Just across the road from the waterfront in Brunswick, Semona Holmes lives in a house surrounded by fruit trees, potted flowers, a fish pond, and —   when it rains or the tide is extra high — floodwater.

“If you can imagine this entire area here completely flooded,” she explained on her front porch on a recent afternoon. “The flooding would be — we would have like a river on our street.”

The floodwater has reached to her knees at times. Once, after a hurricane, her neighbor canoed down the block.

Improvements to the stormwater system have helped a bit in recent years. But Holmes’s concerns go beyond the inconvenience of an occasionally flooded street. She lives about half a mile from a former pesticide plant, which is now a toxic Superfund site — one of thousands of contaminated former industrial sites identified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Holmes is worried about what the floodwaters contain.

“Everything from that chemical plant has flowed into our community,” she said.

Scientists want to get a better handle on what, exactly, has flowed into this community’s air, soil, water, and people. Researchers from six institutions will soon launch Georgia’s first Superfund research center, with $15 million from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Over five years, the team of scientists from Emory University, the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College, and Texas Tech University will look at Glynn County’s four toxic Superfund sites, including the one near Holmes. 

The work has two main goals, according to Emory public health professor Noah Scovronick.

“One is to understand the health effects of past chemical exposures, and the other is to try and reduce people’s future exposures,” he said.

To do that, they’ll study links between the toxic substances at the former industrial sites and possible health effects, and conduct environmental sampling to figure out how and where people may have been exposed. 

They’ll also need to model impacts of climate change, like rising seas and stronger storms. On sites that have toxic materials stored in structures or under caps, flooding could breach those containment measures, which are supposed to keep people safe from exposure.

“We want to be sure that the remediation that is ongoing at those sites is resilient to extreme weather moving forward,” Scovronick said. 

The researchers met with community members like Holmes to plan their work, so that the studies can answer the lingering questions Glynn County residents have about the industrial pollution in their environment.

Holmes and her family already don’t drink their tap water or eat seafood from Glynn County waterways. But she said they need more information about what chemicals they’ve been exposed to, and the possible consequences. She has six grandchildren, several of whom attend an elementary school just blocks from the nearest toxic site.

“We want them to be healthy,” she said. “And you don’t want to worry that they’re playing on a playground that has contaminated soil.”

Even if the new research uncovers damage that can’t be undone or exposure to health risks that can’t be reversed, Holmes said, it’s important to have all of that documented — and acknowledged by the companies that operated the industrial sites in Glynn County.

“It shows that you care about humanity,” she said. “And that you are able to acknowledge that, ‘Yeah, by our actions, we have possibly contaminated an entire county.’”

But beyond that recognition of wrongdoing, Holmes said, “there has to be continued action.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rising seas magnify the dangers of Coastal Georgia’s industrial past on Jul 20, 2026.

While the two executive orders gutting the monuments and their protections repeat an action from the first Trump administration that was reversed by President Joe Biden, Monday’s reductions go far further than before.

In December 2017, Trump signed proclamations to reduce Bears Ears National Monument from 1.3 million acres to roughly 228,000 acres, an 85 percent reduction, while Grand Staircase-Escalante was cut nearly in half, from 1.9 million acres to about 1 million. Monday’s executive orders cut the monuments to less than a quarter of what was left after the previous shrinking of the monuments.

Flanked by Utah Republicans, Trump said in signing the executive orders that new restrictions made it virtually impossible to hunt, fish, or even walk on the monuments, which is not true. Both are accessible to visitors, including for hunting and fishing.

Trump’s executive orders will take effect in 60 days. Shrinking the boundaries of the monuments, the orders state, will better align with the administration’s goals for public lands: opening them up to extraction. 

The orders say the decision puts power back in the hands of local communities, despite its disbanding and terminating of an inter-tribal working group for Bears Ears that led co-stewardship efforts at the monument—the first of its kind, and the result of years of advocacy from local tribes. Tribal officials said they were not consulted about the decision to reduce the monuments. 

“[Trump is] saying the quiet part out loud. He’s being honest: I’m doing this so that we can mine and drill and graze cows,” said John Ruple, a law professor and program director at the University of Utah’s Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment. “We’ll see if the American people think those are the best uses of national monuments, and we’ll see if courts agree with that, too.”

Davina Smith-Idjesa, a member of the Navajo Nation and part of both monuments’ inter-tribal coalitions, said reading the proclamations was a reminder “of genocide and that tribes are expendable” in the U.S. 

Uranium mining in the Four Corners region left members of her family sick and dead, she said after the signing of the executive orders, and now the prospect looms of these sacred areas being made available for extraction again.

“Bears Ears is at my back door,” she said during a press conference Tuesday morning. “This is not a political talking point for me. This is home. My ancestors knew this land. My family knows this land. I know where our people go to pray, to gather medicines, to gather food and to heal. This is our grocery store, our medicine cabinet, our classroom, our church. And I need people to understand: You cannot take a pin, draw a line through the landscape, and tell us what remains should be enough.”

Ruple said there is little political upside to the decision, and polling consistently shows Americans support the monuments and the protection of public lands. Attacks on public lands, including Grand Staircase-Escalante, in recent years have consistently failed. 

The Antiquities Act, he said, makes clear that presidents have the power to create monuments, but not rescind them. That power rests with Congress.

The executive orders come after a June decision in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals that reversed a district court’s opinion to dismiss a lawsuit from the state of Utah attacking the Biden administration’s restoration of the borders of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments after Trump first shrank them. The lawsuit also targets the powers of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows presidents to create national monuments. It was signed by President Teddy Roosevelt, who later used it to protect the Grand Canyon as a national monument before it later became a park. 

“If you go and eviscerate these two monuments, now I suspect we’re going to see the Department of Justice go into the district court and say, ‘Look, this case is moot. The monuments have been reduced by every inch that were restored and the Biden proclamations have now been undone,’” Ruple said. 

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Environmental groups and tribal leaders who have long advocated for the protection of the two monuments vowed to continue fighting to protect them. Both were vital to the creation of Bears Ears, which is the first and only national monument co-managed between the federal government and local tribes. 

Last time the Trump administration shrank the monuments, Earthjustice, representing a coalition of environmental groups and tribes, sued over the decision. The organization vowed to do so again.

The executive orders came as no surprise. Last March, the Trump administration announced it would eliminate California’s Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands national monuments before removing language announcing that decision from a White House fact sheet. Then last June, the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the president has the power to review and eliminate national monuments.

Project 2025, the policy roadmap for a second Trump administration coordinated by the conservative Heritage Foundation, has called for reducing the size of those national monuments and others — and even suggested repealing the Antiquities Act of 1906.

In a press call Tuesday in response to the executive orders, Democratic members of Congress condemned the proclamations for prioritizing public lands for mining rather than for the American people, expressing fear that other protected areas could be targeted next and that cultural and religious sites could be vandalized.

“This is a trend coming from Donald Trump and from this administration,” said Senator Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat from New Mexico. “While these monuments are in Utah, they belong to all of us across the United States.”

“The administration is on the wrong side of history here, ignoring the voices of Tribal Nations, local communities, and the millions of Americans who want these places protected for future generations,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, Wilderness Society president and former director of the Bureau of Land Management under the Biden administration, in a statement. “As our nation marks 250 years, these public lands should be handed down, not over to drilling and mining interests.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump again shrinks Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments on Jul 19, 2026.

The pause, which will last up to a year, is the nation’s first statewide ban on data centers, which have drawn increasing concern from lawmakers and citizens based on their impact on electricity prices and the energy grid.

“As data center development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it’s my responsibility to take action and lead,” Hochul said in a statement.

Technology companies have invested billions of dollars to build data centers all across the country, driven in part by the computing demands from artificial intelligence.

In her executive order, Hochul directed the state Department of Public Service to issue no new permits for large-scale data centers for a  year. During that period, the agency will conduct an environmental analysis on the impacts of data centers, along with a proceeding to “require data centers to either pay more for their energy or supply their own.”

New York lawmakers passed a more extensive data center moratorium last month, but Hochul has not said whether she will sign the bill.

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Maine Governor Janet Mills, also a Democrat, vetoed a measure earlier this year that would have been the first statewide data center ban.

In a news release, Hochul also directed the state’s economic development agency to develop a framework that local communities can use to negotiate with tech companies that seek to construct data centers. That framework will focus on infrastructure improvements, child care investments, direct financial support, and labor and wage standards.

She also announced plans for a fund that would require data centers to invest in New York’s grid infrastructure and clean energy supply. And she called on lawmakers to repeal the state’s sales tax exemptions for large data centers.

Across the country, data centers have drawn vocal opposition at local public meetings and in state capitols. Several cities and counties will vote on ballot measures this year to restrict the development of new data centers.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New York governor orders first statewide data center moratorium on Jul 18, 2026.

The Namaygoosisagagun (Collins) First Nation watched one blaze largely destroy its entire community in less than an hour, forcing residents to flee by boat. Residents reported having only minutes to gather their belongings before homes were overtaken by the flames on Wednesday, and Anishinabek Nation Grand Council Chief Linda Debassige said in a statement that all community members have been accounted for pending a full assessment.  

“It is with heartfelt sadness that I share that our member First Nation, Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, has been devastated by an unexpected and fast-moving wildfire that advanced toward and through the community, causing extensive damage and destruction to homes and community buildings,” Debassige said in the statement. 

Of the 903 fires burning as of Friday, 750 remained out of control and 43 had started within the prior 24 hours. 

The effect has been greatest in Ontario, where seven First Nations have fled the 193 fires now burning there. According to the Chiefs of Ontario, several communities were cleared under mandatory orders issued by their leadership with support from the Ontario Provincial Police. In addition to Namaygoosisagagun, Whitesand First Nation, Kiashke Zaaging Anishinaabek, and Animbiigoo Zaagi’igan Anishinaabek are among those impacted by those orders.

Dozens of non-Indigenous communities throughout the province have been ordered to evacuate as well.

The Namaygoosisagagun (Collins) First Nation is about 125 miles north of Thunder Bay and inaccessible by road. Debassige told The Canadian Press that residents did not receive advance warning from provincial or national officials, nor did they receive any evacuation support. It’s been reported that community members went ​door-to-door warning their neighbors, and more than two dozen people fled by boat just as the flames approached.

Meaghan Daniel, a lawyer who represents Collins First Nation, told The Canadian Press that residents also are being denied assistance because the national government does not recognize it as a First Nation.

Although residents are recognized as First Nations people under the Indian Act, the community itself is not. Its leaders have long sought official recognition. Daniel sent a letter to Mandy Gull-Masty, the Indigenous Services minister calling on the agency to provide the emergency, recovery, and reconstruction support recognized communities are entitled to.

“To be clear, if Namaygoosisagagun is denied access to the emergency and rebuilding supports available to recognized First Nations, it will not simply suffer a slower recovery. It may lose forever the opportunity to rebuild the community its members spent decades creating,” the letter states, according to The Canadian Press. “In those circumstances, the question is not merely whether recovery will be delayed. It is whether Namaygoosisagagun will have a future in the place it has called home since time immemorial.”

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In a statement emailed to The Canadian Press, Eric Head, a spokesperson for the agency, said efforts are now underway to determine the community’s immediate needs and coordinate support to meet them.

As the situation unfolds, many other First Nations are currently undergoing the processes required to declare states of emergency and evacuate their communities. 

Ontario Chiefs held an emergency meeting Wednesday and expressed frustration with the bureaucratic processes in place to access emergency response services as well as a lack of communication from government officials regarding practices in place to declare a state of emergency.

“Jurisdictional disputes and administrative delays have immediate consequences and put lives at risk,” said Ontario Regional Chief Abram Benedict. “The priority of our leadership is to get people out as quickly and safely as possible. This needs to be everyone’s priority rather than financial discussions and technicalities.”

Benedict added that people are coming together to help one another. 

“We are on the front lines of this catastrophe that is having international impacts. Our First Nations leadership, emergency responders, and community members are working to protect their people and homelands,” Benedict said.

On Thursday, during its national assembly in Ottawa, the Assembly of First Nations passed emergency resolutions to provide support for Namaygoosisagagun and other impacted First Nations. It also called on the federal government to provide ongoing support throughout the crisis. 

The Anishinabek Nation asked for prayers for the people of the community that are dealing with this unprecedented loss. 

“We ask that you please keep Chief Paavola, the citizens of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, and all those affected by these wildfires in your prayers, and give them the privacy, time, and space required as they navigate this devastating situation,” the Nation said in a statement. “We send our heartfelt condolences, and our thoughts are with Namaygoosisagagun members who have suffered this tremendous loss of their entire community; our Anishinabek Nation family will be with you.” 

Grist provided additional information for this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Thousands flee as First Nations bear the brunt of Canada’s wildfires on Jul 17, 2026.

Wildfire smoke blowing from Canada has blanketed large swaths of the Midwest and East Coast in recent days, impacting more than a dozen states, with some of the worst-hit cities facing air quality in ranges considered hazardous. New Yorkers are among those who have been watching their air turn orange and hazy this week. On Thursday, the state issued an alert as the air quality index climbed to “unhealthy” and “very unhealthy” levels. “Avoid spending time outdoors, if possible,” officials advised.

As of Friday morning, air quality near the stadium remained in the unhealthy range, and while it’s forecast to improve to “moderate” by Sunday’s kickoff, smoke patterns could still change. If concerns continue during the finals, there’s no way to close off the open-air stadium where stars Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal are slated to square off. That means fans and players would almost certainly be exposed to smoke, which could lead to symptoms such as a burning throat, coughing, or headache, among others. This can be particularly dangerous for sensitive groups, including children, older individuals, and people with respiratory conditions such as asthma. 

Players have also practiced outdoors during air quality events in the lead up to the game — the Spanish team held a practice Thursday in New Jersey. “These are high-level athletes who are moving a lot of air through their lungs,” Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician and Global Climate and Health Alliance official, told the Associated Press. “They shouldn’t be practicing outside if the air quality levels are at hazardous sort of ranges for wildfire-related air pollution.”

World Cup organizer FIFA does not appear to have any contingency plans in place for wildfire smoke. Neither FIFA nor New York City Department of Health officials immediately responded to Grist’s request for comment. In a previous statement to Grist, FIFA detailed extensive protocols related to extreme heat, including mandatory water breaks for players, but didn’t mention air quality. 

“Climate-related risks,” the organization wrote last month, “are assessed as part of overall tournament planning and managed in close coordination with host cities, stadium authorities, and national agencies.” 

Unlike FIFA, a number of other leagues implement standardized adjustments triggered by air quality warnings. Per National Women’s Soccer League policy, for instance, a women’s soccer game at Citi Field in New York on Thursday had additional hydration breaks for safety. NWSL policy adds hydration breaks at an air quality index of 101 (“unhealthy for sensitive groups”) and cancels or postpones games when the AQI tops 200 (“very unhealthy”). Major League Baseball rescheduled one game this week in Philadelphia, and Major League Soccer canceled a game in Chicago due to smoke.

The World Cup is in its fifth and final week, and despite the games taking place across multiple wildfire-prone regions, so far FIFA’s bet that the air would stay clear has paid off. It may get lucky again this weekend, says Nicholas Watanabe, a professor of sport and entertainment management at the University of South Carolina, but that doesn’t excuse not being ready.

“FIFA seems unprepared for these wildfires,” said Watanabe. “At the same time, it looks like the worst of the pollution will dissipate before the World Cup Final, so FIFA will dodge a bullet and likely push forward with the match.”

Some, however, question whether enough is being done, both by FIFA and other outdoor sports leagues facing these and other climate threats. FIFA has already been criticized this year for its policies regarding extreme heat.”If we have to have a hydration break every 15 minutes, then we shouldn’t be playing the game,” said Trinity Rodman, who played in the smoke-affected NWSL soccer game in New York. 

One professional cyclist recently questioned whether the Tour de France should be held in the summer, as this year’s iteration of the iconic event has been plagued by wildfires, smoke, and extreme heat. “I would change the whole calendar,” said yellow jersey holder Tadej Pogačar earlier this month. “It’s not something I can do.”

The power to make changes generally rests with a sport’s governing body, rather than athletes, and Watanabe thinks climate issues should be taken more seriously. Even if the World Cup final is spared any impacts, he said this close call should serve as a warning.

“Hopefully,” he said, “this is a wakeup call to FIFA and all other sport leagues and competitions of the need for regulations and a comprehensive plan to deal with climate risks.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfire smoke threatens the World Cup final. FIFA still doesn’t have a plan. on Jul 17, 2026.

That is, until this summer, when both of those resources vanished from the agency’s site, each now redirecting to “Page not found.” They were taken down by July 3, around the same time that the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages from the Energy Saver section of its site, gutting a resource for people looking to conserve energy and lower bills.

“I can’t remember another time that, with DOE specifically, we’ve seen an entire domain go down the way that [it] has been reported on now,” said Izzy Pacenza, who monitors government websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Over a 30-day span this summer, as swaths of the country suffered under heat waves, more than 300 of the webpages had received 160,000 page views, according to an analysis from The Guardian.

The news coverage of the missing websites has focused on the disappearance of one recommendation in particular. Ahead of a heat wave that roasted New York City with 100-degree temperatures earlier this month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked businesses and residents to set their AC to 78 degrees to conserve energy, drawing the ire of Republicans who mocked the restrictions as “socialism.” Internet sleuths were quick to notice that similar guidance had vanished from the Department of Energy’s website, which used to direct people to keep their thermostat between 75 and 78 degrees. The timing suggested that the agency might have removed the pages as a rebuke to Mamdani’s advice.

The purge looked suspiciously timed for another reason:  On July 2, the Energy Department announced a proposed rule to make it harder for future administrations to approve energy efficiency standards for household appliances, saying it would “permanently end Green New Scam appliance mandates.” The move was part of the Trump administration’s broader attack on energy efficiency requirements.

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative has argued that Trump’s federal agencies tend to remove information from their websites related to regulatory changes they just announced, which limits access to information people could use to oppose agency proposals during the legally required public comment period. But the facts that would be most relevant here — the agency’s information about its Appliance and Equipment Standards Program — remain on the site, pointed out Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “I haven’t seen things come down that are directly related to the appliance standards program,” he said.

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The Department of Energy did not respond to questions about why it removed the webpages. But the purge could be understood as part of a broader pattern of removing the most accessible, actionable public information about climate change from federal government websites. Last summer brought an abrupt end to the government website that hosted the National Climate Assessment, a series of congressionally mandated reports that broke down how climate change affects the regions where people live. Around the same time, Climate.gov, the widely used site that translated the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research into easy-to-understand resources, vanished too.

Energy Saver provided a similar service, distilling technical knowledge about conserving energy into advice for ordinary people: shopping for efficient appliances, installing “cool roofs,” and do-it-yourself guides to saving energy and money. 

“These things are seen as authoritative resources and tools given to us by the government for us to think about how climate change interacts with our daily lives,” Pacenza said. “And now that interaction, and that relationship, is being broken or interrupted.”

This kind of consumer advice on how to save energy clashes with President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” framing. The administration has promoted a narrative that energy use, powered by fossil fuels, “is a tenet of American values and of our identity,” Pacenza said. Telling people to be aware of their energy use is in tension with this narrative. Even if the DOE’s website purge wasn’t driven by Mamdani’s statements about conserving energy, a similar impulse may lie behind the decision.

The debate over asking Americans to adjust their thermostats to save energy is actually decades old: During a fuel shortage in the summer of 1979, President Jimmy Carter required retail stores, restaurants, and other public and commercial buildings to keep the thermostat no warmer than 65 degrees in winter and no cooler than 78 degrees in summer (sound familiar?). President Ronald Reagan reversed those restrictions in 1981, calling them “an excessive regulatory burden.” 

In general, though, energy efficiency measures used to be in the realm of bipartisan agreement. Reagan went on to sign the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987 into law, establishing minimum efficiency standards for refrigerators, freezers, and other household equipment. But recent years have seen air conditioners, laundry machines, shower heads, and other items get roped into the culture wars. Republicans have argued that government efficiency standards interfere with “consumer choice” and have been undoing regulations passed by Democratic administrations.

“This administration isn’t doing anything to improve efficiency standards — they’re only trying to go backwards,” deLaski said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why did energy-saving tips disappear from the Energy Department website? on Jul 17, 2026.

The controversial plan by Enbridge Energy would replace a dual segment of the crude oil and natural gas liquids pipeline that runs through the environmentally sensitive straits, with one buried beneath the lakebed between lakes Michigan and Huron. For more than 73 years, Line 5 has transported oil and natural gas liquids 645 miles from Superior, Wisconsin, to Sarnia, Ontario. 

The Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, approved a construction permit on lake bottomlands “following comprehensive review.” The agency said in a news release that the permit requires Enbridge to minimize damage to surrounding wetlands.

Despite acknowledging that construction would “adversely impact” rare plants and animals in the area, the state Department of Natural Resources still issued a permit to Enbridge. By state law, the permit also requires the company to “lessen impacts” with measures such as collecting seeds for later restoration or only clearing trees in the winter to protect bats.

Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy said the permits are “an important step forward” for the project that will “ensure the uninterrupted flow of energy that supports Michigan and the region.” Products from Line 5 are used in Canada and Michigan for propane or at oil refineries. Enbridge is currently reviewing the permits “to assess any impacts to tunnel construction,” Duffy said.

Line 5 opponents slammed the decisions by state regulators. “The bigger picture is that there should be no destruction, no wetlands destruction, there should be no forest destruction for a project that is not needed,” said David Holtz, coalition coordinator for anti-Line 5 group Oil & Water Don’t Mix.

Enbridge maintains that the tunnel project will protect the Great Lakes, and that Line 5 continues to operate “safely and reliably” under federal standards. 

Holtz said the news is especially ironic given the thick smoke currently blanketing the Great Lakes region from wildfires burning in Canada. He called out Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration for approving a project that would lock in fossil fuel use for decades, worsening climate change. Hotter average temperatures around the U.S. and Canada are making the conditions that can cause fires to ignite and burn more common.

Tribal nations across the state also denounced the permit approvals. EGLE’s permit acknowledged that destruction or removal of historic and cultural resources is likely — including the remains of tribal ancestors — and requires Enbridge to submit a plan that would mitigate impacts.

But Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said any such plan is a “false penitence.”

“Tribes have had so much taken away from them. We have had our land taken, we have had our rights taken, we have had our language taken, we have had our children taken,” Gravelle said. “To now have our ancestors taken and dug up, and moved, and not respected when doing all of that is disgusting.” 

The Bay Mills Indian Community, whose treaty lands the tunnel project would cross, is exploring its legal options for challenging the permits issued this week, such as initiating a contested case hearing for the EGLE permit.

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Enbridge is still waiting for additional permits from state and federal regulators, plus a court decision over a previously issued state permit, before it can begin construction. Wednesday’s decisions signal a favorable path ahead for the tunnel project, according to opposition groups.

A pending state permit would allow Enbridge to discharge about 5 million gallons of treated wastewater a day during construction. Enbridge received this permit in 2021, but it has since expired. 

Environmental groups and tribal nations brought their challenge of a permit issued by the Public Service Commission in 2023 to the Michigan Supreme Court. Oral arguments were in March, and a decision from the court is expected before the end of summer.

Wednesday’s decision from EGLE also includes a certification under the Clean Water Act that allows the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to move forward with issuing its own permit. The Trump administration declared a national energy emergency last year, fast-tracking review processes for energy projects including Line 5. Holtz, with the Oil & Water Don’t Mix Coalition, said it’s highly likely the federal agency will issue its permit to Enbridge.

Separate from the tunnel project, Line 5 faces legal challenges from groups that have fought to shut down the pipeline for years, including the Whitmer administration’s own litigation against Enbridge. This spring, a unanimous ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court paved the way for state court proceedings on whether the aging pipeline can continue operating in the Straits of Mackinac.

And in northern Wisconsin, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and environmental groups are challenging the ongoing construction of a new Line 5 segment that crosses the tribe’s watershed. Last month, crews spilled about 1,900 gallons of drilling fluid into surrounding wetlands.

Gravelle said the permit decisions are a setback. “But we have been trying to protect these things since time immemorial,” she said, “and we cannot abandon that sacred duty to do so because our children and future generations depend on that.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Line 5 tunnel in Michigan clears major permitting hurdle, in blow to opposition on Jul 17, 2026.

The law lasted less than three years. Last July, President Donald Trump signed what he called the “Big Beautiful Bill,” a sweeping tax reform that repealed almost all the main subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. Even though around two dozen Republicans in Congress said they wanted to preserve clean energy incentives, almost all of them voted to pass the law. In signing the bill, Trump said it would end what he called the “Green New Scam.” 

A year after the repeal, the outlook for the climate is mixed. Most significantly, the IRA’s path toward sharply lowering emissions has been derailed. The IRA would have led the U.S. to cut its carbon emissions 50 percent from peak levels by 2035, but that goal is now out of reach. A series of studies have found that the repeal puts the U.S. back on track for the 30 percent reduction it was on track to achieve even before the IRA, and that emissions will likely remain more or less flat through the end of the decade. The repeal has also succeeded in slowing the clean energy buildout. Manufacturers and energy developers have scrapped dozens of solar farms and battery plants.

But the transition has not come to a complete halt. Most solar and wind projects that relied on Biden-era tax credits are still moving forward because they can make a profit even without subsidies. The electricity sector in particular is edging away from fossil fuels as renewables offer a cheap and fast alternative in many parts of the country. And some nixed projects may make a comeback despite Trump’s efforts to kill them.

Even now, a year after the repeal, its full effects are difficult to measure. It’s also hard to separate the effect of the IRA repeal from the Trump administration’s other policies. The president has canceled federal grants for clean energy projects, blocked the development of offshore wind, used executive authority to prevent the retirement of coal plants, and repealed dozens of agency rules that were meant to crack down on emissions. It’s unclear how many of these efforts will survive in court or how long they will last, which also makes it difficult to know how damaging the loss of tax credits for renewable energy and electric vehicles might be. That’s all without factoring in the AI boom, which has triggered more development of renewable energy and fossil fuels.

“There are all of these broader uncertainties and heterogeneity as well, where it’s really hard to be definitive about what are the effects of the repeal,” said Erin Mayfield, a climate modeling expert at Dartmouth who also served as a climate consultant to the Biden administration. She added, though, that the transition is likely to be rockier without the IRA. “With the Inflation Reduction Act, the idea was that you’re building this kind of foundation for future change, you’re trying to structurally change our economy,” she said. That foundation is now gone.

A report released earlier this month by the pro-climate business group E2 found that the Big Beautiful Bill and other Trump actions have caused an economic downturn in the clean energy sector. The group’s analysis found that the IRA repeal likely wiped out some $53 billion in wages and $20 billion in tax revenue that would have come from construction of new energy projects alone. That doesn’t even account for the annual revenue and wages that battery factories and other projects would have produced every year. These projects would have created around $55 billion in annual output, larger than the gross domestic product of the entire state of Vermont.

“Businesses rely on market certainty, and the clean energy industry had that until the Big Beautiful Bill, and it doesn’t anymore,” said Bob Keefe, the executive director of E2, which produced the report.

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The economic carnage is worst in the electric vehicle industry. Even before the Big Beautiful Bill became law, major auto manufacturers pulled back on their plans to build new electric vehicle factories across the United States, and many startups that were planning large EV battery plants scrapped those proposals as well. The automakers cited soft demand for electric cars among American consumers, but many experts believe that the contraction was also driven by an expectation that Trump would repeal the EV credits in the IRA. (E2’s analysis considers cancellations beginning on January 1, 2025, before Trump even took office.)

“This didn’t start with the bill,” said Keefe. “It started with the raft of executive orders that the president issued the day he took office. It started probably actually on the campaign trail. It’s been pretty clear where the market has been headed.”

The wave of closures and cancellations has erased more than 250,000 jobs in the electric vehicle sector, according to the analysis from E2, accounting for around half of all job losses from the repeal. These high-wage manufacturing jobs would have been long-term jobs, not temporary construction roles. Even so, not every canceled project on E2’s list is gone for good. Last year, Ford closed down an electric vehicle battery plant it owned with the company BlueOvalSK. A few months ago, it began retooling the plant to create utility-scale batteries that can store solar energy during times when the sun isn’t shining.

But when it comes to the electricity that lights our homes and buildings, other experts argue that the picture is not as dire. The IRA provided a rebate to developers who built new solar and wind farms, but losing that rebate hasn’t destroyed the clean power sector altogether. A new paper from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, published last week, argues that “the glass is half full” when it comes to solar and wind. By comparing two models of the power grid, one from before the repeal and one from after, the paper concludes that around 75 percent of new clean power expected under the IRA will still come online despite the loss of the tax credits.

“The wind and solar tax credits … certainly accelerated deployments and investments when they were in place,” said Lily Bermel, the author of the report, who is now a visiting fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy. “But without them, what you see is the baseline of market momentum that is still adding this energy to the grid.”

Solar has proven especially resilient, according to Bermel. More than 80 percent of large-scale solar power plants and almost all rooftop solar that were projected under the IRA will still come online. The picture is much worse for onshore wind farms, which are more expensive and take longer to build. These projects are also facing roadblocks from Trump’s Pentagon. Roughly 50 percent of those projects will vanish without tax credits to support them. 

In an ironic twist, the boom in artificial intelligence data centers could blunt the economic impact of these losses, even as their power usage encourages further consumption of coal and natural gas. While Trump’s repeal has wiped out an estimated 125,000 construction jobs in clean energy, the data center boom has created tens of thousands of jobs that no one was expecting when the bill became law. As of late last year, the construction industry was short almost half a million workers. By the same token, tech giants are now paying top dollar for renewable energy to power data centers. Despite the broader struggles in the onshore wind industry, Google just inked a billion-dollar deal to build around 1.4 gigawatts of wind power in Minnesota, enough for around half a million homes. Tech companies also promise investments in transmission and batteries, which will make it easier to build more renewables that can displace legacy coal and gas.

“Demand being that big sends a huge signal to investors and developers to do more in this space,” said Ray Long, the president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, which represents solar and wind developers. “There still remains a lot of interest in investing in clean energy infrastructure in the United States.”

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In addition to her argument that clean energy has survived the repeal of the IRA tax credits, Bermel’s paper makes another provocative argument. She writes that Biden’s climate subsidies weren’t working all that well even before they were repealed. That’s because there were still constraints to building the amount of solar and wind that the market was demanding — the U.S. has a shortage of transmission lines that carry power from region to region, and federal law requires lengthy environmental and historic preservation reviews for new construction projects.  

Even when the Inflation Reduction Act passed, many experts warned that it would fail unless the United States built more new transmission: A projection from the REPEAT Project at Princeton University found that 80 percent of the law’s potential climate benefits depended on that. Yet those lines never appeared. 

Congress has been trying this year to pass a “permitting reform” law that would incentivize new transmission lines and cut down on environmental reviews. The idea has bipartisan support in the House and the Senate because it would boost clean energy while also cutting down on regulations. Bermel argues that passing this package would be better for the climate than restoring the energy tax credits that Trump repealed, as Democrats and even some Republicans have proposed to do after the midterms.

“The point of the IRA was that it made clean [energy] cheaper, and in being successful at doing that, what we did was reveal how big and how scary a monster under the bed permitting is,” said Bermel. 

The clean energy industry is trying to look beyond the Inflation Reduction Act and the subsidies that came with it. Long of the American Council on Renewable Energy was lukewarm about restoring the tax credits. He instead focused on permitting reform and the need to liberate wind and solar projects that the Trump administration is blocking.

“What we’ve got out there, irrespective of policy, is a functioning market,” he said. “The holdup is action and inaction by government. If we’re going to have a discussion about tax credits … we need to have durability, it really needs to be bipartisan.” 

Even so, there are roadblocks: The lead Democrats behind the effort have said they won’t endorse a deal until the Trump administration stops using executive authority to block solar and wind projects on federal lands and waters. And not everyone wants to weaken environmental laws — many climate nonprofits, community groups, and tribal nations say that rolling them back to simplify and speed up permitting would allow developers to bulldoze sensitive species and sacred territory.

A case in point for both sides is SunZia, a 550-mile transmission line that carries electricity from a wind farm in New Mexico to the cities of Southern California. The new electricity from this $11 billion project will help the metropolis plug in more electric vehicles and wean itself off gasoline. It is the largest wind project in the United States, and it only happened thanks to the wind tax credits, which provide a rebate for every watt of electricity that the project’s wind turbines generate. But despite these incentives, the line still took more than a decade to build. First, it had to go through multiple state regulatory approvals, and it had to be rerouted to avoid a wildlife refuge and a missile testing site. Then, in 2024, the Tohono O’odham and San Carlos Apache tribal nations sued to stop the project, arguing that the government had failed to account for its impacts on important ancestral territory and a pristine desert valley. 

Even if Congress passes a permitting reform bill, that won’t set the United States on a path toward meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement, the worldwide pact that sought to limit climate change to 2 degrees Celsius. But the Inflation Reduction Act didn’t either. The Biden-era law made it more lucrative to build solar panels, manufacture high-powered batteries, and buy electric vehicles, but it didn’t make it easier to do those things. The law didn’t provide for power lines that could carry that new electricity around, and it didn’t clear legal hurdles for companies that wanted to build large-scale clean power.

The best that climate advocates can hope for out of the Trump administration is an inversion of that reality. If Trump presides over the repeal of the IRA and the passage of a major permitting package, he will have made all the above climate actions easier but less lucrative.

The hope in that case is that clean power and gas-free cars will become cheap and reliable enough to outcompete fossil fuels on their own merits. The question is how long that will take. We don’t know how long it would have taken if Trump had not repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, but we know it will take longer now.

Correction: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect title for Dartmouth.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s climate law is dead. The energy transition might not be. on Jul 17, 2026.

The Aral Sea is technically a lake. But when nearly any body of water is full and works as it should, organic matter collects on the bottom, where it remains trapped, often for centuries or millennia. “They accumulate carbon in the sediment,” explained Rafael Marcé, a research scientist at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Blanes, Spain, and the lead author of the study, which was published today in the journal Science. “They are carbon sinks.”

If the water dries up, however, stored carbon is released, turning sinks into sources. It’s something that Marcé has seen in smaller lakes he’s studied, but even he was surprised by what his team found during its 2022 expedition to Central Asia. “We didn’t go to the Aral Sea blind. We had some previous evidence,” he said. “We had no idea about the potential magnitude.” 

The Aral Sea has left behind a timeline of sorts. The edges dried out decades back, while some areas were wet until just a few years ago. Marcé and his colleagues collected samples along this gradation. The technique allowed them to reconstruct how much carbon the lake had emitted as it evaporated. The figure is staggering. Between 1960 and 2022, they found, the Aral Sea had pumped a remarkable 748 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s three times the annual emissions of Spain. 

“At the beginning it goes pretty fast, then it slowly decays,” said Marcé, noting that about half of the carbon dioxide is released in the first 15 years after a section of the lake is exposed. The paper also found that nearly a fifth of emissions came from wind blowing sediment away, an aspect of drying that experts say hadn’t been adequately studied before. 

“This dust is a really big issue,” said Sarian Kosten, an aquatic ecologist and professor at Radboud University who was not involved in this research. She called the overall science fascinating and sound, yet the trend disheartening. “I always find it very sad to see these pictures of the declining water surface there.”

Oneof the study’s limitations, said Marcé, is that scientists could bring only relatively light-duty equipment to the Aral Sea. That meant that their sediment cores were capped at 50 centimeters — about 20 inches — even though the lake bed is many feet thick. The researchers aren’t sure what is happening further down “It could be that all these degradation effects are contained in the first layers,” he said. Or, “all these carbon calculations we did could be a gross underestimate.” 

The group plans to return with bigger drills next year to learn more. The paper also highlights the many other places around the world that are in the midst of this “dry flux” phenomenon. That includes Lake Chad in western Africa, Bolivia’s Lake Poopó, and the Caspian Sea, which is the world’s largest inland body of water and is expected to shrink by more than the entire area of the Aral Sea by the end of the century. The Salton Sea in California is also mentioned, as is Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which another recent study found is releasing over 4 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. 

“There is a whole bunch of CO2 coming out of the ground that no one was counting,” said Soren Brothers, the author of the Great Salt Lake paper, a limnologist at the University of Toronto, and the climate curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. But researchers are increasingly putting numbers to that “huge blind spot” and he’s impressed by the latest Aral Sea study, which he wasn’t involved in. “This is adding to the story of these inland waters.” 

The mounting evidence around these emissions is particularly worrying because it could be a sign of a climate tipping point from which it would become difficult, if not impossible, to recover. “If we keep on doing this kind of stuff, where we are drying up lakes,” said Brothers, ”those could take over driving climate change.” 

The Aral Sea paper also examined how much carbon dioxide has yet to be released from the lake, and pegged the number at about 605 million metric tons. While that makes the salt flat a ticking climate bomb, Marcé and his co-authors argue that this also means there’s an opportunity to reverse course. “We want to spotlight the fact that we have all this carbon that can be protected,” said Marce. “It’s offering a solution. Or a conversation at least.” 

Keeping that amount of carbon dioxide in the ground would be equivalent to about $18 billion worth of carbon credits, the paper estimates. Brothers thinks this attention to potential paths forward is among the most interesting parts of the paper. “That’s a new contribution,” said Brothers, and the logic could apply to any body of water that’s storing carbon, from reservoirs like Lake Mead on the Colorado River to urban ponds. 

”I see all of this shaping into a conversation of how do we improve things,” he said, adding that there has been plenty of research on the human, climate, and economic harms of letting lakes dry out. “We need to start researching what is the path forward.”

Marcé acknowledges that there are no easy answers for the Aral Sea. The problem began in the 1960s when the Soviet Union diverted water from the rivers that feed it for cotton crops. Many of those irrigation systems remain outdated, and improving them would save water. Even then, though, getting the water back in the sea would require convincing multiple jurisdictions not to just reuse it for other purposes. Still, fixes like this aren’t impossible, said Marcé, and linking the issue to carbon credits could provide incentives to find them. 

“If we have this kind of program, there could be a hope for the Aral Sea,” he said. “It’s at least a chance.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Aral Sea isn’t just an ecological nightmare — it’s a carbon bomb on Jul 16, 2026.

AI is the transformative technology of our time, with the potential to reshape our world on a global scale. And yet, underpinning its potential is the need for so-called hyperscale data centers that require vast amounts of land, energy, and water. As tech companies and governments continue to develop this infrastructure at a huge scale, Indigenous peoples around the world are responding to this threat in different ways. They are raising concerns about mounting pressure on water resources and inadequate consultation, but in some cases embracing projects for their economic benefits. 

The rapid expansion of this massive digital infrastructure has Indigenous leaders, governments, and experts calling on those developing them to comply with the principle of free, prior, and informed consent while exploring whether this infrastructure can be established in ways that advance Indigenous rights and priorities.

During a panel discussion on the second day of the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or EMRIP, Indigenous delegates said that while there must be policies to ensure that AI does not harvest Indigenous knowledge without consent, protections for Indigenous lands and waters are equally important. 

“AI is resource-intensive and requires vast amounts of energy. In Sápmi, we already see how large data centers put [immense] pressure on our territories,” said Maren Storslett, who is a member of the Sámi Parliament in Norway. “This forces a conversation about priorities and limits and we need to be at the table on these discussions.”

According to the International Energy Agency, conventional data centers, which store thousands of computer machines and other equipment to power everyday digital life like cloud storage, may draw around 10 to 25 megawatts of power per year. But a hyperscale, AI-focused data center, of the likes being built by or for transnational companies such as Google and Amazon, can require 100 megawatts or more annually, consuming as much electricity as 100,000 households would use over the same time. 

All of that energy is needed to power the immense racks of servers that provide the computing power behind things like ChatGPT, Claude, and other platforms. They also require copious amounts of water to keep them cool.

This demand for energy and water, driven in part by the increasing rack power density for AI workloads, is a frequent concern raised by sources at the international Indigenous conference. Research by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that all data centers in the U.S. alone directly consumed approximately 17.4 billion gallons (66 billion liters) of water in 2023. It also estimated that the energy generation consumed 211 billion gallons (800 billion liters) of water. 

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Other research puts it into perspective: By 2030, the energy required for data centers is expected to double to 945 terawatt-hours — enough to meet the needs of all 1.3 billion residents of Sub-Saharan Africa for 5.5 years. Those facilities would also require enough to meet the domestic water needs of all the same people for a year.

“These technologies … come with environmental cost,” said Aluki Kotierk, who is Inuk from Canada and current chairperson of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. “The data centers that power them consume vast amounts of energy, water, and minerals, resources that are often extracted from or developed on Indigenous peoples lands without their meaningful participation or consent, with potential serious consequences for their rights, livelihoods, and environments.”

Extraction for AI data center resources can result in the degradation of sacred sites and threats to fragile ecosystems, according to Camila Vergada, who is a board member of the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation.

While there are potential benefits for Indigenous people, the electricity and water needs of hyperscale, AI-focused data centers can be detrimental to Indigenous lands that lack the capacity to meet their resource requirements, according to Matthew Rantanen, who is a Cree descendant and advocate for digital equity in Indian Country.

Rantanen, who is a co-chair of two technology-related subcommittees of the National Congress of American Indians, believes an industry shift toward renewable energy and alternative cooling methods is needed to ensure that AI infrastructure aligns with Indigenous priorities and rights. 

The permitting needed to build these data centers should require in-depth studies of resource availability and the impacts on communities and ecosystems, as well as the involvement of those impacted throughout the lifecycle of a project — a point that was reinforced by participants at the EMRIP. 

Others, like Rochelle Diver, who is a citizen of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and the U.N. environmental treaties coordinator for the International Indian Treaty Council, are calling for broader support for Indigenous-led moratoriums on data centers. “We are in an urgent situation regarding the infrastructure being built on a massive scale to power AI technology,” she said. 

Data centers are often built in water-stressed regions, like Querétaro, Mexico, and Santiago, Chile. In a protest against the construction of a Google facility in Santiago, Indigenous peoples, local communities and workers’ unions rallied around the slogan “no es sequia, es saqueo” (“this is not a drought, this is a robbery”). Last year, the Anacé Indigenous people in Brazil filed an official complaint before federal authorities, requesting the cancellation of a $10 billion data center for the popular social media platform TikTok on their land. Leaders said their right to consultation was violated, and their concerns dismissed.

Roberto Anacé, leader of the community in Brazil, said in a WhatsApp message that the project “hinders our community, first disrespectfully separating relatives, causing fights, personal interests, bringing out ambition and hatred in human beings, and above all destroying our sacred things: Mother Earth, water, climate, air.”

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A recent analysis by the London School of Economics suggests that the next wave of climate litigation may relate to the impacts of large data centers that AI relies on. In 2024, due to the efforts of Chilean protesters in Santiago, an environmental tribunal suspended construction of the Google data center, ruling that the environmental impact had not been properly considered. So far, there has been no progress on the Anacé peoples’ lawsuit against TikTok. 

In the U.S., a more than $1 billion Meta data center project in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has received mixed responses among Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members. While some support it, others firmly oppose it and have actively campaigned against it. Cheyenna Morgan, who is an enrolled member of the Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Native Americans and the coalition coordinator of Stop Data Colonialism, said in an email that the data center will place a heavy burden on local power and resources. 

Meta, Google, and TikTok did not reply to requests for comment. 

Through Stop Data Colonialism, Morgan works to stop the rollout of hyperscale data centers on vulnerable lands, and said her community is already experiencing an increase in electricity bills and is expecting further rate hikes. “These impacts will be felt on regular people who didn’t ask to have these in their neighborhoods,” she said. 

 In March, the city council passed a moratorium to allow more time to assess the project’s impact. Similar moratoriums have been passed by tribes in the U.S., including the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), and the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.  

At the U.N., some delegates spoke of direct experience with harmful data centers, while others spoke of the potential risks. 

Julia Aka Wille, who is Inuk from Greenland and invited by the Inuit Circumpolar Council to speak at EMRIP, said that even though her homeland does not have any data centers yet, the community is still concerned about their impact on the climate. “They still affect us in that way, because they use so much energy and water, and it will contribute to the general climate change,” Aka Wille said. “The Arctic is the region that is most affected by climate change because the ice is melting, and this affects us that we can’t really have the same way of living anymore.” 

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Although Aka Wille sees opportunity in AI to help teach and preserve Indigenous languages like hers, she hopes that Indigenous peoples from around the world can work together to ensure AI is used in a responsible way.

In Alberta, some Indigenous nations are embracing the data center boom, emerging as key stakeholders and investors. The Woodland Cree First Nation recently announced plans for a 650 megawatt data center that will utilize an idle power plant for energy generation. Woodland Cree has a 51 percent stake in the project.

Te Kāhui Raraunga, an Indigenous-led initiative in Aotearoa New Zealand, demonstrates how some tribal nations are considering AI-initiatives that respect Indigenous rights and priorities. The organization, linked to the Data Iwi Leaders Group, has created a Māori Data Governance Model and Māori AI Governance Framework focused on data policy and infrastructure. 

As part of this initiative, leaders from 85 tribal nations gather each quarter to ensure the communities’ key priorities are upheld. 

“These hyperscale data centres come with promises of economic development and digital sovereignty; however, the reality can be much different, and it is vital that iwi Māori have the information they need to make informed decisions,” Erena Mikaere, the digital program lead for Te Kāhui Raraunga, said in an email. 

She added that the organization has developed resources for tribal leaders that highlight the impacts of hyperscale data centers, as well as key considerations before signing any agreement allowing one.

At EMRIP, Indigenous delegates stressed the need for meaningful participation throughout the development, implementation, and governance of AI initiatives that affect them. 

“We must not only ask what AI can do, but what it should do,” said Maren Storslett. “Respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples must apply across the entire life of AI systems.”

Grist reporter Joseph Lee contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Data centers are booming. Indigenous leaders want help protecting their lands. on Jul 16, 2026.

They wanted to hold Exxon accountable. Then they got hacked.

This story is published in partnership with the Guardian.​

On a cold January morning in 2016, Kert Davies joined a group of climate advocates and lawyers at the Rockefeller Family Fund’s office in Upper Manhattan to discuss an audacious goal: holding Exxon Mobil, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies, accountable for climate change. A few months earlier, a set of explosive media reports had revealed that the company’s own scientists determined as early as 1982 that the extraction and burning of fossil fuels caused climate change — but Exxon went on to fund climate denial campaigns anyway.

For Exxon, it was a public relations crisis that carried potentially devastating legal consequences. Davies, the founder of the Climate Investigations Center, a group that monitors the fossil fuel industry, had been strategizing with other climate advocates to make those consequences stick, using the hashtag #ExxonKnew to raise public awareness.

About a month after the meeting in Manhattan, Davies received the first fishy email. It appeared to be from Facebook and said, “Kert, you have 5 poke.” Similar messages arrived over the next few days — emails that looked like notifications from people on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Not realizing he was being phished, Davies clicked some of the links embedded in the strange messages. But he soon felt a creeping sense of dread. In early March, he asked his colleagues on a climate activist listserv: “Has anybody received weird emails?” They replied that they had. Some had clicked links and entered their passwords.

Inundated with ominous emails, the feeling of constant danger started to stifle the group’s communication. Then, the following month, a Wall Street Journal reporter reached out to Davies about a detailed agenda she had obtained for the January meeting he’d attended at the Rockefeller Family Fund’s office. In April 2016, details from the email were published by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news publication, which alleged “secret coordination” against Exxon by climate activists. 

Although Davies didn’t think it was unusual for environmental advocates to meet to strategize against one of the world’s largest polluters, Exxon soon latched onto the media reports to fight subpoenas and lawsuits it was now facing from 17 attorneys general. Defending itself from the investigations, Exxon quoted the meeting agenda in its court filings to argue that activists were conspiring against the company.

A criminal investigation would later reveal that the email obtained by the two publications had been hacked. But details about who ordered the hack have long been a mystery. Now, court documents allege that the hack was ordered by a firm representing Exxon itself — the very company Davies and others were trying to hold accountable for climate deception.  

The potential link to the oil company came to light last year, after the U.S. government issued an arrest warrant and attempted to extradite Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit from the U.K. Suddenly, Forlit was facing hacking and wire fraud charges that could land him in prison for up to 45 years. In the indictment from the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, which was unsealed earlier this year, prosecutors alleged that a public affairs firm working on behalf of an oil giant matching Exxon’s description hired Forlit to execute a project that involved hacking climate activists. In court documents, Forlit referenced the indictment and alleged that the hacking was commissioned by DCI group, a public affairs firm with a longtime relationship with Exxon. Separately, Reuters reported that the FBI had investigated DCI Group regarding the hacking operation.

DCI Group and Exxon deny involvement. Exxon Mobil did not reply to a request for comment, however, the company has previously said it has not been “involved in, nor are we aware of, any hacking activities. If there was any hacking involved, we condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” The company has said it acknowledges “climate change is real, and we have an entire business dedicated to reducing emissions.”

“We do and always have directed all our employees and consultants to comply with the law,” Craig Stevens, a partner at DCI Group, wrote in an email. He added that his firm has “been told by the government that neither DCI nor any of its personnel are under investigation” and that they had “no knowledge or understanding” of the alleged hacking activity. “Any insinuation otherwise is completely false and unsubstantiated,” he wrote.

Through his lawyer, Forlit declined to comment. He has pleaded not guilty.

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Today, as a direct result of the revelations about what Exxon knew about climate change and when, the fossil fuel giant and others are fighting lawsuits brought by states and cities that could result in hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. And in the past decade, threats to climate advocates have only grown more dangerous; fossil fuel companies have worked with security firms or police to surveil activists who opposed pipeline projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline and Line 3. Cybercrime has grown more sophisticated, and a global hack-for-hire industry has, so far, faced few consequences.

Davies, who is still monitoring Exxon, hopes the Forlit case will reveal whether the oil giant was involved in the hack. “None of that has been proven yet. So any furtherance of that story and that proof is really important to me, personally, and to a lot of the people who were attacked by this operation 10 years ago,” he said. “It’s personal, because I really don’t like bullies or liars or cheaters.”

About a year after Davies began receiving those strange messages, an investigative reporter who was covering financial fraud in Germany began receiving similar emails and flagged them to the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which investigates efforts to surveil civil society. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the lab, quickly determined they were phishing attacks. Citizen Lab researchers noticed that the links in the emails used a custom URL shortener. They then developed a technique to figure out the full unshortened URLs containing target email addresses, giving them a comprehensive list of those targeted.

Many of the victims were people at environmental groups and advocates campaigning against Exxon, but Scott-Railton and his colleagues found that the hundreds of targets also included the families and friends of activists. Non-environmental groups — for example, hedge funds, short sellers, and financial journalists — were targeted as well.

“We began toying with the idea that perhaps this was a mercenary group and they were taking commissions,” Scott-Railton said.

Scott-Railton contacted Davies in the fall of 2017. By then, Davies was experiencing another wave of phishing attacks. This time, a number of emails mentioned Exxon, including one pretending to be his colleague sharing a Dropbox document titled “ExxonMobil (confidential).docx”.

Davies still had no idea where the messages were coming from. When he met with Scott-Railton, the researcher showed Davies that he was on a long list of targets — one that included far more activists than just those in his circle of Exxon critics.

“It was really a relief to know that I wasn’t imagining that we were being targeted,” Davies recalled.

As he investigated the hacking group, Scott-Railton helped Davies and other potential targets search their inboxes for evidence that the strange messages were phishing attempts that could be traced to a single hacking group. Davies alone had received more than 80 such emails. Armed with this evidence, several targets of the phishing attacks shared Citizen Lab’s findings with the Department of Justice, or DOJ, which then began gathering evidence of a coordinated scheme. 

The Justice Department uncovered correspondence that showed a group of unnamed co-conspirators had emailed Israeli private investigator Aviram Azari, suggesting “we can make some money working together” and inviting him to a business meeting in India. The group then used phishing attacks to successfully hack into the email accounts of various targets located in the U.S. Based on this evidence, in September 2019, federal agents arrested Azari at the John F. Kennedy International Airport while he was on his way to Disneyland with his family. He was charged with managing hacking projects and pleaded not guilty. (Azari’s attorney did not reply to requests for comment.)

As the government continued to build its case, Davies met with DOJ investigators in early 2020 and told them everything he knew. A few months later, Citizen Lab published a groundbreaking report revealing that the phishing emails came from Dark Basin, a hack-for-hire group based in India. The climate advocates were just one group of targets among many; the hackers had attacked thousands of people across six continents, including politicians, prosecutors, CEOs, journalists, and human rights defenders. The report revealed the hackers had a highly detailed understanding of the Exxon critics and their relationships — suggesting they’d been provided with instructions. But the client who ordered the hack was still unknown.

After languishing in a New York prison for years awaiting trial, Azari pleaded guilty to the hacking charges in 2022, but denied knowledge of the client. Sentencing documents revealed that he played a crucial role in a global hacking campaign that targeted thousands of people — stretching well beyond the #ExxonKnew campaign — with clients paying him more than $4.8 million over almost five years for managing intelligence-gathering and phishing campaigns. He directed hackers, including the group in India, to target specific victims’ online accounts. 

The DOJ investigation confirmed the successful hacking of more than 100 of Azari’s victims, including those involved in the #ExxonKnew campaign. The government’s sentencing memo said that some of the hacked documents that were stolen from climate advocates’ online accounts were leaked to the press, and that articles about those hacked documents were incorporated into Exxon’s court filings as it battled state attorneys general investigations. DOJ investigators also asked Davies and others to write victim impact statements for Azari’s sentencing. Davies wrote that the attack had caused “anxiety, paranoia, depression, sleeplessness, and fear.”

But despite the revelations from the Azari case, the client who allegedly ordered the hack remained unknown — until the DOJ issued a warrant for the arrest of Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit and requested his extradition.

Forlit’s extradition case sent shockwaves through the U.S. climate community and began providing the answers Davies and others had been waiting for. Davies knew that Exxon had a long working relationship with DCI Group, a strategic communications firm based in Washington, D.C. Public documents show Exxon was a major client of DCI Group, spending more than $3 million on lobbying, including $320,000 in 2015, the year the hacking was allegedly commissioned.

In a filing arguing against his extradition last year, Forlit’s lawyer named the alleged client for the first time: “The hacking is alleged to have been commissioned by DCI Group, a lobbying firm representing ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies.” 

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Davies was elated. Finally, what he had suspected all along was trickling out in court documents. “There’s been periods of time where I thought, ‘Oh, that’s over. There’s no way to ever figure it out.’ And then all of a sudden — this breakthrough,” he said.

With Forlit potentially facing decades in prison if extradited to the U.S., his lawyer referenced the then-sealed DOJ indictment and named the companies in a legal filing. The lawyer argued that one of the reasons for his prosecution in the U.S. was to “advance the politically-motivated case of pursuing ExxonMobil, with Mr. Forlit a form of collateral damage in that endeavor.” But the court didn’t find this argument persuasive, and in April, Forlit was extradited to the U.S.

The U.S. indictment was unsealed in April, offering tantalizing new details. It alleged Forlit was “a leader of a sprawling cybercriminal enterprise” via Israel-based intelligence-gathering firms, and that his actions involved co-conspirators in the U.S., U.K., Israel, and India. The indictment says the operation targeting climate activists was carried out on behalf of a client: “one of the world’s largest oil and gas corporations, with headquarters in Irving, Texas.” (When the indictment was first filed in 2022, Exxon Mobil was the only major global oil company with headquarters in Irving, Texas.)

The indictment described allegations using ciphers instead of specific names of people and companies, but the names were clear to anyone who had read Forlit’s U.K. court filings opposing his extradition. The indictment laid out a chain of events connecting Forlit and Azari to a “lobbying firm” — which Forlit’s U.K. filings say was DCI Group — and in turn the lobbying firm’s “client,” which the U.K. filings say was Exxon Mobil. The indictment alleged that in October 2015, the client asked the lobbying firm for help responding to civil investigations it was facing related to climate change. 

According to the indictment, a principal at the lobbying firm contacted Forlit about a project that would target people working on climate and environmental issues. In a memo to Forlit, the principal laid out a plan for how they “would operationalize the research on the bad guys.” The principal sent the memo to Forlit with a cover email that said: “This is what I gave the client yesterday.” The memo referenced “recent attacks” on the client — the oil and gas company in Irving, Texas — “over climate change by groups on the left” and the “opportunity to go ‘on offense.’”

Prosecutors alleged that Forlit then emailed the principal a proposal for the climate change project, with a $125,000 monthly budget, outlining how his firms would gather intelligence for the client’s use in lobbying and legal proceedings. Forlit then allegedly contracted Azari and others who, in turn, hired hackers. 

The indictment alleges that the hackers successfully breached the accounts of two targets who worked for a climate advocacy nonprofit in February and March of 2016 (around the time that Davies heard from the Wall Street Journal reporter) and continued their phishing spree, successfully hacking more targets, until late 2017. The indictment alleges the stolen materials were funneled through Azari and Forlit to the principal at the lobbying firm and ultimately used in lobbying work and climate litigation filings for the client. Between 2014 and 2017, Forlit’s firms allegedly earned $7 million through the scheme, including work on the climate hack.

A decade after they received a flood of phishing attempts, the targets are now poring over the unsealed indictment, trying to piece together the identity and motivations of those who attacked them a decade ago. Although the government investigation confirmed the successful hacking of 100 victims, the Forlit indictment focuses on five unnamed victims.

Lee Wasserman, director and secretary of the Rockefeller Family Foundation, has reason to believe he is “Victim 5.” He and others received letters from the DOJ stating that they were victims of the scheme, although the government never confirmed to them whether they were successfully hacked.

Wasserman believes he was targeted because he supported a Columbia Journalism School investigation into what Exxon knew about climate change that was published in the Los Angeles Times. He also met with the New York attorney general to talk about Exxon. “We think Exxon and their allies’ conduct was the most consequential corporate deception of all time,” Wasserman said. 

But the phishing attempts had a chilling effect on their accountability efforts, he added. They switched from email to phone calls, and at times, Wasserman found himself whispering because he wondered if someone had bugged his office or home. He pondered whether cars could be lurking outside to follow him or his colleagues.

Wasserman hopes the court process will reveal how the idea was hatched, who directed the operation, and who paid for it. “We’re all sitting on the edge of our seats waiting to see if we hear that at trial,” he said.

In 2016, Jennifer Cunningham was a partner with SKDKnickerbocker, a public affairs firm, and a policy consultant to the New York Attorney General. She was involved in the climate litigation work and recalled receiving phishing emails, which she believes were attempts to obtain information about the litigation strategy.

In an interview with Grist, she initially said the hackers were not successful. “I remember there were a couple that I really narrowly avoided, because [they appeared to be] from a colleague,” she said. Her office turned over the phishing emails to federal prosecutors.

But later, after reviewing the Forlit indictment, she was fairly certain she recognized herself in it. “Wait — I must be Victim 3?” she wrote in a text message. “If so, I guess they were successful in hacking in, which I never knew.” She hopes the court case will reveal more details, including the communication between the companies and the hackers.

Scott-Railton, who first exposed the hacking operation, said, “The #ExxonKnew hacking campaign stands out, in my mind, as one of the largest and most brazen hacking attempts I’ve ever seen against environmental organizations — or for that matter, U.S. advocacy organizations in general.” These groups continue to face digital threats, he explained; phishing attempts still occur, and hacking has progressed to include more sophisticated methods of intrusion that don’t require targets to click on anything. For instance, the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware had been used to target human rights defenders and journalists. “I have no doubt that a version of this is going to come again,” he said.

This year, Davies received a letter from the DOJ stating that he was a “victim” in the Forlit case. He hopes that the people who ordered the hacking operation are named and held accountable.

“I still live not knowing if I was hacked,” Davies said. “I don’t have proof that they did hack me, that they did get my password. I don’t have proof that they didn’t. And that’s the thing that still rests with me: Am I secure?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline They wanted to hold Exxon accountable. Then they got hacked. on Jul 15, 2026.

A year later, that might not hold true for the waters just beyond French Polynesia’s maritime border. A little-known American startup is seeking the Trump administration’s approval to lease 25 million acres of international waters for mining exploration just outside the areas over which French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, and Kiribati have exclusive rights. The area, called Eastern High Seas Pocket 3 because it is entirely surrounded by waters known as the exclusive economic zones of the three nations, has an abundance of albacore, yellowfin, and bigeye tuna and is visited by dozens of fishing vessels each year. 

American Deep Sea Minerals is the first company to propose exploring the seabed there for manganese and other critical minerals, part of a global rush to capitalize on the essential components of batteries, military technologies, and other modern technologies.

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The company’s application is the latest example of the Trump administration enabling those interested in deep sea mining to circumvent international law. The majority of the world’s nations have agreed to a treaty that grants oversight of deep sea mining in the high seas to the International Seabed Authority, a regulatory body that is meeting this month to continue negotiating a framework to govern the industry. The debate has carried on for more than a decade and no commercial deep sea mining has occurred, in part due to concerns about the harm it might do to fisheries and marine habitats, as well as cautionary warnings from Indigenous Pacific peoples with ancestral ties to the ocean.

Two months before Macron’s speech and the announcement of the protected area called Tainui Atea, Trump announced that the United States would not await international permission and would begin allowing the industry to operate in the high seas under a law passed during the Carter administration. The law, called the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, allows the U.S. to permit mining in international waters. It was meant to be an interim measure until the world agreed to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. But when the treaty was adopted, Congress never ratified it.

The application from American Deep Sea Minerals is one of at least a dozen the Trump administration has received so far, and is available online for public comment until August 3. 

According to its application, the company does not own the equipment or technology necessary to work in marine environments, such as ships to collect or process ore. It also does not appear to have a website. 

American Deep Sea Minerals is “obviously not a mining company, it’s an idea,” said Coalter Lathrop, a lawyer who specializes in international ocean law. Its CEO, Graham Goulet, is a financial analyst based in San Francisco. “He wants it to become an idea with a U.S. license to an area that nobody else has a license to,” Lathrop said. 

If the application is approved, Lathrop said, the company’s valuation will likely rise. “This is comparable to a guy who got advance notice that a rural area is about to get a highway running through it, so he goes and buys some cheap land,” he said, adding that the area has “little inherent value until he partners with folks with technology, equipment, and know-how.”

Goulet initially submitted his bid under the name Kraken Metals in August of 2025, four months after the Trump administration announced it would be accepting applications. Goulet paid $100,000 to submit the application, an amount Lathrop described as “peanuts” in the finance world. 

Goulet told Grist the application is for deep sea minerals exploration and the company has not yet decided to pursue commercial mining. The company’s exploration program “is being developed with people who have direct experience in deep-sea nodule collection operations, offshore engineering, marine geology, and environmental science,” Goulet wrote in an email. 

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In April, the company hired Wouter Duijnstee, an environmental engineer who previously worked with Allseas, a construction contractor based in the Netherlands that has provided deep sea mining equipment to The Metals Company, an industry forerunner. It is unclear if it has other employees.

Goulet declined to answer questions about why he had chosen to apply to explore this area of the ocean for minerals. He also declined to disclose whether he had been in communication with the three nations neighboring the area.

The proximity to national waters may pose a risk for the company, Lathrop said. There is a United Nations-established process by which countries can claim sovereign rights over additional seabed if they can prove their continental shelf extends beyond the standard 200-mile exclusive economic zone established by international law. (The United States recently claimed roughly 300,000 square miles of additional marine area using this law.) If one of the surrounding countries successfully extended its claim to the seabed, any claim the company might hold to it would be overridden, Lathrop said. 

Nearby marine areas, such as the seafloor surrounding the Cook Islands, are thought to hold an abundance of polymetallic nodules, which are fist-sized lumps of ore rich in critical minerals. The United States is working with the Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority to search for more nodules. American Deep Sea Minerals’ application says it intends to charter the MV Anuanua Moana, a deep sea mining exploration vessel owned by the Cook Islands. 

Representatives of the governments of French Polynesia, Kiribati, and the Cook Islands did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment. But the application raises questions about the consequences of mining near regional fisheries, as well as the rights of Pacific nations and Indigenous peoples to have a say in how their neighboring waters are used, and either reap any economic benefits or prevent ecological harm. “This is a particularly important area of the high seas because of the fish stocks that migrate through it,” said Pradeep Singh, an expert on ocean governance at the Oceano Azul Foundation, a Portuguese advocacy group. 

Global backlash against the Trump administration’s pursuit of the industry has focused on the fact that high seas are considered the “common heritage of humankind.” But Indigenous peoples of the Pacific also note that the concept of exclusive economic zones is a colonial one. “The ocean doesn’t know any boundaries,” said Solomon Kahoʻohalahala, a Native Hawaiian activist who has testified at the International Seabed Authority. Pacific peoples like his who never achieved U.N. membership were excluded from the creation of the Law of the Sea delineating international waters, and advocates like Kahoʻohalahala are now pointing out that the lines drawn around their islands don’t adhere to their traditional knowledge of the ocean — or the fact that their peoples will be first to suffer any ecological consequences. 

One study, funded by The Metals Company and published independently by scientists, found that releasing mining waste too close to the ocean surface could starve zooplankton and result in cascading effects through the marine food web, eventually harming large and commercially valuable species like tuna. Scientists are also researching the potential toxins and heavy metals that the industry might release while extracting ore. Other studies have found that deep sea mining would reduce the abundance and diversity of life on deep ocean floors by at least a third.

Despite the risks, Kiribati and the Cook Islands are considering permitting deep-sea mining. Mark Brown, prime minister of the Cook Islands, has said revenue from such ventures could be “transformational” for the islands, where the average annual income is roughly equivalent to $9,000. In Kiribati, average annual income is equivalent to about $3,000. Proponents of seabed mining say it could be highly profitable, although industry consultants and economic analyses commissioned by environmental nonprofits have concluded otherwise. 

Because American Deep Sea Minerals is seeking a U.S. permit and the international rules governing seabed mining are not yet settled, there’s no guarantee that neighboring Pacific nations would see any revenue from seabed mining just beyond their borders. Permits granted by the U.S. do not inherently include profit or revenue sharing, although American Deep Sea Minerals’ application indicates that it intends to create a benefit sharing agreement with Pacific nations and avoid interfering with fishing.

French Polynesia remains strongly opposed to seabed mining and is among more than 40 countries calling for a moratorium on it. “We’re playing gods with the cradle of life — and that’s way too dangerous,” its president, Moetai Brotherson, told reporters last year. In June, he added conservation protections on another 200,000 square miles of the islands’ surrounding waters. “We also hope that it can inspire other countries, especially the larger ones, in the way they manage their relationship with the ocean,” he told AFP.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A Bay Area financial analyst wants a piece of this mineral-rich seabed surrounded by 3 Pacific nations on Jul 15, 2026.

In addition to electricity production, water has emerged as a point of contention as companies look to build more data centers in Nebraska. Local residents, researchers, and regulators worry that new data centers could bring about water shortages in a state where water availability can vary widely and where wide swaths of this agricultural state are suffering through extreme drought. For now, the best available information about how much water data centers use comes directly from the data center companies themselves — if they choose to be transparent.

For instance, in Nebraska, there isn’t even an official count of how many data centers there are in the state. Of the ones that have reported their water usage, the amounts vary. Google’s Nebraska data centers consumed about 732 million gallons of water in 2025, according to the company. Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, expects its water consumption from data centers to grow. From 2020 to 2024, Meta’s 4 million-square-foot Sarpy County data center withdrew anywhere from 26.7 million gallons to 37.5 million gallons from the local water supply, depending on the year.

Data centers use water to cool the buildings and the computer servers inside. Keeping everything at optimal temperatures ensures the equipment doesn’t malfunction. Some cooling methods, like evaporative cooling systems, typically use large amounts of water. Air-cooled chiller systems, however, deploy a “closed loop” containing water, a chemical coolant, or sometimes both and can operate without needing to be replenished for years. While closed loop systems use less water, they tend to use more electricity — the production of which can also require water.

“What’s best?” said Eric Masanet, a University of California, Santa Barbara engineering professor. “It depends on the data center, its design, the local climate, if you have enough water, if you have enough power, what people want, what they’re willing to devote their resources to.”

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Google decides which cooling system to use depending on how much water is available in a given location, according to Ben Townsend, the company’s head of infrastructure and sustainability. The company assesses local watersheds before and after building a data center. Meta’s Sarpy County data center uses a combination of evaporative and closed loop cooling.

While data centers have typically been built in urban areas, developments have started to move further out to suburbs and rural areas as fiber optic cables and infrastructure has improved, said Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition. This expansion raises concerns for areas of Nebraska that either don’t have enough water already or whose water supply is already fully allocated. Most of the state’s water is used for irrigation to support the agriculture-based economy. 

With water use expected to rise due to droughts and higher temperatures from climate change, water policy and allocation are top of mind, said Crystal Powers, water extension educator at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

“From a logical, common-sense perspective, we really need to stop putting industry in areas where they can’t be supported” by natural resources like water, said John Winkler, general manager of the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resource District. “It doesn’t make sense to put a data center in an area that’s very water-insecure to begin with.”

Masanet and fellow researcher Jonathan Koomey said the pressure is being put on the data center industry to be more efficient and transparent.

“I work with a lot of people in the tech industry. They’re pouring trillions into this industry,” Masanet said. “We should hold them to account and make them install the very best technologies that minimize energy and water.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nebraska wants data centers to come clean about water usage on Jul 15, 2026.

Guatemala’s 36-year civil war led to the killing of around 200,000 people, the destruction of hundreds of villages, and the raping of more than 100,000 women. Indigenous Maya people experienced these crimes at disproportionate rates, and both the United Nations and the country’s truth commission found state forces committed acts of genocide. 

That brutal conflict ended in 1996, but nearly three decades after the peace accords were signed, Mayan leader Mario Simón Chávez says the violence has not truly ended. “Fortunately, Guatemala is no longer experiencing an armed conflict,” he said. “However, the internal armed conflict has left indelible scars on our people.”

Chávez said Indigenous communities continue to experience structural forms of conflict through state corruption, dispossession of their lands, and attacks on their self-determination. “For our peoples, peace is only possible when our collective rights, our right to self-determination, and our ancestral relationship with our territories are fully respected,” he said. 

Indigenous nations and communities around the world are confronting the enduring legacy of conflict. This week, Indigenous delegates are bringing these ongoing challenges to the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or EMRIP, in Geneva. For many, colonization and its lingering effects represent an ongoing state of warfare.

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“In too many parts of the world, Indigenous peoples bear the heaviest cost of conflicts they did not choose,” Sidharto Reza Suryodipuro, president of the United Nations Human Rights Council, said in opening remarks on Monday.

According to a draft study, prepared by EMRIP and informed by more than 80 submissions from a wide range of Indigenous peoples and other experts, this ongoing strife must be understood as more than armed violence. It includes militarization, occupation, forced displacement and structural violence linked to colonization, resource extraction, and political repression. 

During Monday’s discussion of the study, speaker after speaker praised its authors for broadening the definition to more accurately reflect the challenges Indigenous peoples face. The experiences shared by Indigenous delegates at EMRIP reflect many of the study’s central findings: Conflict is often rooted in unresolved questions of land, self-determination, governance, and inequality, and that peace processes cannot succeed without the meaningful participation of Indigenous peoples. 

“The study demonstrates that conflict affects virtually every dimension of Indigenous peoples’ lives. It threatens the right to live, liberty, and security,” said Ojot Miru Ojulu, who is Anywaa from Ethiopia and led the session. “Across every region, Indigenous peoples possess longstanding traditions of diplomacy, mediation, customary law, and peacebuilding.”

EMRIP advises the U.N. Human Rights Council and wants the study to strengthen international guidance on protecting Indigenous rights before, during, and after conflict, while recognizing Indigenous peoples not only as communities affected by that violence, but as rights holders and participants in its prevention, reconciliation, and subsequent peacebuilding.

Maryann Stancich, who is Ngāti Manu and Ngāpuhi from Aotearoa New Zealand, said this understanding is important for recognizing how colonial systems continue to affect Indigenous peoples even without physical violence. “In Aotearoa, settler colonialism is not a historical event we have moved past,” said Stancich, who teaches law at Waikato University.

“Many of the impacts of colonization continue today through laws, policies, and governance arrangements that affect [Indigenous] self-determination, participation, and authority over our own affairs,” she said. 

According to Stancich, recognizing Indigenous legal systems also is an essential part of peacebuilding, with Māori customs and other Indigenous legal traditions providing frameworks for resolving disputes, repairing harm, and restoring relationships. Those traditions should be recognized as legitimate legal systems that can operate alongside those of the state and other entities to strengthen communities and resolve conflict in culturally meaningful ways.

“Peace is not simply defined by the absence of war,” Stancich said. “Lasting peace also requires justice and the meaningful implementation of the minimum standards affirmed in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

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In 2024, the French government proposed changes to New Caledonia’s electoral system that Indigenous Kanak groups feared would dilute their political representation. France governs the territory, and the Kanak independence movement has been fighting for self-determination for decades. In response, unrest erupted, leaving 14 people dead, most of them Kanak, and caused an estimated $2.5 billion in damage. 

Roselyne Makalu, who is from Lifou Island and a member of the Pacific Women Mediators Network, said women played a critical role in de-escalating tensions among young people during the unrest, using culture, dialogue, and healing to prevent further harm. “Children have anger in their bodies, and they don’t know why or where it comes from, but they feel excluded here in their own country,” Makalu said.

She said that although the immediate unrest has eased, Kanaky, as the Kanak call New Caledonia, remains politically and socially tense, and the deeper, generational trauma of colonization is often missing in international discussions about violence. 

Viro Xulue, the human rights and Indigenous advisor to the Customary Council of Drehu in Kanaky, said the territory’s experience demonstrates why true peace cannot be separated from decolonization. According to United Nations human rights mechanisms and France’s own National Human Rights Consultative Commission, the territory’s decolonization remains unfinished, with unresolved questions around political status, Indigenous representation, and the full recognition of Kanak land and other rights continue to shape tensions. 

Xulue said the struggle for self-determination is part of a wider Pacific movement among Indigenous peoples, with French Polynesia, Guam, Tokelau, and American Samoa also among the territories on the U.N. list of non-self-governing territories seeking true independence. “The Pacific Blue, peace of the Pacific, cannot happen when it isn’t totally decolonized,” Xulue said.

Although Indigenous delegates stressed the importance of a broader definition of conflict, Xulue and others also raised the issue of ongoing active violence. In a statement delivered Monday, Xulue mentioned West Papua, where Indigenous communities have long raised concerns over militarization, resource extraction, and the impacts of large-scale development — including the world’s largest deforestation project — on their lands. He called on EMRIP to remind all states of their obligations to uphold the rights of Indigenous people everywhere. 

“Peace,” he said, “is inseparable from self-determination.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For Indigenous peoples, conflict means so much more than war on Jul 15, 2026.

According to a new report from the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition, over the past 15 years, heat pump sales have doubled. In the first quarter of this year, the appliances outpaced shipments of fossil fuel furnaces by 32 percent, and narrowly missed beating out AC units. And in 2024, 46 percent of new housing included a heat pump, compared to 47 percent that went with forced-air furnaces. (This includes models running on natural gas and electric versions that work like giant hair dryers.) 

“All the trends are pointing towards increased heat pump adoption, not only versus gas, but also versus just traditional one-way air conditioning,” said Kevin Carbonnier, associate director of analytics at the coalition. “It’s not just that heat pumps are better, more comfortable, more efficient than furnaces. But also, you get the two-in-one appliance.”

A major driver of this electrification is new housing. Three quarters of new apartments in the US are heated electrically, and if you’re doing that, the thinking goes, you may as well install electric stoves. At that point, it doesn’t make sense for a builder to spend money with everything needed to pipe natural gas into the place. “It’s kind of becoming more of a common-sense measure to only build electric, especially with these new buildings, because the appliances are also so much more efficient,” said Kristin George Bagdanov, associate director of research at the coalition. 

The tricky bit is that homebuilders too often opt for resistance heating, like baseboard heaters, which are basically giant toasters. These have a “coefficient of performance,” or COP, of one, meaning you get one unit of heat for every unit of energy that goes into the device. Heat pumps, by contrast, have a COP of between 2 and 4, making them at least twice as efficient. (And vastly more so than even the most advanced gas furnaces.)

Apartment builders seem to be coming around to heat pumps, though. Half a century ago, vanishingly few new structures used them, in favor of resistance heating. But since 2010 — in the Northwest, at least — 18 percent of new apartment buildings featured heat pumps, according to a recent report from the nonprofit Sightline Institute. Multifamily housing, then, is a hugely powerful and popular way for the U.S. to decarbonize, as both Democrats and Republicans agree that the country urgently needs new housing. The Building Decarbonization Coalition’s report also notes that in new housing overall, including single-family homes, heat pumps were installed nearly half the time in 2024.

Utilities are also experimenting with a way of heating and cooling buildings even more efficiently with heat pumps. It’s known as networked geothermal: The utility drills holes in the ground, installs pipes that look almost exactly like gas ones, pumps liquid through them, and delivers it to the homes and businesses in a neighborhood, where heat pumps use the water, rather than air, to work their magic. Because the earth might still be 50 degrees Fahrenheit as air temperatures drop below freezing, the devices can extract consistent subterranean heat in the winter, then spend the summer drawing heat from structures and adding it to the liquid, which circulates back through the ground. This makes a utility’s geothermal system up to seven or eight times more efficient than having the same homes using gas furnaces. 

You might imagine a future, then, where liquid, not natural gas, flows into neighborhoods with nothing but electrified kitchens. “It’s all the same skill sets: managing infrastructure systems, drilling, laying down pipe in the street,” Carbonnier said. “All the same stuff that the gas workers are already doing.”

Ultra-efficient systems like networked geothermal aren’t just ideal for decarbonization because they run on electricity. As the U.S. uses more electricity in general — as massive data centers plug into the grid, for instance — utilities will have to build out more solar and wind farms, transmission lines, and battery banks to store power. Those costs get passed down to ratepayers. The less energy we use warming and cooling our homes, the less additional electricity and infrastructure we’ll need, reducing energy bills. (Electric vehicles are another way utilities are trying to avoid adding infrastructure: All those batteries will place extra demand on the grid, but can also send power to it in times of need. This will also lower costs for customers.)

Energy bills have exploded of late, entering the political zeitgeist, as pressure increases on politicians to do something. “I think for a long time individual consumers were taught that it was their fault if their bills were high, either they weren’t turning off their lights or they were keeping their thermostat too low or too high,” George Bagdanov said. Now they’re learning more about how public utility commissions set rates, how much money building out additional fossil fuel infrastructure costs, and how a utility’s investors reap financial rewards. “And then we kind of saw more of a shift to the conversation being about the systems around those bills,” George Bagdanov said.

Meanwhile, the market continues shifting in favor of the heat pump. “It’s been four years in a row that there’s more heat pumps being shipped out from manufacturers than fossil fuel furnaces,” Carbonnier said. “I think we are at a tipping point.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US may be hitting a tipping point for heat pumps on Jul 14, 2026.

Nearly two years ago, Hurricane Helene knocked out power in Burnsville, North Carolina. Fire Chief Niles Howell had to use the station’s generator to keep everything running. Through the storm, and the devastating flooding that followed, the fire department provided a landing pad for helicopters, a base for search-and-rescue operations, and a field hospital to triage and treat the wounded.

But even in less trying times, Howell can’t risk another blackout. The station is a community hub for the small town, and Howell regularly worries about running out of fuel for the generator.  

He can stop worrying. The fire department will soon install 40 kilowatt-hours of solar panels and double that amount of battery storage as part of a statewide microgrid project targeted at communities recovering from Helene. 

“I love redundancy, because inevitably what you plan for will fail at some point in time, so the more avenues you have to keep things going, the better off you are,” Howell said.

A growing number of organizations and even states are reaching the same conclusion. With the Appalachian mountains repeatedly battered by extreme rain and flash flooding in recent years, small-scale energy resilience projects are catching on. Many recent developments are popping up along the path Helene tore through western North Carolina.

The state Department of Environmental Quality invested $5 million in 26 microgrid projects last August, in partnership with a coalition of nonprofits dedicated to the expansion of sustainable energy. The goal is to build 24 stationary microgrids and two mobile ones, with five sites announced in June. 

This mirrors similar projects in storm-battered communities across the United States and its territories. Private and nonprofit microgrid networks have helped keep Puerto Rican communities electrified through increasingly violent hurricanes and an aging grid prone to frequent blackouts. Hurricane Ida prompted churches and community centers in New Orleans to launch a string of privately funded “lighthouses.”

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Solar microgrids, in short, are capable of powering one or more buildings, and some of them can also send electricity to the grid. They often feature large batteries designed to store energy to keep power going for days without sunshine. Stationary microgrids, which, as the name suggests, remain in one place, are found throughout the country, sometimes powering essential infrastructure like hospitals and wastewater treatment plants. One system operated by Duke Energy powers all of Hot Springs, North Carolina, and kept the lights on during Helene. Others are mobile and can be wheeled to wherever they’re needed. The technology is expensive, and all but one of the five stationary microgrids slated for western North Carolina will cost over $100,000, a burden a small community organization would struggle to bear on its own.

The small, portable, trailer-mounted systems, which the renewable energy advocates at the nonprofit Footprint Project call “beehives,” feature batteries and work in sunny and cloudy weather alike. “Cooler bees” include fridges and freezers for medications and food, “power bees” provide charging stations for phones and other devices, and “water bees” filter water. “Because they are mobile, these bees can be towed immediately to communities hardest hit in disasters,” said Footprint Project CEO Will Heegaard. 

These “bees” provide up to 100 kilowatt-hours of energy, and could power a large building for up to 10 hours. The Footprint Project is prioritizing installing them outside food banks, fire stations, community centers, and libraries, all of which can store supplies and serve as a hub of community operations during a disaster.

Two mobile solar power trailers will be ready to deploy in 2027, and installations at five of the planned stationary sites will begin this summer. Sara Nichols of the economic development group Land of Sky Regional Council said she hopes this project can demonstrate that a combination of philanthropic and public funding can support small-scale renewables, even when federal changes have reduced the accessibility of solar for many.

“We are essentially setting the model and the precedent for what we hope will be a much bigger statewide and national project to duplicate,” Nichols said. 

Reid Wilson, who leads the Department of Environmental Quality,  is already talking with potential partners around the state about using small-scale solar to build out local climate resiliency throughout North Carolina, though nothing official has come of it yet. Federal funding could one day help, he hopes, but he isn’t going to hedge all his bets on it. Governor Josh Stein asked the General Assembly to include $1 million for microgrids in his $792 million request for Helene relief funding. It didn’t make the cut. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A swarm of solar ‘bees’ are coming to western North Carolina community hubs  on Jul 14, 2026.

In April, when an out-of-control wildfire threatened the remote Xeni Gwet’in First Nation in western Canada, local governments issued evacuation alerts. The blaze quickly spread to 618 acres before being extinguished a few days later, and people were allowed to return home. 

Although the nearly 500 residents of Xeni Gwet’in were relieved, the crisis provided a reminder of what many Indigenous leaders say is Canada’s inadequate emergency communications with their communities. Authorities do not provide alerts in the Tŝilhqot’in language, the only one spoken by many elders in Xeni Gwet’in, and the mother tongue of nearly 650 people in the larger Tŝilhqot’in Nation. This adds an additional challenge during disasters because many families rely on them to make decisions in important moments. 

“Our elders are who we look to for support,” said Chantu William, who is Tsilhqot’in and a youth policy program development coordinator in Xeni Gwet’in. William said that the nation’s forestry crew must alert them directly. 

This community-led approach is not always enough during larger disasters, and Indigenous peoples are left waiting for emergency services to respond. “It would be nice if we had those preventative things on our own already,” William said.

At the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or EMRIP, which is meeting in Geneva this week, inadequate resources, poor communication, and unsafe conditions were common grievances among Indigenous delegates. The stakes grow increasingly dire as climate change makes natural disasters like wildfires, floods, and extreme weather more common and more intense. Delegates are urging local and national authorities to consult directly with them to better protect Indigenous lives and lands from the ravages of a warming world. To Indigenous peoples, climate disaster and conflict are linked symptoms of colonialism.

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In response to this growing problem, EMRIP embarked on a study to understand the issue. A draft of that research, based on more than 80 submissions from states, national human rights institutions, Indigenous people, and non-governmental organizations, was presented in Geneva this week. The study identifies historical injustices as a key reason why conflict continues to impact Indigenous peoples, even after it has officially ended, and as a link between threats like climate change and conflict. Resource extraction, biodiversity degradation, and displacement are all issues where climate and conflict intersect for Indigenous peoples. Upholding Indigenous rights, according to the study, is key to securing global peace and sustainability.

Speaking at EMRIP’s session on Monday, Ojot Miru Ojulu, who is Anywaa from Ethiopia, noted that conflict must be understood in a broad sense. “For Indigenous peoples, conflict is not limited to armed violence,” he said. “Conflict also includes structural conditions that systematically deny Indigenous peoples’ ability to exercise their rights.”

He noted that it can include the denial of the rights of Indigenous peoples everywhere to self-determination, discrimination against them, and their exclusion from decision-making on issues impacting them. 

In Russia, Viliuia Choinova, who is a Sakha activist, said her people face a long list of issues that could meet the broader definition that Miru Ojulu used. “Conflict is not only a matter of armed violence, it is a continuation of centuries of colonial domination,” she said in a statement delivered to her fellow delegates on Monday. “Our territories continue to face unchecked extractive industries, environmental destruction, and the erosion of our languages, cultures, and traditional ways of life.” 

Choinova also highlighted language challenges. While Yakut is a recognized state language alongside Russlan, she said the declining number of people speaking it has been noticeable. “We are indoctrinated to believe that Russian is the language of profession, education, higher education,” she said. “My language was considered one of the more stable ones, but as it turns out, that it’s degrading really fast.”

Choinova said that all of these issues impact her community’s ability to respond to disasters, conflict, and other incidents. 

Sara Wilson, a graduate communications researcher from Simon Fraser University in Canada, calls this a “crisis communication gap” — something she highlighted in a submission to EMRIP’s conflict study. Wilson previously worked in communications for the province of British Columbia’s forest, land, and natural resources department, and also serves as a senior communications associate with Canada’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Her research spotlights underfunding, language erasure from public systems, and exclusion from decision-making during crisis situations. Wilson cites devastating wildfires and floods as examples of dangerous communication failures.

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In a report analyzing its response to 2023 wildfires, the government of the Northwest Territories listed numerous concerns about how authorities communicated during the fire with Indigenous individuals whose first language is not English. Its Official Languages Act recognizes 11 languages, but the government’s alerts are issued only in English and French.

On its website, the government highlights its working relationship with Indigenous governments, organizations, and communities to “co-develop and establish bilateral emergency and communications protocols, as requested, before the 2026 wildfire season.” Government officials did not respond to emails asking what stage of the process they are in. Its website notes that in the interim they have “developed an Emergency Response Event Communication Protocol with Indigenous Governments to ensure clear communication between Indigenous Governments and the GNWT during emergency events.”

A paper published earlier this year by Climate Cardinals, a youth-led climate organization, revealed that the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientific publications are written in English. It argues that without more inclusive language, “up to 6.5 billion people risk exclusion from climate policy, disaster preparedness, and access to critical information.”

In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori communities have been hit by increasingly devastating storms, like Cyclone Gabrielle, which hit the country in February 2023, causing 11 deaths and billions of dollars in damage.

The cyclone exposed some key barriers to effective communication, according to a study released by Te Whāriki Manawāhine O Hauraki, a community resource center. It also praised the Māori-led mobilization to assist those impacted by the storm, which included setting up community centers. “A truly effective response requires more than collaboration, it demands a Tiriti-based framework [based on the Treaty of Waitangi] where Māori exercise decision-making authority over disaster preparedness and response in their own communities,” it reads.

Throughout Monday’s session in Geneva, Indigenous delegates highlighted the potential of Indigenous knowledge and argued that better resources and communication would benefit the entire world. 

“Indigenous peoples are not merely victims of conflict,” Choinova said, “but rights holders with the knowledge and capacity to shape a just and lasting peace.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A ‘crisis communication gap’ threatens Indigenous peoples on Jul 14, 2026.

By morning, the house Elle and her husband had spent years building was gone. So was much of the island. They were left with just the clothes on their backs. In the days that followed, the family survived in conditions that stripped life to its barest terms, at one point, eating livestock they had found dead in the storm’s aftermath.

“As a mother, it was up to me to find ways to feed my family,” Elle, a fish vendor, told The Xylom. “It got to the point where we were eating dead chickens, dead pigs. We got to that point because the government’s response took so long.”

The 35-year-old mother felt a deep sense of injustice. The typhoon — locally known as Odette — affected 10.6 million people in the Philippines, killing more than 400 and displacing 1.4 million from their homes. Elle began to question why communities like hers had to endure such devastation despite contributing so little to the climate crisis. “Why are we the ones struggling the most?” 

That question propelled her towards climate justice. In December 2025, 67 survivors of the typhoon sued Shell at the Royal Courts of Justice, arguing that the company’s historic emissions contributed to climate change and so worsened disasters like Rai, seeking compensation for the damages caused. Shell did not respond to The Xylom’s requests for comment.

The plaintiffs also contended that Shell has known since the 1960s about the risks climate change posed to vulnerable communities and the role its operations played in worsening those risks. Scientists agree that climate change is making storms like Rai more frequent and more intense.

The case is said to be the first civil case to directly link a major fossil fuel giant to deaths and injuries from climate impacts in the Global South. 

Asia lags in climate litigation

Climate litigation has surged globally over the past decade, but the Global South — home to many of the world’s most climate-vulnerable communities — still accounts for less than 10 percent of the cases. 

As of mid-2025, 3,099 climate change cases had been filed, with nearly two-thirds of all cases stemming from the United States, according to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Excluding the U.S., Europe accounts for the largest share of climate cases at 32 percent. Asia and Africa are the least represented at 6 percent and 2 percent, respectively.

“I remember years ago people would say climate litigation would never take off in Asia because it’s not part of the Asian culture to fight poverty and … to litigate,” Jolene Lin, director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law, said.

Lin disagrees with this line of thinking: She believes that the biggest obstacles to climate litigation stem from weak rule of law. 

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“In Asia, there are many jurisdictions where judicial corruption is a problem [as well as] the lack of judicial independence,” Lin said. Many judges across the region are still unfamiliar with climate litigation and tend to shy away from such cases, she added. 

Another challenge is the shrinking space for activism. In several countries, restrictions on free speech and association make it harder to organize, campaign, and bring cases to court. 

Still, more people across Asia are turning to the courts. Lin described 2024 as a “particularly meaningful year” for climate litigation in the region. 

That year, South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled that parts of the country’s Carbon Neutrality Act were unconstitutional because they failed to protect the rights of future generations. The case was filed by the environmental organization Youth 4 Climate Action in South Korea, a youth-led movement that leads climate strikes and advocates for clean energy.

Alongside this, the Supreme Court of India recognized protection from the adverse impacts of climate change as a fundamental constitutional right. It stemmed from efforts to protect a critically endangered bird, the Great Indian Bustard, amid concerns that the birds were being killed by collisions with overhead power transmission lines linked to expanding renewable energy infrastructure.

Similar legal challenges are now emerging elsewhere in Asia. In January, a Malaysian climate watchdog sued the federal government in a first-of-its-kind greenwashing case. The complaint alleges a fossil fuel company falsely marketed a fossil fuel-based product as “carbon neutral.”

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Win or lose, the case matters. As Malaysia’s first climate litigation, it will test how judges interpret climate obligations under existing laws and expose where resistance lies, which will create a roadmap for future cases, said Kuberan Hansrajh Kumaresan, head of legal advocacy at Malaysia-based environmental watchdog RimbaWatch. 

In April, Malaysian youths sued the government over deforestation, asking the court to enforce the country’s pledge to maintain at least 50 percent forest cover. They argue continued forest loss threatens generations to come. 

“My peers are losing hope for a decent future. It feels like we are more and more out of control of our lives. We cannot sit and continue to watch our government risk our future with every tree they cut down,” Amira Aliya, the youngest applicant in the case, said in a statement. 

Cases abroad

Plaintiffs are also increasingly filing cases outside their home countries. The Super Typhoon Rai survivors filed their case in the United Kingdom because Shell is headquartered there. This is a strategic move, as according to Jefferson Chua, a campaigner with Greenpeace Philippines, courts in jurisdictions like the U.K. have more developed climate jurisprudence and stronger mechanisms for assessing corporate responsibility.

Similar cases have increasingly been filed outside plaintiffs’ home countries. For example, in 2023, four residents of Pari Island in Indonesia — where rising sea levels have caused persistent flooding — filed a litigation against the construction company Holcim. They are asking the Swiss cement giant to cut its emissions by 69 percent by 2040, relative to 2019 levels, as well as to compensate for damages already incurred and fund flood protection measures. The Cantonal Court of Zug in Switzerland admitted the case in December last year. 

“[We] don’t contribute to island damage, but our island is now threatened by tidal floods and will be submerged because of the company’s activity,” said Arif Pujianto, a 55-year-old resident of Pari Island. 

Ibu Asmania, also a plaintiff in the case against Holcim, said they have the right and the responsibility to protect their island because the place where their families are born is at stake. 

The case is still in early stages, but it has already had ripple effects. It has been cited in an Australian challenge to a coal mine permit, and in Switzerland, major commercial law firms have issued alerts to corporate clients warning of the legal risks associated with high emissions, said Johannes Wendland, a legal advisor at HEKS-EPER Swiss Church Aid, which supports the Pari plaintiffs.

Justice in a changing climate

Lin expects a continued rise in climate lawsuits in Asia as awareness grows that the window to act on climate change is narrowing. She also anticipates more cases focused on “loss and damage,” with plaintiffs seeking compensation for climate-related harms. 

The rise in climate litigation reflects a broader strategy of seeking accountability on multiple fronts. “This is a very powerful tool for affected communities in the fight for climate justice, but it’s not the only tool,” Wendland said. “It’s not a silver bullet.”

Beyond setting legal precedents, these cases are also creating space for affected communities to be heard and to act.

“What we really want is to inspire other communities to say that this is actually possible,” Greenpeace Philippines’ campaigner Chua said. “We can hold big companies like Shell accountable. And that’s something that even if it takes time, it will take years to do it [and] it’s still possible.”

For litigants like Elle, the fight is about the future. 

“That’s what I hope I can do, even though I’m just an ordinary person,” she said. “If one day my grandchildren ask me what I did for nature, at least I have an answer: I fought for your future.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate-impacted communities across Asia are taking their fight to court on Jul 13, 2026.

But now, in a world where small, deadly drones can zip through wind farms, the Pentagon says those upgrades may not be sufficient. 

For almost a year, the Pentagon has effectively frozen the permitting process for at least 155 new wind projects in 24 states, citing drone concerns, according to research from the American Clean Power Association, an industry advocacy organization. As long as the freeze persists, developers say, no new wind projects can begin construction. The Pentagon has not revealed when or if it will resume approving new projects. 

Wind developers say they’ve incurred $2 billion in additional costs as a result of the freeze and that the administration’s new narrative is just the latest excuse to shut down their industry. Some may already have missed a July 4 construction deadline to qualify for federal tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the 2025 law that phased out several clean energy incentives.

“Without [Pentagon approval], wind projects can’t get financing or insurance, and so effectively it has frozen the entire process,” said Dave Belote, a wind energy consultant and former director of the Defense Department subagency that greenlights wind projects during the Obama administration. 

Over the past year, the Trump administration has separately been trying to halt the construction of offshore wind projects in federal waters, in part citing similar national security concerns. The Interior Department froze leases for five offshore projects last year, and the developers sued the agency over the decision. In a series of rulings earlier this year, judges struck down the federal stop-work orders even after viewing classified material that administration officials claimed illustrated that wind turbines created national security threats by affecting radar. After the court losses, the Trump administration took the extraordinary step of paying developers a combined $2.6 billion to cancel more than 11 gigawatts of offshore wind projects. 

In contrast, the permitting freeze for onshore wind projects has resulted in no reported project cancellations so far. But the scope of its potential impacts could be larger because it affects land-based projects — including those on private property — which represent the bulk of U.S. wind power development. The projects affected by the freeze have a combined capacity of 44 gigawatts — four times the generation capacity of the offshore projects canceled through federal payouts. 

In May, a coalition of renewable energy organizations and wind energy companies filed suit against the Department of Defense, claiming the permitting pause for onshore wind projects is the most damaging new tactic in the Trump administration’s “unprecedented campaign” against the industry. According to legal filings, the pause could cause developers to fall behind on project timelines, violate agreements, lose tax credits already baked into their financial models, and miss important deadlines for connecting to electrical grids, potentially making some projects unviable. 

“An unknown number of projects may never be able to move forward as a result of [the department’s] freeze,” the lawsuit stated.

The freeze also occurred with none of the official communication or transparency required for what the lawsuit argues is an effort to change a federal rule. For its part, the Pentagon says the freeze does not require that level of public communication because it is a delay, not a rule change: “This case at core is one of agency inaction, i.e., delay, so there is no agency action for which to seek notice-and-comment rulemaking,” the department’s filing reads. (The agency did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.)

In legal filings responding to the developers’ claims last month, lawyers for the Pentagon said that delays to wind projects are a “practical result” of the department’s review, which is necessary to safeguard the country from emerging threats.

“This case centers on the [Pentagon’s] ability to do its job — specifically, whether national security interests must take a back seat when they inconvenience the development interests of the energy industry. The answer should doubtlessly be ‘no,’” Pentagon lawyers wrote.

The freeze is “totally politically motivated,” Belote said. When Belote helped create the first Pentagon process for wind energy reviews, the agency followed the standard process of issuing notices and seeking public comments. The Pentagon’s pause had none of that transparency, Belote said. 

“I’ve got clients all over the country who are just wondering what the heck is going on,” Belote said.

If drone swarms are a new threat that needs to be handled, Belote said, the Pentagon should openly fund studies and experiments to find the best solutions. The lack of transparency and open effort toward a solution points to political motives against the wind industry, he added. 

Fifty-five Democratic representatives signed a letter to the Department of Defense in May, requesting a confidential briefing to understand the basis for the delays. A spokesperson for Congressman Seth Magaziner, a Democrat representing Rhode Island who signed the letter, said the Pentagon has not yet responded to the lawmakers’ request. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Pentagon is blocking more than 150 wind projects over drone fears on Jul 13, 2026.

It was Thursday, two days before the Fourth of July, and Carew, a UPS worker of 13 years, had set up an information booth with pamphlets and thermometers outside the company’s customer center in the north Bronx. His goal was to catch workers on their way in and out of shifts and educate them on how to stay safe when it’s blisteringly hot outside. 

Weather forecasts in New York City predicted temperatures nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit over the holiday weekend — and the heat was already intensifying. Standing in the shade and sporting bright blue sunglasses, Carew talked to his fellow workers, reminding them of their right to take paid breaks in the heat. 

“Heat safety is no joke,” he said the following day. Extreme heat protections have long been a concern for outdoor workers, and in recent years, unions representing delivery workers, farmworkers, and construction workers have been pushing for additional safety measures. In 2023, UPS workers won a labor contract with provisions requiring the company to install air-conditioning in new vehicles starting the following year. The safety measure was an important win, but Carew pointed out there are still risks on the job. In the back of delivery trucks where packages are kept, temperatures can still reach unsafe levels on very hot days. 

“I’ve seen numbers close to 150 degrees Fahrenheit,” he said. “When you’ve got 400 packages, and you’re looking for one envelope, it can get dangerous very quickly.”

Carew takes his role as a worker-organizer seriously — in part because there is currently no federal rule protecting the U.S. labor force from the effects of extreme heat exposure on the job. Although the Biden administration proposed a draft federal heat rule two years ago, the already lengthy process to codify such a rule has slowed even more under Trump. As climate change continues to push summer temperatures up, it has left states and municipalities to create their own standards for worker heat safety. 

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Labor groups also play an important role in workplace protections. According to Carew, last year the Teamsters, the union that represents UPS employees, began “aggressively” enforcing contract protections. Members held safety meetings in parking lots, hosted webinars, and distributed tool kits. The efforts seemed to have paid off: Last year was the first summer without any widely reported heat-related deaths at UPS. 

In New York City, labor rights groups and city agencies are working closely to protect vulnerable New Yorkers from extreme heat. Last month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order announcing a first-of-its-kind initiative to protect outdoor workers from heat illness. Shortly after, a few days before the heat wave descended over the region, Mamdani shared a separate, all-hands-on-deck plan to prepare for the high temperatures over the Fourth of July. The city rolled out hundreds of cooling centers and more than a dozen outreach vans with staff to perform wellness checks during the heat wave. And it also collaborated with groups like the Street Vendor Project to promote the use of pop-up cooling stations for outdoor workers.

The need for this kind of direct community outreach will continue, since it’s unlikely to be this summer’s only extreme heat event.

“When I show them the QR code” to see a map of where cooling centers are located, said Andrew Conca-Cheng, a program manager for Street Vendor Project, “there is a lot of excitement from vendors. They pull out their phone and want to know.”

Street Vendor Project represents over 3,000 food and merchandise vendors across New York City and has been in touch with various city agencies for over a year on heat safety issues. And as part of the executive order signed last month to protect outdoor workers from heat stress, city health and emergency management agencies must now develop a multilingual messaging campaign on heat safety “as soon as practical” this year. 

This emphasis on language access is critical given the wide array of languages spoken by street vendors, delivery workers, construction workers, and other outdoor laborers. These professions often attract immigrants, many of whom may feel more confident reading and speaking in a language other than English. Just within the Street Vendor Project membership, for example, said Conca-Cheng, the main languages spoken in addition to English are Spanish, Arabic, Bangla, French, and Mandarin.

The difficulty of crafting local policy to protect workers goes beyond overcoming a language barrier or distributing QR codes. Paid breaks, as well as shade and water access, are among some of the best practices for protecting workers from extreme heat. But the nature of outdoor work can make such basic and common-sense solutions challenging. For example, street vendors may be self-employed or, if they’re operating without all the necessary licenses and permits, may technically work in the informal economy. If they step away from their station — say, to visit a cooling station or take a break in the shade — they may worry about their food carts or supplies being stolen, or have to enlist a neighbor to watch their belongings.

For app-based delivery workers, taking a break to cool off can result in lost wages. Delivery apps may penalize bike messengers who slow down to take water breaks and stay safe in the heat for taking too long to complete orders.

Heat waves have complicated the already grueling nature of outdoor work. Labor advocates understand that this is the unfortunate reality for many trying to make a living on a warming planet. 

“Extreme heat is no longer an occasional emergency,” said Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project, a worker center in New York City. “It is becoming a defining feature of New York summers. Our response has to evolve accordingly.”

Guallpa added that the organization is “grateful” for Mayor Mamdani’s executive order to protect outdoor workers. (Worker’s Justice Project helps run Los Deliveristas Unidos, a labor union for app-based bike couriers.) She called the initiative “an important step because it acknowledges that the people who keep New York running during extreme weather deserve protection.”

NYC Deputy Mayor of Economic Justice Julie Su told Grist she has heard from workers who voiced similar concerns. “We met with workers in City Hall who all said the same thing: They can’t stop for water when they have a quota to hit. They can’t step into the shade, much less a cooling center, when they’re on the clock. They know what it’s like to feel faint, dizzy, exhausted, [and] to be rushed to the hospital,” said Su. She added that the new executive order “treats this as the public health emergency it is.”

“It’s important for the city to meet vendors where they’re at,” said Conca-Cheng. Recently, he added, the organization heard from members that cooling stations are not always in “relevant locations.” In one case, a cooling station was set up on a street that was temporarily closed to car traffic and turned into a public space for pedestrians, but it was not located near any street vendor clusters. The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which expanded pop-up cooling stations during the recent heat wave, did not respond in time to a request for comment. 

The work of connecting vulnerable workers to existing resources continues even as New York City enjoys slightly cooler temperatures this week. “’Cause there’s definitely going to be a lot more hot days this summer,” Conca-Cheng said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline No federal heat standard? NYC workers are building their own safety net. on Jul 13, 2026.