What Kind of Climate Candidate Will Kamala Harris Be?

Earlier this month, TNR’s Kate Aronoff argued that perhaps the best gift President Biden and his team could give the planet would be to step aside. “The Biden administration has almost certainly done more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than any of its predecessors,” she wrote. But sticking with a “struggling” candidate unlikely to win in November would be a “catastrophe”—not just because it might hand the White House to Donald Trump, who has already promised to reverse Biden’s climate policies, but because Democrats would trash their credibility with younger voters, making it harder to pass robust climate policy for years to come.

Now Biden has stepped aside, passing the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. That Harris would be a more pro-climate president than Trump is pretty clear—even to senior Republicans and Trump alums. But just how pro-climate would she be?

Several outlets have already tried to answer this question by looking at her history. As vice president, in addition to promoting the administration’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, “Harris argued for the allocation of $20 billion for the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, aimed at aiding disadvantaged communities facing climate impacts,” Grist’s Zoya Teirstein writes, and “was the highest-ranking U.S. official to attend the international climate talks at COP28 in Dubai last year,” where she announced new U.S. pledges for green energy and climate adaptation funds for poorer countries. But that, as Teirstein points out, doesn’t indicate much, as it goes along with the V.P. role.

One could also look to Harris’s platform for the 2019 primaries. That’s not the best indicator, either: 2019 was “pretty near peak-Greta,” observes writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben, referring to climate activist Greta Thunberg, and Harris was pitching herself specifically to Democrats. But that said, Harris did differ from Biden in backing a fracking ban. And there’s some reason to believe she meant it. The New York Times noted this week that in 2016, as California attorney general, Harris sued the Obama-Biden administration over fracking approvals off the state’s coast.

This wasn’t the only environmental case Harris pursued as attorney general, or as San Francisco district attorney before that. While the environmental justice unit she created in San Francisco “only filed a handful of lawsuits,” and not particularly significant ones, Teirstein writes, Harris did found the unit. She also secured several settlements for environmental cases against Chevron, BP, and Volkswagen and investigated whether ExxonMobil lied to shareholders about the risks from climate change.

Ultimately, it might be Harris’s time as senator that proves most tantalizing to those dedicated to the fine political art of tea-leaf scrutiny. Harris supported numerous pieces of environmental legislation during her time in the Senate—the Los Angeles Times points to the Clean School Bus Act of 2019, the Water Justice Act of 2019, and her support for limiting PFAS and lead exposure, among others. She was also one of the original co-sponsors of the Green New Deal.

While the Biden administration has pursued policies aligned with the Green New Deal, Biden himself has typically refrained from letting those three words pass his lips, much as he’s often retreated into euphemism when it comes to abortion. There’s clearly a difference of some degree between Harris and Biden when it comes to language and rhetoric. Only time will tell what difference there might be in substance.

Good News/Bad News

Water use in California’s urban areas is down 9 percent since the last drought emergency, the Los Angeles Times reports. A caveat: This falls short of Governor Newsom’s goal of a 15 percent cut in urban water use. A much bigger caveat: Urban water use is, itself, a bit of a red herring. The amount of water consumed by agriculture is roughly four times higher than that for urban residential needs, and that’s a much tougher nut to crack, politically. While shifting away from thirsty crops like alfalfa (for cattle), almonds, and fruit could cut water consumption by 93 percent, researchers recently found, replacement crops wouldn’t be as profitable.

As news broke that the world’s average temperature for a single day had climbed to the highest ever recorded on Sunday and then smashed that record again on Monday, research firm Rhodium Group released a report finding that, even with the Inflation Recovery Act’s infusion of cash into green energy and energy efficiency, the U.S. is falling short of its pledge to cut emissions 50 percent relative to 2005 levels by 2030.

Stat of the Week
40%

That’s how many active ingredients in U.S. pesticides are actually PFAS, according to new research contradicting Environmental Protection Agency claims. PFAS are extremely long-lasting chemicals that have been linked to liver damage, immune system disruption, hormonal disruption, obesity, and some forms of cancer, to name a few possible health effects. “The researchers also obtained documents,” The Guardian
reports, “that suggest the EPA hid some findings that show PFAS in pesticides.”

What I’m Reading

To Help Stop Malaria’s Spread, CDC Researchers Create a Test to Find a Mosquito That Is Flourishing Thanks to Climate Change

Global warming is opening up new habitat for mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit. And one particular species is now threatening Africa:

A mosquito native to Asia has found a new home on the planet’s second-largest continent—and, as a prime carrier of the parasite that causes malaria, poses an increased public health threat to nearly 130 million people.

The mosquito—the notorious Anopheles stephensi—is not only adaptable, but it also bears a striking resemblance to most other insects in its genus, making it difficult for researchers, government officials and just about anyone else to determine which bug is which.

That is, until earlier this year. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that they have developed a new test that allows for the rapid identification of the disease-transmitting insect, giving communities where the mosquito is migrating a chance to move quickly to eradicate it and address potential malaria infections.

Read Victoria St. Martin’s full report at Inside Climate News.

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

In the first two weeks of July, extreme heat killed at least 37 people across the United States, and 19 in one California county alone, according to conservative estimates reported by CNN. Last week, Las Vegas set a new record of five consecutive days with temperatures over 115 degrees, while Washington, D.C., hit 104 degrees on Tuesday amid what is so far the city’s hottest summer ever.

It’s not just the U.S. In April, heat waves hammered East Asia, breaking records in Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. At least 1,300 are estimated to have died from extreme temperatures during this year’s Hajj in Saudi Arabia in June.

Headlines from the U.S. presidential race—a shocking debate, a possible brokered convention, an assassination attempt, and more—have overwhelmed these stories in recent weeks. But extreme heat may prove in retrospect to be one of the most important stories of the summer.

And three-quarters of Americans accept the science behind this fatal heat. Seventy-four percent of people in the U.S. now believe that global warming is affecting extreme heat in the nation, according to a large survey released this week by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.

Let’s put that number into perspective: 74 percent is not only higher than the percentage of respondents in a March 2024 Gallup poll who think Trump would make a good president (35 percent), and higher than the percentage who say Biden would make a good president (30 percent)—it’s higher than both of those numbers added together. More people in the U.S. believe climate change is driving extreme heat than think either party’s candidate would do a decent job in the White House.

Personal beliefs are complicated, and so are poll numbers. That 74 percent figure doesn’t mean that 74 percent of Americans are motivated to act right now (or in November) to limit climate change. The same Yale/George Mason survey found, bizarrely, that only 50 percent of Americans think they have “personally experienced the effects of global warming,” and only 47 percent think people in the country are being harmed “right now” by global warming.

But the survey also found that 67 percent of Americans say global warming is “personally” important to them, to varying degrees, and 62 percent feel some level of personal responsibility to help reduce it.

Liza Featherstone previously wrote at TNR about a group called the Environmental Voter Project, whose leaders believe that climate change—and the environment more broadly—may be a vast, currently untapped force in this country’s elections. While many voters don’t consider climate change their top priority, many people who currently don’t vote (and therefore aren’t necessarily captured in historical election data, “likely voter” polls, or even Democratic or Republican voter-turnout efforts) say climate change is their top political priority.

Some experts, accordingly, are starting to believe disaffection and climate concern may go hand in hand, in ways that could lead to huge swings if people who care about climate change suddenly show up at the polls. That’s an intriguing theory this summer, as so many people and op-eds are expressing dissatisfaction, or even panic, at the candidates taking the stage at the Republican and Democratic conventions.

As deadly heat waves continue, and increase, it will become harder and harder for people to believe that they personally haven’t experienced the effects of climate change. And as Americans’ disenchantment with their political options grows, party leaders may well wonder whether the answer to their electoral woes—putting climate change front and center in their campaigns and policy platforms—has been staring them in the face all along.

Good News/Bad News

A project in Borneo, The New York Times reports, is providing proof of concept that community-run reforestation can boost biodiversity and wildlife while helping villages get the services they need.

Google’s recent retreat from net-zero goals, thanks to the energy demands from artificial intelligence, isn’t the only sign of Big Tech struggling to keep its carbon neutrality promises. As MIT Technology Review explains this week, Amazon’s claims of meeting its targets also deserve scrutiny: The company is relying heavily on renewable energy credits and carbon credits, and it’s far from clear that those actually reduce emissions.

Stat of the Week
1.3 milliseconds per century

That’s the increased rate at which the planet’s rotation is slowing (it was previously slowing by only 0.3 to 1 milliseconds per century), due to the melting of the polar ice caps, The Guardian reports.

What I’m Reading

Scientists plan climate engineering experiment in ocean off Cape Cod

Many worry that geoengineering—tinkering with the world’s natural systems, like the circulation of water in the air and ground, in an attempt to reduce climate change—is both risky and represents time and money better spent just halting fossil fuel emissions. But scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts are about to experiment with it:

The scientists want to disperse 6,600 gallons of sodium hydroxide—a strong base—into the ocean about 10 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard. The process, called ocean alkalinity enhancement or OAE, should temporarily increase that patch of water’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the air. This first phase of the project, targeted for early fall, will test chemical changes to the seawater, diffusion of the chemical and effects on the ecosystem.

If successful, the team plans to conduct a larger trial next year in the Gulf of Maine.

Dan McCorkle, co-principal investigator of the project and a recently retired Woods Hole researcher, said the team chose a part of [the] ocean that would minimize impact on marine life, and that they will stop the release of sodium hydroxide if marine mammals are present. The chemical will likely be detectable in an area a couple miles in diameter and should dissipate within five days.

Read Barbara Moran’s report at WBUR.

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

If a company fills a river with bird poop to the point that fish in nearby lakes asphyxiate, is it “un-American” to sue them? Oklahoma Republican Governor Kevin Stitt thinks so. Last week, he signed a law that makes it impossible to sue a poultry company for pollution as long as it has a “Nutrient Management Plan” that complies with state requirements.

“You can’t have a business have a permit, doing what they’re supposed to do, and then come in and let a frivolous lawsuit take place and somehow put them out of business. That’s un-American. It’s not going to happen in Oklahoma,” local news channel KFOR reported Stitt saying. “We had a former Attorney General that sued the chicken industry even though they were following all the rules at the time, saying they should have done something different.”

You may be wondering what all this is about. Stitt was referring to a case that began almost two decades ago: Oklahoma v. Tyson Foods. Not everyone would agree with Stitt’s description of what happened there.

In 2005, then–Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson, a Democrat, sued 11 companies over the pollution of the Illinois River. The companies, the case alleged, were spreading large amounts of chicken waste and bedding over cropland in the Illinois River Watershed, which covers parts of eastern Oklahoma and northwest Arkansas. While using chicken waste as fertilizer is allowed in some situations, this quantity of chicken waste, the state argued, led to high amounts of phosphorus runoff that polluted local waterways and, in turn, led to an overgrowth of algae and lower dissolved oxygen levels. Fish died, the Illinois River looked and smelled gross, the quality of the drinking water produced by the watershed suffered, and populations of fish and other wildlife in Lake Tenkiller declined.

“Frivolous” (Stitt’s word above) is an odd adjective to describe that lawsuit. Thirteen years after the trial ended in 2009, U.S. District Judge Gregory Frizzell finally ruled in 2023 that the state was right about almost everything. While the state couldn’t prove the bit about the quality of the drinking water, he said, the phosphorus levels, algae levels, wildlife death, and aesthetic degradation were clear, and Frizzell didn’t find the companies’ argument that they were following the law very compelling.

“Historically, defendants have done little—if anything—to provide for or ensure appropriate handling or management of the poultry waste,” he wrote. They “knew or should have known no later than the late 1990s that their growers’ land application of litter was a primary source of the excess phosphorus in the waters,” at which point they were obligated to take action or else fall afoul of state and federal public nuisance law, which stipulates that you’re not allowed to interfere with the public’s use and enjoyment of these waterways. And Oklahoma state law makes it clear, the judge added, that even if companies are following a strict pounds-per-acre regimen for chicken litter, “litter must be applied in a manner that will prevent pollution of State waters.”

Implying, as Governor Stitt did last week, that these sorts of lawsuits are putting law-abiding mom-and-pop shops out of business is also a little odd. Four of the companies named were either Tyson Foods or its subsidiaries. Tyson is the second-largest food company in the nation, right behind PepsiCo, and among the top 10 largest food companies in the world. Another two were Cargill and its subsidiary Cargill Turkey Production. Cargill is the largest privately held company in the country, with an estimated value of around $60 billion. Then there’s Cal-Maine Foods, with revenue above $1.3 billion, which was among those found liable in 2023 for conspiring with other companies to raise egg prices. And George’s Inc and George’s Foods LLC, which cut a $5.8 million deal with the Department of Justice last May as part of the department’s inquiry into poultry companies (including Cargill, which settled for $15 million) conspiring to suppress workers’ wages. Peterson Farms and Simmons Foods admittedly don’t have quite this sort of profile, although obviously no company that can recall 13 tons of TGI Friday’s boneless chicken bites, as Simmons did in December, is small.

The companies in question are now upset that they’re being told to pay to fix something that happened a long time ago—an objection that sort of cuts both ways, since the people affected by their actions are probably mad that it took this long too. The tribal governments of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations have denounced the new law giving the poultry industry immunity from these sorts of lawsuits. This is the background to Stitt’s remarks declaring these suits “un-American.”

The Oklahoma case is part of a bigger picture. Protecting lakes, rivers, and drinking water is actually extremely popular. Polls typically find higher support for that than for fighting climate change. But as TNR’s Kate Aronoff and others have repeatedly observed, the legal system is typically much more favorable to corporations than to their victims—human or animal.

Oklahoma has now made that system even more favorable to corporations. It’s one in a series of recent news events indicating that even the most clear-cut, commonsense moves to protect the public are going to be fought tooth and nail. On Monday, industry groups sued the federal government over a new standard to keep PFAS—chemicals “associated with developmental delays in children, decreased fertility in women and increased risk of some cancers,” per The New York Times—out of drinking water. I previously wrote about companies’ loud objections to being told they could no longer decaffeinate coffee using a chemical so dangerous that it’s been banned for paint stripping since 2019.

Voters say these issues matter to them. But if that’s the case, they’re going to have to show that at the polls. Relying on administrators and courts to protect them is getting riskier by the day.

Good News/Bad News

Stat of the Week
1.5 billion

That’s the number of people around the globe who experienced dangerous heat where they live between January and May of this year, according to The Washington Post.

What I’m Reading

Why a new method of growing food on Mars matters more on Earth

Brazilian astrobiologist Rebeca Gonçalves and her colleagues think an ancient Mayan farming technique could work well for growing food on Mars. And that also means it could work well in some of the increasingly arid, unpredictable climates on Earth:

Intercropping, or growing different crops in close proximity to one another to increase the size and nutritional value of yields, requires less land and water than monocropping, or the practice of continuously planting just one thing. Although common among small farmers, particularly across Latin America, Africa, and China, intercropping remains a novelty in much of the world. This is partly because of the complexity of managing such systems and largely unfounded concerns about yield loss and pest susceptibility. Modern plant breeding programs also tend to focus on individual species and a general trend toward less diversity in the field.

This is a missed opportunity, according to Gonçalves. Evidence suggests intercropping can combat the impacts of climate change and unsustainable farming practices on yields in degraded soils, which comprise as much as 40 percent of the world’s agricultural land. “The potential of intercropping really is very high for solving some of the climate change issues,” she said.

Read Ayurella Horn-Muller’s full report at Grist.

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

Sixty-two percent of likely voters think oil and gas companies “should be held legally accountable for their contributions to climate change,” according to a new poll published this week. Not only do 84 percent of Democrats think that but also 59 percent of independents and even 40 percent of Republicans.

These are striking numbers. As I wrote in this newsletter last month, all too often pollsters ask people vague questions about whether people support “steps” to address climate change, without specifying what those steps are. That didn’t happen with this poll, which was conducted by the progressive think tank Data for Progress and consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen. This was the exact question: “Do you think that oil and gas companies should be held legally accountable for their contributions to climate change, including their impacts on extreme weather events and public health?” In addition to the aforementioned political divides, women said “yes” more often than men, young people more often than old people, and Black or Latino people more often than white people—but that still adds up to a striking degree of support for accountability for fossil fuel companies.

Nor did the poll stop there. It also asked whether people supported not just civil lawsuits but criminal prosecutions for “reckless or negligent homicide.” This is a relatively new idea, and a somewhat edgy one for a lot of people. But 49 percent of respondents said they supported this too, compared to only 39 percent who said they’d oppose.

The New Republic has been covering legal approaches to climate accountability for years now: both the civil suits and more recent approaches. Public Citizen’s Aaron Regunberg and David Arkush made the case for criminal prosecutions, and specifically homicide charges, in March. “In criminal law, homicide means causing a death with a culpable mental state,” they reasoned. “If someone substantially contributes to or accelerates a death, that counts as ‘causing’ it. If they did so intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly, that counts as ‘culpable mental state.’ So the basic questions in a climate homicide trial are as follows: Did fossil fuel companies substantially contribute to or accelerate deaths, and did they do so at least recklessly, if not knowingly or intentionally?”

Criminal charges can do things that civil lawsuits can’t. “In today’s thinking,” Regunberg and Arkush wrote, “tort law—the law of civil wrongs—seeks economically efficient outcomes: The question is about whether one party should give another some money. Criminal law, by contrast, is concerned with society’s fundamental values—with morality.” And that’s reflected in the effects of these types of law: “Where tort law prices misconduct, criminal law prohibits it.”

Regunberg and law professor Donald Braman subsequently proposed another novel legal approach: civil asset forfeiture. That’s a tool that’s typically used by cops to confiscate property they suspect of being used for committing crimes—a system that disproportionately penalizes poor people and minorities, and in which it’s often very hard to recover the seized assets even if no crime is ever proven. But it was originally intended, Regunberg and Braman wrote, to be used against “large-scale criminal enterprises.” Since legal experts are now arguing that fossil fuel companies’ activities “could fall under the category of criminal violations such as reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy and racketeering, and homicide,” Regunberg and Braman wrote, it stands to reason that the “pipelines, refining plants, and oil reserves” that are “recklessly endangering entire communities” could be confiscated by the police.

And then there’s Kate Aronoff’s latest. Given that fossil fuel companies have manufactured and promoted plastics for decades—even misleading the public about plastics recycling—there really ought to be a way, she argued, to hold them accountable at the international level for microplastics, which have now been found not only in “food, water, blood, and placenta” but also in human testicles. “In a recent book,” she wrote, “Spanish economist and environmental adviser David Lizoain makes the case for bringing fossil fuel executives in front of the International Criminal Court, and understanding rising temperatures—and the resulting mass deaths—as climate genocide.”

The international legal system is, on the whole, much more favorable to companies than it is to their potential victims, Kate argued. And that’s arguably true in the domestic arena as well. Which brings us back to the recent poll: If this many people favor legal accountability, perhaps that may be about to change.

Good News/Bad News

Bill McKibben writes in The New Yorker about a photography exhibit he found particularly effective at communicating the urgency of the climate crisis. The Asia Society’s “Coal + Ice” exhibit contains “perhaps the single most powerful rendering of the climate crisis I’ve ever seen,” he writes—specifically, photographer Gideon Mendel’s depiction of people all over the world standing in flood waters. “Mendel’s videos,” McKibben continues, “invoke change over physical space: the same foreign and scary thing is happening around the globe, simultaneously.” (If that doesn’t sound like good news, recall that effective policy depends first upon awareness and communication.)

Former Environmental Protection Agency employees with the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility have accused the EPA of incorrectly reporting the results of PFAS testing in pesticides, falsely telling the public that these long-lasting, potentially damaging chemicals had not been found in samples when, in fact, they had been.

Stat of the Week

26 days

On average, people experienced 26 more excessively hot days in the past year than they would have without climate change. Read The New York Times’ report here.

What I’m Reading

In a warmer world, tornado behavior is changing—this is how we can prepare

At least 24 people were killed last weekend in severe thunderstorms and tornadoes in multiple states. Tornado intensity and frequency are famously much, much harder to tie to climate change than hurricanes or atmospheric rivers are. But peak months seem to be shifting earlier in the season, and the pattern of touchdowns seems to be shifting eastward, the BBC’s Cinnamon Janzer reports.

“We have way more people living in the mid-south and east of the Mississippi River than we do in the Great Plains,” [meteorology professor Victor] Gensini says. The higher population densities of the states seeing an increase in storms means that they have the potential to do more damage.

As tornado seasons and locations change, one thing remains the same—the importance of preparation.… Trudy Thompson Shumaker, a volunteer and national spokesperson for the American Red Cross, says that education is key to preparing for tornadoes. “Know what to do and how to stay safe,” she says. This starts with identifying the safest room in your home—an interior, windowless space. Bathrooms sometimes meet these requirements, but a closet can also work, as can an emergency stairwell in larger buildings.

She also suggests assembling an emergency kit that contains the supplies necessary for sheltering in place for two weeks. “You’ll need water because the water supply may be unsafe. You’ll need a battery-powered radio and phone chargers,” says Thompson Shumaker. Before a tornado strikes, “go through your phone and write down the important numbers you’ll need if your phone goes dead.”

Read Cinnamon Janzer’s full report at the BBC.

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

Imagine if we were to lose the tremendous medical advances of the past century. If people began to routinely die from what we now consider minor infections. If the surgeries we’ve come to take for granted suddenly got much, much riskier.

This isn’t that far-fetched. The growing risk from drug-resistant bacteria, fungi, viruses, and parasites, England’s former chief medical officer Sally Davies told The Guardian in an interview published this week, is “more acute” than climate change and could make Covid-19 “look minor.” Among the many dangers, The Guardian’s Kat Lay reported, is that “widespread resistance would make much of modern medicine too risky, affecting treatments including cesarean sections, cancer interventions and organ transplantation.”

This is scary stuff—all the more so because drug resistance is often presented as a massive, multifaceted problem that is nearly impossible to tackle. Maybe you’ve heard of it in the context of doctors overprescribing antibiotics, or patients not taking the full course of antibiotics when they are prescribed. Maybe you’ve heard of drug-resistant tuberculosis developing and circulating in prisons, or maybe you’ve been told that the chief driver is overprescription of antibiotics in low-income countries, meaning that solving this would require an unprecedented level of global coordination and foreign aid.

Drug resistance is a complicated, multifaceted problem—and it will require global coordination. But there’s one really large lever we could pull that would make it much more manageable. And while some articles on drug resistance don’t mention it, Davies does: animal agriculture.

Over two-thirds of all antimicrobials sold globally wind up in farm animals—73 percent, by some estimates. The meat industry has historically fed animals antibiotics not just to treat illness but to make them grow faster so it can kill and sell them faster. While the Food and Drug Administration stopped allowing that in the United States as of 2017, industrial meat, dairy, poultry, egg, and aquaculture operations still use a lot of antibiotics because of the extreme density in which these animals are raised. Also, antibiotics aren’t always administered at an individual level in response to illness but can be given as a preventative measure, or to an entire group.

The U.S. remains way up in the charts in farm animal antibiotic use—third worldwide, after China and Brazil. While China now seems to be reducing antimicrobial use in farming, analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council and One Health Trust found a troubling trend in the U.S.: If you look at the total amount of antibiotics by weight, while human medicine reduced its use of “medically important antibiotics” from 2017 to 2020, livestock farming used more. After that sharp drop around 2017, livestock production’s share of antibiotic use again crept upward, from about 62 percent of antibiotics sold in 2017 to 69 percent in 2020.

Overuse of drugs in livestock production can affect humans in several ways. Eighty percent of the antibiotics given to animals, Davies told The Guardian, then gets excreted in their waste, meaning antibiotics can pass into the environment, increasing selective pressures that contribute to antibiotic resistance. Drug residue can also persist in animal products that consumers then ingest. (Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a sampling and testing system to prevent the sale of meat with drug residue, with thresholds or “tolerance levels” set by the FDA, that does not mean there is no residue.) Drug-resistant bacteria that develop in animals deluged with antibiotics can contaminate improperly handled meat or pass via animal feces to plant crops.

There are ways to fix American farming’s drug addiction. We know that because the intensity of antibiotic use on farms in Europe is about half that in the United States.

The U.S. could catch up by instituting regulations that encourage or mandate better hygiene and general living conditions and more nondrug preventative care. This would have multiple benefits for human health: As TNR contributor Melody Schreiber recently reported, animal farming—not wild birds, as some narratives suggest—has been the primary driver of bird flu. “Once bird flu gets into a large-scale poultry or, now, a dairy operation, it can spread quickly in cramped confines, and then spread to other farms before spilling back into wild birds and animals.”

Another way to cut antibiotic use worldwide would be to eat less meat. One estimate suggests reducing global meat consumption to the equivalent of one standard fast-food burger per person per day—average U.S. consumption is currently over six times that—would slash the global use of antimicrobials for food animals by 66 percent. This would have the salutary effect of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, waterway contamination, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and more.

While the long-delayed farm bill is back in headlines this week, so far most of the focus is on tracking foreign land purchases, cannabis, and GOP efforts to avoid the words “climate change.” Instead of state-level regulations improving how poultry, hogs, and cattle are raised, Florida and Alabama have opted to ban lab-cultivated meat—which isn’t for sale anyway. And nothing gets culture warriors worked up faster than the slightest hint of a suggestion that people eat less meat—or any regulation that might make it marginally more expensive.

Then again, maybe they’d feel differently after a few public awareness campaigns. One poll in 2019 found that while the vast majority of the American public has heard about antibiotic resistance, their understanding of what antibiotic resistance could mean for their own lives is patchier. And while 59 percent say pharmaceutical companies are “very responsible” for the problem, only 20 percent would say the same of the agricultural industry.

Antibiotic resistance isn’t solely an agricultural problem, of course. Davies—who lost her goddaughter to a multidrug-resistant bacterial infection—also noted the necessity of developing new drugs, international coordination, and reducing the release of antibiotics into the environment during manufacturing.

But we can hold these two truths in our minds simultaneously: Any serious effort to slow the rise of drug-resistant pathogens is going to have to address multiple issues. Any effort that ignores the industry in which two-thirds of the drugs are being used isn’t serious.

Good News/Bad News

A landmark bill to make fossil fuel companies cover some of the costs of repairing and adapting to the damage of climate change passed its final vote in the Vermont Senate this past week. If Governor Phil Scott vetoes, the General Assembly will reconvene in June for an override, according to the Bennington Banner. (Vermonters supported the policy by a 2-to-1 margin even before last year’s catastrophic floods.) When the bill becomes law, it will surely be challenged in court. Whatever happens, this is a story to watch.

Mere days after a report revealed that former President Donald Trump promised a roomful of oil execs that he would reverse loads of regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign funds, the Republican hopeful pledged to issue an executive order halting all offshore wind development “on day one,” if elected.

Stat of the Week
2,000 years

Tree rings indicate that last summer was the hottest Northern Hemisphere summer in two millennia, a new study says.

What I’m Reading

Bishop vanished. His species can still be saved.

While former President Donald Trump has joined a growing chorus of conservatives groundlessly blaming wind farms for whale deaths, the clear culprit in a recent string of endangered right whale deaths is vessel strikes. The Washington Post uses the disappearance and likely death of a 1-year-old right whale named Bishop to examine how this happens, laying out how delayed fishing reforms and proposals to expand low-speed zones along the coast could help save the species.

So far this year, a dead female turned up off Virginia with a dislocated spine, a calf was discovered in Georgia with head lacerations, and a young female was found—again in Georgia—with a fractured skull. All the injuries are consistent with vessel strikes.… In addition to vessel strikes, right whales are also threatened by entanglement in fishing gear stretched deep into the sea to trap lobsters and crabs. Bishop’s family tree underscores the danger.

Bishop’s mother, Insignia, endured four entanglements over the course of her life. She was last sighted in 2015 and is presumed dead. She was the mother of four known calves.… Bishop’s great-grandmother Wart was the matriarch of a family of 31 known whales and counting. Her prodigious family tree highlights how the untimely death of just one female can reduce the species’ future population. Here is Wart in the Gulf of Maine in 2010, with fishing line going through her mouth and over her head. She was last sighted in 2014 and is presumed dead.

Read Harry Stevens and Dino Grandoni’s report at The Washington Post.

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