Since January, many Cubans have lived a life of near-constant darkness. The Trump administration’s oil blockades have led the country into a worsening energy crisis, collapsing what was already an eroding national power grid.
Daily blackouts have plunged the Cuban nationalized, universal health system, once the pride of the country, into a humanitarian crisis. For months, hospitals have been without necessary power and ambulances strapped for fuel. Piles of trash line the streets, increasing the risk of disease. Cold storage issues threaten lifesaving vaccines, and a combination of the frail economy and US sanctions has left pharmacy shelves almost empty.
The public health crisis exposes an often overlooked aspect of the way we tend to think about the promise of universal healthcare. Having accessible and free medical services is only one part of the solution. While Cuba’s once-vaunted health system is bound up in its own history and national context, it still demonstrates that public health of all kinds can only be as resilient as the electricity, water, transportation, refrigeration, supply chains, and institutions that enable it.
Not long ago, Cuba’s health system was seen as a promising model for successful free universal healthcare. In the years following Fidel Castro’s rise to power, health authorities focused on the integration of healthcare delivery models into a single public system. The Castro government aimed to expand services once concentrated in Havana into rural areas, such that the entire population would have access to basic care services. In 1974, the government launched community-based polyclinics that placed primary care specialists in almost every Cuban community.
Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them.
Over the decades that followed, that widened access to healthcare led to significant, measurable returns. Infant mortality in the country has dropped from 37 per 1,000 live births right after the revolution to seven per 1,000 live births in 2024. Infectious and parasitic disease mortality also improved, dropping from a rate of 45.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1970 to 9.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019, according to data reported by the Cuban Public Health Ministry.
It’s not entirely surprising that the successful Cuban national health model has been the site of curiosity and enthusiastic scrutiny in American health equity circles, despite vast differences in state ideologies. The US has never ensured that every citizen has affordable access to healthcare, and large disparities persist in low-income and rural populations. The chokehold of private insurance has ensured that, unlike nearly every other country in the world, the US has largely rejected the prospect of universal care. Even historic gains in insurance coverage have faced rollback threats under the One Big Beautiful Bill.
On certain key metrics, the US also falls far behind Cuba, which boasted 9.5 physicians to 1,000 people in 2021. That same year, the US reported just 3.7 physicians to every 1,000 people. The 2019 measles epidemic demonstrated a gap in childhood vaccination rates as well: 92 percent of children ages 13 to 17 in the US received two doses or more of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. In Cuba, the childhood completion rates were well over 99 percent, and the country has not seen a measles outbreak since 1993.
From its early years, the Cuban health system has functioned against a background of economic decline particular to the country, one attributable to a complex combination of external pressures, among them US blockades, a complicated economic reliance on Venezuela, a struggling state-run economy, and a flailing industry heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
While other sectors faced attrition, Cuba’s health system, at least, appeared capable of weathering these crises. During the pandemic, the country proved to be a model in global health, having developed a homegrown Covid-19 vaccine rapidly and reaching a 95 percent vaccination rate. Its robust supply of trained health professionals made headlines when Cuban healthcare workers provided essential pandemic aid to a small town in Italy.
So why has this system proved to be so fragile now?
Torrents of rain and flooding from the Category 3 Hurricane Melissa hit Cuba in October of last year, affecting much of the island’s eastern provinces. More than 735,000 people were evacuated, and the environmental disaster has put the country’s basic health infrastructure in a precarious state.
In the storm’s wake, a combination of flooding and damaged water systems increased the spread of viral infections of arboviral diseases such as dengue and oropouche. A report by the Pan American Health Organization published in March placed water, food, and vector-borne diseases in the “very high” health risk categories. Apart from damaged water and sanitation infrastructure, the report describes how disruptions to health service access, routine surveillance of disease vectors, and environmental conditions that breed mosquito-borne disease outbreaks have dramatically increased the risk of infectious disease spread.
Hurricane Melissa arrived during a recovery period from earlier storms, such as Hurricane Rafael in late 2024, as well as sporadic earthquakes in recent years. These natural disasters also heavily damaged health facilities, leading to collapsed roofing, damaged roads and cables, and the loss of supplies and equipment.
For years, Cuba’s economy was propped up in large part by its relationship with Venezuela. In exchange for support from Cuba’s highly trained professionals — especially healthcare workers — Venezuela long provided a critical supply of crude oil, which helped the country keep the lights on even in the face of US sanctions.
That partnership ended in January after the nighttime capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and the sweeping Trump oil blockade soon after has dealt a challenge too difficult for the energy infrastructure to withstand.
Already struggling to recover from other disasters, Cuba plunged further into its present crisis. Mario Cruz Peñate, Pan American Health Organization representative for Cuba, said that while the public health situation has been evolving for a while, he has seen more acute upheavals as sanctions persist, causing mass blackouts that have made it impossible to sustain vital health services and emergency care.
Disease control continues to struggle post-Melissa, with aid organizations worrying about communicable food- and water-borne diseases, such as hepatitis A and diarrhea, that can be caused by unrefrigerated food. On the administrative level, limited transportation resources and electricity have led to a dearth of vaccine supplies, which typically require cold rooms for transfer and storage.
Continuity of care, in particular, has been affected for the worse. More than 100,000 elective and reconstructive surgeries have been postponed, for example, because of a lack of supplies and a backlog of emergency surgeries. At a briefing in May, representatives of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Health Organization reported that over 32,000 pregnant women faced limited access to diagnostics and limited amounts of the stable electricity needed to sustain neonatal units. Prenatal care faces delays because of the lack of everything from testing supplies to available facilities. And now, even once successful improvements in health indicators have fallen: a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research measured an increase in infant mortality rates from 4.0 to 9.9 per 1,000 births between 2018 and 2025.
For humanitarian aid organizations, alleviating this health crisis also poses a stark challenge. Cruz Peñate ascribes this to availability, timing, and opportunity to distribute aid supplies, all of which have been made inconsistent by the ongoing blockade.
“The response to the situation in Cuba has to increase; we have to scale up the response. All the support we can manage to receive will be important,” Cruz Peñate said. “Here in Cuba there is really a situation that needs attention.”
While Cuba’s healthcare system was never bound to map precisely onto the US, some of its most notable successes — the high physician-to-patient ratio, the almost entirely vaccinated population, the ample health screenings — still remain desirable. And yet those very accomplishments have crumbled under the threat of extreme weather events and the country’s inability to restore its broken power grid.
Trump targeted even more petroleum suppliers in his latest round of sanctions on July 23, leaving Cuba scrambling still further to revitalize its energy sector. Those same sanctions also took aim at the Cuban healthcare export economy, alleging that it involves forced labor.
Earlier this month, Cuba’s government loosened constraints on a handful of private operations, including pharmaceuticals and elder-care facilities, in response to the shortage of medicine in the country. With state-stocked shelves running empty, the new decree allows private pharmacies with Cuban health registration to fill in the medicine gap. Similarly, privatized elder facilities are also allowed to operate at a capped rate of 60 people per home, with mandatory visits from state physicians.
The government still prohibits private sector medical and dental care, and Cuban officials remain adamant that the “socialist state enterprise keeps its central role,” so it’s difficult to claim that the country’s medical model is being pressured towards privatization. But the erosion of some of its elements still speaks to a state-run health system under strain.
We often think of healthcare itself as an equation of medical services along with healthcare personnel and the authorities — government, industry, or both — that control it. But the crisis facing Cuba gets at the dependence of all of these factors on the broader energy ecosystem. Even a once-promising healthcare model can quickly collapse when a crucial component is missing: fuel.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
PALAU, Micronesia — The ride out to sea was, in a word, unpleasant. The coastal waters of Palau, an island nation in the western Pacific, are typically calm and electric blue, like what you might see on a screensaver or postcard. The country has put in place some of the world’s most rigorous protections to keep its marine environment pristine.
But on this particular morning in July, a super typhoon named Bavi was churning north of us in the Philippine Sea. Clouds darkened the water and battered us with rain as our boat seesawed through the swell toward the horizon.
Our destination was what you might call a coral garden — a patch of coral, about two miles from shore, that scientists had planted over the past couple of years in an effort to rebuild a damaged reef.
I was wet, cold, and nauseated when we arrived. So naturally, I strapped on a mask and jumped in.
Below me, I could see dozens of star-shaped metal structures that researchers had attached to the seafloor. They were studded with corals in all forms and colors: neon blue antlers, fluffy green mittens, baseball-sized brains. Some of the corals looked like a collection of human vertebrae. Others resembled miniature pine forests.
In the past two decades, governments, nonprofits, and even hotels around the world have dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to replanting coral reefs like this one. Reefs are among the planet’s most endangered ecosystems: Rising ocean temperatures, pollution, and other threats have killed off an estimated 50 percent of live coral globally since the 1950s.
Those steep losses erode the irreplaceable benefits that coral reefs provide. They go far beyond tourism. Healthy reefs lessen coastal flooding from storms like Bavi. They also serve as nurseries and homes for larger animal species, such as endangered sea turtles and valuable fish like snappers and groupers that people eat.
That’s why so much time and money has gone into restoring these ecosystems globally. Including here in Palau. A different typhoon and warming waters had destroyed some of the region’s coral many years ago, which caused the local fishery to decline, according to Sharp Sakuma, the governor of Ngaraard, a Palauan state where the coral garden is located. “It’s our food,” Sakuma said of fisheries. So a few years ago, he asked local researchers to help bring the reef back.
But reef restoration has a fatal flaw.
Rising global temperatures are heating up the ocean and fueling marine heat waves, which kill reefs. That means that much of the coral that people painstakingly plant often ends up dying months or years later — simply because the ocean is too hot. It’s like planting trees to restore a forest that will soon burn in a wildfire. And this raises serious doubts about the role reef restoration can play in the recovery, and ultimate survival, of these iconic ecosystems.
The colorful antlers, mittens, and brains below me, however, were not your typical planted corals.
They were different.
And they may offer a new reason for hope.
These corals had all gone through what you might call a fitness test. In a lab on shore, marine scientists exposed them to extreme heat and scored them for their ability to tolerate warming. Corals on some of the metal stars here got top marks — they appeared resistant to heat. Those individuals may have more of a fighting chance at surviving as ocean temperatures rise.
These sorts of fitness tests for corals are inexpensive and unexpectedly low-tech: They take place in cheap, store-bought picnic coolers, like what you might bring to the park. But by helping researchers identify the hardiest corals, these tests could help overcome one of reef restoration’s greatest challenges.
Subjecting corals to hot water in a plastic cooler may sound ridiculous. Until you consider the stakes and the circumstances: As the planet warms, simply protecting our beloved, life-supporting places is no longer enough to save them. Neither is restoring them to some former state.
To truly help coral reefs endure, we may actually need to reengineer them.
Scattered across a remote stretch of the Pacific is a collection of more than 300 islands, which, together, form the nation of Palau. Many of those islands are no larger than a small house. And because they’re eroding at the base, they look as though they’re floating above the ocean. When you’re out at sea, it’s easy to pretend that you’re flying through the floating mountains of Avatar’s Pandora.
But the real magic is, without a doubt, underwater.
Palau is surrounded by a vast network of coral reefs, many of which are in near-perfect condition. The region has more than 400 coral species — for comparison, the Caribbean has about 70 — which form the base of a thriving marine ecosystem. On just one weekend of diving there, I encountered close to 100 sharks, more than a dozen sea turtles, and three enormous manta rays. (In my more than 20 years of diving, I’ve rarely seen such an abundance of sea life.)
In the last two decades, Palau has become an epicenter for research on how warming affects coral reefs. Part of that is practical: The country’s abundant corals allow scientists to study how different species and populations respond to rising temperatures. It’s also home to a well-equipped marine lab, the Palau International Coral Reef Center.
But there’s also an urgent local need. Palau is deeply dependent on its coral reefs: Its fisheries and tourism make up more than a quarter of the country’s GDP. And while Palau is home to one of the world’s largest marine protected areas — which bans commercial fishing across 80 percent of its national waters — that does little to protect the reefs here from the existential global threat of ocean warming.
Why is heat such a dire problem?
One “coral” is not a single animal but a colony of hundreds or thousands of individual animals, known as polyps. Those polyps are all nearly genetically identical. They grow the colony — the coral structure that you see on a reef — by cloning themselves over and over again.
Polyps fuel themselves, in part, by grabbing particles out of the water with tentacles (up close, polyps look a bit like sea anemones). But most of their food, and much of their color, comes from a kind of algae that lives within their cells. Like plants, that algae photosynthesizes. And it passes the solar energy it generates onto the coral, in return for nutrients and a place to live.
This partnership fails under extreme heat.
When the ocean is too warm, the algae malfunction, and the polyps kick them out. As a result, the corals lose their primary source of food and their iconic color. That’s bleaching. A bleached coral is not dead but starving, and it will die unless the water cools back down.
Yet there’s another key detail here: Some corals seem to resist this heat-fueled bleaching. They appear naturally more tolerant to warming than their peers. And you can actually see this when you’re snorkeling during a heat wave: Some corals will be bone white, whereas other colonies of the same species nearby will appear fully saturated. Heat tolerance is a trait with natural variation, like height or eye color in humans.
It’s this detail that underpins efforts to make reef restoration less futile in a warming world. If scientists can find local corals that can tolerate warming, they can use them to regrow native reefs that might endure some degree of climate change, here and anywhere coral reefs can be found.
What scientists in Palau are trying to demonstrate is how — absent a naturally occurring heat wave — you can identify those heat-tolerant colonies.
On a mostly clear afternoon in July, days before the typhoon grazed Palau, I boated out to a shallow reef with Steve Palumbi, a marine ecologist at Stanford University. He’s tall and thin and has white hair that he often pulls back into a short ponytail.
Once the boat dropped its anchor in the sand, Palumbi and I jumped in, along with three researchers from the Palau International Coral Reef Center (PICRC). I felt like I was swimming in a tropical fish tank. The water was clear and full of silvery fish. A carpet of colorful coral coated the seafloor. Every hole and crevice was occupied — by a giant clam, a spiky starfish, a sea cucumber, a furry crab. The reef was a giant apartment building with a cast of unusual tenants.
I followed Palumbi and the PICRC researchers over to metal structures on the reef that his team had built. They looked like sunken bed frames, and like those metal stars, they were covered in pieces of coral.
These corals are some of Palumbi’s guinea pigs.
Over the last two years, researchers in his lab at Stanford have been subjecting them to a variety of different heat tests and scoring their performance. The concept is simple: Put the corals in a tank, crank up the temperature, and measure how quickly each one bleaches. The colonies that stay colorful as the temperature soars — the “winners” — may be more tolerant to warming.
For years, scientists have been chipping away at this question. We now know, for example, that a polyp’s genetics has something to do with it; like height in humans, heat-tolerance is partly heritable and can be passed on from parents to their kids. The specific kind of algae living in the coral tissue — its solar power-plant partner — matters, too.
Yet there are still big unknowns. Scientists still don’t know exactly how the genes of polyps and algae may combine in some way to influence tolerance. In search of answers, a researcher in Palumbi’s lab, Brendan Cornwell, is running corals through heat tests, and then examining the genomes of the winners and losers in search of clues.
There are several different ways to measure a coral’s tolerance to warming in a lab. Some tests expose corals to moderately high temperatures over weeks, whereas others blast them with extreme heat over days, or even hours. Longer-lasting tests tend to better represent a natural heat wave — what corals will actually face in the years to come. But they’re expensive, time-consuming, and require expertise. That’s a problem for people who are racing to rebuild damaged reefs, especially in poor regions that lack fancy marine labs and funding.
Working with PICRC, the Nature Conservancy, and other partners, Palumbi’s lab has been trying to demonstrate that the quick and cheap version of these heat tests — using picnic coolers to pressure-test corals over a few days — works well enough. They can help identify heat-tolerant corals and, thus, improve reef restoration, all within one work week, and on a low budget.
That afternoon, Palumbi was collecting corals from those metal frames to test at PICRC. Using wire cutters, Palumbi and the other researchers snapped off branches of coral from the individual colonies. Breaking fragments of coral off a colony is not unlike taking clippings from plants — the “donor” colony continues to grow, even as parts of it are removed.
After filling plastic bins with dozens of coral fragments across three species, the researchers brought them to the boat, loaded them into a large container full of seawater, and then we headed back to shore.
It is hard to put a price tag on coral reefs, but those who have tried say it is quite a lot.
The authors of one study published in 2024 estimated that reefs in the Asia Pacific, which includes Palau, Australia, and Indonesia, among other countries, contribute about $25 billion a year on average to the region’s economies for their role in supporting fisheries and tourism alone.
That doesn’t include the damage that reefs offset during tropical storms. Coral reefs are self-regenerating seawalls that can reduce wave energy — dulling the fiercest brunt of a hurricane making landfall, for example — by an average of 97 percent. In the US, economists estimate that reefs save the country more than $1.8 billion a year just in avoided flood damage. Globally, the cost savings from coral reefs are far higher.
So it’s no surprise that people are so eager to rebuild reefs when they collapse.
To restore these ecosystems, people typically harvest fragments of coral from the wild and grow them in a tank on land or in a “nursery” in the ocean. Then they plant them, one piece at a time, on the seafloor, often using an adhesive putty.
Reef restoration has grown into a global project of enormous scale: A network called the Coral Restoration Consortium counts more than 900 reef restoration efforts worldwide led by more than 350 organizations. By one estimate, groups have spent more than $250 million on reef restoration over roughly the last decade.
But as important as those efforts may be, many of them haven’t worked — they haven’t actually helped coral reefs grow back. “Show me a square mile of reef that has been [successfully] restored,” Palumbi said. “There isn’t one.”
At the heart of that failure is climate change: Prolonged bleaching kills off much of the planted coral, undoing a tremendous amount of effort.
One of the most extreme examples of this is in Florida. In the last three decades, organizations have planted tens of thousands of corals in the Florida Keys, which is home to the world’s third-largest barrier reef. I visited in 2022 and saw the progress of restoration firsthand — there were beautiful fields of planted staghorn and elkhorn, two federally threatened coral species. Some colonies were more than a meter wide. I wrote a story about how it was reviving Florida’s reef.
Then in summer 2023, a record-breaking heat wave struck. The reefs turned a ghostly white. And eventually, nearly all of the staghorn and elkhorn coral in the Florida Keys — including the vast swaths of replanted corals — died, becoming functionally extinct. It was one of the more devastating things I’ve seen in my time covering the biodiversity crisis.
There are similar examples from around the world — in Colombia and Costa Rica, for example, along with Indonesia and the Seychelles.
It’s not that restoration groups are unaware of this problem. Scientists have been studying bleaching for many years in search of solutions. In Florida, researchers are testing out what happens if you cross-breed corals from South Florida with colonies from a warm reef in Honduras, which have a natural ability to withstand higher temperatures. Perhaps their hybrid babies will be more likely to survive the next heat wave. But most of these approaches are time-intensive, costly, run by teams of PhDs, or stuck in the lab.
“The lab science is cool,” Palumbi told me. “But it’s going too slowly. We don’t have time to wait.”
The outdoor research space at PICRC looked like a typical marine lab — a labyrinth of pipes and pumps and, of course, tanks full of sea creatures, which in this case included corals, urchins, and giant clams that would abruptly close if you got too close. It looked appropriately science-y. With the exception of one wooden shelf. On it were eight blue and red plastic picnic coolers, in which Palumbi’s team is doing the bulk of its heat testing.
After returning to shore with bins full of coral fragments, Palumbi put some of them into the coolers, which were fitted with small heaters and pumps. The water inside was around 30 degrees C (86 degrees F). That’s the average high temperature for waters in this region, and the baseline for the test he was about to run.
Then Palumbi, rather unceremoniously, cranked up the dial.
Over each of the next four days, the water in half of the coolers would hit a higher temperature, before returning to the baseline of 30 degrees. On day one, for example, it would reach 34; on day two, it would hit 35; and so on. And each morning, Palumbi would assess the fragments for bleaching. Although these tests run for only a few days, they’re meant to mimic what some corals might experience at low tide during a heat wave, Palumbi said.
I visited the lab early one morning, after just one day of heat stress — after the coolers had reached 34 degrees. Palumbi laid the fragments out on a white grid to evaluate their color, ranking them from one (no bleaching) to five (fully bleached). They were shaped like twigs and still had their normal orangy brown color. No bleaching yet. By the next morning, however, the corals appeared more varied: Some were starting to pale and others remained saturated.
On the last morning of the test — after the coolers had reached 37 degrees, or close to 100 degrees F — nearly all the fragments were white, resembling cauliflower florets. They had expelled their algae. And yet a handful of the fragments still appeared mostly brown. Even after getting blasted by extreme heat, they hadn’t bleached.
“Those are the champions,” Palumbi said.
Palumbi believes that quick heat tests like this stand to benefit restoration projects across the tropics. The equipment, including four coolers, costs less than $1,000, according to Courtney Klepac, a researcher in Palumbi’s lab, who studies heat testing. Groups that are rebuilding reefs can essentially run the corals they harvest through these tests, and then only plant the champions.
That’s precisely the idea behind a project Klepac leads called the Coral Futures Academy. She’s been helping environmental groups across the Pacific integrate these low-overhead heat tests into local reef restoration efforts. And these actually include the coral garden I snorkeled during the typhoon: All the pieces of coral there had gone through similar heat tests.
As promising as this approach sounds, however, there is an important caveat: These tests are only useful if they actually predict which corals are more likely to survive under real-world warming. And so far, scientists haven’t proven that.
Previous studies comparing short heat tests to those that are longer and more faithfully replicate a real heat wave show mixed results; the winners of one are often not the winners of the other. It suggests that surviving a short blast of heat requires different skills than withstanding warmth that lasts for weeks.
Some researchers have also measured what happens to corals that went through an even faster one-day test after they were put in the ocean and then experienced a real heat wave. The champions in those rapid tests were not always more heat-tolerant in the wild.
Ilan Bubb, a marine biologist at the University of Amsterdam who’s studied heat tests, says it’s like trying to predict a person’s marathon time based on how well they perform in a sprint. “We know there’s some correlation there, but how good is that correlation?” he said. “How much information you can get about that marathon from a hundred-meter sprint is still just undetermined.”
Palumbi, Klepac, and their colleagues have been exploring this question, too. They’ve compared bleaching scores from heat tests that last for three or four days to those that last for roughly two weeks. The results appear to be similar, Klepac said: On average, the same corals resisted or succumbed to bleaching in both experiments.
Klepac has also studied what happens to heat-tested corals when an actual marine heat wave hits. At the coral garden I visited with those metal stars, PICRC researchers planted the heat-test winners as well as the poorer performers, as a point of comparison. And as Klepac’s unpublished research shows, the winners of the short heat tests survived better during a bleaching event in Palau in 2024, compared to the losers.
“I am probably one of the few people that you will talk to that kind of low-key gets a little excited for bleaching events,” Klepac told me. “It is a very true test of what we’ve been doing. If we’re trying to market this approach, I want to feel confident that what we’re prescribing actually works.”
There are other drawbacks to this testing approach. For one, it relies on a visible trait — whether a coral resists bleaching or not. That trait, however, doesn’t always indicate whether the coral has the genes to resist bleaching. The colony may have just been healthier going into the test than its peers. Two runners, for example, might get different times in a 100-meter sprint, not just because of their genes but because of how much rest they got the night before.
This matters when you’re trying to rebuild a reef: Typically, you want the coral colonies you plant to eventually reproduce and create heat-tolerant babies. That only happens if the parents have heat-tolerant genes.
And there are other traits that corals need to survive, beyond the ability to withstand warming.
“It’s not just about heat tolerance,” said Liam Lachs, a coral researcher at University of Queensland in Australia who has extensively studied the value of different heat tests.
By only planting the corals that perform well on these heat tests, you might miss colonies that have other important strengths, such as the ability to withstand disease. In fact, future research may reveal that testing corals for one of these other traits may ultimately be a better predictor of their survival in the era of climate change, says James Guest, a reef ecologist at Newcastle University in England.
Palumbi readily admits that the short picnic cooler tests are not perfect. But the important question, he says, is whether they are good enough — good enough to start using them now to help reefs as the science around fitness testing gradually improves.
That much is clear, he says, and several other researchers I spoke to agreed. While the utility and accuracy of short heat tests is not yet proven, people who want to rebuild reefs should still use them, they said. For restoration, there simply aren’t many better alternatives.
“It’s quick, it’s easy to do, people can apply it relatively straightforwardly, and it offers some kind of test,” Guest told me. “Coming up with these practical approaches makes sense.”
The sun was still low in the sky as Palumbi and I strapped on our tanks and weights and plunged into the ocean near one of Palau’s floating islands.
Sinking down felt like descending onto an alien planet. There were rolling hills of branching coral and stacks of plate coral the size of merry-go-rounds. Schools of colorful fish flew over them, like flocks of birds across a woodland.
Toward the end of the dive, we came across a single coral colony as large as a suburban home. The surface was lumpy and covered in what looked like large bulbous fingers. Given its size, the coral was likely at least three hundred years old.
When we were back on the boat, I asked Palumbi what he thought of the reef. “It doesn’t get better than this,” he said.
Isn’t it arrogant to think we can recreate, or even fortify, something as complex as a coral reef?
There could have been 200 species of coral on this one reef alone, Palumbi said, some of which may still be unknown to science. If this is what coral reefs are supposed to look like, even our best science probably can’t recreate them.
It seems like our time would be far better spent trying to prevent reefs like this from dying in the first place. “We all know that we have to solve the bigger problem,” Guest said. “If we don’t reduce carbon emissions and we don’t deal with climate change, nothing we do is going to help corals.”
But the way Guest and other scientists see it, restoration — and the science to improve it — is not about recreating thriving coral reefs. The goal is much more humble, and much more depressing: to prevent as many species and reefs as possible from disappearing altogether so that, if and when the planet cools back down, there’s still something left to regrow.
Reef restoration encompasses a broad range of approaches, Guest said, meant to “stop species and populations from going off into an extinction vortex.” It would seem anything that might help that cause even a little bit — including a handful of plastic picnic coolers — is worth a try.
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
The 2026 wildfire season on the West Coast is shaping up to be an especially bad one: In Oregon, more than 2 million acres have already burned, breaking a record set just a few years ago, in 2024. In neighboring Washington state, suburbs around the city of Spokane recently burned in an increasingly common example of fires reaching urban and suburban areas (as my colleague Caitlin Dewey covered recently). And the consequences are spreading far beyond where the fires are burning, with hazardous smoke from the Pacific Northwest drifting as far away as New England.
Much of this is a story about climate change, as increasingly dry, hot summers provide ample fuel for fires. But the crisis is also being made worse by the Trump administration: Staff cuts to the US Forest Service have left the agency stretched thin and unable to respond as effectively to fires, while a planned reorganization is also set to shutter Forest Service labs researching and tracking wildfires. EPA research into wildfires and wildfire smoke has also been slashed.
All of this — plus a Trump administration shift away from letting some fires burn themselves out, which has further increased the workload on wildland firefighters — has also resulted in a more dangerous fire season for firefighters; Reuters reported this week that firefighters are “being overrun by wildfires at the highest rate in two decades” — with months still to go until the end of the season.
As if the above weren’t enough to worry about, lawmakers are also raising a brand-new fire season concern: prediction markets. Specifically, the possibility that bettors could turn to arson in order to manipulate prediction markets — and earn themselves some money.
Polymarket, on its international platform, has offered users the chance to bet on everything from when and where a fire might spread to when it could be contained or extinguished, which resulted in more than $1 million in bets on major fires in California last year. High Country News reported in June that a new prediction market, called Wyldfyre, had launched specifically for betting on wildfires.
Legislators like Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) have pointed out that, unlike most other natural disasters, fires are easily started or spread by humans, creating a real risk that people could attempt to manipulate markets.
“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” Merkley and eight other Democratic senators wrote in a letter to the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last week. “There’s also the heightened risk—according to state and local fire officials—that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful. By offering contracts on fires, prediction market sites run the risk of encouraging people to influence fires that have already started, creating additional concerns around public safety and insider trading.
➨ Build (your attention span) back better. Beset as we are by short-form video and tweets, it can often feel like our attention spans are slipping unavoidably away. The good news, it turns out, is that decline doesn’t have to be permanent — there are ways to rebuild attention, including by simply letting your brain rest more.
Earlier this summer, Vox set up two big bug traps in New York City — like, literal traps that catch bugs. Our goal was to try to discover a new insect species right in the middle of the city because the bulk of them are still unknown to science.
We now have some exciting, albeit preliminary, results to share.
During the month of June — the only month we’ve analyzed so far — our traps captured an estimated 12,000 insect specimens, which we sent to a lab at the University of Guelph in Canada for analysis. The lab, known as the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, pulled out specimens across three groups: scuttle flies and two kinds of wasps known as parasitoids, which lay their eggs in other insects. We’re focusing on these groups, because they’re considered “dark taxa,” meaning that most species within them are likely still undiscovered.
That left us with just under 1,000 specimens from June to investigate further.
From there, the lab sequenced a short section of DNA from each specimen, known as a barcode. Those DNA barcodes are unique identifiers for individual organisms, and scientists use them to sort specimens. When individuals have very similar barcodes, that often means they are the same species.
In late July, the insect trap we set up in Central Park — which is about 5 feet long and 4 feet tall — suddenly disappeared. We have no idea where it went. Luckily, we had a spare trap.
Such are the challenges of sampling in a big city.
The other major hurdle was figuring out how to ship boxes full of bugs to Canada, where the DNA barcoding lab is based. I have unfortunately become an expert in international shipping laws; a frequent visitor of a Brooklyn UPS Store (a nightmare); and friendly with an inspection agent at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees animal exports.
Science!
Most of the barcodes from our specimens appear to be similar to barcodes of insects that scientists have already collected and sequenced. There’s a slim chance that these are members of undiscovered species.
But there were striking exceptions: Our wasps and flies yielded more than two dozen barcode groups that are, according to a preliminary review, quite different. They are unlike anything that exists in the big genetic database, known as BOLD, which is essentially a massive library of biodiversity. That means that they may represent new species.
Now, following further analysis by taxonomists, we have a strong indication that at least a few of those barcode groups may, indeed, be new species. And this was after just one month of looking!
Before we know if we have a true discovery to announce, we want to be certain that these species are actually new. That takes hard work, for which we are leaning on Emily Hartop, an entomologist at Norway’s NTNU University Museum, and University of Guelph researchers Ranjith AP and Paul Hebert. They will verify that no one has already described the organisms matching these specimens and then publish a formal description, along with a name, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. At that point, we’ll be able to say with more certainty that the bugs we caught here in New York City are, in fact, new to science.
In the meantime, the traps remain open, and the freezer in my apartment will continue — to my husband’s disgust — filling up with ethanol-soaked bugs.
You can find more information about Vox’s quest to discover a new species here.
The influencers have started to promise me that they know how to get me to stop shopping: I just have to enter every garment of clothing I own into an app, one by one. “I digitally cataloged my ENTIRE wardrobe,” they swear on videos, routinely pulling in hundreds of thousands of views.
The selling point of these apps (Indyx, Whering, ACloset, OpenWardrobe, and many more) is seductive; they promise to help users understand exactly what they already own so that they shop less. In theory, that means saving money — and slowing the steady damage the fashion industry is wrecking on our planet.
“Collectively, we are buying and then throwing away more than ever before,” Indyx warned on its website, before reciting dire statistics about how many clothes are produced now and how many of them end up in landfills. Luckily, it said, “We’re here to break the cycle.”
That idea appealed to me. I am not a fashionista, but I enjoy clothes enough to buy more than I really need, despite what I know about fashion’s impact on the planet. My intellectual understanding of climate change can’t always stop me from clicking “add to cart” when I see a dashing pair of wide-legged trousers, even though there’s a hard limit on the number of times a person can wear wide-legged trousers in one week.
Still, to make these apps work, you have to individually enter photos of everything you own now and everything you buy in the future, which sounds like a tedious, laborious process. (You can take the photos yourself or hunt down product pictures from the brand.) And because so many influencers are pushing this, it’s hard to tell how life-changing it really is and how much is just marketing speak and hype. So, I decided to test one of these apps — Indyx — for you. I also talked to wardrobe cataloging enthusiasts and experts on sustainable consumption to see what I could learn from them. I wanted to know: Could cataloging our wardrobes actually make us shop less? And, if it can, would it be worth the effort?
Wardrobe cataloging apps did not always advertise themselves as being good for the planet.
In 2023, the journalist Avery Trufelman investigated the nascent wardrobe cataloging app industry for her podcast series Articles of Interest. She found that a lot of the apps flopped. The issue was the business model, which was based on revenue generated from affiliate links. The idea was that people would click to purchase items they saw within the apps, and the company would take a cut of each sale. But when the apps were well designed, Trufelman reported, users felt less of a need to buy more clothes.
The current generation of wardrobe cataloging app developers has turned this from a bug into a feature. They now market their wares as the solution to overshopping, and they make their money by charging for either the app itself or for its extra content. (Indyx itself is free, but you have to pay a $75 yearly subscription for its enhanced features.)
What the marketing gets right is that the fast fashion problem is real. “Anywhere from two to 10 percent of our global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with fashion,” said Brie Berry, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.
Fashion’s emissions are generated by the factories that manufacture clothing (the water and the fertilizers for growing cotton, the oil for developing synthetics) and the consumers who wear these garments (the slow shed of microplastics from yoga pants, the water and the energy consumed by washing and drying). When we get rid of old clothes, much of it ends up in landfills or incinerated. By some estimates, the fashion industry contributes more to climate change than the aviation industry.
“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less,” said Katia Dayan Vladimirova, a researcher whose consulting firm Post Growth Fashion focuses on alternatives to growth in the fashion system.
To buy less, it helps most people to know what they already own, said Alyssa Beltempo, a slow-fashion content creator and educator. Beltempo makes videos guiding viewers through the process of “shopping their own closets” to help them buy less stuff, but she’s found in her work that a lot of people aren’t clear on the contents of those closets. Because of that confusion, they end up buying stuff they don’t need.
That’s where cataloging can be helpful, Beltempo said. “These apps reduce that hurdle of not seeing the clothes you have,” she said.
Personally, what I was looking for wasn’t enhanced clarity so much as a barrier. I wanted to erect a wall between my desire to own a new piece of clothing and the click of the buy button. A searchable, scannable lookbook of everything I owned, I thought, might well do the trick.
Indyx has been hyping up its new AI feature, which transforms a picture of a garment hanging limply off a hanger into a neat flat lay photo. It sped the process up, but it was also buggy; it garbled text on the front of T-shirts, misread colors, and had a tendency to interpret loose threads as ornamental bows while leaving wrinkles (I am not an ironer) untouched.
I was also concerned that the process inserted AI, with its insatiable need for water and energy, into a project sold as a way of reducing my environmental impact. But the sustainability experts I spoke to were both skeptical that this sort of light AI use was such a big deal.
“Taking photos and then asking an app to think about how to arrange your clothing into outfits is probably one of the lighter uses of AI that I could imagine,” Berry said. Vladimirova agreed that using AI for this task is unlikely to be as bad for the planet as buying even one new garment. “But then, there is also no proven causality between using this app and reducing overconsumption,” she added as a caveat.
It’s possible to input your clothes into Indyx without using the AI feature, but the truth is: I don’t know that I could have made myself go through with the whole rigamarole without it. I ran out of free AI processing about 80 percent of the way through and, overwhelmed at the thought of having to do my own flat lays, paid $75 to buy more without hesitating.
All told, it took me about five hours and many old episodes of Top Chef to photograph my summer clothes, not including shoes, jewelry, or accessories. My time spent cataloging did not include the process of entering additional data about each garment (including its initial cost, its fiber composition, where I bought it), a herculean task that I have been tackling much more slowly than the initial entry process.
Doing the shoot properly would have taken longer. Angela Goodman, a 51-year-old marketer from Seattle with a background in product photography, says she ran her own cataloging session like a pro shoot, using art lights and folding and refolding each garment to lie perfectly. It took her 10 hours spread out over multiple weeks.
As an exercise, photographing every piece of clothing I owned was clarifying, although not significantly more clarifying than going through it Marie Kondo-style. It left me with a small donation pile of items I no longer wanted and a fretful awareness that I own too many white T-shirts. In theory, that’s the kind of insight a wardrobe cataloging app produces by the spade.
Vladimirova, the sustainability consultant, said that, even though she has a better idea than most of how destructive the fashion industry is, she struggles with over-shopping. She thinks a lot about why people buy so many clothes; her best guess is that it’s a way to self-soothe.
“A lot of consumption happens in the evening when we feel vulnerable and tired, and we’re trying to reward ourselves with this shot of dopamine,” she said. For some people, these apps can replace the dopamine hit that comes from scrolling through other people’s outfit photos with the dopamine hit of scrolling through your own clothes, neatly folded and filtered until they look like aspirational fashion inspo.
Part of the satisfaction here is the infographics. After you’ve given Indyx all your fashion data, the app crunches your numbers and tells users how much you’ve bought new versus secondhand, as well as the share of natural fibers as opposed to synthetics in your closet, so that you can track the environmental impact of your shopping habits. (Synthetics tend to have a higher carbon footprint than natural fibers.) It tells you what their cost per wear is on each item to help you track which expensive garment was worth the splurge and which was a waste of money. Users can also plan outfits. You can share your wardrobe with stylists who will plan the outfits for you (on Indyx, the service ranges from $25 a month to “the low hundreds”). It’s like playing paper dolls with your own wardrobe.
For Goodman, the former product photographer, all this data takes the place of recreational shopping. She describes getting a marketing email from one of her favorite brands about a sale. After a quick scroll through their offerings, she found that she felt no urge to buy.
“I was like, ‘I do not need more clothes. I’m going to go update my Indyx, because I’m a couple of weeks behind,’” she said. She started inputting the last few outfits she’d worn into one of the Indyx services that is supposed to allow users to track their patterns and see which clothes they actually wear and what they like in an outfit. “I’m playing with clothes,” she said. “But, like, I’m not shopping. I’m, you know, building.”
Over time, all this data is supposed to inform future shopping choices. “There is something very clear about seeing two pieces that you’ve owned for the same amount of time — one that you’ve worn 57 times and one that you’ve worn twice,” said Alexandra, a 29-year-old consultant in Northern Virginia who requested her last name be withheld. She thinks tracking her clothes has given her “a little bit less buyer’s remorse.”
Cataloging your wardrobe can’t prevent a compulsive need to buy, though.
“I don’t think it cured me of my undiagnosed shopping addiction,” Alexandra said. “You can very quickly go from ‘I’m cataloging what I have’ to ‘I’m seeing a bunch of gaps in my wardrobe that I should fill immediately.’”
The main question I had about these apps was whether, with such a labor-intensive process, there comes a time when the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
Alexandra says that she gradually stopped using her wardrobe app last year, after she moved out of her own apartment and back into her family’s suburban house in the midst of a career transition.
“I was separated from a lot of my belongings for a very long time, and then, as I started to get things back, it didn’t feel worth the effort anymore,” she said. Who was she going to see in one of her curated outfits? “My job’s on a computer. When I leave the house, I go to the grocery store and the pharmacy and the bookstore,” she said. “There just wasn’t incentive anymore, compared to when I was closer to the city and doing things more regularly.”
Beltempo, the slow fashion content creator, said she doesn’t bother to add every new purchase to her own catalog.
“I really use it more for my packing,” she said. Before she travels, she makes a list of likely candidates for her suitcase and enters them into the app. “And then, I’ll play, and I’ll make outfits,” she says.
Vladimirova, the sustainable consumption researcher struggling with overshopping, gave the apps a spin. She tried three of them and found that she was only able to stick with each one for a matter of months. “In the beginning, when the novelty of the app is there, it’s very satisfying,” she said. “It records your outfits in vivid colors. It can crop out the ugly background and keep it very neat, create fancy capsules. They look so lovely.”
But over time, they all began to bore her. “And now, I forget to update when I buy something new — usually from secondhand sources — and it kind of lost its meaning for me,” she said. “But the premise is good!”
My own experience seems to be closest to Vladimirova’s. I keep having to remind myself to enter my outfits into Indyx. Every time I put on a piece of clothing, I think with dread, “Oh god, if I don’t look up how much I paid for this, I’ll never know my cost per wear and, then, what’s the point?” I keep giving my shoes guilty looks and thinking about how I should really photograph and catalog them — if I’m doing this right.
“It’s a project,” said Lauren Ludwig, a 41-year-old who has been using her wardrobe apps for the past three years. “But it’s a fun one for someone who enjoys clothing.”
Indyx and its brethren are slick, and their infographics are beautiful. For dedicated wardrobe hobbyists, they’re probably a great option. But for most people who just want to cut down on their clothes shopping, it’s hard to say that the $75 annual subscription is worth it. The free version will give you the same paper doll effect if you are willing to do your own flat lays, or you can recreate it by dragging phone camera pictures of your clothes onto a Google Slides deck.
If you find, as Vladimirova theorized, that you shop when you don’t feel good, you can try replacing that habit with a “dopamine menu” of small acts that bring you joy, like hugging a pet, doing a puzzle, or going for a walk. And if your closet is filled with brand new clothes you never wear, you’re racking up debt buying clothes, or you just have the nagging sense that your shopping has spiraled completely out of control, therapy is not a bad idea.
Personally, I found that Indyx could not give me what I really crave when I want to play with clothes: the understanding of the way fabric drapes against my body, the knowledge of its texture against my skin. There is no substitution for the slow analog process of walking into my closet, touching my clothes with my human hands, and learning with my five senses that what I have is already enough.
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
The Spokane, Washington wildfires have destroyed at least 700 buildings and forced 65,000 people from their homes — and with high winds forecast for later this week, the crisis probably isn’t over.
As of Tuesday afternoon, three separate blazes were still burning uncontained to the north and west of the city center, according to a data clearinghouse managed by the US Forest Service. And heavy smoke from the blazes continued to spill across Washington, Idaho, and Oregon.
Meanwhile, investigators appear to have made progress in determining the cause of the largest fire: On Tuesday, local sheriff’s deputies arrested a 37-year-old Arizona man on charges of first-degree arson. The vast majority of US wildfires are started by humans…but typically through carelessness or by accident.
I was struck by an observation that one longtime Spokane resident made to NPR this week: “Obviously, we’ve had wildfire seasons,” she said. But she “never, ever imagined” having to evacuate, because she lived so deep inside of the city.
Living in a city is no protection from climate change, though. And the destruction caused by wildfires in cities and suburbs is very much on the rise. Consider the devastation caused by recent fires in Colorado (2021), Hawaii (2023), and Los Angeles (2025).
Why are wildfires causing more damage in cities and suburbs? It’s not because they’re new. One recent study found urban wildfires have remained a fairly stable share of all US fires over the past generation.
What has changed is the scale of their damage, thanks to factors like climate-driven increases in extreme fire weather and human incursion into forests and grasslands. As a country, we are increasingly building homes and other structures in the “wildland-urban interface” — a liminal zone where neighborhoods and nature overlap.
While housing isn’t dense in these areas, the buildings that exist can serve as tinder that helps fires spread. And putting more people, roads, and power lines into these zones creates more opportunities for ignitions.
All this means that city-dwellers and suburbanites will likely face more wildfire risk in years to come. And for those of you in the Midwest or on the East Coast, like me, don’t assume that wildfires are someone else’s problem. “Every single state” with wildland-urban interfaces also holds the potential for fire disaster, one pyrogeographer told Vox in 2023. That includes communities like Spokane, sure — but also Florida, Minnesota, and Mississippi.
➨ Go ahead, save that tiny glass jar! It’s apparently a bona fide pop culture craze. But don’t bother doing it for the environmental benefits: One policy professor (disappointingly!) tells Vox that consumer decisions like choosing glass over plastic “do not matter in a meaningful way.”
On June 11, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an El Niño advisory after temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean remained higher than average for several months. Declaring an El Niño isn’t out of the ordinary, as they happen in cycles every two to seven years. But this one could be extraordinary.
Some are calling it a “super” or “Godzilla” El Niño, and the NOAA predicts an 81 percent chance that it could develop to a “very strong” level, rivaling the historic and devastating El Niños of 1982-1983 and 1997-1998. Experts are predicting it will likely reach its peak this winter and into 2027, bringing heat, rainfall, and other potential extreme weather events.
But even with that foresight and climate models that can confidently predict what might be in store, we still face a test of what could potentially be the strongest El Niño ever recorded and the wild weather that comes with it. We spoke with atmospheric scientists and meteorologists to find out how a super El Niño forms, why it changes global climate, and what we should expect in the coming months.
Read more about El Niño:
There was a backup plan for getting oil out of the Middle East. We may need another one.
On July 20, the Iran-backed Yemeni rebel movement known as the Houthis declared a “blockade” against their long-time enemy Saudi Arabia, and a short time later attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. Shortly afterward, several ships carrying Saudi crude oil through the Red Sea made abrupt U-turns to avoid going near the Yemeni coast.
With Iran now blocking shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea was supposed to be an alternative way to get oil out of the Middle East and to the world market. Now, though, the importance of the route has merely created fresh leverage in the long-simmering conflict between the Houthis and their longtime enemies in Saudi Arabia. These attacks were a major factor in pushing oil back over $100 a barrel last week.
The Houthis have their own agenda partly unrelated to the Iran conflict. But in launching the Iran conflict, the US has inadvertently given them outsized influence in the region: The sea lane they control is more important than ever. Now, in opening up a new front, they may have just made the war harder to end.
The Red Sea has become increasingly important to Saudi Arabia and energy markets as shippers have avoided Hormuz in recent months. Saudi Arabia has diverted around 70 percent of its oil exports via a pipeline connecting the oil fields on the Persian Gulf to the port of Yanbu on its Red Sea coast. This means that tankers need to use the Red Sea to get oil to Asia. As a result, the Red Sea now accounts for around 7 percent of the world’s energy supplies.
This release valve is one reason why the price of oil — and the price of gas for American drivers — has not risen as much as many experts expected when the Hormuz crisis began shortly after the US-Israel strikes on Iran.
But now, that release valve is also under threat, putting the region and the world in what shipping experts call a “double chokehold.”
The Houthis have used their location to cause chaos before: In 2023 and 2024, they attacked over 100 ships they accused of links to Israel, and dramatically drove down shipping through the Red Sea. Those attacks stopped after the Israel-Hamas ceasefire last year, but shipping has still not fully recovered.
President Donald Trump has threatened both the Houthis and Iran with “major military punishment” over the attacks in recent days. And the attacks also make it likelier that the conflict in Iran could make oil pricier than ever, increasing political pressure on Trump.
The Houthis are a member of Iran’s network of regional proxies, known as the “Axis of Resistance,” along with Hezbollah, Hamas, and a number of Iraqi militias. But most experts believe that while they rely on Iranian support, they operate independently and don’t take their marching orders from Tehran.
Officially known as Ansar Allah, the Houthis are members of the minority Zaydi sect of Shia Islam. They’ve been fighting for control of Yemen since the 1990s and took over Yemen’s capital city, Sanaa, in 2014, though most countries do not recognize them as Yemen’s legitimate government.
The Houthis fought a brutal decade-long war against Yemen’s internationally recognized government and an international coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which ended with a UN-mediated ceasefire in 2022.
The Saudi-Houthi peace has largely held since then, even as the Houthis gained global notoriety during the Gaza war. When this year’s war began, many expected the Houthis to join the fight against Iran’s enemies, the United States and Israel, but for the first few weeks of the conflict, they were conspicuously quiet. Their impact was felt in a different way, though.
Iran’s success in using cheap drones and missiles to effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz almost certainly drew on lessons gained from the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea in 2023 and 2024.
In March, the Houthis made their first move toward actively joining the Iran war when they launched a round of missiles at Israel. But things really escalated in mid-July when they began launching attacks on Saudi Arabia in response to an attack on the Sanaa airport, which they blamed on the Saudis. (The initial attack was claimed by Yemen’s internationally-backed government.)
In addition to the Red Sea attacks, the Houthis also claimed an attack on a Saudi oil refinery last Saturday, the group’s first attack on Saudi energy infrastructure since 2022, followed by attacks on oil depots along the Red Sea coast on Sunday. Several Iran-backed militias in Iraq also carried out their own attacks on Saudi Arabia over the past few days.
The Houthis have now entered the conflict, but it would be a mistake to view them just as Iranian proxies. They have their own demands and agenda in this fight.
“When the whole Iran war started, they were kind of observing and waiting for the right moment,” said Mohammed al-Basha, a US-based security analyst and Yemen expert. Basha suspects that the Houthis saw the leverage and concessions Iran had gained throughout the region and wanted to exert some leverage of their own. “Their aggressiveness went from zero to 60 last week,” he said. “They’re all in.”
All in for what, exactly? The Houthis’ demands from the Saudis include billions in reparations payments and full control of their coastline and airspace. In the long term, they aim to be Yemen’s internationally recognized government.
The Saudis, then, who fought a brutal and unpopular war against the Houthis that ended in a stalemate, are faced with the unappealing choice between placating the group by agreeing to its demands or a return to war.
What about the US? The US carried out more than 1,000 airstrikes over 52 days against the Houthis in 2025. While this campaign, known as Operation Rough Rider, caused significant damage to the group’s infrastructure, it did not succeed in fully restoring shipping in the Red Sea.
Trump has threatened retaliation, but given concerns over munitions stockpiles, the US capacity to retaliate, much less expand this war to a new front, is probably limited.
For the moment, the Bab el-Mandeb is not completely closed — shipping is down around 22 percent since the blockade was declared, but 28 ships were able to transit the strait on Monday. The Houthis maintain that their blockade targets only Saudi Arabia, but Chinese supertankers have been allowed to leave the Red Sea carrying Saudi oil.
But shippers recall that during the Houthis’ last Red Sea campaign in 2024, they were theoretically only targeting ships linked to Israel, but had a pretty broad definition of “linked to Israel.” Under these circumstances, many shippers, and more importantly their insurers, might not want to take the risk.
“We’ve seen what the Houthis can do,” said Noam Raydan, an expert on energy and maritime shipping at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “We know that they can sink ships. We know that they can hit a ship with drones, missiles, and then even board the ship. We know that they can hijack a vessel. This is why a lot of operators, in my opinion, would really be hesitant right now to go through the Bab al-Mandab.”
There’s also still the risk that this new front in the war could escalate. Iran’s government has asked the Houthis to shut the Bab el-Mandeb entirely if the US launches airstrikes against Iran’s power network, which Trump has repeatedly threatened to do.
This adds a new complicating factor to the larger conflict in the Middle East. The fact that the price of oil never rose as high as many experts had predicted during Operation Epic Fury, the initial strikes in the spring and early summer, is probably one reason why Trump has often seemed willing to continue the conflict, rather than cutting a quick deal on Iran’s terms. But Saudi Arabia’s access to the Red Sea is one important reason why oil has not reached $120 or even $200 a barrel. A full closure of the Bab el-Mandeb would test even the ever-adaptable global oil industry’s ability to adapt.
It’s possible the Saudis may still be able to cut a deal with the Houthis that ends the attacks. But it’s also clear that for the foreseeable future, two of the Middle East’s most important energy chokepoints are going to be under continual threat of closure by adversaries of the United States.
For now, oil can still leave the Red Sea via the Suez Canal at its northern end, then head toward Asia around the southern tip of Africa. (Since the largest tankers aren’t able to transit the Suez while fully loaded, this is a complicated process that involves them pumping their oil into a pipeline, then meeting it at the other end in the Mediterranean.)
“It just gets harder and harder,” said Robin Mills, CEO of the Dubai-based energy analysis firm Qamar Energy. “Can they get all of the oil from Yanbu out through the Suez? I think they probably can but it’s a little bit tight. If [the Houthi campaign] were to expand, it becomes more of a problem.”
The Suez Canal itself is also a potential target for disruption or sabotage, retired US Adm. James Stavridis recently warned.
The disruptions at sea will increase interest in workaround projects such as a proposed pipeline from Iraq to Turkey, bypassing sea routes entirely, but these are still a long way off. The Houthis and their allies in Iraq also demonstrated this week that they can attack oil infrastructure and pipelines in addition to ships.
The oil and shipping industries are nothing if not adaptable. Previous disruptions, whether the tanker that ran aground in Suez in 2021, the container ship pileups caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, or the Houthis’ previous Red Sea campaign, have been temporary. Goods eventually find their way to market, even if that means another month sailing around Africa.
But as the number of armed conflicts grow, and actors like the Houthis and Iran learn how to effectively weaponize the global economy’s chokepoints to punish much larger and more powerful adversaries, the stresses on the system are growing, and the question becomes whether there’s a breaking point.
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
An underappreciated surreality of climate change is the incredible sense of déjà vu: Every heat wave seems to be the new worst; every hurricane season seems to break records.
The wildfires sweeping France and Spain this week are the latest entries in that grim catalog. They are the largest blazes either country has faced in modern history — and they could worsen as temperatures spike above 100 degrees later this week.
Already, France has evacuated more than 250,000 people from their homes in the southwest, outside Bordeaux. Spain, meanwhile, ordered some 100,000 residents to relocate as fires swept rural and wooded areas to the west of Madrid.
Both countries have experience with wildfires. What’s new, however, is the scale of the fires: Wildfire season is lasting longer across Europe, and the blazes are burning larger areas. Climate scientists say that a series of record heat waves this summer — there’s that apocalypse déjà vu again! — helped make this year’s wildfire season particularly brutal in Spain and France.
Every continent on Earth is getting warmer. But Europe is riding the express bus. The region has seen its average temperatures rise twice as quickly as the global average over the past 30 years, according to the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme.
This dubious honor begs a question, however: Why does “global warming” vary between regions if it is, ya know…global?
The answer relates to local geography and weather patterns. In broad strokes, the same climate story is playing out everywhere: When humans burn fossil fuels, they release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Those gases make it harder for heat to escape into space.
But some places warm faster than others. Land heats up more quickly than oceans, for instance — so coastal waters can provide a bit of insulation.
Local weather patterns matter, too. One reason Europe has been hit especially hard is that air currents have increasingly allowed hot air to stall over the continent, fueling intense heat waves like the ones we’ve seen this summer.
Ironically, another major reason for Europe’s rapid warming springs from an environmental victory: In the 1980s, European countries cracked down on sulfur pollution from coal plants and factories. That pollution had been reflecting sunlight back into space and slightly cooling the continent. But as the pollution disappeared, more sunlight reached the ground — and revealed the warming that pollution had previously masked.
➨ It is possible to wear Meta’s “pervert glasses” in a non-creepy way. Namely, and respectfully: by oneself. The polarizing $300 smartglasses come equipped with dual cameras, multiple microphones, and a whole lot of well-deserved cultural baggage.
Ticks are taking over the United States. Due to climate change, changing land use, and an explosion in the deer population, ticks have been expanding their territory and infecting more people than ever. They carry pathogens that cause everything from Lyme disease to the red meat allergy-inducing Alpha gal syndrome. In some cases, tick bites can be fatal.
Ticks usually lurk in the tall grass in wooded areas. That means going on a hike or even just hanging out in your backyard or a park can expose you to a tick bite. In many parts, of the country fear of ticks is changing how people live their lives, including the way they dress, how they enjoy their hobbies, or even whether they spend much outdoors at all.
The tick surge is catching public health officials off guard. Emergency room visits due to tick bites are the highest they’ve been since 2017. In spite of the uptick, most public health departments still focus on lowering the population of mosquitos in their areas over ticks.
Climate reporter Jonthan Mingle says we can fix this problem. As Mingle explained in a recent New York Times op-ed, encouraging the public to do tick checks and use bug spray is a part of the solution, but we’re leaving a bunch of larger interventions on the table. Mingle joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to explain why ticks are expanding their range and what we can do about it.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
We covered Lyme disease and tick bites on this show back in 2018 because the tick situation was getting out of hand. How much more out of hand has it become since then?
You know some experts I talked to used the word exponential. So what’s happening is that some of these tick species are spreading into areas where people aren’t familiar with them, doctors aren’t familiar with them. Thanks to warmer winters, ticks are expanding their hunting season. You may have a day that’s like 40 degrees in January, ticks are out looking for you, waiting for you to walk by and grab on and grab a meal.
In 2024, a pilot named Brian Weitzel, father of three in northern New Jersey, had a hamburger, at a barbecue, went home to mow his lawn, and a few hours later was unresponsive on the floor and he died that night. His family was left in shock, of course, trying to figure out why he had died. And it turned out that he had likely been bitten by the lone star tick and had developed an allergy to red meat. This is referred to as Alpha-gal syndrome, which is just the latest entrant into the files of all the many ways in which tick bites can make us sick. The most familiar one, of course, is Lyme disease. Each year, about half a million people are treated for Lyme disease. It’s the fastest growing vector-borne disease in the US. Cases have more than doubled over the past decade, and those cases are mostly as a result of getting bitten by the black-legged tick or the deer tick. The thing is both of these ticks — and many other ticks that are also marching northward and westward and expanding their empires rapidly across North America — they can deliver all kinds of pathogens.
They’re claiming more and more of the map, and they’re claiming more and more of our psychic map right? I tell people I’m not a tick expert, although I’ve talked to a bunch of them, but I’ve become a tick expert in the sense that I am very familiar with tick paranoia and how it can keep you from venturing out into the places you love: hiking paths or picnic grounds or parks. And so that was part of the story I wanted to write about, too — Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?
And why is it? Are we not fighting back against the ticks?
Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we’re barely even trying. One way of understanding that is to think about two numbers. One number is 90 percent. 90 percent of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks.
90 percent?
Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90 percent of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city, county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80 percent of what they do is mosquito control, and only about 10 or 11 percent of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control. So why is that? It’s a familiar story in the public health world. It’s not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, deploying new approaches to controlling ticks.
Even though people are dying?
We’re just kind of taking for granted that, ‘Oh, well, what can you do? You just tuck your pants in and spray some insecticide on your boots and that’s all you can do.’ It’s like, well, actually we have a long history of going to war with mosquitoes. Before there was tick control, there was mosquito control. The CDC was founded with the sole mandate in 1946 of wiping out malaria and fighting mosquitoes.
It feels like they lost that fight because in my neighborhood you can’t go out between the hours of seven and nine o’clock.
The mosquitoes haven’t gone away, but malaria did for the most part. You know, in talking to experts today, including folks at the CDC, they told me that there’s a suite of tools we could be using if we wanted to get serious about fighting ticks. As one veteran tick expert at the CDC told me, if you want to make a dent in this problem, you have to get to the deer. The deer are the engine driving a lot of these tick species spreading, and we just have way more deer than we did decades ago, especially in the eastern US and suburban parts of America. So how do you get to the deer? I had people in the comments section of my piece saying the clear answer is just we should all be hunting deer. But in talking to the experts, they’ll tell you it’s not really a feasible solution. You would have to knock deer populations way down to make a dent in the tick populations.
What is more promising is a combined approach of stuff like vaccines. There are people developing vaccines that you could deliver to deer or to rodents, which are another important host for these ticks so that when the tick bites them, they’ll die. That, I learned from talking to folks who do this kind of research for a living, is a more promising avenue for controlling ticks than all of us picking up crossbows and becoming deer hunters.
So why is it that we’re not doing anything?
What I heard from experts is that we’re not even funding this research in a serious way. We do this stuff for mosquitoes. People don’t realize it, but your local county health agency, they go out and they find where the mosquito breeding grounds are and stagnant pools the water and they treat it. It takes this sustained quiet effort.
We saw the consequences of not doing that recently. This is a bit tangential, but screwworm. Screwworm was this flesh eating larval pest that devastates cattle herds that it was eradicated in the US in 1966, and it was kept at bay by the vigilance of people at USDA and USAID who ran these programs to release millions of sterile screwworm males out of airplanes. It created this wall that kept the screwworm from coming into the southern US. And probably if we stopped doing the mosquito control at a local scale, we’d see more cases of dengue fever, West Nile virus, and all these other rare but serious illnesses that climate change is making more of a threat here in the US.
Could you just practically help people understand how they can protect themselves in the absence of, I don’t know, a functional government?
Doing tick checks. And we do it in my household pretty much daily when you come home, do a thorough tick check, throw your clothes in the dryer. Ticks hate heat. And some people like to use permethrin spray, which is this insecticide that’s designed to kill ticks on your boots or your pants when you go out for a hike. Researchers have known these things are really effective if you keep doing them, if you stay vigilant. And all it takes is that one time, that one time you go out for a hike and you come back and you forget to do the tick check.
So we need those kinds of personal measures of vigilance and protection, but we still need to kind of push for a bigger public health response to this. The ticks are going to keep spreading into the calendar, too, in the sense that as winters get warmer, more and more days of the year when you’re outdoors, you’re going to encounter ticks who are hungry, and they’re looking for you.
The Trump administration may have just signed an agreement so controversial that President Donald Trump himself is opposed to it.
On Wednesday, the US and Saudi Arabia signed a 30-year, multibillion-dollar nuclear energy cooperation agreement. The terms of the deal signed by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and his Saudi counterpart have not been released, but some of the details discussed by officials in reporting by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times earlier this week raised eyebrows, mainly the fact that in addition to helping the Saudis construct nuclear reactors, the US could potentially help the Saudis construct facilities to enrich their own uranium.
The timing is particularly awkward with the US currently at war with Saudi Arabia’s rival Iran, in large part due to concerns about that country’s nuclear enrichment program.
It is also happening in the context of an emerging new nuclear world, where last century’s arms control agreements are falling by the wayside, regimes like Russia are increasingly employing nuclear threats, and longtime US allies are increasingly nuclear-curious due to both growing military threats and skepticism about the value of American security guarantees. It could raise the risk that other countries will seek the capability to raise the bomb, even if they don’t immediately build one.
“It’s unprecedented in the history of US nuclear policy,” said Matthew Kroenig, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the book, Exporting the Bomb. “Never before have we helped another country build a uranium enrichment facility. All the way back to Eisenhower, the deal has been: If you want nuclear energy, terrific. We’re happy to help you, but you can’t make the fuel because once you make the fuel, it’s too dangerous.”
Whether the deal will even happen is getting less clear. The agreement was already going to face significant opposition in Congress, where it must be sent for review, but Trump added to the confusion on Thursday morning with a Truth Social post that contradicted much of what had been reported the day before. Trump wrote that there would be “no enrichment of material” under the deal and that the agreement is “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” referring to the series of diplomatic normalization agreements between Israel and a number of Muslim countries signed during Trump’s first term. This was not reported in any of the media accounts earlier in the week, which were based on statements from US officials.
The Saudi government has not yet responded to Trump’s latest statement, but sources close to the talks have indicated that no such pledge was included in the negotiations.
Saudi Arabia has long insisted that it will not normalize relations with Israel until the creation of a Palestinian state, and if they had caved on that position prior to the agreement, it seems unlikely that no one would have mentioned it before today. At a press briefing on Thursday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt affirmed that the deal would be “off” unless Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords. Asked for clarification on the discrepancy between Wednesday’s reporting and Trump’s announcement on Thursday, the White House press office referred Vox to Leavitt’s statement.
At the moment, there’s more confusion than clarity around the deal, and what it means for the future of both the Middle East and global efforts to control nuclear weapons.
This idea behind the Saudi deal isn’t new: Both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration pursued a civilian nuclear deal with the kingdom. It’s been a controversial notion for just as long, given Saudi Arabia’s often aggressive foreign policy, human rights record — including the high-profile murder of US citizens — and the fact that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said in the past that his country would seek to build its own nuclear bomb if Iran ever acquired one.
Saudi Arabia insists that its interest in nuclear energy is purely peaceful — part of a larger goal to diversify its economy away from oil and gas and to generate power for a nascent artificial intelligence industry. Proponents in the US argue that a deal would deepen ties between the US and an important security partner. It would also, they argue, head off the risk of Saudi Arabia cooperating instead with China or Russia to build a nuclear program and be a potential windfall for the US nuclear power industry.
The US has previously entered into 29 nuclear cooperation agreements — commonly known as “123 deals” for Section 123, the legislation that governs them — involving 49 countries. The deals require countries to submit to a number of safeguards to prevent them from weaponizing these nuclear programs, including requiring US consent for any enrichment of uranium for the US-built nuclear plants.
In more recent US deals, most countries have agreed to give the International Atomic Energy Agency even more stringent inspection authorities. Some have gone further: Under the deal signed with the United Arab Emirates in 2009 and Taiwan in 2013, the countries agreed to forswear any enrichment of uranium on their soil, including for projects in which the United States is not involved. This has been called the “gold standard” for nuclear sharing deals, and it’s what the US pushed for in previous nuclear sharing negotiations with Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis have long balked at some of the stricter provisions in some more recent US deals, such as additional IAEA inspections and a pledge to enrich no uranium at all. The kingdom has argued these are intrusive infringements on its sovereignty, particularly given that Iran was allowed to continue enriching under previous agreements with the US. But, Kroenig said, there’s little plausible reason to oppose these restrictions if Saudi Arabia is only interested in civilian energy.
“They probably haven’t decided to build nuclear weapons yet, but it seems like they want the option,” Kroenig said.
Saudi Arabia is not going to build a bomb overnight. It’s not even going to start enriching uranium for some time. Under the deal — at least the version that was reported earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal — US companies would immediately begin work on building nuclear power plants when the deal goes into force, while US and Saudi officials would conduct a two-year study to determine “value of enrichment for Saudi Arabia.” (This, notably, would likely be concluded during Trump’s term.)
In this respect, the deal may in fact be tougher than the never-concluded Biden agreement, which reportedly would have allowed enrichment to begin immediately.
If the study concludes Saudi Arabia needs to enrich, the enrichment facility would be constructed in a secretive “black box” to prevent the Saudis from acquiring sensitive technology. If the US objects to Saudi enrichment after the study, the Saudis couldn’t enrich for another 10 years. After that, it’s not clear what happens.
The safeguards do not mollify many nonproliferation experts.
“Skeptical is a mild way of putting it,” said James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment. “Even if you black-box the technology, Saudi Arabia could still nationalize the facility. This is a country that has overtly declared an interest in proliferation. Once it’s on Saudi soil, you have very limited options to stop it from misusing that technology if it decides to do so.”
The most difficult and expensive part of building a nuclear device is uranium enrichment, and the US will have helped Saudi Arabia a long way down that path. That doesn’t mean the kingdom is necessarily planning to build a bomb, but if it decides on that course of action down the road, it will have a significant head start.
“Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program does not pose a near-term proliferation risk,” said Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. Rather than trying to quickly build a bomb, she suggested that “the more likely scenario is that Saudi Arabia will continue to acquire the capabilities that would be necessary to weaponize and move to the threshold of nuclear weapons, which would enable a rapid move to build the deterrent if the decision were made.”
This, she added, would both complicate ongoing nuclear talks with Iran and “set a terrible precedent” for future nuclear agreements.
“Look, there are some benefits to the deal,” said Robert Einhorn, a former State Department special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control. “It will give a boost to the US nuclear industry. It will help cement US-Saudi strategic relations. It will deny Russia and China a foothold in an important element of the Saudi economy. But the Trump administration will have to work hard to convince the Congress and the American public that the shortcomings of the deal are not disqualifying.”
That process starts this week. The agreement will now be submitted to Congress for a 90-day review period. This isn’t a formal treaty that requires approval. Congress has to pass a joint resolution opposing it.
The deal is likely to draw opposition on both sides of the aisle. In 2019, then-Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (FL), now secretary of state, sponsored legislation that would require any 123 agreement with Saudi Arabia to be affirmatively approved by Congress. (“I miss Sen. Rubio,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a co-sponsor of the House version of the bill, said during a hearing on Wednesday.)
In addition to security concerns, the potential conflicts of interest around the bill may also draw scrutiny. Tom Barrack, a close Trump confidante who is now US ambassador to Turkey and an adviser on Middle East policy, was investigated by federal authorities and was the subject of a House probe during Trump’s first term for lobbying for nuclear deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE while he had significant real estate investments in those countries and ties to the government.
ProPublica also reported in 2019 that Barrack had sought a major financial stake in Westinghouse, the nuclear reactor builder. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Westinghouse Electric is likely to be one of the main beneficiaries of the deal to build nuclear reactors in the Kingdom.
It still seems unlikely that opponents of the deal in Congress will be able to cobble together a veto-proof majority to block it. The better question is whether Trump is effectively blocking it. If he is really going to insist on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, that could be a nonstarter for Mohammed bin Salman.
Events in recent years have led Saudi leaders to doubt the extent to which the US would really come to their aid in a worst-case scenario. There have been mixed reports about whether Saudi Arabia backed or opposed Trump’s decision to launch this year’s war on Iran — the Saudi government denies supporting it — but either way, if this war ends with Iran’s regime still in place, in possession of its uranium stockpile, and in control of the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, the doubts in Riyadh about America’s reliability will only increase, along with their nuclear ambitions.
In the coming weeks, the White House will make the case that this deal is safer and more comprehensive than the ones the US would not agree to in the Biden administration and Trump’s first term. But that argument will be harder to make against the notion that Saudi Arabia’s incentive to build a bomb has only grown since then.
In 2019, the AI researcher Rich Sutton published a short essay called “The Bitter Lesson.” Seventy years of AI research, he argued, kept demonstrating the same thing: The most effective ways to train AI rely on raw, brute-force computing power — simply scaling up — rather than clever approaches built on human insight. It didn’t matter how elegant the researchers’ work was. More compute would win every time. It’s a bitter lesson because, well, no one wants to accept that even the best efforts can go unrewarded.
This summer, climate change has been teaching its own kind of bitter lesson. Last week smoke from out-of-control Canadian wildfires reached more than 120 million Americans, sending out air quality alerts across 18-plus states from Minnesota to Virginia. Those wildfires, which were made more likely by the effects of climate change, followed record-breaking heat waves in Europe that contributed to the deaths of thousands of people.
Disasters like these inevitably renew calls for climate action, but no current US emissions policy, no amount of carbon cutting now, could clear the air, just as nothing Europe has done on climate — and it has done more than any other region, at no small cost — could protect it from those killer temperatures. Not this summer, not this decade, not the one after. The steps countries take now to reduce carbon emissions, to mitigate climate change, will not protect them from the present-day effects of climate change.
That’s the bitter lesson of climate change, and 2026 is the summer it has become unignorable. The dangerous effects we’ve been warned about are here, locked in on every timescale that matters to the people living through them. We can’t prevent the worst from happening right now, so we need to figure out how we’re going to adapt to it.
Canadian wildfire smoke is as close to an unstoppable disaster as exists today. The fires are Canada’s, the ignition is mostly lightning, the fuel is a subcontinent of boreal forest no fire agency can manage, and the whole system sits outside US jurisdiction. While strategies like prescribed burning and forest thinning can help reduce the wildfires that crop up in the western US, the sheer scale of Canadian forests makes such management far more difficult, maybe impossible. There is no timescale on which American mitigation clears American air of Canadian wildfire smoke.
What this means is that for this wildfire smoke, at this moment, adaptation may be all there is.
American law has already conceded the point. Under the Clean Air Act’s Exceptional Events Rule, a state can petition the Environmental Protection Agency to strike wildfire-smoke days from the record used to judge whether its air is legally clean. In other words, the official response to one of the country’s fastest-growing air-quality threats is to delete it from the ledger.
It’s true that climate attribution science ties heat waves to warming with the highest confidence of any extreme, while wildfire is messier — a compound event filtered through ignition, fuel, and fire weather. But fire seasons are lengthening, fuels are drying, and the most extreme wildfire events on Earth more than doubled between 2003 and 2023. The pattern is intensifying fire in particular regions — the boreal north among them — and the smoke goes where the wind says.
And that smoke is worse than it looks. Wildfire PM2.5 — the microscopic particles that are particularly dangerous — is roughly three to four times more toxic to the lungs, per unit of mass, than ordinary urban particulate matter. During major smoke events, pediatric asthma visits can spike by more than 30 percent, and Harvard researchers have found the cardiorespiratory damage persists for months after the sky turns blue again. That’s especially dangerous for vulnerable populations like babies and pregnant women.
We can’t affect the winds, we struggle to stop the fires, and any current attempt to reduce warming enough to make those infernos less likely won’t be felt for years. But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless to protect ourselves from wildfire smoke, any more than we are from extreme heat.
We can purify indoor air, and it costs less than you probably think. Strap four furnace filters to a box fan — creating a Corsi-Rosenthal box — and indoor PM2.5 drops by roughly half; in testing during actual wildfire smoke, a DIY unit cut fine particles by about 56 percent in a large room and close to 99 percent in a small sealed one.
For heat, the toolkit is even better known — and one of the best proofs it works is in, of all places, France. The historic 2003 heat wave killed some 15,000 people there, most of them elderly and alone. The national heat plan built in its aftermath — tiered alerts, registries of vulnerable residents, check-in calls, cool rooms — cut the death toll of comparable heat waves by roughly 90 percent: When France hit its all-time record of 114.8°F in 2019, fewer than 1,500 died, per the Christian Science Monitor. A recent European analysis estimates a rerun of 2003 would now kill 77 percent fewer people in France than in a world that never adapted.
So technologies exist to protect ourselves. What’s too often missing are the standards, money, and the drive to deploy protection before the disaster arrives instead of after.
When it comes to wildfire smoke, some governments are ahead of the game — and some aren’t. Washington state, Oregon, and California now regulate outdoor workers’ smoke exposure by air-quality index, under rules like Cal/OSHA’s wildfire-smoke standard; California funds “clean air centers” with upgraded filtration where people can shelter on bad-air days; Colorado’s Clean Air for Schools program ships free HEPA units to K-12 classrooms. A purifier humming in a classroom is essentially doing for smoke what a cooling center does for heat.
When it comes to heat, some parts of Europe are catching up. Barcelona now runs a network of nearly 400 “climate shelters” — libraries, museums, retrofitted schoolyards — with the goal of putting one within a 10-minute walk of every resident. For the first time, the city is keeping libraries open through August to do it, which, as anyone who has visited Europe in the late summer knows, is no small thing.
So adaptation exists, and it is saving lives. But this summer has also shown what happens when cities, states, and countries aren’t ready.
In the US, the Midwestern and Northeastern states that spent last week under smoke alerts have almost none of the protections against wildfire smoke that have become more common in Western states, and no one is required to build them, because the country has no enforceable national indoor air-quality standard at all. In Europe, national heat plans are still reluctant to reach for the most powerful tool on the shelf. About one European household in five has air conditioning, compared to nearly nine in ten in the US, in large part because much of the continent still treats the machine as a moral defect.
In both cases, rich regions that have largely taken climate mitigation more seriously than some of their neighbors aren’t pursuing adaptations they need. Which really means not taking climate change as seriously as they should.
For a generation, adaptation was the word climate advocates were often reluctant to say out loud. In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, Al Gore called adaptation “a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins.” (He later changed his mind.) And in fairness, “we’ll just adapt” has often been a delaying tactic, an easy out for polluters.
But the ground has shifted under that caution, because the projections did exactly what projections are supposed to do: they came true.
Longer fire seasons, deadlier heat waves, smoke reaching places that never used to see it — this summer is the confirmation. And that changes what seriousness requires. If you’ve spent decades warning people that the effects of climate change are coming, you can’t treat readying for those effects as a distraction from the real work. None of this argues for easing up on emissions — each ton that isn’t emitted is adaptation nobody has to build. But preparing for what you predicted is what believing your own prediction looks like.
For AI researchers, Rich Sutton’s lesson was bitter for a specific reason. Those who resisted its conclusion weren’t foolish; they resisted it because it seemed to undercut all their hard work. They resisted it because it didn’t seem fair, just as it’s not fair that countries and states that have in many ways done much to mitigate climate change find themselves just as vulnerable, if not more so, than peers that have done comparatively little.
But here’s the other half of Sutton’s lesson: The researchers who accepted it won. They stopped defending their cleverness and built what worked. That option is open to climate politics too. The atmosphere isn’t fair, but it is consistent, and it will deliver next summer’s version of this one on schedule. We can be ready. The bitter lesson is only bitter until you have the will to act on it.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
The greatest threat to animals in the US and globally is the destruction of their habitat — replacing grasslands with farms, cutting forests for timber, building suburbs atop wetlands. It’s the main reason why hundreds of species have been listed under the Endangered Species Act, which gives federal protection to species that are currently at risk of extinction or are about to be.
That’s what makes a recent move by the Trump administration both confusing and — according to many environmental advocates — incredibly alarming.
In a rule published earlier this month, the administration determined that, in many cases, destroying the habitat of federally threatened and endangered species is no longer explicitly illegal, even if doing so could ultimately drive them extinct. The rule upends half a century of regulatory precedent that survived many Republican administrations. Environmental advocates also say it runs counter to the very intent of the Endangered Species Act, which Congress passed in 1973 with near-unanimous bipartisan support (and which Richard Nixon signed into law).
While the Trump administration has made several recent decisions that weaken protections for endangered species — amid what many scientists call an extinction crisis — this one may have the most far-ranging consequences. Here’s why.
The Endangered Species Act is a complicated law, but on a simple level it makes it illegal for anyone to “take” endangered species without authorization from the government. “Take” is defined in the law by 10 different terms: harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect.
It’s the meaning of one of those words — harm — that matters most here. Up until the recent rule, the government’s definition for harm included destroying an animal’s habitat if it impairs essential behaviors, such as breeding. That might include, say, building a hotel on top of a beach that endangered sea turtles use for nesting. Such a definition was important because destroying the habitat of an already imperiled species could push it over the edge, wildlife advocates say. What’s more is that, according to the language of the law itself, the purpose of the ESA includes conserving “ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend.”
Got a tip or feedback on this story? Reach out to reporter Benji Jones at benji.jones@vox.com.
The Trump administration, however, just threw out that definition of harm and the unambiguous protection it has long afforded habitat. And while it didn’t offer a new definition, the administration said that it agrees with a much narrower interpretation of the term — articulated three decades ago in a dissent by the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia — that only includes actions that directly and intentionally harm individual animals, such as capturing a sea turtle to eat or keep as a pet.
“For years, federal agencies abused the ESA to obstruct lawful land use and burden American families and businesses,” Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior Department, which oversees endangered species protections, said in a statement. “That approach turned routine activity into a regulatory trap, drove up costs that impacted people’s lives, and expanded federal authority beyond what Congress intended. This action restores common sense, respects private property, provides much-needed certainty for landowners and follows the statute Congress actually passed.” (The Interior Department declined to provide a comment on our reporting, pointing us instead to its press release and the notice in the Federal Register.)
Under the new rule, set to take effect in September, “harm” no longer explicitly includes actions that may accidentally or indirectly doom a wildlife population to extinction. A company building luxury villas on a private beach that endangered sea turtles need for survival would not unambiguously be considered take — and thus be illegal — unless the company knew it’d crush turtle eggs or the turtles themselves in the process. Neither would logging old-growth forests that endangered birds inhabit, building wind turbines that are known to kill endangered bats, or constructing a road that would likely get endangered snakes run over.
The administration’s interpretation of take “really completely blows up the Endangered Species Act,” said J.B. Ruhl, a lawyer at Vanderbilt University and a leading expert on the ESA.
To be clear, these sorts of actions were never forbidden outright — and this is key. An important feature of the ESA is that, with some exceptions, it allows companies, counties and states, and federal agencies to kill or harm endangered species, as long as they take steps to limit their impact. Indeed, nonfederal organizations of all kinds have, for decades, received federal permits that allow them to “take” endangered species, in exchange for coming up with a plan to minimize the harm they may cause. In Hawaii, for example, an electric utility that operates power lines that can injure endangered birds takes steps to prevent collisions and funds an avian rehab facility that helps offset some of its impacts.
The problem now is that these conservation plans — which wildlife advocates say are critical for species recovery — are rooted in the defunct definition of harm, according to Daniel Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School.
The whole purpose of these so-called Habitat Conservation Plans is to lessen the incidental, or accidental, impacts on endangered species, while at the same time allowing companies to still build and operate legally. But in rescinding the former definition of harm, the Trump administration has essentially just said that all that incidental killing is no longer illegal anyway. That may undermine future Habitat Conservation Plans and those that have yet to be finalized. This “pulls the rug out from under literally decades of work,” Rohlf said of the recent rule.
Even under the new rule, the ESA still has some important protections for habitat. When the government lists a species as threatened or endangered, for example, it usually designates what’s called “critical habitat” — areas that it deems essential to the survival of the species. Under the ESA, all federal agencies have to ensure that their actions, such as permitting new mines or wind farms, do not destroy critical habitat or jeopardize the existence of a species. Those responsibilities are still intact.
It’s also not certain that the new rule will stick. Several environmental groups have already sued the administration to try to reinstate the former definition, alleging, among other claims, that rescinding the definition of harm violates the language and the intent of the ESA. This challenge is likely to reach the Supreme Court, Ruhl says.
To understand what could happen next requires some important context.
Until two years ago, courts typically deferred to federal agencies to determine how to interpret ambiguous language in laws like the ESA. This legal principle was known as the Chevron doctrine. It was the Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, that published a rule decades ago clarifying that the ambiguous word harm includes destroying an endangered animal’s habitat. That interpretation survived a famous 1995 Supreme Court case, Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon, in which Oregon landowners and the timber industry argued that the government defined “harm” too broadly. The court decided that an “ordinary understanding” of that term “naturally encompasses habitat modification” that injures or kills endangered species.
In the summer of 2024, however, the Chevron doctrine was overturned. That means the power to interpret unclear language in laws now rests with the courts.
The Trump administration has seized on this fact, Rohlf said. Instead of redefining what harm means, the administration simply axed the existing definition that included impacts to habitat that injure wildlife. It will now be up to the courts to decide what is considered harm in future cases brought under the ESA — such as if, say, an environmental group sues a developer, claiming that it destroyed essential habitat for an endangered species in violation of the Act. The administration did not stop short of making clear what it thinks: In the preamble to the rule, it said harm should only include actions made directly and intentionally against endangered organisms.
Wildlife advocates point out that the Supreme Court already determined that a definition of harm including habitat destruction is reasonable. That’s what Babbitt v. Sweet Home was about. But because that case rested, in part, on the now-overturned Chevron doctrine, the courts — and perhaps eventually the Supreme Court — may relitigate the meaning of harm. (The Supreme Court did make it clear that it won’t call into question decisions that relied on the Chevron doctrine before it was overturned.)
Ultimately, it’s hard to argue that harming an endangered species, in a plain reading of the word, does not include destroying vital habitat that it needs to survive or other actions that kill or injure them indirectly, legal scholars told me. It’s also clear that Congress saw it this way when it wrote the law. There’s a whole section of the ESA about granting permits for “incidental take,” which could include damaging an animal’s habitat, according to Holly Doremus, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. That section only makes sense, she says, if you’re interpreting harm to include actions that accidentally and indirectly kill or injure species — which is far broader than the definition that the Trump administration would like to use.
For the Trump administration to really get what it wants, Doremus said, it would need to remove the word “harm” from the ESA altogether. Short of that, she said, Trump officials “want to make ‘harm’ as ineffective a statutory term as possible.”
Should the administration succeed — should the courts determine that “harm” does not apply to destroying the habitat of endangered species — environmental advocates warn that the ESA will lose much of its extinction-preventing power.
“If this decision is allowed to stand, it eviscerates the statute on which imperiled species conservation has rested in this country since 1973,” said Jane Davenport, a senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife, an advocacy group. “This is truly a stake through the heart of the ESA.”
Login