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MILAN (Reuters) -Italy's antitrust agency has launched an investigation into a Dublin-based company that manages the Italian website of online...

The Olympics are a sustainability nightmare, and Paris, despite its efforts, is no exception

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For years, eagle-eyed environmentalists have called out banks and consumer businesses—from Barclays to fashion brand ASOS—for making misleading claims that their practices or products are sustainable, otherwise known as greenwashing.  However, lately there has been an uptick in “greenhushing,” a […]

Greenpeace argues European-backed projects hamper countries’ ability to decarbonise their own economiesEuropean countries are extracting renewable energy from Morocco and Egypt to “greenwash” their own economies, while leaving north Africans reliant on dirty imported fuels and paying the environmental costs, a Greenpeace report says.Both Morocco and Egypt are aiming to leverage their strategic locations south of the Mediterranean, and their solar and wind power potential, to position themselves as pivotal to Europe’s quest to diversify its energy supply. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Environmental groups say bank is misleading public over ‘sustainable’ financing for Eni as company vastly expands fossil fuel productionBarclays is being accused by environmental groups of greenwashing after helping to arrange €4bn (£3.4bn) in financing for the Italian oil company Eni in a way that allows them to qualify towards its $1tn sustainable financing goal.Environmental groups have said the London-based bank is deliberately misleading the public by labelling the financial instruments as “sustainable” at the same time that Eni is in the midst of a multibillion-pound fossil fuel expansion drive designed to increase production. Continue reading...

Major banks were underwriting bonds by energy giants that failed to meet climate goals. The post As Green Bonds Tank, Analysts Fear Greenwashing Is to Blame appeared first on .

Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility alleges Santos’s plan to reach net zero by 2040 is ‘little more than a series of speculations’Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastA world-first greenwashing case that seeks to hold oil and gas company Santos accountable for its net zero commitments began in the federal court today, brought by one of its own shareholders, the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR).The organisation claims Santos did not have a proper basis for saying it had a clear pathway to reduce emissions by 26% to 30% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2040, which constituted misleading or deceptive conduct in breach of Australian corporate and consumer laws.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

Institutions alleged to have given billions of dollars to oil and gas companies involved in projects that are harming the rainforestsFive of the world’s biggest banks are “greenwashing” their role in the destruction of the Amazon, according to a report that indicates that their environmental and social guidelines fail to cover more than 70% of the rainforest.The institutions are alleged to have provided billions of dollars of finance to oil and gas companies involved in projects that are impacting the Amazon, destabilising the climate, or impinging on the land and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples. Continue reading...

Arguments abound on the benefits and dangers of trophy hunting. We need a careful, measured approach to analyzing how it’s justified and promoted. The post Greenwashing and Social Justice: Pro-Trophy Hunting Narratives Need Careful Examination appeared first on The Revelator.

Operator also found by Amsterdam court to have painted ‘overly rosy picture’ of sustainable aviation fuelThe Dutch airline KLM has misled customers with vague environmental claims and painted “an overly rosy picture” of its sustainable aviation fuel, a court has found.In a greenwashing case brought by the campaign group Fossielvrij, the district court of Amsterdam ruled on Wednesday that KLM had broken the law with misleading advertising in 15 of the 19 environmental statements it assessed. They include claims that the airline is moving towards a “more sustainable” future and statements on its website about the benefits of offsetting a flight. Continue reading...

Climate activists advocate for a return to Earth Day's protest roots, opposing the commercial exploitation of the event.Kristin Hostetter reports for Outside.In short:Earth Day began in 1970 as a significant protest and has since morphed into a marketing tool for companies.Activists emphasize the day's origins and the need to focus on genuine environmental change rather than superficial corporate shows.Despite the commercialization, the activists interviewed maintain that Earth Day can still inspire valuable ecological behaviors and community actions.Key quote:"I urge anyone who wants to take action for climate to see the undeniable link to social justice.— Pattie Gonia, co-founder of The Outdoorist OathWhy this matters:Understanding the shift from Earth Day's activist roots to corporate greenwashing is important for distinguishing genuine community actions over superficial corporate initiatives. Read more: Earth Day: Amidst the greenwashing, it's still a good thing..

New York attorney general’s lawsuit accuses JBS of deceiving customers about being climate-friendly – and the implications could be far-reachingWhen the office of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, announced that it would be suing the world’s largest meat company, JBS, for misleading customers about its climate commitments, it caused a stir far beyond the world of food. That’s because the suit’s impact has the potential to influence the approach all kinds of big businesses take in their advertising about sustainability, according to experts.It’s just one in a string of greenwashing lawsuits being brought against large airline, automobile and fashion companies of late. “It’s been 20 years of companies lying about their environmental and climate justice impacts. And it feels like all of a sudden, from Europe to the US, the crackdown is beginning to happen,” said Todd Paglia, executive director of environmental non-profit Stand.earth. “I think greenwash[ing] is actually one of the pivotal issues in the next five years.” Continue reading...

The pledge was born out of shareholder activism — and was withdrawn as regulators crack down on greenwashing.

Past Presentation | A supposedly eco-friendly tour company is guiding tourists through a wooded area with the hopes of glimpsing an elusive, critically endangered animal.

When Labor took office, it promised to reverse nature’s decline. But that looks more and more like greenwashing

Upton Sinclair, author of the scathing 1906 meat industry exposé The Jungle, would later in his life coin a particularly useful aphorism: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But if you’ve been following news about the meat and dairy industries this fall, that aphorism might well be rearranged to this: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his tastes depend on not understanding it.At a time when the corpses of dairy cattle felled by the H5N1 avian flu are left to rot on roadsides in California’s Central Valley and human cases of the disease creep upward, and when water-guzzling feed crops for beef and dairy are driving the American West’s worsening water crisis, the biggest stories about livestock in the national media in the past few months were downright effusive about the industry’s future: With a few small fixes to their diets, these stories promised, cows can transform from climate villains to climate heroes, ushering in an era of net-zero beef and dairy. This blend of science, public relations, and status quo bias might be the best window yet into the meat industry’s quest to prevent any serious discussion about the environmental and public health problems posed by animal agriculture. The recent positive press about cows revolves around a red algae seaweed native to Australia called Asparagopsis taxiformis. Over the past half-decade, a number of studies have been published showing that, under small-scale and short-term experimental conditions, adding dried and processed asparagopsis to cows’ feed on feedlots and dairy farms can massively diminish the amount of methane they belch into the atmosphere. Two of the most widely cited studies report reductions of up to 80 percent and up to a stunning 98 percent. The news media has dutifully covered these studies, usually taking them at face value. The Guardian alone has run stories about the promise of feed additives in 2021, 2023, and this past August; since then asparagopsis has also been covered by The Wall Street Journal and on NBC. (I was a guest on the NBC segment, where I presented a very short version of the argument in this article.)If feeding cows seaweed really did reduce their total emissions by 98 percent, and if asparagopsis production and distribution could be scaled globally, this sort of reduction would be a game-changer. But it’s not clear that the math actually holds up. Feed additives are only really effective mixed into processed feed, meaning they work best in industrialized systems where ruminants are confined and fed a prepared diet rather than when they’re grazing on pasture. Most beef cattle are slaughtered between 18 and 24 months of age and spend the majority of their lives on pasture, only being rounded up on feedlots for the last few months of their lives and fed corn, soy, and grasses like alfalfa. This feed is designed to fatten cattle to slaughter weight, but it’s also much easier to digest, meaning that most beef cattle will only emit about 11 percent of their lifetime emissions on feedlots. Dairy cows, meanwhile, live longer than beef cattle and are kept in barns for most of their lives, where they are inseminated, separated from their young, and milked for their productive lives. This means dairy cattle eat an almost all-feed diet, but it also means they emit relatively less over their lifetime than beef cattle because they’re not digesting roughage.Back in 2021, seeing the discrepancy between the reduction promised by headlines and press releases and the basic facts of cows’ life cycles, New York University environmental science professor Matthew Hayek and I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and came up with far less promising numbers. Assuming an 80 percent reduction of emissions on feedlots, where cattle emit 11 percent of their methane, we figured that would make asparagopsis lead to lifetime emissions reductions of about 9 percent. Even that bombastic 98 percent reduction estimate—which hasn’t been replicated in any other studies—would still only result in about an 11 percent total emissions reduction. Hardly game-changing numbers.Since then, longer-term trials have showed our calculations were, if anything, too optimistic. A 300-day study of Wagyu cattle on a feedlot in Australia—Wagyu are allowed to live longer than standard American Angus cattle and spend longer on feedlots to develop the fatty tissues for which their carcasses are so prized—showed only a 28 percent reduction in methane over those 300 days. If we again assume that only 11 percent of the Wagyu’s lifetime emissions take place on feedlots, that means algae additives would reduce only 28 percent of 11 percent of lifetime emissions, amounting to a 3 percent total reduction. But even if we assume that Wagyu emit more of their lifetime emissions on feedlots instead—say, a third of their total emissions—a 28 percent reduction of one-third of lifetime emissions still comes out to around 9 percent: pretty much exactly what Hayek and I calculated. Either way, the math throws cold water on the hype.Feeding algae to beef cattle, in short, doesn’t do much. So algae proponents have switched to touting the possible benefits of feeding algae to dairy cattle instead. Here, the numbers from long-term trials are a little more optimistic but still fall far short of upending agriculture as we know it: a 25 percent lifetime reduction in a Norwegian study and 38 percent in an Australian one. However, the Norwegian study noted that dairy cattle fed asparagopsis had lower milk yield and high milk iodine content, leading its authors to question the viability of large-scale asparagopsis use. If feeding cows algae reduces the quality or quantity of the goods they produce, this plan might not make practical or economic sense.This math may seem tedious. But ultimately, claims about emissions reductions are claims about math. So the best way to evaluate these claims is by asking three questions. First, does the math add up? That’s what I’ve explained above: In this case, it doesn’t. Second, can the solution be scaled such that the math can apply globally and really make a dent in total emissions? Scholars have been asking questions about the feasibility of large-scale asparagopsis use ever since studies about it started being published, and the answer to these questions is far from clear. Asparagopsis is a tropical seaweed that acts as an invasive species if it spreads to new habitats, meaning that growing it in marine environments would be tricky. It lends itself best to on-land aquaculture cultivation, but the economics of scaling this technology and getting the seaweed to any meaningful fraction of the planet’s billion-plus cows would be a herculean undertaking. Another problem with scaling up would involve dose control: The reason that asparagopsis reduces cows’ methane is because it contains bromoform, which is toxic to humans and currently classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as a “probable human carcinogen.” Initial research suggests the risk to humans is pretty low if the initial dose to the cow is low. But that does mean doses given to cows would have to be low enough that this didn’t find its way into their milk.Third, how does the reduced-emissions product compare to alternatives? For beef and dairy coming out of the asparagopsis trials, the answer is: terribly. Reducing beef emissions by 3 percent, or even 9 percent, would still leave beef at least five times as greenhouse gas–intensive as other meats, and even more so than plant-based proteins like beans, tofu, or Impossible burgers. And even 38 percent-less-emitting dairy emits more greenhouse gas than soy milk. So even if asparagopsis could be scaled, beef and dairy would still be the most climate-unfriendly foods available. This shouldn’t be surprising given the physical qualities of ruminants, which simply can’t be erased with a sprinkle of fairy—sorry, seaweed—dust. It’s the cow, not the how, as it were.Given all this, there’s a real risk that focusing on algae and other feed additives will distract from true food-systems emissions reduction and, instead, help “greenwash” the animal agriculture industry—making it seem more environmentally friendly than it actually is. That may already be happening.Since at least 2006, when the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published the “Livestock’s Long Shadow” report showing the magnitude of the global livestock industry’s environmental and climate impact, that industry has divided its time between trying to discredit the science and scientists linking its emissions to climate change and promising that it can reduce those very emissions. As academic, government, and public scrutiny of the climate impacts of food have only increased, the animal agriculture industry has responded by making broad and often unsubstantiated promises about lower-emissions products or even about becoming net-zero. It’s the clean coal debacle all over again. For instance, Tyson Foods has been marketing its Brazen Beef brand as more climate friendly. Matthew Hayek and I broke down the dubious math of those claims for The New Republic last year. Now Tyson is being sued for false advertising of Brazen by the Environmental Working Group. This comes on the heels of JBS, the Brazil-based meat giant, being sued in New York state for false advertising over making unsubstantiated claims about its ability to reach net-zero. Greenwashing matters not simply because it’s often based on spurious claims but because it aims to stave off regulation by showing policymakers that polluters are being proactive in lowering their carbon footprints. Greenwashing also serves, as the New York state suit against JBS argues, to “provide environmentally conscious consumers with a ‘license’ to eat beef.” In others words, as environmental science increasingly points to the need to drastically reduce the amount of beef and dairy in our diets, the promise that beef and dairy can instead be made greener might stop consumers or institutions concerned with climate change from changing what food they choose to buy. Greenwashing eases or erases the concerns that might spur change. And people want their concerns to be eased. This is what makes the story of asparagopsis so appealing: The public is hungry for anything but change.This impulse quickly becomes self-rationalizing. For example, some argue that humans will keep eating meat and drinking dairy, so we should at least try to make them more sustainable. This feels like basic common sense. But behind it lurks the very complacency that greenwashing is designed to fuel: the assumption that change is unnecessary, undesirable, and perhaps even impossible. All of the talk about seaweed—including all of this article so far—falls victim to a much bigger issue: a carbon tunnel vision that reduces environmental impacts and sustainability measurements only to emissions. Merely reducing emissions from beef and dairy—no matter how much—does nothing to offset its other impacts on soil and water, on labor, on the animals themselves, or on public health. And it doesn’t address one of the biggest ways beef and dairy exacerbate both emissions and other forms of environmental degradation: by driving deforestation, as wilderness is replaced with grazing lands and crops grown for animal feed. We not only need more laws and lawsuits cracking down on corporate greenwashing, but we need changes in agricultural policy, diets, and technology that will allow us to shift our food system away from livestock toward more sustainable alternatives.Seaweed, then, doesn’t just fail to reduce emissions as well as promised. It sucks the air out of productive debate. Hoping for any simple solution to hack complex food system problems distracts us from both the complexity and the magnitude of the changes necessary. Red algae, in other words, is a red herring.

Coming Soon | Fifteen years after his eye opening examination of the average, everyday waste consumption habits of his fellow Canadians in Garbage! The Revolution Starts At Home, filmmaker Andrew Nisker finds himself more concerned than ever about humanity’s filthy habits. A quick glance outside confirms that the situation is critical. In a world full of performative greenwashing, corporations fueling the fires of mindless consumerism and governments’ futile efforts to clean up the mess, it’s no wonder that the average citizen has fallen out of touch with the waste we each create, everyday. Enlisting the help of your average condo dwelling couple and a typical rural nuclear family, Andrew once again embarks on an adventure through our waste, tracing our garbage from our carefully sorted bins to landfills and beyond, and meeting innovators along the way who are working hard to create sustainable alternatives, turning our expendable trash into repurposed treasures. Even as it wades through our muck, This Film is Garbage is an ultimately hopeful look at the little things we can each do to change our collectively smelly ways!

Researchers looked at more than 25,000 everyday items available at supermarkets like Aldi, Coles, Woolworths, Harris Farm and IGAGet our afternoon election email, free app or daily news podcastSimple grocery swaps – including substituting red meat for chicken or plant-based alternatives, opting for dairy-free milk and yoghurt and choosing fruit toast instead of muffins – could substantially cut household greenhouse gas emissions, new research has found.A report by the George Institute for Global Health found switches could reduce a household’s climate pollution by 6 tonnes a year, which it said was roughly equivalent to the emissions from an average household’s grid-based electricity use.Sign up for the Afternoon Update: Election 2025 email newsletter Continue reading...

The lawsuit was among a burgeoning crop of plastics litigation amid growing awareness of a global plastics crisis.

The worldwide event aims to raise awareness about the need to protect the environment.

The succession of authoritarian fossil fuel producers hosting international climate negotiations is a concern. We must pay attention to political influences on the talks and beware of greenwashing.

Indian government accused of PR stunt after moving 337 tonnes of toxic waste that had been held in containersForty years after one of world’s deadliest industrial disasters struck the Indian city of Bhopal, a cleanup operation has finally begun to remove hundreds of tonnes of toxic waste from the site.However, local campaigners have accused the Indian government of greenwashing, arguing that the 337 tonnes of waste removed this week represents less than 1% of the more than 1m tonnes of hazardous materials left after the disaster and that the cleanup has done nothing to tackle chemical contamination of the area. Continue reading...

A new form of zero-carbon, on-demand energy could help bring stability to the grid with support on both sides of the aisle — if the diverse coalition now backing it can hold together despite clashing over politics and climate action. Geothermal energy, which taps the heat of the Earth for industrial purposes or to generate electricity, represents...

Environmental advocacy group the Sierra Club is suing the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), arguing the agency’s new rule doesn’t give investors the full truth about a company’s climate risks. The Sierra Club and the Sierra Club Foundation, represented by Earthjustice, filed the lawsuit Wednesday, joining a growing list of states that have filed challenges to the...

Exxon lawsuit accuses California's attorney general, the Sierra Club and others of defaming the oil giant with negative comments about plastic recycling.

The phrase ‘net zero’ has a long history.

New rule hailed as major step toward reining in source of local toxic air pollution that hits low-income neighborhoodsThe EPA plans to require the nation’s municipal waste incinerators to monitor for dangerous air emissions, a move environmental groups have hailed as a major step toward reining in a staggering source of localized toxic air pollution that most frequently hits low-income neighborhoods.Municipal incinerators’ stacks often spew hazardous pollutants like dioxins, particulate matter, PFAS, carbon monoxide, acid gases, or nitrogen oxides. The substances are linked to cancer, developmental disorders and other serious diseases, but still are burned with limited or patchwork oversight. Continue reading...

Carbon capture and storage is one of the least effective and most expensive emissions reduction methods.

Negative scientific and press reports on the efficacy of carbon credit projects has led to a ‘direct pullback in buyer investment’The market for carbon offsets shrank dramatically last year, falling from $1.9bn (£1.5bn) in 2022 to $723m in 2023, a new report has found. The drop came after a series of scientific and media reports found many offsetting schemes do nothing to mitigate the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.The research by Ecosystem Marketplace, a nonprofit initiative that collects data about the carbon market from brokers and traders, found the market had shrunk 61%. Continue reading...

More lobbyists for the controversial technology were present this year, despite debate about its viabilityAt least 480 lobbyists working on carbon capture and storage (CCS) have been granted access to the UN climate summit, known as Cop29, the Guardian can reveal.That is five more CCS lobbyists than were present at last year’s climate talks, despite the overall number of participants shrinking significantly from about 85,000 to about 70,000. Continue reading...

The plastics industry uses a controversial accounting method to inflate the recycled content it advertises

Even a majority of Republicans support efforts to hold manufacturers accountable for allegedly deceptive claimsConcern about the fossil fuel and plastics industries’ alleged deception about recycling is growing, with new polling showing a majority of American voters, including 54% of Republicans, support legal efforts to hold the sectors accountable.The industries have faced increasing scrutiny for their role in the global plastics pollution crisis, including an ongoing California investigation and dozens of suits filed over the last decade against consumer brands that sell plastics. Continue reading...

After nearly a decade of negotiations, leaders during the United Nations climate conference’s first day decided on some of the finer points of much-debated sticking point aimed at cutting planet-warming emissions from coal, oil and gas

Vanguard among the institutional investors that dominate fossil-fuel financing. The post Denver Residents Fight Proposal to Drill for Oil and Gas Under Their Homes appeared first on .

This story was first published by Energy News Network . The term “clean energy” often brings to mind gleaming solar panels, spinning wind turbines or water surging through a hydroelectric dam. Few people would imagine dark salt caverns a mile underground, but these geologic formations could play a key role in the…

The people who clean up the world's trash say some companies' statements of support are little more than lip service.

I’m not a fan of New York City’s Climate Week. As I wrote last year, the annual programming timed to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly has “devolved into a marketing opportunity for all the worst capitalists.” This year, the prominence of heavily polluting tech companies among the sponsors—in a year when Kamala Harris, the most climate-friendly major party presidential candidate on offer, is emerging as a wholly owned subsidiary of Silicon Valley—is especially worrying. Is there no limit to the amount of abuse and gaslighting we will tolerate from the tech billionaire class?The theme for this year is “It’s Time.” In her opening address, Climate Week CEO Helen Clarkson emphasized the peril of delaying action on the climate crisis, warning that “history will judge us.” She imagined the people of the future asking, “How many warnings from scientists did they need? How many people needed to die in heat waves for them to believe what was happening?”But some major polluters—Apple, Google, and Meta—are on the list of Climate Week sponsors. These indignant future humans Clarkson imagines might also ask: Why did even those most concerned—the people dedicating their lives and careers to solving this problem—tolerate such bad actors, enabling big polluters to look like climate heroes? While its native California burns and thirsts, Meta—though it has attempted to confuse the public on this point—has by some measures increased its greenhouse gas emissions steadily since 2019, spewing more than 14 million metric tons of carbon last year. Many of us fret about our personal carbon footprint—and sure, we should—but Meta’s is the equivalent of three million individual humans’. Though Meta has been proactive about renewable energy, including geothermal, its data centers are still largely dependent on fossil fuels. It’s still recklessly pouring energy into planet-killing and pointless A.I. Despite constant wildfires, heat waves, and drought and unprecedented public awareness of what is causing such symptoms of crisis, Meta’s carbon footprint is worse now than it was in 2020. In addition to being a giant energy suck, Meta is also a climate offender in its role as an information source: Numerous advocates, climate scientists, and journalists have said that Meta suppresses climate information and boosts denialist disinformation. Meta has called some of these instances a “security error.”By its own admission, Google has also increased its carbon emissions by 13 percent in 2023 alone, to 14.31 million metric tons, about the same as Meta’s. That’s a whopping 50 percent since 2019, and with similar causes to Meta’s: energy use of the data centers that power its A.I. Last year, Apple boasted about its green commitments and achievements in one of the most cringe ads ever, in which “Mother Nature,” played by Octavia Spencer, shows up to a team meeting and yells at them, and walks away placated, even impressed after hearing about the company’s reforestation work and the alleged carbon neutrality of its new Apple Watch. I’m not the first to feel embarrassed for the company every time I watch this ad: Others have called it “greenwashing” and the “Mother of All Virtue Signals.”Undeterred, Apple published a lofty white paper earlier this year deeming its global corporate operations “carbon neutral.” The company’s “Environmental Progress Report” in April boasted of reducing its emissions by 55 percent since 2015. Yet the company’s carbon footprint is even a little bit higher than Google’s or Meta’s, at 16.1 metric tons. Joseph Romm, a senior research fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, has said that Apple’s definition of “carbon neutrality” is arbitrary and unambitious, relying on offsets, which are such a scam that much of the private sector—even Shell and Nestle, not exactly shining paragons of the triple bottom line—has given up on them. Much of what’s holding back progress for these companies—besides the blinding entitlement of a Silicon Valley culture that believes fervently that it is saving the world just by existing—is A.I. I’ve previously discussed the horrific environmental and climate costs of the technology, and the lengths to which tech companies are going to avoid public disclosure of those costs. They can spout on all they like about renewables and forests, but the fact is that A.I. is vastly complicating the shift away from fossil fuels and even perpetuating our coal use because the data centers the technology requires put so much pressure on the grid.All three companies—Meta, Google, and Apple—have a net zero-goal for 2030, and all three are moving in exactly the opposite direction, poster children for the meaninglessness of such goal setting. Together, they have a carbon footprint greater than many countries’.After record heat this summer, as a hurricane barrels into Florida and much of the West remains on fire, the standards for climate discourse and “climate action” should be higher. Exxon Mobil isn’t listed as a Climate Week sponsor, and other big polluters and purveyors of climate disinformation shouldn’t be able to launder their reputations by sponsoring Climate Week either. Big Tech is enjoying a moment of liberal legitimacy, with presidential nominee Kamala Harris benefiting from its campaign largesse. But, coming back to Climate Week’s theme, “it’s time” to recognize these companies for the noxious environmental offenders they are.

The Saudis have won the right to host football’s biggest tournament. But its bid doesn’t seriously address the environmental issues.

Los Angeles should help lead California and the country in banning plastic ground covering. It's expensive, unhealthy and terrible for the environment.

Jeff Bezos’s $10bn climate and biodiversity fund has garnered glittering prizes, but concerns have been voiced over the influence it can buy – and its interest in carbon offsetsLate last month, the coronation of Jeff Bezos and his partner Lauren Sánchez as environmental royalty was complete. At Conservation International’s glitzy annual gala in New York, with Harrison Ford, Jacinda Ardern and Shailene Woodley looking on, the couple were given the global visionary award for the financial contribution of the Bezos Earth Fund to the natural world.“Jeff and Lauren are making history, not just with the sum of their investment in nature but also the speed of it,” said the Conservation International CEO, Dr M Sanjayan, whose organisation received a $20m grant from Bezos in 2021 for its work in the tropical Andes. Continue reading...

Exxon Mobil has touted 'advanced recycling' as a groundbreaking technology that will turn the tide in our plastic crisis. California says it's a lie.

"Argentina's certification approach relies on a silvopastoral system"

The Paris games are shaping up as the greenest games yet. But some critics say even more needs to be done.

Context Labs, led by Dan Harple SM ’13, uses AI-enabled data analytics and verification to help companies measure their true greenhouse emissions and document reductions.

Attorney General Rob Bonta said the company has “manipulated the public and lied to consumers.”

Here are the world’s top banks financing fossil fuels — is yours on the list? The post Abandoned Wells, Methane-Emission Loopholes and Underground Toxic Waste Dumps All Raise Concerns appeared first on .

Phoenix broke several heat records last year. Now Grant Park, which has inequitable tree cover, is seeing a tree planting drive that promises some respite from 100F temperaturesIt was a relatively cool spring day in Phoenix, Arizona, as a tree planting crew dug large holes in one of the desert city’s hottest and least shaded neighborhoods.Still, it was sweaty backbreaking work as they carefully positioned, watered and staked a 10-ft tall Blue palo verde and Chilean mesquite in opposite corners of resident Ana Cordoba’s dusty unshaded backyard. Continue reading...

Seven guest collaborators bring new eyes to a Smithsonian museum founder’s collection of American art

Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad once worked for Shell. Now, as the country gears up to host the biodiversity Cop16, she is calling for a just transition away from fossil fuelsShe is one of the biggest opponents of fossil fuel on the world stage – but Susana Muhamad’s political career was sparked in the halls of an oil company. It began when she resigned as a sustainability consultant with Shell in 2009 and returned home to Colombia. She was 32 and disillusioned, a far cry from the heights she would later reach as the country’s environment minister, and one of the most high-profile progressive leaders in global environmental politics.Muhamad joined Shell an idealistic 26-year-old. “I really thought that you could make a huge impact within an energy company on the climate issue, especially because all their publicity was saying that they were going to become an energy company, meaning they will not be only a fossil fuel company,” she says, when we meet in the Colombian embassy in London. Continue reading...

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Some of the world’s most profitable—and most polluting corporations—have invested in carbon offset projects that have fundamental failings and are “probably junk,” suggesting industry claims about greenhouse gas reductions were likely overblown, according to new analysis. Delta, Gucci, Volkswagen, ExxonMobil, Disney, easyJet and […]

Trackers placed in 93 bundles of Amazon packaging marked for "store drop-off" recycling showed many of them were buried or burned.

Travel and environmental experts break down the rise of the "green travel" movement and how to incorporate it into your next vacation.

Some climate experts say carbon removal start-ups will limit global warming, but significant questions remain

A campaign touting the oil and gas industry’s environmental progress says its energy-producing hydrocarbons are very clean, but not all of its claims can be verified. The post Is Colorado Really the Clean Energy Leader It Claims to Be? appeared first on .

“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, invoking the ragpicker, a new type on the streets of his native nineteenth-century Paris. “Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot, he catalogs and collects.” Buried in Baudelaire’s descriptions of ragpickers are processes that historians have recently laid bare. With industrialization came the rise of consumer culture, and with consumer culture came the rise of disposal culture. Add unfettered fossil fuel use and the invention of single-use plastics and we arrive at the ragpickers of today: people in Indonesia climbing mountains of trash, or children scavenging for survival in the slums of Delhi or Manila or northeastern Brazil. Consumer lifestyles in high-income nations have clogged the oceans with garbage and broken our recycling systems. Only 9 percent of the world’s plastic waste is recycled, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, but plastic consumption is on track to triple by 2050. Running out of places to put our daily detritus, the United States and the European Union export hundreds of millions of tons of garbage each year to poorer nations where it is landfilled, littered, or burned.In two new books, the rise of recycling is a story of illusory promises, often entwined with disturbing political agendas. In Empire of Rags and Bones, Anne Berg, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, examines one of the first modern recycling systems: the “waste regime” of Nazi Germany, where planners and engineers devised programs to recycle metal, rags, and paper; repurpose wires, cables, and railroad equipment; compost kitchen scraps; and collect old shoes, utensils, and junk—all in the service of a genocidal war.We need a better way to think about our trash, and even more so, our consumption.In Total Garbage, journalist Edward Humes picks up the story of recycling from the postwar era to the present. His dive into the teeming wastes and faltering waste management systems of the United States shows that most recycling is a charade, a form of carefully constructed greenwashing that belies the fact that most postconsumer waste, including packaging, clamshells, films, pouches, boxes with windows, bags, and food containers, was never designed to be recycled.Rather than being a virtuous act or an effective practice, recycling has been a feature of destructive systems that exploit labor and natural resources. We need a better way to think about our trash, and even more so, our consumption. Scientists were decades away from discovering the planet-warming effects of carbon dioxide when millions of Germans took up recycling with near-religious fervor. It wasn’t environmental concerns that energized mass campaigns to eradicate waste, but a war economy. This was not unique to Germany: Across the British Empire and the United States, World War II catalyzed public and private efforts to persuade citizens to salvage metals, paper, and objects that could be used to make munitions. But in Germany, recycling campaigns were compulsory and extreme, bound up with the regime’s plans for total war and the total mobilization of the population. Lacking overseas colonies (the post–World War I settlement stripped the Reich of its imperial holdings), Germany was strapped for raw materials. In 1936, preparing for war, Nazi leaders announced a Four-Year Plan, a series of economic measures that introduced recycling regulations and mandated waste avoidance strategies. In the Nazi imagination, Berg tells us, waste was an abundant resource that could be exploited, cycled through the economy in a zero-waste scheme to extract value from existing goods. The solution was to uncover the hidden value of waste. Lurking in the people’s garbage were the resources to fuel Germany’s expansion, the sole guarantee of the Reich’s security and racial purity.A 1938 book by Claus Ungewitter, the head of the regime’s Office of Chemistry, served as the Nazi “garbage bible,” Berg writes. Ungewitter’s scientific treatise outlined how value could be recovered from manufacturing processes and from old rags, sewage, and municipal waste. During World War I, Europeans had collected scrap for the first time, Ungewitter noted, detailing how Germans contributed to the war effort by rounding up paper, rubber, kitchen discards, lamp sockets, celluloid, and early plastic. He believed that Germans could go much further by irrigating agricultural fields with sewage, melting down fences and door hinges to recover metal, churning out briquettes from coal dust, and converting garbage slag to make cement and build roads. Nazi bureaucrats soon took Ungewitter’s ideas into S.S.-owned industries and concentration camps, concocting ways to wrest value from waste and inventing new uses for old materials. The details of Nazi waste reclamation are gory: There are slippers made of hair and a disgusting “garbage sausage” that sickened any prisoner forced to eat it. There are crates of gold teeth and mountains of garments and shoes, objects that entered the visual record in 1945 as an illustration of Nazism’s murderous designs. The piles of glasses and teeth that confronted Allied troops entering the camps show how coordinated and comprehensive the regime’s efforts were to extract value from waste, using the labor of those it condemned to death. While these atrocities became synonymous with a civilizational breach, they grew out of Europe’s racist, brutal history of colonial rule. As Nazi imperial planners prepared for the conquest and depopulation of the east, and calculated allocations of food and other resources, they studied other colonial powers. Just as Europe’s colonial empires plundered gold, timber, cotton, spices, and fossil fuels, “the imperial visions of the Third Reich, too, were focused on natural resources,” Berg writes, “such as iron, oil, and fertile soil, and the Nazis robbed whatever luxury goods they could get their hands on.” In the end, the contingencies and pressures of war led the Nazi empire to extract gold from people, rather than land, and resources from slave laborers instead of nature. Concentration camp prisoners, POWs, and deportees from enemy nations unloaded trains crammed with junk, scrapped metal, and squeezed value from every available textile. Ordinary Germans, meanwhile, proved eager to display their commitment to the future and became dedicated recyclers. In Berg’s telling, the Volksgemeinschaft was also a Müllgemeinschaft (garbage community), and even down to the regime’s final weeks with Allied troops closing in, Germans clung to the fantasy that old textiles and piles of rubble could be recycled into weapons of war, leading them to final victory.In Berg’s story, this chapter in the history of recycling is about war and imperial exploitation. Perhaps even more confounding is that today, books about Nazi Germany fill libraries, and yet historians have somehow failed, until now, to grasp the ideological and strategic importance of recycling. As Berg makes clear, waste is everywhere in the archives—the Nazis rarely hesitated to create a bureaucracy (or a paper trail)—and yet scholars couldn’t see it. Our systems are designed to make waste invisible, at least for those of us who produce most of it.It wasn’t just recycling but also plastic that emerged from war. The difficulties of rubber extraction and a worldwide ivory shortage led to the 1907 invention of Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, a process Jeffrey L. Meikle traces in American Plastic: A Cultural History. Bakelite could be molded and machined and proved more versatile than labor-intensive rubber or ivory, once the preferred material for European makers of boxes, buttons, combs, and piano keys. The decimation of African and Indian elephant herds thanks to European hunters also spurred the invention of celluloid, another hard, durable substance that originated in nature (its inventor combined nitrocellulose with the sap of the laurel tree), only to be replaced by heat- and water-resistant Bakelite. It was Europe’s colonial quest for raw materials, its booming consumer markets, and then the chemical and war-making industries that created and popularized plastic. The U.S. military, eager to conserve precious rubber, contributed to plastic’s spread in World War II by using it in fuses, parachutes, airplanes, antenna housing, bazooka barrels, helmet liners, and combs distributed to service members as part of a hygiene kit.The 1960s ushered in the dawn of single-use plastics, when shopping bags, straws, tubs, utensils, and food wrap became exceedingly cheap to produce and convenient to use, as long as no one paid attention to where it was going. When the first curbside recycling programs appeared in the 1970s, just as U.S. landfills started running short on space, the point of recycling was no longer to mine an untapped resource, or to get the most out of old stuff, but simply to find a place to put it.The flow of plastic from rich countries to poorer ones, glutting waterways and leaching chemicals into the environment, recalls colonial-era destructiveness.Some three decades later, the accumulation of plastic wastes led the U.S. to look abroad for dumping destinations. By the 1990s, half the plastic Americans chucked into the recycling bin “was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China,” instead of making it to the local recycling center, says Humes. “Why invest in expensive technology and labor to keep up with the constantly changing world of packaging and plastics when the mess could be bundled off to China in exchange for easy money and the appearance of being green?”There is a chasm, Humes points out, between “theoretical recycling” and “actual recycling.” (The chasing arrows symbol is a lie: The majority of plastic types captured by the arrows are considered “financially unviable” to recycle.) In 2018, China banned most imports of plastic, meaning that recyclables collected in the United States could no longer be shipped out of sight, out of mind. Instead of bringing in easy revenue by sending waste to China, U.S. cities, towns, and waste companies now faced staggering costs, and as a result, recycling fell off a cliff. The pandemic’s disruptions of global supply chains only exacerbated the problem of sending junk to other countries. Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, and other nations now absorb a portion of our waste, “a global hot potato,” as reporters referred to it in The Guardian. The bulk of this waste (more than 80 percent) is mismanaged, often dumped in open landfills, according to researchers. The flow of plastic from rich countries to poorer ones, glutting waterways and leaching harmful chemicals into the environment, recalls colonial-era destructiveness. Reading Humes’s book alongside Berg’s, the overwhelming takeaway is that waste management perpetuates systems of domination and oppression. Under Nazism, waste was a resource, while under capitalism, waste is a commodity.Humes reports on garbage changemakers—individuals and communities scattered across the country that have come up with new ways to mitigate waste. There’s the father-son team behind Seattle’s Ridwell, which collects and repurposes single-use, zombie trash that refuses to die. Or Sarah Nichols at Maine’s Natural Resources Council, whose efforts to shift the burden of waste disposal from consumers to producers resulted in a 2021 law that levies fees on producers and sellers of packaging and containers to foot the bill for actual recycling. Several college campuses have diverted much of their waste from landfills while ditching fossil fuels. The trash cognoscenti, as Humes calls them, understand that everything must begin with the end in mind. Zero-waste is the goal, and recycling won’t get us there.The best way to solve our garbage crisis, Humes suggests, is to produce less of it in the first place. He intersperses his reporting with thoughts on how to prevent food waste, how to shop package-free, and how to participate in resale and secondhand economies. Citizen-consumers have power, he notes, to buy less; to live, work, and study in low-waste ways; to vote for better policies, and to model change in our communities. Instead of taking out the trash without mulling over where it’s going, for Humes, the key is to “think about what will happen to a product or package at the end of its useful life.”Berg’s history of Nazi recycling concludes with a reminder: “Waste is supposed to be invisible.” Since the nineteenth century, not seeing our trash has been a marker of civilization and progress. Modern sanitation and urban infrastructure carried away our waste, enabling us to produce more of it. What Berg and Humes tell us is that destructive values and oppressive power structures are embedded in our garbage. To exist and persist, our systems make waste. The first step toward change is to start seeing what is hidden in plain sight.

The labor movement and the environmental justice movement have a shared history — and today, workers in all kinds of sectors are banding together to call for climate action.

Analysis of the carbon offset projects used by top corporations including Delta, Gucci and ExxonMobil raises concerns around their emission cuts claimsSome of the world’s most profitable – and most polluting corporations – have invested in carbon offset projects that have fundamental failings and are “probably junk”, suggesting industry claims about greenhouse gas reductions were likely overblown, according to new analysis.Delta, Gucci, Volkswagen, ExxonMobil, Disney, easyJet, and Nestlé are among the major corporations to have purchased millions of carbon credits from climate friendly projects that are “likely junk” or worthless when it comes to offsetting their greenhouse gas emissions, according to a classification system developed by Corporate Accountability, a non-profit, transnational corporate watchdog Continue reading...

Josh Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell believe their film Common Ground could drive a global movement. The post The Mission to Save the World Through Regenerative Farming appeared first on .

Few environmental documentaries boast the star power of Common Ground, a forthcoming sequel to Netflix’s award-winning 2020 documentary Kiss the Ground, which presented regenerative agriculture as the “first viable solution to the climate crisis.” Executive produced by Demi Moore with narration from Jason Momoa, Donald Glover, Rosario Dawson, Laura Dern, and other celebs, the new film is set to be released on Amazon Prime Video this Earth Day. It features a diverse mix of food and farming activists, wellness influencers, and even two U.S. senators (Democrat Cory Booker and Republican Mike Braun), all linked by a common narrative that farming should work with nature rather than against it to save our food system. The film is just one example of the increasing popularity of this thesis among everyone from Hollywood A-listers to lefty food sovereignty activists to right-leaning podcasters and the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement. Nowhere are regenerative ag’s claims bolder than when it comes to “regenerative” beef, whose evangelists insist that by capturing carbon in the soil, natural cattle grazing can completely eliminate the climate impact of raising ruminants, which currently contributes somewhere between 11 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately for the planet, these claims don’t pan out. Earlier this month, the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a new study that found grass-fed beef has no climate benefits over industrial beef and likely doesn’t help much with arable soil carbon sequestration, either. For those who follow the peer-reviewed literature on agriculture and climate, this is no surprise. Proponents of regenerative agriculture have several useful ideas worth pursuing, but at the end of the day, cows are still cows and they still belch lots of methane, so beef is not and never will be a “solution” to the climate crisis.And yet, no matter how many studies get published, the hype around this and other “natural” fixes for environmental and health problems shows few signs of slowing down, winning adherents from across the social and political spectrum, and now finding its way into the executive branch. New Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spoken about regenerative farming in near-magical terms, claiming that “the best thing that you can do for climate is to restore the soils.” He has also boosted the supposed health benefits of fries cooked in beef tallow (as opposed to seed oils), championed raw milk, called for a “let it rip” bird flu strategy, in the hopes of promoting “natural immunity” among chickens, and proselytized about remedies like cod liver oil to stop the measles outbreaks spreading among primarily unvaccinated people in Texas and New Mexico.The proponents of these approaches tend to get one thing right: There are countless problems with the U.S. food and health systems. Industrialized animal agriculture harms the environment, workers, and animals; chronic diet-related disease has reached epidemic proportions; and powerful corporate interests are blocking change. But where they go wrong is believing that there is a simple, “natural” solution that will solve all of these issues in one swoop. The problem is not just the way that natural is equated with good—a dynamic that has a long and storied history. The bigger issue—and one that goes beyond regenerative beef—is an emerging ideology of nature-based solutionism, where all things “natural” are proposed as a sure fix for complex problems. Be it Common Ground or MAHA, the adherents of this ideology assume that a better world will emerge from letting “nature” run its course, no matter what the experts or regulators say.Troubled by the ambitious and even outlandish promises emerging from the tech sector in the Obama era, writer Evgeny Morozov popularized the term solutionism to describe the shared belief across government and industry that Silicon Valley capital and know-how could revolutionize the modern world—that blood tests could be instantly performed from a single drop, that predictive policing algorithms would end crime as we know it, and that if only billions of people logged onto Facebook then digital connection would lead to mutual understanding. It’s not that these pitches were overly optimistic. Optimism suggests some recognition that things might not go as planned, which wasn’t what prospective investors and TED audiences wanted to hear. No, the tech industry’s disruptors had to be sure that their technology was world-changing—or at least sound like they were sure.These solutions rarely if ever lived up to the hype, and some were outright failures. Most stumbled over the all-too-common mistake of not taking the time to understand the problems they were trying to solve; assuming that a technological solution was always needed, largely because that’s what they had on hand. They depended too much on the technocratic application of science, forgetting that the social sciences matter too, eschewing policy reform and cultural change as too messy, only to realize later that the success of any technology depends on policy and culture. Several books and countless articles have now been written about technological solutionism’s failures in food and agriculture, energy and the environment, and as part of the Covid-19 pandemic response. Today’s ubiquitous progressive refrain that “tech won’t save us” (to quote the name of a popular podcast) speaks to an emerging recognition of technology’s limited ability, absent a broader political strategy, to effect positive social change.But while the critics may be louder, those solutionists persist, perhaps most visibly today in the pursuit of artificial intelligence that, we are told, will solve pretty much everything, including the federal government’s alleged inefficiencies.While tech solutionism was booming, a different sort of solutionism was brewing in the background, rooted in the idea that it was modern technology that was at the root of many of our problems. But instead of scaling back tech solutionism’s delusions, this parallel revolution kept the delusions and swapped the solution: a return to our preindustrial roots could help us fix the world’s most intractable problems. On the topic of agriculture, this perspective appeared in bestselling food books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, especially in the form of its protagonist Joel Salatin, a libertarian small-scale farmer who championed free-grazing animals and opposition to federal regulations as the solution to the ills of the modern food system. It also found its way onto the TED stage, where “Rhodesian” farmer Allan Savory—also featured in Kiss the Ground—made the now-omnipresent claim in regenerative agricultural circles that so-called “holistic grazing” could reverse desertification and climate change. That TED talk has been viewed over nine million times, attracting big money support in the process. Oprah Winfrey meanwhile gave a platform to wellness gurus who touted the benefits of natural cures, including Dr. Oz, who claimed that saffron was a “miracle appetite suppressant.” And all of that was before the food and wellness influencers of the social media era took over Instagram and TikTok.Supercharged by the skepticism of the Covid-19 pandemic era, the line between legitimate critique of our public health and food infrastructures and pseudoscience grifting got increasingly blurry. Figures often celebrated as heroes within the alternative food and regenerative agriculture movements—from Joel Salatin to food sovereignty activist Vandana Shiva to functional medicine doctor Mark Hyman (the latter a cast member of Common Ground)—built common cause with some of the internet’s biggest sources of health misinformation and helped lay the groundwork for the rise of MAHA, often hawking natural health products in the process. Amplified to huge audiences by the likes of Joe Rogan and Russell Brand, their claims reverberated around the internet without a fact-check in sight.The appeal of many “natural” claims is obvious. The world is complicated, confusing, and often corrupt, and those things that seem unsullied by industrial modernity can feel pure and healthful. There’s an attractive truthiness to claims that raw milk must be better than milk that was pasteurized and skimmed of fat in an industrial centrifuge, butter better than seed oil, cows grazing in the field better than those crammed into feedlots. Moreover, nature-based solutionism tantalizingly offers the prospect of a purer world without significant changes in consumption: Regenerative beef and beef tallow mean you can have natural and guilt-free burgers and fries. Each of these assumptions is rooted in a logical fallacy: the appeal to nature, or the view that a thing must be good if it is natural. This claim, of course, stands on shaky epistemological ground. Nature is far from benign, deadly pathogens being just as natural as soil-sequestering carbon. This is compounded by the fact that many appeals to nature are also appeals to an idealized past, like RFK Jr.’s desire to “reverse 80 years of farming policy,” before the advent of much modern agricultural technology. The British journalist George Monbiot calls this “storybook farming,” or a romanticization of the preindustrial past.Such claims are not only inaccurate but potentially dangerous. Where the appeal to nature really falls apart is when it is scrutinized using the scientific method, which has a decidedly unromantic way of cutting through just-so stories. Studies like the one mentioned at the beginning of this essay have shown that free-ranging cows emit just as much methane as those fattened on industrial feedlots; others have suggested that they might even emit more. Research consistently shows that raw milk is not more nutritious than pasteurized milk, will not cure asthma, and has no impact on gut health, but it is certainly less safe to drink. Recent publications suggest it’s the seed oils and not the butter that are more associated with lower cancer and cardiovascular disease risk. And letting a disease spread to develop natural immunity is a far more risky way to do exactly what vaccines are meant to do: expose people to small amounts of a disease so that they can develop immunity to it. Furthermore, in the case of diseases like avian flu, letting the virus run wild in hopes of finding the few birds who have natural immunity risks allowing the disease to mutate further, potentially increasing the risk for both animals and humans. As RFK Jr. promotes the benefits of “pox parties” as a natural way to boost immunity to measles, doctors scramble to convince parents otherwise. For some who follow his suggestion to dose their kids with vitamin A instead of a vaccine, the liver damage has already been done.The problem with techno-solutionism was never the technology itself. The benefits of many technologies are all around us, making food abundant and keeping us safer from disease than we would otherwise be. Pasteurization and vaccines alone have saved hundreds of millions of lives. The problem, rather, was the way technology was assumed to be a cure-all and a one-size-fits-all fix.Like its technological parallel, a defining characteristic of the ideology of nature-based solutionism is that its solutions are already decided upon before the fact, their success considered inevitable—natural, as it were—if only they can be implemented, which often means rejecting most technology altogether. Changing from conventional to regenerative agriculture, for instance, is believed to solve desertification, climate change, soil health, our ailing rural economies, our woeful eating habits, and whatever other problems confront its advocates. There is a presumed lack of friction in implementing such solutions, with legitimate critiques of technical, environmental, or economic feasibility, or of trade-offs and costs, hand-waved away. Solutionisms, as articles of faith, cleave society into believers and nonbelievers: techno-zealots versus Luddites or nature’s children versus those in thrall to Big Food, Big Ag, Big Pharma, and Big Government. But this sort of simplification doesn’t just fail to solve problems, it fails to properly identify them. The food system’s many problems are varied and have distinct causes. Greenhouse gas emissions from livestock come from too much demand for meat; the overuse of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides comes partly from market and government incentives to grow more commodity crops destined for animal feed and ethanol; and chronic disease has many causes, only some of which are related to diet. Correctly identifying and addressing each of these problems takes research, time, and often a range of different solutions.But solutionists either underappreciate or openly fight the very things that help us understand problems in all their nuance and craft realistic solutions: research institutions and the regulatory state. Both of these operate on the belief that large claims require large bodies of proof. In the course of reviewing evidence, for instance, they might note that real-world examples show that the financial and labor costs of transitions to low-tech agriculture can be hefty, the benefits uncertain, and the potential for corporate co-optation and greenwashing very real. But in the world of the solutionists, expertise is treated as suspect, corrupt, or altogether illegitimate, with anecdotes and mantras replacing verifiable data.Ironically, this can lead the solutionists to overlook the real nature-based solutions demonstrably effective at improving health and food system sustainability. Eating lower on the food chain, reducing food waste, protecting ecosystems, and promoting conservation agriculture are some of the best climate solutions out there. They are not flashy, they won’t solve all of our problems, they likely don’t make for the most views on streaming platforms or the most memorable stump speeches, but at least they’re backed by science. Being wary of solutionisms is ever more crucial as solutionists permeate our media and increasingly hold political power. The embrace of AI exists side by side with the embrace of regenerative ranching. One side wants to move fast and break things, giving little consideration to what gets broken. The other side wants to eat grass-fed burgers, hoping that good vibes can capture carbon. Neither approach is going to save us.