The goal of limiting global warming to below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is largely out of reach. That’s according to the United Nations Environmental Program’s (UNEP) 2026 Emissions Gap report released on Wednesday, considered the definitive assessment of global climate action.
“We’ve spent decades postponing cuts to emissions and now we’re facing the consequences,” Anne Olhoff, director of the UNEP-Copenhagen Climate Centre, and one of the report’s authors, said after the report’s publication. “The world can still attain the goals of the Paris Agreement but we must work hard to not only meet but surpass our most ambitious climate targets. The longer we wait, the larger the risk that we jeopardize the temperature goal.”
While the report’s warning is stark, that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. Coordinated efforts to reduce emissions can still have a meaningful impact on climate change, it says—but action must be taken quickly.
Here are the biggest takeaways from the Emissions Gap report.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world agreed to halt planetary warming at 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures and to pursue efforts to limit warming by 1.5°C. Doing so would provide a greater chance at avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. The window to avoid overshooting the 1.5°C goal, however, is now closed, the report finds.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for climate action. It is still possible to limit the overshoot and bring temperatures back below 1.5 degrees by the end of the century. Every fraction of a degree of warming above 1.5°C increases climate impacts, making the goal to limit as much warming beyond 1.5°C all the more important.
Under the terms of the Paris Agreement, countries must submit updated climate pledges, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which outline specific goals to reduce national emissions. Based on the policies currently in place under the NDCs submitted by over 150 nations, the planet is on track to reach 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century.
Based on this, today’s report concludes that global climate pledges are falling short. If countries meet their new NDCs, which set upgraded targets for 2035 and were due last year, global warming is still projected to reach 2.6°C by the end of the century.
Both scenarios would have devastating consequences—dramatically transforming sea levels and ecosystems, and triggering compounding climate extremes such as higher temperatures and drought, increasing the likelihood of wildfires.
The report notes that it is still possible to peak warming at 1.7°C or 1.8°C. Doing so would require major changes. We would need to cut emissions by 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035, and 69% by 2040, relative to 2025 levels. This would require sustained emissions cuts along with carbon dioxide removal.
“Every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5°C increases climate impacts and risks, such as the deadly floods, heat waves, and wildfires that have plagued many nations this year,” said UNEP executive director Inger Andersen. “So, we must pull out all the stops to minimize peak warming and return to 1.5°C by the end of the century.”
While emissions growth has slowed down in most G20 countries, emissions in the United States “far exceeded that of all other countries," the report says. That’s due to the increased electricity demand, in part due to data centers, and new policies that encouraged the use of fossil fuels like coal over clean energy sources.
The report includes a statement from the State Department, noting that the U.S. "does not endorse or agree with its analysis or conclusions, and has not provided comments to this report."
The Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement also worsened the climate projections, as estimates no longer include climate action that would have been taken under the United States’s NDC targets.
The U.S. is the second largest emitter of climate-warming greenhouse gases, behind China, which has quickly become a world leader in renewable energy (while also ramping up coal production.)
Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement just over a decade ago, global renewable electricity capacity has grown three times faster than anticipated, while solar PV build-out has increased seven times faster. If these trends were to continue, and coupled with more policies to support clean energy, the world would be on track to reach its renewable energy goals.
The report examined more than 200 climate policies and found that they target emission reductions across a wide range of sectors and countries. That’s an encouraging sign the report notes. All that’s left is for these solutions to be scaled faster.
“We have a wealth of success stories showing that emissions can be cut quickly,” said Andersen. “It is now up to nations to urgently put in place policies that spark fast, deep and sustained emissions reductions, and put the world on track for a more stable climate and more stable economies and societies.”
When Rachel Bowman first tried to bring lionfish to restaurants and grocery stores in the Florida Keys in 2012, it was a hard sell. “We weren’t getting that much money for them, and it took a little convincing,” says the commercial lionfish hunter. That’s because the invasive lionfish—flamboyant enough that Bowman likens it to a Mardi Gras drag queen—wasn’t traditionally on the menu.
Native to the tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific, lionfish have infiltrated the western Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico, where they have become a destructive invasive species ever since the first was recorded near Miami in 1985, likely after being released from the home aquarium trade. With few predators in these new habitats, a single fish can produce more than 2 million eggs a year. Studies have found that just one lionfish can reduce the replenishment of native fish populations on some reefs by nearly 80%.
In 2016, Bowman sold the first lionfish to Whole Foods in South Florida. “That was the ground-breaker,” she says, “because if Whole Foods is promoting something, then people know it’s good. We went from $2 per lb. to $10 per lb. pretty much overnight.” Now, 10 years later, through Keys Fisheries, her fish is sold in stores, and lionfish appears on restaurant menus throughout the area—and in doing so, millions of native reef fish have been saved from predation.
Bowman’s work is part of a growing trend that’s not just about introducing new dishes to the local food scene; creating a market for invasive species may also bring ecological benefits for the local environment.
Invasive species are considered one of the five most critical direct drivers of biodiversity loss, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), whose most recent report in 2023 notes that the global economic toll of dealing with these species cost more than $423 billion in 2019. Once established, invasive species are often impossible to eradicate because they reproduce rapidly, spread across vast, interconnected environments, and often go unchecked until they are established. And the challenge of managing invasive species is particularly acute in the ocean, says Helen Roy, a professor at the U.K. Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the University of Exeter and a co-chair of the IPBES assessment. It’s a consequence of the openness and connectedness of marine systems, she says.
In 2004, conservation biologist Joe Roman coined the term “invasivorism” to describe the idea of eating invasive species to help control their populations. Since then, a growing movement across North America is attempting to transform ecological menaces into culinary commodities, from Florida to Hawai’i, British Columbia, Maine, and the Mississippi River basin. That movement is still expanding: in 2025, for example, 70 restaurants and fish markets across the U.S. participated in Green Crab Week, a national campaign encouraging diners to eat the invasive European green crab.
The goal, says Isabelle Côté, a marine ecologist at Simon Fraser University, is often “functional eradication”: reducing an invasive population to a level where its ecological impacts are considered acceptable. That’s where our dinner tables can help, by turning the removal of the species into an economic opportunity.
David Standridge’s philosophy is all about harvesting what’s plentiful and turning it into something delicious. Since 2022, the James Beard Award-winning executive chef of The Shipwright’s Daughter in Mystic, Conn., has processed more than 10,000 lbs of green crab, making it a menu mainstay.
Commonly considered one of the world’s worst invasive species, the green crab has successfully invaded every continent except Antarctica. The species, native to Western Europe and Africa, has few predators, aggressively hunts its prey, and can consume a wide variety of shellfish, including oysters, clams, mussels, lobsters, and other crabs. One crab can eat more than 40 juvenile soft-shell clams in a day, while also destroying seagrass habitats. And a single green crab can produce up to 185,000 eggs per year, while its larval life stage allows young crabs to drift considerable distances in ocean currents, spreading from one invaded area to another.
Rather than a nuisance, Standridge describes the green crab as tremendously flavorful, producing a beautiful stock that can be used across dishes. “We use them not to eliminate green crab, but to take some pressure off the ecosystem,” he says. Getting green crab onto the menu, however, wasn’t so straightforward.
When Standridge first tried to source the species in 2020, he discovered that Connecticut, like many states, classified green crab as bait and technically couldn’t be sold for human consumption. He finally found a supplier to help in 2021, and then in 2025, a change to a single line of state code allowed green crab and other species on the bait list to be harvested and sold as food. Parks says the market is beginning to take shape. Suppliers across New England now regularly carry green crab alongside other seafood, making it more accessible to chefs.
The green crab’s global spread is only expected to increase with climate change, says Mary Parks, executive director of GreenCrab.org, a nonprofit organization building culinary markets for the invasive species while raising awareness of its impact. “We used to have these really cold winters and those helped keep green crab populations in check,” says Parks. “But with winters getting warmer and warmer, that population control got taken out of the picture.”
On the other side of the continent, in 2020, the first green crabs were detected on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia. To slow the species’ establishment, the Council of the Haida Nation launched a full-scale trapping and mitigation program. Over five years, 36 crews removed nearly 2 million crabs, including more than 1.3 million from the Honna and Tarundl estuaries alone. The scale of the invasion has made control difficult, and harvester and marine economic development coordinator Eli Gladstone hopes a viable market for the crabs could help reduce their numbers. But he cautions that commercial demand alone won’t be enough: trapping will also need to become more efficient, and some continued public investment may be necessary.
Communities across the U.S. have been grappling with the ecological and economic impacts of introduced species for decades.
In the 1950s, bluestripe snapper, also known in Hawai’i by its Tahitian name, ta’ape, was introduced to O’ahu, when roughly 3,000 fish were released to bolster fishing opportunities and establish a new food source. But ta’ape, native to the South Pacific, never became a sustained part of Hawai’i’s seafood market. By the 1980s, the overabundant fish was largely considered a “trash fish,” prompting the state’s Department of Aquatic Resources to launch a market-development project in 1985 that used consumer education and supermarket promotions to try to build demand. The effort failed to gain lasting traction: supply was inconsistent, and demand tapered off after the project ended.
Freediver and spearfisher Kimi Werner has seen firsthand just how dramatically the ta’ape has come to dominate the reefs. Where schools of snappers in their native ecosystems might number just a handful, she says Hawai’i’s ta’ape, with its electric-blue stripes and lemon-yellow skin, can blanket the seafloor. “You can see the power of numbers taking over these habitats where native fish belong,” she says.
Since 2019, Conservation International Hawai’i, in partnership with local businesses and organizations including the nonprofit Chef Hui, has been trying to turn that abundance into an opportunity: promoting ta’ape as a food source to reduce its numbers while supporting local fishers and food security. The approach is starting to resonate across Hawai’i’s tourism industry, says Jhana Young, sustainable seafood senior manager with Conservation International Hawai’i. Hotels now serve the fish to staff and guests; Hilton Hawaiian Village alone purchases about 500 lbs a month. In 2025, an average of 27 commercial fishers sold approximately 42,000 lbs of ta’ape statewide, 47% more than in 2018. And a March 2026 “Eat the Invaders” tournament removed more than 1,200 lbs of invasive reef fish from Maunalua Bay in a single weekend, nearly 90% of it ta’ape. Where fishers once received an average of just $0.65 per lb. for ta’ape in the 1980s (about $2.63 today), says Young, today some O’ahu fishers receive as much as $6 per lb.
“When we started, ta’ape was a fish people threw back or used for bait,” says Amanda Corby Noguchi, co-founder of Chef Hui. “Now we regularly get organizations, schools, and hotel properties reaching out to us wanting to be part of it, not the other way around.”
But creating a market for an invasive species also raises the question of whether it can genuinely serve conservation goals—or simply become another fishery. Young argues that it can redirect existing fishing pressure toward a species whose removal benefits the ecosystem. “Fishers are always going to fish. By helping create markets for a species that didn’t exist before, it helps point fishers in the direction of a choice that is ultimately better for nature’s long-term balance.”
More than 4,000 miles away, in the lower Mississippi River basin, Asian carp populations have proliferated since the species was imported to the U.S. from China in the 1970s. They were brought in to control nuisance algae in wastewater-treatment plants and aquaculture ponds, as well as for human consumption. Within a decade, they had escaped confinement and spread into the Mississippi River basin and its major tributaries, including the Illinois and Missouri rivers, disrupting aquatic food webs, harming native fish communities, and interfering with commercial and recreational fishing. The invasive Asian carp is one of the most urgent, far-reaching, and complex environmental challenges facing the U.S., according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). And experts now worry about their potential to reach the Great Lakes.
For Angie Yu, founder of Two Rivers Fisheries in Wickliffe, Ky., the potential of invasive carp was obvious. Yu grew up in China, where carp is a dietary staple—so commonplace, she says, that it is eaten “just like chicken.” When she first read about the Asian carp problem in 2010, she saw an opportunity others in the U.S. had largely overlooked: a fish considered “trash” by many Americans but which had an established market in Asia. She began connecting the fish with Asian markets, eventually exporting to 12 countries. Before the pandemic, nearly 90% of the company’s products were destined for overseas markets. But then shipping disruptions, rising fuel costs, and steep international tariffs made exporting increasingly difficult, prompting Yu to turn her attention to building a domestic market. She has since developed a use-everything model for the fish, making meatballs, patties, dumplings, along with pet food, as well as fish meal and fertilizer from the trimmings, guts, and other waste, while finding uses for the skin and bones. Her carp is now sold in Asian supermarkets across the U.S., and her processing plant can handle up to 40,000 lbs of carp a day. “The fish is not trash,” she says, “it’s a treasure.”
The question now is whether commercial demand for invasive Asian carp can grow large enough to meaningfully reduce their populations. For Peter Stoett, a professor at Ontario Tech University and co-chair of the IPBES Assessment on Invasive Alien Species and Their Control, the key is to “measure the population, not the market.” A growing commercial fishery, more restaurants serving an invasive species, or thousands of pounds harvested may signal that a market is working—but not necessarily that the ecosystem is recovering. Reductions in an invasive species’ numbers or biomass, he says, are the clearest indicators of whether management is working. But measuring that requires sustained monitoring: “Money must be spent monitoring these populations or we won’t know if targets are being met.”
Stoett argues that if a market is used to encourage removal, the commercial activity should exist because the species needs to be reduced, contained, or eradicated—not because the goal is to establish a sustainable fishery for that species. In other words, the conservation objective has to come first, with the market serving as a tool rather than becoming the goal itself. As populations decline, he says, there needs to be ongoing dialogue among scientists, industry, local communities, and government about whether incentives should continue, change, or eventually end.
In Kentucky, there is some evidence that removal efforts are having an effect. The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources has increased its fishing incentive to $0.15 per lb. for invasive carp harvested from Kentucky Lake and Barkley Lake, citing evidence that management efforts are reducing populations in both lakes. Most of the carp processed by Yu comes from those same two lakes. Meanwhile, according to a USFWS spokesperson, around 30 million lbs of invasive carp are removed from Midwestern waters each year.
The idea of harvesting and eating invasive species can sound like an elegant solution: turn an ecological problem into dinner and let appetite do the work. But Roy cautions against treating consumption as a panacea for control. The ecological payoff from harvesting is rarely proportional to the share of a population removed. Taking half of a population, for example, does not necessarily mean halving its impact on the ecosystem.
That does not make the markets emerging around lionfish, green crab, ta’ape, and carp meaningless. They can provide food and income, engage communities and, in some cases, redirect fishing pressure toward invasive or overabundant species whose removal can benefit ecosystems. But Roy stresses that these benefits must be considered separately from the ecological damage caused by an invasion: “There’s no simple sum here.”
Creating demand could theoretically give people an incentive to keep an invasive species abundant, although Côté says she is not aware of evidence that this has happened. And while “nothing beats prevention,” says Stoett, once an aquatic or marine invasion is established and containment is the only realistic option, a market for their safe consumption could provide another tool—one whose economic benefits can be weighed against the ecological impacts of the invasion. The goal, ultimately, is not to eat our way out of an ecological disaster. It is to make sure that, when we eat an ecological problem, we are actually helping to reduce it.
In front of foraging chef Robin Kort’s home on Galiano Island in British Columbia’s Salish Sea, is a sea urchin barren—an underwater desert where kelp once swayed but has since been devoured by the urchins that cover the seafloor like a spikey carpet. Unlike lionfish or Asian carp, red and green sea urchins are native to the region. But when their populations become too abundant, they can have invasive-like effects.
Urchins are remarkably effective grazers. Marine ecologist Anne Salomon, a professor of applied marine ecology and social-ecological system science at Simon Fraser University, says urchins and kelp can coexist when food is plentiful. But when food becomes scarce, urchins form what she calls “active feeding fronts,” stripping away vegetation that provides food, shelter, and habitat for a wide range of marine life. Selective harvesting can help restore kelp forests, Salomon says, but doing so effectively requires sustained effort.
“We have this commercial fishery around sea urchin, and we have, in Vancouver, a huge population that likes eating them,” says Kort, who calls uni “the parmesan of the sea,” describing it as cheesy, creamy, and versatile enough for both sweet and savory dishes. Last year, Kort helped launch an Eat the Invaders event, bringing chefs together to channel people’s appetite for delicious food by cooking with invasive and overabundant species. Part of her effort is to incentivize more harvesting of the older, less desirable but more destructive urchins. “Humans’ greatest power is the amount of stuff we can eat, basically, if we want to,” she says. “So can we use that superpower for good?”
The war in Iran, AI, and countries’ growing debt burden all sat at the top of the agenda as leaders of the world’s international financial institutions gathered in Bangkok this week for the fall meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Even with some bright spots, the picture is challenging. The war has driven up fuel prices, leading to inflation. Meanwhile, public debt is soaring, a development the IMF warns is unsustainable. And the enormous investment in AI is a positive development keeping the bottom from falling out—though only in certain economies.
At a first glance, climate change, once touted as a key priority by the two most influential international financial institutions, has fallen off the agenda. But take a closer look and it’s hard to miss how climate change—and the related deployment of clean energy—will play an important role in economic performance. Climate events have worsened the debt challenge in developing countries. Clean energy, on the other hand, has served as a critical defense mechanism that has kept the energy price crisis from getting worse in places where it has been deployed at scale.
A report from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released this week alongside the fall meetings gets at the heart of this challenge while barely mentioning climate change at all—at least in those words. The report points to what it describes as a “triple shock”: high borrowing costs, the energy price spike, and extreme weather events driven by this year’s El Niño, which is on course to set records.
The policy responses aren’t coded climate policy—and in many cases they’re actively bad for climate efforts. The most common response cited by the report is fuel price support, think of subsidies or fuel tax reductions. An IEA survey cited by the report identified 95 countries with such policies. Explicit fuel subsidies could surpass $1 trillion this year globally, according to the UNDP. But, as the report notes, such an approach isn’t sustainable. Backlash to higher prices persists even as governments spend to keep citizens happy. In a smaller group of countries, mostly those most dependent on imports, longer-term, structural changes are emerging: investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electrification. Think of subsidies for electric buses or cutting tariffs on solar panels.
But not every country can afford to remake its energy system with structural changes. Heavy indebtedness and high interest rates are key factors. So too is El Niño and broader climate shocks, which make it harder for countries to pay for new infrastructure that reduces exposure to fossil fuel volatility.
The IMF’s World Economic Outlook is similarly light on climate talk. But follow it to its logical conclusion, and it takes the UNDP argument even further. Indebtedness makes it more difficult to invest in AI infrastructure necessary to compete in the emerging economy. It plots countries’ AI preparedness alongside the non-fossil share of their energy supply, suggesting that energy security and the capacity to adopt AI may increasingly intersect. After all, dependence on volatile imported fossil fuels only compounds this challenge given AI’s energy needs.
This emergent growth dynamic comes with important implications. For one, it adds yet another layer to the argument for non-fossil energy in emerging markets. But it also shows how complicated achieving that end will be. Cheap clean tech hardware isn’t enough.
At the grocery store, you’re a person who roasts squash. You make salads. You have exciting plans for fresh herbs. A week later, you’re a person throwing away unused squash, salad, and wilted herbs.
Even food-waste experts know the gap between the meals we imagine and the food we actually eat. Shelie Miller, who studies sustainability at the University of Michigan, understands how an acorn squash can end up in your cart without a plan. “It’s fall. I’m feeling the fall vibes,” she says, describing the temptation. That’s why she and her husband try to stick to a shared grocery list—and know what they’ll do with what they buy.
We asked experts what else they do to keep good intentions out of the trash.
Read more: How to Stop Wasting So Much Food in Your Kid’s Lunchbox
Once a week, Miller bakes a potato and gives the odds and ends in her refrigerator somewhere to go. Leftover fajita vegetables? On the potato. Little extras from other meals? Those go on, too.
“I always call it a garbage potato, or maybe it’s better to call it a kitchen-sink potato,” she says. The toppings change often enough to keep things interesting: “My husband always plays a guessing game of what my potato is going to be this week.”
The potato solves a familiar problem: You have some food left, but not quite enough to call it lunch. Miller combines those small portions on something she already wants to eat. “It’s such a great blank canvas,” she says.
Stir-fries can serve a similar purpose. But Miller knows where her loyalties lie: “My go-to is a potato.”
Jonathan Deutsch has watched fellow cooks buy cases of broccoli, cut off the florets, and throw away the stems. He considers this a terrible loss. The tender interior of a broccoli stem, he says, is “one of the most delicious vegetables.”
Deutsch, a professor in the department of food and hospitality management and founding director of the Drexel Food Lab, cooks both parts at home. The night before we spoke, he made broccoli salad with tahini and chili crisp. The stem was woody on the outside, so he peeled it, cut up the tender interior, and then air-fried it along with the florets.
Trim the woody bottom and peel away the tough exterior as needed. Deutsch wants people to recognize the good food underneath.
“The same care and love that went into the florets,” he says, “went three inches lower into the stem.”
A recipe that calls for half a cabbage leaves you with another decision: What happens to the other half?
Miller and her husband try to answer that before they start cooking. Cabbage rolls might take care of some; soup or a roasted side dish can use the rest. The same thinking applies to the tomato paste left in a can or the extra chicken breast in a package. “Getting comfortable with all the different ways you can prepare different ingredients really helps extend the menu,” she says.
Deutsch starts by checking what’s already in his kitchen. When his now-adult daughters were teenagers, they would announce there was nothing to eat. He could usually find the makings of a meal: a can of tuna, a can of beans, or chicken in the freezer. Only after taking stock would he figure out what he needed to buy.
“Instead of generating more waste that you have to deal with, you’re taking surplus food,” he says, “and you’re making it into new things that you want to eat.”
Brian Roe is willing to commit to a Costco-size bag of apples. He just doesn’t leave it on the counter.
“I’m an apple kind of person,” says Roe, a professor of agricultural, environmental, and development economics at Ohio State University who leads its Food Waste Collaborative.
He keeps the apples in the refrigerator, where he says he rarely loses one to spoilage. On the counter, he’s more likely to throw a couple away before finishing the bag.
Miller knows what can happen to food you freeze with the best intentions: “It just goes into the abyss of a freezer.”
Eventually, you clean it out and find “freezer-burned chicken breasts and chili from three years ago,” she says. “What happened?”
She and her husband now make a point of shopping in their freezer before deciding what to buy or cook. Sometimes, that means discovering they already have lunches covered for the week. Other times, it means remembering the portions of tomato paste they froze after a recipe called for only a spoonful.
There are only two of them at home, so a big batch can mean eating the same dinner several nights running. “By the fourth day, the last thing you want is more gumbo,” she says.
Their approach: “We’ll eat a day or two of leftovers. We’ll freeze the rest.” Then, when they need lunches another week, they can pull out a meal they haven’t just eaten three days running.
Miller’s husband has figured out how to fit more leftovers in their freezer: He freezes soups and other liquids flat in zip-top bags on a sheet pan. “It ends up like these little folders of soup,” she says.
Once frozen, the thin packages stack neatly, taking up less space than bulky containers. Use bags intended for freezing, leave room for liquid to expand, and follow safe cooling, storage, and reheating practices.
Deutsch keeps a bag in his freezer for the parts of dinner that don’t make it onto the plate: onion trimmings, mushroom bits, and herb stems. When he’s ready to make stock, he has a head start.
“Stock is like magic,” he says. When people wonder why their soup doesn’t taste as good as their favorite restaurant’s, he points to what might be missing: stock, along with generous seasoning. He also uses it in place of water when cooking rice, polenta, or vegetables to give them extra flavor.
He’s selective about what goes into the stock. Add beet scraps, and “you’re gonna have a pink or brownish stock,” he says. Add broccoli trimmings, and “it’s gonna have a little bit of a cabbagey broccoli smell.” That could be delicious in broccoli mac and cheese, but it’s probably not the flavor you want in butternut squash soup. “You have to be a little strategic about what goes in there,” he says.
Roe’s air fryer helps him get another meal out of restaurant leftovers. Recently, he used it to reheat half a tuna steak and vegetables his wife had brought home. “That makes things kind of tasty and crispy again,” he says.
He thinks about the next meal while putting food away, taking an extra minute to make leftovers easy to reheat. The goal is “storing your leftovers in a way that helps you want to use them the next time,” he says.
Sometimes, that means turning last night’s teriyaki chicken into today’s salad. His adult son has found another opening for leftovers: breakfast. “They’re the freshest they’ll ever be because it’s the first meal after,” Roe says.
Ground turkey, two green peppers, and feta: Is that dinner? Deutsch suggests asking a chatbot before adding anything else to your grocery list.
He’s experimented with AI to find ways to use ingredients on hand, and recommends giving it more than a list of what’s in the fridge. Tell it how much time you have, what equipment you’re using, and how comfortable you are in the kitchen.
“Make me an easy recipe with these ingredients,” he suggests instructing your AI platform of choice. You can ask for something that takes less than 30 minutes, too—so you don’t discover halfway through the instructions that dinner needs to marinate overnight. “You could really customize it,” he says.
Throwing away part of a chicken breast means wasting more than dinner. It also wastes the resources used to raise and feed the chicken. Animal products generally have a larger environmental footprint than plant foods, Miller explains, which makes keeping meat, eggs, and dairy from going uneaten especially consequential.
Her rule: “Respect the protein.”
Miller and her husband still eat meat, but they’ve started serving smaller portions. “Meat is an accent to the meal,” she says. They’re trying to avoid a familiar outcome: “We both have two huge chicken breasts and waste a quarter of them.”
Roe describes himself as an evangelist for buying less food—a habit that’s followed him home, “maybe not to the happiness of everybody in my household,” he says.
When they’re having people over, Roe tries to calculate what guests will actually eat, while his spouse comes from a tradition of making sure there’s enough to “feed the army.”
At Thanksgiving, Roe uses the Guest-imator, an online tool from Save the Food that estimates how much to prepare for a gathering. “A lot of it is just buying less or really thinking about what’s being purchased and why,” he says.
Miller studies the environmental impact of plastic packaging. She also has a freezer full of soup in zip-top bags. “Very honestly, we go through a lot of single-use plastic,” she says.
Her research helps explain that choice. A 2022 analysis she co-authored found that plastic packaging accounted for less than 10% of the total environmental footprint of 23 out of 30 foods across most measures examined. And in a 2019 study comparing meal kits with grocery-store meals, the greenhouse-gas savings from reduced food waste outweighed the extra packaging emissions.
Miller uses reusable containers for lunches and tries to minimize disposable items. But she considers what the packaging helps her accomplish. “A good zip-top bag is really hard to compete with for certain applications,” she says.
For her, the environmental cost of throwing away food matters more than the bag used to save it. “When you look at the environmental impacts of food waste versus a single-use plastic bag, the food waste is the much more important thing,” she says.
“My big philosophy is not to sweat the small stuff,” she says.
Miller collects food scraps in a metal pail with a liner. “It’s nothing fancy,” she says. But she doesn’t consider composting a substitute for eating the food she buys.
“A lot of folks think, well, hey, I’m composting, so it’s OK to waste food,” she says. Composting can’t recover all the resources used to produce food that never gets eaten, so she focuses first on using what’s in her kitchen—whether it becomes lunch, soup, or next week’s potato.
When food does go uneaten, “throw it in the compost rather than the trash if you have that option available,” she says.
Southern California towns are on high alert as the first Santa Ana winds of the season have arrived, igniting multiple blazes across the region.
The red flag warning put out by the National Weather Service (NWS) Wednesday evening followed a relatively quiet wildfire season so far in California. Only 300,000 acres had burned since Jan. 1, compared to the over one million acres that fires have usually burned by mid-October.
Santa Ana winds blow in from the desert, typically between the months of September and May. The winds bring warmer temperatures and drier air to Southern California. They also greatly increase the risk of wildfires—warm winds coupled with summer drought can often make for a dangerous combination. The January 2025 fires that tore through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena were fueled by Santa Ana wind gusts that reached 100 m.p.h.
This week’s winds will not be as strong, according to NWS predictions. But that doesn’t mean the area is in the clear. The NWS warned that, if any fires ignite, “conditions are favorable for extreme fire behavior.”
The largest fire, named the Henderson fire, erupted Thursday afternoon around Camp Pendleton, a San Diego Marine Corps training base, and had burned through 1,404 acres by Friday morning. Two other fires have burned through 200 acres and 43 acres in Los Angeles county.
The NWS issued a red flag warning on Oct. 15 for the Los Angeles County San Gabriel Valley forecast zone that will stay in effect until Saturday evening. The most extreme conditions are expected in the Ventura and Los Angeles County valleys and mountains, particularly Santa Clarita, Thousand Oaks, and Simi Valley.
As of Thursday night, Southern California Edison shut off power to tens of thousands of customers. Nearly 90,000 PG&E customers were also left without power. Shutting down power helps stop downed power lines or aging infrastructure from sparking fires.
If you live in an impacted area, sign up for local emergency alerts, plan for power outages, and avoid any outdoor activities that might ignite sparks like BBQs, campfires, or discarded cigarette butts.
One Southern California town is even encouraging residents to secure hallowed decorations—the giant skeleton and inflatable pumpkins haunting front lawns. High winds can turn Halloween decorations into hazards,” the city of Pasadena said in a Facebook post. “Secure them before winds pick up.”
No, Rome was not built in a day, but it was built at breathtaking speed, its temples, amphitheaters, and aqueducts rising with the help of a magical blend of volcanic ash and lime. Today, that miraculous mortar has a less than enchanting name: concrete.
“Romans lived through a true architectural revolution, and at the foundation of this revolution, literally, was a concrete discovery,” said Admir Masic, a materials science professor at MIT who made waves a few years ago for unearthing the fast-hardening secret sauce for why Roman concrete is so durable. “They were able to take a pile of dirt and mix it together, add water, and turn it into solid rock of any arbitrary size. It literally changed everything.”
And yet, for a millennia after the fall of Rome, the world largely forgot about concrete, until, in the 18th century, an English mason found that mixing limestone and clay could form a paste that hardened underwater. Another few decades later, concrete as we now know it was reborn, and once again, it changed everything.
In the centuries since, concrete has come to reshape our way of life, with disastrous results for the climate. What early concrete evangelists didn’t realize was that the modern way of producing the substance released giant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As it has become increasingly central to modernity, it has helped fuel environmental catastrophe.
Today, however, a new generation of concretophiles like Masic have pored over the poured mixture in search of another miracle, a greener, more durable kind of concrete. And they’ve found multiple answers, from concrete that can heal its own cracks — as the Pantheon has for millennia — to electroconductive concrete capable of storing energy to a blend that allows concrete to soak up more CO2 than it emits.
Together, they suggest that in a not-so-distant future, concrete — yes, concrete — one of the dirtiest substances ever concocted, could help save the planet, transforming our built environment while actually intervening in the climate for the better.
It’s no wonder that luminaries of the neo-concrete age, Thomas Edison among them, marveled at the stuff just as their Roman predecessors had. They saw it as a harbinger of utopia, of a world in which anything and everything — a home, an interstate highway, a water pipe, a subway system, or a grand piano — could be molded and poured for a fraction of ordinary costs.
“As to concrete dogs to stand warningly in the front yard and concrete cats to purr stonily under a concrete kitchen range,” the New York Times teased Edison in 1911 when he described his plans for a concrete home finished with concrete furnishings, “he made no announcement.”
The beguiled inventor’s utopian vision of a world remade by concrete would come true in more ways than he realized. Yes, it changed the way we build forever. Muddy roads and rotting wooden sidewalks gave way to smooth gray pavement, and newly cast sewer systems saved millions of lives in the deathly dirty cities of the early industrial era. Concrete, when poured over rods of steel, proved strong enough to prop up colossal skyscrapers that Julius Caesar could only have dreamed of.
But there was a trade-off: Every time Edison fired up his trademark 150-foot kilns, scorching the limestone inside into blistering pebbles of cement clinker, he released hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Yankee Stadium was built not by Babe Ruth’s swing alone, but with around 30,000 cubic yards of Edison concrete, whose creation released at least 5,400 tons of CO2, the equivalent of driving a gas-powered car 12.5 million miles, or to the moon and back more than two dozen times. But this is nothing compared with the roughly 30 billion tons of concrete the world now uses each year, enough to have turned the gluey gray goo into the second-most used material on Earth. (The first is water. Glug glug.)
The Anthropocene has been built atop a foundation of concrete, its weight eclipsing the biomass of all living things, and its annual carbon tab responsible for up to 8 percent of global emissions, the equivalent of the entire country of India. Critically, unlike the astonishingly enduring remnants of Rome, our modern concrete decays quickly, so it must be repoured time and time again, which only makes it more environmentally catastrophic.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, not anymore.
“The future of concrete is to think differently, to go away from claiming that cement is bad,” Masic told me. “Our goal is to turn this around and make concrete part of the solution instead of being a problem.”
Per ton, concrete actually emits far less CO2 by volume than other materials like aluminum, steel, plastic, or glass.
The problem is that we use so much of it, even a slightly negative footprint can quickly become enormous. But “the upside is,” said Sabbie Miller, a professor at UC Davis who focuses on sustainable concrete, “if you’re able to come up with some small change, then those small changes will also scale” in ways “that could have a huge effect on modern society and its burdens on the environment.”
One of those solutions takes a cue from the Romans, who made concrete differently than we do today. Their once-mysterious method ensured that hulking structures like the Colosseum or the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct built during Augustus’ reign and still in use today, could survive for millennia while New York City’s Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or the Washington Bridge crumble after just a few decades of use.
It’s not just that we drive cars over our concrete freeways while the Colosseum has been mostly free of even the bulkiest chariot wheels for millennia. The answer, according to Masic’s research, lies in the Romans’ ingenious recipe for cement, the glue that binds concrete together. When the ancients brewed a batch of cement, they left big white chunks of dormant lime in the final mixture. Later, if a crack formed, any water would react with the idle lime, filling the fissure with new stone. Our modern concrete has no such lime clasts, meaning that if water seeps into a crack, it degrades the structure from within, rusting the rebar that made our big towers possible, leading to a grim condition known as “concrete cancer.”
Masic has recently turned his research into a startup called DMAT that reserves unreacted lime in concrete, giving it self-healing properties he says could extend a structure’s lifespan by about 50 percent, which in and of itself would reduce its carbon footprint by 40 percent. If the construction industry normalized such concrete or other mixtures that emit, say, half as much CO2 as usual, it would keep hundreds of millions of tons of it out of the atmosphere each year.
But why stop there? Some startups have gotten much better in recent years at producing concrete capable of quite literally breathing in more CO2 than it emits in a process that takes advantage of concrete’s natural porousness. It could, in theory, turn our cities into concrete rainforests by turning the material into a storage reservoir. As Miller put it, “what if we can use our concrete to undo some of our environmental damages that we’ve already caused?”
In the Bahamas, the startup Partanna has already built what it’s called the world’s first carbon net-negative home, an unassuming 1,250-square-foot abode that the company claims will sequester 182.6 tons of CO2 in its lifetime, the equivalent of hundreds of trees. Meanwhile, Masic’s lab has been piloting ways to turn concrete into a giant battery, capable of storing solar power during the day and releasing it at night, a green innovation that could cancel out its own carbon footprint within a few years of use.
Masic believes that electroconductivity could be key to catalyzing a new era of concrete — more so even than his neo-Roman ventures. “It might hold the secret,” he said, “for turning a bad guy into something amazing.”
But as promising as these innovations are, it will take time for them to ripple out from model homes and into the concrete that actually surrounds us. American concrete startups have lost billions of dollars in federal funding and expected procurement contracts under the Trump administration. Some states, most notably California, are helping to pick up the slack, but investment still lags behind potential. There’s also the challenge of convincing builders running on paper thin margins that their old ways of doing things might fit better in a new mould.
But concrete’s staggering scale means that we can’t afford to keep pouring it without considering its ugly trade-offs. More importantly, perhaps, we can’t afford to miss out on the opportunity that such a mammoth, transformative material presents to change everything yet again.
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
The first hurricane of the fall season is expected to strike the Gulf Coast overnight, marking the latest onset of hurricane season in living memory. As of early Friday afternoon, Hurricane Isaias had grown to a Category 3 storm, with sustained winds of 120 miles per hour. It will strike along the shores of the Florida Panhandle, Alabama, and Mississippi, posing a threat to life and property for millions of Americans. Weather forecasters anticipate between 8 and 12 inches of rain in the areas near where the storm makes landfall.
Isaias’s imminent arrival signals the end of a period of unusual good luck when it comes to hurricanes striking the United States. Last year, no hurricanes reached the US mainland at all. And this year, Isaias is breaking a more than 100-year-old record: October 9 is the latest date since 1905 for the first Atlantic hurricane of the season to take shape. August and September have historically been the busiest periods of hurricane season.
Not lately, though. It’s a strange recent phenomenon, and it’s been even more fortuitous than it would ordinarily be. That’s because the Trump administration has slashed weather forecasting and emergency relief funding over the past two years, leaving us less prepared for a disaster.
And now our luck seems to be running out — with even more rough weather on the way.
Here’s the secret ingredient that’s pushed off hurricanes even as warming planetary temperatures raise concerns about more extreme weather events: El Niño. This notorious shift in global wind patterns, which occurs every two to seven years, moves warm water around the oceans, disrupting traditional weather patterns and leading to intense rain and sometimes disastrous flooding, as well as droughts. If there is an upside, however, it’s that this temporary change in ocean conditions prevents hurricanes from forming as frequently as they otherwise would.
The downside is, well, El Niño is still on its way. Forecasters expect this year’s version to be historically bad — using words like “super” or “Godzilla” to describe it. The worst of the bad weather is projected to arrive in December: The southern half of the continental US is expected to see unusually rainy and stormy weather, while areas of the Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest could see extreme dry spells.
It will also serve as a crucial test of our reduced capacity for predicting and responding to disasters. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather forecasting and public alert programs by $200 million, and 17 percent of FEMA’s workforce left the agency in 2025 amid the administration’s DOGE purge.
For now, if you’re in the danger zone for Isaias, please pay attention to local and national weather alerts this weekend. If you’re not, count yourself lucky — but there are storm clouds on the horizon.
➨ These days, it feels like we’re all swimming in a sea of AI hype and hysteria — all the ways this technology will make our lives better, all the ways it could kill every single one of us. But what if the two are more related than we think? Eric Levitz’s new piece asks whether the AI companies themselves warning us about the apocalypse is part of their own marketing strategy. It’s a useful guide for how to think about all of these existential conversations.
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The world’s largest penguin colony has declined by two-thirds since 2011, most likely because of the climate crisis, a study has revealed. Scientists said the rapid demise of chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski, the northernmost of the South Sandwich Islands in Antarctica, increased the risk of a wider ecosystem collapse.
“It is an enormous population crash, equivalent to half a million breeding individuals being lost from that island,” said the leader of the research, professor Norman Ratcliffe, a penguin ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey.
The Guardian reported in 2020 that chinstrap penguin populations were decreasing on Low in the South Shetland Islands, prompting concerns among scientists that “something is broken” in the world’s wildest ecosystem. The new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Current Biology, indicates that the speed of collapse may be accelerating so rapidly that the distinctive bird — which gets its name from a black line that runs below the beak from cheek to cheek — may need to be classified as an endangered species.
Zavodovski Island had by far the biggest penguin colony in the world, with about 600,000 chinstraps and 90,000 macaroni penguins when the population was measured in 2011. Given the decline between then and 2025, it is likely to have lost that title to Cape Adare in the Ross Sea.
Scientists believe the most likely cause is climate disruption. Human-driven heating has pushed up winter temperatures on and around the Antarctic Peninsula to 5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, one of the fastest rises in the world. On 6 June, the Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity Peninsula registered a record winter high of 15.4°C, about 20°C above normal for the time of year — a margin that scientists described as “absolutely crazy.”
Chinstrap penguins are struggling to adapt because they have special diets and specific ocean temperature preferences. Tracking data shows they prefer to forage in cooler waters to the northwest of the island, where they would expect to find Antarctic krill, which make up the bulk of their diet. But as the waters warm, the krill have moved south into the Weddell Sea.
Macaroni penguins, by contrast, are less fussy eaters and their numbers rose 30 percent — though not nearly enough to make up for the loss of chinstraps. Ratcliffe said this was only small comfort because if current trends continued, all penguins would run out of space.
He said the loss of chinstrap penguins would have wider repercussions for food webs. “Each ecosystem could be regarded as like a giant Jenga set, and every component that you remove increases the risk of ecosystems collapsing completely.”
The scientists ruled out several other possible causes of decline. There was no sign that chinstrap and macaroni penguins were in competition for food. The nearest humans lived thousands of miles away.
Although the island is volcanic and had a major eruption in 2016, prompting a “Penguin Pompeii hypothesis” of a sudden population fall, this theory was not borne out either by the data, which showed a steady linear decline, or by observations that showed the chinstraps avoided the main “asphyxia plain” area where the ash and lava were deposited.
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is trying to fix the diesel crisis he caused.
What’s happening? On Monday evening, Trump signed an executive order intended to lower diesel prices by temporarily expanding access to red-dye diesel.
What’s red-dye diesel? A kind of diesel usually reserved for farm and construction equipment and other off-road uses — and marked with a little bit of red dye to distinguish it from other diesel sold for use in on-road vehicles. Ordinarily, it’s tax-exempt and not available to on-road vehicles, but Trump is expanding access in a bid to bring down the overall cost of fuel ahead of the midterm elections.
Trump’s order defers payment on — but does not actually suspend — the federal tax on red-dye diesel for on-road vehicles through the end of the year, while also directing his Cabinet “to explore pathways to eliminate the obligation to pay the deferred taxes.”
What’s the context? Diesel prices are way, way up because of the Iran war. Currently, the national average price per gallon is $6.32, compared to $3.68/gallon one year ago.
Will this do anything to lower prices? Not very much, in all likelihood, for a whole slew of reasons ably explained here — including that the order can’t change the underlying reality of a global diesel shortage.
Why does the price of diesel matter? Most people don’t use diesel to fill up their tank, but semitrucks shipping food and other goods around the country rely on it. That means that when diesel gets more expensive, nearly everything else does too, sooner or later.
Why does Trump care? This is best explained by the fact that Trump signed the executive order while on the campaign trail in Nebraska — ordinarily a comfortably Republican state that instead looks potentially in play for independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn.
High diesel prices have hit hard in Nebraska and other agriculture-heavy states like Iowa and Kansas, jeopardizing Republican Senate seats in all three.
Here’s a story worth clicking for the cover photo alone: Scientists have discovered two new challengers for the title of world’s loudest bird, the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema. Both can top out at more than 120 decibels — louder than a jackhammer, according to 404 Media.
If you’re curious, there are videos of both bird calls in the article, though I have not played them out of respect for the sleeping dachshund on my lap.
Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
A grove of coast redwood trees is a forest of forests. Individual trees can live for thousands of years, and as they grow, their canopies develop mats of soils and ferns, creating something like a second forest floor hundreds of feet above the ground.
These elevated ecosystems are home to creatures like the wandering salamander, which can spend its entire life cycle on top of a single tree, and the marbled murrelet, a seabird whose nesting habits were a mystery until one day in 1974, when a tree-trimmer stumbled upon a nest 150 feet above the ground. Sometimes a stray seed — a sitka spruce or oak or even another redwood — finds its way up a massive redwood and grows into another tree entirely, nestled among the branches of a giant.
For millennia, redwoods have been the anchors of this incredibly stable ecosystem; they can even survive wildfires that devastate other tree species. They’ve also been the source of plenty of human inspiration and drive millions of dollars to California’s tourist economy. But like other living things, they aren’t immune to warming temperatures, and it turns out these trees have a particular weak spot.
A new study from researchers at University of California Davis, using measurements taken twice a month for two years, found that coast redwood leaves essentially dial down their photosynthesis during periods of extreme heat. This means trees are slowing their “breathing” and “eating” because they can’t cool down fast enough when temperatures rise. It’s a problem that’s only going to get worse as climate change continues to drive global temperatures up, and it raises urgent questions about the future of these iconic trees and the layers of life that live on and around their shadow-dappled lengths.
To understand what’s happening to the redwoods — and what that may mean for the species that rely on them — first we need to take a quick foray into tree anatomy. Trees use the pores in their leaves, stomata, to do two things: take carbon dioxide in, and let water out. Open stomata mean the tree is “breathing” in carbon dioxide and photosynthesizing, but probably also letting water out. Closed stomata mean the tree is conserving water but also slowing down its photosynthesis, since it isn’t taking in any carbon dioxide.
“Because leaves are a physical, light-absorbing object, they heat up just like asphalt would in the sun,” said Lily Klinek, a PhD student at UC Davis who was the lead author on the study.
“They’re heating up faster than the air around them,” she said. “And one way that they can cope with this is by opening their stomata and allowing water to transpire out of the leaf, which is kind of like the way that humans sweat. When water evaporates off our skin, it cools us down, and it’s the same for leaves. But they can only really do that if they have enough water to lose.”
Klinek and her colleagues studied coast redwoods in Mendocino County, near the southern part of their range, where the researchers used specialized instruments to measure whether or not individual leaves were photosynthesizing. During heat waves, they found, coast redwoods hit a point where they can’t cool down fast enough, and they just keep their stomata closed. While that saves water, it also means the tree isn’t taking in more carbon — which means it’s not “eating” or building up energy stores it can use to keep growing.
This may sound like a technicality of tree physiology. But it could have a big impact on these forests, creating a vicious cycle where trees don’t have enough carbon stored to replenish their leaves in the future, which means they won’t be able to photosynthesize as efficiently, which will starve them even further, repeating until trees eventually die. And while this sort of behavior has been observed in tropical trees, it’s the first time anyone has studied how coast redwoods respond to the same heat stress.
“The term people use is carbon starvation,” said Chris Still, a forest ecologist at Oregon State University who didn’t participate in the study. “Leaves can be expensive to build for a plant.”
Most of the redwoods in California and the Pacific Northwest nowadays are new-growth forests planted in the last couple of centuries. That means the trees are relatively hungry, like growing adolescents, compared to their old-growth cousins, so they need to suck in lots of carbon dioxide to grow taller.
Redwoods are also incredibly good at storing carbon. Thanks to their bulk and long lives, they store more carbon dioxide per acre than any other forest in the world. “Not only is it negative feedback on the climate system itself, with less carbon sequestration from these trees and forests, but the trees themselves are going to obviously not grow as big,” said Anthony Ambrose, a plant physiological ecologist and co-founder of the Ancient Forest Society. So even if the trees survive, they might not have as much space for fern and soil mats, which means less habitat for the creatures that live in them, and they may not grow as tall as they once used to, which could hurt them in another way.
A central threat to these trees, Klinek explained, is that in addition to the heat stress, they may also lose a crucial source of hydration and protection: Coast redwoods have an intricate relationship with the fogs of their native Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. The trees are so tall that their canopies reach high into fog layers, where they can sip water directly from the sky. The fog also shades the trees from the sun and helps coast redwoods create their own microclimate, which is why these forests are noticeably cooler than the areas adjacent to them. But warmer oceans and drier air are making fog more sporadic, which means the trees are missing a crucial source of relief from heat that is only getting more intense.
“It’s kind of a double whammy,” said Todd Dawson, a plant ecophysiologist at the University of California Berkeley, who also didn’t participate in the study. “They’re running out of water and also getting this heat stress,” he said. “They’re used to living in a very narrow temperature range of 8 to 27 degrees Celsius (about 46 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit). California, like everywhere, has been getting long periods of much warmer days than we’ve ever experienced, and now the fog, which is normally kind of like an air conditioner, has also declined between 30 and 40 percent.”
These temperature swings also impact the organisms living high up in the trees. “If they experience really excessive heat throughout the summer,” Ambrose said, “then the soil mats and ferns will probably dry out much faster. And then those salamanders and birds might not be able to live there. So we’ll see cascading effects through the whole ecosystem at that point.”
Klinek said, the trees seem to be doing okay after the heat passes; while the leaves she and her team looked at over their two-year study didn’t acclimate to the heat, they also didn’t lose their capacity to photosynthesize after the heat passed. While that’s a bit of hopeful news, it doesn’t reduce the urgency of the need to better understand the impact of climate change on these trees, and to reduce the warming itself.
“Right now the temperatures are coming back to normal in the fall and winter and letting the trees recover,” Klinek said. “But in five or 10 years, if temperatures are even hotter and heat waves are even more frequent, we don’t really know if there would be a recovery.”
For now, the salamanders and seabirds still have their homes high atop the coast redwoods. But we’re a part of the redwoods’ larger ecosystem too, even if we don’t live near them — they, like all trees, are key to keeping our planet hospitable. The trees Klinek studied have the potential to live for more than a thousand years. The question is if we’ll let them.
Inside Chief Justice John Roberts are two wolves.
The first wolf is a staunch conservative who spent much of his career litigating on behalf of corporate interests. This wolf looks at a series of climate change lawsuits that could potentially cost the oil industry billions of dollars or more, and recoils in horror.
The second wolf is a judge tasked with following the law wherever it leads. And that wolf seemed baffled by the oil industry’s arguments in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a Supreme Court case where two oil companies are asking the justices to shut down dozens of climate change lawsuits.
The Court’s decision in Suncor is likely to shape the future of climate litigation in the United States. If the oil industry prevails, that will probably shut down climate change-related suits in state courts — and it may shut them down entirely because it is unclear whether federal law allows these suits to proceed in federal court. If the oil industry loses, by contrast, it could face dozens of suits in state courts across the country seeking billions of dollars or more.
And the outcome in Suncor is likely to turn on which wolf shows up to the justices’ conference on how to decide the case. Roberts, who asked the most ambiguous questions at Monday’s oral argument in Suncor, clearly wants these lawsuits to disappear. But he also appeared doubtful that the oil companies’ weak legal arguments will allow him to make that disappearing act happen.
Notably, Justice Samuel Alito, who owns stock in oil and gas companies, is recused from hearing the case. So, in the likely event that all three of the Court’s Democrats hold together against the oil companies, Roberts would split the Court 4-4 if he decides to join them. That would leave the Court unable to render a decision, and a lower court opinion, which rejected the oil companies’ bid for lawsuit immunity, would remain in effect.
That said, at least two other justices asked questions suggesting that their votes may potentially be in play. Justice Clarence Thomas, who otherwise appeared sympathetic to the oil companies, repeatedly asked whether his Court has jurisdiction to hear Suncor in the first place. Meanwhile, while most of Democratic Justice Elena Kagan’s questions seemed to favor allowing the climate change lawsuits to proceed, she did ask some questions at the end that indicated that she may be looking for a narrow reason to hand the oil companies a win.
The bottom line is that it is difficult to predict how this case will turn out, as more than one justice asked questions that suggest that their vote is, at least, in play. But the outcome is likely to hinge upon the tension within Roberts — who both signaled that he wants the oil companies to win, but who also expressed deep skepticism of their primary legal argument.
Suncor is one of many lawsuits brought by state or local governments (in this case, the plaintiff is Boulder, Colorado) who’ve sued oil companies claiming that those companies should be liable for the harms caused by climate change within those governments’ jurisdictions. In this particular case, the defendants are Exxon Mobil and Suncor, a company that operates two oil refineries in Colorado.
The lawyer for these two companies, Kannon Shanmugam, told the justices that there are about 60 similar cases brought by municipal governments throughout the country. And, in one of his more pro-oil moments during Monday’s oral argument, Roberts predicted that if Boulder wins in the Supreme Court, there will be numerous other copycat lawsuits filed by other municipalities.
The question in Suncor is whether state courts, including Colorado’s own courts, are forbidden from hearing these sorts of climate change lawsuits.
As Roberts pointed out in one of his less pro-oil moments during Monday’s argument, “there are a lot of familiar situations where conduct outside of a state has broad effects on other states…and yet we allow the state courts in a particular state to bring litigation.” He pointed to “mass tort” suits and “complaints about operations of the internet” as two examples where state courts hear lawsuits involving harms that arise across state borders.
The oil companies’ primary argument is that suits involving air and water pollution are special. But their evidence supporting this argument is confusing and difficult to parse.
Briefly, the oil companies point to several cases, many of which were decided more than a century ago. These cases held that, before Congress enacted the Clean Air Act in 1963, states could sometimes sue other states for cross-border pollution, even though no federal law forbade such pollution. The Supreme Court created “federal common law” permitting these suits, and the oil companies claim that this federal common law preempted any state lawsuits that covered a similar subject matter.
This federal common law, they now argue, has itself been displaced by the Clear Air Act and its partner statute, the Clean Water Act, but the principle that state suits involving air and water pollution are preempted is somehow still in effect. Although there is no provision in the text of the Constitution that supports this argument by the oil companies, those companies claim that their argument is implicit in the “structure of the Constitution.”
If you are confused by all the arcane history and logical leaps contained in the oil companies’ argument, don’t worry. So were most of the justices. Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who repeatedly claimed that his Court’s precedents bar Boulder’s lawsuit, seemed to buy what the oil companies are saying without reservation. Most of the other justices expressed at least some reservations.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, for example, argued that even under the older “federal common law” regime, states still retained some authority over environmental lawsuits, although she noted that the Court’s previous decisions do not really define the scope of that authority. Kagan pointed out that the many suits challenging climate change are similar to past litigation against tobacco and opioid manufacturers. But those suits were heard by state courts.
Many of the justices appear bothered that these lawsuits exist, but the most skeptical justices couldn’t agree on a legal theory they could use to shut them down.
It seems unlikely, in other words, that there are five votes for the oil companies’ convoluted claim that the “structure of the Constitution” somehow bars state courts from hearing climate change lawsuits. But several of the justices did appear troubled by what could happen if dozens of state courts reach conflicting judgments on who is responsible for climate change and who should receive compensation because of it. And some of these justices floated alternative theories for how to hand the oil companies a win.
At one point, for example, Barrett floated the possibility that, if the plaintiffs lose in Suncor, they might file a new suit under the now-defunct federal common law that existed prior to the Clean Air Act. Kagan, meanwhile, suggested that perhaps the Clean Air Act could be read to preempt these suits like Suncor. According to Kagan, that law “sets up an extremely complicated scheme about how regulations of emissions should operate,” and allowing states to hear lawsuits like Suncor would “get in the way of how Congress decided to regulate greenhouse gases.”
And Roberts didn’t so much offer a legal argument in favor of the oil companies’ position as express incredulity of what would happen if those companies lose. “Presumably if you prevail,” before the Supreme Court, Roberts told Kevin Russell, the lawyer for Boulder, “the next day a municipality in every single state will file a lawsuit, copy your pleadings, and then there will be at least 50…how do you think that will work out on the ground?”
All of which is a long way of saying that the outcome in Suncor is uncertain. The oil companies led with a weak legal argument, and only Kavanaugh seemed to fully embrace that argument. Many of the justices appear bothered that these lawsuits exist, but the most skeptical justices couldn’t agree on a legal theory they could use to shut them down.
For what it is worth, the oil companies actually do make a strong policy argument that it is a bad idea to allow state courts to do so. As they argue, climate change is a global problem caused by many polluters (and companies like Exxon that supply the oil burned by polluters) throughout the world. It could be impossible to determine which specific companies caused the specific problems caused by climate change in Boulder, Colorado. And even if this obstacle can be overcome, there are many thorny questions about which state’s law should apply when pollution from one state crosses over into another, not to mention the difficult diplomatic issues that could arise if a state court orders a foreign company to pay a large sum of money.
But under our Constitution, the proper solution if the oil companies want federal law to preempt state court suits like Suncor is that they can lobby Congress, and Congress could then draft a statute that balances these companies’ interest in avoiding many conflicting legal decisions with the interests of plaintiffs like Boulder who say they are experiencing real harms from climate change. Congress has the power, for example, to combine all of these state lawsuits into one grand federal lawsuit, where a single proceeding could determine how to portion out the costs of climate change to various energy companies, and how to divide whatever these companies are ordered to pay among the various plaintiffs.
But that solution would undoubtedly require compromises that companies like Exxon will not like. So, instead, they’ve asked the Supreme Court to give them the legal regime that they want, despite the fact that they could not articulate a persuasive legal argument for that outcome. It remains to be seen whether this Court will give the oil companies a win anyway.
There’s no place like Kansas, a state whose howling winds are so fierce that in the 1800s, the roaring soundscape drove local farmers into madness. It is so windy in Kansas that every so often, trains get swept off their tracks or trampolines get hurled into the air and flung into neighbors’ trees.
But today, the same gusts that whisked away Dorothy’s home have made Kansas the third-most wind-powered place in the country, its great plains dotted with thousands of twirling turbines responsible for generating over half of the state’s energy.
And for years, Kansas has been trying to share.
But that’s easier said than done in the US, where building power lines across state borders can be an onerous, litigious, and bureaucratic slog. The Grain Belt Express, a proposed 800-mile high-voltage line carrying Kansas’s windy riches across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, has been trying to get built for the past 16 years. When completed, it will allow Kansas to pump five times as much wind power into Missouri as it does now. But though the project received its first approval in 2013, it will likely not open until 2029 at the earliest, beset by regulatory hurdles across multiple jurisdictions and an endless stream of legal challenges that immediately halt progress every time a new injunction is filed. Alas, the express — which only broke ground this year — was forced to run oh so local.
But other projects like it might soon enjoy far more reasonable timelines. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of Senators announced a deal called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA — an acronym that’s led to a slew of cringeworthy euphoric Baja Blast references from abundance Democrats, clean energy advocates, and oil industry lobbyists alike. If passed, it would significantly curtail Americans’ ability to endlessly litigate against energy projects they don’t like, and empower the federal government to push critical multistate projects forward even if one state or municipality drags its feet. That could remake the way the nation’s energy infrastructure gets built, including its interstate transmission lines, for decades to come.
But the bill also suggests that easing the way for clean energy in the US may require simultaneously creating the conditions for more oil and gas infrastructure in a country that already has a lot of it. It would also mean defanging some of the landmark regulatory norms that for decades have, for example, given Americans a say over developments that could contaminate their drinking water and helped tribes protect sacred heritage sites. These laws were necessary in the first place because prior to the 1970s, American communities frequently found themselves both literally and figuratively steamrolled by developers singularly focused on building things quickly with little regard for the oil spills, river fires, and bifurcated neighborhoods they left in their wake.
And yet today, half a century later, that same dilemma has, in some ways, turned on its head. America builds things too slowly, and in particular, it builds the kind of infrastructure desperately needed to usher in a transition to clean energy with little of the urgency you’d expect from a world in the throes of climate change-related disaster. Exasperatingly, some of the same protections that have played a critical role in making this nation safer may also be standing in the way of building a nation that is more affordable and sustainable in the long run.
There are still plenty of reasons to feel hopeful about the world’s transition away from fossil fuels, even in the US, which has lagged behind our peers while still building an extraordinary number of solar and wind farms, particularly in Republican-led states like Kansas and Texas. And yet, many of these projects have languished in never-ending Ticketmaster-esque queues to connect to the nation’s decrepit power grid, a direct result of the permitting hellscape that prevents much-needed high-voltage cables like the Grain Belt Express from coming online.
This new bill aims to ease many of the bottlenecks that stymie clean energy, but it also throws a bone to fossil fuels, which, like renewables, would benefit from less onerous environmental reviews and quicker permissions. This is, after all, a bipartisan bill in a Congress that, at least for now, remains Republican-led, under the tutelage of an aggrieved president who has sabotaged some of the nation’s most promising clean energy projects with an often petty and relentless fervor. Some Democrats in Congress, along with other environmentalists, have raised serious concerns about the bill. Those initial objections may prophesize an uphill battle for it when it comes to a vote, likely after the November midterms.
Even so, with American electricity bills spiking to frightening new heights, and a data center buildout that could all but snap the power grid in half, this ambitious deal is, at the very least, an indication that some of the nation’s representatives are finally listening. And if it passes into law in the months to come, it could very well remake how Americans get their energy for a generation.
By most accounts, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act almost didn’t happen.
For months, the proposed permitting deal has been stalled by the Trump administration’s failure to assure Democrats that the president would lay off his attacks on “windmills” and other clean energy projects. But in recent days, lawmakers appear to have come close to a fragile détente on the back of a “very reasonable opening proposal” from the White House, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
If the BAAJA is passed, it will codify new protections that legally prevent presidents like Trump from meddling with already-permitted energy projects or singling out specific forms of energy, a prohibition that will also apply if a Democratic president attempts to halt an approved gas line or a petroleum refinery. The Biden administration’s freeze on approvals for new natural gas export plants, for example, would not be allowed.
It’s this element of the proposed bill that worries many environmentalists most. According to a transcript obtained by Punchbowl News, during a coalition call on Thursday, dozens of advocates from prominent environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Environmental Law & Policy Center — expressed their misgivings about the bill and strategized about how to lobby Democrats against it.
Most environmentalists acknowledge, however, that we need to spruce up the power grid and fix how permitting works for clean energy projects and transmission lines. As clean energy advocates know all too well, the projects they support are, paradoxically, more likely to be hampered by environmental reviews than fossil fuel projects are, because renewables usually require more space and represent the bulk of new energy developments. But many advocates understandably take issue with the idea that reforming this overcomplicated process may require weakening the right to challenge other projects, a right affirmed by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act.
The bill’s fate may ultimately depend on whether this trade-off is worth it. The BAAJA still does leave some room for court challenges if they’re filed within 150 days of an approval. But it will still place a much larger burden for determining these damage thresholds on federal agencies, which are, of course, currently controlled by Trump.
“The question’s not whether that would be a good idea — it’s one of the basic building blocks for converting more of our energy system to renewables,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote of grid expansion and permitting reform on his Substack this week. “It’s how many pounds of flesh the fossil fuel industry would demand in return, and how close to vital organs that flesh would be located.”
The problem is, no matter how many Congressional seats Democrats seem poised to scoop up in November, they will still need to get Republicans on board if they want Americans to be able to really see the benefits of solar, the cheapest energy source of all time, reflected on their power bill. And for most of the nation, if not Earth itself, that transition can’t come soon enough.
Everyone knows how much gasoline prices matter. The recent spike in gas prices triggered by the war with Iran has fueled deep pessimism about the economy and weighed heavily on President Donald Trump’s approval ratings.
But diesel fuel — the lifeblood of shipping, agriculture, and heavy industry — usually flies under the radar. Its price has surged too, and while truckers and farmers are feeling the initial blow, the rest of the country won’t be far behind.
“Most products in America are shipped along the road via trucks,” Nathan Bomey, a business reporter at Axios, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. Diesel prices “directly affect their cost of doing business, which then eventually trickles down and affects the consumer.”
On the podcast, Bomey discusses what’s driving the price spike, how quickly it’s going to become a problem for everyday consumers, and whether electric semi trucks could offer a way out.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What is happening with diesel?
There was one major geopolitical event this year that disrupted the entire energy economy, which is the US and Israel attacking Iran. Iran is at the center of the oil economy in some ways, but primarily you have to look at the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the jockeying over it that has happened in the months since.
Once they closed the strait, it disrupted the entire global energy economy because it handles a substantial portion of the shipping bringing supplies out of the Middle East. That affected diesel prices, gasoline prices, jet fuel prices, and effectively everything based on crude oil.
Who are the people right now that are profoundly freaked out about the cost of diesel?
First off, truckers are freaked out because their cost of doing business is going much higher. Farmers are also freaked out because they’re already facing real pressures from trade wars and things that are out of control, like climate issues, that have caused their costs to go higher.
The price of diesel affecting farmers eventually affects the price they charge, which ultimately gets to the consumer because it ends up costing more to pay for things like an ear of corn.
How stark do you think this might be? In a month or two, do you think I could go down to Walmart and see that something I buy all the time is now a dollar more expensive?
I think the impact is imminent. This flows through very quickly. We’re not talking about months; we’re talking about weeks, if not days, before people will start to notice increases, especially in the grocery aisle. That’s the first place people will notice it because fresh food has to be shipped on a weekly basis. Diesel prices are going to have a big effect on food inflation. This is coming off of several years of food price increases that we experienced in the wake of the pandemic.
We’re also barreling toward the holiday shopping season, which is going to be affected by this as well. If a toy, for example, is made with a resin affected by the cost of crude oil, which also affects the cost of diesel, and then it’s shipped over the road to Walmart in a truck that uses diesel, all of these things add up and will probably lead to higher prices.
We’ve also got an issue with heating oil, which is a fuel used primarily by households in the Northeast to heat their homes. Heating oil, diesel, and all of these oil-based products are caught up in this vortex right now. Ultimately, it is not something the ordinary person can do much about.
Do the industries that rely on diesel have any other options?
There are definitely alternatives to diesel, but in many cases, they cannot be switched to quickly. If you think about the trucking industry, they are invested heavily in big rigs that take products from place A to place B. If you are invested in a truck, yes, you could theoretically switch, but you would be scrapping this huge investment you’ve made. Diesel trucks are not really going anywhere immediately. A lot of times, they’re simply still the best way to get somewhere.
You can switch to rail; railroads are definitely a competitor to trucking, but really only best for certain types of products. There are other types of trucks you can buy. Compressed natural gas or liquid natural gas is an alternative fuel for some trucks, and biodiesel can actually be good. Hydrogen is more of a futuristic thing down the road.
In the short term, there is the possibility of using electric trucks. That is starting to become more realistic. In fact, in recent days, Tesla began major production of the Tesla Semi, an electric semitruck we’ve been waiting for for years. I remember covering this in 2018 when Tesla debuted the semi, and we all thought it was going to be coming out soon.
It has taken nearly a decade for this to finally become a reality in large proportions, but the Tesla Semi is an electric truck that could be an alternative for some. There are other companies making electric trucks too, so that could be viable. But the problem with electric trucks is that the battery is so heavy, making it tough to compete with diesel on shipping heavy items.
It was often joked that when the Tesla Semi first debuted, the very first thing it shipped was a bunch of bags of Cheetos because they were so light and the truck couldn’t handle extra weight. They had a deal with PepsiCo, and it wasn’t ready at the time to ship anything heavy.
It’s a lot better now, but the issue is still how heavy electric truck batteries are, which will make them somewhat limited in capacity. However, we are seeing some demand for the Tesla Semi that indicates it might become more competitive because of the price of diesel.
So when prices are high, generally somebody somewhere is benefiting. Who is it, in this case?
The people benefiting from diesel prices being so high are the refineries, which a lot of people don’t think about much because they’re the middle person in this entire process. They take the crude oil and turn it into usable diesel for a pickup truck, a semi truck, or farming equipment.
The refinery business is experiencing high demand right now, and there’s limited capacity to do this because of issues in Russia, Iran, and other places throughout the world. There’s really nowhere else to do this, and therefore they can charge higher prices. That means higher profits for the refineries.
All of this is shaping up to potentially mean a really ugly winter. One thing I think about a lot is that American consumers will accept a lot of pain. We had Covid — the inflation, and shortages of literally everything. Then we had the war in Ukraine, and prices went up again.
People still keep spending money, even as we predict this one’s going to get bad. People go to the store and spend money, and maybe they gripe, but it’s not like we’re out in the streets. Do you think this coming diesel shock — imminent, in your words — is going to be different?
I’m not an economist, but there is an interesting phenomenon emerging in the economy where consumer sentiment is at rock bottom, but consumer spending is actually really strong. There’s a gap emerging between what people say they feel and what they’re actually doing — in this case, they’re still spending.
Maybe it’s YOLO spending. They’re thinking they don’t have much going for them, so they’re just going to keep spending. I’ve experienced that a little bit, so I don’t blame anybody.
At the end of the day, the numbers matter a little bit more than what people say they feel. But I do think people are going to hit a breaking point because they simply cannot continue this level of spending if the underlying fundamentals of the economy start to collapse.
In a 2016 opinion, authored one year before he became a Supreme Court justice, then-Judge Neil Gorsuch warned against lawyers who tempt judges to reach conclusions that aren’t supported by the Constitution’s text. “Ours is the job of interpreting the Constitution,” the future justice wrote. “And that document isn’t some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams for a new and perfected tort law, but a carefully drafted text judges are charged with applying according to its original public meaning.”
Gorsuch might have gazed into a crystal ball when he wrote this line, because it could have been written with a case that is now before Gorsuch’s new Court — Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County — in mind.
In Suncor, city and county officials in Boulder, Colorado sued the oil behemoth Exxon Mobil, along with a company named Suncor that operates two oil refineries in Colorado. They sued in Colorado state court, seeking, in their own words, to require the two companies “to share a portion of the costs [Boulder] taxpayers face in coping with a climate altered” by the oil industry.
That alone makes Suncor, which the justices will hear on October 5, a hugely important case, because it could be the first of many lawsuits ordering oil companies to compensate the public for the costs of climate change. But the stakes in this case are even higher because of the audacity of the oil companies’ argument to the justices.
Exxon and Suncor claim that their clients should be immune from this suit, not because any particular provision of the Constitution grants them immunity, but because state courts are forbidden from hearing climate change lawsuits under something called the “structure of the Constitution.” The oil companies claim that there’s a rule against many state environmental suits buried somewhere in this “structure,” even though it cannot be found in the Constitution’s text.
This argument exists in an entirely different universe than the Supreme Court’s precedents governing environmental suits, which explicitly permit — and even sometimes require — state courts to hear lawsuits alleging that a company in another state or country caused pollution that migrated across state or international lines.
But there’s a bigger issue at stake here, too. If you take seriously these justices’ pledged allegiance to textualism — and its close cousin, originalism, which, in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s words, claims that “constitutional text means what it did at the time it was ratified and that this original public meaning is authoritative” — then Suncor should be an easy case. The oil companies’ failure to even articulate an argument rooted in constitutional text should be disqualifying.
But Exxon and Suncor clearly believe they can win the case while thumbing their nose at many of the justices’ purported allegiance to textualism and originalism. It’s not hard to guess why they would believe this. Increasingly, the same justices who evangelize for textualism and originalism ignore the Constitution’s text when necessary to achieve their political goals.
There is no textual basis, for example, for the Republican justices’ claim that President Donald Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. Similarly, the Court’s Republican majority recently invented something called the “major questions doctrine,” which allows the justices to veto federal regulations that they deem too ambitious, even though the full Court has never even attempted to justify this doctrine by citing the text of the Constitution or any federal statute.
Now, Suncor will be a test of just how far they will go, with big ramifications not just for climate lawsuits, but potentially for any lawsuit that seeks to declare a state or federal law unconstitutional..
Many of Boulder’s claims against the oil companies arise out of a tort law theory known as “nuisance,” which often allows someone who uses their property in a way that harms someone else to be sued. If your neighbor lights a trash fire in their yard that fills your house with noxious fumes, they have created a nuisance and you may have a viable lawsuit against them.
Often, these nuisance suits involve major environmental claims, and they also often involve claims that cross state lines or even international borders. In Ohio v. Wyandotte Chemicals (1971), for example, the state of Ohio sued chemical companies located in Michigan and Canada, claiming that they “each dumped mercury into streams whose courses ultimately reach Lake Erie,” thus poisoning Ohio’s waters. The US Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s state courts should hear this lawsuit.
In Suncor, however, the oil companies claim that lawsuits arising out of climate change are special, and may not be heard by any state’s courts. Broadly speaking, these oil companies raise two arguments, one of which is easily refuted by quoting a statute; the other is their cockamamie claim that the “structure of the Constitution” prevents state courts from hearing Boulder’s lawsuit.
One of the oil companies’ claims is that Boulder’s lawsuit is “preempted” by the federal Clean Air Act. On the surface, this argument is at least plausible, as Congress does have the power to enact federal laws that effectively nullify a state law. The Constitution states that federal laws are “the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
But the oil companies’ claim that the Clean Air Act preempts climate change lawsuits in state courts is weak. That law states that “air pollution control at its source is the primary responsibility of States and local governments.” And it states that, at least with respect to stationary polluters like factories, power plants, or Suncor’s refineries, “nothing in this chapter shall preclude or deny the right of” states to adopt or enforce air pollution standards or laws, unless the state’s rule is less stringent than what federal law requires. (The Clean Air Act does sometimes preempt state suits involving pollution caused by mobile sources, such as airplanes.)
So it’s pretty clear that the Clean Air Act does not bar state nuisance suits such as Suncor.
Which brings us to the oil companies’ claim that the Constitution’s “structure” somehow bars this suit. Their brief makes the extraordinary claim that “the Court has long held that interstate pollution is an inherently federal area in which state law cannot govern,” a claim that is easily repudiated by the Wyandotte Chemicals decision, among others.
In the same brief, the oil companies claim that the structural principle that only federal courts can hear climate change lawsuits can somehow be derived from an unusual approach to environmental lawsuits that the Court invented more than 100 years ago, and that it abandoned many decades ago.
In Missouri v. Illinois (1906), the Supreme Court heard a claim that Chicago, Illinois was dumping sewage in a river that eventually flowed into Missouri. Despite the fact that there was no federal law governing water pollution at the time, the Court apparently concluded that there should be some process that states can use to sue other states that do what Illinois was accused of doing.
The Court’s opinion in Missouri weighed the evidence in the case before ruling in Illinois’s favor. So Missouri seemed to suggest that federal courts have some power to hear environmental suits even in the absence of an act of Congress permitting them to do so.
Based on this and similar older cases that reached similar conclusions, the oil companies claim that Missouri created a “federal common law” that governed interstate environmental lawsuits in the absence of a federal statute. And they also argue that this judicially created “common law” preempted certain state environmental lawsuits. They also argue that this preemption remains in place even though federal laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act have now displaced this federal common law.
Needless to say, that’s a lot of logical leaps. The oil companies’ argument is that an extra-statutory workaround that existed many decades ago still preempts state environmental lawsuits, even though that workaround no longer exists and has been replaced by an act of Congress. They also claim that this rule against state environmental suits can be found somewhere in the “structure” of the Constitution, despite the fact that it is nowhere in the Constitution’s text.
Among other things, this confusing argument is inconsistent with a case the Supreme Court decided as recently as April. As the Court said in Hencely v. Fluor Corp. (2026), “there is no federal pre-emption in vacuo,” a Latin term meaning “in isolation,” “without a constitutional text or a federal statute to assert it.”
So the oil companies’ claim that the “structure of the Constitution,” whatever the hell that means, somehow precludes climate change lawsuits in state courts should be easily dismissed. Further, as the Court said in Hencely, a litigant making a constitutional preemption claim must cite the text of the Constitution — and the oil companies have not done that here.
Setting aside the oil companies’ risible legal arguments, they actually make a decent argument that, as a matter of policy, it would be best if climate change cases were heard in one grand federal lawsuit rather than dozens of piecemeal suits brought in state courts.
Many different fossil fuel companies in both the United States and abroad have contributed to climate change. It may be impossible to determine which company is specifically responsible for any climate change-related problems that arise in Boulder, Colorado. And, because some of the responsibility for climate change falls on foreign actors, allowing a state court to adjudicate climate change-related suits raises difficult questions of international diplomacy.
Additionally, the fact that the Clean Air Act treats pollution from stationary and mobile sources differently complicates this case even further. How is a court supposed to determine to what extent climate change in Boulder was caused by pollution emitted from oil refineries or power plants, rather than cars or airplanes?
But these are arguments that the oil companies should present to Congress, not the Supreme Court. It is Congress’s job to decide when to preempt state law. And there’s no question that Congress could pass a law shutting down lawsuits like Suncor, while simultaneously creating a federal process that will allow Americans who are injured by climate change to seek compensation in federal court.
Passing a federal law, however, requires compromise. It requires lawmakers to weigh the concerns of voters who don’t want the same outcome that Exxon wants. And, especially given the likely outcome of the 2026 midterms, it would require the oil companies to work with Democrats to come up with a legal framework that would actually earn some bipartisan support.
Instead, the oil companies want to bypass all that by getting a Republican Supreme Court to declare lawsuits like Suncor unconstitutional. And they are apparently so confident that they can convince these justices to do so that they barely even managed to articulate a legal argument for their position.
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk Collaboration.
At a specialized cold lab in Boulder, Colorado, where indoor temperatures hover around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius), atmospheric researcher Anthony Bernal Ayala slices hailstones with a band saw, revealing layers of icy growth like the rings of a tree. These frozen rings — clear or cloudy, thick or thin — indicate the conditions in which the hail formed: A clear layer signals the water froze slowly, while a cloudy layer means it happened quickly, trapping air bubbles. Bernal Ayala then analyzes the crystalline structures, particles, and isotopes preserved in these layers.
“All that information can tell you a wonderful story of how the hailstone was growing, but nobody — not until now — was able to tap into that history,” said Bernal Ayala, who works for Atmospheric and Environmental Research, part of the JANUS Research Group.
Bernal Ayala’s research, conducted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is part of a historic effort to study one of the costliest weather hazards. Researchers hope their findings will help protect lives and property from the stones that careen to Earth, battering roofs, pummeling crops, and pockmarking cars.
From 2023 to 2025, annual severe thunderstorm losses exceeded $50 billion nationwide, according to the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety — more than double the losses seen just a decade earlier. Hail accounted for 60 percent to 80 percent of the damage.
In Colorado, one of the country’s most hail-prone states, hail — not wildfire — is the main factor driving up insurance premiums. And researchers expect larger, more damaging hailstones to become more common with climate change.
“It’s going to just keep getting costlier and costlier,” Bernal Ayala said.
Even basic questions about hail have been notoriously hard to study. But a long-awaited resurgence in research, including the first major US field campaign to study hail in more than 40 years, could help change that.
ICECHIP — the “In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains” — aims to improve forecasts, make warnings more precise and help communities better prepare. It received $11 million in funding from the National Science Foundation in 2024, just before deep cuts hit the foundation in 2025.
For six weeks in spring 2025, about 100 scientists and university students chased hailstorms across the Central Plains and Front Range, from the Canadian to the Mexican border, using radar trucks to track storms and drones to take aerial footage. Researchers photographed hail with high-speed cameras, measured its impact with a tool called a disdrometer, recorded hail’s distribution and size based on its imprints on foam pads, captured it in specialized funnels, and crushed it to test its strength.
Scientists from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology also used balloons to release golf ball-sized sensors into storms. Once aloft, each hail-like probe collected data on how fast it was traveling and whether ice was growing on it; a microphone even recorded water droplets and hailstones hitting it.
“This has really been the first time where we’ve been able to do a real comprehensive look at hail on the ground, hail aloft, the storm itself, the environment around the storm — just everything all at once,” said Becky Adams-Selin, ICECHIP’s lead investigator and a principal scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, JANUS Research Group.
ICECHIP’s samples were packed into 26 cooler-sized boxes and brought to NCAR. This internationally renowned hub for weather and climate research has been used to study hail for decades. In one of its last major campaigns, in the 1970s, the US investigated Soviet claims that it could suppress hail.
Researchers say there’s no other US lab like it; the backup plan to store ICECHIP’s samples involved using a walk-in freezer from a fast-food restaurant.
Now NCAR’s own future is uncertain: In late 2025, the Trump administration said it would dissolve the center and transfer its work out of state. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR, sued the administration in March, alleging that it’s targeting NCAR to punish Colorado for retaining its mail-in voting system and because Gov. Jared Polis initially refused to release former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, a 2020 election denier imprisoned for breaching election security and undermining election integrity.
In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the White House from dismantling NCAR. The government has until Sept. 30 to respond to the lawsuit.
“I can’t even quantify the impact that it would have to our community if we lost NCAR,” Victor Gensini, professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, told HCN. “They are the beating heart.”
Previous research has predicted climate change’s effects on hail, noting that warmer temperatures could melt smaller hailstones before they land but also fuel stronger updrafts, keeping hailstones airborne longer and allowing them to grow bigger, enabling the most damaging hail to become more common.
A record-setting stone recovered in Yuma County, Colorado, in 2023 measured more than 5 inches across. That year, the state logged 176 reports of hail 2 inches or greater, surpassing the previous record of 91 reports in 2018, according to the Colorado Climate Center.
Scientists say it’s difficult to know how much of the rise in damage is due to the increase in large hail versus the increased development in hail hotspots. The connection between a rapidly growing human footprint and higher insured losses has been dubbed the “expanding bull’s-eye effect.”
Gensini, a principal ICECHIP investigator, cites the development boom east of the Front Range, along Colorado’s Interstate 25 corridor, which has grown explosively in recent decades. The population of the Fort Collins metro area alone has doubled since 1990 to around 375,000 residents, according to the US Census Bureau.
This is happening across the Western US, as previously rural or open areas become densely populated, increasingly expensive targets for hail.
“Colorado is the poster child for what I expect the next 25 years to look like for hail,” Gensini said.
In 2019, Fort Collins became one of the first cities to adopt hail-specific roofing requirements for new builds and remodels. Marcus Coldiron, the city’s chief building official, said it was partly in response to all the shingles and roofing materials taken to the landfill after a catastrophic hailstorm in 2018.
It’s still unclear how well the requirements are working: Coldiron said fewer permits were being issued for roof replacements and fewer shingles were going to the dump. However, Fort Collins also hasn’t experienced a hailstorm as devastating as the one that hit in 2018.
A growing number of Front Range communities now require impact-resistant shingles in their building codes, and Colorado legislators recently passed a law offering grants to residents who install more resilient roofing.
ICECHIP’s researchers are also investigating how they can improve building materials as billion-dollar losses from single storms become more common.
“The dollars are simply piling up so fast,” said Ian Giammanco, a lead research meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, one of ICECHIP’s key partners. “We’re still trying to understand how do we get the best materials onto roofs, onto people’s homes, onto businesses to actually start shaving off these losses.”
Login