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University of Miami scientists have developed an AI model that predicts when coral reefs begin experiencing heat stress, aiming to restore them before deadly coral bleaching occurs.

We’ve known for a while now that Big Oil is freaking out about climate change lawsuits. For months, their lobbyists have been urging Congress to pass a liability waiver so they can’t be sued for climate damages. Recently, the American Petroleum Institute, or API, the industry’s largest and most powerful fossil fuel trade association, declared that ending “abusive state climate lawsuits” is one of its top priorities for 2026.But if Big Oil was nervous before, they should be feeling absolutely terrified now, following the filing of a new lawsuit last week by Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel. This one uses a different approach, alleging that the fossil fuel industry engaged in anticompetitive conduct, in violation of state and federal antitrust laws.Most of the climate accountability cases to date have been filed under state consumer protection laws; antitrust is not yet a central part of how people understand our climate crisis. But over the last four years, there has been a revolution in the antitrust field. We’ve seen antitrust laws, long semidormant, applied in areas ranging from pharmaceuticals to fast-food wages to housing costs to health insurance—issues that hadn’t been the focus of antitrust challenges before. Michigan’s complaint demonstrates that Big Oil’s climate conspiracy also fits this framework remarkably well.A key purpose of federal and state antitrust laws is to stop businesses from combining “in restraint of trade” to unfairly shut out competitors and deprive society of the benefits of competition. Antitrust laws were designed to protect open, thriving markets. They prevent existing companies from colluding against new entrants in the market, a practice that serves to slow down innovation and freeze technologies in place.Michigan’s lawsuit argues that Big Oil engaged in exactly this kind of shut-out-the-upstarts collusion against renewable energies—a decades-long conspiracy to, according to the initial filing, “forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy and maintain their dominance in the energy market.”First, the lawsuit says, the fossil fuel industry engineered an across-the-board abandonment of renewable energy that only makes sense in the context of anticompetitive collusion. Already in 1980, Exxon scientists had “internally modeled” that avoiding catastrophic climate change would require a transition away from fossil fuels. Under a “competitive scenario,” they predicted, clean energy would achieve a 50 percent share of the global energy market within 50 years. “A self-interested and law-abiding rational firm,” Michigan’s complaint argues, “would have used this insight to innovate and compete in the energy market.” Instead, Michigan alleges, Exxon shared this proprietary information with its ostensible competitors, both directly and through API, choosing to abandon a massive business opportunity in exchange for what Michigan argues amounted to a strategy of collusively restraining innovation to delay the inevitable energy transition. It’s like if in the 1990s, Apple had internally modeled that MP3 players were the next big thing, but instead of developing the iPod, Steve Jobs had taken the information to Sony and other competitors and worked together to collectively keep the market locked into CD players.Michigan’s complaint then argues that Big Oil misused intellectual property rights to suppress the development and spread of clean energy technologies. Exxon, which invented the lithium battery and obtained other electric battery patents, and even developed the first hybrid electric vehicle, sat on these technologies rather than pursuing them. Chevron blocked the use of nickel-metal hydride, or NiMH, rechargeable batteries, another critical E.V. technology, with capture-and-kill tactics to acquire NiMH patents in order to restrict their use in cars. Stanford Ovshinsky, the inventor of NiMH batteries, explained that this technology was never commercialized because he “made the mistake of having a joint venture with an oil company” and “it’s not a good idea to go into business with somebody whose strategies would put you out of business, rather than building the business.”The industry pursued similar strategies, Michigan argues, to restrain the growth of solar energy. Oil companies could have led the solar revolution—indeed, by the early 1980s, they controlled approximately 70 percent of U.S. solar sales, which accounted for 85 percent of global supply. Instead, companies like BP focused on acquiring solar technology patents and then engaging in extensive patent infringement lawsuits to slow the progress and commercialization of the technology, before ultimately closing plants, selling off assets, and exiting the solar business altogether.In addition to these capture-and-kill tactics, the lawsuit states, the fossil fuel industry “orchestrated decades-long campaigns of deception to suppress demand for renewable energy alternatives.” I’ve written previously about this climate-denial conspiracy. But it’s worth stressing that these companies were quite explicit that the goal of their deception was to restrain clean energy competition. For example, a 1988 memo by a senior public affairs manager at Exxon explained that “the petroleum industry position” was to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” regarding climate change in order to “resist” public understanding of the danger, as this “could lead to noneconomic development of nonfossil fuel resources.” In other words, their plan—written down in black and white—was to lie about climate change in order to block the clean energy transition they knew was necessary to avoid global catastrophe.This strategy was remarkably effective. While the most recent analysis of peer-reviewed scientific literature found that there is greater than 99 percent agreement on the existence and causes of man-made climate change, only one in five Americans understands such a consensus exists. And Big Oil companies continue to misleadingly portray their fossil fuel products as being environmentally friendly, as in their campaigns to falsely advertise natural gas, a fossil fuel product whose destructive climate impact rivals and in some circumstances exceeds that of coal, as a clean energy source. Michigan’s lawsuit also describes Big Oil’s efforts to “infiltrate” critical information-producing institutions—universities, scientific journals, and international climate committees—to reinforce the anticompetitive effects of their misleading claims. For example, between 2001 and 2012, Exxon, API, and other fossil fuel companies paid over $1.2 million to Willie Soon—a climate denialist then based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics—to fund research that undermined the scientific consensus on climate change. “As a contractual condition of this funding,” the lawsuit states, Soon’s Big Oil patrons “retained the right to review Soon’s work” and “demanded that its sponsorship remain secret.” Soon then “failed to disclose his conflict of interest in at least eleven papers”—items one funding contract referred to as “deliverables.” (Soon has repeatedly denied that fossil fuel–industry funding influenced his research and writing. Make of those denials what you will.) Exxon’s chief climate scientist also founded MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and, Michigan argues, directed researchers in the program to emphasize climate uncertainty. Similar programs were set up at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the University of California Berkeley, Stanford, and many other universities, including some where these companies maintain contractual control and approval rights over research projects.These industry-funded programs generated “research” favorable to the fossil fuel industry, allowing Big Oil to disseminate “junk science under the guise of independent commentary.” It’s the same strategy used by Big Tobacco—and, in fact, Big Oil employed many of the same operatives. The industry also extended these tactics to international bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “submitting false evidence ... and fabricated economic models, to taint and mislead U.N. technical bodies’ fact-finding processes.” Michigan argues that these various anticompetitive strategies (and others—it’s a long complaint) allowed Big Oil to freeze the clean energy transition for decades, and that but for this conspiracy, solar, wind, and E.V. technologies would have reached scale years earlier.Big Oil, unsurprisingly, disputes all of this. “This is yet another legally incoherent effort to regulate by lawsuit,” Exxon spokeswoman Elise Otten told The New York Times, saying that “it won’t stand up to the law.” But if the evidence substantiates the lawsuit’s factual claims, then there’s a persuasive legal argument here: Incumbent supermarkets in a small town aren’t allowed to coordinate with each other to stop a start-up new supermarket from gaining traction, or from developing a new method of delivering groceries. There is no Big Oil exception to this principle. Michigan’s lawsuit makes a compelling case that if Big Oil had not colluded to suppress competition, renewables would have begun scaling far earlier than they ultimately did, and we’d likely be on track to avoid the kinds of devastating climate disasters we face today: hurricanes, floods, heat waves, firestorms, droughts, famines, die-offs, mass extinctions, and worse. If proven true, this conspiracy arguably constitutes the most devastating antitrust offense in history—and Michigan’s lawsuit should serve as a model for plaintiffs across the country seeking to hold these corporations responsible for the disastrous consequences of their actions.

Construction was halted in 2021 following a spate of Islamist attacks along Mozambique’s coast, home to some of the world’s largest gas reserves.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. After a tumultuous year under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has adopted a new, almost unrecognizable guise—one that tears up environmental rules and cheerleads for coal, gas-guzzling cars, and artificial intelligence. When Donald Trump took power, it was widely anticipated […]

Temperatures in Ukraine are expected to hit -24°C (-11°F) this weekend; Russian attacks have left millions without heating.

Polar bears adapt by hunting land animals such as reindeer.

Winter storms create many hazards, from slick ice to freezing temperatures. People often underestimate how quickly conditions can become life-threatening

Winter storms create many hazards, from slick ice to freezing temperatures. People often underestimate how quickly conditions can become life-threatening

Hundreds of thousands of households, mostly in the Southeast United States, were without power when a dangerous cold snap hit this week, just days after the previous weekend’s winter storm buffeted large swathes of the country. Officials in several of the affected states have warned that these outages could linger for some time—in Mississippi, one emergency management coordinator told CNN that they might last “weeks, not days.” Power outages during severe weather events are increasingly common. And they can easily be fatal, particularly when paired with extreme temperatures. What would it take to at least reduce the frequency of these outages, even as the severe weather driving them increases?“There are several points of failure that lead to these kinds of widespread power outages,” Gudrun Thompson, senior attorney and energy program leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me by phone. She pointed not just to the most recent storm but also to Winter Storm Elliott, which hit the Southeast hard in 2022, and Winter Storm Uri, which devastated Texas in 2021.Getting electricity into homes happens in a few stages: It begins with power generation, then transmission (where it goes to substations), and finally distribution to the homes themselves. Here, the amount of power demand also plays a role. “Each of these need to be tackled, and some of the solutions won’t address all three of these,” said Adam Kurland, a federal energy attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund.But both Thompson and Kurland pointed to a few things that could make a difference. “On the supply side, the biggest thing is just having a portfolio of diverse resources,” Kurland said. Renewables aren’t just good from a climate and environment perspective, he said, “they are also usually the most reliable during extreme weather events, and that’s been proven out by a number of studies that have found that both gas and coal have resulted in bottlenecks during extreme weather events.”That’s particularly true in some of the regions suffering from outages this week. “You’ve got this legacy power system where the electric grid is still in this very twentieth-century model of big central station power plants,” said Thompson. “You’ve still got coal plants running in the South, you’ve got some nuclear plants, you’ve got a lot of new and old gas plants.” And “in some of these winter storms, we’ve literally seen these piles of coal freeze, so they couldn’t run the coal-fired plants.” Gas supply networks are similarly vulnerable, and were a major factor in the Texas outages in 2021. Initial analysis from the energy and climate policy firm Energy Innovation suggests gas generation within PJM Interconnection—the country’s largest grid operator, serving over 65 million people across the mid-Atlantic to the upper South and Midwest—fell by 10 gigawatts during this most recent storm.This contradicts everything that conservative politicians, in particular, tend to say in the wake of these events—certainly after the Texas outages in 2021. “I often get asked by reporters, ‘What do you say to what the electric utility is saying about how this winter storm event just proves they need more gas?’” Thompson said. “It’s a false narrative. Clean energy resources are more reliable, more affordable, less risky for consumers, when you kind of put them all together as a portfolio. You can’t rely on any one source, so you’ll hear fossil industry apologists saying, ‘Well, the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow.’ That’s true,” she said, but no one’s advocating relying on a single source. And that points to another thing that could be done to eliminate these outages: a more interconnected grid. This was one of the main factors in 2021 in Texas, Kurland noted. “Texas’s power grid, ERCOT, is primarily islanded from the rest of the United States, so there weren’t a lot of connections there to be able to bring power into Texas during that storm.” If the goal is to build resilience to severe weather events, we need “an electrical grid that’s bigger than the weather,” Kurland said. With better transmission lines connecting different regions, it won’t matter if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing or severe cold is kneecapping fossil fuel generation in a particular location, because “you’re now able to dispatch power from one side of the United States to the other.” Microgrids tied into the main grid, as well as better power storage, could also play a role. And then there’s the option of burying power lines, which would address the problem not only of the lines sagging under ice in the winter but also of stray sparks causing wildfires in other seasons. This isn’t feasible everywhere, Kurland emphasized, pointing to water tables and local geology. But even for such inhospitable locales, there are different, more advanced types of wires that are less vulnerable to sagging and the like. “There are some incentives that the federal government and the states can apply to be able to unlock those types of advanced technologies on the transmission system.”When it comes to federal incentives, though, both Kurland and Thompson noted that a lot of the policies that could make households and the electrical grid less vulnerable in severe weather have been recently reversed, or the associated funds delayed. That’s true not just for, say, offshore wind projects but also for the weatherization programs that could both help reduce strain on the grid during cold snaps and help people survive brief outages when they occur. “As of last month, there were still a number of states trying to get that funding for cold snaps and extreme weather events like this,” said Kurland. He pointed to funds already designated to states via the Weatherization Assistance Program, slated to be released in June 2025, which still hadn’t arrived as of late December. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Energy has proposed scrapping the program altogether.The entire grid feels the effect when homes aren’t weatherized, Kurland said. Weatherization is “one way that you can reduce that demand so there isn’t a big draw on the system.” If homes are drawing a large amount of energy, it can actually prolong outages. “When you have all the customers with the thermostats turned all the way up waiting for the power to come on, that can just trip that system again.”Thompson also pointed to the Trump Environmental Protection Agency “unlawfully” canceling grants that had already been awarded for community solar programs and similar projects, in the Southern states where she works. “The Trump administration, even though they say they have this energy affordability agenda, is actually working to undermine successful policies and programs that would actually help households to afford their electricity bills,” Thompson said.Stat of the Week61%Survey results released this week by Yale Climate Communication find 61 percent of Americans underestimate how worried their fellow Americans are about global warming.What I’m ReadingTime for some courage in the climate fight, tooI’ve been reading a lot of good essays from climate writers watching and troubled by the events in Minnesota in the last few weeks. Emily Atkin’s essay, over on Heated, is definitely worth your time, as is Bill McKibben’s reflection on just how wrong politicians have been, time and time again, when guessing what ordinary people care about.… it’s not just the Trump administration that those brave people faced down, it’s the pundit class too, who insisted over and over that progressives should avoid talking about immigration because it wasn’t politically popular. The other subject we’ve been told to sideline is “climate change,” for fear of offending voters more interested in “affordability.” (Former energy secretary Jennifer Granholm told an industry audience Monday that “on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, climate does not rise as much as how much I’m paying for my electricity bill,” which is one of those things that sounds clever until you meet someone who lost their home to a wildfire.)I actually have no problem with the advice to focus on electric bills—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think affordability, especially of electricity, is an issue that helps both elect Democrats and reduce carbon emissions, since anyone interested in the cost of power is going to be building sun and wind. But I also don’t think that talking about global warming is a mistake—most Americans, polls show, understand the nature of the crisis, and want action to stem it. It isn’t the single most salient issue because all of us live in this particular moment (and in this particular moment the fact that federal agents are executing citizens who dare to take cellphone pictures of them is definitely the most salient issue) but it is nonetheless a net plus for politicians, especially in blue states.Read Bill McKibben’s full newsletter at The Crucial Years.This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.