HEATED By Emily Atkin

Screenshots from Fox Business and Fox News about the retirement of the RCP 8.5 climate scenario. Is climate change actually a big deal anymore? Or is everything, like, totally chill now? Earlier this spring, the answer across conservative politics and media was a resounding: It’s chill. The reason, according to Trump and a flurry of conservative coverage, was that scientists had finally admitted their most alarming climate scenarios were wrong, and that nothing bad was actually going to happen.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -46:08 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Flames burn close to a home as the Line fire burns into a tree lined neighborhood on September 10, 2024 in Running Springs, California. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) For season one of the HEATED podcast, Tracy and I threw a lot of ideas and formats at the wall.

In case you missed it, on Thursday I published a story in which I traveled to Miami and posed as a prospective homebuyer to see what real estate agents would tell me about high-risk properties. The story was part of Betting the House, a pop-up collaboration supported by Covering Climate Now, a grant-funded initiative that works with journalists and newsrooms to produce more urgent and informed climate coverage.

This story is part of Betting the House, a pop-up climate newsroom bringing together independent journalists to cover climate and housing. Learn more, and read other stories from the project here. The dock of a waterfront home in Miami Beach, looking over the Biscayne Bay. I am not meant to be in Miami in August. The thick air, the searing cement, the tepid ocean—it’s all teaching me what scientists mean when they say some places are becoming too hot for the human body to survive.

The title of this pic on Getty Images was “corporate businessman taking no responsibility for pollution and environmental impact” and I thought that was pretty apt. A few weeks ago, HEATED reported on a bombshell new peer-reviewed study showing that data centers are nowhere near the biggest climate problem with artificial intelligence. The research identified a far bigger problem with AI: How fossil fuel companies are using the technology.

A storage tank hold fracking wastewater, also known as produced water, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Drillers in America’s largest oil-producing region are proposing to treat produced water and pour it onto crops and into waterways. (Photo by J Pat Carter/Getty Images) Sometime in the next few months, Texas is set to issue its first permits letting the oil industry pour treated fracking wastewater into rivers and onto cropland.

Houses lie partially submerged in muddy water along a riverside after flash floods at Trishuli Bazar in Nepal's Nuwakot district on August 26, 2026. Photo by Prabin RANABHAT / AFP via Getty Images) I’m currently on a reporting trip and working on a few other stories, but I need to say something about the glacial collapse and subsequent catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet that has killed more than 500 people, with potentially 12,000 more still missing.

Microsoft, Amazon, and Google all have aggressive climate commitments—and AI partnerships with oil companies. Source: Getty Images Lots of people—way more than usual!—are reading and sharing last week’s article about a new study finding that Big Oil’s use of AI to increase production could trigger 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than the emissions from AI data centers. The attention is promising.

The Big Spring Refinery is seen on October 04, 2023 in Big Spring, Texas. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images. Until this point, the public conversation about AI and climate change has been laser-focused on the vast amount of electricity used to power the technology. For good reason. Over the last few years, the AI boom has rapidly increased society’s appetite for fossil fuels via the electricity consumption of data centers.

Alexandra Fasulo has posted hundreds of videos campaigning against renewable energy. Source: Instagram On Instagram, a young woman with dark hair stares intensely into the camera. “We’re losing our country,” the text reads. The video cuts to fields of solar panels. “This is what their ‘clean energy’ looks like,” the caption says, as footage flashes between barren trees and wire fences. “This is what it has done to our nature. Our countryside.” An April Instagram video from Alexandra Fasulo.