The ultrawealthy are responsible for more carbon pollution than more than half of humanity, according to a new report published Monday by Oxfam, a global organization fighting against inequality. 

“​​We are seeing the ways that the ultra rich in the U.S. and around the world contribute disproportionately to creating the climate crisis,” says Rachel Carle, senior advisor on climate justice at Oxfam America. “They are also insulated from the impacts of the climate crisis, and are profiting off of the disasters that they have created.”

Billionaires and the ultra-rich are burning more carbon than than most of the world. The world’s richest 1%—just 8 million people who make, on average, $442,000 a year—produce far more emissions than the poorest 3.5 billion, states the report. Someone in the richest 0.1% emits 48 times more CO2 than the average person in the U.S. over the course of a year. 

Oxfam used climate attribution models and a consumption-based emissions dataset developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute to calculate emissions by income group. Keeping emissions in check is a key part of addressing the climate crisis. This month, the United Nations warned that, in order to keep warming below 2°C, urgent action must be taken to drastically reduce global emissions by 18% by 2030.

Research has long shown that wealthier countries drive a disproportionate share of global emissions. But emissions disparities exist within countries as well. The U.S., for example, is the second largest carbon emitter behind China—but not everyone is responsible for the same share of emissions. The report finds that, in just under four months (118.3 days), someone in the richest 0.1% living in the U.S., those making an average of $1.98 million a year, emits more CO2 than what someone in the poorest half of the country (those making an average of $25,600 a year), has emitted over the last 30 years. 

One of the biggest sources of emissions? Private jets—which, in 2025, were responsible for 16 million metric tons of CO2, the emissions equivalent of the annual energy use of over 2 million homes. The U.S. has the highest concentration of private jet use—with the majority of all private jets (68%) taking off from the U.S. Combined, all of the world’s private jets emit more in 2 seconds than someone in the world’s poorest 50%, those annually making an average of $1,500, would emit in a year. According to the report, last year private jets spent more than 6.5 million hours in the air. 

“We see that the ultrarich consume differently than everyday people,” says Carle, who adds that the ultrarich are also far more likely to invest in polluting companies. A list of 217 companies that “profit from either creating climate disasters, preparing for them, or recovering from them,” analyzed in the report shows they made $1.8 billion on average in 2025, and paid out more than $1 billion to shareholders.

This has a direct impact on the climate, the report finds. The researchers constructed emissions pathway models to attribute the emissions of different income groups, and found that the richest 1% are responsible for 20% of global warming since 1990—20 times more than their share of the world’s population. Someone from the richest 1% contributed 34 times more than the average person to extreme heat events, the report states, and one year's worth of emissions from the richest 1% will cause an estimated 1.9 million excess heat deaths. 

Yet, the ultrawealthy are less likely to face the impacts of their emissions. Those with lower incomes are significantly more likely to suffer from the impacts of climate disasters and extreme weather events—and often lack the funds to recover from disasters. Wealthy individuals, on the other hand, are more likely to live in safer locations or have the funds to ride out a disaster—purchasing private resources, like firefighters and generators, or paying a premium for emergency shelter. 

The authors suggest taxing the emissions of the super-rich. This could be done through taxes on high-emitting luxury items and activities, like private jet use, to disincentivize their use, suggests the report, or via windfall taxes on profits from fossil fuel companies. The report envisions that these taxes could be used to help level the playing field when it comes to climate adaptation, like increasing climate financing in the Global South, or investing in adaptation measures around the world.

“We hope that people take away that there are  a lot of opportunities to  address inequality in ways that protect the planet and protect communities,” says Carle. “Polluters need to pay for the harm that they’ve caused.” 

Recent weeks have brought red flag after red flag for investment in AI and the related data center boom. Bond yields soared for AI infrastructure giant CoreWeave, a sign that investors view the buildout as increasingly risky. And Meta’s reporting of negative free cash flow for the quarter to fund its infrastructure buildout while saying it might need to raise even more capital to fund its AI buildout not only hit its own stock but contributed to a price decline across the big tech companies. 

These developments raised questions across Wall Street about whether too much is being spent too quickly on data center expansion. How questions over data center investment play out has big implications for how companies and investors approach the future of energy and, by extension, climate. A pullback in the pace of new data centers could ease pressure to build fossil generation, but it would also weaken the commercial case for clean energy technologies that need big, reliable buyers who are willing to pay a premium for power.  

Most obviously, a dent in the AI buildout would translate directly into a slowdown in related electricity demand growth. In advanced economies like the U.S., data centers will account for 20% of that growth through 2030. By then, data centers are expected to account for 3% of global electricity demand, according to data from the International Energy Agency. 

Some climate advocates may initially rejoice at slowing electricity demand. Even as renewable energy expands, grids around the world still rely on fossil fuels. In the U.S. in particular, AI demand has sparked a wave of building new natural gas infrastructure. In the short term, slowing demand would mean lower emissions from the existing system than today’s baseline assumptions and less investment in new natural gas infrastructure. 

But a slowing data center build out leaves less mature technologies at risk. From advanced geothermal to new ways of producing nuclear power, big tech companies have been willing to pay more to lock in reliable power sources, thereby accelerating the market for these new efforts. Even unproven technologies like nuclear fusion have received a big financial boost from tech firms speculating that they might help solve their power challenges and give them a competitive leg up in the AI race. In a tighter financial environment with lower projected electricity demand, both the incentive and the financial capacity to make bold bets diminish. 

To be clear, data centers are not the only source of growing electricity demand. New manufacturing continues to create the need for power. The need for air conditioning has ramped up in many emerging markets, particularly in the Global South, creating new grid pressures. And electric vehicles continue to take off in many markets outside the U.S. 

Even as gas remains resilient, much of the power built to meet demand will come from clean sources, including and especially solar and battery storage. Solar is increasingly cost competitive. And this year’s spike in fuel prices—particularly natural gas—has made local power more appealing. But the companies behind growing sectors like air conditioning and EVs are less involved in local power systems and lack the capital to really shape them like the world’s wealthiest tech companies have. In short, clean energy will take a hit without the backing of big tech.  

It’s too soon to tell whether, in the long run, this week’s AI infrastructure recalibration will be a blip in time or part of a much broader realignment. But it’s something that anyone invested in clean energy and climate should be watching closely.   

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. 

The 1.5°C target is mostly out of reach 

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.  

The world is on track to reach 2.8°C of warming by 2100

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. 

We need to cut carbon emissions by 18% in the next four years

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.”

The U.S. is a major outlier for emissions

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.)

Climate policies are reducing emissions

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

Make a kitchen-sink potato

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.”

Give broccoli stems a chance

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.”

Give your ingredients a second assignment

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.”

Put your apples in the fridge

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.

Shop in your freezer first

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.

File your soup

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.

Keep a stock bag

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.

Make leftovers worth looking forward to

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.

Ask for ideas before buying more groceries

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.

Buy portions that match your appetite

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.”

Plan for your guests—not an army

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.

Don’t make plastic-free the only goal

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.

Compost what you can’t use—but try to eat it first

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.

Why are Santa Ana winds so dangerous?

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.”

What areas of Southern California are impacted by wildfires? 

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.”