News for May, 2026

Welcome to another month in the life of a planet whose ecological limits continue to be breached in more ways than can be counted on a blog of this size. Never mind: we're still here to read about what's actually been happening.

Lord Howe stag beetle is back (image: Steve Smith CC BY-ND-NC via inaturalist)

And it's amazing what comes bouncing back once whatever is suppressing it has been removed, as our friend above can testify. It's something we may(?) be able to say of certain world affairs shortly.

Getting through that 'shortly' part may prove interesting, however. In the meantime... 

Environment

This was once an inland sea. Surprisingly, it still is in parts. (NASA) 

The Ugly

• Since when did Victoria need new gas fields: especially near natural attractions?
• As with all departments under the reign of Trump, the Bureau of Land Management has morphed into a mechanism for extraction. Going so far as rescinding grazing permits for bison herds, and recommencing the use of cyanide bombs to control coyotes and other predators.

The Bad

•  Australia's budget is out and, for all the good that's being done to repair the environment, far more is being spent in damaging it.
• Seismic testing adversely affects fisheries.
• Eleven-armed sea stars are on a rampage through Bass Strait. Cause unknown. 

The Good 

• On Lord Howe Island, it's out with the rats and mice, in with the indigenous insects.
• A 'golden oldie'. You may have heard of how Soviet agriculture managed to destroy the Aral Sea, turning a once extensive inland water body (now part of Uzbekhistan) into a lifeless salt desert. It was considered beyond repair, but this video shows how some locals begged to differ, and managed to resurrect the northern section.
• When did you last go out and see the stars? While it may not have the same consequences to health as other forms, light pollution is being recognised as a serious problem. In response, places like Naseby, NZ, are obtaining 'dark sky' status.
• Seismology may be getting a bad rap for mineral exploration, especially at sea (see above),  but for soil analysis, it may prove to be revolutionary.
• In the UK, it may be time for a shake-up of approaches to conservation. (After all, the best way to conserve a seed is to grow it)

Climate

As fun as it was, it did not escape my notice that the recent movie 'Project Hail Mary' chose to depict an externally caused global climate emergency whose effect was the diametric opposite to what we are actually facing, and then proceeded to solve it in a *very* out of sight and mind place.

Even nearly forty years after it was confirmed beyond all reasonable doubt, anthropogenic global warming still tends to be talked around rather than at. The recent trend toward 'climate silence' (in case 'Dear Leader' Trump pulls funding: not an idle threat) is not helping.

"I'm still right here, you know!"

(Image: Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

 We will, of course, have to solve global warming in the immediate vicinity of Earth. Despite all the sticking points, though, progress is being made. At the UN, even!

The Ugly

•  In considering the effects of climate change, climate scientists pose a number of scenarios with varying severity. One of the most serious, RCP8.5, has recently been retired as it is no longer considered likely. Good news, on the face of it. The trouble is that the usual suspects have seized upon it as proof that climate concerns were always overblown and ridiculous. Michael Mann explains.
• 'Geo-engineering' is a delicate topic: poking life support systems about which we have a limited understanding poses risks that should be obvious. So, hopefully, this project to inject large amounts of sun-dimming silica microbeads into the stratosphere stays on the drawing board. It should definitely not be left for a few 'tech bros' to unilaterally implement. 

The Bad

• Australia's safeguard mechanism is intended to reduce industrial emissions. It may be having the opposite effect.  
• Now is not the time to be cutting climate and environmental research jobs at the CSIRO.
• A strong El Nino event is being forecast in the coming months, but what will that mean? Prof. David Karoly offers some guidance on what we might expect
• ... not necessarily what Europe has been facing but, 35C, in London, in May. Western Europe heat dome is causing records to shatter

The Good 

• Carbon offsets are coming to be seen as a rort: an excuse for companies to 'greenwash' their usual activities while carrying on. Energy Australia is now being sued for misrepresentation, and have now withdrawn from an offsets program 
• The Australian Government has received a lot of criticism for its refusal to link environmental approvals with climate related effects. Meanwhile, in the first case of its kind, the High Court must  decide how much consideration climate should be given when approving mining extensions.
• Coincidentally, the UN general assembly has ratified last year's ICJ determination that nations had a duty of care to protect against climate change. Australia voted for it. Dominated by Trump, the US (surprise!) did not.
• Breaking news: as a consequence, a UN 'international rapporteur' has been granted access to a High Court case concerning the extension of the NW Shelf gas project.

Energy

The Ugly

•  Not content with offshore wind farms, Trump is also cracking down on solar farms by excluding Chinese panel imports from clean energy subsidies.
• Coal is dead, oil is dying, and gas is looking decidedly unwell. Nothing about how these industries have responded to climate change and renewables to date suggests they will retire without some very ugly behavior (gas powered data centres being only one tactic. Trump being another)

The Bad

•  Is UK Labor *trying* to sabotage their Green Transition? It's not that they're sabotaging the transition itself, but they are increasingly brushing aside any social input and concerns. This is a recipe for public resentment, and plays to other groups trying to erode support.
• The Australian gas industry claims to employ 215,000 people. The reality is closer to 39,000.
• It is now clear that the energy transition to renewables will succeed. However, that is not to say that it will proceed smoothly. Apart from the rearguard actions referred to above, a time is fast approaching when renewables will start to encroach on the minimum profitable operating levels of fossil fuel plants. It is possible these plants will shut down rather than continue operating at a loss, and renewables will not yet be able to make up the shortfall.

The Good 

• A combination of solar power, firmed by battery storage, is now providing power at cheaper rates than gas in much of the world.
• In fact, gas usage in Australia has peaked, and is now in structural decline (but see 'Plaigue').
• The growth in solar farms and battery storage means a 10% (mid-Winter) drop in Australian electricity costs.  
• Ten times the battery storage  became available to the world grid in 2025 compared to only 4 years previously (nitpick: 112GW is the quoted value, which I assume means GWHr, since batteries store energy, and can use it to provide a certain power output for a certain time.)
• One issue with a transition to renewables is who gets left behind. Here is a Volts podcast on how it can be made more equitable.

Health

While I present articles in sections, it should be remembered that 'health' also refers to 'mental health', and that issues relating to the climate emergency is also a health emergency recognised by WHO. In other words, it's all connected.

The Ugly

• Lest you still doubt the obscenities that the dead Kennedy is now inflicting on the US, and the world, consider that the current acting head of the CDC once stated that his approach to pandemic preparedness would be to sack all those responsible for pandemic preparedness, as they.. were.. the cause.. of the pandemic...
• The same administration has also shuttered facilities meant to study transmissible illnesses like the current hantavirus outbreak. 
• At a time when a number of epidemics across the world suggest a strong need for cooperation, the US NIH (and NASA) are limiting co-authorship with scientists from foreign institutions. Research simply cannot operate like this.
• Meanwhile, local institutions assess that the dismantling of USAID has now caused the premature deaths of 600,000 people, of which 2/3 were children.
• No wonder Bill McKibben feels the need to offload some anger, while observing the ever shrinking margins by which Humanity is surviving.

The Bad

• While the world watches a cruise struck by a transmissible form of hantavirus, Australian authorities tackle a serious outbreak of diptheria, and the Congolese are forced to deal with a new (and even more serious) form of Ebola. Response from the US administration? Crickets.

The Good

• Clearly, we live in 'interesting' times, and anxiety about the future is perfectly understandable. How to handle it? Raging against the dying of the light may provide a fleeting catharsis. Withdrawing into fantasy might allow recuperation, although it is also temporary. In the final analysis, you might also find that the best long-term strategy is to engage. 

Resistance

The sheer number of articles relating to this section this month  (collated, if not shown) upholds the idea that we are in the 'then they fight you' stage of resistance. This penultimate part is always going to look ugly, and that's where the bulk of the news is. These are the dark moments for which Yeats wrote his little poem.

 

The question, as ever, is: are you nodding along, or disagreeing? 

The Ugly

• ICE activities in Minneapolis may be fading from memory, but they haven't stopped terrorising people elsewhere. Now they're doing it in Memphis.
• In New Jersey, ICE inmates have started a hunger strike over detainment conditions.
• 'For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the Law!' is a quote attributed to various South American dictators of the Twentieth Century. It is one that is fast coming to define the US Supreme Court, as it follows the 6-3 ruling pattern to effectively abolish the Voting Rights Act. Many Republican state governments have moved (ie rushed) to redraw electoral boundaries to abolish black districts with black representatives. Virginia, despite having held a referendum to do something similar in a Democrat state, was summarily blocked by... the Virginia Supreme Court. This listing summarises the situation. Update: courts in Alabama and South Carolina also rejected the redistribution, although the Supreme Court then overruled the South Carolina decision.
• Totalitarianism is all about control: particularly control of the past. Erasure is a feature, as we are seeing in Trump's removal of all cases records referring to Jan 6 insurrectionists, and any female references on the website of Arlington Cemetery. btw, all woman and blacks have been struck from the latest naval promotion list.

The Bad

•  Seattle is considering an emergency declaration, due to the number of LBGTIQ folk coming to seek refuge from persecution there.
• Having installed a network of surveillance cameras, some cities are covering them up to thwart their unauthorised use by other agencies. 
• Some polls are suggesting that, as Yeats once put it: "The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity". Is the global ascendency of the far right (as typified by UK's Reform and Australia's One Nation) as inevitable as the (far right owned) media making it sound? Perhaps not, if proper canvassing techniques are employed.

The Good 

• Trump has been trying to kill an international agreement for a carbon tax on shipping, threatening nations with various punitive actions unless they vote against it. He hasn't quite succeeded, yet.
• 'Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake' is one piece of advice given by Sun Tze's 'Art of War'. When it comes to Trump's tariffs and pre-emptive strike on Iran, 'mistake' is something of an understatement. One sliver of goodness to come out of these vicious, tragic, and self-destructive acts is that the solar tariffs and closure of the Straits of Hormuz is giving a significant spur to the global energy transition. (There are more preferable ways of achieving this, of course)

Housing 

The Bad

•  One of the factors causing the lack of housing has been the short-stay boom, with these options outnumbering permanent residences in some inner Sydney suburbs.
• While moving undesirables on from an area may be called for on occasion, confiscating the possessions of the homeless (like... tents) seems counter-productive.

The Good 

•  Urban heat islands are a problem, but there is a straightforward solution, if you wait for it to grow. (to anyone living in a treescape, this will seem obvious, but many US cities are not treescapes)

Transport

The Bad

• Speed cameras appear to work in controlling speeds, as Ottawa discovered when they were removed. 

The Good 

• As any driver will know, urban sprawl poses a serious problem for transport, especially when the exurbs are servicing a central business district rather than local hubs. Sydney is tackling this issue, with some promising results.
• What the 'experts' have to say about fixing car dominated spaces.
• Electric vehicles comprised 25% of global sales in 2025. 

Plaigue

Here's another area where the amount of news suggests they're fighting...

Trivia: 'Good News from the Vatican' is a short story by Robert Silverberg which describes the election of a cyber Pope. 

Pope Leo XIV.

 Photo by Edgar Beltrán, The Pillar, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons 

 Given the content of Pope Leo's recent encyclical, I don't think we're at that point yet.

The Ugly

• Would you like to have an AI model taking up 4Gb on your device? Sure you do (even if you didn't know)! You're using Google Chrome, after all.
• You may have heard of Musk's xAI data centre, in Memphis, that is powered by 33 gas generators? Well, they've added another thirteen (never mind the air permits)
• ... and maybe the people of Memphis are noticing?
• AI psychosis is not a joke: especially if someone is having suicidal thoughts amplified back at them. 

The Bad

• In a report that should surprise nobody, Greenpeace has claimed that data centres risk compromising Australia's energy transition. 
• Data centres may pose yet another environmental hazard: a preliminary study finds that they generate significant heat islands of several degrees up to a kilometer in radius. (NB the study has not been peer reviewed at this time, and no indication about the effect of on-site gas generators was mentioned).
• Data centres in the US have caused power costs to increase by 76% in the last quarter.
• Meanwhile, Ireland have published new protocols requiring that data centres remain connected to the grid during power fluctuations so that their sudden withdrawal won't cause a complete shutdown of the grid. 
• Richard Dawkins recently made a fool of himself by publicly (and with... 'evangelical' enthusiasm!) claiming that he was unable to determine whether or not the AI agent he was conversing with (which he inadvisably dubbed 'Claudia') was conscious or not. As a professional scientist, Dawkins should be well aware of the hazards of being the subject of his own experiment (he's done it before), and may yet produce a more balanced account once he's changed hats. In the mean time, someone with more understanding of the topic suggested one test he might have applied.

The Good 

• Community opposition to data centres is having a real effect on their spread, eg in Perth
• Graduates boo ex Google CEO Eric Schmidt for telling them AI is unavoidable, and cheer Steve Wozniack for saying otherwise. 
• For a bit of that overused term 'balance', here is Google's current CEO, Sundar Pichai, giving a more measured reflection on AI's place in society. Maybe the noise is penetrating?
• Even the Pope is speaking out, calling out the risks of AI usage in his first encyclical.