Two weeks ago, I promised this newsletter would have more to say about the emotional sustainability of climate coverage and climate activism—which seems to be a theme of late. In the wake of the most recent U.N. climate report, for example, several prominent voices in the climate space have returned to the question of how to frame climate news optimistically, so that people don’t feel too overwhelmed.

In a world where fossil fuel executives, meat megacorporations, and the like possess vastly more wealth and power than activists, tone probably isn’t the primary challenge in climate communication, as Kate Aronoff argued last week. At the same time, it’s true that sustainability continues to have the reputation of being a lot of work. And that’s a fascinating conundrum—because despite the plethora of popular articles promising five, 10, 12, 20, 22, 40, 58, or 101 ways to live more sustainably and fight climate change, a lot of the easy answers about how to live more sustainably involve doing less.

Four years ago, climate writer Mary Annaïse Heglar penned a classic essay at Vox about being tired of people confessing their environmental sins to her. Too often, she wrote, people feel they need to “convert to 100 percent solar energy, ride an upcycled bike everywhere, stop flying, eat vegan,” or else they’re bad environmentalists. “And all this raises the price of admission to the climate movement to an exorbitant level, often pricing out people of color and other marginalized groups.” Personal action isn’t irrelevant in the fight for a livable future, she wrote, but it’s not the best place to focus one’s efforts, particularly if people then get overwhelmed and stop at the personal—neglecting to vote for robust climate policies because they’re so busy trying to find a place to recycle those pesky plastic bags.

A lot of people clearly feel sustainable living means doing more: taking more time to sort recycling or buying special reusable containers, sourcing clothes from thrift shops or researching the most sustainable varieties of seafood. A lot of people also want guidance about how to live more sustainably (how to have a more sustainable yard, for example, was one question I recently heard raised in a meeting) but feel intimidated by the amount of work it might require (killing off your grass and installing a bunch of native plants is pretty daunting for nongardeners).

But let’s take that sustainable yard question as a good case study. Sure, there’s a case for killing off your grass, planting a meadow of native plants, as The New York Times recently urged to ward off the insect apocalypse, or even adding a frog pond, as Emma Marris suggested at The Atlantic. But if you’re not ready or equipped to do that, there really is one easy trick to make your yard more sustainable: Do less. Mow it less frequently—the estimates on emissions from gas-powered lawn mowers vary, but all of them are staggering (greater than a car operating for an equivalent amount of time), and longer grass is more hospitable to insects and other wildlife anyway. Apply pesticides or herbicides less frequently—the runoff is terrible for watersheds (in fact, that might be an easier way to help amphibians than installing a frog pond). If you’re in a water-strapped part of the country, water it less frequently.

Greater effort doesn’t necessarily mean greater environmental friendliness. This holds for so many other things as well, like clothes shopping. Donating your clothing or looking for sustainably produced labels has some serious limits, as recent reporting on the deluge of unused clothing donations and greenwashing of the fashion industry has shown. The real way to dress sustainably, as a growing number of experts acknowledge, is simply to buy less. The real way to make your commute more sustainable may not be to spend hours researching and then financing the latest e-bike, but to work less—by pushing for a four-day workweek, as Kate wrote about last year.

You’d think that this would be a popular “solution” in a world where people are always bemoaning how little time they have, how little cash they have, how bad inflation has gotten. Yet “do less” isn’t always what people want to hear. Perhaps that’s because “do less” has a hint of austerity to it or because doing less may require swimming against the flow of a culture obsessed with aesthetics. Try doing or not doing anything remotely unorthodox with your lawn in a neighborhood with a neurotic homeowners’ association, and see how that goes. (Although, that being said, this Maryland couple sued those bougie troglodytes and won, so there’s hope.) Buying fewer clothes means ignoring the pressure to engage in competitive social signaling.

Yet it’s worth remembering that it’s precisely this culture of aesthetics over substance that the corporations driving climate change have relied on again and again: by championing the idea of a personal “carbon footprint” in the first place, to make people feel guilty about their own lifestyles instead of questioning fossil fuel companies’ culpability; by marketing gas stoves as a lifestyle upgrade or plastics as convenient and more pleasant to use; by trend-churning to force seasonal purchases; and a multitude of other examples.

If individual consumers are going to take on the task of fighting all this, perhaps the least they can do for themselves is—instead of adding 20 items to their to-do lists and shaming themselves for falling short—choose the path that saves them time and money, by rejecting the cult of aesthetics in the first place. There’s beauty in that too.

Good News

Renewable electricity generation surpassed coal in this country for the first time in 2022, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports.

Bad News

Over a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine catapulted heat pumps and home insulation to the top of the Western European political agenda—to save on winter fuel—an independent report has found that the United Kingdom only “stuttered further” in 2022 on its path to energy efficiency. The chair of the independent commission blamed insufficient funding and an overreliance on “low-stakes incremental changes” and called for bolder policies. “The risk of delay in addressing climate change,” he said, “is now greater than the risk of over-correction.”

Stat of the Week

That’s the degree to which stricter limits on fine-particulate-matter air pollution could reduce mortality rates among older Black and low-income people in the U.S, according to a new study. Read the New York Times write-up here.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

The Gospel of Disaster

Slate has a pretty wild story this week about the Christian relief organizations that are stepping up to the plate to help communities recover from climate disasters when the Federal Emergency Management Agency fails to get the job done (unfortunately a frequent occurrence, due to persistent underfunding):

The Christian relief organizations that have stepped in as first responders—with little oversight—are diverse, spanning from well-intentioned community churches with decades of goodwill to billion-dollar evangelical charities that use far-right outrage to fundraise and take advantage of disaster to spread their gospel.

The overwhelming majority of these organizations’ on-the-ground volunteers serve out of genuine compassion. But some of the country’s largest disaster charities are helmed by far-right extremist leaders who encourage volunteers to make proselytization a main part of their mission, bragging in press releases about how many disaster victims “prayed to receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” For Samaritan’s Purse, that leader is president and CEO Franklin Graham, the evangelical titan who has called Islam a violent religion, compared trans people with pedophiles, and praised Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies, saying LGBT people will burn in “the flames of hell.”

Read Nick Aspinwall’s story at Slate.

This article first appeared in Apocalypse Soon, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

The bottom line of the dire new U.N. climate report this week is that our current policies to reduce emissions aren’t enough. The Summary for Policymakers released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emphasizes that while we have lowered our projected emissions trajectory a bit (here’s a useful graph), we’re still on track for at least three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100—a truly disastrous scenario. Limiting warming to 1.5 or two degrees, which is still globally disruptive, would require major policy changes almost immediately. “Every decision from here on out matters,” Ketan Joshi wrote at TNR in response to the report. And decisions like last week’s approval of the Willow project in Alaska need to stop: “Every next step must be a step where emissions fall.”

That’s going to be tough. As illustrated by the Willow decision and the battle over last year’s big climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, it is really hard to get a majority of lawmakers to take a “no new fossil fuels” position. But there’s no shortage of ideas about how to change that. Here are five that have been proposed at TNR and elsewhere.

Mobilizing nonvoting environmentalists. One of the big reasons often given for American politicians’ lack of ambitious climate policy is that politicians need to get elected, and there just aren’t enough climate-first voters to keep climate-first politicians in power. (This is one of the rationales, presumably, behind Joe Biden’s demonstrable tack to the center ahead of 2024.)

Liza Featherstone, however, spoke last year to members of a nonprofit that thinks all that could change very rapidly. “The polls are right that there are not enough climate-first voters to scare politicians,” Nathaniel Stinnett of the Environmental Voter Project told her. But those polls look at likely voters. And EVP’s research has found that “far more nonvoters list climate as their top priority.” Nonvoting environmentalists, Liza reported, “tend to be young, low-income, or people of color. All those groups vote less than other demographics.” And EVP is betting that helping those people get to the polls via registration, reminders, and transport—rather than earlier climate activists’ attempts at persuading skeptics—might be the way to sway elections.

Liza followed up on this topic after the midterms and found that in the 2022 midterms, “more ‘climate voters,’ people whose top issue is the climate crisis, showed up to cast ballots than in any other election in U.S. history.” There’s a lesson here, she concluded: “Climate voters exist, and Democrats should stop campaigning—and governing—as if they do not.”

Getting fossil fuel money out of politics. Joe Manchin’s frequent obstruction of policies that would transition us off fossil fuels isn’t exactly a mystery, as TNR’s Kate Aronoff has pointed out many times. The West Virginia Democrat gets a lot of both his personal income and his political donations from the fossil fuel industry. And while most of the top recipients of such donations are Republicans, Joe Manchin isn’t the only Democrat raking in oil and gas money! Even at the state level, as Meaghan Winter pointed out in 2019, energy companies wield a tremendous amount of power over politics via political donations.

Fixing this starts with increasing awareness. Media organizations should mention whether a politician receives significant fossil fuel donations when reporting on that politician’s positions on climate change. People can also check the OpenSecrets database to see how much their elected representatives are receiving. Then there are pledges that have circulated in recent years, by which politicians can commit to reject such donations. There’s evidence that these pledges make a difference: “Prior to signing the pledge,” The Guardian reported during the 2020 election, “nearly all of the 2020 Democratic candidates took money from fossil fuel executives, other employees and via political action committees.”

To build momentum, Aaron Regunberg argued last year, activists could “start stigmatizing fossil fuel enablers wherever they exist”—not just the politicians who take donations. Or, of course, there’s always Kate Aronoff’s “one quick trick for curbing the fossil fuel industry’s political influence”: nationalization.

Getting fossil fuel money out of policy. The oil and gas industry influences politics in more subtle ways, for instance by funding a lot of the research from which policies get drafted. ExxonMobil has routinely given six-figure sums to Brookings, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and similar D.C. think tanks, Kate Aronoff reported in 2021. That’s something that ought to be disclosed when experts from those think tanks write blog posts denouncing investigative exposés of the company, as happened that year, or get quoted about how increased gas exports could help Ukraine—a frequent occurrence in 2022.

The divestment campaign at universities is also picking up steam, as people realize just how much climate research at top-tier research institutions is funded by fossil fuels. Recently, Data for Progress and Fossil Free Research calculated that six fossil fuel companies alone had probably spent $700 million funding research at 27 different U.S. universities between 2010 and 2020—something that ought to be taken into account, the authors argued, when considering the research those universities produced favoring things like carbon capture, a questionable climate “solution” that the industry loves because it allows it to continue with its core business model. If you’re interested in a particularly chilling case study in this process, don’t miss Kate Aronoff’s look at Ernest Moniz—the MIT professor emeritus, Obama alum, and former Biden adviser who has built a substantial portion of his career taking fossil fuel money and churning out emissions-heavy “all of the above” energy policies.

The rights-of-nature movement. Climate journalist Amy Westervelt recently wrote about this for Orion magazine. Given that the Inflation Reduction Act is the most ambitious climate policy that the U.S. has ever passed—in fact, it almost didn’t pass—and yet the final form lacked any mechanism for reducing fossil fuels, she writes, there’s a strong case for “rethinking our decision-making framework altogether so that maybe, eventually, we have a shot at not repeating the same damn mistakes over and over for the next century.”

The rights-of-nature movement, she points out—which emerged from Indigenous approaches—offers a way to modify the Western legal system to make more room for the kind of policies we need in the current era. The framework doesn’t just grant “ecosystems the right to survive and thrive” but also “grants the communities surrounding those ecosystems the ability to protect those rights.” And in so doing, she argues, it would fix the “fatal flaw in the U.S. operating system”: the “social contract” theory that, in the end, has assigned vastly more rights to corporations and individuals than to the community or the resources that community needs. “Rights of nature kicks that idea to the curb. No person or entity is more important than its ecosystem, no one gets out of their obligation to protect it.”

Making climate a local issue. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has written extensively about how even some climate skeptics can be won over if you start by talking about local weather patterns. Often, they’ve noticed that weather is getting weirder, and they’re concerned. That’s an underutilized technique when it comes to politics, as well, Liza Featherstone argued ahead of last year’s midterms. Primary challengers who talk about climate not in national terms but in terms more immediately relevant to their potential constituents—hurricanes, water shortages, wildfires—often get more traction than the political establishment might have predicted.

TNR politics reporter Grace Segers also noticed this trend when it came to the general election, when many Democrats shied away from the climate topic in a way that may have cost them winnable votes:

This data suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom that candidates should focus solely on “kitchen table” economic issues, talking about climate change could help boost turnout for Democrats. But given the nuances of individual elections, that rhetoric may be most effective if it is tailored to the particular races they are trying to win and the voters they are hoping to convince.

Good News

The European Commission has proposed new rules to crack down on corporate greenwashing in the EU, by making companies substantiate vague claims like “climate neutral” that they might slap on labels to entice customers.

Bad News

Oil executives are preparing to spend big on new offshore oil projects in the next two years, as new investments rise “to levels not seen in a decade,” Climatewire reports.

Stat of the Week

No, you’re not imagining it if you feel your allergies are lasting longer. The “freeze-free season,” i.e., possible allergy season, has expanded on average by 15 days in the U.S. since 1970, according to recent number crunching from Climate Central. Here in D.C., allergy season has gotten 20 days longer. Oh, and a 2021 paper in the journal Environmental Sciences found that allergy seasons across the U.S. are more intense, with pollen concentrations increasing by 21 percent, “strongly coupled to observed warming.”

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

A “Rocking Chair Rebellion”: Seniors Call on Banks to Dump Big Oil

A series of demonstrations across the country this week staged by environmentalist Bill McKibben’s Third Act group for older activists received a rousing writeup in the Times with plenty of pictures of the demonstrations. Cara Buckley described the scene in D.C.:

Bundled in long johns, puffer coats, layered knit hats and sleeping bags, and fortified by cookies sent by courier from a sympathetic supporter, dozens of graying protesters sat in rocking chairs outside of four banks in downtown Washington for 24 hours, in a nationwide protest billed as the largest climate action ever undertaken by older folks …

Their targets were Chase, the subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Bank of America, the biggest investors in fossil fuel projects, according to a 2022 report by the Rainforest Action Network and other environmental groups. Collectively, the four banks have poured more than $1 trillion between 2016 and 2021 into oil and gas.

Read Cara Buckley’s Report at The New York Times.

This article first appeared in Apocalypse Soon, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

It’s a tough week to be an environmentalist, or really any person concerned about the future.

The Biden administration’s announcement Monday that it will approve the Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope represents more than just another retreat from the president’s campaign promise to end drilling on federal lands. It represents more than just the potential degradation of vulnerable Arctic ecosystems. And it’s not just that Willow is projected to add emissions equivalent to 64 coal-fired power plants, at a time when even the International Energy Agency has concluded that new oil and gas development needs to stop immediately to prevent catastrophic levels of global warming.

In addition to all of these things, the Willow approval underlines that the climate phase of the Biden administration is over. The Inflation Reduction Act, a bittersweet compromise, is behind us, and there’s not much hope of passing more ambitious emissions reductions anytime soon. Biden’s once-ambitious biodiversity agenda is languishing in the congressional discard pile. The tack to the center, ahead of 2024, has begun. And what Democrats managed to shove through the last Congress, good though it was, wasn’t enough—not to prevent catastrophic warming, not to prevent ecosystem collapse, not to shore up and reform the country’s vulnerable and unsustainable food system.

So if you’re worried about this, what should you do now?

In the past decade, much of the most effective environmental and climate advocacy has come from rejecting the 1990s and early-aughts emphasis on personal lifestyle change and instead encouraging people to pour their anxieties into collective action. If the prototypical twentieth-century environmentalist was a bird-watcher, the prototypical twenty-first-century environmentalist would be an organizer. Showcasing these principles, the Sunrise Movement in two short years went from being airily dismissed by Nancy Pelosi as “the green dream or whatever” to being widely credited, among other leftist and youth-focused groups, with changing the Democratic Party’s approach to climate change, pulling Joe Biden left, and influencing the early architecture of the Inflation Reduction Act.

But at a moment when this kind of political action seems pretty comprehensively stymied, how do you do what you can without feeling futile? One answer, which has been floated by a number of different environmental thinkers, is to focus on hyperlocal instead of national issues. It’s the approach many urged as a political strategy back when the legislation that eventually became the IRA looked like it wouldn’t pass at all. And in a slight twist from the organizing push of the last few years, nourishing your local sensibilities as an individual is now the approach a growing number of voices seem to be suggesting for spiritual refreshment, as a personal way of dealing with a political reality that feels overwhelming.

This was one of the themes of Jenny Odell’s surprise bestseller in 2019, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy—that shutting down Twitter, closing the news websites, and reconnecting to the natural world around you is itself a radical act and could furnish the emotional reserves for better political action: “sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully” at present. Odell’s second book, Saving Time, was published last week, and it similarly rejects strict productivity culture in favor of a more organic way of life intimately connected to place (Odell is big on bird-watching and bioregionalism).

Odell’s not alone in pointing to the power of reengaging with what’s directly in front of you, nor the need for an almost spiritual antidote to activist burnout. That’s also one of the themes of British author and former religious sister Karen Armstrong’s Sacred Nature, which came out last fall and argued that contemplating nature in “silence and a degree of solitude” might be necessary, as part of a broader “spiritual revolution,” to fuel policy change. “If we want to halt the environmental crisis, we need first, like Coleridge, to seek a silent receptiveness to the natural world, bringing it into our lives little by little every day.”

Mainstream outlets seem to be catching the vibe. The Atlantic’s climate newsletter recently touted the benefits of creating a frog pond in your backyard, noting that “saving species in the 21st century isn’t just about protecting big, undeveloped parks,” adding that “it can be dizzying to think about all the species that need help right now, but engaging in everyday conservation can also just be fun.” This came barely a week after The New York Times’ climate newsletter linked the obsessive tracking of New York City’s escaped Eurasian eagle-owl to compassion and “radical care” in the Anthropocene, and closed by asking readers, “Tell us: what’s wild around you?”

I’ll admit to a tiny bit of skepticism about this “bird-watching, but make it socialist” approach. While it suits my own proclivities just fine, this kind of solitary engagement with nature is easier recommended by people who already find it compelling than carried out by people with little background in, or space for, avian observation and garden projects. Many people may not know how to start engaging with nature, find it time-consuming, or may not feel inclined to persist in it as a solitary pursuit. And while reconnecting with nature may lead to collective action, there’s no built-in mechanism for it if we’re all walking the urban forests alone.

This is where citizen science comes in. You can focus on the nature around you—even get guidance on doing so—and then submit it to a collective project. Contemplate a nearby stream, then contribute data to a group tracking salt runoff from winter roads. If you do like bird-watching, your time reconnecting with feathery neighbors could feed into a broader effort to figure out the impact of climate change on avian communities. For those who find birds too high-energy for their particular breed of burnout, bivalves are always an option: Volunteer oyster gardening is a thing these days. Where I live in D.C., some of the best information on community water quality gets collected by community members. And these networks are still a way of meeting others—so while they’re a break from politics, they can also furnish not just the data but the connections for subsequent reengagement.

TNR’s climate desk has more to come on the topic of recharging—the emotional sustainability of the climate fight, if you will, in addition to ecological sustainability. But in the meantime, give one of the options here a try. If bad news is getting you down, focus on your immediate surroundings for a while. There isn’t a wrong answer here. Just don’t let despair swallow you whole and spit you out as someone who has given up caring about our fate.

Good News

The distance the average electric vehicle sold in the U.S. can go between charges is now quickly approaching 300 miles, Bloomberg reports. That’s four times the average range in 2011—one of many changes, along with increasing charging station availability, subsidies, and more, that are making E.V.s practical for a wider range of consumers. (Caveat: As TNR’s Kate Aronoff has pointed out, there are problems with “simply recreating current American car culture with electric batteries,” though. Shifting to more of a public transit–oriented system might be more sustainable.)

Bad News

There are possibly PFAS (a.k.a “forever chemicals”) in your toilet paper, and also coffee is going to get more scarce and expensive due to climate change. The Biden administration announced its intent to start restricting PFAS on Tuesday by requiring utility companies to remove them from drinking water.

Stat of the Week

That’s the amount by which a Washington Post investigation found insurance companies were “adjusting” (i.e., reducing) claims from Hurricane Ian survivors, rewriting and even deleting elements of licensed insurance adjusters’ reports to result in lower payouts.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

Landowners Fear Injection of Fracking Waste Threatens Aquifers in West Texas

Fracking sites in West Texas, Dylan Baddour reports, “can produce five times as much wastewater as oil.” And the wastewater is typically reinjected into the ground. While researchers know injection wells can cause earthquakes, they don’t have definitive proof yet that they are contaminating groundwater (although there’s plenty of reason to suspect it’s possible, especially given the earthquakes). The practice is starting to unnerve even reliably conservative farmers in the area:

Shifflett, 74, has nothing against oil. He votes Republican, hangs a cross above his door and leans an old rifle on his living room wall. Oil companies are doing their jobs, he said. For this situation, he blames the government—specifically, Texas’ oil field regulator, the Railroad Commission, which issues permits for fracking wastewater injection wells.

“If they ruin the water out here, there won’t be anyone left. This will be a desert with no inhabitants,” he said from his dining room table. “It’s only a matter of time.”

Read Dylan Baddour’s story at Inside Climate News.

This article first appeared in Apocalypse Soon, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

What do we do about the coming phosphorus crisis? In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert details the troubling paradox of the chemical element that, as she reminds readers, Isaac Asimov called “life’s bottleneck.” On the one hand, we’re slowly running out of the phosphorus needed for the fertilizer on which our agricultural system depends. That’s plenty scary on its own! On the other, phosphorus-rich runoff is poisoning our waterways. That’s because the fertilizer turbocharges certain types of toxic algae that can cause serious health problems in humans. Then, when the algae die, “their decomposition sucks oxygen out of the water, creating aquatic dead zones where almost nothing can survive.” (If you’re curious about what this looks like and what it means for coastal communities, check out the photo essay on algal blooms that TNR published in 2019.)

Kolbert explores several different contributors to the phosphorus crisis and an array of ways to ameliorate it. “If every bit of manure on the planet were recycled—cows, pigs, and chickens produce some four billion tons annually—it could cut the demand for mined phosphorus by half,” she notes. “Of course, even in this best-case scenario, the problem would be only half solved.” She reviews other ideas, from human “peecycling” to filtering phosphorus out of wastewater; eliminating corn-based biofuels, which are both highly subsidized and suck up “something like ten percent of all fertilizer” in the United States; and reducing food waste, which would in turn reduce the need for fertilizer.

But there’s another possible solution that came to mind while reading Kolbert’s piece.

The Guardian’s Damian Carrington on Monday reported the results of a new study from researchers at Columbia University and the Environmental Defense Fund, showing that “emissions from the food system alone will drive the world past 1.5 Celsius of global heating, unless high-methane foods are tackled.” High-methane foods means meat—specifically, meat from ruminants.

On the face of it, this news only adds to the sense of existential crisis hovering over our food system. But the study contained a ray of hope: “The temperature rise,” Carrington wrote, “could be cut by 55% by cutting meat consumption in rich countries to medically recommended levels, reducing emissions from livestock and their manure, and using renewable energy in the food system.” Breaking that down, Carrington notes that “if people adopted the healthy diet recommended by Harvard medical school, which allows a single serving of red meat a week, the rise could be cut by 0.2C,” a staggering result for a behavioral change that is logistically much easier than, say, switching en masse to long-underfunded public transit systems, or updating the energy grid to allow for more renewable energy generation, or creating a domestic electric vehicle and lithium battery industry, as the Inflation Reduction Act seeks to do. And this shift wouldn’t mean abandoning the pursuit of equity: “Such a diet would mean a big cut in meat eating in rich nations but could mean an increase in some poorer countries,” Carrington notes.

Reducing animal agriculture, in addition to helping meet climate targets, could also help reduce our phosphorus use and runoff. Corn is typically estimated to account for over 40 percent of U.S. commercial fertilizer use. Only 30 percent of corn gets processed into ethanol (the biofuel Kolbert is talking about), whereas about half becomes animal feed. Alfalfa, another phosphorus-consuming crop, which accounts for over 4 percent of total cropland in the U.S. (it’s also disproportionately contributing to the Southwestern water crisis), likewise goes into cattle bellies. If we eat less meat, we’ll need less corn and alfalfa to feed the animals and thus less phosphorus to fertilize those crops. Recycling those animals’ manure and using it in lieu of mined phosphate fertilizer may be worthwhile as well, but surely a more efficient solution—both from a runoff and an emissions standpoint—would be to reduce the raw demand.

But I don’t know how we get there. Animal agriculture has historically propelled much of America’s dysfunctional subsidy system, skewing agriculture toward practices that damage both human and planetary health, as detailed in Michael Pollan’s critically acclaimed 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It’s one of the more obvious targets for reform, since meat consumption, as previously mentioned, is comparatively easy to reduce relative to other climate-friendly changes. But as TNR regular Jan Dutkiewicz has repeatedly pointed out, getting people to eat less meat—or even less of one particular type of meat, like beef—is really, really hard. Every time anyone suggests it, people (and Fox News) completely lose their brisket.

TNR’s climate desk has published a couple of ideas on this front over the past few years, from changing the way media covers food to expanding and building on the success of community-led Meatless Mondays. Some people see promise in new meat substitutes, like Impossible Burgers or lab-grown meat. Others may find it helpful to reconnect to traditional foodways—which, contrary to our perception of meat as central to culinary traditions, didn’t involve as much habitual meat consumption because people simply didn’t have access. In presenting “the climate case for rationing” last week, Kate Aronoff pointed out another possible approach. Many argue that rationing in World War II led to one of the healthiest national diets the United Kingdom has ever seen.

Whichever approach you favor—and note that none of these are asking people to forgo hamburgers permanently and forever—something has to give. At the rate we’re going, the food system will break. We can sit on our hands until that happens or take steps now to head off a civilizational catastrophe.

Good News

On Saturday, after a decade of talks, U.N. negotiators finally reached agreement on a treaty to protect 30 percent of the world’s oceans.

Bad News

Ocean spray can contaminate coastal communities with E. coli, norovirus, and salmonella, thanks to the sewage routinely dumped into waterways, a new study from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography finds.

Stat of the Week

That’s the percentage of the world’s population that remained free from harmful levels of air pollution in 2019, according to new modeling published in The Lancet. In other words: Almost the entire global population is being subjected to air pollution above the World Health Organization’s suggested limits.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

Climate solutions do exist. These 6 experts detail what they look like

NPR has a nice little listicle this week offering readers a guide for evaluating so-called climate “solutions” and distinguishing real ones from corporate greenwashing. It’s a good balance between optimism and rigor, which can be a tricky one to strike on this topic. Recommendations include, “Think about who’s selling you the solution” and asking yourself (or the person hawking the solution), “Is it available and scalable now?” Most importantly, it encourages readers not to ignore the big solution staring us all in the face:

It may sound basic, but one big way to address climate change is to reduce the main human activity that caused it in the first place: burning fossil fuels.

Scientists say that means ultimately transitioning away from oil, coal and gas and becoming more energy efficient. We already have a lot of the technology we need to make this transition, like solar, wind, and batteries, [Harvard historian of science Naomi] Oreskes says.

“What we need to do right now is to mobilize the technologies that already exist, that work and are cost competitive, and that essentially means renewable energy and storage,” she says.

Read Julia Simon’s piece at NPR.

This article first appeared in Apocalypse Soon, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

An invisible diagonal line is transecting the country this week, dividing Americans into two extreme realities: in the West and northern Midwest, record cold, dangerous freezing rain, and heavy snowfall; in the Southeast and mid-Atlantic, a historic heat wave, sending mercury in Appalachia and even the nation’s capital rocketing toward 80 degrees in what’s historically been almost the heart of winter. (Back in 1990, the District of Columbia experienced its final freeze of the season on April 13.)

What’s a healthy response to this surreal weather week? While Western and Northern regions prepare for what could in fact be dangerous conditions, unseasonably warm weather often gets met with a shrug: Here in D.C., a handful of people may grumble about the eerie and even alienating effect of the city’s increasingly titular winters, but others often happily plan to make the most of a balmy day—have an early barbecue, make one dark remark about impending climate catastrophe, pass the beer.

The way these weather events are reported to the average news consumer, I suspect—and, specifically, the emphasis on temperature—contributes to the confusion about how to respond. “Washington, D.C., could approach 80 degrees Thursday,” is how the Post reported this news. “That would be just two days later than the city’s earliest 80-degree reading on record.”

That’s a wild statistic, but it’s also a morally neutral one. Early versus late aren’t existentially fraught terms. And if anything, “early” in the English language is associated with good things: “The early bird gets the worm.”

Agriculturally, however, a single record-setting temperature isn’t always the best way to measure the disruption that weird weather can bring; cumulative odd temperature matters too. This week’s heat wave, for example, will hit some of the country’s top states for agricultural production—including Texas, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Georgia. And when it comes to some of the country’s most beloved crops—the iconic Georgia peach, for example—heat waves, even in February, can be tremendously disruptive.

Both peaches and blueberries, which are produced in abundance in the American South, depend on a certain number of what’s known as “chill hours” in winter to trigger fruit production in the spring and summer. For peaches, that means a certain number of hours below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. “Overall, chill hours are decreasing across most parts of the country, as temperatures increase,” University of Georgia agricultural climatologist Pam Knox told me by phone. “It’s hard to document exactly how much that is because there hasn’t been any real research that shows that.” She pointed me to a graph, however, for chill hours in Peach County, Georgia, showing both the historic average accumulation of chill hours over the winter season and the past two winters. This season, as of February 19, the total number of chill hours is 746, compared to a historical average of over 1,100.

“Chill hours are one of those niche climate variables that really only fruit producers are interested in,” Knox acknowledged. But they can really throw a wrench into agricultural timetables. “Most farmers will hedge by having more than one variety of peaches, some that respond to fewer chill hours and some that respond to more chill hours,” she said. “So for some peaches, 700 hours would be sufficient; for some other varieties they would need at least 1,000. More farmers now are leaning toward shorter,” she said, noting that “we would very seldom expect to match the historical average” at this point.

But even then, a heat wave can screw things up, whether for peaches or for Georgia’s even more abundant crop of blueberries. “If you use something that has too few chill hours and they get their chill hours early,” Knox noted, “the plants are ready to go. We get some really warm weather for a few days and they pop, the blooms come out, and that makes them very vulnerable to a late frost,” which would kill the blooms. “Keep in mind,” she added, “that in most of Georgia the last average day of frost for the year is mid-March. Last year we had frost in April.”

There are things farmers can do to guard against this, she added, like covering trees or bushes with water ahead of a subsequent cold snap that freezes to keep the plants from getting too far below 32 degrees. They can also spray the trees with specialized chemicals. All of that costs money, though—one of many ways that climate change translates into higher food prices, even if few politicians are yet willing to treat the topic as the kitchen table issue it is.

Reporting not just record temperatures for a given month, but also chill hours, might be one way media coverage could help people understand the impact of unusual weather—although it would require investing in different types of data collection. Another way, and one less specific to fruit production and more easily understandable to nonfarmers who can still see the effects all around them, might be emphasizing the ever-earlier onset of spring, as measured by so-called “phenology,” i.e., when flowers bloom and birds start to nest. The USA National Phenology Network, Knox pointed out, measures this: “They update it every day, and it shows at least for Georgia that we’re at least two weeks ahead of normal conditions.”

Here in D.C., there is some awareness of phenology through the dating of the annual blossoming of ornamental cherry trees, which attracts tourists. This year, “the indicator tree,” WTOP reporter Megan Cloherty tweeted last week, “which usually blooms 2 weeks before the others on the National Mall, is budding. @NationalMallNPS says it’s not a question of [if] the trees will bloom early, it’s whether they’ll break a record.”

Good News

The New York Times has a surprisingly bullish report on sustainable aviation fuel, which remains costly and very rarely used. In addition to United Airlines leading the launch of a new $100 million venture capital fund for the technology this week, David Gelles reports, Boeing has pledged to double its use of sustainable fuel in 2023, and multiple startups are currently building new factors for fuel production. Gelles points out that United Airlines has, in a rare move, pledged to meet its zero-emissions goal by 2050 without relying on carbon offsets—offsets being something climate advocates, with good reason, increasingly regard as bogus. (Read more about that here.)

Bad News

Four new proposed oil terminals off the Texas coast—one of which the Biden administration has already approved—could produce emissions equal to three times the entire United States’ annual current emissions, The Guardian reports.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

This Is What They Call “Essential for Life”

Climate journalist Emily Atkin points out an undercovered aspect of the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio: The toxic chemicals leaking from the derailed train were largely petrochemicals used to make PVC. Atkin circles back to an advertisement aired last year by petroleum refining company Valero:

In the commercial, we watch a new father imagining his infant daughter grow up. As she gets older, she’s surrounded by plastic products made from petrochemicals: crayons, lip gloss, a plastic drum set. The father beams with pride. The soothing voice returns. “Essential products,” she says. “Essential for life.”

The commercial is supposed to serve as an invitation for us to think about the wonderful things that can happen to a child because of plastics.

But when I watch it, all I can think about is the children in East Palestine, where the air was recently coated in the cancer-causing chemicals needed to make these plastics—the same ones we’re told are “essential for life.”

Read Emily Atkin’s newsletter at Heated.

This article first appeared in Apocalypse Soon, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.