

In addition to establishing programs to physically remove extra fuels and clear out forest floors through prescribed burning, that policy has included allowing unplanned wildfires to do the work, as long as it’s safe to do so. In other words, when fires pose a danger to people, including firefighters and the public, they’re generally fought aggressively. Otherwise, fire managers have had the option of allowing them to play their natural role.

Many fire scientists believe that letting more fires run their course in the backcountry, the way Dallas and his colleagues did on the Six Rivers, will have to happen if we’re going to reduce fuels at the necessary scale.

“We keep putting out fires, and we’re going to get bigger and hotter fires,” said Hurteau. “It’s just true. It’s physics and chemistry.”

Dave Calkin, who recently retired from his job as a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service, where he focused on wildland fire risk management, said many fires are “inherently insuppressible”; all you can do is run.

Fires that don’t threaten people, on the other hand, are useful. “The science is clear and has been clear for decades that the answer to the problem is more fire, not less fire,” Calkin said.

A separate camp of foresters believes using wildfires to remove fuel is reckless, given the volatile conditions during fire season, and that the way forward is to clear fuels by loosening environmental regulations and opening public lands much more broadly to “mechanical thinning” — in many cases logging — launching a moonshot effort to revitalize the moribund timber industry in the process.

A member of a local Prescribed Burn Association uses a drip torch to ignite a controlled burn in Angwin, California, last year.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

“Because the forests are all clogged up, you can’t use [wild]fire as a maintenance tool,” said Michael Rains, who helped lead the Forest Service across five administrations. “You’ve got to use prescribed fire, and you have to use mechanical treatments. And then one day, hopefully, our forest lands will be in the condition [such that], when a fire starts, we can manage it to let it burn a little longer.”

The Trump administration has sided firmly with Rains’ camp, doubling down on suppressing all wildfires — including those that don’t threaten communities — while also demanding more board feet of lumber coming off public lands. Frank Carroll, a former Forest Service incident commander and a zealous advocate for full suppression, said the decrees are like “trying to steer an aircraft carrier with a canoe paddle.” Still, he believes, they are a start. 

Adam Mendonca, the Forest Service’s deputy director of Fire and Aviation Management, said the agency isn’t anti-fire. “No two ways about it. Science will tell you, you need more fire on the landscape.” But, he said, the agency’s focus is on prescribed fire. 

The Forest Service did about 1.2 million acres of prescribed burning in 2025, down from 2.2 million the year before. (The agency attributes the drop to dangerously dry conditions that spring, particularly in the Southeast where it does most of its burning). Recent research shows that the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce — a ProPublica investigation found that more than a quarter of the Forest Service’s firefighting positions were unfilled as of July 2025 — also contributed to the slower progress on clearing fuels last year.

Mendonca said the Forest Service needs to be doing between two and 10 times more fuels reduction work to turn the tide. “We’re not doing enough,” he said, “but we continue to try to ramp up.”

Prescribed fire offers what the agency has become less tolerant of losing: control. But Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE), said a war on wildfire is unwinnable. “We’re just throwing good money after bad in these reactive, siege-like suppression spectacles, versus proactive preparation and treatments within communities.” 

The wildfire doom loop has roots far beyond the current administration, and is fueled by a cycle of perverse incentives. 

One problem, experts say, has to do with how fire-related funding is distributed. Every year in the hot and dry months, Congress authorizes additional funding for emergency wildland fire suppression as needed, not unlike the way it funds a war. The annual expenditure has grown from an average of about $450 million in the 1990s to well over $3 billion in recent years, with $4.3 billion spent in 2021 alone. (Research published earlier this year projected that climate change could push that number to $13 billion by the end of the century.)

“There are no consequences for spending as much money as you possibly can to put that fire out,” said Kelly Martin, a former chief of fire management for two national parks who also served on the congressionally mandated Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission during the Biden administration. When they have airplanes and bulldozers and armies of firefighters at their disposal, she said, federal fire managers are inclined to use them. “There’s not a connection in people’s brains to say, putting that fire out actually does more harm than good in the long term.” 

Crews cut vegetation to widen a fire line for the Oak Fire near Mariposa, California, in 2022.
David McNew / AFP via Getty Images

In contrast, funding for fuel-reduction initiatives like forest thinning and prescribed burns is budgeted, limited, and comes with mountains of paperwork. “Prescribed burning is discretionary — emergency management is not,” said Martin. “So, you end up with this really lopsided scale that tips the scale to the favor of suppression.”

The annual glut also creates an incentive for private firefighting contractors to lobby for as much involvement as possible while the cash is flowing. “I have clients, they’re like farmers,” said Phil Hardy, a Washington lobbyist for the firefighting aviation industry, including retardant and water tankers, which are most effective in suppressing fires while they’re still small. “They make all their money from June to September or October, and then they’ve got to wait all the way until next year to get paid again. By the time fire season starts, they’ve totally wiped out their line of credit.” Hardy said his clients would vastly prefer a steadier cash flow, but Congress only pays when pillars of smoke are looming and it’s too late to do anything but fight like hell. That means that air tankers, which are among the most costly elements of wildland firefighting, are often used even when they’re not especially effective.

A second problem is personnel — fuel-reduction work is often done by the same federal employees who get sent out to fight wildfires. One federal fuels reduction specialist, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak freely, said even experts who are hired to plan and conduct prescribed burns and other fuel-clearing projects often spend up to half the year fighting wildfires. 

“The simple tasks that are supposed to get done to allow these projects to move forward,” he said, “go almost stagnant for like four to six months out of the year.”

Beyond budgets and workforce management and policy memos, there’s a bigger, more emotional machinery at work. After all, fire can destroy homes and take loved ones in the most terrifying ways.

Wildfires are a seasonal spectacle, with journalists dispatched to the firelines like war correspondents reporting from the front, broadcasting images of towering flames and smoking ruins that stoke the feeling in the zeitgeist that everything in the whole world is going to hell. 

“When you see people’s homes burning on the 5 o’clock news and you know people are chasing their horses and their dogs are dying and people are losing their lives,” said Martin, “it’s hard to switch that narrative into something different.”

The fire-as-invader narrative helps drive a kind of patriotic zeal that moves everyone from firefighters to legislators to defend the homeland.

“I hate war analogies when it comes to fire,” said Riva Duncan, president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit firefighter advocacy organization. “It’s not a war and firefighters are not soldiers, because I don’t want them to think that their lives are expected to be given for this.”

Mendonca, the Forest Service fire director, agrees — kind of. “We don’t treat fire as though it’s the enemy,” he said. “It’s just, how do we get there in a way that gets us to those desired conditions or outcomes with the highest probability of success for all the values involved.” 

A home burns as flames from the Dixie Fire tear through the Indian Falls neighborhood of unincorporated Plumas County, California, in 2021.
Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images

Fire, in other words, is like a wild animal. We don’t hate wild animals, but the closer they get to us the less we feel we can afford the risk of tolerating their presence.

But Calkin said there’s also a bureaucratic momentum to the status quo. “It’s the inherent human bias of like, right now, the easiest thing for me to do would be to make this fire go away,” he said. “It’s really hard for me to make this fire grow in a safe way to get good fuel treatment. And it’s risky. And if something goes bad, I am responsible. You know, if in the future it actually saved something really important, I’d never get credit for it. It’s just easier to kick the problem down the road.”

More fire isn’t the answer in every part of the country. Native plants like sagebrush and saguaro cactus haven’t evolved to burn, but invasive grasses in the Great Basin and Sonoran Desert have brought fire with them. “There are certain places where we have too much fire and we need to try and keep it out,” said Hurteau. And as long as our communities are nestled in burnable ecosystems, they’ll sometimes need to be defended. The question is whether we can find a balance we can live with.

Since that futures panel wrapped up its conference calls in 2013, we’ve had 13 years of one record-breaking fire after another. The image of burning houses is no longer the uncanny experience it was — the slash of bright orange across the country’s front pages is now part of our collective wallpaper. And the ranks of the dispossessed, the evacuated, and the dead have only grown.

Dallas, a practical man, said it would make a big difference if firefighting teams like his were allowed to back off fires, setting low-severity backburns on ground of their choosing so that the wild flames don’t blow through and annihilate everything in their path. “Right now,” he said, “that’s off the table.”

When we spoke in early August, Dallas had just come from a fire in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, that was threatening hundreds of homes. The local forest supervisor called for a Complex Incident Management Team — the big guns — and got a response that’s becoming more common across the country: no one was available. All the teams were on other fires.

“Our system is taxed beyond capacity to respond,” Dallas said. “It’s already falling apart.” 

For every fire he puts out, Dallas knows he’s leaving a tinderbox behind. More and more, he said, he’s finding himself back at the same table, looking at the same map. 

Next time, he could be watching a bigger, more dangerous fire escape his grasp.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline America is losing its war against wildfire on Sep 8, 2026.

In April 2024, Tish Taylor and her father, Robert, stood behind President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency chief, Michael Regan, as he signed a regulation designed to dramatically reduce toxic pollution from petrochemical plants like those that cluster near the Taylors’ homes along the lower Mississippi River, in Louisiana. 

Taylor struggled not to cry through the signing ceremony, which followed years of demands from communities like hers — in the 85-mile corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that has become known as Cancer Alley — for tighter limits on plants’ emissions. The new regulation, known as the HON rule, was “a wonderful gift to generations ahead of us,” Taylor said. “It’s hard for me to find the words to say how validated we felt.” 

For decades, regulations on emissions of hazardous chemicals such as toluene, ethylene oxide, and vinyl chloride have been weaker than restrictions on more common pollutants, such as those emitted by vehicles. 

The Biden administration took major steps to strengthen Clean Air Act rules on those hazardous air pollutants, and the HON rule was a centerpiece of that effort. Toughening requirements on six different pollutants at more than 200 petrochemical plants, it was one of a slate of regulations the Biden administration enacted on air toxics, each covering a specific industry, from steelmaking to tire manufacturing.

Gulf Coast petrochemical plants regulated by the 2024 HON rule. Source: Environmental Defense Fund. Yale E360

But shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term, his administration began unraveling those rules, including the one the Taylors had so recently celebrated. Last year, Trump granted two-year exemptions from the HON rule to more than 50 petrochemical facilities. This July, he issued 20 more temporary exemptions, and the EPA said it would propose a rewrite of the regulation this fall. The new version is all but certain to significantly scale back the rule’s protections. 

“Everything that the Biden administration did to help protect us was pretty much just thrown in the garbage,” Tish Taylor said in July, and replaced by “a death sentence.” St. John the Baptist Parish, where her family lives, has the country’s highest risk of cancer from air pollution — nearly 50 times the national average. A disproportionate percentage of those exposed to the highest levels of pollution in the region are Black.

A set of amendments to several existing regulations on toxic air pollutants, the HON rule — which stands for Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants — requires petrochemical plants to upgrade their pollution control equipment to reduce emissions of two hazardous chemicals: ethylene oxide and chloroprene. It also mandates air monitors at plants’ fencelines to measure concentrations of those chemicals and four more — benzene, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride, and 1,3-butadiene — and requires operators to carry out necessary repairs if emissions exceed limits. 

Tracey Woodruff, a Stanford University epidemiology and population health professor who formerly worked on toxic assessments at the EPA, said the pollutants covered by the HON rule are “the classic bad guys of toxic chemicals,” compounds that raise risks for breast cancer, liver cancer, leukemia, lymphoma, and reproductive problems. “We’ve known about their toxicity for decades,” she said, and “they should have been more highly regulated a long time ago.” 

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The HON rule also closed a long-standing loophole that freed plants from emissions requirements when they were shutting down and starting up — for example when carrying out maintenance, or ahead of a storm. With climate change fueling more extreme weather, that loophole has “a massive impact on what is actually getting released,” said Shiv Srivastava, policy director at Fenceline Watch, a Houston environmental justice group.

The HON rule was one of nine new air toxics rules issued by the Biden administration. The eight other rules targeted emissions from sectors including iron- and steelmaking, copper smelting, tire manufacturing, and coal-fired power plants. All nine have been or are now being rescinded, revised, or reconsidered.  

The HON rule was among the most wide-reaching of those hazardous pollutant regulations. “This is a big rule,” said Joe Goffman, who headed the EPA’s air office under Biden. Because air toxics rules typically address very specific types of industrial facilities, an individual regulation sometimes applies to only a handful of plants in a few locations, with pollution reductions often measured in just hundreds of pounds, he said. But the HON rule covered approximately 220 large petrochemical plants, so its footprint promised to be both bigger and more wide-reaching geographically. Nearly 60 percent of the facilities it covered are in Texas and Louisiana, home to the nation’s largest petrochemical production zones. The rest are scattered across the country, in states including Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, and Alabama. 

The EPA estimated when the rule was finalized that it would prevent 6,200 tons of toxic air pollution annually, and slash emissions of ethylene oxide and chloroprene from the plants it regulates by almost 80 percent. In communities near HON plants, the agency said the regulation would reduce the risk of cancers related to air toxics by 96 percent. Facilities affected by the rule produce ingredients for common products such as plastics, paints, antifreeze, and cleaning and personal care items like detergent and shampoo. 

Weeks into Trump’s second term, the EPA invited companies to email the agency with requests for exemptions from the HON rule and Biden’s other hazardous pollutant regulations. In granting the postponements, Trump invoked a Clean Air Act provision that environmental lawyers say has never been used: allowing temporary exemptions to emissions rules if they are “in the country’s national security interests” and if the technology required to comply with a regulation is unavailable.

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“The HON Rule imposes substantial burdens on chemical manufacturers already operating under stringent regulations,” Trump’s exemption proclamations said. “Maintaining a robust domestic chemical industry is vital to safeguarding the supply chains that underpin our economy and to reducing the Nation’s dependence on foreign control over materials critical to national resilience.”

Trump’s orders provided no evidence for their assertions. “That’s not how this works,” said Annie Fox, a staff attorney at the Clean Air Council, in Philadelphia. The law requires a president to set out specifics supporting each claim made in justifying an exemption, “not just state it,” she said. “These are supposed to be rare exceptions that are well-grounded in research and facts.” 

Last October, a coalition of local and national advocacy groups, including the Taylors’ Concerned Citizens of St. John, sued Trump and his EPA in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia over the exemptions, arguing that Trump’s claims are false and amount to “a pretext to relieve polluters from working to comply” with the HON rule while the administration works to undo the regulation.

The American Chemistry Council, a trade group representing petrochemical producers, said the exemptions “offer a pathway for relief for some sources from some of the unrealistic timelines” in the HON rule. It called the regulation “overly stringent” and said it “exceeds the EPA’s statutory authority, disregards relevant scientific evidence, and imposes some requirements without technological availability.” 

The EPA said in an emailed statement that all its proposals on air toxics aimed to “protect American industry and supply chains, while still minimizing Americans’ unnecessary exposure to hazardous air pollutants.” 

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The HON rule’s roots lay in a 2016 reevaluation of ethylene oxide gas that revealed it was much more dangerous to those inhaling it than had been previously understood. That reevaluation also led, in 2024, to a regulation that tightened emissions limits on ethylene oxide at facilities that use it to sterilize medical equipment.

In March, the EPA proposed replacing the medical sterilizer rule with a weakened version, arguing that the Clean Air Act gives regulators very limited scope to update rules in accordance with new science on health dangers.

In backtracking on efforts to limit exposure to hazardous air pollutants, Woodruff said, the Trump administration has signaled that “whatever the industry wants to do, that’s what we want to do.” She noted that former fossil fuel and petrochemical industry representatives hold top jobs across the EPA. The policy changes “will lead to people getting sicker and dying,” she said. “This is exactly opposite of what this administration claimed they wanted to do in terms of ‘Make America Healthy Again.’”

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HON rule exemptions are not the only change that will increase risks to Americans living near petrochemical facilities, advocates say. The EPA has also proposed undoing changes the Biden administration made to strengthen a safety rule called the Risk Management Program, which empowered workers dealing with hazardous substances to stop operations they believe to be dangerous, and required chemical facilities to prepare for natural disasters, undergo independent audits after accidents, and share information with the public. 

Nationally, there were 131 accidents resulting in reportable chemical releases last year. For those living near the Houston area’s nearly 700 chemical plants, “there are constant explosions, there are constant fires, there are constant black, dark plumes that linger over our communities,” Srivastava said.

The Biden-era update sought to address such dangers, but the Trump administration said the new rule was too costly and burdensome, and that it had made refineries and chemical facilities “less safe and less competitive.” Many of the plants it covered already had effective safety programs, the EPA said in a statement, and eliminating duplicative requirements would enable operators to focus on the most important changes. “Due to the varied, complex nature of chemical facilities, the facility operator is in the best position to assess risks and identify steps to mitigate these risks,” it said. 

Last year, the administration also removed an online data tool the Biden administration had created to give communities located near petrochemical plants information about their operations, including their accident history, emergency response plans, and the chemicals they handle. Srivastava said the tool’s loss cuts off neighbors’ access to even the most basic information about nearby plants — their names and locations, for example — making it hard for communities to even begin preparing for accidents. And easing safety mandates, he said, “makes us extremely, extremely vulnerable to having a massive, catastrophic disaster on the scale of something like what happened in Bhopal,” where a leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant, in India, killed thousands of people in 1984.

Sharon Lavigne, founder of RISE St. James Louisiana, an advocacy group in “Cancer Alley,” still has the pen that the EPA’s Michael Regan gave her after he signed the HON rule, and her group is a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging Trump’s exemptions. She said she believes the president’s disregard for the regulation reflects his belief that “we are nothing,” and she vowed to continue fighting to restore the HON rule’s original reach and strength. “When he gets out of office,” she said, “we’re gonna fix it back.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A hard-won rule to cut chemical plant pollution is being unraveled on Sep 6, 2026.

A deadly flash flood in the Grand Canyon over the weekend was probably driven by a confluence of climate factors, including drought, wildfire scarring and warming temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that can supercharge storms.

At least two people have died, nearly 80 people were rescued and one remained unaccounted for after a surge of water and debris swept through the immensely popular tourist destination on Saturday, fueled by torrents of rain that hit the national park’s Bright Angel Creek area.

Flash floods are not uncommon in the region, especially during the monsoon season from June to September, when strong rains pummel the arid landscapes and can quickly fill narrow rock formations. Visiting the Grand Canyon — a crown jewel of the US national park system — can be particularly dangerous in the summer because of the risk of flash flooding, when clear days can give way quickly to thunderstorms and downpours.

The steep, rocky nature of the canyon itself funnels water rapidly, transforming downpours into a charging wall of water.

Debris from the Bright Angel flash flood event, as seen the morning of August 30, 2026. National Park Service

But Saturday’s strong storm also hit part of the burn scar of the Dragon Bravo wildfire, a destructive and fast-moving blaze that swept across nearly 150,000 acres and consumed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge in July 2025.

Runoff tends to flow more quickly in the aftermath of a fire, especially in hotter burns where slopes are left barren of vegetation.

While it’s still unclear how directly long-term damage to the landscape from that fire played a role in last weekend’s disaster, federal models indicated a rise in the risks of debris flows in Bright Angel Creek.

Teams with the Department of Interior charged with assessing post-fire threats to “life, property, and critical natural and cultural resources” found runoff risks would be between two and eight times greater upstream of Phantom Creek. “Hikers on the trails within or downslope from the burned area will experience frequent stabilization issues, especially hazardous rockfall for at least the first year,” the team wrote in a report on conditions.

Park officials were reportedly concerned at the start of this summer that stronger storms could create dangerous conditions near the burned areas. Hikers who had to be evacuated by helicopter after the rushing waters swallowed bridges and other infrastructure told the Arizona Republic that the creek turned black as it filled with runoff.

Debris from the Bright Angel flash flood event, as seen the morning of August 30, 2026. National Park Service

Scientists have long warned that the climate crisis will create stronger extremes and destructive shifts between wet and dry conditions. As temperatures continue to climb, extreme events will not just increase – they are more likely to overlap, causing more calamity and testing the limits of the nation’s resilience and recovery.

So-called “compound extremes”, where a combination of contributing factors come together, are on the rise, according to researchers.

Along with the potential impact from a previous fire, a severe drought that continues to affect the Grand Canyon region — and the Colorado River basin that runs through it — could have contributed to the disaster. The deluge unleashed torrents of rain on hardened and sparsely vegetated steep terrain that is less able to absorb and contain abrupt increases in moisture.

The sudden and strong rainstorm that fueled this catastrophic flood may have been supercharged by the historic El Niño that has sharply increased sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.

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The climate phenomenon has the ability to affect weather systems around the world. But in the Southwest, the higher amount of water vapor in the atmosphere due to El Niño is wrung out in the form of rainfall, Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Associated Press.

El Niño is part of a natural cycle, but models show there is a strong likelihood this will become one of the strongest on record. It layers on top of spikes in temperature fueled by the climate crisis. Together, the possibility of severe and extreme weather is expected to dramatically increase.

The link to human-caused climate change and the heavy Arizona rain is moderately strong, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources.

Swain and colleagues recently published a study in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes finding that during the summer, short-term intense downpours in the US West — akin to the one that hit the Grand Canyon — have become 10 percent stronger since 2000.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How intense rains in the Grand Canyon turned into a deadly disaster on Sep 5, 2026.

It has been more than two months since President Donald Trump’s tentative ceasefire with Iran broke down, and gasoline prices are still high. With the midterm elections looming, the president seems to have turned his attention to the problem, rolling out a series of actions he says will secure more crude oil from Venezuela and exempt refineries from renewable fuel mandates. Most recently, he summoned refiners to the White House earlier this week to discuss ways to lower prices at the pump, although the refiners left without making any public statements and the White House didn’t publish a list of the attendees.

In the months since the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the world has found ways to conserve oil and move Middle East crude around, but structural factors are still keeping prices high. The U.S. average gas price on Thursday was around $4.11 per gallon, up more than 90 percent from this time last year, and diesel was even higher.

The “crack spread,” which is the difference in price between crude oil and refined gasoline and diesel, soared to an historic high of more than $70 per barrel. This is a clear sign that the market for refined products is going haywire, and oil companies are raking in profits. The largest refineries in the United States have been operating at almost maximum capacity for several weeks now, longer than at any time in recent history, and they have deferred regular maintenance to take advantage of these soaring prices.

The president’s frustration with the high fuel cost has become clear over the course of the summer.

“Based on a shortage, they’re making too much money,” Trump said at an Oval Office briefing last month. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price.”

The biggest reason prices have remained high is that there isn’t enough refining capacity to make gasoline from all the available oil. Many refineries in the Middle East have shut down during the conflict, and Russia’s diesel refineries are also offline thanks to Ukrainian drone attacks. The remaining refineries in North America and China are not large enough to fill that gap.

In its effort to lower prices at the pump, the Trump administration first turned to Venezuela, where it kidnapped leader Nicolas Maduro in January and announced a plan to revive the country’s moribund oil industry. Experts said after the Maduro raid that American companies would be hesitant to tap Venezuela’s oil reserves, but the Trump administration has tried to make the country more palatable by easing sanctions and pushing interim leader Delcy Rodriguez to rewrite the country’s oil laws. 

These efforts seem to be paying off. The Pentagon announced last week that it would take a stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, a private Venezuelan company that controls around 20 percent of the country’s reserves; the company plans to increase production in oil fields that had once been drilled by China and Russia. Alejandro Betancourt, the head of the company, has been described as Trump’s “viceroy” in Venezuela, and earlier this year, the Trump administration helped him avoid a Swiss arrest warrant. Chevron, the largest U.S. company that operates in Venezuela, also announced on Wednesday that it would double its production there, signing an agreement with the Rodriguez government at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas.

“In general, the read is positive,” said Ramón Andrade, a lawyer focused on the energy business and a partner at the law firm Ponte Andrade & Casanova in Caracas. He said that the business community in Venezuela is optimistic about a revival of the sector, but cautioned that on the Pentagon deal, “I think we need to look at what’s actually going to be signed.”

Even so, there is no chance that this will help reduce gasoline prices, even after the midterms. For one thing, only a small number of U.S. refineries can process the heavy crude from Venezuela, and they are already working overtime to take advantage of high fuel prices. 

“Everything that the Venezuelans could produce right now, I’m sure they’re squeezing out,” said Al Salazar, an analyst at the energy firm Enverus Intelligence who studies oil and gas markets. “You could get incremental production out of there in six to twelve months, but what really is causing the gasoline and diesel price spike is the lack of refining capacity.”

For another thing, scaling up production will take many years, if the legal agreement with the Pentagon even holds that long — the final details aren’t yet available, and some parties have alleged that conceding resource wealth to the United States would violate the Venezuelan constitution. The interim government has yet to face voters in an actual election.

“You need that long runway to be able to develop this resource,” said Salazar, who spent decades in the Canadian oil industry, which also produces heavy oil like Venezuela’s.

The administration’s other major move this week might do more to keep prices down at the margins, though likely not enough for most consumers to notice. The Environmental Protection Agency ended its summer ethanol blending requirements early. The rules mandate that refiners and fuel importers add ethanol to the nation’s fuel supply to reduce gasoline-caused smog. It also announced a series of waivers that would exempt a few dozen refineries around the country from having to integrate biofuel into their diesel and gasoline products. The purpose of this “renewable fuels standard” is to support farmers and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since biofuels don’t warm the planet as oil does, but many oil industry parties argue that using ethanol drives up costs for refiners.

A number of major lobbies opposed these waivers. Midwestern politicians and biofuel associations argued that they will harm farmers by reducing demand for the corn that makes ethanol, and even the American Petroleum Institute warned that sudden exemptions would create an unpredictable business environment for refineries. The two sides of the biofuel debate argue that the exemptions either will or won’t reduce gasoline prices. Given that crude oil prices are still high, it’s possible ethanol is a cheaper ingredient than oil, and it’s unclear whether the exempt refiners like Marathon and Chevron will pass costs on to customers.

Even with the waivers, gasoline prices in many states are $1.50 above their pre-Iran highs. The early months of the conflict hinged on the question of the Strait of Hormuz, but even if the strait were to open tomorrow, the gasoline market will remain tight, and neither more oil from Venezuela nor cheaper inputs will free up refining capacity. 

“I think it’s going to have a tremendous impact; ultimately, prices are going to come down,” said Trump at the Oval Office on Monday. “Will it happen before the election? I can’t tell you that.” The stubborn high prices do not bode well for Republicans in the midterm elections. On average, the president’s party loses 25 more congressional seats in midterm elections after gas prices spike than in those after gas prices go down, according to a Politico analysis of elections since 1978.

Things could get even worse by then. Around half of U.S. refining capacity is located on the Gulf of Mexico, in the bullseye for Atlantic hurricanes. Forecasters are predicting a quiet season, but there’s still potential for a massive outage. Tropical Depression Edouard formed in the Gulf of Mexico and passed over a Texas refinery complex this week, but it fizzled out before it could become a major storm.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline With the midterms looming, Trump has no real way out of his gas price problem on Sep 4, 2026.

John Boyer grew up on his family’s 131 acres of rolling fields of corn, oats, and wheat in a rural area near the tiny city of East Jordan in northern Michigan. The farm had changed ownership outside the family several times over the decades before Boyer rebought it in 2018. He felt an obligation to repurchase and farm the land to prevent development from encroaching on the area’s community of family farms.

“For any farmer, everything’s personal,” Boyer said. “Every piece of property, every stone you pick up, you spend countless hours out there.”

As millions of farmland acres around the country are expected to change hands in the next few decades, farmers are facing decisions about whether — and if so, how — to preserve farmland amid pressures from rising land values, a shifting climate, and a younger generation that doesn’t want to farm. The number of acres devoted to farming in Michigan has declined in recent decades, as it has in the rest of the country. And ownership of that land is changing. 

In 2022, an estimated 9.5 million acres, or about a quarter of the state, were devoted to farming, a roughly 3 percent dip from 2017, according to the most recent federal farm census. Farmland in Michigan where the majority of operations were family-owned decreased nearly 470,000 acres in those same five years. Conversely, land leased or rented for farming operations increased by nearly 30,000 acres.  

Despite shifts in farm ownership and acreage dedicated to agriculture, the number of farmland acres in Michigan protected by conservation programs has increased in recent years, reflecting a national trend. The state saw an additional 22,000 acres protected in easements between 2017 and 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“It’s a matter of trying to figure out what exactly is going to be the best fit for everybody’s situation. And there’s a lot of pressure. There’s a lot of money,” said Jon LaPorte, a farm business management educator for Michigan State University Extension.

According to the USDA, Michigan farmland was valued at about $6,800 per acre last year, up 7.8 percent from 2024 and outpacing the national average of 4.3 percent.

The pressure to preserve farmland could be especially strong in northern Michigan. Farmers there are already confronting the effects of climate change, including more extreme precipitation, crop disease, and temperature swings, but some local farmers said those impacts are relatively easier to deal with than elsewhere in the country.

“As the world climate changes, this area could become more and more important for food production and food security,” said Dave Skornia, a farmer in Boyne City, Michigan. “So, you got to have land.”

John Boyer on his farm outside East Jordan, Michigan.
Vivian La / Grist

For Boyer, the best way to protect his farmland was to restrict future development on it by entering into what’s called a conservation easement. He still owns the property, but he sold the future development rights of his 131 acres to the Little Traverse Conservancy, a nonprofit that acquires and protects land. The organization holds those rights even if Boyer transfers land to his kids or decides to sell to another owner down the line.

An easement can be a hard decision for farmers because land is typically their greatest asset, something that can pay for retirement or a college fund, said Joe Graham, chief financial and operating officer for the Little Traverse Conservancy.

“We’re offering them another alternative,” Graham said. “We’re offering a way to capture some of the equity and the value they have in that land without having to sell it and see it leave their ownership.”

Of the conservancy’s 30,000 acres protected in easements across five counties in northern Michigan and its Upper Peninsula, about 6,000 acres are farmland. Graham has seen interest in conservation easements growing among small farming communities.

Read Next Georgia is losing farmland fast. Is a state conservation fund enough to save it? Emily Jones

But easements still have their challenges, he said. Conservancies pay landowners for a portion of the overall land value, and selling the development rights earns the landowner less revenue than outright selling the land. As land values rise in rural northern Michigan, the conservancy doesn’t see many farmers purely motivated by financial return entering into such agreements. 

“There can be a question of timing: ‘Is this the right thing to do? What might we be foregoing later?’” Graham said.

Boyer wants to prevent his land from being divided up down the line and sold in smaller parcels “to make a quick buck.” Once an acre is converted for built developments like houses or commercial buildings, it typically doesn’t return to farmland.

“Then suddenly a productive farm field or ground is gone, and it’s gone for generations,” Boyer said. “It’s gone forever.”

Rebecca Carlson, a cherry and apple grower who runs Overlook Orchards in Northport, a village at the tip of Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula on Lake Michigan, also sees land division as a future threat to the farmland in her county. Aging farmers might split up land among multiple kids, leaving a patchwork of ownership that “breaks up multigenerational farms,” Carlson said, especially as younger people in the area choose not to go into the business.

She’s a fourth-generation farmer who married into another multigenerational farming family. She and her husband have grown the original farm from about 200 acres to 1,300 acres over eight years. To expand, the couple bought nearby land, but they also lease some parcels, mostly from family farmers who don’t have a younger generation to take over. 

“In order to be successful in farming, in some cases, it’s one of those, ‘Go big or go home,’ with the climate of farming today,” Carlson said. 

In Michigan, about 39 percent of agricultural land is leased, according to the 2022 USDA census, a number that mirrors the national average.

Leases keep farmland in production for the duration of the contract — most of Carlson’s leases are for 30 years. She pays annual fees that vary based on factors like location or crop productivity. Those fees can be significantly cheaper than owning farmland outright, because Carlson isn’t responsible for property taxes or other costs like insurance for infrastructure.

“It’s a great way to maintain your … farm and grow your farm,” she said. “They don’t make land anymore.”

Leasing does have some limitations. A 2026 MSU survey of Michigan farmers found high lease rates and locating land that matches their needs were the top concerns for those looking to lease. Farmers either have a “crop in mind but no ground, or they had the ground, but in some cases they weren’t sure what they could raise on it,” LaPorte with MSU Extension said.

It’s not just about land, either. LaPorte said the relationship between landowner and farmer is just as important. 

“You might have a great relationship where you never worry a single day about whether or not you’re going to have the property a year from now,” LaPorte said. “Other cases, there’s some differences in terms of what each party’s goals are that kind of create that sense of anxiety about, ‘Is this going to last long-term?’”

Sheep graze among solar panels on the Turkey Creek Solar Ranch in Lancaster, Kentucky. The solar operator pays a local farmer to graze his sheep to keep grass and weeds at manageable levels, and to improve the soil while also producing pasture-raised meat.
Universal Images Group / Getty Images

In the Midwest, farmland values are holding steady or even increasing, even as farm incomes are down nationally. That’s because demand from industrial and residential development in the region is high, said Howard Halderman, president and CEO of Halderman Companies, a farm real estate and management agency working primarily in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.

Halderman said high farmland values come from tax-deferred exchanges, which allow landowners to defer capital gains taxes when they sell highly appreciated land and use those proceeds to buy other property.

“That’s where a lot of your farmland value gets support. Are there other buyers out there that keep a floor under it?” he said. “If you’re looking to buy farmland, that might be frustrating. However, if you’re a farmer that owns a lot of farmland and you like to keep your asset values on your balance sheet higher, it’s a good thing.”

As the state pushes for a cleaner grid to combat the effects of climate change, favorable policies are also attracting renewable energy developers to farming communities, where they’re eyeing land for wind turbines, battery storage facilities, and solar panels.

“From a landowner’s perspective, they’ve got bills to pay the same as a farmer, and they’re looking at situations of, ‘Where can I get the most value?’” LaPorte said. “And if they struggle to find an interested farm, they might be willing to go into some of these long-term agreements that you see into wind turbines, solar.”

In Michigan, solar takes up a small share — 0.09 percent — of USDA prime farmland. Like in the rest of the U.S., it’s less than the acreage that’s been converted to suburban development or recreational uses like golf courses, according to the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association. 

Still, local opposition remains fierce. Earlier this year in Wexford County, on the northern end of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, early plans from a renewable energy developer to build solar panels on nearly 1,500 acres of farmland sparked concerns about encroaching development on productive fields and the long-term impact on the ground.

Michigan researchers are hoping to address those concerns by looking at ways that solar panels and farming can coexist, a practice known as agrivoltaics. Solar panels can shade livestock or crops, and leases with renewable energy developers can be a way for farmers to offset declining farm incomes, said Charles Gould, a bioenergy educator with MSU Extension.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a choice between producing power or food, he said.

“If we can do both on the same acre of land, why wouldn’t we?” Gould said. “We want to preserve the family farm. This is a very powerful tool.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As family farms decline and the climate heats up, farmers weigh what to do with their land on Sep 4, 2026.