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.

"The oil companies, they allow them to just come out here and do whatever the hell they want.”

Some Texas oil wells gush hundreds of barrels of oil a day. But many are like the wells on Jackie Chesnutt’s ranch in West Texas that only trickle out a couple barrels a month.

Chesnutt, a retired engineer, claims the five wells operating on her ranch are out of compliance with state rules and should be shut down. The company, CORE Petro, says that it’s struggling to break even, let alone pay to plug the wells. But it says that all its wells are in compliance. 

There are thousands of oil and gas wells around Texas like these: low-producing wells leased by companies operating on a shoestring. About two-thirds of the active oil wells in Texas, or 99,000 wells, produce less than 10 barrels of oil a day, according to the state regulator. To remain active, oil wells in Texas must produce at least five barrels for three consecutive months or at least one barrel for 12 consecutive months.

A 100% renewable energy grid isn’t realistic in New England, given increased demand, weather and other factors, writes Frederick Hewett. We need an approach that includes nuclear power.

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About a quarter of Americans suffer from seasonal allergies. And researchers at the nonprofit Climate Central say that if you’re feeling snifflier than normal this spring, you aren’t alone—and climate change and pollution might be behind your personal postnasal drip. 

In 173 of the 198 cities Climate Central studied, the freeze-free growing season (that is, the time of year when plants are capable of, among other things, producing pollen) lengthened by an average of 21 days since 1970. In some places, like Nashville, the freeze-free growing season is now a full month longer than it used to be, and one 2022 study suggests that by the end of the century, it’ll be two months longer than it is now. And as climate change causes more-frequent extreme weather events, like hurricanes, that also means more mold and more respiratory distress. 

On top of all that, thanks to changes in temperature and rainfall, some plant species, like ragweed, are moving north, and exposing people to new allergens—which means that some of us who haven’t experienced allergies before might experience symptoms for the first time this year.  

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.

The powerhouse of American citrus is suffering a brutal decline. Everyone has a theory about why.

uiet fell over the room, which was neither full nor very loud to begin with, and the 2026 Florida Citrus Show began.

“It should be a great day,” began the event’s first speaker. “Rain should hold off today, even though we definitely need more rain.” No one laughed.

There was no need to say that things were bad. Everyone knew it. The mood wasn’t sour—citrus farmers could handle sour. It was something else. Postapocalyptic. Florida is in the midst of its worst drought in 25 years, but the dry spell actually ranked far down on the list of challenges these bedraggled growers were facing.

In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent.

Environmental groups are joining an effort to block rules from President Donald Trump’s administration exempting energy companies drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from legal protections for endangered species. 

Last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asked for an exemption to the Endangered Species Act, on the basis of national security, to drill for oil and gas in the Gulf. That means species such as Rice’s whale, Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, and other endangered species lose protection. 

The Endangered Species Committee, an administrative panel sometimes called the “God Squad” because of its sweeping power to overrule environmental protections, comprising top administrators in the Trump administration, approved the exemption.