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The U.S. Energy Information Administration, meanwhile, released its short-term energy outlook for July, in which the agency estimated that global crude oil inventories declined by 5.1 million barrels per day throughout the second quarter of this year, marking a decline above the seasonal average for that period over the past five years. Even before the conflict picked up again, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote that it would be a long time before the Strait of Hormuz returned to normal operations. Don’t hold your breath.
A boy fills a container with drinking water from a tanker truck at an emergency water distribution point amid ongoing water shortages in San Juan.Ricardo ARDUENGO / AFP via Getty Images
In the steamy final weeks of August 2019, I found myself on Puerto Rico’s southeast shores. Set against the backdrop of the island’s central mountain range with streams that quench its underground aquifers, this sun-soaked coastal plain was coveted by Spanish and American sugar barons for centuries before transforming into a hub for U.S. agribusiness in recent decades. By the time I arrived, the aquifer was facing threats on multiple fronts. The Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority — known as PRASA or AAA in its Spanish acronym — was losing, by some estimates, more than half the water in its system to leakage, forcing the state-owned utility to draw more from aquifers. With the island’s electrical system still in tatters from Hurricane Maria and its debt at crushing levels, PRASA had little capacity to make the upgrades needed to prevent further decline. Meanwhile, local environmentalists accused regulators of providing little to no oversight of how much water industrial facilities drew from their wells. The story I ultimately reported suggested that water would follow electricity as the next major infrastructure crisis. It was just being felt first, at that time, in places like the town of Salinas, where people like Manases Vega — then a 65-year-old with a chronic respiratory illness — lost access to water every two weeks due to rationing.
Now the crisis has indeed spread. Last month, I told you when Governor Jenniffer González Colón called in the National Guard to help after a major water pipeline cracked. More than a month later, El Nuevo Día reported that the ongoing shortages are forcing residents to pay up to $700 per week for water. Businesses are paying up to $3,500 per week to buy enough bottles to cook, clean, and flush toilets. Hotels are spending up to $100,000, the island’s newspaper of record also reported last week. “We were without water for more than 50 days here on Calle Loíza,” Jonathan Collazo, a restaurant owner, said, referring to the popular street with bars and restaurants in Santurce, roughly the equivalent of San Juan’s Williamsburg.
For 12 years, Péter Szijjártó served as Hungary’s top diplomat in the government of former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. On Wednesday, he announced his resignation from parliament to take a job at China’s top electric automaker. “I have received an extremely honorable offer to fill an international position from one of the world’s leading companies,” he wrote in a post on Facebook. “BYD is one of the greatest automotive success stories of the past twenty years and is also the world’s leading manufacturer of new energy vehicles.” His critics may quibble with the word “honorable.” Szijjártó established his relationship with the company while serving as foreign minister, and his government had planned to provide subsidies to BYD to open its new hub in Budapest. Just a few months ago, CNBC reported that the European Union was investigating labor violations at BYD’s factory in Szeged. Last month, the Hungarian investigative site 444 reported that a worker died at the plant.
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The Department of Energy has granted the startup SuperCritical Materials an exclusive license to commercialize patented technology to extract uranium from seawater. The deal requires the Austin-based company to manufacture and deploy the technology in the U.S. before exporting to allied nations, according to The Northern Miner. The concept of drawing uranium out of seawater has existed for years, an idea that took root before the vast new reserves of the metal were discovered on land. But seawater extraction remained on the agenda in countries without access to mines. When I visited the Philippines in 2024 to report on the country’s nuclear ambitions, I met scientists at the state atomic energy agency who were researching methods to secure a uranium supply from the water. But Ted Garrish, the assistant U.S. secretary of nuclear energy, said “this technology represents a potentially significant contribution to America’s long-term fuel security and industrial competitiveness.”
On Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order enacting the nation’s first statewide moratorium on data centers. On Wednesday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a fellow Democrat, staked out a different position, unveiling what E&E News called a “package of 10 commitments to ensure companies pay the full cost of construction, operation, power, and water” from new data centers for artificial intelligence. “On my watch, Michiganders have been protected from any rate increases due to data center development and we adopted some of the strongest protections for people and communities, but we need to do more,” Whitmer said in a statement.
“It’s been exciting to see different states — and, to be blunt, to see Democratic-governed states, particularly those in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic — try to take on the data center boom. It’s good to see them test out ideas, solve problems through legislation, and harness this moment for the public good without strangling the buildout entirely,” my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote yesterday. “For too long, blue states have leaned into a particular economic model, one in which states want to attract varying forms of development but in fact succeed only in creating new suburbs, office buildings, and warehouses.”
It is, according to Bloomberg, “the plastic America loves to hate.” But a new industry group wants to save polystyrene by convincing lawmakers to stop targeting styrofoam. Formed by 17 companies that produce the material, the Polystyrene Recycling Alliance aims to forestall bans by making sure styrofoam is treated as recyclable under state packaging laws. “There’s the narrative that polystyrene is not part of the circular future,” Justin Riney, chair of the alliance and an executive at manufacturer Ineos Styrolutions, told the newswire. “We are adamant that we have the data, and we know that our products are part of the future.”
And if you are like 24,000 other Americans every year, this will kill you.
Though wildfire smoke exposure might seem to be more of a nuisance to a healthy person than anything else, experts agree it should be taken seriously. “In my profession, wildland firefighting, you make a decision that you run into that,” Nicholai Allen, a firefighter and founder of Safe Soss, a home-hardening product line, told me. “But for my family and my children, I don’t want them breathing in the smoke that’s traveling that far. We have air purifiers, and we’re taking similar precautions.”
On Wednesday, more than 100 million people in the Midwest and Northeast face unhealthy smoke conditions from fires burning up to 2,000 miles away. Here’s what you need to know.
The smoke is largely coming from 150 or so lightning-ignited fires in Ontario and northeastern Minnesota. Triple-digit temperatures, dry conditions, and high winds have fanned a “wall of fire” across the region, as the firefighting newsletter The Hotshot Wakeup put it, even as Canada is, on the whole, tracking behind its five-year average for area burned so far. Most of the fires sending smoke to the U.S. this week are still out of control and spreading rapidly.
AirNow.gov
A high-pressure area over the central U.S. and a low-pressure area over Eastern Canada are acting as a funnel, pulling bad air east across the Great Lakes region and into the populous Acela Corridor. Conditions are worst closest to the fires: Around 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Duluth, Minnesota had a “hazardous” air quality rating of 785 out of 800. By the afternoon, Toronto had the worst air quality of any major city in the world, and drivers in northern Michigan have been advised to slow down and turn on their low-beam headlights because visibility has been so reduced by the smoke. The eastern-moving plume has also blanketed large portions of Upstate New York.
Degraded air quality reached the Boston and New York City areas on Tuesday night and is expected to linger through Thursday. The smoke reaches as far north as Maine, having dimmed the morning light in New Hampshire, and could spread as far south as Washington, D.C. over the next 24 hours.
Though the smoke is staying largely to the north over the middle part of the country, forecasts show it could dip into downtown Chicago on Thursday as well.
Wednesday and early Thursday will be the worst days for the eastern U.S., per the current outlook. A cold front should help push the worst of the smoke out of the region as we head into the weekend.
So far it appears that much of the smoke has remained high enough in the atmosphere that while you’ll be able to see and likely smell it, it might not cause extreme air quality problems on the ground. As of Wednesday afternoon, New York City was recording some of the worst air on the East Coast, with an air quality index of around 160 — bad enough to trigger an “unhealthy” alert for the general public and to rank fifth-worst among major cities worldwide. The rest of the region still mostly showed orange readings designed to alert sensitive groups such as older adults, people with respiratory conditions, and pregnant women, or more moderate yellow ratings.
Conditions could still change, though. Heat, pressure, and winds can drive smoke down to ground level, where it becomes a threat to public health. In fact, the Fox Forecast Center’s models indicate that particulate matter concentrations around the Great Lakes and Northeast could be on par with the 2023 East Coast smoke event, during which New York had the world’s worst air quality, although The New York Times reports that “even the most severe forecasts” this week should not approach that level.
The best thing to do is to continue monitoring your local air quality. If you want help navigating what those readings mean, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written a great explainer.
For many on the East Coast, the orange skies are a flashback to the 2023 smoke event. While eerie and apocalyptic, the smoke also gives us an excuse to talk about Mie theory.
Air molecules are much smaller than the wavelength of light. When white light from the sun enters the atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen scatter the short, higher-frequency blue light in multiple directions. This is known as Rayleigh scattering, and is also the answer to, “Why is the sky blue?” Under normal conditions, wherever you look in the sky, blue light is headed toward your eye.
Smoke particles, while small enough to enter our lungs when inhaled, are larger than air molecules — about the same size as light wavelengths. Because these particles are larger, they also scatter light more democratically, including the lower-frequency, longer reds and oranges. This is called Mie scattering. When sunlight passes through smoke, the reds, oranges, yellows, and blues are all mixed together as they reach our eyes, appearing as a hazy gray or white.
You might expect thicker smoke to result in a darker gray, then. But smoke also contains organic compounds from burned plants called brown carbon, plus soot, both of which absorb visible light. Brown carbon, in particular, prefers light at the shorter end of the spectrum, absorbing about three-quarters of the total light at blue wavelengths in smoke plumes, compared to about half at red wavelengths. That means that when the smoke thickens, the blue light doesn’t reach our eyes nearly as well, and the sky takes on an orange appearance.
One of the dangers of the current smoke event is that it coincides with high temperatures across the Central U.S. and New England. Both conditions together — high heat and smoke — can lead to some confusion over how to respond.
The best strategy is to keep your windows closed. But while it might feel safe side, wildfire smoke can still degrade indoor air quality. “If you have a fresh air intake on your air conditioning system, I would shut that off so that you’re recirculating just your purified air inside your house,” Allen, the firefighter, told me.
You can also install activated carbon exterior filters on attic and crawl space vents and run a purifier with a HEPA filter. (If you bought an air purifier during the last smoke event, consider this your reminder to replace your filter.) “Then I would avoid going outside or exercising outside if there’s smoke in the air,” Allen added. “When the particles are arriving to you from a great distance from the wildfire, they are the smaller particles that can get in your lungs. So not to create undue fear, but there’s definitely stuff in that air that you don’t want to breathe.”
