Zoë Schlanger | The Atlantic

RFK Jr. Is Neglecting a Legitimate Autism Concern

2025-09-16T15:34:41-04:00

Pesticides once appeared to be a clear target for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s desire to “make America healthy again.” Before becoming the health secretary, he described Monsanto, the maker of the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup, as “enemy of every admirable American value,” and vowed to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals already banned in other countries.” Since he came to power, many of Kennedy’s fans have waited eagerly for him to do just that.

Kennedy has yet to satisfy them: In the latest MAHA action plan on children’s health, released last week, pesticides appear only briefly on a laundry list of vague ideas. The plan says that the government should fund research on how farmers could use less of them, and that the government "will work to ensure that the public has awareness and confidence” in the EPA’s existing pesticide-review process, which it called “robust.”

Unlike Kennedy’s concerns about vaccines, his concerns about pesticides have echoed those found in a body of legitimate research. Studies have found associations between exposure to some herbicides and pesticides and cancer, hormone disruption, and other acute and chronic health conditions. These include neurodevelopmental impacts in children, such as autism—which Kennedy has also promised to tackle.

Right now his department’s promised report on what has caused rates of autism to rise over recent decades is expected to highlight Tylenol use, whether during pregnancy or, as my colleague Tom Bartlett reported, based on Kennedy’s correspondence with a fringe researcher, in early childhood. Researchers generally point to a change in diagnostic criteria as the primary reason rates have spiked so dramatically. They also consider autism a complex condition that does not appear to have a single cause: Studies suggest that genetics play a bigger role than environmental factors in determining a person’s risk, though both seem likely to contribute and may work in concert. A serious effort from the government to understand its causes would require investment in long-term, large-cohort, and detailed studies that might cast light on the contribution of many environmental factors, including pesticides.

Several studies have found neurological impacts associated with pesticides. UC Davis’s MIND Institute put out a study in 2014 that found autism risk was much higher among children whose mothers had lived near agricultural-pesticide areas while pregnant. A 2017 paper found that zip codes that conducted aerial spraying for mosquitoes—a pesticide—had comparatively higher rates of autism than zip codes that didn’t. Others have linked pesticides to a range of behavioral and cognitive impairment in children.

Rebecca Schmidt, a molecular epidemiologist and professor at UC Davis, has been researching potential risk factors for autism as part of the school’s long-term MARBLES study of mothers and children. Schmidt and her colleagues study families with at least one child already diagnosed with the condition—to see what environmental and biological factors may raise the risk of subsequent children being diagnosed. (Younger siblings of a child with autism have on average a 20 percent chance of also having it.) Her own research, she told me, has not seen as dramatic of results for pesticides as the 2014 paper—which she also worked on—reported, though other labs have found associations of their own between prenatal pesticide exposure and autism.

These studies, like most studies that assess environmental exposures, typically cannot determine causality between agricultural-pesticide exposure and autism risk. Investigating links between pesticides and health outcomes is challenging; researchers can look at geographic proximity to sprayed fields, but drilling down to find out how much pesticide actually ended up in a person’s body requires herculean diagnostic efforts, such as frequent urine sampling. And the conclusions drawn from these studies can only point to associations between certain exposures and the likelihood of developing the condition: Showing direct causality would involve willingly exposing pregnant mothers and infants to pesticides and seeing what happens, which scientists cannot do, for obvious reasons. But based on what she knows now, Schmidt told me, “pesticides are probably not a good exposure for any pregnant person, or even children,” because their brains are still developing.

In investigating autism causes, Kennedy could also consider another environmental factor: air pollution. Breathing air pollution does have robust evidence linking it to neurodevelopmental effects in children, including autism. The Trump administration’s policy changes since January have predominantly tipped the country toward more air pollution, not less, while its climate-policy rollbacks will contribute even further to the burden of air pollution from wildfires. Meanwhile, some evidence also suggests a link between flame-retardant exposure and behavioral-developmental problems in children. Other studies have found possible links between pre- and postnatal exposure to PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” and autism.

All of this means that following the science would give Kennedy many places to look. “We've been working on this for over a decade,” Schmidt told me. “Every time we do a study, it raises new questions. And so it’s a complex picture that takes time to tease apart.” Designing and completing strong studies of any of these factors is challenging and costly. If the federal government did want to put its resources toward finding the causes of autism, Kennedy would do well to increase funding for large, national studies that follow people for years.

The latest MAHA plan does say that the National Institutes of Health, along with other agencies, will develop a way to evaluate “cumulative exposure,” or the impact of the cocktail of chemicals Americans are regularly interacting with—including pesticides. It does not say how that research will be funded or which of the tens of thousands of in-use chemicals the agencies would focus on.

Since taking office, Kennedy has mostly avoided even rhetorically linking specific environmental exposures to health concerns. An earlier MAHA report had more to say on pesticides, but The New York Times and Politico reported that Republican lawmakers as well as the farm lobby expressed concern about its potential impact on farmers. At a Senate hearing, Kennedy said that there are “a million farmers who rely on glyphosate” and told lawmakers that “we are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model.” At a Heritage Foundation event last month, Kennedy’s senior adviser, Calley Means, said on a panel that corn and soybean farmers are not the “enemy,” but rather that the “deep state” is. (Corn and soy are two of the most heavily sprayed crops.) In response to a request for comment, HHS pointed me to last week’s MAHA plan, as well as the EPA’s work to evaluate environmental risks while phasing out animal testing.

This shift has raised the ire of some of Kennedy’s most ardent fans. Zen Honeycutt, the founder of the advocacy group Moms Across America who has been a major Kennedy supporter, said shortly after the MAHA plan was unveiled last week that her vote for the Republican Party is not guaranteed: “We will be actively campaigning to get people into office coming in the midterms that will protect our children, and we are not beholden to political parties.” In a statement later that day, she said that eliminating specific mentions of glyphosate and atrazine, another widely used pesticide that appeared in the first report and has concerning health implications, is “a tactic to appease the pesticide companies.”

Some of Kennedy’s defenders rightly point out that he is not in charge of the EPA, which regulates pesticides, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees farming policies. Even if he cannot regulate pesticides himself, he is in charge of the National Institutes of Health, “and the NIH can study the causes of the effects of these chemicals on Americans. Those studies can drive the marketplace and policy change,” Vani Hari, a food activist, MAHA influencer, and vocal supporter of Kennedy, told me. (In particular, she wants to see the United States, as some other countries have, eliminate the practice of spraying glyphosate on crop fields right before harvest, which farmers do to dry out the crops.) Kennedy understands the threat these chemicals pose, she told me: “When there is an opportunity to add influence, he will. He’s not afraid to speak up.”

I asked whether she would be disappointed if the forthcoming autism report doesn’t mention pesticides and instead focuses on Tylenol and folate deficiencies. She told me she doubted that the autism report would overlook pesticides. “I don’t see that even happening,” she said. Yet in his few months in office, Kennedy has had many chances to let science guide him and has let them pass—on the health benefits of seed oils, the safety of abortion pills, children’s mental-health screening, and, most notably, vaccine policy. This may be one more.

Goodbye, FEMA. Hello, Disaster Consultants.

2025-09-03T12:36:53-04:00

Updated at 3:40 p.m. on September 5, 2025

Derrick Hiebert had planned to stick it out at FEMA. He was an assistant administrator working on hazard mitigation—he specialized in getting communities prepared for disasters—and like many emergency-management experts I’ve spoken with, he thinks that the American approach to administering disasters needed an overhaul, even a radical one. The systems had gotten “clunky over time,” he said. Something needed to change. So Hiebert was open to seeing how President Donald Trump might change it.

Then the Trump administration canceled a major grant-making program that helped states and towns build infrastructure to weather future storms and fires—a core mission of Hiebert’s department. (Last month, a judge temporarily blocked the administration from reallocating its funds.) Some FEMA leaders had been fired, and contract renewals for a substantial number of his on-the-ground employees were in jeopardy. Doing his job would only get harder, if not impossible, he thought. Hiebert also found out his wife was expecting twins. They already had two children, and suddenly the risk that his own role or perhaps his whole agency could be erased at any time looked more personally threatening. “If something happened and I were fired, with twins we would be destitute,” he told me. He left FEMA in June and took a job in disaster contracting, at AECOM, a main player in the sector.

The AECOM job paid better, Hiebert told me, but more attractive was its security. Whatever FEMA’s exact fate under Trump, disasters will still happen. Since many states lack their own cadre of emergency-management expertise or manpower, they will likely pay private contractors to step in where the federal government has stepped out. And many will be staffed by former federal employees.

Right now, the federal government’s expertise in disasters is essentially transferring to private companies. Hiebert estimates that between one-third and one-half of his colleagues in FEMA hazard-mitigation leadership have taken private-sector jobs, or will soon. Marion McFadden, who oversaw disaster grants at the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Biden administration, told me that many of the HUD executives she worked with are moving to the private sector. She herself is now a vice president at the emergency-management contractor IEM, and knows of multiple contractors who have been preparing for an influx of business by hiring disaster-readiness corps. These would be “the exact same people who formerly worked directly for FEMA,” she said.

The path from government emergency management to disaster consulting is well trod: Former FEMA administrators and state emergency-management heads have gone on to lead consulting firms, and companies such as AECOM and IEM stock their ranks with former government employees. But the disaster managers and experts I spoke with said the current exodus from the public to the private sector is unique in its scope. “It’s a period like I’ve never seen before in the opportunity to hire experienced folks,” Bryan Koon, the CEO of IEM, told me.

The Trump administration says its aim in shrinking or possibly dissolving FEMA is to push more responsibility for disasters onto the states. This strategy is an inversion of what led President Jimmy Carter to create the agency in 1979: Governors, frustrated by the lack of a coordinating agency for disasters, requested it. Having 50 state agencies ready to respond to relatively rare catastrophes is inefficient; a federal disaster agency would have the advantages of standardized protocols, experience, and staff who can be deployed where needed. Now they may be largely on their own again. And most states, lacking their own cadre of expertise or manpower, will need support to fill in the gaps left by the federal government. States might lean on each other more than they already do, but they will surely also turn more to private contractors, many of which will now be staffed by former federal employees.

Private contractors already play a significant role in disaster recovery. A storm victim arriving at a disaster-recovery center might speak with a private consultant working alongside federal, state, or nonprofit personnel. Contractors are regularly hired to clear debris, do welfare checks, and complete damage assessments. Sometimes FEMA hires contractors directly, but states and cities hire them too—often to help make sense of the labyrinthine financial-assistance process for disasters.

This, many experts both in and outside of government agree, is part of the problem that needs fixing. Grants for recovery come from “30 different federal-government agencies that fund 91 different recovery programs,” Brock Long, a former head of FEMA under the first Trump administration, told me. Long works in private disaster contracting now too, as the executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, and he said that, after getting billions of dollars promised by the federal government, “most local leaders look like deer in a headlights”—they “have no idea what they’re entitled to, how to seek the money, or use it within all of the rules and stipulations.” That’s where firms like his come in. The grant process also often involves lawyers, and years-long fights in which states try to recoup disaster funds from the feds. “Right now it takes a team of lawyers to get a claim through. That’s why I have a job. It’s insane,” Danielle Aymond, a lawyer at the firm Baker Donelson and former executive counsel for Louisiana’s emergency-management office, told me.

Fundamentally, the disaster consultants I spoke with felt that they were helping people at some of their worst moments. They tended to view their private-sector work as akin to the work they did in government: “A lot of us still see ourselves as public servants,” Hiebert said.

Still, for-profit companies can come with their own complications. Horne LLP, a consulting company that has worked on disaster recovery in a number of southern states, recently paid $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit in which federal prosecutors alleged that the company falsified applicant information and filed fake invoices while working for the federal government. (The company denied wrongdoing and settled.) Federal-government auditors eventually found that, in Texas, after Hurricanes Dolly and Ike, disaster consultants were charging exorbitant rates for their services. In Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, the government spent nearly $9 billion on contracts later understood to be plagued by “waste, fraud, mismanagement, or abuse.”

Already, finding out what governments do with the money they get for disaster response is difficult, Madison Sloan, a lawyer who directs a disaster-recovery project at Texas Appleseed, an advocacy organization, told me; she worries that adding in more contractors would make tracking spending impossible. Plus, unshackled from federal civil-rights obligations, states may not work as hard to distribute assistance equitably, DeeDee Bennett Gayle, the chair of the University at Albany’s emergency-management department, told me. “The challenges that existed before will likely increase.” The Trump administration has done away, for example, with civil rights and fair-housing obligations previously required for recipients of post-disaster housing grants from a major HUD program. In the absence of such restrictions, “some states are going to create rules that unfairly treat certain groups,” Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Urban Institute, told me. And however good their intentions, contractors will be working for the state. “They don’t have a public-good mission. They’re doing the work that they’re contracted for,” he said.

Many emergency-management experts do agree that more of the burden of disaster risk needs to shift back onto states; FEMA, as it stands now, is trying to do too much. How exactly the Trump administration will reform the agency is still unclear: Trump has said he will end FEMA, but his administration also recently announced it is getting the agency “back on track.” Its employees and former administrators beg to differ: Last week, just before the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, almost 200 FEMA employees signed a letter warning Congress that the agency was at risk of another failure on the same order. Jennifer Forester, a FEMA employee who signed her name to the letter and was, along with her fellow signatories, subsequently put on leave, told me that, although private companies are part of the mix of disaster response, they are no replacement for government, which “is not and should not be motivated by meeting a bottom line,” she said. The president’s FEMA-review council is supposed to make recommendations about the agency’s fate by November. “FEMA’s outsized role created a bloated bureaucracy that disincentivized state investment in their own resilience,” the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in a statement; the review council’s recommendations would help ensure the agency’s work “remains supplemental and appropriate to the scale of disaster.” A FEMA spokesperson said in a statement that the council would “strengthen how assistance is delivered.”

One very real possibility is that the country will simply spend less on disaster preparation and recovery in the years to come. Koon, the IEM executive, is hiring some departing FEMA folks, but told me uncertainty over how or whether the Trump administration will fund states’ disaster recoveries has kept him from hiring more. Disasters will keep getting worse and more frequent, “so there’s plenty of work that will need to be done,” he said. But without FEMA and other federal agencies to step in when their budgets fall short, state and local leaders will ask themselves whether they can afford to or whether they wish to offer the full suite of disaster work that the federal government once did. Financial assistance, housing assistance, and disaster-care management may shrink, Koon said. So his contracts may too.

At present, most states maintain a rainy-day fund, but few have enough saved to manage a disaster. Small states can be overwhelmed by a disaster that leaves a few million dollars’s worth of damage; Eric Forand, the director of Vermont’s division of emergency management, told me that damage from flooding in 2023 ran to $600 million statewide. Floods have pummeled the state every summer since: This year, flooding in Sutton, home to fewer than 1,000 people, ran to 25 times the town’s annual road budget, he said. The state has pre-disaster agreements with some private contractors but, depending on what happens to FEMA, could need to lean on the private sector more. “We can’t increase and decrease the size of our permanent staff” as disasters come and go, Forand said.

As summer floods increase with climate change, Vermont has been working toward altering its budget so it can manage more of its smaller disasters on its own. But private contracting is expensive, and no matter how the state contorts itself, “there will always be a place for FEMA and the federal government for large disasters,” Forand told me. The cost and personnel demands of a major disaster will always far outstrip Vermont’s capacity to pay for and staff one, as they would outstrip the capacity of many states. Disaster recovery in every state is already a long, hard, imperfect road. If FEMA stops stepping in after catastrophic events, Hiebert told me, “I think you’d see a lot of places that would just never recover.” Disaster contractors will undoubtedly step in more, but only as much as a state can pay.

This story initially reported incorrectly that Horne LLP had been barred from receiving government contracts in West Virginia. In response to Horne's settlement with federal prosecutors, in July 2025, the Purchasing Division of the West Virginia Department of Administration initiated debarment proceedings, which Horne fought. The state withdrew the proceedings on September 4, 2025.

Modern Dentistry Is a Microplastic Minefield

2025-08-25T10:56:51-04:00

If you are like me, you brush your teeth—too vigorously, I’m told—with a plastic rack of plastic bristles. You use your plastic brush to lather a paste pushed from a plastic tube. When you have a cavity, you go to a dentist who might fill the hole with a plastic composite then sand it flush right there in your mouth. Say you grind your teeth at night. Your dentist might prescribe you a fitted piece of cured acrylic to grind into instead, the surface of which eventually gets visibly rough and worn. Perhaps your teeth are not very straight, so you contemplate getting aligners—thin sheets of thermoplastic that would be heated and then molded to the contours of your mouth and that you would need to wear almost constantly. The retainers you’d wear afterward to keep your newly straight teeth in place might also be plastic.

Nearly every part of modern dentistry and orthodontics involves—and is enhanced by—this remarkably useful material. In some cases, it’s part of necessary medical treatments: A cavity must be filled to prevent worse damage, and at least the plastic-glass composite filling your cavity won’t leach mercury, like the silver fillings that were more common for prior generations. But in cases that are purely aesthetic—tooth straightening can fall into this category—the trade-offs may look different.

Although many hands are wrung over the microplastics that pass from our tea bags and carpets and water bottles into our bodies, when it comes to oral health, we welcome plastic intentionally, and sometimes permanently, directly in our mouths. This troubles Adith Venugopal, an orthodontist and a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Otago, New Zealand; he published a letter in a dental journal last year raising concerns about the micro- and nanoplastics that slough off aligners and retainers. A robust body of research links chemical compounds that leak out of plastic to hormone disruption, developmental abnormalities, and cancer, but the effect of the actual fragments of plastic accumulating in our tissues and organs is less clear. Venugopal started researching microplastics in orthodontics after seeing a paper that found patients with micro- and nanoplastics embedded in their artery plaques were more likely to have a heart attack or stroke. Plastic exposure from dentistry or orthodontics, Venugopal thinks, is ethically different than the worries over plastic exposure resulting from consumer choices. “Prescribing it from a medical standpoint, knowing that it would leach out and cause so many millions of particles to be ingested on a yearly basis, is troublesome, isn’t it?” he told me. “I mean, that’s the first thing, to do no harm.”

But what the harm of dental and orthodontic plastics might be is, as of yet, poorly understood. Venugopal’s letter is one in a growing body of statements and studies coming out of those professions that ask if plastic may be harming patients. (“Microplastics: An Orthodontic Concern!” yelped an editorial in the Journal of the World Federation of Orthodontists last year.) So far, few if any papers have looked at the issue in humans, though preliminary studies attempt to replicate aspects of mouths in a lab, by simulating wear and tear from liquid and friction. The Nordic Institute of Dental Materials has been looking into the release of microplastics from night guards. The chief scientific officer of the American Dental Association’s research arm, Ben Wu, said in a statement that the association is “closely monitoring the scientific literature on microplastics” but that “no clinical evidence currently exists showing a meaningful oral or overall health impact from the particles.” The ADA’s best current advice to patients is to monitor their plastic dental devices for cracks, roughness, or breaks, and look into a replacement. Or, Wu suggested, instead of opting for clear plastic aligners, a person could get metal braces or retainers.

The American Association of Orthodontists is taking a more proactive approach. “This is certainly something that is high in our consciousness,” Steven Siegel, the organization’s president, told me. The association recently convened a panel of researchers to look at all of the available studies to date, and has asked its awards committee to put out a call for proposals for new research in this area. It hasn’t taken an official position on microplastics, because the group, like Venugopal and the ADA, considers the available research to be “preliminary,” he said. But it believes microplastics are “an issue that we need to pay close attention to.”

Clear orthodontic aligners have become a particular focus of early research attention, given the nature of their use. “They’re supposed to be worn about 22 hours a day for optimal tooth movement,” Venugopal told me. People typically change theirs out after one or two weeks and continue that cycle for months to years. A group of Italian researchers published a paper in 2023 that found that aligners did indeed leach microplastics after seven days when exposed to artificial saliva in a lab. But Venugopal points out that the lab study couldn’t capture the onslaught of enzymes, teeth gritting, and temperature variation that a real human mouth inflicts. So he and a doctoral student are now conducting what he believes is the first real-world study of how much microplastic leaches into saliva while an actual person is wearing aligners.

There is always the alternative that the ADA pointed to: metal braces. Although these may still use a small amount of plastic adhesive to bond the equipment to the front of a wearer’s teeth, at least the plastic isn’t on the chewing surface. (This doesn’t elide concerns entirely; one paper has tried to characterize the microplastics sloughed off by orthodontic rubber bands. It may be a lot.)

In his own practice, instead of prescribing plastic retainers, which can be removed, Venugopal says he’s intentionally prescribing more fixed-wire retainers for people who would get a similar benefit from either. (Some patients would still benefit more from having thermoplastic molded ones, he said. But for those who could go either way, they’re getting metal.) “So, yes, it is affecting me as a clinician as well,” he said. If a patient were to ask him about microplastics, he would tell them what research has shown (that microplastics leak from objects such as aligners) and what it hasn’t (whether the leakage from an aligner or retainer alone poses a significant danger). “Without being informed about that, I don’t want to scare patients,” he said. Each of his patients—like everyone—is already inhaling, drinking, and eating microplastics just by living in the world.

The only way to get us out of the dental-plastic loop will be to develop different materials. A plastic-bristled toothbrush may add approximately 30 to 120 microparticles of plastic to your diet with each brushing, according to one study. Another put the estimate at an average of 39 particles a day. Either calculation suggests that a plastic toothbrush adds tens of thousands of particles to one’s yearly load of microplastics, which is significant when considering that estimates of microplastic exposure from food, air, and water put a person’s yearly particle load at more than 100,000. Nonplastic toothbrush options exist, but they’re hardly mainstream. Most dental floss is plastic, too—alternatives, such as silk floss, are mostly a health-food-store find.

Conversely, not brushing your teeth would be a dental disaster, and no one should choose not to fill a cavity. The downside of an untreated cavity almost certainly far exceeds any hypothetical harm from additional microplastic exposure. “I was at a dental meeting a couple of months back, and I bit down and I fractured two molars, old fillings,” Siegel said. “And I went to my friend who’s an excellent dentist. I didn’t hesitate to have composite restorations with the materials that we use. I put it in that context: I think that the release, if any, of some of the compounds and microplastics is probably relatively minimal.”

The same goes for mouth guards: Siegel said he wasn’t aware of any material that could take the place of my acrylic set prescribed for tooth grinding. “Whether it’s crossing the street or having a medical procedure, one always looks at the risks and benefits,” Siegel told me. “I try and limit microplastic exposure in my own life. I try not to reheat things in plastic containers. I limit processed-food intake, things like that.” But, he said, when it comes to the health of your mouth, you want to ask yourself: Do the benefits of protecting your teeth and jaw outweigh the potential risks of adding to your microplastic dose? “For me personally, if I ground my teeth, I would wear a night guard,” he said. That was a sensible assessment, I thought, even if—for now—we don’t really have the information to base that decision on. Still, I got his point. I’ll pull mine out of storage tonight.

America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy

2025-08-08T10:26:43-04:00

Updated at 9:56 p.m. ET on August 8, 2025

Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so—by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels—may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.” In other words, curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.

A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite picture of legal responsibility. It announced a plan to rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, from 2009, says quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and qualify as harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This finding is the legal basis for power-plant rules, tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the executive branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and methane. And the U.S. EPA would now like to throw it out.

The United States and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” in terms of legal understanding of climate responsibility, the human-rights attorney Lotte Leicht, who works as the advocacy director of the nonprofit Climate Rights International, told me. “I think almost nothing could have painted a starker picture,” Nikki Reisch, an attorney and the Climate and Energy Program director at the Center for International Environmental Law, agrees.

The ICJ opinion was the first time the world court has expressly addressed climate obligations under international law, and it did so with unusual clarity. It removed what Leicht described to me as a legal fog that the world has existed in for decades by rebuking two of the main arguments that high-emitting countries and companies have made to avoid liability. The first is that the climate crisis is simply too big and complex to attribute to any particular entity, rendering individual accountability impractical and unfair. “The court made clear that that is not an excuse that holds up anymore,” Leicht said. Thanks in part to attribution science, a particular country or company’s contribution to the climate crisis can be assessed, and the fact that many entities are at fault is not an excuse to evade individual liability.

The second argument—that only special climate accords, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, could dictate their climate obligations, and that even then those pacts were by and large voluntary—was also struck down. In its opinion, the court wrote that climate action is not, in fact, voluntary at all: Instead, because climate change threatens lives, degrades health, and deprives people of their home, both domestically and across borders, climate agreements are legally binding, and states can be sued for failure to uphold them.

In fact, according to the court, even if a state is not party to a climate treaty, or if a treaty agreement is too weak to prevent the climate harm that country is enacting, that state is still legally liable, thanks to customary law—well-established fundamental legal principles that all countries must comply with, such as the general duty to protect basic human rights.

An advisory opinion such as this one is not in itself legally binding. But the international laws it is meant to interpret are. In some countries, including the Netherlands and Kenya, international law is incorporated into domestic law at the point of ratification. In others, it can take precedence over domestic law; elsewhere, it may become domestic law through an act of legislature. Reisch told me that she expects this opinion to be used to support climate lawsuits against countries and companies going forward, and to justify new legislation in statehouses and local governments. Leicht, who is also the chair of the Council of the European Center for Constitutional Human Rights, told me the opinion would figure in one of the organization’s cases: It is representing four residents of Pari, a tiny Indonesian island, who are suing Holcim, a major Swiss cement company, arguing that its outsize share of greenhouse gases is contributing to Pari’s disappearance.

The U.S., famously, does not make much of international laws. In prior international climate negotiations, America has tried to minimize its responsibility as the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases. Margaret Taylor, the U.S. legal adviser to the State Department under Joe Biden, presented commentary at the ICJ in December in which she argued that current human-rights laws do not provide for a right to a healthy environment, nor should countries be financially responsible for past emissions, both of which the ICJ ultimately disagreed with in this new opinion. The State Department has said it’s reviewing the opinion; whether or not the country acts on it, it does open the U.S. to new climate lawsuits and will strengthen those already under way, including two separate suits brought by youth in Montana and California, arguing that the Trump administration’s actions on the environment threaten their rights. (The State Department did not reply to a request for comment.)

The Trump administration, meanwhile, seems ready to simply ignore, if not outright reject, any responsibility the U.S. might have for climate change. Its intent to roll back the endangerment finding is at odds with recent domestic legal opinion. After the EPA announced its intentions, various legal experts spoke, almost in chorus, about the slim chance this plan had of making it through the likely court challenges. Jonathan Adler, a conservative legal scholar and professor at William and Mary Law School, said in a column that he agreed with it on policy grounds but called the move legally “foolish”—the Bush administration tried a similar strategy in 2007, only to have the Supreme Court affirm that greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants. The EPA, in an emailed response to questions, acknowledged the 2007 decision, but noted that it “did not require EPA to make an endangerment finding and did not review the logic or conclusions of the 2009 Endangerment Finding because it hadn’t been issued yet.” It also added, hopefully, that there have been two more recent decisions in which the Supreme Court pulled back aspects of the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases.

By attempting to abdicate any legal responsibility to provide for a healthy environment, the U.S. is running in the opposite direction as the global legal community. Last month, prior to the release of the ICJ opinion, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights also declared that the climate crisis qualifies as a human-rights violation, triggering rights-based obligations for countries and companies in that region. And last year, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea issued an advisory opinion qualifying greenhouse gases as marine pollution, triggering similar legal obligations for countries to mitigate them. This trend, Leicht reminded me, will likely outlive the current American political moment.

I found myself struck by the clarity of the final paragraph in the ICJ’s opinion, which reminds lawyers that climate change is bigger even than the law. “A complete solution to this daunting, and self-inflicted, problem requires the contribution of all fields of human knowledge, whether law, science, economics or any other,” the court wrote. “Above all, a lasting and satisfactory solution requires human will and wisdom—at the individual, social and political levels—to change our habits, comforts and current way of life in order to secure a future for ourselves and those who are yet to come.”

Indeed, rights apply not just to the people who exist now, but to future generations. As the U.S.’s climate liability comes into sharper focus, so does the fact of its growing burden on that group. The question is how long the country will disavow that charge.

This article originally stated that Lotte Leicht, the chair of the Council of the European Center for Constitutional Human Rights, was one of the lawyers litigating the case on behalf of Pari, the Indonesian island. She is not, although others at the organization are.

The Sea Slug Defying Biological Orthodoxy

2025-07-23T09:00:00-04:00

This week, a friend sent me our horoscope—we’re both Gemini—from Seven Days, a beloved Vermont weekly, because, improbably, it was about the sea slug I’d been telling her about just days before.

“The sea slug Elysia chlorotica is a small, unassuming creature that performs a remarkable feat: It eats algae and steals its chloroplasts, then incorporates them into its own body,” the horoscope explained. Years ago I had incorporated this fact into my own view of the world, and it had changed my understanding of the rules of biology.

This particular slug starts life a brownish color with a few red dots. Then it begins to eat from the hairlike strands of the green algae Vaucheria litorea: It uses specialized teeth to puncture the alga’s wall, and then it slurps out its cells like one might slurp bubble tea, each bright-green cellular boba moving up the algal straw. The next part remains partially unexplained by science. The slug digests the rest of the cell but keeps the chloroplasts—the plant organelles responsible for photosynthesis—and distributes these green orbs through its branched gut. Somehow, the slug is able to run the chloroplasts itself and, after sucking up enough of them, turns a brilliant green. It appears to get all the food it needs for the rest of its life by way of photosynthesis, transforming light, water, and air into sugar, like a leaf.

The horoscope took this all as a metaphor: Something I’d “absorbed from another” is “integrating into your deeper systems,” it advised. “This isn’t theft, but creative borrowing.” And in that single line, the horoscope writer managed to explain symbiosis—not a metaphor at all, but an evolutionary mechanism that may be more prevalent across biology than once thought.

Elysia chlorotica is a bewitching example of symbiosis. It is flat, heart-shaped, and pointed at the tail, and angles itself toward the sun. Its broad surface is grooved by a web of veins, like a leaf’s is. Ignore its goatish head, and you might assume this slug was a leaf, if a particularly gelatinous one. Sidney Pierce, a marine biologist retired from the University of South Florida, remembers his surprise when a grad student brought a specimen into his office in the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, more than two decades ago. Photosynthesis requires specialized equipment and chemistry, which animals simply do not have—“yet here was an animal that’s figured out how to do it,” he told me. He spent the next 20-odd years trying to find the mechanism. “Unfortunately, I didn’t get all the way to the end,” he said.

No one has, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu has written. The algae and the slug may have managed some kind of gene transfer, and over time, produced a new way of living, thanks not to slow, stepwise evolution—the random mutation within a body—but by the wholesale transfer of a piece of code. A biological skill leaked out of one creature into another.

All of us are likely leakier than we might assume. After all, every cell with a nucleus, meaning all animal and plant cells, has a multigenetic heritage. Mitochondria—the organelles in our cells responsible for generating energy—are likely the product of an ancient symbiosis with a distant ancestor and a microbe, and have their own separate DNA. So we are walking around with the genetic material of some other ancient life form suffused into every cell. And the earliest ancestor of all plants was likely the product of a fusion between a microbe and a cyanobacterium; plants’ photosynthesizing organelles, too, have distinct DNA. Lynn Margulis, the biologist who made the modern case for this idea, was doubted for years until new genetic techniques proved her correct.

Her conviction about the symbiotic origins of mitochondria and chloroplasts was a monumental contribution to cell biology. But Margulis took her theory further; in her view, symbiosis was the driving force of evolution, and many entities were likely composites. Evolution, then, could be traced not only through random mutation, but by combination. “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing one another,” she wrote, with her son, in 1986. This remains pure conjecture, and an exaggeration of the role of symbiosis beyond what mainstream evolutionary theory would support; random mutation is still considered the main driver of speciation.

Yet more scientists now wonder if symbiosis may have played a larger role in the heritage of many species than we presently understand. Phillip Cleves, a geneticist at the Carnegie Institution for Science who studies the symbiotic relationship between corals and their algae symbionts, told me how, as an undergraduate, he was blown away by the fact that corals’ alliance with algae made possible ecosystems—coral reefs—that support a quarter of all known marine life. The algae cells live, whole, inside coral cells, and photosynthesize as normal, sustaining the coral in nutrient-poor tropical waters. “I realize now that that type of interaction between organisms is pervasive across the tree of life,” he said.

It’s probable that the ancestors of all eukaryotes were more influenced by bacteria in their environments than modern evolutionary theory has accounted for. “All animals and plants likely require interactions with microbes, often in strong, persistent symbiotic associations,” Margaret McFall-Ngai, a leading researcher of the role of microbes in animal development, wrote in 2024. These interactions, she argued, are so fundamental to life that the animal immune system should perhaps be thought of as a sort of management system for our many microbial symbionts. Although biology has been slow to recognize symbiosis’s significance, she thinks this line of research should now take center stage, and could alter how all stripes of biologists think about their work.

Cleves, too, sees himself as working to build a new field of science, by training people on how to ask genetic questions about symbiotic relationships in nature: When I called him, he was preparing to teach a four-week course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole on exactly that. Genomic research has only relatively recently been cheap enough to apply it routinely and broadly to all sorts of creatures, but now scientists can more easily ask: How do animals’ interactions with microbes shape the evolution of individual species? And how does that change dynamics in an ecosystem more broadly?

Elysia chlorotica is also a lesson in how easily the boundaries between an organism and its environment can be traversed. “Every time an organism eats, a whole wad of DNA from whatever it’s eating passes through the animal. So DNA gets transferred all the time from species to species,” Pierce told me. Most times it doesn’t stick, but on the rare occasions when it does, it can reroute the fate of a species. “I think it happens more than it’s recognized, but a lot of times it’s hard to recognize because you don’t know what you’re looking for. But in these slugs, it’s pretty obvious,” he said. They’re bright green.

Patrick J. Krug

Still, attempts to understand what is happening inside Elysia chlorotica have mostly fallen short. Scientists such as Pierce presume that, over time, elements of the algal genome have been transferred to the slug, allowing it to run photosynthesis, yet they have struggled to find evidence. “It’s very hard to find a gene if you don’t know what you’re looking for,” Pierce said—plus, slug DNA is too muddled to parse a lot of the time. Slugs are full of mucus, which can ruin samples, and because the chloroplasts are embedded inside the slug cells, many samples of slug DNA end up picking up chloroplast DNA too. After years of trying, and at least one false start by a different lab, Pierce and his colleagues did manage to find a gene in the slug that was involved with chloroplast repair, hinting that a genetic transfer had occurred, and offering a clue as to how the animal manages to keep the plant organelles alive.

But another research team showed that related species of photosynthesizing slugs can survive for months deprived of sunlight and actual food: They may simply be hardy. Why, then, if not to make nutrients, might the slugs be photosynthesizing? Perhaps for camouflage. Or perhaps they’re stashing chloroplasts, which themselves contain useful fats and proteins, as food reserves. (Pierce, for one, is skeptical of those explanations.)

Whatever benefit Elysia chlorotica derives from the chloroplasts, there couldn’t be a leakier creature. It crosses the divide between plant and animal, one species and another, and individual and environment. I first read about the slug in a book titled Organism and Environment by Sonia Sultan, an evolutionary ecologist at Wesleyan University, in which she forwards the argument that we should be paying more attention to how the environment influences the way creatures develop, and how those changes are passed generationally, ultimately influencing the trajectory of species.

While Elysia chlorotica is an extreme example of this, a version of it happens to us, and our bodies, all the time. Encounters with the bacteria around us reshape our microbiomes, which in turn affect many aspects of our health. Encounters with pollution can reroute the trajectory of our health and even, in some cases, the health of our offspring. Researchers think access to healthy foods—a factor of our environments—can modify how our genes are expressed, improving our lives in ways that scientists are just beginning to understand. We are constantly taking our environment in, and it is constantly transforming us.

The Trump Administration Is Violating the First Rule of Disasters

2025-07-15T07:24:20-04:00

In the days since the Texas flash-flood disaster, the Department of Homeland Security has had a stock response to questions about delays in the federal government’s response, or about a recent rule requiring DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to personally approve FEMA expenditures over $100,000, including rescue teams. The response goes, over and over, like this: “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens … The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

The Trump administration has been using this line for more than a month now, in response to criticism of its plans to remake, or perhaps disband, FEMA. And many people who study emergency response agree that, to some degree, the agency needs reform. Yet now the administration’s press to quickly strip down the agency is being tested against a devastating disaster for the first time. And it is violating a basic precept of emergency management: Be prepared.

In any disaster, responding quickly can help save people and salve the harm. Protocols should be well known and well practiced before an event. An active disaster that killed more than 130 people, with more than 160 still missing, is not the occasion to switch up the norms. “This is exactly what many of us are concerned about,” Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Urban Institute, told me. However much FEMA might benefit from change, remaking it in an ad hoc fashion will just result in more devastation, he said: “In the context of a really complicated emergency where lots of people’s lives are at stake—that’s just not where you want to see experimentation happening.”

[Read: The problem with ‘move to higher ground’]

And FEMA’s response to the Texas flash-flood disaster has not been business as usual. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of urban-search-and-rescue teams—deployed in the past within hours during similar events—until more than 72 hours after the flooding had begun, per CNN reporting. The agency failed to answer thousands of calls from flood survivors after allowing contracts for call-center workers to lapse one day after the disaster, according to The New York Times. FEMA had fewer than 100 people on the ground in Texas within four days of the disaster, and 311 by day five; within a week of Hurricane Helene, during what Donald Trump deemed a failed response to the flooding, FEMA deployed 1,500.

The situation on the ground in these immediate post-event moments can create a fog-of-war atmosphere, and no complete assessment of the federal government’s reaction will be possible until later. “Like with any really catastrophic event, it’s hard to understand what’s happening at a micro level,” Rumbach said. Several non-FEMA rescue teams from other states and Mexico traveled to Texas to help, supplementing Texas’s own robust emergency-response apparatus. But each of the other state teams waited on FEMA to call them up, as is protocol; FEMA didn’t begin to activate any of them until last Monday, according to CNN. No missing person has been found alive since last Friday. “It’s clear that the initial response was much smaller and more measured than you would expect from FEMA,” Rumbach said. “It’s different from what you would expect a year ago, in terms of the number of personnel and the speed of response.” And FEMA is simply operating with fewer resources: About a quarter of the agency’s staff has left since Trump took office in January, according to the Times. Due to vacancies, there is currently no FEMA regional administrator in any state along the Gulf Coast, just deputies.

Right now, rather than “lean” and “deployable,” it might be more appropriate to describe FEMA as “starved and hobbled.” But ostensibly, a FEMA-review council assembled by the Trump administration is meant to offer a plan to overhaul the agency. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who praised the Trump administration’s response to the flooding as “swift and very robust,” sits on that council. At a gathering of the council on the Wednesday after the floods (at which Abbott was absent), Noem reiterated her desire to see FEMA “eliminated as it existed” and “remade.” The council’s recommendations are due in November.

The administration does seem to understand that its plans to rapidly remake FEMA have real drawbacks. Noem has retained FEMA employees who looked like they’d be let go; Trump said last month that he intends to phase out FEMA only after this hurricane season. But reporting in recent days suggests that the administration is softening its tone on FEMA even further, at least for the moment. The Washington Post reports that the promised dissolution may in fact look more like a “rebranding.” Reality sets in fast in a disaster.

The Problem With ‘Move to Higher Ground’

2025-07-08T17:17:46-04:00

Before the waters of Texas’s Guadalupe River rose more than 33 feet over the course of five hours, the National Weather Service sent out a series of alerts. The first one that included Kerr County, where most of the fatalities would ultimately take place, warned of “considerable” flood threat and went out just after 1 a.m. on July 4. It triggered push alerts on people’s phones. It set off alarms on any weather radio tuned to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s frequency. More alerts from the weather agency would follow.

But in a situation like this, weather alerts are not enough: Evacuation orders and other instructions mostly come from local governments. But the Kerrville Police Department posted its first evacuation order to social media just after 5 a.m., hours after the warnings from NWS began, and Kerr County and Kerrville posted theirs even later, according to a KXAN investigation.

“Move to higher ground now,” the police department said. “Be safe and move to higher ground,” said the county. The water had risen catastrophically by then.

The swiftness of the oncoming danger meant that even the fastest municipal response would have met major challenges. But what’s clear is that the alerting system failed many people—whether because they had spotty service, weren’t checking social media, had “alert fatigue” in an area where flash-flood alerts are common, or were vacationers unsure of where higher ground might be. Kerr County had considered installing a system of sirens along the river years earlier, but the project had been passed over because of cost. In the end, very little in the way of a meaningful warning system was in place for the area, and many who needed to evacuate didn’t. The death toll from the flooding now exceeds 100. (Kerr County and Kerrville officials did not return a request for comment at the time of publication.)

This Texas tragedy is unique in its details and devastation. But cellphone alerts and emergency warnings more broadly keep failing people in high-profile ways: During the Los Angeles fires earlier this year, a software issue resulted in evacuation orders being sent to millions of people who didn’t need to evacuate. (My colleague in Los Angeles County received 11 evacuation push alerts to her phone, likely all of them sent in error.) In Maui, during the catastrophic Lahaina fires, the authorities sent out evacuation orders over the wireless emergency-alert network, which is meant to reach everyone’s cellphones—but some residents said they’d never received the orders, delaying their evacuation until the last minute or leaving them in harm’s way.

These are failures of technology—messages sent but not received, or messages received by the wrong people. But they are also errors in human judgment, reflecting gaps in training. Before any alert goes out, someone has to write one, then decide how and when to send it. A lot can go wrong there, and often does.

In Texas, the National Weather Service has defended its forecasts, and meteorologists agree that it accurately predicted the risks. Staffing didn’t appear to be an issue, despite the cuts, buyouts, and early retirements that the Trump administration has pushed at the agency; its Austin/San Antonio forecast office had staffed up in anticipation of a potential storm. But the position of warning-coordination meteorologist there was vacant, along with a science-and-operations-officer post. Both positions are responsible for liaising with local authorities. The warning-coordination meteorologist in particular helps local agencies understand what forecasts mean and when to make evacuation calls. “They’re the connectors,” Jeannette Sutton, a social scientist at the University at Albany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, told me. “Without them, there’s a gap.”

Kerr County appears not to have used its access to the federally administered Wireless Emergency Alerts system—which can send out messages to cellphones—until the afternoon of July 6, when flood risk on the Guadalupe was still present but past its peak. Even then, the message was scant on details. It read: “High confidence of river flooding at North Fork of river. Move to higher ground.”

Writing a good alert message is harder than it might seem, Sutton told me, and many local officials across the country don’t know how. An alert message should include at least three basic elements—the affected location, plain-language instructions on actions to take, and the time by which people should act—yet many lack one or more. Authorities who use the Wireless Emergency Alerts system aren’t required to be credentialed or trained; too often, Sutton said, in the moment of a dire event, facing a blank screen, people in charge of writing the alerts can freeze.

She has trained some 500 local officials on best practices for alerts, but the program’s funding, from FEMA, lapsed in May. She and her colleagues have also developed a “warning lexicon” that governments can use to write clear and actionable warning-message templates in language regular humans can understand. San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, is one of the few governments to have officially adopted that system.

Shruti Dhapodkar, the director of emergency management for San Mateo County, told me that December 5, 2024, was a wake-up call. Her county was suddenly under an active tsunami warning. A major earthquake had struck off the California coast, and across the area, a message from the National Tsunami Warning Center popped up on people’s phones. Then things started to devolve: About 30 minutes later, San Mateo County mistakenly sent out a message on social media that said the warning had been canceled. But it hadn’t; the cancellation applied only to Hawaii. Officials issued a corrective, sowing confusion. Even the correct message was difficult to understand: Its directive to “move to high ground” was functionally meaningless to people who didn’t know how high their property was or where higher ground would be. Some local governments, including San Mateo County, decided not to sound their tsunami sirens. Some, like Berkeley, issued mandatory evacuation orders; others didn’t.

Within about an hour, the National Weather Service determined that the danger had passed. But if this had been a dress rehearsal for the Big One, the Bay Area’s crisis plans had flopped.

Since then, San Mateo’s emergency-management department has worked to coordinate across the 32 local agencies that have power to send emergency alerts; the next time a potential disaster strikes, they will all have a unified voice, Dhapodkar said, to cut down on conflicting information and the resulting erosion of trust. When residents look to a second or third agency for confirmation of any instructions they received, they’ll get it immediately. Alert templates are now pre-written for several scenarios, in clear, jargon-free language. And the county has built a website to show if an address counts as “high ground,” and is teaching residents to use it.

In a disaster, people need to hear in multiple ways that they’re in real danger, and that requires thinking beyond cellphone alerts and social media. “The more opportunities you have to receive a message, the more likely you are to receive it and act on it,” Mary Jo Flynn-Nevins, the chief of emergency services for Sacramento County, told me—so putting a community’s entire messaging effort into a single technology is “just increasing the odds of failure.” In rural parts of Sacramento County, her department has implemented a landline-alerting system too, and people from the sheriff’s department can drive around announcing emergency messages through loudspeakers. Drones with speakers can alert people from the air.

But none of this guarantees that the county will reach every last person. Emergency management “really requires people to understand their basic risks and believe that they’re at risk,” Flynn-Nevins said. She thinks everyone should have a weather radio, the kind enabled to receive NOAA weather alerts. They don’t rely on the power grid, and if the National Weather Service issues a warning in the middle of the night, it will wake you up with a loud tone. People are naturally complacent in assuming that important information will come to them, Dhapodkar said, but simply paying attention to the weather forecast and considering how you’d deal with an impending risk goes a long way toward keeping out of danger. As the planet warms and the frequency and intensity of several kinds of weather disasters in the United States climb up, and as the Trump administration indicates that it will pull more resources from the federal safety apparatus, the onus of emergency preparedness will grow only more local, down to each of us.

Hurricane Science Was Great While It Lasted

2025-07-02T12:18:55-04:00

Clouds are the bane of a hurricane forecaster’s existence. Or they were, until about 20 years ago, when forecasters got access to a technology that Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona, told me to think of as cloud X-ray vision: It cuts through the cloud top to help generate a high-resolution, three-dimensional image of what’s happening below.

Known as the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder, or SSMIS, it rides on a series of satellites and allows forecasters to see a storm’s structure, which might otherwise be invisible. The Hurricane Hunter planes that fly into storms can also be used to generate three-dimensional storm images, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is responsible for hurricane forecasting, has only two of those aircraft. They can’t be everywhere at once. With the SSMIS, forecasters had an autonomous, powerful eye in the sky. But now the Department of Defense says it will cease processing and distributing the crucial imagery from this sensor at the end of this month. Losing these views threatens the National Hurricane Center’s ability to see what’s forming, Wood told me.

For years, the National Hurricane Center has been improving the accuracy of its forecasts, and one short year ago, the United States was better at predicting storms’ tracks than it had ever been. But the Trump administration has been cutting the forecasting staff and budgets. And now these satellite data will be missing too. The U.S. is rapidly losing state-of-the-art hurricane forecasting, just in time for hurricane season’s busiest months.

The data were nice while we had them. After all, no one likes a surprise hurricane. When the sun goes down, convective storms over open ocean often grow stronger, juiced by the changing temperature dynamics. But that’s also when types of storm surveillance that rely on what’s visible are least able to determine what’s going on. Infrared imaging can see in the dark, but the picture is typically low-resolution and grainy, and can obscure key shapes. When the sun comes up, forecasters can suddenly be looking at a fully formed storm eye. Forecasters dread the “sunrise surprise,” which is exactly the sort of thing that the microwave imagery from SSMIS is most helpful in preventing. It gives a clearer picture, even through clouds, and even in the dark.

Plus, the technology is vital to picking up on telltale signs of rapid intensification, a phenomenon that has become more common in recent years, most notably with Hurricane Otis in 2023 and Hurricane Milton in 2024. Storms that intensify faster and reach higher peak intensities just before hitting land are a nightmare for forecasting, and climate scientists worry they will become only more common as the planet warms. Research suggests that certain signature formations in a storm could indicate that it may intensify rapidly, Andrew Hazelton, an associate scientist working in hurricane modeling and research at the University of Miami, told me. Those structures are simply easier to see with the SSMIS images.

A few other satellites can provide microwave imaging. But, as the meteorologist Michael Lowry has pointed out, their instruments either are orbiting more infrequently or are inferior to the one being discontinued. NOAA suggested to Lowry that its Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder instrument would be able to fill the gap, he wrote. But that suggestion is misleading, Hazelton said: The information from that satellite is so low-resolution that the eye of a hurricane looks like just a few pixels instead of a more detailed image. “It’s really hard to pick out details,” he told me—including the aspects of a storm’s structure that may signal that it could rapidly intensify. Plus, having fewer microwave instruments operating in the sky means fewer snapshots of oceans where hurricanes might form. Without SSMIS, the number of microwave-image glimpses that forecasters get over any given spot will be essentially cut in half, Lowry wrote; many more hours could go by without observations when they’re most needed. (I reached out to NOAA for comment, but the agency redirected me to the Department of Defense.)

SSMIS is part of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program; a Navy spokesperson told me the entire satellite program is slated to be discontinued in September 2026. When I asked about previous reports citing cybersecurity concerns as a reason for the closure, the Navy spokesperson responded only that the satellite program is “no longer compliant with Department of the Navy information technology modernization requirements.” In the meantime, the Defense Department will just stop processing and distributing the data it collects. A spokesperson from the U.S. Space Force also told me the satellite system will be replaced by two other satellite systems, the second one of which is slated to be operational in 2027. But that still doesn’t explain why this data stream is being cut off now, more than a year before the satellite program is slated to be decommissioned, Hazelton said. “We need all the microwave data we can get while it’s available.”

These aren’t the only data forecasters have lost, either: Right now, across the U.S., fewer weather balloons are being launched because of staffing shortages at National Weather Service forecasting offices. Balloons offer insights into how the atmosphere is behaving; data picked up on the West Coast are the East Coast’s business, too, as they’ll predict the weather coming just hours in the future. “We want the complete picture of the state of the atmosphere so that we have a way to then estimate the next step,” Wood said. “Upstream information is often just as critical as information right at the point where the storm might be.”

NOAA is losing the experts who can interpret those data, too. And cuts to staff this year already mean that more duties are piled higher on individual people, “which means they may be less able to properly use the data once it comes in,” Wood said. Those cuts extend all the way to the people who work on underlying weather models. Hazelton, for example, was on a team at the National Weather Service where he worked to improve hurricane modeling. In February, he was axed along with some 800 employees who had been recently hired; he’d worked for NOAA as a contract employee for nearly a decade, on Hurricane Hunter missions and improving storm modeling. He was part of the group of fired NOAA employees who were hastily rehired after a judge temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s cuts, and was refired after a subsequent Supreme Court ruling. At the University of Miami, he’s now continuing his work on hurricane models through a federal partnership.

The latest proposed NOAA budget for 2026, released Monday, aims to remove even more workers, along with whole programs. It zeroes out, for instance, the line item for the entire Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office, a network of federal research centers whose work helps develop new techniques and tools for forecasters and improve weather models. If this budget passes, the forecasts of the near future—three, five, 10 years down the line—will suffer too, Hazelton said.

This year has been a miserable cascade of losses for the American hurricane-safety apparatus. Any one of these losses might have been papered over by other parts of the system. But now it’s just losing too many components for that. As James Franklin, the former chief of the National Hurricane Center’s hurricane-specialist unit, put it in a post on Substack, “Resiliency is being stripped away, piece by piece.” What’s easy to see coming now are the possible consequences: at best, a needless evacuation. But just as easily: a rushed evacuation, a surprise landfall, a flattened house.

America’s Coming Smoke Epidemic

2025-06-27T09:02:50-04:00

For 49 straight days, everyone in Seeley Lake was breathing smoke. A wildfire had ignited outside the small rural community in Montana, and the plume of smoke had parked itself over the houses. Air quality plummeted. At several moments, the concentration of particulate matter in the air exceeded the upper limit of what monitors could measure.

Christopher Migliaccio, an associate professor of immunology at the University of Montana, saw an opportunity to do what few have ever done: study what happens after people get exposed to wildfire smoke. He and his team quickly cobbled together funding and drove out to Seeley Lake to get data.

That was in 2017. The researchers followed up with residents for two years after the fires, checking on their lung function. To their surprise, the worst effects didn’t show up immediately, despite the heavy dose of smoke. Instead, people’s lung function seemed to deteriorate later. Right after the fires, about 10 percent of the cohort had lung function that fell below the lower limit of normal. By the one-year mark, about 46 percent did. At the two-year mark, most of those people still had abnormally poor lung function. “We were very surprised,” Migliaccio told me. He and his colleagues had intended to follow the residents for a third year, but then COVID hit. Instead, they tried exposing mice to wildfire smoke in a controlled lab environment. Their results pointed to a similar outcome: The worst effects took time to present.

Migliaccio’s work can speak to only a single smoke event. But it is the type of event that more people in the United States are dealing with, over and over again. Until recently, wildfires that exposed large populations to smoke were a relatively rare occurrence. But that’s changing: More frequent and intense wildfires are erasing or even reversing decades of gains made in American air quality in the majority of U.S. states. Across the country, from 2012 to 2022, the number of people exposed to unhealthy air from wildfire smoke increased 27-fold; one out of every four unhealthy air days in parts of the country is now a smoke day. “It is the exposure that is impacting air quality across the U.S. now more than any other pollution source,” Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington whose work helped show a link between wildfire-smoke exposure and increased risk of dementia, told me.

Yet science—to say nothing of policy—has hardly caught up with what that means for human health. “We’re in the preschool stage of development,” Casey said. What cumulative smoke exposure can do to a body and mind remains largely a mystery, but the few studies that do exist point to nothing good.

Plenty of research shows that respiratory distress and heart attacks spike in the event of smoke exposure; acute impacts of breathing smoke send people to the hospital and make them miss work and school. Those risks can linger for months afterward, or, in the case of the Seeley Lake cohort, for years.

Now that more people are regularly breathing smoky air over their lifetime, though, the relevant concern may no longer be what happens when a person gets one big dose of smoke; rather, it may be what happens when they are exposed many times. How much does anyone know about the long-term consequences of exposure to smoke or, worse, the long-term consequences of long-term exposure to smoke? “Very little,” Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, an environmental engineer and epidemiologist at—as of next week—Brown University, told me.

The best model for assessing wildfire-smoke exposure was developed only recently, Kioumourtzoglou and Casey told me, and, because of satellite imagery and monitoring limitations, goes back to only 2006. That means researchers have at most 20 years of data to look at in determining whether smoke could have contributed to a population’s incidence of a particular illness. Latency periods for plenty of diseases, including some cancers, can be longer. Plus, every fire is its own unique nightmare, chemically speaking. The Seeley Lake fire burned mostly trees. Add to that whole neighborhoods of cars and houses and parking lots, and the toxicity profile of the smoke changes significantly. During the Los Angeles fires in January, which burned down entire neighborhoods, noxious compounds from burning plastics and other man-made materials swirled through the air.

Scientists know a lot about the harms of regular ambient air pollution (such as the particulate matter that spews from tailpipes and factories), but wildfire smoke is chemically different—and likely worse, from a health standpoint. Its complexity is also daunting from a research perspective: Even the types of trees burned appear to affect the smoke’s toxicity. In a lab study, for instance, researchers burned peat, pine needles, and several types of wood to simulate different regional forests. They found that pinewood smoke was the most mutagenic, suggesting that it might be more likely to cause cancer than other woods, and that eucalyptus smoke was the most toxic to lungs. How long the smoke stays in the air may matter too. Some research suggests that smoke becomes more toxic as it ages, which is bad news for people living downwind from smoke—in parts of the U.S. during Canadian wildfires, for instance.

And unlike our relatively steady exposure to ambient air pollution, exposure to wildfire smoke is spiky, coming in bursts, with pauses in between. That makes it hard to model, Kioumourtzoglou told me, and also introduces many questions, each of which needs research attention: Is the health impact worse if a person breathes a very high level of smoke for three days, or if they breathe a lower level for three weeks? How does the point in life at which they are exposed—as an adult with asthma, a child whose lungs were still developing, a fetus in utero—change how the smoke affects them?

Many of the attempts to even start to answer these questions depend on chance and the swift action of researchers like Migliaccio, who seize on the chance to study a fire close at hand. In the summer of 2008, for instance, Lisa Miller, who studies pulmonary immunology and toxicology at UC Davis, was in her office as wildfires sent smoke settling over the region. The air outside her office looked like thick winter fog. She suddenly thought about the rhesus monkeys she studied at the primate research center; they had been outside in their habitat the whole time. These primates were great models for human health, so they became a case study for what happens to a smoke-exposed body.

Miller and her team studied the monkeys for the next 15 years. They found that those that were exposed to wildfire smoke as infants became adolescents with smaller, stiffer lungs than their peers born the following year, which resulted in poorer lung function and worse immune regulation. When the researchers exposed blood samples from both populations of adolescent monkeys to bacterial infection, the samples from the smoke-exposed animals responded more weakly, indicating that their immune system wasn’t working as well. The smoke-exposed monkeys also slept far less, she told me: “It was absolutely stunning.” Some research suggests that smoke can affect humans the same way: In 2022, a large study in China concluded that human children who had been exposed to air pollution early in life also had poorer-quality sleep. High-quality sleep is important to neurodevelopment in children, and poor sleep is associated with a range of negative health consequences across a lifetime.

What we can learn from Miller’s monkeys is limited; they spend 24 hours a day outdoors, unlike humans, and they get constant medical care and perfectly tailored diets, also unlike humans. Still, rhesus monkeys are some of the closest animals to us, physiologically, and on a basic level, smoke exposure in infancy seems to have affected these monkeys’ health for their entire life, Miller said.

Standard air pollution is known to have a negative impact on virtually all aspects of fertility, and for people who wish to conceive children, smoke may pose a hazard too. After wildfires in Oregon prompted an air-quality emergency in Portland in 2020, researchers looked at the sperm quality of 30 people who had their semen analyzed at a fertility clinic before and after the fires. The study was small, but the trend was clear: Motility—how well the sperm swims—went down for most of the participants. A nearly identical study in Seattle, which is still awaiting peer review, yielded a similar result. And Luke Montrose, an environmental toxicologist at Colorado State University, told me that he’s seen similar results in bull sperm: He and his colleagues got records from a cattle-breeding facility in Colorado that tests bull sperm with many of the same metrics used for human sperm at a fertility clinic. Sperm that isn’t up to shape gets discarded by the facility; after a wildfire in the area, more of the cattle sperm got thrown out, Montrose found. Quality must have gone down.

The results on the bull sperm are preliminary and are awaiting peer review. But in the meantime, Montrose is enrolling male firefighters in a study to learn whether their fertility is affected by their job (which forces them to breathe much higher doses of smoke than the general population). When Montrose and his colleagues exposed mice to a very high dose of wood smoke in a lab—simulating what they estimate would be the equivalent of 15 years on the job for a wildland firefighter—the mouse sperm was significantly altered at the epigenomic level, where gene expression is altered without changing the underlying DNA sequence. “Normally, in a study like this, you see a handful of sites being changed,” Montrose told me; he and his colleagues found changes at more than 3,000 different sites, reflecting about 2,000 different genes. Montrose wonders what this far higher level means for the mice’s fertility and for their offspring. Whether these changes are positive or negative, it appears that smoke can alter, on a deep level, the very cells involved in reproduction. “It’s intriguing, but we still don’t quite know what it means,” Montrose said.

If smoke can affect health early in life, it also can affect life’s end. Breathing smoke can cause inflammation, which is a key pathway for many neurological disorders, and research is now turning up associations between smoke and conditions that strike older people, such as Parkinson’s, Casey told me. Smoke also causes premature death: more than 50,000 people in California died prematurely from wildfire smoke between 2008 and 2018, according to one estimate, and more than 11,000 people in the U.S. do so each year, according to another. Climate change is only accelerating those dynamics. As I’ve written before, the National Bureau of Economic Research found last year that in a worst-case warming scenario, deaths from wildfire-smoke exposure in the U.S. could top 27,000 a year by the middle of the century. That is, smoke could kill 700,000 people from now until 2055.

Burning fossil fuels has locked us into a downward spiral: Warmer temperatures mean more fires. Already, summer 2025 is poised to be a fiery one in California, only half a year after fires devastated Los Angeles. Canada has already been burning for weeks, sending smoke billowing down through the U.S. The smoke is coming for us all—each of us is now more likely to encounter it in the coming years.

That terrible reality means that researchers will have more opportunities to understand what smoke does to us. Susan Cheng, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles, is now part of a major multi-institutional study of people exposed to the L.A. fires. As a cardiologist, she’s well aware of the extreme heart risks associated with smoke inhalation. Breathing regular pollution over a long period can accelerate heart disease by prematurely aging blood vessels and accelerating plaque buildup in the coronary artery; at least one recent study found that people’s risk of heart failure and other serious cardiac problems can persist for months after smoke exposure. If that’s any indication, fire smoke is a major heart hazard.

“We really need to be closely tracking and following this,” Cheng told me. “Otherwise, we will be facing a major information gap, and trying to, in hindsight, put the pieces together.” She pictures asking, years down the line, “How did people get this way? How did our patients end up with these accelerated aging processes, accelerated development of these different chronic conditions?” Studies like hers—which began in January and will follow a cohort of more than 13,000 Angelenos for the next 10 years—aim to answer those questions now, before even more of the country starts having to ask them.

Last Call at the Disaster Department

2025-06-11T11:17:10-04:00

FEMA now has an end date. President Donald Trump said yesterday that he intends to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Administration after this hurricane season, canceling it like an HBO series. States should lead their own disaster response, he said, suggesting he does not understand that states already do lead disaster response; they just can’t do it without an infusion of FEMA dollars and expertise when the disaster is too big. “The governor should be able to handle it,” Trump said. The buck has been passed.

The Atlantic hurricane season lasts from now until November. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting an above-normal number of named storms this year. The weather doesn’t stop after that, of course. Fire season overlaps with hurricane season, another time of intense FEMA activity, and in recent years, fires have broken the bounds of any usual seasons; the devastating Los Angeles fires were in January. Even if this year’s disasters do quiet after November, hurricane season starts again next June. The administration will convene a council to eliminate FEMA “as it exists today,” Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, said yesterday—but those few short months in between seasons are hardly enough time to dismantle the federal apparatus of disaster response and transfer full responsibility to the states without casualties. Literal casualties, potentially. (FEMA did not respond to a request for comment.)

But, fine, we get FEMA for this hurricane season. Already, it will be a test of what happens when FEMA is hobbled and anemic. Under the Trump administration, the agency has lost roughly a quarter of its core staff. One acting chief of FEMA was pushed out after saying that the agency should not be abolished; his replacement told staffers he wasn’t aware that the United States had a hurricane season. (The administration later said this was a joke.) Should any single storm—or, worse, multiple storms—turn into a major disaster this year, the responsibility that state governments might be expected to shoulder in a FEMA-less America could come as a shock to them, and to their constituents.

Many close watchers of FEMA do think the agency needs a dramatic shake-up and that states should be responsible for more of the financial burden of catastrophe. FEMA was originally intended to handle a relatively small number of catastrophic disasters a year, but now deals with many dozens annually, both because the rate of disasters is increasing and because the agency is being drafted into handling more of them. The ballooning costs of response and recovery regularly exceed FEMA’s main disaster budget, requiring emergency and ad hoc funding to bridge the gap.

Meanwhile, states have come to rely on federal funds to bail them out and, in the quiet moments between storms and fires, are free to make imprudent development decisions: Might as well let developers build those waterfront homes if FEMA will pick up the tab when they flood. “Our system creates some really perverse incentives that need to be addressed,” Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Urban Institute, told me. More risk should be transferred to the states, he and others said.

But that would take time to do safely, and require a major infusion of cash to the states to bolster any FEMA-replacing infrastructure, according to the experts I spoke with. Ending FEMA, as Trump says he will, could easily result in a highly uneven landscape of disaster safety.

The logic for FEMA was all about efficiency: For many states, disasters are rare, and having 50 sets of personnel and resources on standby for those rare events is far more costly than having a centralized stockpile that can be deployed around the country as needed. Good disaster response also requires time spent in disaster mode. States with infrequent disasters naturally lack that. FEMA’s strength is that it deals with crises all the time.

That experience is part of what the agency is now losing. Many senior personnel, including those who coordinate responses during emergencies, have left since January, according to The New York Times. Those decades of experience aren’t easy to replace, Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, an associate professor at Columbia University who has worked in disaster planning, told me. “Emergency management isn’t something where you take a few courses and all of a sudden you can run a complex emergency.” And in states that don’t regularly handle floods or hurricanes, staff, “won’t have the muscle memory” of how to respond when a storm suddenly intensifies, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein said in a press conference last week. He said his state experienced this firsthand when Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina last year: That part of the state had “a lot of new people in emergency-management positions,” he said. “We need the expertise that exists in FEMA.”

Wealthier states, such as California, and states that, like Florida, have extensive experience in response coordination may not be as hurt by changes at the federal level. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has said his state doesn’t need FEMA; just give Florida a chunk of money instead. (Trump’s intention to end FEMA does not yet clearly include major transfers of funds to states to run their own response and recovery programs; he said yesterday that future funds may come directly from the “president’s office,” rather than FEMA.) Rumbach says he heard that same desire from officials in Kentucky, when he taught an emergency-management training workshop there. “Their main argument was ‘We don’t need FEMA. Just give us the money; we know what to do with it.’”

Poorer states and states that rarely see disasters will inevitably be most vulnerable to FEMA’s total absence. Arizona, for example, has received among the fewest FEMA funds in recent years, in part because it isn’t in the path of hurricanes and recent wildfires have not burned as ferociously there as in other western states. But that means the state is ill-prepared for a low-probability but high-devastation event, as The Arizona Republic recently noted. If and when Arizona’s luck runs out, it may not have the infrastructure or the funds to manage the crisis alone.

“You’re going to see a lot of states not prepared. And a lot of people in harm’s way may not be fully capable of recovering if there is an event,” Carlos Martín, a vice president at Resources for the Future, an environmental think tank, told me. Plus, an every-state-for-itself approach comes with the obvious challenges of a free market: At present, FEMA stockpiles essential goods to distribute after emergencies. If that stockpile isn’t maintained, wealthier states could handily outcompete poorer states for supplies during multistate emergencies, according to the Atlantic Council, which found that red states are likely to be on the losing side most of the time.

This all means that more citizens may fall through the disaster-assistance cracks. FEMA has said, for instance, that it will stop its door-to-door outreach this season and rely instead on “more targeted venues”; when a federal disaster is declared, FEMA often goes around the area and knocks on every person’s door to let them know what programs they could apply to for assistance. Now, Rumbach worries, people living in the most rural places, as well as people who may not be mobile—the elderly and those with certain disabilities—may never know about those programs. “A lot of the stories about how badly things went are going to come out later,” he said.

Even in a state with personnel on the ground to capture the full scope of need, a lot of disaster response after that step is paperwork, Schlegelmilch said. Right now, an entire private-sector ecosystem of organizations helps states apply for FEMA funds, and helps FEMA direct its resources. Even if states are on their own, they will still need a system to do something similar. Remaking grant-application processes and managing the bureaucracy of distributing funds will be yet another growing pain of the transition. “That’s going to shock all of the states,” Schlegelmilch said.

If Trump were to decide that reforming FEMA were a more prudent choice than scrapping it, ideas abound. As FEMA’s administrator during Barack Obama’s presidency, Craig Fugate promoted the idea of a “disaster deductible” for states modeled off insurance deductibles; state officials might then be held more accountable for preparing for disasters (which right now tends to mean little to voters) rather than rewarded politically for acquiring disaster funding after the fact. The previous Trump administration created a fund (which Joe Biden expanded) meant to help states prevent the worst impact of disasters before they happen. That program moved billions in funds under local control, with the aim of fixing long-standing infrastructure problems that would have made future disasters more dangerous and expensive. But Trump already canceled it this term. “It’s hard to see how they’re not increasing risk,” Rumbach said. “We’re going to pay for it one way or another.”

For all these reasons, Rumbach is betting that “reality will set in,” and that the federal government will not radically shrink its share of disaster spending so quickly. But the loss of key personnel and the looming dissolution mean that major damage to national readiness has already been done. And the hasty budget changes mean some people will get hurt. The country’s emergency-management system “doesn’t have to be completely broken to have really bad impacts,” he said. If the national ability to respond to disasters falters at all, then “recovery is slower, more chaotic, less efficient,” Rumbach said. “When that happens, people are suffering for longer, they’re more traumatized, communities don’t recover as quickly.”

The United States has already seen what happens when a major weather catastrophe arrives shortly after a president hastily rearranges FEMA. After the newly formed Department of Homeland Security took over the agency in 2003, George W. Bush’s administration eliminated emergency managers and resources, particularly in regional offices. When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the depleted agency badly botched the response. “We’ve read this story before,” Schlegelmilch said. There’s little reason to think it’ll end differently this time around.

America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era

2025-04-09T07:30:00-04:00

Updated at 11:37 a.m. on April 9, 2025

When you inhale a microscopic speck of soot, its journey may go like this: The particle enters your nose and heads into your lungs, penetrating even the tiny air sacs that facilitate gas exchange. Next it may slip into your bloodstream and flow into your heart, or past the blood-brain barrier. Most of us inhale some of these tiny particles every day. But inhaling enough can turn the act of breathing into an existential hazard, prompting or worsening asthma, COPD, respiratory infections, and permanent lung damage. In the heart, the specks can trigger heart disease, heart attacks, and most of the cardiovascular disorders you can think of. Air pollution is also associated with depression and anxiety, and with higher rates of suicide. It can trigger strokes and is linked to dementia or—even at average levels in this country—Parkinson’s disease.

These particles can also cross the placenta, where they can reduce an infant’s lung function before birth. A pre-polluted baby is also more likely to arrive prematurely, and at a lower weight. Exposure to bad air in utero is associated with a higher risk of autism, and exposure in childhood has been linked to behavioral and cognitive problems, including lower IQ. A person’s lungs can develop until age 25, and as Alison Lee, a pulmonologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, put it to me, “once you’ve lost lung function, you can’t get it back.” Persistent exposure to air pollution can cause permanent harm, creating health problems for children and setting them up to become sicker adults.

It’s hard to picture a person dropping dead from air pollution, yet it happens all the time. In the United States, particulate matter is estimated to kill more than twice as many people as vehicular accidents do—in total, some 100,000 to 200,000 people a year, as an underlying factor of chronic disease or by way of heart attacks, asthma attacks, and other sudden events. Even as air quality in America has improved, researchers have found that relatively low concentrations of particulate matter can cause major hazards.

All of this stems from a toxic and mostly invisible danger, largely the product of burning things for fuel and letting the remnant drift into the air and then into us—which is what happens unless the government regulates that process. The Trump administration, however, has shown little interest in doing so. Through new policies and aggressive cuts, the administration is taking steps that will encourage more pollution while muffling the science that shows the harms. The very air that Americans breathe will likely become less safe.

So far, the EPA has announced that it will pursue a suite of rollbacks of environmental rules, among them a Joe Biden–era update to standards for particulate matter that were meant to be fully in force by 2032 and that the Biden EPA projected would, in that year alone, prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 cases of asthma, reaping up to $46 billion in health benefits. It also plans to reassess a rule limiting the amount of airborne mercury and arsenic that power plants can release. In a statement announcing one of these rollbacks, the EPA said that the U.S. has already made major gains in air quality, implying that these are enough. In response to a request for comment, an agency spokesperson told me that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s priority is “clean air, land, and water for EVERY American.”

The air in the U.S. certainly is cleaner than it was when industrial air pollution billowed into the skies unmitigated. Over the past 25 years alone, particulate air pollution in the country has dropped by more than 30 percent. Yet at least one in three Americans lives in a place where the air is still a health hazard. The particulate-matter standard that Zeldin intends to roll back is still nearly twice as high as the limit the World Health Organization recommends to protect health.

Rolling back rules will take time, but America’s air quality could worsen in the interim. The EPA told businesses last month that they can simply email the agency if they want an exemption from certain pollution regulations and that “the president will make a decision.” However they address those pleas, this opens a back door. The recent cuts to EPA personnel almost certainly mean that enforcement will suffer too. Meanwhile, worsening wildfire seasons, fueled by climate warming, are reversing decades of air-quality progress in this country. And ignoring and even stoking climate change, as Donald Trump’s administration is doing, will produce worse wildfire seasons. The country’s slide back toward its more polluted past “will become a steeper trajectory,” Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington whose work helped expose the connection between wildfire smoke and dementia risk, told me.

The administration’s cuts to scientific research mean, too, that the impact of its deregulation may never be fully understood. In recent months, the government has pulled down some air-quality data and canceled grants; it also plans to dissolve a whole EPA division dedicated to studying how the environment affects public health. These actions create a sort of purposeful naivete: You can’t regulate what you can’t prove is harmful, and you can’t prove harm without research.

And you certainly can’t solve for what you don’t yet know is a problem. Newer findings about how air pollution may addle a body—by worsening mental health or triggering more cases of neurodegenerative disease, for example—haven’t yet been included in the EPA’s risk-benefit assessments of air-quality regulations, Casey added. “I think often we’re underestimating the true impact,” she said.

When I called Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, she had just learned that the Trump administration had canceled her grant to study how impacts of climate change, including air pollution, alter cognitive function in aging people. (Earlier this year, too, she was dismissed from her appointment to the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, along with the rest of the panel.) Even so, the basics on air pollution have been studied enough that Kioumourtzoglou knows how current rollbacks will affect Americans: There will be “more heart attacks, more respiratory adverse health outcomes for sure,” she told me. “Our cognitive functions are going to be worse—the progression of Alzheimer’s, the progression of Parkinson’s.” Pollution-related depression and anxiety may go up. Even slightly increasing the risk or rate of any of these at the population level can diminish quality of life and, ultimately, productivity, she said. A sicker country is a poorer one.

Compared with smoking, for example, an individual’s risk of inhaling a dangerous amount of air pollution and then having their health affected because of it is relatively small, she told me—but “the problem is that few people smoke, and everybody breathes.” If a portion of the population’s cognitive function is diminished, even a little bit, the overall impact is enormous.

Kioumourtzoglou wonders, too, how much further the Trump administration will push the idea that air pollution should not be a concern to Americans. When the Heritage Foundation published a report in December that made the radical case that no definitive link exists between air pollution and poor public-health outcomes, she disregarded it. But after watching other Heritage Foundation goals be enacted, she is concerned that its rationale could be taken seriously by the current administration. The Heritage report attempts to cast doubt on the validity of decades of science by, in part, arguing that studies linking air pollution to health effects fail to prove causation, because they’re not randomized or controlled. (After this story was published, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, said that the report was intended to guide federal policies and that it showed that “no causal link between particulates and heart attacks and deaths.”)

This is an attack not just on air-pollution research but on an entire scientific approach. Most public-health research is observational by necessity, because exposing people to air pollution in a lab setting to see how sick they get, say, wouldn’t be ethical. Instead, scientists gather data from already-exposed populations and try to parse out how different variables affected people’s health. Over decades, researchers have developed biostatistical methods to determine causal relationships from large groups of studies.

When EPA scientists and regulators link a pollutant and a health outcome, “they’re not making that assessment on one or two or three studies. It’s decades of scientific publications,” Corwin Zigler, a biostatistician at Brown University who served on an EPA scientific advisory panel on air pollution under the Biden administration, told me. He wasn’t surprised by the logic behind the Heritage Foundation report: The leader of the previous Trump administration’s air-pollution advisory panel had begun to sow doubt about basic air-pollution research. In response, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine undertook a major review of the way the EPA assesses causal relationships, and though it recommended that the EPA’s process be more transparent, it found its methods scientifically robust. Zigler said he has no doubt that particulate matter is causing harm at current levels in the United States: “That’s the scientific consensus. That takes very seriously all of the limitations of any given scientific study.”

Studies about how entire populations are harmed by air pollution are framed in probabilities and percentages, but they represent a multitude of individuals for whom daily living has been made tangibly worse. For Lee, the Mount Sinai pulmonologist, work became personal a few years ago, when her son, now 5, began having asthma attacks that would send him to the emergency room. Asthma is a common-enough ailment that an attack might seem like a routine and manageable health issue. But anyone who’s had a severe one will tell you differently. Over years of reporting on air pollution, I’ve had asthma attacks described to me as feeling like someone is stepping with their full weight on your ribcage, or as though you are suddenly a fish out of water, suffocating on land. It’s a traumatic event. Lee, knowing what she does about air pollution, decided to move her family from New York City to the suburbs a year and a half ago; they haven’t been to the emergency room since.

“Clearly, we know that where you live determines your health,” Lee told me, but few people can make a choice like she did, to upend their life to breathe cleaner air. The Trump administration is also cutting the programs intended to address exactly these geographic disparities, while working to make the air worse for everyone. EPA Administrator Zeldin has said these rollbacks are part of the administration’s plan to “unleash the Golden Age of American prosperity.” But prosperity does not mean choking to death in one’s own home or depriving a child of cognitive capacity. Whatever wealth is promised here is narrowly disbursed at others’ expense.

The Trump Administration’s Environmental Pile-On

2025-03-07T09:34:34-05:00

Tracking the Trump administration’s rollback of climate and environmental policies can seem like being forced through a wormhole back in time. The administration tried to freeze funding that Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act directed to clean energy, turning that particular clock back to 2022. The Environmental Protection Agency could scrap the finding that greenhouse-gas emissions pose threats to human health and the environment, which has underpinned federal climate efforts since 2009. The Trump administration has also barred scientists from working on the UN’s benchmark international climate report, a continuous collaboration since 1990. And it has demolished federal work on environmental justice, which dates back to the George H. W. Bush administration. As part of its purge of so-called DEI initiatives, the administration put 160 EPA employees who work on environmental justice on leave, rescinded Biden’s executive orders prioritizing this work, and pushed to terminate, “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” all environmental-justice offices and positions by March 21.

The concept of environmental justice is grounded in activists’ attempt in the early ’80s to block a dump for polychlorinated biphenyls, once widely used toxic chemicals, from being installed in Warren Country, North Carolina, a predominantly Black community. Evidence quickly mounted that Americans who were nonwhite or poor, and particularly those who were both, were more likely to live near hazardous-waste sites and other sources of pollution. Advocates for addressing these ills called unequal toxic exposures “environmental racism,” and the efforts to address them “environmental justice.” In the early ’90s, the first President Bush established the Office of Environmental Equity, eventually known as the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, and President Bill Clinton mandated that federal agencies incorporate environmental justice into their work.

Biden, though, was the first president to direct real money toward communities disproportionately affected by pollution—places where, say, multiple factories, refineries, truck yards, and garbage incinerators all operated in a condensed area. As with so many targets of Trump’s crusade against DEI, the damage will be felt by poor people across the country. This choice will certainly harm communities of color, but it will also touch everyone, including many of Trump’s supporters, living in a place burdened by multiple forms of environmental stress. Under Trump’s deregulatory policies, that category will only keep expanding.

“There are still these places where life expectancy is 10 to 15 years less than other parts of the country,” Adam Ortiz, the former administrator for EPA Region 3, which covers the mid-Atlantic, told me. Cancer rates are sky high in many of these areas too. Some of these communities are predominantly Black, such as Ivy City, in Washington, D.C., a historically redlined, segregated, working-class community where the air is fouled by a rail switchyard, a highway, and dozens of industrial sites located in a small area. But plenty of the small rural areas that have benefited from environmental-justice money look like Richwood, West Virginia, where catastrophic flooding—a growing climate hazard in the region—knocked out the local water-treatment plant. Residents there are poor, white, and generally politically conservative. In many cases, these communities had gotten little federal attention for generations, Ortiz said.

Untangling the knot of pollution in these places is slow work, in part because federal laws don’t adequately address overlapping environmental ills: The Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act regulate only one form and one source of pollution at a time. A population exposed to many pollution sources simultaneously, or to a cocktail of toxins, has little redress. Each business regulated by these laws may follow them and still end up creating places that, like Ivy City, have dangerously bad air quality. Cumulative impact is a gaping regulatory chasm into which millions of Americans fall each year. Federal environmental-justice efforts aimed to fill it.

The Trump administration has now halted projects such as the ones Ortiz worked on. People who had spent years gaining trust with local communities, and who had worked with local companies to help them alter things such as how they vented pollution, were dismissed or reassigned. By then, in Ivy City, the EPA had managed to address a “handful” of the 40 or 50 pollution sources plaguing the area, Ortiz said.

But some work did get done, and its benefit will likely persist despite the Trump administration’s attempt to make environmental justice disappear. Paul Mohai, a professor at the University of Michigan who served as a senior adviser to the EPA’s environmental-justice office, told me. In his view, one president can’t erase the progress made over the past decades, particularly outside the federal government.

Because he was there at the beginning, Mohai knows what these knotty pollution problems looked like when few in government were paying attention. When he co-wrote a review of the literature on environmental justice in the early 1990s, he struggled to find more than a dozen papers on the topic. Now, he said, more publications are coming out and more nonprofit groups have formed to tackle these issues than he can keep track of.

Surely some of them will be affected by the president’s restrictions on grant making for scientific research. But the facts accrued through existing research cannot be erased: People of color in the U.S. are exposed to a 38 percent higher level of the respiratory irritant nitrogen dioxide, on average, than white people. Low-income communities are disproportionately targeted for hazardous-waste sites. Poor people and people of color suffer the most from climate impacts such as flooding and extreme heat. Several states have also put environmental-justice considerations into their laws; one in New Jersey restricts certain new industrial permits in places that are already overburdened, for instance. The decisions of a single administration can’t undo all that.

But millions of disadvantaged Americans live in states that are not interested in passing these kinds of laws. And layoffs at the EPA will dilute what protections federal clean-air and water legislation do afford, by making enforcement less possible. As the climate crisis deepens—growing the threats of extreme heat, sea-level rise, and catastrophic rainfall, each a hazard that can rob people of safety—more places could succumb to the gaps in these laws as well. Many climate dangers are akin to those of pollution because they create zones of harm where residents bear the costs of the country’s environmental compromises and have little to help them through it. Nothing in any federal law specifically compels the government to protect people from extreme heat, or from unprecedented flooding, though both are set to descend on Americans more often and disproportionately harm poor people and people of color.

As these stresses multiply, they’ll be layered onto a landscape already dotted with sites where heavy industry and major traffic create concentrations of emissions. Without laws to address the cumulative impact of these, more Americans will be left sicker and will die sooner. It’s taken decades for the country to start reckoning with that fact to begin to move toward a more useful vision of safety. For now, it seems, all progress is on pause.

The American Weather Forecast Is in Trouble

2025-02-28T17:09:16-05:00

If you have tips about the remaking of American climate science, environmental policy, or disaster response, you can contact Zoë Schlanger on Signal at @zoeschlanger.99.

At 4 p.m. ET yesterday, Andrew Hazelton got a form email telling him his work as a hurricane modeler at the federal government would be officially over at 5 p.m. that day. In his five months as a federal employee, his job was to help improve the models that serve as the basis for the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts. Now, he told me, “on my particular team, there won’t be hurricane expertise.” He had been hired specifically for his storm experience, which he had built over nearly nine years working for the federal government.

Only, those were spent in contract positions. Before Hazelton joined NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center, which keeps federal weather models running, he was on a team that developed NOAA’s next-generation hurricane-modeling system, which successfully predicted the rapid intensification of Hurricanes Milton and Helene last year. He also worked for a time on “Hurricane Hunters” missions that fly directly into storms to collect data. But because he’d joined the agency as a federal employee only in October, Hazelton was one of hundreds of people at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration whose jobs were terminated yesterday in a purge of so-called probationary employees, who had been in their positions less than one year.

As I reported last summer, Project 2025—the compendium of policy proposals published by the Heritage Foundation prior to the 2024 elections, several authors of which are now serving under President Donald Trump—stated that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the NOAA. Among its other duties, NOAA employs thousands of people to help accurately predict the weather through the National Weather Service; privatizing federal weather data has long been a project of some conservative lawmakers too. Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said in his confirmation hearing that he would keep NOAA intact, but this first cut of NOAA staff is similar to those recently made to other federal agencies. NOAA was also one of the agencies that DOGE employees marched into earlier this month, and it is now bracing for further staff and budget cuts.

It costs the public roughly $4 per year per person to keep the National Weather Service functioning. In return, the NWS provides its own raw weather data to anyone who wants the information, and publishes its own public-facing weather reports; virtually every private forecast relies on freely available NOAA data as the basis for its weather reports. Dan Satterfield, a veteran television meteorologist, told me on Bluesky that many times, he’d notice signs in the data that a storm could turn into a tornado, and that “NWS would have the warning out before I could get on air.”

The National Weather Service is already operating with the smallest workforce it has in years, a current NOAA employee, who requested anonymity out of fear for her job, told me. It’s doing highly technical work on a shoestring budget, and each and every cut will be felt. Already, a National Weather Service office in Alaska announced that it will cease sending out weather balloons, which collect weather data, because of a lack of staffing. The chief meteorologist for CBS Detroit said on X that he gets most of his raw data for television weather reports from those balloon launches.

The average local National Weather Service forecasting office has about 20 employees. They work in shifts, ensuring that there are eyes on satellite data, radar, surface measurements, and other weather information 24 hours a day. After analyzing those data, they write forecasts that are shared directly with the public, and when a weather event develops, they coordinate with local emergency managers and county and state officials to develop warnings and make choices about measures such as evacuations. Similarly, at NWS’s aviation-weather offices, meteorologists provide weather reports to pilots and Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic controllers. Every fishing and sailing vessel off the coast similarly relies on daily NWS reports.

The loss of probationary employees is a particularly strong blow to the National Weather Service, the NOAA employee told me: Because they often have years of experience but are still early enough in their career, they tend to bring energy and ambition to the workforce. They were the plan for the agency’s future. Without them, “we have no pipeline of future employees,” she said.

Employees at NOAA were scrambling to find out exactly who among their colleagues were cut last night: Managers were not told in advance whom they were losing, and some employees had to tell their supervisors that they’d been cut, the employee said. But IT employees at local forecast offices were among those who lost their jobs, and “right now, the IT infrastructure in the weather service is very fragile,” the employee said. It often suffers major data outages during vital moments, such as during a flooding disaster in the Midwest last summer. Without IT teams, outages could be more frequent and last longer. More Americans will go without forecasts, likely when they need them most.

Those forecasts also depend on work like Hazelton was doing to improve modeling for hurricanes and other fast-moving weather phenomena. Models use real-time data—including information collected by Hurricane Hunter missions, weather balloons, and satellite data—to set their initial conditions, then simulate how weather phenomena will behave. Hazelton worries what will happen to America’s ability to accurately predict hurricane behavior without him and his colleagues; he’s heard of a dozen other people who were cut from the Environmental Modeling Center last night.

Models need constant tending to use large streams of new data that come in, and hurricanes need continuous study; any slippage could lead to worse catastrophes. Hazelton estimated that the system he’d helped develop had made hurricane forecasts 10 to 15 percent better, more able to predict the rapid increases in storm intensity that are becoming more common as the climate warms. He was most proud of that work; it almost certainly saved lives. But, he told me, “there still are some that sneak up on us sometimes. I don’t want that to become more common now as a result of all this.”

The risks of disasters, and thus the need for accurate forecasts, are only growing. Last year was the hottest ever for the contiguous United States, and the hurricane season was among the costliest on record. The country’s security is intimately linked with our ability to accurately predict the weather, particularly as the climate warms and extreme weather grows only more extreme.

Of course, NOAA itself has provided some of the key data that confirm that the climate is warming; it houses one of the most significant repositories of climate data on Earth, detailing shifting atmospheric conditions, the health of coastal fisheries, ice-core and tree-ring data, and countless other data sets. Project 2025 targeted the agency for exactly this reason: NOAA’s research is “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism," the policy book states. But climate and weather are closely related. Reducing the country’s understanding of and responsiveness to either will actively shove the public more squarely into harm’s way. The ability to prepare for turbulence that one cannot prevent is the only defense against it. For now, the forecast looks bad.

Trump Could Start a New Pipeline Fight

2025-02-19T07:30:00-05:00

The Trump administration is fully engaged in a drive to eliminate virtually any government activity or mention related to climate change—with a few notable exceptions. Take, for example, a single tax credit in Joe Biden’s signature climate law that may have the best chance of survival out of any climate-coded policy.

A provision in the Inflation Reduction Act, known as 45Q, enlarged a tax credit for any company willing to capture carbon dioxide. A version of this credit has been in place since George W. Bush’s presidency, and in its current iteration, it represents billions of dollars in federal incentives. If the Trump administration moves to keep 45Q intact, that choice would be an unusual vote of confidence from the president for a large government expenditure billed as a way to fight climate change. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

The politics of this tax credit are unusual in the climate world too. Both the oil industry and some climate-minded Democrats in Congress want to keep it. Among its opponents are environmental groups, as well as avid Donald Trump supporters in South Dakota and other states where carbon-capture infrastructure would be built.

Only in recent years has carbon-capture technology made a name for itself as a climate solution. But it was—and remains—primarily a way to produce more oil. The version meant to help mitigate climate change, by storing carbon in the ground virtually forever, might have made sense when instituted alongside many other climate policies. But as a stand-alone measure, carbon capture starts looking more like a handout to the oil industry.

The climate argument for carbon capture goes like this: If one ton of carbon is captured from an industrial process, such as a refinery, and then injected into underground formations, that’s theoretically one ton less carbon added to the atmosphere, where it would have warmed the planet. This process, however, is both expensive and unprofitable. The IRA tried to solve that problem with 45Q, which raised the maximum tax credit for every ton of carbon dioxide a company captured from $50 to $85, if the intent was to store it forever, or $60, if the intent was to produce more oil—which was carbon capture’s original purpose.

In the 1970s, after the OPEC crisis, the oil industry began to look for new methods to milk existing wells for all they were worth. One method was to inject carbon dioxide underground, where it would act as a solvent, liberating the more stubborn oil residues in otherwise-depleted wells. Today, some 4 percent of American oil is produced with this technique, and the majority of all carbon captured from any industry is used to produce more oil and gas.

The price difference in the tax credit was meant to boost the climate-solution version of carbon capture. But critics say the smaller credit, for enhanced oil recovery, is a generous subsidy to the oil industry, which also ends up with a valuable product to sell. And the product potential is enormous: The Department of Energy has said that, if carbon capture was used to its fullest extent to enhance oil recovery, the American petroleum industry could extract the equivalent of 38 years’ worth of the country’s current crude-oil supply.

45Q has many admirers: Oil-and-gas-industry giants such as Exxon and Shell are all in on carbon capture, and Doug Burgum, Trump’s interior secretary, is a big fan of the technology. Losing the credit—which represents billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars that the government is giving up in tax revenues—would be such a blow to the nascent industry that it “would effectively cut it off at the knees,” Jessie Stolark, the executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, told me. And if the credit does survive, it may benefit the oil industry even more: Republican senators just introduced a bill to raise the tax credit for enhanced oil recovery to the same level as the one for long-term carbon storage.

The tax credit also still has fans among Democrats who see it as a way for the country to cut down on its emissions. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, was an author of the IRA energy-tax package, and “is strongly supportive of this credit and is already working to defend it from Republican attacks,” Ryan Carey, a communications director with the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, told me. But many environmental groups think carbon capture and storage is a false solution. Although carbon capture and storage is widely said to be necessary to combat climate change in a world where burning fossil fuels continues, as of now, the technology to store carbon long enough to keep it out of the atmosphere permanently hasn’t been proved reliable at scale. Even projects held up as success stories encounter unexpected problems with keeping highly volatile carbon dioxide in place underground.

Communities in the path of carbon capture projects also worry about the safety of the pipeline expansion. To transport highly pressurized carbon dioxide from the places it would be captured—such as ethanol plants and refineries—to wells for storage, the country would need to build a lot of new pipelines. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless gas, and at high enough concentrations, it’s an asphyxiant. If a pipe were to burst, no one might know for a while. The gas is also heavier than air, so it would hug the ground and roll downhill, choking off the oxygen of whoever is in its path. (This happened in 2020, in Satartia, Mississippi; 45 people were hospitalized.)

Karla Lems, a Republican representative from South Dakota, voted for Trump and considers herself a conservative. She is among the most vocal opponents of a pipeline that the company Summit Carbon Solutions plans to build across her state and four others, to bring carbon dioxide from ethanol plants to a storage site in North Dakota. The company is attempting to use eminent domain to clear its way, which incensed Lems. “George Washington said freedom and property rights are inseparable,” she told me. She sponsored a bill now making its way through the state legislature to bar eminent domain for carbon projects. (For a while, Summit planned to put it directly through her family’s farmland, but the company eventually decided to site it on her neighbor’s land instead, she told me. Summit declined to comment for this story.)

To Lems, the 45Q tax credit is exactly the type of handout and government bloat that Trump promised to eliminate. “In my mind, this is a company that stands to make a lot of money from this project, which I believe is just a grift on the taxpayers," she told me. “It’s all a big boondoggle and a scam. We’ll see if the Trump administration can see it for what it is.” Chase Jensen, an organizer at Dakota Rural Action, which is also working to block the Summit pipeline, says many of his group’s dues-paying members voted for Trump and would see it as a betrayal if he decided to keep the tax credit. Many assumed Trump would be against it, given its presentation as a Biden-branded climate solution, he told me. But more than that, he said, “these folks hold property rights as one of the most core rights.” That those rights would be traded so that, as they see it, a corporation could make money would violate their deepest conservative values.

Already, the Summit-pipeline fight has “completely restructured” leadership in South Dakota, Jensen said; 11 Republican representatives who had voted for pro-pipeline legislation lost primary elections for state House and Senate seats. Jensen expects that the Trump administration’s stance on 45Q will be disillusioning for supporters who might have expected the president to side with people over corporations. “People are going to have to reconcile what’s happening,” he said. (Summit has said that the project would need “reassessment” if the tax credit were repealed.)

So far, the U.S. has relatively few carbon-dioxide pipelines—just 5,300 miles’ worth, compared with roughly 3 million miles of natural-gas pipelines. But the Department of Energy predicts that could grow substantially. Without the tax credit, much of that growth would likely be out of the question. With it, the administration could be setting itself up for a new fight that unites climate activists with aggrieved landowners.

In some ways, the politics of this fight look familiar: After the Obama administration failed to pass climate legislation in 2010, the climate movement started making common cause with conservative landowners in Nebraska and other states that the oil pipeline Keystone XL was set to cross. (Some of the same players are fighting the Summit pipeline now.) That fight continued through the entire first Trump administration, and ended only when Biden blocked the project. Now the Trump administration is reportedly looking at resuscitating that pipeline project too. In its first weeks, the second Trump administration has rerun the attacks on climate policy from its first go-round—leaving the Paris Agreement, stripping climate information from public view—but has also taken them further, culling any federal employees and programs that have a whiff of promoting environmental justice.

45Q presents a challenge: Conspicuously preserve a program billed as a Biden-era climate solution, or axe something with bipartisan support that the oil industry—which contains some of Trump’s most important business allies—wants to keep? Already, the administration has appeared to selectively protect at least one big Biden-era climate project in Montana—the expansion of a plant making sustainable jet fuel—after a Republican senator pressed the White House to release the funds. This administration might be skeptical of both big government and climate science, but that ideology can be bent for the right backers.

Trump Is Inheriting an Environmental Disaster

2025-02-06T13:40:45-05:00

In Wisconsin, where late last year Donald Trump said at a campaign stop, “I’m an environmentalist … I want clean air and clean water—really clean water,” many people want that too. Like Americans across the country, many Wisconsinites have in recent years come to understand that they have been drinking water contaminated by highly toxic “forever chemicals,” compounds known as PFAS, for decades.

This is a challenge for Trump the environmentalist, whose administration is widely expected to gut many environmental regulations and has already suspended work that would have put limits on PFAS. Yet Lee Zeldin, now the EPA’s administrator, said in his confirmation hearing last month that PFAS would be a “top priority” for the agency, and as a member of Congress, he sided with Democrats to back rules that would limit the chemicals in drinking water and make polluters pay for cleanup.

PFAS are the rare environmental issue that might evoke the bipartisan zeitgeist in which Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. By then, President Richard Nixon had already overseen the creation of the EPA but vetoed the landmark water bill, which he thought was too expensive. But 17 Republicans joined with Democrats to override his veto. “If we cannot swim in our lakes and rivers, if we cannot breathe the air God has given us, what other comforts can life offer us?” Senator Howard Baker, a Republican of Tennessee, said on the October morning of the vote.

In this century, some Republicans have argued that PFAS measures are costly and come with legal burdens for businesses; the chemical industry has lobbied heavily against regulation in the U.S. and abroad. But like the environmental disasters of the 1970s, this one is alarming enough that politicians who might otherwise oppose regulation want the government to do something about it.

In his first term, Trump’s EPA issued a PFAS Action Plan to designate the compounds as hazardous, set limits, and make cleanup recommendations. But the White House also opposed a PFAS bill in Congress after the chemical industry objected to it, and the closest the administration came to fulfilling its own plans was submitting a proposal to regulate PFAS in drinking water on its very last day. In the next four years, PFAS could test whether Trump’s version of the EPA—stripped of many career employees and staffed with industry lobbyists—can do the job millions of Americans may want it to.

PFAS, as I’ve written before, are the DDT of this era, though perhaps it is more accurate to say they’re worse: Where DDT was a single compound with a single use, PFAS is an umbrella term for thousands of compounds used in a plethora of quotidian ways. They are often the reason “performance” fabrics on couches can resist stains, a rice cooker wipes clean so easily, and boots are waterproof. They make paper plates grease-resistant and conditioner extra silky. In the places where they are manufactured or are used to manufacture other things, decades of effluent have contaminated groundwater and fed into municipal water supplies. No one has figured out how to destroy the compounds, whose fluorine-carbon bond is the single most stable in organic chemistry, at scale.

And so they persist, virtually forever, cycling through the water system and accumulating in our bodies. PFAS weren’t a known concern when the Clean Water Act was created, nor were they on anyone’s radar when the Safe Drinking Water Act came into force in 1974. By the ’70s, however, 3M knew that a PFAS compound it had invented, and sold to DuPont to make Teflon, was accumulating in employees’ blood.

Now nearly every American has PFAS in theirs. Over the past half century, these compounds have been used in dozens of industries to manufacture thousands of products globally, creating a noxious waste stream that has infiltrated countless communities. Studies have linked exposure to PFAS with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, decreased fertility, and developmental problems in children, among other issues.

Last year, some two decades after the EPA began investigating these compounds, the Biden administration ordered water utilities to test for several kinds of PFAS in their water, and then begin all but eliminating those compounds, for the first time. The agency says that, much like for lead, there is no safe level of two of the most common of these compounds. It also released a report warning of the dangers of spreading sewage sludge—often highly contaminated by PFAS—on fields as fertilizer, a practice that continues in many states. And it was about to set the first discharge limits for PFAS in industrial wastewater—a rule the Trump administration has now put on pause. (An EPA spokesperson told me this action was part of “common transition procedures.”) This means municipal water systems will have to test for PFAS, but manufacturers will not need to measure or limit PFAS in the wastewater they release to those systems.

In the meantime, American towns and cities are trying to deal with PFAS’s threat piecemeal. In Campbell, Wisconsin, a town on a riverine island where people watch bald eagles hunt for fish, and raise their kids in the houses where they were raised, water samples from residents’ wells first came back positive for PFAS in 2020. Firefighting foam, made of PFAS, was used to put out plane-crash fires and to train firefighters at a nearby airport for decades. Residents now wonder if that explains the many unusual diagnoses among their neighbors, Lee Donahue, a Campbell town supervisor, told me: testicular cancer in a 20-year-old, or an ovarian cancer that usually strikes later in life in a woman in her 30s.

Nearly five years after those water tests, residents are still drinking bottled water while the town board works to reroute the drinking-water supply away from contaminated wells and toward a new source. That switch is partly funded by grants from President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Trump has put on pause, and partly by EPA grants secured by Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, and the town’s representative, Derrick Van Orden, a Republican. “This isn’t the most popular Republican position, I don’t really care,” Van Orden told the local ABC affiliate at the time the grant was announced. “When you turn on your faucet, it doesn’t ask if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”

Campbell is a microcosm of a swing state: It split its vote almost exactly 50–50 between Trump and Kamala Harris, Donahue, who is also a town election worker, told me. On the other side of the state, Marinette, a city of 11,000, is an “extremely red community” that is dealing with its own PFAS problems, Cindy Boyle, a former town-board chairperson, told me. At 53, Boyle realizes she may have been drinking water tainted with PFAS her whole life: Tyco Fire Products tested its firefighting foam on land a half mile from the house where she raised her three sons, and its effluent was spread as sludge on fields within a mile of the house she grew up in, she said. The company was sued by the state, public water systems, and some residents in the area. Boyle was not one of them; still, the company is now providing a whole-house filter at her home, and distributing bottled water. (Tyco settled the suits with the water systems and residents without admitting wrongdoing; the state’s suit is on pause.)

But damage may have already been done. She had her thyroid removed in her 30s; her sister has thyroid disease now, and her mother had kidney cancer. Her husband has Parkinson’s disease; recent research shows that PFAS can accumulate in the brain and links them to neurological disorders. Boyle is a registered independent from a conservative family, and she’d “take a Bush any day now,” she told me. But she says she can’t vote for anyone who isn’t interested in clamping down on PFAS.

In Wisconsin, Democrats and Republicans are currently locked in a battle at the statehouse over how to do that. Republicans have been holding up a proposed fund for testing and remediation out of fears it could force landowners to pay for cleanups of pollution they didn’t cause; on Tuesday Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, announced a state budget meant to resolve their concerns and release the funds—if the legislature passes it.

In the absence of federal regulation, states’ efforts to address PFAS have been patchwork and politically unpredictable. In West Virginia, which voted for Trump by a ratio of 7 to 3 and is arguably the birthplace of the PFAS crisis in the U.S., former Governor Jim Justice, a Republican, passed legislation to curb it. In North Carolina, where an estimated 2.5 million residents have PFAS in their tap water, Republican appointees to a state commission have stalled rule making that would set clear limits on PFAS’s presence there. Maine, which has a Democrat-controlled legislature and a widespread PFAS crisis, has passed some of the most stringent PFAS bills in the nation. New York was among the first states to declare certain PFAS hazardous substances, but it also plans to double the volume of sludge it spreads on fields by 2050.

Tackling PFAS contamination meaningfully will require federal effort. During Trump’s previous term, he appointed a former chemical-industry executive to oversee toxic chemicals at the EPA, where she rewrote rules, making it harder to track their health impacts. Back then, Americans in some states were just beginning to understand the threats PFAS posed. Now, eight years later, the landscape is very different—and states are watching. In his time as a congressional representative from New York, Zeldin was in favor of getting rid of PFAS contamination, going so far as to urge the EPA to move faster to regulate it. At his confirmation hearing, he gave no details of how he would proceed on PFAS as EPA administrator, and when I asked the EPA for more specifics, a spokesperson pointed me to the action plan from the first term. Whatever steps Zeldin does take will show what making an issue a priority looks like for Trump’s EPA in this term, and define how far this administration’s environmentalism actually goes.

The End of L.A.’s Magical Thinking

2025-01-18T06:36:19-05:00

The cruel reality of living through a moment of catastrophic change is that the knowledge of how many other people are also living through it offers no comfort. It is happening to you: Your house is gone. Your father’s paintings are gone. Your hundreds of hours of footage, meant to be your film, gone. Your family’s efforts, across a whole generation, to establish financial stability, literally up in smoke. That this is also happening to other people is awful. As is knowing that it will almost certainly happen again.

Los Angeles is still smoldering. The winds have died down, but the Palisades Fire is just 39 percent contained, and the Eaton Fire is 65 percent. Many residents are under instructions not to drink their tap water, which ash and melted pipes may have contaminated. Tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders are still waiting to return, perhaps to a burned-out lot, or perhaps to a house still standing but coated in the toxic remains of everything around it.

The fires were, at their worst, unfightable. But destruction at this scale was not inevitable. The question now is what measures anyone will take to limit the damage next time.

Because there will be a next fire. The vegetation—fire fuel—will grow back, fire season will keep lengthening into wind season, and the combination of drought and wind will nurse an errant spark. Fire is part of the ecology in California; a century of suppressing it has only set up modern blazes to be more intense.

The way places such as California prepare for these fires has to change, or more neighborhoods will end up in ruins. Insurance is meant to insulate people from bearing the costs of extraordinary events, but those are becoming ordinary enough that private insurers have been leaving California. The state’s FAIR Plan, a pooled insurance plan of last resort, is oversubscribed, and may not be able to cover the claims from these fires alone. If it exercises its power to demand that private insurers help cover the difference, that could send even more fleeing. These are all signs that the state’s magical thinking about fire risk has exhausted itself.

[Read: Are you sure your house is worth that much?]

“California is like a driver that’s had five car accidents,” Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now heads a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford University, told me. The state is at proven risk of catastrophic loss. But because California has spent years trying to keep insurance rates somewhat reasonable, those (still high) rates don’t reflect the real risk homeowners face. This creates a problem further up the insurance food chain: Insurers rely on reinsurers—insurance companies for insurance companies—who, Wara said, “are supposed to lose one in 100 times … They’re not supposed to lose, like, four times out of 10, which is kind of where we’re on track for in California.”

If a few of those companies stop insuring the insurers, there aren’t necessarily others to step in. The state is trying to stave off a reinsurance crisis by allowing insurers to incorporate more risk probability and reinsurance prices into their rates, as of last year. But California could still turn into Florida, where all but the most local insurers are leaving the state, or going belly-up, and insurance in places can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Because coverage is generally required for anyone seeking a mortgage, soaring rates in California could drive home values down, threatening yet another crisis, this one in real estate. And if existing homeowners can’t get insurance, they’ll be left bearing the cost of catastrophes all on their own, like many in the burn area around Los Angeles are now.

If nothing changes, more people will get sucked into this doom spiral, because California cannot avoid some level of catastrophe. Wind-driven fires like the ones in L.A. throw embers far ahead of themselves, leading to conflagrations that firefighters can’t stop, and the fastest fires are growing faster now. Transferring those risks to insurance will become less and less affordable as the climate warms and more people live in the zone where cities meet wildlands, because the catastrophic risk to homes is high and getting higher. As Nancy Watkins, an actuary at Milliman who specializes in catastrophic property risk, told me, “That actually is not an insurance problem. It’s a risk problem.”

To bring down risk, she wants to see neighborhoods embark on ambitious missions to “harden” homes and the landscape around them, and then see insurance companies account for those efforts. If each homeowner has removed vegetation from the first five feet around their house, if the neighborhood has kept its roads clear and made firebreaks where fire would be likeliest to enter, a place has much less of a chance of burning down, even in major fires. Plenty of communities, even the most fire-prone ones, still don’t do this. Watkins imagines a future database in which each parcel of land is inspected for fire-readiness, so that each neighborhood can be profiled for fire safety and insurers can price rates accordingly. Creating this system would take major effort, she knows, but it would motivate collective action: If it meant the difference between your whole neighborhood getting insurance and being uninsured, you would probably clean up your yard and screen your vents.

Watkins herself lives in the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, a highly flammable area outside San Francisco, which Wara’s research has identified as one of the top three places where the worst overnight losses could occur, from an insurance perspective. (Another was Pacific Palisades.) She was one of many in her area who got a nonrenewal notice from her insurer last year. Now she’s making her plot as fire-proof as possible, in hopes of coaxing an insurer back. It’s like staging a property for sale, she said: “We’re staging our home for insurability right now.” She cut down a 10-year-old manzanita tree and pulled out her mint garden, but so far she’s kept the Japanese maple that came with the house and turns a brilliant red in the fall. Once she has fire-proofed the rest of the property, she plans to invite a fire-chief friend over for dinner and ask, How bad is the maple? “And then do what they say,” she told me.

But unless her neighbors make similar efforts, Watkins’s risk will still be elevated. And taking these measures can be politically unpopular. Dave Winnacker, who was the fire chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District until his retirement last month, told me about trying to pass an ordinance that would require homeowners to keep a five-foot perimeter around their house free of flammable material; the public comments were overwhelmingly in opposition, even though these borders are proved to cut a house’s risk of burning down, he said. Residents called it a draconian overreach that would make their home unsightly and bring down property values. He chose that moment to retire. He didn’t want to be held accountable for their failure to act the next time fire arrived.

When communities do act, it can save them. Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer at UC Merced, studied what happened to Montecito, California—the town of Harry and Meghan, and Oprah—after it decided in the 1990s to take fire prevention seriously. From 1999 to 2017, the town spent $1.6 million total clearing brush, maintaining evacuation paths, building fuelbreaks, and working with homeowners to make sure they’d cleared vegetation around their houses. When the Thomas Fire came through in 2017—a worst-case-scenario fire for the region, with wind speeds around 75 miles an hour—Montecito could have lost 450 to 500 homes, Kolden’s research showed. Instead it lost just seven. Yards in Montecito do look a little different from others in California. But “there’s a lot of really gorgeous landscaping that does not burn,” Kolden told me. Succulents and other fire-resistant plants—think giant agaves—can be close to houses; rock gardens can be beautiful. Palm trees are fine if they’re well-manicured enough that they wouldn’t throw off flaming fronds, as some in L.A. did this week.

For a wealthy community such as Montecito, less than $2 million across almost 20 years is by no means prohibitively expensive. And according to Wara’s research, the state could help fund projects like these at relatively low cost. By spending about $3 billion a year—less than Cal Fire’s total fire-suppression budget in 2020, by his calculation—the state could harden about 100,000 homes a year, starting in the most fire-prone areas, and build fuelbreaks in every highly threatened community. That would also cover preventive burns on every acre that needs them, to prevent larger fires later.

Of course, landscaping and building better-sealed homes won’t change the fact that the biggest California fires are getting more intense. Climate change is creating more suitable conditions for the worst conflagrations to arise, and they will, again and again, with greater frequency now. Slowing that trajectory is a matter of global action. But yet here Angelenos are, living at the scale of their homes, their parcels of the Earth. Fires in California are like hurricanes in Florida. They’re going to happen, and people will live in their path. Stopping them from happening is impossible. But minimizing the damage they wreak is not.

What Happens When a Plastic City Burns

2025-01-15T11:56:26-05:00

As flames rip through Los Angeles County, burning restaurants, businesses, and whole blocks of houses, it’s clear that the threat of urban fire has returned to the United States. But this time, the urban landscape is different: Modern homes are full of plastic, turning house fires into chemical-laced infernos that burn hotter, faster, and more toxic than their predecessors.

Firefighters are warning that the smoke pouring out of neighborhoods in Southern California is a poisonous soup, in part because of the ubiquity of plastics and other petrochemical products inside them. “It’s one of the reasons why we can’t put firefighters in front of these houses,” the Cal Fire battalion chief David Acuna told me on Monday. After any lifesaving work has been done, keeping firefighters in the toxic air is too great a risk.

Very few fixtures of the modern home are entirely free of plastic. If your couch is like many available on the market today, it’s made of polyester fabric (plastic) wrapped around polyurethane foam (plastic). When polyurethane foam burns, it releases potentially deadly hydrogen-cyanide gas. Perhaps those plastic-wrapped plastic cushions sit on a frame of solid wood, or perhaps the frame is made from an engineered wood product held together with polymer-based glues (plastic). Consider, too, the ubiquity of vinyl plank flooring, popular for its resistance to scuffing, and vinyl siding, admired for its durability. Then there is foam insulation, laminate countertops, and the many synthetic textiles in our bedding and curtains and carpets. Nearly all house paint on the market is best understood as pigment suspended in liquid plastic.

Research has long shown that exposure to the tiny particles that make up wildfire smoke is a major health hazard; as I’ve written before, wildfire smoke kills thousands of people prematurely each year and is linked to a range of maladies. Burning trees release gases such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, along with tiny solid particles called PM2.5, which can penetrate deep into a person’s lungs and circulate in their blood stream, and are linked to heart and lung problems, low birth weight, preterm birth, and cognitive impairment. A burning town takes many of the chemical hazards of a burning forest and adds in a suite of new ones, Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, an atmospheric chemist at the University of British Columbia, told me. As structure fires eat through the plethora of materials inside a home, they can release not just hydrogen-cyanide gas but also hydrochloric acid, dioxins, furans, aerosolized phthalates, and a range of other gaseous contaminants broadly known as volatile organic compounds. Some may be harmless. Others are associated with health problems. As gas-detection technology improves, “we’re discovering new molecules of incomplete combustion that we didn’t know existed,” Borduas-Dedekind said. “When you’re burning a home or an entire neighborhood, we don’t have a handle on the breadth of VOCs being emitted.” And many of these can react with one another in the atmosphere, creating yet more compounds. Whereas N95 masks are good for filtering out the fine particles associated with fire smoke, they do nothing for these gases; only a gas mask can filter them out.

[Read: You have every reason to avoid breathing wildfire smoke]

Plastic is made from petroleum, and petroleum burns fast and hot. A retired Maryland state fire marshal told Newsweek that, from a fire perspective, a typical couch is akin to a block of gasoline. Acuna invited me to think of placing a log on a campfire: It takes some time to heat up, charring first. It eventually ignites and becomes a steady fire, releasing its heat at a slow, consistent rate over, say, 20 minutes. If you threw a two-liter soda bottle on a campfire (which is a highly inadvisable thing to do), it would begin to distort immediately. Within several seconds it would ignite and burn fast.

In 2020, the Fire Safety Research Institute set two living rooms on fire, on purpose. Both were identical in size and full of furnishings in an identical arrangement. But in one room, almost everything was synthetic: a polyurethane-foam sofa covered in polyester fabric sat behind an engineered-wood coffee table, both set on a polyolefin carpet. The curtains were polyester, and a polyester throw blanket was draped on the couch. In the other room, a wood sofa with cotton cushions sat on a hardwood floor, along with a solid-wood coffee table. The curtains and throw blanket were cotton. In the natural-material room, the cotton couch appeared to light easily, and then maintained a steady flame where it was lit, releasing little smoke. After 26 minutes, the flames had spread to the other side of the couch, but the rest of the room was still intact, if smoky. Meanwhile, in the synthetic room, a thick dark smoke rose out of the flame on the polyester couch. At just under five minutes, a flash of orange flame consumed the whole room all at once. “Flashover,” firefighters call it—when escape becomes impossible. In the natural-material room, flashover took longer than 30 minutes. Perhaps that difference helps explain why, although the rate of home fires in the U.S. has more than halved since 1980, more people are dying in their homes when they do catch fire.

[Read: How bad are plastics, really?]

When I spoke with Acuna, of Cal Fire, he was sitting in his office, fielding calls from reporters. He looked around the room. “I’m struggling right now to find anything that is of a natural material. In fact, the only thing I can find is my notebook,” he said. Plastic, he added, is undeniably useful. But it comes with a clear risk. One day, if fire strikes, “it will burn faster, and it will burn hotter.” The advantages will turn to threats.

The Unfightable Fire

2025-01-10T10:53:24-05:00

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In an ember storm, every opening in a house is a portal to hell. A vent without a screen, a crack in the siding, a missing roof tile—each is an opportunity for a spark to smolder. A gutter full of dry leaves is a cradle for an inferno. Think of a rosebush against a bedroom window: fire food. The roses burn first, melting the vinyl seal around the window. The glass pane falls. A shoal of embers enter the house like a school of glowing fish. Then the house is lost.

As the Palisades Fire, just 8 percent contained this morning, and the Eaton Fire, still uncontained, devour Los Angeles neighborhoods, one thing is clear: Urban fire in the U.S. is coming back. For generations, American cities would burn in era-defining conflagrations: the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the San Francisco fires of 1906. Then came fire-prevention building codes, which made large city burns a memory of a more naive time. Generations of western firefighters turned, instead, toward wildland burns, the big forest devastations. An urban conflagration was the worst-case scenario, the one they hoped they’d never see. And for a long time, they mostly didn’t.

Now more people live at the flammable edges of wildlands, making places that are primed to burn into de facto suburbs. That, combined with the water whiplash that climate change has visited on parts of California—extraordinarily wet years followed by extraordinarily dry ones—means the region is at risk for urban fire once again. And our ability to fight the most extreme fire conditions has reached its limit. The Palisades Fire alone has already destroyed more than 5,300 structures and the Eaton Fire more than 4,000, making both among the most destructive fires in California’s history. When the worst factors align, the fires are beyond what firefighting can meaningfully battle. With climate change, this type of fire will only grow more frequent.

The start of the Palisades and Eaton Fires was a case of terrible timing: A drought had turned abundant vegetation into crisp fire fuel, and the winter rains were absent. A strong bout of Santa Ana winds made what was already probable fire weather into all but a guarantee. Something—it remains to be seen what—ignited these blazes, and once they started, there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. The winds, speeding up to 100 miles an hour at times, sent showers of embers far across the landscape to ignite spot fires. The high winds meant that traditional firefighting was, at least in the beginning, all but impossible, David Acuna, a battalion chief for Cal Fire, told me: He saw videos of firefighters pointing their hoses toward flames, and the wind blowing the water in the other direction. And for a while, fire planes couldn’t fly. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have mattered, Acuna said. The fire retardant or water they would have dropped would have blown away, like the hose water. “It’s just physics,” he said.

California, and Southern California in particular, has some of the most well-equipped firefighting forces in the world, which have had to think more about fire than perhaps any other in the United States. On his YouTube livestream discussing the fires, the climate scientist Daniel Swain compared the combined fleet of vehicles, aircraft, and personnel to the army of a small nation. If these firefighters couldn’t quickly get this fire contained, likely no one could. This week’s series of fires is testing the upper limits of the profession’s capacity to fight wind-driven fires under dry conditions, Swain said, and rather than call these firefighters incompetent, it’s better to wonder how “all of this has unfolded despite that.”

The reality is that in conditions like these, once a few houses caught fire in the Pacific Palisades, even the best firefighting could likely do little to keep the blaze from spreading, Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now directs a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford, told me. “Firefighting is not going to be effective in the context we saw a few days ago,” when winds were highest, he said. “You could put a fire truck in every driveway and it would not matter.” He recounted that he was once offered a job at UCLA, but when the university took him to look at potential places to live in the Pacific Palisades, he immediately saw hazards. “It had terrible evacuation routes, but also the street layout was aligned with the Santa Ana winds so that the houses would burn down like dominoes,” he said. “The houses themselves were built very, very close together, so that the radiant heat from one house would ignite the house next door.”

In California, the shift toward ungovernable fires in populated places has been under way for several years. For the former Cal Fire chief deputy director Christopher Anthony, who retired in 2023, the turning point was 2017, when wildfires in populated places in Northern California’s wine country killed 44 people and burned nearly a quarter million acres. The firefighting profession, he told me, started to recognize then that fortifying communities before these more ferocious blazes start would be the only meaningful way to change their outcome. The Camp Fire, which decimated the town of Paradise in 2018, “was the moment that we realized that this wasn’t, you know, an anomaly,” he said. The new fire regime was here. This new kind of fire, once begun, would “very quickly overwhelm the operational capabilities of all of the fire agencies to be able to effectively respond,” he said.

As Wara put it, in fires like these, houses survive, or don’t, on their own. Sealed against ember incursion with screened vents, built using fire-resistant materials, separated from anything flammable—fencing, firewood, but especially vegetation—by at least five feet, a house has a chance. In 2020, California passed a law (yet to be enforced) requiring such borders around houses where fire hazard is highest. It’s a hard sell, having five feet of stone and concrete lining the perimeter of one’s house, instead of California’s many floral delights. Making that the norm would require a serious social shift. But it could meaningfully cut losses, Kate Dargan, a former California state fire marshal, told me.

Still, eliminating the risk of this type of wind-driven fire is now impossible. Dargan started out in wildland firefighting in the 1970s, but now she and other firefighters see the work they did, of putting out all possible blazes, as “somewhat misguided.” Fire is a natural and necessary part of California’s ecosystem, and suppressing it entirely only stokes bigger blazes later. She wants to see the state further embrace preventive fires, to restore it to its natural cycles. But the fires in Southern California this week are a different story, unlikely to have been prevented by prescribed burns alone. When the humidity drops low and the land is in the middle of a drought and the winds are blowing at 100 miles an hour, “we’re not going to prevent losses completely,” Dargan said. “And with climate change, those conditions are likely to occur more frequently.” Avoiding all loss would mean leaving L.A. altogether.

Rebuilding means choosing a different kind of future. Dargan hopes that the Pacific Palisades rebuilds with fire safety in mind; if it does, it will have a better chance of not going through this kind of experience again. Some may still want to grow a rosebush outside their window. After this is over, the bargaining with nature will begin. “Every community gets to pick how safe they want to be,” Dargan said.

The Palisades Were Waiting to Burn

2025-01-08T10:03:56-05:00

As Santa Ana winds whipped sheets of embers over the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California last night, the palm trees along the beach in the Pacific Palisades ignited like torches scaled for gods. The high school was burning. Soon, the grounds around the Getty Villa were too. The climate scientist Daniel Swain went live on his YouTube channel, warning that this fire would get worse before it got better. The winds, already screaming, would speed up. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing as he spoke. Sunset Boulevard was backed up; ash rained down on drivers as they exited their cars to escape on foot. A bulldozer parted the sea of abandoned cars to let emergency vehicles pass.

The hills were ready to burn. It’s January, well past the time of year when fire season in Southern California is supposed to end. But in this part of the semi-arid chaparral called Los Angeles, fire season can now be any time.

Drought had begun to bear down by the time the fires started. A wetter season is supposed to begin around October, but no meaningful amount of rain has fallen since May. Then came a record-breaking hot summer. The land was now drier than in almost any year since recordkeeping began. Grasses and sagebrush that had previously greened in spring rains dried to a crisp and stayed that way, a perfect buffet of fuel for a blaze to feast on. As The Atlantic wrote last summer, California’s fire luck of the past two years had run out. “You’d have to go to the late 1800s to see this dry of a start to the rainy season,” Glen MacDonald, a geography professor at UCLA, told me.

Then the colder months brought the Santa Ana winds: stuff of legend, the strong downslope gusts that suck humidity out of the air, if there was any to begin with. This time, the winds were stronger than average, too. A parched landscape; crisp-dried vegetation; strong, hot winds: “The gun was loaded,” MacDonald said. And it was pointed at Pacific Palisades.

MacDonald studies climate change and wildfires, and he has published a paper with colleagues projecting that the wildfire season in Southern California would, on average, start earlier and last longer in the future, thanks to human-driven climate warming. The lengthier the season, the greater the probability that a fire-weather day would overlap with a Santa Ana–wind day, or a day when someone happened to ignite a fire—more than 90 percent of fires in Southern California are sparked by human activity, he said.

Last night, he watched an example of his work unfold in real time. He could see smoke rising off the Palisades Fire from his house in Thousand Oaks. He had important documents in bags, just in case he and his family had to evacuate. In a dry year, he told me, the concept of fire season no longer applied in Southern California: “You can have a fire any month of the year.”

This morning, a second and third major fire are pressing toward more suburban zones where people are now evacuating. The Los Angeles mayor has told the city to brace for more. Altogether, more than 5,000 acres have burned already, and an unknown number of structures along with them. Schools are closing this morning, and Los Angeles health officials warned of unhealthy air, directing people to wear masks outdoors and keep windows closed as smoke and soot blanketed some parts of the city.

As he watched the smoke, MacDonald said he had colleagues at the university who lived in the active fire zone. He hoped they were all right; he texted them, knowing that they may not respond for a while. He’d evacuated from the Woolsey Fire in 2018, which burned nearly 100,000 acres and destroyed some 1,600 buildings, including some of his neighbors’ homes. I asked what it was like to study the future of fire in California while living it. “It makes the work more immediate,” he said. “It gives you a sense of unease. As the summer ends and you know you’re dried out, you look around you at things you own, and you think, This could just be ashes.”

Climate Models Can’t Explain What’s Happening to Earth

2025-01-06T13:41:51-05:00

Fifty years into the project of modeling Earth’s future climate, we still don’t really know what’s coming. Some places are warming with more ferocity than expected. Extreme events are taking scientists by surprise. Right now, as the bald reality of climate change bears down on human life, scientists are seeing more clearly the limits of our ability to predict the exact future we face. The coming decades may be far worse, and far weirder, than the best models anticipated.

This is a problem. The world has warmed enough that city planners, public-health officials, insurance companies, farmers, and everyone else in the global economy want to know what’s coming next for their patch of the planet. And telling them would require geographic precision that even the most advanced climate models don’t yet have, as well as computing power that doesn’t yet exist. Our picture of what is happening and probably will happen on Earth is less hazy than it’s ever been. Still, the exquisitely local scale on which climate change is experienced and the global purview of our best tools to forecast its effects simply do not line up.

Today’s climate models very accurately describe the broad strokes of Earth’s future. But warming has also now progressed enough that scientists are noticing unsettling mismatches between some of their predictions and real outcomes. Kai Kornhuber, a climate scientist at Columbia University, and his colleagues recently found that, on every continent except Antarctica, certain regions showed up as mysterious hot spots, suffering repeated heat waves worse than what any model could predict or explain. Across places where a third of humanity lives, actual daily temperature records are outpacing model predictions, according to forthcoming research from Dartmouth’s Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin. And a global jump in temperature that lasted from mid-2023 to this past June remains largely unexplained, a fact that troubles Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, although it doesn’t entirely surprise him.

“From the 1970s on, people have understood that all models are wrong,” he told me. “But we’ve been working to make them more useful.” In that sense, the project of climate modeling is a scientific process that’s proceeding normally, even excellently. Only now the whole world needs very specific information to make crucial decisions, and they needed it, like, yesterday. That scientists don’t have those answers might look like a failure of modeling, but really, it’s a testament to how bad climate change has been permitted to get, and how quickly.

The Earth is an unfathomably complex place, a nesting doll of systems within systems. Feedback loops among temperature, land, air, and water are made even more complicated by the fact that every place on Earth is a little different. Natural variability and human-driven warming further alter the rules that govern each of those fundamental interactions.

Some of these systems—such as cloud formation—are notoriously poorly understood, despite having a major bearing on climate change. And, like clouds, many parts of the Earth system are just too localized for climate models to pick up on. “We have to approximate cloud formation because we don’t have the small scales necessary to resolve individual water droplets coming together,” Robert Rohde, the chief scientist at the open-source environmental-data nonprofit Berkeley Earth, told me. Similarly, models approximate topography, because the scale at which mountain ranges undulate is smaller than the resolution of global climate models, which tend to represent Earth in, at best, 100-square-kilometer pixels. That resolution is good for understanding phenomena such as Arctic warming over decades. But “you can’t resolve a tornado worth anything,” Rohde said.

Models simply can’t function on the scale at which people live, because assessing the impact of current emissions on the future world requires hundreds of years of simulations. Modeling the Earth at one-square-kilometer pixels would take “like a hundred thousand times more computation than we currently have,” Schmidt, of NASA, told me. Still, global climate models can be of local use if combined with enough regional data and the correct expertise, and more people now want to use them that way, in order to understand risk to their properties and investments, or to make emergency plans and build infrastructure. “We are asking a lot of the models. More than we have in the past,” Rohde said.

For nonscientists, coaxing useful information from climate models requires professional help. Climate scientists have been working for years with New York City to help direct choices such as where to put infrastructure with sea-level rise in mind. But, Schmidt said, “there’s just not enough scientists to be on the advisory board of every locality or every enterprise or every institution or every company,” helping them access the right climate data or pick which models to rely on. (Some are better at simulating certain variables, such as day-to-night temperature variation, than others.) Often governments end up turning to private-sector companies that claim to be able to translate the data; Schmidt would rather see his own field produce work that is more directly useful to the public.

At the same time, now that the models are running up against the reality of dramatic climate change, some of their limits are showing. When this scientific endeavor first started, the models were meant to imagine what global temperatures might look like if greenhouse-gas emissions rose, and they did a remarkable job of that. But models are, even now, less capable of accounting for secondary effects of those emissions that no one saw coming, and that now seem to be driving important change.

Some of those variables are missing from climate models entirely. Trees and land are major sinks for carbon emissions, and that this fact might change is not accounted for in climate models. But it is changing: Trees and land absorbed much less carbon than normal in 2023, according to research published last October. In Finland, forests have stopped absorbing the majority of the carbon they once did, and recently became a net source of emissions, which, as The Guardian has reported, swamped all gains the country has made in cutting emissions from all other sectors since the early 1990s. The interactions of the ice sheets with the oceans are also largely missing from models, Schmidt told me, despite the fact that melting ice could change ocean temperatures, which could have significant knock-on effects. Changing ocean-temperature patterns are currently making climate modelers at NOAA rethink their models of El Niño and La Niña; the agency initially predicted that La Niña’s cooling powers would kick in much sooner than it now appears they will.

Biases in climate models go in both directions: Some overestimate risk from various factors, and others underestimate it. Some models “run hot,” suggesting more warming than what actually plays out. But the recent findings about temperature extremes point in the other direction: The models may be underestimating future climate risks across several regions because of a yet-unclear limitation. And, Rohde said, underestimating risk is far more dangerous than overestimating it.

To Kornhuber, too, that models already appear to be severely underestimating climate risk in several places is a bad sign for what’s ahead and our capacity to see it coming. “It should be worrying that we are now moving into a world where we’ve kind of reached the limit of our physical understanding of the Earth system,” Kornhuber said.

While models struggle to capture the world we live in now, the planet is growing more alien to us, further from our reference ranges, as the climate keeps changing. If given unlimited time, science could probably develop models that more fully captured what we’re watching play out. But by then it would be too late to do anything about it. Science is more than five decades into the modeling endeavor, and still our best tools can only get us so far. “At the end of the day, we are all making estimates of what’s coming,” Rohde said. “And there is no magic crystal ball to tell us the absolute truth.” We’re left instead with a partial picture, gestural in its scope, pointing toward a world we’ve never seen before.

Gas Will Be the First Big Climate Fight of the Trump Era

2024-12-18T12:18:17-05:00

When the tanker ships come toward the tiny town of Cameron, Louisiana, Travis Dardar, a shrimp fisherman, can hear their wake coming before he sees it, he told me earlier this year. They’re there to pick up natural gas that’s been supercooled to a liquid state at a sprawling export facility, built atop hundreds of wetland acres in the past few years, and to transport that gas to ports in Europe and Asia.

On the Gulf Coast, the rapid expansion of the United States’ gas-export ambitions is impossible to miss: Last year, the U.S. became the world’s largest exporter of natural gas and was building many of these enormous new export terminals. Then, in January, the Biden administration paused permitting for new exports and started analyzing the economic, national-security, and climate impacts of expanding natural-gas exports. That decision was hailed by activists as a tentative victory against the export terminals they’d dubbed “climate bombs” for the decades of future emissions they’d lock in. But no one I spoke with earlier this year in Louisiana, home to a large share of the built and proposed terminals, thought the pause would last: Opponents of liquified natural gas (known as LNG) expected that if Joe Biden won reelection, he’d eventually approve more terminals; none doubted that Donald Trump would.

Now the Biden administration has essentially written a playbook for LNG opponents to use in blocking these projects. Yesterday, the administration released the analysis of the LNG industry ordered when the pause on permitting began. The report was reportedly hurried to conclusion in these last weeks of the administration. And it suggests that the economic, climate, and national-security arguments for gas exporting don’t hold up. Now when the Trump administration moves to expand the country’s gas-export infrastructure, as the incoming president has promised, opponents have the evidence needed to turn that move into a dragged-out legal fight. The country’s present and future as the world’s largest gas exporter, and as a major contributor to climate change, will turn on the outcome.

The conclusions of the report are measured yet damning. The Department of Energy did not outright advise banning new exports of natural gas. But, as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm wrote in a statement, the department found that “unfettered exports” of American gas would reduce supply domestically, potentially driving up wholesale gas prices in the U.S. by more than 30 percent. The report also found that increasing LNG exports could generate 1.5 gigatons of direct greenhouse-gas emissions a year by 2050. That’s equivalent to about a quarter of current annual U.S. emissions, and would more than eclipse the emission reductions the country has made since 2000. If the department’s predictions are correct, the U.S. would be essentially abandoning any pretense of trying to limit climate change. The LNG industry has long countered that it can use carbon-capture technology to counteract its emissions. But that technology is far from functional at any meaningful scale. Even when the Energy Department researchers factored in hypothetical “aggressive” use of carbon capture and storage, emissions were projected to rise.

Read: [America’s new climate delusion]

In the report, the Biden administration also says that its original argument for LNG exports—that Europe needed the gas for energy security during the Russian war with Ukraine—has fallen apart. Demand in Europe is plateauing and is expected to decline, and instead, the increased exports from the U.S. would mostly go to benefit China, already the world’s largest LNG importer, Granholm wrote. This has long been pointed out by LNG’s opponents; it is striking to see the facts laid out by the federal government. The continued pace of LNG exports is “neither sustainable nor advisable,” Granholm wrote.

This marks a major departure in tone for a Democratic administration. As the writer and climate activist Bill McKibben notes, Democrats going back to Barack Obama have touted the American gas boom, glossing it as a step toward a cleaner power source than crude oil or coal. Kamala Harris even made a point to reverse her 2020 position on the topic during her recent campaign, promising that she wouldn’t ban fracking and touting America’s natural-gas boom in response to the only climate question asked at the only presidential debate where she was a participant. But the DOE report makes clear that liquefied natural gas is neither a form of clean energy nor a bridge to a cleaner future. In fact, exporting more of it, Granholm wrote, would serve mostly to generate “wealth for the owners of export facilities.”

I’ve heard that exact sentiment before, from John Allaire, who worked for oil companies (Amoco, which became part of BP) for 30 years but who opposes the giant LNG plant near his property in Cameron, and a second that is slated to be built right up against his property line. The projects he worked on as an environmental engineer sent oil to local refineries in the U.S. to fuel American industry, he told me; these new export terminals are destroying the fragile coastal ecosystem where he lives while helping China fuel its economy. In his view, exporting more gas serves only the interests of methane sales or transportation business; “it will never be in the domestic public interest to sell our finite, critical natural resources to the highest overseas bidder,” he said. The Biden administration has now situated its official analysis of LNG exports closer to that view than ever before.

The report itself does nothing to block plans by Trump to lift the pause on LNG-export terminals on his “very first day back.” Proponents of these terminals say they are an economic boon to the places where they are built, and create jobs in regions that need them. (Most of these jobs are connected to constructing the terminals, and are temporary.) The American Gas Association condemned the DOE report as a means to justify the “mistake” of Biden’s LNG pause; the financial research firm S&P Global put out a report the same day that found that LNG exports contribute $400 billion to American GDP, and that the pause and other regulatory measures jeopardize an additional $250 billion in incremental GDP.

Regardless of administration, in the years prior to the pause, the DOE never denied any company an LNG-export permit. To LNG opponents such as James Hiatt, a former oil-industry worker turned environmental advocate in Louisiana, the DOE’s analysis validates the “harsh reality” of living up against the terminals and could be a useful legal tool, he told me. With Republicans about to control all three branches of government, though, he wouldn’t predict how the coming fight against new export infrastructure would go. Still, to justify issuing future permits, the Department of Energy must determine that each new export operation is in the public interest. And now the Department of Energy has made a case for why it isn’t.

Environmental Internationalism Is in Its Flop Era

2024-12-13T12:16:14-05:00

This year is set to break the record for the hottest year ever recorded. It was a banner year for climate devastation: Southern Africa and South America suffered under severe droughts; dangerous heat bore down on large parts of Asia, Europe, and Central America; and an alarming number of wildfires consumed more than 1 million hectares in Brazil. Hurricanes, intensified by abnormally hot seawater, pummeled the Caribbean and the American Southeast, and floods deluged parts of Africa and Europe. The Arctic tundra, once a sink for carbon emissions, is officially thawed and sufficiently wildfire-prone to become a source of them.

Despite all of that, this year in international environmental diplomacy went exceptionally badly. Inflation and cost-of-living crises, coupled with a rightward shift in politics in many countries, meant that negotiating for major environmental spending this year was poised to be difficult. But environmental diplomacy has also reached a hard new crossroads: The science of ecological destruction is settled, the trajectory is bleak, and the need for change is obvious. All that’s left to do is decide who should deal with it.

The diplomatic season began with Colombia hosting the 16th United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in October; that meeting seeks to stanch the loss of ecosystems and species across the world. Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth, and its leftist president is keen on weaning the country off fossil fuels and reducing deforestation. But even with Colombia’s motivated leadership, the conference ended in disappointment as the gathered nations failed to agree on how biodiversity-conservation targets would be monitored or paid for.

In November, the more than 170 countries that gathered in Busan, South Korea, for what was meant to be the fifth and final round of UN plastic-pollution treaty talks failed to reach a deal. The impasse came down, once again, to who would bear the costs of curtailing the problem. In this case, more than 100 countries wanted measures to curb the production of plastic, rather than just finding new ways to clean up plastic waste. But that would mean jeopardizing the revenue of the plastic-making industry, and petroleum-producing countries, including Saudi Arabia and Russia (plastic is mostly made from oil and gas), pushed against those measures, blocking a deal. The plastic treaty will try again next year.

The blockbuster event, however, was the UN’s annual climate conference, where the wealthy nations historically responsible for most of the world’s carbon emissions were meant to commit real money to fund developing countries’ response. Economists said they’d need at least $1 trillion a year. As one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters, the United States might be expected to be a major contributor to the pool of money dedicated to slowing climate change and mitigate its effects. But the U.S. has always been an unreliable partner in global climate agreements, and Donald Trump’s election last month, shortly before the conference began, meant that any financial contribution from the U.S. in the near future was predicted to be zero dollars. “That obviously made a lot of the developed countries very concerned to promise numbers that they can’t deliver on,” Linda Kalcher, the executive director of the European climate think tank Strategic Perspectives, told me. Some of the donor countries are in the middle of an inflation and cost-of-living crisis, she noted. In the end, the countries agreed to just $300 billion in climate finance a year by 2035, a fraction of the necessary total.

Beyond the U.S., far-right populist parties are gaining footholds in Europe, and they’re inclined to frame climate finance as “money that’s been donated to other countries at the cost of not renovating your schools,” Kalcher said. “It’s really a difficult political setting” for the big project of climate internationalism. The UN climate negotiations need countries that benefit from fossil fuels to sign onto agreements, too, but in recent years, their influence has slowed progress enough that some observers have argued that the whole process is breaking. Energy lobbyists are now always on the conference’s roster; Al Gore has called setting these meetings in petrostates such as the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan “absurd.” During this year’s negotiations, a group that included former diplomacy leaders sent a letter to the UN urging it to reform key aspects of the negotiations, including who is allowed to attend.

Kalcher, who has worked as a senior adviser for the UN secretary-general on climate issues, said she still believes in the process: After all, no other venue exists where countries can hash out deals on climate matters and the least-developed, most climate-stricken ones have a seat at the table with the industrial behemoths. But for right now, climate internationalism is in a sorry state.

Arguably, the project of environmental internationalism has reached the most difficult part of the problems it’s been tasked with. The main question left to answer is who should pay to stave off the worst of climate change’s ravages. When climate negotiations started more than 30 years ago, the science of climate change had begun to resolve some of the most important uncertainties about the planet’s future; now science has produced broad consensus on the cause and general trajectory of climate change. It’s a simple fact that many countries will flounder without major funding from wealthy countries, and suffer enormous consequences from climate changes they did not cause. Prior eras of climate diplomacy were focused on hammering out the basic contours of the climate problem, and agreeing that it must be addressed; now the world is at the point where meaningfully altering the trajectory of ecological decline requires transitioning the world off fossil fuels, which will require fossil-fuel economies to radically change.

Likewise, protecting biodiversity will require major changes to an economic system that values industries such as tourism and timber more than mangroves and rainforests. And curbing plastics will require curbing plastic production, an industry now deeply embedded in almost every aspect of global commerce and tied to the system of subsidies and state support for fossil fuels. One way or another, addressing these problems will require deep economic reforms. Of course, making them could ensure the future habitability of the planet, which comes with its own obvious economic benefits.

A few glimmers of hope for environmental diplomacy do remain. In the final weeks of his presidency, Joe Biden is pushing forward an agreement in which the U.S. and the 37 other well-off countries at the OECD would effectively stop using their export-credit agencies to fund fossil-fuel projects overseas. This decision would deprive the fossil-fuel economy of one source of backing, and eliminate one of the only remaining ways that the U.S. government supports international oil-and-gas development. It would change nothing about the U.S.’s position as the world’s largest current producer of oil and exporter of gas, but it would potentially eliminate billions of dollars in future funding for such projects overseas. And, unlike financial commitments made at the UN climate conference, this decision would put rules in place that proponents say would be hard for the incoming Trump administration to undo. It would be a step toward a modicum of climate safety.

The world will meet again next year, in Belém, Brazil, for the 30th iteration of the UN climate talks. By then, Trump will be in office and will have likely started the process to withdraw the U.S. from the climate bargaining table. The past year’s paltry outcome will surely cast a shadow over relations between developed and undeveloped countries, the most imperiled of which view the weak finance deal as a betrayal of trust. China, the world’s largest current emitter of greenhouse gases, as well as the largest producer of clean-energy technology, may step into the vacuum of power the U.S. will have left behind, or it may not. Other major oil-producing countries, emboldened by the withdrawal of the Americans, may dilute whatever show of climate solidarity they’ve previously made.

This impasse comes just when warming is accelerating faster in some areas even than scientists expected, and the physical threats it poses are reaching dangerous new heights of severity. But global diplomacy remains the world’s best idea to address a global problem. Countries will still come together, and they will try to make some progress, because for many of them in desperate climatic straits, there is simply no other choice. Either we figure this out, or we live with the consequences.

Winter Is Cooked

2024-12-05T09:03:45-05:00

Updated at 12:47 p.m. ET on December 5, 2024

Bing Crosby’s performance of “White Christmas” has, in recent years, sounded to me like an elegy. Some people might still get white Christmases, but where I live, in New York City, 2002 is the last time any snowflakes fell on Christmas Day. That is not a statistic of climatalogical significance, really. It’s more like an omen.

This winter most places in the U.S. should expect less snow than what many people—and the historical record—would consider normal. Climate change might be making summer days and nights hotter, but across most of the U.S., winter is getting warmer faster than any other season. Cold streaks are shorter, freezing nights are fewer, and extremely cold days are just not as cold. The places with the most dramatic warming are also some of the country’s classic winter wonderlands: In Albany, New York, winter is 6.8 degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer on average than it was some 50 years ago, according to an analysis by the nonprofit research group Climate Central. Winters in Concord, New Hampshire, and in Green Bay, Wisconsin, are each 7 degrees warmer, and winter in Burlington, Vermont, is more than 8 degrees warmer. In the places of much of America’s winter mythmaking, the image of a reliably snow-frosted landscape might be more suitably replaced with an image of bare trees and rain.

Snow will still fall for many years to come, sometimes in great quantities. But both the extent of snow cover in North America and the length of the season that would support it have been gradually shrinking. Springtime snows are particularly disappearing. And last winter, researchers identified a “snow-loss cliff”—an average winter-temperature threshold below which snowpack is fairly stable, but above which snow loss happens fast. Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth who contributed to that finding, lives in New Hampshire, which exists well on the other side of that snow-loss cliff, where each additional degree of temperature rise dramatically diminishes snowpack. He now considers the “marginal use cost” of cross-country-ski gear he bought for his kids to be going up and up. “There’s really no snowmaking for cross-country skiing. You just have what nature’s giving you,” he told me. And now there are simply fewer days with worthy conditions to go cross-country skiing than there once were.

When I called him this week, he could see fresh snow outside his window. But that is still perfectly in line with climate predictions. “This is the kind of cognitive dissonance of global warming writ large that we need to hold,” he said. “There will be winters where there probably won’t be much snow accumulation. And then there’ll be other winters where there will be.” What will change—and what already has—is any kind of consistency. The snow system will get far more jumpy with each additional degree of warming. “Snow just doesn’t have the reliability that it has had in our imagination from the 20th century. That’s just gone,” Mankin said. “That’s the thing that is challenging our imagination for a place like New Hampshire.”

But winter precipitation isn’t going away. A study published in September found that the likelihood of extremely wet winters, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, is set to rise significantly. Whereas about one in 30 winters would be classified as very wet now, that rate could rise to six or seven winters out of 30 by the end of this century. But because temperatures will be higher, much more of that precipitation will fall as rain, rather than snow.

Akintomide Akinsanola, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead author of that paper, told me he's lived in Chicago for four years without seeing one of the midwestern city’s notorious major winter storms. His findings imply that most places across the country (except the southern Great Plains region) should be girding themselves for more winter flooding as the century wears on. “The average person is going to experience that firsthand,” he told me. Most places should be planning for that future, and thinking about how they will withstand those new extremes.

In parts of the U.S. that rely on snowpack for water, such as the Mountain West, the implications of both Mankin’s and Akinsanola’s papers are about water security. But in the Northeast and Midwest, that research points to a less concrete loss, of ice fishing and pond skating and dogsledding, and other parts of life that just aren’t as possible in a sopping wet, muddy winter. The identity of these places will continue to vanish as long as the global temperature keeps going up, which it will until carbon emissions halt. “The odds of a winter being snow-free just increases with each gigaton of emissions,” Mankin said. In New Hampshire, he is expecting both “mud season” and “stick season,” when trees are bare of leaves but also bare of snow, to extend further into the best part of the year in his state, when downy white should be blanketing everything.

This article originally misidentified Dartmouth College as Dartmouth University.

Climate Diplomacy’s $300 Billion Failure

2024-11-24T06:00:00-05:00

The problem that the United Nations’ annual climate conference was meant to solve this year was, in one way, straightforward. To have any hope of meeting their commitments to holding global warming at bay, developing countries need at least $1 trillion a year in outside funding, according to economists’ assessments. Failure to meet those commitments will result in more chaotic climate outcomes globally. Everyone agrees on this.

And yet, after two weeks of grueling, demoralizing negotiations, the assembled 198 parties agreed to a deal that was, in the most generous terms, weak. The agreement committed to $300 billion a year, by 2035, in funding for climate action in developing countries—triple the current target but less than a third of that trillion-plus goal.

These negotiations have operated on the presumption that a significant chunk of this money would come from wealthy countries, because where else would it come from? A limited number of places—the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, and Europe—have been the source of 92 percent of excess carbon emissions since industrialization. The countries that are bearing the brunt of climate change largely didn’t emit the carbon causing it. And the wealthiest countries failed to make a financial commitment even close to what was needed. “They’re really finding ways to avoid their responsibility,” Nafkote Dabi, the climate-change-policy lead at Oxfam International, told me.

Even the climate financing that was agreed to is not just a cash handout. Previous agreements had promised $100 billion annually, a goal that the world claims to have finally managed to hit in 2022. But about 70 percent of that financing came in the form of loans. Much of the money in this agreement will likely be structured as debt too—and will add to a global debt crisis that the International Monetary Fund estimates has 35 countries in dire financial straits this year. Dabi described debt—both a country’s existing national debt and climate finance taking the form of new debt—as the elephant in the room at COP. Even as developing countries worried about their debt burden growing from funds promised at the conference, they worried that discussing debt forgiveness would derail the already fragile negotiations.

But both national debt and new climate debt stand in the way of COP’s stated goals. Towering national debts are stifling countries’ ability to invest in climate resilience: Some 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on servicing the interest payments on their debt than on education or health, let alone climate adaptation. And as climate change fuels hurricanes, droughts, and other disasters, the country must take on more debt to respond. African nations in particular are struggling. Last year, the chief economic adviser for Kenya’s president tweeted, “Salaries or default? Take your pick.” The country’s economy is collapsing under the weight of debt repayments. Kenya is also ricocheting between drought and flooding, and although climate funding might help build irrigation systems for drought-stricken farmers or finance renewable-energy infrastructure, it could also exacerbate the economic crisis if it arrives in the form of debt, adding to a burden that itself makes people that much less resilient to climate change’s challenges.

Pakistan is perhaps the clearest example of how debt and climate risk can send a country into a downward spiral. It is one of the countries most loaded with external debt, owing some $100 billion to mostly the Asian Development Bank, IMF and World Bank, and a handful of wealthy countries including China, Japan, and the United States. And disasters worsened by climate change only add to its hardship: In 2022, for instance, flood damage amounted to $30 billion in losses. Pakistan can never repay its debts, and natural disasters will push it to rack up more.

Dramatically lessening Pakistan’s debt would offer some recognition that the country is suffering under climate conditions it was not responsible for creating, and to which it will struggle to respond otherwise. Mark Brown, the prime minister of the Cook Islands, has called for countries on the front lines of climate change to have their national debts forgiven, and the president of Nigeria recently wrote that offering climate financing to African countries without restructuring their debts would be like “pedaling harder on a bicycle as its tires go flat.”

There is precedent for mass debt forgiveness: In the 1990s and early 2000s, the IMF led the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative to restructure debts. It managed to cut out up to 64 percent of the countries’ debts on average. Kevin Gallagher, the director of the Boston University Global Development Policy Center and an expert on climate finance, told me he’d like to see a new program like it, but one meant to wrangle the many private bondholders that have since entered the debt market. These companies, he says, tend to be reluctant to grant a country debt relief, despite charging extremely high interest rates meant to cover losses in the likely case the country defaults. “They’ve already priced it in,” he told me. Right now, China and other major debt holders are then also wary of offering debt relief, knowing the debtor country will likely use any financial breathing room to pay the private bond market.

China, which is the single biggest creditor of any country in the world, is actually a far more progressive lender than private bondholders, experts say. China can be reluctant to restructure countries’ debts when they’re at risk of default, but it also lends at much lower interest rates than private bondholders. And few other creditor countries have been willing to entertain cutting debts as part of a climate-resilience strategy either, according to Jason Braganza, a Kenyan economist and the executive director of the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development. If a major debt-restructuring initiative managed to get China, other creditor countries such as the U.S., private bond markets, and global-development banks to the table, that could alter the fate of the world: Although every one of the poorest indebted countries could default on its loans without having a huge impact on the global financial system, the financial strain of them defaulting—and tumbling into austerity—would drag down the global economy, Gallagher said. “If these countries can’t even afford to pay back their international debts, they certainly can’t invest in climate resilience, mitigation, and development.”

Debt forgiveness poses a similar challenge to the climate-finance question that COP failed so miserably to address: Solving either crisis would take collective will, and at COP, too few responsible entities were willing. And although COP could agree not to issue new climate finance in the form of debt, a multilateral agreement on debt forgiveness wouldn’t happen at COP, which doesn’t include nonstate actors.

Still, last week in Brazil, President Joe Biden called on G20 countries to swiftly provide debt relief to nations that need it, urging a faster debt-restructuring process. Many analysts say wealthy countries have an obvious interest in preventing default in the developing world: The impact of debt distress is not confined to the distressed country’s borders. Indebtedness breeds austerity, and if countries are unable to shield themselves from the effects of climate change and to transition away from fossil fuels, then that crisis deepens into an issue of global security. Emissions go up, as does displacement. If the world could think differently about debt, perhaps the next round of climate talks, scheduled for November 2025 in Brazil, could go differently too.

Drought Is an Immigration Issue

2024-11-18T14:36:58-05:00

In Mexico, the conditions that have contributed to the largest sustained movement of humans across any border in the world will get only more common. This spring, at the start of the corn-growing season, 76 percent of Mexico was in drought, and the country was sweltering under a deadly heat dome. Finally, after too many months, summer rains started to refill reservoirs. But years and droughts like this promise to become more intense: Mexico is slated to warm 1 to 3 degrees Celsius by 2060.

When drought strikes rural corn farmers in Mexico during the growing season, they are more likely to attempt to immigrate to the United States the following year out of economic desperation, according to a study released this month in the journal PNAS. This is just the latest example of a signal in migration data that keeps getting clearer: Climate change is pushing people to cross borders, and especially the southern border of the United States. Many live on the edge of financial stability; if one of their few options to support themselves is jeopardized, they might not recover. “And climate extremes are taking away whatever option there is there,” one of the study’s co-authors, Filiz Garip, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, told me.

Donald Trump and his incoming administration have said that limiting immigration into the United States is a priority; the president-elect intends to both close the southern border and deploy the military in order to carry out mass deportations. He is also poised to ignore the climate altogether, and likely hasten the pace of change with policies that increase oil and gas drilling. That combination is “sort of like turning the heat up on a boiling pot and then forcing the lid shut,” Ama Francis, a lawyer and the climate director of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), told me. Drought and other climate disasters will help propel more people north; U.S. immigration policies will attempt to block them, but migrants won’t stop coming. Part of the argument for dealing with climate change, and doing so in partnership with the rest of the world, is that it will mitigate these sorts of pressures before they become even more dramatic conflicts. The next administration could be setting the country up for the opposite.

Climate isn’t usually the only factor that drives people to move, but it can be a tipping point that clinches their decision. Like many places in the world, Mexico is becoming a harder place to live because of both drought and extreme rainfall, which leads to flooding. These are particular challenges for rural farmers whose crop depends on the seasons progressing as they have for hundreds of years. More may make the desperate choice to leave. And more who have left may stay for longer in the United States. Garip’s study found that climate extremes will delay migrants from returning to their communities. “I was really taken aback by how strong the return results were,” she said. “These weather extremes continue to shape, it seems, how people think about whether to remain a migrant or whether to go back to their communities.”

Climate factors are not what many immigrants first cite as a reason for leaving their home. Violence and racial or political persecution will often come up before drought, for example. But start talking through the deeper roots, and in many cases, “climate-related factors do come up,” Alexander de Sherbinin, an expert on climate and human migration at Columbia University, told me. Francis’s organization, IRAP, which gives migrants legal support, recently co-published a report based on interviews with more than 3,000 clients, nearly half of whom had experienced a climate disaster in their home country before leaving. The most common of these was extreme rainfall, followed closely by extreme heat.

Even when demographers control for other characteristics in a person’s life, climate change still emerges as a statistically significant factor of migration, says Lori Hunter, the director of the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who has studied migration data for decades. The pattern is clear, Hunter told me: “If we disinvest from the climate, the pressure to migrate will intensify.”

Conversely, a certain subset of the potential immigrant population, if their climate desperation could be alleviated, may not choose to come to the United States. In the long term, dramatically lowering the U.S.’s emissions would help limit climate stresses, but the warming the world has already experienced is driving weather extremes right now. Adapting to new climatic normals is now necessary. Migration is one way of adapting. But people could, with assistance, adapt in place. Among the corn farmers Garip and her colleagues studied, those who had access to some form of irrigation infrastructure, such as a reservoir, were less likely to leave, even when faced with drought conditions. It was mostly rural, smallholder farmers entirely dependent on rainfall who decided to make the perilous trek north. With investment for projects to install irrigation in those communities, “these decisions could really be different,” Garip said. “Unless we do something, then we’re just pushing more people into this dangerous journey.”

Indeed, the biggest topic at the global COP29 climate negotiations, under way in Baku, Azerbaijan, is the dollar amount that developed countries, responsible for the majority of historical emissions, will transfer to developing countries, which are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis and require at least $1 trillion of outside funding per year to build more renewable energy and respond to climate-driven disasters. Many at COP assume that the U.S. won’t contribute to those funds at all, and the meeting, now at its halfway point, is by all accounts at a deadlock, with little leadership from wealthy countries materializing. The Biden administration had plans to fund $3 billion worth of climate adaptation internationally each year, with a special focus on water security—and explicitly framed that as a tool to “address key drivers of migration.” Those plans are unlikely to continue into the next Trump presidency.

Climate finance is a nebulous category, and a lack of transparency about how the funds get spent can undermine the process. But other research has found that remittances—money that migrants send home—tend to be spent on things that improve climate resilience, such as air-conditioning. To Hunter, that remittance data suggest that international climate finance could be spent in ways that would help people adapt to climate change where they live, and remove one of the factors that force them to leave. If a motivated government made a real effort to supply that funding in the first place, perhaps those communities would not feel that they had to send a family member north. It wouldn’t stop migration altogether, but it could help reduce the pressures the incoming Trump administration is so eager to address.