The state’s Department of Commerce touted the JetZero project as “the largest economic development project in North Carolina history based on job commitment.” But the project is really about economic growth (making the economy bigger) not economic development (making the economy better). And it is only economic growth if the company’s high-risk, high-reward design project is successful.

Prioritizing economic growth over economic development has resulted in many instances of malignant growth, in which the rich get richer, including instances when politicians don’t intend it, further raising inequality.

“In these conditions,” Guardian columnist George Monbiot reminded us in 2022, “it is easy for demagogues to blame the frustration of people’s hopes on scapegoats: women, asylum seekers, Muslims, Jews, black and brown people, disabled people, LGBTQ people, unions, the left, protesters” with such transfers of blame “open[ing] the door to fascism.”

Prioritizing economic growth (bigger) versus development (better) also often pollutes our environment with some wits as far back as the 1970s “have gone so far as to say that GNP [Gross National Product] means gross national pollution.”

AeroSpace Race

JetZero’s goal, says the company’s Dr. Ravi Chaudhary, is to “deliver the world’s first commercial blended-wing body airplane.”

Why?

A blended-wing design is far more fuel efficient than the tube-and-wing design of existing commercial airliners. JetZero estimates its planes will use 50% less fuel to transport roughly 250 passengers a range of 5,000 nautical miles, which is about the distance from Paris to San Francisco.

But there are lots of engineering reasons why the blended-wing design—first described in 1910—only recently got off the ground: The design requires both new engineering and materials for a safe, pressurized cabin, an invention first commercially available in 1938 that makes flying at high altitudes possible, which is particularly nice for avoiding travel through storms. The more typical tube-and-wing airplane design has a circular cross-section, the best shape for distributing uneven pressures inside and outside the plane. So for its non-tube shape, JetZero has partnered with Scaled Composites to use carbon-fiber reinforced composites.

At the same North Carolina airport, another high-risk-high-reward project, Boom Supersonic, completed construction of its manufacturing plant in 2024, but it has since sat idle. The company has been raising funds instead to use its engines, which are still under development, to act as electricity generating turbines, powering A.I. data centers by burning natural gas. Such fossil fuel use by just 11 new data centers — reports Wired (on Earth Day, 22 April 2026) — has the potential to emit more greenhouse gases than entire nations.

But whether air travel’s commercial future includes more efficient, blended-wing flight or the return of traveling at supersonic speeds, the benefits only go to those who can afford air travel in the first place while the costs affect us all.

Indeed, although the airline industry is proud of having increased air traffic (an average increase of 4.5% per year since 1990) without a corresponding increase in the greenhouse gas emissions (CO₂ emissions self-reported up an average of 2% per year since 1990), the result of the increased traffic still means more greenhouse gas emissions. Add in individual choices—including choosing to fly business class, first class, or even in a suite—and that jacks up emissions even further.

The possible reintroduction of supersonic air travel via Boom Supersonic “consumes 2-3 times as much fuel per seat than comparable premium class subsonic travel,” which is double the trouble. That would wipe out any fuel savings gained by an equivalently sized fleet of blended-wing aircraft from JetZero, if a full-sized, pressurized cabin version ever gets out of the design phase. But it’s also possible that JetZero’s potential fuel savings would translate into less expensive air travel, prompting more people to fly (or, more speculatively, prompting the same people to fly more often), further boosting overall emissions because of increased air traffic.

What Is It Going To Take?

The idea that more information—or people being better informed—will help solve the world’s problems is no more true now with Hamas’s genocidal ideology than it was back when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.

But as Nepal Times publisher Kunda Dixit put it in his book Dateline Earth: Journalism As If the Planet Mattered (3rd edition, 2023), “It will will be a formidable challenge to reform the world’s political and economic order, and ensure better governance and accountability, so that this [inequality] gap within and between nations can be narrowed. Journalists are a crucial link in the feedback loop ensuring that improvements in the quality of life can be sustained, and do not permanently damage nature.”

To that end, with President Donald Trump declaring yesterday a “deal” with Iran, the end of the U.S. naval blockade, and posting “Let the oil flow,” please consider these explicit questions part of a feedback loop regarding fossil-fuel dependent deals made in the name of “economic development” such as those made by North Carolina with JetZero and Boom Supersonic.

• Are these deals really about making the economy better, or just bigger?

• Who pays when high-risk, high-rewards deals fail, and who reaps when they succeed?

• Are the community jobs gained by providing a high-end luxury item—such as supersonic travel that saves wealthy people a few hours on a transcontinental flight—worth the cost to our shared environment?

• Is building more efficient, higher-risk airplane designs worth the fuel savings if the effect is to increase the number of flights and put greater demands on the production of more sustainable aviation fuel, swapping out food production for these kinds of biofuels?

More broadly, when you look at a time when America was “great,” wasn’t it at a time when economic growth was better distributed across incomes — a time of economic development?

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That’s my takeaway from fellow journalist Chris Mooney’s recent article “The scientific ‘study story’ has a questionable future. That may be a good thing” (ReportEarth, 11 May 2026).

But the scientific “study story” — often starting with the words ‘According to a new study’ — stopped being sustainable journalism in the early days of the Internet. Local and regional-level publications stopped doing those stories because they couldn’t compete with national and international-level publications for online audiences. So now, a journalist using A.I. (or an Agentic A.I. all on its own) who feeds a story-writing-A.I. a study’s new information and fresh quotes from researchers (as quotes can be automatically gathered via some researchers themselves, who post quotes on social media) just makes the unsustainable nature of the “study story” more evident.

So it seems to me those national and international-level journalists and publications are finally realizing what local and regional journalists and publications have known for a long time: Journalism that comes from nowhere (or, in the case of science, “from everywhere”) is often little more than gossip. Such stories may be interesting to share. But audiences aren’t convinced they need to know them. So few people are willing to pay for them. And that’s unsustainable.

Producing such unsustainable journalism using A.I. may appear more cost-effective, but that requires ignoring A.I.’s costs to the environment. Those costs are more than just how thirsty and gassy A.I. is. Costs include A.I.’s degradation of our information environment, both in producing information (or disinformation or misinformation) and in turning people off from consuming it.

When so much news sounds like noise, it can be hard to hear useful information.

Or, to put it another way, when we’re showered by information (or disinformation or misinformation), a lot of it goes down the drain.

The degradation of our information environment also extends to our representatives, too. Because of their positions (including those positions requiring specialized expertise), government officials are uniquely susceptible to ignoring information, even if it is their jobs to review and act upon it.

For example, pictured above is a newly placed storm drain on the low spot of a hill where water was pooling after every rain. But the rainwater there was supposed to pool: Workers purposefully placed a barrier to do just that.

As seen in the picture, the barrier consists of black plastic sheeting. It happens to extend well below ground that so water cannot run under it. As may also be seen, there are breaks in the black plastic sheeting where piles of small stones are in place. That riprap allows water through, but traps most sediment. Even so, those riprap locations are at elevated positions, and so only allow water through if the pooled water gets so high that it might dislodge the black plastic sheeting or would otherwise spill over the top of it.

Pooling the water is not the only strategy in evidence for keeping the sediment in place: As publicly available documents show, when the hill was constructed this past winter, workers also sprayed a combination of specialty grass seeds and water (“hydro seeding”) to reduce the hill’s erosion. That’s why the hill appears green. The grasses have taken root.

So why go to all the effort to pool water, trap sediment, and reduce erosion? The hill is made from dirt of a brownfield, so it’s full of toxic substances. Those substances include hexavalent chromium, a chemical with a name made famous by Erin Brockovich (and Julia Roberts, who portrayed her).

So, because of that newly placed storm drain at the low spot of a hill, contaminated sediment is now going into the Randleman Reservior, a water supply for multiple cities and towns in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina.

But unfortunately, just like the contaminated sediment, it appears the information I’ve shared so far with local and state-level officials about all this has gone down the drain.

I think that’s due, in part, to the unfortunate degradation of the information environment.

So how can journalism be sustainable in the age of A.I.? By journalists being the watchdogs, muckrakers, mirrors, guides, and searchlights for society we’re supposed to be. And if, as journalists, we cannot propose a solution to the problems that we spot, then we have not reported enough.

As to proposing a solution to this particular story, plug that drain, review past drain placements, and put procedures in place so that future drains are approved for placement only after any concerns regarding sediments (especially toxic ones from brownfields) draining to the water supply are addressed.

And if you’re in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina, consider contacting your local and state-level officials, too, to help the signal get through all the noise.

This is a developing story.

What sustainability practices or standards might improve sustainability in your habitat, field, university, institution, or business? How could you implement them?

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Three years ago, ChatGPT went public. Its popularity was “explosive.”

Shortly after that, researchers searching for what sets humans apart started converging on a perspective that human culture is uniquely open-ended. That is, human cultures can change enormously, quickly, and in ways that exceed how animal cultures vary.

So A.I.’s similar capacity for open-ended responses—including glaringly and sometimes expensively making things up—had me wondering about the coincidental timing of ChatGPT’s release and the researchers converging on their idea that human culture is uniquely open ended.

But one of those open-ended uses of A.I prompted me to start looking also at how A.I. companies were rolling out their products: I had just produced a podcast for OpenMind about the pros and cons of A.I. chatbots filling in for human therapists. That’s even though research has shown A.I. can be downright dangerous as a therapist.

So, as to what I’ve seen in the rollout of A.I. products, generally A.I. companies push people, other companies, and countries to incorporate A.I. into absolutely everything, including the “technological solutionism” idea that sustainability, too, will be A.I.-powered.

But the way these A.I. companies push their products is prompting backlash with responses to A.I. ranging from patiently legal to hypocritically tragic to wildly violent — providing further examples of humanity’s open-ended culture.

It seems to me that backlash is because A.I. companies are operating under a hundred-year-old understanding of technological adoption captured by a famous slogan from the 1933 World’s Fair: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”

That hundred-year-old idea that “Man Conforms” challenges the modern sense of science and society as a coproduction, in which knowledge and social order are produced together, with science and society each influencing the other. In other words, science and society as a coproduction means influence in both directions, not one-way conformation/adaption.

But “inefficiency” is the cry of those who push the side of invention / production (knowledge), because regulation (social order) pulls back on rollouts. So, without a widespread understanding that the push-and-pull makes the coproduction of science and society more sustainable in the long run, we’re in for a race to the bottom in which A.I. companies try to consume ever more resources in the name of industrial competitiveness.

Decades of Data Centers: Poorly Regulated = Terribly Inefficient?

Regarding competitiveness, if you’ve ever heard of The Cloud, then you know “data centers” by another name. Seeding for The Cloud began in the 1960s. That’s when computer operators developed a way to time-share a mainframe computer by switching it quickly between multiple tasks. That multitasking gave various users the illusion of simultaneous task-execution. Parallel processing (multiple CPUs) and parallel computing (software-coded algorithms) were also being developed at this time, which slowly—then all at once—made the illusion of simultaneous task-execution real.

By the 1970s, multitasking and parallel processing/computing became standard practice, at least to the extent that owning a million-dollar mainframe computer the size of an entire room was standard practice. But the effect of those scientific advances lowered the costs of computing capability. So universities such as UCSB, which had their own computing facilities, published specifications (e.g., this simple one dates to 1971) so others could use their systems remotely and improve upon the sharing of those systems, too.

Since then, there have been decades of scientific advancements leading to the development of the Internet (a worldwide “cloud” if you will) and A.I.. But the data centers supporting it all have not kept apace.

A few years ago, I visited a data centre built in 1977 and, later that year, one built in 2019. To the casual observer, there would appear to be no significant difference between them, so either the 1977 facility had been ‘very’ forward thinking in its design or designs have stagnated.
— John Booth, Chair of the Data Centre Alliance, Managing Director of the Carbon3IT Ltd green IT consultancy, as quoted by Josephine Walbank in Data Centre magazine, 3 Octobeer 2022

Data centers are thirsty and gassy, with serious energy-water-climate implications, particularly as tech companies go forward in skirting regulations.

But there’s no uniform way—still—to quantify energy-water use. So rather than

• regulating a uniform way to quantify data-center energy-water use (i.e., create/enforce more social order in the language of coproduction),

• capture and compare that uniform data, and then

• use that uniform data to improve data-center design…,

A.I. companies would rather—as they have—build massive new data centers where there’s less likelihood for regulation, as The New York Times reported last fall.

That has made data center build-out a kind of worldwide “gold rush” as the World Economic Forum recently put it. But it’s a gold rush only for those who already have lots of gold and can afford to build data centers, such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and a few others.

Unregulated A.I. and Tokenmaxxing, Degree Hacking, and Retractions — Oh My!

Of course, data centers — computers generally — paired with humanity’s uniquely open-ended culture has led to many fantastic scientific inventions. A.I. is one of them, with a history that begins in the 1950s. But perhaps A.I. left the lab perhaps a bit early: It’s only “reactive machines,” those with “limited memory,” or “artificial narrow intelligence.” In other words, A.I. as it is now only performs the illusion of intelligence, like early mainframe computers only performed the illusion of multitasking.

“Most of us are pretty surprised” about the explosive popularity of ChatGPT, admits Margaret Mitchell, the chief ethics scientist at the AI company Hugging Face. “The technology wasn’t putting forth any sort of fundamental breakthroughs.” —Andrew R. Chow, reporting for Time, 8 February 2023

Colloquially, then, the A.I. available now is known as weak A.I., which seems the wrong term to me because weak suggests that it could become strong—or ”capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge across a broad range of tasks—much like a human.”

But weak A.I. can’t become strong on its own, no matter how much time it spends in a data-center gym. A major scientific breakthrough—made by people—must come first. If that breakthrough ever happens, you won’t miss it. You’ll hear about it absolutely everywhere.

So I prefer to use the word “narrow” for describing today’s A.I. because it contrasts with humanity’s “open-ended” capacity.

And it’s that capacity—perhaps informed by an A.I. search, but not A.I. itself—that is employing that hundred-year-old understanding of technological adoption: “Man Conforms.” Among A.I. enthusiasts, there’s a more sinister-sounding version: “adapt or die.”

Indeed, to push A.I. adoption, companies are employing so many strategies that it can feel like “Resistance is Futile,” a phrase popularized most especially by the space drama Star Trek, which imagined a cyborg future forced upon humanity. But one thing that made that Star Trek story line about the “Borg” so successful was that resistance wasn’t futile: There was immediate resistance to the Borg, clever open-ended responses, and—in the end—a Hollywood-formula ending in which the resistance (humanity!) won.

Prompting Resistance: Coproductions Out of Whack

History is full of resistance to top-down industrial application of scientific finds, including vaccination, water fluoridation, artificial insemination, and anesthesia.

As a more recent data-rich example of what happens when science and society are not operating as a coproduction, we also have the coronavirus pandemic. So now, years on, people are still wondering and scientists are still uncertain whether lockdowns and other mandates (social order) were the right course of action given the scientific understanding (knowledge), both the uncertain understanding of the disease and how it spreads as well as the better-known understanding of the harms from a lockdown, such as the social costs of isolation and the long-term effects of a lockdown on education and economies.

The underlying reasons for resistance to A.I. are no different from these historical examples. But given A.I.’s illusion of intelligence, there’s a risk of confusing the rollout of A.I. as being driven by A.I. itself, as if A.I. was taking away jobs, polluting the environment, or making people’s hard-won competence seem obsolete.

It’s not.

It takes a person—a manager, for example—to decide to use A.I. to replace an employee. So, scaled up, the benefits of “narrow” A.I. go to the same narrow group of people and companies who benefit from the data center “gold rush.” And they are using their considerable resources to make resistance to A.I. seem futile.

So it would be interesting to investigate, for example:

• What current faculty, if any, at the University of Southern California were consulted—and what conditions, if any, were put in place—before the administration agreed to accept a $200 million “gift” from one of the largest individual shareholders of the chip maker Nvidia. As reported, the money will mostly be for attracting new faculty to infuse A.I. into the curriculum, including into the arts?

• Which companies were involved in putting pressure on the European Union to further delay A.I. regulatory policies previously put in place even though they hadn’t yet gone into effect?

• How else A.I. companies are adding A.I. to people’s computing devices without their/our consent, a tactic that seems to be spreading?

If Google’s next Chrome update silently removes the unconsented installs and replaces the behaviour with an explicit opt-in, we will know the company can read the room. If it does not, we will know what the company’s published positions on responsible AI and sustainability are actually worth.
— Alexander Hanff, That Privacy Guy! 4 May 2026

Other such investigations have revealed:

• “Tokenmaxxing”— a form of conspicuous consumption in the Claudeconomy (a blend of Anthropic’s flagship A.I. product Claude and economy) in which people try to maximize their use of A.I. resources (“tokens”) because A.I.-use is serving as a benchmark for worker productivity. Tokenmaxxing has been reported to have happened at Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and other companies. At Meta, for example, some 85,000 employees reportedly used 60.2 trillion A.I. tokens in a month. That use, just by Meta, accounted for approximately 5% of all A.I.-use in a single month.

• Degree hacking — in which people take tests or online courses that are accepted as college credit, but may employ A.I. in doing so. That prompts college concerns regarding academic integrity, particularly in presenting A.I. output as a student’s own work (a new kind of plagiarism). Degree hacking also prompts student concerns, at least for those students who are thinking about the long-term consequences, because a degree-hacked college credential will not convey evidence of subject competence (except for the subjects required for degree hacking).

• Retractions — of research in a prominent journal that concluded “ChatGPT has a substantial positive effect on students’ learning performance.” When the editor who had concerns about the research contacted the authors about it, the authors didn’t respond. Now, because this one retracted paper was already cited by over 500 others, it seems likely more retractions will follow. Unfortunately, though, as retractions are never as widely covered as the original research findings are, that now-retracted conclusion—that A.I. has a “substantial positive effect” on learning outcomes—will persist without evidence to support it.

A.I. Proof: Is the Only Winning Move Not to Play?

To persist in the market — whether the academic or labor market — people are looking to make their learning, teaching, or other employment “A.I. Proof.”

The initial thrust to “A.I. Proof” is in emphasizing human skills that “narrow A.I.” cannot replace. That emphasis could reverse the decades-long trend of expecting more from technology and less from one another, even as A.I. gets embedded into human-like, or at least human-shaped robots.

Some opportunists think a better way forward is through learning “prompt engineering,” in which open-ended people learn better how to prompt narrow A.I. to get better A.I. results. A few big businesses are leaning in to prompt engineering, with A.I.-enthusiast scholars even publishing how-to guides about how to “make the most of your human-machine relationship” (such as this one with disclosures in the original version—signaling the author may have a bias and/or conflict of interest—that are not carried over in re-publication).

There’s also the A.I.-enthusiast idea of using A.I. to amplify human creativity, an idea that—to me—echoes of Steve Jobs’s advertisement of Apple’s personal computer as a bicycle for the mind. That bicycle idea was born from research showing the labor-saving advantages of riding a bike compared to walking, and so suggested computers were a new kind of labor-saving device even though using them still has us working hard.

But given all the environmental, social, and human resources that narrow A.I. requires, it seems worthwhile to ask whether the only winning strategy is not to play.

That idea — not playing — is what came to my open-ended mind when I saw Matthew Broderick in a 30-second commercial Genspark AI created to run during the Superbowl earlier this year.

Turns out, the company’s last-minute decision to do a commercial meant the marketing company tasked with creating the commercial used a “narrow A.I.” to develop the commercial’s script and wrap filming in a single day, apparently enlisting “actor Matthew Broderick to reprise his Ferris Bueller’s Day Off persona in an ad urging viewers to take the Monday after the Big Game off.”

But seeing Broderick, my open-ended mind couldn’t help but think of another, earlier movie Broderick starred in that involved a computer: War Games (1983). In that movie, a computer given command and control of the U.S. military nearly starts World War III because the smart/stupid computer confused game-play with reality. But what saves the world from the smart/stupid computer is that the smart/stupid computer is capable of learning on its own, which, by the way, makes it much more advanced than any “narrow A.I..” So — a Hollywood ending — at the last possible minute before starting a nuclear war, the computer plays out every possible game version of nuclear war and concludes that “the only winning move is not to play.” And I’m pretty sure that message — one of A.I. resistance — was not what the narrow-A.I.-based company intended to convey spending an estimated $16-$20 million to play the ad twice.

Laws and policies always lag behind technological innovations. But with A.I., the amount of resource consumption is known and growing. Although the refrain from corporations is often to ‘trust the market,’ laws and policies allow the market to discount effects to the environment.

So, a thought experiment: what would be the various effects of putting policies and laws in place to eliminate or curb the use of A.I. for everyday tasks such as internet searches and queries? Beyond considering the environment and increased energy usage, are there other reasons to limit/curb A.I. use, such as consumer choice that allows people to opt-out/turn off A.I. capabilities, say, even allowing parents to opt-out/turn off A.I. for their children’s devices, or for schools to ban use of it for students in classes?

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One basic tip—to become familiar with records retention policies—stood out to me because of recent events in my community and country.

Many governments write such records retention policies into their laws, which gives not only information about how long records are to be retained but also what records even exist. For example, the state of North Carolina provides a legal framework for what records local municipal governments should retain.

But, in my community, and as reported the day the SEJ conference started, the Mayor of Jamestown, North Carolina, has waited months just for a copy of her own town’s records retention policy (never mind those of us waiting for other public records). The Town Manager—an unelected, appointed government official—is not complying.

When government officials so clearly do not follow the law—a betrayal of the public’s trust—problems compound. In Jamestown’s case, the more that public records requests are delayed or unfilled, the more people request public records. As a result, Jamestown’s staff capacity to fill public records requests is less sustainable. So people’s trust in their government degrades further.

Of course, this same kind of bandwagon effect—”a psychological phenomenon whereby people do something primarily because other people are doing it”—can compound positively, too, and lead to increased trust and more sustainability.

But purposefully employing bandwagon strategies to increase trust or sustainability is risky: Trust without warrant is blind; sustainability without substance is greenwashing. Competing bandwagons are also noisy. Limited is our capacity to tolerate such noise. As a result, some people withdraw. Others adapt, persuaded to jump on various types of bandwagons by the glittering generalities of politicians, marketers, financiers, or propagandists. Still others react to the purposeful deployment of bandwagon strategies by becoming cynics—as state propagandists hope—believing “the world is simply a battlefield for partisan ideas,” a belief that makes concepts such as “trust” or “sustainability” meaningless.

But whether accidental or purposefully deployed, the bandwagon effect takes work to overcome. Without confronting those bandwagon conductors—those who deploy the bandwagon effect purposefully—the dangers of leading people to either extreme, cynicism or warrantless trust, can threaten the whole world.

An Undiplomatic Diplomat

Indeed, as historians remind us, for two months before World War II ended—from 25 April to 26 June 1945—delegates of fifty nations met to charter the United Nations, which begins “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind….” The Charter also requires “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered” (Article 2, part 3).

Sixty years and two failed Senate confirmation attempts later, President George W. Bush made a recess appointment of John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. The U.S. Senate did not confirm Bolton, in part, because Bolton spoke repeatedly over the years about how he thought the United Nations was irrelevant and that it only worked when the U.S. wanted it to work. President Bush reportedly thought the United Nations needed such a strong-minded diplomat. But despite Bolton’s service, he did nothing at the United Nations to improve his own opinion of the institution. And all these years later, Bolton is still saying the United Nations is “hopelessly broken.”

But the “everyday investigative watchdog” in me wonders why any journalism outlet is giving Bolton any space or time to opine about any topic other than the status of his federal grand jury indictment. Although the indictment is purported to be politically motivated because of Bolton’s criticisms of Trump, it comes only after years of investigation, including during President Biden’s administration, and discloses that Bolton shared top-secret information with relatives via an unsecured email account that was also reported hacked by “a cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Yet in this 25 April 2026 NewsNation interview, for example, Bolton is given time to comment on the Trump Administration’s negotiations with Iran. Jumping on the bandwagon to interview Bolton is easy because he says controversial things like “I think the President’s lost. I don’t think he knows what to do next” (CNN 23 April 2026).

The harder work would be to report on how the U.S. and Israel have ignored the U.N. charter and that there’s a coalition of nations currently meeting to transition away from fossil fuels, the world’s reliance on which has energized this war on Iran.

That coalition meeting—the inaugural conference on “Transitioning away from Fossil Fuel”—was announced last November. Invitations then went out to nations. After that, open registration ran from 10-26 February and attracted over 2,600 organizations. The conference itself ends tomorrow.

But it wasn’t until today (in print, yesterday online) that The New York Times—with slogan ”all the news that’s fit to print”—reported on the conference’s existence (the online version I found too late to comment on because the online comments section had already closed). Given the late timing of covering the conference and the good-for-business framing of covering Trump, The New York Times story headlined how the Trump Administration had not been invited to the “Transitioning away from Fossil Fuel” conference. And, as if that were not enough bandwagon conducting, the newspaper also gave voice to the Administration’s position that the climate agenda is “bogus.”

Producing Records, International, National, and Local

In part, that view persists because conspiracy theorists in 2009 cited leaked emails (public records, but taken out of context) to conclude that the whole climate change agenda—the consensus of scientists worldwide—was bogus.

The aftermath of what was then termed Climategate (the conspiracy-fueled leak) led to at least one scientist spending half of his workday—for years—responding to public records requests: Dr. Benjamin Santer was a climate scientist at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory back then, and told me many of the records requests were needlessly complicated or technical, not made by scientists, and so likely meant those requesting the data and documents would not—or perhaps could not—do anything particularly meaningful with them. So Santer told me (and reporters at many journalism outlets) he came to think that the complexity and volume of public records requests were not about watchdog reporting but about keeping him from doing his job as a climate scientist. Then Santer sighed. I waited. He then told me that responding to public records requests was also part of his job—even as a climate scientist—because his employer was the people of these United States of America.

That employment status is true also of the President of the United States and those who are a part of the Executive Branch. And it was in response to the Watergate scandal—involving Nixon’s taped recordings—that Congress passed the Presidential Records Act of 1978. That law makes it clear that work, recordings, correspondence, et cetera even of the President belongs to the people, not to any individual in that office. The 1978 law also includes plenty of limitations on what constitutes a public record, how long before a record must be handed over to an archivist, and—even then—restrictions on what may be made available to the public.

But recently President Trump asked the Department of Justice whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 is constitutional. In reply, the DOJ memo—released 1 April 2026—argued it was not. Since then, the Trump Administration is acting according to that memo rather than to the 1978 law passed by Congress.

Already a couple of lawsuits have been filed in federal court about it. Given past behavior of the Trump Administration and an analysis concluding an 80% success rate by the Trump Administration with “shadow docket” decisions from the Supreme Court, if a lower court rules against the Trump Administration in the lawsuits regarding his Administration’s record-keeping practices, it seems likely they will request the Supreme Court issue an emergency ruling.

“Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the president and thus to reshape the nation’s separation of powers.”
— Justice Elena Kagan, 22 September 2025

Persistence

After the “How to Be an Everyday Investigative Watchdog” session at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference, I asked for the thoughts of those journalists who had experience reporting from authoritarian countries. They had very little to say. One of them told me “That advice doesn’t work for me where I report. But it sounds like it isn’t working for you, here, these days, either.”

I think it will eventually, with persistence and continued hard work. Independent journalists also do occasionally file lawsuits for public documents. But in the case of Jamestown, North Carolina, anyway, now even the (recently) elected officials are starting to act like watchdogs, too, of their own appointed officials.

(But we’ll see.)

What, if anything, keeps you from being a watchdog—monitoring institutions, politicians, and other public figures—in your habitat? Do you have local journalists to rely on for that service?

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The business of environmental reporting, however, is often incompatible with environmental stories about “structural” or “slow violence” over time. Such environmental stories are current events, such as long-term pollution or climate change. But they are not news in the traditional sense and are never “breaking news.” So these kinds of environmental stories do not—perhaps even cannot—attract the kind of attention that, say, environmental reporting about a stranded whale can.

Indeed, we adapt to the structural/slow violence going on around us, sometimes even poking fun at ourselves or others for, say, “normalizing copious amounts of insanity.” There’s an important distinction, though, between normalizing and desensitizing. But without making this distinction and attending to our evolutionary advantageous capacity for desensitization, the attempt to cover structural/slow violence stories can backfire: instead of prompting interest, such journalism may prompt fatigue, annoyance, and even anger. So finding journalistic ways to cover structural/slow violence takes courage and a strategy to maintain it. It’s kind of like dissenting from a group even though everyone in the group agrees that great minds don’t always think alike.

Normalizing versus Desensitizing

Pictured above is a famous example of normalizing waste and consumption. The article, “Throwaway Living,” appeared in the 1 August 1955 issue of Life magazine. Seventy years later, I wonder if any of those throwaway items are floating in the ocean or have broken up into microplastics, with some of those pictured plastics—now as tiny particles—literally circulating in my bloodstream doing structural/slow violence to my body.

Another famous example of normalizing comes from the U.S. presidential campaign of 2016, where normalizing in the media lifted Donald Trump up and tore Hillary Clinton down, with Trump having done significant structural/slow violence to our body politic and increasingly to our environment.

The hand-wringing over Trump’s normalization began in earnest in the wake of the May 4 Indiana primary victory that drove the last of his serious Republican rivals from the race, which in retrospect was the moment his normalization became all but inevitable. The day after the primary, Vox’s David Roberts predicted that within the “whole superstructure of U.S. politics built around two balanced sides” — the media, consultants, parties and the like — “there will be a tidal pull to normalize this election, to make it Coca-Cola versus Pepsi instead of Coca-Cola versus sewer water.”

— Charles Homans, The New York Times Magazine (1 November 2016)

In contrast to normalization, desensitization is evolutionarily advantageous: it allows a person not to be bothered by the presence of sewer water while still recognizing it’s not normal and so something should be done about it. Medical doctors are trained to become desensitized to the presence of blood and gore while the rest of us subconsciously give our attention to most anything colored red. Surgeons are further trained to become desensitized to their own violence of cutting into another person, which helps surgeons concentrate on solving the problem at hand, whether removing an about-to-burst appendix, bypassing a blocked artery, cutting off a gangrenous leg, or repairing damage caused by a foreign object such as a bullet. People in other professions also undergo desensitization training, such as first-responders, military, police, pilots, and social workers. But chefs, musicians, entrepreneurs, and designers also undergo and benefit from desensitization training, with some of these training situations even turned into various forms of entertainment.

For rest of us, though, we become desensitized not through training but from repeated exposure to something unpleasant, such as long-term pollution, climate change, and other forms of structural/slow violence.

Backfire Avoidance

For those of us in the business of informing people about structural/slow violence and the consequences thereof, journalism and communication researchers say long, drawn-out coverage of such issues can cause both fatigue and annoyance, with some people “particularly negative about the lack of progress.” Of course, individual tolerance to repetition-without-progress varies. But so do people’s views about the importance of covering some issues, such as the environment. So researchers also note that news users who do value such long, drawn-out issues may “avoid the [long, drawn-out] issue during news selection and exposure.”

After all, gone are the days when deciding “what is newsworthy” on a daily or hourly basis was done by reporters, editors and publishers in a format printed, produced, or delivered by a select few publishers in print, radio, or television. Now we can choose our news on a second-by-second basis with the journalism business increasingly employing internet metrics to gauge audience interests and some outlets even employing artificial intelligence to respond faster, for example, to what’s happening in financial markets or trending on social media. (And there’s still much to study about what news influencers are doing in the information ecosystem.)

But publishing environmental stories covering long-term pollution or climate change becomes increasingly hard to justify when even news users who value environmental coverage—myself included—may avoid such stories and so generate fewer “likes” or “clicks,” spend less “time on page,” and generate higher “bounce rates” away from such stories.

About People: Do We Have To Wait For Harm?

So the typical strategy journalists use to cover structural/slow violence is to tell a story about people who are harmed. This strategy borrows on the trope “if it bleeds, it leads” the news coverage of the week, day, minute, second. That journalism strategy gets wide attention by people not desensitized to other people’s harm, which is most of us. So it feeds the analytic machines that inform the modern business of journalism.

For environmental journalists, that means covering people already harmed by long-term exposure to pollution or by climate change. But it also comes up with journalists covering, for example, the many kinds of causalities from bad investment strategies, or political corruption, or any of the many other ways people are obviously harmed—after the fact—by structural/slow violence.

But do we have to wait for there to be someone harmed? Alternately, do we have to find some person—academic, advocate, politician—and report a hero story about their efforts to address the structural/slow violence? What if there aren’t any heroes yet because the structures for violence are just being put into place with, say, known slow violence to come decades later? That was the case with this set of award-winning stories about decades of violations about the release of toxic air pollutants. Imagine such watchdog reporting resulting in stopping the release of toxic pollutants before they did such harm!

Journalists I’ve spoken to about this topic range widely in their responses. But one recently made me, unwittingly, the focus of her article on the structural/slow violence done by government officials who fail to produce public records. Although many public reactions to her article and my efforts were as the aforementioned researchers noted—fatigue, annoyance, anger—there was also, to my delight, encouragement. Subsequently, the story was expanded into (so far) a three-part series, with the latest part reporting on the newly elected Mayor coming forward to say she too has trouble getting public records from her own Town Manager!

In the highly segmented media landscape, where serious journalism competes with “oddities,” that encouragement suggests to me there’s an audience for watchdog journalism stories about structural/slow violence before irreparable harm is done. Although it feels like—as a journalist—I am dissenting from my fellow journalists in this endeavor, that’s OK because even great minds don’t always think alike. The question remains, though, in finding a way forward that is sustainable in all its various forms, including avoiding becoming “particularly negative about the lack of progress.” Indeed, right now, staying informed about the world has me feeling like I’m holding my breath. That’s something I’m learning to recognize as “good” — it’s a signal that I should do something about it — but I sure could use some desensitization training.

A final note of encouragement:

Last week, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein proclaimed 9 April as the state’s “Local News Day,” with the first reason given that “Americans overwhelmingly say local news is the most important and most trusted source of news.”

It was part of a national effort coordinated by a number of news organizations.

I wrote all the local news organizations — particularly all those I subscribe to — about joining in. None of them did. But I’ll keep after them, and perhaps they will next year.

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It reminded me of a scene in the historical drama Schindler’s List, when Oscar Schindler explains to his wife why he’s finally successful.

Oskar Schindler: In every business I tried, I can see now, it wasn't me that failed. Something was missing. Even if I’d known what it was, there’s nothing I could have done about it because you can’t create this thing. And it makes all the difference in the world between success and failure.

Emilie Schindler: Luck?

Oskar Schindler: War.

Whether war speeds up the energy transition away from fossil fuels—the success Stiell and others hope for—is still to be determined. But speeding up the energy transition would help mitigate climate change. It could also reduce the amplitude of future geopolitical shocks on energy price volatility. All together that sounds like a more sustainable future.

Despite those hopes, though, the kind of “sustainability” most amplified by the war isn’t mitigation. It’s adaptation. In particular, the fossil fuel industry is adapting to the war, making short-term profits because of higher oil prices and using its financial power and political influence to ensure the industry’s own “sustainability” for decades to come.

Since 28 February, when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, leaders of countries whose economies are—to use Stiell’s term—“shackled” to fossil fuels have employed various tactics to stay that way. In the U.S., a net exporter of fossil fuels, those tactics include spreading misinformation from the fossil fuel industry, making deals for new fossil-fuel power plants (e.g., in Pennsylvania and Ohio), and cancelling billion-dollar wind farm projects and redirecting that money to fossil-fuel production.

Now, the Trump Administration has even lifted sanctions to allow 140 million barrels of Iranian oil that was “already in transit” to be sold on the world market (though reporting suggests financial sanctions will keep Iran from receiving any money from the sale for the time being). After all, more oil on the market—whatever the source—keeps consumer prices from getting too high. And that, in turn, helps maintain the fossil-fuel-dependent status quo.

So although the war has made some people, like Stiell, hopeful for breaking dependencies on fossil fuels, the political will is not there. Instead, the will of leaders from the dozens of nations that make up the International Energy Agency (IEA) seems to be to ensure consumers remain reliant on fossil fuels: On 11 March 2026, the IEA voted to release a record amount of oil from worldwide stockpiles. And they’re already considering doing so again.

Simultaneously, the IEA is advising member nations both on “emergency consumer support measures” and “emergency demand-side energy conservation measures,” both of which help maintain the fossil-fuel-dominated status quo.

And the only IEA advice related to any kind of energy transition is to Indonesia to transition to electricity for cooking and for some very limited transportation needs, and to the U.K. to accelerate installing solar panels at homes and supermarkets.

Neither emergency list includes any advice for the U.S..

Going Nuclear?

Even so, some analysts unequivocally state the war “will accelerate the global energy transition especially to nuclear power” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists). Others’ arguments are more nuanced, saying the “decisive factor” of whether war is an accelerator or an anchor on the energy transition needed to achieve net zero carbon emissions is “how governments respond under war pressure: if they use the shock to drive structural decarbonisation and strengthen the resilience of grids, minerals, circularity, and finance, the transition can accelerate, but if they fall back on broad fuel subsidies, long-term fossil contracts without a decarbonisation pathway, and delayed climate tools, the crisis will likely slow net zero by locking in short-term fixes and undermining investor confidence” (Centre for Environment and Development for the Arab Region and Europe).

“Sustainability”: Polysemic, Polyvalent, and Phatic

Of course, nuclear power has its own sustainability problems, too. But with increasing electricity demands—driven by heavy investment in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), data centers, and one-upmanship—some nations are choosing instead to avoid new investments in energy generation by banning new data centers. So just as some nations perceive the demands of A.I. as threatening their sustainability, others are arguing for A.I.’s increased use as perhaps the only way to solve sustainability challenges.

With all these different uses of the term “sustainability”—be it climate change mitigation, war adaptation, business longevity, technological solutionism, et cetera—it is important to reiterate that standardizing what “sustainability” means isn’t possible because what is sustainable in one culture, economy, political environment, or geography is not necessarily sustainable in another.

“No single blueprint of sustainability will be found, as economic and social systems and ecological conditions differ widely among countries. Each nation will have to work out its own concrete policy implications.”
—United Nation's World Commission on Environment and Development report, “Our Common Future” (1987)

In other words, “sustainability” is a term that is polysemic, polyvalent, and phatic because it

• has many related meanings (polysemic),

• refers to different, but often overlapping values (polyvalent), and

• sometimes gets used without really any meaning at all, simply as a kind of social gesture (phatic).

So Dear Reader, as you consider the many analyses, hopeful statements, and nuanced forecasts about what may come—sustainability-wise—because of the war on Iran (especially this week, being CERAWeek), you may be tempted to think of the story of Oskar Schindler. His war profiteering ended after a crisis of conscience from his exposure to the suffering he was helping cause. Or you may be tempted to think of the story of Lee Scott, Walmart’s CEO, and his “key personal moment” (as retold on SustainLab) with Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, which prompted Walmart’s ongoing sustainability efforts. No doubt, individual conversions of people who put profit over planet matter, and protests, among other means, do work to inspire such conversions. But the persistent action needed over long time scales to transition away from unsustainable fossil fuels is not accomplished one conversion at a time, whether one war profiteer, one CEO, or one political leader. It’s through political decisions (or lack thereof) with worldwide collaboration that anyone can help make happen by provoking discourse.

If you, like me, are a citizen of the United States — whatever your political persuasion or ideology — please keep your sustainability focus local, but also consider provoking discourse, including contacting and urging your representatives in Congress to undertake the persistent action needed over long time scales to transition away from unsustainable fossil fuels.

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People who study rhetoric call deceiving others with truthful statements paltering, which was one of many rhetorical devices used by Senator Inhofe (1934-2024) in his arguments against climate change.

Now, an international team of researchers have used artificial intelligence (A.I.) to reveal paltering—among other rhetorical devices—as part of an overall increase of climate contrarian speeches in Congress from 1994 to 2024.

Without understanding why people palter, however, confronting them with their deception may backfire, prompting them to strengthen their original views. In turn, that could escalate conflict as those who palter may then palter more or even shift to spreading disinformation—lying by commission—to reinforce their worldviews.

Analyzing Congressional Speech

In the research paper, “Large language model reveals an increase in climate contrarian speech in the United States Congress” (Communications Sustainability, 27 February 2026), the authors used publicly available tools to extract the text from the digitized public record of congressional speeches. They then used large language models—a type of A.I.—to separate climate-related vs. non-climate related paragraphs, finding 110,837 paragraphs out of 2,515,806 paragraphs spoken over the 20-year period. They then categorized the rhetorical statements being used against addressing climate change.

This research was building on a previous study (2021) that examined text from conservative think tank websites and climate-contrarian blogs. Those researchers created a taxonomy of contrarian claims.

The new researchers — using congressional speeches — revised the 2021 taxonomy to:

• make substantial additions to category 4 (“Climate solutions won’t work”),

• split category 5 (“Climate movement/science is unreliable”) into two categories (so added category 6: “Proponents are alarmist”), and

• add a new top-level (“super-claim”) as category 7: “We need fossil fuels.”

“These adjustments” wrote the authors of the 2026 study, “substantially improved the classifier’s ability to assign accurate labels across the revised taxonomy, resulting in a more robust and discriminative classification system.”

Indeed, before turning to A.I. to go through the 2,515,806 paragraphs spoken by members of Congress over that 20-year period, the researchers had people—“classifiers” also referred to as “the human gold standard”—assign labels to a sample of the paragraphs from congressional speeches.

In sum, then, the researchers in 2026 added 28 climate contrarian claims to the previous taxonomy. Those additions made the people (“classifiers”) better at classifying statements from members of Congress. Then the researchers gave all 2,515,806 paragraphs to A.I. to find the 110,837 paragraphs related to climate claims.

In the list below of the 28 newly classified claims, the numbers (e.g. 4_1_1_1) refer to the claim location on the researchers’ circle diagram (previously given above):

4_1_1_1 Climate policies will harm economic competitiveness

4_1_1_2 Climate policies will kill jobs and/or harm vulnerable members of society

4_1_1_3 Climate-friendly technologies and practices are too expensive and/or uneconomical

4_1_3_1 Government climate policies will harm the environment, habitats, and/or species

4_1_3_2 Climate-friendly technologies/practices will harm the environment, habitats, and/or species

4_1_4 Climate policies create economic uncertainty and may have unintended consequences

4_2_6 Climate policy can be gamed or manipulated

4_2_7_1 Climate-friendly technologies are not ready

4_2_7_2 Renewable energy cannot provide base-load power and is difficult to scale

4_2_9 Individuals/consumers are responsible for climate change and should change their behavior to solve it

4_2_10_1 Future generations will be richer and will be better able to solve climate change

4_2_10_2 Future technology will fix climate change, so we shouldn’t worry too much

4_2_12 Increasing energy efficiency is enough to meet the challenges of climate change

4_2_13 We should focus on carbon dioxide removal rather than emissions reductions

4_2_14 There are more pressing problems than climate change and we should address those first

4_2_15 It’s cheaper to mitigate climate change abroad, so we are better off focusing on helping other countries reduce their emissions

4_3_1 We don’t have the right policy to solve climate change and/or need to better understand all the implications before implementing climate policies

4_3_2 It’s too late to do anything to mitigate climate change

4_4_0 We have already made a lot of progress on climate change and don’t need to do anything else.

4_4_1 We are already taking climate change seriously, so there is no need to worry

4_4_2 We are already doing enough to address climate change, so there is no need for more action

4_4_3 We are already contributing enough to the societal good we don’t need to also address climate change issues

7_2_1 Fossil fuels are important for economic growth and development. (Assigned when text explicitly links fossil fuels to economic growth/development)

7_2_2 Fossil fuel extraction is important for energy security. (Assigned when text emphasizes the importance of fossil fuels for domestic security or energy independence.)

7_2_3 Our fossil fuels are cleaner than others

7_2_4 Fossil fuels are part of the solution. We need to transition to cleaner fossil fuels.

7_3_0 Fossil fuels are necessary to meet energy demand. This includes, but not limited to, arguments that we need all forms of energy, including fossil fuels.

7_4_0 We have a right to profit from fossil fuels just like others have

On their own, many of these newly classified contrarian claims appear to be examples of paltering, which again means using true statements to deceive others.

For example, it is true that (7_2_3) “Our [American] fossil fuels are cleaner than others.” It’s particularly true of coal from China. So, one argument goes, it’s better for the Chinese to burn American coal than to dig and burn their own. But such true statements, as the authors write, often “withhold the broader context in order to portray a misleading expression.” Some broader context, then, for that argument about why China should be burning American coal instead of its own: unlike the United States, which is embracing more fossil-fuel use under the Trump Administration, China is transitioning its energy system to renewables, and so even as China’s energy demands have gone up, its emissions recently dropped. So although China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, producing twice as much as the U.S., it also has four times the population. That means the average person in China emits far fewer greenhouse gases than the average person in the United States. So in combination with (7_2_4) “Fossil fuels are part of the solution. We need to transition to cleaner fossil fuels,” a member of the U.S. Congress has a powerful set of paltering arguments to advocate for continued coal mining and export.

Paltering

It is impossible to know what prompts paltering among any particular person, including members of Congress. But research on paltering suggests many people who palter don’t see it as wrong. That’s even though those on the receiving end rate paltering the same as lying by commission (i.e., purposefully using false statements) with people considering it “especially unethical when palters are used in response to direct questions as opposed to when they are unprompted.”

Parent: “Did you finish your homework?” 
Kid: “I wrote an essay for my English class.” 
... then after parent finds out kid is not done with homework...
Parent: “Why did you answer my question that way?”
Kid: “What I said is true.” 
Parent: “But you misled me.”
—an example of paltering in response to a direct question   

One reason researchers think that palterers don’t see paltering as wrong—or see it as less wrong—is because the paltering is done in their own self-interest. Doing so discounts the misleading consequences and/or attributes the fault for the deception to the person who was deceived (‘who should have paid closer attention’). In other words, deception by paltering helps a person “delude themselves of their own integrity.” To put it another way, to palter and delude oneself about one’s own integrity is a kind of incompetence in moral or ethical reasoning about which people themselves often are unaware.

When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead… they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine.

— From Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments, Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999).

Contrarians About Climate Change

So what to do? Few people will take well being told their paltering is evidence of their incompetence in reasoning about morals or ethics!

Researchers suggest instead using two strategies: name the negative consequences of the lie and cite reasons the person being deceived doesn’t deserve being lied to.

To get to that point, though, means detecting the paltering in the first place, which is often a matter of asking for clarification.

Parent: “Did you finish your homework?” 
Kid: “I wrote an essay for my English class.” 
Parent: “Was that all you had to do?”
Kid: “I also did my math worksheet.” 
Parent: “That gives me the impression that you finished your homework, but is that what you're saying?” 
Kid -- unwilling to lie by commission -- "No, I'm not finished with my homework."
Parent: "So... I'm going to have to challenge every statement you make until you earn my trust back because I can't trust you not to deceive me. C'mon, kid, I try to be a good parent, and I work hard to give you with every opportunity I can afford. Is there something I did that makes you think I deserve to be lied to? 

Of course, someone paltering may switch to lying by commission, but then that person can no longer delude themselves about their own integrity.

Climate change contrarians in Congress, however, rarely lie by commission anymore. That’s especially after 2015 when the U.S. Senate voted 98-1 acknowledging that climate change is real and not a hoax.

So yes, even the U.S. Senate agrees on one of the “Six Key Truths” — “It’s real” — identified by communications researchers as having “potential to help build public and political will for climate solutions.”

The super-category of contrarian claims not addressed by the six key truths — “We Need Fossil Fuels” — is an old argument. It was first made by people with well-known names that have since been remediated by the foundations built from the wealth they amassed in the fossil-fuel industry, such as Kettering, Sloan, and Rockefeller.

Kettering was head of research for General Motors, and one of his engineers, Midgley, had discovered adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline eliminated engine knocking. Kettering reported it to Sloan, GM’s CEO, whose company contracted with Standard Oil (Rockefeller) to put lead into gasoline in 1923. The discovery was even called a “gift of god.” Knowing, however, about the toxic effects of lead, the leaded gasoline was marketed as “ethyl.”

Scientists and doctors were soon concerned. As Naomi Oreskes recounts the story in a book review in Scientific American (2024):

In 1925 the surgeon general organized a conference of businesspeople, union leaders, scientists, doctors and government officials to consider the matter. Given what Midgley told the surgeon general, one might expect the representatives of American industry to have insisted that lead in gasoline was safe. Instead they argued it was essential for the U.S. economy, for industrial progress, for the American way of life.

It took decades of documenting health and environmental effects, the subsequent creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the passage of the Clean Air Act before oil and gas companies were required to remove lead from gasoline. In the U.S., it wasn’t until 1996 that leaded gasoline was completely banned. But the world didn’t finally stop using leaded gasoline until 2021.

Paltering Influence?

The 98-1 vote in the U.S. Senate — that climate change is real and not a hoax — came a month before Senator Inhofe brought that snowball to the Senate Floor. Senator Inhofe had voted as part of the 98, but said “The hoax is that there are some people that are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful that they can change climate.”

In those same discussions on 21 January 2015, before the vote, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) noted the day of their discussions was the fifth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court (5-4 ruling) Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which enabled unlimited spending by corporations and other outside groups on electioneering communications.

It is perhaps a telling coincidence that we’re having this conversation on the floor of the Senate now on the fifth anniversary of the Citizens United decision. Because before Citizens United came along, there was actually a pretty robust conversation between Democrats and Republicans about carbon pollution and climate change and what needed to be done about it.

Fourteen years after the Citizens United decision, in 2024, oil and gas industries spent $219 million to influence the outcome of the election, with most of it to support Republicans.

By around the same proportions, Republican members of Congress made far more climate contrarian claims than Democrats did from 1994 to 2024.

Critically, however, the researchers wrote in their 2026 paper: “Statistical analysis further suggests that demographic factors and district-level fossil fuel employment predict claims making in floor speeches.”

Indeed, it is paltering to discount the need to address climate change by saying “Fossil fuels are important for economic growth and development” (7_2_1). But there’s no denying the truth of that statement itself for as long as the U.S. lacks the political will to transition away from fossil fuels.

If you, like me, are a citizen of the United States — whatever your political persuasion or ideology — please keep your sustainability focus local, but also consider contacting and urging your representatives in Congress to undertake the persistent action needed, over long time scales, to transition away from unsustainable fossil fuels.

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Upon reflection, the experience left me hopeful. That is even as I…

• read my colleague Chris Mooney’s recent post about the ongoing decline in newspaper industry jobs (see infographic below);

• heard from Harvard University’s writing program (where I have taught since 2021 after finishing a Nieman Fellowship) that the journalism program is shrinking given, among other things, university-wide budget concerns and so won’t be offering any science journalism courses next year;

• found out a writing course I was preparing to teach for 2026-2027 in Harvard’s sustainability master’s program will be put on hold until a future date, again because of university-wide budget concerns;

• heard that it was for similar financial reasons that the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability canceled its planned sustainability publication and let go those already hired;

• understood that Harvard’s and Stanford’s choices are a part of a worldwide decline in funding for science journalism, as Ben Deighton reported in Nature last week,

I believe I’m feeling hopeful because I have been focusing locally — well, virtually locally, as our classroom was virtual — where I could do something: I was helping my students prepare to cover sustainability responsibly, which included understanding how the term sustainability itself means different things to different people, as I have written about here on SustainLab previously (“Standardizing Sustainability,” 7 March 2025).

Earlier this month, for example, Sustainability Magazine published its top-250 sustainability leaders, for which only “senior leaders… including executives from global corporations” etc. were eligible. So, among the 250 are executives from Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Chevron, and Suncor (specializing in extracting tar sands).

Higher up in the list, executives from Philip Morris International (#50) and Patagonia (#49) ended up being pictured in the same spread together (below), an “ironic” pairing according to a sustainability business professional on LinkedIn.

But I led my students toward a definition and understanding of sustainability as informed by the “Our Common Future” report from the United Nations.

No single blueprint of sustainability will be found, as economic and social systems and ecological conditions differ widely among countries. Each nation will have to work out its own concrete policy implications.

— From the 1987 United Nations report “Our Common Future” (nearly a decade before COP1, the first United Nations Climate Change Conference) 

And so, particularly, I taught my students to focus locally, too. That meant, for students doing journalism, reporting to local audiences with local information that enables people to do something to address sustainability issues in their own communities. For students doing science communication, focusing locally meant strategizing with local institutions involved with sustainability efforts to do better at science communication and so reach the audiences those institutions need to reach to better succeed at their institutional sustainability goals.

Regarding my own local efforts, Dear Reader, that’s why I’ve not posted much recently. I have been covering an environmental issue that involves the local watershed and a development project by America’s largest homebuilder, D.R. Horton. It’s an issue I’ve written about before here on SustainLab (“Under Pressure from a Billion-Dollar Company” 30 November 2025). And since then, I have uncovered what appears to constitute a major breach of the Development Agreement between D.R. Horton and the local government.

That discovery, in turn, prompted the local government to call a special meeting at which D.R. Horton company representatives will face tough questions from locally elected officials and, it seems likely, have to stop working on their housing development in order to find a way to cure the breach, if it can be cured. Indeed, it may not be possible to cure this Development Agreement because D.R. Horton wants a high-density development — presumably with a profit motive in mind — and the already burdened local watershed has state ordinances that, among other things, prevents high density developments. It’s an absolute mess how the little town of 3,500 and D.R. Horton got to this point.

So I am hopeful that there are now more of us out in the world who are prepared to cover sustainability responsibly.

And that includes being ever vigilant about whether even a company such as Patagonia (#49 in Sustainability Magazine’s top-250) — which appears to be environmentally conscious — is, in fact, greenwashing (there are pros and cons to the argument that they are). After all, even Patagonia published a post titled “Can We Stop Greenwashing?” with a conclusion that “Fashion has a hefty impact on the planet. There’s an argument to be made that it should never be described as green.”

Would be easier for others in your local community to engage in sustainable actions if they saw you doing them?

The slogan “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote” was born shortly after Randolph’s first attempt. But it’s not as if 18-year-olds had always been fighting.

Soldiers at the time of our nation’s founding were at least 21, which followed the British tradition. Scholars report it was the Civil War that prompted Congress to lower the enlistment age to 18 as more soldiers were needed. But even then, the drafting age (or mandatory enrollment) remained 21. It stayed that way until World War II. Again, more soldiers were needed than had volunteered. But according to The National World War II Museum, that was because of the 20 million eligible men already registered for the draft, half were rejected “either for health reasons or because they were deemed illiterate.”

Literacy began to matter starting in World War I. By that time the machines of war were powered by engines and batteries. So soldiers needed to read instructions to run, maintain, and repair those many machines of war, machines that became even more complicated during World War II.

So, in 1942, as Congress formally prepared to lower the draft age to 18, Jennings Randolph introduced the first of his 11 bills to reduce the voting age to match.

Taking Jennings Randolph as symbol for persistence, the Washington D.C. Coal Club named a lifetime achievement award after him that, on 4 December 2025, they presented to Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.). Senator Capito is Chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which receives referrals to all proposed legislation regarding air pollution, the environmental effects of toxic substances, and regional economic development, among 17 total topics. According to a press release about the D.C. Coal Club’s award, it “honors the Chairman’s lifetime achievements and dedication to the utilization of coal, our nation’s most abundant, affordable energy resource.”

Being a self-proclaimed “advocate for policies that protect vital West Virginia energy and manufacturing jobs” and D.C. Coal Club award winner, it seems fair to conclude Senator Capito prioritizes regional economic development over the other 16 subjects the Senate Committee has jurisdiction over, half of which directly mention the environment or pollution.

But Senator Capito was elected by the people of West Virginia, after all, and it is to them she is most beholden if she wishes to remain a senator. And any economic development in West Virginia will make the state less dependent on the federal government, which sends $2.43 to West Virginia for every $1 it receives. West Virginia also consistently ranks “among the poorest states in the nation.” Mining bituminous coal (West Virginia's official state rock) is how the state has traditionally developed economically. But that development has come at great cost to the health of West Virginians (especially miners), the environment, and the rule of law. In other words, to proclaim coal is “our nation’s most abundant, affordable energy resource” does not figure in health, environment, and social-wellness costs.

If Chairman Capito considers those costs, she does so privately. Publicly she celebrates coal-powered economic development in West Virginia, and this past week gave her plenty to celebrate.

Reckless Endangerment

On Wednesday, 11 February 2026, the Department of Energy announced US$175 million in projects to modernize coal plants, including two in Capito’s West Virginia, two in Ohio, one in Kentucky, and one in North Carolina. President Trump also signed an executive order that Senator Capito praised, the order requiring even more coal use by what is arguably already the world’s single largest greenhouse gas emitter, the U.S. Department of Defense. From the Executive Order:

Given our Nation’s vast coal resources and the proven reliability of our coal-fired generation fleet in providing continuous, on-demand baseload power, it is imperative that the Department of War (DOW) prioritize the preservation and strategic utilization of coal-based energy assets. Coal generation ensures that military installations, command centers, and defense-industrial bases remain fully powered under all conditions — including natural disasters, or wartime contingencies. Maintaining this capability is a matter of national security, strategic deterrence, and American energy dominance.

Then, on Thursday, 12 February 2026, Senator Capito applauded Trump’s EPA for repealing the EPA’s own 2009 Endangerment Finding.

The repeal does not rely on the EPA’s report commissioned last year, which was thrashed by both scientists and untold thousands of commenters. Instead, the repeal argues that the EPA lacked statutory authority under the Clean Air Act.

In other words, the repeal means Trump’s EPA is disregarding the decade-long effort it took to issue the 2009 Endangerment Finding in the first place, including the petitions, legal arguments, court findings that the EPA did have such statutory authority, the EPA producing scientific evidence that there is and would be harm from greenhouse gas emissions, and legal challenges that have since upheld the EPA’s statutory authority. Such disregard for that decade-long effort means also disregarding the harm already and the potential for future harm from greenhouse gas emissions. It also allows — and encourages — additional and future greenhouse gas emissions that pose significant additional harm. So Trump’s EPA repeal may as well be called “reckless endangerment.”

If A then B, So Let’s Try “Not A”

To put it more specifically, below is the Clean Air Act section 202(a)(1) and, because it matters, part (2) as well:

(a) Authority of Administrator to prescribe by regulation
Except as otherwise provided in subsection (b) of this section—
(1) The Administrator shall by regulation prescribe (and from time to time revise) in accordance with the provisions of this section, standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class or classes of new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines, which in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare. Such standards shall be applicable to such vehicles and engines for their useful life (as determined under subsection (d) of this section, relating to useful life of vehicles for purposes of certification), whether such vehicles and engines are designed as complete systems or incorporate devices to prevent or control such pollution.
(2) Any regulation prescribed under paragraph (1) of this subsection (and any revision thereof) shall take effect after such period as the Administrator finds necessary to permit the development and application of the requisite technology, giving appropriate consideration to the cost of compliance within such period.

So, in essence, to get to the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the EPA used a kind of basic logical statement, “If A, then B”: If the Clean Air Act gives the EPA Administrator the authority to prescribe emission standards for pollutants, and greenhouse gas emissions are pollutants, then the EPA — after “giving appropriate consideration to the cost of compliance” (paragraph 2, above) — has the authority to prescribe emissions standards for greenhouse gas emissions.

What Trump’s EPA has argued is, logically “not A.” So, logically, without A, there is no B. Here’s the statement of “not A” from the Trump’s EPA 2026 repeal (page 1):

The EPA determines that CAA section 202(a)(1) does not authorize the Agency to prescribe emission standards in response to global climate change concerns for multiple reasons, including the best reading of the statutory terms “air pollution,” “cause,” “contribute,” and “reasonably be anticipated to endanger.” This statutory interpretation is corroborated by application of the major questions doctrine.

It’s an odd argument because the EPA itself made that very same argument in 2006 before the U.S. Supreme Court. Specifically, the EPA argued that the Clean Air Act “does not authorize it to issue mandatory regulations to address global climate change.” But the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the EPA did, in fact, have that authority “because greenhouse gases fit well within the Act’s capacious definition of ‘air pollutant.’”

It was then two years later, in 2009, that the EPA issued the Endangerment Finding, which came after 380,000 public comments to which the EPA responded with 11 volumes of responses.

As a reminder, a summary of the 2009 Endangerment Finding states “that the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆)—in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

Compared to that 10-year timeline, the repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding took one year. It started on Trump’s second Inauguration Day, 20 January 2025, included a four-month review from formal start to finish, a scientifically dubious report, then a shorter-than-normal comment period that nevertheless garnered 570,000 public comments (or 190,000 more public comments than the 2009 Endangerment Finding had), and — released also this past week — only a 335-page response to those comments from the EPA, which has many tell-tale signs that Artificial Intelligence generated the arguments justifying the repeal.

I previously found evidence the White House using A.I. to justify policy related to greenhouse gas emissions, but — having spoken to the misattributed researcher — also confirmed the A.I. had gotten the conclusion wrong. So A.I. was justifying pre-chosen policy by making stuff up (SustainLab, 5 March 2025).

This time, with the EPA’s response to comments, the tell-tale signs are far more obvious (see image and caption above for example). So I contacted the person listed in the 436-page formal repeal as available for further questions. The automatic response I received said he was out of the office until 2 March 2026 but to contact a far more junior EPA staff member for questions “about the final rule related to greenhouse gas emission standards from light-duty or heavy-duty motor vehicles.” My questions are about the use of A.I. in justifying the repeal of the EPA’s own 2009 Endangerment Finding. It is related to the greenhouse gas emission standards in light-duty or heavy-duty motor vehicles. So I wrote her and will update this post with any new information I receive in reply.

Serious Circumstances

The circumstances that led to, finally, the passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971 and 18-to-20 year-olds getting to vote were serious. After 10 failures, it seems clear that passage of the 26th Amendment had less to do with Senator Jennings Randolph’s persistence and more to do with growing resentment over the commitment of troops without congressional approval. According to the federal Selective Service System, 1,529,539 soldiers were drafted for the Korean War and another 1,857,304 soldiers were drafted for the Vietnam War. Neither war had been declared by Congress.

Upon ratification of the 26th Amendment, Randolph is reported to have said “I believe that our young people possess a great social conscience, are perplexed by the injustices which exist in the world and are anxious to rectify these ills.”

But if they were “anxious to rectify these ills,” they didn’t show it at the polls. In the election of 1972, scholars report only 55% of 18-to-21-year olds voted. Their votes were pretty evenly split between incumbent President Nixon and challenger George McGovern, though overall Nixon defeated McGovern in one of the largest landslides in history.

Since then, the percentage of 18-24 year olds registered to vote or voting has never been as high as it was in 1972 (note: it’s the range 18-24 instead of 18-21 because that’s what the U.S. Census uses).

Also since the 1970s, global temperatures have risen approximately 0.9°C. Will temperatures have to rise so much more — with resulting circumstances so bad — before enough people demand Congress specifically legislate climate action? Young people are also “anxious to rectify these ills,” and have inspired climate-focused protests that may appear now as failures but still act as signals for what is to come. Indeed, the founding of the U.S. EPA itself began because of a purposeful political act — the first Earth Day in 1970 — to force environmental protectionism onto the national agenda.

Yet here we are today with the Trump EPA, apparently using A.I. to justify not doing its already Supreme-Court-authorized job.

The Whole World… In Our Hands?

One often-stated goal of the Trump Administration is energy dominance. But energy dominance in 2026 probably won’t look like energy dominance in 2036. Major economies around the world are heavily investing in non-fossil-fuel technologies, including solar, wind, and batteries. The transition away from fossil fuels in some countries is nearly complete (such as Uruguay). By doubling down on fossil fuels, the U.S. risks ceding leadership in emerging industries that are likely to define the energy economy of the future.

It would be a different matter if environmental pollution was limited only to the places it was emitted. But pollution spreads. The pollution from West Virginian coal mining doesn’t stay in West Virginia. It flows through the waters of nearly a dozen states before dumping into the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay. So Senator Capito may be weighing privately the costs of health, environment, and social wellness to West Virginians in her public support of coal-powered economic development. But it’s the waters of nearly a dozen states and the air of the whole world that is affected by the continued and expanded commitment to mining and burning coal. And that’s a message that deserves regular, consistent, public weighing, discussion, and action — with the kind of persistence symbolized by the other, more famous Senator from West Virginia, Jennings Randolph.

If you, like me, are a citizen of the United States — whatever your political persuasion or ideology — please keep your sustainability focus local, but also consider contacting and urging your representatives in Congress to undertake the persistent action needed, over long time scales, to transition off of unsustainable fossil fuels.

“This isn’t sustainable” said a Tennessee resident after only one full day without power. Thankfully, she could go stay with a neighbor whose power was still on.

Things fall apart gradually—then all at once. A bridge closed because of damages is deemed too expensive to repair. Teachers quit for better pay and careers that don’t require regular union action that angers parents and frustrates legislators. A support agency suddenly stops answering the phone for a while. People are held without charges pending an investigation that’s been going on now two years.

In isolation, none of these failures feel pivotal. But together, such failures prompt a creeping sense that the systems holding us together may not last.

Such a sense is not merely emotional. Nor is it partisan. It reflects a truth about how societies endure or fail. It is not for a lack of ambition or power that civilizations end. They end when they stop sustaining all three forms of infrastructure: hard, soft, and critical. Neglect one too long, the others follow.

Some of Ancient Egypt’s physical, “hard infrastructure,” still stands. The peoples of Egypt remained, too. But through loss of some of that society’s soft infrastructure—administrative continuity, skilled labor systems, and knowledge transmission—the Great Pyramids became “wonders” to behold for thousands of years rather than simple, functional structures. Modern societies are no different. Today, when expertise is criticized as elitism and bureaucracy becomes the enemy, capacity erodes long before structures themselves crumble.

Soft infrastructure more generally—education, public health, law, civil norms —is what allows people to trust systems even when their lives aren’t going well. During Trump’s first term as President, people’s trust in systems was repeatedly strained. The President himself, among others, dismissed judges as partisan actors, called journalists the “enemy of the American people,” and spoke of scientists as if they were hacks interested only in getting government grants. Career civil servants were portrayed as a “deep state” rather than as stewards of institutional memory. Scientific agencies were pressured to bend findings to political needs.

As we saw during President Trump’s first term, there were so many failed “infrastructure weeks” that it became a running joke. Trump continually defied reality in so many ways, including insisting Mexico was already paying for a border wall. His briefings and statements about the coronavirus pandemic contradicted public health experts and lives being lost. He attacked courts he disagreed with, including individual jurors. Then, after he lost five dozen lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election, he whipped up an armed crowd to march on Congress on 6 January 2021. And just this past week in Congress, we heard that Trump had “resorted to a series of criminal efforts to retain power.”

With Trump’s re-election and second term, it’s far worse. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:

• He has issued unjustifiable pardons including those convicted of violence against police officers and trafficking tons (literally) of drugs.

• He’s refused to follow several acts of Congress (e.g., delays for TikTok, Epstein) and orders by judges.

• He’s engaging in expansive grift and corruption.

• Having ordered the pause of enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and violently removed Venezuela’s president, he has recently awarded Venezuela oil-sale contracts to firms previously prosecuted for bribery schemes involving oil sales elsewhere (with records showing millions of dollars of donations by these company executives to political committees supporting Trump’s 2024 election, suggesting future investigations).

• He is regularly declaring emergencies—or manufacturing them—where none exist in order to get bills passed, implement tariffs, or to send federal agents who, in turn, escalate tensions, arrest journalists, and kill protesters.

• He threatens to use the Insurrection Act—with the support of some Republicans in Congress—though no insurrection exists.

• He proposes a hostile takeover of Greenland, ending America’s role in NATO.

• He governs for and by billionaires and companies, with workers scraping for crumbs as the AFL-CIO puts it.

History shows where this path leads. In 18th-Century France, the monarchy presided over what appeared to be a wealthy, sophisticated society. But it nonetheless collapsed because its legal and social systems lost legitimacy. Privilege and access were substituted for fairness. Laws were applied unevenly. What followed was not chaos born of passion but born of institutional failure. Reform became impossible without rupture.

At America’s founding, an altogether different Revolution occurred. In my opinion, though, America’s founding did not begin 250 years ago with the Declaration of Independence. No, the Declaration is mostly a list of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” Indeed, when I look at the transcript of the Declaration, its list reminds me of Trump abuses, which go on and on day after day.

Indeed, much better than the Declaration of Independence, there are plenty of other good birthdays for these United States of America. I particularly like 1783, when the Revolutionary War was officially over with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which also ratified American independence. Or a better birthday yet is the U.S. Constitution, written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and in operation since 1789, represented as having “successfully separated and balanced governmental powers to safeguard the interests of majority rule and minority rights, of liberty and equality, and of the federal and state governments.”

It must be said, though, that at the birth of the U.S. Constitution, slavery was still the law of the land. Indeed, America’s Civil War showed the Constitution had not so successfully separated and balanced governmental powers after all. So perhaps 19 June 1865—Juneteenth—is a better birthday for these United States. The Civil War was over, and word finally reached enslaved people in Texas that they were free.

Today, America still struggles to make good on the promises in the Declaration of Independence—holding that we are all created equal with unalienable rights. Today, regularly infringing on those rights, how concentrated and out of balance the U.S.’s governmental powers are.

Although revolution is on the minds of some people in the United States, what keeps today’s crises from cascading into catastrophe is “critical infrastructure”—the financial systems, emergency services, energy, and rule-bound administration of power. It is particularly our critical infrastructure that is being stress tested by the Trump Administration, perhaps most concerning being the stress-testing of courts, a part of a broader normalization of institutional contempt. When citizens are repeatedly told to doubt elections, courts, medicine, education, and valid, provable facts, soft infrastructure decays. Cynicism replaces civic faith. Grievance becomes the organizing principle of politics.

The Third Reich offers a chilling illustration. As Ernst Fraenkel discussed in his 1941 book “The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship,” Nazi Germany operated as two states simultaneously: a “normative state” governed by laws that allowed capitalist production to function, and a “prerogative state” defined by unchecked arbitrariness and violence. For a time, the coexistence appeared to work. The trains ran. Factories produced. But once the prerogative state was fully established—once legality gave way to loyalty, fear, and force—it consumed the normative state. The system devoured itself. Fraenkel showed how collapse masqueraded as order. So yes, there was economic growth, impressive logistics, and technological prowess. But that hid the dismantling of legal and moral “soft” infrastructure. What had been emergency powers become permanent. Power centralized. Accountability disappeared. Critical infrastructure no longer stabilized society, it weaponized it: The Nazis used their critical infrastructure to brutally oppress, persecute, and kill those they had grievances against.

Fiction is also full of such examples. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, collapse is also disguised as strength: Okonkwo’s rigidity masquerades as resolve; his refusal to adapt appears as honor. But the novel’s tragedy lies in the gap between power and maintenance. A society that cannot maintain its institutions—or adjust them—cannot survive shocks. For Okonkwo’s society, colonization was the shock.

The United States’ institutions are older, more decentralized, and so more resilient to shocks than those in these historical and fictional examples. In part, that’s because of how America came to be, with sustainability embedded in the words of our nation’s founders and through the written-in capacities to amend even America’s most fundamental law, the Constitution. But such resilience is not self-sustaining. It requires maintenance, respect, and renewal. Indeed, the lesson running through these historical and fictional examples is simple: societies cannot choose which infrastructures to maintain. Neglect for too long any one of the three—hard, soft, or critical—the others fail.

Today, the U.S. government is shut down because Democratic Senators refused to vote for continued funding for the Department of Homeland Security. To the Senate Democrats on the Appropriations Committee, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s department is “out of control.” So Senate Democrats are demanding:

• the end of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) roving patrols, tightening rules that govern use of warrants targeting migrants;

• the establishment of a universal code of conduct governing federal law enforcement officers’ use of force, ensuring accountability;

• the requirement that federal officers wear body cameras and proper identification, with a prohibition against them wearing masks.

These demands sound to me like like maintenance of critical infrastructure. But the government may fully re-open on Monday without that maintenance. That’s because two weeks’ worth of DHS funding was included in the bill that passed the Senate “to allow us additional time to negotiate that funding bill, in the wake of last weekend’s tragic shooting of Alex Pretti,” wrote Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) in a statement as Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

So the whole government is funded at least for the next two weeks, and so may re-open Monday with a forthcoming vote by the U.S. House. We’ll see what the next two weeks bring in terms of maintenance of critical infrastructure.

But whether hard, soft, or critical, infrastructure is not neutral. To undermine it is a political choice. Hard infrastructure without expertise falls apart. Soft infrastructure without legitimacy decays. Critical infrastructure without law becomes dangerous, with those who support such “prerogative” states deluded that one kind of strength can substitute for all the rest. Indeed, “the rule of law is a cornerstone of global peace and security.”

But when the systems rot that allow for disagreement to be peaceful, repairing them will require more than elections or spending bills. It will require a recommitment to maintenance—the quiet, unglamorous individual and collective decisions to work toward Our Common Future, a sustainable future “that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Without maintenance, collapse is inevitable. But maintaining infrastructure takes recognizing infrastructure is more than concrete, steel, or cables; it is legitimacy, competence, and restraint. Democracies do not end because bridges fail. They do not end because people suffer hard times. They do not end because stop believing in them all at once. They end because too many leaders decide that maintenance of infrastructure—hard, soft, and critical—is optional.

As the snow continues to fall outside my window, my electricity remains on. For how much longer, I do not know. But if it fails, I trust maintenance crews will come fix it. As to fixing what is politically broken in America, there are many hurdles. I do not have such trust in some Republicans in Congress who seem determined to support President Trump in weaponizing our critical infrastructure even further.

If you, like me, are a citizen of the United States — whatever your political persuasion or ideology — please keep your sustainability focus local, but also consider contacting your representatives in Congress about maintaining—not weaponizing—America’s infrastructure.

Like many Americans, I have many reasons for displaying our nation’s flag. One reason is to remind me of the question that ends the first verse of our national anthem:

“O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

These days, I consider that question far more often given the actions of our nation’s 47th President and his enablers, which, to my way of thinking, include columnists who “shrug” even as they issue dire warnings against his agenda.

So, when I see the video of the brave, free speech Governor Walz gave in response to the ongoing federal presence in Minnesota, “yes” is my answer to that land-of-the-free-and-home-of-the-brave question.

But when I read comments by anonymous posters to that video suggesting Governor Walz’s speech is sedition, I think “maybe not,” or “not much longer.”

Then I remember that such anonymous comments (including edited versions, “likes,” and replies) can be easily generated using modern technology. So I think “yes” again. Indeed, most anyone can become a troll, and a technology-enabled troll—including foreign adversaries—can be quite influential.

Technologies of all kinds enable various forms of power, including all the various systems that bring these words to you. But technology alone, or the science behind it, is no solution to any problem without policies to match. That’s because science and society are a co-production, as scholar Sheila Jasanoff put it, each producing and being produced by the other. Indeed, as the people in Iran are currently experiencing, there are multiple ways to shut down even distributed technological systems—such as the Internet—to keep people from having the power of information on which to act. Technology alone is insufficient.

The more we distribute power—power of all kinds, whether the physical power of energy, the power of information and knowledge, the political power of decision-making—the more sustainable it is.

Autocrats centralize power, but such political systems only last as long as people submit to the autocrat’s power. That submission can be insidious, such as looking at the legal reality here in America and saying “things aren’t that bad” or “my life is pretty much what it was.” But so often that submission is blatant and even performed.

When energy is centralized, some percentage of it is invariably lost. With electricity, for example, about 5% is lost due to transmission and distribution, no matter how that electricity is centrally produced. For fossil fuels, because of the many processes involved—both distributed and centralized processes in locating them, digging them up, processing them, and distributing them to be burned—the majority of its energy is lost. It doesn’t matter if finding the fossil fuels is easy, or whether they’re burned by an individual’s combustion engine (say, a car) or to power turbines to create electricity (say for xAI). The majority of a fossil fuel’s energy is lost as wasted heat.

I must say it is quite challenging—as I have tried to do—to use existing, available datasets to compare the environmental cost of power supplied by a centralized electrical grid to the distributed power of my little solar-powered light, its accompany battery, and the eventual cost of its disposal. But given utility-scale data, it seems a good estimate to say that it probably takes only a few years before the environmental cost of this little light of mine—even though it is imported from China—becomes less than a light powered via the local fossil-fuel burning electricity plant. In part, that’s also because there’s plenty of sunshine here.

Of course, less consumption generally — or less conscientiousness on my part to have both an all-weather flag and to follow the law in displaying it — would be even more sustainable.

But another reason I display the flag is to honor the military veterans in my family, and the flag most reminds me of my grandfathers, who both served during what I hope remains the world’s last world war. That’s why the United Nations—based on distributed power or “sovereign equality of all its Members”—was chartered: “to maintain international peace and security” and so “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
(And if you have input for the U.N. about the “persisting challenges and barriers for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals,” fill out this survey by 30 January 2026.)

Indeed, distributing political power is more sustainable for decision-making generally. Where I live, the billion-dollar developer, D.R. Horton, appears to have violated the Development Agreement with our town by building a house where the company was supposed have a retention pond. The Development Agreement itself was lopsided and so perhaps will soon be under formal dispute given the recent inauguration of newly elected officials. But, even so, according to the Development Agreement as is, changes such as swapping a house for a retention pond appear to require approval—in advance—by our town’s elected officials. Over the weekend, I saw the house going up where a retention pond was to be built and alerted them to the swap. Tonight our community will see and hear how our elected officials respond. Can you imagine how long it would take to resolve such an issue if all such decisions—nationwide—had to be decided by the same group or person?

As regards the power of information and knowledge, this is perhaps the most challenging power to decentralize, especially in our attention economy. We teachers know this very well. I will say, though, that I have found it far easier to attract and retain the attention of my students when teaching journalism—which I do now—than when teaching mathematics, which I did before I became a science journalist. Even the famous Luca Pacioli (who greatly influenced and collaborated with Leonardo da Vinci, both “Renaissance” men) couldn’t keep the attention of Erasmus of Rotterdam—it is suggested—in giving a public lecture that involved mathematics: Erasmus scornfully complained that mathematicians created artificial problems only to impress the gullible by solving them and enjoyed baffling their audiences with geometrical shapes ‘piled on top of each other and intertwined like a maze’ with algebraic notation ‘deployed hither and thither in order to throw dust in the eyes.’

So, Dear Reader, the most important information and knowledge I hope to distribute in this post — using two strategies here simultaneously to gain/retain your attention by both calling you out as “Reader” and using repetition — regards the insidiousness of saying to yourself “things aren’t that bad” or “my life is pretty much what it was.”

In particular, I hope to encourage you to consider the writings of Ernst Fraenkel, which the columnist’s article (also linked just above) above refers to: “An Old Theory Helps Explain What Happened to Renee Good” (David French, The New York Times, 18 January 2026… it is a “gift link”).

But the “Old Theory”—from Ernst Fraenkel—isn’t that old.

I read Fraenkel in college because my History of Western Civilization professor, Karl Joachim Weintraub, refused to teach the historical period he lived through. Instead, our professor invited us to his home and, over calming tea, told stories of how he hid behind a knee wall to avoid the Nazis for being, as our professor put it, “as Jewish as Hitler.” When the Nazis were in the process of discovering his hiding place, he climbed onto the roof and dangled from the gutter. He would have been discovered by other Nazis on the ground if they had only looked up.

Fraenkel worked as Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer, escaping Germany to the United States in 1938 and publishing the English version of “The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship” in 1941. As The University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq wrote in The Atlantic last May (also a gift link, this link courtesy of NYT’s David French), America is watching the rise of the “dual state.” As French summarized it:

Fraenkel had observed the rise of Nazi rule as a working lawyer and committed social democrat and noted that ordinary Germans enjoyed the benefit of what Huq describes as a “capitalist economy governed by stable laws” even as other parts of the German system changed into an engine of genocide and war.

The two components of the dual state are the normative state — the seemingly normal world that you and I inhabit, where, as Huq writes, the “ordinary legal system of rules, procedures and precedents” applies — and the prerogative state, which is marked (in Fraenkel’s words) by “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.”

“The key here,” Huq writes, “is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.”

It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.”

As Huq, though, concludes in his piece in The Atlantic:

Most people can ignore the construction of the prerogative state simply because it does not touch their lives. They can turn away while dissidents and scapegoats lose their political liberty. But once the prerogative state is built, as Fraenkel’s writing and experience suggest, it can swallow anyone.

It didn’t swallow Renee Good. It killed her. There’s been no federal investigation of her death or the federal agent who shot her.

Instead, the federal government is conducting investigations into Good’s partner and have today issued subpoenas to multiple Democratic officials in Minnesota, including Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for allegedly conspiring to impede U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Does that sound like a “prerogative” dual state to you? It certainly sounds like “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” to me.

The Republican party has been conquered by Trump, but can still act to stop him… if only they can stop enabling him, first. Some in the Republican party have said if Trump takes Greenland by force, that would prompt them—finally—to act. By then, though, America would already be involved in an undeclared-by-Congress war. That’s a failure that is hard to recover from.

Today, 20 January 2026 — one year since his inauguration — President Trump has been trolling European leaders as weak, including with posts to social media about his ongoing interest in making Greenland a U.S. territory. In doing so, he’s enacting the very same social-media goals that the F.B.I. (under Christopher Wray) warned us about from foreign adversaries:

• influence public opinion

• misrepresent the true public opinion

• divide our country

• create mistrust in our democratic process.

Trump’s power—becoming ever more centralized—is unsustainable.

As the “shrug”ging columnist put it—or perhaps his editor—in the headline of his column, it’s been “One Year of Trump. The Time to Act Is Now, While We Still Can” (gift link, M. Gessen, 18 January 2025, The New York Times).

That’s not just a message to Republican members of Congress. The time to act — or act again, repeatedly contacting your members of Congress — is now, “while we still can.”

Although the Governor also thanked “the tourism industry for stepping up and collaborating on this initiative,” not all of them were on board. In August, Cruise Lines International Association, Inc. together with local business partners Honolulu Ship Supply Co., Kaua‘i Kilohana Partners, and Aloha Anuenue Tours LLC sued to block Hawaii’s new “Green Fees” for accommodations on cruise ships (full case history).

The federal court for the district of Hawaii denied the motion on 23 December 2025. But then, on 31 December 2025, the U.S. 9th District Court of Appeals granted the injunction. By that time, the U.S. federal government had formally joined the plaintiffs. In effect, the main argument is that only the U.S. Congress, not individual states, may impose such taxes on cruise ships.

The reason Hawaii’s legislature added the tax is in the Act: “Hawaii is experiencing a climate emergency” and “economic development cannot be separated from environmental stewardship,” so “investing in Hawaii's environment is, in itself, economic development.” But, for now, pending appeal, those visiting Hawaii via cruise ship will not be subject to the new tax.

All together, the legislation and the resulting court case is yet another signal that modern markets appear incapable of self-correcting on sustainability measures. But without meaningful sustainability legislation that survives legal challenges, the near future includes a host of problems that go well beyond the many consequences of climate change and otherwise failing at environmental stewardship. Those consequences include increasing burdens on U.S. companies themselves as other countries (e.g., Japan, Australia, Spain) and jurisdictions (e.g., EU) move forward with sustainability measures, including those in accordance with financial reporting standards created through The International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation (based in the state of Delaware and registered overseas in England and Wales). The thrust of such financial reporting standards is to require publicly traded companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions, among other sustainability measures, using a common method. Doing so enables comparisons. In turn, those comparisons “could trigger high emitters, either on their own accord or due to consumer pressure, to reduce emission[s] to match cleaner competitors” according to Michael Greenstone, an economics professor at The University of Chicago, which could happen because “carbon damages per dollar of profits vary greatly across countries, across industries, and even across firms within a given industry.”

Rule In, Rule Out

Greenstone was anticipating being able to do such comparisons of U.S. companies far more easily because in March 2022, the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC)—intended as a non-partisan group of five commissioners—proposed adopting climate-related disclosure rules. Over the next two years, the SEC then considered more than 24,000 comment letters (with more than 4,500 unique letters) that were submitted in response to the proposed rules. Finally, in March 2024, the SEC announced it was adopting climate-related disclosure rules to “respond to investors’ demand for more consistent, comparable, and reliable information about the financial effects of climate-related risks.”

Within days of the announcement, however, those new SEC climate-disclosure rules were challenged by a petition filed by energy companies Liberty Energy Inc. (public) and Nomad Proppant Services LLC (private, but with a significant share owned by Liberty). The court quickly issued an administrative stay to review the petition and SEC rule (885 pages), after which other companies and business associations followed suit with their own petitions in other jurisdictions. So, on 4 April 2024, the SEC ordered its own stay on enforcing the rules pending “completion of judicial review of the consolidated Eighth Circuit petitions” but stating that “the Commission will continue vigorously defending the Final Rules’ validity in court and looks forward to expeditious resolution of the litigation.”

Then, in November 2024, Donald Trump was re-elected President.

That same month, Trump nominated the CEO of that same company that filed the petition — Liberty Energy — Chris Wright, to be the U.S. Secretary of Energy. Days later, a shakeup of the SEC leadership began with the announcement the SEC Chair would step down on Trump’s inauguration day. Then, two months after inauguration, on 27 March 2025, the SEC reported it had voted to end its defense of the climate-disclosure rules it had previously said it would “vigorously” defend. In the SEC’s press release about the vote to end its defense, Acting Chairman Mark T. Uyeda termed the climate change disclosure rules as “costly and unnecessarily intrusive.”

Curiously, however, there is no public record of a 27 March 2025 vote related to the climate change disclosure standards, even though the SEC voted on several other issues that same day.

So, since Trump took office, it appears the SEC has become a baldly partisan institution, and not just in terms of disclosures. For example, the SEC has also paused litigation, lessened penalties, or outright dismissed more than 60 percent of the cases regarding crypto companies, “including companies that had ties to the president,” according to an investigation conducted by The New York Times (14 December 2025). And, last week on 2 January 2026, the SEC is now down to three members, all Republican. That came about because Senate Republicans blocked the vote to reconfirm the last remaining Democrat shortly after Trump’s re-election.

Inspiring Others: An Estimated US$90 Million

Despite all this, Hawaii’s precedent with its “Green Fees” is inspiring other tourist destinations to rethink how to collect and direct tourism revenue. For example, Mexico is looking into it according to reporting yesterday in Mexico Business News. The country already charges a type of carbon tax on yachts and private jets—as home to the third highest number of private jets (after the U.S. and Brazil)—but does not yet direct those carbon tax revenues specifically to address sustainability measures.

Hawaii’s Act is written specifically to address sustainability measures, and the added tax revenue is estimated to raise about US$100 million annually. And even without tax revenue from cruise ship accommodations, it’s reasonable to estimate that Hawaii’s new tax will still generate about 90%—or US$90 million—of its intended “Green Fees” because one-tenth of the nearly 10 million tourists each year come by ship (the Act mentions ”972,820 passenger port calls in 2024”).

That one-tenth percentage of tourists coming as cruise passengers, however, is almost certainly to decrease. The state has been considering reducing the number of cruise ship calls by 50% by 2030 and by 75% by 2040 as part of Hawaii’s Pathways to Decarbonization. That’s because transportation is responsible for a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, and cruise ships emit more greenhouse gases per passenger than other commercial forms of transportation.

The Numbers Say “Omaha”

As controversial as Hawaii’s “Green Fees” are, they only add 0.75% to the daily room tax rate, pushing the state’s rate to 11%. Adding in Hawaii’s counties (3%) and the combined general excise tax on goods and services (4.712%), the overall tax rate on hotel rooms and other short-term accommodations in Hawaii is now nearly 19%.

But according to a 2024 report from HVS, a global hospitality consulting firm, Cincinnati’s tax rate is slightly higher at 19.3%. And a special district in Omaha, Nebraska, has the highest combined hotel room tax rate at 20.5%.

So, Dear Reader, if you’re frustrated by the markets inability to self-correct on sustainability measures or the U.S. federal government’s many responses to further frustrate sustainability measures, change is coming. And markets—slow as they are—appear to be moving faster than U.S. politicians because they are being driven by the need to comply with legislation and regulations passed by other countries.

So, Dear Readers here in the United States, you too can be inspired by Hawaii’s “Green Fees” to pay for sustainability measures in your locale. After all, the federal government is only a minor player in what taxes are levied and what they may be used for. The thousands of elected leaders who oversee states, cities, towns, and even some communities and special districts, have to power to tax and spend, too. According to the Economics and Policy Institute, state and local governments collect about US$1.8 trillion in taxes.

So, as to raising taxes on luxury goods and services, I’m thinking now of proposing such a tax on tourists who pay to ride GPS-enabled golf carts on our town’s municipal golf course. That seems one easy way to pay for some amount of “environmental stewardship, hazard mitigation and sustainable tourism” just as Hawaii is doing.

After all, those who choose luxury goods and services—such as spending US$55 to ride in fancy golf carts around the 18 holes on our town’s municipal golf course—can afford to pay the additional tax, too: using Hawaii’s new “Green Fees” rate of 0.75% would add only about 42 cents to the US$55 fee.

In your habitat, what luxuries—goods or services—might be further taxed to provide a stable source of funding for environmental stewardship and hazard mitigation where you live and work?

That traditional focus on scientific achievements continued until this year.

For 2025, Science highlighted The Tipping Point for Renewable Energy as the “Breakthrough of the Year” because—as News Editor Tim Appenzeller put it—”that’s going to have a lot of consequences for society as a whole.”

One data source for Science naming 2025 as The Tipping Point for Renewable Energy is EMBER, which describes itself as “a global energy think tank that accelerates the clean energy transition with data and policy.” EMBER got lots of press attention earlier this year when it announced, as the BBC put it (7 October 2025), “Renewable energy overtook coal as the world’s leading source of electricity in the first half of this year.”

Coal may have been overtaken by renewables, but it’s not the only fossil fuel used to generate electricity. So, putting EMBER’s announcement in perspective, the combination of coal and natural gas for electricity generation far exceeds the electricity generation by renewable sources.

Science gives that perspective, too, and uses data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) to put the total energy supply in perspective.

In other words, Science’s named Tipping Point is that the growth in renewables met growth in electricity demand. That means there was no need to increase the amount of fossil-fuel-produced electricity because renewables—particularly solar and wind—met the growth in energy demand.

From the EMBER data, it even appears that the amount of electricity generated by fossil fuels went down by 17 TerraWatt hours (TWh) for the first three quarters of 2025 vs. 2024.

But, more perspective: Now a quarter of the way through the 21st Century, “global demand has grown by nearly 60% since 2000, with all the increase coming in emerging market and developing economies. All major energy sources grew over the period” according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2025 report. And because of this increased demand, “Global energy-related CO₂ emissions have increased by more than 50% since 2000.”

Notably, there’s also a key finding that “around 730 million people still live without electricity, and nearly 2 billion rely on polluting cooking methods. As things stand, the world is not on track to close this huge gap in the provision of modern energy.”

Please pardon this interruption of this SustainLab post. This kind of key finding feeds into the belief system of people such as U.S. Energy Secretary (also former CEO of Liberty Energy) Chris Wright, who argues that climate change is really nothing more than “a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world.” That “nearly 2 billion people rely on polluting cooking methods” suggests burning coal or natural gas to produce electricity in order to cook is somehow clean? The wealthy nations of the world would categorize those billions of people as mostly living in the Global South. Those polluting cooking methods are often just burning renewable resources such as wood or cow dung. So closing “this huge gap in the provision of modern energy” is not a valid climate realism concern. Making those kinds of decisions for others is exousiazopolitics. The real climate concern is how the rest of us are using fossil fuels. So now, having explicitly mentioned some beliefs that shape worldviews—part of SustainLab’s effort to name the frames—back to this post.

Blaming big tech companies for the increases in electricity demand is popular (Associated Press, 9 August 2025), but inappropriate. It’s all of us.

Driven by surging data centre expansion, electricity consumption by AI-optimised servers increases fivefold by 2030. This contributes to a doubling of total electricity consumption by data centres by 2030. Despite this growth, data centres account for less than 10% of global electricity demand growth between 2024 and 2030. Other sources, including industry, EVs and air conditioners, account for more of the growth in electricity demand. — IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2025 (p. 51-52)

So to the extent that we—the press—are aware and report on the various costs of sustainable abundance (whether for A.I. data centers or anything else), our reporting influences how our audiences perceive it.

To the editors of Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), the costs for A.I. data centers sound cheap: In the CJR’s Journalism 2050 Issue (8 December 2025), the editors list some of journalism’s headwinds, which include “AI-powered widgets that deliver information for the price of data collection.”

But the high cost to “deliver information for the price of data collection” is not news. Just like it’s not news that our planet is expected to run out of oil and gas before the end of the 21st Century and run out of coal before the middle of the 22nd Century (given our consumption rates of fossil fuels). It’s also not news that if we burn all of those remaining fossil fuels, the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere will cause humanity headaches—literally—for hundreds of years.

So, if not journalists, who then reminds us of these non-news facts to make it clear our current reliance on fossil fuels—powering our current way of life—won’t last?

This year, Science magazine did, breaking with tradition to highlight The Tipping Point for Renewable Energy as the “Breakthrough of the Year.” That they did so seems hopeful — that the world takes note and does something meaningful about our world’s reliance on fossil fuels. That’s the tipping point we have to get to for any semblance of sustainability. But it is one we still have to reach.

Have you reached a tipping point for sustainability in your life? Will 2026 be your year to become a helper — or increase your helping — for more sustainable development?

Perhaps you keep your bedroom door and windows closed at night and wake up sleepy?

Both can happen because the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) inside the car or bedroom rises above 1000 parts-per-million (ppm) so your body is getting too much CO₂. The extra CO₂ you’re breathing in—when stuck inside a car or room—is coming from you.

So getting fresh air will wake you up if you ever find yourself inexplicably sleepy while in a confined space such as a car or room. That’s because the current amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere is about 425 ppm.

If you are unable to get fresh air, however, and CO₂ levels continue to rise above 2000 ppm, you will start to experience headaches, fatigue, and shortness of breath.

That’s humanity’s future—headaches, fatigue, and shortness of breath all the time—if we burn through all our planet’s fossil fuels. We’re on track to do just that, running out of oil and gas within a lifetime and running out of coal next century.

By then, the CEO of the world’s most valuable car company (by market capitalization) will be dead. So “Amazing Abundance” may be possible in his lifetime (and ours) thanks to fossil fuels. But “Amazing Abundance” comes at the expense of “Sustainable Abundance.”

On 24 December 2025, this same CEO used his social media platform to announce his replacing “Sustainable Abundance” with “Amazing Abundance” in his car company’s mission statement because “the latter is more joyful.”

A week previously, he had argued against charity because A.I.—presumably A.I. powered by amazing abundance—would soon lead to “universal high income.”

Indeed, amazing abundance of fossil fuels powers his own A.I. creation. At first, those turbines ran without any permits or public oversight. Then somehow, his company got permits despite causing terrible air quality.

According to the most recent (2023) data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States of America is leading the world in both production and consumption of oil. Starting on inauguration day for the new-old U.S. president, the focus is not just leading the world but energy dominance, prioritizing more oil and gas production and rolling back environmental and sustainability regulations.

One of his enablers is that same CEO, whose car company wasn’t even profitable 9 years ago when he was arguing for sustainability in the energy economy:

We must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better.

The science hasn’t changed. The scientists still agree and the arguments have gotten even better. Even energy companies have been predicting—for years now—that the world will run out of oil and natural gas within a lifetime.

Although estimates of the amount of fossil fuels vary as new reserves are found, those estimates—regularly updated—are based on current production and consumption levels, both of which are rising. In other words, even though we are discovering more fossil fuels, we’re burning more, too.

As for coal supplies estimated to last into next century, once oil and gas run out—or become far too expensive to extract—it’s likely coal reserves will be gobbled up even faster. That’s because there’s likely to be enormous demand to liquify it in order to use existing infrastructure, such as gas stations.

Thankfully, good arguments about sustainability live on even if the people who made them change their minds.

Unfortunately, though, climate change communications are stuck on repeat.

As a result, instead of hearing or reading about new arguments and concerns:

• journalists who profile big oil tycoons report (12 December 2025) “Mr. Trump also pressed the group [of oil and gas executives] at that dinner to raise $1 billion for his campaign, in return for his promise to do away with a laundry list of regulations” without mentioning that oil and gas production was up and these companies were highly profitable even under those regulations during the Biden administration;

• policy opinion writers focus on the political party currently out of power, concluding (18 December 2025) “Taking climate seriously means adopting politically and economically sustainable approaches to energy economics, and that means a reconciliation with all forms of American energy.”

A “reconciliation” with all forms of American energy suggests there is something unfriendly about regulations. That may be the view of the current presidential administration, who signed an executive order titled “Unleashing American Energy” on day one of his presidency.

But nothing in the White House’s actions regarding more sustainable forms of energy production makes sense except in the light of his cozy relationships to advance oil and gas interests, including with former fracking company executive Chris Wright (now U.S. Secretary of Energy) and former South Dakota governor and land lessor to oil companies Doug Burgum (now U.S. Secretary of the Interior).

Indeed, that same inauguration day, Trump also signed an executive order to halt wind farms, an order recently overruled as “arbitrary and capricious” (8 December 2025). Since then, his administration has invoked a different tactic to temporarily block wind-energy projects, among blocking other things, by citing “national security risks” (22 December 2025). So much for “Unleashing [all forms of] American Energy.”

But it also doesn’t stop the good arguments for why wind energy is more sustainable than fossil fuels.

So although it is absolutely worthwhile for politicians and other policymakers to consider

• the millions of people whose direct livelihoods are based on fossil fuel extraction, production, and distribution (see U.S. map above) and

• the billions of people whose direct livelihoods require fossil fuel for transportation, heat, and production

it is equally worthwhile for politicians and other policymakers to consider

• how whole regions of the world are “becoming uninsurable”—especially coastal, arid, and wildfire-prone—because of worsening climate today, and

• how every one of us—including especially our children and grandchildren —need clean air and will want to breathe without carbon-dioxide-induced headaches, fatigue, and shortness of breath.

After all, once CO₂ is added to the atmosphere “it hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years” according to NASA.

Imagine a lifetime of CO₂-induced headaches, not only for yourself but for your children and grandchildren, too. Would such a future humanity even want to procreate?

What are the good arguments for sustainability in your habitat?

It’s a reminder of how direct-to-consumer information-sharing has splintered journalism.

Indeed, “Googling” (searching the Internet via Google) the quoted phrase “Climate Change in the American Mind” and selecting the “news” tab leads to pages of results from the two university-affiliated centers that conducted the survey, rather than reports from journalism outlets. And those Google “news” results include a page from one of the university programs, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, titled AI Guidance with the following introduction: “This page is designed for AI, bots, and other scrapers to better understand the purpose of this website and organization, as well as our work.”

Yes, this “AI Guidance” is along the path toward “AIO” — “A.I. optimized” content (read more in “Nuclear-Powered Search,” SustainLab, 9 June 2025).

For decades, the Internet has democratized information-sharing, and politicians have particularly taken advantage of it by using social media to bypass journalism organizations. But with virtually no hurdles today to publishing, Camille Bromley writes in the Columbia Journalism Review “truth feels so impossible to access that it doesn’t seem to even matter what gets published.”

So it seems quaint that journalists continue to debate the value of journalistic objectivity given that more than three-quarters of teens surveyed (i.e., journalism’s future audience) have negative views of the press. In this context, for journalism to sustainably serve as the Fourth Estate—at least in these United States—journalists are going to have to think differently about providing value.

New Values

The value of written words—having evolved much later than non-verbal, verbal, and visual communication—is that they allow us share ideas worth dissecting, preserving, and revisiting, such as “common good,” “ethics,” and “sustainability.” But the true value are the thoughts behind them, no matter the media form. So that’s one way forward for journalists to sustainably distinguish themselves—by using real thought—in a media landscape filled with artificial intelligence slop.

For example, the Kurzgesagt team expresses a lot of thought in this 2021 video about science communication, making it clear how they are simplifying science in order to represent it: “Kurzgesagt is lying to you, in every video, even in this one, because our videos distill very complex subjects into flashy ten minute videos and unfortunately, reality is, well…, complicated. The question of how we deal with that is central to what we do on this channel and something we think about a lot.”

Has “Objective” Journalism Ever Been Sustainable?

There wasn’t so much thinking about representing complex subjects fairly in the 1700s when Benjamin Franklin was advocating for freedom of the press. Rather, Franklin published hoaxes and often wrote under a pseudonym—such as in Poor Richard’s Almanac—so hecould be snarky without getting the blame.

In the 1800s, Horace Greeley was engaged in politics when he founded the New-York Tribune. Then, even while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, he published investigations of Congress (understandably angering his fellow Congressmen).

By the time of America’s Civil War, however, the U.S. Congress was increasingly making decisions with scientific input. In 1863, Congress chartered the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Expertise grew because expertise mattered, particularly with experts advising Congress on military matters. Sometimes, though, expertise was used to deceive. Journalists were ill-equipped to report on the increasing complexity of expert-informed politics, including ferreting out deception. So, in the early 1900s, journalism started to become a disciplined profession: The world’s first journalism school was founded in 1908; the Society of Professional Journalists in 1909.

But then, in 1920, journalists Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz—with assistance from Walter’s spouse, Faye Lippmann—showed how undisciplined journalism still was. They published their study of The New York Times’s coverage of the Russian Revolution, researching three years’ worth of the newspaper’s articles. Although Lippmann and Mertz wrote that they regarded the Times as one of the world’s great newspapers, they concluded the newspaper’s reporting on the Russian Revolution was so untrustworthy that the public could not use it to form the kinds of sound opinions needed for a functioning democracy. In conclusion, Lippmann and Merz argued that to improve journalism’s trustworthiness, journalism organizations needed to define professional standards and enforce them, like bar associations do for attorneys and medical societies do for doctors.

Over the next decade, Lippmann then took on that task of defining journalism’s professional standards himself. He based his standards on scientific virtues, chief among them objectivity. Lippmann’s metaphor for journalism, though, was as a searchlight revealing situations only intelligible enough for public opinion. It was the expert institutions that provided the steady light needed for self-government. So Lippmann came to understand journalism’s role as managing public opinion, coining the term “manufacture of consent.”

Philosopher and educator John Dewey countered Lippmann. Dewey argued everyday citizens, properly educated, could competently gather, use, and even produce political information themselves. But Lippmann had won the debate with Dewey before it ever started. That’s because Lippmann and Merz had already persuaded their colleagues that public opinion was easily manipulated by propaganda. After all, propaganda had swayed even the Times’s journalists covering the Russian Revolution. So the Society of Professional Journalists, among other new journalism societies, began codifying Lippmann’s science-based standards into ethical codes and enforcing them, though not in the same way as bar associations or medical associations did. Unlike with attorneys and doctors, there were no licensing requirements for journalists.

Newspaper publishers went along with the shift to objectivity because it proved to make economic sense. Funding for U.S. journalism had changed significantly during the 19th Century as technologies reduced publication costs, public literacy improved, and circulations rose. As a result, journalism became a tool for spreading advertising, and advertisers paid more to publishers with larger audiences. At first, many newspaper publishers leaned in to the advocacy, muckraking, and sensationalism they were already doing to attract even larger audiences. This included Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, which had gained the largest national circulation of any U.S. newspaper, publishing the contributions of women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller, theologian Henry James Sr., and philosopher Karl Marx, among others. But, coinciding with Lippmann’s efforts regarding objectivity, publishers soon found objectivity allowed them to grow their audiences even more. By no longer affiliating with political parties and separating fact-baed reporting from opinions or editorializing, these newspapers addressed audiences across the political spectrum. This idea of objectivity—or at least the marketing of newspapers as objective—flourished as outlets grew larger audiences and thus gained more advertising dollars.

A hundred years later, propaganda still easily manipulates public opinion and sways journalists. But Lippmann’s arguments still convince people that journalism’s goal should be objectivity… even if the goal is rarely—if ever—realized.

For example, in 2023, two former executive editors of The Washington Post defended objectivity. One did so as Lippmann defined it (Martin Baron). The other argued the term has lost its meaning and advocated for “original journalism” (Leonard Downie Jr.) quoting Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward: “the best obtainable version of the truth.” So although the two former executive editors appeared to have had a public debate about objectivity, both arguments were for the concept of “objectivity” itself, if not the name.

Tabloids On Television

Fox News, though, actively ignored objectivity. And its decades of reporting climate change as a hoax may be why so many Republicans devalue it, including in today’s Congress. Launched in 1996, Fox News was a return to the kind of advocacy, muckraking, and sensationalism that was successful before the rise of objectivity. Advocacy, muckraking, and sensationalism was also so successful a strategy in Australian and British tabloids that it made News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch a billionaire. Murdoch then used some of his money to try to buy a place in the American television market by trying to acquire CNN. He failed. So in establishing Fox News, Murdoch took the extraordinary step of paying cable companies to carry his new channel. As a result, cable providers shared Fox News not because the providers valued its content or thought their viewers wanted it, but because they were paid to do so. Their choice made Fox News instantly available in 17 million American homes on launch.

By 2009, though, Fox had not only reversed course on payment—getting cable news companies to pay them for licensing their tabloid-like content—but had surpassed CNN as the cable news outlet spending the most money. With an initial motivation for political influence rather than profit, spending more money meant gaining more viewers. But by the time the outlet covered the campaign and presidency of Barack Obama, there was no doubt that CEO Roger Ailes, formerly a political consultant to Richard Nixon, had built a network to lie to its viewers, especially about being “fair and balanced.” Fox News finally dropped the slogan in 2016 replacing it with “Most watched. Most trusted.”

It was a better slogan because Fox News was indeed becoming the most watched and trusted, at least among Republicans. A 2020 Pew Research Center survey also showed around four-in-ten Americans trust Fox News and “nearly the same share distrust it.”

By 2025, that share had barely budged, and the split remained associated with political party.

Unlicensed Journalism

There’s still no journalism equivalent to a bar association for attorneys or medical societies for doctors, as Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz had advocated. Instead, there’s various forms of public shaming, some of which is carried out by journalism organizations themselves. For example, the Columbia Journalism Review recently revived its “Laurels and Darts” column. The Knight Science Journalism tracker is archived and so searchable, but remains defunct.

Such efforts are taken very seriously by serious journalists, but are just part of the wash of information we’re all in. Indeed, there’s far too much information in modern times—coming at us constantly through various media formats—for us to make sense of it all. Thankfully, our brains evolved processing shortcuts (“cognitive biases”) to help us identify what is important and filter out what is not.

Today’s communications—of whatever kind, journalism, marketing, tabloids—tend to take advantage of the “Need to Act Fast” biases:

• “We favor simple-looking options and complete information over complex, ambiguous options.”

• “To avoid mistakes, we aim to preserve autonomy and group status, and avoid irreversible decisions”

• “To get things done, we tend to complete things we’ve invested time and energy in.”

• “To stay focused, we favor the immediate, relatable thing in front of us”

• “To act, we must be confident we can make an impact and feel what we do is important”

But climate change and sustainability—including sustaining journalism’s role as the Fourth Estate—are not “need to act fast” topics. So using communication tactics that capitalize on “need to act fast” biases becomes emotionally exhausting for our audiences, dulls reception through lack of novelty, and so prompts people to filter it out unless there’s information about how to live sustainably within the story.

So for journalists to find a sustainable way through the cloud of biases surrounding our audience’s brains, reporting must not only be in responding to news (literally, what is “new,” which most anyone can post on the Internet), but investing time to create real brain-to-brain communication that informs, entertains, and gives people information with which to act. And even if the only act audiences are inspired to do is inform themselves further, that’s enough if the information they are inspired to seek is more, thoughtful journalism.

Beyond the literal “news”—through whichever source you get it—what outlets are producing thoughtful journalism that engages you to go read, watch, or listen to more?

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.

The quote doesn’t say anything about how Rogers became one of the helpers himself. Self-reported narratives are well known to be biased or untrustworthy. But it’s hard to judge the trustworthiness of a self-reported narrative that includes “I don’t know.” That’s what Rogers told interviewer Terry Gross in 1984: that he simply didn’t know what led him away from commercial television at NBC in New York City to educational television in Pittsburgh, where Rogers would start his journey to become ”television neighbors” to millions of children and, in doing so, help them. In the interview with Gross, Rogers speculated on the reason, though, as “wanting to work with children — because every day that I had off at NBC, I would go and visit a daycare center, or an orphanage, or a hospital that cared for children, and I cannot tell you why. I’m sure it had very deep roots.”

There are many such conversion narratives to becoming a helper (I wrote previously about Walmart CEO’s conversion on SustainLab). But there’s quite a difference between being a paid helper and a volunteer helper. In asking Rogers about the switch from commercial to educational television, Gross prompted Rogers by saying “it sounds like it was very risky to do that.” But Rogers’s reply revealed the risk was not financial: “When I got to Pittsburgh… we weren’t even on the air. This was November of ‘53. We didn’t go on the air until April of ‘54…. Each of us had a salary of $75 a week.” To put Rogers’s salary in context, the estimated median annual income for men in the U.S. in 1953 was $3,200, or approximately $62 dollars a week. The U.S. minimum wage at the time was $0.75/hour, or $30 for a 40-hour work week. So Rogers had a good salary in Pittsburgh—20% higher than the nationwide median salary—with only two years of previous experience. And, as part of the job, Rogers also got months to plan his first educational television show.

Like Rogers, I too am comforted by recognizing there are so many helpers, so many caring people in the world. But in our capitalistic system, paying people to be helpers—especially those who would otherwise volunteer their time or salary (as Rogers says he did in buying all of the props himself for his first television show, "The Children’s Corner”)—is more sustainable than relying on volunteers. Not everyone who cares can afford to be a helper (and, of course, not every helper necessarily cares).

Not every society, though, is so capitalistic. Certainly some societies offer stronger social supports than others, including allowing people to take time off from their paid jobs to volunteer or otherwise engage in civic duties. The United Nations Development Program’s Associate Administrator Haoliang Xu recently estimated “more than 2.1 billion people volunteer every month. That’s one in three working-age adults choosing, freely and without pay, to make someone else’s life better.” Indeed, he’s not talking about either kind of VTO: Voluntary/Volunteer Time Off common in the United States, in which people are either not penalized for not working (Voluntary Time Off, such as at Amazon’s warehouses when there’s not enough work to fill a worker’s full day) or paid volunteer time as a job benefit (Volunteer Time Off, such as at Salesforce).

The first U.N. International Year of Volunteers was in 2001 with “it’s main objectives of increased recognition, facilitation, networking and promotion of volunteering.” Last week, the United Nations formally declared 2026 an International Volunteer Year in order to highlight

…the essential role volunteers play in advancing global goals, fostering resilience, and driving collective progress. Governments, organizations, and communities are encouraged to recognize and support volunteers by creating safe, inclusive environments and integrating volunteering into policies.

That’s because the United Nations is hoping volunteerism will accelerate efforts to deliver on the 2030 Agenda and so achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) adopted in 2015. Acceleration seems necessary: Earlier this year, after 10 years of effort on the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda, Secretary-General António Guterres wrote “only 35 percent of SDG targets are on track or making moderate progress. Nearly half are moving to slowly and, alarmingly, 18 percent are in reverse.” So he declared “We face a global development emergency.” Sounds like it’s time for more helpers. Will more volunteers be enough?

In light of 2.1 billion (or more) people already volunteering every month, I cannot help but think back to this data chart I highlighted in a previous post (“Working Around the Margins” 8 July 2025) showing how income level correlates with average per capita carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions contribute to climate change, which affects “every person, in every country in every continent” as described in the U.N.’s “Climate Action” goal.

So for those of us with expertise in strategic science communications, perhaps 2026 is the year to volunteer to create more effective science communication that drives behavioral changes among those with the greatest per capita emissions, and simultaneously boost the likelihood that people turn to science when faced with societal challenges.

For me, I’ll keep teaching about covering sustainability (when I’m able to find or opportunities to do so) and will keep writing about “what’s working (and not working) in sustainability, share sustainability research and on-the-ground experiences, and reflect on the scientific, economic, and political realities regarding humanity’s sustainable future.”

To make volunteering itself more sustainable in your habitat, consider:

• Volunteering locally. Think about what your community needs. Is it environmental clean-ups, tutoring, public-health outreach, support for marginalized neighbors, watchdog reporting…?

• Share your skills. Every skill has value, and if you can find ways to teach your skills to others, so much the better.

• Advocate. Encourage local governments and organizations to incorporate volunteer-led initiatives into development plans, work-life culture, and jobs/careers.

• Just start doing it. Knowing where to begin is not as important as beginning.

Whether you live in a megacity, a rural village, or anywhere in between, you can contribute meaningfully.

So will 2026 be your year to become a helper — or increase your helping — for more sustainable development? Is there a way to make it (your help itself) more sustainable, perhaps by incorporating volunteerism into your job/career or the jobs/careers of others?

That proposal itself raised alarm bells for many of the town’s residents, but what unfolded in the weeks to follow revealed not only a lack of transparency, but deception and disregard for good governance.

It was a turning point that not only altered the town’s landscape but raised questions about the sustainability of democracy and environmental governance under the pressure of a billion-dollar company.

Deconstructing the Development Deal

Jamestown’s Council unanimously approved the amendments to the Land Development Ordinance and a corresponding Development Agreement with D.R. Horton. They did so despite learning that the town’s own hired land-use attorney, Tom Terrell, admitted in a meeting before the Planning Board that he had drafted the amendments on behalf of D.R. Horton.

Public records later revealed Terrell also billed Jamestown for his work on behalf of D.R. Horton, sending it to D.R. Horton’s attorney, Marc Isaacson, for his review.

Also prior to Jamestown Council’s approval, the public version of the Development Agreement changed — several times — behind closed doors to the benefit of D.R. Horton and at the expense of the town, both in terms of the deal and in paying for Terrell’s time. Legal language was also placed on the front of the Development Agreement stating:

Per NCGS 160D-1003, this agreement is subject to change after public posting and may be changed until the time of the decision by the governing body (Town Council).

However, NCGS 160D-1003 says no such thing.

Then, finally, less than a week before Jamestown’s Town Council unanimously approved the Development Agreement, a new version was released to the public and labeled “Final Draft Development Agreement Prior to Council Meeting.”

Meta-data from that document showed the Development Agreement was both backdated — 10 days before the hearing in an attempt to appear compliant with the most generous reading of legal requirements — and prepared by D.R. Horton’s attorney, Marc Isaacson, who also password-protected it.

But even that “Final Draft… Prior to Council Meeting,” back-dated version wasn’t the final draft prior to the meeting where Council approved it. Changes kept being made under the guise of “Per NCGS 160D-1003…,” which says nothing at all about making changes, never mind saying nothing about making those changes behind closed doors.

All those additional changes led to a stunning moment when one Council member — in the midst of asking for a change to the Development Agreement after the public hearing was over — learned from the Mayor that the change the Council member was requesting had already been made. Neither version, though — not the version the Council member quoted, nor the version the Mayor quoted — was the version released to the public as the backdated “Final Draft.”

But the Council unanimously passed the Development Agreement anyway, whichever version, perhaps because they trusted their hired high-priced land-use attorney, Tom Terrell, to have steered them right.

Unseen Costs

The result? D.R. Horton’s new development area, 0.7 square miles in total size, was added to Jamestown’s three-square-mile footprint, with enough new high-density housing planned to double Jamestown’s population. Not only would the development fundamentally alter the character of the town, it bypassed environmental regulations meant to protect the watershed.

Between then and now, Jamestown’s voters — full disclosure: myself included — replaced every elected official who stood for re-election or ran for a different elected office.

So next month, the remaining members of that Council who approved (or, as Mayor, oversaw) the D.R. Horton deal will step down. Those three — two Council members and the tie-break-voting Mayor — constitute a majority, which may be why D.R. Horton has continued developing the land. Indeed, text added to the Development Agreement by D.R. Horton’s attorney — and approved and amended by Jamestown’s hired land-use attorney — also binds Jamestown and D.R. Horton to cooperate “in the event of legal action instituted by a third party challenging the validity of the annexation, PUD zoning, or the adoption of this Agreement or any provision herein.”

Next month, after Jamestown’s new Council members and Mayor are sworn in, they will have the opportunity to correct course. Doing so acknowledges publicly — and possibly in court — the profound flaws in the way the deal was made.

That will put immense pressure on Council and the Mayor to review the Development Agreement and the changed Land Development Ordinance (LDO). In doing so, they will see — and perhaps be flattered by — the language granting D.R. Horton “the freedom to create its own development standards and not to be restricted by existing LDO provisions if the result is a project that is found by the Town Council to be a higher quality” (emphasis added). Similar language shows up again later on in the profoundly changed LDO: “Unless preempted or required by state or federal law, any LDO development standard may be modified upon approval by the town council and a finding that the result is a development of higher quality.”

Higher Quality

What makes a development higher quality is subjective, and a billion-dollar company putting pressure on Jamestown’s Council for every future modification to make such a judgment seems to be what Land Development Ordinances were designed for in the first place: to prevent making subjective modifications without requiring a lengthy, public procedure.

And any North Carolina land-use attorney would be familiar with The Coates’ Canons blog, created by the UNC School of Government faculty, which includes a post with caselaw relevant to Jamestown’s arrangement with D.R. Horton: “if a decision requires judgment and leaves substantial discretion to the decision-maker, it is quasi-judicial and must follow elements of a fair trial including an evidentiary hearing.”

It seems a higher-quality development — and one that is more likely sustainable — would be transparently constructed in the first place, follow environmental regulations, and would not put Jamestown’s Council in the position of having to hold a quasi-judicial hearing to determine whether any of D.R. Horton’s forthcoming modifications are “higher quality.”

Voters Took The First Step — The Next Steps Are By Those Elected

So the next few months will be pivotal for Jamestown. The questions before the new Council and Mayor are stark. Will they:

• preserve the Development Agreement with D.R. Horton despite evidence of deception and lack of transparency?

• reverse the changes to the Land Development Ordinance that allowed the deal to take place?

• prioritize the protection of the broader community’s watershed and renegotiate the Development Agreement to reflect these environmental safeguards?

These questions are not just about the future of a small town. They are about the sustainability of a system of governance that is to be accountable to its citizens and the sustainability of the environment that supports us all. Jamestown has the opportunity to become a model for how communities may hold their leadership accountable and ensure that development works for everyone, not just billion-dollar developers.

What policies are in place in your habitat to balance development with environmental sustainability? Are those policies strong enough to withstand the pressure of a billion-dollar company that may employ — or cause others to use — deception?

• distance — almost 8 times farther;

• ticket price — about 3 times higher;

• travel time — around 4 times as long;

• emissions of CO₂e or “carbon-dioxide equivalents” — nearly 4 times as much, at least as estimated by Google.

Another difference: I paid for my ticket and my friend’s client paid for his. But that kind of understanding of “who pays” is based on a market understanding of cost. Now, the Republic of Singapore is slowly shifting the meaning of “who pays” to include the environment. Starting in October, 2026, cargo and passenger flights originating in Singapore will be charged a fee for what’s called “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF). Already 178 airports around the world distribute SAF according to the International Civil Aviation Organization. But this is the first known fee directly on consumers to pay for it.

Although the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore made the tax announcement last week (10 November 2025), most worldwide press attention came this week. As a journalist, I think that attention was a result of the surprising news out of the 30th Conference Of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a meeting known as COP30: As reported by The Guardian, the Brazilian presidency of COP30 drafted text for a decision from the summit mentioning a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuel use. It was surprising because the Brazilian hosts previously refused to put any mention of transitioning away from fossil fuels on the conference’s official agenda. More than 80 countries have since joined the call for such a roadmap.

“More Sustainable” Aviation Fuel

Transitioning to Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is transitioning away from fossil fuels, but is “sustainable” only insofar as SAF feedstocks “do not compete with food crops or output, nor require incremental resource usage such as water or land clearing, and more broadly, do not promote environmental challenges such as deforestation, soil productivity loss or biodiversity loss,” which is how the IATA’s Fact Sheet describes SAFs.

In other words, SAFs are essentially biofuels for jets, and the production of biofuels for other types of engines has many varied and well-known spillover effects.

SAFs also contain the same hydrocarbons as fossil-fuel based jet fuel, and so result in similar tailpipe emissions. Already, emissions from the aviation industry account for between 2 to 5 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, depending on who does the counting. So transitioning to SAFs will do very little to address greenhouse gas emissions if the transition prompts more air travel, which is expected to rise anyway as global population rises. In particular, to say that “SAF recycles the CO₂, which has been absorbed by the biomass used in the feedstock during the course of its life” — as the IATA Fact Sheet does — is to ignore that once carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere “it hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years” according to NASA.

So, for all of those reasons, please allow me to rename SAF as “More Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (MSAF) compared to fossil fuels.

A Slow Shift in Who Pays

A transition to MSAF acknowledges that our environment has been paying some of the cost of our air travel. So with its new fee, Singapore is slowly shifting that cost to those of us who travel or ship by air.

“Economy class passengers will pay S$1.00, S$2.80, S$6.40 and S$10.40 to Bangkok, Tokyo, London and New York respectively.”
— From The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) 10 November 2025 announcement “New Sustainable Aviation Fuel Levy to Apply from 1 April 2026 for Flights Departing From 1 October 2026”

The fee itself “is set based on the volume of [M]SAF needed to meet the 1% [M]SAF target for 2026,” which suggests that there will be an increase in the fee as MSAF targets rise.

Procuring that MSAF is CAAS itself, having announced only last month (30 October) that it was setting up its own company to do so. Just two weeks before that (14 October), Singapore’s parliament passed an amendment bill allowing for the implementation of the MSAF policies. So in under two years, Singapore went from the announcement of its [More] Sustainable Air Hub Blueprint (19 February 2024) to implementing policy that goes into effect starting next year.

Global Agreements Shift Responsibility Even Slower

As COP30 wraps up this week, it remains uncertain whether there will be a new global resolution to transition away from fossil fuels. This after a vote only last month to delay—by a year—the U.N. International Maritime Organization’s attempt to add the first global tax on fossil-fuel emissions from ships.

As Reuters reported this morning, despite the many countries calling for a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, the latest draft of the COP30 agreement released before dawn by the Brazilian hosts contains no references to fossil fuels, a development that Panama negotiator Juan Carlos Monterray said risked turning the COP30 talks into a “clown show.”

Singapore may be the first country to explicitly charge customers for the increased costs of procuring More Sustainable Aviation Fuel. But it almost certainly won’t be the last. The country’s blueprint and timeline provides a model for other countries to follow. Coincidentally, on Wednesday Emirates Airlines and Emirates National Oil Company announced a memorandum of understanding to explore MSAF supply initiatives in Dubai.

Travel by air? Would you be willing to pay a small fee—even one that increased annually—for increasing use of MSAF instead of fossil-based jet fuels? What decision-makers and industry leaders in your habitat need to hear from you?

“… [University of California, Riverside’s] Shaolei Ren will discuss his work to understand, quantify and mitigate the environmental and public health impacts of A.I.. For example, there is room to improve the design of cooling systems. And because health impacts change depending on factors like wind, there are opportunities to mitigate impacts by running them more or less often based on current weather. His goal is to advance AI systems that help data centers protect communities and human health.”
— From the 9 November 2025 ScienceWriters session “Thirsty data centers, steep emissions: A.I.’s impact on the environment and public health”

Ren’s briefing also reminded me of his team’s recent research paper “Making A.I. Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and addressing the secret water footprint of A.I. models” (17 June 2025, Association for Computing Machinery, emphasis added).

I admit I wanted to ask Ren if he used A.I. to generate the research paper’s title to maximize attention, having received 20 times more attention (downloads) than usual for his papers. That’s because there is no secret about how A.I. uses water, as Ren and his co-authors detailed in the paper itself. But I skipped the question to focus on understanding why it is so hard to compare how “thirsty” various A.I. uses are.

In sum, it’s so hard to compare because there is no uniform way to quantify A.I. water (and energy) use.

For example, in his briefing Ren illustrated this lack of uniformity by highlighting Google’s August blog announcement that a single text prompt to the company’s A.I. assistant Gemini uses 0.26 mL of water (or about 5 drops). Ren also pointed to Mistral A.I.’s July blog announcement that a 400-token response (generating a ~300 word response) from it’s A.I. assistant Le Chat uses 45 mL of water (or approximately one bartender’s shot).

Does that mean Google made enormous advances in A.I. efficiency between July and August, 2025?

No.

Does that mean Mistral’s A.I. consumes ~173 times more water than Google’s Gemini (because 45 mL/0.26 mL ≈ 173)?

No.

But you might think so depending on the extent of news coverage you follow:

• CBS News coverage basically lifted from Google’s announcement (so they were greenwashed);

• The Register reported that “Google games numbers to make AI look less thirsty” and quoted Shaolei Ren, the same person who gave the briefing this past Sunday.

So after presenting on what was behind 0.26 mL (Google’s number) versus 45 mL (Mistral’s number), Ren said A.I.’s true water footprint is unknown. The same goes for measuring how “gassy” A.I. is in terms of greenhouse gas emissions: Different methods for measuring give different results.

There have been several attempts to require uniform methodologies and standards for sustainability measures without involving governments (as covered previously on SustainLab in “Taxing Carbon Emissions Globally” + “Standardizing Sustainability”). Implementing such sustainability measures, however, still requires overcoming political hurdles (“Sustainability Hurdles” + “From ‘Say What?’ To ‘Hell No!’”). And even the non-binding Paris Agreement made at COP21 — the twenty-first “Conference of the Parties” otherwise known as the U.N.’s Climate Change Conference — proved too binding for the Trump Administration, twice, in the U.S. (“The New Art Needed for the Climate Change Deal”).

Now, it’s COP30 (this week and next), so world leaders (minus the Trump Administration to the relief of many diplomats) have another opportunity to negotiate agreements to address, among other things, “thirsty” and “gassy” A.I. use. Indeed, in advance of COP30, U.N. leadership supported a call for an A.I. Climate Academy — “a global initiative set to be launched during COP30” that will be “anchored in equity and sustainability,” including “enabling countries across the Global South to design, adapt, and implement their own A.I.-driven climate solutions, including lightweight and low-energy models suitable for local contexts.”

But the Green Screen Coalition is rejecting that A.I. focus in a campaign called “The Answer is Not A.I.” in solidarity with The Answer Is Us organization. And yesterday, in alignment with that campaign and organization, protestors broke into COP30, including “some wearing what appeared to be traditional indigenous dress” (BBC) with Reuters further reporting one indigenous leader, Nato, from the Tupinamba community, “We want our lands free from agribusiness, oil exploration, illegal miners and illegal loggers.”

Without political intervention of some kind, there’s nothing stopping A.I. companies from buying as much energy and water as they choose to afford (at least under capitalism, and SustainLab calls out the -isms). Such company demands are already driving up costs, putting strains on infrastructure, and increasing incentives for political leaders to allow further agribusiness, oil exploration, mining, logging, and use of other natural resources.

Sure, those incentives might include compensation, but “We can’t eat money,” as Nato put it at the protest according to Reuters. That’s a signal that ancient forms of sustainability endure — forms that reject the A.I. Sustainability Paradox, forms of sustainability that A.I. cannot optimize, forms of sustainability that are local to the Tupinamba community.

We already know that to be more sustainable — worldwide — requires an aggregate of more sustainable decisions locally. According to Ren’s team’s recent research, those local decisions involve incorporating the local weather, too, at least when it comes to optimizing A.I. use.

What sustainability practices or standards might improve sustainability in your habitat, field, university, institution, or business? How could you implement them?

Read more about A.I.’s energy use in “Nuclear-Powered Search” and ask yourself, “Do I really need to ask A.I. silly questions?”

The biggest part of that challenge seems to be giving up fossil fuels as an energy source.

The announcement comes a day after two of Europe’s largest gas suppliers, ExxonMobil and QatarEnergy, warned they might stop doing business in the European Union if the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) goes ahead as planned. Adopted by the EU Parliament in 2024, the CSDDD does not start phasing in until 2027.

Reuters reported Qatar’s Energy Minister, Saad al-Kaabi, who is also QatarEnergy’s CEO, said “We can’t reach net zero, and that’s one of the requirements, among other hosts of things.”

Exxon’s CEO Darren Woods went further: “What’s astounding to me is the overreach not only requires us to do that for the business that we’re doing in Europe, but it would require me to do that for all my business around the world, irrespective of whether it touches Europe or not.”

Of course, the pollution from burning fossil fuels — anywhere — “touches Europe,” too. But “air” is not yet explicitly considered a global commons.

Putting A.I. on the front lines

So Google and the World Resources Institute think putting “A.I. tools in the hands of communities on the front lines of conservation” will provide the scale of action to “address the nature crisis,” that is, to address our crisis. But there’s an important caveat in the working paper. It’s such a critical caveat that the authors put it in the executive summary.

Though efforts were made to include diverse perspectives from different sectors and geographical areas in the paper, the sample is biased towards A.I. and conservation experts in the Global North and is not a statistically representative sample of the field.
— Google and WRI’s “AI for Nature: How A.I. can democratize and scale action on nature” (published 4 November 2025, emphasis added)

As a result, the working-paper’s recommendations say “This potential will only be possible if A.I. is developed inclusively and responsibly.”

Technological Solutionism

Today’s buzz about A.I. is like what Evegeny Morozov described in his book about the Internet, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (Public Affairs, 2013).

Other influences informing how I think about A.I. include especially two books from 2018 and one research paper from this past summer:

• Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Meredith Broussard (MIT Press, 2018)

• Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, Virginia Eubanks (MacMillan, 2018)

• “Artificial intelligence in sustainable development research,” Nature Sustainability, 21 July 2025

Lots of books about A.I. were published in 2018. It seems the market for such books was hot after all the automated misinformation spread during the previous election season, including the 2016 Presidential election here in the United States. These two books, written by journalists, delved far deeper into the subject, and the book titles themselves are accurate headlines to the contents.

As to the Nature Sustainability research paper, I previously highlighted it here on SustainLab (23 July 2025 “Forecasting Forecasting”). But it influences how I think about A.I. in a different way than the aforementioned books. The research paper’s authors—representing a variety of academic and practical fields, including faculty of sustainability—had surprised me with their assumption that “A.I. must play a central role” in helping provide “tangible knowledge that will lead to responsible [sustainable] change.” Further, because there was no argument about that opinion, their peers—who reviewed the paper for Nature Sustainability—must have taken for granted A.I.’s central role, too.

The A.I. Sustainability Paradox

Only six months before, the World Economic Forum had extensively detailed what is known as the “A.I. energy paradox,” or how A.I. requires lots of energy but using A.I. may be the only way to solve the energy challenges of using A.I..

So I forecast an increasing number of papers and articles detailing the “A.I. sustainability paradox”: A.I.’s demands threaten sustainability but using A.I. may be the only way to solve the sustainability challenges of our planet.

Sounds like “The Folly of Technological Solutionism” to me.

Indeed, the authors of the working paper released yesterday by Google and World Resources Institute specified many challenges to A.I.’s use in finding sustainability solutions. Two key challenges are explainability and data accessibility.

While black-box AI methods can be predictively accurate and efficient, they can also be difficult to decipher. Explainability can be enhanced by PiNNs (Process-Informed Neural Networks), a form of knowledge-guided machine learning that combines process-based models (physical constraints) and neural networks (AI). These have been successfully applied in biology and epidemiology (Farea et al. 2025). PiNNs also address the issue that AI is most powerful in data-rich regimes, whereas data about nature are often sparse.
— Google and WRI’s “AI for Nature: How A.I. can democratize and scale action on nature” (published 4 November 2025, emphasis added)

So, a question:

Will a thorough listing of nature’s data and a complete understanding of A.I.’s proposed solutions to sustainability persuade the world’s fossil fuel companies to go along with policies that phase out their industry?

Persuasion

To get a sense of what it takes to persuade the world’s fossil fuel companies, it’s worth noting last week Exxon filed a lawsuit against the state of California for a law that would require the company, among others, to disclose its carbon emissions using a different methodology, saying the law’s requirement violates the company’s First Amendment rights to free speech. This after the company sued two of its own shareholders last year in an attempt to shut down, in effect, the speech of investors who had filed shareholder proposals to be voted on at annual meetings.

The world’s policymakers did not go so far as to use the term “phase out” two years ago at COP28, but they got close, saying a “transition away” from fossil fuels is needed. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres added that “a fossil fuel phase out is inevitable whether they like it or not” and the world cannot afford “delays, indecision, or half measures.”

But delays, indecision, and half-measures are exactly what fossil fuel executives, and some governments, are demanding from the world’s policymakers, some of whom are choosing to delay or weaken measures, too.

To what extent are we — as individuals and communities — responsible for steering A.I.’s use, and what practical roles can we play in that process?

Do you “vote with your wallet” for companies by shifting purchases to competitors with better sustainability values? Have you ever thought of coordinating a boycott for companies that backslide on sustainability targets? Maybe you’re in a position to file and join shareholder resolutions and attend company annual meetings to demand measurable sustainability targets, independent audits, and supplier accountability? What do you think will work to improve corporate sustainability in your habitat?