Category: News

Originally published by Jake Zuckerman for Cleveland.com on August 18, 2023

COLUMBUS, Ohio – One of the largest distributors of fossil fuel-based natural gas to Ohio homes wants to give customers the option to “offset” the carbon emitted by the gas they buy.

Under the proposal to state regulators, Dominion Energy, which serves 1.2 million customers throughout eastern and northeastern Ohio via its subsidiary East Ohio Gas Company, would task its gas suppliers with planting trees or investing in renewables to balance out the carbon emissions of gas used by customers. Instead of reducing carbon emissions by shifting to nuclear, wind or solar energy generation, the company says it can obtain “net zero” by compensating elsewhere for the planetary heat-trapping effect of the gas it delivers.

Dominion, not the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, would verify that “Decarbon Ohio” gas suppliers acquired enough offsets through “carbon registries” that certify them, according to a company spokeswoman.

“By providing customers a supply option that offsets the carbon emissions related to their consumption of natural gas, the implementation of the program would allow [Dominion], its customers, and suppliers to make meaningful contributions to both the reduction of emissions and the support of sustainable investments,” the company said in a legal filing.

Dominion pitched the idea as a voluntary means for customers to reduce their carbon footprints. Customers would be able to choose from a range of suppliers, including a set that would take steps to offset their carbon emissions and those that would not. So far, Dominion has said it won’t charge customers extra for choosing suppliers that offset carbon emissions, but a final decision will rest with PUCO.

But economists and environmentalists say there’s widespread evidence that the purported offsets don’t reduce emissions in any meaningful way, and they don’t trust a major fossil fuel company to help mitigate climate change.

Originally published by CleanTechnica on August 5, 2023

By Steve Hanley for CleanTechnica

Noted climate researcher Joe Romm has published a paper debunking carbon offsets as basically useless and holding back emissions reductions.

Joseph Romm is a leading expert on climate solutions and clean energy who has spent much of his career working to communicate with the public about these topics. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and has authored countless articles and 10 books on the topics of climate change, clean energy, and communications.

In 2009, TIME named him a “Hero of the Environment” and “the Web’s most influential climate change blogger.” He served as the chief science advisor for the Emmy-award-winning series “Years of Living Dangerously.” His book Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know was called “the best single source primer on the state of climate change” by New York Magazine.

In July of this year, Joe Romm joined the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media as a senior research fellow. Michael E. Mann, the director of PCSSM, welcomed him with this statement:

“We welcome Dr. Romm to Penn and we look forward to working with him in advancing the study and practice of effective climate communication. I have personally known Joe for nearly two decades, since the time I was an early career climate scientist who found myself caught in the crosshairs of the climate change denial machine.

“Joe was one of the first scientists to confront industry-funded disinformation and taught us valuable lessons about science communication, lessons which I’ve taken to heart as I have focused more of my own time and effort on climate communication. We are now at a major crossroads when it comes to urgency of climate action, and I couldn’t be more delighted that Joe is joining us at Penn at this critical juncture in the climate battle.”

One of the first things Joe Romm did after he joined PCSSM was publish a resarch paper with this rather provocative title: “Carbon offsets are unscalable, unjust, and unfixable — and a threat to the Paris Agreement.” In it, Romm doesn’t pull any punches. He basically calls the whole idea of carbon offsets a scam designed to let polluters pretend to be doing something about their climate killing activities while actually doing nothing at all.

Joseph Romm is a leading expert on climate solutions and clean energy who has spent much of his career working to communicate with the public about these topics. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and has authored countless articles and 10 books on the topics of climate change, clean energy, and communications.

In 2009, TIME named him a “Hero of the Environment” and “the Web’s most influential climate change blogger.” He served as the chief science advisor for the Emmy-award-winning series “Years of Living Dangerously.” His book Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know was called “the best single source primer on the state of climate change” by New York Magazine.

In July of this year, Joe Romm joined the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media as a senior research fellow. Michael E. Mann, the director of PCSSM, welcomed him with this statement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=P6ag3b1WCYc ” data-image-caption=”Joe Romm via YouTube

” data-medium-file=”https://cleantechnica.com/files/2023/08/Joe-Romm-YouTube-400×300.jpg” data-large-file=”https://cleantechnica.com/files/2023/08/Joe-Romm-YouTube.jpg” width=”400″ height=”300″>

Joe Romm via YouTube

“We welcome Dr. Romm to Penn and we look forward to working with him in advancing the study and practice of effective climate communication. I have personally known Joe for nearly two decades, since the time I was an early career climate scientist who found myself caught in the crosshairs of the climate change denial machine.

“Joe was one of the first scientists to confront industry-funded disinformation and taught us valuable lessons about science communication, lessons which I’ve taken to heart as I have focused more of my own time and effort on climate communication. We are now at a major crossroads when it comes to urgency of climate action, and I couldn’t be more delighted that Joe is joining us at Penn at this critical juncture in the climate battle.”

One of the first things Joe Romm did after he joined PCSSM was publish a resarch paper with this rather provocative title: “Carbon offsets are unscalable, unjust, and unfixable — and a threat to the Paris Agreement.” In it, Romm doesn’t pull any punches. He basically calls the whole idea of carbon offsets a scam designed to let polluters pretend to be doing something about their climate killing activities while actually doing nothing at all.

In other words, carbon offsets are just another in a never-ending chain of things designed to let fossil fuel companies keep adding unsustainable levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and other climate-killing emissions to the atmosphere while hiding behind a smokescreen of promises and perceived good intentions. Romm’s paper is 50 pages long, so you will be happy to know we will only hit the highlights here.

What Are Carbon Offsets?

Romm writes that the U.S. Government Accountability Office describes carbon offsets as “reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from an activity in one place to compensate for emissions elsewhere.” In a typical transaction, a developed country or company — instead of reducing its own heat-trapping CO2 emissions — pays a developing country to reduce its emissions by an equivalent amount instead. If the buyer purchases enough offsets to cover all of its emissions, then it calls itself “carbon neutral” or “net zero.”

Typical projects are deploying clean energy, planting new trees, and paying people not to cut down trees. But research on offsets shows “the large majority are not real or are over-credited or both,” Dr. Barbara Haya, director of The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, said earlier this year. These problems pervade every major offset program.

Consider the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the world’s largest carbon offsets program, which was launched in 2006. Over 50% of CDM offsets came from China and nearly 70% from China and India. Studies have found the vast majority of those credits were not genuine. Either the projects would have happened anyway (without the offset money) or they were credited for far more reductions than actually occurred, or both.

Also, since 2006, China has built so many coal plants, its yearly CO2 emissions increased by nearly as much as the U.S. emits today. India’s emissions doubled. So, not only was there little actual clean development, but those offsets were sold to developed countries, letting them generate as much as 6 billion tons of CO2 more than they would have otherwise. Too often, offsets cause pollution and discourage genuine CO2 reductions, Romm writes.

A Growing Consensus

Romm notes there is a growing consensus that companies should not be using any offsets they buy from developing countries to make claims about emissions reductions or net-zero emissions. The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which works with thousands of companies, said in 2021, “Net-zero targets are mostly greenwash” that focus on “offsets instead of reducing emissions.” This growing consensus is very visible in the price history since June 2022 of Nature-Based Global Emissions Offsets (NGEOs), such as forest conservation or restoration projects.

The UN is considering changes to the carbon offsets program, but Romm believes they will make it easier for developed countries to reach their Paris climate commitments while making it harder for developing countries to do so. Dr. Haya said recently, “I don’t think it’s fair and I don’t think it’s what we should be doing.” This burden shifting is also not popular with most developing countries. Therefore, we are unlikely to see it happen at scale until those carbon offsets are much more expensive than they are today.

In 2023, the World Bank modeled authorized offsets and found they may well exceed $100 a ton. A high price is especially likely because there are far fewer “negative emissions” — tons of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) — available than were expected. “Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution,” argues a 2023 Nature article. If we don’t “drastically reduce emissions first,” CDR “will be next to useless.”

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is unlikely to generate significant negative emissions by 2050, and scaling it up may well increase global warming for decades. At a June 2023 Direct Air Capture Summit hosted by industry leader Climeworks, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher “told the crowd his company could see its prices remain as high as $300 [per ton] by 2050.”

For most countries, achieving net-zero emissions in the coming decades will involve fewer purchases of carbon removal and more pursuit of domestic emissions reductions, which will likely become more expensive over time. Selling off the easiest emission reductions cheaply now may be a counter-productive policy for any country.

The Takeaway

There’s more — lots more — in the Joe Romm paper. But what little of it we have seen so far is enough to show that carbon offsets are a shell game — a system constructed to allow the biggest polluters to just keep on doing what they have always done, which is dump millions upon millions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere with no regard for the consequences.

Carbon offsets are an attempt to fix the basic problem, which is that the world operates on an economic system that imposes little or no costs for polluting the environment. It reminds me of a quote by Mother Jones, one of the fiercest proponents of “workness,” who said, “I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.”

The fossil fuel industry is shining us all on with scheme after scheme to allow it to continue extracting coal, oil, and methane from the Earth and selling it for another few decades or centuries because they have a perceived duty to maximize shareholder value. One might think the law would impose an additional duty — to not destroy the environment that sustains us — but they don’t teach such “woke” nonsense in business school.

Until they do, humanity is likely doomed to disappear from the face of the Earth within the next century or so. It is startling to realize how willing we are to be bamboozled by charlatans and crooks.

originally published by The Messenger on August 16, 2023

By Andrew P. Jones and Dr. Joseph Romm

Planting 1 trillion trees, a plan recently proposed by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), is not a serious solution to the climate crisis. In fact, it is magical thinking.

The staggering amount of land that would be required defies practical reality. And new research makes the idea even less serious.

Our team at Climate Interactive together with the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative calculated the CO2 emissions the world must avoid or sequester by 2050 to meet the temperature goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, aimed at preventing catastrophic climate impacts. We used our simulator En-ROADS, a global dynamic model designed to compare different climate solutions.

We found that planting 1 trillion trees, under optimistic conditions, would remove only 6% of the needed CO2 reduction. And that would require a wildly unrealistic amount of land, over 2 billion acres, which is to say over 2 billion football fields—greater than the total land area of the contiguous United States.

Instead, we should prioritize protecting existing forests, eliminating the burning of fossil fuels and rapidly reducing the emission of other heat-trapping greenhouse gases like methane.

Why is there such a limited impact from planting 1 trillion trees? First, we don’t actually plant trees; we plant seedlings — and it takes a long time for them to grow big enough to remove much CO2 from the atmosphere.

So this policy wouldn’t help much until the 2040s or 2050s, while we urgently need results in this decade and the 2030s. Some might argue that we could just plant faster-growing trees. But fast-growing tree species, such as Loblolly pines, remove less CO2 every year than slower-growing trees.

And where would we even plant 1 trillion trees? There’s the rub.

We won’t plant them on good cropland because that will be needed to feed 10 billion people by mid-century. A landmark 2022 study in Nature Food found global cropland expansion has been accelerating, adding 250 million acres since 2000. Another study found “the vast majority of models estimate expansion of agricultural land by 2050, including several by more than half a billion hectares” (over a billion acres).

We also shouldn’t plant them in permanently snow-covered areas in Alaska, Canada, the Nordic countries and Russia. The dark forests would absorb more heat than the white snow did and thus “have a warming effect that exceeds the cooling effect of reducing [greenhouse gases],” as the National Academy of Sciences explained in 2019.

And “it would be a mistake to plant trees in natural grassland and savanna ecosystems,” as César Terrer, the lead author of a 2021 Nature study, explained. “Our results suggest these grassy ecosystems with very few trees are also important for storing carbon in soil.”

We shouldn’t plant them in wildfire-prone areas, which are expanding due to climate change.

Finally, most of the supposedly empty, unclaimed land targeted for tree planting is actually claimed and used by indigenous peoples and local communities. Simply seizing it to plant trees would perpetuate centuries of injustice.

For all these reasons, the United States will not be planting anything close to 1 trillion trees, nor will the world. In fact, a November report found the world’s nations had already committed to over 1.5 billion acres of reforestation as part of their Paris Agreement climate pledges. So, most other countries already have their own unrealistic plans for using their own land to plant trees to meet their climate targets.

Planting trees is good for many reasons, but it cannot make a significant dent in the climate problem. For McCarthy to propose planting 1 trillion trees is both magical thinking and a distraction from the real work.

The real work regarding land is to end deforestation and protect existing forests, which are already major removers of CO2, and to stop burning up our forests in wood-based bioenergy plants. And, even more importantly, we must sharply reduce the burning of coal, oil and gas, while cutting methane emissions. That will take real effort, but at least it won’t require magic.

Andrew P. Jones is the executive director of Climate Interactive, which runs climate strategy workshops for global decision-makers.

Joseph Romm, Ph.D., is senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. He is the author of the new report, “Are carbon offsets unscalable, unjust, and unfixable — and a threat to the Paris Climate Agreement?”

Originally published by JoAnn Greco for the Penn Gazette on June 23, 2023

Illustration by Melinda Beck

Michael E. Mann has been a central figure in the battle for the environment since the “hockey stick” graph made him a target for climate change deniers 25 years ago. Now on Penn’s faculty and heading the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, he’s fending off a new generation of “inactivists” comprised of climate change deflectors on the right and doomists on the left to get out the message that it’s still within our power to save the planet.

As about 30 undergraduates sleepily settled into their seats one morning this past February for an introductory level course called Global Climate Change, Michael E. Mann filled the time by asking them what they’d been reading.

Someone mentioned seeing an Associated Press article reporting on a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science predicting that, within the next decade or so, the planet will warm beyond the 2015 Paris Agreement’s call to limit the increase in average global temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. To elude that grim fate, according to the United Nations, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43 percent by 2030. The student pointed out that Mann was quoted in the article as a calming voice to offset the gloomy prognosis.

“Yeah, that spin was actually something I disagreed with,” Mann told the class. “The laws of physics may be immutable, but the laws of policy are not. This is not a cliff—it’s a highway. We may miss the 1.5 exit, but we can still take the 1.6 exit. Our only obstacle is political—a self-defeating prophecy.”

“I feel like over the last couple of years, doomism has become the predominant rhetoric around the issue of climate,” the student complained, frustration quickening her voice. “It’s such a copout.”

“It might be gratuitous of me to say, but I very much concur with you,” Mann responded dryly.

It’s been 25 years since Mann—the star climate scientist who joined Penn’s faculty last fall as a Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science after 17 years at Penn State University—made his first entrance into the great climate change debate after coauthoring a paper that introduced the immediately iconic and enduringly controversial “hockey stick” graph.

So dubbed for its mostly flat and then steeply ascending shape, the graph neatly distilled complex and disparate data to illustrate, simply and clearly, the dramatic uptick in world temperatures during the late 20th century. From the start, climate deniers questioned Mann and his colleagues’ methods and conclusions, and things grew ever nastier over the years.

Mann emerged from the flurry of attacks intent on pursuing his science but also determined to fight climate change deniers in the public arena. Looking back, he offers a summary of the decades-long brawl: “I was subject to attacks on my ideas, my integrity, my livelihood, and my life,” he says. “I do feel privileged, though, to be in the position of being an important voice in the greatest challenge we’ve ever faced. None of that would have happened if not for the hockey stick.”

Drew Shindell, an earth sciences professor at Duke University who’s known Mann for 20 years, observes that “rather than retreating into a shell and not engaging, Mike has used those attacks and made them part of his very compelling personal narrative.”

There’s been no shortage of accolades to balance the attacks. Along with fistfuls of awards and citations from a variety of professional associations, Mann has been rated as among the 50 leading visionaries in science and technology by Scientific American, and his work was cited as contributing to the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore. Just months ago, he was named the 2023 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

In the classroom, he’s a nonintimidating, genial presence, offering patient tutelage and spot-on metaphors delivered with Wallace Shawn-like intonations and quizzical sidelong glances. His commitment as an educator is one of Mann’s “best qualities,” says his friend Bill Nye (aka “the Science Guy”). “He’s someone who is playing at the very top of his game, and here he is teaching classes to undergraduates. He wants them to get excited about their ability to do something about the climate crisis.”

That’s certainly the case for Jasper MacLean C’23, an environmental science major who, though he found the class itself “a bit elementary,” adds that he “really wanted to take it because I like exploring the policy and philosophy behind educating people in these issues. Most professors don’t go into that.”

Mann’s current scientific research includes studies on factors affecting the beginning and end of ice ages, which have implications for predicting the behavior of melting ice sheets in the present day, and on the connections between climate change and extreme weather. With a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication, he also has a platform to combat the forces of denial and spread accurate information on climate change as director of the new Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.

“Michael Mann is not only a distinguished scientist but a highly visible and accessible communicator of science,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “He is very interested in the ways in which media shape our understanding of climate science.”

Mann has been a source for the APPC’s factcheck.org for decades, Jamieson adds. “As Penn was trying to recruit him, I met with Michael and told him we were standing ready to do anything that we could to help him join us.” Next year, she notes, the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists will be held at Penn “as one of the first major activities to tell the world that Michael Mann is here.” In the meantime, the Center has presented several interdisciplinary panels, including an introduction to the business and investment approach known as ESG (for Environmental, Social, and Governance) that takes nonfinancial factors into account, cosponsored with the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and the Wharton Climate Center. Last fall, Jamieson moderated a panel discussion at Perry World House with Mann and Malcolm Turnbull, who advocated for sustainable energy and climate action policies as prime minister of Australia [“Gazetteer,” Nov|Dec 2022].

The Center “will host events to bring together policy and business leaders, researchers, students, and faculty,” Mann says. “We want to propel Penn to the very forefront of the climate conversation today. It’s exciting for me to be here at this time.”

Mann’s latest book, The New Climate War (PublicAffairs, 2021), gives a good sense of how he views the current state of battle. In it, he takes on the fossil fuel industry, internet trolls, and bad actors in government and media, who he says conspire to deflect attention from the problem—since outright denial of the physical evidence of climate change is no longer credible.

This “new climate war” adopts the playbook of deflection campaigns mounted by the tobacco industry and the gun lobby. An early example of the genre in the environmental area was the “crying Indian” anti-littering public service announcement of 1971, released under the auspices of an organization called Keep America Beautiful. Beyond the deception of using a buckskin-adorned Italian American actor with a talent for tearing up as the star, a consortium of beverage companies was behind the ads, with the goal of stopping the passage of bottle bills that would be costly and burdensome for them to implement and manage. The idea in all cases: we as individuals need to step up and take responsibility, absolving corporations from taking a role.

Similarly, climate “inactivists,” as Mann calls them, tout personal actions—recycle, become a vegetarian, stop flying—as the primary solution to the climate crisis. “Though these actions are worth taking,” Mann writes, “a fixation on voluntary action alone takes the pressure off of the push for governmental policies to hold [companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP] accountable.”

Emphasis on the individual’s responsibility is also handy in attempts to divide and conquer, such as by pitting climate scientists and environmentalist factions against each other over how much their “personal carbon footprint” (a concept that BP was an early promoter of in the mid-2000s, Mann says) undermines their authority as advocates for policy change. In one passage, he details a cooked-up controversy in which he was accused of indirectly attacking the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg (for actions like sailing rather than flying across the Atlantic for a UN climate summit)—during an interview where he criticized inactivists for deflecting attention from systemic solutions to personal action. He also recounts stories of other climate scientists, as well as celebrity advocates like Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore, who have been charged with hypocrisy for their excessive consumption of, say, meat, energy, or jet fuel.

Climate change deniers turned deflectors have also worked to thwart economic measures like cap and trade, a carbon tax, or carbon credits designed to level the playing field between fossil fuels and renewables—aided at times, to Mann’s regret, by climate advocates on the left; fan fears that climate action will destroy jobs; and paint renewable energy projects as unreliable because the sun isn’t always shining or the wind blowing.

Another technique involves advocating for “non-solution solutions” like large-scale carbon capture and sequestration or using geoengineering, say, to control the climate—a favorite of former Microsoft CEO, philanthropist, and tech visionary Bill Gates, who Mann notes has spent millions supporting research on the concept. For various reasons, Mann argues, all of these technologies will be ineffective and/or dangerous—and are unnecessary. A truly viable path forward “involves a combination of energy efficiency, electrification, and decarbonization of the grid through an array of complementary renewable energy sources,” he writes. “The problem is that fossil fuel interests lose out in that scenario, and so they have used their immense wealth and influence to … deflect attention from these real climate solutions, promoting in their place ostensible alternatives.”

Mann frequently uses the phrase “urgency and agency” to characterize his own perspective, emphasizing both the enormous stakes involved in climate change and the conviction that acting quickly and forcefully to implement policies to combat it can have an impact. A significant chunk of the book addresses commentators—many of them ostensible allies—who dismiss the second part of that mantra. In a chapter titled “The Truth Is Bad Enough,” he takes on climate activists who display “a distinct appetite for all-out doomism—portraying climate change not just as a threat that requires urgent response, but as an essentially lost cause, a hopeless fight.”

Citing both fringe outlets and high-profile examples like the novelist Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker article, “What If We Stopped Pretending? The Climate Apocalypse Is Coming. To Prepare for It, We Need to Admit We Can’t Prevent It,” and journalist David Wallace-Wells’ New York Magazine article and later book The Uninhabitable Earth, Mann argues that their claims about runaway temperatures and cascading effects leading to a hellish future landscape have little basis in climate science (which has actually done a pretty good job of predicting impacts so far) and also reinforce more general doubt and distrust of that science—playing into the hands of climate deflectors/deniers. Such “climate doom porn” may now be “a greater threat to climate action than outright denial,” he suggests.

As an alternative, Mann offers his own four-point battle plan for the new climate war: Disregard the doomsayers. (“The climate crisis is very real. But it is not unsolvable. And it’s not too late to act,” he writes. “Every ounce of carbon we don’t burn makes things better.”) Take to heart the example of young people like real-life activist Thunberg and the fictional Sophia, protagonist of a children’s book Mann coauthored, The Tantrum That Saved the World. (“The children speak with a moral clarity that is undeniable to all but the most jaded and cynical. It is a game-changer.”) Don’t allow climate denialists to pose as good faith “skeptics” and focus on educating “those who are reachable, teachable, and movable.” Finally, while acknowledging the value of individual action, concentrate on systemic changes aimed toward decarbonizing the energy sector. On this last point, the coronavirus offered a telling lesson “about the limits of behavior change alone,” when widespread lockdowns only cut global emissions by 4 percent.

Mann grew up in Amherst, where his father was a math professor at the University of Massachusetts. He took to math and science early—he remembers stopping by Penn to pay homage to ENIAC while on a family visit to Philadelphia—but mostly as the path of least resistance, rather than out of a passion for the subjects.

That changed when he encountered the work of charismatic scientist, author, and television personality Carl Sagan, whose PBS program Cosmos premiered when he was a high school freshman. “Sagan showed me the magic of scientific inquiry,” he writes, and “made me realize it was possible to spend a lifetime satisfying one’s scientific curiosity by posing and answering fundamental existential questions.” Later in the 1980s, Sagan became an ardent opponent of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative and was subjected to the kind of personal harassment and professional discrediting that Mann himself would later contend with. In another common thread,  Sagan’s controversial nuclear winter simulations “were based on early-generation global climate models.”

By that time, Mann had made his way from Amherst to college at UC-Berkeley, where he double majored in applied math and physics. He then moved on to Yale for master’s degrees in physics and a PhD in geology and geophysics. In his second year in New Haven, he found himself idly thumbing through a course catalog looking for a change of pace. He noticed a class offered by Barry Saltzman, a giant in the field of weather and climate. For a physics and math guy like Mann, though, what was really intriguing was the fact that Saltzman’s work during the early 1960s had become the acknowledged progenitor to chaos theory as developed by fellow meteorologist Edward Lorenz, which seeks to define the patterns underlying seemingly random events. Math and physics and climate—it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Mann became interested in studying the natural variability of climate and wound up with Saltzman as his PhD advisor.

An encounter at a wine tasting between Mann’s father and Raymond S. Bradley, head of the department of geosciences at UMass Amherst, proved fortuitous. When Lawrence Mann told the geography professor of his son’s studies at Yale, Bradley invited the younger Mann to come back home to Amherst for his postdoc. “The funny thing,” recalls Mann, “is that Ray’s son was my 10th grade lab partner in biology!”

Mann was soon ensconced in an upstairs apartment in his parents’ house and ready to work with Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, a University of Arizona specialist in interpreting proxy climate indicators (as opposed to actual temperature recordings) like tree rings, ice cores, and coral. Their resulting paper, with Mann as lead author, analyzed climate data back to the year 1400 and was published in Nature on Earth Day 1998, a year that would turn out to be the warmest one since modern climate records had begun 150 years earlier. The study was picked up by major dailies, newsweeklies, magazines like Rolling Stone, and national broadcasts.

The attention led to another pleasant surprise for Mann—his selection as a lead author for the then-forthcoming IPCC Third Assessment Report (to be published in 2001). In early 1999, Mann and colleagues also released a follow-up to the 1998 paper that incorporated data going back to 1000.

Gavin A. Schmidt, now director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, remembers those days well. “I was at McGill University working in a group that was focused on climate and this was a new thing at the time,” he says. “Climate was studied by atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, paleontologists, and Michael and I came from physics and math, so our trajectories kind of reflected that. We were trying to work out how we could make a mark.”

Mann’s work, beyond its importance to climate science, was “sociologically interesting” because of those silos. While analyses of paleoclimate had been going on since before the ice age cycles were discovered in the 1960s, “the way of working in that field was for many individual people to focus on many individual sites going back in time,” Schmidt says. “There wasn’t a culture of synthesis. Mike is coming from outside of the field, and he’s coming in with this notion of, ‘What can I do, using my math and my stats?’ and then Ray is like, ‘Why don’t we put it all together?’ And that’s the genesis of the hockey stick,” he recalls.

“Initially it was like, this is great …. We would hang out and Mike was basking in the attention, being invited to give keynotes—it was a big step up for him professionally,” Schmidt adds. “Then we started to see the bad faith attacks because it became so high profile.” While the specifics varied, they all boiled down to Mann “getting blamed for the fact that it’s obviously warming up over the 20th century, and to a lot of people who would rather that that not be true—including the fossil fuel industry—he became the fall guy.”

Attempts to undermine the hockey stick began in the late 1990s and conservative media outlets and politicians continued raising questions for years. In 2006, the National Academy of Sciences even felt compelled to put out a statement that the conclusion of Mann and his colleagues “has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world.”

In 2009, emails written by Mann and other climate scientists were hacked in an effort to discredit them, an occurrence inevitably dubbed Climategate. Later that year, factcheck.org presented an analysis of the claims. “The 1,000-plus e-mails sometimes illustrate the hairier side of scientific research,” it read in part. “Criticisms of climate change are sometimes dismissed as ‘fraud’ or ‘pure crap’ …. Other messages, like a 2007 e-mail from Michael Mann of Penn State University, show indignation at being the target of skeptics’ ire …. Claims that the e-mails are evidence of fraud or deceit, however, misrepresent what they actually say.”

Nevertheless, Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, launched a two-year investigation of Mann, looking for evidence of fraud during his time as a researcher and professor at the University of Virginia. And in 2012, a blog post on the website of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (whose self-described mission is to “reform America’s unaccountable regulatory state”) compared Mann to disgraced Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, “except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data”—a comment that was repeated by outlets including the National Review and Wall Street Journal.

“It really never stopped,” Mann says.

“I would have been very happy staying in the background doing the science that I love doing,” he adds. “But they engaged me, to attack and vilify and intimidate me in a cynical effort to discredit my work. I’ve personally seen the enemy close up for decades—I see how they operate and the tactics they use. It took a toll, for sure.”

The resulting atmosphere of controversy, Mann believes, made funding agencies shy away from supporting him. “Personally, I received the nastiest emails you can imagine; there were death threats aimed at me and my family. I received an envelope containing white powder.”

Eventually Mann and his peers learned how to fight back.

“We ended up going to workshops on journalism and media,” Schmidt says. “We learned how to tell a story, how to get down to what’s important for people to understand, how to combat bad information. How to get the scientist back into the discussions.”

One of the people Mann turned to was Susan Joy Hassol, a science writer and consultant who directs Climate Communication, a nonprofit that helps climate scientists learn how to get their message across to the general public simply and without jargon. Mann is listed as a science advisor to the organization.

“Mike has learned how to get his wonderful sense of humor through in his writing and to use metaphor and turns of phrase like the ‘urgency and agency,’ which came naturally out of his brain and is just perfect,” Hassol says. Some 20 years after they first met, the two still regularly team up to write op-eds around teachable moments like extreme weather events—see, for example, “The Heat Dome? Yeah, It’s Climate Change,” in the New York Times in June 2021, and “Enjoy the Weather. Worry About the Climate” in the Hill, last February.

Along with Bradley, Schmidt, and a few others, Mann also launched realclimate.org in 2004, when the notion of direct peer-to-peer communication via blogging was new. “The trigger was the movie The Day After Tomorrow,” Schmidt says with a laugh. Premised on a sudden climate shift that triggers a new ice age, the film had, he quips, the “distinction of being the best movie that has a paleoclimatologist as a hero and the worst movie that has a paleoclimatologist as a hero.” Still, with headlines like “Some new CMIP6 MSU comparisons,” the site is a pretty wonky and insidery effort.

“We in the scientific community produce things like giant IPCC assessments,” says Shindell, who has also contributed to the blog. “But basically the story remains the same—you have to stop using fossil fuels or you’re going to wreck the planet—which is what it was decades ago.

“Communicating the societal impacts of climate change and of different mitigation options, I think, makes the discussion more palatable,” he adds. “If you can say, these many fewer people will die from heat waves, the number of children’s asthma hospitalizations will decrease by this much, this many more people will be employed in new energy industries …”

When it comes to putting the crisis into a relatable context, Mann for one “leaves no stone unturned,” Hassol says.

Each of Mann’s books have tackled the warming problem in a different way. Published in 2008, Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, written with Penn State Professor of Geosciences Lee R. Kump, is a graphics-intense layperson’s introduction to the nearly two decades worth of lengthy IPCC reports. Four years later, Mann’s second book, the memoirish The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, delved into the science behind that graph, the resulting controversy, and Climategate. Four years after that, Madhouse Effect, created with coauthor, Tom Toles, a Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, offered a one-two punch of clever language and witty drawings to debunk climate deniers.

Mann contributed scientific background and explanatory text suitable for young children for The Tantrum That Saved the World, by writer and illustrator Megan Herbert, in which the teenaged Sophia one day finds a parade of displaced animal, insect, and then human refugees arriving at her doorstep and vows to help them by marching, with protest sign aloft, to City Hall, where she is joined by her young friends. The book ends with Sophia standing on the steps of the White House. Originally self-published by Herbert in 2017, Tantrum came out a year before the then-15-year-old Thunberg began organizing her “Fridays for Future” campaign, leading thousands of students to skip school each week to protest for more action against climate change.

Following last year’s New Climate War will be Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis, scheduled for publication this fall. “Climate variability has at times created new niches that humans or their ancestors could potentially exploit, and challenges that at times have spurred innovation,” reads the book’s advance notice.

In considering the opportunities and challenges of climate swerves—and the potential disaster when things get too far off course—it’s impossible not to think of COVID-19 and the crisis the world has recently endured. “The novel pandemic, in terms of forcing animals out of their natural habitats and into contact with human populations was, like climate change, a consequence of our destruction of our earth,” Mann observes. “It also drove home that anti-science is deadly: the defiance of public health messaging, refusal to get vaccinated and to wear masks, that became part of a tribal identity. It was right out of a dystopian nightmare.

“My childhood hero, Carl Sagan, basically presages all of this,” he continues. “I quote a passage from him in The New Climate War, and I tweet it often. It’s from The Demon-Haunted World.” The segment reads:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when … we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness … . The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media … lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

And yet Mann remains optimistic. “It’s never been in my constitution to throw in the towel,” he says. “My battles now are not so much about defending my science, or even climate science, but battling the forces of inaction. Fortunately, it’s a battle in which there are many allies—a massive movement that I wouldn’t have envisioned years ago.”

Originally published by Chris Lang for REDD-Monitor on June 29, 2023

Dr Joseph Romm is a US writer and climate expert. In 2006, he set up the Climate Progress blog. Three years later, Time magazine described Climate Progress as “one of the most influential global-warming blogs on the Internet”. The blog closed in 2019.

Romm recently joined the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media as a Senior Research Fellow. His first contribution is a white paper titled, “Are carbon offsets unscalable, unjust, and unfixable – and a threat to the Paris Climate Agreement?”

Romm’s paper is detailed, 50 pages long, and includes 158 footnotes. REDD-Monitor will come back to Romm’s paper in future posts – for example, Romm’s analysis of corresponding adjustments, Natural Climate Solutions, and tree-planting offsets, among other things.

Romm writes that,

Today, every major offset program still has the same exact problems researchers and investigative reports have been identifying for more than two decades. That suggests the core problems are inherent to offsets and intractable – the impossibility of ensuring additionality or of counting them accurately or of solving the double counting problem in a just way.

And Romm concludes that “carbon offsets are unscalable, unjust, and unfixable – and a threat to the Paris Agreement”.

One of Romm’s findings is that, “There is a growing consensus that companies should not be using any offsets they buy from developing countries to make claims about emissions reductions or net zero.”

Romm illustrates the point with a graph showing the collapse in the price of Nature-Based Global Emissions Offsets since June 2022:

“The offset market is broken, and too far gone to fix”

Romm starts with a look at the Clean Development Mechanism. “Recent studies have estimated the CDM may well have led to a substantial increase in CO₂ emissions – 6 billion tons, in the case of one 2021 study,” Romm notes.

The reductions in developing countries would have happened anyway, and the reductions were far smaller than the number of carbon offsets that they generated. On the other hand, the greenhouse gas emissions that rich countries emitted after buying CDM offsets were real.

“One 2018 study explained the mechanism ‘does not reduce global emissions’ by its very design,” Romm writes.

Romm notes that,

[T]he U.N. has failed in the last two decades to prove it can create or run a credible official regulated offset market—the Clean Development Mechanism. The flaws in the CDM have been detailed again and again in the literature and media, yet the UN has failed to fix them.

Romm also looks at the voluntary carbon markets. He argues that the sale of voluntary carbon offsets soared in 2021 to US$2 billion as a result of the Paris Agreement, the increased focus on limiting global heating to 1.5°C, and the large number of countries and companies making net-zero pledges.

In October 2021, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) wrote that nearly 70% of the global economy had committed to net-zero by 2050. But “Net-zero targets are mostly greenwash,” SBTi stated. The net-zero targets focus on “offsets instead of reducing emissions”.

Mark Trexler, who worked on the first offsetting project in 1988, told Romm that, “I don’t think corporate net-zero leads to decarbonization.”

And Barbara Haya, Director of the University of California’s Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, told Romm that, “the offset market is broken, and too far gone to fix.”

Romm’s paper highlights the problems with carbon offsets: additionality and over-crediting; leakage; permanence; and double counting.

Double counting

Romm spends a considerable part of his paper looking at double counting and “corresponding adjustments”, which is the proposed solution to double counting at the UNFCCC level.

He summarises corresponding adjustments as follows: “The buyer gets to pretend the reductions occurred in its country, while the seller must pretend their own emission reductions never occurred at all.”

Romm points out that “The buyer just made achieving their Paris climate commitment easier, while the seller just made achieving theirs harder.”

Barbara Haya told Romm that, “I think corresponding adjustments reveal what’s wrong with the current system, but I don’t think it’s fair and I don’t think it’s what we should be doing.”

Reputational and legal risks

Romm quotes from a February 2023 article in The Drum, a media and marketing website. The article’s headline states that, “Carbon offsets present an emerging risk to advertisers”. The subheading continues on the theme, “Bad practice and questionable science in the voluntary carbon markets mean firms relying on offsetting to hit net zero targets risk greenwashing – and the law might be coming for them.”

Switzerland’s advertising regulator recently upheld complaints against FIFA’s claims that the World Cup was “carbon neutral”. In June 2022, the Netherland’s Advertising Code Commission ruled, for the fourth time that year, that Shell’s adverts were misleading. In October 2022, Shell lost its appeal against the Commission.

And in May 2023, Delta Airlines was sued in California because the company claimed to have committed to being the “first carbon neutral airline globally”.

Romm writes that,

In September 2022, the global law firm Quinn Emanuel issued a 9-page memo to its clients titled, “Carbon Offsets: A Coming Wave of Litigation?” The firm, which has over 1000 lawyers operating in 12 countries, cited a variety of different offset-related lawsuits. It explained, “The VCM’s lack of oversight, combined with the difficulty in accurately measuring the impact of carbon offsets, makes it ripe for litigation.” This is particularly the case because “Regulators, investors, and NGOs are increasingly scrutinizing the quality of offsets used by companies to meet ‘net zero’ goals.”

Romm’s paper is not just a critique of carbon offsetting. He also proposes a solution to the obvious failure of offsetting:

[R]eplace offsets with programs whereby the richer countries and corporations focus on 1) meeting their climate targets by reducing their own emissions and 2) helping the poorer countries reduce their emissions without offset projects.

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Originally posted by Penn Communications on June 26, 2023

Joseph Romm, a leading expert on climate solutions and clean energy—and on communicating about these issues to the public—has joined the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media (PCSSM) as a Senior Research Fellow.

Romm holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and has authored countless articles and 10 books in the areas of climate change, clean energy, and communications. In the 1990s, Romm spent five years working on climate solutions at the U.S. Department of Energy. For three years, he helped to run the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, ultimately serving as Acting Assistant Secretary, where he oversaw $1 billion in R&D and demonstration of low-carbon technologies. This included renewables, building efficiency, industrial decarbonization, energy storage, bioenergy, hydrogen, and electric cars.

In 2008, Romm was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for “distinguished service toward a sustainable energy future and for persuasive discourse on … sustainable technologies.” In 2009, Rolling Stone named him one of 100 “people who are reinventing America,” and Time named him “Hero of the Environment” and “the Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.” Romm was Chief Science Advisor for the Emmy-winning docuseries, “Years of Living Dangerously.” His Oxford University Press book, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, 3rd Edition, was called “the best single-source primer on the state of climate change” by New York Magazine.

Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and the director of PCSSM, said, “We welcome Dr. Romm to Penn and we look forward to working with him in advancing the study and practice of effective climate communication. I have personally known Joe for nearly two decades, since the time I was an early career climate scientist who found myself caught in the crosshairs of the climate change denial machine. Joe was one of the first scientists to confront industry-funded disinformation and taught us valuable lessons about science communication, lessons which I’ve taken to heart as I have focused more of my own time and effort on climate communication. We are now at a major crossroads when it comes to urgency of climate action, and I couldn’t be more delighted that Joe is joining us at Penn at this critical juncture in the climate battle.”

At Penn, Romm will be conducting research and producing a series of white papers examining the scalability of key proposed climate solutions, including the recently released “Are carbon offsets unscalable, unjust, and unfixable—and a threat to the Paris Climate Agreement?”

Click here for more information visit.

Originally published June 28, 2023 by Eric Roston for Bloomberg

Dr. Joseph Romm, a leading expert on climate solutions and clean energy—and on communicating about these issues to the public—has joined the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media (PCSSM) as a Senior Research Fellow.

Dr. Romm holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and has authored countless articles and 10 books in the areas of climate change, clean energy, and communications. In the 1990s, Romm spent five years working on climate solutions at the U.S. Department of Energy. For three years, he helped to run the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, ultimately serving as Acting Assistant Secretary, where he oversaw $1 billion in R&D and demonstration of low-carbon technologies. This included renewables, building efficiency, industrial decarbonization, energy storage, bioenergy, hydrogen, and electric cars

In 2008, Romm was elected a Fellow of the AAAS for “distinguished service toward a sustainable energy future and for persuasive discourse on … sustainable technologies.” In 2009, Rolling Stone named him one of 100 “people who are reinventing America,” and Time named him “Hero of the Environment” and “the Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.” Romm was Chief Science Advisor for the Emmy-winning docuseries “Years of Living Dangerously.” His Oxford University Press book, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, was called “the best single-source primer on the state of climate change” by New York Magazine.

Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and the director of PCSSM, says “We welcome Dr. Romm to Penn and we look forward to working with him in advancing the study and practice of effective climate communication. I have personally known Joe for nearly two decades, since the time I was an early career climate scientist who found myself caught in the crosshairs of the climate change denial machine. Joe was one of the first scientists to confront industry-funded disinformation and taught us valuable lessons about science communication, lessons which I’ve taken to heart as I have focused more of my own time and effort on climate communication. We are now at a major crossroads when it comes to urgency of climate action, and I couldn’t be more delighted that Joe is joining us at Penn at this critical juncture in the climate battle.”

At Penn, Romm will be conducting research and producing a series of white papers examining the scalability of key proposed climate solutions, including the recently released “Are carbon offsets unscalable, unjust, and unfixable—and a threat to the Paris Climate Agreement?”

For more information visit, web.sas.upenn.edu/pcssm

Originally published by The Philadelphia Inquirer and written by Will Bunch on June 8, 2023

Fans who showed up early at Citizens Bank Park for a scheduled Phillies game on Wednesday were stunned to learn the air was too dangerous to play baseball, the first-ever “smoke-out” for a team that for decades played in the old Connie Mack Stadium amid the then-belching smokestacks of North Philadelphia.

Only one thing seemed clear as the smoke from wildfires across Quebec and the rest of Canada enveloped the Eastern seaboard: Almost no one around these parts has seen anything like this.

But Michael E. Mann has.

Mann is the world-renowned climate scientist who came to Philadelphia last year to lead the University of Pennsylvania’s new Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. In something of a coincidence, Mann spent late 2019 and early 2020 on a sabbatical teaching in Sydney — the peak of Australia’s devastating “Black Summer,” when wildfires triggered by record heat and drought darkened the skies just as they did here this week.

“It’s déjà vu for me,” Mann told me Wednesday. “I could see and smell the wildfire smoke from my front door — Sydney had the worst air quantity in the world at that time,” almost identical to what he saw here in Pennsylvania. But while eastern North America may be copying the “Black Summer” storyline so far, it’s much less certain whether our continent’s latest brush with disaster will have the same hopeful ending.

Down under, the spate of bushfires blamed for at least 33 human deaths and the loss of countless animals has triggered major changes. Australia’s then-prime minister, Scott Morrison, was widely lambasted for his response to the crisis and lost his job in 2022’s elections, with the more liberal Labour Party — along with a surge of Green Party environmentalists — taking control. In April, new prime minister Anthony Albanese pushed through that nation’s toughest climate law, which aims to steeply reduce carbon emissions by 43% by 2030.

Here in the United States, California, of course, has had its own devastating wildfires, while other parts of the nation have suffered multiple “once-in-a-hundred-years” floods or endured hurricanes like 2022’s Ian that strengthened over the overheated seas.

But can the stunning events and unforgettable images of the last couple of days — especially in New York, home to America’s “deciders” of big business, finance, and the media — become similar to what Mann and others now see as “a tipping point” in Australia? June 7, 2023, was the worst air-quality day in New York City’s history, a day when the World Trade Center disappeared into the blinding, orange apocalypse. But will historians also look back on Wednesday as the day everything changed for the climate — much as Jan. 6, 2021, has become for U.S. democracy?

I want to feel hopeful, but — maybe it’s the toxic particles I inhaled Wednesday on an ill-advised trip to the dog park — I keep coughing up cynicism.

In Washington, D.C., staffers at the National Zoo rushed a 2-week-old baby gorilla inside to avoid the hazardous air, but government officials are still racing ahead with a deal to reward Senate swing vote Joe Manchin with approval of a $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline that even the most conservative estimates concede would add between six million and 16 million tons of planet-warming carbon emissions to the atmosphere every year.

As smoke closed in on the statehouses of the East Coast, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin picked Wednesday — of all days in the history of the planet — to take Virginia out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the pact of Northeastern states working together to curb emissions that warm the planet and lead to more frequent, worse wildfires. In Harrisburg, Republican state senators — in a party-line vote on hopefully doomed legislation — voted to change the name of a key state agency from the Department of Environmental Protection to the Department of Environmental Services, because heaven forbid anyone thinks that Pennsylvania wants to protect its environment.

» READ MORE: Why top U.S. climate scientist moved to Philly | Will Bunch Newsletter

Some of the worst haze shrouded Bedminster in central New Jersey — the golf course where an otherwise besieged Donald Trump hopes to celebrate the looming partnership between the Trump-friendly LIV Golf — backed by billions of petrodollars from the journalist-bone-sawing, human-rights-abusing Saudi Arabian regime — and the PGA Tour. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see the lung-paralyzing smoke as a metaphor for this deal that shows how our addiction to the endless pile of dirty money soiled by fossil fuels is poisoning our very humanity.

So far, the only fog that’s lifted this week is the cloud of industry-funded denial that has suffocated our politics for decades. It used to be easy for your Fox News and AM talk radio types to claim that climate change was just a symptom of liberals’ “woke mind virus.” It’s impossible to deny global warming when you can’t see to the end of your block.

On Thursday, some 92 wildfires continued to burn out of control in Quebec, the epicenter of hundreds of fires that have been raging across Canada. So far, 2023 has been much hotter than normal for our northern neighbors, particularly in eastern Canada, which posted its driest April on record. The more than nine million acres that have burned there this year is close to an all-time high, even though the wildfire season doesn’t end until September.

Mann told me that both the Canadian wildfires and the southward path of the smoke are linked to “unusual jet stream patterns.” He told me that eastern North America is one location where we expect the greatest increase in combined heat and drought from human-caused warming. “Put that all together, and it’s a toxic climate change brew,” the Penn climate scientist said. “This is a sign of far worse things to come if we don’t reign in fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions.”

Yet that’s not the vibe among our nation’s leadership — not yet, anyway. The contradictions start at the very top. President Joe Biden — to his credit — won passage in his recent Inflation Reduction Act of some $369 million for programs like clean energy and electric cars, a big win for the planet. Yet, Biden also greenlit the Manchin-backed pipeline, expanded oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, and fist-bumped the Saudi oil dictator.

Just imagine if Winston Churchill, facing the existential threat of World War II, had declared that “we shall fight on the beaches” before announcing business deals with Germany’s Volkswagen and IG Farben because he wanted to hold down costs for the British middle class. In a perfect world, Biden would have donned an N-95 mask Wednesday and spoken in front of the orange blur of the Statue of Liberty to declare unconditional war on fossil fuels.

Will nature’s smoke alarm serve as an American wake-up call, or will we hit snooze one more time?

We talk on and on in American politics about freedom, but is there any liberty greater than the right to inhale clean air? It’s no wonder “I can’t breathe!” — the last words of Eric Garner — became the rallying cry of the fight for civil rights in the 21st century. This week, nearly 100 million Americans got a whiff of the struggle for this basic right. Will we remember when the wind shifts — and finally do something?

Published June 8, 2023

Will Bunch

I’m the national columnist — with some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government.

The Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media is thrilled to announce that three post-doctoral researchers will be joining the center starting Summer 2023! Keep reading for more on our incoming post-docs.