Trump’s policies have brought offshore wind development to a near standstill around the country, with his administration paying developers roughly $4 billion to walk away from projects. But in Louisiana, leaders in the industry say they are trying to preserve their expertise and supply chain in hopes of reviving offshore wind projects under the next administration. 

“Come January 21st, 2029, we all get to wave goodbye,” said state Representative Joe Orgeron, a Republican from southeastern Louisiana who worked in the offshore wind industry. “The current administration has been a one-man stopping show. I’m pretty confident, and I’m hopeful that it’ll change.”

Orgeron later put the industry’s near-term strategy more succinctly: “Just wait for the clock to run out.”

His views were echoed by the other wind energy experts on a panel at Tulane University’s Future of Energy Forum. “The Trump administration has been pretty openly hostile to seeing the advancement of the offshore wind industry,” said Madelyn Smith, a program manager with the Southeastern Wind Coalition, a nonprofit that supports the development of wind power across 11 states. 

Trump’s second-term efforts to halt the industry’s growth in the United States started on his first day in office last January with executive orders withdrawing federal waters from new offshore wind leases and halting permitting for any additional projects. The Trump administration also issued a series of stop-work orders for all of the projects under construction. When that sparked a legal fight, the administration shifted tactics, offering federal money for offshore wind developers to simply walk away from their projects. 

“For many reasons, it’s very compelling,” Smith said of the payout offers. “And there’s no real pathway for progress in the next two to three years, and some of these leases are quite expensive.” 

Smith said developers have relinquished 12 offshore wind leases in exchange for federal payouts, including plans for a 2-gigawatt wind farm in the Gulf of Mexico south of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

“About $4 billion of taxpayer money has been spent to remove those from the pool,” Smith said. “And those projects also represented about 21 gigawatts of potential capacity.” That’s enough energy to electricity to power more than 5 million homes. 

Several Louisiana companies that long served the offshore oil and gas industry had shifted to helping plan and build offshore wind farms on the East Coast. Orgeron’s family-owned supply boat business, along with several Louisiana engineers and metal fabricators, helped build the United States’ first offshore wind farm near Block Island, Rhode Island, in 2016.  

For Louisiana companies, the work kept coming. By 2024, nearly a quarter of all offshore wind work contracts in the U.S. had gone to Gulf-based firms, with about $1 billion in investments flowing to the region’s ship and fabrication yards, according to the Oceantic Network, an industry trade group.

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The bipartisan energy bill tearing the climate movement apart

Jake Bittle & Austin Corona

Louisiana colleges shifted their curricula to meet the growing demand for workers. Nunez Community College in Chalmette launched a two-year turbine technician program, while the University of New Orleans started the Wind Energy Hub, offering engineering scholarships and internships with offshore wind companies. 

RWE, the German company behind that 2-gigawatt project, had planned to tap into this workforce to build its wind farm about 44 miles south of Lake Charles by 2035. It also had a customer for its power, securing a deal with Entergy to deliver electricity to an estimated 350,000 homes in Louisiana and Texas. 

But as the offshore wind industry expanded under the Biden administration, Trump became an increasingly vocal opponent, eventually pledging to halt new projects. His opposition to wind energy dates to at least 2006, when he began a decade-long fight against the Scottish government over an offshore wind farm he said would spoil views from a golf course he planned to develop. Since then, he has frequently derided wind energy, portraying turbines as threats to property values and wildlife while also claiming that the technology spikes food prices, causes cancer, and can somehow drive people insane. 

Trump has managed to stall and at times derail Louisiana businesses that had steered investment toward supporting the industry, said James Martin, CEO of Gulf Wind Technology, an Avondale-based company that builds and tests wind blades. “It is a shame,” he said at the Tulane forum. “It’s been a big pause button on what was a sleeping giant of an industry.”

Martin’s company has tried to adapt by seeking work in the aerospace and defense sectors. Other companies have trimmed budgets and laid off workers. 

“There’s huge layoffs in the wind space, and some of the best engineers on the planet — they’re giving up,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Louisiana wind industry’s plan for survival: Outlast Trump on Oct 9, 2026.

I was skeptical of the bad reviews that Digger has been getting; after all, I like more of the Iñárritu films I’ve seen than not. I would even call one of them (his 2001 debut, Amores Perros) a cinematic masterpiece. (Birdman was fine.) In any case, most of the time a Mexican person is in the news, I am invested in their success, so I decided to see the movie for myself. 

Even then — two hours, nine minutes, and a small popcorn later — I was surprised by my reaction: I simply loved the movie. Despite the negative reviews and poor box-office numbers, Digger is a film well-worth seeing — and talking about. To do that fully, this review contains spoilers. 

Digger is Iñárritu’s most ambitious, visually maximalist, thematically convoluted, and sonically grating movie yet. Or as Jake puts it, yes, it is “ugly, loud, and unpleasant,” but I didn’t mind the sensory overload. In fact, it’s part of why I liked it. There are plenty of movies that try to capture the non-stop roar of the so-called unprecedented times we live in: Sorry to Bother You, Uncut Gems, and Eddington come to mind. These movies offer up cacophony as a form of contemporary social commentary. They’re grating on purpose, because that’s often how waking up, checking your phone, and heading to work feels. 

Digger joins the ranks of these unsubtle, borderline noxious films; it features fiery accidents, signs of planetary collapse, bumbling bureaucrats, casual sexism, decaying pet animals, and bouts of senseless violence. But it also stars Tom Cruise in one of his weirdest roles ever, which is truly a delight to watch. 

Digger revolves around a morally unsound man named Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon (played by Cruise) who ignores warnings from climate scientists that he should stop drilling in the Arctic. A crack has formed in the ice sheet and is leaking methane into the atmosphere — and it’s only likely to get bigger, they say, posing a massive threat to life and property. When their warnings come to pass and an explosion at Rockwell’s oil operation in Greenland triggers a monstrous ice shelf to break off and drift toward Europe, Rockwell and the president of the United States (played by a ghoulish John Goodman), who helped facilitate the drilling, start to panic. These cartoonish men are, clearly, avatars for the real-life architects of the climate crisis: the companies that knew what they were doing, and the powerful governments that delayed meaningful action to correct such oversights. 

Iñárritu takes pleasure in portraying them as howling windbags, targets of both ire from Ganesh, the film’s noble climate scientist played by Riz Ahmed, and of laughter from the audience. The way Rockwell and President Compson stumble through their hubris is often funny, but the laughs are closely followed by discomfort. Uncanny shots of trees falling in the background (only to be propped back up again?) begin to disorient the viewer. You think you’re watching a satire about the bad guys who started this mess, and then a crack in the movie’s narrative world appears. 

At its heart, Digger presents the problem we have with climate change as one of narrative: What is the story about how things went wrong, and who gets to tell it? Its answers might get Iñárritu called a doomer, but I found the way he intellectualizes our current predicament too compelling to look away from. (Spoilers start here!) 

Iñárritu pulls back a curtain, and reveals that Cruise is not actually Digger Rockwell; he’s an actor named Curtis Markson, and he’s playing Rockwell in a stage play. More specifically, Markson is an actor struggling to understand his character’s internal motivations. Here is where Cruise really shines: not as a laughable villain, but as a tortured artist trying to tell the story of the greatest crisis of our time. Goodman and Ahmed are, likewise, actors in supporting roles in this play-within-a-movie. 

As the movie goes on and more details of the theatric production are slowly revealed, this structure offers up more complicating questions for the viewer. Why stage a play about climate change in the first place? Isn’t it bad enough to have to live through global warming without figuring out what to say about it? These questions are aimed at Iñárritu as much as they are at Hannah, the “hip” theatre director (played by the wonderful Sophie Wilde) tussling with a pedantic Markson. These two cannot agree on the nature of what they’re doing onstage. Is the story of climate change a farcical comedy or a devastating tragedy? What would be the point of telling it either way?

The answers offered by Digger will certainly alienate some audiences. During tech rehearsal, Hannah explodes at Markson, saying the purpose of art is to comfort the dispossessed, especially those whose families were lost or displaced by climate change. The point, she argues, is to laugh at Markson as Rockwell, and the sooner he gets onboard, the better. At this point, the viewer learns that an iceberg really did take untold lives throughout Europe, and the play is a cult classic detailing how the Rockwell family attempted to profit off of disaster. 

Exactly why and how the play is being staged 25 years after these horrific events is a juicy twist I won’t share here. Suffice to say, Digger is concerned with legacy, and Iñárritu, the first and only Mexican filmmaker to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture twice, clearly is too. “The movie is not perfect,” he told the New York Times in a recent interview. He did it anyway because, as he put it, “I like taking risks.” Digger feels like the director’s latest bid to cement himself as an auteur, and it also feels like a vehicle for a potentially unpopular idea. Maybe art can’t change the world and maybe we shouldn’t expect it to — at least not when a tsunami is approaching. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Digger’ has a lot of haters. Here’s why they’re wrong. on Oct 9, 2026.

On this question, the coalition known as the climate movement has fractured into two broad groups. On one side, there are activists, lawyers, and environmentalists, who tend to focus on blocking and reducing fossil fuel use. On the other, there are renewable energy companies and policy wonks, who tend to focus on building more clean energy.

These factions have clashed in the past, but over the past week a kind of civil war has erupted between the different elements of the climate movement. The inciting incident was the release of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA, a long-awaited Senate bill that is designed to enable the construction of more power plants, transmission lines, and gas pipelines. The bill does this by weakening some of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws, speeding up the timeline for government agencies to issue permits, and making it harder to cancel projects that have already gotten federal approval. 

For climate-conscious supporters of the bill, it’s better for the planet to build a lot of clean energy even if it means some fossil fuels get built as well, and even if they cause some damage to the environment on the way. Supporters of the effort argue that if the U.S. builds out new clean capacity, it will be easier to wean off fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of global warming and all its myriad consequences. Opponents say that’s a Faustian bargain, one that will jeopardize tribal nations, other marginalized communities, and endangered species.

“It is definitely exposing a potential fault line between the environmental community and clean energy interests,” said Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat who represents Northern California, in an interview with Grist. 

BAAJA is the product of months of bipartisan negotiation between four members of the Senate committees focused on energy and the environment. The two Democrats in the talks were Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, who are both climate hawks and clean energy advocates. The Republicans were Mike Lee of Utah and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who are advocates of fossil fuels and critics of environmental regulation. Despite their ideological differences, the four senators managed to reach a compromise on a sprawling 400-page bill with hundreds of individual provisions. 

The so-called “four corners” reached a deal just before Congress left for its fall recess, and the Senate will not return to take up the bill until after the midterm elections. The bill has not even made it through committee yet, and it also faces an uncertain fate in the House of Representatives. The next few weeks will see a scramble of lobbying as supporters and opponents of the bill try to sway senators and representatives for or away from the bill.

So far, at least, the builders seem to have more influence than the blockers, at least within the climate movement. President Donald Trump has spent the last two years repealing most federal climate policy and blocking the development of new clean energy, and many climate advocates seem willing to accept an imperfect deal rather than hold out hope of fixing Trump’s damage after he leaves office.

“It’s a lot easier to prevent things from being built than to build things, and that applies both to fossil fuels and to renewables,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate expert at the science nonprofit Berkeley Earth, who also directs climate research for the tech company Stripe. “I don’t want us to run roughshod over any community, but we also can’t give everyone a veto for an issue as important as climate change. So ultimately, we need to strike a balance there.”

The case in favor: Build more

A big challenge with building clean energy is that it takes up a lot of space. Solar farms and wind farms can cover thousands of acres of land, and the transmission lines that carry their power to cities can extend for hundreds of miles, covering far more territory than coal and natural gas plants do. This large footprint makes these projects more likely to touch federal lands or waters, which triggers a series of obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act, the foundational environmental protection law also known as NEPA, and other laws that protect endangered species and historical artifacts. Under NEPA, federal agencies must carry out an extensive analysis of a project’s environmental impacts before issuing or denying a permit for it.

That review process often inspires time-consuming litigation. Opponents can bring lawsuits against an agency even years after a review is complete, arguing the review wasn’t comprehensive enough, and they can ask courts to halt the project until the agency redoes the analysis. A 2025 study found that 64 percent of solar projects, 38 percent of wind projects, and 31 percent of transmission line projects face NEPA lawsuits.  

This litigation can come from almost anyone, and can cover almost any conceivable impact from a project. On one end of the spectrum, a coalition of tribes and environmental groups sued the developer of the SunZia transmission line. The line carries much-needed wind power to Arizona and California, but the plaintiffs wanted the developer to reroute the wires away from a holy cultural site, an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful. On the other hand, opponents of a wind project in California delayed development for years by suing on the grounds that a federal agency had failed to consider pseudoscientific theories about wind turbines creating dangerous electromagnetic fields. Both projects were ultimately completed, but years behind schedule.

The bill would make it much harder to file this kind of lawsuit. Litigation would need to be brought within 150 days of the end of the NEPA review process, rather than six years, and the plaintiff must have already described the issue of their suit during a public comment period. Even then, a court could only order the agency to redo its analysis while a project moves forward, rather than pausing a project altogether. The agency could then only revoke the permit under limited circumstances, including a violation of law or the risk of immediate or substantial harm to “life, property, national security, or defense.”  

“This is a great bill, and it’s a huge step in the right direction,” said Ray Long, the president of ACORE, a trade group representing the solar and wind industry. “We need to really put this in reality. We need to build a ton of stuff over the next four years, or else we’re gonna have higher [electricity] prices.”

A related set of provisions makes it harder for the government itself to block projects, providing developers with “permitting certainty.” Here, both the Republicans and Democrats believe they have won — Republicans resent President Joe Biden’s decisions to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline and to pause the construction of new liquefied-natural gas terminals on the Gulf Coast, while Democrats have watched the second Trump administration use dubious executive authorities to halt the construction of solar and wind farms on federal lands and waters. One provision in the bill would help developers seek compensation if they can establish that the government has discriminated against a specific project type, like offshore wind, through delayed and canceled permits.

“This president has found ways to skirt the edges of every law that we have, and his attacks will continue,” said Kris Ohleth, executive director of Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a pro-offshore wind nonprofit research group. “But at least if developers know they can recoup some of their development costs, as this bill might allow, it’s more appealing for them to return to the market.”

What’s arguably the most important thing in the bill doesn’t have to do with permitting per se. It’s about the massive transmission lines that carry electricity from region to region. The United States has built very few of these interstate lines in recent years. This dearth of new wires has made it infeasible for developers to build more solar and wind. 

“Historically, it didn’t matter too much where power plants were located, so we built them close to where the power was needed,” said Chirag Lala, vice president of research and chief economist at the Center for Public Enterprise, a think tank. “But we don’t have that same luxury with clean energy, which can be very location-specific. If you’re going to rely on those resources, you have to ship the power over long distances.”

BAAJA would force utilities and regional grid operators to plan for interregional transmission lines, and would let private developers (like the one behind SunZia) come in and build lines themselves if utilities don’t build enough. The bill would also clear away a number of procedural roadblocks that have allowed utilities to block interregional transmission. 

The Democrats who negotiated the bill and the climate experts who support it see these provisions as a sea change for clean energy. If the bill passes, it could unleash solar in Nevada and wind in the Dakotas, and then bring that power to places like Appalachia that have little solar or wind potential of their own.

The case against: Stop the damage

But while the clean energy industry has celebrated the bill’s effort to speed up permitting for new power plants, many environmental groups have condemned it. These groups argue that the changes would allow for a surge of new development near disadvantaged communities, and will leave residents with no legal recourse to stop that development. 

These groups argue, in essence, that the bill sacrifices many communities in places like the Gulf South in order to achieve an overall nationwide increase in the supply of clean energy. 

“That battle between fossil fuels and renewables is not going to necessarily go well for the people of our region, especially if you take those regular protections that we’ve relied on for years away,” said Liz Zepeda, the director of federal policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center, an environmental law group that represents six states in the Southeast. 

The permitting changes have also drawn intense criticism from Indigenous groups, who say that the narrowing of historic preservation law would deprive tribal nations of a voice in development decisions. By the time that tribes learned about a company’s plans for a new transmission line or solar farm, it could be too late for them to protect culturally important sites.

“These changes will reduce opportunities for Tribal Nations to learn that an infrastructure project is occurring or to participate before decisions are made, all but guaranteeing that construction or other activities affecting sacred places can proceed without meaningful Tribal involvement,” said Valerie Grussing, the executive director of the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, a group representing tribal officials who advise federal agencies on protecting Indigenous historic sites during project development.

The bill would constrain litigation on behalf of endangered species and would also weaken states’ power to stop development under the Clean Water Act. This latter state power has been used in the past to take down old hydropower dams, like the ones on the Klamath River, and that would now be harder.

BAAJA would also allow mines on public lands to unload excavated rock and waste materials on adjacent land. Mining is essential for clean energy development — solar panels, wind turbines, and EV batteries all need metals and minerals — but some environmental groups worry about the impact on local ecosystems.

In addition to raising concerns about environmental and social impacts, opponents argue that the bill would lock in future development of fossil fuels, which could negate the climate benefit of building clean energy. Among the biggest concessions to Republicans is a broad environmental exemption for natural gas pipelines, which, along with the Clean Water Act changes, would make it much harder for states on the East Coast to block new pipelines. Hausfather, who is supportive of the bill, allows that more gas reaching the Northeast would likely cause emissions to go up, though he believes that increased clean energy development elsewhere would more than offset those increases.

The bills’ opponents are also extremely skeptical of the “permitting certainty” provisions that the offshore wind industry welcomed. The bill would prohibit the president and federal agencies from discriminating against any specific energy source, but that prohibition would apply to fossil fuels as well as renewables. It would in theory make it almost impossible for a future president to undertake an LNG pause like the one Biden pursued, or to block offshore oil development. 

“If you have a dominant industry right now, which is the fossil fuel industry, you are creating a structure that makes it possible for them to lock in their dominance forever,” said Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental protection nonprofit that has led the opposition to the bill.

Opponents argue that by trading away their ability to stop new oil and gas production, the bill would hamstring the climate fight, no matter how much solar and wind gets built.

“Do we just ignore the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry, and just hope and pray we can deploy renewable energy fast enough to reduce emissions?” asked Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, a nonprofit environmental group. “That’s what this bill does.” 

Builders vs. blockers

BAAJA’s fate is far from guaranteed. In addition to the opposition from influential groups like the Center for Biological Diversity, there are a number of House members who have expressed uncertainty about the bill. At least one senior Republican, Brett Guthrie, has said he opposes the effort to force new transmission lines, and major utilities will likely oppose that provision as well. On the Democratic side, Huffman, the representative from California, told Grist that he thinks Democrats can likely get a better deal after the midterms.

“The idea that this is this once-in-a-lifetime great opportunity that will never come again and has to be accepted without any scrutiny or questions is pretty silly,” he told Grist. Huffman said he believes the bill is a “Trojan horse” with “giveaways” for the fossil fuel industry, and said he believes he could negotiate a bill without significant environmental rollbacks should the Democrats take control of the House. 

But even if Democrats retake the House and the Senate, they will need some Republican votes to pass a major transmission reform, so some kind of compromise is inevitable. Many supporters say they doubt that Republicans would negotiate a bill when in the minority, or that Trump would sign a Democrat-led bill.

For now, the bill seems to have split the climate movement down the middle. While hundreds of small environmental groups signed a letter urging Democratic senators not to pass the bill, most major green groups did not sign. The list of absences includes the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, arguably the nation’s most influential climate nonprofit, whose leader said in a public statement the bill raises “hard questions” but could be “good for clean energy — really good. ” Others, like Citizen’s Climate Lobby, have offered their unequivocal support. Even the environmental opponents seem somewhat fractured — when a group of opposing nonprofits held a Zoom call to coordinate their strategy, someone leaked the transcript to Punchbowl News.

The fact that the bill has a chance of passing with some support from green groups and climate hawks like Whitehouse reflects a shift in the American climate movement. The movement took off during the fracking boom with protests against pipeline projects like Keystone XL, but efforts to phase out fossil fuels have been stymied by court decisions and administration changes. During that time, solar and wind have both experienced dramatic growth as they’ve gotten cheaper to build, but they are now hitting bottlenecks thanks to transmission constraints and environmental review. 

The fact that Whitehouse and Heinrich came to the table with Republicans, and that so many green groups aren’t fighting their compromise, may be a sign about how climate advocates have come to see fossil fuels: If you can’t beat ’em, build something that can replace ’em.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The bipartisan energy bill tearing the climate movement apart on Oct 8, 2026.

“This is pretty astounding, really, to break a record by just about a month,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate who studies hurricanes at the University of Miami.

So what’s with the extraordinary delay? El Niño, of all things. 

Even though that band of warm water is on the other side of the Americas in the Pacific, it messes with two of the fundamental ingredients for making hurricanes in the Atlantic: wind and humidity. To spawn a tropical cyclone, you need warm water, which provides energy, as well as high humidity and winds moving in a consistent direction. (Hurricanes have been getting more intense lately because climate change is rapidly warming the oceans, creating high-octane fuel.) While the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico have been plenty warm, providing huge pools of fuel, El Niño has been messing with weather patterns, creating dry, sinking air. It also provides wind shear — air moving at different directions and speeds as you gain altitude — which hurricanes really hate. 

Hence the exceptionally quiet Atlantic hurricane season this year.

So why did Isaias finally break through in October? While it is indeed fighting wind shear in the Gulf, atmospheric conditions aren’t as bad for it as they are farther east. “It’s forming in one of the few places that a storm can occur in the Atlantic right now, because of the very strong El Niño that’s taking shape and imposing very strong vertical shear across the deep tropics,” McNoldy said. “The Gulf has a small window of opportunity for a storm to form, and it did.”

The Gulf is also running several degrees warmer than usual, at least at the surface, where Isaias is drawing its energy. Interestingly enough, though, the “ocean heat content,” a measurement of the thermal energy down through the depths, there is nearing a record low. “So that warmth is really only skin deep,” McNoldy said.

This sets up a weird dynamic for Isaias. Hurricanes are such violent storms that they churn up deeper waters: If that liquid is warm like the surface, that means more fuel. But if it’s cooler, that’s anathema to a hurricane. This effect is so pronounced that scientists can use satellites to trace the paths of hurricanes, just by detecting the trails of cold water they leave behind. 

While the Atlantic hurricane season has been exceptionally quiet, in the eastern Pacific has been very busy as seven have formed, five of them being major. (It’s hosted 18 named storms so far, five more than usual.) Hawai’i has suffered particularly badly this summer, with hurricanes Lala and Nolo bringing torrential rain. Right now, Hurricane Rachel is taking aim at Baja Mexico and Southern California, where it could spawn dangerous surf and winds this weekend. 

Meanwhile, the Gulf Coast is bracing for Isaias — a storm that may have arrived very late, but, with ferocious winds and a potential storm surge of up to 7 feet, is no less a threat for life and property.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Isaias is a typical storm — but it’s also ‘astounding’ on Oct 8, 2026.

Each year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is primarily responsible for implementing the law, evaluates species and lists them as “endangered” or “threatened.” When federal activity or private development has the potential to harm a listed species or its habitat, project developers are required to consult with the Service or obtain a permit prior to construction.

For the last several decades, the interpretation of two words in particular — “take” and “harm” — have formed the backbone of the Nixon-era law. Its prohibition of “taking” an animal criminalized any attempts to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” at-risk species. And the provision on “harm” ensured that degrading a listed species’ habitat could be penalized. These definitions have been key to the success of the law. 

But that all changed last month when the Trump administration determined that razing the habitat where endangered or threatened species breed, feed, and shelter would no longer face federal penalties. In a separate internal memo, the administration also reinterpreted the definition of “take,” limiting it to instances of intentional killing of an endangered species. (Nearly two dozen attorneys general have sued over some of these changes.)

“These rule changes, when you zoom out, are an assault on threatened and endangered species unlike we’ve ever seen before,” said Elizabeth Forsyth, a senior attorney in the biodiversity defense program with Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization. “It’s an effort to eliminate habitat protections, eliminate automatic protections for threatened species, and give industry power.”

Climate change is making matters worse, as species struggle to adapt to warming temperatures and changing ecosystems. Below, Grist reporters look at how 10 species — from lovable sea otters to a misunderstood snake — might fare as the regulatory framework that has kept them afloat is weakened. 

North Atlantic right whale

North Atlantic right whales got their name perversely. Because they stick close to shore and to the surface, and float when killed, they were the “right whale” to hunt. So right that humans hunted them nearly to extinction before the practice was banned in the 1930s.

That’s not why right whales are dying today.

“Nobody goes out and says, ‘I’m gonna hit a right whale with my ship,’” said Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School. But it happens anyway.

Though it’s not always possible to determine the cause of death for a whale, research shows that the leading cause is human activity: Ships strike the whales and fishing gear ensnares them, leading to injury and death. It happens often enough that North Atlantic right whales have been experiencing an unusual mortality event since 2017, in which 43 have died and 133 have been spotted injured or in poor health. About 380 whales remain, only 70 of whom are breeding females.

Well before the latest changes to the Endangered Species Act, the Trump administration had already begun rolling back protections for right whales. In March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced plans to rescind ocean speed restrictions designed to reduce the risk of vessel strikes. The agency later declined to expand the whales’ designated critical habitat to include their migratory route.

The administration will likely use its new definition of “take” to bolster those actions, Winders said. “Now they can point to this and say, ‘Look, we can’t have speed limits under the law because it only applies to intentional direct activities.’”

Right whales are “particularly vulnerable” to the changes, Winders said, both because of their critically low population figures and because their primary causes of death are incidental takes. 

“Right whales don’t have two years or four years” to wait for a new president or Congress to restore their protections, Winders said. “This is going to impact them immediately.”

— Emily Jones

Eastern massasauga rattlesnake

Admirers of the only venomous snake species in Michigan call the creature misunderstood. The eastern massasauga rattlesnake — which grows up to 3 feet long, with a rattle at the end of its sandy, brown-speckled body — is often vilified in rare accounts of snake bites and has been the subject of state advisories to stop harassing the animal.

These snakes are actually “very shy, pretty calm,” said Adam Austin, a wildlife biologist who leads the conservation nonprofit Midwest Friends of Wildlife. They prefer to hide in the wetlands that they call home, and their name is a nod to their swampy abodes; massasauga means “great river mouth” in Anishinaabemowin, the Indigenous language spoken across the Great Lakes.

In recent years, as wetland acreage has shrunk across the Midwest — due to development, drainage, and climate change — the massasauga’s habitats have become fragmented. The resulting isolation makes it difficult for them to breed with other populations, diminishing genetic diversity and leaving them less resistant to new diseases. More than a third of the roughly 260 sites where the snake has been surveyed across the Midwest are at risk of habitat loss, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

As a result, federal officials listed the snake as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2016. The move has helped conserve millions of acres of wetlands in the region, Austin said, but recent changes to federal protections are likely to spell trouble for the rattlesnake. 

Snake advocates worry that under the Trump administration, razing wetlands the massasauga roam in or accidentally killing them during construction may not be a violation of federal law. While Michigan has its own endangered species laws — eastern massasaugas are considered state-threatened — protections are narrower than the federal Endangered Species Act. The state also has strong legal protections for wetlands, but the loss of a federal backstop could shift more responsibility to the state to fill regulatory gaps, said Tara Zuardo, a senior advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. 

“Michigan’s law and the federal Endangered Species Act would suddenly be operating under the same words, but radically different legal meanings,” Zuardo said.

— Vivian La

Bull trout

Bull trout, native to Montana and recognizable by their large heads and white-tipped fins, are the alpine equivalent of a canary in a coal mine. They rely on cold, clean water, and as warmer temperatures, invasive species, and sediment runoff have degraded their habitat, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the state’s wildlife management agency, has documented significant declines across half of the population. Road construction, particularly for industrial logging, poses one of the greatest threats to bull trout spawning habitat. The fish are particularly sensitive to sediment buildup, which can coat the gravelly bottom of a river and smother their eggs. 

“I could list off 10 streams right now that 15, 20 years ago had bull trout in them, and they don’t anymore,” said Brian Riggers, a retired fisheries biologist with the U.S. Forest Service who spent decades documenting bull trout in streams across western Montana. “That’s a sad thing.”

Bull trout are listed as “threatened” by the Fish and Wildlife Service in recognition that they’re likely to become endangered and at risk of extinction without protection. The listing ensures that anglers are not allowed to catch and release them like other species of trout, and it’s not legal to fish for them in most of their habitat.

The Trump administration’s proposed policy changes to weaken the Endangered Species Act, as well as rescind protections for roadless areas in national forests and allow more motorized recreation, are the latest blows to these imperiled fish.

Riggers said that without protections for their remaining habitat, bull trout will continue to face steep declines. The need to preserve their habitat has been a key component of legal challenges against large-scale logging projects in the state. Without the explicit federal protections to prevent harm to a listed species’ habitat, it could become nearly impossible to stop development projects that degrade spawning streams and block the bull trout’s ability to move through rivers. 

— Ellis Juhlin

Florida panther

Florida panthers once roamed much of the American Southeast. But then settlers arrived and hunted them until just a few dozen remained. Their range dwindled to a small area in southern Florida — a state that, until 1950, paid a $5 bounty to any hunter who turned in a panther scalp. Today, the panthers, among the first species protected by the Endangered Species Act, are recovering, with an estimated 200 thought to live in the state. 

“It’s been a tremendous effort over the years,” said Elizabeth Fleming, a career expert on the species at Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation nonprofit that helps protect panthers. Because most Floridians haven’t lived with panthers for more than a century, recovery depends on helping people coexist with them as they spread, often through educational programs or compensating ranchers who lose livestock to panthers. Without public acceptance, “we can kiss panthers goodbye,” she said. 

But now, nearly 60 years after panthers were first federally protected, the Trump administration’s new interpretation of the law could undermine this progress.

This is particularly worrisome for Florida panthers, which were listed in the law’s early days and don’t have the additional habitat protections that became mandatory later on. Florida’s population is also booming faster than nearly any other state. That means more housing developments and highways that fragment panther habitat, and more traffic that can kill them. Vehicle collisions are the leading cause of panther deaths, Fleming said. One of the most quickly developing parts of the state directly abuts its only panther refuge. Under the new federal rules, developers may no longer need to contend with how their projects could harm panthers. 

“People don’t understand that these animals need so much more,” Fleming said. “They need a connected system in which to travel and live their lives, and with every single instance of weakened laws, regulations, and protections, it’s just another thing going against them.”

— Sachi Mulkey

California sea otter

Thousands of sea otters spend their lives weaving through the towering emerald ribbons of kelp forest found around California’s central coast. Lucky kayakers might spot one taking a moment to float belly-up, perhaps cracking open a tasty sea urchin with its favorite rock. They also rest this way when they sleep, sometimes holding hands to stay together while trusting their ultra-buoyant and water-resistant fur to keep them above the waves.

These lovable marine mammals were once thought to be extinct in California, after intensive pelt hunting in the 19th and 18th centuries culled their population down from some 16,000 individuals. But a small number of otters survived and repopulated. Today, some 3,000 otters live in the Big Sur region, just south of San Francisco.

That recovery was largely possible through Endangered Species Act protections that the Trump administration has repeatedly weakened. The latest changes, which gut habitat protections, could leave sea otters especially at risk. Much like the Florida panther, they also do not have a “critical habitat designation,” an additional safeguard that only became mandatory after sea otters were already added to the list. 

When it comes to protecting otters, habitat is everything, said Sean Bothwell, the executive director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance. In the past, conservationists rallied to fight against oil spills in otter habitat. Today, they’re turning their attention to fertilizers used for farming, which can cause algae blooms and make the shellfish that otters eat toxic. “We’re so concerned about otters because they live in the tidal zone; they are directly impacted by anything that runs off of the land,” he said. 

The Trump administration’s changes to habitat protections will make it much harder to hold companies accountable for this kind of pollution, Bothwell said. His organization recently decided to pause a lawsuit against a dam that was threatening a number of endangered species, like fish and toads, because the case partly rested on the legal definition of “harming” an animal that the administration rescinded this summer.

Without these safeguards, he said, lawsuits that focus on habitat protections could lose their teeth. “We are worried there will be some kind of backsliding,” Bothwell said. 

— Sachi Mulkey

Rusty patched bumble bee

Like the nearly 50 other bumble bees native to North America, the rusty patched bumble bee is a fuzzy, mostly yellow-and-black insect that buzzes between plants gathering nectar and pollen. Unlike its cousins, and as its name suggests, the rare bee sports a distinctive amber spot near the middle of its back. 

When Libby Shafer, now an urban ecologist and PhD Candidate in plant biology at Northwestern University, was a biological technician with the United States Geological Survey and tried to track down the bee over the course of a three-month search that spanned Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, she had very little luck. “I personally only saw one,” she said. 

The bee, once common in 28 states including Illinois and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec, has declined by nearly 90 percent over the past 30 years. Today, it occupies just 0.1 percent of its historic range.

The pollinator was listed as federally endangered in 2017, becoming the first bee species listed under the Endangered Species Act. Experts have pointed to a number of stressors that explain the bees’ dramatic decline, including habitat loss, pesticide use, disease, and climate change. For example, warmer temperatures can set off a mismatch between when bees emerge from hibernation and when native plants bloom and provide food.  

This past summer, conservationists celebrated the Fish and Wildlife Service’s designation of approximately 1.5 million acres of occupied critical habitat for the rusty patched bumble bee, which protects it from projects funded or permitted by federal agencies but not from private landowners — approximately 83 percent of the bees’ critical habitat is privately held.  

“The rusty patched bumble bee is better positioned than many listed species since critical habitat has finally been designated,” said Delcianna Winders, of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School. But she added that the Trump administration’s rescission of the regulatory definition of “harm” to exclude habitat destruction and reinterpretation of “take” pose serious threats to the species. Bumblebees are small, can easily go unnoticed, and spend about half the year in the soil, making them difficult to spot for an expert, let alone a developer building a service road over a prairie. 

“This is bad news for the rusty patched bumble bee,” Schafer said. 

— Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco

Eastern hellbender

Wildlife advocates with the Center for Biological Diversity and other organizations have been trying to get the eastern hellbender listed for more than a decade. In 2024, they came close. After Hurricane Helene felled trees and kicked up sediment, disturbing the sensitive salamander’s habitat, the Fish and Wildlife Service finally proposed the hellbender for protection, with a decision expected at the end of 2025. But the decision never came. In fact, not a single endangered species has been listed since Trump took office. 

The eastern hellbender has enjoyed state protection in places like New York and North Carolina. However, unlike other species that have been federally designated as “endangered” or “threatened,” the hellbender has had no federal protection, even as its population has dwindled dramatically. The salamander is a homebody — once it finds a place it likes to live, it often stays there its entire life. An ancient remnant of the Ice Age, it has lived in the same streams and rivers for just about 160 million years and has been called a living fossil.

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, its roughly 600 known historical populations have endured narrowing margins over the past few decades. More than 40 percent of those populations have vanished, and another 36 percent are in active decline. The hellbender breathes through its skin, meaning water pollution and sedimentation can cause disease and death. It thrives best in the cold, clear streams of the higher mountains in the Appalachian region, and shade cover is vital.  

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The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit in February, demanding the Fish and Wildlife Service complete its decisionmaking process. Since then, though, there’s been no movement, with the next regulatory step listed as “to be determined,” along with hundreds of other endangered species whose protections have been similarly delayed.

According to Michael Gangloff, who studies freshwater life at Appalachian State University, human development is the biggest threat to hellbenders. But, he said, they’re also fighters. 

“These things are tough, and the fact that they’re still here attests to their toughness,” he said. “They’re an ancient, ancient group of salamanders.”

— Katie Myers

Red-cockaded woodpecker

The southeastern United States used to be a red-cockaded woodpecker’s paradise, with longleaf pine forest stretching across much of the region. Unlike many other woodpeckers that hollow out dead trees to nest, these black-and-white-spotted birds live exclusively in the trunks of living pine trees. They spend months or years hollowing out a suitable cavity, and they prefer to do it in mature trees. 

But finding suitable trees has become much harder than it was a century ago. Much of the South’s longleaf pine forest was clear-cut for timber and replaced by faster-growing species of pine. Management practices vary, but commercial timber operations often cut and replant pines before the trees are mature enough for a red-cockaded woodpecker’s liking, according to Joe Burnham, a wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. 

“They have pretty specific habitat requirements,” Burnham said. “There are a whole suite of species, both plant and animal, that evolved with this ecosystem over time that really have a hard time surviving elsewhere.”

Development is booming in Georgia, with much of the state’s forested land at risk of conversion to housing or more profitable forms of agriculture. The Trump administration’s policy changes, particularly its new definition of “harm,” could put red-cockaded woodpeckers at greater risk by removing protections for their habitat. As a result, more forests could become vulnerable to conversion, further shrinking the mature pine forests they rely on. 

Still, red-cockaded woodpeckers have made substantial strides since their 1973 Endangered Species Act listing, thanks in large part to efforts to restore longleaf pine habitat and transplant birds to suitable forests so they can reestablish themselves. In 2024, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service downlisted them from endangered to threatened. Despite the change, state- and region-level restoration efforts continue, Burnham said, because the woodpeckers need them — as do the long list of other endangered and threatened species that rely on the same habitat, including gopher tortoises and indigo snakes.

“We’re managing these stands for a multitude of species,” he said. “We’ve invested a lot of conservation effort into these species.”

— Emily Jones

Palila

Hawaiʻi is losing its lush and unique biodiversity at a rate seen hardly anywhere else, earning it the depressing distinction of being known as the “extinction capital of the world.” It may be no surprise, then, that the palila — a small, yellow-capped parrot native to the Big Island — is a poster child of the Endangered Species Act. 

The palila was on the very first list of animals that the federal law protected. But conservationists soon discovered that protecting the bird itself was not enough; goats and sheep released on the island were denuding the high-elevation māmane forest that the parrot lives in. When they took the issue to court in 1979, federal courts agreed that allowing the palila’s habitat to be damaged was a violation of the Endangered Species Act and ordered the state to protect the forest from sheep and goats. The decision set a historic precedent and led to habitat protections for listed animals from industries — like mining, logging, and farming — across the United States. (The Supreme Court later cemented these protections.)

But the Trump administration is now upending the legal precedent that the palila once set. The court decisions meant that the Hawaiʻi government had an obligation to continually remove the feral sheep and goats that still roam in palila habitat. When a company or the state wants to build through these areas, it is often required to help offset that lost habitat by reforesting old ranch land with māmane trees. Under the Trump administration’s interpretations, however, damaging an animal’s habitat no longer counts as harming it. And killing an animal no longer counts as violating the law unless it was done on purpose. 

That means, in the administration’s view, it may now be legal to build a road through māmane forest without considering how it affects palilas. And the state may no longer be required to continue eradicating the remaining feral sheep and goats, which would hasten the bird’s demise. 

Only 600 palila still remain on the island. For a bird on the brink, the latest policy changes may accelerate its decline.

— Sachi Mulkey

Chinook salmon

Every year, across Washington’s rivers and tributaries, hundreds of thousands of Chinook salmon sacrifice their lives for the next generation. They swim upstream for weeks, battling currents, starvation, and a flood of hormones that wreck their organs. Then they spawn — often in the river where they were born — and die. 

The completion of this journey is critical for tribal communities, commercial fisheries, and the wildlife of the Pacific Northwest that depend on salmon. But in the last century, salmon populations have plummeted. Humans have built dams and developed the land, degrading river ecosystems and blocking salmon from migrating. And recently, Washington has become the epicenter of another threat: 6PPD, a chemical used in vehicle tires that washes off roads into waterways and harms several fish species, including Chinook salmon.

The Endangered Species Act protects several area-specific populations of salmon found in Washington’s rivers, like Chinook, coho, sockeye, and chum. Environmental advocates have had success leveraging the law to protect these habitats. Dozens of dams in Washington and other Pacific Northwest states have recently been removed, and salmon populations seem to be bouncing back quickly as a result.  

But this recovery is still nascent and, as the Trump administration upends federal protections, it may be cut short. The government recently rescinded the law’s “harm” rule, which previously said modifying a habitat could be considered harming a species. Now, it only prohibits activities that kill salmon on purpose.

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The change could devastate efforts to protect salmon, said Sean Bothwell, the executive director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance. His organization recently began tackling 6PPD contamination in Northern California, but has had to pause these efforts because their legal strategy relied on the rescinded “harm” rule. The change may also mean dam operators can no longer be pressured to maintain adequate flows for salmon, a particular concern as climate change makes downstream areas too warm for spawning. 

“People aren’t going out there and stabbing salmon, but they are putting a chemical into the habitat that is directly killing them” or modifying their habitat by blocking the flow of rivers, Bothwell said. “That’s why this rule was so important.” 

— Sachi Mulkey

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is gutting the Endangered Species Act. These 10 species show what’s at stake. on Oct 8, 2026.

The worst impacts of that global crisis add to the risks those workers face.

“When the city is hit with with massive snowstorms, floodings, or the recent smoke fires, many deliveristas are the ones who are on the front lines doing this work and responding to the climate crisis in order to take care of New Yorkers,” said Ligia Guallpa, who is Kichwa and the co-founder and executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project and Los Deliveristas Unidos. The organization organizes app-based delivery workers and advocates on their behalf. “But the reality is that often they cannot even take care of themselves.”

A report released Monday says that exploitation is deeply embedded in the global food system, leaving many of the 1.4 billion people who produce, process, distribute, and deliver food poorly paid, inadequately protected, and vulnerable to abuse. Climate change and a global affordability crisis are intensifying those pressures, according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, or IPES-Food, an international food policy research organization.

Although the document does not specifically focus on Indigenous peoples, it finds that many of the forces driving that exploitation have roots in the colonialism, land dispossession, forced labor, and racialized labor systems that have long harmed Indigenous communities worldwide. 

“Here we are in the United States, a country that’s founded on stealing land and the import of enslaved people to be able to make agriculture and agricultural labor possible and cheap,” said Raj Patel, an IPES-Food expert and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “And the legacy of that is still with us.”

The report notes that Indigenous peoples remain particularly vulnerable to displacement, and pressures from industrial agriculture and climate change that can undermine traditional livelihoods. For people who have been forced off their land and are disconnected from those livelihoods, exploitative, low-paying work is often the only option. 

“If you put yourself in a situation of a woman who needs to feed her children, they can go to any extreme,” said Teresa Chemosop, who is Ogiek from Mount Elgon, Kenya, and the coordinator for the East Africa Indigenous Women-Led Assembly, which advocates for Indigenous women across the region. 

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Chemosop said that Indigenous workers face severe discrimination and abuse, such as being compared to baboons and not being given utensils to eat with while working. That’s on top of low wages and long, difficult hours. 

Indigenous and intergenerational agricultural knowledge is routinely minimized or dismissed as “unskilled,” the report notes, obscuring valuable expertise and helping to justify lower wages. That knowledge, which often goes back millenia, includes skills like cultivating plant medicines and drought-resistant crops. The authors call for formally recognizing that expertise alongside broader efforts to strengthen worker rights and protections.

The people who keep the global food system running do far more than grow and harvest food. They distribute it to markets and restaurants, deliver it to homes and offices, and provide care work like cooking and feeding families, often in seasonal or subcontracted jobs. Between 60 and 80 percent of food workers are informally employed — a higher share than in any other industry — and they earn about half as much as those with conventional employment. About 30 percent of food system workers, or more than 400 million people, earn less than a living wage.

An estimated 2.1 million people in agriculture work under forced-labor conditions, the report estimates. Migrants, who account for about a quarter of all farmworkers worldwide, are three times as likely to experience such conditions and are more likely than their peers to die on the job.

Despite their importance in feeding the world, these workers do not receive the respect or protection other essential workers enjoy. Guallpa pointed to the pandemic, when nurses and doctors were widely praised even as food service workers remained largely anonymous. “Immigrant workers, who do some of the most dangerous, dirtiest jobs, often go unseen and often are invisibilized,” she said.

The report argues that valuing food work in all its forms, from the field to the table, is just one part of building a more just system. It also calls for building worker power, establishing and sustaining workplace protections, ensuring equal rights for migrant workers, and reining in corporate power. And it makes clear that there is a false choice between affordability and worker rights, arguing that better working conditions do not have to mean higher food prices.

“We can manage all of this, and we will have to manage all of this because climate change isn’t getting better,” Patel said. “But we have choices about protecting workers, and we’re choosing not to do any of those things.”

In New York, Los Deliveristas Unidos’ organizing provides a glimpse of what workers can accomplish. It has established mutual aid chat groups and helped win minimum wages and other protections. “It is possible to give gig workers or independent contractors the ability to earn better pay, to ensure that workers have better working conditions. It is possible to regulate multi-billion-dollar corporations,” Guallpa said. “There’s a lot more to do, but I think it can be applied in every city.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline From the farm to your door: How our global food system exploits workers on Oct 8, 2026.

“We’ve had the coal. We’ve dealt, the whole community, with black lung,” O’Neil said. “The explosions, the fires, and all the things that came along with it.”

But a new industry and type of energy production is about to move near her rural home. And she says it has her and her neighbors even more worried than they were about the dangers that came from their long history with coal. 

“It’s all descending, these data centers,” said O’Neil, who tracks mysterious new projects in the works and shares updates on Facebook community pages. “They’re setting these things within a couple of miles of homes.”

Her latest updates involve a lot of chatter about Valar Atomics, a nuclear startup. The company plans to build a mega-complex of 456 small modular reactors — a still largely untested and unproven technology in the United States — on the vast tracts of Bureau of Land Management land in the county. The project will store radioactive waste, according to a report from National Public Radio, and power an array of industrial activities, including data centers. “Project Beehive” has support from the state of Utah, and will include a square mile of state-owned trust lands.

Another data center complex planned for the county, Altigen Energy’s “Jurassic Spark,” will cover hundreds of acres and include a massive natural gas plant. 

It’s an abrupt shift. Carbon County’s coal mines produced nearly 10 million tons of coal in 2006. But a shift to cheaper energy sources, like renewables and natural gas, along with depleted supplies in the coal seams, sank the region’s main economic engine in just a few decades. Since 2023, not a single pound of coal has been mined in Carbon County.

“They say everything’s left us, and if we don’t grab these table scraps we’re not going to get anything,” said O’Neil. “I don’t think our county has to take the table scraps.”

None of Carbon County’s new data center plans call for coal. The Utah Trust Lands Administration recently agreed to lease a square mile of its state-owned land for up to 100 years to Valar Atomics. The nuclear startup intends to use that lease to run some of its small modular reactors, process its uranium TRISO-fuel to feed the reactors, build water desalination, manufacture steel, refine critical minerals — and support data centers.

The Valar site is expected to generate $35 million in lease rents over 50 years, according to information the Trust Lands Administration staff presented to its board last month. Revenue collected from the project benefits Utah schools. (The state agency declined to comment on the Valar project.)

During that September board meeting, three Carbon County residents who are employed or expected to be employed by Valar spoke in favor of the project. All three of the Carbon County commissioners also voiced their support.

“[We] realize that this topic is a hot button now, along with data centers,” said Larry Jensen, one of the commissioners. “It’s important that you understand that the Carbon County commissioners are committed to allowing these things to move forward. Even with the pushback — we realize that there are a few in our community who will push back — but the silent majority are the ones that we really represent.”

Cheryl Lupo, a longtime resident of the county, balked at that assertion. She is running for a seat on the county commission this year. As an unaffiliated candidate, she had to collect 300 signatures to land on the ballot. She said the opinions she heard during that process were overwhelmingly opposed to data centers and nuclear plants.

“People are up in arms,” Lupo said. “Torches and pitchforks. Because they’re not being heard.”

Governor Spencer Cox, U.S. Senator John Curtis, and other high-ranking Utah officials welcomed Valar to the state earlier this year, allowing it to test its “Ward250” microreactor at the San Rafael Energy Lab in neighboring Emery County. Valar announced it had achieved “self-sustaining criticality” in June — a process where atoms split and maintain a steady fission chain reaction without being fed more neutrons. The company has plans to power a 30-megawatt nuclear-powered AI data center in Emery County, too, in partnership with the computer-chip giant Nvidia.

Small modular reactors have yet to be deployed for commercial use in the United States. During last week’s Trust Lands Administration meeting, Mike Nelson, the board’s chair, seemed to acknowledge that the deal with Valar came with some unknowns. “We weren’t always sure what to ask about,” Nelson said, while offering praise for the nuclear startup, “and probably still aren’t sure of everything to ask about because this is a first, right?”

Utah has a troubled history with nuclear testing. Lupo’s mother was 38 years old when she died, and Lupo believes the cause was downwind effects from radioactive weapons testing in nearby Nevada during the 1950s. Her mother lived in Carbon County at the time. She believes the fallout caused her grandfather’s death, too.

“I will never, ever be a proponent of nuclear,” Lupo said.

Even before the proposal to build Valar’s complex started causing a stir, rumors swirled about the possibility of another data center campus in Carbon County.

Altigen, a company that builds natural gas power plants for data centers, has selected an area east of Wellington for its 1,200-acre “Jurassic Spark” project — nearly double the size of the Valar campus, according to meeting minutes from the local Community Economic Development Board. Plans call for building a 250-megawatt gas plant to power the complex initially, but it could eventually produce 3 gigawatts of electricity, according to Jensen. For the sake of comparison, the entire state of Utah uses about 4 gigawatts. (Altigen did not respond to a request for comment.)

Data center developers are increasingly turning to natural gas to power their projects since utilities have struggled to supply the intense electricity demands of AI servers.

Last year, the Utah Legislature passed SB 132, allowing private companies with energy demands of 100 megawatts or more to build their own self-contained generating stations. The idea was to support business development, including data centers, without putting a strain on the grid used by nearly everyone else. The result was a surge of builders issuing plans and applying for permits to build gas-fired power plants.

Natural gas, however, is a potent greenhouse pollutant mostly composed of methane. It helps fuel climate change and pollutes the air in surrounding communities. And natural gas plants can produce immense amounts of heat.

But nuclear plants can produce even more heat than natural gas plants because they are less efficient, according to Robert Davies, a professor of physics at Utah State University. “If you’re in a contained valley, it concentrates the problem,” he said.

As it happens, the Wellington area sits in a valley, hemmed in by the Wasatch Range to the west and the Book Cliffs to the north and east.

“The heat island that the data centers produce, that concerns me,” said Aspen Westenskow, who has lived in Carbon and Emery counties all her life. “They go clear all this land, the brush, the trees. What helps cool the planet down? Not flat dirt.”

Westenskow said water remains her biggest source of distress. The region is water-strapped, with every drop spoken for.

Valar says its reactors use closed-loop helium cooling which requires little water, and data developers have asserted they will also use closed-loop cooling systems with low water demands.

On July 3, Carbon County issued a statement responding to their residents’ concerns. The region faces a difficult economic reality due to the decline of the coal industry, the statement said. That has shifted more of the county’s property tax burden to homeowners and remaining businesses. Data centers have earned the commissioners’ support because of their potential to infuse tax rolls with much-needed revenue.

The statement also addressed concerns over the non-disclosure agreements that some residents have questioned. “Without these agreements,” the statement reads, “some companies would choose not to explore projects in Carbon County.”

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It’s not clear whether the county had nondisclosure agreements with Altigen or Valar. But they’re common for companies looking to do business in Carbon County. Oran Stainbrook, one resident, said he was aware of several when he served on the county planning commission and economic development board. He resigned from those positions a few months ago to take a job in Colorado, he said.

Although he wasn’t aware of any agreements involving the data center projects, Stainbrook said he believed the commissioners were looking out for the county’s best interests, trying to lure jobs and investment.

O’Neil, from her home on U.S. Highway 6, sees things differently.

“You shouldn’t be hiding what you and the company are going to bring to a community,” O’Neil said, “and not tell the community until it’s too late and a done deal.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Powering data centers on nuclear? That’s a tough sell in Utah’s coal country. on Oct 7, 2026.

The war with Iran has pushed the cost of heating oil, which is essentially diesel, higher than it ever has been. It is hovering around $6 a gallon across much of the Northeast, where about 82 percent of homes that burn the fuel are located. That’s compared to the mid-$3 range in February. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association, or NEADA, projects that the cost of warming a home with that fossil fuel will go up 50 percent across those states. That amounts to $878 per household, or some $3.8 billion overall. 

“The volatility of this product right before winter is scary,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the organization, which had projected a lower increase just weeks earlier. “This is part of the cost of the war.” 

The stalemate in the Mideast has curtailed ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a tenth of the world’s water-borne diesel once flowed. Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries, another major source of diesel, have further curbed the global supply. That has sent prices up, with colder states expected to see heating oil hikes well above the NEADA average. Vermont and Maine, for example, face the prospect of a 76-percent jump. 

These increases threaten to overwhelm the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, a federal safety net for those who cannot afford to heat or cool their homes. With existing aid buying far less fuel than it did before the war, Republicans and Democrats alike are pressing the Trump administration to release assistance quickly while Congress weighs whether to put billions more into the program. The situation is so dire that the governor of Massachusetts declared a state of emergency on Monday.

For people with oil furnaces, there are few easy alternatives. They could turn to space heaters because electricity rates haven’t climbed as fast as heating oil, but the devices are inefficient and could lead to higher bills. Burning wood is another option for those with a fireplace or stove. Although natural gas prices have remained relatively low, installing a new furnace is costly and it could take years for any savings in energy costs to recoup the investment.

Another route is to invest in weatherizing a home by adding insulation or sealing windows, for example, which can help lower bills, and many states have funding available to help with energy-saving projects. 

The EI Niño weather pattern could bring a relatively warm winter to the Northeast, which would help ease the burden of higher prices. Still, as winter approaches, people who rely on it are concerned.

“I just had my boiler cleaned/serviced for the coming season and honestly I’m terrified of the oil bill,” one person noted on Reddit. Others are weighing whether to pre-buy fuel to lock in current prices, though some are finding that dealers aren’t offering that option given the uncertainty. An especially dejected person simply said, “I have no plan and I’m all out of ideas.”

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Wolfe is especially worried about the more than 1 million low-income households that rely upon heating oil. Those families may end up having to choose between filling the tank and buying necessities like food and medication. “This could be a public health crisis,” he said. “The problem is that the administration has said nothing.” 

President Donald Trump has repeatedly targeted the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, for elimination. It has survived so far, though the administration did temporarily hold back payments last spring. Some lawmakers worry fall funds could move slowly, too. 

“A quick release of funding will ensure no gaps in assistance,” a bipartisan group of 31 senators wrote in a letter last month to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The program currently has roughly $4 billion, and the agency has until November 1 to release at least 90 percent of that money to states, with the rest coming in the spring. But the legislators want the payments to reach people as soon as possible. “Given the extraordinary pressure consumers will face this winter,” they wrote, “we ask that you make this distribution well before the deadline.”

The White House referred a request for comment to the Department of Health and Human Services, which told Grist that it will meet the deadline. “HHS has staff and capacity to distribute these funds in a timely manner,” the agency wrote in an email. 

Even if that money arrives quickly, it won’t go as far with fuel prices this high. Increasing the program’s funding would require congressional approval — a step legislators have taken in the past, including during President Trump’s first term. A House bill introduced last week would add $1 billion to the LIHEAP budget, though any action on the legislation won’t happen before midterms. Without more of a buffer, families may not have enough heating oil to last the winter.

“People’s benefit would have less purchasing power,” Miranda Gray, the deputy commissioner at the Vermont Department for Children and Families, told Grist. Her agency distributes the state’s LIHEAP distribution. If assistance were to run out, she said people might have to turn to other options, like community nonprofits. 

On Monday, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey declared a state of emergency to prepare for a rough winter ahead. Her executive order boosts assistance to 156,000 low-income households and expands access to 50,000 middle-class families. It also activates legal protections against price gouging, the state said in its press release. Healey also called on Congress to pass an additional $3 billion in funding for LIHEAP. For now, both officials and consumers are hoping for the best. 

“I try to have an optimistic attitude that things could change,” Gray told state legislators at a hearing last month. One Reddit user put it more bluntly: “I feel like I’m playing chicken with fuel prices and the impending cold weather.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Northeast’s reliance on heating oil is turning into a crisis on Oct 7, 2026.

To address the problem, the Army Corps of Engineers has, since the 1970s, been dredging up sand and depositing it onto beaches up and down the east coast. On Tybee, which sits just south of the mouth of the Savannah River, beach renourishment happens every seven years. The natural sand-sharing there is further interrupted by the shipping channel that cuts between Tybee and its neighbors to the north.

In the winter of 2019 and 2020, the Corps placed 1.3 million cubic yards of sand on the Tybee Island beach. More than half of that sand is gone now. On one stretch near the DeSoto Beach Hotel, the dune looks like it’s been chopped in half with a giant knife, ending in a 5-foot cliff instead of a gradual slope.

“It’s extremely stark and startling to see up close and personal,” said city manager Bret Bell. “You can see the vegetation. It’s bisected in half. You can see the roots coming out of the dune system.”

It’s not just the dune grasses. In some places, the tide and storms have cut into sea turtle nests buried in the dune. Businesses are feeling the pinch too. The dramatic erosion has forced chair and umbrella rental operations off the beach in some places, Bell said, and the DeSoto has lost bookings due to the poor state of the beach in front of its doors. 

All told, the erosion puts the island itself — and the mainland — at risk. The sea level is rising about half an inch a year due to climate change.

“It is really our only protection against the encroaching oceans,” Bell said. “Storm surge would inundate our island if it weren’t for the mitigating effects of the beach and our dune system.”

Tybee Island is due for renourishment again this winter. Planning began when the last renourishment ended, Bell said, and the city, Chatham County, and the state of Georgia have worked since then to set aside enough funds to cover 40 percent of the $20 million price tag — the required local match funding for the federal beach renourishment program. But Congress underfunded that program, according to Bell, and Tybee was left off the project list.

“All of a sudden, all of these beach communities started really competing for the limited amount of funding that there was,” he said.

City officials continued to lobby, residents launched a letter-writing campaign, and members of Georgia’s congressional delegation visited the island to see the stark beach erosion. Then, in September, came a development Bell called a “miracle”: The Corps redirected leftover funds from other projects to Tybee. Work is slated to begin this winter.

When it does, the Corps plans to try something new. When the agency dredges the Savannah River shipping channel, it will deposit that sand in the shallows off Tybee’s beach instead of pumping it offshore. The goal is to minimize the wave action that eats away at the beach and allow the sand to travel more like it naturally would without the interruption of the shipping channel.

“That really is expected to extend the life of our nourishment,” Bell said. “So instead of the next nourishment happening in seven years, it might be 10 years.”

Update: This story has been updated to reflect how the Army Corps of Engineers is funding the Tybee Beach renourishment.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The never-ending struggle to protect Georgia’s most popular beach on Oct 7, 2026.

The justices gave no clear signs of how the court will rule, but over the course of two hours of questioning, they did demonstrate unison on one point: It is a hard and consequential task to identify who is legally liable for the impacts of climate change. 

Although Boulder’s case was first filed in Colorado courts, oil and gas companies asked the Supreme Court to step in, arguing that important climate change matters shouldn’t play out at the state level. Instead, they say, the issue belongs to Congress and the White House. Boulder wants the court to send the case back to Colorado, where it can proceed. 

Eight justices — Justice Samuel Alito removed himself from the case — attempted repeatedly to cast the case into something legible and simple. Multiple times, justices from both sides of the ideological spectrum asked attorneys, “Why make this argument so complex?” Yet they seldom openly agreed on what the simpler argument would be. The consequences for oil companies weighed heavily on some parts of the discussion, while the consequences for communities dealing with a warming planet went largely unexplored.

Some judges attempted to describe it as a case about reducing emissions — a framing that aligns closely with what Exxon Mobil and Suncor argue. If Boulder’s case is an attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through state court, it opens the possibility that a state court could police activity all over the country, and even the world. No state law could be appropriate to apply to the cumulative impact of global pollution, the companies argue.

“This case involves an unprecedented effort to use state law to regulate global conduct,” said Kannon Shanmugam, the attorney representing oil companies.

Several justices seemed to agree with that general picture. Kavanaugh said he could see no difference between allowing a state court to order oil and gas companies to pay damages for climate-related harms and allowing a state to effectively regulate greenhouse gas emissions all over the world. He told Boulder’s attorney, Kevin Russell, that he was downplaying the effect this case could have on oil companies, arguing it could “bankrupt” some of them. In his closing arguments, Shanmugam reinforced the idea that the chaotic consequences of the case could reach the scale of climate change itself. 

“Boulder could tag me … when I am in Colorado in two weeks and sue me on a nuisance claim for refilling my car and thereby contributing to global climate change,” he said. 

Ironically, these questions were far from what Boulder claimed it wanted to do with its case. The city hasn’t asked to stop companies from producing oil and gas, or to stop those who burn them from sending greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Rather, it wants oil companies to pay for deceiving the public into thinking those products weren’t producing large-scale harms through climate change. 

Justice Elena Kagan argued Boulder’s case was similar to suits that states brought against cigarette companies in the 1990s, seeking compensation for health care costs linked to tobacco consumption. The companies weren’t required to stop selling cigarettes, but to roll back their pro-cigarette marketing and fund awareness campaigns around the effects of smoking.

“This is not an effort to reduce emissions,” said Russell. “Under our deception theory, they can continue to produce as much fossil fuels as they like and contribute to as much air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as the market will bear when consumers are properly informed about the consequences of that decision.” 

“It doesn’t prohibit them from engaging in the conduct. It requires them to internalize a portion of the cost of their activities by paying for some of the damage,” Russell said later.

Kavanaugh called Russell’s phrasing “cavalier,” saying that those costs could be significant to oil and gas companies. Some firms, including Suncor, have told their shareholders the accumulating climate cases against them could affect their bottom lines. 

If the case is allowed to proceed in Colorado courts and Boulder wins, it could open the floodgates for other cases, Shanmugam argued: “More [suits] are being filed by the week … so given the extraordinary magnitude of these cases, where, in each of these cases, plaintiffs are seeking billions of dollars of damages, we need an answer to this question sooner rather than later.”

Justices typically hear opening arguments and ask questions at the beginning of the court’s term and then take months before publishing a decision. This thread was only one of several they teased apart during the arguments, including arguments over states’ regulatory authorities under the Constitution and the intent of the Clean Air Act. Judges could use a range of rationales for their ultimate ruling, each of which would affect other climate suits against oil companies differently because those suits depend on different legal bases.

“States and local governments are trying to recoup costs related to harms from climate change in a lot of different types of lawsuits,” said Erika Kranz, an attorney with Harvard Law School’s environmental and energy law program. Whether these other cases “run into trouble will depend on how justices write their decision.”

It’s also possible justices send the case back to Colorado, either by deciding the Supreme Court isn’t the right place for it or by voting 4-4, which would leave Boulder able to carry on with its state-level lawsuit. (Alito has not explained why he removed himself from the case, though he has faced accusations that his investments in oil and gas companies not related to the case made his participation inappropriate.)

Kranz and Chris Winter, executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School, said it’s hard to know whether that emphasis showed the court was leaning toward the oil companies, but it suggested that at least some justices were deeply concerned about the case’s potential financial consequences for the industry.

Boulder’s lawyers must now convince them that this risk to oil and gas companies was beside the point, Winter said. To do that, Boulder will have to overcome justices’ claims that it’s trying to reduce emissions through the court.

“There’s a lot of concern from the oil industry, from corporate actors, and from the conservative justices about the significant consequences of these cases,” Winter said. “One way to get at that is to equate this case with previous cases, which were much more directly about regulation of pollution.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Supreme Court wrestles with who should pay for climate change on Oct 6, 2026.

Marvin Martin was in the Four Corners area of Dorchester one day when a train sped by on the Fairmount Line into downtown Boston. It was filled with white people, sitting comfortably and reading newspapers. It made him wonder why the commuter line seemed to pass through communities of color without stopping, leaving people in his neighborhood to crowd into buses.

Martin decided to do something about that. In 1995, he and others began pressuring the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to expand service. It took more than 15 years, but the agency added three stops in Dorchester in 2012 and 2013. It opened a fourth in Mattapan in 2019.

But Martin wasn’t finished. He also had been pushing for electrifying the line. 

“We want a train that would not be spewing a bunch of toxic particulates into the air,” Martin, who recently retired as the head of the transit advocacy organization Action For Equity, said.

Nearly three decades after Martin saw the train roll through Four Corners, the T, as the transit agency is known, plans to electrify the Fairmount line. It will lease seven battery-powered trains, each with four cars, for 15 years in a deal expected to cost $765 million. The arrangement allows the agency to gain experience with the technology before deciding whether to use it more widely.

The trains, built by the Swiss company Stadler, are slated for 2030. They will boost frequency of stops along the 10-mile route from every 30 minutes to every 20 and save 17,700 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually compared to the diesels they will replace, according to the T.

Battery-powered trains allow transit agencies to electrify without the expense or complexity of installing overhead power lines, called catenary. But some worry the technology remains unproven on lines with ridership similar to what the Fairmount carries daily. 

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They’ll find out soon enough. Caltrain, which provides regional service in the San Francisco Bay Area, plans to introduce battery-powered trains by 2028. Chicago’s Metra has a similar timeline. The projects could offer a glimpse into the future of rail electrification, but the technology must first show that it is capable of transporting thousands of people each day.

Boston is no stranger to electric rail. Its first electric streetcar rolled out in 1889, and the Tremont Street Subway — now part of the Green Line — was the first electric subway in North America. (It was third worldwide behind Budapest and London.) 

Chris Friend, interim executive director of the advocacy organization TransitMatters, considers the Fairmount line a logical place to begin the T’s regional re-electrification because it is the system’s shortest commuter route. But he added that battery-powered trains have not yet been widely used on busy routes anywhere in the world. “So, is this the thing,” he asked, “or are we going to end up in another quagmire of an unproven technology?”

Battery-powered trains built by the French manufacturer Alstom are zipping back and forth on a 50-mile route in Germany that carries 2 million people annually. Dani Simons, the company’s vice president of communications in the Americas, said rising fuel prices make electrification more appealing. (The average price of diesel was $6.32 a gallon on Monday, up from $3.70 a year ago.)

Simons conceded the technology is best suited to “medium ridership.” But she said transit agencies should be pursuing electrification in all its forms, including diesel-electric hybrids and trains powered by overhead lines. These technologies can mitigate the impact of rising fuel costs and improve air quality. Even the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is diversifying, with plans to deploy both battery and catenary trains on the Providence Line.

In some ways, electrifying transit means going back to the future. Urban systems began the transition from horse-drawn vehicles to electric streetcars in the 1880s and 1890s, said Albert Churella, a history professor at Kennesaw State University. Steam railroads, meanwhile, carried passengers between cities and their outskirts, helping spur the growth of suburbs.

Some commuter lines, including routes from New York to New Haven and Philadelphia to Paoli, along with the Long Island Rail Road, electrified at the start of the 20th century. Subways in Boston and elsewhere used electricity because steam trains emitted smoke and risked asphyxiating passengers underground. 

It also helped that the technology was new.

“People get infatuated with technological advancements, and they tend to believe that these are cure-alls, that these are things that have extraordinary, almost unlimited potential,” Churella said. “Electrification of railways was no different.”

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Most commuter lines, however, were never electrified. Many ran on tracks owned by larger railroads that also carried long-distance passengers and freight, operations that favored steam and, later, diesel power, said Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a historian and author of The Great American Transit Disaster. As passenger rail declined after World War II, he added, those companies increasingly wanted out of the passenger rail business. Diesel trains also offered a cheaper alternative to electrification because they do not need miles of wire.

Caltrain provides a look at what electrification can deliver. In 2024, it replaced diesel trains with electric ones on the 51-mile route between San Francisco and San Jose, powering them with overhead lines. Commute times dropped by as much as 23 percent because electric trains accelerate so much faster, and people loved the smoother, quieter cars. Ridership climbed 60 percent, and quality improved. Beyond the immense reduction in CO2 emissions, Joshua Apte, an environmental engineer at the University of California Berkeley, found that riders’ exposure to black carbon dropped 89 percent — a result he called comparable to what California cities achieved during 30 years of regulation.

Given the number of commuter rail systems that still rely on older diesel locomotives, “you might see similar air quality gains if you electrify them,” he said.

Although battery-powered trains might be slightly less efficient than those that use overhead lines or a third rail, Apte said they still do wonders for easing pollution. 

That’s enough for Martin. He acknowledges that the cleaner, quieter trains that will begin rolling through the Four Corners will be a “novel thing” and that riders will continue breathing air polluted by diesel exhaust until they go in service. But he considers his three decades of advocacy a success.

“I’m pretty satisfied with where we ended up,” he said. “As long as we still get that train.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of French train manufacturer Alstom.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The future of commuter rail could be taking shape in Boston on Oct 6, 2026.

Kelly has spent her life on the prairies of the High Plains. As a child, she made bouquets of flowering grasses and hunted for mudpuppies in the interdunal buffalo wallows on her parents’ ranch. Now a rancher herself, she’s trying to preserve the landscape she loves against the usual suspects — overgrazing and overharvesting — and one surprising new threat: trees. 

She pointed out my window to the prairie below. “You can see it there,” she said, pointing to a neat grove of Juniperus virginiana, eastern red cedar, deliberately planted by ranchers to protect calving heifers from the wind. These windbreaks are standard features on the Plains. But to the south of their orderly rows, a dozen cedars have popped up in the middle of the grass, scattering across the nearby range like race-runners breaking free of the pack. 

This spreading of trees is known as woody encroachment — or the “green glacier,” as some call it, evoking the slow creep of tree species over grasslands — and it’s got ecologists and ranchers of the Plains on high alert. 

“We’re losing our biodiversity,” Kelly said. “We’re losing our resiliency.”

For ranchers, a woody takeover of their rangeland creates an obvious problem: less land to graze. The Texas A&M Agrilife extension estimates that woody encroachment over the 10 Great Plains states represents $4 billion in lost range production. Ecologists predict biodiversity losses would affect the insects, birds, and small mammals that populate the country’s remaining prairies. Everybody worries about what those thirsty trees will do to the already stressed water supply as the green glacier expands from the wetter climate in the eastern prairie states to the arid western regions. 

Prairies — on the High Plains and around the world — thrive in cycles of stability and disruption. Fire, grazing, dry seasons, and the area’s particular mix of vegetation all play a role in preserving the healthy root systems that allow a diverse mix of grasses to continue growing year after year. Some heartier grasses with root systems 20 feet deep can keep the prairie green in a drought, while healthy soil can hold dormant seeds until the conditions are right. 

Fire — both naturally-occurring and prescribed burns — has long been a feature of the prairie landscape. Suppressing it is part of what has allowed woody plants to seed, spread, and develop the thick bark that makes them more likely to then withstand future fires. Meanwhile, overgrazing reduces trees’ and shrubs’ grassy competition, allowing them to grow faster. Cattle and bison don’t eat the woody plants. Goats, sheep, elk, and other “browsing” species don’t eat enough of them to control the spread, though some are experimenting with browsers as a component of a larger management plan. 

The Flint Hills of Kansas and Osage Hills of Oklahoma are home to two-thirds of the nation’s remaining tallgrass prairie, said Brian Obermeyer, The Nature Conservancy’s Great Plains grasslands strategy director. The persistence of the prairie in this region is largely because of the longstanding culture of prescribed burns, dating back to when Chisholm Trail cattle drives would divert their skinnier livestock to fatten up on the highly nutritious, tender, juicy grasses that grow back after a burn. Obermeyer even found a lease contract dating back to 1915 requiring the land to be burned regularly so that cattle would have access to the new growth. But in regions where that practice is not common, Obermeyer said, “Getting people comfortable with the culture of prescribed fire takes time.” 

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The Sandhills in Nebraska don’t have the fire culture, though Kelly and others are trying to change that. What they do have, Kelly said, is a culture of tree-planting. 

“Most of the people that settled Nebraska came from areas that were full of trees,” she said. In fact, before it was known as the “Cornhusker State,” Nebraska’s official nickname was the “Tree Planter State.” It dates back to the Homestead Act of 1862, which required settlers to cultivate their land with crops or trees to establish ownership, and Nebraska’s Kinkaid Act of 1904, which offered free trees to help settlers cultivate 640-acre tracts in the state. The tradition has gone on for centuries now, and thanks to advances in horticulture, ranchers buy heartier and heartier red cedar saplings for their windbreaks, which then spread their juggernaut offspring across the plains. 

As executive director of the Sandhills Task Force, a nonprofit established 33 years ago to promote conservation and sustainable land management in the ranching industry, Kelly knows that half the battle is changing the culture. “We’re not talking about trees being bad everywhere,” she said. “But trees are not good on a prairie, especially invasive trees.” On her water bottle I spotted a sticker: Be A Leader, Cut a Cedar. 

Another cultural shift might be necessary as well, particularly for the broader conservation community. The prevailing climate wisdom has been pretty clear: Trees are good, and planting them is virtuous — the more the better. But actually, Obermeyer said, grasslands can be a more secure carbon sink than forests. A big reason for that goes back to the cycle of fire on the landscape, and the worsening threat of out-of-control wildfires that are often the result of too much fire suppression. Woody plants store most of their carbon above ground in their trunks and leaves. When they burn, all of that carbon is released, and the charred remains continue to release carbon after the initial burn. It can take years for the forest to return to its storage capacity. Grasslands store the vast majority of carbon safely underground in their deep root systems, and after a fire their stems and blades quickly rebound. 

There is evidence that the increased atmospheric carbon may be giving another advantage to woody plants, which utilize a different carbon pathway than grasses in photosynthesis, making them more efficient photosynthesizers in carbon-soaked, warm, dry air. While this means that trees may, in the short term, capture carbon more quickly, the loss of an entire ecosystem, especially one that stores carbon more securely, isn’t a good tradeoff in the long term, said Chris Helzer, Nebraska director of science and stewardship for The Nature Conservancy. 

Climate change is one of many reasons that a non-intervention strategy — letting nature take its course — won’t work on the High Plains. There are too many things in motion to simply go “hands-off.” But, really, Helzer said, grasslands as we know them have never been free of human intervention. From the time that Indigenous peoples hunted free-ranging bison, grasslands have evolved in tandem with humans, explained Helzer. The Nature Conservancy has also worked with the InterTribal Buffalo Council and Tanka Fund to support the return of bison to the Plains along with other tribal-led efforts to restore damaged ecosystems and build management capacity. 

Ranchers also have a critical role to play, Helzer said. And many are playing it with gusto. Kelly’s dad, John Taylor, has had a front-row seat to his daughter’s crusade and benefited from her growing expertise. On his ranch the cedar is under control, but near the fenceline, a few of the evergreen treetops peeked over a neighboring dune, like Birnam Wood advancing on MacBeth’s Dunsinane Hill. These trees are prolific, spreading their seeds across a 200-foot radius. Seedlings grow at about a rate of 1 to 2 feet per year, and once they reach 5 feet tall, they start spreading seed in their own 200-foot radius. That said, the Sandhills are mostly lucky, Kelly said. Eastern red cedar is easy to kill. Cut it down to the root and it mostly doesn’t grow back.

Kelly has even helped Nebraskans connect to funding opportunities to clear the cedars. Through grants and fundraising, the Sandhills Task Force can help ranchers pay for up to 75 percent of cedar removal. The funds are stimulating a growing cedar removal industry in the region. State and federal programs will also help fund the removal — but, ironically, the same departments still subsidize tree-planting for windbreaks, Kelly said, though they are increasingly discouraging red cedars. 

The Nature Conservancy is using its preserves to test grazing patterns, new mixes of plant species, and other mitigation techniques that can help private landowners across the High Plains find the right balance of grazing, burning, and rewilding to keep their grasslands healthy. “To some extent, you can have a prairie that has trees,” Helzer said. “But there’s a line — when you cross that line, you have a woodland with clearings, not a grassland with trees.” 

Grassland prairies — short, mixed, tall, and other types — used to stretch from Texas to the Dakotas, into Kentucky and up to the foothills of the Rockies. Only 4 percent of tallgrass prairies are left, making it, Obermeyer said, “the most altered landscape in North America in terms of acres lost.” At the same time, he said, places like the Flint Hills and Sandhills give him hope. More people are recognizing the subtle beauty and ecological power of the plains. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that we have a tremendous amount that we have the chance to preserve,” Obermeyer said. “We have a lot of opportunities to get this right.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Great Plains face a surprising threat: Too many trees on Oct 6, 2026.

He and his Arizona State University teammates spent at least 45 minutes doing push-ups, planks, flutter kicks, bear crawls, squats, sprints, and buddy-carries, led by guest trainer and former Green Beret Tim Ziesel. Before leaving the field, Ziesel gave instructions for one final exercise: a medicine ball run. 

As temperatures approached 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the players set off in small groups, according to the university’s timeline of events. Mayich appeared to struggle, then stumbled, dropped the ball, and fell. He tried to rise and fell again. 

Athletic staff treated him with iced towels and cool water, then sprayed him with a garden hose. Initially responsive, his condition deteriorated, and the trainer called 911. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital, where he remains in critical condition after experiencing what his family’s lawyer, Robert Carey, called exertional heat stroke. Carey did not respond to requests for additional information about the diagnosis, which could not be independently corroborated. He has told journalists the family’s hope for a meaningful recovery hovers near a miracle. 

“We want accountability for what happened to our son,” Mayich’s parents, John and Christina, said in a written statement. “We want the truth.”

University officials declined to be interviewed, and Ziesel’s attorney, Larry Kazan, downplayed the intensity of the training session. “The workout was not difficult as some media outlets have attempted to color it,” he wrote in an email to Grist. Head coach Greg Powers insisted during a September 23 press conference that he was still the “right guy’” to lead the team but did not address specifics of the workout. ASU put him on paid leave Wednesday, more than a month after the workout and two days after seven of Mayich’s teammates impugned the school’s report and response in an anonymous letter sent via an attorney. Among other things, they said the workout lasted 75 minutes, not 45, and alleged that the university did not follow its own guidelines.

“The precautions required by ASU’s heat policy were not in place: no immersion tub, no ice chests, no on-field heat measurement, no scheduled breaks in shade,” they wrote, noting that the session “continued after some of us showed signs of distress, including dropping to a knee, vomiting and, in Matthew’s case, visible disorientation well before the final task.” 

A St. Louis Blues prospect, Mayich, 21, had transferred to Arizona State to continue his college career. Instead, he is the latest in a long line of heat-related athletic tragedies that includes NFL player Korey Stringer, who died of heat stroke 25 years to the month before Mayich’s hospitalization. His death propelled heat safety into the national consciousness.

“We have made tremendous progress since then,” said Doug Casa, an exercise physiologist and certified athletic trainer. He is the CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut, which was established in 2010 to focus on safety and injury prevention for athletes, laborers, and warfighters. But he said Mayich illustrates that more can be done to protect players. 

Exertional heat stroke is a life-threatening condition that occurs when the body overheats and cannot cool down. It’s a leading cause of preventable sports deaths, and the risk is rising as climate change has made extreme heat more frequent, intense, and prolonged. Between 1994 and 2026 — the two times the United States hosted soccer’s World Cup — World Weather Attribution found that the chance of extreme temperatures “at least doubled” in multiple cities. Grass fields have also increasingly given way to synthetic turf, which absorbs enormous amounts of heat. The surface temperatures at a recent Tennessee Titans football game in Nashville hit 157 degrees. One player rolled his ankle after the heat effectively melted his cleats, ESPN reported. “It was hot as s—,” said another. “I didn’t play a snap, and I had to get an IV.”

Whether it’s an NFL star or a t-ball tot, athletes nationwide are facing this new reality. Some organizations have responded remarkably effectively — Georgia high schools instituted policies that moved them from the deadliest state for football players to among the safest. Others rely on vague recommendations and limited mandates that leave athletes at risk. And many policies don’t address non-athletes who are exposed to the same conditions. Just a week after Mayich’s hospitalization, University of Iowa band member Derek Phillips collapsed during a football game played in temperatures that topped 90 degrees. He later died.

The policy landscape is full of holes, Casa said. Although best practices for preventing and treating heat-related illnesses in athletes are now largely established, consistent adoption and implementation is another matter. “A lot of times they know the right thing to do, but then they don’t do it in the time of crisis,” he said. “Heat stroke can happen at any time.”

The Minnesota Vikings picked Korey Stringer in the first round of the 1995 draft and by 2000 he was selected to the Pro Bowl. The following summer he reported to training camp as one of the best offensive linemen in the NFL. By Minnesota standards, though, the temperatures were scorching and Stringer struggled. 

He vomited three times on the first day and left practice early to cool down in an air-conditioned trailer. The next day the heat index — a measure of temperature and humidity — hit nearly 100 degrees, but Stringer, despite vomiting again, completed the session. During a post-practice workout, he slipped, fell on his back, and was brought back to the air-conditioned trailer. He lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital, where doctors recorded an internal temperature of 108.8 degrees. He died of multiple organ failure thirteen hours later. He was 27 years old.

“It was a catastrophic failure in treating Korey,” said Casa, who was an expert witness in the litigation that followed Stringer’s death, and in numerous other cases. “If they had treated him properly, he probably would have had dinner with his teammates that night, or at least been back to normal the next day. That’s how simple it is.”

Research by Casa and others has found that cold-water immersion is the most effective treatment for heat stroke, and is faster at cooling than air conditioning, which the Vikings relied on. Casa said that reducing Stringer’s temperature enough to save his life would have taken well over an hour with AC, compared to about 25 minutes in an ice bath. “The cooling rates are astronomical,” said Casa. “We get their temps down so fast.”

The NFL would not provide a copy of its heat policy, but it did highlight the strengths of its protocol. Immersion tubs, for example, are required when hot weather is a possibility, as are rectal thermometers, which are necessary for diagnosing heat stroke. It also requires teams to adhere to best practices outlined by the Korey Stringer Institute, submit a plan for third-party review, and rehearse how they respond to emergencies. Exact interpretation is often left to each team or facility to allow flexibility, the league said, and clubs are encouraged to implement additional precautions whenever they feel there is a risk of heat issues.

“I don’t think we have ever had a case where a team didn’t comply,” said Allen Sillis, the league’s chief medical officer. “The NFL has really taken a leadership role since Korey Stringer’s death.”

Professional sports have largely standardized how they measure heat risk. Weather reports typically include temperature and heat index, which accounts for humidity. But the gold standard for measuring heat stress is wet bulb globe temperature, or WBGT, which also considers wind, sunlight, and radiant heat. “WBGT is a much better indicator,” explained Jordan Clark, the co-founder and chief climatologist at Klimo Insights, a heat safety and weather app. 

Leagues still differ on their use of the metric. The NFL, for instance, requires teams to use WBGT but doesn’t specify exactly how. On the other hand, the National Women’s Soccer League mandates hydration breaks starting at a wet bulb globe temperature of 82.3 degrees and game delays when it tops 91.1 degrees. Teams that don’t comply can be disciplined or sanctioned. The NFL doesn’t enforce strict WBGT thresholds, so teams have the flexibility to invoke heat precautions more often. 

Not everyone’s attempt to address heat has been well received. FIFA required water breaks during this summer’s World Cup, even in air-conditioned stadiums, prompting accusations that it was creating commercial breaks rather than protecting players. “We had FIFA basically make a mockery of heat rules for commercial value,” said Nicholas Watanabe, a professor of sport and entertainment management at the University of South Carolina. “Heat rules should exist specifically to protect people from heat.”

Policy differences aside, experts say professional leagues generally take heat seriously. The larger gaps emerge at lower levels. No federal regulations exist on heat safety in sports. Organizations like the National Federation of State High School Associations can and do provide guidance, for example, but states and even school districts can choose what to adopt. The Korey Stringer Institute has scored each state on its heat policies, awarding a maximum of 20 points for mandating things like requiring heat acclimatization, assessing wet bulb globe temperature, and making cold water immersion tubs available.

“There is a huge amount of disparity,” in the results, said Christianne Eason, the organization’s president of sport safety and education. Thirteen states and Washington, D.C., scored 15 points or higher, while 17 came in at 5 points or below. Some of the strongest policies are in the Southeast, where heat and humidity can produce some of the nation’s most dangerous conditions. Georgia has led the way. 

Between 1994 and 2009, the state recorded six high school football deaths, which was among the highest in the country. After a string of high-profile incidents, officials examined what schools were doing in order to find ways to improve. “The policies for each school district were all over the map,” said Bud Cooper, a clinical professor emeritus of kinesiology at the University of Georgia who was involved in that work. One school, he remembered, wouldn’t suspend practice until the heat index hit 140. But the research showed a clear trend, he said: “As the temperatures got greater and practices got longer, the risk went up.”

In 2012, the Georgia High School Association implemented some of the most robust policies in the country. Schools are required to take wet bulb globe temperature measurements and adjust practice lengths accordingly. Football teams also must abide by an acclimatization period that limits practices during the first five days of training so players can grow accustomed to the heat. Researchers found that, within three years, heat-related illness had dropped dramatically.

The only heat-related death since the policies took effect, Cooper said, was Imani Bell, a 16-year-old basketball player who died after running stairs in extreme heat in 2019. Her family accused the school of violating the heat rules and settled with the district for $10 million; two coaches are awaiting trial on charges that include second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. 

Georgia’s turnaround shows that strict heat policies can work. “You could say it was luck, for one year, two years, three years,” Cooper said, but it’s been about 15 seasons. “That goes beyond luck. That’s a result.” 

The analysis by the Korey Stringer Institute shows that, aside from Vermont and New Hampshire, where officials have adopted stringent heat policies, many of the states that still have the most work to do are along the nation’s northern border. Even athletes in cooler climates need to acclimatize to summer temperatures, said Cooper, especially as climate change makes extremes and spikes more common. Pushing athletes into tough practices in hot conditions too quickly is a recipe for harm.

“Those student athletes aren’t ready for that,” he said. 

Some resistance to stronger heat policies centers on resources — school districts may worry about the cost of WBGT gauges, athletic trainers, or equipment like immersion tubs. But coaches also fear they won’t be competitive under new rules. 

“We had to reassure them that what they’re doing is the right thing,” Cooper said of his experience in Georgia. “But at the end of the day, the level of play in high school football in the state of Georgia is still just as high as it was 15 years ago.”

Protections are even more important in youth sports, because children are more vulnerable to extreme heat. But deficiencies can be even greater, with policy development often falling to individual leagues, teams, or coaches, many of them volunteers. “It’s truly the wild west,” said pediatrician and researcher Dr. Michele LaBotz, who wants heat taken as seriously as threats such as concussions or lightning. “There is not a mechanism yet for disseminating good information.”

College athletes are in many ways better positioned. Athletic trainers are more ubiquitous, and multimillion-dollar budgets make acquiring equipment less of an obstacle. But the NCAA has few heat-related mandates; most of its guidance is voluntary. “They have not been willing to make things required,” said Casa. “You don’t get credit if it’s a recommendation.”

The NCAA confirmed that it provides “recommendations and guidelines” but declined to answer follow-up questions on the record. The potential for confusion is evident in Arizona State’s heat policy, which runs three pages and uses the words “should,” “will,” “may,” “can,” “recommended,” and “guidelines.”

On Friday, ASU announced that former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Scott Bales will lead an independent review of the university’s planning, policies, and response to outdoor athletic activities, including the use of outside consultants. The university has asked Bales to complete the review by early December.

In a statement that Carey released Friday afternoon, Mayich’s family welcomed Bales’ appointment but said the planned review does not go far enough. It wants an independent investigation of what happened on the field, who was responsible, and whether university, athletic conference, or NCAA rules were violated. Carey called on the university to expand Bales’ mandate to answer those questions or appoint a second independent investigator, and to make the findings public.

Whatever comes of the review, ASU already had heat-safety measures that experts say could have protected Mayich – if they were followed. 

Mayich’s teammates described his collapse in detail, writing in their letter that “Matthew was unintelligible and non-responsive. His lips were gray.” By the time paramedics arrived, he had been down for 17 minutes, during which “nothing effectively cooled him.” They accuse the university of a slew of policy violations in the minutes, hours, and days leading to that moment. 

The missteps, they wrote, started at least eight days before the workout, when ASU hockey staff submitted an official request to have Ziesel lead it. The university timeline says the team did not include the required written activity plan, and it provides no indication that the request was reviewed or approved before Ziesel met with athletes, as school policy dictates. His lawyer, Kazan, told Grist in an email that “as far as he was told, he was approved by the coaching staff and they were aware of his leadership training plan.” 

Mayich, who is from Ontario, Canada, arrived in Arizona eight days before the session. In theory, that was just enough time to complete the seven- to 14-day acclimatization period the university’s heat policy called for. But NCAA rules barred official practices until August 20. Voluntary workouts before then were held indoors with air conditioning and only short stints outdoors. That isn’t sufficient to induce acclimatization, Casa said. Research has shown that physiological adaptation takes repeated and gradually increasing exposure to heat. “Just being there,” he said, “does nothing to help with heat acclimatization.”

When the opening practice finally arrived, the university policy “recommended” that staff take wet bulb globe temperature readings. But the players wrote that “no WBGT instrument was on the field, and no measurement was taken at any point.” The university’s report says it used data from a Weather Underground sensor roughly one mile away, with WBGT estimates, not measurements. 

University officials did not respond to written questions seeking clarification, but a 2021 study by researchers at the school found that taking readings at the stadium is a far more accurate indicator of potential heat stress. “On-field WBGT observations were, on average, significantly higher than WBGT estimated from regional weather stations,” the authors wrote, noting a difference of more than four degrees. Practitioners, they said, “should not rely on regional weather station estimations without corrections.” 

Mayich’s teammates said the practice occurred in full sun, suggesting the wet bulb globe temperature may have been at the higher end of the university’s estimates, which reached well into the 80s. But even the off-site measurements put at least part of the work out in the “high” zone of the university’s heat-risk chart, under which only acclimatized athletes can participate.

Whether Mayich was eligible to practice or not, his teammates wrote that he never got water. There was a brief opportunity to hydrate, but only those who finished the bear crawl first had time to do so. Mayich wasn’t one of them, the players wrote, and went without. He was also showing signs of distress well before the final exercise mentioned in the university’s report. “Matthew crawled on hands and knees and appeared disoriented. When he stood, he nearly fell,” the teammates wrote in the letter. “In the buddy carry, one of us carried him, but he could not carry his partner back.”

Casa called all of that lead-up a “distraction” from arguably the biggest issue: There was no immersion tub, which ASU’s policy called for in multiple places. After he fell, Mayich’s teammates said he spent “several minutes” on the hot turf as people squirted him with water bottles and applied cold towels before he was moved to the shade. They briefly sprayed him with “warm water” from a garden hose before police and paramedics took over, according to their letter.

Mayich’s medical diagnosis may not be publicly revealed for some time. Based on what he’s read so far, Casa says that it’s “very likely a heat stroke” but can’t say for certain without more information, such as rectal temperatures. In the meantime, Mayich has remained on life support at Barrow Neurological Institute. Just 2 miles away, ASU held an event on Tuesday to launch its new Center for Heat Preparedness. 

Scott Barclay, the university’s interim vice president of research, opened the day-long symposium extolling the importance of combating heat-related illnesses and death. “Heat is a killer,” he said in his remarks, which didn’t mention Mayich. “In Phoenix, you don’t have to have that reminder.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme heat left this student athlete on life support. He won’t be the last. on Oct 5, 2026.

Community centers, churches, and fire departments flung open their doors, and for months, they buzzed with activity. Stacks of clothes covered altars. Tools and equipment filled spare rooms. Residents learned how to strip homes to the studs and built networks for bringing food, water, and other essential supplies to one another. 

Now, two years later, people want to turn these ad hoc efforts — which supported communities through the loss of power, water, internet, and other crucial services — into more permanent fixtures of local disaster response, called “resilience hubs.” 

“It’s become one of those terms, I think, that sometimes feels a little nebulous to people,” McKenzie Jones, a director with Urban Sustainability Directors Network, said. “But resilience hubs are just existing community spaces that are used and trusted by residents.”

The East Asheville Library, for instance, is installing solar panels. At the Asheville Tool Library, people are learning how to wield power tools. And at the Old Fort Train Depot, locals recently discussed a heat wave action plan during an ice cream social. 

The city is stepping up as well. Earlier this year, Asheville set aside $2 million to shore up the city’s existing hubs. City Manager D.K. Wesley made a soft commitment of spending up to $10 million over the long term.

This effort reflects a broader movement, as communities across the country invest in resilience hubs to prepare for power outages, extreme weather and other emergencies. But Helene also showed that resilience doesn’t necessarily require a designated hub. It can reside in the skills, equipment, and connections people can draw on even before the next disaster arrives.

“So the question is, How do we get them all to work together proactively before something happens and build those networks so that when it does happen, they’re able to support each other more effectively?” Jones said.

Two years after Helene, those lessons are taking root across western North Carolina. Here are four ways communities are turning what they learned in the disaster and its aftermath into tools for whatever comes next.

Keeping the lights on with solar power 

On a sunny morning in Marshall, Steve Porvaznik and Ryan Callahan, both electricians with Rhino Renewables, put the final touches on a solar installation. They secured white covers over three batteries, each about 3 feet tall and containing a nest of wires and conductors.

The work capped a week spent outfitting Beacon of Hope, a laundromat, thrift store, and food bank with the equipment needed to create a microgrid. “We were able to back up the whole store, essentially, with all the freezers and coolers,” Porvaznik said. The batteries can store an estimated 68 kilowatt-hours of solar power, allowing Beacon to keep the lights and appliances running for at least a day without sunlight or a connection to the larger electrical grid.

It is the first of 26 microgrids planned for western North Carolina. Twenty-four will serve community centers, food banks, fire departments, and other essential facilities. Two more will be mounted on trailers and sent wherever they are needed. A $5 million grant from the state Department of Environmental Quality is funding the work.

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At Beacon of Hope, keeping the power on means the freezers, washing machines, and other equipment continue running. Director Jessi Koontz said the food pantry provides weekly food assistance to about 1,600 families, with hunger up about 50 percent since last summer.  

“People already come here,” she said.  “So, how can we maximize the resources that are available and the communication that is available when they come here?”

Those leading the microgrid campaign hope to expand beyond the 26 already in the works, but so far neither state nor federal officials have provided additional funding. That’s a common impediment to expanding such programs, said Alex Kwasinski, a University of Pittsburgh engineer who studies microgrids and disasters. 

Sarah Nichols of Land of Sky, one of the organizations bringing the technology to the region, is working to identify more community hubs that would benefit from solar microgrids. The best locations sit on high ground and serve populations with high needs. 

“Are we looking at equity?” Nichols said. “Should we put it in a more rural area or in a community that might not traditionally get access to government services?”

During an outage as widespread as Helene’s, such hubs could keep food and medication cold and communications running while providing a safe, warm, and dry place for people whose homes have lost power.

– Katie Myers

Staying connected when cell networks go down

Every Saturday night, William Walker has a standing appointment with his two-way radio. The retired railroad worker runs a weekly check-in, called a “net,” from his home in Fletcher, connecting with dozens of radio enthusiasts who have turned a hobby into a public service.

Over a crackly signal, regulars check in from as far away as South Carolina, sharing snippets about their lives: a 41st birthday, a granddaughter’s wedding, an afternoon spent chopping wood. These exchanges go on for about half an hour, with Walker as master of ceremonies.

“It’s kind of like having family come into your living room every Saturday night,” he said. “We’ve tried to make it a very welcoming place. I mean, if there was ever a bunch that’s never been a stranger, it’s the people that I’ve met on the GMRS radio.”

GMRS, or general mobile radio service, is a two-way system that doesn’t need a cell network or internet connection. A license costs $35 and there is no test, making it easy for anyone to participate. Walker’s weekly check-ins allow people to “overcome their mic fright” and make sure their equipment works.

That preparation gained urgency after Helene knocked out communication across a wide swath of the region, leaving people cut off from loved ones and vital information. The number of licenses jumped by 130 percent in the year after the storm.

Fairview resident Justin Hamel saw the value of GMRS firsthand. “We were really struggling to connect,” he said. He eventually got his hands on some “bubble radios,” as walkie-talkies with GMRS capabilities are known, and passed them out to neighbors.

It wasn’t perfect, and mountain ridges occasionally blocked signals, but everyone could share updates about water, supplies, and cleanup efforts. Hamel even helped relay information to first responders who dispatched a helicopter for a medical emergency.

Inspired by the experience, Hamel launched WNC Radio Project, a nonprofit that teaches people about the technology and works to expand its reach by installing small devices called signal repeaters on mountaintops. “With the aid of repeaters, you can talk across multiple counties,” he said. “Basically, think like a cell phone tower.”

He’s already installed two of them, and the network allowed him to communicate with neighbors during Winter Storm Fern and other severe weather — exactly the situation it was built for. “Radio’s superpower is that it enables instantaneous ad hoc group communication,” Hamel said. “All you have to do is pick up your radio, turn it on, and hit that button.”

– Laura Hackett

Equipping a new wave of power tool users

The day after Hurricane Helene made landfall, Shelby Treichler was determined to make it to the Asheville Tool Library. The power was out and she knew the library, where she is an operations coordinator, had a solar panel setup that would be crucial in the days ahead.

There was just one problem: A fallen tree blocked the only road out of her neighborhood.

“I didn’t think to bring my tools home with me. None of us thought to be on that level prepared,” she said. Armed with only a handsaw, she started cutting, hoping to at least clear a lane. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a man wearing sandals arrived with a chainsaw. He jumped from his truck and started bucking the tree. A few minutes later, he drove off, leaving Treichler in tears. 

“I was like, ‘This is community. This is beautiful,’” she said. “The guy just got back in the truck and drove away. We all barely exchanged three words except for, ‘This is crazy, huh?’” 

Treichler’s experience was repeated across western North Carolina in the days after Helene. Unofficial chainsaw brigades, composed largely of volunteers, fanned out to clear roads. Appalachian poet Gerald Smith described hearing “the sweet, sweet sound of chainsaws,” a familiar refrain that inspired a new wave of people to learn how to use one.

Quetzal Jordan, founder of Skills Academy for Women, is among those showing them how. She has led more than 500 people through safety workshops since Helene. “I’ve taught people anywhere from 18 to 75 how to use a chainsaw,” she said. “And especially the folks who are older, I feel like they have the most transformative experience.”

The chainsaw classes are part of a broader movement in western North Carolina to treat tools and the skills to use them as a form of climate resilience. The Asheville Tool Library, for instance, lends everything from saws and shovels to generators and megaphones and teaches people how to use them. Insurance prevents it from lending chainsaws, but it keeps several among its collection of more than 4,000 tools for emergencies.

“We were doing this work before and resiliency was kind of in all of our minds, but I think, like most people who are affected by Hurricane Helene, it’s taken on a very different meaning now and a very different sense of urgency,” Treichler said. 

– Laura Hackett

Making emergency planning more inclusive

Walter Davis, 67, has multiple disabilities and can’t drive. He takes several medications, and a work injury left him without the use of one foot. When Helene hit his apartment complex in Swannanoa, he relied on neighbors for help.

“For about three and a half weeks we had no power, no water,” he said while waiting for the bus one day last month. “We had to go down to the creek and get five-gallon buckets of water and flush our toilets with it.” 

The storm also took out the only grocery store within walking distance, and many of his neighbors don’t drive.

These challenges extend far beyond Swannanoa. Census data released in 2023 show that while about 1 percent of U.S. adults had been displaced by a disaster in the previous year, the figure rose to 31 percent among those unable to care for themselves. Many people with disabilities never returned home after evacuating, and more than 74 percent of evacuees unable to walk reported experiencing food insecurity a month after a disaster.

State agencies coordinate with emergency services to get information out, but local officials aren’t always aware of the scale of need in an emergency. “Disabled folks are typically not at the table when planning for emergency response,” said Dom Kelly, the founder and director of the advocacy group New Disabled South.

Those gaps became apparent in Swannanoa after Helene. A friend living at Jasper Apartments asked Beth Trigg to help check on medically vulnerable residents, about 100 of whom had been unable to evacuate. She and other volunteers fanned out across that complex and others to ask what people needed and find essentials like insulin and bottled oxygen. “We really immediately saw the different needs of people who had specific medical issues or disabilities,” Trigg said.

That effort grew into Swannanoa Communities Together, which provides therapy and long-term support ranging from help navigating FEMA to rent assistance. The group operates out of a former hair salon and recently bought adjoining lots, with plans to renovate the building with ADA-compliant bathrooms, wheelchair ramps, and changing stations. An accessibility consultant is helping ensure the space can serve as many people as possible.

“We’re seeing it as a place where we can have emergency response for our community in future emergencies or future disasters,” Trigg said.

– Katie Myers

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Two years after Hurricane Helene, survivors are taking lessons for the future on Oct 5, 2026.

These are just some of the public investments data center companies have paid for across rural Texas in the past year.

According to a Texas Tribune analysis, data center companies have donated or invested more than $343 million across the Lone Star state for various community needs, including school programs, infrastructure repairs and emergency services. Much of that money has gone to the very communities that have fought against data center development and is seemingly an effort to win over public support through their bottomless bank accounts.

The Texas Tribune reviewed news releases, public meeting agendas, and interviewed local officials to understand how data centers are using their money in Texas. Because not every donation is made public, the total — the first of its kind compiled in Texas — is likely an undercount.

Google donated millions of dollars to the Haskell area for its hospital, pregnancy center, and other causes. Rowan Digital Infrastructure is giving $38 million to Temple for its water infrastructure, along with more money for STEM Centers at schools in nearby small towns.

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Data centers also created community action grants, which are used for recurring investments in the communities they’re building in. Others, such as Google’s Texas Water Impact Fund, provide funds to restore resources that cause concern for Texans or provide direct lump sum donations to both community and state funds.

As data centers move into the state at a rapid pace, Texas communities in mostly rural areas face a fiscal cliff from property tax cuts, inflation, and overall economic uncertainty. Over the last year, data center companies have stepped in as a white knight of community investment.

“There is no question that these data centers are an opportunity for rural communities that are living in the margin,” said Suzanne Bellsnyder, an editor and publisher of two Panhandle newspapers and a Substack focused on rural issues. “Most infrastructure resources are paid with tax dollars, and there’s not a ton there.”

It’s not a new strategy. Major corporations regularly invest in communities and make charitable gifts big and small. Oil and gas companies in West Texas, for example, have donated to fire and police stations and hosted back-to-school backpack drives to weave themselves into communities.

Data centers have also capitalized on tax breaks from both state and local governments. A Texas Tribune analysis earlier this year found the state will forgo at least $3 billion in sales tax revenue over the next two years due to the exemption for the state’s booming data center industry.

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Because of the negative public perception toward data centers, however, they still have some ways to go. In an August poll from The Texas Politics Project, a nonpartisan research hub focused on Texas government and politics, 57 percent of respondents said they would oppose the construction of a data center in their communities.

“I hope their intentions are good, and they’re not just trying to buy these communities off,” Bellsnyder said.

Tied into the community

It’s been two years since a tornado struck Temple, a city of just over 96,000 people that lies 70 miles north of Austin. The city was devastated. Hundreds of homes and businesses were severely damaged or destroyed. One of the buildings lost was the beloved Sammons Community Center, where senior citizens could come together for bingo, swimming, and meals.

The price tag for the city’s recovery was high — $7.7 million.

Then, Rowan Digital Infrastructure stepped in. The company is developing a $4.2 billion data center campus with six facilities planned in East Temple.

Earlier this month, Rowan announced a $38 million investment in Temple’s public infrastructure, including $25 million to the South Temple Water Infrastructure Capital Program and $10 million for an aquifer storage and recovery program.

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As for the Sammons Community Center, city leaders have proposed a $15 million bond to rebuild it. If voters approve the measure, Rowan has promised to put $3 million to help the project. It’s one of many actions that has made Rowan stand out to Tim Davis, Temple’s mayor, particularly since the company is not making money from the town yet.

“To go ahead and invest dollars into the community for a current need is very generous of them,” Davis said. “That tells me they want to work hard to have a positive impact, and they’ve chosen to help the city.”

Gaining public support is an important tactic for data center companies coming to Texas, and one that can’t be ignored. Over the last year, communities all over the state have voiced opposition to data centers coming to their areas — their main concerns being rising electric bills, losing water and housing issues. Some cities have prevented developments from moving forward. For example, a project in East Texas was pulled after community backlash, and Lubbock leaders passed a 90-day moratorium on large-scale projects following a citizen-led petition.

Nathaniel Brown, director of public relations for Rowan, admits that integrating into a community hasn’t been an easy task. Brown said Rowan began hosting neighbor dinners every month for residents to talk with the construction team and ask them questions. The company has also held public hearings and open houses and has Facebook pages dedicated to its project updates.

“This development doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It needs to be able to fit into the community’s vision for their area,” Brown said.

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Google has used a similar strategy. On top of community meetings, the tech company hosted a dinner in August to announce $6 million for nonprofits in Haskell, Stamford and Rule.

Suzie Shin, manager of data center sustainability programs for Google, said some of their investments are the company’s way of saying they are listening to the public’s concerns. The company has given millions toward major water infrastructure projects, as well as supporting local school programs. Most recently, the company announced a $4.5 million commitment to help Vernon, a town with less than 10,000 residents, fix a leaking pipeline.

Shin said she feels strongly about investing in modernizing water and wastewater infrastructure for the broader community, not just their data centers.

“I think there’s a win-win for communities,” Shin said. “Again, we have employees who live and work there. We are part of the community. It’s a great way to show the value and help improve outcomes, not only for the watershed but for the water users there.”

Bellsnyder, the newspaper publisher and resident in Spearman, said she’s spoken with some of the data center executives who visit the Texas Panhandle. She does think their intentions are to partner with the communities and make them better.

However, she’s still wary because of the boom-and-bust industrial patterns that have become all too familiar for rural Texas. Spearman was built by an oil and gas service company, Bellsnyder said, and when the business left, there wasn’t a long-term plan for the town.

“I don’t want our entire identities to be built around what one company can provide to us,” Bellsnyder said. “We still need to figure out ways to take care of our own business. Nobody likes taxes, but taxpayers will have to be invested in the community.”

Pros vs. cons

When the water tower went out in Turkey, a small Panhandle town of about 275 residents, people were without water for weeks and had to find places in other towns to live temporarily. Lynette Findley, the city manager, said everyone’s known for years that the tower would fail. However, with an annual budget of $500,000, the city had no way to pay for it to be fixed.

After weeks of no water, QTS Data Centers, one of the data center companies in the county, said it would replace it for the city. The cost for the company, which is a major global data center developer, is estimated to be between $3 million and $5 million.

“It was right before major conversations were starting on how QTS could help with our infrastructure,” Findley said. “I joke about it failing at the exact right time.”

For cities and towns facing a budget crunch, data centers are hard to turn away, especially as the Legislature continues to cut their resources. Kevin Hodges, the city manager for Childress, said the more restrictions on cities, the less money they have to put into the city’s needs.

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Childress is facing a similar problem as Turkey. The small town of just over 5,834 people has been under a boil-water notice for a month, and the town issued a disaster declaration because of the problems. Local leaders have handed out bottled water to residents the last few weeks, and employees from IREN, one of the two data centers in town, stepped in to help.

“We’ve had some of our employees help distribute water, particularly to folks who might be challenged to get it, or to the health services, and the elderly,” said David Shaw, COO of IREN. “We’ve been in Childress for around four years now, so it was important to us to establish that connection with the community.”

Hodges, the city manager, blames the ongoing drought for their water issues because Greenbelt Lake levels dropped. While people in town blame the town’s water shortage problems on IREN and Lancium, another data center company in town, Hodges says they are helping.

“The fact of the matter is Lancium does not get any water from Greenbelt Lake,” Hodges said. “They get zero, but they’re willing to give us water from their own water wells.”

While Lancium does not take water from the lake, the company does have wells to take water from the nearby Blaine Aquifer. Hodges said Lancium is running a 16-mile pipeline from its campus to the Greenbelt storage tank, and the company will treat and provide the city with 1 million gallons of water a day — all with no cost to the town, Hodges said.

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“They’re not taking,” Hodges said. “They’re providing.”

Hodges said the Legislature will look into more property tax cuts and other measures that could cause cities to lose money. That will hurt small towns, Hodges said, but data centers could give municipalities the money they wouldn’t normally get.

Davis, Temple’s mayor, agrees. He said municipalities are also impacted by inflation, and delivering essential services is expensive. However, the tax revenue generated by a data center will allow a city to set its own path financially, Davis said.

“If the ability to raise money is hampered, then those dollars have to come from somewhere,” Davis said. “Or, a community simply delivers less services to its residents. And I don’t think that’s acceptable to them.”

Still, Davis said leaders have to weigh the city’s capabilities and guard against any damage that could happen from a data center moving in.

Findley, the city manager in Turkey, said QTS and Lancium have promised to help with other needs too by providing funds for emergency services and the schools. She said all the contracts are with Hall County — not the city — and they are trying to navigate what has been put in their backyard.

“Data centers get a ton of negative publicity, so I’m sure it is a little self-serving on their end,” Findley said. “But to be honest, I don’t know what we would have done without their assistance.”

Alejandra Martinez contributed to this reporting.

Disclosure: Google has been a major financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations, and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in our journalism. Find a complete list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline To win over locals, data centers pump $340M into rural Texas projects on Oct 4, 2026.

Dandelion Energy, a geothermal startup, and Lennar, one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, recently completed construction of nearly 100 homes at the base of Colorado’s Front Range, each equipped with its own ground-source heat pump. The systems use less electricity than even the most efficient air-source heat pumps, potentially helping Colorado meet its climate goals while reducing peak energy demand and eliminating the need for new gas pipelines. 

Ground-source heat pumps draw on steady temperatures belowground to help heat and cool buildings. However, the projects’ custom designs and drilling requirements—homes typically require one or more boreholes drilled several hundred feet deep—are pricey. Drilling alone often costs more than $10,000.

Dandelion, a company that got its start at X—a “moonshot” research and development subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company—says it can complete geothermal heating and cooling projects twice as fast and at half the cost of similar installations.

The company is “taking a kind of mass market and maximally efficient lens to what has historically been a bespoke kind of custom, high-end product,” said Dan Yates, Dandelion Energy’s CEO and chairman.

Earlier this year at Lennar’s Ken Caryl Ranch development, Dandelion’s drill team demonstrated a lightweight rig designed to quickly move from lot to lot, drilling boreholes and installing polyethylene pipe across the sprawling housing development before building foundations are poured.

Each home gets a single bore between 200 and 500 feet deep, where temperatures are approximately 50 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. Water circulating through the pipe is warmed or cooled by the surrounding earth before a heat pump installed in the basement of each new home provides additional heating or cooling depending on the time of year.

Dandelion’s drilling team can complete boreholes for one or more homes per day. If they had to drill a similar installation elsewhere for a single building, they could lose an entire day simply transporting the rig to and from the site.

Installing the devices across dozens of similar new homes at once also eliminates the need for custom plans for each building and avoids potentially costly retrofits to the buildings’ heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems.

The end result is a highly efficient heating and cooling system that Dandelion says outcompetes air-source heat pumps and conventional gas heating systems. This is especially true during cold snaps, when energy demand peaks and ground-source heat pumps use a quarter as much electricity as air-source heat pumps, Yates said. 

It’s “the only system that actually reduces peak demand and electrifies homes at the same time,” he said.

The Ken Caryl Ranch development is part of a larger initiative the company launched with Lennar in 2025 to install geothermal heating and cooling at more than 1,500 homes in Colorado over two years. Dandelion hopes to scale up to 10,000 homes per year nationwide in the coming years.

“Our mission at Dandelion is to mainstream geothermal, and we think that the time has finally arrived for that to happen,” Yates said. 

Just over a million U.S. homes have ground-source heat pumps, with approximately 100,000 new installations each year, according to a 2025 U.S. Department of Energy report. The agency found that geothermal heating and cooling could reach 7 million homes by 2035. Doing so would reduce winter peak energy demand by more than 40 gigawatts nationwide, resulting in roughly $4 billion in annual savings in U.S. electric grid costs, according to the report. 

Ground-source heat pumps currently make up just a small fraction of new home heating and cooling systems. By contrast, 3.6 million air-source heat pumps were sold in the U.S. last year, outpacing gas furnace sales for the fourth year in a row, said Yara van Ingen, an associate with BloombergNEF’s building decarbonization team.

Ground-source heat pumps are economically viable across the continental United States, according to a study published this month in the journal iScience that considered incentives, energy costs and local climate and subsurface conditions. 

“It is technically possible everywhere, and there is economic potential across all states,” said Juliet Simpson, a former research engineer at the National Laboratory of the Rockies and the study’s lead author.

A primary challenge for ground-source heat pumps is their upfront cost, which averages around $25,000 for a typical new home, according to the Energy Department report. Van Ingen added that space constraints, especially in dense urban environments, as well as permitting requirements that vary across the U.S. can also complicate borehole drilling. 

Dandelion and Lennar, an investor in the geothermal company, are among those working to lower costs. But incentives and policy changes also help. An energy efficiency program by Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest gas and electric utility company, provides approximately $25,000 per home for new, high-efficiency buildings with a ground-source heat pump to offset added building and heat pump costs.

“For large neighborhoods with hundreds of homes, builders may receive seven-figure rebate amounts,” an Xcel spokesperson said in a written statement.

The rebates help Xcel advance its climate goals and meet Colorado’s Clean Heat Standard requirement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 22 percent below 2015 levels by 2030.

Colorado also provides a $2,000 tax credit for ground-source heat pumps and requires homebuilders to pay for new gas service expansion pipes, costs that are not incurred if developers build all-electric homes.

Policies that incentivize high-efficiency electric heating and cooling while discouraging fossil fuel use in homes are intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, said Will Toor, executive director at the Colorado Energy Office.

Other states and utility companies also offer incentives for ground-source heat pumps, including Maryland, where Dandelion recently announced plans to install the technology in 129 new homes. In addition, commercial ground-source heat pump projects are now eligible for federal tax credits that cover 30 percent or more of total installation costs. 

“The economics just look better and better,” Jessica Silber-Byrne, senior manager of thermal energy networks for the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit organization working to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in buildings. “There is a combination of both incentives and market signals that suggest that this is about to really take off.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New Colorado neighborhood could offer glimpse into the future of home energy use on Oct 3, 2026.

But one entity still has enough sway, and just enough regulatory authority, to keep pressing car companies toward greater fuel efficiency: California. The state’s vehicle emissions rules are still in effect, effectively setting a baseline for fuel efficiency that automakers cannot fall below without potentially incurring penalties. The Trump administration has been busy attacking California’s ability to make its own emissions rules, but it hasn’t claimed full victory — yet. For now, the Golden State’s wounded but not defeated regulations are the most important government policy on vehicle emissions in the country.

Because of a half-century-old special exemption, California is allowed to go further than the federal government when regulating tailpipe emissions. Southern California was so smoggy in the 1950s that California created its own vehicle emissions standards before Congress established national standards through the Clean Air Act. Acknowledging California’s air pollution struggles, Congress gave it unique authority to keep making its own car emissions rules.

California cannot use its special authority to directly mandate fuel efficiency in vehicles. But because reducing fuel consumption is essentially the only way to reduce a gasoline-powered car’s greenhouse gas emissions, its emissions standards can have much the same effect as federal fuel-efficiency standards, and vice versa. 

California’s rules have vast impacts beyond its borders. Other states can choose to adopt its regulations, and 19 have done so (including the District of Columbia). Rather than produce different vehicles for different states, many car companies have been willing to make all their vehicles comply with California’s standards, even when those standards go further than Washington’s. The states using California’s current vehicle emissions standards made up 40 percent of new car sales in the U.S. in 2022.

The Trump administration has been working to strip California’s special emissions regulations. Last year, both houses of Congress voted to block California’s effort to phase out gas-powered cars by 2035, after President Donald Trump’s EPA asked lawmakers to do so. That phase-out effort was only possible because of California’s special emissions regulation power. In response, California sued the Trump administration.

“What we’re seeing is a thinly veiled attempt by the president to retaliate against California for choosing progress over regression,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta after his office filed the suit.

With its ambitious vehicle transition plan undone for now, California aims to continue enforcing its previous set of emissions standards, which would have otherwise expired in 2026. While those standards won’t force car companies to continue reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, they might keep car companies from backtracking on gains they’ve already made. The Trump administration has asked Congress to overturn these standards also, but a federal judge blocked that effort in early September.

Car companies have been mostly silent on how they’ll respond to the regulatory uncertainty, including whether they’ll stay on track to meet California’s rescinded requirements if courts allow the state to put them back in place. Automakers at this point are used to the whiplash of policies changing between administrations. 

In addition to fluctuating regulations, car manufacturers are also facing changes in what customers want. Automakers have said aggressive fuel efficiency standards from the Biden administration — the ones Trump undid this week — ran up against Americans’ preferences. Companies were building more electric vehicles, partly to help them meet the Biden standards, but customers weren’t buying enough of them. (That problem became much worse after the Trump administration rolled back policies promoting their growth.)

But customers might also push car companies toward greater fuel efficiency even when Washington doesn’t require it — especially at a time when gasoline prices have spiked in the wake of Trump’s war on Iran. Hybrid vehicles are gaining popularity, making up a record 16 percent of passenger vehicle sales by the summer of 2026. And some car companies aren’t giving up on their electric vehicle efforts. Zero-emission cars have become more popular abroad, and some executives think they’ll pick up steam in the United States eventually. 

“We’re in for the long haul, and we’re maybe a little slower on EVs, for instance,” said General Motors president Mark Reuss at a conference this week. “That’s OK, but the whole world is moving that way, and so we invested in the platforms that are EV platforms.” 

But market dynamics alone aren’t expected to be enough to spur the rapid emissions reductions needed to address climate change. California’s remaining regulations provide an important baseline, but the state’s now-blocked rules for phasing out gasoline-powered cars would push automakers much further.

The fate of California’s stricter emissions rules will likely be decided in court, and some analysts say the state has a strong legal case for restoring them. Republicans in Congress used an unusual, potentially unprecedented maneuver to revoke the permission that made the rules possible, and both the Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian declared at the time that the maneuver was illegal.

“There are multiple levels of shenanigans, depending on your viewpoint, that are being litigated,” said Rebecca Higgins, vice president of Policy at the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonprofit transportation research institution. “That creates tremendous uncertainty.”

A judge could ultimately decide that the congressional and Trump administration actions were unlawful. In any case, California’s phaseout plan might be reinstated if Democrats take the White House in 2028. 

But another Republican effort could leave a more lasting mark on California’s authority, Higgins said. In a separate lawsuit, the Trump administration is trying to undo California’s underlying authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, arguing it is illegal for the state to regulate fuel efficiency, even if it does so indirectly through emissions regulations. Federal judges have ruled in California’s favor on this point before, Higgins said. The case is still in lower federal courts for now, but if it reaches the Supreme Court, its fate is uncertain. The Supreme Court has never ruled on this subject, and the current bench of conservative justices has frequently sided with the Trump administration. 

“That one feels like it could have the potential to sort of reset the authorities going forward,” Higgins said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Under Trump, California’s clean car rules are essential — and vulnerable on Oct 1, 2026.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Countries like Germany have encouraged the proliferation of balcony solar, also known as plug-in solar: smaller, cheaper arrays that hook into a home’s electrical outlets. This offsets some of a residence’s energy use, saving users hundreds of dollars a year, and opens up solar energy to renters with balconies or backyards. As a bonus, the less power homes have to draw from the grid, the less stress they put on the system, especially during heat waves when everyone is running energy-hungry air conditioners.

On Wednesday, California officially got in on the balcony-solar action as Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill allowing residents of the nation’s most populous state to adopt the technology. It joins a handful of states, like Utah and Maine, in seeing the potential of the technology to generate clean electricity and save residents money as energy costs rise.

“This technology is very important and very powerful,” state Senator Scott Wiener, who authored the legislation, said during a press conference Thursday. “And what this bill does is eliminate the massive barrier to people using plug-in solar, which is that you’d have to go and negotiate an interconnection agreement with PG&E [Pacific Gas and Electric Company] or the other utility.”

The proliferation of plug-in solar marks a fundamental shift in how the electrical grid operates. Historically, utilities have generated electricity by burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. When demand rose, like when people returned home at the end of the day and switched on appliances, they’d just ramp up production. This kept the system in a sort of equilibrium, a constant balance of supply and demand.

That, though, doesn’t quite work the same with renewables like wind and solar. If demand is holding steady and the sun is setting, a utility isn’t generating as much electricity with its panels. Same with wind, if the skies suddenly calm. So in addition to building out wind and solar farms, utilities are deploying huge batteries to save that energy for later use. This creates a more flexible grid that can still hum with electricity when things are dark or calm.

This transformation is turning you, the consumer, into a more active participant in the grid. For years now, homes with solar have sent excess energy back to the grid. While plug-in solar might generate a fraction of what you’d get from a roof covered in panels, it can still help make the grid more flexible. Instead of feeding the system, it reduces the amount of electricity drawn from the grid. Scaled across a whole city, these small reductions can add up, offsetting some of the growth in demand from things like AI data centers and electrification. (Think induction stoves needing electricity instead of natural gas, and EVs charging instead of burning fuel.) 

“This is one of the most immediate, concrete, tangible, real, and affordable things that we can do to start to get control of our high energy costs, but also save our planet,” Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president for California at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, said during the press conference. “So it’s really a twofer.”

Basically, plug-in solar could help reduce congestion in the system at peak times — when it’s hot out and everyone’s running their AC, there’s also plenty of sun to strike the panels. It’s turning homes and apartments into a distributed network of tiny power plants. “It’s really ideal to use renewable electricity exactly where it’s generated,” said Amanda Smith, a senior scientist focusing on the built environment at Project Drawdown, a climate solutions nonprofit. 

This increased interactivity in the grid comes as utility bills continue to skyrocket. Basic plug-in solar systems will set you back a few hundred dollars, and you can potentially make back that money with energy savings in around four years. (The higher the energy costs in your state, the quicker you’d get that return on your investment.) Still, for a lot of households, that’s a major investment, so ideally a state also provides rebates for people to adopt the technology. 

With California now aboard the plug-in solar train, your state may well follow. “The big reason this is a big deal really is because it’s the most affordable way for people to actually participate with solar PV,” Smith said. “Whatever happens in California is going to influence, I think, a lot of other future state markets. So it’s going to be a key one to watch.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California just made it legal to turn balconies into tiny power plants on Oct 1, 2026.

After ranching for a decade, Macnab had seen those costs firsthand. During one of the worst fires in Colorado history last year, 60 of her neighbor’s cows burned to death. Record heat and drought this year parched the land so thoroughly, ranchers had to pay thousands of dollars to haul in feed and water for their animals. Some ranchers, headed toward bankruptcy, had to sell part of their herds or put their land up for sale. 

“It really disturbed me that the county was taking sides,” Macnab said, “and in particular, supporting oil companies whose operations, we now know, are putting the human population and wildlife, livestock, everything, at risk.” Rio Blanco County spent thousands of taxpayer dollars in legal fees to join the brief alongside other Colorado counties where the oil industry has a large presence.

Macnab rallied ranchers around Colorado to join her in urging the Supreme Court to side with Boulder. They wrote that local governments can’t keep absorbing the increasing costs from worsening heat, drought, fires, and flooding and still provide the resources — disaster relief, grants, infrastructure repairs — to keep ranchers in business. The oil companies argue that federal law not only protects them from needing to defend their actions in state courts, but also shields them from being liable for damages. 

The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in the case on Monday. The court’s decision could have huge ramifications for efforts to hold companies accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels — and the larger question of who pays for the costs of adapting to a hotter world. Oil majors have pulled out all the stops to stymie the dozens of climate lawsuits that local and state governments have brought against them, with billions and billions of dollars on the line. With a conservative-dominated Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s Department of Justice as a powerful ally, oil companies saw their chance to stop these suits, said Alejandro Camacho, a professor at UCLA School of Law.

That calculus changed slightly this week when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a strong conservative with financial holdings in oil companies, recused himself from the case. His withdrawal makes it harder for oil companies to get at least five justices — a majority of the court — on their side.

The city and county of Boulder, Colorado, originally sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in 2018. The lawsuit slowly wound its way through the court system. Oil companies tried to dismiss it or move it to federal court, a more industry-friendly venue, but Boulder won at every stage. In May 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the case should proceed in state courts.

Much of the support for Boulder and the oil companies falls along familiar, partisan lines. Republican states and business associations tend to side with the oil companies; Democratic states and environmental advocates typically back Boulder. A watchdog organization found that 25 of the 38 briefs filed to the Supreme Court in support of Exxon and Suncor were written by groups with financial ties to the fossil fuel industry or foundations opposing climate science and regulation. But Colorado ranchers aren’t the only surprising source of support for Boulder’s case — some conservative thinkers are challenging oil companies’ arguments.

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To understand why, it helps to know that the case before the Supreme Court isn’t really about the substance of the lawsuit: if oil companies should pay damages for climate change. The first question is whether the Supreme Court can take the unusual move of stepping in before the case has gone to trial in state court. If the justices decide that they can, then they’ll consider oil companies’ arguments. Suncor and Exxon’s lawyers argue that Boulder’s suit is essentially a backdoor attempt to regulate emissions through state courts. They also say that the Clean Air Act and broader constitutional limits on state power should prevent Boulder’s claims from proceeding.

“If someone has harmed you, you should be able to go to court and make the case that they harmed you and that they need to pay you for it,” Camacho said. “It’s a centuries-old common law principle. And these companies are basically trying to say, ‘You shouldn’t be able make the case in court.’”

Some conservative legal scholars argue that there’s nothing in the federal law or the Constitution that would prevent the lawsuit from moving forward in state court. That includes Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary Law School. Two former heads of the EPA under Republican presidents, Christine Todd Whitman and William Reilly, are other prominent proponents of that argument. 

The oil companies appear to have recognized that their arguments about the Clean Air Act aren’t very strong, Adler said, because they’ve moved away from them over time, toward other arguments about the limits of state power. In his view, courts generally shouldn’t override claims brought under state law “unless there is a clear basis for doing so.” Adler sees why some conservatives argue that the litigation in state courts is an improper way to drive climate policy, but he thinks it’s possible that skepticism about the merits of the lawsuit might have influenced some of their views on the narrower questions before the court.

Some Republican-dominated jurisdictions have also found themselves challenging oil companies. Coastal parishes in Louisiana are suing Chevron and other oil majors, seeking compensation for restoring coastal lands. “There are going to be conservative communities, or predominantly conservative communities, who see that they are being forced to pay millions of dollars to protect their towns because of the actions of fossil fuel companies,” Camacho said. 

Colorado ranchers, not exactly known for their liberal views, are left with few options for dealing with the environmental changes that are bankrupting them. Macnab said she hopes the Supreme Court sends Boulder’s case back to state court where it belongs, so that oil companies will be forced to face accountability.

“Until they’re held responsible for the consequences that they have known about for decades, they are not going to be part of the solution,” Macnab said. “They need to be brought to the table, because humankind and our food production is what’s at stake.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The surprising allies backing Boulder’s climate case before the Supreme Court on Oct 1, 2026.

After retiring from a long career as a conservation officer with the Canadian government, Derrick Pottle devoted himself to guiding people on the land, carving, hunting, and training bear guards.

Pottle, an elder and skilled guide from the Inuit community of Tikigâksuagusik in Nunatsiavut, founded BearSafe Planning in 2005. The program trains and certifies students to guard against the polar bears and black bears found throughout northern Labrador. The three-day course is advertised as offering “safety, protection, confidence in bear country.”

More than two decades later, that work has taken on renewed urgency. As climate change reshapes the Arctic — particularly the sea ice polar bears rely on to travel and hunt — Inuit are seeing the animals at different times of year and in places they rarely encountered before. Pottle says those changes are increasing the need for people who know how to keep people and bears safe. That, he said, is “the whole objective of the course.”

Graduates of the program keep watch for bears to prevent encounters and learn to recognize signs that a bear is not comfortable. “They may feel threatened, they may feel intimidated, and they may even charge or attack you,” Pottle said. He teaches students “how to recognize those signs, how to prepare yourself for them, the tools you have to use to do your job.”

Canadian officials say encounters between people and polar bears are becoming more likely as a lengthening ice-free season keeps bears on land longer. Inuit and Cree communities have reported polar bears appearing more frequently and in places where they were once rare. Researchers have linked the increase to several factors, including longer ice-free periods, changes in bear abundance and condition, and growing human activity in polar bear habitat. 

Pottle developed BearSafe Planning’s training program with input from groups that included Parks Canada, conservationists, Inuit elders, and academics. It started “out of a necessity,” Pottle said, after the creation of Tongait KakKasuangita SilakKijapvinga, (Torngat Mountains National Park) under the 2005 Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement. 

“They needed bear guards,” Pottle said. We didn’t have trainers in Nunatsiavut at the time. Somebody had to do it.”

The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet. As climate change remakes landscapes across the North, the need for guards is only for “all species of bears,” Pottle said. 

“We’re seeing more and more bears now in this time of our lives than we ever saw before,” he said. “People are seeing polar bears in this part of Inuit Nunangat — where polar bears used to travel north late in the spring — and now are staying all summer long.”

The province’s Endangered Species Act lists polar bears as “vulnerable,” while the federal government deems them a “species of special concern.” Sixty to 80 per cent of the world’s polar bear population lives in Canada, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. The massive carnivores, which can weigh as much as 1,400 pounds, rely upon sea ice to travel, mate, and hunt. “Climate change is the main threat to polar bears,” the agency notes.

Becoming a bear guard can offer employment opportunities, but it can also be used for personal safety. “Lots of people just use the bear guard course for their own personal protection when they’re out on the land with their families fishing, hunting and participating in Inuit lifestyle.”

Sherri Wolfrey, a mother of four, is a trained bear guard in Tikigâksuagusik. She recounted how, in 2015, she became “interested in the program and just thought ‘OK, maybe someday I might want to try for a job that involves bear monitoring.’”

Wolfrey is the secretary of Northern Lights Academy and uses her training when she’s out on the land. Last year, she put her certification to work professionally for the first time, when she was contracted as a bear guard in Akami-Uapishkᵁ-KakKasuak (Mealy Mountains National Park Reserve). “Especially up in that area in the bottom of the Mealy’s, it was so beautiful up there,” she told IndigiNews.

She finds the skills valuable even when she isn’t working as a bear guard. “It’s good to have the training,” she said, “because when you do what I like to do, especially being at the cabin … you could know what to expect and what to do if you came upon a bear.”

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Pottle’s experiences started “before there were bear guards.” People in his community would ask him to escort them on outings with boats, dog teams or snowmobiles because he knew the land. 

BearSafe Planning offers its course on demand and has taught as many as 30 students at a time. And though he is an instructor, Pottle also considers himself a student, drawing from the experiences of others. 

“I talk to the Elders, I talk to the hunters, I talk to the students,” he said. “A lot of these people live on the land all their lives, so they have lots and lots of experiences and stories. So we learn from one another.”

Employment opportunities for certified bear guards vary by season and can range from day trips to longer-term, full-time work, Pottle said. Cruise ship operators, for instance, hire guards to keep tourists safe when they visit the North, while group outings and land-based programs in Nunatsiavut and elsewhere across Inuit Nunangat also rely on them. Inuit governments and agencies employ trained guards for outings as well.

Pottle sees professionally trained bear guards as “no different than any other aspect of the workforce.”

“It’s not always easy to find employment in the North, and bear guarding can give people — if they choose to — an opportunity to make a good living from it.”

Two decades of teaching students about bear safety have been personally rewarding, Pottle said.

“You’re doing something you love, and you’re going into communities, and you’re … bringing knowledge,” he said. “Our role is to keep people safe, and make sure people enjoy the land and enjoy the surroundings — and get the job done and come home safe at the end of your workday.”

This story was originally published by IndigiNews and updated with additional information by Grist.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a warming Arctic, Inuit bear guards protect communities on Oct 1, 2026.