What is the value of a tree? It can provide a cool place to rest in the shade, a snack in the form of fruit, lumber to build a home, and cleaner air. But trees are increasingly being prized for one thing: their ability to capture carbon and counteract climate change. 

Billions of dollars are flowing into projects to plant and protect trees so that governments and businesses can claim they’ve canceled out their emissions. Saving forests and planting trees are often portrayed as a “triple win” for the environment, economy, and people. According to a major report being presented on Friday at the United Nations Forum on Forests, however, that goal is proving more complicated than expected.

The conversation about how to manage forests “has been overtaken by the climate discussion,” said Daniela Kleinschmit, an author of the report and the vice president of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, the network behind the research. The result? Indigenous peoples are getting pushed out of their lands because of carbon offset projects. Native grasslands are getting turned into forests, even though grasslands themselves are huge, overlooked reservoirs of carbon. And offset projects in forests, more often than not, fail to achieve all of the emissions benefits their backers had promised. 

The new report, the first comprehensive assessment of how the world is governing its forests in 14 years, offers some good news—global deforestation rates have slowed down slightly, from 32 million acres a year in 2010 to 25 million in 2020. But what the report calls the “climatization” of forests has led to the rise of carbon sequestration markets that prioritize short-term profits over long-term sustainability, it found.

Experts say that it’s possible to pursue the global goal of sequestering carbon in forests while also keeping locals happy—it would just take a more thoughtful approach that considers the tradeoffs and involves the people most affected.

Daniel Miller, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Notre Dame, said that a narrow focus on forests’ environmental benefits misses “a huge part of the story.” Miller’s research has shown that forests can help fight poverty, since the edible goods found in them are often available during times of the year when people might go hungry. Having forests nearby can make land more productive, increasing crop yields by more than 50 percent in some cases. That’s because forests can enrich the soil, increase rainfall, and help with pollination. More than 3 billion people live within 1 kilometer (a little over half a mile) of forests and depend on them for jobs, like harvesting timber, and for food like nuts and mushrooms. 

Forests can also help people adapt to a warming world. They regulate floods and landslides and sustain livelihoods that are jeopardized by climate change, said Ida Djenontin, a professor of geography at Penn State.

But what looks like a promising carbon sequestration effort can have unexpected consequences that undermine those benefits. For example, Finland’s ministry of agriculture is trying to fertilize its forests to make them grow faster, in the hope that they will suck up carbon quickly and help the country meet its goal of going carbon-neutral by 2035. But according to the new report, the government didn’t account for the energy-intensive process of producing and transporting fertilizer, a large source of carbon emissions. The report also points out that fertilizing forests can end up hurting reindeer herding, since it stifles the growth of lichen that reindeer eat; one study found that it could also reduce berry production in forests by 70 percent. “It seems that the ongoing climate crisis has, to some extent, legitimized excessive forest management techniques, such as fertilization,” the report concludes. 

Many forest offset projects don’t work as intended. An investigation last year found that only eight out of 29 rainforest offset projects approved by Verra, the world’s biggest certifier, had meaningfully reduced deforestation. The rest of the projects “had no climate benefit,” according to The Guardian, partially because the threat of those forests getting cut down had been vastly overstated.

The narrative that forests can save the world from climate change is a tempting one for businesses and politicians—they can seemingly take care of their climate pledges if they’re willing to fork over the money, without having to do the hard work of reducing emissions. It also allows people to skip the hard conversations about cutting down on consumption, Kleinschmit said. The market for voluntary carbon offsets—the ones companies choose to buy—is predicted to grow from around $2 billion in 2021 to $250 billion by 2030. 

Another problem is that “carbon cowboys”—a term for those seeking to profit off carbon offset schemes—can end up evicting Indigenous peoples from their homes. In 2015, Cambodian officials set aside more than 1,900 square miles of rainforest in the country’s Cardamom Mountains for a carbon offset project without consulting the Chong people that had lived there for centuries. Villagers were forced from their lands, and some were even arrested for collecting resin from trees, since carbon offset areas were monitored to stop locals from using the forest’s resources.

In the United Arab Emirates, the company Blue Carbon has negotiated deals for millions of acres so it can launch offset projects aimed at protecting forests across Liberia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Much of that land has been held by Indigenous peoples. Since 1990, an estimated quarter-million people around the world have been pushed out of their homes in the name of conservation. 

Global climate goals, of course, don’t have to come into conflict with local needs. Experts say it’s possible to balance the two effectively. Prakash Kashwan, an environmental studies professor at Brandeis University, said that locals can use resources from trees, at least on a smaller scale, without hurting a forest’s ability to sequester carbon, according to his research. Studies have demonstrated that involving Indigenous peoples and local residents in the process of decision-making is key to better social and environmental outcomes—including carbon sequestration. 

“Allowing communities a say in how forests are managed is absolutely vital to more effective, lasting, and just forest governance, and for tackling these big global challenges that we face,” Miller said.

When office workers stopped working in offices in 2020, trading their cubicles for living room couches during COVID-19 lockdowns, many began questioning those hours they had spent commuting to work. All those rushed mornings stuck in traffic could have been spent getting things done? Life was often lonely for those stuck in their homes, but people found something to appreciate when birdsong rang through the quiet streets. And the temporary dip in travel had the side effect of cutting global carbon emissions by 7 percent in 2020—a blip of good news in an otherwise miserable year.

Emissions bounced back in 2021, when people started resuming some of their normal activities, but offices have never been the same. While remote work was rare before the pandemic, today, 28 percent of Americans are working a “hybrid” schedule, going into the office some days, and 13 percent are working remotely full-time.

Recent data suggest that remote work could speed along companies’ plans to zero out their carbon emissions, but businesses don’t seem to be considering climate change in their decisions about the future of office work. “In the US, I’m sad to say it’s just not high on the priority list,” said Kate Lister, the founder of the consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics. “It gets up there, and then it drops again for the next shiny object.” Commuter travel falls under a company’s so-called “Scope 3” emissions, the indirect sources that routinely get ignored, but represent, on average, three-quarters of the business world’s emissions. 

A 10 percent increase in people working remotely could reduce carbon emissions by 192 million metric tons a year, according to a study published in the journal Nature Cities earlier this month. That would cut emissions from the country’s most polluting sector, transportation, by 10 percent. Those findings align with other peer-reviewed research: Switching to remote work instead of going into the office can cut a person’s carbon footprint by 54 percent, according to a study published in the journal PNAS last fall, even when accounting for non-commute travel and residential energy use.

“It seems like a very obvious solution to a very pressing and real problem,” said Curtis Sparrer, a principal and co-founder of the PR agency Bospar, a San Francisco-based company where employees have been working remotely since it started in 2015. “And I am concerned that this whole ‘return-to-office’ thing is getting in the way.”

Many companies are mandating their employees show up for in-person work regularly. Last year, big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta told employees that they had to come back to the office three days a week or face consequences, like a lower chance of getting promoted. Even Zoom, the company that became a household name during the pandemic for its videoconferencing platform, is making employees who live within 50 miles of the office commute two days a week. 

Of course, there are many benefits that come with heading into the office to work alongside other humans. Interacting with your coworkers in person gives you a social boost (without the awkward pauses in Zoom meetings) and a compelling reason to change out of your sweatpants in the morning.

From a climate change standpoint, the problem is that most Americans tend to jump in their cars to commute, instead of biking or hopping on the bus. A recent poll from Bospar found that two-thirds of Americans are driving to work—and they’re mostly in gas-powered cars. Even though purchases of electric vehicles are rising, they make up roughly 1 percent of the cars on the road.

The climate benefits start falling off quickly when people are summoned into the office. Working from home two to four days a week cuts emissions by between 11 and 29 percent compared with full-time office work, according to the study in PNAS by researchers at Cornell University and Microsoft. If you only work remotely one day a week, those emissions are only trimmed by 2 percent. Another big factor is that maintaining physical office space sucks up a lot of energy, since it needs to be heated and cooled.

So should companies be allowed to claim they’re going green when they’re forcing employees to commute? Many Americans don’t think so, according to Bospar’s survey. Well over half of Millennials and Gen Zers said it’s hypocritical for companies to observe Earth Day while requiring employees to attend work in person. 

Sparrer points to Disney, which celebrated Earth Month in April with a campaign to promote its environmental efforts but ordered workers to come into the office four days a week last year. Nike, meanwhile, promoted its Earth Day collection of “sustainable” leather shoes while its CEO, John Donahoe, argued that remote work stifled creativity. “In hindsight, it turns out, it’s really hard to do bold, disruptive innovation, to develop a boldly disruptive shoe on Zoom,” he told CNBC earlier this month.

“We are entering a time of magical thinking, where people seem to think that this is enough, and it’s not,” Sparrer said. “And the frustration I have is that we all got to experience what it’s like to work from home, and we know how it works and we know how it can be improved.”

Working from home, though, could present its own environmental challenges. Recent research that looked at trends before the pandemic found that if 10 percent of the workforce started working remotely, transit systems in the US would lose $3.7 billion every year, a 27 percent drop in fare revenue, according to the study in Nature Cities, conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Florida, and Peking University in Beijing. Some experts worry that remote work could push people into the suburbs, where carbon footprints tend to be higher than in cities.

Right now, there are many employees who want to work at home full-time but are forced to go into the office, Lister said. She sees the return-to-office mandates as a result of corporate leadership that wants to go back to how things used to be. “As that generation retires,” she said, “I think that a lot of these conversations will go away.”

In Florida, the effects of climate change are hard to ignore, no matter your politics. It’s the hottest state—Miami spent a record 46 days above a heat index of 100 degrees last summer—and many homes and businesses are clustered along beachfront areas threatened by rising seas and hurricanes. The Republican-led legislature has responded with more than $640 million for resilience projects to adapt to coastal threats. 

But the same politicians don’t seem ready to acknowledge the root cause of these problems. A bill awaiting signature from Governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, would ban offshore wind energy, relax regulations on natural gas pipelines, and delete the majority of mentions of climate change from existing state laws. 

“Florida is on the front lines of the warming climate crisis, and the fact that we’re going to erase that sends the wrong message,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, the executive director of the CLEO Institute, a climate education and advocacy nonprofit in Florida. “It sends the message, at least to me and to a good majority of Floridians, that this is not a priority for the state.”

As climate change has been swept into the country’s culture wars, it’s created a particularly sticky situation in Florida. Republicans associate “climate change” with Democrats—and see it as a pretext for pushing a progressive agenda—so they generally try to distance themselves from the issue. When a reporter asked DeSantis what he was doing to address the climate crisis in 2021, DeSantis dodged the question, replying, “We’re not doing any left-wing stuff.” In practice, this approach has consisted of trying to manage the effects of climate change while ignoring what’s behind them.

The bill, sponsored by state Representative Bobby Payne, a Republican from Palatka in north-central Florida, would strike eight references to climate change in current state laws, leaving just seven references untouched, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Some of the bill’s proposed language tweaks are minor, but others repeal whole sections of laws.

For example, it would eliminate a “green government grant” program that helps cities and school districts cut their carbon emissions. A 2008 policy stating that Florida is at the front lines of climate change and can reduce those impacts by cutting emissions would be replaced with a new goal: providing “an adequate, reliable, and cost-effective supply of energy for the state in a manner that promotes the health and welfare of the public and economic growth.”

Florida politicians have a history of attempting to silence conversations about the fossil fuel emissions driving sea level rise, heavier floods, and worsening toxic algae blooms. When Rick Scott was the Republican governor of the state between 2011 and 2019, state officials were ordered to avoid using the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” in communications, emails, and reports, according to the Miami Herald. 

It foreshadowed what would happen at the federal level after President Donald Trump took office in 2017. The phrase “climate change” started disappearing from the websites of federal environmental agencies, with the term’s use going down 38 percent between 2016 and 2020. “Sorry, but this web page is not available for viewing right now,” the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change site said during Trump’s term. 

Red states have demonstrated that politicians don’t necessarily need to acknowledge climate change to adapt to it, but Florida appears poised to take the strategy to the extreme, expunging climate goals from state laws while focusing more and more money on addressing its effects. In 2019, DeSantis appointed Florida’s first “chief resilience officer,” Julia Nesheiwat, tasked with preparing Florida for rising sea levels. Last year, he awarded the Florida Department of Environmental Protection more than $28 million to conduct and update flooding vulnerability studies for every county in Florida.

“Why would you address the symptoms and not the cause?” Arditi-Rocha said. “Fundamentally, I think it’s political maneuvering that enables them [Republicans] to continue to set themselves apart from the opposite party.” 

She’s concerned that the bill will increase the state’s dependence on natural gas. The fossil fuel provides three-quarters of Florida’s electricity, leaving residents subject to volatile prices and energy insecurity, according to a recent Environmental Defense Fund report. As Florida isn’t a particularly windy state, she sees the proposed ban on offshore wind energy as mostly symbolic. “I think it’s more of a political kind of tactic to distinguish themselves.” Solar power is already a thriving industry that’s taking off in Florida—it’s called the Sunshine State for a reason.

Greg Knecht, the executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Florida, thinks that the removal of climate-related language from state laws could discourage green industries from coming to the state. (And he’s not ready to give up on wind power.) “I just think it puts us at a disadvantage to other states,” Knecht said. Prospective cleantech investors might see it as a signal that they’re not welcome. 

The bill is also out of step with what most Floridians want, Knecht said. According to a recent survey from Florida Atlantic University, 90 percent of the state’s residents accept that climate change is happening. “When you talk to the citizens of Florida, the majority of them recognize that the climate is changing and want something to be done above and beyond just trying to build our way out of it.”

Imagine if you could walk from your house to anywhere you needed to go in less than 15 minutes: the pharmacy, the bakery, the gym, and then back to the bakery. In a certain, conspiracy-addled corner of the internet, this urban planning concept of “15-minute cities” gets a shady, sinister gloss. Conspiracy theorists evoke COVID restrictions and tout efforts to create walkable cities as steps toward “climate lockdowns.” They warn of a plot by the World Economic Forum to restrict people’s movements, trapping and surveilling them in their neighborhoods. 

“They want to take away your cars,” claims Clayton Morris, a former Fox News host, in a YouTube video that’s been viewed 1.7 million times.

YouTube is riddled with false claims like these, so it’s the place to document the evolution of arguments against taking action on climate change. A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit based in London and Washington, DC, working to stop the spread of disinformation, analyzed 12,000 videos from channels that promoted lies about climate change on YouTube over the last six years. Over that time, the reality of climate change long predicted by scientists has become increasingly difficult to dismiss. The report, released on Tuesday, found a dramatic shift from “old denial” arguments—that global warming isn’t real and isn’t caused by humans—to new arguments bent on undermining trust in climate solutions.

“The success is that the science has won this debate on anthropogenic climate change,” said Imran Ahmed, the nonprofit’s founder and CEO. “The opponents of action have shifted their attention.”

The report suggests that, rather than doing a victory lap, climate advocates may want to focus on defending climate policies and renewable energy as necessary and effective. As the world was besieged by intense heat, expansive wildfires, and catastrophic floods in recent years, YouTubers promoting disinformation increasingly embraced “new denial” narratives, such as that solar panels will destroy the economy and the environment, or that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a “fraud.”

“What it is doing is creating a cohort of people who believe climate change is happening, but believe there’s no hope,” Ahmed said. People start watching YouTube at a young age—in 2020, more than half of parents in the US with a child 11 years old or younger said their kid watched videos on the platform on a daily basis. New polling from the center, released alongside the study, found that a third of US teens say that climate policies cause more harm than good.

Six years ago, these “new denial” claims made up 35 percent of denier’s arguments on YouTube; now, they make up 70 percent of the total. The fastest-growing assertions were that the climate movement is unreliable and that clean energy won’t work.

To get this data, the Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed video transcripts from nearly 100 YouTube channels that spout climate denial, using an artificial intelligence tool to categorize the arguments. 

One popular source is the channel of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and culture warrior with 7 million followers. In an interview with Alex Epstein, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Epstein makes the case that climate advocates can’t be trusted. “Listening to a modern environmentalist is like listening to a doctor who’s on the side of the germs, somebody who doesn’t have your best interests at heart,” Epstein says in a video entitled “The Great Climate Con” that’s been viewed a million times, reiterating a point once made in the 1990s by the economist George Reisman in an article titled “The Toxicity of Environmentalism.”

The report also points to the libertarian think tank the Heartland Institute and the media company BlazeTV, created by the former Fox News host Glenn Beck, as prominent sources of lies about climate change on YouTube. Videos from PragerU, a right-wing media outlet also known for spreading disinformation, paint solar and wind power as dangers to the environment and compare environmental activists to Nazis. Despite what the name may imply, it’s not actually a university, nor does it offer any degrees.

John Cook, a researcher at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change in Australia, has documented a similar rise in attacks on climate solutions by conservative think tanks and blogs. “It’s surprising to see misinformation on YouTube shifting so quickly,” Cook said in an email. “The future of climate misinformation will be focused on attacking climate solutions, and we need to better understand those arguments and how to counter them.”

Some research has shown that climate disinformation is compelling: A recent study in Nature Human Behavior found that it’s often more persuasive to people than scientific facts. And once people latch onto a falsehood, they find it hard to let go. That’s why stopping disinformation at the source is so important, according to Ahmed. “The key right now is ensuring that we aren’t flooding our information ecosystem with nonsense and lies that make it more difficult for people to work out what’s true or not,” he said.

Together, the YouTube channels that the center focused on garnered 3.4 billion views last year. And all those views means there’s money involved: The report found that YouTube is potentially making up to $13.4 million a year in ad revenue from channels that post climate denial.

Google, which owns YouTube, promised in 2021 to ban ads on its platforms alongside content that contradicts the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and caused by humans (though it hasn’t enforced it well). To counter the latest wave of disinformation, the Center for Countering Digital Hate recommends that Google should also prohibit advertisements on content that pushes misinformation about climate solutions, so that YouTubers won’t be incentivized to publish more of it. (Content creators that partner with YouTube receive a share of the ad revenue.)

“If it wasn’t profitable, would so many people see it as being a business to produce bullshit?” Ahmed said. “We’re asking platforms to not reward liars with money and attention.”

To say that 2023 is one for the record books is a vast understatement—the year was so out of the norm that you’re forced to go back at least 125,000 years for a point of reference. The last time anyone experienced a year as warm as this one, mastodons and giant sloths roamed across North America during the beginning of the late Pleistocene. Suffice it to say, there weren’t many people around to experience it. 

In 2023, it felt like Earth might run out of records to break. For a stretch in early July, the planet snapped its all-time daily heat record four times, one day after another. It added up to the hottest week ever recorded in what became the hottest summer ever recorded. Then, September broke its previous monthly heat record by half a degree Celsius—a margin so stunning that Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist, declared it “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

Hausfather’s attention-grabbing phrase showed up in the headlines of The Guardian, Wired, and Bloomberg, adding pizzazz to what might have otherwise felt like yet another story about another broken record. As the world overheats, everyone from scientists to TikTok influencers is reaching for a fresh vocabulary to put words to what’s happening, coining new terms and assigning old ones new meanings. It’s a sign that language is catching up to the history-making environmental changes happening around us.

For North America, it was a year of fire and smoke. Canada burned from coast to coast, with 6,500 fires scorching so much land that the 45.7 million acres burned surpassed the previous record by more than 2.5 times. The fires sent a thick haze into cities in the eastern half of the United States that were unprepared for smoke, from Chicago to New York, making June 7 the all-time worst day of pollution from wildfire smoke for the average American. The country’s deadliest fire in a century ripped through Lahaina on the island of Maui in August, killing 100 people. 

Elsewhere in the world, heavy rains forced nearly 700,000 people to flee their homes in Somalia after years of drought; Hurricane Otis, a storm that rapidly escalated into a Category 5, slammed into Mexico, destroying the homes of roughly 580,000 people; and an avalanche triggered an outburst from a melting glacial lake in the Himalayas in northeast India, sending a deadly wall of water barreling down the mountain valleys into towns below.

Every December, dictionary editors sift through the lexicon and pick a word that best reflects the spirit of the waning year. Their selections this time around suggested a modern-day preoccupation with what’s genuine. Merriam-Webster chose “authentic,” the Scotland-based Collins Dictionary went with “AI,” and the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary picked “rizz,” slang for charm or romantic appeal. Some of the top contenders hinted at a changing environment, such as “heat dome” and “dystopian.”

When putting together our annual list of the most notable words in the climate conversation this year, we had plenty of great options. “Global boiling” stood out in such an overheated year, and “El Niño” seemed like an obvious pick, too. We whittled the candidates down to the following 10 that we thought best captured what it felt like to live through a particularly smoky, sweltering year. Though these words and phrases aren’t all newborns, they’re all very 2023.

AQI

The Air Quality Index, a color-coded measure of how dangerous the air is to breathe.

The AQI used to be something only air quality nerds cared about, until folks coughing through smoke-filled summers in the West over the past decade began checking the index every morning before heading out for the day. In 2023, wildfires in Canada sent dangerous air to places in the United States that had never seen anything like it in living memory, and the AQI entered the rest of the country’s vocabulary. Google searches for AQI spiked along the East Coast and in the Midwest as people scrambled to understand the new threat. Inhaling the fine particles in wildfire smoke has been linked to long-term effects like heart attacks, lung cancer, and dementia. Public officials in New York City were slow to warn the public and distribute N95 masks, even though the AQI reached 484 in parts of Brooklyn, off the charts of the rating system. Anything over 300, colored maroon on the AQI chart, is considered “hazardous,” even for healthy adults.

Carbon insetting

Business-speak for companies reducing emissions in their own supply chains; an alternative to carbon offsetting.

For years, companies have been making pledges to go “carbon-neutral,” aiming to offset their emissions with tree-planting projects, usually halfway around the world. But offsetting schemes often fail to deliver on what they promise. An investigation by The Guardian in January found that most carbon offsets from rainforest projects are “phantom credits,” with 94 percent of those approved by the world’s biggest certifier, Verra, offering “no benefit to the climate.” Enter carbon insetting, in which companies attempt to remove emissions from within their own supply chains — the string of activities involved in producing and distributing their products. The practice originated in the early 2000s with companies that rely heavily on agriculture, and it’s now being adopted by Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Apple. Still, experts say that without strong standards, insets will have the same problems as offsets. Offsetting, insetting, and whatever-setting are no substitute for just emitting less carbon in the first place.

Climate quitters

People who resign from their jobs over concerns about climate change.

In January, Bloomberg identified a new trend in the workplace: leaving your old job to work on climate change full-time. So-called “climate quitters” included a former public affairs employee for ExxonMobil who now works for a cleantech communications firm and a restaurant reviewer who started a company to plant tiny native forests in cities. It could be a sign of growing discontent at the lack of large-scale climate action. A survey of 4,000 employees in the United States and the United Kingdom this year found that more than 60 percent of employees wanted to see their company take a stronger stance on the environment, and half said they would consider resigning if their companies’ values didn’t align with their own. But does it have any effect besides feeling better about yourself? Publicly quitting can create a PR nightmare for companies, Alexis Normand, the CEO and co-founder of the carbon accounting platform Greenly, told the BBC: “It’s an extremely powerful form of lobbying.” Of course, staying at your current not-very-environmentally-friendly job and advocating for sustainability can make a big difference, too.

Deinfluencers

Social media influencers who (supposedly) want to convince you not to buy things.

TikTok and Instagram aren’t just for entertainment—they’ve become an advertising ecosystem encouraging reckless consumption. Last year, influencers sold more than $3.6 billion worth of products on the online shopping platform LTK alone, and a study from Meta found that 54 percent of Instagram users surveyed made a purchase after seeing a product on the platform. Manufacturing, shipping, and, eventually, disposing of all that stuff when the next trend takes over has created a huge environmental problem, with discarded clothing piling up in Chile’s Atacama Desert and filling the ocean with microfibers. So-called deinfluencers are pushing back against this out-of-control consumerism, targeting fast fashion and pointless crap that has gone viral. “Do not get the Ugg Minis. Do not get the Dyson Airwrap. Do not get the Charlotte Tilbury wand. Do not get the Stanley cup. Do not get Colleen Hoover books. Do not get the AirPods Max,” TikToker @sadgrlswag said in a video in January. By December, videos with the hashtag #deinfluencing had racked up more than 1 billion views. The trend is already at risk of morphing from discouraging overconsumption to simply recommending one product over another — using the mantle of green credentials to sell more stuff and look environmentally friendly while doing it.

El Niño

A global weather pattern characterized by warmer-than-average temperatures.

One reason 2023 was so hot (apart from climate change)? The arrival of a strong El Niño, which the planet hadn’t seen since 2016, the previous record-holder for hottest year. It replaced La Niña, a cooler pattern that had tempered the heat of the last three years. El Niño brought 101-degree, hot-tub temperatures to the ocean off Florida, steaming coral reefs and fish, anemones, and jellyfish in the Everglades. The weather pattern also tends to fuel the spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes, like malaria and dengue, and other pests that thrive in warmer weather. Thanks to El Niño and climate change, it’s easy to make one reliable prediction for 2024: Global temperatures are likely to be even hotter. The World Meteorological Organization predicted in May that the next five years are sure to be the hottest ones yet.

Global boiling

It’s like global warming, but way more worrying.

António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, is the Shakespeare of scary climate phrases. In past years, his fiery speeches have brought us “code red for humanity” and dire metaphors such as “We are digging our own graves.” In a year as hot as 2023, Guterres managed to up the ante again. Not only did he warn that humanity had “opened the gates of hell,” but he also declared that Earth had entered the “era of global boiling” in July, the hottest month in at least 125,000 years. The phrase “global warming” has been criticized for sounding too nice — after all, everyone loves summer! The same can’t be said for global boiling, which sounds like it’s going to turn us all into soup.

Greenhushing

When companies go quiet on their environmental commitments.

A few short years ago, even oil companies were assuring everyone that they’d slash their emissions. But things started changing this year. Amazon, which famously named its Seattle sports and concert venue “Climate Pledge Arena,” quietly abandoned one of its key goals around shipping emissions, and oil majors scaled back their climate commitments. The trend of greenhushing has emerged as governments from California to the European Union are crafting regulations to counter false advertising around sustainability (often called “greenwashing”). Given that corporations such as Delta are getting taken to court over deceptive environmental marketing, many executives figure that silence is the safer option. Nearly a quarter of companies around the world are choosing not to publicize their milestones on climate action, according to a report from South Pole, a Switzerland-based climate consultancy that popularized the term greenhushing. While the practice makes it harder to scrutinize what companies are doing, some say greenhushing could be a good thing — after all, it’s stopping misleading advertisements. 

Noctalgia

The feeling of missing a dark night sky.

Ever since humans started looking up, they’d see the starry arc of the Milky Way on a clear night. Nowadays, thanks to light pollution from cities, satellites, and even oil and gas production, our galaxy is becoming a rare sight. Artificial light messes with our sleep and confuses wildlife, and the absence of true darkness is also a loss for culture and science. In August, the astronomers Aparna Venkatesan from the University of San Francisco and John C. Barentine from Dark Sky Consulting came up with a new term to express the loss of dark night skies: noctalgia, or “sky grief.” It’s a play on “nostalgia” that uses the Latin prefix noct-, meaning night. “This represents far more than mere loss of environment: We are witnessing loss of heritage, place-based language, identity, storytelling, millennia-old sky traditions, and our ability to conduct traditional practices,” the duo wrote in a comment to the journal Science.

RICO

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law made for the Mafia and organized crime—now being applied to oil companies.

Eight years ago, investigations found that “Exxon Knew” about the dangers of burning fossil fuels in the 1970s, but worked to undermine the public’s understanding of climate science, sowing “uncertainty” about its effects. Since then, lawsuits against oil, gas, and coal companies have proliferated, most of them arguing that companies violated laws that protect people from deceptive advertising. But a new kind of climate lawsuit has emerged that uses a relic from the past: a federal RICO law passed in 1970 to take down organized crime. In November 2022, 16 towns in Puerto Rico accused Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other fossil fuel companies of violating the federal RICO law by colluding to conceal how their products contribute to climate change. Six months later, Hoboken, New Jersey, amended its complaint against Exxon and other companies to allege that they violated the state’s RICO law. Racketeering lawsuits have been successful against tobacco companies and pharmaceutical executives tied to the opioid epidemic. Former President Donald Trump and his allies were also hit with a RICO case in Georgia this year, accused of conspiring to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

White hydrogen

Naturally occurring hydrogen found underground.

Hydrogen is a carbon-free fuel that could replace fossil fuels in a range of hard-to-decarbonize industries, from aviation to steelmaking. The problem is that the most abundant element in the universe isn’t normally found on its own, and turning it into a fuel to fly airplanes, for instance, takes lots of energy. There’s a whole rainbow of hydrogens out there, distinguished by how they’re made—expensive “green hydrogen” from renewables, “gray hydrogen” from methane gas, and “brown hydrogen” from coal. Then there’s white hydrogen, which isn’t made from anything at all. Scientists used to think that there weren’t big reserves of hydrogen buried underground, just waiting to be collected, but in recent years, they’ve been discovering more and more. Recently, some scientists looking for oil and gas reserves in France stumbled upon what could be one of the largest reservoirs of white hydrogen to date, containing somewhere within the stunningly wide range of 6 and 250 million metric tons. Untapped reserves in the United States, Australia, Mali, Oman, and parts of Europe could provide clean energy on a large scale — if all goes according to plan. Startups like Gold Hydrogen, based in Australia, and Koloma, based in Denver, are in the early stages of drilling for hydrogen and could be headed to production

In 1995, a leading group of scientists convened by the United Nations declared that they had detected a “human influence” on global temperatures with “effectively irreversible” consequences. In the coming decades, 99.9 percent of scientists would come to agree that burning fossil fuels has disrupted the Earth’s climate.

Yet almost 30 years after that warning, during the hottest year on Earth in 125,000 years, people are still arguing that the science is unreliable, or that the threat is real but we shouldn’t do anything about climate change. Conspiracies are thriving online, according to a report by the coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation released last month, in time for the U.N. climate conference in Dubai. Over the past year, posts with the hashtag #climatescam have gotten more likes and retweets on the platform known as X than ones with #climatecrisis or #climateemergency. 

By now, anyone looking out the window can see flowers blooming earlier and lakes freezing later. Why, after all this time, do 15 percent of Americans fall for the lie that global warming isn’t happening? And is there anything that can be done to bring them around to reality? New research suggests that understanding why fake news is compelling to people can tell us something about how to defend ourselves against it.

People buy into bad information for different reasons, said Andy Norman, an author and philosopher who co-founded the Mental Immunity Project, which aims to protect people from manipulative information. Due to quirks of psychology, people can end up overlooking inconvenient facts when confronted with arguments that support their beliefs. “The more you rely on useful beliefs at the expense of true beliefs, the more unhinged your thinking becomes,” Norman said. Another reason people are drawn to conspiracies is that they feel like they’re in on a big, world-transforming secret: Flat Earthers think they’re seeing past the illusions that the vast majority don’t.

The annual UN climate summits often coincide with a surge in misleading information on social media. As COP28 ramped up in late November, conspiracy theories circulated claiming that governments were trying to cause food shortages by seizing land from farmers, supposedly using climate change as an excuse. Spreading lies about global warming like these can further social divisions and undermine public and political support for action to reduce emissions, according to the Climate Action Against Disinformation report. It can also lead to harassment: Some 73 percent of climate scientists who regularly appear in the media have experienced online abuse.

Part of the problem is the genuine appeal of fake news. A recent study in Nature Human Behavior found that climate change disinformation was more persuasive than scientific facts. Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland had originally intended to see if they could help people fend off disinformation, testing different strategies on nearly 7,000 people from 12 countries, including the United States, India, and Nigeria. Participants read a paragraph intended to strengthen their mental defenses — reminders of the scientific consensus around climate change, the trustworthiness of scientists, or the moral responsibility to act, for example. Then they were subjected to a barrage of 20 real tweets that blamed warming on the sun and the “wavy” jet stream, spouted conspiracies about “the climate hoax devised by the U.N.,” and warned that the elites “want us to eat bugs.” 

The interventions didn’t work as hoped, said Tobia Spampatti, an author of the study and a neuroscience researcher at the University of Geneva. The flood of fake news—meant to simulate what people encounter in social media echo chambers—had a big effect. Reading the tweets about bogus conspiracies lowered people’s belief that climate change was happening, their support for action to reduce emissions, and their willingness to do something about it personally. The disinformation was simply more compelling than scientific facts, partly because it plays with people’s emotions, Spampatti said (eliciting anger toward elites who want you to eat bugs, for example). The only paragraph that helped people recognize falsehoods was one that prompted them to evaluate the accuracy of the information they were seeing, a nudge that brought some people back to reality.

The study attempted to use “pre-bunking,” a tactic to vaccinate people against fake news. While the effort flopped, Norman said that doesn’t mean it shows “inoculation” is ineffective. Spampatti and other researchers’ effort to fortify people’s mental defenses used a new, broader approach to pre-bunking, trying to protect against a bunch of lines of disinformation at once, that didn’t work as well as tried-and-true inoculation techniques, according to Norman.

Norman says it’s crucial that any intervention to stop the spread of disinformation comes with a “weakened dose” of it, like a vaccine, to help people understand why someone might benefit from lying. For example, when the Biden administration learned of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine in late 2021, the White House began warning the world that Russia would push a false narrative to justify the invasion, including staging a fake, graphic video of a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory. When the video came out, it was quickly dismissed as fake news. “It was a wildly successful attempt to inoculate much of the world against Putin’s preferred narrative about Ukraine,” Norman said.

For climate change, that approach might not succeed—decades of oil-funded disinformation campaigns have already infected the public. “It’s really hard to think about someone who hasn’t been exposed to climate skepticism or disinformation from fossil fuel industries,” said Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communication professor at the University of Nevada, Los Vegas. “It’s just so pervasive. They have talking heads who go on news programs, they flood media publications and the internet, they pay lobbyists.”

Bloomfield argues that disinformation sticks for a reason, and that simply telling the people who fall for it that there’s a scientific consensus isn’t enough. “They’re doubting climate change because they doubt scientific authorities,” Bloomfield said. “They’re making decisions about the environment, not based on the facts or the science, but based on their values or other things that are important to them.”

While political identity can explain some resistance to climate change, there are other reasons people dismiss the evidence, as Bloomfield outlines in her upcoming book Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators. “In the climate change story, we’re the villains, or at least partially blameworthy for what’s happening to the environment, and it requires us to make a lot of sacrifices,” Bloomfield said. “That’s a hard story to adopt because of the role we’re playing within it.” Accepting climate change, to some degree, means accepting inner conflict. You always know you could do more to lower your carbon footprint, whether that’s ditching meat, refusing to fly, or wearing your old clothes until they’re threadbare and ratty.

By contrast, embracing climate denial allows people to identify as heroes, Bloomfield said. They don’t have to do anything differently, and might even see driving around in a gas-guzzling truck as part of God’s plan. It’s a comforting narrative, and certainly easier than wrestling with ethical dilemmas or existential dread.

Those seeking to amplify tensions around climate change or spread doubt, such as fossil fuel companies, social media trolls, and countries like Russia and China, get a lot of bang for their buck. “It’s a lot easier and cheaper to push doubt than to push certainty,” Bloomfield said. Oil companies including Shell, ExxonMobil, and BP spent about $4 million to $5 million on Facebook ads related to social issues and politics this year, according to the Climate Action Against Disinformation report. To sow doubt, you only need to arouse some suspicion. Creating a bullet-proof case for something is much harder—it might take thousands of scientific studies (or debunking hundreds of counterarguments one by one, as Grist did in 2006).

The most straightforward way to fight disinformation would be to stop it from happening in the first place, Spampatti said. But even if regulators were able to get social media companies to try to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, dislodging them is a different story.  One promising approach, “deep canvassing,” seeks to persuade people through nonjudgmental, one-on-one conversations. The outreach method, invented by LGBTQ+ advocates, involves hearing people’s concerns and helping them work through their conflicted feelings. (Remember how accepting climate change means accepting you might be a tiny part of the problem?)

Research has shown that deep canvassing isn’t just successful at reducing transphobia, but also that its effects can last for months, a long time compared to other interventions. The strategy can work for other polarizing problems, too, based on one experiment in a rural metal-smelting town in British Columbia. After convincing several local governments across the West Kootenay region to shift to 100 percent renewable energy, volunteers with the nonprofit Neighbors United kept running into difficulties in the town of Trail, where they encountered distrust of environmentalists. They spoke to hundreds of residents, listening to their worries about losing jobs, finding common ground, and telling personal stories about climate change like friends would, instead of debating the facts like antagonists. A stunning 40 percent of residents shifted their beliefs, and Trail’s city council voted in 2022 to shift to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

Both facts and stories have a place, Bloomfield said. For conservative audiences, she suggests that climate advocates move away from talking about global systems and scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a “nameless, faceless, nebulous group of people”—and toward local matters and people they actually know. Getting information from friends, family, and other trusted individuals can really help.

“They’re not necessarily as authoritative as the IPCC,” Bloomfield said. “But it helps you connect with that information, and you trust that person, so you trust that information that they’re resharing.”

Humanity is messing with the Earth’s “salt cycle,” with potentially dangerous consequences for drinking water supplies, crop production, and ecosystems. That’s according to a new study published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment on Tuesday. It’s the first time that scientists have documented the extent to which humans have changed the salt content of the land, water, and air across the globe. 

Researchers in Maryland and four other states found that 2.5 billion acres of soil around the world have gotten saltier, an area roughly the size of the entire United States, and it’s stressing out plants. Salt is even getting kicked up into the air: In arid regions, “lakes are drying up and sending plumes of saline dust into the atmosphere,” such as the Aral Sea in Central Asia, the study says.

Salt pollution presents an “existential threat to our freshwater supplies,” according to the study. It can corrode drinking water pipes, exacerbating lead pollution in water supplies, as it did in Flint, Michigan. “They had all these lead pipes that were leading to their houses and the chloride would basically pull the lead into solution,” Sujay Kaushal, the study’s lead author, told the Washington Post. “They didn’t add enough corrosion inhibitor, and then kids had high levels of lead in their blood.”

Before humans came along, salt moved to the Earth’s surface over long geological periods, surfacing as rocks broke down and cycling through the water and air, available for the animals and plants that needed it. Some research suggests that salt was key to the development of life on Earth. 

But that process has been accelerated by industrialization. Salinization has been supercharged by a host of factors: irrigation, deicing roads, mining, wastewater treatment, and even the use of salt-laden household items like detergent. The researchers looked at lots of different kinds of salts, like calcium and magnesium, not just the sodium chloride that sits in the salt shaker on your dinner table. And they found so much of it, they worried that salt could cause “serious or irreversible damage across Earth systems.”

In coastal areas, sea-level rise can send salty ocean waters into the groundwater, making it undrinkable. In the United States, aquifers near the coastline—many of which are below sea level—supply 95 million people with drinking water. It only takes 2 or 3 percent seawater to make the groundwater undrinkable, and removing salt from water is difficult and expensive.

The rise of saline dust in the air presents a different problem for water supplies. Since salt can alter the freezing temperature of water, this salt-rich dust could accelerate snowmelt, according to the study, presenting a problem for communities that rely on snowpack for their water supply, like many in the western United States.

The biggest contributor to the issue in the US? Dumping salt on the road for safer driving during winter weather. Road salt made up 44 percent of the country’s salt consumption from 2013 to 2017, the study says. That salt helps make roads less icy, but it eventually runs off and contaminates streams and drinking water. 

There are methods available to lessen the environmental impact while helping prevent cars from skidding across roads. In Minnesota, the state has experimented with “smart salting”—training workers to apply salt without wasting any—to cut salt usage by 30 to 70 percent. Washington, D.C. uses beet juice brine, with a lower sodium content than plain old salt. Wisconsin, playing to character, has incorporated cheese brine, preferably from provolone and mozzarella, into its efforts to deice roads with less salt.

The Roman Empire fell more than 1,500 years ago, but its grip on the popular imagination is still strong, as evidenced by a recent trend on TikTok. Women started filming the men in their lives to document their answers to a simple question: How often do you think about the Roman Empire? 

“I guess, technically, like every day,” one boyfriend said, as his girlfriend wheezed out an astonished “What?” He wasn’t the only one, as an avalanche of Twitter posts, Instagram Reels, and news articles made clear. While driving on a highway, some men couldn’t help but think about the extensive network of roads the Romans built, some of which are still in use today. They pondered the system of aqueducts, built with concrete that could harden underwater.

There are a lot of reasons why people are fascinated by the rise and fall of ancient empires, gender dynamics aside. Part of what’s driving that interest is the question: How could something so big and so advanced fail? And, more pressingly: Could something similar happen to us? Between rampaging wildfires, a rise in political violence, and the public’s trust in government at record lows, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that America could go up in smoke.

Theories of breakdown driven by climate change have proliferated in recent years, encouraged by the likes of Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The Roman Empire, for example, unraveled during a spasm of volcanic explosions, which led to a period of cooling that precipitated the first pandemic of bubonic plague. The decline of the ancient Maya in Central America has been linked with a major drought. Angkor Wat’s downfall, in modern-day Cambodia, has been pinned on a period of wild swings between drought and monsoon floods. So if minor forms of climate change spelled the collapse of these great societies, how are we supposed to survive the much more radical shifts of today? 

Focusing too closely on catastrophe can result in a skewed view of the past—it overlooks societies that navigated an environmental disaster and made it through intact. A review of the literature in 2021 found 77 percent of studies that analyzed the interplay between climate change and societies emphasized catastrophe, while only 10 percent focused on resilience. Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have recently tried to fill in that gap. The latest entry is a study that analyzes 150 crises from different time periods and regions, going off a comprehensive dataset that covers more than 5,000 years of human history, back to the Neolithic period. Environmental forces often play a critical role in the fall of societies, the study found, but they can’t do it alone.

Researchers with the Complexity Science Hub, an organization based in Vienna, Austria, that uses mathematical models to understand the dynamics of complex systems, found plenty of examples of societies that made it through famines, cold snaps, and other forms of environmental stress. Several Mesoamerican cities, including the Zapotec settlements of Mitla and Yagul in modern-day Oaxaca, “not only survived but thrived within the same drought conditions” that contributed to the fall of the Maya civilization in the 8th century. And the Maya, before that point, had weathered five earlier droughts and continued to grow.

The new research, published in a peer-reviewed biological sciences journal from The Royal Society last month, suggests that resilience is an ability that societies can gain and lose over time. Researchers found that a stable society can withstand even a dramatic climate shock, whereas a small shock can lead to chaos in a vulnerable one.

The finding is in line with other research, such as a study in Nature in 2021 that analyzed 2,000 years’ worth of Chinese history, untangling the relationship between climate disruptions and the collapse of dynasties. It found that major volcanic eruptions, which often cause cooler summers and weaker monsoons, hurting crops, contributed to the rise of warfare. But it wasn’t the size of the eruption that mattered most: Dynasties survived some of the biggest, climate-disrupting eruptions, including the Tambora eruption of 1815 in present-day Indonesia and the Huaynaputina eruption of 1600 in what’s now Peru.

What matters most, the Complexity Science Hub’s study posits, is inequality and political polarization. Declining living standards tend to lead to dissatisfaction among the general population, while wealthy elites compete for prestigious positions. As pressures rise and society fractures, the government loses legitimacy, making it harder to address challenges collectively. “Inequality is one of history’s greatest villains,” said Daniel Hoyer, a co-author of the study and a historian who studies complex systems. “It really leads to and is at the heart of a lot of other issues.”

On the flipside, however, cooperation can give societies that extra boost they need to withstand environmental threats. “This is why culture matters so much,” Hoyer said. “You need to have social cohesion, you need to have that level of cooperation, to do things that scale—to make reforms, to make adaptations, whether that’s divesting from fossil fuels or changing the way that food systems work.”

It’s reasonable to wonder how neatly the lessons from ancient societies apply to today, when the technology is such that you can fly halfway around the world in a day or outsource the painful task of writing a college essay to ChatGPT. “What can the modern world learn from, for example, the Mayan city states or 17th century Amsterdam?” said Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University. The way Degroot sees it, historians can pin down the time-tested strategies as a starting point for policies to help us survive climate change today—a task he’s currently working on with the United Nations Development Programme.

Degroot has identified a number of ways that societies adapted to a changing environment across millennia: Migration allows people to move to more fruitful landscapes; flexible governments learn from past disasters and adopt policies to prevent the same thing from happening again; establishing trade networks makes communities less sensitive to changes in temperature or precipitation. Societies that have greater socioeconomic equality, or that at least provide support for their poorest people, are also more resilient, Degroot said.

By these measures, the United States isn’t exactly on that path to success. According to a standard called the Gini coefficient—where 0 is perfect equality and 1 is complete inequality—the US scores poorly for a rich country, at 0.38 on the scale, beaten out by Norway (0.29) and Switzerland (0.32) but better than Mexico (0.42). Inequality is “out of control,” Hoyer said. “It’s not just that we’re not handling it well. We’re handling it poorly in exactly the same way that so many societies in the past have handled things poorly.”

One of the major voices behind that theme is Peter Turchin, one of the co-authors on Hoyer’s study, a Russian-American scientist who studies complex systems. Once an ecologist analyzing the rise and fall of pine beetle populations, Turchin switched fields in the late 1990s and started to apply a mathematical framework to the rise and fall of human populations instead. Around 2010, he predicted that unrest in America would start getting serious around 2020. Then, right on schedule, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, a reminder that modern society isn’t immune to the great disasters that shaped the past. “America Is Headed Toward Collapse,” declared the headline of an article in The Atlantic this summer, excerpted from Turchin’s book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. 

The barrage of climate catastrophes, gun violence, and terrorist attacks in the headlines are enough to make you consider packing up and trying to live off the land. A recent viral video posed the question: “So is everyone else’s friend group talking about buying some land and having a homestead together where everyone grows separate crops, [where] we can all help each other out and have a supportive community, because our society that we live in feels like it’s crumbling beneath our feet?”

By Turchin’s account, America has been at the brink of collapse twice already, once during the Civil War and again during the Great Depression. It’s not always clear how “collapse” differs from societal change more generally. Some historians define it as a loss of political complexity, while others focus on population decline or whether a society’s culture was maintained. “A lot of people prefer the term ‘decline,’” Degroot said, “in part because historical examples of the collapse of complex societies really refer to a process that took place over sometimes centuries” and would perhaps even go unnoticed by people alive at the time. Living through a period of societal collapse might feel different from what you imagined, just like living through a pandemic did—possibly less like a zombie movie, and more like boring, everyday life once you get accustomed to it.

The Complexity Science Hub’s study suggests that collapse itself could be considered an adaptation in particularly dire situations. “There is this general idea that collapse is scary, and it’s bad, and that’s what we need to avoid,” Hoyer said. “There’s a lot of truth in that, especially because collapse involves violence and destruction and unrest.” But if the way your society is set up is making everyone’s lives miserable, they might be better off with a new system. For example, archaeological evidence shows that after the Roman Empire lost control of the British Isles, people became larger and healthier, according to Degroot. “In no way would collapse automatically be something that would be devastating for those who survived—in fact, often, probably the opposite,” he said.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that a better system will replace the vulnerable, unequal one after a collapse. “You still have to do the work of putting in the reforms, and having the support of those in power, to be able to actually set and reinforce these kinds of revisions,” Hoyer said. “So I would argue, if that’s the case, let’s just do that without the violence to begin with.”

One-third of American kitchens have gas stoves—and evidence is piling up that they’re polluting homes with toxic chemicals. A study this summer found that using a single gas stove burner on high can raise levels of cancer-causing benzene above what’s been observed from secondhand smoke. 

It turns out gas stoves have much more in common with cigarettes. A new investigation by NPR and the Climate Investigations Center found that the gas industry tried to downplay the health risks of gas stoves for decades, turning to many of the same public-relations tactics the tobacco industry used to cover up the risks of smoking. Gas utilities even hired some of the same PR firms and scientists that Big Tobacco did.

Earlier this year, an investigation from DeSmog showed that the industry understood the hazards of gas appliances as far back as the 1970s and concealed what they knew from the public. The new documents fill in the details of how gas utilities and trade groups obscured the science around those health risks in an attempt to sell more gas stoves and avoid regulations—tactics still in use today. 

The investigation comes amid a culture war over gas stoves. Towns across the country have passed bans on natural gas hookups in new buildings, and the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission is looking into their health hazards. The commission has said it doesn’t plan on banning gas stoves entirely after the mention of the idea sparked a backlash last December. That same month, a peer-reviewed study found that nearly 13 percent of childhood asthma cases in the United States were linked to using gas stoves. But the American Gas Association, the industry’s main lobbying group, argued that those findings were “not substantiated by sound science” and that even discussing a link to asthma was “reckless.”

It’s a strategy that goes back as far back as 1972, according to the most recent investigation. That year, the gas industry got advice from Richard Darrow, who helped manufacture controversy around the health effects of smoking as the lead for tobacco accounts at the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton. At an American Gas Association conference, Darrow told utilities they needed to respond to claims that gas appliances were polluting homes and shape the narrative around the issue before critics got the chance. Scientists were starting to discover that exposure to nitrogen dioxide—a pollutant emitted by gas stoves—was linked to respiratory illnesses. So Darrow advised utilities to “mount the massive, consistent, long-range public relations programs necessary to cope with the problems.”

The American Gas Association also hired researchers to conduct studies that appeared to be independent. They included Ralph Mitchell of Battelle Laboratories, who had also been funded by Philip Morris and the Cigar Research Council. In 1974, Mitchell’s team, using a controversial analysis technique, examined the literature on gas stoves and said they found no significant evidence that the stoves caused respiratory illness. In 1981, a paper funded by the Gas Research Institute and conducted by the consulting firm Arthur D. Little—also affiliated with Big Tobacco—surveyed the research and concluded that the evidence was “incomplete and conflicting.”

These studies didn’t just confuse the public, but also the federal government. When the Environmental Protection Agency assessed the health effects of nitrogen dioxide pollution in 1982, its review included five studies finding no evidence of problems—four of which were funded by the gas industry, the Climate Investigations Center recently uncovered. The EPA, which was investigating whether it should tighten nitrogen dioxide standards outdoors, called for more research to reduce the “uncertainties” of health effects, and didn’t strengthen the standards until more than a quarter-century later. 

Today, as public opinion starts to turn on gas stoves, utilities continue to deploy techniques that mirror the tobacco industry’s. Last year, the gas industry hired a toxicologist to testify at a public comment hearing over gas stoves in Multnomah County, Oregon. Julie Goodman questioned the research around the health concerns of stoves and pointed to a review showing little reason for worry, but she did not mention that she was hired by the local gas utility NW Natural. Goodman told NPR that the views were her own and argued that scientists aren’t necessarily biased in favor of their funding source.

In response to the reporting from NPR and the Climate Investigations Center, Karen Harbert, the American Gas Association’s CEO, acknowledged that the gas industry has “collaborated” with researchers to “inform and educate regulators about the safety of gas cooking appliances.” Harbert claimed that the available science “does not provide sufficient or consistent evidence demonstrating chronic health hazards from natural gas ranges”—a line that should sound familiar by now.

The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the “social cost of carbon,” one of the most important calculations in US climate policy, on Tuesday. The controversial metric attempts to quantify the hidden price of emitting carbon dioxide, from flood damage to health effects. The court’s surprise decision sets the stage for the Biden administration to broaden the metric’s use across federal agencies when formulating climate-related regulations.

One of President Joe Biden’s very first executive orders in January 2021 directed agencies to recalculate the social cost of carbon—currently placed at $51 a ton while the government finalizes its revised estimate. In the meantime, Republican state attorneys general have been flinging lawsuits at the administration in an attempt to block its ability to use the metric in evaluating regulations.

But their plans were thwarted by Tuesday’s order from the conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Without any explanation, the justices declined to hear Missouri v. Biden, a case in which 12 states alleged that Biden’s executive order violated the constitutional separation of powers. A federal appeals court ruled last year that the states suing over the use of the estimate didn’t have legal standing because they couldn’t show they’d been harmed by the way agencies had applied the metric.

It’s the second time the Supreme Court has declined to take up a challenge to the social cost of carbon. Last year, the justices blocked a similar request led by Louisiana.

The social cost of carbon is likely to have cascading effects on agriculture, power plants, oil and gas leases, and more. That’s because federal agencies have to weigh the costs and benefits of any regulation they adopt. If the government accounts for the true costs of emitting greenhouse gases—lost lives, dying crops, homes swallowed by rising seas—then decisions that result in more carbon emissions start to look a lot more expensive, while those that reduce emissions look like a smart deal.

The Obama administration, the first to require agencies to use this metric in assessing rules, placed the social cost of carbon at $43 a ton—a move that helped justify things like stronger emissions standards for vehicles. The Trump administration calculated the number differently and, in typical fashion, slashed the number down to a couple bucks per ton. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed $190 a ton, nearly four times higher than the estimate the Biden administration currently uses. (The EPA’s number is in line with estimates from independent experts.)

Because the social cost of carbon is so influential in developing climate policy, some Republicans consider it a paragon of the “radical climate agenda.” In response to the Supreme Court’s rejection of Missouri’s challenge, Andrew Bailey, the state’s attorney general, vowed to “continue to combat government overreach at every turn.” 

Analysts say the fight isn’t over yet. In a note to clients, the research firm ClearView Energy Partners said the ruling doesn’t preclude states—or anyone else—from suing over specific agency actions and rules that rely on the social cost of carbon, E&E News reported.

In recent months, the White House announced that it was considering applying the social cost of carbon more broadly across agencies, in everything from annual budgets and permitting decisions to fines for violating environmental regulations. It represents a sea change in how the government approaches climate policy: For decades, policies to reduce emissions had been cast as an economic burden, a narrative propelled by oil industry-backed studies that made legislation look prohibitively expensive.

Now, the frame has switched: Carbon emissions are viewed as the economic harm, and climate policy is the balm.