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Tag: Climate change

  • Earth’s Largest Land-Based Carbon Sink Has Sprung a Disturbing Leak

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    ​​Often called the “lungs of Africa,” the Congo Basin is the world’s largest land-based carbon sink. For thousands of years, its swamps and peatlands have played a key role in regulating the global climate by soaking up vast amounts of carbon, but now, a troubling shift may be underway.

    A study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience found that two lakes within the Basin—Lac Mai Ndombe and its smaller neighbor, Lac Tumba—are releasing carbon in the form of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2). While some of the CO2 comes from recently produced plant matter, up to 40% stems from the Basin’s ancient peat.

    The swamps and peatlands of the Congo Basin only cover 0.3% of Earth’s land surface, but they hold 30 billion metric tons of carbon—one-third of the amount stored across all tropical peatlands. Scientists have long assumed that this carbon would remain locked inside the peat for millennia, but these new findings suggest otherwise.

    “As for what this means for the peat’s stability, that is the 30-billion-tonne question!” lead author Travis Drake, a carbon biogeochemist at ETH Zürich, told Gizmodo in an email. “It is entirely possible that this is a natural, balanced cycle: The vast peatlands slowly release carbon from below while sequestering a comparable amount from above, resulting in no net loss,” Drake explained. “However, the more alarming possibility is that climate or land-use changes are actively destabilizing the system, causing it to lose its stored carbon.”

    150 gigatons of ancient carbon each year

    The role that the Congo Basin’s peatlands play in regulating the global carbon cycle, and thus the climate, is poorly understood. That’s largely because the central part of the Basin is difficult for researchers to access due to a lack of road infrastructure. To overcome this, Drake and his colleagues used the natural waterways as their highway.

    Traveling aboard a large ship that served as both their living quarters and a floating laboratory, they navigated the Fimi River—a large tributary of the Kasaï—to reach the southern point of Lake Mai Ndombe.

    Both Mai Ndombe and Tumba are large, shallow blackwater lakes surrounded by swamp forests with thick peat deposits underneath. “Blackwater” is a colloquial term for a river or lake with a high concentration of dissolved organic matter, which gives the water a deep brown color resembling strong tea, Drake explained. The subsurface peat layer has accumulated over thousands of years as plant material has sunk to the wetland floor and partially decomposed.

    The researchers collected and analyzed water samples from both lakes, finding that 39% of the carbon in Lake Mai Ndombe and 40% in Lake Tumba comes from peat. This suggests that the breakdown of long-stored peat is a significant source of CO2 emissions from these lakes. The researchers estimate that Lake Mai Ndombe alone may be releasing more than 150 gigatons of ancient carbon into the atmosphere each year.

    A potential climate feedback loop

    How this carbon is escaping from the peatlands remains unclear, but Drake’s team believes it could be related to microbial activity deep within this organic layer.

    As microbes feed on the stored carbon, they convert it into methane through a process called methanogenesis. The researchers suspect that this subsurface methane then travels up through deep soil flowpaths into the lake, where it reacts with oxygen to produce CO2.

    “While we have found isotopic evidence in the lake supporting this, we still need to investigate the internal peat dynamics to confirm the full pathway,” Drake said.

    It’s possible that climate change is also playing a role in mobilizing carbon from the peat. As rising global temperatures drive more frequent and prolonged droughts, this could cause the peatlands to partially dry out, exposing them to more oxygen and promoting rapid decomposition, Drake explained.

    “There is actually paleoenvironmental evidence from regional peat cores showing that a similar climate-driven destabilization event has happened in the past, leading to massive losses of organic carbon,” he said.

    If human-driven warming has led to a similar event today, a feedback loop may be taking shape. “Naturally, the CO2 released from such an event today would exacerbate climate change, though still to a lesser degree than the anthropogenic emissions currently driving the rapid buildup of CO2 in our atmosphere,” Drake explained.

    He and his colleagues worry that rising temperatures and land use change could transform the Congo Basin’s blackwater lakes into sources of greenhouse gases, but how close they are to reaching this potential tipping point remains unclear. Their next project, which will investigate the mechanisms behind their findings and how these carbon emissions have evolved over the past 12,000 years, could offer some insight.

    “Ultimately, our goal is to better constrain the carbon budget of these peatlands, establishing a baseline to assess future changes and determine their current stability,” Drake said.

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    Ellyn Lapointe

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  • Sam Altman Defends A.I. Energy Use With Human Comparison, Sparking Debate

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    Sam Altman challenged critics of A.I.’s water and electricity consumption. Photo by John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images

    Sam Altman is pushing back on mounting criticism over the environmental toll of A.I. The OpenAI chief has dismissed claims about A.I.’s water consumption as “fake” and drawn comparisons between the electricity required to power A.I. systems and the energy it takes to develop human intelligence.

    Figures suggesting that tools like ChatGPT consume multiple gallons of water per query are “totally insane” and have “no connection to reality,” Altman said in a Feb. 20 interview with The Indian Express on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. Last year, Altman claimed that ChatGPT uses 0.000085 gallons of water per query—roughly one-fifteenth of a teaspoon—though he did not explain how he calculated that figure.

    A.I.’s water footprint largely stems from the need for evaporative cooling systems used to keep data center hardware from overheating. But Altman argued that companies like OpenAI are no longer directly managing such cooling processes. Many A.I. developers, he noted, are shifting toward cooling systems that recirculate liquid rather than continually drawing fresh supplies. Meanwhile, tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon have pledged to replenish more water than they withdraw by 2030.

    Even so, data centers continue to drink up water at a rapid pace. Total A.I.-related water consumption for cooling reached 23.7 cubic kilometers in 2025, a 38 percent increase over 2020, and is expected to more than triple over the next 25 years, according to a January report from Xylem. Despite the industry’s pivot to alternative methods, the report found that 56 percent of data center capacity still relies on some form of evaporative cooling.

    Altman was more measured when it came to electricity usage. “What is fair, though, is the energy consumption,” he said. “We need to move towards nuclear, wind, and solar very quickly.”

    Last April, the International Energy Agency reported that data centers accounted for roughly 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption in 2024. Their power use is rising at a rate more than four times faster than overall electricity demand and is expected to more than double by 2030.

    In response, major tech companies are pursuing data center agreements tied to alternative energy sources, including nuclear power, to ease pressure on grids. Altman, who previously led Y Combinator, has personally invested in nuclear ventures such as Oklo, which is developing small-scale nuclear plants, and Helion, which aims to commercialize nuclear fusion.

    The OpenAI CEO also argued that critics overlook the energy required to develop human intelligence. “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an A.I. model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query,” he said. “But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human—it takes, like, 20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time before you get started.”

    A more appropriate comparison, he suggested, would measure the energy used by a fully trained A.I. model to answer a question against that used by a human doing the same task. “Probably A.I. has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis measured that way.”

    The remarks quickly sparked debate online over whether such comparisons are appropriate. “He’s saying a really big spreadsheet and a baby are morally equivalent,” wrote Matt Stoller, research director of the American Economic Liberties Project, in a post on X. Sridhar Vembu, founder and chief scientist of software firm Zoho Corporation, also took issue with the OpenAI chief’s statements. A.I. should “quietly recede into the background” instead of dominating our lives, said the billionaire on X. “I do not want to see a world where we equate a piece of technology to a human being.”

    Sam Altman Defends A.I. Energy Use With Human Comparison, Sparking Debate

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    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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  • Supreme Court agrees to hear from oil, gas companies trying to block climate lawsuits

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    WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear from oil and gas companies trying to block lawsuits seeking to hold the industry liable for billions of dollars in damage linked to climate change.

    The conservative-majority court agreed to take up a case from Boulder, Colorado, among a series of lawsuits alleging the companies deceived the public about how fossil fuels contribute to climate change.

    Governments around the country have sought damages totaling billions of dollars, arguing it’s necessary to help pay for rebuilding after wildfires, rising sea levels and severe storms worsened by climate change. The lawsuits come amid a wave of legal actions in states including California, Hawaii and New Jersey and worldwide seeking to leverage action through the courts.

    Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil appealed to the Supreme Court after Colorado’s highest court let the Boulder case proceed. The companies argue emissions are a national issue that should be heard in federal court, where similar suits have been tossed out.

    “The use of state law to address global climate change represents a serious threat to one of our Nation’s most critical sectors,” attorneys wrote.

    President Donald Trump’s administration weighed in to support the companies and urge the justices to reverse the Colorado Supreme Court decision, saying it would mean “every locality in the country could sue essentially anyone in the world for contributing to global climate change.”

    Trump, a Republican, has criticized the lawsuits in an executive order, and the Justice Department has sought to head some off in court.

    Attorneys for Boulder had agued that the litigation is still in early stages and should stay in state court. “There is no constitutional bar to states addressing in-state harms caused by out-of-state conduct, be it the negligent design of an automobile or sale of asbestos,” they wrote.

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    Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

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  • Colorado mountains’ reduced snowpack — a sign of things to come or temporary? (Letters)

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    Reduced snowpack — a sign of things to come, or a temporary problem?

    Re: “Endangered snowpack,” Denver Post three-part series on climate and ski industry, Feb. 15-17

    The Post seems to be heavily focused on climate change and any weather that supports its philosophy. Over the last few days, there were a number of articles on Colorado’s recent warm/low snow weather and climate change.

    However, this partial analysis doesn’t provide a full picture, including:

    1) For at least the last five years, there have been typical snows and temperatures here.

    2) It ignores the record cold/snow in the eastern United States this year that killed more than 100 people.

    3) Huge lakes froze over this year (such as Erie and Champlain) that rarely freeze. It begs the question — is weather variability being confused with climate change by The Post?

    In examining the complex climate, a complete analysis is needed to provide a comprehensive view– not cherry-picking events that meet a predetermined agenda. I wonder if The Post has a significant “confirmation bias” on this issue, where anything that doesn’t agree gets buried and things that confirm it get endlessly pushed.

    William Turner, Denver

    With the “Endangered Snowpack” article, there’s a color timeline graph of the number of days that individual Colorado ski resorts were open in 2025, plus dismal projections for 2050 and 2090, based upon the assertion that the “damage already done by anthropogenic climate change to the U.S. ski industry is evident”. That may be the case, but such climate change, reputedly caused by greenhouse gas emissions, could not have occurred overnight.

    In other words, why are there no graphs for 2015, 2000, 1995, etc.? (If the number of ski days in past decades is not easily obtainable, then the recorded snowfall would probably have made a better metric for this analysis.) Regardless, any valid attempt to predict future snowfall is meaningless if it fails to include statistics on snowfall from previous years.

    John Contino, Golden

    Don’t let politicians get involved in water compact negotiations

    Re: “States fail to meet another deadline for water deal,” Feb. 17 news story

    The Post has been carrying a series on the current drought-caused water shortages and their impact on the ski resorts. These stories are of “above the fold, front-page importance.”  Tucked away in the upper corner of Page 2 on Tuesday is an article about states missing the deadline for an agreement on distribution of the shrinking water flows in the Colorado River and the threat of the Bureau of Reclamation stepping in and setting the distribution. Extended litigation is forecast.

    The dispute between the states boils down to the split between the Upper Basin states and the Lower Basin states, and whether the Upper Basin states should reduce their allotments during low-flow years, which they oppose.

    The Colorado ski industry uses a tremendous amount of Colorado River water to make snow. The Front Range cities divert tremendous amounts of Colorado River water for urban domestic use. Both have purchased sufficient senior water rights to sustain current standards, but these are Colorado state water rights, which could have dubious value in the negotiations over the interstate distribution of available river flows.

    In the current political climate, Colorado, being a so-called “blue state,” may have trouble retaining these rights. The president is throwing out all kinds of threats of retaliation for perceived slights, and he controls the Bureau of Reclamation. In particular, Denver, a “sanctuary city,” could be very vulnerable to having its current diversion severely curtailed.

    I hope the Denver Water Board, as well as city and state officials, and our Congressional representatives, act expeditiously to mitigate any adverse impacts.

    Richard (Dick) Emerson, Denver

    Move beyond false choices in energy policy

    Re: “Global energy demand is rising as Colorado is still restricting operations,” Feb. 15 commentary

    In her opinion column on global energy demand, Lynn Granger creates a false dichotomy when she states, “Colorado politics has framed energy policy as a moral choice rather than a systems challenge.” Energy policy is both a moral choice and a systems challenge.

    Given the scientific consensus that fossil fuels are the root cause of the climate crisis, and given the impacts we’ve seen here in Colorado — including the fires, floods, beetle-kill, meager snowpacks, and the dire condition of the Colorado River — doing anything other than constraining the burning of fossil fuels can be considered a crime against the people of Colorado.

    And, given that the whole planet shares the same atmosphere, any steps that would perpetuate or increase the burning of fossil fuels in Colorado could readily be considered crimes against humanity. Energy policy is indeed a moral choice.

    And energy policy is also a systems challenge. Our challenge is to transition our energy systems from huge, established, and entrenched extractive and polluting industries to systems more reliant on clean energy and more resilient to disruptions by climate-change-driven weather events.

    Fortunately, many of the technologies we need are already available. And they are being implemented right here in Colorado. In 2024, Colorado overtook California as the EV capital of the United States with 25.3% in new EV sales. The electricity delivered by Holy Cross Energy was 85% clean last year.

    We can get to a cleaner, safer, healthier future, but Ms. Granger’s false choice doesn’t help us.

    Chris Hoffman, Boulder

    Lynn Granger’s guest opinion is basically “drill, baby, drill” obfuscated in a word salad. Instead of “drill, baby, drill” she talks about “maximizing existing assets” and “preserving affordability.” She helpfully points out that burning hydrocarbons is an easy and relatively cheap way to provide additional energy, because demand is increasing.

    Granger chastises Colorado leaders for prioritizing the “tired” and “outdated” framing of renewable energy. Her opinion is nothing more than the classic Baby-Boomer approach to everything — “let’s consume it, burn it, use it up, borrow and spend it” and then pass all the problems down to our children and grandchildren.

    When you boil down her opinion, it turns out to be — take the easy way out.

    Roy W. Penny Jr., Denver

    When the world asks us too much, dogs provide comfort

    Re: “Are we asking too much of our dogs?” Feb. 15 commentary

    Clara Bow, the “It Girl,” is reported to have said, “The more I see of men, the more I like dogs.”

    Are we asking too much of our dogs? Absolutely not. Their potential as replacements for human interactions has been underestimated for years. Once, a family’s dog was just a dog. That is not longer true.

    Harry, my third and final dachshund, was invaluable to me during the pandemic, and he is even more invaluable to me now during this wretched presidency. (Does anyone not know by now how psychologically depleting last year and this year have been?)

    The importance of dogs — and other pets — during the pandemic became the theme of an art exhibition at the Lone Tree Arts Center. Harry was featured.

    I’m elderly. Final glide pattern. Mark Twain said, “The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man’s.”

    Craig Marshall Smith, Highlands Ranch

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    DP Opinion

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  • The Trump Administration Has Toppled a Landmark E.P.A. Finding

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    It fell to Doug Burgum, once the governor of North Dakota and now the Secretary of the Interior, to offer something resembling a scientific explanation for the Trump Administration’s decision to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” which states that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide pose a risk to the planet’s health. “CO2 was never a pollutant,” Burgum said. “When we breathe, we emit CO2. Plants need CO2 to survive and grow. They thrive with more CO2.”

    Considering that, in recent weeks, Burgum has also appeared in a cartoon with a lump of coal known as Coalie (“Mine, Baby, Mine!”) on social media, such reasoning is perhaps the best that one can hope for. It’s roughly the equivalent of explaining to a drowning person that you’re not going to throw him a life preserver because water is a building block of life. Carbon dioxide is, in fact, among the most dangerous substances at work on the Earth; as it collects in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, it is rapidly raising the Earth’s temperature, melting its poles, and setting off endless rounds of flood and fire. The latest warning came this past week, from a global team of scientists who noted, in a journal paper, that “we may be approaching a perilous threshold, with rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.” Indeed, recent weeks have produced predictions that a new El Niño is in the offing for later this year and, with it, the near certainty of new and dire temperature records.

    Given all that, the decision to terminate the E.P.A.’s finding—which the agency issued in 2009, two years after the Supreme Court ruled, in Massachusetts v. E.P.A., that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act—has to rank as one of the signal moments in America’s descent into idiocracy. Literally every major scientific organization in the world, not to mention every other U.S. President since 1988, and even all the largest oil companies, have acknowledged the dangers of greenhouse gases. The decision is of a piece with the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and its efforts to disconnect satellites and monitoring stations—including, in December, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder—that the world has relied on to track changes in the planet’s chemistry and temperature.

    The repeal of the finding will face significant legal challenges, but the climate-skeptic industry is convinced that it has won a final battle. “We are pretty close to total victory,” Myron Ebell, a veteran of the movement, who fought climate and conservation initiatives for decades and served in the first Trump Administration, told the Times. Marc Morano, who worked for Rush Limbaugh and played a key role in the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry before he switched to attacking climate-change policy, appears in an E.P.A. news release stating that the Administration’s actions “will make America much safer from any future climate wreckage inflicted by potential presidents like Gavin Newsom or AOC.”

    A Times piece on the E.P.A.’s decision ran under a headline ratifying a sense that the Rubicon is now in the rearview mirror of a gas-guzzling S.U.V.: “Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change.” The fear is understandable—the finding has been the linchpin of federal regulations on everything from cars to coal-fired power stations. But it’s not, in fact, game over for future climate action, and understanding why allows for a more nuanced picture of where the climate fight actually stands now.

    It was in 1988 that the public debate about climate change began, after the NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress and warned of the coming crisis. But, for the next thirty-five years or so, the fact that fossil fuel was relatively cheap and clean energy was relatively expensive constrained the debate. For the most part, environmentalists’ strategies involved somewhat complicated ways to bypass that economic reality. If they couldn’t persuade elected officials to raise the price of fossil fuels through taxes, they could, for instance—and quite legitimately—argue for treating by-products of fossil fuels as dangerous pollutants and begin to limit their use on that basis. The finding, though entirely correct, was also always a work-around, a way of avoiding having to directly confront the overwhelming power of the fossil-fuel industry in our political and economic life.

    Then, earlier this decade, it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and the wind than from coal and gas and oil. Around the world, the surge in clean power is now moving faster than any energy transition in history. Over the course of twenty-one months, greenhouse-gas emissions in China have plateaued and even dropped; perhaps even more significant, coal use has declined recently in India, as solar fields expand, creating a real possibility that it may be the first large nation to pass through rapid economic development without relying mostly on fossil fuel. And new reports indicate that Africa is now the fastest-growing solar market in the world, with solar capacity up fifty-four per cent over the course of the past year.

    The Trump Administration can, of course, hinder the development of clean tech in the U.S.—it has shut down under-construction windfarms, restricted the installation of panels on federal lands, and removed already built and paid-for E.V. chargers from federal buildings. That it has done this to appease the fossil-fuel industry, which provided enormous financial support to Republicans in the 2024 elections, is too obvious to be worth denying. But that effort speaks, at least in part, to the industry’s nervousness. It’s even in trouble in Texas, which last year led the U.S. in clean-energy and battery installation, and where, Google announced just this past week, two new data centers it is building will be fuelled by solar power.

    So if a President Newsom (in his current role, as governor of California, Newsom just signed a new agreement on climate coöperation with the British government) or a President Ocasio-Cortez were to take office someday, with a goal to rejoin the international climate fight or just to restore the U.S. as a serious manufacturing competitor to China, their first priority would not be a new endangerment finding from the E.P.A. That was the right move back in the day. Now job No. 1 would be getting back to building clean energy. ♦

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    Bill McKibben

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  • Editorial Roundup: United States

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    Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

    The Washington Post on nuclear innovation in the age of AI

    As America’s energy demands grow exponentially, the country won’t be able to keep up without more nuclear power. For decades, the climate-friendly industry has been held back by overly burdensome regulations, but that’s beginning to change.

    In the 1960s, plants took about four years to build, and they cost, in today’s dollars, about $1,500 per kilowatt of electricity generated. Now the idea of building a reactor in less than a decade is unheard of, and the cost of construction is six times greater.

    The Energy Department took steps this month to exempt certain advanced reactors from duplicative environmental reviews. It’s also flirting with relaxing radiation standards and eliminating some over-the-top security requirements at nuclear plants.

    Defenders of the status quo try to prey on people’s fears of nuclear technology. NIMBYs and radical environmentalists pretend that overregulation is not actually the reason for the industry’s malaise and is instead necessary to instill public confidence.

    This ignores the many undue burdens that federal agencies have placed on projects. Sometimes, regulators have even forced changes to designs mid-construction, as happened in 2009, when they required containment buildings for reactor developments in Georgia and South Carolina to be able to withstand direct aircraft strikes, driving up costs and delaying construction.

    It’s no surprise that regulatory costs surged after the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, but the pendulum has swung too far. Nuclear developers have a point about onerous documentation rules. The administration would do well to emphasize regulatory stability, as well as explore how technology such as artificial intelligence can help alleviate paperwork burdens.

    Capital is already pouring into the nuclear industry from big firms like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos. Yet billions in new investment won’t mean much if the regulatory state refuses to challenge long-held norms.

    Take, for example, the government’s overly stringent radiation standards. The Trump administration has indicated it will reform a decades-old rule requiring nuclear power plants to keep levels of exposure to radiation “as low as reasonably achievable.”

    The rule has led hypercautious regulators to mandate that plants minimize exposure to well below levels that people experience annually from the natural world, such as from the sun. That has forced operators to incorporate concrete shields into their reactor designs, which raise costs and limit how long employees can work at a given time.

    The science underpinning the radiation rule is mushy, at best. It’s based on a theory that because radiation poses a serious cancer risk at high doses, it must also pose a low risk at lower doses. But researchers have hotly debated whether this is true, which is hard to measure given how many factors contribute to cancer risk. Meanwhile, coal plants are subject to no standards on radiation, even though they release far greater levels of radioactive material to the public than nuclear plants.

    No standard should be a be sacred cow, especially as new designs for advanced reactors promise greater safety. Everyone loses when bureaucrats snuff out nuclear innovation.

    The New York Times says Pam Bondi’s malice, incompetence protected perpetrators and stripped victims of privacy

    The hearing in the House Judiciary Committee room this week offered a grim tableau of the state of American justice. Sitting in the gallery were victims of Jeffrey Epstein, women who have waited decades for clarity and accountability. Sitting before them was Attorney General Pam Bondi. When offered the opportunity to apologize to these women for the Department of Justice’s disastrous handling of the Epstein files, Ms. Bondi didn’t just decline; she sneered. Instead, she demanded that Democrats apologize to President Trump.

    She proceeded to subject committee members from both parties to schoolyard taunts. She called the ranking member a “washed-up, loser lawyer.” She derided Thomas Massie — a Kentucky Republican who helped force the release of the Epstein documents after Mr. Trump and Ms. Bondi had kept them hidden — as a “failed politician.” And at one point, in a bizarre non sequitur, she responded to a question she did not like by boasting that the Dow Jones industrial average had surpassed 50,000 points.

    Ms. Bondi’s performance was more than just political theater. It was a final indignity in a process that has victimized Mr. Epstein’s victims all over again. Under the guise of transparency, the Justice Department has managed to expose the victims to further humiliation while shielding the powerful behind a wall of redactions.

    The department’s release of these files has been dominated by incompetence. Ms. Bondi has long had the authority to make them public, but she spent months refusing and yielded only after Congress forced her hand. Her department was then tasked with a clear mandate: release the information while protecting the victims’ privacy, national security and active investigations. Instead, in a grotesque failure, the D.O.J. uploaded dozens of unredacted images to its website, including nude photographs of young women and possibly teenagers. As Annie Farmer, a survivor who testified against Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s partner and associate, noted, it is “hard to imagine a more egregious way of not protecting victims.” Ms. Bondi’s department shattered the trust of women who had already been betrayed by the legal system once before.

    Yet observe the Justice Department’s selective efficiency: While it was careless with the dignity of survivors, it has been more fastidious about protecting the reputations of some members of the elite. Mr. Massie and Representative Ro Khanna, the Californian who has also been central to the release of the documents, have reviewed the unredacted files, and they report that nearly 80 percent of the material remains hidden, including the identities of six wealthy, powerful men. The Justice Department has not even offered a convincing public explanation for these redactions. The Trump administration’s history of disingenuousness around the Epstein files — and its use of the Justice Department to protect political allies and investigate perceived enemies — offers ample reason to be skeptical. This appears to be a weaponized document dump disguised as a reckoning.

    A close reading of the released emails suggests that what is being protected is the comfort of a class of people who believed they were untouchable. The files released reveal a merito-aristocracy that traded favors, influence and access. They depict a transactional world where Kathryn Ruemmler, a former White House counsel for Barack Obama, could joke with a registered sex offender, strategize about her career prospects and accept gifts of designer bags. Howard Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s commerce secretary, claimed he “barely had anything to do” with Mr. Epstein but in fact visited his private island. We read of elites seeking entry to golf clubs, advice on dating, introductions to celebrities and college admission for their children.

    The files reveal a barter economy of powerful people who, at best, looked the other way. As Anand Giridharadas has noted, these documents show us “how the elite behave when no one is watching.” They reveal a world where character is irrelevant and connection is everything.

    Mr. Trump’s role in the selective release deserves attention. While he has railed against the swamp, his administration continues to hide vast amounts of Epstein information. The president’s own history with Mr. Epstein apparently included a bizarre birthday note wishing that “every day be another wonderful secret.” And some of the redactions involved Mr. Trump. A redaction box, for example, appeared over a photograph of him delivering a speech. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said that he also saw redacted pages that involved Mr. Epstein’s lawyers quoting Mr. Trump as saying that he never asked Mr. Epstein to leave Mar-a-Lago — a claim at odds with Mr. Trump’s descriptions.

    Ms. Bondi’s refusal to look the survivors in the eye was symbolic of a broader failure. The Department of Justice had an opportunity to finally prioritize the women who were preyed upon by Mr. Epstein and his circle. Instead, through a combination of malice and incompetence, it has done the opposite. It has stripped the victims of their privacy while wrapping perpetrators in a cloak of state secrecy.

    Americans should not accept vague excuses for protecting the identities of Mr. Epstein’s associates. A two-tiered justice system that coddles the powerful and revictimizes the vulnerable is a violation of American values. The survivors in that hearing room deserved an apology. More than that, they deserve the truth about Mr. Epstein and his friends, unspun and fully exposed.

    The Guardian says the U.S. is in reverse regarding the climate crisis

    Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year – at an estimated total loss of $115bn. The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.

    Just one day later, Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, announced the elimination of the Obama-era endangerment finding which underpins federal climate regulations. Scrapping it is just one part of Mr Trump’s assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels. But it may be his most consequential. Any fragment of hope may lie in the fact that a president who has called global heating a “hoax” framed this primarily as about deregulation – perhaps because the science is now so widely accepted even in the US.

    The administration claimed, without evidence, that Americans would save $1.3tn. Never mind insurance or healthcare costs; a recent report found that US earnings would be 12% higher without the climate crisis. The Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse called the decision “corruption, plain and simple”. In 2024, Mr Trump reportedly urged 20 fossil fuel tycoons to stump up $1bn for his presidential campaign – while vowing to remove controls on the industry.

    In the same week as this reckless and destructive US decision, it emerged that China had recorded its 21st month of flat or slightly falling carbon emissions. As Washington tears up environmental regulations, Beijing is extending carbon reporting requirements. China remains the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, though its per capita and cumulative historical emissions are still far behind those of the US. But clean energy drove more than 90% of its investment growth last year.

    The Carbon Brief website, which published the emissions analysis, says the numbers suggest that the decline in China’s carbon intensity – emissions per unit of GDP – was below the target set in the last five-year plan, making it hard to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement. The shift in emissions may not prove enduring. There is fear that China’s focus may change; the next five-year plan, due in March, will be key. Some subsidies for renewable power have already been withdrawn. The installation of huge quantities of renewable energy infrastructure has been accompanied by a surge in constructing coal-fired power plants, though the hope is that these are intended primarily as a fallback.

    There are other grave concerns, including evidence of the use of forced labour of Uyghur Muslims in solar-panel production in Xinjiang. China’s chokehold on critical minerals hampers the ability of others to develop their own technology. And while its cheap renewables technology has resulted in the cheapest electricity in history, it has also hit manufacturers in other countries.

    No one can compensate for the grim reversal of belated US action on emissions. There is also a vacuum in climate diplomacy that China shows no signs of filling. But Beijing has a vested interest in encouraging others to cut emissions, even if some nations now want to challenge its “green mercantilism”. In contrast, US billionaires look forward to prospering at the cost of wallets and lives – not only at home, but around the world.

    The Philadelphia Inquirer on Trump’s attempt to whitewash the President’s House exhibit

    A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore the slave exhibits that were removed last month from the President’s House on Independence Mall.

    Fittingly, the legal rebuke came during Black History Month as Trump tries to rewrite America’s history of slavery, undermine voting rights and rollback civil rights efforts designed to live up to the Founders’ vision of a country where all are created equal.

    Even better, the ruling came on Presidents Day, a federal holiday first set aside to honor George Washington, who voluntarily gave up power, unlike Trump who was criminally indicted for trying to overturn an election he lost.

    In a poetic touch that feels conjured by Octavius Catto or William Still, the Trump administration lost in federal court on a lawsuit brought by the City of Philadelphia, which is headed by its first African American woman mayor.

    The President’s House exhibit was created to recognize the enslaved people who lived in Washington’s home in Philadelphia while he was president. Like the nearby Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the President’s House is an essential part of American history.

    Trump wants to airbrush the parts of American history that do not fit with his racist record and white supremacist messaging. But understanding how slavery shaped the economic, social and political forces across the United States is crucial to addressing the systemic racism and inequality that persists today.

    U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe called out Trump’s cruel attempt to take the country backward in unsparing terms. She began her 40-page opinion by quoting directly from 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian novel about a totalitarian regime:

    “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”

    She compared the Trump administration’s claim that it can unilaterally remove exhibits it does not like to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

    “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts,” Rufe wrote. “It does not.”

    Rufe, who was appointed to the federal bench by former President George W. Bush, did not buy the Trump’s administration’s authoritarian argument: “(T)he government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control.”

    She added: “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.”

    Rufe dismissed those claims and ordered the federal government to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026,” the day before the exhibits were removed.

    But Rufe did not set a deadline to restore the displays. She should order the exhibits restored as fast as they came down.

    The Trump administration will likely do everything it can to drag out a resolution.

    There is no time to waste in ending this racist charade.

    The country is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is a national embarrassment that the President’s House exhibits are missing while the city expects 1.5 million visitors this year.

    Philadelphia is the birthplace of America. It is here the Founders declared their independence from King George III. Their list of grievances against the king echo some of Trump’s abuses.

    Judge Rufe’s order struck a blow for telling the truth, something Washington would appreciate.

    “It is not disputed that President Washington owned slaves,” Rufe wrote. “Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery receives a false account of this country’s history.”

    Somewhere the slaves who labored at the President’s House smiled.

    Say their names: Ona Judge, Hercules Posey, Moll, Giles, Austin, Richmond, Paris, Joe Richardson, Christopher Sheels, and William Lee.

    The Minneapolis Star Tribune says citizens should demand the truth, accountability as Operation Metro Surge winds down

    Whatever their views on immigration enforcement, Minnesotans should welcome the announcement by border czar Tom Homan on Feb. 12 that Operation Metro Surge soon will end, and that a significant drawdown of the more than 3,000 agents who had been sent to the state under federal orders is underway.

    They should also welcome the vow by Gov. Tim Walz to focus state policies and legislation on recovery from the impacts of the disruption to normal life. The state’s legislative session begins Feb. 17.

    But as the Department of Homeland Security declares its mission accomplished and begins its retreat, many are left wrestling with an infuriating if not incendiary question. What was the point of the bloody spectacle? Stripped of politics and posturing, a state and a nation deserve clear answers.

    When Operation Metro Surge descended on Minnesota, it was described by its champions as a mission to combat fraud tied to Somali American communities and to make the Twin Cities safer. That’s not remotely close to what we witnessed over the course of the past 70 days.

    Indeed, it is the stunning gap between the stated purpose of the federal invasion of Minnesota, the campaign’s actual execution and the outcomes that occurred that completely undercuts the notion of a focused federal law enforcement operation. What we witnessed was a campaign steeped in blame and punishment. The fraud-based premise of the surge was arguably never more than a Trojan horse.

    Homan, who said that DHS agents will now be redeployed to other cities, lauded the Minnesota mission as a law enforcement win and said that a deeply shaken and fatigued Minneapolis is now a much safer place.

    By what immediate or lasting measure, we ask? There has been little to no transparency to the spectacle we have just endured.

    How many violent offenders were actually removed? If the goal was rooting out fraud or targeting dangerous individuals, why were broad sweeps conducted that netted people with little or no criminal history? If the goal was safety, why were these heavily armed and masked agents deployed in a manner that visibly destabilized neighborhoods, shuttered business and splintered families who had committed no crimes?

    Both of their deaths, officially ruled homicides, deserve a full investigation by the U.S. federal government. To date, the federal government has shown little to no interest in determining whether the deaths were legally justified. Good and Pretti will not be forgotten, and an accounting for their killings is not optional.

    There is no mistaking the reality that the harm that Minnesota will continue to bear goes beyond the abduction of children, the hollowing of schools, the wanton street persecution of Americans or even the two deaths. We will now be forced to grapple with “generational trauma” that goes beyond far beyond immigrant communities, as Walz aptly put it.

    Trust in government — already fragile — has been further eroded. But trust can and must be rebuilt. There’s no doubt that Operation Metro Surge induced people to take sides. Which side can declare victory will be in the eye of the beholder, but the many Minnesotans who dedicated themselves to peaceful resistance to aggressive policy can be proud.

    Sen. Amy Klobuchar, ever the Minnesota booster and who’s now running for governor, offered this observation with which we wholeheartedly agree:

    “Our state has shown the world how to protect our democracy and take care of our neighbors. ICE withdrawing from Minnesota is just the beginning. We need accountability for the lives lost and the extraordinary abuses of power at the hands of ICE agents, and we must see a complete overhaul of the agency.”

    Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer, meanwhile, a Republican, laid blame on Minnesota Democrats for the unrest during the ICE surge. He called it “a direct result of radical sanctuary state and city policies in Minnesota by preventing local law enforcement from working together with federal law enforcement,” while testifying Feb. 12 in front of a Senate committee about the shootings of Good and Pretti.

    There are those who undoubtedly agree with him. But as federal agents depart, the state still awaits answers — ones that will require far more than withdrawal. Minnesotans should not cease demanding truth, accountability and reckoning equal to the damage done and lives lost by an ICE surge that never needed to happen.

    Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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  • Revoking Climate-Change Regulation May Be the Worst Thing Trump Has Done

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    Photo: Joseph Sohm/Getty Images

    Sometimes the forces that lead to major social and political change take years to mature before they become public policy. The environmental movement, for example, began well before the first Earth Day in 1970; after decades of advocacy and resistance, the U.S. government finally passed laws regulating the practices and substances poisoning the planet.

    Now all that progress has been reversed at the hands of the Trump administration. The New York Times reported:

    President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

    The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.

    Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.

    The so-called endangerment finding, first promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009, represented the culmination of scientific and regulatory initiatives dating back to the Nixon presidency. Until Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, climate-change “denialism” was a fringe movement. While many Republicans questioned the pace and scope of climate-change regulation, they didn’t oppose it entirely. But now climate-change denialism is official U.S. policy, making this country a global pariah. We’re now the only country that has withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Agreement — in which most of the world agreed to greenhouse-gas-emission reductions — joining Iran, Libya, and Yemen as climate-change scofflaws.

    While Trump has long been a climate-change denier, he really amped up his opposition to environmental protection in 2024 as part of a devil’s bargain with the fossil-fuel industry, as the Brennan Center explained:

    Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. The investment, he said, would be a “deal” given the taxes and regulation they would avoid under his presidency. He also offered to help fast-track fossil fuel industry mergers and acquisitions if he won.

    This is one deal on which he has abundantly delivered:

    His signature legislative package [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act]— which one executive deemed “positive for us across all of our top priorities” — gives oil and gas firms $18 billion in tax incentives while rolling back incentives for clean energy alternatives. He’s placed fossil fuel allies in charge of the agencies that oversee the industry and fast-tracked drilling projects on public lands. In just his first 100 days back in office, Trump took at least 145 actions to undo environmental rules — more than he reversed during his entire first term as president.

    Yes, scientists and nature lovers generally have been stunned by the aggressively reactionary efforts of the 47th president to roll back the fundamental achievements of environmental policy for the past half-century. But you don’t need to be a professor or a tree hugger to comprehend that something dangerous is happening thanks to the toxins our industries and our cars are belching into the atmosphere. The recent explosion of extreme weather from coast to coast, and the steady diminution of the glories of the temperate seasons of spring and autumn, are evident to Americans over the age of 30. And Americans under the age of 30 need no convincing that climate change is a huge and very real challenge, as a 2024 Sacred Heart University survey shows:

    Nearly 2 in 3 (63%) youth report experiencing “eco-anxiety”—a level of psychological distress about climate change that impacts their daily lives—up from 55% in the 2024 ISSJ Sacred Heart University poll.

    Seven in 10 (70%) also report being worried about climate change. 

    This concern transcends demographics: more than 60% of Black, Hispanic and white youth report eco-anxiety,  and among Republicans and conservatives, over 60% say they also experience “eco-anxiety.” 

    Partisan polarization means that differences of opinion on climate change can be countered or obliterated by tribal allegiances on other issues. But it’s important to understand that this particular policy priority of the Trump administration is really bad, rivaling mass deportation, the inversion of civil-rights laws, the ongoing destruction of NATO, the subversion of reproductive rights, and the use of government as an instrument of vengeance as precedent-breaking developments. We will live and breathe Trump’s repudiation of climate-change initiatives for a long time.


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  • Trump administration dismantles US ability to fight climate change; environmentalists vow to appeal

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    In the Midwest, climate change is fueling extreme heat, toxic algal blooms in the Great Lakes and tornadoes across Illinois.


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  • Scientific studies calculate climate change as health danger

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    The Trump administration on Thursday revoked a scientific finding that climate change is a danger to public health, an idea that President Donald Trump called “a scam.” But repeated scientific studies say it’s a documented and quantifiable harm.

    Again and again, research has found increasing disease and deaths — thousands every year — in a warming world.

    The Environmental Protection Agency finding in 2009, under the Obama administration, has been the legal underpinning of nearly all regulations fighting global warming.

    “It boggles the mind that the administration is rescinding the endangerment finding; it’s akin to insisting that the world is flat or denying that gravity is a thing,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a physician and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington.

    Thousands of scientific studies have looked at climate change and its effects on human health in the past five years and they predominantly show climate change is increasingly dangerous to people.

    Many conclude that in the United States, thousands of people have died and even more were sickened because of climate change in the past few decades.

    For example, a study on “Trends in heat-related deaths in the U.S., 1999-2023 ” in the prestigious JAMA journal shows the yearly heat-related death count and rate have more than doubled in the past quarter century from 1,069 in 1999 to a record high 2,325 in 2023.

    A 2021 study in Nature Climate Change looked at 732 locations in 43 countries — including 210 in the United States — and determined that more than a third of heat deaths are due to human-caused climate change. That means more than 9,700 global deaths a year attributed to warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

    A new study published this week found that 2.2% of summer deaths in Texas from 2010 to 2023 were heat related “as climate change brings more frequent and intense heat to Texas.”

    In the more than 15 years, since the government first determined climate change to be a public health danger, there have been more than 29,000 peer-reviewed studies that looked at the intersection of climate and health, with more than 5,000 looking specifically at the United States, according to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed research database.

    More than 60% of those studies have been published in the past five years.

    “Study after study documents that climate change endangers health, for one simple reason: It’s true,” said Frumkin, a former director of the National Center for Environmental Health appointed by President George W. Bush.

    In a Thursday event at the White House, Trump disagreed, saying: “It has nothing to do with public health. This is all a scam, a giant scam.”

    Experts strongly disagree.

    “Health risks are increasing because human-cause climate change is already upon us. Take the 2021 heat dome for example, that killed (more than) 600 people in the Northwest,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, a physician who directs the Center for Health, Energy and Environmental Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The new climate attribution studies show that event was made 150-fold more likely due to climate change.”

    Patz and Frumkin both said the “vast majority” of peer-reviewed studies show health harms from climate change. Peer-reviewed studies are considered the gold standard of science because other experts pore over the data, evidence and methods, requiring changes, questioning techniques and conclusions.

    The various studies look at different parts of health. Some looked at deaths that wouldn’t have happened without climate change. Others looked at illnesses and injuries that didn’t kill people. Because researchers used different time periods, calculation methods and specific aspects of health, the final numbers of their conclusions don’t completely match.

    Studies also examined disparities among different peoples and locations. A growing field in the research are attribution studies that calculate what proportion of deaths or illness can be blamed on human-caused climate change by comparing real-world mortality and illness to what computer simulations show would happen in a world without a spike in greenhouse gases.

    Last year an international team of researchers looked at past studies to try to come up with a yearly health cost of climate change.

    While many studies just look at heat deaths, this team tried to bring in a variety of types of climate change deaths — heat waves, extreme weather disasters such as 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, wildfires, air pollution, diseases spread by mosquitos such as malaria — and found hundreds of thousands of climate change deaths globally.

    They then used the EPA’s own statistic that puts a dollar value on human life — $11.5 million in 2014 dollars — and calculated a global annual cost “on the order of at least $10 billion.”

    Studies also connect climate change to waterborne infections that cause diarrhea, mental health issues and even nutrition problems, Frumkin said.

    “Public health is not only about prevention of diseases, death and disability but also well-being. We are increasingly seeing people displaced by rising seas, intensifying storms and fires,” said Dr. Lynn Goldman, a physician and dean emeritus at the George Washington University School of Public Health.

    “We have only begun to understand the full consequences of a changing climate in terms of health.”

    The issue gets complicated when cold-related deaths are factored in. Those deaths are decreasing, yet in the United States there are still 13 times more deaths from cold exposure than heat exposure, studies show.

    Another study concludes that until the world warms another 2.7 degrees (1.5 degrees Celsius) from now, the number of temperature-related deaths won’t change much “due to offsetting decreases in cold-related mortality and increases in heat-related deaths.”

    But that study said that after temperatures rise beyond that threshold, and if society doesn’t adapt to the increased heat, “total mortality rises rapidly.”

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • EPA Ends Credits for Automatic Start-Stop Vehicle Ignition, a Feature Zeldin Says ‘Everyone Hates’

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    DETROIT (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency announced an end Thursday to credits to automakers who install automatic start-stop ignition systems in their vehicles, a device intended to reduce emissions that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said “everyone hates.”

    In remarks with President Donald Trump on Thursday at the White House, Zeldin called start-stop technology the “Obama switch” and said it makes vehicles “die” at every red light and stop sign. He said the credits, which also applied to options like improved air conditioning systems, are now “over, done, finished.”

    Zeldin repeated the generally-debunked claims that start-stop systems — which are mostly useful for city driving — are harmful to vehicles, asserting Thursday that “it kills the battery of your car without any significant benefit to the environment.”

    This latest Trump administration move to cut automotive industry efforts to clean up their cars and reduce transportation-driven emissions came as Zeldin and Trump also announced a broader repeal of the scientific finding known as endangerment that has been the central basis for regulating U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

    Start-stop is a technology that automatically shuts down a vehicle’s engine when a driver comes to a complete stop, and then automatically restarts the engine when the driver takes their foot off the brake pedal. Developed in response to the 1970s oil crisis, the feature was intended to cut vehicle idling, fuel consumption and emissions.

    About two-thirds of vehicles now have it, providing drivers with anywhere from 7% to 26% in fuel economy savings, according to the Society of Automotive Engineers. Start-stop also causes a split-second lag in acceleration, a point of irritation for some consumers and automotive enthusiasts.

    Burning gasoline and diesel fuel for transportation is a major contributor to planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and more, according to the EPA. By implementing the systems, automakers could earn credits toward meeting federal emissions reduction rules.

    “Countless Americans passionately despise the start/stop feature in cars,” Zeldin wrote in a post on X on Tuesday teasing the announcement. “So many have spoken out against this absurd start-stop-start-stop-start-stop concept.”

    The announcement made good on Zeldin’s promises last year to “fix” the feature. Start-stop is “where your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy,” Zeldin said in a post on X last May. “EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we’re fixing it,” he wrote at the time.

    Jeep-maker Stellantis welcomes the deregulatory effort, a spokesperson’s statement said: “We remain supportive of a rational, achievable approach on fuel economy standards that preserves our customers’ freedom of choice.”

    A Ford Motor Co. statement said: “We appreciate the work of President Trump and Administrator Zeldin to address the imbalance between current emissions standards and customer choice.”

    General Motors deferred comment to the auto industry group Alliance for Automotive Innovation.

    “I’ve said it before: Automotive emissions regulations finalized in the previous administration are extremely challenging for automakers to achieve given the current marketplace demand for EVs,” said John Bozzella, president of the alliance. “The auto industry in America remains focused on preserving vehicle choice for consumers, keeping the industry competitive, and staying on a long-term path of emissions reductions and cleaner vehicles.”

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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  • What if just 1 in 10 people changed how they eat, drive, heat or shop?

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    By AYA DIAB

    Climate change is often viewed as an issue that’s too big for individual action to matter. But calculations show that when personal choices add up, the impact can be significant.

    The Associated Press looked at four everyday behaviors in the U.S. ranging from food and transportation to home energy and clothing. The question was then posed: What if just one in 10 Americans who currently eat beef, drive gasoline cars, heat their homes with natural gas or buy new clothes changed each of those habits?

    To find out, the AP gathered data from federal agencies and other sources on each habit, then calculated how much emissions would be reduced if one out of every 10 users made a switch. The answer is tens, and in some cases hundreds, of billions of pounds of carbon pollution avoided each year.

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FILE – A line cook slices beef brisket June 12, 2024, at a barbecue restaurant in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel, File)

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Food: Swapping beef for chicken

Beef is one of the most carbon-intensive foods in the global food system because cattle emit methane and require vast amounts of land and feed, creating large amounts of climate pollution. Producing beef generates greenhouse gas emissions several times higher than chicken.

The recommended serving size of meat in the U.S. is 3 ounces (85 grams), according to the American Heart Association. Swapping one serving of beef that size for chicken once a week would cut about 10 pounds (4.54 kilograms) of carbon dioxide. Over 52 weeks in a year, that would equal a reduction of about 525 pounds (238 kilograms) of carbon dioxide per person per year.

About 74% of Americans eat beef at least once a week, according to a 2023 survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. If one out of every 10 of them — or about 25 million people — swapped just one beef meal a week for chicken, emissions would fall by about 13 billion pounds (roughly 6 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide each year. That change is roughly comparable to the annual emissions from nearly 1.3 million gasoline cars.

“Beef is a commonly consumed item that has one of the largest carbon footprints per pound,” said Dave Gustafson, project director at Agriculture & Food Systems Institute. “It is probably one of the largest individual choices that people make with regard to what they eat that has a direct impact on personal carbon footprint.”

FILE - Vehicles drive along a highway July 30, 2025, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel, File)
FILE – Vehicles drive along a highway July 30, 2025, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel, File)

Transportation: Gas cars to electric vehicles

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, transportation is one of the largest sources of direct greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and personal vehicles account for a major share of that total. Transportation accounts for 28% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by economic sector.

The EPA says the average U.S. motorist drives 11,500 miles (18,507 kilometers) per year. The average gas powered car emits 400 grams (14 ounces) of carbon dioxide per mile, compared with about 110 grams (3.9 ounces) of carbon dioxide per mile for an electric vehicle. Driving an electric vehicle instead of a gas car cuts roughly 7,400 pounds (3,357 kilograms) of carbon dioxide per person annually, even after accounting for emissions from electricity generation.

If a number of Americans equal to 1 in 10 licensed drivers — or 23.77 million people — made that switch, the emissions savings would add up to roughly 175 billion pounds (roughly 79 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide every year, nearly 1.25% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

“If a large percentage of people changed a little bit of their travel, then all of a sudden the benefits are huge,” said Dillon Fitch-Polse, a professional researcher and co-director of Bicycling Plus Research Collaborative at the University of California, Davis.

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  • Chatham County approves 12-month moratorium on data centers, crypto mining

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    Leaders in Chatham County on Wednesday approved a moratorium that would ban the construction of data centers and cryptocurrency mining for a year in the county.

    According to a presentation on the matter during the county’s commissioners meeting on Wednesday, the moratorium will apply to all development approvals for data centers, data processing facilities, cryptocurrency mining operations and “any uses associated with data processing facilities.”

    The county listed web services and hosting, as well as genome sequencing, as operations that would be affected by the moratorium.

    The move, according to the county, would also give county leaders more time to study the impacts of data centers on the environment, and would give the county a look at regulations required to mitigte the negative impacts associated with data centers and cyrptocurrency mining.

    A single hyperscale data center can draw hundreds of megawatts of electricity and use enormous volumes of water during peak summer heat. A 300-megawatt data center can use as much electricity as roughly 200,000 North Carolina homes running nonstop, based on U.S. Energy Information Administration household consumption data.

    Residents around North Carolina have said they have concerns with large scale data centers being constructed. In New Hill, a rural community in Wake County, residents learning about a 200-acre digital campus approved to be built along Shearon Harris Road, not far from the Harris Nuclear Plant.

    Project materials show the facility could use up to 1 million gallons
    of reclaimed water per day during peak summer heat to cool servers.

    Residents in the New Hill community of Wake County told WRAL News said they were shocked by the size and scope of a planned 200-acre digital campus on Shearon Harris Road. Concern like those in New Hill are playing out across the state, from rural counties west of Charlotte, now home to massive facilities operated by companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Meta, to smaller, faster “edge” data centers proposed near urban centers like Raleigh.

    Artificial intelligence, according to researchers, is requiring datacenters to use far more electricity and generates siginificatly more heat, which intensifies both water and power demands.

    The moratorium in Chatham County is expected to expire on Feb. 11, 2027.

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  • Nevada Nowhere Near Meeting 2030 Greenhouse Gas Emission Goal

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    Nevada fell well short of its greenhouse gas emission-cutting goals in 2025, and it’s poised to be much further behind when the bar raises again in 2030.

    According to the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection (NDEP), the state’s carbon emissions are projected to stay nearly the same over the next five years, reaching less than half of the goals lawmakers hoped to see by 2030.

    Lawmakers in 2019 passed SB254, setting goals of reducing emissions by 28 percent by 2025 over 2005 levels, when greenhouse gas emissions peaked in the state, 45 percent by 2030 and to net zero by 2050. The law did not establish consequences for failing to miss the targets.

    According to NDEP’s annual greenhouse gas emissions report, which the department quietly released just before the new year, the state is set to lower its emissions by just half a percentage point between 2025 and 2030 — nearly 25 percent less than what lawmakers had hoped for.

    Human activities, including burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, power cars and heat homes, release greenhouse gases that most scientists agree are the primary driver of the Earth’s warming climate; its temperature has increased by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution. The warming is driving a variety of changes, including more erratic weather patterns, prolonged drought, changes in when plants flower and fruit, and snow and ice melting at faster rates. Most experts forecast dramatically worsening effects unless emissions are drastically curbed in the next few years.

    Since 2005, the economic downturn of 2007 to 2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the retirement of the Mohave and Reid Gardner coal-powered generating stations, have led to substantial reductions in Nevada’s emissions.

    But since the bill’s passage, emission reductions have been largely flat, and are projected to continue to plateau as state and federal policymakers deprioritize the issue of slowing climate change.

    The state is only anticipated to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20.7 percent by 2030, 24.3 percent short of the legislative target. Nevada’s current trajectory also puts it woefully behind goals of net-zero emissions by 2050.

    Since taking office, Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, has made various moves to distance the state from carbon reduction efforts undertaken by his Democratic predecessor, including pulling the state from a nationwide greenhouse gas reduction coalition, drastically revising the state’s climate strategy and issuing an executive order that, in part, promotes the use of energy sources such as natural gas, a fossil fuel that, while cleaner than coal, still produces substantial emissions.

    Republican President Donald Trump has also taken notable steps favoring fossil fuels and ignoring emission reduction efforts, including withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, ordering coal plants slated to close to remain open and repealing solar tax credits.

    Former state Sen. Pat Spearman (D-North Las Vegas), one of the primary sponsors of SB254, said she isn’t surprised at the lack of state efforts to reduce emissions, but she is disappointed.

    “It doesn’t matter if you’re in a red state, blue state, purple state or no state. You’re talking about people’s lives,” she told The Nevada Independent. “It’s disappointing that the current administration at the state level has decided to go along with the decisions at the national level. It’s about science. It’s not politics. It’s about science and public policy.”


    Electricity generation, transportation drive emission levels

    Electricity generation and transportation remain the largest emitters in the state, followed by industry and buildings. Combined, they accounted for 91 percent of the state’s emissions in 2025; the remaining 9 percent were from waste and agriculture.

    In 2005, electricity generation drove 45 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. By 2023, with the retirement of the Reid Gardner and Mohave generating stations, emission contributions from electricity generation were down to 26 percent. Lawmakers in 2013 passed legislation requiring NV Energy to shutter its remaining coal plants.

    At the beginning of this year, the utility stopped burning coal at the North Valmy Generating Station, the company’s last coal plant. (It is being converted to burn natural gas.)

    “NV Energy is proud of our work in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the state,” utility spokesperson Meghin Delaney said in an email. “Through careful planning since 2005, NV Energy has been a leader in these efforts and is … transitioning to a less carbon-intensive future.”

    However, projections indicate that current policies will not lead to future reductions in emissions from the electricity generation sector, and it will eventually become static.

    “Continuing to encourage energy efficiency, continuing to adopt renewables will help the power sector, which is where we’ve seen our biggest gains,” said former Sen. Chris Brooks (D-Las Vegas).

    But, he acknowledged, he has concerns, including the pace at which the state is decarbonizing the transportation sector, which is becoming an ever larger piece of the pie.

    In 2010, transportation overtook electricity generation as the largest producer of statewide emissions.

    In 2005, transportation drove 33 percent of emissions; last year, it drove 38 percent. Projections also indicate that unless more aggressive policies are adopted at the state and federal level, transportation emissions will not decrease.

    The 2025 report does reflect some drastic year-over-year increases in emissions from transportation, but that is because of changes in how certain emissions, including jet fuel, have been recalculated using methodology developed at the federal level, according to NDEP.

    “This reflects a change in methodology, not an actual increase in real-world emissions,” according to the department.

    Excluding that, the gap between the state’s reduction goals and projected emissions has been fairly flat since the state’s emission reduction goals were established in 2019, the department told The Nevada Independent in an email.

    Olivia Tanager, executive director of the Toiyabe Chapter of the Sierra Club, said the numbers are concerning and that the state is on a “horrible trajectory.”

    The governor’s office of energy declined to make anyone available for an interview or to provide a statement. The Nevada Department of Transportation and the governor’s office referred requests for an interview to NDEP.

    NDEP declined an interview with The Indy but did agree to answer some questions via email.

    “It is not NDEP’s role to set policy or advocate for specific actions,” the department stated. “Our job is to provide objective information to help decision-makers and the public understand Nevada’s emissions outlook.”

    Enacting change is hard though, requiring corporations to prioritize the environment over profit, governments to introduce effective policies and a change in consumption habits by the general public.

    For Nevada, the report points out, achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 “will require major changes to the State’s transportation system,” “shifts in travel patterns and personal transportation choices” and “a more-strategic approach to Nevada’s investment in infrastructure that includes consideration of the cascading impacts of climate change.”

    Elected in 2022, Lombardo pivoted away from the climate policies of his predecessor, Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat.

    Sisolak signed SB254, the legislation outlining the state’s carbon emission goals, entered a coalition of states focused on reducing emissions and issued an executive order directing state agencies to implement measures outlined in SB254. Those changes would be spearheaded by leaders at the state’s office of energy and at the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which oversees NDEP. A statewide climate plan was also drafted under his administration.

    Early in his governorship, Lombardo moved in the opposite direction.

    Shortly after taking office, Lombardo issued an executive order outlining his state energy policy objectives. Instead of focusing solely on renewable energy and electrification, it also emphasized a continued use of natural gas.

    That approach, according to the order, would “meet environmental objectives while keeping costs low for Nevadans.”

    Lombardo then pulled the state’s climate plan offline. It took more than a year and a half for the state to get a new plan online.

    “Nevada’s Climate Innovation Plan,” the 33-page document that replaced the former plan, was intended to “mitigate the ever-changing patterns of the environment while also considering economic realities and national security.”

    Critics panned it as having “no data, no goals, and no proposals. It looks backward to what has already been done, instead of charting a path forward,” pointing out that the plan focused on critical mineral production and economic opportunities while lacking focus.

    Later that year, Lombardo withdrew the state from the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of more than two dozen governors committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by advancing climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement, an international treaty adopted by 196 nations.

    Sisolak enrolled Nevada in the alliance in 2019.

    In his letter withdrawing Nevada from the group, Lombardo stated that the goals of the alliance “conflict with Nevada’s energy policy objectives.”


    Policies affecting emissions

    Several policies that required new cars to emit less pollution were expected to help Nevada get closer to its carbon-cutting goals. But the report notes that some of those rules are in flux, including:

      1. Clean Cars Nevada, which adopted California’s low-emission vehicle standards, went into effect starting with model year 2025 vehicles and was to be applied to all subsequent model years. However, the California Air Resources Board approved new regulations for light-duty vehicles starting with model year 2026 and later light-duty vehicles that Nevada has not adopted; therefore the low-emission standards in Nevada are only applicable to 2025 model year vehicles.

      2. Under former President Joe Biden, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set stricter emission standards for all light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles; those rules are being considered for repeal. (The EPA is expected to soon rescind a nearly two-decade-old determination, dubbed by environmentalists as “the endangerment finding,” that is the foundation for regulating greenhouse gas emissions at the federal level, including from vehicles.)

      3. Updated federal fuel economy standard rules that went into effect in 2024, increasing fuel economy by 4 percent by 2032 for passenger cars and light-duty trucks and 18 percent by 2036 for heavy-duty trucks and vans, were effectively eliminated through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act approved by Trump and congressional Republicans over the summer.

    “The decision-makers at all levels of government need to grow a spine and realize we’re on a dangerous and deadly path here,” Tanager said. “The issue is a lack of political will.”

    This story was originally published by The Nevada Independent and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

    Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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  • Giant snails and tiny insects threaten the South’s rice and crawfish farms

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    KAPLAN, La. — Josh Courville has harvested crawfish his whole life, but these days, he’s finding a less welcome catch in some of the fields he manages in southern Louisiana.

    Snails. Big ones.

    For every crawfish Courville dumps out of a trap, three or four snails clang onto the boat’s metal sorting table. About the size of a baseball when fully grown, apple snails stubbornly survive all kinds of weather in fields, pipes and drainage ditches and can lay thousands of bubblegum-colored eggs every month.

    “It’s very disheartening,” Courville said. “The most discouraging part, actually, is not having much control over it.”

    Apple snails are just one example of how invasive species can quickly become a nightmare for farmers.

    In Louisiana, where rice and crawfish are often grown together in the same fields, there’s now a second threat: tiny insects called delphacids that can deal catastrophic damage to rice plants. Much about these snails and insects is still a mystery, and researchers are trying to learn more about what’s fueling their spread, from farming methods and pesticides to global shipping and extreme weather.

    Experts aren’t sure what role climate change may play, but they say a warming world generally makes it easier for pests to spread to other parts of the country if they gain a foothold in the temperate South.

    “We are going to have more bugs that are happier to live here if it stays warmer here longer,” said Hannah Burrack, professor and chair of the entomology department at Michigan State University.

    It’s an urgent problem because in a tough market for rice, farmers who rotate the rice and crawfish crops together need successful harvests of both to make ends meet. And losses to pests could mean higher rice prices for U.S. consumers, said Steve Linscombe, director of The Rice Foundation, which does research and education outreach for the U.S. rice industry.

    Courville manages fields for Christian Richard, a sixth-generation rice farmer in Louisiana. Both started noticing apple snails after a bad flood in 2016. Then the population ballooned.

    In spring, at rice planting time, the hungry snails found a feast.

    “It was like this science fiction movie,” Richard said, describing how each snail made its own little whirlpool as it popped out of the wet ground. “They would start on those tender rice plants, and they destroyed a 100-acre field.”

    Louisiana State University scientists estimate that about 78 square miles (202 square kilometers) in the state are now regularly seeing snails.

    To keep the rice from becoming a snail buffet, Richard’s team and many other rice and crawfish farmers dealing with the pests start with a dry field to give the rice plants the chance to grow a few inches and get stronger, then flood the field after.

    It’s a planting method they’d already used on some fields, even before the snails arrived. But now, with the snails, that’s essentially their only option, and it’s the most expensive one.

    They also can’t get rid of the snails entirely. Many of the pesticides that might work on snails can also hurt crustaceans. People directly eat both rice and crawfish, unlike crops grown for animal feed, so there are fewer chemicals farmers can use on them. One option some farmers are testing, copper sulfate, can easily add thousands of dollars to an operation’s costs, Courville said.

    It all means “lower production, decreased revenue from that, and increased cost with the extra labor,” Richard said.

    Cecilia Gallegos, who has worked as a crawfish harvester for the past three years, said the snails have made her job more difficult in the past year.

    “You give up more time,” she said of having to separate the crawfish from the snails, or occasionally plucking them out of sacks if they roll in by mistake. Work that already stretched as late as 3 a.m. in the busy springtime season can now take even longer.

    The snails separated from the crawfish get destroyed later.

    To look for pests much smaller than the apple snails, entomologists whip around heavy-duty butterfly nets and deploy Ghostbusters-style specimen-collecting vacuums. Since last year, they’ve been sampling for rice delphacids, tiny insects that pierce the rice plants, suck out their sap and transmit a rice virus that worsens the damage.

    It’s worrying for Louisiana because they’ve seen how bad it can get next door in Texas, where delphacids surged last year. Yields dropped by up to 50% in what’s called the ratoon crop, the second rice crop of the year, said The Rice Foundation’s Linscombe. Texas farmers are projected to grow rice on only half the acres they did last year, and some are worried they won’t be able to get bank loans, said Tyler Musgrove, a rice extension specialist at the Louisiana State University AgCenter.

    Musgrove said entomologists believe almost all rice fields in Louisiana had delphacids by September and October of last year. By then, most of the rice had already been harvested, so they’re waiting to see what happens this year.

    “The rice delphacid this past year was probably one of the most significant entomological events to occur in U.S. rice since the ‘50s when it first appeared,” Musgrove said. Delphacids had eventually disappeared after that outbreak until now. It’s been identified in four of the six rice-producing states — Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi — but it’s not clear yet whether it’s made a permanent winter home in the U.S.

    Scientists are still in the early stages of advising farmers on what to do about the resurgence of the destructive bugs without adding costly or crawfish-harming pesticides. And they’re also starting to study whether rice and crawfish grown together will see different impacts than rice grown by itself.

    “I think everyone agrees, it’s not going to be a silver bullet approach. Like, oh, we can just breed for it or we could just spray our way out of it,” said Adam Famoso, director of Louisiana State University’s Rice Research Station.

    Burrack, of Michigan State, said that climate change is making it harder for modeling that has helped predict how big populations of invasive pests will get and when they may affect certain crops. And that makes it harder for farmers to plan around them.

    “From an agricultural standpoint, that’s generally what happens when you get one of these intractable pests,” Burrack said. “People are no longer able to produce the thing that they want to produce in the place that they’re producing it.”

    ___

    Follow Melina Walling on X @MelinaWalling and Bluesky @melinawalling.bsky.social. Follow Joshua A. Bickel on Instagram, Bluesky and X @joshuabickel.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • New Tempest Threatens Portugal, One Week After Storm Kristin

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    LISBON, Feb 2 (Reuters) – Portugal is bracing ‌for ​a new storm that ‌authorities warn could trigger floods and further ​devastation, as the country still struggles with the aftermath of Storm ‍Kristin.

    The Portuguese Institute of the ​Sea and the Atmosphere (IPMA) said late Monday that the ​new ⁠storm, named Leonardo, is expected to begin impacting mainland Portugal from Tuesday afternoon through Saturday.

    The Iberian Peninsula has experienced a succession of storms bringing heavy rain, thunder, snow and strong gales in ‌the last few months, with southern Spain facing what some ​residents describe ‌as its wettest ‍winter ⁠in 40 years.

    IPMA said Leonardo may bring persistent and at times heavy rain, with wind gusts reaching up to 75 km/h (47 mph) along the coast south of Cabo Mondego in the country’s central region, and 95 km/h in the highlands.

    The gusts, however, should be less ​intense than those exceeding 200 km/h unleashed by Storm Kristin, which battered central mainland Portugal from early last Wednesday, killing at least six people and leaving a trail of destruction across homes, factories and critical infrastructure.

    Daniela Fraga, deputy commander of national emergency and civil protection authority ANEPC, told reporters late on Monday that heavy rain in the coming days could lead to floods and inundations, mainly ​in the regions that were affected by Storm Kristin.

    Nearly 134,000 households were still without electricity, around 95,000 of them in the Leiria region in the centre of the ​country, power distribution company E-Redes said.

    (Reporting by Sergio Goncalves; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

    Copyright 2026 Thomson Reuters.

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  • Portugal Counts Multi‑billion‑euro Damage After Storm Kristin Tears off Roofs

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    By Sergio Goncalves and Miguel Pereira

    LISBON/LEIRIA, Feb ‌2 (Reuters) – ​Last week’s Storm Kristin ‌left hundreds of homes in central Portugal without roofs, ​tens of thousands without power and residents lining up for emergency building materials, as ‍authorities warned damage could run ​into billions of euros.

    The storm swept across the region early on ​Wednesday, with ⁠wind gusts topping 200 kph (124 mph) and heavy rain uprooting trees and ripping off roofs. It killed at least six people and cut power to hundreds of thousands of households.

    “The roof blew off, all the windowpanes are ‌broken, everything is chaos and misery,” said Paula Franco as she queued ​in ‌Leiria for donated tiles ‍to repair ⁠her home.

    Portugal’s government on Sunday approved a 2.5 billion-euro ($2.95 billion) package of loans and incentives to help people and businesses rebuild after the storm.

    The government could apply for grants from the European Solidarity Fund and unused EU recovery funds to finance reconstruction, Environment and Energy Minister Maria da Graca Carvalho said on Monday ​at a joint news conference with EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen.

    Leiria, one of Portugal’s main industrial hubs known for its plastics and metalworking industries, was among the hardest-hit areas.

    Hundreds of houses, several roads, schools, factories and railway lines have been affected. At the Monte Real air base near Leiria, the storm damaged several aircraft, including F16 fighter jets.

    Nearly 170,000 households were still without electricity on Monday, Graca Carvalho said.

    Damage in the region could total between 1.5 billion euros ​and 2 billion euros, Henrique Carvalho, president of the Leiria Business Association, told broadcaster NOW.

    The government on Sunday extended a state of calamity in 69 municipalities until February 8, with more heavy rain ​and flooding expected.

    (Reporting by Sergio Goncalves and Miguel Pereira; editing by Charlie Devereux and Ros Russell)

    Copyright 2026 Thomson Reuters.

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  • The Winter Olympics Face an Existential Chill From Climate Change

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    Olympic Rings are seen above the Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium ahead of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026. Photo by Emmanuele Ciancaglini/Getty Images

    There are currently 93 cities in the world with the infrastructure needed to host the Winter Olympics and Paralympics. But as the planet continues to warm, that pool of options is dwindling rapidly. By 2050, only four cities would be able to support the Olympics without the aid of artificial snow, according to a study published this week.

    “Hockey, figure skating, curling, etc., are all indoors; you can do that in Miami if you want,” Daniel Scott, a professor of geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo and one of the study’s authors, told Observer. “It’s really the snow sports that we’re talking about as vulnerable—how do you maintain that as part of the Winter Games?”

    This question is top of mind for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which is preparing to kick off the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics in Italy next month. The governing body is weighing a range of options to address rising temperatures, from combining the Olympic and Paralympic games to hosting them in different cities, or even shifting their traditional start dates to take advantage of the coldest months of the year.

    “Our ambition is to protect the Olympic Winter Games and the winter sports that so many people love; to minimize the impact on the environment; and to help safeguard the winter economies that so many people rely on,” an IOC spokesperson told Observer over email.

    It isn’t just the IOC that’s worried about warming winters. A 2022 survey of professional and Olympic winter athletes and coaches from 20 countries found that 90 percent were concerned about climate change’s impacts on their sport. Those impacts can include serious safety risks: eight years earlier, during the Sochi Winter Games, higher crash and injury rates among snow sport athletes were linked to warmer temperatures and lower-quality snow.

    The ramifications of global warming will only get worse as the years go by. Of the 93 past and potential hosts for the Winter Olympics—which traditionally take place in February—between 45 and 55 are expected to be climate-reliable by the 2050s, with that figure falling to between 30 and 54 by the 2080s, according to the study.

    The Winter Paralympics, which are held the month after the Olympics, face an even steeper challenge. Only 17 to 31 cities will be able to host the games by mid-century, with just four to 31 cities remaining viable three decades later. “How do you get the Paralympics out of March?” said Scott.

    Aerial view of snowy venue in mountainsAerial view of snowy venue in mountains
    This aerial view shows the Biathlon venue in Antholz, northern Italy, prior to the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Games. Photo by Odd Anderson/AFP via Getty Images

    How can the Olympics adapt to rising temperatures?

    One proposal from Scott and his co-authors is to merge the Olympics and Paralympics so that both games take place in February. The solution would increase visibility for the Paralympics—but, on the other hand, might risk them being overshadowed. The logistics of unifying the two games, too, would be a mammoth undertaking for the host city.

    Another option could be to get rid of the “One Bid, One City” partnership, established in 2001, which requires host cities to stage the Olympics and Paralympics at the same venues. Instead, the games could be held in different locations at the same time. But doing so would end a successful collaboration that has helped the IOC and International Paralympic Committee (IPC) support each other and their athletes over the past 25 years.

    The most promising solution, Scott said, would be to shift both games back by two to three weeks. While that would slightly reduce the number of climate-reliable Olympic hosts, it would substantially expand options for the Paralympics, adding 14 more climate-reliable cities by the 2080s. The IOC “were grateful to get that new analysis, because that was something they were actually considering,” said Scott.

    The future of snow itself is another critical concern. Artificial snow will play an increasingly central role in future Winter Games—and already does today. Currently, just seven of the 93 possible host locations could stage the Olympics without artificial snow, with only five able to do so for the Paralympics. That number is expected to fall even further as emissions continue to rise.

    Artificial snow is nothing new, Scott noted. “I think some people lose sight of the fact that snowmaking has been part of the Olympics since Lake Placid, 40 years ago,” he said. “So, it’s not a question of, ‘Can you do without it?’ It’s, ‘How do you make it as sustainable as possible?’”

    While machine-made snow has drawn criticisms for its energy and water use, newer systems are becoming more efficient and vary widely by location. “That’s for the IOC to select,” said Scott. The 2026 Games in Milan and the 2034 Games in Salt Lake City, Utah, for example, will produce six and 16 times more emissions, respectively, than the 2030 Games in the French Alps, which will rely on an electricity grid that is almost entirely nuclear and renewable.

    Rising heat won’t just affect the Winter Olympics. The Summer Olympics are already feeling the strain: during the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, marathons were moved to Sapporo to escape extreme heat. And the 2032 Summer Olympics in Brisbane will be held during Australia’s winter rather than summer to take advantage of cooler weather. “Heat risk is a growing concern,” said Scott.

    The Winter Olympics Face an Existential Chill From Climate Change

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  • Rising coal demand overshadows Southeast Asia’s transition to renewable energy

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    HANOI, Vietnam — Southeast Asia’s demand for coal is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, undermining efforts to lower carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

    Regional coal demand will rise by more than 4% a year through the end of the decade, driven by rising needs for electricity as economies grow across the region of more than 600 million, according to a recent International Energy Agency report. Indonesia, a nation of about 285 million people, will account for more than half of that, followed by Vietnam.

    The trends raise questions over the $15.5 billion-dollar deals both countries signed in 2022 in Just Energy Transition Partnerships, or JETP, to help fund their renewable energy transitions. Moves under U.S. President Donald Trump to reverse policies meant to address climate change add to the challenges.

    This is a decisive decade for Southeast Asia as the region bears much of the burden of extreme weather and other impacts from climate change.

    “We’re standing on two opposite grounds — wanting to build clean energy, but not letting go entirely of coal,” said Katherine Hasan, an analyst with the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finland-registered think tank.

    Coal emits more planet heating emissions than other fossil fuels like oil and gas when it is burned. Pollution from coal also adds to toxic haze that often blankets many Southeast Asian cities.

    Coal supplies just over a third of Southeast Asia’s electricity, the IEA says, making it the third-largest coal-consuming region in the world after India and China.

    Global coal demand is expected to plateau as alternatives expand and major coal buyers like South Korea cut back.

    But Southeast Asia is headed in the opposite direction. The two main factors driving that trend are cost and energy security.

    “Nobody burns coal for fun,” said Paul Baruya of FutureCoal, a group backed by the fossil fuel industry, formerly known as the World Coal Association.

    “Coal still underpins a level of energy security that the region needs,” he said, noting that coal cutbacks would mean writing off billions of dollars’ worth of fossil fuel-related infrastructure including power plants and mines.

    A recent regional survey by Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute found a growing public preference for delaying giving up coal until 2030 or even 2040, as concerns over adequate power supplies and costs counter worries about climate change.

    Governments across the region are echoing that logic.

    “What is important is that our government is firm in its stance that there will be no phase-out of fossil fuels,” said Hashim Djojohadikusumo, brother to Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto and the country’s special climate envoy, last month.

    “We’ve rejected that; we’re sticking with a phase-down,” he said. “Indonesia’s economy, especially its industry and electricity sector, will continue to rely on fossil fuels.”

    Indonesia is the world’s largest coal exporter and Southeast Asia’s biggest carbon emitter making it vital for the region ’s energy transition.

    “If Indonesia cannot transition away from coal, then why would other developing countries?” said Dinita Setyawati, with the United Kingdom-registered think tank Ember. “For Indonesia, it’s not so much a fear of the unknown, but a reluctance to change and the inertia of change.”

    A years-long effort to retire a coal plant in West Java fell through last month, highlighting Indonesia’s struggle to move beyond coal.

    Indonesia’s updated climate pledge, which dropped a promise to phase out coal by 2040, was rated “critically insufficient” by Climate Action Tracker, which said the country’s aims don’t align with the Paris Climate Agreement.

    Currently, Indonesia is considering re-opening the door for future construction of new coal plants.

    This is despite mounting costs from climate change. Last year more than 700 people were killed in deadly floods and landslides associated with extreme weather worsened by climate change.

    Continued coal use will also likely worsen Indonesia’s air pollution, especially in cities like Jakarta.

    Vietnam has stood out in fossil fuel-dependent Southeast Asia, expanding its solar generating capacity from 4 megawatts in 2015 to 16 gigawatts a decade later. It has plans to grow that to as much as 73.4 gigawatts by 2030 and up to 295 gigawatts by 2050.

    Yet coal use is still rising.

    Vietnam hit a record-high in 2025 with the import of more than 65 million metric tonnes of coal, which was up 2.6% by volume from a year earlier, according to the latest data from Vietnam’s customs department.

    That partly reflects caution over generating capacity following power shortages in 2023, when a drought sapped hydropower output, causing about $1.4 billion in losses, according to the World Bank.

    In order to sustain GDP growth of around 10% a year through 2030, Vietnam aims to increase electricity sales to the point that they are equivalent to Germany’s current annual energy consumption.

    It has allowed large companies like Danish toymaker LEGO and South Korean manufacturer Samsung, to buy electricity directly from Vietnamese wind and solar power producers to meet their climate targets. This could potentially double Vietnam’s renewable energy share from about 19% to 42%, Ember says.

    However, Vietnam’s power grid is already under strain from the rapid, uneven rollout of renewables and years of underinvestment in transmission equipment. The government estimates it needs about $18 billion by 2030 to upgrade the system. But progress has been slow, and funding committed so far covers only a fraction of the need.

    The momentum for JETP-backed projects in Indonesia and Vietnam is unlikely to pick up this year, according to Putra Adhiguna, with the Jakarta-based think tank, the Energy Shift Institute.

    Indonesia’s cancellation of the early retirement of the West Java coal plant, and the 2025 U.S. withdrawal from JETP under the Trump administration, has shaken faith in the rollout of tangible projects in 2026.

    Expectations for the billion-dollar JETP deals were set too high, Adhiguna said.

    “JETP was basically a brute force attempt to do a transition,” he said. “Governments were trying to bulldoze through … But fundamentally there are things that take a bit of time and political commitment to happen.”

    ___

    Delgado reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writer Edna Tarigan in Jakarta contributed to this report.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • Warming temperatures are forcing some Antarctic penguins to breed earlier, study finds

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    Warming temperatures are forcing Antarctic penguins to breed earlier, posing a big problem for two of the cute tuxedoed species that face extinction by the end of the century, a study says.

    Three different penguin species — the cartoon-eye Adelie, the black-striped chinstrap and the fast-swimming gentoo — are beginning their reproductive process about two weeks earlier than the decade before, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of Animal Ecology. The change in habits is setting up potential food problems for young chicks. 

    Researchers used remote control cameras to photograph penguins breeding in dozens of colonies from 2011 to 2021. Between 2012 and 2022, temperatures in the breeding grounds increased by 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. 

    “Penguins are changing the time at which they’re breeding at a record speed, faster than any other vertebrate,” said lead study author Ignacio Juarez Martinez, a biologist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. “And this is important because the time at which you breed needs to coincide with the time with most resources in the environment and this is mostly food for your chicks so they have enough to grow.”

    The researchers said it was the fastest shift in timing of life cycles for any backboned animals that they have seen. For some perspective, scientists have studied changes in the life cycle of great tits, a European bird. They found a similar two-week change, but that took 75 years as opposed to just 10 years for these three penguin species, said study co-author Fiona Suttle, another Oxford biologist.

    Adelie penguins stand on a block of floating ice at Yalour Islands in Antarctica, Nov. 24, 2025.

    Mark Baker/AP


    Winners and loses in a warming world

    Suttle said climate change is creating winners and losers among these three penguin species, at a time in the penguin life cycle where food and the competition for it are critical for survival. 

    The Adelie and chinstrap penguins are specialists, eating mainly krill. The gentoo have a more varied diet. The birds used to breed at different times, so there were no overlaps. But the gentoos’ breeding has moved earlier faster than the other two species, creating competition. That’s a problem because gentoos, which don’t migrate as far as the other two species, are more aggressive in finding food and establishing nesting areas, Martinez and Suttle said.

    Suttle said she has gone back in October and November to the same colony areas where she used to see Adelies in previous years only to find their nests replaced by gentoos. And the data backs up her observations, she said.

    “Chinstraps are declining globally,” Martinez said. “Models show that they might get extinct before the end of the century at this rate. Adelies are doing very poorly in the Antarctic Peninsula and it’s very likely that they go extinct from the Antarctic Peninsula before the end of the century.”

    Climate Penguins

    Gentoo penguins nest at Neko Harbour in Antarctica, Nov. 22, 2025.

    Mark Baker/AP


    Other factors threaten penguin populations

    Martinez theorized that the warming western Antarctic — the second-fasting heating place on Earth behind only the Arctic North Atlantic — means less sea ice. Less sea ice means more spores coming out earlier in the Antarctic spring and then “you have this incredible bloom of phytoplankton,” which is the basis of the food chain that eventually leads to penguins, he said. And it’s happening earlier each year.

    Not only do the chinstraps and Adelies have more competition for food from gentoos because of the warming and changes in plankton and krill, but the changes have brought more commercial fishing that comes earlier and that further shortens the supply for the penguins, Suttle said.

    This shift in breeding timing “is an interesting signal of change and now it’s important to continue observing these penguin populations to see if these changes have negative impacts on their populations,” said Michelle LaRue, a professor of Antarctic marine science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She was not part of the Oxford study.

    With millions of photos — taken every hour by 77 cameras for 10 years — scientists enlisted everyday people to help tag breeding activity using the Penguin Watch website.

    “We’ve had over 9 million of our images annotated via Penguin Watch,” Suttle said. “A lot of that does come down to the fact that people just love penguins so much. They’re very cute. They’re on all the Christmas cards. People say, ‘Oh, they look like little waiters in tuxedos.’”

    Other penguin species in Antarctica are facing trouble. Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and University of Southampton said last June that the continent’s emperor penguin population may be declining faster than even the most pessimistic predictions. Images showed the species, recognizable by their height and yellow patches, declined in Antarctica by 22% between 2009 and 2024. 

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