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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.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed on Wednesday that a New World screwworm — a flesh-eating fly that feeds on cattle, livestock, and other mammals — was found in a 3-week old calf in southern Texas. The screwworms aren’t dangerous to people, but they are a serious health risk to cows, and they are likely to drive already record-high beef prices even higher.
The finding reflects the defeat of what was, up until recently, one of my favorite “unknown” government programs. For decades, the United States government paid to breed millions of male screwworms, blast them with radiation to make them sterile, and then drop them from planes into the rainforest at the narrowest stretch of the Panama peninsula. (Sarah Zhang, the bravura science writer at The Atlantic, wrote the ultimate story about this project back in 2020, which is how I learned about it in the first place.) These sterile male worms mate with female screwworms but produce no larvae, creating a biological border in Central America across which screwworms cannot pass, at least in theory.
That border was breached in 2022 — perhaps via infected livestock smuggled across the Darién Gap — and since then screwworms have been inching toward Mexico and the United States. They were hundreds of miles from the border last summer; now they seem to have crossed it. Once they’re inside the country, the screwworms will be difficult to cordon given that livestock move travel regularly as they move from ranch to slaughterhouse.
The U.S. government is on it — sort of. Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, announced efforts last July to open a new factory in Texas capable of producing 300 million sterile screwworms. Regardless, re-eradicating the worms is going to be much harder than keeping them under control — the U.S. established the bio-wall in that narrow strip of Panama because it was most efficient, but eliminating the bugs at first required enormous air drops across the southern United States and the entirety of Mexico. That will require a bigger bug factory.
Screwworm isn’t the only historic pest that the American government has lost control of: Our measles eradication status is now also under review. New pests threaten, as well, such as the alpha-gal tick and Lyme disease.
I would highlight that the screwworm is a lesson about the reality of good governance. State capacity is not so different from managing the electricity system or, for that matter, cutting carbon emissions, in that there is little political reward for getting it right. Voters do not thank politicians when something bad doesn’t happen — except in the most obvious cases — and they broadly do not notice when difficult systems work. (Nor do journalists — or, for that matter, the algorithmic feeds that have partially replaced us.)
The screwworm may also point to the virtues of taking a more muscular — a more openly protean — approach to environmental engineering. For decades, the U.S. government really did succeed in squashing the screwworm, and while the ecological effects of the widespread and cheaper cattle farming that resulted are perhaps best left to another discussion, it does make me wonder: Should we consider trying the same thing for ticks? Mosquitos?
Like many new parents, I devote considerable time to thinking about sleep and why it’s not happening. Should I have sung the bedtime song and then changed the diaper? Did the baby need a fourth nap, or was the mistake letting her take a third so close to bedtime? It came as a surprise the other day, then, when a fellow parent in my baby group revealed she isn’t overthinking the whole sleep schedule thing at all. “I asked ChatGPT to write my baby’s sleep plan,” she told us. “It’s validating!”
To this author, personally, outsourcing parenting decisions to the world’s most sophisticated Mad Libs respondent seems like one of the signs that we’re doomed. Sleepmaxxing mothers aside, a plurality of Americans agree with me. Per Heatmap Pro’s latestpolling, 45% of voters are “pessimistic” about the long-term impact of artificial intelligence on their lives, with just 22% saying they’re “optimistic” and about a third saying they’re unsure.
Americans were even more negative about the perceived impacts of AI on “society as a whole” — more than half, 55%, said they were pessimistic, while just 17% said they were optimistic. Maybe “future generations” will have it better? Eh. Again, net pessimism outweighed optimism in our polling by more than 30 points (52% to 20%).
Look a little closer at who hates their life because of AI and you might be surprised. The youngest respondents in the survey (and those who will have to live with the tech the longest), were by far the biggest doubters. Respondents aged 18 to 34 reported the most pessimism of any major demographic about the estimated impact of AI on their personal lives, tied with women generally at net 33 pessimistic over optimistic. For AI’s impact on society as a whole, there was a 53-point spread in favor of AI making things worse (68% pessimistic to 15% optimistic), which is 15 points worse than the next most pessimistic age group, the 35- to 49-year-olds.
Seniors, by contrast, are a little more sanguine. Among the 65-and-over crowd, the pessimism gap was a comparatively small net 12. In fact, men over the age of 65 were the only major group to report being more optimistic than pessimistic on AI’s impacts on future generations (34% to 30%) and on their own lives (35% to 32%). By contrast, young women were among the most negative of all groups; nearly three in four women in the 18 to 34 range (73%) said they were pessimistic about AI’s impact on society, and the same group was net 62 under water on AI’s effects on future generations. (Our findings are in keeping with other polls that show a gender gap on the embrace of AI.)
Education, surprisingly, wasn’t a big difference-maker. People who attended college reported nearly identical pessimism about AI’s impacts on society and future generations as non-college-educated respondents. College-educated people were just a few points less pessimistic about AI’s impact on their own lives, 25% versus 29% for those who didn’t attend.
So who actually thinks AI is going to be a good thing? Black respondents were at least more evenly divided on the impact of AI on their personal lives (33% optimistic to 33% pessimistic), though they were less convinced that the technology is good for society or future generations (13 points net pessimistic). People who prefer a hands-off federal approach to AI are generally encouraged by the technology’s application in their own lives, at net 13 optimistic. But even the most AI-friendly group’s outlook dropped off when considering its implications on society as a whole (net 4 pessimistic) and on future generations (net zero).
Independent voters bristled more at AI’s impacts on their lives (pessimism net 32) than Democrats (net 30), and on the question of “society as a whole,” the bloc ran away with net pessimism of 48, compared to Democrats (net 45) and Republicans (net 27). Among Republicans, MAGA voters were net 25 toward pessimism about AI’s impacts on their lives — in spite of President Trump’s boosterism — compared with the even-more-pessimistic non-MAGA voters at net 34 pessimistic.
Are Americans just a half-glass-empty group to begin with? Well, maybe — the percentage of adults who told Gallup they anticipate having “high-quality lives in five years” declined to less than 60% in 2025, the lowest level in two decades of polling. And while this is Heatmap’s first year tracking AI optimism, in Stanford University’s 2025 Artificial Intelligence Index Report, an adjacent line of inquiry found that people are increasingly warming up to the technology, with the “share of individuals who see AI products and services as more beneficial than harmful [rising] from 52% in 2022 to 55% in 2024.”
At the same time, about a third of Americans in our polling worried that AI puts their jobs at risk; a mere 6% said they believe that “AI will create jobs across the country, and I expect my own career to benefit.” Hopefully, there are no baby sleep trainers among their numbers.
The Heatmap Pro poll of 4,118 American registered voters was conducted by Embold Research via text-to-web responses from May 15 to 28, 2026. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.
Current conditions: The southwest monsoon known as “hagabat” has started in the Philippines, dumping up to 4 inches of rain on the archipelago • A strong geomagnetic storm, ranked just two levels below the most powerful type of event of this kind, is underway, threatening radio signals, GPS, and other human instruments that are sensitive to shifts in the Earth’s magnetic fields • San Antonio, where the glorious New York Knicks defeated the Spurs last night, is bracing for rain through the weekend.
THE TOP FIVE
1. U.S. oil stocks drop to the lowest level since 2004
To put it in terms a movie lover could understand, President Donald Trump’s Iran War is drinking the U.S. government’s milkshake. Federal stocks of oil have dropped to their lowest level since 2004. Commercial crude stocks fell by 8 million barrels to 433.7 million last week, according to The Wall Street Journal. Unless the Strait of Hormuz reopens soon — which looks less likely now that Iran has called off negotiations with the U.S. and Israel — prices could hit $200 per barrel by summer, said Bob McNally, president of the Rapidan Energy Group consultancy and a former White House adviser. “You start to raise the risk of spillover into other sectors, the economy and financial system … it detonates fragilities in the broader economy and financial system,” he told the Financial Times.
2. Spurned by Trump, Oklahoma’s attorney general sues to block aluminum smelter
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has filed a lawsuit to block construction of the United States’ first new aluminum smelter in half a century over concerns about the project’s ties to the United Arab Emirates and risks it poses to the state’s cattle industry. Century Aluminum had planned to build the smelter with $500 million from the Biden administration. But in January, as I told you at the time, the company overhauled the deal to partner instead with the Abu Dhabi-based Emirates Global Aluminum, which said it became interested in the project after Trump slapped 50% tariffs on the metal. The move comes after Trump endorsed Drummond’s opponent in this year’s Republican primary for Oklahoma governor.
In the 12-page litigation, the state’s top cop alleged that the smelter, planned for a site 30 miles east of Tulsa, would “leach air and water pollutants that would injure the health, comfort, repose, and safety of the people in the region,” Mining.com reported. “A primary aluminum smelter does not belong in a community’s backyard and its emissions do not respect property lines,” Drummond wrote in the lawsuit, which asks the court to block the project. His lawsuit also refers to the UAE, a close ally of the U.S. and by far the most liberal of the Gulf Arab kingdoms, as an “Islamic foreign monarchy.”
3. Texas’ grid operator puts forward major data center rules
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, approved what E&E News called two “landmark sets of rules of rules” this week that would “shape the future of data centers in the state if finalized.” One package sets up new criteria and processes for bringing big electricity users onto the grid by reviewing them in batches. The other requires data centers and crypto mining operations to remain online during brief grid disruptions in a bid to avoid the cascading outages that downed the electrical system during 2021’s deadly Winter Storm Uri.
The changes come as opposition to data centers reaches critical new heights. Seven in 10 Americans now oppose server facilities built near their homes, according to a new Heatmap Pro released a poll this week that my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote up here. The backlash has grown so severe that former Representative Ben McAdams, a Republican from Utah, is facing serious pushback from his Democratic opponent for the state’s new 1st Congressional District over his small stake in the renewable energy component of a proposed data center in the area, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
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4. Taiwan’s government pushes ahead with geothermal
Taiwan, if you’ll forgive the pun, is in dire straits. The self-governing republic that has functioned as an independent country since the losing side of the Chinese Civil War fled there in 1949, is almost entirely reliant on imported fossil fuels to keep the lights on and semiconductor fabricators churning out the hardware that makes the island so valuable to the global economy. That reliance only grew last year when the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which has opposed atomic energy since its founding in the 1980s, completed the country’s nuclear phaseout, shutting the last of the island’s three functioning plants. The government in Taipei is now considering starting back up at least one of the old nuclear plants. But, as I told you earlier this year, it’s also looking to geothermal to make up the difference. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Economic Affairs announced the first government-led tender for geothermal, Think Geoenergy reported. The six-month process is meant to develop geothermal zones in Taitung County, on the island’s southeast coast.
5. Hybrid sales are surging
The Iran War isn’t just draining America’s crude stockpiles. It’s also spiking gas prices — and spurring a hybrid boom. Sales of hybrid vehicles revved 33% in May compared to the same month last year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Motor Intelligence data. “The hybrids have been a godsend,” Mark Politte, the dealer principal at Stanley Subaru in Ellsworth, Maine, told the newspaper. They are “hotter than the non-hybrids.” While new vehicle sales are down 4.4% overall this year through May, hybrid sales are up 17% compared with 2025.
Meanwhile, autonomous electric vehicle company Waymo announced a deal on Thursday to recycle batteries from its nearly 4,000 operating robotaxis into battery storage for electric grids in California and Texas. Waymo’s fleet is made up mostly of Jaguar I-Pace EVs, which have 90-kilowatt-hour batteries. “Put a little haircut on that in terms of degradation and the effective capacity that would be left in those batteries when they’re suitable for repurposing, and we’re still talking about pretty significant capacity per battery,” Freeman Hall, CEO of B2U Storage Solutions, Waymo’s partner in the project, told Ars Technica.
THE KICKER
Unsurprisingly, two regions with a lot of gas production and data center construction saw an increase.EIA
The U.S. may be depleting its oil stockpiles, but it has increased its storage capacity for natural gas in the future. Underground storage capacity in the Lower 48 states increased slightly in 2025, growing mostly in the South Central and Mountain West regions, according to new data from the Energy Information Administration. “Underground natural gas storage provides a source of energy when demand increases, balancing U.S. energy needs,” analyst Jose Villar wrote. “We calculate natural gas storage capacity in two ways: demonstrated peak capacity and working gas design capacity. Both increased in 2025.”
Air quality information on a home listing in Washington, D.C. Redfin
Unsurprisingly, two regions with a lot of gas production and data center construction saw an increase.EIA