The annual State of the Climate report, published on 14 October in the journal BioScience, tracked sixteen planetary vital signs and found seven of them at record extremes, a group that includes sea level and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, while several others, among them the area burned in wildfires and the heat stored in the ocean, show evidence of acceleration or abrupt shifts. The authors put the rate of warming at about 0.05 degrees Celsius per decade between 1880 and 1970 and roughly 0.36 degrees per decade between 2010 and 2024, and warn that the 2 degree threshold meant to limit planetary damage could be reached before 2050 if that rate holds. Carbon dioxide passed 428 parts per million in May 2026, roughly 50 percent above its pre industrial level and generally higher than at any time in the last 2 million years, and carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide all reached record concentrations this year. Fossil fuel consumption rose 0.9 percent in 2025 with oil, coal and gas each at record highs, and energy related carbon dioxide emissions passed 41 gigatons for the first time, which the report compares to the annual output of more than 10,800 coal fired power plants. Low carbon sources supplied roughly 43 percent of global electricity in 2025 and solar and wind consumption grew by about 18 percent. On the year the report measures, July 2026 was the hottest month on record for the contiguous United States with ocean temperatures also at a record, back to back European heat waves are tied to an estimated 35,000 excess deaths, and Utah, Ontario, France, Spain, Britain and Belgium have had their worst wildfire years on record or are on track to. The authors write that cutting emissions is no longer enough on its own and that adaptation, from dietary change to restoring mangrove buffers against storm surge, is what the next decade is spent on, and they close with a line that reads like a chart annotation rather than a slogan: "This is no longer a warning for the future; it is a diagnosis of the present."
The Bryson Fire was reported just before 5 p.m. on Thursday near Mulholland Highway and Encinal Canyon Road, in the Santa Monica Mountains in far western Malibu close to the Ventura County line, and by Friday morning it had burned more than 140 acres and was 17 percent contained, after growing to 200 acres with no containment overnight. Crews fought it from the air and the ground with more than 300 personnel, two Super Scoopers and aircraft able to fly at night. The Los Angeles County Fire Department issued an evacuation order for the Encinal Canyon area near Trancas Canyon, with Zuma Beach and other surrounding areas under evacuation warnings, the Red Cross opened a shelter at Agoura High School, and the Probation Department moved 38 young people out of the Campus Vernon Kilpatrick facility to a juvenile hall in Sylmar. Decker Road at Encinal Canyon, Mulholland Highway at Westlake Boulevard and Kanan Road at Mulholland Highway were closed, and every Malibu school was shut for Friday as a precaution. No structures had been lost and no injuries reported as of Friday morning, and the cause was not known. The Red Flag Warning stayed in effect for most valleys and coasts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties until 8 p.m. Saturday, with gusts in the canyons of 20 to 30 miles an hour overnight and forecasters calling for up to 90 miles an hour in some areas, so the wind that matters most is still ahead. A county fire spokesman described the conditions as vulnerable and asked residents to charge their phones and keep their gas tanks full in case the utility cuts power. Susan Booker, an evacuee who lost her home in the Woolsey Fire in 2018, said it was really windy and really scary to see this happening again so close to the house.
A downpour that began on the night of 14 October flooded homes and businesses across Istanbul, submerged roads and underpasses, stranded vehicles and shut the city down, and the provincial governor, Davut Gül, said the city had taken its heaviest rainfall in 84 years. The municipality said readings were among the highest recorded since 1985, and precipitation reached 272 kilograms per square metre in parts of the city. More than 1,000 flooding incidents were reported, motorcycles were banned from traffic, classes were suspended on 15 and 16 October, and residents of basement apartments were told to sleep somewhere else. Four people died. A 14 year old was electrocuted after stepping into a puddle in a park in the Fatih district, a 34 year old slipped on a sidewalk in Sarıyer and struck their head, a man reported to be in his 40s was found dead along a stream in Kağıthane, and a construction worker, Faik Şentürk, died after falling into a well while draining floodwater at a school construction site in Beykoz. Seven people remained in hospital. The Kağıthane stream overflowed, workers at a concrete plant in Sarıyer were stranded for 14 hours and were pulled out by a front end loader, 46 aircraft could not land at the city's airports, and runoff turned the water of the Bosphorus brown as far as 200 metres from the shore. The rain began on the night of 14 October and was forecast to continue through 17 October, and the meteorologist Mikdat Kadıoğlu warned that the lighter rain forecast for the next day could flood again, because saturated ground has nothing left to absorb.
Forest and land fires in Sumatra, Borneo and Papua have burned through hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest and plantation and sent thick haze across Southeast Asia, driving air pollution up in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and East Timor. The smoke is blamed on illegal burning of trees and crops to clear land for farming, and a strong El Niño drought has made this year's fires especially severe. East Timor closed all schools for three days from 15 October, urged families to keep children indoors and advised people to wear masks, and in the capital, Dili, the sky went yellow while residents said the air had been worse earlier in the week. Malaysia reported 34 air quality monitoring stations at unhealthy levels and none recording good air. Indonesia's answer was announced by its Coordinating Ministry for Political and Security Affairs: aircraft will drop 1.5 tons of dry ice over urban centers in South Sumatra, the country's first trial of the technique, to break up smoke trapped in the lower atmosphere so that it rises, with the aim of lifting visibility from about one kilometer to five. The Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs, Dudung Abdurachman, said the dry ice is meant to disperse the smoke rather than put out the fires, and that rain seeding operations aimed at extinguishing them will run at the same time. The dry ice, sourced from Lampung province and local suppliers, is flying from an air force base in Palembang, the minister said the trial was carried out on the direct instruction of President Prabowo Subianto, and it will be evaluated before being used in Central Kalimantan.
Waves from Tropical Storm Rachel broke through the bulkhead under the wooden boardwalk on the Alamitos Peninsula on Friday, and by Saturday night the city had closed the century old boardwalk and ordered residents off the two blocks of oceanfront homes between 64th and 66th places. Inspectors marked eight buildings covering thirteen addresses on Seaside Walk with red tags, which mean they are unsafe to enter, and one more with a yellow tag, and at least one home on the 6500 block appeared close to collapse. Roughly 30 feet of the Peninsula bulkhead between 65th and 66th Place was damaged, crews filled the exposed section with about 1,000 sandbags, and the city handed out more than 6,300 sandbags for this storm and 13,600 across the three recent ones. It is the third storm in a month on this one stretch of coast. Hurricane Marie stripped away the sand that had been shielding the barrier, Hurricane Polo pounded it again, and Rachel finished it. Long Beach declared a local emergency on 22 September, the day after Governor Gavin Newsom's proclamation ahead of a 2026 to 2027 El Nino and winter storm season, and the city is now fast tracking a $230,000 plan to move 50,000 to 100,000 cubic yards of sand onto the beach, ahead of an $11.4 million dredging project that starts the week of 19 October. "We're looking at an unprecedented high tide, potentially 7.8 to 8 feet, which is significant for this area," Assistant Chief Jake Heflin of the Long Beach Fire Department said, with rain arriving on top of it as the first significant rainfall the city had seen in a long time.
Michigan lawmakers are the closest they have come in four decades to passing a statewide septic code, with the Democrat controlled Senate poised to pass SB 771 and the bill's future in the Republican controlled House unclear. Michigan is the only state in the nation without uniform requirements for onsite septic construction, maintenance and inspection, so each of its 45 health departments writes its own rules, and many require no inspection at all after the initial installation. The bill would direct the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to issue regulations covering the state's more than 1.3 million onsite systems, each inspected once every 10 years after a ramp up period, prioritizing the oldest systems and the ones closest to lakes and rivers, with civil fines for homeowners who fail to comply. Only 12 of the state's 83 counties have a septic ordinance. The EPA recommends most household systems be inspected at least every three years and pumped every three to five years. A 2018 study of residents in mid Michigan found nearly a third did not know they had a septic system and about a quarter did not pump or maintain it. Local health officials oppose the mandate as written: Calhoun County health officer Eric Pessell said he would need to double or triple his staff, that the bill provides no start up money, and that every department in the state would be hiring from the same small pool of qualified graduates. Bill sponsor and Majority Floor Leader Sam Singh acknowledged that a homeowner who has never had a system inspected could suddenly face $10,000 to $15,000 in repairs and said he is working to expand a loan program for low income residents and add grants, while the Michigan Association of Counties wants a dedicated, reliable fund before it can support the bill. Onsite systems serve about a third of Michiganders who are not connected to a sewer.
A flash flood on the Budhi Gandaki river swept away bridges and damaged settlements and hydropower infrastructure in Gorkha district early on Sunday, according to Dharmaraj Uprety, chief executive of Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority. The water came through Sirdibas, Jagat, Yaru, Tatopani, Machhikhola, Soti, Arukhet and Arughat, carrying so much sediment that downstream settlements were buried in mud and the ground looked as if it had been covered in cement. At Arughat the danger level is about five metres and the river reached 8.3 metres, and the bridge there was swept away. Uprety said the authority received official word at about 6.20am and sent SMS alerts to downstream areas at 6.40am, and that no casualties had been reported, with residents having moved to higher ground, helped by the three to four hours the flood took to travel down from its source. An army helicopter rescued 47 people by the end of the day, the river's water level monitoring equipment was itself swept away so no instrument readings were left to measure the water against the danger threshold, and a drone team is working upstream to establish whether an avalanche or a landslide that dammed the river and then burst is what caused it. Dhading district has now lost its connecting bridge on the Gorkha side, after earlier floods took the one on the other side.
Isaias weakened quickly after making landfall on the Gulf Coast near Destin, Florida, as a Category 2 hurricane Friday evening, and more than 911,000 customers in Florida, Alabama and Georgia were without power early Saturday, according to poweroutage.com. Wind speeds dropped to 35 mph as the storm moved north through Alabama as a post tropical cyclone, but flash flooding threats and the potential for tornadoes persisted Saturday, and the possibility of life threatening storm surges still stood for parts of the Florida Panhandle. Parts of southern Alabama flooded, Mobile reported downed trees and power lines, and roads in Houston County were closed for the same reason. In Pensacola, Tim Mowry rode out the storm from his home, said the wind sounded like a train whistle through a crack in his patio door, lost power and ran a generator, and could not reach his son, who lives nearby, because downed trees and lines blocked the road. It was the first hurricane of the Atlantic season.
Torrential rain battered Santiago in the first week of October and floodwaters swept vehicles down city streets and into homes. Police in central Chile airlifted residents to safety after the Mapocho river burst its banks and flooded large parts of Talagante, about 22 miles south west of the capital, where people and their pets were surprised by fast rising water overnight. Santiago recorded 74 millimetres of rain in the first seven days of the month, which meteorologists called the rainiest October for the area in 76 years, and officials said one person had been found dead in a flooded underpass in San Bernardo to the south, with the cause still unconfirmed. Six people were reported injured. Unlike the storms in July, the riverside community at Talagante had not been evacuated ahead of the downpours. Meteorologists warned that this year's unusually strong El Nino is likely to keep bringing wet weather, powerful winds and storms to the region through the southern hemisphere spring, and climate experts expect it to intensify droughts in some areas and floods in others.
The Fire Safety Research Institute released its final report on Friday, a 723 page review commissioned by Governor Gavin Newsom, and it declines to pin the destruction of the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires on any single agency or decision. The blazes, it concludes, exposed weaknesses across a system that was never designed to fight a wind driven fire that spread from structure to structure across whole neighborhoods. The finding rests on interviews with nearly 300 people from 22 agencies, about 200 conversations with residents inside or near the burn footprints, and analyses of alerts and communications. Homes and the built environment played what the authors call a substantial role in spreading the fire, with embers, flames and heat radiating building to building, and the report states plainly that no single resident's fire hardening could have guaranteed a home's survival. Even before ignition the response system was stressed and failing, survivors said they did not know whose information to act on, and the failures fell hardest on renters, people with limited mobility or vision or hearing, and people who did not speak English. Thirty one people died in the two fires, and the report says the circumstances of several suggest they may not have been aware of the fire's proximity or their own evacuation status. The review lands in Newsom's last months in office and days after the legislative session ended. Michael Wara of Stanford's Woods Institute put the gap in one line: "The problem is implementation and funding. We can have the best plans in the world, but if we do not actually implement those plans, it will not matter."
Hurricane Polo pummeled the Mexican state of Baja California Sur with powerful winds and rain when it came ashore early Tuesday just south of Las Barrancas, about 80 miles north of Cabo San Lazaro and about 70 miles south of Mulege, with maximum sustained winds of 110 mph while moving northeast at 13 mph, the US National Hurricane Center said. Mexican authorities reported no serious damage and no loss of life, and about 700 people who had gone to shelters were expected to return home. Baja California Sur Governor Victor Castro said the hurricane's passage "has brought us rain, but no loss of life." The state government had suspended in person school and work activities for Monday and Tuesday, the ports of Cabo San Lucas, San Jose del Cabo, San Carlos, Bahia Magdalena and Loreto were closed to small craft, and Sonora suspended nonessential activities before a second landfall on its coast. Forecasters expect 6 to 12 inches of rain across parts of Baja California Sur, with isolated areas possibly taking up to 250 millimeters, and Polo was still a Category 1 hurricane with winds near 75 mph by 8am as it crossed the Gulf of California. The impact is expected to stretch into the US Southwest, where Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Texas could receive inches of rain after a year that brought those states drought and then flooding. Andrew Mangham, senior service hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, said arid canyons and rocky expanses with little vegetation are conducive to flash flooding. "We're getting caught up here in a very, very short time," Mangham said. "And that's not really what we want." Pacific storm activity is above average for the season, which National Weather Service lead forecaster Bob Oravec said is consistent with El Niño years. Tropical Storm Rachel was moving parallel to Mexico's coast with 65 mph winds, and Hurricane Nolo, still a Category 3, was edging away from Hawaii after drenching the Big Island, where National Guard members rescued 19 people from flooding over the weekend.
A slow-moving nor'easter crept along the Northeast coast on Saturday, producing high winds, big waves and heavy rain, with tens of millions of people from the mid-Atlantic through Maine in its path. Around 100,000 customers in the region were without electricity Saturday. In Brooklyn, a 56-year-old man was struck and killed by a falling tree, the first confirmed fatality, and NYCHA later confirmed he was an employee of the housing authority. In Egg Harbor Township in eastern New Jersey, nine adults and a dog were rescued from flooded motel rooms. The governors of New York and New Jersey declared states of emergency. On Long Island people kayaked down flooded streets, and in coastal New Jersey the marina owner Kenny Formica watched surveillance cameras show water rising inside his building for the first time since Hurricane Sandy. The storm is intensifying and expected to turn back toward the New Jersey coast Saturday night into Sunday, possibly stalling nearby through Monday and departing Tuesday, after 1 to 3 inches of rain from Philadelphia into eastern New Jersey and 3 to 5 inches on Long Island and southern New England, with gusts near 60 mph on the New Jersey and Delaware coasts and reports above 70 mph.
The floods that followed the 26 August rock and ice avalanche on the Nepal and China border killed more than 1,400 people, with thousands still missing. Nepal has asked the UN Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage for $20m, which Carbon Brief calculates covers 0.7 percent of the $2.7bn the government estimates in physical damage and economic losses, and 0.3 percent once $4.8bn in recovery and reconstruction is counted in. The $20m is the cap for a single project and would still make Nepal the fund's fourth-largest claimant. Developing countries have filed 176 applications from 118 countries asking for $2.8bn, while donors have pledged $822m, only about half of which has actually been paid in, and the fund has made $342m available in its first round. As of September, not one dollar has been disbursed to any country. The US withdrew its support in 2025. In the same weeks, private donors gave nearly $90m to Nepal's government relief fund, in gifts from $5 upward.
On 22 August the surface of the world's oceans averaged 70°F, the hottest in recorded history and probably in 125,000 years. By 5 August the emerging El Niño had cooked Pacific temperatures past the peak of the 1997 to 1998 event. Berkeley Earth scientist Zeke Hausfather called the rise "nothing short of astonishing." James Hansen attributes the abnormal strength of the El Niño itself to human-made warming, with months of heating still ahead.
NOAA's Nino3.4 index, the ocean temperature measure climatologists use to grade El Niño, is one hundredth of a degree below the 2015 record and about to pass it. The average of 14 models assessed by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather forecasts a peak of 4.0C in November and December. Anything above 0.5C is an El Niño and above 2C is officially very strong, and this event is tracking four times the very strong threshold. Hausfather called the forecast "mind-blowing"; others have called it "Godzilla-level". Analysis of corals, tree rings and historical documents suggests no El Niño has reached this level in the last millennium, and 2027 is expected to blow apart every previous heat record. Indonesia has already seen record wildfires and fatal air pollution, India's monsoon rains have been curtailed, drought in Central America and the Caribbean is causing crop losses and slowing trade through the Panama Canal, and the World Food Programme said in August the impacts are likely to push about 50 million people into acute hunger.
In a memo dated 11 August 2026 the EPA's Office of Water rescinded a 2022 memo that encouraged states to use their Clean Water Act authority to stop PFAS from reaching drinking water. The 2022 guidance had told regulators to require chemical manufacturers and similar facilities to sample wastewater for PFAS and to apply effluent limits when issuing permits. The agency said the memo had caused "confusion for states and permittees," a justification the Southern Environmental Law Center called invalid.
Scores of illegal miners on motorbikes are entering Ghana's Atewa Forest Reserve every day past a handful of Forestry Commission guards, stripping forest cover, digging pits and leaving abandoned equipment and camps behind. Rivers and streams that ran clear have turned brown with sediment, and miners have cut the trees along the watercourses, which the conservation group A Rocha Ghana fears have been contaminated with mercury, cyanide and arsenic. Atewa covers 26,300 hectares and holds more than 80 threatened and endangered species, around 20 percent of all threatened species in Ghana, including two frogs found nowhere else on earth. Its watershed supplies as many as five million people. Conservation groups are calling on the government to resource the guards, and Ghana's government is separately pushing to mine the same reserve for bauxite.
Federal funding for public air monitoring has declined for decades, the number of monitors has fallen, and the remaining equipment is aging or sitting far from the biggest polluters, at the same time that wildfire smoke, data center pollution, and heat-driven ozone are raising the stakes. As the public network weakened, communities turned to low-cost sensors they run themselves. A Floodlight investigation finds industry moving to close that route too: since 2024 lawmakers in Louisiana, Ohio, and Kentucky have passed strikingly similar bills backed by chemical and manufacturing trade groups that bar regulators from using community-collected data in enforcement.
Another plume of smoke rose from Vistra's Moss Landing battery plant on the morning of 18 September, a year and a half after a catastrophic fire wrecked the grid storage facility on the California coast south of Santa Cruz. Authorities issued shelter-in-place orders for the surrounding area, a seaside community that gives way to strawberry fields and other farmland inland. A statement from Monterey County said the new fire involves batteries that were previously damaged in the January 2025 blaze, that it is not comparable in size, and that officials expect it to burn out over the next 24 hours. Vistra has been demolishing the site, extracting 34,000 battery modules and hoping to remove the last 5,000 later this year, and those batteries can carry residual charge. The plant was the world's most powerful grid battery when it came online in 2020, with 300 megawatts and 1,200 megawatt hours packed into a former gas turbine hall, a design out of step with current practice: today's installations use modular containers spaced to fail safely, and the industry has largely moved to lithium ferrous phosphate, a safer chemistry. Pacific Gas and Electric, which runs grid infrastructure next door, took its adjacent Elkhorn battery plant offline after the 2025 fire and does not plan to resume service there until 1 July 2027. A resident who watched the latest plume from his boat in the harbor said the fires had become a surprisingly regular occurrence: "Now it's like, man, when is this going to end?"
A SkyTruth analysis released on 23 September, built on satellite radar observations from 2023 to 2025 and the group's Cerulean detection platform, estimates that 1.58 million square kilometers of the world's ocean surface is covered in oil slicks each year, an area more than twice the size of Texas. In the verified observations the team logged 3,152 slicks covering about 22,805 square kilometers, roughly the size of New Jersey. Vessels are linked to about 81 percent of the slicks whose source could be attributed, tankers and cargo ships most of all, and offshore oil and gas infrastructure accounts for about 18 percent. More than 90 percent of the estimated pollution sits inside national waters close to coastlines, with the heaviest concentrations in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the waters off West Africa, and around Indonesia. Sixteen individual vessels appeared to be discharging oil in more than 10 percent of the satellite observations taken of them while at sea, and the analysis found repeat polluters among offshore facilities off Indonesia and Nigeria. The two most densely polluted exclusive economic zones, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of the Congo, are driven mainly by slicks from oil infrastructure. Slicks also reach protected water: the model found oil pollution in the critical habitat of the critically endangered Rice's whale in the Gulf of Mexico, which the authors expect to worsen after a recent rollback of endangered species protections there. Routine discharges of this kind are illegal under the 1973 MARPOL convention, and ownership data was unavailable for more than half of the polluting vessels the analysis identified.
On Wednesday 23 September, storms sat over the Morrisvale community in Boone County, West Virginia, and dropped rain fast enough that streams left their banks and took the roads with them. Along Horse Creek Road the current tore away a section of pavement after an old dam upstream failed. "There was an old dam just up the holler there, but yeah, it let go all the water," resident Steve Stone told WSAZ. "It destroyed the yard and the bridge there, and I think that's what tore the road up through here." Floodwater lifted one resident's woodworking building off its foundation blocks, put three and a half feet of water inside at least one home, and destroyed or heavily damaged a significant number of the private bridges that connect homes to the road. Boone County Emergency Management reported no deaths, injuries, or missing people. Governor Patrick Morrisey declared a state of emergency for Boone and Lincoln counties, the National Guard came in for damage assessments, the Red Cross brought cleanup kits, the Morrisvale Community Center reopened Friday morning with cleanup supplies and tetanus vaccines, and the county is collecting damage reports because those reports are what a request for a federal disaster declaration is built on. It is the second flood in this county in less than three months.
All 50 districts of Bangkok were declared disaster zones on Saturday after almost 48 hours of heavy rain brought widespread flooding, traffic problems and disruption to daily life. Governor Chadchart Sittipunt said schools would close on Monday and government workers were being encouraged to stay home to keep traffic off flooded roads. A cell broadcast alert went out to residents shortly after 9am saying canal water levels were already at critical levels and were expected to rise further. The BMA Drainage and Sewerage Department reported the capital recorded 487mm of rain between 1 and 25 September, against an average of 269mm for the same period from 1991 to 2020. Water levels began to stabilise around midday Saturday with pumping stations running at full capacity and moving 1,200 cubic metres per second combined, and the governor said that if the rain stopped it would take two to three days to drain the floodwater. The Royal Irrigation Department was gradually increasing discharges at the Chao Phraya Dam upstream in Chai Nat province to 1,950 cubic metres per second from 1,850, and people in low lying areas downstream along the Chao Phraya and the Noi River were urged to watch water levels and official announcements. Pathum Thani province declared Rangsit municipality an emergency disaster zone, flooding was reported in 20 other provinces, and Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul cut short an investment roadshow in London to return and monitor the response. The governor said there would be no repeat of the 2011 flooding catastrophe and that there was no need to panic, as residents cleared shelves of instant noodles, drinking water and canned fish.
Jennifer First, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, surveyed about 700 people from the counties that took the most severe rainfall from Hurricane Helene. Thirty five percent reported symptoms of moderate to severe PTSD and more than a quarter reported symptoms of moderate to severe depression. Rates were higher among people who took more severe flood damage and who were still fighting housing, repairs or money problems afterward, and they were lower among people with stronger social resources, including support from family, friends and community networks.
Eliza Petzinger, who runs a pottery business on farmland in Owen County, Kentucky, had a helping of country ham at Christmas and was sick within hours. She tested positive for alpha-gal syndrome, an allergic reaction to a sugar molecule found in most mammals but not in humans, which a bite from the lone star tick triggers. Her 13-year-old daughter tested positive first, about two years ago, and she estimates about five of 10 people in her immediate family have it, including her father and her mother, who broke out in hives at a ball game after eating ham. A neighbor who raises beef cattle has it and cannot eat the beef he raises. Reactions can be life-threatening and are often delayed by hours, which means people worry about what they eat at night. "I'm literally scared to eat certain things," Petzinger said. Larry Johnson, a family doctor who has worked in the county of a little over 11,000 people since 2001, went from diagnosing zero alpha-gal cases in a month to one or two a week during some months this spring and summer, which he called a huge increase. "It just seemed like all of a sudden it was just spreading like wildfire," he said. Kentucky joined a minority of states last year in requiring alpha-gal cases to be reported, and across the four counties of the Three Rivers District the rate of tick-borne illness climbed from 83 cases per 100,000 people in 2024 to over 300 in 2025 and 2026. Kentucky's Lyme disease cases rose 275 percent between 2020 and 2023, national tick-borne illness has more than doubled since 2004, and the state's lone star tick is now its most common tick. University of Kentucky entomologist Jonathan Larson attributes the rise to abundant deer and mice, warmer winters that let tick populations rebound, and weedy invasive plants that create tick habitat.
Jen and RJ Garbowicz own an empty lot on a bayou off Tampa Bay where their house stood. Hurricane Helene flooded it in September 2024, and Hurricane Milton tore off the roof less than two weeks later. They carried both flood and homeowners insurance. The flood policy paid in full at $250,000, and FEMA sent about $33,000. Their homeowners insurer offered $2,279.41 against a $713,000 policy limit. They demolished what the storms had not taken and estimate the rebuild at more than $1.5 million. Their mortgage company is holding several hundred thousand dollars of the flood payout until construction starts, which is stalled on a permit, and when they draw on the Small Business Administration disaster loan they were approved for, $33,000 of that loan goes back to FEMA under what the government calls a duplication of benefits. They are in their second rental, paying rent and the mortgage on a house that no longer exists. Florida property insurance premiums average $4,200 to $5,700 a year, among the highest in the country. Insurers paid more than $10 billion in claims in 2025, 15 property insurers have gone insolvent since 2020, and the state has absorbed at least $200 billion in hurricane damage in ten years. The couple flew to Washington to lobby for the FEMA Act, a bipartisan bill with almost 100 co-sponsors that would make FEMA independent of the Department of Homeland Security, create a single application for disaster recovery, pay homeowners before they rebuild instead of reimbursing them after, and fund mitigation before storms hit. It has not come to a floor vote.
The Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland network, known as GLAMOS, reported on 1 October that the country's glaciers lost more than 5 percent of their volume in 2026, with an average thinning of 2.5 to 4 metres and some glacier tongues losing up to 10 metres. Until recently Alpine glaciologists treated 2 percent in a single year as extreme. The 2025 to 2026 winter was among the ten least snowy in the record, and 76 days of summer heatwaves pushed the freezing level above 4,000 metres, more than twice the average and a Swiss record. By September no snow remained even at 3,500 metres, so the ice went into the next heatwave with no protective cover. Several small glaciers disappeared completely and permanently, including Bella Tola in Valais and Griessfirn in Glarus, while the Rhone, Aletsch and Clariden glaciers set their own melt records. From July to September the glaciers released around 2,200 billion litres of meltwater, more than four times the annual drinking water consumption of Swiss households. GLAMOS chief Matthias Huss said the warming "can be attributed 100% to anthropogenic climate change" and that Alpine glaciers "have no chance of surviving in the long term under such conditions."
The Scott River runs out of the mountains near the California and Oregon border into a broad farm valley, and it is one of the two most heavily regulated rivers in California because of its salmon. This year stretches of it have been reduced to dry sand and gravel while farmers kept hayfields green by running their wells and pumps. The snowpack in the area measured 1 percent of average on 1 May, when it normally peaks, and the surrounding mountains took rain instead of snow. The state water board ordered farms to stop drawing from the river in June and cited some that kept pumping, and limited groundwater pumping mostly by asking growers for plans to cut consumption about 30 percent, which environmental advocates say was too weak. Regina Chichizola, who leads Communities United for Water Protection, said the board "didn't do their job" and already has the authority and the laws to manage the withdrawals. Erik Ekdahl, chief deputy director of the state water board, said the low snowpack is the big driver and that the river can go dry even with very few diversions or little overpumping, because the effect of groundwater pumping on a stream arrives weeks, months or years later. Portions of the river dried up in 2021, 2022 and 2023 as well, after the limits began.
The Tioga River runs through Blossburg, a town of about 1,500 in north central Pennsylvania, and it is orange with the acid, metal rich drainage of five coal mines that were never sealed. There are no fish in this stretch and almost no insects, and there have not been for decades. As of 2020, abandoned coal mines had damaged more than 850,000 acres across the country, 84 percent of it in Appalachia, and Pennsylvania alone has more than 5,500 miles of waterways polluted by the same drainage. A treatment plant designed to clean the whole river, built on a $68 million grant from the 2021 infrastructure law in 2024 and the largest recipient that year, is scheduled to come online by 2029 and to bring cold water fish back within a few years. In January, Congress reallocated more than $500 million for abandoned mine reclamation to other purposes, taking $169 million of it out of Pennsylvania. Organizers say the project is still on track, while the state's ability to clean up the rest of its coal pollution on a leaner budget is now an open question.
At 4pm on 19 July 2022 it was 90 degrees when Carlos Vargas Moreno and other laborers went out to weed a watermelon field in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The heat index, what the temperature feels like to the body when humidity is counted in, was 98.3, which the heat safety app built by OSHA and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health defines as hazardous for outdoor workers. He had worked eight to 11 hours a day since 16 July and the heat index never dropped below 94.4. He paused for water just before 6pm, staggered, and collapsed. There was no supervisor on site. Workers did not call 911, and the contractor's founder, several miles away in another field, told them to wait and did not call either. They put him, unconscious, on a bus without air conditioning, then laid him on the ground at the roadside for about 15 minutes until the founder arrived, and loaded him into the open bed of a pickup rather than its air conditioned cab. He reached the emergency room at 6:32pm unresponsive and covered in vomit, with a body temperature of 109 degrees, and was hospitalized for almost a year. He is 38, has a brain injury, uses a wheelchair, and cannot walk, talk through his case, or care for himself; his wife bathes, dresses and feeds him. Nearly two years earlier the same company, Florida Orange Gold, had a worker die of heat stroke in a North Carolina field on a day the heat index peaked at 108, after 11 to 12 hour days, with no supervisor present and 911 called 50 minutes after he fell. There is still no federal heat standard for farmworkers, and the story is published by Prism with The Guardian US and Enlace Latino NC.
Storms that began 30 September battered Crete for a third consecutive day and then kept going into the weekend, and the worst of the damage landed on inland eastern Crete, particularly the Lasithi region, with the Rethymno area in the center west also hit hard. On the Lasithi Plateau, a fertile upland basin about 840 metres up, Thodoris Ninos of the Crete Development Organisation put the rainfall at about 440 millimetres in two days, roughly 440 litres of water for every square metre, and about 470 millimetres across four days in a region whose entire year normally brings 700 to 900 millimetres. Fields cultivated days earlier are now lakes, and more than 80 percent of the plateau's potato and vegetable production is reported destroyed, after growers had already paid for seed, fertiliser, fuel and labour. The same water lifted the Aposelemis dam, a main drinking water source for the Heraklion area, from about 9.26 million cubic metres on 30 September to more than 12.7 million on 4 October. Large swaths of the island were under emergency status. Forty seven people were evacuated from hotels and short term rentals at Ferma and Koutsounari in Lasithi, eight national park employees were stranded in the Samaria Gorge, an elderly livestock farmer was found dead at Karines in Rethymno, and a 58 year old woman on holiday on Rhodes was killed by lightning. The Lasithi Plateau municipality is under a state of emergency for civil protection, and damage assessments are still being carried out.
Enbridge is responding to an aquifer breach on the $1 billion project to reroute its Line 5 oil and gas pipeline in northern Wisconsin. The breach happened while crews installed a new stretch of pipe beneath the Marengo River, and Wisconsin Public Radio reported it on 5 October. "A flow of water was observed following the direct installation of pipe beneath the Marengo River," Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner said, adding that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources had visited the site and that the flow was being monitored and contained. No estimate of the volume of water released was given. It is the second time in six weeks that the same project has made the news for the wrong reason. On 25 August a leak released more than 1.3 million gallons of natural gas liquids, the largest oil and gas pipeline spill in Wisconsin in more than 50 years, and a federal accident report put the cost at least $15.1 million, with a corrective action order finding a tractor trailer was left unattended and in neutral on a slope before it rolled into the excavation. During a contested case hearing on the project's permits last fall, Enbridge experts testified there was zero risk of an aquifer breach, writing that such impacts were "essentially nil" and that it was "extraordinarily unlikely" a confining layer above an aquifer sat close enough to the fractured bedrock. The company has already paid millions tied to four aquifer breaches on its Line 3 project in northern Minnesota, which released hundreds of millions of gallons of groundwater. Wisconsin DNR Secretary Karen Hyun has said the company shows "disregard for the environment, human health, and the statutory authority of the department," and the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa has asked Governor Tony Evers and the DNR to revoke the reroute permits. A federal appeals panel ruled in August that Enbridge has been trespassing on the reservation and must remove the pipeline, while giving it more time to finish the reroute.
The US Environmental Protection Agency issued a final rule on 8 October extending the deadline for covered onshore facilities to submit facility response plans for a worst case discharge of a Clean Water Act hazardous substance. The old deadline was 1 June 2027 and the new one is 1 June 2030, three more years. The requirement applies to onshore facilities that are not related to transportation and that could reasonably be expected to cause substantial harm to the environment if a hazardous substance reached navigable waters, adjoining shorelines or the exclusive economic zone. The 2024 rule that created the obligation, published on 28 March 2024, requires facilities to write plans for the largest foreseeable discharge in adverse weather conditions, and the extension was first proposed on 5 March with public comments accepted through 6 April. In a separate action on 10 February the EPA administrator signed an advance notice of proposed rulemaking asking for feedback on whether to change the 2024 requirements in Title 40 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 118. The agency said the extra time will let facilities plan more thoroughly, improve compliance and produce better developed plans.
An oil slick in the Black Sea near the Russian resort city of Sochi expanded after a fire aboard a tanker attacked by sea drones earlier in the week, Greenpeace said Friday, a day after authorities reopened the beaches and reported no oil contamination. The slick grew from 8 to 25 square kilometers over three days, the environmental group said, citing satellite images from Planet Labs, and it follows the route taken by the Aframax Rio after the attack. The Liberian flagged tanker was hit on the evening of 6 October, the fire sent thick black smoke over Sochi and kept rescue vessels from approaching the ship, and all 23 crew members, Indian nationals, were rescued, with the flames out by Wednesday. Sochi and the neighboring federal territory of Sirius closed their beaches on Tuesday and reopened them Thursday, saying seawater samples met sanitary standards and satellite monitoring found no slicks. The operator, Executive Ship Management, said officials and two senior crew members had begun inspecting the 2004 built, 247 meter vessel, which has a deadweight capacity of 107,100 metric tons. The amount of oil aboard has not been disclosed, the Mash Telegram channel reported, citing unnamed sources, that it was fully loaded, and the investigative outlet The Insider reports the tanker has called at Russian Black Sea ports and is under Ukrainian sanctions, which Kyiv has tied to Russia's shadow fleet.
The Greater Augusta Utility District filed a federal lawsuit last week against Sappi North America, which runs the Somerset Mill in Skowhegan, Huhtamaki, which runs a manufacturing plant in Waterville, Kimberly-Clark, which owned and operated the former Winslow paper mill, and American Tissue Mills of Maine and American Tissue Corp, tied to a former mill in Augusta. The district supplies drinking water to about 13,750 people in and around Augusta. It detected PFAS in water from its wells in October 2021, and the results rose above Maine's drinking water standard by November 2024, when it took one well out of service and later built a treatment system. The complaint does not blame one company or one event: it alleges that PFAS-containing materials used in paper, packaging and tissue manufacturing entered the environment through wastewater, sludge, landfill leachate and stormwater, traveled down the Kennebec River and mixed into the groundwater aquifer connected to the district's riverside wells. Among the specifics, the district says Maine environmental regulators found PFAS in Sappi's Somerset Mill effluent and landfill leachate in 2023, and that Huhtamaki has sent PFAS-containing wastewater to the Kennebec Sanitary Treatment District in Waterville, where the treatment does not remove it. The district is seeking to hold the companies jointly and severally liable under the federal Superfund law, CERCLA, for past and future investigation, monitoring, treatment and cleanup costs. A Sappi North America spokesperson said the company is reviewing the complaint, that it is in compliance with all environmental regulations and its state and federal discharge permits, and that it does not knowingly use PFAS-containing materials in any of its products. The other companies did not respond to requests for comment.
Indonesia appears to be reversing course on the program critics call the world's largest deforestation project, which since 2023 has been converting tropical forest in New Guinea into rice and sugarcane acreage, about 7 million acres, with a second project over roughly 3 million acres underway in Borneo, both of them built around the goal of making the country less dependent on imported food and energy. Officials told an event last week that Indonesia has reached rice self sufficiency three years ahead of schedule and no longer needs to expand rice cultivation into forest, and that future food and biofuel production will use degraded land instead. Glenn Hurowitz, who leads the conservation group Mighty Earth, called it a potentially huge move and said the statements have to be implemented to have impact, including through changes in decrees and other policies. The country's forest loss reached an eight year high last year as the conversion program ran, which is why the campaigners who have watched earlier commitments are not treating the announcement as an outcome. A Forest Ministry spokesperson told The Straits Times the government cannot yet say that all activity in the two regions will stop, or confirm when it will. Solidaritas Merauke, the coalition of civil society groups opposing the New Guinea project, said the government's stated commitment to sustainable development has historically been reflected only minimally in policy programs and has been weak in practice.
Bellingcat obtained Planet Labs satellite imagery of the East Potomac Golf Links taken on 8 October and 13 October, and the two frames show large barren sections across the southern and western parts of the course where trees were removed. NPR reported that officials notified the court just before 5 p.m. on Friday 9 October of plans to remove up to 529 trees in phases beginning the next day, Saturday 10 October, and that by the time Judge Ana Reyes called an emergency hearing on Monday 12 October, 430 trees had been cut down. Reyes was reported to have said she was "furious" with the Justice Department over the lack of time given to the court and the plaintiffs before the work was carried out, and that the government's actions had cost it "all of its credibility with me in this case." Earlier this year the judge said no more than 10 trees at the course could be cut without first notifying the court. The land is owned by the federal government and managed by the National Park Service, and it is the subject of a February 2026 lawsuit brought by the DC Preservation League, which argued that the president was flouting environmental laws to "irreparably destroy a priceless piece of American history" and convert a public recreation space into an exclusive high end golf course. At the hearing, a National Park Service official, Kevin Griess, said the tree removal was part of a 2019 plan that predates the president's aims for the course and was meant to restore links style vegetation. Bellingcat contacted the Park Service and the Justice Department and received no response before publication.
A Sludge analysis of congressional financial disclosures finds at least 105 members of Congress report that they, a spouse, or a dependent child hold stock or other investments in AI developers, chipmakers, cloud infrastructure providers, data center companies, or private AI firms, worth between $75 million and $287 million. At least 44 of them sit on committees with jurisdiction over AI safety, consumer protection, semiconductor policy, and trade with China. The holdings run from Nvidia, Meta, and Alphabet to small private startups whose shares ordinary investors cannot buy.
CREW documents the administration's effort to force states to hand over their voter rolls and compile them into a single national database. The DOJ has demanded fully unredacted voter files and sued states that refused, building what would be the first national database of voter records without following the Privacy Act requirements for disclosing how the data is used, stored, protected, and shared. Courts across the country have blocked the demands, and state attorneys general, voting rights groups, and individual voters are among those who have beaten it back.
Aimee Cross and Jason Goff, who live near the Washington Works plant landfill in Wood County, West Virginia, have filed a proposed class-action complaint alleging that hazardous chemicals including PFAS drained from the landfill into their land and the Ohio River. They say their homes have lost value and that they can no longer fully use their property, and they are asking for cleanup and damages. The complaint comes three months after Chemours settled legal challenges with state and federal governments and citizen groups over drinking water contamination, and after the West Virginia Rivers Coalition failed to get a federal court to force immediate compliance with Clean Water Act limits.
Millions of complaints reach the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau every year on debt collection, credit reporting, payday loans and more. For over a decade consumers could opt in to have the written narrative of their complaint published as public information. Last month the administration announced it would stop publishing those narratives, a move that aligns the agency with the corporations that have criticized the system for years. The bureau's stated reason was that publishing such narratives provides a less-than-representative sample of one-sided experiences. The complaint system helps consumers get answers from companies, and often fixes, and it gave the public, federal investigators and regulators a window into what companies actually do. ProPublica's data reporter used the narratives for accountability reporting, including a Wisconsin tribe that built a lending empire charging 600 percent annual rates.
Another US soldier died in September, classified by the Pentagon as "non-hostile." A female soldier was on a military flight bound for Saudi Arabia when she suffered an undisclosed medical incident, a defense official told The Intercept. A further 66 US personnel were wounded in action this month, pushing the official tally above 850. Almost half of that total, 419 dead and wounded, has come since Iran stepped up attacks in early July. Casualties were first counted under Operation Epic Fury, and since July 7 they are tallied on a generically titled page called Overseas Operations. The Intercept's prior reporting found the Defense Casualty Analysis System missing hundreds of dead and wounded personnel, a gap one US official called a "casualty cover-up."
The administration is repealing the federal rules that limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas fired power plants, along with the standards for equipment that captures carbon dioxide at coal plants undergoing major modifications and at new gas turbines that run frequently. The EPA argues Section 111 of the Clean Air Act never authorized it to regulate power plant greenhouse gases for climate reasons, a framing meant to stop a future administration restoring the rules. Its headline estimate is $310 billion in economy wide savings from 2026 to 2047, and it projects national average electricity prices 5.8 percent lower in 2035, roughly $8 a month for a household using 1,000 kilowatt hours. In its own 2025 analysis of the same repeal, the EPA put the added illnesses and premature deaths from fine particle and ozone pollution at $130 billion over the same period. The 2026 estimate projects higher carbon dioxide emissions and higher particle and ozone levels across much of the eastern United States by 2035, and assigns no dollar value to either the health costs or the climate damage. Akshaya Jha, an economist at Carnegie Mellon who studies energy and the environment, also notes Consumers Energy reported the net cost of keeping its Campbell coal plant running from May 2025 through June 2026 at $259 million, above the $239 million it earned selling the power, and has asked federal regulators to let it pass that cost to customers across the Midwest.
On the 2024 anniversary of 11 September, the Biden administration began advancing a first-of-its-kind rule that would have required AI companies to tell regulators what kinds of experiments they were running at the technological frontier. Federal officials said the rule was needed to prevent dangerous accidents that could cause injury or loss of life. Within a year the regulation was dead. The transparency initiative quietly disappeared from the federal rulemaking docket a few months after OpenAI's top executive and his wife poured $25 million into MAGA, Inc., Trump's biggest super PAC, according to documents reviewed by The Lever. Those documents also show the same AI giants now saying they welcome federal regulation, and their lobbying groups, pressured regulators to weaken or drop it, arguing that reporting would be too expensive despite the companies holding hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. OpenAI complained in a 2024 letter that the proposal was "potentially burdensome and would add costs." Vishal Misra, vice dean of computing and artificial intelligence at Columbia's engineering department, told The Lever that regulators are now "flying with a lot less instrumentation than they would have had," and that he can find no general federal rule requiring a company training a sufficiently capable frontier model to tell the government what it is building, how it is secured, or what unexpected behavior it is seeing. This week lawmakers from both parties proposed bills to create a federal agency overseeing AI, including one co-authored by Senator Bernie Sanders and others that would require the disclosure the 2024 rule would have mandated. Trump's own stated position is that the only protection the industry needs is a "strong and smart (High IQ!) president."
A US District Court judge for the District of Columbia ruled on Tuesday 22 September that the EPA illegally terminated the $7 billion Solar for All program, in a lawsuit Harris County, Texas brought last October. Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote that the EPA's decision to eliminate the program without congressional authorization was "arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law, and in excess of statutory authority," and that what the court set aside was the agency's policy level determination that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made the program legally impermissible, which applies to the program as a whole and not just to Harris County's grant. The decision comes less than a week after the US District Court of Rhode Island ruled the termination procedurally unlawful in a separate suit filed on behalf of downstream beneficiaries of the grants. The EPA eliminated the program in August 2025 citing the OBBBA, and the lawsuit states the law provides no authority for the elimination decision. The Texas Solar for All Coalition was awarded nearly $250 million in 2024 through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established by the Inflation Reduction Act, with Harris County leading it and securing more than $54 million. Harris County had planned solar powered community hubs to use during power outages and state grid failures. A third suit by 22 states and the District of Columbia was dismissed in January. The EPA says it is reviewing both decisions and considering an appeal.
A report by the American Federation of Government Employees documents that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost a third of its workforce between March 2025 and April 2026, about 3,000 people. The losses include 100 percent of the staff at two units that were eliminated outright, the Office of Health Equity and the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, and 98 percent of the agency's human resources personnel. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who led the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases before resigning in the summer of 2025, told the New York Times the agency is now "zombified." The CDC has done little to respond to high profile outbreaks of measles, food borne cyclosporiasis and rabies, and it made no recommendation on the new flu vaccine the FDA approved in August, a decision it would normally publish with detailed guidance by this point in the year. The committee of vaccine advisers that would normally meet and endorse those recommendations has not held a single meeting this year.
The administration used a pocket rescission to cancel $810 million in funding Congress had already approved, and the White House budget office did it by sending the request inside the 45 days before the fiscal year ended on 30 September, which the administration argues lets it revoke the money even if Congress never votes on it. The cancelled money would have gone to refugee assistance programs at the Department of Health and Human Services, a Treasury Department program that provided debt forgiveness to foreign countries making climate change related investments in coral reefs and tropical forests, and a grant program at the Minority Business Development Agency, among others. Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins sharply disagreed with the tactic in a statement the same evening, saying the move showed the Office of Management and Budget "intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation of appropriations that were approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law." She added that the delay was itself an unreported impoundment and "a usurpation of Congress's appropriations powers," and that her committee would work to address the illegal actions. Washington Senator Patty Murray, the ranking member, called it "theft from the American people, plain and simple," and said every Republican who voted for the bills should be furious because the budget director is saying their votes do not count. A Government Accountability Office spokesperson said the agency stands behind its legal position that pocket rescissions are illegal and not authorized by the Impoundment Control Act, which lets an administration freeze funds for 45 days while lawmakers decide, then requires the money to be spent if Congress does not act. The first pocket rescission, in August 2025, clawed back $4.9 billion for peacekeeping, democracy programs and development assistance.
On 23 September the Pitkin County, Colorado, commissioners unanimously approved a special use permit to take over operation of the Maroon Bells Scenic Area, the gateway to the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness in the White River National Forest, about 10 miles outside Aspen. The scenic area drew roughly 191,000 visitors between May and October last year. The Forest Service says it lacks the personnel and resources to run it. The agency lost almost 6,000 employees in 2025, the administration's proposed budget for fiscal 2027 would cut its budget by 75 percent, the White River National Forest has lost a third of its year-round staff since 2024, going from 169 employees to 111 according to an analysis by Aspen Journalism, and Forest Supervisor Brian Glaspell says Maroon Bells runs in the red by more than $300,000 a year. Pitkin County takes over for the 2027 season on a five year permit, with vehicle entrance rising from $10 to $30 and camping from $15 to $33, all of the revenue going into a county fund for upkeep. The transfer is the first high-profile test of the Forest Service's new National Environmental Policy Act rules, which since April allow agencies to approve this kind of action as a categorical exclusion without public input or a written finding; after backlash the agency added a 15 day comment period that ends 9 October. Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, called it "the camel's nose under the tent" and "the test case for privatization." Mark Squillace, a natural resource law professor at the University of Colorado, wrote to the county and the agency that "the idea that the Forest Service can lawfully categorically exclude this proposal is laughable." Pitkin County's open space director, Gary Tennenbaum, said the agency had told the county that if it could not take the area over it would seek bids from private concessionaires, that the precedent that the federal government will not fund these places has already been set, and that the county "would happily give it back" if Congress funded the land again.
A coalition of farmers, rural businesses and solar groups sued the US Department of Agriculture on 28 September in the District of Columbia, over the department's rewrite of the Rural Energy for America Program. The plaintiffs include the Iowa Farmers Union, the Iowa Solar Energy Trade Association, the New York Solar Energy Industries Association, RENEW Wisconsin, Solar United Neighbors and several Illinois farm operations, and they name the USDA, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and the Rural Business-Cooperative Service as defendants. Solar had accounted for 68 percent of REAP awards between 2011 and the first quarter of 2025. In August 2025 the department restricted solar projects, with Rollins saying it would no longer let businesses "use your taxpayer dollars to fund solar projects on prime American farmland." In March 2026 it stopped making new awards, and in April it rescinded the funding opportunity, so applications without a signed financial assistance agreement had to be resubmitted. REAP pays as reimbursement, so the money is spent before the grant arrives. One Iowa farmer who raises hogs and grows corn and soybeans put $256,064 into a 139 kilowatt rooftop array and was told his application, eligible for 50 percent reimbursement, would not be processed; two Illinois projects selected for $185,328 and $261,144 toward grain dryer arrays were left unfunded. The complaint cites internal emails obtained by public records request in which the Rural Business-Cooperative Service administrator wrote, "let's let the comms shop find the rationale behind their statistics," and a public affairs specialist wrote that she hoped staff could "drum up something."
In July the administration announced it will scrap the long standing definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act. Since 1975 the law has counted significant habitat modification or degradation that actually kills or injures wildlife by impairing breeding, spawning, rearing, migrating, feeding or sheltering; that reading was upheld 6 to 3 by the Supreme Court in 1995 when the timber industry challenged it, with Justice Scalia dissenting that "harm" should cover only conduct aimed at a particular animal. The new rule adopts Scalia's losing dissent, and the administration's own release calls the old definition "outdated" federal overreach and says the change "returns the interpretation of the ESA back to its actual text and original intent." The practical effect is that clearing habitat is no longer itself a prohibited taking, and the groups that spent years lobbying for the change, the American Petroleum Institute and the National Mining Association, have praised it. In March the administration convened the Endangered Species Committee, the cabinet panel that can exempt a project from the law and had met only three times in its existence, most recently in 1992, and that meeting was held without the legally required notice or application process. Habitat destruction was the threat for more than 80 percent of the animals added to the endangered list between 1975 and 2017.
Immigration arrests reached the highest levels since Trump returned to office this summer, driven by an unprecedented expansion of 287(g) agreements that let state and local law enforcement enforce parts of federal immigration law. ICE recorded roughly 43,000 arrests in June, 49,000 in July and nearly 51,000 in August, and those three months saw the most new 287(g) agreements signed since Trump took office, according to a States Newsroom analysis of government data. Theresa Cardinal Brown, a senior DHS official under Bush and Obama, said the program was mostly voluntary and the costs were borne by state and local governments, but "now, the federal government has money to pay them, and so that's encouraging more states and localities to do it because it's a budget plus-up." Republicans in Congress provided billions in federal funding for departments that accept the agreements. The ledger documents the same mechanism: as of 15 September DHS had signed more than 2,500 287(g) agreements with local police, sheriffs, highway patrols and even fish and wildlife agents, a way to hide a multiplied ICE force inside ordinary local law enforcement.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new Office of Religious Affairs during his State of the Force address at Quantico, reporting directly to him and advising Pentagon leadership on religious policy, funding and the "spiritual readiness" of US service members. "No staff filters, no bureaucratic dilution, a direct line to the secretary," Hegseth said. The office will oversee the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and advocate for funding for religious programs across the military. The memo establishing it says the office cannot "compel religious participation" or diminish the rights of service members "of any faith or no faith," but Hegseth introduced it in explicitly Christian language: "Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual. God is good. Evil is not. And America's military must understand the difference." He criticized the military's previous embrace of "political correctness and secular humanism" and claimed fewer than 5% of service members identify as nonreligious, saying "95% of our force recognizes an Almighty God." The Pentagon's most recent public data, from 2019, found roughly 70% of active-duty personnel identified as Christian and nearly a quarter had an unknown or unclassified affiliation.
Federal prosecutors in Texas announced assault charges on 29 September against Wilber Rafael Garces-Perez, a 28 year old Venezuelan delivery driver shot in the back by immigration enforcement agents on 20 September. A federal complaint alleges he tried to escape ICE, who pulled him over after a judge issued a final removal order, and accuses him of sideswiping an officer with his driver's side mirror and later attempting to strike an officer with his car. If convicted he could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. The same court documents record that he provided his driver's license, that an exchange about moving and parking the car was described as "pleasant and not aggressive," and that about a minute later he closed the window and drove off. An immigration lawyer said he was an asylum seeker with a valid work permit, and that a judge issued the deportation order after he missed a hearing because the notice went to a former address. The agent who fired has not been charged.
District Judge P. Kevin Castel in Manhattan issued a 36 page ruling on Wednesday 30 September vacating the Trump administration's 2025 ICE Courthouse Arrest Policy as applied to immigration courthouses, indefinitely extending a stay he put in place in May and largely barring arrests at immigration courts in New York City and across the country. He found the government "arbitrary and capricious" for abandoning years of agency policy that made courthouse arrests rare and permitting them under "unfettered discretion by ICE officers with no guidance whatsoever," writing that ICE "offered no explanation of why" that was "a better option" than what it replaced. Under that prior policy, set under President Joe Biden, courthouse arrests were allowed only in exceptional circumstances such as a public safety or national security threat or an imminent risk of violence. A similar federal district court ruling in California had already largely banned the arrests nationwide. The turn in the case came after government attorneys wrote to the court in March to "correct a material mistaken statement of fact" they said was the result of false information provided by ICE, and admitting that the May 2025 memo they had used to justify the arrests did not in fact apply to immigration courthouses. Immigration advocacy groups The Door and African Communities Together brought the case, and Amy Belsher of the New York Civil Liberties Union said the ruling was "an enormous win for every noncitizen seeking to safely attend their immigration court proceedings," adding that for years the public watched armed ICE officers "ambush noncitizens in courthouse hallways" and "tear sobbing children from their parents."
More than 700 subapplications for Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants, worth $2.2 billion, were still waiting on an award decision when the Government Accountability Office reviewed the program, and FEMA's median time to finalize a subgrant was 7 to 9 months. FEMA announced it was ending BRIC in April 2025, then reinstated the program in March 2026 after a judge ruled the termination unlawful, and the GAO found the agency did not pass on key information internally or externally until it restarted: it never clarified which subgrants would be terminated, and officials and stakeholders said the lack of actionable information from headquarters delayed mitigation work on the ground. Christopher Currie, the GAO's director of homeland security and justice, told Smart Cities Dive that FEMA never told its regional officers what to tell cities and states about the cancelled grants, leaving local governments in the dark, and that inflation adds to the damage because the longer a project waits to start, the more it costs. The GAO also found FEMA did not use performance information to inform the decision to end the program in the first place, and it made seven recommendations, including identifying inefficiencies in the review process and fixing internal and external communication. The Department of Homeland Security concurred with all seven.
On 21 May, vapors began venting from a storage tank holding methyl methacrylate, a toxic chemical used in acrylics and plastics manufacturing, at the GKN Aerospace Transparency Systems plant in Garden Grove, California. The fear that the tank would explode or rupture sent an estimated 13,000 to 17,000 households in Garden Grove and five surrounding cities out of their homes over a five day period, more than 50,000 residents and businesses. A crack in the tank relieved the pressure, which is what kept the incident from becoming a large plume of chemicals into the air or a street level spill into the storm drains. On Monday 12 October the Orange County District Attorney's Office announced a $125 million tentative agreement with the company: a $100 million claims program for the people and businesses forced out, run by an independent third party not affiliated with GKN, paying up to $300 a night for lodging, $50 a day for transportation, $50 a day for meals and up to $5,000 a day for impacted businesses, all of it against documentation, plus $8.47 million for the emergency and abatement response, $15 million in civil penalties, a safety plan and a multi year monitoring program. An Orange County Superior Court judge still has to sign the agreement, and no hearing has been scheduled. Prosecutors chose a civil agreement over a criminal case after an investigation that included onsite inspections, plant records and consultations with outside experts. The 15 acre plant employs more than 500 people and is moving toward restarting manufacturing, which needs court approval of the safety plan. The company previously paid a nearly $1 million settlement over environmental violations at the same plant, and a history of spills, leaks and violations there led city officials in 2023 to press the company to improve its housekeeping. Methyl methacrylate will not be stored at the facility until the first quarter of next year at the earliest. The county has asked for $4 million in reimbursement for the hazmat response, dozens of civil suits tied to the evacuations are pending in state and federal courts, and the FBI and EPA searched the plant in June without either confirming or denying a federal investigation. A coalition called GKN Out of Garden Grove wants the plant closed or a buffer zone between it and the surrounding homes and schools, and city leaders say closure is unrealistic.
Speaking to reporters in Ireland, Trump said Zelensky "has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia," and told him there are plenty of other targets to pursue. Ukraine's long-range drone campaign against Russian oil refineries and energy infrastructure has disrupted Russian fuel production and contributed to domestic shortages. The same week, diesel and petrol prices hit record highs across Europe as the wider war kept taking refinery capacity and shipping offline.
On 29 August soldiers calling themselves the Armed Forces for the Restoration of the Homeland attacked Air Base 101 at Niamey's international airport, the presidential palace, and the national broadcaster. Loyalist presidential guard units held the palace overnight while about 200 Russian Africa Corps soldiers, backed by drones and reportedly reinforced from Mali and Libya, helped retake the airbase. At least 27 people were killed and about 100 mutineers were arrested. Analysts describe grievances inside the army that had been building for years.
The BRICS summit in New Delhi drew Xi Jinping to India for the first time in more than six years, after a year of tactical de-escalation between the two countries that includes new access for Chinese investment in Indian manufacturing and climate technology. The European Council on Foreign Relations reads the summit as evidence that the bloc is a bargaining table rather than a hard anti-Western alliance, and warns that Europe is losing influence in New Delhi by moving too slowly.
Oleshky sits on the Russian-occupied south bank of the Dnipro in Kherson, between Russian forces and Ukrainian positions. It had 24,000 residents before the full-scale invasion; Ukraine's government estimates about 6,000 remain, including 200 children. The city has had no electricity, gas, or water since the Kakhovka dam was destroyed in 2023. Residents told the BBC the last food delivery was in May, no shops are open, and many are now cooking garden weeds, with which weeds are safe and how to boil them discussed on local messaging chats alongside swaps for pieces of food. One resident eats once a day. A couple was killed by a drone on 20 September while carrying a bag of food home from a town 23 kilometers away, after the curfew they were racing. The UN human rights monitoring mission has recorded at least 29 civilians killed and 54 injured in Oleshky and nearby Hola Prystan this year; a volunteer who has been logging the dead since she escaped in 2022 has about 1,200 names. Ukraine's foreign minister calls it a full blockade and asked the UN to press Russia to let aid in. The Kremlin acknowledged a "critical situation" and blamed Kyiv.
In late August the administration lowered tariffs on up to 661 million pounds of imported lean beef trimmings to bring down ground beef prices, which were roughly 8 percent higher last month than a year earlier. The relief does not reach the shopper: that volume is only about 6.8 percent of the annual ground beef supply, most of it goes to restaurants and fast food, and past USDA research suggests only about 19 percent of a wholesale price decline passes through to consumers. Purdue economists Ken Foster and Bernhard Dalheimer put the maximum wholesale effect at 1.41 percent, which at a 19 percent pass through is about 0.27 percent for shoppers, roughly two cents a pound, against a pound of ground beef that has risen $1.32, or 23 percent, since the president took office. Meanwhile US beef exports fell 12 percent in 2025 as China retaliated, the trade war with Canada cut sales further, farms were paying 22 percent more for fuel this July than when the president took office, fertilizer costs rose 8 percent on the war's effect on natural gas prices, and ICE raids in beef producing areas triggered what the Cattlemen Associations for Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas called workforce disruptions, delaying thousands of cattle shipments. Farm state Republicans are distancing themselves: in Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton trails Republican Senator Roger Marshall by 1.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average, in Iowa Democratic state representative Josh Turek leads Republican Representative Ashley Hinson by half a point, and in Nebraska independent Dan Osborn is running even with Republican Senator Pete Ricketts while attacking the beef imports policy. Farm state members of Congress led by Senators Chuck Grassley and Jerry Moran wrote to the president that "cattle markets are cyclical, and ranchers use the upswings to prepare for the inevitable downturn," and asked him to stop intervening in what they called the natural system.
The United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court on Friday 9 October, vowing to cripple the tribunal's operations just hours after the Nobel Peace Prize went to Navanethem (Navi) Pillay, a former ICC judge who had warned of mounting political attacks on the court. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the measures in a video message, saying Washington would ban transactions with what he called a "rogue court," cutting off its resources and crippling its ability to operate against the United States. Pillay had headed the Rwanda genocide tribunal, presided over a UN commission that accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, and led investigations into potential ICC charges against US troops for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rubio said the US expected its allies, including several NATO members in Europe and Japan, to rein in the court, and that if they did not, "the United States will continue its campaign to dismantle the ICC, piece by piece." The sanctions block any assets the ICC holds in US jurisdictions and give US companies and individuals six months to wind down business dealings with the court. The ICC called the measures an assault on the rule of law and an attack on the principle that no one stands above the law, and called on its 125 member states to support the institution, saying its fate now rests in the hands of the states that created it.
Speaking in Yerevan on Friday 16 October, ahead of a UN biodiversity summit that opens there on Monday, Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on governments to stop subsidising the production of fossil fuels, which he said are "boiling our planet and are the scourge of biodiversity." "Subsidising fossil fuels is subsidising suicide," he said, and added that governments were still spending money on the wrong things. The number underneath the line is the point: the United Nations says that for every dollar invested in protecting or restoring nature, about 30 dollars still goes into activities that degrade it, including an estimated 2.6 trillion dollars a year in public subsidies that harm nature and the climate. He had launched a report on Thursday showing the world is off track on the 2030 targets in the landmark pact for nature, and nearly 200 nations are taking part in the negotiations in Yerevan, where the lack of finance for nature is a core focus. Nations have made little headway since they pledged in 2022 to reduce public spending on the activities that harm nature, among them mining, fossil fuel extraction and intensive farming.
The Allentown Planning Commission granted amended preliminary and final land development approval on Tuesday afternoon at City Hall for a plan by Quantm Group LLC to convert a 224,000 square foot warehouse at 2401 Emaus Avenue into a data center, adding an electrical substation, sound attenuation walls and related site work in the city's general industrial zoning district. The project draws 80 megawatts, which the commission's own members flagged: planner Erich Hornung said the only other structure in Allentown that draws that much power is the wastewater treatment center, that this would be the second one in the entire city, and that the city has aging infrastructure, so it was an important decision. The developer, Tony Maras, told the commission that PPL has the available electric capacity to serve the site, which would also carry 32 backup generators, with tens of thousands of gallons of diesel stored on a concrete pad on site. Conditions attached to the approval include a megawatt usage limit, restrictions on emergency generator operation, and air quality and emissions conditions, the cooling system is a closed loop that will not use public water, and the applicant received four waivers covering curb elevation, slopes, storm sewers and a utility easement. Residents objected, with one woman asking what it will sound like and feel like if 36 generators run around the clock, and a man noting that the site needs tons of stored fuel on ground where a 1988 leak sent oil slicks miles down Trout Creek and Jordan Creek. A daycare across the street, Camelot for Children, had filed an appeal against the project and withdrew it immediately before the meeting, saying in a statement that it hoped community leaders would balance economic opportunity with the responsibility to protect the people and organizations that make the community strong, and Maras said a separate legal zoning appeal had been dismissed.
The simulation, titled Exploring Geopolitical Tipping Points and Climate Cooling Strategies, gathered about two dozen foreign relations experts, scientists, military personnel and former government officials at Queen Mary University of London, seated at tables marked with the countries, NGOs, indigenous groups and tech companies they were playing. It was designed by Danielle Young, an assistant professor of international relations at Leeds University, funded by the UK government's Advanced Research and Invention Agency, and run over sessions set in the present, September 2027 and September 2028. The point was to stress test how the world would govern solar radiation modification, the family of technologies meant to cool the planet by reflecting away sunlight, and the answer it produced was no agreement at all. The United States and China each refused a deal that would constrain its own research; an American major playing a national security attaché told the group that "worse than no deal at all is any deal that favors China," and after the Russian delegation was handed an intelligence report about a suspected American research flight and the United States demanded an investigation, the talks collapsed and the Canadian player called it a humiliating defeat. The organisers' final report concluded that "strategic competition and state sovereignty drove the simulations, not climate concerns." In the last session an NGO called the Climate Futures Cooperative offered to fund an international monitoring network, then turned out to be backed by the fossil fuel industry, which used the offer to discredit the room's science adviser and leave the science with no voice. The real world kept moving underneath it. Stardust Solutions, a US and Israeli startup, raised $60 million and in May published details of inventions it says would let a government dial the global temperature down; Musk endorsed solar geoengineering in August; two papers from conservative US think tanks in March urged the administration to take the lead on it, one under the phrase weather sovereignty; and the British government published its first policy paper on the field last week, backing research while saying it does not plan to deploy. Models point to drying in sub Saharan Africa and stronger Atlantic storms, and the cooling would last only as long as the spraying continued.
Clean Creatives' annual F-List report, covered by DeSmog, finds 802 advertising and public relations agencies have worked with some of the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters during 2025 and 2026, holding more than 1,300 contracts with the oil and gas industry. Eight of the largest oil and gas companies, including Aramco, ExxonMobil, and Chevron, amassed record profits in 2026 after the US invasion of Iran drove energy prices up. At least 378 of the contracts are held in countries that lived through extreme heatwaves this summer, including the United Kingdom, France, and Spain.
A peer-reviewed study found the biggest climate problem with AI is not data center electricity but how fossil fuel companies use the technology. Oil majors including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP work with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to build custom AI tools that help them boost production, and the emissions those tools unlock could be 3.3 to 13.3 times the emissions of the AI data centers themselves, almost always outweighing any climate benefit AI provides to renewable energy. When HEATED put the research to Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, the responses raised serious questions about their stated commitments to responsible AI and a livable planet.
US chipmaker Nvidia's supply chain emissions have risen 725% since 2020, an increase of around 9.4 million tonnes, according to a new report from environmental and civil society groups including Greenpeace East Asia. Nvidia's own sustainability reports show Scope 3 emissions climbing from about 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2020 to 10.7 million tonnes in 2026. The report estimates that operating the chips Nvidia sold since 2022 could have generated the equivalent of four to 21 million tonnes of CO2 in 2025 depending on the electricity used. Report author Ketan Joshi calls Nvidia's claim of a net climate benefit for AI a greenwashing tactic.
Food & Water Watch has called for a ban on non-disclosure agreements between government officials at every level and private companies, after documenting how NDAs are used to approve hyperscale AI data centers with little or no public knowledge, in cases across Pennsylvania, Virginia and Arizona. The group notes the same tool is used when public property and infrastructure such as water and sewer systems are sold to private operators. Because the agreements often cover deals involving public subsidies and tax breaks, the public cannot see how its taxes are being spent or what development is being approved, regardless of the health, environmental or economic effects. Policy director Mitch Jones said the issue is broader than data centers: no private company should be able to enter an NDA with a public official that keeps information about a community from that community.
Hope Gas is asking the West Virginia Public Service Commission to approve a four percent rate increase, about $4.37 a month for the average residential customer and $11.47 for small commercial customers, to fund its Pipeline Replacement and Expansion Program. Testimony at the evidentiary hearing on Wednesday put roughly 1,460 leaks along 1,650 miles of Hope Gas lines. The utility's senior director of engineering said the goal is to rank the highest emitting leaks and replace those pipes, and the company is in the early stages of spending about $30 million a year on the program. Hope Gas president and CEO Morgan O'Brien told WAJR that the improvement costs capital, investment, and ultimately shows up in customers' bills. PSC Chairman Charlotte Lane asked the question directly: is it cheaper for Hope's customers to allow the leaks to continue than to fix them?
States created utility recovery bonds, also called storm recovery bonds, more than two decades ago to pay for storm damage, wildfire cleanup and coal plant closures at lower cost to customers. A dedicated, legally protected charge appears on every customer's bill to repay them, and because that revenue stream is unusually low risk, the bonds historically carried some of the market's lowest interest rates, which meant lower charges. Whether the Securities and Exchange Commission calls them asset backed securities or corporate bonds decides which investors may buy them and what interest rate they demand, and that borrowing cost is paid by electricity customers. Index provider Bloomberg reclassified them as asset backed in 2022, narrowing the buyer pool and pushing rates up, and the Edison Electric Institute has told the SEC it would not support moving them back to corporate registration forms while never disputing the pricing claim. The Energy and Policy Institute reports that Saber Partners estimates the reclassification has cost electric customers nationwide roughly $4 billion in extra interest since 2022. Two and a half weeks earlier, on July 29, the SEC's Office of Structured Finance told a law firm that securitizations backing AI data centers fall outside the asset backed definition, keeping that market open to the full range of institutional investors. State consumer advocates, eight governors, former utility commissioners and utility customers suing Bloomberg, now on appeal in the Second Circuit, have all opposed the treatment of recovery bonds.
In January Michigan sued BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute, alleging the companies colluded to suppress renewable energy and electric vehicle technology to protect fossil fuel market dominance and boost profits, which it said left residents with fewer choices and higher energy costs. It was the first suit against oil companies built entirely on antitrust theory in the context of the energy transition. On 22 September, US District Judge Jane M. Beckering dismissed the case on standing, ruling that the distance between the alleged conspiracy and the overcharges Michigan residents pay was too great to establish that the conspiracy caused them, because other market forces, technological developments, investors and public interest could also be at work. She declined to consider the state antitrust claim, ending the case. The American Petroleum Institute's general counsel welcomed the decision, calling climate policy a federal rather than state issue. Michigan's attorney general is reviewing its options. The US Supreme Court hears a climate tort case brought by Boulder, Colorado against Suncor and ExxonMobil on 5 October, which legal experts call the main event for more than two dozen pending climate lawsuits.
Two energy crises in four years, the 2022 Russian embargoes and the one still running from the US war on Iran, exposed how much of the industrial world still runs on fossil fuel, and the response in Brussels has been short-term and contradictory. According to the Brussels economic think tank Bruegel, EU-wide fossil fuel subsidies rose rather than fell, spiking to more than €11.8 billion in fiscal measures to cushion households from the price shock of the Iran war, and the majority of the money committed so far was untargeted, contrary to the European Commission's own recommendations and the European Central Bank's, with more than half the measures tracked falling into that category. The Jacques Delors Institute puts the war's cost to EU member states for the first 100 days alone at roughly €62 billion. The commission's AccelerateEU package talks about cutting dependence on volatile fossil imports, speeding up electrification and directing carbon revenues toward industrial electrification, and in the same document it tells member states to coordinate gas storage filling, revive joint oil and gas purchasing, set up a fuel observatory to track refining capacity and loosen state aid, while falling back on voluntary demand reduction instead of writing the 2022 energy saving rules into law. In July the EU announced proposals to slow the pace of industry's emissions limits under its own carbon pricing system, the Emissions Trading System. Greenpeace called the approach deeply incoherent, saying short-term handouts to the fossil fuel industry took priority over the transition the crisis should have accelerated, and that every euro spent cushioning gas prices entrenches the dependency Brussels says it is fighting.
At the edge of Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, families are clustered along the platform with their belongings packed into cloth bundles and plastic sacks, children half asleep in their mothers' laps, on trains toward Bihar and Uttar Pradesh that are full. Railway workers say the crowds have grown noticeably thicker over a few days, entire families of daily wage laborers waiting with little more than essentials, as if preparing for a longer absence. "Something is wrong," Ab Rahman, a 34 year old porter, told Jacobin. "For four to five days now, there has been a heavy rush, mostly poor workers. They are going back." For many, the article reports, the crisis is not wages or rent but something more immediate: the ability to cook a meal. The piece is a reported account of how supply shocks traced to the Strait of Hormuz reach the poorest households first, and it is illustrated with a man carrying multiple cooking gas cylinders on a bicycle through New Delhi.
We Make Indiana, a faith-based community group in South Bend, sent Microsoft a proposal in May asking the company to negotiate a binding fair share agreement for its $1 billion northern Indiana data center. Under the proposal, Microsoft would establish a fund to address the social and environmental impacts of the site, overseen by an independent board, and would contribute a fair percentage of its annual costs over the life of the project, including construction. The group estimated that even 1 percent would add roughly $30 million to $40 million a year for community programs, and it asked Microsoft to assess what percentage would be fair rather than naming a firm demand. It also asked the company to commit to higher standards on water and energy use, air quality, sustainability and workforce protections. The group first made the ask at a meeting with Microsoft's liaison in a church. The liaison said the request was beyond her purview and promised to check back. The next week Microsoft held an open house, which attendees described as a public relations exercise rather than engagement. A Microsoft representative told a local radio station the proposal was not on his radar. Microsoft has since gone silent; a spokesperson called the proposal an important part of its community listening process without committing to anything. A rumored Meta data center was blocked after the group rallied hundreds of people to a public meeting that ran until 4am.
Documents reviewed by NPR show Valar Atomics is planning what it calls Project Beehive on more than 9,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land near Price, Utah, with data centers, about 456 small nuclear reactors, a facility to produce nuclear fuel and others to store nuclear waste. Together the reactors would produce around 9.6 gigawatts for the data centers plus more thermal heat for industrial use; the entire state of Utah averages only about 4 gigawatts of electricity, with summer peaks near 10. Nonnuclear construction could start as soon as the end of this year, with the first reactors online around 2028 and the full site finished by 2032. Valar has also sought about 650 acres of state land. The company was accepted into the Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program in August 2025, its CEO Isaiah Taylor was in the room when the president signed the executive orders accelerating nuclear development, and the military flew its test reactor from California to Utah on a C-17 in February. That reactor, Ward 250, received rapid approval this year after the Department of Energy conducted a quiet overhaul of its internal safety and security regulations, reached criticality in June inside a tentlike structure in the Utah desert about 30 miles from the Beehive site, and in July was used to run a single Nvidia microchip. Since the turn of the century the US has switched on just three new nuclear plants, about 3.4 gigawatts in total. Neal Clark of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance called it concerning "to see that the Trump administration, with the support of the state of Utah, is pushing this forward on significant acreage of public lands," and Lexi Tuddenham of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah said the use of federal land for reactors, waste storage and data centers is unprecedented and "bigger than the local community." The Bureau of Land Management's Utah office confirmed it has the application and said it is reviewing it for completeness.
Lowndes County, Alabama is rural and poor, and its scars show. Residents have lived with a raw sewage crisis severe enough that a United Nations special representative came to investigate, and federal officials fined a plastics plant on US Highway 80 after finding cancer-causing emissions. On the third night of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march the marchers stopped at what is now Campsite #3 on the Gardner farm. Less than a mile away a developer is working to make roughly 800 acres of farmland shovel-ready for a $1.5 billion hyperscale facility called Project Red Clay. The county has no zoning, the site sits in an opportunity zone, and Alabama's legislature capped data center tax abatements at 20 years starting 1 January 2027, so Cloverleaf is racing a deadline to request a 30 year abatement before the end of this year. The developer says the project brings 1,000 construction jobs and at least 50 permanent positions, has offered up to $10 million through a community foundation, and says it does not sign NDAs with local officials. Residents say critical information is being withheld, and the Southern Environmental Law Center and NRDC have filed an open records request for NDAs, property transactions, site selection records, utility and infrastructure planning, environmental and noise studies, permits and commission minutes. Rev. Tom Gardner, a Vietnam veteran whose property borders the site, said: "I don't know which way to turn if it comes, but I know I couldn't live here." A community group, Protect Lowndes County, spent the summer demanding answers, and the local economic development commission that courts the project holds no public meetings and is not a municipal entity.
Data center companies have donated or invested more than $343 million across Texas in the past year for community needs including school programs, infrastructure repairs and emergency services, according to a Texas Tribune analysis reported by Grist, which reviewed news releases, public meeting agendas and interviews with local officials and said the true total is likely higher because not every donation is made public. Examples include a new $3 million water tower in Turkey, $400,000 for museum upgrades in Stamford, a $10,000 first responders barbecue in Medina County, and Rowan Digital Infrastructure's $38 million commitment to Temple, where it is developing a 4.2 billion dollar campus of six facilities, including $25 million for the South Temple Water Infrastructure Capital Program and $10 million for aquifer storage and recovery. Google funded a hospital and pregnancy center near Haskell, and others created recurring community action grants and a Texas Water Impact Fund. Much of the money has gone to communities that fought data center development. The donations land on top of tax breaks: a Texas Tribune analysis earlier this year found the state will forgo at least 3 billion dollars in sales tax revenue over two years through the data center exemption, and an August poll from the Texas Politics Project found 57 percent of respondents would oppose a data center in their own community.
Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse released a top line summary of an agreement with Senator Shelley Moore Capito and Representative Bruce Westerman to advance what they call permitting reform, in a package titled the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026. The Center for Biological Diversity, which reviewed it, says it grants long term structural advantages to the fossil fuel industry and only minimal improvements to transmission that might marginally help renewable energy, and that it does not meaningfully curb the data center and AI build out. The package locks in fossil projects approved over the past two years, including oil and gas pipelines, LNG export terminals and onshore and offshore drilling, and would make future fossil pipelines and methane gas electricity impossible to challenge in court. It guts parts of the Clean Water Act, including the Section 401 authority states use to protect their rivers from pipelines and the EPA's Section 404(c) veto, which stopped the Pebble Mine in Alaska, weakens the National Historic Preservation Act and Tribal consultation, and lets states take over Endangered Species Act Section 7 consultation with minimal safeguards. Brett Hartl, the group's government affairs director, called it a climate kill shot and said the only winners are tech oligarchs and fossil fuel shareholders. The bill would also bar environmental justice claims and require courts to tip toward the fossil fuel industry.
A report published 30 September by the energy think tank Ember, applying a 2023 health impact method to its country level coal mine methane data, estimates that each year of coal mine methane emissions at current levels commits about 26,400 premature deaths over the following decades, with a 95 percent confidence range of 11,500 to 41,700. Methane escapes when coal is mined, persists about 12 years, drifts across continents, then reacts with sunlight and other gases to form ground level ozone, a respiratory toxin with no safe exposure threshold that inflames airways, degrades lung function and accelerates death from COPD, lower respiratory infections and cardiovascular disease. Because the ozone disperses globally, the people who die are not the people near the mine, and the deaths are excluded from the visible costs of coal and from the air quality frameworks that would otherwise have to account for them. China's coal sector alone is linked to an estimated 20,100 of the deaths, more than the rest of the world combined. The United Kingdom, which mines very little coal today, still carries a burden from methane seeping out of abandoned and sealed shafts, and legacy emissions there now account for more than a third of its total. Ten mines, less than 1 percent of the world's total, are linked to nearly 5 percent of the deaths. Pre-drainage, ventilation air methane oxidation and mine gas capture are all commercially proven and all underdeployed, and Ember estimates that existing technology could avoid about 12,600 of the deaths, nearly half the toll. Global coal mine methane emissions have been broadly flat since the 2021 Global Methane Pledge.
An internal presentation prepared for a closed-door session of fossil fuel advocates in January 2026 laid out a strategy document with a section headed "Knowing our opponents" that details the work of environmental organizations and First Nations, along with the funding that supports them. The material was posted publicly on the website of a coordinating network called Energy In Action, part of a group called Canadian Energy Prosperity, and The Narwhal downloaded it on 2 and 5 October before the site became password protected the following day. "The damage is real and intentional," the document says of environmental advocacy in Canada, adding that every major "problem policy" traced back to an environmental group's framework or idea. The problem policies it names include the federal emissions cap, Canada's commitment to protect 30 percent of its lands and water by 2030, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and funding for Coastal First Nations who oppose lifting the oil tanker ban on the north coast of British Columbia. It proposes moving "from defence to offence" with counter campaigns, calls to "out hypocrisy" and regulatory complaints against groups including the David Suzuki Foundation. A second document singled out the Local Journalism Initiative, a federal program that funds reporting in rural and remote communities, and included a screenshot of a Narwhal story by a journalist who had been followed by private security while reporting on a pipeline through Wet'suwet'en territory. A video presentation shown at the Calgary Petroleum Club credits the network's support for four ad campaigns by an organization called Debunk Inc., including one defending natural gas in homes, one attacking a proposal to limit carbon pollution from the oil and gas industry, and one claiming that carbon dioxide does not cause harmful climate change, a post the group says drew over 3,000,000 views. The most successful campaign, against the emissions cap, claimed a monthly reach of up to 1.5 million Canadians and 22.3 million total views in 2025. Energy United's founder was president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers for seven years, and Cenovus, whose president chairs that association's board, has funded seven of the groups in the network according to its own disclosure records. Greenpeace Canada published the research on 8 October and is calling for every entity connected to the network to disclose its funding.
Brazilian federal prosecutors filed suit against Shell's subsidiary in the country on Friday, demanding $108 million in compensation for the floods that hit Rio Grande do Sul in April and May 2024, which left nearly 200 people dead, displaced 500,000 more and caused damage across the state. The $108 million covers both material and moral damages, and the case argues that the company's liability should match its contribution to global warming, which the suit puts at about two percent of historical global greenhouse gas emissions from the exploration, production and sale of fossil fuels. It was filed together with the Brazilian NGO Instituto Preservar. Maria Antonia Tigre, director of global climate litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told AFP this is the first time a national public prosecutor has sued an oil major for a climate disaster, and Thales Miola, a lawyer at Instituto Preservar, said the costs of climate damage should not fall solely on society and on those who lost everything in the tragedy. German courts moved toward the same principle last year in the case a Peruvian farmer, Saul Luciano Lliuya, brought against the utility RWE, rejecting his compensation claim while leaving the door open to holding major emitters liable, and similar claims are now pending against Shell in the UK over Typhoon Odette in the Philippines, against Holcim in Switzerland over Indonesia's Pari island, and against RWE and Heidelberg Materials in Germany over the 2022 floods in Pakistan.
Character.ai filed for bankruptcy, and the narrative filed in the case gives the clearest public accounting yet of what one AI product costs to run. The company spent $13.8 million a month on compute in 2024 and $10 million a month in 2025, according to the filing, while subscription revenue peaked at $2.8 million a month and at times came in under $1 million, with revenue from all sources including advertising peaking at $5.3 million a month. Between January and August 2026 it spent $56.1 million on compute and $19.7 million on salaries and benefits, and as of August it was losing roughly $8 to $9 million a month, which the company calls a large improvement on the year before: it got there by moving its inference work to cheaper GPUs and post trained open weight models instead of developing its own foundation models, cutting headcount, and adding advertising and purchases inside the app. The company was valued at $1 billion in 2023 after raising $150 million in a round led by a16z, and Disney has reportedly offered $20 million to license some of its characters after sending a cease and desist letter last year. Legal costs from suits over harm to users contributed, and the filing says the business was unsustainable without them: the chief executive states that the technology is expensive to operate and that the company struggled with profitability and high operating expenditure throughout, and employees left after questioning its long term viability. The platform is still running through the bankruptcy process.
House Government Organization Committee Chairman Chris Phillips, R Barbour, and delegates Tristan Leavitt, R Kanawha, Patrick Lucas, R Cabell, and Ryan Browning, R Wayne, sent a letter to Dan Haley, chief legal officer at the Atlanta based Flock Safety, giving the company a Friday deadline for written answers to questions the committee first submitted on 14 August. The letter said six weeks had passed without the answers, that the committee does not intend to sit for a briefing until Flock responds in full, and that meeting behind closed doors is no substitute for written responses now that new Flock camera hacking incidents have come to light. The 19 questions cover security incidents and unauthorized access to Flock systems, the scope of surveillance and data sharing, the accuracy of license plate readers and the rate of false positives, internal oversight and employee access controls, and data governance. Flock answered with a statement saying it had already given nearly two hours of public testimony and 10 pages of written responses, and that its offers to meet were meant to add information rather than replace written answers. The dispute over what is actually mandatory is on the record: Kevin Kane, the company's director of government affairs, told the committee in August that two factor authentication had existed as an option during his three years there and was made mandatory in the last year, while Haley wrote in a blog post days earlier that multi factor authentication had been mandatory only since the beginning of August. The cameras are spreading in the state regardless: Monongalia County contracted for 20 license plate reader cameras for its sheriff's department, and Huntington signed a five year deal worth $2.1 million covering more than 40 license plate readers, live video cameras, gunshot detection and other technology. The Institute for Justice maintains a database of more than 100 alleged abuses of these systems by law enforcement, including officers stalking romantic partners, wrongful stops, and use outside policing.
Ohio County 911 Director Rick Pritt told county commissioners that six dispatchers have departed in recent weeks, leaving a communications center that normally employs 16 people scrambling to cover shifts. Four replacements have been hired, but training them takes time, and another dispatcher is expected to retire in November. The county is considering spending approximately $160,000 to bring in two temporary dispatchers for six months, and Marshall County dispatchers have agreed to help fill shifts when possible. The Wheeling Intelligencer's editorial board notes the immediate coverage is being handled and presses commissioners on the questions underneath it: why six left in such a short window, whether wages and benefits are competitive, whether scheduling and overtime are driving turnover, and what stops the same shortage from repeating in six months or a year, particularly when taxpayers may be asked to fund a temporary fix. Dispatchers are the first point of contact on a 911 call, gathering information, coordinating responders and giving instructions, and the work runs 24 hours a day regardless of how many people are on the roster.
The seven counties with the lowest life expectancies in West Virginia in 2025 were all in the southern coalfields, from 65.5 to 68.9 years against a state average of 72.4, with McDowell the lowest at 65.5. Over the first 18 months of Governor Patrick Morrisey's administration, from January 2025 to July 2026, the state provided about $174.6 million in water and wastewater funding, $110.2 million in grants and principal forgiveness and $64.4 million in loans, according to data the Gazette-Mail obtained through a FOIA request. The six counties Morrisey visited on his August water listening tour, Cabell, McDowell, Mercer, Mingo, Wayne and Wyoming, received just over $11 million of it, 6.3 percent of the total while holding 13.9 percent of the state's population, and Boone, Lincoln, Logan and Raleigh were among 16 counties listed as having been awarded no funding at all. In 2024 West Virginia had the nation's highest share of public water systems with health based Safe Drinking Water Act violations, 29.2 percent, and the share of systems with any violation climbed from 32.1 percent in 2015 to 79.1 percent in 2024. Community advocates asked the Legislature to draw $250 million from the $1.44 billion Rainy Day Fund for shovel ready coalfield water projects. House Bill 5525, which would have created a Southern West Virginia Clean Water Fund, did not pass.
Students from the University of Cincinnati's environmental studies program traveled to Harrison County, Ohio, to learn about water quality problems affecting the village of Cadiz and the surrounding area. They ran a community based study, speaking directly with residents about their experience with the water and asking them to fill out a survey covering the look, taste and odor of their tap water. Some residents brought along recent samples, which showed discoloration and sediment. Abbie Frazer, an environmental studies student, said the team was there to get a baseline understanding of the water quality issues and to listen. Bob Hyland, an associate professor at the university, said the group will aggregate and analyze the data, return to show the community the results, and then ask residents what they think the next step should be. The university expects results in early to mid December.
West Virginia will not host a federal Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus, after state officials told the Department of Energy they cannot execute the hosting agreement and commit to its requirements. In a 30 September letter to Marla Morales, acting deputy assistant secretary in the DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy, state Office of Energy director Nicholas Preservati said the state remains committed to supporting the president's nuclear agenda and stands ready to help future campus recipients. The state had joined Idaho, Tennessee, Utah, Oklahoma and Louisiana in the program, and its 48 page response submitted in April 2026 described a vision built around nuclear fuel recycling, consolidated interim storage and long term materials stewardship, which was the distinction from Governor Patrick Morrisey's public position. Morrisey has pushed nuclear generation and manufacturing for the jobs while explicitly rejecting waste storage, saying "West Virginia will not be a dumping ground for nuclear waste. Period," and directing the office to consider sites only for generation or manufacturing. The April filing named the Hobet site in Boone County, the Century and Casto sites in Jackson County, the Old Standard site in Jefferson County, plus locations in Grant and Mason counties, the Kanawha Valley and the Ohio River corridor. The DOE has estimated a single campus could attract up to $50 billion in capital investment and nearly 25,000 jobs. The state had repealed its 1996 restrictions on nuclear plant construction in 2022 and set up a radiation control framework in 2024.
Point Roberts, Washington, is a five square mile US enclave on a peninsula south of Vancouver. By land it is reachable only through Canada, and about 1,200 people live there year round. The economy runs on Canadian shoppers, and the only grocery store in town is the International Marketplace. The owner, Ali Hayton, warned Senator Patty Murray in 2025 that the trade war with Canada was putting her store and the area's food security at risk. President Trump raised tariffs by 50 percent on a range of Canadian goods including beer, wine, honey, fruit and dairy this July, and trade talks collapsed in August. Canadians responded by staying home: a Bank of Canada survey shows 10 million fewer trips to the US in 2025 than in 2024, a 25 percent drop, and business at the International Marketplace is down almost 50 percent. The town's food bank depends on the same store, and its owners are now trying to lure Canadian customers back to keep it open.
PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for 13 states including West Virginia and most of the Ohio Valley, filed a plan with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in August to track the large electricity users, 50 megawatts or more, that are driving its demand growth, and to set a path for those that do not generate their own power to cut demand when the grid is strained to dangerous levels. The two pieces are the Interim Resource Adequacy Service and a Large Load Registry. Dozens of responses have followed, running to thousands of pages. Representative Frank Pallone Jr., the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote that data centers are responsible for nearly $30 billion in added PJM capacity market costs since the summer of 2024, "costs that my constituents will ultimately have to pay," and urged FERC to allocate the costs to the zones fueling the growth rather than the whole region, and to make as much of the registry public as possible. The Data Center Coalition opposed the plan, arguing that states get no real ability to opt in or out and that a state whose policy does not conform could see all its retail customers exposed to curtailment, and it asked FERC to reject the plan or at least delay it. Google said the plan would chill investment and undermine companies trying to bring their own generation into PJM. The docket is open and the public filings are the record.
When orange water began running through Pigeon Creek in Mingo County in late April, the county's Office of Emergency Management issued a statement saying the discoloration was "connected to ditch and drainage work currently being performed by Norfolk Southern Railroad along the rail line," with no mention of mine runoff. Documents released to WOWK 13 News under a Freedom of Information Act request show the state already knew the source. A Norfolk Southern engineer, Troy Carpenter, called the state spill hotline on 22 April, before the work began on 27 April, reporting that water was coming out of abandoned mines and that the same thing had happened during a similar project in March 2017, "to give a heads-up as to not cause another violation." A WVDEP memorandum dated 8 May records that the source was a pre-law deep mine discharging into the railroad ditch, mining that predates the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, and the state's own lab results identify the mine as Lexington Coal Company. Sampling on 29 April found total iron at 51.3 milligrams per liter at the source against 0.627 milligrams per liter upstream, manganese at 1.07 against 0.119, total suspended solids at 504 against 6, sulfate at 252 against 196, and a pH of 5.80 where state standards call for 6.0 to 9.0. By 5 May investigators found sediment deposits six to twelve inches deep and dead crayfish in the deeper pools, with the orange traveling about a mile downstream of Delbarton. WVDEP sued Lexington Coal on 7 August seeking $8,600,427.25 in outstanding penalties, and a WVDEP spokesperson confirmed some of those penalties are for violations in Mingo County near Ragland. The company denies the allegations are valid or collectible.
Travis Price, 44, of Boone County, died at the American Eagle Mine in Kanawha County on Thursday evening, according to a release from Governor Patrick Morrisey's office issued Friday morning, and the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health, Safety, and Training is investigating the circumstances of the death. Morrisey said in the release that "every day, our coal miners take on difficult and dangerous work to provide for their families and communities," and that their "dedication and sacrifice deserve our deepest respect and gratitude." The operation's accident, injury and violation record is public through the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the state's own investigation file is what the family and the next crew at that mine will have to read. A death at work leaves ordinary questions behind: what the equipment was doing, what the procedure required, and whether the hazard had already been reported.
The news is national until it reaches Main Street. Pick a state and read the signal closest to your ground, the flood, the drought, the bill on your doorstep.
The physical climate market barely moved again this week. CO2, methane, and warming each ticked a fraction, and the carbon budget stayed flat. The flatness is the honest signal: the physics does not move on a news cycle, while everything built on top of it does.
Measured values, NOAA GML / NASA GISTEMP via global-warming.org, read 11 October 2026. The carbon budget is the IPCC AR6 1.5C baseline; its depletion is an estimate, not a fresh measurement.
The rule that told states to stop PFAS at the pipe is gone, and PFAS do not break down. The practical answer is to control more of your own water: catch it where it falls, filter what you drink, and know what is in the ground under you. A rainwater catchment with a first-flush diverter keeps the dirtiest first wash off the roof out of the tank. A sediment filter, then granular activated carbon, and for PFAS specifically a reverse osmosis stage under the sink, all reduce contamination you cannot see. If you draw from a well, get the PFAS panel run and keep the results.
Farming The Dream, this week. Sixteen years of terracing a slope, holding a pond, and choosing what not to do, on the same ground this page reads the news against. The signals above keep describing a climate that no longer keeps its old appointments, and this is what building a place that can absorb that looks like over a decade and a half. Subscribe and read the book if you want the longer version of the argument.
The sea took the boardwalk after the sand that guarded it was already gone, and the mud came down the mountain in the dark, and the only warning that saved anyone was a text that arrived in time. Hold your water, know your high ground, and learn the names on your road, because the storm does not wait for the funding to come through. A Saying for the People, Week 42
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The annual State of the Climate report counted seven of sixteen planetary vital signs at record extremes and put the warming rate at about 0.36 degrees per decade against roughly 0.05 across 1880 to 1970, and it landed in the same week as the rest of this. The third storm in a month took the boardwalk out of the Long Beach Peninsula after the sand that had been shielding it was already gone, the Atlantic's first hurricane of the year left more than 911,000 customers without power across three states, and a wall of mud came down the Budhi Gandaki in Nepal before dawn and took the bridges with it, while a state review of the Los Angeles fires found no single cause and admitted that no single household hardening its own home could have saved it. In Mingo County, state records show the mine at the bottom of the orange water was known five days before the work that let it loose. It showed you a Congress holding stock in the industry it regulates, a resilience program cancelled with no plan and restarted a year later with $2.2 billion still in limbo, a loss and damage fund that has paid out nothing a month after 1,400 people died, and a drinking water rule quietly withdrawn while the chemicals it covered do not break down.
None of that is yours to fix from a kitchen table, and it is not your fault that it happened. What is yours is the ground under you: the water you can catch and clean, the food you can grow, the shelter that does not need the grid, the records you keep, and the neighbors who will show up. Build that, because it is the only ledger that pays out on time.