Politicians Need to Talk About Air Pollution and Alzheimer’s

Last week, researchers at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health published a disturbing study linking air pollution to Alzheimer’s disease. Examining brains donated to research, they found that people who’d lived in areas with a lot of a certain type of air pollution had higher amounts of the plaque associated with Alzheimer’s disease than those who’d been exposed to less pollution. And the association between air pollution and plaque was particularly strong for people who lacked the genetic markers indicating a predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease.

You might be relieved, therefore, to learn that the Environmental Protection Agency just finalized its new, tougher standard for precisely this type of air pollution. But considering the problem solved would be a mistake: Business groups are fighting the regulation tooth and nail, preparing to challenge it in the courts as well as via lobbying and, presumably, political donations. “The new pollution limits could cause election-year complications for President Biden,” The New York Times’ Lisa Friedman wrote.

The air pollution the Emory researchers were studying is called fine particulate matter, which is produced by cars, cigarettes, industrial emissions, and wildfires, to name a few sources. This is not the first time fine particulate matter pollution has been linked to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Analysis using data from the Medicare Chronic Conditions Warehouse found a similar association, with “traffic and fossil fuel combustion sources” being “particularly” associated with higher levels of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Nor is it the first evidence that fine particulate matter can cause serious health problems. This kind of pollution has been linked to heart disease, heart attacks, asthma, premature deaths, and low birth weight. The EPA therefore estimates that its new standard would prevent 4,500 premature deaths per year.

Industry groups insist that the EPA’s rule would impede American manufacturing; cement industry representatives, for example, reportedly have threatened that the rule would lead to layoffs. (That’s despite the fact that the EPA’s rule, lowering the permissible amount of annual fine particulate matter exposure from 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air to nine, isn’t even as stringent as public health experts recommended.)

Findings like those in this new Alzheimer’s study theoretically offer a way to counter political opposition to tougher air quality standards. Alzheimer’s consistently ranks as one of the most feared diseases in the United States, in some polls beating cancer. Poll after poll, both in the U.S. and abroad, suggests that people fear dementia way more than they fear heart attacks or asthma, which are the risks typically invoked when we’re talking about air quality. While it’s worth emphasizing that there’s still a lot researchers don’t know about the association between pollution and Alzheimer’s—it’s going to be hard to definitively establish a causal relationship—it’s conceivable that a lot more people would support tougher air quality standards if elected officials put these kinds of studies on the table and said, “Look, do you really want to err on the side of industry on this one?”

And yet, you probably aren’t going to see politicians talking about this study and using it to defend the EPA rule on the campaign trail this year. The presidential front-runners in both parties have been accused of being old and disoriented, and there is zero chance that President Biden will defend his EPA’s new rule by mentioning the word “Alzheimer’s.”

But particularly because air pollution is very hard for people to wrap their minds around—very hard to turn into a sound bite—it’s important for voters to understand how rapidly scientific evidence is accumulating around its health risks: Two new studies recently reported by The Guardian found that “there is no safe amount” of fine particulate matter air pollution. Every additional amount in the air increases the risk for human hearts and lungs. The preliminary research on the Alzheimer’s link is completely consistent on this score: One study published in 2023 found “largely linear concentration-response relationships at low concentrations” of fine particulate matter pollution, with the authors emphasizing that this suggests there is “no safe level of air pollution for brain health.”

Fossil fuel combustion isn’t the only source of fine particulate matter pollution, of course. Wildfires are now a huge factor in poor air quality as well. And some industry groups have already used this to argue that the EPA’s new rule is unfair and will be ineffective.

But wildfires are, in turn, exacerbated by the climate change that fossil fuel combustion is driving. There’s more than enough evidence, at this point, for policymakers to pull the levers available to them to reduce air pollution and the processes that cause it, regardless of what the businesses that profit off that pollution have to say about it. Because it’s no longer acceptable to claim ignorance.

Good News/Bad News

South Korea’s carbon cap-and-trade system isn’t working. Not only has it failed to reduce industrial pollution, but polluting companies are actually profiting from the program.

Stat of the Week
2.5 million

That’s how many people in the United States were displaced from their homes by extreme weather disasters last year, according to new data.

What I’m Reading

Don’t Panic Over EV Slowdown

Recent reports suggest the electric vehicle transition is stalling, writes Sammy Roth in the excellent Boiling Point newsletter at the Los Angeles Times. But “I’m more concerned,” he writes, “by our seeming inability in modern society—or at least in modern California—to transition quickly away from the personal automobile as the One True Mode of transportation.” Roth points to the example of New York City road building, narrated in Robert Caro’s biography of urban planner Robert Moses:

Three major roadways connecting New York City and Long Island opened in 1936, Caro writes, “bringing to an even one hundred the number of miles of parkway constructed by Moses.” A newspaper editorial “opined that the new parkways would, by relieving the traffic load on [existing parkways], solve the problems of access to Moses’ Long Island parks ‘for generations.’”

Alas, Caro writes, “the new parkways solved the problem for about three weeks.” There were terrible traffic jams almost immediately—not only on the new roads, but also on existing roads.

Moses’ solution? Build more roads. Which he did, again and again, even as the problem repeated itself.… And yet here we are nearly a century later in the nation’s most forward-looking state, still debating whether “induced traffic” is a real thing. It most definitely is, as L.A. Times transportation reporter Rachel Uranga has made extremely clear in her stories. But that hasn’t stopped California from continuing to approve freeway-widening projects that promise to spew air pollution into low-income communities of color—and carbon into the atmosphere—while doing little or nothing to reduce traffic.

Read Sammy Roth’s full newsletter at Boiling Point.

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

Republican Representative Pete Stauber offered a striking case study last week in the reinvigorated war on wolves. “A logger from northern St. Louis County just sent me this video of a wolf running through his job site and taking down a whitetail deer,” the Minnesota congressman tweeted, alongside footage of a wolf bounding over stumps in a clear-cut former forest. “As you can see, wolves lost any fear of humans and are increasingly dangerous to livestock & pets and decimating our deer herd. Delist!”

Stauber’s tweet drew an avalanche of criticism from what remains of liberal Twitter on the site now known as X. “You’re out there cutting down their home and have the audacity to talk about where the wildlife is,” reads the top reply. Others made use of the platform’s new “Community Notes” to post a 1999 ecology paper beneath the congressman’s tweet, focusing on the role wolves play in maintaining stable deer populations. But here’s what stood out to me:

First, Stauber’s call to “delist” gray wolves—that is, to remove them from protection under the Endangered Species Act—comes as the 2024 election heats up. And four years ago, as the 2020 election loomed, the Trump administration did exactly what Stauber desires. “It’s the latest in a series of administration actions on the environment that appeal to key blocs of rural voters in the race’s final day,” the AP reported at the time, noting that wolf hunts could resume in “Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin—a crucial battleground in the campaign between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.” The decision was later reversed by court order: U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, a Bush appointee, ruled in 2022 that the delisting qualified as “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act, and was therefore unlawful.

Of course, the extent to which gray wolves are actually “listed” in any meaningful sense is debatable. Despite the 2022 court order, gray wolves are not, in fact, federally protected in many states, including Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and parts of three other states. This has to do with a random rider inserted in a 2011 budget bill by Montana Democratic Senator Jon Tester and Idaho Republican Representative Mike Simpson, who also stipulated that the rider would be exempt from judicial review.

2011 was the first time Congress had ever removed a species’ protections under the Endangered Species Act. The rider was widely perceived to be Tester’s attempt to gain ground over Republican challenger Denny Rehberg, a former cashmere goat and cattle rancher who kept a stuffed wolf’s head on a wall in his office. Tester won that election despite Rehberg’s attempt to claim credit for the wolf delisting, and is up again for reelection this year. Rehberg, incidentally, may also be on the ballot: Politico reported his intention to run for the congressional seat in Montana’s 2nd district only an hour after Stauber tweeted the logger’s video.

Second, the full delisting of the gray wolf actually looks increasingly likely right now. On February 2, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the results of a recent review of gray wolves’ status, finding that protections were “not warranted” for either the gray wolf population in the Northern Rocky Mountains or the population in the Western United States. This on its own doesn’t change the wolves’ status, but it makes it a lot more likely that they will eventually be delisted—sooner rather than later if Trump is elected in November. (Stauber, incidentally, signed the amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 election in favor of Trump.)

And third, the renewed focus on delisting comes as more research suggests gray wolves—and many other predators—should be protected not because of whether or not they meet the current definition of “endangered” but because they are extremely helpful. Not only do they control the populations they prey on, often improving the health of those populations, but the knock-on effects of that predation can be remarkable.

In boreal forests, one study has estimated that by limiting the number of moose, which eat trees and shrubs, wolves could lead to vastly more carbon being sequestered per year than would otherwise occur—roughly the amount emitted by 33–71 million cars. While that finding may not hold for all ecosystems, researchers have modeled a similar effect for sea otters in kelp forests. Another study in 2021 found that predators help “buffer” the effects of heat waves on ecosystems. Lack of predators is believed to be a key factor in deer overpopulation in some areas of the country, driving a dangerous increase in tick-borne diseases that can infect humans. Not just Lyme disease but babesiosis is now spreading rapidly via deer ticks, The New York Times reported last year. Large white-tailed deer populations may also be contributing to the spread of the lone star tick, which can transmit ehrlichiosis, alpha-gal syndrome, and Bourbon virus, according to Undark magazine.

As Eleanor Cummins wrote for The New Republic in 2021, arguments against wolves usually fall apart under scrutiny, even when it comes to ranching:

In a 2015 study, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that less than 5 percent of cattle and calves die from predation combined, and the single biggest cause of those deaths is coyotes. Of the 3.9 million cattle and calf losses reported that year, just 2,040 deaths could be attributed to wolves.…

Arguments about protecting elk and deer prove equally flimsy. Wolves tend to pick off the old and the weak of a herd, which benefits the health of the overall hunting stock. If wolves were to kill too aggressively, they’d be the first to suffer, as predator populations dip when they don’t have enough prey to eat.

All signs point to wolves’ growing status in humans’ culture wars this year. In order to fit a neat narrative, politicians will likely focus on the yes-or-no question of “listing” versus “delisting.” But as research is increasingly showing, the best arguments for protecting wolves have little to do with whether they’re currently on the “endangered” list.

Good News/Bad News

Stat of the Week
33,774 sq. miles

That’s the increase in the area of land in Greenland now sporting plant life rather than ice, relative to when monitoring of the massive ice sheet began in the 1980s.

What I’m Reading

Cement Is a Big Part of the Carbon Problem. Here’s How to Make It Part of the Solution

Jeffrey Rissman imagines a world where we don’t just reduce the massive emissions from cement and concrete but actually reverse them:

By combining clean heat with carbon-free minerals or equipment to capture the carbon emissions from breaking down limestone, cement-making could become carbon neutral by 2045. That’s an excellent first step, but the innovations happening today could take us beyond carbon neutral.

After concrete is made, it gradually absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a process called carbonation. With the ingredients and techniques common today, making cement produces more emissions than the material can later absorb, so every new ton of cement worsens climate change. But if cement kilns are heated with clean electricity and the emissions from breaking down minerals are avoided or stored underground, then the simple act of pouring concrete would remove carbon pollution from the air. New construction would help repair our climate.

Read Jeffrey Rissman’s op-ed at The Los Angeles Times.

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

$11 billion is a lot of money. It’s more than the annual budget of Montana, among other states. It’s more than the loan the International Monetary Fund is considering giving to Egypt to stave off economic collapse. It is 14 times the size of the latest funding gap for the public transit system here in the District of Columbia, described as an “existential crisis” forcing service cuts.

That enormous sum is the estimated cost of the damage from the atmospheric river that’s been pummeling California since Sunday—after a previous atmospheric river deluged the state last week. While AccuWeather released its $9 billion–$11 billion estimate on Monday, rains continued Tuesday and even into Wednesday, with the death toll rising from three as of Sunday to nine by Tuesday morning (mainly caused by falling trees or car accidents). Sunday alone was Los Angeles’s “wettest February calendar day in 110 years, and the third overall wettest day since records began being kept in 1877,” according to local news service KTLA. Several areas of Los Angeles County got a foot of rain in around 48 hours, causing some 475 mudslides, while winds and fallen trees left over 850,000 homes and businesses without power further north.

We know that climate change is increasing the severity of many types of weather events. Category 5 hurricanes, for instance, are becoming so common that scientists, in a paper published Monday, now say we need a Category 6 to account for hurricanes with wind speeds well above Category 5’s threshold of 157 mph. So it’s no surprise that multiple studies have found that atmospheric rivers, which are bands of moisture in the air, are also getting worse. As Dave Levitan wrote for The New Republic this week, “The warming atmosphere can hold more water, meaning it can drop more of it on us all at once.”

And all of this increasingly destructive weather has a cost. For more than 40 years, from 1980 to 2023, the average number of annual weather disasters in the United States each year “with losses exceeding $1 billion” was 8.5. In 2023, there were 28. And California, along with pretty much everywhere else, remains dangerously underprepared.

As Dave observed, some of the most important measures cities could take to mitigate extreme precipitation are strikingly “mundane”: not massive seawalls, but stuff like bigger sewers, green roofs, strategic landscaping. Not that this necessarily comes cheap, though. “The reason the sewers and storm drains aren’t built for anything even close to the catastrophe unfolding in California is largely thanks to cost,” Dave wrote.

Which brings us back to $11 billion. Granted, one of the reasons the costs of this storm could be so high, AccuWeather noted, is that it has hit “some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the state.” And you might see numbers like this and think, Well, insurance companies and wealthy real estate owners will bear the brunt of it. In some cases, sure. But storms can financially wreck the people, businesses, and municipalities that don’t fall into that category. And don’t forget: The insurance industry is slowly abandoning California, while similarly retreating from Florida, Louisiana, and other disaster-prone states.

Our safety nets for extreme weather, which were always inadequate, are getting even more threadbare. $11 billion—and, let’s not forget, nine lives—is a reminder that not preparing for climate change, and not cutting emissions fast enough, costs a heck of a lot, as well.

Good News/Bad News

Researchers studying sea sponges think they’ve discovered evidence that the world has already warmed 1.7 degrees Celsius (that’s over three degrees Fahrenheit) relative to preindustrial levels. That’s way more than previously estimated. Other scientists dispute the finding.

Stat of the Week

$57.4 billion

That’s the combined profits of ExxonMobil and Chevron last year. While it’s down from the obscene profitability of 2022, The New York Times’ Stanley Reed reports, it would “otherwise” be both giants’ “biggest annual profit in a decade.”

What I’m Reading

Rise of the Lone Star Tick Brings New Disease Threats

A lot of people in the Northeastern United States hear “ticks” and think “Lyme disease.” That’s outdated, reports Rene Ebersole:

Environmental conditions have tilted toward the lone star [tick]’s advantage, said Monmouth County tick researcher Andrea Egizi. The forests are recovering from decades of logging, white-tailed deer populations have rebounded, and winters are getting warmer due to climate change. “It’s kind of this perfect storm for them to be taking over,” Egizi said. Citizens in New Jersey encountered mostly blacklegged ticks until roughly 10 years ago, when the counts “switched over to being dominated by lone stars,” she added.

Research shows the lone star tick’s expansion has been progressing for a few decades; it’s now established from Florida to Maine and as far west as Nebraska.

The rise of the lone star tick is alarming, say public health officials, because it carries novel maladies. These include a Lyme-like bacterial disease called ehrlichiosis, which first appeared in humans [in] the mid-1980s; a meat allergy that sounds like a female superhero, alpha-gal syndrome; and the emerging Bourbon virus, first identified in humans around 10 years ago when a Bourbon County, Kansas man died after being bitten.

Read Rene Ebersole’s report at Undark.

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

As The Guardian reported this week, the benefits of switching to a more sustainable food system could be astronomical: worth up to $10 trillion per year. Currently, the “unaccounted costs” of our global food systems come to about $15 trillion a year, meaning “our food systems are destroying more value than they create,” according to the Food System Economic Commission’s Global Policy report, which released its economic modeling on Monday. This is a fixable problem: We could move toward greater food security while reducing emissions and promoting biodiversity, and it would cost only a fraction ($200–$500 billion, i.e., around 5 percent) of the benefits that reform would generate. But the policy proposals that are currently on the table won’t get us there.

Sustainable agriculture experts may disagree on the precise proposals modeled by this report, which pairs relatively uncontroversial ideas (like conserving water, forests, and peatlands) with more hotly debated ones (like intensifying animal agriculture in some locations and getting comfortable with higher food prices). But few people really dispute that our current food systems need reform, whether globally or closer to home: From the multitudinous environmental, epidemiological, and ethical problems of meat production to toxic runoff and poor land use, to suicidal farmers and systematically exploited agricultural workers, to imminent water crises, American agriculture is way past the point where a rational observer would fail to see the glaring need for reform.

The Guardian’s report on the new economic modeling isn’t the only recent headline pointing to the crisis. Avian flu is also back in the news, spreading among poultry farms in California and leading to over a million birds being euthanized—all while the virus also makes devastating inroads into vulnerable wildlife populations in Antarctica. The virus was found in Antarctic seal populations earlier this month, and this week testing confirmed that the strain has moved to gentoo penguins, leaving over 200 penguin chicks dead, according to Reuters. Recent research has shown that while wild birds can and do spread the disease, it originated in an agricultural setting and spreads rapidly in poultry farms. And while some policymakers are apt to blame bird flu on Chinese agricultural practices, since the first cases were found in Southern China, it bears repeating that the United States has historically been and remains a conspicuous hot spot for swine flu.

Meanwhile, states relying on water from the rapidly drying Colorado River are “racing,” per The New York Times’ Christopher Flavelle, to agree on new water cuts before a possible change in presidential administrations leads to more bureaucratic delays. The vast majority of Colorado River water currently goes to agriculture, and, as E&E News’s Jennifer Yachnin observed this week, “ninety percent of this country’s winter vegetables are grown on farms in the sunny, arid corners of California and Arizona dependent on the river”—a figure that should trouble people worried about food security.

The recent Iowa caucus also offered a reminder, Tom Philpott recently wrote here at TNR, that absolutely all of the 2024 Republican and Democratic candidates support ethanol subsidies—despite the fact that ethanol is a wildly inefficient use of land. “We devote about 30 million acres of pristine farmland—an area the size of Virginia—to growing fuel for our cars,” Tom wrote, when solar panels could accomplish the same in vastly less space. Corn farming also leads to both erosion and rampant water pollution from fertilizers and pesticides.

All of which is to say that it’s a heck of a time for Congress to remain stuck in gridlock, unable to pass a new version of the farm bill—which, in case you’ve forgotten, also controls access to the country’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which provides food stamps. Lawmakers were supposed to figure something out by October 1, and now negotiations are taking place in an election year. Naturally, a new version of the farm bill won’t be enough to fix American agriculture’s problems. But those concerned about the environment, food security, and inequality in this country will be watching these negotiations closely. Tweaks at the margins could affect a huge number of people and ecosystems—both in the U.S. and far beyond.

Good News/Bad News

Stat of the Week
> 200

That’s how many rail cars filled with vinyl chloride—the carcinogenic chemical that spilled during the catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last year—continue to move across the country and through densely populated areas each day, according to a new report. The Washington Post notes in its write-up that Republican senators are resisting the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt even to study the risks of vinyl chloride, denouncing it as a “war on plastic.”

What I’m Reading

Democrats Say Biden Hasn’t “Made the Case” on Climate Despite Achievements

Buried under the election-year analysis in the first half of this piece is a beautiful and important insight about what actually motivates people to care about climate policy:

“Like I said: When I hear climate, I think jobs,” Mr. Biden said. It is a line he has repeated in multiple settings.

Some data suggests that might not be the winning message.

One of the biggest climate marketing studies of its kind, a public opinion poll across the United States and 18 other countries that was conducted last summer, found that “protecting the planet for the next generation” overwhelmingly beats out other arguments for taking climate action. Researchers found the so-called “urgent generational message” was 12 times more popular than the promise of creating jobs.

“At the heart of this is love,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, which conducted the study with other nonprofit groups including Potential Energy Coalition, the Meliore Foundation and Zero Ideas.

“People love particular people, places and things,” Mr. Leiserowitz said. “And those people, places and things are being threatened.”

Read Lisa Friedman’s full report at The New York Times.

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

Coal, steaks, gas stoves, and … halibut? You have to wonder how far off we are from a new climate culture war breaking out over the fishing industry. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a suit from a herring fishing company challenging the government’s authority to force the industry to pay for federal monitors on boats. The case is widely expected to end with the justices gutting the power of federal agencies to interpret congressional statutes—and to set and enforce regulations accordingly—by overturning Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a landmark 1984 decision that affirmed that power.

Also last week, a new study showed that the fishing industry—and bottom trawling in particular—is a strikingly overlooked source of greenhouse gas emissions. We already knew this was a possibility: In 2021, an international team of researchers published a study finding that trawling—in which fishing ships drag nets outfitted with metal panels across the ocean floor to catch seafood like flounder, shrimp, and haddock—releases about a gigaton of carbon dioxide previously stored in the seabed into the water each year. That’s “as much carbon dioxide as the entire aviation industry,” The Guardian pointed out at the time. Carbon dioxide released into the ocean acidifies the water, which can threaten sea life—not just coral and shellfish but also the overall balance of the ecosystem.

Last week, a team that included four of the same researchers published a follow-up: In addition to the acidification effect, over half of that carbon dioxide is then released into the atmosphere “over 7-9 years.” While Enric Sala, one of the authors, acknowledged in National Geographic that this is “small compared to the emissions produced by burning fossil fuels on the land,” the same article noted that this means the effect from bottom trawling “is nearly double the annual emissions from fuel combustion for the entire global fishing fleet.”

That’s for a practice that everyone knew was environmentally catastrophic to begin with. To quote the U.S. Geological Survey: “Trawling destroys the natural seafloor habitat by essentially rototilling the seabed,” destroying an astonishing array of plants and animals as it does so, from coral and other inhabitants of the seafloor to pilot whales and dolphins.

Bottom trawling is restricted in a lot of U.S. waters. But it’s not banned entirely. And while the United States, according to a 2021 report from Flora and Fauna International, accounts for just 4 percent of trawl catch worldwide—well behind China, at nearly 15 percent, and Vietnam, at a little over 8 percent—it’s also a country whose fishing industry shouldn’t, in theory, be particularly dependent on the practice, since bottom trawling accounts for a relatively low percentage of its total fishing haul.

That raises the question of whether policymakers might consider further protections, or even an outright ban. These studies aren’t undisputed, of course—few early studies are. And if Loper Bright v. Raimondo winds up destroying the administrative state, all kinds of environmental protections could get a lot harder. But this finding may prompt policymakers to reexamine the topic, which will doubtless provoke the ire of the fishing industry.

This time last year, a stray comment about regulating gas stoves, which emit greenhouse gases in addition to lung irritants and carcinogens, sparked a bizarre frenzy among right-wingers eager to defend the asthma-linked devices from liberal interference. Panicked posturing over red meat is practically a seasonal sport in American politics. And almost anything can happen in a campaign year. If a candidate brandishes a flounder during a stump speech in a few months, well … that would be about par for the course.

Good News/Bad News

Recycling rare earth metals could go a long way toward meeting the increasing demand for them for clean energy technology, a new study suggests.

The American Petroleum Institute has launched an eight-figure ad campaign, The Guardian’s Dharna Noor reports, to convince Americans that the fossil fuel industry is decarbonizing on its own and that fossil fuels are crucial for the nation’s security and way of life.

Stat of the Week

3 percentage points

That’s the margin by which Donald Trump might have won the 2020 election, if voters’ feelings on climate change had stayed as they were in 2016, according to new statistical modeling. Instead, the number of people rating climate change as “very important” grew, and Joe Biden won climate-concerned voters across the political spectrum by 75 points. Read Anthropocene magazine’s story on this study.

What I’m Reading

The dubious climate gains of turning soil into a carbon sink

Regenerative agriculture techniques, including less tilling and increased use of cover crops, are a good idea for many reasons, Susannah Savage reports. “But the carbon angle has been oversold,” according to Pete Smith, a soil expert at the University of Aberdeen:

There are more serious flaws with soil sequestration than the lack of a clear definition. One is its capacity; research by Smith, working with other academics at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, recently looked at carbon captured in grassland soils and calculated that some 135 gigatonnes of carbon would be required to offset emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from the grazing livestock sector. That is almost twice the carbon currently contained in managed grasslands. In some regions, carbon stocks would need to increase by 2,000 per cent to offset emissions from livestock farming.

Carbon capture in soils has been promoted by the livestock industry as “a get out of jail free card”, says Smith. “‘Yes, we’re producing methane emissions … but no need to worry about it, the soils will offset all the emissions’. This [study] is the nail in the coffin of that argument.”

Read Susannah Strange’s report at Financial Times.

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