Category: News

Carbon offsets have failed for 25 years, and most should be phased out – research

This press release was originally published on October 6, 2025 by the University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise & Environment

Academics at the University of Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania have conducted the most comprehensive review of evidence on the effectiveness on carbon offsetting to date and concluded the practice is ineffective and riddled with “intractable” problems.

Carbon offsets are projects that generate credits meant to represent the reduction, avoidance, or removal of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the atmosphere. The first carbon offset was generated in 1989. The authors call for the phasing out of most credits except those generated by permanent carbon dioxide removal.

“We must stop expecting carbon offsetting to work at scale. We have assessed 25 years of evidence and almost everything up until this point has failed,” says co-author Dr Stephen Lezak, researcher at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. “The present market failures are not due to a few bad apples but rather to systematic, deep-seated problems, which will not be resolved by incremental changes.”

“We hope our findings provide a moment of clarity ahead of COP30: These junk offsets—the ones not backed by permanent carbon removal and storage—are a dangerous distraction from the real solution to climate change, which is rapid and sustained emission reductions,” says lead author Dr Joseph Romm, Senior Research Fellow at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.

The most severe issues uncovered by the research are nonadditionality (generating credits without reducing emissions), impermanence, leakage, double counting, “perverse incentives,” and the “gameability” of crediting systems, where bad actors have been able to routinely circumvent even well-designed rules. Far from solving these problems, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which was finalised at COP29, simply restated “long-ignored tenets of carbon market development, with the specious expectation that this time the outcomes might differ significantly,” the authors say.

“Despite efforts to implement safeguards, carbon offset projects continue to face documented cases of weak accountability, risking the perpetuation of neocolonial patterns of appropriation. While nature-based projects can deliver local benefits, these should be financed through mechanisms other than carbon credits, such as contribution claims where projects are financed while still ensuring that purchasing entities are responsible for reducing their own emissions,” says co-author Amna Alshamsi, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies. Previous research has shown how offset programs routinely overestimate their climate impact, in many cases by as much as a factor of ten or more.

Going forward, all offset markets should prioritise developing high-integrity, durable CDR and storage—with long-term measurement and verification—the authors conclude, while recognising that effective and scalable CDR may not be possible, and will certainly require intensive research and investment.

This approach aligns with the Oxford Offsetting Principles, which encourage companies to reduce emissions first and foremost, and to transition to durable, carbon removal offsetting for residual emissions.

It’s official: 25 years of evidence proves carbon offsets don’t work

Originally published on October 8, 2025 by Kristin Toussaint for Fast Company

A sprawling new study shows the $2 billion market has failed to curb global greenhouse gas emissions.

Carbon offsets have existed for decades, and the size of the voluntary carbon market has ballooned to about $2 billion. Many countries and countless companies, including giants like Amazon and FedEx, have looked to carbon offsets as they work toward reaching net zero.

And yet, these offsets haven’t significantly curbed global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, global emissions are still increasing. As a climate solution, carbon offsets have failed—and according to a new scientific review looking at 25 years of carbon offset research, they’ve failed because they’re riddled with intractable, deep-seated problems that incremental changes won’t be able to solve.

Carbon offsets have long been criticized for their issues, including concerns over greenwashing or double counting. Multiple studies have found that individual offset projects overestimate their climate benefits. Offsets also don’t always last; trees used as carbon offsets have burned in wildfires, releasing all the carbon they’ve long stored.

Proponents of carbon offsets say such criticisms focus on “a few bad apples.”

“But the problem is, it isn’t really a few bad apples. It’s pretty much all the apples,” says Joseph Romm, a senior research fellow at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, and the lead author on the review of offset research.

25 years of evidence—and issues

Romm and his fellow researchers looked at carbon offset studies spanning more than two decades and used more than 200 references, including documents from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Carbon offsets are essentially a way for rich polluters—either countries or companies—to finance projects that reduce emissions somewhere else. Then, they claim those other projects’ emissions reductions for themselves while continuing to pollute the atmosphere.

Offsets need to be verified, and also “additional”—a term meaning that the project wouldn’t have happened otherwise (it only exists, and benefits the climate, because of the offset program). But the idea of additionality is flawed, Romm says.

Take renewable energy projects, which have long been the base of carbon offset projects and are still the most common offsets today. “We pay someone to do a renewable energy project, and then we say that that has reduced emissions. [But] the thing is, renewables are now the cheapest [energy to build],” Romm says. As the cheapest option, renewable projects likely would be built anyway, so the offset project didn’t really change anything.

Since the carbon market is voluntary, there are no regulations or oversight. That creates a “race to the bottom,” Romm says, in which buyers pay low prices for offset projects. “It’s left the world with the impression that there’s a vast sea of cheap offsets in poor countries,” he says. “It’s just not the reality. It’s why there’s been a reckoning in terms of companies realizing it’s going to take more effort to reduce their emissions.”

Other issues include impermanence (like offset projects burning in wildfires), leakage (when the pollution or logging is simply moved elsewhere, outside of the offset’s boundary), and double counting (when more than one party claims the same carbon credit).

Carbon offsets are a distraction

Essentially, the voluntary carbon market is full of “junk offsets” that don’t really have a climate benefit.

The appeal of offsets is obvious: Without having to change their own behavior or pay a lot of money, countries and companies can claim another entity’s emissions reductions. But the reality isn’t that easy, and offsets are a distraction from the fact that we need to stop burning so many fossil fuels in the first place.

“At the end of the day, this comes down to: Everyone needs to get their own emissions as low as possible,” Romm says. “There’s no offloading this problem on someone else.”

Actual carbon capture projects, which sequester carbon from the atmosphere, could work as offsets, but those are currently expensive and operate at a small scale. It takes a lot less money and energy to not burn fossil fuels in the first place than to burn them and then recapture the emissions.

Such criticism of offsets isn’t new. Romm’s review cites 25 years worth of them. This paper also builds on Romm’s publication from 2023, titled “Carbon offsets are unscalable, unjust, and unfixable—and a threat to the Paris Agreement.”

Romm hopes that by putting all this research in one place, and by having a comprehensive look back at the way carbon offsets have failed over the past two decades, it will help people understand the reality.

Leaders of companies or countries always think they can be the one to solve the intractable issues within carbon offsets, Romm says. They say their technology is better, or that they really care about making it work. The review paper counters that notion.

“We wanted to have somewhere someone could go and simply see the compendium of studies, and see that people have been warning about this for over two decades,” he says. “Everything they warned about is true. No one’s ever solved these problems.”

Taylor Swift, storytelling, and climate communication

Originally published on October 10, 2025 by Erica Moser for Penn Today

Joseph Romm’s journey has taken him from a physics Ph.D. student to the author of an award-winning climate change blog to a podcaster and Swiftie helping people improve their storytelling skills.

Romm, a senior research fellow at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, started the podcast “Decoding Taylor Swift” in July with his 18-year-old daughter, Toni, which has reached number two in the music category on Apple Podcasts. And on Oct. 16, as part of Climate Week at Penn, he’s holding the workshop Communication is a Climate Solution: How Taylor Swift can Level Up Your Storytelling.

“Think about your ‘hero’s journey’ story,” Romm says. “You’re at UPenn. You’re studying a field. Why?” People want to hear the story of how people became passionate about their subject and acquired knowledge, he says, and he wants people to know that storytelling is an acquirable skill. “If you don’t tell your own story where you’re the hero, someone will tell the story where you’re the villain,” he says.

But Romm didn’t always have this passion and skill set in climate communication.

Two decades ago, however, while he was consulting in clean energy when Hurricane Katrina destroyed his brother’s home in Mississippi. Romm decided to learn more about climate change, and as he delved into the field, he thought that scientists could do better at communicating it in the media. Around the same time, he asked his then 3-year-old daughter what she meant when she said, “blah blah blah.” He got the response, “It’s when Daddy says something that doesn’t matter.” That hit him hard.

“Figuring out what words matter became my mission,” Romm says. He landed at Penn in 2023 and says he has tried to find ways to teach people about storytelling in an accessible manner. Enter Taylor Swift. Regardless of one’s feelings about her and her music—Romm is a fan—she gets a lot of public attention. He gave a TED Talk last year about the ingredients of powerful storytelling, including examples from Swift.

As he prepares to speak about the topic as part of the Climate Week event on campus, Penn Today caught up with him to discuss how Swift uses some of these storytelling ingredients—and how they can be applied to climate communication.

Use ‘but’ instead of ‘and’

Several of Swift’s lyrics employ the “but” instead of “and” rule, Romm notes: “But I’ve got a blank space, baby, and I’ll write your name.” “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror.” “I cry a lot, but I am so productive.”

He says the rule was popularized by “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. “The word ‘but’ or ‘yet’ is essential in storytelling,” says Romm. It works because “it’s introducing a twist. People use too many ands, ‘I did this and I did this and I did this.’ It’s just boring.”

In the realm of climate communication, Romm points to Greta Thunberg, who populates her speeches with “but” and “yet.” He references an example from her 2019 speech to the United Nations: “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones.”

Add figures of speech

Joseph Romm and his daughter, Toni, saw Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour in Toronto in November 2024 and have since started the “Decoding Taylor Swift podcast.”

(Image: Courtesy of Joseph Romm)

Romm encourages scientists communicating about their work to use figures of speech, such as analogies and metaphors. Swift does this, for example, in the line “Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street” in the song “Red,” and in the descriptions of herself as a mirrorball in the song of the same name.

The purpose of a metaphor or analogy, Romm says, is to describe something people might not understand to something they do comprehend. Romm notes one example of this used in climate communications is comparing the impact of greenhouse gases on the planet to the weight of heavy blankets. “The more coal, oil, and gas we burn,” he says, “the more blankets, we pile on the Earth.”

Making comparisons, he says, is one way for scientists to be more memorable in their phrasing. “You want to be quoted in the media? Give them a quote that’s quotable,” says Romm.

Offering another tip, Romm cites the use of repetition in Swift’s songs. “Think ‘We are never, ever, ever getting back together’ or ‘Cuz the players gonna play, play, play, play, play,’” he says. “Repetition works. Repetition is the most effective way of persuading people.

Why Hydrogen Still Doesn’t Work

Originally published on September 17, 2025 by Michael Barnard for Medium

A few weeks ago, I had another opportunity to sit down with Dr. Joseph Romm, currently working with Michael Mann at the UPenn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. The topic was the 20th anniversary edition of his book The Hype About Hydrogen, available now. What follows is lightly edited transcript of the first half of our conversation.

Michael Barnard [MB]: Welcome back to Redefining Energy Tech. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. My guest today is Dr. Joseph Romm, senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. His work focuses on the sustainability, scalability, and scientific foundations of major climate solutions. The 20th anniversary edition of his book The Hype About Hydrogen is being released on Earth Day, and we’re here to talk about it. Welcome, Joe.

Joe Romm [JR]: Thanks for having me, Mike.

[MB]: Well, it’s great to have you back. We talked about BECCS and a few other things about a year and a half ago. Then, last year, you asked me to take a quick look at your book and offer any technical notes — which I did. And now, here we are — it’s coming out in just six days. Very exciting.

Continue reading the article here. 

What Taylor Swift can teach us about talking about climate change

Originally published on September 15, 2025 by Sarah Kennedy for Yale Climate Connections

Transcript:

If you want to learn how to talk to people about climate change, one expert suggests studying Taylor Swift.

Romm: “I think storytelling is the essential skill that we have to teach people who want to be better communicators in this space, and … she’s the master storyteller of the modern era.”

Joseph Romm is a senior research fellow at the Center for Science, Sustainability, and Media at the University of Pennsylvania. And he’s a Swiftie who co-hosts a podcast in which he and his daughter analyze the storytelling techniques Taylor Swift uses in her songs.

He suggests using stories to communicate about climate change because they’re memorable and they engage people on an emotional level.

Romm: “Start with your personal story, and let people know what you’ve been through and why it means something to you.”

And he recommends using metaphors to make concepts more relatable – like describing climate-warming pollution as a heat-trapping blanket.

Romm: “I think metaphors are the single most powerful thing. And of course, you know, Taylor Swift uses a great many metaphors. … You know, when she says, ‘Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream,’ right? That’s two metaphors.”

So to help increase awareness of climate change, Romm advises people to put on their headphones and learn from a modern master of storytelling.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media

Beyond the Hydrogen Mirage: A Candid Conversation with Joe Romm

Originally published on June 13, 2025 by Michael Barnard for CleanTechnica

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down again with Dr. Joseph Romm to discuss his then about to be released book, The Hype About Hydrogen, available now on Amazon. This is the second half of our conversation, lightly edited.

Michael Barnard [MB]: Welcome back to Redefining Energy — Tech. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. My guest today is Dr. Joseph Romm, senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, working with Michael Mann. His work focuses on the sustainability, scalability and scientific underpinnings of major climate solutions. The 20th anniversary version of his book The Hype about Hydrogen dropped on Earth Day, and we are here to talk about it. This is the second half of our conversation.

Joe Romm [JR]: Let’s be honest. Part of the resurgence of interest in oil and gas companies is because they’re the ones who know how to use hydrogen. They’re the ones who know how to move it around. I’ve always felt the reason they pushed it so hard is that they never believed green hydrogen would be cost-effective. They assumed people would eventually come running back to them to make it from methane—with promises to capture some carbon along the way.

And they were right. Now we’re seeing all these apologists saying, “Okay, well, green hydrogen may not be cost-effective for a while, so in the meantime, we’ll make it from methane. We promise we’ll capture the carbon.” But as we’ve seen with regular carbon capture, almost no one delivers. Everyone claims they’ll hit 90 or 95 percent, but hardly anyone captures anything close to that.

[MB]: I used to point to Sleipner’s North Sea facility as probably the best-case scenario. And even then, it was still a bit odd. For those who don’t know, it’s an offshore natural gas platform. They extract gas from beneath the seabed, but it contains too much carbon dioxide—about 8%, if I remember correctly. So they separate out the CO₂ and get massive tax credits from the Norwegian government to inject it back underground. And they actually do it.

I used to think, at least it was Norwegian engineering—efficient, reliable. But then last year we found out they had been underperforming for five years. They’d pumped far less CO₂ underground than they claimed. Even the Norwegians can’t get it right.

[JR]: I have a section in the book on Sleipner because there’s a common misconception in this country about carbon capture and storage. The people pushing it are mostly oil companies, and most of the time they use the captured CO₂ to extract more oil from the ground. Occidental’s acquisition of Carbon Engineering was clearly for that purpose. I hope we all understand that capturing CO₂—from a power plant or from the air—and then using it to extract more oil is not a sustainable solution. It doesn’t solve climate change.

The reality is that effective carbon storage requires a lot of money for monitoring and verification. Sleipner is a good example: the CO₂ is injected underwater, beneath the ocean floor, into a formation they claim is geologically sealed. But to know it’s truly sealed—and that the CO₂ isn’t migrating—you need continuous, expensive monitoring. CO₂ spreads. It can find old cracks you didn’t know were there, or create new ones over time.

In the book, I discuss two case studies: Sleipner and the In Salah project in Algeria. In both cases, long-term monitoring revealed that the CO₂ didn’t just stay where they put it. It moved. This matters. Especially now, when the literature is clear—and we saw this emphasized at COP 29 in Azerbaijan with two major studies—that if you want to genuinely displace fossil fuel emissions, you need to store CO₂ permanently. CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for a long time. So if you’re going to remove it, you need to lock it away for centuries. If it leaks in 100 years, you haven’t really solved anything. You’ve just delayed the problem.

This is why measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) are so important—but no one wants to pay for them in this country. Oil companies say, “Give us the CO₂, pay us a tax credit, and trust us—we’ll bury it and it won’t come back.” But they don’t want liability. They want immunity in case something goes wrong. If a CO₂ plume resurfaces in a decade and harms people, they don’t want to be held responsible.

That’s the definition of a moral hazard. No accountability, no real incentive to get it right. If you truly want to do carbon capture and storage responsibly, you have to invest in long-term monitoring and verification. Otherwise, it’s just another illusion.

[MB]: Well, the good news about Northern Lights—the Norwegian carbon storage project—is that the ships are finally going to start moving this year. And I say it’s good news not because it makes any real sense, but because it will soon become painfully obvious to everyone that it doesn’t.

Norway paid for roughly 80% of the capital cost using money from its sovereign wealth fund, so it’s already pulled a huge amount of value out of fossil fuels to fund this. On top of that, they’re subsidizing BECCS plants to send CO₂ to Northern Lights. The only facility that even approaches fiscal sanity is Yara’s dockside ammonia plant, which produces a relatively pure stream of CO₂.

But even then, Yara has to buffer, compress, and liquefy that CO₂ at great expense, while waiting for one of the Northern Lights ships to arrive. Then the ship travels 700 kilometers round-trip to the injection site. And that site, while technically on land, is reached via a 100-kilometer undersea pipeline that dives 2 kilometers down to a storage formation supposedly sealed by impermeable shale that will hold the gas forever.

It’s an astonishing amount of engineering and money. They’ve gone so far as to equip the ships with Flettner rotors to gain an extra 3% efficiency. They’re also using air lubrication systems under the hulls, slow steaming—tactics we don’t typically apply on standard cargo vessels barring the slow steaming—all to reduce the CO₂ emissions from the maritime fuel powering the ships. When the illusion breaks and people start adding up the real costs, it’s going to be eye-opening.

[JR]: It’s important for people to understand that when you capture CO₂, it’s a gas—but to store it, you need to convert it into supercritical CO₂. That’s a state where it’s neither a true gas nor a true liquid. It has about half the density of water, and it’s kept at around 1,000 pounds per square inch. In that state, it behaves as a solvent—supercritical CO₂ is actually used in industry for exactly that purpose.

So when you inject it underground, you’re injecting a high-pressure solvent into geological formations. This isn’t a simple “fire and forget” process. It requires serious engineering, long-term oversight, and a deep understanding of subsurface behavior. The first time I saw the equation for this, it really hit me—this is far more complex and risky than most people realize.

Vaclav Smil did a calculation where he pointed out that if you want to capture and move around 3 billion tons of CO₂—whether it’s from power plants or any other source—you’re dealing with a logistical burden equivalent in volume to more than 90 million barrels of oil per day. That’s roughly the same scale as the entire global oil production and delivery system, which took a century to build. If you think you’re going to recreate that kind of infrastructure in a generation, you might want to think again.

And that’s just for 3 billion tons. Total global greenhouse gas emissions are 50 billion tons annually. Even if you’re only aiming for a 6% solution, you’re still talking about building an entire global petroleum-scale infrastructure just to bury waste—and it better stay buried. If it leaks out over the next hundred years, you haven’t solved the problem.
The point isn’t that carbon capture or hydrogen are completely worthless. The point, as I emphasize in the book, is that we need to focus on technologies that are scalable now and capable of driving emissions down rapidly. We’ve been increasing emissions for over 30 years. We’re at COP29 now. In a TEDx talk, I pointed out that there have been over 30 annual global climate meetings—including one we missed during COVID—and emissions have kept rising the entire time.

So unless we start cutting emissions sharply and soon, we’re in serious trouble. That’s what I posted about recently, and that’s what the financial sector seems to be acknowledging quietly. Instead of screaming for immediate action, they’re hedging—investing in air conditioning, insurance, and adaptation. That tells you something.

The real trick is to spend as much money as possible on the things that are likely to work—and as little as possible on things that probably won’t. I’m a physicist, and I ran a billion-dollar R&D office. I’d never say a problem can never be solved, but the thing about hydrogen is, it’s not solving just one problem.

People talk about “gold hydrogen”—naturally occurring hydrogen underground—as if just discovering it solves everything. But, as I argue in the book, there are at least five major challenges. Twenty years ago, I used to say you needed three or four miracles to make hydrogen viable. And usually, it only takes one fatal flaw to kill an idea. But over time, I realized something deeper: if you’re willing to believe in one miracle, you’ll believe in four. It’s like infinity—whether it’s one or four, it’s still an endless leap of faith.

So, saying “we just need to make green hydrogen” isn’t enough. That still doesn’t get hydrogen to end users. It still leaks. It’s still one of the most dangerous substances known to humankind. And no one wants to talk about the safety issues. So no, I’m not saying we should abandon all hydrogen. We will, at some point, need to replace the dirty hydrogen we currently produce. Right now, we make about 100 million tons of it a year, and production keeps growing by about 5% annually.

But hydrogen accounts for only about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. So yes, it’s important—but not urgent. There are hard-to-decarbonize sectors, like international air travel, that contribute 2–3% of global emissions. We all agree they’re difficult and expensive to fix right now. So maybe let’s not focus on them first.

What we need is the kind of cost-curve thinking that McKinsey and others used to do. Let’s go after the relatively easy 80%. Let’s focus R&D on the difficult 20%, like hydrogen, without prematurely scaling up expensive, risky technologies for marginal gains. We need to stop chasing shiny distractions and focus on what actually gets emissions down—fast.

[MB]: The thing about hydrogen is that around 40% of global production is used for refining oil—and that 40% is overwhelmingly tied to heavy, high-sulfur crude from places like Alberta, Mexico, and Venezuela. I actually did the math and the workup on this, and folks at Schlumberger looked at it and said, “Yeah, that checks out.” And they would know.

It works out to about 7.7 kilograms of hydrogen per barrel for Alberta’s crude. By contrast, for light, sweet crude—like some of the best from Brent or Saudi Arabia—it’s only about 1.2 kilograms per barrel. So when you look at that, it becomes clear: if hydrogen becomes more expensive, and if oil demand declines, hydrogen demand is going to decline as well.

The same logic applies to ammonia-based fertilizers. If hydrogen becomes more costly, we’ll stop overusing them. Alternatives like agrigenetics and precision agriculture become more competitive, and in many cases, more cost-effective. There’s a real economic argument there.

I had a conversation recently with Michael Liebreich where he admitted he’d gotten the price point for hydrogen wrong when doing the first version of the hydrogen ladder. He had other reasons for thinking hydrogen wouldn’t be a big deal, but he said the hydrogen ladder would have looked different if he’d had the right price assumptions. I got lucky—I did the cost workups and the modeling before I put out my hydrogen projections. I keep saying this: I don’t think I’m right. I just think I’m less wrong than most. And in this case, I got lucky. I could have been just as embarrassed as a lot of other people are today.

But there’s something we haven’t really talked about: hydrogen leakage. There are two major concerns. First, if hydrogen accumulates in an enclosed space and ignites, it’s extremely dangerous. But the second issue is more subtle and often ignored.

You’ve smelled natural gas before—it stinks. That’s because we add odorants so that leaks can be detected and people can evacuate. But you can’t do that with hydrogen. The odorants that work for other gases destroy fuel cells. So if you want to use hydrogen for both electricity and heating, you’d need two entirely separate distribution systems: one for clean hydrogen feeding fuel cells, and another with odorants for safety in buildings.

Oddly, this seems to be completely overlooked by many hydrogen proponents. I find that strange. Do they just not know? Are they refusing to deal with it? Or is this just one more miracle they assume will somehow be solved later

[JR]: The safety issue around hydrogen is often casually hand-waved away by people who say, “Well, it’s used safely.” And sure, that’s true—under very strict conditions. But let’s look at what countries like India actually do to use it safely. Their regulations require a 100-foot setback between any building that produces or stores hydrogen and the nearest structure. That’s because the fire risk is so high. You also need massive ventilation in any enclosed space where hydrogen might accumulate. Otherwise, you risk a gas bubble forming—and hydrogen, as we know, burns.

But it’s worse than that. Hydrogen is odorless, and as you pointed out, it burns invisibly. That’s why, in NASA safety handbooks, you’ll find guidance like this: if you’re entering a room where there might be a hydrogen fire, carry a broom. Because the broom will ignite before you do. That’s not a joke—it’s a workaround for the fact that hydrogen flame detectors aren’t very good. Maybe people are working on better sensors, but hydrogen is the tiniest molecule in the universe. It leaks through seals, gaskets, joints—materials that easily contain other gases.

And that leakiness matters. In any facility where hydrogen might be present, workers have to wear static-free clothing. Why? Because hydrogen has one-twentieth the ignition energy of gasoline. It’s so combustible that a static discharge—or even a lightning storm miles away—could set it off. It also burns at a much higher velocity than natural gas, increasing the blast risk.

There’s another crucial difference. Natural gas only ignites in air at a fairly narrow concentration—something like 5% to 15%. Hydrogen, on the other hand, can ignite in air across a massive range—from roughly 4% all the way up to 75% or 80%, depending on conditions. That means it’s far more likely to find an ignition point.

The bottom line is, you have to treat hydrogen with extreme care. And that kind of care costs money—money people don’t want to spend. That’s also one reason it makes little sense to put hydrogen anywhere near a nuclear reactor. In fact, nuclear engineers have studied hydrogen in detail because of what happened at Three Mile Island. During that disaster, a hydrogen bubble formed inside the reactor containment vessel. It shocked the public. No one had expected it, and there was real fear it could explode and breach the containment structure.

So yes, hydrogen can be used safely—but only with serious precautions. And most of those precautions make it too complex and costly for broad, distributed use.

[MB]: That’s actually what happened at Fukushima—it was hydrogen that exploded. The reactors generated hydrogen, which accumulated and eventually ignited, causing the blasts that destroyed parts of the facility.

But I’ll point out something interesting: hydrogen is also used in a very controlled way at nuclear plants. It’s used to lubricate the bearings on large turbines because it’s an excellent coolant and lubricant in those high-speed environments. There’s actually one small-scale nuclear-hydrogen use case that I thought made a lot of sense. A plant installed a small electrolyzer onsite specifically to replace the gray hydrogen they had previously trucked in for turbine lubrication. Instead, they used a tiny amount of auxiliary “vampire” power—around 0.003% of total output—to produce all the hydrogen they needed.

That’s a genuinely good use case. But it was small, and crucially, it wasn’t about using hydrogen as a fuel. That’s an important distinction I want to emphasize: everything we’re talking about here—hydrogen’s safety, leakage, infrastructure challenges—it’s all in the context of hydrogen for energy. That’s where the problems lie.

Joe and I are both very supportive of green hydrogen when it’s used as an industrial feedstock. In that role, it makes sense. It has real use cases. It’s hydrogen for energy that remains fundamentally flawed.

[JR]: Making ammonia cleanly is possible—it’s just expensive.

[MB]: Making hydrogen to burn it or run it through a fuel cell is a bad idea—plain and simple.

[JR]: Right. And I know we often try to avoid getting into ethics, but it’s worth stating the basics. Fossil fuels are hydrocarbons. When you burn them, you oxidize the hydrogen into water and the carbon into CO₂. Both reactions release heat, which we’ve historically valued. But water and CO₂ are the end products of combustion. That’s the end of the thermodynamic road.

So when people try to reverse that—when they talk about turning water back into hydrogen and pulling CO₂ from the air, where it’s present at just 420 parts per million—and then combining them to make synthetic fuels, they’re trying to reverse entropy. And thermodynamics tells us very clearly: if you attempt to reverse entropy, you’re going to pay a massive efficiency penalty. That’s the second law—the famous concept of exergy. If it’s bad for hydrogen, it’s worse for direct air capture.

And if you’re foolish enough to say, “I’m going to take hydrogen from water and CO₂ from air and run them through a Fischer-Tropsch process to make a synthetic fuel, just to burn it again”—well, maybe consider that it would be better not to burn anything in the first place. The literature is clear: that pathway is 10 to 20 times less efficient than direct electrification.

And people forget—or conveniently ignore—that it’s not just the electrolyzer that has to run on 100% clean electricity. That electricity has to be new, local, and hourly matched. And you have to power the direct air capture system with that same clean energy. And the Fischer-Tropsch plant too. The total renewable energy requirement is staggering.
So then the question becomes: where are you going to put this thing? We’ve already used most of the easily accessible, high-quality renewables. Are we going to build this massive synthetic fuel complex in the middle of the Sahara Desert? Is that really the signal?

That’s the kind of logic we’re seeing from Germany, for example. I was talking to a Bloomberg reporter who mentioned a story about plans to use solar in Namibia to make hydrogen for export to Germany. I said: so instead of using that African solar power to build up the local economy, you’re going to make hydrogen, find some way to ship it north in some costly and inefficient form, and then burn it in a steel plant in Europe?

That’s your plan? You’re going to build a steel plant that depends on imported hydrogen from an African desert? And what’s truly hard for you and me is trying to talk about this with a straight face—because these are smart people. Serious people. And they’re seriously talking about investing billions into something that depends on multiple miracles to even function.

[MB]: Yeah, a few years ago I did a major study of the Maghreb region and North Africa—Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt—and the European plans to build green hydrogen programs there for export to Europe. I spoke about it at a conference in Tunisia, where I was on a panel, and I said quite plainly: this is all going to fail.

But while the Europeans are being foolish and spending a lot of money, the opportunity for these countries is to leverage that investment. Build out wind, solar, transmission, and storage infrastructure. Use it to decarbonize your own economies. Because whether or not the hydrogen export plans succeed, you’re still going to be affected by the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Everything you currently export to Europe will face increasing carbon tariffs. The way to avoid that? Decarbonize domestically.

But what struck me—and I’ll try to say this politely—is the degree to which Europe still behaves as if it doesn’t have a colonial legacy. It does. And it’s often blind to that fact. The rest of the world isn’t.

There’s a powerful moment captured on video: a German minister—possibly even a chancellor—is speaking to an African leader, laying out climate or energy expectations. And the African leader just blasts them. He says, in effect: you don’t have the moral authority to tell us how to live well. And he’s right.

[JR]: I try to come up with analogies in the book to help people understand this. For me, the best analogy is this: imagine you want to ship water somewhere. So instead of just sending water, you convert it into champagne, ship the champagne, and then distill it back into water at the destination. That’s the plan. And somehow we’re supposed to think that makes sense.

Yes, it’s true that hydrogen can be used for direct energy applications. But is it the only way to do those things? No—not even close.

In the book, I interviewed one of the senior leaders of the International Energy Agency’s hydrogen program, and I quote him at length in the conclusion. One of the reasons people are still so positive about hydrogen is that the IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 roadmap includes it. Hydrogen is in the model because for some sectors, there’s no other obvious pathway. So it becomes a placeholder.

But what he told me was striking. He said, basically, all the major technological advances of the past decade have made hydrogen less plausible, not more. Every big step has been pro-electric: advances in batteries, in heat pumps, in electric vehicles. All of it points to electrification as the cheaper, more efficient, more scalable path.

[MB]: Molten oxide electrolysis is now being developed in labs around the world. Then there’s China’s new green steel process, which is reportedly based on their existing copper production method. Neither of these approaches—molten oxide electrolysis or China’s new process—uses hydrogen at all.

I’m still hearing rumblings, and I haven’t had time to fully dig into them—one person, two eyeballs—but some early indications suggest that molten oxide electrolysis may be using less electricity end-to-end than other decarbonized steelmaking methods. And if it consumes less energy and avoids the complications of hydrogen entirely, it’s probably going to be cheaper too.

[JR]: Right. That’s exactly the point—anything you can do directly with electricity, you’re never going to do more efficiently with hydrogen. And even if electricity has some limitations, they’re nowhere near as severe as the challenges that come with hydrogen.

Here’s what I’d say to the steel industry: let’s list the sectors that are hard to decarbonize but that we don’t have to rush right now. We don’t need to replace all the dirty hydrogen immediately—it only accounts for about 2% of global emissions and comes with high costs. We don’t need to fully decarbonize long-distance air travel yet. We don’t have to replace all international shipping. And we don’t have to fully decarbonize steel today. Those are four of the hardest problems. Let’s give them some time.

Because the choice right now is this: are you going to spend billions building a hydrogen-based steel plant today, even though there’s no green hydrogen available and likely won’t be at scale for years—if ever? Or could we invest in R&D on alternative steelmaking technologies that don’t depend on hydrogen at all? Some of those are already emerging.
Yes, they might not be ready tomorrow. But until we’ve achieved the relatively easy 80 to 90 percent of emissions reductions—through electrification, renewables, efficiency, and grid upgrades—we shouldn’t be spending huge sums to chase technologies that end up costing $500 or more per ton of CO₂ reduced. That’s not climate strategy—that’s waste.

[MB]: I’m a broad-spectrum nerd—I just need to know how things work. And then I leave a breadcrumb trail of what I’ve figured out. Most of the time, I’m not terribly wrong. I get great corrections from people, and that helps refine things. When it comes to steel, I actually see a really encouraging story—with or without hydrogen.
China produces half of the world’s steel, and it’s at the end of its infrastructure boom. It stopped permitting new blast furnaces last year and is pivoting toward electric arc furnaces (EAFs) to make use of its 260 to 280 million tons of domestic scrap. That’s a big shift.

Meanwhile, Europe and the UK are sitting at just 20 to 40% scrap utilization. They’re still exporting tens of millions of tons of scrap each year instead of turning it into new steel, and they’re still running blast furnaces. It’s just baffling.
The United States—despite my various critiques, both historical and current—has been running EAFs for about 70% of its steel demand since around 2000. They’re actually the global leader in electric arc furnace deployment. Yes, they still use natural gas for preheating and could electrify further, but the foundation is already there.

Between the global shift toward electric arc furnaces and a likely reduction in total steel demand, we’re going to see major changes in the steel sector’s carbon footprint. This is one of the few bright spots.

And yes, we did talk about leakage. I mentioned wanting to go in two directions with that. Because, 20 or 25 years ago, hydrogen was hyped as the clean solution—it burns cleanly, and when used in a fuel cell, the only byproduct is water. That was the narrative. But the more we’ve learned about leakage, infrastructure costs, and real-world implementation, the less convincing that story has become.

It’s presented as a climate solution. Yes, we know it leaks—but somehow that’s brushed aside as just a safety issue. And for some reason, people feel comfortable discounting it. Why? I don’t know. But I’m guessing you’ve been following the emerging research on the global warming potential of hydrogen.

[JR]: As it turns out, hydrogen isn’t a greenhouse gas in the traditional sense—it doesn’t directly trap heat. But it is an indirect greenhouse gas, because it extends the atmospheric lifetime of other heat-trapping gases, most notably methane.

Over the past five to seven years, scientists have revisited the numbers. Our understanding of atmospheric chemistry has improved, our models have gotten better, and—frankly—I don’t think anyone ten years ago imagined we’d still be seriously entertaining a hydrogen economy. But once interest resurged, the scientific community took another look. And what they found is concerning.

The 20-year global warming potential (GWP) of hydrogen is now estimated to be around 35, give or take. That’s much higher than we previously thought—and it’s a serious problem.

Historically, the focus was on the 100-year GWP, which is why we didn’t worry too much about natural gas. Carbon dioxide lasts a long time in the atmosphere, so it dominates the hundred-year frame. But now, with growing awareness of short-lived climate forcers, we’re looking at the 20-year impact more closely—because we urgently need to limit warming in the near term to buy time for deeper, long-term solutions.

That’s why methane has come under such scrutiny. Over 20 years, methane has a GWP of about 80. And we now know there’s widespread methane leakage across the economy. Robert Howarth at Cornell was heavily criticized for raising this early on, but he’s since been vindicated. His research showed that you only need 2–3% methane leakage before natural gas is no better than coal. And as it turns out, hydrogen leaks far more easily than methane.

This brings us to the infrastructure problem. How do we transport hydrogen? Ideally, through pipelines—but those require a guaranteed buyer and seller before they’re built. That’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem. If you don’t have established hydrogen demand, no one builds the pipelines. But without the pipelines, no one builds hydrogen-using facilities. So no one goes first. That problem was identified over 20 years ago—and it still hasn’t been solved.

In practice, most hydrogen is likely to be moved by truck, either compressed to very high pressures—up to 10,000 psi—or liquefied. Liquefaction allows for much greater energy density, so you can transport more hydrogen per trip. But it comes with huge energy penalties. And in certain cases—like tunnels—liquid hydrogen poses additional safety concerns that compressed gas might not.

So between its indirect warming effects, its high leakage rate, and the unsolved logistics of safe and efficient distribution, hydrogen as a climate solution looks far less promising than proponents would like us to believe.

[MB]: Right—you’re not allowed to take liquid hydrogen through tunnels. The safety risks are just too high.

[JR]: There are always complications. One of them is that canisters can’t actually dispense all the hydrogen they hold—the pressure dynamics prevent it. These are the kinds of practical realities that get brushed aside in the magical thinking that often surrounds hydrogen.

When people imagine hydrogen-powered trucks, they often talk about using liquid hydrogen—because if you try to cram compressed hydrogen onboard at 10,000 psi, you don’t end up with much fuel. You need specialized, rigid, non-moldable tanks, which limits how you design the vehicle. And every fueling station would need to be equipped with 12,000 psi overpressure pumps just to refill those tanks.

That adds massive complexity and cost. And here’s the kicker: all of that infrastructure is completely worthless if the hydrogen economy doesn’t materialize. If you build 1,000 hydrogen fueling stations with ultra-high-pressure pumps and the market doesn’t take off, you’re left with stranded assets—facilities no one can repurpose and no one wants to maintain.

There are just so many points of failure in this vision, and that’s why no one’s writing the check. The risk is too high, the return too uncertain, and the alternatives—electrification in particular—are simpler, cheaper, and already scaling.

[MB]: And they’re vastly more expensive and far less modular or manufacturable than megawatt-scale charging infrastructure.

[JR]: But if you want to produce green hydrogen locally at each fueling station, then every station needs to be located near a massive renewable energy source. Otherwise, you’re just pulling electricity from the grid—which likely includes fossil generation—and that defeats the whole purpose. You’re not solving the emissions problem; you’re just shifting it around.

[MB]: Let’s face it—even if we power battery-electric trucks with today’s grid electricity, they’re still not as clean as they could be. But they’re vastly better than hydrogen-powered trucks. Hydrogen has about one-third the efficiency of direct electrification for road freight. So if you’re using electricity to make hydrogen, you’re effectively multiplying any CO₂ emissions from that electricity by three.

But let’s get back to the core point—you’re going to a specific place with this, because we’re talking about global warming potential. And that changes how we evaluate all of this.

[JR]: Leakage is a major issue, especially given the pressures involved. That’s why a lot of people suggest switching to liquid hydrogen instead. I keep seeing proposals: liquid hydrogen for planes, liquid hydrogen trucks, trucks powered by liquid hydrogen, or trucks delivering liquid hydrogen. It’s all over the place. But the assumption seems to be that using liquid form somehow solves the storage and transport problem—when in reality, it just introduces a whole new set of challenges.

[MB]: Daimler is heavily invested in this. They’ve even got a member of their board of directors acting as a vocal spokesperson for hydrogen, especially in transport.

[JR]: This is one of the craziest ideas out there. First, liquefying hydrogen consumes about 40% of its energy content—you have to cool it down to near absolute zero. We’re talking much colder than liquid nitrogen or liquid CO₂. The energy inefficiency of that process is staggering.

But it doesn’t stop there. Once the liquid hydrogen is in the tank, it starts to warm up. It sloshes around during transport—and yes, there are actual studies on the sloshing effect. As it warms, it begins to re-gasify, creating pressure inside the tank. And right now, the standard way to deal with that pressure? You vent it. You just let the hydrogen escape into the atmosphere.

[MB]: I will say that Air Liquide actually captures boil-off in Europe—because they’re required to by regulation.

[JR]: And sure, you can pay to do that—capture the boil-off—but in the U.S., I don’t think there’s a single truck doing it. To make that possible, you’d have to scrap the existing fleet and install entirely new technology. And remember, you’re not just capturing the vented hydrogen—you also have to re-cool it.

So somehow this truck that’s already transporting liquid hydrogen would also need to carry the power and equipment to keep it cold enough to prevent boil-off. That’s a huge ask. It means you can’t transport it very far. And that’s the point—I’ve been looking at this, and it just doesn’t add up.

[MB]: Hydrogen leaks everywhere. Every time you do anything with it—every transfer point, every touch point—you’re looking at at least 1% leakage. That’s what the data consistently shows. In California, there was one hydrogen fueling station with 35% leakage. After years of remediation, they managed to bring it down to just under 10%.

In South Korea, when they inspected hydrogen cars and buses, 15% were leaking. An electrolyzer station in Northern Europe—engineered to high standards—still showed leakage rates between 1% and 4%. That’s just the reality.
And when you start multiplying those numbers across a full hydrogen supply chain, things get worse fast. If your value chain has seven or eight transfer points—and many do—you’re easily looking at 10% leakage end-to-end.

Multiply that by hydrogen’s 20-year global warming potential of 35, and you’ve got a significant warming impact. That’s not a climate solution. That’s a problem.

[JR]: It’s a lot of warming—full stop. And even setting aside hydrogen’s global warming potential, the inefficiency alone is reason enough to avoid losing any of it. It’s insane, really. What we’re saying is that our supposed solution to global warming is a gas that extends the lifetime and abundance of methane in the atmosphere.

And then I hear people say, “Well, we can’t do it all with renewables, so we’ll just make the hydrogen from natural gas.” Right—so we’re going to use a leaky fossil system to make hydrogen, which will then leak out itself, further extending the life of methane in the atmosphere. That’s not a solution; it’s a feedback loop. And as I say at the end of the book, the last thing you’d ever want to do in a world worried about near-term warming is expand the use of natural gas. And yet, that’s exactly what hydrogen does.

Even before Trump, there were real questions about whether oil and gas companies were serious about tackling methane emissions. And keep in mind—methane is valuable. You can sell methane. Hydrogen? Not so much. So if we haven’t gotten serious about containing methane, where there’s a profit motive, what makes us think we’ll do better with hydrogen?

Whatever framework you use—three or four miracles, or “turtles all the way down”—the point is the same: there is no foundational layer where this hydrogen economy actually makes sense. It’s built on a stack of wishful assumptions.
And I get it. The climate crisis is dire. Emissions keep rising. It feels like we’re not acting fast enough. But we’re optimistic people—we believe technology can solve problems. And it can. There are real technologies that are scaling today and delivering emissions reductions.

But people need to understand: hydrogen isn’t one of them. Not for energy. Hydrogen isn’t a solution that exists waiting for just one breakthrough to make it all work. It’s not like a “cure for cancer” situation where one discovery unlocks everything. It’s a complex problem that requires solving dozens of hard engineering, safety, infrastructure, and economic challenges—many of which don’t even overlap.

And that’s why the real answer—the practical, scalable, economic answer—is the electrification economy. That’s the future.

[MB]: So we’re at the top of the hour. Normally I’d leave it with an open-ended question, but you’ve got a book coming out in six days. So let people know where they can get it, what formats it’s available in—and if there’s some sketchy black market seller out there, give folks a heads-up to steer clear.

[JR]: Well, look—I get that some people don’t want to give money to Amazon. And I’m not here to defend Bezos. But the truth is, before he became whatever he is now, he did revolutionize book production and delivery. You can think of him a bit like Elon Musk: there’s a “before” and an “after.” The fact remains—Amazon built a remarkably efficient system for both paperback and digital books.

So yeah, if you want to feel conflicted and virtuous at the same time, buy it from Amazon. You really should. Even my publisher doesn’t recommend buying the ebook through other platforms because they can’t legally make it compatible. It’s not a true PDF, and it’s not a true Kindle file, so they’ve explicitly said: don’t buy it there.

This isn’t a book filled with figures or complex formatting, so the Kindle version works great. There will be an audiobook eventually, but for now, grab the paperback or the Kindle.

Personally, I recommend the Kindle. It’s more environmentally friendly, and honestly, it’s more useful to me as an author. I can see what readers are highlighting. And when a bunch of people underscore the same line, I think, okay, maybe that’s the part I should emphasize in a talk.

[MB]: Do you have a launch event or anything planned for the 22nd?

[JR]: No, I’ve been doing book talks, but we live in a world where they don’t really drive sales anymore. Podcasts are the modern book tour, I think..

[MB]: Well, I’m glad to be part of it.

[JR]: Well, it’s electronic, right? And it’s Earth Day—that’s the point. I really worked hard to get this out by Earth Day. So go to Amazon and buy the paperback.

[MB]: Excellent. This is Michael Barnard, the host of Redefining Energy – Tech. My guest today has been Dr. Joseph Romm, whose 20th anniversary edition of The Hype About Hydrogen is out in six days. As he said—buy it on Amazon. Joe, thank you so much for being on.

[JR]: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Trump Signs Executive Orders to Boost Nuclear Energy, Reduce Oversight

Originally published May 23, 2025 by Keerti Gopal for Inside Climate News

President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders Friday focused on speeding up nuclear energy development by reducing regulations that officials said have “choked” the industry for decades.

Many nuclear rules stem from reforms to protect the public after a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979.

Friday’s orders include directives to clear the regulatory path for the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to build nuclear reactors on public lands to power defense facilities and artificial intelligence data centers, speed up the review process and encourage mining for the uranium the industry needs.

One executive order also focuses on reorganizing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency that serves as a watchdog for public health and safety involving nuclear energy. It directs the agency to prepare for layoffs.

“Mark this day on your calendar: This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of over-regulation on industry,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at the signing.

Nuclear energy made up about 19 percent of U.S. utility-scale energy generation as of 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration. Nuclear power reactors don’t spew greenhouse gases or other air pollutants, but they are expensive and time-consuming to build and involve processes, like waste storage and uranium mining, that have a history of environmental and health harms.

Some experts responding to the executive orders said that deregulation and weakening the NRC could do more harm than good, hindering safety and eroding public trust in nuclear projects.

Potential changes to the NRC are particularly concerning, said John Burrows, energy and climate policy director of the Wyoming Outdoor Council, a group focused on public lands and environmental protection.

“The NRC is really respected as an independent agency free of industry and political influence, and to the extent that these executive orders undermine that, I think it poses [a] significant challenge for public buy-in for a lot of these projects,” Burrows said.

The executive order mandating “reform” to the agency questions the NRC’s safety models and warnings about radiation risks, and criticizes what it calls a “myopic policy of minimizing even trivial risks.” The directive also says that the temporary Department of Government Efficiency, a key part of Trump’s efforts to dismantle agencies, will consult on staffing changes.

A senior White House official said that “total reduction in staff is undetermined at this point,” but noted that the orders “call for a substantial reorganization” of the agency. The NRC order left open the possibility of increasing staff in some areas, such as nuclear reactor licensing, even as others are cut.

“The NRC is assessing the executive orders and will comply with WH directives,” NRC public affairs officer Scott Burnell wrote in an emailed statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with the Administration, DOE and DOD on future nuclear programs.”

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Joseph Romm, a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, said that any reduction in capacity at the NRC would be ill-timed with the administration’s proposed ramp-up of nuclear projects.

“This is not the time to be weakening oversight,” said Romm, who was a senior official at the Department of Energy in the 1990s. “It’s very dangerous to be weakening and undermining and politicizing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s oversight at a time when it’s not going to be having to do less work.”

Speeding up the permitting process while accepting proposals for new reactor designs would be “ridiculous and very dangerous,” he added.

The executive orders are part of the administration’s stated push toward “American energy dominance,” and officials said they hope to quadruple the country’s nuclear power production in the next 25 years.

“It’s a hot industry, it’s a brilliant industry, you have to do it right and it’s become very safe and environmental, yes, 100 percent,” Trump said at Friday’s signing.

Members of the Trump administration praised the executive orders at the event, and were joined by several nuclear energy company CEOs, including Joseph Dominguez of Constellation Energy, who said that delays in regulations and permitting can “absolutely kill” companies.

“We’re wasting too much time on permitting and we’re answering silly questions, not the important ones,” Dominguez said.

“Are we doing something about the regulatory in here?” Trump asked Dominguez of the executive orders he was about to sign.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Dominguez responded.

Nuclear energy requires large quantities of uranium, a naturally occurring radioactive element found in soil, rock and water. Mining and processing uranium produces toxic waste and has contaminated water. The Navajo Nation in particular has experienced decades of environmental destruction, death and disease linked to uranium mining for nuclear weapons and then nuclear power.

After years of decreased demand, uranium mining is cropping up again in the Southwest. Amber Reimondo, energy director at Grand Canyon Trust, said Friday’s executive orders could signal a return to the injurious practices that put many communities in harm’s way.

“All these years, the mining industry and the federal government have tried to reassure these communities that they have nothing to fear from future development, and the fact that they’re basically looking to repeat history is really astounding to me,” Reimondo said.

 

Many people believe climate change is happening, but most don’t act. Why?

Originally published on May 27, 2025 by Sarah DeWeerdt for Anthropocene Magazine.

A new study looks systematically for what works—and what doesn’t—to overcome psychological barriers that keep people stuck in the carbon-emissions status quo.

Getting people to think more about the future, especially their own and that of people they care about, is the most effective way to motivate climate action, according to a new study. The findings come from a head-to-head test of a 17 different strategies to inspire people to fight climate change, ranging from viewing information about carbon footprints to brainstorming the personal benefits of environmentally friendly actions.

In the past, most studies of such strategies just tested one intervention at a time to see whether or not it worked. But this made it hard to compare results across studies. Now, researchers are starting to look systematically to find out not just what works but what works best to overcome psychological barriers that keep people stuck in the carbon-emissions status quo.

The new study is an example of an “intervention tournament,” an emerging study design in which a multiplicity of climate interventions are all tested at the same time using the same methodology. Researchers recruited 7,624 adults living in the United States for an online study. They randomly assigned each participant to one of 17 intervention groups or a control group. Each intervention group tested a different psychological strategy to motivate climate action.

To measure the effectiveness of the interventions, the researchers asked participants how often they engage in various climate-related actions, whether they planned to do so more or less often in the future, and how beneficial they thought it would be if many people engaged in the action. Participants also viewed 5 headlines and 3 petitions about climate change and were asked how likely they were to share the information both broadly on social media and directly with people they know.

“We found that guiding people to imagine the future of climate change, especially scenarios that involved oneself and close others, was the most effective way to motivate action,” says study team member Alyssa Sinclair, a postdoctoral researcher in the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Such future-oriented interventions include imagining oneself experiencing negative effects of climate change in the future, and writing a letter to a child about one’s efforts to secure a livable planet for that child to read as an adult.

“Prompting people to relate climate change to themselves and people they care about was the most effective way to motivate sharing news and petitions about climate change,” Sinclair adds. This could be done, for example, through the letter to a child or through an exercise in which participants were asked to describe why news headlines on climate change were relevant to them or people they know.

The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Interventions that aimed to increase people’s appreciation of the effectiveness of climate actions achieved this goal, although they did not actually inspire action itself – a surprising result, Sinclair says. “In prior surveys, we found that perceived impact was associated with intentions to engage in actions that are good for the environment,” she explains. “These results suggest that although increasing perceived impact may be helpful, it’s not always necessary or sufficient for motivating action.”

The researchers also identified interventions that are ineffective at inspiring action or information sharing, notably providing information about one’s personal carbon footprint – despite this being a frequent strategy for climate communication.

Writing a letter to a child also emerged as an effective strategy in another recent intervention tournament, which tested 11 different climate action interventions across 63 countries. In that study, the letter writing was even effective for people on the political right in the U.S., who tend to be skeptical about climate change and climate action.

In the new study, all participants were people who affirm the existence and human cause of climate change, a stance associated with the political left in the U.S. “In ongoing studies, we are further exploring promising interventions that are effective for both liberals and conservatives,” Sinclair reports. The researchers are also testing ways to measure the effects of interventions not just on people’s intentions but on their everyday behavior.

Source: Sinclair A.H. et al.Behavioral interventions motivate action to address climate change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine, AI-generated

What behavioral strategies motivate environmental action?

Originally published May 13, 2025 by Erica Moser for Penn Today

 

A collaborative study from researchers affiliated with the Annenberg School for Communication, Annenberg Public Policy Center, and School of Arts & Sciences tested 17 strategies in an ‘intervention tournament.’

4 min. read

 

 

Image: Irina_Strelnikova via Getty Images

Survey data show that most people believe climate change is happening, but many don’t act, and as a postdoctoral fellow in Annenberg School for Communication Professor Emily Falk’s Communication Neuroscience Lab, Alyssa (Allie) Sinclair has thought a lot about why that might be.

“People may struggle to understand how the issue is relevant to them or people they know [relevance], focus on the present instead of future consequences [future thinking], or feel like their actions don’t matter [response efficacy],” says Sinclair, also a member of Professor Michael Mann’s Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, a joint venture of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and School of Arts & Sciences.

Building off health behavior studies and other literature in psychology, neuroscience, and communication, Sinclair led an interdisciplinary team of researchers examining how to overcome these barriers to climate action. In an “intervention tournament” with 7,624 U.S. adults, Penn researchers including Sinclair, Falk, and Mann tested 17 interventions targeting the themes of relevance, future thinking, and response efficacy to see which were most effective for motivating action.

“We find that helping them think about the future—especially when that future involves themselves and people they care about—is the most effective way to motivate action,” Sinclair says. This is true for motivating both individual actions, such as driving less or eating vegetarian meals, and collective actions, such as donating or volunteering. Interventions emphasizing relevance—why climate change should matter to you and people you care about—were the most effective in motivating people to share articles and petitions. Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There’s been a growing number of efforts from other teams and from us to systematically look at what works and what doesn’t work, and it’s been really gratifying to see the fruits of that—to see that people are open to change when we give them the tools and resources,” Falk says. This study builds on her research on messaging to motivate positive changes in health behaviors.

This study embodies the call in Penn’s strategic framework, In Principle and Practice, for an “all-in” University effort to do more in the challenge of climate.

“This work reflects the emerging collaborations across campus in the climate space, something that I’m trying to foster in my new role as Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy & Action,” Mann says, adding that “understanding how to communicate the science and its implications in a way that leads to useful policy and action is central” to the role.

The work is also inventive in its approach. Sinclair, the paper’s first author, explains that the traditional model of testing whether one idea works makes it difficult to compare findings across studies, so the researchers decided to test many ideas. She says intervention tournaments are not new, but they are rare, as they are ambitious efforts involving a lot of time, energy, and expertise.

Findings

The study—conducted among participants who affirm the existence and anthropogenic causes of climate change—found that two strategies targeting future thinking had the strongest impact on intentions to act: imagining oneself experiencing a negative future that could result from not addressing climate change and writing a letter for a child to read in the future. Both increased intentions to engage in both collective and individual actions.

The letter-writing approach also had the highest impact on intention to share petitions, both broadly on social media and directly with another person. Two interventions targeting relevance had the greatest impact on intention to share news articles: describing why news headlines on climate change matter to them and to people they know. They found that interventions emphasizing response efficacy increased the perceived impact of pro-environmental actions but did not consistently inspire action.

Some strategies exist at the intersection of relevance, future thinking, and response efficacy: brainstorming short-term personal benefits from engaging in pro-environmental behaviors in the next six months and developing a detailed plan to achieve an individual or collective goal. These also increased intentions to act.

Researchers also identified ineffective strategies, showing that receiving information about reducing one’s carbon footprint did not increase intentions to act. This is important because many environmental agencies promote actions focused on individual carbon footprints, but these strategies may not be effective.

“There is a huge gulf between the actions people tend to think make a difference, and the actions that *actually* make a difference when it comes to climate action,” Mann says. “Practitioners, i.e. communicators and organizations that participate in climate communication, could increase their effectiveness by incorporating the key findings of this and related work.”

Sinclair says the perspective of climate scientists has been missing from a lot of behavioral science work on climate change, and Mann advised the team on what actions matter most.

The road ahead

The authors note that while research shows “behavioral intentions are reliably related to actual behavior,” an important goal for future work is to test whether their top-performing interventions change real-world behavior. Such studies could measure the impact on a particular action—such as donating to environmental organizations or signing up for renewable energy programs—or take a longitudinal approach by repeatedly assessing participants’ behaviors in real time.

In the future, the team aims to adapt their findings into interactive online tools, work with museums to highlight the leading interventions through displays and interactive activities, and partner with environmental journalists.

“Overall, we recommend illustrating future scenarios and emphasizing the personal and social impact of climate change as leading strategies to promote behavior change and information sharing,” they write. Additionally, they note that their findings around behavior change, motivation, and information sharing have potential applications in domains beyond climate action, such as for motivating healthy behaviors or civic engagement.

Alyssa H. Sinclair is the Joan Bossert Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media and the Annenberg Public Policy Center and a member of the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

Emily B. Falk is a professor of communication, psychology, marketing, and operations, informatics, and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania; vice dean of the Annenberg School for Communication; director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab; and director of the Climate Communication Division at the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Michael E. Mann is Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action at the University of Pennsylvania; Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science in the School of Arts & Sciences, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication; director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media; and affiliate of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. 

The other co-authors are José Carreras-Tartak, Danielle Cosme, and Kirsten Lydic of the Annenberg School for Communication and Diego A. Reinero of the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

This research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (140D0423C0048), Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Climate Communication Division, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.