- Texas Gov. Greg Abbott urged state regulators to penalize data center developers that do not disclose their water consumption data.
- One in 10 children globally had their schooling disrupted last year as a direct result of extreme storms, flooding, and heatwaves.
- The proposed site for what would be Brazil’s largest data center is a municipality in which 80 percent of land is experiencing “water conflict.”
- The U.S. EPA has rescinded a rule requiring fossil fuel power plants to limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
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In Texas, one of the fastest-growing markets for artificial intelligence infrastructure, Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday directed the state water board to “impose legal consequences” for data center developers who do not disclose details about their water consumption.
“Data centers must share the duty to protect Texas water,” Gov. Abbott said in a statement. “The Texas Water Code requires a complete and accurate water use survey. I direct the Texas Water Development Board to use its enforcement authority to penalize past failures and to impose legal consequences for any future failure to comply.”
The governor’s directive comes a month after ordering a temporary statewide pause on connecting new data centers to the state’s grid amid exceptional demand for electricity: some 474 gigawatts — more than five times the state’s total energy usage during record-breaking demand — are being requested by new large-scale consumers. Some 90 percent of these requests are coming from data center customers, according to Houston Public Media. Gov. Abbott called for the moratorium to last until state agencies can audit new facilities’ water and power needs.
Earlier this year, the Texas Tribune reported in a series of pieces that a combination of increasing demand and extreme weather is rapidly pushing the state toward a water deficit: “By one estimate, the state’s municipal supply will not meet demand by 2030 if there’s a severe drought and no water solutions are implemented.”
One in 10 children globally had their schooling disrupted in 2025 due to storms, flooding, and heatwaves.
A new UNICEF report provides a snapshot of the toll of extreme weather on children’s learning. Globally, 171 million students — ranging from pre-primary to upper secondary school — experienced disruptions to their education last year due to storms (109 million students), flooding (70 million), and heatwaves (50 million). Some students were impacted by multiple events.
August, when monsoon rains typically fall in Southeast Asia, proved to be the most disruptive month for climate disasters. “Children exposed to tropical cyclones experience setbacks in their education, including a 2.5 percent decrease in the likelihood of starting primary school, with girls disproportionately affected,” according to the analysis.
These consequences were not felt equally across all countries. Roughly 75 percent of affected students live in low- and lower-middle-income countries; UNICEF’s analysis predicts that last year’s school closures will translate to $200 billion in future earnings losses.
Just days after NOAA affirmed that summer 2026 was the warmest-ever on record for the contiguous United States — weather that “contributed to water-supply crises in the Colorado River and Rio Grande watersheds,” as reported in Circle of Blue’s Federal Water Tap — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency repealed rules that had limited planet-warming greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from power plants that burn coal and natural gas.
In a statement released Monday, the agency responsible for protecting the environment said that the 2024 standards, which capped how much pollution fossil fuel-burning facilities were allowed to release into the atmosphere, “produced virtually no benefit.”
“The administration is not just abdicating its legal and moral responsibility to tackle climate change—but more broadly its responsibility to public safety, as we all reckoned with the hottest summer in history and a wave of unnatural, climate-spawned disasters,” reads a statement from the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental advocacy group. “The world seeks leadership on climate change, instead the Trump administration delivers more cover for their benefactors in the fossil fuels industry by cutting the biggest polluters loose to do more damage than ever.”
At the time of their establishment, the federal laws were estimated to produce up to $370 billion in climate and public health benefits over two decades. Their elimination is expected to save the power sector an estimated $310 billion over an unspecified amount of time.
The decision comes less than two weeks after the United Nations admitted that the world would undoubtedly surpass 1.5° Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, a threshold that is “critical to avoiding the worst climate devastation.”
“Every fraction of a degree will cost lives, destroy livelihoods, deepen inequality and push ecosystems closer to irreversible damage,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. “Humanity is speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe.”
Mongabay reports that a massive data center complex planned for Paracatu, Brazil — a municipality of 100,000 people and whose name translates from the Tupi language to mean “good river” — is poised to use more electricity than all other data centers in the country combined.
Locals say the 1-gigawatt facility has blindsided a town with a history of water stress. Over the last two decades, 110 “water conflicts” have been registered with local officials. The label indicates areas where demand — often from irrigated farmland, local mining operations, and residences — outweighs supply. These areas span 80 percent of Paracatu, experts say. Meanwhile, in 35 of 39 areas where groundwater usage is heavily restricted, demand is already exceeding the total volume of reserves.
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