Data Centers Are the Next Big Front in Environmental Wars

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the underappreciated and outsize significance of local environmental battles: small-town fights over development plans whose outcomes affect both the health of the community in question and the broader tallies of the energy transition. What do those look like in practice? This week, Bloomberg’s lengthy feature on a fight over a new data center in Fayetteville, Georgia, offers a reminder that new iterations, new industries, and new face-offs are always right around the corner.

Pipelines are some of the more famous and recognizable examples of how local fights come with national ramifications: The protests and legal challenges to the Dakota Access Pipeline have become an iconic symbol of Indigenous resistance to the fossil fuel projects that are damaging culturally and religiously significant sites and endangering water supplies. The cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline in 2020 due to rising costs, after numerous marginalized communities along its planned route challenged the project in court and through protests, likewise became a case study in how local battles over the health and safety of a given community can affect emissions at the national level, as well: Some estimates suggested the ACP would have been responsible for emissions roughly equivalent to 20 new coal plants, while Clean Water for North Carolina calculated that the unintentional, leaked methane from the pipeline alone might increase the atmosphere-warming effect of national methane emissions by over 13 percent.

Pipelines are far from the only example. For a different type of local environmental fight—and one that confounded expectations of ordinary red-blue divides—read Colin Jerolmack’s piece a few years ago about predominantly conservative Grant Township’s efforts to restrict fracking-related pollution, which escalated to the point that it put residents in conflict with state authorities.

There have long been similar efforts underway against petrochemical plants. Larger philanthropic organizations and national nonprofits have only recently begun supporting the tireless efforts of local groups in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” where numerous refineries, as well as chemical and plastic plants, are situated perilously close to the low-income, majority-Black communities where cancer rates are estimated to be 95 percent higher than in the rest of the country. New measurements taken this summer in southeastern Louisiana found levels of carcinogenic ethylene oxide in the air that were as much as 10 times higher than EPA-recommended limits.

Then there are fights over concentrated animal feeding operations that, again, disproportionately pollute low-income, nonwhite communities while also contributing to land use problems, biodiversity crises, emissions, and more. Here too, the contours of environmental justice battles are ever evolving: The current hype around biogas—a way for industrial meat producers to make money selling animal waste by-products for fuel—and the tax incentives supporting it, have spawned new twists on old environmental fights over industrial agriculture. In May, NC Newsline reported a former mayor’s dismay that, despite his town of Turkey, North Carolina, banning hog farms within city limits, a biogas plant using the very same hog waste the town had wanted to keep out was setting up shop just east of him: “I never imagined they’d bring the manure to us.”

On first glance, community opposition to a new data center might seem much different from these battles: The primary reason for opposition is not the near certainty of pollution that you get with these other installations. (As Nick Martin wrote at TNR in 2019, reviewing pipeline spill data, “The simple fact is that it is a matter of when, not if, a series micro-fractures or a loose bolt or a lightning strike will send the pipe’s contents into the ground.”)

Yet look a bit closer, and familiar dynamics emerge. Data-center developer QTS and its new asset manager–owner Blackstone, Inc., came in promising rural Fayetteville something simple: money. It’s the same way that pipeline or biogas pitches to towns tend to start: with promises of economic benefit, including via jobs—although the promised number of jobs often turns out to be exaggerated or only refer to temporary positions. In the case of Fayetteville’s data center, “the portion of QTS’s taxes going to the county board of education this year will cover the equivalent of some half a dozen teachers’ salaries,” Bloomberg’s Dawn Lim and Josh Saul report.

But in a manner similar to how these negotiations have played out with pipeline or fracking plans, the residents of Fayetteville quickly began to feel they had been misled. They say they were told the data center wouldn’t need more electricity than what was already available from the local grid and could use “existing transmission lines.” (QTS disputes this.) The actual power needed turned out to be about twice what one report suggested, with new power lines needing to be built. That’s where the problems started.

The power company serving the area, Georgia Power, then tried to secure new land for power lines, but residents weren’t wild about being paid a couple grand in exchange for trees being cut down and giant new transmission lines being installed on their property. Georgia Power accordingly started offering much larger, six-figure sums of money. Now residents fear their neighbors are being bought off and that their lands could be “seized” by eminent domain if they themselves refuse.

This small fight is part of a larger national—and even global—battle over the giant environmental costs of big tech and, specifically, new forms of artificial intelligence. The data center, Lim and Saul report, is part of Blackstone’s quest to become “the largest financial investor in AI infrastructure.” Microsoft, which like many tech companies is betting big on AI, will reportedly be one client for the new data center.

Liza Featherstone wrote earlier this year about the enormous energy and water demands from AI data centers “endangering the energy transition” that is desperately needed to avert climate catastrophe. There’s already evidence that AI energy demands are keeping high-polluting coal plants running past their planned retirement dates. While tech companies and their advocates have been quick to argue that AI tools could help meet environmental goals rather than derail them, an estimate this fall from Bain & Company suggested data centers for AI could make up 44 percent of U.S. electrical growth in coming years, requiring utilities “to boost annual generation by up to 26% by 2028.” Tech companies have been keen to insist that this demand can be met with new nuclear energy. But there isn’t much evidence to suggest that this can be done in the short term—and when it comes to the climate crisis, every additional day burning fossil fuels comes with steep costs.

As Bloomberg’s feature indicates, data centers are worth watching as a major emerging field for environmental battles, much like power plants and pipelines have been for decades. And while the industries may differ, these fights are likely to follow familiar patterns.

Good News/Bad News

Five young Hawaiian crows—extinct in the wild—were recently released in Maui, after careful raising and “anti-predator training” using cats and owls.

The once-frozen Arctic tundra is now releasing more carbon than it stores, due to thawing.

Stat of the Week
3,400

That’s how many fewer premature deaths per year we might have in this country if all households were to switch from fossil fuels to heat pumps and electric appliances, according to a new study. (This would also save $60 billion in energy bills each year and cut 400 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, according to The New York Times write-up, but it’s the 300,000-ton drop in fine particulate matter that would make the big difference in saving lives.)

What I’m Reading

CNN’s Leah Dolan profiles Barbie-loving photographer Anastasia Samoylova, whose “subtle, anxiety-inducing images of Florida’s collapsing pastel-pink landscapes” are suffused with an acute awareness of climate change.

Samoylova moved to Florida in 2016, where she was struck by the state’s severe weather events and aging infrastructure.… The insidious, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it approach to her observational photography is intentional. Several years of capturing political extremism, gentrification and environmental disintegration has given Samoylova time to think about how to package disastrous messaging. “How do you communicate these very complex subjects and make them relatable?” she asks. “The trickiest part is to not make them off-putting.” Come for the pink sidewalks that characterize the streets of Miami—as many tourists do—and stay for the subsequent feelings of existential dread. It’s a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, she says. “(Climate change) is stigmatized, and it’s become divisive, at least where I live in the US, especially in Florida. And who knows, it’s likely going to be erased from the conversation again.”

Read Leah Dolan’s full profile at CNN.

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

“Giving Tuesday”—the nonprofit answer to Black Friday and Cyber Monday—is supposed to be a reprieve from the crass commercialization of this holiday period, or at least a way to make yourself feel better after spending hundreds or more on Wirecutter-approved deals. But I find it exhausting. Thanksgiving now heralds a multiweek stretch of increasingly frenetic marketing emails from people trying to destroy your budget, and “Giving Tuesday” just means that nonprofits join the fray, each competing against the next to offer the greatest sense of urgency and bang for buck in a world where there are too many crises and needs to count.

Climate and environment groups participate perforce. (How can they not?) “YOUR GIVING TUESDAY GIFT CAN SAVE OUR PLANET,” Al Gore–founded advocacy group Climate Reality Project told its supporters, adding that “ALL GIFTS WILL BE MATCHED.” The Sierra Club replaced its home page with a dedicated Giving Tuesday landing page, announcing: “If we reach our 1,000 donor goal by midnight, we’ll unlock a special $25,000 match for the environment.” The pressure, the pressure!

How do you choose where to give money and in what amounts without going broke? Wearyingly, there are now guides for that, not unlike Wirecutter’s annual “Best Black Friday Deals” tracker. Many of them rely on data and recommendations from nonprofits that now exist to help people navigate nonprofits. Various organizations operating more or less explicitly according to the principles of so-called “effective altruism” (championed by such techbro luminaries as the now-incarcerated Sam Bankman-Fried) promise a “systematic approach to try and determine where the high leverage points are in climate philanthropy—and by high-leverage, I’m thinking most greenhouse gas reductions per dollar,” in the words of Giving Green director Daniel Stein, speaking with Heatmap last week.

Experts could probably haggle over the methodology of such enterprises for years. Rather than get into the finer details of this philosophical debate or a practical one about the rankings that result, I want to point out another option for optimizing your “bang for buck” for the many people of limited means but concerned hearts. It lies in what you don’t give your money to: If you are the sort of person inclined to donate online on Giving Tuesday, you are probably somebody with a bank. And by switching away from a bank that finances fossil fuels, or by simply switching from one of the bigger offenders to a local credit union, you have the ability to extend your “impact” even if you don’t have the means to send large sums to exhaustively researched “evidence-backed” charities.

The Banking On Climate Chaos Report has found that JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup are among the top financers of fossil fuels worldwide. Bank of America recently even walked back its pledge to stop financing new coal projects. Despite the right-wing fantasy that the finance industry is engaged in a discriminatory “conspiracy” against fossil fuels, most financial firms continue to direct a lot of money toward environmentally catastrophic enterprises.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to begin the process of switching banks; like most people with organizational difficulties, I have developed a well-founded fear of fouling up the fine print or forgetting to change an autopay setting and somehow destroying my life through sheer logistical mismanagement. Pearl Marvell’s piece for Yale Climate Connections last February about how she herself made the switch—along with useful information from experts, tools for determining your bank’s climate-friendliness, and databases of banks to choose from according to your criteria—is what pushed me from dithering into actually doing it.

In case it needs emphasizing, this newsletter does not constitute any kind of financial or investment advice, nor is it intended to singlehandedly address the entanglement of capital with the climate crisis by convincing a few TNR readers to exercise their consumer choice. Switching out all your finances at once can be tricky; people have limited control over employer-sponsored retirement accounts, for example. (And certainly there are banks out there charging exorbitant fees for minor infractions that you’d be wise to avoid—although luckily many databases now allow you to select for banks that don’t do that.)

But this option may be more practical for some people than trying to stretch an already stretched budget and agonizing about where to donate. If we’re really going to go about beating our chests about “optimizing” our do-gooder impulses and extracting maximum “leverage,” then removing a bank’s ability to use the money you have in your accounts year-round to help fund fossil fuel projects is probably going to outweigh donating $25 or even $100 once a year to a carefully selected green effective altruism fund.

Psychologically, switching banks wasn’t as chaotic and disruptive as I’d feared. After keeping the old one open for several extra months to ensure there weren’t any automatic bills I’d forgotten about, I’m closing it later this month. It’s nice to know that money I receive from a day job dealing with the climate crisis isn’t being used to fuel that crisis while I sleep. It doesn’t hurt that the two smaller banks my family has switched to offer better interest rates and are way easier to deal with than the endless bureaucracy of my old bank. So far it’s a lot like switching away from a gas stove—after the initial logistical inconvenience has passed, it’s just a much nicer way of living.

Good News/Bad News

Electrifying and decarbonizing require copper—but high-quality reserves are limited and the extraction process is extremely toxic and emissions-intensive. Grist has an intriguing report on new technologies being developed to make the process less environmentally destructive.

Even if you were already aware of the dangers of formaldehyde pollution—an alarming amount of it coming from basic home furnishings—this ProPublica piece on the extent of the problem, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s failure to tackle it, is going to hit very hard.

Stat of the Week
$334 million

That’s how much money from the EPA’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program has yet to be awarded, leaving it “vulnerable to reversal efforts from Trump officials or Republican lawmakers,” Inside Climate News reports.

What I’m Reading

No, the Fight for the Climate Isn’t “Over”

Historian Kevin Young’s new piece over at Jacobin is an intriguing entry in the emerging genre offering reasons for climate followers to have a degree of hope heading into the second Trump era. Despondent leftists have a distorted view of how the first Trump presidency actually played out, Young suggests. Environmentalists secured a number of crucial victories—and understanding precisely how that happened can help activists identify the most promising paths going forward:

Despite Trump’s best efforts, some of the US climate movement’s most notable recent victories happened on his watch. More coal-fired power plant capacity was retired in the United States from 2017 to 2020 than from 2013 to 2016. That’s right: the coal industry took a bigger hit under a president who campaigned on reviving it than under a president who was supposedly waging war on it. Notice how Trump rarely mentions coal anymore?

The reason is that coal’s fate depends only marginally on national politicians. Since the early 2000s, hundreds of local environmental groups, acting largely independently of the big national organizations, have made it much harder for coal plants to be built or remain in operation. The natural gas boom has also undermined coal, but the market shift has been amplified by the movement.…

Trump suffered many quieter defeats too. His efforts to enact extra subsidies for coal and nuclear energy, to expand offshore oil drilling, to end tax credits for the wind industry, and to force banks to fund drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge all were blocked.…

It’s important to understand how we played that role. It wasn’t through the unfocused outrage of occasional mass marches nor through lobbying or electing Democrats. We were most powerful when we put sustained, disruptive pressure on capitalists and state elites whose interests diverged from Trump’s.

Read Kevin Young’s full essay at Jacobin.

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

With the election of Donald Trump, it’s reasonable to take a wide lens on what the consequences will be for the climate. His fossil fuel–friendly proposals may soon add an estimated four billion metric tons of CO2 to the country’s emissions, and he’s expected to re-withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. Beyond Trump, the international news is no more reassuring. The COP29 climate talks concluded last week with widespread acknowledgment that the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is dead, and with rich countries having only agreed to $300 billion in aid to developing countries—far less than the $1.3 trillion that is projected to be needed.

Yet perhaps now, as we celebrate a holiday that has become nearly synonymous with returning to one’s hometown, is a good time to think locally. Despite a deficit of community-level coverage and awareness about climate issues, there’s a lot of solid information about what would make local environmental problems better: revoking the permit for a dubious local biomass plant, banning the use of pesticides on lawns in order to reduce toxic runoff, or doubling down on public transit rather than road widening to reduce traffic problems. And it doesn’t take that many people to make a difference. Voter turnout in local elections is often a fraction of voter turnout in national elections—even compared to midterms—and there’s a shortage of candidates as well: In 2022, Civic Pulse estimated that 34 percent of contenders in local contests ran unchallenged. That’s a shame, but also an opportunity.

Many strikingly consequential environmental issues are local ones. As Helen Santoro and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò wrote at TNR three years ago, local activists are often a crucial bulwark against new fossil fuel installations and can influence city-level climate and sustainability targets. These fights are about both environmental justice and overall emissions, as shown by high-profile showdowns over pipelines. They are about emissions from wood pellet–burning plants or the rapidly developing plans to burn hog waste fumes. Cities were the first places where bans on new gas hookups were passed, and local governments are now leading the charge against gas-powered lawn equipment, which emits stunning quantities of greenhouse gases in addition to fine particulate matter.

Those seeking to block meaningful climate policy know how important these local battles are. It’s why lobbyists are trying to get so many states to pass new laws prohibiting local restrictions on gas hookups in buildings—like the ballot measure that just passed in Washington state, which TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote about here. It will take local activists and politicians, but also simply more engaged voters, to counter these industry forces.

Those who have dedicated months and years to fighting pipelines can testify that winning these local battles is not easy. But for people currently frustrated at the distance between their mouths and the ears of the party elite, it’s worth a reminder: Meeting local elected officials is entirely doable. (Sometimes you may find yourself dismayed by the result. That, too, is useful information. Right-wing activists in recent years have been strikingly effective at mobilizing in local politics like school board races, and they’ve succeeded in part because a lot of people aren’t paying much attention.)

In the face of relentlessly grim environmental news at the national and international level—biodiversity declines, a new Trump EPA pick, COP29 disappointment—many people are tempted to withdraw. I’ve read half a dozen stories in recent weeks about how those once questionably dubbed the “resistance” are tired and tuning out. That’s a natural impulse. But on the principle of “a change is as good as a rest,” those exhausted from national and international news could also consider refocusing. In holiday downtime this week or while waiting in an airport, consider reading a local paper rather than doomscrolling social media; figure out what neighbors are angry about rather than the influencers in your feed.

As climate disasters loom ever larger and with increasing frequency, there is an inherent utility in investing in the local. These are the people who will be sharing resources when disaster strikes, as we saw in North Carolina recently. If the Trump administration presents an existential threat, the existential saviors could be right next door.

Good News/Bad News

New vehicles have reached a record-low average emissions rate of 319 grams of CO2 per mile and a record-high fuel economy of 27.1 miles per gallon, according to a report the Environmental Protection Agency released this week. A significant part of recent progress on these averages has come from electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.

The deal agreed to at COP29 is going to do very, very little to help poorer countries tackle climate change.

Stat of the Week
4x

According to a new paper, the cost of trying to reverse damage from climate change quadruples once so-called “tipping points” are reached—when enough of a rainforest has been cut down that the ecosystem starts to collapse and desertification takes over, or when enough polar ice melts that it becomes easier for the rest of it to melt. If so, that’s strong incentive to act sooner rather than later to limit the damage.

What I’m Reading

For the Love of a Little Sea

Lough Hyne, a saltwater lake on the southwest coast of Ireland fed by the Atlantic Ocean via a small channel, is “the birthplace of experimental marine biology,” Olive Heffernan writes at Hakai Magazine. It was also the first area in the country to be protected as a marine nature reserve. But now, its biodiversity appears to be in decline. Starfish and urchins have all but disappeared, and masses of algae suggest to scientists that fertilizer runoff from nearby farms has led to an excess of nutrients and a deficit of oxygen in the lake’s waters. Heffernan and Grant Callegari’s full piece—with gorgeous visuals—is worth your time, showing the challenges of conservation amid dense agriculture and tourism.

The situation at the reserve is part of a trend in Ireland and globally: “paper parks”—whereby governments create protected areas but fall flat on developing regulations or on enforcing them. Worldwide, there are nearly 19,000 marine protected areas; over 30 percent of their total area lacks meaningful rules and regulations. Ireland currently has 254 protected sites that are wholly or partially marine; few have management plans.… “Over the last 20 years … there was a race to designation,” says Nicolas Fournier, campaign director at Oceana Europe. But “most of the marine species and habitats, if you look at their conservation status, it’s still degrading.… We’ve expanded marine protected areas without any management.”

Read Olive Heffernan’s and Grant Callegari’s full piece at Hakai Magazine.

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

Climate-concerned readers and voters are in a tough spot. They don’t have the postelection coping options—escapism, despair, biding one’s time till the next election—open to some other people. The Biden administration’s climate policies, however historic, weren’t enough to cut emissions to the point that researchers say is needed by 2030, and analysis from U.K.-based climate news site Carbon Brief suggests the Trump administration could now add an extra four billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Simply accepting this and waiting for the next election isn’t really an option—either for the climate-concerned or for the many other groups whose immediate safety and well-being are in jeopardy.

If this realization feels crushing, it also comes with some advantages. Specifically, it offers a useful tool for sifting through the deluge of postelection “takes” and distinguishing what is helpful from what is unhelpful: If we are truly in an all-hands-on-deck moment (I think that we are), and if, as numerous experts have emphasized, every fraction of a degree of warming matters, then postelection analyses and prescriptions that don’t offer some discernible and actionable kernel of wisdom, lighting (however dimly) one plausible path forward, are pointless, and can be discarded without further ado.

Despair, for example—as numerous climate writers have pointed out over the past few years—just isn’t helpful. I no longer feel guilty just closing the window in which I’m reading a “take” of this variety, even if it’s artful, even if I otherwise enjoy this writer’s work, and moving onto something else.

Postmortems suggesting Democrats tack even further rightward—similarly, I don’t even bother hate-reading them unless I have to for work. As TNR’s Kate Aronoff observed this week, these analyses blaming “interest groups” for dragging Dems left are singularly unpersuasive for 2024, given that Harris ran on a platform that was nearly indistinguishable from that of some 1990s Republicans. And these analyses are particularly absurd from a climate perspective: If the message is that climate groups should sit down and shut up, then where does that leave any of us? On a rapidly heating planet in which even the insufficient Inflation Reduction Act—a product, in no small part, of ceaseless and effective climate advocacy—was never passed?

Identifying effective responses to an election that empowered a corrupt, coup-backing rapist to enact mass deportations that would destroy countless lives and kneecap the national economy and food supply is not an easy task. I haven’t seen anyone lay out anything like a comprehensive plan as of yet—and like many people, I’ve been looking. But here and there you can already see people compiling useful suggestions; filtering out the not so useful ones is an important part of moving that discourse forward. Likewise, the first step in figuring out what ethical escapism and rest might look like, or building a sustainable form of political engagement for the coming months and years, lies in identifying what can easily be discarded. It’s a kind of Modified KonMari rule for political discourse: Ask yourself, “Does this ‘take’ offer any discernible theory of change?” If not, let go of it with gratitude or a murmured expletive, according to your preference. Embrace the upside of urgency. That’s all I’ve got by way of advice for now.

Good News/Bad News

Some of the nonprofit organizations that mounted successful legal challenges to the first Trump administration’s environmentally rapacious policies say they are struggling with fundraising.

Stat of the Week
40%

That’s how many of the 204 agricultural lobbyists at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year, attended as part of official country delegations, “which lent them privileged access to diplomatic negotiations,” reports Rachel Sherrington in a joint analysis by DeSmog and The Guardian.

What I’m Reading

The Fossil Fuel Industry Continues to Exert Undue Influence Over COP29, Activists Say

A U.N. climate change conference held in the petro-state of Azerbaijan days after the United States elected a president fully in the pocket of the oil and gas industry was never going to be a cheery affair. And indeed, there’s more grim news: One estimate now suggests at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended the U.N. climate conference known as COP29. There isn’t a good reason why this pattern is allowed to persist, reports Bob Berwyn:

Most other major international negotiations at the United Nations have conflict-of-interest policies. For example, tobacco company involvement was strictly limited when the World Health Organization developed its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, with similar limits on pharmaceutical companies during ongoing discussions about a global pandemic treaty.

But in the case of the climate talks, corporate influence isn’t in keeping with those guidelines. The UNFCCC took small steps to increase transparency on who is attending the annual climate talks by requiring disclosures of affiliation during registration, but that does not eliminate conflicts of interest, said [Rachitaa Gupta with the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice].

Civil society groups have been pushing the UNFCCC Secretariat for years during regularly scheduled meetings to adopt clear conflict-of-interest rules for the climate talks, but she said the response has always been that it’s something that has to come from the member countries.

Read Bob Berwyn’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.

Donald Trump has named his pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency: Lee Zeldin, who was the U.S. representative for New York’s 1st congressional district from 2015 to 2023. What does that tell us about what lies ahead? The first thing to know is that Zeldin is about as natural a pick for EPA head as Martha Stewart would be for machinist’s mate on a nuclear submarine.

When Zeldin ran against Kathy Hochul for New York governor in 2022, he campaigned primarily on law and order, along with tax and regulation slashing, “ending all Covid-19 mandates,” and parents’ rights. He also has a long record opposing gay marriage and abortion. His environmental bona fides are mostly limited to having held an annual “Teach a Kid to Fish” day as a state senator and having been a member of minor congressional caucuses such as the Climate Solutions Caucus, the Congressional Estuary Caucus, and the somewhat questionable enterprise known as the Conservative Climate Caucus.

According to one Long Island politics expert I spoke to, Zeldin probably joined these caucuses just to appear responsive to voter concerns, given that Long Island Sound pollution is a big issue in Zeldin’s former district. The memberships did not translate to pro-environmental votes: Zeldin voted to cut EPA funding, scrap its chemicals risk assessment program, and block the agency from taking action to restrict carbon pollution. He missed the 2017 vote on whether to defund the EPA’s criminal law enforcement program but voted to prohibit funds from being used for this purpose the prior year. The League of Conservation Voters gives Zeldin a lifetime score of 14 percent.

Zeldin is getting this job not because he’s interested in or qualified on environmental issues but because he’s a loyalist: He was one of Trump’s staunchest defenders in the first impeachment probe and one of four New York representatives to vote against certifying the 2020 election. At the Republican National Convention this summer, Zeldin sat in Trump’s own VIP box alongside members of Trump’s family and other cronies, only two seats away from the candidate.

“We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI,” Zeldin promised on Monday—as if he’d been named energy or commerce secretary instead of EPA administrator. “We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water,” he added.

Unsurprisingly, environmental groups’ reactions to the pick have ranged from skeptical to outraged. On the one hand, it would be hard for Trump to do worse than his first EPA pick, Scott Pruitt, who was hired based on his experience relentlessly suing the EPA as Oklahoma’s attorney general. Pruitt resigned in 2018 amid an avalanche of ethics scandals that overshadowed even his abysmal policy proposals—like blocking the EPA from using public health research to show that pollution hurts people, repealing the Clean Power Plan, loosening fuel emissions standards, and much more. And Andrew Wheeler, who took over after Pruitt’s departure, was a former coal lobbyist.

On the other hand, the installation of a diehard Trump loyalist with little apparent agenda of his own suggests that the EPA is about to do precisely what Trump and his allies have been unusually explicit this time in promising it will do: please oil executives and, in former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s words, “rescind every one of Joe Biden’s industry-killing, job-killing, pro-China and anti-American electricity regulations.” (Biden was distinctly anti-China, and the oil industry kind of liked him—to climate activists’ chagrin—but whatever.) That’s in addition to likely decimating EPA staff, which the Biden administration had worked hard to rebuild after the last exodus.

Trump infamously promised oil executives last spring to reverse Biden-era environmental regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions. Unsurprisingly, the oil and gas industry has compiled a wish list of regulations it wants axed. The American Exploration and Production Council, or AXPC, composed of oil and gas companies, is eager to repeal “more than a half-dozen executive orders that lie at the center of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change,” The Washington Post reported last month, based on leaked documents. It is apparently fixated on getting rid of a new fee on excess methane released as a by-product of oil and gas production via flaring or leaks—a rule beloved by environmentalists because it reduces emissions of a particularly powerful greenhouse gas without actually requiring people to give up something meaningful. Meanwhile, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, environmental advocates told me, seem to be focusing on the EPA’s car emissions standards.

Zeldin will have the power to act on both of those—and many more. The vehicle standards could take some time, said Carrie Jenks, executive director of Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. That’s because that rule has already been finalized. “To roll back a final rule,” Jenks explained to me via email, “the Administrative Procedure Act requires an agency to propose a new rule, take public comment, and then finalize that new rule. The agency will have to explain what has changed and why, and the process of proposal, comment, and final rule takes agency resources and time.” That could take two to three years, she said, “and then any litigation starts once the rule is final.”

If the Trump administration haphazardly tries to rush the process, as it did during Trump’s first term, that might help environmental groups’ lawsuits to stop the new rules. The Natural Resources Defense Council has already pledged its readiness to challenge the Trump administration in court. During Trump’s last presidency, chief litigation officer Michael Wall said in a statement last week, “on average, we sued once every ten days for four years, and we won victories in nearly 90% of the resolved cases.”

The methane rule, formally known as the “waste emissions charge,” or WEC, could be reversed more quickly. Because it was only finalized on Tuesday, it’s vulnerable to the Congressional Review Act, which can be used to scrap a rule “finalized within 60 legislative days of the new administration taking office” via a simple congressional majority, Jenks explained. “We saw that used by the Trump administration last time as well as the Biden administration, and I would expect the Trump administration to consider where it can be used again.” Because the methane rule was mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act, “the EPA will continue to have the obligation to implement the WEC (through a different rule) until Congress repeals or alters the methane provisions of the IRA,” Jenks added. But “there are examples of where an agency fails to implement a rule, so that could also be a possible outcome.”

Then there are the rules that have been proposed but not yet finalized. Right now, several important ones fall into that category: proposed rules to limit industries’ ability to pollute the environment with harmful chemicals known as PFAS, for example. Proposed rules can be abandoned immediately. And a new rule for limiting greenhouse gas emissions from existing gas-fired plants, which was postponed while the administration finalized rules for existing coal-fired plants and new gas-fired plants, has not even been formally proposed yet. So that plan could be easily discarded, which is not ideal, given that gas-fired plants generate more electricity than any other type of plant in this country.

It would be a bit ironic if Zeldin were to scrap the PFAS rules—either the proposed ones or the one finalized this spring to reduce PFAS in drinking water. PFAS regulation is one of the very few environmental issues Zeldin repeatedly voted in favor of during his time in Congress: Twice he voted for a bill to require the EPA to set new drinking water standards and limit industrial PFAS discharge; he also voted for an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to set new standards for PFAS cleanups by the Department of Defense. But he also hasn’t been entirely consistent on this front, and at the end of the day, the point of appointing a loyalist is that they do what you tell them to. If Trump says to let industrial donors fill the nation’s waters with PFAS, it’s a good bet that Zeldin will do just that.

Good News/Bad News

The emerging consensus seems to be that Trump and a Republican Congress probably won’t repeal the Inflation Reduction Act (with its many clean energy incentives) in its entirety, because a lot of the money is going to red states. In other marginal good news, a billionaire’s effort to get rid of Washington state’s landmark climate law was roundly rejected at the ballot box, other states are gearing up to continue climate progress without the federal government, and the U.S. Air Force is walking back its initial claim that it doesn’t have to do anything to clean up the massive PFAS mess it created in Tucson, Arizona.

A different Washington ballot initiative, which aims to make it illegal for any municipality or the state itself ever to do anything that could be seen as discouraging gas energy or gas hookups in new buildings, looks like it’s going to pass. TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote about the very weird background to that battle here.

Stat of the Week:
30 million tons

That’s how much ice the Greenland Ice Sheet is currently losing per hour, according to a new report.

What I’m Reading:

At Cop29, the Sun Sets on U.S. Leadership

This year’s international climate talks have kicked off amid news both of Donald Trump’s reelection as president of the United States and that 2024 is already a record-hot year for global temperatures. Despair and nihilism won’t help, but neither will sugarcoating the matter. So to that end, here’s Elizabeth Kolbert’s succinct summary:

In his first term, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. The day Biden took office, he moved to reënter the agreement. Trump in his second term almost certainly will withdraw from the accord once again. And it’s possible that the new Administration could take the even more radical step of withdrawing from the treaty that underlies the Paris Agreement, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1992. Leaving the U.N.F.C.C.C. would make it virtually impossible for the country to rejoin because the move would require approval by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate.

Just how bad a second Trump Administration will be for domestic climate policy remains, of course, to be seen, but the most likely scenarios are all pretty bleak. During his first term, Trump tried to roll back more than a hundred environmental regulations. And, while the Biden Administration is rushing to try to “Trump-proof” various rules, including a set aimed at limiting oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, this seems unlikely to deter the incoming President, who, through his own nominees, has produced a U.S. Supreme Court deeply sympathetic to his agenda. According to a recent analysis by the British-based Web site Carbon Brief, were Trump to roll back the Biden Administration’s key climate initiatives, the U.S. could emit an extra four billion tons of CO2 by 2030. This, the analysis noted, “would negate—twice over—all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.”

Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s full piece at The New Yorker.

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

We’re in the breathless final stretch of this election—when new poll analyses drop seemingly every five minutes, “closing arguments” that contain no new information receive detailed reviews, homepages transform into liveblogs, opinion pages swing wildly between imagining different scenarios, and almost none of it is useful because there simply isn’t much to do other than wait until Election Day. Or rather Election Week: Chances are that we won’t know for days, or even longer, whether the White House will return to a guy who tried to overturn the last presidential election.

In fact, at this stage of the election cycle, The New York Times’ dining section, with its recommendation of what cookies to bake while watching election night coverage, arguably contains more new and useful information than most politics sections: At least you get some tips about baking with brown butter.

But this year, many outlets have added a new genre of article to the mix: how to handle election stress. Experts interviewed by ABC News suggest that people sleep, limit news and social media consumption, and “focus on concrete tasks that they have control over, like helping get people registered to vote or participating in canvassing.” People interviewed by the ABC affiliate in West Palm Beach, Florida, likewise endorse action—and also prayer. Austin news station KXAN suggests people adopt a “day-by-day approach” and use “I” statements when “setting boundaries” with family and friends regarding political discussions. Psychologists in particular had a lot of advice: how to identify the root of your anxiety, “boost optimism up until the last minute,” relax via “deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, aerobic exercise, a warm bath, relaxing music, a walk in nature.” An article from the meditation app Headspace, unsurprisingly, suggested meditation. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus said that she knits, “compulsively.”

Your mileage with all these suggestions may vary. Personally, I found even collecting them to be overwhelming. (And that’s not ideal, given that my boss wrote Monday that we have a moral duty not to panic.)

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about a pair of essays Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote for TNR four years ago: the first about how mourning climate change prepared her to weather the Covid-19 pandemic, and the second about how being both a “climate person” and “a Black climate person” affected her perspective on the 2020 presidential election. Mary is emphatically not a “doomer”—i.e., someone who sees all the bad news and figures it’s time to give up. But in these essays, she emphasized the importance of fully acknowledging the weight of the moment, rather than trying to ignore it. “This is painful,” she wrote in March 2020 about Covid and the climate crisis. “It’s supposed to be. We are suffering through a collective trauma. We’re watching our world change, and it feels like it’s falling apart. That’s not supposed to feel OK: It’s not OK. As hard as it is, as painful as it is, we have to accept the reality of our crisis. Denial, often a critical step in the grieving process, is not an option.”

Her assessment of the 2020 election was similarly unflinching. Being a climate writer means understanding just how high the stakes are, and that there’s no such thing as putting the crisis on “pause” for four years. Instead, as writer and activist Bill McKibben has repeatedly observed, in his newsletter The Crucial Years, these next years are more vital than ever—and merely failing to act during this time will put us on a very dangerous path.

“This election,” as Mary put it, “is less about whether we should act on climate than how we should act on it. Should we act with compassion or with cruelty? Given that our national commitment to democracy has become debatable, this election is also about whether we even have the ability to act on climate in any meaningful way in the future.” Against all that, her message was simple: “This past weekend, on the first day of early voting in New York City, I stood in line for more than five hours to vote like my life depended on it. Because it does.”

That’s not a warm bath. On the other hand, it is an “I” statement, and I’d argue it does engage with the “root” of election anxiety. It’s also a kind of optimism. As Mary put it, “I’ll take a shot in hell over a shot to the head any day.”

It’s a line worth meditating on.

Good News/Bad News

Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere reached record levels last year, according to a new report from the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization.

Stat of the Week
$3 billion

That’s how much money the Biden administration is disbursing in Inflation Reduction Act–funded grants to green the country’s ports, following an announcement this week.

What I’m Reading

Authoritarianism is on the rise. Is climate change to blame?

“Researchers have long noticed that natural disasters like floods, droughts, and wildfires can help autocratic politicians consolidate power,” writes L.V. Anderson in an unnervingly timely article at Grist. But recent research has helped to narrow down what, exactly, is happening and how people disinclined to give up on democracy can push back:

Until fairly recently, researchers looking at the ties between climate disasters and authoritarianism only had case studies, like Duterte and Trujillo.… But in 2022, economists in the United Kingdom and Australia devised a clever study seeking to prove that storms like hurricanes actually cause a slide toward authoritarianism.… A causal relationship between climate change and authoritarian attitudes has also been demonstrated on a much smaller scale in psychology studies. In 2012, a team of psychologists divided cohorts of German and British university students into two groups and told them they were helping to develop a knowledge test. They informed half of the volunteers about some of the threats associated with climate change—findings about how hazardous heat, wildfires, and glacier loss are projected to worsen in the future. The other half learned “neutral facts” about their respective countries’ weather, forests, and economies, with no mention of climate change. The volunteers who had been told about the perils of climate change expressed more negative opinions of dangerous or marginalized groups—like terrorists, drug addicts, or attack-dog breeders—on a 10-point scale measuring their attitudes toward various demographics.

Read L.V. Anderson’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.

I’m not sure what I expected when I typed “low-waste Halloween candy” into a search box a few days ago. I know that trying to celebrate a holiday sustainably can get overwhelming—I’ve written before about the proliferation of bonkers advice when it comes to sustainable Christmas trees. But hey, I like Halloween, I’m told my new neighborhood gets a lot of trick-or-treaters, and if I’m going to bulk-order candy I’d rather it not be packaged in layers of petroleum products.

Alas, I learned that this is much easier said than done.

Let’s review some of the top options: First, I came across blog posts suggesting mini-boxes of Junior Mints or Milk Duds or Nerds, which are some of the few candies available in cardboard packaging. I was intrigued until I realized how hard it was to find a one-stop place for these brands. Some stores were sold out, some didn’t carry them at all, some only carried them in strangely high or low quantities, or their prices were ridiculous, and some online retailers couldn’t ship in time. Also, no one in my household or friend circle really likes these candies (the responses in the group chat, when I checked, were vicious), so I’ve no idea what we’d do if the number of trick-or-treaters was lower than anticipated and I suddenly found myself with 60 Nerds boxes to dispose of. Food waste isn’t sustainable, either.

Then there are the eco-friendly brand suggestions: various fair-trade chocolates in paper or foil wrappers; gummies and lollipops in plastic wrappers that made it into sustainable recommendations lists because they’re organic. I did, in the end, buy some of the more cost-effective of the chocolates, since they had good packaging and I’m pretty confident that the excess will be consumed. Many of these options, though, are quite pricey—particularly when compared to getting a plain-old variety bag at CVS or Walmart. If you’re talking about a high-traffic trick-or-treating neighborhood, stocking up solely on fair-trade paper-wrapped chocolates could easily cost you $150 or more.

Then there’s the ubiquitous suggestion to buy from one of those bins at a bulk store “and then portion out sweets like gummy bears or candy corn into paper or cloth bags,” as phrased by The New York Times in its climate advice column on Monday. This is a lot of work, and if we’re talking about candy that’s completely bare, then putting waxed paper around it at home seems unlikely to reassure parents raised on urban myths about contaminated or poisoned treats. Bulk bins of foil-wrapped candy might be another story. But I’ve also no idea where to find these, let alone cheaply; the only store I can instantly name that had a bunch of these bins lies in my hometown, 400 miles away, and it closed nine years ago.

The point isn’t that finding low- or no-waste candy to hand out is impossible. The problem is that it’s hard: It’s likely to be expensive or time-consuming or both.

What makes this situation especially maddening is that there are ways to make this easier for consumers. It shouldn’t be this hard to avoid an explosion of plastic every October. The real answer to the question of how to have a greener Halloween (and everyday life in general) lies not in specialty chocolate but in a wonky meeting being held next month that many of the people searching for sustainable candy recs probably haven’t heard about: the fifth meeting of the UN’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee tasked with drafting “an internationally legally binding instrument on plastic pollution.”

Taking place in Busan, Republic of Korea, this meeting is supposed to be the last negotiation session before the treaty is signed early next year. That timeline may wind up being revised. “We are not where we would have liked to be in the process,” Rachel Radvany, an environmental health campaigner with the Center for International Environmental Law, told me. “We haven’t honestly gotten into a true negotiation,” she said, “except on a few of the more specific provisions.”

The fundamental problem is that a lot of states with significant oil wealth don’t want a treaty that reduces plastics production. Instead, they’d prefer to focus on recycling—which, as numerous TNR writers have noted, has never been a serious solution, as it’s not feasible for many types of plastic, releases more microplastics and toxic chemicals in the process, and doesn’t reduce the overall quantity of plastic. Leaked documents have recently shown that the petrochemical industry deliberately spread the false idea that most plastics would be recycled in order to keep producing plastic.

There are lots of policies, however, that governments could enact to reduce our overall reliance on plastic. It’s not just about bans on plastic bags or water bottles—many countries have banned single-use plastics, “and we’re still seeing the problem getting worse,” Radvany said. “You have to have policies that prioritize reuse systems and reuse services and give funding for that to build that out.” Ideally, reusable materials should be nonplastic ones to begin with, she added, given that even reusable plastics contain a lot of toxic chemicals. Policymakers could also ban those chemicals. Figuring out which ones to ban “could be assessed by a scientific body within the treaty to determine if they’re carcinogenic or things like that. And then those chemicals would be phased out.” Alternatives to plastics already exist, and more could be developed at scale if the treaty were to include funding for that.

Getting any of these policies enacted would be hard. But it’s also arguably easier than asking millions of consumers to de-plastic their lives in a global economy that’s suffused with plastic. “Once it’s produced in the market, you as a consumer can’t control what you’re being exposed to,” Radvany said. “They’re finding microplastics in everything, every part of our bodies,” and researchers are only beginning to understand how this is affecting human health.

“You can put in a lot of effort to have a green Halloween, to buy less plastics, to feed your kids food that’s not packaged in plastic, but there’s only so much you as a consumer can do,” she said. “It’s exhausting and impossible to stop exposing yourself to these things.”

Think she’s exaggerating? Go ahead, run around town trying to get a decent deal on hundreds of pieces of candy in sustainable packaging. Then do it for the costumes and decorations. Did I mention that Christmas is right around the corner?

Good News/Bad News

Researchers are studying ancient Roman concrete for clues about how to make modern concrete manufacturing—a massive greenhouse gas emitter—more sustainable, The New York Times’ Amos Zeeberg reports.

Heat pumps were supposed to be the easy switch, the win-win proposition that saved people money and cut emissions without too much massive infrastructure investment needed. But “heat pump investment in the United States has dropped by 4 percent in the past two years, even as sales of EVs have almost doubled,” The Washington Post

reports. The experts the Post interviews seem divided: This trend could be because of inflation and interest rates, but it could also be because contractors lack training and there’s a lot of misinformation circulating.

Stat of the Week
2 weeks

That’s how long it took after a widely publicized “radical” nonviolent environmental protest for surveys to show an increase in support for more moderate environmental groups, in a recent study. Instead of turning people off environmentalism, the researchers suggest, so-called radicals (and their disruptive but nonviolent protests) might play a role “in driving change.”

What I’m Reading

One issue will decide Arizona’s future. Nobody’s campaigning on it.

Amid the deluge of political ads in the swing state of Arizona right now, reporter Jake Bittle notices one thing missing: the Western water crisis that’s getting worse and worse, while negotiations over how to manage it sputter and stall.

Arizona voters know that they’re deciding the country’s future—the state is one of just a half-dozen likely to determine the next president—but it’s unclear if they know that they’re voting on an existential threat in their own backyards.… During a week reporting in the state, I saw exactly one ad that focused on the issue. It was a billboard in Tucson announcing that Kirsten Engel, the Democratic candidate for a pivotal congressional seat, supports “Protecting Arizona from Drought”—not exactly the most substantive engagement with the issue.

The reason for this avoidance is simple, according to Nick Ponder, a vice president of government affairs at HighGround, a leading Arizona political strategy firm. He said that while many voters in the state rank water among their top three or four issues, most don’t have a detailed understanding of water policy—meaning it’s unlikely that they’ll vote based on how candidates say they’ll handle water issues.

Read Jake Bittle’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.

Mass deportations, using a 151-year-old law as a national abortion ban, privatizing the National Weather Service, sending the military after the “radical left”: These are some of the policies, proposed by Trump or his supporters, that have made headlines in recent months. But in the past week, reporters have increasingly been looking into the ways that Trump-proposed policies could have far-reaching effects on another big part of the country: its food supply.

Trump’s anti-immigration policy is the most obvious example. “The role of immigrants in the American food system is difficult to overstate,” Frida Garza and Ayurella Horn-Muller write for Grist and El País. “Every year, hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority of them coming from Mexico, legally obtain H-2A visas that allow them to enter the U.S. as seasonal agricultural workers and then return home when the harvest is done.” Another estimated 1.7 million undocumented workers are also employed “in some part of the U.S. food supply chain.”

What would happen if all those workers suddenly disappeared? Replacing them, Garza and Horn-Muller report, wouldn’t be easy, since U.S. workers often don’t find these jobs appealing. The shock to the system would likely drive a spike in food prices. And even if mass deportation policies didn’t survive legal challenges, the “chilling effect” of the threat could still disrupt the industry—and harm a lot of people.

Tariffs could also send food prices skyrocketing. While both parties have proposed strikingly high tariffs in recent years, the ones Trump has proposed recently are much broader than the Biden administration’s (already pretty extreme) 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. Trump, The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein and David J. Lynch note, has “floated ‘automatic’ tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on every U.S. trading partner, 60 percent levies on goods from China, and rates as high as 100, 200 or even 1,000 percent in other circumstances.” Even if these were “only partially implemented,” Stein and Lynch write, “the consequences would be far-reaching: Americans would be hit by higher prices for grocery staples from abroad, such as fruit, vegetables and coffee.” If you’re looking for specifics, the reporters point to one estimate that 90 percent of tomatoes sold in the U.S. are imported.

The policies in Project 2025—a playbook for the next Republican president written by conservative thinkers and former Trump administration officials, which Trump has tried (unsuccessfully) to distance himself from—go further still. It proposes getting rid of dietary guidelines, which “form the basis for all federal food policies, from school meals to SNAP, WIC and other programs,” Cecilia Nowell reports for The Guardian this week. Project 2025 also proposes changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the additional program for Women, Infants and Children that would likely reduce such assistance, by reinstituting work requirements and restricting eligibility. With regard to WIC, Project 2025 suggests changing the bidding and contracting process for baby formula and having the president “re-evaluate excessive regulation” of baby formula, which Project 2025 blames for formula shortages. (In 2022, contaminated baby formula led to widespread recalls and multiple infant deaths.)

The evidence behind these proposals is weak. Republicans push work requirements in the belief that receiving SNAP benefits reduces the incentive to work, but as University of Washington researcher Pia Chaparro told Civil Eats reporter Grey Moran, “research shows that SNAP participation reduces food insecurity but does not act as a disincentive to work. Moreover, research shows that the work requirements don’t lead to increased employment.”

As for the proposals to change WIC and the state contracts for baby formula, removing the competitive bidding process could easily “result in a funding shortfall, jeopardize access to WIC for millions of parents, infants, and young children, and result in higher formula prices for all consumers,” expert Katie Bergh told Civil Eats.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of all the ways Project 2025 proposals would affect the food system. Nor does it cover all the ways other policies publicly proposed by Trump himself could affect food in this country. (After all, inaction on climate change is already wreaking havoc on agriculture and harvests.) As news outlets continue probing the concrete ramifications of culture-war-inspired policies, however, it’s a useful reminder of a basic truth: Culture-war policies don’t stay in the realm of culture. And they often have ramifications far beyond what might immediately be apparent.

Good News/Bad News

E.V. charging stations are a hard sell because they’re not very profitable. But The Washington Post explores the idea that charging stations could “borrow the business model that has made gas stations ubiquitous: Sell fuel at a loss as a way to get people to buy snacks, drinks and other items.”

Two years after countries agreed to fight biodiversity collapse by protecting 30 percent of the planet for wild ecosystems, The Guardian reports, only 25 countries have actually followed through and submitted their plans, while 170 have missed the deadline. “The world,” reporters Patrick Greenfield and Daisy Dunne write, “has never yet met a single target in the history of UN biodiversity agreements, and there had been a major push to make sure this decade was different.”

Stat of the Week
52%

That’s how many Floridians say they would prefer a political candidate who wants to tackle climate change, according to a new survey. Unsurprisingly, there is a large partisan split.

What I’m Reading

Biobanking Corals: One Woman’s Mission to Save Coral Genetics in Turks and Caicos to Rebuild Reefs of the Future

So many people are hungry for “good news” stories about climate change. But as Teresa Tomassoni’s profile of Turks and Caicos Reef Fund executive director Alizee Zimmerman shows, sometimes the “good news” stories aren’t “good news” in the sense of the environment doing better than expected. Sometimes, they’re about people facing forces they can’t stop, trying to find small ways to preserve future options. Tomassoni writes about the effort to create a “Noah’s ark” for Caribbean corals as mass bleaching events decimate the global coral population:

Scientists first removed corals from the water on a large scale to hold them in captivity for the long-term so they wouldn’t go extinct in 2018, in response to Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and NOAA partnered with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and other facilities to collect and hold some of Florida’s most vulnerable corals on land with the goal of propagating them in the future. It was the largest coral rescue effort in history.

Zimmermann wanted to learn how she could do the same, albeit on a much smaller scale in Turks and Caicos.… The Turks and Caicos government had granted permission for Zimmermann to retrieve corals from the ocean, with the caveat that they should be “corals of opportunity,” she said. Whenever possible, she said, they wanted her to collect corals that likely would have been destroyed if they weren’t rescued from a coastal development project. She knew just the right ones.

A few months earlier, she’d gotten word that an old dock on the eastern end of Providenciales was slated to be ripped up for renovations. She’d heard there were corals growing on its underwater structure and went snorkeling to see for herself.… Zimmermann recruited around 30 volunteers to help her rescue the animals, which would have otherwise been killed during the dock renovations. She divided them into two teams. Half of the people entered the water with snorkel gear and hammers and chisels they used to carefully break off live corals from the dock and place them in shopping baskets they kept underwater. When they were full, the snorkelers brought them to the surface and handed them over to other volunteers on deck who transported them on a boat to an old abandoned conch farm. The group rescued more than 400 corals.

Read Teresa Tomassoni’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.

I’ve been thinking a lot, recently, about a piece Mariette Williams wrote for TNR four years ago. Williams recalled her first hurricane, as a college student, hunkering down with a handful of international students in their school’s dining hall in South Florida for three days with the power out. “We ate single-serve boxes of cereal and drank juice boxes—whatever nonperishables the dining hall had.” She didn’t remember the name of the storm. “What sticks out in my mind is what those who were able to leave as danger approached all had in common: money.”

Williams didn’t evacuate for hurricanes in her twenties, either, and neither did her friends: “We had just started making payments on our student loans and second-hand cars,” she wrote. “Leaving meant having a job flexible enough to give time off and either driving the eight-plus hours to the nearest state to book a hotel or buying airline tickets before prices tripled or quadrupled.” Her first evacuation came with Hurricane Maria in 2017: Both her and her husband’s work closed ahead of the storm, “We had a big enough window to plan our evacuation, and we could finally afford to leave.” The price tag was $1,500.

I thought about Williams’s piece as Hurricane Helene bore down on the Florida Panhandle, as reports emerged of the devastating floods in the Appalachians, and while reading reports that workers at a plastics plant in Tennessee were ordered to stay on the job as the floodwaters rose—with deadly consequences. And now of course there’s Hurricane Milton.

“Just watched an NBC meteorologist cry on air talking about how terrifying Hurricane Milton is,” the writer and communications expert Hannah Riley wrote in a tweet that quickly went viral Monday evening, “& then the next thing I saw was a woman in the evacuation zone saying she has literally nowhere to go—all the hotels are booked & she doesn’t have a lot of money & has 4 dogs/6 kids.” A woman matching that description—Amanda Moss, The Washington Post reported Tuesday night—has posted multiple videos to this effect on TikTok, noting that her seven-passenger car cannot fit nine people (her immediate family and her mother-in-law) and four dogs. (Even if she could, as early as Monday evacuees were reporting massive traffic jams and fuel shortages at gas stations along the route.) “Moss said she doesn’t have the money to pack her family on a flight, into multiple hotel rooms or into an Airbnb,” the Post reported.

This is not surprising. Thirty-seven percent of American adults surveyed by the Fed in 2023 said they didn’t have the cash on hand to cover an unexpected $400 expense. Some said they’d put the expense on a credit card “and pay it off over time”—a practice that can quickly add up to crippling debt. Thirteen percent said they simply wouldn’t be able to pay for the expense at all. And that’s for $400. In 2022, the average cost for evacuating for Hurricane Harvey was estimated to be three times that: $1,200. And evacuations can cost much more, especially depending on duration of stay. In 2018, a researcher interviewed by NPR estimated the cost of evacuating a four-person family for a week, if they didn’t have relatives to stay with, at “upward of $2,000.” There’s been quite a bit of inflation since then.

The death count from Helene is now over 230 and is still rising. Unless something very surprising happens, more people are going to die in the next 24 hours from Hurricane Milton. Many of those deaths will be hard to call “accidents,” in the classical sense of something unexpected. Congress may not even return from recess for it to pass supplemental disaster relief. We live in a society that is strikingly nonchalant about the idea that some people are just going to die because they don’t have enough money.

Good News/Bad News

The International Energy Agency reports this week that while the world is not on track to add the appropriate amount of clean energy by 2030, the target can still be met—if, as Heatmap’s Jessica Hullinger summarizes, “governments can get their acts together, set bold new emission reduction targets in the coming months, and work together to lower the energy transition costs for poorer countries.”

Global deforestation seems to be increasing, rather than slowing down.

Stat of the Week
200 to 500x more likely

That’s climate change’s contribution to the unusual heat in the Gulf of Mexico that exacerbated Hurricane Helene, according to a new analysis. That analysis may also hold for Hurricane Milton.

What I’m Reading

The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth

Even if journal articles aren’t typically your cup of tea, you may want to make an exception for this one. It’s not boring—there’s even a section on the “risk of societal collapse.” An excerpt from the introduction:

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm about the impending dangers of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem change.… Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024 (Guterres 2024), and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100 (UNEP 2023). Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage.

Read the full article at Bioscience.

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 Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, moderator Norah O’Donnell asked JD Vance about the death toll from Hurricane Helene, while referring to the research showing that climate change intensifies the rainfall from these storms. “What responsibility,” she asked, “would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change?”

Vance, after expressing horror over the loss of life, moved on to what one might charitably call the substance of his response: If, “just for the sake of argument,” he said, carbon emissions really were driving climate change, the goal should be “to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we’re the cleanest economy in the world.” (We are not.)

Tim Walz responded by saying that “my farmers know climate change is real,” but then he too shifted his focus to American manufacturing, citing “the E.V. technology that we invented,” “the largest solar manufacturing plant in North America,” and “jobs all across the country” created by the Inflation Reduction Act. When O’Donnell followed up by asking about Trump calling climate change a hoax, Vance pivoted again to the need to make solar panels in the U.S., not China; Walz touted record oil and gas production.

Of the swing voters who participated in The Washington Post’s focus group, 13 thought Vance had the better answer, while only nine thought Walz did.

TNR’s Kate Aronoff has written previously about the strange difficulty that Democrats have demonstrated in crafting a compelling narrative around climate change and climate policy. The presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Trump, she wrote, “should be a cautionary tale for how stupid and dangerous it is for Democrats to keep taking on Republicans’ talking points as their own.”

And the horrifying reality of Hurricane Helene, she wrote earlier this week, exposes the moral insufficiency of portraying global warming as primarily a narrative about American manufacturing: “Next to images of entire downtown areas half-submerged in floodwaters, or homes moving faster than a river tube, touting the administration’s successful boost of the construction of manufacturing facilities rings hollow,” Kate wrote. “Framing climate action primarily as a good-news story in which the U.S. will come to dominate green export sectors overlooks the very real pocketbook struggles the climate crisis is already causing.”

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have already estimated that climate change “caused over 50 percent more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas,” due to laws of physics dictating that warmer air holds more water vapor. Before Helene made landfall, the storm traveled over Gulf waters that were significantly warmer than average. And this is part of a broader trend. As Inside Climate News reported this week, “The amount of rain in the most intense rainstorms has increased 37 percent in the Southeast since 1958.”

In the past few days, news outlets have reported some of the stories from the communities deluged with Helene’s increased rainfall: a 75-year-old man calling for help for seven hours before falling into the floodwaters, as horrified friends and family watched; two grandparents stranded on their roof before drowning, along with with their 7-year-old grandchild; a mother and her 1-month-old twin boys killed by a tree falling on their mobile home. There was an American manufacturing angle in there as well: the factory employees who were left holding onto pipes on the back of a truck that eventually flipped, leaving them to the mercies of the raging floods. One of the workers is confirmed dead; another told reporters their managers ordered them to keep working as the waters rose.

Over 160 people have now been confirmed dead. Millions are without power, and at least 400,000 people have seen their water systems fail and are now without potable water except for what is being distributed by relief teams—the true number is likely higher, since 1,293 water systems are either “non-operational,” only semi-operational, or of unknown status, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Restoring water access in Asheville, North Carolina, could take “weeks.”

The question of what responsibility politicians have to address this devastation and prevent it in the future can be answered many ways. Congress could cancel its long recess and return to Washington to pass the supplemental disaster funding it left out of a bill last week. Policymakers could start rethinking home insurance as the first line of defense in these disasters: Most of the homes affected by Helene didn’t have flood insurance because it’s not included in regular home insurance. Moreover, the insurance industry doesn’t have the best track record in states feeling the effects of climate change, such as California and Florida, where premiums are rising. Some insurers have simply abandoned these states altogether.

Major infrastructure investments could make communities more resilient in the future, and as these severe weather events become more common, we also might want to make sure that people affected by them aren’t disenfranchised because of difficulties voting in the aftermath of these disasters. Then there’s the underlying problem: Unless the world starts burning fewer fossil fuels, this will only get worse.

But that’s not what people heard Tuesday night in the vice presidential debate. Instead, the vice presidential candidates argued about who would create more jobs and eat China’s lunch. If politicians can’t talk seriously about climate change even in the wake of a “biblical” disaster wiping out areas once described as “climate havens,” when will they?

Good News

The U.K.—the ultimate coal nation—has shut its last coal-fired plant, becoming the first G7 country to close the book on coal power.

Bad News

A new analysis finds that the destruction from hurricanes and tropical storms has a long tail: “Death rates in affected states remain elevated for 15 years after a storm makes landfall,” The Washington Post reports.

Stat of the Week
40 trillion

That’s how many gallons of rain dropped on the Southeastern United States in just five days, thanks to Hurricane Helene and the storm that preceded it, according to one calculation

What I’m Reading

As climate change helps mosquitoes spread disease, critics push for alternative to pesticides

As mosquito populations rise and spread, bringing West Nile and other diseases with them, a lot of areas are looking to reduce their numbers. The typical way to do that is by spraying pesticides that kill adult mosquitoes—“adulticide,” Diana Kruzman reports. But there’s reason to worry about the effects that spraying endocrine-disrupting pesticides might have on vulnerable humans like pregnant women and children, let alone the rest of the ecosystem. There could be another way, Diana Kruzman reports at Grist:

Some governments are also experimenting with releasing genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild to breed sterile offspring, reducing mosquito populations. Nanopesticides, which are less toxic to mammals but still affect mosquitoes, are also a promising area of research. However, advocates say that the most proven way to deal with mosquitoes is by reducing their ability to breed—by clearing away pools of standing water and utilizing larvicides—and educating the public to protect themselves using long clothing and repellents.

Feldman pointed to the success of programs in cities like Boulder, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., as proof that adulticides don’t need to be a major part of mosquito control efforts. The agency responsible for tracking and preventing the spread of West Nile virus in the nation’s capital, for example, does not use adulticides; instead, the D.C. Department of Health concentrates its efforts on larviciding, even handing out free larvicides for residents to apply in their own neighborhoods. Boulder, meanwhile, utilizes an explicitly “ecological” approach; boosting biodiversity, local officials have found, can lower populations of disease-carrying mosquitoes by forcing them to compete for resources with other species of mosquitoes as well as other kinds of insects.

Read Diana Kruzman’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.