Latest news with #Grist
WIRED
3 days ago
- Climate
- WIRED
The Texas Floods Were a Preview of What's to Come
Jul 26, 2025 7:00 AM Mounting evidence shows no US state is safe from the flooding that ravaged Texas' Kerr Country. Community members grieve during a candlelight vigil to honor the lives lost in the flash floods that claimed more than 120 lives on July 11, 2025 in Kerrville, Texas. Photograph:This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The country watched in horror as torrential rain drenched Texas earlier this month, sweeping at least 135 people to their death. Kerr County alone lost 107, including more than two dozen children at Camp Mystic. From afar, it would be easy, even tempting, to think that floods like these could never happen to you. That the disaster is remote. It's not. As details of the tragedy have come into focus, the list of contributing factors has grown. Sudden downpours, driven by climate change. The lack of a comprehensive warning system to notify people that the Guadalupe River was rising rapidly. Rampant building in areas known to flood, coupled with incomplete information about what places might be at risk. These are the same elements that could trigger a Kerr County type of catastrophe in every state in the country. It's a reality that has played out numerous times already in recent years, with flooding in Vermont, Kentucky, North Carolina and elsewhere, leaving grief and billions of dollars in destruction in its wake. 'Kerr County is an extreme example of what's happening everywhere,' said Robert Freudenberg, vice president of energy and environmental programs at the Regional Plan Association. 'People are at risk because of it, and there's more that we need to be doing.' The most obvious problem is we keep building in areas prone to flooding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, produces readily available maps showing high-risk locales. Yet, according to the latest data from the nonprofit climate research firm First Street Foundation, 7.9 million homes and other structures stand in a FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area, which designates a location with 1 percent or greater chance of being inundated in any given year. FEMA Flood Zone Top 10 Source: First Street Foundation In Louisiana, a nation-leading 23 percent of properties are located in a FEMA flood zone. In Florida, it's about 17 percent. Arkansas, New Mexico, and Nebraska are perhaps less expected members of the top 10, as is New Jersey, which, with New York City, saw torrential rain and flooding that killed two people earlier this month. Texas ranks seventh in the country, with about 800,000 properties, or roughly 6.5 percent of the state's total, sitting in a flood zone. Kerr County officials have limited authority to keep people from building in these areas, but even when governments have the ability to prevent risky building projects, they historically haven't. Although one study found that some areas are finally beginning to curb floodplain development, people keep building in perilous places. 'There's an innate draw to the water that we have, but we need to know where the limits are,' said Freudenberg. 'In places that are really dangerous, we need to work toward getting people out of harm's way.' Kerr County sits in a region known as Flash Flood Alley, and at least four cabins at Camp Mystic sat in an extremely hazardous 'floodway.' Numerous others stood in the path of a 100-year flood. When the Christian summer camp for girls underwent an expansion in 2019, the owners built even more cabins in the water's path. 'It's an unwillingness to think about what the future—and the present—have in store for us,' said Rob Moore, director of the Water and Climate Team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, about Americans' tradition of floodplain development. 'It's a reluctance to own up to the reality we live in.' Many people don't even know they are in harm's way. According to the NRDC, 14 states have no flood disclosure laws, and in eight they deem the laws 'inadequate.' FEMA maps are also flawed. For one, they can be politically influenced, with homeowners and communities often lobbying to be excluded in order to avoid insurance mandates and potential building costs. And experts say the science underpinning the maps is lagging too. FEMA 'only maps main river channels and coastal storm surge areas,' explained Jeremy Porter, the head of climate implications research at First Street Foundation. The agency, he added, specifically doesn't model heavy rainfall, isn't great about indicating the risk of urban flooding, and is behind on accounting for climate change. First Street Flood Zone Top 10 Source: First Street Foundation First Street built a flood model that tries to fill in those gaps. It found that 17.7 million people are at risk of a 100-year flood, a number that's more than double what FEMA's hazard area state rankings also change, with mountainous areas susceptible to inland flash flooding jumping up the list. West Virginia moves into first, with a staggering 30 percent of properties built in flood-prone areas. Kentucky climbs from 19th to sixth. Texas remains at seventh, but the portion of properties at risk goes to 15 percent. In Kerr County, FEMA's maps showed 2,560 properties (6.5 percent) in a flood zone. First Street's model nearly doubled that. 'There's a ton of unknown risk across the country,' said Porter, who says better maps are among the most important goals that policymakers can and should work toward. First Street has partnered with the real estate website Redfin to include climate risk metrics in its listings. Rob Moore says political will is essential to making that type of systemic change when it comes to not only flooding, but other climate risks, such as wildfires or coastal erosion. Strengthening building codes and restricting development in high-risk areas will require similar fortitude. 'Governments and states don't want to tell developers to not put things in a wetland, not put things in a floodplain,' he said. 'We should be telling people don't put them in a flatland, don't build in a way that your home is going to be more susceptible to wildfire.' Until then, hundreds of communities across the country could—and likely will—be the next Kerr County.
Perth Now
4 days ago
- Perth Now
Bali travellers horrified by items washed up on beaches
Travellers seeking the pristine white sand beaches of Bali have been left horrified by a series of shocking items that have been found washed up on some of the islands most popular beaches. Aussie traveller, Kirsty Grist shared pictures of rubbish washed ashore on Legian and Kuta beaches on the Bali Bogans Facebook page. The pictures included bags of medical waste that she had collected which included syringes. 'Hey everyone, if you are in this area, especially with little ones, please be careful. There is a heap of medical waste washed up on the beach. We have picked up 2 bags worth of syringes … some with needle ends, some without,' she wrote. The post was flooded with comments from fellow travellers, many agreeing that the waste that washes up on Bali's beaches is very unpleasant. Aussie traveller, Kirsty Grist shared pictures of rubbish washed ashore on Legian and Kuta beaches Credit: Facebook 'Yuck. That's disgusting,' one person said. 'We picked a big one up off the beach the other week at Bloo Lagoon, the needle was huge,' another commented. However, others claimed that not all of the syringes were necessarily medical waste and didn't believe the scenes that Grist had captured were real. Kirsty Grist claimed to pick up two bags of syringes from Bali's beaches. Credit: Facebook 'Yeah it was here on beach in Seminyak last night too. Some are alcohol shots (usually larger ones) but some are the real deal. Be careful folks,' someone commented. 'Never seen it, been going to Kuta and Legian for 40 years. Absolute bulls**t,' another said. Regardless of the severity of the latest claims, the pictures expose the ugly truth behind the much-loved Indonesian island. Indonesia is second in the world only to China in terms of its contribution to marine plastic pollution due to poor plastic waste management, according to The worst tides of plastic washing ashore Bali's beaches usually happens during the wet season of October to March. Last Christmas, Bali awoke to a monumental tide of plastic on Jimbaran Beach on December 24; Charity, Sungi Watch, had to call on volunteers for an emergency cleanup event in early January 2025. 'A massive 66,000kg of trash was collected by volunteers between over the Christmas holiday period in 2024,' said the not-for-profit. The waste isn't just from the unregulated rubbish which is deposited in the waters around Bali by shipping vessels, it's added to by the island's open landfills . As they become fuller, they put pressure on local waste management operations. Rubbish is then spilt into waterways and dumped in unofficial landfill sites, often on the edges of some of Bali's most beautiful natural landscapes.
Vox
6 days ago
- Climate
- Vox
A 'mosh pit of molecules' is trapping heat over much of the US right now
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. From Texas clear to Georgia, from the Gulf Coast on up to the Canadian border, a mass of dangerous heat has started spreading like an atmospheric plague. In the days and perhaps even weeks ahead, a high-pressure system, known as a heat dome, will drive temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, impacting some 160 million Americans. Extra-high humidity will make that weather even more perilous — while the thermometer may read 100, it might actually feel more like 110. So what exactly is a heat dome, and why does it last so long? And what gives with all the extra moisture? A heat dome is a self-reinforcing machine of misery. It's a system of high-pressure air, which sinks from a few thousand feet up and compresses as it gets closer to the ground. When molecules in the air have less space, they bump into each other and heat up. 'I think about it like a mosh pit,' said Shel Winkley, the weather and climate engagement specialist at the research group Climate Central. 'Everybody's moving around and bumping into each other, and it gets hotter.' But these soaring temperatures aren't happening on their own with this heat dome. The high pressure also discourages the formation of clouds, which typically need rising air. 'There's going to be very little in the way of cloudiness, so it'll be a lot of sunshine which, in turn, will warm the atmosphere even more,' said AccuWeather senior meteorologist Tom Kines. 'You're just kind of trapping that hot air over one part of the country.' In the beginning, a heat dome evaporates moisture in the soil, which provides a bit of cooling. But then, the evaporation will significantly raise humidity. (A major contributor during this month's heat dome will be the swaths of corn crops across the central US, which could help raise humidity in states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana above that of Florida.) This sort of high-pressure system also grabs moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, which evaporate more water the hotter they get. And generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere becomes, the more moisture it can hold. Once that moisture in the landscape is all gone, more heat accumulates — and more and more. A heat dome, then, essentially feeds off itself, potentially for weeks, a sort of giant blow-dryer pointed at the landscape. On their own, temperatures soaring over 100 are bad enough for human health. Such high humidity makes it even harder for the human body to cool itself, because it's harder for sweat to evaporate; hence 100 degrees on the thermometer feeling more like 110. The elderly and very young can't cool their bodies as efficiently, putting them at higher risk. Those with heart conditions are also vulnerable, because the human body tries to cool itself by pumping more blood. And those with outdoor jobs — construction workers, garbage collectors, delivery drivers on bikes or scooters — have little choice but to toil in the heat, with vanishingly few laws to protect them. The humidity effect is especially pronounced in areas where soils are soaked with recent rainfall, like central Texas, which earlier this month suffered catastrophic flooding. There's the potential for 'compound disasters' here: relief efforts in inundated areas like Kerr County now have to reckon with soaring temperatures as well. The Gulf of Mexico provided the moisture that made the flooding so bad, and now it's providing additional humidity during the heat dome. A heat dome gets more dangerous the longer it stagnates on the landscape. And unfortunately, climate change is making these sorts of heat waves longer and more intense. According to Climate Central, climate change made this heat dome at least five times more likely. 'These temperatures aren't necessarily impossible, but they'd be very hard to happen without a fingerprint of climate change,' Winkley said. Summer nights are warming almost twice as fast as summer days, Winkley adds, which makes heat waves all the more dangerous. As this heat dome takes hold, nighttime low temperatures may go up 15 degrees above average. For those without air conditioning — or who can't afford to run the AC even if they have it — their homes will swelter through the night, the time when temperatures are supposed to come down and give respite. Without that, the stress builds and builds, especially for those vulnerable groups. 'When you look at this heat wave, yes, it is going to be uncomfortable during the day,' Winkley said. 'But it's especially those nighttime temperatures that are the big blinking red light that this is a climate change-boosted event.'
Vox
21-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Inside the federal government's purge of climate data
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For 25 years, a group of the country's top experts has been fastidiously tracking the ways that climate change threatens every part of the United States. Their findings informed the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into accessible warnings for policymakers and the public. But that work came to a halt this spring when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed all 400 experts working on the next edition. Then, late last month, all of the past reports vanished too, along with the federal website they lived on. A lot of information about the changing climate has disappeared under President Donald Trump's second term, but the erasure of the National Climate Assessments is 'by far the biggest loss we've seen,' said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The National Climate Assessments were one of the most approachable resources that broke down how climate change will affect the places people care about, she said. The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders — policymakers, farmers, businesses — to guide their decisions about the future. While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they're no longer as easy to access. And it's unclear what, if anything, will happen to the report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, which already existed in draft form. So why did the reports survive Trump's first term, but not his second? You could view their disappearance in a few different ways, experts said — as a flex of executive power, an escalation in the culture war over climate change, or a strategic attempt to erase the scientific foundation for climate policy. 'If you suppress information and data, then you don't have the evidence you need to be able to create regulations, strengthen regulations, and even to combat the repeal of regulations,' Gehrke said. This isn't climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. 'I don't know if we're living in climate denial anymore,' said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at the Columbia Climate School. 'We have this new front of denial by erasure.' By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing. In April, the administration pulled nearly $4 million in funding from a Princeton program to improve computer models predicting changes in the oceans and atmosphere, claiming the work created 'climate anxiety' among young people. That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to submit its annual report to the United Nations detailing the country's greenhouse gas emissions. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ended its 45-year tradition of tracking billion-dollar weather disasters. Trump also hopes to shut down the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii, which has measured the steady rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since the 1950s — the first data to definitively show humans were changing the climate. 'This kind of wholesale suppression of an entire field of federally sponsored research, to my knowledge, is historically unprecedented,' Aronowsky said. In a response to a request for comment, a NASA spokesperson said that it has 'no legal obligations to host data,' referring to the site that hosted the National Climate Assessments, adding that the US Global Change Research Program had already 'met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress.' The EPA directed Grist to a webpage containing past greenhouse gas emissions reports, as well as a version of what was supposed to be this year's report obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund. However, the agency confirmed that the latest data has not been officially released. The White House declined to comment, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not respond. Climate denial first took off in the 1990s, when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about climate science. Last year, a leaked training video from Project 2025 — the policy roadmap organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — showed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to 'eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.' The strategy appears to be designed to boost the fossil fuel industry at a time when clean energy has become competitive and the reality of climate change harder to dismiss, as floods, fires, and heat waves have become perceptibly worse. 'We will drill, baby, drill,' Trump said in his inauguration speech in January. The administration hasn't exactly been subtle about its endgame. Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, doesn't deny the reality of climate change (he calls himself a 'climate realist'), but he's zealously dismantled environmental programs and has recommended that the White House strike down the 'endangerment finding,' the bedrock of US climate policy. It comes from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling on the Clean Air Act that required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants since they endanger public health. If the administration can convince the courts that climate change isn't a health consideration, it could end that regulatory obligation. 'If you're removing information about climate change, its reality, and its impact on people, then I think it's a lot easier to make the case that it's not an environmental health issue,' Gehrke said. There's a word for the idea that ignorance can serve political ends: agnotology (from the Greek 'agnosis,' or 'not knowing'), the study of how knowledge is deliberately obscured. What Trump is doing to information about climate change fits squarely in that tradition, according to Aronowsky: 'If you remove it, then in a certain sense, it no longer exists, and therefore, there's nothing to even debate, right?' Climate denial first took off in the 1990s, when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about climate science. Over the decades, as the evidence became rock-solid, those who opposed reducing the use of fossil fuels gradually shifted from outright denying the facts to attacking solutions like wind and solar power. What the Trump administration is doing now marks a radical break from this long-term trend, said John Cook, a climate misinformation researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia. 'This is a 180, not just a turn, but diving into something we've never even seen before,' he said. On the other hand, Cook said, the administration is taking a classic climate denial tactic — painting scientists as 'alarmists' or conspirators who can't be trusted — and turning it into government policy. Half a year in, the second Trump administration's treatment of climate information hasn't yet reached the 'eradication' levels that Project 2025 aspired to, at least on government websites. The EPA's climate change website, for instance, is still up and running, even though all references to the phenomenon were erased on the agency's home page. Most of the website deletions so far have served to isolate climate change as an issue, erasing its relationship to topics such as health and infrastructure, Gehrke said. Up until the National Climate Assessments disappeared, she would have said that 'climate erasure' was an inappropriate characterization of what's happening. 'But now, I'm really not so sure,' she said.
Fast Company
21-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
The Trump administration is pushing to open new coal mines that will likely never turn a profit
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here. It looked for a while like the coal mining era was over in the Clearfork Valley of East Tennessee, a pocket of mountainous land on the Kentucky border. A permit for a new mine hasn't been issued since 2020, and the last mine in the region shuttered two years ago. One company after another has filed for bankruptcy, with many of them simply walking away from the ecological damage they'd wrought without remediating the land as the law requires. But there's going to be a new mine in East Tennessee—one of a few slated across the country, their permits expedited by President Donald Trump's declaration of an 'energy emergency' and his designating coal a critical mineral. Trump was only hours into his second term when he signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency that directed federal agencies to 'identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them' to identify and exploit domestic energy resources. The administration also has scrapped Biden-era rules that made it easier to bring mining-related complaints to the federal government. The emergency designation compresses the typically years-long environmental review required for a new mine to just weeks. These assessments are to be compiled within 14 days of receiving a permit application, limiting comment periods to 10 days. The process of compiling an environmental impact statement—a time-intensive procedure involving scientists from many disciplines and assessments of wildlife populations, water quality, and other factors—is reduced to less than a month. The government insists this eliminates burdensome red tape. 'We're not just issuing permits—we're supporting communities, securing supply chains for critical industries, and making sure the U.S. stays competitive in a changing global energy landscape,' Adam Suess, the acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department, said in a statement. A representative of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement told Grist that community safety is top of mind, pointing to the administration's $725 million investment in abandoned mineland reclamation. The Department of Interior ruled that a new mine slated for Bryson Mountain in Claiborne County, Tennessee, would have 'no significant impact' and approved it. It will provide about two dozen jobs. The strip mine will cover 635 acres of previously mined land that has reverted to forest. Hurricane Creek Mining, LLC plans to pry 1.8 million tons of coal from the earth over 10 years. The Clearfork Valley, which straddles two rural counties and has long struggled economically, bears the scars of more than a century's underground and surface mining. Local residents and scientists regularly test the creeks for signs of bright-orange mine drainage and other toxins. The land is part of a tract the Nature Conservancy bought in 2019 for conservation purposes, but because of ownership structures in the coalfields, it owns only the land, not the minerals within it. 'We have concerns about the potential environmental impacts of the operation,' the organization said in a statement. 'We seek assurance that there will be adequate bonding, consistent and transparent environmental monitoring, and good reclamation practices.' Matt Hepler, an environmental scientist with environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices, has been following the mine's public review process since the company applied for a permit in 2023. He remains skeptical that things will work out well for Hurricane Creek Mining. Despite Trump's promise that he is 'bringing back an industry that's been abandoned,' coal has seen a steady decline, driven in no small part by the plummeting price of natural gas. The number of people working the nation's coal mines has steadily declined from 89,000 or so in 2012 to about 41,300 today. Production fell 31 percent during Trump's first term, and has continued that slide. 'What is this company doing differently that's going to allow them to profitably succeed while so many other mines have not been able to make that work?' he said. 'All the time I've been working in Tennessee there's only been a couple of mines permitted to begin with because production has been on the downswing there,' Hepler added. Economists say opening more mines may not reverse the global downward trend. Plentiful, cheap natural gas, along with increasingly affordable wind and solar, are displacing coal as an energy source. The situation is so dire that one Stanford University study argued that the gas would continue its climb even with the elimination of coal-related regulations. Metallurgical coal, used to make steel—and which Hurricane Creek hopes to excavate —fares no better. It has seen flat or declining demand amid innovation in steel production. Expedited permits are leading to new mines in the West as well. The Department of Interior just approved a land lease for Wyoming's first new coal mine in 50 years. Ramaco Resources will extract and process the material in order to retrieve the rare earth and other critical minerals found alongside it. The Trump administration also is selling coal leases on previously protected federal land. Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney at the Northern Rockies office of the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, thinks it is a fool's errand. 'I don't see them changing the fundamental dynamics of coal,' he said. 'That's not to say that the Trump administration won't cause lots of harm in the process by both making the public pay more money for energy than they should and by keeping some of these coal plants and coal mines that really are zombies.' Still, Hernandez said he isn't seeing many new permits, just quicker approval of those already in the pipeline. That said, the Trump administration's moves to streamline environmental review will reduce oversight and the time the public has to scrutinize coal projects. 'The result is there's just going to be it's going to be more difficult for the public to participate, and more harm is going to occur,' Hernandez said. 'There's going to be less attention to the harm that's caused by these operations.'
