News Feeds

At Audubon’s Gillmor Sanctuary at Great Salt Lake in Utah, the grass and scattered shrubs of the uplands serve as ideal habitat for Burrowing Owls. While most owls are tree dwellers, this...

DAYTON, Ohio — August 20, 2026 — Deeply Rooted Landscapes and Aullwood Audubon are expanding their partnership to make native plants more accessible to the Dayton community through a new seasonal...

Registered nurses with Contra Costa County Health Services voted 95 percent in favor of ratifying a new contract, winning protections to improve patient safety and nurse retention.

Op-ed by Sidnie Duncan, Advocacy and Outreach Fellow at CCAN, originally published in the Roanoke Times.

College students today face a dilemma with artificial intelligence (AI). On one hand, AI can make schoolwork faster, clearer and learning more personalized. On the other hand, it’s tied to growing inequality, worsening climate change and real public health concerns. College students feel trapped between utilizing AI to get ahead academically or rejecting it to avoid its harms. This binary thinking oversimplifies the reality: AI can be a valuable tool, and its negatives can be mitigated through thoughtful regulation, ethical oversight and responsible development.

As the generation inheriting the consequences of today’s decisions, college students have a stake in shaping what AI becomes and a responsibility to advocate for sustainable AI development that works for everyone, not against the planet or the communities it impacts.

I am a rising senior at Virginia Tech, part of a generation that has grown up alongside rapid technological change. From touchscreen devices to virtual reality, we’ve seen the benefits and the drawbacks firsthand. We’ve seen how devices and social media impact our sleep, attention spans, self-image and social skills. We’re now watching tech reshape the lives of the next generation. We joke about “iPad kids,” but there’s an unsettling reality behind the humor. Watching our siblings and peers lose their social skills to screens has left many college students questioning the consequences of unchecked technological growth.

Fossil-fueled data centers consume gigantic amounts of electricity and water, straining local resources while increasing air pollution and environmental noise. Research shows these environmental impacts are already taking a toll on public health. On top of that, the continued proliferation of large-scale, fossil-fueled data centers could triple electricity demand, driving up utility bills for families.

Through my fellowship with Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) doing grassroots climate advocacy, I have witnessed these impacts in Northern Virginia, widely known as the data center capital of the world. From rising electricity costs to widespread water shortages, Virginians are feeling the weight of rapid data center expansion. I have spoken to both Republicans and Democrats who share concerns about this issue, reinforcing that this is not a partisan debate. It is about protecting public health, keeping energy affordable, and ensuring that our community is not sacrificed for the profit of Big Tech developers.

As digital literacy grows to be more valuable to employers, universities are creating AI-related coursework and integrating it into assignments. Last semester, four out of five of my classes included assignments that required the use of AI. What stood out wasn’t the use of AI itself, but the lack of discussion around it. For context, my major is Environmental Conservation and Society. You would think that in a field focused on sustainability, we would at least talk about the environmental, ethical and social impacts of AI before using it so extensively, but no. There was no discussion. That disconnect is frustrating, especially in fields that emphasize systems thinking.

AI isn’t just changing how we can get ahead; it’s reinforcing inequalities of who gets a chance to succeed. Over 90% of employers rely on AI to pre-screen resumes; some tools have been proven to exhibit racial and gender biases that deny candidates based on the presence of demographic signals rather than the absence of relevant skills — echoing historical patterns of hiring discrimination. AI isn’t born biased; it’s been baked into the historical data it’s trained on. Without proper correction, this will continue to perpetuate white supremacist values in hiring and will undercut the social progress we’ve made during my lifetime. If we don’t address these failures, we aren’t just tolerating discrimination; we are automating it.

We don’t have to choose between being supportive of AI or being fair to our planet and communities. Both are possible, but only if we act quickly.

We must advocate for universities and corporations to invest in renewable energy infrastructure that will support innovative technology while reducing its environmental impact. Sustainable, equitable and accountable AI development is critical to ensure the boom of AI is looked back on as being positively revolutionary. Join forces with advocacy groups to lobby your local and state policymakers to create clean energy and environmental guardrails for data centers.

Op-ed by Sidnie Duncan, Advocacy and Outreach Fellow at CCAN, originally published in the Roanoke Times.

About the Author: Sidnie Duncan is a rising senior at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech), where she is pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Conservation and Society.

She was the Advocacy and Outreach CCAN Fellow for summer 2026.

The post Generation Raised by Technology Must Shape AI’s Future appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

A tiny creature flits from plant to plant under the summer sun. It moves fast, then stops abruptly at a flower’s lip; it sips, then darts aside, its minute body humming red and green.It flies like...

DENVER — The U.S. Forest Service’s (USFS) own Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on repealing the 2001 Roadless Rule, released Wednesday, documents extensive harm from the administration’s preferred plan, including increased risk of wildfire starts and only “modest” fuel reduction gains. 

According to the 333-page DEIS document released alongside the proposed rule, under Alternative 2 (USFS’s preferred option), the DEIS finds:

• The agency would strip road-building and logging protections from 44.7 million acres of national forest (p. 13, 15, 21)

• The agency’s preliminary biological assessment determined the plan is “likely to adversely affect” 327 threatened and endangered species and 71 designated critical habitats (p. 25, 161–162)

• Repeal would increase soil erosion, landslide risk, and sediment pollution (p. 108) in watersheds that supply drinking water to roughly 24 million Americans (p. 121)

• Old-growth forest that has been off-limits for 25 years would be exposed to new logging (p. 78)

• The agency assumes revenue from timber sales “would [not] be sufficient to cover the costs of constructing and maintaining all new roads related to a project” (p. 45)

• The rule opens the door to new oil, gas, and coal leasing on land currently protected by a no-surface-occupancy requirement (p. 58–59)

• USFS’s own fire scientists warn that more roadbuilding in forests could mean more human-caused wildfire ignitions (p. 101)

• The agency concedes that funding and terrain constraints would make any actual gain in fuel-treatment capacity “modest” (p. 225)

• Ignition frequency and density are currently lower in roadless areas and wilderness than on other National Forest System lands (p. 24, quantified as roughly 4x lower on p. 89)

• USFS’s own economists project the rule would cost up to $9 million a year in lost visitor spending in nearby communities (p. 223–224, combining $7 million in lost trail/dispersed-recreation spending and $2 million in lost wildlife-related-recreation spending)

• The rule would degrade scenery and backcountry access across millions of acres of primitive and semi-primitive terrain (p. 25, 192)

• The plan would add to the agency’s $6.9 billion existing road maintenance backlog (p. 43)

• Federally recognized Tribes consulted overwhelmingly oppose the repeal (p. 198), citing threats to sacred sites, treaty-protected hunting and fishing, and cultural landscapes (p. 26)

• Road construction and logging “could potentially have long-term negative impacts” on historic and archaeological sites nationwide (p. 196)

The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Communications Director Kate Groetzinger:

“Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and the Trump administration are trying to spin a move to subsidize the timber industry as a wildfire mitigation strategy, but the government’s own study shows repealing the Roadless Rule could actually increase wildfire risk as well as have shocking negative impacts on Western communities.

“The government’s own scientists found that repealing the Roadless Rule could harm hundreds of species already at risk of extinction, decrease the quality of drinking water in Western communities, cost rural communities millions of tourism dollars, and grow the Forest Service’s already-massive road maintenance backlog. It also found that timber sales won’t offset the cost of building and maintaining new roads.

“Despite all of these negative implications and immense public opposition, the Trump administration seems to be dead set on moving forward with this rule. Western communities must rise up and oppose this change as loudly and forcefully as possible during this month-long comment period.”

Learn more: 

• Proposed rule – USFS
• Comment form for the rule – USFS
• Draft Environmental Impact Statement – USFS
• Comment analysis finds over 99% opposition to repealing 2001 Roadless Rule – CWP
• What is the “Roadless Rule”? – Sierra Club Oregon
• Roadless Rule Recission 2025 interactive map – Trout Unlimited

Feature image: USDA Photo by Preston Keres

The post USFS’s own analysis shows Roadless Rule repeal would harm wildlife, water, and rural communities appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

This article Atlanta offers a model for building sanctuary was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Atlanta community organizer Bassey Etuk opened a community defense workshop in June with a stark observation, and heads nodded around the crowded room. “Atlanta was a sanctuary city until the governor of Georgia made it illegal in 2009. Now Atlanta is Cop City,” he said. 

From California to Kenya, whenever I say I’m based in Atlanta, people immediately bring up Cop City, the police training facility that sparked years of protest and major campaigns to prevent it from being built on public land. The training facility was ultimately built and is now in operation. But the Stop Cop City movement reduced the size and scale of the compound and, importantly, captured the imagination of people fighting on the frontlines against policing and state violence around the world.

In 2026, organizers in Atlanta have shifted from protests and mass mobilizations to applying the lessons they learned from the campaign and building the infrastructure needed to practice real community safety every day.

I am a longtime organizer and senior strategist with Project South, where I work alongside Bassey, an Atlanta-native who organizes in the 10 historically Black neighborhoods of Brownsville in southeast Atlanta. For the past two months, Bassey, I and the ATL Get Ready Team — a coalition of community organizers and organizations from across the city — launched a community preparedness plan to respond to escalating ICE enforcement, policing and National Guard deployments in cities across the United States. Together, we have been recruiting businesses, churches, bars and community centers to become “Sanctuary Zones” — sites that commit to preventing ICE and other law enforcement from entering. 

Building sanctuary and protection for all people is critical in this period. It keeps us alive through moments of immediate crisis while positioning our communities to build the power needed for deeper, fundamental change. We share the lessons we are learning on the ground so that we are moving in coordination and solidarity with other communities all over the country who are similarly experiencing the trauma of this moment — the murders, detentions, intimidation and indictments — as fascist forces attempt to consolidate power at every level of society.

Atlanta gets ready

After witnessing ICE operations in Minnesota and National Guard deployments in Memphis and Washington, D.C., 15 Atlanta-based organizations came together in February 2026 and asked each other some hard questions. If federal agents surge into, deploy across, or occupy Atlanta, are we ready? Are we ready to resist, to protect our communities and to prevent killings and kidnappings? Are we ready to put aside old tensions and disagreements? Are we ready to see ourselves as connected and act together, applying unified pressure in pursuit of our shared goals of community protection and collective defense?

#newsletter-block_7c5408c76d70ed5c9fc95b84520ff63b { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_7c5408c76d70ed5c9fc95b84520ff63b #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

At our first coalition meeting, Adelina Nicholls of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights said it clearly: “We can no longer afford to mobilize in reaction to what is happening. We have to determine a political direction and alignment towards a real vision.”

Large-scale anti-ICE protests have been powerful demonstrations of collective dissent and people power. But we understood that without greater unity across race, class, gender and geography, we could not win.

It was a vital moment for those of us who have organized in Atlanta for a long time. Organizations that did not always work together and that openly acknowledged long-standing tensions and disagreements, decided that, given the rise in state repression and violence, we need each other differently in this moment.

In the face of ICE raids in Latino, Caribbean and African immigrant neighborhoods, ongoing police violence against Black youth, sweeps of homeless encampments ahead of the World Cup in Atlanta, and the targeting of youth and trans people at the federal and state levels, we named criminalization as a shared reality and a political baseline for our alignment and collective action.

We agreed on a single commitment: to prevent and disrupt the growing criminalization of all our people. We called ourselves the ATL Get Ready Team, and we began by sharing trainings and building our collective skills with one another and with communities across Atlanta. In all, 15 Black-led, migrant-led and queer-led organizations made the decision to work together, combining our strengths instead of continuing to work alone.

Over the past six months, that commitment has become a practice. We meet weekly to check in and coordinate on the work happening on the ground. We have facilitated community trainings, hosted educational forums, organized canvassing days and launched a shared campaign to protect our people.

The assembly affirms the vision

In the aftermath of the Stop Cop City movement in 2025, organizations across Atlanta joined forces to organize People’s Movement Assemblies to define and build real community safety — despite the mayor’s assurances that training police forces in advanced urban warfare techniques would do that for us. Assemblies are community gatherings where people come together to assess the problems they face, develop shared solutions and create plans of action.

Drawing on the lessons we learned during the Stop Cop City struggle, we shifted from resisting the city’s vision of public safety to building our own. The assembly process became a form of community governance to define that vision together. It also became a space to strengthen relationships and build the movement infrastructure needed for long-term transformation.

Previous Coverage

ICE will be at the World Cup, but organizers are ready

The ATL Get Ready Team participated in the Atlanta Citywide People’s Movement Assembly in March. It was the third assembly held since early 2025 and led by the People’s Campaign. More than 500 people poured into Project South’s historic building in South Atlanta looking for connection, skills and a plan to act. Together, our organizations facilitated a large-scale, real-life scenario exercise to prepare for the upcoming World Cup season. We walked participants through the anticipated influx of federal law enforcement, drones and surveillance expected over five weeks during the summer. The gym was full of so many people — young and old, seasoned organizers and those just coming into the movement space. Naming the heightened military presence in our communities was scary, especially as we witnessed ICE murders and violence, but there was also relief that we were naming our power to prepare and act. We told the room, “Prepared people don’t panic.”  

We then moved into a full day of practical, hands-on trainings in community first response, mutual aid organizing, ICE tracking, school protection, Know Your Rights (and the risks), and porch-sit community engagement.

By the end of the assembly, participants committed to continuing to organize together, building toward May 1, International Workers’ Day, and developing community safety plans for the World Cup season. We also began to design a campaign that invited more people to participate in protections that would reduce and eliminate law enforcement entanglements.

Recruiting Sanctuary Zones

Sanctuary Zones are spaces that commit to keeping communities safe by refusing to cooperate with ICE or other law enforcement agencies that criminalize, detain and separate people from their families.

They are also a way for businesses, faith institutions, community centers and other public spaces to demonstrate a commitment to caring for their staff, patrons and neighbors. Sanctuary Zones are a practical response to the violence, hostility and fear created by the Trump administration’s escalation of ICE raids, National Guard deployments and the criminalization of protest over the past year.

The more our organizing team learned about the preparations for the World Cup — including hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for security, expanded police deployments, street closures, surveillance technology and drones — the more convinced we became that we needed a campaign with accessible entry points for more public engagement around keeping our communities safe. 

Project South organizers participate in a canvassing day to build the Sanctuary Zone network across Atlanta to protect people from ICE and police violence. (WNV/Stephanie Guilloud)

We designed a plan to invite bars, restaurants and community centers to commit to declaring themselves as a Sanctuary Zone and to become part of a network of protection. We used the word “sanctuary” on purpose to signal that even if Georgia passes legislation to make it illegal for cities to pass sanctuary protections for migrants, independent businesses, faith centers and community spaces can declare sanctuary as autonomous spaces.

The real shift came when we named a deeper truth. We built the campaign in response to the public outrage over ICE, but we also knew we had a responsibility, and an opportunity, to make clear that ICE and the police are two arms of the same apparatus. Both function as agents of the state to control, contain, surveil and criminalize our communities. From the beginning, the ATL Get Ready Team aligned around an abolitionist position not to reinforce any part of the prison-industrial complex.

Bassey opened a Sanctuary Zone workshop at Project South’s Juneteenth gathering by naming his own experience with the police in Atlanta. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been harassed, searched, had guns put in my face,” he said. “But in 2006 when the police shot and killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston, it shifted something in this city. Police had a no-knock warrant using false information and it was the wrong house. Kathryn was old-school, she reminded me of my grandma. My grandma kept a .22 and shot it every 4th of July. When police battle rammed Kathryn’s house, she let off a single warning shot, and in return the officers fired 39 shots killing her dead. There are many battles we’ve lost, but we can’t afford to lose more battles like that if we want to win in the long-term.”

So far, some 70 sites across Atlanta have publicly declared themselves Sanctuary Zones. Barbershops, bookstores, independent businesses, bars, restaurants, retailers, churches and community spaces have all joined the network. We canvassed neighborhoods, inviting sites to display Sanctuary Zone posters in their windows and commit to the campaign. We also coordinated Know Your Rights and Risks trainings and other community preparedness workshops for participating sites, while connecting them with local policing alternatives and diversion programs that offer practical ways to respond to conflict and crisis without calling 911.

Multiple grassroots organizations canvassed over 500 sites across Atlanta as part of the ATL Get Ready Team. (WNV/Stephanie Guilloud)

The campaign engaged more than 500 sites across the city. We began by concentrating on the two-mile radius surrounding the stadium as a visible show of solidarity to the thousands of visitors expected during the World Cup. As we learned that ICE was shifting its tactics and increasingly targeting people in surrounding counties, we expanded our outreach beyond the stadium corridor to neighborhoods where watch parties and community gatherings would take place, so that vulnerable people could feel safer being in public and enjoying the matches.

Many bar owners and restaurant operators expressed their commitment to refusing ICE entry but were hesitant to display a Sanctuary Zone poster or publicly join the network out of fear of retaliation. Many Black-owned businesses appreciated that we named the connection between ICE violence and police violence. As one owner told us, “We already don’t call the cops, we can sign on to this, easy.”

In a time of economic hardship, the government’s extraordinary spending on police, ICE and surveillance feels like a slap in the face, and the people we spoke with responded with outrage at this unjust siphoning of public funds. The Federal Emergency Response Agency, or FEMA, spent more than $846 million on security and policing for the FIFA spectacle instead of responding to climate disasters. During hurricane season. During the hottest summer on record. During floods and wildfires affecting hundreds of thousands of people. 

At the same time, as many of us feared, ICE kidnappings and detentions escalated, reaching 43,000 in the month of June alone. Over the previous two months, four Black men were killed by federal troops and agents deployed in Memphis, while the military occupation of Washington, D.C., doubled from 2,500 to 5,000 troops. For comparison, the massive ICE operation in Minneapolis deployed 3,000 federal agents, creating immense harm. Faced with this reality, we refuse to give in to fear. To protect our people, we prepare and we build.

Sharing the vision

A local coffeehouse owner said, “Of course, we will sign on. I’m an immigrant, and when we are in solidarity with each other, we are stronger. What do we have to lose?”

She immediately offered the coffeehouse as a meeting space. We are now talking to business owners and church leaders about holding sessions that allow folks to share policies and practices that support protections for workers, patrons and community members.

The invitation to Sanctuary Zones is to join a larger vision: a coordinated network of sites that can be proactive and generative in times of crisis rather than reactive. These spaces are one step toward reducing our reliance on policing, which so often produces harm instead of safety. They create a concrete invitation for people beyond the usual movement circles to resist this regime through collective noncooperation. Sanctuary Zones prioritize safety over surveillance and solidarity over fear.

#support-block_6643f12e3c329ca5f1bd5df513ed5847 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

As we move out of the heat of summer and into the fall, the ATL Get Ready Team intends to keep building. Project South will facilitate Community Responder Trainings to strengthen the capacity of community members to assess emergencies, intervene and address medical situations without calling the police. The Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights will continue offering ICE tracker and legal trainings so businesses and faith institutions understand their rights and know how to prevent ICE raids.

Together, we will invite Sanctuary Zone partners to run drills and continue practicing preparedness plans that can be adapted to many kinds of crises — whether climate disasters, economic instability or state violence. Preparation is infrastructure, and in times of disaster or crisis, infrastructure is power.

Sharing the lessons

Below are a few lessons to share with groups working on similar projects: 

1. Differences are not deterrents: We can acknowledge differences and tensions but still work together towards a common vision of preventing criminalization and protecting our communities. Differences can be a strength because sharing knowledge from divergent perspectives gives us a fuller picture of the threats and opportunities to respond. 

2. Connections make our strategies stronger: We can connect ICE, policing and surveillance — an important political intervention that ensures movements to protect our immigrant neighbors are inseparable from movements to protect our Black neighbors from deadly policing. Both are connected to the growing struggles against data centers, surveillance technologies and cameras in our public spaces. We can connect daily, local police harassment to federal agents roaming our streets and to the executive orders and legislation that is targeting trans people and anyone who dissents.

3. Focused strategies are winning strategies: Collaborating around a shared strategy to name and resist the criminalization of people, poverty and protest is an important path forward. Bars, independent businesses and other community spaces want to participate in this moment, they simply need accessible ways to do so. One commitment, one poster, one campaign gives them a concrete way to say yes to noncooperation with institutions of harm, and yes to the work of creating proactive protections and solutions.

4. Local knowledge and national ripples: Rooting in local knowledge, relationships and histories is critical to building long-lasting infrastructure that engages people from diverse backgrounds. Careful reconnaissance to identify canvassing targets, direct follow-up with people with trusted relationships at neighborhood barbershops or churches, elders working with young people to engage sites from different angles, and clear recognition of local cultures and tensions make campaigns like this stronger and allow more people to participate. 

Each of our locations requires different tactics, but if we can coordinate across places and learn from one another as we have learned from Ferguson to Los Angeles, Chicago to Minneapolis, Washington, D.C. to Memphis to Atlanta, we can confront this daunting machine with greater strength, deeper solidarity and more collective power.

As Rehana Lerandeau of Critical Resistance said, “We have to make our practices and our stories fresh, radical and irresistible.” In a time of so much danger and despair, sanctuary is a practice and a vision for how we want to be together in community. This campaign invited people across a diverse range of communities in Atlanta into their own courage, and they have overwhelmingly said yes. 

This article Atlanta offers a model for building sanctuary was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Open access notables

Marine Heatwaves Overwhelm the Buffering Benefits of Marine Protected Areas: Two Decades of Collapse in a Mediterranean Gorgonian, Zentner et al., Global Change Biology

Marine heatwaves (MHWs) are driving mass mortalities of coastal foundation species globally, threatening their persistence and the ecosystems they support. However, long-term demographic evidence of these impacts at regional scales is scarce. Accordingly, whether ongoing conservation actions, mainly marine protected areas (MPAs), mitigate the impact of MHWs is still an open question. Here, we address these gaps by analysing over two decades of demographic monitoring data from 49 shallow (< 40 m depth) populations of the foundation gorgonian Paramuricea clavata paired with in situ temperature records across the north-western Mediterranean (38°–43° N, 0°–8° E). Using hierarchical Bayesian models, we estimated regional-scale trends and assessed the combined influence of MHW exposure and protection status. We found that increasingly frequent extreme thermal events have caused widespread mass mortality, resulting in a 45% median decline in biomass at the regional scale over the past two decades. Within this context of extensive decline, protection temporarily buffered MHW impacts by sustaining higher overall biomass, despite protected populations experiencing greater absolute losses. Taken together, these findings indicate that local protection alone cannot offset climate-driven mortality and underscore the urgent need to integrate conservation measures with global climate action to preserve shallow marine ecosystems.

Petermann Glacier on the brink: Progress, challenges and insights, Fahrner et al., Science Advances

Petermann Glacier (PG), the largest marine-terminating glacier in northern Greenland based on catchment area and ice discharge, plays a key role in modulating ice export from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). With an upstream catchment connected to the GrIS interior via a deep subglacial canyon, its future stability has major implications for sea level rise. This review synthesizes recent advances in understanding PG’s dynamics across three critical interfaces. At the surface, reanalysis data and regional climate models diverge from observations in estimates of air temperature and surface mass balance, underscoring the need for improved in situ data and models. At the ocean boundary, enhanced basal melting driven by subglacial runoff and Atlantic water intrusions is identified as dominant driver of recent mass loss of PG, with continued warming posing a serious threat to the stability of the floating tongue. At the bed, geophysical synthesis reveals complex geology, likely spatial variability in geothermal heat flux, and the megacanyon’s influence on seasonal hydrology and velocity fluctuations. An ongoing rifting event, initiated in September 2025, highlights PG’s vulnerability. The anticipated retreat reduces buttressing and brings the terminus closer to the grounding zone, where additional calving could trigger retreat and accelerate ice discharge. As one of Greenland’s largest floating ice tongues, PG may provide important insights into the stability of other marine-terminating glaciers across the GrIS. Improved observations, sustained monitoring of oceanographic and atmospheric parameters, and high-resolution modeling are critical for constraining projections of PG’s future and its role in GrIS stability.

Near-total loss of buttressing stresses observed on Pine Island Ice Shelf, West Antarctica, Wells-Moran et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Ice shelves, the floating extensions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, provide critical buttressing stresses that resist the seaward flow of ice and help set the position of the grounding line, where the ice goes afloat. As buttressing stresses are diminished by thinning or fracturing and collapse of the ice shelf, glaciers tend to accelerate. Here, we focus on the response of Pine Island Ice Shelf (PIIS) in West Antarctica to multiple calving events and the disintegration of the lateral shear margins. Using observed time-series of the surface velocity fields between 2015 and 2024, we show multiple episodes of acceleration in ice flow and a marked reduction in the buttressing stresses. These observations show that PIIS experienced a significant reduction of its buttressing capacity during the observational record. We then investigate how a model glacier responds to loss in margin buttressing, and are able to broadly reproduce observations. By linking model simulations to observations, we recreate a timeline of buttressing loss on PIIS. These losses likely foreshadow a period of grounding line retreat and acceleration of Pine Island Glacier’s contribution to global mean sea level rise.

Failure to track a stable AMOC state under rapid climate change, Westen et al., Nature Climate Change

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a tipping element of the climate system, currently has an estimated global warming threshold for collapse of +4.0 °C (uncertainty range 1.4–8 °C). However, such a threshold may not be meaningful because AMOC stability depends on the rate of radiative forcing change, not a set temperature. Here we identify an AMOC stabilizing mechanism that operates on timescales slower than present-day warming rates. Slow forcing permits coherent adjustment of surface and interior ocean properties, supported by enhanced evaporation and reduced sea-ice extent, counteracting destabilizing feedbacks. Using a slow CO2 ramp (+0.5 ppm yr−1) climate model simulation, we explicitly demonstrate the AMOC remains stable up to +5.5 °C of global warming. By contrast, under faster CO2 ramps, the AMOC collapses at substantially lower warming levels (+2 °C). Our findings demonstrate rate-induced AMOC tipping and imply that limiting the rate of emissions is critical for reducing the risk of an AMOC collapse.

Disrupting the “wrong” target? Climate protest tactics affecting entities deemed undeserving are perceived as immoral, unjust, and reduce activist support, Nylund et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology

In recent years, disruptive climate protest organisations—such as Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and Last Generation—have sought to convey the urgency of the climate crisis through actions that deliberately interrupt daily life. Many of these tactics have targeted entities perceived as having relatively minimal responsibility for climate change, such as cultural institutions, art galleries, or the general public, whereas others have targeted entities seen as highly responsible, such as fossil fuel companies or governments that could regulate them. Yet little empirical work has examined how the perceived responsibility—and resulting perceived deservingness—of targets shapes public reactions to disruptive climate protest. Across two preregistered studies using US participants (Study 1; N = 246) and UK participants (Study 2; N = 640), we found that climate protest tactics directed toward targets deemed undeserving (vs. deserving) were judged as less moral, provoked greater anger at the activists, and reduced support for them. Study 2 further demonstrated that these actions were evaluated as more unjust. However, target deservingness did not affect support for the broader climate movement, cause, or policies. These findings highlight the importance of perceived target deservingness in forming public judgments of disruptive protest and suggest that climate activists may reduce backlash to their activism by directing tactics toward entities seen as more responsible for contributing to the climate crisis. From this week's government/NGO section:

Temperature Check 2025–26, The Center for Climate Journalism and Communication, University of Southern California

Even though fewer Americans now hear about global warming and climate change through news, newspapers are still the top source of information for climate communicators. Climate communicators still prefer LinkedIn as their go-to social media platform for climate information, followed by Instagram and BlueSky. The use of X/Twitter for engaging in climate media continues to drop even more among climate communicators. Climate communicators are most concerned about the lack of climate action, global warming and the health impacts of climate change this year. Yet, the authors' survey shows climate communicators are also increasingly avoiding terms and phrases such as “climate change” and “global warming,” likely due to increasing politicization of the terms as well as pushback from the government as well as the public.

Climate Change in the American Mind: Politics & Policy, Spring 2026, Leiserowitz et al., Yale University and George Mason University

With the primaries in the 2026 midterm elections underway, the authors found that 58% of registered voters prefer to vote for a candidate for public office who supports action on global warming, while 14% prefer to vote for a candidate who opposes action. 42% would like to hear from political candidates more often about efforts to reduce global warming, while 23% would like to hear about this less often. 31% will only vote for a congressional candidate who supports increasing the use of renewable energy, while 7% will only vote for a candidate who supports decreasing the use of renewable energy. 25% will only vote for a candidate who supports decreasing the use of fossil fuels, while 14% will only vote for a candidate who supports increasing the use of fossil fuels. 93 articles in 45 journals by 733 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Abrupt Increase in Marine Heatwave Accumulated Days Over the Gulf Stream Extension Around 2013 Linked to Subtropical Eastern Pacific Warming, Song et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans 10.1029/2026jc024006

Failure to track a stable AMOC state under rapid climate change, Westen et al., Nature Climate Change Open Access 10.1038/s41558-026-02730-w

Intensified Oxygen Minimum Zone in Response to Both Insolation Maxima and Carbon Dioxide?Driven Warmth in the Tropical North Atlantic, Fayolle et al., Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology Open Access 10.1029/2026pa005463

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Deforestation amplifies climate change effects on warming and cloud level rise in African montane forests, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-51324-7 26 cites.

buffer/PWSE

Observations of climate change, effects

Enhanced Subsurface Warming of the Kuroshio Revealed by Long-Term Observations During 1965–2020, Du et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2025gl120916

From Rare to Recurrent: Intensifying Hot–Dry Extremes Across Romania, Nagavciuc & Ioni??, International Journal of Climatology Open Access 10.1002/joc.70559

Strong human fingerprint on low snowpack amid increasing volatility, Swain, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 10.1073/pnas.2620765123

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The ocean losing its breath under the heatwaves, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-51323-8 38 cites.

buffer/OBME

Instrumentation & observational methods of climate change, effects

A climate impact taxonomy operationalizing IPCC physical driver and risk concepts, Michaela et al., IIASA PURE (International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis) pmh:oai:pure.iiasa.ac.at:21196

A global high-resolution dataset of snowmelt runoff onset timing from Sentinel-1 SAR, 2015–2024, Gagliano et al., Earth system science data Open Access 10.5194/essd-18-5871-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Toward Low-Latency Estimation of Atmospheric CO 2 Growth Rates Using Satellite Observations: Evaluating Sampling Errors of Satellite and In Situ Observing Approaches, AGU Advances, 10.1029/2023av001145 10 cites.

buffer/WINS

Modeling, simulation & projection of climate change, effects

Catalogue of strong nonlinear surprises in ocean, sea-ice, and atmospheric variables in CMIP6, Angevaare & Drijfhout, Earth System Dynamics Open Access 10.5194/esd-17-1081-2026

Heat Extremes Within Hot Summer Seasons Intensify More Than in Average Summers Under Global Warming, Pfleiderer et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008241

Intercomparison of a Regional Climate Model Ensemble for Selected European Catchments, Roque et al., International Journal of Climatology Open Access 10.1002/joc.70554

Pacific Warming Pattern Discrepancy Linked to Spurious Rainband in Climate Models, Wills & DiNezio, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl122859

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Increasing frequency and precipitation intensity of convective storms in the Peruvian Central Andes: Projections from convection?permitting regional climate simulations, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 10.1002/qj.4820 10 cites.

buffer/MSWE

Advancement of climate & climate effects modeling, simulation & projection

Bridging the weather and climate divide with artificial intelligence, Camps?Valls et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-75787-y

Rapid Evaluation Framework for the CMIP7 Assessment Fast Track, Hoffman, Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) Open Access 10.5281/zenodo.21919074

Recent Temperature and Energy Imbalance Trends Point to Higher Estimates of Future Warming, Gyuleva et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008356

The source of uncertainty in future warming and wetting projections over Northwest China, Wei et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.08.008

Uncertainty in Land Carbon Fluxes Simulated by CMIP6 Models from Treatments of Crop Distributions and Photosynthetic Pathways, Ovwemuvwose et al., Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.5194/bg-23-5593-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Uncertainties Inherent from Large-Scale Climate Projections in the Statistical Downscaling Projection of North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Activity, Journal of Climate, 10.1175/jcli-d-23-0475.1 6 cites.

buffer/GCMA

Cryosphere & climate change

Atmospheric Blocking Pattern as the Primary Driver of Subseasonal Greenland Ice Sheet Summer Melt Variability, Guo et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70547

Data-driven equation discovery of a sea ice albedo parametrisation, Atmojo et al., cryosphere Open Access 10.5194/tc-20-4437-2026

Loss of hydroclimate archives in glacier-fed basins worldwide, Vystavna et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03825-0

Near-total loss of buttressing stresses observed on Pine Island Ice Shelf, West Antarctica, Wells-Moran et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2602994123

Petermann Glacier on the brink: Progress, challenges and insights, Fahrner et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.aee4522

Quick northward retreat of the permafrost boundary and controlling mechanisms in northeastern China, Zhou et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105678

Strong human fingerprint on low snowpack amid increasing volatility, Swain, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 10.1073/pnas.2620765123

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
State of Wildfires 2023–2024, Earth system science data, 10.5194/essd-16-3601-2024 236 cites.

buffer/CRYO

Sea level & climate change

Large-scale climate oscillations induce accelerated high tide flooding along the U.S. East Coast, Zhu et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03932-y

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Quantifying the Mean Sea Level, Tide, and Surge Contributions to Changing Coastal High Water Levels, Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans, 10.1029/2023jc020737 11 cites.

buffer/SLCC

Paleoclimate & paleogeochemistry
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Late Pleistocene glacial terminations accelerated by proglacial lakes, Climate of the past, 10.5194/cp-20-1761-2024 3 cites.

buffer/PCIM

Biology & climate change, related geochemistry

Antarctic greening is constrained by biology and requires field validation, Bokhorst et al., Nature Geoscience 10.1038/s41561-026-02076-0

Climate change and conservation of caecilians (order Gymnophiona): prediction of distributional shifts and risk assessment in Chiapas, Mexico, Cabrera-Hernández et al., Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution Open Access pdf 10.3389/fevo.2026.1886733

Faster, bigger, more severe: Extreme wildfire spread sets the stage for forest ecosystem change in western and boreal North America, Coop et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.aeg5802

Food Plant Availability Constrains Climatic Niches of Host?Specialized Europe?Centred Butterflies, Rashid et al., Diversity and Distributions Open Access pdf 10.1111/ddi.70245

Linear resistance but threshold-controlled recovery of vegetation to compound heatwave–drought extremes, Zhou et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105668

Mapping climate-related forest risks: An index-based approach, Martes & Köhl, PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000931

Marine Heatwaves Overwhelm the Buffering Benefits of Marine Protected Areas: Two Decades of Collapse in a Mediterranean Gorgonian, Zentner et al., Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.71052

Quantifying the alpha diversity of vascular plants vulnerable to climate change in protected areas, Wan et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105679

Terrestrial Arthropod Responses to Arctic Cryosphere Degradation, Gillespie & Høye, Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.71062

The Biodiversity of Retreating Glaciers Leaves an Ecological Legacy in Emerging Soil Communities, Cantera et al., Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.71040

Using a “Super” El Niño to understand how lakes respond to climate extremes, Culpepper et al., PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001021

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Climate change and California’s terrestrial biodiversity, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10.1073/pnas.2310074121 42 cites.

buffer/BIOW

GHG sources & sinks, flux, related geochemistry

From Stable to Labile: Forest Expansion Drives Changes in Alpine Soil Carbon Fractions, Man et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences 10.1029/2026jg009751

Implementing methane dynamics into the LPJmL6 model, Schaphoff et al., Geoscientific model development Open Access 10.5194/gmd-19-7615-2026

Net lateral carbon export from eroding United States Atlantic and Gulf Coast marshes, Vittorio et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03911-3

No single rule explains how climate affects carbon storage in tropical forests, Uriarte & Macedo, Nature 10.1038/d41586-026-02291-0

Persistent Shelf?to?Basin Export of Bioavailable Dissolved Organic Carbon in the Arctic Ocean, Gao et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl124640

Soil carbon gains from salt marsh recovery in China, Zheng et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access 10.1038/s43247-026-03944-8

Soil Moisture Thresholds for the Temperature Sensitivity of Ecosystem Respiration, Zhang et al., Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71066

Sphagnum and herbaceous net ecosystem exchanges in a Pyrenean peatland: a long-term study using the ISBA model, Garisoain et al., Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.5194/bg-23-3407-2026

Uncertainty in Land Carbon Fluxes Simulated by CMIP6 Models from Treatments of Crop Distributions and Photosynthetic Pathways, Ovwemuvwose et al., Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.5194/bg-23-5593-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
An Independent Evaluation of GHGSat Methane Emissions: Performance Assessment, Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, 10.1029/2023jd039906 27 cites.

buffer/GHSS

CO2 capture, sequestration science & engineering

Cities need robust carbon dioxide removal strategies to meet net-zero targets, Ulpiani et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02676-z

CO2 geological storage in China: a mini review of technical options, trade-offs, and pathways toward carbon neutrality, Zhao, Frontiers in Earth Science Open Access 10.3389/feart.2026.1873039

Influence of Deep?Sea Carbonate Sediments on the Long?Term Durability of Carbon Storage From Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, Acksen et al., Global Biogeochemical Cycles Open Access 10.1029/2026gb009203

Techno-economics and value judgments of modeling biochar production for carbon removal in climate change mitigation scenarios, Dorndorf et al., Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104882

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Enhanced silicate weathering accelerates forest carbon sequestration by stimulating the soil mineral carbon pump, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17464 65 cites.

buffer/CENG

Decarbonization

Impacts of solar panels on vegetation biomass shift with climate aridity, Zhai et al., AMBIO 10.1007/s13280-026-02466-z

Phased fuel transition for low-carbon shipping, Li et al., Nature Sustainability Open Access 10.1038/s41893-026-01907-7

Projected impacts of future offshore wind farms on coastal precipitation over the Northwest European shelf, Akhtar et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03852-x

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Challenges and opportunities in truck electrification revealed by big operational data, Nature Energy, 10.1038/s41560-024-01602-x 72 cites.

buffer/DCRB

Geoengineering climate

Unveiling the Shortwave Absorption Spectra of Alumina Aerosols: Radiative Implications for Solar Radiation Modification, Kapoor et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl121668

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
An assessment of ocean alkalinity enhancement using aqueous hydroxides: kinetics, efficiency, and precipitation thresholds, Biogeosciences, 10.5194/bg-21-3551-2024 31 cites.

buffer/GENG

Black carbon

Black carbon emissions and climate impacts of cost-saving Arctic transit shipping through 2050, Yi et al., Nature Sustainability 10.1038/s41893-026-01877-w

Aerosols

Sea Surface Temperature Feedbacks and Convective Organization Mediate the Tropical Circulation Response to Aerosols, Sokol & Wright, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl122829

Climate change communications & cognition

A Rapid Systematic Map of Youth Engagement With Marine Environments in a Changing Climate, Ceglia et al., Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change Open Access 10.1002/wcc.70087

Disrupting the “wrong” target? Climate protest tactics affecting entities deemed undeserving are perceived as immoral, unjust, and reduce activist support, Nylund et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology Open Access 10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103184

Inoculating Voters Against Misinformation in Greenspace Ballot Measures, Pitas & Zou, Journal of Environmental Psychology Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103164

Media Framing of Climate Change and Its Dual Impact on Subjective Well-Being and Pro-Environmental Engagement, Lei & Yu, Journal of Environmental Psychology 10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103178

Youth climate activism and the Global South gap in environmental citizenship research, Mubarak et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology 10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103182

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Can large language models estimate public opinion about global warming? An empirical assessment of algorithmic fidelity and bias, PLOS Climate, 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000429 29 cites.

buffer/CSCC

Agronomy, animal husbundry, food production & climate change

Adoption levels of climate-smart agricultural practices through agricultural innovation systems among women smallholder farmers in Tanzania, Ndosi et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1891580

Bridging local decisions and regional forest strategies under climate risks: a flexibility-based optimization framework, Labarre et al., Annals of Forest Science Open Access 10.1186/s13595-026-01355-5

Climate Change Intensifies Cropland Drought Exposure in the Indus River Basin During the 21st Century, Hussain et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70544

Climate Transitions in the Argentine Pampas Exceed Global Rates and Reshape Crop Exposure: A Multi?Period Köppen–Geiger Analysis (1901–2020), Brendel, International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70558

Disentangling the nonlinear responses of rainfed rice growth to climatic factors in South and Southeast Asia, Sun et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105673

High-resolution climate-driven potential evapotranspiration to assess climate change impacts on Mediterranean agriculture, Fonseca et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access 10.3389/fclim.2026.1854734

Institutions and climate risk adaptation among smallholder livestock farmers in North Wollo Zone, Ethiopia, Yilma et al., PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000751

Methane mitigation in ruminants for sustainable livestock production in tropical climates, Oke et al., Discover Environment Open Access pdf 10.1007/s44274-026-00971-2

Quantifying methane and ammonia emissions from beef cattle finishing systems under sorghum and corn diets, Santos et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111368

Systematic review of resilience pathways for smallholder farmers in semi-arid Southern Africa, Mutatu et al., Discover Sustainability Open Access 10.1007/s43621-026-04328-w

Winter wheat yield responses to extreme heat in the North China Plain: GGCMI-AgMIP model evaluation and a heat-stress phenology improvement in JULES-crop, You et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111404

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Reducing climate change impacts from the global food system through diet shifts, Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-024-02084-1 105 cites.

buffer/AGCC

Hydrology, hydrometeorology & climate change

Hot Droughts Increase the Likelihood and Impacts of Abrupt Drought?to?Pluvial Transitions Worldwide, Fu et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008638

Physical Constraints on Future Tibetan Plateau Summer Precipitation: Emergent Relationships and Pareto Optimal Ensembles, Li et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70560

Rapid Increases in Heat?Driven Extreme Moisture Demand in the Southern Amazon, Chang et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl123139

Riverine flood risk mapping using GIS–AHP and climate-driven hydrodynamic simulations in an alpine basin of the Indus River system, Jamshed et al., PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000915

The Portrait of Flood Risk in Italy: Past, Present and Future, From 1870 to 2100, Pavesi et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl122987

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Rapid intensification of tropical cyclones in the Gulf of Mexico is more likely during marine heatwaves, Communications Earth & Environment, 10.1038/s43247-024-01578-2 45 cites.

buffer/HYCC

Climate change economics
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Renewable energy and CO2 emissions in developing and developed nations: a panel estimate approach, Frontiers in Environmental Science, 10.3389/fenvs.2024.1405001 44 cites.

buffer/ECCC

Climate change and the circular economy Climate change mitigation public policy research

Climate change mitigation practices in Porto's Atlantic-front municipalities: A comparative analysis, Leitão et al., Urban Climate 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103094

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Feasibility of peak temperature targets in light of institutional constraints, Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-024-02073-4 47 cites.

buffer/GPCC

Climate change adaptation & adaptation public policy research

Deferred climate-related migration, Melillo, Frontiers in Climate Open Access 10.3389/fclim.2026.1800309

Evaluating urban heat adaptation strategies for extreme heatwaves in complex terrain: A case study of Grenoble, France, Gabeiras et al., Urban Climate 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103059

Intention versus reality: insights from the implementation of the Green Climate Fund's adaptation project in Ethiopia, Kidane et al., Climate Risk Management Open Access 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100870

Opportunities for pathways approaches for adapting to complex climate change risks, Sparkes et al., Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.cosust.2026.101721

Widening climate adaptation gaps in the Chinese expressway network under climate change, Huang et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03913-1

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Relational geographies of urban unsustainability: The entanglement of California’s housing crisis with WUI growth and climate change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10.1073/pnas.2310080121 25 cites.

buffer/CCAD

Climate change impacts on human health

Drought dynamics explain once in a century yellow fever virus outbreak in Brazil with implications for climate change, Caldwell et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.adz6832

Exceeding human heat tolerance in a warming, ageing world: a global projection modelling study, Kong et al., The Lancet Planetary Health Open Access 10.1016/j.lanplh.2026.101494

Exceeding human heat tolerance in a warming, ageing world: a global projection modelling study, Kong et al., The Lancet Planetary Health Open Access 10.1016/j.lanplh.2026.101494

The effect of natural climate variability on future vector-borne disease suitability: A mathematical modelling study, Kaye et al., PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000877

Urban heat vulnerability in a warming climate in Denmark: Projected temperature-related mortality for Copenhagen and the remaining areas, Kloster et al., Urban Climate Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103093

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Climate change and public health in California: A structured review of exposures, vulnerable populations, and adaptation measures, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10.1073/pnas.2310081121 20 cites.

buffer/CCHH

Climate change & geopolitics

Strategic objectives underpin national climate pledges, Fransen & Meckling, Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-76467-7

The ocean as a unifying agenda across the climate, biodiversity, and land degradation conventions, Geddes et al., npj Ocean Sustainability Open Access 10.1038/s44183-026-00227-9

Other

The Critical Role of Moisture in the Record?Breaking Warm Event Over East Antarctica in March 2022, Cui et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2026jd047167

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Government participation in virtual negotiations: evidence from IPCC approval sessions, Climatic Change, 10.1007/s10584-024-03790-7 4 cites.

buffer/OTHR

Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
State of polar climate (2025), Advances in Climate Change Research, 10.1016/j.accre.2024.08.004 20 cites.

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

Ruta Energetica 2026–2030 (Energy Roadmap), Government of Chile

Chile se encuentra en una etapa decisiva de su transición energética, enfrentando el desafío de consolidar los avances alcanzados durante la última década y, al mismo tiempo, responder a nuevas exigencias en materia de seguridad energética, crecimiento económico y competitividad internacional. La presente Ruta 2026–2030 tiene por objetivo acelerar y robustecer la transición energética del país, promoviendo una agenda que combine seguridad del suministro, modernización institucional, competitividad económica, y desarrollo territorial equilibrado. Para ello, se busca impulsar una transición energética con foco en la seguridad, posicionando a la energía como un motor habilitante del crecimiento, inversión, empleo, productividad e innovación. En este marco, la Ruta define las prioridades estratégicas y lineamientos de acción que orientarán la gestión sectorial durante el período 2026–2030. (Chile is at a decisive stage in its energy transition, facing the challenge of consolidating the progress made during the last decade and, at the same time, respond to new demands in terms of energy security, economic growth, and international competitiveness. This roadmap 2026–2030 aims to accelerate and strengthen the energy transition of the country, promoting an agenda that combines security of supply, institutional modernization, economic competitiveness, and balanced territorial development. To this end, it seeks to promote a energy transition with a focus on security, positioning energy as an enabling engine growth, investment, employment, productivity and innovation. In this framework, the roadmap defines the strategic priorities and guidelines for action that will guide sectoral management during the period 2026–2030.)

he Demand Stack: An Assessment of the Benefits, Hledik et al., Uplight

The authors analyzed the potential for Demand Stack implementation to unlock new demand response (DR), time-of-use (TOU) rate, and energy efficiency (EE) capabilities for a representative SPP utility’s service territory. The “Demand Stack” represents a set of strategic initiatives to expand the impact and effectiveness of each individual utility’s demand-side management (DSM) portfolio through a more integrated approach to program design and implementation. Operationally, the Demand Stack allows a portfolio of demand-side programs to be collectively deployed and dispatched to reliably address system needs, similar to conventional supply-side resources. The range of Demand Stack strategies includes regulatory, operational, and behavioral measures that can enable new program offerings, increase enrollment, and improve the performance and cost-competitiveness of the portfolio. The authors focus exclusively on the quantifiable impacts that Demand Stack strategies could have by 2030 for a representative portfolio of demand-side offerings.

Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area, Jeffrey Jones, Gallup

Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor. These results, from a March 2-18 Gallup survey, represent the first time Gallup has asked about data center construction, a topic that has met fierce opposition from local residents in many parts of the country. The March survey asked people to rate their level of concern about the environmental impact of AI data centers. Forty-six percent say they worry a great deal and 24% a fair amount, largely mirroring the degrees of opposition to data center construction. Half of opponents mention data centers’ excessive use of resources, including 18% each mentioning their use of water and energy. Sixteen percent mention a related environmental concern of pollution, including noise pollution and air and water pollution.

The Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints, Aczel et al., United Nations University

The authors examine one of the most underexplored consequences of AI’s rapid expansion: the environmental footprints of the energy required to power it. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in economies, public services, research, communication, and everyday life, it depends on a growing physical infrastructure of data centers, advanced chips, cooling systems, electricity grids, water resources, land, and critical mineral supply chains. The report shows that AI is not only a digital technology, but also a material system with measurable environmental costs. The authors frame AI’s environmental footprint as a governance and justice challenge, not only a technical problem. The benefits of AI often flow across borders and sectors, while the environmental burdens of data center siting, electricity demand, water withdrawals, land use, mineral extraction, and e-waste can be concentrated in specific communities and regions. To address these risks, the authors call for a responsible AI ecosystem grounded in transparency, efficiency by design, equity and environmental justice, lifecycle responsibility, global cooperation, and sustainable use. By making AI’s carbon, water, and land footprints visible and comparable, the authors provide a practical basis for integrating AI into energy, climate, water, and land-use planning, ensuring that innovation advances without shifting environmental costs onto vulnerable communities.

Advancing Industrial Electrification in Pennsylvania, Quinn et al., The 2035 Initiative, University of California, Santa Barbara

Pennsylvania has one of the largest and most energy-intensive manufacturing sectors in the country, making it a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution. This also makes it one of the best near-term opportunities to deploy cleaner, more efficient manufacturing technologies. The Reducing Industrial Sector Emissions in Pennsylvania (RISE PA) program has allocated $396 million to industrial decarbonization, making the Commonwealth an early leader in this area. The authors explore one way the state can effectively deploy its resources: low- and medium-temperature (LMT) process heat electrification. Building on national-scale engineering models, the authors identify how electrification of Pennsylvania’s industrial sector can deliver cost-effective emissions reductions, long-term health benefits for Pennsylvanians, and economic growth in the manufacturing sector.

Global Justice Report, Aggarwal et al., World Inequality Lab

The authors attempt to set out a new vision for global progress in the 21st century: grounding human development and equality in planetary habitability. They explore the conditions under which the world could move toward this horizon and traces an economically and ecologically consistent transition path from 2026 to 2100. Their main conclusion is simple: it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all, but only if the transformation rests on three pillars simultaneously. Fast decarbonization of energy systems is necessary. But we also need a major shift toward sufficiency – understood as a sharp reduction in labor hours and material footprint and large changes in consumption patterns, food habits, land use, and forest cover. In addition, neither decarbonization nor sufficiency can be financed and politically sustained without a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, both between countries and within them. The compression of global inequality is not only compatible with deep decarbonization; it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.

Temperature Check 2025–26, The Center for Climate Journalism and Communication, University of Southern California

Even though fewer Americans now hear about global warming and climate change through news, newspapers are still the top source of information for climate communicators. Climate communicators still prefer LinkedIn as their go-to social media platform for climate information, followed by Instagram and BlueSky. The use of X/Twitter for engaging in climate media continues to drop even more among climate communicators. Climate communicators are most concerned about the lack of climate action, global warming and the health impacts of climate change this year. Yet, the authors' survey shows climate communicators are also increasingly avoiding terms and phrases such as “climate change” and “global warming,” likely due to increasing politicization of the terms as well as pushback from the government as well as the public.

The New Geopolitics of LNG: Asia’s Energy Security in a Divided World, Andrews-Speed et al., The National Bureau of Asian Research

Liquefied natural gas constitutes a growing share of the global energy mix and is an increasingly important element of the energy mix in Asia. The authors examine the role of liquefied natural gas in the energy strategies of the United States, Japan, and China and assess the implications of deepening geopolitical divides for Asia’s future energy security.

Drivers of supply and demand of terrestrial animal source food, Tak et al., Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Diverse foods derived from livestock production systems, including grazing and pastoralist systems, and from the hunting of wild animals, provide high-quality proteins, important fatty acids and various vitamins and minerals – contributing to healthy diets for improved nutrition and health. Challenges related to high resource utilization and pollution, food–feed competition, greenhouse gas emissions, antimicrobial resistance and animal welfare, as well as zoonotic and food-borne diseases, accessibility and affordability, need to be solved if agrifood systems are to become more sustainable.

Clean industry rising: the foundation of resilient value chains, Mission Possible Partnership

The authors highlight the acceleration in the shift to decarbonized industrial production. The latest wave of projects includes clean fuels, chemicals, fertilizers and metals: the industrial essentials needed to grow food, build infrastructure, manufacture goods and move the products that underpin modern economies. As the need for more resilient industrial systems intensifies, clean industry is emerging as a strategic advantage. The authors explore the trends in detail, including country progress, analysis of which projects are progressing along the announced pipeline and the new clean industry value chains that are taking shape worth an estimated $4.7 trillion.

China Carbon Neutrality Tracker 2025 Annual Report Green and Low-Carbon Transition in China's Provincial Level Regions: A Decade in Review, Li et al., Institute for Global Decarbonization Progress

As China's "dual carbon" targets have been enshrined as national strategy and the "1+N" policy framework continues to take shape, the country's green and low-carbon transition has moved into a phase of accelerated implementation at the subnational level. Given China's vast territory and the significant differences among provincial level regions1 in economy, energy mix, and resource endowments, the transition varies notably across regions in terms of starting points, pathways, and outcomes. Therefore, systematically tracking subnational climate action carries significant potential to inform policymaking and ensure the timely achievement of China's "dual carbon" goals. The authors apply Subnational Low-Carbon and Green Index for China (Subnational LOGIC), an indicator tool developed by iGDP, to track and quantitatively assess the low-carbon transition of 30 provincial level regions between 2013 and 2022. Subnational LOGIC encompasses 26 specific indicators under four categories: carbon productivity; carbon emissions including six sub-categories covering energy, power, industry, buildings, transport, and agriculture; environmental conditions and land use; and policy systems and public participation, together capturing the overall quality of regional economic growth and progress on sectoral emission reductions.

Gas share in global power mix has declined for a fifth consecutive year, Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, Ember

The author examines how the role of gas in the global power sector is changing as renewable electricity expands across major economies. She explores long-term trends in gas-fired generation globally and across key markets, including the G7, China, India and Brazil.

Climate Change in the American Mind: Politics & Policy, Spring 2026, Leiserowitz et al., Yale University and George Mason University

With the primaries in the 2026 midterm elections underway, the authors found that 58% of registered voters prefer to vote for a candidate for public office who supports action on global warming, while 14% prefer to vote for a candidate who opposes action. 42% would like to hear from political candidates more often about efforts to reduce global warming, while 23% would like to hear about this less often. 31% will only vote for a congressional candidate who supports increasing the use of renewable energy, while 7% will only vote for a candidate who supports decreasing the use of renewable energy. 25% will only vote for a candidate who supports decreasing the use of fossil fuels, while 14% will only vote for a candidate who supports increasing the use of fossil fuels.

The Intersection of Data Center Development, Water Availability, and Environmental Justice In California, Stewart-Frey et al., NEXT 10

The authors assess the intersection of direct water use by data centers with water availability and distribution in California, focusing on the potential effect of large-scale data center operations on local water resources. The authors also evaluate how data centers might affect the water access and sustainability for communities located near these facilities, highlighting potential disparities in water access for particularly vulnerable communities. As part of this assessment, the authors developed a comprehensive database of California data centers, as well as a newly developed index to evaluate water scarcity and community vulnerability.

Banking on Climate Crisis. Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2026, Lusiani et al., Banking on Climate Chaos Coalition

Affordable energy, environmental justice, respect for human rights, and a livable climate are all critical pillars of society, and all profoundly influenced by choices made by the world’s largest banks. Many of these banks continue to put their — and others — money into the fragile fossil fuel energy system, which has become a source of great wealth for the few and a deepening fault line of vulnerability for everyone else. At a time of great change in the global energy sector, this 17th edition of the Banking on Climate Chaos report tracks these financing choices by the world’s largest banks and provides a roadmap of how to phase out bank financing for fossil fuels.

SLCP Impact Report: A decade of driving decent working conditions, The Social and Labor Convergence Program

In 2025, SLCP added new climate data points to the Converged Assessment Framework (CAF) ensuring alignment with Human Rights Due Diligence requirements and recognizing that climate change is no longer solely an environmental sustainability issue, but that it directly affects worker wellbeing too. The authors who that 69% of facilities are not preparing for climate effects and have not yet made a formal plan for dealing with climate change. This is particularly urgent given that 16% of SLCP facilities maintain indoor temperatures exceeding 31°C, a level that sits dangerously close to or above recognized safe heat thresholds for workers. About New Research

Click here for the why and how of Skeptical Science New Research.

Suggestions

Please let us know if you're aware of an article you think may be of interest for Skeptical Science research news, or if we've missed something that may be important. Send your input to Skeptical Science via our contact form.

Previous edition

The previous edition of Skeptical Science New Research may be found here.

Utah Senator Mike Lee is at it again. Earlier this year, he led a failed legislative attempt to undo the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Management Plan. In July, he couldn’t contain his joy when President Trump illegally decimated both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. And now he’s set the wheel in motion to use the same legislative tool – a fast-tracked resolution via the Congressional Review Act – to attack the Bears Ears Monument Management Plan.

Please contact your members of Congress today (House & Senate) and tell them: Vote NO to Mike Lee’s attack on Bears Ears National Monument.

You might be wondering: does a monument management plan still matter after Trump’s illegal reductions? The answer is a resounding yes! Until a new management plan is finalized for Bears Ears, the existing plan remains in place. The current plan—finalized in early 2025 in consultation with the Bears Ears Commission—will continue to govern day-to-day activities in the monument. There is one major exception: mining. Trump’s proclamations directed that on September 11, 2026, the lands cut out of both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante will be opened to new mining claims and potential oil and gas leasing.

The Bears Ears Management plan was the first of its kind, incorporating significant and meaningful input from Tribal Nations through the Bears Ears Commission. It took important steps towards protecting unique natural and cultural landscapes, while at the same time providing opportunities for respectful appreciation and enjoyment of this remarkable place. All of that is at risk.

Members of Congress have been speaking out in opposition to Trump’s illegal reductions of the national monuments. This is their chance to back up words with action—ensuring that Senator Lee’s effort to fast-track the undoing of the Bears Ears Monument Management Plan goes nowhere.

Please contact your members of Congress today (House & Senate) and tell them: Vote NO to Mike Lee’s attack on Bears Ears National Monument.

Earlier this year, the Protect Wild Utah movement ensured that Grand Staircase-Escalante Management Plan remained in place—it was an extraordinary effort, against the odds, that involved a whole-of-organization effort for SUWA and our supporters. We’ll be mounting a similar campaign for Bears Ears and will need your help again. Thank you—we know you’ll help us rise to the occasion. We’ll be in touch as we have more updates.

>> Want to do more to defend Bears Ears? Click here to get in contact with a Regional Organizer.

 

The post Take Action to Defend Bears Ears National Monument appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

The federal government’s wildfire response system is lacking resources during what is on track to be one of the most destructive fire years on record. In an August 14 memo, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Center told fire managers it cannot “provide all requested resources for every fire,” and an August 11 memo warned of “no immediate relief anticipated.”

Wildfires have burned 7.3 million acres as of August 18, the most acres for this point in the year since federal tracking began in 1994, compared with a 30-year average of 4.3 million acres. Seventy-six large fires remain uncontained, and at points this season all 38 of the nation’s standby incident management teams, each requiring at least 24 people, have been committed simultaneously.

This resource strain follows roughly 3,400 firings at the Forest Service under the Trump administration’s workforce cuts. Officials say frontline firefighters were spared, but the incident management teams coordinating the response were not. “These require the most seasoned and experienced managers. And we lost a lot of them last year,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, Executive Director for Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. “We are just now seeing the impact of that.”

Bulldozers move into protected Arizona desert as second border wall advances near Quitobaquito Springs

A second 30-foot border wall is being built about 100 feet north of the existing barrier in Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, with crews bulldozing a corridor roughly 2.5 miles east of Quitobaquito Springs, home to three endangered species found nowhere else on Earth. “This is the beginning of another destructive chapter for Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Quitobaquito Springs,” said Russ McSpadden, southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, who documented the construction activity.

Join us in Tucson: We’ll be discussing Arizona’s public lands and the border wall in a conversation with advocates including Russ McSpadden. RSVP to join on Friday, August 28 from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at the Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre.

Quick hits Fish and Wildlife Service pauses plan to change wetlands policy

Outdoor Life | E&E News

Bulldozers move into protected Arizona desert as second border wall advances near Quitobaquito Springs

Arizona Daily Star | KGUN 9 | KJZZ | Sierra Sun Times

Poll shows Utahns oppose Trump’s monument reductions

Deseret News

Report: Public lands at risk

Outdoor Alliance

Wildland firefighting bill gains steam as smoke reaches Congress

Roll Call

Trump proposes rescinding roadless rule for 45M forest acres

Arizona Republic | E&E News | Capital Press | AZPM | Grist

Trump administration moves to kill ‘roadless rule,’ but Colorado has its own protections

CPR | Aspen Times

Land acquisition protecting ‘one of the best views of Colorado’ will add 262 acres to national forest

Aspen Times

Quote of the day

We want expertise, and the mistreatment of the federal expertise, the civil service, is going to hurt us for decades to come.”

—Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Roll Call

Picture This @zionnps

Aww, a baby condor! But who’s the other one?

The California condor shown here is baby Milagra. Milagra’s story reminds us that not all of the condors we see in Zion begin their journeys in the park: in fact, some don’t begin them in the wild at all.

All condors spend some time in captivity. Ideally, they only stay in facilities for brief visits – routine check-ups to make sure they’re healthy. Some, spend extended time in human care, as we follow means necessary to best protect this endangered species.

50% of condor mortalities are due to lead poisoning, when a condor is exposed to lead through carrion. If that carrion is the remains of an animal shot by a lead bullet, the scavenger animals that eat it (like condors) are subject to extreme illness. Other threats to condors include microtrash, fire, and other types of illness.

Milagra was rescued as an egg, after her mother was found dead of avian flu a short distance from their nesting site. Once hatched, Milagra was raised in captivity, first with puppets, and later by a pair of adopted parents. After she was released, Milagra immediately ran into her biological father: the two recognized each other and shared a meal. Her story is one of hope. With proper care and attention for these wild species, we can hopefully share this world with them for many more years to come.

Photo from the Peregrine Fund

 

Featured photo: The Woolsey Fire, California, 2018. Peter Buschmann/U.S. Forest Service

The post Firefighting resources are ‘critically low’ in record fire year appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

For Immediate Release:

August 20, 2026

Contact:
Ashley Castaneda, ashley@restorethedelta.org

SACRAMENTO — Today, the California State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board) released the updated San Francisco Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan (“Bay-Delta Plan”), a critical policy guiding water quality, river flows, and ecosystem protections for the state’s largest and most fragile estuary. 

The updated plan was met with immediate backlash from the Delta Tribal Environmental Coalition (DTEC)—consisting of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, Winnemem Wintu Tribe, Little Manila Rising, and Restore the Delta—for failing to make meaningful changes to address longstanding Tribal, environmental justice, and ecological concerns.

Among the coalition’s central concerns is the plan’s reliance on Voluntary Agreements (VAs), privately negotiated deals allowing powerful water districts to offer limited flow commitments and funding in exchange for exemptions from stronger, enforceable regulatory requirements. 

Tribal groups, environmental justice organizations and conservation groups say the VA approach is not scientifically sound and lacks adequate, enforceable protections needed to safeguard threatened fish species and address harmful algal blooms (HABs). The updated plan also fails to establish a comprehensive HAB standard and provides only limited provisions for HAB monitoring.

DTEC is calling on the State Water Board to prioritize strong, science-based, and enforceable protections for Delta water quality and ecosystems. 

“This final update to the Bay-Delta plan once again falls short of meeting the needs of the region,” said Morgen Snyder, Director of Policy and Programs at Restore the Delta. “We face an extinction crisis, a health crisis, and a cultural crisis that could and should have been addressed by the Water Board through a comprehensive HABs standard, and flow standards that are actually protective of environmental, cultural, and other beneficial uses of water. The Voluntary Agreements are not only an expensive drain on financial resources, but will only deepen the threats we see and experience on the ground.”

The plan also falls short in adequately recognizing Tribal sovereignty and incorporating Traditional Ecological Knowledge. In particular, DTEC is concerned about the lack of clear and enforceable standards for protecting Tribal Beneficial Uses.

The coalition is also raising concerns about the State Water Board’s process for reviewing and revising the plan. Key Tribal and environmental stakeholders have faced compressed timelines for reviewing extensive technical materials and submitting public comments. Hearings and deadlines have also repeatedly coincided with holidays and active Tribal ceremony dates, creating additional barriers to meaningful participation.

As a result, DTEC will submit a formal request for additional time to review the materials and provide input before the Board moves forward with the plan. 

###

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

August 20, 2026

Utah Senator Mike Lee Wants to Speed Up the Destruction of Bears Ears National Monument – 8.20.26 Piling on top of Trump’s proclamation, Lee could soon fast-track an attempt to rip up the national monument’s land-use plan, which reflects a historic collaborative management process with five Tribal Nations 

Contacts:
Grant Stevens, Communications Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA); (319) 427-0260; grant@suwa.org
Keri Gilliland, Senior Communications Manager, The Wilderness Society; (303) 386-2243; kgilliland@tws.org
Perry Wheeler, Earthjustice, pwheeler@earthjustice.org, (202) 792-6211
Chaitna Sinha, Conservation Codirector and Staff Attorney, Grand Canyon Trust; (970) 399-9565 (csinha@grandcanyontrust.org)
Andrew Scibetta, NRDC, (202) 289-2421, ascibetta@nrdc.org
Kris Deutschman, Conservation Lands Foundation, kris@conservationlands.org, (505) 498-0212
Brian Willis, Sierra Club, Brian.Willis@Sierraclub.org 

Washington, DC – This week, at the behest of Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), the Government Accountability Office released an opinion that the Bears Ears National Monument land-use plan (finalized in 2025) is subject to the Congressional Review Act. The plan was developed through a collaborative process involving the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bears Ears Commission. This paves the way for Lee and the rest of the Utah delegation to introduce fast-track legislation that could topple Tribal collaborative management and speed up the destruction of the landscape, while also blocking a substantially the same plan from being enacted in the future.

Earlier this year, using the same mechanism, Utah’s federal delegation, led by Senator Lee and Representative Celeste Maloy (R-UT-02), attempted to undo the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Management Plan. Tribal Nations, hunters and anglers, recreationists, local businesses, scientists, faith leaders, and members of the public from across Utah and the country spoke out loudly against this unfounded attack on one of the nation’s public lands gems. Lee and Maloy’s fast-track attack failed on June 12, 2026.

Just a month later, on July 13, 2026, President Trump illegally decimated both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by reducing each of them by over 90%. Significantly, until new management plans are finalized, the existing plans for each National Monument remain in place. That means the current plans will still manage activities in the monuments, with at least one major exception: mining. Trump’s proclamations directed that on September 11, 2026, the lands he cut out of both monuments will be opened to new mining claims and potential oil and gas leasing.

With the GAO opinion in hand, Sen. Lee or other members of the Utah federal delegation can now introduce a bill under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to undo the Monument Management Plan. If Congress passes the bill, called a “resolution of disapproval,” by simple majority votes, the plan will be eliminated and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the US Forest Service (USFS) will be barred from issuing another plan that is “substantially the same” in the future. 

Beloved by Utahns and Americans, Bears Ears National Monument is a region of extraordinary cultural significance and natural diversity. On December 28, 2016, President Obama used his authority under the Antiquities Act to establish Bears Ears National Monument, protecting both a cultural landscape that has been home to Tribal Nations from time immemorial and some of the wildest redrock country in the nation. Equally important, the proclamation elevated the voices of Tribal Nations that have ancestral ties to the region. Nearly 100,000 archaeological and cultural sites were protected by the proclamation, including House on Fire and Moon House.

In 2023, BLM began the process of developing a management plan to govern the Bears Ears National Monument. This was a crucial opportunity to ensure that the monument is managed for its unique and extraordinary values. As part of the collaborative planning process, the Bears Ears Commission played a central role in developing the 2025 Bears Ears Resource Management Plan, an unprecedented collaborative framework that brings Traditional Indigenous Knowledge and western science together to guide stewardship of Bears Ears National Monument. Below are quotes and additional information.

“Bears Ears National Monument is the quintessential southern Utah redrock landscape with towering spires and mesas, deep canyons, and desert streams; it’s a cultural landscape where Tribal Nations have lived from time immemorial. Quite simply, it’s a place like no other,” said Steve Bloch, Legal Director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “And yet Senator Mike Lee – the purveyor of an endless stream of deeply unpopular ideas for public lands – wants to expedite President Trump’s attack on Bears Ears with the undoing of the monument’s management plan, the blueprint that ensures it is protected for current and future generations. We know Americans will stand up and make their voices heard in opposition to Senator Lee’s latest terrible idea.”

“The administration has already stripped protections from 90% of Bears Ears. Now the monument’s land use plan is in the crosshairs,” said Charlie Luke, The Wilderness Society Utah state director. “A new GAO opinion paves the way for Sen. Lee and his allies to tear up the land use plan and accelerate destruction. We stand with the five Tribes of the Bears Ears Commission and the local communities who shaped this land use plan. Without it, we risk losing irreplaceable cultural resources and future generations’ freedom to explore and experience these lands.”  

“It’s no surprise that Senator Lee is yet again trying to strip protections from our public lands,” said Thomas Delehanty, senior attorney with Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountain Office. “As if President Trump’s illegal decimation of Bears Ears weren’t enough, Senator Lee’s CRA project risks throwing management of the monument into further chaos, benefitting no one. Just as Tribes, hunters and anglers, recreationists, and members of the public united to defend Grand Staircase-Escalante against the Utah delegation’s prior CRA attack, we will vigorously defend Bears Ears against this threat.”

“President Trump has already illegally stripped protections from more than 90 percent of Bears Ears National Monument. Now Senator Mike Lee is trying to pile on by using the Congressional Review Act to erase the collaborative management plan that ensures this extraordinary landscape is stewarded with Tribal leadership and public input,” said Jackie Feinberg, Lands Conservation Campaign Manager at Sierra Club. “Utahns and people across the country already made it clear they reject this cynical playbook when Congress failed to fast-track his push to overturn the Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan. Congress should once again reject this attempt to sidestep the public and Tribal Nations and instead stand behind the collaborative process that produced the Bears Ears management plan.”

“The GAO report paves the way for lawmakers to further gut protections for Bears Ears and erase years of taxpayer-funded work undertaken by federal agencies to develop a land-management plan in collaboration with tribes, local communities, and the public,” said Chaitna Sinha, Conservation Codirector and Staff Attorney for the Grand Canyon Trust. “The tribes were central to the development of the management plan and the establishment of Bears Ears as a national monument, but lawmakers have yet to consult with them about stripping away protections for these lands.”

“The Congressional Review Act is being weaponized against our public lands, and Utah’s congressional delegation is leading the way,” said Bobby McEnaney, Director, Land Conservation, NRDC. “If they succeed, the Bears Ears management plan will be struck down with no ready replacement—just a cloud of uncertainty over what the Bureau of Land Management can do when it comes to protecting this national treasure going forward. That would be a punishment aimed squarely at the five Tribes and communities who spent years building the plan together. Every member of Congress should ask whether that’s a legacy they want to own.”

“Once again Utah politicians are trying to use the Congressional Review Act to block responsible, collaborative land management. The monument management plan in place right now represents a historic, collaborative process between the Tribes in the Bears Ears Commission and other groups that use the lands in the monument, from recreationists to ranchers,” said Kate Groetzinger, Communications Director for the Center for Western Priorities.  “Attempting to repeal this plan with the CRA is a dirty trick, which would prohibit the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service from ever issuing a similar plan for this landscape in the future. If Mike Lee moves forward with this attack, it could have implications far beyond Trump’s recent size reduction.” 

“The overwhelming majority of voters in Utah and across western states want Congress to protect the country’s irreplaceable and beloved national monuments,” said David Feinman, Vice President of Government Affairs at the Conservation Lands Foundation. “We urge everyone who values Bears Ears National Monument, and all public lands, to hold their members of Congress accountable to the public’s will and to the Tribal agreements directing the best management of these landscapes.”

Additional information about Bears Ears National Monument 

The Bears Ears proposal was led by the five Tribal Nations that would later comprise the “Bears Ears Commission:” the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Ute Indian Tribe. On December 4, 2017, President Trump ignored millions of public comments and in a brazenly illegal act repealed Bears Ears National Monument, replacing it with two much smaller, non-contiguous units totaling less than 230,000 acres (an 83% reduction). His unprecedented action left rare archaeological sites, unique flora and fauna, and stunning wildlands without protection from looting, uranium mining, oil and gas drilling, and off-road vehicle damage. 

Thankfully, on October 8, 2021, President Biden signed a proclamation restoring Bears Ears National Monument to its full, original boundaries—plus an additional 12,000 acres added to the Trump-era Indian Creek unit. National monuments are overwhelmingly popular. Seventy-five percent of Utah voters support the President’s ability to protect public lands as national monuments. 71% Utah voters, including a majority of Republicans, want to keep Grand Staircase-Escalante as a national monument.

Elected representatives of five Native American Tribes – Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Zuni Tribe, and Ute Indian Tribe – collaboratively manage Bears Ears National Monument through the Bears Ears Commission. The five Tribal Nations played a central role in developing the Bears Ears management plan through the Bears Ears COmmission and the collaborative management process. Their ancestral and ongoing relationships with Bears Ears, and their responsibilities to care for the landscape, are fundamental to its management. Any changes to the plan should include meaningful government-to-government engagement with the Tribes. 

About the Congressional Review Act (CRA)

The CRA is a federal statute enacted in March 1996 that requires federal agencies to submit “rules” to Congress for a mandatory review period “before they may take effect.” If Congress votes to overturn, or “disapprove,” the rule, it “may not be reissued in substantially the same form. . . .” The BLM has long maintained that its land management plans are not “rules” subject to the CRA. Other federal land management agencies, including the USFS,  and National Park Service, have similarly not submitted their land management plans to Congress under the CRA.

However, emboldened by a series of non-binding Government Accountability Office (GAO) opinions, Republican members of Congress have embraced the novel theory that federal land management plans are in fact “rules” subject to the CRA. The 119th Congress has passed seven CRA resolutions overturning previously finalized land management plans or other types of public lands management decisions. The GAO issued a decision regarding the Bears Ears Monument Management Plan on August 17, 2026.

###

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) is a nonprofit organization with members and supporters from around the country dedicated to protecting America’s redrock wilderness. From offices in Moab, Salt Lake City, and Washington, DC, our team of professionals defends the redrock, organizes support for America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, and stewards this world-renowned landscape. Learn more at www.suwa.org.

The Wilderness Society is a national conservation organization dedicated to protecting America’s wild places since 1935. Through science, advocacy and partnerships with communities and policymakers, we champion the protection of wilderness, national parks, forests, and other public lands that provide clean air and water, wildlife habitat and the freedom to connect with nature. For more information, visit www.wilderness.org. 

Earthjustice is the premier nonprofit environmental law organization. We wield the power of law and the strength of partnership to protect people’s health, to preserve magnificent places and wildlife, to advance clean energy, and to combat climate change. We are here because the earth needs a good lawyer.

The Grand Canyon Trust is a nonprofit conservation organization dedicated to safeguarding the wonders of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau, while supporting the rights of its Native peoples. Learn more at grandcanyontrust.org  

NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) is an international nonprofit environmental organization with more than 3 million members and online activists. Established in 1970, NRDC uses science, policy, law and people power to confront the climate crisis, protect public health and safeguard nature. NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Beijing and Delhi (an office of NRDC India Pvt. Ltd).

Conservation Lands Foundation represents a national, nonpartisan network of community advocates who are solely focused on the public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management including National Conservation Lands.

 

 

The post Utah Senator Mike Lee Wants to Speed Up the Destruction of Bears Ears National Monument – 8.20.26 appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu

• The plan would increase UK emissions
• The plan would slow electrification
• Gas prices are unlikely to remain low and stable
• The plan assumes gas plants are cheap to build
• Nuclear faces high costs and delivery challenges
• The report’s high network cost estimates do not ‘add up’
• The system integration costs are ‘far out of line with mainstream thinking’
• The proposed changes could undermine investor confidence
• Carbon market ‘savings’ are ‘just rearranging things on a spreadsheet’
• The report ‘grossly simplifies’ long-duration energy storage

In a new report, the opposition Conservatives argue that UK electricity prices are too high and that it would be better for the climate to have cheap electricity, even if that means using more gas.

The idea is that cheap power would encourage people to use more electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps, leading to higher electrification of the economy and lower emissions.

This is at the heart of a Conservative push to abandon the UK’s net-zero by 2050 target and various climate policies, which the party says are “bankrupting” the country.

Now, the party is using a report by centre-right thinktank Onward to advance this argument, claiming that the UK could save “over £320bn” by scrapping net-zero policies.

In the report foreword, shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho says this approach would make electrification “more attractive”, ensuring both “prosperity and a better environment”.

However, the report fails on these terms, as its alternative scenario ends up with less electrification of heat and transport and an extra 524m tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) emissions by 2050.

Moreover, the report relies on a series of questionable assumptions to claim that gas and nuclear will be cheaper than renewables – including the idea that gas prices will be low and stable.

Experts tell Carbon Brief that with credible assumptions, the report’s conclusions would be flipped on their head, such that renewables – not gas and nuclear – would bring the “lowest total costs”.

Iain Staffell, an associate professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London, tells Carbon Brief that while the report “tells a good story”, the modelling underpinning it “has more holes than a Swiss cheese”.

In this factcheck, Carbon Brief speaks to experts and identifies flaws in the report, explaining why they undermine the anti-net-zero rhetoric of the Conservatives and their supporters.

• The plan would increase UK emissions
• The plan would slow electrification
• Gas prices are unlikely to remain low and stable
• The plan assumes gas plants are cheap to build
• Nuclear faces high costs and delivery challenges
• The report’s high network cost estimates do not ‘add up’
• The system integration costs are ‘far out of line with mainstream thinking’
• The proposed changes could undermine investor confidence
• Carbon market ‘savings’ are ‘just rearranging things on a spreadsheet’
• The report ‘grossly simplifies’ long-duration energy storage

The plan would increase UK emissions

The report by Onward is based on modelling by advisory firm Transira Energy, which compares two pathways out to 2050.

One is a “business-as-usual” scenario based on current “net-zero” policies. (Nevertheless, this only achieves a clean power system by 2045 – far short of the 2030 Labour target.)

The other is an “alternative policy pathway” (APP), developed by Onward, which assumes the UK’s 2050 economy-wide net-zero target is abandoned after the next election in 2029.

The latter says it places “greater emphasis on reducing the cost of electricity”, which includes fewer renewables, no electrification goals and more gas and nuclear power capacity.  

This mirrors the policy platform set out by the Conservatives, who argue that “net-zero” drives up energy costs and that climate change can be tackled without such targets.

In fact, the Conservatives say their “common sense” approach would make it easier to cut emissions, as shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho states in the report foreword:

“If we want those emissions to fall, then we need people to want to use electric cars and electric heating – then our priority should be to make electricity cheap.”

Yet, this argument is firmly contradicted by the report itself. 

The APP results in an extra 524MtCO2 being emitted between 2030 and 2050 – equivalent to the annual emissions of South Africa.

The Transira Energy analysts say this is “explained by an increased share of unabated gas-fired capacity”.

Finally, it is worth noting that the UK’s net-zero target is based on the fact that the planet will continue warming until global emissions reach net-zero. Without such targets, climate change – and its impacts – will get worse.

The plan would slow electrification

Contrary to Conservative claims, uptake of heat pumps and electric vehicles is actually expected to be slower in the alternative scenario, “despite lower electricity costs”.

This is due to the removal of supportive government subsidies and mandates, such as the boiler upgrade scheme and the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

Overall electricity consumption is 7% lower in the APP, compared to the current pathway. 

Daniela Quiroga, a senior associate at Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, questions this reliance on lower electricity demand in the APP, telling Carbon Brief:

“While this is an interesting scenario to explore, it overlooks potentially important feedback effects – mainly, as electricity prices and the capital costs of electrification technologies fall, uptake would be expected to increase.”

A related point was made in a LinkedIn post by Tara Singh, chief executive of trade body RenewableUK, who noted:

“APP makes the electricity system cheaper partly by electrifying Britain less – while leaving the fuel costs that replace electricity outside the model.”

For example, Singh estimates that the extra petrol and diesel fuel expenditure to replace the missing electric vehicles (EVs) on the road could be around £65-95bn over two decades. These costs are not included in the APP scenario.

The only sector that sees increased power demand is data centres, due to policy support to “prioritise” new grid connections for these facilities.

Quiroga notes that the costs of accelerating data centre connections “are not mentioned at all” in the report. 

In short, the proposed pathway involves removing grants that help households buy EVs and heat pumps, while providing more policy support for the AI industry.

.cb-tweet img{ border: solid 1.25px #333333; border-radius: 5px; } @media (max-width:650px){ .cb-tweet{ width:100%; } }

Finally, Onward stresses the UK’s “high spark gap” – referring to the electricity-to-gas price ratio. This makes switching from gas boilers to heat pumps less appealing for consumers, given the relatively high price of electricity, compared to gas.

However, Matt Elliott, lead economic analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), says the analysis does not indicate this gap would substantially change in the proposed APP. He tells Carbon Brief:

“The report claims that electrification would happen even without specific policies, simply due to lower retail electricity prices driving consumer choice. However, its own modelling indicates that the gas-electricity price ratio would actually rise in the early years and end up only marginally lower than today by 2050.”

In other words, in the APP the price of electricity compared to gas would not fall sufficiently to drive consumers towards heat pumps without subsidies or other incentives.

Rather than scrapping net-zero policies, analysts have suggested shifting tax and policy levies from electricity to gas, or breaking the link between wholesale gas prices and electricity, as more effective ways to reduce the spark gap. 

Gas prices are unlikely to remain low and stable

The “alternative” scenario pushed by the Conservatives continues to rely heavily on gas for both electricity generation and heating.

This includes constructing new gas power plants in a bid to lower electricity prices, despite the fact that gas is the main driver of high electricity prices in the UK.

In recent years, the largest spikes in energy prices have been triggered by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which have disrupted fossil-fuel supplies and sent gas prices spiralling.

(Indeed, the report was published on the same day the Office for National Statistics announced that inflation had jumped to its highest rate in four months, due to energy costs surging because of the impact of the Iran war on global oil and gas supply chains.) 

Despite this, the scenario set out by Onward assumes that gas prices drop to pre-conflict levels and remain that way for the next two decades.

Ashutosh Padelkar, research lead at Aurora Energy Research, tells Carbon Brief that the gas price assumptions are “hard to fathom” and significantly at odds with future expectations, from both Aurora and other market analysts. 

Analysis by E3G and ECIU in 2025 concluded that four years of energy spikes caused by the post-pandemic demand surge and Russia-Ukraine war had cost the UK £183bn.

The Onward report acknowledges that the new scenario is “more exposed to a future gas price shock” than the current net-zero scenario. It suggests that a new spike could increase fuel costs in the gas-reliant scenario by another £6bn in 2040.

However, Onward argues that the impact of gas price spikes on consumers would be “significantly smaller” than the shock following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is owing to existing renewable energy contracts and future nuclear power construction in the APP.

In the press release accompanying the new report, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is clear that “our plan means using our own oil and gas in the North Sea”.

This mirrors rhetoric that has been widespread on the right of UK politics, stressing the importance of expanding North Sea drilling as a way to cut energy bills.

However, given the relatively small volumes remaining in the North Sea, the UK will likely remain reliant on gas imported from the US and the Middle East. 

Gas prices will still be set globally and remain subject to geopolitical turmoil, no matter where the UK sources its supplies.

Given this, Johnny Gowdy, director of the thinktank Regen, tells Carbon Brief that the scenario presented by the Conservatives is “a call to rely on imported gas, with global gas prices”.

The plan assumes gas plants are cheap to build

The Conservative plan involves building new gas power plants, in order to meet part of the nation’s growing electricity demand without relying on renewables.

Onward states that the UK “has lost firm generation capacity” – such as gas and nuclear plants – and replaced it with “intermittent”, or variable, power in the form of wind and solar. 

To remedy this, its alternative pathway involves building an extra 21 gigawatts (GW) of gas power plants by 2050 – equivalent to around 20 new facilities. This is roughly a 70% increase from the UK’s current capacity.

However, the small print in the accompanying Transira Energy report explains that it assumes capital expenditure – the cost of building the power plants – is £650 per kilowatt (kW).

This is considerably lower than other recent analyses, which tend to cite capital expenditure figures that are more than double this estimate.

For example, a 2025 GridLab report notes that new US gas power plants set for completion in 2026 and 2027 had a cost range of $1,116/kW (£819/kW) to $1,427/kW (£1046kW).

However, it adds that more recent projects are “routinely reporting” costs of $2,000/kW (£1467/kW) or more. Other sources have reported up to $2,800/kW (£2054/kW).

Gas power plant costs have increased significantly in recent years – a trend that has been attributed to a tight supply of gas turbines worldwide.

This, in turn, is the result of increased demand for gas turbines to power data centres and countries transitioning from coal to gas. 

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says data-centre demand in the US is “limiting the availability of turbines for near-term deployment elsewhere in the world”.

Nuclear faces high costs and delivery challenges

The Onward report champions a substantial increase in nuclear power capacity. 

However, it fails to explain how this could be facilitated or why its cost assumptions are lower than the most recent nuclear projects in the UK. 

Within the report’s net-zero scenario, there is 13.3GW of nuclear power by 2050, roughly double the current capacity. It notes that this will be financed under the regulated asset base (RAB) model – a government-backed funding approach announced in 2022.   

Under the APP scenario, nuclear power capacity more than triples from current levels to 20GW by the middle of the century, all backed by the RAB model. 

The report adds: 

“Reducing nuclear construction costs and timelines becomes the core energy priority of the UK government, with measures to improve the availability of sites and grid connections.” 

The report acknowledges that the APP scenario “faces significant cost headwinds from expensive nuclear capacity”. 

However, it suggests that large-scale nuclear power stations built in the 2040s could cost £122-£138 per megawatt hour (MWh) in 2025 terms.

Hinkley Point C – which in 2018 became the first new nuclear power plant to begin construction in the UK since the 1980s – has a “strike price” of £138/MWh for 2030. (This is the fixed price for the electricity it will generate, guaranteed by the power plant’s contracts for difference agreement.)

This price is at the top end of Onward’s forecast range for “levelised cost of electricity” (LCOE) – the average total cost of building and operating an asset over its lifetime. 

Hinkley Point nuclear power station. Credit: Rory Hailes / Alamy Stock Photo

As such, the report suggests, on average, costs will fall over the course of the decade from 2030, but provides little detail as to how this would happen. 

As Richard Howard, global research director at Aurora, wrote on LinkedIn, the cost assumptions for nuclear are “optimistic”. He adds: 

“It assumes that the LCOE of nuclear will fall 10-20% below the *original* cost of Hinkley Point C, when we know that nuclear costs escalated massively since the HPC deal was struck. The UK does not have a great track record of managing down the costs of nuclear.”

In fact, Sizewell C – a replica of Hinkley Point C in the early stages of construction in Suffolk, which received a final investment decision in 2025 – has a considerably higher strike price of £150/MWh in 2039. 

Hinkley Point C is the first new nuclear power plant to be built in 30 years in the UK. It has been beset by delays and nearly doubled in cost since it was originally approved.

A footnote in the Transira Energy report adds that its calculations for the cost of nuclear include expected capital expenditure for new large-scale plants ranging from £10,000/kW to £12,500/kW.

While the 3.26GW Hinkley Point C was originally supposed to have a price tag of £18bn, which would equate to £5,521/kWh, costs have repeatedly increased. More recent estimates from developer EDF suggest a figure of £10,736/kW, closer to Onward’s figure.

However, if this is adjusted for inflation for 2026, this jumps closer to £14,724/kW. 

As such, the upfront cost of new nuclear is already around £2,500 more per kilowatt than the assumptions in the report for 10 years from now. 

The report provides limited information about how these costs would fall so substantially. 

It suggests that the recommendations from the 2025 Fingleton review should be implemented in full to cut the cost of the technology.

The Fingleton report – a full review of the UK’s nuclear sector by the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce, led by John Fingleton – found an “overly complex” and “bureaucratic” system was holding back the nuclear industry. It advocated for “smarter regulation”, as an overhaul of the planning regime. 

In March 2026, the Labour government committed to full implementation of the Fingleton review by the end of 2027. Despite this, the Onward report includes the implementation of the Fingleton review in the APP scenario, but not the net-zero scenario. 

The report’s high network cost estimates do not ‘add up’

The biggest drop in costs outlined in the Onward APP scenario comes from a reduction in network costs, but experts have said that this “just doesn’t add up”.

Network costs are broadly made up of the price of building, maintaining and operating the transmission and distribution systems. 

A reduction in network spending accounts for £137bn of the £320bn in “savings”, compared to the net-zero scenario that sees significant network expansion to help facilitate more renewables on the grid. 

This drop is “thanks to a higher utilisation of firm power system with supply located closer to demand”, the report says.  

In particular, the report points to discrepancy between the “best wind resources” being located in the north of Scotland, while the major centres of demand are in the southeast of England. As such, currently grid expansion is needed to avoid constraints or the requirement to curtail generation in windy periods with low demand. 

By avoiding the connection of geographically dispersed generation assets, such as 78GW of generation, storage and interconnectors, the APP scenario can reduce total network costs by 43%, according to the report. 

Staffell tells Carbon Brief that the £137bn saving has “a convincing story to it – if we build more fossil and nuclear capacity we can utilise the system better”.

However, he adds that Onward gives “so little detail about how this works that it’s hard to comment”.

The Transira Energy report notes that the APP still includes £19bn in investment for the electricity network, covering the cost to maintain the existing system and connect new gas and nuclear generation.

However, this 86% drop in new transmission investment compared to the BAU scenario leans on “flawed logic”, according to Tara Singh from RenewableUK.

On LinkedIn, she explained that it “rests on an extraordinarily aggressive assumption about how little grid Britain will need”, adding: 

“Onward assumes £137bn of new transmission assets under BAU between 2030 and 2050, but only £19bn under their plan, even though by 2050 it still has 32m EVs/hybrids, more than 6m additional heat pumps, 45GW gas, 20GW nuclear and – particularly strikingly – 62 terawatt hour (TWh) a year of datacentre demand. Is this grid figure credible…?”

Beyond this, the report also attributes a significant portion of the proposed savings to cuts in “balancing costs”. These are the costs to the system operator of balancing electricity supply and demand. 

It claims that having more firm generation located closer to demand and existing transmission infrastructure will “save billions of expenditure on network expansion and balancing costs”. 

Onward suggests that under the APP scenario, the cost of keeping generation and demand balanced would fall by £67bn. 

However, claiming savings by both cutting network expansion and balancing costs amounts to “double counting” and “just doesn’t add up”, according to Aurora’s Padelkar.

He tells Carbon Brief that including both high capital expenditure for the electricity network and high balancing costs in the BAU scenario is “difficult to reconcile”. 

Expanding the electricity network would reduce constraints, reducing the need for constraint management. Such a move would lower balancing costs. 

As noted by the National Energy System Operator (Neso), retaining the current transmission network into 2030, with no expansion, would mean constraint costs could reach around £12.7bn a year. But building new network capacity could cut costs by as much as 75%.  

Padelkar says: 

“They’re saying ‘we continue to invest in the network’…But somehow the network [balancing] costs just don’t come down…This is basically saying ‘we’re paying both to fix the problem and to have the problem’. You can have one of the two, but you can’t have both.”

Despite the claim that the APP approach will lead to the cheapest electricity, Padelkar says that the report does not present a “consistent picture” as to how the system would operate, pointing to the approach to network and balancing costs. He adds: 

“Overall, we would expect that once these figures are correctly accounted for, that renewable energy would remain the cheapest form of a form of decarbonisation. I would even further flip the argument around, to say that decarbonisation is not a prerogative [on] its own, but because it also achieves lowest total costs.”

The system integration costs are ‘far out of line with mainstream thinking’

A central argument in the Onward report is that the costs of renewables are higher than often claimed by proponents, due to the wider system costs of having a large amount of “intermittent” generation. 

As such, it proposes pulling back support for wind and solar, and instead putting focus on “firm generation” sources, particularly gas and nuclear power. 

This relies heavily on the claim that “system integration costs” for wind and solar are much higher than is being “properly revealed” in either contracts for difference (CfD) auctions or levelised costs estimates. 

(CfD’s are power contracts between generators and the government, which work as the UK’s main method for supporting the development of renewables by providing long-term price certainty to developers.)

Therefore, when assessing the overall cost of renewable energy, the cumulative network investment, balancing and ancillary services system costs necessary to manage such variable generation must be considered, it suggests.

The existence of integration costs is not widely understood, but the scale of their impact is disputed.

The report continues that if these costs are taken into account, the “marginal system integration costs” of renewables are “much higher than their individual levelised costs”.

Onward suggests that the cost to integrate additional offshore wind, onshore wind and solar onto the electricity system is £125/MWh. This is far higher than the cost of generating electricity from these sources in the first place.

The figure has been challenged by a number of commentators, with Staffell telling Carbon Brief that this is “very far out of line with mainstream thinking”. 

Analysis published in Nature suggests that if 80% of the electricity mix comes from renewables, the system integration cost is around €30/MWh (£26/MWh). 

Elsewhere, engineering firm Afry put the total cost of electricity at around £55-75/MWh in a high-renewable system. This is “less than [Onward’s] integration cost alone”, Staffell adds.

The high price tag of the £128/MWh marginal integration “is derived by apportioning additional balancing and transmission costs solely to 60GW of new wind and solar deployed from 2030 onwards”, explains Callum MacIver, research fellow at the University of Strathclyde and the UK Energy Research Centre. 

He adds:

“[This figure] only looks at the cost side and there is not enough published detail on where the renewables are deployed and the transmission upgrades it triggers to critique the scale of the numbers presented. 

“It also excludes potential wider system benefits of further renewables deployment, including reduced wholesale prices, avoided fuel and carbon costs and reduced exposure to future external gas price shocks, which are properly examined by looking at overall system costs and testing various sensitivities including different gas price futures.”

Writing on LinkedIn, Adam Bell – a partner at consultancy Stonehaven – suggests that the £125/MWh system costs are “really egregious”. He explains: 

“The ‘system costs’ of renewables…rests on assuming that all additional network upgrades and balancing costs for a net-zero system after 2029 are attributable to additional renewables deployed in that net-zero system. 

“Many of those costs relate to existing renewables as well as nuclear, so this likely overstates system costs by an order of magnitude [roughly 10-fold].”

Furthermore, the system costs for the APP scenario are not fully accounted for in the report. Regardless of the technology mix, old network and generation assets will need replacing, adding additional costs to the system. 

The proposed changes could undermine investor confidence

The APP scenario involves stripping back all support for renewables going forward.

It calls for the CfD scheme to end in 2030. Pre-existing CfD contracts would continue under APP, but after this decade, all further support would “exclusively” be for nuclear power.

Additionally, the renewable obligation (RO) payments for existing wind and solar would end from 2033. These are legacy contracts signed ahead of the scheme closing to new applicants in 2017. Payments are expected to continue until 2037.

(Onward makes an exception for the large-scale biomass power plant owned by Drax, which already has a contract with the UK government to switch from an RO to a low-carbon “dispatchable CfD”. This switch is included under both the net-zero and APP scenarios, in recognition of the “importance of its contribution to generation and to system stability”.)

Both the CfD and RO schemes have contributed significantly to the expansion of the renewable energy sector in the UK. For example, despite coming to an end in 2017, nearly 30% of current electricity supplies are still covered by RO contracts.

It is unclear from the report what the 10GW of capacity currently expected to receive the RO would do beyond 2033. 

Writing on Bluesky, Tom Haddon, senior economist at Arup, says that if, as the APP scenario proposes, the UK “bin[s the] RO”, this could force 10GW of renewable capacity still on the system to simply shut down after 2033.  

Such a dramatic change to a longstanding support system could have an impact on investor confidence. 

Padelkar tells Carbon Brief that energy investors are often involved in numerous technologies. He adds: 

“You wouldn’t be able to say ‘yeah, not going to continue honouring this contract [for renewables], but I expect you to sign this new one for me [to build new nuclear]’. That just wouldn’t work.”

As such, there is no guarantee that investors would agree to enter into government-backed RAB contracts to develop nuclear power plants, having just seen government-backed RO contracts being reneged on four years early.

Carbon market ‘savings’ are ‘just rearranging things on a spreadsheet’

One of the large chunks of “savings” identified to bring down electricity prices in the Onward report is £94bn from “lower wholesale prices, thanks to the removal of carbon taxes”.

This refers to removing power plants from the UK emissions trading scheme (UK ETS) from 2031. 

Onward argues that this reduces the cost of gas power plants, which frequently set wholesale power prices under the marginal pricing system.

Staffell tells Carbon Brief that this is a “concern” when considering the report’s findings:

“That is £94bn no longer going into the government coffers, so it’s not saving the country any money; it’s just rearranging things on a spreadsheet. This lowers electricity bills, but does that get compensated for by higher taxes elsewhere, or do we have to take on a larger national deficit, or does it go hand-in-hand with cutting public services?”

Tom Edwards, a consultant at Cornwall Insight, wrote on Bluesky that it would be “madness” to simply remove the UK ETS and “expect things to remain stable”.

The UK currently sources around a tenth of its electricity via interconnectors that link its grid up with Ireland and parts of mainland Europe. It also exports electricity to other European countries when it has surplus supply.

These relationships would be complicated if the UK abandoned its carbon price on electricity altogether. 

The UK and EU have been negotiating over linking their carbon pricing systems, which would involve the UK navigating the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM).

Alongside ending support for renewables, the new Onward scenario also removes subsidies for new interconnectors, although it says “existing interconnectors will continue”. 

The Transira Energy analysis says there would be “new cross-border trading arrangements” from 2031. Such “arrangements” would, presumably, need to be negotiated from scratch with the EU.

Specifically, the report proposes a “carbon reference price” for electricity sold to the EU to “prevent carbon leakage and the distortion of cross-border electricity flows”.

Adam Berman, policy director at Energy UK, pointed out that the post-Brexit trade and cooperation agreement between the UK and the EU includes a legal commitment by the UK to maintain a carbon price on electricity. He wrote that the Onward proposal “would run contrary to that agreement”.

The report ‘grossly simplifies’ long-duration energy storage

The Onward report states that it would cancel support for long-duration energy storage (LDES), such as large batteries and pumped hydropower.  

This follows the government recently launching a “cap-and-floor scheme” to support the technology. In June 2026, the nation’s energy regulator Ofgem identified 16 LDES that it is “minded to” support under the new scheme. 

LDES can store power across days, weeks or even seasons, helping to boost electricity system security. Analysis by analytics company LCP Delta suggests that rolling out LDES technologies could cut energy system costs in the UK by more than £24bn between 2030 and 2050.

Onward lists support for storage systems – including LDES, as well as smaller batteries, which are only briefly mentioned in the report – as one of the “costs of an intermittent-first, low-carbon electricity system”. 

As such, alongside cuts to support for renewable energy technology, the APP scenario includes ending the cap-and-floor scheme for LDES. (See: The proposed changes could undermine investor confidence)

The report suggests that even if all 16 of the projects shortlisted by Ofgem were built, the total would only provide around five and a half hours of generation. 

It adds: “This is not enough to make it through a winter spell of low wind and sun”. 

This assertion is based on the total storage capacity of all the projects being 136GWh. 

However, the report “grossly simplifies the operation of LDES”, explains Padelkar. He adds: 

“This assumes a rate of discharge that the fleet doesn’t have. Further, this LDES capacity would play a key role in reducing the balancing and ancillary costs, even in the early 2030s, by helping absorb cheap wind generation in Scotland in constrained periods and then discharging it when the transmission from Scotland to the south of Great Britain is not constrained.”

The role of LDES is more complex than simply all projects providing the entire electricity demand for the nation in one go. The projects are designed to act together with other assets to absorb excess supply, smooth out peaks in demand and step in to provide cheaper power when prices spike. 

Related Q&A: What is ‘long-duration energy storage’ – and why does the UK need it? 19.08.2026 Electricity Analysis: Weaker EV targets could cost UK consumers £3bn a year by 2030 12.08.2026 Policy Q&A: Does the world need ‘carbon capture and storage’ to reach net-zero? 03.08.2026 Technology UK withdraws millions in funding from world’s second-largest rainforest in Congo  15.07.2026 Nature

The post Factcheck: 10 flaws in the Conservative report on ‘cheap power’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Thanks to state laws, Dollar Tree is pledging to remove ‘forever chemicals’ from its shelves Monica Amarelo August 20, 2026

If you’ve ever wondered whether state chemical safety laws actually change what ends up on store shelves, Dollar Tree just answered: yes – and faster than consumers might think.

For years, the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS have turned up in personal care products, food packaging, children’s toys and household cleaners sold at dollar stores and everywhere else. Dollar Tree, which operates more than 8,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada, has now pledged to get PFAS out of its products.

Get Your FREE Copy of EWG's Guide To Avoiding PFAS Chemicals

In its chemical management policy, the retailer committed to restricting forever chemicals in its private-label food packaging, children’s products and toys, and formulated products like cleaning supplies and personal care items. By the end of 2027, Dollar Tree suppliers must be able to declare in writing that PFAS haven’t been intentionally added.

Dollar Tree didn’t just decide one day on its own to get tougher on chemicals. It made the change in part because states took decisive action. 

States led, retailers followed

Dollar Tree’s policy explicitly follows restrictions “already adopted in some states.” That’s not a coincidence. It’s exactly how state chemical safety laws are designed to work.

• 13 states now ban PFAS in food packaging, starting with Washington, in 2022.
• 9 states restrict PFAS in children’s products and toys, from California (since 2023) through Illinois (phasing in by 2032).
• 12 states restrict PFAS in cosmetics and personal care products
• 6 states restrict PFAS in household cleaners specifically

For more information on states’ regulation of PFAS as a class in consumer products, visit Safer States. The organization tracks the compliance year for each law, category by category.

Nearly every category in Dollar Tree’s new policy corresponds to one or more specific state laws. 

One retailer’s policy has a national impact

State chemical safety laws typically exert an influence that extends beyond their own borders. 

When a state bans PFAS in one product category, national retailers face a choice: Maintain two (or more) separate supply chains, one complying with a specific state’s law and one that doesn’t and is sold everywhere else, or simplify their production lines by using the safer version only.

Increasingly, companies choose to streamline. It’s cheaper to run one supply chain than two. 

And once a retailer builds the infrastructure to screen out a chemical for California, Maine or Minnesota, it’s fairly straightforward, and good business, to apply that standard nationwide. 

So a law enacted by one state can ultimately protect shoppers in every state, whether or not other states’ lawmakers act.

This is precisely the ripple effect EWG and our state group partners have been fighting for, bill by bill, state by state, targeting toxic chemicals, including PFAS.

Tackling additional chemicals

Other chemicals of concern, such as bisphenols, formaldehyde and parabens, are on Dollar Tree’s list to remove from its private-label products. The retailer’s updated policy lays out real deadlines, not just intentions:

• Formaldehyde-releasing chemicals will be phased out of private-brand formulated products by the end of 2028.
• Two parabens – propylparaben and butylparaben – are already restricted. Four more will be added by 2028, bringing the total to six restricted parabens, all linked to hormone disruption.
• Bisphenol A and bisphenol S, chemicals of concern in food-contact materials, will be restricted from food packaging by 2028.

Within two years, Dollar Tree will also cut in half – as measured against a 2026 baseline – the number of household cleaners and air fresheners containing restricted chemicals.

Starting in 2027, the company has committed to reporting publicly on its progress, including the share of its private-label formulated products that can be fully screened for chemicals of concern, and the share of the screened assortment that’s free of them. 

PFAS exposure health risks

States are targeting PFAS in particular because they don’t break down in the environment or in the human body, so even low, repeated doses build up over time – that’s why they’re called forever chemicals. 

Research links exposure to weakened vaccine response, higher risk of certain cancers, thyroid disruption and harm to the developing reproductive system.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has detected PFAS in the blood of 99% of Americans, including newborn babies. The chemicals cross the placenta and have been detected in umbilical cord blood, confirming that exposure can begin before birth.

That’s the health backdrop behind the categories Dollar Tree’s policy targets first: children’s products and toys, food packaging and formulated products such as cleaning supplies and personal care items.

What this means if you shop at Dollar Tree

Dollar Tree’s intentions are clear, and states pushed the company toward them. But not every product on its shelves will be PFAS-free tomorrow. These are phased-in commitments with multi-year timelines, not an overnight transformation. 

You don’t have to wait until 2027 to shop smarter. Here’s are a few things you can do now:

• Check the Healthy Living™ app before you buy. Search a cleaning or personal care product by name, or scan its barcode in the store, for its EWG rating and the science behind the score. Then compare options side by side to choose with confidence.
• Look for the EWG Verified® mark. Products carrying it already meet strict standards to avoid intentionally added PFAS and other chemicals of concern. You don’t need to wait for retailers.
• Use Food Scores for packaged food. Check ingredients, whether or not it’s an ultra-processed food and packaging concerns where available, before it goes in your cart.

Areas of Focus Food Personal Care Products Cosmetics Household & Consumer Products Cleaning Supplies Cookware & Food Containers Family Health BPA PFAS Chemicals Your wallet and your family’s health will both benefit Authors Monica Amarelo August 20, 2026

With record-breaking ocean temperatures weakening the world’s largest carbon sink, a group of countries is pushing for the UN COP31 summit to deliver meaningful commitments to protect marine ecosystems. Yet this effort could be hobbled by a shrinking pool of climate finance, experts warn.

While discussions on oceans at UN climate talks have so far been limited to annual informal dialogues on the sidelines, African countries, the European Union, some Latin American nations and small island states have launched a bid for COP31 to incorporate ocean protection measures into “negotiated decisions”.

COP31 co-presidents Türkiye and Australia have responded to this call and are working with interested countries on a voluntary ocean roadmap, described as a “concise action plan” and expected to include regional and international steps to integrate measures to safeguard the planet’s ocean and climate.

• Aug 20, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain Chinese capital and technology turned Indonesia into the world’s top nickel supplier, but its dependence on China and the rise of nickel-free batteries could upset its battery ecosystem plans Read more
• Aug 14, 2026 News South Africa’s top court blocks Shell’s offshore oil exploration right Constitutional Court rules that Shell and its partners failed to consult affected communities and did not properly consider environmental risks Read more
• Aug 17, 2026 Energy “Dangerous consequences” – how AI’s climate framing lets Big Tech off the hook Former Microsoft manager Holly Alpine explains why AI’s climate danger isn’t just data centres but also its unchecked use across the fossil fuel industry Read more

At a meeting in Türkiye in September, which plans to convene more than 25 ministers from Asia-Pacific, Africa, Europe and Latin America, governments will consider how to incorporate the recommendations of the informal UN ocean dialogues into global climate policy, according to the Turkish co-presidency.

Whitney Berry, associate director of climate policy at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, said that even an informal “multi-year” plan, instead of a negotiated roadmap, could help guide the ocean dialogues series in the UN climate process towards more concrete results.

“If this plan informed the following dialogues and made sure they were aligned with the Paris [Agreement] ambition cycle, including opportunities like the Global Stocktake, we’d have such a strengthened opportunity for ocean integration,” she said.

The upcoming stocktake – an international assessment of countries’ climate policies that takes place every five years and will culminate at COP33 in 2028 – presents a “huge opportunity” to turn fragmented actions into a “globally recognised evidence base” that can inform the next round of climate plans, Berry added.

Addressing rocketing ocean temperatures

Influenced by this year’s projected “super El Niño” on top of climate heating, the world’s oceans have experienced the warmest July on record, according to both EU and US monitoring data. Scientists are warning of severe mass die-offs of key species like corals, sponges and macro-algae.

John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told journalists in a briefing that some organisms like coral reefs can only tolerate an increase of about 1 degree Celsius before they start experiencing heath declines. In some seas like the Mediterranean, marine heatwaves have caused temperature increases of up to 6C.

As climate pressure mounts on ocean systems, a group of more than 150 top scientists has called on the COP31 Turkish and Australian presidencies to urgently “integrate ocean priorities into negotiation texts on mitigation, adaptation, and finance”.

They also urged world leaders to issue a “clear political declaration and finance outcomes” on ocean-based climate solutions at the World Leaders Summit, a two-day event during COP where heads of states give speeches laying out their climate priorities.

Measures to protect marine ecosystems have gathered more attention in recent years, as 90% of national climate plans submitted last year included at least one ocean-based target, compared to 62% in 2015. But countries have faced challenges implementing these commitments due to finance and governance constraints, according to a paper published in June by the World Resources Institute (WRI).

Most of the current targets focus on protecting marine areas, but have so far lacked commitments to reduce emissions produced at sea, for example through offshore wind or cleaner maritime transport.

Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia?

Rethinking ocean negotiations at COP

At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, countries agreed to “integrate and strengthen ocean-based action” across climate negotiations, which led to the creation of a yearly informal Ocean and Climate Dialogue. This dialogue does not produce a negotiated agreement like other parts of the COP.

The dialogue’s informal nature is both an advantage and a challenge, said Jonathan Baines, ocean programme manager at WRI. It provides a more flexible space than formal negotiations and has helped raise the ambition of countries’ climate plans, but COP presidencies have not fully incorporated its outcomes into the official climate talks, he said.

After five years of holding this dialogue at the mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn, countries called for more tangible outcomes in their submissions to this year’s Ocean and Climate Change Dialogue in June. Some proposed the creation of a roadmap to guide discussions on specific topics and feed them into the formal COP negotiations.

In their submission, the African Group of Negotiators called for a “structured, multi-year roadmap” aligned with the next Global Stocktake. The EU also backed this roadmap proposal, while Pacific islands and some Latin American countries supported incorporating the dialogue outcomes into the negotiations without specifically endorsing the roadmap initiative.

As part of a preparatory event before COP31 focused on oceans, Türkiye has confirmed to Climate Home News plans for a Blue COP31 roadmap, which will be discussed by the ministers attending the gathering in September.

“In essence, this programme is designed to ensure that the ocean is no longer the missing link in climate action, but rather the driving force behind a more resilient, sustainable, and prosperous future for all coastal communities,” Türkiye’s COP31 presidency said in a written comment.

Co-facilitators of the Ocean and Climate Change dialogue Ulrik Lenaerts from Belgium and Sivendra Michael from Fiji. (Photo: IISD/ENB/Maja Schmidt-Thomé) Opposition emerges to “additional burdens”

Some regional groups have already started presenting their priorities publicly, with small island nations calling for more finance, ocean-based renewable energy and bolstering regional research institutes.

African diplomats said “the core problem remains translating these paper commitments into real-world, on-the-ground implementation” and noted that while countries in the region have strengthened their climate plans, “the support required to implement these commitments has not kept pace”.

“The truth is that ambition without implementation is an illusion,” the African submission reads, adding that nearly half of all ocean-related commitments in national climate plans are “strictly conditional on external support”.

This year’s Ocean and Climate Dialogue, chaired by Fiji and Belgium, urged countries to discuss ways of “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, which generated pushback from big fossil fuel-producing and consuming countries who said they would not accept this as a negotiated agreement.

Both the group of Arab nations and India, meanwhile, warned against “imposing additional burdens” on developing countries and rejected a dialogue with “prescriptive expectations”.

The Arab group submission said its members oppose “any report that explicitly or implicitly targets specific energy sources, advocates sectoral restrictions, or fails to adequately reflect different national circumstances, development priorities, and energy security considerations”. This is a thinly veiled reference to singling out fossil fuels within the discussions.

New coal mine openings slow as East Asian demand plateaus

Climate finance constraints

While developing countries are already seeking more funding to implement ocean-based conservation, carbon storage and clean energy measures, experts said this will be a “difficult discussion” at COP31, as developed countries will arrive in Antalya with shrinking aid budgets.

Historically, ocean-related finance has accounted for only a small share of overseas development assistance (ODA), fluctuating between 0.8% and 1.4% of the total, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Berry of the Ocean Conservancy said one opportunity to “grow the pie” of available climate funds will come at a meeting of the UN climate convention’s Standing Committee on Finance, which this year will be held in September in Sydney and will concentrate on financing water systems and the ocean.

“We haven’t had a focused conversation on ocean climate finance before from the UN climate process,” she said. “If they can clarify those financing pathways specific to ocean climate action and help provide the necessary support for countries to translate commitments into projects, that will be a real benefit.”

The post As marine heat breaks records, countries seek ocean roadmap at COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.

This week, we’re chatting with Dallas developer, DART board member, and urban designer Patrick Kennedy about his recent publication, “An Atlas of Intercity Highway Impacts.” We discuss the tax base that highways removed from cities, what we could have done for cities with federal transportation funding, and the long term value we lost.

You know the drill: we provide three ways of enjoying the podcast: The full, AI-generated transcript; an edited excerpt at the end of this post; and the embedded audio player below.

Jeff Wood: What was the process like for putting together all these maps, all these data points, and making sure that you were on the right track in terms of the story that you were trying to tell?

Patrick Kennedy: It was an iterative process because I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I had a plan that I wanted to write a book on the history of the Interstate Highway System and how we got to this place, and a lot of it centered on Eisenhower and the person he appointed, General David Bragdon, to keep the interstate system on time and under budget.

Megan Kimble was working on her book, City Limits, and I talked to her about that. She ended up going to the Eisenhower Library and digging through the notes for that book. I was talking to a friend, Scott Polikov, about this, too. He was like, “Nobody cares about history. Focus on the actual data. What was the impact? And focus on the future.”

And that’s when I decided, you know what? I’m gonna focus on the data. I had been talking to some book publishers, and they were more interested in black and white text than images. So I was like, that’s not what this can be, right?

This has to be maps, and this has to be data. I’m just going to go my own way, just do it, and just do it for free and post it. I just focused on the real world impacts to every city. I started on every city in the Yellow Book, but I realized that was not enough. There were something like 90 cities. I expanded it to 142 because no cities in North Carolina were in the Yellow Book.

Phoenix might have been in the Yellow Book, but San Diego wasn’t. I just wanted to keep adding cities. And I just was assembling data and data and data. I was interested in what happened to population density since 1960 once we started building in earnest, what happened to population since 2000 to present.

I found an inflection point in demographics where millennials were entering the workforce and looking to come back to urban environments and walkable environments. I started keeping this huge database of these things. During the pandemic, I came across a report by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve — their study suggested that within three-mile radius of downtowns, highways become a disamenity and devalue property up to about a half mile away.

That was the key point where I started building these databases and said, “OK, real estate values in most cities is generally not as valuable in a three-mile radius.” So I built a one-mile radius and a three-mile radius, and I used that to collect population data points and my real estate data points regarding how much recent development is worth on the assessed tax rolls in all these cities.

I went through, found new development, looked it up on the tax rolls, and aggregated the total amount of highway right of way in each of these cities, in those geographies, the one-mile to three-mile radius, and said, “OK, if I developed these highway right of ways at 50 to 55 percent efficiency,” you’d have tax-exempt surface roads and schools and whatever else.

55 percent of private development, what would that be worth to the city? And I said, “OK, every city then has this value multiplied by the amount of land that highways take up in those one-mile and three-mile geographies.” And that’s what I used to determine the economic development potential of removals, and how much theoretical tax base was removed from each of these cities because of the development potential those cities lost by building highways.

Another book that was kind of the impetus to this was The Elephant in the Bedroom, which was a book about California highway building from the early 1990s. It was written by a couple of engineers. And when I was researching, thinking I was doing the book on the history of highways, came across a line where they said the 210 freeway through Pasadena wiped off 10 percent of the property tax rolls right off the map. I thought, “Oh, okay, there’s a number for every city,” and I wanted to know what it was.

Jeff Wood: I guess I have to disagree with Scott a little bit. I think the history is really important. I think it’s good to know.

Patrick Kennedy: No, me too. But the story was being told, you know? I was like, yeah … I’m just retelling the same story.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. We talked with Megan Kimble about Bragdon and what she found in the archives from Eisenhower’s library. But I think that’s really important to think about all the places where we could have gone in a different direction. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in the 1970s with the oil crisis — kind of what we’re in now with the Iran oil situation.

But there’s all these off-ramps that we could have taken over time, and we continue to go along the route that we’ve chosen. I feel like this is a negative way we’ve taken to building infrastructure in the country. But those inflection points are really fascinating.

I’m wondering how the Bragdon information spoke to you. You talked about the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. There’s a lot of little things that, in the past, kind of shaped how you’re thinking, but also kind of shape the politics of the way that things are going now.

Patrick Kennedy: To me, Bragdon was the most influential person. I’m drawn to those sort of Cassandras that fight the righteous battle, but then ultimately lose and are forgotten to history. But I also kind of wanted to tell that story because he was right and he fought the Bureau of Public Roads and all of the Robert Moses acolytes that worked there.

If people are this wonky and interested, his 1960 interim report is kind of fascinating because he argued that the interstate highway system was for interstate commerce. It was not to serve local traffic. If we were to build highways to serve the traffic projections in 1980, some of the highways through the bigger cities would have to be 40 lanes or more.

He said that it’s far better to use our dollars for actual high-capacity transit. And part of his job was to keep the entire interstate system under budget. It ended up going about five or six times over the original budget. I calculated that in today’s dollars: the interstate system ended up costing something like $750 billion.

He said the inner city highways, which were one-tenth of the lane mileage of the system, cost ten times per mile to build. And so it was the most expensive part. Roughly half the cost of the entire interstate system was just the property acquisition and construction of the inner city highways.

Montreal was building the first legs of its subway in the 1960s. We could have built the equivalent of 36 Paris Metros for that $375 billion at the cost that Montreal was building its subway. And so part of this is just creating like an Earth 2 in my mind. What if we had gotten it right?

We could have a Paris Metro system in Cincinnati and in Kansas City serving local traffic and not devaluing the downtowns and basically wrecking a lot of the local economies around the country.

For years, the Akademik Lomonosov looked like one of the nuclear industry’s more eccentric experiments: two reactors mounted on a barge and towed thousands of kilometers to Pevek, a tiny Russian port above the Arctic Circle.

But next week, representatives of the nuclear and maritime industries will gather in Washington to discuss whether something resembling Russia’s experiment could become considerably more commonplace.

On August 26 and 27, the International Atomic Energy Agency will formally launch ATLAS — Atomic Technologies Licensed for Applications at Sea — an initiative aimed at developing an international bureaucratic framework for civilian nuclear technologies at sea. The project encompasses both floating nuclear power plants and nuclear-powered commercial ships, bringing together two industries whose regulatory worlds have historically not much intersected.

The event is significantly timed. After decades on the fringes of the nuclear industry, maritime reactors are attracting new interest as small modular reactor developers search for markets and the shipping industry looks for ways to decarbonize.

The United States is already preparing. In July, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Marine Minerals Administration signed an agreement establishing how the agencies would divide responsibility if developers propose nuclear projects on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf. No such commercial projects have yet been proposed, but the government is creating a regulatory pathway before they arrive. The NRC is separately developing guidance for licensing floating plants and nuclear propulsion systems.

Russia got there first

None of this is entirely theoretical. Russia’s Akademik Lomonosov has been supplying electricity from Pevek since 2019 and entered commercial operation in 2020. Its two KLT-40S reactors provide roughly 70 megawatts of generating capacity, making it the world’s only operating commercial floating nuclear power station.

Bellona has followed—and criticized—the project since construction began in 2006, raising questions about its economics, radioactive waste, spent fuel, maritime accidents and the risks inherent in moving nuclear materials through remote Arctic waters. The plant also became an illustration of nuclear megaproject delays: construction ultimately took 13 years rather than the four originally envisioned.

But Rosatom has not abandoned the concept. Quite the opposite.

The Russian state nuclear corporation is now trying to turn the Lomonosov experiment into a repeatable model. Four newer floating power units equipped with RITM-200S reactors are planned to supply the remote Baimskaya mining project in Chukotka. In May, Rosatom announced completion of the first reactor unit for the project.

That project also demonstrates why floating nuclear power may prove considerably more complicated than simply putting a small reactor on a barge.

Russian shipyards lacked the capacity to build the first two hulls on the required schedule, forcing Rosatom to outsource them to China’s Wison shipyard. The first Chinese-built hull arrived at the Baltic Shipyard in St. Petersburg this spring, where its Russian reactors and turbines are to be installed.

In other words, floating nuclear plants promise factory-style construction, but Russia’s experience suggests that they still require an elaborate international industrial supply chain.

New technology, new vulnerabilities

The renewed enthusiasm for nuclear power at sea also arrives at an unsettling moment for international nuclear security. Recent wars have challenged a longstanding assumption underlying civilian nuclear power—that reactors and other nuclear facilities remain insulated from military conflict.

Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has turned Europe’s largest nuclear station into part of an active war zone, repeatedly exposing the site to explosions, drone activity and losses of external power. In February 2025, a drone struck and badly damaged the New Safe Confinement protecting the remains of the destroyed Chernobyl reactor. And this year, projectiles struck the grounds of Iran’s operating Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant during the war there, though no reactor damage or radioactive release was reported.

None of these incidents produced a major radiological accident. But together they raise a question that becomes especially important as nuclear power moves offshore: Does mobility make a reactor safer in wartime—or simply create new ways for it to become vulnerable?

A floating plant could theoretically be moved away from a threatened area, something impossible for a conventional reactor. But a reactor moored in a harbor or supplying an isolated military, mining or industrial installation could also become a conspicuous strategic target. Its electrical connections, cooling systems, moorings and supporting infrastructure may be more exposed than those of a heavily protected land-based plant. And a nuclear-powered commercial ship introduces another problem entirely: unlike Zaporizhzhia or Bushehr, it could actually sail into or through a conflict zone.

A nuclear plant without an address

The technical problems with floating nuclear plants may be easier to solve than the legal ones. Nuclear regulation has traditionally assumed that a reactor stays put. Maritime law, by contrast, is built around vessels that cross borders and operate under different flag, coastal and port-state jurisdictions. A floating reactor forces those systems together.

Who licenses a reactor built in one country, registered in another and moored in a third? Who takes responsibility for its nuclear waste and spent fuel? Which country is responsible for safeguards if the plant moves? What happens when a nuclear-powered ship enters a foreign port—or when a floating reactor must be evacuated because of war or extreme weather?

The IAEA has identified refueling, maintenance, remote operation, safeguards, security and international regulatory harmonization among the issues that must be resolved. Meanwhile, the International Maritime Organization is revising its own 1981 safety code for nuclear merchant ships, with adoption of a new code currently envisioned for 2030.

The appeal nevertheless seems obvious. Floating plants could be assembled in specialized shipyards rather than constructed individually at remote sites, then delivered to isolated communities, mines, islands or industrial projects whose grids cannot support conventional gigawatt-scale reactors. When their work is finished, they could theoretically be removed.

That is the vision ATLAS will begin trying to turn into a workable international system next week.

Russia, meanwhile, has already spent nearly two decades discovering what happens when that idea encounters reality. Its experience suggests floating nuclear power can work—to a point. Whether it can be made economical, replicable and safe enough to operate around the world is a much larger question—and one the rest of the nuclear industry is suddenly eager to answer.

The post Floating nuclear power was a Russian curiosity. Now others want to give it a shot appeared first on Bellona.org.

Restoring cuts to two USDA programs will help more farmers adopt regenerative agriculture Anthony Lacey August 20, 2026

When federal conservation programs have adequate funding, more farmers sign up and put the money toward the most environmentally beneficial and cost-effective regenerative agriculture practices. 

But these programs are in danger of even more cuts.

House and Senate Republicans are floating farm bill proposals that would further reduce funding for the Agriculture Department’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, and Conservation Stewardship Program, or CSP. 

The bill as written would leave more than 56,500 valid farmer applications unfunded by EQIP over the next few fiscal years. The key states set to be hit hardest by estimated cuts and unfunded valid contracts are:

• Arkansas – $81.6 million and 2,232 contracts
• Alabama – $35.9 million and 2,171 contracts
• Kansas – $51.6 million and 1,593 contracts
• West Virginia – $17 million and 661 contracts 
• Georgia – $62.8 million and 2,411 contracts
• Colorado – $56.5 million and 822 contracts

Regenerative agriculture practices such as cover crops and riparian buffers can help increase farm resilience and profitability while also improving the environment. Although they need reform, these programs help reduce agriculture’s air and water pollution, and add to farm resilience. 

Independent analysis has found between 70% and 120% higher profitability for farms that adopt regenerative agriculture practices and a return on investment of 15% to 25% over 10 years. Restoring funding for EQIP and CSP could help more farmers adopt practices that should also help secure their future financial stability.

Preventing those cuts could provide tens of thousands of farmers with continued support for vital conservation projects. Two amendments to the draft farm bill, offered by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), would restore funding to the programs.

If Congress adopts either amendment, significantly more farmers would receive EQIP and CSP support than they would under the current Republican bill. 

EQIP and CSP funding

In 2024, nearly $1.9 billion in USDA conservation support went to practices that increase regenerative agriculture. But as available funding shrank, in 2025, federal support for those regenerative practices dropped by more than $1 billion.

As money for these popular programs disappears, fewer and fewer farmers are able to receive the support they need. In contrast, when funding is available for these programs, existing participants put more funding into good practices and more farmers are able to take part.

The EQIP and CSP are two of the largest federal conservation programs. They are vital to helping farmers adopt regenerative agriculture practices. 

The White House’s own Make America Healthy Again strategy highlighted the importance of expanding the two programs: 

Empowering farmers and keeping solutions voluntary by expanding programs like the Environmental Quality Incentive Program and Conservation Stewardship Program, all while avoiding burdensome mandates; [and] keeping decision-making local and practical with solutions from the farm, not Washington, D.C.

Despite the Trump administration strategy, the House-passed farm bill and the Senate version under consideration would cut the two programs by over $2.4 billion.  

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, included billions more dollars for EQIP and CSP as an opportunity for farmers and ranchers.

Before the IRA funding, just 31% of applicants received an EQIP contract, leaving a backlog of thousands of farmers and ranchers. Following the IRA funding, 43% of farmers received EQIP funding for 2024. 

States had made progress with the IRA funding in  eliminating a backlog of applications – and the additional funding inspired more farmers to apply. 

All farmers and ranchers, regardless of what they grow or where they live, are eligible for conservation funding. That means the farmers who grow fruits and vegetables – the food that the dietary guidelines for Americans and doctors tell us to eat – are more likely to get this money than traditional subsidies. 

Farmers of color, beginning farmers and women are also much more likely to receive EQIP and CSP funds than farm subsidies. If Congress wants to support these farmers and ranchers, conservation programs have an outsized role to play. 

Regenerative agriculture funding went down in 2025

EWG found that EQIP obligations to farmers were $1.82 billion across all practices for fiscal year 2025. Of this pot of money, 43%, or $790.6 million, went to farmers for practices that were on EWG’s list of regenerative practices.

Due to the additional funding from the IRA, total EQIP obligations in fiscal year 2024 were $2.6 billion. Of this, $1.88 billion, or 45%, went to practices that were regenerative. Funding for these practices greatly decreased between 2024 and 2025. 

Through public records requests, EWG received data for USDA obligations made in 2025.  We used data from the USDA’s Financial Assistance Program Data Dashboard for 2024 obligations. 

Farm bill conservation cuts would hurt farmers

The upcoming farm bill must maintain conservation funding, especially for regenerative practices. 

Farmers and ranchers have been promised this money – Congress shouldn’t take it away. The stakes are too high. 

Restoring funding for the two USDA programs would not only reduce agriculture’s environmental and climate impact. It could also provide reliable support to tens of thousands of farmers and potentially reduce the costs of ad hoc disaster assistance and crop insurance payouts covered by American taxpayers.  

Areas of Focus Farming & Agriculture Conservation Authors Geoff Horsfield August 20, 2026

Workers take a rest break under shade as part of the Fair Food Program Fast Company: The Fair Food Program is “A Win-Win-Win for Farmworkers, Growers, Buyers.” FFSC Co-executive director Lilian Sepúlveda on NPR/PBS/WGCU: “Providing electrolytes year-round reflects the Fair Food Program’s commitment to continue to improve standards as new science emerges.”

We recently shared news of the Fair Food Program’s newest heat protection: a first-of-its-kind rule requiring participating growers to provide electrolytes for workers on FFP farms year-round.

The new rule responds to a crisis that only grows more urgent each summer, as record-high temperatures are set year after year and just last month set the mark for the hottest July on record. Farmworkers already face some of the highest risks from extreme heat of any workforce in the country — they are 35 times more likely to die from heat-related stress than workers in other industries. And as temperatures continue to rise, the dangers of both acute heat illness and the chronic effects of repeated heat exposure are growing with them.

The new electrolyte requirement builds on the FFP’s comprehensive heat stress protections — standards the Washington Post called “America’s strongest workplace heat rules” in a front-page feature article in 2024 — which mandate the provision of shade and drinking water, regular rest breaks, heat-stress training, and the right to stop work and seek medical attention when necessary without fear of retaliation. Developed through the Program’s collaborative process with growers, these protections show how the FFP can identify emerging threats, develop practical solutions that benefit all parties to the FFP, and then enforce them across a rapidly growing network of participating farms.

Now, two new stories take an in-depth look at the FFP’s new electrolyte rule and what it tells us about the Program’s approach to protecting workers in an increasingly sweltering world.

First up, we have award-winning journalist Eileen Kelley of NPR/PBS member station WGCU, in a video segment aired across Florida. We are excited to share that clip in full with you below.

Next, we have excerpts from a report on the rule courtesy of Fast Company, one of the country’s leading news outlets focused on innovation and the market. To read the full article from Fast Company, click here.

Farmworkers across 22 states will get free access to electrolytes to combat dangerous heat stress

The Fair Food Program, whose buyers include major retailers like Walmart, McDonald’s, and Trader Joe’s, will now mandate electrolytes for workers.

“On certain farms across 22 states, workers who harvest everything from tomatoes to tulips to blueberries will now have mandatory access to electrolytes, which can help them stay safe in dangerous extreme heat.

It’s the latest rule from the Fair Food Program, a partnership between farmworkers and food retailers (including Walmart, McDonald’s, Whole Foods Market, and Trader Joe’s) to improve working conditions on farms.

As extreme heat worsens, it’s a crucial step, the program says, to keeping workers healthy.

FARMWORKERS HAVE THE HIGHEST HEAT RISK

When a heat wave hits, farmworkers are among the most vulnerable. They’re 35 times as likely to die from heat-related stress as workers in any other industry. Farm work is physically grueling, and, particularly during harvest season, workers can be outside from sunup to sundown.

There are no federal standards to protect outdoor workers, including those on farms, from heat.

The Fair Food Program, however, has its own set of heat protections, including mandatory breaks, guaranteed access to shade and water, and training on how to spot symptoms of heat stress for both workers and supervisors.

Now it’s added a rule, which took effect August 1, requiring participating growers to provide electrolyte beverages or supplements to workers year-round.

Water can only rehydrate workers to a certain extent, particularly during extreme temperatures. Research is increasingly highlighting the importance of electrolyte replacement as a crucial way to prevent heat-related illness, and to protect organs including kidneys from heat stress.

“There have been many, many cases of farmworkers, who have worked for years in the field without adequate hydration, experiencing major organ failure, particularly kidney failure, at young ages,” says Laura Safer Espinoza, senior advisor to the Fair Food Program and founding executive director of the Fair Food Standards Council, the monitoring and auditing body that oversees the Fair Food Program’s implementation.

Electrolytes can preserve kidney function, studies have found; they also mitigate heat stress and help prevent dehydration, which can cause heat stroke…

A WIN-WIN-WIN FOR FARMWORKERS, GROWERS, BUYERS

Such protections, including the new rule about electrolytes, help workers stay safe and healthy in the heat. They also benefit both growers and buyers.

“If workers are healthier, then their employers are not having as many workers’ compensation claims, they are not losing production time by people becoming ill or sidelined and recuperating from serious symptoms,” [FFSC Co-executive director Judge] Safer Espinoza says. “It’s less disruptive, ultimately, for the food supply chain.”

Implementing the electrolyte rule took some time. Once the working group decides on a new standard, they have to publish it to the growers months in advance and set up educational efforts on the farms for both workers and supervisors. It normally takes a season or two, Safer Espinoza says, for a standard to become “fully assimilated” into a farm’s operating procedures—and for the workers to believe that it will actually be enforced.

There’s been little resistance to the addition of the electrolyte requirement, she adds: “There was very little argument about the fact that the body needs those replacements in order to function well in doing a lot of heavy, strenuous work for many hours at a time.”

Growers now see these safety standards as a good investment in their workforce… Extreme heat events are becoming both more frequent and intense; multiple back-to-back heat domes in July broke heat records across the U.S. Workers in other industries, including construction, are looking at the Fair Food Program as a model for heat-stress prevention…”

As summers grow hotter, millions of vulnerable workers across the country will continue to face life-threatening temperatures on the job. Yet the experience of the Fair Food Program demonstrates that those dangers are neither inevitable nor beyond our power to address.

When workers have a meaningful voice in designing the protections they need — and when those protections are backed by real monitoring, enforcement, and the market power of major buyers — new threats can be met with practical solutions that work for workers, growers, and buyers alike. That is the promise of the Fair Food Program and the broader Worker-driven Social Responsibility model.

Stay tuned for more coverage of the FFP’s groundbreaking new heat protections!