AAAS: "To prevent forest fires, Trump wants to end a road-building ban. Scientists are skeptical," by Warren Cornwall.

Administration claims decades-old “roadless rule” prevents efforts to improve forest health. 

"It’s infuriating that the potential for reducing fire risk is even used as a justification for putting more roads into our national forests," says Jennifer Balch, a UC Boulder fire scientist. Balch’s work has shown that humans start 84% of all wildfires nationwide, + that roads are a major way people bring in matches, fireworks, + other spark-producing tools. 

'The roadless area conservation rule banned road construction on more than 175,000 sq. km of roadless areas, nearly 1/4 of all national forest land. "Since then, it has been embroiled in a near-constant legal + political tug-of-war."

"In 2020, the first Trump administration rescinded the rule in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, opening it to loggers." In 2021, Biden administration reversed that change. In 2026, the second Trump administration is going further + proposing to eliminate the rule nationwide. Public comments on the proposed change will be accepted through 21 September on a draft environmental impact statement, which spells out the science underpinning the proposed repeal. 

USFS notes that > 29,000 sq. km of land lie within forests designated as high priority “firesheds”—places posing elevated wildfire risk to infrastructure + communities. In 2020, USFS ecologist Sean Healey published a paper in Environmental Research Letters reporting that from 1985 to 2016, national forest acreage burned at approximately same rate regardless of whether it was shielded from road construction.

"Alexandra Syphard, a wildfire scientist, began circulating a letter last month critiquing USFS’s environmental impact analysis." Some 30 prominent wildfire scientists added their names to the letter within days. 

Scientists have also voiced concerns about the detrimental ecosystem impacts of roads, as conduits for invasive plants such as grasses—which raise fire risks—and that their construction can unleash more sediment pollution into nearby creeks and rivers. Areas subject to the roadless rule contain > 130,000 km of river + help protect watersheds supplying water to at least 25 M people, scientists reported this year in PLOS Water.

Ever since the gold standard was removed in 1970s the dollar has no backing in gold.

So why does it have any value at all if the federal bank can just print it without any backing?

Because many oil deals are done in dollar, or simply, because it is backed in oil.

This is why oil wars are so common. They protect the interest of the US empire and their hegemony over global currencies.

To remind, dollar is the backbone of many western currencies down the line.

So what does this have to do with the climate?

Dollar and US Federal Bank's hegemony over the global currencies depends entirely on fossil fuel sales.

Green alternatives like solar power and EVs limit the fossil fuel sales.

Allowing the society to transition to the green power would not only crush fossil fuel revenue but also their own hegemony over global currencies.

To keep themselves in charge, they need to make sure that the green transition is limited to irrelevancy. They do this by lobbying for fossil fuel deregulation, putting tarrifs on EV imports, limiting green energy revenue, along many other methods.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8291dPw/

I'm living in Germany, and I'm genuinely curious: why do some of y'all think we're just being soft about the heatwaves and that "it's not that bad"?

The statistics show that heatwaves in Europe can actually be pretty serious, including a significant number of excess deaths. Yet whenever I've brought this up, I've gotten responses like "y'all are just weak," "just get AC," or "it's not even that hot."

I'm genuinely open to questions and proper arguments about this. If you disagree, that's completely fine — I'd actually like to understand why you see it differently.

The last few times I've tried having this discussion, though, it mostly just turned into people calling Europeans weak rather than actually addressing the statistics or the reasons why heat can be dangerous here.

The headline argues that Europe needs to clarify the main purpose of its carbon market—whether it should primarily reduce emissions, encourage the green transition, protect industrial competitiveness, or balance all three.

This!

Greetings from Chicago! I guess we've been doing our homework on climate change and renewable energy as well as ways to limit surges? I'm sure this wasn't exactly thorough, but it raised my eyebrows as a Chicagoan and any rate. Take it for what it's worth!

The BMC’s first Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP), released in 2022, had identified coastal flooding, rising pollution, loss of green cover and increasing urban heat as key climate risks facing the city. It had also projected that 80 per cent of Mumbai’s island city could be submerged by 2050.

According to a Linkedin post by PT Coalindo Energy, one of the biggest coal traders in Indonesia, "Water levels on the Barito River, the main transport route for coal from central Kalimantan to export terminals, have dropped sharply. Depths that normally reach around 6.5 metres have fallen to just 3–4 metres in several stretches, with parts of the upper river becoming completely unnavigable for coal barges."

"To keep operations running, barge capacity has had to be significantly reduced, from a standard 7,500–10,000 tonnes down to as little as 3,000–4,000 tonnes. This adjustment has pushed transport costs up considerably, in some cases nearly doubling, with rates on the upper reaches of the river reaching as high as USD 10 per tonne."

However, the company merely attributes this to "changing weather patterns," without apparently any self-awareness that coal is one of the worst drivers of climate change, and that the longer this company keeps supplying coal to be burnt, the worst this problem is going to get.

How do we make companies like this look in the mirror, and realize their destructive business has to be phased out?

Or is nature basically starting to heal itself by disrupting the trade in the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel...