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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.
After the Los Angeles County wildfires in January, it seemed like the federal government was finally poised to do something about the decades of flawed forestry practices and land management policies that have turned the West into a tinderbox. On January 23, before the L.A. fires were even fully extinguished, the House of Representatives passed the Fix Our Forests Act on a bipartisan 279–141 vote, queuing up a bill that proponents say would speed and simplify forest and wildfire management projects that have gotten bogged down in a regulatory morass.
Then … not much happened. Though Republican Senators John Curtis of Utah and Tim Sheehy of Montana teamed up with Democrats John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Alex Padilla of California to write their own version of the Fix Our Forests Act for the Senate, the bill stalled after a summer spent focused on the reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, more wildfires madeheadlines.
Matt Weiner, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Megafire Action, wants to bring some urgency back. This week, the organization launched a six-figure ad campaign in Washington, D.C., aimed at spurring senators to get back to working on wildfire resilience and forestry reform. Though the bill’s approach is divisive — the House version drew initial pushback from more than 100 environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and League of Conservation Voters, for opening up large tracts of federal forest to logging, among other concerns — Weiner told me “there’s no huge substantive holdup in the Senate that is keeping it from getting to 60 votes.”
I caught up with Weiner this week to learn more about where things stand with the Fix Our Forests Act and talk through some of the bill’s more controversial regulatory rollbacks. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Catch our readers up: Why the Fix Our Forests Act, and why now?
We’re looking at a generational opportunity to change the way we do land management. This is the most significant change Congress has considered since the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, and maybe even since the original National Forest Act.
The smoke impacts of wildfires are killing more people than the flames. Wildfires are the most significant driver of PM 2.5 emissions growth in the country right now. The clean air community has done a fantastic job of reducing industrial emissions of PM 2.5, which has had real public health impacts, but those gains are in danger of vanishing because of the growth of wildfire smoke exposure.
Then there’s the climate. If you care about carbon emissions, this is a huge opportunity at a time when a lot of other climate issues seem to be on the backburner. The 2020 fire season in California — a particularly bad year — released enough carbon to undo 20 years of the state’s emissions reduction progress. The 2023 Canadian wildfires, if treated as a country, would have been the third-largest emitter in the world that year. And if you start thinking about Alaska and the Boreal burning in the way the West has been burning, it could potentially be game over for the climate. It’s important that people understand that this is an existential climate issue and that we have an opportunity to make progress in a bipartisan way.
You and I have chatted before — we first spoke about the Fix Our Forests Act almost a year ago, now. What’s happened in the past 12 months with the bill?
The bill passed the House right after the Los Angeles fires. The last time we spoke [in October 2024], the bill had passed the House in the previous Congress with a bipartisan margin. But this time, it got a much bigger bipartisan show of support: 64 Democrats and all the Republicans in the House.
The bill saw some changes and improvements to focus on the immediate needs in Los Angeles County [after the January 2025 fires] — things like improving the ability of a city like Los Angeles to gain access to Community Wildfire Defense Grant funding and improvements to the Wildfire Intelligence Center targeted at making sure it plays a role in helping local governments make decisions on where to place assets before a high risk event.
Then the bill went to the Senate, but instead of moving the House bill through, a group of senators came together to write a bipartisan version with some changes. Senator Curtis from Utah was the lead, along with Senators Padilla, Hickenlooper, and Sheehy. Their version included changes to the litigation section from the House bill, which had raised concerns among a lot of environmental organizations, as well as modifications to the permitting section. That earned the bill the support of more environmental organizations than the version from the House — they have the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Audubon Society, and the National Wildlife Federation on board, as well as a lot of local organizations and wildfire groups like the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience.
But then a lot of the oxygen in the Senate was taken up by the reconciliation package. That put a pause on things through the August recess, and now they’re looking to hopefully mark up the bill during the October work period. We’re very optimistic about being able to get floor time. We think there’s a clear path to 60 votes in the Senate for this bill, and if there’s a good, constructive markup, it could be much more than that. There’s no substantive holdup as much as there is the ever-present fear of stasis and losing momentum. That’s why we launched an ad campaign with an eye toward building the urgency back up.
How did the ad campaign come together?
The idea was that this is a bipartisan issue, so where is the support? We didn’t need to launch a big persuasion campaign; we needed to highlight the absurdity of the fact that, eight months after Los Angeles, we still haven’t had any meaningful action from Congress. There is an opportunity before them that would make a big difference in wildfire policy writ large.
I’m interested in your focus on using “state-of-the-art science” and “new and innovative technologies” to address wildfires and forest health. What have you seen in this space that has made you excited?
The bill is about improving the planning and implementation of wildfire policy — especially mitigation work like treatment projects, but also in the built environment. A big cornerstone of that would be the creation of a new Wildfire Intelligence Center, which would use the most advanced technology to understand what our risk profile is on the ground across landscapes and jurisdictions. Right now, there is no one entity in government responsible for taking a comprehensive look at risk across landscapes, what we’re doing on the ground, and how that buys down risk.
At the same time, one of the things we’re negotiating is making sure that the Forest Service and the Department of Interior are positioned to work with some of the companies doing advanced modeling, detection, and tracking work — as opposed to having the government try to build its own clunky system. We’ve modeled it after successful efforts elsewhere in government, such as the Defense Innovation Unit and other Department of Defense and NASA programs that have been great at harnessing private sector innovation for government use. There’s also a new pilot program in the bill, in Section 303, that would create a pathway for the Forest Service to start identifying and piloting new technologies and give them a path to scale across the agency if they find that it helps them do the job better, faster, and cheaper.
The timber industry has collaborated with the Forest Service on fire suppression since the 1920s. In the decades since, “forest management” has at times been used as a euphemism for industry-friendly practices like tree thinning, which many ecologists say would allow invasive species and brush to flourish, and would actually worsen wildfires. How would cutting the red tape around “vegetation management activities” not be a handout to the timber industry?
We all know that the best tool for mitigation is good fire, prescribed fire, beneficial fire, and — where appropriate — managed fire, as well. Unfortunately, because we’ve taken fire out of these landscapes, forested landscapes in particular are so overgrown that you couldn’t introduce good fire even if you wanted to. So mechanical thinning has to be a part of this.
One of the tensions here is that the timber industry wants merchantable timber. They want the big trees, and in a lot of cases, those are the ones we want to keep in the ground with these projects. What we’re focused on is invasive species, overgrown areas, and dead trees from morbidity events like recent droughts so that we can reintroduce good fire at scale. If we all let it burn, like some have proposed, you’d end up with hundreds of thousands of acres of landscape burning at a time, like we saw in the [2021] Caldor fire, where nothing will grow back in a way we recognize for at least decades — and given climate change, maybe not ever.
It’s important to make sure that we don’t go back to the timber wars [of the 1980s and 1990s between environmentalists and loggers in the Pacific Northwest], but at the same time, we need to recognize that the biggest threat to our forests right now is catastrophic fire, not the timber industry. We want to deal with the threat at hand and make sure the pendulum that swung during the timber wars — for very good reason — against the timber industry comes back a little, but doesn’t swing too far in the wrong direction, either. The Senate bill strikes the right balance there.
A number of major environmental groups initially came out in opposition to the Fix Our Forests Act over numerous concerns, including that it erodes Endangered Species Act protections by exempting the Forest Service and BLM from the requirement to adjust land management policies as new information about how projects could affect threatened species arises. What is the other side of this tradeoff? How would limiting the consultation requirement advance the goal of reducing wildfires?
The biggest challenge right now is that, because of all of the regulatory hurdles, it can take upwards of a thousand days to get a project off the ground anywhere in the country. One great example of that is in the Angeles National Forest. They announced a fuel break maintenance strategy in 2020, but they were not able to get the requisite approvals until the start of December 2024. It took four years — and then the last of the permits that were most relevant to Altadena didn’t get approved until March, two months after the fire. There are very real consequences to this kind of delay, both for the environment and for human health and safety, that need to be taken into account.
If you take a step back and look at the bill, the main tool that it uses is not broad NEPA exemptions or writ-large changes in the law. It utilizes categorical exclusions, a method that has been used for energy projects in other areas and is increasingly sought after to advance targeted projects with public benefits.
One great example is the Tahoe categorical exclusion, on which a significant portion of this bill is based. It was a 10,000-acre CE created in 2016, which allowed for work that protected communities and ecosystems and got good fire on the ground. It’s work that directly saved South Lake Tahoe from the Caldor Fire. But one of the challenges right now is that the current level for CE is 3,000 acres, and when we’re talking about landscapes in forests that are hundreds of thousands of miles big and a fireshed that nationwide is 50 million acres, then 3,000 acres is not enough for it to be worth it for the Forest Service and Park Service and DOI officials to go through the CE process — which takes six months and is very rigorous.
But we also wanted to show restraint here for environmental purposes. We wanted to make sure that this was as targeted as it needed to be, and not overly expansive.
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Gabrielle is intensifying as it travels northwestward through the Atlantic, and may strengthen into a hurricane near Bermuda over the weekend • A trio of tropical storms — Mitag, Ragasa, and Neoguri — is barreling toward East Asia, threatening to build into typhoons as they approach China, the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan • A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off Russia’s Pacific coast, triggering a tsunami advisory.
THE TOP FIVE
1. New York regulator greenlights controversial gas pipeline
All but one member of New York’s Public Service Commission voted Thursday to endorse a plan from the gas utility National Grid that depends on construction of a controversial natural gas pipeline, the Albany Times-Union reported. The state has yet to approve the pipeline plan. In 2019, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo rejected the Northeast Supply Enhancement project, better known as the Williams Pipeline, on the grounds that it threatened too much environmental damage. Soon after, Cuomo shuttered the nuclear power plant that once supplied a significant portion of New York City’s energy, and the offshore wind projects meant to generate much of its carbon-free electricity stalled out. The only major power project to bring clean electricity into the city, the transmission line designed to connect the five boroughs to the hydroelectric system in Quebec, is underway, but at peak capacity will only supply about half of what the Indian Point nuclear station once produced. As a result, the New York City region on the state’s grid system depends on gas and oil for nearly 90% of its electricity.
The decision drew swift blowback from climate groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, which called the pipeline a “climate and affordability boondoggle.” The utility’s “own demand forecasts confirm there is no imminent reliability need — capacity is more than sufficient to meet peak demand well into the 2040s, even under unusually cold temperatures,” Chris Casey, the New York utility regulatory director at NRDC, said in a statement. “The Commission’s decision to signal its support for this fracked gas pipeline very likely contradicts state law, is not in the public interest, and will be vigorously challenged.”
2. California Democrat says Interior Department halted solar approvals
Representative Scott Peters, the Democrat who represents part of San Diego, accused the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management of halting permitting on solar projects in California. At a press conference Thursday to promote a bipartisan proposal he drafted along with the Colorado Republican Representative Gabe Evans to ease federal energy permitting, Peters said he had just been told that the agency would not approve any more panels. “It’s hard to get a deal unless we resolve that,” Peters said, according to a post on X from Politico reporter Joshua Siegel.
The proposal is a framework for a bill, essentially a blueprint of what members of the House Problem Solvers Caucus feel constitute reasonable compromises. For Republicans, the agreement offers fewer bureaucratic roadblocks to all kinds of new infrastructure, including gas pipelines. For Democrats, it charts a path for building more of the transmission lines that are key to adding more renewables to the grid. “It’s a big step to have our caucus, which is a pretty significant number of Republicans and Democrats, sign on to a pretty detailed set of policy principles,” Peters said. But as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival.”
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3. New climate tech coalition forms
On Thursday, a new coalition that includes Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, consulting giant McKinsey, and Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability launched the Climate Tech Atlas. The proposal maps out ways to decarbonize different sectors of the economy, and lists priorities for innovation. The idea is not to eliminate potential solutions, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported in her scoop about the project, but rather “to enable the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers, policymakers, and investors to really focus on where we felt there was the largest opportunity for exploration and for innovation to impact our path to net zero through the lens of technology,” according to Cooper Rinzler, a key collaborator on the initiative and a partner at the venture capital firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
4. Microsoft unveils ‘the world’s most powerful AI data center’ in Wisconsin
Microsoft has announced “the world’s most powerful AI data center” in southeastern Wisconsin. The project, called Fairwater, “is a seamless cluster of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200s, connected by enough fiber to circle the Earth 4.5 times,” CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a post on X. “It will deliver 10x the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen.” He said Microsoft would match “all of the energy that is consumed with renewable sources.”
That power generation could prove more popular than the data center itself. Just 44% of American voters would support or strongly support a data center being built near them, while 42% would oppose or strongly oppose it, according to a Heatmap Pro poll Matthew covered last week. That mere 2% of net support compares to net support of 34% for a gas plant, 19% for a wind farm, 34% for a solar project, and 11% for batteries.
5. Climeworks inks largest-ever carbon removal deal with Schneider Electric
The carbon removal startup Climeworks just signed its largest-ever deal. By 2039, the Switzerland-based company, one of the biggest direct air capture developers in the world, agreed to suck 31,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere on behalf of Schneider Electric, the French industrial giant. Schneider said it remains committed to slashing the direct emissions from its operations by 90% in the next 25 years, and that this deal addresses “future neutralization needs while pursuing aggressive emissions reductions, and supporting the scale-up of an industry crucial for achieving net zero.” In a statement, Schneider’s sustainability chief Esther Finidori said that “both carbon removal and carbon reduction are fundamental to achieving our climate goals, as well as those of the planet.” For Climeworks, the deal is a “milestone,” said CEO Christoph Gebald.
THE KICKER
The speed of climate change may be throwing the insect world out of whack. But a new study has put offshore oil rigs in the North Sea to work identifying the vital role a migratory insect plays. University of Exeter researchers studied 121 marmalade hoverflies that landed on an oil rig in the Britannia oil field. The rig off the coast of Scotland was far from any vegetation or land, so the pollen found on 92% of hoverflies “shows they can transport pollen over great distances, potentially linking plant populations that are hundreds of kilometers apart,” according to a press release. “By analysing the pollen samples and wind patterns, we estimate that many of the hoverflies had flown from places including the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark — over 500 kilometers away,” Toby Doyle, Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation in Cornwall, said in a statement.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the company behind the Fairwater project.
1. Indianapolis, Indiana – The Sooner state’s top energy official suggested energy developers should sue towns and county regulators over anti-renewable moratoria and restrictive ordinances, according to audio posted online by local politics blog Indy Politics.
Per the audio, Indiana Energy Secretary Suzie Jaworowski told a closed-door audience Tuesday that she believes the state has to “do something” about the recent wave of local bans on renewable energy because it is “creating a reputation where industry doesn’t want to come.” Among the luncheon’s sponsors were AES Indiana, Duke Energy, and the industry group Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy, and it was officially chaired by Citizens Energy, Indiana Electric Cooperatives, and EDP Renewables.
Jaworowski – who was previously an official in the first Trump administration – bemoaned the fact companies spend copious amounts of money on community engagement only to reach no deal. “Personally I think that those companies should start suing the communities and get serious about it,” she said, adding that her office is developing a map of “yes counties” for energy development.
At least eleven Indiana counties have outright moratoria on renewable energy development and more than twenty others have at least some form of restriction on solar or wind, according to the Heatmap Pro database.
2. Laramie County, Wyoming – It’s getting harder to win a permit for a wind project in Wyoming, despite it being home to some of the largest such projects in the country.
The county commission voted this week to reject Repsol’s Laramie Range project, which has been under development since 2018 and is supposed to provide up to 650 megawatts of electricity.
The rejection came after a flood of negative comments from farmers, ranchers, and individuals worried about wildlife impacts. One commissioner went so far as to invoke Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax as he supported denying the facility.
As of today, Repsol has less than a week to either appeal the project decision or give up on clearing the hurdle of Laramie County.
Laramie County is a unique example in Wyoming as the most populated county in the least populated state. The county also has the state’s highest opposition risk score in the Pro database because many who live there are relatively affluent and are deeply concerned about the environment.
Laramie isn’t indicative of Wyoming as a whole, given many farmers’ overwhelming respect for individual property rights and a long history of local energy development. Efforts to restrict wind development at the state level failed as recently as this year, and many counties in the state have closer-to-average risk profiles.
3. Ada County, Idaho – Like Wyoming, Idaho is seeing its most populated county locking up land from being available for renewables development.
The Ada County Commission oversees zoning for the entire Boise metropolitan area – and it decided in a split 2-1 vote to bar solar projects from being constructed on “prime farmland,” as defined by federal, state, and local regulators.
This policy, which would be to some a de facto solar ban in much of the county, comes after the county denied Savion’s Powers Butte Energy Center last year over the issue. Due to the split vote, the panel will have to revisit the decision next month before it is formally enshrined into code.
Idaho has seen its fair share of conflicts over renewable energy. For the most part, those battles have been centered around wind energy – a la Lava Ridge – and battery storage. With the vote in Ada County, it seems solar is now on some locals’ chopping blocks too.
That being said, it’s not game over for large-scale solar in the state, or even in Ada County. After the commission took the vote, state officials approved the lease for a giant D.E. Shaw Renewables project in the county that is purportedly not situated on prime farmland.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio – Activists are plotting another appeal to overturn the Ohio Power Siting Board’s decision on a solar farm.
The OPSB approved EDF’s Eastern Cottontail solar project in late August. The organization Citizens for Fair Fields will reportedly be seeking a rehearing, which is a prelude to potential future legal action before the Ohio Supreme Court.
Speaking with local news, one landowner fighting the solar project because it is across from their home offered this magical quote I had to share with you: “[W]e’ve been called NIMBYs over and over again and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, we are NIMBYs. We absolutely are,’ but I don’t know whose backyard this belongs in because it doesn’t belong in anybody’s backyard.”
5. Franklin County, Virginia – Constitution Solar is struggling to assuage local residents’ complaints about a proposed project in this county despite doing, well, it appears anything to make them happy.
The company has already reduced the size of its Robin Ridge Solar facility as well as created large tree buffer plans and a sizable decommissioning strategy. But despite that, county officials are still undecided on whether to formally approve the project for construction.
If this project is ultimately rejected, this county – which has a 99 opposition risk score in Heatmap Pro – may just become a no-go zone for large solar projects. It already has a restrictive ordinance capping acreage for utility solar in general that was adopted two years ago around the same time county officials unanimously rejected a facility.
6. Sumter County, South Carolina – One solar developer is trying for a Hail Mary with South Carolina regulators to circumvent a painful local rejection.
Sumter County officials rejected Treaty Oak Clean Energy’s request to build its White Palmetto solar farm on land designated for farming. The unanimous decision, made in the spring, came after a large turnout at a public hearing and almost a thousand people signed a petition opposing the project. The most often cited reason for the opposition was overall project footprint, which totaled more than 1,700 acres.
On Sept. 2, Treaty Oak Clean Energy applied to the South Carolina Public Utilities Commission for a certificate allowing construction as well as a decision to overrule county officials. The commission has now scheduled hearings in December to decide whether to grant pre-emption or let Sumter stand.
