Union of Concerned Scientists Global Warming

As the known drinking water nerd amongst my friend group, I have been informally fielding questions about whether their water is safe to use near the wildfires in Southern California. Some common questions I’ve heard include: How do I know if I can drink the tap water? Can I shower with it? When will it be safe? Beyond more generally getting the facts right on the water and wildfire issues in California, as this Guardian headline suggests, it’s smart to assume the worst about the safety of drinking water in and throughout the immediate aftermath of devastating disasters like the Los Angeles fires.

Why be concerned about the safety of your drinking water after a major fire?

As colleagues so comprehensively explained in their “Wildfire and Water Supply in California” report, there are a lot of pathways by which a wildfire can make your tap water unsafe (and a lot of great ideas on how to adapt to this growing challenge). In Northern California, the Tubbs Fire’s effects on Santa Rosa in 2017 and the Camp Fire, which burned the entire town of Paradise only a year later, were among the first wildfires known to cause widespread drinking water contamination in cities.

Wildfires in forests and wildfires in urban areas have different consequences. Alarmingly, after the Tubbs and Camp Fires, researchers found evidence of post-fire contamination from volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like benzene, which is carcinogenic, and also from heavy metals, microbes and other contaminants that pose both immediate and long term public health risks. As fossil-fueled fires get worse, tap water contamination concern grows. Drinking water may not be safe for months, depending on the severity of the damage.

To name a few ways water can be contaminated post-fire:

• Incineration of urban infrastructure—houses, buildings, electric wires, etc.—leaches toxic chemicals not only into our air but when hot enough, can melt the underground pipe network that deliver drinking water.
  
• Toxic runoff from the combination of burnt infrastructure, any fire retardant that has been dropped and water to fight the fires, infiltrates into the ground and any stormwater system.
  
• Any disconnection or disruption to an otherwise closed loop treated drinking water distribution system creates risks of contamination.
  
• Distribution network depressurization may also allow for contaminant transport between differently impacted parts of the distribution system.

I live in or near a fire-impacted community, what should I do?

Figure out who your water provider is if you don’t know. Community water systems provide drinking water for most Californians, and there are a few tools to consult to identify your water system:

• The Community Water Center’s Drinking Water Tool, features an address-based search tool available in Spanish or English.
  
• For residents of LA County, the UCLA LA County Water System Governance Map, shows the service areas for more than 200 systems in the county, and is available in Spanish or English.
  
• The state regulatory agency for drinking water maintains a Human Right to Water Portal, which is also address based and includes not only community systems, but also the schools and daycares responsible for complying with safe drinking water standards.  

Then, check your water provider’s website for any advisories like “do not use”, “boil water”, or “‘do not drink”’ notices. (Learn more from the CDC about the difference between them). Depending on the contamination issue, and unless advised by your water provider, it’s unlikely that you can self-treat the water to make it safe by boiling, filtering, adding chlorine or other disinfectants etc.

Check out the LAist Cheat Sheet which compiled thorough FAQ for LA area residents, including how to understand different advisory types, where to get replacement bottled water and your local water provider’s phone number to get your questions answers.

Areas affected by Do-Not-Drink-Water notifications and other water advisories are dynamic. Large water providers like Pasadena Water and Power and LA Department of Water and Power are actively testing and working to get water back to regulatory standards. Smaller systems may have a harder time recovering.

The above concerns and suggested steps are focused on the safety of the tap water being delivered to your house and do not address very real concerns due to on-site contamination from damaged infrastructure on private property. Always review official resources for those impacted by the LA Fires: https://www.ca.gov/LAfires/.

I have a domestic well, what should I do?

If you are not in the service area of a community water system, your house may have a private domestic well. All the fire-related toxic substances infiltrate the soil and reach our groundwater, they contaminate it with dangerous substances that any added chlorine or household point-of-use filters may not remove. That translates to a higher level of pollutants in our tap water, especially when fires occur near a drinking water well.

Domestic well owners are responsible for managing their own water quality, even when impacted by events outside their control. While a brand new law now requires landlords to ensure their rental properties’ wells are tested, there is no state agency that regulates domestic well water quality they way they do for water systems.

Some ideas on how to learn about the safety of your tap water:

• Assess your well if impacted by wildfire, considering using the CDC’s rapid assessment form
  
• Review the SWRCB’s Guide for Well Owners and Well Testing Program Directory, and search by your county to see if which programs are available in your area.
  
• Follow the CDC’s checklist depending on issues experienced from loss of power, to loss of pressure and hire licensed professionals to repair or replace damaged components.
  
• If your house also has a septic tank, check for any signs of damage that could cause issues for indoor plumbing or domestic well contamination.
  
• Review official state resources for those impacted by the LA Fires: https://www.ca.gov/LAfires/

Not impacted by the fires, but want to help? Fire recovery will be a long process, and donations of critical supplies like bottled water will be needed long after the media moves on from this disaster. Find a trusted local organization, like the Pasadena Jobs Center, an organization coordinating volunteers on the ground and recommended by a friend who grow up in Altadena and lost their family home in the Eaton fire. Consider directly supporting mutual aid groups now and in the coming months.

President-elect Trump’s threats to swiftly implement a policy of mass deportation for immigrants in the United States without legal status, as well as end programs that provide lawful temporary protected status for many immigrants, are inhumane. Immigrant rights groups and legal experts have rightly sounded the alarm and are working actively to fight back and resist these actions, which could be announced on Day 1 of the Trump presidency. All of us—whether we or our families, friends and community members are directly impacted or not—have a stake in understanding why these policies are so harmful, morally reprehensible, and have no place in a democracy.

We in the US are part of a country whose history and present-day social and economic realities are deeply intertwined with and built on the experiences of immigrants, enslaved African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Owning that history—the good and the bad—is a crucial part of what it means to be an American. And it’s the first step in charting a path to a better, fairer future for our country.

The current US system of immigration is clearly broken, and across the political spectrum there is a recognition that reforms are urgently needed. I am not an immigration expert so I will not opine here on the details of those reforms.

What is clear—or should be clear—to all of us is that if we arbitrarily judge some immigrants to be “better” than others, we will inevitably risk reinforcing a system that is based on biased and unequal power and economic structures that are pervasive in the world today. All too often, current legal pathways to immigration privilege a subset of people while shutting out many who work equally hard and are equally deserving.

As my colleague Karen Perry Stillerman points out, in addition to being morally repugnant, mass deportation programs would have a significant negative impact on our nation’s food system, which could not function without the labor of immigrants.

As another example, as extreme weather and climate-related disasters mount across our nation, it is often immigrants who help to do the difficult and dangerous work of cleaning up debris and rebuilding homes and infrastructure as quickly as possible. As a recent news article points out:

“The fact is that the people who rebuild those areas—from Palisades to Malibu to Altadena—it’s immigrant construction crews,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “They’re the ones who are the second responders.”

Unfortunately, climate and fossil fuel-driven disasters are also contributing to a growing toll on people across the world, destabilizing economies, threatening livelihoods, health, water supplies, and food security. If we fail to sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions and invest in climate resilience, the numbers of people suffering harm will rise steeply, and many might even find themselves forcibly displaced both at home and abroad.

Rich nations like the United States (which is the leading historical contributor to global heat-trapping emissions) have the capacity and the responsibility to advance resilience at home and provide climate finance to help lower-income nations transition quickly to renewable energy and adapt to climate change. They also have a responsibility to help address climate loss and damage and displacement with a human rights-centered approach.

Hateful political rhetoric from President-elect Trump and his allies that demonizes and dehumanizes immigrants shows political leaders who are more interested in scoring cheap political points through fearmongering and fanning the flames of xenophobia, rather than acknowledging the basic humanity and incredible contributions of immigrants to our economy and our society.

This is not a new tactic. Across history, here in the United States and abroad, in uncertain economic times, extremists have often targeted immigrants and made harmful and deceptive claims blaming them for all the ills in society. Punching down, further marginalizing those who are fearful and may not have access to resources to defend themselves, is also a classic tactic of bullies and doesn’t solve the urgent problems facing our nation and our planet.

It’s up to all of us to stand up for the facts and stop allowing politicians to misuse the important issue of immigration policy to spew hateful lies as a convenient way to further their narrow interests. Mass detention and deportations will tear apart families, cause lasting trauma and harm, and set back health and education in immigrant communities especially for children, alongside undermining the the U.S. economy.  

We all know instinctively that leaving one’s familiar home and embarking on a dangerous journey to a faraway place, with very few resources and no guarantee of safety, is often an act of desperation—especially when bringing children. But for luck, this could be the plight of anyone in any country around the world.

Seeing our shared humanity and acting based on that principle is the best path forward on immigration and for our country of immigrants.  

Here are some resources to learn more. Please share them with anyone who needs them.

• American Civil Liberties Union: Know Your Rights/Immigrants’ Rights
• National Immigration Law Center: Know Your Rights: What to do if You Are Arrested or Detained by Immigration
• National Immigrant Justice Center: Know Your Rights: If You Encounter ICE

Scientists have a long-standing, and probably well-deserved, reputation as a jargon-prone bunch—and I am no exception (see my post on vapor pressure deficit, for one). Despite this reputation we actually use jargon to avoid confusion and be as precise as possible, ensuring our ideas are clearly understood. This seems straightforward enough for phrases like vapor pressure deficit, which needs to be distinguished from concepts like, for instance, relative humidity. But, scientists have also assigned specific meanings to otherwise ordinary words and phrases, that take on additional nuance and meaning when used in a scientific context.  

Take the word risk. Engineers might use it to mean the likelihood of a bridge collapsing. Economists might use it to mean a potential financial loss. An environmental scientist might use it to signal possible harm to a species of fish or vulnerable habitat. And in casual conversation, risk can mean a general concern or danger. Without specifying the context, the statement ‘The risks of addressing climate change are too large’ could justify almost any decision from reinforcing a bridge to withstand extreme heat to ignoring greenhouse gas emissions because of the financial losses that the fossil fuel industry would incur.  

In the case of the incoming administration, malicious actors use and create this confusion to exploit scientific illiteracy, justify inaction, and cultivate chaos, all of which cause harm to our communities, health and environment. This can take many forms: spreading disinformation, overemphasizing uncertainty, weaponizing ambiguity and nuance, or claiming that existing science is insufficient or incomplete, leading to harmful policies that distort science while maintaining a veneer of credibility. science while maintaining a veneer of credibility.  

In its first iteration, the Trump administration launched a coordinated assault on science and scientific integrity, and so far, all signs point to more of the same the second time around. To counter this, it’s critical to recognize and interrogate the language that will shape public discourse in the next administration. Here are three critical concepts that everyone who recognizes the essential value of science should know—and be prepared to defend against bad-faith attacks. 

What is “Best Available Science?” 

Best available science is the most reliable, valid, up-to-date, and relevant, empirical knowledge, and is referenced in laws, regulations, and court rulings, from the criteria for listing new species and developing recovery plans as part of the Endangered Species Act to the regulatory structure used in decision-making by the Food & Drug Administration for approvals and labels.  Science is dynamic and constantly evolving, meaning that the best available science builds on this on-going cycle of scientific inquiry as well as data and evidence from a range of sources. Inherently, best available science also relies on peer review, and draws on experts across disciplines.  

In the decision-making process of many government agencies, expert panels and advisory committees serve this critical function of analyzing existing evidence. These panels are composed of experienced researchers who are in the know about cutting edge research, the strengths and limitations of methodologies, and the latest debates on specific details. In the first Trump administration, we saw these panels and committees disbanded or downsized at the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and Department of Health and Human Services, among others. Last year’s Supreme Court decision overturning the Chevron doctrine further endangered the use of best available science in decision making by shifting power from experts within governmental agencies to the judiciary.  

Further, best available science also uses specific language (and, in some cases, jargon) to accurately describe scientific findings, like using specific forest type designations when calculating wildfire emissions or describing the consequences of rule changes on different orders of waterways. The first Trump administration, in some cases, blocked scientists’ ability to do this by, for instance, removing a term such as “climate change” from certain government communications.  

Outside the US, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea reaffirmed the importance of using the best available science in their unanimous advisory opinion outlining countries’ obligations to prevent, reduce, and control pollution in the marine environment, highlighting the importance of scientists engaging across all facets of decision-making.  

Scientific Consensus Explained 

The term “scientific consensus” refers to concepts that have broad agreement among scientists, based on multiple lines of evidence and extensive peer-reviewed research. Examples of where there is scientific consensus include: evolution as the driver of life on earth, the Big Bang as the origin of the universe; and that human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, is the primary driver of climate change.  This does not signal absolute proof, unanimous agreement, or the end of the scientific process, but consensus does provide a foundation from which scientists can continue to build knowledge to better protect our health, environment and communities.   

In the case of climate change, scientific consensus has led to countless new research questions about how we can adapt to protect our communities from rising seas, intensifying wildfires, and extreme heat. It has also painted a clear picture of how to mitigate future climate change and protect those who are most vulnerable—a fair and fast phase out of fossil fuels.   

The Role of Uncertainty in Building Trustworthy Science 

Quantifying and communicating uncertainty is a key part of any scientific endeavor, and one that scientists go to great lengths to understand and explain. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely regarded as the world’s leading body on climate science, has developed an entire system for describing scientific uncertainty and confidence in key findings throughout their reports.   

As I wrote in a blog last year: “Conversationally, uncertainty means something you don’t know — like I’m uncertain what I’m going to have for lunch. But scientifically, uncertainty means how well we know something— more like a confidence range and usually visualized with confidence intervals or error bars depending on the data (I’m 90-95% confident that I’ll be having beans for lunch).” 

When reading a scientific study, the absence of confidence ranges, explanations of methodologies, or other descriptions of how the researchers dealt with uncertainty is a major red flag. While those outside the scientific community might assume that the absence of uncertainty signals unwavering confidence in a finding, to other scientists it signals that the conclusions deserve particularly focused scrutiny.  

In the first Trump administration, we saw the Department of Interior overemphasize uncertainty around climate change in several of its reports, in direct opposition to the scientific consensus.  

Defending Science and Scientific Integrity 

As the second Trump administration looms, protecting rigorous research and scientific integrity is more critical than ever. When key scientific principles like transparency, accountability and continuous inquiry are compromised, as they were during Trump’s first term, the consequences ripple far beyond the scientific community, affecting public health, environmental sustainability, and the resilience of democratic institutions. The deliberate manipulation of scientific findings, whether by suppressing inconvenient truths, overemphasizing uncertainty, or distorting conclusions to fit a narrative, means that the best available science is absent from decision making.  

This erosion of public trust in science creates fertile ground for disinformation campaigns, stalls progress on urgent issues, and prioritizes political or economic agendas over the public good. During the first Trump administration, we saw these tactics in action, from the removal of climate change terminology from government reports to the systematic dismantling of advisory panels critical to applying the best available science to policy decisions.  

Defending science is not just the responsibility of scientists—it requires collective action by policymakers, educators, advocates, and the public. Together, we can ensure that science continues to serve the public good, guiding decision makers in a defensible and robust way toward a healthy, safe, and just future.  

L. Delta Merner, Lead Scientist for the Science Hub for Climate Litigation, contributed to this post. 

President-elect Trump has nominated Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright to be US Energy Secretary, confirming the fossil fuel industry’s outsized and undue influence in shaping and implementing the Trump Administration’s agenda. Liberty is a leading producer of methane gas through fracking and according to ABC News, Wright donated almost $230,000 to the President-elect’s joint fundraising committee. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is expected to hold a hearing on Wright’s nomination tomorrow. 

In videos and Congressional testimony, Wright portrays himself as a “truth teller,” while falsely  claiming that climate scientists and renewable energy advocates are deceptive. These performances are textbook examples of disinformation, employing the exact tactics Mr. Wright decries.  

These are dangerous deceptions for someone potentially charged with leading the Department of Energy (DOE), an agency specifically tasked with informing the nation’s energy transition. Should Mr. Wright engage in such tactics during his confirmation hearing, Senators on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee must not allow him to get away with this ploy.  

The motivation to engage in disinformation comes when accurate information is threatening. Here are the facts. 

The human-caused, fossil fuel-driven, Climate Crisis is here. 

NASA’s Climate Evidence webpage leads with this headline: “There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.” The Fifth National Climate Assessment is equally clear: “Human activities are changing the climate . . . primarily because humans have burned and continue to burn fossil fuels for transportation and energy generation.” 

While Wright acknowledges the reality of climate change, he deliberately misrepresents climate data and research to downplay the seriousness of the problem and to undermine proven solutions including transitioning away from fossil fuels and accelerating the transition to clean energy. He adopts a purposefully shortsighted view when describing the impacts of burning fossil fuels on the world, focusing on profits over people.  

Yes, nations need energy for economic development, but that energy can and should come from clean resources, not dirty fossil fuels. Air and water pollution from fossil fuels is a major public health challenge and catastrophic climate impacts are setting back sustainable development and anti-poverty efforts, especially in lower income nations. The fact that fossil fuel companies have reaped enormous profits in the process is not an argument for more drilling. 

Wright’s frequent focus on the relatively recent past is purposely misleading. As NASA explains, over most of the last 800,000 years, until humans started burning fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2 concentrations basically never went below 180ppm and never went above 280ppm. That 100ppm difference, though, was the difference between glacial and interglacial periods. During glacial periods, much of the northern half of North America was covered in an ice sheet a mile thick. That .01% change in CO2 concentration is the difference between a planet humans can live on, and one we cannot. 

Primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels, the CO2 concentration has increased to more than 420ppm. For roughly every 10ppm increase in CO2 concentrations, we see about 0.1C (nearly 0.2F) of warming. In the last sixty years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has grown 100 times faster than it did at the close of the last ice age. These are the numbers that must motivate our future energy policy, not the profits generated by the post-World War II oil boom.  

Climate change is making extreme weather more intense and more frequent. 

Leading independent global and U.S. scientific assessments, including from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the National Climate Assessment, show that climate change is already having significant real-world impacts, and these will worsen as heat-trapping emissions rise. Advances in attribution science also show that climate change is contributing to worsening some types of extreme weather. For example, warmer air and oceans are contributing to more intense hurricanes, with record-breaking amounts of rain and rapidly intensifying windspeeds. 

Wright denies that people are experiencing the extreme weather that they are, in fact, experiencing, and misrepresents the IPCC in the process. In reality, the IPCC (a body comprised of thousands of experts from around the world who synthesize the most recent developments in climate science) writes in their Sixth Assessment Report, Chapter 11 of Working Group 1 on Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate: “It is an established fact that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have led to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial time, in particular for temperature extremes.”  

Real-world observations conducted by NOAA show the dramatic increase in billion-dollar extreme weather and climate-related disaster events in the US since 1980. Climate change has contributed to worsening several of these kinds of disasters—including floods, droughts, and wildfires—alongside growing development in risky areas.  

In 2024, at least 568 lives were lost in 27 separate disasters that each reported damages of $1 billion or more, with a total economic cost of at least $182.7 billion. 2025 is already off to a sobering start, with early estimates on the California wildfires ranging as high as $150 billion in damages. 

Wright’s false claims are shameful and should be particularly difficult to defend during hearings before a Committee which includes Senators Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, whose constituents suffered through the 2023 wildfires; Alex Padilla of California, whose constituents in Los Angeles are losing lives and homes as I write; and other lawmakers representing millions of Americans living through or recovering from disasters made worse by climate change. 

The US can meet its climate targets. 

Wright cites the persistent high price of oil, record profits for fossil fuel companies, and even his own personal wealth as evidence that a transition to renewable energy is not happening. His claim that a transition to a cleaner energy system is impossible because Wright and his allies have succeeded in delaying it is nonsense.  

UCS has documented that a transition to a cleaner energy system is feasible and would result in significant, long-term public health and economic benefits. By rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and transitioning to clean energy, the United States can meet its climate targets with lower near-term energy costs and only modest long-term costs. UCS modeling has found enormous economic, health, and climate benefits to transforming the energy system—including more than $800 billion in annual public health savings, and nearly $1.3 trillion in avoided climate damages by 2050. 

Clean, renewable energy contributes to reliability. 

In addition to dirty air and dirty water, the industry that made Wright wealthy also has a dirty secret: it’s unreliable. The recent failures of the gas system, including gas plants, under extreme weather conditions have led to rolling blackouts, with serious safety and health consequences for communities left without power during critical times of need. Looking closely at recent extreme winter weather events, a UCS analysis found that gas plants were disproportionately vulnerable to failure. By contrast, renewable energy sources can be more reliable during challenging weather conditions. 

Carbon pollution is pollution. 

Wright argues that rising CO2 levels are not dangerous. The EPA has found the current (or any increasing) mix of atmospheric concentrations of six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, poses a threat to human health. The EPA engaged in a public process that took more than two years and included exhaustive review of the scientific literature to reach this finding. And while Wright claims labelling CO2 as pollution is a “marketing” tactic, it was the U.S. Supreme Court, not the wind or solar industries, that forced the EPA to act on the basis of existing law, the Clean Air Act. 

Wind and solar are clean energy. 

While all energy sources have impacts, wind and solar are much cleaner than fossil fuels. Wright’s frequent, narrow focus on the use of fossil fuels in the manufacturing and construction of wind turbines and solar panels is highly misleading and doesn’t tell the whole story.  

The heat-trapping emissions from these activities are minor compared to the lifecycle emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. In fact, overall lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from generating electricity from methane gas and coal are 11-23 times higher than solar and 37-77 higher than wind, respectively, according to data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). And unlike fossil fuels, electricity generated by wind and solar does not use water or produce any emissions or wastes that can contaminate the air, land, or waterways. 

Defining the energy produced by wind, solar, and other renewable sources as “clean” is a factual description of what that energy does to our world when we use it, compared to burning dirty coal, oil, and methane. It is obvious why someone who has made a fortune in the business of dirty energy might not like that label, but if the dirty shoe fits . . .   

The Questions Senators Need to Ask. 

Again, the motivation to engage in disinformation comes when accurate information is threatening. For example, when people say, “this is not about the money,” you can be sure it is absolutely about the money. 

A Senate confirmation hearing should provide Senators and the public an accurate picture of the nominees’ views and fitness for public service. President-elect Trump has selected Chris Wright for the Department of Energy because he will double down on the production and use of the same old, dirty energy resources that have made him wealthy; wealth that Wright and other industry figures have used to fund the Trump campaign. (My colleagues have also shared insightful advice that should guide Senators’ approach in evaluating these nominees.) 

Rather than engaging in deceptive claims designed to turn facts on their heads, Wright should simply be honest about his views and let the Senate—and the public—decide whether he is the right person to set US energy policy for the next four years.  

As the climate crisis deepens, so does the urgency to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for decades of deception. Governments representing more than a quarter of the US population have filed lawsuits against major corporations including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP, seeking justice for the harm caused by their lies about the dangers of their products. And especially on the cusp of a new Presidential administration that has vowed to support the fossil fuel industry and nominated appointees with a blatant disregard for science, the courts will become an integral arena to advance climate justice—and a pivotal space for scientists of all disciplines to make an impact. 

These lawsuits hinge on the best available science to uncover the truth and inform the courts. UCS is already working with social scientists and economists, civil engineers and health practitioners who can bring extensive expertise to multi-faceted litigation. As the fossil fuel industry spares no expense to obscure these truths, the work of scientists who engage with climate litigation is increasingly vital. They bring clarity, evidence, and credibility to a high-stakes fight where lives—and the planet—are on the line. 

To help scientists of all disciplines who are thinking about getting engaged, but might not know where to start, I turned to Delta Merner, Lead Scientist for UCS’s Science Hub for Climate Litigation. Merner’s research and expertise has informed climate litigation across the globe, as she connects legal teams with technical experts and leads trainings for scientists working at the intersection of climate science and law.  

AAS: What would you say to scientists who feel they don’t have the expertise or understanding to participate in climate litigation?  

DM: In many ways, climate litigation isn’t actually that different from the work scientists are used to doing. At its core, we’re still asking robust questions, conducting thorough research to assess those questions, and drafting compelling documents to communicate our findings. The fundamental process remains the same—it’s just a different format and audience. 

In some ways, for example, my PhD defense did prepare me with skills that translate well to the courtroom. After all, you quickly learn to stay calm and back up your claims when you have to stand in a room full of brilliant, critical people ready to poke holes in your every word. 

In both cases, you’re making a claim, presenting evidence, and responding to questions or criticism. The key difference is the audience. Instead of speaking to other scientists, you’re addressing a legal community that operates with its own rules of argumentation, unique citation methods, and a distinct language for making claims. 

So, while the tools and processes are familiar, adapting to this new audience requires an additional layer of thoughtfulness. You’re not just presenting facts— you’re translating complex scientific evidence into a form that meets the legal system’s standards of argumentation, while upholding scientific rigor and independence. That intersection between science and law is what makes this work so fascinating and impactful.

AAS: What was that transition into the legal arena like for you? Who did you look to for guidance and to learn from?  

DM: My first time testifying in court was during my PhD program, and honestly, I had very little guidance. I didn’t fully understand how different it would be to communicate my research to a legal audience. I knew my research inside and out, and I thought that would be enough—but it quickly became clear that presenting in this context is a skill in itself. It requires not only expertise in your subject matter but also the ability to convey that knowledge in a way that resonates with the specific needs and expectations of the court. 

This realization pushed me to seek guidance and learn from others. There are experts who have been doing this work for years, and generally speaking, science has been presented in US courts for a long time. For me, working through the courts felt like an opportunity to apply my research to create real-world change, but to do that effectively, I needed to broaden my perspective. I’ve learned a great deal from science communicators, organizers, researchers, and litigators who understand how to bridge the gap between science and law. Each has contributed to shaping how I approach this work and helped me find my voice in the courtroom.  

Historically, however, it can be difficult to find spaces to meet and work with others in this field–that’s why UCS started the Science Hub for Climate Litigation. The Science Hub for Climate Litigation has developed a valuable community of peers where scientists, communicators, and legal experts can learn from each other—whether it’s gaining insights from those with courtroom experience or collaborating to refine how we present complex evidence to drive meaningful change. 

AAS: UCS scientists often provide their scientific expertise to help inform policies. You’ve said that informing legal cases is just as critical as informing the formation of policy. Can you talk a little more about that? 

DM: That’s a great question, and it’s one that gets to the heart of our work. At UCS, we see climate litigation, informed by science, as one of the most impactful tools we have to address climate change—and the evidence is clear that it’s working. The last IPCC report stated that climate-related litigation “has influenced the outcome and ambition of climate governance.” It also highlighted that “outside the formal climate policy processes, climate litigation is an important arena for various actors to confront and interact over how climate change should be governed.” In short, climate litigation is actively shaping climate action today. 

Scientists have a critical role to play in this space. We can conduct robust, timely, and litigation-relevant research. We can help inform the courts through amicus briefs or other legal interventions designed to provide judges with the evidence they need to make informed decisions. And we can even step into the courtroom as expert witnesses. But engaging in litigation isn’t necessarily intuitive or straightforward for most scientists. That’s where the Science Hub for Climate Litigation comes in.  

The Science Hub focuses on four key areas: catalyzing legally relevant scientific research, expanding the community of scientists and legal experts informing litigation, making robust science widely accessible, and connecting legal teams with experts. Together, these efforts create a pathway for scientists to bring their expertise into the legal arena and make a tangible impact on climate action. 

AAS: First and foremost, like many of our readers, you are a researcher. Can you tell us a little more about those existing gaps in current scientific research that, if addressed, could further support climate litigation? 

DM: As a researcher, I see significant opportunities for science to further inform climate litigation by addressing critical gaps. Our recent report on research areas for climate litigation highlights several key needs. For instance, attribution science remains a priority—establishing causal links between emissions, climate impacts, and specific events is essential for many cases. However, there’s a pressing need to expand this research to underrepresented regions, particularly in the Global South, where baseline data is often lacking. Developing new methods to suit these contexts can help ensure justice is accessible to all communities impacted by climate change. 

We also identified the connections between climate change and human health as another priority. Cases that focus on health impacts, such as those related to extreme heat or air quality, require more robust data, particularly for vulnerable populations like children, older adults, and pregnant people. Similarly, economic research that quantifies the costs of climate impacts and the benefits of mitigation is vital for informing remedies in legal cases. Addressing these issues demonstrates how expertise from diverse disciplines—whether in public health, economics, or social science—can play an important role to inform climate litigation. You don’t need to be a climate scientist to make a meaningful impact. 

Beyond these priorities, our work highlights strategic areas like disinformation and greenwashing, emissions accounting, and fair share analysis for corporate and national accountability. Each of these areas presents opportunities for science to fill evidence gaps that are critical to informing litigation.  

By addressing these gaps, scientists can play a role in informing the evolving landscape of climate litigation and ensure that courts have the best available science to inform their decisions. 

AAS: In a recent blog post, you mentioned the opportunities to expand the scope of climate litigation in 2025. Could you elaborate on the stakes of what’s on the docket this year? 

DM: This year’s climate litigation docket has high stakes, with cases that could set major precedents for how we address the climate crisis. On the international stage, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is working on an advisory opinion to clarify what responsibilities countries have under international law to combat climate change. (UCS actually helped a number of states in the Global South to prepare draft their written submissions.) While this opinion won’t be legally binding, it could influence future cases and push governments to take stronger climate action. Similarly, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is considering how climate change disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, linking climate action to fundamental human rights. 

In the US, more than a quarter of people now live in places that are suing  major fossil fuel corporations for deceiving people about climate change and for the damage they knew their oil, gas, and coal products would cause. These cases aim to hold companies accountable for the disinformation that has blocked climate action and slowed the transition to clean energy. ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel corporations have employed numerous procedural tactics to delay progress of these lawsuits (some of which have been ongoing for more than seven years), preventing them from being heard in courtrooms across the country. 

We’re also seeing more lawsuits following climate-related disasters, like the Maui wildfires and severe flooding in North Carolina. These cases often focus on holding governments or companies accountable for not doing enough to prepare for foreseeable climate risks, like stronger storms or longer droughts. They highlight the very real human and financial costs of climate inaction and aim to drive systemic change. 

This wave of litigation shows that courts are becoming a critical arena for climate action, especially as political systems struggle to keep up with the urgency of the crisis. By combining evidence from science, law, and lived experience, these cases have the power to bring about accountability and push for meaningful solutions. 

AAS: And I’ll close with this: it’s a new year, a fresh start, and folks are making resolutions. What is something concrete that you’re working on?  

DM: This year, I’m focusing on communicating the value and potential impact of scientists informing climate litigation. It’s crucial for scientists to understand that this work is about ensuring that courts have access to accurate, robust evidence to make informed decisions. Upholding the integrity of our research while making it actionable is essential to bridging the gap between science and justice. 

At the same time, I want to increase engagement among scientists to help them recognize the critical role they can play in legal processes. Whether it’s providing expert testimony, contributing to amicus briefs, or making their findings more accessible to legal teams, there are so many ways to contribute. By supporting scientists in these efforts, we can create a stronger connection between science and the legal system, and empower courts to drive meaningful change. 

→ Learn more and join the UCS Science Hub for Climate Litigation today 

While deaths and destruction are mounting and tens of thousands flee a devastating inferno in Los Angeles, the President-Elect has used the catastrophic wildfires to spread misinformation, offer false solutions, and disrespect the suffering of people and the hard work of first responders. Here, we provide the facts and avoid the fiction.  

Fact 1: reservoirs are full

Due to a relatively wet winter in Northern California, almost every reservoir in Southern California is at or above its historical average. There is ample water available in reservoirs to fight fires. The challenge is getting the water from the reservoir to the fire fighters. 

Fact 2: California’s water system is a patchwork  

California, like most states, has thousands of water systems. Federal, state, municipal, regional, and private water systems co-exist. Some are connected to each other, some aren’t. What happens hundreds of miles away in one system does not necessarily have an impact on your local supply. In other words, decisions about federal water in one part of the state don’t automatically increase or decrease how much water your local utility has available.  

Fact 3: City water systems are not designed to suppress massive wildfires 

Cities build infrastructure to meet demands without being unnecessarily expensive. For example, water systems are designed for the capacity to deliver enough water to serve customers’ normal household water needs and to provide a limited amount of “fire flow,” or excess capacity for fire suppression. During the initial hours of the Palisades fire, the LA Department of Water and Power experienced unprecedented water demand — four times the normal water use for 15 hours straight. This incredibly high, sustained level of water demand outstripped the ability of the system to keep the water flowing. It was water use, not water supply, that led to a temporary shortage for fire flows.   

Fact 4: Fire fighters often rely on air support to contain rapidly burning fires 

The Palisades fire ignited during some of the worst Santa Ana winds, gusting at more than100 miles per hour at times. This made air support dangerous and unreliable during the critical first few days of the fire, placing a larger burden on the municipal water system.   

Fact: Wildfires are worsening due to climate change 

At a basic level, the connection between wildfires and water is intuitive: fires start more easily, burn more intensely, and spread faster when it’s dry and hot. That’s bad news, because climate change is increasing temperatures and the risk of drought in many regions. It’s particularly pronounced in the western United States, where heatwaves and megadroughts are priming us for wildfire. In fact, western landscapes are now roughly 50 percent drier due to climate change. 

Fact: Fossil fuel companies are privatizing profit and socializing costs of climate change 

Emissions from the products of fossil fuel companies and cement manufacturers have fundamentally reshaped the climate of western North America and left behind a scarred, charred landscape in which people, communities, and the ecosystems that enable their existence are suffering. To-date, taxpayers and victims have been footing the bill for worsening wildfires.  

However, UCS’s new analysis quantifies the contribution of fossil fuel companies to fire conditions. Federal, state, and local governments have the power to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the costs of climate change impacts. And they should. 

President-elect Donald Trump seems hell-bent on filling his cabinet with anti-science extremists, including climate science deniers. While these nominations are dangerous, what’s even more disturbing is the opening they create for fossil fuel corporations that have masterminded climate deception campaigns to regain social license. ExxonMobil, Shell, and trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute now profess to accept climate science—even as they exacerbate the crisis by continuing to expand fossil fuel production and kick the climate action can down the road with greenwashing and doublespeak.

In a cynical effort to please climate-conscious investors, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods may choose to keep climate science deniers like DOE nominee Chris Wright at arm’s length. But with global temperatures rising, the carbon budget dwindling, and climate-driven disasters affecting people and communities around the world, we cannot afford to accept ExxonMobil, Shell, or other major fossil fuel corporations as the lesser evil—or even worse, as integral to climate solutions.

Trump reignites overt climate denial

During his campaign, Trump sought $1 billion from oil and gas CEOs in exchange for a pledge to reverse environmental regulations and prevent new policies from being enacted. Since Trump’s election to a second term, fossil fuel industry interests have published their wish lists—and patrons have been rewarded with appointments to key posts in the administration. And we’ve already seen a resurgence of outright climate science denial.

Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, has denied the well-established connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Liberty Energy, the fracking corporation he heads, describes its Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) focus as delivering secure, reliable, affordable access to energy. Its ESG report downplays the urgency of the climate crisis and misrepresents the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This deliberate distortion of ESG builds on years of anti-ESG efforts by far-right activists including Vivek Ramaswamy, appointed by Trump to partner with fellow billionaire Elon Musk in weakening federal regulations and slashing government spending (notably, oil and gas subsidies are not on the chopping block).

Congressional allies pump up oil and gas

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has continued its attack on ESG investing, most recently in an unhinged report that rallies behind ExxonMobil against an alleged “cartel” of climate-conscious investors. The committee seems to be living in an alternate reality in which investors using market tools to influence corporate strategy is somehow illicit, while fossil fuel companies colluding to fix prices is not. The Judiciary Committee’s upside-down world is detached from reality, ignoring both record high US oil and gas production under the Biden administration and the fact that renewables continue to be cheaper than fossil energy.

Representative Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee embraces anti-climate positions that ExxonMobil itself long ago abandoned, alleging that commitments to reach net zero global warming emissions by 2050 are part of a “left-wing climate agenda.” Does ExxonMobil, the nation’s largest energy corporation, really need protection by a paternalistic Congress against powerful bullying investors? More likely, ExxonMobil recognizes that to compete in the global market, it must convince investors that it is taking action to reduce heat-trapping emissions and limit the worst effects of climate change. (As my colleague Dr. Carly Phillips has shown, ExxonMobil’s recent climate reports are misleading at best, dishonest at worst—textbook examples of greenwashing).

Major fossil fuel corporations lit the fuse decades ago

Climate change denial is no accident. It was plotted decades ago by the fossil fuel industry—for example, in an infamous 1998 memo by a task force of the American Petroleum Institute, which said that “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognize) ‘uncertainties’ in climate science.” As my UCS colleagues and I wrote in the Climate Deception Dossiers, this plan was eerily reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s strategy, succinctly described in an internal corporate memo as, “Doubt is our product…”

Source: UCS

The fossil fuel industry’s concerted disinformation campaign has been so successful that ExxonMobil, one of the ringleaders, can now claim to accept climate science while cronies like Chris Wright and Jim Jordan continue to stoke doubt.

Fossil fuel interests have been in Trump’s inner circle from the jump

In 2016, President Trump tapped ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State. As I wrote at the time, Tillerson was an inappropriate and deeply troubling pick for the post, for countless reasons—here were five of the most distressing ones.

One of those reasons was the ways Tillerson doubted and downplayed climate change. And after his service in the Trump administration, the Wall Street Journal revealed new evidence that Tillerson had dismissed the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (and striving to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius) as “something magical.” Worse still, just months before the agreement was signed, Tillerson asked, “Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough?”

Climate scientists, backed by robust research, say so. The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5° C found that surpassing 2 degrees C of warming would significantly increase the frequency and severity of climate impacts, including extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, and threats to human health and livelihoods. However, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C, could substantially reduce these risks, highlighting the critical importance of ambitious global climate action.

In 2017, Tillerson said he disagreed with President Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. He was fired from his position in the administration just nine months later.

ExxonMobil hides behind extremists

ExxonMobil is staking out a different position in the second Trump administration.

2024 wrapped up as the hottest year on record, with warming temporarily reaching 1.5 C. Unlike Tillerson or Trump, current ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods professes to support the Paris Agreement. However, the corporation pushes technological “solutions” that can’t bend the emissions curve steeply downward in the critical period between now and 2030.

In December, ExxonMobil released its plan to 2030, which calls for an 18% increase in oil and gas production, thanks largely to growth in the Permian Basin (after last year’s acquisition of Pioneer) and offshore Guyana. Woods bragged about reducing ExxonMobil’s upstream (exploration and production) emissions intensity by 20% between 2016 and 2023—and says it is aiming to cut emissions intensity 40-50% by 2050.

However, upstream emissions intensity measures emissions per unit of production—and excludes emissions from burning oil and gas, which constitute roughly 85 percent of the heat-trapping emissions attributable to ExxonMobil. So, if production is increasing—as ExxonMobil’s is—absolute emissions will continue to climb even if upstream emissions intensity significantly decreases.

The corporation says it is pursuing “up to $30 billion in lower-emissions investment opportunities”—which for ExxonMobil means carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, and lithium. Among other projects, ExxonMobil’s Low Carbon Solutions business is developing a Texas plant to produce hydrogen from fossil gas (if the tax credit included in the Inflation Reduction Act survives) and a gas-fired power plant to support a data center. (Read more about how data centers’ rapidly growing energy use is changing electricity supply and demand—and what it means for energy infrastructure planning—in this blog by my UCS colleague Mike Jacobs).

Fossil fuel lobbyists grab seats at the table

ExxonMobil’s Woods was one of more than 1,770 fossil fuel industry lobbyists granted access to the annual UN climate negotiations (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The heads of Aramco, BP, and TotalEnergies were also registered to participate as guests of the host country.

Woods made headlines when he discouraged US President-elect Trump from withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement. Although some media outlets credited Woods with supporting climate policy and pushing back against Trump’s anti-climate agenda, what he actually said was, “The way you influence things is to participate, not to exit.” What I see in the oil and gas industry’s participation at COPs is not a commitment to climate action, but the determination—and access—to interfere with a fair, fast, and funded phaseout of fossil fuels by the international community.

What to watch out for in 2025

As 2025 begins, the challenges for climate advocates are at least threefold: 1) mobilizing fierce opposition and marginalizing climate science deniers who secure positions of power in Congress or the administration; 2) inoculating state, federal, and international policymakers against deception and greenwashing by ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel corporations; and 3) defending and expanding the use of ESG investment strategies against bad-faith Congressional “oversight.”

With federal climate and clean energy policies likely to be stalled or rolled back, climate litigation is a key arena for progress in the United States. Preserving access to justice through the courts will be essential, in the face of veiled threats against climate-related litigation in Project 2025 and Trump’s promise to stop climate accountability litigation against the oil and gas industry.

The fossil fuel industry will attempt to cash in on its political influence in the United States by advancing deregulation, facilitating increased oil and gas production on federal lands and waters, expanding subsidies and other giveaways, blocking mandatory climate disclosure, evading liability for climate damages and corporate misconduct, and stoking political and legal attacks against activists and organizers. As President-elect Trump opens the floodgates to all kinds of disinformation—including climate science denial—some pro-fossil forces will fight climate and clean energy policies directly. But others will more stealthily seek to delay and undermine the transition away from fossil fuels, claiming to support climate action while defining “climate solutions” in their narrow short-term interests. These efforts to regain social license by those most responsible for the climate crisis are particularly insidious.

Both approaches—and the actors who employ them—endanger our health, environment, energy security, human rights, and democracy. Even as we steel ourselves to refute a barrage of lies from top officials in the Trump administration and Congress, we must resist compromising with leaders of an industry that has deceived the public and policymakers for decades, evaded accountability for the harm it has caused, continues to obstruct the urgent transition to renewable energy, and has not earned the public’s trust.

The year 2023 was by far the warmest in Earth’s recorded history, and perhaps in the past 100,000 years, shattering the previous record set in 2016 by 0.27°C (0.49°F). According to recent data from NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information, 2024 is likely to be even warmer than 2023.  

Scientists are sounding the alarm because this warming is shockingly big—bigger than what we would have expected given the long-term warming trend from fossil fuel-caused climate change. But why were 2023 and 2024 so warm? 

The reason why 2016 was so warm was because of a strong El Niño event—a naturally-occurring cycle in the Earth’s climate system—which typically leads to a spike in Earth’s global-mean temperature. In that year, El Niño added to the increased warming caused by the build-up of heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere, leading to that record-breaking heat. 

This is why 2023 and 2024 are so alarming: El Niño was only moderately strong (contributing a small amount of warming) in 2023 and was in a neutral state for most of 2024 (contributing almost no warming), so we cannot attribute the record-breaking warmth of  2023 and 2024 to El Niño like we did in 2016, and we definitely should not be shattering heat records under a neutral state El Niño. In other words, 2023 and 2024 have been much hotter than scientists’ predictions. 

What could be a potential explanation for the record-breaking warmth? This question was a focus at the 2024 annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in Washington, D.C., where 30,000-plus scientists gathered to present their latest research. The two leading theories to explain the record-breaking warmth are a reduction in tiny particles in the atmosphere called aerosols due to shipping fuel regulations that reduced sulfur oxide (SOx) emissions, or decreasing cloud cover. Before we get to those two likely culprits, let’s talk about albedo. 

What is albedo?

A concept that’s important in both of these theories is planetary albedo. Albedo is the total reflection of incoming solar radiation by Earth. This reflection is done partially by lighter-colored surfaces such as ice sheets and ice shelves, clouds, deserts, and also by aerosols. Think of walking outside on a sunny day after a snowstorm or in a desert; the sun’s rays are reflected by the light surface, making it harder to see. These solar rays are normally reflected out to space. 

The planet typically reflects about 30% of incoming solar radiation, but this number can change slightly depending on how much snow- or ice-cover there is, on the amount of cloud cover, or on how many aerosols are in the atmosphere (remember, these are tiny atmospheric particles that reflect light). Humans have a direct effect on albedo through emitting industrial aerosols such as sulfates, which accumulate in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. 

You might be thinking, “if the burning of fossil fuels increases Earth’s albedo due to additional aerosols in the atmosphere, shouldn’t this offset any impact from the effects of increased heat-trapping emissions like carbon dioxide?” It’s a great question, but the warming effect from heat-trapping gases far outweighs the cooling effect from industrial aerosols. 

Reduction in aerosols leads to albedo decrease 

A popular theory that could explain why the past two years have been so warm has to do with a change in aerosol emissions due to new shipping fuel regulations aimed at helping to address pollution that harms health and the environment. In 2020, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) reduced the limit on the amount of sulfur in ships’ fuel oil, which then led to a reduction in sulphur dioxide and particulate matter emissions which form aerosols in the atmosphere.  

According to two recent studies, this reduction in aerosols may have led to a spike in the global-mean temperature. How? As industrial aerosols decreased due to this new regulation, particularly over the North Atlantic Ocean, the planetary albedo slightly decreased, which means that more incoming solar radiation was absorbed by the planet rather than reflected. 

However, another study found that the effect of additional industrial aerosols in the atmosphere would only affect global-mean temperature by a couple hundredths of a degree, rather than the 0.27°C observed in 2023. 

Of course, continuing to strengthen public health-based standards to cut harmful air pollution from burning fossil fuels, including sulphur dioxide and particulate matter, is essential and lifesaving. Further scientific work is underway to help advance our understanding of how and how much this contributes to changes in industrial aerosols and how that may be influencing the rate of warming. Meanwhile, sharply cutting our use of fossil fuels is the best way to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the primary driver of climate change.  

Diminishing cloud cover due to warming creates more warming 

A study released just last month, and another preprint of a study presented at AGU, provide a different explanation for the spike in global-mean temperature: clouds. In this case, the authors of both papers argue that a decrease in cloud cover led to the decrease in planetary albedo.  

Over the last few decades, there has been an observed decrease in total planetary cloud cover, especially over the North Atlantic Ocean off the Northeast US coast. Here, low-level cloud cover has decreased drastically, mostly related to an increase in ocean surface temperature.  

The decrease in low-level cloud cover due to warming ocean surfaces is particularly alarming because the process could be the manifestation of a feedback associated with global warming: as the oceans warm, low-level cloud cover decreases, which results in a lower planetary albedo and thus a faster warming world. 

Ocean surface temperatures in the North Atlantic could also be warming so much due to a weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which I blogged about in November. While ocean surface temperatures are increasing globally due to fossil fuel-caused climate change, they are warming even faster off the US Northeast coast, which could be the result of the AMOC slowing down and pooling warm water in the region. 

Important questions are still being sorted out 

Climate scientists are still trying to figure out what exactly made 2023 and 2024 so warm. We discussed some potential reasons that could explain the spike in warming, but the details haven’t been ironed out quite yet. 

What’s interesting is that the sudden warming could also be due to a combination of the two theories.

Did you know that in order for water droplets to form in the atmosphere to create clouds, they need a tiny particle to condense onto? These tiny particles are called cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), and one type of CCN is industrial aerosols such as sulfates. After the IMO lowered sulfur in shipping fuel oil, less sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere could have resulted in less CCN available for cloud droplets to form, resulting in a lower planetary albedo. 

To perhaps add another layer to everything, during my PhD research, I studied how different patterns of ocean surface temperature affect the rate of global warming. For example, if the West Pacific warms more than the rest of the world, then the planet will actually warm at a slower rate than if that warming was distributed evenly across the ocean’s surface. 

We found that the most likely ocean surface pattern of warming in the near future, which is currently developing, will result in a rapidly warming planet. This could very well be a piece of the puzzle as to why 2023 and 2024 were so warm. 

Scientists continue to sound the alarm 

The additional warming in 2023 and 2024 adds a layer of complexity to fossil fuel-caused climate change (and not the kind of complexity we want, given that the planet seems to be warming more rapidly than before). These two ideas from the science community are still being ironed out, and it will take some more time to understand exactly what caused this spike in global-mean temperature. 

One thing is for sure though: the planet is warming mainly due to increased heat-trapping emissions in Earth’s atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. The only way to slow down warming is by reducing said emissions through a fast and fair transition to clean, renewable energy. 

Senators have the herculean task of ensuring that our nation’s future is in the hands of appropriate leaders. Through the Senate confirmation process, they are responsible for vetting nominees for the most senior leadership positions in federal agencies.

There are more than 1,300 positions requiring Senate confirmation, many of whom will shape policies and programs that rely heavily on scientific expertise and knowledge. These are positions critical to protecting public health and the environment, keeping the nation’s food and drug supplies safe, and advancing US interests. Senators need to ensure that nominees are the right fit for the job and avoid costly mistakes that risk human lives and the health of our planet.

Some positions you may have heard of include the Under Secretary for Nuclear Security for the Department of Energy; the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering for the Department of Defense; Administrators for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Transportation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); and Directors for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

My colleagues have raised concerns already about President-elect Trump’s picks to lead the EPA, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Justice, and why the new NOAA administrator must understand and advocate for science.

Appointees’ Science Savvy Matters

Why should we care that presidential appointees know how to understand and apply science appropriately in their decision making? One key reason is that President-elect Trump’s scientific understanding does not inspire confidence, so senators should at least make sure the people running the executive branch have a firm grounding in science.

Perhaps you remember “Sharpiegate” in 2019, when then-President Trump doctored the forecast path of Hurricane Dorian with a black Sharpie maker. He altered the official weather forecast to suggest the hurricane might strike Alabama. Despite corrections from the National Weather Service, President Trump continued to insist he was correct, creating public confusion about who needed to evacuate and where emergency response resources would be needed. This put American lives and livelihoods at risk and wasted taxpayer dollars.

Senators evaluating nominees who will oversee policies and programs deeply rooted in science should vet them for the following:

1. Strong scientific background. Does the nominee know their quarks from their quasars or their atoms from their amino acids? Do they consult bona fide experts in the subject matter?  Do they check for people posing as experts who are really purveyors of disinformation or misinformation?  Do they check the potential conflicts of interests of the experts they consult? A strong grasp of technical material is essential for making rules that keep us safe, for instance from environmental contaminants such as the carcinogenic gas ethylene oxide.
2. Analytic skills. The nominee should be able to analyze complex data, interpret scientific research, and apply findings to policy or program development and implementation. Maximizing electric grid reliability, for instance, requires our leaders to integrate data about the costs and benefits of energy storage options considering multiple factors such as local growth projections, increased electricity demand, solar and wind profiles over time, energy generation by fossil gas technologies, and policy incentive impacts.
3. Critical thinking. Look for someone who questions assumptions, even questions their questions about the assumptions! A nominee should be aware of the heuristics and biases that challenge all human cognition and set up strategies to address these limitations. For instance, biases that block funding for all federal research that uses fetal tissue put at risk advancements in vaccines, transplants, and treatment of degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s.
4. Communication skills. The nominee must be able to communicate complex scientific concepts so clearly that your grandma (and even the President) will understand. For instance, explaining nuclear toxicology concepts is important for helping the public understand why and how to avoid radiation exposure.
5. Problem-solving abilities: They should be adept at identifying problems and developing innovative, science-based solutions. There will be no shortage of opportunities to test this skill, especially during periods such as “danger season,” the time of year when climate change impacts like hurricanes, extreme heat, and wildfires peak and collide with one another.
6. Ethical judgment: Senators must ensure the nominee has a strong sense of scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, as they will be making decisions that can significantly impact public health and safety. Why? Because lives and livelihoods are at risk. Lessons from prior administrations and examples of anti-science actions during the first Trump administration are well-documented by UCS.
7. Collaboration and teamwork: The nominee should play well with others, including scientists, policymakers, and members of the public who are directly or indirectly affected by their programs. The nominee has a particular responsibility to respect and defend the federal scientific workforce because these experts are essential for keeping people and our planet safe and healthy.
8. Adaptability: Having the ability to adapt to new scientific developments and changing policy landscapes is a must because science evolves, as does the social-ecological system scientists are working within. Nominees will need to integrate the latest science with other considerations as they decide on the optimal solutions to complex problems.
9. Leadership skills: This includes the ability to inspire and guide teams, and to make tough decisions when necessary. The captain of the ship needs to navigate through a sea of scientific jargon, uncertain evidence, and different assumptions and values. Dialogue on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is just one example issue where leadership plays a critical role in global stability, in this case in preventing a runaway arms race.
10. Passion for public service: A genuine commitment to using science to benefit society and improve public policies is a must. Taxpayer dollars will pay this nominee’s salary, so I want them acting in my best interest.

Some of these might seem like “no duh” suggestions. But we don’t have to look too far back to see when a lack of scientific expertise, a lack of respect for scientific methods, or a predilection for ignoring science resulted in preventable death and disease, or profound harm to our planet. For senators who find science daunting, this simple rubric can help to highlight who should be trusted to lead federal departments and agencies that rely on science to address the important concerns and needs of their constituents.

As 2024 winds down, with its parade of climate-and extreme weather-fueled disasters, people across the nation are feeling the sharp pinch of rising insurance premiums and dropped policies. There are other factors at play here—including growing development in flood-prone and wildfire-prone areas and fundamental inequities and information gaps in the insurance market—but all of that is being exacerbated by worsening flooding, wildfires and intensified storms. Policymakers and regulators must act quickly because the market is not going to solve this problem on its own, and it’s definitely not going to do it in a way that protects low- and middle-income people. 

Please see earlier blogposts I’ve written on this topic to learn more.  

More data transparency is urgently needed 

Despite the many headlines and heart-breaking stories about the impact of high insurance costs and dropped policies, there’s a lack of publicly available, granular data on where and how much premiums are increasing and why.  

Earlier this year, the US Department of the Treasury’s Federal Insurance Office (FIO) and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) announced a first-ever data call to assess how climate risks were affecting the insurance market. This is a voluntary effort and some states, including Florida, Texas and Louisiana, have already signaled they will not participate. That’s a problem because these are also states where consumers have experienced sky-rocketing rate increases and insurers dropping policies or even exiting the market entirely—and they are highly exposed to climate risks. 

According to an annual report from the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), “The data call required participating insurers to submit ZIP Code-level data on premiums, policies, claims, losses, limits, deductibles, non-renewals, and coverage types for the ZIP Codes in which they operate nationwide. State insurance regulators sought more than 70 data points. An anonymized subset of the data was shared with FIO.”  

Yet, none of that data has been shared publicly. That’s why UCS has joined in signing a letter from a group of organizations, calling on FIO to release the data so it’s available for local planners, policymakers, decisionmakers, scientists and community-based organizations to have a better understanding of how best to address this rapidly growing problem.  

Private insurers are holding a lot of proprietary data that regulators and the general public do not have access to. This creates a gap in information—an information asymmetry—that can prevent people from making informed decisions and prevent the market from functioning well. A lack of freely available, localized information about climate risks and projections is also part of the challenge for many communities and homeowners.  

Congressional oversight is needed 

The insurance crisis is now a nationwide problem, spilling into parts of the country that may not yet be on the frontlines of climate risks, and into the broader insurance market beyond property insurance. Congress must step up to examine the problem and propose solutions, working alongside state regulators.  

That’s why it’s heartening to see that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and the Senate budget committee are holding a hearing on December 18 on the climate-driven insurance crisis. Among the witnesses is Dr. Benjamin Keys, who has done important work in highlighting the role of climate risks in driving increases in insurance premiums.  

According to his research, homeowners in the US saw their annual insurance premiums increase by an average of 33% or $500 between 2020 and 2023. Further, his work analyzing premium increases at the county level shows a stark correlation with places that are more exposed to climate risks.  

Average annual insurance premiums in the first half of 2023 by county 

Source: Keys and Mulder, 2024 https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32579/w32579.pdf 

Earlier this week, Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), released a report highlighting the growing risks of climate change to insurance and housing markets.  

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has also released a recent report and conducted recent briefings on climate change, disaster risk and homeowner’s insurance. One of the challenges they point out is that, even as disasters are worsening, many people are underinsured.  

Low- and moderate-income households are more likely to be underinsured. According to their report: “In 2023, insurers covered $80 billion of the $114 billion of losses attributable to natural disasters, meaning that 30 percent of those losses were not insured.” With insurance premiums increasingly unaffordable, that gap in insurance will likely increase as many people may be forced to go without.  

There are important ways insurance affordability could be tackled by policymakers, including increasing access to parametric insurance, microinsurance programs, and community-based insurance, as well as passing legislation to include means-tested subsidies in the National Flood Insurance Program. Parametric insurance contracts can help simplify and speed up payouts since they are set up based on specific disaster thresholds being crossed (e.g. an earthquake of a certain magnitude or a hurricane with a specific wind speed), rather than being based on an actual evaluation of loss which can take time. Microinsurance programs can provide low-income households access to basic insurance with lower premiums and less comprehensive coverage. Community based insurance is purchased at the community level instead of individual households.  

Insurance companies should also be required to provide more information about why they are increasing rates, how they determine the magnitude of the increases, and what incentives they provide to help homeowners reduce their premiums by investing in risk reduction measures. Regulators must ensure that insurers are not discriminating against low-income policyholders or dropping less profitable lines under the guise of climate impacts.  

Time to act

The crisis in the insurance market we’re seeing today was entirely foreseeable, and largely preventable if we had acted earlier to limit the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change, invest in climate resilience, and enact equity-focused reforms in insurance markets. Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades, and yet the market and policymakers have reacted with short-term strategies because those are the timeframes for determining shareholder value, profits and elections.  

As we look to find ways out of this crisis, let’s keep in mind the continued mismatch in time horizons for decision making in the insurance marketplace and the climate impacts we have unleashed and are locking in for the long term by continuing to burn fossil fuels today. And, in an outrageous contradiction, the insurance industry continues to insure the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure! 

Data from Swiss Re shows that, globally, insured losses will exceed $135 billion in 2024. Two thirds of that happened in the US, with Hurricanes Helene and Milton alone causing $50 billion in insured losses.

US insurance companies will very likely hike rates again in the new year as global reinsurers reset their rates to reflect the growing costs of disasters worldwide. Rate hikes will hit homeowners hard. Renters, too, as landlords are increasingly passing through this increase in insurance costs in the form of higher rents, thus worsening the housing affordability crunch. More people will find their monthly budgets stretched or be forced to go without insurance and live in fear that they won’t be able to recover from the next disaster.  

The question for policymakers and regulators is whether they are willing to take bold action to help keep insurance available and affordable wherever possible (which unfortunately won’t be everywhere); help people invest in resilience measures to keep their homes and property safer in a warming world; help provide options for people to move away from the highest risk places; and help cut the heat-trapping emissions driving many types of extreme disasters.  

Insurance is one important tool. Let’s make sure it’s working well, guided by the latest science and with strong oversight and equity provisions. And let’s invest in a whole range of necessary actions to complement that because the current insurance crisis is likely just the tip of the iceberg.  

Climate risks are not just affecting the insurance market but also the housing and mortgage markets. And it isn’t just insurance that is increasingly hard to buy, finding safe, affordable housing in places protected from climate extremes is a growing challenge for many low- and middle-income people. 

One thing we can’t afford our policymakers and decisionmakers to do is to deny that climate change is an economic and pocketbook issue.  

As the days grow shorter and I prepare for the holiday season, it’s a fitting moment to reflect on the state of climate litigation—a field that continues to evolve as both a tool for accountability and an arena for climate action. In the past year, we’ve seen significant victories that inspire hope, like the Swiss KlimaSeniorinnen case, which called for an improved government climate action plan; Held v. Montana, where young plaintiffs won the first U.S. trial court ruling affirming a constitutional right to a safe climate; and in Hawaii, which settled a landmark transportation-related case that will fund critical efforts to decarbonize its transit system. These victories illustrate the power of courts to advance meaningful progress in climate governance and highlight the growing importance of science and scientists in providing the evidence needed to inform these legal decisions. 

Yet, progress often feels frustratingly slow. In the U.S., cases challenging fossil fuel companies for decades of climate disinformation remain stalled, tied up by the defendants in procedural wrangling that prevents them from being heard on their merits, delaying justice for affected communities. It’s a familiar frustration: will 2025 finally be the year these cases move forward?  

While I’ve learned not to make bold predictions on this front, I remain cautiously optimistic. In fact, last week the U.S. Department of Justice weighed in on this with two key Supreme Court briefs supporting state-level climate lawsuits. In both cases, the DOJ sided with local governments, arguing that their claims against fossil fuel companies for misleading the public about climate harms should proceed under state law. These briefs underscore a clear federal stance on the importance of preserving state-level legal avenues to address deceptive practices.  

Although US Courts in the U.S. have made progress in hearing other types of climate-related cases, the lack of substantive rulings in disinformation lawsuits is a glaring gap. 

Similarly, even cases that appear to be securing meaningful outcomes often face uncertainties. In the Milieudefensie et al. v. Shell case, for instance, the Dutch courts upheld the ruling that Shell must act to reduce emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. However, the appeal process revealed uncertainties about the precise scale and timing of these reductions, exposing challenges of translating scientific evidence into clear legal mandates. 

This tension—between exciting breakthroughs and persistent delays—underscores the complexity of litigation’s role in climate governance. Courts are emerging as critical players in climate action, especially as a lack of political will and obstruction by fossil fuel interests continue to impede bold outcomes and accountability in international processes like the COP negotiations. I previously wrote about expectations for the incoming Trump presidency, positioning courts as an essential backstop for accountability in the U.S. in the absence of federal leadership. 

The ability of courts to enforce obligations, act on science, and elevate human testimony has never been more crucial. With this in mind, here are three key developments that I believe will shape climate litigation in 2025. 

International Courts Grapple with Climate Change Action  

2025 will undoubtedly be defined by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its advisory opinion on states’ obligations to combat climate change. The ICJ hearings, which wrapped last Friday, drew unprecedented global engagement, with a historic number of countries and organizations submitting arguments. These comments repeated an often-shared plea for justice, sustainability, and progress, emphasizing the need for international cooperation rooted in sound science and human rights. 

The ICJ’s advisory opinion has the potential to set a new benchmark for climate accountability. While not legally binding, such opinions hold significant moral and legal influence. They can guide future litigation, encourage governments to align their policies with scientific imperatives, and clarify the responsibilities of states under international law to protect vulnerable populations from climate harms. 

This moment at the ICJ builds on a growing trend of international courts stepping into the climate governance arena. In 2024, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) issued a landmark advisory opinion affirming that greenhouse gas emissions constitute marine pollution under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). ITLOS went further, clarifying the obligations of states to prevent, reduce, and control emissions, protect marine ecosystems, and collaborate internationally to address climate-related ocean impacts. While the ruling didn’t impose specific measures, it established UNCLOS as a legal framework for climate accountability that complements other treaties like the Paris Agreement and provides a pathway for legal action. 

Similarly, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) held hearings on climate change and human rights earlier this year, with a focus on the Americas. Submissions from states, NGOs, and individuals emphasized the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable populations,  the need for regional cooperation, and corporate accountability. The IACHR’s forthcoming ruling could further solidify the link between climate action and human rights, providing another layer of legal precedent for addressing the climate crisis. 

Together, these international judicial interventions highlight a growing recognition of the courts as key arbiters in the fight against climate change. When diplomatic negotiations falter, judicial action serves as a complementary pathway, providing a critical counterbalance, grounded in evidence and accountability.  

A Surge in Greenwashing Litigation 

Another defining feature of 2025 will be the continued rise of greenwashing lawsuits. These cases, which challenge companies for making deceptive claims about their climate commitments or sustainability efforts, are becoming a cornerstone of climate litigation. Over 140 such cases have been filed globally since 2016, with 47 new filings in 2023 alone.  

Climate-washing lawsuits are particularly potent because they expose and disrupt the narratives corporations use to greenwash and bolster their reputations while continuing to contribute to the climate crisis. Recent cases have targeted sectors ranging from finance to consumer goods, and the scope is expanding. Courts have ruled against companies for overstating their “net zero” pledges, misleading consumers about the environmental impact of products, and greenwashing their financial products. 

As governments introduce stricter regulations on corporate sustainability claims and public awareness of greenwashing grows, this area of litigation is poised for significant expansion. Beyond penalizing false claims, these lawsuits send a clear message: corporations must back their promises with real, measurable action. 

Post-Disaster and Failure-to-Adapt Cases Gain Ground 

The growing prevalence of climate-related disasters—wildfires, hurricanes, floods—continues to drive litigation targeting both public and private entities. In 2024, lawsuits were increasingly filed in response to catastrophic events, including the Maui wildfires, which devastated communities and underscored systemic vulnerabilities.  

Similarly, earlier this month, the town of Carrboro, North Carolina, file a complaint against Duke Energy, alleging that the utility’s failure to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy has contributed to intensified weather events, such as flooding and storms, causing significant harm to local infrastructure and residents.  These cases focus on holding governments and corporations accountable for failing to adapt to foreseeable climate risks or mitigate their impacts. 

As courts wrestle with these issues, they are shaping a new era of accountability. Post-disaster cases bring the abstract reality of climate change into sharp relief, translating emissions data into the lived experiences of communities harmed. In 2025, we can expect to see more cases that address the human cost of climate inaction while pushing for systemic change. 

The Critical Role of Courts 

Courts have the ability to enforce accountability in ways that are direct, timely, and rooted in evidence. However, the power of courts to affect change depends on the conditions we create for them to act. This includes fostering robust scientific research, empowering communities to bring cases, and ensuring that legal systems are equipped to handle the complexities of climate litigation. Efforts to integrate science more effectively into legal arguments, help judges accurately interpret technical evidence, and improve access to justice for climate-vulnerable populations are all critical to building a resilient legal framework. Reach out to get involved in our expert working groups and engage in this work with us. 

The ICJ’s deliberations, the rise of climate-washing cases, and the focus on disaster liability all point to the transformative potential of litigation to address the climate crisis. But these legal battles are just one piece of the puzzle. They must be complemented by bold policy action, international cooperation, and a collective commitment to protecting future generations. 

2025 holds immense promise, but it also demands care, creativity, and persistence. While we are facing great challenges in the U.S. and around the world, courts have shown they can play a transformative role in shaping our collective response to climate change. As we look to the year ahead, let us renew our resolve to leverage every available tool—legal, scientific, and political—to combat the greatest challenge of our time. Together, we can create the conditions for a more just, sustainable future. 

Editor’s note: Updates status of investigation into RealPage

Scott Turner’s nomination by President Trump to lead the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has garnered less attention than some of his other cabinet picks. This is surprising given the power he wields over millions of people’s most immediate everyday need—having a place to live.   

As the housing and climate crises continue to collide—destroying homes, displacing communities, and causing instability in the insurance industry—it’s important to understand the background of the person selected to lead the agency responsible for policy and programs to address America’s urgent housing needs.

Turner’s track record of advancing ultra-conservative agendas raises valid concern that he would prioritize developer interests while shifting climate risk onto local governments and individuals.   

What does the HUD Secretary do?

As the head of HUD, Scott Turner would oversee a broad, important portfolio of programs that literally helps keep the roof over many people’s heads.

HUD serves a crucial role in providing access to affordable housing for millions of people, including through rental assistance programs, public housing, and pathways to homeownership. These programs are especially important for low-income households, people who live with disabilities, the elderly and families with young children.  

HUD also provides financial support for community and economic development through its Community Development Block Grant Program. The Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) component of this program is increasingly important in an era of worsening climate-fueled disasters.  

The question is: if Turner is confirmed as HUD secretary, will he keep the people’s interests as his top priority—or will he be more beholden to deep-pocketed real estate and developer interests?  

Potential conflicts of interest 

To get an idea of how he would lead HUD, it’s important to look at who Scott Turner is. He has had a varied career, including stints in the Texas legislature, the first Trump Administration, and the NFL. During his time in the Texas legislature, Turner stuck mostly to the fiscally and socially conservative Tea Party agenda and didn’t file any housing bills.  

Most recently, Turner has served as a Chief Inspiration Officer for JPI—a development firm that specializes in building multi-family homes across the income spectrum. While it’s essential for the nation’s housing secretary to understand the development landscape, their actions must be rooted in the public interest, not real estate industry interests. The Project 2025 chapter on HUD, authored by former HUD Secretary Ben Carson who Turner considers a mentor, encourages the sale of existing public housing to private, profit-motivated developers.

Additionally, Turner’s former employer has a longstanding and well-publicized relationship with RealPage, a private equity-backed software firm that the US Justice Department claimed enables price-fixing, artificially increasing the rents of hundreds of thousands of renters nationwide. While a criminal investigation into RealPage was recently dropped, a civil lawsuit by the DOJ and eight states remains active. As the average American pays more money than ever before to keep a roof over their head, this confluence of interests and influence should raise concerns during confirmation hearings.   

Opportunity Zones  

In his previous role as a senior official at HUD, Turner was celebrated by President Trump and others for his role in promoting Opportunity Zones. Opportunity Zones were a signature economic development effort of the first Trump administration codified in the 2017 tax bill that allowed investors to defer taxes on capital gains by siphoning those gains into a fund that invested in economically distressed areas. 

The architects of Opportunity Zones claimed the program would spur desirable investment in communities and jumpstart economic revitalization, however, the program didn’t lay out tight regulatory guidelines, and the full impact of the policy isn’t yet obvious as investments can be made through 2026 and some forms of investment (like developing or rehabbing housing) can take years to realize.   

What we do know is that real estate is the largest investment category among Opportunity Zone investors. It’s reported that thousands of affordable homes have been financed in hot housing markets like Charlotte and Austin, but how many of those homes are meaningfully affordable or only nominally affordable, stretching buyers and renters thin, is unclear. 

The return of Opportunity Zones was a key component of the president-elect’s campaign platform, and they are poised for extension in the new administration and Republican-controlled Congress.  If Turner’s job is to champion safe, healthy affordable housing, members of Congress should ask how he intends to strongly condition Opportunity Zones to help address the nation’s housing shortage and whether those benefits will flow to those with lower incomes.  

Reversing climate progress at HUD 

In addition to investing in public housing, rental support and providing pathways to homeownership for low-income families, HUD is also tasked with distributing funds for long-term recovery to cities and states after increasingly frequent and costly disasters.  Cuts to disaster response programs in other federal agencies like FEMA proposed in Project 2025 will almost certainly reduce community resilience and may drive up the price tag of long-term recovery that Turner is tasked with administering. 

In the last few years, HUD has adopted climate initiatives to make affiliated properties more energy efficient, weatherize buildings against extreme heat and reduce flood risk. Project 2025 recommends eliminating the agency’s climate programs. The climate denialism of these proposed repeals aside, the conservative playbook’s obsession with reducing government spending simply transfers risk to levels of government and communities less equipped than the federal government to pursue resilience.  

HUD’s climate initiatives are intended to keep communities safer and tackle climate challenges that, if left unchecked, will have increasingly expensive impacts on its assets and risk the lives of people the agency has a responsibility to protect.

Members of Congress should probe Turner on the true, long-term cost of walking away from common sense climate efforts like weatherization and floodplain standards.   

Project 2025 regurgitates rejected policies

It’s too soon to tell just how much of President Trump’s dangerous agenda Scott might be able to realize as HUD Secretary.  Much of the Project 2025 plan for the agency are policies that were rejected or unfinished during the first Trump presidency, which like the coming administration also began with a Republican-controlled congress.

Other parts of President Trump’s agenda like his inhumane threats of mass deportation could make it harder to build affordable homes. With an electorate deeply concerned about making ends meet, it’s important that confirmation hearings reveal who Turner will center in his leadership—a nation struggling with housing costs and growing climate risk or his real estate industry colleagues.    

For the first time, the Arctic Report Card assessed that the Arctic is faltering as a reliable area for storing carbon away from the atmosphere (Natalie et al., in Arc2024). It was its first failing grade after thousands of years holding onto more carbon than released to the atmosphere. As a scientist who has conducted research in the Arctic, this is truly alarming for me. 

This report, issued by NOAA annually since 2006, was a much-anticipated event at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting because the implications matter far beyond the Arctic. 

Grade F: First major “vital sign” shift in its report card

Different factors are at play in terms of whether the Arctic is a net sink or source of carbon. On one hand, warming temperatures increased vegetation in the region with increased uptake of carbon dioxide. However, unprecedented Arctic wildfires combined with soils thawing released even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Methane releases were sustained as well.  

The carbon cycle trend in the Arctic will be a closely watched “vital sign” for Earth’s climate going forward. 

Is this report card for the Arctic, which includes boreal and tundra of northern permafrost regions, a temporary carbon cycle hiccup, or will this be a growing trend as a net carbon source region? 

If the latter, the implications are profound because the Arctic holds an immense store of carbon that, if released, would set off a chain of cascading consequences, including significant global warming.

The implications of these changes are enormous for the Arctic ecosystem, the ways of life of communities living in the region, and for the many unique species that exist there. Moreover, changes in the Arctic have a huge impact on weather patterns north of the equator, including polar vortex disturbances, changes to ocean currents, and extreme heat domes. Shrinking Greenland ice sheet and mountain glaciers also contribute to accelerating sea level rise. 

Meanwhile, the warming climate is leaving Arctic species with little choice but to adapt, but some are finding it harder than others. 

Grade C: Coping or struggling to cope with Arctic change 

A vivid scene reappeared from memory when I learned the findings of the annual Arctic Report Card. It’s from my time in the Arctic aboard the Oden. The Icebreaker suddenly blasted the horn on an unplanned  stop that shuddered the entire ship as the sounds of water pumps that help roll the ship and engines shifting speed reverberated in the ears.   

Biologists had spotted a tiny Arctic cod on top of the ice! We watched as the fish was retrieved for analysis amid plenty of evidence that a seal and a polar bear had been on that spot of sea ice not too long before we had arrived. Given the primary source of polar bear food— ice dependent seals —it likely was their favorite, ringed seal. Now we knew why the fish was on top of the ice and not in the frigid seawater below. These three are species in an Arctic ecosystem that used to be more tightly linked together.  

But the Arctic report card assessed that ringed seals in the Pacific sector of the Arctic have adapted away from their former major food source—Arctic cod — to a new major food source—saffron cod (Quakenbush et al., in Arc2024). This is a cod species shift to warmer seawater from that particular cold seawater with floating sea-ice.  

The surprise is that, despite plummeting sea ice, the ringed seal is currently coping with these changes. It’s a bright sign brought by collaborations among indigenous researchers and other scientists.   

Yet there are more stark signs in the report card overall logging different marine and land species coping with regional changes that differ from the Arctic averages. 

Arctic cod and seawater in glass jar collected from the surface of Arctic sea-ice.  Brenda Ekwurzel 

Case in point is the difference between coastal caribou herds that are coping with the wetter and warmer conditions and the inland migratory tundra caribou herds that are struggling to adapt (decreasing 65% over past two to three decades) (Gunn et al., in Arc2024).  Rain on snow that often freezes can shield vital forage away from inland caribou herds.  Roads associated with mines and railroads are also factors.

If these inland herds fail to adapt to these changes, the caribou’s future in these locations is uncertain. And so too are the ways of life of indigenous communities that are adapting given local traditional levels of reliance on the caribou for food and other essentials. 

NOAA Arctic Report Card 2024 Grade A: Amplified warming in the Arctic, a dubious distinction

This year logged the eleventh year in a row when the Arctic warmed faster than the global average (Ballinger et al., in Arc2024)—quite a feat given the Earth’s global average temperature is on track to being the hottest on record.  

This greater pace of warming has implications for the character and timing of snow cover. The 2023-2024 Arctic winter snow accumulation was above average over Eurasian and North American sectors with the Central and Eastern Canada region logging the shortest snow season in 26 years (Mudryk et al., in Arc2024).   

Amplified warming in a region that has water locked in the form of ice on land for millennia has global significance for coastal communities worldwide.  Mountain glacier and ice sheet contributions to global sea level rise has been a growing proportion with each passing decade.   

Another bright spot this year amid the bad news was that the massive Greenland Ice Sheet had the lowest annual ice mass loss since 2013 (Poynar et al., in Arc2024).   

No doubt about it. That F grade for failing to remain a region that stored more carbon than it released has got to grab the attention of anyone involved with international negotiations in line with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  The urgency for reducing emissions is a serious Arctic warning. 

Icebergs from a Greenland Ice Sheet glacier that has released large volumes of ice to the ocean over recent years. Brenda Ekwurzel

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is one of the foremost federal science agencies whose foundational work has wide implications and immense value for people’s daily lives and for our economy.

As an economist who is part of an interdisciplinary team focused on understanding climate impacts and advocating for smart solutions, I can tell you that NOAA science and data is crucial for our work at UCS. To give a few examples, we’ve used NOAA sea level rise data to analyze and quantify the impacts of flooding on coastal real estate and critical infrastructure. We use NWS weather alerts for our Danger Season mapping tool. The reality is that climate change now touches almost every aspect of our lives and economy and having robust scientific information gives us the power to confront these challenges effectively.

NOAA also provides critical, widely relied-upon forecasts for hurricanes and marine conditions, monitors wildfire smoke, and contributes to essential global scientific endeavors to help us understand and respond to changes on our planet.

That’s why the Trump administration’s nominee to lead NOAA must live up to a high standard for scientific integrity and make a commitment to safeguard the mission of the agency and the work of its dedicated career staff. When the nominee is announced, here’s what we’ll be looking for and why.  

NOAA administrator must support NOAA’s crucial scientific work

The most important priority for the incoming NOAA administrator is to show is that they understand the breadth and importance of NOAA’s scientific work for our nation and commit to fully supporting that work and fostering an environment where agency scientific experts can do this work without political interference.

It should go without saying, but given the incoming administration’s track record with inappropriate agency nominees, it’s worth stating explicitly: the NOAA administrator should not have conflicts of interest or be beholden to fossil fuel and other special interests.

As my colleague Juan Declet-Barreto wrote in a recent blog post “We need a strong and independent NOAA.”

Here are some of the key responsibilities for the job:

• Familiarity with the core missions and functions of the agency’s six branches—NOAA Marine & Aviation Operations (OMAO), NOAA Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), National Ocean Service (NOS), Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), National Weather Service (NWS), and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS)—and how their work is closely coordinated and integrated.
• Commitment to uphold and enforce NOAA’s strong scientific integrity policy. This policy helps ensure that the scientists at NOAA do the highest quality scientific work free from harassment and interference, and that the public can rely on and trust NOAA science for that reason.
• Commitment to safeguard NOAA and its work from attacks such as those proposed in Project 2025 that seek to dismantle the agency, privatize core components of its work, and politicize the science it produces. To be clear, NOAA’s line offices work together closely, and dismantling the agency would make it far less effective and, in some cases, unable to provide the services the public needs. Privatizing parts of NOAA such as the National Weather Service makes no sense—and even private companies like AccuWeather have said so. NOAA’s comprehensive and freely available weather and climate information is vital for the public and already being used by private sector entities like TV and radio forecasters and meteorologists. This life-saving information must be freely accessible to all so that everyone can use it and rely on having it, not just those who are able to pay.
• Commitment to advocate for the resources, budget and staffing NOAA needs to do its work well. NOAA’s budget is a very small part of the overall federal budget, and it provides incredible bang for the buck. There will be inevitable attacks on its budget as we saw under the previous Trump administration, and it will be crucial for the NOAA administrator to clearly articulate what NOAA delivers for taxpayers and why it is worth investing in. Draconian cuts will save very little money but can completely hobble the agency’s work. The Secretary of Commerce also plays a vital role in advocating for NOAA’s crucial work which falls within the Commerce Department’s purview and budget.
• Commitment to continue to invest in the tools, data and practices that will keep NOAA’s work at the cutting edge of science, including investing in satellites and earth observation systems, AI weather forecasting tools, integrating community knowledge and science, collaborating with scientific agencies around the world (for example, key data sharing and harmonization agreements), and building public-private partnerships.
• Commitment to protecting marine fisheries, mammals, and ecosystems that are crucial to livelihoods, food security, commerce, planetary health and more.  

What does NOAA do?

NOAA gathers, maintains, analyzes and provides for free an enormous amount of data, scientific information and tools that help us understand climate and weather conditions wherever we live. It also monitors ocean conditions crucial for maritime traffic and fisheries and helps with marine conservation efforts.

To gather this data, it has a powerful array of satellites as well as the much-admired hurricane hunters who fly into the most hazardous weather to improve predictions. These kinds of data are literally lifesaving when extreme weather events like heatwaves and hurricanes threaten, and it’s also incredibly important for our economic prosperity.

Here are just some of the powerful examples of NOAA’s valuable work:

• NOAA’s National Hurricane Center provides seasonal hurricane forecasts and crucial information all through the hurricane season as tropical depressions form and progress. Just in this last year, the accurate and constantly updated forecasts for catastrophic hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton, among others, helped save lives and provided emergency responders with the information they needed to protect people and infrastructure. NOAA has also invested in creating and updating numerous related tools like its storm surge  and wind speed products.
• NOAA collects global and localized sea level rise data from tide gauges and satellite altimetry which are analyzed and made available through its sea level rise portal. These data help communities around the nation understand the accelerating rate of sea level rise—largely due to climate change—and the frequency and magnitude of high-tide flooding they can expect as a result. This information is crucial for local planners, infrastructure owners, operators and engineers, homeowners, businesses, and many others.
• NOAA monitors wildfire smoke conditions and maps how those hazards travel hundreds of miles away from the original site of the wildfires. The latest science shows that particulate matter pollution from wildfires is a serious health hazard for people who may need to work or be outdoors, especially for young children, pregnant women and their babies in utero, and people with pre-existing heart or lung ailments.
• NOAA’s marine forecast products are a bedrock source of information for the maritime industry. These products are available in multiple formats and routinely used by the crew of seagoing vessels to navigate and prepare for conditions at sea.
• NOAA is working with the NSF to help the insurance industry better understand and prepare for the impacts of climate change on their businesses. This work could not be more salient as the industry is facing an acute upheaval as extreme weather and climate disasters multiply, and consumers are facing the brunt of raised insurance rates and dropped policies.
• NOAA makes invaluable scientific contributions to global initiatives like the Famine Early Warning System, the Joint Typhoon Early Warning Center and the World Meteorological Organization.

The federal government’s data.gov portal links to more than 100,000 datasets generated or provided by NOAA. Having this kind of information is not just vital to understand the scope of the problems our nation faces but it helps policymakers develop effective policies and solutions so communities across the nation can thrive in the face of a warming world.

UCS will be advocating for a new NOAA administrator who can live up to the task the nation needs them to perform so we can all be safer and prosper.

In 2022 I visited Glacier National Park for the first time with two close friends. We spent five days backpacking through the backcountry, and I was enthralled by the park’s vastness and beauty and the chance to see glaciers for the first time in my life. While I loved camping out in the wild, as a trail runner I couldn’t help but think of ways to travel lighter, cover more territory, and see even more of this breathtaking landscape. After the trip, I found myself studying maps, plotting potential routes, and, eventually, conceiving an ambitious plan: a 75-mile route linking three of the park’s historic lodges. This route offered restocking points and a bed each night, but each leg of the route was about 25 miles long, with over 4,000 feet of elevation gain.

Proposed route through Glacier National Park, proceeding clockwise from the start/finish at the southwest corner. Blue dots indicate the lodges where we planned to stay along the way, and numbers indicate cumulative miles.

Having recently read several books on ultramarathon training, I began to incorporate their techniques into my routine. Like any engineer, I created a spreadsheet to plan my training, then booked the trip for Labor Day weekend.

Training presented its own challenges: I live in Madison, Wisconsin—great for many things, but not exactly mountainous. But Wisconsin does offer the Ice Age Trail, a 1,200-mile national scenic trail that winds through the state, tracing the terminal moraine of the North American Ice Sheet—a massive glacier that once covered much of the continent. The trail, characterized by rugged landscapes, narrow technical trails, and sections affectionately called “rollers” for their endless ups and downs, became my go-to training ground. It felt especially fitting to retrace the path of the last major glaciation while preparing to visit some of the last remaining glaciers in the lower 48 states.

In January, about two months into my training, I joined the Union of Concerned Scientists. This marked a career shift toward direct climate and equity advocacy, where I could use my background in electrical engineering to more directly tackle the climate challenges threatening our planet’s critical resources, including the glaciers I would soon visit. The connection felt profound: I was focusing my personal time on training for a chance to witness these glaciers up close, even as I was now working professionally to mitigate the emissions causing their rapid retreat.

Training on glacial terrain A picture taken on my way up the east bluffs in Devil’s Lake State Park, part of the Ice Age Trail, with Spirit Lake visible in the distance. Photo by Lee Shaver.

The Ice Age Trail zigzags across Wisconsin, and from where I live in Madison, I can access several segments of the trail within a short drive. During training runs, my thoughts were often practical: monitoring my water supply, fending off bugs, calculating carb intake, etc. But I also reflected on the nature of the landscape I was running across.

The trail gave me a unique perspective on how glaciers not only sculpted the land but also influenced human use of it. The flatter lands on one side became ideal farmland, supporting the dairy industry for which Wisconsin is known, while the rugged driftless terrain on the other side, harder to farm, has lower population densities. Even the Ice Age Trail itself follows the edge of these different land uses, often marking the boundary between neighboring farms.

The glaciation process played out over an incomprehensibly long timescale—the ice age that ended about 10,000 years ago had lasted over 100,000 years. By contrast, the glaciers in Glacier National Park are retreating at a disturbingly rapid pace. Some estimates suggest they could disappear by 2030 due to the climate change triggered by human fossil fuel use, which began less than 200 years ago.

The journey through glacier: running on borrowed time

Eventually, after logging over 1,000 miles in preparation, it was time to head to the park. For the trip, I was joined by my friend Brian, a fellow runner from Madison. We arrived in Glacier on Thursday afternoon, and with time to spare, booked a boat tour from our starting point at Lake McDonald. Our guide shared insights into the fragility of the landscape, pointing out the shrinking glaciers and evidence of recent forest fires.

Friday morning we set out on six relatively flat miles through thick forest, carpeted in moss and dense with cedars. We hiked this section to avoid startling bears, as Montana has the largest grizzly population in the lower 48. Next, we joined the Going-to-the-Sun Road for six miles, a necessary but unpleasant stretch due to the noise and fumes from traffic (a reminder of the carbon emissions that threaten the very glaciers we had come to see).

After leaving the road, we began the steep ascent up to Swiftcurrent Pass. Despite training on every hill in Wisconsin, we found ourselves unprepared for the altitude. Climbing during the hottest part of the day was grueling, and we began to feel the effects of the altitude. At the pass, we rested and refilled our bottles before descending into the valley, where we finally glimpsed Swiftcurrent Glacier. From a distance it was hard to grasp the scale of the glacier, but as we descended the pass the sights and sounds of immense waterfalls draining the glacial basin helped us understand just how massive it must be.

Bullhead Lake at the bottom of Swiftcurrent Pass. Swiftcurrent Glacier is visible just below the ridge above. Photo by Lee Shaver.

We followed the chain of lakes out of the valley to Swiftcurrent Lodge, where we enjoyed a much-needed rest after a dinner of mac and cheese. We ended up traveling nearly 28 miles that day, the longest day of the trip.

On Saturday we joined the Continental Divide Trail and made our way up to Piegan Pass. We saw only one other hiker all morning, underscoring how remote and isolated we were. As we climbed, the roar of a distant waterfall grew louder, coming in and out of earshot as we switched back up the mountain. Near the top, we encountered a snowbank across the trail and carefully made our way over. At the pass, we stopped for lunch, gazing out over snow-fed pools that sparkled in the afternoon sun.

After hearing glowing reviews from other hikers, we decided to take the more challenging Siyeh Pass route, adding another 1,500 feet of elevation gain but allowing us to run through a recent burn area with clear visibility. We covered about 21 miles that day, grateful to avoid vehicle traffic by catching a shuttle for the final few miles along the road.

The view from Siyeh Pass trail, with evidence of forest fire in the foreground. Photo by Lee Shaver. Up close and personal with a glacier

On the morning of day three, we experienced deus ex machina—or more accurately, ursus ex machina: Gunsight Pass, our intended trail for the day and the only path back to our starting point, had been closed by park rangers due to bear activity. We hitched a ride to our final hotel and opted for an out-and-back run up to Sperry Glacier instead—a chance to get closer to the ice than we’d anticipated.

After a 3,500-foot climb, we reached Sperry Chalet and paused for a refreshing lemonade. Another 1,500 feet of climbing led us over Comeau Pass to what we thought would be an easy half mile to the base of Sperry Glacier.

Instead, we were reminded of how glaciers shape the land around them. Sperry Glacier sits on the edge of a large basin which is constantly scraped and scoured by the ice that accumulates each year from snowfall, then melts and sublimates in the warmer season. As a result, the “trail” to the base of the glacier is actually a mostly unmarked traverse across a boulder field. Just a handful of cairns, rebuilt each year by volunteers, mark the path around the ridge that hides the glacier from view.

View from the edge of Sperry Glacier across the melt pools and boulder field. Photo by Lee Shaver.

On the other side of the ridge, we were rewarded with spectacular views of crevasses, melt pools, and Sperry Glacier itself. We picked our way over more boulders to reach a US Geological Survey weather station at the base of the glacier. We were completely alone at this point and could hear the constant sound of water dripping from the glacier, and the periodic sound of ice and boulders shifting in the field all around us: the soundtrack of quiet disintegration.

Sperry Glacier, with a USGS weather monitoring station in front. Photo by Lee Shaver.

Exhausted but exhilarated, we made our way back, covering a total of just over 20 miles and 5,400 feet of elevation gain—the most intense day of the trip, which we felt made up for the change in course that took five miles off our planned total.

DayMileageAscent (feet)Highest point (feet)Elapsed time127.84,9407,20310:21220.93,9818,0807:43320.35,4008,0618:42Total69.014,321 26:46Running through Glacier, by the numbers. Reflections on glacier loss and climate action

The weather just before the trip was marked by contrast: a few days earlier, a storm had dropped enough snow to close several miles of road inside the park, but by the time we arrived it had gotten hot enough to melt off nearly all the snow, except for a few lingering piles in the shade at higher elevations. I felt the same contrast as I stood at the foot of Sperry Glacier, feeling both the heat of the sun and the cool breeze blowing over the ice, and I was struck by the reality of the glaciers’ vulnerability.

The prediction that all of the park’s glaciers could be gone by 2030 felt painfully real as we looked out over the landscape. While snow accumulating and disappearing is an annual event as the seasons change, the trend over the last several decades has been a global net reduction in the mass balance of mountain glaciers like Sperry.

The feelings that accompanied this moment were bittersweet; I felt privileged to see something that may be gone in a few short years, but also a sense of guilt that I was seeing something that future generations may be robbed of the opportunity to witness. Glaciers, once thought of as static, timeless icons, have become a fleeting phenomenon, highlighting the urgent need for action on climate change.

The personal meaning of this journey intersected profoundly with my work at the Union of Concerned Scientists. My role focuses on developing solutions for cleaner energy systems and policies to reduce heat-trapping emissions, work that is closely tied to the survival of landscapes like the one I had just run across, as well as the people who inhabit and depend on those landscapes. In Montana and around the world, glaciers support ecosystems, serve as year-round water sources, and regulate the climate, among other important ecological functions. The trip reminded me that the impacts of climate change are not abstract—they are visible, tangible, and current. At home, I train on a landscape shaped by glaciers over a hundred thousand years, but human-caused climate change is re-shaping Glacier National Park within my own lifetime.

Moving forward with purpose

I carry two main insights after running through Glacier: first, the incredible value of experiencing and witnessing these landscapes firsthand; second, the motivation to actively protect and preserve them. My hope is that future generations will be able to visit places like Glacier National Park and stand in awe, as I did, of their beauty and the ancient forces that shaped them. But without meaningful, immediate action, these “icescapes” may not survive to inspire future generations, leaving behind only the evidence of their former grandeur.

This experience changed the way I view both my personal and professional goals. Every mile I ran reminded me of the resilience and adaptability required to face the challenges ahead. It underscored the importance of not only reducing carbon footprints, but actively working to reshape our policies, technologies, and societal structures to build a future where these irreplaceable wonders can endure, and where we can experience them.

As I continue my work with the Union of Concerned Scientists, I’ll carry this journey with me and use it to fuel my dedication to tackling the climate crisis. There’s still hope to protect places like Glacier, but that window of opportunity is narrowing. My experience has reaffirmed that the path forward requires not just awareness, but action—action that can make a difference, just as each small step in my training built toward something greater.

Another year, another legislative session. Much like a sine graph, this year had highs and lows. Also like a sine graph, Union of Concerned Scientists will keep moving forward no matter what (and backward technically, but I am political science major and way out of my depth here, so let’s pretend they only move forward, give me kudos for an awesome simile, and get to the recap!).

Bidirectional EVs Could Be the New Standard

Electric vehicles (EVs) should be a clean transportation and a clean energy solution. That is why we sponsored SB 59 by Senator Nancy Skinner which paves the way for California to require EVs to have the ability to export their power. This could let drivers use these batteries to power critical appliances during emergencies, their homes during power shutoffs, or even the grid when electricity demand is high. (More on this in my colleague Sam Houston’s latest blog.)

The bill made it all the way through the legislature and was signed by Governor Newsom. As exciting as this is, it is only the first step in making sure this capability is standard issue on all new EVs. The California Energy Commission now holds the power to set this requirement, but it will be up to us to make the case that they should.

 As fate would have it, UCS is working to analyze the potential benefits of widespread bidirectional capabilities in CA that will help inform the implementation of SB 59 in the coming year.

Special session takes on big oil and wins

The transition to clean transportation and away from fossil fuels is here. Earlier this month, we saw yet another California refinery announce plans to close its doors. While this is an inevitable part of the transition to clean transportation, and generally good news for the climate and impacted communities, the oil industry will not go down easily. ABX2-1 by Assemblymembers Hart and Aguiar-Curry illustrates this reality.

Over the last few years, California drivers have seen huge spikes in gasoline prices and big oil has seen corresponding, massive windfall profits. With authority granted by the legislature and Governor last year, the state discovered that when refineries did not store enough gasoline before maintenance, prices (and profits) spike. So, refiners were incentivized not to be prepared, and it was drivers who paid the price.

This year, we helped Gov. Newsom take on Big Oil by strongly supporting his special session that resulted in the passage of AB2X-1 allowing the state to require minimum gasoline storage at refineries, limiting refiners’ ability to manipulate the market.

Policies like this will be critical to ensure that the fossil fuels phaseout is equitable and Big Oil doesn’t squeeze every dollar out of California consumers on the way out the door.

A step towards getting water rights right

California’s water rights system is inequitable, unfair and just plain broken. The outdated system essentially allows “senior water rights holders” to use water with reckless abandon, even as the climate crisis worsens, and water supply becomes more constrained.

Over the past few years, we have been fighting to pass bills that would reign in some of the most powerful interests in the state and ensure that they are not using too much water when supply is limited.

This year, we took an important step forward by passing AB 460 by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, which increases the fines on entities that knowingly steal more water than they are allocated. This is a commonsense step and hopefully the first of many towards a more equitable, sustainable water rights system. 

EV battery end of life bill life ended on Governor’s desk

Due to the necessarily ambitious regulations we fought to pass, California will continue to see a huge increase in the number of EVs on the road. As these regulations drive down emissions, we will also see an increase in battery retirements.

When EVs do retire, it is critical that we can keep hazardous waste out of landfills and communities while limiting the amount of critical minerals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc.) that need to be mined for new batteries.

For two years, we worked on SB 615 with Senator Ben Allen to require all EV batteries to be repurposed or recycled. We negotiated hard with auto makers, recyclers and others for the bill to include robust reporting requirements, producer responsibly and environmental protections.

In the end, we won on all those issues and sent a strong bill to the Governor’s desk. Newsom ultimately vetoed it due to concerns with the cost of implementation in a tough fiscal year for the state.

We now have a roadmap for a strong bill and will keep at it next session. Rest assured, we won’t sleep until all EV batteries are repurposed or recycled at the end of their useful lives.

Clean cars not 4 all

UCS research found that cars that were manufactured before 2004 make up less than one fifth of the cars on California roads but account for more than two thirds of the smog-forming emissions of all cars. That is why we sponsored AB 2401 by Assemblymember Phil Ting to target the state’s limited “Clean Cars 4 All” clean vehicles incentive dollars towards replacing these older cars.

This bill was such a good, science-based, iron-clad idea that it made it all the way through the entire legislative process without a single “no” vote. In the end, the Governor vetoed it citing similar budgetary concerns.

The intention of the bill was to require the state to spend wisely with a pot of money we know is vanishingly small rather than increase costs as the Governor feared. Fortunately, we built momentum on this idea that clearly everyone in the legislature thinks is a worthwhile endeavor.

We will think creatively and work with the Governor to make sure our research results in a positive policy change next year.

Onward

Before the new legislative session begins in January 2025, we will take time to both celebrate our victories, work to support their implementation, and continue working on the bills that ended up on the wrong end of Newsom’s pen.

We will also work on new policy solutions to protect California’s values, combat the climate crisis, clean the air, improve access to water, overcome barriers to clean energy adoption, take on Big Oil, transition cropland to less intensive uses, and many, many other answers to the world’s biggest problems. 

I hope you aren’t tired from riding that sine wave, because next year we are going fully linear with a positive slope (I know I nailed that one).

The Trump campaign has made so many radical promises that it’s hard to know which will come to pass. Yet, we are tracking them knowing that the president-elect’s team is committed to broad and destructive reforms.  An early target of the transition team is the agency where I worked for nearly two decades: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 

The EPA, like many federal agencies, is run by political appointees. While it’s true that federal agencies have always changed leadership from administration to administration, countless career employees have worked to fulfill their agencies’ missions, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. Their expertise and institutional knowledge are invaluable—and of great benefit to the public.  

I know this because I lived it, serving at the EPA through the majority of the first Trump administration. Within the Office of Community Revitalization, and across the entire agency—an institution charged with protecting human health and the environment—I saw politically-motivated and industry-driven attacks on science that sought to undermine our core values and mission. 

Lee Zeldin must protect people 

Last week, the President-elect announced former Congressman Lee Zeldin as his nominee to lead the EPA. Zeldin is a loyalist to the President-elect with no relevant environmental background to lead an agency that relies heavily on science to protect the public, and especially environmental justice communities. If confirmed by the Senate, he will be forced to choose between taking the EPA’s mission to serve the public seriously or following through on the Trump campaign’s promise of severe deregulation. 

Deregulation would benefit a small number of big polluters at the expense of people’s health, wallets, and the environment. This is also a major equity concern because heavily polluting industries exist most commonly in communities where Black, Indigenous and people of color, as well as low-income people, live. 

Data shows this is also a concern shared by nearly two-thirds of Trump voters, who worry that the future EPA Administrator will put the interests of polluting corporations ahead of protecting clean water, clean air, and public health. Now that Zeldin is the official nominee, I too share this concern. 

Zeldin has a history of fossil fuel fealty, illustrated by campaign donations and a track record of anti-science votes. During his terms in Congress, he voted against clean air and clean water legislation dozens of times, putting our health, environment, and economy at risk. Frankly, this is not the record of someone seriously interested in protecting people and our environment. 

Lee Zeldin must protect science 

More than two-thirds of the civil servants who power the EPA are scientists, charged with protecting both human health and the environment. They oversee long-term research that may, and often will, span administrations. The speed of science is not meant to be managed under political cycles, and when the pendulum swings too far between administrations, public trust in agencies designed to protect us erodes.

Science-informed public policy requires scientists serving in key agency positions to recommend policy. To do that agencies devote staff time, expertise, and resources to gathering and sharing data and information to make better decisions about policies now and in the future. When scientists are forced or threatened to leave agencies, it severely limits agencies’ ability to advance science-informed policy free from any particular group’s self-interest. It also poses a long-term threat. It could lead to more hazardous air pollutants from power plants and chemical plants.  Or it could mean capitulating to the auto industry, rolling back fuel efficiency standards and sending emissions soaring. Or it could mean putting children’s safety at risk because dangerous pesticides are allowed to flow freely. When federal agencies lose the expertise and knowledge of scientists, anti-science special interests benefit while public health is harmed. The EPA relies on scientists to inform policies that protect people and the environment, and the politicization of facts puts all of us at risk. 

In the first Trump administration, UCS catalogued over 50 instances of political appointees sidelining scientific evidence and attacking scientific integrity. These tactics included censoring scientists, circumventing advisory committees, undermining science-based safeguards, halting, suppressing and altering scientific studies, and driving out over 1,000 scientists and technical experts. President-elect Trump and former Congressman Zeldin are expected to do much of the same in the four years to come: removing experts who could stand in their way of dismantling landmark climate regulations that for decades have kept the air we breathe and water we drink clean.  

Lee Zeldin must protect stability 

The last time Trump was president, his administration sought to impose double-digit percentage budget cuts on the EPA year after year. And, year after year, the EPA saw the departure of hundreds upon hundreds of scientists. Undermining the EPA doesn’t only pose real, tragic health risks—it is in direct defiance of the voters who elected the incoming administration.  

An overwhelming majority of voters, including 81% of voters who supported Donald Trump, want Congress to increase funding for the EPA, or at the very least, keep it the same. Three in four Trump voters oppose attempts to weaken the EPA. And of dire importance to me, after focusing on the EPA’s environmental justice work for years, 72% of Trump voters support increasing funding for communities disproportionally harmed by air and water pollution. Rolling back the progress the EPA has made over its nearly 55-year tenure isn’t just out-of-touch with what communities need—it’s entirely detached from reality.  

Source: EPN 

Ultimately, attacking science endangers our health by compromising protections for the public and for environmental justice communities facing the largest potential impacts from buried science, and weak and ineffective environmental and public health protections. In order to support the EPA’s mission, and ensure they are providing benefits to those most harmed by the current status quo, we need a robust and supported scientific community at federal agencies—both to limit the potential harms of a Trump administration, and to ensure we can have a speedy recovery and reversal of any harmful and damaging policies when the opportunity arises. 

We must protect our future 

Nothing is inevitable, and UCS is ready to fight to keep strong science at EPA. During the first Trump administration, UCS successfully led a lawsuit overturning the EPA’s unlawful ban on scientists serving on advisory committees and restoring integrity to federal decision-making. When the EPA refused to hold a hearing on a proposed rule that would transform how the agency uses science in policy decisions and scientific assessments UCS organized an alternative public hearing, giving a platform to affected communities and experts. UCS brought accountability to the agency, exposing the devastating impacts of the administration’s weakened Clean Water Rule, highlighting its disregard for science and the importance of wetlands and tributaries in protecting drinking water. And UCS helped win additional pollution protections from trucks, and brought a spotlight to the real and devastating impacts reckless, anti-science leadership has on public health. 

I bring up what UCS did from 2017 to 2021, not to diminish the tangible harms accomplished in the first Trump administration, but rather to frame our mission in facing the challenge that lies ahead.  

It is clear that the incoming administration has the entire regulatory state in their crosshairs—which is why UCS is hitting the ground running to save science and save lives.  We intend to continue our work of fully supporting federal scientists through our network and resources in order to protect and limit the loss of the federal scientific workforce. We will also use Senate confirmation hearings to fight unqualified science agency nominations such as Lee Zeldin. We will also support efforts to continue funding programs that support communities via the Inflation Reduction Act.  

Independent science is a public good and it must be protected. 

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said “In the first Trump Administration, the agency was dealt double-digit percentage budget cuts year after year.” This has been corrected to say, “The last time Trump was president, his administration sought to impose double-digit percentage budget cuts on the EPA year after year.“

2024 is another year of new extremes in climate: this year’s summer was the hottest on record. In particular, July 22 will be remembered as the hottest day recorded, when the global average temperature hit 62.9°F according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Heat waves, floods, storms, and wildfires are breaking records and impacted nearly everyone in the United States and its Caribbean territories.  

As we have been doing since 2022, this year we tracked alerts issued by the National Weather Service (NWS) for these extreme weather events during Danger Season—the period between May and October when climate change increases the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events. By mid-August everyone in the US lived in a county that had experienced at least one of these events.  

We saw that climate change is driving a longer Danger Season that affects everyone in the US. That means that the work of key federal agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS) is more critical than ever. They must be allowed to continue providing accurate and timely forecasts of extreme weather events because these forecasts save American lives.  

According to a proposed policy framework for the Trump Administration, NOAA and other federal agencies will be gutted, leaving us with little protection against the more intense and more frequent extreme weather we experienced this danger season and will continue to experience as global temperatures rise. 

In recent years, Danger Season has ended in October, but in yet another sign of worsening climate change, the Northeast is still facing fire weather amid summer temperatures in November. Here’s what it has brought so far. 

Heat

The 2024 Danger Season opened in late May with a nearly week-long heat wave in southern Texas during Memorial Day weekend, when millions in the US kick off the summer. The border cities of Brownsville and McAllen set daily records at 100°F and 102°F, respectively, while Del Río broke its own monthly record of 109°F, then a few days later it broke that record when temperatures hit 112°F.   

June 19 marked the first-ever excessive heat wave on record for northeast Maine in a nearly nine-day heat wave that stretched from Ohio to the mid-Atlantic. Impacts were expected on transportation infrastructure, as Amtrak warned travelers they may experience delays as trains need to run at slower speeds when tracks get too hot.  

On July 8, the Third Avenue bridge that connects the Bronx and Manhattan in New York City was stuck in the open position because the high temperatures expanded the steel, prompting city crews to hose down the bridge with water to cool it down. 

From June 27 to July 14, heat wave conditions persisted along the West Coast and Pacific Northwest. In Death Valley National Park, temperatures of 128°F grounded rescue helicopters that could not safely fly to rescue motorcyclists affected by heat. And in Washington state, triple-digit temperatures expanded the asphalt along a county highway, causing delays and emergency road repairs.  

However, these reports do not reveal the profound inequities in who is most exposed to climate impacts. I combined data from our Danger Season tracker with population disadvantage data to assess inequities in population exposure. I found a few concerning things.  

While counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged population experienced, on average, 18 extreme heat alerts during this year’s Danger Season, counties with lower fractions of disadvantaged populations experienced 12 heat alerts. Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest numbers of heat alerts are in Arizona and California, as seen in the table below. Riverside County and Imperial County, both in California top the list with 84 and 77 heat alerts.  

Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest frequency of heat
alerts during the 2024 Danger Season  Wildfires

Wildfires raged on as well this Danger Season. To give an idea, 404 wildfires—threatening 1.6 million acres—were active in the US as of October 21, 2024 according to American Forests. The Park Fire, affecting Tehama and Butte counties in northern California, started on July 24 (allegedly caused by an arsonist) and burned nearly half a million acres on days when there were already wildfire weather and heat alerts in these and adjacent counties.  

The National Centers for Environmental Information tallies the number of fires and acreage burned; as of this writing, data are available to assess Danger Season impacts between May and August. These show a clear seasonal increasing trend in burned acres per fire, indicating that as peak wildfire season was reached in August, wildfires became more and more destructive.  

Wildfires became more destructive, consuming more acres per fire, as peak wildfire season advanced this Danger Season

The top ten counties with at least 25 percent of their population at disadvantage and number of fire weather alerts in the 2024 Danger Season are in Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. Harney County, OR, tops the list with 56 fire weather alerts.  

Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest frequency of fire weather alerts during the 2024 Danger Season  Flooding and Storms

Near-record warm ocean temperatures, a reduction in Atlantic trade winds and wind shear, and the development of La Niña in the Pacific led NOAA to issue an above-normal hurricane season forecast. And the forecast was accurate—17 named storms. Rapid intensification was the defining characteristic of hurricanes this Danger Season. The list is long, but here are some of the most impactful storms.  

Beryl was a long-lived tropical cyclone (June 28 July 11), strengthening into a Category 5 over the Caribbean and making landfall not once, but twice over the Yucatán Peninsula before making landfall as a tropical storm about 100 miles southwest of Houston. Beryl was also the earliest-forming Category 5 storm on record, and poured 3-6 inches in southeast Texas and up to 2 inches in central and southern parts of Louisiana.  

On August 13, Tropical Storm Ernesto rapidly intensified right before grazing Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Although Ernesto did not make landfall in Puerto Rico or the nearby archipelagos, the storm still delivered winds reaching 50 miles per hour (mph, or 80.5 kilometers per hour) and heavy rainfall of up to 10 inches (25.5 cm) across Puerto Rico.  

By the morning of Wednesday, August 14, around 728,000 customers—nearly half of the island—were left without electricity. Many communities also lost access to drinking water, as the water supply systems depend on electric pumps. Flood warnings were issued throughout the island due to the storm’s impact. This storm highlighted the fragile state of the badly-run energy infrastructure in Puerto Rico. 

Hurricane Helene rapidly intensified from 45 to 80 mph (72.4 to 128.7 km/h), and it was blowing at 140 mph (225.3 kph) less than 36 hours later when it made landfall on September 26 as a Category 4 in the Florida Gulf Coast. In states such as North Carolina, the hurricane battered communities with high percentages of people living with disabilities, people of advanced age, or living in mobile homes, all markers of populations that face significant challenges to recover from such disasters.  

And in perhaps the saddest and most sobering reminder that we are running out of places to be safe from climate impacts, the community of Asheville, NC, more than 500 miles from where Helene made landfall, suffered more than 100 deaths from mudslides and other disasters caused by the storm. 

The ninth hurricane of the 2024 season in the Atlantic was Hurricane Milton, which rapidly intensified into a Category 5 on October 7. Milton resulted in at least 24 fatalities, and brought at least 19 tornadoes to Florida.  

These storms and other precipitation activity across the country brought large numbers of flood alerts this Danger Season. The highest number of flood alerts were in counties in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina. These counties have high percentages of people at socio-economic disadvantage. Orange County, TX, tops the list with 131 flood alerts this Danger Season. Newton County, Texas is in third place with 111 flood alerts, and 100% of its population is in disadvantaged status.  

Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest frequency of flood alerts during the 2024 Danger Season  Accurate weather forecasts helped save lives from the destruction of Helene and Milton

The National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) initial forecast for Hurricane Milton predicted a landfall location just 12 miles from the spot where the storm actually came ashore four days later.  This early forecast allowed millions of people to evacuate in advance of the hurricane, which undoubtedly contributed to reducing the loss of life from destructive winds and lethal storm surge.  

We need sustained and increased resources for scientists at key federal agencies such as NOAA and its dependencies (NHC and NWS) to do their job of issuing accurate, timely forecasts of extreme weather events that can minimize the loss of life and property. But if Project 2025 comes to fruition as written, the second Trump administration would break up and downsize NOAA (pro tip for the incoming administration: don’t dismantle NOAA; it’s proven that its science saves lives and property from climate impacts. I just wrote about it here).

This year’s Danger Season showed us that the climate crisis is in full force and worsening, and we need action to reduce global emissions, adapt to the impacts we can’t avoid, and strengthen the country’s scientific capacity to forecast extreme weather events and protect people.  

It’s November, and heat may not be the first thing on your mind. But here’s why it should be and what you can do to help indoor and outdoor workers stay safe from deadly heat. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has issued a proposed heat health safety standard and is taking comments on it through the end of December. Please weigh in to protect workers’ health and safety.

We’re coming off a summer that was the planet’s hottest on record, and millions of people had to work through it in conditions that are risky for their health—even deadly. Many of us interact frequently with outdoor workers or have friends and family who work outdoors. They work construction jobs, or harvest vegetables and fruit, handle baggage on hot airport tarmacs, clean the inside of planes with the AC turned off in between flights, or deliver packages to our doorsteps. In the United States, outdoor workers face a disproportionate risk of heat-related death, which occurs disproportionately among Black and Hispanic people.

Even now, with fall in the air, we are reminded of the harsh reality that fossil-fueled climate change is causing fall to be warmer across the contiguous US, particularly in the southwest. Phoenix, which has experienced record-breaking extended heatwaves this year, endured an unprecedented four days of temperatures of 110°F or higher in October! California too experienced a late-season October heatwave, made worse by climate change. And the first few weeks in November had weirdly warm temperatures across the Northeast.  

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) monthly outlook for October and November looks to follow this trend in which many parts of the US will have above-average temperatures. Warmer temperatures during the fall months could have repercussions on outdoor workers who worked through dangerously hot conditions this past summer.

Our own research finds that outdoor workers’ exposure to extreme heat can be expected to triple or quadruple between now and midcentury depending on the pace of growth in global heat-trapping emissions. As if this projected increase in extreme heat exposure isn’t daunting enough, outdoor workers are also at risk of collectively losing up to $55.4 billion in annual earnings due to extreme heat.

Is there any good news?

Yes! After years and even decades of calls for action, OSHA has finally proposed heat protection standards to help keep workers safe, and we have an opportunity to urge them to quickly finalize the strongest version of these standards.    

On July 2, 2024 OSHA  announced the release of the Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings rulemaking and on August 30 OSHA officially listed the proposed rule in the Federal Register, requesting public comments by December 30, 2024.  

What it does

OSHA’s goal is to prevent and reduce the number of occupational injuries, illnesses, and fatalities caused by exposure to hazardous heat. It would apply to all employers whose workers take part in outdoor and indoor work across industries and in construction, maritime, and agriculture sectors where OSHA has jurisdiction, excluding emergency responders and people working in air-conditioned spaces.    

OSHA’s standard would require employers to create a plan to evaluate and control heat hazards in their workplace and would clarify employer obligations and the steps necessary to effectively protect employees from hazardous heat.

OSHA has also provided a robust and extensive scientific basis for the rule. Section III of the proposed rule provides these science-based background materials, and OSHA also has a one-stop shop webpage with additional background information and resources.

Critical points for public comments 

UCS, alongside a broad coalition of worker justice and public health professionals, has long been calling for these heat-health protections. We have also been weighing in on the OSHA rulemaking process over the years (2022 and 2023).

We hope that you will submit comments in support of OSHA’s rulemaking.

In a recent blogpost, my former colleague Kristina Dahl summarized the proposed rulemaking, noting that while there are areas for improvement that OSHA should address, this is a strong standard that will help keep workers safer from extreme heat.

As you prepare to submit comments on OSHA’s heat standard, below are points from Kristy Dahl’s overview to keep in mind:

1. Support the strong provisions in the heat protection standard which include:

• The core health-protective measures workers need when it’s hot: water, shade, and rest;
• Provisions that require rest breaks to be paid—a real win that will ensure workers don’t have to choose between their health and their livelihoods. UCS research shows that outdoor workers could collectively be losing billions of dollars in earnings due to worsening extreme heat by midcentury if provisions like this are not in place;
• The inclusion of an initial heat trigger at 80°F, above which certain protective measures go into place, and a high heat trigger at 90°F, when those measures get ramped up;
• Requirements that managers involve non-managerial employees in identifying hot spots in workplaces and in developing plans to monitor employees when it’s hot.

2. Highlight how the standard could be improved:

• Written heat injury and illness protection plans should not be exempted for employers with fewer than 10 employers. There are different means of assessing how many employers and employees this would exempt, but it’s safe to say it’s a lot. Pew Research shows that half of small businesses in the US have fewer than five employees, for example. And the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council has used Census data to estimate that nearly 80% of employer firms have fewer than ten employees.
• OSHA should strengthen protections for temporary and part-time workers, many of whom work in construction and agriculture, as recommended by heat and health experts like Juanita Constible.
• Weak and limited recordkeeping requirements. Under the proposed rule, employers would not be required to keep records of heat illnesses and injuries experienced in their workplaces or how those cases were resolved. Employers would only be required to keep six months’ worth of records of workplace temperatures.
• Fixed length for rest breaks. The rest break policy is set at a minimum of 15 minutes every two hours rather than progressively longer breaks as the temperature rises, as was suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in their 2016 recommendations.  
• Shorter-than-needed acclimatization periods. The proposed rule requires employers to implement a gradual period of acclimatization for new workers that is, at a minimum, four days long. Science suggests this is much too short. OSHA’s own data has shown that most workplace heat-related fatalities occur during the first week on the job. And the CDC notes that acclimatization can take longer than one week.
• Improve sedentary work activity protections. We are pleased OSHA included more specificity on what constitutes sedentary work indoors and encourage OSHA to maintain, at a minimum, this language. However, workers’ exposure to sufficiently extreme heat even when sedentary can present serious harms. Given this, we encourage OSHA to consider a stipulation in which the standard does not apply to those engaged in sedentary work activities in environments where the heat index is below 110 °F but does apply in environments above that threshold.
• Monitoring conditions at work sites or with local forecasts. This policy has the potential to provide insufficient protection for workers because measurements from the weather stations used to determine forecasts might differ from measurements at local worksites. Instead, we recommend OSHA strengthen this policy by requiring employers to monitor the on-site heat index or wet bulb globe temperature throughout the day. Alternatively, employers could note that if the daily maximum heat index forecast exceeds relevant thresholds, they would then implement protection measures for the full workday regardless of how temperature and humidity evolve throughout the day.

If you have expertise on worker conditions, public health or if you’re simply interested in submitting a more substantial set of comments you may be interested in reading and lending support to our full set of UCS comments on the heat protection standard. You could also draw from fellow advocate Juanita Constible’s excellent blog post about the proposed rule and this recent helpful NPR interview with experts including Kristina Dahl. We also recommend that you read the proposed rule itself and decide how you’d like to respond. For even more in-depth data, you may wish to review UCS’s reports Killer Heat and Too Hot To Work.

Whatever route you choose, we urge you to consider submitting a comment. The health and wellbeing of the roughly 36 million outdoor and indoor workers in the U.S. depends on this standard being as strong as possible, and it’s up to all of us to ensure it lives up to its potential.

State and local protections to complement the OSHA standard

While we are very close to being able to celebrate a productive end to this long OSHA heat standard journey (since the 1970’s), there are still multiple stages in the rulemaking process that will take months or years to finalize so the work doesn’t stop here.

We also need state and local protection standards. Why you ask? Good question. Currently only a few states and localities have heat protection standards and even when we have a final federal standard, states and localities can do more to tailor their policies to better reflect local conditions and employee needs while also lending to an increase in monitoring and enforcement of these standards so that fewer workers are left to the mercy of their employer. For more on state and local policies, see Public Citizens Scorched States report card and Section III, Part D of the proposed rule.

With your help, we’ll get a strong and final federal rule requiring employers to implement OSHA’s heat-protection standard. Moving forward we will also work to advocate for strong state and local standards. Thank you for your efforts in helping to keep workers safe from dangerously hot working conditions!

It may feel like we are facing a grim reality. Regardless of people’s beliefs, the facts show us the increasing toll from an unaddressed climate crisis. Globally, this year is going strong as the warmest on record and likely one of the coolest we’ll see in the decades ahead. In Spain, recent catastrophic flooding, the most devastating in Europe since 1967, has cost more than 200 lives. And locally, this year marks the second highest number of red flag warnings in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, with fires threatening to damage homes.  

Annual global mean temperature anomalies from January – September 2024 (relative to the 1950-1900 average) from six international datasets. Source: WMO 

In these dire times, it’s a huge relief to see that here in Massachusetts, state legislators rolled up their sleeves to protect their constituents now through steady climate action, passing An Act promoting a clean energy grid, advancing equity and protecting ratepayers, which Governor Maura Healey supports and is expected to sign shortly. This is a huge reason for hope and celebration! 

The legislation includes multiple components to decrease heat-trapping emissions from the electricity, transportation, and building sectors, including streamlining the siting process for clean energy projects, increasing energy storage targets, enabling a robust electric vehicle charging system, and implementing measures to protect ratepayers and reduce overreliance on gas in buildings and homes. In particular, I am celebrating two key achievements of this legislation related to clean energy siting and gas overreliance.  

Advancing faster, more equitable siting of clean energy infrastructure 

While the ability to build quickly is a key component of a clean energy transition, doing so with appropriate attention to the needs of communities, particularly to those who have been most heavily burdened by energy infrastructure and pollution, is just as crucial.  

Our own recent analysis found that to date, infrastructure siting has put a disproportionate burden on environmental justice (EJ) communities where people of color, low-income people, and limited-English proficient speakers live across the state. While close to 50 percent of Massachusetts neighborhoods (2,604 of 4,985 census block groups) classify as EJ neighborhoods, more than 80 percent of existing polluting electricity generating units—with their associated health risks—are located in or within one mile of an EJ neighborhood. 

The existing siting process has resulted in a high concentration of polluting electricity generating units in and near environmental justice neighborhoods. Source: UCS, with Alternatives for Community and Environment, GreenRoots, and the Conservation Law Foundation. 

With that in mind, it’s really encouraging to see that the three key recommendations from our analysis, guided by priorities from the Massachusetts Environmental Justice Table, were included in the new legislation to advance the siting of new clean energy infrastructure in the Commonwealth: 

• requiring a robust cumulative impacts analysis,  

• expanding the state’s Energy Facilities Siting Board to include representation from environmental justice and Indigenous sovereignty perspectives, and  

• integrating public health and climate change as priorities for decision-making.   

Addressing the state’s gas overreliance problem in buildings 

Buildings are the second largest source of heat trapping emissions in Massachusetts. As the state works to achieve its climate goals, it’s essential to explicitly put in place measures to move away from gas use in buildings.   

The new legislation gives particular attention to this issue by: 

• Allowing gas utilities to build networked geothermal projects. This is an important tool to replace fossil fuels for heating and cooling entire neighborhoods.  

• Prioritizing short-term repairs or retiring stretches of gas pipelines instead of continued investments in costly pipe replacements. 

• Considering alternatives such as electric heating and cooking before allowing for more gas hookups. This is good not only for the climate, but for the health of Massachusetts households by reducing indoor air pollution from gas stoves.  

Rising to meet the challenge ahead 

The job is not done yet. Despite this welcome good news, the new legislation does have some concerning elements and leaves plenty of work for the next legislative session. Of particular concern is the inclusion of nuclear fusion as a technology that qualifies for the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, a tool created to incentivize the generation of energy using commercially available technologies that harvest natural sources that are constantly replenished, like the wind and the sun (hence renewable energy) . The inclusion of fusion, a technology that’s not going to yield any practical source of electricity generation in the foreseeable future, is at best a distraction from the urgent need to decarbonize our electric grid with available and proven renewable energy technologies. 

While this new legislation will build on the state’s climate progress, including recent pieces of legislation like a net zero by 2050 goal, increased investments in offshore wind, and key protections for its most pollution burden communities, there is still a lot of work ahead of us, especially given the incoming Trump administration and the increased importance of state action.  

But for today, I want to express my sincere gratitude to our legislators for passing this bill, to Gov. Maura Healey and her administration for their leadership in prioritizing the health and well-being of their constituents and our shared planet, and giving us this much-needed breath of fresh air. Thank you!