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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

Loading…

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.”

Read NextHow the Klamath Dams Came DownAnita Hofschneider & Jake Bittle

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.”

Read NextA filing error put more than 90,000 acres of Yakama Nation land in the hands of Washington stateMaria Parazo Rose

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...]

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.”

Read NextThe science behind Texas’ catastrophic floodsMatt Simon

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.

Read NextWhy flash flood warnings will continue to go unheededRebecca Egan McCarthy

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

Read NextThe USDA is unfreezing clean energy money — but ‘inviting’ grant recipients to remove DEI and climate languageAyurella Horn-Muller & Izzy Ross

“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.

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

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

Beatriz Salazar was sifting through her usual pile of mail this spring when an envelope from the city of Chicago caught her eye. Inside, she found a letter warning her — in 10 different languages — that her drinking water was delivered to her tap through a toxic lead pipe.

With it, the city included tips to reduce exposure, links to city programs to help replace the pipe, and a full-page diagram showing how the lead can flake or dissolve into tap water from a service line or other plumbing infrastructure and cause serious health harm, including brain and kidney damage.

“Lead?” Salazar remembered thinking. “We’ve been drinking lead for how long?”

Salazar, a housing counselor, lifelong resident of the city’s Southeast Side and mother of two, immediately called friends and family. Her mother-in-law, who lives around the corner, had received the same letter. So, too, had one of her clients. But others, including her mother, 74-year-old Salome Fabela, fewer than 10 blocks away, hadn’t seen or heard anything about it.

Beatriz Salazar looks over information on lead contamination and the city’s replacement programs at her mother’s kitchen table. Keerti Gopal / Inside Climate News

A federal drinking water rule required Chicago officials to warn approximately 900,000 renters, homeowners, and landlords before November 16, 2024, that their drinking water is at risk of lead contamination. Their properties were built before 1986, when the city required the installation of lead service lines. Lead pipes were banned nationwide that year.

But as of early July, Chicago had only notified 7 percent of the people on its list that their water may be dangerously contaminated.

Fabela’s home, according to city records, is connected to a service line containing lead, so she should have received a letter. But she is among the vast majority of people who — eight months past the deadline — still have not been warned. The federal law requires water systems to warn residents on a yearly basis until all of its lead pipes are replaced.

Megan Vidis, spokesperson for the Department of Water Management, estimated that about 3,000 letters are mailed out every week, adding up to about $8,500 in monthly costs.

Related Stories

Chicago residents risk daily lead exposure from toxic pipes. Replacing them will take decades.

As states replace lead pipes, plastic alternatives could bring new risks

Advocates worry that the city’s delayed warnings could keep already vulnerable communities in the dark about the state of their drinking water and what they can do about it.  A study published last year found two-thirds of Chicago children under 6 years old live in homes with tap water containing detectable levels of lead.

Vidis said DWM has asked the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency for more time to make its notifications, but they haven’t received an extension thus far. She added that the state is aware of Chicago’s delay and estimated that the city would not complete its first round of mailed notifications until 2027, but that it will notify residents electronically by the end of this year.

IEPA said water systems that did not certify completion of the requirement by July 1 will receive a reporting violation that they will have to make public.

Lead pipes are a serious health hazard, and millions are still in use across the country in older homes and buildings. No other city in the nation is so reliant on the dangerous metal as Chicago, where around 412,000 out of about 490,000 service lines are at least partly made of lead, or may be contaminated with it. And the city doesn’t plan to finish replacing them for another five decades — 30 years later than required by the federal government.

Climate change could amplify the health risks of lead pipes because soaring temperatures can increase the amount of lead dissolving into and contaminating drinking water. Service lines, which bring water from the street into homes and buildings, are just one of many plumbing fixtures — along with faucets, valves and internal plumbing — that can add lead to drinking water.

All of that makes timely notifications even more important.

This is the first time water utilities have been required to notify the public they might be getting water through a lead pipe, according to Elin Betanzo, founder of Safe Water Engineering. Betanzo was instrumental in uncovering the water crisis in Flint, Michigan — which celebrated the replacement of a majority of its lead service lines earlier this month.

Chicago has provided other resources to let residents know that houses built before 1986 are likely to have a lead service line, including an online lookup tool that shows the material sourcing water to a specific address. The city also encourages residents to test their water by calling 311 and signing up for a free lead test kit. But the program was unable to complete any tests in May while it was undergoing maintenance, and it’s currently backlogged. Some residents have been waiting months, or even years, to receive results.

Chicago residents: Take these steps to find out more about lead in your water

To request a free lead testing kit from the city of Chicago, enter your address here.

The city also has an address look-up tool that can help determine whether you have a lead pipe. (Scroll down and check the box agreeing to the site’s terms and conditions in order to go to the tool.)

If you have already tested and lead was found, you may qualify for pipe replacement. Find out more here. In the meantime, use a water filter and flush your water often. See if you qualify for a free water filter here.

Gina Ramirez, director of Midwest environmental health for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said her mother completed a lead test in 2022 and never received results, although her service line was replaced through a city program geared toward lower-income residents in 2023.

Of the 10 cities with the most lead service lines in the country, only Chicago has confirmed that it has not yet finished mailing all its notices. By the end of last November, about 200,000 notices had gone out in Cleveland and Detroit, more than 100,000 in Milwaukee, more than 85,000 in Denver and St. Louis, more than 75,000 in Indianapolis, nearly 70,000 in Buffalo, and more than 55,000 in Minneapolis, according to the cities’ respective water departments and utilities. New York City did not respond to multiple inquiries.

In Chicago, only about 62,000 of the 900,000 notices that were due in November had gone out by early July. In some cases, they pointed residents to broken links.

While Chicago is struggling to mail 3,000 notices a week, Milwaukee sent over 100,000 in a single day. And Detroit has already sent 124,000 this year after its 200,000 last year.

“People are not getting the information they need to protect themselves,” Betanzo said of Chicago’s pace. “It’s information they should have had a long time ago, and we’re continuing to delay that? That’s not OK.”

Beatriz Salazar looks over information on lead contamination and the city’s replacement programs at her mother’s kitchen table. Keerti Gopal / Inside Climate News

Chicago has a big job ahead, replacing hundreds of thousands of lines that are partially owned by private citizens, and it has to get permission from homeowners to replace their portion of the line. The city has said in its service line replacement plan that notifying homeowners of the problem and why it should matter to them is an important step in building buy-in for replacement.

Suzanne Novak, a senior attorney working on safe drinking water issues for the nonprofit Earthjustice, said she thinks Chicago’s delay means city officials aren’t taking their responsibilities to the public seriously.

“They are brazenly violating the law,” Novak said. “We not only need them to step up and catch up really quickly, but we also need the state of Illinois and EPA to use their powers to hold them accountable for this blatant lack of compliance with the law.”

The EPA also requires water systems to send out three types of notifications to residents: one if their service line is confirmed to be made of lead; another if it’s galvanized steel, which contains lead; and a third if the material of their service line is unknown. So far, Chicago has only started sending letters to homes with confirmed lead service lines.

Chicago officials say they are also prioritizing notifications by neighborhood and type of home. So far, the city has notified homes within 15 wards, mostly in lower-income areas on the city’s South, West, and Northwest sides. The city has begun by sending letters to single-family homes, which officials say are more likely to experience higher lead contamination due to less water usage and, subsequently, more water stagnation in the pipes.

But advocates and residents say the notification letters haven’t reached every affected home in these categories. Salazar and her mother both live in the 10th ward, one of the city’s priority areas, and Fabela lives in a single-family home.

Vidis, the spokesperson for the city’s Department of Water Management, said Fabela had not yet received a letter because city records showed she has a galvanized steel pipe. Vidis said Fabela’s notice would go out this year but did not specify when.

“I just think they should have done something to inform us faster,” Salazar said. “I think they’ve known this, and they’re just now informing us.”

Vanessa Bly, co-founder of Southeast Side neighborhood advocacy group Bridges//Puentes: Justice Collective of the Southeast, has been working since 2022 to raise awareness about the dangers of lead in drinking water. Last year, Bly began working with a Northwestern University laboratory that is developing rapid, at-home lead tests.

Bly has been troubleshooting the experimental test kits with homeowners like Salazar and Fabela on the Southeast Side. The predominantly Black and Latino community experiences disproportionate pollution and health harms linked to toxic exposures, including higher rates of chronic disease and lower life expectancy. Decades of disinvestment have also bred distrust with the city.

Coming soon: More reporting on Chicago’s lead service lines, plus an interactive map to explore which areas are most at risk. Sign up to be notified when these stories and tools are available.

Have you been affected by lead pipes or lead exposure in Chicago? Tell us what happened.

Over and over, Bly has found that many of her participants still haven’t received lead notifications from the city. She worries about residents drinking their tap water with no idea it could be unsafe.

“Is it so hard to have a commercial campaign to talk about it?” Bly asked.

Some residents have long been suspicious about their water quality, even if they didn’t know it might contain lead. Salazar and her kids drink bottled water at home and keep a filter in the refrigerator, she said. Her mother, Fabela, has filtered her water for almost 25 years, first through a filter attached to her tap, and then through a handheld pitcher.

At her mother’s kitchen table, Salazar looked over the city’s options for lead service line replacement. She doesn’t qualify for Chicago’s equity program, which replaces lines for free for homeowners whose household income is below 80 percent of the area median income. The city is raising money to cover costs for more homeowners, but it hasn’t told Salazar when it might get to her line. And she doesn’t have $30,000 to pay for her own immediate replacement.

For now, she said, continuing to filter her water is probably the most realistic option. But she thinks the city should have told her and her family about the risk sooner.

“How long have they known?” Salazar asked. “And why did it take them so long to inform us?”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Chicago was supposed to warn residents about toxic lead pipes last year. Most still have no idea. on Jul 14, 2025.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed

For 25 years, a group of the country’s top experts has been fastidiously tracking the ways that climate change threatens every part of the United States. Their findings informed the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into accessible warnings for policymakers and the public. But that work came to a halt this spring when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed all 400 experts working on the next edition. Then, on June 30, all of the past reports vanished too, along with the federal website they lived on.

A lot of information about the changing climate has disappeared under President Donald Trump’s second term, but the erasure of the National Climate Assessments is “by far the biggest loss we’ve seen,” said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The National Climate Assessments were one of the most approachable resources that broke down how climate change will affect the places people care about, she said. The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders — policymakers, farmers, businesses — to guide their decisions about the future.While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they’re no longer as easy to access. And it’s unclear what, if anything, will happen to the report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, which already existed in draft form.

So why did the reports survive Trump’s first term, but not his second? You could view their disappearance in a few different ways, experts said — as a flex of executive power, an escalation in the culture war over climate change, or a strategic attempt to erase the scientific foundation for climate policy. “If you suppress information and data, then you don’t have the evidence you need to be able to create regulations, strengthen regulations, and even to combat the repeal of regulations,” Gehrke said.

Read NextHow your showerhead and fridge got roped into the culture warsKate Yoder

This isn’t climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. “I don’t know if we’re living in climate denial anymore,” said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at Columbia Climate School. “We have this new front of denial by erasure.”

By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing. In April, the administration pulled nearly $4 million in funding from a Princeton program to improve computer models predicting changes in the oceans and atmosphere, claiming the work created “climate anxiety” among young people. That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to submit its annual report to the United Nations detailing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ended its 45-year tradition of tracking billion-dollar weather disasters. Trump also hopes to shut down the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaiʻi, which has measured the steady rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since the 1950s — the first data to definitively show humans were changing the climate.

“This kind of wholesale suppression of an entire field of federally sponsored research, to my knowledge, is historically unprecedented,” Aronowsky said.

In a response to a request for comment, the EPA directed Grist to a webpage containing past greenhouse gas emissions reports, as well as a version of what was supposed to be this year’s report obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund. However, the agency confirmed that the latest data has not been officially released. The White House declined to comment, and neither NASA nor NOAA responded in time for publication.

Last year, a leaked training video from Project 2025 — the policy roadmap organized by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — showed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.” The strategy appears to be designed to boost the fossil fuel industry at a time when clean energy has become competitive and the reality of climate change harder to dismiss, as floods, fires, and heat waves have become perceptibly worse. “We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said in his inauguration speech in January.

Read NextIn Trump’s new purge of climate language, even ‘resilience’ isn’t safeKate Yoder

The administration hasn’t exactly been subtle about its endgame. Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, doesn’t deny the reality of climate change (he calls himself a “climate realist”), but he’s zealously dismantled environmental programs and has recommended that the White House strike down the “endangerment finding,” the bedrock of U.S. climate policy. It comes from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling on the Clean Air Act that required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants since they endanger public health. If the administration can convince the courts that climate change isn’t a health consideration, it could end that regulatory obligation.

“If you’re removing information about climate change, its reality, and its impact on people, then I think it’s a lot easier to make the case that it’s not an environmental health issue,” Gehrke said.

There’s a word for the idea that ignorance can serve political ends: agnotology (from the Greek “agnosis,” or “not knowing”), the study of how knowledge is deliberately obscured. What Trump is doing to information about climate change fits squarely in that tradition, according to Aronowsky: “If you remove it, then in a certain sense, it no longer exists, and therefore, there’s nothing to even debate, right?”

Climate denial first took off in the 1990s, when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about climate science. Over the decades, as the evidence became rock-solid, those who opposed reducing the use of fossil fuels gradually shifted from outright denying the facts to attacking solutions like wind and solar power. What the Trump administration is doing now marks a radical break from this long-term trend, said John Cook, a climate misinformation researcher at The University of Melbourne in Australia. “This is a 180, not just a turn, but diving into something we’ve never even seen before,” he said. On the other hand, Cook said, the administration is taking a classic climate denial tactic — painting scientists as “alarmists” or conspirators who can’t be trusted — and turning it into government policy.

Half a year in, the second Trump administration’s treatment of climate information hasn’t yet reached the “eradication” levels that Project 2025 aspired to, at least on government websites. The EPA’s climate change website, for instance, is still up and running, even though all references to the phenomenon were erased on the agency’s home page. Most of the website deletions so far have served to isolate climate change as an issue, erasing its relationship to topics such as health and infrastructure, Gehrke said. Up until the National Climate Assessments disappeared, she would have said that “climate erasure” was an inappropriate characterization of what’s happening. “But now, I’m really not so sure,” she said.

Rachel Cleetus, the senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks that the administration’s actions actually go beyond erasure. “They’re literally trying to change the basis on which a lot of policymaking is advanced — the science basis, the legal basis, and the economic basis,” she said. Her biggest concern isn’t just what facts have been removed, but what political propaganda might replace them. “That’s more dangerous, because it really leaves people in this twilight zone, where what’s real, and what’s important, and what is going to affect their daily lives is just being obfuscated.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why the federal government is making climate data disappear on Jul 14, 2025.

---

From Grist via this RSS feed