Maybe you’ve spent the past few days either buried in articles, op-eds, editorial board exhortations, podcasts, and cablecast panels discussing the presidential debate. Or perhaps you’ve devoted your time to avoiding all that along with the public quarrel about what Joe Biden should now do. In either case you may have missed yet another Supreme Court decision in the recent competition for top billing on the roster of worst rulings ever. Two cases were involved Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce.
As Zoë Schlanger noted at The Atlantic, the Court’s array of usual suspects in the ruling “essentially threw a stick of dynamite at a giant, 40-year-old legal levee.” That barrier was the Chevron deference, since 1984 a mainstay for administering U.S. laws whose reversal has now “likely unleashed a river of litigation, much of which could erode away the country’s climate and environmental ambitions.”
At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explain:
The government is vast. It is run by a bunch of agencies, most of which you probably haven’t heard of, that are staffed with experts who have a deep knowledge and experience in a particular subject matter, alongside lawyers who want to make government work for the people. And they’re operating under political appointees who are accountable to the president, who’s accountable to the people. We rarely talk about these agencies, yet they’re the ones who are interpreting and executing the law, day in and day out. They’re approving or rejecting new drugs. They’re limiting pollution from some dirty factory in West Virginia that’s creating a cancer cluster in a majority-Black community. They’re the ones who are making sure we’re given the full scope of protections that Congress aimed to give us when enacting broadly worded laws.
That’s how government works, and it’s anathema to the Republican Party and Donald Trump. One of Trump’s key goals was dismantlement of the administrative state. Steve Bannon said it himself. And that’s a fundamental part of Project 2025. They want to stop government from working, because they believe when government functions properly, it’s bad for billionaires. It’s bad for polluters. It’s bad for industry that wants to dump pollution into our waters, or sell drugs that aren’t safe, or make a ton of money and shelter it from taxation.
Right now, much of the country is still talking about Biden stuttering on the debate stage instead of how each of these men would run and staff the sprawling government that they would ostensibly run. If we had a healthier conversation here, we’d be talking more about Loper Bright today than about the debate. Because the Supreme Court has just awarded itself sweeping authority to overrule those agencies and experts and appointees and shift all that power to unelected judges, away from the people. And Trump wants to appoint more power-hungry judges who operate like this Supreme Court, and staff the executive branch with industry-allied appointees who will try to dismantle the very agencies they run. But because most Americans, I fear, still fundamentally misunderstand how the wheels of government truly turn, we’re obsessing about Biden’s sore throat, not talking about one of the biggest power grabs that the judiciary has ever undertaken.
A year ago, when the Court struck down President Biden’s student debt relief plan in Biden v. Nebraska, Justice Elena Kagan wrote a fiery masterpiece of dissent. For the Loper ruling, she did it again:
Today, the Court flips the script: It is now the courts (rather than the agency) that will wield power when Congress has left an area of interpretive discretion. A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris. In recent years, this Court has too often taken for itself decision-making authority Congress assigned to agencies. The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education. […] But evidently that was, for this Court, all too piecemeal. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar. It defends that move as one (suddenly) required by the (nearly 80-year-old) Administrative Procedure Act. But the Act makes no such demand. Today’s decision is not one Congress directed. It is entirely the majority’s choice. […]
It barely tries to advance the usual factors this Court invokes for overruling precedent. Its justification comes down, in the end, to this: courts must have more say over regulation—over the provision of health care, the protection of the environment, the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportation systems, and so on. A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.
That last line will, I suspect, will live through the ages.
As momentous as the Chevron ruling is, Justice John Roberts did as he did in Shelby v. Holder back in 2013 when he wrote that a portion of the Voting Rights Act was no longer necessary because voter suppression was a thing of the past, This time Roberts tried to downplay the impact of Chevron being reversed on the grounds it hasn’t been used by the Supreme Court since 2016, that it is just a “decaying husk with bold pretensions.”
Kagan is again scathing in response:
because this Court has ignored Chevron lately; all that is left of the decision is a “decaying husk with bold pretensions.” […] Tell that to the D.C. Circuit, the court that reviews a large share of agency interpretations, where Chevron remains alive and well. […] But more to the point: The majority’s argument is a bootstrap. This Court has”avoided deferring under Chevron since 2016 […] because it has been preparing to overrule Chevron since around that time. That kind of self-help on the way to reversing precedent has become almost routine at this Court. Stop applying a decision where one should; throw some gratuitous criticisms into a couple of opinions; issue a few separate writings “question[ing the decision’s] premises”; […] give the whole process a few years … and voila! you have a justification for overruling the decision.
While Roberts wrote that previous rulings under the now-demolished Chevron deference remain safe, we’ll see how long that lasts. Given the Supreme Court’s invention of “major questions doctrine” to arrogate even more power over policy to the federal judiciary, the risk to some of those past rulings is far from zero.
Meanwhile, it will no longer be the people who have spent their lives working to understand a particular field who will be interpreting how legislation should translated into administration regulations. We’ll instead have the likes of Judge Aileen Cannon ruling on whether the government made the right standard for how much lead is acceptable in our drinking water and blood.
Several progressive members of Congress are seeking to upend the Chevron reversal with new legislation.
In a statement announcing he would introduce a bill to protect government policy-making abilities in the wake of the reversal, Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts said: “Now, with this ill-advised decision, judges must no longer defer to the decisions about Americans’ health, safety, and welfare made by agencies with technical and scientific expertise in their fields. MAGA extremist Republicans and their big business cronies are rejoicing as they look forward to creating a regulatory black hole that destroys fundamental protections for every American in this country. […] This unhinged Supreme Court needs to stop legislating from the bench, and we must pass sweeping reform to hold them accountable.”
Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal of Washington labeled the ruling “dangerous” and is calling on Congress to “immediately pass” the Stop Corporate Capture Act, which she introduced in March 2023. She had introduced a similar bill in 2021, but it only got 12 co-sponsors and no hearings. The current bill has 40 co-sponsors. In a statement Friday, Jayapal said the act was “the only bill that codifies Chevron deference, strengthens the federal-agency rulemaking process, and ensures that rulemaking is guided by the public interest—not what’s good for wealthy corporations.”
Important, worthwhile legislation, but without a ghost of a chance of passing until Congress is firmly in Democratic hands.
—MB
You can learn more about the Red Rock Wilderness Act by clicking here. The bill was introduced 15 months ago by Democratic Rep. Melanie Ann Stansbury of New Mexico and co-sponsored by 96 House members, which is 45% of the Democratic caucus. No Republicans are yet on board.
The California Energy Commission published its finalized strategic plan for developing offshore wind resources Tuesday. The plan was mandated by the California legislature in 2021. The state has set a goal of 25 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2045, and the plan is to get 2-5 GW of that installed by 2030. California has also set 2045 as the year the state gets 100% of its electricity from clean sources, which may include nuclear.
When completed two decades from now, those 25 GW of offshore wind installations could provide electricity to about 7.2 million homes based on average U.S. consumption in 2024. On the other hand, if they were in the Baltic Sea, those turbines could provide 21 million EU homes with power, so many more because average European households consume far less electricity than Americans do.
When the 279-page draft CEC report was released in January, Offshore Wind California’s Executive Director Adam Stern said, “Certainly on the floating side, there’s no plan in the country—maybe even in the world—that’s as comprehensive as this.”
Based on additional work, including scrutiny of the ample public comments made on the draft report, the final version makes significant additions regarding transmission, potential impacts on bats, seabirds, marine mammals, and noise pollution, as well as the concerns of coastal residents and Indigenous tribes regarding effects of both the turbines and the land-based supply chain the projects will require. That includes manufacturing turbine blades, turbine foundations, nacelles, cables, and substations.
Diana DiGiangi at Utility Dive reports:
Deployment will also require significant port infrastructure upgrades, the CEC said. The offshore wind turbines the state deploys “are likely to be between 15 to 25 [megawatts], and the only feasible way to transfer components from one location to another is over water.”
“As a result,” the report said, “staging and integration port sites where floating offshore wind turbines will be assembled are critical and must be available in time to support the future of offshore wind in California.” […]
The CEC estimates that to meet a goal of deploying 25 GW by 2045, California will need two port sites for blade manufacturing, one each for tower manufacturing and nacelles, but four sites each for foundation subcomponent manufacturing and foundation assembly.
Research has shown that California has the potential for ultimately developing nearly 60 GW of offshore wind capacity. The Biden administration seeks to deploy 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030 and an another 15 GW of floating offshore wind by 2035. That’s quite aggressive for an industry that has barely begun in the United States. So far, several states have set a collective goal of 39 GW of offshore wind by 2040. Together with California’s 25 gigawatts, if all the state goals are met, the U.S. would have a combined 64 GW of wind capacity by 2045. According to the CEC report, “With this trajectory, the United States is on a path to deploy 110 GW by 2050.” Currently, the U.S. has a total of about 1,298 GW of electricity-generating capacity from all sources.
The wind turbine build-out is going to be especially difficult in the waters off the Golden State. As opposed to the Atlantic coast, where the Continental Shelf allows for permanently mooring wind turbine platforms to the shallow seafloor, the waters off California are much too deep to use fixed-bottom turbines. “To date,” the CEC report states, “most offshore wind energy projects [around the world] have used fixed-bottom foundations, which are more suitable for shallow waters of 60 meters (195 feet) or less. At the end of 2022, there were only 10 floating offshore wind energy projects operating globally, totaling 123.4 [megawatts].”
—MB
More than four decades ago, Iowa politicians in both major parties decided that encouraging the spread of wind turbines in the Hawkeye State was a good thing, a smart thing, a financially beneficial thing. Today, 64% of Iowa’s electricity comes from 13 gigawatts of wind turbine capacity, the biggest proportion of any state, although it ranks second behind Texas in the absolute amount of installed wind capacity. The Lone Star State also has a history of bipartisan support for renewables, as do a few other red states. In Iowa, new wind is cheaper to install than coal, nuclear, and natural gas. And customers pay lower rates for their electricity than the U.S. average.
Among Republicans in Congress and several state governments, however, policies favoring renewables are under attack. And a new Pew Research Center survey finds that there’s a growing gap between rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats in the matter of renewables, with ever more Republicans opposed. There is, however, a big difference between younger and older Republicans.
Until 2020, more than 75% of people in both parties favored expanding renewables. But the survey of 8,638 people taken early last month found that the percentage of those who favor expanding solar and wind power farms was down 12 points and 11 points, respectively, since 2020. This comes from steep drops in Republican support. Even so, more Americans continue to say the U.S. should focus on developing renewable energy rather than fossil fuel sources (65% vs. 34%).
In 2020, Democrats were 26 points more likely than Republicans to say the U.S. should prioritize developing renewable energy (91% vs. 65%). That gap is now 49 points, with 61% of Republicans saying developing oil, coal, and natural gas should be the more important priority. But there’s a big age gap among Republicans, with 67% of those aged 18 to 29 say the priority should be for wind, solar, and hydrogen development, while 76% among the oldest Republican cohort (age 65 or more) say developing oil, coal, and natural gas should be the highest priority.
While Republicans have sharply shifted their views on renewables, Pew found that Democrats have not and are more united across age groups in their views on energy. They support lowering carbon emissions and expanding renewable energy sources. There are splits, however: 45% of Democrats say the U.S. should phase out the use of oil, coal, and natural gas completely, while 53% say these fuels should remain in use along with renewable sources. The latter view brings grimaces from scientists who note that we have to stop burning fossil fuel quickly if we are to have any chance of mitigating some of the climate emergency’s worst impacts.
Click here for extensive detail about differences on energy between the two major parties.
—MB
The University of Chicago’s new climate initiative. Brave research program or potentially dangerous foray into solar geoengineering? by Jessica McKenzie at The Bulletin of the Atomic Sceintists. As the climate crisis has escalated, some experts have suggested that drastic measures like solar geoengineering may eventually become necessary and so should be researched now. Would it work? In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo spewed 17 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which cooled the Earth by roughly 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) for about a year. After the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted in 1815, parts of Europe and North America saw a “year without summer.” Scientists have looked to those events to try to understand what might happen if humans deliberately released sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. But there is a world of difference between studying naturally occurring volcanic eruptions and intentionally modifying the amount of solar radiation that reaches Earth’s surface. Introducing particles like sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere could create a plethora of new and unpredictable problems. Possible negative impacts may include changing regional weather patterns—creating or shifting areas of drought or regions that receive extreme precipitation—or altering tropospheric chemistry and ocean circulation patterns. Partially blocking the sun’s rays could interfere with normal plant processes and reduce agricultural yields. Adding sulfate aerosols to the stratosphere would degrade the ozone layer (thereby increasing global cancer rates) and increase acid rain. The potential effects of solar radiation management are so large and wide-ranging as to implicate almost every aspect of life on the planet. Even in best-case scenarios, it would be only a partial stopgap.
Turning Brownfields to Blooming Meadows, With the Help of Fungi, an interview conducted by Richard Schiffman at Yale Environment 360. The United States is dotted with up to a million brownfields — industrial and commercial properties polluted with hazardous substances. These sites are disproportionally concentrated near low-income communities and communities of color, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and researchers predict that heavy rains and flooding due to climate change are likely to both spread and increase exposure to these contaminants. For more than 15 years, Danielle Stevenson, who holds a PhD in environmental toxicology from the University of California, Riverside, has been pioneering a nature-based technique for restoring contaminated land, using fungi and native plants to break down toxins like petroleum, plastics, and pesticides into less toxic chemicals. The usual way of dealing with tainted soil is to dig it up and cart it off to distant landfills. But that method is expensive and simply moves the problem somewhere else, Stevenson says in an interview with Yale Environment 360, “typically to another state with less restrictive dumping laws.” In a recent pilot project funded by the city of Los Angeles, Stevenson, 37, working with a team of UC Riverside students and other volunteers, significantly reduced petrochemical pollutants and heavy metals at an abandoned railyard and other industrial sites in Los Angeles. While her research is still in its early stages, Stevenson says she believes her bioremediation methods can be scaled up to clean polluted landscapes worldwide.
Titicaca in Crisis: Climate Change Is Drying Up the Biggest Lake in the Andes by Tim Brinkhof at The Revelator. The Uros, who call themselves the Guardians of Titicaca, subsist on fish, waterbirds, and the sale of handcrafted souvenirs. Their traditional existence can be traced back to the dawn of the Inca Empire, when the Uros’ are said to have moved onto the lake to escape subjugation on land. Their history and culture are now at risk of being wiped out by climate change. “The reeds that we use to build our islands aren’t growing,” Lujando says. “The lake is drying up and we can’t move. The birds — they have gone in search of water, leaving behind only a few eggs. The fish are also gone.” The 2022-2023 drought rendered Titicaca almost unrecognizable. In November 2023, Flores Sancho, director of the National Meteorology and Hydrology Service of Peru (Senamhi) announced that the amount of rainfall in the region had fallen by 49%, causing the water flowing through the tributaries that feed the lake to drop by almost 80%. At its peak Titicaca’s overall water level fell by over 19 inches, with 120 metric tons evaporating per year. As the water retreated, Puno’s bay quickly ran dry, leaving dozens of fishing and touring boats stuck in the waste-filled dirt. […] In late 2023 conditions got so dire that some 1,500 Uros — approximately 75% of the entire community — banded together to dig a canal that would reconnect their islands to the dried up Puno bay. They raised money to rent construction equipment, but, according to Bogotá-based photojournalist Yader Guzman, the Peruvian government forced them to quit before the project could finish.
Batteries and Rooftop Solar Can Lead to Huge Savings for the Entire Grid. A New Study Shows How—and How Much by Dan Gearino at Inside Climate News. The growth of customer-owned solar and batteries can help to reduce wear and tear on the grid and save ratepayers money. How much money? A new paper from University of Texas at Austin researchers shows savings of about 40%. For lead author Nick Laws, the paper is the culmination of his doctoral dissertation, completed in December, about extending the life of grid hardware by reducing the stress caused by periods of high electricity demand and long-term growth in demand. He and his colleagues looked at how best to encourage companies and individuals to invest in energy systems that help to diminish demand on the grid. The utility-speak term for these systems is “non-wires alternatives,” which can include rooftop solar, community solar and battery storage. An observer may look at the possibility of 40% savings and ask why utilities and grid operators aren’t investing heavily in incentives to maximize the benefits. The disappointing answer is that the utility business model doesn’t deal well with tools that reduce demand, largely because utilities make money by selling electricity and building infrastructure. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and regulators in some states have taken steps to encourage or require utilities and grid operators to work better with customer-owned resources.
Generations Z and Alpha Flex Climate Power Through Hawaiian Courts by Gabreille Gurley at The American Prospect. Thirteen young Hawaiians secured a monumental victory last week in a closely tracked case that strengthened children’s constitutional rights, documented transportation’s outsized role in producing planet-warming greenhouse gases, and underscored the youngest climate activists’ ability to upend business as usual when and where it counts: in the courts. The Navahine v. Department of Transportation, State of Hawai‘i settlement marks the first time that state agencies have agreed to work alongside youth plaintiffs on climate change constitutional issues. Only Hawaii and a handful of other states—Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—grant specific environmental rights in their state constitutions. In 1978, Hawaii added a provision to its constitution that states, “Each person has a right to a clean and healthful environment.” […] Fast-forward nearly five decades, and in 2022, 13 young people, then aged 9 to 18, took the state transportation department to court to force it to move faster to protect natural resources that were disappearing in sometimes spectacular fashion. Both sides acknowledged that state officials, including Gov. Josh Green (D-HI) and Ed Sniffen, the state transportation director, were genuinely committed to climate goals and embracing clean energy. That, and the fact that Hawaii is a Democratic state known for embracing climate solutions, helped the two sides hammer out a settlement last week rather than move forward with a trial.
Inside Big Oil’s Business as Usual: Failure on Climate and Profits from War by Stella Levantasi. Oil majors are not on track to hit Paris Agreement climate targets that limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C (2.7°F), a new report reveals. Eight fossil fuel giants—Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies, BP, Eni, Equinor, and ConocoPhillips—are on course to use 30 percent of the world’s remaining carbon budget for that 1.5°C goal, according to the Big Oil Reality Check report by nonprofit Oil Change International. Combined, the oil and gas companies’ extraction plans are consistent with a temperature rise of over 2.4°C (4.3°F), the report found. That level of warming, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will reduce food security, risk irreversible loss of ecosystems, and increase heat waves, rainfall, and extreme weather events. […] A recent paper by academics at University College London and the International Institute for Sustainable Development, published in Science in May, calls for stopping fossil fuel expansion and building a “No New Fossil” global norm. According to the authors, this would make it “easier to phase down fossil fuels” and achieve the Paris Agreement climate goals.
“If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled, or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned, or removed from production.”—Pete Seeger
Elena Kagan Is Horrified by What the Supreme Court Just Did. You Should Be Too by Mark Joseph Stern at Slate. Since 1984, federal courts have applied Chevron in about 18,000 decisions in every conceivable area of the law: energy policy, education, food and drug safety, labor, the environment, consumer protection, finance, health care, housing, law enforcement—the list is pretty much endless. It has become the background principle against which Congress enacts all legislation. That all ends now. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in Loper Bright declared that Chevron is unmoored to any law, “fundamentally misguided” and “unworkable,” creating an “eternal fog of uncertainty.” He dismissed it as “a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties.” From here on out, courts must apply their “independent judgment” rather than deferring to federal agencies when Congress’ handiwork is ambiguous. And yet Roberts also tried to forestall a flood of challenges to past rulings rooted in Chevron, adding that courts require “special justification” to overrule these thousands and thousands of decisions. It would require immense naivety to believe that hard-right lower courts will abide by this passing suggestion. Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, is a masterwork of alarm and despair. “A rule of judicial humility,” she wrote, “gives way to a rule of judicial hubris.” The justice pulled no punches, bemoaning the majority’s reckless arrogance with outrage and contempt. “In one fell swoop,” the justice explained, “the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
The Supreme Court just made a massive power grab it will come to regret. Welcome to hell, SCOTUS by Ian Millhiser at Vox. While this decision will undoubtedly be celebrated by Republicans — and especially Republican lawyers in conservative legal organizations like the Federalist Society, which have pushed for a decision like Loper Bright for years — the six Republican justices responsible for Loper Bright will likely come to regret Friday’s power grab. Loper Bright transfers a simply astonishing amount of policymaking authority from federal agencies that collectively employ tens of thousands of people, to a judiciary that lacks the personnel to evaluate the overwhelming array of policy questions that will now be decided by the courts. This problem will be felt most acutely by the Supreme Court itself, which has only nine justices staffed by a bare handful of law clerks and a skeletal administrative staff. The Court’s decision to seize this power is all the more puzzling because it has already given itself sweeping authority to veto nearly any decision by an executive branch agency that, in the Court’s words, involves a matter of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
As chocolate prices skyrocket from decades of deforestation, adopting agroforestry is key by Etelle Higonnet at Mongabay. If you’re a chocoholic, you may have noticed that the price of cocoa recently went through the roof. Cocoa prices on the world market—which averaged around $2,500 over the past decade—reached $10,000 per ton. It’s the highest in history. Experts think it’s likely to remain above $5,000/ton for the next 16 months at least. You may have also read that global warming is to blame for recent sky-high prices, with wild weather anomalies hitting cocoa farms hard. What’s received less attention is the root cause of the problem. While the weather anomalies are worsened by global warming, what’s actually causing them is largely local deforestation—more specifically, the clearing of forests to make way for cocoa plantations. […] Cocoa is a “cannibal commodity.” Its production has killed the forests that have helped it thrive. Now, standing in the wreckage of once-spectacular tropical jungles, cocoa farms struggle.
Car-Free Cities Are Not ‘Radical’ by Addison Del Mastro at Resident Urbanist. There’s no element of social engineering or ideological weirdness or Brave New World to a city that doesn’t prioritize cars. It doesn’t feel like some sort of utopian scheme. It isn’t Saudi Arabia’s miles-long city (or whatever it is) or a techy “smart city,” or something socially untested like universal basic income. It doesn’t question notions of private property. Those things depart from what many of us think of as reality in some way, or at least they challenge it. A city that has organized, protested, and resisted cars simply does not feel that way. It is not meaningfully distinguishable from a city that simply existed before the car. It seems as if people can intuit, at a level below politics or even consciousness, that this is what a city is. Ask someone if they want congestion pricing, or closed streets, or outdoor dining enclosures replacing parking, and they may tell you they don’t. Put them in an urban street where some or all of those policies have been implemented efficiently and pleasantly (sure, you can have some rules on making the outdoor dining structures a little nicer than plywood and plexiglass), and they will very likely like it despite what their abstract opinions about these policies are.
Plastic Industry Is Selling False Promise of New Recycling Tech. Don’t Buy It by Lisa Song at ProPublica. This year, nearly all of the world’s countries are hammering out a United Nations treaty to deal with the plastic crisis. As they consider limiting production, the industry is making a hard push to shift the conversation to the wonders of chemical recycling. It’s also buying ads during cable news shows as U.S. states consider laws to limit plastic packaging and lobbying federal agencies to loosen the very definition of what it means to recycle. It’s been selling governments on chemical recycling, with quite a bit of success. American and European regulators have spent tens of millions subsidizing pyrolysis facilities. Half of all U.S. states have eased air pollution rules for the process, which has been found to release carcinogens like benzene and dioxins and give off more greenhouse gases than making plastic from crude oil. Given the high stakes of this moment, I set out to understand exactly what the world is getting out of this recycling technology. For months, I tracked press releases, interviewed experts, tried to buy plastic made via pyrolysis and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the science of recycled molecules. Under all the math and engineering, I found an inconvenient truth: Not much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the plastic crisis. Not now. Maybe not ever.
Scientists Demand Citigroup End Fossil Fuel Funding by Carly Phillips at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Last week, I participated in the Scientists Speakout Day during the Summer of Heat on Wall Street, to protest and disrupt the financial institutions that are enabling the fossil fuel industry (and, as a result, our current climate crisis). This campaign, which will be active all summer, demands action from Citigroup and other big banks and insurers to stop enabling fossil fuel pollution. Citi is underwriting climate devastation through its continued funding of fossil fuels, including $396 billion since the Paris Agreement in 2016. These investments and resultant heat-trapping emissions are driving record heat and extreme climate impacts worldwide. The Speakout coincided with the release of an open letter signed by over 750 scientists, calling on Citi bosses to: stop financing companies engaged in fossil fuel expansion; end funding for new and expanding liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects; safeguard human rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and the rights of workers at the companies they finance’ finance renewable energy to help limit warming to 1.5°C; acknowledge and repair harm from previously funded projects.
Giant Slush Zones as New Threat to Antarctic Ice: A detailed new analysis of NASA satellite images shows there is much more meltwater sitting atop Antarctica’s ice shelves than previously estimated, much of it in huge slush zones that haven’t been carefully mapped until now. The new information will help determine how vulnerable the shelves are to cracking and disintegration, according to an international team of scientists who published their findings in Nature Geoscience this week.
Clean Water Act leaves about 55% of water flowing out of rivers vulnerable to pollution, study suggests: The Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that rivers that only flow in response to weather events—called ephemeral streams—do not fall under the protection of the Clean Water Act. Research published in the journal Science, led by University of Massachusetts Amherst recent doctoral graduate Craig Brinkerhoff and co-authored by colleagues at Yale University, suggests that this now leaves many U.S. waterways vulnerable to pollution.
12 EU Countries Will Fail to Comply With 2030 National Climate Targets: Without immediate action, a dozen EU countries will miss their national climate targets under the Effort Sharing Regulation, a new study analysing national climate plans finds. Seven more countries are at risk of not meeting their goals. France will only meet its target by a very close margin — but any backtracking of policies, or even a very cold winter pushing higher energy consumption, means it could fall in the red zone. There is still time to rectify government policies in order to meet the 2030 targets. Germany and Italy will fail to meet their climate targets by a substantial gap (10 and 7.7 percentage points respectively), the study finds. As a result, they could eat up all the available carbon credits left for other countries. Germany alone will be in need of 70% of the available credits The other under-compliant countries could be left with no allowances to purchase and face court cases.
How to make an EV tire that won’t pollute the environment • Postcard from California: The human cost of living with wildfires • Clean Water Act leaves about 55% of water flowing out of rivers vulnerable to pollution, study suggests • The Facts Are In: It’s Not Looking Good For Internal Combustion • California: New EV Incentives for Low-Income Buyers Could Help Replace ‘Clunkers,’ Improve Air Quality