Americans are paying more for electricity, and those prices are set to rise even further.

In almost all parts of the country, the amount people pay for electricity on their power bills — the retail price — has risen faster than the rate of inflation since 2022, and that will likely continue through 2026, according to the Energy Information Administration, or EIA.

Just about everything costs more these days, but electricity prices are especially concerning because they’re an input for so much of the economy — powering factories, data centers, and a growing fleet of electric vehicles. It’s not just the big industries; we all feel the pinch firsthand when we pay our utility bills. According to PowerLines, a nonprofit working to reduce electricity prices, about 80 million Americans have to sacrifice other basic expenses like food or medicine to afford to keep the lights on. And it’s about to get even worse: Utilities in markets across the country have asked regulators for almost $29 billion in electricity rate increases for consumers for the first half of the year.

Why are prices rising so much all of a sudden? Right now, there are the usual factors driving the rise in electricity rates: high demand, not enough supply, and inflation. But there are problems that have been building up for decades as well, and now the bills are due: Aging and inadequate infrastructure needs replacement, while outdated business models and regulations are slowing the deployment of urgently needed upgrades.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump promised to bring energy prices down by increasing fossil fuel extraction. “My goal will be to cut your energy costs in half within 12 months after taking office,” Trump said last August in a speech in Michigan.

But electricity prices are still going up, and Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is likely to raise prices further. Without better management and investment, the result will be more expensive and less reliable power for most Americans.

The variables baked into your power bill, explained

There are several key factors that shape how much you pay for electricity.

There’s the cost of building, operating, and maintaining power plants. Higher interest rates, inflation, tariffs, and longer interconnection queues — power generators waiting for approval to connect to the grid — are making the process of building a new electricity generator slower and more expensive. PJM, the largest power market in the U.S., said this week that soaring demand for electricity and delays in building new generators will raise power bills 1 percent  to 5 percent for customers in its service area across 13 states and the District of Columbia.

Then there’s the fuel itself, whether that’s coal, oil, natural gas, or uranium. For renewables, the cost of wind, water, and sunlight are close to zero, but intermittent generators need conventional power plants or energy storage systems to back them up. Still, wind and solar power have been some of the cheapest sources of electricity in recent years, forming the dominant share of new power generation connecting to the grid.

That electricity then has to be routed from power plants over transmission lines that can span hundreds of miles and into distribution networks that send electrons into homes, offices, stores, and factories.

Read NextTrump calls program to help low-income Americans pay their energy bills ‘unnecessary’Naveena Sadasivam

Then you have to think about demand, over the course of hours, days, months, and years. Some utilities offer time-of-use billing that raises rates during peak demand periods like hot summer afternoons and lowers them in evenings. Cooling needs are a big reason why overall electricity use tends to be higher in summer months than in the winter. And for the first time in a decade, the U.S. is experiencing a sustained increase in electricity use driven in part by a rapid build-out of power-hungry data centers, more EVs, more electric appliances, and more air conditioning to stay cool in hotter summers.

More users for the same amount of electricity means higher prices. The Trump administration’s rollback of key incentives for renewables and slowdown of approvals for new projects is likely to slow the rate of new generation coming online.

And the process of bridging electricity supplies with demand is becoming a bottleneck, thus comprising a larger share of the overall bill. “If you actually look at the cost breakdowns of what’s significantly increasing, it’s really the grid,” said Charles Hua, founder and executive director of PowerLines. “It is the poles and wires that make up our electric infrastructure that’s increasing in cost particularly rapidly.”

According to the EIA, just under two-thirds of the average price of electricity is due to generation costs, with the remainder coming from transmission and distribution. However, energy utilities are now putting more than half of their expenditures into transmission and distribution through the end of the decade. “It used to be the case maybe a decade ago where generation was the largest share of utility investments, and therefore customer bills,” Hua said. “But it has now been inverted where really it’s the grid expense that is rising and doesn’t show any signs of relief.”

There are several reasons for this. One is that the existing power grid is old, and many components like conductors and switchgear are reaching the ends of their service lives. Replacing 1960s hardware at 2025 prices raises operating costs even for the same level of service. But the grid now needs to provide higher levels of service as populations grow and as technologies like intermittent renewables and energy storage proliferate.

Power outages driven by extreme weather are becoming more frequent and longer, but hardening the grid against disasters like floods and fires is expensive too. Putting a power line underground can add up to double or more the price of stringing conductors along utility poles, which is why power companies have been slow to make the change, even in disaster-prone regions.

While utilities are pouring money into distribution networks, they are having a harder time building new long-distance transmission lines as they run into permitting and regulatory delays. The U.S. used to build an average of 2,000 miles of high-voltage transmission per year between 2012 and 2016. The construction rate dropped to 700 miles per year between 2017 and 2021, and dipped to just 55 miles in 2023. There were 125 miles of new high-voltage transmission installed in the first half of 2024, but it was all for one project. The Department of Energy this week canceled a loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project that would stretch 800 miles across four states.

There are also shortages of critical parts of the grid like transformers, while tariffs on materials like aluminum and steel are pushing up construction expenses.

One underrated driver of higher prices is the lack of coordination between utilities, grid operators, and states on how to spend their money. In utility jargon, this process is called Integrated Distribution System Planning, where everyone with a stake in the energy network puts together a comprehensive plan of what to buy, where to build it, and who should pay — but only a few states like Illinois, Maine, and New Hampshire have such a system set up.

“That’s sort of a no-brainer,” Hua said. “Anybody should understand the need to plan ahead, especially if you’re talking about something that has such high economic implications, but that’s not what we’re doing.”

So while prices are rising, there’s no easy way around the fact that the grid is overdue for a lot of necessary, expensive upgrades. For millions of Americans, that means it’s going to get more expensive to stay cool, charged up, and connected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why your energy bill is suddenly so much more expensive on Jul 27, 2025.

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President Donald Trump is temporarily exempting medical sterilization facilities that use the colorless gas ethylene oxide from tighter emissions standards, including plants in Georgia that have generated health concerns for residents living nearby.

Last year, then President Joe Biden’s administration finalized new emissions limits for plants that use ethylene oxide, also known as EtO.

The rules require facilities install new controls to limit releases of the gas, monitor continuously for leaks, and meet other requirements. The standards were set to phase in starting in 2026, with the largest EtO users given an extra year to comply. Under Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency said the stiffer regulations would reduce emissions from EtO facilities by 90 percent and protect residents living near them.

But in a Thursday proclamation, Trump said he would extend the deadline for a slew of facilities across the country to meet the requirements, claiming the technology is not “commercially viable” to meet the timelines. Now, sterilizers will have two more years to make upgrades.

Trump argued the current rules would “likely force existing sterilization facilities to close down, seriously disrupting the supply of medical equipment.”

“In short, the current compliance timeline would undermine our national security,” Trump’s proclamation says.

Read NextHow medical supply warehouses poison workers with ethylene oxideNaveena Sadasivam & Lylla Younes

The extension applies to several Georgia facilities, including: Becton Dickinson, or BD, facilities in Covington and Madison; the Sterigenics plant in Cobb County; Kendall Patient Recovery, or KPR, near Augusta; and Sterilization Services of Georgia’s facility 15 miles from downtown Atlanta.

EtO plays a critical role maintaining safety in medical and dental settings by killing dangerous bacteria that can’t be eliminated by other methods, like steam or radiation. About half the medical devices used in the United States — approximately 20 billion devices each year — are sterilized with EtO, according to the EPA. It is also used to kill potentially harmful microbes lurking in spices, dried vegetables, walnuts and other food products.

But the gas has been known for years to be dangerous to humans.

In 2016, the EPA reclassified ethylene oxide as a human carcinogen and the gas has been linked to breast, lymphoid, leukemia and other types of cancers. That same year, the EPA determined ethylene oxide is dangerous at much lower levels than previously thought.

Based on its new threshold, EPA air modeling flagged several census tracts in Georgia for potential elevated cancer risks from exposure to ethylene oxide in 2018. But neither the agency nor the state Environmental Protection Division alerted the public. A year later, media reports revealed the potential for increased cancer risk based on the modeling faced by residents in neighborhoods surrounding Sterigenics’ Cobb County plant.

Read NextThe unregulated link in a toxic supply chainNaveena Sadasivam & Lylla Younes

The situation spawned a slew of lawsuits and in 2023, Sterigenics agreed to pay $35 million to settle dozens of claims by people who alleged their exposure to EtO from the plant caused cancer and other injuries. Sterigenics did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s proclamation.

Hundreds of lawsuits are still pending in Georgia against BD, Sterigenics, and KPR. In May, the first of those to reach trial resulted in a $20 million verdict for a retired Covington-area truck driver, Gary Walker, who claimed decades of exposure to EtO from BD and its predecessor, C.R. Bard, was to blame for his non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Michael Geoffroy, an attorney who’s part of Walker’s legal team and involved in many other EtO cases, said the Trump administration’s move “is only going to make things worse.”

“Loosening rules or delaying implementation of safety standards that are there to keep communities safe and make it to where fewer people get sick with cancer is just a step in the wrong direction,” Geoffroy said.

In a statement, BD spokeswoman Fallon McLoughlin said the company is “committed to the safe and responsible operation of our medical sterilization facilities and has a long history of compliance with local, state and federal regulations related to EtO emissions.”

She added BD has already installed new emissions controls at many facilities and is committed to meeting the new standards. But she said doing so could require new equipment that may not be available in time to meet the deadline.

“The recently announced exemption will ensure there is a more realistic time frame to comply with the new requirements,” McLoughlin said.

A representative for Sterilization Services declined to comment. KPR did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mindy Goldstein, director of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University, said the federal Clean Air Act allows presidents to exempt certain facilities from compliance for up to two years. But to do so, they must prove that the technology to meet the requirement is not available and the extension serves a national security interest.

Trump used both rationales in his proclamation. But Goldstein said he included little evidence to support the claims, which could give opponents an opening to challenge the move.The Trump administration, meanwhile, has already said it’s reevaluating the Biden-era EtO rules, but it’s unclear whether they’ll seek to change the standard. Trump’s EPA has already unwound much of his predecessors’ environmental legacy, announcing plans to reconsider drinking water standards for certain toxic “forever chemicals,” roll back limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and much more.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Georgia sterilization plants using toxic gas among those exempt from new rules on Jul 26, 2025.

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The motley crew of scientists, conservationists, and agricultural producers set out to begin in earnest. Spring was well underway in Hood Canal, Washington, when the team assembled on the shores of Baywater Shellfish Farm, armed with buckets. Before them, floating mats of seaweed were strewn about, bright green clumps suffocating clams, geoducks, and other intertidal creatures while swallowing the gear laid out to harvest them.

Excess seaweed is a seasonal nuisance along the bays and inlets that twine throughout Puget Sound. But the issue has magnified as excess nutrient runoff has fueled sprawling blooms. It has become a bona fide threat to the business of Washington shellfish farmers like Joth Davis.

In the past, Davis has attempted to harvest the seaweed by hand to reduce the surging number of macroalgae menacing his catch. Alas, there is the “age-old problem of scale,” he said. “It is difficult work, and time available during low tides to tackle the problem is limited, with everything else we need to accomplish when the tide is out.”

A couple years before the team got to work last May, researchers at the University of Washington, or UW, approached Davis to see if he’d be interested in partnering with them to develop a new supply chain. The plan was simple: Harvest the seaweed from Davis’s farm, give it to small and mid-sized crop farmers in the area as a soil-building replacement for chemical fertilizer, and along the way study the effects — reduced emissions from a shortened supply chain, steady yields from shellfish and terrestrial farms, changes in soil chemistry, and possibly a way to sequester the carbon stored in the seaweed itself. They were also aiming to investigate the impacts of seaweed removal on shellfish survival and growth.

A Department of Agriculture program established by the Biden administration, and funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, offered exactly the federal support they needed to make the vision happen. In February 2022, the USDA launched the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, or PCSC, which former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said at the time would “provide targeted funding to meet national and global demand and expand market opportunities for climate-smart commodities to increase the competitive advantage of American producers.”

Davis, who has a background in marine science, seized the chance.

The aptly named “Blue Carbon, Green Fields” project was selected by the USDA in 2023 to receive roughly $5 million of the climate-smart commodities money in a five-year agreement. In addition to Davis’s team at Baywater and the scientists from UW, the partnership consisted of researchers from Washington State University and Washington Sea Grant, conservationists from the nonprofit Puget Sound Restoration Fund, and the local farm incubator Viva Farms. In their first year in the field, the team harvested a little over 15,000 pounds of wet seaweed, which was stockpiled and distributed to four crop farms throughout the region. By laying the groundwork for the agricultural supply chain, the team was on track for the unthinkable — a quadruple win of sorts, where everyone involved benefited, including the planet.

Instead, not even halfway through a federal contract, their drying racks and other seaweed harvesting equipment are at risk of just gathering cobwebs on Davis’s farm; each unused tool a daily reminder of the progress they lost at the behest of President Donald Trump’s cultural politics. The supply chain, fragile in its novelty, is splintering apart.

Excess seaweed overtaking shellfish gear on Baywater Shellfish Farm in Hood Canal, Washington. Sarah Collier

Almost a year after the team began their field work harvesting seaweed in Puget Sound, the USDA announced that it would cancel the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative. In a press release issued on April 14, the agency called the $3.1 billion funding pot a “climate slush fund” and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins decried it as “largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers.” The USDA said that it axed the initiative due to the “sky-high administration fees which in many instances provided less than half of the federal funding directly to farmers.”

Robert Bonnie, the former under secretary for farm production and conservation at the USDA under the Biden administration, rejects this claim. He contends that the reason some projects reported higher administrative fees than others is because roughly half the awards were intended to boost markets for smaller projects. “You would expect those projects to have higher administrative costs because those farmers are harder to reach,” he argued. “Take the Iowa Soybean Association, or Archer Daniels Midland, where they’ve got established relationships with farmers, where they’ve got high demand amongst many of their farmers, you’re going to expect those projects to have lower administrative costs as a percentage because they’ve already got an extensive network. So we wanted to provide flexibility across projects to make sure that the door was open to everyone,” added Bonnie.

In any case, USDA’s use of the term “cancel” was something of a misnomer. In the same announcement, the agency shared its plan to review existing projects under a new set of scoring criteria, to ensure that they align with the new administration’s priorities. The release noted that the program would be “reformed and overhauled” into a Trump-era effort to redistribute the pool of IRA money. So as the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program sunsetted, the Advancing Markets for Producers initiative was born.

The Trump program’s criteria required grant awardees to ensure that a minimum of 65 percent of their funds go directly to farmers, that they enrolled at least one farmer in their program by December 31, 2024, and that they have made a payment to at least one farmer by that same date. According to a former senior USDA official, who spoke to Grist on the condition of anonymity, the USDA grouped the 135 PCSC grantees into three buckets: Fifteen projects were told they could keep going, as they met the new thresholds; five recipients were told they could continue on the condition that they modified their projects to meet the new priorities; and 115 were informed that their projects were terminated as they did not meet the new policy priorities and were invited to resubmit. A few weeks later, the official said that projects that initially received cancellation letters were told something different – that the termination would be rescinded and they could just modify their proposals to meet administration priorities.

The group behind Blue Carbon, Green Fields was among the 115.

In the USDA’s official termination notice to the University of Washington, shared with Grist, the team was told that their project “failed to meet the first of three Farmer First policy priorities identified by USDA” — that at least 65 percent of the funds must go to producers. A second notice stated that because of that, “the award is inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, department priorities.”

Sarah Collier, the UW assistant professor leading the initiative, remembers how the news of the termination hit her. When she got the letter, “everything had to come to a screeching halt.” She jumped into crisis mode, notifying the 25 or so people working on the project, including students whom Collier said saw their “dissertation research derailed.” She then reached out to notify the farmers who had been receiving the seaweed fertilizer. The timing couldn’t have been worse: The team had just completed a round of farmer recruitment, and were in the middle of signing contracts with five more small and mid-sized farmers.

“I have days where I am like, I can’t,” said Collier. “I can’t handle one more conversation where all I can say is, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do about this, because this isn’t the way that things are supposed to go. This isn’t the way that federal grants are supposed to work.’”

In May, the USDA sent a letter to grantees who had received cancellation notices informing them of how to submit revised applications. According to the letter, which was also shared with Grist, grantees would need to arrange one-on-one meetings with Natural Resources Conservation Service representatives and submit a new budget narrative and statement of work incorporating Trump’s policy priorities. They had until June 20.

When they first learned that their funding had been culled, Collier’s UW team, as the main grantee, wasn’t sure they were going to resubmit — or whether they even could. At the time, nothing further had been disclosed about what it would entail, so Collier decided to wait to talk with the NRCS to find out more. After that meeting, they moved forward with resubmission, in a bid to salvage what funding they were able to. That required Collier to create “a very revised” narrative and restructure the budget, in addition to regular meetings with the NRCS.

The former USDA official noted that specific details of the resubmission process have since largely been kept quiet, since the vast majority of former PCSC grantees are fearful of speaking out about their experiences in case of retaliation by the administration. The closed-door nature of it all, with a lack of clear communication from the Trump administration and changes in guidance leading up to the submission deadline, the official said, has sown confusion and distress among former grantees.

Although no official verdict timeline has been communicated — Collier has heard everything from 60 days to sometime in September — she expects to be waiting on the final funding decision for at least two more months. Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director at the nonprofit Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, or Pasa, has been told something similar about her pending resubmission. Another PCSC grantee, Pasa also reapplied to the new USDA program after being informed they didn’t meet one of the Trump administration’s priorities. Doing so required a total revamp of what their old project had been structured to do.

“In the end, we decided to completely rewrite our proposal rather than just alter our original proposal. We had already said goodbye to the old program and knew it wouldn’t be able to fit the new reality,” said Smith-Brubaker. She says she “lies awake at night” concerned over the outcome, including whether the USDA may choose to deny their resubmission because of Pasa’s involvement in a federal lawsuit filed earlier this year challenging the Trump administration’s funding freeze.

“It’s hard to say right now which decisions and actions might unintentionally result in things going awry,” said Smith-Brubaker. “Even though we still feel it was not in farmer’s best interest to have this degree of disruption, and fear for what a new reality could mean where every change in administration could involve a complete dismantling of stability and promises, we are extremely grateful for the opportunity to still leverage these funds for what our farmers need most.”

In a series of separate recent actions, the USDA provided a peek into how leaders at the nation’s highest food and farming agency have taken strides to comply with the president’s executive orders targeting climate action, environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In mid-June, the agency announced the termination of more than 145 awards totaling $148.6 million of “woke DEI funding.” Then, on July 10, the USDA posted a final rule in the Federal Register revoking a longstanding provision that ensured “disadvantaged” producers have equitable access to federal support, by allowing for carve-outs designed specifically for groups, such as Black and Indigenous farmers, that have historically faced discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the agency also revoked guidelines implemented during the Biden administration that mandated schools administering federal meal programs to ban discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Some observers say that in the USDA’s rushed campaign to gut federal funding while erasing footprints of the Biden administration, the termination of the climate-smart project happened much too fast, and much too soon. For one, Bonnie, who helped design and implement the PCSC initiative, believes that the USDA’s invitation for grantees to resubmit their applications signals the administration’s initial lack of understanding about the bipartisan backlash to the decision.

“The Trump administration was surprised at the amount of support for not only this program, but for climate-smart agriculture more broadly,” said Bonnie. Leadership at USDA were, he added, “under pressure to satisfy the far right, to be anti-climate and anti-woke.”

“They try to paint with a broad brush about this being the Green New Deal,” Bonnie continued. “Most people that knew this program knew that they were blowing smoke.”

Read NextUSDA abruptly cancels rural energy grant application windowKari Lydersen

While the Blue Carbon, Green Fields team is hopeful that, in time, an iteration of the project may continue, work on the ground has stalled. If they do receive a new round of funding from the USDA, Collier said, one change to their budget proposal will have considerable impacts on how the project will be carried out. To satisfy the requirements for resubmission, nearly two-thirds of the funds for the award will have to go directly to participating producers — rather than to the partners like the UW team, which is how it was originally structured.

“That does mean that, pending what we learn as we engage with USDA on this, that if we’re able to go forward, participants will have to seek out their own services to support the practices that they’re implementing, rather than having those services provided by the project partners, as part of the grant,” said Collier. “Instead, they will receive funds to seek out the services that they need, like technical assistance, or like harvesting and transporting seaweed.”

That modification, though seemingly minor, is rather significant, particularly for small farmers who already struggle with limited time and resources to allocate to anything beyond their day-to-day operations, some of whom say it presents an unjust burden. According to fellow PCSC grantee Smith-Brubaker, such a structural change will make things harder for them. “It’s really too bad to have to make it even more complicated for farmers to get the services they want and need,” she said.

Ellen Scheffer, who co-operates a 20-acre organic vegetable and grain farm in Fall City, Washington, is asmall farmer involved with the Blue Carbon, Green Fields project. The funds “being yanked away” makes Scheffer “feel really defeated about the future.” A downside of USDA’s resubmission process, she noted, is that “any positive benefit that might help the future of our environment is going to have to be a side benefit, rather than the direct goal of the research. It feels very, very frustrating, especially as someone who is living every day trying to grow food in a way that is good for our planet.”

Others, like project partner Viva Farms, the nonprofit farm incubator that connected producers in their network with the seaweed researchers, feels as if the group’s chapter together has already come to a close. “It did feel like the momentum was really a sheer drop-off,” said Viva Farms’ Elma Burnham. “We were about to prepare to onboard all sorts of new farms, to have seaweed drying here, to sort of get them more action of the program, instead of more of this, like, planning. And, yeah, it was challenging to see it sort of come to a halt,” she said.

The likelihood of revival, according to Burnham, feels low. “Of course, we would love to see more organic, small-scale farmers pursue this research, we would love to see more innovation and collaboration happening in the Puget Sound region. But it feels over,” said Burnham. “This particular project feels over.”

Davis, the shellfish grower, says he struggled to come to terms with the time and workload that would be demanded of him in the revised program — and what the restructuring of the proposal to align with the Trump administration’s policy priorities altogether represents. “I just thought it was kind of backwards, to be honest. It just didn’t seem like the right way to do it,” he said. For instance, directing most of the grant money to the farmers rather than project leads, he added, “didn’t make sense.”

Instead, he’s going his own way. Davis has begun planning out an even shorter seaweed supply chain in tandem with his daughter, Hannah, and Emily Buckner, one of her colleagues at the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, just two of the six original partners. They’ve been busy identifying producers in the Chimacum Valley to collaborate with, all within a 20-mile radius of his farm. By narrowing the geographic range and foregoing much of the soil chemistry research, the scope of Davis’s new venture is limited compared to Blue Carbon, Green Fields, but, he said, “At the end of the day, I was, and I am, too invested in the parts that [the USDA] didn’t want.”

Still, not all the equipment that the USDA funds bought is laying idle around the farm, at risk of catching cobwebs: Davis is currently testing out a raft-based suction system to vacuum up the excess seaweed clustered around sensitive geoducks.

“We’ve got the equipment, and we’re going to harvest it and dry some and see where this can go,” he said. “We want to move forward with that, just to see if it works.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Seaweed brought fishers, farmers, and scientists together. Trump tore them apart. on Jul 25, 2025.

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It’s less than an hour before the Dave Matthews Band takes the stage on a sunny Thursday evening on the coast of Long Island — but the biggest crowds at the Northwell at Jones Beach Theater aren’t at the tequila bar. They’re in the “eco-village” operated by Reverb, a nonprofit focused on greening live music by inspiring fans to take action around climate change.

As I wander through tents emblazoned with the logos of organizations like the Nature Conservancy and Generation180, volunteers explain how fans can reduce their carbon footprints and join the clean energy transition. The longest line emanates from Reverb’s flagship tent, where batches of limited-edition blue-and-yellow Nalgene bottles hang from tent poles like so many coconuts from a grove of palm trees.

Fans acquire the bottles by making a $20 donation, which enters them into a raffle to win a guitar signed by Matthews; they can fill their bottles at a nearby filtered water station. It’s all part of “RockNRefill,” a partnership between Reverb and Nalgene. The program has raised $5 million for climate and conservation nonprofits and eliminated an estimated 4 million single-use plastic bottles.

“It’s cutting down on single-use plastics, so we hope everybody takes a bottle home or brings it back to another show,” says Dan Hutnik, Reverb’s onsite coordinator. “We’re trying to help save the planet — I like to say, one water bottle at a time.” (I bought one of the Nalgenes, but didn’t win a signed guitar.)

Concertgoers wander around the Reverb eco-village at Dave Matthews’ show at the Northwell at Jones Beach Theater. Zack O’Malley Greenburg

With this year’s summer touring season in full swing, the Dave Matthews Band’s efforts are just one example of the increased focus on sustainability in live music over the past several years. Decades after trailblazers like Bonnie Raitt began to prioritize climate, more and more artists are embracing sustainability and pushing for change — both inside and outside the industry — with the help of organizations like Reverb.

Founded in 2004 by environmentalist Lauren Sullivan and her husband Adam Gardner, a guitarist and vocalist of the alt-rock group Guster, Reverb has become a leading force in greening live music. The nonprofit sends staffers like Hutnik out on the road with acts from Matthews to Billie Eilish, setting up eco-villages and organizing volunteers. Reverb staffers serve as the bands’ de facto sustainability coordinators, allowing initiatives like RockNRefill to be scaled up, rather than every artist having to build something similar from scratch.

Reverb also coordinates with concert promoters and venues, which have their own sustainability teams and programs. As part of the recent renovation of Jones Beach, for example, Live Nation added a sorting facility out back where employees handpick recyclables and compostables out of the garbage. The company’s Road To Zero campaign, a partnership with Matthews, diverted 90 percent of landfill-bound waste at the majority of the band’s shows last summer.

Live music has grown immensely since the pandemic — the top 100 tours grossed roughly $10 billion last year, nearly double what they reached in 2019. (For various reasons unrelated to climate, the 2025 number will likely be lower.)

If abandoning climate projects is the new normal in our current political moment, the music business hasn’t gotten the memo. According to a recent Reverb study, 9 out of 10 concertgoers are concerned about climate change and are prepared to take action — and artists are ready to lead the way.

“As more and more artists are asking for the same things, it makes sense for these venues to make it a permanent change and not something where they just say, ‘OK, put away all the Styrofoam and all that crap, we’ll save it for the next band,’” said Gardner. “And that’s where the power really starts coming into play.”

Five days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Coldplay played the biggest — and almost certainly the most overtly eco-friendly — stadium show of the 21st Century. A crowd of 111,000 streamed into Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, India, to see the latest stop on the band’s Music of the Spheres Tour. Coldplay has grossed nearly $1.3 billion in the first three years of the tour, making it the second-most lucrative of all time behind Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

Coldplay has notched quite a few firsts on the climate front. After the group’s 2016-2017 tour, front man Chris Martin and his bandmates were so concerned about their carbon footprint that they took a break from the road until they could forge a more sustainable path. They eventually began planning the Music of the Spheres Tour with a pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by 50 percent compared to their last tour, and to hold themselves accountable with transparent reporting.

Coldplay committed to offsetting unavoidable emissions as responsibly as possible, drawing on the Oxford Principles for Net-Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting, a guide that aims to ensure the integrity of carbon credits. The group has also used a portion of its tour proceeds to support new green technologies and environmental causes. Above all, the band wanted to push the envelope industry-wide with a sustainability rider — a set of requests that artists make as a condition for performing — covering everything from venues’ power connections to free water for fans.

Coldplay performs at a Music of the Spheres tour stop in Las Vegas in June. The tour and album name references planets and outer space. Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Concert promoters are accustomed to accommodating all manner of demands on big acts’ riders (ranging from peppermint soap to actual kittens) and have proven open to doing the same for climate initiatives.

“Any artist could add sustainability considerations to their rider and try to influence promoters and venues to do things in a lower-impact way,” said Luke Howell, the band’s head of sustainability. “While not all artists can change how a venue operates at the macro scale, they can all ask for no single-use plastics, more veggie options on menus, or make sure the kit they are using is efficient and specced correctly to minimize energy use. And they can all engage their fans.”

To that end, while operating at a scale that few other acts can approach, Coldplay has introduced a bevy of novel green touring concepts. The band partnered with BMW to develop the first mobile show battery, which can power 100 percent of a concert with renewable energy. These clean sources include solar panels that come along for the ride, as well as power-generating bicycles and kinetic floors that quite literally draw energy from dancing fans.

Coldplay, of course, isn’t the first group to care about its impact on the planet, or try to reduce it. Environmental activism in the modern pop music world dates back more than half a century to conservation-focused songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).”

Similarly, early benefit concerts — many organized by late folk singer Tom Campbell — focused on causes like protecting forests in the Pacific Northwest. After Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne played one such show in Oregon, their crews needed a police escort out of town to stave off a convoy of chainsaw-wielding loggers.

As the science around global warming went mainstream at the turn of the millennium, artists turned their focus toward climate change. Raitt’s 2002 summer tour launched Green Highway, a traveling eco-village where fans could learn about environmental issues and check out the newest hybrid vehicles from Honda. She and her manager, Kathy Kane, convinced tour bus companies to let them power their vehicles with biodiesel, booking the tour well in advance so as to route buses efficiently instead of wasting fuel hopscotching the country.

At every venue, Raitt’s rider called for replacing disposable silverware with real cutlery, and she began bringing her own water bottle refill stations to reduce backstage plastic use. If there wasn’t a proper recycling system on-site, the crew would bring paper scraps on the bus and dispose of them properly in the next town. And Raitt inspired a new generation of artists who were concerned about live music’s environmental footprint.

“All I had to do was look at the ground when the lights came up at the end of the show to see all the plastic,” said Guster’s Gardner. “I just didn’t feel good about it.”

His wife, Lauren Sullivan, was working for the Rainforest Action Network when a venue refused to let them set up a table at a Dave Matthews show. Apparently, the nonprofit had been rallying against old growth woodcutting practices of one of the venue’s major sponsors. When Matthews threatened to skip the gig, the venue relented.

The episode inspired Sullivan to team up with her husband to channel the power of live music into climate action. Sullivan reached out to Raitt, who was on the Rainforest Action Network’s board, and learned that the touring gear from Green Highway was in storage. Raitt offered it up — and pledged to incubate Sullivan’s project via her own nonprofit, until Reverb was officially launched in 2004.

Sullivan and Gardner wanted their new nonprofit to be an organization that all acts could use to make their tours greener. In their vision, fans walking into any venue would be greeted by a Reverb volunteer wearing a band-branded T-shirt, ready to engage on environmental issues. Concertgoers would be incentivized to take action — like reducing their own carbon footprint or pushing elected officials to enact eco-friendly legislation — with chances to win goodies like ticket upgrades and signed instruments.

On the artists’ side, Reverb helped institutionalize practices that not only reduced waste, but saved dollars — like replacing single-use batteries with rechargeable battery packs for performers’ in-ear monitors. Over time, due to artist demand, these rechargeable packs became the norm.

It turned out that, when big acts demanded a certain standard of sustainability, the live music industry was willing to make meaningful changes. Adam Met, from the alt-pop band AJR, remembers realizing this while planning a tour five years ago and asking venues to eliminate single-use plastics.

“Every place we went, the venue [employees] said, ‘Oh, like Jack Johnson,’” recalled Met, who now serves on Reverb’s advisory board. “That was the artist bringing the requests to the table, and an organization like Reverb.”

As the nonprofit grew, one challenge was broadening its reach beyond alt-rock, whose artists and audiences skew heavily white, male, and middle-aged. To that end, Reverb worked increasingly with emerging artists to help them weave sustainability into their touring process from day one.

Perhaps the best example is Billie Eilish, who started teaming up with Reverb six years ago when she rose to stardom with her 2019 album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” On her 2022 Happier Than Ever Tour, Reverb helped her eliminate 117,000 single-use plastic bottles, save 8.8 million gallons of water, and push venues to offer plant-based meals — for the same prices as meat-based meals. She also introduced the pricier Changemaker Ticket, with proceeds supporting climate projects. Eilish even fueled her 2023 Lollapalooza set with solar-backed batteries.

Billie Eilish performs onstage at Lollapalooza in 2023 in Chicago. Michael Hickey / Getty Images for ABA

Other young artists have also joined the movement. Last year, for the first time, solar panels fueled the batteries behind festivals in the world of country music (Tyler Childers’ Healing Appalachia) and hip-hop (Tyler, the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw). And concert promoters continue to step up to meet artist and fan demand. In 2022, Live Nation invested in Turn Systems, purveyor of a leading reusable cup setup; earlier this month, AEG hosted its first solar-backed battery-powered festival.

“As touring infrastructure becomes normalized where we don’t have to go out of our way to bring along our reusables and compostables, it’s just part of what’s happening at those venues,” said Gardner. “If that becomes the new normal, then there’s massive savings there, both with carbon and with dollars.”

On a bright Monday morning, I was walking through Central Park with AJR’s Met — discussing the future of green touring — when, appropriately, we happened upon the seasonal amphitheater at Rumsey Playfield. Perched on a hill overlooking Bethesda Fountain, it has hosted acts ranging from Pitbull to the Barenaked Ladies. The venue is largely constructed with repurposed shipping containers.

“So the infrastructure itself is already reused, which is great,” said Met, who then wondered aloud how this sort of space could be used during the venue’s downtime — perhaps as a seasonal solar farm. “There are all of these different ways to think about how to use the venue itself as a producer for sustainability initiatives.”

For Met, though, what’s even more powerful is the collective ability of fans to mobilize around the causes championed by their favorite artists. That’s the focus of his new book, Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connectivity to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World.

He believes that, with a little encouragement, audiences can be particularly potent around local causes. For example, during last summer’s AJR tour stop in Phoenix — where temperatures reached 109 degrees — thousands of fans signed petitions to FEMA asking the agency to designate extreme heat as a type of emergency, thereby unlocking additional funds for response. In Salt Lake City, concertgoers phone-banked around increasing the Great Salt Lake’s water levels because of the economic benefits it provides to seven different states; Met noted that each state later voted for progressive climate policies, even the ones that went for Trump.

This sort of activity might strike some as preachy, but it turns out most fans don’t mind. According to a survey of 350,000 concertgoers organized by Met’s nonprofit, Planet Reimagined, most fans encourageit. A full 70 percent of respondents said they had no problem with musicians publicly addressing climate change; 53 percent believed artists had an obligation to do so.

Perhaps the most important thing an artist can do on the climate front is spotlight the collective carbon footprint of concertgoers — a facet that has more to do with advocating for a greener society than a greener music industry. As part of its Music Decarbonization Project, Reverb recently released its Concert Travel Study, which found the average amount of CO2 emissions generated by the thousands of fans getting to a given show is 38 times larger than that of the typical act — including artist and crew travel, hotel stays, and gear transportation.

That makes sense: 80 percent of fans at the average show arrive in a personal vehicle, usually gasoline-powered. Yet the study also found that fans are hungry for greener ways to attend concerts — 33 percent would prefer to use public transit, but only 9 percent say they can and do.

Rock stars can’t make cities build more subways. But they can work with municipalities to run more routes on show nights, and keep trains and buses open later than usual. They can also team up with businesses like Rally and Uber that can offer deals on group shuttles. That’s something Raitt and her peers never had back in the day.

“I mean, what were you going to do, send postcards to people in the ’90s: ‘Let’s meet up at 8 o’clock and catch a ride to the show?’” said Raitt’s manager, Kane. “The development of technology has been able to allow fans to connect into a community, and artists to connect to their fans, in more real time.”

Music — and the special energy and sense of community that forms around a concert — has a unique power, whether that’s starting fashion trends or catalyzing social change. It shouldn’t be a stretch for acts to inspire fans to choose more sustainable options, especially if artists and venues do the work to make those options more accessible.

At its best, live music can be a launching pad for all sorts of climate-friendly ideas — from the plant-based concessions championed by Eilish to the kinetic dance floors pushed by Coldplay — making them not only available, but desirable to the broader public.

In the meantime, back at Jones Beach, as Dave Matthews winds down his set, thousands of cars sit in the parking lot beyond the grandstand, dimly illuminated by a strawberry moon rising over the ocean. While many fans will be leaving with new reusable water bottles, they’ll still have to burn dinosaur bones to get home. But the singer offers a message of hope.

“The world is a little bit crazy at the moment,” Matthews tells the crowd. “We should take care of each other a little bit more.”

One Nalgene at a time.

***Correction:***This story originally misstated the partners involved in the RockNRefill program.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How musicians and concert venues are upping the tempo on climate action on Jul 25, 2025.

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The massive budget bill that President Trump signed into law earlier this month took aim at a robust system of tax credits that have aided the explosion of U.S. wind and solar energy in recent years. While the move was primarily intended to help enable the law’s extension of tax breaks for high-earning Americans, some Republicans felt the law did not go far enough in discouraging the growth of wind and solar power. Those holdouts, however, voted for the bill after saying they’d received assurances from President Trump that he’d use his executive authority to further stymie the energy sources.

“We believe we’re going to get 90-plus percent of all future projects terminated,” U.S. Representative Chip Roy of Texas told Politico after the bill passed. “And we talked to lawyers in the administration.”

Last week, Trump’s Department of the Interior announced what appeared to be a fulfillment of the president’s promise to his party’s right wing. The department’s new guidelines for wind and solar developers now require all federal approvals for clean energy projects to undergo “elevated review” by Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, who was appointed by President Trump in January.

The new guidelines include a granular outline of steps that will now require personal approval from Bergum’s office, rather than being delegated to department bureaucrats as had previously been customary. Experts who spoke to Grist say that this could create an unmanageable slowdown for developers and allow the administration to quietly kill wind and solar projects on public land. Some are even worried that the effect of the updated regulations will spill over into private projects, which sometimes have to consult with the Interior Department when their work bleeds into federal lands or a habitat for endangered species.

Since only 4 percent of existing renewable energy projects are on public land, clean industry insiders who have interpreted the new policy narrowly are not yet panicking. But those with a broader interpretation of the text — or those who suspect that the administration will take a broad interpretation — wonder if the new rules will amount to a de facto gag order on the industry. For now, only time will tell just how many of their fears come to pass.

Much of the memo’s power to wreak havoc for renewables depends on how strictly it’s enforced. The Interior Department maintains a website called Information for Planning and Consultation, or IPaC, which developers often use to plan large-scale projects. You type in the name of a locale, draw a border around the general area of your proposed project, and IPaC will tell you what kind of federal permitting you might need to move forward. (For example, it would flag if there are any protected wetlands or endangered species that would be affected by your development.) As of last week, the website now displays a pop-up warning users that “solar and wind projects are currently not eligible to utilize the Information for Planning and Consultation website.” This kind of opacity could make it especially hard for developers to plan for an endless bureaucratic battle with Interior.

“It’s one thing to take away our [tax] credits, but it’s another to basically just put impediments so projects can’t get built,” a source who works for a renewables developer told E&E News. (He was granted anonymity due to his ongoing professional engagement with the federal government.) “The level of review here is so ridiculous.”

Others say that, while the outlook for wind and solar has become much dimmer, the new Interior rules aren’t necessarily a kill shot. “I was personally very worried when I saw it come out,” said Jason Kaminsky, CEO of kWh Analytics, a solar risk management firm. “But after doing more reading, it does seem like it affects, hopefully, a minority of assets.”

An internal report from the investment bank and research firm Roth Capital Partners, which was obtained by Grist, estimated that only 5 percent of projects on private land — specifically, those that require an easement or need to cross public land to connect a transmission line to the main electrical grid — would be affected by the new regulations.

“If [projects are on] a private piece of land, that’s a totally different story that would not be impacted by this,” said Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “There’s plenty of projects that are going to go ahead.”

Others warn that it will be hard to know anything for certain until the dust clears and the permitting process begins to play out. “Just how broad and wide-scoped the activities listed in the memo were, points towards an attempt to quash [private] projects, not just the ones on federal land,” said Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at the clean energy think tank Energy Innovations, noting that developers often end up consulting the Interior Department on issues like wildlife protection.

Regardless of the scope of the memo, any move with the potential to slow the deployment of renewables is almost certainly bad news for American energy, since most other sources of new electricity simply aren’t being built: 93 percent of new energy that came online in 2024 was renewable. But upon taking office, President Trump warned that the United States was reliant on a “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” and immediately set about revoking previously approved federal funding from green energy projects, trying to cancel offshore wind leases, and rescinding clean energy tax credits that had been expanded by his predecessor. How this will lead the nation toward the current administration’s promise of “energy dominance” is unclear.

“You don’t have enough [electricity] supply to meet new demand,” said O’Brien. “Instead of new capacity coming online — cheap renewables — you have existing gas plants running longer, and so gas demand goes up and prices go up, both for power plants and for household consumers. … All signs point toward this being a bad, bad scenario.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will new Interior Department rules shackle wind and solar? Insiders are divided. on Jul 25, 2025.

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From Grist via this RSS feed

In the first six months of the second Trump administration, some 60,000 federal workers have been targeted for layoffs, even more have taken buyouts, and up to trillions of dollars in funding has been frozen or halted. Many more people could still be facing cuts under additional planned reductions.

President Donald Trump has explicitly targeted climate- and justice-related programs and funding, but the resulting cuts have gone deep into services communities rely on to survive, like food aid in rural areas or improvements to failing wastewater infrastructure. Farmers have lost grants and support that help keep them going through increasingly volatile weather. Even your favorite YouTube creators may be affected.

We asked those who have lost their federal jobs or funding to tell us about what’s being lost: What was their work providing to communities, and what happens now?

Their stories, reflecting just a small sample of the many people who’ve been affected, illuminate  how deep these cuts go, not only into programs explicitly working to reduce emissions, but also into those keeping us safe, healthy, fed, and informed.

Have you been impacted, or know someone who has? We want to hear about it. Message us on Signal at 206-876-3147 or share your story using this form. (Learn more about how to reach us and how we will use your information.)

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Disaster recovery

“It offered housing, your food was paid for. I didn’t really have to worry about how I would survive.”

Rachel Suber, former FEMA Corps member | Pennsylvania

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Since January, Rachel Suber had been a member of FEMA Corps, a specialized program of AmeriCorps, the federal national service program, which deploys volunteers to disaster zones to aid in recovery. She’d been assigned to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to help those affected by Hurricane Debby, a tropical cyclone that flooded parts of the Northeast last summer.

As a corps volunteer with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Suber would go into the field to survey damage and help people access federal assistance funding. Back at the office, she would log data about what had been done at site inspections, where the worst damage was, and who had yet to receive assistance.

In April, Suber got the news that her program — and all of AmeriCorps — was being terminated. “We will be demobilized immediately,” she remembers her boss saying. “I’m going to miss you all.” One hundred and thirty FEMA Corps members and some 32,000 AmeriCorps volunteers were out of work.

Suber and her cohort were aware of the changes Trump was making to FEMA and other federal agencies, but the funding for her program was allocated for the year. No one had thought the new administration could take it away.

So far, FEMA’s work in the region continues. But without help from the corps members, Suber said, more work will be put on program managers, slowing the process of getting aid to those who need it.

For Suber, it’s also the end of her path to a career and a way out of rural Pennsylvania, where jobs are scarce. “It offered housing, your food was paid for. I didn’t really have to worry about how I would survive.” With the cancellation of the program, less than four months into what should have been a 10-month assignment, Suber’s dreams of working for FEMA have faded.

— Zoya Teirstein

Health and safety

“People felt like their concerns were real and that they deserved better.”

Caroline Frischmon, graduate research assistant | Mississippi

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Caroline Frischmon had been selected to receive a $1.25 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to study air pollution in two Louisiana towns and Cherokee Forest, a subdivision in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The neighborhood, which is near a Chevron refinery, a Superfund site, and a liquefied natural gas terminal, has more than three times the amount of cancer risk the EPA deems acceptable.

The funding was part of EPA’s Science to Achieve Results, or STAR, an initiative that has awarded more than 4,100 grants nationwide since 1995 to support high-quality environmental and public health research. In April, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin ordered the termination of STAR and other research grants, including some $124 million in funds that had already been promised. Frischmon’s funding evaporated overnight.

As a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Frischmon had set up low-cost air monitors in Cherokee Forest and identified a recurring pattern of short-lived, intense pollution episodes that correlated with resident complaints of burning eyes, sore throats, vomiting, and nausea. The state air quality monitors were capturing average pollution levels but missed short-term spikes that were just as consequential to human health.

“The validation has really led to an activation in the community,” said Frischmon. “People felt like their concerns were real and that they deserved better.”

The $1.25 million EPA grant would have funded a multiyear air quality study and Frischmon’s postdoctoral position at the university. She is now job hunting and searching for smaller grants, but she isn’t optimistic she will find funding on the scale of the EPA grant. For the community, she said, it feels like an abrupt end to tangible progress toward solving their health crisis. “So there’s a lot of sadness over losing that momentum.”

— Naveena Sadasivam

Food access

“Agricultural producers are already living on the fringes of income.”

Matthew O’Malley, agricultural engineer with the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service | Colorado

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As an agricultural engineer with the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, Matthew O’Malley’s job was helping farmers and ranchers in northeastern Colorado implement more efficient infrastructure to deal with growing water scarcity. On any given day, that could involve anything from building an irrigation system that cuts down on the amount of water released to feed thirsty crops to designing a retention basin to store excess water produced during rainy periods for use during drier ones.

In February, O’Malley was abruptly fired from his position in a wave of mass layoffs by the Trump administration. By the end of the following month, he’d be invited back to work, temporarily, after a federal court ruled the thousands of laid-off government workers must be reinstated. O’Malley instead elected to take the deferred resignation he was subsequently offered, wary of the volatility. Until September 30, he will remain a federal employee on paper.

Before the mass government firings hit the NRCS offices in northeast Colorado, there were a total of four staffers, O’Malley included, serving as agricultural engineers in the region. Half took the deferred resignation.

“The planning stopped for the projects I was designing overnight,” said O’Malley. “I’m more concerned for the smaller agricultural producers, rather than myself, for the agency. They’re the ones that rely on USDA programs to help them make it through years when there’s crop failure.”

Because of the economic landscape, escalating extreme weather risk, and intensifying water scarcity, farmers’ need for support in the region is at a level O’Malley has never before seen. “Agricultural producers are already living on the fringes of income,” he said. “Helping these producers protect the resources that they have, and allowing them to better utilize them, ultimately helps everyone. We all need to eat.”

— Ayurella Horn-Muller

Photo credit: Courtesy Matthew O’Malley

Health and safety

“The funding just stopped. I’m stuck with this valuable data that not a lot of people have.”

Edgar Villaseñor, advocacy campaign manager for the Rio Grande International Study Center | Texas

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Residents of Laredo, Texas, like people in cities all over the world, endure a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, whereby roads, sidewalks, and buildings trap heat. For Laredo, this phenomenon only exacerbates already ferocious heat, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods that tend to have fewer trees and green spaces.

Last summer, to better understand how heat affects Laredo’s 260,000 residents, the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and enlisted more than 100 volunteers to drive around the city taking temperature readings. Edgar Villaseñor, the center’s advocacy campaign manager, then worked with a company called CAPA Strategies to create a map of heat throughout the city.

Villaseñor wanted more detailed data and an enhanced, interactive map that would not only be easier for residents to navigate, but also help the city council plan interventions, like installing more shade for people waiting at bus stops. He applied for a $10,000 grant through NOAA’s Center for Heat Resilient Communities, which was funded through the Inflation Reduction Act.

The center had planned to work with a range of communities for a year to craft targeted heat action plans, and then to create guides that would help cities around the U.S. build their own heat strategies.

The research center was ready to announce in May that Villaseñor’s nonprofit, along with 14 city governments, had been selected. But the day before the announcement, NOAA instead sent notices that it was defunding the center. “The funding just stopped,” Villaseñor said. “I’m stuck with this valuable data that not a lot of people have.”

Villaseñor said his work won’t stop, even though that $10,000 grant would have gone a long way. “I’m still trying to see what I can do without funding.”

Read more: Funding to protect American cities from extreme heat just evaporated

— Matt Simon

Historical preservation

“You have to make sure you’re not destroying any wetlands, not affecting air pollution … not harming any historical or cultural material.”

Name withheld, National Park Service archaeologist | East Coast

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Archaeology might not be the first profession that comes to mind when you think of the National Park Service. But the federal agency, housed under the Interior Department, needs a whole lot of them — to examine historical artifacts, to oversee excavations, to ensure that on-site construction projects comply with preservation laws.

One federal archaeologist, who asked that their name be withheld for security, worked at a historic East Coast park, combing through a “very long backlog” of 19th-century farm equipment and deciding which samples should be preserved. Storage space is a “very serious problem in archaeology,” they said, and the park service generally lacks the funding to make more room.

The other part of their job was about compliance, ensuring that proposed developments — whether a new water line or a building renovation — adhered to federal laws on environmental and historical impacts. “You have to make sure you’re not destroying any wetlands, not affecting air pollution … not harming any historical or cultural material,” they said.

This worker had been at their post, which was supported by funding via the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, for national parks, just over a year when Trump froze IRA spending. They found out in February that their funding was no longer available, but held on a few more weeks, thanks to extra funds cobbled together by their supervisor. By the time a federal judge ordered the IRA money unfrozen, they had already accepted another archaeology job. With all the funding uncertainty — compounded by layoffs and buyouts that have reduced park service staff by 24 percent since the beginning of the year — they said the vacancy they left is unlikely to be filled.

Without archaeologists, the worker said, simple maintenance projects could be stalled or improperly managed. “They will either not be able to do that or they will do the projects without compliance and destroy very important sites to our shared history.”

— Joseph Winters

Public information

“The team was part of a nationwide push to build trust with communities so that we could better understand what they needed so that the government could serve communities better.”

Amelia Hertzberg, environmental protection specialist at the EPA | Virginia

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When EPA employees engage with communities affected by an environmental disaster, they often face angry and distrustful crowds. These communities are often the ones that have been historically neglected by the federal government, and residents may be dealing with serious health problems. Amelia Hertzberg was training staff to stay calm and engage productively in those situations.

Hertzberg began working at the EPA in 2022, first as a research fellow and then as a full-time employee in the community engagement department within the environmental justice office. She initially helped communicate the risk that ethylene oxide, a toxic chemical used in sterilization, poses to communities. Then, as the EPA ramped up its efforts to work with historically disadvantaged communities during the Biden administration, she began conducting trainings to help staff understand how to work directly with communities facing trauma.

“Again and again, I heard, ‘I don’t know how to deal with people’s emotions,’” recalled Hertzberg. “‘There’s things that I can’t help them with that make me upset, and I don’t know what to do with my feelings of stress or theirs.’ And so I was trying to meet that need.”

In April, the Trump administration announced that it would lay off 280 employees from the EPA’s environmental justice office and reassign an additional 175 people, effectively ending the office altogether. The announcement came after a February notice that placed 170 staff members, including Hertzberg, on administrative leave. Just two of the 11 people on Hertzberg’s community engagement team stayed on, and most of their programs have been canceled. Hertzberg is still on administrative leave.

“The environmental justice office is the EPA’s triage unit,” Hertzberg said. “The team was part of a nationwide push to build trust with communities so that we could better understand what they needed so that the government could serve communities better.”

— Naveena Sadasivam

Disaster recovery

“We were in constant contact with survivors who were very upset.”

Julian Nava-Cortez, former California Emergency Response Corps member | California

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After devastating fires tore through Los Angeles in January, Julian Nava-Cortez traveled from northern California to assist survivors at a disaster recovery center near Altadena, where the Eaton Fire had nearly destroyed the entire neighborhood. People arrived in tears, overwhelmed and angry, he said.

“We were the first faces that they’d see,” said Nava-Cortez, at the time a member of the California Emergency Response Corps, one of two AmeriCorps programs that sent workers to assist in fire recovery. He guided people to the resources they needed to secure emergency housing, navigate insurance claims, and go through the process of debris removal. He sometimes worked 11-hour, emotionally draining shifts, listening to stories of what survivors had lost. “We were in constant contact with survivors who were very upset,” he said. What kept him going, he said, was how grateful people were for his help.

Volunteers like Nava-Cortez have helped 47,000 households affected by the fires, according to California Volunteers, the state service commission under the governor’s office. But in late April, Nava-Cortez and his team at the California Emergency Response Corps were suddenly placed on leave. Another program helping with the recovery in L.A., the California AmeriCorps Disaster Team, also abruptly shut down as a result of cuts to AmeriCorps.

At the end of April, two dozen states, including California, sued the Trump administration over the cuts to AmeriCorps, alleging that DOGE illegally gutted an agency that Congress created and funded. In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the cuts in those jurisdictions.

The nonprofit that sponsored Nava-Cortez and his fellow AmeriCorps members offered them temporary jobs 30 days after they were put on leave, though many had already found other work. Nava-Cortez took the offer and worked for another month before the money ran out, but was unable to finish his term, which was supposed to go through the end of July. Since then, he’s been on unemployment, unable to find work ahead of moving to San Jose for school this fall.

Read more: After disasters, AmeriCorps was everywhere. What happens when it’s gone?

– Kate Yoder

Public information

“There might just be one day you log onto YouTube and none of your favorite creators are there anymore.”

Emily Graslie, creator of The Brain Scoop YouTube channel | Illinois

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Emily Graslie creates YouTube videos explaining all kinds of scientific research in fun, easy-to-understand ways. On her channel, The Brain Scoop, she’s covered topics ranging from fossils to rats, often partnering with libraries or museums to tell the story of their work.

Her next project was going to be with the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, creating videos for The Brain Scoop explaining some of the organization’s groundbreaking medical research. She’d spent a year developing the series with her NIH partners and was supposed to be on campus at the NIH in January of this year to begin shooting. Instead, she received an email telling her that the project was on hold until further notice.

The acting Health and Human Services secretary had issued a memo within the first days of the Trump administration halting nearly all external communications. “Because I’m considered a member of the media, I was unable to communicate with these people I had been partnering with for over a year,” she said.

Through an informal meeting with one of her collaborators, she learned that the project was effectively canceled — and with it, money Graslie had been counting on for her livelihood, a slate of planned videos, and what she saw as important work educating viewers about lifesaving science.

Many people may not realize, Graslie said, that the federal funding that supports scientific research and programming at museums also often covered contracts with independent creators like herself, to help communicate the work to the public.

“One of the most significant things that The Brain Scoop did is just share the different kinds of work that happens at nature centers and museums across the country,” she said. The loss is “just a limiting of people’s understandings of what they’re capable of, who they want to be when they grow up, how they see the world around them.”

Read more: Even your favorite YouTube creators are feeling the effects of federal cuts

— Claire Elise Thompson

Photo credit: Julie Florio

Education

“It’s a huge loss for the 1,000 students that we work with.”

Sky Hawk Bressette, former restoration educator for the city of Bellingham’s Parks and Recreation Department | Washington

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For three years, Sky Hawk Bressette served as a restoration educator in the parks department in Bellingham, Washington. With a fellow member of the Washington Service Corps, he worked with the school district to teach nearly every fifth grader in the city about native plants.

Their free lessons — aligned with state science standards — showed kids how to identify plants, spot invasive species, and understand the role of native flora in the local ecosystem. They also hosted “mini-work parties,” where students got their hands dirty pulling weeds and planting native trees and shrubs, learning how to care for the land around them. “All of our teachers that we work with absolutely love what we do,” Bressette said.

But that work is now on hold — possibly for good — after federal cuts to AmeriCorps funding. In late April, Bressette received notice that he was being put on unpaid leave, effective immediately. “It’s weird, it’s sad, it’s scary,” he said. “I really do love what I do.” After a judge struck down the cuts in June, he briefly returned to work until his term ended in July. By then, he had already missed the end of the school year, the busiest time for working with students.

Outside the classroom, Bressette helped organize volunteer work parties that planted thousands of trees and hauled dump trucks’ worth of invasive species out of local parks in Bellingham. But with no guarantee for future funding, the city is eliminating Bressette and his colleague’s positions. That means that the environmental education lessons are likely shut down for at least the next year, Bressette said, while the city weighs whether to bring them back.

“It’s a huge loss for the 1,000 students that we work with in our city alone,” he said.

— Kate Yoder

Photo credit: Allison Greener Grant

Disaster recovery

“I lost my job from the fire and here again from this political climate.”

Ryanda Sarraude, former office administrator at Roots Reborn | Hawai‘i

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In the summer of 2023, Ryanda Sarraude was working as an account manager at a human resources company serving local businesses in West Maui. When massive wildfires shut down tourism and contaminated the water in her neighborhood, Sarraude was forced to move out of her house and her company laid her off because so many local businesses had shut down.

Months later, a job opened up at Roots Reborn, a nonprofit organization serving recent immigrants on Maui, and Sarraude was hired as an office administrator. The role was funded by a federal program aimed at helping disaster survivors get back on their feet.

Lāhainā is home to many immigrant communities from the Philippines, Latin America, and the Pacific islands. Many families who didn’t have bank accounts had hidden cash in their homes that burned down, so the nonprofit launched a financial education workshop. Health issues like depression and asthma shot up in the wake of the fires, so Roots Reborn partnered with Kaiser to help people enroll in health insurance by providing guidance and Spanish interpreters.

“I wanted to help people,” Sarraude said. “It was very rewarding.” Then in February, Sarraude found out the federal funding for her position had evaporated amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on government spending. Sarraude was among 131 Maui workers who lost their jobs almost overnight across 27 different organizations, even though the nonprofit overseeing their program had expected the federal funding to be renewed for several more months. Around 5 p.m. on a Sunday, Sarraude was told not to show up to work the next day.

“I lost my job from the fire and here again from this political climate,” Sarraude said. She scrambled to apply to other gigs and a few weeks later landed a lower-paying role as a web administrator for a local business. She likes her new job, but is relying on Medicaid and food stamps and is nervous about what Republicans’ decision to cut funding for those programs will mean for her access to food and health care.

— Anita Hofschneider

Food access

“We want kids to understand where their food comes from. We want them to be able to have that experience of growing their own food.”

Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted | Wisconsin

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First established some 25 years ago in a historically underserved neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin, that has long struggled with access to healthy food, Mendota Elementary’s garden is now a part of the school’s curriculum — students plant produce, which is shared with local food pantries. Come summer, the garden opens to the surrounding community to harvest crops like garlic, tomatoes, zucchini, collards, and squash.

“They’re mending the soil one week, and then the next week they’re going to start to see these little seedlings pop through the soil,” said Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted, a nonprofit that helps oversee the garden.

In January, the Rooted team applied for a $100,000 two-year grant through the USDA’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School program, intended to provide public schools with locally produced fresh vegetables as well as food and agricultural education, a grant they’d received in past cycles. The program was created in 2010, and Congress allocated $10 million for it this fiscal year.

In March, Rooted received an email announcing the cancellation of this year’s grant program “in alignment with President Donald Trump’s executive order Ending Radical and Wasteful Government and DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

The loss of the funds is “so upsetting,” said Krug, and the reasoning provided, she continued, is “ridiculous.” In prior years, Krug said, “we were being asked ‘What are you doing to address equity? To address diversity? How are you making sure your project is for everyone?’ And now we’re going to be penalized for talking about that.”

The team at Rooted is now working overtime to find other funding sources to continue the work. “We’re not ready to say, without this funding, that we’re going to abandon this program, because we believe so strongly in it,” she said.

Read more: Trump’s latest USDA cuts undermine his plan to ‘Make America Healthy Again’

— Ayurella Horn-Muller

Public information

“It’s our duty to help protect people and have them understand the risks and understand the tools they can use.”

Tom Di Liberto, former public affairs specialist at NOAA | Washington, D.C.

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For Tom Di Liberto, a climate scientist-turned communications specialist, working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fulfilled a dream he had held since elementary school. It was also, he believed, fulfilling an essential function for the American people.

“I was incredibly proud of being able to work with different communities to help them understand the resources that NOAA has, so they can properly use them in the decisions that they make,” he said. That included working with doctors to help them make better use of the agency’s climate and weather data to understand the shifting probabilities of various medical diagnoses, and reaching out to faith communities to discuss how they could use their gathering spaces to help residents weather extreme heat and other impacts.

“Those sorts of activities are all done now,” Di Liberto said.

He lost his job at NOAA on February 27, along with hundreds of his colleagues targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency. By court order, he was rehired in March, but then fired once again in April, he said, when the judge let that order expire. Di Liberto is now working as a media director for the nonprofit Climate Central.

These workforce reductions have hampered the agency’s research capacity, as well as its ability to share that critical research with the public, Di Liberto said.

“I think people don’t know that NOAA is beyond just your weather forecast — that NOAA works directly with communities to help build resilience plans for extremes,” he said, adding that, under the new Trump administration, the bulk of that community work “is either threatened or come to a screeching halt.”

One of the communication projects he was proudest of was launching NOAA’s first animated series — a creative tool to teach climate and weather science to kids. “I have all the episodes downloaded personally on my computer — so if they ever take it down, they’ll go right back up,” he said.

— Claire Elise Thompson

Food access

“This was for important work, representing small- and medium-sized farms, and also trying to leverage the food economy to go faster and further.”

Anthony Myint, cofounder of Zero Foodprint | Oregon

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Anthony Myint’s nonprofit, Zero Foodprint, works across the public and private sectors, sourcing and awarding grants that incentivize the adoption of better farming practices. His goal is to support farmers who are working to build healthier soil, which increases the food system’s resilience to supply chain shocks, improves water quality, and stores carbon.

A chef-turned-entrepeneur, Myint founded the nonprofit after seeing firsthand how important farming practices are to ensuring a more sustainable planet.

In April, Myint learned that a $35 million USDA grant his team was a subawardee on had been suddenly canceled. The nonprofit had been awarded roughly $7 million in 2023 as part of a five-year program to help hundreds of farmers and agricultural projects across the country implement production techniques to improve soil quality and crop resilience.

Myint’s team had been helping award and distribute the funding to roughly 400 projects, like a group of almond producers in California’s Central Valley working to establish composting and nutrient management practices. By the time the project was terminated, only about $800,000 had been awarded to around 50 projects. “We were ramping up to the bulk of work this spring,” said Myint.

The loss of the funding left “a really big gap.” “We’re using reserves and philanthropy and other things to maintain and sort of shift our growth onto that new available capacity instead of hiring,” said Myint. “We’re essentially frozen.”

Myint saw the USDA funds as a vital — and successful — incentive to move farms and companies to more sustainable practices. “This was for important work, representing small- and medium-sized farms, and also trying to leverage the food economy to go faster and further … and every single project was negatively impacted.”

— Ayurella Horn-Muller

Data and research

“It’s just about having the info that policymakers need to make decisions. Without it, we’re flying blind.”

Shane Coffield, former science and technology policy fellow at AAAS | Washington, D.C.

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Every year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, places roughly 150 fellows at various federal agencies. Established in 1973, the Science and Technology Policy Fellowships program provides a pipeline for scientists to enter public service.

Shane Coffield was one of six fellows placed at the EPA last September. As a researcher with a doctorate in Earth system science, Coffield specializes in various remote sensing techniques and was tasked with working on the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, an annual accounting of the country’s emissions, which provides a baseline for climate policy and has been published since the early 1990s. The U.S. is also obligated to provide the emissions data every year to a United Nations body that oversees international climate negotiations.

In April, the agency missed a deadline to release the data, even though Coffield and others at the EPA had finished the report. That month, the agency also terminated its agreement with AAAS that allowed Coffield and five other fellows to work there, four months before their positions were due to end. This year’s report was never officially released, although the information was made public through a FOIA request. It’s unclear if the agency will produce the inventory in 2026.

The greenhouse gas inventory is “policy agnostic,” said Coffield. “It’s just about having the info that policymakers need to make decisions. Without it, we’re flying blind.”

During his time at the agency, Coffield also helped other countries such as El Salvador and South Africa build their own greenhouse gas inventories. When the Trump administration instructed staff to drop all foreign aid work in late January, Coffield could not engage with his international counterparts anymore.

— Naveena Sadasivam

Photo credit: Courtesy Shane Coffield

Education

“There’s a huge need to increase climate literacy, even here in NYC, and now there will be fewer opportunities for it.”

Rafi Santo, principal researcher at Telos Learning | New York

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Last year, Rafi Santo helped launch an education project that aimed to connect young people from climate-impacted communities with scientists and artists to co-create interactive public exhibits. The program — a collaboration between Pratt Institute, Beam Center, and Santo’s organization, Telos Learning — was funded by a National Science Foundation grant focused on bringing STEM learning to new settings and audiences.

“We have an incredible need to both have the general public understand the mechanisms behind climate change, but also understand what they can do about it,” Santo said. The pop-up exhibits would aim to build climate literacy and awareness of local adaptation efforts in New York.

Santo, who studies educational frameworks, also wanted to research the significance of giving young people a seat at the table — “helping to better understand how those most affected by the crisis can be meaningfully contributing to its response.”

The group received around 400 applications. But on April 25, the day they planned to send acceptance letters, they instead found out that their grant had been terminated. The National Science Foundation had announced that it was terminating awards “that are not aligned with program goals or agency priorities.” Hundreds of research grants were canceled.

Santo’s program was specifically focused on young people in communities of color, which “probably made an easy keyword search for them,” he said.

It was devastating to see so much passion and so many stories that now won’t get to be shared, Santo said, as well as the loss to the public of the opportunity to engage with climate topics in new ways. For him personally, this would also have been his first climate research initiative — something he had wanted to pursue professionally ever since he experienced a devastating heat wave in 2021. “It feels especially heartbreaking,” he said. “I now don’t know how I might contribute or what kind of projects I might do that can contribute to this work.”

— Claire Elise Thompson

Waste and recycling

“Composting, for me, is a lot about community.”

Ella Kilpatrick Kotner, compost program director at Groundwork RI | Rhode Island

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“Composting, for me, is a lot about community,” said Ella Kilpatrick Kotner, who leads a composting program at Groundwork RI, a nonprofit in Providence, Rhode Island, “and treating this thing that many people think of as a waste as a resource to be cherished and handled with care and turned into something beautiful that we can then reuse to grow more food.”

Every day, her team of three bikes through the city, collecting food scraps from hundreds of households. Back at a community garden, they mix it all with dry leaves and wood shavings, while sifting out pieces of plastic and even the occasional fork, transforming the waste into a nitrogen-rich conditioner for the soil. That compost is available to those enrolled in Groundwork RI’s subscription service to use in home gardens, yards, or urban farms.

In December, Groundwork RI was one of nine organizations included in an $18.7 million grant awarded to the Rhode Island Food Policy Council through the Community Change Grants Program, a congressionally authorized program to support community-based organizations addressing environmental justice challenges.

A portion of the three-year funding was intended to help Groundwork RI expand its collection service to neighboring cities, build a bigger compost hub, renovate its greenhouse and pay-what-you-can farm stand, and add composting bin systems to more local community gardens. It also would have made it possible for Kilpatrick Kotner’s team to launch a free food-scrap collection pilot with the city.

During Trump’s first term, his administration committed to ambitious food waste reduction goals. This time, after months of uncertainty, the partners involved in the Rhode Island food-waste project learned in May that their grant was terminated. The EPA’s official notice, shared with Grist, informed the grantees that their project was “no longer consistent” with the federal agency’s funding priorities and therefore nullified “effective immediately.”

Read more: An $18M grant would have drastically reduced food waste. Then the EPA cut it.

– Ayurella Horn-Muller

Photo credit: Charlotte Canner / Groundwork RI

Health and safety

“We have wastewater infrastructure that is old. It’s critical that we do the work to replace this.”

Sheryl Sealy, assistant city manager for Thomasville | Georgia

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Thomasville, Georgia, has a water problem. Its treatment system is far out of date, posing serious health and environmental risks — not just the risk of sewage overflowing into homes and waterways, but resulting respiratory issues as well.

“We have wastewater infrastructure that is old,” said Sheryl Sealy, the assistant city manager for this city of 18,881 near the Florida border. “It’s critical that we do the work to replace this.”

Earlier this year, Thomasville and its partners were awarded a nearly $20 million Community Change grant from the EPA to make the long-overdue wastewater improvements, build a resilience hub and health clinic, and upgrade homes in several historic neighborhoods.

“The grant itself was really a godsend for us,” Sealy said.

Thomasville has a history of heavy industry that has led to high risks from toxic air pollution, and the city qualified for the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, which prioritized funding for disadvantaged communities.

In early April, as the EPA canceled grants for similar projects across the country, federal officials assured Thomasville that its funding was on track. Then, on May 1, the city received a termination notice. “We felt, you know, a little taken off guard when the bottom did let out for us,” said Sealy.

Under the Trump administration, the EPA has canceled or interrupted hundreds of grants aimed at improving health and severe weather preparedness because the agency “determined that the grant applications no longer support administration priorities,” according to an emailed statement to Grist.

Thomasville, along with other cities that have had grants terminated, is appealing the decision.

Read more: Trump cuts hundreds of EPA grants, leaving cities on the hook for climate resiliency

— Emily Jones

Disaster recovery

“I come home and I’m exhausted and I’ve got cat poop all over me, but it was just such a rewarding feeling.”

Susan Caballero, former humanitarian at the Maui Humane Society | Hawai‘i

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Susan Caballero wasn’t living in Lāhainā the day that the West Maui town burned down on August 8, 2023. But the devastating wildfire brought the island’s tourism industry to a screeching halt. A day later, Caballero was laid off from her job as a salesperson at a boutique handicrafts store 45 minutes away.

Within months, federal funding to help wildfire survivors poured in and the Biden administration released a federal grant specifically to help displaced workers. It was through that funding that Caballero got hired at the Maui Humane Society. Her job was caring for cats: feeding them, giving them medicine, persuading families to adopt them.

There are 40,000 stray cats on Maui that need homes, about one cat for every four people living on the island. Residents often abandon their cats because there’s so little pet-friendly housing. It’s a massive challenge with terrible environmental consequences: Parasites in feral cat poop contaminate the ocean, killing endangered monk seals. Caballero felt proud using her sales skills to persuade families to take the creatures home, once successfully adopting out a 20-year-old feline.

“It’s just an amazing feeling, I come home and I’m exhausted and I’ve got cat poop all over me, but it was just such a rewarding feeling,” Caballero said.

In February, Caballero was hospitalized after a moped accident. She was lying in her hospital bed when she learned that she was out of a job. The state of Hawaiʻi had expected the federal grant supporting her position and 130 others to be renewed at least through September, but in February the state learned that, at best, the new administration would only offer half of what had been requested. Confronted with uncertain funding, the state shut down the program.

“I was only making $23 an hour. I’m 58 years old,” she said. “I have to laugh because that’s all I can do and that hurts.”

Five months later, she’s still physically recovering and isn’t sure what’s next. Her rent just went up to $1,582 per month, and her disability check will no longer cover it.

— Anita Hofschneider

Food access

“This is a blow to our entire food system.”

Robbi Mixon, executive director of the Alaska Food Policy Council | Alaska

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Three years ago, the Alaska Food Policy Council, or AFPC, partnered with a handful of other food and farming groups to apply for the Regional Food Business Center program — a new initiative launched by the Biden administration to expand and build localized food supply chains. In May 2023, it was selected by the USDA as a sub-awardee to help create one of 12 national centers established through the initiative, leading the Alaska arm of the Islands and Remote Areas Regional Food Business Center.

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Zoe Jonick didn’t think she was asking for much when she went before the Oakland City Council with what she considered a simple request: Urge the California state Senate to vote yes on a bill requiring the state to study the feasibility of ditching Pacific Gas & Electric and embracing public power.

It didn’t seem unreasonable, given that the nearby cities of San Francisco, Berkeley, and Richmond had done exactly that in recent months. What Jonick, an organizer with the climate organization 350 Bay Area, and others backing the move wanted the city to do was push state lawmakers to support SB 332. The legislation would explore alternatives to investor-owned utilities and introduce safety and equity measures to improve service. “We’re not being prescriptive and saying what exactly a not-for-profit system would look like,” she said.

Yet this proved to be too much for the City Council, even if dozens of residents spoke out against the utility — which employs more than 8,000 people in Oakland — during a tense council meeting last week. The legislation, which also would have urged regulators to link utility executive compensation to power reliability and grid safety, was pulled from the agenda by a procedural maneuver. “It seems like a number of the council members have not had an opportunity to meet with both sides,” said Kevin Jenkins, the council president.

It was the latest setback in a nationwide campaign to replace investor-owned utilities with publicly owned operations. Advocates argue such a move would lead to cheaper, more reliable power and greater say for residents in how electricity is generated. Despite some victories here and there — Winter Park, Florida, and Jefferson County, Washington, have flipped the switch, and some nonprofit utilities, like California’s Sacramento Municipal Utility District, are many decades old — they’re fighting an uphill battle. Voters in Maine rejected switching to public power in 2023, an effort to do so in San Diego stalled amid skepticism from city leaders, and the city council in Ann Arbor, Michigan voted down a feasibility study proposal five months ago.

Those hoping to see Oakland join the fight come from the climate and environmental justice world. People of color comprise about 70 percent of the population, and almost 14 percent of the city’s 438,000 people live at or below the federal poverty line, leaving them burdened by utility debt. Critics of the utility, known locally at PG&E, also say the for-profit model disincentivizes maintenance and upgrades. That lack of upkeep contributed to faulty equipment sparking at least 31 fires, which killed 113 people, between 2017 and 2022.

Oakland council member Carol Fife sponsored the measure in support of Senate Bill 332, the Investor-Owned Utilities Accountability Act. Beyond calling for a feasibility study, the legislation caps rate hikes, prevents disconnections for vulnerable customers, and mandates periodic equipment audits and replacement. California’s utility bills are the second-priciest in the nation, and Fife said people in her district have experienced six rate hikes and frequent cutoffs in the past year — even as PG&E’s CEO earned $17 million.

“When I’m hearing that one ZIP code in my district in West Oakland has double-digit shutoffs for energy costs, I get concerned,” Fife said. “There are several neighborhoods in Oakland where at least 10 percent of the population has had their power cut off and remains without access to power.”

Critics say public power doesn’t necessarily mean cleaner power: Nebraska, the only state served entirely by a public utility, gets most of its electricity from coal. They also argue that the process of transforming a large utility system into a nonprofit would be time-intensive and expensive, and that they could cost electrical workers their jobs. But those weren’t the primary concerns constituents brought to Fife in voicing their reservations: She said Oaklanders were afraid that PG&E grant funding to local nonprofits would be cut off.

Read NextUtilities are shutting off power to a growing number of householdsAkielly Hu

The company, which provides power to about 16 million people throughout California, is Oakland’s second-largest employer, and it recently spent $900 million relocating to Oakland. The utility also is a big philanthropic player — it provided nearly 1,000 grants throughout the state totaling $36 million last year, and spent $3.5 million on Oakland nonprofits in particular.  Fife said nonprofit leaders she’s known for “two, three decades” said they supported her resolution but feared losing funding over it. (None of them spoke at the July 15 council meeting.)

“The lobbyists for PG&E were telling people that I specifically was trying to push PG&E out of Oakland, that I would be responsible for a lack of charitable giving to nonprofits in my district and in the city,” she said.

A PG&E representative, in an emailed statement, said the company “did not, and would not, suggest that we would pull our charitable support.”

“We stand ready to continue to listen to the concerns of City Council members and citizens, and we look forward to continuing to work with city officials on tangible efforts to advance energy equity, climate resilience, and public safety.”

The company representative did not comment on SB 332, but the company made the its thoughts clear during a Senate hearing in May: “SB 332 proposes sweeping changes without fully accounting for existing regulatory safeguards or the operational complexities of transforming the state’s energy infrastructure,” a PG&E lobbyist told lawmakers.

PG&E’s response speaks to the vehemence with which investor-owned utilities fight to maintain their hold over energy. When advocates of public power in Maine managed to get a referendum on the ballot, the state’s two dominant utilities spent more than $40 million to oppose it, outspending its advocates 34 to 1 and handily defeating the measure.

Even if Oakland’s resolution is out of play for now, the city’s public-power advocates aren’t done. As SB 332 continues moving through the legislature, “We’re also building this movement from the ground up,” Jonick said. That might look like more community workshops, or more city council resolutions. Above all, it’ll look like neighbors talking to each other. “No matter what, we’re going to be pushing to build community understanding that another way is possible, and we can fight the utility monopolies’ hold on us.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The national fight for public power comes to Oakland on Jul 24, 2025.

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Like so much of an iceberg is hidden underwater, much of a tree is hidden underground. While the trunk and branches and leaves sequester planet-warming carbon dioxide, trees and other plants have long formed subterranean alliances with mycorrhizal fungi, which intertwine with their roots to establish a mutually beneficial trade network. In exchange for helping everything from oaks to redwoods find water and essential nutrients like nitrogen, the fungi get energy, in the form of carbon that their partners have pulled from the atmosphere.

A whole lot of carbon, in fact: Worldwide, some 13 billion tons of CO2 flows from plants to mycorrhizal fungi every year — about a third of humanity’s emissions from fossil fuels — not to mention the CO2 they help trees capture by growing big and strong. Yet when you hear about campaigns to conserve and plant more trees to slow climate change, you don’t hear about the mycorrhizal fungi. Humanity may be missing the forest for the trees, in other words, in part because without going somewhere and digging, it’s hard to tell what mycorrhizal species are associating with what plants in a given ecosystem.

Mycorrhizal fungi in Italy’s Apennine Mountains Seth Carnill

A new research project is trying to change that. The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, has launched the Underground Atlas, an interactive tool that maps mycorrhizal fungi diversity around the world. It’s a resource for scientists and conservationists to better understand where to focus on protecting these species so they can keep sequestering carbon and provide other critical services in ecosystems. “We’ve known for a long time that these mycorrhizal fungi are very important in ecosystems, and that they exist all over the planet and partner with lots of different plants,” said fungal ecologist Michael Van Nuland, lead data scientist at SPUN and lead author of a new paper describing the work in the journal Nature. “But it’s been hard to match that sense of scale with large datasets or large-scale, high-resolution maps.”

To build this atlas, Van Nuland and his colleagues didn’t visit every square foot of vegetation on Earth and take soil samples, because they didn’t have to. Instead, they analyzed the DNA of mycorrhizal fungi samples from 130 countries. Because they knew the conditions where the samples were taken — local temperatures, precipitation, vegetation type, even the pH of the soil — they could teach a computer model to associate those characteristics with different species of fungi. 

SPUN

Now the system could predict what mycorrhizal species should live in a given place, even if scientists haven’t been at that exact spot to collect a sample. In the map above, brighter colors indicate a greater diversity of a group known as ectomycorrhizal fungi, which grow as sheaths around roots. Notice the glowing areas in the far north, which include boreal forests. “It is nice to see that their model recapitulates the patterns that we mostly know to expect of high diversity in those temperate boreal regions,” said fungal ecologist Laura M. Bogar, who studies ectomycorrhizal fungi at the University of California, Davis, but wasn’t involved in the research.

SPUN

The map above inverts that dynamic. It shows the predicted richness of the second group, the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. (You can play with the map here. To toggle between the two groups, hit the button at lower right.) Instead of encasing the roots, these penetrate them. Notice their species richness beyond the boreal forests, especially in the tropics. Interestingly, an arbuscular fungi hot spot isn’t the Amazon rainforest, but the adjacent savanna in Brazil. “When you think where the hottest hot spots on the planet for biodiversity are, most people are going to think about the Amazon rainforest,” Van Nuland said. “But for this type of mycorrhizal fungal group, that’s in the surrounding ecosystem.”

Scientists are still working out what influences the global distribution of ectomycorrhizal and arbuscular fungi. Complicating matters, though, is the fact that the two groups can overlap in the same environments. Bogar, for instance, works in Northern California with Douglas fir trees, which have ectomycorrhizal fungi, and redwoods, which have arbuscular fungi. “Even though to me standing on the ground, they both look like just really tall, beautiful trees that probably have similar ecology,” Bogar said. “From the perspective of a fungus interacting with their roots, they’re profoundly different.”

Scientists taking samples in Tierra del Fuego, Chile Mateo Barrenengoa

Globally, the researchers found that just 9.5 percent of fungal biodiversity hot spots lie within existing protected areas. If an area is deforested to make way for cattle grazing — a particularly acute problem in the Amazon — mycorrhizal fungi lose the partners they need for energy, and the planet loses a powerful symbiosis that naturally draws down carbon into soils. Without a robust population of fungi, nutrients leech out of the system, and soil erosion increases. “There are all these other cascading benefits, beyond just how much carbon physically goes into the bodies of the fungi,” Van Nuland said.

Not only do mycorrhizal fungi have to deal with humans degrading their habitats, but the climate around them is rapidly changing. Van Nuland and his colleagues included historical data in their model, which found that climates that were stable over long periods allowed unique and rare symbioses to evolve between plants and fungi. With the atmosphere now in flux — both with rising temperatures and worsening droughts — those unique symbioses may be at risk, imperiling both plant and mycorrhizal fungus.

Equipped with the atlas, scientists might be able to better prioritize where they venture in the field to study the fungi, Bogar said. Van Nuland, meanwhile, is trying to determine the best way to conserve these essential fungi, especially the biodiversity hot spots popping up on the map. “We don’t know if the same protection strategies work for mycorrhizal fungi like they do for plant and animal biodiversity,” Van Nuland said. “We are actively researching that right now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There’s a surprising climate solution right under your feet on Jul 24, 2025.

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From Texas clear to Georgia, from the Gulf Coast on up to the Canadian border, a mass of dangerous heat has started spreading like an atmospheric plague. In the days and perhaps even weeks ahead, a high-pressure system, known as a heat dome, will drive temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, impacting some 160 million Americans. Extra-high humidity will make that weather even more perilous — while the thermometer may read 100, it might actually feel more like 110.

So what exactly is a heat dome, and why does it last so long? And what gives with all the extra moisture?

A heat dome is a self-reinforcing machine of misery. It’s a system of high-pressure air, which sinks from a few thousand feet up and compresses as it gets closer to the ground. When molecules in the air have less space, they bump into each other and heat up. “I think about it like a mosh pit,” said Shel Winkley, the weather and climate engagement specialist at the research group Climate Central. “Everybody’s moving around and bumping into each other, and it gets hotter.”

But these soaring temperatures aren’t happening on their own with this heat dome. The high pressure also discourages the formation of clouds, which typically need rising air. “There’s going to be very little in the way of cloudiness, so it’ll be a lot of sunshine which, in turn, will warm the atmosphere even more,” said AccuWeather senior meteorologist Tom Kines. “You’re just kind of trapping that hot air over one part of the country.”

In the beginning, a heat dome evaporates moisture in the soil, which provides a bit of cooling. But then, the evaporation will significantly raise humidity. (A major contributor during this month’s heat dome will be the swaths of corn crops across the central U.S., which could help raise humidity in states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana above that of Florida.) This sort of high pressure system also grabs moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, which evaporate more water the hotter they get. And generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere becomes, the more moisture it can hold. Once that moisture in the landscape is all gone, more heat accumulates — and more and more. A heat dome, then, essentially feeds off itself, potentially for weeks, a sort of giant blow drier pointed at the landscape.

On their own, temperatures soaring over 100 are bad enough for human health. Such high humidity makes it even harder for the human body to cool itself, because it’s harder for sweat to evaporate. Hence 100 degrees on the thermometer feeling more like 110. The elderly and very young can’t cool their bodies as efficiently, putting them at higher risk. Those with heart conditions are also vulnerable, because the human body tries to cool itself by pumping more blood. And those with outdoor jobs — construction workers, garbage collectors, delivery drivers on bikes or scooters — have little choice but to toil in the heat, with vanishingly few laws to protect them.

Read NextAfter deadly flash floods, a Texas town takes halting, painful steps toward recoveryNaveena Sadasivam

The humidity effect is especially pronounced in areas whose soils are soaked with recent rainfall, like central Texas, which earlier this month suffered catastrophic flooding. There’s the potential for “compound disasters” here: relief efforts in inundated areas like Kerr County now have to reckon with soaring temperatures as well. The Gulf of Mexico provided the moisture that made the flooding so bad, and now it’s providing additional humidity during the heat dome.

A heat dome gets all the more dangerous the longer it stagnates on the landscape. And unfortunately, climate change is making these sorts of heat waves longer and more intense. According to Climate Central, climate change made this heat dome at least five times more likely. “These temperatures aren’t necessarily impossible, but they’d be very hard to happen without a fingerprint of climate change,” Winkley said.

Summer nights are warming almost twice as fast as summer days, Winkley adds, which makes heat waves all the more dangerous. As this heat dome takes hold, nighttime low temperatures may go up 15 degrees above average. For those without air conditioning — or who can’t afford to run it even if they have AC — their homes will swelter through the night, the time when temperatures are supposed to come down and give respite. Without that, the stress builds and builds, especially for those vulnerable groups.

“When you look at this heat wave, yes, it is going to be uncomfortable during the day,” Winkley said. “But it’s especially those nighttime temperatures that are the big blinking red light that this is a climate change-boosted event.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

Are you affected by the flooding in Texas? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.

Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The science behind the heat dome — ‘a mosh pit’ of molecules on Jul 22, 2025.

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For more than half a century, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development, or ORD, has furnished the EPA with independent research on everything from ozone pollution to pesticides like glyphosate. Last week, after months of speculation and denial, the EPA officially confirmed that it is eliminating its research division and slashing thousands more employees from its payroll in the agency’s quest to cut 23 percent of its workforce. The latest moves add to the nearly 4,000 personnel who have already resigned, retired, or been laid off, according to the agency’s calculations.

The decision came directly on the heels of a Supreme Court order that greenlit the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize and restructure the federal government.

With approximately 1,115 employees — just 7 percent of the EPA’s headcount at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term — the research office has played an outsized role in helping the agency fulfill its legal mandate to use the “best available science” in its mission to protect human health and the environment. ORD science has underpinned many of the EPA’s restrictions on contaminants in air, water, and soil, and formed the basis for regulations on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS or “forever chemicals,” in drinking water, deadly fine particulate matter in air, carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, and chemicals and metals like asbestos and lead.

“Without a research arm, it will be very difficult for EPA to issue new standards for air or water pollutants, toxic chemicals, pesticides, or other hazards,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

ORD, which works with states, local governments, and tribes in addition to its federal work, has six national research programs, each one focused on a different aspect of health and the environment. Research being undertaken at those centers included studying how to safeguard water systems from terrorist attacks, understanding the impacts of extreme weather on human health, and modeling the economic benefits of reducing air pollution.

The EPA said it is moving some of ORD staff into other parts of the EPA, including into its air, water, and chemical offices and a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions within EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s office. The agency said the moves will save taxpayers nearly $750 million, and produce an agency that closely resembles the shrunken version of the agency that existed under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. The aim, the agency said, is to “prioritize research and science more than ever before.”

In an email to Grist, an agency spokesperson called media reports about the disbanding of ORD “biased” and denied that the changes will affect the quality of EPA science. “Friday’s announcement is not an elimination of science and research,” the agency said.

But former EPA employees and environmental advocates say disbanding ORD will both weaken the EPA’s research capabilities and put its scientific independence at risk of political interference.

“Part of the reason why ORD is a separate office is to preserve scientific integrity,” said Chris Frey, an associate dean at North Carolina State University who worked in the office on and off from 1992 to 2024, most recently as its Assistant Administrator under former President Joe Biden. “From a societal perspective, it’s a huge win for the public that those decisions be based on evidence and not just opinions of stakeholders to have a vested interest in an outcome.” The EPA hasn’t said how many ORD scientists will be allowed to continue working at the agency.

Already, the U.S. regulatory system gives chemical companies like 3M and DuPont a large degree of influence over how the chemicals they produce are controlled, a strategy that has been known to fail. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, the EPA has 90 days to assess a chemical’s risks before it hits the market.

The EPA’s decision to dissolve ORD and integrate a portion of its scientists into the agency’s policymaking infrastructure stands to benefit chemical companies and industrial polluters by rubbing away the boundaries between science and politics, science advocates argue. Research conducted at ORD not only grounded new EPA regulations, it also provided the scientific basis for TSCA enforcement.

“There’s lots of ways that ORD speaking truth about impacts of pollutants was inconvenient for regulated industry,” said Gretchen Goldman, president of the nonprofit science advocacy organization the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They’re probably celebrating over this.”

Despite recent wins, industry trade and lobby groups are pushing for even more freedom. Last week, on the same day the EPA announced it was disbanding ORD and a day after the EPA separately exempted dozens of chemical factories and power plants from Biden-era air pollution and emissions rules, the American Chemistry Council’s President and CEO Chris Jahn floated the idea of making changes to the Toxic Substances Control Act in an interview with The Washington Examiner.

“EPA Administrator Zeldin, the White House, Congress are all looking at this right now,” he said, “to potentially make some updates to TSCA to make it work more effectively for the long run.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This EPA research office safeguarded Americans’ health. Trump just eliminated it. on Jul 21, 2025.

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When former Grist fellow Joseph Lee tells people that his family is from Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, they invariably look confused about what it means to be from a popular vacation spot for U.S. presidents and celebrities like Oprah. Their confusion deepens when he explains that he’s Indigenous and a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag nation.

“Their surprise says as much about Martha’s Vineyard as it does about the way this country sees Indigenous people,” Lee writes in his new book, Nothing More of This Land, which was published last week*.* “Very few people ever say it, but I can always feel an unspoken ‘but I thought you were all dead’in those moments.”

Throughout his book, Lee grapples with the question of what it means to be Indigenous. It’s a question intricately connected to climate change, Lee says, because it’s a question directly related to land. On Martha’s Vineyard, Lee’s community has long been saddled with the effects of colonization, which fuels both extreme gentrification and rising sea levels. Lee traces the history of his own tribal nation, reflects on being mixed race and living in diaspora, and envisions potential futures unencumbered by colonial constraints.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. How would you describe the connection between Indigenous identity and climate change?

A. When you talk about Indigenous people, you have to talk about land. And right now, when you’re talking about land in any context, climate change is the looming backdrop. So many of the challenges Indigenous communities are facing may not be outwardly related to climate change, but they’re impacted by climate change. Fighting for water rights, which I would say is a sovereignty fight and a political fight, is made more difficult and the stakes are higher because of drought. Tensions around land ownership and what we do with our land are also made more complicated by climate impacts like rising sea levels and stronger storms that are eating away at our land. If you’re fighting over land and land you’re fighting over is shrinking because sea levels are rising, it makes that fight much more intense and much more urgent. You could look at salmon and the right to protect salmon and for subsistence lifestyles and all that’s becoming more complicated not just because of overfishing but because the way that salmon and other fish are impacted by warming waters and climate change. Any area of the story that you’re looking at, climate change is present.

Q. I also grew up on an island that is a tourism hub, and in so many communities that’s often perceived as the only viable economic driver. Can you talk about what it feels like to be Indigenous in a land that’s become a tourism destination, and how that affects our communities?

A. In this country, one part of the experience of being Indigenous, is the experience of erasure and of being ignored. That’s throughout history, through culture, through politics, through all these spaces. But I think especially in a place like Martha’s Vineyard, it’s even more extreme because the reputation of the place is so big and so specific. Being Indigenous, people are really often not listening to you. The more your land becomes a tourist destination, the harder it is for Indigenous voices to be heard, the harder it is for Indigenous people to hold onto the land.

In a very concrete way, tourism typically drives property values up. It drives taxes up. And that makes it harder for folks to hold on to land that’s been in the family for generations. And that’s what’s happened in Martha’s Vineyard. Beyond that, I think tourism is just a really, really difficult and unfortunate choice that people have been kind of forced into. When so much opportunity has been taken away or denied from Indigenous communities in these places, tourism is often the only thing that’s left. So it can become like a choice between having nothing and contributing to tourism, which is probably ultimately harming the community and the land, but there’s no other way to make a living. So I think that’s just a really unfortunate reality.

Q.There’s a part in the book where you’re talking about how every time you say you’re from Martha’s Vineyard, people either assume you’re really rich or they think, oh, I didn’t realize that people live there. And that really resonated with me because when I say I’m from Saipan or Guam, people either don’t know what it is or they assume, ‘Oh, are you military?’ And then when I say I’m not military, they are confused. This is a long way of asking, what do you want people to know about your community and your tribe in particular, separate from the broader journey of this book? Is there anything that you wish people knew that this book could convey so that other tribal members don’t have to be on the receiving end of that question?

A. First, I hope that this will help to change the narrative of erasure that has existed about Wampanoag people for most of this country’s history. At the very least, I hope this helps people know that we exist — we’re here. And also, I like to think that it helps to show some of the complexity and diversity of my community: that we have disagreements, we have different perspectives, we have different talents, we live in different places.

Something else that your question made me think of was the question of audience. And I thought about that a lot. Even growing up within the tribe, there was so much just about my own community that I didn’t know. And so I try not to be judgmental of what people know, whether they’re Indigenous or not. And that’s how I really wanted to approach the book. I would hope that Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers can get something out of it, both in terms of learning things, but also hopefully seeing themselves in the pages and this exploration of figuring out who we are and where we want our community to go.

Q. Another part that really resonated with me and I think a lot of Indigenous readers will relate to is the struggle of what does it mean to be Indigenous if you aren’t living on your land. I was wondering what you hope Indigenous readers will take away from the book in terms of understanding what distance from their land can mean for their identity.

A. I hope that Indigenous readers will discover what I’ve discovered, which is that there are so many ways to engage with your homelands and your home community, even if you don’t live there. I used to think that I was only engaging if I was there with the tribe doing some cultural tribal event or something, and I realized that there are so many other ways of engaging. I don’t think any of us are less Indigenous because we live somewhere else.

For a long time I felt like if it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t worth it. If it wasn’t the perfect ideal of me participating in the tribe, I thought I shouldn’t do it. Ultimately what that led to is I just wasn’t doing anything because I didn’t have as many opportunities to go to these tribal gatherings or participate in tribal politics. And so I just did nothing and I felt the distance sort of growing over the years. What other people can do is realize that there are all these small ways to engage and to try to embrace those, and not let ideas of what it means to be Indigenous be defined by outsiders, or these big colonial structures like federal recognition, for example, or blood quantum.

Q. Why? What’s at stake? Why do you think it’s important for folks to embrace Indigenous identity and why is it important, particularly at this moment?

A. Circling back to what we talked about at the beginning, we’re not going to be able to address these huge existential crises like climate change if we can’t be at least in some way united as a community, as a people. If we’re always fighting over who belongs and what does it mean to be Indigenous and saying that people are less Indigenous because of XYZ, that takes away our ability to tackle those bigger challenges. Right now we’re facing these serious challenges and that’s what we should be dealing with, so figuring this out is the first step.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rising seas, vanishing voices: An Indigenous story from Martha’s Vineyard on Jul 22, 2025.

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It was 4 a.m. on July 4 at Camp La Junta in Kerr County when Kolton Taylor woke up to the sound of screaming. The 12-year-old boy stepped out of bed and straight into knee-deep floodwaters from the nearby Guadalupe River. Before long, the water had already risen to his waist. In the darkness, he managed to feel for his tennis shoes floating nearby, put them on, and escape to the safety of the hillside. All 400 people at the all-boys camp survived, even as they watched one of their cabins float away in the rushing river. But 5 miles downriver at Camp Mystic, 28 campers and counselors were killed.

The flash flooding in Texas would have been catastrophic at any time of day, but it was especially dangerous because it happened at night. Research shows that more than half of deaths from floods happen after dark, and in the case of flash floods, one study put the number closer to three-quarters. Other hazards are more perilous in the dark, too: Tornadoes that strike between sunset and sunrise are twice as deadly, on average, as those during the day. No one can stop the sun from rising and setting, but experts say there are simple precautions that can save lives when extreme weather strikes at night. As climate change supercharges floods, hurricanes, and fires, it’s becoming even more important to account for the added risks of nocturnal disasters.

Stephen Strader, a hazards geographer at Villanova University, said that at night, it’s not enough to rely on a phone call from a family member or outdoor warning sirens (which Kerr County officials discussed installing, but never did). The safest bet is a NOAA radio, a device that broadcasts official warnings from the nearest National Weather Service office 24/7. One major advantage is that it doesn’t rely on cell service.

“That’s old school technology, but it’s the thing that will wake you up and get you up at 3 a.m.,” said Walker Ashley, an atmospheric scientist and disaster geographer at Northern Illinois University.

Read NextDisaster 101: Your guide to extreme weather preparation, relief, and recoveryLyndsey Gilpin

Even with warning, reacting in the middle of the night isn’t easy. When people are shaken awake, they’re often disoriented, requiring additional time to figure out what’s happening before they can jump into action. “Those precious minutes and seconds are critical a lot of times in these situations for getting to safety,” Strader said.

The darkness itself presents another issue. People tend to look outside for proof that weather warnings match up with their reality, but at night, they often can’t find the confirmation they’re looking for until it’s too late. Some drive their cars into floodwaters, unable to see how deep it is, and get swept away. It’s also harder to evacuate — and try to rescue people — when you can barely see anything. “I invite anybody to just go walk around the woods with a flashlight off, and you find out how difficult it can be,” Ashley said. “Imagine trying to navigate floodwaters or trying to find shelter while you’re in rushing water at night with no flashlight. It’s a nightmare.”

The logic applies to most hazards, but the night problem appears the worst with sudden-onset disasters like tornadoes and earthquakes — and the early-morning flash floods in Texas, where the Guadalupe rose 26 feet in 45 minutes. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, meaning that storms can dump more water more suddenly than they used to.

“We have essentially, because of climate change, put the atmosphere on steroids,” Strader said. It’s on his to-do list to study whether other disasters, like hurricanes and wildfires, are deadlier at night.

When Hurricane Harvey pummeled Texas with rain for days in 2017, people described waking up to water creeping into their homes; the Texas National Guard navigated rescue boats through neighborhoods in the dark, searching for survivors. In recent years, hurricanes have rapidly intensified before making landfall, fueled by warmer ocean waters. That shrinks the window in which forecasters can warn people a strong storm is coming. To compound the problem, at the end of July, the Pentagon plans to stop sharing the government satellite microwave data that helps forecasters track hurricanes overnight, leaving the country vulnerable to what’s called a “sunrise surprise.”

Read NextAfter deadly flash floods, a Texas town takes halting, painful steps toward recoveryNaveena Sadasivam

In the past, nighttime conditions have proved useful for slowing wildfires: Temperatures are cooler and the air has more moisture, reducing the likelihood of fires spreading quickly. But climate change is lessening these beneficial effects. The overall intensity of nighttime fires rose 7 percent worldwide between 2003 and 2020, according to a study in the journal Nature. That means fires are increasingly spreading late at night and early in the morning. It was an ultra-dry January night when the Eaton Fire began tearing through Altadena in Los Angeles County. Some residents were woken up in the predawn hours to smoke already in their homes, strangers pounding on their windows, or sheriff’s deputies and rescue volunteers driving by with loudspeakers.

While daytime tornado deaths have declined over time, nighttime fatalities are on the rise, Strader and Ashley have found in their research. (It’s still unclear as to how climate change affects tornadoes.) They found that tornadoes that touch down at night are statistically more likely to hit someone, simply because there are more potential targets scattered across the landscape. During the day, people are often concentrated in cities and sturdy office buildings versus homes, which may be manufactured and not as structurally resilient to floods or high winds.

Night adds dimensions of danger to many types of disasters, but the darkness isn’t the only factor at play — and it doesn’t have to be as deadly, Ashley said, stressing the importance of getting a weather radio and making a plan in case the worst happens. “Have multiple ways to get information, and your odds of survival are extremely high, even in the most horrific tornado situation.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

*Are you affected by the flooding in Texas? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.**Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.*Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The surprising reasons floods and other disasters are more deadly at night on Jul 21, 2025.

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The country watched in horror as torrential rain drenched Texas earlier this month, sweeping at least 135 people to their death. Kerr County alone lost 107, including more than two dozen children at Camp Mystic.

From afar, it would be easy, even tempting, to think that the floods like these could never happen to you. That the disaster is remote.

It’s not.

As details of the tragedy have come into focus, the list of contributing factors has grown. Sudden downpours, driven by climate change. The lack of a comprehensive warning system to notify people that the Guadalupe river was rising rapidly. Rampant building in areas known to flood, coupled with  incomplete information about what places might be at risk. ’

 These are the same elements that could trigger a Kerr County-type of catastrophe in every state in the country. It’s a reality that has played out numerous times already in recent years, with flooding in Vermont, Kentucky, North Carolina and elsewhere, leaving grief and billions of dollars in destruction in its wake.

“Kerr County is an extreme example of what’s happening everywhere,” said Robert Freudenberg, vice president of energy and environmental programs at the Regional Planning Association. “People are at risk because of it and there’s more that we need to be doing.”

The most obvious problem is we keep building in areas prone to flooding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, produces readily available maps showing high-risk locales. Yet, according to the latest data from the nonprofit climate research firm First Street Foundation, 7.9 million homes and other structures stand in a FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area, which designates a location with 1 percent or greater chance of being inundated in any given year.

FEMA Flood Zone Top Ten

RankStatePercent of Properties****Number of Properties1Louisiana22.83%542,7562Florida17.15%1,581,5523Mississippi12.41%240,5264New Jersey10.57%364,0985West Virginia9.29%126,9186Arkansas7.27%146,2267Texas6.49%806,8278Iowa6.32%154,2179New Mexico6.28%94,26510Nebraska6.18%71,235Source: First Street Foundation

In Louisiana, a nation-leading 23 percent of properties are located in a FEMA flood zone. In Florida, it’s about 17 percent. Arkansas, New Mexico and Nebraska are perhaps less expected members of the top ten, as is New Jersey, which, with New York City, saw torrential rain and flooding that killed two people earlier this month.

Texas ranks seventh in the country, with about 800,000 properties, or roughly 6.5 percent of the state’s total, sitting in a flood zone. Kerr County officials have limited authority to keep people from building in these areas, but even when governments have the ability to prevent risky building projects, they historically haven’t. Although one study found that some areas are finally beginning to curb floodplain development, people keep building in perilous places.“There’s an innate draw to the water that we have, but we need to know where the limits are,” said Freudenberg. “In places that are really dangerous, we need to work towards getting people out of harm’s way.”

Kerr County sits in a region known as Flash Flood Alley and at least four cabins at Camp Mystic sat in an extremely hazardous “floodway” and numerous others stood in the path of a 100-year flood. When the Christian summer camp for girls underwent an expansion in 2019, the owners built even more cabins in the water’s path.

“It’s an unwillingness to think about what future — and the present — have in store for us,” said Rob Moore, the director of the Water & Climate Team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, about Americans’ tradition of floodplain development. ”It’s a reluctance to own up to the reality we live in.”

Many people don’t even know they are in harm’s way. According to NRDC, 14 states have no flood disclosure laws and, in eight, they deem the  laws ‘inadequate.’ FEMA maps are also flawed. For one, they can be politically influenced, with homeowners and communities often lobbying to be excluded in order to avoid insurance mandates and potential building costs. And experts say the science underpinning the maps is lagging too.

“[FEMA] only maps main river channels and coastal storm surge areas,” explained Jeremy Porter, the head of climate implications research at First Street Foundation. The agency, he added, specifically doesn’t model heavy rainfall, isn’t great about indicating the risk of urban flooding, and is behind on accounting for climate change.

First Street Flood Zone Top Ten

RankStatePercent of Properties****Number of Properties1West Virginia30.25%413,4992Louisiana26.33%626,1203Florida19.04%1,755,3634New Jersey17.32%596,5215Mississippi15.46%299,5666Kentucky15.30%328,2837Texas15.19%1,888,2828Pennsylvania14.93%856,8899New York14.27%771,60510Delaware12.95%55,535Source: First Street Foundation

First Street built a flood model that tries to fill in those gaps. It found that 17.7 million people are at risk of a 100-year flood, a number that’s more than double what FEMA’s hazard area covers.The state rankings also change, with mountainous areas susceptible to inland flash-flooding jumping up the list. West Virginia moves into first, with a staggering 30 percent of properties built in flood prone areas. Kentucky climbs from 19th to sixth.Texas remains at seventh, but the portion of properties at risk goes to 15 percent. In Kerr County, FEMA’s maps showed 2,560 properties (6.5 percent) in a flood zone. First Street’s model nearly doubled that.

“There’s a ton of unknown risk across the country,” said Porter, who says better maps are among the most important goals that policy makers can and should work toward. First Street has partnered with the real estate website Redfin to include climate risk metrics in its listings.

Rob Moore says political will is essential to making that type of systemic change when it comes to not only flooding, but other climate risks, such as wildfires or coastal erosion. Strengthening  building codes and restricting development in high-risk areas will require similar fortitude.

“Governments and states don’t want to tell developers to not put things in a wetland, not put things in a floodplain,” he said. “We should be telling people don’t put them in a flatland, don’t build in a way that your home is going to be more susceptible to wildfire.”

Until then, hundreds of communities across the country could — and likely will — be the next Kerr County.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Kerr County’s tragic flood wasn’t an outlier. It was a preview. on Jul 21, 2025.

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AI is “not my thing,” President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI.

“You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that,” Trump said, recalling a conversation with “David”—most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. “I said, what, are you kidding? That’s double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it.”

At the high-profile summit on Tuesday—where, in addition to Sacks, panelists and attendees included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat, and ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods—companies announced $92 billion in investments across various energy and AI-related ventures. These are just the latest in recent breakneck rollouts in investment around AI and energy infrastructure. A day before the Pittsburgh meeting, Mark Zuckerberg shared on Threads that Meta would be building “titan clusters” of data centers to supercharge its AI efforts. The one closest to coming online, dubbed Prometheus, is located in Ohio and will be powered by onsite gas generation, SemiAnalysis reported last week.

For an administration committed to advancing the future of fossil fuels, the location of the event was significant. Pennsylvania sits on the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, which supercharged Pennsylvania’s fracking boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The state is still the country’s second-most prolific natural gas producer. Pennsylvania-based natural gas had a big role at the summit: The CEO of Pittsburgh-based natural gas company EQT, Toby Rice—who dubs himself the “people’s champion of natural gas”—moderated one of the panels and sat onstage with the president during his speech.

Read NextTrump promised to help Big Oil. Its revenues plummeted.Tik Root

All this new demand from AI is welcome news for the natural gas industry in the US, the world’s top producer and exporter of liquefied natural gas. Global gas markets have been facing a mounting supply glut for years. Following a warm winter last year, Morgan Stanley predicted gas supply could reach “multi-decade highs” over the next few years. A jolt of new demand—like the demand represented by massive data centers—could revitalize the industry and help drive prices back up.

Natural gas from Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region, in particular, has faced market challenges both from ultra-cheap natural gas from the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico as well as a lack of infrastructure to carry supply out of the region. These economic headwinds are “why the industry is doing their best to sort of create this drumbeat or this narrative around the need for AI data centers,” says Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It appears to be working. Pipeline companies are already pitching new projects to truck gas from the northeast—responding, they say, to data center demand.

The industry is finding a willing partner in the Trump administration. Since taking office, Trump has used AI as a lever to open up opportunities for fossil fuels, including a well-publicized effort to resuscitate coal in the name of more computing power. The summit, which was organized by Republican senator (and former hedge fund CEO) Dave McCormick, clearly reflected the administration’s priorities in this regard: No representatives from any wind or solar companies were present on any of the public panels.

Tech companies, which have expressed an interest in using any and all cheap power available for AI and have quietly pushed back against some of the administration’s anti-renewables positions, aren’t necessarily on the same page as the Trump administration. Among the announcements made at the summit was a $3 billion investment in hydropower from Google.

Read NextData centers are building their own gas power plants in TexasDylan Baddour & Arcelia Martin, Inside Climate News

This demand isn’t necessarily driven by a big concern for the climate—many tech giants have walked back their climate commitments in recent years as their focus on AI has sharpened—but rather pure economics. Financial analyst Lazard said last month that installing utility-scale solar panels and batteries is still cheaper than building out natural gas plants, even without tax incentives. Gas infrastructure is also facing a global shortage that makes the timescales for setting up power generation vastly different.

“The waiting list for a new turbine is five years,” Williams-Derry says. “If you want a new solar plant, you call China, you say, ‘I want more solar.’”

Given the ideological split at the summit, things occasionally got a little awkward. On one panel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who headed up a fracking company before coming to the federal government, talked at length about how the Obama and Biden administrations were on an “energy crazy train,” scoffing at those administrations’ support for wind and solar. Speaking directly after Wright, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink admitted that solar would likely support dispatchable gas in powering AI. Incredibly, fellow panel member Woods, the ExxonMobil CEO, later paid some of the only lip service to the idea of drawing down emissions heard during the entire event. (Woods was touting the oil giant’s carbon capture and storage business.)

Still, the hype train, for the most part, moved smoothly, with everyone agreeing on one thing: We’re going to need a lot of power, and soon. Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray said that AI could help drive “40 or 50 percent more power usage over the next decade,” while Porat, of Google, mentioned some economists’ projections that AI could add $4 trillion to the US economy by 2030.

It’s easy to find any variety of headlines or reports—often based on projections produced by private companies—projecting massive growth numbers for AI. “I view all of these projections with great skepticism,” says Jonathan Koomey, a computing researcher and consultant who has contributed to research around AI and power. “I don’t think anyone has any idea, even a few years hence, how much electricity data centers are gonna use.”

In February, Koomey coauthored a report for the Bipartisan Policy Center cautioning that improvements in AI efficiency and other developments in the technology make data center power load hard to predict. But there’s “a bunch of self-interested actors,” Koomey says, involved in the hype cycle around AI and power, including energy executives, utilities, consultants and AI companies.

Koomey remembers the last time there was a hype bubble around electricity, fossil fuels, and technology. In the late 1990s, a variety of sources, including investment banks, trade publications, and experts testifying in front of Congress began to spread hype around the growth of the internet, claiming that the internet could soon consume as much as half of US electricity. More coal-fired power, many of these sources argued, would be needed to support this massive expansion. (“Dig More Coal—The PCs Are Coming” was the headline of a 1999 Forbes article that Koomey cites as being particularly influential to shaping the hype.) The prediction never came to pass, as efficiency gains in tech helped drive down the internet’s energy needs; the initial projections were also based, Koomey says, on a variety of faulty calculations.

Koomey says that he sees parallels between the late 1990s and the current craze around AI and energy. “People just need to understand the history and not fall for these self-interested narratives,” he says. There’s some signs that the AI-energy bubble may not be inflating as much as Big Tech thinks: in March, Microsoft quietly backed out of 2GW of data center leases, citing a decision to not support some training workloads from OpenAI.

“It can both be true that there’s growth in electricity use and there’s a whole bunch of people hyping it way beyond what it’s likely to happen,” Koomey says.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump and the energy industry are eager to power AI with fossil fuels on Jul 20, 2025.

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As negotiations over President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” came down to the wire in early July, renewable energy developers were holding their breath. Until the eleventh hour, it looked like Congress was ready to make good on Trump’s promise of “terminating” key subsidies for wind and solar virtually overnight.

In the end, the industry breathed a small sigh of relief after the Senate reached a compromise that would, at least in principle, give new projects a slim window to go ahead. Under the final law, wind and solar projects that begin construction by July 4 of next year are eligible for the full federal tax credits. Halfway through that window, a new requirement kicks in: Projects that begin construction after January 1, 2026, can only keep the tax credits if they follow restrictions on the use of Chinese materials.

That could still upend New York’s renewable energy transition.

Federal tax credits have typically covered almost a third of the cost of building a solar or wind farm. That’s made them “critical to financing and ultimately building renewable energy projects,” said Carl Weatherley-White, interim chief financial officer at the development firm Greenbacker, which is currently building New York’s largest solar farm and has several smaller projects in the works. “It’s been a core part of the business for 20 years.”

The bill will also impact New York’s public power authority, NYPA, which this year issued a plan to put up more than three gigawatts’ worth of solar and batteries, and has been counting on federal tax credits to deliver.

Read NextCongress is killing clean energy tax credits. Here’s how to use them before they disappear.Tik Root

Developers now have less than a year to start digging if they want the subsidies. The impending deadline is lighting a fire under the industry — and, developers hope, under New York’s leaders, too.

“Now, the game is in the states,” said Marguerite Wells, executive director of the renewable energy lobbying group Alliance for Clean Energy New York. “I would say there’s many thousands of megawatts’ worth of wind and solar in upstate that would be eligible to fall into that start of construction if we played the cards right.”

For a start, there are 26 permitted but unbuilt wind and solar projects in the state, which in total could unlock about 3,000 megawatts’ worth of energy — enough to power some half a million homes. Only two of the large projects the state has approved in the last four years have even started construction; one of them was completed in late 2024, more than six years after filing its first paperwork. (The most recent permit was issued last week, but most of the permits date back to 2023 or earlier.)

The problem? The state doesn’t make it easy to move quickly. It normally takes years for wind and solar projects just to get permits to begin construction in New York, despite reforms intended to speed up the process. The rest of the approval process can take years, too. More environmental reviews are required even after the main permit is approved. And it’s just as complicated getting approval to connect to the grid.

All told, at least three different sets of regulators have to weigh in before a company can put shovels in the ground. That makes New York far more restrictive than other states in allowing developers to start building.

There are things the state could do to speed things up, like allowing developers to start construction even while they finalize certain details of their projects, but it’s largely in Governor Kathy Hochul’s hands.

Jolting the process forward would require a concerted push across her agencies. Besides permits, building a wind or solar farm in New York requires a contract with the state’s energy research and development arm, NYSERDA, guaranteeing that the developer will get paid for the energy the facility produces. Sometimes it requires the state Department of Environmental Conservation to weigh in on water quality plans, with additional input from the US Army Corps of Engineers. And it requires the state’s grid operator — which acts independently — to assess the impact and cost of connecting the facility to the grid.

Developers need answers from all of those entities before they can break ground, Wells said: “Every last whisper of detail of the project has to be finalized before they generally let you start construction.”

In her eyes, improving coordination between all of New York’s energy regulators is the single biggest thing the state could do to help move construction forward.

It’s not yet clear how committed Hochul is to the effort.

“The Governor has directed the state’s energy agencies to conduct a high-level review of the federal legislation and specific impacts to New Yorkers,” spokesperson Ken Lovett told New York Focus, when asked whether the Hochul administration shared developers’ goal of accelerating construction.

Greenbacker’s 20-megawatt “Albany 1” solar project, in Albany County, New York. Courtesy of Greenbacker Renewable Energy Company

Before most developers even had a chance to fully digest the changes coming down from Congress, Trump threw in another gut punch. Last week, he issued an executive order directing the Treasury Department, which enforces tax credit rules, to revisit how it defines a project’s “start of construction.”

That throws even the megabill’s one-year deadline into doubt. Historically, developers have been allowed to qualify for tax credits by proving either that they’ve started physical construction or spent a certain amount of money. Now, Trump has given federal regulators 45 days to revise those definitions.

The specific definitions that the Treasury adopts could prove decisive in some cases. But whatever exact language the administration lands on, the bottom line is that Trump still has significant leeway to kill wind and solar projects if he’s committed to it, said Advait Arun, senior associate for energy finance at the think tank Center for Public Enterprise.

“Simply, I think Trump is trying to use control over the IRS to exercise his judgment about what projects should proceed and what shouldn’t,” he said.

Trump will have even more sway after the end of this calendar year, when additional requirements kick in. Starting in January 2026, developers hoping to claim tax credits will have to abide by restrictions on sourcing from “Foreign Entities of Concern,” including those connected to the Chinese government. The megabill tasks the Treasury with updating those rules, giving Trump another opportunity to crack down on what he’s called the “Green New Scam.”

Read NextThese fishermen made peace with offshore wind. Then Trump came along.Clare Fieseler, Canary Media

It all adds up to shaky terrain for renewable developers, even those who stand a chance of getting shovels in the ground within a year.

“The big concern … is that no matter what we do, someone in the Treasury is going to just say no,” said Weatherley-White, of Greenbacker, speaking to New York Focus a few hours before Trump issued his executive order last week. (Reporting earlier this month had already suggested that the construction rules could be in the crosshairs.)

Neither Weatherley-White nor Wells, of ACE NY, responded to follow-up inquiries about the order.

Unless the Trump administration completely upends what counts as the “start of construction,” there’s still a lot New York could do to help more projects get in under the one-year bar.

For example, in many states, wind and solar developers can begin construction on projects that don’t have all of their final approvals, but have the main elements of their design — like the location of roads and buildings — agreed upon, Wells said. But in New York, that initial green light is hard to get. It would make a big difference if the state were to adopt the practice more readily, she said.

New York could also jumpstart the contracting process for wind and solar projects. Close to half of the state’s permitted but unbuilt projects had contracts that were canceled after post-pandemic inflation upended their finances. Over the last year, the state has announced new contracts for dozens of projects in this situation, but others remain in limbo.

NYSERDA had plans to kick off a fresh round of wind and solar contracting by the end of June, but it’s behind schedule. A spokesperson said the agency would begin the process by the end of September.

Read NextClean energy projects on tribal lands were booming. Then came Trump’s tax bill.Miacel Spotted Elk

Those nitty-gritty steps are unlikely to change, though, unless Hochul makes it a priority. The governor could direct agencies to fast track permitting or contracts, as she did with offshore wind a couple of years ago. She has lately shown a keen interest in cutting red tape for other forms of energy — specifically, a nuclear plant that she has tasked NYPA to build by 2040. (There, though, the key approvals need to come from the Trump administration rather than her own.)

Her Department of Environmental Conservation also appears to be speeding along a revived pipeline project that would bring gas into New York City and Long Island. The agency said earlier this month that it had received a complete application from the pipeline company and opened a 30-day comment period with no public hearing. The notice came just five weeks after it was revealed that the state would reconsider the previously abandoned project — reportedly as part of a deal with the Trump administration to allow a major offshore wind project to move ahead, though Hochul’s office has denied a quid pro quo.

Renewable developers, by contrast, can spend years applying and reapplying for permits before they’re allowed to proceed to a mandatory, 60-day public comment period.

“If we’re cutting red tape for other forms of energy, we should cut red tape for renewable energy, too,” Wells said.

Read Next‘A self-inflicted tragedy’: Congress approves reversal of US climate policyJoseph Winters

Whether any wind or solar projects remain viable in New York after the federal tax credits expire remains an open question. Although Trump has framed his efforts as rolling back Biden-era policies, solar and wind tax credits date as far back as the 1970s, and have remained largely steady since 2005.

Some, like Weatherley-White, remain optimistic that the renewable industry can learn to live without them.

“The renewable energy industry has adapted to lots of changes over time,” he said, suggesting that developers could find ways to cut costs to cushion the blow from losing the tax credits.

“Unfortunately, there will be losers and winners,” Weatherley-White continued. “I think we’re going to see some short-term pain. But in the long run or medium term, let’s say, I think people will adapt and succeed.”

The labor coalition Climate Jobs NY struck a similarly bullish tone in a statement earlier this month. “With or without the support from our federal lawmakers, union workers in New York will find ways to build the pro-worker clean energy economy we need,” the group wrote.

Others see the glass half empty. Arun said that a key part of how the industry hoped to bring down costs was by using tax credits to build momentum and standardize the development process.

“If you can’t build, there’s no standardization or lowering costs through economies of scale,” he said. “And that’s what I’m really worried about.”

Hochul’s office, too, is striking a sober note.

“The federal budget bill slashes the very tools states need to achieve energy independence and economic growth,” Lovett said, “and no state will be able to backfill the massive cuts they face across so many key areas.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The race to build solar and wind in New York before Trump’s tax credit deadline on Jul 19, 2025.

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The Kill Step

By Alleen Brown

July 18, 2025

In March 2025, a jury ordered the environmental giant Greenpeace to pay $666 million to the companies behind the Dakota Access pipeline.

The companies argued that Greenpeace was responsible for protests near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation nearly a decade ago that drew thousands.

But Indigenous leaders, water protectors, activists, and court records agree: Greenpeace played a bit part in the Standing Rock movement, at best.

“They’re trying to point the finger at Greenpeace,” said Honorata Defender, a Standing Rock Sioux tribal member who helped start the movement.

“Because God forbid some Indians think for themselves and make a decision to stand up for themselves and their water and their land.”

Chapter 1 “They’re waiting for someone to wink.” Chapter 2 “What the hell is this bullshit?” Chapter 3 “We’ll stand with you. You’re going to fight this.” Chapter 4 “How many of you feel the same way?” Chapter 5 “It’s part of the treaty.” Chapter 6 “We believed that to be true.” Chapter 7 “They’re scumbags.” Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images Chapter

1234567This story is a partnership between Grist and Drilled, a global multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability.

They called themselves “water protectors” and began protesting on the side of a highway near where construction was approaching the river. Most were Oceti Sakowin — Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples. It was the early days of the #NoDAPL movement, in August 2016, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had just granted a key permit for the Dakota Access pipeline to go under the Missouri River.

The company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer, had originally considered building it upstream of the twin cities of Bismarck and Mandan in North Dakota, which are mostly populated by white people. But the Army Corps of Engineers rejected that route, in part because it had the potential to harm the cities’ drinking water supply. Instead, the pipeline was rerouted to cross the river just north of the Standing Rock reservation’s own drinking water intake.

To Dave Archambault, then-chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, this was a case of environmental racism. He and other tribal leaders were worried, too, that culturally important sites located along the pipeline route could be destroyed.

It was also a matter of sovereignty. Two days after the Army Corps issued that key permit to Energy Transfer for the new route, the tribe sued. They argued that the Army Corps should not allow construction to continue without a deeper review of the route and substantial consultation — a cornerstone of federal Indian law that recognizes the nation-to-nation relationship between tribal governments and the United States.

When small protests began, the corps had still not issued an easement, a legal right that would allow Energy Transfer to build under the river on land that belonged to the U.S. government. However, there was nothing stopping Energy Transfer from building on private land. That’s when the trouble started.

Chairman Archambault was one of more than a dozen people arrested that August for attempting to block Dakota Access pipeline construction, but there was little attention paid by journalists. Online, however, in Indigenous digital spaces, protests were becoming very visible, very quickly. Facebook Live had launched that spring, and water protectors were broadcasting their actions on social media in real time for the world to see and attracting Indigenous peoples from around the country to stand with Standing Rock.

Activists protest against the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in August 2016. James MacPherson / AP Photo

As more and more water protectors made their way to North Dakota, Achambault realized he would need help. He put out a public call to action, asking people to stand with Standing Rock. He also called Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota organizer who had helped found a collective called the Indigenous Peoples Power Project, or IP3, which offered nonviolent, direct-action trainings to Indigenous peoples working to protect their communities, including from unwanted industrial development.

“The training that we’re talking about is not some crazy training,” said Tilsen, who saw the protests as an extension of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. “Some people think that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks just one day sat on a bus and launched a movement. But the reality is, they went through training. And that training helped them be disciplined and helped them be effective and helped them change the course of history.”

With protests underway, Tilsen worked with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to develop a set of principles for nonviolent direct action — protest actions and acts of civil disobedience meant to disrupt activities. At times, nonviolent direct action involves trespassing or disregarding police orders. The principles were hand-painted on a sign that hung prominently in the growing camp. Among them: “We are nonviolent,” and “Property damage does not get us closer to our goals.”

Tilsen was close with a Greenpeace employee named Cy Wagoner who is Diné and also a member of IP3, and Tilsen said he invited Wagoner to bring Greenpeace to Standing Rock. “We asked them to help train people,” Tilsen recalled. Around the same time, Tom Goldtooth, who is Diné and Dakota, was also urging Greenpeace to come. The executive director of the nonprofit Indigenous Environmental Network, Goldtooth was watching as tensions between police, private security, and water protectors intensified throughout the month. “I’m afraid of escalation,” recalled Goldtooth. “They’re waiting for someone, you know, to wink.”

Like Tilsen, Goldtooth hoped that Greenpeace would reinforce trainings already in progress, and send support for water protectors, such as a solar trailer that could power laptops and cell phones so that broadcasts could continue across social media.

Wagoner put together a proposal and a budget request for Greenpeace, which was approved: About $15,000 would pay for five people from IP3 to go to Standing Rock for two to three weeks. Greenpeace agreed to pay the cohort $125 a day, plus expenses, to conduct trainings, while Wagoner went on his usual Greenpeace salary. They began arriving around the beginning of September.

Meanwhile, the week before Labor Day, Tim Mentz — Standing Rock’s former tribal historic preservation officer and one of the people responsible for reviewing federal projects that may impact historic areas, burial sites, and religious places — began a survey of an area Energy Transfer planned to bulldoze. He was looking to see if there were culturally important sites along the pipeline path.

Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault poses for a photo on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016. James MacPherson / AP Photo

Mentz is a highly respected elder, and the first tribal historic preservation officer in the U.S. thanks to his tireless work to amend the National Historic Preservation Act that created the role — one that is now used by over 200 Indigenous nations.

As part of Standing Rock’s lawsuit against the Army Corps filed in July, Mentz had already submitted a statement to the court saying that “destruction of these sites will eventually destroy generations of family connections to these areas of spiritual power.” He added that protecting those sites wasn’t just about the past: It was about the future of the Oceti Sakowin.

“Steps taken to preserve sites like this are important to the survival and recovery of our spiritual traditions,” he wrote. “These sites still retain the ability to mend our people.”

On a hot, bright day, with permission from the landowner, Mentz and his team drove onto the privately-owned buffalo ranch that included access to the area where Energy Transfer wanted to drill under the river, and Mentz got to work. Over the course of a few days, they documented 27 burial sites and 82 stone features — arranged in circles and other patterns for ceremonial purposes — all along a 2-mile corridor that Energy Transfer planned to dig up.

On the Friday before Labor Day, he wrote up what he found, including a cluster of stones shaped like the Big Dipper, with a grave site attached to the cup, indicating an important leader. “This is one of the most significant archaeological finds in North Dakota in many years,” he wrote. The tribe’s attorney, who worked for a nonprofit public interest law organization called Earthjustice, filed the coordinates Mentz identified with a North Dakota Court.

The next morning, the Saturday before Labor Day, bulldozers were spotted at the sites Mentz had identified and that the tribe had filed in court. Water protectors rushed to stop them but private security guards stood waiting, and their dogs lunged at the pipeline opponents.

Despite their attempts, Energy Transfer graded the 2-mile corridor Mentz surveyed, digging a foot deep into the earth. “A significant portion of the site we’d surveyed had been cleared,” Mentz wrote in another declaration to court. “I do not believe that the timing of this construction was an accident or coincidence.”

A judge ruled soon after that he didn’t have the power to stop the company from continuing to build on private land.

However, the images of security dogs attacking pipeline opponents transformed the movement. Recorded by nonprofit news organization Democracy Now!, the dog attacks were broadcast around the world and quickly went viral. People poured in, mushrooming new resistance camps across the prairie and filling them with Indigenous peoples, longtime environmental organizers, and everyday activists moved by the social feeds coming out of Standing Rock. Church members, community groups, and individuals donated money and supplies to keep the camps afloat. A school opened for families with children and kitchens opened to feed the growing number of water protectors.

Nonprofits began to join the fight too, including Tom Goldtooth’s Indigenous Environmental Network, 350.org, Bold Alliance, and Greenpeace.

More than a thousand people gather at an encampment near North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in September 2016. James MacPherson / AP Photo

The story of Standing Rock is relatively well-known from here: The governor of North Dakota called in the National Guard, which joined law enforcement officers from around the U.S. and private security contractors hired by the pipeline company in an effort to disperse protests. For more than six months, water protectors faced off against military-grade armored vehicles, surveillance drones, at least one sniper, police with semi-automatic rifles, a surface-to-air missile launcher, tear gas, rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and water cannons deployed in sub-freezing weather.

While a vast majority of water protectors, including Greenpeace employees, abided by the nonviolent, direct-action principles IP3 and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe posted in camp, not all agreed. Some pipeline opponents set fire to bulldozers and vandalized construction equipment. Some fought back against police, throwing rocks, logs, water bottles, and even Molotov cocktails.

In February 2017, soon after Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration, the Army Corps gave the green light for Energy Transfer to begin drilling under the river. By late February, security forces moved in and removed water protectors camped near Standing Rock. Energy Transfer bored a hole underneath the Missouri River for the pipeline to be pushed through, effectively ending the fight.

Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images Chapter 2

“What the hell is this bullshit?”

In February 2017, as security forces prepared to evict water protectors from their camps, TigerSwan — a private security firm contracted by Energy Transfer — began emailing with the law firm Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher.

The firm had been representing Energy Transfer as it attempted to convince a federal court to dismiss the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s claims against the Army Corps. Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher would eventually declare victory against Greenpeace in the $666 million lawsuit.

TigerSwan had spent months spying on water protectors by monitoring social media feeds, listening in on radio communications, flying drones, and monitoring camps by helicopter. It sent infiltrators — people pretending to be water protectors — into the anti-pipeline camps to gather information. Founded in 2008 by a former commander of an elite special operations unit known as Delta Force, TigerSwan’s security contractors had cut their teeth during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At Standing Rock, it brought those “war-on-terror” tactics home.

Files obtained through a public records request reveal that TigerSwan was not only providing the intelligence it collected to law enforcement, but it was also preparing to provide some of the information it gathered on water protectors to the law firm Gibson Dunn, including a set of spreadsheets listing crowdfunding pages, how much each had raised, and who was involved, as well as spreadsheets matching protest actions with individual water protectors, labeled “named conspirators.” The company asked one of its infiltrators to identify what groups pipeline opponents belonged to. And it asked another contractor to send over the makes and models of vehicles that showed up at certain protests.

Dogs held by private security guards lunge at protestors attempting to stop the bulldozing of land for the Dakota Access pipeline on September 3, 2016. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images

That record request also revealed a purpose of the communications between TigerSwan and Gibson Dunn: a RICO lawsuit. Gibson Dunn was considering using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — a law originally developed to go after the mafia — to target anti-pipeline activists and organizers, and had turned to Energy Transfer’s mercenary private security firm, TigerSwan, to help. TigerSwan did not respond to a request for comment.

Months later, in August of 2017, Deepa Padmanabha, the senior legal advisor for Greenpeace in the U.S., learned that Energy Transfer was suing the environmental organization in federal court, alleging violations of the RICO Act. “This one came as a very big surprise just because the Greenpeace entities had such little involvement with anything associated with Standing Rock,” she said.

Padmanabha called it a SLAPP suit — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation — which is designed not necessarily to win, but to drain opponents of resources and discourage them from speaking out. SLAPP suits are meant to set an example, and when successful they can be extremely effective.

Gibson Dunn is known to excel at aggressive lawsuits. The firm also has a history of helping big corporations avoid accountability for harming the environment or undermining Indigenous peoples’ rights — including arguing to gut the Indian Child Welfare Act in 2023.

In 2007, banana workers in Nicaragua won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in the U.S. against the Dole fruit company for poisoning them with a pesticide called DCBP. To combat the win, Dole hired Gibson Dunn. They alleged a vast conspiracy in which the banana workers’ attorney had recruited fake banana workers to go after the fruit company. There were multiple holes in the story that later came to light, but to the American judge who presided over the conspiracy case, it didn’t matter: The money awarded to the workers was taken back.

Dole’s general counsel at the time gave the strategy a name: the “kill step.”

The kill step worked by not only targeting the plaintiffs, but also going after their lawyers, supporters, and media. It destroyed the story being told and replaced it with a new one. Perhaps the most well-known application of the kill step by the law firm was for Chevron. In Ecuador, the homelands of several tribes, including the Cofan, Secoya, and Kichwa, had been contaminated by abandoned pits of oil waste, and in 2011, they won an $18-billion lawsuit, holding the oil giant Chevron accountable. The settlement was reduced by the Ecuadorean Supreme Court to $9.5 billion in 2013. Chevron, in turn, filed a RICO complaint in the U.S. against the lawyers who argued the case, including attorney Steven Donziger, claiming that they had contaminated witnesses, behaved unethically, and maybe even bribed a judge.

There were a number of issues with Chevron’s case, but the company won. Over the next few years, Chevron and Gibson Dunn kept going after Donziger. He ended up on house arrest for two years and in jail for 45 days for a contempt of court charge. Meanwhile, the oil is still contaminating water in the Ecuadorian Amazon — and, like the banana workers in Nicaragua, the Ecuadorians still haven’t been able to collect the settlement awarded to them.

When Padmanabha got word Greenpeace was being sued, she wasn’t just confused as to why the organization was being sued, she was also confused by the timing. Oil was already flowing through the Dakota Access pipeline — the company had gotten what it wanted. But there was a clue: “We were already dealing with another massive SLAPP suit filed in federal court.”

Greenpeace representatives talk with reporters on March 19 outside the Morton County Courthouse in Mandan, North Dakota. Jack Dura / AP Photo

In 2016, before Standing Rock, a law firm called Kasowitz Benson Torres had filed a RICO suit against Greenpeace on behalf of a timber company called Resolute Forest Products. The lawsuit claimed that Greenpeace Canada’s anti-logging campaign, which targeted Resolute, amounted to racketeering, defamation, and tortious interference. In 2017, the Kasowitz law firm filed a second lawsuit against Greenpeace, this time on behalf of Energy Transfer.

“The complaints looked very similar,” said Padmanabha. “It was the same allegations of a RICO conspiracy, and it was the same attempt to scare us into silence and bankrupt us.”

Ultimately, the RICO suit didn’t live long. A federal judge dismissed it in the winter of 2019, writing: “This is far short of what is needed to establish a RICO enterprise.” But Energy Transfer quickly filed a new version of the lawsuit in North Dakota state court, using local conspiracy law to tie the claims together.

Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher would eventually take over the case. In a statement, a spokesperson for Kasowitz, Shannon O’Reilly, wrote: “The firm spearheaded Energy Transfer’s suits against those who wrongfully targeted these projects, and we are gratified that Energy Transfer ultimately achieved such a successful result.”

In the North Dakota iteration, the lawsuit’s primary targets were Greenpeace, two individual pipeline opponents named Cody Hall and Krystal Two Bulls, and a group called the Red Warrior Society. All were accused of conspiring together to propel the anti-pipeline movement. The company also alleged that the conspiracy was spread throughout Greenpeace-affiliated organizations, including Greenpeace Inc., which carries out U.S. based campaigns; Greenpeace Fund, also based in the U.S., which raises money for certain Greenpeace efforts; and Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International, which licenses out the Greenpeace name to independently operated nonprofits around the world and coordinates some of their activities.

The lawsuit included three buckets of claims. There were on-the-ground, protest-related damages for things like trespassing and destruction of construction equipment. There were defamation claims, alleging that Greenpeace and the other defendants lied by accusing Energy Transfer of deliberately desecrating sacred sites and putting the pipeline on tribal lands, and accusing police and private security of being violent toward nonviolent water protectors. And finally, Energy Transfer alleged tortious interference — essentially, that those defamatory statements damaged the company’s relationship with banks.

Those accused weren’t the only ones impacted by the lawsuit. Subpoenas went out demanding people and organizations hand over documents or testify in front of lawyers. Energy Transfer subpoenaed Water Protectors Legal Collective, a group that provided legal support to pipeline opponents, and Unicorn Riot, a media collective that broadcast hours of footage of police violence. It also subpoenaed Standing Rock’s former tribal historic preservation officer Tim Mentz. Across the water protector community, fear began to spread that anyone and everyone could be dragged into the lawsuit.

However, two people at the heart of the case — Greenpeace’s alleged co-conspirators Cody Hall and Krystal Two Bulls — never received official notification of the lawsuit. Months went by, then years. In legal filings, Energy Transfer said they’d attempted to serve Hall at a home in South Dakota where his parents lived briefly a decade before, but the knock Hall expected at his door didn’t come. At one point, Hall got so stressed about it he called Energy Transfer. “I said, ‘You guys say you can’t serve me. I’m sitting here at home. Serve my ass. So what the hell is this bullshit?’” A receptionist took his number but he never heard back.

Helen H. Richardson / The Denver Post via Getty Images Chapter 3

“We’ll stand with you. You’re going to fight this.”

Greenpeace was founded just as the contemporary environmental movement was taking off in the 1970s. What set the organization apart from others at the time was dramatic protest actions at sea: Greenpeace activists zoomed little boats in between whaling ships and harpoons, risking their lives to save whales. From the very beginning, Greenpeace was ardently opposed to any kind of violence. Still, governments and companies began to label its activities as ecoterrorism.

“I don’t think there’s any credible examples of anything remotely like something you could describe as ecoterrorism in Greenpeace’s history,” said Frank Zelko, a historian at the University of Hawai‘i who wrote a book on the organization called Make It a Green Peace!. “Unless you reframe ecoterrorism as a bunch of people just blocking bulldozers or hanging a banner between a couple of chimneys.”

It’s important to note that Greenpeace’s efforts to save wildlife at times took aim at Indigenous peoples and practices. For example, an anti-seal-hunting campaign Greenpeace launched in the 1970s destroyed subsistence living for a number of Indigenous communities and a major income stream for many Indigenous nations. By the 1990s, activities like those began to get pushback.

“We challenged the white organizations back in the early 1990s with environmental racism,” said Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “Greenpeace stepped up.”

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In 2017, when the RICO lawsuit hit Greenpeace, Goldtooth was in touch with the organization again. “We said: ‘Hey man, this is mucked up. We’ll stand with you. You’re going to fight this.’” But by 2024, as the lawsuit looked like it would go to trial, it became less and less clear that Greenpeace actually would fight Energy Transfer.

Management for Greenpeace in the U.S. assessed that they had a 5 percent chance of winning. If this went to trial, they determined that Greenpeace as they knew it might cease to exist.

Then, around the winter of 2024, Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher reached out to Greenpeace with a settlement proposal: Energy Transfer would drop the lawsuit if the organization put out a statement. Greenpeace would have to indicate that there was violence during the Standing Rock movement, that the pipeline did not pass through the Standing Rock Sioux’s land, and that the company did not deliberately destroy sacred sites. In other words, they’d have to refute the statements that Energy Transfer had claimed as defamation.

The statement Energy Transfer wanted Greenpeace to make “would have been a lie,” Goldtooth said.

Over the next few months, Greenpeace leadership deliberated over the settlement offer. A worst-case trial scenario could mean the loss of a 50-year legacy and could scuttle Greenpeace’s future impact. It could put up to 135 staff members out of work and risk dismantling the organization’s global network. It could cause reputational damage to the Standing Rock Sioux, allies, and other activists who would be forced to testify, and it could set a legal precedent for suing movement organizations out of existence. The best-case trial scenario: Greenpeace would lose, but would be able to say that it went down fighting. Some in the organization concluded that this trial scenario would be catastrophic.

A worst-case settlement, on the other hand, didn’t seem quite as bad to some. It could cause a public relations crisis, and Greenpeace might lose a few million dollars a year in funding. Some staff might resign, and Indigenous peoples and nations might stop working with the organization. The statements that Greenpeace would have to sign could also be used by Energy Transfer to go after the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. But Greenpeace would live to fight another day.

Managing the worst-case scenario of a settlement became the option Ebony Twilley Martin, Greenpeace’s newly appointed executive director, and several senior managers supported.

Ebony Twilley Martin, then co-executive director of Greenpeace USA, speaks during a “Stop Dirty Banks” rally and protest in 2023. Alex Brandon / AP Photo

However, the view was not shared by everyone, and the question of the settlement began to divide the organization.

Multiple people high up in the organization strongly opposed Energy Transfer’s settlement proposal. For example, Deepa Padmanabha resigned as deputy general counsel because she disagreed with senior management’s position on the settlement, according to sources close to Greenpeace. Staff members who got wind of the possibility of settlement organized a letter to the board, expressing their own concerns. Meanwhile, Twilley Martin met with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe about the possibility of settling.

“It would’ve hurt us, no doubt,” current Standing Rock Chairwoman Janet Alkire said of the settlement. “ We’d have to fight against that too. Again, lies. It’s not true.” However, she said she viewed the decision as Greenpeace’s to make.

Tom Goldtooth also spoke with Twilley Martin on the phone multiple times. He said he knew she was under a lot of pressure, but he was clear in his conversations with her about what it would mean for Greenpeace to accept Energy Transfer’s terms. “This would end our relationship with you, with Greenpeace,” he said he told her. “It was that serious. This is a life and death issue to our Indigenous peoples. This is a life and death issue to life itself, to water, to the river.”

Goldtooth said that Twilley Martin was quiet. “I feel it hit her hard.”

Ultimately, it was up to Greenpeace’s board to decide. “It was clear for us that it was a hell no,” recalled Niria Alicia Garcia, a Greenpeace Inc. board member. To Garcia, the survival of Greenpeace was not the most important thing on the line, but she said it made sense to her that certain people did want to accept the settlement.

“When you’re an eight-figure, big legacy, big green, you are going to have to hire people who know how to keep a 501(c)(3) viable and afloat,” she said, referring to nonprofit organizations that are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3). “And at the same time, you’re going to need to hire people who are fully aligned and ready to embody the mission. That is the forever tension in nonprofits that exist to be in service to the movement.”

In the spring of 2024, the board voted to reject the settlement proposal. It came at a cost: Ebony Twilley Martin, the first Black woman to serve as Greenpeace’s executive director, hailed as a “historic first” in the environmental movement, left the organization. Padmanabha ultimately rejoined the U.S. organizations as senior legal adviser.

A spokesperson for Greenpeace in the U.S., Madison Carter, wrote in a statement: “Difficult conversations are a common byproduct of risk assessment exercises, and this case is no different.” She added: “SLAPP lawsuits like the one we are facing from Energy Transfer are intended to divide movements and drain resources, which is why it is paramount that we remain as prepared as possible for any and all outcomes.”

Twilley Martin declined to comment.

Garcia, the Greenpeace board member, said, “I’m proud that we stuck to our values and decided to stay true to the spirit and the mission and the purpose of why Greenpeace ever came to exist.” She added, “At the end of the day, nonprofits are discardable; they are revocable; they are replaceable — and the movement is not. Relationships are not.”

North Dakota’s Morton County District Court set a date for trial: February 24, 2025.

Michael Nigro / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images Chapter 4

“How many of you feel the same way?”

Jury selection began on a chilly morning last February. “I want to congratulate you on being chosen for jury duty,” said Judge James Gion to the pool of potential jurors. “It is one of the highest obligations and privileges of our democratic system.”

Gion, a judge of 10 years, presided over the Stark County District Court in rural western North Dakota, more than 90 miles away from Morton County, where the suit was filed. Every judge in the entire South Central Judicial District of North Dakota, in which Morton County sits, recused themselves from the case due to conflicts of interest.

Over the next two days, two sets of around 30 potential jurors, selected from the local populace, would answer questions from the lawyers. Each side of the lawsuit aimed to select jurors who would be most favorable to their case, and they sought to convince the judge to eliminate people too biased to be fair.

As lawyers questioned the jury pool, a pattern emerged: Multiple potential jurors said that hearing about the Standing Rock protests reminded them of what they called “the disruption in our community.” One woman put it plainly: “I think you’ll have a tough time finding people completely unbiased on that, because it affected everyone.”

Greenpeace’s lawyer, Everett Jack, asked the group: “How many of you feel the same way?”

All but a handful of people raised their hands.

About five months before jury selection began, an unusual newspaper, Central ND News, began showing up in people’s mailboxes. Sandwiched between articles criticizing then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris and analyzing the dangers of “illegal aliens” were recollections about the Standing Rock protests a decade before. Most were unpleasant.

One headline read, “Former Dakota Access pipeline protester: ‘We ended up creating a local ecological disaster.’”

Another said, “THIS MONTH IN HISTORY, OCTOBER 2016: Area schools locked down as authorities respond to pipeline protests.”

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Central ND News is part of a company called Metric Media, which includes dozens of locally-oriented media sites that have been labeled as part of a “pay-for-play” network. For a price, that network has allowed corporate executives and political operatives to order up articles and have them distributed to specific audiences. These latest stories were apparently aimed at residents of Morton County, where the Standing Rock protests took place — and from which the jurors were selected. According to court filings, a murky trail of funds connects Energy Transfer’s board chair Kelcy Warren to the newspapers. Metric Media did not respond to a request for comment.

When Jack, Greenpeace’s lawyer, asked about the newspapers, a potential juror pulled out a copy he had brought with him. “I thought it was kinda weird that I got that,” he said. “It brought back memories. I agree with it that what happened down there wasn’t good.”

Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, at a panel on the future of pipeline infrastructure in March 2018 in Houston. Karen Warren / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Greenpeace had already attempted to get the trial moved to another county, arguing that the Morton County jury pool would be too biased to decide the case fairly. In a survey the organization commissioned from the National Jury Project, a consultancy that does jury research, 97 percent of respondents gave answers indicating bias against Greenpeace, or, in a few cases, Energy Transfer.

Many of the potential jurors also had financial links to the fossil fuel industry. One of them, labeled juror 14 by the court for the sake of anonymity, said he didn’t think the case was right for him because he worked in the petroleum industry. He added that he would be uncomfortable ruling against his industry, and that he would be less likely to believe Greenpeace’s witnesses than Energy Transfer’s. Juror 14 also revealed that he had a family member in law enforcement who policed the protests. When Greenpeace’s lawyers asked for him to be removed from the pool, Energy Transfer’s lawyer, Trey Cox, pushed back.

“If the judge instructs you that the law requires you to only consider the evidence in this courtroom and to treat all the parties fairly, are you able to follow the judge’s instruction and be fair to all parties?”

“Yes, I believe I can be,” the man replied.

Juror 14 was allowed to stay.

After two days, the jurors were announced: a man who worked at a gasification company; another who oversaw two power facilities and told lawyers that “my job depends on fossil fuels” during the selection process; a woman whose family received royalties for oil on their land; and three women whose husbands had ties to the oil and gas industry. One woman’s husband also worked for a security company hired by Energy Transfer, as well as the contractor that drilled under the Missouri River, though she added that she didn’t think he worked at those places during pipeline construction.

In the end, seven of the 11 jurors and alternates revealed economic ties to the fossil fuel industry. Nobody on the jury identified themselves as Indigenous.

Opening arguments began the next day.

Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images Chapter 5

“It’s part of the treaty.”

“Here they are,” explained the Gibson Dunn lawyer, Trey Cox, standing before a flat-screen television. “These are the Greenpeace six. Not a single one of them lives in this community. These people are professionals.”

On the screen flashed headshots of six people, all employees of Greenpeace Inc.

“They embed in a location, then they escalate,” he said. “They thought they could do it in secret — they thought that we wouldn’t be smart enough to figure out what they did.”

“Today starts the day of reckoning,” he concluded.

Energy Transfer’s first witness was a towering bald man with an American flag pin on the lapel of his suit. Mike Futch was the project manager for the North Dakota section of the Dakota Access pipeline. Cox asked him about violence perpetrated by private security — like the now-infamous dog attacks.

“The only violence was when protesters came onto private property and attacked us,” Futch said. “We were always in retreat.”

[Content truncated due to length...]

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It looked for a while like the coal mining era was over in the Clearfork Valley of East Tennessee, a pocket of mountainous land on the Kentucky border. A permit for a new mine hasn’t been issued since 2020, and the last mine in the region shuttered two years ago. One company after another has filed for bankruptcy, with many of them simply walking away from the ecological damage they’d wrought without remediating the land as the law requires.

But there’s going to be a new mine in East Tennessee — one of a few slated across the country, their permits expedited by President Donald Trump’s declaration of an “energy emergency” and his designating coal a critical mineral.

Trump was only hours into his second term when he signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency that directed federal agencies to “identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them” to identify and exploit domestic energy resources. The administration also has scrapped Biden-era rules that made it easier to bring mining-related complaints to the federal government.

The emergency designation compresses the typically years-long environmental review required for a new mine to just weeks. These assessments are to be compiled within 14 days of receiving a permit application, limiting comment periods to 10 days. The process of compiling an environmental impact statement – a time-intensive procedure involving scientists from many disciplines and assessments of wildlife populations, water quality, and other factors –  is reduced to less than a month. The government insists this eliminates burdensome red tape.

“We’re not just issuing permits — we’re supporting communities, securing supply chains for critical industries, and making sure the U.S. stays competitive in a changing global energy landscape,” Adam Suess,  the acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department, said in a statement. A representative of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement told Grist that community safety is top of mind, pointing to the administration’s $725 million investment in abandoned mineland reclamation.

The Department of Interior ruled that a new mine slated for Bryson Mountain in Claiborne County, Tennessee, would have “no significant impact” and approved it. It will provide about two dozen jobs. The strip mine will cover 635 acres of previously mined land that has reverted to forest. Hurricane Creek Mining, LLC plans to pry 1.8 million tons of coal from the earth over 10 years.

The Clearfork Valley, which straddles two rural counties and has long struggled economically, bears the scars of more than a century’s underground and surface mining. Local residents and scientists regularly test the creeks for signs of bright-orange mine drainage and other toxins.

The land is part of a tract the Nature Conservancy bought in 2019 for conservation purposes, but because of ownership structures in the coalfields, it owns only the land, not the minerals within it. “We have concerns about the potential environmental impacts of the operation,” the organization said in a statement. “We seek assurance that there will be adequate bonding, consistent and transparent environmental monitoring, and good reclamation practices.”

Matt Hepler, an environmental scientist with environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices, has been following the mine’s public review process since the company applied for a permit in 2023. He remains skeptical that things will work out well for Hurricane Creek Mining. Despite Trump’s promise that he is “bringing back an industry that’s been abandoned,” coal has seen a steady decline, driven in no small part by the plummeting price of natural gas. The number of people working the nation’s coal mines has steadily declined from 89,000 or so in 2012 to about 41,300 today. Production fell 31 percent during Trump’s first term, and has continued that slide.

“What is this company doing differently that’s going to allow them to profitably succeed while so many other mines have not been able to make that work?” he said. “All the time I’ve been working in Tennessee there’s only been a couple of mines permitted to begin with because production has been on the downswing there,” Hepler added.

Economists say opening more mines may not reverse the global downward trend. Plentiful, cheap natural gas, along with increasingly affordable wind and solar, are displacing coal as an energy source. The situation is so dire that one Stanford University study argued that the gas would continue its climb even with the elimination of coal-related regulations. Metallurgical coal, used to make steel — and which Hurricane Creek hopes  to excavate — fares no better. It has seen flat or declining demand amid innovation in steel production.

Expedited permits are leading to new mines in the West as well. The Department of Interior just approved a land lease for Wyoming’s first new coal mine in 50 years. Ramaco Resources will extract and process the material in order to retrieve the rare earth and other critical minerals found alongside it. The Trump administration also is selling coal leases on previously protected federal land. Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney at the Northern Rockies office of the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, thinks it is a fool’s errand.

“I don’t see them changing the fundamental dynamics of coal,” he said. “That’s not to say that the Trump administration won’t cause lots of harm in the process by both making the public pay more money for energy than they should and by keeping some of these coal plants and coal mines that really are zombies.”

Still, Hernandez said he isn’t seeing many new permits, just quicker approval of those already in the pipeline. That said, the Trump administration’s moves to streamline environmental review will reduce oversight and the time the public has to scrutinize coal projects.

“The result is there’s just going to be it’s going to be more difficult for the public to participate, and more harm is going to occur,” Hernandez said. “There’s going to be less attention to the harm that’s caused by these operations.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is fast-tracking new coal mines – even when they don’t make economic sense on Jul 18, 2025.

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By Wednesday, almost two weeks after the July 4 floods that devastated the Central Texas region that hugs the Guadalupe River, the rain had finally subsided long enough for rescue and recovery work to resume in earnest. Celbi Lucas was clearing debris alongside the many volunteers who have poured into Kerr County from all over Texas to pitch in, even as temperatures reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit and a heavy humidity settled over the riverside.

Lucas and her husband live over 100 miles away in New Braunfels, but they drove to the unincorporated riverside town of Hunt to “put a good 12-hour day in and try to put a dent in any of this,” in Celbi’s words. The work was personal: She lost a second cousin, Reese Manchaca, to the floods. Manchaca, a 21-year-old college student, was visiting Hunt for the holiday with three of her friends when floodwaters overwhelmed the cabin they’d rented. In the disaster’s solemn aftermath, Texas officers arranged a procession to escort Manchaca’s body back to her hometown in Montgomery County, 300 miles away, so she could be laid to rest.

Another volunteer, Bryan Hill, has been driving two hours each way from his ranch in nearby Kimble County to volunteer. Hill, who is a road construction worker for the city of Austin, felt compelled to help after watching news coverage; he was helping operate heavy equipment to clear debris.

“I’ve just seen everything on TV,” he said. “It bothers me. If I see somebody in need or something, I want to help.”

A tow truck aids cleanup efforts in Hunt, Texas, on July 16, 2025. Naveena Sadasivam / Grist

At least 134 people lost their lives in the flash floods that overwhelmed Hunt, Ingram, Kerrville, and other communities along the Guadalupe River earlier this month. Those who survived tell harrowing stories of clinging to electric poles, trees, and rooftops as the river raged around them. The camera crews may have left, but helicopters continue to buzz overhead, an army of volunteers is traversing the river banks, and the county is considering draining a lake in an effort to find the more than 160 people who have been reported missing.

Volunteer efforts were delayed by more rain and a flash flood watch over the weekend. For about two days, the county ordered that all volunteer search and rescue operations halt as river levels rose yet again. On Monday, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said the search for the missing could take up to six months.

The larger rebuild and recovery process will likely take much longer. Several river crossings on the roads in and out of Hunt have been ripped apart by fast-flowing waters. The trees along the river banks are bowed, having succumbed to the force of the river, and littered with blankets, clothes, and the wreckage of people’s lives. Mattresses, refrigerators, debris, and other belongings from flooded homes are piled all along Highway 39, the main road that runs along the Guadalupe and through Hunt.

Piles of mattresses, refrigerators, debris, and other belongings from flooded homes in the community of Hunt, Texas, on July 16, 2025. Naveena Sadasivam / Grist

Hunt is an unincorporated town of roughly 1,100 people in the heart of Texas’ Hill Country in western Kerr County. The region is so named because of its rolling hills, rugged terrain, and dramatic escarpments. While the community of permanent residents is small, the population of the town increases over the summer when vacationers camp and hike along the river. RV parks and cabins dot the river banks, and the region relies on tourism and recreation for revenue. Many residents of nearby Austin and San Antonio maintain second homes in the area. In fact, officials have had a difficult time estimating the number of missing people in part because many were visiting from out of town.

Although the region has been in a severe drought for the past several years, it’s no stranger to flash floods. In 1932, about 20 years after the town’s founding, the river rose 36 feet and Hunt “was washed away in a flood,” according to a webpage maintained by the Kerr County Historical Commission. The Guadalupe has flooded several times since then — including in 1987, an event locals refer to as “the big one.”

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Nevertheless, the conditions that powered the recent floods had all the hallmarks of a changing climate. As the Gulf has warmed, it has increased the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, and with it the potential for intense rainfall. The storm that caused the floods dumped 2 to 4 inches of rain over Kerr County every hour; given the region’s limestone deposits, which don’t absorb water, the rainfall had nowhere to go but down. The region’s extended drought, which had left the soil dry and compacted, didn’t help either. Hillsides turned into runoff channels, and the Guadalupe swelled up and outward, hundreds of feet beyond its banks.

Many of Hunt’s part- and full-time residents have left the devastated town, but some have stayed — or returned — to assess the damage. On Wednesday afternoon, LeAnn Levering was spraying a wooden table with vinegar in a desperate attempt to save it from mold. The table, built by her ex-husband and cherished by her children, sat on the front porch along with all the salvageable possessions from her cabin. The house had been inundated with five feet of water as the Guadalupe swelled in the early morning of July 4. The river rose furiously, climbing several dozen feet up a hill before spreading another 300 or so feet across the land to reach the cabin. Levering, a psychotherapist who primarily lives near Austin, was fortunate not to be staying in the cabin that weekend. When she and her son arrived a couple of days later to assess the damage, she found dead fish and sewage backflow amid the wreckage.

“We’re so high up this hill — it should never have happened,” Levering said. “I understand we’re in a flash flood alley but not this high. This is just bizarre.”

LeAnn Levering wipes down furniture with vinegar to save it from mold. Naveena Sadasivam / Grist

The floods arrived too quickly for many of those present to evacuate. Douglas Bolduc’s family, which owns three of the neighboring cabins and was staying in one of them, retreated to a loft as the floodwaters overwhelmed the home. They were eventually rescued and taken to higher ground. Another one of the family’s cabins was pulled off of its foundation and into the raging river.

“It’s a pile of rubble over there in the field,” Bolduc told Grist, pointing to a large open meadow.

While the flash flood itself was unavoidable, the region’s devastating death toll was exacerbated by the limits of cell-phone-based warning systems. Unlike neighboring communities, Kerr County was not equipped with sirens or other alarm systems to alert residents when the river rose in the middle of the night. The county sent phone alerts to those who had signed up through its CodeRED initiative, but it did not use FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, which sends blaring alerts to all cell phones in a region, until after the most devastating flooding.

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Bolduc himself was in Colorado during the floods, but he returned to help rebuild the homes with his sister. Volunteers had helped empty out the homes, power wash the floors, and set up blowers to dry them out.

“We didn’t lose anybody,” Bolduc said of his family. “All we lost was stuff. And stuff can be replaced.”

Stacks of relief supplies in Hunt, Texas, on July 16, 2025. Naveena Sadasivam / Grist

Levering and Bolduc, who do not have flood insurance to cover their homes in Hunt, will be shouldering the cost of rebuilding their cabins on their own. (Nationally, only 4 percent of homeowners have flood insurance; in Kerr County, that figure is only 2.5 percent.) Bolduc’s family plans to dip into savings to rebuild, while Levering is planning on looking into low-interest loans. She estimates rebuilding will cost at least $100,000 and hasn’t yet investigated if any form of assistance might be available from FEMA or any other government entity.

“I have no idea,” she said. “I haven’t had time for paperwork.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

*Are you affected by the flooding in Texas and North Carolina?Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.**Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.*Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After deadly flash floods, a Texas town takes halting, painful steps toward recovery on Jul 17, 2025.

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For over two decades, Bruce Everly has been helping Indiana farmers apply for funding from the federal Rural Energy for America Program, which provides grants for solar, wind, energy-efficiency upgrades, grain dryers, biodigesters, and other projects in rural America.

He’s seen it serve as an economic lifeline for small farmers, especially the state’s poultry producers who operate on thin profit margins.

But the program, known as REAP, has faced a series of setbacks under the Trump administration. Nearly $1 billion in funding was frozen for months, farmers have heard nothing about applications filed last fall — and now a window for new applications that was supposed to open July 1 was closed at the last minute.

Meanwhile, the most common use case for REAP grants, helping farmers install solar, is under direct threat from the administration. A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture document outlining its Make Agriculture Great Again agenda says that, going forward, REAP ​“will disincentivize funding for solar panels on productive farmland.”

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act infused REAP with over $2 billion, but those funds will soon run out, meaning the program will likely revert to the lower funding level of $50 million per year ensured by the current iteration of the federal Farm Bill.

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“We’re not looking at an IRA-like opportunity for REAP again any time soon,” said Lloyd Ritter, founder of the clean-energy policy consultancy Green Capitol. He helped draft the original REAP program as senior counsel for former Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).

A slowdown in REAP funding would be a blow to the thousands of American farmers who use the program nationwide, forcing them to spend more money to meet their energy needs. And the efforts to block REAP funds from solar projects in particular would both stymie the growth of clean energy in rural areas and hamper what’s become a key source of income for farmers.

“This program has been key to helping people who don’t have a lot of assets make a change and provide some cash flow for their family,” said Everly, who has assisted with REAP grants to turn manure into biofuel, grow vegetables year-round in indoor enclosures, and add ​“desperately needed” energy efficiency to poultry barns.

A boon and bust

The 2002 Farm Bill created the program now known as REAP; it was given its current name under the 2008 Farm Bill.

For more than two decades, the program has offered loan guarantees and grants to farmers and rural small businesses, as well as doled out grants to organizations that provide applicants with technical assistance.

Under the Farm Bill, REAP grants reimbursed recipients for up to a quarter of a project’s cost. The IRA increased reimbursement to up to 50 percent of a project’s cost.

USDA data shows that more than $1 billion in IRA REAP funding was awarded in over 6,800 grants to farmers and rural small businesses between fiscal year 2023 and the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, according to an analysis by the Environmental Law & Policy Center, with 80 percent of the grants going to Republican House districts.

Congress allocated IRA funds for REAP applications through 2031, though the funding will likely run out long before then. Federal data shows that about half of IRA REAP funds have already been obligated.

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President Donald Trump froze over $911 million in REAP funds with his Day 1 executive order targeting IRA programs. His administration lifted the freeze in late March and has yet to make another attempt at clawing back already-promised IRA REAP funds, as some advocates had feared would happen — especially for solar projects.

Nonetheless, farmers and experts who monitor the program wonder whether expected grant payments will be disbursed or new applications accepted in coming months, and whether farmers will still trust the program after this period of chaos.

REAP grants are administered through reimbursement, meaning uncertainty is particularly harmful. Farmers and other recipients make significant up-front investments with their own money under the assumption that the government will honor its commitment to pay them back.

“This year, since Jan. 20, has been incredible levels of stress for people who did not understand if they would ever get paid for work where they have already put down millions of dollars on projects,” said Everly.

“No matter what the government does, the harvest happens at the same time every year. Farmers had made investments with hope of help from the government, and there’s great uncertainty right now.”

A window closed

On June 30, the USDA released a statement saying that the fiscal year 2026 REAP application period that was supposed to run from July 1 to Sept. 30 would not happen.

“This decision was made due to the overwhelming response and continued popularity of the program resulting in a backlog of applicants,” the brief statement says. The USDA said it ​“anticipates” accepting applications again starting Oct. 1.

Meanwhile, the agency has yet to announce decisions on applications submitted last fall, farmers and the advocates who help them with REAP applications told Canary Media. Usually, farmers and technical assistance organizations feel fairly confident that a strong proposal will receive an award, and many made plans expecting to receive funding, Everly said. Now, they are unsure.

Kevin Carter/Getty Images

REAP only reimburses projects that were started after the application was submitted, so many farmers planning to apply this round had postponed breaking ground on projects until after July 1, Everly said. But with the sudden delay, they must now choose to either move forward without REAP funding or kick needed upgrades down the road once more.

The number of REAP award decisions is indeed down significantly this year, according to an analysis by the Environmental Law & Policy Center. Federal data obtained by the group through a public records request shows the USDA obligated money for just over 1,900 grant and loan guarantees between the start of this fiscal year and July 9; almost 2,400 obligations were made during the same period last year. While the money awarded for grants so far this year is only slightly less than last year, the dollars for loan guarantees are drastically lower.

Everly was hired by the Indiana state government to help farmers file REAP applications in the program’s early days, then founded a firm now staffed by his wife and more than a dozen employees.

His company, EIM LLC, had seven people working full time on REAP applications over the past three months in anticipation of the July 1 application window. They only get paid once projects come to fruition. REAP data from the USDA shows that the company was awarded five grants for $100,000 each in fiscal year 2023, but has received only about $25,000 thus far.

Everly said his firm has a 92 percent success rate in applications, so the wait for payment is not usually a problem. But now he’s uncertain if the 3,000 hours of staff time spent on this latest round of applications will ever be compensated.

“We don’t know if we’ll ever get paid for any of the work we did,” said Everly, whose family also owns two farms in the state, one going back seven generations. He said his firm can survive the possible financial setback, but many farmers are working on tighter margins. ​“We’ve helped a lot of people who really need the help” from REAP funds.

A rollercoaster

The canceled July application window was just the latest disruption in what’s been a chaotic year for REAP.

On March 26, USDA sent a cryptic letter to REAP and other rural agriculture grant recipients noting that the funding freeze was over, and they had 30 days to ​“voluntarily” alter their applications to remove ​“any harmful [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility] project features” or to use ​“more affordable and effective energy sources.” The letter indicated grants would be paid even without changes.

Amanda Pankau, director of energy and community resiliency at the environmental nonprofit Prairie Rivers Network, said REAP recipients her organization works with in Illinois were alarmed by the freeze and then confused by the letter, especially since switching to an energy source other than solar wasn’t an option, and most projects did not have DEIA components. Indeed, federal data shows that over the past decade, 82 percent of REAP grants went to recipients identified as white, and 75 percent went to men or businesses owned by men.

“The federal freeze and policy chaos, including the confusion surrounding the March 26 letter, created real distress for Illinois’ farmers and rural small businesses,” Pankau said. ​“We know that rural farmers and small business owners are already managing intense stress and thin profit margins. Many don’t have the privilege of a financial cushion to absorb months of federal uncertainty for clean energy projects that were already awarded or underway.”

Read Next‘A self-inflicted tragedy’: Congress approves reversal of US climate policyJoseph Winters

In mid-April, a federal judge ruled that the USDA must pay out billions of dollars promised under the IRA, including from REAP and other clean energy programs such as Empowering Rural America, Powering Affordable Clean Energy, and Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities.

The following week, on April 25, three congressional Democrats from Minnesota — Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, along with Rep. Angie Craig — sent a letter to the USDA demanding answers about REAP funds that appeared to still be frozen.

The tumult has had lasting impacts on farmers, technical assistance organizations, and solar developers, multiple sources told Canary Media.

“People are being whipsawed out there, who are just trying to use the program to install clean energy and cut energy waste,” said Andy Olsen, senior policy advocate for the Environmental Law & Policy Center.

Tim Biello is the owner and manager of Featherbed Lane Farm, a regenerative farm supplying community-supported agriculture in upstate New York. He learned in January that he had received REAP funding for a 30-kilowatt, $115,000 solar project. After the freeze, he wondered whether he should really start the project, since he can’t afford it without REAP reimbursement.

Crops at Featherbed Lane Farm in upstate New York. Courtesy of Featherbed Lane Farm

“I got awarded, which was awesome news,” said Biello in May. ​“Then we got the notice it was frozen. The solar company was just about to put a $50,000 to $75,000 order for panels. We canceled that; the advice was not to proceed unless you can take it on with no reimbursement.”

Biello said at the time that he assumed he would get the promised payment, ​“but I don’t feel like anything now is guaranteed, even if you have a signed contract with the government.”

Ultimately, Biello decided to install the solar project this summer, after learning the funds were unfrozen and consulting with advisers. In early July, he could finally take a breath of relief: The USDA officially reimbursed him.

Farmers in Iowa have similar trepidation, according to Mike Brummer, sales manager at Eagle Point Solar, an installer that counts REAP grantees among its customers.

“We’re at this point trying to treat it as business as usual. Let’s keep talking about the project, moving forward with the necessary items,” Brummer said. ​“I joke I’ll check my Twitter account at 2 a.m. for an update.”

He said many farmers can only do solar projects with the help of REAP.

“The REAP grant can make or break a project, especially for a small farmer or small business,” he said. ​“For farmers, every penny has a name on it before it hits the bank. The more pennies you can save, the more chance you have of enduring as a farm and being able to go to the next generation.”

The future

Everly has three wishes for REAP going forward: clarity on the status of application windows and the program’s future; full funding through the Farm Bill, so that 50 percent reimbursement can continue; and staff support from the USDA.

“Is it 25 percent or 50 percent [reimbursement], and are the application deadlines real or imaginary?” he said.

With sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, it can be hard to reach someone in the USDA with questions or concerns about the program or an application, he added.

Read NextTrump’s tax bill could be a major win for Big Ag. Everyone else? Not so much.Ayurella Horn-Muller

Given the turmoil of the past six months, Everly and others are worried that farmers won’t trust REAP as a resource even if the USDA takes applications again. Everly noted that the average farmer only has about 40 harvest seasons in their life, and with so many resources sunk into each season, they can’t afford to take many risks.

“Any time you create uncertainty,” farmers will be dissuaded, he said. ​“They only get to run this experiment 40 times in their life. If you messed up two of them, it’s hard to get their faith back. One mistake and you’ve lost multiple generations of wealth.”

Ritter at Green Capitol shares Everly’s concern about federal layoffs impacting REAP. In May, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told lawmakers that the USDA was trying to fill critical positions after more than 15,000 agency employees took buyouts aimed at reducing the federal workforce.

“My biggest fear is the staffing cuts at USDA will hurt program implementation and efficiency and speed,” Ritter said.

He emphasized the bipartisan support that REAP has long enjoyed, and said he hopes and expects that popularity will help the program weather tough times.

“REAP just makes sense,” said Ritter. ​“The vast bulk of applicants are farmers, ranchers, [and] rural small businesses using it to help lower energy costs and build energy dominance in rural America. Despite unfair and unreasonable attacks from the far right, I think REAP will be OK.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline USDA abruptly cancels rural energy grant application window on Jul 17, 2025.

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Have you ever listened to a recording of birdsong? Or ocean waves? The howling of wolves, or thunder and rain? If you have, did you ever wonder whether nature was getting any compensation for producing that acoustic art that found its way to your speakers?

A number of musicians and environmentalists have begun raising that last question — and trying to ensure that its answer is yes. Nature sounds have long been sampled in musical tracks of all genres, but over the past few years, artists and cultural leaders have created a movement viewing nature as more than just a source of inspiration, but as a collaborator — one who deserves both credit and compensation.

One such initiative formally launched in mid-May, on the day of the full flower moon: a new record label and platform called Future Sound of Nature, dedicated to “blending the soul of electronic music with the rhythms of the Earth.” The platform is the brainchild of Eli Goldstein and Lola Villa, two electronic artists who connected as part of the group DJs for Climate Action.

“Having experienced what happens on the dance floor and the type of magic that happens there, we always believed that it was a very special place for community building around climate and acknowledging the Earth,” said Villa. “Eli and I wanted to create an organization or a platform where music could speak to that notion. And then also, how do we give nature a role in our storytelling and in our business model?”

In Future Sound of Nature’s model, 20 percent of the revenue from each release will go toward conservation or stewardship projects for the habitats featured in the recordings. The plan is for every release to have a theme, Villa said, whether that’s a location, a type of habitat, or even perhaps a single species. The first release under the new label was an EP of her own, titled Amazonía. Its eight tracks are built on field recordings she took during two visits to the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon, and 20 percent of the proceeds will go directly to the Indigenous Bora people who hosted her there.

The cover art for Villa’s Amazonía EP. Courtesy of FSON, design by Claudia Smith

That direct connection is an important part of what Goldstein and Villa are trying to create for artists and listeners alike. “It’s not just like, ‘Here’s some nature sounds, make some music,’” said Goldstein. “It’s really all about trying to create a deeper connection with the land and the communities where the music is being recorded, where nature is being collaborated with.”

Every time she has played the Amazonía set live, Villa said, she has given her audience context about the landscapes and animals that are represented in what they’re listening to — including the threats that they face. For instance: “Some of these birds are endangered. What does that do to you?” she posed. “What does that do to the listening experience?”

Future Sound of Nature is not the only initiative aimed at lifting up nature as an artist, and channeling the power of music back into her protection. On Earth Day last year, an initiative called Sounds Right officially launched in partnership with Spotify, putting “NATURE” as a creator on the platform for the first time. With nearly 2 million monthly listeners, NATURE’s artist page includes EPs of purely natural sounds — like Colombian rainforests and Nepalese rivers — and a playlist of more than 60 collaborations, where NATURE is listed as a contributor on tracks by artists ranging from Ellie Goulding to Aurora to Brian Eno.

Two months ago, the singer-songwriter Hozier became one of the latest to join this initiative. He released a new version of a song from his first album, “Like Real People Do,” incorporating the sounds of birds, crickets, thunder, and rain recorded in his home of Wicklow, Ireland. (Much to my heartbreak, Hozier could not be reached for an interview.)

“Everyone has a nature story,” said Iminza Mbwaya, the global program manager for the Sounds Right initiative, which is spearheaded by the Museum for the United Nations. As a musician herself, she has always been inspired by nature, she said. “Being able to credit it, being able to go through this creative challenge of like, ‘OK, what nature sound would I include in my song, and why would I do that?’ It opens up a world of possibility.”

Mbwaya (center) and rest of the Sounds Right team took home a Grand Prix for Innovation at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France last month. Courtesy of Iminza Mbwaya

That includes processing experiences with nature that aren’t necessarily positive. Rozzi, an L.A.-based singer-songwriter, got connected with Sounds Right when she was looking for a way to give back in the aftermath of the catastrophic L.A. fires earlier this year. Her brother and sister-in-law lost their home in Altadena, one of the neighborhoods that suffered the worst impacts.

“Altadena is just so special,” she said. “It’s this magical place where you can live right up against the mountains … hence why it’s a little bit vulnerable.” While it was emotionally difficult to see the charred landscape after the fire, and the place where her brother’s home once stood — only the chimney remaining — she was also surprised to find a sense of hope as she listened.

“I stood there with my phone, and it had been raining all day, so there was water dripping and so many birds and the wind in the trees,” she described. “I’m a natural optimist, so maybe this is just me — but I have to say, it felt like I was so aware of nature’s ability to come back. And I took that to be a metaphor for us as people as well. If we’re a part of nature, we must also have resilience inside of us.”

The track she created with those sounds, “Orange Skies – Chapter 2,” is also a reimagining of an old song she released in 2020, in the wake of another record-breaking fire season. Sadly, she said, the song’s message only grows more relevant. And while she has heard from a number of fans who have found it cathartic, she did not want to profit off that message. “I wanted to use that song to give back.”

Sounds Right requires that at least 50 percent of royalties from tracks featuring NATURE must go to conservation and restoration projects — although not necessarily in the places where the recordings are from. In its first year, the initiative raised $225,000, which was channeled through the foundation EarthPercent into projects in Colombia and other parts of the tropical Andes. That area was determined to be a priority, as a biodiversity hot spot that is also under significant threat. In its second year, Mbwaya said, the project will focus half its grantmaking in the Amazon Basin and half in the Congo Basin.

The idea of crediting and compensating nature as an artistic collaborator has some elements of the rights of nature movement, an effort to extend legal rights to natural entities as a means of protecting them from exploitation and harm. Both Future Sound of Nature and Sounds Right attempt to represent nature’s interests in their decisionmaking. For Future Sound of Nature, that will involve giving nature a seat on the board of directors — filled by a human representative who will change over each year. Similar mechanisms have been proposed for how we might give nature a voice in governance.

But both groups stop short of suggesting a legal framework for giving nature credit and payment beyond their individual initiatives. “Sounds Right exists primarily as an initiative within the pop culture and nature conservation space. So it’s anchored in that creative world first, and then could extend into some of the legal world,” Mbwaya said. “But our aim, our purpose, is not really to step into the legalities of establishing nature’s ownership or nature’s rights in that sense.”

Still, she is hopeful that the model could eventually spread to other creative industries — or even something like pharmaceuticals, where many ingredients are derived from plants and animals.

For the time being, both Future Sound of Nature and Sounds Right are focused on getting more artists on board and reaching more listeners. In addition to the money that every stream generates for conservation, Future Sound of Nature’s Villa is hopeful the music will help listeners connect more deeply with nature.

“I think that the beauty of music is that it can give us a language that we don’t yet have in words — as to like, how do we describe our relationship with nature?” Villa said. “In our words, it’s still very divided. Whereas music doesn’t need words for it to convey this notion that there is actually no division. You can just feel it. And that’s the goal of our work, to convey that feeling of connection.”

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

Read: a previous newsletter about DJs for Climate Action, a group that Goldstein and Villa are part ofRead: about how the changing climate threatens some of our most beloved nature sounds (Grist)Read: more about the rights of nature movement and some of its recent victories and proposals (Rolling Stone)Read: about the history of our interest in recorded nature sounds, and how they’ve found audiences through meditation apps and other platforms (The Economist)Read: about a movement among Latin American artists to incorporate more nature sounds in their music, in the face of ecological decline (Pitchfork)

A parting shot

While I sadly did not get to speak to Hozier for this story (I know he’s busy tending to his bees, OK), we can all enjoy this serene video of him singing “Like Real People Do” live by a lake in Wicklow.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Mia Torres / Grist

Parting shot: Hozier / YouTube

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the movement to recognize nature as an artist on Jul 16, 2025.

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The next time you’re on a flight worrying about destroying the planet, rest easy knowing that at least you’re not in a fighter jet. The airline industry is responsible for 2.5 percent of global CO2 emissions, but the world’s militaries are responsible for more than double that, at 5.5 percent.

When nations boost military budgets, they also boost their carbon emissions. With a bump of $157 billion, thanks to the budget the Trump administration passed earlier this month, the United States now spends $1 trillion each year on defense. That’s more than three times as much as China, the next highest spender, as well as the entire European Union. If combined, the world’s armed forces would have the fourth highest carbon footprint, behind India, the U.S., and China.

Yet it’s been maddeningly difficult for researchers to monitor the emissions of militaries, which aren’t required to report these things. “There’s a guessing game involved,” said Nick Buxton, who has coauthored reports on military emissions from the Transnational Institute, an international research and advocacy group. “One of the overwhelming calls for everyone working in the sector is just for more open and transparent data, so we can come up with some reliable figures.”

To that end, using what data the Department of Energy has made publicly available between 1975 to 2022, researchers have calculated that if the U.S. consistently decreased military spending — by even a little — instead of increasing it, it’d be saving as much energy as Delaware and Slovenia use in a year. A decrease of less than 7 percent each year over about a decade would theoretically reduce energy consumption from about 640 trillion to 394 trillion British thermal units (a measurement of heat energy produced from burning fuels).

The study gives observers not just a better idea of how much carbon the American military is spewing, but also how effective it would be to reduce its funding. “We realize that the feasibility of military spending reductions taking place anytime soon within the U.S. context is probably quite questionable, to put it mildly,” said Andrew Jorgenson, professor of sociology and founding director of the University of British Columbia’s Climate and Society Lab and coauthor of the study, which was published June 2 in the journal PLOS Climate. “But it does highlight that it is a possible pathway to decarbonization and climate mitigation, just with very modest reductions in military spending.”

The researchers note that between 2010 and 2019, the Department of Defense’s emissions were over 636 million metric tons of atmosphere-warming emissions. (The DOD did not respond to a request to comment for this story.) And that’s a conservative and necessarily incomplete estimate, Jorgenson said. Fuel use can give researchers a general idea of how much carbon the armed forces are directly sending into the atmosphere, but there are also all kinds of indirect emissions that come with operating a military. Vegetables, for instance, took energy to grow and ship to bases, to say nothing of all the other supplies flowing around a military’s supply chain: bullets, blankets, boots.

“If anything, our findings are then perhaps undercounting and underestimating the actual scope of the U.S. military’s contribution to energy consumption and carbon emissions and climate change,” Jorgenson said. “That’s a speculative statement — I just want to be clear about that.”

All these variables not only make it difficult for researchers to accurately determine the climate costs of war — governments themselves can be in the dark too. “Militaries are decades behind in their ability to even understand their emission sources and where they’re coming from,” said Ellie Kinney, military emissions campaigner at the nonprofit Conflict and Environment Observatory. “There is this lag compared to other industries, because no one’s asked them to.”

Calculations get even more complicated when a military actually goes to war. More jet flights require more fuel, and even missiles produce their own emissions. The resulting fires in conflict zones, like the ones that have been devastating Ukraine’s forests, release still more carbon into the atmosphere. While the U.S. spends an outsized amount of money on its armed forces, other nations, particularly those involved in active wars, seem intent to catch up. Russia is now spending a third of its federal budget on defense as its invasion of Ukraine drags on. Last year, Israel’s military spending jumped by 65 percent to $46.5 billion as the country assaulted Gaza.

Last month, at President Trump’s urging, NATO allies committed to investing 3.5 percent of their gross domestic product each year on defense, and a further 1.5 percent on domestic security like new infrastructure, by 2035. That combined 5 percent is more than double their previous agreement to spend 2 percent of GDP. And on Monday, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte joined Trump in the Oval Office to announce a deal in which “billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment” will be purchased from the U.S. and delivered to Ukraine to support its defense against Russia.

According to a Transnational Institute report, if every NATO state actually reaches its new military spending goal, by 2030 the alliance’s annual military carbon footprint would be 2.3 billion metric tons CO2 equivalent. (The group published the report prior to the formalization of the June agreement, hence the discrepancy of using 2030 in their modeling instead of 2035.) That’s nearly 700 million metric tons extra than if 2024 levels of military spending were sustained until that time.

“We’re moving to a world which is readying itself constantly for war, which often makes war much more inevitable,” Buxton said. “And when war happens, emissions just skyrocket.”

All this additional military investment can create a feedback loop, Buxton and Kinney warn. Military leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere recognize climate change as a “threat multiplier,” meaning that it exacerbates existing hazards and conflicts. But with more investment in defense comes more emissions, and more warming, and more threats, which encourages more investment in armed forces. That also means less money for investing in renewable energy and adaptation measures: The richest nations are spending 30 times more on their militaries than on climate finance for the world’s most vulnerable countries.

“An escalation beyond control feels like the situation that we’re heading into,” Kinney said. “This is obviously deeply concerning from a broader security perspective, but really concerning from a climate perspective.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How reducing the US military budget would also reduce emissions on Jul 16, 2025.

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This year’s Fourth of July was the first time that the town of Comfort, Texas, used the sirens intended to warn its roughly 2,000 residents of imminent flooding. Founded by German abolitionists in 1854, Comfort sits along the Guadalupe River in an area known as “Flash Flood Alley.” It installed its siren-based warning system last year, a move that neighboring Kerr County, where well over 100 people died in this month’s floods, opted against.

One Comfort resident told Grist that when she heard the sirens, she had no way of knowing just how much urgency was called for.

“In my mind, I’m going, ‘Okay we’ve got a couple hours before it gets up to the house, because it’s a 50-foot drop from our house to the creek,” she said. Her husband started walking down to check on the water level, but quickly ran back inside. “You’ve got five minutes,” he told her. “Grab everything you need.’”

Ultimately, she and her husband were lucky — they were able to shelter with a neighbor whose house is on higher ground — but their close call captures a dilemma that’s taking on new urgency as flash floods claim lives from Texas to North Carolina: Even the most comprehensive disaster warnings are only as helpful as the responses of those who receive them.

“If you’ve never seen water rise in front of you in minutes, it’s hard to conceive of how quickly that can happen — and how quickly your life and property can be at risk,” said Rachel Hogan Carr, executive director of The Nurture Nature Center, a nonprofit focused on flood risk communication.

“There’s barriers to warning delivery from things like internet connectivity, people not having cell phones, or being asleep when a warning comes in,” added Hogan Carr, who is also a co-chair of Integrated Prediction of Precipitation and Hydrology for Early Actions or, InPRA, a working group within NOAA that researches early warning systems. “Communities need to anticipate these barriers, and set up local systems in order to amplify the distribution of warnings when they come in.”

In the aftermath of the July 4 deluge, questions about the efficacy of local warning systems have swirled, particularly in Kerr County, which saw the most devastating flooding. Although the county had the ability to use FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS, to push out aggressive, vibrating alarms to residents’ mobile phones — similar to those that sound when an AMBER alert is issued to inform residents of a given area about a missing child — that system wasn’t used until days after the flood, as more rain headed towards the area.

That said, cell phone customers in the at-risk service area were sent a variety of warnings — including a flash flood warning from the National Weather Service — but their effects appear to have been limited. Many received no alert, or only received an alert after the flood had overtaken them. Even if the county had sent additional warnings, many residents likely would have missed them if their phones were off or out of reach for the night.

Plus, a warning from local officials may have carried more weight than the alerts from the National Weather Service, Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who studies emergency management, told the Washington Post. People tend to be more receptive to warnings that are tailored specifically to them, added Hogan Carr.

“We saw this in Superstorm Sandy,” she explained. “Even though the entire New Jersey shoreline there was at risk, if it didn’t say somebody’s specific small town name, they often decided it [didn’t apply] to them.”

On the night of the flooding, Kerr County resident Martha Murayama says she was woken up by an audible alert on her phone. But she turned it off without reading the warning, assuming that it was an AMBER Alert. Murayama lives in the gated subdivision of Bumble Bee Hills, which sit directly across from the Guadalupe between Kerrville and Ingram, Texas. By then, the flood was already well underway. Not long after she got back to bed, Murayama received a panicked call from her neighbor, saying that someone was banging on the door. It was a family who lived directly across from the river, trying to warn people as they moved to higher ground. Murayama was worried — her neighbor, Joe, suffers from Parkinson’s and was not in good health. When Murayama’s husband went outside to investigate, he was quickly swept away by flood waters, although he was ultimately able to make his way back to the house.

Just up the hill, Ramiro Rodriguez was awoken by the same family seeking shelter. Like Murayama, he too thought immediately of Joe, and made his way down to the house through flood waters to help Joe and his wife up the hill. As they managed to pop the garage door open, Rodriguez spotted a tow strap, which he used to haul the couple to his house. “I tied up Joe to my hips,” he said. “And right about that time, you can hear the flash flood warning.”

But just as quickly as the water arrived, it receded. Since July 4, Murayama says, she’s gotten new flood alerts constantly.

Flash floods are among the deadliest natural disasters and the most difficult to accurately predict. Less than 1 percent of waterways across the United States have stream gauges that monitor rising water in real time; the National Weather Service often relies on computer modeling to assess flood risk in smaller creeks and streams. (Kerr County only has six river gauges, which makes predicting floods more difficult). But nearby development can quickly render these models outdated. For example, a stream bordered by concrete will flood much faster and cause much more damage in the surrounding community than one that runs alongside a park, which has natural features that can absorb water.

Even when floods can be anticipated, communicating their severity to the public is a tall order. Because flash floods are very localized, even neighborhood-level warnings may seem like false alarms to some residents, leading to what the journalist Zoë Schlanger has dubbed “alert fatigue.”

That’s why early community education is such an integral part of a functioning warning system, according to Hogan Carr. “If you get a flash flood warning and you never see it, you got lucky,” she said.

Many people do not understand the speed with which floods move, which can lead to them driving through areas that are about to be submerged, for example. Warnings such as the ones sent in Texas, encouraging residents to “move to higher ground,” don’t necessarily convey urgency, according to Ashley Coles, an associate professor of environmental geography at Texas Christian University who studies flash flooding.

“I spoke to somebody regarding the flooding in Texas. They said, ‘You know, if I had gotten that message I would’ve gotten together a go bag and then gone to bed.’ So they would have been ready to evacuate if needed, but it came so fast that they would have been swept away,” said Coles. “It makes it very difficult even for people who are trying to be cautious.”

The National Weather Service has defended its response to the floods, pointing out that it issued warnings at 1:14 am, two hours before the flood waters reached inhabited riverside areas like Camp Mystic. But the warnings, though they cautioned that “life-threatening” flooding was possible, did not order evacuations.

As climate change makes flash floods and other extreme weather events more common and deadly, researchers across the country are struggling with how to effectively communicate risk to the public, without losing their trust through over-warning.

”It has to be really a comprehensive strategy of community support, wrapped around the issuance of a formal flood warning,” said Hogan Carr, explaining that ideally, the local weather service would have a forecaster whose job was dedicated to doing community outreach, explaining local risks, where forecasts come from, and where residents can get reliable information in an emergency. “It’s an investment of time and resources proactively, that could pay off tremendously during these large-scale events,” she added.

In the meantime, Kerr County residents are hoping for a siren system, like the one used in neighboring Comfort.

“I slept through [the phone alert],” said Rodriguez. “If it wasn’t for those people knocking on the door, I would have slept right through it.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

Are you affected by the flooding in Texas and North Carolina? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.

Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why flash flood warnings will continue to go unheeded on Jul 16, 2025.

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The Miccosukee Tribe in Florida joined environmental groups on Tuesday to sue the federal and state agencies that constructed an immigrant detention center known as the “Alligator Alcatraz” and located in the Everglades National Park.

In a motion to join a lawsuit, as one of the first tribes to potentially sue against the detention center, the case argues that the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Miami-Dade County, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management did not seek an environmental review.

The filing alleges the center’s proximity to Miccosukee villages, ceremonial sites, and access to traditional hunting grounds, and “raises significant raises significant concerns about environmental degradation and potential impacts.”

“We are going to make sure that we fight this facility on whatever front is available to us,” said William “Popeye” James Osecola, who is the secretary of the Miccosukee tribal council. He hopes the lawsuit will “signify that the tribe will continue fighting to do what it’s always done, which is protect the land and save the land that saved us.”

According to Osecola, since the facility’s operation began, tribal members have been restricted from gathering plants and roots for uses such as medicine. “Obviously, that’s not an option for us right now,” he said. “At the moment, it’s the first time we’ve ever seen gates like that there, so it’s very jarring for us.”

Nearby the facility, 15 active tribal villages reside inside Big Cypress National Preserve, located within the Everglades.

During the 19th century, the Seminole Wars, which the Seminole Nation and Miccosukee Nation view as one continuous conflict against the U.S., many members fled into the wetlands and used their natural environment as refuge.

Protestors stand outside a makeshift detention center for immigrants known as the “Alligator Alcatraz” as government vehicles drive by, in the Florida Everglades. Betty Osceola

In a press conference at the detention center last month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said there would be  “zero impact” on the wetland’s environment. The site is located on an abandoned airstrip, once a controversial project that aimed to be the world’s largest airport. Observers outside the facility said they could see lights on at all hours, attracting mosquito swarms. Recent satellite images also reveal that a freshly paved road has been laid down.

Last year, the tribe and the National Park Service signed a co-stewardship agreement for Everglades National Park. The partnership aimed to collaborate on protecting tribal practices, restoration efforts for the land’s vegetation, and protection.

In these cypress swamps and toothy sawgrass marshes, wildlife alongside alligators includes bats, turtles, and panthers. Because species such as the panther are critically endangered, Osecola implied that the continuous traffic at Alligator Alcatraz will “see more deaths with the wildlife”. “It’s taken decades just to get Everglades restoration going like it is now,” he said.

While the Department of Homeland Security distanced itself after promoting the facility for weeks, claiming Florida controls the facility under state hands, critics are not convinced. Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization that filed alongside Friends of the Everglades in the case last month, noted that “setting aside the funding for detaining immigrants is essentially a federal function. This is a federal project, regardless of what they say in their court filings.”

Last week, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a legal notice with an intent to sue that the construction also violates the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, raising concerns such as light pollution and the use of insecticide to mitigate mosquitoes on-site that could affect the area’s wildlife and surrounding water.

Each day since its opening, protestors and groups have noticed trucks coming in carrying diesel, generators, and caged vehicles holding detainees. There are currently 3000 beds inside the facility and at least 400 security personnel on-site.

After state legislators were blocked from entering the Alligator Alcatraz’s premises, Governor DeSantis invited legislators and the state’s members of Congress to tour the facility over the weekend. According to Osecola, the Governor of Florida did not extend that invitation to tribes.

Some Republican members claimed that the detention center was clean and safe. Others, such as Democratic State Representative Anna Eskamani, reported that, “The environmental impact of this facility cannot be overstated — there is new asphalt, thousands of gallons of water used every day and gas tanks powering generators. No alligators seen, but plenty of mosquitoes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A tribe in Florida joins the fight against the ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigrant detention center on Jul 15, 2025.

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Since 2019, the 191 countries that are party to an international agreement called the Basel Convention have agreed to classify mixed plastic trash as “hazardous waste.” This designation essentially bans the export of unsorted plastic waste from rich countries to poor countries and requires it to be disclosed in shipments between poor countries. But the rule has a big loophole.

Every year, an unknown but potentially large amount of plastic waste continues to be traded in the form of “refuse-derived fuel,” or RDF, ground-up packaging and industrial plastic waste that gets mixed with scrap wood and paper in order to be burned for energy. Environmental groups say these exports perpetuate “waste colonialism” and jeopardize public health, since burning plastic emits hazardous pollutants and greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

Many advocates would like to see the RDF loophole closed as a first step toward discouraging the development of new RDF facilities worldwide. They were disappointed that, at this spring’s biannual meeting of the Basel Convention — the 1989 treaty that regulates the transboundary movement of hazardous waste — RDF went largely unaddressed. “It’s just frustrating to witness all these crazy, profit-protecting negotiators,” said Yuyun Ismawati, co-founder of the Indonesian anti-pollution nonprofit Nexus3. “If we are going to deal with plastic waste through RDF, then … everybody must be willing to learn more about what’s in it.”

RDF is a catch-all term for several different products, sometimes made with special equipment at material recovery facilities — the centers that, in the U.S., receive and sort mixed household waste for further processing. ASTM International, an American standard-setting organization, lists several types of RDF depending on what it’s made of and what it’s formed into — coarse particles no larger than a fingernail, for example, or larger briquettes. Some RDF is made by shredding waste into a loose “fluff.”

Although RDF contains roughly 50 percent paper, cardboard, wood, and other plant material, the rest is plastic, including human-made textiles and synthetic rubber. It’s this plastic content that makes RDF so combustible — after all, plastics are just reconstituted fossil fuels. According to technical guidelines from the Basel Convention secretariat, RDF contains about two-thirds the energy of coal by weight.

One of the main users of RDF is the cement industry, which can burn it alongside traditional fossil fuels to power its energy-intensive kilns. Álvaro Lorenz, global sustainability director for the multinational cement company Votorantim Cimentos, said RDF has gained popularity as cities, states and provinces, and countries struggle to deal with the 353 million metric tons of plastic waste produced each year — 91 percent of which is never recycled. Some of these jurisdictions have implemented policies discouraging trash from being sent to landfills. Instead, it gets sent to cement kilns like his. “Governments are promoting actions to reduce the amount of materials being sent to landfills, and we are one solution,” he said.

Workers sort plastic waste for recycling in Samut Prakan, Thailand, in 2023. Matt Hunt / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Lorenz said RDF makes his company more sustainable by contributing to a “circular economy.” In theory, using RDF instead of coal or natural gas reduces emissions and advances companies’ environmental targets. According to David Araujo, North America engineered fuels program manager for the waste management and utility company Veolia, RDF produced by his company’s factory in Louisiana, Missouri, allows cement company clients in the Midwest to avoid 1.06 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions with every ton of RDF burned. The ash produced from burning RDF can also be used as a raw material in cement production, he added, displacing virgin material use.

RDF is also attractive because it is less price-volatile than the fossil fuels that cement production would otherwise depend on. In one analysis of Indonesian RDF production from last year, researchers found that each metric ton of RDF can save cement kiln operators about $77 in fuel and electricity costs.

Lorenz said that the high temperatures inside cement kilns “completely burn 100 percent” of any hazardous chemicals that may be contained in RDF’s plastic fraction. But this is contested by environmental advocates who worry about insufficiently regulated toxic air emissions similar to those produced by traditional waste incinerators — especially in poor countries with less robust environmental regulations and enforcement capacity. Dioxins, for example, are released by both cement kilns and other waste incinerators, and are linked to immune and nervous system impairment. Burning plastic can also release heavy metals that are associated with respiratory and neurological disorders. A 2019 systematic review of the health impacts of waste incineration found that people living and working near waste incinerators had higher levels of dioxins, lead, and arsenic in their bodies, and that they often had a higher risk of some types of cancer such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Read NextThe misleading accounting behind your ‘recycled’ plasticJoseph Winters

“Before they convert it into fuel, the chemicals are still locked inside the [plastic] packaging,” said Ismawati. “But once you burn it, … you spray out everything.” She said some of her friends living near an RDF facility in Indonesia have gotten cancer, and at least one has died from it.

Lorenz and Araujo both said their companies are subject to, and comply with, applicable environmental regulations in the countries where they operate.

Lee Bell, a science and policy adviser for the International Pollutants Elimination Network — a network of environmental and public health experts and nonprofits — also criticized the idea that burning RDF causes fewer greenhouse gas emissions than burning traditional fossil fuels. He said this notion fails to consider the “petrochemical origin” of plastic waste: Plastics cause greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of their life cycle, and, as a strategy for dealing with plastic waste, research suggests that incineration releases more climate pollution than other waste management strategies. In a landfill, where plastic lasts hundreds of years with little degradation, the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law has estimated greenhouse gas emissions at about 132 pounds per metric ton. That rises to about 1,980 pounds of emissions per metric ton when plastic is incinerated.

Bell said he’s concerned about the apparent growth of the RDF industry worldwide, though there is little reliable data about how much of the stuff is produced and traded between countries each year. Part of the problem is the “harmonized system” of export codes administrated by the World Customs Organization, which represents more than 170 customs bodies around the world. The organization doesn’t have a specific code for RDF and instead lumps it with any of several other categories  — ”household waste,” for example — when it’s traded internationally. Only the U.K. seems to provide transparent reporting of its RDF exports. In the first three months of 2025 it reported sending about 440,000 metric tons abroad, most of which was received by Scandinavian countries.

Nearly all of the world’s largest cement companies already use RDF in at least some of their facilities. According to one market research firm, the market for RDF was worth about $5 billion in 2023, and it’s expected to grow to $10.2 billion by 2032. Other firms have forecast a bright outlook for the RDF industry in the Middle East and Africa, and one analysis from last year said that Asia is “realizing tremendous potential as a growth market for RDF” as governments seek new ways to manage their waste. Within the past year, new plans to use RDF in cement kilns have been announced in Peshawar, Pakistan; Hoa Binh, Vietnam; Adana, Turkey; and across Nigeria, just to name a few places.

A cement factory in Port Canaveral, Florida. Peter Titmuss / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Araujo, with Veolia, said his company’s RDF program “has grown exponentially” over the past several years, “and we recently invested millions of dollars to upgrade equipment to keep pace with demand.” A separate spokesperson said Veolia does not send RDF across international borders, and a spokesperson for Votorantim Cimentos said the company always sources RDF locally.

Dorothy Otieno, a program officer at the Nairobi-based Centre for Environment Justice and Development, said investment in RDF infrastructure could create a perverse incentive for the world to create more plastic — and for developing countries to import it — just to ensure that facility operators earn a return on their investment. “Will this create an avenue for the importation of RDFs and other fossil fuel-based plastics?” she asked. “These are the kinds of questions that we are going to need to ask ourselves.”

At this year’s Basel Convention conference in May and June, the International Pollutants Elimination Network called for negotiators to put RDF into the same regulatory bucket as other forms of mixed plastic — potentially by classifying it as hazardous waste. Doing so would prohibit rich countries from exporting RDF to poor ones, and make its trade between developing countries contingent on the receiving country giving “prior informed consent.”

Negotiators fell short of that vision. Instead, they requested that stakeholders — such as RDF companies and environmental groups — submit plastic waste-related comments to the secretariat of the Basel Convention, for discussion at a working group meeting next year. Bell described this as “kicking the cans down the road.”

“This is disappointing,” he added. “We appear to be on the brink of an explosion in the trade of RDF.”

The next Basel Convention meeting isn’t until 2027. But in the meantime, countries are free to create their own legislation restricting the export of RDF. Australia did this in 2022 when, following pressure from environmental groups, it amended its rules for plastic waste exports. The country now requires companies to obtain a hazardous waste permit in order to send a type of RDF called “process engineered fuel” abroad. Although RDF exports to rich countries like Japan continue, the new requirements effectively ended the legal export of RDF from Australia to poorer countries in Southeast Asia.

Ultimately, Ismawati said countries need to focus on reducing plastic production to levels that can be managed domestically — without any type of incineration. “Every country needs to treat waste in their own country,” Ismawati said. “Do not export it under the label of a ‘circular economy.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This fuel is 50% plastic — and it’s slipping through a loophole in international waste law on Jul 15, 2025.

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Early in the morning on July 4th, as torrential rains battered Central Texas, the dangers of flash floods became imminent. In Kerr County, the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet within 45 minutes, leading to the deaths of 106 people. As the catastrophic deluge swept throughout the region, the death toll climbed to at least 132.

Later that day, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. The law gutted public food and healthcare safety nets, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, while also codifying massive tax breaks for wealthier individuals and major corporations. The devastation in Texas, then, became the first major disaster to expose the grave effects of Trump’s extensive disinvestment from disaster resilience programs — and his administration’s newest food and hunger policies.

Charitable groups such as food banks and pantries typically serve as frontline distributors of food and water in a time of a crisis, working in tandem with other responding national and global relief organizations and government agencies. Now, though, because of the policy and funding decisions enacted by the Trump administration over the last six months, the primary food banks that are responding to the needs of residents throughout central Texas have less food to distribute.

Near the beginning of Trump’s second term, the Department of Agriculture stopped the flow of some of the money that pays for deliveries of products like meats, eggs, and vegetables known as “bonus commodities” through The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, to charitable organizations like food banks. TEFAP is one of the primary ways that state and federal governments have ensured food reaches communities in need in the aftermath of climate-fueled disasters like a hurricane or heatwave.

In March, the USDA also moved to end future rounds of funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. These two programs, which are also designed to support emergency food providers such as food banks, were slated to distribute more than a billion dollars this fiscal year to states, tribes, and territories.

In April, the funding cuts drove the Central Texas Food Bank to cancel 39 loads of food — the equivalent of 716,000 meals — scheduled to be delivered through September, said Beth Corbett, the organization’s vice president of government affairs and advocacy. The state of Texas lost more than $107 million for programs that allowed food banks and schools to buy food locally because of the administration’s funding cuts, the Austin Monitor and KUT reported. The San Antonio Food Bank also endured similar losses to its inventory.

San Antonio Food Bank’s president and CEO Eric Cooper told Grist he is consumed by concern that they may not be able to meet the emergency food demand prompted by the flooding tragedy in central Texas.

“Prior to this disaster, we just don’t have the volume of food in our warehouse that we need to have,” said Cooper, noting that they are “struggling to keep up” with the demand intensified by the deluge. “We have had to try to pivot a little bit to ration some of what we do have across the population we serve so that we can stretch [our supply],” he added. “USDA cuts have made it harder to keep up. The flood will make it even more difficult. Pending SNAP cuts feel like it will be impossible.”

Read NextDisaster 101: Your guide to extreme weather preparation, relief, and recoveryLyndsey Gilpin

Over a week after the floods, more than 160 people remain unaccounted for, and on Sunday another round of heavy rains halted some rescue efforts. The food bank, which has pantries and distribution sites throughout 29 Texan counties, is now acting as the central community-based anti-hunger hub serving some of the hardest hit swaths of Hill Country. Throughout the last week, the bank distributed more than 160,000 pounds of food relief to households in affected counties — an amalgamation of heated and ready to eat meals, groceries, pallets of water, and snacks, that equates roughly $300,000 in value and provides up to 120,000 meals. In the period of recovery to come, they expect to distribute another 40,000 pounds or so worth of food every day, an amount which feeds anywhere between 300 and 500 families.

That volume, according to Cooper, is far more than the bank normally distributes. They are already seeing a 10 percent increase in demand — a rapid uptick in the span of a little over a week. “We’re doing what we can to make sure that people don’t go hungry, but it has been tough,” he said. The biggest problem they are running up against, he noted, is how federal funding cuts have obstructed their ability to fully respond.

“I feel like the parent whose child asked what’s for dinner tonight, and not knowing, not able to totally confirm, that I’ve got it.”

With more than 5 million residents facing food insecurity, 17.6 percent of the state’s total population, Texas leads the rest of the nation in hunger rates. The region struck by floods is no exception. Among the six Hill Country counties most severely affected by the floods is Tom Green County, home to 120,000 or so residents. Preliminary estimates by Feeding America show that, based on location trends and new individuals registering for San Antonio Food Bank distributions, about 1,872 people in the area are now at further risk of hunger because of the expected economic impacts of the floods. About 20,080 residents living in Tom Green already confront food insecurity — nearly 17 percent of the population.

Signs outside of the Hunt Baptist Church advertise free water, food, and supplies to anyone in need. Jim Vondruska / Getty Images

But most of the destruction wrought by the floods was seen across neighboring Kerr County, where about 9,310 people already grapple with food insecurity, according to the latest public Feeding America data. With a total population of little more than 53,000 people, the towns found in this rural belt of south-central Texas include places like Hunt, an unincorporated community on the Guadalupe River, with a permanent population that sits at around 1,300. Roughly 876 residents in Hunt — more than half — now face a deeper food insecurity risk because of the floods, according to the Feeding America data shared with Grist.

Hunger typically intensifies in disaster zones because of the lasting economic repercussions of an extreme weather event. Poverty rates — and issues with food access — surge in areas significantly impacted by floods and storms because many Americans are less able to afford the mounting costs needed to best prepare for a disaster or recover from the damages they wreak.

In the last week, the USDA has issued flood-related waivers for households already enrolled in SNAP but not yet announced broader food assistance through programs like D-SNAP, or the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In flood-ravaged places like Hunt, humanitarian organizations are stepping in to provide assistance where the government isn’t.

The World Central Kitchen set up its main distribution site in Hunt. Their on-the-ground team of ten has handed out over 12,100 meals throughout Hill Country and has begun coordinating with local food banks to assess their longer-term resource needs.

“There is an influx of aid here because of this national tragedy,” said Samantha Elfmont, who leads emergency global food relief operations for World Central Kitchen. “We’re in that period now of ‘How do we support the community much longer than the month of July?’”

The latest round of torrential rainfall has complicated those efforts: Over the weekend, the Hunt site was flooded, so they are now also working to evacuate the team and food truck.

Getting a hot meal to those reeling from the floods is important for not just physical recovery from a disaster, but also for the emotional recovery process, said Elfmont. “People often think of health and shelter,” she said, but “emergency feeding helps people get through the trauma.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

Are you affected by the flooding in Texas and North Carolina? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.

Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Texas food banks are rationing meals for flood survivors because of Trump’s cuts on Jul 14, 2025.

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