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Pilgrims will walk as far as 36 miles — often in triple-degree temperatures.
On Monday, millions of people assembled in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for what could be a record-breaking Hajj pilgrimage. It could also be among the hottest ever.
As one of the five pillars of Islam, the Hajj is expected to be performed by every able-bodied Muslim with the financial means to do so at least once in their lives. The annual five- to six-day pilgrimage to Mecca was already one of the world’s largest religious gatherings, but this year, the first since pandemic-era restrictions were lifted, more than 2.5 million people have reportedly descended on the holy site, undeterred by “extreme” daily temperatures over 110 degrees. Saudi officials say it will be “the largest Hajj pilgrimage in history.”
Because the dates of the annual Hajj are dictated by the lunar calendar, the pilgrimage season has fallen during Saudi Arabia’s hottest months since 2017 and won’t move out of them until 2026. But while there were, of course, many summer Hajj seasons before this one, the Middle East has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe, meaning it’s much hotter now than when the Prophet Mohammed performed the first Hajj some 1,400 years ago. Looking at just the past 30 years in Mecca, there has been a “significant” nearly 2-degree Celsius (3.6°F) rise in the average wet-bulb temperature — that is, the preferred metric for measuring heat-related stress on the human body — Yale Climate Connections reports, adding “this increase is well above the global average, and can be largely attributed to human-caused global warming.”
Since the Hajj moves 11 days earlier every year, the pilgrimage is finally transitioning out of the worst months of summer beginning this year (the hottest recent Hajj hit 122 degrees in August 2018). But June 2023 hasn’t cooled down much; a hot spell in the Kingdom has local authorities mobilizing in anticipation of heat-related illnesses. Though the 113-degree daily highs aren’t unheard of in Saudi Arabia this time of year, they don’t tell the full story of the heat the pilgrims face, either. The so-called “penguin effect,” in which a crowd retains heat, will exacerbate those already eye-popping temperatures. There are reportedly 32,000 health workers and “thousands” of ambulances standing by to address dehydration, heatstroke, and exhaustion, and 217 beds are said to be set aside on-site for sunstroke patients.
Regional religious leaders around the globe are also warning pilgrims from their countries to protect themselves from Mecca’s heat since the lack of acclimation makes foreigners uniquely susceptible to extreme temperatures; some “71% of deaths among pilgrims could be attributed to elevated temperatures,” one study found.
But all the advice and medical preparations still might not be enough. Many Muslims who perform the Hajj are elderly — having saved over the course of a lifetime to make the pilgrimage — and thus at high risk in the heat. On top of that, the pilgrimage is physically demanding: The estimated total walking distance, including the circling of the Kaaba and “miscellaneous walking to get to the pick-up points of the tour,” is about 36 miles over five days, according to a study on Hajj-related blisters. Much of that journey is now made in massive air-conditioned tunnels that connect significant sites, though key rites are performed outdoors and under the sun — some 20 to 30 hours of exposed outdoor activity in total. The result is “roughly one in every 1,000 religious visitors to Mecca dies, many from cardiorespiratory attacks,” The Economist reports.
There is a bit of good news for pilgrims this year, though. While it is hotter than in recent years, a major difference is that there isn’t much humidity forecast for Mecca this week — and it is typically humidity, which hinders the body’s natural cooling abilities, that makes the Hajj pilgrimage deadly. (Though not always: In addition to heat exhaustion, a 1990 stampede that resulted in the deaths of 1,400 people is believed to have started due to panic over rising temperatures in a tunnel where a ventilation system broke down). Still, it will be critical for pilgrims to keep hydrated, watch their electrolytes, and maximize time in air-conditioned tents supplied by the Saudi authorities — though those same tents can quickly become deadly if AC fails, since they also trap dangerous humidity inside.
In theory, the Hajj should become safer in the immediate future as it moves deeper into Mecca’s cooler months. But those who are able might want to prioritize making their obligatory pilgrimage sooner rather than later. Come 2047, when Hajj season is in the summer again, the planet will be even warmer than it is now — and perhaps even too dangerous to participate outdoors.
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On Senate committees, a public lands selloff, and energy investment
Current conditions: Southern New England will experience its hottest day of the year so far today, with temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit • Record levels of Sargassum seaweed are overwhelming Caribbean resorts • Saharan dust has spread across most of Florida and will continue over the coastal Southeast through this weekend.
1. The Senate’s first pass at IRA repeal cuts huge climate programs ...
On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill. “At least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in her analysis of the contents — although there is one Environmental Protection Agency grant program, for reducing pollution at ports, that had been targeted in by the House bill and is absent from the Environment and Public Works Committee’s text. As in the House bill, the latest text eliminates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the Trump administration has sought to kill with accusations of fraud, though it has yet to produce any evidence of impropriety.
Elsewhere in the Senate, however, some Republicans appear more friendly toward preserving at least some IRA tax credits. “I would be in the camp that doesn’t think we need [to do] a full repeal and instead can live with a circumscribed, narrower version of the existing IRA credits,” Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a member of the Finance Committee, said, as reported by Axios. Senator John Curtis of Utah published an op-ed in Deseret News on Wednesday in which he argued that “the right policy solution must navigate tax credits and regulatory reform in what I believe is central to America’s economic future, the planet and our national security: energy.”
2. … and a public lands sell-off is back on the table
Senate Republicans are reviving a plan to sell off public lands to fund President Trump’s tax cuts after their colleagues in the House thwarted a similar proposal, Senator Mike Lee of Utah told reporters on Wednesday. According to the senator, a new version of the plan will be included in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’s pass at the bill, which will likely be made public on Monday, Bloomberg reports.
Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana helped lead the charge to kill the earlier version of the proposal in the House, although Lee added that his version would exempt Montana. Still — as I’ve reported — the plan would jeopardize as much as 500,000 acres of public land across Utah and Nevada alone. “These are the places people recreate with their families, they are places to hunt and fish, and they are held in trust for the American people to enjoy for generations to come,” Travis Hammill, the D.C. director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement.
3. 2025 will be a banner year for energy investment, despite economic turbulence: IEA
Despite tariffs, trade wars, and economic uncertainty, the International Energy Agency anticipates a record $3.3 trillion investment in global energy in 2025, per a new report released Thursday. That represents a 2% rise from 2024. “The fast-evolving economic and trade picture means that some investors are adopting a wait-and-see approach to new energy project approvals, but in most areas we have yet to see significant implications for existing projects,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement about the findings.
Around $2.2 trillion of the total global investment is “going collectively to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, twice as much as the $1.1 trillion going to oil, natural gas, and coal,” the report says. Solar specifically is booming, with a forecast of $450 billion in investment by 2025. The overall picture represents an enormous reversal from a decade ago, when fossil fuel investments were 30% higher than electricity generation, grids, and storage. That said, the research also found that investment in grids — at around $400 billion per year — is “failing to keep pace with spending on generation and electrification,” mainly because of “lengthy permitting procedures and tight supply chains for transformers and cables.” Read the full report here.
4. UK solar is having a record year due to unusually sunny spring
Carbon BriefSolar farms in the United Kingdom generated more electricity than ever before in the first five months of the year, according to a newly released accounting by Carbon Brief. The surge in solar energy was 42% higher than over the same period last year, growing from 5.4 terawatt-hours of electricity generated to a record 7.6 terawatt-hours. Carbon Brief credited the record output to the nation’s sunniest spring on record, although the publication notes it was also “aided by rising capacity, which reached 20.2GW in 2024, up by 2.3GW from 17.9GW a year earlier.” You can read the full report here.
5. ‘Atmospheric thirst’ is making droughts more severe: study
While extreme heat almost always has a climate change signal, the same cannot be said for droughts, which have different causes and feedback mechanisms that researchers are still working to understand. A new study published Wednesday in Nature has found that atmospheric evaporative demand — that is, the complex process of water evaporation into the atmosphere, also called “atmospheric thirst” — has increased drought severity by an average of 40%. Over the five years from 2018 to 2022, areas in drought have expanded 74% on average compared to the 1981 to 2017 period, with atmospheric evaporative demand “contributing to 58% of this increase,” the report further found. “We were very much shocked when we saw the results,” Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, told The New York Times.
“A large majority of new residential houses and buildings in Germany feature a heat pump as their main heating system,” according to government numbers reported by Clean Energy Wire. “The climate-friendly heating technology was installed in more than two-thirds (69.4%) of the 76,100 homes finished in 2024, a 5% increase compared to 2023.”
The Environment and Public Works Committee largely preserved the cuts made by the House, with one odd exception.
The Senate GOP began working through Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill this week, and at least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House.
Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of the bill on Wednesday evening, and it retains many of the policy repeals and funding rescissions that were in the House version.
To be clear, it does not touch the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, the most controversial climate-related parts of the package. Their fate will be up to the Senate Finance Committee, which is not expected to release text for its section of the bill until at least next week. There has been no indication that Republicans in the upper chamber intend to fight for any of the myriad grant programs the IRA created.
Still, I’m looking closely to see if some of it might yet be saved. For example, there is, oddly, one Environmental Protection Agency grant program targeted by the House bill that is absent from this first text from the Environment and Public Works Committee: $3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports.
Here’s what is in the text.
The text published Wednesday would repeal and rescind funding for more than two dozen programs, most of which are administered by the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the General Services Administration. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the now-infamous lending program for clean energy projects targeted by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as a wasteful, fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Biden administration, is still on the out list. Same goes for funding for oil and gas producers to reduce their methane emissions, plus a related fee that would be levied on operators who did not reduce methane leakage below a certain threshold.
The full list of cuts:
The text would also rescind two new pots of money that were not touched by the House bill — funding for Endangered Species Act recovery plans, strategies developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help threatened species thrive again, and general funding for the White House Council on Environmental Quality to train staff, do environmental reviews, and improve stakeholder and community engagement.
Like the House bill, the Senate committee’s text includes instructions to repeal the latest update to the nation’s tailpipe emissions standards for cars. The regulations are required under the Clean Air Act and were strengthened under the Biden administration for model years 2027 through 2032, requiring automakers to sell an increasing proportion of electric vehicles over time.
It would not, however, repeal the latest Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (also known as the CAFE standards), which regulate how far a vehicle must be able to travel on a gallon of fuel and were targeted by the House bill.
This provision is one I’ll be watching closely, as Democrats are likely to challenge its inclusion. If Republicans want to pass the budget bill with a simple majority, they can only include policies that affect the federal budget, and as the Environmental Defense Fund told me, these standards are “regulations, not budgetary provisions.”
The text proposes the same pay-to-play permitting scheme that was in the House bill and would allow energy infrastructure developers to pay for expedited permitting. Like the House bill, it also asserts that environmental assessments made under this program “shall not be subject to judicial review.”
Coming up, we’ll be on the lookout for a text from the Energy and Natural Resources committee, which will reveal whether Senate Republicans have any interest in saving the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, administered by the Loan Programs Office, which provides essential support for the nuclear industry.
Meta’s deal with Constellation is a full circle moment for an Illinois nuclear plant.
America’s nuclear fleet remains its largest source of emissions-free power. America’s biggest technology companies are its largest voluntary buyers of emissions-free power. Only in the past few years have these two facts managed to mingle with each other.
The latest tech nuclear deal is in Central Illinois; Meta on Tuesday unveiled a 20-year power purchase agreement for the electricity produced by the Clinton Clean Energy Center, an 1,100-megawatt nuclear plant run by Constellation Energy. The deal will “guarantee that Clinton will continue to run for another two decades,” Constellation said in its announcement. The deal allows the company to look at extending its existing early site permit for a new plant, the announcement said — or apply for a new one to “pursue development of an advanced nuclear reactor or small modular reactor,” although it made no specific development commitments.
While neither Meta nor Constellation disclosed the value of the deal, Mark Nelson, founder of Radiant Energy Group, estimated that it would cost around $17 billion, of which between $7 billion to $9 billion would be profit for Constellation, enough to fund the building of a new plant. Either way, the announcement represents the “first time a nuclear customer is proposing another nuclear reactor in the state,” Nelson told me.
These types of deals are not exactly novel anymore (Microsoft struck a deal with Constellation last year to resurrect Three Mile Island), but they demonstrate a shift in mindset among tech companies, which are finally showing some respect for the emissions benefits of nuclear energy — albeit about a decade late.
The 2010s were a dark time for the nuclear industry. Cheap natural gas threatened the economic viability of aging plants, while the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan combined with rising enthusiasm for renewable power had left the industry politically isolated. Between 2012 and 2022, 12 nuclear reactors closed in the U.S. Those 12 plants represented over 9,000 megawatts of capacity, about a 10th of the total capacity of the American nuclear fleet.
Nuclear plants suffered most in “restructured” electricity markets like Illinois’, where utilities generally purchase power from independent power producers. In these markets, power that’s cheap on an hourly basis, i.e. renewables and natural gas, sets the price for the whole system, which can disadvantage nuclear power.
At the same time, big technology companies were ramping up purchases of low-carbon power — typically wind and solar — with Google doing its first power purchase agreement in 2010. Many state and federal programs to support alternative energy usage were aimed at wind and solar, i.e. were no help to struggling nuclear generators. Environmental groups were largely either indifferent or outright opposed to nuclear power.
Eventually states had to do what the market couldn’t and big tech wouldn’t and step in and keep plants alive. A broader Illinois clean energy law from 2016 included a program to support nuclear power plants by paying for what the market had historically ignored: the fact that their electricity is generated without carbon dioxide emissions. The zero emission credits were part of a larger climate law that provided 10 years of support for downstate nuclear plants. The Illinois bill followed on similar efforts in New York to keep upstate plants open.
(The push and pull between the economic and environmental concerns on both sides of the nuclear argument also led to some bizarre political inversions: At the same time New York was working to keep the upstate plants open, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo joined with Riverkeeper, the environmental group long associated with Cuomo’s ex-brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to close the Indian Point nuclear plant closer to New York City.)
Environmental groups supported the New York and Illinois clean energy programs, but they were at best cool to the nuclear provisions, illustrating the political hole nuclear power plants had fallen into. Touting the pollution benefits of the Illinois law, the Natural Resources Defense Council claimed that “nuclear energy does not represent a clean energy resource.” In New York, the NRDC filed a brief supporting the state’s legal authority to set up a zero emission credit system — “not because it supports the nuclear support program,” but rather because it supported the broader principle of paying for zero-emissions attributes.
The Environmental Defense Fund likewise supported the Illinois law, but with assurances that the nuclear credits “only represents a small fraction of the more-than-500-page bill.” The Union for Concerned Scientists hailed the bill but also made clear that it was “much more than a nuclear subsidy.”
The balance changed in earnest with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included generous subsidies for new and existing nuclear power, reflecting both its lack of emissions and the industry’s longstanding sway in Washington. Then tech companies’ demand for energy started to climb with the advent of large language models and the immense power needed to train and operate them.
Energy policy experts at the big tech companies were also rethinking how best to decarbonize their operations. They had “run out of baseload,” Nelson told me, referring to always-on power sources as opposed to intermittent sources like wind and solar, and so would need to start supporting options like nuclear in order to truly decarbonize. With the arrival of a new breed of artificial intelligence, Nelson said, these companies realized that they were, in fact, industrial electricity purchasers and would have to act like it.
The past year has seen a flurry of big tech and nuclear tie-ups.
Amazon acquired a data center adjacent to a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in March, 2024, although the company’s subsequent efforts to use it as a “behind the meter” power source soon faced regulatory opposition. Google, along with Microsoft and Nucor, announced a plan to work together to buy and advance the development of non-carbon-emitting power, including nuclear. Microsoft announced its Three Mile Island deal later last year, while Amazon started investing in small modular reactors and Google said it would buy power from plants built by the advanced nuclear company Kairos. And in December, Meta released a request for proposals for nuclear energy developers to deliver at least 1 gigawatt and up to 4 gigawatts of clean power by “the early 2030s,” which the company said today it was “still advancing.”
Meta’s deal for the Clinton nuclear plant will essentially replace the Illinois emissions credit program, which runs out in 2027. The announcement of the deal also reflects the volatile and confusing politics of clean power in 2025. While Republicans in Congress are looking to slash the Inflation Reduction Act and its support for clean power investment and production, the House budget reconciliation bill included carve-outs for advanced nuclear power. The Trump administration has also signed a fleet of executive orders looking to streamline nuclear power regulations and encourage new nuclear development, reflecting the high esteem the industry has with the Republican Party despite its lack of interest (at best) in climate change policies, per se.
When Constellation announced the Three Mile Island project less than a year ago, it included a quote from a Biden Energy Department official, as well as a line about how “renewed interest in nuclear energy has spread globally as nations seek to electrify their economies to support the digital economy and address the climate crisis.” This time, Constellation included quotes from Clinton, Illinois’s mayor, as well as three legislators who represent the area, all Republicans, and a local union official. It also mentions climate change zero times, although it does describe the electricity generated by the plant as “emissions free.” (Meta’s release also doesn’t mention climate change specifically.)