“The biggest Green New Deal win in US history.” So said the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America after the Build Public Renewables Act made it into the state’s budget on Monday evening. Readers who haven’t been following this battle may not appreciate why climate watchers were so giddy about the workings of a state legislature this week. They might, for example, instead focus on New York passing the first statewide ban on new gas hookups, starting in 2025. And that’s a big deal, but there’s a reason activists are even more worked up about the BPRA. So let’s unpack it.

The Build Public Renewables Act hides a revolutionary idea behind a wonky title: “that the state should be empowered to provide clean energy if the private sector fails to,” as TNR columnist Liza Featherstone wrote last month, calling it “the boldest challenge yet to the fossil fuel industry.”

In practice, the BPRA would require and empower the New York Power Authority to rapidly build renewable energy infrastructure to meet the goal of 100 percent clean energy by 2030. It’s easy to underestimate what a big step that is in a country that has overwhelmingly adopted a privatized model of energy generation. “The bill is therefore seen by proponents and detractors alike as a possible foundation for socializing and centralizing control of all energy in order to effectively address the climate crisis and keep energy affordable and accessible to all,” Liza explained. “It provides a way of ensuring that public interest, rather than the profit motive, dominates energy generation.”

But that’s not the only reason the BPRA has generated this outpouring of emotion. The act previously failed twice in New York. After the failure in 2021, TNR staff writer Kate Aronoff wrote,

its backers within and without the legislature worked on expanding their coalition, opening up conversations with environmental justice and labor groups, among others. New language added as a result of those conversations aims to safeguard low-cost power for low-income New Yorkers and those who live in disadvantaged communities and ensure that projects don’t violate Indigenous sovereignty. The bill also provides project labor agreements for the construction of clean energy projects and would democratize the process by which NYPA approves and locates new projects. Strengthened labor provisions … helped to move labor groups from oppositional to neutral, and some from neutral to supportive.

So when, after all this work, the legislative session ended in June 2022 again without the proposal making it to law (despite passing the state Senate), this was seen as a particularly depressing signal for U.S. climate policy—all the more so because it wasn’t “Republicans to blame,” Kate explained, “but Democrats ostensibly committed to climate action.” If Democrats couldn’t manage to pass a policy to reconfigure energy generation and make good on their 2019 climate goals in New York while controlling the Senate, Assembly, and the governorship, Kate reasoned, it’s hard to imagine them making much progress anywhere else.

All of which brings us back to this year’s drama. Legislators at long last managed to finalize and pass the 10-bill series for the state’s budget, including the BPRA in the package, on May 1, a full month after the original state budget deadline of April 1. As of early April, it wasn’t at all clear that the BPRA was going to make it in—at least not in anything like its original form. And it seemed that Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul might be one of the people standing in the way. “If New York finally does start passing bills to make good on its four-year-old climate law,” Kate wrote in an update on the fight, “it’ll be the result of near-constant pressure from outside groups and having certain kinds of Democrats—those who’ve sworn off fossil fuel cash, for instance—making the case and whipping votes on the inside.”

The passage of the BPRA on Monday without one of the loopholes that was under discussion (letting municipalities opt out) is therefore credited as a victory not just for climate activists in general but for the specific progressive organizers and their legislative allies who refused to give up on this policy. It’s likely to be considered proof of concept for battles in other states. TNR will have more on this shortly.

Good News

The U.N. climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in November, known as COP 28, will dedicate a day to the health implications of climate change.

Bad News

Researchers are increasingly concerned about record ocean temperatures, which might be explained by a cyclical shift from the La Niña weather system to the El Niño weather system in the Pacific—but might also indicate the ocean is warming much faster than previously anticipated. That would be very bad for both ocean carbon storage and marine ecosystems, including fisheries.

Stat of the Week

$18 billion

That’s how much ExxonMobil and Chevron made in profits in the first quarter of this year, despite lower gas prices. (Read Kate’s coverage of what the companies plan to do with the cash.)

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

Google Promised to Defund Climate Lies, but the Ads Keep Coming

Well, you knew it couldn’t be all sunny headlines this week. Back in 2021, Google pledged to pull the cord on climate deniers trying to make money on YouTube. The follow-through leaves something to be desired, The New York Times reports:

If you recently clicked on a YouTube video titled “who is Leonardo DiCaprio,” you might have found a ramble of claims that climate change is a hoax and the world is cooling after a Paramount+ ad for the film “80 for Brady,” starring Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Rita Moreno.…

These are not aberrations, according to a coalition of environmental organizations and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In a report released on Tuesday, researchers from the organizations accused YouTube of continuing to profit from videos that portrayed the changing climate as a hoax or exaggeration. They found 100 videos, viewed at least 18 million times in total, that violated Google’s own policy.

Read Nico Grant and Steven Lee Myers’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.

The gas stove wars are back: Three Ninth Circuit judges on Monday struck down Berkeley, California’s ban on gas hookups in new buildings. The panel, consisting of one Reagan appointee and two Trump appointees, unanimously overturned a lower court’s decision and sided with the California Restaurant Association, which claims the ban passed in 2019 violates the Federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act. That act stipulates that only the federal government gets to regulate the energy efficiency and energy use of certain products. The Restaurant Association says its members have been hurt by the ban because, it claims, opening a restaurant in Berkeley is harder now.

This probably won’t be the final ruling in this case; the Justice Department filed a brief backing Berkeley, arguing the Restaurant Association misinterprets the FEPCA. But it does represent the latest salvo in what’s become a full-out culture war over gas stoves. And like many culture wars, this one doesn’t seem to make a ton of sense—unless you know where to look.

Whether switching to electric truly hurts restaurants is an interesting question. Despite high up-front costs for induction ranges, some chefs who have made the switch love them, citing both their superior performance and better labor conditions (the kitchen doesn’t heat up as much, and there are fewer burns). The switch can save money over time too. Christopher Galarza, founder of Forward Dining Solutions, told The Washington Post in February, “When you’re able to talk about cost savings and talk about the operational efficiencies and how it’s going to benefit the operations, all of a sudden everyone forgets about gas versus electric and they say, ‘How can I get there?’”

But as the dangers of gas stoves become clearer, the Post noted, “the restaurant business has, by and large, sided with gas.” In November 2022, the National Restaurant Association released an aggressive two-page flier listing an array of alleged problems with using anything other than gas stoves, arguing that banning them would have “little to no effect on climate change overall” and concluding: “Restaurant owners and operators want to be a part of the climate change conversation but banning a reliable and affordable source of energy is a disastrous mistake for the industry.”

It was a striking straw-manning of the anti–gas stove argument—not least because by November, concerns about gas stoves were increasingly focused on their health effects rather than their greenhouse gas emissions. While over four decades of research suggests gas stoves increase kids’ risk of respiratory illness, health concerns reached a noticeable tipping point last October after a widely covered study revealed that gas stoves also leak benzene, a known carcinogen.

This growing awareness eventually led to the goofy fracas that erupted in January, when Bloomberg published a rather sparse and contextless quote from U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr., who said that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” Many on the right went predictably apeshit, vowing to defend their gas stoves with their last breaths against imaginary feds showing up to rip the appliances from the walls.

Why this fervent devotion to gas stoves? And why now, specifically? (After all, Berkeley first banned new hookups in 2019, with some 70 jurisdictions following suit since then!) “Your guess is as good as mine,” wrote TNR’s Alex Shephard as the furor grew. “A few weeks ago, gas stoves were just stoves.”

As TNR explored in a subsequent podcast, there are several reasons that a political divide over gas stoves doesn’t make sense: U.S. households are majority-electric; red states are particularly electric-dominated; and gas stoves, as literary editor Laura Marsh pointed out, are disproportionately associated with liberal “foodie culture” and concentrated in majority-liberal states.

So what is this actually about? In honor of Earth Day on Saturday, TNR is running a weeklong series on environmental culture wars, and I’ll confess I’m partial to something Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg wrote while dissecting the growing cult of right-wing meat masculinity.

The fundamental premise of a culture-war framing is that an existing material problem must be seen as a surrogate for a larger clash between two (and only two) irreconcilable views of the world held by two irreconcilable groups of people. Us versus them, elites versus the people, woke versus MAGA, globalists versus purebloods.… The role of the culture warrior is to establish new fronts within this symbolic struggle.… Because the larger struggle is itself vague and irresolvable, this mode of engagement is less about practically addressing the instigating problem than about signaling to adherents how they should feel about the problem’s stubborn irresolution; how it should shore up their opposition to whatever the other side is doing. Culture-war framings are intended not just to polarize but to separate the audience from any material analysis of the problem at hand and the means of fixing it.

Culture-war framings, accordingly, tend to wildly amplify and distort real, less sensational messages. “We should eat less meat” is real. “The elites are going to make cows illegal” is not.

This applies pretty well to the gas stove case. The risk of gas stoves poisoning kids is a material problem. The current culture-war backlash almost inevitably avoids talking about that material problem, instead focusing on in-groups and out-groups. (See Representative Ronny Jackson’s tweet contrasting his own gas stove attachment to “the maniacs in the White House” or Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t tread on Florida” tweet, even though Florida residents overwhelmingly use electric appliances.) The message “Gas stoves have demonstrable health risks, and maybe we should protect people from those” is real. “The feds are coming to pry the stove from your walls” is not.

Jan and Gabriel also pointed out that because these culture wars distract from material problems, they almost inevitably hurt the consumers embroiled in them (the people getting sick from mass-produced meat and stoves) while benefiting the corporations causing the material problem. Although, once started, the culture wars take on a life of their own, industry lobbying can certainly provide a match or opportunistically fan the flames.

With that in mind, the timing and framing of the backlash make a lot more sense. The October report that gas stoves could be leaking a carcinogen considered unsafe at any level is far more threatening to the industry than climate concerns. Consumers might not be motivated to switch their range if this device, like many, many others, is vaguely contributing to the greater problem of climate change. But if this device is hurting them, directly? The National Restaurant Association’s weird pro-gas flier said only 20 percent of consumers supported gas stove bans—data from an early fall Morning Consult poll before the benzene study came out. By January, that support was up to 42 percent of all adult-age Americans, and 56 percent of Democrats. And progressive pollsters at Data for Progress found consumer interest in switching to electric increases further after respondents are informed about health risks.

While the politicians who tweeted inflammatory misinformation about the federal government coming to take people’s stoves don’t live in majority-gas-stove states, they do receive big donations from the fossil fuel industry. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who implied on Twitter that his gas stove was his family’s most prized possession, was the top senatorial recipient of oil and gas money in 2022. Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who along with Manchin later introduced the baffling Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act (to block a gas stove ban that doesn’t seem to have been on the table), won that honor in 2018.

The gas stove culture wars are like a lot of other cultural divides in American life, it turns out. If you want to understand who’s fueling them, follow the money.

Good News

2023 could be the first year ever that electricity generation from coal, oil, and gas drops without a global recession or pandemic, the BBC reports.

Bad News

A heat wave smashed numerous records across Southeast Asia and China this week.

Stat of the Week

$500 billion

That’s the average value produced by the world’s kelp forests per year, according to a new estimate published in Nature Communications. The breakdown is just as striking: Their contribution to fisheries averages over $12,000 per acre of kelp forest per year, and in total they sequester 4.91 megatons of carbon per year.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

Senator’s Bill Would Fine Texans for Multiple Environmental Complaints That Don’t Lead to Enforcement

A Republican bill in Texas proposes to fine residents “if they make three or more complaints to environmental regulators in a calendar year and their complaints don’t result in an enforcement action.” The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would be tasked with carrying this out. Environmental advocates say this will intimidate people out of filing complaints. And that’s not the only problem:

Tim Doty, an independent environmental consultant and former TCEQ air monitoring employee, said responding to citizen complaints is part of the agency’s job: “Just because it doesn’t lead to an enforcement action doesn’t mean your complaint is not valid.”

Doty said residents often file multiple complaints because TCEQ typically takes weeks or months to resolve investigations.

Doty said it can take TCEQ weeks just to send an investigator to check out a complaint, and by then the problem may have disappeared or changed. If Springer’s bill becomes law, that situation would result in a strike against the complaining person, even though the problem they reported may have been a violation had the agency responded faster.

Read Alejandra Martinez’s and Martha Pskowski’s report 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.

The time draws near. Those working in climate and environmental coverage can feel it approaching like the rumble of an oncoming train: Earth Day.

The celebration on April 22 started with the best of intentions in 1970—part of a radical, nationwide movement that also helped establish the Environmental Protection Agency and extend the Clean Air Act. In recent decades, though, Earth Day has felt a bit more nebulous—and susceptible to cliché, pablum, window dressing, and corporate greenwashing. Reliably, at least one oil major each year uses the day to release some bonkers ad copy suggesting they’re environmentalists.

TNR has published several pieces about this long-running trend, from Bradford Plumer’s short post in 2008 comparing the corporate co-opting of Earth Day to Christmas to Emily Atkin’s 2017 classic about Earth Day having become a “corny celebration of green living” mostly for white and privileged people, while low-income and minority populations face toxic air and water every day. Going forward, she wrote, “the onus is on the more privileged classes to change Earth Day from a feel-good exercise for well-off liberals to a day of mass activism to help the underprivileged, who have more immediate concerns than environmental injustice (let alone global warming).”

Liza Featherstone struck a similar note in her plea last year to resurrect the radicalism of the original Earth Day. But on the optimistic side of things, she argued, we can point to the original as powerful proof of concept:

If not for the climate crisis—which scientists and environmentalists warned about on that first Earth Day and the world has struggled and largely failed to address ever since—we’d probably view ’70s environmentalism as one of the most transformative social movements in history. That first Earth Day kicked off many of the important changes. As National Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes said in a 2020 interview, before that first Earth Day the Cuyahoga River was routinely on fire, breathing the air in major American cities like Pittsburgh and Los Angeles was like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, and the bald eagle—America’s national bird—was in danger of going extinct. None of that is true today. Our waterways are also much cleaner, and fewer children suffer from lead paint poisoning in their homes (in fact, childhood lead poisoning has declined by 90 percent). The massive mobilization of Earth Day helped focus the general public’s attention on the environment, and in turn, that of politicians. Looking at this history tells us something that we need to know right now: We have solved pervasive and deadly environmental problems in the past, and we can do it again.

As part of a series next week on the origin of various environmental culture wars, we’ll have more coverage of how, exactly, this moment of consensus fractured and climate policy got stuck in partisan deadlock. But in the meantime, as we gear up for a week that will doubtless feature its usual share of corporate shenanigans, it’s worth sparing a thought for what meaningful celebration might look like.

Denis Hayes, the original organizer of Earth Day in 1970, offered five suggestions to Outside magazine’s Heather Hansman last year: Focus on the biggest, and ideally the most discrete, issue (that would be emissions); name a “clear enemy”; pinpoint specific political changes (as when Earth Day activists identified the “dirty dozen” congressmen in flippable districts who were blocking environmental policy); take the imperfect, passable policy over no policy at all; and give people a goal that doesn’t feel “hopeless.”

Notably, none of these sound much like the program you’ll see if you visit EarthDay.org’s rundown for 2023. The official theme is “Invest in Our Planet”—a word choice evoking start-up culture, business-led solutionism, and so-called sustainable investment, none of which have performed all that well in recent years when it comes to reducing emissions. (In any event, the right is now engaged in all-out war on the entire idea that investment should be sustainable.) Under the heading “How to Do Earth Day 2023,” visitors are offered six ideas: “Climate Literacy,” “End Plastics,” “Plant Trees,” “Vote Earth,” “Global Cleanup,” and “Sustainable Fashion.”

If Hayes is right, then for Earth Day to be effective again, it might need to choose one issue. It might need to be more explicitly political and less universally inoffensive. A useful Earth Day might not look like a product you can buy but a fight you can sign up for—and an affirmative vision of what winning the battle might look like.

Good News

We don’t need the toxic and long-lasting chemicals known as PFAS to make things stain-resistant, a new peer-reviewed study finds. Furniture fabric that hadn’t been treated with PFAS held up just as well as untreated fabric. “PFAS on treated fabric can break off and end up in indoor air, attach to dust, or be dermally absorbed, and the pollution is especially a problem for homes with small children,” The Guardian’s report on the study notes. “The product is commonly applied to stain-resistant apparel and products for babies and children.” Find more information on what we know about the health effects of PFAS here and here.

Bad News

Sea levels are rising more quickly than predicted along the southeastern and Gulf coasts, which might exacerbate the effects of hurricanes that make landfall there.

Stat of the Week

$14 billion

That’s how much the “collective market value of the biggest US [oil and gas] companies” fell in just three days when Ireland’s parliament voted to divest from fossil fuels, even though the value of the divestment itself (i.e., the value of the stocks in the sovereign wealth fund) was only about $78 million. That seems to indicate, according to a new study reported by the Financial Times, that divestment pledges and “viral divestment tweets” serve as important market signals.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

This Is How Fast Humans Have Changed the Ecosystem

The forest of aspen trees known as Pando, in Utah, is actually a single organism, “perhaps the world’s largest living creature. It might also be the oldest living thing on the planet, having survived for over 10,000 years,” writes Faye Flam at Bloomberg. Each tree is a clone stem of the same plant, all connected by an underground network of roots. But now the organism is under threat:

In the last 100 years, human activity has made growing new stems much tougher for Pando. The main threats, said Rogers, are deer and elk, as well as a few domestic cattle and sheep. Aspen grow fast, which makes their young stems tender and tasty to these herbivores, and so most are getting eaten before they have a chance of becoming a new tree. Areas that used to hold 200 adult stems now have just 50. “It hasn’t shrunk from the outside,” said [Utah State University biologist Paul] Rogers. “It’s thinning and collapsing from the inside.” The fact that it’s getting eaten isn’t the fault of the herbivores. Their populations exploded when, in the early 20th century, people decided to exterminate their main predators—wolves, bears and cougars.

The impact of climate change is harder to predict, said Rogers. “We have these two opposing forces.” On the one hand, warming temperatures could shrink aspen habitat, pushing them to cooler, higher elevations. On the other hand, aspen thrive in fire.

Read Faye Flam’s article at Bloomberg.

One thought in particular has dominated my mind this week amid the media frenzy of the Trump indictment: Do you remember when every week was like this?

Obviously, not every week literally involved a former president turning himself in for arraignment on 34 felony charges related to misusing campaign funds to pay hush money to an adult film actress. But for entire stretches of the Trump administration, it felt like each day brought a new political tornado, a new scandal, a new baffling situation where it was hard to get answers about what was going on because no one in power seemed to know. As TNR legal writer Matt Ford put it in one memorable, viral tweet in early 2017, “It’s less of a ‘news cycle’ these days and more of that [Battlestar Galactica] episode where the Cylons attack every 33 minutes.”

While Trump, of course, has not exactly faded into dignified, dog-painting retirement like George W. Bush, it’s been easy until the past week to forget what the adrenaline-fueled chaos of his administration felt like. One of the tragedies of that era was that, while the ethics violations, racist rhetoric, and international incidents that dominated headlines were unambiguously worthy of attention, they also made it hard for the average media consumer to get a handle on the Trump administration’s policies—the concrete, substantive legacy of the three-ring circus parked at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

So as recent climate news—deadly tornadoes across 14 states, a U.N. report characterized as a “final warning” on global warming, the abrupt reappearance of an inland sea in California—again fades from the headlines this week in favor of Trumpernalia, it seems appropriate to look back at just how many destructive climate and environmental policies got pushed through in those years while the Russia investigation or Melania’s jewelry line competed for the nation’s attention.

Donald Trump began his presidency by making climate denial more or less the official position of the United States government. He did this, TNR’s Emily Atkin observed in 2017, by first nominating a bevy of climate deniers to key positions: Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Rick Perry as energy secretary, Kathleen Hartnett White to the Council on Environmental Quality (this was later withdrawn), and Oklahoma Congressman Jim Bridenstine to head NASA. Meanwhile, Department of Agriculture employees were instructed to avoid the term “climate change” in favor of euphemisms like “weather extremes.”

Before his resignation the following year, Pruitt accrued so many bonkers ethics scandals—a soundproof phone booth, four-figure spending on fountain pens, use of a military helicopter to visit a coal mine, and a really great deal on a Capitol Hill rental owned by an energy lobbyist—that sometimes his policies flew under the radar. In 2018, for instance, Pruitt announced a boring-sounding new rule blocking the EPA from considering studies that contained confidential information about human subjects. The upshot, as Emily Atkin wrote at the time, was that the EPA could no longer use “much of the research showing how pollutants damage public health.… If science based on confidential human health information couldn’t be used by the government,” she wrote, “the tobacco industry likely never would have been subject to strict regulation.” Pruitt also attempted to gut the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, a crusade that his successor, Andrew Wheeler, continued—despite the EPA calculating that this would result in an extra 1,400 premature deaths per year. (The plan was halted by a federal appeals court.)

As the Trump administration entered its final year, Trump’s long-announced withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement became official, the Senate passed his climate-hostile replacement to the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, and his administration’s effort to gut environmental regulations went into overdrive. Miranda Green chronicled the dizzying timeline for TNR that summer:

Since March, the Environmental Protection Agency has weakened mercury air pollution standards, permanently lowered regulations for vehicle tailpipe emissions, and finalized a reinterpretation of the Clean Water Act that opens the door to expedited pipeline development.

At the White House, Trump has been just as busy. In June he signed an executive order that allows companies to bypass key environmental reviews on infrastructure projects like mines and issued a proclamation to allow commercial fishing in a protected monument off Maine’s coast that was created specifically to limit such activity.… As of May 20, [the administration] has revoked, replaced, or weakened 66 environmental rules, according to a count by The New York Times.

By the time of The New York Times’ final update on its deregulation count on Inauguration Day, that list of scrapped environmental rules had risen to 98, with 14 more in progress. Less than a week before Election Day 2020, the administration also attempted to open more of the Tongass National Forest—part of the world’s largest intact coastal temperate rainforest—up to logging.

This isn’t even close to an exhaustive list of Trump-era climate and environmental policy. It’s intended, instead, as an attention exercise. Whether Trump committed multiple felonies during the 2016 presidential election matters. But it’s far too easy, in cases like these, to get sucked into the daily drip of drama that seems to accompany the former president. This court case, even if it results in a conviction and scuppers Trump’s 2024 presidential bid (a long shot), is hardly the final word on the lasting impact of the Trump era. In 2050, as we plausibly approach a once unfathomable two degrees Celsius of global warming, the Trump legacy people may find most appalling is the one which lacked any salacious headlines.

Good News

European Union countries have approved a law to require all new cars sold starting in 2035 to be zero-emission, despite some controversy.

Bad News

On the whole, the drought in California is probably not over, despite the deluge of rain in the past few months.

Stat of the Week

That’s how much households currently heated by fuel oil may save on average by switching to an electric heat pump, according to Rewiring America. Check out The Washington Post’s fascinating article (with visuals!) about the geographical divides in U.S. home heating, which cited this number.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

“Tornado alley” is shifting farther into the U.S. east, climate scientists warn

Last weekend’s shocking tornado outbreak—over 80 tornadoes across 14 states in the Midwest and Southeast—may be a sign of things to come, The Guardian reports:

Previous research has shown that over recent decades there has been a stagnation, or even slight drop, in the number of tornadoes in their traditional home range of the Great Plains, but an uptick in states further east, such as Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Illinois and Indiana.

These dervish-like storms also appear to be hitting earlier in some instances – tornado season usually starts in spring but parts of the south just had their most active tornado winter season on record and recent research found that milder US winters could be helping spur conditions ripe for earlier storms…. As tornadoes, on average, edge east they are coming into contact with more densely populated areas – think sprawling suburbia more than the isolated Kansas farm in The Wizard of Oz.

Read Oliver Milman’s report at The Guardian.

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

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.