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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The commission oversees utilities, including telecommunications, natural gas, and electricity, and has final say over how Georgia Power, the state’s largest electric utility, makes energy and what it charges customers. This gives commissioners substantial power over Georgians’ energy bills and the state’s climate future, because burning fossil fuels to make electricity is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. By the PSC’s own description, “very few governmental agencies have as much impact on peoples’ lives as the PSC.” 

Still, elections for the commission have rarely received much attention. That changed last year. Amid frustration over rising energy bills, voters overwhelmingly ousted two Republican incumbents, sending Democrats to the five-member commission for the first time in 20 years. With two seats up for election again this year, majority control of the commission is at stake. 

Most candidates, regardless of party, broadly agree on the issues commanding the most attention: that energy bills should be kept in check and that the commission should do more to protect ordinary customers from the costs of powering data centers. But they bring different backgrounds and approaches to the job.

District 3

The seat for District 3, which encompasses the metro Atlanta counties of Clayton, Dekalb, and Fulton, was on last year’s ballot, but only for a one-year term. Democrat Peter Hubbard won that election and is now running for reelection as the incumbent. Hubbard told Grist he’s running for reelection because he needs more time to enact changes like expanding renewable energy and ensuring Georgia Power is getting the most out of existing resources before building expensive new ones. A full six-year term, he said, would include the “big, meaty decisions” of Georgia Power’s long-term resource plan and rate case. Hubbard said he wants to take an active role in shaping those plans, rather than reacting to what the utility proposes.

“There’s just a baseline to acting as a shield to imprudent spending. But I also think that a proactive commissioner can find even lower-cost solutions than what otherwise would be provided,” he said.

Republican Fitz Johnson, who had been the incumbent last year, lost to Hubbard in 2025 and is running against him again. He told Grist at a campaign event that he’s “got some unfinished business.” While most other candidates in the race have said the commission should do more to shield ordinary customers from data center costs, Johnson said the commission has “100 percent, without doubt” protected them.

“When it comes to the data centers and the large loads, we put the ratepayers first,” he said. “We said we’re not going to put any burden on our ratepayers.”

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During his time on the commission, Johnson voted for the current rate freeze and the contract terms designed to ensure data centers pay for their own infrastructure, though critics argue those protections aren’t enough. He also voted in favor of Georgia Power bill increases that became the focus of last year’s election and for the utility’s multibillion-dollar expansion to serve rising demand coming mostly from data centers.

Another Republican, Brandon Martin, is running against Johnson for the party’s nomination. He did not respond to requests for an interview. According to his campaign website, Martin is a graduate of Georgia Tech and now works as a purchasing manager in a “multi-billion dollar industry.” His website stresses the importance of reliable energy for Georgia’s growing economy and calls for electricity generation that’s “flexible and as U.S.-centric as possible” in light of uncertain global fuel markets, though the site does not offer specifics.

District 5

District 5 covers a stretch of west Georgia from the Tennessee border south nearly to Columbus. Republican Tricia Pridemore has held the seat since 2018 and is running for U.S. Congress instead of seeking reelection. Three Democrats, three Republicans, and a Libertarian are all running to replace her.

All three Democrats stressed that their party’s majority on the commission would bolster support for renewable energy programs.

“Two commissioners can demand better analysis. Three can stop the rubber-stamping of utility requests,” said electrical engineer and lawyer Craig Cupid, one of the Democrats running in District 5. He grew up in a working-class family, he said, after his parents immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago to Augusta. “Every penny counted,” Cupid said. “I understand when a rate increase affects someone, particularly lower-income families.” Cupid also emphasized his technical background, saying it gives him the expertise to act as a “watchdog against monopoly utilities.” 

Democrat Shelia Edwards told Grist that she was inspired to run for a seat on the PSC after getting a power bill of nearly $500. Edwards could pay it, she said, though it was “painful.” “But what about the families that are struggling to keep a roof over their head, or food on the table or medicine?” she said. “How are they gonna afford this situation?”

That was in 2022. Edwards won the party’s District 3 primary that year and was preparing to face Fitz Johnson in the general election when it was canceled because of a voting-rights lawsuit. Edwards, who has worked on political campaigns and in local environmental advocacy, is running again in District 5.

The third Democrat on the ballot in District 5 is Angelia Pressley, who told Grist she’s running because of the PSC’s “dismissal” of the public’s environmental and cost concerns. “The public has to have more voice,” she said. “There has to be more balance at the commission between business concerns and public concerns.”

Pressley said if elected, she plans to host listening sessions around the state to hear Georgians’ concerns and educate them about the work of the commission. 

The Republican candidates all stressed the importance of reliable energy. They said they support affordable clean energy as part of the utility’s overall mix, but would not impose a renewable mandate.

Republican Bobby Mehan has spent most of his career in health care records technology and now works as a mediator. He said that work has taught him “to be open-minded and kind of take this all-the-above approach,” a philosophy he said is key to innovating the energy grid. In a debate hosted by the Atlanta Press Club, Mehan pledged that he would not vote for new rate hikes and pushed his opponents to do the same. 

“I’m willing to put my neck out there and say, ‘six years, not a single rate increase from Bobby Mehan,’” he said in the April debate.

When pressed on the feasibility of that promise, Mehan clarified that he meant he personally wouldn’t vote for rate hikes.

Carolyn Roddy is a regulatory lawyer who has worked for the Federal Communications Commission and on a rural electric service program in the first Trump administration. She is also running in the Republican primary for District 5 and told Grist her experience would help her keep utility costs in check.

“The Georgia Public Service Commission can do a better job of what they’re doing,” she said. “How dare you impose these kinds of rate increases when people’s family budgets are already stretched really thin?”

The commission, she said, should question and guide utilities but should not be either “a big impediment or a big rubber stamp” for their plans.

Republican Joshua Tolbert is an engineer who’s worked in several different types of power plants, a perspective he said is missing from the commission. Without specific technical expertise, Tolbert said, commissioners are less able to question and push back on proposals from utilities. That pushback is critical, he said, because Georgia Power is a monopoly, so the commission has to provide the kind of “consequences and feedback” that would normally come from free market competition.

The Libertarian party doesn’t have a primary, so the path to November’s election for Libertarian Thomas Blooming is different from the other candidates. He needs signatures from voters to appear on the ballot, though the party can collect those signatures for their slate of candidates as a whole.

Blooming is an electrical engineer who’s worked on data centers for Google and Facebook and now works for Utility Innovation Group, which builds microgrids with a focus on decarbonization and resilience. Blooming stressed that he’s not against data centers, but that problems come up when the grid can’t support them. More nuclear energy could be one route to serving data centers, he said. Blooming also highlighted the risks of relying too heavily on any one source of energy. Too much natural gas could drive up costs, he said, while overreliance on renewables could make the grid less reliable.

“You have to protect the ratepayers, but you also have to make decisions that keep Georgia Power healthy,” he said. “It doesn’t do anyone any good to just absolutely lock down on Georgia Power and then they’re not able to provide the power that they should.”

Rahul Bali contributed to this report.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Energy bills keep rising. These candidates in Georgia say they can help. on May 15, 2026.

Costanzo, the Chicago Park District’s only full-time employee at the north-side greenhouse, spearheads a months-long effort to grow more than 15,000 plants, including vegetables, greens, and flowers, to get them ready in time for the Kilbourn Park’s annual plant sale.

The massively popular sale, which took place earlier this month, typically draws upwards of 1,100 people every year, with local gardeners lining up around the park waiting to snatch up plants at $4 a piece. But this year, attendance broke records — more than 2,300 shoppers turned out.

“We generally start these annuals at the end of February,” said Costanzo, pointing to rows of popular annual flowers like zinnias, marigolds, and geraniums, which provide bright blooms all summer long before dying at the end of the season. “So we’ve been coddling and loving these babies for months now, and we just want to get them into happy homes.”

For decades, Chicago gardeners flocked to the Kilbourn Park sale to pick up tomatoes, cucumbers, and some annuals — the standard starter kit for backyard gardeners. But this year, the park responded to a relatively new demand: Nearly 1 in 5 plants for sale are native plant species that have adapted to the local climate and wildlife and are generally low maintenance. 

“Just in the last five years, people have asked for more natives, which is why we’ve been increasing our production,” said Costanzo, who experimented with 30 different native species in November ahead of the plant sale this year. 

For a long time, native plants were seen as little more than weeds, but their value has grown significantly in recent years. Other local plant sales across Chicago and the country are incorporating native species at a pace surprising to even veteran horticulturalists who remember a time when they couldn’t give them away. 

“I’ve watched this for 44 years, from almost zero to now,” said Neil Diboll, the president of Prairie Nursery, a Wisconsin-based nursery dedicated to growing and shipping native plants across the country. 

“It’s not a fad,” Diboll said. “This is a long, steady climb.”  

Last year, Diboll said his nursery experienced a 7 percent increase in native plant sales. This year, they’re shipping out about 500,000 plants and even more seeds. Back in 1982, when Diboll first started selling plants, business was tougher: The company grossed just over $13,000. These days, he said, “you can add a few zeros on there.”

That relatively new mainstream demand has been driven, in part, by concerns about dramatic declines in insect species and climate change-powered extreme heat, drought, and flooding. The caterpillars of the Monarch butterfly, for example, depend on native milkweed as a food source. But as land use patterns have changed, local milkweed species have disappeared, leading to recent declines in Monarch populations. 

“Native plants have been adapting to change for thousands of years,” said Tiffany Jones, who leads habitat education throughout the Great Lakes region for the National Wildlife Federation. “They need less water, less maintenance, and they’re incredibly resilient — not to mention they help flood prevention with their deep root systems and provide habitat for all kinds of crucial species and pollinators. They’re practical and beautiful.”

In Minnesota, Becky Klukas-Brewer, co-owner and head of marketing and sales at Prairie Moon Nursery, a popular native plant nursery, said the Midwest greenhouse is shipping more plants and seeds than ever before. “In the last seven years, we have seen a 350 percent increase in sales, which is pretty awesome,” said Klukas-Brewer. At the same time, the 44-year-old nursery has seen its orders triple. She credits that success, in part, to the growing number of local plant sales across the country, drumming up interest in ecologically-minded gardening. 

For nearly 50 years, Wild Ones, a national nonprofit, has been educating the public about the benefits of reintroducing native plants back into their habitat. What started as a gardening club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has ballooned into a nationwide organization with over 14,000 gardening enthusiasts putting on plant sales, seed giveaways, and exchanges. The group has also been noticing an uptick in native plant sales. 

Over 110,000 native plants were sold last year through the organization’s 107 plant sales, according to Josh Nelson, development director with the Wild Ones. He added that another 40,000 native plants were distributed as part of the group’s various programs.

As the native plant business continues to grow, the annual Kilbourn Park plant sale is helping meet some of that demand. To make it happen, a team of local volunteers came out on a weekly basis over several months to help sort, pot, and move seedlings. 

“It’s completely worth it,” said Lourdes Valenzuela, a retired schoolteacher who has volunteered at the north side plant sale for 12 years. Valenzuela is part of the Friends of Kilbourn Park Greenhouse, a dedicated group of local volunteers who fundraise to help expand the resources at the nursery. With help from funds collected at previous plant sales, they’ve been able to buy benches, a shed, and even a patio — increasing the footprint of the educational center. The goal this year was to raise $25,000, about half of the total projected cost, for a new outdoor learning center. But Valenzuela said the plant sale was a huge hit, and they easily surpassed the goal. The Chicago Park District confirmed the sale generated approximately $48,000. 

“We literally sold every possible plant, all the compost, lots of baked goods,” she said. “We’re not fighting against the climate here. We’re working with it because it’s what’s native to this area, and they’re beautiful.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Once dismissed as weeds, native plants are now flying off the shelves on May 15, 2026.

How do those two interests fit together? For Honnold, the connection seems clear. “Go on enough trips like this,” he said, referencing his climbing trips to remote locations, and “you just see how much it matters.”

“A lot of these projects basically help protect the land in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily assume,” he said. “Empowering local communities is always a good way to protect the land on which they live.”

Honnold was interviewed by Grist Editor-in-Chief Katherine Bagley at Grist’s live event Turning the Tide: Stories of Climate Solutions, held during San Francisco Climate Week.

In his own climbing experience, Honnold shared, he’s seen how landscapes have changed even in the span of just a few years due to rising temperatures. “A lot of things that used to be approaches or descents up snowy couloirs … those are mostly melted out,” Honnold said. “Basically, big mountains you see change very quickly right now. It’s pretty sobering.”

But he also emphasized the need for positive stories that help people understand that progress is happening. “I personally am just not inspired by pessimism at all,” he said. “The environment has been severely degraded, we’ve lost a lot for sure, but if you were just dropped onto this planet right here, right now, and you just looked around in the natural world, you’d think, ‘This is incredible.’ There’s so much life, the natural world is still amazing, and there’s still so much to protect.”

Watch the full video of the event, including Honnold’s interview, or read a few excerpts (lightly edited for clarity) below.

Katherine Bagley: You and I are about the same age, and I remember as kids growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was like the recycling ads and the oil spills and that we had to save the ozone layer. And I’m curious when climate became part of the conversation for you.

Alex Honnold: Yeah, honestly, I’m not sure. None of those things really speak to me. I think that I was probably not that environmentally aware as a child. I mean, my parents are both professors. I grew up in Sacramento, just sort of a suburban California kid. And I think those weren’t big things in my house. I don’t think either of my parents were profound environmentalists in any way, even though we went camping and stuff, but that’s kind of different. 

And so I think it really was as I started to travel as a rock climber and go on expeditions. I mean, basically I just started reading a lot more. I read a ton of environmental nonfiction and just started to care a little more and then to see a little bit more. And sort of seeing some of the links between energy access and global poverty and climate change — basically the transition to renewables. And those are all things that I was kind of interested in starting in, I guess 2009.

Basically when I started doing some of my first overseas rock climbing expeditions, I was like, “Oh, I care about the way the rest of the world works and I’m interested.” And really the more I learned, the more it was like, “Oh, this seems important. This seems like something I should be more stressed about.”

Emily [Teitsworth, executive director of the Honnold Foundation] was just talking about Kara Solar, this organization that the Honnold Foundation supports in the Ecuadorian Amazon. And this is in Guyana [referencing an onscreen photo], which is the other side of the Amazon. It’s a different river base and everything. This is called a tepui. It’s like this giant rock face. And this was an expedition for a TV show in National Geographic. But anyway, we basically took river transit boats all the way to the end of the river kind of thing, and then walked for a week through the jungle to get to these walls. 

And so, I mean, I think that has really helped inform my environmental activism. Do you call it activism? Basically, the reason I care. And it’s that you go on enough trips like this and you’re kind of like, Well, we took two-stroke gas-powered boats to the end of the fricking world and then hiked for a week into the jungle to go climb this wall. And you see how these communities — basically you just see how much it matters.

* * * 

Bagley: Have you noticed climate change or other environmental impacts that have impacted some of your favorite places to climb?

Honnold: Yeah, I mean, one of my favorites is Yosemite. And so you don’t really see climate change impacts in Yosemite that much. I mean, other than beetle kill and obvious things like that, where you’re sort of like, “Oh, the forests have changed composition very quickly,” and drought, and fire, and those types of impacts. 

But you really see it in some places that aren’t necessarily my favorite places to climb, bigger mountains with glaciers. I don’t like ice climbing, which is a good thing, because it’s all falling down anyway. Like, that ship has sailed. 

Because actually, one my last experiences in Patagonia in southern Argentina — if anyone’s ever been to some of the climbing areas in Patagonia, the key to success in Patagonia, basically the weather’s always horrible, is to always have a whole spreadsheet of objectives so that depending on the weather window, you can choose the correct objective. If you’re like, “Oh, we have one day of marginal weather in between two storms, what’s the right objective for that?” Anyway, so we had a really, really bad weather window with marginal conditions and cold temperatures. And we’re like, perfect for an ice climbing objective, let’s go in and do an ice route up this one spire. 

And we hiked in. And hiking in is no joke. It’s like a couple of days to walk into the town and you get to the mountain and we get up there. Anyway, we got there and there was no ice route anymore. The whole thing had fallen down and it was gone. And we were just like, huh. Like, that’ll probably never reform. Like, that’s just gone. 

You see that all over the world with glaciers and with ice features. And a lot of things that used to be approaches or descents up snowy couloirs, like basically just hike up a chute in a mountain, those are mostly melted out. And so now it’s just like a rock chute with things falling down it the whole time. Basically big mountains you see change very quickly right now. 

It’s pretty sobering, because those landscapes don’t seem like they should change. Because when you look at it, you’re just like — since time immemorial, this has been these rugged mountains. And then you’re sort of like, “Oh, no, actually since four years ago, that’s completely changed.” 

I mean have any of you guys been to Chamonix? Anybody skied in Chamonix? They have a whole tourist attraction with labels and dates and stairsteps to the level of the glacier so basically you can get off and you’re sort of like, in 1850 the glacier was up to here and then you go down literally hundreds and hundreds of stairs, you drop hundreds of vertical feet down to this, like, tiny, tiny little piece of ice and, like, here’s the glacier now. And you’re kind of like, “Whoa, that’s changed a lot in the last hundred years.” It’s insane.

* * *

Bagley: I feel like there would be this assumption based on your climbing and where you go that your go-to would be land conservation, but your foundation does solar energy work, and I’m just curious how that interest came about in particular.

Honnold: Well, I would actually say the energy access work in some ways is land conservation or ties in to land conservation in many ways. Just to go back to this project in the Ecuadorian Amazon, when you reduce the cost of river power transit, you know, basically when you make the boats solar, you don’t have to buy gas. It reduces the need for communities to cut roads through the forest. And so that is basically land conservation because once you cut a road to any of these communities, then those roads are jumping off points for illegal mining, illegal deforestation, basically extractive industries can easily take hold there. A lot of these projects basically help protect the land in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily assume. Basically, empowering local communities is always a good way to protect the land on which they live.

* * *

Bagley: You now go to a lot of the Climate Week events, a lot of these other kinds of events all over the country, and I think for a long time, there was this narrative of just everything is horrible. I’ve been covering climate change as a journalist for 20 years, and it’s a pretty depressing beat a lot of the time. I remember when you and I were talking the other week in preparation for this, you wanted to stress the optimism that there is actually a lot that we can do about climate change, and that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. So can you talk a little bit about the need for that narrative shift? 

Honnold: So I was at New York Climate Week, six months ago or whenever, last year in New York, and there were just so many questions about existential doom and gloom, or like, “Climate, it’s a lost cause, we’ve already lost so much,” blah, blah, blah. And at a certain point, you know, maybe like two days into climate week, I just kind of snapped. 

I’m personally a pretty optimistic person, and just often see the good in things, but I was kind of like: Yeah, I mean, the environment has been severely degraded, we’ve lost a lot for sure, but if you were just dropped onto this planet right here, right now, and you just looked around in the natural world, you’d think, “This is incredible.” There’s so much life, the natural world is still amazing, and there’s still so much to protect. I think we’re better off highlighting what we have and what we can save, rather than mourning what we’ve already lost. Because in a way, what’s lost is lost. You basically only have from the present moving forward. And that’s still pretty freaking great. 

I interview climate folks all the time, and one of the things that I’m often struck by is I interview a lot of marine biologists and people working in ocean conservation, and when you protect reefs — basically anytime you make something a no-fishing zone or you protect it in any way, life just returns. I mean the oceans seem to recover even faster than things on land. Every time I’m just like, man, there’s such a capacity for restoration if you give nature even the slightest chance. 

And I feel like to date, humans haven’t really given nature much of a chance. We haven’t really chosen to make that much effort yet. I mean, obviously in some cases, local communities can put tremendous effort into saving one river, let’s say. But at a big picture, humans haven’t really tried that hard yet. And I’m kinda like, man, humans are capable of a lot when we try. And so that keeps me pretty optimistic.

* * *

Everybody here knows more about all of this than I do. I just love rock climbing, and I’m trying to do my small part to do something useful in the world. But I do think that there’s something lost in the pessimism around environmental storytelling and all that kind of stuff. Just because at least I personally am just not inspired by pessimism at all. I’m kind of like, “Oh, well, if it’s already lost, then screw it, it’s already lost.” But if I’m making progress, if I am improving, then I’m very motivated to keep making progress and keep improving. 

And I mean, that’s kind of a personal thing. That’s true for training, that’s true for all the things that I do in sport and climbing. If I feel like I’m making progress then it’s easy to get up and try hard and absolutely try my best. And so I feel with environmental issues, it’s like you’re better off focusing on the places that you can make progress. I mean like seeing a river restored like that and just seeing the absolute transformation in just a few years [referencing the restoration of the Klamath River after the removal of dams], that’s incredible. It’s stories like that I think are worth highlighting.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alex Honnold: ‘You just see how much it matters’ on May 14, 2026.

Maciel is a shed hunter, meaning he collects antlers that have been naturally “shed” by wildlife. But a winter tick feeding frenzy in Maine, driven by rising temperatures, means that this year he kept finding dead animals. Up to 90 percent of the moose calves tracked by scientists in recent years have been bled to death by ticks — an ongoing crisis in a state that prizes these largest of all deer species.

But where scientists see the hand of climate change at work — average temperatures in Maine have risen 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1985 — others see the designs of a global cabal. 

“Human engineered biological warfare,” read a comment on Maciel’s video posted by Dries Van Langenhove, a far-right former member of the Belgian government who was recently convicted of violating the country’s Holocaust denial laws. The comment got 32,000 likes. “It’s Bill Gates,” someone else posted.  

These posts are part of a wave of tick-related conspiracy theories garnering millions of views online. In April, a self-proclaimed holistic doctor on Instagram claimed to have spoken with multiple farmers in the Midwest who told her that they were finding boxes of ticks dumped on their properties. “Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk,” she posted alongside a video that got 10 million views across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The MAHA Moms Coalition, a nationwide group inspired by the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, reposted the claim asking affected farmers to come forward.

The theory dates back to 2023, with viral claims that Pfizer and Valneva, pharmaceutical companies developing a vaccine for Lyme disease, were planting boxes of ticks on farms to drum up demand for their product. 

A separate theory that gained traction around the same time linked a British research program to genetically modify cattle ticks, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to rising cases of red meat allergies in the U.S. The biggest problem with that theory is that the allergy, Alpha-gal syndrome, is caused by the bite of a Lone Star tick — a completely different species from the cattle ticks in the research program.

While all these conspiracies involve different ticks, different diseases, and different alleged culprits, they are often treated as interchangeable evidence of the same broader claim: that rising tick encounters are a part of a nefarious human plot. 

The theories are right about one thing: Ticks are getting worse. Some of the same ecological changes fueling Maine’s winter tick boom are also making tick encounters more common in broad swaths of the U.S. The arachnids are showing up earlier in the year, expanding into new terrain, and biting people more often than they used to. But the force driving those shifts is not a clandestine bioweapons program, a vaccine plot, or Bill Gates — it’s climate change. 

Richard Ostfeld, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, said a warming world is “bringing ticks out earlier in the year” in states like New York, where he lives. “It used to be we were pretty safe in the month of May,” he said. “Now, not so much.”

Tick season is off to an unusually early start across most of the U.S. this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, said in an alert published late last month. Emergency room visits for tick bites in four of the five geographic regions the agency tracks are the highest they’ve been for this time of year since the CDC started keeping tabs on tick-borne illness rates in 2017. 

While the CDC hasn’t said what’s behind the uptick in bites this spring, ample snow cover earlier in the year helped insulate adult ticks from the cold of winter, and an early spring bloom across much of the U.S. likely brought those hungry adults out of the leaf litter earlier than normal. But regardless of the specific dynamics at play this year, rising average temperatures will lead to more robust tick exposure on balance. That’s because warmer temperatures both coax ticks north into territory that was once too cold to host them and also extend the length of time that ticks are active every year.

More tick bites mean more opportunities for infection — and the list of infections doctors are watching for is getting longer. Positive tests for alpha-gal syndrome have increased 100-fold since 2013; nearly half a million people in the U.S. now carry an allergy to red meat. Cases of anaplasmosis, a disease carried by black-legged ticks that hospitalizes roughly 30 percent of the people who contract it, increased 16-fold between 2000 and 2017. Babesiosis, a malaria-like illness also carried by black-legged ticks, has risen roughly 10 percent year-over-year since 2015. It’s not uncommon now for a single tick to carry two or more diseases. 

Ecologists who study ticks see an interwoven mix of factors driving these increases. Land-use and wildlife changes are increasing contact between humans and ticks, invasive and expanding tick species are bringing different disease risks to new parts of the country, and better testing and reporting of tick-borne illnesses is making diseases more visible. But there is widespread agreement in the scientific community that those trends are unfolding against the backdrop of climate change.

Ostfeld worries that the complexity of the factors that lead to higher rates of tick-borne disease, paired with the allure of online conspiracies, will make it harder for people to understand why backyards in some parts of the country are getting more dangerous. “The more I read about people actually believing some of these conspiracy theories, the more I worry that even moderately complex explanations or phenomena we care about — like how likely we are to get bitten by a tick — might be too much,” he said.

It doesn’t help that conspiracies about ticks have now been legitimized by federal government officials. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has at various times in his career opined that Lyme disease, which now affects an estimated half a million Americans every year, was created as a byproduct of vaccine research and originally used as a military bioweapon. (This flies in the face of genomic evidence that the bacteria causing Lyme has existed in North America for at least 60,000 years.)

Both Kennedy and Tucker Carlson, one of America’s most prominent Republican-aligned media figures, have hosted the writer Kris Newby on their podcasts in recent years. In both cases, Newby espoused debunked claims about the military origins of Lyme.  

The idea that Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses were created by a U.S. military bioweapons program is so pervasive that a formal initiative to investigate the origin has twice been introduced by lawmakers in the House of Representatives. Chris Smith, a Republican representative from New Jersey who spearheaded those efforts, was successful on his second attempt. A directive in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, signed by President Donald Trump last December, includes a provision requiring the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, to investigate whether the military used ticks as biological warfare agents in the middle of the 20th century. 

“GAO will be fully empowered to leave no stone unturned, and now it’ll have a congressional mandate to get to the bottom of it, because they were weaponizing ticks,” Smith said at a Lyme disease roundtable convened by Secretary Kennedy last year. 

But away from the congressional roundtables and viral videos, the plot begins to lose some of its drama. Even in the Midwest, where millions of social media viewers have been told that boxes of ticks are being dumped on unsuspecting farmers, evidence of foul play is hard to find. Terry Hoerbert and her husband Bob own Little Brown Cow Dairy, a small dairy farm in Delavan, Illinois. The lane down to the farm is short, Terry said, so she would have seen someone dropping off packages of ticks. Had the Hoerberts heard of any other farms in the area receiving packages of live ticks?

“We have not,” Terry told me. “You are the first to enlighten us.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change is driving a tick boom. MAHA is blaming Bill Gates. on May 14, 2026.

In Murphy, North Carolina, a peaceful mountain town once defined by birdsong and swaying trees, a steady electric hum cuts through the calm. The noise from a nearby cryptocurrency mine has intruded on Rebecca and Tom Lash’s lives since it opened in 2021.

“There was nothing in this little pasture but these electric lines,” Rebecca Lash said, as she and Tom stood on the hill overlooking the mine. “And it was just nice and quiet.”

The Lashes came to Cherokee County eight years ago to settle down and enjoy their older age in view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They grew more and more incensed as three cryptocurrency mines opened near their home within the last five years. 

Now, the landscape is shifting again as one of those mines becomes an artificial intelligence data center.

Western North Carolina is seeing a local manifestation of a national trend. Across the country, communities that spent years trying to stop cryptocurrency mines are confronting a new and potentially larger wave of digital infrastructure that powers AI. As profits from crypto mining have fallen, the companies behind it have begun converting their operations into facilities designed to handle the computing that underpins that burgeoning industry. 

“The big AI centers and the big data centers, there’s some horror stories about people that live near those,” said Tom Lash.

This transition is triggering a growing backlash. Residents and local officials in Cherokee County and beyond fear that these immense operations — which consume as much electricity and water as small towns — will alter rural communities with few land-use restrictions. Towns and counties across western North Carolina have begun passing moratoriums and considering new regulations as they scramble to respond to an industry many say arrived faster than local authorities could understand or control it.

The shift is possible because crypto mines and AI data centers rely on the same underlying resources: enormous amounts of electricity, industrial-scale cooling systems, and large buildings capable of housing thousands of servers that run constantly. That infrastructure has made crypto operations attractive targets for companies racing to build AI computing capacity. 

Political and environmental conditions of Cherokee County are easing the transition, especially in post-industrial communities that need economic invigoration. In Marble, Core Scientific’s cryptocurrency mining site-turned-data-center once housed American Thread, which produced thread for the garment industry until it closed in 2015, taking hundreds of jobs and hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual taxes with it. The region’s abundant water, mild climate, and lack of zoning restrictions make it attractive. 

Late last year, Core Scientific announced plans to merge with CoreWeave, which leases computing power to AI companies. Though that deal fell through in October, Core Scientific has publicly said it is still converting facilities like the one in Marble to handle artificial intelligence workloads. That facility consumes as much power as a medium-sized town. 

Core Scientific did not respond to a request for comment. CoreWeave declined to comment.

Becoming an AI data center has required quite an expansion. According to Cherokee County commissioners and a public records request filed by commissioner Ben Adams, the company submitted a site plan last year that included more than 170 diesel generators, most of which would provide backup power. Records released by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality after an inquiry by Grist showed that they were exempt from air-quality permitting requirements because they were classified as backup systems.

The site spreads across 250,000 square feet, or 7 acres. The company is working with neighboring utilities to meet its water and sewer needs, and it’s digging three wells to tap the local water table. The data center sought a wastewater contract with the nearby town of Andrews, but Mayor James Reid told Grist officials denied the request because the company lacked an environmental plan. 

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He’s also not happy that a soccer complex Core Scientific had promised hasn’t materialized. What’s more, he thinks the facility is an eyesore.

“I wouldn’t wish this on any county or entity, ever,” said Reid. “It’s absolutely destroyed Marble.”

Taxes, at least, are back. The county received $268,000 in 2024 from the Marble facility’s last full year of the crypto operation, with a steep drop last year, mostly because of data center construction. In an email, County Tax Assessor Teresa Ricks said her office is working with a contractor to appraise the value of the Marble data center and its equipment in hopes the community will receive every cent it’s entitled to.

Adams doesn’t think the revenue is worth the impact the operation has on the community. He ran on an anti-crypto campaign in 2022. Although he wants to lure new business, he doesn’t want to see the county’s rural nature change and worries the data centers will bring noise and pollution. During a commissioners’ meeting in January, he begged his colleagues to renew a moratorium on crypto mining that expired a year ago and include AI data centers in the restriction.

“If we don’t do something, our little peaceful town’s going to turn into something else and people are going to come here looking to put stuff in our town,” he said at the time.

Another commissioner expressed concern that the Trump administration’s efforts to discourage local regulation of AI would hamstring any county action. “It would require a tremendous amount of resources, money to fight that back,” one commissioner said.

In the end, nothing happened that evening. 

But Cherokee County’s circumstance has alarmed communities throughout the region. Since January, officials across western North Carolina — in towns like Boone and Clyde, and counties like Swain and Clay — and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians have adopted temporary bans or moratoriums on new data centers. In Canton, where a recently decommissioned paper mill might become a data center, the town council approved a moratorium in February before a crowd so large it couldn’t fit in the town hall building. The temporary bans, like the one that existed in Cherokee County from 2024 to 2025, are meant to give communities breathing room as they consider more permanent limits.

Like Canton’s ordinance, many of the moratoriums were passed before any formal data center proposals emerged. In April, Democratic state representative Lyndsey Prather introduced legislation that would scale back incentives for data centers and require them to pay the full cost of their energy use.

The tide is also beginning to turn against these operations elsewhere in the U.S. Lawmakers in Maine are considering a statewide ban, and similar bills are under consideration from New York to Oklahoma to Michigan. But as Cherokee County shows, a moratorium can come and go without a clear result, even as data center construction continues to hum. 

Adams, who is in his final year in office, is reconvening the county planning board to explore ways to limit new data centers without imposing zoning laws. A pro-business conservative, Adams said he has struggled to reconcile his support for economic growth with what he sees as a need to preserve the county’s rural character and manage its rapid transformation.

“I do believe, one, that we are stewards of our property,” Adams said. “Two, I think we can’t possibly keep out all these bad elements coming in. Three, growth is inevitable, but I hope that we can maintain it and keep it more of a peaceful community.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline First crypto, now data centers: How tech is reshaping this North Carolina community on May 14, 2026.

But the village’s food carries an invisible danger. Tests by scientists from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, or Fiocruz, show that Aleckson, his parents, and nearly everyone in neighboring communities have mercury levels above the safe threshold. Research by Fiocruz indicates that the contamination stems from gold mining, where mercury is used to separate the metal and then spreads through the rivers into the food chain.

This poisoning results not only from illegal mining but also from decisions and omissions by the Brazilian government. An exclusive InfoAmazonia investigation has found that Brazil’s National Mining Agency, or ANM, still maintains mining permits with signs of irregularities, such as reported gold production with no evidence of extraction consistent with the declared volumes — a practice identified by oversight bodies as illegal gold laundering.

Created in 1989 to regulate mining during the Tapajós gold rush that ran from the late 1970s to the 1990s, Garimpeiro Mining Permits (PLGs) were meant to be a simplified authorization for supposedly small-scale, low-impact operations. Decades later, what began as artisanal mining has become industrial-scale extraction involving heavy equipment, dredges, and mercury. These permits now give a veneer of legality to large-scale illegal mining in Tapajós, sidestepping legal limits.

For more than a decade, oversight agencies have warned the mining authority about the irregular use of PLGs. In 2022, the Comptroller General of the Union uncovered a series of illegalities in an audit. The following year, Operation Sisaque — carried out by Brazil’s Federal Police (PF), Federal Revenue Service, and Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) — exposed one of the Amazon’s largest gold-laundering schemes, which relied on PLGs in Tapajós. In 2025, the Federal Court of Accounts reached similar conclusions, identifying structural flaws that enable gold of illegal origin to be legalized.

Even so, our reporting found that between 2022 and 2026, of the 540 PLGs that declared gold sales in the Tapajós River basin, nearly half (263) showed no evidence of extraction consistent with the amounts reported. This suggests these permits may be used to launder gold extracted illegally elsewhere — a practice known as “gold laundering.”

Roughly 70 percent of the mining activity in the region lies within 10 kilometers of the PLGs that declared gold production. This proximity suggests that illegal mining operations, including those operating inside conservation areas and Indigenous lands, may be using these permits to bring their gold into the formal market.

Nearly 60 percent of the gold from legalized mining in Brazil has passed through a Tapajós PLG over the past four years, totaling $2.03 billion (10 billion Brazilian reais) in declared production in the basin during that period.

The information for this investigation comes from the VEIO (Verification and Investigation of Gold Origin) platform, which cross-references mining and deforestation data with mineral production taxes and gold export figures. The tool was developed by InfoAmazonia in partnership with Instituto Dados, with support from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

The PLG is a “sham document” that sustains this system despite the Brazilian government’s inability to put an end to gold mining in the Amazon, according to Danicley Aguiar, coordinator of Greenpeace Brasil’s Indigenous Peoples Front. “It is environmentally impossible for these permits to meet even minimal conditions. Yet they continue to exist because they are part of a structural problem,” he says.

PLGs have become the backbone of illegal mining in Tapajós: Without them, gold would have to be transported through clandestine routes, often across borders, before entering the formal market. With them, gold can be declared as legally sourced and leave the Amazon already carrying a stamp of legitimacy.

Multiple mining fronts

Gerson Harlei Selzler, president of the Minuano Cooperative of Miners and Prospectors, previously headed the Cooperativa dos Garimpeiros do Brasil, whose members were investigated in Operation Sisaque for “gold laundering.” Among them were his father, Nelson Selzler, accused of supplying gold to the scheme using falsified documents, and Lillian Rodrigues Pena Fernandes, who, according to the PF, owned a company used to launder gold and ran the operation with her husband, Diego de Mello.

Although not indicted in Operation Sisaque, Gerson reported selling $548,780 (2.7 million Brazilian reais) in gold in 2023 through a PLG whose area shows no signs of extraction, such as deforestation characteristic of mining activity. He also jointly administered a PLG with Nelson Selzler in which InfoAmazonia identified declarations of gold unsupported by evidence of exploitation.

Founded in 2022, Minuano began declaring production only in 2024, coinciding with when the main suspects in Operation Sisaque stopped reporting gold transactions. Since then, the cooperative has declared roughly $9.76 million (48 million Brazilian reais) in gold production linked to two PLGs inside the Tapajós Environmental Protection Area (APA), where it operates without authorization from the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, or ICMBio, the office responsible for managing federal protected areas in Brazil. According to VEIO’s analysis, the volume declared in these PLGs exceeds by a factor of 10 the extraction estimates cited in studies, which suggest around 20 grams of gold per hectare explored.

The two PLGs used by Minuano are part of a group of eight permits held by the cooperative inside the Tapajós APA. Seven of them are contiguous, extending along the Creporizinho River, a tributary of the Crepori and Tapajós rivers, which run through the conservation unit.

Satellite images show an operation functioning as an integrated whole, despite being formally divided into parcels of up to 50 hectares, the maximum area allowed for individual mining under an ANM resolution issued in 2025. As a result, the work falls under more permissive environmental rules, since each parcel has its own authorization and environmental license issued by the city government of Itaituba. This arrangement enables large-scale extraction under simplified requirements, and satellite images reveal that the mining has already altered the river’s course.

Minuano holds 15 PLGs in total, including the eight within the Tapajós APA, covering 2,200 hectares. According to ICMBio, the cooperative has requested authorization to operate inside the conservation unit, but the application remains under review.

Beyond Minuano’s PLGs, Gerson also holds mining permits as an individual. He recently obtained from the ANM the transfer of rights to conduct gold prospecting on a 3,200‑hectare area, also within the Tapajós APA. For that area, VEIO found that mining was already underway, yet no production had been reported to the regulator. 

Despite mounting evidence and repeated warnings, the ANM continues to engage with suspicious actors in the sector. In March of this year, under the banner of expanding mining legalization in the region, the Pará state government backed the Legal Mining Expedition, an initiative supported by the mining agency and cooperatives.

Diego de Mello, accused by the Federal Police of running the laundering scheme revealed in Operation Sisaque, attended a meeting in Brasília alongside ANM director José Fernando. The expedition held meetings in mining areas and opened channels to help legalize PLGs with applications already filed with the agency.

Mining concentrated in the hands of a few

There are currently 9,101 mining applications to exploit the Tapajós APA, including 6,255 PLGs. This report found that 21 individuals control more than half (3,382) of these applications. Some have declared gold production in more than 30 different PLGs, a situation the Federal Court of Accounts described as a “real circumvention of the area limits established by law.”

One such figure is lawyer José Antunes, who chairs the Environmental Law Commission of the Brazilian Bar Association in Itaituba and holds 162 PLGs of 50 hectares each within the conservation unit, more than 8,000 hectares in total.

Between 2022 and 2023, Antunes reported $13 million (64 million Brazilian reais) in gold sales across 31 PLGs. In several of them, there is no evidence of mining activity; in others, the extraction appears to extend beyond licensed boundaries. In December 2024, inspectors from Ibama, Brazil’s environmental regulator, documented active, unauthorized mining in areas covered by Antunes’s PLGs, including illegal mercury use, river alteration, and deforestation in Permanent Preservation Areas (APPs).

Hot gold on the market, mercury in the body

Aleckson was born already contaminated with mercury. He has never walked, uses a wheelchair, and depends on his mother, Alnice, for nearly every task. Soon after birth, he was diagnosed with spastic tetraparesis, a neurological condition that causes weakness and muscle stiffness in his limbs. The disability was attributed to a lack of oxygen during a long and painful labor.

In his most recent test, Aleckson had 6.9 micrograms of mercury per gram of hair (µg/g) in his system, three times the upper safe limit of 2.3 µg/g defined by the World Health Organization and Brazil’s Ministry of Health.

“We eat fish almost every day. It’s very hard to change that, because this is how we were raised,” says Alnice, as her son devours a stew of surubim and barbado prepared by her sisters. In one of her tests, Alnice recorded 9 µg/g of mercury, more than four times the safe limit.

Researcher Isabela Freitas Vaz, from Fiocruz, has followed the case since the first tests. “The signs we’ve observed, not only in Aleckson’s case but in many children, point to a high-risk scenario,” she says.

Although a definitive causal link between mercury exposure and the observed clinical conditions has yet to be proven, researchers say the warning signs are consistent: people with high exposure levels exhibit indicators associated with the potential development of mercury-related diseases.

“The next step is to establish this causal connection between contamination levels and the symptoms we are seeing, so it can guide public policy,” explains Isabela Vaz.

The Tapajós basin lies in western Pará state, extending into northern Mato Grosso and southern Amazonas. It consists of the Tapajós River and major tributaries such as the Jamanxim, Teles Pires, and Juruena, which converge toward Santarém. Mining is concentrated in the Tapajós Gold Province, centered on Itaituba and including Jacareacanga and Novo Progresso. This area is home to Brazil’s largest active mining front.

In February, InfoAmazonia traveled along stretches of the rivers feeding the basin and accompanied Fiocruz researchers as they collected samples from pregnant women and newborns of the Munduruku people.

The researchers are investigating how mercury contamination in the Tapajós may be linked to Minamata disease, a severe neurological syndrome caused by acute exposure to methylmercury, the metal’s most toxic form.

Identified in the 1950s in Minamata, Japan, the disease struck thousands who were acutely poisoned by large volumes of industrial mercury waste dumped into the fishing bay. Many victims were left with lifelong impairments, and more than 900 died.

Unlike the disaster in Minamata, scientists say contamination in the Tapajós occurs slowly and persistently. It is chronic rather than sudden, and its effects can take years to appear.

“The main source of contamination in the Amazon today is fish consumption. The mercury used in mining enters the river, becomes organic [methylmercury], and accumulates in the food chain,” says Pedro Basta, an analyst with the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health and a member of the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Pregnant Women and Newborns Exposed to Mercury in the Amazon.

Because the metal accumulates over time, it remains in the environment for decades, even in places where mining has ceased. In the Tapajós basin, it is most concentrated in carnivorous fish such as barbado, surubim, and tucunaré, species widely consumed by local communities.

Since 2019, when studies began in some villages, nearly half of the children examined have shown heavy metal levels above the safe limit. Among pregnant women, concentrations reach up to five times the recommended threshold, passing the substance to the fetus. “Mercury causes irreversible brain damage. It can cause tremors, numbness, muscle weakness, and long-term neurological problems,” says Basta.

The most significant harm may not be visible deformities but progressive neurological impairment, including delayed development, cognitive difficulties, and reduced learning capacity. For those with levels above 6.9 µg/g, considered high risk, the recommendation is to reduce fish consumption. In practice, that means altering the dietary foundation of entire communities.

In the Tapajós between the Sawré Muybu and Sawré Bap’in Indigenous lands, the water no longer retains its natural color. When we visited in February, a dozen mining rafts churned the river’s emerald green into a murky brown, five operating within a 6,700-hectare PLG authorized by the National Mining Agency (ANM) for the Cooperativa dos Garimpeiros da Amazônia, or Coogam. One raft worked less than a kilometer from the Daje Kapap village.

The area Coogam exploits along this stretch of the Tapajós forms a kind of barrier between the two territories, where the noise and movement of the mining barges are nearly constant. According to ANM records, the cooperative’s PLG authorization (850.796/2009) expired in January 2025; its environmental license expired in June 2024 and was resubmitted only early this year. Even so, the barges continued operating. ANM scheduled a task force to inspect this and other PLGs on the Tapajós, but says the inspection never occurred because of a lack of funds.

Between 2022 and 2026, this PLG reported $5.49 million (R$27 million) in gold sales. Coogam holds 32 PLGs in the Tapajós region and has declared $22.97 million (R$113 million) from seven of them over the past five years.

‘Regulatory permissiveness’

In December 2024, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) filed a public civil action seeking to suspend all mining permits within the Tapajós Environmental Protection Area (APA). According to Federal Prosecutor Gilberto Batista Naves Filho, who filed the lawsuit, the permits were issued without prior ICMBio analysis, a requirement explicitly stated in Article 17 of Law 7.805/1989 for activities in conservation units.

“We are facing an evident lack of mercury control, an unacceptable risk for rivers and public health, especially for Indigenous and vulnerable populations who depend on the region’s rivers for their survival,” Naves Filho states in the civil action.

ICMBio told InfoAmazonia that mining activities within the Tapajós APA require prior authorization from the environmental agency, which has not been granted in most cases.

The result, according to the MPF, is an ongoing environmental collapse. With 83,000 hectares already affected, an area larger than New York City or Chicago, the Tapajós APA has become Brazil’s federally protected area most heavily degraded by mining, according to MapBiomas data compiled by Greenpeace at InfoAmazonia’s request.

ICMBio reports that at least 829 PLGs have been authorized by ANM within the Tapajós APA without any review by the management body. ANM interprets the law differently and argues in the MPF lawsuit that environmental authorization is required only when exploration begins, not when permits are issued.

For the MPF, this interpretation nullifies environmental oversight and turns mining permits into tools that give a veneer of legality to illegally extracted gold. The agency describes ANM’s actions as “merely notarial,” issuing permits without assessing environmental feasibility or the cumulative impacts of hundreds of mining fronts.

The lawsuit seeks $20.33 million (R$100 million) in collective moral damages from the ANM. After an unsuccessful conciliation hearing in March, the case awaits a ruling from the Federal Court.

The Federal Court of Accounts reached similar conclusions. In an audit completed in July 2025, the court identified “regulatory permissiveness” and systemic failures in oversight of the gold supply chain. The report notes that ANM’s omissions enable PLGs to launder illegal gold and artificially fragment areas, making large-scale operations viable under rules intended for small-scale mining.

The court ordered ANM to cancel irregular authorizations within 90 days. That deadline has passed.

On the ground, the pattern repeats. Between December 2024 and January 2025, Ibama ordered the suspension of 342 PLGs in the Tapajós APA after an operation against illegal mining. Inspectors found multiple violations, including lack of ICMBio authorization, destruction of vegetation, mining in permanent preservation areas, and extensive mercury use.

For Ibama’s director of environmental protection, Jair Schmitt, the issue goes far beyond isolated violations. Even permits considered “regular,” he says, contain structural illegalities, from municipal-level licensing, contested by the federal agency and MPF, to lack of meaningful environmental oversight.

“There is no mercury legally available for mining in Brazil today,” Schmitt says. “For this reason, even PLGs considered regular are not, because there is likely no lawful mercury available for their operations.”

Ibama estimates that producing one gram of gold requires roughly one gram of mercury. But after the Minamata Convention took effect in 2017, Brazil stopped importing the substance and sharply restricted its use. According to Schmitt, this means the current scale of mining cannot be reconciled with any legal scenario.

Although the agency claims it has no authority over the need for prior authorization for exploration in the Tapajós APA, it has begun notifying PLG permit holders within the conservation unit that they must secure ICMBio approval before starting exploration. Still, there is no news of any permits operating within the conservation unit being revoked.

The management plan for the Tapajós APA, in development since 2020, is expected to be completed this year. The proposal includes creating zoning areas within the territory, including an urban-industrial zone, the largest in the unit, to organize landscapes already heavily degraded by mining and deforestation, where ICMBio says there may still be potential for mining. The plan’s drafting has been marked by pressure from groups linked to the mining sector, pushing to formalize the activity within the conservation unit, a move environmentalists criticize because of its environmental and social impacts.

‘Water becomes like milk’

In September 2025, the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Santarém recommended annulling 15 PLGs granted in areas adjoining the Sawré Muybu, Sawré Bap’in, Munduruku, and Sai-Cinza territories, including the Coogam PLG documented during our February reporting trip.

According to the MPF, these permits were issued without prior consultation with Indigenous communities, as required by International Labor Organization Convention 169. The agency also notes that barge and mining operations near the villages violate measures ordered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to contain mercury contamination. “It is unacceptable for state-licensed projects to inflict the same harm on Indigenous people as illegal mining,” prosecutor Thais Medeiros da Costa wrote in a recommendation sent to ANM in September 2025.

“When the prospectors arrive and start working, the water becomes like milk,” said Chief Juarez Saw Munduruku of the Sawré Muybu Indigenous Land. “We can’t bathe anymore; it causes itching. It used to be joyful; children played along the riverbank. Today that’s over,” he says.

According to the chief, mercury exposure has become part of daily life for families, with symptoms resembling those researchers are investigating as possible effects of poisoning.

“My son’s contamination level has reached the limit. He already feels numbness in his legs and arms. We keep wondering … could this be what’s causing these symptoms?” the chief asks.

Deivison Saw Munduruku, the chief’s son, is among the cases with the highest contamination levels recorded by researchers, nearly 10 times above the safe threshold.

Aldira Akai Munduruku, deputy coordinator of the Pariri Indigenous Association and a teacher in Sawré-Muybu village, believes contamination may be linked to some children’s learning difficulties. “We notice that some children struggle to learn, and this is not normal,” she says.

In 2019, the Pariri Association approached researcher Paulo Basta — the father of analyst Pedro Basta and coordinator of Fiocruz’s “environment, diversity, and health” research group — after the death of environmentalist Cássio Beda, who had lived among the Munduruku and developed a severe neurological condition. While mercury poisoning has not been confirmed as the cause, the physician who treated him noted the possibility of “secondary motor neuron disease and mercury intoxication” in a July 2017 report, as reported by Repórter Brasil.

“We monitor the results and try to warn people. But it’s not only the Munduruku who can change this. We need more effective public policies,” Aldira says.

Among the Indigenous residents interviewed, suspected miscarriages, numbness in the limbs, memory lapses, and tremors appeared frequently, symptoms the medical literature associates with high mercury levels.

For Paulo Basta, who coordinates research in the region and is working to determine which symptoms are linked to mercury exposure, one conclusion is clear: continual exposure, combined with precarious living conditions in the villages, creates extreme vulnerability. In this setting, he says, mercury exacerbates existing inequalities, hindering child development and shaping the entire life trajectory of affected populations.

“A child with mental deficits today becomes an adult with mental deficits tomorrow. They will struggle in school and later in the job market,” Basta explains.

Paradoxically, when the Tapajós River swells during the Amazon’s winter rains, access to water becomes even more limited. As the river floods, contamination spreads into the streams supplying the villages, bringing mud and mercury.

On February 13, a federal court ruling underscored the severity of the health crisis in the Tapajós, ordering the federal government to provide drinking water to Indigenous communities and recognizing the structural abandonment aggravated by mining-related contamination.

The National Mining Agency (ANM) stated that PLGs with environmental licenses are considered valid and that it is not the agency’s role to “question the validity of the documentation submitted,” saying it relies on licenses issued by other authorities. Regarding the Tapajós APA, the agency acknowledged the requirement for ICMBio approval and said it is working to identify and regularize permits lacking it. The agency maintains it is not responsible for identifying illegalities because it received the licenses “in good faith.”

On the issue of irregularities, ANM said it does not authorize mercury use in PLGs. It acknowledged knowing of evidence of the laundering of gold, a practice linked to weaknesses in the self-declaration system, and said it uses inspections, data cross-checking, and satellite monitoring to detect inconsistencies between explored areas and reported production.

“There are ongoing administrative investigations, some confidential, others public, into indications of irregularities in the gold production chain, including possible cases of laundering,” the ANM stated.

The agency also said it has discussed prior consultation with Indigenous peoples but noted there is no automatic ban on mining within 10 kilometers of Indigenous lands, considered a direct-impact zone. In a statement to InfoAmazonia, it said it had no knowledge of the so-called “Legal Mining Expedition,” supported by the Pará state government, and did not comment on the meeting between representatives of the initiative and one of its directors.

The report also contacted Coogam president Tânia Oliveira Sena, who declined to be interviewed. We also reached out to the defense of Nelson Selzler, who declined to comment on his mention in the Federal Police investigation and the activities of the Minuano Cooperative in the Tapajós APA. The report was unable to reach Gerson Harlei Selzler, Diego de Mello, or his wife, Lillian Rodrigues Pena Fernandes.

Lawyer José Antunes has contested oversight authorities’ findings that no signs of mining were present in the PLGs where he declared production. He argues that the satellite images used to reach this conclusion “are not reliable for the Tapajós biome.” He also disputes the irregularity arising from lack of ICMBio authorization, saying his operations were licensed by Pará’s state environmental agency. Regarding the concentration of PLGs, Antunes claims it “represents almost nothing compared to the area of the Tapajós APA” and insists they “are all fully up to date.”

Responding to Ibama’s citations for illegal mercury use in the area of his PLGs, Antunes said in a statement that the violations “were committed by miners who have no link to me, as they themselves stated.” He also criticized what he called sweeping generalizations in the investigations and argued for greater legal certainty for the sector, insisting he acts in good faith and within the law.

For Danicley Aguiar of Greenpeace, the state’s failure to address the region’s economic dependence on mining ensures the activity will continue to thrive, even under a veneer of legality, while inflicting ongoing environmental and social harm.

“Mining violates human rights in a widespread and systematic way. How can the state tolerate such an activity? How can it claim this is essential for regional development?” he asked. For the Munduruku, the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” areas does little to change daily life. Mining continues to contaminate the river, and the river remains the center of their existence.

Translated from the Portuguese original by Matt Sandy.

This investigation was carried out with support from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Brazilian government keeps giving out mining licenses in the Amazon – in spite of evidence of gold ‘laundering’ on May 14, 2026.

“This is a very, very big deal,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “Money speaks.”

At the simplest level, geothermal generation is the process of harnessing the heat within the earth to produce steam, which then spins turbines to generate much-needed electricity. But locating suitable geology and getting deep enough to make power on a utility-scale isn’t easy. Fervo uses horizontal drilling and fiber-optic sensing to tap previously out-of-reach sources. 

“Innovation is allowing these technologies to cover a wider variety of sites,” said Zainab Gilani, a geothermal analyst with research firm Cleantech Group. Fervo, she noted, is using some of the same techniques that the oil and gas industry uses, with the hope of cutting the price of geothermal from $7,000 to $3,000 per kilowatt as it grows. This initial public offering, or IPO, could prove a bellwether for not only that technology, but cleantech more broadly. 

“If Fervo demonstrates that there is money to be made for investors,” said Wagner, that “is going to draw a lot of attention well beyond just the narrow advanced geothermal community.” 

Fervo has successfully deployed its technology in Nevada, producing enough clean energy to power about 2,600 homes. It is building a much bigger facility, Cape Station, in Utah that would produce more than 100 times that amount of electricity and is slated to go online later this year. The prospect has attracted a slew of high-profile investors, including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which has also signed contracts with the company to supply power to its data centers. 

Now it’s the public’s turn to weigh in. 

When Fervo announced it was going public earlier this year, it said it would sell 55.6 million shares at around $21 to $24 each. Its debut comes as electricity demand is rapidly rising in the U.S. The race to build the data centers needed to sustain the artificial intelligence boom has strained grids nationwide, and has made the appetite for reliable energy seem insatiable. The Iran war has only exacerbated high energy prices, and this week Fervo boosted its target to 70 million shares, at around $25 or $26, which would value the company at $7.4 billion. The line has reportedly been out the door. 

Still, the road ahead won’t be easy, and bringing the price of geothermal down will take time. “They’re just not here yet on any large scale,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a power sector consultant. “They are great 2040 and 2050 options.”

Regardless of whether Fervo’s stock sinks or sails in the coming months or years, some see its initial offering as a promising sign for a clean energy industry that has faced political whiplash in recent years. The Inflation Reduction Act that President Joseph Biden signed in 2022 was the nation’s most ambitious climate legislation ever and included billions for solar, wind, geothermal, and other green technologies. But, since returning to office, President Donald Trump and Congress have largely dismantled that legislation, rolled back much of the nation’s wind development, and pushed fossil fuel as the answer to the country’s energy woes. 

While many major projects were canceled in the wake of those changes, Fervo has secured hundreds of millions of dollars in additional financing for Cape Station, and could be about to have a blockbuster IPO. “You’re in this situation where it is very obvious that the oil and gas sector is doing the best it can,” said Jigar Shah, a former senior official at the Department of Energy under Biden. “But the climate sector is the one that’s surging.” 

Earlier this year, Amazon-backed nuclear reactor developer X-Energy raised $1 billion with its public offering and is valued at more than $9 billion. Shah, who is a managing partner at the investment firm Multiplier, says IPOs like these bode well for clean tech. 

“There is a level of confidence coming to our sector, which I think is great,” said Shah. “For a long time, our space has acted as if we’re alternative energy. But when you’re 90 percent of everything that gets added to the grid every year, you’re no longer alternative.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wall Street is betting big on clean energy tech on May 13, 2026.

In 2015, the Obama administration passed rules requiring utilities to clean up the ponds and implement monitoring requirements, transforming the Environmental Protection Agency into the chief regulator overseeing these sites. States were also given the opportunity to assume this regulatory role — as long as they met minimum federal requirements. 

Georgia was among the first to do so. In 2019, the EPA approved the state’s authority to oversee coal ash management. But in their first official act — a “bellwether” for future decisions — regulators at the state’s Environmental Protection Division approved a permit to leave coal ash partly submerged in groundwater at one of Georgia Power’s plants. Despite outcry from communities and a rebuke by the EPA, the agency continues to hold its regulatory authority and has approved another 20 permits for coal ash ponds at roughly a dozen coal plants across the state. 

The Trump administration is now signaling it wants to transfer coal ash oversight to even more states and roll back federal protections. Five states currently have approved coal ash programs, including Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Oklahoma and Georgia were approved during Trump’s first term, Texas received approval during the Biden administration, and North Dakota and Wyoming were approved in the last year. The Trump administration is also in the process of approving Virginia for local coal ash permitting.

“The state agencies that have programs where they can issue permits, we’ve seen, unfortunately, that they’ve not been rigorous in enforcing standards,” said Nick Torrey, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “We know that they are underfunded, underresourced. The utilities are often the most powerful entity in the state and call the shots.”

A spokesperson for the EPA stressed that the agency maintains “backstop authority and will use it” if states fail to meet federal standards. The agency can conduct reviews as necessary, and state programs are only approved if they are at least as protective of public health and the environment as the federal requirements, the spokesperson noted. “If state staffing or funding proves inadequate — or if implementation is otherwise deficient — EPA will address it through these reviews,” they said.

The coal ash decision is part of a broader campaign to shift environmental regulation to the states. During Trump’s first term, the EPA handed over wetlands permitting in Florida to state regulators — the first state to apply for and receive the authority in 25 years. In January, the administration began the process of accepting so-called “Good Neighbor Plans” from eight states. These plans had previously been rejected by the Biden administration for failing to prevent ozone emissions from crossing state lines. And over the past year, the administration has expanded state authority over underground carbon sequestration, giving West Virginia, Arizona, and Texas supervisory authority of carbon injection wells. 

According to the EPA, there are more than 670 coal ash ponds across the country. The lagoons range in size from a few acres to a thousand or more. Over the years, many of these ponds have repeatedly spilled coal ash into waterways. One of the worst accidents took place in 2008 when a dike at a Tennessee Valley Authority pond failed, releasing more than a billion gallons of coal ash. The flood buried homes, and residents are still reporting health issues. Similar incidents have occurred on the Dan River in North Carolina and in eastern Kentucky.

The Obama administration’s 2015 rules — the first oversight of coal ash — required utilities to monitor groundwater near coal ash ponds for contamination and for new ponds to be lined. In cases where there was evidence coal ash was leaching into water, the companies were required to close the ponds, either by draining them or excavating the ash and moving it elsewhere. 

But the rule had major loopholes and didn’t cover all coal ash disposal sites. Lagoons that weren’t actively receiving new material and located at retired coal plants weren’t covered. And crucially, dump sites — where coal ash is collected before being moved into lagoons — were not included in the rule. As a result, when testing indicated heavy metals were leaching into groundwater, utilities could point to the dump sites and claim they were to blame. 

“Utilities would point to these areas and say, ‘We don’t have to clean up our groundwater pollution because we think the pollution is coming from these exempt areas. Therefore, the pollution is exempt,’” said Torrey. 

About six years ago, the Altamaha Riverkeeper, a local nonprofit, tested groundwater near the coal-fired Plant Scherer in Monroe County, Georgia, and began notifying residents that their well water was contaminated with compounds found in coal ash. The county eventually ran water lines, but some low-income residents unable to afford water bills still rely on church waterfilling stations, said Fletcher Sams, executive director of the Altamaha Riverkeeper. “This is an area where the median household income is $30,000,” said Sams. “It’s pretty rural, and some people can’t afford to run pipe from the road and the hookup and the monthly fee for the water.”

Sara Lips, a spokesperson for the  Georgia Environmental Protection Division, said that the agency has a long history of overseeing coal ash in the state prior to the passage of the Obama-era rules. Their oversight has allowed for “timelier permitting process, quicker response to compliance issues, better understanding of community and environmental needs, and the ability for our permits to be more stringent than the federal requirements.” Lips said the agency added five staff members to help oversee coal ash permitting and that the state’s permits comply with federal regulations. “Georgia’s state rules reference and incorporate the federal rules,” she said. Lips also defended the permit at Plant Hammond, which the EPA noted was deficient, saying Georgia Power installed a cover system that “minimizes infiltration, promotes runoff, and collects precipitation to prevent future impoundment of surface water, sediment, or slurry” at the coal ash pond.  

In 2024, the Biden EPA attempted to close these loopholes by expanding coverage with a new rule that applied to all coal ash disposal sites, including so-called “legacy ponds.” But the Trump administration is now attempting to unwind these protections. In April, the EPA proposed exempting older or inactive coal ash disposal sites from the rules and granting state officials more leeway in overseeing coal ash monitoring plans. In press releases announcing these plans and the EPA’s intent to overhaul how coal ash is managed, administrator Lee Zeldin said that the agency “will advance cooperative federalism to allow states to lead the charge on local issues, with federal support. This is just one of many examples where this agency can and will work with our state partners to deliver for the American people.” 

“State environmental agencies know their communities, their geology, their utilities, and their facilities better than any federal regulator in Washington, and empowering them to run their own permit programs, under a federal floor of protection that cannot be lowered and with continuing EPA oversight, delivers stronger, faster, and more accountable results for the people and resources at stake,” the EPA spokesperson said. 

This move comes at a time when state legislatures have slashed budgets for environmental agencies. According to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit founded by former EPA enforcement officials under both parties, more than half of states have cut funding for environmental agencies in the last 15 years. Mississippi’s budget has dropped by more than 70 percent during this time period, while South Dakota had its budget slashed by 61 percent. Three of the five states overseeing coal ash disposal — Texas, Georgia, and Wyoming — have had budget cuts of at least 20 percent over this time. Georgia has reduced its staffing by about 16 percent. 

Not all states that have applied for coal ash authority have received it. In 2024, the EPA rejected Alabama’s application to manage its coal ash ponds because it did not meet standards set in federal law. “Alabama’s permit program does not require that groundwater contamination be adequately addressed during the closure of these coal ash units,” the agency noted in its decision.

Torrey said the Trump administration appears poised to rubber stamp state requests, putting public health and the environment at risk.

“There’s a real retreat from the EPA doing the job it was created to do,” Torrey said. “When you combine that with the weakening and choking of funds for state agencies, it means that people are getting dramatically less protection from pollution.”

This story has been updated with comments from the EPA and Georgia Environmental Protection Division.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA wants to shift monitoring of toxic coal ash to states on May 13, 2026.

The Silver State has emerged as a key source of lithium, the main component in electric vehicle and other batteries. About 85 percent of the country’s known reserves are in Nevada, and several Indigenous nations and organizations, alongside environmentalists, have been fighting for years against its extraction and the environmental risks that creates, including water contamination and biodiversity loss. “This is our land,” said Fermina Stevens, a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone and the executive director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project. “We should have a say in what happens. But I know that they don’t want us there because Nevada is so rich in all of these minerals.” 

The three projects Amnesty International highlights in its report are Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, Nevada North Lithium Project, and Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project. Each is located primarily on public land that the Western Shoshone and Paiute people consider unceded territory. Thacker Pass is under construction and Rhyolite Ridge is slated to begin construction this year, while Nevada North is in the exploratory phase. 

Amnesty International’s report says all three are violating Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent. That principle, known as FPIC, is an international standard that affirms Indigenous peoples’ right to approve or deny projects that impact their land and communities. Although the projects were approved by federal agencies, Amnesty International argues the review processes fell short of FPIC and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP.

“They’ve got to come down on the right side,” Mark Dummett, the organization’s head of business and human rights, said of the mining companies. “They’ve got to come down on the side of human rights, rather than getting the minerals at all costs.” He added that, regardless of domestic laws in the countries in which they operate, these firms must follow international human rights standards. The report also highlights the impact of the Trump administration’s push for deregulation, including fast-tracked permits and limited environmental review, which reduces the ability of Indigenous peoples to offer full consent. 

In a statement, a spokesperson from the U.S. Department of Interior said, “The climate crazed activists behind this report are notorious for making baseless claims, repeatedly rejected by courts, as part of their pathetic rage against energy production that is not only bipartisan, but proven to benefit the American people.” They also said that a review of lithium projects in Nevada by the federal Bureau of Land Management included extensive environmental review and opportunity for tribal engagement.

Nevada is experiencing a lithium boom that has seen more than 20,000 claims filed. The report also comes amid global resistance by Indigenous peoples to “green transition” mining that they say comes at the expense of their land and rights. Given the increasing demand for minerals like lithium, cobalt, and copper, Dummett said that mining companies around the world are taking advantage of gaps in regulation and human rights enforcement. “The way that this mining has always taken place has been incredibly damaging to the environment and people,” Dummett said. “We don’t want to see the mistakes of the past repeated.”

Stevens said that although her people have experienced a long history of land theft and abuse by the U.S. government and corporations, consultation has grown even more perfunctory amid the worldwide drive for lithium, which has surged since the war in Iran. “War and the military complex is all that they can see,” she said. “And so they’re blinded to the things that are sacred, that are more important for human survival. And I just don’t think that they care about those things.”

Lithium Americas, the owner of the Thacker Pass mine, disputed many of the report’s claims in a response submitted to Amnesty International, including inadequate consultation, environmental risks, and violation of Indigenous rights. Its reply also noted that UNDRIP is not binding in the United States, but argued that the project complies with it anyway. “The Thacker Pass Project has the potential to significantly advance America’s electrification efforts, reduce carbon emissions, and strengthen domestic supply chains for critical minerals — strengthening America’s energy future. LAC has made stakeholder engagement, including with Tribes, an important part of the development of the Project,” its response reads.  

A spokesperson for Ioneer, the owner of the Rhyolite Ridge project, said the company “respectfully but firmly disagrees with the findings released by Amnesty International,” and highlighted the company’s engagement with tribes. “We take great pride in our compliance with all U.S. legal requirements and remain committed to a transparent process that respects tribal sovereignty while delivering a reliable and secure domestic supply of critical minerals,” the spokesperson said.

Surge and Evolution, the owners of the Nevada North Lithium Project, did not respond to a request for comment, but in a response to Amnesty International, Evolution said, “We take all reasonable efforts to conduct proactive and ongoing engagement with Indigenous peoples.”

Indigenous leaders said they do not expect the mining companies to change, but will continue the fight to protect their land. “We can survive without technology, but we can’t survive without water,” Stevens said. “We can’t save the Earth through the energy transition while we’re simultaneously destroying biodiversity.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Report: Nevada’s lithium boom comes at the expense of Indigenous rights on May 12, 2026.

Hantaviruses are an ancient family of rodent-borne pathogens that likely caused disease in humans long before they first appeared in medical records in the 1950s. The viruses infect people via rodent waste — often through the inhalation of dust containing trace amounts of the excreta. Andes hantavirus, the strain that gripped the MV Hondius on its polar cruise, is one of a few hantaviruses known to cause hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare but often deadly illness.

The Andes strain is also the only known hantavirus that can be transmitted human-to-human — a characteristic turning a rare rodent-borne infection into a multinational emergency, just a few years after the world was caught flat-footed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The good news is that the Andes hantavirus, while uniquely deadly, is likely nowhere nearly as transmissible as COVID-19. Nevertheless, the outbreak is illuminating the complexity of responding to infectious disease outbreaks as international cooperation on public health issues has become fractured and contentious — all while global pandemics are only becoming more likely overall. A month before the first patients onboard the MV Hondius became symptomatic, Argentina officially completed the process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization, joining the U.S. in leaving a global health alliance that exists in large part to coordinate responses to these very kinds of cross-border disease outbreaks. 

The emergency also points to another growing challenge for global public health: Climate change is altering the rainfall, vegetation, and habitat conditions that influence rodent populations — changes that experts say boost the odds that the pathogens these animals carry will spill over into human populations.

While the hantavirus’s one-to-six-week incubation period means the outbreak could have originated in any of the passengers’ home countries, a possible culprit is the ship’s stop for a birding expedition near Ushuaia, which is home to a landfill that attracts rodents looking for food. Argentina’s health authorities have already documented a sharp rise in hantavirus this season: 101 infections have been recorded since June 2025, about twice as many as there were in the same period a year earlier.

The country’s health ministry hasn’t yet determined what’s behind the surge, but research suggests that climate change may play a role. Argentina and neighboring countries in South America endured years of severe drought between 2021 and 2024, including Argentina’s worst dry spell in more than 60 years in 2023, followed by extreme rainfall last year. Weather extremes exacerbated by global warming change how rodents behave, according to Kirk Douglas, a senior scientist who studies hantaviruses and climate change at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, in Barbados.

Prolonged drought sends rats and mice into populated areas in search of food, which can put people at higher risk of contracting the virus. Sudden rainfall following drought causes trees and shrubs to produce a windfall of nuts and seeds, which tend to benefit rodents and boost their numbers — all the while increasing the risk of transmission from animal to human.

That doesn’t mean there’s a one-to-one relationship between global temperature rise and rodent-driven risk, however, and climate change is hardly the only force at play. A complex web of natural and human-made landscape changes can increase or decrease contact between humans and rodents. Increased temperatures and humidity, for example, don’t seem to influence the disease ecology of hantavirus in the same way that drought and precipitation do.

“Hantavirus is sensitive to the changes climate change will bring,” Douglas emphasized. “It’s all dependent on what the prevailing climate impact is.”

That complexity makes hantavirus risk difficult to predict — and easy to overlook. In the United States, hantavirus has been rare since federal surveillance began in 1993. There were fewer than 1,000 total confirmed cases up to 2023, the latest year that data is available. About 35 percent of those cases, almost all of which occurred west of the Mississippi River, resulted in death. 

As in South America, the dynamics of hantavirus in the U.S. may be shifting. The places most at risk, federal scientists reported in a study published last year, are dry landscapes where homes are spread out, many kinds of rodents live nearby, and communities may have fewer resources to prevent or respond to disease — conditions that describe broad swaths of the American West.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change could help hantavirus find more hosts on May 12, 2026.

The sheer magnitude of waste accumulated over decades of Carnivals — and its impact on the flood-prone city’s drainage system — shocked many residents and city officials. 

“Once you hear a number like that, there’s no going back,” then-Public Works director Dani Galloway said at the time. “So we’ve got to do better.”

But nearly a decade later, New Orleans is generating more Mardi Gras garbage than ever. During the roughly five weeks of this year’s Carnival season, crews collected 1,363 tons of beaded necklaces, beer cans, plastic cups, and other refuse along the city’s parade routes — a 24 percent increase from the year before and the highest total on record. The trash tonnage is the equivalent of 741 cars. In New Orleans terms, it’s roughly the weight of the Steamboat Natchez or more than 1 million king cakes.  

“To see the waste go up that much, it’s just absurd,” said Brett Davis, founder of Grounds Krewe, a nonprofit group trying to make Mardi Gras more sustainable through recycling and waste reduction efforts. 

It’s a century-old tradition for riders on parade floats to shower crowds with beaded necklaces, toys, and other items — collectively known as “throws.” Most are cheap plastic trinkets. The beads are often laden with toxic chemicals, including unsafe levels of lead. Many throws are dropped moments after they’re caught, then crushed under feet and eventually swept up and hauled to landfills. 

City officials initially blamed the rise in rubbish on the popularity of this year’s festivities, which ran from January 6 to February 17 and included more than 30 float parades. An estimated 2.2 million people visited downtown New Orleans during the Carnival season, about 10 percent more than in 2025, according to the Downtown Development District, which drew on data from location analytics company Placer.ai.

“The increase from last year was directly associated with the larger crowds,” Matt Torri, the city’s sanitation director, told the City Council in March. “Anybody who was out at this year’s parades definitely took note that there seemed to be more people enjoying the Carnival season, which is great for the city.”

But a Verite News analysis of annual attendance and city cleanup records shows no clear relationship between crowds and trash levels. Overall, Mardi Gras waste tonnage has trended upward over the past decade, regardless of the year-to-year changes in attendance. The Mardi Gras season in 2020, for instance, drew more people — about 2.4 million — but produced roughly 241 fewer tons of garbage than in 2026.

In the early 2010s, trash tonnage hovered around 880 tons. It spiked in 2017, surpassing 1,320 tons, and has not fallen below 1,000 tons since. The only exception was 2021, when no trash was recorded because the city canceled parades and most Carnival festivities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Since 2020, when the Downtown Development District began tracking visits in the Central Business and Warehouse districts, annual attendance has stayed within a relatively tight range, between 1.9 million and 2.4 million. Still, the trash tally has swung wildly, indicating that other factors are at play. The development district doesn’t track citywide visits, but its annual downtown tally is considered the most accurate indication of Carnival attendance. 

The office of Mayor Helena Moreno and the city’s sanitation department did not respond to requests for comment. 

Parade trash remains a problem for the city’s drainage system. After the infamous bead blockage of 2018, the city began installing temporary filter contraptions, known as “gutter buddies,” at catch basins along parade routes, but conservation groups say the outfalls still spew more litter into canals and Lake Pontchartrain during the Carnival season.

The upswing in trash is occurring alongside a seemingly contradictory trend of waste reduction. In recent years, many parade organizations, called krewes, have cut back on plastic beads and other “junk” throws. They’ve opted for higher-value items like socks, baseball caps, wooden cooking spoons, and metal drinking cups. 

Grounds Krewe and other groups have also expanded their recycling efforts. They set set up stations to collect bottles, cans, and reusable throws, and some volunteers even pick through the parade debris for recyclable items. This year, the groups diverted about 28 tons from landfills. That’s despite the city pulling back its support for recycling this year because of budget concerns. Even if the city government spent the $200,000 it initially earmarked for recycling, “it’s not going to reverse the 24 percent gain” in waste, Davis said.  

There was some hope that the volume of throws would be curbed by rising prices for beads and other trinkets, a result of higher inflation and President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs on imports from China, where most beads are made. Some parade-goers said they noticed the change, taking to social media to complain about stingier krewes.

“We are really perplexed,” Davis said. “All that is happening, with people throwing fewer beads and a lot of krewes switching to higher-quality throws, but waste is still going upward.” 

The swelling tonnage may have less to do with the throwers and more with the catchers. Davis and some city leaders say parade-goers are setting up earlier, staying longer, and bringing even more of the comforts of home: folding chairs, canopy tents, coolers, grills, and wagonloads of food. They’re also chaining together walls of ladders, erecting scaffolding, installing portable toilets, and plunking down generators and old sofas. As the season ends, many of these items are broken, dirty, or too much of a hassle to haul home. 

These abandoned items, which can range in weight from 5 pounds for a folding chair to 300 pounds for a couch, are an increasingly heavy lift for cleanup crews, City Council President JP Morrell said.

“The reality is that they get their use out of this stuff, and then it becomes a tremendous amount of debris that our workers have to deal with because these people had no intention of ever picking this stuff up,” he said. “It goes towards a sense of abject entitlement — that our entire city exists to serve other people’s whims.”

Many of these gear-laden revelers are territorial, roping off patches of sidewalk or spreading tarps across grassy street medians, known locally as neutral grounds. These public-space appropriators have come to be known as the “Krewe of Chad,” after the name, spraypainted across a large patch of grass, went viral in 2013. 

These “Chadders,” as Morrell calls them, appear emboldened by the recent ebb in the enforcement of the city’s parade rules. Officially, early birds aren’t supposed to set up until four hours before a parade starts, but this rule is regularly flouted. In 2024, the list of banned items grew to include many of the things that have become commonplace — tents, tarps, and viewing platforms among them. A crackdown that year, which included the seizure of truckloads of encampment gear, appeared to briefly change behavior, Davis said. 

But last year, the city announced it would scale back enforcement and prioritize security after a terror attack on New Year’s Day killed 14 people on Bourbon Street. 

Enforcement was further scaled back by the city’s current budget crisis. Amid layoffs and other cutbacks aimed at reducing a $220 million deficit, Morrell admitted that efforts to clear Carnival encampments would be “spotty.”

“How are they going to enforce it? Well, to be honest, we’re hard up for cash,” Morrell said on an Instagram post in early February. He stressed that police and other city departments would “do their best,” but enforcement wouldn’t be as “robust as it could be.”

Torri, the sanitation director, said the city had the capacity to clear large items on just one day before the final cleanup on Fat Tuesday. “Mardi Gras Day was a major undertaking,” he told the council in March. Crews started working at 8 a.m. and didn’t finish until 1 a.m. “It’s a full day of cleaning because of everything that people have brought. Tarps, ladders, tents, coolers, grills are left because they’re disposable things that were only intended to last the weeks of Mardi Gras.”

Davis predicted the trend toward fewer but better throws will continue, and his organization will keep pushing for more reuse and recycling. But, he added, the policies meant to curb parade encampments — and the waste they leave behind — are only as effective as their enforcement.

“Having the krewes throw less is great, but what’s really heavy is a couch and all the stuff people brought out in wheelbarrows,” Davis said. “Unless we have police out there and the trucks to haul it away, this kind of behavior creeps back. And that’s what we’re seeing now.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New Orleans wants to fix its Mardi Gras mess. So why is the trash pile still growing? on May 11, 2026.

In February, following a winter of record-breaking heat, snowpack in various mountain ranges across the American West reached record lows. March came in even hotter, smashing records in states across the region.

“What happened in March was unprecedented and stunning and disturbing and out of this world, frankly — we had temperatures the likes of which we have never seen and couldn’t have happened without human-caused climate change,” said Brad Udall, a senior water and climate researcher at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center. “We had a crummy snowpack that went from crummy to god-awful in three weeks.”

This snowmelt crisis is having dire impacts on the Colorado River, one of the most crucial water sources in the West, which provides water for 40 million people across seven states. River flow in some areas on the Colorado had slowed to a trickle last week, thanks to the early snowmelt this year.

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The Colorado River isn’t just a crucial water supply: It also provides power for more than 25 million people through dams at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the country. Low water levels in those reservoirs spell trouble for electricity generation. As of Tuesday morning, Lake Mead was sitting at just 17 feet above its record low level, set in July of 2022.

This record dry season is also colliding with a decades-long political crisis on the Colorado River. For years, the states drawing water from the river have sparred over how to equitably divide the supply from the river, as the growth of agriculture and a series of climate-charged droughts have begun threatening the long-term water supply. Alfalfa for cattle feed is the biggest consumer of water from the Colorado, using more water than all of the cities along the river combined. States have missed key deadlines, including one in February, to renegotiate the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which regulates how water in the region is distributed. Each state gets an annual allotment, and the total amount of water is supposed to be divided evenly between an upper basin and a lower basin.

Earlier this month, following dire projections for the summer, the U.S. Interior Department stepped in, announcing a series of actions intended to keep hydropower at Lake Powell running. The government acknowledges that this could lessen hydropower at Lake Mead as well as water availability in states along the lower part of the river.

With all this chaos, there’s a chance, Udall said, that this season’s scarce water could cause a historic first in the next few years: States in the upper basin of the river could fail to deliver enough water to states in the lower basin, violating the 1922 agreement for the first time. This could trigger a potential lawsuit between states.

“What’s frustrating to somebody like myself is this is all foreseeable,” said Udall. “Those of us who are kind of in the know, and that includes a lot of people in the Colorado River Basin, have seen something like this coming for a long, long time.”

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Even with this dire set of circumstances, it’s unlikely that the millions of people who rely on the Colorado River will reach Day Zero, the term for when municipal water sources run dry. No U.S. city has ever gotten to that point.

However, there’s a region that could be inching closer to this kind of catastrophe. Officials in Corpus Christi, the eighth-largest city in Texas, said last week that the city is set to reach a Level 1 drought emergency — what it defines as 180 days of water demand outpacing supply — by September. Some projections say that, barring major weather patterns that bring more rain, municipal water sources could run dry by next year.

People living in Corpus Christi are already under restrictions for their water use, including limits on lawn watering and car washing. Residential water bills also increased by an average of just under $5 this year. City officials said that industrial customers would be asked to cut use by 25 percent in September.

“We don’t want to wreck our economy,” Corpus Christi city manager Peter Zanoni told NBC News of the decision to wait until September to declare a Level 1 drought emergency, which would force those industrial customers to curb their use. “We don’t want to have operations close down.”

Corpus Christi’s water supplies come overwhelmingly from surface water sources. Two of the most important local sources — the Choke Canyon Reservoir and Lake Corpus Christi — have reached critically low levels over the past few years as drought has gripped the region. As of Tuesday, they were sitting at 7.4 percent full and 8.7 percent full, respectively.

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Many of the city’s problems stem from industrial water use. Corpus Christi is a major petrochemical hub, and the largest industrial consumer of water in the area, according to permit statistics obtained by Inside Climate News, is a joint Exxon Mobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation plastics plant. The plant used an average of 13.5 million gallons of water each day between 2022 and 2024. The average residential customer, according to the city, uses 6,000 gallons per month. (Exxon Mobil did not return a request for comment.)

The city has discussed building a desalination plant to provide water to its industrial customers — including the Exxon plant, which began operating in 2022 — for years. But the project’s potential costs ballooned to more than $1 billion, while residents expressed concerns about the ecological impacts the plant could have. Last year, regulators voted to pass on the project, with no backup plan for water supply in place. On Wednesday, the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office had denied Corpus Christi additional funding for a separate desalination plant.

“Some lessons to learn from this situation that are important for a lot of cities, especially in the Southwest, is that water infrastructure projects are getting more expensive with time,” said Shane Walker, director of the Water and the Environment Research Center at Texas Tech University. “If you think you can wait around and get a cheaper deal on a water infrastructure project, it’s probably the opposite.”

This push and pull between attracting business and what a city can maintain waterwise, Walker said, is a common tension for city planners. As more cities in Texas see population growth — and struggle with planning out their water needs — more of them need to be thinking much farther ahead.

“You have to think of a 20-year time horizon as urgent,” Walker said. “If you’re relying on groundwater — groundwater is a finite resource. Lakes are vulnerable to drought. What’s your alternative supply?”

There could be some short- and medium-term relief for both Corpus Christi and the Colorado River. At a water update briefing last week, Zanoni said that recent rains had been “beneficial” to the region, helping to boost water levels in Lake Texana, another water source for the city. Udall said that recent wet weather has also helped stabilize some conditions out West. And the upcoming El Niño phenomenon — forecast to be one of the most intense El Niños on record — could bring a heavy monsoon season to the West this summer.

But both the municipal situation in Corpus Christi and the regional crisis for the Colorado River have specific similarities: a lack of attention to slow-building problems, exacerbated by industrial use. Climate change is pushing water crises like these to a new type of breaking point.

“Around the world we’ve seen climate change events that are really big and massive,” Udall said of the crisis on the Colorado River. “Maybe this is the first worldwide climate change crisis that’s going to force really fundamental policy-level decisions to be made, and fundamental changes in how we operate. Seven states, two nations, 40-plus million people, a whole bunch of farmers, and major cities are going to have to completely rethink how they use this resource.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This summer, the American water crisis becomes real on May 10, 2026.

A few years after he graduated from high school and got married, Smarsh went to work in a coal mine in his home county, just as his father and grandfather had. “It was the best-paying job around,” he said. “It still is.” Now Smarsh, 42, has progressive massive fibrosis — the most severe form of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or black lung.

There is no cure for Smarsh’s condition. He tries to slow the progression with “piles of meds,” he said, but things will eventually worsen, potentially to the point of heart failure. In patients with advanced disease, a flu or common cold can lead to a kind of drowning as the lungs fill with fluid. Smarsh’s doctors say he won’t live to see 50. 

“Most people think coal mining is a thing of the past,” said Deanna Istik, CEO of Lungs at Work, a black lung clinic in Washington County, Pennsylvania. “Meanwhile, we see more people being diagnosed with black lung disease than we ever have before.” 

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Coal mining has always been a hazardous occupation. But today’s miners face a new danger because they’re inhaling something worse than the coal dust that settles in lungs, triggering immune cells to form nodules, masses, and scarified black tissue. Most of the large coal seams in the mountains of Appalachia are gone now. To reach smaller seams, miners must cut through much more rock with high levels of quartz, which gets pulverized into crystalline silica.

When tiny particles of silica are inhaled, they act like minute shards of glass, leading to severe tissue scarring and inflammation and eventually to progressive massive fibrosis, the most severe form of black lung disease. Researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, estimate the disease now afflicts one in 10 working miners who have worked in mines for at least 25 years. Rising rates of the disease have led to stark increases in lung transplants and mortality. Between 2013 and 2017, hundreds of cases of progressive massive fibrosis were identified at three Virginia clinics alone, leading NIOSH to declare a renewed black lung epidemic. Black-lung-associated deaths, which declined between 1999 and 2018, rose between 2020 and 2023.

The disease is on the uptick at a time when the Trump administration is calling for the expansion of coal production. Last fall, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it was investing $625 million in coal projects, and this month, President Trump signed an executive order reaffirming coal as essential to national security, a move that will direct billions of dollars in federal funding to the industry. But while the administration is calling for more coal, it is simultaneously delaying implementation of new regulations that would protect miners from deadly silica. 

In the United States, black lung was officially acknowledged as a workplace-related illness only in the late 1960s, after a highly publicized disaster at a West Virginia mine killed 78 coal miners. Subsequent strikes and protests led to the passage of the 1969 Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which mandated federal safety inspections of mines, set fines for violations, and established a benefits program to compensate miners with black lung. 

Rates of the disease dropped almost immediately, and by the end of the 20th century, thanks to the implementation of those standards and a strong union presence in mines in Pennsylvania and across Appalachia, black lung was nearly eradicated. 

In the last two decades, U.S. coal production has fallen precipitously. It peaked in 2008 at more than 1,170 million tons, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration; in 2023, production was 578 million tons, a drop of more than 50 percent. 

But in Pennsylvania, says Istik, “this is not a dead industry. We’re still cutting coal.” A 2024 report by the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance counted more than 5,000 mining jobs generating some $2.2 billion in economic output. Nationwide, there are still close to 40,000 coal workers. 

Black lung diagnoses continue to mount. Doctors and miner advocates say the condition is underdiagnosed, as many miners are reluctant to undergo testing for fear of losing their jobs should their employer find out. “I think there’s always going to be that fear of retribution,” said Istik. But eventually, she added, the symptoms become debilitating. Smarsh, a patient of Lungs at Work, didn’t see a doctor about his labored breathing until his wife, Alicia, insisted he had no choice. 

Black lung clinics are seeing more and more patients like Smarsh, who’ve gotten sick in their 30s and 40s. In earlier generations, miners might have needed decades of coal dust exposure to develop serious disease, if they got sick at all. “My dad and my pap were both miners, and they didn’t get it,” Smarsh said. “So, I thought, ‘Who says I’m going to?’” But today’s workers, who are breathing a much higher proportion of silica, can develop a disabling illness in much less time. 

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Smarsh worked mostly as a roof bolter — the person responsible for installing supports to prevent cave-ins — drilling up into rock. He spent eight years underground before his lung condition made it impossible for him to work, or to walk across his own backyard without using an inhaler. 

Experts have understood the dangers of silica dust for decades. In the 1970s, NIOSH suggested regulations that would limit exposure to 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air, averaged over a 10-hour workday in the mine. In 2016, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration adopted the 50-microgram silica standard for other occupations, like construction and manufacturing. But in 2017, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, or MSHA — which is mandated to conduct quarterly inspections of underground mines and enforce safety standards — responded to industry pressure and set the limit for mining at 100 micrograms over an eight-hour workday. 

After a negotiation process that spanned years and multiple administrations and involved mining industry lobbyists, legal groups, and scientists from NIOSH and other agencies, MSHA announced in 2024 that it would issue a new rule reducing the silica exposure limit in mines to 50 micrograms, with enforcement to begin in April 2025. 

The new rule would require operators to use “engineering controls,” such as improved ventilation systems, as the primary means of meeting the standard. Those tools could be supplemented, when necessary, by “administrative controls,” such as clothing decontamination and avoidance of especially dusty areas, to keep miners from breathing unacceptable amounts of silica.

The National Mining Association and other industry groups mounted a legal challenge, arguing that when ventilation systems aren’t enough to bring respirable silica levels below the 50-microgram standard, operators should be able to require miners to use respirators to achieve compliance.

But “respirators are really the last line of defense, because they aren’t foolproof,” Istik said. “Silica is such a small particle; it still comes through.” 

Smarsh wore a respirator some of the time when he was underground. But there were other times, he said, when it was too difficult to see or breathe through it. “Anytime you’re underground, you see dust,” he said. “But it’s not the dust you see that gets you. It’s the little stuff you don’t see.” 

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While respirators are important safety equipment, it should not be the coal miner’s responsibility not to get black lung, said Erin Bates, communications director of the United Mine Workers of America. It is the company, she added, that must ensure a safe work environment for its employees.

When the Trump administration came into office, it cut MSHA’s budget and staff. The agency had already been operating at a disadvantage: According to data from the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, MSHA’s coal mine enforcement staff has been cut in half over the last decade. The American Federation of Government Employees reported that another 7 percent of the agency’s full-time workforce accepted the Trump administration’s “Fork in the Road” buyout last year, and 90 newly hired mine inspectors had their job offers rescinded. There were concerns among black lung experts and advocates about the diminished agency’s ability to implement the new silica exposure rule. The loss included people “we desperately needed,” Carey Clarkson, who represents Labor Department workers for the federation, told NPR at the time. “I can’t image how many years of experience we lost.” 

A few days before the April 2025 enforcement date, the rule hit two different roadblocks: The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency stay of the rule in response to a petition led by another industry group — the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association — and MSHA itself announced it would delay implementation to give operators more time to “come into compliance.” 

The litigation has remained in limbo. Last November, MSHA moved to have the legal proceedings paused as it “reconsiders” parts of the rule, and earlier this month it announced the delay would continue “indefinitely” pending judicial review. The agency did not respond to a request for comment. 

Bates said the union is disheartened. The agency “was literally created for the health and safety of coal miners, but they don’t want to take that into consideration,” she said.

Rebecca Shelton, director of policy for the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, which has been advocating for a new silica rule since the late 2000s, said her organization had hoped to see the rule implemented under the Biden administration “because we were concerned about challenges it might face.” The process was slowed by intense lobbying, she said, and MSHA’s need to study the rule’s impact across diverse mining industries. 

“If the Trump administration actually cared about protecting coal miners from black lung, we’d have a strong silica rule in place right now,” she said in a statement issued by the center after MSHA announced the indefinite delay. “Instead, they are hiding behind a ridiculous legal process to delay action while miners get sick and die.” 

Smarsh said his 19-year-old son wants to work in the coal mines. “Me and my wife tell him all the time, you see what I’m going through? All the good coal that was around here is gone. Now there’s nothing but rock and silica.” Gone too, Smarsh said, is any trust he once had in a coal company to keep miners safe. 

“All they’re worried about is ‘you better have that black gold,’” he said. “They say they care about miners, but you go underground, you’re taking the risk, for you to get nothing but sick, and to fill their pockets full.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In coal country, black lung surges as federal protections stall on May 9, 2026.

Two new studies show how simply planting more trees can provide huge temperature benefits, not to mention how the additional plant life would boost biodiversity and improve mental health for urbanites. The first finds that tree cover can cancel half of the heat island effect, in which the urban jungle gets much hotter than the surrounding countryside. The second compares neighborhoods in 65 American cities, finding that canopy-deprived areas suffer up to 40 percent more excess heat than heavily greened spots. 

Places like New York and Atlanta and Los Angeles, then, don’t just have to foster and maintain their “gray” infrastructure — roads and sidewalks and such — but their living infrastructure as well. “Heat is already a major public health threat. It kills 350,000 people a year by some estimates, and it’s worse in cities,” said Robert McDonald, the Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist for nature-based solutions and the Europe region, who spearheaded the first paper. “The urban heat island effect would be about double what it is now if world cities didn’t have trees.”

By increasing their canopies, metropolises dress themselves like their more comfortable rural counterparts. A vegetated area cools itself both because plants “sweat” by releasing moisture from their leaves, and because trees provide shade. By contrast, concrete absorbs the sun’s energy, driving temperatures up, and releases it throughout the night. That beats back the cooling typically experienced in the evening, meaning urbanites without air conditioning don’t get respite. This is especially dangerous for vulnerable groups like the elderly, and it’s one reason heat kills more Americans every year than all other extreme weather events combined.

Such conditions are especially dangerous for those living in lower-income neighborhoods, which tend to have significantly less tree canopy than richer areas. In industrialized areas, for example, vast stretches of concrete absorb and radiate heat. In urban centers, policymakers may have prioritized building dense housing without incorporating ample tree cover. Compare that to the suburbs, which have plenty of parks, curbside trees, and yards to cool things down.

The differences in greenery between neighborhoods translates into striking differences in temperatures. The second study calculated this “cooling dividend,” or the difference in the average urban heat island in areas with low and high canopy cover. It found gaps reaching almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit. If you’re lucky enough to live where there’s lots of trees, you might experience 20 to 40 percent less excess heat. The report found that this is playing out regularly across the U.S. “I think what maybe was surprising is that there was a dramatic amount of consistency,” said Steve Whitesell, executive editor at the Healthy Green Spaces Coalition, which authored the report. “In other words, they were all showing an impact.”

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The trick is not just planting enough trees, but planting the right kind. The biggest species provide the most shade, of course. But more cryptically, some provide more evaporative cooling than others — drought-adapted trees, for instance, try to retain as much water as they can. A neighborhood might also want to prioritize food production, opting for trees that create both shade and fruit. Favoring native varieties will also help support native animal life, like birds and pollinating insects. 

Climate change, though, is complicating these calculations. Even in rural areas, without the added temperatures of the urban heat island effect, some places are getting so hot that native plants are moving north in search of cooler climes. Within cities, they are blasted with still more heat — and temperatures will only climb from here. So urban arborists aren’t just planting species that will thrive today, but will survive the climate of tomorrow. “I think that for us to use trees as a type of living infrastructure, that can counter those increased temperatures, is paramount,” said Edith de Guzman, a cooperative extension researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies urban heat but wasn’t involved in either study. “I think it’s pretty much the most important thing we can do.”

But trees alone can’t save urbanites. McDonald’s study found that even if cities planted as many as possible, it would only offset 20 percent of the potential running up of temperatures due to climate change. Designers will have to deploy other techniques, like reflective rooftops, to manage the heat. That’s especially important in poorer nations, whose cities are rapidly growing but have much less tree cover than richer countries, the study found. “It’s just to say that climate change is a big enough challenge that while planting more tree cover helps with temperatures, it won’t do the job by itself,” McDonald said. 

Urban areas have been here before, McDonald added. As the Industrial Revolution kicked in, people in overpopulated metropolises would have to travel to the countryside to glimpse greenery. An exception was London, with its many publicly available green spaces, which Paris took as inspiration when it essentially rebuilt itself in the 1800s and made room for massive parks. Today, planners are similarly bringing some of the country back into the city, blurring the lines between rural and urban. “We know how to increase tree cover, if we put our minds to it,” McDonald said. “But it takes effort and time.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The solution to urban heat is much, much simpler than you think on May 8, 2026.

Last year, the International Maritime Organization, or IMO, the United Nations agency overseeing global shipping, was poised to adopt a plan to bring that down to zero. But that was before the Trump administration stepped in, threatening countries with visa restrictions, tariffs, and port fees if they supported the effort. As a result, the ambitious plan to decarbonize global shipping has been on the rocks for months. Alternate proposals that dispense with the core function of the original Net-Zero Framework, or NZF — a per-ton fee on greenhouse gas emissions above a certain threshold — seemed to be gaining traction, threatening climate progress in the sector.

But at a meeting of U.N. member countries last week, none of those watered-down proposals received much attention. Instead, a slim majority of countries expressed vocal support for the NZF, indicating that a narrow path to adopting the framework as originally intended still exists. 

“A genuine spirit of collaboration and optimism pervaded the negotiations,” said Em Fenton, a senior director at the U.K.-based climate group Opportunity Green, who attended the meeting in London. “There were people who did not want to see progress, but a vast majority of delegates in the room were working together.”

The Trump administration opposes the NZF on the grounds that it would burden American consumers and businesses. In public documents submitted to the IMO, the administration has drawn a hard line at penalizing carbon-intensive fuel types and the inclusion of an “economic element,” such as a tax or levy, in the framework. 

“The United States submits that the most appropriate path forward is to end consideration of the IMO Net-Zero Framework entirely,” it noted. 

But supporters of the weaker alternative proposals — which were submitted by Japan, Liberia, Argentina, Panama, and others — did not entirely derail the majority’s push to advance the original NZF. The path to adopting the net-zero plan is a long one — and there’s still time for talks to fall apart. Opponents of the framework can tank it by gathering support from one-third of member countries, or from a smaller group of countries if that group controls half of the world’s shipping tonnage, per IMO rules.

Just four countries — Liberia, Panama, Bahamas, and the Marshall Islands — account for roughly half of the world’s registered ships. Ships can be owned by a company in one country, operated by another, and registered — or “flagged” — in a third, much like offshore banking for tax purposes. As a result, these so-called flag countries have extraordinary leverage during IMO negotiations. Since some of these flag states have already voiced their opposition to the NZF, Evelyne Williams, a research associate with the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, said that “you’re kind of already in that neighborhood of the 50 percent blocking threshold.”

However, “cautious optimism is reasonable” at this stage, she added. “[The NZF] hasn’t been abandoned, but it’s kind of sobering to look at the blocking arithmetic still available.”

While key countries oppose the Net-Zero Framework, the shipping industry itself — the companies that actually own and operate the ships and make their profits from the delivery of goods — has largely backed the effort in the hopes that a single uniform global tax will put every company on the same footing, no matter where they operate. Shippers are already navigating European carbon regulations and want to avoid a patchwork of rules by different countries.

“Our industry needs the IMO as our global regulator,” said David Loosley, CEO and secretary general of BIMCO, a trade organization representing shippers, on LinkedIn after the meeting last week ended. “To arrive at implementable regulations at a global level, we need the backing of all member states. Without consensus, global regulations will be ineffective and will fail to provide a level playing field for a truly global industry.”

At the meeting last week, U.S. delegates distributed leaflets laying out their projections of the country-by-country economic effects of the Net-Zero Framework. One handout, summarizing the effects on Peru, led to nearly $800 million in compliance costs. But experts who examined the figures said the analysis was misleading and utilized outdated assumptions. 

“The data is a clear effort being made by a country acting in strong self-interest and using misinformation and exaggeration to the detriment of other countries’ interests,” said Fenton. 

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Fenton expects countries to continue engaging in bilateral negotiations and technical discussions in the coming months. Several finer points — such as the distribution of funds collected as a result of the framework’s fee — are yet to be decided. After the U.S. intervention last year, a vote to adopt the framework was delayed by a year. As a result, the earliest countries can vote to adopt the framework is November. Talks are scheduled for that month to get the framework — or an alternate proposal — over the finish line.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is trying to kill a carbon tax on global shipping. He may not succeed. on May 8, 2026.

According to a study published today in the journal Science, every dollar that the agency spent on such tactics avoided $3.73 in smoke, property, and emissions harm. “A lot of people have suggested that there could be potential economic benefits,” said Frederik Strabo, the lead author of the paper and an economist with University of California, Davis. “But it’s been a pretty understudied area.”

The study analyzed high-resolution data from 285 wildfires across 11 Western states between 2017 and 2023 that burned through areas where the Forest Service had reduced the fuel load. On average, the treatments decreased the total area burned by 36 percent and cut the amount of land burned at moderate to high severity by 26 percent. Researchers then modeled the economic benefits of those reductions. 

The paper estimated that fuel treatments prevented $1.39 billion in health and workforce productivity losses tied to wildfire smoke, $895 million in structural damage, and $503 million in carbon dioxide emissions. Overall, that amounted to an average savings of about $3.73 for every dollar the government spent. The research also found that larger treatments — those covering more than 2,400 acres — were the most cost effective. 

“It’s a significant number, but when you compare it to the total cost of wildfires it’s small,” caveated Strabo, noting that the cost of the worst disasters can reach hundreds of billions of dollars. But he also said the boon could be even greater than calculated. The research didn’t, for example, examine any savings or benefits for the multibillion dollar outdoor recreation industry. “We’re only capturing a specific subset of benefits.”

Morgan Varner, the director of fire research at the conservation nonprofit Tall Timbers, called the work “the missing link for a lot of fuels treatment research,” and said that data like this can be extremely helpful in guiding decision-makers. “Studies like this round out the story and provide more evidence for the benefits of these treatments.” 

David Calkin, who until last year was a Forest Service research scientist, also applauded the analysis, calling it “novel.” But he does not find the math entirely convincing, and questions the notion that such an intangible public good can, or should, be assigned a monetary worth. “A lot of the values of fuel management are non-market,” said Calkin, who wasn’t involved in the study. Ecological benefits, for instance, can be hard to quantify, as can things like public recreation access. 

“I’m not trying to reduce the importance of fuel management and the value of it. It’s just highly uncertain,” he said. “I worry about trying to monetize the value of treatments on public lands.”

One issue Calkin notes is that such work on federal lands may not significantly mitigate the costliest fires, which ignite near communities and destroy homes and buildings. “The best way to protect a structure is at the structure itself,” he explained. That means the study could be overestimating the amount of property damage that clearing and prescribed burns avoid.

Strabo disagrees, saying that an unpublished portion of the analysis found that fires that interacted with fuel treatments accounted for a disproportionately large share of structure losses and suppression costs. “That suggests [those fires] were often among the more economically consequential wildfires,” he said, pointing to the 2021 Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe as an example. “The fire still caused substantial damages, but treatments helped prevent it from becoming even more catastrophic.”

One thing the paper explicitly didn’t account for was the smoke and carbon dioxide emissions that intentional fires produce. “We’re finding that’s not a non-trivial amount in our research,” said Mark Kreider, a Forest Service researcher. Because wildfire is unpredictable, he explained, you inherently have to treat more of the landscape than will actually encounter flames. How to best factor those emissions in is part of Kreider’s ongoing work, but he says it could potentially even flip an analysis like the one in Strabo’s paper. Still, he said, that doesn’t undermine the core point that fuel treatments are effective.

“It’s very clear,” he said, “that on the whole they are very beneficial.”

Not everyone supports such tactics. Critics argue they can harm ecosystems, disproportionately target larger trees, and open forests to logging under the guise of fire prevention. Some opponents also contend that this approach is less effective against extreme fires, while others question whether public funds would be better spent hardening homes and communities.

The federal government’s approach to forest management has shifted since President Donald Trump returned to office. In 2022, the Forest Service released a 10-year wildfire plan that increased forest management and prescribed burns. The Trump administration, which has announced plans to radically remake the agency, has placed greater emphasis on fighting wildfires than preventing them. According the Forest Service, in 2025, the agency reduced vegetation on about 1 million fewer acres than in 2024.

A Forest Service spokesperson attributed most of that decline to elevated wildfire activity in the Southeast. The agency also called 2025 “one the most successful wildfire years in recent history.” But critics worry it is moving away from proactive forest management.

“The takeaway that I really got from this article was that it provides further evidence that the administration’s current policy of full suppression in Western wildfire situations is misguided,” said Heather Stricker, a climate and lands analyst with the Sierra Club. While that approach might sound protective, she said a large body of research shows that it can often backfire. “This paper reiterated a lot of that previous research, but then took it a step further to quantify the cost savings.” 

The Trump administration has also announced plans to increase logging on federal lands. This has added to long-standing fears from environmental groups that instead of thoughtful, well-managed fuel treatment, the government could resort to clear-cutting. Even the paper notes this resistance. “Public pressure and risk aversion,” it reads, “skew wildfire management resources toward fire suppression rather than prevention.”

Strabo is hopeful that by adding to the range of evidence supporting forest management, his paper could help guide policymakers. “We could have these economic and ecological benefits if we scaled it up,” he said. “It’s a critically underfunded public good.”

This story was updated to include a response from the U.S. Forest Service.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How controlled burns can help save taxpayers billions on May 7, 2026.

Nationwide, the average dam is 64 years old and most were built for rainfall patterns that no longer reflect today’s changing climate. Thousands are classified as high hazard, meaning their failure could result in the loss of life. Dam safety experts say inspections are uneven and improvements often underfunded.

More than half of Michigan’s dams are beyond their 50-year design life, and the risks became clear as snowmelt and weeks of heavy rain swelled rivers. Rising water came within 5 inches of flowing over Cheboygan Dam in Cheboygan, a city of about 4,700 people, on April 16. In Bellaire, officials deployed about 1,000 sandbags to shore up a century-old dam.

“This needs to be considered not the worst we can experience. This needs to be considered as typical of the future,” said Richard Rood, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who studies climate change.

There are about 92,000 dams in the United States. About 18 percent are considered high-hazard. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates repairing all of these aging structures will cost more than $165.2 billion. In Michigan, that estimate is $1 billion.

Communities facing these risks are left with difficult choices. Given the cost of repairing and upgrading dams to withstand stronger storms, removing them is often cheaper. That can reduce long-term risk and restore rivers to a more natural state. But it often faces resistance from property owners and communities with economies built around the reservoirs those dams created.

As floodwaters recede across Michigan, local leaders, dam safety advocates, and experts are renewing calls to bolster safety regulations and deal with aging dams.

Bob Stuber, executive director of the Michigan Hydro Relicensing Commission, considers the April flooding a wake-up call and believes the solution is clear: upgrades where feasible and removal where it makes sense. 

“I think every opportunity we have to remove an aging dam, we should take advantage of it because it’s not going to get better,” he said. “It’s just going to get worse.”

Officials in Traverse City came to that conclusion in 2024 and removed the Union Street Dam along the Boardman-Ottaway River as part of a decades-long restoration project that includes FishPass, which will allow key species to pass while blocking harmful invaders like sea lamprey. Engineers said that removal and upgrade most likely reduced flooding impacts when waters surged to near-record levels last month, falling just short of a 500-year flood.

“Upstream would have been under 2 more feet of water, which would have been quite devastating,” said Daniel Zielinski, a principal engineer for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. “We actually had a really great stress test of the system. It functioned really well.” 

Removals are increasing across the country, according to data from American Rivers. Since 2000, more dams have come down than gone up, and that pace is accelerating as aging infrastructure, safety concerns, and environmental benefits reshape how communities weigh their value. 

In northern Michigan, conservation groups like Huron Pines help dam owners make that decision. It has managed nine removals in the last 13 years and has seen growing interest after the recent flooding, said Josh Leisen, a senior project manager for the organization. Removal reconnects river ecosystems and eliminates the need for expensive upkeep of aging structures, he said.

“There are costs associated with repair and there are risks associated with having a dam,” Leisen said. “Even if it seems to be in good condition, you get extreme weather events like we just had.”

Removing dams is not always straightforward. Beyond the technical challenges, many communities are reluctant to give up the lakes and waterfronts those structures create.

“There’s this emotional attachment to that impoundment,” said Daniel Brown, a climate resilience strategist at the Michigan-based Huron River Watershed Council.

In other cases, dismantling isn’t practical. Some dams provide electricity or drinking water, linking them to local economies and infrastructure. “[Removal] is not really something that’s on the table because they are connected in this very practical way,” Brown said.

Still, Brown said, there are limits to how much aging structures can be adapted to a warming world. “[A dam] is this very long-term, huge, expensive infrastructure that you’ve put on the landscape that’s going to stay there. And that is not how climate change or nature or rivers behave,” Brown said.

Dismantling dams, like upgrading them, can come with steep costs. The Boardman-Ottaway River project — which removed three dams in the largest removal effort in state history — cost $25 million. Huron Pines is managing the removal of Sanback Dam in Rose City next month, at an estimated cost of $4 million.

Half of the expense is funded through a grant program from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, launched in response to the 2020 Edenville Dam failure which overwhelmed the downstream Sanford Dam. The twin catastrophes forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 residents, destroyed thousands of homes, and flooded ecosystems in a disaster that investigators later found was avoidable. The $44 million state program funded several dam removals, upgrades, and engineering studies before it ended last year. 

Federal funding is available through programs administered by agencies such as FEMA or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But those resources fall short of the estimated $165.2 billion needed to address the issue, and some are at risk of elimination.

State governments regulate roughly 70 percent of the dams in the United States, with the federal government regulating hydropower dams and providing funding and guidance. This means inspection standards, regulations, enforcement, and resources can vary widely.

In Michigan, about 1,000 dams fall under state oversight, while 99 hydroelectric dams are overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The remaining 1,500 are smaller barriers that don’t fit the criteria for state regulation, according to the Michigan Dam Inventory.

Now, state officials are renewing calls for more money and stronger regulations. “Dam safety may be an issue that isn’t partisan,” said Phil Roos, director of EGLE.

Proposed state legislation would bolster inspection rules, address private ownership, update design standards, and create more funding opportunities for upgrades or removals. “It’s so important to our state that we can come together, and whether it’s passing the legislation that was proposed, or improving procedures, or ultimately funding,” Roos said.

Michigan state Senator John Damoose has expressed concern about private dam ownership since the close call at Cheboygan Dam, which is under both state and private control. About 75 percent of the dams Michigan regulates are privately owned.

“Somebody made a point, ‘Well, we can’t have private companies owning these things.’ I tend to believe in private ownership but they might be right,” Damooose said during a Traverse City roundtable discussion on dam safety.

It’s not just a Michigan issue. Most dams in the United States are privately owned, meaning responsibility for maintenance, upkeep, and potential failure falls on individuals, not governmental agencies, according to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. 

Climate change is expected to bring more frequent and intense storms. As the world warms, the atmosphere holds more moisture, fueling more intense precipitation, according to Rood at the University of Michigan.

Recent flooding “has shown an incredible vulnerability,” he said. “[Dams] are either going to have to be removed or reengineered. Or they’re going to become a set of slowly unfolding failures.”

Luke Trumble, chief of dam safety for Michigan, said the state is already dealing with conditions that many dams were never designed to withstand.

“It’s a little bit of a misconception that if we fix the dam issue, there’ll be no more flooding,” Trumble said. “There’s still going to be flooding on rivers whenever we get rain like this, or rain on snow.

“What we can do with dam safety legislation is help ensure that flooding is not made worse by a dam failure,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Close calls at Michigan’s dams are a climate warning to America on May 7, 2026.

She worked for years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, working in its Office of Environmental Justice, where public outreach and education, and coordinating between communities and federal agency staff together with the community were part of her daily routine. Eventually, White-Williamson saw that kind of advocacy was missing in her own backyard. In 2020, she co-founded the non-profit Environmental Justice Community Action Network (EJCAN) to educate and empower communities to advocate for themselves on environmental issues. 

Not long after its first meeting in October of that year, the group began working with residents of Snow Hill, a historically Black rural community near the Sampson County landfill. People described a range of environmental and public health worries. One concern that rose quickly to the top was whether the water — especially the private wells on which many households rely — might be contaminated.

Over the next few years, EJCAN partnered with UNC Chapel Hill and Appalachian State to do free well water testing through some small grants. “The community felt like they were seeing elevated levels of illnesses and [were] convinced what they were seeing was directly related to their proximity to the landfill, and the water that they’re drinking,” White-Williamson said, but there had been little formal research. “There’s never been a health impact analysis in that area, so it’s been all anecdotal,” she explained. The well testing became a first step toward gathering evidence that contaminants from the landfill might be harming residents.

The results were troubling. After four rounds of sampling at homes in the area, they found 13 percent of wells were contaminated with PFAS and other contaminants of concern. Short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the synthetic chemicals have been produced in the U.S. since the 1940s, and are used in water-repellent fabrics, nonstick cookware, and fire fighting foam, among other things. 

PFAS are sometimes referred to as “forever chemicals” because of how long they persist in the body and the environment. That includes “legacy” PFAS, substances such as PFOA and PFOS that were widely used for decades, but phased out during the 2000s. It also includes what researchers call “novel” PFAS, or newer chemicals developed as replacements. While initially thought to have fewer health risks, scientists are now questioning if these next-generation products are meaningfully safer. Because they are newer, far less is known about their impacts, according to the Center for Environmental and Health Effects of PFAS at NC State.

“We know that landfills are a common source of [PFAS], because folks have thrown away a range of consumer products,” said Courtney G. Woods, an environmental sciences professor at the University of North Carolina. According to a 2020 report in the academic journal Toxicology, there is mounting evidence that PFAS are implicated in “adverse health outcomes associated with exposure, including reduced kidney function, metabolic syndrome, thyroid disruption, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.” 

Residents raise red flags

Research into Sampson County water quality dates back a decade, thanks to the work of the late Ellis Tatum, who lived in Snow Hill. In 2016, Woods and some of her students met Tatum at the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network Summit, a gathering of environmental justice organizations led by people of color. “He was convinced there was something going on with what was in the water,” explained White-Williamson. 

Tatum invited Woods and some students to partner with his community. After convening neighborhood focus groups, Woods and a student began to test for legacy and novel PFAS, metals, and bacteria in Bearskin Swamp, located on the north side of the Sampson County landfill in Snow Hill. “There was a suspicion that bad things were going into the water from [the landfill],” White-Willliamson explained.

On this first research foray, Woods’ team didn’t detect significant contamination upstream of the landfill. But downstream was a different story. “We found elevated levels of legacy PFAS, as well as novel PFAS just near the landfill,” Woods explained. These include newer chemicals like GenX and Nafion, she explained, which some studies have linked to liver damage and other human health effects.

Some of these chemicals match those produced by Chemours, a PFAS manufacturing facility which has dumped in the landfill for years. “We did have some knowledge from Chemours’ permit, as well as knowledge from other folks that Chemours had been sending their industrial sludge for disposal at the Sampson County landfill,” Woods continued. 

Bridging community concern with free water testing 

After Woods’ initial findings, EJCAN worked to establish further relationships with universities to expand water testing in the Snow Hill community. The collaboration marked a crucial step moving community concerns toward independent scientific verification.

The cost of at-home testing can be prohibitive to many households. According to Antrilli, costs for PFAS testing through private labs start around $380. “Considering the population in Sampson County, a lot of folks could not pay to have their water tested,” White-Williamson said.  

In February 2021, EJCAN partnered with Appalachian State University to provide free testing of well water for bacteria and metals for residents. The non-profit sent out a notice to community members asking if they wanted to participate. “There was a fairly decent amount of response,” said White-Williamson. The initial round of testing included professor Rebecca Witter, who focuses on sustainable development, and biologist Shea Tuberty. Rebecca Witter worked to develop a protocol that could be used to derive community impressions of water quality, while Shea Tuberty and his students went door to door collecting samples, testing for bacteria, nitrates, and heavy metals.

On subsequent research trips, the team was joined by Woods from UNC, who provided PFAS testing with support from the nonprofit Research Triangle Institute. After sampling about 250 homes, they found over thirty families had PFAS in their water.

As further rounds of testing were conducted, the respective labs mailed letters to residents with their results, as well as called to speak to residents who had concerning results. The scientists also held a meeting with residents, which White-Williamson attended, so that they could ask questions. Woods said the close communication “was absolutely instrumental” for both research and community organizing. 

EJCAN holds a monthly community meeting that is open to the public, which Tuberty sometimes brings his class to attend, “just to be present and answer questions,” he said. “That’s been really useful, because we get more community buy-in when they realize we’re invested long-term.”

The results led White-Williamson to contact the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Waste Management. In November 2023, the department held a community meeting where people who lived closest to the landfill could request sampling of their private wells. State staff initially tested 30 wells, before expanding the effort, Vincent Antrilli Jr., the waste management agency’s environmental program supervisor, wrote in an email. From October 2023 through April 2026, the program had collected 241 samples—about 25 percent (61) of which had exceedences of PFAS for EPA drinking water standards.

The program also provides bottled water and home filtration systems designed to remove PFAS. “To date, 87 point-of-use filter systems have been installed or authorized statewide, including 37 in Sampson County,” Antrilli wrote. 

EJCAN has supplemented this by distributing over 50 Clearly Filtered water pitchers, which remove PFAS and other contaminants like lead and arsenic. “We worked with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to identify a pitcher that seemed to be pretty efficient in removing a large number of contaminants from drinking water,” White-Williamson said. 

A canceled grant 

EJCAN is still hearing from people who want their well water tested. “We really need thousands of water samples, and we’ve only done hundreds,” said Tuberty from App State.

For about six months, EJCAN, App State, UNC and the Department of Health and Human Services collaborated on an EPA grant application. “The grant would have been for a million dollars over the next three years,” White-Williamson explained. With that support, the coalition would have been able to test up to 250 homes a year and provide follow up support for the homes who had problems. “That would have gone a long way,” she said. 

In February, they learned they’d been approved for the million dollar grant. But in April 2025, as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slashed federal programs, the coalition learned the grant might be suspended. Only three days later, Tuberty said, they were told it would be spared. Then in early May, there was another reversal. 

“Before we got a nickel of it, we got DOGE-d,” Tuberty said. “Most of the money was going to go to the community members to mitigate the problems that we identified, which would have been great.”

While the research to date has been supported by a number of smaller grants, Tuberty said, “you need that big money to make a significant impact.” The researchers hope another opportunity will present itself. “I don’t think any of us are giving up on it,” he said. 

With federal priorities shifted, EJCAN is concerned about the unmonitored forever chemicals in their community. “These are hard projects to do, because the communities have just been burnt for so long, for so many decades,” Tuberty said. “They’ve just been overlooked over and over again.”

The Environmental Justice Community Action Network (EJCAN) is a North Carolina–based nonprofit that works to advance environmental justice in rural communities, particularly in Sampson County. The organization supports residents facing pollution and other environmental harms by providing scientific research, water and air monitoring, education, and advocacy. EJCAN also helps communities access legal and technical resources, empowering them to hold polluters accountable and push for cleaner air, water, and soil.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural North Carolina fights back against PFAS contamination on May 6, 2026.