We should be unimpressed. Acting on this promise is overdue. Opportunities have risen, and they have deferred or demurred. The time has come to call their bluffs.    

For starters, these claims to care are just that: words, not promises. No single politician or regulatory agency, neither federal nor state, has the authority to keep all the costs from data centers out of consumers’ electric bills. However, the utilities and the data centers could address this head-on through their actions and protect consumers.  I assure you plenty of opportunities have sailed past without that happening. (It’s been nearly a year since I wrote about this “consensus” of concern, and little has been changed.) But now a case out of Maryland could finally shake the table.  

Pledges on pollution 

Before we get into the dark and murky world of how utility costs work their way into consumer rates and bills, it’s important to consider Big Tech’s push for  dirty energy choices and the obstacles deliberately enacted by data center companies to block informed decision-making. These controversies are capturing public attention, though the near-zero transparency from data centers themselves feels ironic given their branding as “information technologies.”  

Before these promises of consumer protection, companies set carbon goals. Amazon was a founder of the Climate Pledge, but now the headlines are “The Single Largest Pollution Source In The USA Going To Be An Amazon AI Data Center.”  “Net zero” now seems to describe the amount of information, not the carbon, emitted by data centers’ energy plans. 

In 2023, voluntary clean energy pledges were led by Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft. But now we see Microsoft’s Chief Sustainability Officer explaining that “In 2020, Microsoft leaders referred to our [net-zero carbon] sustainability goals as a moonshot, and nearly five years later, we have had to acknowledge that the moon has gotten further away.” 

Running from climate responsibility makes no sense, given the enormous costs from continued burning of fossil fuels, projections from UCS on long-term cost savings from clean energy, strategies for adding renewables to power data centers, and the actual way Texas has handled rising demand from data centers with wind, solar plus storage.  

Our fights in the state regulatory reviews focus on:  

• Requiring data centers to disclose clean energy plans. 
• Prioritizing data centers with the most robust clean energy plans. 
• Keeping data centers accountable for their commitments. 

Pledges on costs 

While the data center companies and utilities seem to abandon climate goals, they have rolled out a variety of promises under the cover of a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge.” UCS experts dig through regulatory filings, transmission plans, and the arguments written by utilities, data center companies, and power plant owners every day. What are we finding? There are undisclosed deals for data centers and there are half-measures for consumers. We need the regulatory agencies that referee the arguments about who actually pays to call these bluffs. 

We have found, over and over, utilities and data companies arguing that the state regulators should not adjust who pays the costs brought by data center connections and increased need for power plants. For example, Microsoft argued in Illinois they should not be required to sign binding commitments to pay for the costs they cause.  This was after utility ComEd expressed concern about the huge demands from data centers.  

So, ComEd proposed requiring a security deposit from new data centers to ensure they get paid. Since the utility is always going to be paid, this helps recoup the costs caused by data centers that would be passed other ratepayers if the data center business fails. However, this didn’t change the practice of spreading to all customers the costs caused by the new data centers. Thus this is a half-measure, only addressing the risk that new these customers like Microsoft actually pay their bills.  

This safety-net for the utility is a repeating practice, with no actual cost-saving impact for ratepayers. ComEd’s parent company, Exelon, made related requests at the federal level. And yet, in those filings, nothing has changed to the existing practice of putting the transmission costs caused by new data centers into everyone else’s rates. In fact, Exelon says in its agreement with Amazon and other data centers that it will keep pursuing this spreading of costs.  

My work digging through just the grid upgrades to connect data centers in eight states found $4.6 billion in 2024 and $3.1 billion in 2025 committed by utilities, in full knowledge these costs will be paid by all their customers. More transmission costs caused by the same data centers, described below, are being challenged by the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, the state consumer advocate. 

State regulatory efforts may exacerbate these harms 

The “move fast, break things” culture of Silicon Valley isn’t the approach utilities—or their regulators—take.   The unwillingness of regulators to push back and do more than the utilities’ proposals is extending the problem of costs falling on consumers rather than ending it.  

Perhaps the most egregious utility response is Entergy building 10 new, full-size gas-burning power plants for the data center Meta is building in Louisiana. Entergy relies on overly optimistic assumptions to justify claims that the costs put on consumers will be eventually offset by benefits. When UCS and allies sought relevant information regarding the data center’s energy demand and permanent job creation in Entergy’s proposal, Entergy and Meta refused to answer and fought a subpoena.   

UCS has also tried to get the Wisconsin Public Service Commission to wrangle data center recklessness better. The rules there don’t require real planning to lower costs to supply data centers. The Wisconsin utility We Energies announced delays in the retirement of the Oak Creek coal plant units multiple times.  

The Trump administration is undermining cost-saving measures 

The Trump Administration has been seeking a lot of attention for its data center policies and promises. When it comes to keeping costs lower, some of these are only rhetorical, and some are harmful.  

Three times (so far) this year, the White House has organized large, public events about consumer protections from data center costs. First, there was a statement of principles from the National Energy Dominance Council and 13 state governors in January 2026; the second, an original presidential proclamation of a Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March 2026; and then in July 2026 a new release of “Rate Payer Protection Pledge” with more signatures by company leaders.  

And yet, over the same period, the administration has made it harder to meet these goals by blocking renewable energy projects, reversing offshore wind leases, and cancelling clean energy grants—all of which would contribute more energy supply and help keep costs to consumers stable.  

How this falls on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission 

There is no mistaking that the federal government’s tools for utility consumer protection are found at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). In a dramatic rollout of supports for data centers, FERC explained: “To fulfill its responsibility, the Commission must act to address the risk of cost shifting among transmission customers for the service to…[data centers].”  

Note that FERC has not taken any of the opportunities previously available to them to stop utilities from raising customers’ rates to pay the costs caused by data centers. FERC agreed to utilities’ requests that there be protections for the utilities, like the one described above for ComEd that requires a data center pays the bills that the utility sends them. That is, for all their bluster about transparency and cost shifting, billions of costs will still go into the rates, and ratepayers will still have rate increases. 

So, after letting the opportunity pass, FERC is changing their tune. They have taken up the battle flag, calling for this exact reform in a series of “Show Cause” orders directed at utilities in the regional power grids from the Great Plains to the Northeast, plus California. However, without explanation, FERC omitted any mention or attention to protecting consumers in the Southeast and most of the West. Also, I see no guidance in the “Show Cause Orders” for what levels of protections FERC expects utilities to enact, and no discussions about upending the old practices.   

In fact, every indication so far from the federal government is that consumer protection is not happening. Fortunately, we have an opportunity to call the bluff. The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel filed a complaint at FERC, calling for them to separate the costs from Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania data centers that have been falling on Maryland’s and other states’ consumers. 

The case Maryland brings 

The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel is the consumer protection agency in Maryland and is active in utility rate-setting cases. This case stems from the costs caused by utilities in neighboring states that committed to data centers in 2022, 2024, and 2025. These utilities’ actions caused commitments totaling “more than $22 billion in transmission capital expenditures for baseline projects, overwhelmingly driven by projected data center load growth.”  Their filing also cites UCS reporting on additional  transmission costs from data centers from 2024 and 2025 that added $7.7 billion more onto customer bills from another utility process. 

This is a pivotal opportunity to assign the costs back to the sources that caused them: data centers. The existing rules would spread the costs across the region make sense where the growth in demand is more evenly spread. That is the assumption that has supported the existing rules, and that assumption needs to be examined.  

This is the same as what FERC said June 18 in the “Show Cause Orders:” “In particular, we are concerned about: (1) transparency regarding the assignment of Network Upgrades, and their associated costs; and 2) [data center] customers are ultimately responsible for costs incurred to provide transmission service, including the cost of Network Upgrades.”  

This is such a rare case and a real chance for change: the murky, hard to find details are actually known, and the needed reforms align perfectly with  the goals the government has announced. 

This should be such an easy decision for the regulatory body to put the costs on the parties that cause them. If FERC took this step, then the state regulators could put these costs on the data centers—and then data centers would actually have to pay for what they need. In fact, state regulators don’t need to wait- each rate case is a fresh opportunity to sort and assign costs previously lumped together. Even quicker, the utilities and data companies could adhere to their pledges, and stop the cost-shifting before it starts. 

The standards it cannot set, the deadlines it cannot hold, the public it cannot consult, the experts it cannot employ, the grants it cannot fund, the enforcement it cannot conduct: for EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, it has been a relentless pursuit of cannot. Or rather, cannot for the people, in service of can for a select polluting few.  

Nowhere is this clearer than in all the ways EPA is suddenly arguing that it cannot protect the public from a surge in pollution due to the rapid build-out of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data centers and the increasing amounts of coal, gas, and diesel resources now being relied on to power them. So much so, in fact, that Administrator Zeldin has made slashing safeguards for AI-enabling infrastructure one of the five core pillars of his agency’s entire agenda for President Trump’s second term. 

This ethos of “cannot” is a staggering perversion of EPA’s mission. It is also incredibly consequential. 

Exactly as EPA is attempting to remove itself from the business of protecting the public, the public is being confronted by a massive onslaught of new fossil fuel-fired power plants, alongside an increasing reliance on existing gas and coal plants.  

The consequences for people’s health and the environment are severe: these are heavily polluting sources, yet the administration is frantically working to free them from basic pollution control requirements and shield them from public view. And because of the long lifetime of this infrastructure, if the Trump EPA gets its way, the result will be vastly more pollution today and for decades to come.  

Power sector scene-setting 

Right now, all across the country, tech companies are on the hunt for power. They are seeking enormous amounts of electricity to run energy-intensive new data centers, each equivalent in electricity use to the needs of entire cities. As these data centers rapidly hoover up any remaining surpluses of electricity supply, attention has turned to building out new sources of generation.  

Renewable resources, especially wind and solar generation alongside energy storage, are overwhelmingly the fastest and cheapest resources to deploy. Or at least, they should be.  

However, the Trump administration is actively, often illegally, holding back their deployment and antagonistically increasing their costs, while at the same time heavily pressuring companies to embrace the use of fossil fuels. As a result, while there are still large amounts of renewables and storage being added to the system, there is nowhere near as much as there could or should be—and there is a lot more new gas, both on the grid and, increasingly, off. Moreover, demand for gas plants is now so high, and regulatory accountability around resulting pollution is now so low, that it’s not “just” typical gas plants being built, either: it’s also far less efficient, far heavier polluting jet engines, reciprocating internal combustion engines, and what-should-be-back-up generators running full-out, full-time.  

And here’s what makes this bad situation even worse: the slashing of pollution standards is an entirely worthless dealing away of the public interest.  

Beyond the wrongness in principle, there’s also the wrongness in underlying fact. The thing that energy-seeking Big Tech is constrained by is rapid access to power, not cost of power. Their willingness to pay is incredibly high. If fossil-based power plants were rightly held accountable for their pollution harms, the tech companies would pay for plants employing pollution controls. They’d also, of course, be likelier to avoid more gas to start. And for the Trump administration, that’s the catch. 

It’s not about AI. It’s not about Big Tech. It’s about fossil fuels. More specifically, it’s about making fossil fuels win and renewable resources lose, as much for the benefit of special-interest polluters as for the chance to advance a grievance-born, anti-renewables agenda.  

How the Trump EPA is making it easier for data center-related power plants to pollute 

Here are just a few of the ways that EPA is wielding “cannot” to withdraw from the business of holding tech companies to account for the surging pollution generated by their energy-intensive, increasingly fossil-powered data centers. Staggeringly, these lists are not exhaustive. 

Rolling back regulations. Key regulatory rollbacks include:  

• Attempting to strip EPA’s basic ability to regulate power plant carbon dioxide emissions, not just repeal the standards set to limit those emissions (though the agency also proposed to cut those, too). 
• Dramatically weakening standards limiting emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from new gas turbines. 
• Fully striking down rules that strengthened the regulation of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal plants. 
• Proposing to significantly weaken regulations covering toxic wastewater discharged from coal plants and required handling of coal ash. 

Introducing new loopholes, delays, and exemptions. Where EPA has not been able to fully strike or weaken regulations—or to do so on as fast a timeline as it would like—it has adopted other approaches to achieve a similar effect, including: 

• Incorporating new loopholes to enable entire tranches of polluters to slip through; in the recent NOx rule, this included certain exemptions such as for temporary turbines and low-use turbines, as well as hard-coding a conditional exemption for an entire class of turbines if the agency lands a triple-bank-shot of a polluter handout.  
• Delaying implementation timelines until the agency can more fully dismantle the underlying regulations, such as for methane standards covering oil and gas operations (meaning the upstream supply of gas for power plants) as well as coal-related regulations.  
• Setting up a plug-and-play process for coal-fired power plants and other toxic polluters to receive a two-year exemption from complying with certain Clean Air Act requirements.  
• Easing restrictions around how and when emergency backup generators can be operated outside of emergency events.  
• Explicitly and proactively declaring that power plants operating in off-grid configurations fall outside of Acid Rain Program coverage.  
• Adopting a position of non-enforcement for regulations that it does not “prioritize,” in alignment with the broader Trump administration’s guidance to this effect. 

Cutting out the public. At the same time as EPA is rolling back regulations and polluter coverage, it is also attempting to make it harder for the public to be in the know and able to participate. This includes by: 

• Proposing to shield polluters from public awareness by removing a federal public notice-and-comment requirement for “minor” New Source Review-related pollution permits—which is frequently how data center-related fossil generation projects are classified, despite there being nothing minor about their overall pollution footprints.  
• Proposing to make it easier for large sources of pollution, including data center-related projects, to be built before the public has a say, by allowing significant facility construction to occur before actually obtaining a permit.  
• Repeatedly working to hide data around the magnitude, and impacts, of health- and climate-harming pollution, including by proposing to repeal requirements for polluters to measure and report carbon emissions; stopping the use of the social cost of carbon, which translates carbon emissions into economic impacts; and stopping the quantification of public health impacts from changing levels of key pollutants of concern, including particulate matter and ozone. 

This is a staggering array of actions—and it’s only a subset of what EPA is doing to further clear the path for polluting data center infrastructure, alongside so many other polluting industries. Furthermore, EPA’s work is only a subset of the broader administration’s pro-polluter, anti-accountability agenda.  

The consequences of these rollbacks will reverberate for decades 

In the absolute best of cases, the data center buildout would be shaped by an unequivocal prioritization of the public interest, intentional and long-range planning, rigorous standards, meaningful transparency, and a wholesale commitment to accountability—and even then, it would pose a massive challenge to navigate responsibly and effectively.  

Suffice it to say: now is not the best of cases. Indeed, across every one of these issues, the Trump administration is instead careening toward the very worst of cases.  

As a result, communities across the country are being asked to bear entirely avoidable harms and costs, in the here and now and for decades to come. This unchecked, fossil-heavy data center bender is on track to leave the country with a staggering hangover, full stop.  

What shameful, profligate waste.  

Yet there’s another implication, too. Even in the best-case scenario, not one of those interventions would begin to contend with addressing the societal risks and harms, nor capturing the potential opportunities, arising from the deployment of AI as enabled by these data centers. Addressing that gap should be one of the nation’s, and the world’s, foremost issues of the day. But because of the actions of the Trump administration, attention and expertise are being diverted to contend with this entirely preventable, entirely self-inflicted catastrophe instead. 

The necessary recourse, the only recourse, is for people to keep pushing back. To push back against disastrously consequential and inequitable regulatory proposals, to push back against lawmakers enabling this pro-polluter agenda, to push back against reckless and unaccountable projects.  

To push back against an EPA that repeatedly asserts it cannot for the American people, and instead demand an EPA that can.  

This scheme keeps huge chunks of clean energy offline, with real consequences. Here’s where things stand, by the numbers: 

• 5 = number of offshore wind developers involved in the “settlements” 
• 12 = number of leases involved 
• $3.9 billion = amount of US taxpayer money being used for the buyouts 
• 21,000 = megawatts (MW) of potential offshore wind capacity lost without the lease areas 
• 6–8 million = approximate number of households the lost offshore wind capacity could have served, at a minimum 

Add to those figures the number of jobs that aren’t being created as a result of the buyouts, and the economic development that evaporates: a single 1000 MW project could generate more than 3,000 jobs and some $9 billion in US economic output. Also lost in these transactions is the potential for offshore wind to help homes and businesses manage or even cut their energy costs with stably priced power for the long term, while displacing dirty fossil fuel generation and improving the resilience of regional power grids in the face of extreme weather. 

Broken leases, broken laws? 

There’s another important figure that should be on the list in considering this woefully misguided push to take offshore wind off the table: the number of laws that the administration has broken in these deals.  

That last number is still to be determined, but some of those potential laws are the basis of suits against the administration that have been, or are about to be, filed by states that are counting on offshore wind to meet their energy and climate needs. One such case is New York et al., filed in June by New York Attorney General (AG) Letitia James and the attorneys general of six other Northeast states in response to the first of these buyouts. That “deal” involved two leases held by TotalEnergies, one off New York and the other off North Carolina. In July, based on two subsequent buyouts, eight states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, led by Massachusetts AG Andrea Campbell, filed “Notices of Intent to Sue”. California AG Rob Bonta similarly announced the state’s intent to sue over two of the deals involving leases off its shores. 

The illegality of the buyouts is also the subject of various oversight pushes by members of Congress. Those include communications from the Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and multiple communications from the Ranking Members of the Natural Resources and Judiciary Committees of the House of Representatives, Jared Huffman (D-CA) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD), respectively. Other members of Congress followed on with additional questions about some of the deals. 

Here is a taste of some of these laws—and how they may have been broken.  

Administrative Procedure Act – “Arbitrary and capricious” actions don’t fly 

Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in the mid-20^th century “to improve the administration of justice by prescribing fair administrative procedure.” These buyout deals have failed that test in many ways, according to the AGs and members of Congress. 

In their complaint in New York et al., for example, the attorneys general contend that the TotalEnergies New York lease cancellation “is arbitrary and capricious, is not in accordance with law, and occurred without observance of procedure as required by law.” 

If that “arbitrary and capricious” phrase seems familiar, it’s because it is one that has shown up often in court decisions that have struck down other illegal Trump administration actions. Those include the cases involving the “stop work” orders that the administration issued in December 2025 against the five offshore wind projects under construction at the time. The judges for each of the five cases allowed the projects to get back to work after ruling that the administration had shown no good cause for the stoppages. 

In the New York et al. case, plaintiffs similarly argue that “Defendants failed to (1) provide a reasoned explanation for cancelling the Lease; (2) explain their change in position or account for New York’s reliance interests; (3) address alternative means of achieving their objectives; or (4) provide a genuine justification for their actions.” The filing explains in detail each piece of the administration’s actions that appear arbitrary and capricious, and each piece of the other alleged violations of the APA. 

The letter from Reps. Huffman and Raskin, too, points to the APA, noting that the timing of some of the lease buyout processes suggest that the Department of the Interior (DOI) may have illegally relied on a rationale that they didn’t actually have at the time they made their decision: “DOI’s excuse of national security to cancel offshore wind leases may have been fabricated to justify the deal after it was already sealed,” whereas under the APA, “an agency cannot rely on a justification it did not actually have when it made its decision.” 

National Environmental Policy Act – Impacts and alternatives have to be considered  

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires that “all federal agencies … prepare detailed statements assessing the environmental impact of and alternatives to major federal actions significantly affecting the environment.” The statements can be either environmental assessments (EAs) or, for larger projects, environmental impact statements (EISs). These reviews have to provide the opportunity for public comment and consider alternatives.  

Aas the New York et al. plaintiffs point out, the DOI did not prepare an EA or EIS, did not include opportunities for the public to comment, nor did they give consideration of alternatives to proposed actions. Given that the deal in question involves getting rid of a large quantity of offshore wind energy, with all of the implications for the environment that would entail, plaintiffs suggest it is clearly “a major federal action requiring Interior Defendants to consider the impacts of and alternatives to their action.”  

Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act – Laws don’t stop at the water’s edge  

The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), which governs how the federal government manages the seabed off our coasts, features prominently in each of these legal and oversight efforts. The plaintiffs in Massachusetts et al., for example, point out that to cancel a lease under OCSLA, the DOI would be required “to hold a hearing and specifically find that continuing the lease would likely cause serious harm to life, property, national security, or the environment, and further determine that the benefits of cancellation outweigh the benefits of allowing the lease to continue.”  

That didn’t happen. 

As the Mass. et al., New York et al., and California AGs each point out, the law also requires coordination with the governor of any state on any action that “has a direct and significant effect on the outer Continental Shelf or its development.”  

That likewise didn’t happen.  

California underscored the importance of OCSLA for ensuring that the state “gets a say in the offshore wind leasing program and prevent corrupt backroom deals.” 

Judgment Fund Act – The settlement fund isn’t a slush fund 

One of the biggest apparent legal deficiencies of the buyout deals is the source of the funds. The Judgment Fund Act provides resources for settlements coming out of lawsuits or likely lawsuits against the United States. 

The New York et al. plaintiffs note that the settlement fund is for use for compromise settlements between “adverse parties”—and that in this case, there hadn’t been any lawsuit against the administration by the offshore wind leaseholder. As Sen. Whitehouse notes, there was “no evidence that Total had filed any claim in any forum against DOI or any other agency of the US government,” and no evidence of any imminent litigation.  

Sen. Whitehouse and others also point out that the judgment fund is usable only in situations where there aren’t options—which appears not to be the case here, given that OCSLA includes provisions for canceling leases and potentially providing compensation. Reps. Huffman and Raskin state that the Total deal “violates federal law because it does not adhere to the congressionally determined formula for calculating compensation for cancelled leases,” and that “OCSLA is the governing statute in this case.” 

Another challenge to the legality of the deals based on the Judgment Fund is the apparent lack of serious Department of Justice (DOJ) involvement, which would be a prerequisite for tapping the Judgment Fund. Per Reps. Huffman and Raskin, the “only public role” in the Total case for DOJ was a quote from then-US Attorney General Pam Bondi in the press release announcing the deal. 

Antideficiency Act – Agencies can’t spend money that’s not theirs  

The money piece of the buyouts also brings in another important law. The Antideficiency Act “prohibits federal agencies from obligating or expending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation.”—ssentially, agencies can’t spend more than they’ve been given. Sen. Whitehouse points out that “no relevant bureau or office within DOI has sufficient funds to pay Total the nearly $1 billion it has been promised.” 

The New York et al. plaintiffs similarly claim that the NY lease buyout is “in excess of statutory authority” because there’s no law that would authorize them to enter into such a “sham settlement agreement to unlawfully cancel an offshore wind lease and redirect the money paid for the lease to a separate, unauthorized use favored by the President”—in these cases, investment in fossil fuel projects. 

On the broader issue of the “settlement” in the absence of a judicial proceeding, and the source and use of the funds, the letter from Reps. Huffman and Raskin further spell out all kinds of ways this approach, if legal, could be used—including supplanting oil leases with renewable energy investments, for example. “The only requirements would be a hypothetical thread, a side agreement, and a check drawn from a permanent, uncapped federal account that Congress never authorized for this purpose.”  

Under those circumstances, they say, the Judgment Fund could become “the ultimate political slush fund.” The Antideficiency Act “exists to prevent exactly this kind of executive waste, fraud, and abuse.” 

And more 

If this recitation of legal impediments makes the likely illegality of the Trump administration’s actions seem readily apparent, that notion may not be lost on the administration either. These agreements include explicit clauses that claim courts can’t review these agreements in most cases.  

Reps. Huffman and Raskin say in their letter to Total’s CEO that including that language is “not only legally ineffective but almost certainly unconstitutional,” and that its inclusion “suggests that DOI and you both knew this deal was indefensible” and “is itself evidence of consciousness of wrongdoing.”  

What’s next 

Despite the apparent illegality of each of the deals, the most recent “settlement” may not be the last of them, given how enamored the administration seems to be with this approach. That makes legal and oversight efforts like these all the more important.  

On the judicial front, New York et al. is likely to be followed by lawsuits from the group led by Massachusetts and from California based on the Intent to Sue notices, once each has passed the 60-day waiting period required by OCSLA. Other suits may follow. Congressional investigations in parallel with those efforts can help draw more attention to everything lost if the Trump transactions stick. Recently introduced legislation could also get those offshore wind leases back into circulation. 

All of the filings and documents point to one thing: a strong suspicion, based in law, that this scheme is yet another example of the Trump administration using a wrecking ball without regard to process or to legality. Or to the workers, households, businesses, and communities hurt by these reckless decisions. And, again: all with US taxpayer money.

President Trump’s strong authoritarian tendencies have hit the US energy sector, as they have other areas of the economy. For offshore wind, establishing which or how many of these various laws his administration is actually breaking in these buyout deals is key to stopping this brazen attempt to cut the legs out from under a key source of clean renewable energy. 

Offshore wind is too powerful a source—of jobs, energy savings and resilience, community development, and clean renewable energy—for it not to be allowed to live up to its potential.  

Thanks to UCS Schneider Clean Energy Fellow Riya Bhatia for the research help for this post.

There is also a general lack of transparency by the industry as a whole; Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech companies often work through subsidiaries to build data centers, “masking their presence and revealing little about the resources that the facilities consume.” There is no central database providing information for the numbers of data centers currently in operation, under construction, or in the planning stages. And there is no accountability for data center developers and utilities who may see the current landscape as an opportunity for profit.  

For our own data center analysis, UCS used electricity demand projections developed by Evolved Energy Research (which itself draws from a database of existing data centers from Baxtel), and we supplemented this data with news reports about announced projects and utility filings from both public sources and private databases. Private (read, costly) databases such as S&P Global and BloombergNEF have information about individual projects, but these databases are not complete.

We additionally made assumptions about which proposals might be built using data from an Independent System Operator (ISO) and from data purchased from S&P Global. This was not a straightforward process and was in the end both time consuming and costly. Ultimately the electricity demand projections were in the range of other bottom-up projections from national labs and industry studies. And after all of this effort, our projections quickly became outdated as the data center market is rapidly evolving, underscoring the need for both dedicated and transparent reporting by data center developers.  

Without access to precise information on where data centers may be built and how they are operated, utility planners, grid operators, federal, regional, state and local agencies and researchers end up using their best guess at approximations and projections of how much electricity is required at specific places and times, which could lead to inaccurate conclusions, and risks saddling ratepayers and utilities with unneeded costly fossil fuel plants – not what you want when you are making investment decisions that could last for 30 years or more.  

Inaccurate data about electricity demand leads to poor planning of infrastructure expansion. Over-building leads to higher short-term costs and heat-trapping emissions, while under-building leads to reliability issues. Long-term, both lead to even more costs when the problems must inevitably be fixed. 

Developers are rushing to build data centers and are asking utilities to keep up with their proposed increased power requirements. This is a particular problem in many parts of the country;  in states that UCS studied like Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and California, state planning for utilities can have additional challenges (such as having no state Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) process, interstate electricity trading that could lead to even more fossil electricity generation, or states that fast tracked electricity infrastructure for data centers with minimal planning).

The lack of transparency and accountability around data centers in these states and others compounds potential problems with poor planning: utilities can over-build infrastructure, delay coal plant retirements, and can unnecessarily invest in fossil gas capacity. This is costly to consumers, increases pollution, and negatively impacts the health of communities. Communities are often either not provided with information on data center energy use, water consumption, and pollution produced or are straight up given misinformation about data center impacts. Some data centers are proposed in communities that already experience high levels of pollution from energy generation, potentially exacerbating already existing problems. But the possibility of billion dollar investments by data center operators in communities and the lack of planning can cause local decisionmakers to overlook very real risks.  

These policies across many states and at the federal level risk setting us up for a future dependent on fossil fuels. Often, states see data centers as a way to promote local economic growth, spur job creation and increase local tax revenues. State and local governments have been offering data center developers tax discounts and other incentives. These tax breaks have led to massive data center growth in states with larger incentives.

But some states are now beginning to pause (or having the appearance of pausing) and rethink data center-related policies. Texas is seeing a huge loss in state revenue: the Texas governor announced a pause on new data centers for the state Public Utility Commission (PUC) and ERCOT to conduct an audit of projects to be approved, but has allowed the giant Meta $10 billion 1 GW, enough to power 750,000 average US households, data center project to move forward. Minnesota rolled back its data center tax incentives, removing the data center electricity exemption from the state sales tax. Wisconsin removed some data center financing incentives from two municipalities. And New York is the first state to impose a temporary moratorium (through July 2027) on building new data centers of 50 MW or larger until the state has had a chance to evaluate the potential impacts.   

It’s encouraging that these states are slowing down data center development to listen to the concerns of communities, but we also need to do more to ensure a clean, affordable, and healthy electricity system for the electricity load that is imminent. Our recent analysis has shown that the US can meet increased demand from data centers primarily with clean energy while simultaneously phasing down fossil fuels. But we need strong policies to support and accelerate a clean energy transition. And we also need best practices and policy and regulatory changes at the federal, state and regional levels to ensure accountability and smart planning around data centers.  

Increase data center transparency and accountability 

State and federal policymakers need to require that data center developers and utilities be transparent in their contract negotiations and eliminate non-disclosure agreements. There should be public proceedings (with enough notice for communities to make informed decisions) for power purchase agreements and grid interconnections between data centers and utilities. Data centers need to publicly report and be held accountable for their electricity needs, water use, land use, onsite and induced emissions, and other data. Data centers need to be held accountable for any hazardous reliability, environmental, or public health impacts. 

There are some moves at the national level to try to improve data center reporting. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) is moving to require that data centers become registered entities and is currently drafting reliability standards for data centers.  

The NERC draft standards are to establish modeling data requirements, verification, and reporting procedures by data center owners, to ensure that grid operators and utility planners have the site data and information they need from data center owners to “plan, monitor, and assess the reliable operation” of the power system, and to have “adequate data available” from data center owners to ensure reliability and resource adequacy. These NERC standards are a good first step, but the information the data center owners are providing to meet these standards are confidential to NERC and are only focused on grid reliability. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) is also working to collect energy usage data from data centers. At the state and local level, there are efforts to prohibit lawmakers from signing NDAs and some state public utility commissions/public service commissions are working to not allow (as happened in Michigan) utilities to connect data centers through ex parte processes. These efforts should be widely adopted and become standard practice for all data center proposals. 

Require utilities to conduct transparent long-term planning to include data centers 

States need to require utilities to create long-term integrated resource plans (IRPs) that include transparent reporting of electricity demand from data centers, including any projected demand increases (this should cover any projected increases in load including data centers, population changes, changes due to electrification, etc.). Currently only 27 states are considering legislation to regulate data centers. It is important to conduct detailed modeling and analysis to make investment decisions for electricity generation to meet both electricity demand and any state climate and clean energy policies.

These plans, and the assumptions that went into the analysis for the IRPs, need to be made public. State regulators need to demonstrate to their communities that investments made in electricity generation are well planned, to minimize the risk of over- or underbuilding the electricity system. Data center developers need to be held accountable for the additional costs to the electricity system due to their increased load. There should be requirements around new data center loads to eliminate speculation so that rate payers are not stuck with the costs of over-building.  

There is a lot of uncertainty if the increase in electricity demand due to data centers is going to continue, or if the AI bubble is going to “pop”. Investments in data centers and AI infrastructure has greatly exceeded data center revenue, which is worrying investors. When the AI bubble bursts we will be stuck with way more electricity generating capacity and other data center infrastructure than we need: investments that are “stranded” and beg the question of who pays the bill. As these IRPs are being developed, utilities should be cautious and need to place more emphasis on near-term projects that have already made significant financial commitments.  

The data center boom is currently outpacing our electricity system’s ability to respond, already driving up electricity rates. Our federal, state and local governments need time to evaluate our complex electricity system, with its aging and polluting infrastructure and increasing electricity demand. We need accurate data enforced through standardized reporting requirements to make informed investment decisions for the size and type of new electricity generating capacity to build, where and when to meet this new demand, to keep electricity costs affordable and to limit the impacts of climate change.

This degree of data transparency must also be extended to water use and other environmental impact reporting. We need good data to develop policies to encourage investments in renewable energy and keep electricity costs affordable. Accurate data is essential for developing smart plans and making informed decisions to provide all consumers with clean affordable power. The first step to ensuring clean and affordable energy for consumers is an informed group of decision-makers that keep AI and utilities accountable for their impacts and investments to our grid.   

New study links emissions from fossil fuel producers to western water crisis 

Water in the western US is defined by widespread scarcity, in part due to a timing mismatch. Most water falls as snow in the winter, is stored as snowpack, and then melts during the warm season, when it can be used, primarily for agriculture. Major feats of engineering like canals, aqueducts, and reservoirs have buffered against this mismatch, enabling industrial agriculture and rapid population growth despite dwindling and overallocated rivers.  

Climate change is adding pressure to an already precarious situation, threatening the livelihoods, ecosystems, and economy of the region. The events of 2026 show the harms that climate change is already inflicting and the threat that unchecked emissions pose to our future.  

First, an extreme March heatwave decimated snowpack, meaning that a huge amount of water melted earlier than usual, and now is not available for the growing season. Of the five major basins in the region, three saw the lowest April 1st snowpack ever recorded , the time of year when snow accumulation historically peaks.  

A recently published paper dubbed these heat events ‘snow-eaters’ because of how they decimate snowpack The study also showed that these heatwaves have increased in frequency and intensity since the mid-1880s. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global authority on consensus climate science, concluded with virtual certainty that extreme heat events are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, suggesting that heat events which pose major threats to water availability will continue to occur into the future. 

Next, the region’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead—which supplies water to more than 25 million people throughout the western United States—has also hit a new low, falling several inches below the previous record set in 2022.  

While water has always been limited in the western US, these examples highlight the ways fossil-fueled climate change is pushing the system to the brink.   

Our new peer-reviewed research, Wringing the West Dry, highlights how for snowpack, streamflow, and irrigation demand in the Western US, nearly half of the impacts due to climate change between 2014 and 2024 can be traced to emissions from the 122 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. This research adds to a growing body of evidence linking major fossil fuel companies—including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell—to the harms of climate change being experienced by communities around the world, and highlights the important role that scientists can play in informing accountability. 

1. Advance Legally-Relevant Research  

Scientific engagement is a key component of both litigation and legislation that seeks to hold major polluters accountable.  

Attribution science identifies and quantifies the contribution of climate change to global trends, extreme events, and their impacts, allowing scientists to quantify how climate change is directly shaping the lived experience of communities across the world. Source attribution, a subdiscipline and growing field that includes our newly published study, quantifies how specific sources of emissions, sectors, actors, or nations have contributed to climate change and its impacts. Research in this field has traced emissions from the Carbon Majors, the largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, to their consequences, including global temperature increase, ocean acidification, sea level rise, area burned in forests of the western US, and extreme heatwaves and their impacts.  

In pursuing accountability, attribution evidence goes hand-in-hand with social science and archival research that outlines how major fossil fuel companies deceived the public about climate change, even when their own internal research clearly showed the risks that continued use of their products posed.   

Our recent report, Research Priorities for Climate Litigation, identifies ten other types of research that lawyers need to advance litigation,  extending far beyond climate science. From public health experts to economists to stewards of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, well-communicated scientific information and insights are a critical component of ongoing and future accountability efforts.  

To learn more about how to use your expertise, sign up for the Science Hub for Climate Litigation newsletter and explore our Research on the Record toolkit. 

2. Stand up for science and democracy  

Scientists can be important advocates for evidence-based decision making, especially when it comes to accountability. Scientific research and scientists themselves have come under attack during the second Trump administration, threatening not only the advancement of critical research in the US, but also our ability to hold big polluters accountable. UCS has tracked the explosion of attacks on science, illustrating how sidelining scientists, rolling back regulations on forever chemicals, and degrading infrastructure to monitor and predict extreme weather can harm communities across the country.  

When it comes to climate accountability, the fossil fuel industry and its politically appointed allies are pulling out all the stops to intimidate scientists, manufacture controversy about widely accepted research, and block judges from accessing factual, reliable scientific information about climate change. These attacks follow the same playbook used by powerful industries for decades to distract, discredit, and deny research that threatens their bottom lines.   

In the face of this assault, scientists have stood up to these attacks and made a meaningful difference in resisting and reversing many of the anti-science actions of this administration. UCS has used the legal system to hold this administration accountable, including by securing the dissolution of the sham Climate Working Group led by well-known climate contrarians, and fighting against the administration’s goal of removing factual information from our National Parks.  

Join the movement of scientists pushing back on this administration’s anti-science agenda.  

3. Tell your Congressperson: No immunity for Big Oil  

Amidst these attacks on scientific evidence that can inform climate lawsuits, Big Oil is pursuing an even more brazen strategy to evade accountability: lobbying our elected representatives in Congress to pass immunity legislation, much like the liability waiver Congress passed to protect the gun industry in 2005. This would prevent science from being heard in court and impose barriers to justice for those harmed by the industry’s products and practices.  

Several state legislatures, including Utah, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, have already passed their own versions of liability waivers, and Representative Harriet Hageman and Senator Ted Cruz have introduced legislation on the federal level that, if passed, would eliminate pathways to accountability for the communities most harmed by the consequences of climate change.  

Scientists can reach out to their members of Congress to ensure that communities across the country have access to justice through the courts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for their deception and the harms caused by their products.  

This evocative metaphor is a key part of the oil industry’s narrative about why the state’s gas prices are so volatile. Chevron and its astroturf proxies have spent millions on ads, billboards and direct mail to make sure you hear that the state’s regulatory environment is making it impossible for oil companies to supply fuel at fair prices.  

But what if I told you these companies were disingenuous?  

Well, that is true: the oil industry has spent staggering amounts to proliferate the energy island narrative while simultaneously advocating against bridges to connect the island to the mainland. And the brazenness with which they are wielding their ability to control the supply and, thus, the price of gasoline over consumers would raise the eyebrows of even the most seasoned, jaded Sacramento observer. 

Big oil’s favorite cost-driver  

California has a unique gasoline blend. It is called CARBOB for short (which stands for California Reformulated Gasoline for Oxygenate Blending) and is a much-maligned, oft-cited reason for California’s expensive gasoline. And for good reason.  

Not only is it slightly more expensive to produce, but it also makes the state’s fuel market fragile. Only a small number of mostly in-state refineries make this gasoline on a regular basis. The market power created by the combination of limited CARBOB producers and an inflexible market is a big contributor to the state’s “Mystery Gasoline Surcharge.”  

Other factors are also important, including the control of in-state refining by an ever-shrinking number of companies, control by these same companies over pricing at branded gas stations through restrictive contracts, and other physical and market barriers to competition. According to the latest analysis of the California Division of Petroleum Market Oversight, the resulting Mystery Gas Surcharge is an extra 41 cents per gallon Californians pay at the pump, after adjusting for differences in taxes, fees and other state-specific costs. At major brand stations the surcharge is even higher, 75 cents a gallon, and the cumulative impact of the cost California consumers over $59 billion in extra payments for gasoline between 2015 and 2024.  

In other parts of the country, when a refinery has an unplanned outage or there are global supply constraints, gasoline-sellers can simply bring in fuel from a nearby refinery or ship, and consumers barely notice. 

In California, we pay a serious price at the pump when there’s a supply disruption because our unique gasoline blend is not readily available. It can take weeks after a disruptive event to get California gasoline produced (often in South Korea or India), loaded on to ships, and delivered to the state. Meanwhile, consumers are paying a premium at the pump. 

If gasoline sellers in California had access to an abundant, affordable supply, the state would be more resilient, and consumers would pay less. 

But alas, oil majors want the state to keep clutching California gasoline standards to limit supply and reap in windfall profits. This is a great deal for big oil, but consumers are paying the price at the pump. 

Marginal emission reductions at maximal cost

California’s leadership on gasoline requirements was a crucial part of air quality improvements over the last few decades, as we’ve seen with how much Los Angeles smog has decreased.  

The federal government saw California’s success at reducing toxic air pollution and updated their gasoline regulations three times in the past few decades. Now, California’s gasoline is only marginally cleaner than gas sold in other states.  

Another thing has changed in the decades since California updated its gasoline regulations: the vehicle fleet. Vehicles regulations in California and federally have significantly improved the emissions controls in gas-powered cars.  

So, California’s gasoline is not much cleaner than other abundant, cheaper gasolines and cleaner gasoline only really matters for the emissions of cars made before 2004 when vehicle regulations started being the key driver of emission reductions. 

The state’s unique gasoline blend is more problematic than ever because market consolidation in refining and retail means that problems that harm consumers benefit refiners, and there is not enough competition for the market to fix the problem without making changes that facilitate competition.   

A better way for consumers and the climate

The California Energy Commission (CEC) included a clunkily named, elegantly conceived idea in their 2024 Transportation Fuels Assessment: A Non CARBOB Fee Based Variance. 

The idea is that the state could allow for the sale of the gasoline most other states use with a 25 cent per gallon fee to help with supply constraints. This would stabilize gasoline supply and could put a cap on the premium California drivers pay for their gasoline.  

When the CEC proposed this idea, they were uncertain how it would impact air quality. UCS stepped in with analysis showing that if the fee revenue is directed to replacing old, dirty cars, the emissions increase from dirtier gasoline would be effectively offset.  

“Fee” is often seen as a dirty word, but this fee is important for two reasons: 

1. It would pay for the marginal emissions impact of using dirtier gasoline. UCS analysis shows that if this fee was directed towards the replacement of pre 2004 vehicles, it would effectively mitigate emissions in the first year of replacement and pay long-term climate and pollution dividends. 
   
2. Dropping California’s regulation entirely could destabilize the market, potentially accelerating additional refinery closures. The fee works to protect jobs and in state supply because when there is no California supply problem, it would not make sense to pay a fee to sell non-California gasoline.   
   
3. The fee is voluntary and would only ever reduce gasoline prices because gasoline sellers would only pay a fee to sell alternative gasoline when California gasoline is more expensive than the fee due to supply constraints. 

Our analysis showed the CEC idea was a win for consumers, a win for air quality and big win for drivers of old, inefficient and polluting cars that get help upgrading to a new or used EV and don’t have to buy gasoline at all. 

Brilliant, right? 

So, what’s big oil’s deal?

UCS sponsored a bill by Assemblymember Hart, AB 2672, which would have made this idea a reality. The Western State’s Petroleum Association (a trade group of major oil companies) opposed it and the bill was stalled after overwhelming passing its first committee.  

Then, we tried again with SB 1245 by Senator Stern which would have simply required the state to implement a strategy to allow for the sale of non-California gasolines if state agencies found that doing so would benefit consumers without undermining fuels supply. Again, Big Oil opposed it and stopped it.   

Even with a fee to protect their in-state refineries, Big Oil is unwilling to limit their ability to profiteer and make consumers pay outrageous prices when there’s a supply constraint.  

Fighting this proposal while constantly bemoaning California’s burdensome regulations displays an absurd level of hypocrisy. It shows the lengths the industry is willing to go to maintain their immense leverage over working Californians who have no choice but to pay the ungodly prices imposed by these companies. 

A path forward

Policymakers in Sacramento should take a sober look at whether keeping an outdated regulation solely to make sure oil companies can extract maximum profits from their constituents is a good idea. 

Updating California’s gasoline regulations to be more fungible while maintaining emission benefits is achievable and essential. It may take some time and must involve conversations with industry and labor to make sure it does not have unintended consequences.  

In the meantime, allowing the sale of non California gasoline with a fee will help stabilize supply, mitigate emissions and protect in-state refiners and jobs.   

Elected leaders should reject the oil lobby’s argument that price spikes caused by a disconnected market are simply a price California consumers must keep paying to keep big oil happy and, instead, get us all off this fuel island.  

Water defines so much of our lives: what we plant, where we build, how we spend our leisure time. Here in the Western US, water is precious, as its supply has always been limited. Because of this, huge amounts of time, money, and labor have been poured into increasing water availability, resulting in aqueducts and canals that bring water from mountainous regions to otherwise dry regions for agriculture or cities, and massive dams that store water for the hot and dry months.

The often dramatic history of water management in the Western US has been a central part of our story, inspiring stories like the film Chinatown. But just like the movie, our waterways have aged, and perhaps not aged well. They were designed in an era of more plentiful water. Today, we face a very different reality. In recent decades, due to increasingly warmer temperatures leading to drier years, fossil-fueled climate change has brought in an era of even greater limitations to our water.

Our biggest reservoir: the mountain snowpack

While we do get water from some local sources in the western US (e.g. local groundwater or reservoirs), around half of runoff comes from winter snowpack. In mountainous regions like the Sierra Nevada or Cascades, it can be up to 75%. Except for the US Southwest—which gets summer rains carried in by the North American Monsoon—most of our precipitation comes in the cold, winter months. In California, most of our precipitation has historically come in just a handful of winter storms, some of which carry so much water that they can act as ‘drought busters.’

This fact is crucial to understanding our water supply: when that precipitation falls in our high mountain regions, it’s cold enough that it falls as snow. As such, our winter snowpack functions as our largest reservoir. Whereas rain requires an actual reservoir to hold that water for summer months, snowpack holds onto its water content until it gets warm enough to melt. That water content, or Snow Water Equivalent (SWE), generally peaks around April 1, after which, as winter gives way to spring, snow begins to melt, running off into our rivers and streams, meaning snowpack acts as a bridge between when the moisture comes in (winter), holding onto water until it’s needed (spring-summer).

We get in trouble when our snowpack fails, as we saw this year. Across much of the western US, our snowpack was abysmal—from California to the Colorado Basin to the Pacific Northwest, we experienced our lowest to second-lowest April 1 snowpack on record. This record-low snow drought was made 4 times more likely by climate change. Our warm winter meant that precipitation came in heavy and warm, at times falling as rain on top of the snowpack. This was followed by a warmer-than-average spring, including a record-breaking heatwave, leading to the rapid melt of the already small snowpack. While this year was remarkable, spring temperatures have been warming significantly over the past two decades, with an increase in these types of ‘snow eater’ heatwaves.

Dramatic reductions in snowpack mean we have a longer window of dry conditions, with huge implications for the health and wellbeing of our ecosystems, human health, and infrastructure. We’ve seen what this means when it comes to fire. Our forests are historically adapted to plentiful water supplied by a late-melting snowpack. When the snowpack fails to accumulate, or melts early, forests can become bone-dry, ready to burn on a hot windy day. Moreover, when wet winters are followed by hot summers, dry grasses become tinder. We saw how this can play out in Spokane, Washington, earlier this month.

And a low snowpack, crucially, spells trouble for water resources. Lake Mead just broke records by reaching its lowest level ever recorded. And the hot, dry season is when agriculture, which sucks up the most water, comes online.

Our biggest water user: agriculture

I learned from a young age to conserve water by taking shorter showers and turning off the tap while brushing my teeth. While these things matter, they are such a small slice of the (water) pie: Western US water is mostly used for industrialized, irrigated agriculture, ranging from 74% of developed water in the Colorado Basin to 80% in Washington to more than 90% in California’s San Joaquin Valley. This multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry produces crops consumed from the East Coast to China to Saudi Arabia.

In fact, much of the water infrastructure across the Western US was designed to bring agriculture to regions that were historically water-poor but have plenty of sun and fertile soils. Today, however, many basins in the western US are already overallocated, operating at the tail end of what they were designed for. And when those surface water supplies fail to materialize or when local demand surges, groundwater has been used to fill the gap.

In the agricultural-intensive San Joaquin Valley, so much groundwater has been used for the past century that groundwater declined by ~12mm/year during 1962-2021, leading to dramatic land subsidence (or sinking) of up to 30 feet in some regions.

Since the onset of the megadrought in the 2000s, groundwater decline in California has accelerated. This has been in part due to lower snowpack, and in part due to greater water demand from irrigation due to warmer temperatures from climate change.

Irrigation comes online in spring with the start of the growing season, and extends into summer until harvest time. As you may remember from biology class, plants need water to photosynthesize. They ‘breathe’ in carbon dioxide, then store that carbon and emit oxygen. As part of this process, plants move water up from the soil then out through their leaves through tiny pores called stomata. On a hot, dry day (i.e. low humidity), more water evaporates into the air due to a strong difference, or gradient, between the water content on the leaf and the water content in the air. This process—evapotranspiration—is strongly related to the temperature and water content of the atmosphere. The problem is that this demand for water or ‘thirstiness’ of the atmosphere rises exponentially with temperature, in fact by 7% per degree Celsius.

To visualize this process, think of the air as a giant sponge. When the sponge is dry (i.e. the humidity is low), it sucks up water from the ground below. Warmer air can hold more water, so as temperatures increase due to climate change, that sponge gets bigger and can draw even more water out of the land surface—including plants.

Therefore, as climate change increases temperatures—especially in the warmer spring and summer months—it also increases that thirstiness, which translates to greater demand for crop irrigation. That water has to come from somewhere, and if there isn’t enough surface water being delivered from snowmelt, farmers turn to groundwater.

Climate change is largely due to the combustion of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and gas. Ironically, in places like the San Joaquin Valley, there are oil wells peppered throughout agricultural fields. In these places, the two industries compete for water: agriculture pumps water for irrigation while oil pumps use water to extract even more oil. Rural communities bear the brunt of these impacts since residential wells are shallower than industry’s wells and hence dry up first, and these communities then breathe in and drink up polluted air and water.

The full picture

This all adds up to a water system pushed to the brink. Declining snowpack means less water is available while a thirstier atmosphere means water demand will only increase. So what do we do? This is a problem with no easy fixes.

California Governor Newsom’s proposed to expand the state’s reservoirs, but reservoirs can increase downstream flood risk during wet years, which we expect to see more of with climate change, and even dispossess tribes of culturally important lands.

Other proposals tackle multiple issues at once, such as placing solar panels over canals or in agricultural fields (“agrivoltaics”), which both reduce evaporation of water by shading the area as well as help move us away from greenhouse-gas emitting energy sources.

Efforts to pursue climate accountability from major emitters, through litigation or climate superfund laws, also play an important role in ensuring that companies that have contributed the most to climate change pay their fair share.

Any effective measures to protect our water will require systemic changes and cooperation that aim much higher than our individual efforts to take shorter showers. However, water conservation on its own isn’t going to cut it if we don’t address climate change. It’s past time for our decisionmakers to be realistic about what our changing climate means for equitable management of and access to water.

This past July, Blake and computer scientists across the US were granted temporary relief when a federal court blocked the Trump administration from enforcing its unconstitutional policy of censorship at the border. The court’s decision in response to a legal case by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) also came shortly after two international scholarly associations in computing stood up publicly for scientists like Blake.

In June, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, stated that “scientific progress depends on freedom of inquiry, communication, global mobility, and international collaboration… without undue political or institutional pressure.” The Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) affirmed similar values the same month and expressed support for the legal case.

The lawsuit and public statements respond to the federal government’s attempts to control science by controlling the flow of researchers. In May 2025, the State Department announced a policy of excluding noncitizens who study misinformation, fact-checking, content moderation, and regulatory compliance in the technology industry. The policies were later expanded to include deportation. Such restrictions are similar in spirit to policies in China and other countries that selectively vet scholars for overseas travel based on the content of their research.

This censorship-by-visa scheme also affects the technology industry by preventing safety teams from international travel. Trust and safety workers at tech firms maintain a 24-hour watch over child sexual abuse, harmful scams, and human trafficking. According to industry leaders Charlotte Willner and David Sullivan, the State Department policy is “undermining the urgent fight against criminals who abuse online services to exploit everyone from children to the elderly.”

Why would the US threaten scientists who study the safety of AI and social media at a time when their expertise is in high demand worldwide? According to the State Department, these policies protect Americans from “encroachments” that “undermine the… right to free speech.”

Writing in Science this January, former White House official Alondra Nelson offered a different explanation: US promises of protection from burdensome rules are a cover for maximizing discretion in who the government punishes, rewards, and controls through ownership. By threatening officials and researchers, those in power can tip the digital scale in favor of firms and political actors who are closest to them in a hierarchy of patronage. In this system of punishment by discretion, people are incentivized to keep their heads down or say what they think the government wants to hear.

Censorship at the border rewires science

In an era where people can easily publish ideas and find an audience online, how much damage can a travel and immigration policy actually do to the integrity of science and industry? This kind of censorship achieves tectonic changes through three mechanisms: intimidation, peer influence, and the most consequential and invisible impact: fair selection.

Censorship most directly works through intimidation when people worry that constitutionally-protected ideas might expose them to retaliation from the government. For example, an expert on social media and child safety might reasonably wonder if they or their family will be targeted if they speak at a professional conference. Faced with vague language from authorities and silence from their own institutions, they face tremendous pressure to self-censor—keeping quiet or changing their work entirely. A representative survey of scientists in the US in January found that 47% of researchers have reframed their work and 36% have abandoned plans for at least one project due to concerns about negative consequences.

Academic self-censorship rates are so high because intimidation also sends shock waves throughout a community through peer effects. When people see others hiding and changing their work, they update what psychologists call social norms—expectations about what others consider expected behavior. When each person backs down and there are no counter-examples, dozens of others see it and adjust accordingly. The chilling effect spreads further.

The most pervasive effects of censorship hijack fair institutional rules to enlist organizations as unwitting accomplices. Both academia and industry are hierarchies of scarcity that frequently review people’s records when deciding who to hire, promote, and recognize. When one person looks less productive on paper, they are sometimes passed over in favor of someone who has more grants, publications, or other accomplishments. Under systems of intimidation and fear, seemingly impartial processes will tend to reward whoever is least targeted by censorship. When cohorts of leaders are filled with people who were lucky, clueless, or compliers, the fruit of intimidation can last a generation.

I imagine Blake wonders if intimidation or selection explains why they have been passed up for opportunities since the US censorship policy started, despite being a widely recognized leader in their field. In computing, the effects of censorship are most likely to impede women and underrepresented minorities, who systematically take on the most challenging social issues in our fields and already face reduced status as a result. If we’re not careful, the tech sector will face a cumulative, generational setback from government intimidation, undoing even the paltry gains that computing has made to engage more inclusively with society.

Since censorship exerts control through selection, individual efforts to keep a low profile also make us into unwitting accomplices by increasing the risk for others. That’s why the best response is to stand together—something that the ACM, AOIR, and CITR have chosen to do in powerful ways.

Making science resilient to intimidation

What can individuals and institutions do in the face of government attempts to shape science and industry through intimidation?

Institutions can protect our people and our fields by standing up to intimidation. Direct, public support can take several forms. When successful, legal challenges from organizations like CITR can protect basic rights while shielding individuals from retaliation. Public statements from professional organizations like the AOIR and ACM can dampen the damage of censorship’s peer effects. Statements also provide a powerful signal to admissions, hiring, and promotion deciders to resist the censorship of selection by acknowledging the courage of people who take on important, risky topics.

This leadership will come from small and medium-sized organizations that have less to lose. But even large organizations can help by offsetting the costs of censorship on targeted researchers and by supporting the organizations that fight to protect our rights.

Leaders can use our voices, our networks, resources, and power to redirect the inertia that turns us into unwitting accomplices. Often simple acts like speaking up in a hiring or promotion meeting can reorient key decisions away from the gravity of censorship into a better orbit. We can also organize our fields to enable people to contribute equitably even when they face government restrictions. When we design our teams and conferences for remote, secure participation at the core, our fields will also protect the environment and become more inclusive of people with disabilities.

Individuals can build resilience among our peers by educating ourselves and by championing the careers of people affected by government threats. Because censorship works through peer effects and field level selection, we are most effective when we work together. That’s why it’s especially important to support organizations like CITR that use collective power to stand up for our rights.

For Blake, the court decision and public statements from ACM and AOIR are a welcome, if temporary, change. With governments around the world rushing to regulate AI and social media, their research has never been more in demand. As Blake goes on the job market, it’s fair to ask: will the tech industry and scientific establishment account for these threats or let government intimidation succeed? The answer is up to us.

While the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has been documenting and publicizing such attacks for more than 20 years, the pace, scale, and scope of attacks since January 2025 has been dizzying, and incredibly damaging to our safety, health, and environment. (For context, UCS recorded 207 attacks during the entire first Trump administration, 96 during the two terms of George W. Bush, and 21 during the Obama and Biden administrations combined.)

With the Trump administration unleashing an average of more than 30 attacks each month, UCS needed a more robust and effective system for keeping track of them. Dr. Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst with the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS, took the lead on a new multipurpose tool that not only tracks attacks on science, but offers anyone who wants to use it the data they need to fight back.

What is the new Attacks on Science Tracker? How can people use it?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: The Attacks on Science Tracker is an interactive analytical platform that presents data on such attacks, along with potential scientific integrity violations, all in one place. It has a lot of different uses and interactive features that allows users from any area, any expertise, any interest level—basically, any person who cares about science—to narrow in on the data that they are interested in, with visualizations.

What’s really cool about it is that users can look at attacks in isolation, or explore patterns, or how different variables intersect with one another, just in the tool alone. People can use this data and connect it to other sources for any type of purpose that they would want—I think of it as a “choose your own adventure” kind of resource. For scientists and researchers, there are endless possibilities for creating custom research products. And it can also be used just for curiosity’s sake, or if someone’s interested in becoming more involved in science advocacy.

For example, if someone wants to write a letter to the editor, or author an op-ed on a topic that they’re particularly passionate about, then the Tracker can be used to help inform the content. In a UCS webinar last month, I walked audience members through an example of how they can use the Tracker to help develop talking points for in-district meetings with their members of Congress. Our team wanted to create something that can be used for many different purposes, by people with different levels of expertise and familiarity with scientific policies.

What rises to the level of an attack on science to be included in the tool?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: Attacks on science, in general terms, are instances of political interference in the federal government. Our Attacks on Science Tracker categorizes 11 different types of attacks and seven attack topics—e.g., climate science—to contextualize how this is happening and why it matters. Anyone who’s curious about how we arrived at these classifications can review our methodology.

How does the Attacks on Science Tracker differ from previous UCS efforts to record and monitor attacks on science under different presidential administrations?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: The Tracker is the front-facing product component of it that everyone sees. But the methodology behind that—how the data is collected, screened, analyzed, organized to feed into it—has been updated. The new methodology is based on over two decades of UCS research and advocacy documenting attacks on science. Now, scripts automate the collection and organization of news coverage of attacks on science, and our team analyzes the data to identify and categorize attacks. This will allow us to document and record these attacks much more efficiently and consistently, and in perpetuity.   

Why is it so important to document these attacks on science?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: Documenting is just one part of this work, and it’s important for folks who are interested in pursuing litigation, or in helping to connect the dots between different attacks on science and impacts that we see down the line. There’s a whole host of uses for people who want that record.

But the Tracker also presents an opportunity to think forward: to have a clear sense of what has been attacked and dismantled, and what can be reimagined or rebuilt, to be able to better serve the public and keep people safe.

In my view, it also highlights the need to protect the role of scientific integrity in government decisionmaking. The Tracker suggests how potential scientific integrity violations could be prevented by implementing protections like those in the Scientific Integrity Act. This bill, which has some bipartisan support, is currently being debated in the House and Senate. It would reinforce federal science against political interference in all scientific agencies. It would be more consistent than agency-specific policies, and would also be more resistant to changes coming from executive orders.

Our team has presented the Tracker to members of Congress who have signed on to the Scientific Integrity Act, and members who are interested in signing on. It’s pretty stark evidence to support these protections.

The Tracker has been live for about two months! How has it been received by the people now using it?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: Overall, there’s been a very positive reception. Our team has been getting good feedback on how useful it’s been for different purposes—from supporters, from our colleagues at UCS, and from partner organizations. I’ve been presenting the Tracker to different partners to learn how they’re interested in using the tool and how they can plug it into their own work, and they’ve been sharing different use cases of the tracker in response.

Did anything surprise you or stand out to you as you worked on the Tracker? What are you hoping people will take away from it?

Jules Barbati-Dajches: For me, what stood out the most about what we’ve recorded in the Tracker is the frequency of attacks on health and safety. That means the physical, mental, emotional, or social health and safety of people, groups, and communities. So many of these attacks are negatively impacting our safety and well-being.

And as a takeaway: People should know that we created this tool for anyone who cares about science. I hope that people feel like they can use it for whatever purpose will serve them best, and whatever will help them advocate for scientific protections and evidence-informed policy.

Now, as the next phase of tailpipe regulations of truck engines is set to go into effect, the technology enabling these emissions reductions is being attacked by both the Trump EPA and Congress. These proposals attack the ability to set regulations and enforce them to ensure emissions reductions in the lab result in emissions reductions in the real world. And it comes as the result of heavy lobbying by special interest groups including Big Ag, drivers through organizations like the Owner-Operator and Independent Driver Association (OOIDA) and the American Bus Association, trucking fleets, and truck manufacturers.

Diesel emissions control systems are incredibly efficient, cutting emissions by 90 percent or more, so anything that undermines that technology can result in emissions increases of 10X or more. Below I walk through how these controls have been so successful and the attacks that could completely obliterate any reductions in emissions made to date by the trucking sector.

How cleaner trucks cut soot pollution

In response to EPA regulations, new trucks deployed aftertreatment systems to significantly reduce the pollution resulting from diesel combustion. These systems are called “aftertreatment” because rather than reducing emissions within the engine (say, through more efficient combustion), they are deployed downstream of the engine and work to reduce the component materials of the exhaust itself.

Beginning with the 2007 model year, new diesel trucks meeting strong particulate matter (PM) standards began to deploy diesel particulate filters (DPFs), which do exactly what is said: filter particulate matter from diesel exhaust. DPFs cut particulate matter from diesel trucks by over 90 percent, critical emissions reductions given the negative impacts of soot on health and the carcinogenic nature of diesel particulate.

How cleaner trucks cut smog-forming NO_x pollution

In addition to cutting particulate matter, since 2010 EPA standards have resulted in trucks deploying selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems to cut smog-forming NO_x pollution. SCR systems inject diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) into the diesel engine exhaust. Under high heat the urea-based DEF turns into ammonia vapor that reacts within the SCR system to neutralize the NO_x pollution from the engine, forming nitrogen gas and water.

Because the SCR system is an aftertreatment system, the efficiency of the catalyst is critical to cutting NO_x pollution. Modern diesel engines typically emit between 3 and 4 grams of NO_x per brake-horsepower-hour (bhp-hr is a measure of work); with aftertreatment, trucks already on the road today can cut that to below 0.2 g NO_x/bhp-hr, and engine manufacturers are responding to next year’s standards to drop that even further to 0.035 g/bhp-hr.

However, anything that impairs the efficiency of the SCR system has a dramatic impact on the total emissions from the truck. For example, real world measurements of pollution from 2010-compliant trucks turned out to be much higher than anticipated under the types of low-speed operation near ports and warehouses because those older SCR systems were running too cold to be maximally effective.

A number of actions the Trump administration and Congress are seeking to make SCR systems even less effective, or even non-existent, increasing NO_x emissions nationwide and threatening public health.

How regulators incentivize compliance with emissions regulations

The trucking industry has a long history of opposing attempts to clean up the sector. In fact, in response to EPA’s regulation, a cottage industry developed around Class 8 trucks to sell new truck bodies with old truck engines, a pollution loophole resulting from a number of truckers wanting to avoid emissions control systems. There’s also been widespread tampering with diesel engines, illegal activity which the Trump administration and Congress are now trying to absolve.

Since the pollution from a truck is dependent upon those emissions controls acting properly, it is critical that any failure in the emissions control system is dealt with ASAP. Emissions from a post-2010 truck with a faulty SCR system has about 10 times the pollution impact of a truck with a working SCR system—a small number of faulty trucks and/or a small number of miles driven under sub-optimal conditions can add up to big harms quickly.

In order to ensure that truckers handle any failures to the emissions control systems quickly, EPA uses so-called “inducements” that affect the truck’s operation to encourage drivers to fix the issue immediately. Upon detection of a fault, the truck will notify the driver, typically with both a “check engine” light on the dash and an accompanying auditory notification. After this condition exists for a certain period of time/distance traveled, if the issue has not yet been dealt with the next step is what is called a derate—the engine’s power/torque will be throttled, e.g., to 50 percent of maximum power. After this phase is triggered, the inducement cycle will then look for a safe harbor to institute a final limitation—upon parking, for example, the vehicle will be limited to low-speed operation only, e.g., 5 mph.

The goal of the inducement is to be severe enough to push the driver to proceed to the nearest service center to handle any fault while providing enough latitude to do so, with the vehicle typically capable of traveling a couple hundred miles before the final level of inducement. These inducements were set by EPA via industry guidance after both an industry workshop and notice-and-comment process where the trucking industry and manufacturers all weighed in.

Trump EPA attacks emissions controls through guidances and rulemaking

Truckers do not like the fact that inducements affect operability of the vehicle, a major reason for the existence of the highly polluting glider trucks noted earlier. As a result, they’ve lobbied both Congress and EPA to eliminate any inducements. And, unfortunately, some policymakers have followed through on that request.

While issues with premature failure of Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) sensors have led to some disruptive derates, this is a problem solved with the redundancy of the emissions control systems as well as stronger warranty provisions set to go into effect next year. Yet industry has instead shown its true colors by pushing for total elimination of ties between vehicle performance and the emissions controls limiting pollution from those vehicles.

First, EPA blew wide open the window for the inducements—rather than a couple hundred miles, trucks could now travel thousands of highly polluting miles with little repercussion, a loophole some in Congress have sought to enshrine in law through the  “Diesel Engine Flexibility Act” or the “DEF Act”, along with a 10-year freeze even as new standards go into effect next year. Under this guidance, a single emissions control failure could emit as much pollution as the truck would emit over the course of an entire year before the final “limp mode” derate took effect.

But even worse, now EPA is threatening to do away with inducements altogether in a newly proposed rule, replacing them with a mere “check engine” light and auditory warning, something which is already required and has repeatedly been ignored by truckers (or they would not experience deratement). Surveys of car drivers show that up to half drive with a “check engine” light for up to 18 months to delay repair costs—given that we know truckers routinely ignore emissions-related notifications until deratement and have even more pointed concerns around cost, there is no reason to expect the share of truckers responding to these notifications to be any higher. And yet the costs of such failure would be devastating.

If just 1 percent of trucks operate without a fully functioning SCR system, they could generate roughly as much emissions as the remaining 99 percent.

As noted earlier, the NO_x emissions of a Class 8 engine are around 3 or 4 g/bhp-hr, about 100 times the required average certification level for 2027 and newer engines. If just 1 percent of trucks operate without a fully functioning SCR system, they could generate roughly as much emissions as the remaining 99 percent. If just 6 percent of truckers ignore the proposed “check engine” light, the rule could be no more effective than the current 2010-era standards. And yet the survey data suggests 6 percent may be a gross underestimate of the size of this problem.

Of course, the only thing worse than not having inducements to keep emissions controls operating properly is to not have strong emissions controls in the first place. But EPA is proposing to allow manufacturers to buy their way out of compliance with the standards through “non-compliance penalties”—and manufacturers are jumping at the chance. Major engine manufacturers like Cummins and PACCAR have already said that they’re going to pay up to continue selling older, more polluting engines even though they already have engines that meet the next set of standards.

Emissions controls are necessary to reduce public harm from trucking

A new tractor-trailer engine will be on the road for about 1 million miles. EPA is proposing to cut the warranty requirements of the engine (and therefore the warranty requirements of the emissions controls) down to just 100,000 miles. That means for roughly 90 percent of the time that engine is on the road, truckers will bear the cost of the emissions control system’s upkeep rather than truck manufacturers. And the public will bear the cost of any failure for truckers to do so.

Diesel engines are the largest manmade source of NO_x emissions in the United States, and diesel trucks represent about half of those emissions. According to EPA’s COBRA model, from this NO_x pollution alone, trucks are estimated to cause between 3,600 and 4,700 premature deaths every year, along with 21,000 new cases of asthma and 1.8 million lost days of work or school. This amounts to between $58 and $75 billion in health-related costs to the country.

The trucking industry is built on externalizing these costs, subsidized by the health impacts borne disproportionately by the low-income communities and communities of color who see greater levels of truck traffic. EPA regulations are meant to shift those costs, reducing health burdens through emissions controls that reduce pollution, paid for by the emitting industry. And history has shown that these and other Clean Air Act regulations are not just effective but a tremendous bargain! If you want to take a stand for clean air, join the effort to tell Congress that transporting goods shouldn’t pollute the air.

EPA and Congress are now seeking to break that social contract, putting public health in the hands of an industry that has shown repeatedly it doesn’t care about its impacts. Not only must EPA set the strongest possible emissions standards, but it must also ensure that any emissions controls are operating as intended for the entire lifetime of the vehicles in which they are deployed. And that means we need strong inducements to hold industry accountable for its harms. After all, their strong lobbying effort to pollute more freely has shown they’re not going to do it of their own free will.

After catastrophic floods about one century ago, the river started to be lined with concrete for most of its 51 miles. The river became a single-purpose concrete channel to flush stormwater from the mountains to the sea as fast as possible.

But in three stretches, the river couldn’t be lined with concrete. And in those stretches, something happened that no one had planned. Cottonwoods and willows came back. Herons, egrets, and the Santa Ana sucker (an endangered fish species) came back. And people came back too to enjoy the river that had become their neighborhood park, to ride their bikes or to use their kayaks.

Same river, two realities. Gray concrete infrastructure does one job at a very steep price. The soft-bottom stretches do multiple things at once: flood protection, habitat, public health, recreation, urban cooling, water quality… And the river runs through neighborhoods where nearly a million Angelenos live within a single mile. Luckily for our L.A. friends, the L.A. River is undergoing a restoration that will bring back many of the multiple benefits of the river such as habitat, cleaner air, and green areas in the city while improving water quality, reducing erosion, and of course, maintaining (or even improving) the much-needed flood risk control.

This restoration project in the L.A. River is an example of a nature-based solution. Nature-based solutions are approaches to adapt to challenging environmental conditions in ways that work with nature, not against it. Traditional infrastructure is often more expensive and provides fewer benefits with more negative impacts. Nature-based solutions are often cheaper and always more natural than concrete infrastructure to tackle the same problems but with many more benefits and positive side effects.

This is the first post in a series about what using nature-based solutions looks like in California. You can read our guide Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions: How Nature-Based Solutions Can Build Resilience, and you can also see our related first Instagram video below.

A whiplash climate

Many public health and environmental problems we experience in California and in other parts of the world come from a legacy of unsustainable land management exacerbated by climate change. Extreme events that swing from one end to the other like a whiplash are now the new normal.

Gray infrastructure was originally designed to control nature instead of working sustainably with the environment, as most Indigenous communities do. Climate change is making destruction more frequent and more expensive, and gray infrastructure cannot adapt to the new conditions in many cases. And our traditional response has been to react rather than prevent. California spends billions on fires, floods, and droughts after they happen, which is far more expensive than preventing them in the first place. Every dollar we do not invest in resilience today, we end up paying many times over in the near future.

And those costs are not paid equally. All Californians pay them through taxpayers’ money in disaster relief and emergency response. But frontline communities with limited infrastructure pay also with their health, their wellbeing, and the quality of their daily lives.

We need to prepare California for what is coming, but the answer is not just more gray infrastructure. Concrete dams, levees, and storm drains are expensive, brittle, and built to fight nature instead of working with it.

Nature-based solutions are a better (and cheaper) way.

Nature-based solutions and cropland repurposing in agricultural regions

Here where I live in Merced, in the middle of California’s San Joaquin Valley, agriculture is one of the main economic engines and represents the identity of a lot of people. But agriculture in California hasn’t been sustainable for more than a century, especially because of an inadequate water management and inadequate agricultural practices (like dry tillage of idle land, excessive pesticide use, monoculture, or irrigation of marginal lands), problems aggravated by climate change. Part of my work is to understand this system and find solutions that don’t create new problems. And since I love agriculture and the environment, and I have many friends who live in farmworker communities, I have been thinking of nature-based solutions for agricultural regions since years ago.

My work orbits around cropland repurposing to achieve a just land transition. Current water law in California requires local agencies to sustainably manage groundwater and avoid what the law defines as “undesirable results,” such as dry wells, soil sinking, and seawater intrusion. This legal framework has the potential to become a transformative power to change a system that wasn’t working. And to achieve water sustainability, California may need to repurpose about one million acres of irrigated agriculture to decrease our water footprint.

While this is a huge task, it is also a huge opportunity to correct a legacy of problems that started more than a century ago while adapting to climate change, adopting sustainable agricultural practices, and managing public resources sustainably. Nature-based solutions can tackle water sustainability in multiple ways, including aquifer recharge, floodplain restoration, and sustainable agricultural practices. And they can also take care of public health issues, such as flood prevention, erosion, dust prevention, pollution reduction, lack of green areas, and extreme heat. Nature-based solutions can also create local employment during the construction, for maintenance, or even tourism and other new, out-of-the-box ideas. However, Nature-based solutions are not a solution for everything, and we will need to create pathways to foster local, non-extractive economies to bring complete sustainability to agricultural regions. We call this a Just Land Transition, and along with on-the-ground grassroots partners like Allensworth Progressive Association, with nonprofits like Community Water Center and Environmental Defense Fund, and with agencies like the California Department of Conservation, we are supporting science-based policy and science-driven actions to bring sustainability to agricultural regions in California.

In this blog series, we will show the potential of nature-based solutions to become the best to-go tools to address cropland repurposing and to tackle climate justice in agricultural areas.

If you want to know more, you can read our guide: Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions: How Nature-Based Solutions Can Build Resilience. And if you want to know more about best practices in land repurposing for a just land transition beyond nature-based solutions, you can check UCS’s webpage Guiding California’s Land Transitions Toward Justice and Equity.

California has the tools, intellectual knowledge, and the funding to make this better choice happen. Proposition 4, the Climate Bond, has provided billions of dollars to use in climate resilience and land repurposing, and nature-based solutions can be one of the best ways to invest our taxpayer’s money to create sustainability and transform the system to work for everyone.

Después de inundaciones catastróficas hace casi un siglo, el río comenzó a ser revestido con concreto en la mayor parte de sus 51 millas (82 kilómetros). El río se convirtió en un canal gris con un solo propósito: desalojar el agua de lluvia desde las montañas hasta el mar lo más rápido posible.

Pero en tres tramos, el río no pudo ser revestido con concreto. Y en esos tramos, ocurrió algo que nadie había planeado. Los álamos y los sauces regresaron. Las garzas, las garcetas y el matalote de Santa Ana (una especie de pez en peligro de extinción) también volvieron. Y la gente regresó también, para disfrutar del río que se había convertido en el parque de su vecindario, para andar en bicicleta o para usar sus kayaks.

El mismo río, dos realidades. El concreto cumple una sola función a un precio muy alto. Los tramos naturales cumplen múltiples funciones a la vez: protegen contra inundaciones, mejoran el hábitat, la salud pública, la recreación, la calidad del agua, bajan las temperaturas locales … Y el río atraviesa vecindarios donde casi un millón de personas viven a menos de una milla (1,6 kilómetros) de distancia. Por suerte para nuestras amistades de Los Ángeles, el Río de Los Ángeles está en proceso de restauración que traerá de vuelta muchos de los múltiples beneficios del río, como hábitat, aire más limpio y áreas verdes en la ciudad, además de mejorar la calidad del agua, reducir la erosión y, por supuesto, mantener (o incluso mejorar) el tan necesario control del riesgo de inundaciones.

Este proyecto de restauración en el Río de Los Ángeles es un ejemplo de una solución basada en la naturaleza. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza ayudan a adaptarnos a condiciones ambientales difíciles trabajando con la naturaleza, no en contra de ella. La infraestructura gris (de concreto) suele ser más costosa y ofrece menos beneficios con más impactos negativos. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza suelen ser más económicas y pueden abordar los mismos problemas de manera más natural que la infraestructura de concreto y con muchos más beneficios y efectos secundarios positivos.

Esta es la primera publicación de una serie sobre cómo las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden ayudar a California. Puedes leer nuestra Guía sobre soluciones-basadas en la naturaleza aquí. También puedes ver nuestro primer video en Instagram:

Latigazos climáticos

Muchos de los problemas de salud pública y ambientales que experimentamos en California y en otras partes del mundo provienen de un legado de manejo insostenible de los recursos naturales, agravado por el cambio climático. Los eventos extremos que oscilan de un extremo a otro como un latigazo son ahora la nueva normalidad.

La infraestructura gris fue originalmente diseñada para controlar la naturaleza en lugar de entender cómo trabajar sosteniblemente con el medio ambiente, como hacen muchas comunidades Indígenas alrededor del mundo. Y ahora que el clima y las condiciones están cambiando, la infraestructura rígida de concreto no consigue adaptarse en muchos casos. Su baja capacidad de adaptación y el cambio climático están haciendo que la destrucción sea más frecuente y más costosa, y nuestra respuesta tradicional ha sido reaccionar en lugar de prevenir. California gasta miles de millones de dólares en impactos de incendios, inundaciones y sequías después de que ocurren, lo cual es mucho más costoso que prevenirlos desde un principio. Cada dólar que no invertimos hoy en resiliencia termina costándonos unas seis veces más en el futuro cercano.

Y esos costos no se pagan de manera equitativa. Todas las personas pagamos con nuestros impuestos la ayuda para desastres y emergencias. Pero las comunidades en primera línea con infraestructura limitada además pagan con su salud, su bienestar y su calidad de vida.

Necesitamos preparar a California para lo que viene, pero la respuesta no es simplemente más infraestructura gris. Las presas, los diques y los drenajes pluviales de concreto son costosos, frágiles y están construidos para luchar contra la naturaleza en lugar de trabajar con ella.

Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza son una manera mejor (y más económica) de enfrentarnos a estos desafíos.

Soluciones basadas en la naturaleza y el reúso de tierras de cultivo en regiones agrícolas

Aquí donde vivo, en Merced, California, en medio del Valle de San Joaquín, la agricultura es uno de los principales motores económicos y representa la identidad de mucha gente. Pero la agricultura en California no ha sido sostenible durante más de un siglo, sobre todo por un manejo inadecuado del agua y por prácticas agrícolas inadecuadas (como arar tierra seca, el uso excesivo de pesticidas, el monocultivo o el riego de tierras marginales), problemas que son agravados por el cambio climático. Parte de mi trabajo consiste en entender este sistema y encontrar soluciones que no generen nuevos problemas. Y como me encanta la agricultura y el medio ambiente, y tengo muchos amigos que viven en comunidades de campesinos, llevo pensando en soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para regiones agrícolas desde hace años.

Mi trabajo gira en torno al reúso de tierras de cultivo para lograr una transición justa de la tierra. La ley de agua vigente en California exige que las agencias locales gestionen el agua subterránea de manera sostenible y eviten lo que la ley llama “resultados no deseados”, tales como pozos secos, subsidencia del terreno e intrusión de agua de mar. Este marco legal tiene el potencial de convertirse en un poder transformador capaz de cambiar un sistema que no funciona para todos. Y para lograr la sostenibilidad del agua, California podría necesitar reusar cerca de un millón de acres (unas 400.000 hectáreas) de agricultura irrigada para reducir nuestra huella hídrica.

Aunque esta es una tarea enorme, también es una gran oportunidad para corregir un legado de problemas que comenzó hace más de un siglo, y a la vez adaptarnos al cambio climático, adoptar prácticas agrícolas sostenibles y gestionar los recursos públicos de manera sostenible. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden abordar la sostenibilidad del agua de múltiples maneras, incluyendo la recarga de acuíferos, la restauración de llanuras de inundación y las prácticas agrícolas sostenibles. Y también pueden atender problemas de salud pública, como la prevención de inundaciones, la erosión, la prevención de polvo, la reducción de la contaminación, la falta de áreas verdes y el calor extremo. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza también pueden generar empleo local durante su construcción, mantenimiento, o incluso para el turismo y otras ideas nuevas. Sin embargo, las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza no son una solución para todo, y necesitaremos crear caminos para fomentar economías locales no extractivas que traigan sostenibilidad completa a las regiones agrícolas. A esto le llamamos una Transición Justa de la Tierra, y junto con aliados como Allensworth Progressive Association, Community Water Center y Environmental Defense Fund, y con agencias como el Departamento de Conservación de California, estamos apoyando políticas y acciones basadas en ciencia para traer sostenibilidad a las regiones agrícolas de California.

En esta serie mostraremos el potencial de las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para convertirse en las mejores herramientas para abordar el reúso de tierras de cultivo y para enfrentar la justicia climática en las áreas agrícolas.

Si quieres saber más, puedes leer nuestra guía: Soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para crear resiliencia en regiones agrícolas de California. Y si quieres saber más sobre las buenas prácticas en el reúso de tierras para una transición justa de la tierra más allá de las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza, puedes visitar la página web de UCS (en inglés pero con multiples recursos en español) Guiando las transiciones de tierras de California hacia la justicia y la equidad.

California tiene las herramientas, el conocimiento intelectual y el financiamiento para hacer realidad esta mejor decisión. La Proposición 4, el Bono Climático, va a dedicar miles de millones de dólares a la resiliencia climática y al reúso de tierras, y las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden ser una de las mejores formas de invertir el dinero de quienes pagamos impuestos para crear sostenibilidad y transformar el sistema para que funcione para todas las personas.

Some quick context

In April 2026, Louisiana’s largest utility company, Entergy Louisiana, filed an application with state regulators to build seven additional gas-fired power plants to serve an expansion of the AI data center being built by Meta in Richland Parish, Louisiana. These new plants, along with new transmission and other proposed infrastructure, would be in addition to three gas plants approved by regulators last year for Meta’s data center. Entergy and Meta are claiming that a single data center needs a total of 10 new gas plants, each of them rated at 754 megawatts (MW) of power. For perspective, 7,540 MW is enough to power the entire city of New Orleans’ annual peak demand — six times over.

Now, the regulatory proceeding at the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC) is well underway, where stakeholders are weighing in on Entergy’s proposal to build the seven additional plants and other associated infrastructure. Because Entergy must make its case to the LPSC that this new proposal is in “the public interest” in order to get approval, the company is claiming that the data center will actually benefit its existing customers instead of triggering rate hikes, which has already happened in other parts of the country and is set to take place in Louisiana as well.

This claim of ratepayer “benefit” does not stand up to scrutiny when you actually dig into the details of the proposal. It shouldn’t come as a total shock that Meta is opposing efforts for improved transparency into the data center project.

Meta is fighting transparency, but Louisianans can make their voices heard

On August 4^th, 2026, an administrative law judge at the LPSC rejected Meta’s motion to cancel a subpoena that was requested by Earthjustice on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Alliance for Affordable Energy (AAE), a Louisiana-based consumer advocacy group. The subpoena ordered Meta to substantiate:

1. Meta’s level of investment and permanent job creation; and
2. The amount of electricity the data center will demand.

Because Meta isn’t a party to this proceeding, UCS, AAE, and other stakeholders in the proceeding haven’t been able to ask the tech company these types of questions in any formal, legal manner. Stakeholders can ask Entergy these questions formally, because that’s the company that filed the application for all the power infrastructure. But when asked to back up the claim that the data center will create new permanent jobs and will require seven additional gas plants, the utility company points only to Meta’s claims, without any other data.

So, the judge ruled last week that Meta must back up these claims in a formal and rigorous manner, but has also granted the tech company’s request to have the full Commission review the issue.

The bottom line: Louisiana’s five elected Commissioners are set to take a vote to ultimately decide whether Meta has to answer these key questions at the Commission’s Wednesday, August 12^th public meeting, starting at 9 AM at 602 North 5th Street, Baton Rouge, LA in the 1^st Floor Natchez Room.

If you live in Louisiana outside of New Orleans (where the city council regulates utility rates), you can make your voice heard either by contacting your Commissioner or showing up physically to the meeting in Baton Rouge. If you show up, you’ll have an opportunity to make a public comment to the Commissioners, and this blog may give you some ideas if you’re unsure where to start with your remarks But even if you don’t want to speak, your presence in the room makes clear to the Commissioners that people are paying attention to the decisions they’re making.

Now, let’s get into more of the substance of this proposal and why it’s such a risky proposition for Louisiana ratepayers.

Ratepayers still on the hook

Starting with the basics: Meta has not agreed to cover all of the costs of powering this data center project. That means Louisianians could get stuck footing the bill for their ten new polluting, expensive gas plants, including the seven at issue in this proceeding.

This is partially because Meta and Entergy structured their deal with flexibility to allow Meta to walk away from the data center before all the infrastructure is paid for, leaving ratepayers to pay for remaining costs. But even if Meta is truly in it for the long haul, ratepayers are still set to subsidize the operating costs at the new plants.

Expert testimony filed by Current Energy Group (CEG) on behalf of UCS and AAE shows that Entergy’s claimed “benefits” are premised on an unreasonably optimistic set of assumptions and quickly turn into higher ratepayer costs—potentially billions of dollars—once key uncertainties, such as data center demand and fuel costs, are examined. Further, Entergy’s analysis of power grid reliability was wholly inadequate for a project of this scale, failing to consider solutions that could have reduced both costs and emissions.

To be specific about the scale, Meta wants the data center’s peak computing electricity demand to grow to about 5,000 MW, roughly the average  load of New York City. Yet, just like last year’s case, the tech company is refusing to come to the table and answer any questions that would shed some much-needed light on this proposal.  Let’s recap what’s actually being proposed.

Large construction costs go untested

Investor-owned utilities like Entergy profit off construction projects, generally referred to as “capital costs.” The more they build, the more they profit. Entergy is currently seeking to build more than $15 billion in new capital infrastructure, summarized by the table below:

Entergy is proposing four gas plants in Richland Parish, and three gas plants in Point Coupee Parish, totaling 5,278 MW. The company is also proposing some additional battery storage capacity, plus transmission infrastructure.

If the construction projects were approved as proposed, Entergy’s shareholders would stand to make an estimated $8 billion in additional profits over a 20-year period.

Also, because Entergy is proposing this project be rushed through the regulatory process under the LPSC’s new “Lightning Amendment”, the utility company won’t be required to prove that its proposal is the least-cost option for meeting Meta’s needs – a process typically required before new infrastructure projects are approved by the LPSC. With that process being pushed aside, the project costs could very well likely be inflated.

20-year contract, but…

Under the proposal, Meta would get electricity service from Entergy through a 20-year contract that includes “minimum charges” the tech company must pay in order to offset the costs to other ratepayers. Included in these minimum charges is the annual capital cost, the rate of return to Entergy’s shareholders and debtholders, fixed operating and maintenance costs, as well as taxes and insurance. However, while Meta will be paying its own share of Entergy’s “fuel adjustment clause” (FAC) charge, that charge isn’t included in Meta’s minimum charge; these are operating costs that will be spread to all customers. More on that a little further down.

It’s important to keep in mind that even if Meta sticks around for the entirety of its 20-year contract, ratepayers aren’t in the clear on the capital costs. Three out of the seven gas plants being proposed, which would be in Point Coupee parish, would not be fully depreciated (in other words, paid off) until 32 years after being in service, so ratepayers would be on the hook for more than a decade’s worth of capital costs if Meta doesn’t renew its contract. The other four proposed plants, which would be in Richland Parish near the data center, would depreciate over just 20 years, but will still only be about 90% paid down by the end of the contract term, due to the contract coming into effect in 2028 before all the plants are finished being constructed.

Entergy estimates that the gas plants, and the much smaller battery storage projects, will be about 75% depreciated by the end of the 20-year contract term. The utility company’s method of allocating these costs over time isn’t clear from its public filings, which include many redactions, but 25% of those total costs is $3.4 billion. The receipt ratepayers are left holding after the contract expires could be in that ballpark, and that wouldn’t include other costs, such as the operating costs I’ve alluded to, as well as the ~9.7% profit margin Entergy’s shareholders are authorized to make on their construction projects.

But Meta could terminate this contract much earlier than 20 years. If Meta decides to do this, there is a loophole that allows Entergy to seek so-called “retained generator” status, which would allow the utility to charge ratepayers for any remaining costs. This caveat is particularly concerning because Entergy has a financial incentive to retain the plants in order to continue earning its 9.7% profit margin on those billions of dollars in capital infrastructure. Plus, with overall future demand for AI services remaining uncertain, Meta backing out is a possibility that regulators must rigorously take into account.

CEG’s testimony finds that ratepayers seem to bear 100% of the financial risk of these Meta-triggered plants if Entergy retains them. Ratepayers didn’t prompt these huge expenses, so at a bare minimum, Entergy’s shareholders should have to share this risk, and the LPSC should make that expectation clear at the outset (especially given the $8 billion  in profits shareholders are estimated to make). This would incentivize the utility to instead pursue any unrecovered funds from Meta, which is the company causing the additional costs. If Entergy is making a huge bet that all these costs will be worth it, the company should be betting with its own money, not ratepayer money.

“Benefits” quickly turn into costs

Even assuming Meta stays at the data center for 20 years, Entergy’s claims that this proposal will benefit other ratepayers doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The utility calculates $28.5 billion in total costs over the next 20 years, compared with $30.4 billion in total revenue. That’s how the company derives a “benefit” of about $1.9 billion (roughly 6.5% – shown in the table below), in the event that Meta renews its contract. If Meta walks away after 20 years, that decreases to $991 million, or about 3.5%. This means that just a 3.5% increase in costs or decrease in revenues could wipe out any benefit and result in a ratepayer subsidy for Meta. To compare this to a recent example, the projected capital costs of Entergy’s already-approved project to power the first phase of Meta’s data center increased in May from $3.9 billion to $4.4 billion, or about 11.7%.

There are several key uncertainties with this massive new proposal that could result in higher costs or lower revenues, but Entergy didn’t adjust any of those variables to see how they’d change the results compared to their overly optimistic assumptions. One of those uncertainties is: how much energy will Meta’s data center actually demand? We are trying to get an answer to this question via the subpoena mentioned above, but Entergy just used the Meta-provided number and didn’t test any other possibilities.

The expected “load factor” of the data center—which is the average percentage of time it will run at its own peak load—is kept confidential. But the CEG testimony notes that the assumed load factor is “very high for any load, leaving no room for upside in the analysis but resulting in significant downside exposure if actual operations fall short of that level.”

We are not the first to point out utilities using very high data center load factors in their projections. With all the uncertainty around the future AI landscape, and with Meta clearly still hedging its bets on what to actually use its data centers for, Entergy should be testing for lower levels of demand to see how it affects its cost-benefit analysis. In fact, Entergy does seem to be expecting possibly lower demand as outside of that analysis; the companies’ contract allows Meta to reduce its average contracted demand in order to avoid a “windfall” benefit to other ratepayers at Meta’s expense.

However, windfalls appear to be going the other direction under this current proposal. The testimony points out that another key variable that Entergy failed to thoroughly examine is fuel and other operating costs at the plants. The utility’s fuel adjustment clause (FAC) charge includes not just fuel costs for the gas plants, but also major maintenance costs—about $10.3 million per year at each of the seven plants—as well as gas transportation costs. The utility company would spread the FAC costs to all customers right away, and most of the estimates for these costs are redacted from public view.

The proposed gas plants would have “firm”, or uninterruptible, gas transportation service via pipeline, which means Entergy would pay a gas pipeline operator to reserve capacity on the line. That is a fixed cost Entergy will recover through the FAC, but again, Meta could use less electricity than expected and then the tech company’s revenue contributions to the FAC therefore wouldn’t be commensurate with the costs. Ratepayers could therefore subsidize Meta’s fuel costs.

Entergy also acknowledged that three of the plants in Point Coupee parish will likely need new pipeline infrastructure. Those additional costs will be caused by this Meta-driven project, but Entergy will spread the costs to all of its customers through the FAC. This is yet another subsidy of Meta’s fuel needs by ratepayers.

Power-grid reliability solutions go unexplored

The second piece of testimony, submitted by engineering consultancy HickoryLedge on behalf of AAE and UCS, highlights a number of grid solutions that Entergy ignored or only studied at a very surface level. These solutions could have the potential to reduce the number of gas plants and project costs, and improve the reliability of the grid. But the company instead is primarily seeking to throw more fossil fuels at the problem.

For example, for the proposed transmission aspects of this project, Entergy is seeking to use transmission line designs that are 20 years old. Newer, more advanced lines would be able to carry up to about 30% more power and could potentially allow better access to renewables at a minimal impact on capital cost.

Another solution is data center load flexibility: essentially, reducing demand during peak hours a handful of hours per year so that the overall infrastructure buildout can be reduced. This strategy has potential to reduce overall costs, mitigate the risk that these assets become stranded (essentially worthless), and improve grid reliability. But Entergy wrote off data center load flexibility because Meta said it wasn’t interested in it. The companies seem to have given up quickly for such a massive project.

LPSC must prioritize ratepayers in this risky proposal

The LPSC has a long way to go to adequately protect ratepayers. With such a massive contemplated scale, the risks are enormous, and many of them are being kept out of public view.

The Commission should require Entergy to further study the above-mentioned grid-reliability issues, among others detailed in the testimony, and come up with a plan for monitoring the data center’s grid impact if it were to come online. The seven gas plants should also not be considered all at the same time; a more staggered review schedule is more appropriate for a more-than $15 billion project that has so much ratepayer money at stake. This would also allow more time for the Commission’s normal request for proposal process, which would allow third-party power providers to offer potentially cleaner, cheaper options to meet demand. There are more detailed recommendations outlined in the testimony that readers should check out if they’re interested—and highlight to the LPSC as well.

I’ll reiterate that if you’re in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, you can contact your Commissioner and urge them to protect ratepayers instead of the shareholders of Entergy and Meta. You can even show up to the Commission vote this Wednesday, August 12^th, which starts at 9 AM at 602 North 5th Street, Baton Rouge, LA in the 1^st Floor Natchez Room.

Showing up lets the elected Commissioners know that folks are paying attention to their decisions, and you can even give a public comment urging basic transparency from Meta. It’s far past due for the LPSC to hold these billion- and trillion-dollar companies accountable.

Editor’s Note: Since the time of publication, state regulators nixed a subpoena that would’ve required Meta to be more transparent about its plans for this data center. The move was made in spite of multiple decisions from a judge who ruled that more information from Meta was necessary, as well as the wishes of community members who showed up to voice a wide array of concerns.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the biggest package of housing legislation passed since the Cranston-Gonzalez Affordable Housing Act became law in 1990. It sets the stage for more housing to be built by working across a suite of federal agencies: to change federal housing programs to enhance financing for housing production; support state and local governments’ initiatives to plan for more housing; and encourage states to re-think their approach to land use. Although resilience to climate impacts was not the primary focus of this legislative package, some important progress was made on improving the resilience of manufactured housing, expanding repair programs for homeowners and landlords of existing housing, and speeding up funding for disaster recovery efforts in low-income communities for the next three years.    

A package combining 60 bills, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing now requires dozens of next steps for the implementation of its provisions, which you can find in a section-by-section summary. In this post, I’ll unpack two federal processes—appropriations and rulemaking—which, together with actions taken at the state and local level, will shape the outcomes of this legislation for communities across the nation in the years to come.  

Appropriations shape impact

As passed, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing funded a few pilot programs but was budget-deficit neutral. Instead, this legislation overwhelmingly focused on policies that encouraged the private market to put more homes on the ground. This will certainly have an impact on the number of homes in a nationwide housing shortage, but the resilience of those homes and the impact on overall affordability for lower and fixed income households is still unknown.   

For this legislation to have maximum impact, federal lawmakers must demonstrate continued bipartisan commitment to addressing the housing crisis through the annual appropriations process. Subcommittees in the House and Senate authorize federal funding through the appropriations process each year by setting funding levels, rescinding previous appropriations or transferring unspent balances. Unless a meaningful level of funding is provided during the appropriations process, programs authorized by the legislation—such expanded home repairs, studying the impact of deadly residential extreme heat in public and subsidized housing, and planning grants to state and local governments to support housing development—will lack the resources needed to preserve and expand our housing supply.

Rulemaking amidst rollbacks  

The 21^st Century ROAD to Housing Act will kick off several rule-making processes managed by different federal agencies, including several branches of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Rulemaking involves substantive public engagement and can have an important impact on policy implementation, grounding government action in the public interest, fairness, and the best available science. Rules that guide where and how housing is built will last far beyond any presidential administration or Congress, and this process will be an opportunity to enshrine climate resilience policies and standards for the long term—instead of rushing to build without accounting for the risks of mounting climate extremes. Any new rules also need to rely on the best available climate science, and account for the myriad ways fossil fuel-driven climate change will re-shape our natural resources and built environment in the years to come. 

A few of the rule-making processes detailed below will be particularly important in shaping the climate resilience and energy efficiency of the new housing that this legislation will spur. One of the rules that will be developed pursuant to the new law will identify circumstances under which federally-funded housing projects will be excluded from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Changes to NEPA have long been suggested to speed up the construction of housing. The final rule must ensure that these exceptions, known as categorical exclusions, made today don’t exacerbate the harms of the past—a concern made all the more urgent given the attacks of the second Trump administration on federal environmental justice commitments. 

Another new rulemaking requires new energy efficiency standards for manufactured housing to be developed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Unlike other types of housing for which building standards are set by state and local governments, the code for manufactured homes is set by the federal government.  This process could shape the long-term affordability of manufactured housing amidst volatile energy prices and worsening heatwaves. For this sector of the housing market to be deployed at scale to fulfill its potential to provide safe and affordable housing, HUD must develop a rigorous standard that reflects the long-term benefits of energy efficiency for residents of manufactured housing.

The three-year authorization of HUD’s Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program, intended to speed up and reform long-term funding to low- and moderate-income communities, after disasters occur, will also require a rule-making process by next summer. It’s an important step forward, and Congress should go further and permanently authorize this crucial program. As disasters grow in frequency and complexity, rules developed by the federal government must also require programs to address the long-term harms of disasters and use rigorous data to incorporate future conditions into their recovery programs.  

These and other rulemaking processes kickstarted by 21^st Century ROAD to Housing are occurring at the same time as the federal government pursues repeal of the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard (FFRMS) across agencies. As my colleague Shana Udvardy has previously detailed, the HUD version of these standards ensured that HUD’s federally funded projects would be built to withstand current and future flood risks. The repeal of HUD’s FFRMS rule will mean that new buildings, facilities and homes could be at an increased risk of flooding from hurricanes and sea level rise: increasingly severe weather that is supercharged by climate change.  

Much of the rulemaking required by 21^st Century ROAD to Housing will be spearheaded by HUD, an agency besieged by staffing cuts and struggling with capacity as it operates billions of dollars of critical programs.  The rulemaking process requires a well-resourced  and accountable federal agency to ensure that programs serve the public interest. HUD and other agencies must be funded not only to support their core mission and programs, but to shape much-needed new policy and programs such as those in the 21^st Century ROAD to Housing Act.

Congressional leaders must act to ensure this legislation benefits us

After decades of neglecting our housing crisis and ignoring clear warnings from climate science, no single legislative package from one level of government could have addressed our many needs.  As communities, policymakers, and advocates begin to make the most of this historic legislation, we must also fundamentally shift how we approach housing policy. We can’t afford to wait decades for the next major housing legislation and public investment. The climate crisis will increasingly require leaders to fund transformations in the built environment and social safety net to keep communities safe and manage the growing economic risk of climate change on our housing market.

We should consider the implementation of the ROAD to 21^st Century Housing an essential and welcome opportunity for laying the groundwork for further progress. That this legislation was passed in the current political environment—despite the many threats to climate science,  resilience programs,  and a growing effort by the fossil fuel industry to avoid any accountability for its role in a climate crisis that destroys homes, contributes to homelessness, and decimates communities—demonstrates the necessity of climate resilient housing for all.

The nation has also gone the entire 18 months of the second Trump administration without a permanent administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and with major chaos plaguing the agency thanks to President Trump. The president failed to appoint an administrator, instead leaning on four plainly unqualified “senior officials performing the duties of the administrator” (SOPDA), one of whom was Cameron Hamilton, until he was fired on May 8, 2025. In the chaotic fashion typical of this administration, he was renominated to lead the agency a year after being fired. This week, the Senate voted to confirm him as the first permanent FEMA administrator under this administration.

Hamilton’s rocky road to permanently leading FEMA

Hamilton worked as FEMA’s SOPDA for roughly 3.5 months at the start of the second Trump administration until he was fired for supporting the existence of the agency during a congressional hearing a year ago (instead of calling for its elimination, which was the Trump administration’s preferred stance at the time).

While his tenure was brief, Hamilton implemented several controversial policies at FEMA including:

• Increasing the threshold by which the federal government would declare a disaster, meaning a reduction in critical federal assistance that states rely on for disaster response
• Halting the automatic approval of funds under the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, limiting crucial funding that would help communities prepare for extreme events
• Canceling funding for the incredibly popular Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program. A FEMA statement called the program “another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with climate change than helping Americans effected [sic] by natural disasters.” After multiple court orders, FEMA reversed this decision and BRIC was reinstated on March 25. However, the program hasn’t been fully reinstated; grant awards that had funds already allocated to them can expend those funds, but grants that were selected but did not have funds allocated prior to the cancelation of the program have not seen those funds restored.

Since his nomination in May, Hamilton has been working at FEMA as a senior adviser. This allows the Trump administration to sidestep the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which in most cases prohibits a nominee from serving in an acting role for the same position for which they’ve been nominated. This law is why the Trump administration created the SOPDA role.

Hamilton’s Senate testimony was short on substance

We’re dealing with a low bar when it comes to President Trump’s agency nominees. Even though it could be worse when it comes to Hamilton as FEMA administrator (think back to missing-in-action David Richardson and “the enforcer” Karen Evans), he will be the first FEMA administrator who lacks the qualifications and the five years of experience required by the Post Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006. Since that law was enacted, all five former FEMA administrators, including David Paulison, Craig Fugate, Brock Long, Peter Gaynor, and Deanne Criswell, had years or even decades of emergency management experience.

During the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs hearing on June 17, Democrats grilled Hamilton on multiple issues and Hamilton promised to conduct a review within the first 30 days on “areas where FEMA can reform.” Unsurprisingly, the committee voted largely along party lines to advance his nomination to the full Senate, with the exception of Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who joined the Republicans.

Hamilton was well coached by two former FEMA administrators, Brock Long and Peter Gaynor, in preparation for his nomination hearing. His responses to senators’ questions, while respectful, were vague and noncommittal. Although Hamilton expressed his commitment to FEMA’s mission, it’s unlikely he’ll defy the vision of his bosses, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and President Trump.

There are several points to highlight from the nomination hearing, including the objections raised on process, Hamilton’s brief and inadequate written testimony, and his noncommittal answers to the senators’ questions.

Hamilton’s written testimony is brief—a total of two pages. The first page expresses his gratitude for his family, President Trump, and the two former FEMA administrators who provided him with support and counsel. On page two, Hamilton outlines what he’ll accomplish in his role as FEMA administrator. He echoes the tired mantra of the Trump administration: “We must return to our roots where disaster response is locally executed, state led and federally supported.” As has been pointed out by emergency managers, this is what FEMA already does.

He also promises to “deliver assistance to survivors rapidly” with the caveat “when Federal assistance is warranted.” These two statements conveniently balanced Hamilton’s need to appease senators on the committee but also show allegiance to President Trump’s politicization of disaster aid and his campaign to push more of the disaster response and recovery burden onto local, state, Tribal, and territorial governments.

Democrats highlight broken process leading to a “rubber-stamped” nominee

In the first opening remarks of the nomination hearing that included 11 nominees, Committee Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI) spoke powerfully on the many problems with the hearing, including a rushed process, overcrowded panel, and harmful lack of transparency. Senator Peters pointed out that the chairman did not allow each nominee to make a public statement, and that the ranking member had not received the nominees’ written testimonies prior to the hearing.

Senator Peters also noted that Hamilton had not completed his FBI background investigation, calling it “unprecedented” that nominees were advancing without meeting the minimum requirements of a typical vetting process. Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) promised that the committee would vote on the nominees only after the ethics and FBI review were complete, but it is not clear if that promise has been kept.

During the hearing, Democrats focused on several important concerns with the administration’s handling of FEMA and Hamilton’s past decisions.

• The politicization of disaster assistance. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), among other Democratic senators, asked whether disaster survivors from blue states should be treated differently and receive less help than red-state survivors. She called the politicization of disaster assistance “shameful and unamerican.” Senator Hassan pressed Hamilton on what he would do if the president ordered him to withhold assistance to blue states. Hamilton replied that he would be sure that FEMA is “objective,” “fair and reasonable,” that he would “follow the law,” and would be “consistent in how [FEMA] adjudicates claims.” Senator Hassan closed her questioning by challenging Hamilton, noting that he was going “to have to think about what you are going to do when he (President Trump) reverses your recommendations.” Hamilton, however, did promise to speed up answers to disaster declaration decisions and reimbursements with the caveat of keeping a “close eye” on how states spend the assistance. The Trump administration has brazenly denied FEMA assistance to blue states and is continuing to do so.
• Hamilton’s April memo. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) addressed an April memo in which Hamilton recommended raising the threshold for disaster assistance. Senator Blumenthal spoke to how this change would disqualify a lot of families in Connecticut and asked him whether he still supported this policy. Hamilton responded that the memo reflected a “pre-deliberative” and “pre-decisional” process for areas where disaster assistance could be reformed and that it was not ready for adoption. Hamilton’s evasive answer ignores the fact that the Trump administration has been advancing both unwritten and written policies that reduce disaster assistance to communities, including Trump’s preparedness executive order and the final report by Trump’s FEMA Review Council.
• FEMA staffing cuts. Senators also asked Hamilton about staffing cuts at FEMA and FEMA’s readiness. Hamilton’s response was noncommittal, stating he had “full faith and confidence in the FEMA workforce” but that “we can do better.” Missing from the answer was a commitment to fully staff up the agency in a timely manner.

Unfortunately, additional important issues, such as Hamilton’s position on climate change (which is directly contributing to worsening disasters), and his lack of qualifications for the job were not adequately explored by the committee.

Actions Administrator Hamilton must take in his first month in office

In January 2025 I wrote about the five things the nation needs from the next FEMA administrator, and these remain true today. While Hamilton’s pledge to update FEMA’s antiquated IT system is important, this will take time and there are other pressing needs. In the immediate future, here are the top five actions he must take in his first month in office:

1. Advance a robust hiring process to shore up the agency’s ability to deliver for the public and disaster survivors. Unfortunately, during the nomination hearing Hamilton praised the opening of 350 FEMA positions but did not commit to a more robust hiring effort as was outlined in a recent Government Accountability Office report. The GAO found that FEMA reduced more than 4,300 employees in fiscal year 2025, causing a loss in institutional knowledge and experienced personnel, and was told by FEMA officials that “they have been operating in uncertainty and confusion while still trying to meet the mission with the staff they have.” The GAO raises serious concerns about FEMA’s ability to meet its mission in the case of a catastrophe such as the back-to-back hurricanes in 2024, Helene and Milton.
2. Stop President Trump’s politicization of disaster assistance and ensure disaster relief is equitable and nonpartisan.
3. Ignore the Trump administration’s biased FEMA Review Council report recommendations and instead develop a strategic plan based on the latest science and staffing analysis, and work with members of Congress on bipartisan policies that can actually improve FEMA.
4. Reinstate FEMA advisory committees, including its National Advisory Council, Technical Mapping Advisory Council, and National Dam Safety Review Board, so the agency’s work will be informed by the best available science and expertise.
5. Defend against mis- and disinformation about disasters and advocate for robust funding for FEMA, the Disaster Relief Fund, and preparedness programs that will help communities get back on their feet in more resilient ways.

Cameron Hamilton is expected to bring stability to FEMA. But the nation deserves and needs more than just the bare minimum of bringing stability to a broken agency. We’re witnessing back-to-back fossil-fueled disasters on top of the affordability crisis. Communities that are still recovering from last year’s disasters—like the tragic Texas Hill Country floods—are being hit again this Danger Season.

Congress must continue its oversight of FEMA and press Administrator Hamilton to implement immediate actions that ensure FEMA is ready to serve people across the nation this Danger Season, and in the months and years ahead.

Two weeks ago, over three gigawatts (GW) of data centers disconnected themselves from the grid in response to a minor transmission fault in Virginia and switched to their own polluting backup power. This sudden drop in load—equivalent to millions of homes—caused fluctuations in the grid’s voltage and frequency that could be detected as far away as Illinois and took nearly 10 minutes to resolve. While grid fluctuations are common, most are resolved automatically in seconds. Such massive, extended fluctuations create a risk of cascading disturbances which can eventually lead to blackouts—and since data centers are connected to the transmission system, the impact can be felt states away.

If this feels like déjà vu, you might be remembering a very similar incident which occurred in July 2024, when 1.5 GW of data centers disconnected from the grid in response to a transmission fault. (And that’s not to mention the 26 documented loss of load events in Texas over the last two years.) In between these two events, regulators have been busily drafting standards and making recommendations—but because this keeps happening, it’s clear that not enough is being done. To address the growing risk, immediate action is needed from state regulators and utilities to transparently apply robust requirements, and make plans to implement upcoming standards.

The rapid growth of data centers causes reliability risks

The technical name for the two events in Virginia is “customer initiated load reduction,” or CILR. In both cases, major damage to the grid was avoided, although utilities did field complaints about flickering lights and strange noises coming from refrigerators and air conditioners, caused by the grid’s voltage and frequency going outside of normal ranges.

Shortly after the 2024 event, the president of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) described it as a “five-alarm fire when it comes to reliability.” NERC is responsible for developing and enforcing grid reliability standards. NERC’s authority, and approval of its standards, comes from FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which governs the bulk power system—the large wires which move power between states and which most hyperscale data centers are seeking to connect to.

Despite NERC’s best efforts, data centers continue causing problems on the grid. I’m going to provide an overview of what FERC and NERC have been doing, but the truth is that their efforts alone are not enough— state regulators will need to step up to the plate, too.

What have NERC and FERC been up to?

Here’s a brief timeline of key actions by NERC and FERC, bookended by these two events:

• January 2025: NERC published an incident review covering the 1.5 GW CILR event in 2024, recommending actions that transmission planners and operators “should start taking to avoid significant issues in the future.”
• September 2025: NERC issued a level two alert with specific recommendations to address reliability risks caused by data centers. NERC’s later summary of responses to the alert found that very few utilities are following the recommendations or developing plans to implement them.
• October 2025: The Secretary of Energy issued an “advanced notice of proposed rulemaking”, directing FERC to develop rules to “ensure the timely and orderly interconnection of large loads to the transmission system.”
• May 2026: NERC published reliability guidelines, a precursor to enforceable standards, and issued a level three alert (NERC’s highest), including seven “essential actions” which utilities must take “to address the risks posed by existing and new computational loads interacting with the bulk power system.”
• June 2026: In response to the October directive, FERC issued “show cause” orders to each of the regional grid operators, finding that none of them were doing enough to address the reliability concerns of data centers.

Finally, in July FERC ordered NERC to issue reliability requirements by the end of the year (a timeline NERC had proposed earlier). This answered one of the key questions that had been swirling around all of NERC’s activity: whether the organization actually had the authority to require data centers to register (and thus be subject to reliability standards). NERC’s CEO had raised this concern earlier in a letter to members, noting that “registering load-side assets is unprecedented.”

Data centers are coming online even as standards evolve

While this may seem like a lot of movement, key gaps remain. NERC noted as much in a March 2026 whitepaper, finding that the lack of coordination between regulators, utilities, and data centers “can result in inefficiencies, misalignment, and increased risk to system reliability.”

A critical challenge is that data centers are already online, with even more being built now, while enforceable standards won’t be published for several more months. A recent report from Berkeley Lab estimates that from 2024, when NERC documented the first data center CILR, to 2027—the earliest that data center reliability standards will be enforceable—total load from data centers is expected to nearly double.

This growth wouldn’t be quite so challenging for grid reliability if utilities were taking it more seriously by implementing sufficient requirements on their own in the meantime, or if regulators were planning to make any future standards retroactive. However, neither of these are happening.

This is especially egregious given that a constant excuse from utilities about why they aren’t moving faster to connect clean energy is a lack of confidence in existing standards for things like rooftop solar. But now, utilities are rushing to interconnect data centers without any applicable standards.

The Midwest grid operator takes a step backward on enforcing reliability standards

MISO, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, is one of the grid operators under FERC jurisdiction which is responsible for building NERC standards into its interconnection policies and practices. In a June presentation, MISO shared a plan to phase in any NERC requirements by late 2027, with standards retroactive to data centers built after October 2026, or existing data centers which expand by over 25 MW.

But just a month later, MISO changed course, saying that existing data centers will be “managed,” with the full standards only applying to new data centers. In sharing the update, MISO mentioned feedback from un-named stakeholders. On a call announcing this change, MISO estimated that there are up to 30 GW of data centers in its territory that would thus be exempt from these standards. While the individual utilities that serve them may have their own standards, there is no transparency into these standards to understand whether they are sufficient or how they will be enforced.

Just 1.5 GW of data center load in Virginia triggered an event that NERC referred to as a “five alarm fire.” The risk in MISO’s territory is potentially 20 times greater.

State regulators must fill this gap

While FERC and NERC are active at the federal level, progress is slow. At the regional level, FERC’s show cause orders spared no one, finding that none of the six grid operators are doing enough,  allowing for a massive lapse in regulation. This makes it imperative that state regulators—public service commissions and public utility commissions—step in.

Across our state-level advocacy, UCS has been pushing for such efforts.

When Michigan utility I&M submitted a large load tariff for approval, I recommended that the state create a working group to address the data center reliability risks even as NERC and regional requirements are pending. The administrative law judge supported this recommendation; a decision by the commission may come later this month.

I built on this testimony when Michigan utility DTE filed for approval to interconnect a 1 GW Google data center. Our brief argued that because standards are still under development, greater scrutiny of DTE’s confidential requirements is needed.

This week, I filed additional testimony in Michigan calling on the Commission to ensure that any NERC and MISO standards are applied retroactively.

In a Louisiana docket to develop large load guidelines, UCS submitted extensive comments documenting the reliability risks from data centers and recommending formation of a workgroup similar to what we recommended in Michigan.

UCS also submitted excerpts from these comments in a Maine docket to investigate the impacts of data centers.

Next steps

This is a crowded landscape, and I haven’t even touched on the work of industry-expert groups, developments from other regional grid operators, or what’s happening in Europe. However, the rapid pace of development in this area underscores the point: regulators must require more transparency from data centers and utilities, and as standards are developed, lay plans to apply them retroactively.

The 3 GW loss of load incident that I opened with demonstrates exactly why: data centers are impacting the grid’s reliability even as experts scramble to develop standards and requirements. We can’t simply wait until those standards are ready. Doing so allows the stress from data centers to build up on the grid, inevitably leading to wide-scale grid damage and blackouts.

The images of these fires are stunning, their scale terrifying, the human toll enormous already and mounting. And while the proximate causes of the fires, the types of vegetation burning, and nearby settlements differ greatly, the abnormal climatic conditions looming in the background everywhere are unmistakably clear.

Many lives have been lost, and precious communities razed to the ground. Hundreds of thousands of people have had to evacuate from fire zones and millions more have experienced dangerous levels of exposure to wildfire smoke. And, unfortunately, more heat is on the way—a deadly hazard on its own, and one that will also continue to fan the flames of this extraordinarily destructive wildfire season.

If these infernos don’t bring policymakers to their senses and force necessary changes to grapple with the fossil fueled climate crisis, what will?

Wildfire conditions in the United States

The 2026 wildfire season got off to an early above-normal start in the U.S. Thus far this year, nearly 5.3 million acres of land have burned across the country, well above the 10-year average of 3.7 million acres for this time of year. On July 18, the National Preparedness Level was raised to 5, the highest level, a sign of the extreme fire dangers and high level of resources committed to fight fires.

Colorado, Nebraska, and Utah are among the states that have experienced an incredibly challenging wildfire season this year. The Aspen Acres fire, covering nearly 102,000 acres in Colorado, has been burning for over a month now. And recent rains have led to heavy flash flooding in the burned areas, carrying ash and debris across roads and into waterways.

As of last week, Oregon had 31 large fires burning, across 1.6 million acres. They include the Rowe Creek Complex fire currently covering over 320,000 acres, the Big Grass fire with over 337,000 acres and the Coleman Creek fire covering over 251,000 acres. Despite the state being in such a dire situation, the Trump administration has denied FEMA Fire Management Assistance Grants (FMAGs) for two wildfires: the East Evans Creek Fire and Rowe Creek Fire Complex. State Senators Merkley and Wyden have strongly criticized the action and demanded answers from the agency.

Washington had 13 large fires burning over nearly 204,000 acres as of last week, including the Kaiser Canyon fire, which has burned over 128,000 acres.

The latest fuels and fire advisory for the Pacific Northwest notes that low snowpack and drought conditions in the region have led to fuels (i.e. vegetation) drying out much earlier than usual—all of which is ‘producing extreme fire behavior.’ This means intense fires that spread rapidly and are hard to control, putting people and infrastructure in danger.

And the most recent wildfire outlook for August shows continued elevated fire risks in the Northwest, the upper Midwest, as well as Texas, and southern Florida.

The world in flames

Numerous large wildfires (nearly 900) are also burning across Canada. Over 9 million acres (3.76 million hectares) have burned thus far this year as the nation experiences one of its worst seasons (with the province of Ontario experiencing its worst-ever season).

France and Spain are also in the throes of their worst wildfire seasons on record, with little let-up in sight as yet another intense heatwave rolls through Europe, the fastest-warming continent globally. Approximately 300,000 people have been displaced by the fires thus far, which are now approaching major cities. Firefighters have lost their lives. Homes and livelihoods are going up in smoke. New research from World Weather Attribution shows that climate change is increasing the likelihood of the kind of hot, dry conditions preceding the extreme fire weather that led to the wildfires in France and Spain.

Northern Africa, which has received far less attention, is also seeing major wildfires which have caused deaths, prompted evacuations, and are putting a big strain on local firefighting resources in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco.

And earlier this year, Southern hemisphere countries, including Australia, Chile, and Argentina, experienced intense wildfires during their summer season.

While year-to-date carbon emissions from biomass burning in wildfires were at record lows in the first half of the year, that could change rapidly depending on how the next couple of months of peak fire season in the northern hemisphere go (especially boreal fires).

Dangerous wildfire smoke

Repeatedly this year, smoke from wildfires in Canada and the western U.S. has blanketed areas up to hundreds of miles to the east and south, reaching as far south as Florida last week. At times, over 100 million people were under alerts for pollution from wildfire smoke. Numerous cities—including Chicago, Detroit, Toronto and Milwaukee—experienced hazardous levels of particulate matter pollution, which can cause heart and lung ailments, worsen or trigger asthma, cause cancer, and even lead to death.

Research shows that the contribution of wildfires to PM2.5 pollution has been steadily growing in the U.S. One recent research article on the health impacts of wildfire smoke, driven by climate change, estimates that cumulative excess deaths caused by PM2.5 pollution could be as high as 1.9 million between 2026 and 2055.

Firefighters who spend extended periods of time exposed to hazardous smoke, often with little to no protection, face some of the most acute health risks. A 2025 investigative series by Hannah Dreier of the New York Times showed the harrowing toll this is taking on young firefighters who are getting sick and dying from the toxic substances they’re exposed to. The Forest Service and the Department of Interior have finally been forced to respond and start providing N95 respirator masks to frontline firefighters in 2026.

Fossil fuel companies and the Trump administration: making things much worse

Even as wildfires are raging, fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits, aided by craven politicians all too eager to give them free rein to burn down the planet. Fossil fuel companies and their political allies are now pushing for legislation to grant them immunity from legal and financial accountability for the climate damages they have caused. Join us in fighting back: Tell Congress: No Immunity for Big Oil!

And the Trump administration’s cuts to the US Forest Service staffing and budget, closure of research stations, and chaotic reorganization plans for federal firefighting efforts are also hampering efforts to address wildfire threats. News stories indicate that DOGE’s destructive actions also delayed grants for forest thinning and fuels management efforts in Minnesota, in an area that has now experienced major fires.

The climate future we feared is here

Whether it’s catastrophic wildfires or unrelenting heatwaves, this year has brought home the realities of climate change in ways that are hard to comprehend. Tens of thousands of people have died from extreme heat this year alone, with the highest toll in Europe and Asia. We’ve seen searing images of people fleeing for their lives, and firefighters bravely risking theirs, in the face of towering wildfires. Otherworldly, murky yellow skies and smoke-refracted sunsets signaling dangerous air quality have become all too common.

It’s almost unbearable to think that we knew the scientific facts decades ago and policymakers could have taken action to limit the harms so evident around us today. We can’t let greedy fossil fuel companies and spineless politicians decide our future. We owe it to people reeling from climate-fueled disasters today, and to the generations to come that will live in the shadow of our choices, to do what it takes to chart a different, safer path ahead.

The fact that driving an EV is cleaner than driving a gasoline car is not news to anyone following this issue in the last decade. UCS has been reporting on this issue since 2012 and over that time emissions from electricity generation have fallen significantly as coal use has declined and renewable energy has increased greatly.

Missing data complicates this year’s analysis

However, this year’s update of our EV analysis revealed a troubling trend that goes beyond transportation; while the raw data about pollutant emissions from electricity generation is still available, the compiled dataset we rely on is no longer being produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In every other analysis we’ve done on the climate change benefits of switching from gasoline to electricity we have relied on the US EPA’s Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database, or eGRID.

EPA itself calls eGRID “the preeminent source of U.S. power sector data and a primary source of U.S. emission rates for organizations reporting location-based, Scope 2 emissions,” and describes it as “valuable to those in the Federal Government, state and local governments, non-governmental organizations, companies, and academia”. State and local governments rely on it for emission inventories and electricity labeling programs, and it supplies the electricity emission factors in EPA’s own ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, which companies and cities use to benchmark building energy use. It’s also the data behind our own EV Emissions Tool and more than a decade of UCS analysis.

While no announcement has been made on the discontinuation of the eGRID reporting, EPA’s website lists the next update as happening in January of 2026 with no further information.

This isn’t a one-off occurrence though. Here at UCS, we’ve documented 579 examples of the Trump administration interfering in federal science, several where the Trump administration has shut off the flow of information from federal agencies by ⁠halting data collection, ⁠deleting datasets, and ⁠suppressing scientific guidance. For the case of eGRID data, we were still able to calculate EV emissions through the foresight of EPA staff to make the eGRID methods available under an open source license and the work of the Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative to gather the needed input data and produce a validated 2024 eGRID dataset (2024 represents the most recent data available using this methodology).

The average EV is better than the average gasoline car everywhere in the US

Wherever you plug in, the average EV is cleaner than the average new gasoline car. In grid regions covering 96 percent of the United States population, it beats the most efficient gasoline car you can buy.

When we compare driving on electricity versus gasoline, we consider the heat-trapping emissions that occur in producing and using those fuels. For a fully electric EV, that means:

• Emissions that result from raw material extraction, such as coal mining and natural gas drilling;
• Emissions from delivering these fuels to power plants;
• Emissions from burning those fuels in power plants to generate electricity;
• Electricity losses that occur during distribution from power plants to the point where the electric vehicle is plugged in; and
• The efficiency of the vehicle in using electricity.

Similarly, our assessment of the heat-trapping emissions from comparable gasoline vehicles addresses emissions that result from:

• Oil extraction at the well;
• Transporting crude oil to a refinery;
• Refining oil into gasoline;
• Delivering fuel to gas stations; and
• Combusting fuel in the vehicle’s engine.

The emissions from driving an EV depend on where the electricity comes from to recharge it, and that depends on where in the country you’re recharging. In places with a relatively clean grid, emissions from driving an EV are very low. For example, driving an EV in upstate NY is equal to a 219 mpg gasoline car, or less than 12 percent of the average new gasoline vehicle emissions.

Even where the grid still has significant fossil fuel-powered generation, EVs are a cleaner choice. In the grid region that serves most of Texas, driving the average EV produces emissions equal to an 87 mpg gasoline car, despite over 60% of electricity generation coming from fossil fuels.

California currently has the lowest state-level emissions for driving an EV

While our analysis uses the eGRID electric generation regions shown on the map above, we can also estimate a state average, using the relative population in each grid region within a state’s boundaries to account for states that are served by more than one eGRID generation region. While upstate New York has the cleanest grid, California has the lowest emissions when looking at a state average. Driving the average EV in California has emissions equal to a 164 mpg gasoline car, or less than one sixth the emissions of the average new model year 2024 gasoline car. The results can also be expressed directly as climate-changing emissions, measured in grams of CO₂ equivalent per mile. Driving an EV in California results in 64 g/mi of climate-changing emissions, compared to 409 g/mi for the average new gasoline car when considering both tailpipe emissions and those from producing and delivering gasoline.

Driving an efficient EV maximizes emissions benefits from switching to electricity

EVs vary in efficiency, with the most efficient EVs going more than 4 miles on one kilowatt-hour of electricity while some electric pickup trucks get about 2 miles of driving on the same amount of energy. One kilowatt-hour is roughly what it takes to run an electric oven for 30 minutes or brew about nine pots of coffee. Choosing a more efficient EV that meets your driving needs will reduce the emissions from driving. For example, charging the average EV in Michigan means effective emissions equal to a 62 mpg gasoline car, while choosing an EV like the Lucid Air can reduce emissions to that of an 87 mpg conventional vehicle. And of course, a more efficient EV will also cost less to recharge.

Driving on electricity is better, for trips that require a car

Switching from gasoline to electricity can sharply cut climate-changing emissions and accelerating that shift is essential to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. But the cleanest car trip is still the one you do not have to take. Replacing some car trips with public transit, e-bikes, walking, or a traditional bike can reduce pollution even further or even avoid tailpipe pollution and climate-changing emissions altogether. Our current transportation system makes it hard for many people to leave the car behind for every trip but using lower-emission options even part of the time can make a meaningful difference.

Notes on calculations

The analysis presented in this blog uses the methods detailed in the 2022 report “Driving Cleaner”, with the following modifications:

• The data source for electricity generation was updated to reflect 2024 emissions data, using EPA’s eGRID methodology. The analysis was performed by Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative in March 2026 as production of the eGRID database has been paused by EPA, with no status known. EPA’s eGRID website lists a next planned release of “eGRID2024 in
  January of 2026,” but as of July 2026 that release has not been posted and eGRID2023 remains the most recent EPA version.
• State-level emissions were estimated by using a population-weighted average of eGRID subregions, based on EPA’s designation of primary grid region at the ZIP code level.
• Upstream emissions factors now use the GREET2025 database from Argonne National Laboratory. (downloaded May 1, 2026)
• Small-scale solar (residential and commercial) that is not included in eGRID has been estimated using the state-level data from the Energy Information Agency’s Electric Power Monthly (table 1.17B) report and allocated to grid subregions using population-weighted averages based on EPA’s ZIP code subregion assignments.
• The average EV efficiency and location of EV sales (for the sales-weighted national emissions estimate) have been updated to reflect EV sales from 2016 through 2025 based on data from Atlas Public Policy.
• The most efficient gasoline vehicle available is rated at 57 mpg: the highest combined fuel economy among gasoline-only (non-plug-in) model year 2026–2027 vehicles, the 2026 Toyota Prius (2.0L 4-cylinder, front-wheel drive). That is the benchmark behind the comparisons in this post, including the share of the population living where the average EV has lower heat-trapping emissions than any gasoline car on the market.

This is the world of ‘Common Ground,’ a video game developed by a team of students at Harvey Mudd College in partnership with UCS, to explore just land transition, climate change, and the decisions involved in transitioning cropland in California’s Central Valley.

Drought, extreme heat, and floods

Townsville is fictional, but the problems players must grapple with are based on real challenges Californians are facing today.

California is home to more than 60 thousand farms, covering more than 20 million acres of land. Unfortunately, California’s highly profitable agricultural industry comes at a cost to water security, air quality, and health for nearby residents, farmworkers and small farmers.

Agricultural water demand has taken a toll on the long-term sustainability of California’s groundwater. During the 2012-2016 drought, surface water deliveries were restricted and groundwater pumping in the Central Valley increased, in part due to agricultural demand. Heavy groundwater pumping in the San Joaquin Valley caused thousands of private domestic wells to go dry and contributed to subsidence—a phenomenon where so much groundwater is removed that the land sinks.

The San Joaquin Valley faces challenges from poor air quality, exposure to pollution from pesticides and fertilizers in the air and water, and extreme heat conditions. With climate change, these challenges are becoming more pressing. We’ve already begun to experience the weather whiplash that will become more frequent from flooding in some years to California’s snowpack at historic lows in other years.

Addressing these challenges will require fundamentally changing the systems that govern how we use natural resources and transitioning to practices that rejuvenate, rather than strain, lands and water resources.

The Opportunity—just land transition

California’s commitment to groundwater sustainability means that cropland transition is already underway in California’s Central Valley.

Following the 2012-2016 drought, California adopted new laws and incentive programs to encourage sustainable water practices. In 2014, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), was passed to regulate California’s groundwater basins and require them to be managed for long-term sustainability. California has also committed to investing roughly a quarter of a billion dollars through the Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program to assist groundwater sustainability agencies with planning and implementing groundwater resilience projects, including groundwater recharge, stormwater capture, and cropland repurposing.

To accomplish California’s groundwater sustainability goal, more than 500,000 acres of irrigated cropland may be repurposed in the San Joaquin Valley alone. Where and how this transition takes place will shape the future of California’s agricultural industry and Central Valley communities.

Instead of allowing market forces to guide where and how agricultural land is taken out of production, a just land transition ensures that communities impacted by the transition are part of the decision-making process. A just land transition based on strategic and intentional cropland repurposing can help shift from practices and systems that are unsustainable and extractive, to those that support communities and local economies. By repurposing cropland inside and around rural communities, we can also reduce public health exposures and provide public benefits. In our recent report, “Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions,” we offered examples of how to use nature-based solutions improve water sustainability and increase public health, climate resilience, and economic benefits.

This transition has the potential to reshape the Central Valley and help communities adapt if public investment dollars are spent on projects that center community decision-making and provide direct and meaningful benefits to frontline communities.

UCS scientists have found that repurposing cropland near communities can produce multiple benefits for communities. Reducing pesticide and fertilizer applications, dust and emissions from agricultural operations, and groundwater withdrawals in proximity to communities can reduce the public health risks faced by frontline communities.

When land is transitioned to projects that provide multiple benefits, including, for example, energy reliability, habitat restoration, flood risk reduction, and groundwater recharge, communities can benefit from land transition. There is enormous potential benefit in exploring nature-based solutions to accomplish climate adaptation and resilience, along with groundwater sustainability.

A card from the Common Ground video game. Harvey Mudd College/UCS

Welcome to Townsville

In ‘Common Ground’ players can explore these challenges as they collaborate to implement cropland transition projects in Townsville. Players make spending decisions, negotiate with landowners, and work against unpredictable extreme weather to protect their community.

Players can explore different types of cropland transition opportunities and their benefits in a conceptual way and see how the community, environment, and economy of Townsville respond to their choices.

To develop this game, UCS partnered with an incredible team of students at Harvey Mudd College. Laura, Mia, Nicole, Ria, and Vibhu, led by Professor Kirabo, worked with us over the course of the academic year. We started out with a goal of creating a fun, multiplayer cooperative game, grounded in the idea of transitioning cropland around communities to reduce the negative externalities (e.g. pesticide exposure) and provide meaningful benefits (e.g. improved groundwater levels, access to parks and nature, renewable energy, etc.). The students learned about cropland transition and took on the task of adapting these scientific concepts into game mechanics.

Informed by the real-world effects of nature-based solutions, the students created a range of potential project types in the game, each with different benefits for the environment, community well-being, economy, and local farmers

Over the course of the year, the students sought more feedback through playtests with their peers, UCS staff, and even came to Sacramento to share an early version of the game with the State Agencies and staff working directly on groundwater sustainability and cropland transition.

After a year of hard work, we are so excited to be able to share Common Ground—which is now available for you to play online! This game is designed so that anyone can play—all you need is 3 friends and an internet connection. We hope that the game can be used as an educational tool for anyone and everyone to learn about cropland transition and nature-based solutions, to simulate collaboration and negotiation throughout the project design and selection process and see the benefits and tradeoffs of climate resilience planning.

As a former federal scientist and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy official, these losses are deeply personal to me. I’ve seen firsthand how science, data, and evidence help policymakers make informed decisions that improve people’s lives, which is why the erosion of the federal scientific workforce, agencies, and norms are so concerning as we grapple with extreme heat waves and danger season due to climate change, the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever recorded, nationwide cyclosporiasis infections from unsafe food and water, and an AI data center boom that is roiling communities across the country, among other things.

And beyond this loss of technical expertise of career federal employees, a less well-known path for science-informed government decision-making has also been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration: federal science advice from experts outside of government, who volunteer their time and expertise to inform government decisions through federal advisory committees.

The importance of federal science advice

More than 750 Federal Advisory Committees (FACs) currently exist across 51 U.S. government agencies, with 484 of these FACs specifically housed within 9 federal agencies with science-related missions—including the Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and Department of Health and Human Services.

FACs were created to provide independent, unbiased, and up-to-date technical expertise to inform policy decisions across agencies and issue areas. Historically, they’ve been comprised of the nation’s best independent experts and scientists from academia, state and local government, industry, and nonprofits. Not every government scientist is an expert in every area that they’re expected to inform policies for, so bringing in outside expertise is crucial to their process.

Expert input is essential for science-based responses to complex challenges with global impacts: from the outbreaks of deadly diseases and flood or wildfire disasters to air pollution standards and appropriate pesticide use. And, as we’ve previously written, FACs also bring the public into the work of government, representing a vital form of public participation and civic engagement in a government of, by, and for the people.

How President Trump has kneecapped federal advisory committees and science-based policy

Since 2018, we’ve been tracking how the Trump administration has sidelined science advisory committees and outside scientific expertise in federal policymaking. To hold the administration accountable, we documented stalled and disbanded scientific advisory committees, cancelled meetings, and dismissed experts. Expert input was important then, but it’s arguably even more crucial now with the mass firings of federal scientists and decimation of in-house expertise by DOGE.

Now, in President Trump’s second administration, the federal science advice infrastructure has been disrupted, which is especially damaging in a corrupted misinformation-rich environment. After a flurry of executive orders, including one dissolving at least one-third of FACs across the government, it was clear that the administration was intent on disrupting federal science advice. In its first six months, the Trump administration terminated or disbanded 27 percent of active science FACs.

One year later, we have a much better picture of the rubble.

As of this writing, the FACA database—a government-run database that hosts information on past and current FACs—has not updated its data for terminated committees beyond 2024. So, we crunched these numbers.

The consequences of even a single disruption to these FACs can be far-reaching. For example:

• In February 2026, term limits expired for the EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC), who advise EPA on wide-ranging environmental issues (e.g., air and water pollution regulations, chemical safety programs, risk assessment policies) that impact children’s health. The EPA solicited nominations in August 2025 and claimed they would fill CHPAC vacancies by March 1, 2026, but as of this writing that has still not happened, and the committee has been inactive since its last meeting in August 2025. CHPAC is tasked with advancing research to implement Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, but it’s impossible to see how they will do that when they have failed to hold any meetings, and prioritized industry representatives in their call for member nominations.

• The US Preventive Services Task Force is a volunteer panel at HHS that reviews scientific evidence on tests and medications to help prevent conditions like cancer, diabetes, and HIV. This key health care panel has not met since March 2025 because it has been blocked from doing so four times—leaving important evidence reviews on hold, the public in the dark, and delayed recommendations to guide physicians’ clinical decisions and insurance coverage requirements for millions of Americans. Alarmingly, last year the US Supreme Court ruled that the HHS Administrator can remove members from this panel and override its decisions. This means that political appointees can exert extraordinary influence over an ostensibly independent, evidence-based committee, despite not having the public health expertise on which the panel’s credibility depends—which I assure you HHS Secretary RFK JR. also does not.

• In March 2026, the EPA finally announced its new selection of members, nearly a year after seeking nominations, for the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), a powerful panel that provides the agency with crucial scientific expertise to inform air pollution standards to protect public health. It is largely academics who have historically held these seats, but now it’s got the same conflicted and contrarian leader at the helm as during Trump 1.0, in addition to a steel industry official and a member of a fringe Koch-funded climate denial organization that advocates for more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Without independent science advice at EPA, we risk having fewer protections from air pollution, water pollution, toxic chemicals and more.

• In April 2026, in another blow to independent science, Trump fired of all 25 members of the National Science Board at NSF, which finances nearly $9 billion in basic science research in labs across the US that powers innovations like our smartphones. As of this writing, there has been no news of the administration reestablishing this board. But perhaps they intend to keep it that way, seeing that they’re trying to politicize all federal research funding through their recently proposed OMB rule.

• In April 2026, the EPA finally announced its new selection of Science Advisory Board (SAB) members. The SAB was another casualty of Trump’s war on independent science when he fired the entire board en masse just days before confirming his new EPA administrator. The SAB is responsible for providing independent scientific and technical advice to the EPA to help guide policies, and now it’s been slashed by 11 members (nearly a quarter). Looking at the professional backgrounds of its 2024 vs 2026 membership below, it’s clear this independent scientific body is not only being diminished but also politicized—with several of its members coming from the chemical industry.

How we’re fighting back: building an alliance for independent science

At UCS, we are building an alliance for independent science, a pillar of our Science Rising initiative, in response to Trump’s attacks on science and authoritarian efforts to remove facts, data, and evidence from policymaking.

To counter the Trump administration’s erosion of independent science and build the nation’s capacity to use science for the public good, scientists from several committees that were disbanded or terminated have independently convened to offer policy recommendations on important issues, a powerful and courageous response. Their doing so preserves a vital channel for scientific advice.

In collaboration with the Environmental Protection Network, we are providing strategic guidance, training, and coordination for independent scientists to provide their expertise and recommendations for evidence-based policies, starting with:  

• Protecting children’s health: We’re convening former Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC) members and subject matter experts in plastics, toxics, pesticides, and environmental health to ensure that science can keep our nation’s kids healthy and safe. Operating outside of the government, this group aims to bridge a current oversight gap by operating as an independent, parallel body to preserve scientific rigor and transparency while the formal committee remains inactive. Once it’s active again, the group will conduct oversight of EPA’s activities to ensure that the best available science is used and that the public interest and children’s health remain a priority.
• Protecting clean air: We’re convening a group of former Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) members and subject matter experts in air quality and public health to monitor and provide rapid response to current industry-friendly EPA actions and inactions that undermine science, public health, or the integrity of the regulatory process. Operating outside of the federal government, this group will develop reports and papers that can inform evidence-based policy for current decisionmakers and—hopefully—a more science-friendly administration in the future.

How you can protect independent science

It’s encouraging and energizing to see such a broad and clear response from the scientific community in defense of independent science. At a time when fear and reluctance to criticize the administration persist from pockets of the scientific community, this kind of solidarity and commitment to independent science are desperately needed for the public good. Current and former science advisors should speak out when they perceive that federal agencies and others in the government are sidelining important scientific work and findings.

We must draw on our expertise, our networks, and our collective resources to adapt our strategies and focus our efforts where they can have the greatest impact. Doing so will require rebuilding the infrastructure, institutions, and communities from outside government to preserve what’s being dismantled within it.

To find out whether there is an FAC in your field of research or interest that has been dismantled, use our guide to the FACA database. To continue the work of dismantled federal FACs, you can use our toolkit for running an independent science advisory committee.

And to help make issues of science and democracy more visible for members of Congress and advocate for hearings on the status of science advisory committees, and ensuring they are carrying out the Federal Advisory Committee Act appropriately, I invite you to join our Science Rising Action Corps.

Action is the antidote to despair, and these are important steps toward reimagining and building a better, stronger federal scientific enterprise.

I’ve been a UCS ally for decades—especially with my friends at the UCS Center for Science and Democracy, who are working to protect scientific integrity in the US government. That work includes pushing for Scientific Integrity Act legislation and drafting and implementing government-wide policies on scientific integrity. This summer, I’ve joined UCS as a Senior Advisor focused on countering the administration’s attacks on science and supporting the organization’s new Science Rising initiative. 

Today, I want to talk to you about the US National Science Foundation (NSF), why it’s so important for American science, engineering, technology, and innovation, and how its role in American science is now under threat. But working together, we can protect the national treasure that is NSF.  

Why the National Science Foundation matters

Although two dozen US federal agencies fund some form of research and development (R&D), NSF is the only federal agency charged in its original legislation with supporting research at the frontiers of knowledge across all science and engineering disciplines. Since 1950, NSF has been investing in research, research infrastructure, and STEM education across the nation—primarily through universities via research and education grants—with a mission “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense; and for other purpose.” And it’s delivered many benefits to the American people, as my colleague Carlos Martinez recently described.  

NSF has built a merit review process for allocating nearly all of its funding to ensure “the proposals it receives are reviewed in a fair, competitive, transparent and in-depth manner.” This review process is the true gold standard of science and has been the inspiration and model for research funding agencies around the world. I know this because more than a dozen nations’ science policy professionals have visited me wanting to learn how NSF’s merit review process works, particularly its use of two criteria—intellectual merit and broader impacts—so that they can build similar gold-standard merit reviews for their nations.  

Several UCS colleagues have shared their stories of why NSF is important to them, so let me share mine: Early in my career, NSF’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES, part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Directorate) supported my early work on government R&D funding and its impacts and helped me become an R&D budget nerd (which I still am today) and science policy practitioner.  

Without NSF, I would not have had the career in science and science policy I’ve had. That early support led to many years of contributing to NCSES’ federal R&D data and working with NSF and the National Science Board on its biennial Science and Engineering Indicators.  

“More than a dozen nations’ science policy professionals have visited me wanting to learn how NSF’s merit review process works.”

My experience with NSF led to one of my first assignments at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 2009: implementing President Obama’s campaign pledge to double the number of NSF Graduate Research Fellowships (GRFs) awarded to 2000 from 1000 a year. Yes we did!  

Over the years, I’ve had the chance to meet many current and past GRFs, and through them I understand on a personal level the impacts GRF and NSF support can have on US science and engineering and on STEM careers. Indirectly, my experiences with NSF led me to become the chair of the NSF transition team for the incoming Biden administration in late 2020 and then a White House science official in the Biden OSTP working closely with NSF leadership and the National Science Board (NSB) to keep advancing US science and engineering.  

NSF under siege 

NSF is so critical for US science and engineering that UCS has written repeatedly about the agency, from making our position known on the latest nominee to be NSF Director to taking legal action to prevent NSF from closing its National Center for Atmospheric Research. We’ve sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to NSF to release the responses to its Dear Colleague Letters and its own internal decision-making for greater transparency in these proposals. We’ve sounded the alarm on proposals to restructure the agency and fire scores of scientists, and we recently called on the UCS community to comment on a government-wide rule that would politicize federal research funding, including NSF funding, in unprecedented ways. (Thank you to everyone who responded by the July 13 deadline!)  

Well, here we go again. NSF has just proposed major changes in its procedures for awarding research grants. Essentially, the proposed rules—which are now open for public comment— would codify within NSF the damaging changes OMB proposes to make government-wide. That would be destructive, not only to NSF’s merit review process, but also to the entire US science and engineering enterprise.  

Injecting politics into science

The prime example, NSF’s proposed Guide 25 (page 197), incorporates OMB’s proposal to allow agencies to terminate a grant or decline to issue an award for not being aligned with administration political priorities. It would even allow NSF to terminate already-awarded grants at any time for being inconsistent with an administration’s political priorities.  

The proposed rule would subject all NSF awards, meaning everything (not just research grants but also fellowships, training grants, center grants, undergraduate research opportunities, etc.) to review and approval by a politically appointed official before being issued through an unspecified process and under unspecified criteria, and thus contradicts everything NSF’s current merit-review process stands for.  

This could be even more problematic for NSF than other agencies: NSF currently has no political appointees since Director Panchanathan resigned last year and the entire presidentially appointed National Science Board was fired this spring. Who’s supposed to review NSF grants? Presumably OMB and OSTP officials. I know that when I was an OSTP official, I would have been appalled at even the idea of someone like me approving every single NSF award with a political litmus test. NSF’s merit-review process and NSF’s talented program managers and leaders need to retain that non-political responsibility.   

In another example, NSF’s proposed Guide 12 (page 128), would disallow NSF funds from supporting travel to scientific conferences or publication costs of research publications. I’ve always believed that if a federal agency determines that research is worthy of federal support with public dollars, they should support not only the experiment but also the publication and public presentation of the results of the research. Communicating research results is an integral part of research without which research can’t have impact because no one can learn from it or even read it.  

And my final example, Guide 6 Section G (page 84), deals with international collaborations. Recently, NSF issued a Dear Colleague letter (DCL) titled “Prohibition on Collaborations with Restricted Entities” which replaces the NSF’s carefully constructed policies and procedures for evaluating potential NSF-funded research collaborations to consider research-security concerns with lists of restricted entities. The letter says plainly, “NSF has determined research security risk mitigation for NSF-funded projects involving these restricted entities is not sufficient.” Accordingly, NSF plans to implement a new research security policy prohibiting collaboration on NSF-funded projects with the restricted entities listed. 

This article’s headline sums it up well: “New NSF policy would ban almost all collaborations with Chinese scientists.” I think it’s a bad idea to shut them down. US scientists are the best because they collaborate with the best scientists from around the world, including China, on areas where there is little to no risk for national security, especially for research that is intended to be published in the open literature. Putting aside thoughtful “research security risk mitigation” in favor of prohibiting any collaboration with entities on a list—even when no NSF funding supports foreign collaborators’ work, and even when results are openly available in publications—does great damage to US science.  

OMB’s regulation goes further, and by implication NSF would too, by prohibiting federally funded researchers from collaborating with any researchers from a covered country or entity, list or no list, starting with China (including US scientists at Chinese institutions and also US-trained Chinese scientists) but with ‘covered country’ or ‘covered entity’ so ill-defined that an administration could add, say, Spain at a moment’s notice. Although the Dear Colleague letter is not open for public comment, only questions, the NSF Guidance on international collaborations which will incorporate this DCL and the proposed OMB regulation is. 

Raise your voice for the National Science Foundation

I could go on. If you have thoughts on these and other proposals contained in the draft NSF Guidance for Financial Assistance, and I certainly do, then we have until August 24 to make our voices heard. I’ll be dusting off my OMB comments and sending some of them to NSF, as these OMB and NSF proposals both aim to do the same thing: change the US federal research enterprise as we know it, which has brought the United States so many benefits in scientific discovery, security, health, and economic opportunity, and replace it with a more isolated, more politicized, and less scientific research enterprise that no longer relies on merit review but rather political review.  

I think these changes would destroy what has made NSF great and therefore diminish the United States as the leading scientific superpower and leader in achieving impact from research. If NSF’s long tradition of supporting leading-edge scientific research based primarily on merit review is as important to you as it is to me, I hope you’ll join me in using your voice to speak up for NSF.  

Together, these events served as a reminder that during Danger Season—the period between May and October when North America is hit hardest by extreme weather, like heat, drought, wildfire, and hurricanes—electricity is about much more than keeping the lights on. Electricity is powering our air conditioners, fans, refrigerators for medication, and other essential services, all of which keep people safe during extreme heat. For older adults, young children, people with chronic illnesses, and many medically vulnerable individuals, access to cooling can mean the difference between remaining safe at home and experiencing serious heat-related illness.  

These events also illustrate a broader challenge. As the climate warms, households are increasingly relying on cooling to stay safe while electricity costs continue to rise. In other words, the need for cooling and the cost of cooling are increasing together.   

For many families, particularly those already facing high energy burdens, this creates a growing affordability challenge. Paying for electricity is no longer simply a question of comfort: it is increasingly a prerequisite for health and safety.  

Because no single dataset captures every dimension of affordability, the five figures below draw on multiple national datasets covering different time periods. Together, they illustrate long-term temperature trends, recent changes in household electricity costs, and the latest available evidence on energy burden and energy insecurity. They show how electricity spending during Danger Season has changed over time, how seasonal cooling needs have increased, how energy burdens remain concentrated among lower-income households, and how affordability is already affecting people’s ability to keep their homes at safe temperatures. 

Taken together, these figures suggest that affordability is becoming an increasingly important dimension of climate resilience. As extreme heat becomes more common, the challenge is not only whether households have access to cooling—but critically, whether they can afford to use it.  

The cost of cooling a home is increasing 

As summers become hotter across much of the country, electricity has become one of the most important tools for protecting health during periods of extreme heat. But staying cool comes at a cost. Since 2020, the average household’s electricity spending during Danger Season will have increased by more than 30 percent, projections suggest. This increase reflects more than inflation alone. According to research from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA) and the Center for Energy Poverty and Climate (CEPC), higher household cooling costs are being driven by a combination of rising electricity demand, increasing retail electricity prices, continued investments in grid infrastructure, fuel costs, and broader changes in energy markets. What may once have appeared to be a temporary increase is increasingly becoming the new normal.  

The need for cooling is growing 

Rising electricity bills are only one part of the story. Households also need more cooling than they once did. One helpful data set for understanding this long-term change is the Cooling Degree Days (CDD) from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA)—a standard measure used by climatologists and utilities to estimate how much cooling buildings require. Unlike measures that simply count extreme heat days, CDD captures the cumulative need for cooling over an entire season. Because climate trends are generally evaluated over periods of 30 years or more, this 50-year record provides a robust picture of long-term change. And despite the year-to-year variability, the overall trend is clear: people in the United States generally need more cooling today than they did five decades ago.  

Rising cooling demand does not necessarily translate into hardship for every household. But for families already facing high energy burdens, the need for more air conditioning can mean substantially higher summer electricity bills.  

Lower-income households were already struggling with costs

Higher electricity bills and greater cooling needs do not affect every household equally. Lower-income households were already spending a disproportionate share of their income on energy before this summer. That’s where an examination of energy burdens becomes important. Energy burden refers to the share of a household’s income spent on energy bills, and it is highest among lower-income households. In this analysis, lower-income households are defined as those earning 80% or less of their Area Median Income (AMI). AMI is the median income for a given metropolitan area or county. Because incomes and costs of living vary across the country, AMI provides a locally adjusted benchmark for comparing household incomes. 

The graph above, with data from the most recent annual estimates available from the US Department of Energy’s Low-Income Energy Affordability Data (LEAD) Tool, shows that energy burden is dramatically higher among lower-income households. Families with lower incomes have less flexibility to absorb rising utility bills because energy already consumes a much larger share of their budgets. For these households, even modest increases in cooling costs can force difficult tradeoffs between paying utility bills and meeting other essential needs.  

Affordability is forcing difficult, unsafe choices

Energy burden isn’t just reflected in household budgets—it shapes everyday decisions. Responses collected by the Census Bureau in late summer 2024 about experiences during the previous 12 months show that lower-income households are substantially more likely to reduce spending on essentials, such as food or medicine, in order to pay their energy bills. They are also much more likely to report keeping their homes at temperatures that felt unsafe or unhealthy. Households earning less than $25,000 annually, more than one-quarter reported keeping their homes at temperatures that felt unsafe or unhealthy. As household income increases, both of these hardships become steadily less common, suggesting that affordability increasingly shapes who can safely cool their homes during periods of extreme heat. 

Affordability is driving increasing rates of energy insecurity 

These affordability challenges are becoming more widespread. Energy insecurity refers to the inability to adequately meet a household’s basic energy needs. It can include difficulty paying utility bills, keeping a home at safe indoor temperatures, or maintaining reliable electricity service.  

New data suggest that these challenges are affecting a growing share of households. Comparing the 2020 and 2024 Residential Energy Consumption Surveys from the US Energy Information Administration shows increases  across every major indicator measured, includingutility disconnection notices, reductions in spending on food or medicine, and an inability to adequately heat of cool the home. . Together, these findings suggest that energy affordability is becoming an increasingly important public health and climate resilience challenge. 

Addressing the climate and energy affordability challenge 

Fortunately, there are solutions. Reducing heat-trapping emissions remains essential to limiting how severe, and how costly, future summers become. Investments in weatherization and energy efficiency can reduce household energy needs before temperatures rise. Utility bill assistance and stronger protections against utility disconnections can help families stay safe during periods of extreme heat. Community solar, resilience hubs, and distributed energy resources can also help communities prepare for, withstand, and recover from increasingly dangerous summers.  

Just as important, policymakers and regulators can and should evaluate energy decisions through an affordability lens. As electricity demand grows and investments are made to modernize and strengthen the electric grid, ensuring that electricity remains affordable, particularly for households already facing high energy burdens, will be critical. Affordability is becoming an increasingly important component of climate resilience, alongside investments in grid reliability, energy efficiency, weatherization, and consumer protections.  

The figures in this analysis point us toward important questions. Which lower-income communities face the greatest combined risks from rising cooling needs, high electricity costs, and limited household resources? Where are households already struggling to stay safe during periods of extreme heat? And which policies can ensure affordability keeps pace with a warming climate? As the climate changes, our understanding—and our solutions—must continue evolving too. 

Because when temperatures become dangerous, access to cooling is no longer simply a matter of whether air conditioning exists. It is increasingly a matter of whether people can afford to use it. 

Earth is going to shatter global temperature records

A record-breaking super El Niño has a lot of implications for the world’s weather and climate system, and for the human systems that depend on them, like agriculture and food security. In a typical El Niño, the overall global average temperature is warmer than usual due mainly to warm ocean surface temperatures in the eastern Tropical Pacific. When ocean temperatures are warmer, they release a lot more heat into the atmosphere, warming up global air temperatures.

As I mentioned in my last blog, El Niño and fossil fuel-driven climate change together make a terrible team. While El Niño is a natural cycle in Earth’s climate system, fossil fuel-driven climate change is not. When you combine an El Niño event with the overall warming of Earth due to emissions from heat trapping fossil fuels, you get an exceptionally warm planet.

A super El Niño, which is a very strong El Niño event, would almost certainly push global temperatures into record territory. Check out the latest model forecast simulations from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME; below). The observed global surface temperature anomaly (compared with the 1850-1900 average) is on the left side of the graph. You can see that, so far this year, we’ve been above 1.0°C (1.8°F) warmer every single month compared with the same temperature values in the late 1800s.

Global surface temperatures from July 2025 to March 2027, showing observed temperatures up to July 2026 and projected temperatures after that. On the right, the thin orange lines show individual model projects, and the red line shows their average.  NOAA/University of Miami.

The right panel of the graph shows the forecast through March 2027: with a super El Niño, global average temperatures will skyrocket. Monthly temperature anomalies are expected to approach 2.0°C for January, February, and March 2027, with nearly half of the models forecasting well over 2.0°C values. A couple models are literally off the chart, over 2.5°C! That means there’s a possibility of reaching a monthly global average temperature anomaly of 2.5°C. This would be a shocking escalation of global warming, as we only just crossed the 1.5°C threshold (temporarily, in terms of yearly average) in 2024.

As a reminder, 1.5°C and 2°C are the internationally agreed targets, encoded in the Paris Climate Agreement, as the safer temperature limits that we should strive to remain below. Fossil fuel-driven climate change plus this Super El Niño could, at least temporarily, breach these targets.

Climate change and El Niño

So what’s up with this record-breaking super El Niño? Is it related to fossil fuel-caused climate change? I have two responses for you:

1) In today’s world, every part of our climate system (ocean, atmosphere, land, cryosphere) is fundamentally different due to climate change in some way. This isn’t the same climate system as the 1950s. Therefore, every meteorological or climatological phenomenon that occurs, even if it’s a natural cycle like El Niño, is being affected by our changing system.

2) There is evidence that fossil fuel-driven climate change is directly influencing El Niño. As I mentioned in my last blog, one study found in recent observations that El Niño and La Niña events are becoming more extreme. Another study found that the impact of El Niño events on our weather patterns is getting worse with climate change.

The oceans are blazing hot

One would think we wouldn’t reach record-breaking ocean surface temperatures in the eastern Tropical Pacific until the super El Niño is in full swing, but that’s not the case. Ocean surface temperatures in the main development region for El Niño events are already at record levels for the date (below). And not just barely breaking the record, we are nearly 0.5°C (0.9°F) warmer than the previous record for mid-July, and over 2.0°C (3.6°F) warmer than the 1991-2020 average.

Daily sea surface temperature in the Niño 3.4 region, which is an area in the eastern Tropical Pacific where El Niño typically develops. The red line is 2026 values, the orange line is 2025. The dashed lines are 1991-2020 (thicker dashed) and 1982-2010 (lighter dashed) averages. ClimateReanalyzer.

Globally, ocean surface temperatures are also in record territory for this time of year, driven not just by the El Niño region but by marine heat waves currently affecting nearly 40% of the ocean. According to the marine heatwave tracker from NOAA, abnormally hot ocean temperatures are being observed in every ocean basin around the world (below). There’s a huge bullseye in the Pacific Ocean where the super El Niño is developing, but look at the Indian Ocean, Atlantic Ocean north of the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. That patch of heat in the Mediterranean actually helped produce the heat dome leading to the record high temperatures Europe experienced last month, leading to over 20,000 excess deaths.

NOAA coral reef watch daily map for tracking marine heatwaves. The areas in yellow, orange, and red denote oceans currently experiencing a marine heatwave. NOAA.

It’s no surprise that the oceans are blazingly hot. They have absorbed over 90% of the heat added to the climate system from the additional heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels—a truly mind-boggling amount of excess heat. These marine heatwaves that we’re seeing covering 40% of the world’s oceans are yet another indicator of accelerating fossil fuel-driven climate change.

Climate change, El Niño and the heat dome in western US

What goes on in the ocean doesn’t stay in the ocean. If record ocean surface temperatures are occurring, whether it’s from El Niño or a marine heatwave, we’re going to feel those effects on land. Now, a heat dome has started in the western US which could last through the end of July for the west coast. And we’re seeing some unprecedented temperatures: both Salt Lake City, Utah and Helena, Montana have broken their all-time record high temperatures.

The fingerprints of fossil fuel-driven climate change are all over this heat dome. According to Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index, a broad swath of temperatures in the Mountain West (the day of the Salt Lake City and Helena record highs) were made 5x more likely due to climate change on Sunday, July 12.

The Climate Shift Index for Sunday, July 12, 2026. Places in dark red show areas that experienced temperatures made 5x more likely due to climate change. Climate Central.

You also might be thinking, “wait, are the developing super El Niño or the marine heatwaves related to this heat dome?” That is an excellent question, and most likely, yes. The weather of the western US is often directly influenced by ocean surface temperatures in the Pacific, as my own research showed in 2024. Another study released in 2024 found that anomalous storms/rainfall south of Hawaii, which develops from warmer ocean surface temperatures, influenced the Pacific Northwest heatwave in 2021. Record warm ocean surface temperatures as a result of climate change and the developing super El Niño are likely influencing the strength and duration of the current heat dome in the western US.

Earth’s climate has changed

We are now living in a dangerous new world thanks to the emissions of heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels. The climate of yesterday is no longer present. El Niños will look different, marine heatwaves will become more frequent and longer lasting, and heat domes that produce unprecedented heatwaves are here to stay. But there’s still hope. We know what to do to tackle the climate crisis we’ve brought onto ourselves. It’s time to take action.

Here are two things you can tell your Congressional representatives today.

• No immunity for big oil
• Protect FEMA and NOAA from budget cuts

Stay safe and fight on.

Correction: Fossil fuel-driven climate change plus this Super El Niño could, at least temporarily, breach 1.5°C and 2°C temperature targets. An earlier version of the story stated that the targets are already being breached.

The OMB rule would also:

• Deny grants that don’t align with the administration’s beliefs
• Allow grants to be terminated if the results are politically inconvenient
• Erect barriers to international scientific collaboration
• Base funding decisions on applicants’ history and organizational “affiliations”
• Require pre-approval for scientific conferences, society memberships and publications

As my colleague Alexa Dietrich, research director for Center for Science and Democracy writes, the OMB rule would “upend US science as we know it.” Political appointees without specific expertise or experience would be the loudest voice on who receives funding for vaccine development, water quality investigations, estimates of disparate impacts from air pollution, or advancing the state of the science on healthcare for LGBTQ+ people. The bureaucratic requirements in this rule would be a restrictive vice grip applied to the scientific community and institutions. What’s more, the proposed rule does not only apply to research funding—the same approach would impact all of the federal government’s discretionary funding, including funding for natural disaster relief programs.

We took a stand

The Union of Concerned Scientists strongly opposes these restrictions on and politicization of federal funding for research, and we laid out our opposition to this harmful rule in a public comment letter.

This policy, we contend, threatens scientific discovery and the scientific research system as a whole, beyond the federal government. Through a variety of agencies and programs, the U.S. distributes billions of dollars every year—and those funding decisions have broad power to shape the direction of science across the country and the world.

• Under this rule, today’s peer review panels—who have specific expertise, specific rules for declaring conflicts of interest, and a mission to advance the cause of science –would be sidelined, reduced to an advisory role for decisions made by political appointees whose primary incentive is to support an administration’s policies. The rule also requires restrictions on funding based on ideological standards that are simply not grounded in scientific evidence. While the administration has announced its intention to evaluate funding based on an insistence on a fundamentally binary concept of gender, we detail how this restriction denies the actual scientific evidence. The administration has also made it clear that they intend to disallow science that studies questions related to diversity, equity, and inclusion—but, as we point out, these limitations —would ignore clear facts and “degrade evidence-based policy in the United States, to the detriment of all Americans.” 
• The proposed rule is even inconsistent with its purported objectives of transparency and efficiency, as it requires many unobjective limitations and hurdles and creates uncertainty for the scientific community because of vague, subjective benchmarks. The administration’s deceptively-titled “Gold Standard Science” guidelines give political appointees an open-ended power to disallow research based on flimsy pretexts. The proposed rule isn’t just bad policy—it would also violate the constitutional separation of powers, by shifting spending and policymaking powers from the Legislative Branch to the Executive Branch. In other words, the proposed rule intrudes on Congress’s power of the purse. An administration is supposed to implement the law—not make it.
• Finally, the proposed rule would violate the First Amendment by impermissibly conditioning funding on alignment with the President’s viewpoints, which would create a chilling effect within the scientific community. Good science is driven by curiosity and a drive to understand the real world—not by fealty to a political leader’s whims.

In sum, we and our partners agree: “the proposed rule would violate the Administrative Procedure Act because it infringes on constitutional rights, exceeds OMB’s statutory authority, and is substantively arbitrary and capricious.”

The scientific community spoke up

After OMB published this rule, they posted it the Federal Register and allowed 45 days for the American public to comment. At UCS, we’ve been mobilizing our supporters to fight back, including and disseminating a public comment guide to help people advocate against this proposed rule.

We are not alone in our concern for how the proposed OMB rule upends science.

By the end of the public comment period, the rule had received nearly half a million public comments (public docket, OMB-2026-0034), a huge number and almost entirely in opposition to the proposal. The AAAS and many scientific and research societies from the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, and aerospace have posted their comments, comment guides, or blogs about their specific opposition to the rule. There are comments from associations for cancer researchers, people who study pharmacology, and from social scientists to mathematicians and astronomers. We found posted comments and articles stating concern from historians to people who study marine mammals.  And we are seeing concern and engagement from providers and scientists that study and care for the health of wildlife. And we’re hearing from experts who study human health, including the eyes, hearts, brains, and lungs. It’s a flood of public comments showing “overwhelming and lopsided” opposition to this proposal from tens of thousands of individuals who understand science best. Looking through these comments from a diverse group of scientific organizations and associations reminds me why I studied science and continue to ask questions and publish results. Science is about discovery, and it is more about learning than knowing. If we lose the ability to test hypotheses that may not align with a political agenda, or if we lose an ability to present results regardless of how politically inconvenient they might be, we close our eyes to the real world and poison our capacity to solve today’s problems as well as the problems of the future. If this rule were enacted, the administration could deny research grant applications related to life-saving issues like vaccine safety, climate science, and LGBTQ+ health, which have all been under attack by President Trump and his enablers.

Keep advocating for independent science

Many in the US Congress are also questioning and pushing back on the OMB rule, not least because it would represent yet more centralization of power in the hands of the President. That power grab violates the democratic principles of our Constitution. Just as science should be driven by a variety of perspectives, voices, and areas of expertise, government decision-making needs to be democratic, participatory, and accountable to the people.

A lot of people have engaged and pushed back on the OMB rule, but we have to continue standing up to this administration’s many attacks on science. We need to prevent further damage, but we also need long-term solutions.

That’s why we at UCS support the Scientific Integrity Act. This bill was recently re-introduced in the US Senate. It would establish stronger safeguards to protect federal scientists from political interference, require agencies to maintain scientific integrity policies, and ensure government decisions are informed by evidence rather than political agendas.

At a moment when independent science is under immense and increasing pressure, Congress must move swiftly to advance the Scientific Integrity Act and strengthen all available guardrails. This piece of legislation gives watchdogs, courts, and the public the tools to fight back against politicization of federal science. Please show your support for the Scientific Integrity Act. You can use this link to contact your Representatives in the House, and this link to contact your Senators.