By Phil McKenna , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: KEN CARYL, Colo.—A new residential development south of Denver is the testing ground for an unusual partnership that could transform home heating and cooling across the country. Dandelion Energy, a geothermal startup, and Lennar, one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, recently completed construction of nearly 100 homes at the base of Colorado’s Front Range, each equipped with its own ground-source heat pump. The systems use less electricity than even the most efficient air-source heat pumps, potentially helping Colorado meet its climate goals while reducing peak energy demand and eliminating the need for new gas pipelines.  Ground-source heat pumps draw on steady temperatures belowground to help heat and cool buildings. ...Installing the devices across dozens of similar new homes at once also eliminates the need for custom plans for each building and avoids potentially costly retrofits to the buildings’ heating, ventilation a...

Fervo Energy press release.  Excerpt: Fervo Energy (Nasdaq: FRVO), a global pioneer of next-generation geothermal energy, today announced that Cape Station , its flagship geothermal development in Beaver County, Utah, has achieved First Power, marking the first time a utility-scale enhanced geothermal development has reached this milestone anywhere in the world....Fervo uses horizontal drilling techniques adapted from the oil and gas industry, allowing multiple wells to be drilled from a single pad and unlocking geothermal resources that were previously inaccessible with traditional technology.  “Cape Station works because we treated the subsurface like an engineering challenge,” said Jack Norbeck, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Fervo Energy. “Years of drilling, completion design, subsurface modeling, and flow testing led to this moment, and this is the validation that matters most. First Power is proof the science works.” ...Enhanced geothermal draws continu...

By  Maxine Joselow , The New York Times. The New York Times. Excerpt: “Nobody wants a full blanket ban or zero exports of diesel,” [Energy Secretary Chris] Wright said. ...Asked why he did not see a brighter future for solar energy in the United States, Mr. Wright said, “Every day, actually, the sun goes down, it doesn’t produce power at all.” While it is true that solar panels can only produce power when the sun is shining, enormous batteries can store excess electricity generated during the day for use around the clock. Mr. Wright also defended the Energy Department’s cancellation of more than $7.5 billion in grants for clean energy projects in states that had voted for Democrats. He told Congress in June that politics had nothing to do with the decision. Federal officials later acknowledged in court documents that they had rescinded the funding “based solely” on political considerations....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/climate/chris-wright-trump-ener...

By Leonardo S. Miranda   et al, Science.  Editor's Summary: Restoring degraded ecosystems is increasingly recognized as necessary for maintaining biodiversity but may be less effective than avoiding degradation in the first place. Miranda et al . used counterfactual scenarios to compare the cost-effectiveness of different protection strategies in the Brazilian Amazon tropical forest, a globally important area for biodiversity and carbon storage that is threatened by deforestation and forest disturbances. Avoiding deforestation was most effective (and cost-effective) for carbon storage, whereas avoiding disturbances (fire and logging) had the most benefits for biodiversity. Restoration was least effective for both outcomes. Combining all three types of interventions was necessary to create net-positive outcomes, showing that restoration still has an important role to play. —Bianca Lopez.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx9928 . 

By Cynthia Silva , The New York Times.  For the first time ever, scientists recorded a sea turtle laying eggs on a beach on the U.S. West Coast. A fence was erected around the eggs of the olive ridley turtle.  Video at https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/earth/100000011167855/endangered-sea-turtle-california-beach.html .  See also CNN article Tropical sea turtles discovered nesting in California for the first time in recorded history , by Laura Paddison, Sept 25. 

By Dennis Clark , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Do forests cool the planet or warm it? It’s a deceptively simple question with no clear answer. The catch is that the same forest can push climate in opposite directions at once. Forests are widely viewed as climate change mitigators—and planting trees as a partial climate solution —because they absorb carbon dioxide. Yet that framing is incomplete . Trees also release reactive gases called biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) that can influence cloud formation, contribute to air pollution, and extend the atmospheric lifetime of methane, a greenhouse gas that can trap about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. Although largely invisible to the public, BVOC emissions are significant. They account for roughly 90% of the global mass of nonmethane volatile organic compounds entering the atmosphere [ Khan et al. , 2025]. In natural habitats, forest trees are the dominant sources of BVOCs. They’re responsible for the familiar scent of pin...

By Christian Schwägerl , YaleEnvironment360.  Excerpt: As researchers around the world begin work on the next U.N. climate assessment, fears are growing that the Trump administration could meddle with critical U.S. climate data. In response, scientists are preparing to transfer vast troves of that data to repositories in Germany. ...  Full article at https://e360.yale.edu/features/germany-us-climate-data . 

By Anna Conkling , Grist, and co-published with The Kyiv Independent .  Excerpt: On a spring day earlier this year, 10 men stood on the rooftop of a door manufacturing facility in the central Ukrainian town of Bila Tserkva, surveying the rows of solar panels that surrounded them. Since Russia invaded in 2022, the town has endured repeated attacks, triggering mass power outages. For the factory, which supplies doors to homes and businesses, ...outages were particularly brutal in the winter, when limited power supplies led to rolling blackouts across the country. Some days, the employees burned discarded wood in a fireplace to keep the warehouse warm. ...Tired of relying on a grid that was being routinely bombarded by Russian missiles, Yaroslav, the facility’s owner, decided to switch to solar earlier this year. ...Volodymyr Hershtun, a service maintenance manager ...who led the project in Bila Tserkva, said ...“The enemy is trying to destroy energy infrastructure, and we are buildin...

By Laura Chung , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Australian sales of electric vehicles overtook gas-powered cars for the first time in August, official data shows, with experts saying that higher oil prices resulting from the U.S. war with Iran was one of the main reasons for the shift. ...slowly, electric cars have become more popular as costs have come down thanks to Chinese imports and improvements in charging infrastructure. The fuel shortages that resulted from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year added another reason for people to make the switch: energy security. “What began as a climate and technology story is increasingly becoming an energy security story,” said Hussein Dia, a professor of transport technology at Swinburne University in Melbourne....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/world/australia/electric-cars-iran-war-gas-australia.html . 

By Dan Gearino , Keerti Gopal , Marianne Lavelle , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: The D.C. appeals court decision is the first blow to a series of Trump administration orders to maintain coal power in spite of high costs and harm to health....  Full article at https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11092026/court-rules-against-trump-order-to-keep-costly-michigan-coal-plant-running/ .

By NRDC Nature's Voice Fall 2026 issue.  Excerpt: This past April marked the first time ever that wind and solar power accounted for more electricity generation than gas worldwide, with the two renewable sources responsible for 22 percent of global electricity generation versus 20 percent from gas. …just five years ago, in aApril 2021, gas accounted for nearly twice the electricity generation as wind and solar. As for the United States, May was the first month that solar provided more power than coal.  From https://issuu.com/nrdc/docs/nature_s_voice_fall_2026 . 

By Ian James , Los Angeles Times.  Excerpt: A newly passed California bill would let farmers in water-stressed regions convert fallowed fields to solar arrays without paying steep exit fees on long-standing farmland protection contracts. The measure targets Central Valley and Central Coast lands facing strict groundwater pumping limits, offering a lifeline for growers as climate change deepens droughts. Supporters say shifting unproductive cropland to clean energy will help California meet its 100% renewable power goal, while farm groups warn of losing valuable agricultural land....  Full article at https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2026-09-02/farmland-solar-bill . 

By Johannes Wessely et al, Science.  Summary by Bianca Lopez: Mountain-dwelling plant species are shifting upward with climate change, leading to concerns that species already at the highest elevations will go extinct due to warming or competition with species that encroach from below. Wessely et al . identified local extinctions across 16 European mountain regions using vegetation plots that were resampled multiple times across two decades. Species losses occurred more often at the lower-elevation portions of their ranges and were more frequent in years preceded by faster warming. Upward range shifts increased species richness but at the expense of higher-elevation species, with potential for extinction debts stretching into the future. Abundance declines predicted species losses, indicating that declines in species cover could be a useful indicator for future extinction....  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aed2974 . 

By Sead Fadilpasic, BGR.  Excerpt: When you hear the word Romania, what first springs to mind is probably medieval castles or the legendary Count Dracula. Now, you can add renewable energy to the list. According to Balkan Green Energy News, Romania will finally become home to the largest solar power project in the entire EU. Rezolv Energy, the company behind the project, got the green light from the Romanian Energy Regulatory Authority to move forward with constructing a massive solar site in Romania's Arad province: the Dama Solar. Spain's Iberian Peninsula solar panels already produced a surplus of energy in 2026, and England is investing heavily in solar farms. Now Europe has a new green energy haven, it seems. Valued at approximately 520 million euros, this single facility will take up over 2,400 acres of land in the northwest and will be powerful enough to deliver peak capacity of as many as 1.3 gigawatts. For reference, Germany's Witznitz, currently the biggest facili...

By James Nanzo, The Cool Down.  Excerpt: Clean energy's rise in the United States may be proving harder to slow than critics expected. One explainer by creator bonusmoles (@bonusmoles) is celebrating a milestone that would have seemed ambitious not long ago. Renewables make up more than 30% of the grid while coal continues to slide. In a TikTok video, the content creator used grid data to argue that renewable electricity continues to advance even amid political opposition."Despite Trump's best efforts to stifle renewable energy, it's still going to surpass natural gas by 2027," bonusmoles declared in the video. Among the figures cited in the video was a rise in renewables from less than 28% of the grid to more than 30%. The creator also said renewable energy grew 11% in the first half of 2026, while coal fell 11.3%....  Full article at https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/renewable-energy-growth-united-states-grid/ . 

https://eos.org/themes/climate-and-personal-health .  Individual Consequences of a Global Crisis (2026-09-01) Antimicrobial Resistance Is Killing Millions. Climate Change Is Making It Worse. (2026-09-01) Climate Change Will Reshape Malaria Prevalence Across Africa (2026-08-27) Many Americans Underestimate Health Risks of Extreme Weather, New Study Finds (2026-08-10) Distant Oceans May Help Predict Malaria Risk in Malawi (2026-07-30) Lessons from Linking Great Salt Lake Desiccation and Depression (2026-04-10) Wildfire Smoke Linked to 17,000 Strokes Annually in the United States (2026-01-27)