In a recent paper, a team of scientists describes two of these events in the region, one stretching for three-quarters of a mile and the other for 2 miles. Combined, they’d moved 30 million cubic yards of earth. Whereas other kinds of slides send a torrent of rainwater and mud and rock down a hillside, permafrost detachments happen when frozen soils degrade and the land fails catastrophically. Weirder still, the two slides started three decades ago during a wildfire, which slowly transformed the permafrost until the land collapsed in a matter of hours or days along the Johnson River in 2017 and Redstone River in 2018. 

When the researchers visited the slides, they found them embedded with chunks of frozen material up to 650 feet long. “It’s a very dramatic manifestation of the changing climate,” said geoscientist Joseph Young, lead author of the paper, who conducted the research while at the University of Alberta. “They’ve only started happening in the last 10, 15 years, and it’s a very drastic and abrupt change in the landscape.”

Permafrost is a major planetary wild card. Simply put, it’s ground that remains frozen for two years or longer, containing ice and dead plants, plus dirt, rock, or sand. Across the Northern Hemisphere, permafrost zones cover an area two and a half times the size of the continental United States. With the Arctic warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, permafrost is now thawing so quickly that it’s gouging massive potholes in the landscape, a phenomenon known as thermokarst, releasing clouds of greenhouse gas in the process.

A similar thing is happening with permafrost detachment slides, only a single event is much, much bigger in scale. “I think it’s fascinating that we’re discovering a new type of thermokarst,” said David Olefeldt, a soil scientist at the University of Alberta, who studies permafrost but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “This is a type of land collapse due to permafrost thaw which hasn’t really been observed before.”

The disturbance began in 1995, when a wildfire swept through the region. The flames burned off the vegetation that normally shaded the permafrost, keeping it cool during the sunny northern days of summer. The ground, then, lost a sort of thermal shield. “After about 20 years or so, that thermal signature from the burned forest can reach the base of permafrost,” Young said. “It’s slight, but it’s there.”

The collapse of the permafrost, then, actually came from the bottom up through the mixture of soil, ice, and organic material that comprised it. As the base warmed  — even slightly — tension cracks propagated. This created pools of relatively warm water at the surface, which further infiltrated the permafrost. As the melange degraded it slipped downhill at a rate of a handful of feet a year, increasing to perhaps 80 feet annually, before it all suddenly gave way as a detachment slide. “This kind of movement can create its own release of energy because of friction and cracking on the bottom,” said Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a permafrost geophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who wasn’t involved in the new research. Glaciers — vast sheets of ice creeping downhill — do this, too, suddenly surging and accelerating.

Because the researchers found those huge blocks of frozen material, they can tell that the permafrost eventually failed from below. That is, if they instead found a bunch of mud in the slide area, that might suggest that the ground degraded from above as the permafrost slowly thawed into mush.

The tumult didn’t stop at the moment of collapse. So much material was displaced that it left walls of permafrost on either side of the slide, which were then exposed to the sun. “Just because you have this large detachment failure, that doesn’t mean it’s over,” Young said. “Actually, it means you’ve opened up more potential for failure.”

The consequences could extend far beyond the Northwest Territories. As permafrost thaws, microbes begin feasting on the organic material within, expelling greenhouse gas as they digest it. This might be kicking off a feedback loop, in which warmer temperatures release more carbon, which leads to more warming and more carbon, and on and on. “That’s a major global concern,” said Miriam Jones, a research geologist who studies permafrost at the United States Geological Survey but wasn’t involved in this research. “It’s a feedback that many of us have been studying.”

At the same time, plants are quickly marching north at miles per decade, a phenomenon known as Arctic greening. In some areas, a rising number of shrubs trap snow, preventing the chill of winter from penetrating the underlying permafrost, thus hastening its decline. More plants also means more fuel for the wildfires that initiate permafrost detachment slides. As if that weren’t bad enough, northern wildfires tend to burn through peat, the carbon-rich material that accumulates in the ground over centuries. These “zombie fires” are so persistent that they can smolder underground even as snow falls above, popping up again during the spring thaw, releasing still more carbon into the atmosphere.

Now the question is: How much more of that planet-warming gas might be spewing from permafrost detachment slides, as bacteria proliferate in the aftermath? “The short answer is: We don’t know how much, because we haven’t characterized and classified it,” Young said. “But it could be quite severe, just because the size of these features.” 

Indeed, previous research has found that much smaller instances of abrupt permafrost thaw could be producing significant carbon emissions. “I expect that we can see more of these types of surprises,” Olefeldt said, “as we cross thresholds in other regions that have these vulnerabilities to collapse.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Strange, catastrophic landslides are kicking off across the far north on Oct 30, 2026.

On some days, the air quality conditions are more than 13 times worse than the threshold considered unhealthy. And like in many tropical countries, buildings in Indonesia are often built to maximize air flow, rather than filter it or keep it out. “This is a public health catastrophe,” said Robert Field, a fire researcher at Columbia University. Although there are other pressing consequences of the fires, such as carbon emissions and the harm to wildlife and forest habitats, “it’s hard to think much past the air quality issues,” he said. 

The fires are the latest environmental crisis inundating Indonesia. The country is not only one of the world’s most populated, but also one of its most disaster-prone. Just last year, 1,200 residents of Sumatra died during catastrophic cyclone-induced flooding and landslides. And the country’s capital city of Jakarta, which already partially sits below sea level, is sinking. As a warming climate pushes sea levels higher, the country is racing to build a new capital on higher ground.

These disasters are all wrought from the dangerous combination of human sprawl and climate change. But it’s not yet clear how much hotter temperatures influenced the ongoing disaster. By contrast, wildfires in parts of the world that are warming faster than Indonesia — like the recent devastating outbreaks in Canada and Europe — are clearly attributable to climate change, scientists say.

The primary culprits of Indonesia’s fires, however, are no mystery. A superstrong El Niño has sent Indonesia into a severe drought, drying out the peatlands found across the country. And peat, a kind of soil packed with partially decayed plant matter, is highly flammable, especially so when dried out. But when farmers or agriculture companies light fires to quickly and cheaply clear away vegetation and debris, a common practice in Indonesia, peat fires can quickly get out of control — smoldering underground for months.

“This is a crime against humanity, because what they have done endangers the health of millions of our people,” said Prabowo Subianto, the president of Indonesia, during a Cabinet meeting last week, according to a government press release. Seemingly in an effort to address the public’s outrage, he vowed to investigate who was responsible for lighting the fires and called these actions a kind of environmental terrorism. Frustration over the fires, high living costs, and government spending has sparked numerous large protests across the country in recent weeks.

The government has also been preparing for the year’s fires for months, ever since scientists first began forecasting this year’s El Niño. “This year, we must be much more careful,” Raja Juli Antoni, Indonesia’s minister of forestry, told the United Nations in May. “The potential for a longer dry season due to El Niño demands heightened vigilance from all of us.”

Unfortunately, the fires were lit anyway. According to Field, who worked with the Indonesian government to create fire prevention strategies in the 2000s, many of the fires appear to be on unmanaged lands next to working plantations, which often grow oil palm, and are the primary driver of Indonesia’s high rates of deforestation and biodiversity loss. That means the fires were likely being used to clear the overgrowth to make room for more crops, he said.

Indonesia has faced terrible peat fire outbreaks since the 1990s, but began making strides to address the problem in the last decade. In 2014, it banned drainage canals used to dry out peatlands and make them more suitable for crops. And a couple of years later, after a particularly bad wildfire season, the government sharply curbed deforestation and began restoring large areas of already degraded land. The rate of deforestation continued to fall for five more years and, although it began creeping back up in 2022, remains far below what it once was.

“I was optimistic that the drought was inevitable but the fire was not,” said Field, adding that Indonesia was much more prepared for this year’s fires than in the past. “I don’t think there was a lack of sincerity from officials not wanting this to happen, and the fact that it did just points to how hard it is to manage fire in such a large and complicated country.”

Peat fires are an especially challenging form of wildfire for many reasons, said Israr Albar, Indonesia’s former deputy director of forest fire management, in an emailed statement. The dense buildup of organic material allows fires to burn underground for months, making them difficult to detect by satellite even as they release large amounts of carbon and smoke. (The smoke can become dense enough to obscure satellites from seeing fire on the surface, too.) “Just because we cannot see a fire does not mean it is not there,” Albar said.

This dynamic makes the flames hard to locate and put out, and even fires that seem extinguished will often reignite without notice. And it’s not always possible to find the large amounts of water necessary to put a peat fire out during the water-stressed conditions of the dry season. The country recently saw some rain, but “that doesn’t mean the danger has passed,” Albar said. “Even when the rainy season begins, fires may continue underground.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’s fueling Indonesia’s worst wildfire season in a decade? on Oct 30, 2026.

Last year’s warm, dry winter hit Arnold’s unirrigated farm hard. Record-low snowpack left moisture in short supply, stunting crops’ growth. But he could soon see some financial relief. Arnold is one of nearly 300 Montana landowners in the path of a proposed pipeline that would traverse nine counties in eastern Montana and an expanse of eastern Wyoming. 

“We’re coming off of two, three bad years,” Arnold said, “and that’s going to be a good-size check.”

Wyoming-based Bridger Pipeline LLC plans to build a 650-mile pipeline to move tar sands oil — a dense mix of sand, clay, water, and a molasses-like form of petroleum that generates about 20 percent more greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional crude. The route would connect to an existing Canadian pipeline and run through Montana to an oil refinery hub and trading center in Guernsey, Wyoming. The company has said it plans to break ground within a year. This spring, President Donald Trump granted the project a presidential permit authorizing it to cross the Canadian border.

Arnold has farmed in this region all his life. He’s seen droughts come and go, and expanded his operation to remain profitable in an industry that runs on razor-thin margins. In the 1980s, when a trifecta of drought, heat, and grasshoppers decimated his crops, he wasn’t sure if he could afford to keep going. Then a pipeline came to town. 

The Northern Border Pipeline moves gas from Canada to the American Midwest, with 105 miles running through Montana. The check Arnold got for letting that pipeline cut through his land enabled him to continue farming. 

“It was the greatest thing ever,” he said. 

Decades later, when the Keystone XL was proposed to move tar sands oil from Alberta through the U.S. to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, Arnold was excited to see another pipeline come into his community, but disappointed to find he wasn’t along the path. The pipeline was never constructed after then-President Joe Biden terminated the project in 2021.

Now, Arnold has another chance. Standing in his grain fields, he said he was excited when Bridger first approached him about an easement more than a year ago. 

“My first thought was, ‘I’m not gonna let you come through unless you do circles out there,’” Arnold said, noting that he wanted to maximize the length of the pipeline crossing his land. The more pipe on his property, the more he stands to earn.

Bridger’s proposed pipeline runs through farm and rangeland where volatile cattle markets, skyrocketing diesel prices, and multiyear droughts have made a challenging industry even harder in recent years. Farmers and ranchers who own land along the route say a payment from Bridger could provide meaningful stability. 

Pipeline companies often negotiate deals with individual landowners, paying them a one-time sum for an easement on their land. Landowners are also compensated for survey access or preliminary legal fees to consult a lawyer about an easement proposal.  

The amount a pipeline company pays depends on the length of pipe and individual negotiations, which are often private. In 2012, some landowners reported offers of up to $38,000 from the Keystone XL pipeline. Landowners in Nebraska who held out said they were offered tens of thousands of dollars in signing bonuses, with some reporting offers of more than $150,000.

With President Donald Trump back in office, many landowners in eastern Montana are cautiously optimistic that a new pipeline could deliver the economic opportunities Keystone once promised. Still, the project has multiple milestones to pass before it can be built. 

First, the company must identify potential routes. Bridger has proposed three, with one defined as the preferred route. Next, the company must survey the route, examining topographical challenges and environmental impacts. Bridger spokesperson Bill Salvin told Grist and Montana Free Press in October that the company has paid each of the roughly 450 landowners on the preferred route for the right and access to conduct surveys. Salvin declined to say what collective payments to landowners might add up to. 

The Bureau of Land Management will then publish its own environmental review for public comment. Pending that process, Bridger has to secure state and federal compliance permits, negotiate with landowners, and pay them for easements. Only then can construction begin, Salvin said. 

Landowners along the pipeline’s proposed routes have varying levels of information about the company’s plans. Many still have basic questions about what the pipeline will carry, where it will end up, and how it might help them with rising fuel costs. But the Montana Department of Environmental Quality has hosted regular meetings with Bridger and county commissioners along the route, and as a result, local commissioners are largely championing the project. 

Daniels County Commissioner Tammi Fladager said a project like Bridger would provide a much-needed economic boon. Fifty miles of Bridger’s preferred route run through the county, which is home to roughly 1,600 people, 11 percent of whom live in poverty. 

“We’re kind of desperate,” Fladager said, sitting in a purple rocking chair in her living room in September. “Anybody that comes with a big check, it’s ‘Where do I sign?’ You don’t want the lottery ticket to walk out the door.”

Bridger anticipates hiring anywhere from 2,000 to 2,500 construction workers to build the pipeline, and those workers, Salvin said, would stay in temporary housing provided by the company, commonly referred to as “man camps.” Salvin said Bridger expects to create 50-100 full-time jobs in Montana to maintain the pipeline once it’s built. 

Economic impacts at that scale are meaningful in rural eastern Montana. The Continental Divide separates more than just the forests from the prairie. Most of the state’s income-generating population centers, tourism destinations, and growth are located in the western half of the state. It’s a different story in the east. The oil and gas industry is a major economic driver for eastern Montana, and one of the region’s primary avenues of revenue. Carter County commissioners said existing oil and pipeline infrastructure accounts for the vast majority of the county’s property tax receipts. The pipeline’s promise to consistently fill county coffers, Fladager said, carries a lot of weight in the eastern half of the state. 

“It almost feels like western Montana is eating off of a banquet table, and we’re down here picking up scraps,” Fladager said. “And this [pipeline] is like a pork chop falling on the floor. That’s what it is to us.”

Daniels County is also uniquely poised to benefit from Bridger because it doesn’t have any existing pipelines paying into county tax accounts. In 2025, neighboring Valley County collected more tax revenue from centrally assessed properties, which include everything from pipelines to power lines, than from any other real estate. 

Valley County Commission Chair Paul Tweten said the community was hopeful when Keystone announced it was coming through the area. He said residents built new shops, bought new pickups, and approved a $16.8 million school bond with the expectation of leveraging Keystone tax revenues.   

Asked how he felt when Biden signed the executive order ending Keystone, Tweten paused. “You don’t want to know,” he said. 

Bob Thielen ranches outside Plevna, about 250 miles southeast of Valley County. His land is on the pipeline’s preferred route, and he supports the project. 

“There’s a couple old Bridger pipelines that were put in way before I was born,” Thielen said, standing beside the county road running through his property. “I don’t even know what year. Probably in the ’50s, maybe.” 

His property was also on the path of Keystone XL. Having watched Keystone’s death, Thielen said he’s skeptical about Bridger’s chances.   

“I’m going to call this the annoying stages of it,” he said. “When all the negotiations are going on, and when you got all the surveyors and environmentalists, and everybody is wanting to come through your property and do all this and do all that, really before anything’s even set in stone.”

Bridger has local offices in the area, and Thielen said he trusts the company. But he has questions. 

“Where’s the oil going? It’d be really nice to know,” Thielen said. “I don’t know why we have to keep sending oil out of our country when we’re in a struggle right now.”

He said he’d like to see more transparency from company and government officials about what the pipeline will carry, and whether it will help drive down gas prices. 

“What is the benefit to the American people?” Thielen said. “The counties might get a little revenue, us ranchers are going to get a little revenue — the American people are going to get absolutely zero from it if it’s just coming in and going out.”

Several landowners on the pipeline’s route told Grist and Montana Free Press they are in the dark about what the pipeline will carry and its final destination.

While Wyoming may mark the end of the pipeline, it’s not necessarily the last stop for the crude it will carry. Bridger, in collaboration with South Bow, another energy company, plans to build a pipeline to move tar sands crude from Guernsey, Wyoming, through Colorado and Kansas to a refinery in Cushing, Oklahoma. From there, it could be stored or moved to the Gulf of Mexico to be globally exported. 

Salvin said it’s impossible to say how or whether the Bridger pipeline might impact the cost of fuel but noted that more supply in the market is a good thing. 

“This is scheduled to start at 550,000 barrels a day; that gives additional security and stability to a market that can be unstable at times,” Salvin said. “And when you have a secure market, and you have a security of supply, that can help even out some of those shocks.”

The pipeline also comes with risk. At full capacity, it could carry more than a million barrels daily. A spill could pose serious environmental and health hazards. 

The preferred route skirts just north of the Fort Peck Reservation boundary, coming within 2 miles of the reservation at its nearest point. Tribal leaders have said that even though the pipeline wouldn’t cross their land, a spill could put thousands of people’s drinking water at risk. 

Krystal Two Bulls, executive director of Honor the Earth, an Indigenous-led environmental advocacy organization, said plotting a pipeline’s path just beyond a reservation boundary is a “familiar tactic.” The Dakota Access pipeline skirts around the northern border of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and Enbridge’s Line 5 is being rerouted to avoid the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin. 

“It’s an extremely common practice,” she said. “It’s like, ‘We’ll put the pipeline just close enough where you don’t have rights. And you can’t say that it’s on the reservation, so, legally, you don’t have the same protections or the same ability to fight it.’ But it’s close enough where it’s going to have an impact.”

Bridger’s Salvin said the company prioritized a route that does not cross reservation land because of tribal opposition. 

“Their tribe has made it clear they don’t want additional pipelines,” he said. “We are of the mind that if people don’t want our pipelines, whether it’s Fort Peck Tribes or an individual landowner, we don’t want to put it there. We’d rather have someone amenable to the pipeline willing to have it cross their property.”

Sitting beside his colleagues in the Fort Peck tribal chambers on a Thursday morning in late September, Tribal Executive Board member Jestin Dupree addressed two U.S. Bureau of Land Management representatives. Because the pipeline would cross more than 50 miles of BLM land, the federal agency is a major player in the planning process. 

“I want to know about worst-case scenarios,” Dupree told agency leaders.

The pipeline would run near several water systems that treat and deliver water from the Missouri River to thousands of Native and non-Native people on the reservation and in surrounding counties. It would also cross the Poplar River, a tributary of the Missouri.

What would happen, Dupree wanted to know, if it were to spill? 

In 2015, a different pipeline owned by Bridger spilled at least 30,000 gallons of Bakken crude oil into the Yellowstone River. About 6,000 Glendive residents, whose water treatment plant was downstream of the spill, were directed not to consume drinking water at the time. Bridger ultimately settled a civil lawsuit with the Montana Attorney General’s Office over the spill for $2 million in 2021. According to data from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, Bridger pipelines have spilled 12 times since 2012. In 2023, Bridger and pipeline company Belle Fourche agreed to pay a $12.5 million civil penalty under the federal Clean Water Act and pipeline safety laws following oil spills in Montana and North Dakota. 

Slavin told Grist and Montana Free Press the company has improved its safety protocols since the 2015 spill.

“We build the pipelines today better than they were built in the past,” he said. “They are designed for safety and 24/7 monitoring with multiple leak detection systems, including one that we invented using AI.”

In the same September meeting, tribal leaders asked BLM representatives if the agency’s environmental analysis will consider the lifetime emissions produced by processing and burning tar sands oil. 

The refining and burning of fossil fuels releases planet-warming emissions. In addition to the higher greenhouse gas footprint compared to other types of crude, tar sands oil requires large amounts of water and gas for heating and mining to extract the bitumen.   

Phillip Blundell, the pipeline project lead for the BLM, cited a recent Supreme Court decision that federal agencies are not required to analyze such environmental impacts. He told tribal leaders that the BLM’s environmental analysis “will only look at emissions from construction.”

Council members also asked what an emergency response would look like in the event of a spill. They wanted to know how to document potential harm to the tribes’ natural resources and asked if there are plans to mitigate possible violence at man camps.

BLM representatives provided council members with little in the way of specifics, repeating several times that Bridger’s delay in providing logistical information about the pipeline has stalled the agency’s progress on its environmental analysis. 

Dupree said he left the council meeting with more questions than answers.

“We met with the BLM twice and Bridger Pipeline twice in the last year and a half, but you know, the same questions come about with no answers,” he said. “It’s just a lot of lip service, it seems.”

Asked about plans to meet with the tribal council, Bridger spokesperson Salvin said the company is preparing technical assessments to address the tribes’ questions and plans to meet in December. 

Dupree told Grist and Montana Free Press that, as of mid-October, he was unaware of any scheduled meeting. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In eastern Montana, a new oil pipeline comes with perils and a potential payday on Oct 29, 2026.

Usually, they’d get a couple of days’ notice, allowing them time to make any necessary arrangements. But this time there was no such buffer. Her sister had called to let her know that the road would be closed that evening for the test launch, so Burton left work early and drove home. Then, about a half hour later, she observed an unmarked security vehicle blocking her driveway. This, more than anything, she found infuriating. Her 6-year-old was sick, and whoever was overseeing the launch was essentially telling her not just that she couldn’t drive into town, but also that she couldn’t leave her house.

The launch, it turned out, was delayed until the following night. On August 21, 2025, around 10 p.m., a massive rocket streaked across the sky before breaking up somewhere over the Pacific. Videos posted to Facebook, X, and other social media captured its flight path, with one viewer wondering if it had been a nuclear weapon fired from Russia. 

The Alaska Aerospace Corporation, which operates the Spaceport facility, later released a statement explaining that it had carried out “a successful government rocket launch,” and that the people of Kodiak (with a population of over 12,000) should be proud of their role in “the United States’ space legacy.” But the information blackout the U.S. military required for this launch was unprecedented and even ruffled feathers within Alaska Aerospace. The Spaceport had prepared a press release and public notice that it wanted to share with the local media a few days before the launch. But government officials wouldn’t allow it. They wouldn’t even let Spaceport staff tell Alaska’s Department of Transportation about the road closure.

“It was the government that put the handcuffs on us,” Alaska Aerospace’s CEO, John Oberst, told colleagues at a board meeting in Kodiak a few weeks later. 

For the Burtons, it was an ominous sign, the beginning of a new era of secrecy around the launch facility and militarization of Kodiak Island itself. Founded by the state of Alaska in 1991, Alaska Aerospace was originally billed as a “public corporation” that would focus primarily on “space-related economic growth” and “space-related educational and research development by encouraging and assisting the University of Alaska,” according to the state statute establishing it. Unlike Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida or Vandenberg Space Force Base in California — two of the country’s busiest launch facilities — it was the first commercial spaceport not affiliated with a federal installation. 

Stacy Studebaker, a Kodiak resident and longtime critic of the facility, said that officials used to tout its public-facing nature and potential to contribute to the local economy. “They claimed from the beginning that this would be a commercial launch site,” Studebaker said.

But in the last couple of years, the tone has shifted. Alaska’s proximity to Russia and China, viewed as the U.S.’s primary threats and competitors in the region, and existing Cold War-era infrastructure, have made places like Kodiak highly attractive to military planners. At the same time, a rapidly warming Arctic is accelerating the competition for resources, including minerals and rare earth metals, and for control of shipping lanes, while also exposing infrastructure to the threat of worsening storms and sea level rise. This quest for “Arctic dominance” has heightened the risk of accidents — an oil tanker capsizing in the Arctic Ocean, for example — or outright military conflict.  

The Trump administration is planning to invest billions of dollars in Arctic security, including its Golden Dome missile defense system — a complex, layered defense shield incorporating “space-based sensors and interceptors,” designed to protect the United States from incoming missiles.

Much of the project has been cloaked in secrecy. But in September, the Air Force announced for the first time that it had deployed weapons in orbit to guard against “hostile adversary action.”

All of this means a potentially dramatic increase in launches from the Spaceport. In July, Rocket Lab, a private aerospace company, announced that it had signed a $266 million contract with the U.S. Air Force for missile defense testing, which will entail up to 18 suborbital launches at the facility over the next two years. And in the last year, the Spaceport was allocated up to $45.5 million from the federal government to upgrade the facility. It plans to modernize several of its launch pads and build a new 10,000-foot airstrip as well as a large lodging facility to accommodate government employees and private contractors, according to Oberst.

Alaska Aerospace’s 2025 annual report states that the Spaceport is “actively planning for increased launch cadence” and could see an exponential increase in activity — from one to three launches per year to one to three per month. Since opening nearly three decades ago, the Spaceport has performed a total of 35 launches. Now, it could potentially exceed that figure in a single year. 

Alaska Aerospace also has ambitions to grow beyond Kodiak. It has partnered with the University of Alaska Fairbanks to facilitate orbital and suborbital launches out of the university’s Poker Flat Research Range, north of Fairbanks, and is looking at a possible launch site on Alaska’s North Slope at Oliktok Point.  

“Spaceports are like beachfront property,” Oberst said in a press release announcing the agreement with the university in June 2025. “Very few and in high demand.”

This activity comes as the Trump administration is loosening regulations for commercial space operations and speeding up the permitting and review process for launches. The goal is to expand the number of launches nationwide from roughly 200 last year to 1,000 every year by the end of the decade (and as many as 10,000 launches a year by 2035), as outlined in a recently released National Security Presidential Memo, and marks the beginning of what President Donald Trump has called the “golden age of space transportation.” Achieving that goal will require not only new infrastructure, but also fast-tracking the environmental review process for launches and the construction of new spaceports.

In an executive order issued last year, Trump called for streamlining the licensing requirements for commercial launches. More recently, the Federal Aviation Administration announced a new rule that would allow private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to bypass more than a dozen regulations, including longstanding environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Water Act when applying for launch permits or construction of new spaceports. 

Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy group that has criticized the FAA’s rule, says the rapid increase in launch activity poses risks to public health and the climate, many of which have yet to be studied. 

“One of the main goals of this deregulatory push is just to massively increase commercial space activity,” said Scott Stern, a senior attorney at Earthjustice. “And the whole point of our environmental review statute is not necessarily to impede activity. It is to make sure that it’s being done safely and that it is not unduly harming the human environment, wildlife, clean air, clean water, and our own communities.”

The scientific community has only recently begun revisiting the impacts of air pollution from rockets — including black soot and other toxic chemicals released during takeoff. One study published by researchers at University College London in 2022 found that a surge in rocket launches on a scale being proposed by the Trump administration could threaten progress in restoring the ozone layer over the past four decades and accelerate global warming. An emissions tracker created by the research team estimates that in the last five years alone, the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere from rocket launches has increased by more than 300 percent. 

Eloise Maraise, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and air quality at the university and the study’s lead author, said interest in the subject is now starting to attract significant funding opportunities because there’s been a realization that the impacts could be far-reaching. She described herself as being in the unenviable position of “forecasting an upcoming environmental disaster.”

It’s not just missile defense that is driving investment in Kodiak. The U.S. Coast Guard, which operates its largest base on the island, is slated to receive two new 328-foot polar icebreakers in the coming years (a third will have its home port in Seward, just to the north). The government is already building 30 new housing units, a child development center and playground, and other infrastructure improvements to accommodate the influx of personnel. There’s also been a flurry of construction at the highly secretive Navy Seal cold-weather training base in Kodiak, fueling rumors about what may be coming. All of this new activity is raising concerns among residents and local officials that the island’s energy grid, which is already nearing capacity, will not be able to accommodate the new development.

Meanwhile, Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican, has advocated for reopening the U.S. base on the island of Adak, part of the Aleutian archipelago southwest of Kodiak, which served as a staging ground for the Navy during World War II. The flight path over these islands is being turned into what Alaska Aerospace has dubbed the “Pacific Test Range,” which will be used to pilot “hypersonic vehicles, orbital launch, and other advanced aerospace systems.” 

Given these changes, the Burtons sold most of their property, which had been in the family since the 1960s, to Alaska Aerospace for $2.4 million in February. (They kept their home and 20 acres.) Christine Burton said it no longer made sense to hold onto the land. The increase in launches would have made it too difficult to operate their game ranch, and she feared the Spaceport’s new military focus meant the government would have found a way to seize the property by eminent domain. 

“We saw the writing on the wall,” Burton, who grew up in a military family, told me. 

Alaska Aerospace hasn’t said much about what it plans to do with the 139.5 acres of land, close to popular hiking trails and beaches where visitors can watch gray whales make their way north in the summer. More than 150 bird species, several of which are at risk of extinction, also frequent the area along the island’s eastern edge, known as Narrow Cape. In addition to the new lodging complex, Alaska Aerospace officials have also resurrected a controversial plan to install a barge dock at the mouth of the Pasagshak River that would allow them to get heavy equipment to the site, but which could impact salmon and other species. 

Taken together, the expansion of the Spaceport and other defense installations on Kodiak will transform this rugged island into a hub of military activity in just a few short years. What Kodiak Mayor Jared Griffin described to me as a “sleepy working-class fishing town” is poised to become the tip of the spear in a new battle for control of the Arctic.

Kodiak is the second largest island in the United States and one of Alaska’s most important commercial fishing hubs. A one-hour flight from Anchorage, it flanks the eastern edge of a volcanic island chain that extends more than 1,000 miles into the Bering Sea along the Russian border. 

Although the Trump administration has been fixated on exerting more control over Greenland, and the president himself has frequently referred, falsely, to the ubiquitous presence of Russian and Chinese ships in the North Atlantic, there’s been far more tension and potential for conflict along Alaska’s coast. The U.S., Russia, and China are all competing for control of these waters and the riches that lie beneath them, including oil and gas, rare earth metals, and highly lucrative commercial fish stocks such as crab and pollock. China, which declared itself a “near Arctic State” in 2018 and is rapidly expanding its own fleet of icebreakers, now routinely sends research vessels to the Bering Sea near the U.S. border on the way to the Arctic.

As warming waters melt the sea ice that once blanketed much of the Arctic Ocean — the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet — shipping access will only increase. Russia has already invested tens of billions in developing the Northern Sea Route, which runs along its roughly 3,500-mile-long Arctic coastline and would slash the amount of time it takes for oil and gas to reach East Asia. The world’s superpowers also have their sights set on commercial fishing opportunities in the Arctic Ocean, though it is currently protected by an international treaty.

Tensions have already spilled out into the open. In 2023, a Chinese spy balloon entered U.S. airspace north of the Aleutian Islands and drifted across the continental United States before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina. And the U.S. has intercepted several Russian fighter jets — and one joint Russian-Chinese mission — in the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone near the Bering Strait. One encounter in 2024 came dangerously close to an outright collision.

These sensitivities extend to the Spaceport. Oberst, the Alaska Aerospace CEO, said last year’s launch was kept quiet until the last minute because the government “didn’t want anybody, especially the adversaries, to be aware of the timing or the detail of it.” 

Though Democratic and Republican administrations have both sought to project power in the Arctic — the Army released a report in 2021 titled “Regaining Arctic Dominance” — Trump has placed a premium on reasserting U.S. primacy in the region. 

The Golden Dome project, which the Congressional Budget Office has estimated will cost more than $1 trillion, is the crown jewel in his plans. The system, which Lockheed Martin has described as a “Manhattan Project-scale mission,” would use land, air, and space-based sensors and interceptors to stave off an incoming attack.  

“Golden Dome is the main driver for business for the next three-to-five years,” Oberst told colleagues at Alaska Aerospace’s annual board meeting last year. “It’s the national imperative. So it supersedes other missions.”

Commercial launches aimed at environmental research or scientific discovery, the suggestion seemed to be, would have to take a back seat.

Money has already begun to flow into Alaska, and Kodiak in particular. Beyond the tens of millions of dollars for upgrades to the Spaceport, the facility is also one of hundreds of contractors considered eligible for up to $151 billion in government funding related to Golden Dome over the next decade. Alaska Aerospace has also signed a memorandum of understanding with Moonshot Space, an Israeli aerospace start-up whose CEO helped develop the Iron Dome, Israel’s missile defense shield. The company is currently developing an electromagnetic launch technology that would operate out of Poker Flat. 

Shahar Bahiri, one of Moonshot’s co-founders and its chief operating officer, told me Alaska is attractive precisely because of its large open spaces and low population density. “What we want to have is an area which is open sea … very low air traffic, very little sea traffic, not a lot of civilians around the launch area, and not a lot of nature,” he said. 

Meanwhile, the Defense Authorization Act for 2027, which still has to get through Congress, would provide $2.6 billion for military assets across the state, including the continued expansion of Kodiak’s launch capacity. Sullivan, in an op-ed published earlier this year, said Alaska is “in the midst of the most significant military buildup … since World War II.”

Cold War-era military development and infrastructure is still visible in parts of Alaska. Distant Early Warning Line radar stations were set up across the Arctic, from the Aleutians to Greenland, and served as a kind of trip wire for Soviet bombers. The U.S. also tested nuclear weapons in Alaska in the 1960s and ’70s, including a series of underground explosions on Amchitka Island in the Bering Sea — despite opposition and a lawsuit from Native Aleuts — which killed up to 2,000 sea otters as well as thousands of sea birds and other wildlife. (In an editorial published a few days before the final test in 1971, the New York Times wrote, “The folly of Amchitka is the folly of a species that burns and poisons and blows up its only home.”)

Today, some of the most direct impacts of this new military buildup will be felt by people in places across Alaska. At board meetings and in op-eds, residents of Kodiak have expressed worries about the disruption and potential harm from new weapons testing, but also more mundane concerns such as what all the activity will mean for housing, roads, and the island’s energy supply. 

A couple of days before I first spoke with Kodiak Mayor Jared Griffin in July, he’d toured the Spaceport with the undersecretary for energy, Kyle Haustveit, who was in town to learn about the island’s energy needs. Griffin, who was elected a year ago, grew up in Alaska in a military family and teaches English and literature at the University of Alaska at Anchorage’s Kodiak College. A self-described “space nerd,” Griffin believes Kodiak will benefit from the defense-related investments. He lobbied for the expansion of the Coast Guard base, which he said could bring an additional 300 to 500 people to the area, which has seen a decline in its population over the last decade. But he also recognizes that the infusion of federal dollars and personnel has the potential to change the character of the island.

Griffin said that when he was campaigning for office last fall, most of these concerns weren’t really on the table. Over the past six months, however, interest in Kodiak’s role as a central military outpost in the Arctic has intensified. “Things are just exploding,” Griffin said.

Dan Menth, CEO of the Kodiak Electric Association, the island’s main electric utility, expressed a similar sense of disbelief in just how quickly the mood has changed. Over the past year, Menth said, the cooperative started receiving inquiries from federal agencies about Kodiak’s grid capacity as rumors swirled about new development, whether it was tied to Golden Dome or a broader military buildup in the Arctic. 

“It’s kind of like the year ended and the floodgates opened,” Menth said.

It was also unclear to Menth, and the rest of the island’s residents, what specifically the federal government had in mind and what it would mean for Kodiak. “What’s coming?” Menth asked when I spoke to him in August. “I don’t know.” 

Secrecy surrounding construction at the Navy Seal training base has added to the sense that government officials are not being fully transparent. “Something was definitely happening last summer, and they were cryptic about it for sure,” said Natura Richardson, executive director of the Island Trails Network, which promotes access to Kodiak’s hiking trails, including a loop that skirts the naval base. (In a written statement, the Navy said it is constructing a new “operational facility,” that will be powered from the existing grid with backup generators for emergencies.) 

The new projects will be an added challenge for the island’s electrical grid, which at certain times of the year, especially the height of fish processing in February and March, is nearly maxed out.

Kodiak relies on a mix of hydro and wind power that provides residents with affordable clean energy and can draw on backup diesel generators if necessary. Indeed, Kodiak has some of the least expensive electricity in Alaska, which is notable considering that Kodiak is an island in the Pacific Ocean. 

“It takes years to add generation to our system,” Menth said. “It’s not like the Lower 48 where you just show up and you plug it in. We’re an island. And, unfortunately, we’re right on the verge of being tapped out.”

A representative from the Department of Energy said the federal agency is “focused on leveraging Alaska’s abundant energy resources and advancing practical solutions to deliver more affordable, reliable, and secure energy for Alaskan communities, including Kodiak.”

Some locals also worry about the island’s fragile ecosystems. There are rare and endangered bird habitat, grey whale migration corridors, and salmon streams — already facing threats from rapidly warming water. Marine mammals are especially sensitive to noise pollution, which will increase with more launches and shipping traffic. The Spaceport’s expansion will fragment important wildlife habitat. And with significantly more launches, there’s a greater chance that something will go wrong — as happened in 2014 when the Army’s experimental hypersonic missile exploded four seconds after takeoff, raining debris on the surrounding area. The mishap led to a multiyear $34-million reconstruction project, according to an Alaska Aerospace presentation. (There have been at least five launch failures that have ended in explosions or accidents.)    

Stacy Studebaker, who moved to Kodiak in 1980 after working for the National Park Service, says her biggest fears are that the military buildup and increase in launch activity will block access to public lands and beaches and result in environmental contamination. She also worries about the proposed barge landing dock at the mouth of the Pasagshak River, not far from where she and her husband have a seasonal cabin.

This past May, Studebaker, who is conservation chairperson of the local chapter of Audubon Alaska, arranged a meeting with Oberst, who gave the group a tour of the Spaceport and answered questions. Studebaker presented a recent inventory of bird species in the area compiled by Audubon; they identified 185 in Narrow Cape, including two dozen considered species of conservation concern. 

“We really wanted them to know they are on hallowed habitat,” Studebaker said. 

By all accounts, Oberst has been much more engaged with the community than previous Alaska Aerospace leaders: After the missile launch last August, he sent Christine Burton flowers and a note apologizing for the disturbance. But his relationship with the town could soon be strained. The military’s insistence on secrecy and the rushed timeline for developing a Golden Dome prototype — the Pentagon has scheduled the first major test before the 2028 presidential election — will likely take precedence over the concerns of the community. 

That seems to be the emerging pattern. In August, General Michael Guetlein, who oversees the Golden Dome project, told an audience at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, that the government had already carried out two secret tests of the missile defense system, one of them at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico (the other site remains undisclosed). But the program largely remains a black box. At the 2025 symposium, government officials were barred from talking about Golden Dome. More recently, David Mosher, national security division director for the Congressional Budget Office, which produced its own estimate of the program’s cost, said that the Pentagon initially refused to share any information with him, and he only received a briefing on the program after intervention by Senate Armed Services Committee staff.  

Oberst, for his part, said he intends to be as transparent as he can be with the community. He hopes the new hotel and land acquired from the Burtons will eventually create more opportunities for residents and the public to explore that part of the island. But as the military presence on Kodiak grows and tensions between the U.S. and its adversaries escalate, there will be limits to what he can tell his neighbors.

As Oberst said only half-jokingly during our conversation, he’s not even supposed to say the words “Golden Dome.”    

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The new Cold War comes to Kodiak on Oct 29, 2026.

Extreme weather is creating a perfect storm of misinformation

a perfect storm of misinformation

You likely remember the 2023 Maui wildfires, a tragedy that killed more than 100 people and destroyed nearly 2,000 homes, all but erasing a historic island community. You may also remember that the fires began when a broken power pole owned by the local electric utility sparked against dry vegetation on a windy day. 

But do you really know that? Were you there? How can you prove it?

In the aftermath of the Maui fires, thousands of people across all the major social media platforms shared posts and videos alleging that the fires had a more sinister origin. They posited that the government had used a “direct energy weapon,” or a form of laser, to ignite the area. Depending on the post you saw, this was part of a plot to reclaim the area for a high-speed rail line, or a high-tech “smart city.” A number of right-wing activists and social media personalities amplified these claims, including the late Charlie Kirk. At the same time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency saw accounts linked to China circulating rumors that a “weather weapon” had caused the fires. Other accounts alleged that the agency was going to seize the homes of people in Maui who applied for emergency aid, a claim that raised traumatic memories of colonization in a community with significant Indigenous historical and cultural ties.

Extreme weather events are always chaotic, and it’s always been easy for rumors to spread during moments of calamity, but the problem has never been as bad as it is now. The escalating pace of climate change has produced a series of supercharged wildfires, rapidly intensifying hurricanes, devastating drought, and sudden floods, all of which plunge communities into confusion and disarray. At the same time, the information landscape has never been more fragmented — major social media companies have given up on any pretense of fact-checking and content moderation; politicians often distort or politicize disasters; government agencies are short-staffed following DOGE cuts; and generative AI models have created an entirely new and little-understood way to source information. It’s not just your weird uncle seeing these rumors  on Facebook: A recent report from the News Literacy Project found that a vast majority of teens encounter social media conspiracies, and a vast majority of teens who encounter those theories are inclined to believe them.

“Disasters are, by their nature, very urgent and have a lot of uncertainty surrounding them,” said Amber Silver, a professor of emergency management at the University at Albany and an expert in disaster communications. Victims of extreme weather events have an urgent need for facts, she said, but almost no way to get reliable data about their situation. “So now we have essentially all of the perfect conditions for the spread of misinformation.”

This confluence of factors does more than sow confusion. A void of good information after a disaster can lead to lost lives, traumatic displacement, or a slow recovery. It also strains the relationship between public authorities and their citizens. A growing body of research from around the world shows the consequences of this strain: A Department of Homeland Security study found that an inaccurate map tweeted out during a 2017 California flood caused an unnecessary mass evacuation, while another study, from the Inter-American Development Bank, found that an earthquake in Mexico led to an 11 percent drop in people’s trust in government. The federal government in the United States now often creates fact-checking and myth-busting websites in an attempt to dispel rumors after disasters.

A review of recent research found that this kind of bad information has often “led to resource misallocation, overwhelmed emergency services, and diverted attention away from genuine needs.”

At Grist, we have been hearing for years from emergency managers and disaster victims in the U.S. about this growing chaos. In our new series, Distorted, we’re exploring this fragmented information landscape: Who do people actually trust when disaster strikes, and why do so many people believe conspiracies that are clearly false? Is there anything the authorities can do to fight social media rumors and post-disaster hysteria? What would it actually take to establish a shared sense of truth as a hurricane or a wildfire is bearing down?

The concepts of “misinformation” (unintentional deception) and “disinformation” (intentional deception) have been the subject of innumerable academic papers and policy initiatives, and the Biden administration even appointed a “disinformation governance board” at the Department of Homeland Security in 2022. In truth, the concepts are a little hard to pin down — the question of whether a certain piece of information is “dis” depends on the beliefs and attitudes of the person who’s reading or hearing that claim. Even so, it’s clear that many people believe things about disasters that simply aren’t true, and they often mistrust the people whose job it is to keep them safe. 

When disaster strikes, this lack of trust can be the difference between life and death. 

Anatomy of a conspiracy

How a series of unrelated photos morphed into a climate conspiracy theory. 

It all starts with an innocuous photo taken on January 16, 2018. The Marathon Petroleum Refinery in Canton, Ohio, conducts a flare in response to a mechanical issue. A local resident captures a blurry picture of the flare, which includes a lens flare pointing upward, and posts it on Facebook. ​​

May 2018: Santa Barbara County, California​

SpaceX posts an Instagram photo of their Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. 
​

May 2023: Santiago, Chile​

A windstorm in Santiago, Chile, causes an electrical transformer to explode. A resident captures the event on video, which includes a lens flare from the bright explosion, and posts the video on TikTok.
​

August 2023: Maui, Hawai‘i

A brush fire in Maui, Hawai‘i, spreads out of control, destroying the town of Lahaina. The fires caused over $5.5 billion in damages and killed more than 100 people.​

Old photos become a conspiracy

Soon after the fires ignite, social media posts on Instagram, TikTok, and X start to resurface these old photos of the refinery flare, the electrical explosion, and the rocket launch, attributing them as evidence of some kind of energy weapon used to ignite the Maui fire.

These posts were viewed and reshared millions of times, and often would take on a life of their own. ​

​

​

The conspiracy can't be stopped

Hawai‘i-based Instagram user @for_our_rights_kauai, for example, posted the old photo of the refinery flare and suggested the Maui fires were the result of an “attack.” A few days later, she acknowledged that the photo was unrelated to the fires.

“I want to apologize for contributing to spreading that photo that I was told came from Maui on the day of this event. It turns out it was not true,” she said in a follow-up video. “It is very important for us to vet our information.” ​

​

The conspiracy spreads

But it was too late. The instagram account @cultivateelevate, run by an influential MAHA-adjacent health food entrepreneur, had already published a video containing a screenshot of @for_our_rights_kauai’s later-deleted post. “My friend in Hawai‘i,” the host said, pointing to the screenshot, “showed a laser beam coming out of the sky, directly targeting the city.” @cultivateelevate’s video received 432,000 views, over 40 times more views than the video apologizing for the mistake. ​

Out of control

Other accounts, like Instagram user @mama_speaks_truth, also contributed to the spread, posting screenshots of screenshots of screenshots, each getting further and further from the original photo of a refinery, taken five years earlier and 4,500 miles away. This is just one example of the twisty way that misinformation can spread in the wake of a disaster. Images and facts can blend together with old fears and suspicions, morphing into a conspiracy with a new meaning and a life of its own. ​

Anatomy of a conspiracy

How a series of unrelated photos morphed into a climate conspiracy theory. 

It all starts with an innocuous photo taken on January 16, 2018. The Marathon Petroleum Refinery in Canton, Ohio, conducts a flare in response to a mechanical issue. A local resident captures a blurry picture of the flare, which includes a lens flare pointing upward, and posts it on Facebook. ​​

May 2018: Santa Barbara County, California​

SpaceX posts an Instagram photo of their Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. 
​

May 2023: Santiago, Chile​

A windstorm in Santiago, Chile, causes an electrical transformer to explode. A resident captures the event on video, which includes a lens flare from the bright explosion, and posts the video on TikTok.
​

August 2023: Maui, Hawai‘i

A brush fire in Maui, Hawai‘i, spreads out of control, destroying the town of Lahaina. The fires caused over $5.5 billion in damages and killed more than 100 people.​

Old photos become a conspiracy

Soon after the fires ignite, social media posts on Instagram, TikTok, and X start to resurface these old photos of the refinery flare, the electrical explosion, and the rocket launch, attributing them as evidence of some kind of energy weapon used to ignite the Maui fire.

These posts were viewed and reshared millions of times, and often would take on a life of their own. ​

​

​

The conspiracy can't be stopped

Hawai‘i-based Instagram user @for_our_rights_kauai, for example, posted the old photo of the refinery flare and suggested the Maui fires were the result of an “attack.” A few days later, she acknowledged that the photo was unrelated to the fires.

“I want to apologize for contributing to spreading that photo that I was told came from Maui on the day of this event. It turns out it was not true,” she said in a follow-up video. “It is very important for us to vet our information.” ​

​

The conspiracy spreads

But it was too late. The instagram account @cultivateelevate, run by an influential MAHA-adjacent health food entrepreneur, had already published a video containing a screenshot of @for_our_rights_kauai’s later-deleted post. “My friend in Hawai‘i,” the host said, pointing to the screenshot, “showed a laser beam coming out of the sky, directly targeting the city.” @cultivateelevate’s video received 432,000 views, over 40 times more views than the video apologizing for the mistake. ​

Out of control

Other accounts, like Instagram user @mama_speaks_truth, also contributed to the spread, posting screenshots of screenshots of screenshots, each getting further and further from the original photo of a refinery, taken five years earlier and 4,500 miles away. This is just one example of the twisty way that misinformation can spread in the wake of a disaster. Images and facts can blend together with old fears and suspicions, morphing into a conspiracy with a new meaning and a life of its own. ​

Experts have identified a few main vectors where communication can collapse in the lead-up and aftermath of a disaster:

Mistrust in government

The most important source of information around extreme weather is the government itself. Federal, state, and local agencies and officials are responsible for predicting the weather, sending out warnings about disasters, coordinating mandatory evacuations, and leading disaster response. If people don’t trust them, or if they can’t get their messages out effectively, lives are at stake. The background trends are already bad: Less than 20 percent of Americans say they believe the government does the right thing most of the time, the lowest level on record. 

The most visible avatar of the government in a disaster is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, so it’s no coincidence that FEMA is also the most frequent subject of conspiracies and disinformation. Even though the agency is supposed to act as a backstop for state and local authorities, disaster-affected communities often swirl with allegations that federal relief is absent, that the government is restricting freedom of movement, or, as in the case of Maui, that officials are going to seize land and disenfranchise victims.

“FEMA has been the source of misinformation since its inception,” said Deanne Criswell, who led the agency under the Biden administration. She pointed to the famous allegations that the agency plans to imprison disaster victims in government-run “FEMA camps”; these allegations have circulated almost since FEMA was founded. “It’s this [idea] of the black arm of government. It makes it harder for us to actually get the assistance to the people who really need it, because they don’t know who to trust and who to believe.” There’s no knowing how many victims never show up to apply for FEMA aid because of these rumors and fears.

During Hurricane Helene in 2024, this misinformation became dangerous: A rumor about a man who had come to North Carolina to shoot FEMA disaster response officials forced Criswell to shut down field operations for several hours during the immediate aftermath of the storm. At the same time, both Criswell and her deputy chief of staff had their homes “swatted,” meaning anonymous trolls called police with false accusations that resulted in the deployment of SWAT teams. These disruptions further stressed an aid system that was already strained, which likely meant more victims in North Carolina had to wait longer to receive aid and shelter.

Hurricane Helene also hit just a few weeks before a consequential presidential election, which likely helped fuel the spread of mis- and disinformation. Right-wing accounts with names like End Wokeness accused Biden of starving North Carolina of aid, racking up millions of views despite a complete lack of evidence for their claims. Elon Musk claimed on his own platform, X, that FEMA was barring him from flying in to deliver aid, only to walk back those claims later. His retraction got 1 million views, but his initial accusation got almost 30 million, and it’s likely that many people in North Carolina and elsewhere still believe that Biden tried to restrict aid.

In other cases, mistrust in government can look very different. It doesn’t have to be about political animus — it can also be about blithe confidence, or even fear. Some people who’ve experienced storms that didn’t live up to early projections may dismiss evacuation warnings later, while others may be afraid to evacuate because they’re undocumented and fear retribution. The end result is the same — more people putting their lives at risk, and more people unwilling to get the help they need after a disaster. 

“It could just be a person who says, ‘I’m a conspiracy theorist, I don’t trust the government,’ but there are also people who can’t or won’t trust that government for very different reasons,” said Silver, pointing to the example of undocumented migrants or communities that have traumatic experiences with law enforcement. “There is some skepticism and doubt, and that is hard to overcome.”

Pervasive social media

Based on the pervasiveness of social media in Americans’ lives, it may not come as a total surprise that these platforms act as the incubator for almost all major disaster conspiracy theories in the modern age. Rumors have swirled around extreme weather events since the dawn of disaster — from allegations that a group of wealthy industrialists caused the 1889 Johnstown flood, which killed more than 2,000 people in Pennsylvania, to claims that FEMA put disaster survivors in concentration camps after Hurricane Katrina. But platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X have allowed for these rumors to achieve global circulation in minutes. The networks also make it near impossible to trace the origin or the trajectory of a given rumor, unless you’re a university or nonprofit lab doing “network analysis” of many millions of tweets. 

There is little good data about how these rumors spread, but it’s clear enough that they do spread. One study on a 2023 earthquake in Turkey found that around a quarter of polled residents believed at least some version of a conspiracy theory that the U.S. had caused the earthquake with a seismic weapon or a bomb. Those who believed these theories were more likely to be supportive of the incumbent government ahead of an election that year. A comprehensive study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that most conspiracy posts were from verified accounts. Even benign fakes, like a famous doctored image of a shark on a flooded highway, have duped media outlets and at least one U.S. senator.

If you’ve spent any time on social media, you already know how pervasive this kind of misinformation can be. One meta study last year found that “misleading messages … often outpaced official communications, resulting in reduced trust and exacerbating anxiety, stress, and fear.” This mistrust can have real-world consequences: A study on a 2018 Japanese earthquake found that communities with low trust in government tended to evacuate even when they didn’t need to, which risked clogging up the roads for people who actually did need to flee. After the Maui fires, Criswell worried that the fear of a colonial land grab caused families who needed help to reject it. 

Even though many people blame bots and malign actors for the spread of rumors, some studies have found that most people who spread false rumors believe what they are sharing. While accounts in Russia and China may have stoked outrage about the fires in Maui, it seems clear that many people who shared such misinformation believed it to be true. One prominent source of conspiracies belonged to  an account called Cultivate Elevate, with over half a million followers. It’s run by a MAHA-adjacent health food entrepreneur who posted a number of videos alleging that the fires had been set on purpose through some kind of government scheme. (The owner of the account did not respond to a request for comment.)

The rise of AI

The proliferation of large language models like Gemini and ChatGPT is the latest wrinkle. About a quarter of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots daily, and searching for information is the most common usage. These models are more likely to draw on news articles and official sources than social media rumors when they answer user queries, which can cut against misinformation — if I type in “Maui directed energy weapon” into ChatGPT, it hectors me that “there is no credible evidence supporting” that theory, and even offers to debunk the actual origins of alleged images that show lasers starting the fire — but that doesn’t mean these models would always be trustworthy in an emergency. 

What if a model were to scrape a news article from last week, for example, that said there’s no evacuation from a storm, but the weather had since progressed or a new event had since formed? Can I really trust the bot to give me an accurate summary of my eligibility for FEMA benefits?

Generative AI is developing so rapidly that most researchers have yet to conduct peer-reviewed studies of how it operates in the disaster space, but it’s clear that the intersection is growing. In addition to dozens of startups that purport to map flood risk or storm damage, the Red Cross has developed a chatbot named Clara that can help navigate disaster situations, and MIT has created a similar technology called Crisischat. The Trump administration’s own chatbot, America.gov, offers information on how to get FEMA assistance. When it comes to analyzing how people trust these tools and standard chatbots like Gemini, however, we are still flying blind.

“You need to learn if the information’s accurate, but then you also need to know, Do people trust it, regardless of the objective veracity?” said Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication and a crisis expert at the University of Maryland. “If people trust it, they’re going to act on it whether it’s accurate or not.” Seate is working with other researchers to develop a longitudinal study about how people in disaster areas use AI tools.

It’s hard to know what it would even mean to “solve” the problem of mis- and disinformation in a landscape as fragmented as the 21st century United States. There’s no way to measure the number of people who believe a false rumor, and efforts to debunk inaccurate information will always be of necessity slower and less viral than that information itself. It’s not great for politics if someone in Iowa believes that a laser started the Maui fires, but the more urgent question is how to ensure people in disaster areas have accurate information before, during, and after extreme weather events. That could make the difference between a slow recovery and a fast one, or even between life and death. 

Experts in the field tend to say that the only way to fight disinformation is to establish strong communication channels beforehand, and for emergency managers to partner with people who have organic trust in their communities. Toward the end of the Biden administration, FEMA started to experiment with such efforts. The agency partnered with a Native Hawaiian FEMA employee in Maui who reassured his broader network that the government wasn’t planning to take anyone’s home. While there are still people out there in the U.S. who believe Biden set the fire with a laser, eventually most people in the vicinity of the fire did come to the agency for aid. FEMA also partnered with the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers to distribute disaster info to home health aides and caregivers, putting information in the hands of trusted messengers who would have credibility when the disaster arrives.

“From a government perspective, they’re just like, ‘They don’t know us,’” said Seate, describing the communication difficulties that she’s observed at the National Weather Service. “But they don’t have to know us, they know Jim down at the fire station and Jim, you know, rings the alarm and posted on Facebook for us.”

The tough part is this only tends to work if you lay the foundations before a disaster. Even then, it isn’t always successful — there are people out there who will choose to believe a social media hoax over a trusted weatherman, whether because it confirms their prior beliefs or just because that’s how their brain works. Fighting misinformation isn’t like swordplay, where one side wins and another side loses. It’s more like trench warfare, where emergency managers and recovery leaders have to slog to increase their share of the information environment.

“It’s at a level that we’ve never really seen before, because the systems and the silos of information have gotten so siloed and quick,” said Justin Knighten, a risk communication consultant who led FEMA’s external affairs team under President Biden during several major disasters. “When trust is low, you have a lot of work to not only build up that trust, but to also get ahead of those upcoming threats, so you’re really working at a deficit.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme weather is creating a perfect storm of misinformation. Here’s what’s at stake. on Oct 28, 2026.

The problem? The emergency manager had generated the graphic using an artificial intelligence chatbot, and it wasn’t accurate. 

“That county emergency manager was trying to get his stakeholders to focus on the risk in that county, and so he had asked AI to help him,” she said. “It did what he wanted it to do, but it was not meteorologically accurate.”

Most emergency management agencies don’t permit employees to use generative AI, but Myers and most other emergency management experts agree that its usage is likely already pervasive at state and local disaster departments. There are hundreds of companies that are marketing AI tools to emergency managers for tasks like flood damage assessment and resource coordination, but public communication is one of the areas where government employees and startups have the most interest.

The reason? Most emergency managers aren’t very good at sending out alerts and quickly communicating about disasters with the public. That’s not because they’re emergency managers, but because they are human beings. They tend to write in jargon that non-experts might not understand, leave out information on the assumption that the public already knows it, and include irrelevant details that could distract people from what they actually do need to know. 

“A lot of agencies are really limited in resources and the number of people that they have,” said Jeannette Sutton, a disaster researcher at the University of Albany who has created a comprehensive dashboard that provides templates for disaster alerts. “I think they recognize it as a priority, but they don’t prioritize it until they realize they should have. They’re just trying to get their job done without screwing something up.”

Emergency managers are the government officials who are in charge of disaster response and recovery. At the state and local level, It is these officials and their agencies, not the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that make up the first line of defense after an extreme weather event. As such, emergency managers often like to say that “trust is our currency,” and it’s in their communication with the public that they build and lose this trust. 

As climate disasters become more frequent and widespread, there have been numerous examples of flawed human communication scrambling an emergency response. In 2016, for instance, adjacent counties in California issued a “voluntary evacuation” and a “mandatory evacuation” for the same wildfire. In Australia in 2019, officials warned about wildfires by using the phrase “Watch and Act,” which the government later said caused “significant confusion” because no one knew what it meant.

In some cases, inadequate communication can mean the difference between life and death. This happened in Montecito, California, after the 2017 Thomas Fire. A few weeks after the fire, a heavy rainstorm produced a deadly mudslide. The government of Santa Barbara County struggled to communicate the risk to residents still traumatized from the blaze and  experiencing a phenomenon that Sutton calls “warning fatigue.” The county sent alerts to everyone in the “voluntary evacuation zone” for wildfires, telling residents to “stay alert to changing conditions and be prepared to leave immediately.” Most of those residents should have left immediately, but to many the evacuation notice was optional; others just didn’t want to evacuate for a second time in a month. The mudslide killed 23 people and injured more than 160 others.

Governments that put out bad warnings are apt to lose the public’s trust said Sutton. “They’re losing the opportunity to be that voice to help people to be safe.”

In theory, alerts are a perfect use case for artificial intelligence, and in particular for the generative AI systems that have developed at a dramatic pace over the past few years. FEMA provides training sessions for emergency managers to learn best practices for synthesizing and sending alerts, but many officials don’t remember all their training when an emergency arrives. A large language model is different. It can read hundreds of thousands of alerts in mere minutes, digest all the research on what works in similar scenarios, and then apply that to edit a human alert in seconds.

“If you’ve only sent one [alert] in your life, and that was 15 years ago, and you need to remember all your training, and you’re thinking ‘Hey, there’s a chemical plume coming my way, the phone’s ringing, the radio’s blaring, I need help,’ the AI is probably gonna do a better job than you are,” said Rob Dale, a former meteorologist who now runs the emergency management department in Ingham County, Michigan.

Dale has already used AI to draft a few practice alerts behind the scenes, but he’s never had to send one out. Ingham County is a small county in central Michigan, and it’s immune from major weather events like hurricanes and fires. If such an event did happen, Dale said he would have no issue allowing a chatbot to draft his incident communication, but he’d still want control over sending the alert out. 

Some experts believe the technology is already good enough to deploy. EM1, a startup that produces AI software for emergency managers, has used Sutton’s research to train a model that its executives say is already better than almost any human emergency manager. The company has tested this in-house model on a number of scenarios including wildfires and tsunamis. It can already match or exceed human capabilities on most benchmark tests.

Sutton gave Grist an example of how the software works: Grist provided her with a recent alert sent by a New Mexico county that was trying to warn residents about flooding on the San Juan River.

Sutton asked the EM1 model to evaluate and revise the alert. In a few seconds, it produced what she said is a far better alert, one that checks all the main boxes of disaster communication.

The model identified and fixed several problems with the original text, which does not say who is sending the alert, name the specific location where flooding is happening, or clarify who needs to evacuate and give advice on how to do so safely. It misspells the word “breached,” and it doesn’t provide any guidance on where residents can seek further information. 

EM1 has contracts with around a hundred government agencies and school districts, but none are using it to automate their extreme weather alerts just yet. For the moment, they’re only using it to workshop plans and internal preparations. Even so, all the experts interviewed for this story said they are certain that many emergency managers are already using chatbots to write messages, even if they won’t admit it. Sutton said that the emergency managers who take her alert training sessions often present her with high-quality alerts they have drafted in seconds using ChatGPT or Gemini. 

“Official adoption is pretty low, but people are unofficially using it, absolutely,” said Sarah Miller, a professor of emergency management at Pierce College in Washington and a longtime instructor at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. “They’re using their own personal accounts, or they’re using free ones.”

It sounds like an easy trade-off: if AI is better and faster than humans, and the difference between a good alert and a bad alert can be life and death, we should be using AI for every heat wave and wildfire. Yet even researchers who are bullish on chatbot technology say that making the switch could backfire. Members of the public who are skeptical of AI or who don’t trust the government in the first place may spurn agencies that publish AI-generated graphics or social media posts. In Syracuse, New York, for instance, a union of public employees sued the local government for using an AI service to answer non-emergency 911 calls. 

“We trust things that we perceive [are] authentic and care about us,” said Ginny Katz, the founder of HazAdapt, a consultancy that helps disaster officials figure out how to use technology. “AI-generated content does not feel authentic.” There’s also a risk that chatbots could allow emergency managers to send out more alerts, and faster, which could increase the risk of warning fatigue.

As is the case in other areas where AI is being deployed, disaster experts say that for the moment the software is only as capable as the person using it. A seasoned emergency manager might be able to speed up their communication with the public by having a chatbot draft a series of alerts, but an inexperienced one rushing to create an urgent alert won’t know how to evaluate the output of a model like ChatGPT or Claude. 

Even though the technology is a ways off from being able to perform without a human expert in the loop, that hasn’t stopped many understaffed emergency management departments from using it. As for how the proliferation of AI-generated content is affecting public trust in government, experts say it’s too early to tell.

“If you had a human sending you a text message versus a computer sending you a text message, which one would you believe is being more accurate?” said Justin Snair, the founder of Preppr, another company that offers AI software to emergency managers. 

The answer, he said, depends on the person receiving it.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Would you trust an emergency alert written by AI? on Oct 28, 2026.

Trying to fact-check during a crisis is stressful, and extreme weather makes you feel like there’s a lot to figure out and learn in a short period of time. That’s why it’s important to know ahead of time who you can trust, how to vet information, and how to talk to your friends and family about it. 

Where to find accurate information about extreme weather 

Many well-intentioned people want to do their own research. But not all sources of information are equal — especially when your safety is on the line. Finding the right sources will help you avoid falling for — or fueling — rumors that aren’t true. 

Below is a list of reliable sources for extreme weather alerts, updates, and more.

Your local emergency agency: Your city, county, and state has an emergency management department. Emergency managers handle response efforts and communicate with the public in their jurisdiction about the disaster. Many of these agencies have an SMS-based emergency alert system that you can sign up for via text to get regular updates. In larger cities, it’s a separate agency. But in smaller communities, updates and alerts come from a sheriff’s office. 

Find specific details: Sometimes rumors about extreme weather or disaster conditions accidentally spread as people try to share information on social media that hasn’t been fact-checked. When in doubt, look for an official source. You can track extreme weather conditions on these websites:

• Poweroutage.US, managed by energy data platform Find Energy, tracks which states and counties are experiencing significant outages. 
• The National Interagency Fire Center tracks wildfires around the country.
• The National Hurricane Center tracks hurricanes in the bodies of water surrounding the U.S. 
• The National Weather Service active alerts page monitors severe weather through several filters including state, region, and type of weather.

National Weather Service: This agency, called NWS, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and offers information and updates on everything from wildfires to hurricanes to air quality. You can enter your ZIP code on weather.gov and customize your homepage to get the most updated weather information and receive alerts for a variety of weather conditions. The NWS also has regional and local branches where you can sign up for SMS alerts. Local alerts in multiple languages are available in some areas.

Weather stations and apps: The Weather Channel, AccuWeather, Apple Weather, and Google, which all rely on NWS data, will have information on major storms. That may not be the case for smaller-scale weather events, and you shouldn’t rely on these apps to tell you if you need to evacuate or move to higher ground. 

Local news: The local television news and social media accounts from verified news sources will have live updates during and after a storm. Meteorologists at your local news station use NWS weather data. Follow your local newspaper, radio station, and television station on Facebook or other social media, or check their websites regularly. If you don’t have cable, these stations often livestream online for free during severe weather. Your local news may also have a live blog that is updated regularly. You can search this database for nonprofit news outlets, or this one for local journalism by state.

Official social media accounts: Many agencies and elected officials share quick updates on social media about extreme weather. If you are unsure whether information is coming from an official account, Google the name of the agency. Most official agency websites have links to their social media accounts. For example, the New York City Emergency Management’s website has a section on its homepage with all of its social accounts.

How to fact-check during a crisis

An extreme weather event can cause many emotions: fear, anger, grief, confusion. Knowing whom to trust and how to spot inaccurate information can help you keep a clear head when making decisions.  

Keep your questions short: When you hop on your phone or laptop, try to prioritize a few quick questions that you’re trying to answer. It’s important to look for specific details that apply to you or loved ones so that you can avoid doomscrolling through a deluge of details. For instance: If there’s heavy rain, look up something specific, such as when the rain is forecast to stop in your area or if there are evacuation orders for your county. 

Double-check the source: A lot of news is shared via social media, but it’s often hard to pinpoint where it comes from. Before you share something or act on it, re-read the information and look closely at any photos or videos.

First, ask yourself: Is there a source tagged anywhere? 

If the answer is yes:

• If you don’t recognize it as a news outlet, government website, or other vetted source, do a quick Google to confirm what it is. 
• Look around the source’s website and social media accounts to make sure they publish factual information, not solely opinions or conspiracy theories. 
• Send it to a friend, neighbor, or family member and ask them if it tracks with what they’re seeing online.

If the answer is no:

• Is there any identifying information that you can Google to confirm at least some of the information that you’re seeing? 
• Is there a logo or watermark on an image that you can search for to help confirm the source?
• Send it to a friend or family member and ask them if it tracks with what they’re seeing. 

If it’s hard to confirm anything, avoid sharing it. It could unfortunately be misinformation that’s making the rounds on your feed. 

Keep to official sources when possible: If you’re struggling to figure out where to find the correct information, look for the official accounts from your local and state agencies. Government agencies, newsrooms, and other trusted institutions can make mistakes, too, but you can trust they’ll address it and issue a correction if they do. They’ll also likely share updates as they receive new information about extreme conditions. 

Bookmark some fact-checking sites: As online rumors may continue spreading online, it’s important to find news sources that double-check information and explain sources. 

Here are a few:

• FactCheck.org
• SciCheck
• The Washington Post Fact Checker
• Snopes

Know the common myths: During every disaster, officials have to address rumors. During Hurricane Helene in 2024, for instance, there were conspiracy theories that FEMA was stealing supplies and food. Another common one is that agencies, like FEMA, will take away people’s land and homes after a disaster. 

Familiarize yourself with these myths and how to bust them whenever you see them being spread:

• Common disaster-related rumors (from FEMA)
• FEMA myth-busting for homeowners (from FEMA)
• More common myths about disasters (from Red Cross)

How to identify AI images and videos 

The internet has become inundated with content generated by artificial intelligence. About 34 percent of webpages published after ChatGPT was released in late 2022 showcase AI editing or authorship, according to an analysis from the Pew Research Center. There’s a lot to sift through, and some posts aren’t easily identified as AI-produced content, no matter how trained your eye is. Here are a few things you can look out for to help identify AI: 

• AI-generated written content doesn’t have a consistent writing style. Look for abrupt shifts in tone and formatting.   
• Some AI images look too airbrushed. A guide from the Global Investigative Journalism Network suggests zooming in on people’s faces. If there are no imperfections, no hair out of place, and no visible pores, that photo might be AI or has been heavily edited. 
• Look at the background of photos and videos, as well. Does a landscape shot of a city accurately reflect the skyline? Are buildings out of place or fake?
• Videos generated by AI sometimes have an overly polished look, and elements that may defy the laws of physics. 

How to debunk misinformation  

Most people are trying to be helpful when they share information online. They may be worried or angry, especially during or after a disaster. They likely truly believe what they’re seeing, even if it is incorrect. Below are some suggestions for approaching a conversation with a loved one, which can be difficult to navigate.   

Decide if it’s worth engaging: Research shows people listen to those they already trust. Arguing in the comments of a news article or Facebook post hardly goes well. Before you start the conversation, really think about the setting, the impact on your relationship, and the possible outcomes.

Assume best intentions and show empathy: Don’t approach a conversation about misinformation with your guns blazing — you’re trying to understand where someone is coming from, and they aren’t going to let you do so if you aren’t curious and calm. Most people that share misinformation believe it to be true. By asking questions and not assuming bad intent, you’ll have a better, more productive conversation. 

Have a real dialogue: Ask meaningful questions and try to understand the other person’s experience and emotions. This communication guide from the Environmental Defense Fund offers tips for this type of conversation, including offering to trade sources, acknowledging that it’s difficult to find sources to trust amid all the noise online, and finding common ground on something. Once you hear someone out, share your sources and explain how you fact-check for yourself when looking for information online. 

Learn when to take a step back: Some of your friends and family will be open to learning about misinformation, and some may not. If a handful of conversations don’t go well, it may be time to move on from speaking to that person about your concerns. A misinformation tool kit from the Initiative to Study Hate at the University of California, Los Angeles points out that continuing to force someone to have a conversation is only going to escalate the situation. 

If the conversation isn’t going anywhere, your loved one is simply not willing and maybe not ready to process what you’ve told them yet. That could change in the future, but for now it’s time to take a step back.  

Pre-bunk for future extreme weather: Some friends and family may seem receptive to conversations. It may be worth “pre-bunking” information with them before extreme weather comes back around. This may include sharing vetted sources of information or mentioning that certain rumors may spread and how to fact-check them. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to fact-check during and after a disaster on Oct 28, 2026.

“Well, we’re not weather people,” Moody said with a hoarse laugh, “but these floods that keep coming — they’re supposed to be 500-year floods. You’re like, ‘What is going on?’”

Two years after the storm, recovery remains far from complete. Helene caused nearly $60 billion in damage and recovery needs, and about $10 billion in federal assistance has been provided so far. Even after accounting for state funding and insurance payments, the state pegs the unmet need at roughly $41 billion.

Half of all North Carolinians are dissatisfied with the government’s response, compared to 37 percent who are satisfied, according to a poll commissioned by television stations WRAL and WSOC. In western North Carolina, which bore the brunt of Helene’s fury, just 5 percent said they are “very satisfied” with how officials are handling things.

The lingering dissatisfaction looms over two surprisingly competitive races closely tied to the recovery. North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, which includes much of the area hit hardest by Helene, is considered a toss-up. In the state’s Senate race, Democrat Roy Cooper, who was governor when the storm hit, has maintained a double-digit lead over Republican Michael Whatley, whom President Donald Trump tapped as his point person on the recovery.

This is something of a reversal from the 2024 election. As Republicans campaigned in Helene’s immediate aftermath, the party hammered the Biden administration over its response to the disaster. Two years later, Republicans control the White House, Congress, and the federal agencies responsible for the recovery.

Trump, who joked that he wouldn’t send North Carolina additional aid if Whatley lost, has drawn connections between aid and the election in other races. He announced $17.9 million in disaster assistance for Wisconsin while promoting Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany. He also approved an Ohio disaster declaration just before campaigning with Republican Senator Jon Husted but left 15 others pending. Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, promised $858 million to North Carolina during a recent campaign stop near Asheville.

The White House has denied that disaster decisions are politically motivated, but the episodes underscore a question hanging over the midterms: Politicians are treating recovery as an electoral issue. It is much less clear whether voters are doing the same.

Western North Carolina offers one place to look for an answer. NC-11 encompasses 16 largely rural, mountainous counties along with solidly Democratic Asheville. Trump carried the district by 9.5 points in 2024, and its voters have sent three successive Republicans to Congress: Mark Meadows, Madison Cawthorn, and Chuck Edwards.

But Republican Jennifer Balkcom, who entered the race three months ago after Edwards withdrew, is running even with Democrat Jamie Ager. A pro-Trump political action committee recently canceled more than $1 million in television advertising supporting Balkcom, and the race is considered a toss-up. 

For some voters, Helene figures into the election for reasons beyond the recovery. Maggie Panther, a Democrat voting early in Canton, said the storm reinforced her concerns about climate change and the increasingly severe weather it is bringing. “I hate to sound totally partisan, but I know that there’s one party that’s trying to do something about climate change, and there’s one party that is denying it,” she said. “And so, I vote accordingly.”

Ager, a fourth-generation farmer whose grandfather served three terms in Congress, has focused on the economic impact of the storm and on the many residents who are still awaiting FEMA reimbursement and struggling to rebuild.

“We were trying to do everything we could to get back up on our feet here at the farm and everywhere else,” Ager said. “As time kept dragging on and recovery was clearly insufficient, [we were] hearing from neighbors and folks in the community about their frustrations.”

Helene has become an issue in the Senate race as well, though the questions about recovery center more directly on Whatley’s role in the federal response.

Whatley’s role in the recovery — widely described as Trump’s “Helene recovery czar” — has haunted him in the campaign. A recent investigation by the Asheville Citizen-Times found no communication between Whatley and FEMA in the two years after the storm, with only six text messages and five phone calls documented between Whatley and a state official coordinating hurricane recovery. The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, has pulled its financial support from the race as Cooper maintains a healthy lead in the polls.

Cooper and Whatley have blamed each other for the slow pace of Helene aid while defending their own records. Neither agreed to an interview, but commented by email. Whatley’s campaign said he helped “deliver more aid for Hurricane Helene than any other natural disaster” in the state’s history. Cooper’s campaign argued that Whatley “has completely failed in his role as federal recovery czar” and said the state has received just 16 percent of the funding it needs.

But despite sparring over Helene, mailers and ads for both campaigns are shifting attention to economics and crime.

Political scientist Chris Cooper at Western Carolina University said Helene has figured less prominently in campaign ads and mailers than he expected. That may be because neither candidate has much to gain from drawing attention to an unpopular recovery.

“One reason why Hurricane Helene hasn’t come up quite as much during this election is because both candidates have some experience that might allow folks to blame them for what almost everyone agrees was a poor response,” said Cooper, who is not related to the former governor.

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The WRAL/WSOC poll supports that idea. Despite the candidates’ attempts to blame one another, it found no meaningful difference between Cooper and Whatley supporters in their views of the government’s response to Helene. It follows a pattern that Cooper has previously seen after hurricanes, which until Helene had largely impacted the eastern part of the state.

“I cannot think of a single disaster in North Carolina or elsewhere, where afterward public opinion was, ‘Boy, we really got this recovery right,’” he said. Generally speaking, voters tend to blame the government, he said, which means someone who wasn’t involved with the response, like Ager, may have a better shot at winning.

Research suggests that disasters can influence how voters judge elected officials. Penny Liao, an economist at the think tank Resources for the Future, said incumbents can benefit from a strong response and timely aid, while a poor recovery can work against them.

“The disaster itself is usually not very good news for the incumbent, but if there is large aid or a timely response, generally the incumbent can potentially benefit from it,” she said. On the other hand, a failure to prepare for a disaster or a poor response “is not going to be rewarded.”

Whether that dynamic is playing out in North Carolina may become clearer after the election. Political responsibility for Helene spans parties and levels of government: ADemocratic administration was in the White House when the storm hit, a Republican one has overseen much of the recovery, while a Democratic governor and Republican-controlled Legislature share power in Raleigh.

Residents remain deeply dissatisfied with the recovery, and two races closely linked to Helene have become unexpectedly competitive. But so far, voters’ frustration is easier to measure than its effect on their votes, and it may well be that whoever is in office during a troubled recovery, regardless of party, will pay a political price.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Helene haunts the midterms in North Carolina on Oct 28, 2026.

“For Indigenous peoples, the reelection of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is more than a victory, and it is bigger than Brazil,” said Edson Krenak, who is Indigenous Krenak. “It is not about victory; it is about the possibility to dream and to fight without fear of death.”

But Sunday’s runoff election strengthened Bolsonaro’s movement in Congress, where his Liberal Party won the largest number of seats in both houses and the broader right gained a Senate majority. Leaders warned that this could open their territories to mining, weaken environmental protections, and roll back land rights, making it much harder for Lula to advance his Indigenous and environmental agendas.

Climate Observatory, a nonprofit coalition of 172 organizations, said 70 percent of the incoming lawmakers oppose the climate and environmental agenda, according to The Associated Press.

The stakes were especially high for Indigenous peoples because Bolsonaro campaigned on policies aligned with those of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, whose presidency from 2019 to 2023 saw an increase in mining, land grabs, deforestation, and attacks on their rights. Amazon deforestation reached a record in 2022, and Indigenous leaders say their communities endured unchecked violence from illegal mining operations during the elder Bolsonaro’s time in office.

His son finished more than 2 million votes ahead of Lula in the first election earlier this month, but neither candidate secured the 50 percent required to win outright. That result sparked fear in Indigenous communities and environmental advocates, who warned that the future of the Amazon was at stake. Lula came back to win Sunday’s runoff by roughly 4.4 million votes, securing a fourth nonconsecutive term as president.

In an interview between the two rounds of voting, Toya Manchineri, the general coordinator of the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon, or COIAB, said Indigenous peoples across the rainforest were deeply concerned about the possibility of a Bolsonaro win. Much of the last three years of Lula’s administration were spent undoing the damage the Bolsonaro administration caused, Manchineri said.

Manchineri said Lula’s term has largely been a period of rebuilding as Indigenous peoples gained greater roles in decision-making. “We were only beginning to see the resources returning,” he said.

In 2023, the administration established the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and appointed Sônia Guajajara to lead it. Lula also revitalized the federal Indigenous affairs agency FUNAI after Bolsonaro had used it to support agribusiness, despite Indigenous resistance. The government also announced just before the election that Amazon deforestation had fallen to its lowest level since recordkeeping began in 1988, according to the AP.

Still, Indigenous leaders said the progress made under Lula has not resolved deeper conflicts over land, development, and decision-making.

“Lula’s victory prevents a president who promised to halt Indigenous land demarcation from taking office, but our territories are far from safe,” Alessandra Korap Munduruku, coordinator of the Munduruku Pariri Indigenous Association, said in a statement. “We have demanded that Lula’s government respect our decisions and listen to Indigenous peoples before advancing projects that affect our rivers and forests. Congress has become more dangerous for us, and we must remain organized. Our struggle does not end with an election’s outcome.” 

For Indigenous organizations, Lula’s victory is cause for hope, but they must now work with a Congress dominated by lawmakers who have already voted in favor of easing environmental protections and against Indigenous land claims. Given that dynamic, Krenak expressed concern about the difficulty Lula may face advancing his agenda. “The costs of negotiating with the Congress and Senate will be very high, if ever successful,” he said.

The election also came amid years of Indigenous voters struggling to access the polls. Earlier this month, a court denied a request for transportation assistance filed by Indigenous peoples in the Javari Valley in northern Brazil. Other efforts were more successful: Court rulings elsewhere helped secure government transportation for Indigenous voters in remote areas, while Indigenous communities across the Amazon organized to increase turnout, AP reported.

“Despite the challenges faced throughout the electoral process, Indigenous peoples of the Amazon made their voices heard at the polls across all nine states of the Brazilian Amazon, reaffirming their commitment to democracy, national sovereignty, and the defense of Indigenous rights. We marked the ballot boxes in defense of life, our territories, and Brazil’s future!” COIAB said in a statement. “Brazil’s future is Indigenous, and it begins in our territories! WE ARE THE ANSWER!”

For Krenak, however, Lula’s victory is only the beginning. He said he wants to see more meaningful progress during the president’s next term.

“By 2030, success should not be measured by how many Indigenous leaders stand beside officials at summits,” he said, “but by whether Indigenous peoples gain real authority to prevent their territories [from becoming] sacrifice zones, but territories of life, reciprocity, and generosity.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For Indigenous peoples in Brazil, the election results offer a reprieve — not a resolution on Oct 28, 2026.

The new rule, proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency in response to complaints from the oil and gas industry, revises a Biden-era rule targeting methane leaks and would relax methane monitoring and emission-control requirements. 

The agency has planned to repeal these rules for months, saying that they posed a “monumental threat” to the economy and an “undue burden” on the oil and gas industry. But it wasn’t until the rally on Tuesday night in Lubbock, Texas, where Trump was campaigning on behalf of Ken Paxton’s bid for the Senate, that the president announced the long-awaited changes. 

“Tonight, I’m officially terminating Biden’s expensive and unnecessary methane regulations to save consumers and energy producers $45 billion in costs, unlock vast quantities of Texas natural gas, and produce 210 million barrels of oil,” Trump said in between rants in which he described praise from Chinese President Xi Jinping and claimed to have more “Indian blood” than Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts. 

The EPA’s proposal follows other sweeping reversals of Biden-era environmental policies that are also likely to exacerbate global warming, pushing the planet closer to a climate hotter than any humans have experienced before. Just last month, the EPA repealed a rule that limits carbon emissions from power plants, a move which is likely to extend the lifespan of coal-fired power plants. Environmental groups say weaker restrictions on methane would also worsen air pollution in communities that live near oil and gas operations. 

“Any proposed rollback to the federal methane rule is a slap in the face to families who are exposed to oil and gas pollution where they live, work, and play,” said Celerah Hewes, a campaign manager at the nonprofit Moms Clean Air Force. Hewes recently protested alongside other environmental activists outside of an industry conference in New Mexico where Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, spoke about the agency’s plan earlier this month.

Methane, the greenhouse gas at the center of the EPA’s new proposal, is emitted by oil and gas operations, landfills, and cattle farms. It’s also the primary component of natural gas used to heat homes. Methane emissions make up about 12 percent of the greenhouse gases released by the United States every year and are roughly 80 times more potent at warming the planet than carbon dioxide over a period of 20 years.

“Cutting methane emissions from the oil and gas industry is the fastest way to fight climate change,” said Tsion Amare, a policy expert at the Environmental Defense Fund. “This rule could severely set back the advances we’ve made over the years.”

The earlier methane rule, finalized at the end of 2023 under the Clean Air Act, was among the Biden administration’s most ambitious attempts to reform the oil and gas industry. It required operators to monitor their overall emissions, inspect their wells and pipelines for leaks, and upgrade their equipment to prevent escaping gas. They were also required to phase out or sharply cut back the routine practice of flaring, in which excess methane is burned off rather than being captured for use as natural gas.

Amare said these limits were some of the “strongest in the world“ and positioned the United States as an international leader in curbing the climate pollutant. The EPA estimated the rule would prevent 58 million tons of methane from being emitted in the next 15 years, as well as prevent 400 billion cubic feet of natural gas — enough to heat nearly 8 million American homes during winter — from being wasted every year. 

In March 2025, Trump’s EPA said it would no longer enforce the methane rule and began the process of formally rescinding it. The newly released proposal would cancel the Biden administration’s Super Emitter Program, which used satellite imagery and other remote-sensing methods to catch large leaks, and required operators to investigate and address them. It also reverses Biden-era limits on routine flaring, loosens requirements on certain types of wells, and gives operators a 30-day window to repair a leak.

The recent changes are all part of President Trump’s so-called “energy dominance” agenda, a catchphrase used to justify similar roll backs since the first hours of his second term in office. In a recent action proclaiming this October as “National Energy Dominance Month,” the president boasted that his administration has “unleashed” millions of acres for oil, gas, and coal, approved thousands of drilling permits, “saved” more than 100 coal plants, and pulled out of international climate agreements. 

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“The Trump EPA is committed to fixing this so the U.S. can reach its full energy potential,” Zeldin said in a statement about the Biden administration’s methane regulations earlier this month. 

The weakened methane restrictions will especially benefit companies that run low-producing “stripper” wells by allowing them to pollute more. These wells account for just 5 percent of the country’s oil and gas but more than half of the industry’s emissions. According to reporting by ProPublica, lobbyists from this industry have gained “unprecedented influence” during the second Trump administration. One owner of a company that buys up stripper wells, Jeffery Hildebrand, has also been one of the oil industry’s biggest donors to Trump’s political campaigns. 

“Under crooked Joe Biden, Democrats crushed the small oil and gas operators,” Trump said while announcing the changes. “They’re great operators, too.”

The president’s statement leans into a false narrative about these operators, experts said. Stripper-wells are often discussed as if they’re run by small, mom-and-pop companies that don’t have the financial means to comply with the stricter regulations. But in reality, more than half of them are owned by large companies that operate more than a thousand wells, said Darin Schroeder, the methane legal and regulatory director at the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental nonprofit. Hildebrand’s Hilcorp Energy Company, for instance, is thought to own nearly 19,000 low-producing wells. Another company, Diversified Energy, owns more than 50,000 of them. “Just because they’re a marginal producer doesn’t mean they’re a marginal polluter,” Schroeder said.

Because these stripper wells make up more than half of the oil and gas industry’s emissions, letting them off the hook is going to have a significant climate impact, Schroeder said. Allowing more of these emissions gives the world less time to tackle climate change before the worst consequences take hold. “Reducing methane in the short term really gives you a big bang for your buck, and gives us more of an on-ramp to address carbon dioxide,” he said.

Pollutants released alongside methane also pose a health risk to people living in oil-producing regions by contributing to the buildup of ground-level ozone, which can damage lungs and worsen asthma. The Biden-era rule would have incidentally filtered out these toxins, such as benzene, a known carcinogen, and other volatile organic compounds, which can also cause ozone to form, along with methane. 

Nearly 1 in 10 Americans live in a county with more than 1,000 stripper wells. And Texans may have the most to lose, said Amare, who is based in Dallas and specializes in the state’s energy and environmental issues. The state has more oil and gas than any other and an estimated 136,000 stripper wells. The public health consequences tend to disproportionately affect people of color who live near wells in places such as Texas’s Eagle Ford, she said.

The Biden administration had tasked states with implementing its regulations. But Texas has repeatedly delayed creating and adopting the necessary plans. Now, experts like Amara say that without pressure from the federal government the state is unlikely to curb its methane emissions, which amount to 19 percent of the U.S. total.

Other states, including Colorado and New Mexico, already have more stringent methane regulations on the books, and some, like Pennsylvania, are making plans to comply with the former Biden administration’s rule. Experts say that makes them less likely to lower their standards just because the federal government has.

And states may be financially motivated to capture methane anyway. An Environmental Defense Fund analysis found that New Mexico has saved an estimated $125 million worth of natural gas each year that would have otherwise been leaked, vented, or flared. The nonprofit also estimates that the entire industry has lost some $7 billion worth of natural gas since the Trump administration stopped enforcing the methane rule last year. “All of this waste of gas is something that definitely needs to be discussed more,” Amare said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s EPA is letting America’s leakiest oil and gas companies off the hook on Oct 27, 2026.

“I don’t want our politics to continue so that the person with the most money wins everything,” Getsinger said. “I don’t think that’s a very sound democracy.” 

Getsinger spent months knocking on doors throughout northern Michigan. She said nearly all the people behind those doors agreed with her that utilities shouldn’t wield as much political influence as they do. 

Keeping corporate money out of elections is notoriously difficult in the United States, but next week Michiganders are going to vote on whether they should try it anyway, with a particular focus on the state’s electricity and gas utilities. Saying they are sick of power outages and high bills, advocacy groups and volunteers are pushing for a ballot measure they say will roll back utilities’ influence over state elections, freeing lawmakers to hold them accountable. Polls from supportive organizations show strong voter approval of the initiative, but even if it passes, and even if it survives legal challenges, some experts say it still won’t get all utility money out of politics.

The ballot proposal comes as customer dissatisfaction with Michigan utilities mounts — the state sees some of the highest utility rates in the country and the least reliable service. Rounds of extreme weather events like ice storms and tornadoes over the last few years left people without power for extended periods of time. Residents are angry at the increasing footprint of data centers in the state and the utilities that power them.

“Everything is more expensive. The quality of service is worse, and we are dealing with more air and water pollution as a result of utility influence in Lansing,” said Christy McGillivray, co-chair of Michiganders for Money Out of Politics, a coalition of local groups that collected 560,000 signatures to put the proposal on the ballot. “So we have to put a stop to it.”

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The measure is designed to plug up leaks in Michigan’s laws restricting corporate influence over politics. The state already prohibits corporations, including investor-owned utilities, from giving directly to political campaigns, but corporate dollars have plenty of other avenues into elections. The classic example is for companies to establish and fund nonprofit organizations known as political action committees, or PACs, which then contribute to campaigns or launch political advertisements. Last year, Michigan lawmakers and committees on both sides of the aisle accepted $421,000 in corporate utility donations, according to the Michigan League of Conservation Voters. In the 2022 election cycle, donations totaled more than $1.6 million across state and local races.

Proposal 2 would end some of that spending, prohibiting utility-funded PACs from giving directly to campaigns. It would also go a step further by prohibiting utility executives, board members, and even the family members of those individuals from giving to campaigns or parties. The same would go for other companies that provide services to state or local governments with contracts larger than $250,000. 

The measure would also tighten some loose bolts in Michigan’s campaign finance laws, making the funding of certain political ads more transparent and adding legal definitions to online political advertisements.

For Getsinger and many of the voters she spoke to, climate was an important motive in wanting to limit utilities’ political power. Michigan has set ambitious climate goals that require utilities to get 100 percent of their energy from clean and renewable sources by 2040, but utilities in Michigan have been seen as impeding climate and environmental progress.

Michigan utilities have lobbied against community solar, arguing that these programs would increase electricity rates. Legislation that would force utilities to pay to clean up contaminated sites has stalled at the state house because of industry pushback. And previous attempts to introduce legislation on what this year’s ballot proposal aims to do — curb utilities’ influence in the state capitol — have failed.

However, it appears that Michigan lawmakers have become aware of the unpopularity of utility influence in politics. When the Michigan League of Conservation Voters launched its “No Utility Money Challenge” in 2025, pushing lawmakers to promise they wouldn’t accept money from utilities or associated groups, fewer than 10 candidates signed on. Today, that number has jumped to 126 candidates for state office, including Democrats and Republicans.

“These pledges are reflective of how toxic utility money has become, and that’s new,” said Karlee Weinmann, a research and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a think tank that focuses on utilities. “It used to not even be controversial in the state capitol to be connected with the utilities as a lawmaker.”

Critics like utilities and interest groups argue that Prop 2 infringes on freedom of speech and fails to address the outsize influence of out-of-state groups.

John Sellek, spokesperson for the opposition group Protect MI Free Speech, said supporters are using voters’ frustration with high costs of living “to carry out a much wider sneak attack” on Michiganders who can’t support candidates “simply because of who they are related to or contract with.” The group formed after Prop 2 was first proposed in 2025. Protect MI Free Speech has received $232,000 from utility interest groups, out of a total of about $851,000 from all sources, according to campaign finance disclosures tracked by the Michigan Transparency Network. In contrast, Michiganders for Money Out of Politics, also known as Mop Up Michigan, has received more than $8.7 million in contributions from individuals and voter interest groups. 

Consumers Energy, one of the state’s largest publicly regulated utilities, said it follows all campaign finance laws and reports political donations transparently. 

“Mop Up Michigan’s approach won’t eliminate money in politics — it will simply shift influence away from Michigan companies and toward wealthy national donors and special interests,” said Katie Carey, a spokesperson for the company. 

Twenty-one states have made it illegal for corporations to donate directly to campaigns, but very few have tried to expand those limits as far as Prop 2 would, and none have done so by specifically targeting utilities. The coalition that helped write the ballot question said the goal was to rein in some of the “worst spenders” in state politics. “Nothing happens in our state legislature if regulated gas and electric utilities don’t greenlight it,” said McGillivray with Michiganders for Money Out of Politics.

Hawai‘i lawmakers passed a law in 2026 that would prevent all kinds of political spending by organizations, whether they’re corporations or nonprofits. (That law has already received two challenges in court.) Montana voters will see a similarly ambitious effort on their ballot in November. And states including Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine have set limits on utilities’ ability to fund political lobbying with ratepayer money.

If voters pass the measure, Michigan will almost certainly test the limits of what states can legally do to limit corporate money’s influence in politics. Though residents of many states might want restrictions like the ones listed in Prop 2, they probably haven’t materialized because the Supreme Court has severely limited their options. 

In 50 years of cases, culminating in the 2010 Citizens United case, courts have ruled that political spending is protected as a form of free speech, and that corporations have speech rights like individuals. As a result, governments have limited legal means to control corporate spending on elections. 

Governments can ban direct corporate contributions to candidates, courts have said, because it helps prevent corruption and its appearance, as well as the circumvention of contribution limits. States and federal lawmakers can also limit the amount that anyone, including corporate-aligned nonprofits, donates to campaigns. But lawmakers cannot prevent corporations from funding PACs that donate to campaigns. And governments can put almost no limits on some other kinds of political spending, namely expenditures on political advertising that supports a campaign without coordinating directly with that campaign. Corporations can contribute unlimited amounts of money to aligned nonprofit organizations that run these kinds of ads, trying to convince voters in one direction or another.

With those court decisions in place, some experts believe it would take nothing short of a constitutional amendment to put meaningful limits on corporations’ or wealthy individuals’ political spending. 

Opposition groups have vowed to sue Michigan if the ballot initiative wins. Experts point to limitations on PAC spending and family members’ political contributions as particularly vulnerable to legal attack.

And even if it beats those challenges, the measure still wouldn’t address the amount of corporate spending on politics, including lobbying and political spending on uncoordinated advertisements. 

“If one avenue is closed off to them, they can redirect that money to other entities that can effectuate pretty much the same goal,” said Karley Abramson, a research associate at the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan research organization. 

Advocates for the initiative, like the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, acknowledge the limits on what it can do. It doesn’t matter, they say: Even if the measure can’t satisfy the system-wide frustration voters are feeling, it’s a step in the right direction. And anyway, it will let politicians know how serious their constituents are about holding utilities accountable.

“This is a really solid first step in starting to kind of push forward some more transparency,” said Nick Dodge, senior director of programs for the Michigan League of Conservation Voters.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline High power bills, blackouts land Michigan utilities on the ballot on Oct 27, 2026.

Although the ruling Judge Robert Pitman issued last month is unique in its invocation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, it is an explicit recognition of an idea increasingly reflected in laws and policies nationwide: As extreme heat becomes more dangerous, even deadly, access to cooling is increasingly seen as a necessity rather than a luxury. This shift has been especially active in housing, where renters often face structural hurdles to accessing cool air, from high costs to explicit bans on the installation of air-conditioning.

This summer, jurisdictions across the U.S. passed policies setting maximum indoor temperatures, requiring landlords to provide AC, or otherwise expanding tenants’ access to cooling. The state of Maryland, for instance, said property owners with 10 or more units must install AC if they renovate. In Spokane, Washington, where 14 people died during a heat wave in July, landlords must now provide “adequate cooling” in at least one room of each unit.

“You can no longer responsibly rent a place if you don’t have a way of keeping it cool, because people will die,” said Brian Henning, director of the Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment at Gonzaga University and a leading advocate for the Spokane policy.

Indeed, a study from 2024 found that renters were three times more likely than homeowners to need medical attention due to heat exposure at home, and researchers estimate as many as 50,000 people died during the five heat waves Europe experienced this summer. But unlike the incarcerated in Texas, whose protection rests on the Eighth Amendment, renters’ claim to safe indoor temperatures rests on a different and less explicit legal foundation.

It’s based, in part, on the “implied warranty of habitability,” a legal principle requiring landlords to provide the basic necessities for life — things like running water — even when they aren’t explicitly guaranteed in a lease or by law. Heating has long been understood as part of that warranty. As extreme heat poses an increasing threat to health, advocates argue that protection from dangerously high indoor temperatures should be as well.

“You can’t rent a place without heat,” said Doug Ruley, director of the Environmental Justice Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law. “The same is exactly true for cooling. I think the rights framing is powerful, and very consistent with how we Americans tend to think about things we care about.”

Tenants could, in theory, ask courts to recognize heat protection as part of the implied warranty of habitability. But rather than rely on judges, advocates have largely pursued explicit protections through housing codes and landlord-tenant laws. 

Exactly what those protections should guarantee — and how they are implemented — is far from settled.

The first question is whether they should require air-conditioning, as the ruling in Texas does, or simply establish a maximum allowable indoor temperature that property owners can comply with however they see fit. Clinton Andrews, director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University, believes the latter approach could encourage passive, energy-efficient methods, like planting trees or installing window shades. A well-designed performance standard also makes clear exactly what landlords are expected to achieve. Unlike a law that simply requires them to install AC or provide “adequate cooling,” a temperature threshold gives tenants and regulators something concrete to measure against.

Such a standard still requires deciding how hot is too hot, and there’s no universally accepted science on this. Some jurisdictions have settled on 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Others, like several cities in Canada, are exploring a limit closer to 79 degrees F. Stefano Schiavon, a professor of architecture and civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said this is to some extent influenced by physiology and culture, because people regularly exposed to high temperatures can more readily adapt to hotter weather.

The same flexibility that appeals to Andrews, however, can also be a liability. Some housing advocates worry that a performance standard could allow a landlord to avoid providing the most effective — and costly — means of cooling: air-conditioning.

“The only intervention that is going to protect people’s lives in a heat event is AC,” said Chelsea Kirk, advocacy and policy director for the L.A. nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. During a major heat wave, she added, “tree shade is not gonna get us there.”

Jurisdictions are already experimenting with different approaches. Houston’s right-to-cooling ordinance, approved in August, requires AC. It establishes air-conditioning as a health and safety standard for all rental housing, closing a loophole that had allowed landlords to forgo it in apartments with window screens. Spokane stops short of requiring AC, but says landlords must reimburse their tenants up to $500 if they want to install it themselves.

Los Angeles County has taken the performance-standard approach in its unincorporated communities. Beginning January 1, landlords must provide a “safe and code-compliant method” of maintaining a maximum indoor air temperature of 82 degrees F. The city of Los Angeles voted in February to explore a similar measure, though adoption has been delayed.

Other jurisdictions have adopted variations on these protections. Since 2020, New Orleans, New York City, and Austin, Texas, have passed cooling requirements, while Washington and Oregon have barred landlords from prohibiting tenants from installing their own AC units. In Arizona, the attorney general’s aggressive interpretation of housing laws has established what amounts to a de facto statewide AC requirement.

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Henning said he’s been in talks with advocacy groups and state legislators about taking Spokane’s right-to-cooling policy statewide, while lawmakers and officials elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada are weighing similar measures.

One hurdle advocates will likely continue to face is cost. Landlords argue cooling requirements will lead to higher rents, though researchers say there’s scant evidence to support that. Some tenant advocates and other experts worry greater reliance on AC could mean higher utility bills. Supporters of such mandates concede that is a significant concern, but not a reason to deprive people of AC.

“Tenants can make their own choices. I don’t think somebody’s going to be, like, ‘Well, I’d rather risk dying tonight because I don’t want to turn on the AC,” said Michele Thomas, director of policy and advocacy for the nonprofit Washington State Housing Alliance.

C.J. Gabbe, an associate professor of environmental studies and sciences at Santa Clara University, said one way to help cover cooling costs would be to expand the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. The Trump administration fired the federal staff that administered the program last year and has proposed eliminating it, but Congress continues funding it. This month, the administration released about $3.6 billion for the current fiscal year.

Experts Grist spoke with stressed that expanding access to cooling can’t be a substitute for addressing the climate change that is making it increasingly necessary. Ultimately, Henning said, governments must address the underlying causes of the crisis by stopping the burning of fossil fuels. “Otherwise, these problems will continue to outstrip our ability to address them,” he told Grist. “We can’t just AC the world.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As extreme heat worsens, renters are gaining a ‘right to cooling’ on Oct 27, 2026.

“When the progressives look at me and say, ‘You’re MAGA’ because of the green energy issue, it really hurts me,” Steele told Grist. As she has crossed the state opposing new development projects, she has encountered fierce pushback from climate-conscious progressives.

There has been one notable exception. Earlier this year, when she was in Lansing to lobby state lawmakers for a data center ban, she met William Lawrence, a Democrat who is running for U.S. Congress in Michigan’s 7th District. She knew that Lawrence was a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, one of the nation’s most prominent climate organizations, so she wasn’t sure how he would receive her. The two sat down to eat Jimmy John’s, and she spoke to him at length about what she sees as the negative consequences of clean energy development, including noise pollution and the destruction of prime farmland.

“I let him have it,” she said. “I just gave him the whole spiel rather forcefully. And he listened and he asked amazing questions. He’s clearly actual grassroots, otherwise he wouldn’t be at my table, because mainstream establishment politicians do not like talking to me.” A few weeks later, she saw Lawrence do an interview where he seemed to be repeating many of her points. The Economic Development Responsibility Alliance later endorsed him, something it seldom does for major-party candidates.

Like many parts of the country, the Lansing area has experienced a fierce uproar against the data center boom. Several hyperscale projects have appeared in communities across the state, including a $16 billion Oracle-OpenAI campus being built near Ann Arbor, and more than a dozen local governments have attempted to ban them. Local backlash tanked a smaller proposal in Lansing called Deep Green earlier this year, despite the developer’s promises to recycle waste heat and use minimal water. Activist fears about these data centers run the gamut from water and power usage to noise and light pollution, and the coalition appears to span partisan lines, from MAGA conservatives to progressives. It also includes many people, like Steele, who don’t want renewables built in their backyards, either.

The race in Lansing represents a test of whether major party candidates can channel these anti-development sentiments into electoral victory. Lawrence emerged from the mainstream climate movement and, like many Democrats, wants to see new restrictions on data center development. But running in Lansing has also required him to make common cause with skeptics of solar and clean energy. As Lawrence sees it, the stakes are extraordinarily high. The success of his coalition-building effort could determine not only control of the House of Representatives but also the success of the country’s efforts to ditch fossil fuels.

“I think it’s all up in the air right now,” he said. “It’s really hard to tell which way it will lean…It is genuinely cross-partisan. People do not believe that anybody at the top of business and government is looking out for them.”

The 7th District, which encompasses Lansing and a swath of its suburbs, is one of the few true swing districts in the country. Moderate Democrat Elissa Slotkin won it three times by slim margins, but Republican Tom Barrett won it back by a narrow margin when Slotkin vacated the seat to run for the U.S. Senate in 2024, and he’s running for reelection this year. 

On paper, the 36-year-old Lawrence is not a good fit for such a purple seat. He is tall and lanky, with a cerebral speaking style, and projects the image of a graduate student much more than that of a farmer or an auto worker. He co-founded the Sunrise Movement in 2015 on the theory that solving climate change required disruptive activism and sweeping government intervention. In November 2018, he and his fellow founders organized a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s congressional office calling for a Green New Deal that would see massive public investment in clean energy. He was once a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, though he now says he no longer considers himself a socialist, and in since-deleted tweets from 2020 he called for “free and open migration” as well as police abolition.

Yet Lawrence secured 40 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary in August, beating two centrist candidates who appear to have split the moderate vote between them. Since then he has secured an endorsement from the Democratic Party’s congressional leaders, who tried to defeat him in the primary. He has also kept pace with Barrett on fundraising in what has become one of the most expensive House races, as Barrett has pulled in money from major Republican PACs as well as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 

Lawrence has done this in part by campaigning like a community organizer. His campaign has knocked on more than 100,000 doors in the district, and Lawrence has held dozens of unscripted town halls where he takes direct questions from constituents. He has also inserted himself into local campaigns, in particular around data centers: Last month, he showed up to a city council meeting in the town of Mason to oppose a potential data center proposal, joining locals who appeared at the meeting wearing crimson-red baseball caps. 

But the anti-development opposition in areas like Lansing is not only about data centers. It also extends to solar farms, battery storage systems, and transmission lines that carry renewable energy to cities. These technologies are some of the cheapest and most effective solutions for replacing fossil fuels on the power grid, but they also take up a lot of land, which makes them more likely to produce pushback from locals. 

“We’ve definitely seen some bleed over from data center opposition to all types of infrastructure development,” said Ed Rivet, who runs the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, a right-leaning group that advocates for clean energy. He said this “infrastructure fatigue” is “unfortunate … because these other types of projects will have tangible benefits for customers in terms of cost, reliability, and cleaner energy.”

Solar has become a particular source of controversy in Michigan, which aims to transition its power grid fully to clean energy by 2040. After several local governments passed zoning laws that banned new solar farms, the state legislature in 2023 passed a law that preempted those statutes. Developers can now apply for direct approval from the state if they don’t succeed in securing a local permit. 

The first project permitted under this state law, Assembly Solar, just finished construction on the eastern edge of Lawrence’s district, outraging many locals. Lawrence told Grist that a homeowner in the area took him on a tour of the solar farm last month and showed him how it has disrupted the area’s agrarian lifestyle. More projects are already underway in his district under the state authority. Lawrence has criticized this policy in a number of public fora — he said in a radio appearance that wind and solar critics have “some good points” and that the state solar preemption has allowed utilities to “build mega projects without community buy-in.”

Lawrence explains his skepticism of large-scale clean energy by arguing that the process of economic development in the United States is broken. Most communities have little say over whether a data center or a solar farm gets built near them, and they don’t have any reason to believe that these projects are good for them. While these projects sometimes produce construction jobs and tax revenue for local governments, they create very few long-term jobs, and most of their revenue goes elsewhere. Meanwhile, residents have to deal with construction noise and aesthetic disruptions.

“What’s clear is that people just don’t believe that investments that are directed from outside of the district, from somewhere else in the state or somewhere else in the country or the world, are going to benefit them,” he said, adding that he’s heard “a lot of concerns” about the state solar law in particular and that he thinks those concerns should be taken “very seriously.”

Lawrence acknowledged that it’s unclear what another model of development would look like: “It’s an open question,” he said, “and I’ll leave it at that.” He advocates for a public bank that could build infrastructure without seeking high profit margins, and he wants to use the “convening power” of the congressional office to bring developers and community members together for talks about “what we want to build, why, and how.” Perhaps developers could allay opposition by sharing revenue with the communities where they build data centers or solar projects, or by committing to more conservation and water protection when they build. In the meantime, he’s calling for a national pause on data center construction.

Lawrence concedes that his past efforts with Sunrise are in tension with this new focus on community control over economic development. The Sunrise Movement’s marquee proposal was the Green New Deal, which argued that the federal government should build massive amounts of new energy infrastructure while also taking control of sectors like housing and healthcare. The implication of such a program is that the government, not individual communities, would decide what to build and where. Lawrence left the organization in 2020 and spent years working as a tenant organizer in Michigan, where he grew up, and he said he now sees the climate issue differently.

“I think in that era, you know, we were thinking about the necessity of the outcome, and now I’m thinking more about what is necessary in the process,” he said. “And I’m reckoning with just how little trust we all have.”

Anti-development Michiganders like Steele say they aren’t opposed to solar per se, but to large-scale projects that erase farmland and generate profits for utilities. Steele’s group does support “community solar,” smaller solar farms that provide electricity to specific communities, as well as agrivoltaic projects that allow for continued farming of cropland under solar panels.

“I don’t want to make it seem like green energy is a big boogeyman,” said Steele. “We’re solutions-oriented.” Her group has envisioned an “agricultural renaissance community” that would feature small businesses, farmland, open park space, and light manufacturing, perhaps powered by community solar.

The problem with these proposals is that they won’t produce power at a large enough scale to replace coal and natural gas plants, said Doug Bessette, a professor who studies energy development at Michigan State University and has worked with groups pushing community solar and agrivoltaics. Michigan has about 14,000 megawatts of natural gas capacity, and the typical community solar project has a capacity of between 1 and 5 megawatts. 

“In order to fully transition our economy to clean energy, you have to build huge solar and huge wind and huge batteries and you have to do it fast,” said Bessette. “The smaller-is-better approach honestly would be ineffective at actually mitigating emissions at the rate at which we need to do it” — and would also be more expensive. 

If Michigan and other states don’t find a way to appease critics of solar, each new project will only create more backlash, making it harder to build. Hundreds of counties across the Midwest have tried to limit solar and wind construction, and activist groups on the Eastern Seaboard have organized against offshore wind proposals. Lawrence is far more open to acknowledging this problem than many climate activists, who sometimes dismiss anti-renewable opposition as astroturfing by conservative groups. 

Not everyone is convinced that Lawrence’s vision of a cross-partisan coalition is possible. Barrett, the Republican incumbent, has also cast himself as a skeptic of data centers. It’s unclear that Lawrence’s strength on the issue will convince Republicans to cross partisan lines en masse, said Jean Hardy, a professor at Michigan State University who has studied local government decisions around data center development.

“Data center opposition is so bipartisan at this point that I don’t think it’s an issue that is going to activate people to switch sides or is going to organize independents in a particular way,” he said. 

But Lawrence believes that Democrats have to channel this opposition, and not just in order to win an election in Lansing. As he sees it, fixing the American model of economic development is a necessary step in order to transition to clean energy. Unless voters feel that energy infrastructure is benefiting them, and that they have a say in what their communities look like, any attempts to build clean power at scale will be bound to fail.

“The question is who can effectively connect the big ‘no’ that we’re all saying to data centers into an affirmative ‘yes’ about what we want to build,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Michigan climate candidate courting opponents of Big Solar on Oct 26, 2026.

The Antarctic bulwark known as Thwaites, or the “Doomsday Glacier,” is gargantuan — roughly the size of Florida — and holds enough ice to push the planet’s coastlines up 2 feet. But the edge of Thwaites also acts as a cork, holding up the rim of the West Antarctic ice sheet, much of which sits below sea level. As Thwaites deteriorates, more ice in this bowl becomes exposed to the ocean, creating a feedback loop that makes it melt faster. And if Thwaites were to succumb entirely, the whole interior of the sheet might follow suit, raising sea levels by as much as 10 feet. 

It’s easy to track Thwaites’ demise from space, but predicting its future has been much trickier. For years, computer models used to simulate Thwaites’ retreat weren’t able to pass the simple test of accurately re-creating the retreat that satellites have captured over the last few decades, marking them unreliable tools for looking ahead.

But now, scientists have plugged in a major missing piece. A new paper, published in Nature Communications earlier this month, appears to be the first to account for what’s happening underneath Thwaites to simulate how quickly it may lose ice. Using this model to simulate the future paints a grim picture: Thwaites could contribute twice as much to sea level rise by the end of the century as previously projected.

“There are many other unknowns, but this solves a specific and very important piece of the puzzle,” said Mattia Poinelli, a glaciologist at the University of California Los Angeles and the lead author of the paper. 

The problem area is where the icy underbelly of Thwaites rests on the seabed, known as the grounding zone. Only relatively recently did scientists realize this zone was not a fixed boundary, but one that oscillates with the tides. As it bobs up and down, warm water pushes underneath the glacier — creating cracks and miles-long channels that allow even more melting. 

Previous simulations of how Thwaites might melt didn’t account for this dynamic, Poinelli said. By doing so, his team’s model was able to match the changes to the glacier that satellites had observed. It also showed that Thwaites could become permanently unpinned from the seafloor as early as 2038, with a 60 percent chance that this could happen by the end of the century, an eventuality which would likely cause the melting to ratchet up even more.

If the climate remains as warm as it is now, the model shows that Thwaites would be on track to add 3 centimeters of sea level rise by the end of the century. That may not sound like much, but it doubles the projections made by previous models, according to the study. Thwaites contributes about 4 percent to sea level rise, which over the past three decades amounts to some 10 centimeters. That’s enough to have sent homes in North Carolina crashing into the sea, while forcing coastal communities in places like the Solomon Islands and Senegal to move to higher ground. 

Of course, global warming is not holding steady but rather continuing to ramp up, with each decade expected to be hotter than the one before. As a result, the world should brace for even more melt than the model predicts, Poinelli said. 

But what if humans get their act together and slow down climate change, or find a way to safely cool the oceans with geoengineering? A separate study, published in Geophysical Research Letters in July, used a model that tested this kind of hypothetical scenario with Thwaites and its comparably large neighbor, the Pine Island glacier, which is the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica.

Together, the two glaciers account for the bulk of sea level rise coming from Antarctica. Ocean melt is the primary culprit, so the researchers “switched it off completely” in their model as a way of understanding the condition of each glacier, said Rosie Williams, an ice sheet modeler at the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the paper.

For all their similarities, it turns out that Pine Island and Thwaites would respond very differently, according to the study. In cooler ocean temperatures, Pine Island would be able to recover ice within a decade, and eventually regrow to where it was 80 years ago — in part thanks to its relatively intact outer shelf. Thwaites, on the other hand, would keep losing ice and raising sea levels worldwide for at least 150 years. The researchers hypothesize that’s because Thwaites is in much worse shape, with the eastern half significantly diminished and the western half disintegrated into many icebergs. While the speed of ice loss would slow down, the glacier may be doomed even in this fictional best-case scenario.

But “that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do,” Williams said. Each fraction of a degree of warming makes a difference in how quickly Thwaites disintegrates, and lowering greenhouse gas emissions could protect other glaciers around Antarctica. “The more we can slow it down,” she said, “the longer we have to adapt to any change that’s coming.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Thwaites is a runaway climate disaster. New studies show how. on Oct 26, 2026.

The lawsuit is the latest in a yearslong campaign by young people who are using the courts to force elected officials to mitigate climate change. Like similar cases in the United States, including the landmark Held v. Montana, the plaintiffs in La Rose v. His Majesty the King argue that the government has violated their constitutional rights by allowing the crisis to continue.

Set in Vancouver, the proceedings are slated to last five weeks, with the 15 plaintiffs expected to testify alongside climate scientists and other experts. “It’s the chance for the young people to tell their story,” said Kelly Matheson, deputy director for global strategy at Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit behind this case and many similar efforts around the world. 

The outcome, while not precedent-setting outside of Canada, could prove persuasive in other climate litigation or spur new cases. “We found that some of the positive decisions from some countries have been inspirational in other countries,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “This trial will be closely watched.” 

The case began in 2019, when the youth, six of whom identify as Indigenous, filed suit. They alleged, among other things, that by not doing enough to combat climate change, the government had violated Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees “the right to life, liberty, and security of the person.” They also argued that federal action breached their equality protections granted under Section 15 of the charter because, as young people, they will bear a disproportionate share of the impacts of the crisis.

The original lawsuit took aim at much of Canada’s approach to climate change. The plaintiffs argued that the government had allowed emissions to remain dangerously high, set targets that fell short of what scientists said was necessary to avoid the worst outcomes, repeatedly failed to meet those targets, and continued supporting the development and expansion of fossil fuels.

Although the government did not challenge the reality of climate change, its arguments included a claim that the accusations were overly broad and the lawsuit improperly asked the court to resolve a political matter. A federal judge agreed and dismissed the case without a trial in 2020. The plaintiffs appealed. In 2023, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the dismissal of the Section 15 claim but allowed the Section 7 arguments to proceed if the plaintiffs more specifically detailed the government conduct that violated their protected rights.  

The plaintiffs amended their complaint to focus on the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act of 2021, which commits the country to achieving the law’s objectives by 2050, and the 2030 emissions reduction plan adopted under that law. They argue that the efforts don’t go far enough to avoid violating their charter rights in the context of climate change and that the government committed to the net-zero law. 

“Increasingly, people across Canada and the world are seeing the direct impacts of climate change,” said Andrew Gage, a staff lawyer for West Coast Environment Law who has worked on this case alongside Our Children’s Trust. “The plaintiffs will have their day in court.”

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The Canadian Department of Justice referred a request for comment to Environment and Climate Change Canada, which declined an interview request but provided a written statement to Grist. “Our commitment to net-zero by 2050 has not wavered, and we are implementing an ambitious climate agenda,” a spokesperson, Samantha Bayard, wrote in an email. “The Government of Canada respects the role of the courts, the right of Canadians to bring matters before the courts, and the important role that an independent judiciary plays in our democracy.” 

All 15 youths, who were between the ages of 10 and 19 when the suit was filed, are expected to testify. They will be joined by expert witnesses in climate science, renewable energy, children’s health, and economics. Closing arguments are scheduled for February with a decision expected sometime in 2027, although an appeal could delay a resolution. Still, it is unusual for such a case to even be heard.

“Seldom has climate been put on trial,” said James May, an environmental law professor at Washburn University who isn’t involved in this case but has supported some of Our Children’s Trust’s past work. He estimated that more than 3,000 climate cases have been filed worldwide over the past few decades, but most never reached a courtroom. The Hawai’i state Department of Transportation, for example, settled a lawsuit filed by 13 young people and agreed to develop a plan to zero out emissions from the transportation sector by 2045. The landmark case Juliana v. the United States was dismissed after years of litigation, and the Supreme Court declined to consider it.

Held v. Montana was a rare exception. After a seven-day trial in 2023, a judge ruled that the state’s energy permitting policies violated the plaintiffs’ right to “a clean and healthful environment,” which is enshrined in the state constitution. The state Supreme Court upheld that decision in 2024.

A similar outcome in Vancouver could have implications in other British commonwealth countries and beyond, said Matheson. “These courts are looking to each other,” she said. “There is momentum building.”

But even if the plaintiffs don’t win, May considers the trial a victory even before it starts. “It could serve as a blueprint for how to do this elsewhere,” he said. “It has already succeeded.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change rarely goes on trial. This one could be a landmark. on Oct 26, 2026.

The life-giving water that normally hydrates people and crops is bringing an aura of dread this autumn, thanks to the strongest El Niño ever recorded. While the phenomenon causes severe drought and heat in many parts of the world, historically it’s brought extraordinary rainfall to the Golden State. The monstrous El Niño of 1997 and 1998, for instance, caused widespread flooding and debris flows (made not just of water and dirt, but big chunks of rock), destroying property and killing residents.

The state can’t stop rain from falling, so in the last few decades it has been renegotiating its relationship with precipitation. As climate change makes California whiplash from years of intense drought to years of intense rain, water agencies have been capturing as much H2O as they can to reduce reliance on using canals to bring it in from afar. That’s set the state up to avoid at least some flooding as this El Niño takes hold and bank the bounty for the dry spells to come.

“Heavy storms can affect regional infrastructure, construction schedules, and areas vulnerable to debris flow or power disruptions,” said a spokesperson with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in a statement provided to Grist. “However, these rain events also present a significant opportunity. Stormwater capture is a critical pillar of LADWP’s long-term plan to reduce reliance on purchased imported water.” 

The threat isn’t just more rain overall, but the way it arrives. If one storm hits, water can build up and flood, but some of it will soak into the ground, preventing further inundation. But if a succession of storms rolls through, the soils get saturated. “Even one can be very big and impactful,” said Steven Springhorn, supervising engineering geologist in the California Department of Water Resources’ sustainable groundwater management office. “But if they start to come in a series, that’s where you start to get into some situations where you have a lot of excess water.”

Water, like any material thing, moves through time and space but brings unique challenges in both realms. For one, it’s heavy, so channeling it requires using pumps or gravity, like when draining water out of a reservoir. And for humans, at least, the rain’s timing isn’t always ideal: A lot can fall at once, or it doesn’t fall for months on end. 

To address the timing problem, California operates nearly 1,500 reservoirs. But that creates a challenge with space, as the dams can only hold back so much water — during especially wet winters, the reservoirs occasionally release water to keep from overfilling or even breaking apart. That’s to say nothing of the plethora of environmental harms that come from damming rivers, like destroying migratory routes for fishes.

So in recent years, California has been turning its attention underground, to its sprawling aquifers. In 2014, the state passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires local water agencies to tackle the crisis of dwindling subterranean supplies. California has long been extracting an unsustainable amount of groundwater, due in part to droughts exacerbated by climate change. The issue is particularly acute in the agricultural Central Valley, where farmers have drawn so much groundwater that aquifers have been collapsing like empty plastic bottles, causing the land to sink by nearly 30 feet.

But that problem is also an opportunity. Whereas the state’s major reservoirs currently hold around 21 million acre-feet of water — that is, the amount it’d take to cover an acre in a foot of the stuff — its land could hold something like a billion acre-feet underground, according to Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “So the potential room for storage is immense,” Kiparsky said. “The enticing question is: Is there a way to grab those flood flows before they flow out to sea, and hold them underground, and therefore expand our capacity?”

That strategy is known as managed aquifer recharge, which tweaks how water moves through space and time. California water agencies, for instance, have been diverting excess rainfall into big dirt bowls on the landscape. This slows it down, allowing it to seep into the underlying aquifer. “If that fills up, then they go and talk to the growers in the area and see if there could be opportunities to put that water on agricultural land,” Springhorn said. 

Whether it’s in basins or on fields, the water moves underground where, as a bonus, it’s not lost to the evaporation that inevitably occurs in a reservoir. When summer rolls around, water managers and farmers can pump that groundwater back up. Indeed, in an average year, this subterranean stash provides about 40 percent of California’s supply. “But in a drought, it makes up even more,” Springhorn said. “So that’s why we want to use the wet years, and the excess water that might be there, to replenish the aquifers so that there’s more there year to year.”

As a bonus, managed aquifer recharge can boost biodiversity. California has lost 95 percent of its wetlands, which used to mitigate flooding and provide critical habitat, especially for migrating birds. To help restore them, a Nature Conservancy project called BirdReturns incentivizes farmers in the Central Valley to flood their acreage, replicating the erstwhile ecosystems. “The local landowners can make a profit off doing a service for this really valued part of ecology,” Kiparsky said, “and it functions also as a groundwater-recharge project.”

But what about the state’s cities? Like metropolises the world over, California’s were designed to move water into sewers and out of the built environment quickly. But as climate change intensifies rainfall — a warmer atmosphere by default holds more moisture — wastewater systems are struggling to keep up. “The gray infrastructure that we built in the 20th century was really built for a climate that is no longer here,” said Edith de Guzman, a water equity and adaptation policy cooperative extension specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We can’t just engineer our way out of the problems — we need to actually kind of reverse-engineer a little bit and think about the way that nature does things.”

Simply put: Gray infrastructure like concrete is a liability, whereas green and brown spaces are assets. So in 2018, Los Angeles County voters passed a tax of 2.5 cents per square foot of impermeable land, like driveways, raising nearly $300 million annually. That finances preserving local watersheds and developing stormwater-capture projects, helping the region pioneer a better way to manage urban water by getting “spongier.” As it develops roadside gardens and retrofits public parks, Los Angeles creates more spaces for the liquid to soak into the ground. It’s also built several spreading grounds, a series of bowls where water accumulates. 

All told, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said that in the 2025-2026 water year, it captured around 37 billion gallons of stormwater. (The average resident uses around 100 gallons a day.) “While intense downpours require active management, they allow us to maximize local groundwater replenishment and capture as much precious rainfall as possible when it arrives,” said the spokesperson for the LADWP.

By building out as much spongy infrastructure as possible, California cities like L.A. better prepare themselves not just for the aquatic ravages of El Niño, but for the hotter summers ahead. Green spaces significantly cool the neighborhoods lucky enough to have them, while urban farms go a step further in producing nutritious food for residents. “The psychological and societal benefits,” de Guzman said, “are really not something to be ignored in this era of ever-increasing needs for us to have more connection and more reasons to celebrate where we live, rather than reasons to stay on our phones indoors with our air-conditioning on.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California has a plan for El Niño’s torrential rain: Save it for later on Oct 26, 2026.

Cities including Boston, Baltimore, and Raleigh saw record temperatures, and readings in Philadelphia topped 100 degrees for three consecutive days.

The sweltering city also saw a busy weekend for gun violence. Between July 2 and July 4, the Gun Violence Archive recorded nine shootings, leaving three dead and nine wounded.

“Those who commit gun violence are in a vulnerable population that have limited economic ability to make sure that they have air conditioning,” said Marion Campbell, executive director of Eddie’s House, a Philadelphia nonprofit that provides violence prevention and social services to such populations. “When you get hot you get irritated, OK! I’m just going to keep it real. You get irritated and your inability to manage your frustration could be heightened.”

Research confirms what Campbell and others see on the ground: When temperatures rise, gun violence increases. What was previously unknown was the effect of climate change on gun violence.

A new finding shared with The Trace by Climate Central, a nonprofit focused on climate change research and communication, estimates that approximately 2,000 shootings between 2021 and 2025 in the 100 U.S. cities with the most gun violence are attributable to high temperatures made more likely by climate change.

In fact, the baking July Fourth weekend in Philadelphia was at least twice as likely to occur due to climate change, according to Climate Central.

And this is only the beginning. As temperatures continue to rise, even more upward pressure on gun violence is likely.

“Across all of these cities, we see that in aggregate, climate change is raising the risk of gun violence,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central. “Short of really swift and deep cuts to heat-trapping emissions globally, we expect the planet to continue to warm,” Dahl said.

The theory that increased temperatures correspond with increased violence is well established, said John Roman, a distinguished senior fellow at the University of Chicago’s NORC social research center, whom The Trace asked to review the Climate Central analysis.

It can be confusing for observers, because this summer has seen record high temperatures but record low gun violence in many cities. But that doesn’t mean that climate change isn’t having an effect, Roman said.

“I think if we still had the same climate we had in 1980, I think we’d see even lower violence than we see today,” he said.

Understanding how

Until now, researchers haven’t pinned a number on the effect of climate change on violence.

“We’re talking about close to 2000 shootings that we can attribute to climate change’s influence on high temperatures,” Dahl said. “So, that’s still a lot of people who are being exposed to this kind of traumatic event because of climate change.”

No individual shootings were attributed to climate change. There are multiple stressors and contributing factors, and shooters themselves would never say they committed violence because it’s unusually hot outside. 

Instead, Climate Central researchers looked at the aggregate relationships between climate change, temperature, and gun violence for each of the 100 cities studied.

They started by identifying the relationship between outside temperature and gun violence. This is complicated, given a 95-degree summer day is sweltering in the humid northeast, but barely noteworthy in Phoenix. So each city got its own gun violence model, an equation based on historical values that gives back the expected number of shootings for any given temperature.

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Next they applied the model to find the number of shootings that would have occurred if cities had seen cooler temperatures without climate change. 

To simulate that cooler world, researchers used 22 climate models from leading scientists around the globe, combined with real-world temperature records, to calculate hypothetical daily temperatures for each of the 100 cities.

Comparing these temperatures to actual recorded temperatures returned estimates that climate change has made the typical day in those cities about 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, ranging from about 1.7 F in San Francisco and Miami to 3.8 F in Fresno, California. 

Once researchers know the gap, they can use a city’s temperature model to estimate the number of shooting incidents associated with it. 

Added up over five years and 100 cities, the difference comes to about 1,950 shootings, roughly 1.7 percent of the 116,281 total shootings recorded in the Gun Violence Archive for the cities during that time period.

In Philadelphia, the gap was about 2.7 degrees F, associated with an estimated 149 additional shootings from 2021 to 2025. “Estimated” is key. The simulated temperatures are estimates, as are the number of shootings associated with them. And climate is just one of many facets that affect the rate of shootings in a city.

“There are a lot of factors that go into a city’s gun violence incident rate. Temperature is just one,” Dahl said. However, “we can actually parse out the signal of climate change in this data,” she said.

In other words, 149 additional shootings in Philadelphia is an estimate, but the direction is clear: Climate change is pushing up the number of shootings.

Who’s most vulnerable

In any given city, not all neighborhoods are equally vulnerable to the effects of increased temperatures. Instead, the burden of climate change’s effects will likely fall on neighborhoods where gun violence is already high.

The leafy green New York City where the movie characters Harry and Sally strolled is real. But just three miles away from the Upper West Side of Manhattan lies the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighborhood, a place that sees more than its share of gun violence.

The median income is about $100,000 less, and there is 40 percent less green space, according to city health department data. Pavement traps and concentrates heat, raising the surface temperature about 5 degrees on the average day — a gap that can literally mean life or death.

Neighborhoods like Mott Haven are known as urban heat islands, and nationally, they disproportionately affect residents who are not white. Mott Haven itself is 97 percent Black and Latino.

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At a recent community meeting, residents gathered to organize around the stifling effects of heat. 

About 84 percent of households in the neighborhood have air-conditioning units, leaving 16 percent without access, the health department data shows. But even for those with air conditioners, the cost can be prohibitive. One mother brought a monthly electric bill of $1,000.

“You can’t run your AC all day,” said Soledad Alvarado, a longtime Mott Haven resident who is a climate justice fellow at the Waterfront Alliance. Instead, residents use it just to survive the hottest hours.

When residents leave home, they find little relief. Major bus routes are on streets with little shade. Underground subway stations are essentially heat traps and can be up to 18 degrees hotter than the street-level temperature. Playgrounds — covered in asphalt, not grass — become unbearable.

For workers who work outside, heat stress accumulates all day. Currently the city has no requirement that work stop, no matter how extreme the temperature is.

These conditions are not an accident, but rather reflect the historical realities of how cities decided to invest — or not invest — in neighborhoods, said Dahl of Climate Central. 

“We know that the hottest parts of cities tend to be places where there hasn’t been an investment in the sort of natural environments that would help to keep the environment cooler,” Dahl said. “Trees and parks that can really create a lot of shade and help cool the city down are less likely to be present.”

“This is one example among many, many, many,” she said, “in which climate change falls hardest on the people who have the fewest resources to cope with it.”

When this heat burden falls on disadvantaged communities, it can be more likely to translate into increased violence, said Kimberly Meidenbauer, an assistant psychology professor at Washington State University who leads an environmental neuroscience lab there.

Financial strain, resource scarcity, discrimination, and exposure to violence put the body in a stressed state known as allostatic load. When the stressors are chronic, she said, it becomes difficult for the human body to calm back down. 

“In the context of heat, we’re talking about an additional stressor. Well, if your body’s already dysregulated and under a lot of stress it’s just probably not going to be able to handle an additional stressor quite in the same way,” she said.

Science of why

Why would heat lead to shootings, when most people have been miserably hot without harming anyone? Scientists have two main explanations, and they aren’t mutually exclusive.

The first has to do with human physiology.

It begins when heat throws our bodies into disequilibrium, Meidenbauer said.

The hypothalamus region of the brain detects when the body is too hot and starts trying to move heat from the core of the body to the periphery by initiating sweating, and expanding veins and vessels near the surface of the skin.

“Thermoregulation is pretty effective at keeping our bodies in a safe range, but it is also uncomfortable,” she said.

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That discomfort, in turn, ushers in negative emotional states like irritability, hostility, and frustration, while simultaneously impairing parts of the brain that normally help us keep our emotions in check.

Research is also starting to point to the possibility that our brains aren’t good at placing blame for stress where it belongs, she said. Trapped in a hot subway car, a person might blame their stress on a crying baby instead of the heat.

What’s worse, this state also seems to change how a person understands the emotional states of others.

“When you’re hot, you actually perceive others as being more hostile and aggressive, so it actually alters your perception of the intentions and threat of other people, which we think also might be driving, in part, what we see here,” Meidenbauer said.

Scientists are still working on showing definitively that heat as a stimulus causes aggression toward others, she said. In the Washington State University lab, they put study participants in an infrared sauna and asked them to play a video game against a (non-existent) player in a different room that allowed stealing from opponents as part of game play. Warmer temperatures were associated with the “impulsive aggression” of stealing, she said.

The other possible cause, known as routine activities theory, originated in the 1970s and suggests that violence increases with temperature because people are outside more and thus more likely to encounter potential sources of conflict. An example of this is the ubiquity of shootings at high school sporting events. These shootings are almost never planned, they occur because games bring together a large number of people, some of whom are carrying guns.

Roman said he sees evidence for this behavior in the data itself. Gun violence starts going up at relatively moderate temperatures, and keeps increasing — up to a point. Then at extremely high temperatures, there is a signal that gun violence goes down again, he said.

“If it’s 95, I don’t care how mad you are at somebody else, you’re gonna wait until it’s not 95 to go out and do something about it,” Roman said. When it’s really hot, he said, “people go inside.”

This also points to an unexpected way climate change could change gun violence patterns, he said, because it won’t just increase very hot days, it will also increase the number of days per year that clear the minimum temperature threshold.

“The more days you have that are warm enough to be outside, the more people are exposed to violence, and so now it isn’t that July is super hot and people are madder or shorter fuse. It’s that April and March and October and November are much nicer to be out and about,” he said.

Stereotypes

Back in Mott Haven, community members said they worry that connecting temperature and gun violence could stir up old stereotypes about heat and its effect on Black and brown people.

“People who are not from here, they might see a cluster of people outside in the Bronx and think that something violent is going to happen,” she said, but she wants people to know that the time-honored tradition of hanging out outside in warm weather can be both peaceful and joyful.

This summer’s outdoor celebrations around the World Cup and the Knicks’ victory parade showed people of all races and backgrounds could be outdoors, together, in the city, peacefully, she said

Indeed, climate, race, and violence have been bogusly linked throughout history.

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Climatic determinism, the idea that hot climates produce hot-tempered, less civilized people, was used for centuries to justify slavery and colonialism.

In 1967, civil unrest occurring in 128 cities in protest of racial discrimination, police mistreatment, and economic oppression, was given the minimizing moniker of “long hot summer.” Before that summer, the FBI warned that racial unrest had become “a summer phenomenon” driven by hot weather, and it pointed to Communist agitation.

“Temperature is only one of many factors that go into why someone might pull out a gun on a hot day,” Dahl said. “There’s a whole constellation of supports and services and policies that could help to alleviate some of the other stressors people are facing that might lead to these kinds of decisions.”

Solutions

Many cities give residents access to cool spaces, like libraries, swimming pools, and community centers so their bodies can at least take breaks from extreme heat. New York City operates hundreds of these heat shelters during heat emergencies. The mayor’s office also recently announced vans that can travel to older residents’ homes and pop-up cooling centers that can be set up at job sites to give relief to outdoor workers.

Still, resources are limited. The city’s first-come, first-served program that gives air conditioners to the most vulnerable households, people over 60, young kids, and people with heat-sensitive conditions, stopped taking applications before summer even started, earlier than any previous year. And the program does nothing to help families pay for running the units once they have them. 

Another idea might be to warn people about what to expect, Meidenbauer said. “So much of our public messaging right now is about ‘on hot days, stay cool and watch out for signs of heat exhaustion and heat illness,’” she said. “We also know that heat affects us psychologically. So telling people to look out for changes in how they’re feeling, whether they’re thinking clearly, and disrupted sleep due to nighttime heat.”

Longer-term solutions involve addressing the underlying causes of heat islands.

Back in Philadelphia, a 2018 study found that removing trash and adding grass to randomly selected vacant lots was associated with about a 29 percent reduction in nearby gun violence in neighborhoods below the poverty line. 

Now, the city is undertaking a massive greening project called Tree Plan, which is city-funded but run by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. The goal: 30 percent tree canopy citywide. Some neighborhoods have as little as 2 percent tree cover and are up to 22 degrees hotter than leafier areas.

Such efforts are needed because models predict warming will only get worse.

“We know when it gets hot outside people get angrier, and when people get angrier and there’s guns present, it’s more likely to end up violent,” said Adam Garber, executive director of CeaseFirePA, a nonprofit advocacy group. And, he said, “We know it’s getting hotter every year because of climate change.”

Climate Central and The Trace collaborated on this story and the analysis behind it. As experts on climate science and gun violence, respectively, we each wanted to explore how climate change is affecting violence, and we knew that neither of our organizations could do so without the input and expertise of the other. Over the course of the project, we have met regularly to define and refine the analytical approach, identify places to dig into with on-the-ground reporting, and review results.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Higher temperatures fuel gun violence. Now we know how much is from climate change. on Oct 25, 2026.

He grew up in a predominantly Black, low-income community in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and went to school next to a paper mill that filled the air with pollution. He always wondered why it seemed like the only employment option for people in town. 

Now, as data centers expand in Virginia, where he moved as a teenager, he fears the political promises of data center-driven economic growth won’t reach him or his generation. 

At 18, Lee is preparing to vote in his first midterm election. Climate policy ranks among his top concerns. But he understands why people struggling to pay their bills might not put it first.

“It’s hard to care about the quality of your air or your food that you eat and whether or not that food is actually clean when you can’t even afford the food in the first place,” he said.

New polling suggests that tension is widespread. Black voters may not name climate change as their biggest election concern, but they still want leaders to address it. 

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In a seven-state survey conducted by HIT Strategies for the Climate Equity Action Fund and the League of Conservation Voters, only 9 percent of Black registered voters ranked climate change among their top three issues motivating them to vote, compared with 74 percent who selected the cost of living. 

At the same time, most respondents said they wanted climate policy to be a top issue for their elected officials. Even among Black Republicans, 79 percent said it was important for candidates to prioritize addressing climate change.

Interviews with voters and advocates suggest the gap is not simply a messaging issue, but also about whether voters see the connection between environmental policy and their immediate needs. Increasingly, it is also a question if voters should even prioritize climate positions when voting because they cannot trust elected officials to deliver lower bills, cleaner water, and protection from corporate pollution.

“Young people today want to ensure we have a future where we can live prosperously,” Lee said. “We understand that the future requires environmental protections. But we also understand that it is not being prioritized today.” 

Climate politics at the kitchen table

The survey, taken from September 24 through October 10 this year, included 2,000 Black and Latino registered voters in swing states in the 2024 election. Seven in 10 respondents in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania said they are likely to vote in the November midterm elections. 

Across both groups, 89 percent said it was important for candidates to prioritize lowering energy costs, 86 percent said the same about reducing air and water pollution, and 82 percent wanted candidates to prioritize addressing climate change.

Erica Tebbs, a senior analyst at HIT Strategies, said the problem is not convincing Black voters that environmental threats exist.

“The proof that is needed is that their concerns will be addressed and responded to by elected officials and that a vote will result in a real impact in their community,” Tebbs said. “That’s where the doubts lie.”

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For Tebbs, those answers show why climate’s relatively low ranking on a list of election issues should not be read as indifference. When questions turn to the cost of electricity, safe drinking water, or extreme weather, the concerns become personal and immediate. By contrast, the phrase “climate change,” can feel abstract.

Bill Hairston, national field director for the League of Conservation Voters, sees a similar dynamic in conversations with residents. Data center development, he said, has become one of the issues bringing people into discussions about energy and environmental policy. Residents worry about what the facilities will mean for their bills, air pollution, and housing costs and gentrification. 

“I think it’s actually just putting the two and two together,” Hairston said.

Hairston grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, where his grandparents’ home sat in a poor, Black neighborhood. Daily, coal trucks passed nearby. He remembers the grass around the house looking yellow, with soot on it. 

“I never saw my grandmother’s grass green,” he said. 

He didn’t fully connect those conditions to the decisions shaping his neighborhood when he was young, but he said voters should be making those connections more often.

For Hairston, conversations about data centers offer an opportunity to connect an industry’s presence with questions about health, affordability, and government oversight. Rather than treating those as separate concerns, he wants residents to consider who makes the decisions and whose interests those decisions serve.

Who pays for the data center boom?

The poll found substantial concern among Black voters about what data centers could mean for electricity costs.

Black voters also showed skepticism that policy promises actually benefit their households.  

Respondents were told Congress was considering a policy requiring companies building data centers to pay for the electricity they use rather than passing costs to consumers. Even with that protection described, 52 percent of Black voters expected data centers to raise electricity costs for everyday Americans.

“They don’t necessarily trust that this type of policy will really protect the public from taking on these costs,” Tebbs said.

For Andrea Cristina Mercado, who leads Climate Equity Action Fund, the results show clearly that Black communities are confronting failed policies related to climate change and the environment.

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Lee, who now lives in the data center capital of the U.S., is an example of this. He questions the tax breaks offered to data center developers and the promises of jobs used to promote the facilities. He worries that communities will be asked to accept the costs without receiving the benefits they were promised.

“I understand the importance of wanting to bring money into Virginia,” Lee said. But “to pass these things off as mass sources of employment is just not true.”

For Mercado, that is why climate policy cannot be separated from affordability and the economy.

“We actually believe that climate policy has to address the needs of working people,” she said, and that is why affordability is leading to “the emergence of a massive organic movement against data centers.”

Shared concerns across party lines

Concern about climate change among Black voters extended across party identification more than it did among Latino voters in the survey.

Among Black Republicans, 79 percent said it was important for candidates to prioritize addressing climate change. Among Latino Republicans, 59 percent said the same.

Hairston said this had to do with the lived experience of Black voters, who are subjected to more pollution and climate change-related issues like flooding. 

He sees those experiences as an opening to organize around protections that reach beyond party labels. For climate advocates, the challenge is persuading people that taking action can produce results.

Nearly half of respondents said that powerful interests and wealthy corporations would always block meaningful efforts to reduce climate harm, regardless of what ordinary people did, and that they believed it was already too late to reduce that harm.

But 45 percent of Black voters said people working together through voting, petitions, and boycotts could hold government and corporations accountable and reduce the harmful effects of climate change.

Tebbs said those doubts about political power mattered especially to younger voters. 

But the possibility of change is still visible among young people, said Lee, who is a first-year college student. He pointed to a group of high school students in Spartanburg, South Carolina, organizing against a proposed data center as an example of students seeking a say in the future being built around them.

He wants older voters to listen to those concerns rather than assume a generation raised with technology will welcome every project built to support it.

“We know that this is the future that we’re inheriting, the markets that we’re inheriting, the housing that we’re inheriting, the food prices that we’re inheriting,” he said. “And so I think more than anything, I’m being driven by deep concerns, but also by a deep hope that we can turn this around.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For Black voters, climate action means little without relief from rising costs on Oct 24, 2026.

Key climate indicators are going in the wrong direction: greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise, glacier thickness, ice mass, and more. These shifts should no longer be taken as warning signs about some distant future, the authors write; instead, they amount to a “diagnosis” of how climate change is impacting the planet today — and where things will go if human behavior doesn’t change quickly or sufficiently enough. 

Concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, stemming primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, hit record highs this year. Meanwhile, glacier thickness and Greenland ice mass are at record lows. Things are also not looking good for the Earth’s energy imbalance, a measure of how much energy the planet absorbs from the sun versus how much of that energy exits the atmosphere. This measure has been rising, a sign of how the planet, essentially, is heating up. 

Of the 16 climate indicators examined by the authors, seven — or 44 percent — are at record extremes. The paper also discusses worrisome feedback loops, or how existing warming might be further accelerated by phenomena like wildfires or permafrost melting that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and are themselves made more likely by climate change. 

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But the authors also wanted to delve into how human activities like agriculture, transportation, and energy usage — in other words, things within our control — contribute to climate change. Changes within our food system in particular present some of the easiest opportunities for individuals to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane. 

That’s because some animals raised for human consumption — such as cattle, sheep, and goats — emit methane as part of their digestive process. These animals are called ruminants, and in 2024, there were more ruminant livestock than at any other point since the 1960s, according to the study. Per capita meat production also hit a record high in 2024. 

These two figures reflect “important pressures from the global food system,” said William Ripple, professor of ecology at Oregon State University and one of the report’s lead authors. They point to meat’s growing role in our global diet, as well as the environmental cost of that shift. Ripple said they looked at ruminant livestock populations because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas; it only stays in the atmosphere for roughly 10 years, but it is 28 times better than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. There is a silver lining to that, though: For these same reasons, reducing methane emissions is an effective tool to curb warming in the short term.

One way of doing that, clearly, is producing and eating less meat. “I think this is an important opportunity for climate action that sometimes gets overlooked,” said Ripple. “Shifting toward more plant-based diets, especially in countries with high meat consumption, could make a meaningful difference.”

Raising cattle for human consumption is also one of the main drivers of deforestation, which contributes to warming by eliminating carbon sinks. Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University who studies the relationship between agriculture and the climate, noted that “we can’t solve climate change unless we stop” such clearing of carbon-rich habitats, “and we probably cannot stop that unless the world’s wealthy eat less meat, and particularly less beef.” (Searchinger was not involved in the report.)

He added, “Just eating 1.5 hamburgers a week on average instead of 3 is one of the basic ways Americans can help address climate change.”

Ripple and his co-authors also point out that such high levels of meat production create a wildly inefficient agricultural system, since cattle need so much land to graze and farmers are compelled to dedicate land to grow crops like corn and soy that ultimately go to feed cattle. That land could be used instead to grow carbon-sinking ecosystems or food that feeds people directly. 

“At a time when climate change is threatening food security, we can hardly afford a food system that uses so much of its productive capacity inefficiently,” said Ripple.

The bottom line, he said, is that there is no way to address global warming without also making changes to what we eat and how it’s produced. “Our growing demand for meat is putting enormous pressure on the climate, land, and water at a time when all three are already under stress,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The planet’s vital signs are getting worse. One of the easiest fixes is your diet. on Oct 23, 2026.

Grist and Climate Central held a virtual conversation with meteorologists, journalists, and researchers about how we can communicate more accurately and thoughtfully before, during, and after extreme weather. Speakers included: Deanne Criswell, former FEMA administrator; Shel Winkley, senior engagement specialist and chief meteorologist at Climate Central; Ginny Katz, hazard adaptation researcher and founder of HazAdapt Community Resilience Tools; and Jake Bittle, staff writer at Grist.

The webinar answered questions and offered tips for navigating conversations — whether they’re public or private, online or offline.

Watch the full event replay

This event was part of Grist’s new series exploring the spread of misinformation in the wake of extreme weather. Distorted: Truth and Trust in an Age of Climate Disasters examines the pathways through which mis- and disinformation spreads in the wake of extreme weather, and how those falsities disrupt relief and recovery and upend real people’s lives.

The series highlights successful attempts to build trust and ground truth in disaster-prone communities, while giving readers the tools to navigate disrupted information systems, and to identify what’s real and what’s fake when disaster strikes. Learn more about Grist’s Distorted series.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Event: Distorted, October 28, 2026 on Oct 23, 2026.