The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years. Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress. At a time when the Great Salt Lake is already in crisis, approving a project that will consume water and energy at this scale is irresponsible and dangerous,” said Franque Bains, director of the Sierra Club’s Utah chapter. “Utahns want to see the Great Salt Lake restored, not stripped.”

The proposed project is backed by Kevin O’Leary, the venture capitalist who appears on the TV show Shark Tank and recently played a villainous tycoon in the movie Marty Supreme. O’Leary has claimed Stratos will deliver thousands of jobs and help the US compete with China in the burgeoning AI industry. “I don’t think there’s a bigger site in the world than this,” O’Leary told Fox News. “It shows the Chinese and the rest of the world we are not messing around, we are going to get this done, move it forward and provide the compute power to our AI companies that defend the country. ”In an X post, O’Leary added: “We’re not gonna drain the Great Salt Lake. That’s ridiculous. We are gonna create incremental jobs.”

But these jobs will not outweigh the longer-term impacts to Utah and beyond, critics argue. Stratos is expected to raise the state’s planet-heating pollution by about 50% by consuming a huge amount of energy and water to power and cool itself, according to one impact analysis. The network of industrial-scale fans needed to cool the datacenter’s hot pipes will result in so much waste heat that it could raise daytime temperatures in the surrounding Hansel valley by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) and night-time temperatures by 8F to 12F (4.4C to 6.6C), according to an analysis by Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University. “The thermal load from the proposed Stratos project is extreme,” Davies said. “Of course it has effects. One of those effects is this: this facility imposes substantial drying on a watershed and ecosystem already in active collapse.” O’Leary said the extra electricity demand won’t raise residents’ energy bills as new gas-fired generation will power the facility. “We are building power from scratch, from the pipeline,” he said. “We are going to burn it with turbines, clean,” he added, although gas is a fossil fuel that is dangerously overheating the world and isn’t clean.......read on- Corporate America strikes again with an environmental and social disaster!,,,,read on  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approves-datacenter-backlash?utm_source=climate-desk&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=climate-desk-newsletter-05-17-2026

• Researchers found that about 84% of animals for sale on Facebook are banned from commercial cross-border trade under an international treaty. More than half of them were endangered or critically endangered species.

• Facebook’s architecture — its closed groups, anonymous users, content monetization and algorithms that push related content to users — makes it a go-to platform for traffickers, researchers say. The platform’s official policy bars the sale of wildlife, but the volume of animals offered for sale point to poor moderation.

• To combat this massive online trade, experts call for stricter regulation of content on Facebook and other platforms, as well as better oversight and increased collaboration between online platforms and law enforcement.

• This article was originally written by Spoorthy Raman appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.

With just the click of a button or a swipe on a phone, it’s possible to buy almost anything online, including rare or endangered animals. From quirky shark trophies to exotic live birds, contraband rhino horns or ivory, buyers can flock to e-commerce platforms and find them all. Traffickers hide behind their screens while profiting from online sales of protected species as these animals dwindle in the wild. “It’s the largest wildlife market,” said wildlife trade researcher Chris Shepherd from the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s easy, it’s convenient; you can operate anonymously from the comfort of your home. You don’t have the expenses of setting up a shop.” Online commerce in illicit wildlife products continues to grow, involving more species and wider geographies. It’s an illicit industry run by kingpins with well-connected networks, and it’s hard to prosecute. Catching online criminals is extremely challenging. “Wildlife markets have moved from physical locations into online locations, and that’s mirroring broader trends in the global economy,” said Simone Haysom, director of environmental crime programs at the Swiss-based organization Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.......read on   https://news.mongabay.com/2026/05/facebook-is-a-hub-for-illegal-wildlife-trade-and-thats-by-design-report-says/

In a recent report, Haysom and her colleague Russell Gray analyzed online wildlife trade data from April 2024 to March 2026. They focused on 10 countries across three continents, places where environmental crime and internet use are high, making them fertile grounds for online wildlife trafficking. They found some 266,535 wildlife products posted on 61 online marketplaces, worth about $66 million. About 75% of the nearly 22,000 ads they saw were on Facebook, a platform that’s been notorious in selling live wildlife, as a recent Mongabay investigation revealed. https://news.mongabay.com/2026/05/facebook-is-a-hub-for-illegal-wildlife-trade-and-thats-by-design-report-says/

We have been here before. In July 2022, the DRC government announced an auction round that included Virunga national park and the Cuvette Centrale tropical peatlands in the north-west of the country, which store the equivalent of three years of global emissions from fossil fuels. It came just months after a $500m (£380m) deal at Cop26 in Glasgow to better protect the DRC’s portion of the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest. In the end, the auction petered out despite defiant claims from the country’s then oil and gas minister that celebrity campaigners including Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Affleck would not stand in their way. The DRC government announced the end of the auction last October, citing lack of competition and irregular offers.

But the world has changed in the proceeding months. In 2022, the US was a leading diplomatic voice behind the scenes, urging the DRC government to cancel the auction. Dozens of environmental NGOs spoke out to condemn the decision. One New York investment firm even tried to buy the oil blocks and turn them into an enormous carbon offsetting project. Today, in a world shaped by Donald Trump’s White House and with the growing risks of speaking out about the environment, the reaction to the latest auction has been comparably meek. “The world’s worst place to prospect for oil is up for auction, again,” said Prof Simon Lewis from University College London, who led the team that first mapped the central Congo peatlands, speaking to my colleague Phoebe Weston last month. “No credible company would bid for oil in the DRC’s forests and peatlands, as there is probably not enough oil to be commercially viable, and it will be expensive oil in financial, social and environmental costs.” Those in favour of the oil exploration say the development does not need to come with a major environmental cost and could provide a huge economic boost for one of the poorest nations on Earth. They point to Gabon, also a Congo basin rainforest country, as an oil producer that maintains one of the highest levels of forest cover in the world. But there is confusion about the priorities of the DRC government. . However more than two-thirds of the corridor overlaps with the planned oil blocks......read on       https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/07/opening-up-the-congo-basin-rainforest-could-be-a-disaster-for-nature-and-the-climate

Trump has launched an unprecedented assault on the environment. Where’s the pushback? Guardian Rei Takver 4 Mar 2026 Climate deniers expected more resistance to the fossil fuel blitz. But Democrats, billionaires and activists have gone silent.This story is published in partnership with DeSmog, the climate investigations site As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil-fuel agenda. “In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a longtime climate denier, said in January at the World Prosperity Forum, a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a rightwing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos.The event’s sponsor was the Heartland Institute, a conservative thinktank that has been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation for decades, and was also a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for Trump’s second administration. “Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no pushback on this,” Morano said – and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement.

“The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,” Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, told me, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December. “And nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whimper. I never thought I’d ever say this: Marc Morano is correct.

”Elimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement Last month, the Trump administration repealed the 2009 “endangerment finding” establishing that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health. It was a determination that undergirded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating pollution from automobiles and power plants. Elimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement. Its repeal is just the latest in a long line of Trump’s climate-related destruction. Since taking office in January 2025, his administration has significantly curtailed the country’s weather forecasting organizations and climate science research facilities, published reports denying established climate science, and made deep cuts to funding for climate-related energy and community projects. Under the leadership of Trump’s appointee Chris Wright, the Department of Energy last year all but banned its key renewable energy department from using terminology like “climate change”, “green”, and “sustainability.”“Trump overturned Biden’s climate agenda at breakneck speed,” Morano said at the Heartland Institute’s Zurich forum.

Instead of pushing back on this blitz, many Democratic party representatives have retreated from talking directly about the climate crisis across social media, podcasts, speeches, and in Congress. The party is now embroiled in a debate about whether affordability is a better message than climate action, despite polling suggesting that 63% of the American public believes the president and Congress should prioritize clean energy.

This trend hasn’t gone without resistance in the party, however. “Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ – people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,” Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse posted on social media in January. Genevieve Guenther, a climate communications expert and founding director of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, largely agrees. “The Democrats’ climate hushing is politically foolish,” she said in an email. “It only benefits the Trump regime’s agenda.”......read on    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/04/trump-climate-change-democrats