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.

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.

The battle over election materials and election administration

President Trump is using the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate past elections based on debunked election fraud claims. So far, the FBI has seized 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, and dispatched over 200 analysts to the state to investigate the 2020 election; the FBI has also seized images of ballots from Maricopa County, Arizona; and the DOJ is currently seeking 2024 ballots and other election materials from Wayne County, Michigan. In Georgia, the federal government has also demanded the names, addresses, and other personal information of election administrators, poll workers, and volunteers.

This isn’t just about relitigating past elections, as bad as that would be on its own. These actions are also meant to intimidate voters and election officials, cast doubt on elections in general, and set the stage for challenges to future elections where President Trump and his allies lose. The more people that doubt the legitimacy of elections, the easier it is to for President Trump and his allies across the country to interfere with them. These fabricated claims are being used to justify passing disenfranchising election laws. At least nine states have passed fifteen restrictive voting laws this year. Of these fifteen laws, nine are set to be in effect for the midterm elections.

In Colorado and Missouri, Trump administration allies requested access to voting equipment, requests that were refused by officials in both states. In Colorado, a consultant who identified themselves as working with the White House contacted 10 Republican county clerks in the summer of 2025 to request to inspect voting equipment. In Missouri, also in the summer of 2025, a DOJ official requested equipment used in majority-Republican counties in the 2020 election. Importantly, the DOJ possesses no legal or constitutional authority over voting equipment and, as former DOJ attorney and current head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research David Becker argues, lacks the required expertise to properly review the machines.

Some states are preparing for the possibility that the federal government or local government law enforcement could try to seize ballots or other election materials. California just passed a law prohibiting the unlawful seizure of ballots, voter rolls, or other materials after Riverside County Sheriff and Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots from the 2025 redistricting referendum.

And not only is the Trump administration targeting election materials—it is also going after the hard-working administrators who run elections. President Trump and his allies have long unfairly targeted election officials and administrators, including their recent attempts to acquire the personal information of election workers who administered the 2020 Fulton County, Georgia election. This effort was blocked by a federal judge who described it as “unreasonable.” The DOJ also letters to top election officials in every state threatening criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting. Just last week, President Trump fired all members of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a body that is supposed to help states administer elections fairly and consistently.

The administration’s quest to grab voter data

In March, President Trump signed an Executive Order instructing the Department of Homeland Security to collaborate with the Social Security Administration to create lists of eligible voters in each state—“State Citizenship Lists.” The Constitution is clear that states and Congress, not the executive branch, have jurisdiction over elections—but this executive order poses considerable risks beyond the constitutional overreach.  

The Department of Justice has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia after they refused to share voter registration data. Eight federal courts have dismissed these lawsuits on merit (and one was dismissed for being filed in the wrong venue). At least 15 states have either provided these data or said they would provide full registration lists, which include personal information like Social Security numbers and driver license numbers. The agreement the DOJ demanded of states sharing these data reveals the insufficient security measures the federal government has taken to secure these sensitive, personal data. Alaska and Texas signed this agreement, while Mississippi, South Dakota, and Tennessee refused to sign despite providing the data.

The DOJ has also been shifty about its plans for sharing voter roll data, but the Acting Chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division said they planned to compare it to the DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (or SAVE database). Voting rights groups have argued that a national voter list would likely “lead to eligible voters having their registrations revoked and prevented from casting ballots.” The DHS told ProPublica that SAVE identified over 21,000 potential noncitizens but that list had “vast inaccuracies.” Non-citizen voting is already illegal, and the myth that it is widespread has been thoroughly debunked by federal and state-level Republican-led investigations. Despite the lack of any supporting evidence evidence, ICE agents were granted access to voter files in two counties in Texas and North Carolina.

While the EO is the subject of numerous lawsuits, a federal judge decided not to block it, claiming that, since it has not yet been implemented, the parties could not show they had been harmed by the policy (a court decision that is being appealed). Subsequently, the Postal Service has announced a new proposed rule wherein they would only deliver ballots to voters who are on the federal government’s dubious State Citizenship lists. However, a federal appeals panel has agreed to fast-track its review of a lawsuit against this order and should issue a ruling sometime this month. In late June, a federal judge in Massachusetts prevented federal agencies from implementing the EO, effectively blocking the Trump administration from creating a national voter list and the USPS from only delivering ballots to those on said list, stating that the order exceeded the president’s authority, violated separation of powers, and encroached on states’ power to administer elections.

An opening to abuses of power

As Kathy Broockvar (former Pennsylvania Secretary of State and member of our Election Science Task Force) and John Lindback write, at the heart of the Trump administration’s demands for state voter data is a dispute over who controls elections. Their actions raise concerns about data privacy and how these data can be used to disenfranchise voters: “…The Trump administration has offered no clear explanation of how it intends to use the data, who will have access to it, or what safeguards will protect it from misuse or breach,” they note.

It should also be said that these efforts are part of a larger authoritarian strategy to overturn past legitimate elections and further spread disproved allegations of election fraud. The lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—a lie that has resulted in violence, distrust, and anti-voting rights legislation and statutes—has been proven false time and time again. Still, President Trump and his allies refuse to admit he lost the 2020 election, continue to push conspiracy theories, and try to make the public doubt the legitimacy of past and future elections for their own political gain. For example, Vernon Jones, a failed candidate for the Republican nomination for Georgia Secretary of State, said that he would publicly release voters’ personal information to support the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Retroactively challenging the legitimacy of elections because you don’t like the result is an attack on democracy and a violation of the rights of voters who participated in those elections.

True transparency supports democracy

Elections should be transparent. But federal and local efforts to seize election materials aren’t about transparency, they’re about controlling the process and sowing doubt, and they could yield disastrous results. Voters could lose the secrecy of their ballots, a critical component of American democracy. The government should not be able to determine who voted for what candidate. Furthermore, if the government has access to ballots or ballot images, there is the possibility that that information could become public.

Election data transparency should be done responsibly and with the intent to improve elections, not interfere with the critical work of election officials, administrators, and workers. Done right, improved election data transparency can improve trust, not undermine it. Improved election data transparency can allow experts to examine where democracy can be strengthened and voting can be more secure and accessible. Done right, improved election data transparency can protect the voting rights of historically marginalized communities, rather than the Trump administration’s efforts to curtail them. Read our full report and see our election science recommendations designed to improve data transparency here.

As climate change is projected to increase severe thunderstorm activity across much of the Midwest, the power sector should heed this year’s pummeling as a wake-up call and reflect on whether it’s ready to withstand more of the same. This year offers an opportunity to imagine more concretely into a climate changed-world, to consider where system vulnerabilities lie, and where investments are needed to ensure our grid is resilient and able to reliably and equitably provide electricity for homes and businesses across the region. 

2026 weather extremes blow past 30-year averages

Taking stock of this year’s weather extremes in the Midwest is personal for me. And not to bury the lede: my family is fine, but we just barely avoided landing in the crosshairs of some of the most dangerous storms that have hit my home state of Wisconsin.

In mid-June, my husband and daughter were hunkered down in a barn in Belleville, Wisconsin, waiting out a severe thunderstorm that produced a tornado down the road. The storm destroyed two homes and severely damaged several more in Belleville. 

On another occasion, my daughter spent her last hour of the school year sheltered in place in her school’s basement as a severe thunderstorm roared through the area, producing 80+ MPH wind gusts. It was such a strong storm that it was eventually classified as a derecho— a particularly extreme class of severe thunderstorms. 

Looking out from the personal to the broader pattern, this has been an astounding year for Wisconsin. This April was the most tornadic on record in 76 years, with 27 tornados touching down across the state versus the more typical single April tornado. May was a relatively calm month, but there were 58 percent more severe storms in June than average. 

Wisconsin is certainly not alone. Most states in the Midwest had above average tornado counts in April. However, Illinois has been the hardest hit, experiencing the most tornados of any state in the US this year. Illinois has already seen 212 tornadoes form—more than three times its annual average of the last thirty years. To date, the National Weather Service has issued a whopping 812 severe thunderstorm warnings in Illinois.

Consequences for our power system

The deadly and damaging severe storms that have hit the Midwest this year have been incredibly consequential for power outages, and things are not slowing down yet. On Independence Day weekend, deadly, climate change-driven extreme heat and severe thunderstorms drove prolonged power outages for hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across the Midwest, leaving many in dangerous, hot conditions. 

Nearly two million homes and businesses lost power as a result of a series of severe thunderstorms that hit the Midwest and Ohio Valley in mid-June, according to an analysis by PowerOutage.us. Thousands of homes and businesses lost their power for multiple days on end as a result of the storms, including in my hometown of Madison, where the storms downed power lines and broke power poles. Check out this incredible simulation of the power outages caused by some of the severe thunderstorms rolling through on June 10. 

Unfortunately, this year is unlikely to be an anomaly with respect to severe storms causing power outages in the Midwest. Important aspects of severe thunderstorm activity are already strengthening as a result of human-caused climate change. 

In addition, warmer temperatures—and with them, thunderstorms—are expected to occur earlier in the Midwest as they did this spring, lengthening the timeframe within which severe thunderstorms can form. And climate change is forecast to increase the likelihood of extreme heat that can co-occur with severe storms and strain the power system as happened on Independence Day weekend, leaving communities in harm’s way.

It is therefore critical that power sector actors heed the warning that this year is giving them. As my colleagues and I recommend in our report Power After the Storm, detailed climate risk assessments must be carried out to understand what the grid is going to be up against and how risks should be mitigated and addressed. 

We also urge the power sector to transition to electricity grids powered by clean energy so that we can prevent the worst impacts of climate change from manifesting. Finally, we encourage engagement with communities in order that investments and decisions reflect the needs of all customers that our electricity grids are meant to serve. 

By taking lived experiences from this year into account together with advances in climate science, we can make our electricity grid more resilient and ready to handle the more extreme weather that is headed our way.

The author would like to thank the Wisconsin State Climatology Office for their assistance with some of the statistics used in this blog.

In broad strokes, attribution science identifies and quantifies human contributions to climate change and its related impacts. Attribution research has provided foundational understanding about climate change for over 30 years and has been a cornerstone of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments, which serve as the global authority on consensus climate change science. These studies are retrospective and distinct from climate impact time series because they isolate the role of climate change and address questions of causation. Similarly, they are separate from projection studies that model the impacts of climate change into the future. 

Attribution science includes four interrelated subfields—trend, source, impact, and extreme event—which provide different kinds of insight into the consequences of climate change. This blog, however, will focus specifically on what extreme event attribution can tell us about our world and discuss strategies to communicate both its findings and its limitations.

A brief history of extreme event attribution

Did climate change make this heatwave more likely?

Did climate change make this downpour more intense?

Extreme event attribution (EEA) answers research questions like these. Like so many scientific disciplines, attribution research has evolved over time, allowing scientists to answer new questions about the impacts of fossil-fueled climate change.

The first EEA study focused on a devastating heatwave that occurred in Europe in 2003, that led to 35,000 excess deaths and the creation of extreme heat warning programs in countries across Europe. The study, published by Peter Stott and colleagues in 2004, found that human influence had more than doubled the likelihood of this event. While attribution methods had previously shown how climate change had contributed to trends like rising global average surface temperatures, this study represented a huge methodological advance by isolating the role of climate change in an individual event for the first time.

Over the past 20+ years, the field has evolved rapidly, increasing our understanding of how climate change is driving extreme weather. This type of research has shown that during Hurricane Harvey, climate change tripled the likelihood of extreme rainfall and increased total rainfall by at least 19%, with a best estimate of 37%. Similarly, research on extreme heat has shown that climate change made the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave up to 3.6°F hotter.  

Sometimes this research finds that climate change did not play a role in a given extreme event. A study focused on May 2023 extreme rain in northern Italy, for instance, found that climate change didn’t affect the event’s likelihood or severity. Results like these affirm the rigor of this methodology, but are also rare given the fundamental changes to our atmosphere.

EEA studies have also become critical evidence in IPCC assessment reports, supporting key findings like:

“Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe” and “It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s, with high confidence that human-induced climate change is the main driver of these changes.”

Each statement and figure included in the Summary for Policymakers section of IPCC reports (like those quoted above) are approved by every country that participates in the IPCC in collaboration with the report’s scientific authors. As a result, the inclusion of EEA research in IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policymakers underscores the robust methodology that underlies these studies as well as their role in shaping the consensus understanding of climate change.   

Innovative studies moved the field of EEA forward in 2025, with two high profile studies that addressed research questions about the contributions of emissions from the Carbon Majors, the largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers in the world, to extreme heatwaves.

One study attributed the economic costs of several extreme heatwaves to the emissions of the Carbon Majors, finding that the emissions of single emitter, Chevron, have led to between $791 billion to $3.6 trillion USD in heat related losses over a 31 year period.

Another study systematically attributed 231 heatwaves to emissions from the Carbon Majors, finding that their emissions contributed to half of the increase in heatwave intensity over the last 120 years, and that between 16 and 53 of these heatwaves would not have occurred without emissions traced to these entities. Like the Stott study in 2004, these studies highlight major developments in extreme event attribution and foreshadow the exciting research on the horizon.

Ease of attributing the role of climate change depends on event type and geography

Extreme event attribution research builds on decades of peer-reviewed science. The available data and methodology, however, mean that scientists can attribute some types of events with higher confidence and that the geographic spread of these studies skews heavily towards events in the Global North.

The events that can be attributed with the most confidence are those that are most closely tied to temperature increases, like heatwaves. Isolating the contribution of climate change can be more complicated for more complex events,  like convective storms that involve more complex processes. This translates to different levels of confidence in the attribution of certain types of events, which is reflected in the published literature about these topics. The IPCC is very clear about this while also affirming the confidence and rigor of studies and event types where scientists have stronger confidence in their conclusions.

Extreme event attribution research is also not well distributed geographically, with lots of studies focused on events in the Global North and far fewer studies on events in the Global South. Systemic issues can make bridging this gap difficult. For example, long term data sets required to establish a baseline in this type of research are often more readily available the Global North, which carries important equity implications as attribution science becomes important in the accountability and litigation spaces.

EEA research is one important tool among many for understanding climate change. However, remaining cognizant of its limitations and working to overcome them will be key as the field continues to develop.

Communicating about climate change and extreme events

Attribution science is a broad field of research, but EEA research has become its poster child, in part, due to the work of World Weather Attribution which conducts rapid attribution studies using peer reviewed methods, often resulting in broad media coverage. While these studies have increased awareness of fossil fueled extreme events, they have also led to confusion about what types of questions attribution science can and can’t answer. answer.

Attribution science answers questions like: did climate change make this event more frequent or intense?

It does not answer the question: was climate change the sole contributor to this event?  

Similarly, we’re never going to have an attribution study for every event. But even without one, climate science—particularly trend attribution research—can inform our thinking about how climate change may have played a role.

For example, hurricanes are super complex events, and tropical cyclone formation is notoriously hard to model. As a result, I’m not aware of any EEA studies that demonstrate how climate change contributed to the formation of a specific hurricane. As discussed above, much research has established the connection between climate change extreme precipitation associated with hurricanes.

However, we also have robust trend attribution research that shows the key role of climate change in rising sea surface temperatures, which can allow storms to rapidly intensify. Similarly, sea level rise attributed to climate change can exacerbate flooding from hurricanes. When talking about hurricanes in the absence of an EEA study, highlighting these key pieces of information is key in contextualizing how climate change may be contributing to these events. This distinction matters because scientific integrity requires us to be clear about what we know and what we don’t. We can state with confidence that climate change is warming oceans and raising sea levels (both of which worsen hurricane impacts) while acknowledging that other aspects remain less certain. Being precise about this strengthens, rather than weakens, the science.

Wildfires represent another example of this. As individual events, they are incredibly difficult to attribute to climate change due to the range of factors that play a role like historical banning of cultural burning practices by Indigenous communities, forest management, and ignition source. But we have amazing trend attribution science that can allow us to say a lot about the role of climate change in these events. A 2016 study, for example, showed that climate change via increased dryness nearly doubled burned area in forests of western North America between 1986 and 2015. This study looked at many wildfires in aggregate to understand the role of climate change.

Following the devastating January 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles, one rapid attribution study found that climate change made the observed extreme fire weather—that drove the rapid spread of wildfires in the region—35% more likely. Together, this research shows that while event attribution studies allow us to quantify the specific contribution of climate change to a given event, we have a wide range of other science we can rely on to show how climate change is impacting our communities and ecosystems.

Moving forward: Five things to keep in mind when talking about attribution science

As attribution science continues to grow and find new applications—from IPCC assessments to courtroom evidence to help with city planning—how we talk about it matters. Here are key considerations for communicating about EEA and attribution science more broadly:

1. Be precise about the questions EEA can answer. Extreme event attribution tells us how climate change influenced an event’s likelihood or intensity, not whether climate change was the sole driver of an event. This distinction matters when framing EEA as answering “did climate change make this more likely or severe?” rather than “did climate change cause this?” and avoids overclaiming while still conveying meaningful information about climate change’s role.

2. Acknowledge varying confidence levels without undermining the science Confidence in attribution findings varies by event type. Heatwaves, which tie closely to temperature increases, can be attributed with high confidence. More complex events like extreme precipitation or hurricanes involve additional factors that complicate isolation of climate change’s contribution. Attribution science still has a lot to say about most event types, but communicating these differences transparently strengthens credibility while still affirming the robust methodology underlying the research. These methodological constraints represent opportunities for the research to further develop.

3. Absence of an attribution study doesn’t mean absence of a climate connection. Not every event will have a dedicated attribution study, and that’s okay. Trend attribution research can inform our understanding even when event-specific studies don’t exist. For hurricane formation and intensification, for example, we can point to robust science on rising sea surface temperatures and sea level rise to contextualize climate change’s role without needing a specific EEA study for each storm.

4. Extreme event attribution exists within the broader attribution science research field. Extreme event attribution is one of four interrelated subfields,alongside trend, source, and impact attribution. Communicating EEA as part of this broader toolkit helps highlight that multiple lines of evidence can inform conclusions about climate change’s contributions, even when one type of study isn’t available.

5. Attribution science is robust and continues to evolve. From the first 2004 European heatwave study to 2025 Carbon Majors research attributing economic costs and heatwave occurrence to specific emitters, EEA has rapidly expanded the questions it can answer. Pointing to these advances signals that attribution science is dynamic and continues to develop new tools for understanding climate impacts.

Attribution science has come a long way in two decades and continues to develop. By communicating its findings and its boundaries clearly and constructively, we can help ensure this research continues to inform the decisions, policies, and accountability efforts that shape our climate future.

AAS: California is on the front lines of climate change, with extreme weather intensified by fossil fuel use and weather whiplash causing frequent drought conditions. How can science and scientists support rural California communities, like Allensworth, incorporating resilience into their planning to protect long-term livability?

RANYEE CHIANG: We need to use science to help communities to build resilience, minimize the harmful impacts of climate change, and strengthen themselves. Specifically, UCS has supported communities in California’s Central Valley with data and analyses to inform and support their vision of repurposing the surrounding agricultural land. One example of this type of partnership is with the town of Allensworth, which for decades has advocated for a systemic transformation of their community into a new paradigm that works for everyone.

Like the rest of the Central Valley, water issues are front and center in Allensworth. That’s because water shortages are increasing, and California will have to transition a significant amount of irrigated cropland into less water-intensive uses. This rethinking is an opportunity for communities to shape their futures—with sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and nature-based solutions to manage droughts and floods and increase ecological resilience, all while reducing pollution, addressing food and energy security, offering new economic opportunities, and achieving environmental justice. So there’s a natural nexus between rural communities and UCS because California’s water challenges have been a major focus of our science advocacy for years.

At UCS, we are working towards making California a place where families and communities can thrive.

AAS: Can you tell us more about nature-based solutions to climate change?

RANYEE CHIANG: Nature-based solutions offer a powerful approach to address these challenges by working with natural systems to increase climate resilience, create economic opportunities, improve water sustainability, and enhance public health. Some examples include capturing flood water to replenish groundwater, which reduces flood risk for communities. A second example is creating buffer zones, essentially pesticide-free areas that improve air quality and provide safe recreation spaces for the people who live in what were former agricultural areas. Another is the use of ecovoltaics which combines solar energy with native habitat restoration, generating clean electricity while supporting pollinators and wildlife. These solutions are typically less extractive and promote resilience to our changing climate as well as providing economic, public health, and environmental benefits.

AAS: For readers unfamiliar with this part of the country, what unique challenges have Allensworth and other rural California communities faced? What makes Allensworth’s transformation a model for communities around the country?

RANYEE CHIANG: Low-income, rural communities in California’s Central Valley, like Allensworth, are challenged by a host of compounding problems. Political underrepresentation, underinvestment, and social and economic inequities, rooted in a legacy of systemic oppression, have plagued community members for generations. Added to those burdens are the changing climate and the environmental issues caused by intensive industrial monoculture—a practice where single crop species are grown to maximize yield and efficiency. Decades of overuse have depleted groundwater, left residents with an unreliable drinking water supply, and worsened air quality. Economic gains from land use were not equitably shared with the community. A lack of fundamental infrastructure left residents particularly vulnerable to climate change.

In Allensworth, restoring native habitats; a transition to a farming system that is healthy, economically viable, and ecologically sustainable; and meaningful involvement from community members have helped the community chart a path towards increased food security, energy, and water sovereignty, and create a more enjoyable and healthier place where residents can thrive.

Because of the transformative future that community members of Allensworth are building, the town will be a model for other communities in the US facing similar challenges. A key part of this vision is agroecology.

AAS: What is agroecology?

RANYEE CHIANG: Agroecology is an approach to farming that promotes farmworker well-being, biodiversity, soil health, wildlife protection, climate resilience, and food independence. Thinking about how energy use intersects with farming is part of this approach. Allensworth plans to pursue energy independence through agrivoltaics, a practice where the land is used to grow food and generate solar power. This is especially critical since an unreliable, inconsistent energy supply currently threatens water access and vulnerable residents during extreme heat events that cause temperatures to soar above 110°F.

AAS: Zooming out from Allensworth and looking at the whole state, where does UCS see the greatest opportunities to make an impact in California?

RANYEE CHIANG: There are so many important issues that are deservedly getting a lot of attention, especially in a year when we have a governor’s race in California. Housing, jobs, affordability, public transportation, clean transportation, wildfires, AI, data centers. How can we address so many different massive issues without getting overwhelmed?

A good example of this is UCS’s efforts to sponsor and pass legislation to address gas prices and help low-income families access clean transportation options, while continuing the longer-term transition away from fossil fuels.

Another example is empowering other communities with analyses, tools, and funding to scale successful solutions, such as the ones implemented in Allensworth. This is where UCS brings the most value: using our scientific analyses to address complex problems systematically and holistically.

As my colleague Dr. Delta Merner explains, attribution science includes several connected areas of research. The first, “event attribution,” asks whether climate change made a particular weather event more likely or more intense. The second, “source attribution,” traces climate change and associated hazards back to emissions sources or sectors. And third, “impact attribution” examines the resulting harms, including damage to homes and infrastructure, lost livelihoods, health impacts, and deaths.

Attribution science utilizes a suite of tools to understand these connections: earth observations, statistical methods, emissions data, and climate models. Climate models are a central tool of attribution science through their ability to develop modeled counterfactuals—that is, simulations of what our world might have been without human-induced warming.

Climate models and attribution science have both advanced rapidly over recent decades, making both critical tools for understanding how climate change is progressing and fossil fuel companies’ responsibility for its worsening effects.

So, how exactly are climate models used in attribution science, and why can we have confidence in the conclusions they help produce?

What is a climate model, and why does it matter for attribution?

Climate models are among the main tools scientists use to simulate how Earth will respond to increasing concentrations of heat-trapping pollutants in the atmosphere. When scientists refer to climate models, they generally talk about a general circulation model, or GCM. These models simulate how the atmosphere, oceans, land, and cryosphere respond to changes in internal climate dynamics, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and external drivers, including greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate models are some of the most reliable tools for understanding our earth-climate system because they have been improved, tested, and updated for decades. 

Modern climate models are made up of connected component models for the atmosphere, ocean, land surface, and cryosphere. An atmospheric model, for example, simulates circulation, radiation, clouds, and aerosols. Ocean models simulate circulation and heat uptake. Land models represent processes such as soil moisture, vegetation, snow cover, evapotranspiration, and carbon storage.

When these components are connected, or coupled, they exchange information with one another, allowing models to represent the feedbacks and interactions that shape the real-world climate system. These coupled models are often compared through coordinated international efforts such as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP, which allows scientists to evaluate results across many models, institutions, and experimental designs.

CMIP simulations are also a major source of evidence for national and international climate assessments, including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where they help scientists assess past climate change, project future risks, and evaluate confidence across different concentration scenarios and model results.

At their core, climate models use well-established physical laws to calculate how energy, momentum, water, and other properties move through the climate system. They divide the planet into a three-dimensional grid and calculate how conditions such as temperature, moisture, winds, and rainfall change over time and from place to place.

Attribution science: Comparing what is with what could’ve been

For attribution science, knowing how each of these factors contributes to our climate matters enormously. Event attribution compares the climate in which an event occurred (usually today’s climate) with a counterfactual climate that is identical except for the added influence of human-caused warming. By running climate model simulations with—and without—observed human influences, researchers can quantify how greenhouse gas emissions changed the probability or intensity of an event.

For example, a heatwave may have occurred because of a particular weather pattern, but human-caused warming can raise the baseline temperature on which that weather pattern acts, making an extreme heat event more likely, hotter, longer lasting, or all three. The 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave illustrates this clearly: the region has already warmed by 1°-1.5°C, and event-specific attribution studies found that the heatwave would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change and was about 1°C hotter because of it. The relevant question is therefore how much climate change shifted the odds, intensity, or consequences of any given event.  

Climate models have a strong track record for simulating global warming

Climate models are some of the most reliable tools for understanding our earth-climate system because they have been improved, tested, and updated for decades. Their development spans generations of scientists and computational advances, and they continue to improve.

In fact, a recent study found that climate models that were developed over 50 years ago have correctly predicted the Earth’s warming. The fact that models developed decades ago broadly projected the warming trajectory we are now living through is strong evidence that they capture the core physics of global warming.

Furthermore, climate models have evolved in both scale and resolution, improving our ability to understand regional and localized changes to our earth-system. While global climate models are essential for understanding large-scale warming and circulation patterns, regional models can provide more detailed information about how those changes interact with local geography, land surfaces, coastlines, mountains, cities, and weather systems. This is especially useful when studying events such as convective storms, storm surge, flooding, and wildfires, where local and regional processes can strongly influence the severity of an event.

The advances by climate models and their proven record for simulating our earth system are important in the attribution of science. Climate models allow scientists to translate that physical understanding into quantitative estimates of how human-caused warming has changed the likelihood, intensity, or impacts of specific weather extremes.

Climate models address scientific uncertainty

Attribution scientists use multiple robust methods to test, constrain, and quantify uncertainty. One of the most important methods is the use of climate-model ensembles, which help scientists distinguish the role of natural variability from the influence of human-caused warming when assessing extreme weather events and their impacts.

First, scientists use initial-condition ensembles to understand internal climate variability. In these experiments, researchers run the same climate model many times with nearly identical conditions, changing only very small differences in the initial state of the atmosphere or ocean. Because the climate system is complex and chaotic, these tiny differences can lead to different weather patterns and different sequences of natural variability over time.

This allows attribution scientists to simulate the range of outcomes that could occur under the same external conditions. When researchers compare a world with human-caused emissions to a counterfactual world without them across many simulations for each scenario, they can see whether the climate-change signal consistently shifts the likelihood or severity of an event beyond the range expected from natural variability alone.

Second, scientists use multi-model ensembles to evaluate structural uncertainty, which originates in the scientific choices made by developers of each model. Different modeling centers make different scientific and technical choices about numerical schemes, parameterizations, spatial resolution, and how to represent processes such as clouds, aerosols, land-atmosphere interactions, and ocean circulation because the climate system is complex and no single model can perfectly capture every process at every scale. Comparing results across models helps scientists determine whether a finding is robust across multiple plausible representations of the climate system.

That said, some models can be similar in their representation of certain interactions in the climate system, mainly due to the fact that a few were developed using the same computer code and parameterizations. Regardless of the choice, researchers use methods that account for both model performance and model interdependence, giving less weight to structurally similar models or models that perform less well against observations.

The purpose of ensembles is to understand and constrain uncertainty in a transparent way. And what is clear is that, with both types of ensembles, there is greater confidence in the climate-change signals on a variety of weather extremes and impacts.

Bottom line: Climate models are important tools for attribution science

Climate models are essential tools for attribution science because they are grounded in well-established physics, tested against observations, and used alongside multiple lines of evidence. Attribution science brings together physical understanding, observations, statistical analysis, emissions data, and climate-model experiments to test how human-caused warming is changing the risks people face today. The use of multiple datasets, models and methods is what makes the field robust, allowing scientists to compare the world as it exists now to a counterfactual world without human-caused warming, quantify uncertainty, and assess how much climate change has shifted the likelihood, intensity, or impacts of specific events.

In May 2026, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands heard arguments in the landmark climate case of Milieudefensie v. Shell on whether Shell has a civil law obligation to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, including downstream emissions from the burning of the fossil fuels it sells (Scope 3 emissions). A few weeks later, the Paris Judicial Court ruled that TotalEnergies’ vigilance plan—in which companies must identify, prevent and mitigate environmental and other risks across their operations, under France’s Duty of Vigilance Act—must address Scope 3 emissions. Across the Atlantic, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed rolling back the Climate Risk Disclosure Rule that requires companies to report their climate-related financial risks to investors.

The legal arguments being weighed by the Supreme Court of the Netherlands and the Paris Judicial Court on the one side, and SEC’s proposal on the other, represent two fronts in the ongoing battle over whether and how companies must account for the full scope of their impacts on the world’s climate.

Our recent research, co-authored with colleagues at the Climate Social Science Network and published in Netherlands International Law Review, examines the evolution of these arguments in corporate climate change litigation. We analyzed twelve ‘corporate framework’ cases from around the world—legal cases and complaints seeking to hold companies accountable for their impacts on the climate through changes to corporate policies and governance. What we found is both encouraging and sobering.

Accountability for Scope 3 emissions

Our research shows that courts are increasingly recognizing that companies have some responsibility for their Scope 3 emissions, although there are differences in approaches across jurisdictions and courts. For fossil fuel companies, such as Shell and TotalEnergies, this matters enormously. Scope 3 emissions account for the overwhelming majority of their impact on the climate, primarily from customers’ use of their oil and gas products, which typically represent 80-90% of a fossil fuel company’s total carbon emissions.

But recognizing responsibility in principle is different from determining that an oil and gas company has a legal obligation to reduce these emissions, agreeing on what the reduction should be and then enforcing a legal obligation in practice. The cases of  Milieudefensie v. Shell and Notre Affaire à Tous et al. v. TotalEnergies illustrate this tension.

The case of Milieudefensie v. Shell was filed under tort law. In 2021, the District Court of The Hague issued a landmark ruling that Shell must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030, relative to 2019 levels, including its Scope 3 emissions. This is the first time any court in the world has ordered a company to cut its value-chain emissions. Shell appealed the decision.

In 2024, the Dutch Court of Appeal overturned the specific order for Shell to reduce its emissions by 45% by 2030. However, significantly the court did affirm that companies such as Shell have a duty of care to reduce their emissions, including downstream emissions. The problem, the court said, was translating that general duty into a specific percentage. According to the ruling, there was insufficient consensus on what percentage should apply to Shell specifically. In raising questions about the effectiveness of specific orders to reduce emissions, the court highlighted the challenge of addressing emissions through single-company obligations. Now, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands must decide if courts can order specific emissions reductions or whether they are limited to declaring that companies have a general responsibility to act.

The case of Notre Affaire à Tous et al. v. TotalEnergies, in turn, is based on France’s due diligence law. The Paris Judicial Court’s recent judgement is particularly significant for its treatment of Scope 3 emissions (paragraphs 151-170). By requiring emissions generated through the downstream use of TotalEnergies’ products to be addressed in the vigilance plan, the court extends the duty of vigilance to risks that are economically and causally linked to the company’s business model, even where the emissions are produced by third parties. As noted by researcher Marta Torre-Schaub, the vigilance plan therefore becomes a forward-looking due diligence instrument designed to anticipate climate-related harm throughout the value chain, not a simple reporting obligation.

The International Court of Justice’s 2025 advisory opinion on the climate obligations of states may provide useful guidance on causation and remedies for both the French and Dutch courts.

Key questions facing courts in relation to corporate emissions

Our analysis of twelve corporate framework cases across multiple jurisdictions reveals three recurring questions that courts grapple with in relation to corporate emissions. These are:

Do companies have a legal obligation to reduce their Scope 3 emissions?

Courts are increasingly taking the view that companies do. The Dutch Court of Appeal in Milieudefensie v. Shell confirmed that international soft law instruments (e.g. recommendations and guidelines), human rights frameworks and greenhouse gas accounting standards all pre-suppose corporate responsibility for Scope 3 emissions. The Philippines Human Rights Commission reached the same conclusion in its Carbon Majors inquiry in 2015. Australian and Dutch National Contact Points for Responsible Business Conduct, which implement the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Guidelines, have issued statements recognizing that financial institutions are responsible for indirect emissions in their value chains linked to their loans and other investments (see Australian Bushfire Victims and Friends of the Earth Australia v. ANZ Bank and BankTrack et al. v. ING Bank).

Can that obligation be translated into a specific reduction requirement?

This question has proved more challenging for courts, which have been reluctant to set specific percentages without clear sectoral standards. This is not only a scientific problem; it is also a litigation strategy problem. Our research confirms legal and governance specialist Phillip Paiement’s view that rather than relying on a single headline percentage for reducing a company’s Scope 3 emissions, future cases might present ‘bundles of duties’ that address, for example, transition-plan quality, production limits, rules on no new oil and gas fields, marketing constraints and transition plan requirements. This approach reflects a broader shift away from debating specific emissions targets towards scrutinizing corporate decisions that drive emissions.

Would such an order be effective?

Companies routinely argue that court orders to reduce their Scope 3 emissions will not reduce global emissions. Arguments include the ‘market substitution’ defense: if one company sells less oil and gas, another will sell more, and the ‘drop in the ocean’ defense: one company’s emissions are too small to matter globally. These arguments have had a mixed reception. In the Netherlands, the Court of Appeal found them persuasive, but the District Court did not. In New Zealand, the Supreme Court allowed Smith v. Fonterra, a case in which a Māori climate change spokesperson brought a case against seven high-emitting New Zealand companies in the agriculture and energy sectors, to proceed. This signals that these arguments are not necessarily fatal at the pleading stage of a case.

Strategies for responding to these corporate defenses

The Supreme Court of the Netherlands’ ruling, which is expected in early 2027, will send ripples through climate litigation worldwide. Twenty corporate framework cases were already pending when the Shell appeal was decided in 2024. Many of these cases drew inspiration from the original 2021 ruling imposing the 45% reduction order on Shell. A Supreme Court decision reinstating that reduction order would energize these cases. A decision upholding the appeal could force litigants to rethink their strategies.

Our research suggests several ways forward for holding companies to account through the courts:

• Sector-specific evidence: Rather than applying global reduction pathways uniformly, litigants can present evidence tailored to specific sectors and companies’ actual control over their value chains.
• Activity-linked obligations: Instead of (or in addition to) percentage targets for reducing emissions, corporate framework cases can seek constraints on specific activities, such as preventing new fossil fuel fields, restrictions on fossil fuel financing or marketing restrictions.
• Transition plan enforcement: The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive requires companies to adopt transition plans with time-bound targets. Courts can enforce the quality of these transition plans, even when they are reluctant to set specific targets.
• Precaution and intergenerational equity: These principles can help bridge evidentiary uncertainties, aligning private law duties with the protective logic already accepted in public law climate cases such as Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands, the world’s first climate case in which citizens successfully established that their government has a legal duty under human rights law to prevent dangerous climate change.

Corporations are fighting disclosure rules

The proposal by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to roll back requirements on companies to report their climate-related financial risks to investors connects directly to the fight to establish corporate liability through the courts. In short, it is not possible to hold companies accountable for emissions they do not disclose.

Companies already report their greenhouse gas emissions inconsistently, using different methods and varying levels of transparency. Some do not track their emissions at all. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol provides guidance, but is voluntary. This creates the uncertainty that courts point to when they decline to set specific reduction obligations.

The Climate Risk Disclosure Rule the SEC is now proposing to cancel could have standardized how companies report climate risks to investors, including Scope 3 emissions. But heavy lobbying by high-emitting industries and their trade associations succeeded in stripping Scope 3 disclosures from the final rule, revealing the litigation threat companies believe this information poses. However, opponents to this disclosure rule have won the battle not the war: dozens of jurisdictions around the world have adopted global standards that require Scope 3 disclosures, including California in the US.

As we can see, without transparent, standardized and mandatory reporting, claimants face uphill battles proving causation and foreseeability. And without the risk of legal liability, companies have less incentive to disclose accurately. These two dynamics reinforce each other.

Corporate climate litigation: the direction of travel

The cases of Milieudefensie v. Shell and Notre Affaire à Tous et al. v. TotalEnergies are about more than two companies. These cases are key tests of whether the legal system can hold major corporate emitters to account for the full scope of their impacts on the climate. They also highlight the vulnerability of corporate profit models in the oil and gas sector, because addressing emissions may require companies to sell less of the carbon-intensive products that drive their revenues. This is why corporate resistance is so fierce.

Both cases might still see developments in the near future. In early 2027, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands will decide whether Shell can be ordered to reduce their Scope 3 emissions by specific amounts. In France, TotalEnergies issued a statement expressing “satisfaction” that the court declined to ban new fossil fuel projects or impose production cuts and that it would “assess the next steps to be taken following the Court’s decision”.

Regardless of the outcome, the direction of travel is clear: major companies are increasingly being held accountable for their global warming emissions and the resulting impacts on the world’s climate. Our job as scientists and researchers is to make sure that the science applicable to these issues keeps pace with the law, and that both keep pace with the urgent action that we need to take to address the climate crisis.

Joana Setzer is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her main areas of expertise are climate litigation and global environmental governance.

Over a span of two decades, a federal scientific integrity apparatus was built, improved, and stress-tested to protect federal science activities from political interference, safeguard the freedom and independence of federal scientists, and allow the US science and technology enterprise to thrive. Federal agencies established scientific integrity policies, installed officials to oversee the application of these agency safeguards, and built a culture of scientific integrity through training, integration, process, and policy. But the second Trump administration has laid bare the vulnerability of that apparatus to a hostile administration uninterested in respecting law, process, and science in government. These past efforts on scientific integrity provide key insights for creating something not only more durable but also re-imagined to play a key role in protecting democratic principles and combating corruption.

Across recent decades, much has been learned about system vulnerabilities that can be exploited by political actors interested in weaponizing science for public harm or private gain. Several key challenges are apparent.

Authority versus politicization risk. Who should hold the authority on matters of scientific integrity and where should that person be positioned within agencies? Placing a scientific integrity officer in a research office places them close to the scientific activities they oversee and farther from political appointees who may seek to inappropriately influence science activities. But this positioning can be removed from policy matters and removed from the level of authority necessary to adequately oversee scientific integrity across an agency or department. By contrast, placing scientific integrity authority closer to the political level, such as designating scientific integrity authority to a politically appointed chief scientist will instill more authority for matters of scientific integrity, but relies on a good-faith actor in that role. In either case, what happens when it is the political heads of agencies who are accused of scientific integrity violations? A scientific integrity official may not feel empowered to act.

Blurred lines between science and policy decisions. While it is a clear violation of scientific integrity when a political appointee changes a number on a scientific report to achieve more politically convenient math, or when a scientist is muzzled from speaking about a politically sensitive finding, many scientific integrity challenges occur at the science and policy interface—places where it can be unclear what is a scientific decision and what can and should be a political decision. How can the public discern whether scientific integrity was compromised if this distinction is blurred? This lack of transparency in science policy processes can make it easier for political actors to interfere with science for political purposes. 

The challenge of durability. The second Trump administration has made abundantly clear the need for mechanisms and authorities that sustain scientific integrity across administrations, even in hostile environments. In a single executive order on May 23, 2025, the Trump administration erased much of the progress that was made under the Biden administration on scientific integrity. While some agencies have persisted, the president’s move made apparent how vulnerable the entire apparatus was to a president uninterested in the project of respecting science in government. 

Future scientific integrity efforts must be different. They must be stronger. They must be more integrated into federal activities and authorities. And we know the formula: Re-imagined scientific integrity infrastructure in the executive branch must have transparency, independence, and authority.

1. Transparency

First, there must be greater commitment to transparency in the process by which science informs decisions across the government. One opportunity is to allow the public to submit allegations of scientific integrity violations and for those submissions to be publicly posted. This would allow the public to see where challenges may exist and provides an avenue for public interest groups, watchdogs, and members of the public to raise concerns. Such a system would also create external support and political cover for scientific integrity officials to investigate matters of high public interest, even if these matters are politically inconvenient to agency leaders or involve senior agency leadership, because there would be public pressure and an opportunity for accountability.

We can also require public reporting on scientific integrity. This was a requirement under the Biden-era scientific integrity framework but could be made stronger by linking scientific integrity reporting to congressionally mandated reporting, requiring reporting in the context of agency budget requests, or other “built-in” processes. Such transparency and integration in public reporting requirements would allow for more cross-agency assessments and trend discernment that can inform future improvements. Seeing how agencies compare can allow for healthy competition and improvement across administrations, and provide additional scrutiny and support for underperforming agencies where scientific integrity issues persist. To facilitate such transparency and cross-agency coordination over future administrations, the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Subcommittee on Scientific Integrity could be codified into law, the way some other subcomponents of NSTC are.

2. Independence

The independence of federal science activities is critical, both for the US science enterprise itself to thrive, and for science activities to play their critical role in our federal system of checks and balances. Government scientists collect and share data critical for the nation, speak out when scientific information is misused and ignored for public harm or private gain, counter disinformation from political leaders, and ensure scientific truth reaches the public. But those functions only happen when the independence of federal science is preserved and government scientists feel empowered to do their jobs freely.

This can be achieved when career civil servants’ jobs are protected and mechanisms for clear distinctions between science and policy are developed and enforced. In laws like the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act where provisions require decisions based on science, it is publicly known where the science ends and the policy decisions begin. But many decisions do not have this clear delineation either in agency structure or law, so scientific integrity must be safeguarded through other mechanisms of separation.

Federal statistical agencies, for example, have clear practices and protocols that buffer data collection and publication from political influence. These mechanisms could be expanded to other federal science activities and agencies, such that science and scientists are better protected from political influences, and federal employees are empowered to freely speak up, push back, and serve as guardians of the science and truth. Such measures to enhance the independence of federal science also combat corruption, because they allow federal science and scientists to share reliable data and scientific truth, even when political actors seek to obscure it. Federal scientists, in other words, keep the score.

3. Authority

For scientific integrity policies and practices to be recognized and enforced across the government, they must be governed by officials with a necessary weight of authority. One way to achieve this is to integrate scientific integrity infrastructure within other existing federal authorities and processes. Such integration would have several benefits. It would put the responsibility of shepherding scientific integrity into the hands of more senior officials. This would help sustain scientific integrity infrastructure across administrations, because the principles and practices would be ingrained across more people and processes throughout the government. Across the US science and technology landscape, there are several key actors that could have expanded roles on scientific integrity, such as the comptroller general; the Government Accountability Office; inspectors general; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; the National Academy of Public Administration; the National Archives and Records Administration; and the Office of Special Counsel.

Codifying such roles in federal law, such as the Scientific Integrity Act introduced in the 119th Congress, is a key strategy for achieving integration with aligned and authoritative institutions. The Scientific Integrity Act would require federal agencies that fund or conduct research to adopt and enforce scientific integrity policies, helping protect federal science from political interference and ensuring that research findings are not suppressed, distorted, or manipulated. Enacting legislation of this kind would be an important step toward building a more durable scientific integrity infrastructure that can withstand changes in administrations while strengthening transparency, accountability, and public trust in government science.

Creating and implementing mechanisms that adhere to this framework of transparency, independence, and authority across the executive branch will ensure not only that the US science and technology enterprise can thrive, but also that any scientific integrity infrastructure provides anti-corruption measures and bolsters the nation’s democratic processes and institutions.

California has been fighting vehicle pollution for 60 years

California’s first clean car standards were enacted in 1966, as the state took action to deal with pervasive smog and air pollution, especially in the Los Angeles Basin. In recognition of California’s leadership, when the federal Air Quality Act of 1967 was passed (later amended to be the Clean Air Act), it explicitly allowed California to continue to set stricter pollution standards for cars and trucks to address the state’s persistent and deadly poor air quality.

What is a Clean Air Act waiver?

California follows a two-step process to enforce vehicle pollution standards. First, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) carefully researches potential regulatory mechanisms and adopts standards for vehicle manufacturers that want to sell cars in the state. Second, the federal Environmental Protection Agency is directed by the Clean Air Act to issue a waiver of federal preemption to allow California to enforce those standards if they meet the Clean Air Act requirements, such as being at least as protective than the federal standards. Since the 1960s, California has received numerous waivers to enforce standards to protect public health and the environment.

How EPA and Congress attacked California’s clean car standards

Last year, Congress took the unprecedented step of mischaracterizing the waivers for California’s Advanced Clean Cars II, Advanced Clean Trucks, and Heavy-Duty Omnibus standards as “rules” subject to the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Despite the ruling of the nonpartisan Senate Parliamentarian that the waivers are not subject to the CRA because they are indeed not rules, Congress passed CRA resolutions and they were signed by the president. These actions have put the future of clean transportation in California at risk as the state sues to overturn these actions.

Not content with stopping future clean cars, the EPA is now asking Congress to use the same illegitimate mechanism to undo prior waivers, going all the way back to the greenhouse gas emission standards for model year 2009 cars and trucks, standards that have already been fully phased in.

California received a waiver in 2009 for greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for cars and trucks (known as the Pavley standards). These standards were largely mirrored by Obama-era federal standards. In addition, CARB received a waiver in 2013 to establish the Advanced Clean Cars (ACC) standards. These standards included smog-forming pollution limits, caps on GHG emissions, and a sales requirement for zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), all of which steadily grew more stringent through model year 2025, with an electric vehicle sales requirement of about 8 percent of new cars. The auto industry complied with the standards, resulting in new gasoline, hybrid, and electric cars that are cleaner than ever. From 2012 to 2024, global warming emissions from new passenger vehicles dropped over 25 percent. And drivers are also benefiting from thousands of dollars in fuel savings as they switch from less efficient gasoline cars to electric vehicles.

EPA is now attacking the remaining clean car standards

Why is the EPA interested in getting rid of standards for vehicles that were sold over 15 years ago? The answer lies in CARB’s response to last year’s CRA action on clean car waivers. When Congress and the president used the CRA against the waivers, in addition to the legal response, CARB started an emergency regulatory process to clarify that certain prior clean car standards were still valid if the new standards could not be enforced. Specifically, CARB signaled that it would enforce the standards on smog-forming pollution and GHG emissions at the 2025 levels for cars and trucks until new standards are enacted, or a court reinstates the Advanced Clean Cars II standards currently on pause. Notably, CARB is not seeking to enforce the 2025 ZEV sales requirements, so there is no California requirement for electric vehicle sales if the Advanced Clean Cars II standards are not reinstated.

These existing state-level vehicle standards are already being met by automakers. The Trump administration has already rolled back federal greenhouse gas standards for vehicles, and is in the process of rolling back criteria pollution standards for vehicles in a two-part rulemaking. If these deregulatory actions are successful, California could have no protection against automakers reverting to the dirtier cars and trucks from decades ago.

Strong standards needed for clean air and slowing climate change

California’s clean car authority has delivered cleaner air for decades, and weakening it now would mean more pollution, higher emissions, and fewer protections for public health. Erasing standards that automakers are already meeting will only have negative effects, and will significantly set back efforts to clean the air. With these actions, Californians will have to rely on federal vehicle standards, a losing proposition given the strong anti-science stance of current EPA leadership. The EPA has already claimed that global warming pollution shouldn’t be regulated, via the repeal of the Endangerment Finding, and has signaled that health-protecting tailpipe emissions standards will be rolled back.

California has the worst air quality in the nation and has failed to meet the federal standards for several pollutants, including ground level ozone and particulate matter pollution. The state’s plans to achieve compliance with these standards relies on the ability to require cleaner vehicles. Without the authority to regulate pollution from mobile sources, the state will have to significantly revise its plan to comply, and may force more significant emissions reductions from other sources.

Rolling back California’s standards would not just increase pollution; it would also cause significant regulatory uncertainty for an auto industry that has already made investments to develop cleaner cars to meet state and federal standards. The way forward is to maintain the standards that are already working to protect public health and put us on a path to slow climate change. Congress should reject Congressional Review Act resolutions that violate its authority to protect its residents from pollution.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the Western US has been stunned almost annually by destructive and often deadly wildland fires. It has become increasingly clear that we are in a new era of destructive megafires, due a combination of climate change, vegetation changes from widespread fire suppression, and development at the wildland-urban interface. In this post, I’ll touch briefly on the history of wildland fire and human response in the West, on some climate metrics that are related to the trends in wildland megafires, and identify possible mitigation and adaptation measures to respond to the fire-climate crises.

The first era of megafires

As the timber industry pushed west and north in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, large and destructive forest fires followed, since logging and land clearing for agriculture left large accumulation of debris. Some of the notorious and destructive fires included:

• The 2,400 square-mile Peshtigo fire in Wisconsin, October 1871, which killed over 2,000 people;
• The 3-million acre Big Blowup in Washington, Idaho and Montana, 1910, which killed 85 people. The story of that fire is told in Timothy Eagan’s book, The Big Burn.  It marked a turning point for staff of the young US Forest Service, who went from pariahs who were trying to control illegal logging and grazing against strong resistance, to local heroes in the fight to stop the fire; and
• The Tillamook Burn, Oregon, was a series of four fires that burned between 1933 and 1958, consuming 350,000 acres of mostly old-growth Douglas-fir.

Fire prevention and suppression techniques put in place

For generations, Indigenous peoples used fire management techniques such as controlled burns, harnessing the power of fire to shape the landscape for their survival. European colonizers banned and criminalized many of these practices when they arrived in the Americas.

During the 1930s and after World War II, under the New Deal, the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, relying on Civilian Conservation Corps workers, built a network of fire lookouts in the West. Fire stations were built and staffed at the district level. An aggressive educational campaign was launched, using slogans like Smokey the Bear’s famous “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Smokejumpers were trained to parachute into otherwise inaccessible terrain to fight forest fires that mostly originated from lightning strikes.

The anti-fire campaign was successful for a time, but was marred by an incident in 1949, when 13 smokejumpers died fighting the Mann Gulch fire in west Montana. That tragic accident, memorialized in Norman Maclean’s book Young Men and Fire,  provided the impetus for the US Forest Service to establish a program of research on fire behavior, with Fire Science Laboratories now at Missoula, MT, Riverside, CA, and Seattle, WA, as well as projects at research stations throughout the US. Research was directed, for example, on understanding how local topography and microclimates could cause sudden and dangerous shifts in fire behavior.

Unfortunately, this March, the US Forest Service announced that it will close the majority of its research stations in 31 states, and consolidate its research division in a centralized office in Fort Collins, Colorado. When the Bureau of Land Management imposed a similar relocation plan during the first Trump administration, more than 87 percent of the Bureau of Land Management employees in the main Washington, DC, office resigned.

This relocation and downsizing of the Forest Service research program will have a devastating effect on ongoing and well-established research programs that are addressing the impacts of climate change on wildfires and forest health. It is hard to see this move by the Trump administration as anything but an ideological attack on science; it will likely take years for the research program to recover.

Megafires in the era of climate change

Records since the mid-1980s show marked increases in both the number of large wildland fires (“large” defined as >400 hectares) and total area that they burned. The increases are sharpest in the northern Rocky Mountains, and are attributable to the earlier onset of spring and increasing summer moisture deficit (or vapor pressure deficit). Historic moisture deficit data are based on climate records, and future projections of vapor pressure deficit are derived from general circulation models. The evidence is very strong that increasing summer temperatures and atmospheric water deficit are the primary cause of the upward trend in megafires.

In addition to moisture (or vapor pressure deficit), climatic variables that have been related to changes in longer fire seasons and greater overall burned areas include:

• The percent of annual water-year precipitation falling as snow
• The maximum annual snowpack, in inches of stored water
• The snowpack water storage on April 1, the date of an important snow survey
• The onset date of spring snowmelt
• The center timing of snowmelt—that is, the date by which half the annual water-year snowmelt has passed a stream gage
• The Palmer Drought Severity Index
• The Forest Drought Severity Index

Mitigation and adaptation

For people who live in a wildlife-urban interface area—that is, is an area where homes and businesses are located that are adjacent to undeveloped land, forests and grasslands—adaptation to extreme forest fire might mean keeping a “go bag” close at hand in the short term. For decision-makers thinking about the longer term, modifying design standards will help make buildings more fire resistant.  

Mitigation might mean reducing forest fuel loads with prescribed burning, or cutting and removing vegetation. This approach often focuses on “ladder fuels,” small trees and shrubs that can conduct flame from the ground into the higher tree canopy. Fuel load reduction—or eliminating the vegetation most likely to burn—can help firefighters to protect certain assets, but it can be expensive. Average costs for prescribed burning in California range from to $140 to $170 per acre, and for cutting and removing vegetation, from $6,500 to $8,500 per acre.

To date, more than 100,000 acres in California’s Lake Tahoe region have been treated for fuel load reduction. Of course, these treatments will have to be repeated as vegetation re-grows.

Unfortunately, climate change is closing the window on opportunities for safely using prescribed fire—controlled burns—as a vegetation management strategy. This point was driven home in 2022 when a prescribed fire in New Mexico escaped control to become the 345,000-acre Hermit’s Peak Fire.

Recent and accurate information on forest conditions is essential for planning and implementing fuel load reduction and prescribed burning. From the 1970s until last year, the US Forest Service’s Aerial Detection Survey mapped areas of forest mortality in California associated with insects, disease, drought and wildfire using low-elevation flights with trained observers. Last year, the Trump administration ended funding for the survey, and the US Forest Service was forced to lay off key staff and terminate the program. 

Widening cooperation to address the megafire crisis

Ecologists have long known that many Indigenous Tribes/nations have been using fire for millennia, managing vegetation to enhance forage for deer, keeping forests relatively open to facilitate hunting, and to promote the growth of plants useful for food, dye, medicine, ceremonies and weaving. Finally, staff at public agencies have begun to realize the value of this Indigenous knowledge and to seek opportunities for collaboration.

Although the forest management vocabularies of Tribes and agency staff are quite different, and distrust on the Tribal side is deep (with good reason), both sides are discovering the benefits of working together. The experience of the Yurok and Karuk tribes in working with the US Forest Service using prescribed fire as a vegetation management tool is a good example.

Of course, the best ways to address wildfires are to stop burning fossil fuels, hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the damages their products have caused, restore funding and create new investments into wildfire research and prevention, and allow the US to proceed on a trajectory toward clean, renewable energy and sustainable land management. With the Trump administration working against these goals, we’re in for a long summer of dangerous wildfires. You can help by asking your member of Congress to prevent the restructuring of the US Forest Service, to keep intact this agency’s crucial insights on wildfire prevention. And follow the advice of your local agencies and officials if you live in a wildfire-prone area.

Last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a new, interactive tool that shows the number of attacks on science and potential scientific integrity violations committed by the second Trump administration. UCS has documented a shocking 576 attacks and 188 potential scientific integrity violations between January 20, 2025 and June 29, 2026.

The Attacks on Science Tracker is a transparent, fully accessible analytical platform backed by a rigorous methodology. It acts as a public record of elected officials politicizing federal science, from the start of the second Trump administration into perpetuity. And it vividly illustrates not just how elected and political officials attack federal science, but how it affects all of us—undermining the science, including climate science and medical information, that we need to stay safe and healthy.  It also shows how many of these attacks could be prevented by passing the Scientific Integrity Act.

Introducing the Attacks on Science Tracker

The UCS Attacks on Science Tracker is the culmination of an effort I’ve led over the past several months (with the help from an entire village worth of people!) to evolve the Center for Science and Democracy’s methodology to track attacks on science. We undertook this effort in response to the second Trump administration’s ferocious and systemic attack on federal scientific systems and on our democracy. 

The Center has been tracking attacks on science and advocating for scientific integrity protections since 2001, and this work continues more than two decades later through research, community organizing and outreach, and policy advocacy. The Tracker and its methodology were created to support all these avenues of work within and outside of UCS.

This means that anyone who cares about science can take advantage of the tool’s interactive features, robust data, and transparent methodology to hold elected officials accountable, document harms from the past into the future, and advocate for evidence-informed policy and scientific integrity protections. These are all necessary for a healthy and functioning democracy, one that exists to protect all its people.

We need the Scientific Integrity Act

Scientific integrity protections, in particular, are critical, because they help keep science independent from political, corporate, and financial influence. These policies help federal scientists conduct and communicate their scientific work about toxic chemicals, vaccine safety, climate change, and other topics free from the threat of alteration, suppression, or censorship. With independent science, all of us—the public and decisionmakers—can hear the full story, and can make both policy and personal decisions based on the best available science.

A major feature of the new Attacks on Science Tracker and its methodology is that it identifies which of the documented attacks constitute potential scientific integrity violations. Anybody can use this data and interactive visualizations to advocate for scientific integrity protections and the passing of the Scientific Integrity Act.

Not every attack on science is a scientific integrity violation, but these concepts are inherently linked. Think of “attacks on science” as a broader umbrella term that encompasses all the various ways that elected and political officials politicize science.

In the recently released Attacks on Science Tracker, we categorize attacks on science into 11 differenttypes of attacks to contextualize how officials politically interfere with science.

Passing and enforcing the Scientific Integrity Act would have helped to prevent about a third of the total number of attacks on science we’ve documented since January 20, 2025. That’s almost 190 instances of political interference that have implicated climate science, equity, the environment, and health and safety.

How we categorize attacks

In our data, potential scientific integrity violations are specific types of attacks on science. We chose these types of attacks on science based on the most current text of the Scientific Integrity Act. The bill doesn’t explicitly define scientific integrity violations, but does list several examples of the types of political interference (like censorship) the bill would help prevent.

We use the bill text as a metric for which attack types to classify as potential scientific integrity violations. However, there may be potential discrepancies between our attack type definitions and what is considered a scientific integrity violation based on current bill text. Thus, our potential scientific integrity violation data should be used for informational purposes, not treated as the final determination of the presence of a scientific integrity violation.

Based on the most current bill text, we classify the following five (out of 11) of our attack on science types as potential scientific integrity violations. We’ve seen the Trump administration commit many examples of each since inauguration, and these attacks come at the expense of all of us, by undermining the science and science-based policies we depend on.

Altering Study Results: This variable captures when elected or political officials edit, misrepresent, or manipulate a federal (or federally funded) scientific study. Between January 20, 2025 and June 29, 2026, the Attacks on Science Tracker has documented 38 of these types of potential scientific integrity violations. As an example, the Trump administration altered over 100 federal datasets related to public health and safety to align with its anti-science and anti-trans executive orders. In another incident, a political official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence urged analysts to redo an analysis because its results conflicted with the White House’s policy priorities.

Changing the results of a study or the data that informs them is blatant politicization and could ultimately call the reliability and accuracy of the study into question. Trusting this information and making informed personal and policy decisions becomes much harder to do in the short term. In the long term, this can change the scientific record on many different topics and sideline the ability for future researchers to assess the best-available science when conducting new studies.

Censorship: This represents when elected or political officials stop or control federal scientists’ public communication. There are 26 censorship attacks recorded in the Attacks on Science Tracker, encompassing various instances when federal agencies and officials have instituted additional political review of projects before they’re published in peer-reviewed journals, stymied communication and materials related to the administration’s prohibited topics, and halted all external health agency communication shortly after President Trump’s second inauguration.

When their communications and messaging are restricted or halted, federal scientists may not be able to relay accurate and important scientific information, either in a timely manner or at all. This interference is especially concerning when the restricted information is about public health, like emerging infectious diseases or cancer treatments and diagnoses.

Data Accessibility: This variable captures when elected or political officials eliminate federal data or scientifically informed information or make it less accessible to the public. We documented 58 data accessibility attacks in the Tracker as of June 29, 2026. The administration’s efforts to scrub federal websites and scientific guidance that includes any mention of transgender, non-binary, and intersex people is a prime example of this type of attack. But there have been several others that have unfolded since, including when the Environmental Protection Agency removed materials from their website that drew connections between human actions and climate change.

Removing taxpayer-funded scientific information from federal websites like this alters the critical information researchers, decision-makers, and entire communities need. And suppressing the availability of information that goes against the administration’s priorities can sow doubt in established scientific facts.

Data Collection: This encompasses instances where elected or political officials interfere with or stop the data collection of a scientific study. There are 87 such attacks in the Attacks on Science Tracker, including an incident where the Trump administration, using explicit political language, canceled ongoing research that would help determine the safety of pipelines that transport hazardous materials to the environment and nearby communities. In another incident, the administration canceled an annual survey that helped assess the state of food insecurity in the US, claiming it had become “politicized”.

Looking at this type of attack, I often think of the popular adage: “only what gets measured gets managed.” Halting data collection makes it difficult for the government to assess the true scope of any given topic and provide the necessary resources and support in response. Refusing to see a problem can be an excuse for simply declining to address it at all. And in the case of canceling ongoing studies—or studies that have already used federal resources and compiled data—it’s simply wasteful.

Restrictions from Professional Engagement: This refers to incidents where elected or political officials cancel federally sponsored research events, bar federal scientists from attending such events, or investigate scientists for their involvement in such events. 20 of these types of attacks are documented in the Attacks on Science Tracker. As soon as the first week after President Trump returned to office in January 2025, all travel and grant review panels were paused indefinitely in federal health agencies and at the National Science Foundation. And during a time of increased bird flu infections and uncertainty of how it could spread, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered the National Academy of Sciences to cancel a workshop that was meant to provide guidance to medical professionals and farmers on best practices for protecting themselves against infection.

This type of attack has far-reaching and, perhaps, less visible consequences. Pausing grant review panels indefinitely halted the ability for federal agencies to review and disseminate federal research grant applications, throwing people’s projects, jobs, and entire careers into jeopardy. And preventing federal involvement in conferences and workshops can prevent collaboration among resources or undermine the timely dissemination of critical information needed to help communities navigate natural disasters and keep people safe from emerging diseases.

We’re not just watching—we’re pushing back

The Attacks on Science Tracker provides unique and robust documentation of political interference in federal science and presents many opportunities for people to advocate for evidence-informed policies and scientific integrity protections. This is the type of advocacy that recently brought the Scientific Integrity Act back to the Senate for the first time in seven years. You can help us keep the momentum going by:

• Getting acquainted with the Attacks on Science Tracker and its many interactive features. UCS is hosting a webinar tomorrow, on July 1 (4-5p ET), in support of efforts to protect federal science. During the webinar, I’ll introduce the audience to the Tracker and walk through some examples of how it can be used to advocate for scientific integrity protections, and my colleagues will provide an update on the Scientific Integrity Act. Join us!
• Urge your Congresspeople to co-sponsor the Scientific Integrity Act, which can help prevent the very types of attacks I laid out here. Use this easy link to contact your Representatives in the House, and this link to contact your Senators.
• Spread the word about the Tracker by sharing our posts on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
• And stay up to date on UCS’s other advocacy actions by regularly checking our website.