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The 8 Talking Points Fossil Fuel Companies Use to Obstruct Climate Action
Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP via Getty Images
New research highlights companies’ “aligned and coordinated” use of Twitter to deny climate change and delay solutions.
To the extent that X ever was the “public square” of the internet, it is clearly no longer such a place. The platform — known as Twitter until it was rechristened in 2023 by Elon Musk — has become an echo chamber for extremist conspiracy theories and hate speech — or, depending on what you’re looking for, a porn site.
Even before this transformation, however, years of research suggested that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests. In 2015, oil and gas companies were active on Twitter during international negotiations over the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, promoting the incorrect notion that Americans did not support taking action on climate change. More recent research has shown similar industry messaging in the lead-up to climate negotiations in Glasgow and Dubai, and one multi-year analysis of more than 22,000 tweets from Exxon Mobil-funded think tanks and industry groups found that they have frequently disseminated the ideas that climate change is not threatening, and that former president Joe Biden’s energy plans hurt economic growth.
Other branches of the fossil fuel industry — including plastic producers and agrichemical companies, both of which depend on oil and gas and their byproducts — have also taken to social media to discourage actions to reduce the use of their products. In a new paper published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers suggest that climate communications from these three sectors — oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals — are “aligned and coordinated … to reinforce existing infrastructure and inhibit change.” 01-21-25
Science Is Revealing the Social Disparities at the Root of Urban Ecosystems
Front, from right: NYU researchers Rafael Baez, Emerald Lin, and Valentina Alaasam collect data with birders in Prospect Park. Photo: Sydney Walsh/Audubon
When it comes to biodiversity, research shows not all neighborhoods are created equal. They’re defined by injustices past and present.
On a cloudy September morning in Prospect Park, a massive swath of greenery amid Brooklyn’s concrete sprawl, the fall migrants are flying fast and furious. A group of birders spin excitedly in a clearing, calling out as new species appear. “What a hotspot,” says Valentina Alaasam as she scribbles down each name in rapid succession: American Redstart, Scarlet Tanager, Black-and-white Warbler.
Alaasam will add the morning’s counts to a biodiversity database that she and her colleagues at New York University have been compiling for more than a year. The goal: to figure out whether parks in richer areas are also richer in wildlife. “I’ve always been really interested in this concept of luxury effects, where neighborhoods that are wealthier tend to get more investment from the city, and more trees, and more green spaces,” Alaasam says. To test how that may play out in New York, the team has been counting birds, bugs, frogs, and more across 11 city parks, including relatively well-maintained oases like Prospect Park and others that receive less upkeep.
The project will add to a growing body of research that’s revealing how economic and racial inequities shape urban ecosystems. In many cities, money has proven to be a major ecological boon: Wealthier neighborhoods host more of the street trees and park spaces that attract wildlife, while poorer areas have more uninterrupted concrete, leaving residents less likely to spot a flitting vireo or loping coyote. Yet such disparities didn’t pop up overnight, and in recent years, scientists have been peeling back the deeper layers that create these patchworks. 01-20-25
Joe Biden Was America’s First Climate President. Did it Matter?
Lucas Peltier / AP Photo
The outgoing Democrat’s climate agenda was a surprising success — and a cautionary tale.
When Joe Biden first became president, some found it hard to believe that he cared very much about climate change.
With a global pandemic raging, the former vice president and longtime senator pitched his 2020 campaign as a return to normalcy and a referendum on the erratic leadership of Donald Trump. His campaign pledges to ban drilling on federal lands and spend trillions of dollars to decarbonize the economy — though they amounted to among the most ambitious climate agenda ever put forward by a major-party candidate — were widely seen as consolation prizes to skeptical progressives and climate hawks, like those who had backed Senator Bernie Sanders or former Washington Governor Jay Inslee in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
It’s clear now that these skeptics underestimated the outgoing president. Biden’s climate agenda, broader and more ambitious than that of any U.S. president before him, is poised to stand as the most consequential feat of his presidency, especially given his self-evident failure to “heal the soul of the nation” by ushering it into a post-Trump era. He succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, a misleadingly titled law that amounts to an unprecedented subsidy for renewable energy and climate-friendly technologies like electric vehicles. The measure triggered a wave of investment that has begun to reshape the nation’s economy and finally put the U.S. within reach of its commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement. 01-17-25
How Four Years of Biden Reshaped Food and Farming
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks to guests gathered at the O’Connor Grain Farm on May 11, 2022 in Kankakee, Illinois. Biden visited the farm along with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to discuss the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on food supply and prices. (Photo credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
From day one, the administration prioritized climate, “nutrition security,” infrastructure investments, and reducing food system consolidation. Here’s what the president and his team actually did.
During his first presidential term, Donald Trump attempted to cut funding to hunger programs, implemented agricultural tariffs, tax cuts, and record-setting payments to commodity farmers, and rolled back regulations impacting environmental pollution, labor standards, food safety, and nutrition.
Despite no big changes to agricultural policy as a result of a farm bill still stalled in Congress, President Joe Biden’s governing of the food system looked very different.
Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s priorities have centered on spending billions of dollars on food and farm infrastructure, paying farmers to implement climate-smart practices, finalizing new regulations related to the environment, labor, food safety, and nutrition, and distributing more dollars to food insecure families.
On December 29, 2024, during the final monthly meeting to track the progress of efforts launched after the 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack made the case that those efforts had paid off.
“Folks from across the country have pulled together towards our common goal of ending hunger, improving nutrition, and supporting the farmers, ranchers, farm workers, and food workers who grow and produce our food,” he said. “And through that work, we have collectively made progress in transforming the food system from farm to fork.” 01-15-25
The American Climate Corps is Over. What Even Was It?
Two AmeriCorps NCCC Forest Corps members participate in field training in California last summer.
AmeriCorps
Biden’s green jobs program was never what it seemed. Now it’s shutting down before Trump takes office.
Giorgio Zampaglione loved his two-hour commute from the town of Mount Shasta into the surrounding northern California forests last summer. The way the light filtered through the trees on the morning drive was unbeatable, he said. He ate lunch with his crew, members of the new Forest Corps program, deep in the woods, usually far from cell service. They thinned thickets of trees and cleared brush, helping prevent the spread of fires by removing manzanita — a very flammable, shoulder-high shrub — near campsites and roads.
“The Forest Service people have been super, super happy to have us,” Zampaglione said. “They’re always saying, ‘Without you guys, this would have taken months.’”
Zampaglione, now 27 years old, had previously worked analyzing environmental data and mapping, but he was looking to do something more hands-on. Then he saw an ad on YouTube for the Forest Corps and applied through the AmeriCorps site. He didn’t realize until his first week on the job last summer that he was part of the first class of the American Climate Corps, an initiative started by President Joe Biden to get young people working in jobs that reduce carbon dioxide emissions and protect communities from weather disasters. 12-15-25
Altadena Has Avoided California’s Fire Insurance Hell. That Won’t Last.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
As they rebuild, residents of the middle-class enclave could face steep price hikes.
Randy and Miki Quinton held hands as they walked uphill into what remains of their neighborhood in Altadena, the unincorporated Los Angeles suburb where they had lived for more than 20 years. After they entered the barricaded neighborhood through an open alleyway with two of their friends on Friday, the husband and wife confronted a scene of utter devastation: The Eaton Fire had incinerated hundreds of homes and cars in the middle-class neighborhood, leaving behind only ash-soaked chimneys and flaming gas lines. The Quintons’ own house had been vaporized, along with all their belongings.
“Twenty-four, forty-eight hours, and it’s all gone,” Randy Quinton told Grist.
The Quintons and thousands of other families now confront a living nightmare as they begin to recover from the most devastating wildfire outbreak in modern U.S. history. The Palisades Fire, which overwhelmed coastal neighborhoods about 30 miles away, and the Eaton Fire have together killed at least 24 people and destroyed well over 10,000 structures.
How the victims rebuild their lives will now depend largely on California’s beleaguered home insurance market. Unlike many fire victims in other parts of the L.A. area, the Quintons and many of their neighbors had been able to maintain their insurance policies in the leadup to the fire, even as companies dropped thousands of other fire-prone customers across California and in other states across the country. 01-14-25
Climate Change Threatens the Mental Well-being of Youths. Here’s How to Help Them Cope.
Abby Rafeek, a 14-year-old high school student from Gardena, California, says decision-makers aren’t doing enough to address climate change. Jenna Schoenefeld for KFF Health News
A 2022 poll of 1,500 U.S. teenagers found that 89 percent of them regularly think about the environment, “with the majority feeling more worried than hopeful.”
We’ve all read the stories and seen the images: The life-threatening heat waves. The wildfires of unprecedented ferocity. The record-breaking storms washing away entire neighborhoods. The melting glaciers, the rising sea levels, the coastal flooding.
As California wildfires stretch into the colder months and hurricane survivors sort through the ruins left by floodwaters, let’s talk about an underreported victim of climate change: the emotional well-being of young people.
A nascent but growing body of research shows that a large proportion of adolescents and young adults, in the United States and abroad, feel anxious and worried about the impact of an unstable climate in their lives today and in the future.
Abby Rafeek, 14, is disquieted by the ravages of climate change, both near her home and far away. “It’s definitely affecting my life, because it’s causing stress thinking about the future and how, if we’re not addressing the problem now as a society, our planet is going to get worse,” says Abby, a high school student who lives in Gardena, California, a city of 58,000 about 15 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.
She says wildfires are a particular worry for her. “That’s closer to where I live, so it’s a bigger problem for me personally, and it also causes a lot of damage to the surrounding areas,” she says. “And also, the air gets messed up.” 01-12-25
The Climate Benefits of NYC’s Hard-won Congestion Pricing Plan
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Driving into lower Manhattan is now more expensive, but the toll promises cleaner air, safer streets, and improved subways.
After months — and, for some, years — of anticipation, congestion pricing is live in New York City.
The controversial policy, which essentially makes it more expensive to drive into the busiest part of Manhattan, has been floated as a way to reduce traffic and raise money for the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s subways and buses, since the 1970s. But it wasn’t until 2017 that it seemed like it might finally catch on.
Still, getting it implemented has been an uphill battle. Last summer, New York Governor Kathy Hochul abruptly paused a carefully crafted plan that would have implemented $15 tolls on drivers heading into Manhattan below 60th Street, a mere 25 days before the plan would have gone into effect. Months later, in November, she said she would unpause the plan with lower tolls: $9 for passenger vehicles during peak hours and $2.25 during off-peak. After all the hubbub, New York City made history just after midnight on Sunday, January 5, when the cameras used to enforce the tolls turned on.
With this move, New York City becomes the first U.S. city to experiment with congestion pricing tolls, and joins a small cohort of other major cities — London, Stockholm, and Singapore — trying to disincentivize driving in order to unlock safer streets and a host of other environmental benefits. 01-10-25
The Conditions That Led to the ‘Unprecedented’ Los Angeles County Fires
Flames from the devastating Palisades Fire—the largest of four fires currently impacting Los Angeles County—have engulfed nearly 16,000 acres as of Wednesday afternoon since it was first reported by Cal Fire on Tuesday. About 1,000 structures have been destroyed, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone confirmed during Wednesday’s press briefing.
The wildfires, which spread due to the lack of precipitation, dry fuel, and strong winds measuring up to 99 miles per hour, have taken at least two lives so far, officials confirmed Wednesday. A “high number of significant injuries” have also been reported, though officials could not share a more exact number.
“This is a tragic time in our history,” said Los Angeles County Police Department Sheriff Jim McDonnell during the press briefing Wednesday. “These are…unprecedented conditions, but also unpredictable as the fire continues to spread and pop up in different locations, none of us know where the next one is going to be.”
The devastating nature of the fires is in part due to climate change, experts say, which has exacerbated the size, intensity, and damage caused by the wildfires in recent years. The southwestern U.S. is undergoing the driest 22-year period in the last 1,200 years.
As temperatures have risen, so has the aridity, or dryness of the vegetation, which proved disastrous when coupled with the gusty Santa Ana winds. “The hot and dry Santa Ana winds that often affect the southern California region and fuel large wildfires such as the ongoing one, only make things worse,” said Imperial College London Professor Apostolos Voulgarakis in a statement. “Research has shown that the occurrence of Santa Ana winds in the autumn are also likely to get worse with climate change, leading to even drier vegetation, fast fire spread and more intense late-season wildfires.” 01-08-25
California and Environmental Groups Sued Exxon Over Plastics. Now Exxon is Striking Back.
Mayra Beltran / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
In a retaliatory lawsuit, Exxon says claims against it are motivated by “sordid for-profit incentives and outright greed.”
On Monday, Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a coalition of environmental groups over their criticism of the company’s plastics recycling initiatives.
In the complaint filed in federal court in Beaumont, Texas, the oil giant accuses Bonta and the advocacy groups of mounting a “smear campaign” motivated by “foreign influence, personal ambition, and a murky source of financing rife with conflicting business interests.”
“This is a suit … about the corrupting influence of foreign money in the American legal system,” Exxon writes in the suit’s introduction, “and the sordid for-profit incentives and outright greed that tries to hide behind so-called public impact litigation.”
Exxon’s new lawsuit is a response to two legal complaints brought last September by Bonta and four environmental groups — Baykeeper, Heal the Bay, the Sierra Club, and Surfrider Foundation — in which the plaintiffs alleged that Exxon Mobil had engaged in a “decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.” 01-07-25
House Republicans Pledge Drilling and Make It Easier to Shed Federal Land
Representative Mike Johnson, on the dais with raised hand, was sworn in as speaker on Friday.Credit…Eric Lee/The New York Times
The newly elected Speaker said the party would make it a priority to “restore America’s energy dominance.”
Moments after his election as House speaker on Friday, Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, wasted no time in highlighting energy as one of his top priorities. He said the Republican Congress would expand oil and gas drilling, end federal support for electric vehicles and promote the export of American gas.
“We have to stop the attacks on liquefied natural gas, pass legislation to eliminate the Green New Deal,” he said in a floor speech after accepting the gavel. “We’re going to expedite new drilling permits, we’re going to save the jobs of our auto manufacturers, and we’re going to do that by ending the ridiculous E.V. mandates.”
The Green New Deal to which Mr. Johnson referred was proposed legislation that Congress never passed but that Republicans have seized on as shorthand for policies designed to help the United States transition away from fossil fuels, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet. Likewise, there is no mandate that requires Americans to buy electric vehicles. Instead, there are federal subsidies to encourage consumers to buy electric vehicles and new regulations designed to cut tailpipe pollution and get automakers to sell more E.V.s.
Still, Mr. Johnson was clearly signaling that energy policy would be on the front burner. “It is our duty to restore America’s energy dominance and that’s what we’ll do,” he said. 01-03-25
Biden to Ban Offshore Oil, Gas Drilling in Vast Areas Ahead of Trump Term
U.S. President Joe Biden will ban new offshore oil and gas development along most U.S. coastlines, a decision President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to boost domestic energy production, may find difficult to reverse.
The move is considered mostly symbolic, as it will not impact areas where oil and gas development is currently underway, and mainly covers zones where drillers have no important prospects, including in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The White House said on Monday that Biden will use his authority under the 70-year-old Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect all federal waters off the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of the northern Bering Sea in Alaska. The ban will affect 625 million acres (253 million hectares) of ocean.
Biden said the move was aligned with both his efforts to combat climate change and his goal to conserve 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.
He also invoked the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the low drilling potential of the areas included in the ban did not justify the public health and economic risks of future leasing.
“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks.”
Around 15% of U.S. oil production comes from federal offshore acreage, mainly in the Gulf of Mexico, a share that has been falling sharply in the last decade as drilling onshore booms, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 01-06-25
The Supreme Court Decisions That Gutted Environmental Protections in 2024
Credit: trekandshoot/Big Stock Photo
Several major cases destroyed federal agencies’ ability to address climate change and pollution.
In recent years, U.S. Supreme Court decisions have undercut federal agencies’ ability to curb pollution and fight climate change. Several cases decided in 2024 continued this trend, systematically shifting the power to make and enforce environmental regulations over to the judicial branch.
Though it will likely take years to know the full consequences of this year’s rulings, legal experts say they have profound implications as to how federal agencies can respond to the threat of climate change. Congress passed the majority of the laws that protect our lands and waters decades ago, and with an increasingly polarized political environment, legislators have passed few new environmental regulations since. In the past few decades, Congress has in effect tasked federal agencies with adapting existing laws to our new climate reality, said Chris Winter, executive director of the University of Colorado Law School’s Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment. But with an increasingly conservative Supreme Court in place, these laws have come under increased scrutiny, including in several of the court’s 2024 landmark decisions.
Perhaps the most significant was Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which overturned the 1984 Chevron doctrine, a powerful legal tool that gave federal agencies the ability to interpret and enforce ambiguous or unclear laws. 12-19-24
As Trump Mulls His FEMA Pick, a Political Land Mine Waits in Florida
President Joe Biden walks with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell during a tour of the damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Pinellas County, Florida.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The agency is hiking insurance rates and punishing flood-prone construction in the president-elect’s favorite state.
Donald Trump owes a lot to his adopted home state of Florida. The state, which is the third-largest in the Electoral College, has delivered him increasingly large majorities in each of the past three elections. Since his victory in November, the president-elect has announced plans to remake the federal government in Florida’s image: His nominees for secretary of state, attorney general, chief of staff, and national security advisor are all from the Sunshine State.
But Florida may also present Trump with one of his thorniest political challenges. He’ll have to oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has spent the past four years bringing down the hammer on Americans who live in disaster-prone regions like Florida’s populous coasts, rolling out a series of insurance hikes and enforcement actions that make it more expensive to live and rebuild in risky areas.
This ongoing effort is a direct threat to the boom of cheap coastal development that has fueled the Sunshine State’s breakneck growth. Florida accounts for a huge share of the nation’s total risk from hurricanes and floods: It has more than $2 trillion in residential property, almost all of which is vulnerable to extreme winds or flooding, and it accounts for more than a third of all policies in the federal government’s public National Flood Insurance Program. 12-20-24
Was Van Gogh an Environmentalist Ahead of His Time?
Van Gogh’s “Starry Night Over the Rhone” (1888) (Image credit: WikiArt / public domain)
Two new books explore how artists have captured the human impacts on the environment – including the iconic Vincent van Gogh.
What connects an iconic 19th-century painter with a contemporary photographer? A shared inspiration: nature’s beauty – and its vulnerability to human activity.
Two new books feature artists whose work, done centuries apart, helps demonstrate the profound impacts of humans on the environment.
In “Van Gogh and the End of Nature,” author Michael Lobel traces evidence of environmental destruction across the acclaimed painter’s body of work. In “Entropy,” photographer Diane Tuft captures images of environmental impacts; two guest essays articulate the cultural history and science behind the art.
Vincent van Gogh: Celebrating nature’s beauty, or bearing witness to its demise?
Climate-concerned readers up on the news may recall recent examples of how climate change affected Van Gogh’s art: the infamous soup-slinging incidents of 2022 and 2024, when Just Stop Oil protesters threw tomato soup at “Sunflowers” (1888*), the beloved painting on display in London’s National Gallery.
The New York Times reported that the protesters chose the painting solely for its high profile: “It was simply ‘an iconic painting, by an iconic painter’ and an attack on it would generate headlines.” 12-19-24
Biden Just Set a Big New Climate Goal. Can the US Achieve It?
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
With Trump set to take office, cutting emissions 66 percent by 2035 will require rapid action from states, cities, and the private sector.
With just a month left in office, the Biden administration is setting a bold new target for U.S. climate action. On Thursday, the White House announced a national goal that would see the country’s greenhouse gas emissions drop 61 to 66 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. That would keep the United States on a “straight line” trajectory toward Joe Biden’s ultimate goal of hitting net zero emissions by 2050, officials said. If that happens, it would mean the country is only emitting as much carbon as it’s simultaneously sequestering through techniques like restoring forests and wetlands — in other words, that it’s no longer playing any part in warming the planet.
The announcement is the latest in a series of climate-related actions Biden is taking during his final months in office. In the last week alone, his administration pushed for an international deal to limit global fossil fuel finance and published a study that cautioned against new export infrastructure for liquefied natural gas. These actions are designed to shore up environmental action ahead of president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. 12-19-24
Scientists From 57 Countries Want to End Siloed Decision-making on Climate and Biodiversity
A forest of quiver trees in Namibia’s biodiverse southern region. Edwin Remsburg / VS Pics via Getty Images
A new report calls for solutions that simultaneously address climate change, biodiversity, health, water, and food issues.
As global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, researchers and policymakers have proposed solutions like installing renewable energy, replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric ones, and developing technology to suck carbon out of the air. But these policies often address climate change in isolation — without regard for other pressing issues like a decline in biodiversity, the contamination of freshwater sources, and the pollution of agricultural soils.
A new report released Tuesday by the United Nations’ expert panel on biodiversity makes the case for a different approach based on addressing the “nexus” between two or more out of five essential issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, food, human health, and water. Such an approach is not only more likely to help the world meet various U.N. targets on biodiversity, sustainable development, and climate mitigation; it’s also more cost-effective.
“We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos,” said Paula Harrison, a professor of land and water modeling at the U.K. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a co-chair of the report, in a statement. Other scientific reports have studied the interlinkages between two or three of these issues, but she told reporters on Tuesday that this latest report is the “most ambitious” to date. 12-18-24
An Ocean of Possibilities
Ted Cheeseman, founder of Happywhale, at his home office. Brown Bird / Mathew Falcon / Toyota Crown
How AI is changing the future of marine conservation
On a sunny October morning off the coast of California, the water was full of life. Just a few minutes into the bay on a motorized, inflatable pontoon, ocean waves revealed endless rows of energetic sea lions weaving in and out of the water. Looking down, schools of phytoplankton swam below the boat. For the ocean scientists who have committed their lives to studying marine life, these were the perfect conditions to find what they were searching for. Looking out into the ocean with their long-lens cameras ready, they could see what an untrained eye couldn’t. All of a sudden, one of the researchers shouted, “2:00,” and their lenses quickly shuttered to catch the elusive whale tail.
These tails are critical clues that contribute to conservation research, and every whale tail tells a story: Markings like barnacle scars, shark bites, and pigmentation make each 15-foot-across whale tail unique.
Until recently, researchers could spend anywhere from hours to months comparing photos of whale tails to determine species’ population numbers.
“You could spend two weeks in the field and end up with tens of thousands of photographs, and it could take you 10, 12 months to go through and match all those photographs,” said Erin Ashe, cofounder of Oceans Initiative, a Seattle-based research nonprofit on a mission to protect marine wildlife and marine biodiversity. “It can be enormously expensive.” 12-16-24
‘Waging war on science’: Researchers Worry About Their Jobs Under Trump 2.0
Rachel Carson at microscope, 1951. Photo credit: Brooks Studio.
“There are a lot of days where I feel very much like just quitting all of this.”
Over the years, Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been a champion of science. As president and on the campaign trail, he called climate change a “hoax“; oversaw the rolling back of more than 100 environmental policies; directed agencies to cut down on expert guidance; pushed unproven COVID treatments; pulled out of the Paris climate agreement (and pledged to do so again); and claimed, without evidence, that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. Ahead of his next stint in the Oval Office, he has nominated a vaccine denier to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services, promised to rid federal agencies of potentially tens of thousands of career staffers, and said he intends to shutter the Department of Education.
“Trump has basically said he is waging war on science and scientists,” said Jennifer Jones, the director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS, a nonprofit science advocacy group.
And that “war” likely won’t be limited to researchers within the federal government. To get a better sense of how scientists are feeling about their work under Trump 2.0, I spoke with a handful of researchers at public and private universities, Ph.D. students, postdocs, and startup founders. Many described concerns about losing funding, avoiding terms like “climate change” in federal grant applications and other paperwork, and losing access to federal datasets. Some even feared for their own safety. Others, due to their field, felt confident their work would be insulated from the future Trump administration. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid putting their research at further risk.
While their testimonials by no means offer a comprehensive picture of the scientific community’s stance on Trump, they do shed some light on how some researchers feel about the next four years, and what exactly is keeping them up at night. As one Ph.D. student in California bluntly put it, “There are a lot of days where I feel very much like just quitting all of this.” 12-14-24
After 2 Years, Coca-Cola’s Promise to Scale Up Reusable Packaging is Dead
Vernon Yuen / NurPhoto via Getty Images
The pledge was born out of shareholder activism — and was withdrawn as regulators crack down on greenwashing.
Despite growing public scrutiny and legal challenges over its use of plastic, Coca-Cola appears to be moving backward on packaging sustainability.
Earlier this decade, the soda giant publicly pledged to decrease its use of virgin plastic and boost the share of its beverages sold in reusable containers. But in a blog post last week, the company quietly dropped those targets. Coca-Cola’s “evolved” plastics strategy now seems to rest almost entirely on cleaning up existing plastic waste and recycling — though its recycling targets are now weaker than they were before.
“We remain committed to building long-term business resilience and earning our social license to operate,” the company’s executive vice president for sustainability, Bea Perez, said in a statement.
Coke’s announcement is part of a broader trend of companies walking back or falling short of their plastics sustainability targets. Last month, a progress report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation — a nonprofit that advocates for a “circular economy” in which resources are conserved — showed that hundreds of companies had collectively fallen short of the progress needed to meet a range of voluntary plastics commitments by 2025. 12-13-14
Leaded Gasoline Didn’t Just Pollute the Air—It May Have Let to 150 Million Mental Health Disorders
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Leaded gasoline was banned in 1996—but its disastrous effects are still being felt today.
Childhood exposure to leaded gasoline may be responsible for more than 150 million mental health disorders in Americans alive today. That’s the shocking takeaway from a recent study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. It suggests that anyone born before 1996—when leaded gasoline for passenger vehicles was finally banned—was almost certainly exposed to harmful levels of this heavy metal as a child. As a result, huge chunks of the population are walking around with at least some level of reduced cognition, and researchers believe this may help explain some troubling trends and behaviors that plague our entire society.
Countries across the world started putting lead into gasoline in the 1920s because it helped improve engine performance in cars. In America, the practice began in 1923. To say this was a bad decision for public health would be an understatement. “Lead is toxic to almost every organ system we’ve studied,” says Aaron Reuben, a postdoctoral scholar in neuropsychology at Duke University and one of the study’s authors.
It’s uniquely harmful to the brain—especially the young brain. Kids younger than 5 who are exposed to even small amounts of lead can be left with cognitive damage that stays with them for life. 12-11-24
Whales: The Ocean’s Secret Weapon Against Climate Change
Once the giants of the ocean, whales are now struggling to survive against an onslaught of human-driven threats.
Whales play a vital role in combating climate change by driving nutrient cycling, fertilizing carbon-absorbing phytoplankton, and serving as carbon stores through their bodies. Their movements enhance marine ecosystem productivity and support global climate stability, making their conservation essential for a sustainable future. Yet, anthropogenic threats continue to endanger these magnificent mammals, highlighting the urgent need for stronger protection and restoration measures.
When it comes to tackling climate change, one of the most promising solutions may lie in the flippers of the world’s largest creatures: whales.
Their ecological role in ocean ecosystems extends far beyond their majestic size, as they help regulate the global climate. This is possible thanks to their critical contribution to nutrient cycling and ocean mixing, which promotes phytoplankton growth. Phytoplankton, which are responsible for the majority of photosynthesis on Earth, sequester carbon and play a vital role in regulating the climate.
So, protecting whales is not just about preserving biodiversity; it is a crucial step in combating climate change.
Human activities continue to endanger whale populations, and current restoration efforts remain insufficient. As the climate crisis intensifies, restoring whale populations becomes an increasingly powerful tool for climate mitigation and marine ecosystem preservation. 12-11-24
Does Talking About Climate ‘tipping points’ Inspire Action — or Defeat?
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
The phrase grabs people’s attention, but some scientists argue it’s doing more harm than good.
Climate tipping points are a specter looming over our future — thresholds beyond which the Earth’s systems switch into new states, often abruptly and irreversibly.
The long-frozen soil beneath the Arctic could rapidly thaw and release vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane stored within it, heating up the atmosphere even more in a feedback loop. Fast-melting freshwater from Greenland’s ice (one tipping point) could disrupt the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation pattern (another tipping point), causing weather chaos around the world: Temperatures might plunge in northern Europe, the tropics could overheat, the rainy and dry seasons in the Amazon could flip, and parts of the U.S. East Coast could be submerged by rising seas.
A new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change makes the case that all these alarming events should be called something other than “tipping points.” The framing is intended to draw attention to the radical changes that global warming might bring. But a group of scientists from Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and cities around the United States argue that the concept is scientifically imprecise — and worse, it might be backfiring. 12-10-24
Senate Democrats Push to Ease Process for Disaster Housing Aid
Damaged belongings are piled outside an apartment building on Oct. 5 after Hurricane Helene hit Treasure Island, Fla. Credit: Thomas Simonetti/The Washington Post via Getty Images
At the end of a year of devastating hurricanes and other climate-fueled disasters, a bill would help address disparities between renters and homeowners applying for federal aid.
Kathryn Gaasch has worked to assist rural communities in western North Carolina for five years with the nonprofit support group MDC. But she found herself seeking assistance after Hurricane Helene tore across southern Appalachia in late September, dumping record rainfall and cutting residents off from water, electricity and contact with the outside world.
It was days until Gaasch was able to get a phone signal to call the Federal Emergency Management Agency. By then, she had learned that her quest for help was complicated because she was not a homeowner, but leased a basement apartment in a mountainside rental home. A FEMA representative told her that someone else at her address—as it turned out, an upstairs neighbor who had evacuated—already had applied for and received aid. FEMA only approves one aid request per household, Gaasch was told.
“That was the first time I cried, because she said we should have applied together,” Gaasch recalled. Eventually, she was able to get her landlords’ help in documenting her eligibility for emergency FEMA aid, but she knows that many renters were not so lucky. 12-05-24
The Trump Cabinet Nominees Who Could Decide Our Climate Future
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It’s not just the EPA. From Elon Musk and RFK Jr. to Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum, Trump’s picks to lead key agencies are poised to set a very different climate agenda.
President-elect Donald Trump has put forth a slate of Cabinet nominees that reflects a clear commitment to fossil fuels and upending the country’s efforts to address climate change.
The eclectic group includes TV personalities, industry insiders, and climate skeptics. If confirmed, they are expected to promote fossil fuels, environmental deregulation, and hostility toward climate science. They will also likely stymie the expansion of renewable energy and the adoption of climate-friendly technologies.
Of course, the clean energy transition has built up some momentum that even the Trump administration cannot stop. State and local governments are preparing to take up the mantle as well. But Trump clearly intends to use the full weight of federal authority to reverse the climate initiatives of the Biden administration and slow or stall further efforts to mitigate the crisis. Such efforts would add billions of tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Grist has unpacked the background of the Trump Cabinet nominees who will have an especially significant impact on federal climate policy, the public, and, ultimately, the planet. 12-05-24
Don’t Blame Biden For inflation. Blame the Climate.
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Inflation was a defining issue in the presidential election. Here’s how climate change is making everything more expensive.
Angela Bishop has been struggling with what she describes as “the cost of everything lately.” Groceries are one stressor, although she gets some reprieve from the free school lunches her four kids receive. Still, a few years of the stubbornly high cost of gas, utilities, and clothing have been pain points.
“We’ve just seen the prices before our eyes just skyrocket,” said Bishop, who is 39. She moved her family to Richmond, Virginia from California a few years ago to stop “living paycheck to paycheck,” but things have been so difficult lately she’s worried it won’t be long before they are once again barely getting by.
Families nationwide are dealing with similar financial struggles. Although inflation, defined as the rate at which average prices of goods or services rise over a given period, has slowed considerably since a record peak in 2022, consumer prices today have increased by more than 21 percent since February 2020. Frustration over rising cost of living drove many voters to support president-elect Donald Trump, who campaigned on ending inflation. 12-05-24
Protection of Wetlands Could Come Down to Farmers, Says a New Report
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Industrial agriculture in the Upper Midwest has been a driving force behind wetland loss. The farm bill might hold a solution.
Tucked about a mile offshore from Lake Michigan, in northern Michigan’s Charlevoix County, sits Norwood Centennial Farms. Besides some 300 cows that live there, a creek and underground springs make up a wetland on the property — one that’s perilously close to the manure pit.
“A concern for us is making sure that the manure stays in the pit, that there’s no seepage,” said Sarah Roy, who helps run the farm with her family.
To protect the area, they’ve worked with federal and state authorities on manure control, earning four state sustainability certificates. Roy noted that their farm is relatively small — which makes balancing agricultural production and wetlands protection less fraught than elsewhere in the Midwest, where regulating an industry many people’s livelihoods depend on can be much more complicated.
A new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS, called “Wetlands in Peril,” argues that farmers can play a key role in protecting and restoring wetlands in the Upper Midwest, even as federal policy has paved the way for industrial agriculture to degrade and destroy wetlands in recent decades. 12-04-24
Over 100 Countries Want an Ambitious Plastics Treaty. Oil-producing Nations Are Getting in the Way.
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“If it wasn’t for Saudi and Russia we would have reached an agreement here.”
What was supposed to be the final round of United Nations negotiations for a global plastics treaty ended without an agreement on Sunday, as delegates failed to reconcile opposing views on whether to impose a cap on plastic production.
Another negotiating session — dubbed INC-5.2 after this week’s INC-5 — will be held in 2025, but it’s unclear how countries will make further progress without a change in the treaty’s consensus-based decision-making process. As it stands, any delegation can essentially veto a proposal they don’t like, even if they’re opposed by most of the rest of the world.
“If it wasn’t for Saudi and Russia we would have reached an agreement here,” one European negotiator told the Financial Times. Those two countries, along with other oil producers like Iran and Kuwait, want the plastics treaty to leave production untouched and focus only on downstream measures: boosting the plastics recycling rate, for example, and cleaning up existing plastic pollution.
Kuwait’s delegation said on Sunday that “we are not here to end plastic itself … but plastic pollution.” That’s the position the plastic industry is taking, as well: Chris Jahn, council secretary for a petrochemical industry consortium called the International Council of Chemical Associations, said it’s “crucial” for the treaty to focus on plastic pollution alone. “With 2.7 billion people globally lacking access to waste collection systems, solutions must prioritize addressing this gap,” he said in a statement. 12-02-24
What Climate Law Tax Credits Will Be In — and Out — Under Trump 2.0
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Clean industry analysts and tax experts lay out which clean power and manufacturing tax credits might be cut next year under the Republican trifecta.
The engine of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Biden administration’s landmark climate and industrial policy achievement, is tax credits.
Through federal tax incentives alone, the law could direct as much as $780 billion into the U.S. clean energy economy over the rest of this decade. That money will help the U.S. cut its carbon emissions, grow employment, and compete in the global race for clean-technology dominance.
But the Trump administration and congressional Republicans could throw a wrench into that engine next year.
The GOP, which controls Congress as well as the presidency, has made it clear that its priority for 2025 is to extend for 10 more years the tax-cut package passed under the first Trump administration. The package, which primarily benefits corporations and wealthy individuals, is projected to add about $4.6 trillion to the federal deficit. 12-02-24
