This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell.” Studies claiming to have revealed micro- and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries, and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian and Mother Jones. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years. However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked. > One scientist estimates there are serious doubts over “more than half of the > very high impact papers” on microplastics in biological tissue. The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics. There is an increasing international focus on the need to control plastic pollution but faulty evidence on the level of microplastics in humans could lead to misguided regulations and policies, which is dangerous, researchers say. It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded. While researchers say analytical techniques are improving rapidly, the doubts over recent high-profile studies also raise the questions of what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies. “Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising” was the shocking headline reporting a widely covered study in February. The analysis, published in a top-tier journal and covered by the Guardian, said there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024. However, by November, the study had been challenged by a group of scientists with the publication of a “Matters arising” letter in the journal. In the formal, diplomatic language of scientific publishing, the scientists said: “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.” One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60 percent fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study. Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue. Matthew Campen, senior author of the brain study in question, told the Guardian: “In general, we simply find ourselves in an early period of trying to understand the potential human health impacts of MNPs and there is no recipe book for how to do this. Most of the criticism aimed at the body of work to date (ie from our lab and others) has been conjectural and not buffeted by actual data. “We have acknowledged the numerous opportunities for improvement and refinement and are trying to spend our finite resources in generating better assays and data, rather than continually engaging in a dialogue.” But the brain study is far from alone in having been challenged. One, which reported that patients with MNPs detected in carotid artery plaques had a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than patients with no MNPs detected, was subsequently criticized for not testing blank samples taken in the operating room. Blank samples are a way of measuring how much background contamination may be present. Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system.” But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.” This study was by Campen and colleagues, who responded: “To steal/modify a sentiment from the television show Ted Lasso, ‘[Bioanalytical assays] are never going to be perfect. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can and if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving toward better.’” > “This isn’t a dig…They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything > better available to us.” Further challenged studies include two reporting plastic particles in blood—in both cases the researchers contested the criticisms—and another on their detection in arteries. A study claiming to have detected 10,000 nanoplastic particles per liter of bottled water was called “fundamentally unreliable” by critics, a charge disputed by the scientists. The doubts amount to a “bombshell,” according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.” While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyze samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr. Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.” These include measures to exclude background contamination, blanks, repeating measurements and testing equipment with samples spiked with a known amount of MNPs. “So you cannot be assured that whatever you have found is not fully or partially derived from some of these issues,” Béen said. A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporizing it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.” “This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.” She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy.” > “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological > barriers,” but today’s instruments “cannot detect nano-size particles.” Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolyzing the sample—heating it until it vaporizes. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them. The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains, the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives. Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometers can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.” “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.” Further criticism came in July, in a review study in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the journal of the German Medical Association. “At present, there is hardly any reliable information available on the actual distribution of microplastics in the body,” the scientists wrote. Plastic production has ballooned by 200 times since the 1950s and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion metric tons a year by 2060. As a result, plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion metric tons now contaminating the planet, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled. An expert review published in the Lancet in August called plastics a “grave, growing and underrecognised danger” to human and planetary health. It cited harm from the extraction of the fossil fuels they are made from, to their production, use and disposal, which result in air pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals. > Insufficiently robust studies might help lobbyists for the plastics industry > downplay known risks of plastic pollution. In recent years, the infiltration of the body with MNPs has become a serious concern, and a landmark study in 2022 first reported detection in human blood. That study is one of the 18 listed in Rauert’s paper and was criticized by Kuhlman. But the study’s senior author, Marja Lamoree, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, rejected suggestions of contamination. “The reason we focused on blood in the first place is that you can take blood samples freshly, without the interference of any plastics or exposure to the air,” she said. “I’m convinced we detected microplastics,” she said. “But I’ve always said that [the amount estimated] could be maybe twice lower, or 10 times higher.” In response to Kuhlman’s letter, Lamoree and colleagues said he had “incorrectly interpreted” the data. Lamoree does agree there is a wider issue. “It’s still a super-immature field and there’s not many labs that can do [these analyses well]. When it comes to solid tissue samples, then the difficulty is they are usually taken in an operating theatre that’s full of plastic.” “I think most of the, let’s say, lesser quality analytical papers come from groups that are medical doctors or metabolomics [scientists] and they’re not driven by analytical chemistry knowledge,” she said. Improving the quality of MNP measurements in the human body matters, the scientists said. Poor quality evidence is “irresponsible” and can lead to scaremongering, said Rauert: “We want to be able to get the data right so that we can properly inform our health agencies, our governments, the general population and make sure that the right regulations and policies are put in place. “We get a lot of people contacting us, very worried about how much plastics are in their bodies,” she said. “The responsibility [for scientists] is to report robust science so you are not unnecessarily scaring the general population.” > “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume.” Rauert called treatments claiming to clean microplastics from your blood “crazy”—some are advertised for £10,000 (about $13,400). “These claims have no scientific evidence,” she said, and could put more plastic into people’s blood, depending on the equipment used. Materić said insufficiently robust studies might also help lobbyists for the plastics industry downplay known risks of plastic pollution. The good news, said Béen, is that analytical work across multiple techniques is improving rapidly: “I think there is less and less doubt about the fact that MNPs are there in tissues. The challenge is still knowing exactly how many or how much. But I think we’re narrowing down this uncertainty more and more.” Prof Lamoree said: “I really think we should collaborate on a much nicer basis—with much more open communication—and don’t try to burn down other people’s results. We should all move forward instead of fighting each other.” In the meantime, should the public be worried about MNPs in their bodies? Given the very limited evidence, Lamoree said she could not say how concerned people should be: “But for sure I take some precautions myself, to be on the safe side. I really try to use less plastic materials, especially when cooking or heating food or drinking from plastic bottles. The other thing I do is ventilate my house.” “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume,” said Materić. “But real hard proof on how much is yet to come. There are also very easy things that you can do to hugely reduce intake of MNPs. If you are concerned about water, just filtering through charcoal works.” Experts also advise avoiding food or drink that has been heated in plastic containers. Rauert thinks that most of the MNPs that people ingest or breath in probably expelled by their bodies, but said it can’t hurt to reduce your plastics exposure. Furthermore, she said, it remains vital to resolve the uncertainty over what MNPs are doing to our health: “We know we’re being exposed, so we definitely want to know what happens after that and we’ll keep working at it, that’s for sure.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Friday morning, the US House of Representatives approved a bill that would get the Department of Energy (DOE) out of the business of energy standards for mobile homes, also known as manufactured homes, and could set the efficiency requirements back decades.  Advocates say the changes will streamline the regulatory process and keep the upfront costs of manufactured homes down. Critics argue that less efficient homes will cost people more money overall and mostly benefit builders.   “This is not about poor people. This is not about working people,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), who grew up in a manufactured home, on the House floor before the vote. “This is about doing the bidding of corporations.” The average income of a manufactured home resident is around $40,000, and they “already face disproportionately high energy costs and energy use,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy at Environment America. That, she said, is why more stringent energy codes are so important. But the Energy Department, which oversees national energy policy and production, didn’t always have a say over these standards.  Starting in 1974, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, became tasked with setting building codes for manufactured homes. But HUD last updated the relevant energy-efficiency standards in 1994, and they have long lagged behind modern insulation and weatherization practices. So in 2007, Congress assigned that task to the DOE. It still took 15 years and a lawsuit before President Joe Biden’s administration finalized new rules in 2022 that were projected to reduce utility bills in double-wide manufactured homes by an average of $475 a year. Even with higher upfront costs taken into account, the government predicted around $5 billion in avoided energy bills over 30-years. At the time, the manufactured housing industry argued that DOE’s calculations were wrong and that the upfront cost of the home should be the primary metric of affordability. Both the Biden and now Trump administrations have delayed implementation of the rule and compliance deadlines, which still aren’t in effect.  This House legislation would eliminate the DOE rule and return sole regulatory authority to HUD. Lesli Gooch, CEO of the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade organization, describes it as essentially a process bill aimed at removing bureaucracy that has stood in the way of action. “The paralysis is because you have two different agencies that have been tasked with creating energy standards,” Gooch said. “You can’t build a house to two different sets of blueprints.” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), agreed and called the move “commonsense regulatory reform” in a letter urging his colleagues to support the bill. Ultimately, 57 Democrats joined 206 Republicans in voting for the bill, and it now moves to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain.  If the bill becomes law, however, the only operative benchmark would be HUD’s 1994 code and it could take years to make a new one. While more than half of the roughly 100,000 homes sold in the US each year already meet or exceed the DOE’s 2022 efficiency rules, the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy estimates that tens of thousands are still built to just the outdated standard. “Families are struggling,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the council, and he does not expect HUD under Trump to move particularly quickly on a fix. “I have not seen this administration lowering energy bills.” For now, though, it’s the Senate’s turn to weigh in.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Combating climate change can feel particularly difficult these days. Countries, states, and municipalities across the globe are missing greenhouse emission reduction targets, and in the United States, President Donald Trump has rolled back key elements of his predecessor’s climate agenda.  Given the trajectory, it might be tempting for pro-climate policymakers to turn to more aggressive measures of getting people to take action, such as mandates, bans, or restrictions. People would then have to save the planet.  But a study published last week in the journal Nature Sustainability suggests that approach can carry real risks. It found that climate policies aimed at forcing lifestyle changes—such as bans on driving in urban centers—can backfire by weakening people’s existing pro-environmental values and triggering political backlash, even among those who already care about climate change. The findings suggest that how climate policy is designed may matter as much as how aggressive it is.  “Mandates can sometimes get you over a hump and tipping point, but they come with costs,” said Sam Bowles, an author of the paper and an economist at the nonprofit Santa Fe Institute. “There could be negative impacts that people don’t anticipate.” Researchers surveyed more than 3,000 Germans and found that even people who care about climate change had a notably negative response to mandates or bans that did things like limit thermostat temperatures or meat consumption, which they saw as restricting their freedoms. The paper also compared that to people’s reaction to Covid-related requirements, such as vaccine and mask mandates. While researchers found a backlash effect, or “cost of control,” in both instances, it was 52 percent greater for climate than Covid policies.  “I didn’t expect that people’s opposition to [a] climate-mandated lifestyle would be so extreme,” said Katrin Schmelz, the other author of the study, who is also at the Santa Fe Institute. She said that people’s trust in their leaders can mitigate the adverse impact, and compared to the United States, Germans have fairly high trust in the government. That, she said, means she would “expect mandates to be less accepted and provoke more opposition here.”  Ben Ho, a behavioral economist at Vassar College, wasn’t involved in the study and wasn’t surprised by its findings. “This is fundamentally about how a society values individual values of liberty and expression against communal values like safety,” he said, pointing to a sizable body of similar research on the potential for backlash to climate policies. “What is novel about their work is to show that these backfire effects are still true today, and what is especially interesting is to connect their data to how people felt about Covid.” > “Ethical commitments and social norms are very fragile and they’re easily > destroyed.” The political consequences of climate-related mandates can be dramatic. In Germany, a 2023 law passed by the country’s then center-left government sought to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels by effectively banning new gas heating systems and promoting heat pumps. Though the policy allowed for exemptions and subsidies, opponents quickly framed it as a ban, dubbing it the heizhammer, or “heating hammer.” The measure became a potent symbol of government overreach, seized on by far-right parties and contributing to a broader public backlash against the governing coalition. “The last German government basically fell because they were seen to be instituting a ban on gas,” said Gernot Wagner, climate economist at Columbia Business School. The current government is attempting to roll back the legislation.  Germany’s experience underscores the risks the study identifies. Policies that are perceived as restricting personal choice can trigger resistance that extends beyond the measure itself, weakening public support for climate action more broadly. So far, policies in the US have largely avoided such opposition. That’s largely because American climate policies have historically been much less aggressive, with even progressives rarely turning to outright bans. But there is both precedent for a potential backlash and inklings of potential fights to come. The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, for example, laid out the path to gradually phase out incandescent light bulbs. That led to the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice and Better Use of Light Bulbs acts, two 2011 bills that the then-burgeoning tea party movement pushed, without success. Today, methane, also known as natural gas, is at the center of similar cultural fights as cities attempt to ban new hookups and take other steps to curtail its use. Opponents of climate action seem to have become aware of the power of bans to spark backlash, too. President Trump regularly refers to fuel-efficiency benchmarks as an electric vehicle “mandate.” The natural gas industry has also framed efficiency standards for gas appliances as bans and used the backlash effect to help successfully delay other explicit bans on gas in new construction, such as in New York state. On its face, research like this can put lawmakers in a difficult position: If a policy isn’t aggressive enough, it won’t do much to combat climate change. But if it’s too aggressive, people could turn against it or even the entire political movement behind it, as in Germany, and progress can stall.  “This doesn’t mean we should give up on climate policies,” said Ho. “It just means we should be more mindful in how policies are designed, and that trust could be a key component.” Schmelz and Bowles both point to a similar conclusion, and say that any policy should at least consider the plasticity of citizens’ beliefs and values. “Ethical commitments and social norms are very fragile and they’re easily destroyed,” Bowles said. Schmelz added that people in power “can upset and reduce willingness to cooperate by designing poor policies.” One way that policies can avoid backlash is by focusing less on banning a particular action and instead on making the other options more abundant and more attractive (by adding tax incentives or rebates, for example). “Offering alternatives is helping in enforcing green values,” Schmelz said. Another option could be aiming to make climate-unfriendly activities more expensive rather than restricting them. As Bowles put it, “people don’t feel like they are being controlled by a higher price.” The closer a policy gets to people’s personal lives, they say, the more important it is to be mindful of potential missteps. The authors also emphasize that they aren’t claiming mandates or bans never work—seatbelt laws and smoking restrictions have become commonplace, for instance. But those were enacted in a different era and there was little public dissent about their benefits to personal health.  “There was always somebody in that person’s family saying, ‘No, look, sweetheart, I really wish you would be wearing your seatbelt,'” said Bowles. “We don’t have that in the case of the environment, so it’s a much greater challenge to shift the rhetoric.” But ultimately, Bowles said the broader message that he wants to convey is that people are generally generous and want their actions to align with their values. This new research underscores the need for policies that help them embrace that inclination, rather than temper it, which mandates or bans can do. “People have a lot of good values,” he said. “When we look at our citizens and are designing policies, don’t take them to be jerks.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Donald Trump has sparked outrage by announcing the US will exit the foundational international agreement to address the climate crisis, cementing the US’s utter isolation from the global effort to confront dangerously escalating temperatures. In a presidential memorandum issued on Wednesday, Trump withdrew from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), along with 65 other organizations, agencies and commissions, calling them “contrary to the interests of the United States”. The UNFCCC treaty forms the bedrock of international cooperation to deal with the climate crisis and has been agreed to by every country in the world since its inception 34 years ago. The US Senate ratified the treaty in October 1992. Trump has, however, routinely ridiculed climate science as a “scam” and a “hoax” and has actively hobbled clean energy projects and other climate policies as president, attempting to force the US and other countries to stay wedded to the fossil fuels that are driving disastrous heatwaves, storms, droughts and conflicts that imperils billions of people around the world. Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief and executive secretary of the UNFCCC, described the move as a “colossal own goal.” He said: “While all other nations are stepping forward together, this latest step back from global leadership, climate cooperation and science can only harm the US economy, jobs and living standards, as wildfires, floods, mega-storms and droughts get rapidly worse. It is a colossal own goal which will leave the US less secure and less prosperous.” “This is a shortsighted, embarrassing and foolish decision,” said Gina McCarthy, who was a top climate adviser to Joe Biden’s White House. “As the only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty, the Trump administration is throwing away decades of US climate change leadership and global collaboration. This administration is forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country.” Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump’s decision to exit the UNFCCC is an “unforced error” and “self-defeating” as it will further hamper the US’s ability to compete with China, which is increasingly dominant in the world’s burgeoning clean energy technology industries. “While the Trump administration is abdicating the United States of America’s global leadership, the rest of the world is continuing to shift to cleaner power sources and take climate action,” Bapna said. “The Trump administration is ceding the trillions of dollars in investment that the clean energy transition brings to nations willing to follow the science and embrace the cleanest, cheapest sources of energy.” Underscoring the administration’s hostility to any measure to deal with a climate that is now hotter than at any point in human civilization, the White House memo also states that the US will pull out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s top climate science body, as well as an assortment of other international environmental organizations, including the International Renewable Energy Association, the International Solar Alliance and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Last year, Trump said the US would exit the Paris climate deal, in which countries agreed to limit dangerous global heating, while the administration also declined to send a delegation to UN climate talks in Brazil. As the UNFCCC treaty was ratified by the Senate, it is unclear whether Trump can unilaterally scrap it, or whether a future president will be able to rejoin the framework without a further Senate vote. “Letting this lawless move stand could shut the US out of climate diplomacy forever,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said in a statement that the agreements jettisoned by the administration on Wednesday are “often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests.” The climate crisis is, in fact, a matter of scientific consensus and is already taking a measurable and growing toll upon economies and people’s lives. In the US, record numbers of major extreme weather disasters are forcing insurers to flee states, undermining the country’s property market. Scientists have warned that global temperatures are set to breach previously agreed thresholds, which will trigger further worsened calamities. “On the one-year anniversary of the wildfires that stole dozens of lives, thousands of homes and the sense of safety for millions as it reduced Los Angeles communities to ash, Trump is making it clear he has no interest in protecting Americans from the rapidly increasing impacts on our health and safety of the worsening climate crisis,” said Loren Blackford, executive director of the Sierra Club. “This is not leadership. It is cowardice.” Al Gore, the former US vice-president and climate activist, told the Guardian: “The Trump Administration has been turning its back on the climate crisis since day one, removing the United States from the Paris Agreement, dismantling America’s scientific infrastructure, curbing access to greenhouse gas emissions data, and ending essential investments in the clean energy transition.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Donald Trump, by dramatically seizing Nicolás Maduro and claiming dominion over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, has taken his “drill, baby, drill” mantra global. Achieving the president’s dream of supercharging the country’s oil production would be financially challenging—and if fulfilled, would be “terrible for the climate”, experts say. Trump has aggressively sought to boost oil and gas production within the US. Now, after the capture and arrest of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, he is seeking to orchestrate a ramp-up of drilling in Venezuela, which has the largest known reserves of oil in the world—equivalent to about 300bn barrels, according to research firm the Energy Institute. “The oil companies are going to go in, they are going to spend money, we are going to take back the oil, frankly, we should’ve taken back a long time ago,” the US president said after Maduro’s extraction from Caracas. “A lot of money is coming out of the ground, we are going to be reimbursed for everything we spend.” Source: The Oil & Gas Journal. Note: China and Taiwan and Sudan and South Sudan are combined in the data. *Estimates for the Saudi Arabian-Kuwaiti Neutral Zone are divided equally between the two countries.Guardian US oil companies will “spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure… and start making money for the country,” Trump added, with his administration pressing Venezuela’s interim government to delete a law requiring oil projects to be half-owned by the state. > A 50 percent boost in Venezuelan oil production would result in more carbon > pollution than major economies like the UK and Brazil emit. Leading US oil businesses such as Exxon and Chevron have so far remained silent on whether they would spend the huge sums required to enact the president’s vision for Venezuela. But should Venezuela ramp up output to near its 1970s peak of 3.7 million barrels a day—more than triple current levels—it would further undermine the already faltering global effort to limit dangerous global heating. Even raising production to 1.5 million barrels of oil a day from current levels of around 1 million barrels would produce around 550 million tons of carbon dioxide a year when the fuel is burned, according to Paasha Mahdavi, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This is more carbon pollution than what is emitted annually by major economies such as the UK and Brazil. “If there are millions of barrels a day of new oil, that will add quite a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and the people of Earth can’t afford that,” said John Sterman, an expert in climate and economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The climate costs would be especially high because Venezuela produces some of the world’s most carbon-intensive oil. Its vast reserves of extra-heavy crude are particularly dirty, and its other reserves are “also quite carbon- and methane-intensive,” Mahdavi said. The world is close to breaching agreed temperature increase limits – already suffering more severe heatwaves, storms and droughts as a result. Increased Venezuelan drilling would further lower global oil prices and slow the needed momentum towards renewable energy and electric cars, Sterman added. “If oil production goes up, climate change will get worse sooner, and everybody loses, including the people of Venezuela,” he said. “The climate damages suffered by Venezuela, along with other countries, will almost certainly outweigh any short-term economic benefit of selling a bit more oil.” During his first year back in the White House, Trump has demanded the world remain running on fossil fuels rather than “scam” renewables and has threatened the annexation of Canada, a major oil-producing country, and Greenland, an Arctic island rich with mineral resources. Critics have accused Trump of a fossil fuel-driven “imperialism” that threatens to further destabilize the world’s climate, as well as upend international politics. “The US must stop treating Latin America as a resource colony,” said Elizabeth Bast, the executive director of Oil Change International. “The Venezuelan people, not US oil executives, must shape their country’s future.” Patrick Galey, head of fossil fuel investigations at the climate and justice NGO Global Witness, said Trump’s aggression in Venezuela is “yet another conflict fuelled by fossil fuels, which are overwhelmingly controlled by some of the world’s most despotic regimes.” “So long as governments continue to rely on fossil fuels in energy systems, their constituents will be hostage to the whims of autocrats,” he said. Oil rigs at Maracaibo Lake in Venezuela’s Zulia state.Leslie Mazoch/AP Though the president’s stated vision is for US-based oil companies to tap Venezuela’s oil reserves for profit, making good on that promise may be complicated by economic, historical and geological factors, experts say. Oil companies may not be “eager to invest what’s needed because it will take a lot longer than the three years of President Trump’s term”, said Sterman. “That’s a lot of risk—political risk, project risk,” he said. “It seems very tricky.” Upping production is “also just a bad bet generally”, said Galey. “Any meaningful increase in current production would require tens of billions of investment in things like repairs, upgrades and replacing creaking infrastructure,” he said. “That’s not even taking into account the dire security situation.” > “The heavy Venezuelan crude that could be refined in US Gulf coast > installations is likely going to undercut domestic producers.” Venezuela’s oil production has fallen dramatically from its historical highs—a decline experts blame on both mismanagement and US sanctions imposed by Barack Obama and escalated by Trump. By 2018, the country was producing just 1.3m barrels a day—roughly half of what it produced when Maduro took office in 2013, just over a third of what it produced in the 1990s, and about a third of its peak production in the 1970s. Trump has said US companies will revive production levels and be “reimbursed” for the costs of doing so. But the economics of that expansion may not entice energy majors, and even if they choose to play along, it would take years to meaningful boost extraction, experts say. Boosting Venezuela’s oil output by 500,000 barrels a day would cost about $10bn and take roughly two years, according to Energy Aspects. Production could reach between 2 million and 2.5 million barrels a day within a decade by tapping medium crude reserves, Mahdavi said. But returning to peak output would require developing the Orinoco Belt, whose heavy, sulfur-rich crude is far more costly and difficult to extract, transport and refine. Returning to 2 million barrels per day by the early 2030s would require about $110 billion in investment, according to Rystad Energy, an industry consultancy. “That is going to take much more time and much more money, to be able to get at or close to maybe 3, 4 or 5 million barrels a day of production,” said Mahdavi. Increasing Venezuelan extraction amid booming US production may also be a hard sell. “The heavy Venezuelan crude that could be refined in US Gulf coast installations is likely going to undercut domestic producers, who until Trump kidnapped Maduro had been vocally supportive of sanctions on Venezuelan oil,” said Galey. Some firms may be willing to “eat that uncertainty” because the US plans to provide companies with financial support to drill in Venezuela, said Mahdavi. “If you’re willing to deal with the challenges…you are looking still at relatively cheap crude that will get you a higher profit margin than what you can do in the United States,” he said. “That’s why they’re still interested: It’s way more expensive to drill in, say, the US’s Permian Basin.” Some US oil majors may be more receptive to Trump’s Venezuela strategy. Chevron, the only US company operating in the country, may be poised scale up production faster than its rivals. And ExxonMobil, which has invested heavily in oil production within neighboring Guyana, could benefit from the removal of Maduro, who staunchly opposes that expansion. Overall, however, it remains unclear how US oil majors will respond to Trump’s plans of regime change and increased oil extraction in Venezuela. What is much clearer is that any expansion would be “terrible for the climate, terrible for the environment,” said Mahdavi.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Wildfire smoke is an emerging nationwide crisis for the United States. Supercharged by climate change, blazes are swelling into monsters that consume vast landscapes and entire towns. A growing body of evidence reveals that these conflagrations are killing far more people than previously known, as smoke travels hundreds or even thousands of miles, aggravating conditions like asthma and heart disease. One study, for instance, estimated that last January’s infernos in Los Angeles didn’t kill 30 people, as the official tally reckons, but 440 or more once you factor in the smoke. Another recent study estimated that wildfire haze already kills 40,000 Americans a year, which could increase to 71,000 by 2050. Two additional studies published last month paint an even grimmer picture of the crisis in the US and elsewhere. The first finds that emissions of greenhouse gases and airborne particles from wildfires globally may be 70 percent higher than once believed. The second finds that Canada’s wildfires in 2023 significantly worsened childhood asthma across the border in Vermont. Taken together, they illustrate the desperate need to protect public health from the growing threat of wildfire smoke, like better monitoring of air quality with networks of sensors. The emissions study isn’t an indictment of previous estimates, but a revision of them based on new data. Satellites have spied on wildfires for decades, though in a somewhat limited way—they break up the landscape into squares measuring 500 meters by 500 meters, or about 1,600 feet by 1,600 feet. If a wildfire doesn’t fully fill that space, it’s not counted. This new study increases that resolution to 20 meters by 20 meters (roughly 66 feet by 66 feet) in several key fire regions, meaning it can capture multitudes of smaller fires.  Individually, tinier blazes are not producing as much smoke as the massive conflagrations that are leveling cities in the American West. But “they add up, and add up big time,” said Guido van der Werf, a wildfire researcher at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands and lead author of the paper. “They basically double the amount of burned area we have globally.” > Smaller fires may be less destructive then the behemoths, but they can still > be catastrophic, pouring smoke into populated areas. With the 500-meter satellite data, the previous estimate was around 400 million hectares charred each year. Adding the small fires bumps that up to 800 million hectares, roughly the size of Australia. In some parts of the world, such as Europe and Southeast Asia, burned area triples or even quadruples with this improved resolution. While scientists used to think annual wildfire emissions were around 2 gigatons of carbon, or about a fifth of what humanity produces from burning fossil fuels, that’s now more like 3.4 gigatons with this new estimate. The type of fire makes a huge difference in the emissions, too. A forest fire has a large amount of biomass to burn—brushes, grasses, trees, sometimes even part of the soil—and turn into carbon dioxide and methane and particulate matter, but a grass fire on a prairie has much less. Blazes also burn at dramatically different rates: Flames can race quickly through woodland, but carbon-rich ground known as peat can smolder for days or weeks. Peat fires are so persistent, in fact, that when they ignite in the Arctic, they can remain hidden as snow falls, then pop up again as temperatures rise and everything melts. Scientists call them zombie fires. “It really matters where you’re burning and also how intense the fire can become,” van der Werf said. But why would a fire stay small, when we’ve seen in recent years just how massive and destructive these blazes can get? It’s partly due to fragmentation of the landscape: Roads can prevent them from spreading, and firefighters stop them from reaching cities. And in general, a long history of fire suppression means they’re often quickly extinguished. (Ironically, this has also helped create some monsters, because vegetation builds up across the landscape, ready to burn. This shakes up the natural order of things, in which low-intensity fires from lightning strikes have cleared dead brush, resetting an ecosystem for new growth—which is why Indigenous tribes have long done prescribed burns.) Farmers, too, burn their waste biomass and obviously prevent the flames from getting out of hand.  Whereas in remote areas, like boreal forests in the far north, lightning strikes typically ignite fires, the study found that populated regions produce a lot of smaller fires. In general, the more people dotting the landscape, the more sources of ignition: cigarette butts, electrical equipment producing sparks, even chains dragging from trucks. Yes, these smaller fires are less destructive than the behemoths, but they can still be catastrophic in a more indirect way, by pouring smoke into populated areas. “Those small fires are not the ones that cause the most problems,” van der Werf said. “But of course they’re more frequent, close to places where people live, and that also has a health impact.” That is why the second study on asthma is so alarming. Researchers compared the extremely smoky year of 2023 in Vermont to 2022 and 2024, when skies were clearer. They were interested in PM 2.5, or particulate matter smaller than 2.5 millionths of a meter, from wildfire smoke pouring in from Quebec, Canada. “That can be especially challenging to dispel from lungs, and especially irritating to those airways,” said Anna Maassel, a doctoral student at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study. “There is research that shows that exposure to wildfire smoke can have much longer-term impacts, including development of asthma, especially for early exposure as a child.” This study, though, looked at the exacerbation of asthma symptoms in children already living with the condition. While pediatric asthma patients typically have fewer attacks in the summer because they’re not in school and constantly exposed to respiratory viruses and other indoor triggers, the data showed that their conditions were much less controlled during the summer of 2023 as huge wildfires burned. (Clinically, “asthma control” refers to milder symptoms like coughing and shortness of breath as well as severe problems like attacks. So during that summer, pediatric patients were reporting more symptoms.) At the same time, climate change is extending growing seasons, meaning plants produce more pollen, which also exacerbates that chronic disease. “All of those factors compound to really complicate what health care providers have previously understood to be a safe time of year for children with asthma,” Maassel said.  Researchers are also finding that as smoke travels through the atmosphere, it transforms. It tends to produce ozone, for instance, that irritates the lungs and triggers asthma. “There’s also the potential for increased formation of things like formaldehyde, which is also harmful to human health. It’s a hazardous air pollutant,” said Rebecca Hornbrook, who studies wildfire smoke at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, but wasn’t involved in either study, though a colleague was involved in the emissions one. (Last month, the Trump administration announced plans to dismantle NCAR, which experts say could have catastrophic effects.) As wildfires worsen, so too does the public health crisis of smoke, even in places that never had to deal with the haze before. Governments now have to work diligently to protect their people, like improving access to air purifiers, especially in schools. “This is no longer an isolated or geographically confined issue,” Maassel said. “It’s really spreading globally and to places that have never experienced it before.”

This story was originally published by bioGraphic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 1987, wildlife veterinarian Mark Pokras was in his office at Tufts University in Massachusetts when a colleague from New Hampshire called. “I’ve got a dead loon here,” she said. “If I bring it down to you, can you tell me how it died?”  Understanding what’s killing wild animals is often the first step to saving them, and over the course of his career, Pokras has necropsied everything from whales to hummingbirds. Yet this was his first loon—in part because common loons (Gavia immer) had only recently begun repopulating New England after being nearly extirpated by 300 years of hunting, pollution, and habitat loss. European settlers so disliked these “ill-shap’d” birds that nature writer Henry David Thoreau described his neighbors on Walden Pond in Massachusetts shooting them just for fun. By the early 1900s, common loons—which winter on the coast and spend summers nesting along inland lakes—had disappeared from their breeding grounds in Massachusetts and much of New Hampshire, and been reduced to a fraction of their former abundance elsewhere in New England. Places with names like Loon Pond didn’t see nesting loons for more than a century. With the banning of DDT and the passage of the US Clean Water Act in the 1970s, however, loons began returning to the region, and people came to see them as symbols of a recovering wildness. The birds’ red eyes and geometrically patterned black-and-white plumage are instantly recognizable, but loons are most beloved for their long, tremulous vocalizations. In the same way that a train whistle symbolizes the freedom and loneliness of travel, loon calls have come to represent a specific, nostalgic kind of northern wilderness: piney woods, the clean smell of a lake, perhaps a rustic cabin tucked away on shore. Flannel shirts, bug spray, an early morning fishing trip. Scientists say that smell is the sense most strongly connected to memory, but for people with a connection to such lakes, there’s nothing like the sound of a loon to conjure an entire place, an entire feeling. Some locals can identify individual birds by the sound of their voices. Pokras witnessed loons’ rebranding firsthand. As a kid in the 1950s, he remembers occasionally seeing and hearing loons while canoeing with his dad, but loons were no more or less popular than any other wild animal. Today, homes across northern New England display loon flags and loon mailboxes, and gift shops sell loon blankets, loon sweatshirts, loon wine glasses, and nearly any other item you can imagine with a loon on it. Maine residents can get a license plate featuring a loon, and one New Hampshire resident told me that people who grow up there often get one of three tattoos: the state area code (603), the state motto (“Live Free or Die”), or a loon. She chose the loon. Pokras doesn’t have a loon tattoo, nor any other tattoos for that matter. But he’d become enchanted by loons while volunteering to rescue seabirds after a series of oil spills in New Jersey, and when his colleague asked if he’d necropsy a dead loon on that otherwise ordinary day in 1987, he readily agreed.  Cutting into the bird, Pokras discovered that it had suffered from lead toxicosis, more commonly known as lead poisoning. Loons eat pebbles to help digest food in their gizzard, and this one may have mistaken a lead sinker left behind by a fisherman for a pebble, or perhaps eaten a fish with a lead sinker in its body. In Pokras’s X-ray, the sinker showed up as an unnaturally round ball amid a mess of partially digested fish and shellfish. After the bird ate it, the lead would have leached toxicants into the bloodstream, causing impaired vision, gastrointestinal distress, neurologic issues, and ultimately death. “This is weird,” Pokras remembers telling his colleague. “We’ll probably never see this again. But if you ever find another dead loon, give me a call.” > “This is weird. We’ll probably never see this again. But if you ever find > another dead loon, give me a call.” That sentence changed the trajectory of his life.  Today, Pokras and his colleagues have necropsied nearly 5,000 dead loons, mostly from New England. Other scientists and veterinarians have necropsied more from across the species’ breeding range, which extends across most of Canada and the northern United States. In nearly every place—from the Maritimes to Minnesota to Washington State—lead poisoning is the leading cause of death for adult loons in freshwater habitat. A loon that ingests a single 28 gram (1 ounce) lead sinker left behind by a fisherman will likely die in two to four weeks. The late poet Mary Oliver witnessed this loss. In a poem titled “Lead,” she wrote that “the loons came to our harbor / and died, one by one / of nothing we could see.” In an era when many species are declining because of multipronged, seemingly intractable problems, the solution to protecting loons is relatively straightforward. Anglers simply need to swap their old lead jigs and sinkers for tackle made from tungsten, steel, tin, or bismuth. Given loons’ immense popularity, you might think that would be an easy sell. But although conservationists have tried educating the public for decades—and although Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts have laws regulating the use and sale of lead fishing tackle—lead is still responsible for around 25 to 30 percent of loon deaths in most states and provinces, and until recently, nearly 40 percent in New Hampshire. Why? The answer, at least in the United States, is entangled with gun rights. I meet up with Mark Pokras on a green, humid summer morning at the headquarters of the Loon Preservation Committee (LPC), a nonprofit based near Lake Winnipesaukee, the largest lake in New Hampshire. Though he retired from Tufts in 2015, Pokras facilitates an interorganizational effort to study loons and drives from his home in Maine to LPC’s wood-shingled building a few times a year to help run a summer research fellowship for graduate students. Today, two Tufts students, Brynn Ziel and Khangelani Mhlanga, are preparing to necropsy a female loon who had been brought to a wildlife rehabilitation center earlier. The loon had been alive but emaciated, with a length of fishing line emerging from her sinuous neck. Unable to save the bird, staff euthanized her, then sent her frozen body to LPC for examination. Now, the body is splayed on a stainless steel grate above a large, shallow sink, like the kind that might be used for dog grooming. The loon’s organs—esophagus, gizzard, liver, intestines—glisten in the fluorescent lights, and the interns’ nitrile-gloved hands are smeared with blood. Ziel uses forceps to pluck pieces of shellfish from the gizzard, while Mhlanga works on severing the head. The loon is surprisingly large up close—about the size of a goose. The digits on her webbed feet look like long, gnarled human fingers topped with black nails. Pokras occasionally chimes in with an observation, and Harry Vogel, LPC’s senior biologist and executive director since the late 1990s, looks on from across the room. We’re two hours into the necropsy, and the frozen bird is starting to thaw. The room smells a bit like roadkill. “They’re a lot prettier on the outside,” Vogel comments. “I’m biased,” Mhlanga says, “but I think they’re pretty on the inside, too.” The interns continue disassembling the bird’s internal architecture in silence, then Mhlanga pulls out a fishing hook as long as her finger. “Huh,” Pokras says, examining it. “This is the CSI part—the detective work…I’m looking at this and asking, ‘Is that the reason the bird is emaciated?’” Wildlife veterinarian Mark Pokras and Tufts University veterinary student Khangelani Mhlanga necropsy a female loon with a length of fishing line emerging from her neck. Krista Langlois Fishing hooks aren’t typically made of lead—it’s too pliable—so the team doesn’t suspect lead poisoning. Perhaps the hook inhibited the animal’s ability to hunt or swallow, leading to starvation. Still, the necropsy is valuable because it contributes to an ongoing record of the lives and deaths of New England loons across five decades. When Pokras first realized the scope of lead poisoning while necropsying loons in the 1990s, he imagined the problem would be solved relatively quickly. After all, once Silent Spring author Rachel Carson publicized the harm that DDT was causing to birds and other wildlife in North America in the 1960s, legislators and the general public mobilized against the agrochemical industry and worked to ban DDT in much of the world, saving the lives of countless birds and ensuring that springtime still resonates with their songs. Yet efforts by LPC and others to educate anglers about the dangers of lead tackle and convince them to switch to non-lead gear hardly moved the needle. And by the time conservationists took their work to Congress in the late 1990s, hoping for a federal ban, it was becoming harder to pass environmental legislation. Voters in the US were increasingly divided by party lines, and politicians were increasingly influenced by a powerful group: the National Rifle Association, or NRA. As Pokras and his colleagues were spreading the word about the dangers of lead fishing tackle in the ’90s, it just so happened that other conservationists had begun noticing that piles of guts contaminated by lead bullets and left behind by hunters were poisoning scavengers, like bald eagles and California condors. (The US Fish and Wildlife Service had banned lead shot—a type of ammunition used for bird hunting that consists of a spray of small pellets rather than a single bullet—for hunting waterfowl in 1991, but other types of lead bullets were still used for hunting larger animals, and continue to be used today.) Conservation groups across the country began lobbying for a federal ban on lead bullets. And the NRA responded in force. As one NRA website currently states: “The use of traditional (lead) ammunition is currently under attack by many anti-hunting groups whose ultimate goal is to ban hunting.” But how did the fight over lead bullets thwart efforts to regulate lead fishing tackle? Many hunting and fishing organizations have ties to the NRA, and they maintain that any effort to regulate tackle will open the door to regulating ammunition, and that any effort to regulate ammunition is an assault on Americans’ gun rights. “One of the unusual things about lead is there are very few other toxic materials that have a huge public lobby in favor of them,” Pokras says. “You don’t see a lot of members of the public out there campaigning [for] more DDT or neonicotinoid pesticides. But with lead there’s a huge, wealthy, politically influential contingent supporting it.” When Pokras retired in 2015, he had decades of data showing that lead fishing tackle was killing loons, along with some 7,500 peer-reviewed scientific papers that unequivocally show the dangers of lead for wildlife. When I asked why he continues to necropsy loons to amass new data despite this preponderance of proof, his answer is concise: “We haven’t solved the problem yet.” Lead—an element found not just on Earth but throughout the solar system—has always been attractive for human industry. The earliest known case of metal smelting can be found in 7,000-year-old lead beads found in Asia Minor. The Roman empire produced 72,000 metric tons of lead at its peak, much of it was used to make vessels for eating and drinking and pipes for moving water; the word “plumbing” comes from the Latin word for lead, plumbum. And lead has been harming people and animals for nearly as long as we’ve used it. Lead seeping from a Greek mine was already polluting the environment some 5,300 years ago, while an Egyptian papyrus from 3,000 years ago depicts a case of homicide by lead poisoning. Still, lead remains popular, used in everything from car batteries to computer screens. Global lead production increases annually, with more than 4 million metric tons (some 10 billion pounds) mined or extracted through recycling in 2024 alone. Before traveling to New Hampshire to seek out loons, I’d met with Elaine Leslie, the retired chief of biological resources for the National Park Service, at her home in rural southwestern Colorado. When Leslie was leading the Park Service’s biology department in the early 2010s under Barack Obama’s administration, she helped enact an internal ban on lead ammunition in all US national parks and preserves. Hunters and gun advocates weren’t thrilled—“I got death threats,” Leslie tells me matter-of-factly—but the US Fish and Wildlife Service followed suit by banning lead ammunition in certain national wildlife refuges, and began making moves toward a more comprehensive ban. The state of California also banned lead bullets in condor habitat in 2007, eventually followed by a statewide ban. For a while, it seemed as though scientists and conservationists were making progress. But when President Donald Trump took office in 2017, his administration largely reversed the Park Service’s ban on lead bullets. (Rangers must still use non-lead bullets when dispatching an injured animal.) It also restricted the agency from spending money on research, education, or other efforts to reduce lead impacts to wildlife and people. Such pushback is bolstered by gun advocates who claim there’s no research proving that lead has population-level effects on wildlife. In the case of California condors, they say, California’s lead ban hasn’t reduced mortality rates, so the lead in condors’ blood must be coming from a different source. (Scientists say it’s because condors regularly cross into states like Arizona and Nevada and eat meat left by hunters who used lead bullets.) Critics also claim that non-lead ammunition is more expensive, which used to be true but is becoming less so. And they allege that non-lead ammunition is less effective—another argument that has been disproved in peer-reviewed research. Still, the backlash against regulating lead at the federal level has only grown in recent years, with federal legislators introducing bills to protect hunters’ and anglers’ right to lead tackle and bullets. California remains the only state with a complete ban on lead ammunition. Sitting in the shade of her porch sipping iced tea, I asked Leslie, a wildlife biologist by training, if the science showing the dangers of lead to animals is well established. She let out an incredulous laugh. “There’s so much peer-reviewed science out there,” she said. “There’s study after study.” > “Those are the very top of the iceberg. Grizzly bears are impacted. Coyotes > are impacted. Ravens are impacted. Any animal that eats another animal can be > impacted.” For months after our meeting, Leslie sends me those studies by email. Research has shown lead poisoning in doves, whooping cranes, eagles, owls, and many other birds. And as Leslie points out, those are only the animals that are monitored. “I mean, those are the very top of the iceberg,” she says. “Grizzly bears are impacted. Coyotes are impacted. Ravens are impacted. Any animal that eats another animal can be impacted.” While not every animal that absorbs lead dies from it, the bioaccumulation may lead an animal to become sluggish or disoriented and get struck by a car or fly into a power line it would have otherwise avoided. Lead poisoning, Leslie says, is an underreported issue. While most animals killed by lead poisoning encounter the element from bullets, loons are predominantly killed by lead fishing tackle, which is theoretically less contentious to regulate—especially in progressive regions like New England. That’s why, beginning in the early 2000s, loon conservationists turned their focus to state-level laws. They also kept their efforts to ban lead tackle separate from efforts to ban lead ammo, in the hope that it might be an easier pill for lawmakers to swallow. New Hampshire became the first to ban certain types of lead fishing tackle in 2000, and subsequently strengthened its laws to become some of the most stringent in the nation. Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine followed, though the details differ so much from state to state that education and enforcement remain challenging. “We thought great, problem solved,” says Vogel, the LPC director. “But then we realized the problem was not solved.” Today, even after the bans have been in place for years, LPC continues to receive loons each year who have died of lead poisoning. Vogel and his colleagues initially thought this was because the birds were swallowing old lead sinkers buried in the muck at the bottom of lakes. But after necropsies demonstrated that the months when most loons died of lead poisoning coincided with the months when freshwater fishing was at its peak, the team realized that the deaths came from current use. Fishermen were still using—and even purchasing—lead sinkers and spinners. Back at the LPC’s headquarters on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, Pokras shows me a lead lure that he picked up at a fishing store in Maine a few weeks prior. “This is actually a good thing,” Vogel chimes in, with characteristic optimism. It means conservationists don’t have to figure out how to remove old tackle sunk at the bottom of lakes. If they can just figure out how to keep new lead tackle from getting into the environment, the benefit to birds should be almost immediate. And fortunately, they’ve found a promising solution. After the interns finish taking samples of the dead loon’s organs to send off for testing, they seal what’s left of the body in a heavy-duty trash bag for disposal at the local dump. As they wrap up, I head upstairs to the education center and gift shop. A recording of loon calls plays softly, and educational exhibits share information about loons, including the fact that they can dive to depths of 60 meters (200 feet) to hunt for fish, and that their name comes from the Swedish word for clumsy, lom—a nod to loons’ notorious ineptitude on land. On one wall, a taxidermied loon appears to be suspended mid-swim in a glass case, its neck stretched out and its webbed feet splayed behind it like propellers. Affixed to the glass is a placard: “This loon died after ingesting lead fishing tackle.” A table below displays a jar half full of lead sinkers: “This small Mason jar contains enough lead fishing tackle to kill every adult loon found in New Hampshire!” Nearby, a wooden bowl carved in the shape of—you guessed it—a loon holds non-lead tackle that visitors can take home for free. Brochures urge people to earn credit for more new tackle by turning in their old lead gear. This is part of New Hampshire’s pioneering lead tackle buyback program. LPC gets generous donations from loon lovers, and along with support from the state’s department of fish and game, some of that money becomes $20 vouchers to sporting goods stores given to people who turn in lead tackle. Banners and flyers publicizing the lead buyback program are displayed at waste transfer stations, government offices, shops, and community lake associations, and Scouts can earn a badge for collecting lead tackle from their community. Since its launch in 2018, people have dropped off nearly 80,000 pieces of lead tackle; in 2024 alone, 78 kilograms (172 pounds) of lead tackle were turned in, marking a 119 percent increase over the prior year. Maine has taken the work a step further—in addition to buying tackle from individual anglers, the conservation nonprofit Maine Audubon buys stock directly from merchants, keeping lead tackle off the shelves and helping stores comply with newly tightened state regulations. For loons, the combination of legislation, education, and buyback programs seems to be working. Lead poisoning is no longer the number one killer of loons in Maine. And in New Hampshire, lead-related deaths dropped 61 percent between the late 1990s and 2016, and fell another 34 percent since then. “I suppose you could see New Hampshire as a leader,” Vogel says, “But that’s also driven by necessity. The problem was the most severe here.” Vogel is optimistic that states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Washington—all of which have significant loon habitat—will one day follow suit, along with his home country of Canada, where 94 percent of common loons breed. Canada already bans lead tackle and ammo in national parks and wildlife areas but allows it elsewhere. Resistance to a Canadian national ban seems to come from a more basic reluctance to change, rather than fear of losing gun rights, along with the fact that loons are so abundant in Canada that preventing lead poisoning feels less urgent. Europe, meanwhile, is far ahead. The European Union, Norway, and Iceland already ban lead in all wetlands, and the EU is considering a proposal to ban lead from all fishing and hunting gear. Denmark already has a complete ban, and the United Kingdom will enact one beginning in 2026. With the necropsy complete, I follow Vogel and Ashley Keenan, LPC’s field crew coordinator, to a small motorboat docked on Lake Winnipesaukee. The southern part of the lake bumps with party boats and Jet Skis, but these northern reaches are quieter, scattered with islands and ringed with coves where dark sweeps of pine forest feather the shore. Ashley Keenan, field crew coordinator for the Loon Preservation Committee, checks on a loon nest on an island in Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. Krista Langlois Vogel and Keenan are tracking this year’s loon chicks. Unlike ducks and many other waterfowl, loons hatch only one or two eggs per year and don’t typically reproduce until they’re six years old, making population-level growth slow. Out of 32 nesting pairs of loons scattered across Lake Winnipesaukee’s 179 square kilometers (69 square miles) in the spring of 2025, 12 chicks had survived as of August. The figure is slightly below average, although survival rates fluctuate. (One year, 23 chicks survived, Vogel tells me; a few years later, only three did.) During Keenan’s last patrol, the eggs in one nest perched on a tiny island hadn’t yet hatched, and today she’s trying to find out if the chicks have emerged. Keenan steers toward the island, cuts the motor, and jumps into the shallows. She aims her binoculars at a cluster of lichen-splattered boulders. We wait in silence. Nothing. “Goddamn it,” she says, climbing back into the boat. One egg might still be there, but there’s no sign of the second egg or a living chick. She guesses it was picked off by a predator, perhaps an eagle. Vogel speculates that unseasonably hot summer weather contributed to the lower-than-usual survival rate. Loon parents who need to cool down by going for a swim must leave their eggs unguarded, opening them to predation or overheating under the blazing sun. Although common loon populations are holding steady or even growing slightly across their range, loons are increasingly susceptible to the impacts of climate change, as well as avian malaria, shoreline development, and collisions with recreational motorboats. And this region—one of the first in North America to be settled by colonists, and still one of the most densely developed on the continent—echoes with stories of species that have disappeared, from mountain lions to American chestnuts. People here know that survival is never guaranteed, and that keeping common species common requires effort, sacrifice, and care. For loons specifically, it means keeping as many adults of reproductive age alive as possible. “This is probably the most intensely managed species in New Hampshire,” Vogel says. “And despite that, we’re still having trouble maintaining reproductive success.” Just then, a white-haired woman in a kayak approaches our boat, waving her arms. “I’m just trying to find out what happened to my baby loon,” she calls out. Her name is Dotty Wysocki, and she’s been watching nesting loons near her summer cottage here for three decades. “We name ’em and everything,” she tells me in a thick Boston accent. “We really get involved. I’m constantly looking for them.” Wysocki tells us that she saw a newly hatched chick alive earlier in the week but hasn’t spotted it since. When Keenan affirms that the chick is likely dead, Wysocki lowers her eyes. She wishes she could have done more; when she was younger, she and her friends used to watch the chicks in four-hour shifts to scare off eagles and other predators. At the end of her poem about lead poisoning in loons, Mary Oliver wrote: “I tell you this to break your heart / by which I mean only / that it break open and never close again / to the rest of the world.” As Wysocki paddles away and Keenan starts up our motor, both seem dispirited, perhaps even a little heartbroken. But their concern for the fate of this one tiny chick nonetheless fills me with hope. It’s the kind of love that can save a species, and indeed, the only thing that ever has.

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the past decade at the forefront of US politics, Donald Trump has unleashed a barrage of unusual, misleading, or dubious assertions about the climate crisis, which he most famously called a “hoax”. This year has seen Trump ratchet up his often questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it. In a year littered with lies and wild declarations, these are the five that stood out as the most startling. 1. “PUTTING PEOPLE OVER FISH” Upon re-entering the White House in January, Trump revealed an unusual fixation would become an immediate priority for his administration—the fate of an endangered, three-inch-long fish that lives in California. The unassuming delta smelt, Trump said rather uncharitably, is “an essentially worthless fish” which had been lavished with water flows that should instead go to nearby farmers or help fight the devastating wildfires that were raging hundreds of miles south in Los Angeles. On his first day in office, Trump issued an eye-catching executive order titled “Putting people over fish” that demanded water be diverted from the smelt’s habitat and towards needy people. Experts were quick to point out that water situated so far away would not aid the firefighting effort in LA, with the small amount of water provided to keep the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta ecosystem intact overshadowed by the much larger forces at play in California, such as the climate crisis, which has spurred monumental droughts in the region. 2. WIND ENERGY IS “DRIVING THE WHALES CRAZY” Continuing on the aquatic theme, Trump’s first month in the most powerful office on the planet also included a bizarre tirade against offshore wind energy for its supposed impact upon whales. The president said that “windmills” were “dangerous,” citing the example of whales being washed ashore in Massachusetts as proof that “the windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously.” While there was a spate of dead and sick whales becoming stranded ashore, Trump’s own federal government scientists have rejected the idea that wind turbines placed in the ocean are to blame. “At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths,” the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration states. “There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.” The main threats to whales continue to be entanglement in fishing nets, boat strikes, and altered prey behavior due to a rapidly heating ocean from the climate crisis, which is causing whales to have to forage closer to land, experts say. This hasn’t deterred Trump from enacting a long-held grudge against wind energy by halting planned projects and stating that “we don’t allow the windmills and we don’t want the solar panels” in August. The president has also claimed that wind is “the most expensive energy there is”—a false claim: wind and solar are, in fact, among the cheapest sources of power that have ever existed. 3. CLEAN, BEAUTIFUL COAL In September, Trump delivered a remarkable, often fact-free speech to the United Nations, in which he said that climate change is the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, blaming “stupid people” for predictions that have hobbled countries with a costly “green scam.” > “I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word ‘coal’. > Only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?” But perhaps the most unusual revelation in the speech was Trump outlining how he has sought to directly rebrand coal as a clean power source. “I have a little standing order in the White House,” he said. “Never use the word ‘coal’. Only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?” Coal is, in fact, far from clean. It is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels in terms of the carbon it emits when burned, which then heats up the planet, and gives off air pollutants that routinely harm the heart and lung health of those who live near coal power plants. Black lung disease, meanwhile, is an affliction many coal miners have suffered after directly inhaling coal dust. The Trump administration axed a program that screened coal miners for the respiratory condition. The federal government, across different administrations, has lavished funding for plans to install carbon capture facilities at coal plants to stop harmful emissions from escaping, but this has yet to be implemented in any meaningful way in the US. 4. GLOBAL COOLING In the same speech to beleaguered-looking diplomats at the UN, Trump scoffed at the scientific reality of global heating, instead claiming that scientists had just changed their minds from the planet cooling down. “It used to be global cooling,” he said. “If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said, global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler.” The world is not cooling down. It is heating up at the fastest rate in the history of humanity, due to the burning of fossil fuels and, to a lesser extent, deforestation. Scientists are unequivocal about this, as can anyone able to grasp a simple temperature graph. In the 1920s and 1930s, the field of climate science wasn’t as developed as it is now, but even then there was an understanding of the greenhouse effect, and few scientists in the decades since have expressed concerns about “global cooling” compared with those warning of planetary heating. The Earth is thought to have been in a long, gentle cooling pattern for thousands of years due to natural forces, but this was upended by the industrial revolution, with the vast amounts of heat-trapping gases emitted over the past 150 years setting us on a completely new and dangerous path. The world is now hotter than at any previous point in human civilization. 5. CLIMATE CHANGE INVESTIGATIONS Last month, Trump announced new investigations related to the climate crisis. Not to find more about the severity of global heating and its implications—more to target those who have told the world about it. “It’s a little conspiracy out there,” the president said at a US-Saudi investment forum in Washington. “We have to investigate them immediately. They probably are being investigated.” It’s unclear who “they” are—scientists, Democratic politicians, the insurance companies pulling out of states because of the crushing cost of climate-driven disasters? But Trump pushed on. “Their policies punish success, rewarded failure, and produced disaster, including the worst inflation in our country’s history,” he said. While the Trump administration has fired scientists, hauled down mentions of the climate crisis from government websites, and banned federal employees from uttering verboten words such as “emissions” and “green”, the reality remains that the world is warming up, and past projections of this have been generally accurate. Some of the most accurate forecasts of global heating came from the fossil fuel industry, which knew of the dangers from the 1950s onward and produced strikingly accurate projections of future heat in the 1970s. Instead of informing the world of this peril, however, oil and gas companies instead set about a decades-long campaign to downplay and distort this science in order to maintain their lofty position in the global economy. Trump has not called for an investigation of these companies, choosing instead to openly solicit campaign donations from them in return for rollbacks of clean air protections once he became president—a promise he has largely fulfilled.

Bill McKibben isn’t known for his rosy outlook on climate change. Back in 1989, he wrote The End of Nature, which is considered the first mainstream book warning of global warming’s potential effects on the planet. Since then, he’s been an ever-present voice on environmental issues, routinely sounding the alarm about how human activity is changing the planet while also organizing protests against the fossil fuel industries that are contributing to climate change. McKibben’s stark and straightforward foreboding about the future of the planet was once described as “dark realism.” But he has recently let a little light shine through thanks to the dramatic growth of renewable energy, particularly solar power. In his latest book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, McKibben argues that the planet is experiencing the fastest energy transition in history from fossil fuels to solar and wind—and that transition could be the start of something big. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “We’re not talking salvation here,” McKibben says. “We’re not talking stopping global warming. But we are talking the first thing that’s happened in the 40 years that we’ve known about climate change that scales to at least begin taking a serious bite out of the trouble we’re in.” On this week’s More To The Story, McKibben sits down with host Al Letson to examine the rise of solar power, how China is leapfrogging the United States in renewable energy use, and the real reason the Trump administration is trying to kill solar and wind projects around the country. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in October 2025. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bill, how are you this morning? Bill McKibben: I’m actually pretty darn good, which one feels bad about saying in the midst of planetary ecological trauma and the collapse of our democracy, but it’s a beautiful day in the mountains of Vermont and in the midst of all that bad stuff, I’ve got one piece of big good news, which it’s actually kind of fun to share. Yeah, I think in the midst of all the stress and pressure and sadness about the way the world is heading at this moment, I think having joy is a revolutionary act and it’s good. I think when you come outside and the sun is shining and it feels good outside, I don’t know. I don’t think we should be ashamed of it. I think we should bask it and hold onto it as long as possible because good Lord, who knows what’s next? Amen. One of the results of having spent my whole life working on climate change is I never take good weather for granted. If there’s a snowstorm, I make the most out of every flake. If there’s a beautiful cool fall-like morning like there was today, nobody’s out in it quicker than me. So I take your point 100%. How long have you been working in the field of environmental justice and thinking about the environment? Al, when I was 27, I wrote a book called The End of Nature, so this would’ve been 1989 because I’m an old person. So, wrote a book called The End of Nature that was the first book about what we now call the climate crisis, what we then call the greenhouse effect. And that book, well, that book did well, it came out in 24 languages and things, but more to the point, it just made me realize that this was not only the most important question in the world, what was going to happen to the Earth’s climate, but the most interesting, that it required some understanding of science, but also more importantly of economics, of politics, of sociology, of psychology, of theology, of pretty much everything you could imagine. And so for 38 years now, I guess, it’s been my work and at some level, I wish I’d been able to spend my life on something not quite so bleak. On the other hand, I have to confess, I haven’t been bored in any point in there. Yeah. How would you describe the environmental causes in America since you’ve been watching it for so long? It seems to me that there’s a lot of one step forward, three steps back, one step forward, three steps back. I’d say it’s been more like one step forward, three quarters of a step back over and over again. And that’s a big problem because it’s not only that we have to move, it’s that we have to move fast. Climate change is really probably the first great question we’ve ever come up against that has time limit. As long as I’ve been alive and as long as you’ve been alive, our country’s been arguing over should we have national healthcare? I think we should. I think it’s a sin that we don’t, people are going to die and go bankrupt every year that we don’t join all the other countries of the world in offering it, but it’s not going to make it harder to do it when we eventually elect Bernie and set our minds to it than if we hadn’t delayed all this time. Climate change isn’t like that. Once you melt the Arctic, nobody has a plan for how you freeze it back up again. So we’re under some very serious time pressure, which is why it’s incredibly sad to watch our country pretty much alone among the world in reverse right now on the most important questions. Yeah. Is that forward movement and regression tied to our politics, i.e., is it tied to a specific party? If the Democrats are in office, we move forward, if Republicans come in office, we move backwards? Yeah, in the largest terms. The fossil fuel industry, more or less purchased the Republican Party 30, 35 years ago. Their biggest contributors have been the Koch brothers who are also the biggest oil and gas barons in America. And so it’s just been become party doctrine to pretend that physics and chemistry don’t really exist and we don’t have to worry about them. Democrats have been better, and in the case of Joe Biden actually, considerably better. His Inflation Reduction Act was the one serious attempt that America’s ever made to deal with the climate crisis, and it was far from perfect, and there were plenty of Democrats like Joe Manchin that got in the way and so on and so forth. But all in all, it was a good faith effort driven by extraordinary activism around the Green New Deal. And it’s a shame to see it now thrown into reverse in the Trump administration, especially because the rest of the world is at different paces, some of them very fast, starting to do the right thing here. So given all of that where we are and kind of stepping back away from the progress we had made forward, you just wrote a new book that is pretty optimistic, which is a little bit different for you because you’ve been described as dark realism. Tell me why are you feeling optimistic in this moment? About 36 months ago, the planet began an incredible surge of installation of renewable energy, solar panels, wind turbines, and the batteries to store that power when the sun goes down or the wind drops. That surge is not just the fastest energy transition play on the planet now. It’s the fastest energy transition in history and by a lot, and the numbers are frankly kind of astonishing. I mean, the last month we have good data for is May. In China, in May, they were putting up three gigawatts of solar panels a day. Now, a gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a big coal-fired power plant. So they were building the equivalent of one of those worth of solar panels every eight hours across China. Those kind of numbers are world-changing if we play it out for a few more years, and if everybody joins in. And you can see the same thing happening in parts of this country. California has not done everything right, but it’s done more right than most places, and California has hit some kind of tipping point in the last 11 or 12 months. Now, most days, California generates more than a hundred percent of the electricity it uses from clean energy, which means that at night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply on their grid is batteries that didn’t exist three years ago. And the bottom line is a 40% fall in fossil fuel use for electricity in the fourth-largest economy in the world is the kind of number that, adopted worldwide, begins to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets. And we know that every 10th of a degree Celsius, that the temperature rises, moves another a hundred million of our brothers and sisters out of a safe climate zone and into a dangerous one. We’re not talking salvation here, we’re not talking stopping global warming, but we are talking the first thing that’s happened in the 40 years that we’ve known about climate change, that scales to at least begin taking a serious bite out of the trouble we’re in. Yeah, so I own a home in Jacksonville, Florida. In the Sunshine State. In the Sunshine State. I was planning on getting solar panels for the house, but then I was told A, one, it would be really expensive, and then B, it wouldn’t save me that much on my bill because of the way some local ordinances are configured. And so for me, somebody who wants to have solar panels and wants to use solar power, it’s just not cost-effective. So how do we get past that? Well, there’s a lot of ways. One of the ways was what Biden was doing in the IRA, which was to offer serious tax credits. And those, despite the Republican defeat of them, remain in effect through the end of this year through New Year’s Eve. So if people move quickly, they can still get those. Probably more important in the long run, and this was the subject of a long piece I wrote for Mother Jones this summer, we need serious reform in the way that we permit and license these things. Putting solar panels on your roof in Florida is roughly three times more expensive than it is to put solar panels on your roof in say, Australia, to pick someplace with a similar climate, or Europe, someplace with a more difficult climate, costs three times as much here. A little bit of that’s because of tariffs on panels. Mostly it’s because every municipality in America, they send out their own team of inspectors, permits, on and on and on. It’s a bureaucratic mess, and that’s what drives the price up so dramatically. There’s actually an easy way to do it. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed a piece of software called the Solar App Plus that allows contractors to just plug in the name of the type of equipment they’re going to put on the roof and the address that they’re doing it, and the computer quickly checks to see if it’s all compatible, and if it is, they get an instantaneous permit and get to work right away. And then, for apartment dwellers, because there’s almost as many apartment dwellers as homeowners in this country, who don’t have access to their own roof usually, we need another set of easy technology. We’re calling this balcony solar. And across Europe over the last three years, three and a half, 4 million apartment dwellers have gone to whatever you call Best Buy in Frankfurt or Brussels and come home for a few hundred euros with solar panel design just to be hung from the railing of a apartment balcony and then plugged directly into the wall. No electrician needed nothing. That’s illegal every place in this country except that progressive bastion in the state of Utah where the state legislature unanimously passed enabling legislation earlier this year because some Libertarian Republican state senator who I’ve talked to, an interesting guy, he said, “Well, if people in Stuttgart can have it, why not people in Provo?” And no one had a good reason, so now there’s on YouTube lots of videos of Happy Utahns putting up their balcony solar arrays. So let me just to clarify that because I never heard of this before. In overseas, in different countries, they can go to, I don’t know, an Ikea and grab a solar panel, come home and plug it in the wall to power their apartment? It often powers 25% of the power that they’re using in their apartment. It’s a real amazing thing and it’s for a few hundred euros. And among other things, it really introduces people to the joy of all this. There was a big story in The Guardian a few months ago following all sorts of people who’d done this and almost to a person, they’d all become fascinated by the app on their phone showing how much power they were generating at any given moment. Solar power is kind of a miracle. It exists in so many different sizes, from your balcony to big solar farms, all of which we need. But the thing that’s a miracle about it is precisely that it’s available to all of us. I mean, no one’s going to build a coal-fired power plant on their balcony. This is something that everybody can do, and it’s something that once you’ve got the panel, no one can control. We’re talking about energy that can’t be hoarded, that can’t be held in reserve, and that essentially the sun delivers for free every day when it rises above the horizon. So that is an extraordinary boon to especially poor people around the world and an extraordinary threat to the fossil fuel industry, which is why you’re seeing the crazy pushback that marks the Trump administration. So with the Trump administration and this bill that they passed, The Big Beautiful Bill, that impacts tax credits for renewable projects like solar, how is that going to affect the solar power industry in the United States? It’s going to decimate it. There are already companies laying people off and going out of business because that tax credit was important and it’s, since we can’t do anything in Washington at the moment, why we need state and local governments to step up big to change the rules here and try to keep this momentum going in the States. The United States accounts for about 11% of emissions in the world. The other 89%, things are going much better than they are here, not just in China, but in all the places that China touches. In some ways, the most powerful story for me in the book was what happened in Pakistan last year. Now, Pakistan’s been hit harder by climate change than any country on earth. Its cities now routinely report temperatures of 125, 126 degrees. The two worst floods that really we’ve ever recorded on the planet happened in Pakistan over the last 15 years. Right now there’s big major, not quite as bad, but really serious flood across the Punjab. Pakistan also has an expensive and unreliable electric system. So about 18 months ago, people began importing in very large numbers, cheap Chinese solar panels from across their shared border. And within six months, eight months, Pakistanis, without government help, just basically using directions you can get on TikTok, had installed enough solar panels to equal half of the existing national electric grid in Pakistan. It’s the most amazing sort of citizen engineering project in history and of incredible value to people. Farmers in Pakistan, I don’t know if you’ve traveled in rural Asia, but the soundtrack of at part of the world is the hum of diesel pumps, often the cough of diesel generators because you need to bring up this irrigation water from quite a great depth to wells that came with the green revolution. Often for farmers, that diesel is the biggest single input cost that they have. So farmers were very early adopters here. Many of them lacked the money to build the steel supports that we’re used to seeing to hold your solar panels up. They just laid them on the ground and pointed them at the sun. Pakistanis last year used 35% less diesel than they did the year before. Now the same thing is happening in the last six months across large parts of Africa. Pretty much any place where there’s really deep established trade relations with China, and it’s not just solar panels. What the Chinese are also doing is building out the suite of appliances that make use of all that clean, cheap electricity. The most obvious example being electric vehicles and electric bikes. More than half the cars sold in China last month came with a plug dangling out the back, and now those are the top-selling cars in one developing nation after another around the world because they’re cheap and they’re good cars and because if you’re in Ethiopia or Djibouti or wherever you are, you have way more access to sunshine than you do to the incredibly long supply chain that you need to support a gasoline station. But my understanding, and my understanding is definitely dated, which is why I’m glad I’m talking to you, but for a very long time, my understanding of solar power was that it wasn’t that efficient, that you wouldn’t be able to get enough power to really do much of anything versus fossil fuels. Is it true that the Chinese have really invested in the technology and really pushed it forward? Yeah, I mean Chinese are now, you’ve heard of petro states, the Chinese are the first electro state in the world. This stuff works great and it works great here. I mean, I was telling you about what’s going on in California. In some ways, an even more remarkable story, given the politics, is that Texas is now installing clean energy faster than California because it’s the cheapest and it’s the fastest thing to put up. If you’re having to build data centers, and God knows, I’m not convinced we have to build as many data centers as we’re building, but if you do, the only thing that builds fast enough to get them up is solar or wind. You can put up a big solar farm in a matter of a few months as fast as you can build the dumb data center. Your question’s really important because for a very long time, all my life, we’ve called this stuff alternative energy, and it’s sort of been there on the fringe like maybe it’s not real big boy energy the way that oil and gas is. I think we’ve tended to think of it as the Whole Foods of energy. It’s like nice, but it’s pricey. It’s the Costco of energy now. It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk, it’s on the shelf ready to go. 95% of new electric generation around the world and around the country last year came from clean energy, and that’s precisely why the fossil fuel industry freaked out. You remember a year ago, Donald Trump told oil executives, “If you give me a billion dollars, you can have anything you want.” They gave him about half a billion between donations and advertising and lobbying. That was enough because he’s doing things even they couldn’t have imagined. I mean, he’s shut down two almost complete big wind farms off the Atlantic seaboard. I mean, it’s craziness. We’ve never really seen anything like it. Do you think we’ll be able to bounce back? As we’re watching all of these forward movements that have happened before Trump came back into office, it feels like he is burning it all down and not just burning it down, but salting the earth. Nothing’s going to grow there again. Yeah, I completely hear you. Yeah. This one possibility. Look, 10 years from now, if we stay on the course that Trump has us on, any tourist who can actually get a visa to come to America, it’ll be like a Colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion. People will come to gawk at how people used to live back in the olden days. I don’t think that that’s what’s going to happen. I think that at some point, reality is going to catch up with this, and everyone’s going to start figuring out we’re paying way more for energy than else in the world, and that means our economy is always on the back foot. That means that our consumers are always strapped. I mean, electricity prices are up 10% this year so far around this country because he keeps saying, “We’re not going to build the cheapest, fastest way to make more electricity.” I don’t see how that can last. But then I don’t see how any of this, none of it… I mean, I confess, I feel out of my depth now, the hatred of immigrants, the racial hatred, the insane economic policy around tariffs, none of it makes any real sense to me politically or morally. So I could be wrong, but I hope that America, which after all was where the solar cell was invented and where the first solar cell came out of Edison, New Jersey in 1954, the first commercial wind turbine in the world went up on a Vermont mountain about 30 miles south of where I’m talking from you speaking in the 1940s. That we’ve now gifted the future to China is just crazy no matter what your politics are. The idea that we are ceding ground to China is not just about solar energy, but in all sorts of ways. The move of the Trump administration to be sort of isolationists is actually hurting us way more than being open and growing and advancing. Yep, I couldn’t agree more. Look, I’ve been to China a bunch of times. I’m glad that I’m not a Chinese citizen because doing the work I do, I would’ve been in jail long ago, and I’m aware of that and understand the imperfections and deep flaws in that country. But I also understand that they have a deep connection to reason. They’ve elected engineers, or not elected, appointed engineers to run their country now for decades while we’ve been electing lawyers to run ours. And as a result, they’re not surprisingly better at building stuff. And so they have. And I think now, they’re using that to build a kind of moral legitimacy in the world. If the biggest problem the world faces turns out to be climate change, and I have no doubt that it is, then China’s going to be the global leader in this fight because we’ve just walked away from it. Yes. The question that comes to mind when you say that is, it’s clear to me that what some climate change skeptics and renewable energy skeptics have been able to do is to wrap things like solar power and wind energy into the culture war. So now that it’s a part of the culture war, people just stand against it because, well, they’re on the wrong team. Instead of looking at the economic reality that their bills could go down significantly if they dived in. It’s super true, but it’s also true that solar power is remarkably popular across partisan lines. The polling we have shows that yeah, the Republican voters are less enamored of it now because Trump’s been going so hard after it, but still like it by large margins and want more government support for it. I think the reason is that there are several ways to think about this. I’m concerned about climate change. I’m a progressive. I like the idea that we’re networking the groovy power of the sun to save our planet, but I’ve lived my whole life in rural America, much of it in red state, rural America. I have lots of neighbors who are very conservative. There’s lots of Trump flags on my road, and some of them fly in front of homes with solar panels on them because if you’re completely convinced that your home is your castle and that you’re going to defend with your AR-15, it’s a better castle if it has its own independent power supply up on the roof, and people have really figured that out. So this can cut both ways, and I hope that it will. That’s that story from Utah about the balcony solar. That’s the one place where people have said, “Well, there’s no reason not to do this. Let’s do it.” Yeah. So you’ve been doing this work for a really long time. I’m curious, when you started doing this work, could you have ever imagined the place that we are in right now as a country? No. Remember I was 27 when I wrote this first book, so my theory of change was people will read my book and then they will change. Turns out that that’s not exactly how it works. It took me a while to figure out. Really the story of my life is first 10 years after that, I just kept writing more books and giving talks and things because I thought being a journalist that we were having an argument and that if we won the argument, then our leaders would do the right thing because why wouldn’t they? Took me too long, at least a decade, to figure out that we had won the argument, but that we were losing the fight because the fight wasn’t about data and reason and evidence. The fight was about what fights are always about, money and power. And the fossil fuel industry had enough money and power to lose the argument, but keep their business model rolling merrily along. So that’s when I started just concluding that we needed to organize because if you don’t have billions of dollars, the only way to build power is to build movements. I started with seven college students, a thing called 350.org that became the first big global grassroots climate movement campaign. We’ve organized 20,000 demonstrations in every country on earth except North Korea. And in recent years, I’ve organized for old people like me, what we call Third Act, which now has about 100,000 Americans that work on climate and democracy and racial justice. And so this is a big sprawling fight, we don’t know how it’s going to come out. The reason I wrote this book, Here Comes the Sun, was just to give people a sense that all is not lost, that we do have some tools now that we can put to use. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Shane Farrell has spent the better part of the last three years underwater, diving off the coast of Maine. The University of Maine Ph.D. student and his team at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences are surveying the rapid decline of kelp forests in the warming waters. While the marine heatwaves killing the kelp ecosystem were alarming on their own, the researchers have discovered a new threat—the rise in red turf algae, a filamentous invasive species—that is taking over the place of the kelp that has collapsed from the heat.  The team published its findings in a recent study published in Science stating that the predatory algae were releasing waterborne, allelopathic chemicals into the water that prevented the regeneration of juvenile or baby kelp. These molecules were specifically affecting the gametophyte phase—when the kelp reproduces to produce gametes—which is particularly important for their recruitment and survival on the reefs.  “What was most shocking was that the types of chemicals found in the study are also found behind the lack of recovery in certain coral reefs and tropical rainforests,” Farrell said, alluding to the bigger impact of these invasive species.  One of the most abundant varieties of the red algae originally came from Asia. Doug Rasher, a senior research scientist heading Bigelow’s Rasher Lab, where Farrell works, points out that the warming waters of this part of the North Atlantic match the temperature of the red algae’s native habitat, which is why the algae does well compared to kelps, which are a cold-water species. Through underwater surveys and laboratory experiments, the team found the warming water had helped the proliferation of the red algae. Even though they span all the way from Canada to certain regions of Massachusetts, the kelp forests are a foundational fixture on Maine’s coasts. The state remains one of the largest homes for this ecosystem on the East Coast. However, between 2004 and 2018, southern Maine experienced an 80 percent decline in kelp cover, mainly because the south is one of the warmest regions on the coast.  “This transition from kelp to turf algae is not just happening here in Maine. It’s happening in places of rapid ocean warming around the world,” Farrell said.  However, this is far from the only threat the kelp faces. A host of environmental and biological stressors continue to thwart the survival and regeneration of kelp, putting the alarming numbers about the steady decline in perspective. For instance, the sea urchin remains one of the main reasons for the decimation of abundant kelp cover in the country. “Sea urchins are locusts, they crawl across the substrate [and act as] underwater lawn mowers—they eat everything in their path,” said Jon Witman, a marine biologist who has taught at Brown University and spent most of his research life studying marine food webs across the Gulf of Maine, Galapagos Islands, and the reefs of Easter Island.  > “Sea urchins are locusts, they crawl across the substrate [and act as] > underwater lawn mowers—they eat everything in their path.” Witman also said storm surges can destroy the kelp forests, with intense hurricanes uprooting and tossing up the fronds. When he was conducting his Ph.D. research in Maine, he remembers tens of thousands of plants washing ashore after a storm.  Such extreme weather events are known to leave dead corals, kelp, and fish in their wake. But with climate change, such events are becoming more frequent and intense. In 2024 alone, the country has faced 27 extreme weather events, ranging from heatwaves and droughts to both severe and tropical storms. Scientists have predicted that by the end of the century, the world might potentially warm by 2.3 degrees C to 2.5 degrees C, leading to a surge in extreme weather events.  A map measuring marine heatwaves in the United States between 1982 and 2023 found that they have increased in intensity and duration. The Gulf of Maine in the last three decades has warmed at a rate of 0.06 degrees Celsius per year (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit), which is three times more than the global average. In 2019, the region suffered a marine heatwave that continued for over a month.  The impact of this thermal stress on the kelp is a complex process. They tend to do poorly in warming waters and begin to disintegrate when temperatures reach higher than 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), Witman said.  Farrell attests to this. In the Gulf of Maine, at 16.5 degrees Celsius (62 degrees Fahrenheit), he says the kelp start to erode from the very tip of the plant, which limits the plant’s ability to release spores, which are vital for reproduction. This makes Farrell concerned for the aquaculture industry. “[The kelp farmers] rely on wild kelp beds for their seed, and use the reproductive tissue of these kelp and use their spores to grow for seed,” he said. The loss of kelp can effect the seed bank and, in turn, the kelp aquaculture industry in Maine, which is leading kelp farming in the country.  Rasher’s team also found that two common or widespread fish species depend heavily on kelp forests, getting most of their energy from kelp. This is not to say the fish are herbivores directly feeding on the kelp, Rasher said. Instead, they benefit from a chain of interactions that move kelp-derived carbon up the food web and into their tissues. “[Before this study], people didn’t know that Maine’s kelp forests play an important role in creating energy that fuels the nearshore food web,” he added. As kelp has been a viable habitat and nutrient deposit for fishes, their escalating loss can reduce the abundance of reef fish and potentially impact local fisheries, which has happened in California. But the authors don’t know just yet how this would play out for Maine’s fisheries.  Soon, however, they intend to tease out what the cascading impacts of the red turf algae invasion will mean for the state’s most economically viable crustacean—the lobster.  “Physical removal of invasive algae like Caulerpa in the Mediterranean does work with a lot of effort, but those plants are large and easy to target, compared to red algal turf, which is filamentous,” Witman said, which means one cannot really grab and pull it off the bottom, as a method of controlling it.  Rasher emphasized the need for more research into the long-term resilience of kelp forests. If the goal is to bring the kelp forests back, he said, improving the receptivity of reefs would involve not only getting rid of the turf algae but also identifying kelp cultivars that can withstand the warming ocean temperatures.  The research received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, both of which have undergone significant reductions in their funding during President Donald Trump’s second term. The cuts will reverberate across labs such as Rasher’s, which depended on the organizations to sustain their cutting-edge research.  However, Rasher is not deterred. He said his lab is further diversifying its funding sources by seeking foundational and philanthropic support, in addition to federal support.