climate

Southern Europe struggles with soaring heat as temperatures hit 40C, sparking fears of wildfires and health risks.

Europeans are braced for the first heatwave of the Northern Hemisphere summer, as climate change pushes thermometers on the world’s fastest-warming continent further into the red.

With temperatures expected to rise to 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Italian capital, Rome, on Saturday, the Eternal City’s many tourists and Catholic pilgrims to the Vatican alike have been converging around the Italian capital’s 2,500 public fountains for refreshment.

In France, with residents of the southern port city of Marseille expected to have to cope with temperatures flirting with 40C (104F), authorities ordered public swimming pools to be made free of charge to help residents beat the Mediterranean heat.

Two-thirds of Portugal will be on high alert on Sunday for extreme heat and forest fires with 42C (108F) expected in the capital, Lisbon.

Meanwhile, visitors to – and protesters against – Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos’s Friday wedding in Venice were likewise sweltering under the summer sun.

“I try not to think about it, but I drink a lot of water and never stay still, because that’s when you get sunstroke,” Sriane Mina, an Italian student, told AFP news agency on Friday in Venice.

Meanwhile, Spain, which has in past years seen a series of deadly summer blazes ravaging the Iberian peninsula, is expecting peak temperatures in excess of 40C (104F) across most of the country from Sunday.

Scientists have long warned that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is heating up the world with disastrous consequences for the environment, with Europe’s ever-hotter and increasingly common blistering summer heatwaves a result of the long-term warming.

With peaks of 39C (102F) expected in the cities of Naples and Palermo, Sicily has ordered a ban on outdoor work in the hottest hours of the day, as has the Liguria region in northern Italy.

The country’s trade unions are campaigning to extend the measure to other parts of the country.

In Greece, the first heatwave of the summer arrived on Thursday when a fast-moving wildfire engulfed holiday homes and forest land on a section of the Greek coastline just 40km (25 miles) south of the capital, Athens.

More than 100 firefighters, supported by two dozen firefighting aircraft, battled the wildfire that tore across the coastal area of Palaia Fokaia. The flames were whipped up by high winds as temperatures approached 40C (104F).

The heatwave comes hot on the heels of a series of tumbling records for extreme heat, including Europe’s hottest March ever, according to the European Union’s Copernicus climate monitor.

As a result of the planet’s warming, extreme weather events including hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves like this weekend’s have become more frequent and intense, scientists warn.

Coastal blaze triggers evacuation orders, days after state of emergency declared over fires on Aegean island of Chios.

A fast-moving wildfire has engulfed holiday homes and forest land on a section of the Greek coastline just 40km (25 miles) south of the capital, Athens.

More than 100 firefighters, supported by two dozen firefighting aircraft, battled the wildfire that tore across the coastal area of Palaia Fokaia on Thursday, officials said. The flames were whipped up by high winds as temperatures approached 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in the country’s first heatwave of the summer.

Fire department spokesman Vassilis Vathrakogiannis told reporters that 40 people had been evacuated by police, with evacuation orders issued for a total of five areas. A seaside roadway running across the affected areas was protectively cordoned off, he added.

The coastguard said two patrol boats and nine private vessels were on standby in the Palaia Fokaia area in case an evacuation by sea became necessary.

“We’re telling people to leave their homes,” local town councillor Apostolos Papadakis said on Greece’s state-run ERT television.

The cause of the fire was not immediately known, but the fire department spokesman said that an arson investigation unit had been sent to the area.

Local mayor Dimitris Loukas said on ERT television that several houses were believed to have been damaged by the blaze.

The wider Athens area, as well as several Aegean islands, were on Level 4 of a 5-level scale measuring the risk of wildfires owing to the weather conditions, with the heatwave expected to last until the weekend.

Early in the week, hundreds of firefighters took four days to bring a major wildfire under control on the eastern Aegean island of Chios, where a state of emergency was declared and more than a dozen evacuation orders issued.

The fire department said one woman had been arrested on suspicion of having contributed to the sparking of that fire.

Greece has spent hundreds of millions of euros to compensate households and farmers for damage related to extreme weather and to acquire new equipment to deal with wildfires.

It has increased its number of firefighters to a record 18,000 this year.

Scientists say human-caused climate change is contributing to extreme weather conditions and extending heatwaves for billions of people across the world.

‘Exceptionally large floods’ swept through Guizhou’s Rongjiang county, forcing some 80,000 people to flee their homes.

At least six people have died and more than 80,000 people were evacuated from their homes after floods inundated China’s Guizhou province, state media reported, as a tropical depression made landfall in the island province.

State broadcaster CCTV reported on Thursday that “exceptionally large floods” had swept through Guizhou’s Rongjiang county since Tuesday.

Deluges in Guizhou – classified as a southwestern province by the Chinese government – have prompted authorities to activate the highest-level emergency flood response, evacuating about 80,900 people.

“As of 11am on Thursday… six people have unfortunately lost their lives,” the report said, citing the local flood control headquarters.

“Many low-lying areas in the county were flooded, and the infrastructure of some towns was seriously damaged, resulting in traffic obstruction, communications blackouts, and some people being trapped,” the broadcaster said.

“The water level in the county has now retreated below the warning level,” it added, saying “post-disaster recovery and reconstruction and investigation of trapped people are under way.”

State news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday that a football field in Rongjiang was “submerged under three metres (10ft) of water”, and a resident said they were rescued from the third floor of their home.

Images published by Xinhua also showed rescue operations carried out by emergency services. Tents have been set up to serve as temporary shelters for those who were displaced.

In other parts of Guizhou, where the floods have subsided, people were also seen clearing up the debris and thick layers of mud that covered the lower sections of some business establishments and other buildings.

Meanwhile, a tropical depression made landfall in Hainan early on Thursday, according to the country’s National Meteorological Centre.

The tropical depression is expected to move from the city of Wenchang across the island’s northeast tip, before heading back into the South China Sea and making a second landfall in China’s southern Guangdong province and gradually weakening.

The storm will again test the flood defences of the densely populated Guangdong province, as well as Guangxi and Hunan further inland.

China is enduring a summer of extreme weather.

This week, authorities issued the second-highest heat warning for the capital, Beijing, on one of its hottest days of the year so far.

Tens of thousands of people were evacuated last week in Hunan province – neighbouring Guizhou – due to heavy rain brought about by Typhoon Wutip.

Authorities say that rescue workers continue to search for the missing and assist residents in town outside of Medellin.

At least 11 people have been killed and 15 remain missing after a landslide in the city of Bello in Colombia’s northwest, according to authorities.

Evacuation orders and rescue efforts continue a day after the landslide, with government officials warning that heavy rains pose an ongoing threat to the area around Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city.

“We continue to support emergency and rescue work in Bello, where 11 people have sadly been reported killed, at least 15 are missing, and more than 1,500 people are in shelters,” Medellin Mayor Federico Gutierrez said in a social media post on Wednesday.

Floodwaters overwhelmed local waterways on Tuesday during the early morning hours while residents were asleep.

A wave of mud surged through Bello, a crowded community in the hills above Medellin, burying about a dozen homes, sweeping away cars and leaving behind piles of debris.

Rescue workers have used dogs, drones and other means to search for the missing. Shelters have been set up in local schools and community centres.

Heavy rains pose especially high risks for makeshift homes built into the hillsides, which can become unstable during periods of sustained rainfall. It is often the country’s poorer residents who live in these danger zones, many of them having fled conflict in Colombia’s rural areas for the relative safety of a city.

The Medellin town hall also issued evacuation orders for Villatina, also on the outskirts of Medellin, on Tuesday, stating that 23 buildings would be demolished due to the risk of possible collapse. The town hall says that the order was based on previous landslides during late May, and that the risk posed by the insecure structures has been aggravated by recent heavy rain.

Around 60 homes were also ordered evacuated in Medellin, which suffered damage during recent storms.

Getty Images

Heat pump progress but a long way to go

Make electricity cheaper

As heat related power outages surge, things are expected to worsen, with AI-focused data centres sucking up power.

The heatwave currently blanketing two-thirds of the United States with record-setting temperatures is straining the nation’s power system.

On Monday, Con Edison, New York City’s power provider, urged residents to conserve electricity. It reduced power voltage to the borough of Brooklyn by 8 percent as it made repairs; it did the same to areas in the boroughs of Staten Island and Queens yesterday. Thousands also lost power as the grid could not handle the strain.

Comparable outages have been felt around much of the East Coast and Midwest including in the states of Virginia and New Jersey. In Philadelphia and Cleveland, power went out for thousands of customers after severe thunderstorms late last week, and has yet to be restored as the region faces high temperatures.

The national railroad corporation Amtrak reported delays on Tuesday due to speed restrictions caused by the heat on routes that went through Washington, Philadelphia and New York.

Power grid woes

This heatwave is bringing attention to the vulnerability of the power infrastructure in the US.

In the latest annual assessment from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), large parts of the US have insufficient power reserves to operate in “above-normal conditions”, including parts of the Midwest, Texas, New England and southern California.

Heat-related power grid strains have surged in recent years. According to a report from Climate Central released last year, there have been 60 percent more heat-related power outages between 2014-2023 than in the 10 years prior.

This comes amid new but growing pressures on the US power grid, including the prevalence of artificial intelligence data centres and the energy needed to power them. In 2022, in northern Virginia, Dominion Energy warned that data centres there used up so much energy that it might be unable to keep up with surging demand.

For AI data centres, that strain is only set to get more pressing as generative AI booms. It is expected that AI server farms’ power demand will increase to 12 percent by 2030.

There are also more immediate concerns of a cyberthreat from Iranian-backed “hacktivists”, which could target the US power grid at a vulnerable moment to avenge the recent US attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, CNN reported. The US power grid cyberthreat sharing centre has been monitoring the dark web for threats, it said, as the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning on Sunday about potential cyberattacks.

“Both hacktivists and Iranian government-affiliated actors routinely target poorly secured US networks and Internet-connected devices for disruptive cyber attacks,” the advisory said.

In 2023, Iran-linked hacktivists targeted a water authority in Pennsylvania with minimal success. In 2024, US authorities discovered that Iran-associated hackers were behind cyberattacks on US healthcare facilities.

Power grids are particularly at risk, according to a 2024 report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), which said that there are as many as 23,000 to 24,000 susceptible points in the US power grid systems that could be vulnerable to cyberattacks.

RICHMOND, Calif. — An oil tanker sat docked at Chevron’s sprawling refinery in Richmond, Calif., on Thursday — a visible link between California’s appetite for Amazon crude and the remote rainforest territories where it’s extracted. Just offshore, bundled in puffy jackets against the Bay wind, Indigenous leaders from Ecuador’s Amazon paddled kayaks through choppy waters, calling attention to the oil expansion threatening their lands.

Their visit to California helped prompt the state Senate to introduce a landmark resolution urging officials to examine the state’s role in importing crude from the Amazon. The move comes as Ecuador’s government prepares to auction off 14 new oil blocks — covering more than 2 million hectares of rainforest, much of it Indigenous territory — in a 2026 bidding round known as “Sur Oriente.”

The Indigenous leaders say the move goes against the spirit of a national referendum in which Ecuadorians voted to leave crude oil permanently underground in Yasuni National Park.

The preservation push in Ecuador comes as another South American country that includes part of the Amazon rainforest, Brazil, is moving ahead with plans to further develop oil resources. On Tuesday, Brazil auctioned off several land and offshore potential oil sites near the Amazon River as it aims to expand production in untapped regions despite protests from environmental and Indigenous groups.

Indigenous voices

Juan Bay, president of the Waorani people of Ecuador, said that his delegation’s coming to California was “important so that our voices, our stance, and our struggle can be elevated” and urged Californians to reexamine the source of their crude from the Amazon — ”from Waorani Indigenous territory.”

On Thursday, the Indigenous delegation joined local Californians in Richmond for a kayaking trip near a Chevron refinery, sharing stories about the Amazon and perspectives on climate threats.

For Nadino Calapucha, a spokesperson for the Kichwa Pakkiru people, the visit to California’s Bay Area was deeply moving. Spotting seals in the water and a bird’s nest nearby felt “like a gesture of solidarity from nature itself,” he told the Associated Press on a kayak.

“It was as if the animals were welcoming us,” he said.

The connection between the Amazon and California — both facing environmental threats — was palpable, Calapucha said.

“Being here with our brothers and sisters, with the local communities also fighting — in the end, we feel that the struggle is the same,” he said.

California is the largest global consumer of Amazon oil, with much of it refined and used in the state as fuel. Ecuador is the region’s top producer of onshore crude.

Bay highlighted a March ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which found that Ecuador had violated the rights of the area’s Indigenous groups by allowing oil operations in and around a site known as Block 43.

The court ordered the government to halt extraction in protected areas and uphold the 2023 referendum banning drilling in Yasuni National Park, where the country’s largest crude reserve lies, estimated around 1.7 billion barrels.

Bay appealed to the California government to reconsider if it “should continue receiving crude from the Amazon” — or continue to be “complicit in the violation of rights” happening on Indigenous territory.

Defending Indigenous rights

State Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), who introduced the new resolution, praised the visiting leaders for defending their land and the global climate.

“Their communities are on the front lines asserting their rights and resisting oil extraction,” Becker said on the Senate floor on Monday. “They are defenders of a living rainforest that stores carbon, regulates the global climate, and sustains life.”

Long criticized by environmental justice advocates, the refinery has processed millions of barrels of Amazon crude, fueling concerns over pollution, public health, and the state’s role in rainforest destruction.

The delegation also helped launch a new report by Amazon Watch, an Oakland-based nonprofit dedicated to the protection of the Amazon Basin, which outlines the climate, legal and financial risks of operating in Indigenous territories without consent.

‘Addiction to Amazon crude’

Kevin Koenig, Amazon Watch’s director for climate, energy and extraction industry, said the effects of Amazon crude extend far beyond Ecuador. He joined the Ecuadorian delegation on the kayaking trip Thursday.

“The Golden State, if it wants to be a climate leader, needs to take action,” he told AP. “California has an addiction to Amazon crude.”

Californians need to “recognize their responsibility and their complicity in driving demand for Amazon crude and the impact that that is having on Indigenous people, on their rights, on the biodiversity and the climate,” he added.

California’s future is closely tied to the Amazon’s — the state relies on the rainforest’s role in climate regulation and rainfall, Koenig said, warning that continued Amazon crude imports contribute to the destruction increasing California’s vulnerability to drought and wildfires.

He said environmental and public health damage tied to oil drilling is not confined to South America.

“We’re seeing the same impacts from the oil well to the wheel here in California, where communities are suffering from contamination, health impacts, dirty water,” he said. “It’s time that California lead an energy transition.”

California, one of the world’s largest economies and a major importer of Amazon crude, must take stronger climate action, Koenig added, and called on the state to phase out its reliance on oil linked to deforestation, human rights abuses, pollution and climate damage.

The resolution commends the Indigenous communities of Ecuador for their struggle in defending the rainforest and Indigenous rights.

It also marks the first time California would examine how its energy consumption may contribute to the region’s deforestation and cultural loss. The resolution is expected to be up for a vote within a few weeks, according to Koenig.

Grattan and Vasquez write for the Associated Press.

The dispute centred on an exception granted to California on national vehicle emission standards, allowing it to set stricter rules than federal standards.

The United States Supreme Court has sided with fuel producers that had opposed California’s standards for vehicle emissions and electric cars under a federal air pollution law, agreeing that their legal challenge to the mandates should not have been dismissed.

The justices in a 7-2 ruling on Friday overturned a lower court’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit by a Valero Energy subsidiary and fuel industry groups. The lower court had concluded that the plaintiffs lacked the required legal standing to challenge a 2022 US Environmental Protection Agency decision to let California set its own regulations.

“The government generally may not target a business or industry through stringent and allegedly unlawful regulation, and then evade the resulting lawsuits by claiming that the targets of its regulation should be locked out of court as unaffected bystanders,” conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.

Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the decision.

The dispute centred on an exception granted to California during Democratic former President Joe Biden’s administration to national vehicle emission standards set by the agency under the landmark Clean Air Act anti-pollution law.

Though states and municipalities are generally preempted from enacting their own limits, Congress let the EPA waive the preemption rule to let California set certain regulations that are stricter than federal standards.

The EPA’s 2022 action reinstated a waiver for California to set its own tailpipe emissions limits and zero-emission vehicle mandate through 2025, reversing a 2019 decision made during Republican President Donald Trump’s first administration rescinding the waiver.

Valero’s Diamond Alternative Energy and related groups challenged the reinstatement of California’s waiver, arguing that the decision exceeded the EPA’s power under the Clean Air Act and inflicted harm on their bottom line by lowering demand for liquid fuels.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out the lawsuit in 2024, finding that the challengers lacked the necessary standing to bring their claims because there was no evidence that a ruling in their favour might affect the decisions of auto manufacturers in a way that would result in fewer electric and more combustion vehicles to be sold.

Sceptical court

California, the most populous US state, has received more than 100 waivers under the Clean Air Act.

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has taken a sceptical view towards broad authority for federal regulatory agencies and has restricted the powers of the EPA in some important rulings in recent years.

In 2024, the court blocked the EPA’s “Good Neighbor” rule aimed at reducing ozone emissions that may worsen air pollution in neighbouring states. In 2023, the court hobbled the EPA’s power to protect wetlands and fight water pollution. In 2022, it imposed limits on the agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act to reduce coal and gas-fired power plant carbon emissions.

Sao Paulo, Brazil – In the far north of Brazil, where the Amazon River collides with the sea, an environmental dilemma has awakened a national political debate.

There, the Brazilian government has been researching the possibility of offshore oil reserves that extend from the eastern state of Rio Grande do Norte all the way to Amapá, close to the border with French Guiana.

That region is known as the Equatorial Margin, and it represents hundreds of kilometres of coastal water.

But critics argue it also represents the government’s conflicting goals under Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva.

During his third term as president, Lula has positioned Brazil as a champion in the fight against climate change. But he has also signalled support for fossil fuel development in regions like the Equatorial Margin, as a means of paying for climate-change policy.

“We want the oil because it will still be around for a long time. We need to use it to fund our energy transition, which will require a lot of money,” Lula said in February.

But at the start of his term in 2023, he struck a different stance. “Our goal is zero deforestation in the Amazon, zero greenhouse gas emissions,” he told Brazil’s Congress.

As the South American country prepares to host the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) later this year, those contradictions have come under even greater scrutiny.

Nicole Oliveira is one of the environmental leaders fighting the prospect of drilling in the Equatorial Margin, including the area at the mouth of the Amazon River, known as Foz do Amazonas.

Her organisation, the Arayara Institute, filed a lawsuit to block an auction scheduled for this week to sell oil exploration rights in the Equatorial Margin. She doubts the government’s rationale that fossil-fuel extraction will finance cleaner energy.

“There is no indication of any real willingness [from the government] to pursue an energy transition,” Oliveira said.

“On the contrary, there is growing pressure on environmental agencies to issue licenses and open up new areas in the Foz do Amazonas and across the entire Equatorial Margin.”

Last Thursday, the federal prosecutor’s office also filed a lawsuit to delay the auction, calling for further environmental assessments and community consultations before the project proceeds.

A government reversal

The fate of the Equatorial Margin has exposed divisions even within Lula’s government.

In May 2023, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) — the government’s main environmental regulator — denied a request from the state-owned oil company Petrobras to conduct exploratory drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River.

In its decision, the IBAMA cited environmental risks and a lack of assessments, given the site’s “socio-environmental sensitivity”.

But Petrobras continued to push for a licence to drill in the region. The situation escalated in February this year when IBAMA again rejected Petrobras’s request.

Lula responded by criticising the agency for holding up the process. He argued that the proceeds from any drilling would help the country and bolster its economy.

“We need to start thinking about Brazil’s needs. Is this good or bad for Brazil? Is this good or bad for Brazil’s economy?” Lula told Radio Clube do Para in February.

On May 19, the director of IBAMA, a politician named Rodrigo Agostinho, ultimately overruled his agency’s decision and gave Petrobras the green light to initiate drilling tests in the region.

Petrobras applauded the reversal. In a statement this month to Al Jazeera, it said it had conducted “detailed environmental studies” to ensure the safety of the proposed oil exploration.

It added that its efforts were “fully in line with the principles of climate justice, biodiversity protection, and the social development of the communities where it operates”.

“Petrobras strictly follows all legal and technical requirements established by environmental authorities,” Petrobras wrote.

It also argued that petroleum will continue to be a vital energy source decades into the future, even with the transition to low-carbon alternatives.

Roberto Ardenghy, the president of the Brazilian Petroleum and Gas Institute (IBP), an advocacy group, is among those who believe that further oil exploitation is necessary for Brazil’s continued growth and prosperity.

“It is justified — even from an energy and food security standpoint — that Brazil continues to search for oil in all of these sedimentary basins,” he said.

Ardenghy added that neighbouring countries like Guyana are already profiting from “significant discoveries” near the Equatorial Margin.

“Everything suggests there is strong potential for major oil reservoirs in that region. The National Petroleum Agency estimates there could be around 30 billion barrels of oil there. That’s why we’re making such a major effort,” he said.

A ‘risk of accidents’

But critics have argued that the area where the Amazon River surges into the ocean comprises a delicate ecosystem, lush with mangroves and coral reefs.

There, the pink-bellied Guiana dolphin plies the salty waters alongside other aquatic mammals like sperm whales and manatees. Environmentalists fear exploratory drilling could further endanger these rare and threatened species.

Indigenous communities at the mouth of the river have also resisted Petrobras’s plans for oil exploration, citing the potential for damage to their ancestral fishing grounds.

In 2022, the Council of Chiefs of the Indigenous Peoples of Oiapoque (CCPIO) formally requested that the federal prosecutor’s office mediate a consultation process with Petrobras, which has not taken place to this date.

The federal prosecutor’s office, in announcing Thursday’s lawsuit, cited the risk to Indigenous peoples as part of its reasoning for seeking to delay the auction.

“The area is home to a vast number of traditional peoples and communities whose survival and way of life are directly tied to coastal ecosystems,” the office said.

However, in its statement to Al Jazeera, Petrobras maintains it had a “broad communication process” with local stakeholders. It added that its studies “did not identify any direct impact on traditional communities” resulting from the drilling.

But some experts nevertheless question the safety of oil exploration in the region, including Suely Araujo, who used to chair IBAMA from 2016 to 2018.

Now the public policy coordinator for the advocacy coalition Observatório do Clima, Araujo pointed to practical hurdles like the powerful waters that gush from the Amazon River into the ocean.

“The area is quite complex, with extremely strong currents. Petrobras has no previous exploration experience in a region with currents as strong as these,” Araujo said. “So it’s an area that increases the risk of accidents even during drilling.”

Still, she fears there is little political will within the Lula government to stop the oil exploration — and that awarding drilling licences could be a slippery slope.

“All the evidence is there for this licence to be approved soon,” she said, referring to the project planned near the river mouth.

“The problem is that if this licence gets approved — let’s say, the 47 new blocks in the Foz do Amazonas that are now up for auction — it will become very difficult for IBAMA to deny future licences, because it’s the same region.”

Oliveira, whose organisation is leading the legal fight against the exploration licences, echoed that sentiment. She said it is necessary to stop the drilling before it starts.

“If we want to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees [Celsius], which is where we already are,” she said, “we cannot drill a single new oil well”.

An unprecedented heat wave is baking Seattle, and Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital is overwhelmed.

Doctors scramble to treat people with heat stroke and pregnant women going into early labor due to triple-digit temperatures. The emergency room runs out of ice. Elective surgeries are canceled. Grey Sloan is so inundated — partly due to power outages at another hospital — that it’s forced to turn away patients.

In one scene — because this is all happening on the latest season of “Grey’s Anatomy” — several doctors operate on a young man who tried to rob a convenience store, only to wind up shot with his own gun during a scuffle.

“We should invite the lawmakers voting against background checks to assist,” says Teddy Altman (Kim Raver), the hospital’s chief of surgery.

“Well, violent crime rises along with the temperature,” responds intern Jules Millin (Adelaide Kane).

Fact check: Accurate. There’s real research linking gun violence to above-average temperatures.

There was also a real heat dome that inspired the writers of “Grey’s Anatomy.” Portland hit a record 116 degrees in 2021; between the U.S. and Canada, 1,400 people died. Global warming made it worse, researchers found.

If President Trump and other politicians keep doing the oil and gas industry’s bidding, the climate crisis will only get deadlier. But Hollywood can play a leading role in turning the tide.

Not by preaching. By entertaining.

I’d never seen “Grey’s Anatomy” before watching the heat wave episodes; soap operas aren’t really my thing. But the long-running ABC drama got me invested right away. The characters are sympathetic, the dialogue sharp and funny, the medical plotlines rife with tension. And I was impressed by how the writers kept the heat front of mind: a coffee cart running out of cold drinks, patients fanning themselves, several references to cooling centers.

In one of the final scenes of the two-episode arc, which concluded in March, surgical resident Ben Warren (Jason George) says the hospital needs an emergency plan for heat domes. It isn’t prepared for wildfires, either.

“They’re only increasing with climate change,” he says.

Sabina Ehmann and her daughter Vivian, visiting Seattle from North Carolina, use umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun during the June 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest.

(John Froschauer / Associated Press)

Some of you may be thinking: Who cares about a bunch of fake doctors running around a fake hospital? We have real climate problems in the real world. Trump and congressional Republicans are eviscerating clean air rules and revoking clean energy grants. Let’s focus on politics and policy, not pop culture.

Thing is, people don’t form opinions in a vacuum. The media we consume inform our politics — fiction included.

Studies have shown, for instance, that the sitcom “Will & Grace” reduced prejudice against gay men, and that on-screen violence can increase the risk of violent behavior. Researchers found that a scene from HBO’s “Sex and the City” reboot “And Just Like That …” made viewers more likely to say eating less meat is good for the environment.

Millions of people watch “Grey’s Anatomy.” The impact is clear to producer Zoanne Clack, an emergency medicine physician who spoke at the Hollywood Climate Summit this month.

“In the ER, I could tell two people about diabetes. They might tell two people, and they might tell two people,” she said. “But I do a story on [diabetes] on ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ and 20 million people have seen it.”

“And if 10% of those people get something out of it, that’s a lot of people,” she added.

Already, researchers are studying viewer responses to the heat dome storyline. The conservation nonprofit Rare surveyed 3,600 people, showing some participants the first heat episode and others an unrelated episode.

Although the study isn’t done yet, Anirudh Tiwathia, Rare’s director of behavioral science for entertainment, told me it’s clear that viewers came away from the heat episode more concerned and better-informed about extreme heat. The nonprofit is still testing whether those effects persisted several weeks after watching.

Rare also showed some viewers the heat dome episode plus a social media video reiterating the health dangers of extreme heat. Those viewers may come away even more informed. Rare released a study last year finding that people who watched “Don’t Look Up” — a disaster movie with intentional climate parallels — were far more likely to support climate action if they also watched a climate-focused video starring lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

“People see stuff on screen, and then they see stuff on the second screen,” Tiwathia said, referring to phones and laptops. “The second screen is an opportunity to really pick up the baton from the main narrative.”

The videos used by Rare for its “Grey’s Anatomy” study were commissioned by Action for the Climate Emergency, which paid social media influencers to create 21 videos tied to the show. Rare chose four videos, including one by a gardener with 234,000 Instagram followers and one by an artist with 2 million followers.

A survey by Action for the Climate Emergency found that social media users who saw the videos were more likely than typical “Grey’s Anatomy” viewers to understand the links between heat, health and global warming.

“It’s an opportunity for us to reach outside the echo chamber,” said Leah Qusba, the group’s chief executive.

Jules Millin (Adelaide Kane) talks with Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.) on the “Grey’s Anatomy” heat wave episode “Hit the Floor.”

(Christopher Willard / Disney)

Fortunately, there’s a small-but-growing ecosystem within Hollywood that’s increasingly able to support this kind of partnership. A few major studios have started teams to advise creatives on climate storytelling. Environmental groups, consulting firms and universities have stepped up to provide expertise and research.

The “Grey’s Anatomy” heat dome storyline might not have happened except for Adam Umhoefer, an executive at the CAA Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Creative Artists Agency, one of Hollywood’s top talent agencies. He co-founded Green Screen, an effort to connect CAA clients and others in the industry to sustainability experts.

“The idea is that I’m kind of operating as an agent for climate,” Umhoefer told me.

When Umhoefer heard from a friend in the “Grey’s Anatomy” writers’ room that the writers were looking to tell a climate story — after ending Season 20 with a massive wildfire — he connected them with the Natural Resources Defense Council, whose Rewrite the Future initiative consults with studios to improve climate storytelling.

“We were very interested in continuing that [fire] story, and the effect on the community of Seattle,” showrunner Meg Marinis said at the Hollywood Climate Summit. “We just didn’t want to pretend that never existed.”

To foreshadow the heat dome, they started the season with climate protesters blocking a bridge, causing several characters to get stuck in traffic. One of them, Link (Chris Carmack), scolds his partner Jo (Camilla Luddington) for getting annoyed, since the protesters are fighting for a worthy cause. Tick populations are exploding, he reminds her, increasing the risk of Lyme disease. And the last 10 years have been the 10 hottest on record globally.

“When Camilla and Chris Carmack were in that car, it was like 95 degrees near Long Beach. … They were putting ice packs on their heads in between takes,” Marinis said. “It was all very relatable. We were all living through it.”

Lived experience aside, it’s hard to know how much appetite entertainment executives will have for more climate stories while Trump is in office. He’s flouted democratic norms by threatening and even pursuing lawsuits against media companies that irk him, including Paramount, Comcast and the Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC.

But the fossil fuel industry won’t stop winning the culture wars, and thus the political wars, until a much broader segment of the American public demands climate solutions, now. Hollywood can help make it happen.

The folks behind “Grey’s Anatomy,” at least, say they aren’t planning to back down. Stay tuned.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.

For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

A new report accuses fashion giants of not considering the welfare of workers affected by climate change in garment factories in Southeast Asia.

Fashion brands including luxury label Hermes, sportswear giant Nike, and fast fashion chain H&M are in the hot seat amid new allegations of climate greenwashing after making commitments to slash carbon emissions in Asia, which is home to more than 50 percent of global garment production.

A report released this morning by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), titled, The Missing Thread, analysed 65 global fashion brands. It found that while 44 of them had made public commitments to reduce carbon emissions, none had adopted what is known as a “Just Transition” policy, a concept first introduced during COP27 in Egypt in 2022.

A Just Transition ensures that workers are not left behind as industries shift towards a low-carbon economy.

Only 11 companies in the study acknowledged the climate-related impact on workers in their social and human rights policies. Just four provided any guidance on managing heat-related stress.

Only two companies among those deemed the most ambitious by the report mentioned the welfare of workers. These included Inditex, the Spanish retail giant that owns the fast fashion company Zara, and Kering, the parent company of Gucci.

“Decarbonisation done without workers as critical and creative partners is not a just transition, it’s a dangerous shortcut,” said Natalie Swan, labour rights programme manager at BHRRC, in a news release.

Currently, the global textile industry relies on 98 million tonnes of non-renewable resources per year, such as oil and fertiliser. At current trends, the fashion industry is on track to be responsible for more than 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

“The fashion industry’s climate targets mean little if the people who make its products are not taken into consideration,” Swan said. “It’s not enough to go green. It has to be clean and fair.”

“Brands must stop hiding behind greenwashing slogans and start seriously engaging workers and their trade unions, whose rights, livelihoods and safety are under threat from both climate change and the industry’s response to it. A just transition is not just a responsibility, it’s a critical opportunity to build a fairer, more resilient fashion industry that works for people and the planet.”

Al Jazeera reached out to Nike, Hermes, H&M, Inditex and Kering. None of them responded to a request for comment.

Extreme weather

The effects of climate change have already hit much of Southeast Asia hard. Garment workers in countries including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam have experienced extreme weather events such as surging temperatures and severe flooding.

In Bangladesh, workers reported fainting from heat-related illnesses. According to the report, factories allegedly failed to provide fans or drinking water. Similar challenges were noted in Cambodia, where temperatures regularly exceeded 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit) during a 2022 heatwave.

A third of workers said they had already lost work due to automation. In Bangladesh’s garment sector, 30 percent reported job losses stemming from technological changes. These shifts have disproportionately affected female workers, who are less likely to receive training on new technologies and are often excluded from on-the-job learning opportunities that could help them adapt to evolving industry demands.

Officials say death toll expected to rise as authorities launch search operation in the country’s Eastern Cape province.

At least 49 people have died in heavy flooding in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province after an extreme cold front brought torrential rain and blanketed snow in parts of the country, officials said.

Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane said on Wednesday that the death toll, provided by police, is expected to rise as authorities continue to search for the missing.

“As we speak here, other bodies are being discovered,” Mabuyane told reporters at a briefing.

In one tragic incident, authorities reported the deaths of six high school students who were washed away on Tuesday when their school bus was caught in floodwaters near a river. Four other students were among the missing, Mabuyane said.

Authorities found the school bus earlier Wednesday, but it was empty. Three of the students were rescued on Tuesday when they were found clinging to trees, the provincial government said.

Disaster response teams have been activated in Eastern Cape province and the neighbouring KwaZulu-Natal province after torrential rain hit parts of southern and eastern South Africa over the weekend. Power outages have affected hundreds of thousands of homes, authorities said.

Eastern Cape officials said at least 58 schools and 20 hospitals were damaged by the floods. Approximately 500 people were taken to temporary shelters after their homes were washed away or damaged, they added.

“I have never seen something like this,” Mabuyane said.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa offered his condolences to the affected families in a statement. His office said South Africa’s National Disaster Management Centre was now working with local authorities in the Eastern Cape.

Weather forecasters had warned for days prior that an especially strong weather front was heading for the eastern and southern parts of South Africa, bringing damaging rains in some parts and snow in others.

The biggest temperature increases were recorded in the Middle East, West Asia, northeast Russia, and north Canada.

This year, the world experienced its second-warmest month of May since records began, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has said in a monthly bulletin.

Global surface temperatures last month averaged 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, C3S said.

The latest data comes amid mixed momentum on climate action globally, with China and the EU reducing emissions as the Trump administration and technology companies increase their use of fossil fuels.

“Temperatures were most above average over western Antarctica, a large area of the Middle East and western Asia, northeastern Russia, and northern Canada,” the C3S bulletin added.

At 1.4C above pre-industrial levels, May was also the first month globally not to go over 1.5C (2.7F) in warming in 22 months.

“May 2025 breaks an unprecedentedly long sequence of months over 1.5C above pre-industrial,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S.

“Whilst this may offer a brief respite for the planet, we do expect the 1.5C threshold to be exceeded again in the near future due to the continued warming of the climate system,” Buontempo said.

The increased temperatures were particularly felt in Pakistan’s Jacobabad city in Sindh province, where residents grappled with extreme temperatures in the high 40s, which sometimes reached 50C (122 F).

The soaring temperatures followed another heatwave last June that killed more than 560 people in southern Pakistan.

“While a heatwave that is around 20C might not sound like an extreme event from the experience of most people around the world, it is a really big deal for this part of the world,” Friederike Otto, associate professor in climate science at Imperial College London, told reporters.

“It affects the whole world massively,” Otto added. “Without climate change, this would have been impossible.”

In a separate report released on Wednesday, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) research collaboration said Greenland’s ice sheet melted 17 times faster than the past average during a May heatwave that also hit Iceland.

Mixed momentum on climate action

The latest data comes amid mixed progress on climate change action.

United States President Donald Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill” during his presidency, even as his country faces increasingly severe weather events, like the fires that tore through California’s capital, Los Angeles, late last year. Emissions from technology companies are also surging, as expanding use of artificial intelligence (AI) and data centres drives up global electricity demand, according to a recent report from the United Nations International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

New analysis by the climate reporting site Carbon Brief found that China’s emissions may have peaked, as the country increased electricity supplies from new wind, solar, and nuclear capacity and reduced its reliance on coal and other fossil fuels.

“China’s emissions were down 1.6 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025 and by 1 percent in the latest 12 months,” Carbon Brief reported last month.

“If this pattern is sustained, then it would herald a peak and sustained decline in China’s power-sector emissions,” it added.

The EU also announced last week that its 27 member states are well on track to meet their goal of a 55 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

“Emissions are down 37 percent since 1990, while the economy has grown nearly 70 percent — proving climate action and growth go hand in hand,” said Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s commissioner for climate, net zero and clean growth.

In the Caribbean, leaders met recently to plan ways to restore the region’s mangrove forests, which help prevent climate change and protect from rising sea levels and intensifying storms.

Bangkok, Thailand – A brief text message informed Chonlada Siangkong that she had lost her job at a solar cell factory in Rayong, eastern Thailand.

The factory operated by Standard Energy Co, a subsidiary of Singaporean solar cell giant GSTAR, shut its doors last month in anticipation of United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs on solar panel exports from Southeast Asia.

From Monday, US Customs and Border Protection will begin imposing tariffs ranging from 375 percent to more than 3,500 percent on imports from Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaysia.

The punishing duties, introduced in response to alleged unfair trade practices by Chinese-owned factories in the region, have raised questions about the continuing viability of Southeast Asia’s solar export trade, the source of about 80 percent of solar products sold in the US.

Like thousands of other workers in Thailand and across the region, Chonlada, a 33-year-old mother of one, is suddenly facing a more precarious future amid the trade crackdown.

“We were all shocked. The next day, they told us not to come to work and would not pay for compensation,” Chonlada told Al Jazeera.

US officials say Chinese producers have used Southeast Asian countries to skirt tariffs on China and “dump” cheap solar panels in the US market, harming their businesses.

US trade officials have named Jinko Solar, Trina Solar, Taihua New Energy Hounen, Sunshine Electrical Energy, Runergy and Boviet – all of which have major operations in Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia or Vietnam – as the worst offenders.

Thai solar exports to the US were worth more than $3.7bn in 2023, just behind Vietnam at $3.9bn, according to the latest US trade data.

Standard Energy Co’s $300m facility in Rayong had been in operation for less than a year, producing its first solar cell to great fanfare in August.

“I’m baffled by what’s just happened,” Kanyawee, a production line manager at Standard Energy who asked to be referred to by his first name only, told Al Jazeera.

“New machines have just landed and we barely used them, they’re very costly too – a few million baht for each machine. They’ve also ordered tonnes of raw materials waiting to be produced.”

Ben McCarron, managing director of the risk consultancy Asia Research & Engagement, said Southeast Asian manufacturers are facing a serious hit from the US turn towards protectionism.

“There are suggestions that manufacturing might exit Southeast Asia entirely if tariffs are introduced either in a blanket way, or that specifically address Chinese-owned manufacturing capacity in the region,” McCarron told Al Jazeera.

“The implications are significant for these countries; Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia accounted for about 80 percent of the US’s solar imports in 2024,” McCarron said, adding that “some manufacturers have already begun shutting down and moving out of the region”.

Unfair advantage

US officials and businesses have accused China of giving its solar firms an unfair market advantage with subsidies.

China was the largest funder of clean energy in Southeast Asia between 2013 and 2023, pouring $2.7bn into projects in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, according to Zero Carbon Analytics.

The American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee, a coalition of seven industry players, was among the loudest voices to lobby for a sharp rise in levies on Chinese imports.

Without a reprieve from the notoriously unpredictable Trump, companies affected by the tariffs have little recourse apart from the ability to file an appeal once a year, or after five years, once a “sunset review” clause takes effect.

Some observers believe the sector may never recover.

“It’s not just the low-skilled labour that was affected by the trade war; many workers in the solar cell supply chain are technicians, skilled labourers,” Tara Buakamsri, an adviser to environmental organisation Greenpeace, told Al Jazeera.

“Even if you make a lot of savings, solar cell exporters would still need to cut down on these skilled workers.”

Others take a more bullish view, arguing that, once the dust has settled, Chinese solar firms will drive the supply of products needed to meet regional emissions targets.

While Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam welcomed Chinese solar companies in part due to the large sums of up-front investment on offer, they are all also seeking to meet more of their energy needs with cleaner sources.

Before Trump entered office with his tariff agenda, Thailand had announced plans to become carbon neutral by 2050 and produce net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2065.

“A slowdown [or halt] in solar exports as a result of US tariffs may supercharge efforts in Southeast Asian markets by Chinese solar companies, which see the region as a critical and well-aligned destination for green technologies,” McCarron said.

“Leftover supply from slowing exports could be absorbed by domestic markets in Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, particularly if governments use the situation as a cost-effective opportunity to rapidly accelerate policy initiatives that stimulate domestic solar.”

For Southeast Asia’s solar companies, survival is also likely to depend on governments cutting red tape and loosening the control of oil and gas monopolies over the energy mix.

At the same time, the US’s exclusion of Southeast Asian solar imports could hamper the shift towards greener energy in the world’s top economy.

“Thailand’s solar cell production is heavily export-driven and the US has historically been a major export destination,” Pavida Pananond, a professor of international business at Thammasat Business School in Bangkok, told Al Jazeera.

But solar tariffs will “also hurt American consumers and the green transition in the US as prices become higher”.

As wind turbines on the horizon churn out clean energy, John Smyth bends to stack damp peat – the cheap, smoky fuel he has harvested for half a century.

The painstaking work of “footing turf”, as the process of drying peat for burning is known, is valued by people across rural Ireland as a source of low-cost energy that gives their homes a distinctive smell.

But peat-harvesting has also destroyed precious wildlife habitats, and converted what should be natural stores for carbon dioxide into one of Ireland’s biggest sources of planet-warming gas emissions.

As the European Union seeks to make Dublin enforce the bloc’s environmental law, peat has become a focus for opposition to policies that Smyth and others criticise as designed by wealthy urbanites with little knowledge of rural reality.

“The people that are coming up with plans to stop people from buying turf or from burning turf … They don’t know what it’s like to live in rural Ireland,” Smyth said.

He describes himself as a dinosaur obstructing people who, he says, want to destroy rural Ireland.

“That’s what we are. Dinosaurs. Tormenting them.”

When the peat has dried, Smyth keeps his annual stock in a shed and tosses the sods, one at a time, into a metal stove used for cooking. The stove also heats radiators around his home.

Turf, Smyth says, is for people who cannot afford what he labels “extravagant fuels”, such as gas or electricity.

The average Irish household energy bill is almost double, according to Ireland’s utility regulator, the 800 euros ($906) Smyth pays for turf for a year.

Smyth, nevertheless, acknowledges that digging for peat could cease, regardless of politics, as the younger generation has little interest in keeping the tradition alive.

“They don’t want to go to the bog. I don’t blame them,” Smyth said.

Peat has an ancient history. Over thousands of years, decaying plants in wetland areas formed the bogs.

In drier, lowland parts of Ireland, dome-shaped raised bogs developed as peat accumulated in former glacial lakes. In upland and coastal areas, high rainfall and poor drainage created blanket bogs over large expanses.

In the absence of coal and extensive forests, peat became an important source of fuel.

By the second half of the 20th century, hand-cutting and drying had mostly given way to industrial-scale harvesting that reduced many bogs to barren wastelands.

Ireland has lost more than 70 percent of its blanket bog and over 80 percent of its raised bogs, according to estimates published by the Irish Peatland Conservation Council and National Parks and Wildlife Service, respectively.

Following pressure from environmentalists, in the 1990s, an EU directive on habitats listed blanket bogs and raised bogs as priority habitats.

As the EU regulation added to the pressure for change, in 2015, semi-state peat harvesting firm Bord na Mona said it planned to end peat extraction and shift to renewable energy.

In 2022, the sale of peat for burning was banned.

An exception was made, however, for “turbary rights”, allowing people to dig turf for their personal use.

Added to that, weak enforcement of complex regulations meant commercial-scale harvesting has continued across the country.

The agency also said 350,000 tonnes of peat were exported, mostly for horticulture, in 2023. Data for 2024 has not yet been published.

The European Commission, which lists more than 100 Irish bogs as Special Areas of Conservation, last year referred Ireland to the European Court of Justice for failing to protect them and taking insufficient action to restore the sites.

The country also faces fines of billions of euros if it misses its 2030 carbon reduction target, according to Ireland’s fiscal watchdog and climate groups.

Degraded peatlands in Ireland emit 21.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, according to a 2022 United Nations report. Ireland’s transport sector, by comparison, emitted 21.4 million tonnes in 2023, government statistics show.

The Irish government says turf-cutting has ended on almost 80 percent of the raised bog special areas of conservation since 2011.

It has tasked Bord na Mona with “rewetting” the bogs, allowing natural ecosystems to recover, and eventually making the bogs once again carbon sinks.

So far, Bord na Mona says it has restored approximately 20,000 hectares (49,421 acres) of its 80,000-hectare target.

Staying cool just got a little more expensive this summer. The price of coconut oil, a key ingredient in ice cream, has soared in 2025. Looking ahead, further price gains are likely as demand continues to outpace supply.

At the end of May, the wholesale price for Philippine coconut oil delivered in Rotterdam, an industry benchmark, reached $2,800 a tonne, roughly twice as much as the year before.

Adverse weather in Indonesia and the Philippines, which together account for three-quarters of global coconut oil supplies, has negatively affected production. Ice cream prices, in turn, have risen.

According to an analysis by RIFT, a British business consultancy, United Kingdom supermarket ice lollies and cones shot up by 7.6 percent in May.

Due to its high melting point, coconut oil keeps industrially made ice cream solid for longer at room temperature. Crucially for food companies, it does so without affecting ice cream’s flavour and texture.

The global ice cream industry, worth $81bn in 2024, is now paying close attention to the market dynamics affecting coconut prices.

What role has the weather played?

Coconuts are found in the tropics, where they benefit from lots of rain and sunshine. But the El Nino weather pattern, which produces warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures across the Pacific, led to drier weather across Southeast Asia, particularly from June last year to October.

During that period, coconut farms suffered from extreme heat and droughts. Because coconuts take a year to grow, last year’s weather pattern has meant that palm trees have yielded less fruit than normal in 2025, reducing supply.

The United States Department of Agriculture expects that unfavourable weather conditions will see global coconut oil production fall to 3.6 million tonnes in 2024-2025, down 5 to 10 percent from the previous season.

Output is also likely to stay low in the 2025-2026 season, according to analysts.

Are biofuels to blame too?

In October, the Philippine government mandated blending larger amounts of coco methyl ester, a fatty derivative of coconut oil, with diesel to produce biodiesel.

Until recently, the impact of the coconut-for-diesel policy was limited. A blending target of 1 percent was introduced in 2007 and then 2 percent from 2009. But that changed last year, when Manila hiked the target to 3 percent.

The government announced a further jump to 4 percent by late 2025 and 5 percent by the end of 2026. A 1-percentage-point increase requires an extra 900 million coconuts for the biofuels market, raising demand and prices.

Last year, Philippine Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla said: “Implementing the higher biofuels blend is a win-win solution as we promote economic growth, uphold environmental stewardship and strive for cleaner energy utilisation.”

If the Philippine government carries out its plan, it will use 4.5 billion coconuts to generate the 500 million litres of coco methyl ester necessary to meet the biodiesel target by 2026. That would amount to nearly one-third of the country’s annual crop of 15 billion coconuts.

For context, the US diverts about 40 percent of its annual corn crop into its bioethanol, a fuel made primarily from fermented cornstarch designed to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Are chocolates eating into coconut too?

In an effort to maintain profit margins and contain costs, increasing numbers of chocolate makers have started reformulating products with cocoa substitutes. One of those is coconut oil.

In December, the US ICE cocoa futures contract surged to a record $12,931 per tonne, up a staggering 177 percent from the same period the year before. Since then, prices have come down but continue to remain elevated.

The high price of cocoa – currently trending about $10,000 per tonne – continues to be supported by crop shortages and resilient consumer demand for cocoa-based products, especially chocolate.

Coconut oil is an established alternative for cocoa butter, particularly in vegan or dairy-free chocolate recipes. And even at its elevated price, coconut oil is still cheaper than cocoa.

“I expect many confectionery and chocolate makers to substitute cocoa for coconut oil in the near term,” Felipe Pohlmann Gonzaga, a Switzerland-based commodity trader, told Al Jazeera.

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have become another source of demand. In recent years, coconuts have been extolled by celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Kourtney Kardashian for their nutritional benefits.

Wellness Mama, a popular healthcare website, lists 101 uses for coconuts, including as a treatment for insomnia, heartburn, cuts, acne, haemorrhoids, mosquito bites and sunburn.

In the makeup and beauty market, coconut oil is seen as a natural and environmentally friendly alternative to palm oil. Here too, industrial consumption is rising.

While the health benefits of coconut oil continue to be questioned, this niche source of demand is rising. And although they wouldn’t have a big impact on their own, health-conscious buyers are entering an already tight market, lifting prices.

Can coconut production rise to meet the demand?

Despite coconut oil’s growing popularity, expanding production is a difficult task.

“Unlike with other crops, coconut farmers can’t simply add acres in response to higher prices,” Pohlmann Gonzaga says.

“It takes at least a year for the trees to reach maturity and production. Deforestation concerns and environmental laws also make expansion difficult,” he added.

Like palm fruit, coconuts grow on trees in tropical areas where forests would have to be removed to plant more trees.

“The European Union deforestation regulation, for instance, inhibits the destruction of biodiverse forests in order to import monoculture crops,” Pohlmann Gonzaga said.

He also pointed out that “we’re moving from El Nino to La Nina, which tends to bring more flooding in Southeast Asia. So planting, harvests and logistics will be impacted.”

With demand for coconuts likely to remain firm and supplies constrained, he added that he does not expect the prices to come down anytime soon.

“We can expect ice cream prices to be high this summer and stay high next year,” he said.

“For ice cream lovers out there, it may be time to start looking at fruit-based sorbet substitutes.”

The mandate that the DoT challenged was a key part of former US President Joe Biden’s plan to address climate change.

The United States Department of Transportation (DoT) has declared that former President Joe Biden’s administration exceeded its authority by assuming a high uptake of electric vehicles in calculating fuel economy rules.

With that declaration on Friday, the DoT paved the way for looser fuel standards and published the “Resetting the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Program” (CAFE) rule. A future separate rule from the administration of President Donald Trump will revise the fuel economy requirements.

“We are making vehicles more affordable and easier to manufacture in the United States. The previous administration illegally used CAFE standards as an electric vehicle mandate,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement.

The department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in writing its rule last year under Biden, had “assumed significant numbers of EVs would continue to be produced regardless of the standards set by the agency, in turn increasing the level of standards that could be considered maximum feasible,” it said Friday.

A shift away from Biden policies 

In January, Duffy signed an order directing NHTSA to rescind fuel economy standards issued under Biden for the 2022-2031 model years that had aimed to drastically reduce fuel use for cars and trucks.

In a release last year, the DoT, then led by Pete Buttigieg, put in place a required fuel economy to increase by 2 percent for cars made between 2027 and 2031.

At the time, the DoT said it would help save consumers upwards of $600 on gas every year. It was also part of the Biden administration’s plan to address climate change.

“These new fuel economy standards will save our nation billions of dollars, help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and make our air cleaner for everyone. Americans will enjoy the benefits of this rule for decades to come,” then NHTSA Deputy Administrator Sophie Shulman said at the time.

In June 2024, the NHTSA said it would hike CAFE requirements to about 50.4 miles per gallon (4.67 litres per 100km) by 2031 from 39.1mpg currently for light-duty vehicles.

The agency last year said the rule for passenger cars and trucks would reduce gasoline consumption by 64 billion gallons and cut emissions by 659 million metric tons, cutting fuel costs with net benefits estimated at $35.2bn.

Late on Thursday, Senate Republicans proposed eliminating fines for failures to meet CAFE rules as part of a wide-ranging tax bill, the latest move aimed at making it easier for automakers to build gas-powered vehicles.

Last year, Chrysler-parent Stellantis paid $190.7m in civil penalties for failing to meet US fuel economy requirements for 2019 and 2020 after paying nearly $400m for penalties from 2016 through 2019. GM previously paid $128.2m in penalties for 2016 and 2017.

Stellantis said it supported the Senate Republican proposal “to provide relief while DoT develops its proposal to reset the CAFE standards … The standards are out of sync with the current market reality, and immediate relief is necessary to preserve affordability and freedom of choice.”

GM declined to comment.

As we drove north along Highway 395 — passing the salty remains of Owens Lake, the Museum of Western Film History, the geothermal plant outside Mammoth Lakes that supplies 24/7 clean energy to San Bernardino County — I felt certain we’d found the northernmost reaches of Southern California.

It was Memorial Day weekend, and my wife and I were headed to a U.S. Forest Service campground in the White Mountains, 225 miles as the crow flies from downtown L.A.’s Union Station. If you drew a line on a map due west from our campsite, you’d cut through the Sierra Nevada and eventually hit San José.

But to my mind, we were still in Southern California.

For one thing, Southern California Edison supplied electricity here. For another, Los Angeles had sucked this place dry.

In the early 1900s, agents secretly working for the city posed as farmers and ranchers, buying up land and water rights in the Owens Valley. Then Los Angeles built an aqueduct, diverting water from the Owens River to feed the city’s growth. Owens Lake largely dried up. The city later extended the aqueduct north to Mono Lake.

As a lifelong Angeleno, I felt compelled to see some of the results for myself.

I had spent time in the Owens Valley, but never the Mono Basin. So we took a dirt road branching off the gorgeous June Lake Loop to stand atop an earthen dam built by L.A. in the 1930s. It impounds Rush Creek, the largest tributary bringing Sierra snowmelt to Mono Lake. As I looked out at Grant Lake Reservoir — beautiful in its own way, if totally unnatural — I realized I had been drinking this water my whole life.

Grant Lake Reservoir stores water for the city of Los Angeles. I took this photo standing atop the earthen dam.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

My feelings were similarly muddled when we arrived at Mono Lake.

On the one hand, this was one of the coolest and weirdest places I’d ever seen. As we padded along a boardwalk toward the sandy southern shore, I was blown by the gleaming blue water, the snow-capped Sierra peaks and the tufa — my gosh, the tufa. Bizarre-looking rock towers made of calcium carbonate, like something from a dream.

At the same time, much of the boardwalk ideally would have been underwater.

Under a 1994 ruling by state officials, L.A. is supposed to try to limit its withdrawals from Mono Lake’s tributaries, with a goal of restoring the lake to an elevation of 6,392 feet — healthier for the millions of migratory and nesting birds that depend on it for sustenance, and better for keeping down dust that degrades local air quality.

Three decades later, the lake has never gotten close to its target level. L.A. continues to withdraw too much water, and the Mono Basin continues to suffer. Mayor Karen Bass said last year that the city would take less, but officials ultimately reneged, citing a dry winter.

As we walked past a sign on the way to the southern shore marking 6,392 feet, I felt a little pang of guilt.

Tufa formations line the sandy southern shore of Mono Lake.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

Responsibility is a funny thing. When we got back from our camping trip, I read about a woman suing oil and gas companies over the tragic death of her mom, who died of overheating at age 65 during a historic heat wave that roasted the Pacific Northwest in 2021. The first-of-its-kind lawsuit claims wrongful death, alleging — accurately — that the companies spent years working to hide the climate crisis from the public.

I’m neither a psychic nor a psychologist. But I’m guessing, based on more than a decade reporting on energy and climate change, that executives at the fossil fuel companies in question — including Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Phillips 66 and Shell — aren’t suddenly feeling guilty for their role in boiling the planet.

Same goes for the Trump administration — impossible to guilt. The World Meteorological Organization reported last week that Earth is highly likely to keep shattering temperature records in the next few years, driving deadlier heat waves, more destructive fires and fiercer droughts. That hasn’t stopped President Trump and congressional Republicans from pressing forward with a budget bill that would obliterate support for renewable energy.

So why was I, a climate journalist, feeling guilty over something I really had nothing to do with? Was it silly for me to bother taking responsibility when the people wrecking the planet were never going to do the same?

I think the answers have something to do with the importance of honesty.

Sunset from the White Mountains.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

As we sat at our campsite by a roaring fire — stoked by my wife, who’s way better than me with open flames — I cracked open a book of speeches by President Theodore Roosevelt, delivered in 1903 on his first trip to California. He was on my mind because he’d originally established Inyo National Forest, where our spectacular campground was, to protect the lands and watershed where Los Angeles would build its Owens Valley aqueduct.

“You can pardon most anything in a man who will tell the truth,” Roosevelt said. “If anyone lies, if he has the habit of untruthfulness, you cannot deal with him, because there is nothing to depend on.”

“The businessman or politician who does not tell the truth cheats; and for the cheat we should have no use in any walk of life,” he said.

Naturally, I thought of Trump, whose political success is built on outrageous lies, from climate and election denial to insisting that Haitian immigrants eat their neighbors’ cats. I also recalled a recent order from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum discouraging “negative” depictions of U.S. history on signs at national parks and other public lands — a directive with the Orwellian title, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Did that mean educational materials at Manzanar National Historic Site — which sits just off Highway 395 and is managed by the National Park Service — would soon be revamped, to avoid explaining how the U.S. government cruelly and needlessly imprisoned more than 10,000 Japanese Americans there during World War II?

If a similar order were issued covering the Forest Service, which is overseen by a different federal agency, would the Mono Lake visitor center take down its thoughtful signs explaining the history of the Los Angeles water grab? Would the Forest Service alter a sign at the nearby Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest detailing the possible impacts of global warming, considering that the U.S. is the largest historical emitter of heat-trapping pollution?

Trees at Schulman Grove in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

Only time will tell. But Teddy Roosevelt was right. So long as Trump and his allies keep lying — pretending that oil and gas aren’t cooking the planet, that we don’t need sound science, that Americans have only ever done good — they’ll feel no guilt, no responsibility. Because they’ll have nothing to take responsibility for.

Accepting the facts means owning up to the hard ones.

It’s not just politicians who have trouble. Highway 395’s Museum of Western Film History is mostly hagiography, a collection of props and artifacts that fails to unpack the settler colonialism behind the western films it glorifies.

But I did learn that the original “Star Wars” was one of many films to shoot footage in the Owens Valley. And the “Star Wars” universe, as it happens, is all about fighting an empire that seeks to control people’s homelands and histories — a message central to Season 2 of “Andor,” now streaming on Disney+.

“I believe we are in crisis,” says Galactic Senator Mon Mothma, a leader of the brewing Rebellion. “The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.”

Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) makes a pivotal Imperial Senate speech in “Andor,” Season 2, Episode 9.

(Lucasfilm Ltd.)

Here’s the truth: There’s not enough water in Mono or Owens lake. It’s hotter than it used to be. The sky is dark with wildfire smoke more often. The Sierra Nevada peaks frequently aren’t as snowy.

Again, the senator: “When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”

In America, monsters are screaming. Find harbor in honesty, and perhaps the mountains.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.

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The study found that without the phasing out of fossil fuels, temperatures will continue to soar.

About half of the world’s population experienced an additional month of extreme heat over the past year due to human-caused climate change, according to a new study.

The extreme heat caused deaths and illnesses, damaged agricultural crops and strained energy and healthcare systems, according to the report (pdf) from World Weather Attribution, Climate Central and the Red Cross published on Friday.

Researchers analysed weather data from May 1, 2024 to May 1, 2025 to spotlight the dangers of extreme heat, which was defined as hotter than 90 percent of temperatures recorded at a given location between 1991 and 2020.

It found that about four billion people, or 49 percent of the world’s population, experienced at least 30 days of extreme heat. According to the report, 67 extreme heat events were found during the period.

“Although floods and cyclones often dominate headlines, heat is arguably the deadliest extreme event,” the report said.

Deaths linked to extreme heat are often underreported or mislabelled, according to experts. Heatwaves are silent killers, said Friederike Otto, associate professor of climate science at Imperial College London and one of the report’s authors.

“People don’t fall dead on the street in a heatwave … people either die in hospitals or in poorly insulated homes and therefore are just not seen,” he said.

“With every barrel of oil burned, every tonne of carbon dioxide released, and every fraction of a degree of warming, heatwaves will affect more people,” he added.

The Caribbean region was among the most affected by additional extreme heat days, the study found, with the island of Aruba recording 187 extreme heat days, 142 days more than would be expected without climate change.

Low-income communities and vulnerable populations, such as older adults and people with medical conditions, suffer the most from extreme heat.

The high temperatures recorded in the extreme heat events that occurred in Central Asia in March, South Sudan in February and the Mediterranean last July would not have been possible without climate change, according to the report.

At least 21 people died in Morocco after temperatures hit 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) last July.

Roop Singh, head of urban and attribution at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, in a World Weather Attribution statement, said people are noticing the temperature is getting hotter without linking it to climate change.

“We need to quickly scale our responses to heat through better early warning systems, heat action plans, and long-term planning for heat in urban areas to meet the rising challenge,” Singh said.

The researchers said that without phasing out fossil fuels, heatwaves will continue to become more frequent and severe.