We often laud China for its boom in renewable energy projects, but seem to ignore the fact that it’s still building coal-fired power plants at a faster pace than any other country.

Experts are questioning whether China's gains in green energy will be clouded by the black smoke billowing from its robust fleet of coal plants. Air pollution in China kills 2 million a year.

On the topic of China’s “green” energy boom, it’s also important to note that many of the critical mineral operations key to its renewable projects are harming workers and the environment across South America and Africa. This week, as Trump landed for talks in Beijing, the feeble US Congress released a paper on China’s “mineral mafia”. The report wasn’t driven so much by criticism of China’s practices but by imperial jealousy. 

Exclusive: Commission says alert would trigger coordinated international response that could help avoid millions dying.

The climate crisis should be declared a global public health emergency by the World Health Organization, or millions more people will die unnecessarily, leading international experts have said.

The independent pan-European commission on climate and health, which was convened by the WHO, concluded the climate crisis was such a worldwide threat to health that the WHO should declare it “a public health emergency of international concern” (Pheic).

The international spread of vector-borne disease, such as dengue and chikungunya, as well as the health impacts of extreme weather events, global heating, food insecurity and air pollution make a Pheic necessary, said the commission’s report, which will be presented to European ministers on Sunday before the WHO’s world health assembly starts on Monday.

Reporting Highlights

• Taken for Granted: The Trump administration has granted more than 180 polluting facilities nationwide a two-year pause on compliance with Clean Air Act rules.
• Deregulating by Email: The administration set up an email address through the Environmental Protection Agency where companies simply had to send an email to make their request.
• Silenced Science: The EPA’s air quality experts played no meaningful role in determining whether a facility should be handed an exemption to the rules, according to the agency.

In March 2025, President Donald Trump’s administration made a tantalizing offer to coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturing facilities and other factories: Their operations could be exempted from key provisions under the Clean Air Act, the bedrock environmental law estimated to have prevented thousands of premature deaths. All they had to do was ask.

No rigorous application was needed. An email, which they had until the end of the month to send, would suffice.

Within two weeks, executives across major industries began flooding an inbox set up to receive and funnel requests from the Environmental Protection Agency to the White House. They asked that their facilities be excused from expensive Clean Air Act requirements, relief that would save their companies money but pollute the air breathed by millions of Americans.

At least 3,000 pages of emails were sent to and from this inbox in the weeks that followed. ProPublica obtained them via public records requests, giving the most complete look to date at a key aspect of what Trump’s EPA calls the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”

In a weird stroke of good fortune, Trump’s misrule provides a perfect context to press the correct argument about climate change.

In the second Trump administration, Democrats have been backing away from climate change messaging. Joe Biden apparently got no credit for the Inflation Reduction Act, his marquee climate policy bill, and Trump has since unceremoniously disposed of it.

The Searchlight Institute, a centrist think tank, presented polling last September indicating that while most Americans think climate change is a problem, they don’t think it’s a major one. Therefore, the first step to solving climate change is “don’t say climate change.” Luckily, as Matt Huber points out at The New York Times, tremendous progress in renewable energy means one can accomplish a lot, emissions-wise, without mentioning climate change at all. The “heart of any affordability agenda—housing, energy, transportation—overlaps with the sectors we must decarbonize,” he writes. “When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.”

In what is the 11th Cybertruck recall, certain models of Elon Musk’s embattled pickup could experience a sudden, unexpected wheel separation, thanks to the wrong grease and loose nuts.

Last year, nearly all Cybertrucks had to be recalled because Tesla used the wrong glue on a steel trim panel that the carmaker said could become detached while driving. Now, yet another embarrassing recall exposes that the electric pickup could see wheels come off certain models due to the use of the wrong grease.

In what is the 11th Cybertruck recall so far, alongside concerns that the stainless steel trucks could be rusting, Tesla is recalling its Rear Wheel Drive (RWD) Cybertruck Long Range over faulty brake rotors. In a notice posted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Tesla states that “brake rotor stud holes may crack and allow the stud to separate from the wheel hub.”

Tesla's description of the defect is as follows: “On affected vehicles, higher severity road perturbations and cornering may strain the stud hole in the wheel rotor, causing cracks to form. If cracking propagates with continued use and strain, the wheel stud could eventually separate from the wheel hub.” In which case, some RWD Cybertruck owners merrily driving along could be disconcertingly overtaken by their own wheels.

Poor Cybertruckers have enough to contend with without worrying about the wheels on their “apocalypse-proof” pickups falling off, so thankfully, Tesla says it will completely replace the wheel hubs, rotors, and lug nuts free of charge for all 173 trucks affected by the recall.

Intervention for farming and flood risk change the unique systems as communities grapple with how to live alongside the vital waterways.

When British settlers started building Christchurch city 170 years ago, they largely ignored the nearby Waimakariri River, which twists from the South Island’s alps towards the eastern shore.

But rain and glacial shifts compelled the braided river – a globally rare form of river with many woven channels – to take on a new shape, occasionally flooding land and depositing tonnes of shingle in its wake.

By the 1920s, the Waimakariri was described as a “flood menace” in a report to authorities, one that showed a “deficiency of nature, which must be made good by the art of man”.

With that, the river was brought into submission, slowly hemmed in with stopbanks, exotic tree planting and gravel extraction. Now it requires endless maintenance to tame the river and prevent the risks of flooding to homes, infrastructure and the nearby airport.

A possible super El Niño could bring extreme heat, heavy rainfall, and rare weather patterns across the globe.

The tropical Pacific is starting to look restless again, and forecasters are paying close attention. El Niño, a recurring ocean pattern tied to floods, droughts, and heat, appears increasingly likely to develop later in 2026.

The latest U.S. outlook, issued April 9, 2026, puts the chance of El Niño forming during June to August 2026 at 62% and says it could persist through the end of 2026. It also highlights about a one in four chance the event reaches the “very strong” category, the zone where headlines start using the phrase “super El Niño.”

In this week’s newsletter: Forecasts suggest a stronger version of the climate phenomenon could supercharge extreme weather events, putting the world on track to again breach a 1.5C average temperature rise.

Scientists and officials are keeping a close eye on conditions brewing in the Pacific Ocean that could spike temperatures and smash global heat records in the year ahead.

It’s still too early to get a definitive picture, but there are signs that a so-called super El Niño could develop this year, supercharging extreme weather events around the world. Some forecasts are suggesting it could become one of the strongest ever recorded.

Alongside heating from the human-caused climate crisis, this could put the world on track to once again temporarily breach the 1.5C average temperature rise over preindustrial levels – the critical climate threshold that experts have warned comes with a host of catastrophic consequences. Some models show that temperature anomalies could even push past that point next year and go beyond a 2C increase for the first time in recorded history.

What would a super El Niño look like and what would it mean for the global climate? I’ll explain, after this week’s most important reads.

Trump administration pays energy firms $885M to cancel wind projects, favoring fossil fuels. Backlash grows as gas prices surge.

President Donald Trump’s administration this week shelled out even more US taxpayer money to get energy firms to cancel planned renewable energy projects.

As The New York Times reported, the US Department of the Interior on Monday announced plans to reimburse energy companies a combined $885 million in exchange for forfeiting their leases to build wind farms in federal waters off the coasts of New York, New Jersey, and California.

They can erase a rule from the Federal Register, but not the consequences written into soil, water, fire, and memory.

When the Trump administration finalized the rescission of the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, it did not merely erase a regulation from the federal register, it chose, in plain sight, to narrow the meaning of care. The rule it repealed, formally known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, had placed conservation, restoration, land health, and ecosystem resilience more firmly within the BLM’s multiple-use mission, which governs roughly 245 million acres of public land and 700 million acres of federal mineral estate, more land and subsurface mineral estate than any other federal agency manages in the United States.

14 May 2026 – CHATHAM, MA – When boats on Cape Cod lose their winter shrink wrap coats, a model program provides a way to recycles the material and keep huge mountains of plastic out of landfills.

While the wrapping keeps boats safe and secure during the cold snowy months it also leaves behind about 30 pounds of plastic waste – per boat. With Cape Cod’s population of boats that waste adds up to tons upon tons of plastic.

However, for the past several years a model program in Barnstable county flips what would be those mountains of bulky landfill waste into the recycle market instead.

When boats on Cape Cod lose their winter shrink wrap coats a model program provides a way to recycles the material and keep huge mountains of plastic out of landfills.

Diplomats in Vietnam warned Washington that halting USAID’s efforts to clean up the massive deposit of postwar pesticides would be a catastrophe for public health and relations with a key strategic partner in Asia.

Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind.

And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies.

The Defense Department has stopped once-routine reviews that even wind projects on private land need to pass, jeopardizing a power source that could help meet skyrocketing demand.

Even as Ocean Winds abandons two U.S. offshore wind leases, it’s staying the course on projects elsewhere, including a floating French array that flicked on this week.

While ​local lawmakers obsess over how to keep Democrats in majority-Black districts from governing, their state is literally shrinking.

In the coming century,* New Orleans will be surrounded by ocean. That’s the contention of a paper published this week in Nature Sustainability. It finds that the city has already passed a “point of no return.” The authors recommend taking immediate action to start relocating the more than one million residents there and across coastal Louisiana who are being placed “in harm’s way” by the rapid loss of coastal wetlands, a loss increasingly driven by rising sea levels. The study suggests that the “widespread conversion” of low-elevation coastal zones in the Mississippi Delta into “open water” is “probably unavoidable.” 

“Between the chronic stress of land loss and sea level rise, New Orleans’s days are numbered—at least as we know it today,” said Jesse Keenan, a co-author of the paper and an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University.

Construction of an advanced nuclear power plant partly funded by the U.S. government -billed as the first of its kind this century, is now underway in Wyoming. The Bill Gates-backed company says its technology is proven but there are still hurdles to nuclear.

“I believe the technology was deployed too quickly in too vast amounts, with hundreds of vehicles, when it wasn’t really ready,” one police official told federal regulators last month.

Emergency first-responder leaders told federal regulators in a private meeting last month that they were frustrated with the performance of autonomous vehicles on their streets—that city firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and paramedics are forced to spend time during emergencies resolving issues with frozen or stuck cars. One fire official called them “a safety issue for our crews as well as the victims.” WIRED obtained an audio recording of the meeting.

Officials from San Francisco and Austin, where Waymo has been ferrying passengers without drivers for more than a year, said the vehicles’ performance is getting worse. “We are actually seeing something interesting: backsliding of some things that had improved upon,” Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, told officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees self-driving vehicle safety in the US. “They are committing more traffic violations.”

Record low winter snows mean insufficient water in the Colorado River. Here's how a city that's first in line to be cut off is handling it.

On the outer edges of the Phoenix metro area, the small town of Cave Creek, Arizona sits nestled among the cactus-dotted hills. It's home to about 5,000 people and known mostly for its quiet residential neighborhoods, art galleries and an annual rodeo.

It's also on the front lines of the Colorado River crisis.

Climate change and a 26-year megadrought have crippled the river, which supplies nearly 40 million people across seven Western states and Mexico. Negotiations about how to share its shrinking supply are at an impasse, and the federal government has proposed steep cutbacks to protect the nation's largest reservoirs.