The EPA’s page explaining the causes of climate change now focuses on how “natural processes,” like variations in Earth’s orbit and in solar activity, influence the climate.

“Human causes are not even on the list, which is simply misinformation. It’s false,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. “And moreover, it’s clearly deliberate, because a week ago, that page correctly reflected the scientific understanding of climate change.”

At least 80 pages related to climate change vanished from the EPA’s site in early December. It’s one of the most far-reaching removals of climate change information from government websites since President Donald Trump took office in January. “Up till now, we really had not seen hardly any changes on EPA pages,” says Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.

While important resources have already disappeared from other government sites – including the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated climate reports translated for public consumption – many of the previous changes were language swaps, replacing “climate change” with more innocuous phrases like “future conditions” or “extreme weather.” The EPA’s most recent overhaul represents a more radical rejection of mainstream science.

“Yes, there’s been climate information coming down, but so far it hasn’t actually necessarily been the nuts-and-bolts climate science information,” Swain says. “This is pretty fundamental physical science.” The resources on the EPA’s site were used by teachers, businesses, and local and tribal governments, as well as the public, since they translated the jargon-filled language of scientific reports into something more useful and accessible.

For example, the agency deleted a resource explaining the signals of a warming world – everything from rising temperatures and melting ice sheets to the damage toll on wildlife and human health – with more than 100 charts and maps. Also gone is a website quantifying the physical and economic risks. The effect is to isolate climate change from the issues that affect people’s lives, Gehrke says: “It’s specifically targeting the information about why we should care.”

In response to questions about why the EPA’s climate change resources were removed, the agency said it was upholding “gold-standard science.”

“Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. “As such, this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.”

Swain says the changes could be a way for the EPA to bring its public-facing information in line with the proposal to reverse the agency’s own “endangerment finding,” the scientific basis that allows the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. The agency is expected to finalize the repeal soon, in what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has promised to be “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

Mark Carney trades climate allies for controversial oil-patch solutions

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Paul Hawken, the author of the new book Carbon: The Book of Life, argues that the climate movement is thinking about its work, and messaging, all wrong. “Those who call carbon a pollutant might want to lay down their word processor,” Hawken writes. Carbon, he notes, is, after all, the building block of life, the animating force behind trees, rhinos, eyelashes, hormones, bamboo and so much more. Without it, Earth would just be a lonely, dead rock. So much for decarbonizing.

Hawken has come to believe that treating carbon as something to tackle, liquefy and pump into geological formations not only reflects the same mindset that caused climate change in the first place, but also further alienates people from the living world. There is no “climate crisis,” he argues, but a crisis of human thinking and behaviour that’s degrading the soil, wiping out entire species and changing the weather faster than people can adapt. “From a planetary view,” he writes in Carbon, “the warming atmosphere is a response, an adjustment, a teaching.”

Shifting the frame: From fix to flow

The book records a shift in his thinking. In 2017, Hawken published Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, a book that ranked 100 climate solutions by how much they could reduce carbon emissions, from refrigerant leaks to food waste. The non-profit Project Drawdown, which he launched, continues to implement these kinds of fixes around the world. But now, Hawken is forgoing straightforward metrics to focus on what he sees as a deeper cultural problem. “The living world is a complex interactive system and doesn’t lend itself to simple solutions,” he said.

The core of it is about care, and kindness, and connection, and compassion, and generosity. That’s where regeneration starts.

– Paul Hawken

The new book frames carbon as a flow – a cycle that moves through the atmosphere, oceans, soil, with the element absorbed by growing plants and exhaled in every animal breath. Hawken’s book is a lesson in what’s sometimes called “unlearning,” or letting go of old assumptions, like the idea that nature is something to fix or control. The book explores ways to repair a broken relationship with the natural world, drawing inspiration from Indigenous cultures and new scientific discoveries. Hawken marvels at how much remains unknown about carbon, which he dubs “the most mysterious element of all.”

The book’s poetic language offers a stark contrast to the warlike terms climate advocates tend to use to describe carbon. Hawken argues that the typical metaphors are not only inaccurate – how exactly do you battle an element? – but also provide fuel for right-wing narratives that carbon has been unfairly demonized. Last week, E&E News reported that the Trump administration is planning a federal report making the case that a warming world would be a good thing, a pretext for weakening climate regulations.

“Carbon dioxide is not an evil gas,” David Legates, a former Trump official, said in a recent video put out by the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank. “Rather, it’s a gas beneficial to life on Earth. It’ll increase temperatures slightly, and warmer temperatures are certainly better than colder temperatures.”

A radical rethinking of the language of climate change

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It resembled a sales pitch for Musk’s company, the country’s biggest seller of EVs. Tesla has lost more than half of its value since December as sales have plummeted worldwide. With Musk dismantling parts of the federal government as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, the vehicles have become a toxic symbol for Democrats, a large portion of Tesla owners. Over the past week, protesters have vandalized Tesla dealerships, set Cybertrucks aflame and boycotted the brand. Liberal Tesla drivers have slapped stickers on their cars that read “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”

The strong feelings surrounding Musk have already started to scramble the politics around EVs. Trump’s exhibition at the White House on Tuesday was a defence of Musk, who he said had been unfairly penalized for “finding all sorts of terrible things that have taken place against our country.” Yet the bizarre scene of Trump showcasing a vehicle that runs on electricity instead of gas felt almost like a sketch from Saturday Night Live, and not just because the Trump administration has been trying to reverse Biden-era rules that would have sped up the adoption of low-emission vehicles. Here were the two biggest characters in MAGA politics promoting a technology that’s been largely rejected by their right-wing base.

Other prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, quickly moved to defend Tesla against vandalism that Trump is labelling “domestic terrorism.” Tesla’s sudden shift from Democratic status symbol to Republican icon has some thinking the controversy around Musk could lead to a bipartisan embrace of EVs.

“He’s uniquely positioned to and has the power to really shape this debate and help bridge the divide here,” said Joe Sacks, executive director of the American EV Jobs Alliance, a non-profit trying to prevent “silly partisan politics” from stopping a manufacturing boom for electric vehicles. “I’m unsure if that’s what he’s going to use his new perch and his role in the administration to do, but it seems like he has the ability to do that.”

According to polling the alliance conducted after the November election, Republicans have warmed up to Musk, with 82% of those polled saying that Musk is a good ambassador for EVs. A solid majority of Trump voters – 64% – said they viewed Tesla favourably, compared with 41% of those who voted for Kamala Harris. “Republicans are probably inching towards the idea that there shouldn’t be much of a cultural divide on this product category, if the market leader CEO is sitting next to President Trump in the Oval Office during press conferences,” Sacks said.

The data aligns with a recent analysis from the financial services firm Stifel, which found that Tesla has become more favourable among Republicans as its popularity plunges with Democrats. Compared to August, 13% more Republicans are willing to consider purchasing a Tesla.

Yet there are reasons to suspect that EVs will continue to be a hard sell for Republicans. They are typically tradition-minded people who like big cars, not small cars with new technology they’ve never used before, said Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of the book Prius or Pickup? “Conservatives don’t have the sensibility that fits with electric vehicles at all,” he said. “So I don’t think that you’re going to see a spike in Tesla sales among conservatives.”

Alexander Edwards, president of the research consultancy Strategic Vision, said that Republicans view gas-powered cars as a more practical purchase for transporting their families from place to place. That’s based on his firm’s surveys, which examine the psychology behind the car choices of about a quarter-million Americans a year. “I think Elon made a bet that I think he’s secretly regretting, that Republicans would come out of the woodwork and say, ‘Yes, we’re going to support you,’” Edwards said.

If they came around to any electric vehicle, however, it might be a Tesla. One of the primary things Republicans care about when it comes to buying a car is that it looks fast and goes fast, and Tesla has seen more Republican buyers for that reason, Edwards said. Democrats have consistently been buying electric vehicles at a rate of four to one compared to Republicans, but two to one when it comes to Teslas, according to Edwards’s data. Last year, more Republicans than Democrats bought Teslas for the first time – not because more Republican flocked to the brand, but because Democrats pulled away from it.

For Democrats, who had long been criticized as having a smug attitude for driving a Prius, Teslas offered a cool and desirable alternative with less baggage when they took off in the early 2010s. “Tesla was able to finally give Democratic buyers what they were looking for – a Prius-like image of being thoughtful, combined with the fun and excitement of a real luxury sports car,” Edwards said. That started to change as Musk became a magnet for political controversy, starting with his takeover of Twitter in 2022. A Tesla EV became a symbol of Tesla’s CEO.

“Doesn’t matter if you’re Republican or Democrat – when you jump into the Batmobile, you become Batman,” Edwards said. “And the same thing is true with the vehicles we purchase. We often want them to show who we are, what we’ve accomplished, what we stand for.”

Of course, there are ways to depolarize electric vehicles that don’t rely on cues from Trump or Musk. Sacks recommends talking about the attributes of electric vehicles: their ability to accelerate faster and brake more crisply, as well as help people save money for every mile they drive, since there’s no need to buy gas. When people have friends or family who own an EV, that also helps break down the cultural divide, he said.

In a way, you could see Trump becoming a salesman for electric vehicles as an example of that very phenomenon, with his self-described “first buddy” convincing him to come around. Just two years ago, Trump complained that EVs needed a charge every 15 minutes and would kill American jobs. But, after Musk endorsed his presidential campaign last summer and donated $288 million, Trump softened his tone, saying that he was in favour of “a very small slice” of cars being electric. “I have to be, you know,” Trump said, “because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”

On Tuesday, as Trump climbed into his new electric car for the first time, he seemed surprised by what he saw there. “That’s beautiful,” he said, admiring the dashboard. “This is a different panel than I’ve had. Everything’s computer!”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

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Fitzgerald manages to convince many farmers by explaining the simple economics of leasing their land for solar power. “At the end of the day, the financial payments from these types of projects are generally higher than what folks can pull off of their ground through other types of crops,” he said. To sell solar power to people who might have hesitations, he often talks about how the technology was invented in the United States. “When you install a solar project, you’re collecting an American resource here in America,” Fitzgerald said.

It echoes the way that President Donald Trump talks about energy, though he’s usually heaping praise on U.S. oil and gas, not renewables. Still, the Solar Energy Industries Association, the industry’s primary lobbying group, has found plenty of ways to align its work with the administration’s talking points. Now splayed across its site, next to an image of a U.S. flag hovering over solar panels, is a new slogan: “American Energy DOMINANCE.” Earlier this month, the association participated in a lobbying blitz in Washington, D.C., urging lawmakers to keep tax credits for clean energy projects in place.

Selling solar to Trump

Solar provided almost 6% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, but it’s been growing fast, expected to supply “almost all growth” in electricity generation this year, according to the pre-Trump Energy Information Administration. Many are hoping that the technology – which is broadly popular among Americans, with 78% supporting developing more solar farms – can manage to stay out of Trump’s culture wars over climate change. More so than wind power with its towering turbines, solar energy has an ability to bridge ideological divides, appealing to environmentalists and “don’t-tread-on-me” libertarians alike.

“President Trump has specifically said that he loves solar – and as energy demand soars, we know that solar is the most efficient and affordable way to add a lot of energy to the grid, fast,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, the Solar Energy Industries Association’s president and CEO, in a statement to Grist.

You know, we don’t talk about it in terms of the environment — we talk about it in terms of choice and competition in the market and in terms of good economics, because the price of solar is rapidly declining.

– Mark Fleming, CEO, Conservatives for Clean Energy

In December, her trade group released a policy road map that reflects Trump’s agenda, with priorities such as “eliminate dependence on China” and “cut red tape in the energy sector.” It’s a change from the vision the association laid out in 2020 after the election of former president Joe Biden, when Hopper promised to “meet the moment of the climate era with equity and justice at the forefront.”

The new language reflects a change in the federal government’s priorities, but also a recognition among solar advocates that they don’t need to talk about climate change to advance clean technologies. “Energy independence – I think that they should scream that from the rooftops,” Fitzgerald said. “Every single politician in the world, in America, should be saying, ‘We’re trying to make these things here to collect energy here.’”

A cloudy forecast for solar energy

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The weather was bound to be bad in 2024, the hottest year on Earth out of the last 125,000 of them.

In Saudi Arabia, temperatures climbed above 125°F during the hajj in June, killing 1,300 people on their annual pilgrimage to the city of Mecca. Across the Arabian Sea, a prolonged heat wave led to hundreds more deaths in southern Pakistan. Hurricane Helene brought 30 inches of rain to an already-waterlogged western North Carolina in September, filling mountain valleys with mudslides and floods that surged through homes in one of the most destructive hurricanes in recent memory. Then, in November, a year’s worth of rain fell on Valencia and across eastern Spain in just eight hours. The floodwaters swept through towns, and flash flood alerts came too late for people already on the road or trapped in garages underground.

As climate change intensifies extreme weather in multiple ways, the kind of push alerts that popped up on phones around Valencia are arriving more and more often. But overwhelm people with too many warnings about heat or flooding or bad air quality and they might start tuning them out, a phenomenon called alert fatigue that’s been troubling emergency managers. “It may be one of the biggest problems facing their field as climate disasters mount,” journalist Zoë Schlanger wrote in The Atlantic this summer.

The phrase comes from medicine, where overworked doctors blasted with hundreds of medical alerts every day got so many false alarms they learned to ignore them. Alert fatigue could also describe the dynamic of becoming numb to warnings about climate change more broadly. Since the late 1980s, scientists have been raising the alarm about the devastation that global warming would bring. Nearly two-thirds of Americans now understand that climate change is affecting their local communities, and yet they reelected Donald Trump, who has promised to boost fossil fuel production and undo much of President Joe Biden’s climate agenda.

It’s a paradox emblematic of an especially turbulent, anxiety-filled time. As 2024 draws to a close, dictionary editors have been sifting through the lexicon to choose a term that encapsulates the spirit of the previous months, with this year’s selections including “brat” and “brain rot.” For us, alert fatigue stood out as the winner in a year in which severe weather – and the accompanying push alerts – added to the chaos. The runners-up, from “climate homicide” to “underconsumption core,” captured other aspects of what it was like to live on our overheating planet in 2024.

Anti-tourism

The opposition to masses of vacationers taking over your town.

Thousands of locals took to the streets across southern Europe this year, calling for tourists to go home. These anti-tourism protests started in Spain’s Canary Islands this spring and from there spread to Barcelona, Majorca and Málaga, then to Venice, Italy and Lisbon. Residents argued that their governments, during a post-COVID travel boom, had started catering to visitors rather than to locals, turning their towns into theme parks and straining natural resources. Environmental groups like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund supported them. Tourism is responsible for about 8% of global carbon emissions, thanks in large part to the emissions involved with flying. Protesters aren’t calling for an end to all tourism (which plays an important role in their local economies), but for a more sustainable, limited version that allows them to reclaim the souls of their cities.

Carbon cowboys

Those seeking to profit off the carbon-storing potential of other people’s lands.

Companies have been buying carbon offsets for years, paying to protect, say, a forest to claim they’ve cancelled out the greenhouse gases they emit. Yet carbon-offset markets have been riddled with false promises and a lack of oversight, earning comparisons to the Wild West. The metaphor has extended to calling the companies involved in these schemes carbon cowboys. This year, investigations of lucrative conservation projects in Zimbabwe and the Amazon found that companies were failing to distribute money to the locals who were supposed to be rewarded, profiting off lands they often had no right to. “The system is very gameable,” Joseph Romm, a climate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Washington Post. “And the victim is the planet, and all of humanity who suffers because we’re not reducing emissions, but get to pretend we are.”

Category 6

A not-yet-official classification for ultra-powerful hurricanes.

Category 5 has been synonymous with the scariest storms for decades. But as hurricanes have started to intensify more rapidly, some scientists have been making the case for expanding the Saffir-Simpson scale to include even scarier ones, creating a new category for storms with winds that top 192 miles per hour. A paper published earlier this year found that at least five storms had already passed the test for the Category 6 label, the strongest of which was Hurricane Patricia, which slammed into Mexico’s Pacific Coast in 2015 with winds peaking at 215 miles per hour. Tropical storms are fuelled by warm waters, meaning that as climate change warms the atmosphere and oceans, more and more powerful storms could be headed our way. One objection some experts have with creating a Category 6 is that it might double down on what’s already the biggest communication problem with hurricanes: flooding, not wind speed, is the deadliest risk of these storms.

Climate homicide

A new legal theory proposing that oil companies could be guilty of actual murder.

Climate change has killed roughly four million people since the year 2000, by one estimate. Some legal scholars are now making the case that oil companies like ExxonMobil, which have long understood that burning fossil fuels could have lethal consequences, could be charged with every type of homicide in the United States, except for first-degree murder. In a paper in Harvard Environmental Law Review this spring, David Arkush, the director of the climate program for the advocacy group Public Citizen, and Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote that fossil fuel companies have been “killing members of the public at an accelerating rate.” While it’s unusual for criminal law cases to be brought against corporations instead of individuals, climate homicide could open up a new flank for fighting climate change in court. It has already gotten attention from law schools at Yale, New York University and Vermont Law School, along with district attorneys’ offices around the country.

Hot droughts

When extreme heat and drought happen at the same time

Combine a stretch of scarce rainfall with rising temperatures and you get what’s known as a hot drought – a double whammy of dry conditions, because heat enhances evaporation. According to a study published in the journal Science Advances in January, hot droughts have become more frequent and severe across the western United States, which is enduring its driest period since the 1500s. The Great Plains and parts of the Colorado River Basin are the most affected, the study found, with consequences for ecosystems, farming and city planning. “It is clear that anthropogenic drying has only just begun,” the study’s authors wrote.

Semi-dystopian

A term to describe a future that’s nearly as bad as some authors have imagined.

In May, The Guardian released the results of a survey that hundreds of climate scientists had participated in, showing that almost half of them thought greenhouse gas emissions would push the world at least 3°C (5.4°F) hotter than the preindustrial era by the end of this century. “I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one South African scientist, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Guardian. Ecological catastrophe has long been in the backdrop of dystopian fiction, like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a 1993 novel set in a future California replete with raging infernos, scarce water and mass migration to more fertile lands. These days, what once sounded outlandish is looking more and more like reality – as climate fiction authors themselves are beginning to admit.

Snow-loss cliff

The point at which snowpack begins to disappear at an accelerating pace.

About two billion people in the Northern Hemisphere rely on snowmelt as a source of water. As winters warm, however, parts of the United States and Europe are close to a tipping point that could lead to a disastrous loss of snow, according to a study published in Nature in January. This snow-loss cliff sits at the point where the average winter temperature hovers around 17°F. Any warmer than that and snowpack loss begins accelerating irreversibly. While most of the Northern Hemisphere’s snow is in the far north and safe for now, millions of people live in places that have already crossed the temperature cliff. Regions like the western United States are on track to see a sharp decline in snowpack – further straining a region already struggling with drought.

Supercommuter

Someone who travels a very, very long distance to get to work.

The news site Fast Company did some back-of-the-napkin math and calculated that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol’s supercommute would emit 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, equivalent to the annual energy use of 118 homes. He’s not the only supercommuter out there, with some people flying to high-paying jobs in New York City from places with lower housing costs, like Charlotte, North Carolina, and Columbus, Ohio. Long driving commutes also have a significant climate cost, with so-called gasoline superusers, the 10% of drivers who use the most fuel, guzzling more than a third of the country’s gas. Even though data suggest that working remotely instead of in an office can halve a person’s carbon footprint, businesses have been going in the opposite direction, forcing employees back to the office.

Underconsumption core

A social media trend with a new take on minimalism.

Behind the funny cat videos and chaotic cooking fails on TikTok, there’s a whole ecosystem of ads designed to make you spend money. In 2023, the push against out-of-control consumerism brought “deinfluencing.” In 2024, it morphed into even more of a mouthful: underconsumption core. The budget-friendly trend emphasizes buying only what you need and celebrating the old tank top or water bottle you’ve treasured since skinny jeans were the thing. (“Yes, being normal is now trending,” The New York Times quipped.) It’s a rejection of fast fashion, which has turned into a mounting climate and pollution problem. Well over half of Gen Z and millennial adults surveyed by Deloitte this year reported either avoiding fast fashion or wanting to do so in the future. Underconsumption core, TikToker Jade Taylor told Grist last month, is “a response to the type of normalized overconsumption that influencers have pushed with their marketing, but also due to climate anxiety and economic instability.”

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It illustrates how far companies will go to influence elected officials. Politicians have elections to worry about, giving them a general motivation to avoid moves that will be unpopular. In fact, one survey found that congressional representatives rated “staying in touch with constituents” as the most important aspect of their jobs. But behind the scenes, there’s a very meta struggle to sway what politicians perceive as popular opinion.

“What really matters, in some ways, is not objectively what the public thinks, but it’s what decision-makers think the public thinks,” said Matto Mildenberger, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Across the board, politicians tend to think climate action is much less popular than it really is. The latest example comes from a new study, published in the journal Nature Energy earlier this month, finding that local elected officials in Pennsylvania underestimated support among their constituents for large solar projects. Based on survey responses from nearly 900 residents and more than 200 policymakers, researchers found that Pennsylvanians liked solar projects 7 percentage points more than natural gas ones. Local officials, however, misperceived that preference, thinking natural gas, which is primarily composed of the potent greenhouse gas methane, would be more popular.

Since local officials have a lot of sway over what energy projects get approved, this misperception could translate to less clean energy projects getting built, slowing the transition away from fossil fuels. Pennsylvania has been identified as the state with the fifth-most solar capacity by 2050, according to Princeton’s modeling for how the country could reach net-zero emissions. “In the vast majority of the U.S., the actual ‘Is this project going to be built or not?’ is decided at the local level,” said Holly Caggiano, a co-author of the study and a professor of climate justice and environmental planning at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Misunderstanding what Americans believe about climate change could be slowing climate action at the national level, too. A study in 2019, co-authored by Mildenberger, showed that congressional staffers underestimated the popularity of putting restrictions on carbon emissions in their local districts. The same bias was true of elected officials at the state level, according to his research. “We should absolutely believe that those perceptions are limiting the ambition of climate and energy policy,” Mildenberger said. “It is one factor among many that makes solving the climate crisis harder.”

It’s not just politicians who hold a distorted view: People systematically underestimate public support for climate policies. A study from 2022 found that Americans imagined only a minority of their fellow citizens supported a carbon tax or a Green New Deal, when it was actually an overwhelming majority — meaning that actual support for climate policies was almost double what they thought.

Part of the problem is that people who support renewable energy or climate policies don’t usually talk about it much, giving everyone else a distorted impression about how popular, or unpopular, those beliefs really are. “Often, opponents to projects are very, very loud,” Caggiano said. In addition, media coverage may give unpopular opinions outsized weight in order to present “both sides” of an issue. While that practice has been fading in climate science coverage, it’s still common in articles about climate policy debates, Mildenberger said.

Some politicians have a more skewed view than others. Those who oppose climate action tend to be even further off in their estimates of what the public wants, because of a psychological bias that assumes most of their constituents share their opinions. But the information lawmakers are exposed to also affects the size of that perception gap — it widened when officials got more campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests, and when they reported having more contact with conservative interest groups, Mildenberger’s 2019 study shows. Those groups might push commissioned polls that make a climate policy look unpopular, for example, Mildenberger said.

“There’s this enormous effort by the industry to shape what politicians think the public wants,” Mildenberger said.

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Pro-fossil fuel interests might also engage in “astroturfing,” a PR strategy that fakes grassroots support for a cause, like Entergy’s natural-gas-fired power station in New Orleans. The tactic has also been used in national debates. In 2009, when Congress was considering the Waxman-Markey bill that would enact a federal cap-and-trade program, a lobbying group for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity forged more than a dozen letters opposing it, supposedly from local community groups concerned about rising energy prices, and sent them to members of Congress. The bill passed the House by a slim margin but was never brought to a vote in the Senate.

There are accurate sources of information showing what Americans think about climate change, like nonpartisan polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which find that nearly three-quarters of Americans want to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Learning that the position they hold is unpopular with the electorate can even lead politicians to change their position on an issue, at least according to one study from Belgium.

More than a decade after the Waxman-Markey debacle, in 2022, Congress finally passed major climate legislation: The Inflation Reduction Act is investing hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy, heat pumps, and other low-carbon technologies. Since there wasn’t significant public backlash to the law, it’s one data point that can help correct politicians’ misperceptions of public opinion, Mildenberger said. But he warns that fossil fuel interests are still very active in trying to block climate-friendly policies. “We should have every reason to expect that they’re going to keep on bringing more distorted information into the political arena to try and tilt that arena in their favor.”

This article was first published by Grist. Read the original article here. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

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In 2023, it felt like Earth might run out of records to break. For a stretch in early July, the planet snapped its all-time daily heat record four times, one day after another. It added up to the hottest week ever recorded in what became the hottest summer ever recorded. Then, September broke its previous monthly heat record by half a degree Celsius — a margin so stunning that Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist, declared it “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

Hausfather’s attention-grabbing phrase showed up in the headlines of The Guardian, Wired, and Bloomberg, adding pizzazz to what might have otherwise felt like yet another story about another broken record. As the world overheats, everyone from scientists to TikTok influencers is reaching for a fresh vocabulary to put words to what’s happening, coining new terms and assigning old ones new meanings. It’s a sign that language is catching up to the history-making environmental changes happening around us.

For North America, it was a year of fire and smoke. Canada burned from coast to coast, with 6,500 fires scorching so much land that the 45.7 million acres burned surpassed the previous record by more than 2.5 times. The fires sent a thick haze into cities in the eastern half of the United States that were unprepared for smoke, from Chicago to New York, making June 7 the all-time worst day of pollution from wildfire smoke for the average American. The country’s deadliest fire in a century ripped through Lahaina on the island of Maui in August, killing 100 people.

Elsewhere in the world, heavy rains forced nearly 700,000 people to flee their homes in Somalia after years of drought; Hurricane Otis, a storm that rapidly escalated into a Category 5, slammed into Mexico, destroying the homes of roughly 580,000 people; and an avalanche triggered an outburst from a melting glacial lake in the Himalayas in northeast India, sending a deadly wall of water barreling down the mountain valleys into towns below.

Every December, dictionary editors sift through the lexicon and pick a word that best reflects the spirit of the waning year. Their selections this time around suggested a modern-day preoccupation with what’s genuine. Merriam-Webster chose “authentic,” the Scotland-based Collins Dictionary went with “AI,” and the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary picked “rizz,” slang for charm or romantic appeal. Some of the top contenders hinted at a changing environment, such as “heat dome” and “dystopian.”

When putting together our annual list of the most notable words in the climate conversation this year, we had plenty of great options. “Global boiling” stood out in such an overheated year, and “El Niño” seemed like an obvious pick, too. We whittled the candidates down to the following 10 that we thought best captured what it felt like to live through a particularly smoky, sweltering year. Though these words and phrases aren’t all newborns, they’re all very 2023.

AQI

The Air Quality Index, a color-coded measure of how dangerous the air is to breathe.

The AQI used to be something only air quality nerds cared about, until folks coughing through smoke-filled summers in the West over the past decade began checking the index every morning before heading out for the day. In 2023, wildfires in Canada sent dangerous air to places in the United States that had never seen anything like it in living memory, and the AQI entered the rest of the country’s vocabulary. Google searches for AQI spiked along the East Coast and in the Midwest as people scrambled to understand the new threat. Inhaling the fine particles in wildfire smoke has been linked to long-term effects like heart attacks, lung cancer, and dementia. Public officials in New York City were slow to warn the public and distribute N95 masks, even though the AQI reached 484 in parts of Brooklyn, off the charts of the rating system. Anything over 300, colored maroon on the AQI chart, is considered “hazardous,” even for healthy adults.

Carbon insetting

Business-speak for companies reducing emissions in their own supply chains; an alternative to carbon offsetting.

For years, companies have been making pledges to go “carbon-neutral,” aiming to offset their emissions with tree-planting projects, usually halfway around the world. But offsetting schemes often fail to deliver on what they promise. An investigation by The Guardian in January found that most carbon offsets from rainforest projects are “phantom credits,” with 94 percent of those approved by the world’s biggest certifier, Verra, offering “no benefit to the climate.” Enter carbon insetting, in which companies attempt to remove emissions from within their own supply chains — the string of activities involved in producing and distributing their products. The practice originated in the early 2000s with companies that rely heavily on agriculture, and it’s now being adopted by Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Apple. Still, experts say that without strong standards, insets will have the same problems as offsets. Offsetting, insetting, and whatever-setting are no substitute for just emitting less carbon in the first place.

Climate quitters

People who resign from their jobs over concerns about climate change.

In January, Bloomberg identified a new trend in the workplace: leaving your old job to work on climate change full-time. So-called “climate quitters” included a former public affairs employee for ExxonMobil who now works for a cleantech communications firm and a restaurant reviewer who started a company to plant tiny native forests in cities. It could be a sign of growing discontent at the lack of large-scale climate action. A survey of 4,000 employees in the United States and United Kingdom this year found that more than 60 percent of employees wanted to see their company take a stronger stance on the environment, and half said they would consider resigning if their companies’ values didn’t align with their own. But does it have any effect besides feeling better about yourself? Publicly quitting can create a PR nightmare for companies, Alexis Normand, the CEO and cofounder of the carbon accounting platform Greenly, told the BBC: “It’s an extremely powerful form of lobbying.” Of course, staying at your current not-very-environmentally-friendly job and advocating for sustainability can make a big difference, too.

Deinfluencers

Social media influencers who (supposedly) want to convince you not to buy things.

TikTok and Instagram aren’t just for entertainment — they’ve become an advertising ecosystem encouraging reckless consumption. Last year, influencers sold more than $3.6 billion worth of products on the online shopping platform LTK alone, and a study from Meta found that 54 percent of Instagram users surveyed made a purchase after seeing a product on the platform. Manufacturing, shipping, and, eventually, disposing of all that stuff when the next trend takes over has created a huge environmental problem, with discarded clothing piling up in Chile’s Atacama Desert and filling the ocean with microfibers. So-called deinfluencers are pushing back against this out-of-control consumerism, targeting fast fashion and pointless crap that has gone viral. “Do not get the Ugg Minis. Do not get the Dyson Airwrap. Do not get the Charlotte Tilbury wand. Do not get the Stanley cup. Do not get Colleen Hoover books. Do not get the AirPods Max,” TikToker @sadgrlswag said in a video in January. By December, videos with the hashtag #deinfluencing had racked up more than 1 billion views. The trend is already at risk of morphing from discouraging overconsumption to simply recommending one product over another — using the mantle of green credentials to sell more stuff and look environmentally-friendly while doing it.

El Niño

A global weather pattern characterized by warmer-than-average temperatures.

One reason 2023 was so hot (apart from climate change)? The arrival of a strong El Niño, which the planet hadn’t seen since 2016, the previous record-holder for hottest year. It replaced La Niña, a cooler pattern that had tempered the heat of the last three years. El Niño brought 101-degree, hot-tub temperatures to the ocean off Florida, steaming coral reefs and fish, anemones, and jellyfish in the Everglades. The weather pattern also tends to fuel the spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes, like malaria and dengue, and other pests that thrive in warmer weather. Thanks to El Niño and climate change, it’s easy to make one reliable prediction for 2024: Global temperatures are likely to be even hotter. The World Meteorological Organization predicted in May that the next five years are sure to be the hottest ones yet.

Global boiling

It’s like global warming, but way more worrying.

António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, is the Shakespeare of scary climate phrases. In past years, his fiery speeches have brought us “code red for humanity” and dire metaphors such as “We are digging our own graves.” In a year as hot as 2023, Guterres managed to up the ante again. Not only did he warn that humanity had “opened the gates of hell,” but he also declared that Earth had entered the “era of global boiling” in July, the hottest month in at least 125,000 years. The phrase “global warming” has been criticized for sounding too nice — after all, everyone loves summer! The same can’t be said for global boiling, which sounds like it’s going to turn us all into soup.

Greenhushing

When companies go quiet on their environmental commitments.

A few short years ago, even oil companies were assuring everyone that they’d slash their emissions. But things started changing this year. Amazon, which famously named its Seattle sports and concert venue “Climate Pledge Arena,” quietly abandoned one of its key goals around shipping emissions, and oil majors scaled back their climate commitments. The trend of greenhushing has emerged as governments from California to the European Union are crafting regulations to counter false advertising around sustainability (often called “greenwashing”). Given that corporations such as Delta are getting taken to court over deceptive environmental marketing, many executives figure that silence is the safer option. Nearly a quarter of companies around the world are choosing not to publicize their milestones on climate action, according to a report from South Pole, a Switzerland-based climate consultancy that popularized the term greenhushing. While the practice makes it harder to scrutinize what companies are doing, some say greenhushing could be a good thing — after all, it’s stopping misleading advertisements.

Noctalgia

The feeling of missing a dark night sky.

Ever since humans started looking up, they’d see the starry arc of the Milky Way on a clear night. Nowadays, thanks to light pollution from cities, satellites, and even oil and gas production, our galaxy is becoming a rare sight. Artificial light messes with our sleep and confuses wildlife, and the absence of true darkness is also a loss for culture and science. In August, the astronomers Aparna Venkatesan from the University of San Francisco and John C. Barentine from Dark Sky Consulting came up with a new term to express the loss of dark night skies: noctalgia, or “sky grief.” It’s a play on “nostalgia” that uses the Latin prefix noct-, meaning night. “This represents far more than mere loss of environment: We are witnessing loss of heritage, place-based language, identity, storytelling, millennia-old sky traditions, and our ability to conduct traditional practices,” the duo wrote in a comment to the journal Science.

RICO

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law made for the Mafia and organized crime — now being applied to oil companies.

Eight years ago, investigations found that “Exxon Knew” about the dangers of burning fossil fuels in the 1970s, but worked to undermine the public’s understanding of climate science, sowing “uncertainty” about its effects. Since then, lawsuits against oil, gas, and coal companies have proliferated, most of them arguing that companies violated laws that protect people from deceptive advertising. But a new kind of climate lawsuit has emerged that uses a relic from the past: a federal RICO law passed in 1970 to take down organized crime. In November 2022, 16 towns in Puerto Rico accused Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other fossil fuel companies of violating the federal RICO law by colluding to conceal how their products contribute to climate change. Six months later, Hoboken, New Jersey, amended its complaint against Exxon and other companies to allege that they violated the state’s RICO law. Racketeering lawsuits have been successful against tobacco companies and pharmaceutical executives tied to the opioid epidemic. Former President Donald Trump and his allies were also hit with a RICO case in Georgia this year, accused of conspiring to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

White hydrogen

Naturally occurring hydrogen found underground.

Hydrogen is a carbon-free fuel that could replace fossil fuels in a range of hard-to-decarbonize industries, from aviation to steelmaking. The problem is that the most abundant element in the universe isn’t normally found on its own, and turning it into a fuel to fly airplanes, for instance, takes lots of energy. There’s a whole rainbow of hydrogens out there, distinguished by how they’re made — expensive “green hydrogen” from renewables, “gray hydrogen” from methane gas, and “brown hydrogen” from coal. Then there’s white hydrogen, which isn’t made from anything at all. Scientists used to think that there weren’t big reserves of hydrogen buried underground, just waiting to be collected, but in recent years, they’ve been discovering more and more. Recently, some scientists looking for oil and gas reserves in France stumbled upon what could be one of the largest reservoirs of white hydrogen to date, containing somewhere within the stunningly wide range of 6 and 250 million metric tons. Untapped reserves in the United States, Australia, Mali, Oman, and parts of Europe could provide clean energy on a large scale — if all goes according to plan. Startups like Gold Hydrogen, based in Australia, and Koloma, based in Denver, are in the early stages of drilling for hydrogen and could be headed to production soon.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/words-of-the-year/grist-2023-words-year-language-global-boiling-aqi/.

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