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The state plans to scrap a 2030 goal that sought a 40% reduction in emissions and replace it with a 2040 goal that aims for a 60% reduction.

I used to walk through Copley Square in Boston’s Back Bay and catch it by accident — the way Trinity Church appeared twice. Once in stone, anchored and unmoved, and again, improbably, in the mirrored skin of the John Hancock Tower.

Completed in 1877, Trinity rises from a very different era than the Hancock, finished nearly a century later in 1976. And yet, depending on the light and angle, the two seem to occupy the same moment.

Trinity Church reflected in the mirrored glass of the John Hancock Tower, Boston. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The old isn’t erased by the new. It’s carried forward, reflected back at the city.

That distinction — between replacement and reflection — matters more than we often admit, especially now, as so many institutions, from environmental governance to technology itself, are being rebuilt at speed.

Henry Cobb, the lead architect of John Hancock Tower, described wanting the building to be deliberately quiet — a modern structure that responded to Copley Square rather than dominating it. The mirrored glass was meant to dissolve the tower’s presence, allowing the city — and especially Trinity Church — to remain visually central.

Whatever Cobb intended, the outcome became something larger than design logic alone. The tower doesn’t merely recede; it carries the past into view. Meaning emerged not just from intention, but from how the structure settled into its surroundings over time. Nearly a century of distance collapses into a single frame, not by imitation or nostalgia but by restraint.

That choice — to build something new that reflects rather than replaces — is not a silver bullet. Reflection alone does not guarantee success. But its absence almost guarantees failure.

This is the lesson conservation continues to relearn: The durability of a system matters more than the brilliance of its design. Protection that only works under ideal conditions isn’t protection — it’s aspiration.

Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the ocean, the world’s largest and most vulnerable mirror.

Ocean conservation is often driven by urgency. New frameworks, tools, and technologies are deployed to address collapse at scale. The focus is speed, efficiency, and ambition. The pressure is always forward.

And yet, again and again, the efforts that endure are not the most novel. They’re the ones that manage — sometimes deliberately, sometimes imperfectly — to carry older lessons forward: restraint, relationship, and place-based memory. The understanding that ecosystems are lived with, not simply managed.

The problem is not innovation itself. It’s innovation that looks impressive but reveals very little beyond its design.

Consider Mexico’s Cabo Pulmo, often cited as one of the most successful marine protected areas in the world. The headlines focus on dramatic increases in fish populations and the power of no-take regulations.

But those tools came later. Long before formal protection, local families understood the reef as relational rather than extractive. Fishing practices were shaped by limits, seasons, and the knowledge that abundance depended on patience. When modern conservation arrived — laws, enforcement, scientific monitoring — it did not overwrite that ethic. It reflected it, giving durable form to values already in place.

What mattered was not simply that protection arrived, but how it arrived.

The new rules did not ask the community to abandon identity in exchange for compliance. They extended a relationship people already understood. Because restraint was familiar, limits felt legible rather than imposed. Continuity made patience possible — and patience made recovery visible.

Cabo Pulmo’s success was ecological and also cultural. Protection worked because it felt continuous rather than disruptive.

In places like Kaʻūpūlehu on Hawaiʻi island, a different but complementary pathway was revealed. There, continuity was not merely recognized by outside institutions after the fact; it was actively reclaimed and relegitimized by the community itself. The revival of ahupuaʻa-based management blends contemporary science with customary practice — seasonal closures, species-specific rules, and governance grounded in community responsibility rather than distant authority.

To understand the ahupuaʻa is to understand connectivity as a physical and social mandate. These wedge-shaped land divisions traditionally ran from the mountain peaks down through valleys to the reef. If you fouled the stream in the uplands, you starved the taro patches and the fishponds below. Responsibility wasn’t an abstract environmental ethic; it was a literal downstream consequence.

Ahupuaʻa systems were never static codes handed down unchanged through time. They were adaptive frameworks, responding to shifts in abundance, climate variability, and social need through observation and restraint. They endured not because they resisted change, but because they embedded flexibility within .

When modern conservation engages these systems as living frameworks rather than cultural artifacts, authority becomes relational. Compliance becomes collective. Resilience begins to scale — driven less by tighter rules than by deeper meaning.

Still, reflection is not immunity.

The field has learned this through a category of failure so common it has a name: “paper parks.” These are protected areas that were intensively planned, legally designated, internationally celebrated — and then quietly failed in practice: protections that looked complete from a distance but proved too thin to hold under pressure.

A particularly instructive case is the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. On paper it was a triumph of ocean policy design: years of consultation, sophisticated ecological science, international financing mechanisms, and UNESCO World Heritage status. It was widely hailed as a model for large-scale ocean protection in the high-seas era.

And then it faltered.

This was not a story of hypocrisy or neglect. It was a structural mismatch between design and reality.

Despite its careful planning, the reserve struggled with enforcement, financing, and political durability. Kiribati faced real economic pressures from fishing access fees, climate impacts, and national debt. The conservation model assumed that long-term international support and compliance would hold.

They didn’t.

At points, commercial fishing resumed or enforcement weakened, as the governance design failed to account for sovereignty, economic vulnerability, and political gravity.

The surface held global conservation values clearly, but it did not reflect the weight the system would be asked to carry. Ecology was remembered; history was not. Like a building designed to photograph well but not weather a storm, the reserve reflected the ideals of its designers more clearly than the conditions it would have to survive.

That fragility is not theoretical. It is being actively stress-tested.

In the United States, recent policy direction under the Trump administration has moved to accelerate deep-sea mining exploration in U.S. territories, fast-tracking permits and weakening environmental review in places where baseline knowledge is still profoundly incomplete.

At the same time, longstanding marine monuments and sanctuaries — areas once framed as durable commitments to restraint — have been reopened or proposed for reopening to commercial extraction, including fishing access once explicitly limited.

These are not isolated policy shifts; they are a demonstration of how protections built by executive decree can be unbuilt by the same mechanism. The legal architecture remains thin, contingent on political alignment rather than ecological necessity. What was presented as permanence reveals itself as provisional — protection that reflects intention in one moment, but cannot withstand the next.

You see this pattern elsewhere: marine protected areas mapped with exquisite precision but no budget for enforcement; fisheries reforms negotiated over years that collapse when leadership changes; international ocean treaties whose necessity is uncontested, but whose buy-in remains elusive.

In each case the failure wasn’t a lack of rigor. It was the assumption that process equals permanence.

Conservation was designed to be impressive at birth, not resilient across political seasons.

Durability is the real design challenge. Ocean policy fails when it isn’t built to survive pressure, fatigue, turnover, and bad years.

Technology has only intensified this tension. Satellites, autonomous vehicles, and AI-driven analytics now extend our perception, revealing patterns in the water that were once invisible.

Used well, they act as clarifying filters. But a technocentric mindset has taken hold — the belief that future tools will spare us from the harder work of changing ourselves. This is the blank glass of our era: a surface so smooth it stops the eye, obscuring the downstream consequences of our choices.

We see it in autonomous ocean cleanup systems that promise to vacuum plastic from the high seas while leaving the industrial tap wide open on land. We see it in carbon removal schemes that treat the atmosphere as a ledger rather than a life support. And we see it in deep-sea mining proposals that promise “smart robots” to manage extraction — outsourcing moral weight to machines operating in the dark.

In this framing conservation begins to resemble the tech industry itself: forever iterating and increasingly uncomfortable with limits. When a tool is designed only to look forward, it behaves like a screen rather than a mirror. Demand disappears from view; efficiency becomes the sole metric of virtue.

The ocean has never been short on clever tools. What it has lacked is the willingness to say enough. A satellite can track a vessel with surgical precision, but it cannot decide when fishing should stop. No algorithm can negotiate the social courage required to leave resources unextracted. Those decisions require memory — of places, of relationships, of limits already tested. Technology works best when it remains reflective — when it amplifies accountability rather than automating it.

Some conservation structures are built to last. Others are built to be seen. The difference becomes clear over time. Enduring systems allow people to plan, to invest, and to commit attention without constantly checking the political weather. Fragile ones, even when ambitious, remain provisional — less like stone and more like a projection, subject to being switched off.

When authority is provisional, stewardship becomes reactive. Budgets hesitate. Careers stall. The long view collapses into crisis management. Conservation becomes a flickering screen rather than a structure capable of holding meaning.

Older stewardship traditions rarely operated this way. Continuity wasn’t a political achievement; it was the point. They were designed to absorb change without constantly redefining their own existence. There is a difference between adaptation — the breathing of a living system — and instability, which is simply erosion by another name.

This does not mean protections should be frozen in time. Healthy systems require reassessment. But endurance resists the constant resetting of goals before ecosystems and communities have time to respond.

What lasts is often quiet. It does not announce itself with sweeping designations or polished dashboards. Like all structures that truly hold, its value becomes visible only when stress arrives — and the system does not collapse.

The ocean responds to steadiness: to protection held long enough for complexity to return, to rules applied consistently enough for trust to form, to care practiced across generations. Conservation falters when it confuses motion with progress. The future worth building is not one that erases the past, nor one that freezes it in place. It is one that remains readable — where earlier lessons about limits, restraint, and relationship are still visible as new structures rise.

What endures is not the shine of what’s new, but the care taken to ensure it can still hold and reflect something older in view.

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

The Work Behind the Win: The Long, Collective Effort Behind the Moments Conservation Celebrates

The post Reflections on What Endures in Conservation appeared first on The Revelator.

Data collection can feel meaningless when utilities lack the tools to turn that data into improved performance or efficiency, writes Ariel Santamaria from Advanced Technology Services.

It is “the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” a deputy assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice wrote in a court notice suggesting it might intervene.

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. 
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week US-China meet

ENERGY TALKS: Trump administration officials have raised the prospect of China buying more US oil in response to the disruption caused by the Iran war, following two days of talks between the leaders of the superpowers in Beijing, said Reuters. On Thursday, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC the nations had discussed China “buying more US energy”, adding that production from Alaska would be a “natural” ⁠for China. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported that Trump and Xi also agreed that the strait of Hormuz must remain open to “support the free flow of energy”. 

CLIMATE ‘COOPERATION’: Ahead of the talks, the Communist party-affiliated People’s Daily published an article saying that addressing climate change requires “coordinated efforts and cooperation” between China and the US. State-run newspaper China Daily said that US-China cooperation on energy security and climate governance is “essential” because the two countries have “considerable influence over international institutions”. However, an article in Legal Planet said that the Trump-Xi meeting had no climate agenda, adding that the two countries are now moving in “radically different directions”.

El Niño extremes

‘SUPERCHARGED’: From wildfires to heatwaves and flooding, scientists have warned that the El Niño weather pattern could “amplify climate extremes” in 2026, reported Climate Home News. There is an 82% chance of a “very strong” El Niño forming this year, according to the average of four weather forecasters cited by the Times. The Independent added that the phenomenon could be “supercharged” by another weather pattern – a positive Indian Ocean Dipole – raising the risks of fire, drought risks and other extreme weather events.

WORLD ON FIRE: Global fire outbreaks hit a “record high” in Africa, Asia and elsewhere this year, reported Reuters, with conditions expected to worsen to the “highest in recent history” if a strong El Niño “kicks in”. More than 150m hectares of land were damaged by fires from January to April – 20% more than the previous record – according to data compiled by the ​World Weather Attribution (WWA) research group cited by the newswire. 

Around the world

• ETHIOPIA EVS: Electric vehicles now account for 8% of Ethiopia’s car fleet as “soaring prices and fuel shortages compel” African countries to switch to “cleaner and cheaper transport”, according to the Associated Press. 
• UK AID CUT: The UK has halved its most recent contribution to the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF) as part of a government “shift from development aid to military spending”, according to Climate Home News. The UK is no longer the top donor to the GCF following the move, said Carbon Brief.
• TORT RETORT: Reuters reported that the New Zealand government plans to amend a key climate law, to prevent courts from holding private companies liable for climate harms. This would apply to “both current and future proceedings”, the newswire said, including a current case against six major emitters. 
• RENEWABLE SECURITY: Military alliance NATO is “openly backing renewables and other non-fossil fuel sources of energy as key to the alliance’s security” despite US scepticism, reported Politico. The outlet covered a NATO-backed study that highlighted how imported fuels have been used as a “bargaining chip” in conflicts.
• NO INDIAN ‘LOCKDOWN’: India’s oil-and-gas minister “dismissed concerns of any imminent lockdown-like restrictions” after prime minister Narendra Modi “urged citizens” to adopt fuel-saving measures amid a global energy crisis, reported the Economic Times.

One billion barrels

The volume of oil the world has lost over the past two months since Iran began its blockade of the strait of Hormuz following attacks by the US and Israel, according to Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser, quoted in Reuters.

Latest climate research

• Antarctic sea ice levels have plummeted to “record-low anomalies” since 2015, with researchers calling it “one of the largest present-day climatic shifts in the Earth system” | Science Advances 
• Rainfall reductions in the southern Amazon will occur at progressively lower levels of deforestation as the planet warms, indicating that “climate change amplifies the sensitivity of rainfall to forest loss” | Global Ecology and Biogeography 
• Economic inequality adds more than 100,000 deaths to the total toll from heat and cold in Europe | Nature Health

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Contrary to claims by the UK car industry that demand is not high enough to meet the UK government’s sales targets for “zero emissions vehicles” (ZEVs), a new Carbon Brief factcheck found it has actually “overcomplied” with its mandate. The chart above shows the required (left) and achieved (right) share of ZEVs in total UK car sales in 2024, the latest figures available. “Flexibilities” (in light blue) include the sale of lower-emission petrol cars.

Spotlight Chennai’s gig workers race against the heat

This week, Carbon Brief visits one of India’s first air-conditioned lounges designed to help gig workers deal with extreme heat.

An air-conditioned lounge for gig workers in Chennai’s T Nagar shopping district. Credit: Ishan Tankha / Scorched

On a single day in late April, 20 of the world’s hottest cities were all in India.

Chennai was not on the list this time, but is no stranger to high temperatures. In the south-eastern coastal capital of Tamil Nadu, extreme humidity and heat are inescapable facts of life.

“The heat is by no means manageable, but we have no choice but to deal with it,” said Mohammed S, a 29-year-old grocery platform delivery worker, speaking to Carbon Brief. 

Last year, Chennai became India’s first ever city to roll out air-conditioned lounges for millions of gig workers, like Mohammed, navigating India’s increasingly hotter cities. 

Lounge access

In the dense shopping district of T Nagar – recognised as an “urban heat island” – studded with silk sari and jewellery shops, an unassuming oblong container-like structure stands out.

Gig workers leave their slippers outside the lounge. Credit: Ishan Tankha / Scorched

Through the building’s tinted windows, workers wearing synthetic jerseys emblazoned with food delivery app logos are stretched out on wooden benches meant to seat 25 people. 

The lounge has charging points for phones, a water cooler and a unisex toilet. It might not seem like much, but workers tell Carbon Brief that it has made a “huge difference” to their lives – even on a day when the air conditioner stopped working. 

“Before this, life was very difficult,” said Mohammed. He continued:

“We would park our [electric] bikes and try to find a tree to sleep under, stop for tea and tea shop owners would tell us we couldn’t sit there for more than 10 minutes, try to rest in a building’s stairwell and be chased away, then try to find shade under a flyover. Now we can sit in the AC and avoid the worst of the heat.”

Dinesh, 27, said his day starts at dawn before the sun is up, picking up packages from companies in north Chennai – another critical heat hotspot.

For the next seven hours, there is no “off point” or breaks for Dinesh as apps rush deliveries. 

Some of Chennai’s gig workers told Carbon Brief they try to avoid the worst of afternoon temperatures from noon to 3pm, but for many – especially migrant workers – sitting back in the lounge is not a choice they can afford. One of them explained:

“If you don’t have cash to cover your bills or have to send money back home, you head out into the heat for a 12-hour shift and hope for the best.”

Dinesh checks his orders in the gig worker’s lounge. Credit: Ishan Tankha / Scorched Feeling ‘gear’

In Chennai, heat might be normalised, but it has its own vocabulary. Speaking to Carbon Brief, the city’s gig workers, auto rickshaw drivers and fish sellers used an all-encompassing term – “gear” – to describe their symptoms, including dizziness, exhaustion and nausea. 

Last summer, researchers offered Delhi’s gig workers a Rs 200 (roughly £2) cash transfer on the first day of a heatwave, to provide them with a means to achieve “real-time” adaptation to heat risk. Workers who received a cash transfer reported fewer heat-related symptoms, according to the study.  

Asked if they would accept similar incentives to stay home on 40C days, workers in the T Nagar lounge expressed disbelief. Dinesh – who also trains technicians on how to repair air conditioners to support his income – told Carbon Brief:

“They [the apps] offer us incentives to go out in the heat when there are fewer riders.” 

Barring a few, none of the dozens of outdoor workers Carbon Brief spoke to had an air conditioner at home or in their hostels, making the lounge the only place they could cool down. 

Watch, read, listen

THE BIG ‘LOSER’: Writing in Foreign Affairs, Princeton University’s Prof Benjamin Bardlow argued that Beijing “may emerge from the war in Iran as its winner – and Washington its ultimate loser”.

CARBON ‘KINGPIN’: A new podcast by Drilled followed Bruce Rastetter – a corn ethanol “kingpin-turned-carbon entrepreneur” from Iowa – now promoting biofuels and carbon-capture projects in Brazil.
OPEC ‘DRAMA KINGS’: An episode of the Polycrisis podcast, titled “Gulf drama kings”, dug into the UAE’s announcement that it was quitting oil producers’ cartel OPEC, asking whether this reflected “doom” for the group, geopolitical tensions, or “different beliefs” about the future of oil.

Coming up

• 17 May: Cape Verde election
• 17-22 May: 13th session of the World Urban Forum, Baku, Azerbaijan
• 20-21 May:Copenhagen climate ministerial

Pick of the jobs

• Greenpeace, communications and engagement co-head (climate) | Salary: £63,756-£67,644. Location: London
• Global Witness, deputy director of campaigns (one-year contract) | Salary: £75,886. Location: London
• Karolinska Institute, research assistant in climate attribution and health | Salary: Unknown. Location: Stockholm, Sweden
• Greenpeace South Asia, climate researcher | Salary: Unknown. Location: Colombo, Sri Lanka

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

DeBriefed 8 May 2026: EU eyes fossil-fuel exemptions | Wind and solar save UK ‘£1.7bn’ | Amazon ‘tipping point’

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08.05.26

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17.04.26

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The post DeBriefed 15 April 2026: Trump-Xi talk energy | ‘Supercharged’ El Niño | India’s first ‘heat lounges’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.

“In order to support a stay, the movant must substantiate that irreparable injury is ‘likely’ to occur. Bare allegations of what is likely to occur do not suffice,” the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said in its decision. 

The UK is no longer the top contributor to the UN’s flagship Green Climate Fund (GCF), after the government announced that it only intends to honour half of its most recent pledge.

Amid wider cuts to its climate aid for developing countries, the UK informed the GCF in May that it will reduce its commitment for the 2024-27 period to £815m ($1.1bn).

In doing so, the Labour government is drastically cutting a Conservative pledge of £1.62bn ($2.16bn), hailed by former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s government as “the biggest single funding commitment the UK has made to help the world tackle climate change”.

This “record” pledge also meant the UK became the top GCF funder, after the Trump administration withdrew $4bn in pledged US funds in 2025.

Now, the UK follows the US in becoming the second major donor to cancel substantial funding, leaving aid experts concerned that other developed countries will follow suit.

As the chart below shows, the UK’s total past and promised contributions to the GCF have now dropped below those of Germany, France and Japan.

GCF pledges by top 10 donors. Dark bars indicate pledges from the initial resource mobilisation in 2014 and the first replenishment round in 2019, while light blue bars indicate pledges from the second replenishment round in 2023. Source: NRDC GCF pledge tracker.

The GCF is the largest dedicated UN climate fund and is seen as a vital way of raising grant-based climate finance for developing countries. It oversees more than $20bn worth of funding across 354 projects and programmes.

Developed countries, such as the UK, are obliged under the Paris Agreement to provide climate finance. One of the main ways to do this is through specialised climate funds, such as the GCF. 

However, despite countries committing to increase their climate finance over time, progress in scaling up GCF contributions between funding rounds has been gradual.

With its now-revoked £1.62bn pledge in 2023, the UK was among the donors that had increased its GCF pledging compared with the previous 2019 funding round. 

The latest reduction means the UK will now provide around 45% less funding than it did during the 2019 round. This is the biggest reduction between rounds by any major donor, apart from the US.

In an email to the GCF board, reported by the Financial Times, the fund’s executive director Mafalda Duarte said the UK’s actions were “expected to have a material impact on the delivery” of the fund’s projects.

According to the newspaper, Duarte noted that the move came as the UK cuts its overall aid budget in order to “invest more in addressing growing security threats”. 

In March, the UK government announced plans to spend “around £6bn” of its aid budget on climate projects in developing countries over the next three years.

Carbon Brief analysis suggests that this spending amounts to roughly halving the UK’s annual climate finance, when accounting changes and inflation are factored in.

Analysis: Wind and solar have saved UK from gas imports worth £1.7bn since Iran war began

UK policy

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07.05.26

Q&A: How the UK government aims to ‘break link between gas and electricity prices’

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21.04.26

Analysis: UK is ‘halving’ its climate finance for developing countries

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27.03.26

Factcheck: Nine false or misleading myths about North Sea oil and gas

Policy

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25.03.26

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The post Analysis: UK no longer top UN Green Climate Fund donor after latest aid cut appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Meanwhile, residential prices have been growing in all regions of the United States, “and we expect this trend to continue,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration said.

In March the world’s largest tourism trade fair took place again in Berlin and was met with resistance from Berlin to Mexico. As the event put the spotlight on the upcoming FIFA World Cup, campaigners called out the deadly impact the tournament and a profit-driven model of tourism have on human rights. Here Asamblea Berlin explain the action they took at the fair to denounce the industry.

Source

CALGARY — CHRIS SEVERSON-BAKER, Executive Director of the Pembina Institute, made the following statement in response to the latest news on the federal-Alberta energy MOU:“The federal–Alberta energy MOU is a failure for Canada and Alberta both in the...

Austin and Shannon Ehrisman raise all-natural hogs on a 22-acre patch of once-overgrown Christmas trees in central Pennsylvania. While the area is home to many hog farms, Austin says raising them outdoors is unusual—and he didn’t think it was possible a few years ago. Even his father thought he was “a little bit crazy” when getting started.

“In Pennsylvania, I was taught to believe you can’t do anything independently or all-natural with hogs,” says Austin. “Around here, everybody’s got some kind of contract [with a large pork company].”

But the cost of setting up a confinement barn—how the vast majority of hogs are raised—has risen significantly since the 1990s. Austin’s father, for example, built a 1,100-pig barn in 1989 for about US$100,000. That same barn today, according to Austin, would be US$400,000 to US$500,000 but rarely are new barns built this small. He says many hog farmers today feel the need “to get bigger, bigger, bigger,” typically borrowing US$1 million or more, to support their families with hog farming which may not be economically sustainable long-term.

When the Ehrismans were in their early 20s, they toured 50 to 100-acre farms—what might be a traditional launchpad for a young farmer. But between the high land cost and the expenses to build barns, they couldn’t make it work financially.

Then an old Christmas tree farm, previously used as a weekend cabin site, went up for sale between Austin’s parents’ and brother’s farms. There were hundreds of Christmas trees that had gone untrimmed for more than a decade, but it could be a farm of their own.

The Ehrismans were able to negotiate a deal within their budget, closing on the farm one year after they married at 22 years old. Then the real work began.

Austin took a job packing eggs at a chicken farm and picked up part-time work at another hog farm, while Shannon worked as a dental hygienist. Full-time farming on their own land was the dream, but there wasn’t a straightforward path to make that a reality. Austin says he and Shannon spent several years “throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what stuck” to make their small, nontraditional farmland profitable.  

In 2014, Austin saw a YouTube video by a fellow Pennsylvania farmer that introduced him to a different way of raising hogs. Instead of building a US$1 million confinement hog barn, this farmer raised pigs on pasture or in hoop barns with continual access to fresh air and sunshine. They worked with specialty pork company Niman Ranch, which offered a guaranteed market for pork in exchange for high standards of sustainable and humane farming practices.

Austin realized that this would not only be healthier for pigs but would also work for his 22-acre plot. “Getting started with Niman Ranch is a fraction of what a commercial barn is because you can start at any scale,” he says.

Today, the Ehrismans care for around 200 sows, which are mature female pigs that have raised at least one litter of piglets. Austin also works as a Niman Ranch field agent, helping other independent farmers make small to mid-scale farming work. 

For the Ehrismans, their primary goal is making family life possible on the farm. Shannon has reduced her dental hygiene schedule to two days a week, and the family homeschools their seven-year-old son, Lane. Their daughter, Everley, is four years old, and the family recently welcomed a third child, Nathan.

The Ehrismans value the farm being a place where their children can participate and learn. At the confinement hog barns Austin grew up around, farmers need to “shower in, shower out” and wear protective clothing due to the heightened disease pressures in high-density facilities. But on his farm, the hogs are raised in the open air with space to root around and express their natural behaviors. It’s safe for his children to work alongside him, and his older children already help with chores like taking out the trash.

“A farm is the best place in the world to raise kids. There are just so many little things to learn,” says Austin. “The kids are always running in and out…helping with chores, or playing tag in the farrowing barn.”

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Photo courtesy of Niman Ranch

The post A Farmer’s Dream Takes Root on 22 Acres of Forgotten Christmas Trees appeared first on Food Tank.

Wine is one of the most delicious agricultural products worldwide, but it leaves behind a less delectable trail: millions of tons of wasted skins, seeds, and flesh. Now a team of researchers has landed on a circular economy solution for these mounds of mush. 

They say it can be used as a replacement antibiotic on chicken farms, working almost as well as the real thing.  

In the United States where the study was based, broiler farms—those that raise chickens for meat—have been trying to wean their livestock off antibiotics, over growing fears about drug resistance and environmental damage. But there’s a catch: these drugs, known as ‘antibiotic growth promoters’ serve a useful purpose because they help fight harmful gut bacteria that cause inflamed guts, make chickens sick, and reduce their growth levels. Farmers have been crying out for a solution—and this is where wine waste comes in.

Building on previous work revealing the possible bacteria-fighting potential of wine waste (known as ‘pomace’), the researchers decided to test it out in a series of experiments on 126 chickens, which they split into different treatment groups. Some were fed a diet containing 30% rice bran which is a known gut-inflamer. Others received that diet, but with the addition of a conventional antibiotic called zinc-bacitracin. Another group were fed the bran diet supplemented with a tiny percentage of grape pomace, which was either plain or fermented. 

Even at a tiny dose making up just 0.5% of the chickens’ diet, the researchers found that the addition of grape pomace brought about a remarkable change in the birds. Compared to those animals that received the diet without any added treatment, their body weight gains increased by 79%, and their average body weight increased by almost 20%, both helpful indicators of improved gut health. 

The fermented grape waste produced the most promising results. The researchers think this may be because fermentation changes the grapes’ chemical composition in a way that appeals to beneficial gut microbes that can boost the chickens’ digestive health. Strikingly also, the grape waste-treated birds showed beneficial physiological changes in their guts, 

Overall, the benefits of adding grape pomace were comparable to those recorded in the birds that received the conventional antibiotic treatment. It’s still not known why grape pomace has this antibiotic-like effect, but the researchers speculate that it could have something to do with a series of bioactive compounds contained in the waste including flavonoids, polyphenols, and tannins, which have been shown to reduce inflammation and to have antibacterial qualities. All of that potential sits untapped in wine waste, like buried treasure. 

But at least now there’s a possible alternative. Fermentation to make wine, and then to treat chickens might be exactly the circular solution that both these industries need. 

Tako et. al. “Dietary grape pomace mitigates high-NSP-induced inflammation and production loss via microbiome-SCFA-immune mediated pathways.” npj Biofilms and Microbiomes. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene

Headline News:

• “Clean Energy Seen As ‘Structurally Immune’ To Hormuz-Style Shock” • The war in Iran provided the transition to low carbon with new impetus, as renewable energy is seen as less vulnerable to price shocks, a group of corporate executives and senior bankers said. “Clean energy systems are structurally immune to this type of shock.” [The Straits Times]

Clean energy (Karsten Würth, Unsplash)

• “Cuba’s Power Grid Collapses And Plunges Eastern Provinces Into A Major Blackout” • Cuba is going through blackouts as its aging power grid deteriorates. The island is facing a prolonged economic crisis, recently made worse by a US energy blockade of the island. In Cuba, daily life can be an ordeal for many of the 10 million people. [ABC News]
• “Global Wind Installations Surge As OEMs Pass 100 GW” • Global wind turbine installations rose sharply in 2025, with five turbine makers surpassing 100 GW of cumulative installed capacity, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. A record 178 GW of wind capacity was mechanically installed and 28,395 turbines were deployed worldwide. [reNews]
• “UK Go-Ahead For 3-GW Dogger South And 1-GW North Falls” • The UK government has given permit nods to RWE and Masdar’s 3-GW Dogger Bank South and SSE and RWE’s 1-GW North Falls wind farms off east England. The 200-turbine Dogger Bank array has a grid connection and is expected to be fully commissioned by 2032. [reNews]
• “Solar-Powered EVs Are Here, All Five Of Them” • After twenty years of fits and starts, US automaker Aptera has finally reached a critical milestone. Aptera has a long way to go before it can catch up to industry leader Tesla, but it has 50,000 reservations in hand for its solar-powered EVs, and five validation vehicles have been rolled off the assembly line. [CleanTechnica]

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

Based on reports that the federal government will announce a deal where Alberta’s effective industrial carbon price reaches $130 as late as 2040, we modeled three emissions scenarios. The delay in reaching $130, and the resulting delay in the...

Namun di balik keseruannya, tidak sedikit pemain yang justru mengalami kekalahan besar karena kurang memahami cara mengelola permainan dengan bijak.

Banyak pemain pemula sering terbawa suasana ketika sedang bermain. Mereka terus menekan tombol spin tanpa memperhatikan modal yang tersisa. Akibatnya, permainan yang awalnya hanya untuk hiburan berubah menjadi pengalaman yang melelahkan secara finansial maupun emosional. Karena itu, memahami cara menghindari kekalahan besar menjadi hal penting sebelum memulai permainan slot.

Jangan Bermain Dengan Emosi

Salah satu kesalahan paling umum saat bermain slot adalah mengambil keputusan berdasarkan emosi. Ketika mengalami kekalahan beruntun, sebagian pemain justru meningkatkan taruhan dengan harapan bisa mengembalikan modal dalam waktu cepat. Padahal langkah seperti ini sering membuat kerugian semakin besar.

Pemain yang lebih berpengalaman biasanya memilih berhenti sejenak ketika emosi mulai tidak stabil. Mereka memahami bahwa permainan slot tetap mengandalkan sistem acak, sehingga tidak ada jaminan kemenangan akan datang hanya karena taruhan dinaikkan. Mengendalikan emosi menjadi langkah awal agar permainan tetap terasa nyaman dan tidak berlebihan.

Tentukan Batas Modal Sejak Awal

Sebelum mulai bermain, tentukan terlebih dahulu jumlah modal yang memang siap digunakan untuk hiburan. Cara ini terlihat sederhana, tetapi sangat membantu menjaga kondisi keuangan tetap aman. Banyak pemain disiplin yang selalu memisahkan dana bermain dengan kebutuhan sehari-hari.

Misalnya, jika seseorang sudah menetapkan batas modal Rp100 ribu dalam satu sesi permainan, maka ia harus berhenti ketika nominal tersebut habis. Kebiasaan disiplin seperti ini membantu pemain menghindari keputusan impulsif yang sering muncul saat mengalami kekalahan.

Hindari Bermain Terlalu Lama

Durasi bermain juga memengaruhi pola keputusan pemain. Semakin lama seseorang bermain tanpa jeda, fokus dan konsentrasi biasanya mulai menurun. Dalam kondisi lelah, pemain lebih mudah mengambil keputusan terburu-buru.

Karena itu, banyak pemain berpengalaman memilih bermain dalam waktu singkat namun teratur. Mereka menikmati permainan secukupnya tanpa memaksakan diri untuk terus mengejar kemenangan. Cara ini membuat permainan terasa lebih santai dan tidak menimbulkan tekanan berlebihan.

Pahami Pola Permainan dan RTP

Memahami informasi dasar seperti RTP (Return to Player) juga penting sebelum memilih permainan slot. RTP merupakan persentase teoretis pengembalian dana kepada pemain dalam jangka panjang. Meski tidak menjamin kemenangan instan, game dengan RTP lebih tinggi sering dianggap memiliki peluang yang lebih stabil dibandingkan permainan dengan RTP rendah.

Selain RTP, pemain juga perlu memahami volatilitas permainan. Slot dengan volatilitas tinggi memang menawarkan kemenangan besar, tetapi risikonya juga lebih tinggi. Sebaliknya, slot volatilitas rendah cenderung memberikan kemenangan kecil namun lebih sering. Menyesuaikan jenis permainan dengan kondisi modal dapat membantu mengurangi risiko kekalahan besar.

Jangan Mudah Percaya “Pola Pasti Menang”

Di berbagai media sosial, banyak beredar informasi mengenai pola slot yang disebut-sebut bisa memberikan kemenangan pasti. Faktanya, permainan slot modern menggunakan sistem RNG (Random Number Generator) yang membuat hasil setiap putaran bersifat acak.

Karena itu, pemain sebaiknya lebih berhati-hati terhadap klaim yang terlalu berlebihan. Bermain dengan pemahaman realistis jauh lebih aman dibandingkan mengejar janji kemenangan instan yang belum tentu benar. Sikap kritis seperti ini penting agar pemain tidak mudah terbawa ekspektasi yang tidak masuk akal.

Jadikan Slot Sebagai Hiburan

Hal terpenting yang sering dilupakan pemain adalah memahami tujuan awal bermain slot, yaitu sebagai hiburan. Ketika permainan dijadikan sarana mencari keuntungan utama, tekanan mental biasanya akan meningkat. Pemain menjadi lebih mudah kecewa saat kalah dan sulit berhenti ketika sedang mengejar kemenangan.

Pemain yang menikmati slot sebagai hiburan umumnya memiliki kontrol bermain yang lebih baik. Mereka tahu kapan harus berhenti, kapan menikmati kemenangan kecil, dan kapan menghindari risiko berlebihan. Sikap seperti inilah yang membantu banyak pemain tetap nyaman menikmati permainan tanpa mengalami kerugian besar.

Penutup

Bermain slot memang bisa memberikan sensasi hiburan yang menyenangkan, terutama setelah menjalani aktivitas harian yang melelahkan. Namun tanpa kontrol yang baik, permainan ini juga bisa membawa kerugian besar dalam waktu singkat. Mengatur modal, mengendalikan emosi, memahami pola permainan, dan bermain secara bijak menjadi langkah penting agar pengalaman bermain tetap aman dan menyenangkan.

Pada akhirnya, pemain yang mampu menjaga kendali diri biasanya justru lebih menikmati permainan dalam jangka panjang. Bukan semata soal menang atau kalah, tetapi tentang bagaimana seseorang tetap bisa bermain dengan nyaman tanpa kehilangan kendali atas keputusan yang diambil.

As spring weather arrives, drivers in electric vehicles (EVs) may notice that their cars are going farther between charges. They aren’t imagining things — like all vehicles, EVs operate more efficiently in temperate weather. To help grid planners and regulators better account for these seasonal effects, RMI is releasing a set of new scenarios in our GridUp EV load forecasting tool to showcase how changes in temperature can affect EV charging demand throughout the year.

What factors affect EV efficiency?

A vehicle’s efficiency boils down to two main factors: the friction it needs to overcome to keep moving forward, and the energy it uses to keep the passenger comfortable through air conditioning or heating (often called auxiliary energy use).

Friction reduces vehicle efficiency in three main ways: air resistance, rolling resistance (tires on the road), and drivetrain losses. In the case of air resistance and drivetrain losses, EVs are often more efficient than internal combustion engines, thanks to design decisions that reduce resistance and far fewer moving parts.

All vehicles, including EVs, use more auxiliary energy when the ambient temperature is either colder or hotter than what is comfortable (such as 68°F/20°C). In these conditions drivers use climate control systems to heat or cool the cabin. This is energy intensive, especially on very hot or cold days. While some electric vehicles use heat pumps to improve climate control efficiency, warming a vehicle requires more energy when the ambient temperature drops regardless of the technology used.

EVs also have a third, smaller factor that can impact their charging speed. Low temperatures can affect battery performance for most common battery chemistries, so some vehicles are designed to heat the battery pack to keep it within an optimal temperature range. This impact is typically only noticeable during high-speed charging in very cold weather, when the vehicle needs to warm the battery more to receive the higher power of a fast charge.

Why does EV efficiency matter?

Vehicle efficiency dictates overall energy demand, regardless of the fuel source. The efficiency of the EV fleet — including variations due to temperature — has important implications for the electric grid: all else equal, a less efficient EV fleet will require building more charging and grid infrastructure to meet the greater demand. While there are tools to mitigate the impacts of EV charging on the grid, making good, data-driven investments relies on decision makers at utilities and regulatory agencies being able to anticipate the scale and location of EV charging demand. This led us to develop our EV load forecasting tool GridUp.

This latest update to GridUp, which incorporates EV efficiency variations throughout the year, helps stakeholders such as utility distribution system planners and public utility commission regulatory staff gain more confidence in their ability to make the prudent infrastructure investments needed to serve EV load.

Additionally, while EVs have zero tailpipe emissions, their efficiency still influences upstream power sector emissions. As three-quarters of US electricity still comes from nonrenewable sources, lower EV efficiency means burning additional fossil fuels and therefore greater carbon and local air pollutant emissions (although EVs still have a much smaller carbon footprint than gasoline vehicles).

In numbers: the seasonal temperature effects on EV charging energy demand

To demonstrate how seasonal temperature changes can affect the energy needed to charge EVs, let’s take a closer look at the results from the new, temperature-dependent GridUp scenarios for two cities with very different climates: Phoenix and Minneapolis. We modeled the energy use of millions of trips individually, incorporating trip speed and seasonal snapshots of ambient temperature based on hourly weather data to determine how changes in operating friction and climate control use impacted the amount of energy used by a vehicle.

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Phoenix

In Phoenix, the average daily temperature is 76°F (24°C) year-round. On days like that, GridUp’s forecast for unmanaged EV charging in 2035 shows peak power demand reach 2,525 MW. However, on a hot day in July, the temperature climbs to a sweltering average temperature of 96°F (35°C). Then the peak power for charging rises 14% to 2,871 MW. In other words, hot days result in significantly increased energy and power demand from these vehicles, primarily from air conditioning usage. (Gasoline usage is also higher on these days, as drivers of all car types use more energy to cool down.)

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Minneapolis

In Minneapolis, the average daily temperature is 47°F (8°C) year-round. During these days, GridUp’s forecast for unmanaged EV charging in 2035 shows peak power demand to be 387 MW. However, the temperature can plummet to a frigid 16°F (-9°C) on average in January. The peak power for charging then rises dramatically to 540 MW, 39% above the median day. Cold weather also brings additional energy and power demand for cars as drivers try to stay comfortable and their vehicles must overcome an increase in air resistance.

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Seasonal temperature swings change the shape and size of loads that utilities and regulators must plan for, not just the range of an individual EV. For grid planners, relying on EV load forecasts that only consider average conditions can systematically underestimate energy needs for charging, especially during extreme weather, which already stresses the grid. Understanding seasonal variation in vehicle efficiency is a prerequisite for making prudent, least-cost investments that keep costs down and improve reliability.

Consider an example from Minneapolis: In 2035, EV charging is excpected to draw 5,496 MWh for an average temperature day compared to 7,433 MWh in our cold scenario, and this difference of 1,947 MWh occurs day after day. At the end of a cold month (e.g., January), energy demand from charging exceeds an average scenario by 60,357 MWh. Perhaps more importantly, if even a fraction of this demand lines up with evening hours when winter peaks often occur — almost a certainty given typical unmanaged charging patterns — feeders, transformers, and generation capacity that are adequate in an average scenario may become constrained. Planners should treat seasonal EV efficiency as a key part of preparing for peak conditions in different parts of the year.

Whether the weather is hot or cold, utilities and regulators have a set of options to mitigate the impact of EV charging demand; the key will be to plan ahead using good data and planning tools, and take advantage of such opportunities. For example:

• Utilities can and should lean into managed charging and other load management strategies to shift charging to off-peak hours, reducing the need for infrastructure to be built solely for extreme-weather conditions.
• Utilities, regulators, consumer advocates, and other stakeholders can support these cost-effective options by earnestly incorporating EV load flexibility into planning exercises, prioritizing development of programs to harness this flexibility, and ultimately making participation easy for customers.

The new seasonal scenarios in the GridUp tool are designed to make this actionable: they can be used to stress-test infrastructure planning against extreme conditions, model how much incremental load shows up on extreme days, and, importantly, explore what amount of flexibility can be obtained from EV charging to keep upgrades focused where they are truly needed.

RMI’s GridUp Tool

GridUp forecasts when and where energy and power demand will materialize from vehicle electrification. The tool is uniquely detailed and flexible, allowing users to gain greater insight into how driving behavior will create and shape charging demand.

Explore the Tool

RMI would like to thank FedEx for their generous support of this work.

The post How Weather Changes EV Charging Demand appeared first on RMI.

We are disabled, crip, mad, debilitated, and disability activists, advocates, scholars, workers, and home care recipients.

We proclaim our full support for the struggle of the home care workers of New York City who are currently engaged in the “No More 24” campaign. We specifically support their immediate demand for enactment of the No More 24 bill (City Council bill, Intro. 303), and we support the broader struggle of the Ain’t I A Woman?! coalition against the hyper-exploitation of home care workers.

Presently, tens of thousands of New York City home care workers are compelled to labor for 24-hour shifts at only 13-hours pay. These workers are predominantly immigrant women of color, subjected to systematic precarity, vulnerability, under-valuation, overwork, debility, and disablement. They have been unfairly made to shoulder the failings of medical insurance, corporate home care, and municipal and state political systems.

Home care workers deserve far better than the intolerable status quo. So, too, do disabled people and other recipients of home care. Disabled people in New York City and nationwide face disproportionately high rates of poverty, houselessness, unemployment, violence, neglect, discrimination, incarceration, and institutionalization. All disabled people deserve to live dignified, autonomous, well-resourced lives as full members of society in their own homes and communities.

While sympathetic to the concerns expressed by some disabled people about the No More 24 bill, we think it is horribly mistaken that some leaders of disability NGOs and legacy advocacy organizations have publicly framed the No More 24 workers’ struggle as counterposed to the interests of the “disability community.” We know well that disabled people have much to lose (and potentially gain) in the outcome of this fight. But we know, too, that the battle lines in this fight are not primarily between disabled people and the home care workers.

We are further disappointed that some supposed allies of disabled people – including the officialdoms of certain unions, and the Democratic Party state governor and city mayor, Kathy Hochul and Zohran Mamdani – have lent their efforts to stymieing or otherwise slow-walking the No More 24 campaign, citing in part their “concern” for the disabled. We reject this as a hollow alibi for refusal to act on the just demands of the home care workers.

In sum, we endorse the home care workers’ demand for an immediate end to 24-hour shifts at 13-hours pay. We further emphasize what to us is an inextricably linked demand, namely, that disabled people should continue to have the option of receiving care in their own homes and communities, with no reduction in the number of care hours received. We view the home care corporations, “managed care” insurers, and city and state government officials – that is, the most powerful entities in this many-sided relationship – as being squarely responsible for effecting this latter demand by way of their access to ample funding sources (this is, after all, the richest city in the richest country in the history of the world).

This is a crisis of the ruling class’s making. It is the fault of neither the exploited home care workers nor the predominantly poor recipients of home care. Consequently, we believe that the joining of the struggles and demands for both workers’ justice and disability justice will strengthen each in a powerful mutualistic coalition. Thus, we appeal to the home care workers, the No More 24 campaign, and the Ain’t I A Woman?! coalition, as well as to all disability advocacy organizations, to explicitly advance our respective interests in tandem. We say: “No More 24!”, “Put People First!”, and “Universal Home Care Access is a Right!”

Add your signature.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Ain’t I A Woman Campaign; modified by Tempest.

The post No more 24! appeared first on Tempest.

Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin speaks to writer Grace Byron about trans representation, artificial intelligence, and the role of criticism in an age of moral panic.

The post Grace Byron on cultural criticism, transphobia and Trump appeared first on Red Pepper.

As the fast-moving blaze rolled toward Fire Chief Jason Schneider’s district in Cozad, Nebraska, he and his crew faced a literal uphill battle.

The Cottonwood Fire was tearing through the Loess Canyons, an area defined by steep slopes, narrow valleys, few roads, and pockets of invasive eastern red cedar trees, which can throw embers and ash and even explode when they burn.

“You think you would have it put out, and you keep on moving north, and you’d look back south and it’s just going again behind you,” Schneider said of the March blaze.

But the situation started to improve when Schneider’s crew connected with the South Loup Burn Association, a group of landowners and ranchers who were also fighting the fire. They showed Schneider and his volunteer crew how to do back burns — setting controlled, low blazes in the path ahead of the Cottonwood Fire to consume any flammable material — to contain the wildfire. About 92 percent of Nebraska’s fire departments listed with the National Fire Department Registry are volunteer-based.

A drip torch owned by Austin Klemm was used to help contain the Cottonwood Fire that burned in Nebraska’s Dawson, Lincoln, and Frontier counties in March. Courtesy of Austin Klemm

“It would have burned a lot more if they hadn’t showed up and helped us get it stopped where we did,” Schneider said.

Unlike other parts of the country where wildfire season peaks in summer and late fall, Nebraska is set ablaze in the spring. This year has marked the state’s worst on record. As of May 6, conflagrations burned about 981,502 acres and dealt a blow to ranchers. They also brought to the forefront the growing debate over a controversial and centuries-old land management practice: using fire to fight fire. 

The Cottonwood Fire, contained by prescribed burn techniques and past prescribed fires, made the case for the practice. But during the same month, separated by just a county, heavy winds turned the smoldering remnants of a prescribed burn in the Nebraska National Forest into the Road 203 wildfire, which devoured nearly 36,000 acres.

Decades of fire mismanagement and climate change have primed America’s landscapes to burn. Today, fire districts, land managers, and local authorities from California to Florida to New Jersey are increasingly embracing the use of prescribed burns to prevent the most severe blazes. According to the National Association of State Foresters and the Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina burned between 250,001 and 1 million acres, while California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona burned between 50,001 and 250,000 acres, in 2020 alone. In the Great Plains, these burns are now common practice in states like Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, said Dirac Twidwell, a rangeland and fire ecologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

In Nebraska, too, particularly in east and central parts of the state. The Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council estimates that 2025 saw the most acres burned by prescribed fire in one year during recent times. 

But in areas of the state like the western Sandhills, the practice has sparked backlash.  

“There was a [prescribed burn] group that tried to establish a couple of years ago up around the Tryon, Mullen area up in there. And they almost lynched that group,” Keystone-Lemoyne Fire and Rescue Chief Ralph Moul said. “They said ‘No, we do not want fire in the Sandhills,’ because there’s nothing to stop it up here.”

Despite the fear, there is overwhelming evidence that prescribed burns, when done correctly, can help prevent massive wildfires by burning up volatile fuels like cedar trees. They can also replenish nutrients in soils, making the land ecologically healthier, boosting plant and wildlife diversity and saving ranchers money. The grass that comes back after a burn is often preferred by cattle.

“The wildfires you’ve seen here in Nebraska the last few years are also a consequence of removing fire from the landscape,” said Kent Pfeiffer, program manager for the Northern Prairies Land Trust. “You don’t get rid of fire, you just change the nature of it … instead of having frequent low-intensity fires, you end up with infrequent, high-intensity fires.”

Nebraska’s mild and dry winter set up the state for major wildfires early this spring. Graphic by Quentin Lueninghoener of Hanscom Park Studios for the Flatwater Free Press. Source: U.S. Drought Monitor and wildfire.gov

The issue is growing more urgent as the state faces dual threats. Suppression of natural fires has allowed cedar woodlands to creep into Nebraska’s native grasslands, with more large swaths at risk and an already costly headache for ranchers. Meanwhile, climate change is bringing more extreme conditions, including intense stretches of drier and hotter weather that can fuel more destructive, less controllable blazes.

“What we know is that overall, our fire management is not working,” Twidwell said.

Tucker Thompson was in his 30s back in the early 2000s when he first helped out on a prescribed burn on another person’s property near Gothenburg. The rancher, who summers cattle in the Loess Canyons, knew some neighbors would be upset, but cedar trees were starting to sprout across his land. He wanted to get ahead of the problem, and he was curious.

By today’s standards, the group’s equipment was basic and their knowledge limited. Even though everything went fine, Thompson left thinking the entire practice was insane. He went home and took a chainsaw to the cedar trees across about 400 acres of his property.  

“I’m like, ‘I am never going to be responsible for another fire,’” Thompson said. “And then five years later, they all start coming back. Ten years later, it’s like, I have no choice. There’s no way of killing these dang things, so I burned them.”

Now, Thompson continues the practice and is a member of two burn groups. He helped firefighters contain the Cottonwood Fire, even as it ravaged his grazing lands.

Prescribed burns “decrease the fuel load in these canyons, so we can control these fires to some degree,” Thompson said.

The Loess Canyons area has one of the most advanced prescribed fire cultures in the entire country, Twidwell said. It has reduced the risk of catastrophic fire and made the land more suitable for grazing, which has boosted landowners’ profits.

Up until the last 150 years, fire was common in Nebraska. Wildfires would naturally control species like eastern red cedar, and Indigenous peoples would run prescribed burns to clear underbrush, remove dead biomass, replenish soil nutrients, and encourage new plant growth. 

Prescribed burn associations, nonprofits, and state, federal, and municipal agencies burned more than 92,700 acres in prescribed fires in the first six months of 2025 alone, according to a survey by the Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council. It’s likely the most acres burned through prescribed fire in the state in one year during recent times, the council said.

But conducting these burns requires a lot of planning, monitoring, money, machinery, and manpower. And even when it comes together, a change in weather can cancel the whole operation on a moment’s notice.

Brian Sprenger checks on his cattle in 2023, in Sidney, Nebraska. Cedar trees are creeping into the state’s grasslands, fueling more several wildfires. AP Photo / Brittany Peterson

Semi-retired rancher Jon Immink coordinates burns across multiple landowners’ properties near the Nebraska-Kansas border to help manage cedar trees. He plans years ahead as he maps out which plots of land need to burn when, typically in the stretch from January to March.

“I do not sleep well in burn season. You wake up 4 o’clock in the morning and all you can think of is … you prepare for what could go wrong,” Immink said. 

In order to conduct a land management burn, a landowner or tenant has to apply for a permit and submit a burn plan to their local fire chief, who decides whether to waive Nebraska’s standing open burn ban. By law, the plan requires a lot of documentation and forethought, including a list of on-hand equipment and a description of the weather conditions needed to burn safely.

Fairbury Fire Chief Judd Stewart’s jurisdiction is filled with landowners and managers who use prescribed burns. Stewart had to cancel 40 to 50 burn permits in March when Governor Jim Pillen ordered a temporary statewide halt in issuing due to the devastating wildfires. Stewart wishes the governor would have given more consideration to areas like southeast Nebraska, where fire danger was lower.

“These areas that people had this heavy vegetation, and now they still have that heavy vegetation, but they’ve got new grasses growing in it, and it makes it very difficult to burn,” Stewart said. “As we approach mid- to late summer, when we start getting high temperatures … that vegetation will carry fire again, and now we’ve got those heavy fuel loads that are going to be hard to contain.”

The governor’s order has impacted landowners and managers who have invested thousands of dollars, conducted years of planning, and deferred grazing for prescribed burns that might now have to wait another year, said Austin Klemm, board member of the South Loup Burn Association, the group that helped Schneider and others contain the Cottonwood Fire.

Right now, he is working with about six landowners who have invested roughly $250,000 to $275,000 to plan a burn that might not happen this year.

“Some of these guys have invested tens of thousands of dollars in prep work to be able to burn,” Klemm said. “These guys have deferred grazing, did not graze at all last year, had to go find a place to stick cows or feed cows all last year.”

Becky Potmesil doesn’t have to look far to see the devastation wildfire can cause. Potmesil raises cattle in the Alliance area of the Panhandle, on the western edge of the Sandhills. To the south, the Morrill Fire burned an estimated 642,000 acres, making it the largest on record in the state’s history. To the southeast, the Ashby Fire burned another 36,000 acres.

The winds have blown away the black, burnt grass, leaving behind only sand dunes. It looks like a moonscape, she said. 

“Anybody who’d do a prescribed burn out here in the [western] Sandhills in western Nebraska is crazy, and it’s dangerous,” she said. While she sees how there could be benefits in some parts, like the meadows, she doesn’t think it would be worth the risk in her area.

Moul, the Keystone-Lemoyne Fire Chief, is cautious about issuing burn permits in his district, especially in the Sandhills. He likes for there to either be snow or green grass on the ground. Unlike in other parts of the state, the Sandhills have fewer fire breaks, less infrastructure, and more extreme weather conditions like high-speed winds and very little humidity, Moul and Potmesil noted.

A prescribed burn conducted south of Callaway, Nebraska, in 2022 by the South Loup Burn Association.
Courtesy of Austin Klemm

Moul, who was an incident commander on the Morrill Fire, understands that prescribed fire has its place if it is done safely. However, after seeing damages from prescribed burns escaping in his career, he said fire chiefs should not allow prescribed burns on or right before red flag days in their districts. 

“Some of these burn groups, they’ve been burning for years and years and years. For the most part, they know what they’re doing out there, but there are a few, like I said, that have convinced these fire chiefs to write the permit on red flag days, because that’s when they get the best kill of the trees,” Moul said. “But it was my experience when I worked with the state that we went to a lot of escaped fires because of prescribed burns that got away.”

The Road 203 wildfire initially started as a prescribed burn in the Bessey Ranger District of the Nebraska National Forest. More than a day after the fire ignitions ended, heavy winds created a spot fire outside the original boundary as firefighters mopped up and patrolled the area, according to the Forest Service. The agency said 99.84 percent of its prescribed burns go according to plan. This one didn’t.

According to the Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council’s survey last year, 1.6 percent of burns surveyed escaped and required outside assistance, primarily from volunteer fire departments. Changing weather patterns and the spread of cedar trees are the primary reasons for escapes, the Fire Council said in an email.

“When the gap between prescribed fire acres and fuel load increases, it also increases fire behavior in both prescribed fire and wildfires, causing us to adapt to riskier burns with increased planning and equipment,” the Fire Council said. 

When Twidwell came to Nebraska in 2013, he was told prescribed fire would never be used in the Sandhills. Since then, he’s seen multiple burns happen there as the culture continues to shift. 

He knows some landowners will never be convinced, and he understands their concern. But beyond protecting the grasslands, Twidwell believes Nebraska needs to have more conversations on how to mitigate the large wildfires that have torn through the state.

“Everybody understands … the wildfire risk playing out. Fewer understand the benefits and why certain groups are using prescribed fire,” Twidwell said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nebraska wonders which is riskier: The fires it starts, or the fires it fights on May 15, 2026.

Democrats and Republicans agree on virtually nothing at this point, except the desperate need to build more housing in the United States. Depending on your viewpoint, the country needs new domiciles because it puts people to work and stimulates local economies, or because it creates affordable homes and drives down housing costs, thus reducing homelessness. Affordability, including in housing, is now one of the biggest political issues in America.

Neither party, though, is talking about the secret superpower of new apartment buildings: They’re much better for the planet than constructing single-family homes. According to a new report, these units are “an almost automatic form of building decarbonization,” because three-quarters of new apartments are heated electrically. That means they can run on rooftop solar panels or tap into grids humming with clean energy, instead of burning plant-warming natural gas in furnaces or boilers. 

While the Trump administration and the Republican Party at large try to roll back as much climate progress as they can, they’re inadvertently bolstering that progress by calling for new construction. Deep-red Montana, for instance, recently passed a flurry of bills to get more multi-family housing built. “Apartments are the climate solution hiding in plain sight,” said Alan Durning, executive director of the nonprofit Sightline Institute, which authored the report. 

Nothing against single-family homes, but apartment buildings and condos are much more efficient for a number of reasons. For one, residents share walls, floors, and ceilings with their neighbors, surrounding them with excellent insulation. Secondly, the square footage of each unit tends to be smaller than detached homes, so there’s less air to manage. Accordingly, it takes less energy to climate-control apartment units and keep people comfortable: The typical resident of a downtown high-rise emits one-third as much greenhouse gases as a resident of a detached house in the suburbs.

Because of this inherent efficiency, apartment builders have for decades opted to install what’s called electric resistance heating, like baseboard heaters, instead of gas furnaces. That’s because wiring them up is cheaper than piping in all that methane. “If I am building something with the intention of renting it, I really want to minimize my upfront costs,” said Amanda D. Smith, senior scientist at the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, who studies the built environment but wasn’t involved in the new report. “Often electric water heaters and electric heaters for space heating make sense from that perspective.”

Economic forces, then, have long encouraged the adoption of such systems: 68 percent of apartments built since the early 1970s have been heated with electricity, the report notes. Half a century ago, no one was campaigning to decarbonize buildings to fight climate change — going electric was just the better option. Today, if you live in an apartment, you’re 60 percent more likely to be all-electric than your neighbor living in a house.

And apartments can get even greener. Heat pumps — which move warmth from outdoor air inside, instead of generating it like a gas furnace does — are around three times more efficient than space heaters. Over the past few decades, the technology has gotten more powerful, capable of extracting heat from even freezing outdoor air. That’s helped heat pumps proliferate across even the chilliest climes: Maine installed 100,000 of the appliances two years ahead of schedule, and almost two-thirds of households in Norway use them. Heat pumps are increasingly popping up in American apartment buildings, too: While quite rare in the decades after the 1950s, heat pumps have been incorporated into 18 percent of these structures in the Northwest since 2010, the report notes. (Overall, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the U.S. for several years now.)

While traditional electric heat pumps work like air conditioners, in that you need an outdoor unit that connects to an indoor one, new varieties are easier to incorporate into apartments and condos. One from a company called Gradient fits like a saddle over a window sill and plugs into a regular outlet, with installation taking less than a half hour. (Think of it like those old-school AC units jutting out of city apartment windows, only much cooler looking.) Another launching this winter combines the two units into one attached to an interior wall, where it exchanges air with the outside. “Making retrofits simpler will be a game-changer,” Smith said.

If new buildings in hotter parts of the U.S. rely upon gas heating, they’d still need an air conditioning system. The beauty of a heat pump is that it can reverse in the summer to fill a home with cool air. As temperatures rise across the country, heat pumps will not only work more efficiently than space heaters and gas furnaces to warm apartments, but to provide invaluable cooling to keep people healthy. Already in the U.S., heat kills more people every year than all other forms of extreme weather combined.

Making a building’s heating fully electric encourages the adoption of another appliance critical for reducing greenhouse gas emissions: the induction stove. “If you’re building a building and you’re heating and cooling with heat pumps, it doesn’t really make sense to hook it up to the gas system to pipe a tiny bit of gas in for people to cook on their gas stoves a couple of times a week,” said Matt Casale, managing director of states and regions at the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition, which wasn’t involved in the report.

All this electrification could potentially slot into a burgeoning technology known as networked geothermal. Instead of a building’s heat pump using outdoor air, it uses liquid pumping underground. Because the earth’s temperature remains a more consistent temperature year-round than the air, these heat pumps are even more efficient at warming a space. If all of an area’s buildings — apartments or otherwise — are hooked into a networked geothermal system, there’s no need to pipe gas into the neighborhood at all. “It’s a real community-based energy system, and you’re using energy that’s literally homegrown,” Casale said. “It’s right under your feet.”

Beyond their superior energy efficiency and tendency to go electric, apartment buildings provide denser housing, fitting far more people into a footprint than a single-family home could manage. If located near daily essentials, like grocery stores, residents can walk instead of drive, further reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Ideally, robust public transportation systems can get those apartment-dwellers anywhere they can’t walk to. 

Building big apartment buildings of just apartments, though, just won’t cut it, said Cécile Faraud, head of the clean construction program at C40, a global network of climate-focused mayors. These structures need mixed uses, where living spaces sit atop commercial spaces, like markets and doctors’ offices. “So you can access care, you can access education, you can access your needs in terms of shopping,” said Faraud, who wasn’t involved in the report. “But also in terms of health, so being able to exercise in parks, etc., and access to nature.” 

Indeed, what surrounds these apartment complexes matters too. Green spaces reduce temperatures, boost residents’ mental health, and provide habitats for native plant and animal species. Better yet, “agrihoods” surround working farms with multi-family housing, generating nutritious produce for residents to enjoy or sell. (Faraud stresses that in addition to creating more housing, cities need to retrofit existing buildings to be more energy efficient, like with double-paned windows and better insulation.)

Constructing apartments, though, is often way more difficult than it should be, housing advocates say. The new report notes that “apartment buildings of at least four stories are currently allowed on less than 1 percent of the residential land in all but 10 Oregon cities” — even in progressive Portland, that figure is 14 percent. “The main thing that we need to do is re-legalize apartments in a much larger area of our cities,” Durning said.

Cities and states are responsible for that, not the feds. But the growing national push from both parties to get more units built will be a win-win for people and the planet. “Even across a political landscape that’s as fractured and divided and as contentious as what we’re seeing now,” Smith said, “I think most people are willing to say: We want people to have homes.” 

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The surprising climate fix that Democrats and Republicans both love on May 15, 2026.