Since first announcing its intent to reorganize the agency last July, the Trump administration has marketed the plan as a way to streamline Forest Service operations, with a focus on boosting timber production and communicating more closely with local communities. But during a congressional hearing and public comment period on the subject last summer, more than 80 percent of the 14,000 public comments submitted were negative, with many tribal representatives, conservation groups, and former Forest Service staffers opposing the move. A U.S. Department of Agriculture summary of public comments included concerns that relocating Forest Service staff and further cuts to its budgets “could compromise ecological management, public access, and employee morale.” The current plan incorporates many elements of the original proposal, including the move to Salt Lake City and the closure of regional offices.

“Nobody is asking for this,” said Robert Bonnie, who oversaw the Forest Service as a Department of Agriculture undersecretary during the Obama administration. “None of the farm groups want this. No one in conservation wants this. Nobody.” To Bonnie and other former Forest Service staff, the plan, which will uproot thousands of employees, looks like it will only make the agency’s existing troubles worse, especially given the past year of deep cuts and chaos.

“This is not going to strengthen the Forest Service, it is going to weaken it,” Bonnie said. “It’s not about solving problems, it’s about blowing things up.”

Mary Erickson, a retired Custer Gallatin National Forest supervisor, had more questions than answers after the announcement. “I’m not going to say if it’s good or bad at this point,” she said. “It’s just such a sweeping change with no real analysis about if there would be cost savings.”

Under the new proposal, some states will have their own offices and others will be lumped together, similar to the organization of the Bureau of Land Management. This will be a new approach for the country’s 154 national forests, which have long been managed by the nine regional offices that will be shuttered or repurposed. Now, forests in Washington, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, and Idaho will each be managed by their own state office. Forests in Nevada and Utah, however, will be managed together, as will forests in Colorado and Kansas.

Some Forest Service research facilities, including the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, will stay open. Others, including the research station in Portland, Oregon, which is responsible for critical work on species like spotted owls, will be closed. Losing local leadership “is not going to improve the programs,” said former Forest Service wildlife biologist Eric Forsman. Forsman, who retired in 2016, studied spotted owls and red tree voles at the agency’s Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon, which will remain in operation. “It may help budgets,” he added, “but it won’t improve the quality of the research or the amount of research that gets done.”

Erickson and others were also concerned about the plan to move high-level bureaucrats out of D.C., where the nation’s law- and policymakers reside. “I would push back on this idea that moving out of D.C. is moving closer to the people you serve. That’s not the role of the national office,” Erickson said. The national office, she added, is supposed to coordinate and create guidance based on national policy. “Forests and districts have always been the heart of local communities and local delivery.”

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After talking with current and former Forest Service staffers following Tuesday’s announcement, she also worries that, at least in the short-term, disarray created by the reorganization will hamstring the agency’s ability to address the complex and worsening challenges that modern forests face. Those include tree disease outbreaks, the growing wildland-urban interface, and climate change-induced drought. The Forest Service is already reeling from the loss of thousands of employees during the last year, through the terminations and deferred resignations effected by the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

The reorganization may also lead to states playing an even bigger role in forest management, said Kevin Hood, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, who retired in 2025 after decades working in the Forest Service throughout the West. While local coordination isn’t bad in theory, he said, he’s concerned the new structure will be a step toward ceding the management of national forests and other public lands to states.

Tribal representatives, several of whom declined to comment for this story, voiced concerns during the July public comment process that the reorganization would lead to losses of expertise and fractured relationships. Mass staff relocations, one representative wrote, would “destroy irreplaceable knowledge about Treaty rights, forest conditions, and working relationships built over decades, and new staff unfamiliar with the land will make mistakes.”

For many people in conservation, the Forest Service reorganization feels like déjà vu, or even a recurring nightmare.

In 2019, during Trump’s first term, his administration announced a plan to move nearly all Bureau of Land Management staff out of the agency’s D.C. headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado — then a 66,000-person city located hundreds of miles from a major airport. As with the March 31 Forest Service announcement, the administration said the change would put high-level staff closer to the mostly Western lands they manage. Instead, many of those staff left the agency altogether, said Tracy Stone-Manning, who directed the BLM under President Joe Biden and is now president of The Wilderness Society.

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In fact, by the time the Grand Junction office opened in 2020, only 41 of the 328 BLM employees expected to move West chose to do so, according to a High Country News investigation. For many, moving meant uprooting their entire family and required a spouse to find a new job in a much smaller market.

The reorganization cost taxpayers $28 million. And the Biden administration ended up moving many high-level positions back to D.C., though it did keep some agency leaders in the Grand Junction office, which it renamed the agency’s “Western Headquarters.” John Gale, who headed the office for two years under Biden, sees merit in searching for ways to improve public-lands management. But restructuring and relocation need to be done thoughtfully and carefully to be effective, he said. 

That’s because agencies lose irreplaceable institutional knowledge when people with decades of experience are forced out the door, said Stone-Manning. And while that may not have been the first Trump administration’s intention, it was indeed the outcome of the BLM reorganization. She and others expect the Forest Service to suffer the same fate, with even more dire results for the public.

“Our public lands are not being cared for the way they need to be,” she said. “And what that means is ultimately people will throw up their hands and say the federal government can’t manage them, let’s sell them off.”

This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation and the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Forest Service overhaul sows confusion and concern on Apr 4, 2026.

The Salt River Project, or SRP, now serves one of the nation’s largest metro areas, not just a swath of farmland. With several hydropower dams and a fleet of power plants, it generates power for more than 2 million customers in the Phoenix area, making it the largest public power utility in the country and one of the few in which customers elect the people who run the utility itself. 

Even though Phoenix has transformed from a patch of farmland into a sprawling city, the utility still uses an acreage-based voting system. A person who holds 20 acres gets 20 votes, a person who owns a half-acre lot gets half a vote, and many condo owners get only .01 votes. Renters can’t vote at all. Only individual homeowners and trusts can vote, so a company like Target doesn’t get to vote with the acres of its shopping center. Thousands of ratepayers, then, are excluded from voting. Even taking into consideration the restricted pool of voters, turnout for these elections is usually very low, which further constrains the mandates that board members carry when making decisions about how Salt River generates electricity. 

“It’s effectively feudal,” said John Qua, a campaign director at Lead Locally. Qua has been working on clean energy advocacy in the SRP over the past six years, through three election cycles.  

That undemocratic governance structure has kept the Salt River association stuck in its opposition to clean energy — despite the association’s location in sunny Arizona, a region that also has the benefit of flat desert expanses with steady winds. The utility relied on fossil fuels for almost two-thirds of its generation in 2024, and its carbon reduction target could allow the utility to burn more fossil fuels in 2035 than it does now. 

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Next week, though, the balance of power might finally shift. On Tuesday, Salt River ratepayers will elect candidates for half of the utility’s 14 board seats. 

In recent years, a new slate of board members who want to boost clean energy have been elected, and with Tuesday’s election, their coalition stands to win a majority if it sweeps its races. Their opponents are part of a coalition of large landowners and business leaders backed by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.

The clean energy advocates say that their presence on the board has already shifted SRP toward solar and distributed energy. The district identified around 2.8 gigawatts of new solar for addition to the grid in 2024, which could power hundreds of thousands of homes. Even under its current plans, solar and renewables will make up 45 percent of its generation within a decade. It has also piloted a number of programs that can make home air-conditioning more efficient and ratchet down demand during peak periods.

The election comes at a pivotal moment: The utility is now facing a huge spike in demand, and the two sides differ on how to meet it. In its latest long-term plan, the utility estimated that peak demand could grow by around 4 percent per year between 2023 and 2035, and that power consumption from large customers like data centers could almost triple over the same period. The adoption of electric vehicles and the sprawl of the Phoenix metro will further stress the grid.

Other big utilities around the country are struggling to meet similar demand growth, and in most cases the utilities are responding by building more natural gas to provide around-the-clock backup power, and extending the lifespans of coal plants. That’s the strategy of the pro-business slate, which argues that shunning fossil energy will lead to high prices or even shortages of energy.

The clean energy advocates, meanwhile, believe that SRP can meet peak demand with renewables. They want to build more batteries that can store solar energy for nighttime use and invest in other carbon-free baseload power such as nuclear reactors. They also want to reduce demand stress by installing rooftop solar panels and making homes more energy-efficient. 

Both sides have claimed that the data center boom is proof that their preferred source of energy should dominate. 

“A lot of the votes on resources are split, us all on one side and them all on the other,” said Casey Clowes, one of the clean energy advocates on the Salt River Project board, who is now running for vice president. “What’s holding up us being faster and adopting more and just getting more solar online is really that the board controls those decisions.”

Clowes and her allies believe that the utility’s nine existing gas plants are enough to provide round-the-clock power while the utility builds out more solar, wind, and battery storage. The conservative slate, by contrast, supports SRP’s current plan to convert retiring coal units into gas-fired power plants and to build new gas turbines across the service territory. 

“They’re chasing rainbows and unicorns,” said Barry Paceley, a construction business owner and utility council member who is running against Clowes for vice president. “If we’re sitting here static, and said nobody else can move to Arizona, no more businesses come in, no more chips, no more data centers, then maybe. But for the real world, where are you getting the power from?”

The clean energy advocates have an even harder task ahead of them this year thanks to the involvement of Turning Point USA, the conservative political group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, who was a resident of Scottsdale. The group has deployed hundreds of volunteers to turn voters out for the pro-business slate, which has also drawn $500,000 in spending from a pro-business political finance group. Turning Point’s lawn signs are widespread, says Qua of Lead Locally. The clean energy advocates are trying to run a similar ground game, but they expect the pro-business slate to outspend them by a 10-to-1 margin.

Turning Point has cast the race as a referendum on “radical change” and says it is opposed to wind and “bad solar,” but its website notes with apparent approval that the Salt River Project “supports clean energy initiatives” and “supports solar and storage.” (Turning Point didn’t respond to interview requests.)

The clean energy slate controls six of the board’s 14 seats, and the establishment controls eight seats, including the presidency and the vice presidency. Clowes and a former state utility regulator named Sandra Kennedy are running for the presidency and the vice presidency; the clean energy coalition is also running candidates in three of the seven district-level elections for the board. They will need to win all three, or flip two and the presidency, in order to take control of the utility.

The areas in question are extremely small, and represent the purplest of Maricopa County’s famously purple suburban landscape. The two seats that are most up in the air are for Districts 4 and 6, which encompass the western side of Phoenix and its immediate suburb Glendale. There are only around 7,000 acres of votable land in District 4, split across around 57,000 landowners. The largest landowners in Salt River’s service area used to own big patches of farmland, but many of them have sold their farms to developers, commercial parks, and even data centers. Because only individuals and trusts can vote, the land sales have shifted voting power toward a larger group of ordinary landowners who own much smaller lots. Even so, the big landowners still have significant sway over election outcomes. 

Most of these landowners won’t cast a vote: In a comparable election in District 8 in 2022, the clean energy candidate won by a margin of 248.33 acres to 209.01, meaning that well under 10 percent of eligible voters even showed up to the polls. 

Rebecca Egan McCarthy contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One acre, one vote: The bizarre election that could decide Arizona’s energy future on Apr 3, 2026.

“It was only 8 miles from our village. We watched industry evacuate their personnel on ice roads in front of our community while we were left waiting for information about what was going on,” she said. “It was very concerning that through all the efforts we had put forward, we still couldn’t protect our community from the effects of what was happening.”

Nuiqsut sits 4 miles from the boundary of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, known as the NPR-A, and the standoff between oil development and local Indigenous communities has ebbed and flowed over the years. 

During Ahtuangaruak’s tenure as mayor in 2023, the Biden administration approved the Willow Project, a ConocoPhillips oil production project that Ahtuangaruak opposed. In late 2024, as a compromise, the Biden administration produced a right-of-way agreement for land around Teshekpuk Lake, the largest lake in the state’s Arctic region, as a way to protect caribou migration, wildlife, and subsistence for Iñupiat communities across the North Slope. This changed last year when the Trump administration announced oil and gas auctions in the NPR-A, last held in 2019, and voided the agreement protecting Teshekpuk Lake to include the area in the sale. 

“Generations of leadership have talked about the importance of [Teshekpuk] Lake and the special areas that were created, and the uniqueness of these areas that are not reproducible in other Arctic areas,” said Ahtuangaruak. “And then this administration put profitability over everything else — just taking the reins and leaving life, health and safety, the importance of tradition and culture on the wayside.”

Last week, more than $164 million in leases covering 1.3 million acres of land in NPR-A, near Nuiqsut, were sold to oil companies, including ConocoPhillips, Shell, and Exxon Mobil Corp., as part of the Trump administration’s energy plan. Under the Trump administration’s sweeping budget bill known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, will hold additional auctions in the future until 2035.

But two days before the auction, U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason issued a preliminary injunction in a case brought by Nuiqsut Trilateral Inc., a nonprofit created by the Nuiqsut local governments and the Kuukpik Corporation to protect Teshekpuk Lake. While initial claims cited the lake as a place of cultural significance to the Iñupiat, Gleason said property rights, rather than “esoteric” claims on environmental or cultural grounds, supported a more compelling argument to reinstate the right-of-way agreement before the BLM sale as the Nuiqsut Trilateral case continues.

On the day of the auction, several oil companies, including ConocoPhillips, purchased almost a quarter of a million acres near Teshekpuk Lake despite the injunction. According to Andy Moderow, senior policy director at the Alaska Wilderness League, it’s uncertain how the Trump administration will handle these leases. 

“I don’t think industries will treat any place as off limits if they can make profits there, and that’s why we’re so concerned about what we’re seeing from the Trump administration and the rush to hold the sale and cancel easements designed to put communities in the driver’s seat of what they want to see near their communities,” said Moderow.

Ahtuangaruak and other Nuiqsut residents argue that environmental and cultural issues are inseparable from the impacts of oil development. Nauri Simmonds, Iñupiaq, directs Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, a grassroots nonprofit, and Ahtuangaruak leads Grandmothers Growing Goodness, another small nonprofit. Both organizations focus on the health and ecological tolls of oil development and the threat it poses to Iñupiat life.

Both Ahtuangaruak and Simmonds say a community health study has not been conducted for the village to document trends driven by nearby development. “We’re decades past the ability to do a baseline study at this point,” said Simmonds, who has pushed for research on impacts to community maternal health.

A 2017 industry report prepared by ConocoPhillips found that oil field operations release 1.7 million pounds of nitrous oxide into the air each year. The chemical is linked to respiratory problems, mental disorders, and vitamin deficiencies. “There are health effects that come from these emissions. Is that why we’re seeing the increase in neurological disorders around our community?” Ahtuangaruak said. “These are important questions we keep asking, but nobody’s giving us answers except for more and more development.”

“The perspectives of Alaska Native Tribes and Alaska Native Corporations on the North Slope have been critical to the Bureau of Land Management’s work to date to unlock the potential of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska,” the Department of Energy said in a statement. 

Simmonds says the oil industry’s influence in the North Slope is inescapable, especially when it helps pay for social services and is a top employer in villages. Approximately 46 percent of workers in the North Slope work in the industry. Local Alaska Native corporations also support industry projects as a way to generate revenue and distribute dividends to their shareholders under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, especially in communities that face high rates of poverty.

“When you’re in that particular sort of level of survival mode, living at poverty levels and worrying about the next rent payment, it’s propagated that these projects are going to make bigger dividends,” said Simmonds. “I think some people, even in Nuiqsut, are recently starting to give credit to this idea that their physical health is being impacted by the industry.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What does $164M buy Big Oil? Inupiat land and a broken promise. on Apr 3, 2026.

Five years later, when Pérez got word that Hurricane Fiona was expected to make landfall, she was prepared. This time, she and her family boarded up the doors and windows, sealed every opening with silicone, and evacuated to her daughter’s home, which lost power as the storm hit the island.

Pérez has a heart condition that makes heat dangerous for her. She relies on air conditioning to stay cool, especially during the long summer months when temperatures can top 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the air is thick with humidity. With no power after Fiona, her health was once again at risk.

The experiences cemented something in her: She needed electricity she could count on, independent of a grid that not only collapsed during storms but also carries the highest rate of outages in the country.

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So when she learned more than a year after Fiona that the U.S. federal government would make solar panels and battery storage available to low-income Puerto Ricans and people with medical conditions, she jumped at the chance. Over the next couple of years, she gathered documents proving she owned her home, submitted financial records showing she and her husband lived on $900 a month in Social Security payments, and hosted multiple visits from solar company representatives who measured the property, inspected the electrical setup, and assessed the feasibility of installation. She cleared every hurdle.

Then in January, the Trump administration announced it was terminating the program’s funding. Overnight, the prospect of a dozen solar panels and a battery system to safeguard her health — a future she had spent more than a year working toward — vanished.

“My turn was next,” Pérez told Grist. “It’s done in shifts, and I was next. Why did this happen?”

Pérez was one of up to 40,000 low-income or medically vulnerable Puerto Ricans who were expected to receive solar panels and battery systems through the Energy Resilience Fund, a $1 billion program established by Congress in 2022. President Donald Trump and his administration — with the help of the Puerto Rican governor — have chipped away at the effort since reentering office, initially pausing funding before permanently rescinding the payments over the course of the year. Just 6,000 solar and battery systems were installed before the money disappeared. 

The Department of Energy has since redirected more than a third of the intended solar funding to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, a government-owned utility with a checkered reputation on the island. The utility has for decades been plagued by chronic corruption and serial mismanagement, and for the last roughly nine years, it has been navigating bankruptcy proceedings, one of the longest utility bankruptcies in the country. PREPA also has a poor track record in effectively carrying out major improvement initiatives. After Hurricane Maria made landfall, Congress allocated more than $17 billion to modernize the island’s grid. But more than a decade later, PREPA has completed just 16 projects, spending less than $100 million of those funds. (Spokespeople for PREPA did not respond to a request for comment.)

The Energy Department earmarked its latest infusion of cash for “key emergency activities designed to address critical vulnerabilities across generation, transmission, and distribution systems.” It also arranged for the grant to be “noncompetitive” — meaning it didn’t solicit bids before reallocating the solar funding to the utility.  

“Why would you cancel something that is working as intended and being executed, to give it to someone that has a bad history?” said one former Energy Department official, referencing PREPA. “Why are we risking these funds?”

Puerto Rico’s grid has long been fragile and unreliable. The island depends largely on imported oil, gas, and coal for generating electricity. Although its population centers are clustered in the north around San Juan, most of the power plants are located on its southern coast. A network of transmission and distribution lines crisscrosses through mountainous terrain to move electricity across the island.

When Hurricane Maria made landfall as a Category 4 storm, this network collapsed. High-speed winds twisted and flattened transmission towers. Substations flooded. Power lines snapped or toppled over, leading to the longest blackout in the country’s history. Every Puerto Rican on the island lost power. In fact, some residents in remote parts of the island went without it for nearly a year.

Most of the roughly 3,000 people who died as a result of Maria were not felled by the hurricane itself, but by the collapse of the grid and health care infrastructure. Diabetics who needed insulin didn’t have a way to refrigerate their medicine. Dialysis patients couldn’t get the routine treatment they needed. And those who depended on oxygen machines and ventilators lost access. 

Estimates for repairing the island’s power lines topped $100 billion. Congress stepped in to provide funding, earmarking more than $15 billion to PREPA to rebuild its grid. The funding came at an opportune time for the utility. Just two months prior to Maria, saddled with $9 billion in bond debt and no clear path to paying it off, PREPA had filed for bankruptcy. With the infusion of federal cash, the utility now seemed to have the resources to both right its financial ship and rebuild a stronger grid in Maria’s wake.

Four years later, that optimistic outcome was longer on the horizon. Outages continued to be common, the cost of electricity on the island was double the national average, and communities faced long lead times to restore service after storms and flooding. These problems continued even after PREPA contracted out the job of generating electricity to Genera, a subsidiary of the natural gas company New Fortress Energy, and the job of moving that power across the island to Luma Energy. Privatizing these efforts was pitched as a solution to the island’s grid woes, but in practice, neither company substantially improved reliability or affordability for Puerto Ricans. In response, a cadre of nonprofits, private solar companies, and wealthy Puerto Ricans began installing rooftop solar and battery systems. Within a year of Hurricane Maria, more than 10,000 new solar and battery systems were installed by private parties — nearly double the uptake in all the years prior combined. By early 2022, some 42,000 rooftop solar systems were enrolled in the island’s net-metering program.

When Hurricane Fiona hit, it put those solar systems to the test. By and large, those who had installed panels kept their lights on after the storm. Sunnova Energy, one of the major solar installers on the island, reported that 97 percent of its 30,000 customers had access to power in the days after the storm. That included fishermen who required electricity to refrigerate their catch, hospitals and fire stations that had set up solar for backup power, residents in remote parts of the island, and those who relied on power to operate medical equipment or refrigerate prescriptions.

The lessons from Fiona spurred lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to once again act. This time, with clear evidence of the resilience of a distributed energy system, new funding was specifically set aside for solar and battery systems for low-income Puerto Ricans and those who depended on electrical medical equipment. Led by the late Representative Raúl Grijalva, Congress eventually allocated $1 billion as part of an appropriations package “to carry out activities to improve the resilience of the Puerto Rican electric grid.” Jenniffer González-Colón, the governor of Puerto Rico, was then the resident commissioner for Puerto Rico, the island’s one non-voting member in the U.S. House of Representatives, and championed the effort alongside other congressional members. 

The task of interpreting the language in the appropriations package and disbursing the new funds fell to the Energy Department, which was helmed at the time by Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat appointed by then-President Joe Biden. Although Congress had said the money could be spent to assist low-income households with purchasing solar and battery systems, it did not mandate that this be the only use. To clarify, Energy Department officials began discussions with the lawmakers who had championed the funding and made clear the money was intended to be used for distributed solar systems, according to people involved in those conversations, who requested anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their current employment.

As the agency was weighing important questions about the implementation of the program, Grijalva and other lawmakers sent a letter to Secretary Granholm in April 2023, emphasizing the role solar and battery systems had played in keeping lights on during Hurricane Fiona. “Residential solar and storage systems are critical lifelines when Puerto Rico’s power grid fails during natural disasters,” the letter said. It encouraged the department to consider “solar power and storage for individual households” and to “prioritize low-income people with disabilities.”

Congress’ intent was not to duplicate existing federal efforts to repair the grid and strengthen the island’s energy systems, which were already funded to the tune of $20 billion thanks to the aid made available post-Maria. Instead, it wanted the agency to use the new $1 billion to “ensure that the most vulnerable households have access to localized power and backup battery storage,” said one of the Energy Department officials who attended the meetings with Grijalva and other lawmakers, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ritchie Torres, and Nydia Velázquez. 

The goal was to ensure that “if something else happens, another storm, another long-term outage happens while the long-term reconstruction is taking place, we don’t see what happened after Maria,” they added.

The Energy Department immediately began designing programs to distribute the funds, identify local partners, and issue awards. It set up three main initiatives: About $490 million was directed to Sunnova Energy and Generac to install solar and battery systems for low-income households, especially residents reliant on powered medical devices or those living in areas prone to outages. Another $48 million was awarded to four nonprofits — Barrio Eléctrico, Environmental Defense Fund, Let’s Share the Sun Foundation, and Solar United Neighbors — to deploy up to 2,000 residential solar and storage systems for low-income Puerto Ricans with health issues. Another $365 million was awarded to solar companies and nonprofit groups to install solar and battery systems at community health care facilities and community centers. It took the better part of 2023 and 2024 to establish all three programs and begin disbursing funds.

Just as some of the funding began flowing, Trump won his second term as president, vowing to undo Biden’s climate programs. Within a year, all three Puerto Rican solar initiatives were gone. 

Governor González-Colón’s position had shifted by then, too. In a separate press release the same day announcing the reallocation of funds to PREPA, she said that the Trump administration had prioritized the energy needs of Puerto Rico, and that the island could not rely “on piecemeal approaches with limited results.” (A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

The final nail in the coffin came in January when the Department of Energy announced in an email that it was cancelling $350 million in grants to set up systems for low-income households. “The electric system of Puerto Rico cannot afford to operate with more distributed solar,” the agency said. The funds haven’t officially been redirected to PREPA, but former DOE officials said the money will likely also end up in the utility’s coffers. 

A spokesperson for the Energy Department shared a link to a webpage with answers to frequently asked questions about the fund. The page, which was created six days after Grist first inquired about the funds, states that the department’s goal is to provide reliable power “for the greatest number of Puerto Ricans and provide a quicker end to the energy emergency.” By repairing existing fossil fuel power plants and modernizing the grid, “all 3.2 million residents, including low-income and medically vulnerable households, experience more reliable power,” the website notes. 

The page also states that it did not make the decision to cancel the solar programs lightly and said continuing to fund rooftop solar would “exacerbate reliability issues with the distribution grid and only cover a very small segment of the population.” 

While high levels of distributed solar can create grid management challenges, there’s little evidence that the uptick in rooftop solar installations has worsened the island’s grid reliability.  

When Wanda Ríos first learned about the $1 billion program, she knew it would benefit her neighbors in Salinas — and specifically the La Margarita community, where a majority of the residents are elderly and face significant health challenges. More than 80 percent of the homes in La Margarita, like that of María Pérez’s, are in a FEMA-designated floodplain. Every time the water levels rose, the power went out. At the time, just five houses out of around 300 in the neighborhood had battery and solar systems. 

“Because we have the river, everything gets shut down,” she said. “And that’s why it was important that everybody produce their own energy in their own house.”

Ríos, who is a community organizer and leads the AbeynoCoop, an energy cooperative that has been trying to improve access to solar and battery systems in Salinas, began work securing federal funds in 2023. She got in touch with David Ortiz, a senior program director for Puerto Rico at Solar United Neighbors, a solar advocacy group. Together with other partners, they applied for a $6 million grant from the Energy Department’s pool. The funding would be sufficient to install about 150 solar systems in Salinas.

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By the winter of 2023, they learned the agency was awarding them the grant, but the work that followed to finalize it was immense. Ortiz, Rios, and their partners in the work had to identify community members who needed the systems and develop budgets estimating the cost of work. That meant knocking on doors and convincing residents that the systems could help them, and that they should take the time to collect the various financial and medical documents needed to qualify. It took more than a year to get everyone on board. 

But over the course of last year, the program came to a standstill. Ortiz needed a final green light or sign-off on a new budget and updated program costs, but he couldn’t get the agency to set up a meeting — let alone begin installing panels. 

“In our case, and in another grantee’s case, we both hadn’t started installing because we had been waiting for a very long time to try to get the meeting for definitization to happen,” said Ortiz, referring to one of the last steps in the project approval process. 

Then, out of the blue, a letter arrived in January informing Solar United Neighbors that their grant was being terminated. The news was devastating. Ríos had to announce the termination on Facebook. “People were pretty sad,” she said. “We were wasting their time for two years.”

Ríos had turned away from other opportunities to pursue grants, she said, because federal rules prevented her from applying to different sources of funding for the same project. The residents who signed up with Solar United Neighbors, too, hadn’t known they should be looking into other options to secure their energy systems. 

“They probably have another opportunity to get a system, but they didn’t because they trust me, they trust Abeyno Coop,” Ríos said. 

Solar United Neighbors is being represented by Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit advocating for organizations that have lost federal funding over the past year under the Trump administration, and Earthjustice, an environmental group. For her part, Pérez isn’t giving up. She’s determined to finance the system herself with the help of grants from nonprofits and other private entities. She has been calling solar companies to estimate what it might cost and working with Ríos’ cooperative to find alternatives. 

“I’ll find a way, because I’ve always been a salesperson,” she said. 

Benton Graham contributed reporting to this story. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Solar was poised to help Puerto Ricans survive blackouts — until Trump axed nearly $1B in funding on Apr 2, 2026.

The government-run center publishes monthly reports predicting fire risk for the four months ahead, and the change since the March outlook is staggering. The agency denotes elevated risk in red on its maps, and the June forecast from March 2 showed a small swath of rouge in the Southwest. But, citing an ongoing snow drought, rapid snowmelt, and a recent unprecedented heat wave, the latest maps feature red spilling across the Southwest and into the Rockies, Pacific Northwest, and northern California.

“We’re probably not going to be in great shape this year,” said Matthew Hurteau, director of the Center for Fire Resilient Ecosystems and Society at the University of New Mexico. While it’s normal for the Southwest to experience a relatively early fire season, before the summer monsoons hit, what really stood out to him was how quickly the red moved north. “It’s really early for that.” 

June typically sees snow lingering in many mountain ranges and snowmelt wetting the landscape, he said. Not this year. 

The latest outlook reports that the snow melt-off in the Four Corners region came “not just several weeks or months earlier than normal, but also four to six weeks earlier than the previously recorded earliest melt-off dates.” The recent heat wave also desiccated the West. Albuquerque, for example, recorded its earliest ever 90-degree reading on March 21, more than six weeks sooner than its previous earliest date, in 1947. The daily average of 73.1 degrees Las Vegas recorded in March would have broken the city’s April record.  

Overall, there’s been less snowpack and higher temperatures than pretty much any winter on record. It’s a situation that climatologists have said would be virtually impossible without climate change, and the maps reflect that reality. 

“It doesn’t mean that all of these areas are going to burn,” said Alastair Hayden, professor at Cornell University and a former division chief in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. Last year, for example, the Pacific Northwest saw an above-normal risk but was largely spared. Local patterns, such as wind and precipitation, play a major role, too. “But, when I look back at the forecast, fires usually tend to be in one of these locations.”

The one notable spot on the latest maps that seems safe for now is Southern California, though that’s because the fire season there doesn’t usually start until later in the summer, or even into fall. There are also surprising splotches of red, like in Florida, which is experiencing a drought. But the West is by far the largest area of concern. “Keep an eye on July,” said Hurteau. “The Fourth of July is the single highest ignition day of the year.” 

The sheer expanse of land that could be at risk simultaneously worries Hurteau. “Our fire suppression apparatus is in part dependent on the whole region not being on fire at the same time,” he said. Fire crews count on being able to hop from hot spot to hot spot. If there are too many at once, resources could run thin.

The number of acres across the country that have burned through March is already 231 percent of the 10-year average. A wet spring, however, could change everything. It recently rained in Albuquerque where Hurteau is based, and, if it continues, the fire risk could go down dramatically. That’s what happened last year. 

“I’m sure that’s what all the fire people are hoping for too, because that would be nice,” said Hurteau. “But hope is not a great strategy.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline These maps show exactly where the West might burn this summer on Apr 2, 2026.

The “God Squad” loophole is onerous by design, and it has only ever been invoked a few times. In 1978, the committee voted to deny an exemption for a small Tennessee dam; the following year, it voted in favor of a small Wyoming dam despite concerns about whooping crane habitat. The committee met again in 1992 to grant an exemption for a few thousand acres of timber land sales in Oregon, overruling threats to the spotted owl. That exemption was withdrawn after a lawsuit. 

On Tuesday, the Trump administration convened the “God Squad” for the first time in more than three decades, seeking to grant a far larger exemption than the committee has ever considered. In a morning meeting that lasted around 15 minutes, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made the president’s case. “We cannot allow our own rules to weaken our standing and strengthen those who wish to harm us,” Hegseth said. 

The committee then voted unanimously to waive all Endangered Species Act regulations on oil and gas extraction in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration has itself noted that oil and gas production in the Gulf “is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the Rice’s whale.” Its analysis concluded that the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 killed 17 percent of the whale’s population and that vessel strikes could kill multiple whales per year. The decision to override the Endangered Species Act could cause the extinction of the Rice’s whale, a species that only lives in the northern Gulf of Mexico and which has only about 50 living members.

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“It’s another example of this administration trying to figure out what the limits are on how far they can push the existing norms and authorities,” said Sally Jewell, who served as Interior Secretary under the Obama administration.

In granting the exemption, the committee cited a never-before-used section of the Endangered Species Act. The statute says in direct language that “the Committee shall grant an exemption for any agency action if the Secretary of Defense finds that such exemption is necessary for reasons of national security.” 

As each member of the committee voiced their support for the waiver, they cited the national security implications of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, which Trump joined last month. The war has caused the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, blocked millions of barrels of oil from moving around the world, and raised fuel prices.

“Recent hostile actions by the Iranian terror regime highlights [sic] yet again why robust domestic oil production is a national security imperative,” said Hegseth during the committee meeting. “Production in the Gulf of America provides a vital buffer, insulating our economy and military from foreign instability and reducing the strategic leverage of our adversaries.”

The U.S. produces more oil than any other country, and the Gulf of Mexico only accounts for about 15 percent of the nation’s oil production, a far lower share than before the fracking boom and only around 2 percent of natural gas production. “Getting around environmental laws is not going to accelerate production and won’t solve any current challenge that our nation faces,” said Jewell. What’s more, the national security risk the administration cited would not exist were it not for Trump’s own decision to enter a conflict in Iran. “I just don’t view this as something that’s going to address any near-term national security crisis,” she said. 

What, then, does the Trump administration consider to be such a dire threat to national security? The supposed threat, in this case, appears to be litigation from environmental groups. “I feel like it’s a solution in search of a problem, but in the most harmful way,” Steve Mashuda, a lead attorney for oceans at the environmental organization Earthjustice, told Grist.

Last year, the administration concluded that oil producers in the Gulf could prevent harm to the whales by using new whale detection technology. Environmental groups sued over that conclusion, arguing that the technology is speculative and on its own would be insufficient. Limits on ship speed, the plaintiffs argued, would be the most effective way to prevent whale deaths.

The state of Louisiana, Chevron, and the American Petroleum Institute also sued the federal government over the proposed requirement to use whale-detection technology — calling it too stringent and arguing the Rice’s whale is not as threatened as the federal government thinks. According to federal disclosures, BP, which is pursuing a new offshore oil and gas platform called Kaskida in the Gulf of Mexico, lobbied the White House and three federal agencies on the issue at least once a quarter last year. (BP didn’t respond to a request for comment. The American Petroleum Institute said in a statement to Grist that it did not advocate for the God Squad meeting.) A federal court overruled the administration’s proposed requirement to use whale detection technology in January, and at the moment there is no active Endangered Species Act restriction on vessel speed in the offshore oil industry.

In the end, the Trump administration’s attempt to avoid litigation has already brought on litigation. Earthjustice and other environmental groups said on Tuesday afternoon they’re going to sue over the God Squad’s decision.

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

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s ‘God Squad’ blocks endangered species protections in the Gulf of Mexico on Apr 1, 2026.

When these plots are planned — as opposed to letting vacant lots grow wild, which is valuable in its own right — they become extra powerful. You may have even enjoyed one without knowing it: the “pocket garden.” Tucked into spaces accessible to pedestrians, like sidewalks, hospital grounds, and campuses, they can be engineered to turn heat-absorbing concrete into air-cooling oases packed with vegetation and seating for people to escape the metropolitan bustle. 

“This increasing prioritization of creating green spaces in unexpected spots and underutilized spaces in communities is not only going to be making our communities more resilient, it’s going to be making people healthier,” said Dan Lambe, chief executive of the nonprofit Arbor Day Foundation, which promotes urban forestry. “A little bit of green goes a long way.”

Pocket gardens aren’t gardens in the agriculturally productive sense, but ornamental grounds. (Though there’s nothing stopping a designer from adding a fruit tree or two.) Ideally, they’re host to native plant species, which bring several benefits. For one, they attract native pollinators like insects and birds, which get a source of food that powers them to go on and fertilize plants elsewhere, like crops in urban farms. And two, if the vegetation is adapted to a particular region or condition, it’s already used to the local climate — drought-tolerant varieties, for instance, won’t require as much water to survive. Furthermore, choosing native grasses that don’t need mowing can cut down on maintenance costs. And picking trees with big canopies will increase the amount of shade for people to use as refuge from the heat. (Sorry, palm trees, that means you’re disqualified.)

Biodiversity — mixing tree species as opposed to planting 10 of the same kind — is key here. That attracts a broader range of pollinating animals, and builds resiliency into the system: If you only plant one variety of tree and a disease shows up, it can spread rapidly.

And speaking of disease, trees have an additional superpower in their ability to scrub urban air of the pollutants that contribute to respiratory problems. In addition, the vegetation of a pocket park releases water vapor, bringing down air temperatures. This mitigates what’s called the urban heat island effect, in which cities absorb the sun’s energy all day and slowly release it into the night. Combined, reduced air pollution and temperatures improve public health. 

There’s also the harder-to-quantify bonus of people getting out of their cars and gathering in public spaces, no matter how diminutive. “It’s actually a transition toward the pedestrian — toward the person — and away from the vehicle,” said Eric Galipo, director of campus planning and urban design at the architecture firm FCA, which has integrated pocket gardens in their projects. (The photo at the top of this story is of one of the firm’s projects, at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.) “We may not spend as much time together as a society as we used to, and so these are great opportunities for that sort of connection to happen.”

When the rains come, these verdant plots take on another role as an infrastructural asset. As the planet heats up, rainfall increases because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. In response, cities like Los Angeles and Pittsburgh are getting rid of concrete to open up more green spaces, which absorb rainfall, allowing it to seep underground. This reduces pressure on sewer systems that are struggling to handle increasingly heavy deluges. These systems, after all, were designed long ago for a different climate than we’re dealing with today. 

When a city prioritizes green spaces, you can actually hear the difference. Barcelona, for instance, has been developing superblocks, which aim to improve city life by transforming car infrastructure into walkable spaces. That includes the development of “green axes” (the plural of “axis,” not the tool for chopping) full of vegetation and paths for strolling. A recent study found that after these spaces were pedestrianized and vehicles disappeared, average noise levels fell by 3.1 decibels. (For context, hearing a car traveling at 65 mph from 25 feet away would be 77 decibels.)

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While 3.1 may not seem like much, each increase of 10 decibels means a tenfold rise in loudness. And we have to consider not just the decibels but how the kind of noise changed as Barcelona developed green axes: Revving engines, honking horns, and even the occasional cacophony of a car accident were replaced with voices. As the built environment dramatically changed, so too did the way that folks on foot experienced their surroundings. “If people see green in general, the noise perception tends to change,” said Samuel Nello-Deakin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and lead author of the study. “You think that things are not as noisy as they actually are. So there’s also this interesting interaction, right, between sort of what you hear and what you see.” In addition, green spaces absorb city racket, keeping it from bouncing off of and between buildings and pavement, insulating residents from the din. 

With less commotion come still more gains to public health. Noise pollution is an invisible crisis worldwide, as studies link the stress it causes not just to struggles with mental health, but physical problems like hypertension and heart disease. By contrast, pocket parks and other green spaces encourage people to ditch their cars and move their bodies. “There are also physical health benefits from walking, biking, and being outside that over a lifetime tend to have a cumulative positive effect on what our society spends in health care,” Galipo said.

So as cities increasingly realize and utilize the power of greenery, the environmental, auditory, and social fabric of the urban landscape transforms. “There’s a gravity to this green space that brings people out,” Lambe said. “And all of a sudden, neighbors are connecting, generations are connecting, cultures are connecting. Trees are about the one thing that everybody can agree on.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pocket gardens: The tiny urban oases with surprisingly big benefits on Apr 1, 2026.

There was a designated recovery room, staffed by a full-time athletic trainer, giant ice baths to cool overheated athletes, and indoor facilities to practice if outside got too hot. At his old school in another part of Orlando, the football team relied on one makeshift ice bath and a cafeteria table to rest on when injured.

“There’s a vast difference between schools that have money and schools that don’t,” said LaComb, a senior at Lake Buena Vista High School and Florida state representative on the National Student Council, a membership group for student leaders. “Making sure each school has the resources to keep students safe shouldn’t be dependent on income.”

As climate change pushes temperatures to new highs, schools across the country are contending with threats to student health and safety on athletic fields, playgrounds, and beyond. More than 9,000 high school athletes receive treatment for heat illnesses each year, according to past estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, nine high schoolers died from exertional heatstroke — a record. At least 65 teenagers have died from heat-related causes since 2000, according to an analysis by the Louisville Courier Journal.

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For now, the United States has no national standard for heat safety in schools. That may change once federal regulators develop a workplace rule that would extend to schools. In the meantime, states have moved ahead with their own rules — ordering schools to adjust practice schedules, buy professional-grade equipment, or hire licensed trainers who can spot and treat heat-related illnesses. How easily districts can comply, though — and whether they can afford to go beyond the bare minimum and make the sorts of investments LaComb’s new high school has — depends on the size of their budgets. 

“The lack of funding and capacity in many places around the country will almost certainly lead to a continuation of the Swiss cheese heat health protections at the state and local level,” said John Balbus, former deputy assistant secretary for climate change and health equity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The United States doesn’t track heat-related injuries or deaths in public schools. But recent research confirms exertional heatstroke as a leading — and preventable — cause of death in high school sports, with incidents increasing over the past four decades. A life-threatening emergency, heatstroke occurs when the body overheats and can’t cool itself down, often due to intense physical activity or exposure to high temperature. 

In July of last year, a Mississippi high school sent 11 marching band members to the hospital after they collapsed during practice. A Memphis teenager died that same month from heatstroke after football practice, and a 15-year-old in North Texas died in August following conditioning drills.

Children face unique biological vulnerabilities to extreme heat. Their bodies take longer to acclimate to high temperatures and produce sweat. They’re more prone to dehydration, and young children don’t always know when they need to cool down.

“Children spend more time active outdoors, which results in increased exposure to high ambient heat,” said Autumn Burton, senior associate of climate, health, and environment at the Federation of American Scientists, a think tank. “Children usually depend on others to provide them with water and protect them from unsafe outdoor environments.”

What’s new, she explained, is the intensity, length, and scope of heat waves.

“Communities that didn’t experience extreme heat in decades and years past are now facing it, and they don’t have the infrastructure and planning and protocols in place to deal with it,” Burton said.

The Korey Stringer Institute — named after the NFL player who died from exertional heatstroke during training camp in 2001 — advocates for athletic safety and evaluates states on policies to protect young athletes. It reviews heat safety rules, licensing of athletic trainers and coaching education. Since 2017, states have adopted nearly 200 heat illness prevention policies, said Rebecca Stearns, chief operating officer for KSI.

States like Florida and Georgia, where tragic heat-related deaths in recent years have spurred policy changes, rank near the top of KSI’s list due to comprehensive legislation and regulations. Both states — as well as Louisiana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and North Carolina — received full marks for requiring a period for athletes to acclimate at the start of formal practices. They also mandate other changes based on readings from wet-bulb globe thermometers, which experts consider the gold standard for measuring heat stress because they account for air temperature, humidity, cloud cover, wind speed, and sun angle. All six states also require schools to keep cold water immersion tubs on site at all warm weather practices and adopt the “cool first, transport second” standard to lower a person’s body temperature before taking them to a hospital.

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With no formal heat protections in place, Colorado and Maine rank near the bottom of KSI’s evaluation — where California used to be before passing new mandates in 2024. 

Toward the end of that year, the Biden administration advanced federal regulations that would for the first time protect workers from the heat, including teachers and other school staff. Employers would have to develop plans for heat hazards, with higher temperatures triggering more controls, like access to cool drinking water or shaded breaks. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, under President Donald Trump, is moving forward with finalizing those rules. 

Already, OSHA requires employers to report heat-related deaths on the job — a tally schools don’t have to report for students.

“At the high school level or below, there’s no required reporting when a kid dies,” Stearns said. “What we know is probably just the tip of the iceberg.”

And the new standards would only apply to about half the country: Twenty-seven states, and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, extend OSHA protections to cover public workplaces, like schools. The other states do not include government workers.

New Hampshire once ranked at the very bottom of the KSI list. But after years of lobbying by athletic trainers — motivated in part by a desire to cover their own liability — the state in 2021 passed some of the strongest heat safety policies in the country.

Every campus must have emergency response plans, identifying which staff members are trained and responsible for attending to injuries. Schools now must use wet-bulb globe temperature readings to add more break times or to delay or cancel practices and games.

“It’s not a partisan issue,” said state Senator Ruth Ward, the Republican chair of the education committee who sponsored the 2021 legislation. “This is about keeping our kids safe.”

But the bill exposed the challenge of unfunded mandates. New Hampshire courts have found the state underfunds its public schools by more than $3,000 per pupil. Wet-bulb devices can cost up to $500, yet lawmakers allocated just a symbolic $1 account for schools to buy them.

During debates over the bill, some school district officials expressed concern that the statewide standard would create an unfunded mandate, further straining tight budgets. Schools have had to seek outside grants to cover what seems like a small expense.

New Hampshire, like just three other states, also now requires athletic trainers at collision and contact sporting events. But an annual count in 2024 found that close to a third of secondary schools report having no athletic trainers on staff. Part of the problem is pay, said Precious Burke, president-elect of the New Hampshire Athletic Trainers’ Association: Athletic trainers can earn much more at New Hampshire’s private schools and in private practice. 

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In the face of funding shortfalls, schools — and students — are improvising.

Molly McDougal, assistant athletic director for Kearsarge Regional School District in New Hampshire, laughed while describing a method her cash-strapped district employs, known as TACO, which stands for “tarp-assisted cooling with oscillation.” Her schools can’t afford standing immersion tubs, but coaches can lay overheated athletes in a tarp filled with ice water to rapidly cool them.

“It sounds, for lack of a better word, kind of sketchy,” McDougal said. “But it’s just as effective.”

In neighboring Massachusetts, the Boston school system, which couldn’t afford to hire full-time staff like its neighboring districts, started partnering with a regional hospital to hire a team of athletic trainers. A dermatology group offers grants to help schools create more shade on their campus, and California created a statewide initiative to transform asphalt-covered schoolyards into shaded green spaces.

Isabella Malloy, a senior at Vista PEAK Preparatory, a high school in Aurora, Colorado, said young people also should guard their own health and safety. Temperatures there have already broken heat records this year, reaching 85 degrees. 

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Malloy, who has played on her school’s flag football, softball, and wrestling teams, recalled hyperventilating during one football game on a particularly warm Saturday morning and signaled for her coach to sub her out. He immediately started pouring water over her head.

“You have to know yourself and if something doesn’t feel right,” Malloy said. “Some kids get afraid if they tell coach they’re tired, he’ll make you run more,” she added. “It’s hard to advocate for ourselves when you also don’t want to seem lazy.”

The safety measures come with trade-offs, too.

Even with the amenities at his new school, LaComb at Lake Buena Vista High School said wet-bulb readings often meant his football team couldn’t train at all. Some athletes desperate for time on the field, he said, would resort to blowing on the wet-bulb thermometer to trick it into a cooler reading or arrange informal practices at nearby parks without the supervision of trained staff.

“It’s so hot, and the heat’s increasing so much over the years,” LaComb said. “We get less and less play time every year.”

He added, “It really impacts the joy that you have in the sport. You’re supposed to think only of the game, but now you’re just thinking about how hot it is — even when you’re sitting on the bench.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As climate change threatens student athlete safety, states try to adapt on Apr 1, 2026.

At 74, Hallman still feels honored to work the 9,200-acre ranch he owns with his brother and sister, sometimes putting in as much as 15 hours a day. The labor starts at dawn — mending fences, clearing pastures, tending horses and livestock — and is far from lucrative. He doesn’t do it for the money, but out of gratitude to those who kept the ranch going before him. “Somebody worked their tail off to make it happen,” he said. “And I have worked my tail off, too.”

Standing beneath a live oak, his ballcap shielding tired eyes, Hallman spoke of bluebonnets that carpet the pastures each spring and moonrises that “knock your socks off” — one so bright he thought it was a spaceship. His great-grandfather Sam Henderson, a Texas Ranger, bought the land in 1916; it straddles Tom Green, Schleicher, and Irion counties about four hours west of Austin. Hallman spent his childhood summers there, learning his way around.  

He took over after his grandparents died in 1975 and set to work — rebuilding pens and corrals, cutting cedar and mesquite, tending livestock. In the early 1980s, an oil company drilled 15 wells, and the Hallman siblings prospered. “That was a good time,” he said. “They were trying to get it out of the ground as fast as they could.”

But within a decade, the oil began drying up and federal wool subsidies vanished. Suddenly the ranch felt fragile. They needed a new revenue stream — something that might soften the hard years and help keep their children on the land after them — and in 2007, they signed a lease with a clean energy company. They hadn’t even heard of wind rights when the landman called. “We just thought the wind blew across the surface,” Hallman said.

For roughly six months, workers uprooted stones, bushes, and trees; carved 53 miles of road through the hills; and poured concrete slabs for 33 steel towers. The land thrummed with constant motion and dust choked the air. As Hallman watched his ranch transform, he worried that he’d made a mistake.

Little did he know, he had glimpsed the future. 

Hallman’s doubts reflect a larger reckoning underway in West Texas. Over the past two decades, rural counties that helped meet the nation’s demand for oil have become unexpected linchpins of its clean-energy buildout. Pumpjacks now stand alongside wind and solar farms drawn in part by open range and generous federal incentives. For Schleicher County, where oil production has waned and the tax base dwindled, “renewables” have taken on a double meaning, offering the promise of fiscal stability in a place desperate for economic rejuvenation. But that promise is now complicated by the Trump administration’s rollback of clean energy policy and many of the incentives that fueled the boom. 

Texas has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. During the three years after the legislation passed in 2022, developers invested some $62 billion in clean energy ventures statewide and announced billions more in planned construction. Projects already constructed or proposed in Schleicher County — including a hydrogen facility once estimated to bring $1.2 billion in tax revenue — were forecast to generate tens of millions for schools, hospitals, and other services.

But those projections rested on one key assumption: The federal tax credits at the heart of the IRA would remain in place. The law expanded and extended earlier incentives through 2024 and established a new system of credits to begin in 2025. This federal support — including additional incentives for installations built in low-income communities and regions with a history of fossil fuel extraction — could cover up to 70 percent of a facility’s cost.

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Before the cuts, governments and landowners across Texas stood to collect nearly $50 billion in lease payments and tax revenue from current and planned projects, according to one report, with roughly three-quarters of counties positioned to benefit. Now, many of these developments — and their hoped-for revenue — face a precarious future. More than $4 billion in investment has already been threatened or cancelled. All told, the about-face could eliminate thousands of jobs and shave $20 billion from the state’s gross domestic product by 2035. The climate consequences are equally stark, adding roughly 83 million metric tons of carbon emissions to the atmosphere by some estimates. 

One county illustrates what has been gained by the boom — and what could be lost with its passing. Scurry County, about two hours northwest of Hallman’s ranch, is one of the largest producers of renewable power in West Texas. Companies have built roughly a dozen wind and solar farms, with a total capacity of about 2,300 megawatts of power; they are projected to generate nearly $1 billion for the county and local landowners over the facilities’ lifetimes.

County Judge Dan Hicks said clean energy helped stabilize a budget long whipsawed by volatile oil and gas revenues. Some years, without a steady income stream, local officials faced the prospect of closing the library, the youth center, and the golf course. Renewables helped change that. Abatement agreements with developers created reliable, long-term payments that don’t fluctuate with the market or vanish when a manufacturer leaves town, Hicks said. Jobs have been slower to follow, but a support industry is beginning to take shape around the installations. “When your population is 17,000, every job counts,” he said. Eventually, he said, “I’d love to see us become the energy capital of Texas.”

He doesn’t think new wind and solar will come without federal incentives. Yet Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at the University of Texas who has studied the IRA’s impact in Texas, anticipates development continuing — albeit more slowly, and at greater cost. That likely means pricier electricity and slimmer returns for rural counties hoping to share in the growth. How much of it will materialize now is uncertain.

Schleicher County Judge Charlie Bradley looks out the window of his cluttered second-floor office in Eldorado, the sand-colored farming town he’s known all his life. The old filling station on the corner, where he pumped gas in high school, has closed. So has the wool warehouse a few blocks south, where he helped process yarn in middle school. 

Just north of the courthouse, the yellow-brick elementary school shows its age. Water pools in the basement and leaks through the ceiling, and, as one teacher said, “a lot of the rooms stink.” At lunchtime, kids from the high school next door spill into the surrounding neighborhood, a mix of small houses and mobile homes. A washing machine rusts on one porch. Yards collect trailers, cars, and piles of brush, though many assert pride with Texas stars, decorative windmills, and Christmas lights still twinkling in January.

Bradley grew up here in the 1960s and ’70s, when Eldorado was prosperous enough to support several family-owned groceries, stores, and restaurants. He set out for Texas Tech University and dabbled in six subjects before settling on photography. (“Best seven years of my life,” he said.) After returning home, he ran a portrait studio for a decade, then spent another 10 years chasing storms as an insurance adjuster. He was in the middle of one in 2007 when the retiring county judge called to suggest he run for the job. Bradley said he didn’t know a thing about governing. “Well hell, Bradley,” the judge replied, “Nobody does. If they did, they wouldn’t run.’”

By the time Bradley took office in 2009, the county was reeling from the decline of the fossil fuel and sheep industries. Then came fresh blows. A fundamentalist Mormon sect that was the county’s fourth-largest taxpayer was prosecuted for child marriage and lost its property in 2014, putting a sizeable dent in revenue. The next year, the Baker Hughes oilfield services yard — which employed about 80 people — shut down. With property taxes already near the legal ceiling, Bradley had to trim about $300,000 from the budget, hitting roads, bridges, and a meals program for the elderly. Much of what remained of the fossil fuel economy eventually left, too, though a Kinder Morgan gas pipeline announced in 2019 has boosted the tax base. The population has fallen from roughly 3,500 in 2010 to about 2,300 in 2024.

Today, the county runs on $9.3 million. Things are so tight there are just two workers to cut all of its grass, and Bradley has been known to climb on a mower to help out. “It’s real relaxing,” he said. “You can’t hear the phones.”

Renewable energy has provided a modest lift. The 160-megawatt Langford wind farm, which stretches into Schleicher County from an adjoining county, came online the same year Bradley took office, offering a bit of relief amid the losses; it now pays the county about $35,000 annually. The 100-megawatt Live Oak wind farm was built in 2018; in just the past six years, it has contributed nearly $16 million in taxes to local governments, including $7.2 million to Bradley’s budget. A 430-megawatt solar farm rising nearby could add about $225,000 to his budget each year.

Still, Bradley remains clear-eyed about green energy’s limits. Several companies have signed agreements without ever breaking ground, and those that did haven’t replaced what oil and gas once provided. The projects employ only a handful of workers — nothing like the number the oilfield service yards and gas plants once did.

The modest financial gains have come with friction. Some ranchers, tired of what Bradley called “scraping out a living on six inches of topsoil and rock,” want the money clean energy developers pay to lease their land. They also hope the revenue might help Schleicher County avoid the fate of neighboring Menard County, one of the state’s poorest. Others resent having their tax dollars spent on federal incentives for what they call “alternative energy.” Bradley said he has been asked, “Why in the hell do we want all that stuff? This is ranching land, and it’s always been ranching land.”

The flashpoint came in 2023, when ETFuels began leasing rights for a 500-megawatt wind, solar, and battery complex that would also produce hydrogen to make methanol for shipping — a larger and more complex industrial endeavor than anything Schleicher County had seen before. For many residents, the problem wasn’t the size, but the water. The plant would draw from the Edwards-Trinity Aquifer, the county’s only source, and no one could say how much could be spared. The first exploratory wells came up dry; later ones struck water. The question filled the civic center with tense, packed meetings. But under state law, Bradley had no ability to intervene in the landowner’s drilling. “I can’t tell him what to do with his land,” he said.

ETFuels never broke ground, but something even bigger emerged. In December of 2024, Apex Clean Energy pitched a wind, sun, battery, and “green” hydrogen facility that would produce enough energy to power 700,000 homes and create 90 full-time jobs. This time, the water would come from another county. A presentation outlining the benefits left school board members speechless: The operation would provide as much as $1.2 billion in property tax revenue over 25 years, including $20 million a year for the school district, enough for a new elementary school. In November, the board put a bond package to voters, hoping the Apex project would pay for it. (The measure ultimately failed.)

Apex appears to have scuttled plans to produce hydrogen in Schleicher County, though it’s not clear why. The company, which declined to comment, last promoted the project in June, just before President Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” into law. Among other things, that legislation rolled back the production tax credit of up to $3 per kilogram for clean hydrogen. Experts like Rhodes at the University of Texas doubt many such projects can be viable without it. 

Bradley won’t speculate about lost or future revenue. “That egg is not in my basket,” he said. What is in his basket lies just beyond his office window: an elementary school with a leaky basement, two men mowing all of the county’s grass, and a community that’s spent decades waiting for something to take root.

IIf Bradley can see the changes that have come to Schleicher County in recent years, Sandra Pfeuffer can hear them. The sound carries across ranchland where her family once expected only the lowing of cattle.

Her father-in-law leased wind rights on his ranch in Eden, a town in neighboring Concho County, to a renewable energy company in 2008. He did so, Pfeuffer said, because he was dying, and paying estate taxes would have required selling off part of the ranch. Nothing came of the deal, but a decade later, her husband Ray signed a lease with Maverick Creek Wind Farm, which was built in 2020. “It was the worst decision we ever made,” Sandra said.

The four turbines hummed so loudly, and the transmission line buzzed so persistently, that she couldn’t sleep during visits. “I’m not going to lie — mailbox money is great,” she said. “But the mailbox money will never cover the loss of the enjoyment we had in that ranch.”

Pfeuffer is now fighting the rising tide of clean energy developments in eastern Schleicher County, where she lives. She isn’t blind to the irony of her stance. Ranches are dividing all around, she concedes, and times are changing. But she has come to see such projects not as progress but as a threat to the only life she’s wanted. “As a rancher, I feel kind of like a quail,” she said. “Everything’s after you, and it’s only a matter of time ’til you die.” 

When ETFuels began drilling wells on her neighbor’s land in 2023, she led the charge against it. She worried about what might be lost beneath the surface. “My fence doesn’t go underground and separate your water from my water,” she said. “It’s wrong for my neighbors to pump half a million gallons a day and cut my water away from underneath me.” (A representative of ETFuels told the county’s water board it could use about 220,000 gallons per day.) 

The next year, the Pfeuffers gathered fellow ranchers around their dining table and formed the Edwards Plateau Alliance to “counteract misleading narratives” about renewable energy. Sandra organized meetings, brought in outside critics, and pressed lawmakers to protect groundwater from hydrogen development. “[Companies] go into communities that need a lifeline and they promise the world,” she said. “The money is not worth the peace and beauty that they take away from your property.”

A visit to their 3,300-acre ranch shows what she believes is at stake. A few miles from the turnoff from the main road, a sign reads: “Wind Turbines Destroy Land Value.” Beyond the stately, white farmhouse and its web of gates, rocky pastures stretch wide and still, dotted with live oaks and a few oil pumpjacks. Sandra cut the engine of her all-terrain vehicle in front of one and listened. There is no whoosh or hum, only the rustle of breeze through the grass.

The quiet helps explain why the Pfeuffers are so committed to their ranch. They have spent years clearing mesquite and cedar so grass can take hold — not just for profit, she said, but to benefit the land. The work has taught her to pay attention. “Out here, you’re so connected to everything,” Sandra said. “If there’s a rock out of place, you notice.”

She doesn’t see that kind of attentiveness in the push for renewables. To her, it’s just another extractive industry — one that will leave West Texas depleted, its water drained, and its land scarred with concrete, rebar, and fiberglass. Above all, she resents what she sees as urban priorities imposed on rural communities by people who will not live with the consequences. “I don’t come into town and knock down your buildings so I can run my cows,” she said. 

The Pfeuffers’ activism has riled other ranchers. Sandra said that her neighbor no longer speaks to her. She’s heard rumors of vague threats, of people at the coffee shop saying things like, “These people who are fighting this, we know where they live.”

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While the fight in West Texas plays out in sidelong glances and veiled warnings, in Austin it is reduced to charts, forecasts, and models. State planners say Texas simply doesn’t produce enough energy: Rising electricity use, driven in part by population growth and a boom in data centers across the state, are pushing demand sharply upward even as extreme weather strains the grid. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the nonprofit that manages power for about 90 percent of the state’s electric load, expects peak demand to climb from 85 gigawatts to 150 by 2030. To move that juice, the state is building a $33 billion transmission “superhighway” with 2,500 miles of high-voltage lines linking the power plants of West Texas to cities like Dallas.

Discussing the state’s plans, Pfeuffer’s voice hardens. “Texas is so unique,” she said. “Do we really want to destroy it with power lines, wind turbines, solar panels? One day we’re going to wish we hadn’t.”

The future she fears is coming quickly. A 200-mile stretch of high-voltage transmission lines could bisect eastern Schleicher County, not far from her land. More might follow. The buildout seems relentless. “I have to wonder,” Pfeuffer said, “if I’m ever going to sleep again.”

The din and dust that roiled Duff Hallman’s ranch in 2009 have long since faded. What replaced them were steady payments that helped offset the rising cost of ranching. The expense of maintaining the place has crept as high as $217,000 a year. Lease payments — Hallman wouldn’t be specific, but suggested roughly $200,000 annually, split between him and his two siblings — helped cushion them during the droughts of 2011 and 2021, which stripped the fields and forced them to sell their cattle. Not that Hallman has any illusions about its limits. “Is it like having oil?” he asked. “No. Not anywhere close.”

Hallman tells other ranchers who are considering windmills on their own property that he barely notices them anymore. His only complaint is the giant icicles they sometimes sling during freezing rain. Still, he’s happy. Clearway Energy, which owns Langford, maintains the towers; after construction, it paid for the lost trees and reseeded the land — things Hallman said the oil and gas companies never did. The roads it built double as firebreaks. Driving down one in his truck, he gestured toward the scenery rolling by. “These hills are rough and rocky,” he said. “I haven’t lost that much.” 

Still, his enthusiasm isn’t always enough to overcome skepticism and deeply held convictions, including the idea that turbines lower property values. He chuckled at that. “I bet you we could get top dollar for our ranch,” he said. 

Hallman admitted that the solar farm rising up the road gives him pause. He could earn a little money grazing sheep beneath the panels, but he worries how the facility might impact wildlife and the ecosystem he has worked with a biologist to maintain. He’s as wary of transmission lines and data centers as anyone, and was among those who declined to let ETFuels draw water from his land, choosing instead to safeguard it for the future. 

Renewables have helped the ranch, but he knows the land may not stay in the family forever. Every generation brings more heirs, each holding a smaller parcel with a looser grasp of its history. Change is inevitable. One day, the steel columns may vanish, made obsolete by something he can’t yet picture. Hallman shrugged at the thought and smiled. “I don’t know what that’s going to be, but it’s going to be something pretty ‘wow,’” he said. “We’re only limited by our imaginations.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Texas saw a $50B future in clean energy. Then the political winds shifted. on Mar 31, 2026.

“Climate change is often discussed in terms of the change in the global mean surface temperature,” John Kennedy, lead author and scientific coordinator of the report, said in an email to Grist. But year-to-year variations in air temperatures, caused by the weather patterns El Niño and La Niña, can “hide the long-term trend” of global warming, said Kennedy.

With the addition of this new key indicator, however, the WMO authors aimed to clarify the fundamental dynamics of global warming, and represent them simply. The Earth’s energy imbalance, or EEI, is a pretty straightforward concept: It’s the difference between how much energy from the sun the planet takes in and how much energy is radiated back out into space. Put even more simply, the energy imbalance, Kennedy said, is “fundamentally what climate change is.”

“As long as that energy imbalance is there, the Earth will keep on warming, ice will continue to melt, and the sea level will continue to rise,” he added. 

As far as numbers are concerned, what the WMO found should be unsurprising to anyone following the climate crisis. Because of the greenhouse gas effect, the Earth has been steadily holding on to more energy, mostly as heat, since the 1960s. And every year for the last nine years, that rate has set a new record. 

What’s more, the report shows where on the planet most of that heat is going. Oceans, the WMO reports, absorb 91 percent of the excess energy hanging out in the Earth’s climate. Kennedy offered that, as a key indicator of global warming, EEI provides a helpful context to better understand all the other indicators followed by the organization, such as sea level rise and glacier melt. 

This rising ocean heat also carries significant consequences for food pathways in a number of ways. Warming oceans mean more coral bleaching, habitat degradation, and reduced fishing yields. Sea level rise also leads to coastal erosion, which can wreck the livelihoods of those who work in fisheries — and spell trouble for the people and other animals who depend on them for food. When glaciers melt, the resulting flooding can also disrupt farming on land. 

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Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, said she “really appreciated” the WMO’s efforts to reframe the climate crisis — and its emphasis on the relationship between oceans and global warming. Oceans are often talked about as carbon sinks — but Jacquet, who was not involved in the WMO report, prefers to refer to them as carbon sponges, as a way of pointing out that these ecosystems have saturation points. Because oceans do sequester so much carbon, she fears that they have been “masking” how much climate change has progressed this century — that is, how much more heat has been absorbed than has been reflected back to space. 

Jacquet added that the question of whether and how warming oceans impact food security is complicated. For example, marine heat waves can greatly impact farmed fish, in part because these fish cannot freely move around. In Chile in 2016, a fish farmer noted their Atlantic salmon were dying at a higher rate after an algae bloom, because they couldn’t escape it. 

Jacquet argues that farmed fish often end up serving higher-income populations, not food-insecure ones. But as oceans warm, wild fish populations are moving closer to the North and South Poles where relatively cooler waters carry more oxygen. This trend does negatively impact the livelihood of fishers near the equator, said Jacquet, and can increase food insecurity. 

“The oceans are reaching their limit of what they can do to help offset anthropogenic changes,” she said, adding that scientists and science communicators should try “whatever way we can represent that to communicate that reality.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Oceans are absorbing the Earth’s excess energy. That’s bad news for food systems. on Mar 31, 2026.

These woes could be straight out of a climate fiction novel. But the West’s no good, very bad winter was alarmingly real. And, experts say, a worrisome combination of low snowpack and a devastating heat wave could create a summer ripe for climate disasters. “There is no analog,” Marianne Cowherd, a climate scientist at Montana State University, said of what’s happening. “There isn’t a year in the historical record we can look to for information … This limits our ability to look to the past for insight.”

Much of that uncertainty stems from what’s happening to the region’s snowpack, a cornerstone of its water system. Snow accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the Northwest’s water supply and is especially critical to the ever-thirsty Colorado River Basin, which supplies seven states. But much of the region has experienced the warmest winter on record. That has meant a higher proportion of water arrived as rain, and the snow that did fall melted more quickly than usual. Snowpack is critically low, according to the federal Colorado River Basin Forecasting Center, which utilizes the federal government’s Snow Telemetry network of monitoring stations that go back half a century.

“The majority of them have record-low or near-record-low snowpack conditions,” said hydrologist Cody Moser at the center’s monthly briefing in early March. At that time, he said the upper Colorado River basin, which covers the watershed north of Lake Powell on the Colorado-Arizona border, had about 40 percent of normal snow cover. That has since dropped to 25 to 30 percent. 

While winter precipitation has actually been fairly average, how that water falls is important, too. Snow acts as a natural water-storage mechanism that spreads the delivery of water out over weeks or even months as it melts. This helps keep rivers and reservoirs flush for longer. Without snow, the moisture can be fleeting. “Even when we’re getting precipitation, we’re not storing it,” Cowherd said. “A lot of it actually just ends up evaporating or flowing out to the ocean, so it’s not necessarily in a place where we can still access it.” 

Cowherd will be watching the snowmelt closely. On one hand, the warmer temperatures are priming the snow to liquify more quickly than normal. But the solar angle — the sun’s maximum height — is lower now than it would be later in the spring, which could impede the melting trend. “I’m really interested to see how those balance,” she said, adding that the answer could be critical to the region’s water supply. “We don’t have the reservoir capacity behind human-built dams to hold the amount of water that we need.”

If snowpack problems weren’t enough, a mid-March heat wave also wreaked havoc in the West. A heat dome brought temperatures as much as 35 degrees above normal, according to the research group Climate Central. More than 1,500 daily records were set across 11 states. Several saw temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the U.S set a national March record of 112 in four cities.

An analysis by the World Weather Attribution Initiative found that this heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. “The role of climate change is clear,” said Clair Barnes, a researcher at the Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy who was part of the team behind the report. She added that extreme temperatures this early in the year “tend to be more dangerous for people because your body is not yet acclimatized.” 

While the heat broke in many places after about a week, the impacts could last through the summer. July-like temperatures and dwindling snowpack jeopardize the West’s fragile water supply. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s forecast shows that levels in Lake Powell could dip below the minimum needed to generate power as early as August, and most probably by December. Some Colorado residents are already facing the earliest restrictions on water use ever seen.

“This winter was unusually warm and did not deliver the snow we need,” Alan Salazar, CEO of Denver Water, the state’s largest water provider, said in a statement last week. The utility declared a Stage 1 emergency, which called for a 20 percent cut in usage and mandatory restrictions on outdoor watering. “This drought is also a reminder of the impacts of climate change on our water supply,” he said. 

Such conditions heighten the risk of wildfires. Excessive runoff and high heat foster early growth of vegetation that can fuel them, and unseasonably warm weather turns all that greenery to kindling. “Record heat over the previous weeks has put us into early ‘green up’ for the year,” August Isernhagen, a division chief in the Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District, told the University of Nevada, Reno. “This, coupled with many other human impacts on the landscape, has created potential for unprecedented conditions this fire season.”

If these risk trajectories pan out, the impacts could be catastrophic. Low water supplies could upend agricultural operations that feed people across the country. Wildfires could threaten lives, displace thousands, and cause billions of dollars in damage. Still, a lot could change over the next few months.

Barnes said an early heat wave doesn’t necessarily mean there will be more of them later in the year. The weather between heat events also matters, and could go in many directions. A looming El Nino climate pattern could, for example, help alleviate a potential drought. The snowpack problem could even rebound, too.

“We could have a huge snow storm tomorrow and it would be great,” Cowherd said. But based on the current weather forecasts, she cautioned, “I don’t think this is likely to happen.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The West’s unprecedented winter could fuel a summer of disaster on Mar 31, 2026.

That’s according to an announcement made in February by Starbucks, the waste hauler WM (formerly known as Waste Management), and three recycling groups called The Recycling Partnership, GreenBlue, and Closed Loop Partners. In a press release, they said that more than 60 percent of U.S. households can now recycle cold to-go cups in their curbside recycling bins. This makes the cups eligible for one of GreenBlue’s special labels featuring the familiar chasing arrows triangle and the words “widely recyclable.”

“To-go cups are entering a new era of recyclability,” the release said.

However, there’s a catch. Just because a product can be collected for recycling doesn’t mean it actually gets recycled. To imply otherwise is to conflate two very different numbers: the access rate and the real recycling rate. The former describes the number of people who are told they have “access” to a recycling program for a given product. The latter — the amount of plastic that is ultimately turned into new things — is what really matters, from an environmental standpoint. There’s not much evidence to suggest that the recycling rate for plastic cups is above 1 or 2 percent.

“This is one of those situations where statistics can be very misleading,” said Alex Jordan, a plastics researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. “They can pull a statistic that would make the public think that all these things are being recycled, but unfortunately even if you clean and dry and put your recycling in the recycling bin and it gets picked up, the overwhelming likelihood is that it ends up in a landfill or being burned for energy generation.”

Jordan is one of several experts across government, academia, and industry who question the feasibility of recycling plastic cups. Polypropylene, the type of plastic Starbucks’ cups are made from, is ubiquitous in packaging and foodware but not in recycling facilities. It’s often contaminated with food or other types of plastic, difficult to sort, and expensive to process — so most recyclers don’t want it. 

There “just aren’t a lot of recycling centers that want to accept polypropylene,” Jordan said.

The manager of one recycling center in California, who asked not to be named, said the cup announcement represents little more than a convenient alignment of interests: It generates good press and revenue for GreenBlue, allows WM to collect more material, and casts Starbucks as eco-friendly without requiring it to move away from single-use plastic.

“Everyone wants that warm, fuzzy recyclable label,” the manager said, adding that they suspected there would be no buyers for polypropylene even if they advertised it widely. “Our phone would not ring. It’s not something there are a lot of mills out there that are buying.” 

February’s announcement is part of a yearslong effort to increase polypropylene collection and recycling. Helming the effort is The Recycling Partnership, or TRP, a nonprofit funded by plastic-producing companies and their lobbying groups, including the American Chemistry Council, Exxon Mobil, and Coca-Cola. 

It started in 2020, just two years after China stopped accepting the United States’ plastic waste. At the time, polypropylene had a bit of an image problem. It was the second most common type of plastic in Americans’ municipal solid waste, but its recycling rate was far below that of other resins, at just 0.6 percent. (Polypropylene “containers and packaging” had a slightly higher rate of 2.7 percent.) Because cities could no longer ship their mixed plastic waste to China for reprocessing and there weren’t enough domestic facilities to sell it to, many stopped accepting all but the simplest products: bottles and jugs made of PET or HDPE, labeled with the numbers 1 and 2, respectively.

All of this called into question the legality of labeling polypropylene products with the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol, as some recycling organizations had previously recommended. TRP said there was an immediate need for action to “ensure the long-term viability of polypropylene plastic.” 

Working in tandem with other recycling groups including GreenBlue — whose board of directors includes executives from Walmart, Dow, and the packaging companies Printpack and Smurfit Westrock — TRP launched a “Polypropylene Recycling Coalition” that would work to increase the number of curbside collection programs accepting polypropylene. TRP started by giving grants to material recovery facilities, the factories where your household recycling is sent to be sorted, so they could install better technology capable of picking out polypropylene from mixed piles of plastic. The organization also said it would pursue “education of residents.”

One of TRP’s key goals was to reach the 60 percent access rate it now claims to have achieved for polypropylene cups. Hitting that threshold allows the cups to carry the chasing arrows and the words “widely recyclable,” as shown on a label sold by GreenBlue’s subsidiary, How2Recycle. But state and federal regulators don’t actually vet these labels. Instead, How2Recycle sells them to hundreds of companies across the U.S., from Procter and Gamble to Lowe’s, via annual use fees of up to $6,780, depending on their revenue.

From the start, TRP and its partners have faced scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest and for opaque, unilateral determinations about the state of recycling systems. For the polypropylene cup announcement specifically, Malak Anshassi, an assistant professor in environmental engineering at Florida Polytechnic University, said she wasn’t sure where the 60 percent access rate came from. Nor would she have “full confidence” in it, since recycling programs “vary completely in terms of what is accepted.” 

Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer and founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup, conducted an analysis for Greenpeace last year and found that only 6 percent of the U.S. population has access to a municipal recycling program that accepts plastic cups. She said TRP’s numbers relied on an AI analysis of whether city websites listed cups as accepted materials. “They say through their magic AI tool, ‘Oh, yeah, 78 percent acceptance.’ And they have no data that they can give you.”

GreenBlue did not respond to multiple requests for comment, or to a detailed list of questions from Grist. TRP sent a statement from its press release saying that “access alone is not enough.”

“Only 20 percent of [polypropylene] packaging is currently captured, and 76 percent of all recyclables are still lost at the household level,” said Kate Davenport, the organization’s chief impact officer. She said TRP is focused on increasing polypropylene recycling through “clear communication, stronger engagement, and continued investment in communities.”

Critics argue that TRP, GreenBlue, and their partners intentionally blur the line between a cup’s recycling access rate and its actual recycling rate. The touted 60 percent access rate only measures how many people are allowed to toss plastic cups into their curbside bins. It guarantees nothing about the cups’ final destination. Because there are virtually no buyers for this low-value plastic, waste haulers could simply collect the cups to hit the 60 percent threshold, only to route them straight to landfills and incinerators.

Ending up in landfills and incinerators is the kind of thing that is liable to happen if plastics don’t have robust “end markets” — buyers who will pay what it takes to collect, sort, transport, and reprocess polypropylene. TRP and GreenBlue say they take end markets into account when judging a product’s recyclability, but they didn’t publish information about how they did this for polypropylene cups, other than to say that WM “helped develop” them. 

WM said in a November press release that, thanks to a $1.4 billion investment in new recycling infrastructure, cups had become “valuable recyclable materials that are baled at WM’s recycling facilities along with other commodities, then sold to end markets that remanufacture products out of the recycled materials.” The company encouraged cities to update their accepted materials lists, but it’s unclear if it provided further justification. In at least one case — in Salt Lake City — communications obtained by Grist show that WM did not give city staff advance notice of the change, nor did the company directly respond when the city asked asked if it could be “100 percent clear” that plastic cups sent to the local MRF would ultimately be recycled. WM did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The manager of the California recycling center said they were only familiar with “one place” accepting polypropylene to be reprocessed on an industrial scale: KW Plastics in Alabama, which is too far away to send California’s plastic to. A 2025 analysis from Greenpeace suggests that all of the U.S.’s recycling facilities combined only have the capacity to reprocess 2 percent of the country’s discarded polypropylene tubs and containers, or about 5 percent of its polypropylene cups.

In Oregon, polypropylene cups are still not accepted in curbside recycling programs as a matter of law. That’s because of the state’s Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act, which established a uniform list of recyclable items for all of Oregon. The state’s Department of Environmental Quality explicitly chose to exclude single-use polypropylene cups from its list for 2025 to 2027.

“There was a preliminary study for polypro cups, and … the market for those cups was not ‘responsible,’” said Peter Chism-Winfield, sustainable materials and waste policy manager for the city of Portland. “There are certain materials like low-grade plastics, which polypropylene cups fall into, that are the ones most susceptible to bad practices,” he added. The third-party organization helping implement Oregon’s recycling law said it would conduct research to see if polypropylene cups could one day be added to the uniform list.

Chism-Winfield said he expects similar laws in Washington and California will eventually lead those states to stop accepting polypropylene cups. “If you go down the trail of where those materials are going, and the environmental and social impacts that those are having, it’s not going to be a pretty story for them,” he said. 

Maryland and Minnesota are also in the process of evaluating which products meet criteria for responsible end markets. Colorado listed polypropylene cups as recyclable in a plan for 2026 to 2030, though the needs assessment on which the plan was based found there were no in-state end markets for post-consumer plastics of any type. It identified KW Plastics as the only potential processor for Colorado’s polypropylene waste, provided that it is baled separately from other plastics and that these bales have a contamination rate less than 2 percent.

Davenport, from TRP, said in February’s press release that recyclability labels are an important “first step” toward increasing polypropylene cups’ recycling rates. Without them, people would keep throwing their cups in the trash. This is consistent with the way other industry groups talk about labels, as a way to provide recyclers with more material to turn into new products. 

Recyclability labels “educate and activate everyday people, and get waste into the right streams, and improve the recycling rate,” How2Recycle wrote in a 2024 press release. 

But that approach — using recycling labels before there’s evidence of actual recycling — might run afoul of state and local consumer protection laws.

In California, the state’s recycling agency determined last December that polypropylene cups are technically “recyclable,” but only in order to force plastic producers to try to increase their recycling rate from 2 to 65 percent by 2032. While companies try to meet that threshold, a separate law will prevent them from labeling polypropylene cups with the chasing arrows symbol; the law requires evidence that labeled products are sorted for recycling 60 percent of the time.

Howie Hirsch, a retired lawyer who’s been involved in recycling-related consumer protection litigation, said companies may be opening themselves up to lawsuits if they use the “widely recyclable” label on polypropylene cups in California. “I would certainly argue it is deceptive and misleading to label something as ‘widely recyclable’ when we know that the vast majority of any of those plastic materials that are placed in a recycling bin are going to end up in a landfill,” Hirsch said.

The same may be true of other states with their own truth-in-advertising laws. Attorneys general could argue that the use of the recycling symbol contravenes guidance from the Federal Trade Commission, a watchdog agency tasked with protecting consumers from fraud and deception. The FTC’s “Green Guides” for environmental marketing claims say it’s misleading to label something as recyclable unless 60 percent of consumers have access to a recycling program that will actually recycle it, not accept it and then throw it away.

Starbucks declined to say whether it would use How2Recycle’s labels for to-go cups in its California stores, or respond to additional questions. A spokesperson said its polypropylene cup initiative is part of a “broader packaging strategy” that includes “reducing single-use materials where we can, promoting reuse, and improving recyclability across our footprint.”

Starbucks has publicly committed to make all of its packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2030. Last year, it replaced polypropylene to-go cups with paper versions at about 580 of its stores nationwide, potentially in response to local ordinances restricting the use of single-use plastics, as well as a CBS investigation showing that polypropylene cups placed in the company’s in-store recycling bins were usually taken to incinerators, landfills, and waste transfer stations. But the company’s endorsement of the “widely recyclable” label suggests it isn’t planning on a broader phaseout.

“Starbucks wants consumers to think that the cups are recyclable so that consumers will buy lots of them and feel good about themselves,” said Dell, with The Last Beach Cleanup.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Your ‘widely recyclable’ Starbucks cup is still trash on Mar 30, 2026.

At the beginning of March, the state legislature passed a bill blocking local governments from adopting or enforcing “net-zero” policies. The bill, which was sent to Ron DeSantis’ desk, is expected to be signed by the governor in the coming days and would impact commitments made by more than a dozen cities from Tallahassee to South Miami to lower emissions and energy costs. 

Then, last Monday morning, DeSantis signed Senate Bill 290, or the “Florida Farm Bill,” into law. The bill passed with a 94-10 vote in the House and a unanimous vote by the Senate. Among the biggest climate rollbacks of the new legislation, which goes into effect July 1, is the provision that now preemptively bans cities and counties throughout the state from outlawing gas- and diesel-powered tools, such as tractors, lawn mowers, and leaf blowers. 

“If you want to use different stuff, fine, it’s a free country,” DeSantis said before signing the bill in Sebring, Florida. “But I like the gas-powered better. I just think it’s more reliable.” 

According to Brooke Alexander-Goss, the Organizing Manager at Sierra Club’s Florida chapter, there are at most seven municipalities in Florida that actually have bans against gas-powered lawn tools, like leaf blowers and chainsaws; no municipalities in the state have prohibited the big gas- and diesel-powered machines that farmers use on a daily basis. “They’re pinpointing something very, very specific, and it’s not even something we’ve seen or heard of,” Alexander-Goss said. “It’s just another example of the legislature overstepping and wanting to take over local control, which obviously opens the door for more of that in the future.”

Farmers and ranchers in the state are celebrating the way the new law bolsters an industry in decline. Florida’s $387 billion agricultural sector is facing a serious downturn, driven in no small part by climate change. Extreme weather has become a major economic strain in recent years for farmers and ranchers statewide. More extreme heat and insufficient rainfall have contributed to significant losses in citrus acreage, back-to-back hurricanes have decimated the production of animal goods and row crops, and the unusual cold temperatures that hit the state last month cost the entire industry upwards of $3 billion. Major storms have also driven up farm insurance rates, while federal tariffs, trade disruptions, and immigration enforcement have increased input, fertilizer, and labor costs. And yet agriculture itself remains a big contributor to planetary warming. Sugarcane production in Florida’s Everglades agricultural area alone has been found to be responsible for more than 7.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year — the bulk of the state’s agricultural emissions. The new law locks the state’s farmers into that cycle of reliance on fossil fuels — and in a state where greenhouse gas emissions surged by 30 percent between 1990 and 2022, no less. 

Environmental groups are, naturally, lamenting the bill’s passage for its climate setbacks. “This proves that, again, the legislature is not taking climate change seriously,” said Alexander-Goss.

The “Florida Farm Bill” also includes a provision that allows the state to open land designated for conservation for commercial farm use. Under this policy, lands acquired for conservation purposes since 2024 can be reclassified if deemed suitable for agriculture by state agencies. 

The legislation “represents a troubling shift away from the state’s long-standing commitment to land conservation at a time when we should be doubling down on climate resilience,” said Javier Estevez, political and legislative director at the Florida chapter of the Sierra Club. 

While the law requires an easement, or an agreement between governments and landowners to determine land use, as an attempt to limit the scale of development, Estevez says it still removes these lands from public ownership and weakens long-term ecological protections. Farming can increase water pollution, disrupt habitats, and stress fragile ecosystems that conservation programs were designed to protect. 

“By allowing certain conservation lands to be declared ‘surplus’ and sold for agricultural use, this law undermines the fundamental promise that protected lands stay protected,” said Estevez.

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According to DeSantis, the farm bill “shows that we have a strong commitment to not just agriculture, but our rural communities writ large.” But the package largely sidesteps farm country’s economic strife. Other parts of the law include citizenship requirements for disaster loans, a new program designed to boost locally-grown seed varieties, and permanently authorizing a program that directs farm-fresh food to food banks. Ultimately, the law comes at a time of heightened tension between what Florida state policymakers want and what cities and counties are trying to achieve in the name of climate action, food production, and public health. One thing that the law doesn’t do for the agricultural industry is indicative of that growing political tension.

An earlier version of the bill proposed to expand Florida’s food disparagement law, often called a “veggie-libel” law, which gives individuals and companies the ability to sue for claims that disparage perishable agricultural products — by saying, for instance, that a product is unsafe for consumption. The new provision aimed to expand that authority to include all agricultural products and practices and would have allowed companies to recover attorney’s fees if they won a defamation suit.

In January, Kelly Ryerson, a leading Make America Healthy Again advocate and founder of the website Glyphosate Facts, launched a full-scale campaign against the measure, on the basis that it would violate free speech and inhibit MAHA’s main priority of improving public health by cleaning up the food system. Ryerson and other MAHA advocates took to social media, email, and phone blitzes to reach Florida lawmakers and voice their opposition to the measure. She even teamed up with environmental advocacy groups to make their case before policymakers at the state capitol.

Sugarcane is one of Florida’s biggest agricultural products and its growers routinely burn their fields, a practice that has been linked to premature death, respiratory distress, and other dangerous health conditions in low-income communities of color. The measure drew particularly fierce backlash from the many critics of these controversial practices because it would have expanded the “veggie-libel” law to include sugar manufacturers. 

Florida, Ryerson said, is “a really large stronghold” for MAHA, a powerful national movement that helped Trump win a second term and is now showing some dissatisfaction with the administration. She said there is “an interesting conflict” between health advocates and an agricultural industry she sees as “contributing to the toxicity of the food supply.”

The Senate stripped the provision from the bill last month. But Ryerson remains dismayed over the state’s decision to allow some conservation lands to be sold for farming. MAHA advocates would rather “permanently protect those lands for clean water, wildlife, and future generations,” she said, “not to have them auctioned off for commercial agricultural production, which will certainly pollute with toxic chemicals and fertilizers.”

The move “betrays Florida voters,” Ryerson said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline With its new farm bill, Florida’s climate fight just hit a tractor-sized roadblock on Mar 30, 2026.

But in the vast expanse of California’s Westlands Water District, the ranch is about the most central spot for a meeting. On a sunny afternoon in late January, Jeff Fortune, Ross Franson, and Jeremy Hughes, three of the nine directors of the country’s largest agricultural water agency, gathered there for lunch to discuss an ambitious plan to rescue some of the most productive farmland in the U.S. from a decades-long water crisis. 

The Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan, or VCIP, envisions converting 136,000 acres of land into 21 gigawatts of battery-backed solar power — nearly as much utility-scale solar capacity as has been installed in California to date. 

“This will be not only the largest project in California, or the largest project in the United States,” said Fortune, a third-generation farmer and the district’s board president since 2022. ​“This will be the largest project in the world.”

The scale of the plan matches that of the land. Westlands Water District was formed more than 60 years ago to collectively manage water resources and irrigation infrastructure for the farmers within its 1,000-square-mile territory. The district’s 614,000 acres grow billions of dollars’ worth of crops per year — grapes, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, garlic, citrus fruits, almonds, pistachios, and many others. Those crops make up a major share of the bounty in a region that produces a quarter of the country’s food, including 40 percent of its fruits and nuts. 

Fortune, Franson, and Hughes run family farming operations that collectively own or manage thousands of acres of a landscape transformed by industrial-scale irrigated agriculture. The water flows from reservoirs hundreds of miles north and is pumped from the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta via the Central Valley Project, one of the biggest water projects in the state. The water supply is augmented by wells that have delved ever deeper into the region’s aquifers. 

But that water supply is drying up. Since the 1990s, surface-water cutbacks from the environmentally stressed delta have led to the fallowing of hundreds of thousands of acres. And under state law, Westlands farmers face increasingly strict limits on the groundwater they use. 

Now, after decades of fighting state and federal agencies and lobbying Congress to increase the flow of water, Westlands farmers are shifting to a new approach. ​“Our hand is forced,” Fortune said. ​“Everyone’s in the same sinking ship together.” 

VCIP could keep the ship afloat by financing a wholesale conversion of fallowed land into solar farms and battery storage systems capable of powering the equivalent of 9 million homes. To carry those clean electrons to market, the district will finance and build a transmission network that will speed interconnection to California’s congested grid and expand power flows between the state’s two biggest utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. 

None of this has happened yet, and completing it will take 10 years or more. But after years of work with developer Golden State Clean Energy, VCIP is now poised to move from concept to reality. 

In December, Westlands Water District’s board approved the programmatic environmental impact report that lays out a master plan for the project. Hughes, a fifth-generation farmer who has been operating in Westlands for a quarter century, said that about 150 contracts so far have been signed by growers to make land available — including about 800 acres of his family’s land. 

“The way we look at it is as a new crop,” he said. ​“We’re harvesting the sun and producing electricity.” 

Critically, farmers will retain land ownership under VCIP’s lease and easement deals, and thus, access to the water allocations. And under Westlands’ agricultural-land repurposing plan and its VCIP master plan, water allocations for acres put into solar can be redirected to remaining farmland. 

“You’re making the district more sustainable,” Fortune said, summing up the plan. ​“And that just helps the grower, it helps the communities, it helps the farmworkers — everybody.” 

That help is desperately needed. The farms that make up Westlands Water District — many of them sprawling, multigenerational family-run organizations with substantial landholdings — have struggled for years with drainage challenges, salination, and other effects of heavy irrigation, which have polluted watersheds. The communities in and around the district have high rates of poverty and unemployment, a lack of economic opportunities, tainted groundwater, and inadequate investment in roads, schools, and public safety. State law requires VCIP to include a community benefits plan that delivers economic value to not just its growers but also the local governments and residents. 

While it will be a massive and complicated undertaking, California needs four to five times as much new clean energy and storage as this project is slated to provide in the next 20 years, said Franson, president of farming at Woolf Farming & Processing, which cultivates 30,000 acres across the San Joaquin Valley, most of it in Westlands. 

The master plan could provide a model for what the state must accomplish to meet that need for power on a grand scale, he said. ​“There’s so much talk in the state about the demand they’re seeing, about energy transition, about water issues … This hits all those boxes.”

Highway 33 runs south from the Mendota pool, a key water-exchange point for the San Joaquin Valley’s interlocking irrigation systems, and into Westlands Water District’s northeastern zone. 

On a cold winter morning, Jose Gutierrez, the district’s assistant general manager, and I drove along the two-lane road through a thick blanket of Tule fog. Despite the limited visibility, Gutierrez had no trouble pointing out the solar farms on both sides of us. Farther down the road, pile drivers rattled away, busy planting anchor posts for yet more solar projects. 

The installations there now are a fraction of what’s envisioned under VCIP. If that plan is fully realized, the trucks roaring up and down Highway 33 will pass solar fields stretching uninterrupted for roughly 30 miles, Gutierrez said. The surrounding area is slated for solar for a simple reason: It’s no longer irrigable. 

Much of the land designated for solar development under the master plan is drainage-impaired — undergirded by a shallow layer of clay soil that prevents water from percolating deeper. As water accumulates above the clay layer, it becomes increasingly salty, but cannot be flushed out — and there’s no easy fix, thanks to a decades-old impasse between the federal government and the water district. 

Under a 2015 settlement agreement with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Westlands was required to retire at least 100,000 acres from irrigated agriculture. In 2022, the district launched a land purchasing program to take on managing the retirement and eventual remediation of those drainage-impaired acres. 

That land can still be planted with wheat or other cereal crops that tolerate being irrigated by rainfall alone, or leased to sheepherders. ​“But its value from a commodity perspective is pretty low,” Gutierrez said. As a result, it has mostly been left unused.

In fact, it’s a financial drag on the district. Idle land must still be managed to prevent pests and invasive weeds from setting in and endangering neighboring farms. Several times while on the highway, I spotted signs on utility poles advertising barn-owl boxes for rent — the birds help control gopher populations. And the debt the district took on to buy the fallowed acres must be paid off. 

All this makes the land ideal for solar in a region whose clean energy potential is well understood. State agencies have designated large swaths here as the Westlands Competitive Renewable Energy Zone, meaning they are primed for solar development. Studies from universities and nonprofit groups indicate that the San Joaquin Valley can build solar while retaining sustainable levels of agriculture. 

In the 13 years Gutierrez has worked for the district, eight solar projects have been launched on non-irrigable lands that the district has purchased and sold to developers. The biggest ones include the Darden Clean Energy Project, a 1.15-gigawatt solar-battery system being constructed on about 9,500 acres in the district’s central area; and Westlands Solar Park, a 2.27-gigawatt multistage development on roughly 20,000 acres in the district’s southern reaches. 

Private landowners, like Fortune, Franson, and Hughes, have also been making deals with developers — and many other farmers could follow suit, Gutierrez said. In fact, VCIP expects that roughly half the 136,000 acres of solar and batteries it plans to develop will be on privately-owned land. 

Water shortages are the primary reason that Westlands growers are seeking alternatives to farming. But growers are facing other pressures, too, Gutierrez said. Volatile commodity prices have driven a boom and bust in certain crops, such as almonds. Rising energy and labor costs have taken their toll. 

Landowners are eager to move more acres into solar to defray these costs, hedge against market risks, and bolster their bottom lines, he said. But there are roadblocks. Solar developers face long and onerous environmental reviews for each project under the California Environmental Quality Act, as well as drawn-out county permitting processes. And in California, as in many other parts of the country, limited grid capacity is forcing projects to wait for years in clogged-up interconnection queues.

Patrick Mealoy, partner and chief operating officer of Golden State Clean Energy, the VCIP developer, summarized the situation as a convergence of factors. ​“The land use planning, the water restrictions in the valley, the congestion on the transmission grid,” he said, ​“screamed for a master plan.”

Mealoy was part of the development team that put together a similar, if much smaller, master plan for Westlands Solar Park, the biggest solar-battery project in the district to date. That plan set key terms for individual developers on issues ranging from environmental mitigation and land management practices, to standard lease and contract requirements, to agreements regarding the arrays’ eventual decommissioning. 

VCIP takes essentially the same approach, Mealoy said. Golden State Clean Energy itself will likely develop less than a fifth of the 21 gigawatts and will be working with independent developers for the rest, he said. But it’s far more efficient to create a master plan than to have each developer go it alone. 

“When you look at the sheer magnitude of the tens of thousands of megawatts we need to build in California, the targets are getting higher. We’re doing a remarkable job, but we’re actually falling behind,” he said. ​“VCIP is enormous, but it’s a fraction of what we have to add.” 

The programmatic environmental impact review approved by the district in December is the culmination of that master planning effort, Gutierrez said. It took two years, but now that it’s done, ​“it sets a standard for all VCIP solar developments of what they’re going to have to follow.”

That includes requirements for limiting construction impacts like air pollution, noise pollution, traffic safety, fire prevention, and the like, he said — an important consideration for nearby communities. 

It also sets out how solar farms will be maintained once they’re built, said Allison Febbo, Westland’s general manager. That’s good not just for the neighbors but also for the developers. 

Individual projects will still need conditional land use permits and construction permits from Fresno County, which encompasses the VCIP project boundaries. But with the approved guidelines in place, ​“we believe that we’ve knocked off two years in the planning process,” Gutierrez said, as opposed to ​“if a solar developer was to come in and do a one-off.” 

Golden State Clean Energy has also laid out common financial terms and conditions for landowners and solar developers, Mealoy said. ​“If you’re farming near Kerman or if you’re farming near Huron, you have the exact same deal.” 

The district hopes that all this planning ahead will help bring enough privately-held land on board to roughly match the amount of district-owned land on the table, Gutierrez explained. That is vital to achieve the scale needed to enable the most unusual aspect of the plan, he said: building out the transmission. 

“The district had enough land to make it interesting,” Gutierrez said. ​“But we knew we needed more land on the private side to justify the investments in infrastructure.” 

To be reminded of how important new power lines and substations are to achieving the VCIP vision, Ross Franson need only look out his office window.

I met up with Franson at the white-painted, single-story field operations offices of Woolf Farming & Processing, which sits just east of Interstate 5, near Huron, the district’s sole incorporated city. To the south, past a field now under solar development, a spiderweb of power lines and transmission towers march southward. They converge just over the horizon, at PG&E’s Gates Substation — a critical juncture for solar power to interconnect to the larger state grid. 

Of the 20,000 or so acres the company farms, roughly 1,200 have been built out in solar, Franson told me. Woolf plans to develop up to 3,000 acres in total. ​“We’re a little bit unique, in the sense that our farm is right next to the Gates Substation,” he said. 

That’s not the case for much of the district’s acreage, he explained: ​“It’s far away from transmission lines and substations. And so the cost of doing that isn’t ideal.” 

Enter Assembly Bill 2661, a state law passed in 2024. It allows Westlands to finance and build its own grid infrastructure. It also allows the district to use the clean energy it generates for its own purposes and to sell the rest to utilities and other power buyers via the transmission system run by the California Independent System Operator, or CAISO. 

In that sense, as Hughes said over lunch at Harris Ranch, VCIP is a ​“transmission play, not a solar play. The solar is doable because of the transmission.” 

VCIP’s 500-kilovolt system will entail five new electrical substations and roughly 70 miles of high-voltage transmission connecting to the CAISO grid to the north, south, and west, Hughes said. In essence, it will provide an eastern parallel to the two 500-kilovolt transmission pathways already running along I-5 on the district’s western border. 

Transmission is notoriously hard to build. But Westlands hopes that its master plan can forestall landowner and environmental opposition that has stymied many other projects. Much of the 70-mile line has been sited to cross district-owned lands. Where transmission will be situated on privately owned land, Westlands has crafted standard easement agreements to give landowners confidence they’re getting the same deals as their neighbors, Gutierrez said.

Westlands is taking on a significant financial commitment to unblock the grid bottleneck. Gutierrez estimated the price tag of building the project’s grid infrastructure is more than $1 billion. 

The district will need to negotiate agreements with CAISO to earn back that money through transmission access charges. That’s the same way the state’s major new grid expansions are repaid over time via increases to utility customers’ bills. 

But Mealoy believes those costs will be more than counterbalanced by benefits to the state at large. A study commissioned by Golden State Clean Energy found that VCIP could yield more than $9 billion in net energy cost savings over the next 25 years, both by adding more clean power and by reducing grid congestion that drives up rates and reliance on fossil gas–fired power plants in Northern California. 

State agencies are loath to approve massive transmission investments to accommodate future clean energy projects. But as that buildout lags, CAISO’s grid remains congested — and clean energy developers face potentially project-killing costs for upgrades to connect to it. 

That’s why VCIP relies on doing solar, batteries, and transmission together, Mealoy said. ​“To get transmission built, you needed size and scale,” he said. 

Owning the power lines also gives Westlands control over some of its energy-related expenses. Several California irrigation districts operate their own utility services, including Turlock Irrigation District and Modesto Irrigation District in the Central Valley and Imperial Irrigation District in the southeast corner of the state.

Westlands, which is served by PG&E, isn’t becoming its own utility, Fortune stressed during lunch at Harris Ranch. ​“PG&E is not fighting us, and we’re not fighting PG&E.”

But running the district’s massive pumping stations requires a lot of power, as does operating well pumps and drip irrigation motors, he said. ​“The district is going to get lower power costs to supply the water, and [growers] are going to get the option of lower-cost power on their end — so the water cost is going to come down.” 

The central role of water in Westlands is evident to anyone driving along I-5. Scattered among the fields and orchards are signs — posted on fences and on wheeled trailers once used to haul cotton — broadcasting slogans like ​“No Water = Lost Jobs,” ​“Stop the Politicians-Created Water Crisis,” and ​“Congress-Created Dust Bowl.”

The angry sentiments stem from the decades-long conflict over California’s massive state and federally managed water distribution. Westlands secured its water allotments from the Central Valley Project in the 1960s. But since the 1990s, joint federal and state efforts to restore endangered fish species and protect the delta’s environment have increasingly restricted flows from the massive pumping stations that move water southward. And as the most recent water district to be created and served by the federal water system, Westlands is a junior holder of water rights, which makes it first in line for cuts. 

Historically, San Joaquin Valley farmers and politicians have held a hard line on keeping the water flowing, with Westlands-bankrolled lobbyists often taking the lead. But as those political efforts faltered and drew public pushback during the state’s historic drought of 2011 to 2017, Westlands growers shifted their stance. 

In 2022, Franson, Hughes, and two other growers won seats on the district’s board on a ​“change coalition” platform, aimed at putting an end to the adversarial water policies of Tom Birmingham. The district’s general manager for more than 20 years, Birmingham announced his retirement after the election. 

To be clear, Westlands hasn’t surrendered the fight for water, said Febbo, who replaced Birmingham in 2023. ​“Our growers have shifted, from saying we don’t want to repurpose any of our agricultural lands, to a position where we have to fallow a significant portion of our area,” she said, ​“and that we should do that in a planned and thoughtful way until we determine a way to restore our water supply.” 

If decades of on-again, off-again surface water allocations were the instigating incident, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA, was the hard closer. Passed in 2014, the SGMA created the first statewide regulations to manage groundwater resources that provide roughly 40 percent of California’s water and that have sustained San Joaquin Valley agriculture for more than a century. 

But overpumping has reached a crisis point in the San Joaquin Valley. Thousands of public and private wells have run dry. The land itself is sinking, as water from underground aquifers gets depleted by as much as 2 feet per year in some parts of the valley. That subsidence is threatening to undermine critical infrastructure, including the San Luis Canal, the section of the California Aqueduct serving Westlands Water District.

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The SGMA requires overdrafted water basins to achieve sustainability by the early 2040s, which will entail both significant cutbacks on pumping and replenishing depleted aquifers. Complying with the law will likely necessitate fallowing about 500,000 acres across the San Joaquin Valley, according to the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California.

Under the Westlands groundwater management plan approved by the state in 2022, the district must roughly halve the amount of water it normally pulls from the ground during dry years by 2030, Gutierrez said. That reduction, along with the uncertainty around future surface water deliveries from the Central Valley Project, forces growers to face the prospect of reducing by half the amount of land they’re able to irrigate every year. 

This prospect has helped convince a critical mass of Westlands growers to support VCIP, Franson, Hughes, and Fortune said over lunch. 

“I really do think SGMA forced the issue,” Franson said. ​“When push comes to shove, we needed to come up with an alternative plan.”

Allowing farmers to put land into solar without losing its water allocations is essential to making that plan work, Fortune said. Typically, allocations for land repurposed or sold for nonagricultural uses revert to the district, he explained. But under VCIP, landowners with long-term leases or cash-up-front easement deals with solar developers keep both surface water and groundwater allocations, which they can apply to remaining farmland. 

That’s important for Westlands growers like Rebecca Kaser, owner of Avellar-Moore Farms. Her family has been farming in Westlands for four generations. She hasn’t put land into VCIP yet, but her father has. 

“We have fallowed over half our acreage,” she said. ​“We still have property taxes, we still have horticultural expenses … and they don’t return any income. And we do this just for the water allocation, so we can continue to grow, to help out our neighboring communities providing jobs and paying property taxes.” 

VCIP offers ​“financial relief from the incurred expenses year over year on this fallowed acreage — and the way it was designed, we could still keep our water,” she said. ​“What I really want to emphasize is that if we can keep on farming all of it, we would. The VCIP is a tool in the toolbox to at least stay farming with the little that we can.” 

If VCIP develops as intended, it’s not just the growers who will benefit but all residents in Westlands Water District. 

Danny Garcia, 41, has lived his entire life in Three Rocks, an unincorporated community in the middle of the district. He hopes that building the world’s biggest solar and battery project will bring prosperity to Three Rocks, which is also known as El Porvenir, which means ​“the future.” But he and his family have their doubts.

“People are struggling right now,” he told me when I stopped by his home. ​“There’s many ways that people could work on solar.” Garcia makes a living as a trucker, hauling produce and delivering fruit and nut tree seedlings from nurseries for planting in the fields. He can envision participating in the construction boom when VCIP gets underway. 

Almost everyone who lives in Three Rocks is employed in agriculture in one way or another, he said — including longtime farmworkers like his mother, Rosa Ramirez. She’s worked in the fields since she moved here from Mexico about 50 years ago, she told me in Spanish as Garcia translated. She can earn up to $600 per week when jobs are steady, but less than $200 a week when it’s slow.

And work has been slower and slower, Ramirez said, sitting at her son’s dining room table. ​“Back in the ​’90s, they used to have tomato fields, lettuce, onions.” But as water has become scarcer, ​“a lot of almond trees are knocked out because of water — less and less.” 

With solar panels eating up more and more farmland, ​“how is she going to pay her bills?” Garcia asked. ​“Is she going to work there with the solar system? She has no experience.” 

The San Joaquin Valley includes some of the poorest counties in the state. The confluence of water stresses, environmental degradation, and rising heat and weather disruptions from climate change are only set to intensify the area’s challenges, according to a report issued as part of California’s 2021 climate change assessment. 

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Agriculture provides 17 percent of the San Joaquin Valley’s employment and 19 percent of its revenues. Those economic ties are even tighter in the sparsely-populated Westlands, where agriculture generated $3.6 billion in economic activity and more than 27,500 jobs as of 2022, according to a 2025 study commissioned by the district. 

But those figures were down from an estimated $4.7 billion in economic activity and about 35,000 jobs in 2019, driven largely by increases in fallowed land due to water restrictions. Those declines led to roughly 30 percent less in public tax revenues for counties, cities, and special districts, meaning millions of dollars no longer available for roads, water systems, schools, and other public services. 

VCIP could help buck those trends, Mealoy of Golden State Clean Energy said. Building the solar and battery farms and grid infrastructure will require employing about 6,000 people for at least 10 years — in what he described as ​“good-paying, labor union jobs” — as well as about 1,000 full-time operations jobs once the project is complete. Some of those positions could be filled locally through apprenticeship and training programs with community colleges and workforce development agencies. 

Businesses in the region could provide equipment and services to developers, and secondary spending will boost local economies, he added. The cost of building solar and battery projects ranges from $1 million to $1.5 million per megawatt, he noted. 

And the towns, school districts, and county services will benefit from ​“billions of dollars that could be injected” into the tax base, once the state’s current property tax exemption for solar projects expires at the end of 2026, he said. It’s hard to predict future property tax revenues for Fresno County, but they’re certain to be significantly higher than those collected on fallowed fields, he said. 

How those economic benefits will flow to communities suffering from generations of underinvestment and facing the loss of agricultural jobs has yet to be defined, however. In January, Westlands’ board voted in favor of a draft approach to meet the requirements in AB 2661, the law making VCIP possible, to ​“ensure that local communities have meaningful opportunities to participate and access benefits” from its clean energy transformation.

That plan for the community benefits agreement commits the district to work with Fresno County and seven incorporated cities to ​“commit a portion of project revenues” to workforce, energy-affordability, environmental, and quality-of-life benefits. 

But Westlands doesn’t plan to start making that money available for ​“at least 60 months out, coinciding with the commercial operation of the facilities,” Russ Freeman, the district’s deputy general counsel, said at the January meeting before the vote took place. 

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That’s worrisome to community groups that feel they’ve been neglected by Westlands’ power players and the region’s political leaders. Rural Communities Rising, representing 36 communities across western Fresno County, was formed last year so that residents ​“are heard, respected, and prioritized,” as the clean-energy developments envisioned by VCIP move ahead. 

“We believe in a big-tent concept. Everybody should participate,” Espi Sandoval, a Rural Communities Rising board member and educator, said at that January meeting. His group is advocating for a formal organization, including local governments, school and water districts, labor associations, workforce agencies, nonprofits, and local representatives, to ​“work collectively with developers to address … priorities.” 

Community groups are focused first on mitigating impacts from construction — like limiting vehicle traffic that can clog narrow roads, worsen already poor air quality, and kick up dust carrying fungi that cause a pulmonary ailment known as valley fever. They’re also demanding more emergency services, including fire stations located closer to solar and battery sites that could pose fire risks. 

And they’re asking for remediation of longtime problems like high energy costs and polluted water supplies. Ramirez’s electric bill from PG&E was $331.74 for the month of November — far more than she thinks she ought to be paying for a small single-story home. California has the highest electric bills in the mainland U.S. That’s a particular burden for low-income San Joaquin Valley residents during days or weeks of triple-digit summer temperatures.

Ramirez’s water bills have also risen, even as the water remains undrinkable, she said — a problem plaguing hundreds of thousands of California residents, many of them in the San Joaquin Valley. In Three Rocks and nearby Cantua Creek, the cause is disinfectant by-products from chemicals, such as chlorine, used to treat surface water delivered from Westlands to a Fresno County–managed treatment facility. 

“That’s why we have the water jugs,” Garcia said, pointing to the five-gallon containers arrayed under the trampoline in his front yard. ​“Every two weeks, the water man comes in and leaves them.”

Clean energy could provide an economic lifeline for the region — but that’s not guaranteed. A 2024 report from the Sierra San Joaquin Jobs Initiative, a joint project of the Fresno-based Central Valley Community Foundation and the state-funded California Jobs First Council, found that the four counties of Fresno, Kings, Madera, and San Joaquin could host 29 gigawatts of solar and energy storage through 2045, adding up to about $10 billion in investment and an estimated 73,000 new jobs paying an average of $32 per hour. 

But it also found that workers ​“feel inadequately prepared for this transition” in terms of education, training, and opportunity to break into the industries involved. 

Elizabeth Cabrera, city manager of San Joaquin, a town of about 3,700 people in western Fresno County, has attended meetings held by nonprofit groups working with solar developers to offer jobs and training to locals. But less than a third of San Joaquin residents have a high school degree or equivalent, she said. Many speak only Spanish, and ​“a high percentage are undocumented. That’s already three major barriers to entry.”

Leticia Fernández, the 63-year-old owner of the Half-Way Store in Cantua Creek, is also doubtful that solar development can make up for the loss of agriculture in the area. She started working at the store when she was 16, and bought it from the previous owner in 1997. But business has declined as more land has been fallowed, and the solar projects being built haven’t reversed that, she said. ​“They’re not spending the money like they tell us at the meetings.”

That’s not to say that solar projects aren’t doing some good, Fernández said. She pointed to the new fire station being built in Cantua Creek, financed in part through a $15 million commitment from Intersect Power, the initial developer of the Darden Clean Energy Project (the project is now owned by IPX Power).

Intersect also committed to community benefits plans that will make $2 million in direct investments in the next 10 years and $5 million over the project’s lifetime. The initial $2 million has gone to support affordable housing, provide grants to small businesses, bolster school programs, plant trees, and give away about 250 window air-conditioning units, among other benefits. 

“We want to build strong partnerships, and we want to bring the community into the project, whether that’s supplying concrete or getting a union job and working on-site,” said Elizabeth Knowles, head of community engagement at Intersect Power. The Darden project is expected to create more than 1,600 all-union construction jobs, generate more than $70 million in state and local sales tax revenues during its construction, and provide more than $200 million in property taxes in the first 10 years, she said. 

Still, some people say the Darden project’s original community benefits agreement didn’t direct money to the most pressing needs. They want to make sure the process for VCIP, which will be more than 15 times larger than Darden, doesn’t leave them out of the loop. 

“We understand the project will take at least 10 years to build out. But we want residents to be part of conversations before decisions are made,” said Mariana Alvarenga, a senior policy advocate with the nonprofit Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability.

The challenge is that most of the economic impacts of clean energy projects are tied to ​“jobs and spillover work for local businesses” during construction, said David Adelman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law who studies local opposition to clean energy developments. Beyond that, ​“virtually all of the benefit is in increased local property taxes,” he said. ​“Most of that impact gets buried in county and school district budgets” that are ​“not very visible to the local community.” 

These facts could bolster arguments for larger up-front community benefits payments, he said. But that might be hard for clean energy developers already struggling with the looming loss of federal tax credits, rising equipment and labor costs, and other economic headwinds. Nor do solar project developers want to be held responsible for repairing past harms to communities and to the environment that were caused by others. 

County tax revenues from clean energy projects could be directed to helping the communities near those projects. But that requires commitments from county politicians and administrators to ensure those revenues aren’t redirected elsewhere — and like many other rural counties, Fresno County is facing major budget pressures.

Justin Diener, controller of Red Rock Ranch, understands these concerns. He grew up on his family farm in Five Points, which has won recognition for its sustainable water and soil management. After graduating from Stanford University, he was employed in agriculture finance for 12 years, then returned to work with his father in 2016. He won his seat on the Westlands board of directors in 2022 as part of the change coalition — and unlike most Westlands farmers, he lives on the land that his family farms.

“I love to be out here,” Diener said on a stroll outside the modest one-story building that houses his family’s farm operations. ​“I grew up out here, across the street. But you know, it’s not a walk in the park, either.” It’s a half-hour drive for him or his wife to take their daughter to and from school. Last fall, crops left rotting in nearby fields because they were unsuitable for market caused a fly infestation that plagued the area for months. 

Diener has also seen the decline in Fresno County services over the decades. ​“When I was younger, the roads got paved more frequently,” he said. ​“The potholes were taken care of.” He’d like to see VCIP money coming into the district prioritized for critical needs. ​“Do you have shelter? Do you have food? Do you have water? Is where you live safe?” 

He thinks that long-term funding from Fresno County and municipal governments, rather than one-time community-benefits dollars, is the logical source for supporting those kinds of fundamental services. ​“I’d look to ongoing community-benefits dollars to be an enhancement to government dollars, rather than a replacement,” he said. It’s also important that community benefits be ongoing, rather than one-off donations. 

Still, Diener says VCIP could be ​“transformational” for Westlands. ​“The district’s not going to see the benefits today or tomorrow,” he said. ​“But five to 10 years down the road, I think things are going to be very different.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘We’re harvesting the sun’: A huge solar project grows in California on Mar 29, 2026.

On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by 31-year-old lawyer Seth Cohen. Just five years out of law school, Cohen brought no significant experience in nuclear law or policy; he had just entered government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.

As Cohen led the group through a technical conversation about licensing nuclear reactor designs, he repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns. When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.

“They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said.

“But … there’s lots of babies,” one staffer pushed back. Babies, pregnant women, and other vulnerable groups are thought to be potentially more susceptible to cancers brought on by low-level radiation exposure, and they are usually afforded greater protections.

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“They’ve been downwind before,” another staffer joked.

“This is why we don’t use AI transcription in meetings,” another added.

ProPublica reviewed records of that meeting, providing a rare look at a dramatic shift underway in one of the most sensitive domains of public policy. The Trump administration is upending the way nuclear energy is regulated, driven by a desire to dramatically increase the amount of energy available to power artificial intelligence.

Career experts have been forced out and thousands of pages of regulations are being rewritten at a sprint. A new generation of nuclear energy companies — flush with Silicon Valley cash and boasting strong political connections — wield increasing influence over policy. Figures like Cohen are forcing a “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley ethos on one of the country’s most important regulators.

The Trump administration has been particularly aggressive in its attacks on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the bipartisan independent regulator that approves commercial nuclear power plants and monitors their safety. The agency is not a household name. But it’s considered the international gold standard, often influencing safety rules around the world.

The NRC has critics, especially in Silicon Valley, where the often-cautious commission is portrayed as an impediment to innovation. In an early salvo, President Donald Trump fired NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson last June after Hanson spoke out about the importance of agency independence. It was the first time an NRC commissioner had been fired.

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During that Idaho meeting, Cohen shot down any notion of NRC independence in the new era.

“Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do,” he said, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In November, Cohen was made chief counsel for nuclear policy at the Department of Energy, where he oversees a broad nuclear portfolio.

The aggressive moves have sent shock waves through the nuclear energy world. Many longtime promoters of the industry say they worry recklessness from the Trump administration could discredit responsible nuclear energy initiatives.

“The regulator is no longer an independent regulator — we do not know whose interests it is serving,” warned Allison Macfarlane, who served as NRC chair during the Obama administration. “The safety culture is under threat.”

A ProPublica analysis of staffing data from the NRC and the Office of Personnel Management shows a rush to the exits: Over 400 people have left the agency since Trump took office. The losses are particularly pronounced in the teams that handle reactor and nuclear materials safety and among veteran staffers with 10 or more years of experience. Meanwhile, hiring of new staff has proceeded at a snail’s pace, with nearly 60 new arrivals in the first year of the Trump administration compared with nearly 350 in the last year of the Biden administration.

Some nuclear power supporters say the administration is providing a needed level of urgency given the energy demands of AI. They also contend the sweeping changes underway aren’t as dangerous or dire as some experts suggest.

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“I think the NRC has been frozen in time,” said Brett Rampal, the senior director of nuclear and power strategy at the investment and strategy consultancy Veriten. “It’s a great time to get unfrozen and aim to work quickly.”

The White House referred most of ProPublica’s questions to the Department of Energy, where spokesperson Olivia Tinari said the agency is committed to helping build more safe, high-quality nuclear energy facilities.

“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, America’s nuclear industry is entering a new era that will provide reliable, abundant power for generations to come,” she wrote. The DOE is “committed to the highest standards of safety for American workers and communities.”

Cohen did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The NRC declined to comment.

Blindsided by DOGE

The U.S. has not had a serious nuclear incident since the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, a track record many experts attribute to a rigorous regulatory environment and an intense safety culture.

Major nuclear incidents around the world have only strengthened the resolve of past regulators to stay independent from industry and from political winds. A chief cause of Japan’s Fukushima accident, investigators found, was the cozy relationship between the country’s industry and oversight body, which opened the door for thin safety assessments and inaccurate projections overlooking the possible impact of a major tsunami.

“We knew regulatory capture led directly to Fukushima and to Chernobyl,” said Kathryn Huff, who was assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy during the Biden administration.

The U.S. has barely built any nuclear power plants in recent decades. Only three new reactors have been completed in the last 25 years, and since 1990 the U.S has barely added any net new nuclear electricity to its grid. Though about 20 percent of U.S. energy is supplied by nuclear power plants, the fleet is aging. Some experts blame the slow build-out on the challenging economics of financing a multibillion-dollar project and the uncertainty of accessing and disposing of nuclear fuels.

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But an increasingly vocal group of industry voices and deregulation advocates have blamed the slow build-out on overly cautious and inefficient regulators. Among the most powerful exponents of this view are billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; both venture capitalists have their own investments in the nuclear energy sector and are influential Trump supporters.

Andreessen camped out at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, after Trump won the 2024 election, helping pick staff for the new administration. In late 2024, Thiel personally vetted at least one candidate for the Office of Nuclear Energy, according to people familiar with the conversations. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Four months into his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to supercharge nuclear power build-out. “It’s a hot industry, it’s a brilliant industry,” said Trump, flanked by nuclear energy CEOs in the Oval Office. He added: “And it’s become very safe.”

Under those orders, the NRC was directed to reduce its workforce, speed up the timeline for approving nuclear reactors and rewrite many of its safety rules. The DOE — which has a vast nuclear portfolio, including waste cleanup sites and government research labs — was tasked with creating a pathway for so-called advanced nuclear companies to test their designs.

The goal, Trump said, was to quadruple nuclear energy output and provide new power to the data centers behind the AI boom.

As DOGE gutted agencies, departures mounted in the nuclear sector. Career experts in nuclear regulations and safety departed or were forced out. When Trump fired Hanson, a Democratic NRC commissioner, the president’s team explained the move by saying, “All organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction.”

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In an unsigned email to ProPublica, the White House press office wrote: “All commissioners are presidential appointees and can be fired just like any other appointee.”

In August, the NRC’s top attorney resigned and was replaced by oil and gas lawyer David Taggart, who had been working on DOGE cuts at the DOE. In all, the nuclear office at the DOE had lost about a third of its staff, according to a January 2026 count by the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit focused on science and technology policy.

That summer, Cohen and a team of DOGE operatives touched down at the NRC offices, a series of nondescript towers across from a Dunkin’ in suburban Maryland. He was joined by Adam Blake, an investor who had recently founded an AI medical startup and has a background in real estate and solar energy, and Ankur Bansal, president of a company that created software for real estate agents. Neither would comment for this story.

Many career officials who spoke with ProPublica were blindsided: The new Trump officials at the NRC seemed to have no experience with the intricacies of nuclear energy policy or law, they said. One NRC lawyer who briefed some of the new arrivals decided to resign. “They were talking about quickly approving all these new reactors, and they didn’t seem to care that much about the rules — they wanted to carry out the wishes of the White House,” the official said.

At one point, Cohen began passing out hats from nuclear energy startup Valar Atomics, one of the companies vying to build a new reactor, according to sources familiar with the matter and records seen by ProPublica. NRC staffers balked; they were supposed to monitor companies like Valar for safety violations, not wear its swag.

NRC ethics officials warned Cohen that the hat handout was a likely violation of conflict rules. It betrayed a misunderstanding of the safety regulator’s role, said a former official familiar with the exchange. “Imagine you live near a nuclear power plant, and you find out a supposedly independent safety regulator — the watchdog — is going around wearing the power plant’s branded hats,” the official said. “Would that make you feel safe?” The NRC and Cohen did not respond to requests for comment about the hat incident.

Valar counts Trump’s Silicon Valley allies as angel investors. They include Palmer Luckey, a technology executive and founder of the defense contractor Anduril, and Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir, the software company helping power Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation raids.

It was among three nuclear reactor companies that sued the NRC last year in an attempt to strip it of its authority to regulate its reactors and replace it with a state-level regulator. Before the Trump administration came into office, lawyers watching the case were confident the courts would quickly dismiss the suit, as the NRC’s authority to regulate reactors is widely acknowledged. But new Trump appointees pushed for a compromise settlement — which is still being negotiated. The career NRC lawyer working on the case quietly left the agency.

Valar and its executives did not reply to requests for comment.

‘Going so fast’

The deregulatory push is the culmination of mounting pressure — both political and economic — to make it easier to build nuclear power in the U.S. Over the years, a bipartisan coalition supporting nuclear expansion brought together environmentalists who favor zero-carbon power and defense hawks focused on abundant domestic energy production.

Anti-nuclear activists still argue that renewable energy like wind and solar are safer and more economical. But streamlining the NRC has been a bipartisan priority as well. The latest major reform came in 2024, when President Joe Biden signed into law the ADVANCE Act, which went as far as changing the mission statement of the NRC to ensure it “does not unnecessarily limit” nuclear energy development.

Some nuclear power supporters say the Trump administration is merely accelerating these changes. They cite instances in which the current regulations appear out of sync with the times. The NRC’s byzantine rules are designed for so-called large light-water reactors — massive facilities that can power entire cities — and not the increasingly in vogue smaller advanced reactor designs popular among Silicon Valley-backed firms.

Rules that require fences of certain heights might make little sense for new reactors buried in the earth; and rules that require a certain number of operators per reactor could be a bad fit for a cluster of smaller reactors with modern controls. Advances in sensors, modeling and safety technologies, they say, should be taken into account across the board.

The NRC has said it expects over two dozen new license requests from small modular and advanced reactor companies in coming years. Many of those requests are likely to come from new, Silicon Valley-based nuclear firms.

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“There was a missing link in the innovation cycle, and it was very difficult to build something and test it in the U.S. because of mostly licensing and site availability constraints in the past,” said Adam Stein of the pro-nuclear nonprofit Breakthrough Institute.

The regulatory changes are in flux: This spring, the NRC is starting to release thousands of pages of new rules governing everything from the safety and emergency preparedness plans reactor companies are required to submit to the procedures for objecting to a reactor license.

“It’s hard to know if they are getting rid of unnecessary processes or if it’s actually reducing public safety,” said one official working on reactor licensing, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. “And that’s just the problem with going so fast — everything just kind of gets lost in a mush.”

Lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been sent to the NRC to keep an eye on the new rules, a move that further raised alarms about the agency’s independence.

Nicholas Gallagher — a relatively recent New York University law school graduate and conservative writer whom ProPublica previously identified as a DOGE operative at the General Services Administration — has been involved in conversations about overhauling environmental rules.

He’s working alongside Sydney Volanski, a 30-year-old recent law school graduate who rose to national attention while she was in high school for her campaign against the Girl Scouts of America, which she accused of promoting “Marxists, socialists, and advocates of same-sex lifestyle.”

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NRC lawyers working on the rules were told last October that Gallagher and Volanski would be joining them, and they both appear on the regular NRC rulemaking calendar invite.

The White House maintains, however, that “zero lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been dispatched to work on rulemaking.” Neither Gallagher nor Volanski replied to requests for comment.

The administration is routing the new rules through an office overseen by Trump’s cost-cutting guru Russell Vought, a move that was previously unheard of for an independent regulator like the NRC. The White House spokesperson noted that, under a recent executive order, this process is now required for all agencies.

Political operatives have been “inserted into the senior leadership team to the point where they could significantly influence decision-making,” said Scott Morris, who worked at the NRC for more than 32 years, most recently as the number two career operations official. “I just think that would be a dangerous proposition.”

Morris voted for Trump twice and broadly supports the goals of deregulating and expanding nuclear energy, but he has begun speaking out against the administration’s interference at the NRC. He retired in May 2025 as part of a wave of retirements and firings.

At a recent hearing before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board — an independent body that helps adjudicate nuclear licensing — NRC lawyers withdrew from the proceedings, citing “limited resources.” The judge remarked that it was the first time in over 20 years the NRC had done so.

Meanwhile, some staff members, other career officials say, are afraid to voice dissenting views for fear of being fired. “It feels like being a lobster in a slowly boiling pot,” one NRC official who has been working on the rule changes told ProPublica, describing the erosion of independence.

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The official was one of three who compared their recent experience at NRC to being in a pot of slowly boiling water. “If somebody is raising something that they think that the industry or the White House would have a problem with, they think twice,” the official said.

Inside the NRC, the steering committee overseeing the changes includes Cohen, Taggart, and Mike King, a career NRC official who is the newly installed executive director for operations. The former director, Mirela Gavrilas, a 21-year veteran of the agency, retired after getting boxed out of decision-making, according to a person familiar with her departure. Gavrilas did not respond to a request for comment.

Any final changes will be approved by the NRC’s five commissioners, three of whom are Republicans. In September, the two Democratic commissioners told a Senate committee they might be fired at any time if they get crosswise with Trump — including over revisions to safety rules.

Draft rules being circulated inside the NRC propose drastic rollbacks of security and safety inspections at nuclear facilities. Those include a proposed 56 percent cut in emergency preparedness inspection time, CNN reported in March.

Even some pro-nuclear groups are troubled by the emerging order. Some have tried to backchannel to their contacts in the Trump administration to explain the importance of an independent regulator to help maintain public support for nuclear power. Without it, they risk losing credibility.

“You have to make sure you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” said Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes nuclear energy and supports many of the regulatory changes being proposed by the Trump administration.

Greenwald’s group favors faster timelines for approving nuclear reactors, but she worries that the agency’s fundamental independence has been undermined. “We would prefer that they yield back more of NRC independence,” she said.

‘Nuke bros’ in Silicon Valley

One Trump administration priority has been making it easier for so-called advanced reactor companies to navigate the regulatory process. These firms, mostly backed by Silicon Valley tech and venture money, are often working on designs for much smaller reactors that they hope to mass produce in factories.

“There are two nuclear industries,” said Macfarlane, the former NRC chair. “There are the actual people who use nuclear reactors to produce power and put it on the grid … and then there are the ‘nuke bros’” in Silicon Valley.

Trump’s Silicon Valley allies have loomed large over his nuclear policy. One prospective political appointee for a top DOE nuclear job got a Christmas Eve call from Thiel, the rare Silicon Valley leader to back Trump in 2016. Thiel, whose Founders Fund invested in a nuclear fuel startup and an advanced reactor company, quizzed the would-be official about deregulation and how to rapidly build more nuclear energy capacity, said sources familiar with the conversation.

Nuclear energy startups jockeyed to spend time at Mar-a-Lago in the months before the start of Trump’s second term. Balerion Space Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in multiple companies, convened an investor summit there in January 2025, according to an invitation viewed by ProPublica. Balerion did not reply to a request for comment.

A few months later, when Trump was drawing up the executive orders, leaders at many of those nuclear companies were given advanced access to drafts of the text — and the opportunity to provide suggested edits, documents viewed by ProPublica show.

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Those orders created a new program to test out experimental reactor designs, addressing a common complaint that companies are not given opportunities to experiment. There are currently about a dozen advanced reactor companies planning to participate. Each has a concierge team within the DOE to help navigate bureaucracy. As NPR reported in January, the DOE quietly overhauled a series of safety rules that would apply to these new reactors and shared the new regulations with these companies before making them public.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright — who served on the board of one of those companies, Oklo — has said fast nuclear build-out is a priority: “We are moving as quickly as we can to permit, build and enable the rapid construction of as much nuke capacity as possible,” he told CNBC last fall. Oklo noted that Wright stepped down from the board when he was confirmed.

The Trump administration hopes some of the companies would have their reactors “go critical” — a key first step on the way to building a functioning power plant — by July 2026. Then the NRC, which signs off on the safety designs of commercial nuclear power plants, could be expected to quickly OK these new reactors to get to market.

According to people familiar with the conversations, at least one nuclear energy startup CEO personally recruited potential members of the DOGE nuclear team, though it’s not clear if Cohen was brought aboard this way. Cohen has told colleagues and industry contacts that he reports to Emily Underwood, one of Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s top aides for economic policy. He is perceived inside government as a key avatar of the White House’s nuclear agenda.

In its email to ProPublica, the White House said, “Seth Cohen is a Department of Energy employee and does not report to Emily Underwood or Stephen Miller in any capacity.”

The DOE spokesperson added, “Seth’s role at the Department of Energy is to support the Trump administration’s mission to unleash American Energy Dominance.”

Cohen has been pushing to raise the legal limit of radiation that nuclear energy companies are allowed to emit from their facilities. One nuclear industry insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said many firms are fixating on changing these radiation rules: Their business model requires moving nuclear reactors around the country, often near workers or the general public.

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Building thick, expensive shielding walls can be prohibitively expensive, they said.

Valar CEO Isaiah Taylor has called limits on exposure to radiation a top barrier to industry growth. A recent DOE memo seen by ProPublica cites cost savings on shielding for Valar’s reactor to justify changing those limits. “Shielding-related cost reductions,” the memo said, “could range from $1-2 million per reactor.” The debate over the precise rule change is ongoing.

The DOE has been considering a fivefold increase to the limit for public exposure to radiation, which will allow some nuclear reactor companies to cut costs on these expensive safety shields, internal DOE documents seen by ProPublica show.

A presentation prepared by DOE staffers in their Idaho offices that has circulated inside the department makes the “business case” for changing the radiation dose rules: It could cut the cost of some new reactors by as much as 5 percent. These more relaxed standards are likely to be adopted by the NRC and apply to reactors nationwide, documents show.

In February, Wright accompanied Valar’s executive team on a first-of-its-kind flight, as a U.S. military plane was conscripted to fly the company’s reactor from Los Angeles to Utah. Valar does not yet have a working nuclear reactor, and a number of industry sources told ProPublica they viewed the airlift as a PR exercise. Internal government memos justified the airlift by designating it as “critical” to the U.S. “national security interests.”

Cohen posted smiling pictures of himself from the cargo bay of the military plane.

Cohen told an audience at the American Nuclear Society that the rapid build-out was essential to powering Silicon Valley’s AI data centers. He framed the policy in existential terms: “I can’t emphasize this strongly enough that losing the AI war is an outcome akin to the Nazis developing the bomb before the United States.”

As it deliberated rule changes, the DOE has cut out its internal team of health experts who work on radiation safety at the Office of Environment, Health, Safety, and Security, said sources familiar with the decision. The advice of outside experts on radiation protection has been largely cast aside.

The DOE spokesperson said its radiation standards “are aligned with Gold Standard Science … with a focus on protecting people and the environment while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.”

The department has already decided to abandon the long-standing radiation protection principle known as “ALARA” — the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” standard — which directs anyone dealing with radioactive materials to minimize exposure.

It often pushes exposure well below legal thresholds. Many experts agreed that the ALARA principle was sometimes applied too strictly, but the move to entirely throw it out was opposed by many prominent radiation health experts.

Whether the agencies will actually change the legal thresholds for radiation exposure is an open question, said sources familiar with the deliberations.

Internal DOE documents arguing for changing dose rules cite a report produced at the Idaho National Laboratory, which was compiled with the help of the AI assistant Claude. “It’s really strange,” said Kathryn Higley, president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, a congressionally chartered group studying radiation safety. “They fundamentally mistake the science.”

John Wagner, the head of the Idaho National Laboratory and the report’s lead author, acknowledged to ProPublica that the science over changing radiation exposure rules is hotly contested. “We recognize that respected experts interpret aspects of this literature differently,” he wrote. His analysis was not meant to be the final word, he said, but was “intended to inform debate.”

The impact of radiation levels at very low doses is hard to measure, so the U.S. has historically struck a cautious note. Raising dose limits could put the U.S. out of step with international standards.

For his part, Cohen has told the nuclear industry that he sees his job as making sure the government “is no longer a barrier” to them.

In June, he shot down the notion of companies putting money into a fund for workplace accidents. “Put yourself in the shoes of one of these startups,” he said. “They’re raising hundreds of millions of dollars to do this. And then they would have to go to their VCs and their board and say, ‘Listen, guys, we actually need a few hundred million dollars more to put into a trust fund?’”

He also suggested that regulators should not fret about preparing for so-called 100-year events — disasters that have roughly a 1 percent chance of taking place but can be catastrophic for nuclear facilities.

“When SpaceX started building rockets, they sort of expected the first ones to blow up,” he said.

Pratheek Rebala and Kirsten Berg contributed research.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline DOGE goes nuclear: How Trump invited Silicon Valley into America’s nuclear power regulator on Mar 28, 2026.

Roberts, union president at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois, has worked for the federal government for nearly a decade. In that time, the physical science technician has weathered several political administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term. None compare to what’s happening now. 

The sweeping transformation became apparent last March, after a memo from upper management at the USDA Agricultural Research Service instructed staffers to avoid submitting agreements and other contracts that used any of 100-plus newly banned words and phrases. Roughly a third directly related to climate change, including “global warming,” “climate science,” and “carbon sequestration.” 

Roberts met with his union to figure out how to respond to the memo. They concluded that the best course of action was just to avoid the terms and try to get their research published by working around them. Throughout the federal agency, “climate change” was swapped for softer synonyms: “elevated temperatures,” “soil health,” and “extreme weather.”

It’s part of a bigger trend. Across federal agencies and academic institutions, scientists are avoiding words they once used without hesitation. When Trump took office last year — calling coal “clean” and “beautiful” while deriding plans to tackle climate change as a “green scam” — a so-called “climate hushing” took hold of the United States, as businesses, politicians, and even the news media got quieter about global warming. There’s a long list of supposedly “woke” words that agencies have been discouraged from using, many tied to climate change or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

The language changes were accompanied by larger shifts in how the federal government operates. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, laid off hundreds of thousands of federal workers last year. The Trump administration also slashed spending on science, cutting tens of billions of dollars in grants for projects related to the environment and public lands. Researchers are adapting to the new landscape, with some finding creative ways to continue their climate research, from changing their wording to seeking out different sources of funding.   

For federal researchers studying, say, the interplay between weather patterns and soybean diseases, the key is to reframe studies so they don’t clash with the Trump administration’s politics. “Instead of making it about the climate, you would instead just make it about the disease itself, and be like, ‘This disease does these things under these conditions,’ rather than ‘These conditions cause this disease to do this,’” Roberts added. “It’s just changing the focus.”

You can see how federally funded research has changed by looking at the grants approved by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, an agency that provides roughly a quarter of the U.S. government’s funding to universities. Grist’s analysis found that the number of NSF grants whose titles or abstracts mentioned “climate change” fell from 889 in 2023 to 148 last year, a 77 percent plunge. Part of that’s a result of NSF staffers approving fewer grants related to climate change under Trump. But researchers self-censoring by omitting the phrase in their proposals also appears to play a role, evidenced by the corresponding rise of “extreme weather” — a synonym that gets around the politicized language.

Trent Ford, the state climatologist for Illinois, said he’s started using terms like “weather extremes” and “weather variability” in framing his proposals for grants. 

“It’s sort of a weird thing, because on principle, if we’re studying climate change, to not name climate change feels dirty,” said Ford, who’s also a research scientist at the Illinois State Water Survey at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. But it’s more of a practical decision than anything else: “We’ve seen where grants that say everything but ‘climate change’ and are obviously studying the impacts of climate change get through with no problem.” He only uses the phrase in grant proposals when he thinks it’s absolutely necessary and when efforts to steer around the term would look too obvious to a reviewer.

Researchers have always had to tailor their framing to align with a funder’s priorities, in this case the federal government. Near the end of President Joe Biden’s term in late 2024, when Ford’s team applied for an NSF grant to study how climate conditions could affect Midwestern agriculture, it made sense to include a line about talking to a diverse group of farmers. But that word became a problem after Trump returned to office.

“By the time the proposal got reviewed by the program manager at NSF, that same language that was required four months ago was now actually a death sentence on it,” Ford said. The NSF liked the proposal, but wanted the researchers to remove the line about reaching a diverse set of agricultural stakeholders and confirm that they would talk to “all American farmers,” Ford said. The team sent it back in, and the NSF approved it last April.

Others weren’t so lucky. Another scientist at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said DOGE eliminated major research programs at the agency and, in the process, wiped out hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds for an initiative to grow plants without soil that “really didn’t have anything to do with climate change.” The scientist said it had only been labeled as climate research to “satisfy the previous Biden administration.”

“Anything, any project, that had ‘CC’ in front of it, was eliminated. Because ‘CC’ stands for climate change,” the staffer said. “So, unfortunately, that came back to bite them during this administration.”   

Though not to this extreme, researchers have found themselves staying away from politically fraught terms like “climate change” before. During the first Trump administration, Austin Becker, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies how ports and maritime infrastructure can be made more resilient to hazards like storms and flooding, started avoiding the phrase, even though it’s what motivated his research. “Everything that was ‘climate’ just became ‘coastal resilience,’” he said. “And we’ve kind of just stuck with that ever since.”

Ford initially resisted pressure to stop using the phrase from colleagues he was writing grants with, but he gave in this time around for financial reasons. “Getting a grant could be the difference between a graduate student getting a paycheck and us having to let a graduate student go, or having to let a full-time employee of the university go,” he said.

Some researchers have been looking for grants in new places as federal money dries up. Dana Fisher, a professor at American University and the director of its Center for Environment, Community, and Equity, has procured private funding to research ways to improve and expand communication about climate change in North America. She’s also looking overseas for funding, where she’s had success during past Republican administrations that were hesitant to approve grants for climate research. When George W. Bush was president, Fisher got a grant to study how climate action in U.S. cities and states could influence federal policymaking, an effort funded by the Norwegian Research Council. That fact raised some eyebrows when she mentioned it to people she was interviewing in Congress. “They’re like, ‘Huh?’” Fisher recalled. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s what happens when there’s a Republican administration.’”

As scarce as funding for anything related to the climate has become under Trump, some topics appear to be even more politically toxic. In Ford’s experience, and from what he’s heard from other researchers, “equity” and “environmental justice” are “actually dirtier words.” The Trump administration has closed the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice offices at its headquarters and in all 10 of its regional offices, and continues to lay off EPA staff who helped communities dealing with pollution. Grist’s analysis of grants reveals a similar pattern: Under Trump, mentions of “DEI,” or diversity, equity, and inclusion, have vanished from NSF grants entirely. Terms like “clean energy” and “pollution” have also declined, but not as sharply as climate change.

You could view the federal government’s pressure on scientists to change their language in different ways. Is it Orwellian-style censorship, silencing dissent and policing language? Or simply the right of a funder, whose politics changes with each administration, to ask for research that reflects its concerns? Does it affect what research gets done, or will applicants simply swap in harmless synonyms to ensure the work can continue? 

The answer is complicated, according to the USDA’s Roberts. Many of the climate projects at the agency’s research division that have so far avoided cancellation are stuck in funding purgatory, awaiting a fate that could hinge on a politically charged word or two. Scientists are adapting their research to better align with White House priorities, hoping to continue equipping farmers with the knowledge of how to adapt to a warming world — and scrubbing any forbidden language in the meantime.

“Clever word usage, and controlling the scope of how the research is presented, allows for scientists to keep doing the work,” Roberts said. “There’s no one going around hunting these people down, thankfully. Not yet, anyway.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline To keep climate science alive, researchers are speaking in code on Mar 27, 2026.

During the same period, California’s production of crude oil has also fallen by around half, and many oil wells have shut down. The state now imports almost two-thirds of its crude oil from tanker ships, which is cheaper and more practical because it is separated by steep mountains from oil-producing zones such as Texas. Some of the state’s largest gasoline and diesel refineries are also shutting down amid declining demand, which will make the state dependent on imports of refined gasoline, too.

The state’s diminished fossil-fuel sector has made it especially vulnerable to the oil shock of the Israeli-U.S. war with Iran — and to interventions from the Trump administration that could delay or even reverse California’s trend toward renewable energy. Gas prices in the state have spiked toward $7 a gallon in recent weeks, the highest prices in the country. As other economies clamp down on fuel exports, it’s possible the state could face even higher crude prices or a shortage of gasoline.

Two weeks after the war began, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department issued a legal memorandum arguing that the federal government can use the Defense Production Act to preempt state law in the event of energy emergencies. The Department of Energy then moved to restart a long-defunct California offshore oil pipeline owned by the company Sable Offshore. The order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright cited “California’s reliance on foreign oil vulnerable to geopolitical disruption,” with “a significant share traveling through the Strait of Hormuz.” The pipeline has been shut down since a 2015 oil spill that killed hundreds of animals, and state officials had not given it clearance to reopen. On the very next day, the pipeline reopened. California has sued to shut it back down.

For now, the Sable pipeline is ramping up to process around 50,000 barrels a day, which would provide around 3 percent of the state’s daily oil needs. Chevron has already said it will buy and refine 20,000 barrels of crude from the pipeline starting in April. The addition of new supply from Sable could lower costs for refineries, said Mike Umbro, an energy entrepreneur who runs Californians for Energy and Science, an educational nonprofit that advocates for increased oil production. Beyond Sable, though, there aren’t many good options for increasing crude supplies in the short term.

“Sacramento’s saying, ‘You don’t have a long-term future here,’ so the companies aren’t going to dump a bunch of money in to increase production,” Umbro said.

Nevertheless, the Interior Department said this week it would consider a proposal from another offshore oil company to frack undersea oil wells in order to increase production. The administration has also held oil lease sales on federal land in California, and has sued to block a state law that would limit drilling near homes and schools, both measures that would open up more onshore oil production in the state.

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But more upstream oil production won’t help resolve the current fuel crunch. Even as some oil producers consider pumping more crude, no one has suggested building more refineries. In fact, Chevron and other large refinery owners have warned that California’s “cap-and-invest” program — a carbon tax that gets more expensive as time goes on — could soon drive them out of the state. The California Air Resources Board, the state’s climate regulator, is supposed to debut new rules for the carbon tax later this year, which would reduce the amount of free emissions refineries would be allowed to emit and make refineries less likely to stay in California. 

The oil industry’s argument against these regulations follows the same logic as the Trump administration’s. “Continued erosion of California’s refining capacity risks increased reliance on imported fuels that are slower to arrive, more exposed to global supply disruptions, and less reliable during emergencies or periods of heightened geopolitical risk,” Andy Walz, a senior executive at Chevron, wrote in a letter to state leaders.

At the CERAWeek energy conference this week in Texas, Walz said he believes the state could soon have a shortage of gasoline and jet fuel, and that Chevron might close its own refineries within a decade. Those refineries account for 30 percent of capacity, and losing them could cause huge supply shortages for Bay Area drivers, Central Valley farmers, and even Air Force bases.

Democrats and environmental groups in the state, meanwhile, say that the refiners may be crying wolf about the state’s carbon tax. They see the Iran crisis as more evidence that the state should lean harder into its transition away from oil. Indeed, as Katelyn Roedner Sutter, the California state director for the Environmental Defense Fund, sees it, the current gas spike may only speed up the state’s energy transition by making electric vehicles even more attractive. Governor Gavin Newsom’s latest budget proposed a subsidy for first-time EV buyers, designed to replace the repealed Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, and she said the Iran crisis could strengthen the governor’s case.

“I do think the war actually makes it even more important to move forward with this, because I think it just underscores how vulnerable we are, being so dependent on fossil fuels,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California’s fossil fuel phaseout has left it vulnerable to the Iran oil shock on Mar 27, 2026.

On March 18, Israel struck the South Pars gas field in Iran, the largest natural gas field in the world. Iran is heavily dependent on South Pars for its energy supply; by some estimates, the field accounts for 90 percent of the country’s domestic energy use. 

The assault on South Pars kicked off a series of retaliatory attacks from Iran on energy facilities throughout the region, including an aerial strike that caused considerable damage to Ras Laffan, a sprawling liquefied natural gas, or LNG, facility in Qatar — the world’s largest LNG export hub. About one fifth of the globe’s LNG supply comes from this plant, according to Bloomberg. Qatar’s energy minister said the damage could take three to five years to repair.

This escalation in hostilities has added more pressure to an already fraught situation affecting the energy industry in the Persian Gulf, which will continue to have implications both regionally and worldwide. The price of Brent crude, considered the global benchmark of crude oil prices, spiked after the South Pars attack, reaching nearly $120 per barrel. It has since fallen a bit, to just under $100 per barrel. 

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But another casualty of the attacks on infrastructure is water security. Even before oil and gas facilities became targets of war, water desalination plants in the Gulf were being struck. In a region with scarce freshwater, these plants deliver clean drinking water to millions — particularly in Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, where roughly half or more of their total water supply comes from desalination. 

The threat of future damage to these key operations looms over the Arabian Peninsula. Over the weekend, following the attacks on oil and gas facilities, President Donald Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran: reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours or the U.S. would destroy the nation’s power plants. Iran responded by threatening to demolish energy and water systems throughout the Gulf if Trump went after Iranian energy. Although negotiations between the United States and Iran appear to be ongoing behind closed doors, on Wednesday, March 25, Iranian officials rejected Trump’s offer for a ceasefire agreement.  

With no indication of just how long the war might last, conditions in Iran and throughout the Gulf may continue to deteriorate. Iran is no stranger to water scarcity — the country has a history of water challenges both inciting social unrest in urban areas as well as clashes between farmers in more rural settings. With its arid climate, poor water management practices, and rapid population growth, Iran is already one of the most water-stressed countries in the world. The country has been facing an unprecedented climate-charged drought for the last six years. That limited rainfall has collided with Iran’s legacy of overpumping water from aquifers and reservoirs. 

All this means that the country is in a state of “water bankruptcy,” a concept that Madani developed roughly 10 years ago to describe how Iran’s unchecked water use is outpacing its diminishing water resources.

By and large, though, Iran is much less vulnerable to attacks on desalination plants than other countries in the Gulf. Most of those countries “have a very small number of very critically important desalination plants and they can very easily be damaged,” said Peter Gleick, a co-founder and senior fellow of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. “That’s a serious worry. … They have no long-term storage. There are no large reservoirs. There are no alternatives.” 

However, that doesn’t mean that Iran is completely immune to attacks on its water security — which may have spillover effects on its food security. Only a small fraction of Iran’s water supply comes from desalination plants. But strikes on its power plants would indeed hamper the country’s water supply, said Madani. Without electricity, water treatment operations could not run.

When ships and oil tankers in the Gulf are struck, the contamination from those attacks (such as oil spills) could derail Iranian fisheries and aquaculture — although this hasn’t happened yet, said David Michel, a senior associate with the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. On land, food producers face other potential challenges: When drones or missiles strike certain Iranian facilities — such as weapons factories, some of which are in close enough range of farms — the explosions that can result from those attacks often contain things like PFAS, propellants, and other toxic chemicals. Those substances could leech into agricultural soils nearby, creating problems for both farmers and consumers down the line.

The economic impacts of the war can also indirectly affect farmers. Since March 3, the state has banned all food and agricultural exports in what looks like an attempt to bolster its domestic food supplies during wartime, said Michel. But that “distorts incentives for production and consumption,” he added, “and that will have impacts on agricultural systems and food security,” potentially leading to higher inflation on food prices, which was a burden for Iranians before the current conflict.

Madani and other experts have argued that in order to rehabilitate its water system, Iran will need to shift agricultural production from specialty crops like pistachios to staple crops like wheat and other grains. Currently, Iran imports a significant amount of these cereals. Gleick added that, should the country’s water expenditures continue to exceed its water resources, Iran may become more reliant on desalination plants in the future, which would have its own knock-on effects. For instance, Gleick said, “You then have to spend energy to move that water to the big cities.” 

Like climate change, the war in the Gulf has only increased pressure on Iran’s water and agricultural systems, said Madani. “If your system is already inefficient, it becomes even more difficult during the war,” he said. He agreed that positive change is possible, but unlikely in the short-term — as long as hostilities are ongoing. “During war, you are only thinking about surviving.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Iran was already running out of water. Then came the ‘war on infrastructure.’ on Mar 26, 2026.

“I’m a chemical engineer,” Campos said. “I felt like the carwash matched my skill set.” But Mr. Fancy Pants, with its two locations, could soon face an existential crisis. Last week, Corpus Christi’s city manager announced that it may enter a water emergency as soon as May. The city’s two main reservoirs — Choke Canyon and Lake Corpus Christi — are just 8.4 percent full, while the backup reservoir, 100 miles away, is 55 percent full. Without drastic cuts, the water supply for the more than 500,000 residents of the Corpus Christi area could run dry by early next year. 

“To be honest,” Campos said, “I bought [the carwash] without really understanding what I was buying into.” 

Although it might seem like the city has been abruptly pushed to the brink of disaster, experts say years of faulty planning have brought Corpus Christi to this point. Plans for the proposed Inner Harbor seawater desalination plant, which would have drawn from the Gulf of Mexico, fell apart in September as cost estimates crept up from an estimated $160 million in 2019 to $1.2 billion.

Inflation, tariffs, and supply shortages all drove the cost of construction up, but the scope of the project also expanded. Further complicating things: the plant faced pushback over environmental concerns — a study from Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi found that discharge from the plant would raise salinity in the bay and cause harm to marine ecosystems. 

Although Corpus Christi’s residents are under drought restrictions, which prohibit people from watering their lawns, the city has not asked industrial facilities to look into ways of conserving water after the plans for the desalination plant collapsed. Corpus Christi is one of the largest petrochemical hubs in the United States, and oil, gas, and other industrial facilities account for 50 to 60 percent of the city’s water usage. One enormous plastics plant owned by Exxon Mobil and Saudi Arabia used just under 5 billion gallons of water in 2024 alone.

In February, city officials voted to restart planning for a desalination plant with a new contractor, arguing it was the only way to ensure Corpus Christi’s long-term health. But Robert Mace, a hydrologist and the executive director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University, warned that even under a best-case scenario, a plant is unlikely to come online until 2028. Corpus Christi is also drilling an emergency wellfield in an attempt to pump groundwater into the Nueces River, which feeds into Lake Corpus Christi. But it also might not be enough to prevent the city from declaring a water emergency in the coming months. Officials have stated that a Level 1 water emergency would require a 25 percent reduction in water use, but there are no clear plans how those cuts would be implemented and enforced.

The years of delays may prove catastrophic. The drought plaguing Texas has stretched out for five years now, with no end in sight. “At some point it’ll rain — hopefully, knock on wood,” Mace said. “And people will look back and throw shade on everybody that pushed the desalination project. But they’ll forget how scary things look today.”

According to researchers, this kind of crisis may be a glimpse into the future, even for cities that don’t consider themselves water stressed. “What we’re seeing in Corpus Christi is really not an isolated crisis,” said Shannon Marquez, a professor at Columbia Water Center, a research institute at Columbia University. “It’s very consistent with how things are going to unfold if we don’t start to plan.” 

Water stress is a dilemma that will affect “almost everyone,” said Sara Hughes, a senior policy researcher studying water at the RAND Corporation, a global think tank. Cities that aren’t used to thinking about water conservation, not surprisingly, tend to be the most unprepared when drought does hit. Hughes said that coastal communities will increasingly need to scramble to construct desalination plants as sea levels rise and saltwater intrusion contaminates aquifers. 

“It’s really easy to kick the can down the line,” Hughes said. “We have competing demands on budgets — it’s a lot easier to pay for something tomorrow than to pay for what’s maybe coming next year.” Nobody wants to be the one to build a billion-dollar desalination plant, Mace explained, “and then it rains.”

Melbourne, Australia, found itself in a similar situation toward the end of the country’s devastating millennium drought in 2007. The state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital city, opted to build a desalination plant, but nearly as soon as work on it began, rain started coming down relentlessly — so much rain that it delayed construction. The plant was eventually finished in 2012 but many have blamed the project for saddling the state of Victoria with heavy debts. 

When record droughts hit, public trust is critical to reducing water demand, according to Hughes. “You’re going to be asking people to monitor and engage with their water in new ways. You’re going to be asking them to support investment and get on board with [austerity].” In Corpus Christi, residents have told reporters that they feel like the city has prioritized the petrochemical industry over their lives. “The city needs to tell industry: We need to give our people water,” Hillcrest resident Mona Lytle told the Texas Tribune. “[The refineries are] getting water first, and we’re second.” 

Should Corpus Christi’s city officials eventually restrict the petrochemical industry’s water use, oil and gas executives have warned it could further raise gas prices, which are already approaching record highs as a result of the war with Iran. In the end, city officials may have little choice but to prioritize the people who voted them into office. A partial industry shut down could “maybe free up water for health and human safety,” Mace said. “I mean, they have to consider shutting down industry to avoid having to evacuate the city.” 

As for Campos, the owner of Mr. Fancy Pants Carwash, he’s worried about his business and trying to prepare for the worst. Other carwash chains, such as the private equity-owned Quick Quack chain, have faced heightened scrutiny for wasting water as the crisis has worsened. Campos is looking into whether his business could draw well water, rather than pulling from reservoirs as the rest of the city does. He’s also joined an alliance of carwash companies that works to conserve water. For the moment though, Campos feels set adrift. “I know my employees are concerned about their jobs,” he said. “Those are the facts. Everything else is speculation.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Texas, Corpus Christi’s water crisis may be a glimpse into the future on Mar 26, 2026.

How many of these elements from traditional farming can successfully translate into larger crop production models, when little research defines their economic value, is a question Kamaljit Sangha, a researcher in ecological economics at Charles Darwin University, wanted to explore in a new study published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

“How do we take it from the perspective where there are holistic and multiple values [of Indigenous farming], which are mostly hidden in the current way of measuring the importance of these food systems?” said Sangha.

When assessing how many publications include rigorous empirical evidence to measure potential scalability and sustainability for Indigenous farming systems against mainstream agriculture, “there is a gap between advocacy and evidence,” the report reads.

In the study, Sangha and her colleagues found that when reviewing 49 published research articles on Indigenous peoples and local communities, known as IPLCs, most literature highlighted the benefits of communities’ traditional farming practices. This comes at a crucial vantage point, as global industrialized agricultural systems are swept up by climate change risks. The study also found a lack of research examining the quantitative productivity and scalability of IPLC farming, an area Sangha hopes to see more literature on in the near future.

It’s estimated that a 35 to 56 percent increase in food production, achieved while suspending land clearing for agricultural use, is vital to feeding a projected 10 billion people by 2050. As climate change has emerged as a threat, food producers are looking to these reliable traditional forms of farming.

As average temperatures climb, climate change is decreasing biodiversity, altering nutritional values and degrading soil health. These effects are disrupting global food production and Indigenous food systems alike. Currently, food systems are responsible for 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

Sangha said this review couldn’t be done without acknowledging the impact of colonialism on traditional farming. “In countries like Australia, a lot of food practices Indigenous people have carried in the past have been severely impacted, and in many other countries as well,” she said. The expansion of “mainstream food systems” has resulted in changes to Indigenous communities’ diets and the widespread loss of knowledge needed to carry these practices on to future generations.

The study also argues that merging the two systems, rather than viewing them as opposites, is required to tackle the climate crisis. With government investment and targeted policy, IPLC agriculture can build a resilient wall against threats driven by climate change, while modern farming industries can learn from these traditional ways of growing food. Otherwise, both systems face the loss of ecological, economic, and cultural resources.

“Beyond market value, IPLC farming systems generate substantial non-market economic contributions by reducing household expenditure on food, medicine, fibre, and fuel,” the report reads. The review suggests that government funding and support can provide larger food producers with a look into how to address growing challenges caused by climate change and the impacts of fertilizers on soil health.

In 2024, the United Nations Global Biodiversity Framework Fund ratified investments to dedicate 20 percent of its resources to support IPLC initiatives to improve their lands and conserve biodiversity. Yet, a global commitment to specifically fund efforts to conserve traditional food systems is so far missing.

“If we highlight these non-monetary values of these food systems, and they’re important for policy decision-making, we hope that this can attract more attention from policy decision-makers and governments to support these Indigenous peoples and local communities’ food systems,” Sangha said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Modern agriculture is collapsing under climate change. Indigenous farming has answers. on Mar 26, 2026.