Grist

Johnny Appleseed was ahead of his time. Not because he fed so many people by planting apple trees (really, he got them drunk instead, as his real goal was encouraging the production of cider), but because he created so much shade to enjoy on hot days. More than two centuries later, American cities are wishing they had better followed Appleseed’s lead, as rising temperatures and a lack of tree cover combine to make urban life increasingly stifling.

A pair of new studies show how simply planting more trees can provide huge temperature benefits, not to mention how the additional plant life would boost biodiversity and improve mental health for urbanites. The first finds that tree cover can cancel half of the heat island effect, in which the urban jungle gets much hotter than the surrounding countryside. The second compares neighborhoods in 65 American cities, finding that canopy-deprived areas suffer up to 40 percent more excess heat than heavily greened spots. 

Places like New York and Atlanta and Los Angeles, then, don’t just have to foster and maintain their “gray” infrastructure — roads and sidewalks and such — but their living infrastructure as well. “Heat is already a major public health threat. It kills 350,000 people a year by some estimates, and it’s worse in cities,” said Robert McDonald, the Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist for nature-based solutions and lead scientist for Europe, who spearheaded the first paper. “The urban heat island effect would be about double what it is now if world cities didn’t have trees.”

By increasing their canopies, metropolises dress themselves like their more comfortable rural counterparts. A vegetated area cools itself both because plants “sweat” by releasing moisture from their leaves, and because trees provide shade. By contrast, concrete absorbs the sun’s energy, driving temperatures up, and releases it throughout the night. That beats back the cooling typically experienced in the evening, meaning urbanites without air conditioning don’t get respite. This is especially dangerous for vulnerable groups like the elderly, and it’s one reason heat kills more Americans every year than all other extreme weather events combined.

Such conditions are especially dangerous for those living in lower-income neighborhoods, which tend to have significantly less tree canopy than richer areas. In industrialized areas, for example, vast stretches of concrete absorb and radiate heat. In urban centers, policymakers may have prioritized building dense housing without incorporating ample tree cover. Compare that to the suburbs, which have plenty of parks, curbside trees, and yards to cool things down.

The differences in greenery between neighborhoods translates into striking differences in temperatures. The second study calculated this “cooling dividend,” or the difference in the average urban heat island in areas with low and high canopy cover. It found gaps reaching almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit. If you’re lucky enough to live where there’s lots of trees, you might experience 20 to 40 percent less excess heat. The report found that this is playing out regularly across the U.S. “I think what maybe was surprising is that there was a dramatic amount of consistency,” said Steve Whitesell, executive editor at the Healthy Green Spaces Coalition, which authored the report. “In other words, they were all showing an impact.”

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The trick is not just planting enough trees, but planting the right kind. The biggest species provide the most shade, of course. But more cryptically, some provide more evaporative cooling than others — drought-adapted trees, for instance, try to retain as much water as they can. A neighborhood might also want to prioritize food production, opting for trees that create both shade and fruit. Favoring native varieties will also help support native animal life, like birds and pollinating insects. 

Climate change, though, is complicating these calculations. Even in rural areas, without the added temperatures of the urban heat island effect, some places are getting so hot that native plants are moving north in search of cooler climes. Within cities, they are blasted with still more heat — and temperatures will only climb from here. So urban arborists aren’t just planting species that will thrive today, but will survive the climate of tomorrow. “I think that for us to use trees as a type of living infrastructure, that can counter those increased temperatures, is paramount,” said Edith de Guzman, a cooperative extension researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies urban heat but wasn’t involved in either study. “I think it’s pretty much the most important thing we can do.”

But trees alone can’t save urbanites. McDonald’s study found that even if cities planted as many as possible, it would only offset 20 percent of the potential running up of temperatures due to climate change. Designers will have to deploy other techniques, like reflective rooftops, to manage the heat. That’s especially important in poorer nations, whose cities are rapidly growing but have much less tree cover than richer countries, the study found. “It’s just to say that climate change is a big enough challenge that while planting more tree cover helps with temperatures, it won’t do the job by itself,” McDonald said. 

Urban areas have been here before, McDonald added. As the Industrial Revolution kicked in, people in overpopulated metropolises would have to travel to the countryside to glimpse greenery. An exception was London, with its many publicly available green spaces, which Paris took as inspiration when it essentially rebuilt itself in the 1800s and made room for massive parks. Today, planners are similarly bringing some of the country back into the city, blurring the lines between rural and urban. “We know how to increase tree cover, if we put our minds to it,” McDonald said. “But it takes effort and time.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The solution to urban heat is much, much simpler than you think on May 8, 2026.

Ninety percent of global trade is conducted by giant ships that crisscross the globe, delivering containers of jet fuel, electronics, clothing, and many other goods every day of the week. Seafaring trade on this scale has brought the cost of many products down dramatically, but those ships have historically run on a very dirty fuel — essentially the sludge left over from refining crude oil — causing the shipping sector to contribute about 3 percent of total carbon emissions worldwide. 

Last year, the International Maritime Organization, or IMO, the United Nations agency overseeing global shipping, was poised to adopt a plan to bring that down to zero. But that was before the Trump administration stepped in, threatening countries with visa restrictions, tariffs, and port fees if they supported the effort. As a result, the ambitious plan to decarbonize global shipping has been on the rocks for months. Alternate proposals that dispense with the core function of the original Net-Zero Framework, or NZF — a per-ton fee on greenhouse gas emissions above a certain threshold — seemed to be gaining traction, threatening climate progress in the sector.

But at a meeting of U.N. member countries last week, none of those watered-down proposals received much attention. Instead, a slim majority of countries expressed vocal support for the NZF, indicating that a narrow path to adopting the framework as originally intended still exists. 

“A genuine spirit of collaboration and optimism pervaded the negotiations,” said Em Fenton, a senior director at the U.K.-based climate group Opportunity Green, who attended the meeting in London. “There were people who did not want to see progress, but a vast majority of delegates in the room were working together.”

The Trump administration opposes the NZF on the grounds that it would burden American consumers and businesses. In public documents submitted to the IMO, the administration has drawn a hard line at penalizing carbon-intensive fuel types and the inclusion of an “economic element,” such as a tax or levy, in the framework. 

“The United States submits that the most appropriate path forward is to end consideration of the IMO Net-Zero Framework entirely,” it noted. 

But supporters of the weaker alternative proposals — which were submitted by Japan, Liberia, Argentina, Panama, and others — did not entirely derail the majority’s push to advance the original NZF. The path to adopting the net-zero plan is a long one — and there’s still time for talks to fall apart. Opponents of the framework can tank it by gathering support from one-third of member countries, or from a smaller group of countries if that group controls half of the world’s shipping tonnage, per IMO rules.

Just four countries — Liberia, Panama, Bahamas, and the Marshall Islands — account for roughly half of the world’s registered ships. Ships can be owned by a company in one country, operated by another, and registered — or “flagged” — in a third, much like offshore banking for tax purposes. As a result, these so-called flag countries have extraordinary leverage during IMO negotiations. Since some of these flag states have already voiced their opposition to the NZF, Eveylne Williams, a research associate with the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, said that “you’re kind of already in that neighborhood of the 50 percent blocking threshold.”

However, “cautious optimism is reasonable” at this stage, she added. “[The NZF] hasn’t been abandoned, but it’s kind of sobering to look at the blocking arithmetic still available.”

While key countries oppose the Net-Zero Framework, the shipping industry itself — the companies that actually own and operate the ships and make their profits from the delivery of goods — has largely backed the effort in the hopes that a single uniform global tax will put every company on the same footing, no matter where they operate. Shippers are already navigating European carbon regulations and want to avoid a patchwork of rules by different countries.

“Our industry needs the IMO as our global regulator,” said David Loosley, CEO and secretary general of BIMCO, a trade organization representing shippers, on LinkedIn after the meeting last week ended. “To arrive at implementable regulations at a global level, we need the backing of all member states. Without consensus, global regulations will be ineffective and will fail to provide a level playing field for a truly global industry.”

At the meeting last week, U.S. delegates distributed leaflets laying out their projections of the country-by-country economic effects of the Net-Zero Framework. One handout, summarizing the effects on Peru, led to nearly $800 million in compliance costs. But experts who examined the figures said the analysis was misleading and utilized outdated assumptions. 

“The data is a clear effort being made by a country acting in strong self-interest and using misinformation and exaggeration to the detriment of other countries’ interests,” said Fenton. 

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Fenton expects countries to continue engaging in bilateral negotiations and technical discussions in the coming months. Several finer points — such as the distribution of funds collected as a result of the framework’s fee — are yet to be decided. After the U.S. intervention last year, a vote to adopt the framework was delayed by a year. As a result, the earliest countries can vote to adopt the framework is November. Talks are scheduled for that month to get the framework — or an alternate proposal — over the finish line.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is trying to kill a carbon tax on global shipping. He may not succeed. on May 8, 2026.

For decades, the U.S. Forest Service has actively managed public lands to reduce wildfire risks by clearing underbrush and trees, or employing prescribed burns — something Indigenous nations have practiced for centuries. Scientists have generally lauded the ecological benefits of what is also known as “fuel treatment.” Now, they say there’s another reason to support this approach: It saves money. 

According to a study published today in the journal Science, every dollar that the agency spent on such tactics avoided $3.73 in smoke, property, and emissions harm. “A lot of people have suggested that there could be potential economic benefits,” said Frederik Strabo, the lead author of the paper and an economist with University of California, Davis. “But it’s been a pretty understudied area.”

The study analyzed high-resolution data from 285 wildfires across 11 Western states between 2017 and 2023 that burned through areas where the Forest Service had reduced the fuel load. On average, the treatments decreased the total area burned by 36 percent and cut the amount of land burned at moderate to high severity by 26 percent. Researchers then modeled the economic benefits of those reductions. 

The paper estimated that fuel treatments prevented $1.39 billion in health and workforce productivity losses tied to wildfire smoke, $895 million in structural damage, and $503 million in carbon dioxide emissions. Overall, that amounted to an average savings of about $3.73 for every dollar the government spent. The research also found that larger treatments — those covering more than 2,400 acres — were the most cost effective. 

“It’s a significant number, but when you compare it to the total cost of wildfires it’s small,” caveated Strabo, noting that the cost of the worst disasters can reach hundreds of billions of dollars. But he also said the boon could be even greater than calculated. The research didn’t, for example, examine any savings or benefits for the multibillion dollar outdoor recreation industry. “We’re only capturing a specific subset of benefits.”

Morgan Varner, the director of fire research at the conservation nonprofit Tall Timbers, called the work “the missing link for a lot of fuels treatment research,” and said that data like this can be extremely helpful in guiding decision-makers. “Studies like this round out the story and provide more evidence for the benefits of these treatments.” 

David Calkin, who until last year was a Forest Service research scientist, also applauded the analysis, calling it “novel.” But he does not find the math entirely convincing, and questions the notion that such an intangible public good can, or should, be assigned a monetary worth. “A lot of the values of fuel management are non-market,” said Calkin, who wasn’t involved in the study. Ecological benefits, for instance, can be hard to quantify, as can things like public recreation access. 

“I’m not trying to reduce the importance of fuel management and the value of it. It’s just highly uncertain,” he said. “I worry about trying to monetize the value of treatments on public lands.”

One issue Calkin notes is that such work on federal lands may not significantly mitigate the costliest fires, which ignite near communities and destroy homes and buildings. “The best way to protect a structure is at the structure itself,” he explained. That means the study could be overestimating the amount of property damage that clearing and prescribed burns avoid.

Strabo disagrees, saying that an unpublished portion of the analysis found that fires that interacted with fuel treatments accounted for a disproportionately large share of structure losses and suppression costs. “That suggests [those fires] were often among the more economically consequential wildfires,” he said, pointing to the 2021 Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe as an example. “The fire still caused substantial damages, but treatments helped prevent it from becoming even more catastrophic.”

One thing the paper explicitly didn’t account for was the smoke and carbon dioxide emissions that intentional fires produce. “We’re finding that’s not a non-trivial amount in our research,” said Mark Kreider, a Forest Service researcher. Because wildfire is unpredictable, he explained, you inherently have to treat more of the landscape than will actually encounter flames. How to best factor those emissions in is part of Kreider’s ongoing work, but he says it could potentially even flip an analysis like the one in Strabo’s paper. Still, he said, that doesn’t undermine the core point that fuel treatments are effective.

“It’s very clear,” he said, “that on the whole they are very beneficial.”

Not everyone supports such tactics. Critics argue they can harm ecosystems, disproportionately target larger trees, and open forests to logging under the guise of fire prevention. Some opponents also contend that this approach is less effective against extreme fires, while others question whether public funds would be better spent hardening homes and communities.

The federal government’s approach to forest management has shifted since President Donald Trump returned to office. In 2022, the Forest Service released a 10-year wildfire plan that increased forest management and prescribed burns. The Trump administration, which has announced plans to radically remake the agency, has placed greater emphasis on fighting wildfires than preventing them. According the Forest Service, in 2025, the agency reduced vegetation on about 1 million fewer acres than in 2024.

A Forest Service spokesperson attributed most of that decline to elevated wildfire activity in the Southeast. The agency also called 2025 “one the most successful wildfire years in recent history.” But critics worry it is moving away from proactive forest management.

“The takeaway that I really got from this article was that it provides further evidence that the administration’s current policy of full suppression in Western wildfire situations is misguided,” said Heather Stricker, a climate and lands analyst with the Sierra Club. While that approach might sound protective, she said a large body of research shows that it can often backfire. “This paper reiterated a lot of that previous research, but then took it a step further to quantify the cost savings.” 

The Trump administration has also announced plans to increase logging on federal lands. This has added to long-standing fears from environmental groups that instead of thoughtful, well-managed fuel treatment, the government could resort to clear-cutting. Even the paper notes this resistance. “Public pressure and risk aversion,” it reads, “skew wildfire management resources toward fire suppression rather than prevention.”

Strabo is hopeful that by adding to the range of evidence supporting forest management, his paper could help guide policymakers. “We could have these economic and ecological benefits if we scaled it up,” he said. “It’s a critically underfunded public good.”

This story was updated to include a response from the U.S. Forest Service.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How controlled burns can help save taxpayers billions on May 7, 2026.

Flooding across northern Michigan last month pushed rivers to record levels, testing the limits of the state’s aging dams so severely that officials in one city nearly ordered evacuations as water threatened to spill over the top of a key barrier — a close call that highlights the growing risk that intensifying storms pose to similar infrastructure around the country.

Nationwide, the average dam is 64 years old and most were built for rainfall patterns that no longer reflect today’s changing climate. Thousands are classified as high hazard, meaning their failure could result in the loss of life. Dam safety experts say inspections are uneven and improvements often underfunded.

More than half of Michigan’s dams are beyond their 50-year design life, and the risks became clear as snowmelt and weeks of heavy rain swelled rivers. Rising water came within 5 inches of flowing over Cheboygan Dam in Cheboygan, a city of about 4,700 people, on April 16. In Bellaire, officials deployed about 1,000 sandbags to shore up a century-old dam.

“This needs to be considered not the worst we can experience. This needs to be considered as typical of the future,” said Richard Rood, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who studies climate change.

There are about 92,000 dams in the United States. About 18 percent are considered high-hazard. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates repairing all of these aging structures will cost more than $165.2 billion. In Michigan, that estimate is $1 billion.

Communities facing these risks are left with difficult choices. Given the cost of repairing and upgrading dams to withstand stronger storms, removing them is often cheaper. That can reduce long-term risk and restore rivers to a more natural state. But it often faces resistance from property owners and communities with economies built around the reservoirs those dams created.

As floodwaters recede across Michigan, local leaders, dam safety advocates, and experts are renewing calls to bolster safety regulations and deal with aging dams.

Bellaire Dam in Bellaire, Michigan, on April 13, 2026.
Austin Rowlader / IPR News

Bob Stuber, executive director of the Michigan Hydro Relicensing Commission, considers the April flooding a wake-up call and believes the solution is clear: upgrades where feasible and removal where it makes sense. 

“I think every opportunity we have to remove an aging dam, we should take advantage of it because it’s not going to get better,” he said. “It’s just going to get worse.”

Officials in Traverse City came to that conclusion in 2024 and removed the Union Street Dam along the Boardman-Ottaway River as part of a decades-long restoration project that includes FishPass, which will allow key species to pass while blocking harmful invaders like sea lamprey. Engineers said that removal and upgrade most likely reduced flooding impacts when waters surged to near-record levels last month, falling just short of a 500-year flood.

“Upstream would have been under 2 more feet of water, which would have been quite devastating,” said Daniel Zielinski, a principal engineer for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. “We actually had a really great stress test of the system. It functioned really well.” 

Removals are increasing across the country, according to data from American Rivers. Since 2000, more dams have come down than gone up, and that pace is accelerating as aging infrastructure, safety concerns, and environmental benefits reshape how communities weigh their value. 

In northern Michigan, conservation groups like Huron Pines help dam owners make that decision. It has managed nine removals in the last 13 years and has seen growing interest after the recent flooding, said Josh Leisen, a senior project manager for the organization. Removal reconnects river ecosystems and eliminates the need for expensive upkeep of aging structures, he said.

“There are costs associated with repair and there are risks associated with having a dam,” Leisen said. “Even if it seems to be in good condition, you get extreme weather events like we just had.”

Removing dams is not always straightforward. Beyond the technical challenges, many communities are reluctant to give up the lakes and waterfronts those structures create.

“There’s this emotional attachment to that impoundment,” said Daniel Brown, a climate resilience strategist at the Michigan-based Huron River Watershed Council.

In other cases, dismantling isn’t practical. Some dams provide electricity or drinking water, linking them to local economies and infrastructure. “[Removal] is not really something that’s on the table because they are connected in this very practical way,” Brown said.

Still, Brown said, there are limits to how much aging structures can be adapted to a warming world. “[A dam] is this very long-term, huge, expensive infrastructure that you’ve put on the landscape that’s going to stay there. And that is not how climate change or nature or rivers behave,” Brown said.

Dismantling dams, like upgrading them, can come with steep costs. The Boardman-Ottaway River project — which removed three dams in the largest removal effort in state history — cost $25 million. Huron Pines is managing the removal of Sanback Dam in Rose City next month, at an estimated cost of $4 million.

Half of the expense is funded through a grant program from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, launched in response to the 2020 Edenville Dam failure which overwhelmed the downstream Sanford Dam. The twin catastrophes forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 residents, destroyed thousands of homes, and flooded ecosystems in a disaster that investigators later found was avoidable. The $44 million state program funded several dam removals, upgrades, and engineering studies before it ended last year. 

Neil Hawk and his wife Dawn take a rowboat out to a residential part of Sanford, Michigan, to inspect the damage to their neighborhood following extreme flooding throughout central Michigan in May 2020.
Matthew Hatcher / Getty Images

Federal funding is available through programs administered by agencies such as FEMA or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But those resources fall short of the estimated $165.2 billion needed to address the issue, and some are at risk of elimination.

State governments regulate roughly 70 percent of the dams in the United States, with the federal government regulating hydropower dams and providing funding and guidance. This means inspection standards, regulations, enforcement, and resources can vary widely.

In Michigan, about 1,000 dams fall under state oversight, while 99 hydroelectric dams are overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The remaining 1,500 are smaller barriers that don’t fit the criteria for state regulation, according to the Michigan Dam Inventory.

Now, state officials are renewing calls for more money and stronger regulations. “Dam safety may be an issue that isn’t partisan,” said Phil Roos, director of EGLE.

Proposed state legislation would bolster inspection rules, address private ownership, update design standards, and create more funding opportunities for upgrades or removals. “It’s so important to our state that we can come together, and whether it’s passing the legislation that was proposed, or improving procedures, or ultimately funding,” Roos said.

Michigan state Senator John Damoose has expressed concern about private dam ownership since the close call at Cheboygan Dam, which is under both state and private control. About 75 percent of the dams Michigan regulates are privately owned.

“Somebody made a point, ‘Well, we can’t have private companies owning these things.’ I tend to believe in private ownership but they might be right,” Damooose said during a Traverse City roundtable discussion on dam safety.

It’s not just a Michigan issue. Most dams in the United States are privately owned, meaning responsibility for maintenance, upkeep, and potential failure falls on individuals, not governmental agencies, according to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. 

Climate change is expected to bring more frequent and intense storms. As the world warms, the atmosphere holds more moisture, fueling more intense precipitation, according to Rood at the University of Michigan.

Recent flooding “has shown an incredible vulnerability,” he said. “[Dams] are either going to have to be removed or reengineered. Or they’re going to become a set of slowly unfolding failures.”

Luke Trumble, chief of dam safety for Michigan, said the state is already dealing with conditions that many dams were never designed to withstand.

“It’s a little bit of a misconception that if we fix the dam issue, there’ll be no more flooding,” Trumble said. “There’s still going to be flooding on rivers whenever we get rain like this, or rain on snow.

“What we can do with dam safety legislation is help ensure that flooding is not made worse by a dam failure,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Close calls at Michigan’s dams are a climate warning to America on May 7, 2026.

For more than half a century, residents of Sampson County, North Carolina have watched their local landfill grow to nearly 1,300 acres, becoming the largest in the state. Garbage now arrives from far beyond the county line, traveling from all over the state. For locals like Sherri White-Williamson, the scale of the operation has become a source of concern. She grew up in the county, and was alarmed by potential for landfill chemicals leaching into residents’ groundwater and the impact it may be having on their health. “Many of the folks out around that landfill are on well water,” White-Williamson explained. “They are drinking in it, they’re bathing in it, they’re using it to water gardens and animals.” 

She worked for years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, working in its Office of Environmental Justice, where public outreach and education, and coordinating between communities and federal agency staff together with the community were part of her daily routine. Eventually, White-Williamson saw that kind of advocacy was missing in her own backyard. In 2020, she co-founded the non-profit Environmental Justice Community Action Network (EJCAN) to educate and empower communities to advocate for themselves on environmental issues. 

Not long after its first meeting in October of that year, the group began working with residents of Snow Hill, a historically Black rural community near the Sampson County landfill. People described a range of environmental and public health worries. One concern that rose quickly to the top was whether the water — especially the private wells on which many households rely — might be contaminated.

Sherri White-Williamson outside of EJCAN’s headquarters in Sampson County, NC. Cornell Watson

Over the next few years, EJCAN partnered with UNC Chapel Hill and Appalachian State to do free well water testing through some small grants. “The community felt like they were seeing elevated levels of illnesses and [were] convinced what they were seeing was directly related to their proximity to the landfill, and the water that they’re drinking,” White-Williamson said, but there had been little formal research. “There’s never been a health impact analysis in that area, so it’s been all anecdotal,” she explained. The well testing became a first step toward gathering evidence that contaminants from the landfill might be harming residents.

The results were troubling. After four rounds of sampling at homes in the area, they found 13 percent of wells were contaminated with PFAS and other contaminants of concern. Short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the synthetic chemicals have been produced in the U.S. since the 1940s, and are used in water-repellent fabrics, nonstick cookware, and fire fighting foam, among other things. 

PFAS are sometimes referred to as “forever chemicals” because of how long they persist in the body and the environment. That includes “legacy” PFAS, substances such as PFOA and PFOS that were widely used for decades, but phased out during the 2000s. It also includes what researchers call “novel” PFAS, or newer chemicals developed as replacements. While initially thought to have fewer health risks, scientists are now questioning if these next-generation products are meaningfully safer. Because they are newer, far less is known about their impacts, according to the Center for Environmental and Health Effects of PFAS at NC State.

“We know that landfills are a common source of [PFAS], because folks have thrown away a range of consumer products,” said Courtney G. Woods, an environmental sciences professor at the University of North Carolina. According to a 2020 report in the academic journal Toxicology, there is mounting evidence that PFAS are implicated in “adverse health outcomes associated with exposure, including reduced kidney function, metabolic syndrome, thyroid disruption, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.” 

Residents raise red flags

Research into Sampson County water quality dates back a decade, thanks to the work of the late Ellis Tatum, who lived in Snow Hill. In 2016, Woods and some of her students met Tatum at the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network Summit, a gathering of environmental justice organizations led by people of color. “He was convinced there was something going on with what was in the water,” explained White-Williamson. 

Tatum invited Woods and some students to partner with his community. After convening neighborhood focus groups, Woods and a student began to test for legacy and novel PFAS, metals, and bacteria in Bearskin Swamp, located on the north side of the Sampson County landfill in Snow Hill. “There was a suspicion that bad things were going into the water from [the landfill],” White-Willliamson explained.

An exterior view of the Sampson County landfill where a constant stream of trucks deliver waste daily. Cornell Watson

On this first research foray, Woods’ team didn’t detect significant contamination upstream of the landfill. But downstream was a different story. “We found elevated levels of legacy PFAS, as well as novel PFAS just near the landfill,” Woods explained. These include newer chemicals like GenX and Nafion, she explained, which some studies have linked to liver damage and other human health effects.

Some of these chemicals match those produced by Chemours, a PFAS manufacturing facility which has dumped in the landfill for years. “We did have some knowledge from Chemours’ permit, as well as knowledge from other folks that Chemours had been sending their industrial sludge for disposal at the Sampson County landfill,” Woods continued. 

Bridging community concern with free water testing 

After Woods’ initial findings, EJCAN worked to establish further relationships with universities to expand water testing in the Snow Hill community. The collaboration marked a crucial step moving community concerns toward independent scientific verification.

The cost of at-home testing can be prohibitive to many households. According to Antrilli, costs for PFAS testing through private labs start around $380. “Considering the population in Sampson County, a lot of folks could not pay to have their water tested,” White-Williamson said.  

In February 2021, EJCAN partnered with Appalachian State University to provide free testing of well water for bacteria and metals for residents. The non-profit sent out a notice to community members asking if they wanted to participate. “There was a fairly decent amount of response,” said White-Williamson. The initial round of testing included professor Rebecca Witter, who focuses on sustainable development, and biologist Shea Tuberty. Rebecca Witter worked to develop a protocol that could be used to derive community impressions of water quality, while Shea Tuberty and his students went door to door collecting samples, testing for bacteria, nitrates, and heavy metals.

Pictured from left to right are Dr. Shea Tubberty, Sherri White-Williamson, Danielle Koonce (Project Director, EJCAN) and Dr. Rebecca Witter during the first weekend of water testing in Snow Hill.
Chris Lang

On subsequent research trips, the team was joined by Woods from UNC, who provided PFAS testing with support from the nonprofit Research Triangle Institute. After sampling about 250 homes, they found over thirty families had PFAS in their water.

As further rounds of testing were conducted, the respective labs mailed letters to residents with their results, as well as called to speak to residents who had concerning results. The scientists also held a meeting with residents, which White-Williamson attended, so that they could ask questions. Woods said the close communication “was absolutely instrumental” for both research and community organizing. 

EJCAN holds a monthly community meeting that is open to the public, which Tuberty sometimes brings his class to attend, “just to be present and answer questions,” he said. “That’s been really useful, because we get more community buy-in when they realize we’re invested long-term.”

The results led White-Williamson to contact the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Waste Management. In November 2023, the department held a community meeting where people who lived closest to the landfill could request sampling of their private wells. State staff initially tested 30 wells, before expanding the effort, Vincent Antrilli Jr., the waste management agency’s environmental program supervisor, wrote in an email. From October 2023 through April 2026, the program had collected 241 samples—about 25 percent (61) of which had exceedences of PFAS for EPA drinking water standards.

Point-of-use filter systems like this one are common throughout the Snow Hill community. Cornell Watson

The program also provides bottled water and home filtration systems designed to remove PFAS. “To date, 87 point-of-use filter systems have been installed or authorized statewide, including 37 in Sampson County,” Antrilli wrote. 

EJCAN has supplemented this by distributing over 50 Clearly Filtered water pitchers, which remove PFAS and other contaminants like lead and arsenic. “We worked with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to identify a pitcher that seemed to be pretty efficient in removing a large number of contaminants from drinking water,” White-Williamson said. 

A canceled grant 

EJCAN is still hearing from people who want their well water tested. “We really need thousands of water samples, and we’ve only done hundreds,” said Tuberty from App State.

For about six months, EJCAN, App State, UNC and the Department of Health and Human Services collaborated on an EPA grant application. “The grant would have been for a million dollars over the next three years,” White-Williamson explained. With that support, the coalition would have been able to test up to 250 homes a year and provide follow up support for the homes who had problems. “That would have gone a long way,” she said. 

In February, they learned they’d been approved for the million dollar grant. But in April 2025, as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slashed federal programs, the coalition learned the grant might be suspended. Only three days later, Tuberty said, they were told it would be spared. Then in early May, there was another reversal. 

“Before we got a nickel of it, we got DOGE-d,” Tuberty said. “Most of the money was going to go to the community members to mitigate the problems that we identified, which would have been great.”

While the research to date has been supported by a number of smaller grants, Tuberty said, “you need that big money to make a significant impact.” The researchers hope another opportunity will present itself. “I don’t think any of us are giving up on it,” he said. 

With federal priorities shifted, EJCAN is concerned about the unmonitored forever chemicals in their community. “These are hard projects to do, because the communities have just been burnt for so long, for so many decades,” Tuberty said. “They’ve just been overlooked over and over again.”

The Environmental Justice Community Action Network (EJCAN) is a North Carolina–based nonprofit that works to advance environmental justice in rural communities, particularly in Sampson County. The organization supports residents facing pollution and other environmental harms by providing scientific research, water and air monitoring, education, and advocacy. EJCAN also helps communities access legal and technical resources, empowering them to hold polluters accountable and push for cleaner air, water, and soil.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rural North Carolina fights back against PFAS contamination on May 6, 2026.

On the first day of his presidency back in 2021, Joe Biden revoked a key permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought oil from Canada’s tar sands into the U.S. The decision to kill Keystone XL was perhaps Biden’s clearest gift to the environmental movement. 

But now, five years later, a family of Wyoming oil tycoons is bringing the Keystone concept back from the dead — and the Trump administration is signaling its support. Last week, President Trump signed a presidential permit for the so-called Bridger expansion pipeline, which would likely deliver oil from the carbon-intensive Alberta tar sands to a pipeline hub in central Wyoming, 647 miles away. From there, the oil could move through other pipelines to key refineries as far south as the Gulf of Mexico.

“Slightly different than the last administration,” Trump said ⁠at the White House last Thursday when he signed the presidential permit. “They wouldn’t sign a pipeline deal, and we have pipelines going up.”

The presidential permit gives the project the green light to transport oil across international borders, and it’s only the latest step in what appears to be a fast-tracked timeline for the revived tar sands pipeline. Last month, the federal Bureau of Land Management announced that it would begin conducting an environmental review of the project on an expedited schedule. (The Trump administration has shortened many of the environmental review processes required for pipeline construction.) Bridger Pipeline, the company behind the project, says it wants to begin construction next year and start moving oil in 2028.

The pipeline would carry at least 550,000 barrels of crude oil per day. That’s only about two-thirds of what Keystone XL would have carried, but it could expand to a peak capacity even larger than what was originally planned — more than 1 million barrels a day. The similarity between the new pipeline’s path and Keystone’s has led some opponents to call the successor “Keystone Light.” The Canadian portion of the new pipeline would be built by a company called South Bow, which was spun off from TC Energy, the company behind the original Keystone XL line. 

Miles of unused pipe, prepared for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, sit in a lot outside Gascoyne, North Dakota, in 2014.
Andrew Burton / Getty Images

The proposed pipeline would be one of the biggest new fossil fuel developments of Donald Trump’s second presidency. It comes at a time of growing oil production in Alberta and skyrocketing global crude prices due to the war the president is waging in Iran. The project is being pushed by the True family, a clan of oilmen with a long history of drilling in the Rockies — and a history of oil spills from pipelines across the region.

“We know that there is limited pipeline capacity to move Canadian crude oil, and we have extensive experience in the Rocky Mountains,” said Bill Salvin, a spokesperson for Bridger Pipeline, the True family pipeline company proposing the project.

The True business empire dates back to the 1940s, when a wildcatter named Henry Alphonso “Dave” True Jr. began exploring for oil in Wyoming. He and his three sons expanded their company into a network of almost a dozen corporations that includes a drilling company, a network of local oil pipelines, a trucking company, an oil trading company, an oil equipment company, a geothermal energy firm, and a real estate company called Brick & Bond, according to a Grist review of corporate records. They also invested in cattle ranching, becoming some of the state’s largest landowners. One of True’s sons, Diemer True, served for two decades in the Wyoming legislature.

This corporate expansion has given the four-generation True family outsize influence in a state that doesn’t produce much oil but neighbors the massive Bakken shale formation of North Dakota, which is served by some of the True family pipelines. The family name is synonymous with oil in Wyoming, and True family members have become prominent donors to the University of Wyoming and to a conservative legal foundation in the region. The Trues have also run afoul of the federal government: Several members of the family engaged in a 10-year dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over what the government said was a strategy to evade some taxes by shuttling ranchland purchases between different companies. (The case ended in a multimillion-dollar fine against the Trues, which was upheld by an appellate court in 2004.)

“They’re very prominent, and their business interests have spread all around the West,” said Phil Roberts, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wyoming and an expert on the state’s oil industry. He noted that families like the Trues have shifted away from oil production as the state’s fields have declined, investing in pipelines and oilfield services to maintain their revenue.

“Those fields have gotten really worn out, so they’ve had to diversify,” said Roberts.

Tad True speaks during the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in 2012. Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Tad True, the grandson of the True who first struck oil in Wyoming, has led the family’s pipeline business for most of this century, expanding its network to more than 4,000 miles across Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. He argued as early as 2006 that more pipeline development was needed in order for regional oil producers to remain competitive, and in a 2012 testimony before the House of Representatives he said that the Obama administration’s regulations were blocking the pipelines needed for the fracking boom that was then in full swing. True spoke at the Republican National Convention the same year, accusing Obama of “playing politics” with the Keystone XL pipeline, which the then-president had rejected the previous year. (While the pipeline was primarily intended to carry Canadian shale oil to American markets, it would also have included an “on ramp” for crude from True’s part of the country.)

True’s company, Bridger Pipeline, has a history of oil spills. In 2015, one of the pipelines it operated ruptured underneath the Yellowstone River after fast-moving waters eroded sediment and rock from the riverbed. At least 30,000 gallons of crude oil streamed into the river, contaminating the water supplies of Glendive, Montana. The town had to truck in bottles of drinking water after some residents noticed an odor in their tap water. Then, just a year later, another pipeline operated by one of the company’s subsidiaries leaked 600,000 gallons into a stream in North Dakota — almost enough oil to fill an Olympic-sized pool. Another pipeline broke several years later, dumping 45,000 gallons of oil onto ranchland in Wyoming. The company ultimately paid $1 million in fines to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality for the 2015 spill and $12.5 million for the 2016 spill.

In total, there have been at least 42 spills as a result of pipeline operations by True subsidiaries since 2010. According to data collected by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, more than a third of those spills had detrimental effects on the environment or people. The data shows that the Bridger Pipeline company alone is responsible for seven of those spills in just the last three years. The most recent spill took place in March near Guernsey, Wyoming. 

“That definitely sets off some alarm bells,” said Kenneth Clarkson, communications director with the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. “It’s not acceptable to have one incident, and when we have this quantity, it’s definitely troubling.”

If the expanded Bridger pipeline ultimately carries tar sands oil from Canada, as appears likely, the environmental consequences of a spill could be dire. Given the thick, viscous nature of tar sands, operators mix a type of thinner — called a “diluent” in technical parlance — to help it flow through pipelines. In the event of a rupture, the diluent can easily evaporate, leaving behind a heavy, tar-like substance that sinks to the bottom of rivers and other waterways. That particular property of tar sands made cleanup of the Kalamazoo River particularly complicated after a different company’s pipeline burst in southwestern Michigan in 2010.  

“We regret any spill from our pipelines,” said Salvin, the Bridger spokesperson. “Anytime oil gets out of the line, that’s unacceptable to us, so we do everything possible to keep the oil in the line.” He said that Bridger will employ “horizontal drilling” to tunnel under rivers and streams, which he said would reduce the risk of ruptures. Salvin did not say what type of oil the pipeline would carry, but confirmed it would be engineered for “mostly heavy crude” from Alberta; the Canadian portion of the pipeline will begin in the town of Hardisty, in the heart of Alberta’s oil sands.

He also said the company would use advanced technology to monitor for leaks. In the aftermath of the 2015 spill, when North Dakota’s then-governor Doug Burgum challenged Tad True to prevent leaks, True created an artificial-intelligence software called Flowstate that analyzes pipelines for potential ruptures. Salvin said the company now uses the software on all its pipelines and markets it to other operators as well.

Even though the new proposed pipeline is similar to Keystone XL in length and size, it will only cost $2 billion, far less than Keystone’s $8 billion price tag. That’s because its route will largely follow existing infrastructure and rights-of-way established by True Companies pipelines. Salvin said that the company has held a dozen landowner meetings and has secured surveying easements, or allowances to scout the land for construction, from 374 of the 376 private landowners along the pipeline route. Unlike Keystone XL, the route does not cross any federally recognized tribal lands.

“We’re very familiar with what happened with the previous project,” said Salvin. “Given that we have existing pipeline corridors that we have access to, that’s one of the reasons why this makes such commercial sense to us.” Salvin declined to offer details about the financing of the project, and such details are not publicly available because Bridger is a privately held company.

The project must still secure a number of state and local permits, but so far it isn’t having any trouble with the Trump administration, which has been aggressive in supporting new oil and gas development. The line cuts through Montana and Wyoming, including public land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, which is leading the federal government’s review of the project under the National Environmental Policy Act. Although the law typically requires the preparation of a detailed assessment of the project’s impact on wildlife and waterways, the bureau has suggested it might fast-track the pipeline’s review. 

Past studies have found that it typically takes federal agencies more than two years to complete an environmental impact statement, but the Bureau has indicated in public filings that it intends to publish a final impact statement by next May and make a decision on the project, allowing the company to begin construction by July.

Though True family members do not appear to be particularly close allies of Trump himself, they have given more than $4 million to Republican candidates and political action committees since 1977, according to federal records. A combined $12,000 went to Trump’s unsuccessful reelection campaign in 2020, the only apparent record of True financial support for the president. Furthermore, six members of the True family appeared on a 2022 endorsement list for Liz Cheney, the Wyoming politician who lost her reelection bid after she voted to impeach Trump.

The business case for the new pipeline rests on a number of big assumptions. The existing pipelines from the tar sands are running near capacity, but the Bridger proposal assumes that production in Canada’s oil hub will continue to increase. Many forecasters aren’t so sure; even with prices high, current projections show that production growth is slowing and may peak in 2030 at around 3.5 million barrels a day, well under what the proponents of Keystone XL anticipated. 

Second, the pipeline would only carry oil to central Wyoming, not all the way to the Nebraska refinery hub targeted by the original Keystone XL pipeline. Another company would need to build another pipeline across Nebraska in order for the crude to reach the major oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. (Salvin said Bridger is “exploring options” for that segment.) Third, it’s unclear if those refiners will even want as much of the heavy Canadian crude oil that the pipeline would offer, since imports of similar oil from Venezuela have started to tick up following Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and subsequent negotiations with the country’s new leadership. 

“To call this plan half-baked would be an insult to baking,” wrote energy lawyer and anti-pipeline advocate Paul Blackburn in a blog post last month. Blackburn is an advisor to Bold Alliance, the activist network that opposed the last Keystone XL proposal. 

Many of the same activist groups that opposed the prior pipeline are getting ready to oppose this one as well. The Bold Alliance, which organized tribes and rural landowners against Keystone, has said it will litigate any attempt to extend a pipeline into Nebraska. Jenny Harbine, a managing attorney with the nonprofit Earthjustice, said her group is “keeping a close eye” to ensure federal and state agencies adequately consider environmental and safety concerns. The Bureau of Land Management and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, which is coordinating its review with that of the federal government, closed an initial public comment period last week.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Keystone Light’: These Wyoming oil tycoons are reviving the controversial pipeline on May 6, 2026.

There’s a strange trend afoot on the East Coast, where residents have seen some of the highest increases in electricity costs in the country. As part of efforts to relieve the pressure, some Democrats are planning to slash energy-efficiency programs. Because utilities fund energy-efficiency measures through charges to their customers, the thinking is that scaling the programs down will reduce people’s bills quickly. The irony is that energy efficiency is meant to do exactly that: lower people’s energy use, and thus reduce their bills. 

“The cheapest, fastest thing you can do to help meet energy demand in this moment of increasing need for energy is energy efficiency,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE.

This emerging trend among Democrats, alongside a more established shift among Republicans, is the opposite of how politicians have reacted to similar situations in the past. In 1973, when Arab countries stopped exporting oil to the U.S. because it supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, oil prices soared, drivers waited in long lines at gas stations, and electricity bills increased. In response, President Richard Nixon proposed measures to trim energy use, including reducing speed limits to 50 mph, and urged Americans to lower their thermostats in the colder months. It was the beginning of a decades-long, bipartisan effort to improve energy efficiency and reduce the country’s reliance on “foreign oil.” 

The effort ended up saving Americans trillions of dollars. As regulations prompted manufacturers to make cars with better gas mileage, they trimmed fuel costs for Americans by an estimated $5 trillion over the course of decades (as well as preventing 14 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions). In addition, the efficiency standards that the government set on home appliances and plumbing still save the average household about $576 a year on their utility bills, while cutting national energy use by 6.5 percent. That’s according to data from the Department of Energy in January last year, before President Donald Trump took office.

Read Next How your showerhead and fridge got roped into the culture wars Kate Yoder

But confronted with another oil crisis today, again sparked by a conflict in the Middle East, many politicians are taking the opposite approach. The Trump administration, along with Republicans in Congress, has attacked the Biden-era fuel economy standards for cars, along with rules requiring appliances to be more efficient. And some Democrats, previously reliable supporters of energy efficiency, are wavering in their support. The result is that as data centers gobble up electricity, and extreme weather and an aging grid further drive up prices, some politicians are weakening one of the best tools for lowering bills and protecting people from price swings.

In Maryland, for example, Democratic Governor Wes Moore is expected to sign legislation scaling back the state’s target to reduce emissions, which would cut the amount utilities have to spend on energy-efficiency programs and eliminate a surcharge ratepayers see on their bills. Politicians in the region are looking for anything to immediately decrease their constituents’ bills, and they don’t have a lot of options to address the drivers of rising costs. “Energy affordability politics are dominating the political agenda, and it’s very difficult to address energy affordability,” said Kelly Trombley, senior director of state policy at Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit. But politicians can remove energy-efficiency surcharges with the stroke of a pen.

That helps explain why Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee, another Democrat, floated the idea of capping spending for energy efficiency rebates at $75 million a year, down from $95 million approved for this year. Fees, state mandates, and other charges tied to state policies reportedly account for a quarter of energy bills. Affordability concerns also prompted Democrats in the Massachusetts House to pass a bill that would cut $1 billion, out of $4.5 billion, from the state’s energy-efficiency budget. That bill appears to have a tough path forward, since the chair of the state Senate’s energy committee has signaled his support for Mass Save, a program that rewards ratepayers for buying heat pumps and making other energy-saving moves.

In Maryland, supporters of the legislation to cut energy efficiency spending say it could save residents $150 a year or more on their bills. “The thing about surcharges like this is, it is one of our most direct tools,” state Delegate Marc Korman, a Democrat, told Canary Media. ​“We don’t want to forsake all efforts at energy efficiency, but we want to try to provide a little bit of relief for some time if we can.” 

To opponents, focusing on immediate savings misses the bigger picture, since it would hurt affordability in the long-term. An analysis from ACEEE found that the proposed legislation in Maryland would increase costs for the state’s electricity customers by a net $592 million.

“Unfortunately, cutting energy efficiency programs — it’s like trading in your car for one that gets worse gas mileage at a time when gas prices are going up, and it won’t do anything to address those real cost drivers that will only get worse,” Trombley said. “Energy efficiency is one of the only options customers have to insulate themselves from the volatility coming from things like natural gas or an aging grid susceptible to extreme weather.”

While the trend appears mostly limited to the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, there’s one recent example of Democrats opposing an energy-efficiency measure on the federal level. In January, 57 Democrats in the House voted with Republicans on a bill that would eliminate the Biden administration’s efficiency standards for manufactured homes, which haven’t been updated since 1994 and allow for poor insulation. It’s still awaiting a vote in the Senate.

Republicans have increasingly targeted energy-efficiency laws, a reversal from the days of presidents Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who signed the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act in 1987. These days, everything from dishwashers to laundry machines has been sucked into the culture wars. The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have targeted efficiency standards enacted under the Biden administration, viewing them as symbols of Democrats interfering with “consumer choice.” Last week, the Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to strike down Biden-era rules that would have restricted gas-powered commercial water heaters and consumer furnaces, siding with the natural gas industry and utilities.

Still, some energy efficiency programs have survived the Republican-dominated federal government. After the Trump administration threatened to eliminate Energy Star, a government program that puts its certification label on products that meet its efficiency standards, Congress passed a bipartisan spending bill in January that ensures continued funding. Congress also allocated $3 million more in funding for the Weatherization Assistance Program, which provides free energy-efficiency upgrades for low-income households, than it did last year, for a total of $329 million. Some Republican members of Congress have proposed a bill to extend tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act that were set to expire at the end of June — including incentives for constructing energy-efficient homes and supporting retrofits for commercial buildings.

And in the bigger picture, state spending on energy efficiency, especially in terms of assisting low-income households, has been on the rise. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, signed a handful of pro-efficiency laws in April aiming to trim household bills by providing energy-saving upgrades to low-income families, some with bipartisan support. Also last month, Ned Lamont, Connecticut’s Democratic governor, announced a measure that’s supposed to save families about $30 a month by decreasing charges for public benefits on utility bills, with much of the reduction offset by contracts he negotiated with nuclear power plants that provide energy at fixed prices.

“We’re hopeful that there’s a pathway to strengthen and really recognize that you actually can’t have an energy affordability strategy without energy efficiency,” Trombley said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Democrats used to back energy-saving plans. Now they’re wavering. on May 6, 2026.

Last week, the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues released urgent calls to action, including a pause on fast-tracked critical mineral projects and increased funding for Indigenous climate projects. But those recommendations come as the Forum itself is facing an existential crisis. 

For 25 years, the Forum has been the leading United Nations body representing Indigenous peoples, but that status has not always translated to policy change by member states or the U.N. itself. Growing questions about the Forum’s effectiveness also come amid budget cuts at the U.N., Trump’s rejection of multilateralism, and ongoing efforts to streamline U.N. processes. These intersecting challenges are all threatening to push the Forum, and the causes Indigenous representatives bring to it, even further toward the margins.

“For us, climate change is not a distant threat. It is a present and lived human rights crisis,” Aluki Kotierk, who is Inuk from Canada and current chairperson of the Permanent Forum, said Friday at the conclusion of the Forum’s two-week annual meeting in New York City. The Forum’s recommendations reflect discussions and research conducted by hundreds of Indigenous delegates and experts over the past year. They join more than 1,000 recommendations issued by the Forum since it first began to meet, many of which Indigenous advocates deem critical to their survival. But state governments often blatantly ignore them. 

A new “Systemic Assessment” report by a group of current and former members of the Permanent Forum underscores this problem. “While UNPFII has succeeded in establishing itself as a visible and legitimate global platform, questions remain regarding its ability to translate dialogue, recommendations, and knowledge production into tangible outcomes for Indigenous Peoples on the ground,” the report said. “The proliferation of recommendations has not been matched by corresponding mechanisms for implementation, follow-up, and accountability.” 

The report underscores the limitations of Forum, which makes recommendations on behalf of Indigenous peoples to U.N. agencies and member states, but has been hamstrung by funding cuts and the willingness of other U.N. agencies and global leaders to listen. Annual funding for the U.N. Trust Fund on Indigenous Issues, which helps the Permanent Forum carry out its mission, is at a historic low, falling from more than $300,000 in 2021 to less than $50,000 in 2026. Currently, only three U.N. member states contribute to the fund, down from nine member states in 2006. 

The drop in funding reflects a broader liquidity crisis at the U.N. driven in part by late payments from key members like the U.S. and China. Kotierk said the lack of funding has led to staff reductions at the Forum, shorter meeting times, and fewer interpretation services. 

That didn’t stop the Forum from issuing bold calls to action on Friday, including urging U.N. member states to seriously consider international court rulings to mitigate climate change by 2027, and to legally protect Indigenous lands, especially land belonging to uncontacted tribes. The Forum published multiple reports Friday with recommendations ranging from asking member states to develop legal protections for nomadic Indigenous communities, to urging the Green Climate Fund and Global Environment Facility, multi-billion dollar government-funded global funds, to provide direct funding to Indigenous peoples to mitigate climate change. 

Eirik Larsen, who attended this year’s Forum on behalf of the Saami Council, urged Forum members to consider capping the number of recommendations to maximize their effectiveness, and to ask member states and U.N. entities to report back on whether they’ve implemented recommendations from previous years. 

Larsen said that despite the need for improvement, he keeps returning to the Forum because it’s an important arena for discussing critical issues at the international level. “It’s a unique venue for Indigenous peoples to interact directly with member states,” he said. 

The systemic assessment of the Forum found that many Indigenous survey respondents agreed with Larsen’s appreciation of the Forum, seeing it as “a place of visibility, exchange, and recognition,” the report found. “Yet a large number also characterize it as overly performative, a ‘talk shop,’ or a space in which testimony is heard but not translated into meaningful change.” 

To Ghazali Ohorella, international relations and Indigenous rights advisor of the Alifuru Council, the assessment could not have been issued at a worse time. Just a year ago, the U.N. embarked on a process of restructuring, which could lead to U.N. bodies like the Forum being consolidated or eliminated. Today’s Permanent Forum is the result of decades of advocacy by Indigenous peoples for a dedicated space within the U.N., which by design, privileges the voices of recognized state governments and doesn’t allow Indigenous peoples who remain under colonial rule to vote in the General Assembly. Ohorella is worried that the report — which is based on a survey of 200 respondents, rather than the thousands of attendees over the past 25 years — could give ammunition to the Forum’s detractors. “It allows them to say: See, even Indigenous Peoples themselves identified problems with the Forum. Retire it,” Ohorella said. 

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One of the most valuable aspects of the Forum is its ability to elevate issues that otherwise might be ignored, like Indigenous health, which was the main topic of this year’s gathering. “There is no health without land. The well-being of Indigenous Peoples is inseparable from our lands, waters, and territories,” Kotierk said in her closing speech on Friday. “To restore health, we must advance decolonization.” This year, the Forum’s official recommendations urged U.N. member states to disaggregate health data on Indigenous peoples by 2027, and “to treat prolonged climate-induced displacement of Indigenous Peoples as a health emergency.” 

Kotierk said that the Forum has been instrumental in influencing global policies. “This Forum has consistently elevated what the world too often ignored. It has brought visibility to the crisis of Indigenous Peoples’ languages, affirmed the rights and leadership of Indigenous women and girls, and ensured that Indigenous Peoples’ voices are not only present—but heard—in international decision-making,” Kotierk said. 

Yet despite its importance, it’s not easy for Indigenous advocates to participate in the Permanent Forum. Structural barriers that limit participation include challenges obtaining visas — which have worsened under the Trump administration — lack of awareness about the Forum and how to register, and the high cost of travel. In the systemic assessment report, survey respondents suggested the Forum consider holding regional, national and local gatherings “that do not force all meaningful participation through a single annual gathering in New York.” 

Mariah Hernandez-Fitch, a first-year law student at Emory University and a member of the United Houma Nation, attended the Forum for the first time as a youth fellow for the Ban Ki-Moon Foundation. Hernandez-Fitch has never been abroad and this was her first time participating in a global Indigenous space. “It was beautiful to see people not all in suits,” she said. “Seeing people in their cultural attire, their formal wear, that was very exciting to me.” She listened to someone from Vietnam speak about how climate change was affecting their community and was moved by how similar their experience was to her family’s experience with rising seas in southeastern Louisiana. 

But she also felt overwhelmed by the process, confused by when the side events were happening, and ended up not delivering a planned statement, in part because she was intimidated by the process. “There’s rules, but if you don’t know about them, you do feel out of place even in a space that is for Indigenous peoples,” she said. 

Still, now that she’s back in New Orleans, Hernandez-Fitch can see herself returning to the Forum. “I can see myself applying the law and my experience into those spaces,” she said. “I could see myself not being scared of making an intervention.” It helped to meet other Indigenous youth who care just as much as she does about making a difference. “There’s a communal kind of excitement and I feel excited for the future.”

Conversations about how to make the Forum more effective will continue at next year’s gathering, which will be held from May 10 to 21 and focus on global progress on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The uncertain future of the UN’s leading voice on Indigenous rights on May 6, 2026.

On a sunny Friday afternoon in October 2023, some 70 children filed into a cool, dark tunnel in the south of Paris to help the city rehearse for its increasingly hot future.

The tunnel, part of the abandoned Petite Ceinture railway encircling the city, is always 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celcius), making it the perfect safe haven from the potentially lethal heat imagined outside. Once underground, each youngster was asked to simulate the effects of extreme temperatures that might become reality in their lifetimes. Some pretended to have been poisoned by food that spoiled during a power outage. Others faked the effects of carbon monoxide leaking from a faulty generator. Meanwhile, Red Cross workers scrambled to decide who to send to overwhelmed hospitals. Around them, dozens of others — fire fighters, city officials, teachers — did their best to simulate the chaos and cascading impacts a heat wave of unprecedented duration and intensity might force them to confront.

The officials who created the Paris at 50C exercise wanted children to participate because they will face the consequences of a warming world and because they ask so many questions. Crisotech

The exercise, called Paris at 50 degrees Celsius, was designed to imagine what might happen if the mercury hits 122 degrees F, something scientists warn is increasingly likely by 2100. It combined live drills and a tabletop exercise to help shape a plan to protect the city’s 2 million people from that kind of heat. Once limited to a handful of cities, these exercises are spreading as local governments stress test health services, emergency response, and essential infrastructure before temperatures reach dangerous extremes.

What Paris is rehearsing could soon confront cities across the continent. European governments are being urged to prepare for 5 to 6 degrees F (2.8 to 3.3 degrees C) of warming, a change that could push Paris toward dangerous summertime temperatures by the end of the century. 

Such heat is a global threat. Modeling suggests more than 1.6 billion people in nearly 1,000 cities could regularly face perilous conditions within three decades. Heat waves are already straining hospitals, causing outages, and paralyzing transit. In the complex systems that make up a city, even small failures can lead to larger breakdowns.

But as cities invest time and money into these exercises, one question remains: Do they actually improve preparedness?

It took Pénélope Komitès more than 18 months to prepare a drill that would last just two days. As Paris’ deputy mayor in charge of resilience, she considers such planning essential. “It was very important for us to show people that heat waves are not just something we see on the TV, but something that can happen soon, and that we need to improve what we’re going to do,” she said.

To help inform the scenario, scientists at the Île-de-France Regional Climate Change Expertise Group, which advises city leaders on climate risk, modeled what the future might look like. Other studies based on data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have largely confirmed their projection that temperatures could hit 122 degree F (50 degrees C) by the end of the century. For now, the city’s record stands at 108.68 F (42.6 C), registered on July 25, 2019.

A temperature sign over a pharmacy in Paris, France, reads 47 degrees C (116 degrees F) during a heat wave in 2015.
Pierre Suu / Getty Images

The World Health Organization estimates that heat contributes to roughly half a million deaths worldwide each year. Symptoms can quickly escalate from fatigue to dehydration to heat stroke as the body loses its ability to cool itself. For older adults and people with heart or kidney disease, that strain can be fatal. 

In Paris, much of the work of designing the simulation fell to Crisotech, a consultancy specializing in crisis exercises. It spent nine months working with the city to develop a dozen scenarios designed to anticipate where services would buckle, how agencies would work together, and which residents might be missed. The role-playing the children, from two different schools, participated in at two locations occurred on the first day; the second was dedicated to tabletop exercises among city officials and first responders. 

The simulations are designed to test a city’s response to all the things that might happen during a prolonged heat wave, such as people experiencing heat stroke and other health impacts. Crisotech

“The objective was to anticipate all possible impacts of a heat dome across Paris, to consolidate the [preparedness] measures planned by the city in the event of an extreme heat wave, test new solutions, … and identify new actions to be implemented,” said Komitès.

More than 100 organizations took part, from city agencies and emergency services to utilities and nonprofits. While other cities, including Melbourne, London, and Phoenix, have hosted similar workshops, Paris made the unprecedented decision to include citizens in the role-playing portion of the €200,000 ($236,000) event. The city held informal meetings to recruit volunteers and help residents visualize the scenario. Children were especially valuable participants, both because they will face the consequences of a warming world and because they ask so many questions, said Ziad Touat, the crisis management consultant who led the simulation for Crisotech.

Komitès also wanted to prepare Parisians for the day when all of this would unfold for real. That’s important, she said, because the pandemic showed that well-informed communities respond to a crisis more effectively. If people recognize the symptoms of heat stroke, for example, or know when to find a cooling shelter, first responders can focus on the most vulnerable, Komitès said.

Five years ago, these simulations were confined to a handful of cities in the U.S. and Europe. Now, cities around the world are getting interested, said Cassie Sunderland, managing director of climate solutions at C40, a global network of mayors focused on climate action. 

Some of the sims are sprawling operations like the one in Paris; others are more modest tabletop exercises, or hybrids that combine interagency workshops with limited role-playing. All are meant to identify points of failure before a crisis does.

A huge generator provides power during an exercise designed to simulate the surge in electricity demand Paris might experience during a prolonged heatwave. Crisotech

Success is not measured by whether a drill runs smoothly, but rather, the opposite. The most valuable ones are realistic enough to force decisions, yet unpredictable enough to expose coordination problems and infrastructure failures. For example, engineers might be brought in to determine the temperature at which train tracks expand. “Imagine if you suddenly have a huge amount of people who need additional health care, but doctors and nurses can’t get to the hospital because of transport failures,” said Sunderland.

The growth of these exercises reflects a broader concern that many cities are unprepared. “Simulating extreme heat is really important,” said Dr. Satchit Balsari, a professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. “A lot of cities stop and make heat action plans, but they actually don’t drill into how they are going to implement them, whether the funding for it exists, and if they actually have the know-how.”

Some scenarios can only be explored in a simulation, such as the question of cooling patients experiencing heatstroke. “How do you take a large human body and put it in ice? Is there a bucket that big?” Balsari said. “The answer is no, so is it a body bag? Where do you get all this ice?” What might appear simple on paper becomes a challenge unless tested.

Simulations should also consider what measures are needed after the heat breaks, Balsari said. For instance, healthcare systems will need plans for addressing the long-term impacts like increased risk of chronic kidney disease. “Have a final session that thinks about what the subsequent months look like,” he said. 

Read Next How to build a heat-resilient city Jake Bittle & Naveena Sadasivam

Such challenges are compounded because most cities do not have someone responsible for crafting a unified response. A few, including Athens, Greece; Melbourne, Australia; and Freetown, Sierra Leone, have appointed “heat officers,” but most rely upon coordination among multiple departments. Rigorous testing can identify where that might break down and how coordination can be improved. Phoenix created a heat department after an exercise revealed that very problem.

Some of the cities most vulnerable to extreme heat may not have the resources to stage an expensive drill. But Touat said preparedness is not an all-or-nothing affair. Smaller, less costly efforts can still build readiness — whether by testing communications plans, mapping vulnerable citizens, or practicing how agencies would collaborate during an outage. “Don’t try to have everything at once and to spend too much money to do an exercise of this type,” he said. “It’s better to do five small ones than one big one.”

However, simulating extreme heat to improve preparedness isn’t enough, and work to decrease temperatures in cities must happen in parallel, Sunderland said. True resilience requires long-term changes that cool cities and slow climate change itself.

Even though these simulations have their limits and can come with a hefty price tag, many cities still see their appeal. 

In Taiwan, they are expanding beyond cities. The country staged a tabletop exercise last year and plans a live simulation in July to test coordination within cities and between national officials. The goal is to test whether national and local agencies can effectively work together, said Ken-Mu Chang, the deputy director general of the country’s Climate Change Administration. 

The tabletop exercise and role-playing scenario will focus on managing the health impacts of a days-long 104-degree F (40-degree C) heat wave — the kind of prolonged heat that can overwhelm hospitals and power systems. One challenge, Chang said, is designing an exercise that feels realistic enough to be useful without creating unnecessary public anxiety.

After last year’s trial run, officials realized that much of the exercise focused on agencies explaining existing plans, rather than showing how they’d respond to a crisis. “We want to make those gaps more visible and more concrete,” Chang said. “We want agencies not only to explain what they have, but also to identify what is still missing under a more extreme situation.”

Meanwhile, Barcelona, Spain is adapting the model Komitès helped develop.

Barcelona has created more shaded areas throughout the city to protect people from increasingly dangerous heat. Courtesy of Ajuntament de Barcelona

The Catalan city faces growing urgency to prepare for a hotter future. The Mediterranean basin is warming 20 percent faster than the global average, making it one of the continent’s climate hot spots. Barcelona is among the European cities expected to see the greatest number of heat-related deaths by the end of the century. 

Given that future, city officials want to develop plans to protect infrastructure, build a registry of vulnerable residents, and improve coordination. “It’s not easy when there’s so many actors and it’s not easy when the impacts are on so many different levels,” said Irma Ventayol, who leads Barcelona’s climate change department and is overseeing the simulation.

Barcelona’s Heat Plan 2025-2035 calls for the continued expansion of green infrastructure and shaded areas in public schools and playgrounds. Courtesy of Ajuntament de Barcelona

“Can we cope with waste management at 40 degrees C or 50 degrees C? Are the trucks prepared? Maybe they are, but no one has checked, so we need to ask those questions sooner rather than later,” Ventayol said. She also sees media coverage of the event as an opportunity to raise awareness among Barcelona’s nearly 2 million residents.

Beyond protecting the city, she hopes the exercise can help others. “I’d like to have a protocol that can serve other cities too, a scalable methodology that other cities can take and replicate, even for other impacts such as floods,” Ventayol said.

In Paris, the simulation — which inspired a flooding exercise that took place in October — produced 50 recommendations later folded into the city’s 2024–2030 Climate Action Plan. Some are now underway, including insulating thousands of homes and replacing asphalt parking spaces with trees; it planted 15,000 last winter alone. Even the three bathing spots along the Seine River that opened with a splash during last year’s Olympics are part of a broader effort to help residents stay cool.

Komitès is being peppered with questions from others eager to launch similar exercises. All of the lessons for the simulation were compiled into two public documents: a guide to running a heat simulation of this scale and a report detailing what organizers learned. “Everything we did is already on the internet so you’re already one step ahead,” said Touat at Crisotech.

The biggest surprise to come out of the exercise had nothing to do with infrastructure resilience or cooperation among departments. What shocked Komitès the most was how unprepared Parisians are for extreme heat.

The realization prompted what may be the city’s most important adaptation effort yet: preparing citizens, not just officials. In March, Paris opened its first Campus of Resilience with the civil protection agency and fire department. The center will host training sessions, smaller simulations, and public workshops open to all residents. “We need to talk with Parisians,” Komitès said. “To inform them, to prepare them.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cities are rehearsing for deadly heat. Will it help when disaster comes? on May 5, 2026.

If you want to ditch your gas furnace and heat your home more cleanly and efficiently, you need to scale up one of your kitchen appliances. The first option is “electric resistance heating,” better known as a space heater, which acts like a giant toaster to warm a room instead of bread. The second is a heat pump, which extracts warmth from even freezing outdoor air and pumps it indoors, like a refrigerator moves heat from inside the box to the kitchen. (That’s why the back of your fridge feels warm, by the way.)

Energy experts say that to bring down greenhouse gas emissions and improve human health, we need to replace toxic gas furnaces and boilers with heat pumps ASAP. Less talked about, though, is that we also need to replace those giant toasters with giant reverse refrigerators, which would make homes more comfortable and more efficient, and therefore cheaper to heat.

According to a new report from the nonprofit energy group RMI, one in five homes in the United States is heated primarily with electric resistance heating. Replacing those devices with heat pumps would save households an average of $1,530 a year, or $20 billion annually across the country. (The calculations included only single-family homes, not multifamily units like apartment buildings.) At the same time, demand on the electrical grid would fall significantly, while total carbon emissions from homes making the switch to heat pumps for climate control and water heating would plummet by about 40 percent. “There’s a lot of benefits to the grid, which translate to lower rates as well,” said Ryan Shea, a manager in RMI’s carbon-free buildings program. “Then, of course, there’s using less energy.”

Electric heat pumps work their magic with a trick of physics: By changing the pressure of refrigerants, they draw warmth from outdoor air or liquids coursing underground, then bring it indoors. (In the summer, the process reverses, cooling an indoor space like a traditional air conditioning unit.) They’re ultraefficient because unlike a furnace or space heater — which generate warmth by burning fossil fuels or using electricity — these appliances simply transfer heat from one place to another. Accordingly, heat pumps have a “coefficient of performance,” or COP, of around three, meaning they produce three units of heat for every unit of electricity used. In other words, they’re 300 percent efficient. That’s three times as efficient as electric resistance heating, which has a COP of one, while even the most efficient gas furnaces operate well below that.

In all kinds of homes, heat pumps are replacing electric resistance heating or gas furnaces. If you don’t have ducting, heat pumps come in units that embed in walls to exchange between outdoor and indoor air. If you have ducting, an indoor unit replaces the furnace and connects to an outdoor one, which exchanges the heat. If you also have an AC unit that has reached the end of its life, subbing in a heat pump will give you both cooling and ultraefficient heating. “That’s kind of the right trigger point for a lot of people to start thinking about heat pumps,” Shea said, “is when their air conditioner needs replacing.”

The next generation of heat pump is targeting apartment-dwellers, too. A company called Gradient, for instance, has been working with building owners and public housing authorities to deploy its units, which slip over window sills like saddles and plug into a standard wall outlet. The appliance can swap in for old window AC units, giving tenants clean heating, not just cooling.

The idea is to quickly and cheaply deploy these appliances in large buildings, without landlords having to retrofit each unit if they, say, get rid of the structure’s central fossil-fuel boiler. Gradient says that in less than two weeks, it installed 277 of them in a Providence, Rhode Island public housing development that previously used electric resistance heating. “It is very straightforward and a huge energy win for them,” said Vince Romanin, the company’s founder and chief technology officer. “You’re not just saving money. You are providing a dramatically better service, because you’re adding cooling.”

Still, the RMI report notes, the U.S. builds nearly 1.5 million homes each year, 200,000 of them with electric resistance heating. It also installs a million AC units annually in homes with electric resistance heating, when those could instead be heat pumps that’d save occupants money. The trick, then, is for policymakers and utilities to incentivize these efficient appliances with rebates and the like. That’s what helped Maine reach its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps two years ahead of schedule — by next year, it hopes to install 175,000 more. 

The U.S., though, can’t simply replace all of its furnaces and space heaters with heat pumps and call it a day, energy experts said. It must happen alongside a push to make homes more efficient, like by installing proper insulation and double-pane windows. That is, a home needs to retain more heat in the winter and cool air in the summer, so a heat pump would need to run less. “Step one, don’t burn fossil fuels in your home, basically,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, who wasn’t involved in the new report. “Step two: insulate, insulate, insulate. And both of those go hand-in-hand.”

The grid, too, needs upgrades if heat pumps are to reach their full potential. For one, ideally you’re powering them with electricity coming entirely from renewables like wind and solar, otherwise you’re still burning fossil fuels to warm homes. (Though to be clear, because heat pumps are so efficient, this is still better than sticking with gas furnaces.) And two, heat pumps join electric vehicles and induction stoves in increasing demand on the grid. Utilities are already making upgrades to handle all this electrification, like installing huge battery banks to store renewable energy to use when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow. They’re also experimenting with vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G, which allows EVs to send power to the grid when demand is highest.

If the U.S. is really going to wean itself off fossil fuels, it needs all these systems to work in concert: More renewables, more batteries, fewer giant toasters.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline American homes need heat pumps, not space heaters on May 5, 2026.

As Hurricane Helene roared through the mountains of western North Carolina in September 2024, Devon ran from one side of his house to the other, listening to the sound of trees snapping in the dark.

The wind whipped the steep hill his family lived on in Asheville, rattling the windows and cracking limbs. Pine trees fell like dominos, 20 in all. Five of them took the porch and a corner of the house with them. The creek behind the family’s home was rising fast, and anything caught in it was swept away.

Inside, Devon’s wife and their daughter, who is now five,  hid in a closet, crying as the house shook. Devon shouted over the wind as he tried to figure out what would fall next. He was inside the house, but also somewhere very far away, reliving memories he had been trying to put away.

“For me, it was very triggering,” he said. “I felt like I was in a war situation.”

Devon, an Iraq war veteran who moved to the mountains from Florida in 2019, asked to be identified by only his first name, as anonymity is a core component of 12-step programs. The 41-year-old had returned from the Middle East in 2006 with post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury that pushed him to numb himself however he could. It started with pills, then heroin, and eventually a combination of heroin and cocaine. “I was so physically addicted,” he said. “The sickness was unbearable. I couldn’t imagine life without drugs.”

In Asheville, he slowly found his way back from the precipice. He joined Narcotics Anonymous, attended regular meetings, and began to confront his trauma in therapy. He and his wife, who had moved to Asheville with him, had a daughter in 2020. It wasn’t always easy, but life with his family, in their house in the woods, felt like it was creeping toward stability. 

Everything changed after the storm.

Hurricane Helene fractured many of the support systems that people in recovery, like Devon, relied on to stay sober. Jesse Barber / Grist

Disasters like Hurricane Helene level communities and upend even the stablest lives. For people recovering from addiction, they can also fracture so much more: 12-step meetings, treatment programs, transportation, and the social networks that are essential to maintaining sobriety. When that scaffolding breaks down, the risk of relapse and overdose rises. 

Penn State University sociologist Kristina Brant has spent the past few years studying the long-term impacts floods can have on communities, finding “an increase in overdose deaths that persists for a decade after a flood.” Grief and trauma can linger for years, she said. “Those are significant triggers that can derail recovery.”

The threat is especially acute in the Appalachian region, a mountainous swath of the country that includes 13 states stretching from New York to Mississippi. Throughout the region, a long-running drug crisis has already taken a devastating toll. Though overdose death rates in Appalachian counties have declined slightly alongside national trends, mortality for people in their prime working years still exceeded the national average in 2023 by 52 percent. These trends are driven by limited access to health care, physically demanding work, and economic hardship. In six western North Carolina counties, including Buncombe, for example, overdose mortality was more than 36 per 100,000 residents as of 2022. 

Increasingly severe storms and flooding, fueled by a warming world, are compounding those vulnerabilities, damaging not just infrastructure but the support systems people rely on to stay alive.

For people like Devon, the weeks and months after Helene unraveled lives they’d spent years building.

Recovery from substance use disorder hinges on stability. Routine keeps people connected to the relationships and services that make long-term sobriety possible, and builds the kind of network where someone notices if a chair is empty.

Across Appalachia, that support system is already stretched thin. Rural communities don’t have the redundancies that make it easy to hit another meeting, find another clinic, or line up another therapist. Long travel distances and high poverty rates create additional barriers.

Disasters further strain the system. Annual hospitalizations for substance use disorders jumped 30 percent after Hurricane Katrina and continued rising for years afterward, especially in neighborhoods that experienced the greatest destruction and displacement. 

“When you factor in a disaster like Helene or other flooding where infrastructure is really impacted, we’re just amplifying that existing barrier a billion-fold,” said Erin Major, a doctoral candidate in health services research at Boston University who studies substance misuse in Appalachia. “It became genuinely impossible for quite a few of these patients to access their care.”

Keep reading Helene frayed the safety net for people who use drugs. This community wove it back together. Katie Myers

In Devon’s walk-up apartment in Arden, a town just south of Asheville, his pit bull, Qball, trotted across the gray carpet to meet him. Devon is tall and thin, with close-cropped hair and an understated, honest way of putting things. He said he understands how much routines matter, because he had spent years building his.

He returned from Iraq in 2006 after two years in a scout platoon. Back at a base in coastal Georgia where he enrolled in college, he began to understand what he’d brought home with him. His brain injury and PTSD plagued him with nightmares and made it difficult to hold a job. He began to self-medicate. “Once I started using, you know, the harder opiates, I would say I was using against my will at that point,” Devon said, scratching his dog’s ear. He overdosed and nearly died several times.

Devon’s formal dress jacket hangs on a door of his apartment.
Jesse Barber / Grist

His relationships frayed under the strain, and for a time he lived on the street. He and his wife separated; her job didn’t pay well, he’d lost his, and they were in debt. In a bid to save their marriage and finances, the couple moved to Asheville, where his wife’s family lived, in 2019. The city’s recovery resources, which are abundant compared to elsewhere in the South, offered the promise of support, consistency, and a fresh start. 

Over time, Devon began building a new life. He is on disability and can’t work, but he and his wife were able to buy a house. Suboxone, a daily prescription medication available at most pharmacies, eased his cravings for opioids. Twelve-step meetings allowed him to find support and celebrate progress. He and his wife welcomed their daughter into the world in 2020. While marriage and recovery were sometimes bumpy, he felt he was building something lasting.

Hurricane Helene blew all of that apart.

In the weeks and months after the storm, the routines that had anchored Devon’s recovery began to shift. His 12-step group moved its meetings online for a couple of weeks. When it resumed gathering in-person, he struggled to attend, bogged down by the demands of repairing his house. With his time consumed by cleaning up from the storm, he stopped regularly going to individual therapy. Financial worries took the place of personal goals.

“There was a huge interruption,” Devon said. Online meetings are “not the same as being in person. You know, like when I like to go in-person in my home group… I can do service like either chair a meeting, help set up literature, help greet people, help set up chairs.”

That kind of service is central to the recovery pathway that’s worked for Devon, and it had become a vital part of his life. He tried to fulfill it by helping neighbors rebuild from the storm. He spent his days clearing debris, organizing disaster supplies at community spaces, and delivering them to people in harder-hit areas. “We were just pitching in the best we can, and I feel like I was using my experience in the program,” he said.

He also met new people along the way — including church volunteers who helped remove the five trees that had fallen onto his house. At first, the spirit of cooperation brought people together. But as the months passed, that warmth faded and the losses began to settle in. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave his family an emergency stipend of $750 to cover immediate expenses, like food and water, but they’d already spent $20,000 on repairs. Even with insurance, they realized they’d have to refinance the house to keep it. 

By last summer, the strain had become too much. Devon and his wife decided to sell the house,  for $30,000 less than they’d hoped. Amid the back-and-forth with the insurance company, their own fights escalated, and they filed for divorce — not uncommon after a life-changing disaster. Because North Carolina law requires a couple to live separately for one year before a divorce can be finalized, Devon moved into a hotel. He found himself alone more often. 

He managed to avoid relapse, but that meant treading carefully with hobbies that summoned the urge to drink, like playing poker. As the summer of 2025 dragged into fall, he felt spiritually adrift. Between his divorce and the costs of the storm, he’d lost about $100,000. It was all too much. It had been years since he’d felt this hopeless. “I was suicidal,” he said.

For many people in recovery, relapse can be more dangerous than their initial drug use. After a few days of sobriety, tolerance starts to drop. Those who have gone through treatment are sometimes more likely to overdose, with the immediate first few days of relapse being the most dangerous. Over time, the mental health impacts and compounding losses of a disaster can push people further off course. 

In the early days after the storm, communities, volunteers, and recovery groups across the region sprang into action, temporarily filling the gaps left by upended routines and the slow trickle of federal help.

Researchers often observe a curious “honeymoon phase” after a disaster: A time of intense social cohesion as people united by shared loss come together to help each other. It’s months or years down the line when the pileup of trauma and loss begins to complicate that cohesion. 

John Kennedy saw that shift unfold in Buncombe County.

John Kennedy sits in front of boxes of Narcan, which his organization, Musicians for Overdose Prevention, helps distribute. Jesse Barber / Grist

Kennedy, a guitarist, and his wife Cinnamon Kennedy, a drummer, spent years distributing naloxone, which can quickly reverse an opioid overdose, to nightclubs, music halls, and other venues throughout the county. Such work is called harm reduction — providing the education and tools to help people who are actively using drugs prevent infection, illness, and death. The project began after John lost several friends and his brother to overdoses. The Kennedys rely on the tight network of musicians and venues to get those supplies to the people who need them.

John Kennedy drove me around Swannanoa, a small, largely working-class town outside of Asheville. Even a year and a half after the storm, there are reminders of how the social fabric has frayed. 

The last music venue in Swannanoa closed after the storm, and others in the area also have closed or aren’t booking bands.. One survey found that across 23 counties, small businesses lost an average of $322,000 during Helene, and many couldn’t withstand it. The closures of bars and venues has left fewer places to congregate. Kennedy worries that may mean more people are using alone. Research shows that hurricanes and tropical storms can cause excess mortality for as long as 15 years, so the region is still only at the beginning of the aftermath.

John Kennedy walks among what is left of Salvage Station outdoor music venue along the French Broad. Jesse Barber / Grist

Kennedy can’t help but reflect on what’s been lost. “Just the ability for people — like a church service, like a job — to show up and come in and be able to check on everyone, check in on everyone, see how people were doing,” he said, driving past Silverados, one of the venues he relied on to carry naloxone until it closed permanently. One after the other: shuttered, shuttered, shuttered. 

Kennedy pointed out the dozens of RVs parked along the roadways, all hosting people who lost their homes to the storm. A field where there was once a trailer park. Ossified muck and debris where there was once a gas station, a farmers market, a woodworking shop, a veteran’s clinic.  “It’s not what it was.”

Kennedy still delivers naloxone, but more often to venues in Asheville, where it’s easier to find people. The community feels battered, he said, but he hopes it is slowly regrowing.

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, many opioid treatment providers struggled to track patients and keep records up to date, said Major, the Boston University doctoral candidate. Some providers reported that the number of people in treatment remained stable, or even increased as street drugs became harder to find. Others have lost patients — one provider saw 15 patients drop out or move away. Just some eventually returned.

How to support people with substance use disorder during and after disaster 

Learn how to recognize and respond to opioid overdoses. Harm reduction groups or syringe exchanges may offer first aid and sensitivity training, as does the Red Cross.

Have naloxone (also known by the brand name Narcan) on hand and know how to dispense it. 

Understand the medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), to help reduce stigma around their availability and use. Buprenorphine is an evidence-based treatment, but requires healthcare providers and pharmacies to maintain an adequate supply to ensure access when disasters hit. 

Ask your local officials how people with substance use disorder are considered in disaster planning. Do shelters have low barriers to entry and no abstinence requirements? Are volunteers trained on how to reduce stigma and respond to overdoses? 

Grist’s Disaster 101 Toolkit — a comprehensive guide to extreme weather preparation, response, and recovery — includes a detailed section on how people with substance use disorder can stay safe during disasters and how community members, volunteers, and other responders can best support them. Read, share, and easily customize it for your community.

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FIRST at Blue Ridge, a halfway house in nearby Black Mountain, saw about 30 residents leave to deal with the aftermath of Helene, though record-keeping was difficult in the chaos. Some residents lost the homes they’d hoped to return to. Others, placed there as a condition of probation, had to navigate spotty cell service to notify court officials and get permission to go assist their families. A few simply walked off, hoping to hike home. Most eventually came back, but one or two never returned. The center administers drug tests when people come or go, and found that several had relapsed during their time away.

Similar disruptions have been reported across the mountains, especially where the legal system is involved. Cordelia Stearns, chief medical officer at High Country Community Health in Watauga County, said displacement can set off a chain of events that ends in incarceration for the patients treated at her clinic.

One had been living in a shed after Helene and accidentally burned it down trying to stay warm through the winter. He walked hours to reach the clinic and keep up with treatment for opioid addiction. “He did actually make these heroic efforts to stay in care,” Stearns said.

Despite that, he was incarcerated multiple times for nonviolent drug offenses. He’s currently out of touch again, and, she assumes, probably in jail. She hopes he’s OK, she said, choking up. “It’s always a little nerve-racking when you can’t reach people.” 

Stearns has seen similar patterns play out repeatedly, particularly among people who are unhoused. Access to medications like Suboxone or methadone often depends on the policies of individual jails, and incarceration can bring people back into environments where drugs are readily available. “I’m not totally sure who it’s supposed to be helping,” she said.

In Buncombe County, community health worker Brandi Hayes has seen how quickly this turmoil can unravel recovery. She works with the county’s Post-Overdose Response Team, which checks on people who have recently survived an overdose and steers them toward treatment. Like many in this field, she has a family history with addiction that makes the work personal.

Brandi Hayes (left) works for the Buncombe County Post-Overdose Response Team, which works with recent overdose survivors. Her organization offers treatment services, like Suboxone (right). Jesse Barber / Grist

In the weeks after Hurricane Helene, she and her colleagues slogged through the muck to check on patients, deliver essentials like food and water, and keep people connected to treatment and care. Some stayed on track. Others disappeared. One case in particular has stuck with her: A man who had been doing well in his treatment for opioid use, and had even gotten his license and a car back after a period of suspension for legal issues.

“Then the storm came,” Hayes said. “He had to take care of someone else that wasn’t in the sober mind state that he was in.” He quit going to treatment, started using drugs again, cycled through jail several times, and lost his car. 

“I don’t even know where he’s at right now or what he’s doing, ’cause he’s fallen off so bad and not going to appointments and things like that,” Hayes said. When that gets harder for the people she serves, she takes notice. “It’s very easy to backslide.”

The same pattern has played out across Appalachia before. When floods tore through eastern Kentucky in 2022, Jeremy Haney lost nearly everything: his apartment, most of his belongings, and Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company, where he built mandolins by hand. He is in recovery from addiction to painkillers and methamphetamines. A recovery-to-work program had led him to the factory in 2019, and building the instruments had become the bedrock of his life. When the floodwaters receded, the factory was temporarily closed, and it didn’t look likely to reopen soon. He wondered what he’d do next.

“My first initial thought is, ‘OK, our factory’s gone. We’ve got no job,’” Haney recalled thinking. He didn’t want to go back to where he was from in Morgan County, all the way across the state. “I’ve put all this work and effort into relocating and rebuilding my life here in Knott County, and now I’m going to have to start all over again.”

Doug Naselroad, who runs the recovery-to-work program, dreaded telling roughly a dozen men that their jobs had disappeared. Instead, he found funding from the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, a combination of state and federal Department of Labor funding, that allowed them to work in disaster relief. “Nobody missed a paycheck,” Naselroad said. “But they had to rethink what they did for a living, you know, and for months they just slogged away in the mud.”

Haney spent that time cleaning and reorganizing the luthiery and its instruments, determining what could be kept and what had to be thrown away. But the flood had upended the rest of his life. He received $1,800 from FEMA to replace his lost possessions. But after his landlord opted into a FEMA program designed to reduce future disaster risk, the building was cleared and everyone had to move out. Haney spent months searching for a new place to live. The factory eventually reopened, allowing him to return to his usual job as a luthier, but much had changed.

Nearly 9,000 houses and apartments were destroyed in the Kentucky flood, and about 31 percent of the homes in Knott County were damaged. Rental housing was scarce. Even after being approved for federal homeowners’ loans, he struggled to find something within his budget. “There just ain’t that many homes around here that would be cheap enough for me to be able to afford the payment,” he said. His landlord had another apartment come open, but the situation felt unstable.

He worried he might have to return to Morgan County, where he could fall back into addiction. The cleanup job helped keep him grounded. He eventually qualified for an unusual state post-disaster housing program for flood survivors that allowed him to buy his first home last year. He moved in just before Christmas, more than three years after the flood. He credits his support network with helping him get through the long stretch in between — helping him move, find new furniture, and giving him social support.

“That’s a big thing in recovery,” Haney said. “Asking for help.”

For Devon, community connections have made all the difference. He has struggled with depression and long bouts of hopelessness over the last year and a half, but he hasn’t gotten high. 

The waning afternoon light moved across the gray carpet of Devon’s apartment as he tried to recall a time when he really felt tempted to use again.

“I’ve thought about it, but very rarely,” Devon said. “If I do, I have a support system where I can call somebody. I would really have to be in a bad place to use.”

Devon sits in his apartment. Jesse Barber / Grist

He leans on people who’ve survived their own crises — divorces, bankruptcies, other disasters. While some friends have returned to drug use, he’s been grateful for his sponsor and fellow members of Narcotics Anonymous. “This is, like, why we do what we do — when shit hits the fan,” he said. 

His life now is quieter. He keeps up with appointments and stays in touch with friends in recovery. He attends weekly meetings, which he sometimes leads. He’s also returned to individual therapy, which helps him cope with lingering anxiety from the hurricane.

It isn’t the life he once imagined, but for now he has made peace with it. “I try to focus on my daughter,” Devon said. “I’m just doing the best I can.”

Being with her gives his days purpose. He looks after her while his ex-wife is at work, and he’s structured his life and routines around her activities — ballet, gymnastics, kickboxing. For Devon, the structure helps him keep moving forward.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Helene shattered lives — and the systems that keep people sober on May 4, 2026.

Kimberly Treadaway hoped she was prepared for the storm. Hurricane Helene was heading right for her home in Weaverville, North Carolina, and she worried about having enough food and water, and about her 5-month-old son. But something else weighed on her — access to Suboxone, a prescription medication she must take daily to reduce the cravings and withdrawal symptoms associated with opioid use.

“If I didn’t have my medication, I wouldn’t feel OK,” she said.  

Treadaway is about a decade into her recovery. Maintaining sobriety depends upon a great many things remaining consistent: relationships, housing, employment, and, especially, access to the treatment she needs to avoid a relapse.

She wasn’t just concerned for herself. Her partner was also on Suboxone, as were “a lot of our friends.” Many had a stockpile, or a plan to taper their dosage if they suddenly lost access. Withdrawal is always unpleasant and often dangerous. The thought of navigating the aftermath of a natural disaster with fever, chills, vomiting, and other symptoms was frightening.

 “Helene just made it really, really real,” she said.

Treadaway recounted the story in the office of Holler Harm Reduction, alongside fellow staffer Hush Sinn and volunteer Oscar Smith. The grassroots organization in Marshall, often known simply as “Holler,” strives to meet people who use drugs where they are, providing clean needles, naloxone, and other supplies to minimize the threat of an overdose or infection. Treadaway joined the staff in November 2024, right after Helene hit. In the wake of the storm, Holler was part of a loose network of similar organizations that mounted an ad hoc but essential response — to ensure that people who use drugs or are maintaining sobriety got the care and supplies they needed.

Kimberly Treadaway, left, and Oscar Smith, sit beside a stack of needle boxes at Holler Harm Reduction in Marshall, North Carolina.
Jesse Barber / Grist

As the initial barrage of rain and wind gave way to isolation and infrastructural breakdown, the systems Treadaway and so many others rely on remained interrupted for weeks. 

But something else took their place. Across western North Carolina and beyond, people like Treadaway joined doctors, nurses, and others on ATVs, in trucks, and occasionally on foot in delivering care and supplies. They did so in ways that official emergency responders, constrained by training, resources, logistics, or mandate, could not. They did what they felt was urgent and right, and in that, they revealed what disaster response might look like if it were designed with those realities in mind.

For people in recovery or still actively using drugs, survival depends on a connection to care, routine, and the people and systems that make such things possible: pharmacies; clinics, rehabs, therapists, and 12-step meetings. 

Across Appalachia and the South, that web is already strained. A flood of prescription opioids, followed by heroin, fentanyl, amphetamines, and other drugs, brought skyrocketing addiction rates and death in the early 2000s. Though efforts to combat overdose have reduced death rates since 2022, rural areas hit by hospital closures and dwindling access to basic health care still see high rates of these and other so-called “deaths of despair.” With climate-fueled disasters growing more frequent, the same fragile system is tested again and again.

Keep reading Hurricane Helene shattered lives — and the systems that keep people sober Katie Myers

Treadaway, who is 33, grew up in a rural area outside Boone, near the Tennessee state line. Shy and raised on an abstinence-only education, she had been taught to avoid drugs at all costs without ever learning how they differed or how they affected the body. All she knew was that they felt good and made her more at ease in life and at parties. She began using opiates and other substances in high school, alongside friends and romantic partners. She eventually dropped out of school, and stopped doing other things she loved, like art, theater, and dance. One day, when she was 19, she awoke to find her partner lifeless in bed next to her. It shook her into seeking help.

She went back to school and tried to bring balance to her life. It wasn’t until around 2017 that she found a welcoming place in the harm reduction community, where she could share her experiences and wisdom. Harm reduction aims to reduce the risks associated with drugs — infection, illness, death — and promote understanding, respect, and compassion for people who use them. She found its philosophy of helping people without judgment appealing. Treadaway felt accepted for sometimes existing in a gray area between active use and recovery, a process that’s rarely linear. 

“It wasn’t a clear-cut journey,” she said. “But after that, I let go of certain substances and then let go of some others, and worked my way into a place in life that felt good.”

Treadaway first volunteered with The Steady Collective, a harm-reduction group based in Asheville, and later served on its board. There, she found like-minded people who embraced her first-person perspective on complex health and social issues. She now works as the organizational director for Holler.

Holler Harm Reduction distributes supplies like Naloxone and drug testing kits (left), comfort items like lip balm (center), which treats dry-mouth symptoms caused by withdrawal medications like Suboxone, and clean supplies to prevent infection (right).

Many of her friends navigate the same space between use and recovery, occasionally moving back and forth between the two. In the harm reduction community, Treadaway said, they find forgiveness, patience, and love that the greater world doesn’t always have for them.

She and others in the community brought that approach to the aftermath of Helene, seeking to show their neighbors that they were there, loved them, and wouldn’t let them fall. The organization, along with other western North Carolina groups like Steady Collective and Smoky Mountain Harm Reduction, quickly mobilized. As soon as the roads were passable, truckloads of basic supplies arrived from all over. A region’s worth of people, increasingly accustomed to the disruptions of flooding, got to work distributing them.

“The scope of mutual aid is just like harm reduction,” said Hush Sinn. “The norm in mutual aid is that we show up for each other. That nobody says, ‘That’s not my problem.’”

Flooding had washed out roads and cut communications, making it difficult or impossible to reach clinics or refill prescriptions. Those who could often found drugstores and clinics closed, or unable to verify insurance because of internet outages. For people in treatment for opioid addiction, the consequences were dire: Methadone typically must be dispensed daily at a clinic, while Suboxone is tightly regulated as a controlled substance.

“It was like hundreds of dollars” that people had to pay if they couldn’t apply insurance, Treadaway said. Most couldn’t afford that. With supplies uncertain, she reduced her own dosage. Some people pooled what they had and shared it with friends — helping each other through a crisis felt more important than following laws that prohibit such actions.

How to support people with substance use disorder during and after disaster 

Learn how to recognize and respond to opioid overdoses. Harm reduction groups or syringe exchanges may offer first aid and sensitivity training, as does the Red Cross.

Have naloxone (also known by the brand name Narcan) on hand and know how to dispense it. 

Understand the medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), to help reduce stigma around their availability and use. Buprenorphine is an evidence-based treatment, but requires healthcare providers and pharmacies to maintain an adequate supply to ensure access when disasters hit. 

Ask your local officials how people with substance use disorder are considered in disaster planning. Do shelters have low barriers to entry and no abstinence requirements? Are volunteers trained on how to reduce stigma and respond to overdoses? 

Grist’s Disaster 101 Toolkit — a comprehensive guide to extreme weather preparation, response, and recovery — includes a detailed section on how people with substance use disorder can stay safe during disasters and how community members, volunteers, and other responders can best support them. Read, share, and easily customize it for your community.

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Treadaway ended up leaving for her son’s safety. Others, like Sinn and Smith, remained. They found people were doing surprisingly well, given the circumstances — not because the system was holding, but because many were accustomed to its failures. They were used to interruptions in electricity, water, or housing.

“People who use drugs are scrappy,” Treadaway said. “They are used to having to fight for their basic needs, which isn’t a good or correct thing, but I had this really deep sense of faith and trust in their survival skills that maybe other community members haven’t had to ever use.”

Sinn, who is on the staff at the Steady Collective and has a history of substance use, was drawn to harm reduction not only to save lives but to ensure no one faces the crushing loneliness that can come with substance use. That seemed particularly important in the wake of Helene. “There’s nothing worse than feeling like nobody gives a shit about you,” Sinn said.

State health officials also found themselves scrambling to meet urgent needs. Tyler Yates, the state opioid coordinator for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, watched treatment centers across the state suddenly also become depots for first aid supplies, clean water, and gasoline, filling the community’s basic survival needs.

Yates, like many in his line of work, comes to the job with personal experience: He started using opioids and other substances when he was 11. He went to treatment in 2017, for what he said may have been the eighth time. It was around then that he found a home in harm reduction work. 

After the storm, Yates knew what people who use drugs needed to survive, and was frustrated by how bureaucracy stood in the way. For instance, he wanted to quickly get sterile water to intravenous drug users, fearing that without it, they could face infection, sepsis, or death from water containing bacteria and other contaminants. But the request went nowhere. According to Yates, state emergency officials were reluctant to fund supplies beyond the usual disaster checklist. “When we submitted the order, it was denied by the emergency response folks because they didn’t think that FEMA would reimburse them,” he said.

North Carolina Emergency Management declined to comment and referred all questions to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Summer Tonizzo, a spokesperson for that agency, told Grist in an email that it collaborates with local jurisdictions, health departments, and community organizations to assist those with substance use disorder during disasters by helping provide naloxone and offering crisis counseling in shelters.

“The State Emergency Response Team makes decisions regarding the distribution of emergency health supplies based on the immediate public health needs and circumstances at hand,” wrote Tonizzo. “The reimbursement process occurs after the response phase has ended and involves separate processes.” 

After a month of back and forth, Yates and his team ended up receiving supplies donated by local and regional harm reduction groups and delivering them throughout western North Carolina. “There’s so much red tape,” he said. His team did its best to fill supply and training gaps, like distributing naloxone to rural volunteer fire departments and first responders who often lacked the training and supplies. 

The state also saw more contamination in the illicit drug supply, driven by a drop in availability of fentanyl and other opioids due to damaged roads and landslides. In places like Haywood County, health providers said xylazine — a cheap, widely available tranquilizer that slows breathing and can cause severe tissue damage — flooded the supply. Health care professionals and harm reductionists scrambled to warn people of the risk, and provide test strips to keep them safe.

Training and preparation were also an issue when it came to longer-term disaster relief volunteers. Several health providers in western North Carolina told Grist they saw people who used drugs — or even those taking medications for opioid use disorder — being turned away from shelters by volunteers who believed they were keeping others safe.

Tonizzo said her agency received no reports of people being wrongfully ejected from shelters for being on medications used to treat opioid use disorder, but that use of illegal drugs “can be restricted” and is grounds for removal.

Buncombe County officials said the county’s response plan prioritizes access to water, sanitation, and shelter for everyone, and it works with harm reduction groups to maintain access to safe use supplies. Although the county handled the initial coordination of emergency shelters, it handed that task off to the Red Cross, which did not respond to written questions, in the weeks after the storm. “Coordinating the various needs of the shelter population was no small challenge,” a Buncombe County spokesperson said in an email. “As the needs of shelter residents became more apparent, the Red Cross and our teams worked to relocate individuals needing specialized support to a more appropriate shelter setting.”

Wreckage from Hurricane Helene in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Jesse Barber / Grist

The storm’s overall effect on public health was mixed. Hospitalization data showed some illnesses worsened, particularly chronic illnesses such as diabetes and mental health conditions like anxiety. Emergency room visits for overdoses and alcohol use also rose, with opioid overdoses up about 21 percent in the three months after the storm, according to an analysis by Appalachian State University geographer Maggie Sugg and environmental epidemiologist Jen Runkle, who works for the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, a research arm of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. Because ER data reflects only those who needed and could access care, the real impact may have been greater.

Still, more than a dozen health care providers, harm reductionists, and peer counselors told Grist they were astonished that things weren’t worse, given the multitude of health risks the people they care for face. Some even said they saw fewer overdoses and cases of severe withdrawal than they expected.

“Some of my patients fared way better than they had in years,” said Cassie York, a peer support counselor at a Mountain Community Health Partnership clinic in rural, low-income Mitchell County. “Because there was food available, there were resources available, no questions asked.” 

After disasters, a safety net of free emergency health clinics blooms and fades. But between those moments lies what many described as a glimmer of possibility — a kind of equality in access to care among people caught in addiction or early recovery, who are often uninsured or avoid seeking medical care due to fear of stigma and arrest.

Red Cross workers distribute supplies at Asheville-Buncome Technical Community College after Hurricane Helene. Jesse Barber / Grist

Doctors worked out of community centers and churches, writing prescriptions more freely as patients bypassed the usual restrictions on access. The state Board of Pharmacy, acting on Governor Roy Cooper’s declaration of an emergency and Drug Enforcement Agency approval, allowed doctors and pharmacists to provide emergency refills of regulated medications , including some of those used to treat opioid use disorder.

People came in with chronic infections, injuries, and diseases like AIDS — conditions that can arise from intravenous drug use — and were treated, free of charge. For a brief moment, many experienced what it meant to have free, nonjudgmental care. “Word of mouth spreads fast, you know? ‘Hey, there’s a doctor at the church, go get your prescription,’” York said. 

But if that access was easier than usual, it was because there were people who made the decision to make it happen, and local and state officials willing to provide the resources. In other states throughout the Appalachian region, communities with high overdose rates and growing disaster risk face a very different set of political circumstances.

Not every county, or state, in the region provides harm reduction programs with the same level of support found in Buncombe County. Some actively inhibit it. West Virginia, for instance, passed restrictions in 2021 that threaten needle exchange programs, and a bill banning them is under judicial review. In Tennessee, state laws prohibit these exchanges, which help intravenous drug users avoid infection and disease by providing sterile injection supplies, from operating near schools or parks. Such restrictions limit how many syringe exchanges can operate, and often push them into less accessible areas. Many people in rural Tennessee drive across the state line seeking help, further straining services in western North Carolina.

The myriad challenges of meeting immediate needs make it difficult for harm reductionists to plan for the next crisis. Health workers in West Virginia, which has the nation’s highest overdose rate, described feeling as though their heads are being held underwater. “It can be hard to think about climate emergency, because so many people who I see are in a state of emergency all the time,” said Lake Sidikman, who coordinates harm reduction programs at the Charleston Women’s Health Center.

Even in Buncombe County, widely cited as a lodestar for substance use services, gaps remain. Helene highlighted the lack of a concrete plan for providing services during a crisis. 

That gap has sparked efforts to rethink disaster planning. Harm reductionist Kathryn Humphries works with others in her field and officials at all levels of government and grassroots groups on disaster response. She said such plans often overlook people who use drugs and the unhoused, despite their heightened vulnerabilities and overlapping needs. She is among those helping lead a national conversation about how to better draw community organizations and those with direct experience with drug use into preparedness efforts.

To Dr. Shuchin Shukla, a physician and addiction medicine researcher who previously practiced family medicine in Buncombe County, disaster preparedness starts with the pillars of overdose prevention: naloxone to reverse overdoses, medications and supplies such as Suboxone and clean needles, and peer support from trusted people in the community. Strangers cannot arrive after a disaster and expect people in active addiction or early recovery to trust them. “You have to bring a ton of support to the people they already know and rely on,” he said.

He’d like to see family members, trusted neighbors, and others with firm connections in the community trained to be first responders and given the necessary resources. Such methods worked after Hurricane Helene; the challenge is institutionalizing and funding these programs, which are just as important as access to food, water, and shelter when disaster strikes, at the state and federal level. “People will go through withdrawal from medication and fentanyl before they’ll go through withdrawal from food,” he said.

A medical professional with Respite at Haywood Street Congregation gives wound care to a community member in Asheville, North Carolina. Addiction researcher Shuchin Shukla thinks organizations with strong community ties should be included in disaster response plans.
Jesse Barber / Grist

He also wants states to maintain emergency reserves of medications and safe-use supplies, and to provide basic first aid and medical resources. Ideally, he’d like to see trained staff, volunteer organizations, and federal emergency response teams prepared to distribute these resources.

Shukla sees this as increasingly urgent. Opioid settlement funds — more than $57 billion that drugmakers, distributors, and pharmacy chains paid to all 50 states for their role in the overdose crisis — are abundant now, but annual disbursements will decrease each year and expire in 2038. Federal support for substance use services has fluctuated under the Trump administration. After the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration saw as much as $1.9 billion in grants cut and later reinstated, the agency faced a wave of layoffs and resignations; the 2027 federal budget proposes further consolidation and reductions. 

“We can’t predict what’s going to happen,” he said, “but we can make sure that if stuff were to happen, we have various levels of resilience.”

For people who work in harm reduction, the long tail of Helene has been hard to watch. The people they rushed to serve, and who benefited from the sudden abundance of free health care, have begun to fall back into isolation.

“When all of that finished, it was like, not only did they go back to being uncomfortable, but it was even harder because they’d kind of gotten used to having needs met as we all should, you know?” Treadaway said.

As quickly as a health care safety net unfurled, it began to fray.

“There are now folks where their living situations with like five to seven people are falling apart, and they’re just ending up with nothing,” Smith said. “Now they have to pick up the pieces and figure it out.”

The donations have slowed, but the need hasn’t. Last winter, the Holler crew and other nonprofits delivered propane and water alongside harm reduction supplies. A year and a half after the storm, they are still meeting basic needs for survivors even as they brace for the next disaster. They can only hope they’re ready when it comes.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Helene frayed the safety net for people who use drugs. This community wove it back together. on May 4, 2026.

Since 2018, when it bought the chemical manufacturer Monsanto, the German conglomerate Bayer has set aside billions to settle legal claims that the active ingredient in the company’s weedkiller Roundup has caused cancer and other health issues among its users. More than 100,000 plaintiffs across the U.S. have filed lawsuits alleging a cancer link, and in February, the company agreed to settle a class action lawsuit for $7.25 billion.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in one case that didn’t reach a settlement. John Durnell first sued Monsanto in 2019, arguing that he developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma because of persistent exposure to glyphosate in Roundup, which he had regularly sprayed throughout his neighborhood for 20 years. In 2023, a Missouri jury found Monsanto liable for failing to warn users of the cancer risk from glyphosate, and awarded Durnell $1.25 million in damages. The company has denied the claims and issued a series of appeals ever since.

Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act — known as FIFRA — the Environmental Protection Agency is authorized to govern the sale and labeling of pesticides. The federal law bars pesticides that are “misbranded,” or lack warnings that may be necessary to protect health and the environment. According to the law, states cannot impose labeling requirements that differ from or go beyond what federal law already mandates for these products. Manufacturers must register pesticides and herbicides with the EPA before selling them, and when a product is registered, the agency signs off on its labels. 

Durnell’s case rests on a Missouri law that bans the sale of dangerous products without adequate warnings. Monsanto argued those claims should have been preempted by FIFRA, since the company registered its product with the EPA and received approval for its label. The central legal question before the Supreme Court, then, is whether the EPA’s approval of that label overrides the Missouri state law. 

The justices appeared divided on the case during oral arguments. Several, including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, pressed attorneys on whether preemption would block states from responding to changing research. “Could we have a world in which a product that has been registered, the label is consistent with what the agency has said is appropriate at the time of registration, but let’s say a new research study comes out at some point between when the EPA is statutorily required to look at it again that casts doubt on the safety of this product?” Jackson asked Paul Clement, a former solicitor general and a lawyer for Monsanto, appearing skeptical of the company’s claim.

Clement responded by saying, “I think the way that you deal with that and the way the agency deals with that is either through some amended registration or some cancellation process which could be subject to judicial review.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett then put a finer point on Jackson’s inquiry: “But could the agency come after you for misbranding if you didn’t comply with your statutory obligation to give the updated information to the EPA?” 

“Absolutely,” Clement responded. “But it wouldn’t be a misbranding action.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to side with Monsanto’s argument that varying state requirements undermine federal uniformity. “Do you think it’s uniformity when each state can require different things?” Kavanaugh asked Ashley Keller, the attorney representing Durnell. 

The EPA’s handling of pesticides has been fraught and shapes the stakes of the case considerably. Glyphosate is America’s most-used herbicide on agricultural crops — more than 280 million pounds of the chemical are applied to roughly 300 million acres of farmland every year, according to the EPA. In 2021, the EPA did a biological evaluation on glyphosate and found 1,676 endangered plant and animal species are likely to be harmed by the chemical. J.W. Glass, a senior EPA policy analyst at the conservation nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, which contributed to an amicus brief filed in support of Durnell, said the sheer scale of glyphosate use is the problem, and the ripple effects can show up not only in the environment, but in people’s bodies. Farmworkers face some of the most acute exposure risk, a byproduct of working on farmland where the use of herbicides like Roundup is a routine part of crop production, according to Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, a senior grassroots advocacy coordinator at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. 

“The indiscriminate use of it, and how much we use it, is the environmental issue,” said Glass. “You have these cases where people are spraying it directly into waterways for weed control.”  

Read Next While Zach Galifianakis finds peace in gardening, I’m at war with raccoons Matt Simon

Glass said there are “plenty of issues” in the EPA’s pesticide labeling process. Two analyses his organization co-released with the Center for Food Safety in March found that the EPA has routinely left cancer warnings off pesticide products even when its own assessments have identified cancer risks. “Does EPA actually label pesticides when they are found to be a carcinogen? And the answer is, it’s very rare. But that’s only one part of it. There are all sorts of, I would say, loopholes that have been exploited within the pesticide law,” he said.

As reported by Mother Jones, the EPA spent more than a decade reviewing Roundup before clearing the herbicide in 2020 under the federal standard that its agricultural benefits outweighed its societal harms — only for that assessment to be swiftly challenged in court by environmental groups. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the EPA’s assessment in 2022, finding serious “errors in assessing human-­health risk.” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told Congress last Tuesday that a new ruling on the herbicide is coming by the year’s end. 

At that same hearing, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat in New York, cited internal EPA emails that noted Bayer promised to “provide a small thanks” to Zeldin for the agency updating its webpage on glyphosate after an appeals court struck down a California label warning against the chemical’s cancer risk. The emails, according to Ocasio-Cortez, also show that the company “wanted to thank you and your agency for removing support for California’s warning because their case before the Supreme Court right now hinges on you not warning the American people and withdrawing your support on glyphosate.” 

“Do you understand the conflict of interest that is before the American people right now, Mr. Secretary?” Ocasio-Cortez asked the EPA administrator. According to transcripts of the hearing, Zeldin did not explicitly respond.

The Durnell case has become a national flashpoint for environmentalists, public health advocates, and Trump voters who consider themselves a part of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Some of that friction can be traced back to last year, when the administration urged the Supreme Court to take up Bayer’s case. Then, in February, the president issued an executive order deeming glyphosate-based herbicides key to national security and calling for more domestic production of the chemical, which was met with serious backlash within the MAHA coalition. Trump’s administration also sent a lawyer to argue last Monday on behalf of the chemical company. 

As justices heard oral arguments, a crowd of protesters gathered outside of the Supreme Court for what they called “The People vs. Poison” rally. At the same time, members of the U.S. House of Representatives debated provisions of the farm bill that would have blocked states from passing pesticide label requirements that differ from federal labels. Those provisions were stripped in a House amendment vote last Thursday, and the Senate is expected to vote in the coming weeks on the farm bill.

Kelly Ryerson, the prominent MAHA activist and founder of the website Glyphosate Facts who helped organize “The People vs. Poison” rally, said the Durnell case amounts to a litmus test for whether the administration is truly serious about the MAHA agenda. 

A ruling that strips people’s ability to file state-level failure-to-warn claims would be “catastrophic for public health,” said Ryerson. “It would be entirely because of this administration, and it will be unforgivable.” The Supreme Court is expected to render its decision this summer, giving voters just months to reckon with the ruling before heading to the midterm polls. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Supreme Court is deciding whether Roundup, America’s most-used herbicide, needs a cancer warning on May 4, 2026.

The new data center proposed for a quiet city about 115 miles east of San Diego came across people’s radars in different ways.

For patrons of the deli on West Aten Road, it was the white “Not In My Backyard” signs jutting out of lawns.  

For local irrigation district workers, it was something called an “electric service application.” 

For Margie Padilla, it was a rant on Facebook.

The 43-year-old mom came across a post online while she had a few minutes to scan social media last spring after a day spent tending her garden and taking care of her two boys.

“Somebody was complaining about this center,” Padilla said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’” 

What’s going on is the second-largest new data center being considered statewide, which would be less than half a mile from Padilla’s stucco home in the center of Imperial Valley. If finished by 2028, as the developer expects, the at least 950,000-square-foot, two-story data center could be the largest operating statewide, taking up 17 football fields’ worth of land. 

The roughly $10 billion, 330-megawatt data center would require 750,000 gallons of water a day to operate, said developer Sebastian Rucci, who insists electricity and water costs won’t rise due to the data center. 

The proposed 330-megawatt data center in Imperial, Calif., is slated to take up 17 football fields of land and needs 750,000 gallons of water a day. Courtesy of Sebastian Rucci

“We have studies on the air. We have studies on the water. The electricity could be handled,” Rucci said. “We did our homework.” 

Imperial officials haven’t quelled local concerns, only noting that the project is facing litigation and that the center’s long-term impacts on utilities haven’t been determined. 

On top of the financial burden of maintaining her family’s health, gas and grocery expenses strain Padilla’s budget, and she’s worried a new data center will only increase water and power costs. Padilla, who first heard of the data center a year ago, has only grown more concerned, and she’s not alone. 

Some residents would see it from their backyards.

“I can only imagine the rates going up once that data center is up and running,” she said, shading her eyes from the beaming sun.

This is one of two dozen data centers expected to open in California in the next few years.

Growing concern and regulatory gaps

A majority of respondents to a nationwide poll by the US Water Alliance’s Value of Water campaign share Padilla’s worries, with 54 percent extremely or very concerned about the effect data centers will have on water quality, water supply, and costs in their area. 

In its first question about data centers since the poll began in 2016, two-thirds of voters said it was important for their state to have a plan for the effects of data centers on water in the coming years.

“I suspect that as data centers continue to be part of the broad conversation, then these numbers will probably continue to go up as people are more concerned about the impacts they have on the things that affect them and their communities, like supply, quality and cost,” said Scott Berry, the senior advisor on policy and external affairs at the US Water Alliance, from Water Week in Washington D.C. this month.

More than 90 percent of data centers in the U.S. get most of the water they need for cooling from municipal systems, estimated Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. 

During the hottest summer days, a large 100-megawatt facility can use about 1 million gallons of water for evaporative cooling. That amount is the same as about 10,000 people’s daily water use at home, Ren said. 

But those centers require “zero water for many days of the year when it’s cool outside,” he said.

Some data centers are exploring alternatives like treated wastewater or graywater for cooling instead of drinkable water, providing residents and officials with options that could reduce strain on local water supplies.

California doesn’t require AI data centers to report water usage, and the state’s Water Resources Control Board does not maintain a specific list of water rights held by data centers. Although residents are working to require more transparency about water use from data centers, recent efforts to require the facilities’ owners to report how much water they use to the state have faltered.

On top of the data center boom in California, the hundreds of water districts, a deepening Southwestern megadrought and the diminishing of the Colorado River increasingly complicate water issues. 

Also, while data centers can take as little as two to three years to build, developing new water sources can take as long as 20 years, said Ren.

Plans for the steep increase in water demand from California data centers inevitably focus on infrastructure, experts said.

“Water is not purely an environmental issue,” Ren noted. “In many places, it is fundamentally an infrastructure challenge.”

Across the country, water infrastructure upgrades are estimated to cost between $10 billion to $58 billion, Ren’s research team found. How many more facilities are built and where will be a big factor in future infrastructure costs.

The site of the proposed data center in Imperial, California. Steven Rodas / Inside Climate News

The amount of electricity a data center uses, to some degree, determines how much heat it produces, and consequently how much cooling it requires and, in turn, how much water it needs.

The Imperial County data center is one of 24 planned for completion across California by 2030, according to the latest information gathered by analysts at Cleanview, a market intelligence platform. 

Based on the about 1.7 GW of electricity the proposed data centers would use, with at least two projects for which there aren’t energy consumption figures, water infrastructure upgrade costs just for the demands of the centers in the state could run from about $200 million to $800 million, Ren said.

“This number assumes that California data centers’ water use intensity is the same as the national average,” he explained.

There is no central permitting authority for data centers in California, and most are overseen by city and county governments, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. Data Center Map shows 286 of the facilities currently operating in California.

While California’s size and tech focus lead some to expect many more data centers here, the cost and availability of power and land, as well as the general tax and regulatory climate, have been hurdles to building them out, according to the Data Center Coalition, which represents big corporations like Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft.

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Nonetheless, California trails only Virginia and Texas in the number of individual data center locations, but its centers have much lower total new electricity capacity, which may also indicate lower water demand.

A research team at the University of California, Riverside, recently found that data centers could collectively require 697 to 1,451 million gallons per day (MGD) of new water capacity nationally through 2030. New York City’s average daily supply is about 1,000 MGD.

Currently, data centers are estimated to use about 39 billion gallons of water nationally each year, Khara Boender, the senior manager for state policy at the Data Center Coalition, said, citing market research from Bluefield. 

“I know when we start to talk about billions of gallons of water in a year, that sounds absolutely crazy,” Boender said. “Looking at how that falls into context with some of these other large water users, I think that that kind of contextualization could be surprising to folks.”

Alfalfa irrigation in California’s Imperial Valley alone uses more than 800 billion gallons a year, an April essay in Outside highlighted. The beverage industry uses 533 billion gallons of water a year, and the semiconductor industry uses 59 billion gallons, Boender noted.

But spikes in water needs for data centers can lead to bottlenecks in small community water systems, Ren, at the University of California, Riverside, noted. “Only comparing the annual totals can obscure the real water challenge,” he said.

There is no single fix for the pressure data centers are placing on water supplies across the state, which will be different depending on the location and water systems where each facility is built, said Shivaji Deshmukh, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — the largest supplier of treated water in the U.S. The district serves 19 million people in six California counties.

“Every community — even within our service area — is different in terms of costs, what type of supply they have. Some regions have access to groundwater. Some have access to treated wastewater or recycled water somewhere along the coast,” Deshmukh said.

So industries, most of which require water for cooling, will look to satisfy that thirst from different sources, depending on their location. 

“Imperial Irrigation District is one where I know they’re discussing … installation of data centers in their area,” Deshmukh said.

The Imperial dilemma

The plot of dirt on West Aton Road betrays nothing of the colossal data center that could one day sit on the land. Owner Sebastian Rucci hopes to have the facility up and running by the summer of 2028, he said.

Rucci, who is also a lawyer, has purchased 235 acres for his data center so far. He says the data center will allow Google to train its Gemini artificial intelligence, although Google denies any involvement “in a data center project in Imperial County.”

Before he can begin building on the site, a judge will weigh in on the city of Imperial’s lawsuit against the project, which demands that it clear higher environmental hurdles, including the California Environmental Quality Act — which often draws ire from developers who claim it can needlessly stall proposals. The local water district also has to complete its review of the project.

Rucci is determined, though, citing a series of studies conducted by survey and consulting groups, and by the district itself, which manages water and provides power. He posted those reports online to show the data center made sense — in part because water and power could be effectively provided to the data center, and the land was permitted for industrial use. 

Margie Padilla tours her garden on April 16, where she holds a carrot that she thinks hasn’t grown well due to drier temperatures in the Imperial Valley. Steven Rodas / Inside Climate News

The debate between supporters and opponents of the facility has escalated, with the next court date set for the end of April.

With that date in mind, Padilla, the Imperial mother, set out to work in her garden on a balmy Thursday morning. 

Donning a green, short-sleeved shirt and flip-flops, she checked on her squash, poked at her cherry tomatoes, and dug in her spade to move periwinkle to a better spot for watering. And through it all, she wondered what the thirst of the proposed data center would do to her garden. And her monthly water bill.

Her payment for water, sewer, and trash services currently ranges from $90 to $130 a month — more than double what she paid six years ago. 

“I’m also afraid they’re going to put [water] restrictions for us, for the residents,” said Padilla, who estimates her family of four uses about 300 gallons of water a day. “That’s going to be harsh on me, particularly, because of my garden. I grow my own food, my own vegetables.” 

Worries over power and water price surges are misguided, Rucci said. He has been considering power and water needs for the 18 months he has worked on the project, he said, and outlined how it would bring various economic benefits to the region, including about 100 permanent jobs post-construction. 

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Still, Padilla is thinking about other things. She says her two sons were anemic when they were younger, requiring them to eat fresh produce to supplement the iron their bodies needed. Even after treating the condition, the Imperial mom keeps her sons’ diet filled with veggies and fruits. She needs her garden for that.

The Imperial Irrigation District declined to be interviewed for this story but, in a written statement, noted that it has yet to receive a formal request for water for the project.

The District, which provides water and power to all of Imperial County as well as parts of Riverside and San Diego counties, did not have specific estimates of how demand from the data center could impact its costs.

“Water was very concerning to us from the beginning,” Rucci said.

He’s spoken with city officials in Imperial and El Centro to arrange a water deal for the facility, he said, and proposed getting 6 million gallons per day of reclaimed water from both cities.

“Our plan was we would do all the municipal upgrades at our cost, and then we would take the excess water and run it clean to the Salton Sea,” he said. 

Those conversations have not paid off, although Rucci said he remains hopeful municipal officials will help him get water for his facility. 

“We first tried to do reclaimed water. I still prefer that, but that seems to be taking months, and I don’t know if that … will happen,” Rucci said. “Probably we’ll just get it from the [Imperial Irrigation District]” by purchasing it for industrial use.

How the center obtains its water may change as its plans are updated, he added. 

Through it all, he remains confident the data center will be built in Imperial County and be good for the area.

Carolina Paez disagrees.

The 46-year-old mother’s backyard abuts the data center site. She says she’d be able to hit it with a rock from her property. 

Both she and her son have asthma, and she’s worried about the construction dust, potential pollution, and noise from the data center. And higher bills.

“I’m not just thinking about the expenses that are going to increase, but also about the things that are going to lose value — for instance, my house,” Paez said in Spanish.

“What am I going to do with this property? Who would even want to live here?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California will soon have more than 300 data centers. Where will they get their water? on May 3, 2026.

In March, a month traditionally known for heavy mountain snows and dreary lower-elevation weather, a heat wave settled across the West, shattering temperature records from Tucson, Arizona, to Casper, Wyoming.

The heat wave’s intensity and early arrival shocked many climate scientists. “It is exceptionally difficult for the Earth system to produce temperatures this warm so early in the season,” wrote Daniel Swain, a climatologist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources who runs the Weather West blog.

Yet not only did Western locations set new March highs; many exceeded temperature records for May. And those high temperatures kept hanging on, said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at the nonprofit science center Climate Central, for nearly two weeks.

While heat waves are a natural phenomenon, this was the earliest and most widespread one ever recorded in the Southwest. And it was caused by climate change, which is making intense heat waves much more likely. Researchers say this means understanding their fallout is even more important.

Scientists are just now beginning to understand the ramifications of a devastating 2021 heat wave, when a massive heat dome brought 120-degree temperatures to the Pacific Northwest, causing widespread ecological damage. Tens of thousands of trees died. Baby birds that could not yet fly plummeted to the ground as they tried to escape the heat. Salmon and trout suffocated in small streams. Millions — perhaps even billions — of mussels and barnacles cooked.

Number of daily record highs broken in March 2026

This year’s heat wave may not have had the same immediate ecological impacts, but it comes on the heels of an already record-breaking hot, dry winter. Researchers say 2021 holds lessons about what lies ahead for both vulnerable and resilient species. Ecosystems, they warn, are likely to permanently change as some species simply can’t handle the heat.

Fully understanding the impact that events like heat waves have on long-lived tree species takes time. Research is now trickling out from places like Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, and it’s not good.

The 2021 heat wave either killed or otherwise harmed more than three-quarters of species surveyed, including by limiting their reproductive success, according to Julia Baum, a professor at the University of Victoria who co-wrote a recent paper on the long-term impacts. The hardest hit, perhaps unsurprisingly, were those unable to move to seek shade or cooler temperatures. Marine species like acorn barnacles and green rope seaweed fared the worst, as did kelp, surfgrass, and rockweed.

“The rocky shorelines they live on heated up to [122 Fahrenheit]. Think of being glued to hot concrete on the most scorching summer day: They essentially baked and died,” said Baum. “On land, wildflowers wilted and died, preventing entire populations from reproducing that year, and there was widespread leaf scorch and death in forests.”

Some species that could move modified their behavior: Ferruginous hawks reduced their flight time by about 81 percent, while wolves moved around more, perhaps seeking hunkered-down prey like mule deer and moose.

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Meanwhile, species already adapted to hotter or more variable temperature ranges adjusted better than others.

The heat wave’s timing also mattered, said Adam Sibley, a remote sensing scientist and co-author of a 2025 paper that examined the impact on trees and forests. Plants tend to acclimate to heat throughout a season, so the triple-digit temperatures that struck in June hit harder than they would have in August.

So many tree needles died, in fact, that when Sibley drove to the Oregon coast with friends a few days after the heat wave ended, the tree canopy looked as though it had been dusted with orange snow.

New buds and needles are fragile for a number of reasons, said Christopher Still, a forest ecology professor at Oregon State University. Many contain fatty membranes that, when super-heated, will melt and cause the leaf to fall apart. Young leaves and needles also lack “heat hardening” mechanisms like specialized proteins that stabilize mature leaves and needles when it’s hot.

Many larger, more well-established trees, such as Douglas fir, lost a growing season: Their needles fell off, but grew back the following year. Other trees died, especially younger ones and species like Sitka spruce and western red cedar that require cooler, wetter temperatures.

The 2021 heat wave also rapidly dried grasses, flowers, and other fine fuels, leading to record-breaking wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, according to a 2024 paper in the journal Nature.

Read Next The West’s unprecedented winter could fuel a summer of disaster Tik Root

While the timing of this year’s heat wave surprised many climatologists, the fact that it arrived in March may have ultimately saved some Southwestern plants, said Osvaldo Sala, a professor and director of Arizona State University’s Global Drylands Center.

During the hottest period, he explained, many plants were still dormant. Desert plants tie their growing cycles to rain and moisture instead of heat or sun duration. That means that, unlike in places like Wyoming, where cherry trees started blooming in March instead of May, desert plants were still waiting for rains to come.

Unfortunately, that early blooming has left the cherry trees and other flowering plants particularly susceptible to spring frosts, Still said.

The effects of this year’s heat dome have only exacerbated the winter’s record-setting heat and drought, Still added. Snowpack across much of the West was abysmal; in many places, it was the worst in recorded history. 

“The heat dome put an exclamation point on the worst winter in a century,” said Still. “It was the worst possible way to end the winter that was already worse than normal.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ramifications of record-shattering heat on the West’s ecosystems on May 2, 2026.

For almost half a century, the vast majority of climate experts have agreed on a solution to global warming: stop burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas. But despite the political efforts of governments across the world to promote replacing these fuels, fossil sources have remained a stubbornly large share of global energy — around 80 percent at last count.

But the war in Iran, which the United States and Israel launched two months ago this week, may turn out to be the push that dislodges fossil fuels’ place atop the world’s energy system. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway near Iran through which 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas supplies flow, has been blocked since early March, with no relief in sight. This has created the biggest energy crisis in modern history. Twenty-five countries are now reporting critical road fuel, jet fuel, or heating oil shortages. 

But unlike the oil shock of the 1970s, which occurred in a time when substitutes for fossil fuels were not yet powerful or cheap enough to build at scale, this disruption is happening as renewable energy sources are beginning to outcompete fossil fuels, providing countries with new energy options at costs that have plummeted in recent years.

“We now have a viable alternative,” said Selwin C. Hart, a special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General, at a first-of-its-kind international conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels in Colombia this week. “Renewables have changed the equation.” 

But even though this calculus has changed, it’s too soon to say where the chips will fall as the world’s energy system evolves. While the reliability of a huge chunk of the world’s oil and natural gas is now perhaps permanently in question, it’s not certain that renewables will fill all or even most of the gap. Coal, the most polluting fossil fuel, is taking on a renewed appeal in a world desperate to replace natural gas for electricity, and it remains difficult for solar and wind to replace the around-the-clock power provided by both of those fossil fuels.

“It’s hard to say which direction things will go,” Daan Walter, a lead researcher at the energy think tank Ember, told Grist.

Still, two months after the war began it’s becoming clear which sources of energy stand to win and which stand to lose as the world changes in response to the conflict. As prices rise and supplies dwindle, countries around the globe are reevaluating their energy futures. While some have fallen back on dirty fuels to fill the gaps caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, others have announced significant investments in clean energy to chart a path away from the sources of energy they have relied on for more than a hundred years. 

Iraq has begun exporting oil by sending tanker trucks through Syria. An official said oil revenue dropped more than 70 percent in March.
Bakr ALkasem / AFP / Getty Images Losers: Oil and natural gas

The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint through which more than 20 percent of the world’s oil supply passes, including exports from major producers such as Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The small nation of Qatar produces around one-fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which it exports on boats in superchilled tanks. Iran’s drone attacks have damaged Qatar’s major gas infrastructure and prevented all the nations in the region from sending both oil and LNG shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.

The main buyers of this oil are in Asia, but tankers from the strait travel all over the world, including to the U.S. The first month of the war set off a scramble to replace this lost supply. Major buyers like China and Japan started hoarding refined oil products they would normally export and began rationing their strategic fuel reserves. Rich importers like Australia and California paid more to secure seaborne oil from other countries.

Most nations don’t have the same luxuries; they simply have to use less oil. In Asia, the loss of LNG compounds the problem tremendously. Several major Asian economies including Japan, Korea, and Singapore rely on LNG to run their power plants and factories. Many LNG shippers sign long-term contracts with importing countries, meaning there weren’t any spare shipments floating around, as was the case with crude oil after the start of the war. If they wanted to keep the lights on, these countries had to turn back to dirtier coal power.

Nepali consumers line up to receive partially-filled liquefied petroleum gas cylinders at a depot of the Nepal Oil Corporation in Kathmandu, Nepal, on March 14, 2026.
Sanjit Pariyar / NurPhoto / Getty Images

The loss of LNG from Qatar was a big win for the United States, which is the world’s other biggest exporter of liquefied gas. The LNG exporters who did have spare capacity available could command eye-watering prices from countries that needed the fuel. But there’s a limit to how much more gas the U.S. can send to fill the gap: liquefying natural gas requires the construction of massive factories on the coast, which can take years, and existing plants are already running at full capacity. In the meantime, the disruption has dampened enthusiasm for what had been a very popular fuel, said  Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and the former head of gas analysis at BP. 

“If you are an LNG importer and you are looking at the global market, you’re thinking, ‘do I want to be exposed in that way?’” she said.

Meanwhile, governments across Asia have rolled out a host of policies intended to cut down on the consumption of oil and natural gas: They lowered speed limits, mandated remote work, set thermostats higher despite hot weather, and asked employees to take the stairs rather than using the elevator. They have also waived fuel taxes and banned price increases to prevent an affordability crisis. These measures have contained unrest and economic collapse for now, but further warning signs are emerging. Airlines in Europe, Africa, and New Zealand have cancelled hundreds of flights, and small carriers in the U.S. are facing bankruptcy as the price of jet fuel rises.

In the long term, the oil crisis may accelerate a preexisting shift to electric vehicles and hybrids, which had already begun to outsell gas cars in many countries in Europe and Asia. In the first month of the war, electric-vehicle sales jumped by more than 50 percent in big European economies like France and Germany, and by almost 200 percent in Brazil. While gas cars still make up the vast majority of vehicles on the road today, a fast shift to EVs — juiced by government mandates such as Indonesia’s — could cause oil demand to plateau or decline in the coming years.

Winners: Coal, solar, nuclear

Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel; it produces far more carbon dioxide than oil or natural gas to generate the same amount of energy. Although some major economies like China and India still burn tremendous amounts of it, many world powers have been shifting toward liquefied natural gas and renewables over the past decade, cutting emissions in the process.

Even so, most of these coal-to-gas switchers never decommissioned their old coal plants — they just stopped using them. Since the beginning of the war, the availability of this legacy coal fleet has allowed countries across Asia to ramp up coal capacity to fill the gap in lost LNG imports. South Korea lifted a previous emissions limit that barred coal plants from running at more than 80 percent of total capacity, allowing the coal fleet to generate as much power as possible. On the other side of the globe, some European countries like Italy are extending the lifespans of their coal plants, in some cases by more than a decade. 

“The real question is how governments balance short-term energy security with long-term climate commitments,” said Dinita Setyawati, a Jakarta-based analyst for Ember who studies decarbonization in Asian economies.

Japan’s government plans to temporarily lift restrictions on coal-fired power plants like the Isogo Thermal Power Station.
Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP / Getty Images

Although most experts believe coal power will continue its decline as a major source of primary energy, Corbeau said that the crisis could prolong its lifespan in Asia, breaking natural gas’s role as a so-called “bridge fuel” between coal and renewables.

“They could definitely keep coal, add more renewables, and do less LNG in the end,” said Corbeau. “It may be that a lot of countries say that coal is a lot less subject to geopolitics, therefore we are going to use more coal.”

No renewable source is in a better position to surge than solar. Solar farms already made up the vast majority of new power plants even before the war, and Chinese exports of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles hit records in March, according to recently-released export data. (China is by far the world’s most prolific exporter of renewable energy technology.)

The countries most affected by the Iran War are among the areas seeing the “sharpest increases in demand” for these products, according to Ember. Exports of Chinese batteries rose 44 percent; the European Union, Australia, and India were top customers. The flow of solar components to India rose by 6.6 gigawatts between February and March, a nearly 150 percent increase. Solar exports to Africa rose 176 percent over the same time frame. Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia led the way with more than a gigawatt of growth each. All told, 50 countries set records for Chinese solar imports in March. 

After Europe saw its solar market contract slightly last year, demand for rooftop solar in countries across the continent is surging as electricity bills rise, according to a report from Reuters. Three major energy equipment wholesalers interviewed for the report have seen their sales spike more than 30 percent, with one company’s net sales tripling in March. The European Commission, which released a document last week calling for more electrification, renewables, and energy efficiency measures to counteract the ongoing energy shortage, will present energy ministers with proposals for how to reduce short-term fossil fuel exposure at a meeting in Greece next month.

Solar panels on a residential building’s balconies in Germany.
Martin Schutt / picture alliance / Getty Images

In Vietnam, a company that planned to build a 4.8-gigawatt liquefied natural gas plant — which would have been the country’s largest — has axed those plans and now aims to build a wind, battery storage, and solar facility instead. South Korea recently announced a fast-tracked plan to deploy 100 gigawatts of renewables by 2030, a plan that includes 400 billion won, or roughly $270 million, for low-interest loans for village solar projects. (One hundred gigawatts is roughly enough electricity to power Ho Chi Minh City 10 times over.)

While solar is a clear winner in light of the new bottleneck in the Middle East, the outlook for wind power is less clear. On the one hand, the German wind turbine maker Nordex saw its shares reach a 24-year high in the first quarter of 2026, as demand for clean energy in Europe continues to rise. But the Iranian and American blockades of the Strait of Hormuz could stymie the delivery of wind turbine components such as foundations and substations, many of which are manufactured in the Persian Gulf. This could have a depressive effect on wind growth even if countries in Europe and the United Kingdom wish to boost development. 

There’s a chance, however, that the biggest winner may be the most controversial form of climate-friendly power. For decades, the growth of nuclear energy has been constrained by high prices and long development timelines; it can take over a decade to get a plant licensed and built. Disasters like the 2011 tsunami that damaged the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan further dampened nuclear’s growth. In Europe, pressure from anti-nuclear environmental groups led many countries to decommission their nuclear power fleets. As a result, the share of power coming from nuclear reactors globally reached its lowest point in four decades in 2022.

Anti-nuclear sentiment was starting to soften before the war in the Middle East began, but the Iran War is speeding up this trend, prompting countries that shunned nuclear for decades to reevaluate the role that around-the-clock carbon-free energy plays on their grids. Early evidence for a nuclear surge is strongest in Asia, which is most reliant on Middle Eastern oil and natural gas. In Taiwan, a country that gets a third of its liquefied natural gas from Qatar, the state utility formally submitted a restart plan for its Maanshan nuclear plant a month after the war began.

South Korea, which already gets about 30 percent of its power from nuclear, signed a cooperative agreement with Vietnam to jointly develop new nuclear capacity, building on talks that began last year. After restarting Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, which is the world’s largest nuclear plant, in January, Japan inked a$40 billion deal to build advanced small nuclear reactors in the American south during a visit to the White House in March. Japan also signed a 5-year “memorandum of cooperation” with Indonesia aimed at advancing nuclear power and critical minerals development around the same time.

Construction at the Penly nuclear power plant in Petit-Caux on the English channel coast. France’s nuclear recovery program provides for the construction of six new reactors.
Ludovic MARIN / POOL / AFP via Getty Images

Elsewhere, countries are delaying nuclear phase-outs and talking about how to boost capacity. “I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in March this year as she announced a $232 million fund to galvanize private investment in new nuclear technologies. The Commission warned member states like Spain and Belgium against prematurely phasing out nuclear power plants. In Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa reaffirmed their support for nuclear; nearly half of the countries on the continent had long-term nuclear development plans before the war began. This week, the government of Belgium began negotiations to take over a fleet of nuclear reactors that the utility Engie had been planning to shut down.

“All decommissioning activities are being halted with immediate effect,” said the country’s prime minister, Bart De Wever, in a statement.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Two months in, the Iran war has changed the global energy system forever on May 1, 2026.

I caught a raccoon almost literally red-handed the other day. The night before, it (and presumably the comrades in its pack, technically known as a “gaze” of raccoons, because sure why not) had assaulted my garden, digging holes willy-nilly and uprooting seedlings I’d just put in the ground. In my three years of gardening, I’ve never actually seen the critters I’ve been at war with, on account of their nighttime raids. I’ve only found their aftermath. But now I had solid evidence: A muddy paw print on a watering can the invaders had tipped over to get a drink. 

You might wonder, then, why in his new Netflix docuseries, This Is a Gardening Show, Zach Galifianakis gushes about the joys of adding water and nutrients to a plot of land, hoping something actually grows, and then further hoping that it doesn’t get uprooted by omnivorous nocturnal bandits. “I honestly think for human beings and for the world itself, the only future is agrarian,” says Galifianakis, himself a gardener, in an episode about composting. “We should all know how to garden. It’s a better hobby than jetskiing.”

It’s exactly because gardening can be so frustrating and seemingly arbitrary — though, admittedly, much safer than jetskiing — that it is, in fact, joyful. Visiting various farms across six short episodes, Galifianakis finds that gardeners seem happier and funnier than most folk. Maybe it’s because they get to be outside all the time, or they’ve got balanced diets, or because they’re reliving their childhoods as they search for earthworms wiggling in compost. Or, more likely, it’s because raccoons have somehow vanished from that part of the world. 

Damning evidence left by the critters ravaging my garden. Courtesy of Matt Simon

This is not the Galifianakis of Between Two Ferns fame, in which he eviscerates celebrities who are in on the joke. His new show is still funny, of course, though in a sweeter, bucolic way. (A good chunk of the humor comes from not-especially-insightful — at least as far as gardeners are concerned — segments in each episode in which he asks school children about food.) When Galifianakis is traipsing around gardens, the biting, sardonic wit of Ferns gives way to genuine awe of what these farmers can accomplish. 

I identify. While I’m walking around the garden in the morning, watering and assessing the damage, I’m also cutting flowers to hang inside and dry. I’m watching bumblebees bumble around, fertilizing my native plants. I’m snapping new spears from my asparagus plants and eating them raw. (You haven’t lived until you’ve had asparagus straight out of the ground — they’re unbelievably tender, and mine have a somewhat peppery, garlicky taste.) Unlike the masterful producers profiled in This Is a Gardening Show, I’m not generating nearly enough sustenance even to feed myself, true enough. But in my experience, that’s not the point.

A glimpse into their operations stands in stark contrast to modern industrial agriculture. Food prices are skyrocketing as farmers struggle to pay for fuel and fertilizer, especially after Iran closed the Straight of Hormuz. People are freaked out about ultra-processed fare. Droughts are exhausting water supplies as the world gets too hot to feed itself. While humble gardens can’t feed the world on their own, they can certainly help with food security, especially when tucked into cities. Heck, you can even grow crops on top of buildings, under the shade of solar panels, thus generating both nutrition and clean electricity. 

Whereas industrial farms grow monocrops, like vast fields of wheat, gardens are more diverse and adaptive to a changing planet. Galifianakis, for instance, visits Royann Petrell and Sylvain Alie, founders of Steller Raven Ecological Farm, who’ve developed a variety they call the “future of tomatoes,” in that it “doesn’t mind 140 degrees in a greenhouse.” They say its taste improves the hotter it gets, in fact. Compare that to the industrial, perfectly formed, perfectly tasteless tomato you’ll find in the supermarket. 

Asparagus spears grow out of the ground like this, ready to eat. Courtesy of Matt Simon

Even though it was released on Earth Day, this is not a show centered on climate change, which is a massive threat to farmers big and small. We can imagine that these gardeners might be struggling with water shortages or extreme heat waves withering their crops, or growing seasons getting thrown out of whack. But more often, Galifianakis jokingly predicts a kind of generalized civilizational collapse. “There will be mass population decline, and there will be a small group of people that will be able to continue on, and their lineage will be able to continue on,” he says. “But a lot of us are gonna die.” 

Apocalypses aside, This Is a Gardening Show is a charmer, much more about triumphs of gardening than its many lows. A garden abhors arrogance — one thing after another lies in wait to humble you. From your many struggles, you realize the futility of struggling: Pests will come and go, weeds will grow even in the event of a nuclear winter, and a carefully tended vegetable will simply give up and die on you. Sometimes it’s your fault, and sometimes a plant is just trying to be difficult. Living in San Francisco, our infamous microclimates mean one species might grow big and strong in someone’s backyard a mile away, but struggle to survive in my own. I’m still learning, and will probably always be learning. And I’m very jealous of the masterful gardeners in the series.

As the seasons come and go, you find a rhythm in gardening, and things click into place. You learn that as much death as life visits a garden, and that’s OK. You problem-solve and improvise not just because you have to, but because it’s fun. Share a garden with someone and you forge a unique bond, like Petrell and Alie strolling hand-in-hand among their tomatoes. “Can I just say, off the record, seeing you guys hold hands through the garden, that’s what does it to humans, right?” Galifianakis says. “The garden is good for us. It can be a lifesaver.”

But then, inevitably, return the frustrations, which we don’t see too much of in the show, and the adaptations they demand from the gardener. For my part, I imagine raccoons are digging up my garden to find earthworms, grubs, and other invertebrates. (To be fair to raccoons, I can’t rule out an opossum as the culprit, or they might even be co-conspirators that trade off nights. But living near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, raccoons are absolutely everywhere in my neighborhood.) But I drew the line when they repeatedly dug up my sugar pea seedlings last year, which I had for weeks grown from seed, then transplanted into the ground. So this year, instead of providing a single A-frame trellis for the plants to climb, I locked the seedlings inside by breaking a second frame in half and zip-tying the two pieces to either end of the structure. Irony among ironies, though: Research suggests that raccoons love solving puzzles for the fun of it, so they’ll get the same pleasure breaking the cage that I enjoyed improvising. 

But back to the show. The quaint farms that Galifianakis visits are as much producers of sustenance as they are of knowledge. You’ll learn a lot from the series, like where apples came from, how to graft a fruit tree, how corn will develop weirdly if not pollinated properly, and what you shouldn’t add to your compost bin (if you think plastic utensils are OK, maybe gardening isn’t for you after all). 

The short series won’t turn you into a master gardener. But it doesn’t have to, because much of the thrill of gardening is figuring it out for yourself through trial and error, when dealing with raccoons or otherwise. “Very pompously, if I were to offer a remedy to the human condition, it would be a garden,” Galifianakis says. “Or acid.”

So Zach, the next time you’re in San Francisco and want to lend me a hand, let me know. With the raccoons, not the acid.  

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline While Zach Galifianakis finds peace in gardening, I’m at war with raccoons on May 1, 2026.

Abigail Spanberger won a landslide victory in the Virginia governor’s race last November with a platform that focused on reining in rising electricity costs. Virginia is home to the world’s largest concentration of artificial-intelligence data centers, and the state’s biggest utility is straining to meet an expected surge in power demand. Spanberger, a Democrat, promised on the campaign trail to “make Virginians’ bills more affordable.”

It might seem surprising, then, that the new governor signed a bill last month that would return Virginia to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, a carbon pricing program that covers electrical utilities in states across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. Spanberger’s Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, pulled out of the program in 2022.

“Cap-and-trade” programs like RGGI put a ceiling on the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide that utilities are allowed to emit when they generate electricity, and they require utilities to pay for every ton of carbon they emit below that cap. These programs can help drive utilities toward cleaner fuels, but they also increase costs, and those costs get passed on to consumers.

As a result, cap-and-trade programs have come under scrutiny as Democrats pivot to a focus on lowering costs for voters concerned about inflation. Democrats in California have called for relaxing the state’s cap-and-trade system this year, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has tried to punt on launching a cap-and-trade system that would apply to emissions from cars and buildings, on top of the state’s membership in RGGI. 

Supporters of RGGI (pronounced “reggie”) say that rather than driving bills up for Virginia households, re-entering the carbon price alliance could protect many families in the state from shouldering the costs of the data center boom. The revenues from selling pollution permits could eventually lower energy bills in many households and speed up Virginia utilities’ shift away from fossil fuels.

“Of course [RGGI] imposes costs on ratepayers, because we’re trying to internalize the costs that pollution is causing on everyone else,” said William Shobe, an original architect of the RGGI program who is now an emeritus professor of public policy at the University of Virginia. “But…if you design it right, it’s another tool for reallocating the costs that data centers are imposing on ratepayers.” 

The 10 other states in the RGGI program agree by consensus to lower the cap on emissions every few years, which should encourage utilities to get more power from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Since the program launched in 2009, utilities in the Northeast have reduced their overall emissions twice as fast as the rest of the United States, mainly by replacing dirty coal power with natural gas.

More than half of Virginians get their electricity from a giant utility called Dominion, which serves the state’s populous coast. In the past, Dominion has dealt with RGGI costs by imposing a surcharge on all customers. It came out to around $4.50 a month for the average household. Some have argued that the utility never needed to pass on these charges, but now that Virginia is rejoining RGGI, a representative from Dominion told Grist it will seek to reimpose them.

The price of a RGGI pollution permit has doubled in the past five years — from $8 to $16 for every ton — as member states have tried to ratchet down carbon emissions. At the same time, energy consumption in Virginia has increased by around 15 percent due to the AI boom. Data centers now consume around 20 percent of the state’s electricity, a number that could increase to more than 50 percent by 2030, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent research firm. 

That surge in demand means that Virginia’s utilities will have to purchase more carbon permits from RGGI, which will make it more expensive for them to burn natural gas. Even though Virginia left the alliance for a few years under Youngkin, it will have to keep up with the pace of decarbonization across the rest of the Northeast.

“[Virginia] is coming back at the allocation where they would be if they had not left,” said Andrew McKeon, the head of the nonprofit that manages RGGI, during a talk earlier this month at the BloombergNEF energy summit in New York City. 

But returning to RGGI might not harm Spanberger’s affordability agenda as much as opponents claim. States spend the revenue raised from permits on projects that help reduce energy bills. Before it left the program, Virginia spent about $250 million in RGGI funds to make low-income households more energy efficient by, for instance, weatherizing homes against temperature swings and upgrading HVAC systems. These improvements even benefit customers who don’t receive them because using less energy tamps down prices. That’s not to mention the future health benefits of reduced pollution from coal and gas plants.

Data centers themselves will likely foot a large share of the bill for rejoining RGGI, since they use such a big share of the state’s electricity. Late last year, Dominion rolled out a new rate structure for “large load” users, requiring them to pay for most of the cost of generating and distributing the power they need, an effort to ensure those costs didn’t get spread onto ordinary homeowners. Shobe said that Virginia legislators are weighing whether to change the way they spend RGGI’s revenues so that some of the money gets funneled to help low-income families pay their electric bills. 

“It [would be] an automatic mechanism for recovering some of those increased costs and giving it back,” he said. Some low-income households that don’t use much energy would see their bills go down compared to if Virginia wasn’t in RGGI. (Shobe has been appointed to Virginia’s state air pollution control board, though he doesn’t have an affiliation with the Spanberger administration.)

A coal power plant owned by Dominion Energy in Saint Paul, Virginia. The utility must replace all its fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy in the coming decades. Mike Belleme for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Even if RGGI doesn’t threaten Spanberger’s promise to lower energy bills, experts disagree about how much the cap-and-trade program will do to speed Virginia’s shift off fossil fuels. The state legislature has already ordered Dominion to phase out all its fossil fuel plants by 2045, although the utility is allowed to keep them open if it’s necessary to avoid blackouts. Dominion has brought around 2 gigawatts of solar power online over the past decade, and plans another 16 gigawatts over the next decade, at a cost of around $8 billion. In 2024, fossil fuels made up about 60 percent of Virginia’s energy mix, with the rest coming from nuclear and some solar.

Dominion will also soon begin taking power from the country’s largest offshore wind farm, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, which is nearing completion despite interference from the Trump administration. But the company is also seeking to expand a large gas power plant over the objection of environmentalists and community groups. Dominion plans to spend even more money on gas development than on solar, and it has met data center demand by importing power from dirtier coal and gas plants in West Virginia and Ohio. The utility said last year that phasing out its use of fossil fuels to meet the state’s law would cost $270 billion. (Environmental groups have disputed these estimates.)

Given the existing Virginia Clean Economy Act mandate and the high cost of maintaining reliable round-the-clock power without fossil fuels, some doubt that RGGI will push Virginia off natural gas any faster. 

“I don’t see a magic wand, we’re hitting the ceilings everywhere,” said Shuting Pomerleau, an energy analyst at American Action Forum, a center-right think tank. “I will be very skeptical if all these things combined could accelerate the decarbonization much faster than it currently already is.”

But supporters of Virginia’s rejoining RGGI argue that it will influence decisions made by Dominion and other utilities. These companies will soon need to spend tens of billions of dollars to meet surging demand, and that power has to come from somewhere. The financial nudge of RGGI will make investment in solar and batteries look more appealing compared to holding on to fossil fuels, said Jamie Dickerson, a senior policy analyst at the Acadia Center, a climate policy think tank.

“RGGI will be a direct price signal,” Dickerson said. 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can a carbon price lower power bills? Virginia is betting yes. on May 1, 2026.

Since President Donald Trump took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has made it harder for small and activist investors to raise concerns through the government filing system known as EDGAR. Now they’re pushing back with their own alternative platform, which they call the Proxy Open Exchange — or POE. 

Literary puns aside, the initiative is aimed at bringing greater transparency to an increasingly restricted space. In January, the SEC said it would no longer allow investors with less than $5 million in shares to use EDGAR to send communiqués called exempt solicitations to fellow shareholders. Such documents are often used to lay out an investor’s stance on a given issue, including climate action, board accountability, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“We believe a free market requires communication,” said Andrew Behar, CEO of the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, which spearheaded the new site. “If they’re going to take away EDGAR, we’re going to give them POE.”

The response has been swift. In less than a week, POE has 63 filings, with dozens more expected. EDGAR shows just 39 exempt solicitations so far in 2026. 

The SEC declined to comment about POE, but has previously told Grist that limiting access to the system is an attempt to rein in the scope of government, ease burdensome regulation, and curtail the “large volume” of requests that often require prompt attention. “Over the years, companies have expressed concerns that this misuse has caused confusion among their investor base,” an SEC spokesperson said at the time. “Shareholders can continue to conduct exempt solicitations through other commonly used means, such as press releases, emails, websites, and social media, and electronic shareholder forums.”

Critics of the move see it as an attempt to silence irksome investors.

The work-around is not the only attempt at an alternative to the official platform. The nonprofit Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, for instance, recently started putting exempt solicitations and proxy memos it receives about issues relevant to its members on its website. Still, POE is the most robust effort yet to fill the gap the government created.

It is designed to mimic EDGAR, Behar said. It even relies on the same set of codes — known as central index keys — to identify individuals and companies making posts. Although As You Sow reviews submissions for basic errors, it doesn’t filter content, making POE, like EDGAR, open to all viewpoints. 

“POE is a new and adventurous approach to try to set up a large public website that people of all persuasions can post their solicitations on,” said Tim Smith, senior policy advisor for Interfaith Center, who applauded the idea. “It could be an investor that’s filing a resolution on climate. It could be a conservative investor who decides to push a resolution that’s challenging diversity, equity, or inclusion.” 

Any filings are subject to the same anti-fraud legal provisions required by EDGAR, says Jill Fisch, a professor of business law at the University of Pennsylvania. “The postings have to be accurate, so that doesn’t change,” she said. What is new is that POE’s interface is much more user-friendly, she said, calling the government’s site “kind of old and glitchy.” 

Not everyone, however, is embracing the system. According to Behar, one of the world’s largest proxy advisors — which helps its clients research shareholder proposals — won’t consider any information that’s not on the official platform. The company, ISS, declined an interview request and did not respond to written questions. Still, Fisch said the pool of potential users of the new system is vast. 

“The great thing about these being public websites is that they’re available to mutual funds, to smaller institutions, to universities, and so forth,” she said. She’ll be curious to see data on who uses the site in the coming weeks and months. So far, though, “it’s way too early to tell.”

Fisch will also be watching how corporations respond. Some, like Exxon Mobil, which has often opposed shareholder advocacy, could see it as a threat (the company did not respond to an interview request) and start their own platforms. Or, perhaps, the existence of unregulated alternatives will encourage companies to ask the SEC to push people back to EDGAR, where everything will be in the same place. 

Whatever the rationale, it would be relatively easy for the government to reverse course. “Any new administration or new SEC could change this in a moment,” said Smith. That, in many ways, would be an ideal outcome for Behar, who hopes that POE will be temporary.

“We do not want this to be a necessary platform into perpetuity,” he said. “This is hopefully short-lived. When the administration changes and the SEC returns to its core mission, we expect EDGAR to be restored because transparent information sharing is essential for the free market.”

More often, though, Fisch finds that platforms like POE are one-way streets. Even if EDGAR is loosened back up, she expects people to continue finding the alternatives useful. “Once investors figure out how cheap and easy and convenient it is to use the internet and social media to communicate, I don’t think they’re going to stop,” she said. “The cat’s out of the bag.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The SEC tried to silence activist investors. Now they’re fighting back. on Apr 30, 2026.

In February, the United States Department of Agriculture announced two proposed changes to federal rules governing the rate of production in meat processing plants — a move advocates say would endanger workers, public health, and the environment. One proposed amendment would raise the maximum line speeds in poultry slaughter from 140 birds per minute to 175 for chicken and from 55 birds per minute to 60 for turkey. For swine slaughter, the agency is proposing there be no cap on line speed at all. 

Last week, the public comment period for the proposed amendments came to a close. If finalized, these changes would “lower production costs and create greater stability in our food system” as well as help “keep groceries more affordable,” said Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins back in February.

The proposals are in line with other Trump administration policies that encourage higher meat consumption among Americans — like the revised food pyramid with its emphasis on eating more protein. But despite the promise of lower costs and higher efficiency, experts say these proposed rollbacks pose more risks than benefits to the public. 

“This is doubling down on an already broken and polluting food system,” said Dani Replogle, staff attorney at Food & Water Watch, an environmental nonprofit that submitted public comments against the proposed rules. 

The USDA will need time to review the tens of thousands of comments submitted, but the United Food and Commercial Workers, or UFCW, a union that represents workers along the food supply chain, estimates that over 22,000 comments oppose the poultry rule, along with over 20,000 oppose the pork rule. 

The union — which successfully sued and blocked the USDA from enacting a similar change to swine line speeds in 2021 — stresses that increasing line speeds in meat processing will result in more injuries for workers. While various parts of the line in these facilities are automated, the beginning of the line — where animals are corralled into the plants — is notoriously backbreaking and dangerous work. For chickens, workers who hang the birds by their feet often end up covered in fecal matter; in swine slaughterhouses, workers on the “kill floor” move pigs into stunning chambers. In both scenarios, unlike climate-controlled segments of the line, workers are exposed to the elements and face heat stress on very hot days. 

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Further down the line, workers handle knives and often labor shoulder-to-shoulder. They make repetitive motions for hours at a time, making the same cuts over and over to process hundreds or thousands of birds and swine. This workforce already runs the risk of developing carpal tunnel syndrome and enduring lacerations and amputations. Research has shown injury rates go up when line speeds increase.

The USDA contests this finding. In its proposed rule for poultry slaughter, the USDA states that a study funded by the agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service determined that increased line speeds during the evisceration segment of the line — where internal organs are removed from dead animals — “are not associated” with a higher risk of musculoskeletal disorder. The study’s authors, however, have since said that the proposed rule “fundamentally misunderstands and mischaracterizes the scope and results” of their research. 

“The potential for injury to these workers, it’s just something people can’t deny,” said Mark Lauritsen, who leads UFCW’s food processing, packaging, and manufacturing division. “Quite honestly, line speeds are too fast now.”

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson from the USDA said, “Decades of data prove that plants can run at higher speeds while maintaining process control and meeting every federal food safety standard.” They also added that federal inspectors in meat processing plants are still able to slow lines down if they discover a problem. 

Ultimately, the spokesperson said, “The USDA’s legal authority is strictly limited to ensuring food safety and process control; we do not have the power to regulate piece rates or how private companies manage their staff.” (Piece rate refers to the number of items — such as whole birds or parts — handled by a worker per minute.)

When it comes to meat processing, going faster “is not good for the environment either,” said Lauritsen. 

Packages of chicken at a supermarket in Texas. Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP via Getty Images

Slaughterhouses are incredibly water-intensive operations, due in part to the need to regularly spray down these facilities in order to maintain sanitary conditions while processing animals. In turn, they also produce a lot of waste — in the form of, yes, contaminated water, but also blood, guts, and fecal matter from animal carcasses. Both labor and environmental advocates argue that increasing the line speeds in slaughterhouses will necessarily increase the amount of water used and the amount of waste discharged into local ecosystems. 

In written comments submitted to the USDA, the Center for Biological Diversity stated: “Increasing line speed slaughter rates will increase slaughter capacity […] and lead to further damage to the environment, wildlife, animal welfare, worker safety, and public health (including food safety).” 

Replogle, the attorney at Food & Water Watch, also believes that if slaughterhouses go faster, then factory farms will decide to raise more animals. These farms, known as confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, are “another gigantic source of water pollution in particular and nitrate pollution,” said Replogle, as well as greenhouse gas emissions. Across the U.S., CAFOs are also linked to higher levels of air pollution in uninsured and Latino communities. 

In its proposed rule for poultry slaughter, the USDA states that increasing line speeds “would not affect consumer demand for the establishments’ products,” and that only “expected sales of poultry products […] would determine production levels in establishments.” But demand for meat in the U.S. is already quite high, with most Americans eating more than 1.5 times the daily protein requirement. 

It’s also unclear that increasing line speeds would actually lower the price of chicken and pork at the grocery store. Agricultural economist David Ortega, a professor at Michigan State University, said increasing slaughter capacity would only result in lower poultry and pork prices at the grocery store if slaughterhouses pass on their savings “through the supply chain.” That outcome, Ortega said, would run counter to the slaughterhouses’ economic incentives. 

For some workers, the proposition of increased line speeds has already been made real. Magaly Licolli is a labor organizer based in Springdale, Arkansas, where Tyson Foods, the largest U.S. meat corporation, is headquartered. She said that poultry workers in Northwest Arkansas, at companies she did not name, say they have already been told to work faster. “We had a meeting with workers from different companies. And all of them stated that the line speed had increased,” said Licolli. 

The USDA spokesperson said, “The safety and well-being of the workforce are essential to a stable food supply; however, worker safety is overseen by the Department of Labor, not USDA. The law is very clear on this.” They also added that meat processing plants have long been able to receive line speed waivers, which allow the facilities to operate at higher speeds — and that this may explain what workers are reporting to Licolli.

Debbie Berkowitz, a worker safety and health expert at Georgetown University, argued that increasing line speeds ultimately puts profits above all else. “I think the line speed issue is not about selling more chicken or pork, but being able to exploit workers and get them to work even harder and faster. That is how the companies save money,” said Berkowitz. In cases like this, Berkowitz argues that workers and the environment are treated as expendable. “It’s just churning through workers,” she said. In other words: “Exploitation 101.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s plan for ultrafast meat processing would be a disaster for workers and the environment on Apr 30, 2026.