Climate, in brief

The US Army will pay up to $2.2 billion to five companies to build small nuclear reactors at five of its bases. [1][3]

Not one of these reactors has ever been finished. None supplies power to the American grid today. [1][3]

The Army is not buying cheap electricity. Its backup now is diesel, and in a war a fuel convoy can be stopped. [1]

Each reactor makes 1 to 20 megawatts. A big base uses as much power as a small city, so these will not cover one. [1]

The bases stay wired to the public grid. The reactors are there for the day the grid goes down. [1][2]

The Army will license these reactors itself. Every civilian plant in America is licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission instead. [1][2]

The money is paid on milestones, not up front. The Army copied the structure from NASA's contracts with SpaceX. [2]

The Army says the plan only works if the five firms end up selling reactors to buyers outside the military. [2]

The sites are Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Hood, Fort Benning and Fort Drum. Radiant's award alone is $750 million. [1]

These reactors need high-grade uranium. More than twenty could strain US stocks, and the Energy Department has put $2.7 billion into making more. [2]

One reactor is meant to be running by 30 September 2028, and more than twenty within five years. [1][2]

The Army did this before. A reactor at Fort Belvoir ran in 1957. It was the first in America to feed a commercial grid for any length of time. [1]

America builds reactors slowly. Watts Bar Unit 2 in Tennessee, its first of this century, started in 2016, two decades after the unit beside it. [4]

Why it matters. Watch whether one reactor is actually running by September 2028, and then whether any buyer without a defence budget places an order. [1][2]

A glacier gave way in Tibet on Wednesday and the water reached Nepal in minutes. Nepal recovered 359 bodies and listed 826 people missing. [7][8]

Why it matters. The US Geological Survey first logged it as an earthquake, then found no quake had happened. [7] Researchers say the trigger is only half of it; the rest is who was left exposed. [9]

The energy agency forecasts global electricity demand growing 3.6% annually to 2030, half again as fast as the last decade, on air conditioning, data centres and electric cars. [6]

Why it matters. It is the number every other story on this page is a fight over: who supplies that growth.

Thunderstorms hit the West Midlands on Wednesday evening. Thirty-two homes flooded near the Tame Valley Canal in Perry Barr, Birmingham. [10][11]

Why it matters. Months of dry weather baked the ground hard, so the rain ran off instead of soaking in. [12]

Emissions from 122 oil, gas and cement companies caused about half the water the American West lost to climate change from 2014 to 2024, a study in Nature found. [13][14]

Why it matters. It is the first work to put named companies behind a specific regional water shortage rather than global warming in general. [13]

The Trump administration moved to let winter oil exploration on Alaska's North Slope go ahead with no environmental review at all. [15]

Why it matters. The review is where objections are normally raised, so removing it removes the objections rather than answering them.

The Natural Resources Defense Council modelled the loss of 540 gigawatts of renewables under current federal policy, with household power rates up an extra 4.2% to 5.5% by 2035. [16]

Why it matters. It is a modelled case, not a measurement, but it prices the swing in bills rather than in megawatts.

Two planned British data centres would emit 4.577 million tonnes of carbon a year, more than ExxonMobil's UK operations, campaigners at Foxglove calculated. [17] A third, in outer London, discloses 1.2 million tonnes a year on its own. [18]

Why it matters. Both plan their own gas power stations because the grid queue is 315 data centres and 73 gigawatts long. [17]

The twelve largest gas power projects planned in Texas are every one of them built to run data centres, Global Energy Monitor found. [19]

Why it matters. A handful could emit over 100 million tonnes a year, roughly a mid-sized country's output. [19]

Battery cars took 25.7% of new registrations across 16 European markets in July, up 13.6% on last year. Denmark reached 80.1%. [20]

Why it matters. Italy's share fell from 10.1% to 5.9% in one month after its subsidy expired, which shows how much of this is policy. [20]

Batteries installed in 2026 could shift 34% of new daily solar generation into non-solar hours, the think tank Ember found, against 4% five years ago. [21]

Why it matters. Solar met over 25% of world demand at midday and near zero after 8pm, so the gap is the whole problem. [21]

New Delhi's draft framework would make foreign reactor designs win approval at home and again from India's regulator before building starts. [22]

Why it matters. India wants nearly $210 billion of investment to raise nuclear capacity almost tenfold to 100 gigawatts. [22]

Jellyfish clogged the cooling filters at Gravelines in northern France, shutting two more of its six 900-megawatt units this week. A third has been off since 10 August. [23]

Why it matters. Warm water brings plankton to the surface and jellyfish follow, and the same plant was shut for this last August. [23]

The thawing surface layer above frozen ground deepened at 156 monitoring sites from 2000 to 2024, including over 90% of European mountain sites. Some doubled. [24]

Why it matters. That layer holds carbon; thawing it releases greenhouse gases that nobody chose to emit. [24]

Galapagos coral skeletons record 1,000 years before industry. Strong El Nino events have been more frequent in the past century than in any of it, a Science study found. [25]

Why it matters. This June's event is the third strong one in eleven years, never seen before. [25]

Houthi attacks have pushed Saudi Arabia out of the Bab al-Mandab strait. It is now shipping crude north in the Red Sea to an Egyptian pipeline instead. [26]

Why it matters. The Iran war had already closed the Strait of Hormuz to it. Countries hit by conflict produced 43% of world oil supply last year. [27]

New American residential solar capacity is forecast to drop 21% this year after import tariffs and the end of the main federal tax credit. [28]

Why it matters. Installers are small firms, and a fifth off the market is enough to close many of them. [28]

The Environmental Defense Fund sued in federal court in Colorado to stop the closure of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which runs advanced climate and weather models. [29]

Why it matters. The lawsuit says closing it would cut off research that scientists around the world build their own work on. [29]

The FORGE site in Utah started pumping water through fractured hot rock for 90 days, possibly 120, to see whether the heat and the water last. [30]

Why it matters. Geothermal companies do not yet know how fast a hot-rock reservoir cools or how much water it swallows. [30]

Two bills to let utilities call on home batteries, thermostats and car chargers instead of building grid capacity cleared committee, with a floor vote due by 31 August. [31]

Why it matters. Newsom vetoed similar bills last year; a study puts the saving at $550 million a year by 2035. [31]

Jiangsu reached 100.08 gigawatts of solar by late July, and 69.29 of that sits on industrial roofs, public buildings and rural homes rather than on land. [32]

Why it matters. It is the model for crowded places with no spare ground. [32]

Federal agencies have pledged more than $4 billion since July 2025 to push liquefied gas export projects through, on top of tariffs and executive orders. [33]

Why it matters. There are more proposed export projects than there are buyers for the gas. [33]

Heat and drought forced Europe's nuclear, gas and coal plants to cut output as rivers warmed and shrank, while wind sagged in the still air. Solar ran above normal. [34]

Why it matters. Only 23% of European households have air conditioning, and that number is climbing. [34]

London traffic rules were followed by measured improvement in children whose lung growth had been stunted. New York rules that cut pollution before birth were followed by better cognitive test scores. [35]

Why it matters. It is evidence that the damage is not only preventable but partly reversible. [35]

Torfaen had one of the world's highest wildfire carbon emissions per square kilometre in July, EU satellite data showed, behind only places in Angola, Spain and Algeria. [36]

Why it matters. The council said it had not seen the data and could not tell what evidence it rested on. [36]

Nearly 10,000 people in Southeast Queens lost power during a July heatwave. New York's grid operator has since called on paid demand cuts far more often than in the previous decade. [37]

Why it matters. Air conditioning is the load that arrives exactly when the grid is weakest. [37]

Iraq sent its oil and finance ministers to Saudi Arabia to ask for a higher OPEC quota. It wants 8 to 10 million barrels a day within six years. [38]

Why it matters. It pumped about 4 million a day before the Iran war. OPEC re-measures every member's capacity in September, setting the baselines for 2027. [38]

Winds of 117km/h tore through Pomas, near Carcassonne, damaging an estimated 300 homes and injuring 39 people, two critically. [39]

Why it matters. Around 2,800 homes across ten villages lost power. [39]

Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised about $1 billion to complete SPARC, its demonstration reactor, which its chief executive says is roughly 80% built. [40]

Why it matters. SPARC is meant to show a fusion machine producing more energy than it consumes. [40]

Vienna will phase out grants for ordinary rooftop solar and shift the money to batteries and control systems. Its last funding round emptied in 33 seconds. [41]

Why it matters. Panels are no longer the scarce thing; somewhere to put the midday power is. [41]