Posts Tagged ‘environment’
“Adaptation and mitigation are two sides of the same coin. If mitigation is about preventing the unmanageable, adaptation is about managing the unavoidable.”*…
Adapting to climate change is quickly becoming part of everyday life. Nabig Chaudhry outlines seven trends we’re seeing for 2026 and beyond…
Within the climate and scientific communities, there’s growing concern about how quickly the world is approaching (and may exceed) 2°C of warming. 2024 was the first calendar year in which global average temperature exceeded 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. The impacts of rapid warming are becoming harder to miss: The climate is changing quickly almost everywhere, local and global climate risks are growing, progress on mitigation has become more politically constrained and uncertain, and many of our systems and policies aren’t prepared for the conditions ahead.
Growing climate risk is increasing the demand for new technologies, tools, strategies, and ways of thinking about climate adaptation. Since publishing our Insights on Climate Adaptation in 2025 report, the practice of climate adaptation has continued to develop, as more people, communities, organizations, and institutions work to understand and respond to climate risks.
People use different language to describe climate adaptation (including climate resilience), but the work centers on helping people, communities, and organizations manage the risks of a changing climate. Those activities are expanding, and we can already see signs. For example, new funding and investment vehicles are emerging, such as Tailwind Futures, and adaptation is receiving more dedicated space at major climate convenings, including The Adaptation Forum, a co-hosted gathering of thought leaders in the adaptation space during Climate Week NYC 2025.
In my role as Director of Climate Adaptation Research at Probable Futures and through my PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, I speak with experts, read emerging research, and study adaptation developments every day. Through these conversations and insights, I’ve reflected on which adaptation trends are likely to emerge and strengthen…
Chaudhry npacks seven different trends; here, let me highlight two. The first is one that (Roughly) Daily has visited before, insurance…
Elevating insurance as a force in adaptation planning, policy, and behavior
Insurance is a valuable adaptation tool, as it can transfer risk, support recovery after climate shocks, and help signal where danger is increasing through premiums, deductibles, coverage limits, or insurer retreat. It can also shape incentives, because the way risk is priced can influence whether and how people and institutions reduce exposure, strengthen buildings, or avoid certain kinds of development.
As climate risks grow, damage to property and homes becomes more frequent and severe. Property owners are experiencing those shocks both physically (flooding, fire, wind damage, etc.) and financially as insurance markets adjust and recalibrate in response to changing probabilities and severities. Insurance markets have begun reflecting climate risk, and those changes are starting to influence where and how people build homes and infrastructure, where they invest in property, and where they choose to live.
A useful example of how insurance is beginning to influence adaptation efforts in the public sphere is Strengthen Alabama Homes, a program of the Alabama Department of Insurance. The program provides grants to help homeowners retrofit their homes and roofs to reduce wind damage from extreme winds and storms. Homeowners who participate can receive discounts on the wind portion of their homeowner’s insurance premium, which makes insurance not only a tool for recovery but also a tool for encouraging adaptation before exposure occurs.
Insurance pricing is one way climate risk is made visible, priced, and acted on through adaptation. I expect that insurance will increasingly influence adaptation planning, policy, and behavior, not only by helping people recover after climate shocks, but by shaping the choices people make before those shocks occur. The development of the insurance industry will therefore be an important factor in adaptation. If insurers become a source not only of risk pricing but also of risk information, adaptation guidance, and incentives to reduce risk, they could help more people act before losses occur. But that would require a meaningful shift in the role of insurance companies, from mainly pricing and transferring risk to also helping people reduce it…
The second goes to the contentious topic of geoengineering…
Expanding debate around the role of climate intervention
As warming continues, risks keep growing. We have more, clearer, worrisome signals that irreversible change, tipping points, and local climate changes so severe that adaptation is impractical if not impossible, are not far off. In response, people and institutions are starting new conversations about global-scale responses. One of those responses is climate intervention, sometimes called geoengineering.
Climate intervention generally refers to intentional efforts to alter Earth’s systems in order to counteract some of the effects of climate change. It can include approaches that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well as approaches that reflect a portion of sunlight back into space, such as stratospheric aerosol injection.
Its relationship to adaptation is uneasy, but important. If climate intervention is, at its core, an effort to manage the otherwise unmanageable risks of global climate change, then is it another tool for adapting to climate change, or is it something fundamentally different? There is no consensus, and there may never be, not least because global action will cause uneven responses locally. We don’t know much about the potential impacts of some climate interventions, how they could affect different regions unequally, or what long-term consequences they may have for Earth’s climate and natural systems.
There are good reasons to have informed conversations and do fundamental research on intervention. People with adaptation expertise can help explore, illuminate, and explain what climate intervention could mean for society and nature. There are also likely to be benefits for adaptation professionals to participate in these conversations and research projects. Even if climate intervention is never widely deployed, the debate itself may shape adaptation thinking, climate policy, research funding, public trust, and international governance.
Climate change requires people to consider risks and options, whether for mitigation, adaptation, or intervention. Treating strategies for managing the rate, pace, and impacts of climate change as distinct and separate is unlikely to lead to good outcomes. I am hopeful that there will be more collaboration across these new fields as society faces new challenges that have a common root cause. This may include more discussion about how these technologies should be governed, whether they should receive more investment, and whether climate intervention is a possible third leg alongside mitigation and adaptation…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The near-term future of climate adaptation: emerging trends.”
* U. N. Environmental Program
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As we prepare, we might recall (wistfully) that it was on this date in 1942 that Bing Crosby, with the Trotter Orchestra and the Darby Singers, recorded Irving Berlin’s song, “White Christmas.” According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this version is the best-selling single of all time with an excess of 50 million copies sold worldwide. (In fact, the version most often heard today is not the original. After frequent use, the master had become damaged, so on March 18, 1947, Crosby re-recorded the holiday hit.)
“It is by the deep, hidden currents that the oceans are made one”*…
A significant part of the earth’s climate infrastructure is under threat. New research suggests the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (or AMOC) could weaken by half this century with wide ranging consequences for weather, food, and sea levels across the world. Alison Smart and Charlotte Venner unpack the past and ponder the future of this critical ocean current…
London, England, and Quebec City, Canada sit at roughly the same latitude (51°N and 47°N, respectively) but have vastly different climates. Historically, Quebec City had 99 freezing days in an average year—weather you might expect from its relative proximity to the Arctic—but London only experienced three freezing days in an average year, despite being slightly further north. This difference is largely due to an ocean current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which distributes warmth from the Tropics via the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, impacts from climate change are weakening the AMOC, and it could collapse entirely in the near future. AMOC collapse would rapidly make regions of the Northern Hemisphere with historically mild weather colder and harsher, while triggering irreversible changes in the global climate.
The AMOC is both the product of a stable climate and a factor in maintaining weather patterns around the planet. To plan for future scenarios, we need to first understand how the AMOC works and what might happen if it collapses…
[Smart and Venner explain the AMOC and outline the ways in which it shapes the climate of regions around the world…]
… Even minor weakening of the AMOC can significantly impact local climates, as has happened several times in the past 12,000 years. A “Little Ice Age” occurred in Europe in the Middle Ages, likely connected to a disruption in the AMOC. Just a slight slowdown in the AMOC could make Europe colder overall, disrupt global precipitation patterns from South America to India, and worsen drought in Africa.
The more freshwater pours into the ocean, and the more ocean temperatures rise, the weaker the AMOC becomes—until, at some threshold, it could stop moving altogether.
It is possible that the AMOC will collapse entirely if warming continues. There is no agreed-upon global average temperature at which collapse becomes certain, but there are signals we can track and historical examples we can examine to predict the likelihood of collapse…
… The consequences of total AMOC collapse would be far-reaching, severe, and irreversible on timescales relevant to humans. AMOC collapse would cool parts of the Northern Hemisphere and warm parts of the Southern Hemisphere by multiple degrees Celsius and drastically alter weather around the world.
In Europe, winter temperatures would drop, cold snaps could increase, and winter storms would intensify. A 2025 research letter found that, even if global warming reached 2°C, AMOC collapse would make Europe colder than it is today, creating extreme winters in Northwestern Europe in which record cold might reach -20°C (-4°F) in London and -50°C (-58°F) in Scandinavia. Even milder cold days would increase, with approximately 150 to 180 frost days per year in Utrecht, Netherlands, compared to a historic average of about 53. Precipitation would likely shift and decrease, potentially drying out some parts of Europe and making others wetter.
Around the world, other climates would change, likely in less extreme ways.
- North America. The East Coast of North America would likely experience rapid sea level rise as the gravitational pull of the AMOC weakens, as well as cooler conditions, with some parts of Eastern Canada and the North Atlantic coast cooling by several degrees Celsius, erratic storms, weather variability, and more intense hurricanes.
- Tropics & South America. Without the AMOC, the ITCZ would shift south, potentially leading to drying in the Northern Tropics and parts of the Amazon and wetter conditions in the Southern Tropics.
- Africa. Because of the shift in the ITCZ, West Africa and the Sahel would be much drier, experiencing severe and frequent drought and reduced rainy seasons. The Sahel could possibly transition from a semi-arid climate to hot dry desert.
- Asia. Because of the shift in the ITCZ, weakened and more erratic monsoons in Asia would lead to increased drought and a higher risk of extreme precipitation events.
These changes may occur rapidly, create climate risks, and cause systemic disruption in affected regions. The collapse of the AMOC would also be a tipping point in the global climate, meaning that the changes would likely be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse on human timescales.
Once the AMOC passes a critical threshold of weakening, called a tipping point, it would continue to weaken until it collapses. AMOC collapse could also create systemic impacts that activate other tipping points as well as feedback loops that could generate further warming.
For example, if AMOC collapse contributed to changes like a permanent dieback of the Amazon Rainforest or increased ice loss, those changes would generate their own warming effect on Earth’s climate. A 2026 paper suggests that AMOC collapse would result in substantial carbon release from oceans and add around 0.2°C in additional atmospheric warming.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions may slow warming enough to reduce weakening and delay collapse. If collapse begins, it is unlikely we could stop it. There is no feasible technological way to reengineer ocean currents…
A bracing, but important read: “A complete guide to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).”
See also: “What would happen if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapses? How likely is it?”
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As we put on our sailin’ shoes, we might send interconnected birthday greetings to Andrew Sharrett; he was born on this date in 1946. An archaeologist, his application of world-systems theory to questions of change on large, often global, scale made him one of the most influential archaeologists of the late 20th/early 21st centuries. Sharrett is best known for his theory of the secondary products revolution; but his work touched on a broad range of fundamental human developmental issues: global migration and colonization, the spread of agriculture, the development of metallurgy and urbanism, and the development of new forms of consumption, to name a few. All of those dynamics were, as Sharrett observed, shaped in significant ways by the climatic conditions in which they unfolded.
“Where’s the beef?”*…
There’s been some consternation over the FDA’s new food pyramid, with nutritionists arguing that, while the emphasis on “whole foods” (as opposed to processed) is a plus, the guidance overstresses satured-fat-rich foods and under-recommends gut-healthy fermented foods, and beans and grains (see also here).
There could be material economic costs as well. The Federal goverment already spends over $72 Billion subsidizing livestock— not counting the reduced cost grazing permits offered ranchers on Federal land. And as ranch and farm land ownership has become more and more concentrated in fewer and fwer hands, the benifits are flowing to fewer, wealthier “ranchers” (like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, a clutch of large corporations, and foreign investors).
Then there are the environmental implications. Oliver Milman ponders the potential scale of that impact if the new pyramid is followed…
The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.
A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.
The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”
But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.
Even a 25% increase in the amount of protein consumed in this way in the US would require about 100m acres of additional agricultural land each year, an area about the size of California, and add hundreds of millions of tons of extra pollution to an already overheating planet, according to an estimate by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a non-profit research body.
“We are seeing millions of acres of forest cut down and agricultural expansion is the lead driver of that – adding 100m acres to that to feed the US means additional pressure on the world’s remaining ecosystems,” said Richard Waite, the director of agriculture initiatives at WRI.
“It’s already hard to feed the global population while reducing emissions and stopping deforestation, and a shift in this direction would make the challenge even harder. We need to reduce the impact of our food systems urgently and the US is an important piece of the puzzle in doing that.”
While many Americans will simply ignore the guidelines, the new framework will probably influence institutions such as schools and federal workplaces. The average American already eats about 144kg (317lb) of meat and seafood a year, second globally only to Portugal, and ingests more protein than previous federal government guidelines recommended.
Any further increase will be felt in places such as the Amazon rainforest, which is already being felled at a rapid rate for cattle ranches and to grow livestock feed.
Red meat, in particular, has an outsized impact upon the planet – beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions per gram of protein than common plant proteins, such as beans. The raising of cows, pigs, lamb and other animals for slaughter is also associated with significant localized air and water pollution.
“To the extent that people follow these guidelines and eat more animal protein foods, particularly beef and dairy, they will negatively impact our environment, since the production of these foods emits way more greenhouse gases than vegetable protein foods, or even other animal foods,” said Diego Rose, a director of nutrition at Tulane University.
Choosing beef over beans and lentils is “a big choice we make that has real consequences”, said Waite. “If people want more protein there are ways to do that via eating plant-based foods without the environmental impacts. We can have our protein and our forests, too.”
Animal agriculture is responsible for about a fifth of global emissions, with little progress made in recent years to reduce its impact as more of the world starts to demand meat products. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and meat is projected to reach over 500m tonnes by 2050 –double what it was in 2000.
In the US, much of this meat-eating is concentrated in a relatively small group of avid carnivores – just 12% of Americans consume nearly half of the country’s beef, a 2024 study found. But plant-based options, including “fake meat” burgers, have suffered a slump in sales in recent years amid a resurgent trend in meat-eating, fueled by online “meatfluencers” and a broader desire to consume more protein.
The environmental problems associated with the meat industry were previously highlighted by Kennedy himself, when he was a campaigner on green issues. At one point, Kennedy even said the pork industry was an even bigger threat to the US than Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind.
“The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of US citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty,” Kennedy wrote in 2004.
However, since becoming Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy has sought to elevate meat-eating, dismissing an independent scientific committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based proteins to instead favor meat.
“The Trump administration will no longer weaponize federal food policy to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working American ranchers and protein producers under the radical dogma of the Green New Scam,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in response to questions about the knock-on environmental impacts of the new guidelines.
“Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and things like beef tallow is puzzling to me,” said Benjamin Goldstein, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied the huge emissions associated with meat-eating by city-dwellers in the US.
“We needed to be addressing climate change two decades ago and we are still not doing enough now. If we are adding more greenhouse gases to impose unnecessary ideas of protein intake, that’s going to destabilize the climate further. It’s going to have a big impact.”…
Even 25% increase in meat and dairy consumption would require 100m more acres of agricultural land: “Huge amounts of extra land needed for RFK Jr’s meat-heavy diet guidelines,” from @olliemilman.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.
* Wendy’s advertising tagline (from 1984)
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As we deconstruct diet, we might send bibulous birthday greetings to William Claude Dukenfield; he was born on this date in 1880. Better known by his stage name, W.C. Fields, an actor, comedian, juggler, and writer, became a vaudeville headliner, “the world’s greatest juggler” [which he may have been], then transitioned to Broadway (e.g., the Ziegfeld Follies revue and Poppy, wherein he perfected his persona as a colorful small-time con man) and began appearing in silent films. In the 1930s, Fields wrote and starred in a series of successful short films for (his golf buddy) Mack Sennett, then appeared in 13 feature films for Paramount. An illness sidelined him in the late 30s, but he roared back in the early 40s with Universal classics like My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
Now widely regarded one of the comic geniuses of the 20th century, the Surrealists loved Fields’ absurdism and anarchistic pranks. Max Ernst painted a Project for a Monument to W. C. Fields (1957), and René Magritte made an Homage to Mack Sennett (1934).
The Firesign Theatre titled the second track of their 1968 album Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him “W. C. Fields Forever,” a riff on the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
“I personally stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.”
– W. C. Fields
“Photography helps people to see”*…
Your correspondent was in New York last week and ducked into Grand Central Station (or more formally, Grand Central Terminal)… to find it transformed. Sarah Cascone has the backstory…
For the first time possibly ever, there is not a single ad to be seen in Grand Central Terminal. “Humans of New York,” Brandon Stanton‘s popular social media art series of photographs of people he’s interviewed on the city’s streets, has taken over each and every one of the 150 video billboards in the grand concourse, as well as the subway ads below in Grand Central Station for “Dear New York.”
“This beautiful art installation transforms the terminal into a photographic display of New Yorkers telling their stories from all walks of life—serving as a powerful reminder of our shared humanity,” MTA director of commercial ventures Mary John said in a statement. “It is the first time an artist has unified digital displays in both the terminal and subway station below, and the MTA coordinated across many corners of our organization to make this happen.”
It’s New York’s largest public art installation in 20 years, since The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, a magical pathway of saffron-colored fabric in Central Park. And it’s all the more impressive in that Stanton paid for it all out of pocket, as a gift to the city.
“If it provides even the slightest amount of joy, solace, beauty, or connection to the 750,000 people who pass through Grand Central every day—we have achieved our goal,” he wrote on Facebook.
The original plan was to use the proceeds from his new book, Dear New York, but Stanton ended up having to dip into his life savings to cover the total cost, which included space rental and covering the station’s lost ad revenue. The artist and journalist, who wrote the best-selling book Humans of New York, declined to provide an exact figure, but told the New York Times that “I no longer have any stocks.”
Stanton has shot portraits of 10,000 people across the five boroughs and beyond since beginning “Humans of New York” in 2010, creating a kind of photographic census of the city. (He has since expanded the project’s scope internationally, to 40 countries and counting.)…
More– and more photos– at: “‘Humans of New York’ Transforms Grand Central Into a Monumental Photo Show.” The remarkable show is up through tomorrow…
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As we see, we might spare a thought for a photographer with a different– but also crucially-important– focus, Edwin Way Teale; he died on this date in 1980. A naturalist, photographer, and writer, his works serve as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930–1980. He is perhaps best known for his series The American Seasons, four books documenting over 75,000 miles of automobile travel across North America following the changing seasons.
Teale’s Hampton, CT home, “Trail Wood” (chronicled in his A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm and further described in A Walk through the Year) is now managed as a nature preserve by the Connecticut Audubon Society. His papers, housed in the University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections, take up 238 feet of shelf space and include field notes and drafts for each of his books, early childhood writings, professional writings for magazines, newspapers and book reviews, correspondence- both personal and professional, personal and family documents, scrapbooks, and memorabilia, as well as his photographs (prints, negatives, and transparencies) and his personal library. But he bequeathed to the Concord (MA) Free Public Library his collection of Henry David Thoreau books, letters, correspondence, mementos and any other material dealing with Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and other material relating to Concord, Massachusetts– 12 containers and 108 printed books and pamphlets.
“Heap high the farmer’s wintry hoard! Heap high the golden corn! No richer gift has Autumn poured From out her lavish horn!”*…
… but exercise care. In an excerpt from his new book, We Are Eating the Earth- The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, Michael Grunwald with the story of Tim Searchinger, the cascading impact of ethanol production on climate change, and the importance of fighting for lost causes…
Something felt off.
Tim Searchinger lacked the proper credentials to say exactly what was off that day in the spring of 2003. He was a lawyer, not a scientist or economist. He was reading a complex technical paper on an unfamiliar topic, produced by well-respected researchers at the world-renowned Argonne National Laboratory. Sitting at his cluttered desk in the Environmental Defense Fund’s sixth-floor offices in Washington, D.C., overlooking the famous back entrance to the Hilton where President Ronald Reagan was shot, he just had a sense the paper didn’t add up.
Searchinger tended to distrust new information until he could study it to a pulp. He never assumed consensus views were correct, conventional wisdom was wise, or sophisticated-looking scientific analyses reflected reality. He questioned everything, so his unease that day didn’t feel particularly unusual. He had no inkling it would eventually lead him to a new profession—and the world to a new way of thinking about food, farming, land use, and climate change.
The Argonne study analyzed whether fueling cars with corn ethanol rather than gasoline reduced greenhouse gas emissions, which did not seem like a particularly urgent question in 2003. And Searchinger was a wetlands guy fighting to save the streams and swamps that provide kitchens and nurseries for fish and wildlife, not an energy-and-climate guy trying to keep carbon out of the atmosphere. So it was a bit odd that he would slog through such an obscure report.
But not too odd.
He was also an agriculture guy, because farms were the main threat to the wetlands he wanted to protect. And he was above all a details guy, a data sponge willing to soak up minutiae far too technical for less obsessive laymen. The revelatory stuff usually seemed to be hidden in arcane modeling assumptions and other fine print. He was a compulsive reader of boring papers, all the way through the footnotes, and he had learned from his uphill legal and political battles that knowledge could be a powerful weapon against money. He always did the reading, and his burden in life was that others didn’t.
Ethanol was just his latest uphill battle.
It was the most common form of alcohol, the fermented magic in beer, wine, and liquor. It was also a functional automotive fuel; it had powered the first internal combustion engine, and Henry Ford once called it the future of transportation. Gasoline turned out to be more efficient and better for engines, so ethanol mostly ended up in solvents and booze. But in the 1970s, ethanol distilled from corn—the “field corn,” or maize, grown by grain farmers, not the “sweet corn” you eat off the cob—had carved out a small role as an additive in US fuel markets.
That was the start of a twisted political love story. Farm interests, whose outsized political influence dated back to America’s origins as an agrarian nation, seized on ethanol as a new government gravy train. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, founded under President Abraham Lincoln for the express purpose of supporting farmers, backed ethanol as enthusiastically as it backed farm subsidies, farm loans, and other federal farm aid. And presidential candidates sucked up to farm interests so reliably that a West Wing episode lampooned the quadrennial tradition of ethanol pandering before the Iowa caucus, as the fictional future president Matt Santos considered denouncing subsidies he considered stupid and wasteful.
“You come out against ethanol, you’re dead meat,” an aide warned Santos. “Bambi would have a better shot at getting elected president of the NRA than you’ll have of getting a single vote in this caucus.”
The Midwestern grain interests behind ethanol did have serious political swat. The top ethanol producer was agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, whose former CEO helped finance the Watergate burglary, and whose reputation as an all-powerful force of corporate darkness would soon be satirized in The Informant! The U.S. industry owed its existence to a lavish tax break for domestic ethanol and a punitive tariff on foreign ethanol, both of which owed their existence to Big Ag lobbyists. The corn the industry distilled into fuel was also subsidized through “loan deficiency payments,” “counter-cyclical payments,” and a slew of other bureaucratically differentiated programs that all diverted taxpayer dollars into farmer wallets. The farm lobby usually got what it wanted out of Washington—not only subsidies and tax breaks, but exemptions from wetlands protections, pollution limits, and other regulations. Even the federal rule limiting the hours truckers could drive had a carve-out for agricultural deliveries.
Still, barely 1 percent of America’s fuel was ethanol, and barely 1 percent of America’s corn became ethanol. The issue wasn’t on Searchinger’s radar until Big Ag began pushing an ethanol mandate, and he began worrying it could become the corn industry’s new growth engine.
His concern had nothing to do with climate change, because that wasn’t on his radar, either. It wasn’t yet a front-burner issue in Washington, and he knew no more about it than the average newspaper reader. He was focused on preserving what was left of nature in farm country, and preventing polluted farm runoff from fouling rivers and streams. More ethanol would mean more cornfields, more pollution, and more drainage of the Midwest’s few remaining wetlands.
Most Americans seemed to think the middle of the country was somehow ordained to be amber waves of grain—he used to think so, too—but he always kept in mind that it had once been a vibrant landscape of tallgrass prairies and forested swamps, a temperate-zone Serengeti with spectacularly diverse plant communities and birds that darkened the sky. Washington had accelerated the near-total obliteration of that ecosystem, with incentives as well as rhetoric encouraging farmers to grow crops from “fence row to fence row,” and ethanol seemed like the latest excuse to complete Middle America’s metamorphosis into an uninterrupted cornfield. Searchinger was on the prowl for science he could use to prevent that, so when he heard about the Argonne paper, in those days before studies were routinely posted online, he called the lead author, a Chinese-born environmental scientist named Michael Wang, and asked him to FedEx it.
Unfortunately, Wang’s team had calculated that ethanol generated 20 percent fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline, a modest but measurable improvement. Wang had helped pioneer the “life-cycle analyses” that were becoming standard in the field, and the emissions model known as GREET that he developed at Argonne was considered state-of-the-art, while Searchinger had never even read a climate study. So he didn’t really have standing to object.
But he did know models could mislead, because one of his professional obsessions was exposing how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cooked the books of cost-benefit analyses to justify its own ridiculously destructive water projects. He had learned from Army Corps documents how economic and scientific models could be structured and twisted to reach convenient conclusions, how garbage in plus garbage assumptions could produce garbage out. And when he started thumbing through the ethanol study, he had familiar bad vibes.
Wang had found that drilling oil and refining it into gasoline emitted much fewer greenhouse gases than planting, fertilizing, and harvesting corn and refining it into ethanol. Initially, Searchinger was confused: If the agro-industrial complex was twice as carbon-intensive as the petro-industrial complex, why would ethanol have a smaller carbon footprint?
The study’s answer was that cornfields, unlike oil wells, were carbon sinks. The Argonne team assumed that growing corn on a farm offset the tailpipe emissions from burning corn in an engine, because cornstalks sucked carbon out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis. The climate case for farm-grown fuels was that ethanol merely recycled carbon, while gasoline liberated carbon that had been buried for eons. It made sense that ethanol, a renewable fuel, would be climate-friendlier than gasoline, a fossil fuel. “Renewable” sounded clean and green, while “fossil” evoked zombies coming back from the dead to destroy the earth.
Searchinger’s spidey-sense kept tingling, though. His father, another question-everything guy, liked to quote H. L. Mencken: “For every complex human problem, there’s a solution that’s clear, simple and wrong.” That’s what ethanol felt like. And the more he thought about the study, the less he understood its conclusions.
Yes, corn soaked up carbon as it grew. But it soaked up just as much carbon whether it was grown for fuel or food! Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car. If the only difference was that producing ethanol emitted much more carbon than producing gasoline, where were ethanol’s benefits?
That led back to his original concern: If more corn was diverted from food to fuel, how would the lost food be replaced? Presumably, Midwest farmers would plant more corn, converting more wetlands into farmland that would get blasted with more chemicals. Again, he wasn’t focused on the climate impact, just the environmental impact of losing habitat and increasing pollution. But he had a hunch the Argonne researchers and their spiffy analytical tools were also understating the climate costs of using grain to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.
Searchinger loved figuring things out, and he was on the verge of figuring something out that would transform climate analysis.
Uncharacteristically, though, he lost interest.
For one thing, it became clear that climate would be irrelevant to the debate over the proposed “Renewable Fuels Standard.” With America at war in Iraq, ethanol’s boosters were touting the mandate as a win-win that would reduce reliance on Middle Eastern oil while propping up demand for Midwestern corn. They weren’t touting it as a climate solution, because Washington wasn’t looking for climate solutions. The Senate had unanimously rejected the Kyoto Protocol a few years earlier, and Congress had ignored the issue ever since.
It also became clear the biofuels debate would be another charade controlled by farm interests and farm-friendly politicians. President George W. Bush had genuflected to ethanol in Iowa, as future presidents always do. (Even The West Wing’s Santos caved.) Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, whose top aide later became an ethanol lobbyist, and Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois—who also became an ethanol lobbyist, before going to jail in a child molestation scandal—were both farm-state biofuels boosters.
Searchinger did try to lobby some non-Midwestern politicians to oppose the mandate, arguing it would punish their constituents at the pump to subsidize out-of-state agribusinesses. But even an aide to Democratic Senator Jon Corzine, a former Wall Street titan from corn-free New Jersey, sheepishly admitted his boss couldn’t buck the ethanol lobby, because he might need Iowans someday.
Come on, Searchinger pleaded, the guy who ran Goldman Sachs thinks he’s running for president?
“Tim, they’re all running for president,” the aide replied.
Searchinger sometimes joked that he was the patron saint of almost-lost causes, because he spent his days failing to save wetlands, failing to stop farms from degrading the environment, and failing to reform the Army Corps. He didn’t go looking for uphill battles—he’s a generally friendly guy with no particular lust for conflict—but he didn’t shy away from them, and as an enviro in ag world, he ended up in a lot of them. Even his victories felt temporary, because defenders of nature have to win again and again to keep wild places wild, while despoilers of nature only have to win once. And unlike campaigns to save the whales or the Grand Canyon, causes that inspired public outrage and sympathetic press, his fine-print fights to limit the damage from American agriculture went mostly unnoticed.
Usually, he was fine with that. He was a relatively happy warrior who believed knowledge could at least sometimes be power. But sometimes, power was power, and the anti-ethanol cause felt unusually lost. ADM, which owned half of America’s ethanol plants, seemed to own half of Congress, too. The proposed mandate wasn’t big enough to transform the Midwest, anyway, so he moved on to issues where victory was at least conceivable.
In retrospect, he’s embarrassed by how much he failed to grasp in 2003. At the time, he was totally unaware of the climate benefits of the wetlands he was fighting to save. He also knew almost nothing about international agriculture and its intrusions into tropical rainforests, so he overlooked how mandating farm-grown fuel in America could trigger deforestation and food shortages abroad. It certainly hadn’t dawned on him that biofuels represented a larger land-use problem that threatened humanity’s future on a planet with limited land to use.
Then again, it hadn’t dawned on anyone else, either.
Searchinger would later return to ethanol and climate, making scientific and economic connections the field’s scientists and economists had missed. He would then figure out how agriculture was eating the earth, and create the first serious plan for preventing that. It was an odd plot twist for an urban lawyer whose closest encounter with farm life growing up had been the petting zoo in Central Park.
But not too odd.
Taking on biofuels, and then the broader food and climate problem, required a wonk-crusader smart and stubborn enough to master the intricacies of esoteric models in unfamiliar disciplines, intellectually arrogant enough to believe he could parachute into the new fields and prove the experts wrong, and foolishly romantic enough to believe his impertinent crusades could help save the world. That’s always been who he is…
“How Big Agriculture Mislead the Public About the Benefits of Biofuels,” from @mikegrunwald.bsky.social via @literaryhub.bsky.social.
For more, see this World Resources Institute reports authored by Searchinger: “Why Dedicating Land to Bioenergy Won’t Curb Climate Change.”
* John Greenleaf Whittier
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As we tackle tradeoffs, we might spare a thought for James Lovelock; he died on this date in 2022 (which was also his 103rd birthday). An independent scientist, environmentalist, and futurist, he invented (in 1957) the Electron Capture Detector, a portable analytical instrument able to detect infinitesimal traces of halogenated organic compounds. The device revealed once untraceable amounts in the biosphere, of man-made chemicals such as CFCs or pesticide pollutants. French philosopher Bruno Latour compared that technological advance to the leap when Galileo’s telescope invention could peer deeper into space, revealing so much previously unseen.
He is better known for his Gaia Hypothesis, which he developed in the 1960s while designing scientific instruments for NASA and working with Royal Dutch Shell. Lovelock suggested that the Earth functions as a planet-sized superorganism—subterranean bacteria to the ice crystals of the stratosphere, working in a gigantic living network.
For more on the remarkable man, his accomplishments, and the Gaia Hypothesis, see Jon Watts‘ The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory.
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