Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a congressional candidate and high-profile opponent of local data center sprawl, filed suit Thursday against his hometown’s City Council after the council threw him, his brother, his mother, and other locals out of a meeting earlier this month for protesting delays to a vote on a data center moratorium—and then banned them from future city council meetings. Pearson will now be locked out of a particularly important meeting on October 20, when the council will finally hold that data center moratorium vote. He and his five co-plaintiffs, including a high school senior involved in the protest, argue that the two-month ban from city council violates their first amendment rights to free expression. “Every person, whether you disagree with them or not, is entitled to speak their opinion and give their ideas in public forms,” Pearson wrote in a press release October 15. “There is no right that gives a City Council chairwoman or anyone else the ability to go beyond the bounds of Tennessee law and the United States Constitution to discriminate or retaliate against those who do not agree with their actions.” Pearson, elected in 2023 to the Tennessee House of Representatives, became known nationally in 2023 as one of the “Tennessee Three,” when he was removed from office for violating “decorum rules” after co-leading a personal protest for gun reform on the statehouse floor. He later won back his seat in a special election. Now Pearson is running for Congress in a freshly-gerrymandered congressional district, seeking to woo a district where Republicans now have an estimated nine-point advantage, according to the Cook Political Report. Pearson has made opposition to Elon Musk’s Memphis-area xAI data centers and their polluting onsite gas plants a cornerstone of his campaign. xAI has installed 59 gas turbines in Memphis to power its data centers, as Reuters recently found. People living near the site say they’re plagued with poor air quality and constant noise.  On October 6, Pearson attended the city council meeting where the data center moratorium vote was pushed back for the second time this year, and where the scheduled public comment period was cancelled, leading chants of protest as police officers tried to remove people from the chamber, Memphis’ Fox News affiliate reported.  About 200 other people attended the protest. To Pearson, the city council’s actions constitute an “ongoing pattern of intimidation.” With the moratorium vote approaching next week, he told Mother Jones he’s urging them to resolve the issue. “Our right to attend Council meetings should be restored and these bans rescinded,” he said. “I welcome an opportunity to meet to discuss how we move forward with protecting the First Amendment rights of the people as a priority, especially as we stand up against these hyperscale data centers.” The city council policy under which Pearson was banned says that “members of the audience and persons addressing the council will not be permitted to engage in gossip, make defamatory, personal, slanderous, or profane comments or use abusive or vulgar language.” That, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argue, is a vague attempt to “suppress disfavored viewpoints, particularly criticism directed at City Council and its officials.” “While they’re working to keep us out of city council meetings, neighbors in Westwood and Boxtown are still dealing with the impacts of having xAI in their community,” said Amber Sherman, a local political organizer who was banned from the meeting alongside Pearson. As I wrote in August, data center backlash isn’t strictly a left-of-center issue. And that matters for Pearson, who—having stayed in the race after a Trump-backed redistricting went into effect in May—is running as an unabashed progressive in a Trump-leaning district some analysts think is Tennessee Democrats’ best shot at a flip. > The backlash draws on a current of populism—and suspicion of big companies, > and fear of AI-prompted job loss—that goes beyond party boundaries. Opposition > to data center buildout is nearly as high among Republicans as it is among > Democrats. > > That fact could be good news for Pearson. His Memphis-based district had a > Democratic-voting, majority Black population, but the district was splintered > and redrawn by Republican officials this year following a Supreme Court ruling > that gutted the federal Voting Rights Act. > > Pearson’s anti-data-center positions could play well with the rural, white, > Republican-leaning voters who now make up part of his district.  Musk began building data centers in Memphis—and gas turbines to power them—in 2024. “Before data centers were all the news every single day, our community was fighting Elon Musk,” Pearson said at a press conference this summer. People like SpaceX’s billionaire owner, Pearson said, “view these communities as sacrifice zones.”  Garrison Hayes contributed additional reporting.

Two months after swimming across the breakwaters to Ceuta, Spain, Mohamed learned that his asylum claim was denied. In late July, at his home in Tangier, Mohamed didn’t hesitate when he received a social media alert that the border crossing between Morocco and the Spanish enclave had opened. He hopped in a friend’s car, drove four hours to the border, and jumped into the sea. “I swam for three or four hours, I was so cold,” he said. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. You can’t even imagine.” He carried nothing but his phone and 14 euros.  I first connected with Mohamed through a friend in academia, and over the last few weeks, I’ve been speaking to him while he’s lived in a Ceuta shelter along the border. The facility has ten showers and four phone charging ports for over a thousand migrants. Mohamed was initially optimistic while waiting for his pending asylum application, but that’s changed now that his case has been denied. “I’m so sad, I have no mood,” he told me over WhatsApp. “All of our claims, they’re getting denied.” Mohamed (not his real name) is one of the estimated 80,000 people who crossed from Morocco into Ceuta over 48 hours last summer—the largest recorded migrant crossing which took place at one of only two land borders between Africa and the European Union. The other is the Spanish enclave Melilla and both locations have experienced migrant crossings. Over two days in May 2021, 8,000 people entered Ceuta, and in June 2022, 2,000 people attempted to cross the Melilla border fence. But the sheer number of people who made the crossing in July eclipses previous attempts by an order of magnitude. Like Mohamed, many migrants this summer waded into the sea and swam around the breakwaters of Tarajel Beach and Benzú into Ceuta. An estimated 141 people died, some by drowning and some were crushed as they attempted to climb around the border fence. “It was a disaster,” said Francesca Fusaro, a volunteer for No Name Kitchen, a humanitarian NGO that provides aid to migrants crossing borders. Within a matter of days, over 70,000 people voluntarily returned to Morocco, but thousands still remain in Ceuta hoping to be granted asylum. More are being rejected every day. Photo Mohamed shared with me on WhatsApp of migrants protesting for their asylum cases to be heard in Ceuta after crossing the border. Photo taken sometime in September 2026.Courtesy Photo When news of the mass crossing first broke, headlines describing the events went viral: “Taxi drivers called it an invasion; NGOs described it as a humanitarian crisis; local politicians faced with handling the situation labeled it a national emergency,” Carmen Morán Breña wrote in El País. Meanwhile, far-right Russian and Israeli networks fueled right-wing social media narratives online, calling the crossing an “assault” and pushing Islamophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Media attention may have focused on the geopolitics behind the crossing, but another reality was in the background: climate change.  That is not to say that the effects of climate change caused tens of thousands of people to risk their lives by attempting to swim to Ceuta. Economic forces were much more urgent motivators for Mohamed to leave his home. “I am suffering in Morocco,” he told me. “There are no job opportunities. I have a degree in British literature. I speak English, German, and French. I work as a painter.”  But after another summer of extreme temperatures and wildfires in the northern and southeastern provinces in Morocco, severe flash flooding and landslides in rural communities throughout the High Atlas Mountains, and the culmination of a seven-year drought after a winter of heavy rainfall across the country, climate change also may be an underlying factor in creating the economic crisis forcing so many to leave their homes. As Lauren Herzer Risi pointed out in her piece for New Security Beat, “60,000 [plus] people don’t just cross a border when a guard points to an open door.” I spoke to several experts focused on the intersection of climate change, migration, and border security. They explained the nuanced interaction between the warming world and migration. “Every story of human movement now is a climate story, whether we like it or not,” said Petra Molnar, a lawyer and researcher who has spent years documenting what she calls “border necrotechnics”—the lethal blend of law, racism, and technology at borders. “Pretty much every case of forced or ‘voluntary’ migration has a climate element built into it.” > “Every story of human movement now is a climate story, whether we like it or > not. Pretty much every case of forced or ‘voluntary’ migration has a climate > element built into it.” Whether within or across borders, “no one calls themselves a climate migrant,” said Amali Tower, the co-founder of the organization Climate Refugees. Legally, there’s no such category because international law does not consider climate displacement to be grounds for refugee status. Add to this the fact that data on international climate displacement is lacking; it’s easier to measure displacement after a distinct disaster, such as a hurricane, rather than the slow onset of rising temperatures or sea levels. Today, North Africa and the Middle East are warming faster than the rest of the world, and Morocco’s agricultural sector—the cornerstone of the country’s economy—is particularly vulnerable to climate impacts like soil degradation and depleted groundwater. Many Moroccan farmers have had to adjust their lives in response to extreme weather events, planting different crops, or eating different food, or reducing livestock holdings. A January 2026 Afrobarometer survey showed that almost a fifth of all those surveyed considered moving to a new place due to climate impacts. A 2021 World Bank report found that by 2050 in Morocco, 1.9 million climate migrants would be moving internally in the country. “The relationship between environmental change, climate hazards, and aspirations to move is incredibly complex,” said Karolina Sobczak-Szelc, a migration researcher who studied climate displacement in Morocco. In Syria, for example, the decade-long civil war and subsequent refugee crisis was the result of systemic political and sectarian repression. But, just before the civil war broke out in 2011, the country experienced the worst multiyear drought in nearly a millennium, decimating Syria’s economy and livestock. Climate change is what Peter Schwartzstein, an environmental journalist and Stimson Center fellow, calls the “mood music” behind events like Ceuta, not mass migration’s main driver, but a constant presence. “It puts a proverbial thumb on the scales that amplifies the pressure exerted by a whole bundle of other things,” he said. “This is the bitter reality of climate-induced crises.” Coupled with stressors like rising housing costs, growing wealth inequality, and youth disenfranchisement laid bare during Morocco’s 2025 GenZ212 uprising, “the difference between the bright lights of Casablanca and some of these really, really quite deprived areas is stark in the extreme,” said Schwartzstein. Before even reaching another country’s border, climate migration typically starts with internal movement within a country. “They move from village to small town, from small town to bigger city,” said Sobczak-Szelc. “Only later, when the city doesn’t fulfill their changed expectations, do they think about moving further.” Mohamed followed a similar trajectory. He was originally from Fez, a city in central Morocco with high rates of income inequality and poor public infrastructure in comparison to its coastal neighbor. When he was unemployed and in his twenties he moved north to Tangier—only to find similar circumstances. “It’s reductive of international law and policy to expect people to fit into one neat lane,” Tower says. “People have always moved, and they’ve moved for no one singular reason.” After the mass crossing, Morocco’s Association for Human Rights issued a statement saying that it “[reflected] the profound despair among young people fueled by the lack of prospects, endemic corruption, the rise of authoritarianism, the absence of social justice, and the lack of employment opportunities and decent conditions.”   Todd Miller, a journalist for The Border Chronicle in Tucson, Arizona, has covered the intersection of border militarization, surveillance, and climate change. In his 2021 Global Climate Wall report, Miller wrote that wealthy countries would rather spend on average over 2.3 times more to arm their borders than on efforts to mitigate climate change, using the so-called threat of “mass migration” to justify increased surveillance. “Attention isn’t going towards helping people adapt to climate change or move them into better situations,” Amali Tower, from Climate Refugees, says. “Instead, we’re putting all our money and effort into how to keep people out.”  In some ways, the regional response to July’s mass crossing illustrates their points. Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni called for Spain to be suspended from the EU’s visa-free region known as the Schengen Area, writing on X that the mass crossing demonstrated “that uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a real threat to the security of Europe’s borders.” Finland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, and Austria supported Meloni’s call. And, in late September, the European Commission floated plans for the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, to lead a rapid-response team that could deploy within 24 hours in a crisis. The Chief of Frontex said its agency could deploy satellites, aircraft, and observers on the ground “to improve our situational awareness.” For the first three weeks after Mohamed arrived in Ceuta, he slept in a forest on the edge of the city with limited food and water. For several nights, Spanish military guards patrolled the forest for migrants. “Some friends near us, the military found them and started beating them, they smashed their phones,” Mohamed said. “Those first few nights, I was very scared.” As Ceuta has faded away from public attention, No Name Kitchen has continued to report similar stories of law enforcement violence against migrants waiting to have their asylum cases processed in Ceuta.  Photo shared with me via WhatsApp by Mohamed of migrants sleeping in the forest in Ceuta in August 2026.Courtesy photo And for the people most affected by climate change, leaving is not a choice, even when faced with violence from law enforcement and the security state. “There’s a desperation that leads to migrants wanting to leave, so, they’ll take any avenue available to them, even if it’s short-lived,” Tower said. “They do so when circumstances become untenable, when everything they’ve tried has been exhausted, and it’s now beyond their means of coping.”  Fatima Zahra Znioi, a researcher at Warsaw’s Centre of Migration Research who moved to Poland from Morocco several years ago, compares the situation for many Moroccans to being trapped inside a burning house. “There are two ways of dying,” she said, “you can just burn to death, or jump out the window.” Znioi misses her home in Agadir, but understands why so many others have tried to leave. “I believe these people were completely desperate. You have to be to throw yourself into the sea.”  In my last video call with Mohamed, climate change never came up. Instead, Mohamed tells me he’s “fed up,” and even though he still has the right to appeal his asylum denial, he’s getting ready to return to Tangier. Then I ask about his plans for the future. “This isn’t the first time I’ve crossed into Ceuta,” he says. “I’ll just try again.” 

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The US Securities and Exchange Commission issued an unusual warning this week to the country’s largest asset managers and a climate-focused investor group over their roles in a 2021 campaign that replaced board directors at ExxonMobil. The commission published a letter saying it had concluded a probe into the entities, and while it found no evidence of violations, it expressed “serious concerns” about their actions. Investor advocates and some former SEC staff say the letter clearly aims to suppress shareholder advocacy on climate change and pressure large asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, each of which were named in the letter, to steer clear of the topic entirely. It is only the latest move by the SEC this year to limit investors’ ability to address climate risks and engage with corporate boards more broadly. The Trump administration and Republican officials across the country have spent years clamping down on efforts to press corporations for climate action.  In 2022, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives opened an antitrust investigation into some of the same groups, accusing them of acting like a “cartel.” More than a dozen Republican state attorneys general also launched probes. Oil industry campaign contributions have gone overwhelmingly to Republican candidates. Mika Morse, who was a policy counsel on climate risk to former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, said many investors and asset managers view climate change as a significant risk to their portfolios and feel a fiduciary duty to engage with companies on the topic, but may now hesitate to continue that work. > “This is just part of this pressure campaign to ensure that the financial > system doesn’t take climate into account.”  “Investors are feeling really inhibited because of this fear that they will become the target of investigations,” Morse said. “And this type of harassment is really effective, unfortunately.” SEC Enforcement Director David Woodcock, who began that position in May, was an attorney at Exxon during the investors’ campaign, according to his LinkedIn profile. An SEC spokesperson said the investigation began last year and that Woodcock recused himself. The investigation probed the communications of some of the country’s largest asset managers and pension funds—including BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, and the New York State Common Retirement Fund—with a group called Climate Action 100+, an investor initiative that pushes for climate action by large corporate emitters. The report traced what it called a campaign by Climate Action 100+ beginning in 2019 to change Exxon’s board because of the company’s inaction on global warming. The California and New York pension funds were active in the climate group, and BlackRock and State Street joined the initiative in 2020. By 2021, a small activist investor firm called Engine No. 1 had launched a campaign to replace some of Exxon’s directors. That campaign focused on what the firm said was the company’s poor financial performance—Exxon had been removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average the previous year as its stock price lagged—rather than inaction on climate change. But the SEC letter said Engine No. 1 had communicated with some Climate Action 100+ members and with Ceres, a sustainable business advocacy group that helps coordinate the climate investor organization. That year, the campaign succeeded in appointing three new members to Exxon’s board, in large part by convincing large asset managers like BlackRock to vote yes.  It was a huge blow to Exxon and came at a low point for the oil industry. Profits had plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some analysts were predicting peak oil consumption had passed. Major investors lined up behind the notion that climate risks were systemic, and President Joe Biden had won election the prior year after pledging to shift away from fossil fuels. In the following years, the oil industry and its allies in public office and think tanks pushed back forcefully, filing lawsuits, launching investigations, and pushing legislation that targeted opponents in the financial sector, academia and elsewhere.  The Trump administration has incorporated this effort as public policy through the Department of Justice, SEC, and other agencies, siding with the oil industry in numerous lawsuits, for example. The SEC investigation examined whether the asset managers and other members of the climate organization coordinated their votes, which could have triggered onerous reporting requirements under SEC rules meant to give public insight into campaigns by activist investors to influence companies.  > “Climate Action 100+ supports investors as they assess and address the > financial risks that climate poses to the companies they invest in.” Firms like BlackRock are exempt from these reporting requirements even though they hold large stakes in many companies because they are considered passive investors. The SEC letter raised the question of whether the firms should have been required to report more extensively in the case of the Exxon campaign. Experts in securities law say the difference is significant and that a finding of violation could have had serious implications. Ultimately, the commission did not find evidence to support any of these claims but still issued a public report. Jim Moloney, director of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, said the “report reminds asset managers and investors of their responsibilities with respect to shareholder engagement, especially in the context of organized efforts that follow a playbook similar to that of Climate Action 100+.” Shareholder advocates have criticized the SEC report, arguing that it sought to intimidate investors. “What we’ve seen in the ongoing investigations and attacks on climate groups is simply an opinion that shareholders should not be considering climate,” said Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel of As You Sow, a nonprofit shareholder advocacy group that is part of the Climate Action 100+. “This is just part of this pressure campaign to ensure that the financial system doesn’t take climate into account.”  Andrew Behar, As You Sow’s chief executive, said the campaign to remake Exxon’s board was an attempt to reverse the company’s declining financial performance, and it worked. He pointed to a sustained increase in Exxon’s value that coincided with the addition of new board members. Overall, Behar said, the campaign showed how capitalism is meant to work. Michael Boudett, general counsel at Ceres, said in a statement, “Climate Action 100+ has always operated within US securities law. It supports investors as they assess and address the financial risks that climate poses to the companies they invest in. It is up to every participating Climate Action 100+ investor to make their own decisions, including how they vote their shares.”  He added, “Understanding material risks, including financial risks from climate change, is central to that duty.” Many shareholder advocates have criticized the SEC more broadly under the Trump administration. It is generally supposed to have five commissioners with at least two from each party, but there are currently only two total, and President Donald Trump has not appointed any Democratic commissioners. Last week, the commission issued a rule saying it can reach a quorum with only one commissioner. BlackRock and State Street declined to comment, with a BlackRock spokesperson pointing to the SEC report’s declaration that the investigation “did not develop evidence that BlackRock or State Street agreed to vote proxies in certain manners or shared their proxy voting intentions with investors or others associated with” the Climate Action 100+. Exxon did not respond to a request for comment. As conservatives have targeted BlackRock, its positions have shifted. The asset manager left the Climate Action 100+ in 2024. Behar said that a few years ago, BlackRock voted in favor of nearly half the proposals his organization supported, which cover numerous social and environmental topics. Last year BlackRock backed hardly any. Morse said the SEC has identified all the ways investors try to press companies to manage climate risk and is working to shut down each path, from limiting their ability to file shareholder resolutions to making it harder for investors to meet with companies. “The total picture is pretty stunning,” Morse said.  After the commission proposed rescinding a rule on climate-related disclosures, Morse said she heard from many investors and people at corporations that they disagreed with the proposal but declined to submit comments because they feared retribution.  While she understood their position, she said, “This is such a low point for our democracy, that companies and investors would disagree with a policy but be afraid to comment.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A four-hour legislative committee hearing in June, punctuated by applause and anger, offered a window into the growing backlash against data centers. The prospect of unchecked development has galvanized a cross-section of Ohioans, urban and rural, Democrat and Republican, alarmed about the spread of the giant computing facilities. Residents are demanding that local governments impose bans and moratoria on data centers while gathering signatures for a statewide ballot measure that could go before voters in 2027. Leading the push is an eclectic group from rural Southern Ohio, including an outdoor-tourism guide, a lawyer and others who fear that the state’s data center boom is changing their communities faster than they can respond. “Especially on America’s 250th anniversary it’s your job to make sure there’s life for another 250,” Nikki Gerber, the tourism guide, said at the June 1 statehouse hearing. Data centers powered by fossil fuels are a rising source of planet-warming emissions. But for many opponents, the concerns are closer to home: They fear that data centers will change the look and feel of familiar landscapes and threaten local air and water. Resistance to data centers is spreading across the country, especially against the supersize complexes being built to support artificial intelligence. The issue is emerging as a focal point in the November midterm elections, with about 40 local ballot measures in seven states, according to Ballotpedia. Ohio has the most, with 21, including 10 communities set to vote next month on local restrictions on data centers: Conneaut, Defiance, Granville, Oregon, Pataskala, Piqua, Sunbury, Upper Sandusky, Trenton, and Urbana. The Ohio campaign stands out because the Columbus region has become one of the nation’s data center development hot spots. If opponents prevail in Ohio, the outcome could reverberate beyond the state. But Gerber is not thinking about the national stakes. Her focus is the 1.3-gigawatt data center that Amazon Web Services wants to build about 15 miles from her campground. She’s worried about what the project could do to the area’s water levels and biodiversity. Inside Climate News visited her business, Moondoggie Liveree, tucked into the woods near Ohio Brush Creek, which flows into the Ohio River in Adams County. Gerber’s office is an open-air shed left behind by a previous owner, with walls covered with knickknacks, bumper stickers and signs. Among the messages: “Watch! 4 Turtles! Caution!” The business rents campsites, canoes and kayaks, and assists hikers. “Everybody thinks Ohio’s flat,” she said. “But it’s not, and it’s a really, really special area out here.” The office of Moondoggie Liveree, a business that supports camping, kayaking and outdoor tourism.Dan Gearino/Inside Climate News Gerber is a local leader in promoting Adams County—one of Ohio’s poorest counties based on median household income—as a destination for outdoor tourism. She’s worried that the proposed data center could open the door to more projects, transforming the rustic landscape into an industrial zone. She bought her property after working for years as a medical assistant. During the offseason, she builds rental cabins around the region. After learning about the proposed Amazon data center early this year, she grew frustrated by what she saw as a lack of details from the local government. Adams County officials did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In neighboring Brown County, also one of the poorest counties in the state, attorney Austin Baurichter left his job at a law firm office in Cincinnati, partly because he didn’t want to work on behalf of data center developers. He opened his own practice and connected with Gerber and others looking for answers about the projects. They seem to have little in common. Gerber spends most of her day outdoors in flip-flops and shorts, while Baurichter is an early-career lawyer, usually dressed in a suit and tie. But they share a dedication to the cause. Gerber is “the living embodiment of the sparkle emoji,” Baurichter said, interviewed by phone from his home office. He praised her energy and optimism. The two are among the half-dozen people at the core of Conserve Ohio, the organization leading a statewide campaign for a data center moratorium. Austin Baurichter testifies before the Select Committee on Data Centers on June 1 in Columbus, Ohio, asking lawmakers to listen to concerns about out-of-control development.The Ohio Channel via Inside Climate News Baurichter has grown frustrated with local governments, which he says are becoming more hostile toward data center opponents. He argues that some officials “got bamboozled” by developers early on, sometimes signing nondisclosure agreements and supporting projects without understanding the ramifications. He approaches his activism with intensity, bringing his legal skills into the fight, filing public-records requests and questioning officials at public meetings. > “We would rather you fight for our honor than for scraps that are being > offered by people who know what they’re offering [is] scraps.” In late September, he was there when the Ohio General Assembly voted on a temporary pause in the state’s gasoline tax. Data center opponents, along with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, a former director of the state health department, urged lawmakers to pass a measure pausing data center development that day. Majority Republicans declined to take up the issue. Ohio political blogger D.J. Byrnes, who writes The Rooster newsletter about Ohio politics, captured video of Baurichter speaking on the sidelines with state Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, a Cleveland-area Democrat. Baurichter admonished her for not doing more. “We would rather you fight for our honor than for scraps that are being offered by people who know what they’re offering [is] scraps,” he said. His conversations at the statehouse underscored his sense that leaders are not listening. “It’s exhausting, like throwing your energy down a black hole,” he said soon after. The legislature responded to public concerns last spring by creating the Select Committee on Data Centers. The panel has met five times, including the June 1 hearing, and has gathered feedback from local officials, data center companies, and the public. “We’re committed to being a good neighbor—operationally, economically, and in how we engage with communities across the state,” Thor Underdahl, data center and energy public policy manager for Meta, said at a June 4 committee hearing. Craig Sundstrom, head of energy and sustainability policy for Amazon Web Services, testified about the jobs and investment that data centers could bring. He pushed back against concerns about their water use, saying claims about excessive water consumption are false. An Amazon data center “uses less water than a few car washes do annually,” he said. State Rep. Adam Holmes, a Republican from a rural district in the east-central part of Ohio, is the committee’s co-chair. In an interview, he said that legislators are in a fact-finding phase, trying to understand how the state can reap the economic benefits of development while addressing the issues raised by voters. “It’s overwhelming the amount of money that’s coming, and it’s coupled with this historic transformation in technology that we’re facing,” he said. “The change is dramatic; that creates a lot of anxiety.” Ohio Rep. Adam Holmes, co-chairman of the Select Committee on Data Centers, speaking on the House floor.Ohio General Assembly via Inside Climate News Holmes wants to make sure consumers are protected from potential increases in electricity and water bills tied to data centers’ demand for those resources, he said. But he’s still figuring out how to approach proposals that would pause development. He noted that both Acton, the Democratic nominee, and her Republican opponent, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, support some form of a moratorium. That said, candidates differ on what could come next. On her campaign website, Acton has called for greater transparency, ending state incentives for data centers and restricting where they can be built. This is in addition to a moratorium that would give lawmakers time to establish new rules. Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate and prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, has proposed making electricity free for residents of communities with data centers and strictly enforcing clean-air and clean-water rules for the projects. He supports pausing development until state law clearly protects consumers. “Despite my opponents’ claims, I’m not ‘pro-data center,’” he said on his campaign website. “I’m pro-Ohio, and I have a plan to fix the problem.” Conserve Ohio leaders are skeptical of both candidates. They question whether politicians, especially Republicans, can withstand pressure from gigantic tech companies and Trump. The Trump administration has a stake in Ohio’s data center debate because the federal government owns the land that would host the largest data center in the country, Ports Technology Campus near Piketon, which is not far from Adams and Brown counties. When fully built, the project would require 10,000 megawatts of electricity. A proposed natural-gas power plant would supply 9,200 megawatts, with an additional 800 megawatts that may come from other sources. The federal government is working with SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate, to develop the site, with OpenAI expected to be its primary user. Even though Ports Technology Campus is a short drive from where Gerber and Baurichter live, the project is almost too large for them to comprehend, and its federal ownership makes it difficult to challenge, they said. So far, the proposal has drawn little opposition in Pike County, which, like Adams and Brown counties, has struggled to attract jobs for decades. Data center opponents are focusing on several dozen hot spots where resistance is strongest. Conserve Ohio advises local activists on how to obtain public records. In return, local activists help gather signatures for a statewide moratorium vote. As of Oct. 2, the campaign has collected about 140,000 signatures of the roughly 410,000 needed to qualify for the ballot, Baurichter said.The campaign is too late to make the November ballot, meaning the earliest the issue could go before voters is 2027. Polling suggests the campaign has public support. A survey released by Bowling Green State University’s Democracy and Public Policy Network found that 75 percent of residents opposed data center construction in their communities, while 63 percent oppose such projects anywhere in Ohio and 55 percent oppose them anywhere in the United States. Ohio has emerged as one of the country’s leading data center markets, ranking among the top five states for development based on the number of projects and their electricity demand, according to industry research firms. Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate research firm, ranks Columbus third among US data center markets behind Virginia and Portland and Eastern Oregon. Much of the development has happened in New Albany, a suburb northeast of Columbus. Amazon and Meta were among the companies that built large data centers in New Albany in the 2010s. Today, rows of buildings filled with computer equipment, surrounded by muddy construction sites, occupy much of the city, as The Columbus Dispatch showed in a recent video. For data center opponents, New Albany is an example to be avoided. An aerial view of Google’s New Albany data center campus in Central Ohio. Google via Inside Climate News Michael Thomas, CEO of Cleanview, a research firm that tracks power plants and data centers, said that the Columbus-New Albany area is attractive for data centers because of its abundant electricity and close proximity to many of the nation’s population centers. “Ohio has cheaper power than most other states, and historically the state and its utilities have offered generous incentives and easy permitting,” he said in an email. Back on Gerber’s property, she led a tour of Ohio Brush Creek, where the water level was unusually low. The area, she said, has suffered from drought broken up by flooding, making her wary of projects that may affect the region’s water. The campaign has cost Gerber time and added to her stress, but she sees those costs as small compared with what is at stake. She believes this fight will determine the future of Adams County. “It’s overwhelming,” she said.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025. The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda. A long-standing vaccine critic, Kennedy has upended the childhood vaccination schedule in his year in office, removing several shots from a list of recommended immunizations for all children, including those for Covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A and B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Kennedy has also called for overhauling the current safety monitoring system for vaccine injury data collection, known as Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), claiming that it suppresses information about the true rate of vaccine side effects. He has also proposed changes to the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that could make it easier for people to sue for adverse events that haven’t been proven to be associated with vaccines. Jointly managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration, VAERS was established in 1990 as a way to detect potential safety issues with vaccines after their approval. Anyone, including health care providers and members of the public, can submit an adverse reaction report to the database. Because these claims are not verified, VAERS data alone can’t be used to determine if a vaccine caused an adverse event. > “I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a > need for a lot of skilled human follow-through.” “VAERS, at best, was always a hypothesis-generating mechanism,” says Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was previously a member of the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practices. “It’s a noisy system. Anybody can report, and there’s no control group.” Offit says the system only shows adverse events that happened at some point following immunization; it doesn’t prove that a vaccine caused those reactions. CDC’s own website says that a report to VAERS does not mean that a vaccine caused an adverse event. Despite this, anti-vaccine activists have misused VAERS data over the years to argue that vaccines are not safe. Leslie Lenert, previously the founding director of the CDC’s National Center for Public Health Informatics, says government scientists have been using traditional natural language processing AI models to look for patterns in VAERS data for several years, so it’s not surprising that HHS would move toward the adoption of more advanced large language models. One major limitation of VAERS is that it doesn’t include data on how many people received a vaccine, which can make events logged in the database seem more common than they actually are. For that reason, Lenert says it’s important to pair information from VAERS with other data sources to determine the true risk of an event. LLMs are also famously good at producing convincing hallucinations, underscoring the need for humans to follow up on any hypotheses generated by an LLM. “VAERS is supposed to be very exploratory. Some people in the FDA are now treating it as more than exploratory,” says Lenert, who is currently the director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Health Artificial Intelligence at Rutgers University. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, reportedly proposed stricter vaccine regulation in a recent memo sent to staff in which he blamed the deaths of at least 10 children on the Covid-19 vaccine without citing evidence. The deaths were reported to VAERS and had previously been reviewed by FDA staff. More than a dozen former FDA commissioners responded with a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine, expressing concern about Prasad’s proposed guidelines. The changes, they wrote, would “dramatically change vaccine regulation on the basis of a reinterpretation of selective evidence.” Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at Georgetown University, says that the use of LLMs could potentially detect previously unknown safety issues with vaccines. But since VAERS can contain inaccurate and incomplete data, he says it’s important that any leads are thoroughly investigated first. “I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a need for a lot of skilled human follow-through by people who understand vaccines and possible adverse events, as well as statistics, epidemiology, and challenges with LLM output,” he says. With deep staffing cuts at the CDC, Goodman says it would be important to have plans and capacity in place to deal with any emerging data, including screening it and deciding what may need to be studied further and how. In the past, VAERS has flagged legitimate safety issues, including instances of a rare clotting disorder among some people who received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and rare cases of myocarditis, particularly among younger males, who got the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Kristi Noem faces intensifying public scrutiny over her leadership of the Department of Homeland Security. Criticism of the former South Dakota governor has focused on her handling of the killing of Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent and her oversight of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The controversies have prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers—and a small but noteworthy group of Republicans—for her resignation or impeachment. The immediate flashpoint has been the January 24 killing of Pretti, which occurred during ongoing protests in Minneapolis. Noem initially described Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, as a “domestic terrorist,” a narrative repeated by others in the Trump administration. Her account was almost immediately contradicted by numerous videos that showed Pretti was unarmed and restrained when federal agents shot him repeatedly. “She should be out of a job,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said after the videos emerged. While President Donald Trump has publicly said Noem’s position is secure, a number of potential successors have reportedly emerged, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency. > “It’s magic-wand policymaking, where you need a crisis in order for something > to happen.” Noem’s handling of the killing—which came two weeks after a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis fatally shot protestor Renée Good—follows sustained criticism of her management of FEMA. Lawmakers, disaster response experts, and disaster survivors say her policies have slowed emergency response and delayed recovery funding. Long before the crisis in Minnesota, concerns were building over her approach to FEMA preparedness and spending and its response to calamities like last year’s devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country. “It’s a policy of chaotic austerity,” said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies disasters and adaptation. “It’s magic-wand policymaking, where you need a crisis in order for something to happen.” FEMA helps coordinate the response to major disasters like last year’s Los Angeles wildfires, but the agency more often acts like a bank, reimbursing states and cities for their disaster preparedness and recovery spending. When Noem took office, she throttled that spending by, among other things, requiring her personal sign-off on all expenses over $100,000. The pace of disbursements has since slowed to a trickle. Those restrictions reportedly hindered the agency’s response to emergencies like July’s floods in Texas because officials could not pre-position search and rescue teams. The acting head of FEMA at the time, David Richardson, was reportedly unreachable for several hours, and the agency did not answer two-thirds of calls to its hotline. More than 130 people died in the floods.  On Thursday, a coalition of disaster survivors released a “report card” that gave Noem’s leadership an “F.” Brandy Gerstner, a member of that coalition, lost her home and belongings in the Texas flood. She and her family live in the rural community of Sandy Creek and spent three days without power or water waiting for federal assistance. “Official help was scarce,” she said. “Despite that, Kristi Noem and Texas Gov. [Greg] Abbott have described the response as exceptional, a lie that insults the memory of those lost in the floods.” Beyond floods in Texas and fires in Southern California, the United States experienced relatively few major disasters last year. Even so, Noem’s restrictions on FEMA spending has also slowed payments to local governments still recovering from past catastrophes. The reimbursement backlog has reached $17 billion, according to the New York Times—more than the agency spends on such things in a typical  year.  Delays have also affected FEMA’s efforts to reduce the impact of future catastrophes. A Grist analysis found that the agency’s net spending on resilience grants declined over the past three quarters, even as climate-driven disasters intensified nationwide. The nonprofit news outlet NOTUS identified a $1.3 billion backlog of such allocations, the primary source of federal funding for states and cities seeking to harden infrastructure. FEMA terminated another climate resilience program last year, though a court has ordered it to reinstate that program. Former FEMA chief of staff Michael Coen Jr. said Noem’s departure could ease the logjam. “I don’t see another secretary coming in that is going to want to review every single grant,” said Coen, who served in the Obama and Biden administrations. “I would think that most executive leaders…are gonna find that that is micromanagement.” > “There’s plenty of towns in Vermont that would still say they’re waiting.”   Beyond Noem’s leadership lie other questions about the agency’s direction. The Trump administration has yet to nominate a permanent administrator, leaving Karen Evans, a former cybersecurity official, in charge since Richardson departed in November. Agency leaders have suggested firing more than 11,000 employees, many of them contract workers involved in local response and recovery efforts.  The Trump administration’s touted “review council” was set to produce a report on FEMA’s future, but Noem reportedly pared the council’s final report to a fraction of its original length. The panel abruptly cancelled its plans to present the findings in December, and its deadline has been pushed to March. “I think whether she stays or goes, there are huge issues that have been created in the last year at FEMA that have to be resolved quickly ahead of hurricane season,” Labowitz, said, referring to the season to come. Noem appeared to soften her approach last week. The agency paused its planned terminations, and Noem hosted her first in-person briefing with agency employees, whom she attempted to rally ahead of Winter Storm Fern. She also appeared to respond to mounting criticism on Thursday when she announced the release of $2.2 billion in disaster response funds. The money will reimburse states and local governments for repair costs associated with events like Hurricane Helene, the 2023 floods in Vermont, and coastal erosion in Louisiana. A press release frames the allocation as “additional” recovery money, but recipients told Grist that FEMA is merely following standard procedure in granting reimbursements. “We were all quite surprised yesterday when we were informed that the payment was coming as quickly as it came,” said Joe Flynn, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Transportation. FEMA told his agency that it would provide $22 million to help rebuild a fleet garage destroyed in the 2023 floods. “There’s plenty of towns in Vermont that would still say they’re waiting.”   The offer was less than the state had requested, but Flynn accepted it given uncertainty about future funding. “With everything going on in the federal government, an adequately granted award is a bird in the hand,” he said.  The press release appeared to have been composed in haste. It contained multiple typos, including a misspelling of Louisiana as “Louisianna.” The director of the Greeneville Water Commission, after confirming that FEMA will reimburse the cost of rebuilding infrastructure lost to Helene, noted that her own town’s name was spelled wrong as well.  “By the way,” said commission director Laura White, “they spelled Greeneville wrong!”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Can a lump of coal ever be…cute? It’s a question no one was thinking about until last Thursday, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted a cartoon of himself on X kneeling next to “Coalie”—a combustible lump with giant eyes, an open-mouthed grin, and yellow boots, almost like a carbon-heavy Japanese video game character. Department of the Interior It might seem like a strange mascot to promote what Burgum calls the “American Energy Dominance Agenda.” “Especially for this administration, I would have expected a little bit more macho twist to it,” said Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of literature and culture at Chuo University in Tokyo, and the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World.  In Japan, Dale said, seemingly everything gets a cute character attached to it—not just in TV shows and games, but also as part of government public relations efforts. This ultra-adorable aesthetic, associated with rounded shapes and huge eyes, is so common it has a name: kawaii. Even the Tokyo police department has an orange, mouselike mascot, with a disarming cuddliness that serves to make law enforcement feel softer and less threatening.   > “There’s nothing funny about black lung disease. There’s nothing funny about > the water pollution.”  Coalie appears to do something similar, countering Burgum’s “mine, baby, mine” message with a kawaii-style innocence. “You know, it makes us feel more familiar,” Dale said. “It makes us want to get closer.” Those warm, fuzzy feelings come from how our brains are wired to respond to babylike characteristics. Give a character a round body, big eyes, and chubby arms and legs, and you can even make a lump of coal look huggable.  Coalie is just the latest in a long line of characters used by controversial industries, from tobacco to nuclear energy, that seem designed to make their risks feel less threatening—though they typically looked less cute, at least in the United States. David Ropeik, a risk expert, sees Coalie as part of a tradition of advertising strategies that widely disliked companies use to push back against criticism.  “It’s a common response from cultures that feel themselves under attack, looking for ways to make their case in a less than adversarial way to sell their point of view,” Ropeik said. President Donald Trump has been working on rehabilitating coal’s image as the administration tries to stall the fuel’s decline. Trump has even said he has a standing order in the White House for staff to use the phrase “clean, beautiful coal.” He explained why in November, saying, “It’s ‘clean and beautiful’ because it needs public relations help.” Even cuteness can backfire, though, if people notice that an extra-adorable character is trying to coax them into liking something dangerous. Consider Pluto-kun, a cherubic mascot from the 1990s who promoted the Japanese nuclear company Tepco—at one point by cheerfully drinking a glass of plutonium as if it were harmless. The character attracted little attention until the nuclear accident at Tepco’s Fukushima plant in 2011, when people began resurfacing Pluto-kun online to point out the irony of its upbeat reassurances as the threat of nuclear disaster felt real and immediate.  Some felt a similar dissonance when Interior Secretary Burgum posted the image of Coalie. Chelsea Barnes, director of government affairs and strategy at Appalachian Voices, an environmental nonprofit, said the character was mocked by some of her friends and colleagues who work to support coal communities because of the serious damage they see firsthand from coal. “There’s nothing funny about climate change,” she said. “There’s nothing funny about black lung disease. There’s nothing funny about the water pollution that many people in Appalachia experience because of coal mining.”  Part of the problem was that the timing was bad, Barnes said. The day after Coalie showed up on Burgum’s social media feed, Trump signed a law that redirects $500 million in funding originally set aside for cleaning up abandoned coal mines to the Forest Service and federal wildfire management programs. On top of that, the administration has been trying to roll back safety programs for miners. To people who care about the health of people working in mines and living near mines, Barnes said, Coalie “comes across as a middle finger, in a way.” For Coalie’s creators, the backlash was a bit surprising, according to Simone Randolph, the communications director at the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, or OSMRE. The thing is, Coalie wasn’t initially intended as a mascot for “American Energy Dominance.” Its story actually started way back in 2018, when a social media manager at OSMRE put googly eyes on a picture of coal.  “Coalie” became a running joke in the office and an icon on their Teams channel, evolving into different versions over the years, Randolph said. “If you walk down our hallway in the D.C. office, people have pictures of Coalie on their doors.” Despite the uproar over Coalie, Randolph hopes the mascot can help people learn about her obscure federal office. OSMRE oversees the permitting and regulation of the country’s coal mines and is responsible for cleaning up old, polluted mining land. The agency has transferred and authorized billions of dollars to restore mining lands for better uses—like what’s now the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden. “So often, communication boils down to something that’s kind of bland,” Randolph said. “It doesn’t really catch the public’s attention. And so we were hoping to do something that would be a little bit more attention-grabbing.” Last week, OSMRE posted an explainer of its work using Coalie as a guide to walk readers through the agency’s responsibilities.  But the office’s character has notable differences to the version of Coalie that Burgum posted on X, which has tiny pink circles next to its eyes. Its features show a clear link to kawaii, an unusual move for an American institution, Dale said. It’s possible that it’s the result of somebody in Burgum’s department using AI to generate the image. In his own experimentation, Dale has found that AI will often add kawaii features to cute characters. Randolph said that OSMRE’s team uses AI tools, encouraged by Burgum, and that the version of Coalie he posted was designed to align with the secretary’s existing “Cartoon Doug” character. Randolph said that it was an intentional decision to have the interior secretary introduce Coalie online, to bring more attention to OSMRE’s work. “The response has been extreme on both sides,” she said. “And my hope is that we can capitalize upon this moment to at least show the good work that is happening.”

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Polar bears became the poster child for the peril of climate change for obvious reasons: They hunt seals from the ice, and as fossil fuels warm the planet, the ice where these bears live is melting. For more than three decades, scientists have been warning that climate change could drive polar bear populations extinct. That message infiltrated the public psyche, perhaps more than any other about the scourge of global warming. But as scientists are continuing to learn, the reality for these iconic bears is more complicated. In 2022, scientists published a study showing that polar bears in southeastern Greenland were able to use glacial ice instead of sea ice to hunt, sheltering them from some of the impacts of warming. And a study published late last year revealed some changes in polar bear DNA that may help them adapt to hotter weather. > “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the > variability story.” Now, research in the journal Scientific Reports adds yet another wrinkle of hope for the species. The study, an analysis of hundreds of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, found that declining sea ice is not causing polar bears to starve. They actually appeared healthier in the last two decades of the analysis, from 2000 to 2019. The overall population, meanwhile, is either stable or growing, according to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute. “I was surprised,” Aars told Vox from Svalbard. “I would have predicted that body condition would decline. We see the opposite.” The new study makes clear that, in other regions, the loss of sea ice from warming is indeed linked to ailing polar bear populations. In Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, for example, researchers have tied melting ice to lower bear survival and a shortage of food, finding that the population has roughly halved since the 1980s. Climate change remains the largest threat to these animals. Yet, there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the world, and they all behave slightly differently. Warming is not uniformly killing them. Perhaps, then, polar bears aren’t the best mascot for the climate crisis—a point some advocates have been making for a while—especially when there are countless other species imperiled by rising temperatures. Polar bears need fat to survive the harsh Arctic cold; that’s why they eat blubbery seals. Seals, meanwhile, need ice to rest and birth pups. Without that ice, polar bears have a hard time finding and catching them. Since the late 1970s, the Arctic—the northernmost region of the planet, including parts of Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Russia—has lost more than 27,000 square miles of summer ice. That’s an area larger than the state of West Virginia. Some estimates suggest that the region could be ice-free by the middle of the century, even under optimistic emissions scenarios. That melting ice is what’s harming polar bear populations in Canada’s Hudson Bay; the Beaufort Sea, located north of Alaska and the Yukon; and Baffin Bay in Greenland. And it’s why they’re listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, a global authority on endangered species. But the story in Svalbard—an icy archipelago in the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia—is different. Magnus Andersen and Jon Aars, researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute and co-authors on the new study, measure a polar bear in Svalbard.Jon Aars/Norwegian Polar Institute Between 1992 and 2019, scientists in Svalbard darted hundreds of polar bears from helicopters and measured their bodies. Then they compared those measurements to sea ice conditions, such as the number of ice-free days, and other climate variables. Remarkably, the number of days with no ice in the region increased by roughly 100 during that period. And yet, as the authors found, the body condition of both male and female polar bears—i.e., how fat and healthy they are—increased from 2000 onward. Female bears were actually in worse condition when the sea ice lasted longer. Often, the message about polar bears is “100 percent doom,” said Kristin Laidre, a polar bear researcher at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. “But that’s not true,” Laidre told me. “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the variability story.” If polar bears in Svalbard are healthy, that means they’re finding food. So what are they eating? One possibility, said Aars, the lead author, is that there may be higher densities of ringed seals, their primary food source, in years with less ice, so they’re easier to catch. Even if polar bears have less time to catch the seals—because there are fewer days with ice—they can put on loads of weight quickly and rely on that for months. The bears may also be eating other animals on land that don’t require ice. Reindeer on the archipelago are increasing, for example, and Aars says he’s seen bears eat them. Walrus populations are increasing, too. Although polar bears can’t easily kill a walrus, they can scavenge their tusked, fat-filled carcass when walruses die from other causes. “Bears in Svalbard are potentially changing their diet, and that might account for the increase in body condition,” said John Iacozza, a senior instructor and polar bear expert at the University of Manitoba. That’s a luxury that polar bears elsewhere might not have. “You wouldn’t see the same effect happening in Western Hudson Bay, just because the availability of other species is less,” said Iacozza, who was not involved in the new research. While the Svalbard bears might be fine for now, researchers still worry about the long-term impacts of warming in the region. “We do think there’s a threshold,” Aars told me. “The difficult part is that we don’t know what it is.” No other animal has been so closely tied to climate change as the polar bear. It was on the cover of TIME’s 2006 global warming issue. It was featured in Al Gore’s seminal documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which premiered the same year. It was used in funding campaigns for environmental groups. (One year, I even dressed up as a drowning polar bear for Halloween with a friend who went as a melting ice cap.) The bear’s symbolism is rooted in good science. Those early studies were in places like Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, where these Arctic apex predators were clearly dying from melting sea ice. Media outlets amplified the most sensational conclusions—and they stuck. That’s partly because the message is simple, Laidre said: Polar bears need ice, and warming is making it disappear. “The relationship between [climate and] an animal that needs a platform to eat is easy to wrap your brain around,” she said.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. With an icy white sheet still blanketing much of the Eastern United States after an intense storm this week, it’s hard to imagine a future with less snow at this time of year.  But over time, climate change has decreased snowpack by as much as 20 percent per decade in parts of the Northern Hemisphere. This trend is already causing trouble for the Winter Olympics and Paralympics, global events reliant on snow to succeed. In a landmark 2024 study, researchers found that potential host locations are dwindling as temperatures warm.  Just weeks before this year’s Olympics-Paralympics events kick off in Italy, scientists published a follow-up study analyzing how the games can adapt. The most effective option: shifting when they are held.  Disappearing snow isn’t just affecting Olympians. Around the world, the warming climate is shortening recreational ski and snowboarding seasons, which could have cascading impacts for the towns that have long relied on this winter economy.  For more than a century, the Winter Olympics have been held almost every four years in snowy cities across the globe, from the first games in Chamonix, France, to the most recent in Beijing. The Paralympic Games take place in the same location shortly afterward.  Olympic competitions such as alpine skiing and snowboarding are dependent on consistent snowpack. Rapid levels of warming across the Northern Hemisphere disrupt that. In 2010, Vancouver saw a record-warm January, partially due to the weather phenomenon known as El Niño, and had to drive and fly in enough snow to fill 20 Big Bens for snowboarding and freestyle skiing events, the Christian Science Monitor reports.  Warm weather also threatens the quality of the snow already on the ground, as shown at Russia’s Sochi Olympics and Paralympics in 2014, which saw an uptick in injury rates compared with the previous games as athletes struggled in the slush.  With this in mind, the International Olympic Committee, which governs the games, recently commissioned a study to determine future climate impacts. Researchers analyzed 93 regions around the world that have previously hosted the Olympic Winter and Paralympic Games to determine whether they’d be “climate-reliable” by the 2050s. Under the most likely emissions scenario, only 52 locations met the criteria for the Olympics and just 22 for the Paralympics, given that it is slightly later in the season, according to their 2024 study. But there are ways to adapt, according to co-author Daniel Scott, a climate expert at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. In a follow-up study published last week, Scott and his colleagues found that shifting both the Olympic and Paralympic Games to earlier dates could increase the number of climate-suitable host countries, particularly for the Paralympics.  As I reported last year, experts have called for a similar timing change for the Summer Olympics to reduce the risk of extreme heat, which has harmed both competitors’ and fans’ health in recent years.  It’s a seemingly simple shift but comes with its own set of complexities. Moving the Winter Olympics up a few weeks would mean the games are happening right after the holiday season. Cities may struggle to secure pre-games housing, ensure there’s sufficient infrastructure, or find volunteers shortly after Christmas.  Another added nuisance, according to Scott: Television rights. Broadcasters and advertisers pay billions and plan years ahead for the rights to air the Olympics, which provides the financial foundation for the games. Changing the time of the games could disrupt this model, at least in the short term.  Other experts have pointed out that organizers must reckon with the Olympic Games’ own rampant emissions to secure a future less threatened by climate change. Cities often raze ecosystems to build new facilities, companies use copious amounts of energy to broadcast the competitions, and people travel from around the world in carbon-emitting planes to spectate.  For the Winter Games specifically, environmentalists are concerned about the growing amount of artificial snow cities must pump out to supplement dwindling natural supplies. In 2022, Beijing made Olympics history as the first host to use artificial snow almost exclusively to support the games.  It was a mammoth task. China pulled water from key reservoirs to help create a wintry snowscape in a historically dry city. But critics said the effort strained water supplies for local communities, disrupted soil and plant growth, and used large amounts of energy.  The 2026 Olympics is in a snowier region, the Italian Alps. But still, the International Olympic Committee told the Associated Press it has produced more than 2 million cubic yards of artificial snow for the upcoming games.  Since the last time Italy’s Cortina d’Ampezzo hosted in 1956, February temperatures have warmed in the area by 6.4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central.  Environmentalists have pointed to the climate feedback loop this can create: As places pump out more artificial snow, the emissions from this process—if fossil fuels are used—feed the climate change that will reduce future natural snowpack.  Artificial snow is becoming similarly important for recreational winter sports as temperatures rise. Some resorts have taken to stockpiling snow under giant insulating blankets to keep it from melting during warmer seasons, WIRED reports. But these efforts are costly, and it may soon become untenable for certain regions in the Northern Hemisphere, including some parts of the Northeastern US such as New York and Pennsylvania, to save or make enough snow for a lucrative ski operation.  Scott told me there will be “winners and losers” as winter resort towns face global warming. “As some of those businesses go out of business, the others are there to pick up market share, if demand stays the same,” he said.  Though Scott recognizes the energy and water required to produce machine-made snow, he believes the sustainability of snowmaking gets a bit of a bad rep. He noted that up to 90 percent of the water is returned to the same watershed once the snow melts, and the process likely has a lower emissions footprint than traveling farther to ski elsewhere or flying to watch the Olympics.  Nonetheless, winter sport enthusiasts—professional and amateur—will have to adapt to changing conditions. A survey of Olympic winter athletes and coaches from 20 countries found 90 percent had concerns about how climate change will affect the future of their sport. “When it comes to the Olympics, you hope you deliver [athletes] the best conditions possible,” Scott said. “These people have trained their whole damn lives for these things.”

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When Oregon’s short legislative session convenes in early February, conservation advocates will once again try to convince lawmakers to pass a major funding bill that could provide nearly $30 million annually to protect the state’s biodiversity. The 1% for Wildlife bill, sponsored by state Reps. Ken Helm (D-Beaverton) and Mark Owens (R-Crane), would increase the state’s current hotel and lodging taxes by 1.25 percent, creating a new revenue stream for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to support long-neglected habitat conservation programs. Last session, the bill passed the House, but two Republicans blocked it in the Senate. > “The bill is a very innovative concept, and there are probably 49 other states > that are watching closely to see if it’s successful.” Oregon’s federally required State Wildlife Action Plan identifies species at risk of extinction or decline due to habitat loss, climate change, and other threats. In 2025, as the plan was being updated, dozens of species were added, including the Crater Lake newt, the California condor, and the North American porcupine, bringing the total to more than 300. “It’s a blueprint of the most imperiled species and habitats in the state,” said Sristi Kamal, deputy director of the Western Environmental Law Center, which supports the bill. “But a plan is only as good as the funding to implement it.” Though Oregon’s Fish and Wildlife Department receives some state funding, most of its budget comes from hunting and fishing licenses and federal taxes on guns and ammunition via the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937. The majority of Oregon’s federal funds, about $20 million annually, are earmarked for big game species and sport fish. Other federal grants primarily support species already protected by the Endangered Species Act. That means that Fish and Wildlife, like most state wildlife agencies, has little money to prevent species from becoming endangered in the first place. Between 2023 and 2025, it spent just 2 percent of its budget on wildlife conservation programs. Increasing hotel and lodging taxes would leverage the state’s robust eco-tourism industry, which annually attracts tens of thousands of out-of-state and international visitors. If the bill passes, Oregon’s statewide hotel tax rate would be 2.5 percent—the third-lowest rate in the US and less than half of what Washington, Montana, and Idaho charge. The 1% for Wildlife bill could provide a new model for state-level conservation funding, said Mark Humpert, director of conservation initiatives at the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which advocates for state agencies at the federal level. “Ninety-five to 99 percent of species that states are responsible for have no dedicated funding from the federal government. We sometimes joke that state agencies have to offer bake sales to fund this work,” Humpert said. Some states sell specialty license plates; others use a small percentage of sales taxes on outdoor equipment. The “gold standard,” Humpert said, is Missouri, where a state constitutional amendment dedicates one-eighth of 1 percent of its sales tax to its Department of Conservation. According to a 2016 study by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and its partners, fully implementing every State Wildlife Action Plan in the country would cost around $1 billion annually. But for years, Congress has failed to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, a bipartisan bill that would bolster states’ conservation funding. Now, as the Trump administration slashes federal conservation and climate funding, advocates say that the 1% for Wildlife bill could provide the stable funding needed to implement Oregon’s wildlife action plan. “The bill is a very innovative concept, and there are probably 49 other states that are watching closely to see if it’s successful,” Humpert said. In northeast Oregon’s high-desert region, Jamie Dawson, the Greater Hells Canyon Council’s conservation director, hopes the bill can fund wildlife crossings on Highway 82. “This section of the Blue Mountains is an absolutely critical habitat connectivity corridor—of continental importance,” Dawson said. Deer, elk and other species use it to migrate between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades Range in western Oregon and Washington. But the route is a wildlife collision hotspot, with hundreds of animals killed by vehicles over the past few years. Elsewhere, the funding could support studies of migratory bird habitats like eel grass estuaries and wetlands, said Joe Liebezeit, conservation director for the Bird Alliance of Oregon. In spring 2025, local birdwatchers and radar data indicated that half as many birds as usual migrated through the state, though the reasons for this are unclear. > “The goal of this funding is to keep common species common, and that’s > something sportsmen can get behind.” As the state’s general fund waxes and wanes, so does the wildlife department’s budget, which is rewritten every two years. The lack of stable conservation funding prevents it from focusing on long-term solutions for species conservation, said Davia Palmeri, the agency’s federal policy director. “We do monitoring for these species when we can—when there’s a grant or short-term funding—to get pulses on species like reptiles or amphibians.” For over a decade, advocates have fought to secure state funding for conservation. “At one point, there was a proposal to put a tax on birdseed,” said Danielle Moser, wildlife program manager at Oregon Wild. “There was the idea of a gear tax—things you buy at REI.” But none of these ideas would have raised enough, and ultimately, they fizzled. Last year, two Republican senators, Daniel Bonham and Cedric Hayden, killed the bill by refusing to allow the final committee vote that would bring it to the governor’s desk. Now, conservation advocates from across the political spectrum are determined to pass it. “You won’t always see all these logos on the same page,” says Amy Patrick, policy director at the Oregon Hunters Association, which is working with conservation groups like Oregon Wild to shape the bill. “The goal of this funding is to keep common species common, and that’s something sportsmen can get behind. There’s a real sense that this is an investment that will benefit all of our wildlife and habitats.” The current 1.5 percent tourism tax funds the $45 million annual budget of Travel Oregon, which promotes the state’s tourism industry. Travel Portland, an independent nonprofit that works with Travel Oregon, opposes the bill, arguing that the additional tax would discourage large conferences and events. (Travel Oregon said in a statement that it does not take positions on bills.) The Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association called the bill a “Pandora’s box” of future tax increases. “We don’t see an end in sight, with all the other state agencies that would love a new revenue source,” said Jason Brandt, the association’s president. Brandt and others note that the bill’s original text only provided a 1 percent tax increase for the wildlife agency, but amendments tacked on 0.25 percent for conservation efforts by other departments, including the Department of Agriculture’s invasive species management and anti-poaching efforts at the Department of Justice. The association’s political action committee donated more than $17,000 to Bonham during his time in state office. Bonham, who resigned from the Senate in October when he was nominated to a federal position, did not respond to a request for comment. Kamal and other advocates say the tourism industry’s opposition is ironic, given that revenue from the new tax would be reinvested in some of the state’s most popular attractions. Travel Oregon’s surveys show that scenic beauty is the top draw for 90 percent of out-of-state visitors. “A lot of people come to Portland for business, but then they go to our beaches, or the mountains,” said Kamal. “The tourism industry is standing on the back of these natural resources. If you don’t invest in it, the pressures on these resources will make that legacy crumble.”