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The Secret Affair that Bloomed Gaia Theory

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Saturday, September 7, 2024

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealized as something cold, hard, rational, neutral, and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings. The life and work of James Lovelock is proof that this is neither possible nor desirable. In his work, he helped us understand that humans can never completely divorce ourselves from any living subject because we are interconnected and interdependent, all part of the same Earth system, which he called Gaia. Our planet, he argued, behaves like a giant organism—regulating its temperature, discharging waste and cycling chemicals to maintain a healthy balance. Although highly controversial among scientists in the 1970s and 80s, this holistic view of the world had mass appeal, which stretched from New Age spiritual gurus to that stern advocate of free-market orthodoxy, Margaret Thatcher. Its insights into the link between nature and climate have since inspired many of the world’s most influential climate scientists, philosophers, and environmental campaigners. The French philosopher Bruno Latour said the Gaia theory has reshaped humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe as fundamentally as the ideas of Galileo Galilei. At its simplest, Gaia is about restoring an emotional connection with a living planet. Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness. While the most prominent academics of the modern age made their names by delving ever deeper into narrow specialisms, Lovelock dismissed this as knowing “more and more about less and less” and worked instead on his own all-encompassing, and thus deeply unfashionable, theory of planetary life. I first met Lovelock in the summer of 2020, during a break between pandemic lockdowns, when he was 101 years old. In person, he was utterly engrossing and kind. I had long wanted to interview the thinker who somehow managed to be both the inspiration for the green movement, and one of its fiercest critics. The account that follows, of the origins and development of Gaia theory, will probably surprise many of Lovelock’s followers, as it surprised me. Knowing he did not have long to live, Lovelock told me: “I can tell you things now that I could not say before.” The true nature of the relationships that made the man and the hypothesis were hidden or downplayed for decades. Some were military (he worked for MI5 and MI6 for more than 50 years) or industrial secrets (he warned another employer, Shell, of the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1966). Others were too painful to share with the public, his own family and, sometimes, himself. Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness. He preferred to move on. Everything was a problem to be solved. What I discovered, and what has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory. Lovelock told me his greatest discovery was the biotic link between the Earth’s life and its atmosphere. He envisaged it as a “cool flame” that has been burning off the planet’s excess heat for billions of years. From this emerged the Gaia theory and an obsession with the atmosphere’s relationship with life on Earth. But he could not have seen it alone. Lovelock was guided by a love affair with Hitchcock, an American philosopher and systems analyst, who he met at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Like most brilliant women in the male-dominated world of science in the 1960s, Hitchcock struggled to have her ideas heard, let alone acknowledged. But Lovelock listened. And, as he later acknowledged, without Hitchcock, the world’s understanding of itself may well have been very different. Lovelock had arrived at JPL in 1961 at the invitation of Abe Silverstein, the director of Space Flight Programs at NASA, who wanted an expert in chromatography to measure the chemical composition of the soil and air on other planets. For the science-fiction junkie Lovelock, it was “like a letter from a beloved. I was as excited and euphoric as if at the peak of passion.” He had been given a front-row seat to the reinvention of the modern world. California felt like the future. Hollywood was in its pomp, Disneyland had opened six years earlier, Venice Beach was about to become a cradle of youth culture and Bell Labs, Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard were pioneering the computer-chip technology that was to lead to the creation of Silicon Valley. JPL led the fields of space exploration, robotics and rocket technology. In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who designed the V-2 rockets that devastated London in the second world war, made JPL the base for the US’s first successful satellite programme. It was his technology that the White House was relying on to provide the thrust for missions to the moon, Mars and Venus. By 1961, the San Gabriel hillside headquarters of JPL had become a meeting place for many of the planet’s finest minds, drawing in Nobel winners, such as Joshua Lederberg, and emerging “pop scientists” like Carl Sagan. There was no more thrilling time to be in the space business. Lovelock had a relatively minor role as a technical adviser, but he was, he told me, the first Englishman to join the US space programme: the most high-profile, and most lavishly funded, of cold war fronts. Everyone on Earth had a stake in the US-USSR rivalry, but most people felt distant and powerless. Three years earlier, Lovelock had listened on his homemade shortwave radio in Finchley to the “beep, beep, beep” transmission of the USSR’s Sputnik, the first satellite that humanity had put into orbit. Now he was playing with the super powers. Dian Hitchcock had been hired by NASA to keep tabs on the work being done at JPL to find life on Mars. The two organisations had been at loggerheads since 1958, when JPL had been placed under the jurisdiction of the newly created civilian space agency, Nasa, with day-to-day management carried out by the California Institute of Technology. JPL’s veteran scientists bristled at being told what to do by their counterparts in the younger but more powerful federal organisation. Nasa was determined to regain control. Hitchcock was both their spy and their battering ram. Lovelock became her besotted ally. They had first met in the JPL canteen, where Hitchcock introduced herself to Lovelock with a joke: “Do you realise your surname is a polite version of mine?” The question delighted Lovelock. As they got to know one another, he also came to respect Hitchcock’s toughness in her dealings with her boss, her colleagues and the scientists. He later saw her yell furiously at a colleague in the street. “They were frightened of her. Nasa was very wise to send her down,” he recalled. They found much in common. Both had struggled to find intellectual peers throughout their lives. Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life. Hitchcock had grown used to being overlooked or ignored. She struggled to find anyone who would take her seriously. That and her inability to find people she could talk to on the same intellectual level left her feeling lonely. Lovelock seemed different. He came across as something of an outsider, and was more attentive than other men. “I was initially invisible. I couldn’t find people who would listen to me. But Jim did want to talk to me and I ate it up,” she said. “When I find someone I can talk to in depth it’s a wonderful experience. It happens rarely.” They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. Vance Oyama, an effusively cheerful biochemist who had joined the JPL programme from the University of Houston the same year as Lovelock, put the prospects of life on Mars at 50 percent. He had a multimillion-dollar reason to be enthusiastic, as he was responsible for designing one of the life-detection experiments on the Mars lander: a small box containing water and a “chicken soup” of nutrients that were to be poured on to Martian soil. Hitchcock suggested her employer, the NASA contractor Hamilton Standard, hire Lovelock as a consultant, which meant she wrote the checks for all his flights, hotel bills and other expenses during trips to JPL. As his former laboratory assistant Peter Simmonds put it, Lovelock was now “among the suits.” On March 31, 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data. She accused the biologists of “geocentrism” in their assumption that experiments to find life on Earth would be equally applicable to other planets. She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order—in homeostasis—not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had “initiated” with Lovelock. “I thought it obvious that the best experiment to begin with was composition of the atmosphere,” she recalled. This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point. At a JPL strategy meeting, Lovelock weighed into the debate with a series of withering comments about using equipment developed in the Mojave Desert to find life on Mars. He instead proposed an analysis of gases to assess whether the planet was in equilibrium (lifelessly flatlining) or disequilibrium (vivaciously erratic) based on the assumption that life discharged waste (excess heat and gases) into space in order to maintain a habitable environment. It would be the basis for his theory of a self-regulating planet, which he would later call Gaia. Lovelock’s first paper on detecting life on Mars was published in Nature in August 1965, under his name only. Hitchcock later complained that she deserved more credit, but she said nothing at the time. The pair were not only working together by this stage, they were also having a love affair. “Our trysts were all in hotels in the US,” Lovelock remembered. “We carried on the affair for six months or more.” Sex and science were interwoven. Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life. This was essential for the Gaia hypothesis. Hitchcock said she had posed the key question: what made life possible here and, apparently, nowhere else? This set them thinking about the Earth as a self-regulating system in which the atmosphere was a product of life. From this revolutionary perspective, the gases surrounding the Earth suddenly began to take on an air of vitality. They were not just life-enabling, they were suffused with life, like the exhalation of a planetary being—or what they called in their private correspondence, the “great animal.” Far more complex and irregular than the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, these gases burned with life. They sounded out others. Sagan, who shared an office with Lovelock, provided a new dimension to their idea by asking how the Earth had remained relatively cool even though the sun had steadily grown hotter over the previous 8 billion years. Lewis Kaplan at JPL and Peter Fellgett at Reading University were important early allies and listeners. (Later, the pioneering US biologist Lynn Margulis would make an essential contribution, providing an explanation of how Lovelock’s theory might work in practice at a microbial level.) The long-dead physicist Erwin Schrödinger also provided an important key, according to Lovelock: “I knew nothing about finding life or what life was. The first thing I read was Schrödinger’s What is Life? He said life chucked out high-entropy systems into the environment. That was the basis of Gaia; I realized planet Earth excretes heat.” In the mid-60s, this was all still too new and unformed to be described as a hypothesis. But it was a whole new way of thinking about life on Earth. They were going further than Charles Darwin in arguing that life does not just adapt to the environment, it also shapes it. This meant evolution was far more of a two-way relationship than mainstream science had previously acknowledged. Life was no longer just a passive object of change; it was an agent. The couple were thrilled. They were pioneers making an intellectual journey nobody had made before. It was to be the high point in their relationship. The following two years were a bumpy return to Earth. Lovelock was uncomfortable with the management duties he had been given at JPL. The budget was an unwelcome responsibility for a man who had struggled with numbers since childhood, and he was worried he lacked the street smarts to sniff out the charlatans who were pitching bogus multimillion-dollar projects. Meanwhile, the biologists Oyama and Lederberg were going above his head and taking every opportunity to put him down. “Oyama would come up and say: ‘What are you doing there? You are wasting your time, Nasa’s time,’” Lovelock recalled. “He was one of the few unbearable persons I have known in my life.” In 1966, they had their way, and Lovelock and Hitchcock’s plans for an alternative Mars life-exploration operation using atmospheric analysis were dropped by the US space agency. “I am sorry to hear that politics has interfered with your chances of a subcontract from Nasa,” Fellgett commiserated. Cracks started to appear in Lovelock’s relationship with Hitchcock. He had tried to keep the affair secret, but lying weighed heavily on him. They could never go to the theater, concerts, or parks in case they were spotted together, but close friends could see what was happening. “They naturally gravitated towards one another. It was obvious,” Simmonds said. When they corresponded, Lovelock insisted Hitchcock never discuss anything but work and science in her letters, which he knew would be opened by his wife, Helen, who also worked as his secretary. But intimacy and passion still came across in discussions of their theories. Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory. Lovelock’s family noticed a change in his behaviour. The previous year, his mother had suspected he was unhappy in his marriage and struggling with a big decision. Helen openly ridiculed his newly acquired philosophical pretensions and way of talking—both no doubt influenced by Hitchcock. “Who does he think he is? A second Einstein?” she asked scornfully. Helen would refer to Hitchcock as “Madam” or “Fanny by Gaslight,” forbade her husband from introducing Hitchcock to other acquaintances, and insisted he spend less time in the US. But he could not stay away, and Helen could not help but fret: “Why do you keep asking me what I’m worried about? You know I don’t like (you) all those miles away. I’m only human, dear, and nervous. I can only sincerely hope by now you have been to JPL and found that you do not have to stay anything like a month. I had a night of nightmares…The bed is awfully big and cold without you.” So, Lovelock visited JPL less frequently and for shorter periods. Hitchcock filled the physical void by throwing her energy into their shared intellectual work. Taking the lead, she began drafting a summary of their life-detection ideas for an ambitious series of journal papers about exobiology (the study of the possibility of life on other planets) that she hoped would persuade either the US Congress or the British parliament to fund a 100-inch infrared telescope to search planetary atmospheres for evidence of life. But nothing seemed to be going their way. In successive weeks, their jointly authored paper on life detection was rejected by two major journals: the Proceedings of the Royal Society in the UK and then Science in the US. The partners agreed to swallow their pride and submit their work to the little-known journal Icarus. Hitchcock admitted to feeling downhearted in a handwritten note from 11 November 1966: “Enclosed is a copy of our masterpiece, now doubly blessed since it has been rejected by Science. No explanation so I suppose it got turned down by all the reviewers…Feel rather badly about the rejection. Have you ever had trouble like this, publishing anything?…As for going for Icarus, I can’t find anybody who’s even heard of the journal.” Hitchcock refused to give up. In late 1966 and early 1967, she sent a flurry of long, intellectually vivacious letters to Lovelock about the papers they were working on together. Her correspondence during this period was obsessive, hesitant, acerbic, considerate, critical, encouraging and among the most brilliant in the Lovelock archives. These missives can be read as foundation stones for the Gaia hypothesis or as thinly disguised love letters. The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists. In one she lamented that they were unable to meet in person to discuss their work, but she enthused about how far their intellectual journey had taken them. “I’m getting rather impressed with us as I read Biology and the Exploration of Mars—with the fantastic importance of the topic. Wow, if this works and we do find life on Mars we will be in the limelight,” she wrote. Further on, she portrayed the two of them as explorers, whose advanced ideas put them up against the world, or at least against the senior members of the JPL biology team. The most impressive of these letters is a screed in which Hitchcock wrote to Lovelock with an eloquent summary of “our reasoning” and how this shared approach went beyond mainstream science. “We want to see whether a biota exists—not whether single animals exist,” she said. “It is also the nature of single species to affect their living and nonliving environments—to leave traces of themselves and their activity everywhere. Therefore we conclude that the biota must leave its characteristic signature on the ‘non-living’ portions of the environment.” Hitchcock then went on to describe how the couple had tried to identify life, in a letter dated December 13, 1966: “We started our search for the unmistakable physical signature of the terrestrial biota, believing that if we found it, it would—like all other effects of biological entities—be recognizable as such by virtue of the fact that it represents ‘information’ in the pure and simple sense of a state of affairs which is enormously improbable on nonbiological grounds…We picked the atmosphere as the most likely residence of the signature, on the grounds that the chemical interactions with atmospheres are probably characteristic of all biotas. We then tried to find something in our atmosphere which would, for example, tell a good Martian chemist that life exists here. We made false starts because we foolishly looked for one giveaway component. There are none. Came the dawn and we saw that the total atmospheric mixture is a peculiar one, which is in fact so information-full that it is improbable. And so forth. And now we tend to view the atmosphere almost as something itself alive, because it is the product of the biota and an essential channel by which elements of the great living animal communicate—it is indeed the milieu internal which is maintained by the biota as a whole for the wellbeing of its components. This is getting too long. Hope it helps. Will write again soon.” With hindsight, these words are astonishingly prescient and poignant. Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory. The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists. It was not just the persuasiveness of the science that resonates in this letter, but the intellectual passion with which ideas are developed and given lyrical expression. The poetic conclusion—“came the dawn”—reads as a hopeful burst of illumination and a sad intimation that their night together may be drawing to a close. Their joint paper, “Life detection by atmospheric analysis,” was submitted to Icarus in December 1966. Lovelock acknowledged it was superior to his earlier piece for Nature: “Anybody who was competent would see the difference, how the ideas had been cleared up and presented in a much more logical way.” He insisted Hitchcock be lead author. Although glad to have him on board because she had never before written a scientific paper and would have struggled to get the piece published if she had put it solely under her name, she told me she had no doubt she deserved most of the credit: “I remember when I wrote that paper, I hardly let him put a word in.” The year 1967 was to prove horrendous for them both, professionally and personally. In fact, it was a dire moment for the entire US space program. In January, three astronauts died in a flash fire during a test on an Apollo 204 spacecraft, prompting soul-searching and internal investigations. US politicians were no longer willing to write blank cheques for a race to Mars. Public priorities were shifting as the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement gained ground, and Congress slashed the Nasa budget. “He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something.” The affair between Hitchcock and Lovelock was approaching an ugly end. Domestic pressures were becoming intense. Helen was increasingly prone to illness and resentment. On March 15, 1967, she wrote to Lovelock at JPL to say: “It seems as if you have been gone for ages,” and scornfully asked about Hitchcock: “Has Madam arrived yet?” Around this time, Lovelock’s colleague at JPL, Peter Simmonds, remembered things coming to a head. “He strayed from the fold. Helen told him to ‘get on a plane or you won’t have a marriage’ or some such ultimatum.” Lovelock was forced into an agonising decision about Hitchcock. “We were in love with each other. It was very difficult. I think that was one of the worst times in my life. [Helen’s health] was getting much worse. She needed me. It was clear where duty led me and I had four kids. Had Helen been fit and well, despite the size of the family, it would have been easier to go off.” Instead, he decided to ditch Hitchcock. “I determined to break it off. It made me very miserable…I just couldn’t continue.” The breakup, when it finally came, was brutal. Today, more than 50 years on, Hitchcock is still pained by the way things ended. “I think it was 1967. We were both checking into the Huntington and got rooms that were separated by a conference room. Just after I opened the door, a door on the opposite side was opened by Jim. We looked at each other and I said something like: ‘Look, Jim, this is really handy.’ Whereupon he closed the door and never spoke to me again. I was shattered. Probably ‘heartbroken’ is the appropriate term here. He didn’t give me any explanation. He didn’t say anything about Helen. He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something…He could not possibly have been more miserable than I was.” Hitchcock was reluctant to let go. That summer, she sent Lovelock a clipping of her interview with a newspaper in Connecticut, below the headline “A Telescopic Look at Life on Other Planets,” an article outlining the bid she and Lovelock were preparing in order to secure financial support for a telescope. In November, she wrote a memo for her company detailing the importance of her continued collaboration with Lovelock and stressing their work “must be published.” But the flame had been extinguished. The last record of direct correspondence between the couple is an official invoice, dated March 18, 1968, and formally signed “consultant James E Lovelock.” Hitchcock was fired by Hamilton Standard soon after. “They were not pleased that I had anything at all to do with Mars,” she recalled. The same was probably also true for her relationship with Lovelock. The doomed romance could not have been more symbolic. Hitchcock and Lovelock had transformed humanity’s view of its place in the universe. By revealing the interplay between life and the atmosphere, they had shown how fragile are the conditions for existence on this planet, and how unlikely are the prospects for life elsewhere in the solar system. They had brought romantic dreams of endless expansion back down to Earth with a bump. This is an edited excerpt from The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory, published by Canongate on September 12 and available at guardianbookshop.com

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealized as something cold, hard, rational, neutral, and objective, dictated […]

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealized as something cold, hard, rational, neutral, and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings. The life and work of James Lovelock is proof that this is neither possible nor desirable. In his work, he helped us understand that humans can never completely divorce ourselves from any living subject because we are interconnected and interdependent, all part of the same Earth system, which he called Gaia.

Our planet, he argued, behaves like a giant organism—regulating its temperature, discharging waste and cycling chemicals to maintain a healthy balance. Although highly controversial among scientists in the 1970s and 80s, this holistic view of the world had mass appeal, which stretched from New Age spiritual gurus to that stern advocate of free-market orthodoxy, Margaret Thatcher. Its insights into the link between nature and climate have since inspired many of the world’s most influential climate scientists, philosophers, and environmental campaigners. The French philosopher Bruno Latour said the Gaia theory has reshaped humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe as fundamentally as the ideas of Galileo Galilei. At its simplest, Gaia is about restoring an emotional connection with a living planet.

Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness.

While the most prominent academics of the modern age made their names by delving ever deeper into narrow specialisms, Lovelock dismissed this as knowing “more and more about less and less” and worked instead on his own all-encompassing, and thus deeply unfashionable, theory of planetary life.

I first met Lovelock in the summer of 2020, during a break between pandemic lockdowns, when he was 101 years old. In person, he was utterly engrossing and kind. I had long wanted to interview the thinker who somehow managed to be both the inspiration for the green movement, and one of its fiercest critics. The account that follows, of the origins and development of Gaia theory, will probably surprise many of Lovelock’s followers, as it surprised me.

Knowing he did not have long to live, Lovelock told me: “I can tell you things now that I could not say before.” The true nature of the relationships that made the man and the hypothesis were hidden or downplayed for decades. Some were military (he worked for MI5 and MI6 for more than 50 years) or industrial secrets (he warned another employer, Shell, of the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1966). Others were too painful to share with the public, his own family and, sometimes, himself. Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness. He preferred to move on. Everything was a problem to be solved.

What I discovered, and what has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory.

Lovelock told me his greatest discovery was the biotic link between the Earth’s life and its atmosphere. He envisaged it as a “cool flame” that has been burning off the planet’s excess heat for billions of years. From this emerged the Gaia theory and an obsession with the atmosphere’s relationship with life on Earth. But he could not have seen it alone. Lovelock was guided by a love affair with Hitchcock, an American philosopher and systems analyst, who he met at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Like most brilliant women in the male-dominated world of science in the 1960s, Hitchcock struggled to have her ideas heard, let alone acknowledged. But Lovelock listened. And, as he later acknowledged, without Hitchcock, the world’s understanding of itself may well have been very different.

Lovelock had arrived at JPL in 1961 at the invitation of Abe Silverstein, the director of Space Flight Programs at NASA, who wanted an expert in chromatography to measure the chemical composition of the soil and air on other planets. For the science-fiction junkie Lovelock, it was “like a letter from a beloved. I was as excited and euphoric as if at the peak of passion.” He had been given a front-row seat to the reinvention of the modern world.

California felt like the future. Hollywood was in its pomp, Disneyland had opened six years earlier, Venice Beach was about to become a cradle of youth culture and Bell Labs, Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard were pioneering the computer-chip technology that was to lead to the creation of Silicon Valley. JPL led the fields of space exploration, robotics and rocket technology.

In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who designed the V-2 rockets that devastated London in the second world war, made JPL the base for the US’s first successful satellite programme. It was his technology that the White House was relying on to provide the thrust for missions to the moon, Mars and Venus. By 1961, the San Gabriel hillside headquarters of JPL had become a meeting place for many of the planet’s finest minds, drawing in Nobel winners, such as Joshua Lederberg, and emerging “pop scientists” like Carl Sagan. There was no more thrilling time to be in the space business.

Lovelock had a relatively minor role as a technical adviser, but he was, he told me, the first Englishman to join the US space programme: the most high-profile, and most lavishly funded, of cold war fronts. Everyone on Earth had a stake in the US-USSR rivalry, but most people felt distant and powerless. Three years earlier, Lovelock had listened on his homemade shortwave radio in Finchley to the “beep, beep, beep” transmission of the USSR’s Sputnik, the first satellite that humanity had put into orbit. Now he was playing with the super powers.

Dian Hitchcock had been hired by NASA to keep tabs on the work being done at JPL to find life on Mars. The two organisations had been at loggerheads since 1958, when JPL had been placed under the jurisdiction of the newly created civilian space agency, Nasa, with day-to-day management carried out by the California Institute of Technology. JPL’s veteran scientists bristled at being told what to do by their counterparts in the younger but more powerful federal organisation. Nasa was determined to regain control. Hitchcock was both their spy and their battering ram. Lovelock became her besotted ally.

They had first met in the JPL canteen, where Hitchcock introduced herself to Lovelock with a joke: “Do you realise your surname is a polite version of mine?” The question delighted Lovelock. As they got to know one another, he also came to respect Hitchcock’s toughness in her dealings with her boss, her colleagues and the scientists. He later saw her yell furiously at a colleague in the street. “They were frightened of her. Nasa was very wise to send her down,” he recalled. They found much in common. Both had struggled to find intellectual peers throughout their lives.

Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life.

Hitchcock had grown used to being overlooked or ignored. She struggled to find anyone who would take her seriously. That and her inability to find people she could talk to on the same intellectual level left her feeling lonely. Lovelock seemed different. He came across as something of an outsider, and was more attentive than other men. “I was initially invisible. I couldn’t find people who would listen to me. But Jim did want to talk to me and I ate it up,” she said. “When I find someone I can talk to in depth it’s a wonderful experience. It happens rarely.”

They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. Vance Oyama, an effusively cheerful biochemist who had joined the JPL programme from the University of Houston the same year as Lovelock, put the prospects of life on Mars at 50 percent. He had a multimillion-dollar reason to be enthusiastic, as he was responsible for designing one of the life-detection experiments on the Mars lander: a small box containing water and a “chicken soup” of nutrients that were to be poured on to Martian soil.

Hitchcock suggested her employer, the NASA contractor Hamilton Standard, hire Lovelock as a consultant, which meant she wrote the checks for all his flights, hotel bills and other expenses during trips to JPL. As his former laboratory assistant Peter Simmonds put it, Lovelock was now “among the suits.”

On March 31, 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data. She accused the biologists of “geocentrism” in their assumption that experiments to find life on Earth would be equally applicable to other planets. She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order—in homeostasis—not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had “initiated” with Lovelock. “I thought it obvious that the best experiment to begin with was composition of the atmosphere,” she recalled. This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point.

At a JPL strategy meeting, Lovelock weighed into the debate with a series of withering comments about using equipment developed in the Mojave Desert to find life on Mars. He instead proposed an analysis of gases to assess whether the planet was in equilibrium (lifelessly flatlining) or disequilibrium (vivaciously erratic) based on the assumption that life discharged waste (excess heat and gases) into space in order to maintain a habitable environment. It would be the basis for his theory of a self-regulating planet, which he would later call Gaia.

Lovelock’s first paper on detecting life on Mars was published in Nature in August 1965, under his name only. Hitchcock later complained that she deserved more credit, but she said nothing at the time.

The pair were not only working together by this stage, they were also having a love affair. “Our trysts were all in hotels in the US,” Lovelock remembered. “We carried on the affair for six months or more.” Sex and science were interwoven. Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life. This was essential for the Gaia hypothesis. Hitchcock said she had posed the key question: what made life possible here and, apparently, nowhere else? This set them thinking about the Earth as a self-regulating system in which the atmosphere was a product of life.

From this revolutionary perspective, the gases surrounding the Earth suddenly began to take on an air of vitality. They were not just life-enabling, they were suffused with life, like the exhalation of a planetary being—or what they called in their private correspondence, the “great animal.” Far more complex and irregular than the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, these gases burned with life.

They sounded out others. Sagan, who shared an office with Lovelock, provided a new dimension to their idea by asking how the Earth had remained relatively cool even though the sun had steadily grown hotter over the previous 8 billion years. Lewis Kaplan at JPL and Peter Fellgett at Reading University were important early allies and listeners. (Later, the pioneering US biologist Lynn Margulis would make an essential contribution, providing an explanation of how Lovelock’s theory might work in practice at a microbial level.) The long-dead physicist Erwin Schrödinger also provided an important key, according to Lovelock: “I knew nothing about finding life or what life was. The first thing I read was Schrödinger’s What is Life? He said life chucked out high-entropy systems into the environment. That was the basis of Gaia; I realized planet Earth excretes heat.”

In the mid-60s, this was all still too new and unformed to be described as a hypothesis. But it was a whole new way of thinking about life on Earth. They were going further than Charles Darwin in arguing that life does not just adapt to the environment, it also shapes it. This meant evolution was far more of a two-way relationship than mainstream science had previously acknowledged. Life was no longer just a passive object of change; it was an agent. The couple were thrilled. They were pioneers making an intellectual journey nobody had made before.

It was to be the high point in their relationship.

The following two years were a bumpy return to Earth. Lovelock was uncomfortable with the management duties he had been given at JPL. The budget was an unwelcome responsibility for a man who had struggled with numbers since childhood, and he was worried he lacked the street smarts to sniff out the charlatans who were pitching bogus multimillion-dollar projects. Meanwhile, the biologists Oyama and Lederberg were going above his head and taking every opportunity to put him down. “Oyama would come up and say: ‘What are you doing there? You are wasting your time, Nasa’s time,’” Lovelock recalled. “He was one of the few unbearable persons I have known in my life.”

In 1966, they had their way, and Lovelock and Hitchcock’s plans for an alternative Mars life-exploration operation using atmospheric analysis were dropped by the US space agency. “I am sorry to hear that politics has interfered with your chances of a subcontract from Nasa,” Fellgett commiserated.

Cracks started to appear in Lovelock’s relationship with Hitchcock. He had tried to keep the affair secret, but lying weighed heavily on him. They could never go to the theater, concerts, or parks in case they were spotted together, but close friends could see what was happening. “They naturally gravitated towards one another. It was obvious,” Simmonds said. When they corresponded, Lovelock insisted Hitchcock never discuss anything but work and science in her letters, which he knew would be opened by his wife, Helen, who also worked as his secretary. But intimacy and passion still came across in discussions of their theories.

Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory.

Lovelock’s family noticed a change in his behaviour. The previous year, his mother had suspected he was unhappy in his marriage and struggling with a big decision. Helen openly ridiculed his newly acquired philosophical pretensions and way of talking—both no doubt influenced by Hitchcock. “Who does he think he is? A second Einstein?” she asked scornfully. Helen would refer to Hitchcock as “Madam” or “Fanny by Gaslight,” forbade her husband from introducing Hitchcock to other acquaintances, and insisted he spend less time in the US. But he could not stay away, and Helen could not help but fret: “Why do you keep asking me what I’m worried about? You know I don’t like (you) all those miles away. I’m only human, dear, and nervous. I can only sincerely hope by now you have been to JPL and found that you do not have to stay anything like a month. I had a night of nightmares…The bed is awfully big and cold without you.”

So, Lovelock visited JPL less frequently and for shorter periods. Hitchcock filled the physical void by throwing her energy into their shared intellectual work. Taking the lead, she began drafting a summary of their life-detection ideas for an ambitious series of journal papers about exobiology (the study of the possibility of life on other planets) that she hoped would persuade either the US Congress or the British parliament to fund a 100-inch infrared telescope to search planetary atmospheres for evidence of life.

But nothing seemed to be going their way. In successive weeks, their jointly authored paper on life detection was rejected by two major journals: the Proceedings of the Royal Society in the UK and then Science in the US. The partners agreed to swallow their pride and submit their work to the little-known journal Icarus. Hitchcock admitted to feeling downhearted in a handwritten note from 11 November 1966: Enclosed is a copy of our masterpiece, now doubly blessed since it has been rejected by Science. No explanation so I suppose it got turned down by all the reviewers…Feel rather badly about the rejection. Have you ever had trouble like this, publishing anything?…As for going for Icarus, I can’t find anybody who’s even heard of the journal.”

Hitchcock refused to give up. In late 1966 and early 1967, she sent a flurry of long, intellectually vivacious letters to Lovelock about the papers they were working on together. Her correspondence during this period was obsessive, hesitant, acerbic, considerate, critical, encouraging and among the most brilliant in the Lovelock archives. These missives can be read as foundation stones for the Gaia hypothesis or as thinly disguised love letters.

The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists.

In one she lamented that they were unable to meet in person to discuss their work, but she enthused about how far their intellectual journey had taken them. “I’m getting rather impressed with us as I read Biology and the Exploration of Mars—with the fantastic importance of the topic. Wow, if this works and we do find life on Mars we will be in the limelight,” she wrote. Further on, she portrayed the two of them as explorers, whose advanced ideas put them up against the world, or at least against the senior members of the JPL biology team.

The most impressive of these letters is a screed in which Hitchcock wrote to Lovelock with an eloquent summary of “our reasoning” and how this shared approach went beyond mainstream science. “We want to see whether a biota exists—not whether single animals exist,” she said. “It is also the nature of single species to affect their living and nonliving environments—to leave traces of themselves and their activity everywhere. Therefore we conclude that the biota must leave its characteristic signature on the ‘non-living’ portions of the environment.” Hitchcock then went on to describe how the couple had tried to identify life, in a letter dated December 13, 1966:

We started our search for the unmistakable physical signature of the terrestrial biota, believing that if we found it, it would—like all other effects of biological entities—be recognizable as such by virtue of the fact that it represents ‘information’ in the pure and simple sense of a state of affairs which is enormously improbable on nonbiological grounds…We picked the atmosphere as the most likely residence of the signature, on the grounds that the chemical interactions with atmospheres are probably characteristic of all biotas. We then tried to find something in our atmosphere which would, for example, tell a good Martian chemist that life exists here. We made false starts because we foolishly looked for one giveaway component. There are none. Came the dawn and we saw that the total atmospheric mixture is a peculiar one, which is in fact so information-full that it is improbable. And so forth. And now we tend to view the atmosphere almost as something itself alive, because it is the product of the biota and an essential channel by which elements of the great living animal communicate—it is indeed the milieu internal which is maintained by the biota as a whole for the wellbeing of its components. This is getting too long. Hope it helps. Will write again soon.”

With hindsight, these words are astonishingly prescient and poignant. Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory. The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists. It was not just the persuasiveness of the science that resonates in this letter, but the intellectual passion with which ideas are developed and given lyrical expression. The poetic conclusion—“came the dawn”—reads as a hopeful burst of illumination and a sad intimation that their night together may be drawing to a close.

Their joint paper, “Life detection by atmospheric analysis,” was submitted to Icarus in December 1966. Lovelock acknowledged it was superior to his earlier piece for Nature: “Anybody who was competent would see the difference, how the ideas had been cleared up and presented in a much more logical way.” He insisted Hitchcock be lead author. Although glad to have him on board because she had never before written a scientific paper and would have struggled to get the piece published if she had put it solely under her name, she told me she had no doubt she deserved most of the credit: “I remember when I wrote that paper, I hardly let him put a word in.”

The year 1967 was to prove horrendous for them both, professionally and personally. In fact, it was a dire moment for the entire US space program. In January, three astronauts died in a flash fire during a test on an Apollo 204 spacecraft, prompting soul-searching and internal investigations. US politicians were no longer willing to write blank cheques for a race to Mars. Public priorities were shifting as the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement gained ground, and Congress slashed the Nasa budget.

“He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something.”

The affair between Hitchcock and Lovelock was approaching an ugly end. Domestic pressures were becoming intense. Helen was increasingly prone to illness and resentment. On March 15, 1967, she wrote to Lovelock at JPL to say: “It seems as if you have been gone for ages,” and scornfully asked about Hitchcock: “Has Madam arrived yet?” Around this time, Lovelock’s colleague at JPL, Peter Simmonds, remembered things coming to a head. “He strayed from the fold. Helen told him to ‘get on a plane or you won’t have a marriage’ or some such ultimatum.”

Lovelock was forced into an agonising decision about Hitchcock. “We were in love with each other. It was very difficult. I think that was one of the worst times in my life. [Helen’s health] was getting much worse. She needed me. It was clear where duty led me and I had four kids. Had Helen been fit and well, despite the size of the family, it would have been easier to go off.” Instead, he decided to ditch Hitchcock. “I determined to break it off. It made me very miserable…I just couldn’t continue.”

The breakup, when it finally came, was brutal. Today, more than 50 years on, Hitchcock is still pained by the way things ended. “I think it was 1967. We were both checking into the Huntington and got rooms that were separated by a conference room. Just after I opened the door, a door on the opposite side was opened by Jim. We looked at each other and I said something like: ‘Look, Jim, this is really handy.’ Whereupon he closed the door and never spoke to me again. I was shattered. Probably ‘heartbroken’ is the appropriate term here. He didn’t give me any explanation. He didn’t say anything about Helen. He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something…He could not possibly have been more miserable than I was.”

Hitchcock was reluctant to let go. That summer, she sent Lovelock a clipping of her interview with a newspaper in Connecticut, below the headline “A Telescopic Look at Life on Other Planets,” an article outlining the bid she and Lovelock were preparing in order to secure financial support for a telescope. In November, she wrote a memo for her company detailing the importance of her continued collaboration with Lovelock and stressing their work “must be published.”

But the flame had been extinguished. The last record of direct correspondence between the couple is an official invoice, dated March 18, 1968, and formally signed “consultant James E Lovelock.” Hitchcock was fired by Hamilton Standard soon after. “They were not pleased that I had anything at all to do with Mars,” she recalled. The same was probably also true for her relationship with Lovelock.

The doomed romance could not have been more symbolic. Hitchcock and Lovelock had transformed humanity’s view of its place in the universe. By revealing the interplay between life and the atmosphere, they had shown how fragile are the conditions for existence on this planet, and how unlikely are the prospects for life elsewhere in the solar system. They had brought romantic dreams of endless expansion back down to Earth with a bump.

This is an edited excerpt from The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory, published by Canongate on September 12 and available at guardianbookshop.com

Read the full story here.
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Harris County commissioners approve climate justice plan

Nearly three years in the works, the Harris County Climate Justice Plan is a 59-page document that creates long-term strategies addressing natural resource conservation, infrastructure resiliency and flood control.

Sarah GrunauFlood waters fill southwest Houston streets during Hurricane Beryl on July 8, 2024.Harris County commissioners this month approved what’s considered the county’s most comprehensive climate justice plan to date. Nearly three years in the works, the Harris County Climate Justice Plan is a 59-page document that creates long-term strategies addressing natural resource conservation, infrastructure resiliency and flood control in the Houston area. The climate justice plan was created by the Office of County Administration’s Office of Sustainability and an environmental nonprofit, Coalition for Environment, Equity and Resilience. The plan sets goals in five buckets, said Stefania Tomaskovic, the coalition director for the nonprofit. Those include ecology, infrastructure, economy, community and culture. County officials got feedback from more than 340 residents and organizations to ensure the plans reflect the needs of the community. “We held a number of community meetings to really outline the vision and values for this process and then along the way we’ve integrated more and more community members into the process of helping to identify the major buckets of work,” Tomaskovic told Hello Houston. Feedback from those involved in the planning process of the climate justice plan had a simple message — people want clean air, strong infrastructure in their communities, transparency and the opportunity to live with dignity, according to the plan. It outlines plans to protect from certain risks through preventative floodplain and watershed management, land use regulations and proactive disaster preparation. Infrastructure steps in the plan include investing in generators and solar power battery backup, and expanding coordination of programs that provide rapid direct assistance after disasters. Economic steps in the plan including expanding resources with organizations to support programs that provide food, direct cash assistance and housing. Tomaskovic said the move could be cost effective because some studies show that for every dollar spent on mitigation, you’re actually saving $6. “It can be cost effective but also if you think about, like, the whole line of costs, if we are implementing programs that help keep people out of the emergency room, we could be saving in the long run, too,” she said. Funds that will go into implementing the projects have yet to be seen. The more than $700,000 climate plan was funded by nonprofit organizations, including the Jacob & Terese Hershey Foundation. “Some of them actually are just process improvements,” Lisa Lin, director of sustainability with Harris County, told Hello Houston. “Some of them are actually low-cost, no-cost actions. Some of them are kind of leaning on things that are happening in the community or happening in the county. Some of them might be new and then we’ll be looking at different funding sources.” The county will now be charged with bringing the plan into reality, which includes conducting a benefits and impacts analysis. County staffers will also develop an implementation roadmap to identify specific leaders and partners and a plan to track its success, according to the county. “This initiative is the first time a U.S. county has prepared a resiliency plan that covers its entire population, as opposed to its bureaucracy alone," Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said in a statement. "At the heart of this plan are realistic steps to advance issues like clean air, resilient infrastructure, and housing affordability and availability. Many portions of the plan are already in progress, and I look forward to continued advancement over the years."

A forthcoming Supreme Court decision could limit agencies’ duty to consider environmental harms

The ruling could allow federal agencies to skip climate analysis when approving major projects — with wide-reaching consequences.

A forthcoming Supreme Court decision is poised to weaken a bedrock law that requires federal agencies to study the potential environmental impacts of major projects. The case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, concerns a proposed 88-mile railroad that would link an oil-producing region of Utah to tracks that reach refineries in the Gulf Coast. Environmental groups and a Colorado county argued that the federal Surface Transportation Board failed to adequately consider climate, pollution, and other effects as required under the National Environmental Protection Act, or NEPA, in approving the project. In 2023, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the challengers. The groups behind the railway project, including several Utah counties, appealed the case to the highest court, which is expected to hand down a decision within the next few months.  Court observers told Grist the Supreme Court will likely rule in favor of the railway developers, with consequences far beyond Utah. The court could limit the scope of environmental harms federal agencies have to consider under NEPA, including climate impacts. Depending on how the justices rule, the decision could also bolster — or constrain — parallel moves by the Trump administration to roll back decades-old regulations governing how NEPA is implemented. “All of these rollbacks and attacks on NEPA are going to harm communities, especially those that are dealing with the worst effects of climate change and industrial pollution,” said Wendy Park, senior attorney at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, a party in the Supreme Court case.  Since 1970, NEPA has required federal agencies to take a “hard look” at the environmental effects of proposed major projects or actions. Oil and gas pipelines, dams, mines, highways, and other infrastructure projects must undergo an environmental study before they can get federal permits, for example. Agencies consider measures to reduce potential impacts during their review and can even reject a proposal if the harms outweigh the benefits.  NEPA ensures that environmental concerns are “part of the agenda” for all federal agencies — even ones that don’t otherwise focus on the environment, said Dan Farber, a law professor at the University of California Berkeley. It’s also a crucial tool for communities to understand how a project will affect them and provide input during the decision-making process, according to Park.  Oil tanker railway cars in Albany, New York, in 2014. John Carl D’Annibale / Albany Times Union via Getty Images In 2021, the Surface Transportation Board, a small federal agency that oversees railways, approved a line that would connect the Uinta Basin to the national rail network. The basin, which contains large deposits of crude oil, spans about 12,000 square miles across northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado and is currently accessible only by truck. The proposed track would allow companies to transport crude oil to existing refineries along the Gulf Coast, quadrupling waxy crude oil production in the basin. According to the agency’s environmental review, under a high oil production scenario, burning those fuels “could represent up to approximately 0.8 percent of nationwide emissions and 0.1 percent of global emissions” — about 30 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Environmental groups and a Colorado county challenged the board’s approval at the D.C. Circuit Court. The groups argued that the agency had failed to consider key impacts in its NEPA review, including the effects of increased oil refining on communities already burdened by pollution along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas, and the potential for more oil spills and wildfires along the broader rail network. In August 2023, the D.C. Circuit largely agreed, finding “numerous NEPA violations” in the agency’s environmental review. In their appeal to the Supreme Court, the developers of the railway initially argued that an agency shouldn’t have to consider any environmental effects of a project that would fall under the responsibility of a different agency. In this case, for example, the Surface Transportation Board wouldn’t have to consider air pollution impacts of oil refining on Gulf Coast communities because the Environmental Protection Agency, not the Surface Transportation Board, regulates air pollution.  By oral arguments in December, however, the railway backers had walked away from this drastic interpretation, which contradicts decades of NEPA precedent. It’s standard practice for one agency’s environmental review to study impacts that fall under the responsibility of other agencies, said Deborah Sivas, a law professor at Stanford University. The railway proponents instead proposed that agencies shouldn’t have to consider impacts that fall outside of their authority and are “remote in time and space.” That would include the effects on Gulf Coast communities residing thousands of miles away — as well as climate impacts like greenhouse gas emissions. Park, from the Center for Biological Diversity, argued that overlooking those impacts would undermine the intent of NEPA, which is to inform the public of likely harms. “The entire purpose of this project is to ramp up oil production in Utah and to deliver that oil to Gulf Coast refineries,” she said. “To effectively allow the agency to turn a blind eye to that purpose and ignore all of the predictable environmental harms that would result from that ramped-up oil production and downstream refining is antithetical to NEPA’s purpose.”  Lawyers for the railway’s developers didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment. A coalition of Utah counties backing the project has previously underlined the economic potential of the project. “We are optimistic about the Supreme Court’s review and confident in the thorough environmental assessments conducted by the STB,” said Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, said in a statement after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. “This project is vital for the economic growth and connectivity of the Uinta Basin region, and we are committed to seeing it through.” The Supreme Court has historically always ruled in favor of the government in NEPA cases, and legal experts told Grist the decision will likely support the railway developers in some manner. But during oral arguments, several justices seemed skeptical of positions presented by railway supporters. Chief Justice John Roberts noted that imposing such severe limits on NEPA review could open agencies up to legal risk.  Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts poses for an official portrait in 2022. Alex Wong / Getty Images The court could reach some kind of middle ground in its decision — not going as far as the D.C. Circuit to affirm the legitimacy of considering a wide range of climate and other risks, but also not excluding as many impacts as the railway developers had hoped, said Farber.  Any decision will ultimately serve as an important guide for agencies as the Trump administration introduces even more uncertainty in the federal permitting process. In February, the administration issued an interim rule to rescind regulations issued by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which oversees NEPA implementation across the federal government. The council’s rules have guided agencies in applying the law for nearly five decades. Now, Trump officials have left it up to each individual agency to develop its own regulations by next February.  In developing those standards, agencies will likely look to the Supreme Court’s decision, legal experts said. “What the Supreme Court rules here could be a very important guide as to how agencies implement NEPA and how they fashion their regulations interpreting NEPA,” said Park. If the court rules that agencies don’t need to consider climate impacts in NEPA reviews, for example, that could make it easier for Trump appointees to ignore greenhouse gas emissions, said Sivas. The White House has already instructed agencies not to include environmental justice impacts in their assessments. On the other hand, a more nuanced opinion by the Supreme Court could end up undercutting efforts by the Trump administration to limit the scope of environmental reviews, said Farber. If justices end up affirming the need to consider certain impacts of the Utah railway project, for example, that could limit how much agencies under Trump can legally avoid evaluating particular effects. Agencies need to design regulations that will withstand challenges in lower courts — which will inevitably rely on the Supreme Court’s ruling when deciding on NEPA challenges moving forward. In the meantime, however, legal experts say that Trump’s decision to have each agency create its own NEPA regulations will create even more chaos and uncertainty, even as the administration seeks to “expedite and simplify the permitting process” through sweeping reforms.  “I think that’s going to just slow down the process more and cause more confusion, and not really serve their own goals,” said Farber. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A forthcoming Supreme Court decision could limit agencies’ duty to consider environmental harms on Apr 24, 2025.

The World's Biggest Companies Have Caused $28 Trillion in Climate Damage, a New Study Estimates

A new study estimates that the world’s biggest corporations have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, which is a shade less than the sum of all goods and services produced in the United States last year

WASHINGTON (AP) — The world's biggest corporations have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates as part of an effort to make it easier for people and governments to hold companies financially accountable, like the tobacco giants have been.A Dartmouth College research team came up with the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total dollar figure coming from 10 fossil fuel providers: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India and the British Coal Corporation.For comparison, $28 trillion is a shade less than the sum of all goods and services produced in the United States last year.At the top of the list, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom have each caused a bit more than $2 trillion in heat damage over the decades, the team calculated in a study published in Wednesday's journal Nature. The researchers figured that every 1% of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere since 1990 has caused $502 billion in damage from heat alone, which doesn't include the costs incurred by other extreme weather such as hurricanes, droughts and floods.The study is an attempt to determine “the causal linkages that underlie many of these theories of accountability,” said its lead author, Christopher Callahan, who did the work at Dartmouth but is now an Earth systems scientist at Stanford University. The research firm Zero Carbon Analytics counts 68 lawsuits filed globally about climate change damage, with more than half of them in the United States.“Everybody’s asking the same question: What can we actually claim about who has caused this?” said Dartmouth climate scientist Justin Mankin, co-author of the study. “And that really comes down to a thermodynamic question of can we trace climate hazards and/or their damages back to particular emitters?”The answer is yes, Callahan and Mankin said.The researchers started with known final emissions of the products — such as gasoline or electricity from coal-fired power plants — produced by the 111 biggest carbon-oriented companies going as far back as 137 years, because that's as far back as any of the companies' emissions data go and carbon dioxide stays in the air for much longer than that. They used 1,000 different computer simulations to translate those emissions into changes for Earth's global average surface temperature by comparing it to a world without that company's emissions.Using this approach, they determined that pollution from Chevron, for example, has raised the Earth’s temperature by .045 degrees Fahrenheit (.025 degrees Celsius).The researchers also calculated how much each company's pollution contributed to the five hottest days of the year using 80 more computer simulations and then applying a formula that connects extreme heat intensity to changes in economic output. Mankin said that in the past, there was an argument of, “Who's to say that it's my molecule of CO2 that's contributed to these damages versus any other one?” He said his study “really laid clear how the veil of plausible deniability doesn't exist anymore scientifically. We can actually trace harms back to major emitters.”Shell declined to comment. Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and BP did not respond to requests for comment.“All methods they use are quite robust,” said Imperial College London climate scientist Friederike Otto, who heads World Weather Attribution, a collection of scientists who try rapid attribution studies to see if specific extreme weather events are worsened by climate change and, if so, by how much. She didn't take part in the study. “It would be good in my view if this approach would be taken up more by different groups. As with event attribution, the more groups do it, the better the science gets and the better we know what makes a difference and what does not,” Otto said. So far, no climate liability lawsuit against a major carbon emitter has been successful, but maybe showing “how overwhelmingly strong the scientific evidence” is can change that, she said.In the past, damage caused by individual companies were lost in the noise of data, so it couldn't be calculated, Callahan said. “We have now reached a point in the climate crisis where the total damages are so immense that the contributions of a single company's product can amount to tens of billions of dollars a year,” said Chris Field, a Stanford University climate scientist who didn't take part in the research.This is a good exercise and proof of concept, but there are so many other climate variables that the numbers that Callahan and Mankin came up with are probably a vast underestimate of the damage the companies have really caused, said Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist who wasn't involved in the study.Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Vineyards in NY Wine Country Push Sustainability as They Adapt to Climate Change

The Finger Lakes are home to New York’s largest wine-producing region, but vineyards there are struggling with the impacts of climate change

PENN YAN, N.Y. (AP) — A decade ago, Scott Osborn would have eagerly told prospective vineyard owners looking to join the wine industry to “jump into it.”Now, his message is different.“You’re crazy,” said Osborn, who owns Fox Run Vineyards, a sprawling 50-acre (20-hectare) farm on Seneca Lake, the largest of New York’s Finger Lakes.Despite the challenges, however, many winegrowers are embracing sustainable practices, wanting to be part of the solution to global warming while hoping they can adapt to changing times. EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is a collaboration between Rochester Institute of Technology and The Associated Press. The Finger Lakes, which span a large area of western New York, have water that can sparkle and give off a sapphire hue on sunny days. More than 130 wineries dot the shorelines and offer some of America’s most famous white wines. At Fox Run, visitors step inside to sip wines and bring a bottle — or two — home. Many are longtime customers, like Michele Magda and her husband, who have frequently made the trip from Pennsylvania.“This is like a little escape, a little getaway,” she said.Traditionally, the plants’ buds break out in spring, emerging with colorful grapes that range from the cabernet franc’s deep blues to the soft greens of the region’s most popular grape, riesling. However, a warming world is making that happen earlier, adding to uncertainty and potential risks for farmers. If a frost comes after the buds have broken, growers can lose much of the harvest. Year-round rain and warmer night temperatures differentiate the Finger Lakes from its West Coast competitors, said Paul Brock, a viticulture and wine technology professor at Finger Lakes Community College. Learning to adapt to those fluctuations has given local winemakers a competitive advantage, he said. Winegrowers as part of the solution Many winegrowers say they are working to make their operations more sustainable, wanting to help solve climate change caused by the burning of fuels like gasoline, coal and natural gas.Farms can become certified under initiatives such as the New York Sustainable Winegrowing program. Fox Run and more than 50 others are certified, which requires that growers improve practices like bettering soil health and protecting water quality of nearby lakes. Beyond the rustic metal gate featuring the titular foxes, some of Osborn’s sustainability initiatives come into view.Hundreds of solar panels powering 90% of the farm’s electricity are the most obvious feature. Other initiatives are more subtle, like underground webs of fungi used to insulate crops from drought and disease.“We all have to do something,” Osborn said. One winegrower's sustainability push — and struggle to stay in business For Suzanne Hunt and her family’s 7th-generation vineyard, doing something about climate change means devoting much of their efforts to sustainability. Hunt Country Vineyards, along Keuka Lake, took on initiatives like using underground geothermal pipelines for heating and cooling, along with composting. Despite the forward-looking actions, climate change is one of the factors forcing the family to make tough decisions about their future.Devastating frosts in recent years have caused “catastrophic” crop loss. They’ve also had to reconcile with changing consumer attitudes, as U.S. consumption of wine fell over the past few years, according to wine industry advocacy group Wine Institute.By this year’s end, the vineyard will stop producing wine and instead will hold community workshops and sell certain grape varieties.“The farm and the vineyard, you know, it’s part of me,” Hunt said. “I’ll let the people whose dream and life is to make wine do that part, and I’ll happily support them.” Tariffs and US policy changes loom Vinny Aliperti, owner of Billsboro Winery along Seneca Lake, is working to improve the wine industry’s environmental footprint. In the past year, he’s helped establish communal wine bottle dumpsters that divert the glass from entering landfills and reuse it for construction materials.But Aliperti said he’d like to see more nearby wineries and vineyards in sustainability efforts. The wine industry’s longevity depends on it, especially under a presidential administration that doesn’t seem to have sustainability at top of mind, he said. “I think we’re all a bit scared, frankly, a bit, I mean, depressed,” he said. “I don’t see very good things coming out of the next four years in terms of the environment.”Osborn is bracing for sweeping cuts to federal environmental policies that previously made it easier to fund sustainability initiatives. Tax credits for Osborn’s solar panels made up about half of over $400,000 in upfront costs, in addition to some state and federal grants. Osborn wants to increase his solar production, but he said he won’t have enough money without those programs.Fox Run could also lose thousands of dollars from retaliatory tariffs and boycotts of American wine from his Canadian customers. In March, Canada introduced 25% tariffs on $30 billion worth of U.S. goods — including wine.Osborn fears he can’t compete with larger wine-growing states like California, which may flood the American market to make up for lost customers abroad. Smaller vineyards in the Finger Lakes might not survive these economic pressures, he said.Back at Fox Run's barrel room, Aric Bryant, a decade-long patron, says all the challenges make him even more supportive of New York wines. “I have this, like, fierce loyalty,” he said. "I go to restaurants around here and if they don’t have Finger Lakes wines on their menu, I’m like, ‘What are you even doing serving wine?’”The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Climate Change Has a Joe Rogan Problem

If you’re reading this, chances are good that you read other stories about climate change too. Looking around at the news yesterday, you may well have stumbled onto any number of Earth Day–inspired cases for optimism: “tiny climate actions” like adjusting the thermostat and propagating your plants, profiles of environmental do-gooders, steps to becoming the “best planetary citizen possible.” Those kinds of cheery spreads are standard fare for Earth Day. But they feel more than a little discordant with the drumbeat of decidedly awful climate news coming from both the planet itself and a White House attempting to dismantle clean air regulations, defund scientific research, claw back climate funds approved by Congress, and potentially even strip environmental groups of their nonprofit status.Many people, though, are hearing less about all of the above. Media Matters recently found that corporate broadcast news coverage of climate change fell by 25 percent last year compared to 2023. While climate coverage at national outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post has surged by as much as 300 percent since 2012, according to one recent academic study, smaller outlets around the country haven’t kept pace; smaller, predominantly state and local outlets expanded their climate coverage by about half as much over the same time period. The growing numbers of people who tend to get their news from other sources, meanwhile—including social media platforms—are hearing a lot of nonsense. An analysis published this week by Yale Climate Connections found that eight of the 10 most popular online shows—including those hosted by Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson—have “spread false or misleading information about climate change.” A report from the British news site Tortoise Media—analyzing the climate-related output of more than 300 influencers—likewise shows that climate-skeptic posts on YouTube grew by 43 percent between 2021 and 2024. On X (formerly Twitter), such content ballooned by 82 percent over the same time period. As much as 40 percent of it posits that climate change is merely an excuse for some shadowy network of conspirators to control the population and/or bring about “communism.”Given that one in five people in the United States regularly get their news from social media, that means a lot of people are getting bad information about the climate crisis. That’s especially true of young people. A Pew poll released late last year found that 37 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds here regularly get news from “news influencers,” who tend to lean right if they have any obvious political affiliations. Survey results released in early 2024 by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that nearly a third of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 view climate change as “harmless,” including 39 percent of teen boys. The same poll found 33 percent of teenagers—and 40 percent of teen boys—said climate change policies “do more harm than good.”Academics and philanthropists have spent more than a decade theorizing about the best ways to convey information about climate change to the general public: the merits of projecting hope instead of “doomerism” and of showcasing actually existing climate solutions. Nobody seems to have cracked the code, though. Growing awareness of the climate crisis—and consistently positive polling about how many people want their governments to do more about it—still hasn’t translated into many governments actually taking said action, at least not at anywhere near the scale the crisis requires. Big national outlets have invested in telling more good-news stories to readers who already care about climate change, while right-wing YouTubers broadcast lies and conspiracy theories to huge audiences. If you’ve made it this far, you can count yourself among the relatively small number of people who regularly read climate coverage beyond the headlines. Thank you! Accordingly, you probably don’t need me to sugarcoat the conclusion with a half-baked case for optimism: This isn’t good.

If you’re reading this, chances are good that you read other stories about climate change too. Looking around at the news yesterday, you may well have stumbled onto any number of Earth Day–inspired cases for optimism: “tiny climate actions” like adjusting the thermostat and propagating your plants, profiles of environmental do-gooders, steps to becoming the “best planetary citizen possible.” Those kinds of cheery spreads are standard fare for Earth Day. But they feel more than a little discordant with the drumbeat of decidedly awful climate news coming from both the planet itself and a White House attempting to dismantle clean air regulations, defund scientific research, claw back climate funds approved by Congress, and potentially even strip environmental groups of their nonprofit status.Many people, though, are hearing less about all of the above. Media Matters recently found that corporate broadcast news coverage of climate change fell by 25 percent last year compared to 2023. While climate coverage at national outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post has surged by as much as 300 percent since 2012, according to one recent academic study, smaller outlets around the country haven’t kept pace; smaller, predominantly state and local outlets expanded their climate coverage by about half as much over the same time period. The growing numbers of people who tend to get their news from other sources, meanwhile—including social media platforms—are hearing a lot of nonsense. An analysis published this week by Yale Climate Connections found that eight of the 10 most popular online shows—including those hosted by Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson—have “spread false or misleading information about climate change.” A report from the British news site Tortoise Media—analyzing the climate-related output of more than 300 influencers—likewise shows that climate-skeptic posts on YouTube grew by 43 percent between 2021 and 2024. On X (formerly Twitter), such content ballooned by 82 percent over the same time period. As much as 40 percent of it posits that climate change is merely an excuse for some shadowy network of conspirators to control the population and/or bring about “communism.”Given that one in five people in the United States regularly get their news from social media, that means a lot of people are getting bad information about the climate crisis. That’s especially true of young people. A Pew poll released late last year found that 37 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds here regularly get news from “news influencers,” who tend to lean right if they have any obvious political affiliations. Survey results released in early 2024 by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that nearly a third of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 view climate change as “harmless,” including 39 percent of teen boys. The same poll found 33 percent of teenagers—and 40 percent of teen boys—said climate change policies “do more harm than good.”Academics and philanthropists have spent more than a decade theorizing about the best ways to convey information about climate change to the general public: the merits of projecting hope instead of “doomerism” and of showcasing actually existing climate solutions. Nobody seems to have cracked the code, though. Growing awareness of the climate crisis—and consistently positive polling about how many people want their governments to do more about it—still hasn’t translated into many governments actually taking said action, at least not at anywhere near the scale the crisis requires. Big national outlets have invested in telling more good-news stories to readers who already care about climate change, while right-wing YouTubers broadcast lies and conspiracy theories to huge audiences. If you’ve made it this far, you can count yourself among the relatively small number of people who regularly read climate coverage beyond the headlines. Thank you! Accordingly, you probably don’t need me to sugarcoat the conclusion with a half-baked case for optimism: This isn’t good.

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