Natural gas prices could triple in some parts of the U.S., which could saddle hyperscalers with massive bills to power their AI data centers.

The U.S. on Friday threatened action against the EU unless Brussels reins in its environmental and human rights rules, which Washington says unfairly burden American companies.

Acknowledging Brussels had made “some positive reforms,” Washington said the EU had “failed to fully address U.S. concerns,” and that it “will take any actions necessary to address unreasonable burdens on U.S. commerce.”

U.S. Ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder piled on the pressure Friday, writing on X that “now it’s time for the EU to deliver.” He pointed to commitments made under last year’s Turnberry trade deal to ensure U.S. businesses do not face “undue restrictions” on transatlantic trade due to Brussels’ green regulations.

The dispute centers on two pillars of the EU’s corporate sustainability rulebook: the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which requires large companies to address human rights and environmental harms linked to their operations and supply chains, and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which requires companies to disclose sustainability-related information.

Brussels has scaled back both laws in its drive to cut red tape, but has stopped short of Washington’s demand to shield U.S. companies from their reach.

Last week, Puzder similarly attacked the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism as a tariff on U.S. exporters. On Thursday, the White House also accused the EU and more than 40 countries of enabling Chinese goods to skirt U.S. tariffs by rerouting them through their markets.

A European Commission spokesperson told POLITICO that Brussels had made “considerable efforts” to explain its rules and highlight “its willingness to cooperate with the US to increase trade where possible,” but drew a line at changing its regulatory regime in response to U.S. pressure.

“We have been very clear and consistent on the fact that neither our rules framework nor our regulatory autonomy are up for negotiation,” said the spokesperson.

This story has been updated.

Koen Verhelst contributed reporting.

Earlier this summer, Vox set up two big bug traps in New York City — like, literal traps that catch bugs. Our goal was to try to discover a new insect species right in the middle of the city because the bulk of them are still unknown to science. 

We now have some exciting, albeit preliminary, results to share. 

During the month of June — the only month we’ve analyzed so far — our traps captured an estimated 12,000 insect specimens, which we sent to a lab at the University of Guelph in Canada for analysis. The lab, known as the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, pulled out specimens across three groups: scuttle flies and two kinds of wasps known as parasitoids, which lay their eggs in other insects. We’re focusing on these groups, because they’re considered “dark taxa,” meaning that most species within them are likely still undiscovered. 

That left us with just under 1,000 specimens from June to investigate further.

From there, the lab sequenced a short section of DNA from each specimen, known as a barcode. Those DNA barcodes are unique identifiers for individual organisms, and scientists use them to sort specimens. When individuals have very similar barcodes, that often means they are the same species.

Most of the barcodes from our specimens appear to be similar to barcodes of insects that scientists have already collected and sequenced. There’s a slim chance that these are members of undiscovered species. 

But there were striking exceptions: Our wasps and flies yielded more than two dozen barcode groups that are, according to a preliminary review, quite different. They are unlike anything that exists in the big genetic database, known as BOLD, which is essentially a massive library of biodiversity. That means that they may represent new species.

Now, following further analysis by taxonomists, we have a strong indication that at least a few of those barcode groups may, indeed, be new species. And this was after just one month of looking!

Before we know if we have a true discovery to announce, we want to be certain that these species are actually new. That takes hard work, for which we are leaning on Emily Hartop, an entomologist at Norway’s NTNU University Museum, and University of Guelph researchers Ranjith AP and Paul Hebert. They will verify that no one has already described the organisms matching these specimens and then publish a formal description, along with a name, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. At that point, we’ll be able to say with more certainty that the bugs we caught here in New York City are, in fact, new to science. 

In the meantime, the traps remain open, and the freezer in my apartment will continue — to my husband’s disgust — filling up with ethanol-soaked bugs. 

You can find more information about Vox’s quest to discover a new species here.

PARIS — French firefighting unions are calling for a nationwide protest next month after accusing the government of failing to adequately support them during a summer of unprecedented heat.

“We are asking for the necessary resources to protect French citizens,” said Xavier Boy, a spokesperson representing several firefighters’ unions.

The strike will take place Sept. 29. Firefighters are allowed to walk out on the job but must maintain minimum staffing levels to respond to emergencies.

Boy said the unions’ most pressing demands include legislation to “modernize” France’s civil security framework, “massive” recruitment of professional firefighters and increased funding to protect firefighters’ health and safety.

He also called for “investments to match the risks France faces today and will face tomorrow” given Europe is the planet’s fastest-warming continent.

Boy and other firefighting representatives on Thursday — when they held a smaller-scale strike — met with French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez to discuss their concerns. They said they left unsatisfied and disappointed, accusing the minister of equivocating and spewing “political blah blah.”

Nuñez told reporters later Thursday that a bill to improve civil security would be presented to the unions on Sept. 8. The minister said the resources granted to firefighters would “evolve” in next year’s budget, but he refused to commit to a specific increase.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has also tasked seven parliamentarians with producing a report on how to improve firefighting in France and asked them to submit policy proposals by Sept. 21.

France’s current firefighting system relies heavily on volunteers. As of 2024, just under 80 percent of the country’s firefighters were volunteers, while fewer than 20 percent, mostly in urban areas, were professionals.

Most full-time firefighters work in major urban areas like Paris, but this summer they have faced ferocious conflagrations fueled by climate change-driven heat and drought, which are expected to cost taxpayers billions of euros.

Boy said firefighters battling the wildfire near Bordeaux, one of the worst in recent French history, were insufficiently equipped.

“Everything lacked — personnel, equipment and forest firefighting resources … especially anticipation,” he said.

Romania took Cernavodă’s second and last operating nuclear reactor offline on Thursday after the drought-hit Danube River fell too low to supply its cooling pumps.

“At 10:53 a.m., Unit 2 of Cernavodă NPP was shut down in a controlled manner,” Romania’s Energy Ministry said in a press release.

The government insisted the national grid remained stable and said it would bridge the shortfall with imports, hydropower, wind, coal and reserve generation. Romania had already notified the European Commission of an electricity crisis after the shutdown of Unit 1 on July 28, with Unit 2 accounting for roughly another 700 megawatts — about 10 percent of national production.

Cernavodă could stay offline for a while. “The forecast for the next 10 days shows a continuous decrease in the flow and level of the Danube,” plant director Romeo Urjan told Romanian news outlet Digi24 on Tuesday evening, saying officials did not expect to restart Unit 2 during that period.

Emergency dredging, rock blasting and sunk barges had bought the reactor roughly another week of operation.

The shutdown is the latest fallout from a drought emptying Europe’s rivers. Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite images released last week showed the Danube shrinking dramatically compared with last summer, exposing sandbanks and parched countryside north of Budapest in Hungary.

The river has hit a record low in Hungary, while record-low levels have also been reported in Romania, disrupting shipping and straining energy and water supplies.

Hungary is scrambling to keep its Paks nuclear plant operating. With output down to little more than 10 percent, Prime Minister Péter Magyar ordered the construction of a riverbed barrier Wednesday and put two barges on standby to be sunk if the Danube falls further.

Cernavodă’s two reactors normally supply around a fifth of Romania’s electricity. Before this summer, drought last forced a reactor there offline in 2003.

PARIS — France’s historically hot summer will end up costing the country €10 billion to €15 billion — the equivalent of as much as 0.5 percent of French gross domestic product — according to an estimate shared by Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut.

Barbut said the preliminary estimate, which she advised treating “with great caution,” was based on an extrapolation of heat-related costs compiled by France’s official statistics agency, Insee, in past years. She added that the figure could rise as temperatures remain well above seasonal averages in many French regions. Eighty-five percent of the country was also under drought warnings as of mid-July.

Barbut said recent wildfires and drops in agricultural output were the biggest estimated costs and warned they would continue to grow in the future if governments fail to implement policies to limit the impacts of climate change.

France’s August 2003 heatwave, which, until this summer, was the warmest ever recorded in the country, led to a 22 percent drop in cereal production and a 9 percent drop in wine production, according to the French statistics agency.

A 2025 report from the European Central Bank found that regions hit by heat waves and droughts both had noticeable impacts on European economic output.

Nicolas Camut contributed to this report.

Lee McIntire, an independent member of Fermi's board, has been hired as CEO, more than three months since the company fired co-founder Toby Neugebauer from the top post.

Tesla wants to build a massive solar factory in Texas, but first it wants the state to chip in to defray the costs.

Form Energy has landed Google and Crusoe as customers. Now, it has raised $750 million to expand manufacturing to deliver its massive, 100-hour batteries.

The US Bureau of Reclamation is resorting to moving water between reservoirs so that Glen Canyon Dam can continue to generate electricity. Darren Orf reported in Popular Mechanics on August 10, 2026, that a long drought has pulled Lake Powell and Lake Mead so low that Hoover Dam's output this year will fall by 40 percent from its full-capacity output. — Read the rest

The post Hoover Dam is set to lose 40% of its maximum power this year appeared first on Boing Boing.

Reservoir has built an ultra-efficient water heater that can predict hot water demand, store energy, and detect plumbing leaks throughout a home.

California is launching a probe into the Trump administration’s most recent move to scuttle the state’s nascent offshore wind industry.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration on Tuesday released an investigative subpoena against German energy company RWE, according to David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission.

“These are unlawful actions … they’re using funds that are not dedicated to those purposes, and we’re going to vigorously contest those,” Hochschild said of the Trump administration’s settlement agreements to kill offshore wind projects. “We’re going to court.”

He made the announcement on stage during POLITICO’s The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit.

Hochschild’s statements show that California, facing a relentless assault on its offshore wind ambitions, is turning to the courts as its primary venue for fighting back.

RWE announced a $1.2 billion agreement on Thursday to surrender its offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York, California and Louisiana. That signaled the continued success of a recent Trump administration strategy to kill wind projects it opposes: offer the developers funds to instead invest in fossil fuel facilities. That tactic has so far ended three of the five planned wind projects off the California coast.

In May, California issued a similar investigative subpoena to Golden State Wind after it cut a Trump administration deal to cancel an offshore wind project. The state later said it intended to sue over that deal. California followed that same playbook with Invenergy’s offshore wind cancellation. It has not filed any lawsuits in response to the deals to date.

Aug. 11 is quickly becoming jellyfish invasion day at the Gravelines nuclear power plant in northern France.

Despite spending hundreds of thousands of euros to protect the plant from a jellyfish swarm like the one that saw reactors shuttered on Aug. 11, 2025, French utility provider EDF on Tuesday was again forced to bring the parts of the facility offline due to the presence of “several dozen tons” of jellyfish blocking pumping systems.

“On-site teams are fully mobilized to ensure the safety of the facilities and to reconnect the reactors to the national power grid,” EDF said in a statement.

Three fishing vessels are now “constantly patrolling off the coast of the plant” to conduct “preventive fishing operations […] 24/7,” the company added.

Tuesday’s jellyfish invasion comes a the latest in a series of climate change-driven incidents that have affected French nuclear energy during a particularly infernal summer.

Nuclear power plants are typically built by rivers or on coastlines so they can use nearby water sources to cool their reactors. But a record number in France this summer have been forced to temporarily shut down due to heatwaves and droughts affecting their water supply.

Rising sea temperatures have made jellyfish swarms more common along the French coast in recent years, and those swarms can affect a plant’s ability to bring in seawater — which is what happened at Gravelines. Following last year’s incident at the plant along the North Sea, EDF installed cameras and deployed fishing boats to monitor the situation.

While the vessels “prevented a massive influx of jellyfish” on Saturday and Sunday, they were eventually overwhelmed as the swarm grew from “about 100 kilograms” to “several dozen tons,” the French state-owned utility giant said.

Opponents of nuclear energy were quick to jump on the incident.

“This only highlights that nuclear power plants are ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of climate change,” the French branch of Greenpeace said in statement.

Fusion power startups are turning to Kyoto Fusioneering to supply components for future power plants. The Japan-based startup just received a grant to build a part of the fuel system.

ATHENS — Sparks from Greece’s aging electricity grid are responsible for a disproportionate share of the country’s most destructive wildfires, according to preliminary data from Greece’s Arson Crimes Investigation Directorate and evidence from recent fire investigations. 

While power infrastructure accounts for only a small share of wildfire incidents, fires sparked by the grid often break out under the most dangerous conditions — during high winds, in periods of heavy electricity demand and often in remote, fire-prone areas — making them more likely to spread rapidly and become catastrophic. 

According to the Arson Crimes unit, fires linked to the electricity grid account for about 75 percent of the land burned in Greece this year.

Two deadly wildfires in late July — one in western Attica and one on the island of Crete —were also linked to the electricity grid in preliminary findings from the Greek fire brigade. The fires destroyed more than 36,000 acres and killed four people. 

“Six out of 10 major fires and 55 percent of the area burnt in 2025 were caused by the power grid,” said Elias Tziritis, wildfires actions coordinator at World Wildlife Fund Greece. “Statistically speaking, the majority of fires may not start from the power grid, but these are the ones that cause the most major, devastating fires.”

Loose or sagging power lines, vegetation coming in contact with cables, dust buildup on transmission equipment and other such faults can all generate sparks. The risk rises during strong winds and periods of heavy electricity demand, when aging infrastructure is under greater strain. 

Much of Greece’s electricity grid was installed decades ago and runs above ground through fire-prone forests and increasingly depopulated rural areas. In the 1960s, the country opted for an overhead network as a cheaper way to extend electricity across the country, while the prolonged financial crisis that began in 2009 further constrained investment in the system.

Critics say Greece has moved too slowly to bury distribution lines and adapt the network to increasingly severe fire conditions.

“We raised the issue years ago, calling for something to be done with the power grid urgently,” said Christos Kalogeropoulos, a retired lieutenant-general with the Fire Service and former director of the Arson Crimes unit. “We have been calling for urgent underground cabling.”

Greece’s power distribution operator HEDNO disputes suggestions that the network is a major cause of wildfires, saying only about 1 percent of wildfire incidents recorded in 2025 were attributed to the electricity grid, compared with roughly 3 percent in the U.S. The company also said its crews have been deployed to major fire fronts to support emergency services and restore electricity to affected communities. 

“The easy targeting of HEDNO whenever a fire breaks out serves neither the truth nor the protection of the public but creates false impressions, and, in many cases, appears to serve short-term expediencies and self-serving agendas by covering up local responsibilities,” said the company in a statement.

Following the fire in Crete, authorities arrested two HEDNO network operations and maintenance managers, who were later released. In Viotia, where a late-July fire spread into western Attica, investigators suspect sparks came from equipment on a private wind farm. A local mayor, a contractor and a company owner were taken into custody last week.

Energy Minister Stavros Papastavrou said the government plans to tighten rules governing private power projects. But experts warn that focusing on private operators risks obscuring the broader problem of an aging public grid. 

Moving cables underground is expensive and time-consuming, said Paleologos Paleologou, associate professor of forest protection at the Agricultural University of Athens. 

Paleologou said researchers need access to detailed data on the location of power lines and pylons to model where the network is most vulnerable. “If we had that information, we could tell them where their network is vulnerable and where a fire could break out,” he said. “Since the budget is limited, we should prioritize the most difficult areas.”

The government is currently using money from the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility to fund underground cabling. It says the share of the distribution network that is underground has risen to about 14 percent, up from 9 percent in 2021. 

Alexandra Sdoukou, a spokesperson for the ruling New Democracy party, said burying the entire 120,000-kilometer medium-voltage network would cost about €35 billion, requiring the government to first focus on areas under the greatest risk. 

Greece’s Energy Ministry did not reply to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, opposition parties and advocacy groups accuse the government of moving too slowly, failing to maintain the grid properly and dropping some fire-prevention projects from EU recovery funding.

“There is still no public acknowledgement of the problem,” said Tziritis. “The issue should be recognized and efforts to find solutions should be taken at the government level.”

Such an acknowledgement could also carry legal and financial consequences. California utility Pacific Gas & Electric filed for bankruptcy after its equipment sparked catastrophic wildfires and exposed the company to billions of dollars in liabilities.

In Greece, the number of court cases involving fires linked to the electricity grid rose from 369 to 681 in 2024, said Kalogeropoulos.

One of the few cases to result in a final ruling against HEDNO is a class action lawsuit following a 2015 wildfire in Neapoli, Laconia, which destroyed homes and large areas of woodland and farmland. Around 90 victims are now pursuing compensation. 

“It is a real struggle for a citizen to go after an electricity grid company,” said Evgenia Lazaraki, a lawyer representing the victims. Utilities, she said, have both the technical expertise and access to evidence needed to defend themselves, putting plaintiffs at a significant disadvantage. 

The brutally hot summer is set to cost the EU economy €180 billion this year — that’s equivalent to roughly 1 percent of GDP, which is all the growth the bloc was expected to generate in 2026, according to new analysis.

France could lose 1.4 percentage points of growth, which is enough to push its economy into a 0.6 percent contraction, while an 0.8-point hit could almost wipe out the Netherlands’ expected expansion.

“The result is not simply ‘the hottest countries lose the most,'” notes the analysis by Triodos Bank. “Spain and Italy have the highest physical exposure and the most hot days in absolute terms, but decades of acclimatisation imply that the marginal effect of any single hot day is comparatively small.”

The biggest drag is expected to come from people struggling to work in extreme heat. Triodos estimates lost labor productivity alone could shave around 0.6 percent off EU GDP, while agricultural output could fall by between 3 and 7 percent.

“At first sight this might seem modest, but it is exactly the expected economic growth for the EU this year,” said the bank of the overall €180 billion blow.

And the summer is not over. France and Britain are bracing for their fifth heat wave of the season this week, with temperatures nearing 40 degrees Celsius in southeastern France and 36 degrees forecast in the U.K.

The bill is already mounting beyond GDP. POLITICO estimated at least 14,000 excess deaths across the six hardest-hit European countries during the record-breaking heat wave from mid-June to early July.

Drought has also hammered Europe’s energy system: Low water levels in the Danube in recent weeks have forced sharp cuts at Hungary’s Paks nuclear plant and pushed Romania to blast apart a rock to divert water toward its last operating reactor. Vessels on the Rhine and Danube have had to sail only partially loaded.

In Austria, meanwhile, drought has caused an estimated €1 billion in agricultural losses, according to Austrian Hail Insurance, after some regions received more than 75 percent less rain than normal since mid-June.

Triodos warned against treating this summer as a freak event, saying extreme heat “might become structural” as the planet warms. But governments can soften the damage through irrigation, insulation, cooling and shifting working hours, said the bank.

“Every year adaptation without mitigation is a year borrowed against a hotter baseline.”

The Senate voted 86 to 11 to pass the sweeping Russia sanctions bill championed by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham on Friday, advancing legislation that would give the White House more leverage against Moscow as it seeks to end the war in Ukraine — and a brand new tariff tool.

Now that the bill has cleared the upper chamber, it’s up to lawmakers in the House to determine its fate when they return in September. President Donald Trump has already signaled he would sign the bill if it lands on his desk.

The bill, which Graham and cosponsors including Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) have worked to advance for more than a year, would issue mandatory sanctions not only on Russia’s leadership and energy sector, but also on abetters of Russia’s defense industry and so-called shadow fleet in an effort to curb the flow of cash to Moscow’s war chest.

Ukraine’s supporters on the Hill and officials in Kyiv have been urging its passage, arguing that it would deal a timely blow to Russia’s war efforts as Kyiv seeks to capitalize on a series of recent favorable turns in the war to end it altogether.

In comments on the Senate floor ahead of the vote, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vocal backer of the bill Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) stressed the “urgency” of the moment.

“The momentum is on Ukraine’s side,” Shaheen said. “Now is the time to put more pressure on Putin.” She added that the situation on the ground could turn back in Moscow’s favor within months — especially with assistance from foreign foes like China.

It has already been a long road for the sanctions measure, which Graham and Blumenthal first introduced in April 2025. The lawmakers negotiated for months with the White House, which wanted more control over what entities it could sanction, and by how much. In July, Graham announced — from Kyiv — that the White House had agreed to a revised version of the bill.

The new iteration of the bill includes broad authority for the president to waive any sanctions that are applied, as long as the White House provides a written certification that the waiver is “in the national interests of the United States” and a report outlining the basis for the certification.

Following a last-minute demand from Trump, lawmakers also added language to the bill to extend certain sanctions on Iran.

Graham’s sudden death just days after winning Trump’s green light spurred his fellow senators to support the legislation, which cleared a procedural hurdle at the end of the month by a wide margin.

But a provision in the bill that would grant the White House authority to issue 100 percent tariffs on top buyers of Russian oil, and countries facilitating sanctions evasion, nearly derailed the measure’s passage in the upper chamber before lawmakers left town for August recess.

An amendment pushed by Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that would have stripped the tariff language from the bill entirely failed in a 64 to 32 floor vote Friday.

Still, nearly one-third of the upper chamber voted in favor of striking the tariff language, highlighting Democrats’ worries about handing more tariff powers to a White House already eager to use that tool against Washington’s global allies and enemies. That Democratic discontent is likely a foreshadowing of a similar sticking point for lawmakers on the House side when they return from recess in September.

As Senate leadership tried to reach an agreement to fast-track consideration of the bill before the chamber adjourned for the summer, lawmakers opposed to the tariff provisions threatened to derail that effort over squabbles about what amendments should get a floor vote.

One of those amendments was an effort from Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), to add language curbing the tariff powers afforded to Trump in the bill. Warnock — who voted to advance the bill in July — had threatened to thwart Senate leadership’s effort to fast-track consideration of the legislation this week if his amendment didn’t get a floor vote.

But Warnock pulled the amendment at the eleventh hour Thursday evening after securing the Trump administration’s commitment to enact a clear off-ramp for countries hit with tariffs, according to a person familiar with the senator’s plans granted anonymity to speak about internal conversations.

That move may not go far enough to quell the concerns of Democrats in the House — some of whom have already expressed frustration over the provision.

House Foreign Affairs ranking member Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) issued a joint statement following the Senate vote slamming the current bill text as “unacceptable” and citing the broad waiver authority and tariff powers granted to the White House.

But the lawmakers vowed to “continue to seek a path forward that remedies this bill’s flaws.”

BERLIN — Europe’s reserves of natural gas are running dangerously low, risking fresh energy woes if the Iran war rages on and cold spells drive up heating demand over winter.

But the continent’s top energy user doesn’t seem too bothered.

Germany is the EU’s biggest vulnerability because its sheer size means gas shortfalls there could be felt in neighboring countries, driving up prices across the bloc if it fails to restore its reserves.

That’s prompted growing calls for Berlin to do the unthinkable: intervene outright to direct its state-controlled energy giants to buy gas at any price, abandoning years of free-market doctrine on energy policy.

So far, the government has refused to budge, even as it falls short of EU targets and faces the risk of physical supply shortages as early as November. It’s a gamble that the markets will figure everything out, even as war and hot weather distort traditional incentives and upend global supply chains.

“Storage levels are not only exceptionally low for this time of year, but historically low,” said Sebastian Heinermann, the managing director of Germany’s top gas storage association, INES.

But Germany, he warned, is still relying on an outdated, market-oriented approach to refill its reserves, even when there are “hardly any market-economic incentives left.”

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, EU countries have been required to hit gas storage targets of 90 percent of national capacity by winter to prevent serious supply shortfalls. The EU lowered that target to 80 percent following the outbreak of the Iran war to prevent panic buying.

Typically, refilling is the responsibility of traders and utilities, which buy gas cheap in the summer to store and then sell in the winter for a profit. But buyers say higher summer prices as a result of the Iran war and climate change have upended that dynamic, leaving gas reserves across the bloc at around 58 percent of national capacity, 16 percentage points below the five-year historical average and the lowest level since 2011. 

The low reserves have already added to the increased pressure on gas prices linked to renewed tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, with the European natural gas benchmark now consistently higher than it was for the first four months of the Iran war.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has said the bloc faces no winter supply risks. But a report by energy analytics firm Rapidan projects that reserves will rise to only 65 percent of total storage capacity by November, arguing that hitting the EU’s target by winter won’t be possible without “materially higher prices.” 

That risk has been exacerbated, analysts say, by the bloc’s move in recent years to replace its long-term supply deals with Russia with short-term purchases of globally traded liquefied natural gas. These seaborne cargoes are highly mobile and go to the highest bidder — leaving buyers more exposed to volatility on international markets, especially in the wake of the loss of key supplies from Qatar and rising demand in Asia.

Germany, the bloc’s largest gas consumer, has seen its reserves fill up even more slowly than others, in part thanks to its more hands-off, market-led approach to restocking than many of its neighbors. As a result, reserves stood at only 47 percent of national capacity in August, according to the latest data — the lowest fill level since records began. That’s especially worrying as the country’s reserves are important for the bloc as a whole, representing over 20 percent of the EU’s storage capacity. 

Nevertheless, Berlin is staying the course. While its energy ministry has acknowledged the country’s historically low reserves, it has refused to intervene to direct its main state-controlled gas buyers, SEFE and Uniper, to buy gas at current prices to ensure its targets are met, instead of waiting for market conditions to improve.

“It is the responsibility of companies and traders to fill the storage facilities for the winter,” a spokesperson for the German energy ministry told POLITICO. “Government-led filling of the storage facilities would further constrain the gas market and drive prices even higher. The supply situation over the coming months would actually deteriorate.”

Whether this is the right approach will become clearer by winter, said Laurent Ruseckas, a senior gas analyst at S&P Global. If temperatures are unseasonably low, traders may be forced to buy additional supplies at late notice, driving up prices, especially if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. On the other hand, intervening could raise prices prematurely if winter turns out to be mild.

“If you start buying now to get storage to some politically predetermined level you’re making prices higher now to get insurance that you won’t get higher prices in the winter when it’s cold,” said Ruseckas.

Germany’s reluctance to move quickly also highlights the difficulty the EU’s fragmented energy sector has in competing with more centralized Asian economies that have acted more quickly to secure supplies, consistently outbidding European countries even as their reserves run low.

Others warn that physical supply strains are also possible. Heinermann, of INES, warned that even filling the country’s reserves to 76 percent of capacity — which SEFE says is achievable — would not necessarily meet its supply needs if winter is “exceptionally cold.” That could ripple out to neighboring countries to which Germany is treaty-bound to provide emergency gas assistance, including Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Denmark.

Heinermann called on the German government to encourage faster restocking by lowering network charges at storage facilities or abolishing the conversion levy, fees imposed for the conversion of gas on national grids. Berlin has already unveiled plans for a new emergency gas stockpile, but that will only cover 10 percent of the country’s gas capacity and kick off officially next summer.

It’s no surprise that other major gas consumers have already waded into the private sector. The Netherlands, another free-market champion suffering from low gas reserves, earlier this summer allocated €1.2 billion for its state energy company, EBN, to more swiftly top up its reserves. 

But Berlin’s energy giants are sticking to their guns — for now.

A spokesperson for SEFE told POLITICO that even though “international conflicts” could weigh on European storage levels, the 70 percent target “remains achievable” without intervention. He pointed out that 78 percent of German storage capacity has already been booked, though acknowledged that doesn’t necessarily translate to actual volumes of gas stored. 

Regulatory measures could be useful if “necessary” but could distort markets and increase costs, he added, without specifying what.

A Uniper spokesperson was less confident, warning it would be “increasingly challenging to reach the target storage levels before the winter season starts” at the current rate of filling. But she too stopped short of calling for intervention, arguing instead for better incentives for refilling — mirroring growing calls from gas lobbyists in Brussels to scrap the rules outright.

The influencers have started to promise me that they know how to get me to stop shopping: I just have to enter every garment of clothing I own into an app, one by one. “I digitally cataloged my ENTIRE wardrobe,” they swear on videos, routinely pulling in hundreds of thousands of views. 

The selling point of these apps (Indyx, Whering, ACloset, OpenWardrobe, and many more) is seductive; they promise to help users understand exactly what they already own so that they shop less. In theory, that means saving money — and slowing the steady damage the fashion industry is wrecking on our planet.

“Collectively, we are buying and then throwing away more than ever before,” Indyx warned on its website, before reciting dire statistics about how many clothes are produced now and how many of them end up in landfills. Luckily, it said, “We’re here to break the cycle.” 

That idea appealed to me. I am not a fashionista, but I enjoy clothes enough to buy more than I really need, despite what I know about fashion’s impact on the planet. My intellectual understanding of climate change can’t always stop me from clicking “add to cart” when I see a dashing pair of wide-legged trousers, even though there’s a hard limit on the number of times a person can wear wide-legged trousers in one week. 

Still, to make these apps work, you have to individually enter photos of everything you own now and everything you buy in the future, which sounds like a tedious, laborious process. (You can take the photos yourself or hunt down product pictures from the brand.) And because so many influencers are pushing this, it’s hard to tell how life-changing it really is and how much is just marketing speak and hype. So, I decided to test one of these apps — Indyx — for you. I also talked to wardrobe cataloging enthusiasts and experts on sustainable consumption to see what I could learn from them. I wanted to know: Could cataloging our wardrobes actually make us shop less? And, if it can, would it be worth the effort? 

“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less”

Wardrobe cataloging apps did not always advertise themselves as being good for the planet. 

In 2023, the journalist Avery Trufelman investigated the nascent wardrobe cataloging app industry for her podcast series Articles of Interest. She found that a lot of the apps flopped. The issue was the business model, which was based on revenue generated from affiliate links. The idea was that people would click to purchase items they saw within the apps, and the company would take a cut of each sale. But when the apps were well designed, Trufelman reported, users felt less of a need to buy more clothes.

The current generation of wardrobe cataloging app developers has turned this from a bug into a feature. They now market their wares as the solution to overshopping, and they make their money by charging for either the app itself or for its extra content. (Indyx itself is free, but you have to pay a $75 yearly subscription for its enhanced features.)

What the marketing gets right is that the fast fashion problem is real. “Anywhere from two to 10 percent of our global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with fashion,” said Brie Berry, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.

Fashion’s emissions are generated by the factories that manufacture clothing (the water and the fertilizers for growing cotton, the oil for developing synthetics) and the consumers who wear these garments (the slow shed of microplastics from yoga pants, the water and the energy consumed by washing and drying). When we get rid of old clothes, much of it ends up in landfills or incinerated. By some estimates, the fashion industry contributes more to climate change than the aviation industry. 

“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less,” said Katia Dayan Vladimirova, a researcher whose consulting firm Post Growth Fashion focuses on alternatives to growth in the fashion system. 

To buy less, it helps most people to know what they already own, said Alyssa Beltempo, a slow-fashion content creator and educator. Beltempo makes videos guiding viewers through the process of “shopping their own closets” to help them buy less stuff, but she’s found in her work that a lot of people aren’t clear on the contents of those closets. Because of that confusion, they end up buying stuff they don’t need.

That’s where cataloging can be helpful, Beltempo said. “These apps reduce that hurdle of not seeing the clothes you have,” she said.

Personally, what I was looking for wasn’t enhanced clarity so much as a barrier. I wanted to erect a wall between my desire to own a new piece of clothing and the click of the buy button. A searchable, scannable lookbook of everything I owned, I thought, might well do the trick. 

How to catalog every piece of clothing you own

Indyx has been hyping up its new AI feature, which transforms a picture of a garment hanging limply off a hanger into a neat flat lay photo. It sped the process up, but it was also buggy; it garbled text on the front of T-shirts, misread colors, and had a tendency to interpret loose threads as ornamental bows while leaving wrinkles (I am not an ironer) untouched. 

I was also concerned that the process inserted AI, with its insatiable need for water and energy, into a project sold as a way of reducing my environmental impact. But the sustainability experts I spoke to were both skeptical that this sort of light AI use was such a big deal. 

“Taking photos and then asking an app to think about how to arrange your clothing into outfits is probably one of the lighter uses of AI that I could imagine,” Berry said. Vladimirova agreed that using AI for this task is unlikely to be as bad for the planet as buying even one new garment. “But then, there is also no proven causality between using this app and reducing overconsumption,” she added as a caveat.

It’s possible to input your clothes into Indyx without using the AI feature, but the truth is: I don’t know that I could have made myself go through with the whole rigamarole without it. I ran out of free AI processing about 80 percent of the way through and, overwhelmed at the thought of having to do my own flat lays, paid $75 to buy more without hesitating.

All told, it took me about five hours and many old episodes of Top Chef to photograph my summer clothes, not including shoes, jewelry, or accessories. My time spent cataloging did not include the process of entering additional data about each garment (including its initial cost, its fiber composition, where I bought it), a herculean task that I have been tackling much more slowly than the initial entry process.

Doing the shoot properly would have taken longer. Angela Goodman, a 51-year-old marketer from Seattle with a background in product photography, says she ran her own cataloging session like a pro shoot, using art lights and folding and refolding each garment to lie perfectly. It took her 10 hours spread out over multiple weeks. 

As an exercise, photographing every piece of clothing I owned was clarifying, although not significantly more clarifying than going through it Marie Kondo-style. It left me with a small donation pile of items I no longer wanted and a fretful awareness that I own too many white T-shirts. In theory, that’s the kind of insight a wardrobe cataloging app produces by the spade.

“I’m not shopping. I’m building.”

Vladimirova, the sustainability consultant, said that, even though she has a better idea than most of how destructive the fashion industry is, she struggles with over-shopping. She thinks a lot about why people buy so many clothes; her best guess is that it’s a way to self-soothe. 

“A lot of consumption happens in the evening when we feel vulnerable and tired, and we’re trying to reward ourselves with this shot of dopamine,” she said. For some people, these apps can replace the dopamine hit that comes from scrolling through other people’s outfit photos with the dopamine hit of scrolling through your own clothes, neatly folded and filtered until they look like aspirational fashion inspo. 

Part of the satisfaction here is the infographics. After you’ve given Indyx all your fashion data, the app crunches your numbers and tells users how much you’ve bought new versus secondhand, as well as the share of natural fibers as opposed to synthetics in your closet, so that you can track the environmental impact of your shopping habits. (Synthetics tend to have a higher carbon footprint than natural fibers.) It tells you what their cost per wear is on each item to help you track which expensive garment was worth the splurge and which was a waste of money. Users can also plan outfits. You can share your wardrobe with stylists who will plan the outfits for you (on Indyx, the service ranges from $25 a month to “the low hundreds”). It’s like playing paper dolls with your own wardrobe. 

For Goodman, the former product photographer, all this data takes the place of recreational shopping. She describes getting a marketing email from one of her favorite brands about a sale. After a quick scroll through their offerings, she found that she felt no urge to buy. 

“I was like, ‘I do not need more clothes. I’m going to go update my Indyx, because I’m a couple of weeks behind,’” she said. She started inputting the last few outfits she’d worn into one of the Indyx services that is supposed to allow users to track their patterns and see which clothes they actually wear and what they like in an outfit. “I’m playing with clothes,” she said. “But, like, I’m not shopping. I’m, you know, building.”

Over time, all this data is supposed to inform future shopping choices. “There is something very clear about seeing two pieces that you’ve owned for the same amount of time — one that you’ve worn 57 times and one that you’ve worn twice,” said Alexandra, a 29-year-old consultant in Northern Virginia who requested her last name be withheld. She thinks tracking her clothes has given her “a little bit less buyer’s remorse.”

Cataloging your wardrobe can’t prevent a compulsive need to buy, though.

“I don’t think it cured me of my undiagnosed shopping addiction,” Alexandra said. “You can very quickly go from ‘I’m cataloging what I have’ to ‘I’m seeing a bunch of gaps in my wardrobe that I should fill immediately.’” 

“There just wasn’t incentive anymore”

The main question I had about these apps was whether, with such a labor-intensive process, there comes a time when the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. 

Alexandra says that she gradually stopped using her wardrobe app last year, after she moved out of her own apartment and back into her family’s suburban house in the midst of a career transition. 

“I was separated from a lot of my belongings for a very long time, and then, as I started to get things back, it didn’t feel worth the effort anymore,” she said. Who was she going to see in one of her curated outfits? “My job’s on a computer. When I leave the house, I go to the grocery store and the pharmacy and the bookstore,” she said. “There just wasn’t incentive anymore, compared to when I was closer to the city and doing things more regularly.”

Beltempo, the slow fashion content creator, said she doesn’t bother to add every new purchase to her own catalog. 

“I really use it more for my packing,” she said. Before she travels, she makes a list of likely candidates for her suitcase and enters them into the app. “And then, I’ll play, and I’ll make outfits,” she says. 

Vladimirova, the sustainable consumption researcher struggling with overshopping, gave the apps a spin. She tried three of them and found that she was only able to stick with each one for a matter of months. “In the beginning, when the novelty of the app is there, it’s very satisfying,” she said. “It records your outfits in vivid colors. It can crop out the ugly background and keep it very neat, create fancy capsules. They look so lovely.”

But over time, they all began to bore her. “And now, I forget to update when I buy something new — usually from secondhand sources — and it kind of lost its meaning for me,” she said. “But the premise is good!” 

My own experience seems to be closest to Vladimirova’s. I keep having to remind myself to enter my outfits into Indyx. Every time I put on a piece of clothing, I think with dread, “Oh god, if I don’t look up how much I paid for this, I’ll never know my cost per wear and, then, what’s the point?” I keep giving my shoes guilty looks and thinking about how I should really photograph and catalog them — if I’m doing this right. 

“It’s a project,” said Lauren Ludwig, a 41-year-old who has been using her wardrobe apps for the past three years. “But it’s a fun one for someone who enjoys clothing.”

Indyx and its brethren are slick, and their infographics are beautiful. For dedicated wardrobe hobbyists, they’re probably a great option. But for most people who just want to cut down on their clothes shopping, it’s hard to say that the $75 annual subscription is worth it. The free version will give you the same paper doll effect if you are willing to do your own flat lays, or you can recreate it by dragging phone camera pictures of your clothes onto a Google Slides deck. 

If you find, as Vladimirova theorized, that you shop when you don’t feel good, you can try replacing that habit with a “dopamine menu” of small acts that bring you joy, like hugging a pet, doing a puzzle, or going for a walk. And if your closet is filled with brand new clothes you never wear, you’re racking up debt buying clothes, or you just have the nagging sense that your shopping has spiraled completely out of control, therapy is not a bad idea. 

Personally, I found that Indyx could not give me what I really crave when I want to play with clothes: the understanding of the way fabric drapes against my body, the knowledge of its texture against my skin. There is no substitution for the slow analog process of walking into my closet, touching my clothes with my human hands, and learning with my five senses that what I have is already enough.

PARIS — Is France ready for a crisis that plunges it into darkness? The French government is planning to find out.

The government is looking to organize a tabletop simulation of a sudden, nationwide power outage in the second half of 2027, according to four people with direct knowledge of the exercise, who were granted anonymity to discuss plans that have not been publicly announced.

The exercise will involve the French electricity grid operators Enedis and RTE as well as several government departments and ministries and the French military administration. 

Its purpose will be to determine how the country would respond to a paralyzing electricity outage of the kind that hit Spain and Portugal in April 2025, or a major cyberattack targeting the power grid as Poland experienced last year — an act of sabotage Brussels has attributed to Russian intelligence services.

The simulation will test “the country’s ability to respond,” said one person familiar with preparations for the exercise, adding that it is intended to assess the time needed to restore power and the country’s ability to ensure the continuity of essential services.

The exercise was formally confirmed during an interministerial committee on national resilience on July 8. A detailed announcement should come before the end of the year.

The meeting notes outline other priorities, such as making sure the French state maintains access to goods considered “essential to ensuring the continuity of the state and the protection of the population.”

These include “emergency blankets, generators, medicines, telecommunications equipment, equipment for law enforcement, as well as rare and critical raw materials.”

Stress test

Crisis preparedness has turned into a political issue in France as record-breaking heat and wildfires are forcing the country to reckon with its ability to respond to emergencies. 

Last summer, the government updated the country’s National Resilience Strategy, a roadmap on how to “maintain the functions essential to collective life” in the face of war or natural disasters. 

Since the start of the summer, many French regions have faced unprecedented temperatures, with mercury levels setting multiple records in June. 

In the country’s southwest, out-of-control wildfires fueled by extreme heat and drought forced mass evacuations that affected more than 200,000 people.

In Paris, the mayor made a desperate plea to large-scale food retailers to mobilize ice stocks over fears that first responders would run out of much-needed cubes to cool down victims of heatstroke.

Opposition parties were quick to attack the government over what they described as a widespread lack of preparedness, forcing the executive to defend itself.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu also announced that the government would submit a bill to parliament to improve emergency response systems.

“We want to refocus fire and rescue services on their core mission and adapt our organization to the crises that lie ahead,” said Lecornu Sunday in an interview with La Tribune Dimanche.