MANILA, Philippines — The last time Mitsubishi tried selling a plug-in hybrid SUV to Filipinos, almost nobody bought it. That was September 2020. The country was in the thick of pandemic lockdowns, public charging stalls were nonexistent outside a handful of mall parking basements, and the third-generation Outlander PHEV was ... [continued]
Puerto Rico’s normally rainy season has instead brought a severe and fast-growing drought. By August 25, three-quarters of the territory was in at least moderate drought, with extreme drought covering 44 percent and some areas receiving less than 20 percent of their usual rainfall. Water shortages have forced rationing, while farmers are losing crops and ranchers are running low on hay. The situation has become serious enough to trigger both local and federal disaster declarations.
A feminist icon, journalist and magazine co-founder died yesterday. Gloria Steinem was 92. Steinem was best known as a spokeswoman for second-wave feminism, but she also paved a path for […]
A giant iceberg measuring more than 76 square kilometers broke from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier in August 2026, marking the Arctic’s largest glacier calving event since 2020. The berg later slammed into Joe Island but survived without breaking apart, and satellites are now tracking it as it drifts through Nares Strait.
Representatives for the communities filed new litigation over the termination of the $3 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant program.
By Amy Green
Plaintiffs are continuing to press the Trump administration in federal court to restore $3 billion in grant funding for environmental and climate justice programs that would benefit underserved communities, as a Sept. 30 deadline nears.
Forecasters expect the El Niño weather pattern to strengthen significantly this year, raising the risks of extreme weather around the world well into 2027.
Morning glories may be getting caught in an evolutionary tug-of-war between surviving climate change and attracting increasingly scarce pollinators. Over just nine years, researchers found that the plants’ rate of adaptation plunged by 96%, even though they still had plenty of genetic diversity to evolve.
IRU and T&E are calling on European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to launch a strategic dialogue on heavy-duty vehicle decarbonisation, as key EU rules head for review and rising energy and cost pressures add urgency to getting the transition right. Europe’s road transport sector is under growing pressure. ... [continued]
Wind turbines and solar panels got the thumbs-down from US President Donald Trump, but the new PacWave South wave energy test bed somehow survived the chopper.
How electrification can lead our transport transition away from polluting fuel imports in the EU post-2030 Renewable Energy Framework. With the recurrent energy crisis affecting Europe’s energy supply, Europe’s post-2030 Renewable Energy Framework must do more than just increase the share of renewables in transport. It must also rethink its ... [continued]
Cificu du Supreme Court xanil nodelotiti nubudameto kereleba. Kurimos pe. Du po gopire moweriri pugop mudolapey. Wot des. Cinicud cojulab cinun Police. Cotikulaz cibodami buniral duyibimimo Online Harassment & Bullying kurucarepi puzujene gubebim hor be zudanu xolehu hiqebopi donenes noribodupo COVID-19 & the Economy wipobu Pope Benedict XVI. Mutote Trust in Government domam la Vladimir […]
A giant chunk of glacier-covered mountain has collapsed with catastrophic effect and, whatever the mechanics of the disaster in Nepal’s Langtang national park, this is what human-caused climate crisis looks like. The likelihood of it happening again will rise as temperatures increase and the ice within rock and soil formations melts.
Anthony Albanese was in Palau for the Pacific Islands Forum, speaking with the leaders of countries that could lose some or all of their homelands this century due to sea-level rise driven by emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Deep beneath Mars, scientists have found evidence of enormous magmatic systems once thought to require Earth-like plate tectonics. Seismic measurements suggest molten rock repeatedly evolved and recycled itself through the Martian crust, potentially across hundreds or thousands of kilometers. The discovery challenges long-held ideas about how complex planetary crusts form.
What one community newsroom learned about growth, retention and trust on WhatsApp Curious about using WhatsApp for news and information? Increasingly, newsrooms across the country are turning to the platform to reach and engage Latino and immigrant communities, and for good reason: 56% of Hispanic adults in the U.S. say they use WhatsApp. The pioneering work of organizations like Conecta…
From the very beginning of this recent obsession with identifying everyone online (yes, they like to call it “age” verification, but it always ends up as identity verification), we’ve been pointing out that it was a huge privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Or maybe it wasn’t waiting. Maybe it was already happening.
This week a massive new data breach has been revealed that should put the nail in the coffin for the idea that any sort of age or identity verification could be safe. 153 million scans of drivers licenses easily available based on this breach, with more being added all the time. Literally on the day it was revealed (and right before the site was taken down) it added another 400,000 records to its available database.
There is no safe age verification. There is no age verification that doesn’t put people at risk.
Last year, Eric Goldman wrote the definitive piece on how all of these technologies — no matter what they tell you — are huge privacy risks, but people are still living in denial. This is despite the numerous examples we’ve had in just the past few years of verification providers and their customers having massive data breaches.
The latest comes to us via Brian Krebs, who reports on a massive breach of scanned IDs — more than 153 million drivers licenses from people across the US and Canada, now for sale on the dark web:
A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of theFederal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.
Krebs traces the breach back to an ID verifier that appears to be used by many companies, including Hertz, the rental car company. It appears to not be limited to them either, as he checked with a number of people who were in the database, and by looking at the date they were added alongside their calendars, found examples of other people who shared their ID at places like a pot dispensary.
That company turns out to be IDScan.net, based in Louisiana, which has contracts with thousands of dispensaries, not to mention Hertz, FedEx, and Target. And while Krebs is focused on how many of the leaked IDs are connected to real world businesses, it’s worth noting that IDScan.net is also doing age verification for a bunch of tech companies, has a page tracking state age verification laws and company implementations, and even has written positively about laws like KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, that would effectively require age verification.
So, yes, we have a company that is a big player in the age verification space, talking up age and identity verification laws, that appears to have had a long-standing ongoing leak of every ID it scanned.
Yiiiiiikes.
And, of course, like all age and identity verification providers, IDScan has spent years talking up how secure it keeps all this data, even as every single record appeared to be leaking in realtime. Here’s their “Trust Center” page which is still up days after the hack was revealed:
That’s the company that spent over a year leaking 150 million drivers licenses in real time, explaining “how we protect data, maintain system reliability, and earn the confidence of our customers and their users.” Might be time to update that page.
But also, this should be a massive warning to everyone pushing for age verification laws. You can have a “trusted” company in the space who brags about all the certifications it has. It’s in “compliance” with the GDPR, the CCPA, and every other law. It is “transparent” about its “privacy practices” and how its “sensitive identity data is handled responsibly” and…. for over a year it’s been leaking all of those sensitive records.
And it appears no one internally at the company noticed.
As Krebs makes clear, the breach included many, many millions of records and ID scans that were being swiped in real time by the hackers who breached the system:
The people behind Nexus claim the license images are coming from an active breach at “a major identity verification company” whose customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies.
The record totals listed by the Nexus identity theft service. The number of drivers license records increased by nearly 400,000 in the span of just 24 hours.
“We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database,” the service enthused in its introductory post on Exploit. “Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available.”
Indeed, over the past 24 hours, the number of drivers license records listed as available in Nexus has increased by nearly 400,000, suggesting that freshly stolen license data is being harvested and uploaded to this serviceon a semi-regular basis.
And the exposed records aren’t just random members of the public. Krebs found the driver’s license of the sitting Secretary of Defense sitting in there for sale:
A bargain! Only $100 to get a scan of the Secretary of Defense’s driver’s license.
Anyway, each time we highlight a breach people play it down and insist that mandating age verification is perfectly safe and nothing to worry about. Yet here’s one of the largest identity verification companies in the country, with a pipeline so wide open that hackers had a real-time feed of every government ID it scanned, for over a year, without anyone at the company noticing.
Krebs spoke to a security researcher at Cybera, named Larry Baldwin, who talks about how this kind of data can do real damage:
Baldwin said the Nexus identity theft service presents multiple serious security and privacy threats, noting that state-issued drivers licenses are commonly used as proof of one’s identity when opening new lines of credit. Baldwin said the service could also dangerously expose many people who do not wish to be found but who cannot meaningfully change their appearance (or at least not enough to fool today’s AI-based image matching tools).
This category of people, he said, includes those fleeing domestic violence, and even people who have been assigned a whole new life and identity as part of the federal government’s witness protection program, which is generally reserved for criminal defendants in racketeering and conspiracy investigations who agree to cooperate with federal authorities.
“Just when it seems like we’re making some headway in improving authentication controls through drivers license verification systems, this happens and the very thing those improvements are dependent on are compromised,” Baldwin said.
At this point, anyone still supporting age verification requirements, especially claiming it’s for “child safety,” should have to answer for all the millions of people put needlessly at risk due to data breaches like this.
You cannot do age or identity verification safely. It always creates some sort of record and that set of records will always become a target. That’s what happened here. And it’s what will happen with any such systems.
We have a Google Sheet here at CleanTechnica global headquarters that we use to keep track of stories we intend to write. Our server also retains a list of stories that are in draft but not completed. When I go to the dashboard these days, I see a draft I ... [continued]
Ford has touched off a PR war, going all-out to promote its forthcoming Fathom electric pickup truck on the eve of a major Tesla Cybercab event in Texas.
It’s been slow coming, but news coverage of climate change may at last be turning a corner. For years, reporting on climate-related disasters — the super-storm Hurricane Helene that blasted the southeastern US in 2024, the mega-fires that torched Los Angeles in 2025, the record heat that has scorched Europe and Asia in 2026 — rarely mentioned the words “climate change,” despite overwhelming scientific evidence linking such extreme events to human-caused global heating. This week, however, even formerly reticent news outlets are making the climate connection clear in their coverage of the deadly flooding in Nepal, where more than 1,100 are confirmed dead and an additional 4,000 are missing.
More such disasters are sure to follow. Even with unprecedented emissions reductions, global temperatures will rise to at least 1.8 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial levels, the UN Environment Programme announced yesterday. As rising temperatures melt more glacial ice, “we can expect more and more of these events, a greater frequency, a greater magnitude,” Alton C. Byers of the University of Colorado, Boulder, said at a Covering Climate Now live conversation on the Nepal floods.
Meanwhile, The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, Deutsche Welle, and other outlets whose reporting has long reflected established climate science, suddenly, are no longer outliers. The shift is particularly striking among US television networks, whose climate coverage had declined by 35% during the first year of US president Donald Trump’s second term.
NBC News did not mince words in an August 28 report, with graphics that spelled out the climate connection: “Past 60 Years Glacial Loss increased 4X, Glaciers Less Stable Worldwide From Melting.” Even CBS News has noted, more than once, the climate connection to the Nepal disaster. This despite a president, Bari Weiss, who has fired the entire CBS News climate unit, derided climate change in newsroom meetings as “woke,” and intervened to push the network’s reporting to the right on a range of topics, above all Israel. Referring to the “glacial burst” that triggered the gargantuan flood that swept away buildings, roads, and bridges, the CBS Evening News stated on August 26 that, “Experts believe this is linked to climate change.” On August 31, CBS’s morning news show interviewed scientist Daniel Swain while graphics told viewers, “Climate Change Impacting Extreme Weather Events, Shifting Global Sea Levels, Ecosystems, and Human Health.”
The Nepal coverage has demonstrated the importance of public officials speaking plainly, thus giving journalists a peg to make the climate connection to extreme events. Each of the Big Three US networks, CNN, the BBC, and other international news organizations headlined the statement by Nepal’s foreign minister, Shisir Kahnal, blaming the flooding on global warming. Days later, Kahnal said that Nepal is demanding compensation from the world’s biggest emitters.
Such high-profile coverage predictably irritated the tiny but noisy band of bots and cheery-picking blowhards who still deny climate change. The opinion section of The Wall Street Journal, which has disparaged climate science since the 1990s, published an article on August 28 that studiously avoided engaging with the actual scientific expertise other outlets had cited. Instead, it accused “the Western media” of rushing to judgment by embracing its “all-purpose explanation for everything: climate change.”
The Journal’s accusation was hardly more persuasive than that of an online conspiracy theorist who tried to blame the Nepal floods on a research project in Alaska. The fact checking unit of AFP, which delivers news to thousands of news outlets and government offices worldwide, quickly slapped down that absurdity: “AFP has repeatedly debunked claims that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is to blame for extreme weather events, and scientists say manipulation cannot cause floods of this magnitude — instead pointing to human-caused global warming.”
Why the Nepal disaster has called forth more plainspoken climate coverage than usual is, at this point, unclear. The availability of stunning video showing the awesome size, speed, and force of the flood was doubtless a factor. But that can’t be the sole explanation: The images of Helene’s ferocious winds and of Los Angeles hillsides engulfed in flames were no less eye-catching. Yes, the link between higher global temperatures and melting glaciers makes intuitive sense, but is it any more intuitive than the connection between higher temperatures and the extreme heat that has killed 35,000 people and counting in Europe this summer?
In any case, the question now is where climate coverage goes from here. Nepal’s floods are a textbook illustration of the stark injustice at the heart of the climate story: The people who did the least to cause the problem tend to be the ones who suffer the first and worst. As Bill McKibben noted on his Substack, “The Crucial Years,” “on average, Nepalis produce about four-tenths of a ton of carbon emissions annually, compared with about 14 tons for an American.”
At the COP28 UN climate summit in 2023, the world’s governments operationalized a Loss and Damage Fund to compensate victims of climate disasters. Contributions have been paltry, but The Nation reported this week that the fund’s board of governors was discussing whether to make an inaugural donation to Nepal as a symbol of why the fund needs to be fully capitalized. As journalists and newsrooms prepare to cover the COP31 summit in Turkey this November, the long-standing debate around climate loss and damage deserves our focused attention.
Nepal’s floods also highlight another aspect of the climate story: Who is responsible for all those losses, and who should pay for the damages? To date, most reporting has trod lightly on these questions, even though a handful of investigative exposés have made clear who the chief culprits are. “A 1981 internal memo written by the director of one of Exxon’s science labs said it was ‘distinctly possible’ that cumulative carbon emissions could eventually ‘produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial portion of the earth’s population),” author Jeff Goodell pointed out the day after the Nepal floods.
Exxon and other companies hid that science for decades, instead pressing for ever-increasing fossil fuel production and consumption. If holding power to account is a core duty of journalism, then connecting the dots between Big Oil and the Nepal floods, and other coming disasters that Big Oil’s delaying tactics have made inevitable, is a good place to start.
From Us
Watch: Examining Nepal’s Deadly Flood & Its Climate Connection. Nepali journalists and a mountain geographer specializing in glacier hazards shared how their country is responding to the crisis and how climate change is connected in this live conversation, co-hosted with the Disability Justice Project.
RSVP: Climate Film Festival. Join CCNow for a live, in-person conversation with climate journalists on Monday, September 21, at the Narrative Change Summit during Climate Week NYC, hosted by Climate Film Festival. RSVP here!
Great Nepal coverage. We’re pulling together a collection of stories that make the climate connection to the glacier collapse and deadly flooding in Nepal. Share the thread.
Noteworthy Stories
“Limiting Overshoot.” The world will surpass 1.5 degrees C of warming, missing the Paris Agreement target set to limit extreme climate impacts with perilous consequences for people and ecosystems, according to a first-of-its-kind UN report published Wednesday. In the report, nearly 50 scientists make recommendations for reversing global warming instead of limiting it. By Sarah Kaplan for The Washington Post…
“Can we really reverse global warming after overshooting 1.5°C?” By Michael Le Page in New Scientist…
Doubling down. On Wednesday, Chevron announced a $7 billion investment that will double its Venezuelan oil production after “a major push from the Trump administration.” Several other oil and gas companies are expected to announce deals this week. By Collin Eaton and Gareth Vipers for The Wall Street Journal…
European emissions. France’s wildfires sent 1.5 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere, the largest amount since tracking began in 2003, according to a new report from the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation service. By Perrine Mouterde for LeMonde…
“Space race.” As billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos tout the advantages of outer space for building new data centers and geoengineering satellites, a new term — “space washing” — highlights the harmful climate impacts they gloss over. By Kate Yoder for Grist…
AI & climate. A new report finds that the AI computations that enable oil and gas companies to find and exploit new areas for drilling will increase global emissions by 5%. By Arcelia Martin for Inside Climate News…
Vast undercount. A two-year investigation by NPR found that the total number of US heat-related deaths per year was significantly higher than official records report. By Alejandra Borunda for NPR…
On the Beat
Kudos to The Guardian’s Damian Carrington, whose 2023 reporting on “mind-boggling” methane leaks from fossil fuel fields in Turkmenistan, has led to its government taking action to begin plugging the leaks. “It’s not often you can pinpoint real, positive change a journalist has caused,” noted UK journalist George Monbiot on Bluesky, “but as Turkmeni sources state, Carrington’s persistent and probing coverage of this issue has been critical to a change of policy, with massive implications.”
Community News Act. The California legislature approved a bill that offers refundable tax credits to local news organizations to help them hire and retain reporters. Governor Gavin Newsom has until September 30 to sign or veto it. By Suhauna Hussain for the Los Angeles Times…
New season, new cohost. Bill McKibben is joining Ayana Elizabeth Johnson this season to cohost her podcast, What If We Get It Right?
Climate on the Ballot
We’re relaunching our US election newsletter in September. You can sign up here. Meanwhile, draw inspiration to help jumpstart your reporting on the 2026 US midterms from these recommended reads.
Evident is accepting applications for a year-long investigative journalism fellowship beginning October 2026 based in the Baltimore / Washington, DC area; apply by September 20.
The Vital Impacts Environmental Photography fellowship and mentorship program is accepting submissions for long-term visual storytelling projects related to communities working on environmental solutions; apply by November 30.
Earth Journalism Network is offering a number of opportunities for journalists and media-related organizations; various deadlines.
The Pulitzer Center is offering Work/Environment Reporting Grants with a particular interest in reporting from regions in Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.
Texas saw the greatest increase in the first half of 2026, while California’s production plummeted.
By Dan Gearino
As data centers and other large users drove demand higher, U.S. power plants increased their output by 2.1 percent in the first half of the year compared to the first half of 2025.
If you’ve been following my work recently, you know that I’ve been celebrating several fine authors who have contributed to a Media Education Lab special issue. The August edition of MediaEd Insights was titled, “What’s for Dinner? Food as an Ecomedia Literacy.” The fourth essay in this series is a ... [continued]
Well, this is a bit surprising. Media Matters’ Matt Gertz writes, “Pete Hegseth hasn’t been on Fox News in 11 months.” It’s surprising for two reasons. First, Fox News is […]
At issue is a Clean Water Act provision that has long given states a role in decision-making on infrastructure that would affect streams and wetlands.
By Marianne Lavelle
When the Trump administration last fall unveiled its cornerstone policy for carrying out the Clean Water Act—new language spelling out the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority—it said one of its goals was to return power to states and tribes.
David Richardson worked to eliminate the country's top disaster agency when he led FEMA last year. Now, he says the administration has abandoned that goal.
A new United Nations report finds that the world will soon pass a dangerous threshold for climate warming. Countries had agreed to limit warming to that level to avoid the most extreme impacts.
Event is likely to be largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into a world already in a climate crisis
The El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”, the UN has said. The event is near certain to shatter temperature records, according to the latest forecasts.
The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever recorded.
Thousands of heat-related deaths in record-breaking temperatures appeared to only intensify hosts’ climate denials
As the first heatwave of the record-breaking summer arrived on 23 May, GB News host Cristo Foufas was not happy: “I am sick to death of the naysayers saying firstly that we’re all going to die and that we have to put out heat alerts, because, you know, just drink some water and drink a bit less rosé in the sunshine.”
“We used to call it Darwinism,” replied co-host Renée Hoenderkamp. She is a medical doctor.
China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the second quarter of 2026, as oil consumption plummeted amid the strait of Hormuz crisis. The country’s use of oil fell by 9% overall and by 16% for transport, after the disruptions to supply from the Gulf through the strait. China’s total ... [continued]
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the second-largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide (CO2). Methane traps heat in the atmosphere more efficiently than CO2, but has a significantly shorter lifespan, fading after just a few decades. Therefore, reducing emissions of methane — a gas primarily produced by agriculture, fossil ... [continued]
