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Star Energy, the oil and gas operator with multiple UK onshore sites, is planning to expand its portfolio, according to company accounts.

Singleton oil site. Photo: DrillOrDrop

Interim results for the first half of 2026 reported:

“we are seeking to materially increase profitable production through a combination of acquisitions and the development of our existing in-field and near-field opportunities.”

Chief executive Ross Glover said:

“we have been actively evaluating a number of acquisition opportunities, both in the North Sea and more widely, and have committed management and technical resource to this process.

“We are encouraged by the range of opportunities we are seeing, but to date we have not identified a transaction where the combination of asset quality, risk and valuation will provide the level of return we require for shareholders.”

Star Energy said its “core UK oil and gas business remains fundamental to our strategy.”

It said it intended to use the £8.5m proceeds from a fundraise in May 2026 to increase profitable production. The company said it was focussing on operated or non-operated portfolios of up to 2,500 boepd [barrels of oil equivalent per day].

Star Energy’s net production in the first half year averaged 1,866 boepd. This was down from 1,894 boepd in the same period in 2025.

The company said production had been “adversely affected” by “temporary operational and reliability issues across parts of the portfolio, together with the natural variability associated with operating mature fields”.

But production in July and August 2026 was “materially higher” than the first-half average, following “the resolution of a number of these issues and the completion of optimisation activities”, the company said.

Singleton

Star Energy also blamed delays in the grid connection at the Singleton gas-to-wire project in West Sussex for the fall in production rates.

It said the project, which involves generating electricity from waste gas, would add 74 boepd and reduce routine flaring.

Electricity would be transmitted 1.4km by cable from the Singleton site to a grid connection on the A286 road.

Star Energy said all major equipment had been delivered to the site during the first half of 2026. Export cabling had been laid to the substation and gas processing equipment installed and commissioned on site.

The company said:

“We are working closely with the Distribution Network Operator to complete the final stages of the grid connection, following which final commissioning will be undertaken. First production is currently expected in early October 2026.”

Other  onshore developments

Official figures show Star Energy operated 27 formal producing oil and gas fields onshore in the UK in 2026. The fields comprised 18 producing oil and 1 producing gas. There are also 8 oil fields where there had been no production in 2026..

The company said it had invested £3.2 million in oil and gas assets in the first half of 2026, including the Singleton project (see above). Net cash capital expenditure for 2026 was expected to be £6.6million, the company said.

Investment was being targeted to offset what Star Energy called “natural declines” and improve operating reliabilities. The accounts described work at:

Stockbridge, Hampshire: conversion of well to water injector

Bletchingley, Surrey: installation of gas generator

Welton, Lincolnshire: installation of replacement separator

Glentworth, Lincolnshire: development of the western extension of the Mexborough reservoir that could add 162 bopd, Star Energy said. It said technical and regulatory work is progressing to maintain the site as “a development-ready opportunity”.

Key figures for six months to June 2026

Interim unaudited results released on 169/2026

Revenue: £23.2m (Six months to 30 June 2025: £18.3m)

Oil sales: £22.5m (Six months to 30 June 2025: £17.80m)

Profit before tax: £0.6m (Six months to 30 June 2025: £4.5m)

Profit/(loss) for the period: £2.361m (Six months to 30 June 2025: (£4.069m))

Oil and gas adjusted EBITDA: £6.2m (Six months to 30 June 2025: £5.5m)

Operating cashflow before working capital movements: £6.0m (Six months to 30 June 2025: £4.8m)

Net cash/(debt): £4.6m (Six months to 30 June 2025: (£4.3m))

Cash and cash equivalents: £15.7m (Six months to 30 June 2025: £7.6m)

Loss on commodities hedge: £5m

Capital expenditure in oil and gas: £3.2m.

Expected net cash capital expenditure for 2026: £6.6m

Proceeds to Star Energy of sale of Croation geothermal subsidiary IGeoPen: £1.1m

May 2026 fundraise (net of expenses: £8.5m

Average net production: 1,866 boe/d (Six months to 30 June 2025: 1,894 boe/d

Expected full year production for 2026: 1,900-1,950 boe/d

Net assets: £45.8m (Six months to 30 June 2025: £34.8m)

The bill would “largely reinforce” a transition that is already underway as more states adopt large-load tariffs and is unlikely to pass the Senate before the midterm elections, according to ClearView Energy Partners.

To the apocalypse! And beyond! Possible futures in and beyond UN climate modeling …

Coastal Erosion at Atherington by Chris Richardson Wikimedia

By Paul Atkin

The new modeling now being used by the UN Panel on Climate Change to map possible futures has shifted its methods. I’m going to attempt to get behind the jargon to spell out what the projections indicate, but also to highlight some flaws in the process.

Key differences are

The old “no action” baseline projection of what would happen if nothing was done about climate breakdown at all has been dropped on the grounds that some action is being taken and will continue to be: so the points of comparison now are between the consequences of sticking with the current level of action, and advancing or retreating from it.

The overall effect is to remove the highest, most damaging scenarios, as fossil fuel use is peaking – despite Trump – and they can no longer be considered the most dominant future fuel source. This reflects the partial success of actions to date.

The inevitable claims by Trump and his acolytes that the removal of projections based on what would happen if the “drill baby drill” polices they advocate were universally applied that this proves climate breakdown itself is “a hoax” are beyond surreal. To spell this out. If the world were to act with blithe insouciance and just double down on fossil fuels in the way that Trump wants to do to secure “US Global Energy Dominance” based on them, the worst case scenario would be back with a vengance. In fact, if “every last drop” of fossil fuels on the planet were to be burnt, as they advocate, that would drive a rise in temperature of 16C.

On the contrary, this drop in the worst case scenario is a sign that the world is not being completely bullied into its own self destruction. As there is now $2 trillion a year investment in renewable energy (double the current level of investment in FFs) so most new energy even in the US, and even in Texas, is now being provided by renewables; as they are now too cheap to be replaced by coal. But, $1Trillion is still being invested in Fossil Fuels annually. This is because the rate of profit on the investment is four to five times greater than for investment in renewables; so the search for returns is risking all our futures.

Nevertheless, dropping the worst case scenario has come in for criticism, as it replicates at international level what the Trump administration is trying to do to the still legally mandated US National Climate Assessment. In so doing, it implies that the worst outcomes are not possible – which it would be rash to assume – and therefore that taking action has less urgency – which is dead wrong.

This is particularly the case as the lowest scenarios have been revised upwards, reflecting the rapidity with which the climate is heating – and implicitly highlighting the inadequacy of the measures taken so far to stop it.

The headline from this is that 1.5C will be overshot. Although the IPCC only counts a threshold being passed after ten years on average, we are evidently already there, or thereabouts. 1.4C this year. Possibly 1.7C next. Again, this has been seized on by climate deniers to argue that “the battle” that they didn’t want us to engage in in the first place “has been lost”; so we’d best just give up and adapt to a new normal.

The problem with that is that a new normal of unchecked climate breakdown is not a slightly balmier set of stable conditions, in which Yorkshire becomes like Tuscany, but a state of spiralling crisis, weather whiplash between extreme droughts and torrential rain, failed harvests and hunger; and the more we put off action the worst it will get. The UN has noted that even a temporary overshoot will do “irreparable damage”. Battles are only lost if we give up, and every tenth of a degree is a front line.

The deeper point about “overshoot” is that we’ve been overshooting since we passed the 350 CO2 ppm mark in 1986, so everything we are now doing is about damage limitation. We care now at 430ppm, and rising.

The possible futures they spell out are clear and make it clear that what happens next depends on what we do, and don’t do, now.

Possible futures

The new assessment puts forward seven scenarios ranging from high to low emissions trajectories. In these scenarios the range of possible heating is between 1.6C and 3.3C by the end of the century.

• The high scenario envisages emissions of 55 billion tonnes a year, significantly up from the 38 billion tonnes now. This gets us to 3.3C by 2100.
• The medium scenario, based on existing policies, projects 34 million tonnes a year, a minimal reduction. This gets to 2C by 2050, 2.9C by 2100 and 3C by 2150.
• The low scenario based on accelerated action cuts emissions to 9 billion tonnes but temperatures still rise to 1.8C by 2050 and fall back to 1.5C by 2100.
• The old baseline warning of the likely consequences of no action – the policy favoured by Trump, Reform, and now the Conservative Party (which has banned anyone who takes climate change seriously as a possible Parliamentary candidate) – was a possible rise of 4.6 – 4.9C by century’s end, and more beyond. Meltdown, basically. If these forces win in enough places, that is back on the table.
• As “there are no good outcomes above 1.5C” we are in for a lot of trouble at least for the rest of this century. This is why it is so mind bogglingly idiotic for the BBC to post a story entitled “what will you tell your grandchildren about the summer of 2026?”, as if what we have just experienced is a one off, a weird anomaly after which we get back to normal, not a warning of Summers to come, during which we may well reminisce fondly about how relatively cool it was just to have 35C heatwaves.

All these projections are essentially technical. And that the changes already in train will develop with an orderly predictable Fabian gradualism that we can slowly adapt to. tPlaying down the potential for sudden catastrophic shifts as we reach tipping points – the mass deaths of coral – the Amazon becoming a carbon source not a carbon sink – accelerating methane release from melting permafrost – gives a false impression that everything is under control. The point about tipping points is that that seems to be the case, until it isn’t. A report just out indicates that “Warming-induced” emissions of greenhouse gases from natural sources – including permafrost, wetlands and wildfires – could amplify global temperature rise by a further 20-30% for example.

We have to bear in mind that the rise in greenhouse gases driven by human industrial and agriculture activity now is 40 times faster than during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum 50 m years ago and over 100 times faster than during the warming at the end of the last ice age. Those who say that the Earth’s climate has always changed for natural reasons are right, but wrong to ignore the way our actions are giving it such a ferocious acceleration in such a short space of time. In the case of the PETM it took about 3,000 years for global temperatures to increase by 5-8C. On average, that works out at between .0017 and .0027 C a year. At the moment the temperature is increasing on average by .35C a year. So this is almost unbelievably fast, and so must our response be.

And we should bear in mind that the last time the Earth had a 430ppm concentration of CO2 was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when temperatures were 3-4C higher than the pre industrial average and sea levels were 5 – 25 metres higher.

This is the East coast at a 5 metre rise, the low end of that projection. Peterborough and Cambridge are on the Wash.

And the Thames Estuary would start around Wapping. At 25 metres it would start at Windsor. Current IPCC projections are for a 1 metre rise by 2100, with an outside chance of 2 metres, but the rate is rising and it keeps going after that.

A recent report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (the Insurance Industry essentially) and Exeter University applied a planetary solvency model on the basis that the existing technical models underestimate the risks and the knock on negative impacts that are already being felt and are accelerating.

Their projection is that by 2070 – 2090 the impacts will be so severe that world GDP will halve and 4 billion people will die. While fact check websites poo poo this, this is actuaries making this projection based on insurance industry risk projections, so shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. And if it is even the most remote possibility, it should concentrate minds and give us more of a sense of proportion…and urgency.

Social and geopolitical factors

And here’s the core of the problem. All of these projections seem to be based on presumptions that all other factors are equal, and that existing social economic and political structures stay essentially the same, when there is actually no way that they can; if only because of the impact of climate consequences that are already baked in.

They rest on UN projections that the global population will rise from 8.23 billion now to 9.6 billion by 2050, peak at just over 10 billion around 2080, then slowly decline from then on. By the end of the century, the projection is that people will be, on average, 10 -25% poorer than they are now.

But, there is no average person, no average state. Projections of climate impacts vary – with the Canadian government projecting rises of 3-5C by 2100, with 10C in the Arctic, the threat of mass deaths from wet bulb temperature events at a global average of a 2C rise primarily in Northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Eastern Asia, the Arabian Gulf and the African Sahel Zone. Lets not forget that the medium scenario gets us to 2C in 2050 – 24 years from now.

Further, the existing state of affairs is not socially or economically static. It is characterised by rapid shifts in wealth and power within states and between them. The ever growing concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands in the West under neoliberalism, the increased global weight of the BRICS in general (with a combined economy now greater than the G7) and China in particular, with its colossal exports of renewable products and technology. Part of this is an attempt by the Western ruling classes to sustain their bloated lifestyles by keeping the global South as poor as possible to keep kits carbon footprint down. The UK government decision under Starmer to cut ODA, including climate finance to pay for the first installment of increased war spending expresses this perfectly.

These questions will be resolved in political struggle within and between states. The most decisive of these now is to defeat the attempt by the United States to sabotage international cooperation, to shore up its slipping global imperial dominance by preparing itself and its allies for an apocalyptic war, to roll back the deployment of renewable energy and transport, to secure “global energy dominance” through its own abundance of fossil fuel reserves, control of those of other states, and enforced dependence on its exports by those without. Part of this is an attempt to sustain the bloated lifestyles of the western ruling class by keeping the global south as poor as possible. The UK’s cut of ODA, including climate finance, to pay for the first installment of increased war spending expresses this perfectly.

The good news on this is that we could be reaching tipping points in this energy shift. The cost of renewable technology, wind, solar, batteries, has dropped so far and so fats that they are now cheaper than FF alternatives just about everywhere. More than half of countries have passed peak FF use and China is plateauing, with solar now producing more energy there than coal for the first time and other GS countries having a viable sustainable path to development which also liberates them from FF dependence and everything that goes with it. Its possible we could move not only away from unipolarity but through multi polarity to no polarity as a result. And because electric energy is so much more efficient that FFs, every unit of additional RE displaces 3 units of FF energy. And the total amount of extractive mining needed for all the resources needed for the transition up to 2050 is equivalent to the amount needed just for coal, just in 2024. Once the initial bottleneck of grid upgrades is dealt with, costs will drop even further. Quids in.

The post To the apocalypse! And beyond! Possible futures in and beyond UN climate modeling … first appeared on Greener Jobs Alliance.

Europe’s effort to break its dependence on Russian nuclear fuel has a paradox in Germany: making Russian-designed fuel without buying it from Russia may initially require working with Rosatom.

That contradiction is now headed to court. The German environmental group BUND last week sued the state of Lower Saxony over its decision to allow Framatome subsidiary Advanced Nuclear Fuels to expand its fuel fabrication plant in Lingen. The expansion would allow the facility to manufacture fuel for Russian-designed VVER-1000 reactors using licenses and technology from TVEL, Rosatom’s nuclear fuel subsidiary.

The arrangement is supposed to help European nuclear operators do exactly the opposite: reduce direct purchases of Russian fuel.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European countries operating Soviet-designed VVER reactors — including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary and Slovakia — have been searching for alternatives to Russian nuclear fuel. Several have already begun introducing fuel from Western suppliers, while Hungary and Slovakia remain more dependent on Russian supplies.

Framatome argues that cooperation with TVEL is an interim step that will allow it to supply those customers while developing its own independent production technology.

But BUND claims that the arrangement creates security risks inside a piece of European nuclear infrastructure. The group says some manufacturing and quality-control processes will use Rosatom-supplied machinery, raising the possibility of manipulation, espionage or sabotage. Its lawsuit also alleges procedural shortcomings in the approval process, including reliance on outdated environmental assessments.

German authorities themselves acknowledge the uncomfortable fit.

Lower Saxony approved the expansion in July only after consultations with the federal government and imposed unusually strict conditions. Rosatom and TVEL personnel are generally prohibited from entering the Lingen facility. Russian-supplied hardware and software must undergo outside security checks and remain isolated from other plant computer systems, while fuel components arriving from Russia must be inspected for possible manipulation.

Lower Saxony Environment Minister Christian Meyer has said he fundamentally opposes cooperation with Rosatom. But federal and state authorities concluded that existing German nuclear law provided no legal basis to reject the application on the security evidence before them.

Berlin says the proper mechanism for stopping such cooperation would instead be European Union sanctions against Russia’s nuclear sector—sanctions Germany supports but which have failed to win sufficient backing from other EU members.

The dispute highlights a problem Bellona has followed since the invasion of Ukraine: replacing Rosatom is considerably more complicated than simply signing contracts with other fuel companies.

Decades of Soviet and Russian nuclear development left VVER operators dependent on specialized fuel designs and supply chains. Western companies are developing alternatives, but creating a completely independent manufacturing capability takes time.

According to Bellona nuclear expert Dmitry Gorchakov, Framatome is out on a limb with several existing orders for VVER fuel for reactors in Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary—orders it can only fulfill on time with Rosatom’s help.

“Framatome needs to cooperate with Rosatom because it does not yet have its own fully licensed, independent technology for manufacturing fuel for VVER reactors,” Gorchakov said. “The company is developing that technology in parallel, but it will need several more years to complete and test it.”

A joint facility at Lingen is a shortcut to that goal, Gorchakov added.  Instead of waiting for an entirely Western VVER fuel-production chain, Framatome would manufacture Russian-designed fuel in Germany while gradually developing its own technology.

The controversy also raises a broader question about how Europe defines nuclear independence. Germany considers cooperation with Rosatom politically undesirable and has imposed extraordinary security conditions on the Lingen arrangement. Yet it also considers the project one route toward replacing Russian fuel imports.

“Continuing to cooperate with Rosatom on the production of VVER fuel in Europe would simply shift this dependence into another, somewhat less direct and obvious form,” said Gorchakov. “But it would still be dependence.”

It also creates two risks, he added. First, it preserves a revenue stream to Rosatom from Europe’s nuclear economy. Second, it could delay the introduction of Framatome’s own fully independent, proprietary fuel in Europe and postpone the complete phaseout of Russian-produced fuel for VVER reactors in the EU.

“However, as long as there are no sanctions or restrictions on Russian supplies to the EU, this cooperation is far from unique,” Gorchakov noted. “Rosatom has supplied — and plans to continue supplying — several dozen tonnes of enriched uranium annually to the Lingen plant for the production of nuclear fuel for Western-designed reactors.”

Cooperation between the French and Russian nuclear industries also continues on Rosatom projects outside Europe, Gorchakov said. So while the Lingen plant is a particularly visible and high-profile example, it is far from the only instance of Franco-Russian cooperation in the nuclear sector. Whether Lingen represents a practical bridge to independence or simply relocates Russian nuclear dependence inside the European Union is now a question for Germany’s courts.

The post Germany wants independence from Russian nuclear fuel, using Rosatom as a bridge appeared first on Bellona.org.

As a cofounder of Native Species Network, I’m grateful for those who go beyond treasuring native plants and actually get out in the field to do the hard work of clearing away undesirable alien plants. But I have concerns about how some projects are affect the larger landscape, including the animals who live there.

For instance, when I taught an animal-tracking class in Point Reyes National Seashore this past June, I was surprised to find that someone had uprooted all the cakile (sea rocket) in my favorite tracking spot on the open sand at Abbots Lagoon. And they had also removed the few harmless foxgloves that managed to grow along the trail, as well as some ice plant and a few other nonnatives.

Tracking is an integrated practice in which we study all the visible lifeforms in certain areas and how they interact. In Sonoma County, where I’m based and have studied wildlife for virtually all of my 90 years, we like to see cakile because it has become a major food source for mice and voles, which themselves are a major food source for raptors, herons, foxes, bobcats, coyotes and weasels. Pipits, plovers, sand pipers and other insectivore birds like it because it harbors a rotating zoo of insects. Plus, it provides cover. At the end of the annual cycle, if there are any geese around, they graze the plant nearly to the ground, occasionally killing it.

If ever there are any non-native plants welcomed into our biosphere, cakile should be among them. The California Invasive Plant Council acknowledges it is an invasive non-native, but is generally not a problem, and they do not recommend a removal plan. Plus, it is an attractive flowering plant for people, many of whom have tasted the peppery leaves. To my eye this plant is integrating productively into the landscape. There are a few places where it displaces natives, and in those locations, it could easily be controlled by selective hand pulling a few times a year.

Ice plant is another plant that looks different through a tracker’s eye. We know that deer eat it a lot. Rabbits and voles eat it occasionally, as do some other critter we have not yet identified that takes the very tips of the leaves…maybe an insect. What seems to be the case around here is that in places where ice plant is getting enough moisture, like on the ocean facing side of Bodega Head, it becomes more invasive and displaces especially desirable, often uncommon, native plant life. But further inland, along the drier coastal terraces, it seems more like a hundred-year struggle is raging in slow motion between the ice plant and the natives. Ice plant thrives and spreads with damp weather, but in dry locations in the hind dunes, it dries out and dies back massively every summer. Now that the climate is warming, the natives are winning more battles. It makes me smile to find a waist-high yellow lupine blooming in a 20-foot circle of dead, black ice plant.

I say, sure, pull out the ice plant, especially where it’s doing harm. But treat it as an actor in the larger landscape. On Bodega Head, for example, the summers are tough on deer. As the milk herd, with 20 or so does, forms up in the fall, forage becomes precious. Among invasive plants that helps sustain them, in addition to ice plant and nonnative forbs, are the nonnative wild radish/mustards. By fall their leaves are almost stripped bare, but in the moist air they grow small new leaves that are eaten by the deer. Recognize, too, that many native plants are unpalatable to native herbivores.

I would like to see invasive plant priorities determined place by place, based on the role they now play in the local ecology. It seems pretty narrow for people to just pick projects based on the single principle that it’s good to eliminate any nonnative under all conditions, even where the species in integrating well. Removing a plant species is an intervention with impact on the local balance of nature that radiates out some distance. If we want to intervene, we should understand what we are doing not only to the species, but to the local environment. This is something you have to spend quite a bit of time in the landscape to learn to recognize. Trackers call this “dirt time.”

In Sonoma County, we track a lot in the Salmon Creek estuary. This tidal creek snakes lazily down out of the coastal hills and makes a 90-degree bend on the south bank a hundred or so yards before the ocean, then runs north almost a quarter of a mile, before bending 90 degrees again into the sea. The peninsula dunes that formed between the creek and the ocean is composed of dune grass, ringed on three sides by patches of cakile and various native plants. Mice, voles, rabbits, and gophers colonized the area. Geese and occasionally ducks nested there. Otters cross it as a shortcut from the creek to the ocean. There were always large open sandy patches, with a few natives. It was a great place to track because in that small, but productive area, we reliably found coyote, bobcat, fox, rabbit, skunk, raccoon, mice, and vole tracks, plus birds ranging from geese to sparrows and pipits. To us, this was a thriving ecozone.

One day, going on three years ago, we were astonished to find a crew completely digging out all the dune grass from this entire peninsula. I talked to the supervisor, and he explained they had gotten a contract to remove the dune grass. There was quite a bit of community opposition. It was further explained that Cal Trans wanted to open a channel directly through the peninsula to protect the north cliff faces from potential erosion, which had never happened yet. I was never able to determine who let the contract. And as far as I know there was never any community outreach for such a large, high-impact project. I told the contractor that dune grass roots go down 10 feet and will probably resprout, which is now happening even though a few clusters of natives have taken hold. One or two maintenance visits were undertaken, but I suspect that is all that the contract covers.  Personally, I think this was perfectly good grant money down the drain.

Now all the predators, except for the otters and a couple of foxes, have disappeared — not only from that location, but in large measure from the adjacent mainland for a half mile or so south of the creek. What we see now are only occasional forays into the old hunting grounds.

I tell this story for two reasons: One, to encourage native plant people to notice and account for the larger biological accommodations that the animals are making. Two, to show that removal projects at scale can affect not only the animals but the local human communities.

A third consideration involves failure to plan for maintenance. I’m not sure there’s a gain in removing ice plant, say, only to let wild nonnative grasses and forbs take over. Anybody who’s been involved in broom removal, for instance, knows that success requires years and years of maintenance to deal with the long-lasting seed bank. One project near Ft. Bragg, some time ago, involved an expensive, massive, and welcomed removal of Scotch Broom, followed up with five years of contracted maintenance. In the sixth year it all came back, thicker than ever.

And lastly, I want to mention priorities. In the Bodega Dunes and along the coast there have been several expensive campaigns to remove pampas grass, but now it’s returning. It would make sense to take it out now, while it’s relatively easy, rather than to wait until the infestation is unbearable. I think the parks understand this, but they’re starved for funding. This is much harder work than removing ice plant, but probably more important. Also, in addition to nonnative grasses, there are many other exotics that are at least as harmful as ice plant, ranging from poison hemlock to Monterey pines, and are seldom dealt with.

I’m not against intervention. I’m suggesting we need to understand what our objectives are. Even native plants should sometimes be controlled. Meadows, which are rich in both plant and animal diversity, are also said to be better carbon sinks than conifer forests, which support very restricted levels of wildlife. Yet many meadows in my area are being overrun by Doug firs, eucalyptus, coyote brush, coffee berry, poison oak, and blackberries. The local Pomo and Miwok treasured the open grasslands and meadows and kept them vital by burning. We should control them, too. To this end, the natural succession in this coastal area has already been interrupted for ten thousand years by burning the coast facing hillsides. In years past, grazing performed some of that job. But now chaparral is forming, and Doug firs are working their way downhill, while invasive Monterey pines are working uphill. Without intervention, redwoods will probably ultimately crowd all the way to the beaches, destroying the beautiful, open and fruitful habitat that characterizes the south Sonoma County landscape.

The most advanced regional resource I know of for science-based research into all of these problems is Pepperwood Preserve. I urge those who want to volunteer their efforts to acquaint themselves.

All of that said, I don’t want to discourage the good work being done by native plant activists. But realistically, we will never be able to eliminate more than a fraction of the nonnative species that always accompany the expansion of human population. Moreover, the worst is still to come, as climate change increasingly alters the environments that native plants evolved to thrive in.

I don’t have a solution to all of this, but I can attest that it’s rewarding to get out in the field and pay close attention to the struggles plants and animals are engaged in as they try to survive the epochal changes that characterize our era. I think we’ll make better choices if we respect some of the accommodations being made.

The post Is Removing All Nonnative Plants Always the Answer? appeared first on The Revelator.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued a sweeping new directive that attempts to strip imperiled wildlife of protections from most activities that can kill or injure them.

“This stabs at the very heart of the Endangered Species Act by giving federal approval to the killing of some of America’s most beloved wildlife,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Trump administration is desperate to annihilate environmental protections, but this incredibly radical measure is both cruel and profoundly unlawful. Killing endangered wildlife is illegal, whether that’s your purpose or not.”

The Sept. 14 memo from Brian Nesvik, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, attempts to fundamentally rewrite the Endangered Species Act’s prohibition on “take,” effectively ending nearly all potential law enforcement activities under the Act.

The unintentional or incidental killing of an endangered whale, for example, would no longer be considered illegal, even if it was easily foreseeable.

“A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it, because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale,” the Nesvik memo says. “Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

The new directive goes substantially beyond the administration’s recent elimination of the longstanding regulatory definition of “harm.” It declares that prohibited “take” requires an intentional act directed at a particular animal that directly and immediately affects that animal.

The administration’s July rule rescinded the regulatory definition of “harm,” which had expressly covered significant habitat modification that actually kills or injures protected wildlife. But the Sept. 14 directive goes considerably further. Rather than merely interpreting the word “harm,” the directive establishes requirements that it says apply to “take” generally — a statutory term Congress defined to include “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect.”

The directive also violates the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon, where the majority rejected the contention that “take” is limited to conduct intentionally directed against particular animals.

Under the new Nesvik directive, Fish and Wildlife Service personnel are instructed to look for four elements: an affirmative act; an act intentionally directed at an animal; a direct and immediate effect; and a particular animal rather than populations, future occupants or unoccupied habitat. That could radically shrink the universe of activities the government considers to constitute unlawful take.

The directive could have far-reaching consequences for logging, mining, development, water diversions and other activities that foreseeably kill or injure endangered wildlife without deliberately targeting individual animals.

“If you chop down a tree full of endangered birds or race a huge ship through a pod of endangered whales, you should be held accountable for your destructive acts,” Hartl said. “But this administration wants to give wildlife killers a ‘Get out of jail free’ card. Imposing new limitations on the entire definition of take is a flagrant and illegal attempt to rewrite the Endangered Species Act via unilateral fiat. This would drive imperiled species over the cliff to extinction.”

Two years ago, John Lowrey woke to the roar of water surging into his home. The 65-year-old retiree and father of five rushed toward his basement just as a 3-foot wave slammed through the door, tearing it from its hinges.

Water crashed through his bay windows, drowning the family’s piano and heirloom cedar chests. His 29-year-old daughter piled family photos on a bed until it started floating. The inundation ruined documents, appliances, and insulation, and repairs cost the family $150,000. “We lost everything,” Lowrey said.

What Lowrey didn’t know then was that the flood that wrecked his home would return the following summer. And the summer after that.

Alaska is warming at two to three times the global average, and the changing climate poses a particular risk to Juneau. Since 2011, meltwater and rain collecting in a basin beside the Mendenhall Glacier have periodically flooded neighborhoods along the Mendenhall River. For more than a decade, the floods remained relatively small. Then, in 2023, the river reached a record high of nearly 15 feet. New benchmarks followed in 2024 and again in 2025.

Another flood came last month. Scientists expect them to return annually for decades to come.

That has forced Juneau to confront a problem that communities around the world are increasingly facing: How do you prepare for a natural disaster when you know it will come back?

The Mendenhall Glacier overlooks a residential neighborhood in Juneau. Marina Lopes

Juneau is beginning to find an answer. Scientists and local officials are putting increasingly sophisticated flood forecasts directly into the hands of residents. The online dashboard rolled out in 2025 translates complex glacier and hydrology data into information they can use to decide when to protect their belongings, prepare for rising water, or leave their homes.

The forecasts are changing how Juneau responds to the threat by providing officials and thousands of people in the flood zone more time to act before the water arrives. The approach could offer lessons far beyond Alaska as communities elsewhere contend with floods, hurricanes, and other climate-driven disasters that strike again and again.

Juneau sits amid the mountains and wilderness that define much of southeast Alaska. Although it is the state capital and home to 32,000 people, it is accessible only by air or sea. Lowrey’s family has deep roots in this rugged landscape. He recounted his story standing beneath the hide of a brown bear his grandfather shot decades ago. Still, the flood traumatized his family. His daughter tears up thinking about it. 

“We didn’t know anything,” he said. “We didn’t understand the nature of the basin. We thought it was a 100-year flood.”

They quickly learned otherwise. Each summer, the basin beside the Mendenhall Glacier fills with meltwater and rain. The glacier acts as a dam until enough water accumulates to trigger a flood downstream. In 2023, one of those floods inundated roughly two dozen homes, sweeping a house into the river and causing millions of dollars in damage. A year later, another flood damaged nearly 300 homes.

John Lowrey points to how high floodwaters rose inside his home in Juneau during a glacial flood. Marina Lopes

Glacial outburst floods are not unique to Juneau. They occur in Iceland, the Alps, the Himalayas, and other regions with glaciers. In Alaska’s capital, however, residential neighborhoods sit directly in the flood’s path, leaving thousands of residents exposed to the recurring threat.

“For Sale” signs dot the valley, but it’s a buyer’s market in the flood zone. Those within it have had little choice but to adapt to the annual floods. Some have dug moats. Others have raised their houses several feet above the ground. The city has built roughly 6 miles of barriers between the Mendenhall River and residents’ homes. 

Amid the uncertainty, the dashboard has become a source of comfort. Mark Miller, 75, checks it every day, waiting for the warning he knows is coming. “It’s pretty much on my mind constantly,” he said.

Two years ago, the sound of water pouring into the crawl space beneath his home jolted Miller awake in the wee hours. When he ventured into the garage and opened the door, a wall of gray slush surged toward him.

By the time the water receded, 16 inches of water filled the garage and mud and silt streaked the walls. Setting it all right took seven months and cost $35,000. Tears still fill his eyes at the memory of it all. Now, he prepares for each flood by placing sandbags on both sides of his doors to hold them in place against the water’s pressure. He turns to the dashboard to understand what happened and what is coming. 

“It can accurately predict the height of [glacial] floods within hours, which is pretty amazing,” he said.

Barriers, installed by the city of Juneau with help from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, line the Mendenhall River to protect residential neighborhoods from recurring glacial floods. Marina Lopes

Last year, more than 15,000 people accessed the dashboard for real-time updates on the floods. In addition to flood maps and forecasts, it offers an interactive explanation of how the basin formed and how glacial outburst floods happen.

It was there that Miller learned the science behind the water that invaded his home.

The Mendenhall Glacier peeks out behind verdant mountains in the summertime, a vast block of ice streaked with blue and gray that has long drawn tourists and scientists to Alaska’s capital.

The basin beside the glacier is known as Suicide Basin. As the water accumulates, the pressure can lift the expanse of ice, creating a drain that sends a torrent rushing toward the Mendenhall River. During a large outburst flood, the basin can release upward of 15 billion gallons, enough to fill 22,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Mendenhall Valley first flooded in 2011, but scientists had no idea why. They hopped in a helicopter and discovered that water in the basin behind the glacier was leaking.

Looking for a way to communicate directly with residents, researchers at the University of Alaska Southeast and the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center collaborated with the city to develop the dashboard. They then worked with residents to distribute flyers and magnets with QR codes that directed people to the dashboard.

Residents created and distributed flyers with a QR code to the flood dashboard. Marina Lopes

Eran Hood, one of the environmental scientists who developed the tool, said he sees a broader lesson in Juneau’s experience.

“You can do the same thing with hurricanes, storm surges,” he said. “You could do the same thing with floods on rivers like the Mississippi.” The goal, he said, is to “find the best way to provide people with information that gives them the power to make decisions. That to me is the biggest lesson from this.”

The flood data and forecasts are also shaping the city’s response. In 2024, officials started studying them to determine where to build miles of temporary walls along the Mendenhall River to protect homes from future floods.

On a rainy July afternoon, Nate Rumsey, deputy director of engineering and public works for the city, stared up at stacks of army-green, dirt-filled barriers lining the river to protect residents from a deluge that came on August 13.

Another severe flood “could put the viability of our community at risk,” he said.

Read Next Who will benefit from melting glaciers? Max Graham

The defenses, known as Hesco barriers, snake through town, behind the library and elementary school and past homes, sometimes coming within inches of windows. The fabric-lined wire-mesh baskets, which are filled with sand and gravel, connect like Legos, stacked two, three, or four high. Rumsey spent months working with the Army Corps of Engineers to map out and oversee their installation.

The dashboard helped homeowners watching soldiers carry barriers into their backyards understand the threat they faced and the city’s response, Rumsey said.

“We recognized early on that the community needs to have information pertinent to this available to them for their own decision-making,” he said.

Residents could use the online tool to see how high the water might rise on their property without the barriers, and understand what those defenses were designed to prevent.

Sandbags are deployed by residents to protect their homes in anticipation of the next glacial flood in Juneau. Marina Lopes Flood barriers line the Mendenhall River, coming within inches of some homes. Marina Lopes

The dashboard has also changed how residents understand the landscape around them. 

Alyssa Fischer never gave much thought to the glacier towering over her house until she woke at 2 a.m. to find her street had turned into a river.

As the water rolled into her garage and swept away her front porch, the 33-year-old single mother decided it was time to go. She grabbed her 8-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son and carried them through knee-deep, icy water, shouting to wake her neighbors. She put her pet duck, quail, and goose in the bed of her red pickup as water rose above the wheels.

Alyssa Fischer stands in her backyard with her pets. A glacial flood destroyed part of her home. She carried her children through the icy current and put her pet duck, quail, and goose in the bed of her pickup as water rose above the wheels. Marina Lopes

Like so many residents in Juneau, Fischer now speaks the language of the scientists studying the ice above her. She talks about how rainfall can change a flood’s timeline and how many cubic feet of water could spell disaster for her and her neighbors. During flood season, she checks the dashboard hourly.

“Before it impacted my life, it was, like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’” she said. “Now, I want to know what’s happening.” That knowledge shapes decisions about her home, her children, and her future. “It’s your life,” she said. “It’s your money and your investment, and understanding what’s actually happening in the world around you and how it’s going to affect you.”

Armed with a radio, flashlights, and the dashboard, she awaits the next flood.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Juneau can’t stop the floods, but it’s learning to see them coming on Sep 17, 2026.

In 2025, a third of rivers worldwide had below-normal flows

Source

More than 300,000 solar panels and 120 battery containers are helping to power Africa’s largest copper mine with continuous clean energy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as miners turn to solar as an alternative to expensive diesel and energy imports.

The project at the Kamoa Copper mine in the south of the DRC, which became operational last month, is one of the largest solar and battery facilities generating baseload power on the continent.

The clean electricity is displacing millions of litres of polluting diesel and costs less than a fifth of the price of generator power per kilowatt hour, the mining company said.

The project is part of a massive solar deployment across the continent. Recent data from global energy think-tank Ember found record solar capacity of 17 GW will be installed in Africa this year – a 45% rise from 2025.

Installed by CrossBoundary Energy, a developer of distributed renewable energy systems, the solar-battery facility at the DRC mine is “proof of concept” that solar and battery systems can provide the reliable power at scale needed by remote industrial operations, Annebel Oosthuizen, managing director at Kamoa Copper, told Climate Home News in an interview.

“There’s always been this perception in the DRC that solar isn’t ideal because it is raining half of the year. But it’s perfectly ideal. We are seeing a lot of interest from other mines that are still depending on generators and power imports,” she said.

Mining drives solar and battery surge

Like Kamoa Copper, a growing number of miners in the DRC are looking to solar power to compensate for the country’s chronic energy deficit at a lower cost as global diesel prices hit record highs amid ongoing attacks on oil infrastructure in the Middle East.  

As a result, the mining sector has become a key driver of the country’s growing clean energy demand and one of the biggest importers of large-scale solar equipment.

Ember found the DRC is set to install a record 1.7 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels this year – a 544% increase compared to 2025 and the equivalent of adding more than 60% of the country’s entire 2023 grid capacity.

The deployment of combined solar and battery storage solutions to deliver stable energy supplies to mines has also caused battery imports to surge. In dollar terms, the DRC’s imports of batteries from China far exceeded that of solar in the year to June 2026, according to Ember.

A crippling power deficit

The DRC holds significant energy resources and some of the world’s largest reserves of the minerals required to manufacture clean energy technologies. It is the world’s largest producer of cobalt, which is needed to make batteries, and Africa’s top producer of copper – a metal sought after for its electrical conductivity which is pivotal to the world’s electrification efforts.

Yet just 22.5% of the DRC’s population had access to electricity in 2024 – one of the lowest rates in the world, according to the World Bank. And as mining expands and more of the minerals extracted are being processed in the country, unreliable power supply has become a major constraint for the sector, which contributed to more than a quarter of the country’s GDP in 2024, excluding oil and gas.

The country has enormous hydropower potential, with the hydroelectric potential of the Congo River estimated at around 100 GW. But only a fraction is being harnessed.

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Still, virtually all of the DRC’s grid-connected electricity is generated by hydropower by the state-owned utility, Société Nationale d’Électricité (SNEL).

The electricity then has to be transported more than 1,500 kilometres to reach the mining belt in the south – a challenge made more difficult by ageing grid infrastructure and limited transmission capability. SNEL did not respond to a request for comment.

“It is estimated that there’s around a 1 GW energy deficit for the DRC mining sector,” said Matt Tilleard, CEO of CrossBoundary Energy, which owns the solar and battery equipment at the Kamoa Copper mine and provides the power as a service.

“The interest in solar from the mining industry is not theoretical – it is already translating into large-scale solar and battery procurement for mining operations in the region,” he added.

Solar displaces gas, saves energy costs

The facility installed by CrossBoundary is part of a plan by Kamoa Copper to supply more of the electricity it needs with solar energy and batteries as its operations expand, a faster solution than relying on harder-to-build hydropower projects.

“Our processing capacity has increased drastically over the last couple of years. We’ve constructed the largest copper smelter in Africa and that is so power-intensive,” said managing director Oosthuizen.

A joint venture between Canadian firm Ivanhoe Mines, Chinese company Zijin Mining Group and the DRC government, the mine needs 235 megawatts (MW) of power, which is expected to nearly double to 450 MW in the next five years.

Kamoa Copper currently receives 100 MW from state utility SNEL – “and the rest we have to find a solution for”, said Oosthuizen.

Aerial view of a vast solar park and battery storage containers powering the Kamoa Copper mine in southern DRC (Photo: Kamoa Copper SA)

Another 30 MW solar and battery baseload facility is expected to come into operation this month, enabling around 25% of the mine’s power needs to be generated by solar energy. An additional 60 MW of continuous solar power will be added by the end of 2027, and the company is exploring options for more solar capacity and two hydropower projects.

The operational 30 MW of clean electricity provided by CrossBoundary Energy will power pumps that prevent 400 million litres of water from flooding the underground mine every day.

In August alone, the facility has reduced the mine’s diesel consumption by around four million litres, generating an estimated $11 million dollars in savings at current diesel prices, Oosthuizen said.

The mine still relies on generators to meet a 20-40 MW deficit and to power the trucks used in the mine, which Oosthuizen said would be difficult to electrify in the next five years because the technology isn’t yet ready to operate in the mine’s tough and wet conditions.

Avoiding a two-speed transition

To prevent a major imbalance between industrial players’ access to clean, reliable energy and the millions of Congolese who remain without power, the government requires private electricity producers to reserve at least 10% of their generated power for local communities living near rural production sites.  

Delivering this, combined with rural electrification, mini-grid development and national grid expansion, is critical to prevent a two-speed energy transition that leaves people behind, said Catherine Mukobo, head of ACERD, the Congolese Association for Renewable and Decentralised Energies.

“Without implementing these policies, the DRC could get in a situation where mines have access to abundant modern energy while a large part of the population remains without electricity,” she said.

The post DR Congo’s power-hungry mining sector drives record solar surge appeared first on Climate Home News.

Registered nurses at MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center, in Baltimore, Md. will hold a rally on Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026 to highlight unaddressed patient safety concerns — including short-staffing and lack of equipment and supplies — that have driven them to unionize.

"The National Land Agency, cannot become an institution that renders invisible the main subject of agrarian policy: the Colombian peasantry.", says FENSUAGRO

The post Colombia: FENSUAGRO demands respect for the Constitution and the rights of Colombia’s peasantry appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

A new ultra-black wool could make it desirable to be a black sheep. The specially dyed wool could be a low-cost, biodegradable material for producing potable water from saltwater using only sunlight.

The material reflects less than 0.5% of visible light falling on it and helps to purify saltwater by evaporating it. It produces water that exceeds both World Health Organization and Environment Protection Agency drinking-water standards, says Larissa Shepherd, a professor of human centered design at Cornell University. Shepherd and her colleagues reported their new ultrablack solar water evaporator in the journal Advanced Science.

Nearly half the world’s urban population is projected to face water scarcity by 2050. Conventional desalination technologies can convert seawater into potable water. But they are “too infrastructure-heavy and energy-intensive to reach the communities that need it most,” Shepherd says.

Distillation is one of the simplest ways of purifying water. It involves heating water into a vapor to separate any solid impurities such as salts, and then cooling the vapors to give fresh water. Researchers have been developing many methods and novel materials to distill water using only sunlight.

Most solar vapor generation devices that perform well, however, “rely on complex 3D fabrication or synthetic nanomaterials that are costly, hard to scale, and risk leaching into the water they produce,” Shepher says.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Researchers strike the “Achilles Heel” of desalination

 

So she and her colleagues took commercial white merino wool fabric and dyed it with polydopamine, a light-absorbing polymer inspired by melanin. The researchers took cues from the deep-black feathers of the riflebird, a type of Bird of Paradise. They etched the dyed wool to create spiky microscopic growths that mimic the tiny structures on the bird’s feathers that help absorb most of the light that hits them. They reported this “darkest fabric ever made” last year in the journal Nature Communications.

The team has now used the material as a solar water evaporator. The researchers created three wool structures with horizontal, one-sided vertical and two-sided vertical configurations. While the tiny spike fibers trap light, the polydopamine converts near-infrared light into heat.

In tests under simulated sunlight, the two-sided vertical system produced 2.43 liters of water per square meter of fabric each hour. That is the range of high-performing 3D architectures that require far more elaborate fabrication, Shepherd says. And it is lower than more complex systems and those using microplastics or nanomaterials.

But this material is 100% natural, simple, and low cost. The material weighs about 281 grams per square meter, and costs roughly $0.62 in materials for a 20 × 20 cm piece, she says. “Our modeling suggests a single square meter could yield around 4,700 liters of vapor a year in a sun-rich location like Mokha, Yemen. That makes off-grid, textile-based water purification realistic for vulnerable communities. I see it being used as an off-grid water source for communities that conventional infrastructure doesn’t reach.”

The researchers have already tested the material outdoors on a partly cloudy day in Ithaca, New York, on water three times saltier than seawater and it performed well. They now plan to test its performance on brackish ground water and wastewater.

Source: Kyuin Park et al. Polydopamine-Wool Textiles for Sustainable Interfacial Solar Vapor Generation. Advanced Science, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

 

Registered nurses will hold a rally and community event on Saturday, Sept. 19 in Bangor, Maine to highlight the patient care impacts of federal health care cuts on Maine hospitals. Nurses will also use the event to discuss their Vision for a Healthy Society, a set of broad political demands that require taking back health care, democracy, and society from billionaire and corporate control.

Headline News:

• “Five Takeaways From Ursula Von Der Leyen’s State Of The Union Speech” • Ursula von der Leyen gave an hour-long State of the Union speech, laying out solutions to cope with the “exceptional” challenges and the “incredible” change that Europe is undergoing. One thing that was predictable after last summer was attention to climate change. [reNews]

Ursala von der Leyen (European Parliament, CC BY-SA 4.0)

• “Sierra Club Strongly Opposes Bill To Give Legal Immunity To Fossil Fuel Companies” • Fossil fuel corporations knew they were causing climate change in the 1950s and spent millions of dollars to mislead the public. A study found that climate costs for the US economy will exceed $1 trillion this year. HR 8330 would give the companies immunity. [CleanTechnica]
• “Vineyard Wind And GE Vernova Settle Litigation” • Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova have reached an amicable settlement resolving all outstanding litigation concerning the 800-MW Vineyard Wind offshore wind project off the north-east US coast. The parties said GE Vernova withdrew its notice of termination as part of the agreement. [reNews]
• “Climate Change Was A Key Factor In Deadly Nepal-China Flood, Scientists Say” • Climate change played a significant role in last month’s deadly Himalayan disaster in Nepal, thinning glaciers and thawing mountain permafrost in ways that likely destabilized the slope before it collapsed, according to a report by World Weather Attribution. [Euronews]
• “Trump’s Slashing Of EPA Pollution Rules Will Cost Trillions” • At first glance one might think the Trump Administration’s move to reduce federal climate protection laws would be a good thing for energy stocks. The Environmental Defense Fund calculated that the move is so unhealthy it will result in between $1.5 trillion and $4.2 trillion in harm. [Yahoo]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

After an extended period of limited deployment, renewable energy is once again gaining momentum in Ontario. Wind, solar and batteries swept the most recent, technology-neutral, procurements, outcompeting other technologies to deliver the lowest-cost...

In 2023, under the bright lights of the Expo City Dubai, almost 200 nations adopted an agreement to dramatically alter the world’s relationship with energy.

The deal at the COP28 climate summit promised to triple the amount of renewable electricity capacity to at least 11,000 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements from 2% to 4%. Taken together, these two commitments have the potential to usher in a new global economy that is cleaner and smarter. 

Research suggests the world is on course to meet the renewable energy target, with an annual growth rate of nearly 30% between 2023 and 2025. The same cannot be said of energy efficiency, where growth fell to 1% in 2024, but has since climbed to 1.8%, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The IEA attributes this poor performance to a number of factors: strong growth in industrial energy demand, policy gaps, greater access to inefficient air conditioners, and an overall growth in energy demand which renewables have not been able to meet. 

Air conditioning units lined up outside a building in Hong Kong. (Image: Unsplash) Air conditioning units lined up outside a building in Hong Kong. (Image: Unsplash)

Global electricity demand is predicted to grow by 3.8% in 2027, up from 3% in 2025. According to researchers, this demand is primarily being driven by heavy industries – steel, chemicals, cement – which overwhelmingly still use fossil fuels to power their energy-intensive factories. 

In addition, the explosive growth of AI has led to the development of new data centres which require huge amounts of electricity. Under conservative scenarios, data centres could double their electricity consumption by 2030, and those dedicated to servicing AI needs could see a 30% annual increase over the same period. The more these trends continue, the greater the cost of transitioning to cleaner, more efficient technologies.

Taking the right policy direction

While both old and new technologies put added pressure on the electricity system, the targets set in recent years remain the same. This presents policymakers with a challenge and an opportunity.

Policy is often designed to be responsive to the world around it. When the EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive was first adopted in 2012, the world was a very different place. That is why it has since been updated, twice, in 2018 and 2023.

Is electrification a no-brainer in the race to net-zero?

Mario Giordano, global head of public and government affairs at lighting multinational Signify, calls this piece of legislation “market transformational” as it created “long-term certainty through binding targets, energy saving obligations, and renovation requirements”. This, in turn, allowed businesses to plan investments and start to innovate with the stability the directive created. 

The legislation has been credited with improving efficiency rates across the bloc. According to Eurostat, the EU used a record low amount of energy in 2024, 20% less than in 2006, an historic high point.

One of the next steps on that journey for Europe is the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive which seeks to upgrade old buildings and introduces a zero-emissions standard for new public ones.

“It is a huge opportunity to renovate the continent’s building stock, and lighting is everywhere,” said Giordano. “There will need to be a massive overhaul from conventional lighting to LEDs, targeting the worst-performing buildings,” he added. This bold legislative approach could provide a template for other countries to develop energy policies with maximum impact on efficiency rates.

How to get to 4%

Jérôme Bilodeau, energy efficiency programme manager at the IEA, told Climate Home News “the world is not currently on track” to meet the COP28 efficiency goal but agreed it was achievable with the right policies in place.

“Nine out of 10 countries have achieved a rate of improvement of 4% at least one year over the past decade,” he said.

“There are many examples of effective energy efficiency policies across the world, and governments are introducing new ones regularly,” he added, pointing out that countries representing 85% of global energy demand had announced hundreds of new or updated policies in 2025 alone.

Signify: “We believe resilience is becoming more important to businesses right now”

In addition, the global energy crisis caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has turbocharged the policy environment with a suite of new policies from dozens of countries now in place to reduce energy demand.

The IEA recommends closing policy gaps and raising the ambition of existing ones to help achieve the 4% energy efficiency improvement target. These policy gaps can be quite straightforward to address – for example, creating efficiency standards for new buildings, something the IEA says is lacking in almost half of all countries. And as technologies improve, policies need to be updated.

“In some countries, a building that meets the local efficiency standard may in fact be using three times as much energy as one in another country with a similar climate but with higher efficiency standards,” Bilodeau added. 

One integrated system

Giordano argues that a whole system view is needed: “Across different industries, there is a growing consensus that energy efficiency, electrification and renewable energy are not separate policy tracks, but one integrated system,” he said.

He believes that lighting can make a serious contribution to this system as a scalable and cost-effective efficiency measure. As lighting is a mature technology that is installed almost everywhere, from small buildings to city streets, it can be upgraded faster and provide immediate savings.

“You can reduce emissions, free up electricity for electrification purposes, and also save money that can be invested elsewhere,” he added.

Can the circular economy win over big business?

The latest figures show lighting accounts for around 8% of global electricity demand, and Signify estimates that switching to efficient LED technologies could save enough electricity to power up to 300 million heat pumps, or 400 million electric vehicles worldwide.

The focus on lighting would form part of a wider policy push to upgrade each country’s energy system where efficient appliances and processes are powered by renewables. And using energy more intelligently and flexibly, for example, by incentivising demand when renewable generation is higher, will greatly improve efficiency rates.

The English city of Liverpool is an example of one place seeking to use electricity in this way. A recent project, completed in 2026, saw the installation of ‘traffic adaptive lighting’ on key routes between a new football stadium and the city centre. The council can now respond to real-time fluctuations in demand, such as increased usage on match days, to meet people’s needs. This new approach could offer up to 30% in cost savings over the next decade, according to Signify.

Making energy work harder

An oft-repeated phrase in energy circles is that the greenest electron is the one you don’t use. The world is making steady progress on the challenge of transitioning away from fossil fuels. New wind and solar power installations continue to grow at record rates, with widespread coverage across continents. But in the headlong rush to build out capacity, governments and business may at the same time be taking a step backwards by paying insufficient attention to energy efficiency.

The positive work in renewables could easily be undone without a coordinated effort to make energy go further and work harder than it currently does. Experts in these circles agree that stronger, targeted policies are an important first step to achieving the world’s energy efficiency goals. But time is quickly running out to do so.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post The overlooked shortcut to meeting the world’s energy goals appeared first on Climate Home News.

For much of his career, Carlos Santos’ job involved being stranded in the middle of the Amazon. Santos is a truck driver on the BR-319, a hazardous dirt highway in Brazil that cuts through a critical part of the rainforest. “You knew when you were going in,” he said of the road. “But you never knew when you’d come out the other side.”

It once took Santos 22 days to cross the 540-mile route. An unexpected rain pounded the highway during the dry season, leaving large pools of mud that mired convoys of trucks. “It’s a survival test in the jungle,” he said. “Time moves slowly. You have to ration food and water.” At night, Santos would hang a hammock in his truck cabin and watch as jaguars, tapirs, and snakes crossed the road in front of him. For weeks, he dug vehicles out of ditches, bathed in nearby rivers, and waited for heavy machinery to pull rigs from the mud one by one.

Carlos Santos has been driving a truck since he was 18 years old. Joaquim Salles

When he finally got home, Santos rested for a few days and then returned for another haul down the 319. “I went back because I enjoy it,” he said. “It’s one hell of a challenge.”

But there’s another reason such conditions are endured aside from a penchant for adventure. The BR-319 is the only road connecting the state of Amazonas, home to 4.2 million people and twice the size of Texas, to the rest of Brazil. Now, after decades of court battles and challenges by environmental groups and regulators, sections of the highway are being asphalted, and plans to pave the entire route are moving forward. 

Asphalting the 319 is a long-held demand of many in the region, who feel their isolation hinders economic development. “Why should we be forgotten?” Santos asked. “Why doesn’t the state of Amazonas have the right to be connected to the rest of the country?”

But the decision isn’t so straightforward. Scientists warn that paving the road will connect previously inaccessible regions of the Amazon to its most under-pressure areas, leading to a deforestation boom with dire consequences for the global climate. The biome currently holds an estimated 150 to 200 billion tons of carbon in its plants and soils, helping to offset greenhouse gas emissions from activities like burning fossil fuels. When the forest is cleared and burned, that stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere, fueling climate change. Indigenous groups that live in the area also say the project poses an existential threat to their communities. 

A sign marking the start of the unpaved section of the BR-319. Joaquim Salles

This May, before the paving went into full swing, I joined Santos on his route to observe how the 319 and the forest it traverses are already changing. We met at 3 a.m. at a distribution center on the outskirts of Manaus, the capital of Amazonas and home to over 2 million people. Despite its isolation, Manaus is a major manufacturing hub, the legacy of tax incentives that have attracted industry since the 1960s. The vast majority of goods currently enter and leave the city by boat or by air. Proponents of asphalting the 319 argue this dependence raises costs, lengthens delivery times, and leaves the region vulnerable to river-navigation interruptions brought on by severe droughts, which have become more common. 

Santos was born and raised in Manaus and has been driving a truck since he was 18 years old. “I was never a fan of being locked in a room in front of a computer,” he said. Now 45, he is affable with an easy smile. His belly comes close to touching the steering wheel, and his trimmed salt-and-pepper beard matches the remaining hair on the sides of his head. A long career driving the potholed roads of Amazonas has left him with a bad back.

Carlos Santos says he enjoys driving the BR-319, though “it’s one hell of a challenge.” Joaquim Salles

We pulled out of the distribution center in an immaculate bright blue semi-truck, smaller and more nimble than some of the larger rigs that are regularly seen stranded or capsized amid the mud of the 319. The truck belonged to Bemol, a leading retailer in the Amazon region, and carried large kitchen appliances, furniture, and medicine. Our destination was Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia, which sits at the other end of the highway.

Santos has been driving on the 319 since 2015, when it reopened after decades of disrepair. Back then, he said, mud pools would stretch for dozens of yards during the rainy season, and potholes were the size of small craters. He was recounting this as we crossed the Rio Negro on a ferry, with dozens of other vehicles. The sun began to rise as we passed the famous meeting of the waters, where the dark, Coca-Cola-colored Rio Negro meets the murky brown Solimões, and the two rivers flow side by side without mixing. An hour later we were off the ferry and onto the highway. It would be a two-day trip with an overnight stop, but that was not guaranteed. The speed of travel on the 319 is highly dependent on the conditions of the road on any given day.

“You never know what to expect,” Santos told me.

In many ways, the history of deforestation in the Amazon is a history of road-building. 

In the 1970s, Brazil’s military dictatorship pursued an aggressive policy of constructing roads and encouraging settlement in the Amazon region. Since then, an area roughly the size of Spain has been deforested — 94 percent of which sits within 3 miles of a road. Often the mere possibility that a road will be built or paved is enough to increase deforestation in a given area.

The BR-319 was fully paved when it opened in 1976, but maintaining it proved too costly. It runs through a low-lying part of the forest and over the years, the grinding conditions of the rainy and dry seasons eroded the asphalt. Bus companies ceased service along the route, and businesses stopped using it to ship goods. The trees closed in on the highway and by 1988 it was virtually impassable, with only the ends still covered with asphalt. 

For years it was left to the forest, used only by the handful of communities that still lived along its route and the occasional adventurer passing through. The trees blocked the sky for long sections of the road, and the wood bridges rotted away. In 2015, federal regulators issued a license for the cleanup and maintenance of the roadway, though not its repaving. Crews worked to clear the trees and repair the more than 50 bridges that run along the road. Conditions remained precarious, but traffic returned. 

When Jair Bolsonaro was elected president in 2018, he gutted environmental regulations and announced he would pave the BR-319 once again. A far-right former army captain, Bolsonaro had campaigned on a platform friendly to loggers, miners, and agribusiness. The promise alone drove a 122 percent rise in deforestation in the area surrounding the highway between 2020 and 2022, greater than the already high deforestation rate for the Amazon as a whole during the same period. 

Brazil’s federal courts blocked the project due to inconsistencies in the environmental licensing process, but in 2025, years after Bolsonaro had left office, Brazil’s pro-agribusiness Congress passed a law that said work on existing roads could bypass licensing altogether. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, tried to veto parts of the bill but was overruled by Congress. In May, the government opened bidding for paving contracts. “By the end of June,” George Santoro, the Minister of Transportation, announced, “the entire BR-319 will be under construction.” 

After the ferry, the BR-319 continues on potholed asphalt for 120 miles, the final remnants of the original 1970s road. As we drove through the district of Careiro, the first on the 319 after Manaus, the landscape varied between forest and pasture, with modest, scattered homes on the side of the road. “Houses used to be a rare sight,” said Santos. “You’d see one here and another way off in the distance. Not anymore.”

It’s typical of a region in the early stages of deforestation. First, speculators and loggers clear public land. Once the timber is extracted, ranchers move in. They might live on the land themselves, but often they’ll hire someone to live there for them and tend the livestock. The ultimate goal is to petition the government for a formal land title which, if granted, can be resold once the road is fully paved and the land worth far more. The process of land regularization in Brazil is slow, bureaucratic, and rife with irregularities. Occupation is often a first step towards legal recognition, even when the initial clearing was illegal.

Cows in a pasture in the district of Careiro. Joaquim Salles

For three months in 2023, Manaus was shrouded in a thick cloud of smoke, ranking it among the cities with the worst air quality in the world. The governor of Amazonas at the time blamed the crisis on forest fires in the neighboring state of Pará. Research using satellite imagery and atmospheric data has since shown that while some of the smoke was indeed coming from Pará, much of it originated from forest-clearing blazes in districts at the start of the BR-319, like Careiro. 

As the old asphalt continues, the pastures become less frequent and the landscape progressively more wild. Then, all of a sudden, the asphalt turns into a reddish, iron-rich clay. It’s a surface that is rock-hard when dry and extremely slippery when wet. The rainy season brings mud and a slickness that causes trucks to glide out of control. The dry season brings clouds of dust that reduce visibility to just a few yards. This constant wetting and drying causes the dirt to form small ridges that drivers have come to call “cow ribs.” They rattle trucks like never-ending rumble strips.

Compared to what the highway was like in the recent past, this is a minor nuisance. “For the veterans around here, the road is a cakewalk now,” Santos said. The BR-319 may not be paved yet, but maintenance on the route has intensified in the past few years.

We encountered a road crew just a few miles after hitting dirt. To keep the highway passable, crews work daily on different sections, flattening uneven terrain, packing the ground, and adding gravel. Areas that easily flooded just a few years ago have been raised, bridges repaired or rebuilt entirely. (Environmentalists claim that much of this work goes beyond the maintenance license that was issued in 2015.) The road is still mostly used by trucks, but new companies can now be seen on the route, mostly transporting consumer goods, some coming from as far as São Paulo, 2,400 miles away.

A maintenance crew at work on the BR-319. Joaquim Salles

Traveling the 319 with Santos means listening to an unbroken catalogue of accidents he’s witnessed. A truck that rolled into a ravine here, dropping brand new washing machines into the river. Another that tumbled over there, spilling gallons of milk onto the road. Even today, it is not uncommon for Santos to encounter a capsized truck, sometimes more than one in a single journey. 

As we ventured deeper down the highway, lush forest occupied both sides of the road. “It’s every shade of green you could think of,” Santos remarked. He had a point. One hectare of Brazilian Amazon holds more species of trees than all of the continental United States and Canada combined.

About eight hours in, we reached the settlement of Iguapó-Açu. The town is home to some 75 families who live in stilt houses with tin roofs. It serves as a final rest stop for truck drivers before they face the BR-319’s middle stretch, where it cuts through 250 miles of dense forest with virtually nothing else around. Residents of Iguapó-Açu live on subsistence farming, fishing, and by operating a sluggish barge that drivers must take across a narrow river to continue on their way down the 319. 

While waiting for the barge, I spoke to residents who were eating freshly-caught fish stew on the porch of one of the houses. Raimunda de Sá Assunção, 53, moved to the town as a child and still remembers when the road was paved. She also remembers the years when the road fell into disrepair, many families left, and the drive to the nearest hospital could take days. Now the drive can take as little as two hours. She remains skeptical whether the road will ultimately be paved. “My hair’s turned white, and nothing’s happened. All they do is plug holes,” she said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Raimunda de Sá Assunção is a long-time resident of Iguapó-Açu. Joaquim Salles​

A spot just a few miles north of Iguapó-Açu was the site of a presidential photo-op in late May. As Lula posed with a road crew working on the 319, he painted a rosy picture of the future. “We will set an example of how to build a road,” he said, adding that the paved highway would be “the most beautiful and most preserved road in the world.” 

Lula was elected in 2022 by a broad anti-Bolsonaro coalition. Among those who buoyed him to victory was Marina Silva, the politician and environmental activist who is one of the Amazon’s most respected defenders. To get her support, Lula put the environment at the forefront of his campaign, pledging to put Brazil on a road to end deforestation by 2030.

He’s had mixed results. Deforestation rates are significantly down from the Bolsonaro years, but the government has had little success in stopping a barrage of anti-environment legislation coming from Congress, including the licensing reform that cleared the path for the paving of the 319. Now running for office again, Lula has thrown his support behind the paving, knowing that not doing so will cost him votes in the Amazon region. Silva has since left the Lula government to run for Senate in the upcoming elections. She has long been seen by many in the Amazon as an obstacle to paving the BR-319. In reality, she has never opposed the road outright, only insisted that it proceed with adequate environmental safeguards in place.

The week of the photo-op, in closed meetings with environmental groups, the government said a portion of the highway’s R$1.5 billion ($300 million) construction budget would also go towards an environmental governance plan. It would involve the creation of protected areas, wildlife bridges, and a ramp-up of environmental monitoring in a 60-mile buffer zone along the entire route. The main criticism from environmental groups is that these measures should have been implemented before any paving takes place. Instead, they are still in the discussion stage while the BR-319 is actively being asphalted.

“The plan being drawn up needs to be translated into documents with feasible, credible targets,” said Suely Araújo, Public Policy Coordinator at Observatório do Clima, a coalition of Brazilian civil society organizations focused on climate. “You need structural measures that are actually implemented. Not just promised.”

On September 8, Lula announced the formal creation of four protected areas around the BR-319, encompassing 2,600 square miles, well below the nearly 14,000 square miles the government had promised in closed meetings months earlier. 

“On one side were people who thought it was off-limits to undertake a project on a road that had already been built, connecting two state capitals,” Lula said in a speech during the announcement ceremony. “On the other were people who thought we should do it haphazardly, without any environmental-preservation criteria, without properly demarcating the relevant areas, turning it into a way for a few people to get rich by buying and selling land. We insisted that it was possible … We found a way to demarcate whatever needed to be demarcated.”

As it stands, most of the land around the BR-319 remains undesignated public land, the most attractive target for land-grabbers. It’s unclear if the government plans to announce additional conservation units. There is speculation that it might do so next year if Lula wins reelection in October. Polls show him neck-and-neck with Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro.

While research shows that giving an area protected status is a powerful deterrent to deforestation, it is by no means a silver bullet. “It’s far from enough. Many conservation units exist only on paper.” said Araújo. “The plan for the region hasn’t been formalized yet. What we’ve seen is a Power Point presentation.” 

The whole notion of whether the Brazilian state is capable of closely monitoring an area as large as the one impacted by the BR-319 is up for debate. Araújo told me there is no historical precedent for it in Brazil. IBAMA, the main agency responsible for environmental enforcement, is chronically understaffed. The area around the BR-319 almost entirely lacks state presence. Authorities that attempt to enforce environmental regulations in the region are often met with hostility. There are no police checkpoints and no bases for any of Brazil’s environmental monitoring agencies along the 319, though the government had pledged to establish them in the future. 

The main risk is what experts call the “fishbone phenomenon,” a pattern seen from above in many parts of the Amazon. Highways serve as a main corridor from which illegal side roads opened by loggers, land-grabbers, and wildcat miners branch out. The highways are the spine of the fish and the side roads are the ribs. It is from these unauthorized roads that much illicit activity takes place.

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The BR-319 is only in the early stages of this process, which picked up when the road reopened in 2015 and intensified during the Bolsonaro years, but it already has more miles of side roads than the length of the highway itself. Follow one of those through satellite images and inevitably you’ll find large, recently cleared areas in the middle of the rainforest. 

Phillip Fearnside, a biologist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research, or INPA, has studied the region for decades. “You have a huge area that could be deforested very quickly,” he said. 

Researchers have used complex modeling to simulate how the paving of the BR-319 and the proliferation of side roads — both legal and illegal — will impact the forest. One study, led by Britaldo Soares-Filho of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, found that if the road is asphalted, the resulting deforestation in the region would emit 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2050, four times more than if the highway remained unpaved but maintained. A separate study projected that deforestation will be 60 percent greater by 2100 under a paved scenario. 

Fearnside argues the impact would extend far beyond the 60-mile buffer zone that the government has pledged to monitor because the asphalt would connect the mostly untouched central Amazon — “the last big stretch of forest,” as he described it — to deforestation hotspots in the south. “It would be enough to push climate past the tipping point where warming gets out of control,” he said.

The threat is not only theoretical or in the future. Indigenous communities in the highway’s reach are already feeling the consequences. There have been several reports of illegal side roads encroaching into Indigenous territory. The Mura people in the region of Lago Capanã Grande have been under growing threat from land-grabbers since 2020, as conditions on the 319 improved and traffic increased. There is evidence that the toxic chemical 2,4-D, one of the main components of Agent Orange, was used to deforest land the Mura use to harvest Brazil nut, a key food source in the region. The waste was then dumped into rivers relied on by the community and made 20 people ill.

In total, there are 69 Indigenous territories in the region impacted by the BR-319, including some groups living in voluntary isolation. Together, these territories are inhabited by at least 13 different ethnicities comprising over 18,000 people. Although Brazilian law requires that Indigenous groups be consulted on large infrastructure projects that could impact them, there is no evidence this has happened in this case. 

“Consultation must happen before any decision is made, with real dialogue and the possibility of influence, including the right to say ‘no.’ What is happening is the opposite,” Mariazinha Baré told the Brazilian website Nexo. Baré is a coordinator at APIAN, a coalition of Indigenous groups from Amazonas. “BR-319 is not just infrastructure; it is an instrument of death that threatens the existence of Indigenous peoples and weakens the Amazon,” she said.

The middle stretch of the BR-319, where the road cuts through 250 miles of dense forest with virtually nothing else around. Joaquim Salles

After Iguapó-Açu, the 319 enters its wildest section. We stopped so I could get an aerial view using a drone. At 400 feet, nothing but thick, impregnable forest stretched to the horizon in every direction, except for the distinct red gash of the highway.

Since there is no cell service, truckers going in opposite directions often stop to swap notes on road conditions and weather. It wasn’t long after we started driving again that a passing trucker warned of rain ahead.

It began as a soft patter but quickly turned torrential. “While it’s raining, it’s best to push on,” Santos said. It’s the hours after the downpour, when the ground is drying but still slick, that are the most dangerous for drivers. It was getting late, and we still had 100 miles to go before reaching the town of Realidade, where we’d spend the night.

Large puddles began pooling across the road, and the ground turned to sludge. A few miles later, we encountered a stranded truck, a flatbed carrying generators that had drifted to the road’s soft shoulder and listed sharply to one side. “Welcome to the BR-319!” Santos laughed.

A truck stuck in the mud in the middle stretch of the highway. Joaquim Salles

The sun set and soon we could only see what was illuminated by the headlights. The rain continued relentlessly. At times our speed was reduced to just 5 miles per hour. Santos pressed on, passing other stranded trucks and crossing rickety wooden bridges that creaked under the wheels. Many hours later, we came to a town that appeared seemingly out of nowhere. The muddy streets were deserted and dark as we pulled into a bright orange motel called La Kazita.

It was 11 p.m., 20 hours after our departure from Manaus.

The largest settlement on the unpaved part of the 319, Realidade is a dusty outpost typical of Amazonian boom towns. Its population has swelled from just 800 people in 2010 to 7,000 today. The town lives and dies by the highway.

Many of its original residents were workers who built the road in the 1970s. When the route closed in 1988, Realidade became a virtual ghost town. Landless farmers from out of state arrived in the region in 2004 and were granted settlement rights under a federal land-reform program. Since then, a steady stream of land-grabbers, loggers, and cattle-ranchers have poured in.

Exploring Realidade, the impression is that the people arrived before the government did. The town has no police station and only a small health post, but numerous cattle-ranching supply stores. The dynamic has been the same throughout the modern history of the Amazonian frontier: People come in search of land and the riches of the forest; the state then scrambles to catch up with basic services and the rule of law.

A cattle-ranching supply store in the town of Realidade. Joaquim Salles

At La Kazita, Santos and I were eating a breakfast of plain bread when the manager began telling us how two nights before he had been paid R$600 ($115) to drive some logging workers to Humaitá, a mining town southeast of the 319. They had just come out of the forest after weeks of work felling trees. Flush with cash, they wanted to party.

Data from Simex, a system that uses satellite images to monitor logging, show that 16 square miles of land were illegally logged between 2021 and 2024 in the municipality that includes Realidade.

“All the money flowing through the region is rooted in illegal logging and land grabbing,” Lucas Ferrante, a researcher at the University of São Paulo who has studied the area extensively, told me.

The scenery around Realidade is a far cry from the lush forest I had driven through the day before. Illegal side roads abound, sawmills dot the side of the highway, and native forest is interrupted by swaths of pasture. I stopped by one of the largest ranches in the region.

Eliane Jesus Pereira, 33, lives in a ramshackle wooden house at the edge of an expansive pasture. She sells cheese made out of buffalo milk while her husband tends to the cattle. The couple moved to the farm from Realidade in 2021 when her husband was hired as a ranch hand. The owner of the land lives in Manaus. Since she has been living on the farm, she’s seen a marked improvement on the road. “Sometimes my daughter couldn’t go to school because the bus got stuck in the mud,” she said. “Now it’s better.”

Eliane Jesus Pereira lives on a ranch a few miles north of Realidade. Joaquim Salles​

It’s consensus among the scientific community that paving the BR-319 without environmental safeguards will lead to drastic consequences. Realidade might well be a vision of the future of the entire highway. Beyond the immediate impacts, studies suggest that the deforestation the asphalt could trigger may disrupt key hydrological cycles within Brazil that, in the long run, will lead to severe water shortages in large cities like São Paulo. And if Amazonas, with its size and its 97 percent forest coverage, goes the way of other Brazilian states, like Rondônia, which has lost more than a third of its native vegetation, the climate implications would be global in scale.

On the local level, it is hard to begrudge the people of Amazonas for wanting a paved road connecting them to the rest of the country, particularly in a nation as rich as Brazil. A 2025 poll by the Instituto de Pesquisa do Norte showed that 9 in 10 Amazonenses were in favor of the BR-319 being asphalted. The state has the 25th lowest GDP per capita among Brazil’s 26 states and the federal district. It ranks well below the national average in most developmental metrics, including access to education and healthcare.

“We have the sense that the region is subordinate to Brazil, like an invaded territory, a colony,” said Augusto Rocha, an engineering professor and logistics expert at the Federal University of Amazonas. “Infrastructure is a way of reducing this inequality.” Rocha is in favor of the road being paved, but warns that without environmental controls, deforestation will increase.

“We don’t deny the importance of the road,” said Suely Araújo. “The problem is building it without the necessary social and environmental conditions in place.”

Whether environmental governance is possible along the BR-319 is an open question. In the spectrum of opinions surrounding the road and development in the Amazon as a whole, there are those who would just shut it all down and leave the forest intact. On the other end, there are those who believe the forest is there to be exploited, and that the preservationist approach is to blame for the economic woes of the region. In the middle, there are those who believe that sustainability with development is possible, even if the history of the Brazilian Amazon has not yet provided a large-scale model to follow. And there are the Indigenous peoples who are too often an afterthought.

As we grew closer to Porto Velho, the dirt turned to asphalt again. I was relieved to finally be on a smooth surface after two days of bumpy, uneven terrain. The truck, now caked in dried mud from top to bottom, picked up speed for the first time since the previous morning. During the whole ride I had not seen a single instance of roadkill. But just minutes into the asphalt I did — a bright green snake and a few miles later an anteater strewn across the highway.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A trip down the road that will determine the fate of the Amazon on Sep 17, 2026.