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• What happened?
• How did bedrock collapse trigger the flash floods?
• How have temperatures risen in the affected region? 
• How have rising temperatures affected mountain stability?
• How have glaciers retreated in the affected region?
• Can the event be attributed to climate change?

On the morning of 26 August, flash floods surged through a Himalayan border region of Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, killing more than 1,300 people, with thousands still missing.

In the days since the floods, scientists have examined satellite imagery, drone footage and seismic data in order to understand and explain the forces behind the event.

While initial theories pinned the flood on a glacial collapse, scientists now understand the event as a “multi-hazard cascade”, which began with a bedrock collapse. 

Some climate sceptics have tried to use this to falsely claim that human-caused climate change had no impact on the event. 

Yet, scientists have noted that, while no formal attribution study has been carried out thus far, warming is making such ice-rock avalanches in the region more likely.

Researchers have highlighted how rapid warming is dramatically reshaping Asia’s high-mountain region – and identified rising temperatures, glacier retreat and permafrost thaw as factors that may have all contributed to the disaster. 

Balendra Shah, Nepal’s prime minister, has called the floods a “serious signal that…the risks we must bear in the Himalayan region are increasing” due to climate change.

Here, Carbon Brief unpacks what scientists currently know about the causes of the catastrophic event and what they can – and cannot – say about the role of climate change. 

• What happened?
• How did bedrock collapse trigger the flash floods?
• How have temperatures risen in the affected region?
• How have rising temperatures affected mountain stability?
• How have glaciers retreated in the affected region?
• Can the event be attributed to climate change?

What happened?

A report published on 28 August by the HiRisk scientific consortium of high mountain experts detailed the events that led to the flash floods.

It said that events were set in motion on 26 August when a mass of bedrock, as well as the glacier ice on top of it, broke off a slope of Langtang-Lirung mountain in the Nepalese Himalaya, plunging from approximately 5,200 metres above sea level to the valley floor at 3,000 metres. 

The landslide shook the ground hard enough that, at 8:37am Nepal local time, the US Geological Survey (USGS) initially reported a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. Later that day, it clarified the shaking was caused by glacier collapse and debris flow, equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.

On the valley floor, the melting ice, water and debris slammed into the Lhende Khola river, a high-altitude river that runs along Nepal’s border with China. 

Known downstream as the Bhote Koshi river in Nepal and the Poiqu or Poqu in China, the Lhende Khole feeds a network of rivers across Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, including the Trishuli river. (In China, the Lhende Khola is known as the Donglin Tsangpo.)

The designations employed and the presentation of the material on this map do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of Carbon Brief concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. Credit: Carbon Brief.

A large “debris” lake was briefly formed on the valley floor. When this lake burst, a wall of water and rock travelled downstream, killing more than a thousand people and destroying settlements, roads, bridges, hydropower plants and border posts across Nepal and Tibet.

HiRisk said that the floodwave travelled down rivers as fast as 30km an hour (around 19 miles per hour) and reached Mugling – a Nepalese town more than 130km downstream – at around 1pm local time.

A separate report from the Center for Land Surface Hazards in the US noted that the flood moved “exceptionally fast, was sediment-laden and extreme in scale”. For example, in the Nepalese municipality of Galchhi, the Trishuli river rose by nine metres in 30 minutes, it said.

Writing in the Conversation, Dr Umesh Haritashya, a glaciologist at the University of Dayton in Ohio, explained that the disaster “wasn’t finished when the first wall of water passed [on 26 August]”. 

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He continued that a new “barrier lake” – estimated to hold a few million cubic metres of water – had developed in a location where two rivers meet in Tibet before crossing into Nepal. This lake burst on 28 August and the river rose again, he said. 

On 4 September, the chief of Nepal’s National Disaster ​Risk Reduction and Management Authority, told Reuters that property and infrastructure worth “at least” $2.5bn (£1.9bn) had been lost. Dharma Raj Upreti estimated the cost to build roads and temporary shelters, provide drinking water and ⁠restore power would be around $53m (£39m). 

How did bedrock collapse trigger the flash floods?

In the immediate aftermath of the floods, initial reports suggested that the trigger was a collapsing glacier or earthquake in the high mountains of Nepal.

After confirming that a seismic tremor was as a result of falling rock and ice, the USGS said the trigger was likely a “glacial collapse and debris flow”. This was widely picked up by the media. 

Subsequently, satellite imagery revealed that an “enormous chunk of the mountainous bedrock” beneath the glacier had also given way, reported the New York Times. 

Dr Kristen Cook, a geomorphologist at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, told the newspaper:

“The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed…It was a much larger collapse than we were initially able to see in the satellite imagery.”

The result was a “deluge of rock and ice, which pulverized into mud and water as it surged down the mountainside”, the newspaper said.

Dr Jakob Steiner a geoscientist at the University of Graz in Austria, tells Carbon Brief:

“It was not a glacier that collapsed. It was the mountain below the glacier that collapsed and the glacier had no other chance but to go with it because it was sitting on top of it. 

“The trigger for that is something that we are not 100% certain about, but, in the end, it very much looks like simply a mechanical failure of the rock material because of stressors that have built up over a long period of time.”

Failures of “bedrock” – the hard, solid rock that sits below looser rocks and soil – are an “increasingly common occurrence”, says Prof Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at Newcastle University. She tells Carbon Brief:

“These massive landslides occur in mountain regions, commonly following rapid deglacierisation [the melting away of a glacier]. Similar events happened in the Chamoli event in 2021 [in the Indian Himalaya] and in the Blatten landslide last year in Switzerland. They’ve also occurred recently in Alaska.”

With a shift in focus from the failure of a glacier to the bedrock underneath, some climate sceptics seized on the development to falsely claim that climate change had not played any role in the disaster.

These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program, on Twitter, as well as former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley in the Spectator. 

However, scientists have highlighted the likely contribution of rapid warming in the region. These factors include the thawing of permafrost and glacier retreat. (For more, see sections below).

Fundamentally, “this would have been a much less significant tragedy if it had been just a rock-slope failure”, notes Davies.

The initial landslide took a mixture of rock and ice into a valley that “contains buried ice” as well, she says, providing the water that “resulted in the hyperconcentrated flow, which took so many lives”.

How have temperatures risen in the affected region? 

Global temperatures have risen by roughly 1.4C since the pre-industrial period. However, this increase is not uniform across the planet, with some regions warming faster than others. 

A study published in Global and Planetary Change in June 2026 investigated changes in the Langtang catchment – a river basin in central Nepal, in which the Langtang-Lirung mountain is located, which eventually drains into the Ganges. Around one-quarter of the area is made up of glaciers.

The paper found that glacial areas of the catchment – found at 4,000 metres above sea level – warmed at 0.31C per decade over 1960-2023. This was “more than three times” the rate observed at a lower elevation weather station, the authors said.

Looking in more detail at the site of the glacial collapse, Dr Robert Rohde, chief scientist for Berkeley Earth, used ERA5 reanalysis data to show how temperature has changed at the 5,200-metre elevation site where the mass of ice and rock broke loose. 

Rohde’s analysis found that June-to-August temperatures have been rising at the site of the glacier collapse since the year 1940, with 2026’s summer the fourth warmest on record, behind 2024, 2025 and 2022. This is shown in the graph below.

Average summer (June-August) temperature at the ice-rock avalanche site over 1940-2026. Data source: Rohde, Bluesky (2026)

Rohde also found that the days leading up to the disaster recorded the hottest August temperatures ever experienced at the site. This is shown in the graph below.

Daily average temperature, from 1 June-1 September, at the ice-rock avalanche site. 2026, 2025 and 2024 are shown in dark, mid and light blue. All other years from 1940-2023 are shown in grey. Source: Rohde, Bluesky (2026)

On social media, Rohde stated:

“Given the warming trend, this Nepali glacier had probably been thinning and weakening for years, or even decades. But it ultimately failed during the warmest week in one of its warmest years on record. It would be a hell of a coincidence if global warming wasn’t at least partially to blame.”

How have rising temperatures affected mountain stability?

Many experts have linked warming temperatures in the region to thawing permafrost – ground that has been frozen for at least two consecutive years, whose thickness ranges from less than one metre to more than a kilometre. 

Steiner is part of a research team that has been using sensors to monitor permafrost in the region since 2014. He tells Carbon Brief that it is “pretty clear” the permafrost has been thawing “very actively” at elevations as high as 5,200 metres above sea level “for many years”. He adds:

“This means that the ground has, over the last decades, moved from being in a solid state into – at least, periodically during the warm season – patchy ground where some is frozen and some isn’t…

“If you have frozen ground next to non-frozen ground, you have dynamics happening between that because there are different densities and there’s movement happening, which is conducive to interventional failure – and that we know from many other cases.”

Davies also points to the “degradation” of perennially frozen ground as a factor in the disaster:

“This permafrost acts as a glue to hold together the rocks and, as it melts, the rock can become weakened.”

Permafrost thaw can also result in saturated ground, says Davies, which adds “pressure in the joints” of rock and can “facilitate” failure. She continues:

“Sources of the water include melting permafrost and meltwater from the overlying glacier. We know that this event happened during a period of warmth, but in the absence of heavy precipitation, pointing to ice melt as the source of water.”

A 2025 study of rock and ice avalanches in High Mountain Asia found that more than two-thirds started in areas “where permafrost is probable”.

How have glaciers retreated in the affected region?

Glaciers – frozen rivers of ice holding three-quarters of the global freshwater supply – are extremely vulnerable to climate change.

In the Himalaya, the rate of glacier retreat has doubled since the late 20th century, according to a 2019 study in Science Advances.

The Global and Planetary Change study found that glacier area loss rates in the Langtang catchment increased more than fourfold from 1964 to 2023 – with melting accelerating after 2000.

It added that glaciers in the region also experienced “fragmentation” and “widespread thinning” over this period.

The study noted that this loss “coincided with elevation dependent warming”.

The figure below provides an overview of glacier loss in the Langtang catchment over 1964-2023, with orange, red and dark red indicating areas of retreat.

In addition, green dots note points of glacier fragmentation, while blue dots show separation and pink show disconnection.

Glacier loss in the Langtang catchment over 1964-2023. Orange, red and dark red indicate areas of retreat. Green dots note points of glacier fragmentation, while blue dots show separation and pink show disconnection. Credit: Silwal et al. (2026)

In comments released by the University of Reading, Prof Maria Shahgedanova, a climate scientist researching climate impacts on mountain glaciers, said that the glacier involved in the floods had “retreated by approximately 450 metres between 1990 and 2020”.

She adds that this “potentially reduce[d] the mechanical support provided by the glacier to the underlying rock slope”.

Speaking to Carbon Brief, Davies reiterates that the retreat of the glacier is “potentially a contributing factor” to the bedrock collapse and subsequent disaster.

This is because the removal of the glacier from the lower slopes leaves the “upper rock slopes less stable”, she says.

The most recent assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development said that glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region are “rapidly shrinking” as a result of climate change. (This region extends 3,500km over Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.)

It said this loss is threatening the safety of the nearly two billion people, including by increasing the risk of “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs). A GLOF is a sudden and catastrophic release of meltwater from a glacial lake. 

Although this disaster was not caused by a GLOF, it is known that climate change is making such events more likely.

Can the event be attributed to climate change?

In the wake of the flash floods, climate campaigners, media outlets and Nepalese politicians have linked them to human-caused climate change.

However, many climate scientists have cautioned that it is too early to say precisely how climate change impacted the disaster. 

Davies tells Carbon Brief:

“These events happen so quickly that the exact causes and drivers can take a little time to uncover, especially if the event was a surprise and there had been no monitoring system in place.”

When trying to determine the role human-caused climate change played in the intensity or likelihood of extreme weather, scientists turn to the field of “attribution science”. 

To date, no formal rapid attribution study has been produced that attempts to quantify whether – and how – climate change contributed to the event.

Scientists have noted that climate attribution of ice-rock avalanches – which are typically driven by a variety of factors – remains limited, in part because of the lack of a long-term observational record of previous collapses in high mountain areas.

Meanwhile, the studies that do exist stop short of directly linking such disasters to climate change. For example, the authors of a 2021 study into the Chamoli ice-rock avalanche concluded that “we cannot attribute this individual disaster specifically to climate change”. 

However, they added, the “possibly increasing frequency of high-mountain slope instabilities can likely be related to observed atmospheric warming and corresponding long-term changes in cryospheric conditions (glaciers and permafrost)”.

In the aftermath of the disaster, many researchers have similarly highlighted that climate change could not be singled out as the cause of the disaster, even if warming likely increased the probability of its occurrence.

On the Climate Brink substack, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather noted that a “definitive single-event attribution” of the more recent disaster “may never be possible” due to the “messy causality of rock-ice avalanches”.

However, he added that both the existing scientific literature and “essentially every scientist working on these hazards point in the same direction” – namely, that warming is making such events more likely in the Himalaya.

Steiner tells Carbon Brief it might be possible to attribute different factors that played a role in the disasters to climate change – for instance, the recession of the glacier – but it would be more difficult to do so for the event as a whole.

Part of the reason for this, he says, is that rock failures in this region of the Himalaya have occurred for millennia, well before humans started altering the climate. 

However, he continues:

“The physics of it is not something that has been made possible by climate change. This could have happened without it. But the chance of it happening – and the likelihood of it happening five years after a previous, similar event [in Chamoli] – we, as the scientific community, can be pretty confident about that [being increased because of a changing climate].

“This is because so many of the changes that we know are related to climate change can potentially drive the build-up to eventual failure.”

Ultimately, says Davies, a “careful attribution study is needed, but it is hard to argue that the rapidly warming climate is not having an effect in these regions”. She adds:

“A single event may have multiple drivers, but we are seeing an increase in these events and are likely to see more as the permafrost and glacier melt continues.”

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The post Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Comandante Tacho, headquarters of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), La Realidad, Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas, México (1996) Photo: Orin Langelle/GJEP

This article Making change from the dirt up was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Twenty-eight years ago, a group of neighbors in downtown Tucson, Arizona, led by permaculture designer Brad Lancaster, cut curbs in their neighborhood to let rainwater into the verge, where they guerrilla-planted indigenous flora. These and other crimes made their once-barren neighborhood an urban refuge. Then they put on their lobbying hats; today, Tucson’s government gives financial incentives to do what the scofflaws once did illegally.

When I first moved back to Tucson part-time to find good care for my mother, I met David Walker, a friend of Brad’s with another ambitious vision: Use a huge, extremely destructive weed called buffelgrass — imported from Africa by the USDA and Big Cattle, for feed — to make beautiful adobe housing for the unhoused, while paying them to help build it. He imagined a network of brickyards, sponsored by the city and providing not only money but food, music, community and new skills to people in need, and to anyone. 

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This felt like the best idea I’d ever heard, and once my mother was finally in good hands I helped gather a group of university students and others to start making it a reality. Long story short, today we have a functioning prototype brickyard where volunteers — and, soon, a number of unhoused people paid by a local non-profit — pull buffelgrass, mold it with dirt and water into 4-foot-long bricks, eat freshly cooked food and make friends. We’re working towards five buffelgrass-adobe structures, including a low-income row house and two low-income accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, in backyards volunteered by their owners. This isn’t mutual aid, or not only: Once these pilot projects prove viable, we’ll lobby the city to sponsor this kind of low-income housing at scale, for a fraction of the cost of commercial construction and a whole lot more social, ecological and aesthetic benefit. Never having lobbied before, I don’t know all that’s involved, but several city officials have been very supportive, and Brad has given us a good roadmap. 

Escaping the corporate maze

In Tucson, regular people — especially the less privileged — once built their own houses from dirt and plants and water, and could repair them when needed. Then, in the 1960s, the city razed most of downtown, uprooting hundreds of families to make way for a brutalist convention center meant to attract business dollars. Today, what remains of that old adobe neighborhood is one of the most prized parts of the city to live in and homes there command the highest prices. Building adobe structures citywide to serve the unhoused could be a way for the city to make amends for those 1960s-era crimes against people, community and aesthetics. 

Buffelgrass-adobe housing would also be an improvement over commercially built shelters, and not only because they’d be cheaper to build and run and a whole lot nicer to live in: The ways corporations make buildings, even “green” ones, ruin natural landscapes, emit massive carbon and fuel a race to the bottom among providers of raw materials. 

Volunteers pack adobe-coated buffelgrass into brick. (Beihua Guo/Barrio Buffelworks)

In other forms of housing for vulnerable populations, it’s the corporate structure itself that’s the source of the problem — but that, too, could be fairly straightforward to fix, at the municipal level at least. 

When my mother was diagnosed with dementia and keeping her in her home proved untenable, I found a nearby facility that was part of a statewide chain called The Villas. The place was as stately and manicured as its name suggests, but a host of dysfunctions appeared soon enough: neglect of some residents, conflict between staff and management, and so much turnover that I sometimes couldn’t keep track of who the director was, let alone staff. For want of activities, the TV often served as a caregiver. I visited other facilities that looked just as good, but all clearly had the same problems, or worse: one large branch of Atria Senior Living, with more than a billion dollars of revenues yearly, informed me that they didn’t even have a staff nurse for residents and so couldn’t administer medicines on an as-needed basis, for anxiety or anything else. (Atria did not respond by deadline for a comment request for this piece.)

I finally stumbled onto a large independent facility and was able to settle my mother there. This place is owned by a local couple who built it and now help to run it. They don’t advertise, and the building is unimpressive, but the high-ceilinged inside is airy and bright, with big windows everywhere onto a courtyard that — in contrast to the perfunctory runs of some corporate places — is lush and green, with a path that weaves through three distinct zones. It also has chickens and rabbits, plus one gregarious tortoise named Penelope; the owners know animals are good for those with dementia, and to hell with the small extra cost. Besides the full-time medical staff there is also a full-time activities director and a music director, and the TV stays off except for occasional movie nights. The staff changed little in my mother’s last years, and we both formed valuable bonds with several of them.

Local ownership may not guarantee this kind of quality, but I’ve come to believe that corporate ownership guarantees quite the opposite. The hierarchy required to run a chain of facilities manufactures a kind of psychopathy: People at the top, making decisions for profit, are shielded by layers of management from what their decisions might mean. Local owners, by contrast, must face the results of their decisions; to be as cutthroat as chains they’d need to be actual psychopaths — and luckily that’s pretty rare.

To make eldercare less psychopathic at local levels, we could disincentivize ownership of more than one care facility. Getting good-enough city governments to do this would take lots of legwork, but it would be possible. Just as corporate lobbyists work hard to accomplish their aims — like building water-guzzling data centers in the desert near Tucson, against the city’s wishes — regular people can also lobby and win, as Brad and his cohort proved.  

Local change can be deeper change

Back when the Yes Men began in early 2000, we thought the world just needed a few giant tweaks. The final action of our first movie was a fictional mega-tweak: a reform of the World Trade Organization to serve human people instead of big corporate ones. Over the next two decades we never let go of the feeling that change at the top could occur through public pressure, and we communicated that through dozens of actions.

Today, of course, positive change at the federal level is unimaginable in the U.S. At that level, and in some cities and states, progress can only occur through changes in leadership — as has happened in New York City. But in most cities, and many states, the government’s good enough as it is: We just have to use it to fix what’s been broken in better, creative ways. That can also change worlds: Many movements, like women’s suffrage and marriage equality, spread city to city and state to state before changing national policy.

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And who knows? The takeover of farming and manufacturing by big corporations destroyed rural economies, creating deep hardship that a tin-pot wannabe dictator turned into false grievances. Maybe building the muscles we need to declare independence from big corporations could not only help us to solve big problems now, but even help prevent future slides into fascism. That’s just theory; what’s certain is that it’s great fun to get our hands dirty. 

This story was produced in partnership with The Yes Men substack.

This article Making change from the dirt up was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.

Does hosting wind turbines provide farmers with additional income?

Wind projects provide farmers with substantial economic benefits while allowing most land to remain in agricultural use.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates about 98% of land within a typical wind project remains available for farming, grazing, or other uses.

Meanwhile, farmers who host turbines can receive long-term lease payments that provide additional income and financial stability. One study found that farmers with turbines invested about twice as much in their farms, while 80% had plans for who would take over or inherit the farm, compared with 62% of farmers without turbines.

Compared with the small amount of farmland used by turbines, unmitigated climate change poses broader risks to agriculture through heat, drought, shifting pests, and reduced crop yields.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact

This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.

Sources

NREL Examining Supply-Side Options to Achieve 100% Clean Electricity by 2035

Handbook of Sustainability and Social Science Research Wind Energy and Rural Community Sustainability

Center for Rural Affairs Navigating Land Leases for Wind and Solar

IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land: Chapter 5

Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles

Please use this form to provide feedback about this fact brief. This will help us to better gauge its impact and usability. Thank you!

About fact briefs published on Gigafact

Fact briefs are short, credibly sourced summaries that offer "yes/no" answers in response to claims found online. They rely on publicly available, often primary source data and documents. Fact briefs are created by contributors to Gigafact — a nonprofit project looking to expand participation in fact-checking and protect the democratic process. See all of our published fact briefs here.

Chinese industry is beginning to shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, with wind, solar and batteries progressively displacing coal, oil and gas across the industrial sectors that made the country the world’s factory and largest carbon emitter, a new analysis shows.

Clean electricity met all of China’s demand growth in 2025 and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade, even as electricity demand rose by 5%, the report found.

Despite a rebound in coal power generation in the first half of 2026, the analysis by global energy think-tank Ember found the growth in clean electricity illustrates a longer-term shift: a massive build-out of wind, solar energy and battery storage and deepening electrification of the economy are starting to make a dent in the fossil-fuel energy system supporting China’s industrial base.

China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain

The research identifies early signs that a structural transformation of China’s industrial economy from coal, oil and gas to clean electricity is underway, even if changes on the ground are not yet reflected in national data.  

“The energy foundation of the Chinese industrial economy is shifting,” Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at Ember and the report’s lead author, told Climate Home News.

“Fossil fuels are progressively being replaced in the many functions they have historically assumed. Because of that, fossil fuel peaking is increasingly coming into view,” he said.

Electrifying industry

Coal generation has stopped growing in 17 of the 26 provinces and regions analysed by Ember between 2021 and 2025. This includes industrial centres such as Hunan in southern China and Shandong – home to energy-intensive industries like cement production. Together, these regions are home to more than half of China’s thermal power capacity.

A greater share of the Chinese economy is now running on electricity than in other major economies, accounting for 29% of final energy consumption in 2024, compared with about 23% in Europe and 21% in the US. Less than half of China’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of the year.

• Aug 6, 2026 News China’s coal power rebounds as record clean energy goes to waste Long-term contracts guarantee coal plants buyers regardless of demand, crowding out renewables, report finds Read more
• Jun 22, 2026 Comment China’s coal-chemicals boom risks repeating the mistakes of the past By reviving the problematic industry in the name of energy security, China runs the risk of higher emissions, stranded assets and setting back its ambitions as a clean energy leader Read more
• Jun 4, 2026 Energy China’s carbon emissions rise again as more clean power is wasted The economic powerhouse burned more coal and gas in the first quarter of 2026, despite record wind and solar build-out Read more

Meanwhile, fossil fuel use has fallen in eight of 11 tracked industrial sectors, declining between 26% and 71% from peak consumption levels across fossil fuel extraction, manufacturing industries such as textiles, machinery and food and beverages, transport equipment and chemical materials.

Earlier this year, German company BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, opened a new facility in southern China, which is fully supplied by renewable energy. The company said emissions from the site could be 50% lower than conventional petrochemical facilities.

An employee walks near fields of heliostat mirrors at the site of Dunhuang Shouhang 100MW Tower Solar Thermal Power Generation Project, during an organised media tour to Dunhuang Photovoltaic Industrial Park, in Gansu province, China (Photo: REUTERS/Tingshu Wang) An employee walks near fields of heliostat mirrors at the site of Dunhuang Shouhang 100MW Tower Solar Thermal Power Generation Project, during an organised media tour to Dunhuang Photovoltaic Industrial Park, in Gansu province, China (Photo: REUTERS/Tingshu Wang)

In easier-to-electrify sectors such as machinery, electronics and textiles, electricity now supplies about three-quarters of final energy consumption, Ember found.

Fossil fuel use is also showing signs of flattening in the metals smelting and processing sector – one of the most fossil-intensive parts of the economy – offering “encouraging signs” that the transformation is starting to take hold in harder-to-abate sectors, said Yang.

“If that is happening in more and more provinces, and more and more economic sectors that means that fossil fuels are progressively being squeezed out of the energy system,” he said.

“Growing by greening”

China’s vast cleantech manufacturing power has become an engine for growth in its own right, spurring investment, creating jobs and generating export revenues.

Yang described this “growing-by-greening” dynamic as “turning each step of the transition into a source of strength for the next”.

China and Brazil join pledge to triple global nuclear energy capacity

For Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, this is part of what makes China’s lead in manufacturing clean energy equipment “irreversible”, comparing its growth with that of a rainforest, where different parts of the ecosystem thrive by reinforcing one another.   

The early success of deploying wind and solar helped drive down electricity costs, which created favourable conditions for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and in turn boosted demand for batteries that are now critical to balance the grid.

A livestreamer promotes coal during a livestreaming session for Huaze Coal Industry on the Douyin app (Photo:REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration) A livestreamer promotes coal during a livestreaming session for Huaze Coal Industry on the Douyin app (Photo:REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration)

An oversupply of renewable energy incentivised industrial players to benefit from cheap and readily available clean power generation, encouraging innovative solutions to electrify other parts of the economy. In the transport sector, for example, electrification is moving from passenger vehicles to harder-to-electrify trucks.

This abundance of cheap green energy is also making China competitive in what has long been seen as the anchor of Western competitiveness, Li said.

Stalling fossil fuel use

At the same time, China’s huge legacy fossil fuel generation capacity is still expanding, even as coal power plants are being used less intensively.

China brought 30 GW of new coal power capacity into operation in the first six months of the year and coal-fired generation rose 3% over the same period after local governments fast-tracked coal projects to prevent a repeat of severe power shortages in 2021.

Solar surge kept fossil electricity flat in 2025 as China and India made ‘historic’ shift

A further 274 GW of coal capacity is either under construction or has permits to be built while vast amounts of solar and wind power that could not be absorbed by the grid have gone to waste in the first half of the year.

“This doesn’t mean that the transition is losing steam,” said Yang, arguing that China is now grappling with some of the more complex aspects of the transition.

A recent analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief found that China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement have plateaued for more than two years following a peak in March 2024. Ember found that on a 12-month moving average, coal generation has been stalling since then, following years of continuous expansion.

• Jun 24, 2026 News EU, UK lead push for electrification as “powerful weapon” against fossil fuels A group of dozens of countries seeks to build momentum for a COP31 pledge to electrify 35% of global energy use by 2035 as an alternative to fossil fuels Read more
• Jun 9, 2026 Politics COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification Co-hosts Türkiye and Australia want countries to sign on to global targets in three of their priority areas for this year’s COP climate negotiations Read more
• Jul 16, 2026 Comment Africa can lead the Age of Electrification The electrification agenda presents both an extraordinary opportunity for Africa and an immense challenge for the continent Read more

In the second quarter of the year, CO2 emissions fell by 1% after China’s oil consumption plummeted 9% as the US-Iran war prevented the transport of oil cargoes from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.

The electrification of the transport sector, particularly electric trucks, was the biggest driver in displacing oil demand as the conflict in the Middle East accelerated the transition.

A lesson in sequencing

China’s bumpy transition offers a useful lesson for other countries at an earlier stage of their transition, said Xunpeng Shi, president of the Sydney-based International Society of Energy Transition Studies (ISETS), a global network of professionals that shares research and fosters collaborations.  

“Build quickly enough so that clean electricity can start taking over and prepare for the pressure on the fossil system before it arrives, because that is the part nobody has done easily,” he said.

For countries that are heavily reliant on revenue from fossil fuel exports, a peak in Chinese fossil fuel use weakens the assumption of rising demand on which investments have long been made.

“For them, the time to plan for that is now, while the revenues are still there,” he said.

The post China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit appeared first on Climate Home News.

The outbreak of multiple regional wars, the global increase in military spending, and the fractious trade wars in response to Trump’s tariffs are all signs...

The post Canadian nationalism won’t save us from Trump’s aggression; working class struggle will first appeared on Spring.

Safer choices: What to know about eyelash serums JR Culpepper September 8, 2026

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Growing demand for the  “clean girl aesthetic” and lightweight, minimalist makeup, has influencers and everyday buyers reaching for eyelash serums.

These lash serums range from prescription, prostaglandin-based medications that grow your lashes to cosmetics with hydrating ingredients that may give your lashes a fuller look.

All that goodness can come with a cost, though: potential exposure to toxic chemicals that could lurk in some products, making it tougher than usual to choose which is best for you.

EWG has done the work for you by finding safer lash serum alternatives that avoid harmful ingredients.

Prostaglandin-based eyelash serums

Prostaglandins are lipids that, similar to hormones, can act like messengers to manage your body’s everyday processes. They are sometimes referred to as “hormone like” chemicals. Some eyelash serums use these chemicals to lengthen lashes’ growth phase. 

One Food and Drug Administration–approved medication for eyelash growth, bimatoprost,  is a prostaglandin derivative. It was originally studied for lowering eye pressure. But scientists noticed patients using the eyedrops were growing longer, thicker eyelashes. After more tests, the FDA approved bimatoprost as an eyelash growth serum, in 2008.

Today you can find cosmetic serums with prostaglandin-like chemicals that are not FDA-approved. These blur the line between drugs and cosmetics because, although sold as personal care products, they may have drug-like effects. 

Eyelids are more sensitive than other parts of your skin, so they’re easily irritated.

Prostaglandin-like chemicals have many adverse side effects, such as darkening of your iris or eyelid, eye irritation and fat loss around your eyes. 

To avoid these ingredients in cosmetics, check lash serum labels for ingredients that end in “-prost” or “-prostone.” If you struggle with lash growth and are looking for clinical results, consult your dermatologist about FDA-approved options before reaching for prostaglandin-based cosmetic products.

Non-prostaglandin eyelash serums

Lash conditioning serums without prostaglandin can also help make lashes look fuller without hormone–like ingredients, though they do not generally grow your lashes. 

Eyelash conditioning serums and even some types of mascara use moisturizing ingredients, vitamins and more to promote lash health. 

Emollients like castor oil are low hazard and can help hydrate or condition lashes. Amino acids like glutamic acid or alanine are also low-hazard serum ingredients that may help strengthen and protect lash structure. 

Still, the eye and the surrounding area are sensitive, so EWG recommends trying a product on a different part of skin first, then applying it only to your lashes. Always avoid getting products in your eye.

We’ve curated a list of EWG Verified® and low-hazard lash serums rated a 1 or 2 – meaning low hazard –  in Skin Deep®, EWG’s free, searchable database of personal care products. Products that bear the EWG Verified® have been evaluated by our scientists and meet our strictest standards of safety and transparency. 

You can find these products in store or online on sites such as Amazon, CVS and Walmart. Scan products for details on the go with our Healthy Living™ app.

EWG Verified® Kleem Organics Eyelash & Eyebrow Enhancing Serum

Available for $29.99.

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View details ATTITUDE Oceanly Mascara + Serum

Available for $27.99 on Amazon.

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View details Cliganic Castor Oil

Available at Target, Walmart and on Amazon for $18.89 .

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View details FLORISAN Organic Castor Oil

Available for $27.99 on Amazon.

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View details Cimouy Organic Castor Oil

Available on Amazon for $22.98.

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View details DIME Eyelash Boost Serum Rating

Available on Amazon for $48.

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View details Rated 1 in Skin Deep Essynaturals Eyelash & Brow Enhancing Serum

Available for $18.95 on Amazon.

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View details Sea-el Skincare, Castor Lash & Brow Serum

Available for $17.49 on Amazon.

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View details Rated 2 in Skin Deep Milani Highly Rated Lash & Brow Serum

Available for $12.99 on Amazon.

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View details Neutrogena Lash + Brow Enhancer Serum

Available at Walmart and on Amazon for $12.97.

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View details Grande Cosmetics GrandeDRAMA Intense Thickening Mascara, Black

Available for $25.99 on Amazon.

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View details Areas of Focus Personal Care Products Cosmetics Guest Authors Chimdi Ikpe, Science intern September 9, 2026

Union registered nurses at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. will hold a community forum on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026, to discuss the closure of postpartum unit 5F at Washington Hospital Center, the devastating impact of Medicaid cuts in DC, and building a health care system that works for us all.

After a summer of heatwaves, wildfires and record-breaking temperatures, new polling has revealed the UK public want Burnham’s government to take strong climate action to protect people in schools and hospitals.

The More in Common polling, commissioned by investigative climate non-profit Global Witness, revealed high levels of concern about how extreme heat impacts the NHS’ ability to treat patients (75%) and schools’ ability to teach pupils (63%).

When it came to support for targeted climate interventions, 75% of people supported the installation of solar-powered AC in schools and hospitals.Over two thirds (69%) backed a new legal maximum indoor working temperature of 30 Celsius, while 65% thought councils should be required to open free, cool public spaces with air conditioning during heatwaves (65%).

NHS doctors have told Global Witness that hospital temperatures became so high during this summer’s heatwaves that MRI scanners and CT machines cut out, with waiting times and patient flow affected. Teachers told Global Witness that staff and students fell sick during the extreme heat this summer and reported a lack of clear guidance on school closures or maximum working temperatures.

Global Witness says Andy Burnham should foot the bill for climate adaptation and mitigation by fairly taxing the oil and gas industry, who raked in big windfalls from the Iran war this year, after bumper profits following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Key polling findings

• 75% of the public were concerned about high temperatures’ impact on the NHS's ability to treat patients
• 63% were concerned about high temperatures’ impact on schools' ability to teach pupils
• 75% support the installation of solar-powered air conditioning in schools and hospitals
• 69% support a new legal maximum indoor working temperature of 30 Celsius
• When asked who should foot the bill to protect Britain from climate change, the two most popular answers were: government and taxpayers, closely followed by multinational oil and gas corporations

Global Witness senior campaigner, Flossie Boyd said:“Our schools and hospitals should be keeping people safe, but this summer many of us lost sleep worrying about our loved ones in baking hot classrooms and wards.

“MRI scanners cut out in the heat, teachers reported classrooms hitting 40 degrees and kids have fallen sick in sweltering school buildings.

“It’s scandalous that as people’s lives were put at risk this summer, the oil giants turbo-charging extreme heat were raking in sky-high profits, pushing for more dirty drilling and lower taxes.

"The climate crisis is here, and bold action is needed to keep people safe. If Burnham wants to stand up for families and working people, he should stand up to oil giants, tax them fairly and use the proceeds to fund the climate preparedness Britain desperately needs – like solar-powered AC to protect the most vulnerable.”

UNISON head of policy Sampson Low said:

"Paramedics, cleaners and other public sector workers have no choice but to carry on when the mercury rises.

"Extreme heat not only brings a rise in demand for care but can also affect the health of staff. What's needed are thresholds based on evidence. This is for jobs where work can't simply stop when a temperature is reached.

"Such an approach would allow employers to bring in measures such as extra breaks, more water and ways to cool the work environment."

Earlier this year, Global Witness sent thermometers to teachers across the UK to measure excess heat in school classrooms during the mid-June heatwave. Several teachers reported temperatures between 30 and 38 degrees - well above the recommended maximum classroom temperature of 26°C set by the National Education Union.

The TUC reignited calls for government to introduce a maximum working temperature this summer, after amber heat alerts in the South of England. They say workers should have the right to stop work if workplace temperatures reach 30C, or 27C for those doing strenuous jobs.

An increase in civilian deaths and injuries caused by cluster munitions should trigger united action among the 124 countries that are members of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, Human Rights Watch said today on the release of the “Cluster Munition Monitor 2026” by the Cluster Munition Coalition. Human Rights Watch is a founding member of the coalition and contributed to the report.

The 150-page report assesses all countries’ adherence to the 2008 convention. Cluster munitions killed or injured at least 1,063 people globally in 2025. This figure is among the highest annual totals recorded by the Cluster Munition Coalition. The actual number is most likely higher as many casualties go unreported. New casualties were recorded in nine countries in 2025: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Laos, Lebanon, Myanmar, Russia, Syria, and Ukraine. Cluster munitions continued to disproportionately affect civilians, whether from direct attacks or the remnants they leave behind. Civilians accounted for 87 percent of casualties recorded for 2025, where the civilian status was recorded.

“It’s critically important for countries to renew their commitment to the international treaty that seeks to rid the world of the scourge of cluster munitions,” said Verity Coyle, deputy crisis, conflict and arms director at Human Rights Watch. “The clearest way to do that is for all convention member states to condemn continued production, stockpiling, and transfer of cluster munitions.”

In recent months, both the United States and Türkiye have disclosed plans to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine. Both Russia and Ukraine have used cluster munitions during the war in Ukraine. Lithuania’s withdrawal from the treaty, the first member state to do so, became final in March 2025.

The country delegations meeting at the convention’s Third five-year Review Conference in Vientiane, Laos on September 14-18, 2026, should condemn the production, transfer, and use of cluster munitions by other countries and reaffirm their commitment to pressing for universal support for the ban treaty. Laos hosted the first meeting of states parties to the treaty in 2011.

There has been no confirmed use of cluster munitions by any state party since the convention was adopted in May 2008. Cluster munitions were used by non-state parties Iran, Myanmar, Russia, Thailand, and Ukraine during the reporting period of mid-2025 to mid-2026. Iran repeatedly used cluster munitions in Israel in 2026, while Thailand used them in Cambodia in 2025 in the context of their border conflict. Cluster munitions were used in northern Mali in May 2026, but it was not possible to confirm who used the weapons.

Cluster munitions can be fired from the ground by artillery, rockets, missiles, or mortars, or they can be dropped by aircraft. They typically open in the air, dispersing multiple explosive submunitions or bomblets over a wide area. Due to their wide area effect, the weapon cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants, especially when they are used in populated areas. In addition, many submunitions fail to explode on initial impact, leaving unexploded duds that can indiscriminately injure and kill—like landmines—for years, until they are found and destroyed.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions prohibits the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions and requires the clearance of explosive remnants. The Third Review Conference will address the potential for expanding treaty membership, closing funding gaps for explosive ordnance clearance programs, and providing assistance to affected communities.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions has 112 states parties and 12 signatories. The most recent country to accede to the treaty was Vanuatu in September 2025. Prior to that, South Sudan and Nigeria were the last countries to become parties, joining in 2023.

During the current reporting period there was evidence of cluster munition production in China, India, Israel, Myanmar, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, and South Korea. Eighteen countries outside of the treaty actively produce cluster munitions, maintain the capacity to do so, or have not formally committed to never producing them.

Approximately US$116 million in international and national funding was provided in 2025 to address the impact of cluster munition contamination in states parties to the convention. The US foreign assistance freeze in February 2025 disrupted the clearance of cluster munition remnants in several regions, notably in Southeast Asia. Subsequent grant terminations reduced clearance capacity in Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Sudan. Other major donors have also begun to reduce allocations and narrowed their geographic focus in response to changing political priorities.

“In the face of the continued use of cluster munitions and rising civilian casualties, member countries to the convention need to send a clear message that they will stand firm in their commitment to end all use of these indiscriminate weapons,” Coyle said.

The Cluster Munition Monitor 2026 is the 17th annual monitoring report by the Cluster Munition Coalition, the global coalition of nongovernmental organizations co-founded by Human Rights Watch in 2003. The report will be presented to countries attending the Third Review Conference of the Convention on Cluster Munitions in Vientiane, Laos on September 14-18.

Twenty years ago this summer, Al Gore delivered environmentalists a jolt of energy with the release of his climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The film was an unlikely blockbuster — who knew a slideshow could be so gripping? — that became a commercial and critical success, eventually earning Gore an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize. His 100-minute monologue helped catapult global warming to the center of the political discourse.

But if the film landed with bang, it ended with something of a whimper. As the credits rolled, the filmmakers offered the audience some ideas for how they could help combat climate change. The top suggestion for “changing the way you live” was to “buy energy-efficient appliances: lightbulbs.”

The best thing we could do to stop sea-level rise and the eventual inundation of lower Manhattan was to swap out our lightbulbs? To many environmentalists, it felt like bringing a squirt gun to a world war.

The gap between the problem at hand and the proffered solution was “enough to sink your heart,” as author Michael Pollan put it in a 2008 essay for The New York Times Magazine.

The criticism of the film’s final minutes was so withering that eventually Gore himself would have to backpedal and began frequently telling people that it was just as important to “change laws” as change lightbulbs. Twenty years on, “change your lightbulbs” has become a metaphor for a wan kind of environmentalism, an easy punchline for greens trying to make a point.

But here’s the thing: In the decades since An Inconvenient Truth was released, Americans did, in fact, swap out their lightbulbs. As they did, they helped to check U.S. electricity-demand growth for the better part of a generation and avoided the release of many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of tons of heat-trapping carbon pollution.

When it came to lightbulbs, Al Gore was right. Changing tens of millions of lightbulbs, it turns out, helped change the real world.

The story of how Americans made a remarkably swift and widespread switch from inefficient incandescent lightbulbs to compact fluorescents and LEDs offers important lessons for climate activists today. The experience supplies a proof of concept for how engineering innovations can overwhelm an entrenched technology. It’s an example of how basic household economics — or if you prefer, the market — can shift an entire sector in a virtuous direction.

And, perhaps most importantly, it’s evidence that individual actions do make a difference — as long as they are taken collectively and at scale.

“I think this is one of the least appreciated, most important energy innovations of recent history,” says Lucas Davis, a professor of energy economics at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

From 2005 to 2020, U.S. electricity demand growth was essentially flat, according to the Energy Information Agency. During that same period, the U.S. population grew by more than 30 million people and economic growth was relatively steady (minus, of course, the dip of the Great Recession). Yet all those new people and all that additional economic activity required almost no new electricity. To some environmentalists, it seemed the United States had reached the long-sought goal of decoupling electricity consumption from economic activity.

A primary cause of the plateau in electricity usage was the significant decline in residential electricity consumption. That decline was driven by several factors, including an across-the-board improvement in the efficiency of household appliances.

But the drop in lighting’s share of electricity demand was particularly sharp. In a remarkably short period, households and businesses swapped out their inefficient incandescent bulbs (which wasted most of their electricity as heat and which had barely changed since the days of Thomas Edison), for CFLs (a technology that’s now on the decline) and LEDs. When Gore made his movie, illumination accounted for about 15% of home energy use. Today it’s about 6% — roughly two-fifths of what it used to be. That’s a big deal.

“The really striking thing about LED lightbulbs is the large percentage reduction in consumption,” says Davis, who charted the transformation in a 2017 paper. “Imagine you were driving a car that gets 30 miles per gallon and you were able to trade it in for one that gets 300 miles per gallon.”

New lightbulbs cut illumination’s electricity usage on a bulb-by-bulb level by roughly 90%. If you’re wondering why lighting’s total share of electricity demand only dropped by 60-some percent, it’s because as lighting got cheaper, people used more of it. Even so, no other electricity-end-use innovation of the 21st century comes close.

“Refrigerators have become massively more energy efficient,” Davis explains, “but today’s refrigerators don’t use 90% less than the incumbent technology. So it’s a big change.”

Davis is an economist, and so naturally he views this success story through a market lens. When consumers were offered a product (LEDs) that could perform the same function as the old technology (incandescents) and which were much more durable and therefore cheaper than replacing your lightbulbs every few months, consumers quickly made the switch. According to Davis, between 2008 and 2016 — the flick of a light switch in macroeconomic time — the price of LEDs plummeted by 94%, making them something of a no-brainer.

It’s true that energy efficiency standards put in place by the Biden administration effectively banned the old-fashioned incandescents. But — and this needs to be emphasized — consumers had already made the switch before the government mandate. In 2020 nearly half of American homes were using LEDs for all or most of their lighting; by 2024, that number was almost two-thirds.

Ultimately, the economic gravity of a superior product was implacable.

That’s a happy takeaway for climate activists. You don’t have to squint hard to see how the lighting success story could be applied to other modern necessities.

Take heating and cooling, which gobble up nearly a third of all electricity used by American households. Heat pumps are far more efficient than oil or gas furnaces and standard air conditioning, and consumers are starting to notice. For four years straight, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces, and last year, for the first time ever, heat pumps accounted for more than half the heating-and-cooling technology in new apartment construction. The heat pump tipping point doesn’t seem far away.

Or take transportation, the largest source of U.S. carbon pollution. You can think of electric vehicles as the LEDs of the auto sector. EVs are obviously vastly more efficient than internal combustion engine models, and EVs easily outmatch gas-powered vehicles on performance metrics like acceleration and handling. It’s true that EVs are pricier upfront, but they’re cheaper in the long run due to lower fuel costs and minimal maintenance costs. Even though Americans have been slow to adopt EVs, sales in the rest of the world are booming. As the EV cost curve bends downward, the internal combustion engine will succumb to the same economic gravity that dragged down the incandescent bulb. Quality trumps ideology or nostalgia.

Beyond the lessons of technology and markets, the lightbulb conversion story offers climate activists another, more profound teaching, one that has to do with the role of individual action in making broad social change.

In some circles, it’s become fashionable to dismiss the role of individual action as a solution to our environmental woes. According to this view, individual action is, at best, performative virtue-signaling and, at worst, lets the oil and gas companies off the hook for their primary role in fueling the climate crisis. The carbon footprint calculator is a Big Oil scheme — didn’t you know?

The lightbulb story offers a real-life rebuttal to the view that individual action is a distraction in the effort to fight climate change. Sure, if you’re the only person to switch a lightbulb, nothing much happens. But swap a billion lightbulbs and the world begins to look different.

“The individual choices added up to a lot because there were so many of them,” says Amory Lovins, a cofounder of the clean energy think tank RMI who also teaches energy efficiency at Stanford. “Doing many small things with very large numbers of diverse actors can be faster than doing a few big things requiring specialized institutions.”

This is not to say that policy action is unnecessary. The transition to heat pumps and EVs may be implacable in the long run. But, famously, in the long run we’re all dead — which is why we need smart policy to spur those transitions at the speed and scale required.

Truly, social change is an alloy: Lasting progress requires a combination of policy making and individual citizen action. The Inflation Reduction Act — the American climate movement’s signature policy achievement to date — reflected this wisdom. The law (which has been largely dismantled by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans) briefly created the political and economic conditions for accelerating the clean energy transition. It offered households financial incentives for installing rooftop solar, putting in heat pumps, and purchasing electric vehicles.

But those government nudges toward a clean energy economy could only accomplish their goals if people decided to take advantage of them. Without individuals’ commitment to climate action, policy levers would be useless.

The carrot only works if someone snatches it.

It can seem as if those who pooh-pooh the power of individual action or who blithely dismissed Gore’s lightbulb moment have never encountered a get-out-the-vote campaign. As any veteran of a get-out-the-vote push knows, elections are a team sport. And at the same time, every door knocked is an attempt to get an individual voter to the polls.

Similarly, building a truly sustainable society will require countless individual actions — votes, as it were, in the form of personal behavior. Stabilizing the climate and protecting biodiversity require that each of us eat less meat, fly fewer miles, install some rooftop solar, and trade in the gas-guzzler for an electric vehicle — and that we do these things not as atomized solo actors, but as individual members of a collective movement.

Ultimately, individual climate action in the absence of robust government climate policy is little more than moral drudgery. Climate policy that makes no demands for individual behavior change is just a political mirage. But policy that’s linked to individual agency, individual commitment, and individual action — well, that’s the hope of the world.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Insects Are Disappearing — Here’s How to Help

 

The post Al Gore Was Right appeared first on The Revelator.

Deadly US-Israeli coalition attacks on densely populated areas of Tehran in March 2026, that killed and injured dozens of civilians, must urgently be independently and impartially investigated to determine whether they constitute war crimes, Amnesty International said in a new briefing published today. The organization is calling for accountability and redress for possible indiscriminate attacks in violation of international humanitarian law as hostilities continue to escalate between the USA and Iran.

The recent escalation between the USA and Iran – with reports of civilian casualties in a deadly US attack on a wedding celebration in Hormozgan province on 1 September 2026, and Iran’s retaliatory attacks on Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq and Bahrain – demonstrates that the risks to civilians across the region remain high.

The organization’s investigation into air strikes on Niloufar, Resalat, and Javadieh neighbourhoods of Tehran between 1 and 13 March 2026 found evidence that explosive weapons with wide area effects were used in densely populated areas, killing and injuring civilians and causing extensive damage to homes, businesses and other civilian buildings.

In Resalat, air strikes destroyed or damaged a facility belonging to one of the Basij battalions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as three nearby buildings – at least one of which was a residential building – killing 16 civilians. In Niloufar and Javadieh, at least 25 civilians were killed during air strikes that caused destruction or damage to police stations as well as widespread damage to nearby homes and other civilian structures.

Police are normally considered civilians under international humanitarian law unless they are incorporated into the armed forces or are directly participating in hostilities. In Iran, the police force is part of the broader armed forces structure and therefore police stations may qualify as military objectives. While the USA and Israel announced strikes on “regime” targets in Tehran in March 2026, neither confirmed carrying out these three specific attacks.

“The available evidence in Tehran points to a series of strikes using explosive weapons with wide area effects on security-related facilities within densely populated urban areas, with devastating and yet entirely predictable consequences for civilians. The civilian death toll, the scale of destruction, the timing of the attacks, the impact on nearby civilian structures and the lack of effective advance warnings point to alarming failures by the US-Israeli coalition to abide by the obligations to take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm and spare civilian objects,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International

“The US/Israeli strikes in Tehran investigated by Amnesty International may constitute indiscriminate attacks and amount to war crimes. They must be the object of independent, impartial, effective and transparent investigations.

The available evidence in Tehran points to a series of strikes using explosive weapons with wide area effects on security-related facilities within densely populated urban areas, with devastating and yet entirely predictable consequences for civilians
Agnès Callamard, Secretary General

“Amid the resumption of US strikes in Iran and renewed threats by US President Donald Trump to target civilian infrastructure, it is imperative that the US and Israel end all unlawful attacks and strictly comply with international humanitarian law, including by taking all feasible precautions to avoid, and in any event minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects during the planning and execution of military operations. The same international law obligations apply to Iran while carrying out retaliatory attacks, including against Gulf states.”

Amnesty International renews its calls for an enduring ceasefire, and accountability for the unlawful US and Israeli attacks on Iran in violation of the UN Charter, and for all violations of international humanitarian law.

The organization also calls on the USA, Israel, and Iran to invite the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission to conduct enquiries into allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law by all parties, including attacks on energy infrastructure; and urges the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly to consider all possible avenues to deliver and ensure peace, security and justice for all unlawful attacks in Iran.

Amnesty International analysed satellite imagery, as well as verifying 60 videos published online in relation to the three incidents. The organization also reviewed official public statements made by authorities in Iran, Israel and the USA and conducted interviews with two individuals inside Iran. Pseudonyms are used to protect their security. Amnesty International wrote to Israeli and US authorities on 17 July 2026 and to Iranian authorities on 31 July 2026. No response was received by the time of publication.

AIR STRIKES IN NILOUFAR

At least 20 civilians were killed in the attack in Niloufar Square in central Tehran on 1 March 2026, according to information gathered by Amnesty International from eyewitness accounts, media reports, and statements from Iranian officials. The attack took place at around 9pm when restaurants and cafes were open and the presence of civilians was readily foreseeable.

The evidence gathered indicates that the attack directly struck and destroyed the 104 Abbas Abad Police Station (Kalantari 104), located on Eshghyar Street in Niloufar Square.

Stills from a video showing the impact of the strike on buildings and cars in Niloufar Square. © VahidOnline

Verified videos show that the blast destroyed the police station and caused extensive damage to surrounding apartment buildings, shops and other civilian structures located up to approximately 100 metres away.

A journalist who visited the site said the devastation extended well beyond the police station, leaving multiple apartment buildings uninhabitable and killing civilians, including a father and son who worked at a nearby bakery.

Satellite imagery from 1 March 2026(left) shows the police station building. On 6 March 2026 (right) imagery shows the building has been destroyed. The yellow circle highlights areas of damage and destruction visible in the imagery which extend beyond the police building. ©Planet Labs PBC
AIR STRIKES IN RESALAT

At least 16 civilians were killed and dozens injured during an attack in the densely built-up neighbourhood of Resalat, a populated district in eastern Tehran, at around 2.30pm local time on 9 March 2026, according to information gathered by Amnesty International from open-source evidence, eyewitness accounts, state media reports, and statements from Iranian officials and the Iranian Red Crescent.

According to Amnesty International’s research, the attack directly struck a facility belonging to a Basij battalion of the IRGC.

Amnesty International is unable to independently verify the exact number of strikes that took place and the nature of all buildings impacted in Resalat but satellite imagery analysed by the organization shows four distinct buildings where heavy damage and destruction are visible, including a residential building known as “Number 12” (Pelak-e 12). An eyewitness told Amnesty International that at least 13 civilians in residential building Number 12 were killed, including the building’s caretaker and 12 members of one family.

Evidence gathered by Amnesty International, including satellite imagery and videos as well as witness accounts, indicates that Number 12 was likely struck separately from the Basij facility.

Satellite imagery from 6 March 2026 (left) shows Basij facility and nearby buildings in the Resalat neighbourhood. On 21 March 2026 (right), imagery shows four distinct buildings with heavy damage and destruction © 2026 Planet Labs PBC AIR STRIKES IN JAVADIEH

At least five civilians, members of the same family, were killed and dozens injured during an attack in the densely populated neighbourhood of Javadieh in southern Tehran at around midday on 13 March 2026, according to information gathered by Amnesty International from state media reports and statements from Iranian officials.

Satellite imagery taken between 11 and 14 March 2026 and audiovisual evidence show that the attack destroyed parts of Police Station 117 (Kalantari 117) on Ghorbani Street and other buildings nearby.

Satellite imagery from 5 June 2025 (left) shows the police station gate and surrounding area. On 5 April 2026, imagery shows the area of destruction, highlighted with a yellow circle (centre) . On 10 May 2026, imagery shows the areas that were cleared in red extending beyond the area of heavy destruction, further suggesting other buildings were heavily impacted and were cleared during the clean-up (right).©Planet Labs PBC

Verified videos show the blast impact extending up to more than 50 metres and causing severe damage to surrounding residential and commercial buildings. One verified video shows emergency and rescue workers carrying out rescue operations. Amnesty International’s weapons experts analysed a photograph published by state media showing individuals standing around two dark, cylindrical pieces of metal lying on the ground and identified the objects as consistent with a component of a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), specifically the section that houses the GPS guidance unit. JDAM kits are manufactured in the US and are known to be used by both US and Israeli forces.

Components of a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) found in Javadieh as reported by Iranian state media. © Farsnews
BACKGROUND

On 28 February, the USA and Israel launched joint attacks on Iran, with tens thousands of strikes across the country since. The strikes killed at least 1,469 civilians in Iran, including hundreds of children, between 28 February 2026 and 24 July 2026, according to official figures.

The Iranian authorities launched retaliatory attacks across the region. Iranian attacks have thus far killed at least 21 civilians in Israel and four in the occupied West Bank; and at least 29 killed across Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Amnesty International found that some of the attacks carried out by the Islamic Republic authorities were unlawful, including an attack that killed nine civilians in Beit Shemesh in Israel, and an attack on a migrant labour camp in Saudi Arabia that killed four civilians. Israel has also escalated its attacks on Lebanon, in response to Hezbollah’s attacks, with at least 4,333 killed in Lebanon since 2 March 2026.

An integrated, nationwide system for recycling and reusing old EV batteries could save 6.1 billion tons of carbon emissions and 3.9 trillion Chinese Yuan over 30 years, according to a new study.

The savings depend on resolving a conceptually simple but logistically profound problem: a geographic mismatch between where old batteries get switched out of EVs and where they could be reused.

China has the world’s largest EV market that is also growing faster than anywhere else, leading to a flood of old EV batteries, which are typically retired from use once they can hold only 80% of their original charge. The most common method for recycling these batteries recovers only a limited set of metals and sends the rest of the battery material to the landfill.

Recently reuse of old EV batteries as part of stationary storage for solar or wind power has emerged as an alternative solution. New recycling methods are also being developed that remanufacture battery components without breaking down their chemical structure.

But retired batteries aren’t always where they need to be in order to get a second act. And moving lots of old EV batteries around isn’t straightforward since they are hazardous materials that can catch fire, be damaged, or leak toxic materials into the environment if not transported properly. Is it worth it?

The answer is a resounding yes, according to the new study, the first to systematically explore how to optimize battery reuse and advanced recycling.

The researchers modeled the supply, demand, and disposal of retired EV batteries for each province in China from 2020 through 2050. They calculated the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions and economic costs associated with a dozen different scenarios involving varying levels of battery collection and post-disposal pathways.

 

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Retired batteries mostly accumulate in the wealthier eastern provinces of China with high rates of EV ownership, the researchers report. But demand for battery storage is mostly in the western part of the country where there is a lot of renewable energy potential. And demand for advanced recycling is mostly in battery manufacturing regions with the necessary specialized factories.

Absent any intervention, the mismatch will become more acute in the coming decades, as EV adoption accelerates in the east and renewable generation expands even further in the west.

Study scenarios that prioritize either advanced recycling or storage reuse are associated with three to five times greater cost savings and one to three times greater emissions reductions compared to a system that continues to route batteries mostly to conventional recycling, according to the researchers’ model.

Put another way, the business-as-usual pathway leaves 50-97% of potential cost savings and 26-53% of emissions reductions on the table.

Realizing those savings will require establishing efficient networks for transporting retired batteries between provinces: investing in specialized trucks, streamlining permitting, and so on.

The impact of building out that system would be pretty minimal, eating up just 2.3% of the cost savings and 0.03% of the emissions savings.

The optimal scenario according to the analysis, involving a balance of storage reuse and advanced recycling and moving away from conventional recycling after 2030, would save about 6.1 billion tons of carbon emissions and 3.9 trillion Chinese Yuan over three decades.

Other regions such as Europe and the United States have similar spatial mismatches between EV adoption and renewables generation, so the findings have relevance beyond China. “These results demonstrate that early, coordinated planning can convert spatial barriers into scalable climate and economic benefits, offering a transferable pathway for other rapidly electrifying markets,” the researchers write.

Source: Xie H. et al.  “Spatial mismatches constrain high-value utilization of retired batteries for decarbonization in China.” Environmental Science and Ecotechnology 2026.

Image: Based on Getty for UnSplash. ©Anthropocene Magazine.

Carbon credit developers, corporate buyers and some leading conservation NGOs are challenging new proposed rules to stop UN carbon credits being wiped out by fire, drought or logging, in what critics have called a “coordinated lobbying campaign” to weaken the nascent market’s push for greater integrity.

According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.

The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.

How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses. 

In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.

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Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.

“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”

The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.

The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests. 

Copy and paste?

More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.

A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.

In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses. 

Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s. 

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The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.

The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market. 

Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets. 

UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant. 

UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basis

In mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.

The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.

The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News. 

During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.

Burn company enumerator Teresia Wanjiru checks moisture on firewood at a client’s house using clean cookstoves in Kachoroba village of Kiambu county, Kenya, August 16, 2023. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi Burn company enumerator Teresia Wanjiru checks moisture on firewood at a client’s house using clean cookstoves in Kachoroba village of Kiambu county, Kenya, August 16, 2023. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi

Cookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.

But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.

At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.

Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).

After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations as optional aids for participants if they decided to prepare their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process

Getting the rules ‘right’

In a statement to Climate Home News, the FCLP Secretariat said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.

They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.

In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.

A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.

‘Inconvenient science’

The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six. 

To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario. 

The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.

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Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.

But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low. 

Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon. 

“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”

Regulators under pressure?

An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community. 

“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”  

Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.

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Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.

Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.

But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.

“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi. 

Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears. 

“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”

The story was updated to clarify FCLP’s position and the attribution of its comments.

The post Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push appeared first on Climate Home News.

Almost half of the world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every single year, a study has found.

Read more on E360 →

Sugar Coated, a new book by Marion Nestle and Lisa Sunderland, reveals the influence American cereal companies have on food policy and public health.

Nestle, a nutritionist and Professor Emerita at New York University, has been collecting cereal boxes for years, drawn to the “ridiculous health claims” they once displayed.

Consumer advocacy and government interventions have forced companies to alter their marketing over the years. But Nestle and Sunderland—the former Vice President of Nutrition at Kellogg Company—still see so much reflected in their design.

“The boxes are so big, they’re like billboards,” Nestle tells Food Tank. And because they change so frequently, “they can respond to every health claim in the world.”

Sugar Coated explores these health claims along with the ingredients and marketing strategies that Big Cereal companies have embraced to sell products and cover up their negative health effects. Throughout the book are full-color images of boxes over the years.

Nestle and Sunderland trace the history of cereal back to what they call its “bizarre start” in the 1860s, when early breakfast cereals emerged from health reform movements that promoted bland, grain-based foods as a path to better physical—and even moral—health. From there, they follow cereal’s evolution into a highly marketed staple and the public health debates that continue today. A section on color additives likely wouldn’t have existed if U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. hadn’t taken up the issue, Nestle explains.

Companies have worked hard to entice eaters from an early age—an important tactic for the sector and one they’re particularly good at, Sugar Coated shows. “The Big Four cereal companies were among the first to target marketing directly to young children,” the authors write.

When did it become okay to feed kids vitamin-supplemented cookies for breakfast, “which is basically what kids’ cereals are?” Nestle asks.

Cartoon characters, toys, and prizes have been used to draw children to sugary breakfast foods. For a time, toys disappeared in response to concern from eaters, but now they’re back,  Nestle says. “It’s time for [advocates] to get busy again.”

But these efforts must go beyond plastic prizes, Nestle says, arguing that nothing substantive will change until corporations hold less influence over government. “Get money out of politics.”

Sugar Coated: Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America’s Favorite Breakfast Food is now available from the University of California Press.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Phil Aicken, Unsplash

The post Unboxing Breakfast: Marion Nestle on the Hidden Forces Shaping What We Eat appeared first on Food Tank.

With less than a year to go before France’s presidential election, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen seems almost certain to reach the run-off. Her party’s fortunes have continued to rise in recent years thanks to its leaders’ ability to rally working-class voters while securing support from business elites. Tensions between these two bases remain, but they are unlikely to come to a head before the vote.

Marine Le Pen is no stranger to strategic ambiguity. She has existed in this state for the past year, promoting Jordan Bardella as a potential presidential candidate for the Rassemblement National (RN) in 2027, but not ruling out running herself if the courts decided to reduce her sentence for embezzlement of public funds.

In July, her sentence was reduced to three years in prison, two suspended, one under house arrest. Her ineligibility for public office was cut to 15 months. Because she had already served this since the first verdict, her path to the presidency reopened, and she immediately threw her hat back into the ring.

Le Pen has already launched an appeal against the new sentence too, at the Cour de Cassation, France’s supreme court. Depending on when this judgement is delivered, she may have to face an ignominious end to the election campaign, spending the last few days wearing an electronic ankle tag and under curfew. If she is lucky, however, the sluggish timeline of French justice may spare her a verdict until after the second round, by which point she hopes to have presidential immunity.

Candidate, or perhaps not. Ankle tag, or perhaps not. The uncertainty of the French justice system is not where the ambiguity ends either: Le Pen’s bid for the Élysée Palace rests on her ability to maintain unity between different fractions of her base that have competing interests.

A short-lived social turn

When Le Pen achieved her first major breakthrough, advancing to the second round of the presidential election in 2017, she did so off the back of a “social turn”. Advised by Florian Philippot, then vice-president of the Front National (now RN), she ran on a platform of retirement at 60, scrapping the 2016 labour reform which restricted workers’ rights, fighting against tax evasion, and maintaining the 35-hour work week and the wealth tax, amid a host of other statist measures.

Ten years on, […] Le Pen has dropped her social commitments as opportunistically as she initially picked them up.

During the campaign, she attacked Le Siècle, an elite cross-partisan social club that she described as a secret meeting point of the oligarchy. She borrowed the slogans of populist left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon to appeal to his voters in the second round, calling them to “dégagez-les” (“throw them out”), a direct echo of his call to “dégagez-les tous” (“throw them all out”). She even quoted the Socialist leader of the early 20th century, Jean-Jaurès, but it was to no avail. She had spent the 2017 campaign talking up the benefits of euro-exit and Frexit, which business and 70 per cent of the French public strongly opposed. At the last minute, she tried to backpedal but failed to convince the electorate. Her campaign ended with a bruising debate against Emmanuel Macron in which she appeared not to understand her own economic policies.

Ten years on, little remains of that Marine Le Pen. As part of the de-demonisation strategy of rendering the RN palatable, she has dropped her social commitments as opportunistically as she initially picked them up.

Unlike in the US or the UK, companies in France cannot donate to political campaigns, and donations from private citizens are capped at 7,500 euros. Industry thus doesn’t intervene as directly in the democratic process as the cryptocurrency and fossil fuels interests backing Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Similarly, because of the RN’s ties to historical fascism, business has previously been wary of being seen to associate with the party, to the point that the Front National couldn’t even access French bank loans.

Nonetheless, since 2024, when the Rassemblement National became the largest individual party in both the European Parliament and the French National Assembly, the RN and big business have gradually moved closer. This has been in no small part thanks to Jordan Bardella, the young gun who would have replaced Le Pen if the courts had rejected her appeal. Bardella, who is just 30 years old and currently dating an aristocrat, believes the RN needs to expand beyond its working-class and struggling petit-bourgeois base into the affluent classes. He sees austerity as a core part of the RN’s project: in 2024, he proclaimed the need for “order in the streets and order in the public accounts”.

Party of capital

Two additional factors have enabled the RN to become a standard party of capital: support from oligarchs, and an attempt by centrists to paint the Left as the real extremists, letting the RN off the hook.

Media moguls Vincent Bolloré and Pierre Édouard Stérin relentlessly platform the party and talk up its preferred themes in the media (although they also boost other right-wing forces, like Éric Zemmour’s party Reconquête, various other Catholic reactionaries, and what remains of the Sarkozyist right). François Durvye, a former hedge fund manager for Stérin and a special advisor to Bardella, was tasked with establishing relationships with the business elite. Durvye recently quit the party, but in a parting shot, he claimed he was unable to reconcile himself to Le Pen’s insufficiently neoliberal positions. In reality, reporting in Libération and Mediapart suggests that his departure was largely an ego-driven firing by Le Pen, who made clear that his days were numbered after he had unsubtly expressed his dissatisfaction to various RN bigwigs that she – and not Bardella – was running for president. This was not an ideological purge. Bardella, and his other economically liberal advisors like Ambroise de Rancourt, remain part of Le Pen’s campaign team. On 29 August, the party announced that, if it gained power, it would enshrine a “golden rule” of keeping the deficit below 3 per cent in the constitution.

Durvye and Bardella’s strenuous efforts to sign up to the agenda of the patronat – France’s business establishment – appear to be working. In 2011, Laurence Parisot, then head of the business lobby MEDEF, denounced Le Pen, accusing her of sitting squarely within the far-right tradition. By 2025, Bardella was a guest at the MEDEF summer university, keen to demonstrate that the party was abandoning any statist economic policies it may have previously favoured. In 2026, he was invited back for a working lunch, which he later described as “courteous”. The rapprochement extends to Le Pen herself: In April, she dined with influential corporate leaders including France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, the owner of luxury goods firm LVMH, who backed Macron in 2017 and 2022 and is a personal friend of Vincent Bolloré.

The institutions representing business interests are taking the RN seriously because the polls currently show Le Pen/Bardella making it into the second round in all scenarios, and likely beating their opponent in the runoff. Business leaders feel they have to suss out the potential next party of government. They also fear the alternative: though centrist candidates seem to stand a better chance of making it to the second round, some polling scenarios show the RN candidate facing off against Mélenchon, who is himself running for the fourth time.

The centrist parties have already supplied the arguments for business to back the far right, treating Mélenchon and his party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”, LFI) as an equivalent “extreme” to the RN, while also slowly turning the framework of demonisation away from the RN and onto LFI. In 2024, the newspaper Libération revealed secret dinners between Édouard Philippe, the likely candidate of the Macron camp, and Marine Le Pen. At one of these dinners, Philippe reportedly said that he wanted the next election to be between his camp and the far right; an election of “project against project, without moral critique”, according to the revelations. Last year, Bruno Retailleau, head of the right-wing Les Républicains party and former interior minister under Macron, called for a united “republican front” including the RN against LFI. Most of the attacks from the Macron camp on the RN have thus far concentrated on the party’s economic irresponsibility, based often on the promises they made during their brief social turn.

In this context, business has little work to do to abandon republicanism and justify a swing behind the RN. In the 2026 Toulouse municipal election, local industrial leaders threatened to cancel investments or to pull their businesses from the city if LFI candidate François Piquemal beat Macronist Jean-Luc Moudenc. Business and industrial leaders are primed to take this one step further and come out against LFI in future LFI-RN runoffs. As Bernard Cohen, the head of a lobby group representing the interests of small- and medium-sized businesses put it recently: “whether they are small, medium or large, what the bosses like generally is financial and economic stability […] economic danger for the bosses comes not from the Left of government, but a certain section of the Left; by which they mean LFI”.

For their part, the unions, or at least the more radical ones, have started to push back against the bosses creeping toward the RN. In August, Sophie Binet, the leader of the CGT, denounced MEDEF in an interview with Le Monde for helping roll out the red carpet to the far right. She argued that the party’s economic position was irrelevant and that business leaders should be thinking about the RN’s programme regarding women, LGBT rights, climate change, the constitution, and the independence of the judiciary, rather than any economic reforms that the bosses might favour.

The standard position across the unions is that the far right is a unique and dangerous threat to the republic, to which any other political force is preferable. The Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front; a broad left-wing electoral alliance in France) was endorsed in 2024 because it was a rare instance of left unity. In other words, the unions wouldn’t burn any bridges by backing it. In 2024, the leaderships of various unions condemned media outlets and politicians trying to invoke a false equivalence between LFI and the far right, but they prefer to remain relatively politically neutral, not least because the leadership of LFI and union leaders have butted heads over strategy many times.

Kicking the can

The RN’s move closer to its roots on the economy poses problems for the coalition that it is trying to build over the long term. The party has no meaningful answer to how it reconciles the interests of its working-class and petit-bourgeois voters with those of the oligarchs that now back it.

For example, the RN has been keen to position itself as the party of French agriculture, and has allied closely with small farmers who smile in selfies with Bardella. These traditionalist farmers are the kinds of people who oppose the over-financialisation of agriculture and the mass purchase of land by agri-giants like Otium, owned by Pierre Edouard Stérin, one of the oligarchs instrumental in smoothing the party’s path to power. When iron and steel colossus ArcelorMittal entered crisis due to global overcapacity, the company closed two sites and said it would cut a further 600 jobs. The RN attacked Macron incessantly, but when LFI proposed a vote on nationalising the firm, it abstained, fearing it would alienate business.

The party has also opposed wealth taxes as well as taxes on private jets. It promises a better life for workers through horizontal redistribution away from immigrants, welfare cheats, the recipients of overseas development aid, and a very optimistic assessment of government waste. It also proposes cutting France’s contributions to the EU, which could ultimately result in reduced subsidies for its agricultural base. In the RN’s 2026 counter-budget, the party put forward proposals for deeper austerity than the Macronist government, arguing for 36 billion euros in savings compared to prime minister Sébastien Lecornu’s 30 billion. In short, the RN is back to the ultra-racist Reaganism that defined the party under Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father.

The party has no meaningful answer to how it reconciles the interests of its working-class and petit-bourgeois voters with those of the oligarchs that now back it.

To obviate the conflict between the interests the RN is trying to represent, Marine Le Pen defaults to unity through nationalism. She talks in the language of the people and presents the struggle as a national one against a cosmopolitan establishment. As political scientist Théo Bourgeron has observed, Le Pen kicks down the road the difficult spending tradeoffs that will arise when not enough government waste is found to cover what remains of the party’s social commitments.

Where there is a genuine tension in the strategy is Le Pen’s disagreement with Bardella (and previously Durvye) over pensions. Bardella used the period when he was the likely presidential candidate to argue against Le Pen’s position on the subject. Fearful of alienating the party’s older working-class base, she wants to roll back Macron’s pension reforms and revert the retirement age to 62. Bardella, by contrast, wants to keep the reform and is even considering scrapping a rule that allows people to retire at 67 on full pension, aiming to replace it instead with a minimum of 42 years of contribution, or the option to take a smaller pension. While it does open the party up to accusations of abandoning its base, even this tension could work in the RN’s benefit. Candidate once more, Le Pen can set the line in favour of the lower pension age, while Bardella privately reassures his newfound friends in MEDEF that he will do his utmost to lobby for a higher one when in power.

Maintaining the coalition

For the moment, this tension seems unlikely to pose too many problems for the RN. The far right does not have a monopoly on the working class, most of whom choose abstention, and many of whom vote for left-wing parties. It is true, however, that the voters they do have, including those among the working class, are unlikely to be fazed by the imprecision on economic questions and the cosiness with big business. Félicien Faury’s Des électeurs ordinaires (“Ordinary Voters”), a study of the RN electorate, has demonstrated the importance of race and identity to the far-right vote. He has amassed ample evidence that RN voters tend to feel that the distributional conflicts in society are almost entirely between natives and immigrants, not between social classes, and that they generally share the low-tax impulses of the Grand Patrons – France’s most influential corporate bosses.

The contradictions of the RN aren’t likely to be confronted on the ground or in the media. Although LFI speaks in the language of class conflict and is committed to highlighting RN hypocrisy, Mélenchon’s strategy is to assemble a “New France” of public sector workers, educated young people, and the urban, often racialised working class. This means that they will spend limited time and resources during the campaign in the working-class areas where the far right is strongest, because their strategy is not premised on converting far-right voters, but on building an alternative coalition by activating abstentionists to reach the second round.

There is a certain logic to Mélenchon’s gamble. Abstentionists are sociologically closer to left-wing voters, and have values that more closely resemble those of the left bloc than those of the centre or the far right. The French presidential election accounts only for raw numbers, not the geographic distribution of voters, so there is a lot to be gained for a Left concentrated primarily on winning votes in densely populated urban areas.

Polling hypotheticals show Mélenchon, currently the only left candidate with a plausible shot of making it to the second round, being destroyed by both Le Pen and Bardella in a runoff. To this, the Insoumis retort that polls always underestimate Mélenchon and overrate Le Pen. They argue that the extra votes from the abstentionists they hope to activate can be combined with the same dynamic that made the New Popular Front, a broad left-wing electoral alliance, win the legislative elections in 2024 (albeit without a majority), when enough centrist voters chose to block the far right.

Mélenchon’s candidacy remains a long shot, though his campaign is progressing well. The far right’s unity is currently being held in place by proximity to power. Commonalities are emphasised and differences dissolved by the possibility that Marine Le Pen might soon be in the Élysée. If Mélenchon wins, the factions will compete to establish the post-Le Pen orientation of the far-right bloc. If she (or a candidate of post-Macronism) wins, then the reverse occurs: the Left will be scrambled, and the succession battle will play out among the interest groups and political tendencies to the left of Macron. For now, the far right’s contradictions are likely to remain unresolved.

Nama sebuah game bisa bertahan lama bukan cuma karena fitur di dalamnya. Karakter kuat, simbol khas, ritme permainan, sampai konsep visual ikut membentuk identitas hingga mudah dikenali. Pola Slot Maxwin kini berada di tengah perubahan tersebut, saat pemain mulai memperhatikan kombinasi mekanisme serta tema populer sebagai pembeda antarjudul.

Kondisi ini membuat istilah game ikonik memiliki arti lebih luas. Sebuah permainan tidak harus rumit untuk mendapatkan perhatian. Justru konsep sederhana dengan ciri visual konsisten sering lebih mudah melekat. Dari mitologi, dunia oriental, permen, petualangan, sampai karakter unik, setiap tema membawa pendekatan berbeda dalam membangun pengalaman.

Pola Slot Maxwin Mulai Identik dengan Karakter Game

Pola Slot Maxwin tidak hanya dibicarakan melalui susunan simbol atau fitur tertentu. Istilah tersebut juga sering dipakai komunitas untuk menggambarkan karakter sebuah permainan, mulai dari tempo, struktur fitur, volatilitas, hingga cara bonus muncul. Setiap game memiliki sistem internal masing-masing. Karena itu, kemiripan tampilan tidak berarti dua permainan memakai mekanisme identik. Pola pembayaran, jumlah gulungan, fitur tambahan, serta struktur bonus dapat menciptakan pengalaman berbeda meski keduanya membawa tema serupa.

Sudut pandang ini penting agar pembahasan pola tidak berubah menjadi klaim kepastian hasil. Pola Slot Maxwin lebih tepat dibaca sebagai cara pengguna mengenali karakter permainan, bukan formula untuk menjamin hasil tertentu.

Game Ikonik Memiliki Identitas Mudah Diingat

Game ikonik biasanya mempunyai satu atau beberapa elemen pembeda. Ada judul terkenal karena karakter utama, ada pula permainan populer berkat simbol khas, desain bonus, atau atmosfernya. Identitas semacam ini membantu sebuah game bertahan di tengah katalog besar. Pemain dapat mengenalinya hanya melalui thumbnail, karakter, atau potongan tampilan. Efeknya mirip identitas visual pada produk digital lain: semakin konsisten cirinya, semakin mudah nama tersebut tersimpan dalam ingatan.

Tema Populer Membentuk Generasi Game Baru

Tema populer terus bergerak mengikuti selera pasar. Mitologi masih mempunyai ruang besar, tetapi kini berdampingan dengan konsep oriental, fantasi, budaya pop, makanan, petualangan, sampai dunia futuristik. Perubahan tersebut memperluas cara pengembang membangun pengalaman. Tema tidak berhenti pada background. Musik, simbol, karakter, efek transisi, serta desain fitur dapat mengikuti satu konsep serupa sehingga permainan terasa memiliki dunia sendiri. Pada titik ini, tema populer bekerja sebagai pintu masuk. Pengguna dapat tertarik lewat tampilan lebih dulu, kemudian mempelajari fitur setelah membuka permainan.

Mitologi dan Oriental Tetap Mudah Dikenali

Dewa, petir, kuil, naga, koin emas, serta ornamen Asia mempunyai karakter visual kuat. Elemen tersebut dapat dipahami dalam waktu singkat tanpa membutuhkan penjelasan panjang. Tema mitologi cenderung membawa atmosfer dramatis. Sebaliknya, konsep oriental sering menggunakan simbol keberuntungan, warna kontras, serta ilustrasi tradisional dengan sentuhan modern. Keduanya mampu melahirkan game ikonik karena memiliki bahasa visual jelas. Namun popularitas tema tetap tidak menentukan peluang hasil. Aspek visual dan sistem permainan merupakan dua lapisan berbeda.

Pola Slot Maxwin Dengan Game Ikonik Memadukan Familiaritas

Ada alasan mengapa konsep lama terus muncul dalam bentuk baru. Familiaritas mempermudah pengguna memahami tampilan sejak sesi pertama. Pengembang kemudian menambahkan variasi mekanisme supaya pengalaman tidak terasa seperti salinan judul sebelumnya. Pola Slot Maxwin Dengan Game Ikonik dapat terlihat melalui kombinasi tersebut. Simbol familiar dipertemukan dengan animasi baru, fitur interaktif, struktur reel berbeda, atau presentasi bonus lebih ekspresif. Pendekatan ini juga menjelaskan mengapa beberapa judul cepat mendapat perhatian. Pengguna memperoleh sesuatu untuk dikenali sekaligus unsur baru untuk dipelajari.

Mekanisme Tetap Menjadi Pembeda Utama

Dua game bertema sama belum tentu memberikan pengalaman serupa. Perbedaan jumlah baris, sistem pembayaran, simbol khusus, multiplier, free spin, atau fitur bonus bisa mengubah ritme secara signifikan. Karena itu, membaca informasi permainan tetap lebih berguna daripada hanya mengikuti tema. Paytable, aturan fitur, informasi volatilitas jika tersedia, serta penjelasan simbol memberi konteks lebih konkret mengenai cara sebuah judul bekerja. Pendekatan tersebut membuat pembahasan Pola Slot Maxwin lebih informatif. Fokus tidak berhenti pada istilah populer, tetapi masuk ke struktur permainan secara nyata.

Game Ikonik Tidak Selalu Berasal dari Konsep Rumit

Kesederhanaan justru dapat menjadi kekuatan. Desain bersih, simbol mudah dibedakan, serta fitur dengan aturan singkat membuat pengguna lebih cepat memahami alur permainan. Game ikonik sering lahir dari kombinasi sederhana: karakter kuat, tema konsisten, mekanisme mudah dikenali, lalu ditambah satu ciri khas. Formula desain semacam ini membuat sebuah judul mempunyai identitas tanpa perlu memenuhi layar dengan terlalu banyak elemen.

Pola Slot Maxwin Bergerak Bersama Tren Tema

Perubahan tema memperlihatkan bahwa industri permainan digital terus mencari cara baru untuk mempertahankan perhatian pengguna. Pola Slot Maxwin ikut berkembang dalam percakapan tersebut karena istilah ini kini bersinggungan dengan mekanisme, visual, karakter, serta popularitas sebuah game. Game ikonik memberi unsur familiar, sementara tema populer membawa variasi baru. Ketika keduanya dipadukan secara tepat, sebuah permainan memiliki peluang lebih besar untuk mudah dikenali di antara banyak pilihan.

Namun identitas populer tetap perlu dipisahkan dari anggapan soal hasil. Tema, karakter, atau pola visual tidak memberikan jaminan kemenangan. Nilai utamanya terletak pada cara sebuah game membangun ciri khas, menjelaskan mekanisme, serta menciptakan pengalaman berbeda dari judul lain.

Canada currently faces numerous, interconnected challenges. Budget 2026 presents a critical opportunity to demonstrate the country’s commitment to becoming a clean energy superpower through ambition and investment that exceeds the public support...

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.