u/relianceschool

Water regulators and farmers in Colorado’s San Luis Valley are in a lose-lose situation.

Either they adopt a plan to aggressively manage the use of groundwater from their rapidly declining aquifer, likely forcing a contraction of the local agricultural economy, or continue overpumping and further lower the water table, which will likely force mass shutoffs of well water in the future.

“It’s really draconian,” Colorado state Sen. Cleave Simpson, a fourth-generation valley farmer and general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, said in an interview in March. “I don’t know how my community is going to survive.”

But Simpson sees no other option.

We talk a lot about success in conservation: a restored lake, a recovering species, a thriving forest, improved access to nature. The word success seems straightforward, but success to whom?

Consider a river where salmon are returning after decades of decline. One person might point to the number of fish reaching spawning grounds. Another might highlight the renewal of relationships among salmon, people, and place. Someone else might think about whether there are enough fish to harvest again. And another might simply notice that eagles have returned or kids are fishing from the bank. These aren’t necessarily competing versions of success. Indeed, they can all be true. And research shows that this matters.

This is one of the reasons we created the Community Notes project at The Nature Record. More than 160 experts have been assembling evidence about nature across the United States: what is changing, why it is changing, why it matters, and what can be done. But there are things a national assessment cannot see very well: a stream behind your house; a prairie your community spent twenty years restoring; a shellfish bed that reopened; birds that returned to your neighborhood; the community that manages a forest for fire resilience; or a park that became a place where people actually want to spend time.

There may never be one version of nature that everyone agrees is ideal. But we can work to become much better at seeing the world through one another’s eyes—and at recognizing the many forms that progress can take.

Tell us what’s working where you live at naturerecord.org/community.

The extreme heat scientists have warned about for decades came to Europe again this summer, killing at least 30,000 people like a silent, invisible plague. It came for poor people, the very young and very old, and those suffering from debilitating conditions.

Heat is hard to see, but you feel it in the pavement, in the walls of poorly insulated apartments, in sweat that never quite dries and a bedroom that just won’t cool down. And people do not experience it equally. 

Bologna photographer Michele Lapini made those differences visible, using his iPhone and a thermal sensor to document temperatures in homes, workplaces and public spaces as the heat gripped the city. The images show that construction workers in direct sun, delivery riders crossing the city and residents of old apartment buildings and poorly cooled senior centers inhabit radically different thermal worlds than people with access to air conditioning, shade and well-insulated homes.

Ranchers, conservative legal scholars, and former Republican EPA chiefs are siding against oil companies. Here's why.

The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in the case on Monday. The court’s decision could have huge ramifications for efforts to hold companies accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels — and the larger question of who pays for the costs of adapting to a hotter world. Oil majors have pulled out all the stops to stymie the dozens of climate lawsuits that local and state governments have brought against them, with billions and billions of dollars on the line. With a conservative-dominated Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s Department of Justice as a powerful ally, oil companies saw their chance to stop these suits, said Alejandro Camacho, a professor at UCLA School of Law.

That calculus changed slightly this week when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a strong conservative with financial holdings in oil companies, recused himself from the case. His withdrawal makes it harder for oil companies to get at least five justices — a majority of the court — on their side.

The city and county of Boulder, Colorado, originally sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in 2018. The lawsuit slowly wound its way through the court system. Oil companies tried to dismiss it or move it to federal court, a more industry-friendly venue, but Boulder won at every stage. In May 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the case should proceed in state courts.

Much of the support for Boulder and the oil companies falls along familiar, partisan lines. Republican states and business associations tend to side with the oil companies; Democratic states and environmental advocates typically back Boulder. A watchdog organization found that 25 of the 38 briefs filed to the Supreme Court in support of Exxon and Suncor were written by groups with financial ties to the fossil fuel industry or foundations opposing climate science and regulation. But Colorado ranchers aren’t the only surprising source of support for Boulder’s case — some conservative thinkers are challenging oil companies’ arguments.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has recused himself from a landmark climate lawsuit pitting Boulder against major oil companies, the court announced in a letter Monday.

In a 2018 complaint, the city and county of Boulder argued that the oil giants ExxonMobil and Suncor deceived consumers of the harms of burning fossil fuels, and that they should share the costs of adapting to the escalating toll of climate disasters, such as floods and wildfires. 

Alito does not own Suncor or ExxonMobil stock. But he does own thousands of dollars in investments in the oil companies ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66, according to a report released earlier this month from the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, and Alito’s own 2025 financial disclosures.

Alito has batted down previous calls to recuse himself from the case earlier this year. A Supreme Court spokesperson also told NBC News in May that he had inadvertently recused himself in 2023, when Suncor and Exxon unsuccessfully asked the Court to review the case. 

“Justice Alito’s recusal from Suncor v. Boulder is the right decision, and one he should have made from the start,” said Consumer Watchdog organizing director Alexandra Nagy in a statement. 

“The public should not have to wonder whether a justice’s personal investments could benefit from a ruling that shields the fossil-fuel industry from liability,” she added.

Fossil fuels have hidden the true cost of 8 billion people. Here’s what could happen when the illusion ends.

In a study recently published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, scientists pored over two centuries’ worth of historical population records and ecological growth models to see whether the planet could keep up. They concluded that while humanity’s resource output kept pace with population increases for generations—largely driven by innovation, technological advancement, and increased efficiency—the tables started to turn in the early 1960s, not long before the publication of The Population Bomb. Around that time, the human population continued skyrocketing, but ecological resources began to shrink.

The result? For nearly 60 years, humanity has been writing a check that neither it—nor the planet—can cash. More humans means more resources, energy, and food, and in much of the industrialized world, overconsumption and unending growth lie at the foundation of the entire economy. The situation is so dire that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) even lists population growth as a key driver of greenhouse gas emissions.

But how has our population been able to grow beyond a size that our host planet can really support? One big reason is that finite fossil fuels can temporarily hide the effects of ecological overshoot. In other words, continuing to support a growing economy as well as a growing population just doesn’t math out in the long run—or even in the here and now.

A new residential development south of Denver is the testing ground for an unusual partnership that could transform home heating and cooling across the country.

Dandelion Energy, a geothermal startup, and Lennar, one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, recently completed construction of nearly 100 homes at the base of Colorado’s Front Range, each equipped with its own ground-source heat pump. The systems use less electricity than even the most efficient air-source heat pumps, potentially helping Colorado meet its climate goals while reducing peak energy demand and eliminating the need for new gas pipelines.

Ground-source heat pumps draw on steady temperatures belowground to help heat and cool buildings. However, the projects’ custom designs and drilling requirements—homes typically require one or more boreholes drilled several hundred feet deep—are pricey. Drilling alone often costs more than $10,000.

Dandelion, a company that got its start at X—a “moonshot” research and development subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company—says it can complete geothermal heating and cooling projects twice as fast and at half the cost of similar installations.

We believe that it is important to work with our friends and colleagues in China to advance our understanding of the threat posed by human-made climate change and effective policies to a achieve a propitious long-term climate.

we simply make available the talk that Jim gave in Xi’an last week and resist the temptation to elaborate on that, for the sake of staying on our self-imposed deadline of finishing his overdue book (Sophie’s Planet) this year and working on a proposal for cooperative research next year. We appreciate your support as we work toward that goal. The charts used in Xi’an and discussion of each are here. Other presentations and graphs are available on our website, which is currently under construction.

That imagery of the Himalayan tsunami smashing into the multi-story building in Nepal was horrifying, but then murder always is, isn’t it?

That’s what happened at that border crossing: mass murder. The perpetrators were the boards and CEOs of fossil fuel companies who have known for decades what they were doing, have known the consequences of it, and carried on with reckless indifference to those consequences.

They murdered the hundreds, maybe a thousand or more, who were swept away in Nepal, as surely as they murdered thousands in Europe this summer and will take the lives of tens of millions more in the coming decades.

Too strong, too much, too soon, or is it all too late?

When reading reports of the catastrophe in Nepal, I was counting off the moments until whatever media outlet I was reading quoted some scientists to assure me that, although it may have been related to climate change, it was not possible to say without a doubt that this particular incident was the fault of climate change. But that’s not really true, is it.

This was not the act of some vengeful god. Look into the truth of this, and you will find names, org charts and KPIs. There are quarterly reports and executives who read them. What fell in Nepal was not just gigatons of fast-moving rock and roaring ice. It was a reckoning.

About five summers ago, I wrote a story called “What Can I Do? Anything.” It was essentially a call to action for people staring at climate devastation and wondering what they could possibly do about it. The gist was: If ever there was a time to join the fight against fossil fuels and for a livable climate, now is it. Here’s how you can get involved, and how you can actually be effective.

If you’re watching this disaster unfold with rage and feeling absolutely helpless, it could be a good time to return to that story. It doesn’t offer an easy answer for dealing with horror on this scale, but it does offer some concrete paths toward climate action that focuses on systems change, and a case against giving up.

Local and state governments across the United States have turned to state courts over the past nine years, filing lawsuits reminiscent of those against the tobacco industry in the 1990s against major fossil fuel companies, aiming to hold them accountable for climate change damages and alleged deception. 

The cases are still in preliminary stages and none have yet made it to trial. But now, a significant cloud of uncertainty hangs over them as the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to get involved, at the request of oil company defendants. With the court slated to hear one of the cases at the start of its fall term, the fate of many, if not all, of these climate accountability lawsuits could be on the line, legal experts say.

The court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on Oct. 5 in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a petition from oil companies Suncor and ExxonMobil that seeks to quash a climate change tort suit filed by the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, against the companies. The case will be the very first the justices hear in their new term—a case that raises significant constitutional questions around federalism and state authority, with potentially enormous stakes. 

The number of data centers is rapidly increasing across the United States as investment in artificial intelligence grows. In our latest Climate Change in the American Mind survey, conducted in Spring 2026, we asked Americans about their views on local data center development, whether they think new data centers will affect electricity bills, and whether they support requiring new data centers to offset their electricity use by installing rooftop solar on and/or weatherizing and insulating local homes.

This analysis examines how public opinion about these questions differs across Global Warming’s Six Americas, our framework for understanding the spectrum of views on global warming. 

In the FAQ, it's mentioned that there's an option to verify your address by postcard:

https://preview.redd.it/oyzmz6fweelh1.png?width=1195&format=png&auto=webp&s=ff5620f6576cff5b632519b8ad63f11426311dd4

In notification settings, there's also an option to receive a push/email when your verification postcard is sent:

https://preview.redd.it/5pxpr3zkdelh1.png?width=838&format=png&auto=webp&s=7c54ac7b538e05949a712fc9fbb664072dc83b06

However, I've gone through all my account settings and there's no option to send a postcard. Am I missing something or has this not been implemented yet?

For many people concerned about the climate, how much we fly is a big dilemma and a challenge! Flying burns a LOT of fossil fuels, and is the single biggest source of climate pollution for most frequent flyers.

Family lives abroad, work demands travel, and social pressure pushes the other way.

"The plane's going anyway" is something you hear a lot, but does it actually hold up? In this episode, Kim talks to Ed about his struggle to fly less: the guilt, the trade-offs, and the practical alternatives he's found for family visits, work trips, and travel.

See SHIFT for more on other ways to travel, combining flights or flying less.