Crypto News: The US city with the world’s worst air

Smoke from fires burning across the Pacific Northwest has triggered pollution alerts in the US and Canada. In today’s edition, we detail how the blazes mean Portland currently has the worst air quality among the world’s top cities.

In an interview ahead of COP31 in Turkey in November, the summit’s president, Murat Kurum, tells us he’ll press nations to boost demand for carbon credits. And we also examine exactly how much water the rapidly expanding data center sector will consume.

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Portland’s unhealthy air

By Brian K Sullivan

Wildfires burning across Washington and Oregon have left Portland with the worst air quality among major cities around the world, edging out Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A Portland resident takes a picture of smoke from the Bench and Beachcomb fires along Highway 26 near Madras, Oregon, on July 25

The air in both cities is classified as unhealthy, although the quality is improving in the Congolese capital on Wednesday, according to IQ Air, a commercial monitoring service. At the other end of the ranking, Canberra, Oslo and Stockholm have the cleanest air, with Washington DC currently the highest ranked US city.

Air quality alerts have been issued for both sides of the US-Canada border as smoke from wildfires across the Pacific Northwest continues to cloud the skies. That includes parts of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, as well as British Columbia and Alberta. There are also pockets of very unhealthy air around Oregon and Washington.

Fires raging through built-up areas can release large amounts of “dangerous pollutants, which can be carcinogenic,” said commercial forecaster AccuWeather Inc. Where they can, people should use at least an N95 respirator to protect themselves.

Area burned

10,400 acres

The area burned by fires that erupted over the weekend in and around Spokane, Washington, destroying homes and sending tens of thousands of residents fleeing for their lives.

Warming impact

Global warming is “putting a thumb on the scale, producing severe and unprecedented heat waves.”

Noah Diffenbaugh

Professor of Earth system science at Stanford University

Diffenbaugh comments on the impact of climate change on delivering hot and dry conditions that can raise the prospects of large wildfires.

COP31’s carbon credits focus

By Alastair Marsh

Governments will be pressed at the annual United Nations climate conference to help boost demand for carbon credits and unlock more than $50 billion in additional annual finance for developing economies to tackle tasks like reducing emissions, according to the summit’s host.

Elevating the use of carbon markets will be among objectives for the COP31 meetings in Turkey in November, Murat Kurum, the country’s environment minister and president of the talks, said in an interview.

“Mobilizing private capital at the speed and scale required means ensuring every available tool is being used effectively, and carbon markets are one of the most underused,” Kurum said. “We want to see carbon markets take their rightful place in the climate finance architecture.”

To facilitate this aim, Turkey confirmed Thursday it had joined the Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets, an initiative formed last year and led by countries including the UK, Kenya and Singapore to bolster corporate demand for high-integrity carbon credits. The move builds on the enactment last year of the country’s first climate law, which provided the legal basis to establish a domestic emissions trading scheme.

Zero

The Iran War Revealed China Has a New Oil Weapon

The Middle East conflict is now in its fifth month, deepening the oil and gas supply shock. Early in the war, analysts worried that the oil price would rise to $200 a barrel, causing a global recession and widespread panic, but that didn’t happen.

This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi is joined by Bloomberg Opinion columnist Javier Blas to discuss why oil prices stayed around $100 per barrel and why the war is the start of a new paradigm in energy politics.

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

How much water?

By Michelle Ma

The artificial intelligence boom has inspired one of the largest infrastructure build-outs seen in decades: Tech firms are investing billions into constructing the data centers powering AI. This has meant massive new demands on water supplies. Data centers need water to cool their hot servers and also consume it indirectly through the water required to generate the electricity they use. That indirect water footprint is typically orders of magnitude higher.

Demonstrators ahead of a Box Elder County Commission meeting to decide whether to approve the construction of a large data center in Tremonton, Utah, in May.

Tech giants say they’re taking steps to reduce their water consumption, and some tech leaders have suggested the water problem is overblown. But as climate change intensifies drought stress in many regions, especially in the western US, data centers’ demands on water are raising questions from the public. An investigation by Bloomberg News last year found that data centers are increasingly being built in places that already have high competition over scarce water resources.

Data center water usage is projected to soar as the AI build-out continues. Lawmakers are beginning to reckon with what that could mean for local communities.

An Amazon Web Services data center in Haymarket, Virginia, US, on Wednesday, July 9, 2025.

There are two ways to look at data center water usage: consumption and withdrawal. Consumption measures how much of the water is effectively lost, usually through evaporation. Withdrawal measures how much water a data center draws from a source. Withdrawn water that doesn’t evaporate is typically discharged to surface water or groundwater and is eventually reusable after treatment. However, the water may be discharged warmer or with altered chemistry, which can pose ecological risks.

In the US, data centers directly consumed about 17.4 billion gallons of water in 2023 – equivalent to about 160,000 US households – and could consume as much as 74 billion gallons annually by 2028, mainly for cooling, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates. (National data for 2024 and 2025 is not available.) A separate analysis by UC Riverside professor Shaolei Ren and his coauthors estimates that US data centers could consume as much as 110 billion gallons annually by 2030, or about 7% of total annual consumptive use in US public water systems.

Keep reading

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