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Current conditions: Much of the U.S. will see calmer weather over the next few days • A tornado caused “biblical damage” in Cyprus • Mexico is experiencing its worst drought in 12 years.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Study: Polar bears head ashore for food as sea ice melts
A new study sheds light on how polar bears are changing their diets and behaviors in a warming world. Climate change is shrinking the sea ice on which the bears rely for hunting seals. As the ice melts, the bears are forced onto land, where they can either reduce their physical activity in order to save energy and calories, or forage for berries and small prey. The research, which involved strapping cameras to 20 bears in Canada’s Manitoba province, found that neither option is enough to prevent the animals from going hungry. All of them lost weight and two of them were on track to starve before the sea ice was expected to return. “Polar bears are not grizzly bears wearing white coats,” said Charles Robbins, director of the Washington State University Bear Center and co-author of the study in the journal Nature Communications. “They’re very, very different.” The study found some bears are spending more time in the water, which is “new and unexpected,” one polar bear expert toldVox. “These are possibly acts of desperation. Hungry and skinny bears take more risks than fat bears.”
2. Health insurers fret about climate change impact
Health insurance may be the next sector to hike premiums due to climate change, The Wall Street Journal reported. The rise in extreme weather events has already roiled the home insurance market, making it more expensive – or even impossible – for homeowners in some high-risk areas to take out a policy. Now health insurers are “building new models to reassess premiums, estimate risk, and meet incoming climate reporting standards,” the Journal said. Recent research has linked extreme heat and wildfire smoke to a variety of health problems including heart attacks and cancer, and insurers want to know what this all means for their bottom lines. But the Journal reports that for now, insurers aren’t worried about their profits, “because the groups most likely to be affected by climate change aren’t covered by insurance.”
3. Redfin adds air quality tracker to home listings
In a sign of the times, Redfin has become the first real estate brokerage to include air quality data alongside home listings. The feature allows house hunters to see the air quality in their prospective new neighborhoods, and tells them whether it is expected to get better or worse in years to come. One home listed in Washington, D.C., for example, came with this warning: “Over the next 30 years, this area will experience a 20.0% increase in the number of poor air quality days, i.e. where the Air Quality Index (AQI) exceeds 100.”
Air quality information on a home listing in Washington, D.C. Redfin
Redfin already lists other risk factors like flood, fire, heat, and wind. “Redfin wants to ensure that every single person searching for a home has the information they need to understand climate risks,” said Redfin Senior Vice President of Product and Design Ariel Dos Santos. The company also published data this week showing that more people are moving into than out of metro areas that have bad air quality, not necessarily because of health concerns, but because they’ve been priced out.
4. BlackRock’s ESG funds are ‘soaring’
BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, has seen more cash flow into its ESG funds than out every quarter for the last two years, “a period that marks one of the toughest ever in the two-decade history of environmental, social and governance investing,” Bloombergreported. Most people might associate ESG with renewables, but it also encompasses some of the biggest tech giants: BlackRock’s three top-performing ESG funds include Microsoft and Apple as their biggest holdings.
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5. UK Royal Navy reportedly considering climate change course for sailors
The United Kingdom’s Royal Navy is considering making all its sailors take a course about climate change, The Telegraphreported, citing a leaked document. The course would focus specifically on how climate change threatens peace and defense efforts. The document also said rising sea levels could damage maritime infrastructure. Other initiatives under consideration include paying for sailors to study climate change, and inviting climate scientists to conduct research on Britain’s warships. One former head of the Royal Navy told the paper he supported the plans, but added: “Climate change is not more important than fighting the King’s enemies, so it has to be done with a balance.”
THE KICKER
At a North Carolina aquarium, a round stingray named Charlotte is pregnant despite not having contact with a male of her species in at least eight years.
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I’ve got an update for you on the data center backlash — and what it could mean for the governor’s race in Wisconsin, one of the country’s most important state-level battles in the upcoming midterms.
Last week, I wrote about how the Republican congressman and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany was trying to turn the data center issue into a kind of trojan horse for slowing down renewables. Tiffany claimed to be anti-data-center, but he was really looking to apply new and stricter rules to clean energy development, as well.
Over the weekend, Tiffany said the quiet part loud. “David Crowley wants to cover our farmland with industrial-scale wind, solar, and data centers,” he posted on X. (He also started calling his opponent “Data Center David Crowley.”) Tiffany vowed to “protect Wisconsin farmland,” picking up on the idea — already used by the Trump administration to stymie solar development — that renewables threaten the integrity of agricultural land.
Now Crowley isn’t nearly as pro-data-center as Tiffany claims, although he has said the computing facilities should run on 100% clean energy. Yet Tiffany's accusation made me curious: How many local governments now see data centers and renewables as a package deal — and a farmland-threatening incursion that should be blocked? Back in March, my colleague Jael Holzman has covered how data centers are turning Americans against renewables. Are we seeing that on the ground?
Our market intelligence service Heatmap Pro tracks local laws affecting clean energy, batteries, and data centers. I asked the Pro team to look at how many local governments have now banned all three types of infrastructure — communities with what you might call a “none of the above” policy.
There’s mostly good news in the results for renewables advocates. The number of towns and counties that have blocked data centers, solar, and batteries remains small. As of late last week, 21 counties across the country have an active restriction or moratorium on solar, batteries, and data centers combined.
Another 10 counties have banned either data centers and solar, or data centers and batteries, but not all three. Six cities or municipalities have placed combined restrictions on the technologies nationwide.
The bad news: The number is growing fast. Most of these “none-of-the-above” restrictions were passed in 2026, and the overwhelming majority are in the rural Midwest and Great Plains. Kansas, Iowa, and Indiana account for most of the moratoriums or restrictive laws.
Not all of the restrictions are new. Although most of these multi-technology restrictions get passed at the same time, a handful of counties blocked solar and batteries first, then tacked on data centers later. Dickinson County, Kansas, for instance, has long blocked solar and batteries. But this spring, as the data center boom came along, the county’s leaders extended that moratorium to apply to data centers and all forms of energy development — including natural gas.
Overall, the scale of the trend remains small. Less than 10% of data center restrictions nationwide also target clean energy. That’s good news for renewable developers because the number of data center ordinances is surging. More than 530 data center restrictions are now on the books nationwide, and most restrictions have come in the past 12 months.
And what about the Wisconsin election? As of right now, only one county in America’s Dairyland has restricted data centers and batteries together. None have restricted solar, wind, and batteries. But Tiffany does seem to be tapping into a much larger zeitgeist. When you look at the stated reasons why communities nationwide are adopting these policies, farmland protection ranks high on the list. When it comes to permitting politics, in other words, farmland looks like the next frontier.
All I wanted was to drive an electric car to the solar eclipse. But after the third consecutive charging port RFID reader wouldn’t accept my credit card and finding that the employees inside the attached Spanish hotel restaurant mostly didn’t speak English, I began to feel as though, just maybe, this hadn’t been my best idea.
Opting for an EV as a rental car can be an attractive proposition. For a longtime electric driver like me, it’s the opportunity to avoid car emissions even when on holiday, and to try out the experience in another country. For others, it could be a way to save money while on vacation in countries with even more expensive gasoline than America’s, or perhaps to try out electric driving before taking the plunge on buying an EV back home.
My advice, though? Don’t — at least not yet. The reason is that road-tripping on vacation is not only different from the driving you do back home, it’s also the worst kind for using an EV, especially for a newbie. The experience might lead you to believe, incorrectly, that the EV experience is just like this.
I admit, I had high hopes. Europe as a whole is far ahead of the United States in EV adoption, and its denser built environment means fewer long, open expanses between the kinds of cities that would have charging stations. Spain isn’t nearly as far along with EVs as the Scandinavian or the low countries, where electric cars are already a majority of cars on the road, or nearly there. But it is ahead of the U.S. So I figured driving around the country to see the total solar eclipse in a Peugeot E-5008 electric SUV would be a manageable task.
The first problem is time. Here in California, I’ve come to terms with the fact that driving long distances in an EV adds minutes. There’s simply no way to replicate the five-minute pump-and-go gas station stop, but when it comes to dealing with the slog of freeway travel from L.A. to the Bay Area, for example, I’ve come to enjoy taking a longer charging stop to breathe as opposed to making the best possible time on a car trip. On vacation, though, there’s no time to lose.
And it’s not just charging itself that takes time. Unless you rent a Tesla and enjoy the seamless experience of its Superchargers, you’re stuck with the same annoyances that have vexed so many EV early adopters in the U.S.: busted chargers, hit-or-miss credit card readers, and juggling a variety of phone apps to interact with all the various brands of charging stations one might encounter. It’s also, frankly, just mentally taxing to think about all this in a new country and a new car, the very opposite of what most people seek on holiday.
Driving abroad intensifies these grievances. In just five days of driving around Spain, I racked up five new phone apps dedicated to charging the car on different networks. (Electromaps! Movilidad! PowerGo! EnelEnergy! Zunder!). Sometimes this was out of desperation: I parked, plugged, and scanned multiple credit cards that the machine would not accept, finding pay-by-phone to be the only way to activate the machine. Of course, signing up for a new app is a 10-minute process that involves typing in endless fields of personal information just to add a few kilowatt-hours to one’s car battery. Not great when you’re already running behind, and doubly problematic if you had no or little cell service abroad and couldn’t download the necessary app at that moment. (Death to walled-off apps.)
Those chargers that did work typically ran far below their stated capacity, in the range of 70 kilowatts to 90 kilowatts of charging speed as opposed to the 180 kilowatts or 350 kilowatts they were rated to deliver. And when plugs are scarce, you have to take what you can get in terms of speed and amenities. I was overjoyed to find one that worked without much hassle in Basque Country — even though I had to ask one of the gas station employees to move her Volkswagen Passat that was ICEing a charger, and encountered an industrial stench from nearby petroleum production so strong I nearly vomited when I got out of the car.
The EV culture can be different, too. I’d hoped to charge at the plugs located in the parking garage of my hotel in Bilbao, Spain, but arrived home too late after eclipse traveling and found the lot full and locked. The nearby underground structure had plenty of charging spaces, but those were bring-your-own-cable chargers — something common in Europe that’s only now coming to the United States.
Despite the difficulties, the trip went off. We saw the spiritual experience of the eclipse through the cloudless skies of Burgos; we traveled around northern Spain without once having to buy gasoline at European prices. And while an inconvenient experience like this might be enough to dissuade someone from ever taking a chance on EVs again, it shouldn’t.
There’s a dichotomy in the electric car experience I’ve talked about ad nauseum. As detractors say, taking long road trips can be kind of annoying, and those annoyances run deeper in unfamiliar territory. But most of us don’t drive like we’re on vacation most of the time. We do our driving close to home, where electric cars are a better and more convenient experience if you can do much of your charging at home or work. Public charging still takes time. But in your own city and state, you already know the nearby ones you like and have all the necessary apps downloaded and filled out.
A more seamless time is coming, when charging stations are abundant everywhere and a simple, idiot-proof interface for plugging in is the standard. Until then, you’ll probably have a more relaxing vacation burning fossil fuels. Just don’t let that stop you from buying an EV.
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Moke sideswiped Hawaii yesterday just weeks after a weakened Hurricane Lala became the first major storm to hit the Big Island in decades • On the western fringe of the United States’ Pacific borders, Typhoon Saudel struck Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands over the weekend, bringing heavy rain and flooding • Temperatures in Khorramshahr, on Iran’s border with Iraq, are topping 118 degrees Fahrenheit, rendering the southwestern port city the hottest place on Earth.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Trump administration orders Arizona, California, and Nevada to cut water use
With water levels in reservoirs across the American West at record lows, the Trump administration has directed Arizona, California, and Nevada to cut back on how much water they use from the Colorado River over the next two years. On Friday, the Department of the Interior imposed the reductions via a series of documents detailing a two-year and a 10-year plan to salvage the supplies from the drought-stricken river fed by snowmelt from Colorado’s stretch of the Rocky Mountains. As climate change has shifted snow patterns, levels on the river have dropped. Yet the seven states that depend on the water — the aforementioned three in the Lower Basin, and Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the Upper Basin — could not come to agreement among themselves on how to divvy up the dwindling supply. Instead, the Interior Department came up with a proposal that forced the Lower Basin states to pare back first. As you may recall, Arizona’s Democratic governor called the cuts “draconian” when the administration released its proposal in early August. The plan, which imposes short-term cuts while leaving a larger split for later, sets the stage for what E&E News predicted would be “a behemoth legal fight.”
2. Energy Department redirects $500 million for green steel to upgrading a coal-fired blast furnace
When the Department of Energy announced a review last year of droves of grants the Biden administration had given for clean industrial projects, the nation’s leading green steel project appeared on the chopping block. Cleveland-Cliffs, the steel giant based in Vice President JD Vance’s hometown in Ohio, said it was renegotiating the $500 million grant that was supposed to fund construction of a modern, integrated mill that could increase U.S. steel production and allow the country to compete with China in selling lower-carbon material to Europe. More than a year later, the deal has finally been renegotiated. As expected, the money will now go instead toward upgrading a coal-fired blast furnace at the Middletown Works plant, Canary Media reported on Friday. Never mind the fact that Congress promulgated the money specifically for lower-carbon steel, making the shift “possibly illegal,” as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reported last year.
3. Congestion costs on largest U.S. grid spike by nearly half
Congestion costs on PJM Interconnection skyrocketed 43% to $6 billion during the first half of this year, up from $2.1 billion during the same period of 2025. That’s according to the grid’s independent watchdog, which last week warned that bottlenecks on high-voltage transmission lines during high-stress events such as storms or heat waves were now what Reuters put bluntly as “the single biggest driver of the increase in soaring wholesale electricity costs.” Across the U.S., July’s electricity bills were, in the frank words of Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin, “higher than ever.”
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4. America’s nuclear fuel supply chain is forming anew
Last week, the uranium miner Ur-Energy sent the first shipment from its mine in Wyoming, World Nuclear News reported Friday. That same day, the American subsidiary of the European uranium giant Urenco broke ground on its latest facility in the U.S., NucNet reported. Downstream, meanwhile, Standard Nuclear — a fuel manufacturer specializing in extra-expensive but extra-safe ceramic-coated fuel pellets called TRISO, which I have written about previously— just cut another deal with a major vendor.
5. Tesla abandons solar roof tiles
I have a confession. Nearly a decade ago, I sat at my sister’s kitchen counter in Massachusetts after she gave birth to my niece, trying to write about the latest technology to come out from Tesla. Not yet burdened by its billionaire chief executive’s political baggage, the company was largely seen at the time as subverting preconceptions about the popularity of electric vehicles. Tesla’s erstwhile absorption of Musk’s former solar manufacturer, Solar City, only cemented the company’s status as an industry leader in producing and deploying panels domestically. The conventional wisdom, at least among some industry analysts at the time, was that any bet against Tesla was an ill-advised gamble against the lucky Mr. Musk. So, I wrote about it as a breakthrough. But the solar-generating roof tiles the company unveiled that fall when I was in New England turned out to be little more than a passing fantasy. Now Electrek has reported that the company plans to discontinue the product.
THE KICKER
And I said, dam. Egyptian Cabinet/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images
Say what you will about Spain’s solar records or America’s gas surge, nothing quite matches the enormous surge of power that is a new hydroelectric station. This week, Tanzania christened its largest-ever hydroelectric station, the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Dam, named for the country’s revolutionary first prime minister after independence. Mwananchi, the country’s largest newspaper, said the plant’s launch “opened a new chapter in Tanzania’s energy sector.”
Air quality information on a home listing in Washington, D.C. Redfin
And I said, dam. Egyptian Cabinet/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images