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The Blue-State Governors Who’ve Gone Weak on Climate Policy

If you scroll California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press releases, a portrait emerges of a undaunted climate fighter. One day he’s “paving [the] way for climate pollution-cutting technology”; another he’s launching “new international climate partnerships as Trump unleashes unhinged UN rant.” Last month, he announced the signing of a suite of measures “saving billions on electric bills, stabilizing [the] gas market and cutting pollution.” But look under the hood, and his heroic self-image dims somewhat. That big legislative package, for instance, also increases oil drilling and sets up a regional electricity market that “could tether California to fossil-fuel states at a time when the Trump administration is moving to roll back clean energy,” CalMatters reported.With Trump in death-drive mode on climate, canceling renewable energy projects left and right and even forbidding federal agencies to use language such as “climate change,” “green,”or “sustainable,” blue-state governors are well positioned to distinguish themselves and their party on the issue. They also have a responsibility: The states are our best hope for policy at a scale to match the problem. Yet a worrying trend is taking shape: Blue-state governors are making a big show of battling the Trump administration, but on climate issues they’ve been disappointing—and sometimes downright infuriating. Last month’s climate package wasn’t the California Democrats’ first flub this year. Over the summer, in what Politico dubbed the state’s “Great Climate Retreat,” they weakened limits on the carbon intensity of transportation fuels, rolled back environmental reviews for new housing, and lifted a cap on oil industry profits. “California was the vocal climate leader during the first Trump administration,” Chris Chavez, deputy policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air, told Politico. “It’s questionable whether or not that leadership is still there.” In Maryland, a climate advisory panel appointed by Governor Wes Moore has hit the brakes on a carbon trading measure, and late last month the state Department of the Environment, or MDE, appeared to cave to the Trump administration in abandoning some environmental justice metrics, which many fear means abandoning Black and brown communities to the whims of polluters. “It just appears to me that MDE blatantly does not want to be accountable in the massive pollution and the overburden of these heavy industrial industries,” Kamita Gray, a community leader in Brandywine—a majority-Black town that’s home to gas-fired power plants, a coal ash dump, and a Superfund site—told Maryland Matters.Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania too is under fire from climate critics. As attorney general, he authored a solid road map for protecting Pennsylvanians from the harmful environmental and health effects of fracking, but in his two years as governor he has allowed companies to be secretive about the chemicals used in fracking, and has not pushed to pass any laws curbing the industry. The Environmental Health Project, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, said “residents are still waiting for meaningful action. Our assessment concludes that the Shapiro administration has not fulfilled the commitments the governor made to Pennsylvanians in general and to frontline communities in particular.”And then there’s New York. Governor Kathy Hochul has been failing to follow the decarbonization timeline that was outlined in the state’s 2019 climate law, prompting environmental justice groups to sue her. She has delayed plans for “cap and invest” and is dragging her feet on building public renewables (despite the state’s landmark Build Public Renewables Act, which passed in 2023). She has seemingly caved to Trump by going ahead with gas pipelines she previously rejected. And it’s unclear whether she will sign a repeal of the outdated “100 foot rule,” which requires utility ratepayers to subsize the cost of connecting new customers to the gas system, a reform that has long been a priority of the state’s climate movement.Part of what’s so self-destructive here is that energy affordability is a highly salient issue for voters, taking center stage, for example in the governor’s race in New Jersey, where electricity rates have risen 22 percent. Interviewed in Friday’s New York Times on this subject, David Springe of the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates described electricity as “the new eggs,” an indicator of how costly daily life is for most Americans. Republicans in New York have seized on the problem as an opportunity to blame Democrats and climate-friendly policies. Stephan Edel of New York Renews, a progressive coalition fighting for clean energy, told me the governor “has spoken really eloquently about the need to do something about affordability.” Indeed, she endorsed Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist, for New York City mayor, partly for this reason. She often uses “affordability” to justify rightward shifts or retreats from climate policy, he said, adding that, inexplicably, she also shies away from touting the affordability benefits of climate policies that she does support. For example, in the state budget last year, she agreed to invest over a billion dollars in funding for climate programs, including one that will help make homes for low-income New Yorkers more energy efficient and another that will save school districts money by shifting to electric school buses. Instead of touting those wins for affordability—or embracing the potential of publicly owned renewables to do the same—she’s embraced the Republican narrative that climate policy and affordability are at odds.By contrast, Mikie Sherill in New Jersey has been touting clean energy as a solution to energy affordability woes. If she gets elected and continues this path, more blue state governors should follow her lead. The Democratic base is desperate to see its leaders stand up to Trump on both climate and affordability. (And when Democratic governors do stand up to Trump on anything—Illinois’s JB Pritzker on the militarization of Chicago, Maine’s Janet Mills on health care—their poll numbers spike.)And the reverse is also true—failing to differentiate themselves from Trump has been political suicide for many Democrats. “Every time one of these elected officials says, ‘I’m going to stand up to Trump, I’m going to protect affordability, I’m going to address climate change,’ and then doesn’t do it,” that’s a win for the Republicans, Edel said, because it fuels low turnout for Democratic voters. Climate offers an obvious opportunity to isolate the Republicans on a matter of broad concern, renew Americans’ faith in government, and make real progress. The Democratic governors flailing so badly on this issue have not only a moral obligation to change course, but also a political one.

If you scroll California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press releases, a portrait emerges of a undaunted climate fighter. One day he’s “paving [the] way for climate pollution-cutting technology”; another he’s launching “new international climate partnerships as Trump unleashes unhinged UN rant.” Last month, he announced the signing of a suite of measures “saving billions on electric bills, stabilizing [the] gas market and cutting pollution.” But look under the hood, and his heroic self-image dims somewhat. That big legislative package, for instance, also increases oil drilling and sets up a regional electricity market that “could tether California to fossil-fuel states at a time when the Trump administration is moving to roll back clean energy,” CalMatters reported.With Trump in death-drive mode on climate, canceling renewable energy projects left and right and even forbidding federal agencies to use language such as “climate change,” “green,”or “sustainable,” blue-state governors are well positioned to distinguish themselves and their party on the issue. They also have a responsibility: The states are our best hope for policy at a scale to match the problem. Yet a worrying trend is taking shape: Blue-state governors are making a big show of battling the Trump administration, but on climate issues they’ve been disappointing—and sometimes downright infuriating. Last month’s climate package wasn’t the California Democrats’ first flub this year. Over the summer, in what Politico dubbed the state’s “Great Climate Retreat,” they weakened limits on the carbon intensity of transportation fuels, rolled back environmental reviews for new housing, and lifted a cap on oil industry profits. “California was the vocal climate leader during the first Trump administration,” Chris Chavez, deputy policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air, told Politico. “It’s questionable whether or not that leadership is still there.” In Maryland, a climate advisory panel appointed by Governor Wes Moore has hit the brakes on a carbon trading measure, and late last month the state Department of the Environment, or MDE, appeared to cave to the Trump administration in abandoning some environmental justice metrics, which many fear means abandoning Black and brown communities to the whims of polluters. “It just appears to me that MDE blatantly does not want to be accountable in the massive pollution and the overburden of these heavy industrial industries,” Kamita Gray, a community leader in Brandywine—a majority-Black town that’s home to gas-fired power plants, a coal ash dump, and a Superfund site—told Maryland Matters.Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania too is under fire from climate critics. As attorney general, he authored a solid road map for protecting Pennsylvanians from the harmful environmental and health effects of fracking, but in his two years as governor he has allowed companies to be secretive about the chemicals used in fracking, and has not pushed to pass any laws curbing the industry. The Environmental Health Project, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, said “residents are still waiting for meaningful action. Our assessment concludes that the Shapiro administration has not fulfilled the commitments the governor made to Pennsylvanians in general and to frontline communities in particular.”And then there’s New York. Governor Kathy Hochul has been failing to follow the decarbonization timeline that was outlined in the state’s 2019 climate law, prompting environmental justice groups to sue her. She has delayed plans for “cap and invest” and is dragging her feet on building public renewables (despite the state’s landmark Build Public Renewables Act, which passed in 2023). She has seemingly caved to Trump by going ahead with gas pipelines she previously rejected. And it’s unclear whether she will sign a repeal of the outdated “100 foot rule,” which requires utility ratepayers to subsize the cost of connecting new customers to the gas system, a reform that has long been a priority of the state’s climate movement.Part of what’s so self-destructive here is that energy affordability is a highly salient issue for voters, taking center stage, for example in the governor’s race in New Jersey, where electricity rates have risen 22 percent. Interviewed in Friday’s New York Times on this subject, David Springe of the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates described electricity as “the new eggs,” an indicator of how costly daily life is for most Americans. Republicans in New York have seized on the problem as an opportunity to blame Democrats and climate-friendly policies. Stephan Edel of New York Renews, a progressive coalition fighting for clean energy, told me the governor “has spoken really eloquently about the need to do something about affordability.” Indeed, she endorsed Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist, for New York City mayor, partly for this reason. She often uses “affordability” to justify rightward shifts or retreats from climate policy, he said, adding that, inexplicably, she also shies away from touting the affordability benefits of climate policies that she does support. For example, in the state budget last year, she agreed to invest over a billion dollars in funding for climate programs, including one that will help make homes for low-income New Yorkers more energy efficient and another that will save school districts money by shifting to electric school buses. Instead of touting those wins for affordability—or embracing the potential of publicly owned renewables to do the same—she’s embraced the Republican narrative that climate policy and affordability are at odds.By contrast, Mikie Sherill in New Jersey has been touting clean energy as a solution to energy affordability woes. If she gets elected and continues this path, more blue state governors should follow her lead. The Democratic base is desperate to see its leaders stand up to Trump on both climate and affordability. (And when Democratic governors do stand up to Trump on anything—Illinois’s JB Pritzker on the militarization of Chicago, Maine’s Janet Mills on health care—their poll numbers spike.)And the reverse is also true—failing to differentiate themselves from Trump has been political suicide for many Democrats. “Every time one of these elected officials says, ‘I’m going to stand up to Trump, I’m going to protect affordability, I’m going to address climate change,’ and then doesn’t do it,” that’s a win for the Republicans, Edel said, because it fuels low turnout for Democratic voters. Climate offers an obvious opportunity to isolate the Republicans on a matter of broad concern, renew Americans’ faith in government, and make real progress. The Democratic governors flailing so badly on this issue have not only a moral obligation to change course, but also a political one.

Climate
Chemicals
Government

Nature groups rebuke Reeves for ‘cynical’ 11th-hour planning bill changes

Chancellor accused of removing environmental protections to win short-term growth and save her budgetUK politics live – latest updatesLast-minute changes to the government’s landmark planning bill have sparked a furious backlash from nature groups who have mounted an attack on the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, over her plans to remove environmental protections.The changes to the legislation come as it enters its final stages before being signed into law. Continue reading...

Last-minute changes to the government’s landmark planning bill have sparked a furious backlash from nature groups who have mounted an attack on the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, over her plans to remove environmental protections.The changes to the legislation come as it enters its final stages before being signed into law.Promoted by Reeves, they are designed to make it easier for developers to side-step environmental laws in order to build major projects such as AI datacentres.They include new powers for the government to overrule local democracy if councils refuse developments based on environmental grounds, or on issues such as water shortages.But in outspoken attacks on the chancellor, charities including household names such as the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts say Reeves is seeking to grab short-term growth headlines to save her budget, rather than well-thought-out reforms to planning.Reeves is pushing for the planning bill to be passed before her budget on 26 November so that she is able to factor it into forecasts by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which could give her about £3bn extra breathing room against her own debt rules.The charities have spent months working with ministers in an attempt to forge the best planning bill to ensure growth and nature recovery go hand in hand.Dr James Robinson, the RSPB’s chief operating officer, said: “Dropping 67 amendments to the planning bill at the 11th hour isn’t just poor process, it’s legislative chaos. There’s no time for proper scrutiny, no clarity on the cumulative impact, and no confidence this is about good planning rather than political optics.“It looks like a cynical attempt to game a better forecast from the OBR, rather than a serious effort to fix the planning system.”The intervention by Reeves into the landmark bill comes after she was filmed boasting about her closeness to a major developer after she intervened to lift legal blocks to their housing plans.The objections to 21,000 homes being built in Sussex concerned water shortages and concerns over the amount of water being taken from rivers and wetlands in the Arun Valley, which risked affecting protected wildlife and local water resources. The MP for Horsham, John Milne has criticised the chancellor’s intervention, stating that it was top-down government at its worst.“This decision rides roughshod over the work that Horsham district council has been carrying out to find a balanced solution.”One amendment promoted by Reeves would allow more central government intervention in local decision making. It allows the secretary of state to overrule councils that refuse permission for projects, even if they have legitimate concerns on environmental grounds, or there are issues relating to water shortages.The amendment is designed to ease the path of major infrastructure projects, for example AI datacentres, which create vast amounts of CO2 and put huge pressure on water resources.Alexa Culver, an environmental lawyer from RSK Wilding, said: “For the first time, the secretary of state will be able to make orders that prevent refusals of planning permission by planning authorities.“This could direct authorities to ignore real-world infastructure and environmental constraints – like water shortages – to allow harmful development through that leaves local communities stranded.”Joan Edwards, director of policy and public affairs at the Wildlife Trusts, said Reeves was trying to grab headlines about growth measures before her budget.“The chancellor continues to fail to understand that a healthy natural environment underpins a healthy economy. These performative amendments represent neither a win for development or the economy, and promise only delay and muddle in planning and marine policy.”Richard Benwell, CEO of Wildlife and Countryside Link, said the government’s race to speed up planning decisions would fall flat on its face if it did not include the environment at its core.“Last-minute changes to the bill are being made in a hurried and piecemeal approach,” he said. “This kind of scattergun policymaking doesn’t give businesses or investors the certainty they need to drive growth, and it puts the UK’s irreplaceable natural environment at risk.”Government officials have said the amendments were required in part because an earlier watering down of the bill in the summer damaged investor confidence. However, no data has been provided to back this claim.The government said if passed, each of these “pro-growth changes” would accelerate the government’s “plan for change” to build 1.5m homes, achieve clean power by 2030 and raise living standards across the country.Steve Reed, the housing secretary, said: “Britain’s potential has been shackled by governments unwilling to overhaul the stubborn planning system that has erected barriers to building at every turn. It is simply not true that nature has to lose for economic growth to succeed.“Sluggish planning has real-world consequences. Every new house blocked deprives a family of a home. Every infrastructure project that gets delayed blocks someone from a much-needed job. This will now end.”

Nature
Government
Health

Watchdog rules Red Tractor exaggerated its environmental standards

The Advertising Standards Authority agrees with River Action that the food safety body’s 2023 advert misled the publicThe UK’s advertising watchdog has upheld a complaint that Britain’s biggest farm assurance scheme misled the public in a TV ad about its environmental standards.The Red Tractor scheme, used by leading supermarkets including Tesco, Asda and Morrisons to assure customers their food meets high standards for welfare, environment, traceability and safety, is the biggest and perhaps best known assurance system in Britain. Continue reading...

The UK’s advertising watchdog has upheld a complaint that Britain’s biggest farm assurance scheme misled the public in a TV ad about its environmental standards.The Red Tractor scheme, used by leading supermarkets including Tesco, Asda and Morrisons to assure customers their food meets high standards for welfare, environment, traceability and safety, is the biggest and perhaps best known assurance system in Britain.About 45,000 of the UK’s farms are members of the scheme, and the advert promised that food carrying the logo had been “farmed with care”.But the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld a complaint from the clean water campaign group River Action that the scheme’s environmental standards were exaggerated in the advert, last aired in 2023.In its judgment, the ASA said the ad must not be shown again in its current form. It said in future Red Tractor should make clear exactly what standards it is referring to when it uses the phrases “farmed with care” and “all our standards are met”.River Action said it made the complaint because it was concerned environmental standards relating to pollution were not being met on Red Tractor farms, including the claim “When the Red Tractor’s there, your food’s farmed with care … from field to store all our standards are met.”The ASA considered evidence from an Environment Agency report into Red Tractor farms, which found that 62% of the most critical pollution incidents occurred on Red Tractor farms between 2014 and 2019.Charles Watson, chair and founder of River Action, said large food retailers such as Tesco and Asda should lay out credible plans as to how they would move away from what he termed a “busted flush” of a certification scheme and instead support farmers whose working practices were genuinely sustainable.“Red Tractor farms are polluting the UK’s rivers, and consumers trying to make environmentally responsible choices have been misled,” said Watson.“This ASA ruling confirms what we’ve long argued: Red Tractor’s claims aren’t just misleading – they provide cover for farms breaking the law.”Red Tractor said its standards did not cover all environmental legislation. Therefore, data on compliance with environmental regulation should not be confused with farms’ compliance with Red Tractor’s requirements.Jim Moseley, CEO of Red Tractor, said: “We believe the ASA’s final decision is fundamentally flawed and misinterprets the content of our advert.“If the advert was clearly misleading, it wouldn’t have taken so long to reach this conclusion. Accordingly, the ASA’s actions are minimal. They’ve confirmed that we can continue to use ‘farmed with care’ but simply need to provide more information on the specific standards being referred to.“The advert … made no environmental claim, and we completely disagree with the assumption that it would have been misinterpreted by consumers.”

Food
Pollution
Water

Red Tractor ad banned for misleading environmental claims

The Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint by environment charity River Action.

Red Tractor ad banned for misleading environmental claimsRed TractorThe Red Tractor advert was last shown in 2023 but will now be banned for future use unless it is updatedA TV advert by Red Tractor, the UK's biggest certifier of farm products on supermarket shelves, has been banned for exaggerating the scheme's environmental benefits and misleading the public.The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled the organisation had provided "insufficient evidence" that its farms complied with basic environmental laws to substantiate the claims in its ad.Environmental group River Action, which brought the complaint in 2023, said the ruling showed the scheme was "greenwashing" and urged supermarkets to stop using it.But Red Tractor called the watchdog's decision "fundamentally flawed" and argued that the scheme's focus was animal welfare not environmental standards.In 2021, Red Tractor aired an advert in which it said: "From field to store all our standards are met. When the Red Tractor's there, your food's farmed with care."You can watch it below.Watch: the ad banned by the Advertising Standards AuthorityThe environmental charity River Action took issue with the ad, which ran for a further two years, and complained to the watchdog that it suggested to consumers that Red Tractor farms will "ensure a high degree of environmental protection".The charity pointed to a report by the Environment Agency, released in 2020, which looked at how many breaches of environmental law there were on Red Tractor farms in the previous five years. The report concluded that these farms were "not currently an indicator of good environmental performance".After more than two years of investigation - one of the longest running - the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld the complaint.It said that Red Tractor had failed to provide "sufficient evidence" that its farms met "basic" environmental laws and had a good environmental outcome to substantiate the claims in the ad.It also ruled that as a result the advert was "misleading" and "exaggerated" the benefits of the scheme.River Action welcomed the decision by the ASA and called on supermarkets to act."What this shows is that for their environmental credentials Red Tractor has been misleading the public and their supplies," said Amy Fairman, head of campaigns at River Action. "So, we're looking for suppliers like supermarkets to really examine and take stock of what is on their shelves."She added that challenging such adverts was important because of the pollution risk to the environment from agricultural pollution.In 2022, the Environment Audit Committee concluded that agriculture was one of the most common factors preventing rivers from being in good health - affecting 40% of them. The risks to the environment include from slurry and pesticide runoff.BBC News/Tony JolliffeAmy Fairman represents environmental charity River Action which campaigns for clean and healthy riversBut Red Tractor, which assures 45,000 farms in the UK, have pushed back strongly, calling the finding by the ASA "fundamentally flawed".Jim Mosley, CEO of Red Tractor, told the BBC: "They believe that we have implied an environmental claim. Nowhere in the voiceover or the imagery is any environmental claim actually made."He argued that the ASA only found a minority of people would think the advert meant Red Tractor farms had good environmental standards, and in fact the scheme is focused on other issues."Red Tractor's core purpose is food safety, animal welfare, and traceability. Whilst we have some environmental standards, they are a small part. And as a consequence, we leave that entirely to the Environment Agency to enforce environmental legislation," said Mr Moseley.When asked if that meant Red Tractor does not know if its farms are complying with environmental law, he said: "Correct".But many supermarkets do refer to the environmental benefits of Red Tractor farms.Natalie Smith, Tesco's head of agriculture said last month, on the 25-year anniversary of Red Tractor: "Certification schemes play a key role in providing reassurance for customers, and over the past 25 years, Red Tractor has established itself as a mark of quality, standing for… environmental protection."On Morrisons' website it states: "100% of the fresh pork, beef, lamb, poultry, milk and cheddar cheese we sell in our stores comes from farms certified by Red Tractor, or an approved equivalent scheme, giving customers assurance… environmental protection."Both supermarkets were asked if they stood by the Red Tractor logo.Morrisons did not respond to comment and Tesco referred the BBC to their industry body the British Retail Consortium.The consortium said that "retailers remain committed to working with Red Tractor", but that the organisation themselves are owners of the scheme.

Agriculture
Animals
Food

Why some quantum materials stall while others scale

In a new study, MIT researchers evaluated quantum materials’ potential for scalable commercial success — and identified promising candidates.

People tend to think of quantum materials — whose properties arise from quantum mechanical effects — as exotic curiosities. But some quantum materials have become a ubiquitous part of our computer hard drives, TV screens, and medical devices. Still, the vast majority of quantum materials never accomplish much outside of the lab.What makes certain quantum materials commercial successes and others commercially irrelevant? If researchers knew, they could direct their efforts toward more promising materials — a big deal since they may spend years studying a single material.Now, MIT researchers have developed a system for evaluating the scale-up potential of quantum materials. Their framework combines a material’s quantum behavior with its cost, supply chain resilience, environmental footprint, and other factors. The researchers used their framework to evaluate over 16,000 materials, finding that the materials with the highest quantum fluctuation in the centers of their electrons also tend to be more expensive and environmentally damaging. The researchers also identified a set of materials that achieve a balance between quantum functionality and sustainability for further study.The team hopes their approach will help guide the development of more commercially viable quantum materials that could be used for next generation microelectronics, energy harvesting applications, medical diagnostics, and more.“People studying quantum materials are very focused on their properties and quantum mechanics,” says Mingda Li, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering and the senior author of the work. “For some reason, they have a natural resistance during fundamental materials research to thinking about the costs and other factors. Some told me they think those factors are too ‘soft’ or not related to science. But I think within 10 years, people will routinely be thinking about cost and environmental impact at every stage of development.”The paper appears in Materials Today. Joining Li on the paper are co-first authors and PhD students Artittaya Boonkird, Mouyang Cheng, and Abhijatmedhi Chotrattanapituk, along with PhD students Denisse Cordova Carrizales and Ryotaro Okabe; former graduate research assistants Thanh Nguyen and Nathan Drucker; postdoc Manasi Mandal; Instructor Ellan Spero of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Professor Christine Ortiz of the Department of DMSE; Professor Liang Fu of the Department of Physics; Professor Tomas Palacios of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); Associate Professor Farnaz Niroui of EECS; Assistant Professor Jingjie Yeo of Cornell University; and PhD student Vsevolod Belosevich and Assostant Professor Qiong Ma of Boston College.Materials with impactCheng and Boonkird say that materials science researchers often gravitate toward quantum materials with the most exotic quantum properties rather than the ones most likely to be used in products that change the world.“Researchers don’t always think about the costs or environmental impacts of the materials they study,” Cheng says. “But those factors can make them impossible to do anything with.”Li and his collaborators wanted to help researchers focus on quantum materials with more potential to be adopted by industry. For this study, they developed methods for evaluating factors like the materials’ price and environmental impact using their elements and common practices for mining and processing those elements. At the same time, they quantified the materials’ level of “quantumness” using an AI model created by the same group last year, based on a concept proposed by MIT professor of physics Liang Fu, termed quantum weight.“For a long time, it’s been unclear how to quantify the quantumness of a material,” Fu says. “Quantum weight is very useful for this purpose. Basically, the higher the quantum weight of a material, the more quantum it is.”The researchers focused on a class of quantum materials with exotic electronic properties known as topological materials, eventually assigning over 16,000 materials scores on environmental impact, price, import resilience, and more.For the first time, the researchers found a strong correlation between the material’s quantum weight and how expensive and environmentally damaging it is.“That’s useful information because the industry really wants something very low-cost,” Spero says. “We know what we should be looking for: high quantum weight, low-cost materials. Very few materials being developed meet that criteria, and that likely explains why they don’t scale to industry.”The researchers identified 200 environmentally sustainable materials and further refined the list down to 31 material candidates that achieved an optimal balance of quantum functionality and high-potential impact.The researchers also found that several widely studied materials exhibit high environmental impact scores, indicating they will be hard to scale sustainably. “Considering the scalability of manufacturing and environmental availability and impact is critical to ensuring practical adoption of these materials in emerging technologies,” says Niroui.Guiding researchMany of the topological materials evaluated in the paper have never been synthesized, which limited the accuracy of the study’s environmental and cost predictions. But the authors say the researchers are already working with companies to study some of the promising materials identified in the paper.“We talked with people at semiconductor companies that said some of these materials were really interesting to them, and our chemist collaborators also identified some materials they find really interesting through this work,” Palacios says. “Now we want to experimentally study these cheaper topological materials to understand their performance better.”“Solar cells have an efficiency limit of 34 percent, but many topological materials have a theoretical limit of 89 percent. Plus, you can harvest energy across all electromagnetic bands, including our body heat,” Fu says. “If we could reach those limits, you could easily charge your cell phone using body heat. These are performances that have been demonstrated in labs, but could never scale up. That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to push forward."This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Energy
Science
Sustainable

Engineering next-generation fertilizers

MIT postdoc Giorgio Rizzo harnesses plant chemistry to design sustainable fertilizers that could reshape modern farming.

Born in Palermo, Sicily, Giorgio Rizzo spent his childhood curious about the natural world. “I have always been fascinated by nature and how plants and animals can adapt and survive in extreme environments,” he says. “Their highly tuned biochemistry, and their incredible ability to create ones of the most complex and beautiful structures in chemistry that we still can’t even achieve in our laboratories.”As an undergraduate student, he watched as a researcher mounted a towering chromatography column layered with colorful plant chemicals in a laboratory. When the researcher switched on a UV light, the colors turned into fluorescent shades of blue, green, red and pink. “I realized in that exact moment that I wanted to be the same person, separating new unknown compounds from a rare plant with potential pharmaceutical properties,” he recalls.These experiences set him on a path from a master’s degree in organic chemistry to his current work as a postdoc in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, where he focuses on developing sustainable fertilizers and studying how rare earth elements can boost plant resilience, with the aim of reducing agriculture’s environmental impact.In the lab of MIT Professor Benedetto Marelli, Rizzo studies plant responses to environmental stressors, such as heat, drought, and prolonged UV irradiation. This includes developing new fertilizers that can be applied as seed coating to help plants grow stronger and enhance their resistance.“We are working on new formulations of fertilizers that aim to reduce the huge environmental impact of classical practices in agriculture based on NPK inorganic fertilizers,” Rizzo explains. Although they are fundamental to crop yields, their tendency to accumulate in soil is detrimental to the soil health and microbiome living in it. In addition, producing NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) fertilizers is one of the most energy-consuming and polluting chemical processes in the world.“It is mandatory to reshape our conception of fertilizers and try to rely, at least in part, on alternative products that are safer, cheaper, and more sustainable,” he says.Recently, Rizzo was awarded a Kavanaugh Fellowship, a program that gives MIT graduate students and postdocs entrepreneurial training and resources to bring their research from the lab to the market. “This prestigious fellowship will help me build a concrete product for a company, adding more value to our research,” he says.Rizzo hopes their work will help farmers increase their crop yields without compromising soil quality or plant health. A major barrier to adopting new fertilizers is cost, as many farmers rely heavily on each growing season’s output and cannot risk investing in products that may underperform compared to traditional NPK fertilizers. The fertilizers being developed in the Marelli Lab address this challenge by using chitin and chitosan, abundant natural materials that make them far less expensive to produce, which Rizzo hopes will encourage farmers to try them.“Through the Kavanaugh Fellowship, I will spend this year trying to bring the technology outside the lab to impact the world and meet the need for farmers to support their prosperity,” he says.Mentorship has been a defining part of his postdoc experience. Rizzo describes Professor Benedetto Marelli as “an incredible mentor” who values his research interests and supports him through every stage of his work. The lab spans a wide range of projects — from plant growth enhancement and precision chemical delivery to wastewater treatment, vaccine development for fish, and advanced biochemical processes. “My colleagues created a stimulant environment with different research topics,” he notes. He is also grateful for the work he does with international institutions, which has helped him build a network of researchers and academics around the world.Rizzo enjoys the opportunity to mentor students in the lab and appreciates their curiosity and willingness to learn. “It is one of the greatest qualities you can have as a scientist because you must be driven by curiosity to discover the unexpected,” he says.He describes MIT as a “dynamic and stimulating experience,” but also acknowledges how overwhelming it can be. “You will feel like a small fish in a big ocean,” he says. “But that is exactly what MIT is: an ocean full of opportunities and challenges that are waiting to be solved.”Beyond his professional work, Rizzo enjoys nature and the arts. An avid reader, he balances his scientific work with literature and history. “I never read about science-related topics — I read about it a lot already for my job,” he says. “I like classic literature, novels, essays, history of nations, and biographies. Often you can find me wandering in museums’ art collections.” Classical art, Renaissance, and Pre-Raphaelites are his favorite artistic currents.Looking ahead, Rizzo hopes to shift his professional pathway toward startups or companies focused on agrotechnical improvement. His immediate goal is to contribute to initiatives where research has a direct, tangible impact on everyday life.“I want to pursue the option of being part of a spinout process that would enable my research to have a direct impact in everyday life and help solve agricultural issues,” he adds.

Sustainable
Agriculture
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Nobel Prize in Economics Awarded for Research on Science, Technology and Growth

Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt share the Nobel economics prize for work that underlines the importance of investing in research and development

October 14, 20254 min readEconomics Nobel Honors Work Linking Scientific Research to ProsperityJoel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt share the Nobel economics prize for work that underlines the importance of investing in research and developmentBy Philip Ball & Nature magazine Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, winners of the 2025 Economics Nobel prize. Northwestern University, Patrick Imbert/Collège de France, Ashley McCabe/Brown UniversityThe 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to three researchers who have shown how technological and scientific innovation, coupled to market competition, drive economic growth.One half of the prize goes to economic-historian Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and the other half is split between the economic theorists Philippe Aghion of the Collège de France and the London School of Economics and Peter Howitt of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.“I can’t find the words to express what I feel,” Aghion said. He says he will use the money for research in his laboratory at the Collège de France.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The award “underlies the importance in investing in science for innovation and long-term economic growth”, says economist Diane Coyle of the University of Cambridge. “It's great to see the Nobel prize recognize the importance of this topic,” adds innovation policy researcher Richard Jones of the University of Manchester, UK. “It's important that economists understand the conditions that lead to technological progress,” he adds. The winners, says Coyle, “have long been on people’s list of potential candidates”.Old isn’t goldEconomic growth at a rate of about 1-2 per cent annually is the norm for industrialized nations today. But such growth rates did not happen in earlier times, despite technological innovations, such as the windmill and the printing press.Mokyr showed that the key difference between now and then was what he calls “useful knowledge”, or innovations based on scientific understanding. One example is the advances made during the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the eighteenth century, when improvements in steam engines could be made systematic rather than by trial and error.Aghion and Howitt, for their part, clarified the market mechanisms behind sustained growth in recent times. In 1992 they presented a model showing how competition between companies selling new products allows innovations to enter the marketplace and displaces older products: a process they called creative destruction.Underlying growth, in other words, is a steady churn of businesses and products. The researchers showed how companies invest in research and development (R&D) to improve their chances of finding a new product, and predicted the optimal level of such investment.Entrepreneurial stateAccording to economist Ufuk Akcigit of the University of Chicago, Aghion and Howitt highlight an important aspect of economic growth, which is that spending on R&D does not by itself guarantee higher rates of growth: “Unless we replace inefficient firms from the economy, we cannot make space for newcomers with new ideas and better technologies.”“When a new entrepreneur emerges, they have every incentive to come up with a radical new technology,” Akcigit says. “As soon as they become an incumbent, their incentive vanishes” and they no longer invest in R&D to drive innovation.Thus, because companies cannot expect to remain at the forefront of innovation indefinitely, the incentive for investing in R&D coming from market forces alone declines as a company’s market share grows. To guarantee the societal benefits of constant innovation, the model suggests that it is in society’s interests for the state to subsidize R&D, so long as the return is not merely incremental improvements.The work of all three laureates also acknowledges the complex social consequences of growth. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution there were concerns about how mechanisation would cause unemployment of manual workers – a worry echoed today with the increasing use of AI in place of human labour. But Mokyr showed that in fact early mechanization led to the creation of new jobs.Creative destruction, meanwhile, leads to companies failing and jobs being lost. Aghion and Howitt emphasized that society needs safety nets and constructive negotiation of conflicts to navigate such problems.Their model “recognizes the messiness and complexity of how innovation happens in real economies”, says Coyle. “The idea that a country’s productivity level increases by companies going bust and new ones coming in is a difficult sell, but the evidence that that’s part of the mechanism is pretty strong.”Timely messageThis year’s award comes at a time when funding for scientific research is under threat in the United States and around the world. “It’s a very timely message when we’re seeing the United States undermining so much of its science base,” says Coyle. Aghion said, “I don’t welcome the protectionist wave in the US” and added that “openness is a driver of growth. I see dark clouds accumulating”. to translate high-tech innovations into market value.Economic historian Kerstin Enflo, a member of the Nobel prize awarding committee, denied that the award was intended as a comment on the direction of US policies. “It is only about celebrating the work [the laureates] have done”, she said at the press conference.Green growthMore recently, researchers are questioning the ‘growth-at-all-costs’ narrative not least because of the ways to pursue growth has led to environmental degradation, including global warming.“How can we make sure we innovate greener?” Aghion asked. “Firms don’t spontaneously do this. So how can we redirect growth towards green?” Mokyr’s work showed that growth can sometimes be self-correcting in the sense of producing innovations needed to solve such problems. But that is not a given and requires well-crafted policies to nurture innovation without promoting inequality and unsustainability. “We need to harness the productivity potential and minimize the negative effects”, said Aghion.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on October 13, 2025.

Science
Technology
Nature

New York to appeal after judge OKs radioactive Indian Point water in the Hudson

Governor Kathy Hochul has confirmed that the Indian Point nuclear plant will not be reopened, despite a federal judge's ruling that the state's Save the Hudson Act, which aimed to prevent the dumping of radioactive wastewater into the Hudson River, was invalid.

ALBANY, N.Y. (NEXSTAR) — A federal judge in New York last month struck down the state's Save the Hudson Act, a law that aimed to prevent Holtec International, the owner of the decommissioned Indian Point nuclear plant, from dumping over a million gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Hudson River. Still, despite the ruling and her openness to expand nuclear power in the state, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) maintains that the site will not reopen. "Let me say this plainly: No," Hochul wrote in a letter to Westchester County Executive Ken Jenkins on Friday, which can be read at the bottom of this story. Entergy, the previous owners of the Indian Point Energy Center, shut down its final reactor, Unit 3, in April 2021. Holtec bought the three-unit nuclear power plant located in the northwestern corner of Westchester County on the eastern bank of the Hudson River in May 2021. Use it or lose it: Summer EBT food benefits expiring Friday The plant is undergoing a decommissioning process that includes removing equipment and structures, reducing residual radioactivity, and dismantling the facility. Holtec projects that process to finish by 2033. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sided with Holtec in a lawsuit they filed in April 2024, agreeing that state law can't block the discharge of radioactive wastewater from nuclear sites being decommissioned. The court found that only the federal government has that authority, because federal law like the Atomic Energy Act overrules the state under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Hochul launches $1B clean climate plan as state, federal energy agendas diverge The judge determined that S6893/A7208 wasn't meant to protect the radiological safety of the public or the environment, which falls under federal jurisdiction. Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James announced their intent to appeal the decision, arguing that the law represents vital protections for the iconic river and the economic health of the region through tourism and real estate values. Jenkins applauded the decision to appeal, saying, "The Hudson River is the lifeblood of our region—a source of recreation, natural beauty, and economic vitality—and we must do everything in our power to protect it." And in the letter to Jenkins, Hochul directly addressed the concern that the state government may plan to reopen Indian Point or build small modular reactors on the site. NYC storm cancels Columbus Day parade amid Indigenous Peoples Day debate "There have been no discussions or plans," the governor wrote. "I would not support efforts to do so." Riverkeeper, an environmental advocacy group, called the ruling a blow to the progress made in restoring the Hudson River. They worked with local officials to pass the Save the Hudson Act in 2023 after Holtec announced plan to release the wastewater. New York’s 2040 energy grid: Nuclear power, public renewables, and fracked gas pipelines The wastewater in question is contaminated with tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen created during the nuclear fission process. Tritium—whose half-life is 12 years—bonds with oxygen, meaning the wastewater cannot be filtered. S6893/A7208, signed by Hochul in August 2023, lets the attorney general enforce the ban with civil penalties of $37,500 for the first day of violation, $75,000 for the second, and $150,000 per violation thereafter. It came in response to Holtec's initial plan to put between 1.3 and 1.5 million gallons of tritiated water from the spent fuel pools, reactor cavity, and other holding tanks into the Hudson. The company maintained that discharge would be the safest option for the tritiated water, that the planned release represented just 5% of what the plant discharged historically, and that the plan followed federal guidelines. Data challenges tax flight claims in New York The company wanted to start dewatering with three 18,000-gallon batches—45,000 gallons in total—in May 2023. Holtec paused their initial plan so the state could perform independent sampling and analysis of the water. Federal water standards set the maximum contaminant level for tritium at 20,000 picocuries per liter, though California, for example, aims to say below 400 picocuries of tritium per liter. Regulations on radioactive releases from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal body managing decommissions, are based on the dose to the public, regardless of the volume of the discharge. NRC has an internal goal to keep the dose from liquid releases below three millirem per year at the release point, and a legal limit of 25 millirem per year. Power struggle: New York lawmakers, environmentalists clash over electricity The calculated dose to the public from Indian Point in 2021 was about 0.011966 millirem—about one-thousandth of the federal cap. Plus, NRC allows several disposal methods, including transferring the waste, storing it for decay, or releasing it into the environment. Still, critics said the discharge would undermine local economies, erode public trust, and doom the Hudson even as more New Yorkers swim, boat, fish, and work on and in the river. Riverkeeper said there are alternatives, like storing the water for its 12-year half-life. They want the contaminated water to be held at Indian Point for at least 12 years, when its radioactivity will be reduced by half, before exploring any alternative disposal. Gas pipelines eye return to New York But delaying the discharge process could force lay offs of specialized Holtec workers. The company already extended decommissioning timelines at two other sites—Pilgrim and Oyster Creek—from eight to 12 years because of inflated costs and poor market performance. In the letter to Jenkins, Hochul confirmed her support for nuclear as part of the state's energy strategy, but that any new plant would be upstate, and only in communities that want it. Hochul said that downstate New York needs to rely on energy sources like the Champlain Hudson Power Express transmission line, set to bring hydroelectricity from Canada. New York Republican Senators propose scaling back climate laws She characterized the decision to close Indian Point as a hasty failure that caused emissions to rise. It happened before her administration, Hochul argued, and the state "lost 25% of the power that was going to New York City without having a Plan B." Take a look at the letter below: Hochul Indian point letter to JenkinsDownload Arizona AG threatens legal action if Johnson doesn't seat recently elected Democrat FDA expands cinnamon recall to 16 brands with elevated lead levels New York to appeal after judge OKs radioactive Indian Point water in the Hudson Bondi says Facebook has removed page targeting ICE agents after DOJ outreach Live updates: Trump to honor Kirk with Medal of Freedom; Senate to vote as shutdown hits Day 14

Water
Waste
Energy

Governor Wants 27k New Homes Built in Honolulu Neighborhood, Plans to Seek Infrastructure Funding

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green has an ambitious plan for Iwilei, a working-class neighborhood bordering Honolulu's Chinatown, along the rail line

Gov. Josh Green has a big vision for Iwilei, the working-class neighborhood bordering Honolulu’s Chinatown along the rail line. It would cost an estimated $667 million in state taxpayer money for a massive infrastructure upgrade, Green says. The trade-off: 27,500 new homes and upward of $5 billion in investment into an area Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi has targeted for redevelopment.Green said he’ll include a request for some Iwilei infrastructure money in his housing package for the upcoming session. “This is already being formulated in the housing plan,” he said.The Iwilei effort reflects Green’s current approach to housing, which relies on development along the Honolulu rail line, coordinating with county initiatives, building on government-owned land and focusing on affordable housing — all expedited by an emergency proclamation more modest than the one he announced to great fanfare in 2023.Housing remains a major initiative, Green said in a sweeping interview.“It’s still our top priority,” the governor said. “Affordability, in other words, cost of living and housing still are the top two concerns that our people have, and they are still our top priorities.”The market has shown few signs of improving since Green took office. While the resale prices of single-family homes and condos have leveled off, rents have increased 17% since his December 2022 inauguration, according to the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization. Polls show 53% of residents feel burdened by housing costs, Green said, and 28% feel severely cost-burdened.Housing was one of Green’s major campaign issues. And upon taking office, he quickly announced bold measures to address Hawaii’s housing crisis. An emergency proclamation on homelessness heralded a statewide initiative to build villages of tiny homes combined with social services to get people off the streets. His emergency proclamation on housing was even bolder. Designed to encourage home building of all types, not just homes designated as affordable, the proclamation suspended an array of land-use and environmental laws that developers have long complained led to interminable delays and increased costs. The proclamation established a working group to approve projects according to a set of emergency rules set up in place of the suspended laws.The order triggered applause from builders but fierce opposition and lawsuits from environmentalists. Green quickly scaled back the order, restoring many of the suspended laws and issuing a new proclamation focusing on affordable housing.Although the Hawaii Supreme Court in September agreed the original proclamation on housing had gone too far, the court upheld the current proclamation on affordable housing. Green calls the ruling a victory — and sees it as an opening for county governments to also address the problem.“I intend to keep the emergency housing proclamation active through the entire first term,” Green said. “And I’m encouraging the mayors and other government officials to consider their own emergency housing proclamations as they see fit going forward.”Much of the governor’s attention for the past two years has been focused on issues other than housing. The Maui wildfires that killed 102 people and destroyed much of Lahaina in August 2023 created massive suffering for residents and economic damage for property owners. In response, Green’s office created a victims’ settlement fund, built hundreds of modular homes near Lahaina and crafted a settlement of thousands of lawsuits, which saved Hawaiian Electric Industries and its utility subsidiaries from bankruptcy.Last session, Green pushed lawmakers to pass a historic law imposing a fee on hotel and other short-term rental users to raise money to help offset the negative impacts of tourism on the environment. There was also a tax bill intended to put more money into the hands of people struggling to get by.“Though people might not hear me utter the words ‘housing crisis’ as often, we’re still under the housing emergency proclamation,” he said. “And I wouldn’t be under an emergency housing proclamation and all that comes with it, if it wasn’t still our top priority.Hawaii now has 64,000 units in the “affordable housing development pipeline,” Green said. Only about 3,000 of those are included in the 27,500 new homes envisioned for Iwilei.In reality, nearly 31,000 of the 64,000 homes are in their infancy and still must go through the arduous process of obtaining land-use permits and other entitlements that can take years to obtain.Green also pointed to his tiny home, or kauhale, initiative. It’s led to 23 kauhale being built since 2022 at a cost of $128.3 million. The Legislature last session handed out $88.2 million over the next two years to keep the program on track toward Green’s goal of 30 villages by 2027.At the same time, lawmakers prohibited building off-grid villages, a practice Green’s former homelessness coordinator, John Mizuno, had criticized, and requested an audit of the program.Still, Green said his housing initiative is on track.“I think it’s been successful,” he said. “You know, there’s a ton of examples here of housing projects that are on the go, you know, where we’ve had groundbreaking and even (people moving in).”Green also said he stands by a pillar of his initiative that continues to get strong pushback from neighborhood and environmental groups. An existing statute gives broad development power to the state Housing Finance Development Corp., a government agency that helps private developers finance projects meeting certain affordability requirements. But affordability is relative.A studio apartment in Honolulu can rent out for as much as $3,724 per month and still be considered affordable under HHFDC guidelines, which are set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. A home for a family of four can be priced as high as $757,300 at today’s interest rates and still count as affordable.In exchange for building such affordable housing, projects built by government or private developers with HHFDC approval are exempt from all statutes, ordinances, and any other “rules of any government agency relating to planning, zoning, construction standards for subdivisions, development and improvement of land, and the construction of dwelling units.”The law gives county councils 45 days after plans are submitted to approve, modify or nix the projects. If the councils don’t act by the deadline, the project is considered approved. Green said the law was inspired by his emergency proclamation on affordable housing.“We don’t want to add extra conditions once we get a project approved by HHFDC,” he said. “If they’re ready to go, and then you add in two, three or four extra conditions … That’s a lot of the time how things get bogged down.” Green also defended the use of the statute even if it meant destroying existing homes that working people could afford to make way for housing that was technically deemed affordable but still priced out of reach for many.The Kobayashi Group did just that with its HHFDC-approved Kuilei Place project, located on Kapiolani Boulevard in Moiliili. To make way for the 1,005-unit, 43-story project, the developer razed a neighborhood of about 120 two-story walk-up apartments: true workforce housing walking distance from Waikiki's hotel and restaurant jobs. About 600 condos were set aside as affordable, priced for families of four earning between $104,500 and $158,600.Green said on balance the project was good for society.“It will house many hundreds of additional people, and that’s the macro housing proposal,” he said. Those who had to relocate were “comparatively a very small number of people for a greater benefit to society, which is to build thousands of additional houses.”Green doesn’t foresee the same risk of displacing Iwilei residents. The area, about the size of Waikiki, is one of Honolulu’s more affordable housing markets. Approximately 12,295 residents now live in Iwilei’s 4,297 housing units, according to data from the Census and a private research firm cited in an environmental impact statement approved for the state’s envisioned $667 million infrastructure project.Median rents are around $1,400 per month in the broader Liliha-Nuuanu neighborhood encompassing Iwilei, according to the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization’s housing data dashboard. The annual income needed to afford rent is about $56,760 — far lower than the $91,000 median household income for Oahu. Still, the EIS notes, people struggle: the median household income is just $45,400, creating more housing affordability stress for Iwilei residents than Oahu residents in general.That said, the EIS says, the state’s infrastructure project “will not in itself impact housing stock, but its intent is to enable other planned developments to proceed.”Ultimately, Green said, the goal is to allow residents to live in Hawaii and stop the outmigration that has occurred for years before now starting to level off.He sees two potential outcomes for the state. In one, the yearslong pace of outmigration levels off and a surge in housing produces “a win for local people, Pacific Islanders, Hawaiians: people can afford housing, and your population can grow normally, so you get some economic growth … and it’s good.”The other, he said, pointing to a chart in a slideshow, is for the population to continue declining.“And then here’s the very bad scenario,” he said. “We go the opposite direction, we fail to build housing. It tightens even further. And it’s really dangerous. It’s dangerous because then only affluent people can live in Hawaii.”This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

Crisis
Government
Land Use

A Warning for the Modern Striver

A new biography of Peter Matthiessen chronicles his many paradoxical attempts to escape who the world expected him to be.

Restlessness is deeply rooted in American mythology. We are a country of pilgrims, engaged in a lifelong search for what Ralph Waldo Emerson called an “original relation to the universe”—a unique understanding of the world that doesn’t rely on the traditions or teachings of past generations. Those who internalize this expectation will walk, trek, and seek—anything to shed an inherited skin and find an undiscovered self they can inhabit. If only skin, inherited or not, were so easy to shed. As Emerson wrote, “My giant goes with me wherever I go.”Few have embodied this supposedly American quality with more complexity than the writer Peter Matthiessen. And few have captured it with more clarity than Lance Richardson in his new biography of Matthiessen, True Nature. Richardson portrays the peripatetic life of Matthiessen—a celebrated author, magazine editor, and undercover agent who died in 2014—not as an eclectic series of adventures but as a single, 86-year spiritual quest. As he writes, Matthiessen’s “inner journey determined the choices he made throughout his long life; it is the string on which the various beads of his career were strung.” Matthiessen fled his monied upbringing in a flawed yet fascinating attempt to escape the person the world expected him to be.The central project of Matthiessen’s existence was a relentless, often painful attempt to locate what, quoting Zen Buddhists, he called a “true nature”—an authentic core beneath the layers of identity that he had received or constructed. His life story provides a warning for today’s perpetually dissatisfied strivers: mainly members of the tech or business elite who have made a name for themselves, only to still feel empty and insecure. Many use their considerable resources to set out for other territories in search of something they’re unlikely to find.[Read: You don’t know yourself as well as you think you do]Like many pilgrimages, Matthiessen’s journey began with a foundational trauma. Born in 1927, he had a storybook childhood on New York’s Fishers Island that was ruptured one summer by an incident on his father’s boat. The young Matthiessen had been learning to swim, so his father took him out to the harbor and threw him overboard to see if the lessons had stuck. As Richardson writes, Matthiessen made the mistake of clinging to his father’s shirt as he was thrown and nearly broke his arm on the side of the boat. He would later call this humiliation “the opening skirmish in an absolutely pointless lifelong war” with his family, and his adulthood was a series of escapes from that original wound. He fled to Paris, the classic expatriate move, but did so under bizarre circumstances—co-founding The Paris Review while serving as an agent for the CIA. Thoreau went to Walden Pond to flee a society he saw as corrupt; Matthiessen, for his part, went to the center of the establishment’s undercover operations to fund and facilitate his own existential escape. Jill Krementz The only writer to ever win National Book Awards for both fiction and nonfiction, Matthiessen was an architect of the postwar intellectual world, a contemporary of giants such as Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and William Styron. His peers often waged their philosophical battles in the public squares of New York and Washington, but Matthiessen grew wary of the ego and performance required of the literary lion. Instead he traveled to the mountains of Nepal in search of snow leopards, and deep into China and Mongolia to catch a glimpse of the rarest cranes on Earth. But what he was really searching for was far more personal.Matthiessen’s pursuits weren’t solely internal; his work was also a very public counterpoint to the materialism and social conformity that he believed defined the second half of 20th-century America. His seminal book, Wildlife in America, published in 1959, was a meticulously researched history of the natural world and the devastating effects of human activity. Richardson rightly calls it “a landmark in nature writing,” which predated Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Matthiessen’s search for a preindustrial Eden also drives The Snow Leopard, his best-known work. On its surface, the book is the account of his two-month trek into Nepal’s Himalayas with the naturalist George Schaller, in 1973. But it is also a record of what Matthiessen called “a true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart” as he grieved the recent death of his wife. The hunt for the elusive, almost mythical snow leopard becomes a metaphor for the search for spiritual enlightenment, a release from the travails and humiliations of everyday human life.I first read The Snow Leopard when I was 20. It filled me with the misguided but tantalizing belief that a life of meaning was to be found elsewhere. It inspired my own pilgrimage to the Alps, retracing the trails that Friedrich Nietzsche hiked while writing his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; I sought the kind of authenticity that seemed impossible to find in a comfortable American suburb. The journey was enabled by a scholarship to a good school—a form of privilege that was almost entirely lost on me. Matthiessen’s profound and lonely meditations at 17,000 feet were, similarly, made possible by National Geographic funding, a name that opened doors, the very worldly security he was trying to transcend.Perhaps he understood, on some level, the irony. Richardson writes that in the Amazon, many years before his subject traveled to Nepal, Matthiessen had encountered a genuine wanderer, a French Canadian drifter named Johnny Gauvin, and felt a sudden, uncomfortable self-awareness. Displacement and its attendant poverty were Gauvin’s way of life. Matthiessen realized that he was no authentic man of the wilderness, but an affluent visitor. “It’s a disturbing quality, and one that induces a certain self-consciousness about one’s eyeglasses, say, or the gleam of one’s new khaki pants,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1961. Pilgrimages sometimes cause collateral damage too. In later life, he admitted that it may have been a mistake to leave his 8-year-old son so soon after the death of his wife to embark on the Himalayan expedition.Matthiessen’s example provides a powerful archetype for the modern day. The tech billionaire who flies to space seeking the “overview effect” is in search of something beyond the ken of the material world, which he has already conquered. The annual ritual of Burning Man sees wealthy people enact a temporary shedding of their consumerist skin, even if getting there requires enlarging one’s carbon footprint. The Silicon Valley executive who flies to Peru for an ayahuasca retreat is on a journey Matthiessen would have recognized intimately. Long before embarking on his formal Zen training, Matthiessen was an early psychonaut, experimenting with LSD in the 1960s. In search of mind-altering effects, he sought a chemical shortcut to the dissolution of the ego, a forced glimpse of the “true nature” that his privilege and ambition otherwise obscured. Matthiessen’s path from psychedelics to the rigorous discipline of Zen meditation shows what a genuine spiritual journey looks like: It is extremely difficult, deeply private, and never-ending. There is no shortcut. Jill Krementz [Read: A reality check for tech oligarchs]Did Matthiessen ever find what he was looking for? Richardson’s elegant and rigorous biography wisely leaves the question open. But what it does make clear is that “true nature” is not a stable or permanent destination. It is a process, an experience, a temporary vision, an opening caused by a sudden confrontation with the world beyond us. Later in life, as Richardson writes, Matthiessen compared it to a tiger jumping into a quiet room. Reflecting on his tiger moment—a vision of his dying wife experienced in a sesshin, an intense form of Buddhist meditation—Matthiessen noted that “for the first time since unremembered childhood, I was not alone, there was no separate ‘I.’ Wounds, anger, ragged edges, hollow places were all gone, all had been healed; my heart was the heart of all creation.” But this beautiful instant is, by definition, temporary.Matthiessen, ultimately, refused to fit into any tidy box. He was an environmental activist who hobnobbed with the jet set, a devoted Buddhist who wrestled with a titanic ego, a man who knew that all things ultimately return to nature but fought against death to the very end. Matthiessen embodied many ironies, but one might feel particularly evergreen: The conditions that make possible a search for existential fulfillment are often what make it so very difficult to find.

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