The V.P. Candidates’ Terrible Responses to Hurricane Helene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good News

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

Bad News

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

Stat of the Week
40 trillion

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

What I’m Reading

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

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

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

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

Read Diana Kruzman’s full report at Grist.

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

Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts stands accused this week of killing his neighbor’s dog with a shovel circa 2004. Three people who knew Roberts during his time at New Mexico State University told The Guardian that they remember Roberts telling them that he had killed the dog because it was barking too much. Three more people reportedly recall hearing the story at the time from those colleagues. Guardian reporter Stephanie Kirchgaessner also tracked down Roberts’s neighbor, who said that his dog, Loca—he provided a photo—indeed disappeared around 2004, when the neighbor was 16.

Killing a teenage neighbor’s pet out of irritation and then telling co-workers about it might seem like a whole new level of bizarre, even for this already surreal election cycle. Roberts, however, denies it, calling the allegation “patently untrue and baseless.” In some ways, that denial is the most unusual part of this whole story.

Had Roberts confirmed that he killed a dog, he would hardly be the only prominent conservative in recent years to treat such an act as a badge of honor. The most striking example is Kristi Noem, who stunned the country this spring by bragging in her book about shooting her 14-month-old puppy and a family goat, portraying the story as an example of her grit and fortitude. (The dog, apparently, was hard to train and killed some chickens while off leash. The goat was “mean.”) The book was widely seen as an attempt to burnish her credentials for Trump’s V.P. slot. In response to the widespread backlash, Noem dug in, insisting that these were the sorts of tough calls necessitated by country life.

The episode made for lots of late-night satire. But if you cast your memory back a bit further, you can kind of see where Noem got the idea that killing animals and boasting about it was a form of informal right-wing résumé building, akin to knocking back bourbon after work to prove you can hang with the boys.

I’m not talking about Mitt Romney—the strangely ubiquitous comparison made in news coverage of Noem’s book. Romney may have strapped his dog to the roof of his car using a windshield-equipped crate in 1983, but he did not kill his dog, nor did he intend to kill his dog, and he bristled at those comparing him to Noem—which makes sense, because Romney’s conservatism has never been the sort for which animal cruelty functions as an in-group signifier. (If Mitt Romney had killed his dog, it would have seemed incoherent and try-hard, because he’s just not cowboy-coded.)

The better example of this trend would be Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, who has repeatedly incorporated questionably legal violence into his “rugged Westerner” brand. While Gianforte first made headlines for assaulting a human reporter in 2017, he also illegally killed an underage elk in 2000, and then received a written warning in 2021 for trapping and shooting a collared Yellowstone wolf without having taken Montana’s required (and free) wolf-trapping certification course—which covers, among other things, trapping ethics. Trapping critics argue that there is no such thing as humane trapping, given that the trapped animal may suffer for hours or even days. But Gianforte campaigned on the issue, saying that “the effort to stop trapping in Montana is an attack on our heritage.”

Gianforte again made headlines in 2022 when he shot and killed a researcher-monitored mountain lion that hunting dogs had pursued up a tree. This time, the killing was legal, although there was some dispute about whether the dogs had kept the mountain lion up a tree for hours before the governor arrived to shoot it—just as there was some question, with the wolf trapping, about whether the governor had been called from far away to finish off the trapped animal.

Gianforte, whom Trump has called “my guy,” falls into a category of Republican politician that has grown more prominent over the past two decades: the hunter that even other hunters express misgivings about. In 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney participated in a so-called “canned hunt,” shooting pheasants that had been raised in captivity and then released specifically for this event. “I don’t see anything terribly wrong with it, but I don’t think it should be confused with hunting,” Sid Evans of the hunting magazine Field & Stream told The New York Times.

The Republican Party at this point was losing its animal-friendly vibe in general. While Nixon was a staunch conservationist, and George H.W. Bush banned ivory imports to protect African elephants, the younger Bush proposed reversing the ban on importing hunting trophies of endangered species into the U.S., and later named a top lobbyist for the trophy hunting organization Safari Club International as acting director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. (Bush received the organization’s “Governor of the Year” award in 2000, over the objections of the Humane Society.)

In the 2008 election, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s support for aerial wolf gunning—a practice deliberately designed to give hunters the advantage and thin out wolf numbers—was denounced by animal lovers but lauded by her supporters, who loved her “frontier femme” identity politics. After the 2008 election loss, Palin ritualistically pardoned a Thanksgiving turkey but gave an interview in front of a man decapitating the other birds. The show Sarah Palin’s Alaska routinely featured graphic footage of the governor and her family hunting and gutting animals.

Then, of course, there were the Trump children. In 2011, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump traveled to Zimbabwe with a safari firm that Zimbabwean conservationists later said was not registered in the country. They killed an elephant and leopard, among other animals, posing with the dead bodies. “I AM A HUNTER I don’t hide from that,” Trump Jr. tweeted when the photos surfaced the following year. In late 2019, ProPublica reported that Trump Jr. had received “special treatment” during a trip to Mongolia, shooting an endangered argali sheep, for which he was retroactively given a permit after meeting with Mongolia’s president. (The hunting trip was later reported to have cost American taxpayers over $75,000.)

The Trump administration, incidentally, also oversaw the reversal of policies banning the imports of lion trophies into the U.S., and re-legalized controversial hunting tactics like killing wolf pups and using bait to kill bears and wolves in the Alaska wilderness—mere months after the Safari Club had auctioned off a seven-day Alaskan deer and sea-duck hunt with Trump Jr. as part of its annual convention.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, because the examples are too numerous to recount. In 2022, Trump’s former secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, posted a picture of himself pressing a hot cattle brand into a strapped-down calf during his congressional campaign. As Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg memorably wrote for The New Republic last year, meat eating is now so entrenched as a masculinity marker on the American right that vegetarian men minding their own business are now mockingly referred to as “soy boys.”

It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that willingness to kill animals would become a kind of right-wing purity test. In the 2012 primaries, noted animal lover Newt Gingrich attacked Mitt Romney over the dog-on-car episode. Gingrich was similarly unimpressed by Noem’s dog-killing story. Yet the Gingrich-like voices are increasingly drowned out by the Noems, or by Ron DeSantis decrying the horrors of meat that hasn’t come specifically from a dead animal.

So maybe Kevin Roberts bragged at work about killing his kid neighbor’s dog with a shovel, or maybe he didn’t. At this point in the history of American conservatism, he’s going to have a tough time convincing people to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Good News/Bad News

The U.S. is not, contrary to President Biden’s claim at the U.N. on Tuesday, on track to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030.

Stat of the Week
7/9

Seven of the nine “planetary boundaries” keeping life on earth stable may now have been crossed, according to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

What I’m Reading

In Praise of Climate Virtue Signaling

In recent years, politicians have tried to portray the climate crisis as something that can be solved without major behavioral shifts, worried about sounding preachy or alienating voters. Matt Reynolds at Wired has mixed feelings about that:

I think about this dynamic a lot when it comes to food, and particularly alternatives to beef, which has an outsized carbon footprint compared with almost any other foodstuff. A lot of people hope that making plant-based burgers cheap and tasty will be enough to switch vast numbers of meat-eaters over to the plant-based side. When I hang out at alternative protein conferences, no one wants to talk about the morals of eating meat, although I suspect that is a major motivator for many of the people there. They assume that argument won’t win over any converts to pea protein burgers or whatever.

Maybe they’re right. But I suspect that if we ignore the moral component of climate decisions, we drastically limit the whole scope of our climate ambition. It’s not that morals should make up the whole or even a significant part of our decisionmaking, and we shouldn’t expect people to be morally consistent either. Morality isn’t the whole part of the climate story, but it’s not exactly a footnote either.

Read Matt Reynolds’s full piece at Wired.

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

When running for president in 2020, Joe Biden pledged to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, ban all new oil and gas drilling (including fracking) on public lands, spend $2 trillion on clean energy and infrastructure, and rejoin the Paris climate accord. Multiple environmental groups dubbed it the “most ambitious climate platform in history.”

In Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention last month, she mentioned climate change only once. When asked about it during the presidential debate, she responded that “I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” and elsewhere she bragged about being “the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”

Why is Harris so much more reluctant to talk about the climate crisis than Biden was in 2020? Why is she so much more reluctant than she herself was in 2020? And why is she embracing the so-called “all of the above” approach to energy, portraying clean energy as a complement to fossil fuels rather than an eventual substitute?

One answer I’ve repeatedly seen suggested is that she’s responding to voter preferences, and voters care less about climate change in 2024 than they did in 2020. “Fewer Americans today see climate change as a ‘very serious problem’ than they did three years ago,” The Hill reported in May, based on a Monmouth University poll. “Democrats see talking about the environment as a lose-lose proposition,” The Washington Post reported in August. (And rightly so, the piece seemed to suggest, finishing with a quote from a voter who said, “The environment is not my top thing.… Sorry.”) Bill McKibben, trying to divine Harris’s climate positions after Biden withdrew from the race, acknowledged that “since most of what we know about her stands on energy and climate date from the 2020 primaries, it’s important to remember the context. We were pretty near peak-Greta … and polls were showing that the number one issue for many Democratic voters was climate change.”

But it’s not clear that voters actually do care less about climate in 2024. (It would be remarkable if they did, given that we continue to smash temperature records and severe weather records and the home insurance industry seems to be fleeing entire states now.) The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change conduct some of the most comprehensive annual surveys on American public opinion on climate change. When I asked YPCCC director Anthony Leiserowitz whether he was seeing numbers suggesting people care less about climate change today than they did in 2020, he observed that, on the contrary, voters’ views on whether global warming should be a major presidential priority have “been pretty consistent among all party/ideological groups at least back to 2018/2019.”

The liberal Democrats making up the party’s base now claim global warming as their fourth-highest priority. But that’s actually not a big shift from ranking it second or third, for example, and it doesn’t seem to be because they care less. Rather, abortion (their current second-highest priority) seems to have become especially urgent for respondents after Roe was overturned, and “free and fair U.S. elections” (their top priority) likewise—presumably after Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Have voters, then, grown more fond of drilling and fracking, in a way that would explain Harris’s shift? Also no. “In 2022,” Leiserowitz wrote to me via email, “‘energy independence’ did shoot up considerably as a voting priority, but that was almost certainly driven by spiking gas prices at the time. Its voting priority has since dropped back to 2020 levels.” The same pattern was observed in voters’ support for expanding offshore drilling or drilling on public lands. “I don’t see anything in these numbers that suggests American voters are now more supportive of ‘all of the above’ than they were in 2020,” he wrote.

So why is the Harris campaign hitting this message so conspicuously? One possibility, previously discussed in this newsletter, is that they’re playing to Pennsylvania—the state most likely to decide the 2024 election. This explanation has some intuitive appeal: Although Biden would have been eyeing Pennsylvania in 2020 as well, the Harris-Trump race in Pennsylvania is much tighter right now than it was at this time in 2020.

But there are problems with this story too. Leiserowitz pointed to a prominent New York Times report this week that suggested that low natural gas prices, not fracking policy, are the “big energy issue” in the state right now, while Pennsylvanians remain worried about fracking’s effects on groundwater.

Perhaps a more persuasive explanation for the difference between Biden 2020 and Harris 2024 has to do with primaries. Facing Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary seemed to draw Biden leftward on climate change. Harris, by contrast, didn’t face a Democratic primary in 2024. (And notably, when she competed in the 2020 primary, she favored banning fracking.) Primaries require candidates to court the party’s base, rather than centrists and swing voters.

If part of the narrative around Harris’s silence on climate change is that voters care less than they did in 2020, the second part of the narrative is that her silence doesn’t really matter. “I am not concerned,” Governor Jay Inslee told the Times when asked about this, espousing the common view that Harris’s job right now is to beat Trump and that “when she is in a position to effect positive change, she will.” The Times also quoted Biden climate adviser Gina McCarthy saying, “Nobody’s worried about how many times she talks about climate change.”

While campaign promises don’t determine governing, they do frame the window through which the governing is evaluated. Biden ultimately retreated from several of his climate campaign promises, but the fact that he had promised to end drilling on federal lands was part of why his administration’s lease auctions and speedy approval of drilling permits got as much attention as they did. Should Harris win in November, there won’t be any such climate pledges to hold her to.

The Harris camp may consider that a plus, of course. But it could cause problems down the road: As TNR’s Kate Aronoff has repeatedly observed, Democrats have struggled to tell a compelling story about climate change and the policies that could ameliorate it. That makes it hard, she writes, for them either to win big in elections or to build support for their climate policies. At some point, party leaders will have to start drafting and testing a better strategy—and given climate scientists’ increasingly frantic warnings these days, sooner would be better than later.

Good News/Bad News

Inside Climate News reports on NASA’s effort to “revive” commercial supersonic air travel, despite projections that the supersonic planes would burn anywhere between three and 10 times as much fuel as conventional planes.

Stat of the Week
662%

That’s how much higher the emissions from Big Tech’s data centers likely are than officially reported, according to new analysis by The Guardian.

What I’m Reading

These states tried, and failed, to cut food waste. One succeeded.

Food waste accounts for half of all food-system greenhouse gas emissions globally, according to the U.N., and in the U.S. emits the equivalent of 50 million cars on the road per year. California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Massachusetts were the first five states to pass laws tackling food waste. But of those, only Massachusetts’s law worked, according to a new study. The Post’s Anna Phillips explains why:

The study identified several factors that could explain Massachusetts’ success.

First, the state had built the most extensive network of food-waste-composting sites, making it relatively simple and affordable for businesses to divert food from landfills and incinerators. Massachusetts’ law had no special exemptions and was easy for business owners to understand. Massachusetts also increased the cost of not following the rules and had conducted the most compliance checks.

“By contrast, there is almost no enforcement in other states,” the study’s authors wrote. The effect of [the] other four bans, or lack of effect, “suggests widespread noncompliance with US food waste bans—i.e., that food waste is still being landfilled despite the bans,” they wrote.

Read Anna Phillips’s full report at The Washington Post.

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

In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president last week, Kamala Harris gave the biggest existential crisis of our lifetimes roughly the same amount of time as a recollection of her parents playing Miles Davis: She mentioned it exactly once. In fact, it didn’t even get its own sentence. “The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis” (emphasis added) was listed among many other “fundamental freedoms” under threat in the 2024 election.

Media outlets have been noticing this tendency of the Harris campaign—and they’ve also been reporting that this strategy might be fine, actually.

“Harris Goes Light on Climate Policy. Green Leaders Are OK With That,” read a New York Times headline on a story in which Washington Governor Jay Inslee says, “I am totally confident that when she is in a position to effect positive change, she will.” In other words: Harris needs to win first. Winning, so the wisdom goes, means not alienating swing voters with too much fracking talk. Politico, meanwhile, noted that climate activists who have protested the Biden administration’s drilling record “are pursuing a new strategy with his would-be successor: Get Kamala Harris elected now, ask questions later.”

“Democrats see talking about the environment as a lose-lose proposition,” reported Maxine Joselow for The Washington Post. “If they call for curbing fossil fuel production to fight global warming, they risk alienating voters in Pennsylvania, a pivotal swing state where natural gas powers the economy. But if they tout record U.S. oil production that has helped lower energy costs, they risk angering young voters.” While climate policy polls well, Joselow wrote, “of 28 issues, global warming ranks 19th in importance to registered voters.” The piece concludes with a Philadelphia woman saying to canvassers from the Environmental Voter Project: “The environment is not my top thing … sorry.”

Is it true that Harris needs to keep quiet about climate and environmental policy in order to win? Honestly, who’s to say? Some polls have indeed found that voters are less concerned about the climate now than they were in 2020—a bonkers conclusion given that 2024 is so far the hottest year on record, with experts increasingly abandoning the idea that global warming can be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). But there you have it!

What’s striking, though, is the implicit fatalism of this retreat into conventional wisdom, in an election that has already proven fatalists, and their conventional wisdom, about as spectacularly wrong as they’ve ever been. Harris could still lose in November, to be sure, but a lot of people thought there was zero chance of off-ramping Joe Biden even though he struggled to complete sentences in the first debate, and many others doubted that the party could unite behind someone else.

Several writers at TNR have questioned whether “running scared” on climate and the environment is really the best, or only, option. Kate Aronoff sees parallels between the sidelining of the climate crisis at the convention and the sidelining of pro-Palestinian delegates and activists. “Discussing either the climate crisis or Israel’s war on Gaza in any convincing fashion requires specifics,” she wrote. “Who, exactly, is spewing all of those heat-trapping emissions? And who is taking all those innocent Palestinian lives? More importantly, ending all of that suffering—from global warming and war alike—requires a willingness to challenge the forces responsible for it with more than words. The convention showcased a party that isn’t willing to do any of this.” Whatever the “short-term benefits” of avoiding divisive topics, she added, “continuing to avoid them promises not just to prolong suffering, but invite calamities that there’ll be no turning back from.”

Liza Featherstone points out that there could actually be ways to win more voters while talking about the environment. One of RFK Jr.’s “few appealing causes” she wrote, was “his passion for fighting toxic pollution,” particularly as it affects human health. In the wake of his exit from the 2024 election—and baffling endorsement of Donald Trump, whose record on pollution is not at all in keeping with RFK Jr.’s views—the Harris campaign may have an opportunity, Liza wrote, to pull former RFK voters away from Trump while doing the right thing: “RFK Jr.’s concerns with the toxins in our bodies and environment are crucial and have broad popular resonance. Harris should immediately take them on board.”

In general, it’s always a little hard to tell whether the electorate’s ambivalence about a given issue is about the issue itself, or how it’s been presented to them. There’s little doubt at this point that the Inflation Reduction Act—the Biden administration’s signature piece of climate legislation—is a bust in terms of its campaign usefulness, even if it succeeded in its stated goals. But its limitations as a sales pitch were pretty clear from the get-go. After all, if you want a sound bite–able case for how fighting climate change can quickly and materially improve voters’ lives, a law called the “Inflation Reduction Act” that functions in large part via byzantine tax incentives ain’t it.

The Harris campaign is operating on an unprecedentedly compressed timeline, and maybe it’s too late to come up with a climate messaging strategy that defies conventional wisdom by seeking to persuade voters rather than just mirroring current polling. But clearly there are opportunities for such persuasion. A few elections ago, the idea that 62 percent of likely voters would support legal accountability for oil and gas companies over their role driving climate change—and almost half, per a recent Data for Progress poll, would support prosecuting them for homicide—would have been unthinkable. So yes: The Harris campaign may be right that talking about climate change and the environment would lose them Pennsylvania. But it’s also hard to know what American voters might support if their politicians made a compelling pitch.

Good News/Bad News

On the one hand, countries aren’t making anywhere near enough progress toward their emissions-reductions targets. On the other hand, a new study published in the journal Science claims to have found 63 cases where policies really did work to reduce emissions, Grist’s Kate Yoder reports.

Another recent study in Science does not give as much cause for optimism. Fisheries aren’t being managed sustainably, and fish population numbers have been overestimated, a team of ecologists found. “Among over-fished stocks,” the lead author wrote, “we estimated the number of collapsed stocks was likely 85% larger than currently recognised.”

Stat of the Week
$3 million

That’s how much the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers is paying, Axios reports, for an ad attacking Kamala Harris for her purported “ban on most new gas cars,” targeting voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well as in Wisconsin, Montana, and Nevada.

What I’m Reading

Two states become first in U.S. to ban use of PFAS in firefighters’ protective gear

Long-lasting PFAS chemicals are often used to make fabrics stain- and water-resistant, and for years they’ve been used in firefighters’ equipment in particular. But they’ve also been linked to a wide variety of serious health problems, and evidence has emerged over time that firefighters may be at particular risk given their consistent exposure to the substances. Last week, Massachusetts joined Connecticut in banning firefighting gear sold in the state from containing PFAS, starting in 2027 (Connecticut’s ban will take effect in 2028). The Guardian’s Tom Perkins reports some of the extraordinary efforts that went into lobbying the state for this legislation:

Diane Cotter, the wife of a Worcester fire department firefighter, Paul Cotter, helped spearhead the Massachusetts effort. Paul developed prostate cancer, which is linked to PFAS exposure, about 10 years ago, when he was 55 years old.

Her crusade started in 2019 when she mentioned her husband had prostate cancer at a lunch with other wives of local firefighters.

“Almost every wife at the table lifted up their head and said: ‘Me too,’” Cotter said, noting that most of the women were only 35 to 55 years old. She described herself as “naive” at the time, armed with “only an expired hairdresser’s license” but willing to take on a then unfriendly firefighter union, state government, chemical industry and turnout gear industry.… She was invited to the bill signing last week, a moment she described as “surreal”.

Read Tom Perkins’s full report in The Guardian.

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

Beneath the deluge of election news, two remarkable statistics made smaller headlines this past week. First, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that last month was the hottest July on record, following the hottest June on record, in what is so far the hottest year on record. Second, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that, in the first half of 2024, the U.S. added more electrical generation capacity than they have in two decades: 20.2 gigawatts, with another 42.6 gigawatts planned for the second half of the year.

You might be inclined to interpret this as good news: After all, 59 percent of that new capacity seems to be coming from solar power. But this is being added to what existing plants already generate. Existing plants scheduled for retirement—coal, natural gas—aren’t being phased out as quickly as you might expect. In fact, coal and natural gas plant retirements slowed in this same period, with only about 5.1 gigawatts retired as opposed to 9.2 in the same period last year.

The current electrical generation boom, Bloomberg reports, seems largely to be responding to the increased demand from “data centers and artificial intelligence.”

Liza Featherstone has previously written at TNR about the staggering environmental toll from artificial intelligence, including so-called generative A.I.—you know, the awkward-creepy chatbots that sometimes deliver an eerily coherent answer that’s fit for a fifth grader’s science paper, and other times spit out utter gibberish. (Or the image tool that allowed Donald Trump to claim that Taylor Swift had endorsed him for president. She hadn’t.)

The understandable fixation with the cultural and political consequences of this kind of technology, Liza wrote in March, risks “obscuring the more direct, physical problems with the technology,” like its rapacious water and electrical consumption. The International Energy Agency’s predictions for A.I. energy use by 2026 would be the “equivalent of adding a new heavily industrialized country, like Sweden or Germany, to the planet.” Simultaneously, Liza pointed out, data centers will be sucking up raw materials that are urgently needed for the clean energy transition: like lithium, for example.

As the world was baking this summer, Big Tech was doing its darndest to kill any goodwill people might have for its A.I. projects. In June, Meta notified European users that its privacy policy was changing, allowing the company, in the words of the nonprofit organization that subsequently filed complaints in 11 European countries, “to use years of personal posts, private images or online tracking data for an undefined ‘AI technology’ that can ingest personal data from any source and share any information with undefined ‘third parties’” with “no option of ever having it removed.” (Meta has been training A.I. on U.S. users’ public posts for a while now.)

Microsoft A.I. CEO Mustafa Suleyman then did one better. In an interview later that month, he insisted that anything on the “open web” was fair game, counting as “freeware”—a statement many understandably found exploitative and hypocritical.

During the Olympics, Google ran a dystopian ad in which a father, instead of helping his track-and-field-obsessed daughter compose her own fan letter to her Olympic hero, had Google’s generative A.I. tool, Gemini, “help” her instead. Viewers found it distasteful, and Google pulled the ad.

And it almost goes without saying that Elon Musk’s A.I. venture, Grok-2, was a bust: Mere weeks ago, lacking appropriate content controls, it quickly flooded the social media site now known as X with violent and sexual images of Disney and other copyrighted cartoon characters.

So here we are, in a record-hot summer in a record-hot year, with coal plants being kept online in part to meet the increased demand from bumbling A.I. technology. It would be one thing if that demand were coming from, say, the sudden adoption of electric vehicles by tens of millions of Americans. It’s another thing entirely if the energy transition were to be slowed by Big Tech stealing people’s personal life updates or generating graphic images of Goofy.

Good News/Bad News

A federal judge ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service during the Trump administration did not properly account for the risks from oil spills to endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico, and that the federal government has to do more to protect marine life from offshore drilling.


Akielly Hu at Grist reviews the many signs that the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Chevron doctrine is already starting to slow or reverse the implementation of climate and environmental policies, such as the U.S. Air Force now saying they now can’t be required to clean up the drinking water they contaminated with PFAS.

Stat of the Week
1.6 degrees Celsius

Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels—for years considered a vital goal for avoiding climate-related disasters—is going to be very, very hard, a new study says; the new best-case scenario may be 1.6 degrees.

What I’m Reading

Here’s how much cropland could be freed up if Americans ate half as much meat

TNR has run lots of pieces on the environmental cost of meat consumption. But a new study shows that cutting meat consumption by half might free up land that altogether would be about the size of South Dakota:

The organization argues that if those acres weren’t used to grow crops, they could instead be transformed into carbon sinks or used to restore threatened ecosystems. That would deliver climate benefits on top of the reduction of animal agriculture’s more direct emissions sources: manure and cow burps.

The U.S. currently devotes a tremendous amount of land to agriculture: Over 60 percent of land in the contiguous U.S. is used for agriculture, and 21 percent of that is cropland. A majority of the nation’s cropland—78 percent—is used to raise crops that are primarily used to feed animals.

Read Frida Garza’s full report at Grist.

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

Shortly after the Iowa caucuses—a moment that feels almost unfathomably long ago in this presidential race—Tom Philpott wrote about the peculiar role that corn-based ethanol plays in national politics. Because ethanol is important to Iowa, and the Iowa caucuses are important in the primaries because of their early date, candidates from both parties tend to declare their allegiance to federal ethanol subsidies.

But ethanol subsidies are a pretty inefficient way to encourage energy production. Solar panels generate 100 times as much energy as corn per acre, Tom wrote. Installing them in place of cornfields would open up more land for growing actual food, while reducing pesticide and fertilizer runoff into waterways and reducing the destruction of Iowa’s soil layer. But the tangled history of Iowa corn, federal subsidies, and the primary schedule go back so far at this point that it’s very hard to start a serious political discussion about what better policies might look like.

I thought back to Tom’s piece this week, as news emerged that Kamala Harris was walking back her prior opposition to fracking. As California attorney general, she sued the Obama administration over its fracking approvals off the state’s coast, and in the 2019 Democratic primaries she promised to ban the practice, but her campaign is now telling the press that she would not in fact ban it.

Fracking is somewhat similar to ethanol, actually, in terms of its place in American political narratives. Fracking pollutes groundwater, has fueled a huge spike of planet-warming methane, and isn’t very profitable: The expensive practice is a “sorry bet for job creation,” TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote in 2019. But much like ethanol in Iowa, for almost two decades fracking has played an outsize role in states that play an outsize role in the presidential election—specifically, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Ohio, which Trump has twice won comfortably, probably won’t decide the 2024 election. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, very well might. “Many strategists in both parties believe Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes could wind up being the decisive state,” Axios reported in May. And so far, the polling in Pennsylvania has suggested the race is neck and neck. So it’s not particularly surprising that Harris is backpedaling on her fracking opposition, presumably aiming to win Pennsylvania voters.

As with ethanol, though, there’s something a bit tragic about this political pandering. While Pennsylvanians are the ones Harris hopes to win by backing fracking, they’re also the people most likely to be harmed by fracking. As Colin Jerolmack has repeatedly written for TNR, even landowners who have made money leasing their land to drillers have sometimes come to regret it—either because they regret losing control over their own properties or because of the effect on local groundwater. (In one community, he wrote, “private water wells became laced with carcinogenic chemicals and contained methane concentrations so high that running faucets could be set on fire.”) Grist’s Jake Bolster reported last week on the industry’s troubling habit of dumping fracked wastewater—which has been found to contain toxic compounds—on Pennsylvania roads, with the cooperation of some state authorities. As of 2021, the last time a major poll was conducted, not only did a majority of Pennsylvanians want to see more regulation of the fracking industry, but a majority actually wanted to “end” fracking in the state (25 percent wanted it done “as soon as possible,” and 30 percent favored a gradual transition).

So why is Harris reversing her position on fracking if Pennsylvanians want it gone? One reason may be that many of the voters who oppose fracking (for example: the 79 percent of Democrats who want fracking to end) will vote for her either way. The people the party is anxious about winning, on the other hand, might be the ones who’d be turned off by a proposed ban. For example, 43 percent of independents in the 2021 poll said fracking should not end or be phased out.

At the end of the day, ethanol and fracking—which defy any rational cost-benefit calculation—persist for the same reason: American democracy isn’t particularly democratic.

Good News/Bad News

There’s a growing consensus that carbon capture doesn’t work very well—and, per Amy Westervelt’s analysis of internal documents, that fossil fuel companies probably knew that to begin with. That’s bad news in one sense, but the growing consensus also builds the foundation for better ideas and policies going forward.


Wildfires like the Park Fire now threatening four counties in California can also contaminate the water supply beyond the immediate burn range in several ways. A new multimedia report in The Washington Postexplains how.

Stat of the Week
73%

That’s how much of the world’s coral is now bleaching due to heat, according to The Guardian’s latest report on the ongoing mass bleaching event.

What I’m Reading

Do bigger highways actually help reduce traffic?

The answer is “no.” MIT Mobility Initiative fellow David Zipper explains why widening highways doesn’t solve the problem these proposals are hoping to solve:

These projections have a fatal blind spot: They fail to consider how humans respond to changing conditions like new vehicle lanes. When people see cars traveling freely over a recently expanded highway, they will recalibrate their travel decisions. Some will choose to drive at rush hour when they would have otherwise driven at a non-peak time, taken public transit, or perhaps not traveled at all. When a roadway is widened, Marshall said, “You might have less congestion at first, but it quickly goes away.”

Such behavioral adjustments will continue until traffic is as thick as it was before, when the roadway was narrower. The only difference is now there will be more cars stuck in traffic, emitting even more pollution.

This phenomenon is known as induced demand.

Read David Zipper’s full story at Vox.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good News/Bad News

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

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

Stat of the Week
40%

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

What I’m Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good News/Bad News

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

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

Stat of the Week
1.3 milliseconds per century

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

What I’m Reading

Scientists plan climate engineering experiment in ocean off Cape Cod

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

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

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

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

Read Barbara Moran’s report at WBUR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good News/Bad News

Stat of the Week
1.5 billion

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

What I’m Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good News/Bad News

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

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

Stat of the Week

26 days

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

What I’m Reading

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

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

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

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

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

Read Cinnamon Janzer’s full report at the BBC.

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