We’re all lonelier than we used to be. So much so that government agencies are calling a public health crisis.

The easy culprits are smartphones and social media, which warp our sense of self and connection: Why meet up, when you can text? Why be in the moment, when you can post? Why approach someone in a bar, when you can swipe?

Aside from that very real problem, we may have another culprit: climate change. As people from Europe to the United States sweat through the hottest summers of their lives on record, the social toll is adding up: Heat waves cancel events, delay travel, ruin vacations, and drive people inside.

• According to a new poll, 90% of Americans say that extreme heat has affected their lives, up from 83% two years ago. Two of every three people say it’s affecting their outdoor activities, and two of every five say it’s affecting their travel plans — both up from two years ago.

Wildfire smoke also throws a wrench in plans, blanketing regions with toxins and having similar isolating effects to extreme heat.

In both cases, the blame rests with climate change — an unfortunate but direct consequence of burning fossil fuels to power homes, buildings, factories, and vehicles — which makes heat waves much more likely and Canada’s forests more likely to burn.

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As Americans retreat into their air-conditioned alcoves, they lose out on valuable time with friends and family and also the memories made with them. Even for those without A/C, sitting in front of an electric fan can feel more appealing than trekking across a sweltering city or sitting outside at a ballgame.

I’m particularly interested in this sports angle because sports are absolutely essential to many people’s social life. Whether as a spectator or an athlete, sports are one of the most universal ways that people bond, offering a chance to do something beyond just drinking at a bar.

Yet more and more games are being canceled or delayed by climate impacts. The few brave that do attend or play can face heat- and smoke-related risks. For kids, these impacts can hit harder, hindering their ability to play outside with friends and even cancelling school outright.

There are also financial costs to extreme heat. If people leave their homes during a heat wave, they may be more likely to take ride services, like Uber or Lyft, which act as portable A/C units but also cost money (not to mention eliminate the very real social interactions of walking down the street). Same thing if they order in with delivery apps.

Throw in the added expense of pumping the A/C at home, and you’re eating into “going out” money just to stay cool.

• One analysis finds that cooling degree days have increased in 97% of major U.S. cities since 1970, with households in several states spending $500+/year on average just for cooling. That can fund a whole boys trip!

To be clear, climate change is not the root of loneliness. But by forcing us inside, it further fuels the loneliness epidemic and all that comes with it: a loss of connection, a hit to our mental health, and a weakened social fabric that is essential for any community.

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To combat this, the obvious answer is to stop burning fossil fuels, so that it doesn’t get any hotter. But to deal with the dual costs of climate change and loneliness, communities also must learn to adapt.

One way they can do so is by investing in more gathering spaces and events that bring people together, while keeping them safe from the heat and the smoke. Such events can restore some of that social connection needed to share knowledge, form bonds, and give us an avenue to get out and meet people, despite the heat.

Air-conditioning and fans are great for staying cool at home, but it’s hard to make memories from the couch.

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I’m the last person to write an article about electric vehicles. I haven’t owned a car in seven years and regularly dunk on cars, even electric ones.

Still, if I ever buy another car, I’d prefer one that’s electric. That’s because transportation accounts for the largest slice of climate pollution in the United States, and globally EVs avoid the use of 2.3 million barrels of oil/day. But it’s also because EVs are cleaner, quieter, and easier to maintain than their gas-powered counterparts.

Despite these benefits, EVs still only make up 10% of new U.S. car sales, far behind Western Europe and China. This is partially because many Americans still don’t feel comfortable switching to EVs, routinely citing concerns about charging, cost, and range.

But are these concerns valid?

On a trip to Michigan last month, I spent several hours in an EV leased by my friend Logan, who recently made the switch to his first all-electric vehicle. From him I learned about the ins and outs of EVs but also about these perceived barriers to EV adoption.

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Concern #1: Charging availability

In a recent survey, a third of respondents said they had no place to charge where they lived. In another, a fifth said their top concern about EVs is unreliable charging networks. This is a real problem.

“Charger availability is probably the single most important thing to consider when debating on getting an EV,” said Logan, a software engineer who lives in Cincinnati. “This will single-handly make or break your entire experience.”

Logan has access to EV charging both at his apartment and his work, so he can almost always plug in his car when he’s working or sleeping and return to a full charge. But without those, he’d have a very different experience.

“If you don’t have access to a convenient charger at your apartment, or you can’t install one in your home, I would probably not recommend EVs because you’re going to have to fast charge, which is expensive,” he said.

Concern #2: Price tag

Speaking of costs, EVs aren’t cheap. Logan told me his EV was listed at double what he paid for his Ford Bronco several years earlier. But he added that he recoups a lot of that money by avoiding ballooning costs at the pump.

And though fast charging is expensive, most charging, like the kind in many apartments or parking garages, is much more affordable.

“Right now in my apartment I pay about 25 cents for three miles,” said Logan. “If you own your home, and you have your own charger, you’re paying six cents for three miles. So imagine filling up your tank of gas for seven dollars — that’s the kind of savings that you can get with an EV.”

EVs are also much easier to maintain than gas-powered vehicles, as they have fewer parts, and don’t need oil changes.

Concern #3: Range anxiety

Finally, many worry their EVs can’t make it on “road trips.” This concern is perhaps the most overblown, largely because almost all trips drivers take (commuting, errands, outings) are well within an EV’s range.

This aligns with new research that finds that many people underestimate — by as much as 30% — how many daily tasks they can do in an EV. And when you do vacation or road trip, EV drivers have plenty of options.

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“The number of times I’m charging 300-plus miles on a single drive is maybe two, three times a year,” said Logan. “That does require a little bit more planning, but there are plenty of tools and resources out there because I’m not the only EV driver.”

But these resources aren’t perfect. Though apps will tell you where to find chargers, some are in private lots or not working.

I saw this firsthand when we spent 25 minutes looking for an overnight charging port because our hotel didn’t have one — which is really frustrating when there’s So. Much. Parking.

After a couple days cruising through Michigan, I came away with a more nuanced view of electric vehicles. Concerns about EVs are real. Upfront costs do push EVs out of reach for many, and not enough chargers exist nationwide (though that’s changing). Still, most people would be surprised by how well EVs fit into everyday life.

“Many of the fears that people have about EVs seem to be more in imagining what could go wrong than in daily reality,” Logan said.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether electric vehicles are ready for America. It’s whether Americans are ready to rethink what they’ve been told about electric vehicles.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Crippling heat, plus an unhealthy dose of wildfire smoke, is forcing us inside — spoiling what could be a beautiful summer day.

• Of course, summer is hot. That’s what makes it summer. But what we’re seeing is a warped version of it, because we keep burning fossil fuels: For example, this week’s heat wave in the Western United States was made five times more likely by climate change.

As we all retreat to our air-conditioned alcoves, we lose what could be another beautiful day outside. But we’re also losing nights of sleep inside.

A new study from Climate Central tells the story:

• Between 2020 and 2025, higher temperatures have robbed us of nearly 56 hours of sleep/year.

• In the last 50 years, sleep loss linked to climate change–fueled nights has doubled.

This builds on previous research from the organization: Across the U.S., summer nighttime temperatures in the last 50 years have warmed on average by 3.1°F. At our current pace of warming, we could see extremely hot summer days and nights four to eight times more often by the end of the century.

When people are literally dying from the heat, a couple nights of tossing and turning doesn’t seem too bad. But part of this newsletter is to ensure we don’t overlook the wide-ranging effects of climate change. And sleep is really important!

Though extremely hot summer days are obviously dangerous, when followed by hot nights, they’re even more so. That’s because without cooler nights, we lose another way to cool down, which could open us up to additional health risks.

Not only do hot nights make it harder for people to get much needed rest but warmer nighttime temperatures can slow cognitive function, increase the chance of workplace accidents, and hurt brain development, learning and school performance for children.

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It’s even worse for vulnerable populations, including children, pregnant people, older adults, incarcerated people, unhoused people, outdoor workers, those with disabilities, and those with chronic health conditions.

• One study found that the impacts of warmer nighttime temperatures are twice as large for older adults, compared with middle-aged adults, and nearly three times as large for people in lower-middle-income countries, compared with people in high-income countries.

For many Americans, the answer seems obvious. Pump the air conditioning. After all, A/C, like cooler night time temperatures, offers a reprieve from the heat of the day.

But as I’ve written several times before, A/C isn’t a silver bullet.

A/C is often tied to geography: Everyone in the U.S. and Japan may own A/C units, but globally, only 40% of the world has access to air conditioning — and that number is lower in Europe, Southeast Asia, and India.

Access to A/C is also tied to money, as many lower-income people either lack or cannot afford to run A/C. Even for those who can afford it, A/C uses a lot of energy, which strains grids at a time when energy supply is notably limited (think: data centers).

And of course, there’s pollution. Many A/C units also pump super pollutants into the air, which warms our Planet, and waste heat into the street, which warms your neighborhood.

If not A/C, then what else? Aside from ditching fossil fuels for clean energy, which should be our top priority, we do have some short-term options.

Many homes in Europe are designed to trap heat instead of withstand it. Homeowners can change this by sealing windows, adding ceiling fans, and blocking daytime heat with coverings or curtains.

Cities can also add more greener spaces to combat urban heat islands and adjust building codes to encourage more ventilation and airflow. In places like Dubai, the government redirects waste heat to cooling plants outside of the city. And in Phoenix, the city operates 24-hour cooling centers.

Life’s hard enough with work, money, relationships, and the existential dread of living in 2026. The last thing we need is climate change keeping us up at night.

For ways to stay safe in the heat, check out these resources.

What if you could see plenty of diverse wildlife without ever leaving your car?

You don’t need to be in a national forest or state park to spot foxes, coyotes, bobcats, rabbits, turtles, snakes, armadillos, deer, or any number of birds and rodents. As long as you’re okay with a little blood and guts, America’s Interstate Highway System offers an unparalleled view.

At least that was my experience on a recent cross-country road trip. On one particularly gruesome day, my friend and I counted 237 dead animals — or one dead animal every two minutes for eight hours.

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While Planet Days often focuses on the negative effects cars have on people and cities, I often ignore the wide-ranging effects on animals. And that’s a big oversight: U.S. roads kill about one million vertebrate animals every day.

• That’s the conundrum of the road, as Ben Goldfarb puts it in his book Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of the Planet: “To us, roads signify connection and escape; to other life-forms, they spell death and division.”

Unfortunately, like the 40,000+ annual human deaths, roadkill is largely treated as an inevitable consequence to a nation reliant on the automobile and the four million miles of roads that serve it. So how do we address a problem that is largely ignored?

The first step is to recognize the problem. Though less than 1% of the U.S. is paved over, 20% of the nation’s land is in some way affected by roads, from air and noise pollution to habitat destruction.

• Just as deadly, these roads slice up ecosystems, cutting off whole parts of land from native species. The result is not merely a rabbit meeting its bloody end — it’s the slow death of an entire rabbit species, trapped into corners of isolated homogeneity.

To avoid runaway extinction then, humans must learn to coexist with animals.

The good news is that existing roads can be made much safer with easy and relatively cheap fixes, such as wildlife crossings, tunnels, bridges, culverts, and fences. Many of these solutions are inexpensive and incredibly effective, especially when placed in the most dangerous areas.

• One study finds that fences can reduce roadkill by up to 80%, while combining fences with culverts can reduce roadkill by up to 98.5%.

Of course, every road is different. More opossums or squirrels call for rope bridges. Frogs and salamanders? Culverts. Bobcats and deer? Underpasses. If we want to simply keep animals away or funnel them to another place? Fences.

Reduced speed is also critical. Governments should adjust speed limits, especially at dawn and dusk when wildlife is most active. But they shouldn’t stop there. Roads should be designed in ways that slow down drivers, from narrower lanes to increased paint and signage.

Though it sounds drastic, sometimes we need to remove roads altogether. Writes Goldfarb in Crossings: “Roadless areas are planetary buffers against extinction… Road networks, like economies and tumors, are predisposed to grow; it’s crucial that ours begin to shrink.”

• For example, by retiring only 1% of U.S. Forest Service roads annually for 25 years, we could boost wildlife habitat by 25%.

This is especially relevant given Congress’s current attacks against the Roadless Rule. Passed in 2001, the Roadless Rule prevents roadbuilding and logging on the nearly 59 million acres of national forest land, a rare outright win for animals.

• While opponents of this law argue that a lack of roads hinders wildfire management, in fact it does the opposite: In many places, roads increase the risk to wildlife, bringing people (and their cars and campfires and cigarettes and fireworks) into otherwise untouched land.

Of course, any interventions to protect animals will also protect people.

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With such measures, we’d save billions of dollars in hospital bills, vehicle damages, and car insurance spikes. And we’d prevent animal suffering and the very real human grief that comes with it (many reading this have unintentionally hit a squirrel, bird, or raccoon — or god forbid someone’s dog or cat — and shouldered the emotional burden of doing so).

It’s easy to see roads as serving one purpose: getting us from point A to point B. But roads are much more than that. Whether we like it or not, an open road for a human can be a dead end for an animal. It’s time we start treating it as such.

There’s nothing more American than a roadtrip.

I, like many insufferable English majors in college, got really into Jack Kerouac’s delirious On the Road, alongside John Steinbeck’s more muted Travels with Charley. Both books glorify the open road as quintessentially American.

Capturing this spirit, reality star–turned Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently launched a YouTube series, The Great American Road Trip, where he and his wife cart around their 11(!) kids on a cross-country road trip.

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“The motto is to love America is to see America,” said Duffy in the series trailer. “It’s more than a road trip, it’s a civic experience. It’s one of the most powerful ways to understand the vast, beautiful, complicated place we call home.”

Despite the questionable ethics, tone deafness, and general cringiness of the series, I’m not really that offended by a transportation agency trying to promote tourism and travel. I just think there’s a better, cheaper, and greener way to see the country and celebrate America’s birthday — one that centers on Duffy’s department’s oft-neglected stepchild: Amtrak.

For each of the last five years, I’ve taken a long train trip on Amtrak, the country’s federally operated passenger rail system. I’ve chronicled these trips, good and bad, in past posts. But no matter the experience, one thing rings true: Amtrak offers an unparalleled view of the country and the small towns and big cities that make it.

• Amtrak’s routes stretch from sea to shining sea. They traverse through purple mountains majesty and burst through amber waves of grain. They connect far-flung cities, from the sea-side towns of New England to the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles.

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So if the goal of a cross-country trip is to better understand the nation and its history, as Duffy’s video series promotes, Amtrak does just that. And it does so without the inconvenience of white-knuckling through traffic, spending exorbitant amounts of money on gas, or pumping as much pollution into the atmosphere.

Today, though, Amtrak’s trains seem like a relic of the past. Like streetcars in downtowns, many long-distance routes have been replaced by the car — with car ownership and highways rendering many train journeys obsolete. And once neglected, these routes are hard to revive:

• Without proper and consistent funding for Amtrak, rail services get slashed, which means fewer trains and routes, and maintenance gets deferred, which means trains that do run are slower and less efficient.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy: With slower trains that run less, even fewer people want to ride them, leading to more cuts.

The thing is, Duffy can use his platform and agency to revive Amtrak. And there are plenty of reasons why American passenger rail should return to its former glory:

• Amtrak trains produce only a fraction of climate pollution as cars or planes — and even less if they’re electrified.

• In our age of work from “home,” trains offer mobile workspaces, with way more space and flexibility than any other mode of transit.

• Train journeys can be both relaxing and interesting: They provide freedom, space, and social interactions, all with a scenic backdrop.

• And of course, the train — which helped launch American tourism by opening up the country — is a great way to celebrate America 250.

So Secretary Duffy: As much fun as it is to watch your family gas up the car and hit the road, you miss an opportunity to shine light on a once great system.

I implore you instead to swap gas stations for train stations and hit the rails for a cross-country train trip. Maybe you’ll even hole up in a seedy train station in the dead of night, as Amtrak’s limited service has forced me to do, and see firsthand what underfunded rail means for so many in Middle America.

And then I ask that you do something about it: Amtrak needs consistent, reliable funding from the federal and state governments. With it, we can create a system that people want and, for your purposes, one that we can be proud of as we celebrate America 250.

Calls for a gas tax holiday have reached a tipping point.

Suspending the $0.18/gallon tax on gas has been backed by President Trump, several prominent Republicans, and even some populist Democrats. State taxes on gas have already been suspended in Indiana, Georgia, and Kentucky.

• This has been going on for months, in response to the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, which has effectively blocked oil tankers from traveling through the Strait of Hormuz and sent gas prices through the roof.

Though relieving voters’ wallets is top of mind for many politicians, revoking the gas tax is far from a good idea — especially when many better climate-friendly solutions already exist.

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The problem with gas tax holidays

First, since this is a climate newsletter, let’s start with the climate implications of a gas tax holiday. In a world of carrots and sticks, the gas tax is one of the few sticks that actually attempts to quantify the cost of driving.

• Revoking that small stick will make it much more difficult to increase the tax in the future, which is what we should do — especially since cars spew pollution, create traffic, degrade infrastructure, and kill tens of thousands of Americans annually.

A gas tax holiday also doesn’t address the supply problem of our gas crunch. Such a holiday may even be counterproductive: Discounted gas can encourage driving (i.e., increase demand), which would further increase prices.

Finally, suspending the gas tax doesn’t provide any real financial relief. One analysis found that a gas holiday would cause gas prices to fall about $0.13/gallon. Put another way, filling a 15-gallon tank once a week between June 1 and October 1 would save a household about $35 total.

• Meanwhile, the move would cost the federal government about $500 million/week, or about $17 billion over a five-month period. That’s a massive tradeoff, which has been pointed out by several high-ranking officials, including Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

Better ways to offer relief

So if not scrap the gas tax, what should we do? As Sen. Chuck Schumer put it simply: “The best way to lower costs is to end this illegal war.”

Aside from that, though (sigh), politicians do have tools to provide immediate financial relief, while also addressing the root of high gas prices: our dependence on a volatile fossil fuel–based energy system.

First, federal policymakers can tax excess profits of large oil and gas companies, who have benefited from the war in Iran. The government can then give that money back to consumers or invest it in locally sourced renewables.

• The problem with this on its own is that Big Oil is pretty good at avoiding these taxes. As reported by The New York Times: After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, France’s windfall taxes on oil producers raised only a fraction of what was expected.

Second, lawmakers can revoke fossil fuel industry incentives — such as tax credits, direct payments, or subsidies — that artificially lower the cost of doing business. Better yet, they can realign these incentives toward clean energy, jumpstarting renewable investments or electric vehicle purchases.

• Energy company Ørsted famously transitioned from an oil and gas company to a global leader in offshore wind with support from the Danish government.

Such repurposed subsidies can also go toward freezing power rate increases or upgrading energy infrastructure to keep electricity costs low.

Third, governments can just tax the ultra-rich, who are disproportionately unaffected by gas prices. The wealthy may complain about costs at the pump, but they’ll mostly go about their business; for poorer people, though, high gas prices upend routines, forcing them to drive less, carpool, or take public transit. So it makes sense to level the playing field a bit.

It’s natural for politicians to prioritize short-term relief over long-term climate goals. But the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Governments have many ways to lower costs for consumers, while reducing reliance on a volatile and dirty system.

A gas tax holiday isn’t one of them.

The NBA recently took formal steps toward adding teams in Las Vegas and Seattle — which would be the first league expansion in over 20 years.

You may not care about professional basketball (Go Cavs), but the Planet does. Sports create a lot of carbon pollution. And though the NBA has committed to halving its carbon footprint by 2030, individual teams’ commitments to these goals vary widely.

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So by starting from scratch, two expansion teams can create models of sustainability for the rest of the league and its fans. Below are my thoughts on how the NBA can leverage its expansion to create a greener league and a greener Planet.

Arena construction and location

The most immediate climate impact for expansion teams is the construction of new arenas. The good news is that hockey and basketball teams have been sharing venues for decades — and both Seattle and Las Vegas have hockey teams.

Though it’s tempting to build a new arena in Vegas, the cheapest and easiest solution is also the greenest: retrofitting the 10-year-old T-Mobile Arena, where the NHL’s Golden Knights play, to accommodate basketball. Unlike some proposals, T-Mobile Arena is already on the Las Vegas Strip with semi-reasonable access to transit. The same goes for Seattle: Climate Pledge Arena, where the NHL’s Kraken play, is near downtown and connected to bus and rail lines.

In both cases, location is key: Fan travel accounts for 65–80% of a carbon footprint of the event industry. Teams can offer more climate-friendly ways (and incentives, like free fares) to get to arenas. And the easiest way to do that is by placing venues downtown.

Waste and energy

Of course, location isn’t everything. Games create a lot of waste and use a lot of energy. So any new teams should see how other teams are trailblazing (no pun intended).

In Portland, the Trail Blazers launched a first-of-its-kind program to swap plastic and compostable cups for reusable ones, eliminating more than 320,000 single-use cups in a single season. And in Atlanta, the Hawks have diverted at least 90% of fan-created waste from landfills since 2021.

Any home game played by a new team should also be powered by clean energy, as is the trend with newer arenas. Both the Los Angeles Clippers’ Intuit Dome and the Sacramento Kings’ Golden1 Center are completely solar powered. And when Las Vegas hosted the Super Bowl, Allegiant Stadium was powered entirely by a 621,000-panel solar farm in the Nevada desert.

Even more can be done by partnering with local farms on soil restoration projects or by offering more plant-based options at games.

Scheduling

While fan travel creates the most pollution for any sporting event, team travel still makes up around 5% of league emissions — with about 1.3 million air miles flown by its teams during a regular season.

Several years ago, the NBA introduced “baseball” series, in which teams cut down on travel by staying in the same city for multiple games. And in cities with two teams, visitors stay to play both teams.

• Quick aside: A more radical approach would be to coordinate schedules by conference, as the MLB did with its American and National Leagues for years. Instead of traveling coast to coast, Eastern and Western Conference teams would play regular season games in their half of the country — but that will never happen because money.

Such a hyperlocal approach can also take advantage of non-flying options. A new Seattle team can take regional rail to play Portland, and a new Vegas team can take Brightline West’s future high-speed rail to play L.A. teams.

Team name

Yes, even naming a team can be a climate win. When the NFL’s Washington Commanders were looking for a name, they briefly explored the red wolves — a critically endangered species that once roamed the D.C. area.

Though Seattle’s team will likely be named the Sonics, the new Vegas team name is up for grabs. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 56 species in Nevada are threatened or endangered. How about the Vegas Wolverines? Red Foxes? Blazingstars (a type of plant)? These names can encompass the resilience and endurance of a desert species, while also catalyzing efforts to protect habitats and boost populations.

• (Any new teams should also avoid slapping an oil/gas logo on their jerseys or arenas and ensure that all corporate partnerships align with the team’s commitments to sustainability.)

Sports are incredibly popular, attended and watched by tens of millions of fans every year. That gives the NBA a ripe opportunity to make sustainability visible and accessible — especially to those fans who don’t regularly think about it.

With a potential expansion in the works, two new NBA teams are in prime position to make change, setting an example for the rest of the league.

A country of illusion.

That’s what Marc Reisner calls the American West in his book Cadillac Desert, which chronicles our reckless depletion of water from Colorado to California: “In the West,” he continues, “logic and reason have never figured prominently in the scheme of things.”

Nowhere is that illusion more apparent than Phoenix, Arizona, the booming desert metropolis that routinely hits triple-digit temperatures and imports over a third of its water from hundreds of miles away. Some even call Phoenix the “world’s least sustainable city.”

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But despite their obvious flaws, combined with the irreversible threat of climate change, thirsty boomtowns like Phoenix also showcase humanity’s ability to adapt.

Hear me out. Phoenix is a model of hubris, a middle finger to the limits of nature. In previous posts, I’ve scoffed at the long-term livability of cities like these, which drain our tax dollars to allow communities to survive such a harsh climate:

• For example, the federally funded Central Arizona Project syphons water to Phoenix from the Colorado River, which is littered with federally funded dams.

But pointing out the obvious problems of living in Phoenix, which logged 122 days of triple-digit heat in 2025, is counterproductive. Because anyway, even if millions of desert dwellers packed up and left, where would they go? And who would go? It quickly becomes a messy problem of justice and equity.

Instead, let’s focus on what’s in front of us: that living in an incredibly dry and hostile environment has actually brought about some pretty creative and scalable climate solutions.

First, Phoenix is a model of water conservation. This is a matter of necessarily but also some really effective public policy:

• Several years ago, the Phoenix City Council unanimously passed a water conservation policy that regulates large water users, prioritizes native and drought-tolerant plants, and sets standards for lawns, outdoor irrigation, and swimming pools.

• And across the state, 93% of water that enters wastewater treatment is recycled.

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Second, the American West is a hub for potential solar energy: Arizona has the third-highest grid battery capacity and the fourth-highest solar capacity in the country. Last year, the Grand Canyon State was the second-biggest state for battery and solar construction.

• With so much solar potential, Arizona has more than enough energy to power the homes of a booming population, so long as it regulates power- and water-hungry data centers and stays true to its renewable energy policies and investments.

Of course, all these water and energy gains make little difference if they’re reinvested in sprawl. In the Sun Belt especially, most growth has been suburban growth — driven by low taxes, cheap land and water, and federal funding to subsidize suburban infrastructure. Such growth stresses water supplies, encroaches on fragile ecosystems, and spews air and climate pollution.

But in 2023, Arizona also acknowledged that continuous sprawl is a fantasy, mostly because there’s not enough groundwater to meet growing demand. As a result, governments and builders are set to shift and even undo the region’s suburban development. As Bloomberg wrote around the time:

“Builders might rethink large homes set around lush golf courses. Residential development may move from the exurban fringes to closer-in locations with water access. Tracts without water might be developed for industrial or commercial uses rather than housing.”

And then there’s Culdesac in Tempe, a 17-acre walkable community surrounded by shops, restaurants, parks, and co-working spaces, all without a single private parking spot.

• By bringing the city to the suburbs, Culdesac is not only creating healthier, more enjoyable places to live; it’s creating greener neighborhoods with better connections to water and public transit.

It’s easy to write off Phoenix as a city that shouldn’t exist. And living there does have obvious challenges, especially given extended droughts and record–high temperatures made worse by climate change. But there are also real conservation, energy, and urbanist solutions in the desert.

These places show us that when faced with dwindling water supplies or stressed energy grids, we can get creative — and create greener communities in the process.

What does it mean to be green? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years — so much so that I started this newsletter to work through the problem.

Last Sunday, I got one answer.

Wrapping up a four-day bender — er, I mean spring training trip — in Phoenix, my friends and I went to see the Suns, the city’s professional basketball team. And lucky for me (and this newsletter), the game was presented as “Sustainability Night.”

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But instead of an honest discourse about what it means to be sustainable, the team largely focused on actions that have very little impact: recycling and reusable bags.

• In other words, they used the night as a platform for greenwashing — when we focus on environmental wins that do little to address environmental problems.

Of course, I’m being too harsh. After all, the Suns’ job is to entertain people, not communicate about climate change. And the night was sponsored by Footprint, an Arizona-based material science company in the business of replacing single-use plastic, not decommissioning coal plants.

But at the same time, the evening felt stale. The few sustainability-themed showcases were limited to recycling challenges, prize wheels, and a lot of t-shirt tosses — ironic, considering that giveaways contribute to the very waste problem Footprint hopes to solve.

I get that it’s really hard to talk about the root of climate change — burning fossil fuels — when the NBA doesn’t want to piss off other sponsors, like oil and gas companies, utilities, airlines, and automakers.

But knowing that you can’t solve climate change at a Sunday home game against the Hornets, I still think the Suns and Footprint could’ve been more effective:

• For example, instead of a recycling-sorting challenge (since recycling really doesn’t matter), the Suns could have hosted trivia about global plastic pollution or what the team is doing about it.

• And instead of t-shirt or reusable bag giveaways, Footprint could have offered free drinks in one of its plastic-free disposable cups or discounts to one of its products.

The whole thing could’ve been packaged into interactive trivia where people could answer questions about the true costs of plastic pollution, consumption habits, and sector-specific emissions.

This would all be more in line with the team’s sustainability webpage, which features actually impactful initiatives like free public transit, solar panel installation, and a goal to eliminate single-use plastic throughout the arena (shoutout to the $2 aluminum cans of Dasani water).

On their own, these efforts won’t solve climate change, but they’re great ways to get people thinking about real solutions.

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Instead, the Suns reverted to their bread and butter as loud and flashy entertainers, catering to an attention-deficit crowd, while failing to diverge from safe messaging that makes Big Oil happy because it fails to challenge the fossil fuel–powered economy in which we all live.

• Because when you feel empowered to recycle, you are less likely to question true threats to sustainability, like why everyone needs a car and why these cars, and your grid, are powered by burning fossil fuels, which pollute your air and heat your Planet — not to mention are incredibly vulnerable to international conflict.

The thing is, Footprint isn’t a greenwashing company — they’re not really about recycling as much as they’re about eliminating plastic pollution (and what plastic is made out of: fossil fuels). Meanwhile, the Suns, like other NBA teams, are incredibly influential due to their massive following — plus, many teams DO have truly sustainable initiatives!

Combined, these sorts of partnerships can normalize talking about climate change and promoting real sustainability solutions to a largely untapped market.

They just need to do a better job at talking about it.

“We’re not Europe.”

That’s a common refrain in the United States, usually employed by those pushing back on “progressive” European reforms — from universal healthcare to social safety nets to public transit.

For example, Americans are quick to brush off bike lanes as too Dutch or car-free zones as too Parisian. “Those things are nice,” they say, “but they won’t happen here.”

But that falsely assumes that the Dutch and the French have a monopoly on bikes and plazas — when Europe, like the U.S., has spent much of the last century building cities around cars, usually at the expense of everyone else.

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Yet today, Europe has much better train systems, safer bike lanes, more connected neighborhoods, and more accessible parks — all things Americans want (otherwise U.S. neighborhoods with them wouldn’t be so damn expensive to live in).

In other words, the U.S. stands to learn from Europe on ways to build better cities. But by defaulting to American exceptionalism and dismissing European reforms as too European, we sacrifice opening our minds to real solutions that can make our cities and lives better.

If you want to open your mind just a little, though, a great place to start is Belgium — mostly because Belgium has long been dominated by the car, more so than many of its neighbors.

• In the mid-20th century, Belgians embraced the car as the future, transforming its capital to the needs of the automobile.

• Major cities widened streets, removed streetcars, and razed neighborhoods — all in preference to the car (sound familiar?).

• Across the country, governments converted famous plazas and canals into parking lots, most famously in Grand-Place in Brussels.

• It was like this for years: Brussels gained a reputation for its gridlock, while accumulating more parking spots than residents.

Then something changed. Cities started listening to their constituents, many of whom supported measures to curb traffic.

It wasn’t overnight. And it wasn’t without pushback. But one of the most car-centric countries in Europe slowly began looking more like its more transit-friendly neighbors.

So how’d Belgium do it? Let’s look at two cities.

In 2019, Brussels launched a program to significantly reduce traffic in key locations. The city converted streets to one way, replaced parking spots with plazas, installed flexible bollards and traffic cameras to restrict nonessential vehicles, and blocked traffic from some streets altogether.

• As a result, traffic plummeted, biking and walking exploded, and pedestrian zones emerged as de facto town squares.

Around the same time, Ghent pedestrianized much of the medieval city’s historic center, diverting vehicle traffic elsewhere. Like Brussels, Ghent’s plan restricted nonessential vehicles in certain sections of the city, using bollards, signs, and paint that were flexible and cheap to change.

• Shortly after the plan was carried out, trips by motor vehicles, which used to make up 55% of trips in Ghent, dropped to 27%; cycling jumped 60%.

I like using Belgium as a case study because it isn’t viewed as a handlebar utopia like Denmark or the Netherlands. The country is still dominated by cars, and its capital is still one of the most congested cities in Europe, with the average driver spending more time in traffic every year than the average Houstonian.

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But despite these flaws, Belgium’s recent achievements means progress is well within reach for car-dominated cities looking to create safer, cleaner, and less congested neighborhoods:

• In the last decade, drivers in Brussels spent 12 less hours in traffic a year than they did a decade ago; drivers in Los Angeles, Boston, and New York all saw traffic times increase.

If Europe — specifically Western Europe, with its overlapping politics, culture, and GDP — can shake off cars and build an impressive network of mobility, so can the United States.

Just something to think about next time you have waffles.

The New England Patriots weren’t the only no-shows at the Super Bowl. Ads for electric vehicles also skipped the biggest game of the year.

Despite being sponsored by Toyota, the Super Bowl saw only four car commercials — none of which featured all-electric vehicles. Instead, ads for AI, weight-loss drugs, and cryptocurrency dominated the evening.

• This is not only a sign of the times but also part of a larger trend: Since their peak in 2022, which saw seven EV-centric ads, electric vehicle commercials have disappeared from Super Bowl Sunday.

That most didn’t even bother showing up is a big climate problem. In the United States, transportation is the largest-polluting sector, and passenger vehicles are the biggest culprit, responsible for something like 15% of the country’s carbon footprint. And so electrifying gas-powered cars is really important.

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It can be easy to blame the economy for automakers passing on high-priced ads, even if it is a chance to showcase new products to a huge American audience. After all, U.S. automakers are scrambling to adjust to tariffs, supply chain bottlenecks, and an economy where it’s really tough for people to justify spending $40,000 on a new SUV.

But it’s also tough to sympathize with an industry that for years dragged its feet on electric vehicles. As the rest of the world electrified their transportation sector, many American automakers focused on making cars bigger (and thus harder to electrify).

This makes it not only a climate problem but also a geopolitical one.

The U.S. now has one of the worst adoption rates for developed countries:

• In 2024, the EV sales in the U.S. made up 10% of passenger vehicle sales.

• The European Union was over double that, with 21%

• China was nearly five times the U.S., with 48%.

That China number should be a big concern for the U.S.: Because China is so big, the country leads the world in both total volume and share of EV sales.

Chinese EV company BYD, which offers low-cost models, is now the world’s largest EV maker, in many places replacing American-made Teslas, and is considering factory expansion in Europe and Canada. In other words, China is filling the void that has traditionally been occupied by U.S. automakers:

• Canada recently lowered levies to bring Chinese-made EVs to North American roads. And the E.U. relaxed rules on Chinese EV imports, which helped EVs outsell gas-powered cars in Europe for the first time in December.

• These same countries are also expanding EV charging infrastructure and launching programs to make EVs more affordable.

This isn’t entirely the fault of American business. Where EV makers in other parts of the world can count on government support, U.S. automakers must contend with a White House that is rolling back EV incentives, freezing funds for EV infrastructure, and tightening requirements for charging stations.

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But no matter who’s to blame, the rising popularity of EVs abroad spells trouble for an industry and country unable to adapt to these trends — especially if you’re a federal government that wants to revamp domestic manufacturing: After all, what is U.S. manufacturing without car companies?

Interestingly, one Super Bowl commercial did prominently feature an EV. But it wasn’t from an automaker. It was from a vacuum cleaning company, called Dreame, which ran an ad that signaled an evolution to selling other devices, including an electric sports car.

And where is Dreame based? China.

A walk up 18th Street in Northwest D.C. used to be a sight: dozens of streateries — street patios, usually owned by adjoined restaurants — framed the sidewalks, inviting people to stop by for a bite or drink or just a chat.

This month, though, this same walk is much bleaker: Nearly all of the streateries (also called parklets) have been torn down, replaced by parking spaces.

• That’s because the local D.C. government recently launched a program that requires restaurants to pay $15 per square foot, plus fees, for each structure, while also adjusting their designs.

• Rather than comply with these rules, and the additional thousands of dollars in rent, many restaurants opted to tear down their structures.

What once was a way to stay afloat for restaurants during the pandemic has now become a hindrance.

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The disappearance of streateries isn’t just a loss for restaurants, though; it’s a loss for citydwellers, who have reaped the knock-on effects of streateries for the last five years — including for the climate:

• Streateries slow down traffic, encouraging people to ditch their cars for biking and walking, which means less air and noise pollution.

• Streateries are also often paired with plants and greenery, which have cooling effects, especially when they replace a block of asphalt that absorbs heat.

Probably most of all, though, streateries show that we can reenvision on-street space. Streateries drive foot traffic, social interactions, and connectivity. They encompass what cities, and streets, are all about — something we’ve lost touch with. As described in the book Life After Cars:

“Streets used to be for people. They were incubators for style, slang, politics, love, and simple neighborly affinity. They were places we could do things together, make things together, simply be together. Cars roll over all of that human activity and crush it.”

Perhaps the worst part of D.C.’s new policy is that it reverses something that people overwhelmingly support: namely, that streets can be so much more than storage for cars. That it took a pandemic to realize that is disappointing; that it took a D.C. law to reverse it is damning.

Of course, the local government has its reasons for tearing down these structures, number one being money. Streateries replace parking spots, which people pay for, so it’s only right that streateries pay their fair share.

But fair is the key word here, which the new policy is not.

Parking spots are historically undervalued. In D.C., for example, you can get a residential car permit for $50 a year. For the same spot, the city can now charge restaurants over $2,400. And while metered spaces draw much more money, they still don’t draw as much as diners, who pay a 10% restaurant tax.

D.C. also uses safety to justify the program — the idea being that the slipshod way these structures sprang up during the pandemic can be dangerous, blocking sightlines for cars and pedestrians alike. D.C.’s new rules require more uniform, open-air designs and eliminate enclosures above 3.5 feet.

• But by that logic, parking spots that replace streateries should only be available to convertibles with their tops down (many parked cars are, in fact, 6-foot-tall SUVs and trucks).

I’m giving D.C. flack because I live here. But the city is not an anomaly: Around the country and the world, streateries are falling out of favor, as the unshakable urge for cheap parking again overpowers our thinking for something better.

There are real reasons to improve streateries. Visibility, safety, and other general measures of accountability are important. After all, diners should have a reasonable expectation that these things won’t fall on top of them. At the same time, though, policies shouldn’t be so stringent that they close half the city’s streateries.

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And we must remember that the alternative to streateries is not housing or parks — it is parking, which brings no climate, cultural, or social benefits.

For the last five years, streateries have shown how public spaces can be repurposed for people, not cars. Local governments — from Barcelona to Brussels to Paris — are adjusting laws to make these structures permanent.

But for D.C., one step forward is two steps back. And in a couple months when we shake off our winter blues, we’ll be greeted not by lively corridors of outdoor dining and drinking but instead rows of unoccupied vehicles.

We deserve better.

As we celebrate the New Year, I’m struggling to find what to read next.

At the end of every year, there is no shortage of great climate books to choose from, with tons of best-of-year lists (and even lists of books coming out soon). But those kinds of lists overwhelm me: I’m lucky to read one climate book published in the last year, let alone a dozen of them.

So now that we’re a quarter into the century, it seems like a good time to reflect and share my favorite climate books published this century — often so good that they hang around my head long after I’ve put them down.

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A note on this list: I’ve tried to balance widely lauded books with some personal favorites, while also diversifying topics (otherwise, it would be a bunch of books about walkability and the Midwest).

At the same time, I am an American, so naturally many books skew toward American audiences and geographies. And I only picked books read by me, a mere mortal with implicit bias, limited reading time, and plenty of interests outside of climate change.

So please don’t drag me in the comments — but do let me know your favorites!

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1. Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability, by David Owen (2009)

Can a book turn you into an urbanist? This book follows a simple premise: “New Yorkers, individually, drive, pollute, consume, and throw away much less than do the average residents of the surrounding suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and farms.” That’s because sprawling spaces, which are so prevalent around the country, encourage driving — one of our most climate-destructive habits. Reversing this trend takes not only ambitious policies but complete mindset shifts, replacing white picket fences with the cleaner, healthier, and, let’s be honest, much more fun spaces of cities.

Liked it? Try: Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, by Jeff Speck; Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek.

2. We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, by Jonathan Safran Foer (2019)

If Green Metropolis can make you an urbanist, this book can make you vegan. Part essay–part memoir, this book isn’t simply a step-by-step guide on how to go vegan the first two meals of the day — it’s a wrestling match with individual decisions in a world where we know too much (in this case, the profound environmental impacts of our food choices). As Foer writes, “Knowing is the difference between a grave error and an unforgivable crime.”

Liked it? Try: Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

3. A Children’s Bible, by Lydia Millet (2020)

A Children’s Bible is a 240-page novel that follows a group of children stuck at a vacation house with their parents — largely incompetent and representative of the growing indifference and denial of an older generation — when a hurricane strikes. This isn’t just a disaster story, though; it’s a coming-of-age story amid a climate-changed future: “I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway.”

Liked it? Try: The Overstory, by Richard Powers; The Hungry Tide, by Amitav Ghosh.

4. All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Katharine K. Wilkinson and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (2020)

We need a dose of optimism here, right? This collection of essays by climate leaders and feminists is a rewarding “mosaic of voices — the full spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can turn things around.” The book — divided into sections of strategy, language, problem-solving, activism, compassion, transformation, and more — is both a gateway into finding one’s role within the climate crisis and a guidebook to understanding the issues at hand.

Liked it? Try: The Best American Science and Nature Writing (series); The Fragile Earth: Writings from The New Yorker on Climate Change, edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder; Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global War, edited by Paul Hawken.

5. Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, by George Marshall (2014)

Once upon a time, I was absolutely floored that climate change was a partisan issue. I just didn’t see what was so political about having cleaner air and more efficient energy. Then I read Don’t Even Think About It. The book explains psychological roots of climate denial, the misinformation tactics that exploit this, and importantly, the steps we can take to do something about it.

Liked it? Try: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway; Losing Earth: A Recent History, by Nathaniel Rich.

6. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh (2016)

As a full-time climate communicator, I also really connect with this one. The Great Derangement explores the lack of climate change in art and literature and the imperial and colonial roots of this absence. To tackle climate change, we must transform our thinking in politics, history, art, and literature, and incorporate a clear discussion and acknowledgement of climate change into these mediums.

Liked it? Try: The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, by Amitav Ghosh; Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, by Katharine Hayhoe.

7.The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

No list like this can exclude The Sixth Extinction, which is probably THE 21st century book on climate. Written by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, the book shows what could happen if we don’t get our shit together. With each chapter focused on a different extinct species, Kolbert explores the relative ease, speed, and permanence in which we’ve driven extinctions: “We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolution pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed.”

Liked it? Try: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells; The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, by Peter Brannen; Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas.

8. How To Avoid A Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, by Bill Gates (2021)

Bill Gates is a hell of a communicator. And I truly believe in the premise of his book, which argues that innovation and technology are keys to tackling climate change. It’s not just investing in existing clean tech and driving breakthroughs, though — we also need government policies and incentives to scale these technologies, generate demand, and bring them to market.

Liked it? Try: Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis, by John Doerr and Ryan Panchadsaram; Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War, by Tom Steyer.

9. After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, by Eric Dean Wilson (2021)

Climate change is about impacts far and wide, from droughts to hurricanes to wildfires. But it’s also about living in a much hotter world, and the contradictions that emerge from that. Enter air conditioning. As the world becomes hotter, we need more A/C, but A/C is also a great contributor to climate change — and inequity. As Wilson writes, “The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the comfort line: Who gets to be comfortable and at what cost to others?”

Liked it? Try: The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff Goodell; The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson (if only for the unforgettable opening).

10. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, by Dan Egan (2017)

This is totally Midwestern bias, but I couldn’t help myself. Growing up just south of Lake Erie, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the Great Lakes, which provide drinking water to over 40 million people. But after decades of pollution, invasive species, and climate change, they are under threat. What’s at stake is the largest body of freshwater in the world, a precious environmental resource that’s home to countless species and relied on by millions.

Liked it? Try: The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers, by Martin Doyle; Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, by Elizabeth Rush; Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., by Cynthia Barnett.

Men are in trouble. Boys and young men have fewer friends, face diminishing job prospects, and lag behind in education and mental health.

This crisis has been exploited by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, who warped traditional notions of masculinity and offered fear-laden, often misogynistic, messages to men who felt they were being left behind by society. And it worked.

With Trump again in the White House, he and his party are pedaling these same messages to deny climate change, roll back clean energy programs, and boost fossil fuels — all to the detriment of our Planet.

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There’s a word for this: petro-masculinity. Coined by political scientist Cara Daggett, petro-masculinity is an identity shaped by climate change denial, racism, and misogyny, steeped in an overall appreciation of fossil fuels.

• Examples of petro-masculinity include driving big trucks (symbols of force and domination), eating meat (strength and virility), and employing mantras like “Drill, baby, drill” (physicality and grit).

In each case, petro-masculinity reflects broader masculinity norms of domination and control, while devaluing traditionally feminine traits like caregiving, compassion, and cooperation.

Transforming this idea of masculinity then offers an incredible, yet often overlooked, climate solution — one that not only tackles climate impacts but also offers men an escape from loneliness and anti-social behavior.

• That transformation can look a lot of different ways, but it mostly banks on a healthier version of masculinity rooted in variations of loving, thinking, working, and serving in an honorable manner.

Once we recognize the difference between healthy and toxic masculinity, though, how do we resonate with young men and then move them to action in ways that also benefit the climate?

Enter movies and TV shows.

If progressives have anything, it’s Hollywood. Every year, incredibly popular films and TV shows celebrate compassionate, healthy relationships with our Planet and those who inhabit it. Successful series like Avatar, Wicked, and Marvel align these values with positive masculinity.

Yet these movies all lack something: They fail to directly connect masculinity with climate action. Past efforts to do so are largely too corny (Don’t Look Up, The Day After Tomorrow) or too subtle (Wall-E, Train Dreams, like any Bong Joon Ho movie).

Which brings me to Landman.

Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount+ TV drama follows fortune seekers trying to make it big in the oil and gas industry of West Texas. But for our purposes, it also connects masculinity not to climate action but to fossil fuels. And it works!

Landman successfully spins decades of Western lore for its own end — to glorify fossil fuels — in ways that clean energy supporters have failed. This brings up a larger problem: There are countless film and TV Westerns about oil men (two of my favorites are Giant and There Will Be Blood), but few similarly successful stories of the scientists, engineers, and politicians, who collectively invent, build, and coordinate action against impending climate impacts.

As a writer and pseudo storyteller, I think Landman works because of three main reasons:

• It has a simple message: Oil and gas work is manly, and the men who “keep the lights on” are heroes.

• It reinforces long-held American values of freedom, independence, power, and ambition.

• It uses the long and popular tradition of the American Western as its frame.

Yet it also embraces toxically masculine tropes: Its women are boring and complacent, its men are reckless and wrong, and its means are violent. Again, though, it works as entertainment!

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The climate field can learn from the success of Landman. Simple, effective messages about climate change exist. Healthier versions of masculinity are already rampant in popular culture and storytelling. And genres like science fiction, adventure, and even Westerns can be used to support the goals of clean energy advocates.

Of course, movies and TV shows are only part of the equation. Men still consume toxic algorithmic content on YouTube, Meta, and other social sites.

But the better content produced by streaming platforms and studios, the better chance it can compete for space in the limited attention spans of consumers. And Landman shows that it can be done successfully in the context of energy.

As boys and young men discover how healthy masculinity offers more rewarding lives, they can also learn how these same traits benefit the Planet. And the big (or small) screen is one very effective way to communicate that.

“Do you think that the bad things we do follow us in life?”

This question haunts Robert Grainier (played by Joel Edgerton) in the new Netflix film Train Dreams. As a logger and railroad man, Grainier makes a living clearing forests and laying tracks, all to quench the nation’s ever-expanding thirst for land and resources.

Yet to Grainier, there is something almost mystical about this untouched wilderness: He is but a man amid towering trees that stretch endlessly into misty mountains and foggy forests. Awed by this natural beauty, Grainier begins to question his role in destroying it.

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It is a meditation echoed by the eccentric explosives expert Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), whose comedic ramblings are rivaled only by his sharp wisdom: “The world is intricately stitched together,” he says. “Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things.”

And it’s a meditation relevant today more than ever, as the consequences of a world powered by fossil fuels have come to wreak havoc on our natural landscape.

Train Dreams, set in the early 20th century, takes place long before climate change was in the public consciousness. Yet its portrayal of man’s desire to conquer nature tells us a lot about the myth of American progress.

What makes Grainier unique is not that he is one man of many who “built this country” but that he is perhaps one the few that question the consequences of doing so. Some can move from job to job, clear-cutting anything in their way for a paycheck. But to Grainier, and the older and more philosophical Peeples, it is different:

• As Peeples says: “You cut down these magnificent trees that were around when Jesus roamed the earth, and it hurts your soul.”

The camera sweeps over epic vistas of old-growth forests but, like Grainier, also refuses to shy away from a once-rich landscape turned desolate. The effect is chilling, and the sense of grief and loss that accompanies it is fully realized in the film’s tragic second act.

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Train Dreams, based on a 2011 novella written by Denis Johnson, is part of the Anti-Western genre, or stories that question the old “Go West, Young Man” adventures of tramping, shooting, and drinking. Like so many in these stories, Grainier quietly endures the brutality of his job — a mantra that is classically Western and American in its bootstraps mentality and rugged individualism.

But there is a flip side of the coin, and that’s what haunts Grainier. In the Anti-Western, themes of individualism, freedom, and romance are paired with isolation, destruction, and displacement. What once was courageous now looks pathetic.

Johnson isn’t the first American author to question classic Western themes through this genre.

• In The Bear, William Faulkner writes of man’s pathetic nature and the “doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness.”

• In Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams rejects adventurous romance with the warning that “You can’t deal with this country as long as you’re in it; it’s too big, and empty… You have to get away from it before you can handle it. And no more dreams.”

Grainier’s various jobs are grounded in the belief that nature is infinite, land is disposable, and wilderness can be tamed. It is a story told over and over again across this nation’s history — from engineering the Mississippi and damming the Colorado to carving canals to the Great Lakes and plowing and draining the prairie.

And, of course, it is the story of climate change, fueled by our endless pursuit of wealth and extraction at the expense of our Planet.

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In Train Dreams, Grainer witnesses the transformation of a once-pristine landscape, the same way we witness a Planet torn apart by increasingly intense heat waves, hurricanes, floods, and droughts. Yet the film’s power is in its ability to remind us of what’s at stake.

Listening to the sounds of the forest, Peeples says, “Beautiful, ain’t it?” When questioned, he continues: “All of it. Every bit of it.”

There is a quiet beauty to this country, just waiting to reveal itself. And even on the edges of a disappearing world, that is something worth saving.

A troubling narrative plagues Florida’s private rail system, Brightline — or Frightline, as some call it.

The Miami Herald labels it a “killer train.” Local news dubs it America’s deadliest train. Entire Instagram accounts are dedicated to tracking deaths by Brightline. That’s because since its opening in 2017, Brightline trains have killed 182 people.

That local news sensationalizes death isn’t new (U.S. media disproportionately covers deaths by homicide and terrorism, despite them accounting for less than 1% of deaths). But by giving weight to these stories, the media also ignores a much larger one: the 40,000 annual deaths caused by cars — which are no less graphic but much more accepted.

• Last year in Florida, vehicle crashes killed 3,184 people (908 of whom were pedestrians or cyclists). In other words, for every one person killed by Brightline in Florida, 160 people die by automobile.

So why has Brightline become a transit bogeymonster, while personal vehicles are embraced like members of the family?

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The problem is partially how the media covers car crashes. When people die in car crashes, media outlets overwhelmingly deflect blame from drivers — treating crashes as unfortunate realities and isolated incidents, labelling them as “accidents,” and failing to include infrastructure design as a contributor to deaths.

With little effort to report why crashes exist, car deaths are a crime without a villain. A boring story if I ever heard one.

Brightline deaths, however, are covered much differently. In researching this post, I read a 3,000-plus word feature on Brightline deaths, which quoted in graphic detail police reports describing “total body destruction” of victims. Imagine if such an article existed about the 265 Floridians killed every month by cars!

• Whereas cars and drivers skirt responsibility, Brightline is overwhelmingly assigned blame. And with blame comes anger and then action: “How can we accept this killer train in our community? We must do something!”

Yet this same reaction is never directed at the state’s department of transportation, whose road standards and designs contribute to thousands of grisly deaths every year.

Americans have historically accepted the destruction that cars bring with them. Over 90% of households have access to a car. And it’s a lot easier to justify something that you own and rely on. Said University of Melbourne researcher John Cook on a recent episode of the Shocked podcast:

“We are particularly biased when the science or information threatens our beliefs or our identity, our social identity, our religious identity, even our political identity.”

Questioning the destruction of cars would threaten our social identity. So anything new, anything different — especially when different is also constantly associated with violent death — is met with skepticism.

Of course, this is nonsensical. Cars are not only responsible for thousands of deaths every year in Florida; they’re also major contributors to pollution and climate change.

• In the U.S., the transportation sector is the largest source of direct greenhouse gas emissions, and cars and trucks are the biggest culprits.

• Meanwhile, electric Brightline trains have no localized air pollution, and by getting people out of cars, these trains can directly tackle climate change and make streets safer.

Our comfort with the status quo is a comfort with death and illness. And while the safety of Brightline trains can be improved, they are not responsible for the dangers that haunt American towns every day.

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Media outlets, even progressive ones, focus on how Brightline transforms once-familiar environments, introduces new barriers, and forces residents to face “life-and-death situations.” But they ignore the fact that car-centric infrastructure has done this for a century.

This reflects an inner and uncomfortable truth about ourselves: that we rather accept carnage than work toward something better.

By pointing fingers and accepting any death in transportation, we ignore real solutions — notably, that with the right laws and infrastructure, we can end deaths by car or by train altogether.

Until we grasp that, trains will not be a viable solution to climate change but instead an afterthought in our transportation equation: at best, a neglected stepchild and, at worst, a killer lurking beyond the bend.

In his novel Ulysses, James Joyce mused, “Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.”

My friend and I experienced this first hand this month, as we traveled to Dublin to retrace the steps of Joyce’s Odyssean protagonist, Leopold Bloom, who in the book walked nearly nine miles over 16 hours across the city on June 16, 1904.

Though Ulysses took place nearly 125 years ago, one can still follow Bloom’s meandering route through Dublin, taking the same tram and rail lines and walking to many of the same shops, pharmacies, libraries, hospitals, churches, hotels, parks, apartments, and, of course, pubs.

What’s this have to do with climate? Well, all this time later, Dublin is still very walkable. And that’s good for the Planet, as going car-free is the most impactful way to reduce individual emissions.

It’s quite remarkable that much of Bloom’s route exists intact today. Sure, there are no horse-drawn carriages, like the one Bloom takes from Irishtown to Glasnevin Cemetery. But there are also no highways that plow through entire neighborhoods. I may just be a jaded American, but even the fact that rail and tram lines exist is impressive: In many U.S. cities, streetcar lines have been torn up for cars and parking.

Perhaps most interesting is that Dublin maintains its walkability while lacking a proper metro system — something that puts it at odds with the rest of Europe: Dublin is the only capital city in Western Europe without a metro.

Instead, Dublin has steadily invested in its tram and bus services, two large train stations, and an integrated suburban network, which stretches nearly 10 miles from its urban core.

• That’s not to say metros aren’t important. A heavy rail system would be a boon to Dublin’s economy, cutting down on traffic, freeing up commuting times, and opening many parts of the city to development.

But Dublin also shows that creating a sustainable, walkable city isn’t dependent on such a system, nor is it dependent on a huge taxbase: If it were an American city, Dublin would rank 29th in population — bigger than Baltimore but smaller than Memphis.

The preservation of such a walkable, well-connected city is important, not just because it’s good for the Planet but also because it brings about so many other benefits. As writes in his Substack (emphasis mine):

“By walking through a city, you meet the people who live there, and engage with them and their culture, on their terms in their environment. It allows you a small window into how they live. How they think about and experience the world. Consequently, it can change how you see the world.”

But you can only experience this if you have safe walking infrastructure and good public transit (such life-shaping moments don’t easily happen on an interstate highway).

That’s one of the big lessons I take away from both Ulysses and Dublin. Just as the literary world has preserved the endearing humanity of Leopold Bloom, Dublin has preserved the neighborhoods and infrastructure that make it such an inherently walkable, and lively, city.

• That’s probably easier in old European cities than in newer American ones. But even older, more dense cities on the East Coast have had to contend with the terrible destruction of highway projects.

Dublin isn’t perfect. And without a metro, there will always be obvious gaps in its transit system. But there’s also something to be celebrated about Bloom’s meandering journey across Dublin on that fateful June day.

Over a hundred years later, readers are still talking about it, and Dubliners — consciously or not — are still retracing the footsteps of one of Ireland’s most beloved protagonists. And that’s an experience worth preserving.

I visit Baltimore a lot. It’s a great day trip from D.C., even without a car: A commuter train runs several times a day, takes an hour, and only costs $9.

Once you arrive in Baltimore by train, though, it gets tricky. That’s because Penn Station is about two miles north of the Inner Harbor and the vibrant neighborhoods, ballpark, and football stadium that surround it.

• It’s a classic last-mile problem: when you get really close to your destination by transit but can’t manage the final haul without a private vehicle.

So when I was in Baltimore for an Orioles baseball game last Sunday, I was excited to ride the city’s light rail system, which should have ushered me seamlessly from Penn Station to Orioles Park at Camden Yards. But it didn’t.

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Trying to figure out what went wrong, I applied the four pillars of good transit — speed, frequency, reliability, and convenience — to my experience with the city’s light rail.

Here’s how it went:

I arrived at Penn Station just before noon, eager to get downtown. Leaving the platform and entering the main hall, I followed signs to the light rail (convenience ✅).

• I knew that on weekends the light rail runs every 30 minutes (frequency ❌), but I had time to kill and taking it would still save me a $20 Uber or a 45-minute walk.

When I got to the light rail platform, however, the train wasn’t running (reliability ❌). Talking to the station manager, I learned that I could walk a couple blocks to the next light rail station and catch it there (convenience ❌).

• The manager also said there was a bus stop near the station (convenience ✅), but she hadn’t seen a bus in a while (reliability ❌, frequency ❌).

So I walked seven minutes to the next light rail station, only to learn that the entire light rail line was closed due to track issues (reliability ❌). Not backing down from a challenge, I scanned a QR code for a shuttle bus route — but I took one look at the shuttle map and knew I couldn’t read it.

So I cut my losses, opened Google Maps, and headed downtown by foot, hoping to find a bus before I walked two miles (speed ❌).

I eventually saw a bus going to Camden Yards and waved down the driver, who said he’d pull over at the next intersection. I hustled a block and jaywalked across a six-lane road (convenience ❌), where true to his word our kind bus driver waited for me.

From there, it was a smooth ride to the ballpark (speed ✅), where I walked from and somehow made it for pre-game drinks on time (beer 🍺).

The point of this story is not to dunk on Baltimore, a city I’ve grown fond of over the years. Instead, it’s to show that for Baltimore’s light rail to work, or for any train or bus system to work, it can’t skip out on any of four pillars of good transit: speed, frequency, reliability, and convenience.

• I obviously felt the consequences of system under repair (reliability ❌), but even if the light rail were running properly, how many people were willing to wait 30 minutes for it (frequency ❌)?

By following this metric for good transit, there’s a simple way to fix this: Run more buses/trains (reliability ✅), more often (frequency ✅), in more places (convenience ✅), and build infrastructure and pass laws to support and prioritize these buses/trains (speed ✅).

But you have to do all four — because, as we see, skipping just one can upend the whole system.

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Baltimore’s light rail, and its low ridership, is not an indictment of public transit. Rather it’s a case of a good idea not going far enough.

In theory, the system should at least be able to close the two-mile gap between Penn Station and the Inner Harbor. But it doesn’t. And the simplest explanation for that is that it was never designed with all four pillars of transit in mind.

Amid sweeping heatwaves this summer, people from North America to Europe to Asia sought shelter from the heat.

Often that meant finding air conditioning, an invention that sometimes feels like a miracle. With A/C, we set the temperature and humidity to our liking, outside weather be damned. Such control has given us the power to literally save lives.

But not everything is life threatening. And most of A/C’s history has not been about necessity but about comfort.

That’s according to Eric Dean Wilson, who tells the story of air conditioning and its consequences in his excellent book, After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. In it, Wilson posits the question of the comfort line: Who gets to be comfortable and at what cost to others?

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The irony is that by using A/C to solve short-term discomfort, Wilson writes, we’ve created a society uncomfortable for everyone else — especially those without access to cooling:

• A/C uses energy that stresses the grid, produces waste heat that warms cities, and spews refrigerants that double as highly potent greenhouse gases (to say nothing of previous refrigerants that tore a hole in the ozone layer).

• These refrigerants are so good at trapping heat that the nonprofit Drawdown lists refrigeration management as its fourth-most effective solution to climate change.

• A/C also disproportionately benefits the well off, as many vulnerable or low-income populations cannot afford higher energy costs to power units.

Our quest for comfort, and reliance on cheap fossil fuels to achieve such comfort, suddenly becomes complicated. And there’s no quick fix… because we’ve created entire societies around the expectation of that comfort.

I think about this a lot when I work. Commercial and retail buildings in the United States are almost always equipped with A/C, which means they’re not designed to naturally cool occupants. So instead, buildings are sealed shut and reliant on HVAC systems, leading to artificially cool environments.

• When I worked in an office, the office was so cold that I’d bring sweaters and run a space heater under my desk, even in the middle of summer.

• Now I work remotely but still fight the same battles around town, jumping from coffee shops to co-working spaces, going inside for a reprieve from the heat only to go outside for a reprieve from the air conditioning.

Wearing a jacket in a cafe is hardly a life-or-death issue. But you don’t have to squint hard to see that creating an igloo in the middle of summer is a terrible waste of energy and resources.

Such excessive folly is common in the U.S., where 90% of households are equipped with A/C and where A/C is sometimes considered a right. And now such lifestyles are spreading to other regions, from Southeast Asia to Western Europe.

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Instead of adopting this white middle-class American view of comfort, however, the rest of the world should learn from the U.S.’s mistakes and find other ways to keep cool — ones that aren’t so damaging to the Planet or costly to our wallets.

Some promising examples:

• In India, cities are painting roofs white to reflect heat, and the government is setting standard temperature ranges on air conditioners to slash energy use.

• Across Europe, countries are changing building codes to improve shade and insulation.

• In New York, the Department of Parks & Recreation is installing mist gardens, a cheaper, more accessible way to keep cool.

• And then there are old fashioned ways of keeping cool, from opening windows to using fans to turning off appliances.

Of course, as summers become hotter and heatwaves become more common, many countries adopt air conditioning out of necessity. So when A/C is unavoidable, homeowners should use (and governments should subsidize) electric heat pumps or other innovations that are way more efficient (and climate friendly) than traditional A/C.

The point is not that air conditioning is never the answer. It sometimes is. But we also shouldn’t blindly accept A/C as some miracle drug.

Our decades-long insistence on A/C is not unlike Demi Moore’s character in The Substance, who injects herself with a serum that promises a better life, while also killing the only one she has. Only A/C may be worse, because it’s also killing the Planet.

And that’s not comfortable for anyone.

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If there were any doubts about the fossil fuel–loving, climate change–denying bona fides of the second Trump Administration, the White House put them to rest with the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).

Among countless other measures, the law rolls back large parts of the Biden Administration’s landmark climate laws, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs Act, which together represented the United States’ only significant attempts to stave off the worst impacts of climate change.

• For anyone concerned about the future of the Planet, it is an enormous loss, and it represents only the opening salvo in the administration’s assault on environmental protections and decarbonization efforts.

Yet to consign ourselves to despair is to give up on the changes we can make: When abandoned by our national leaders, we can still act locally, cultivating our own gardens by focusing our energies in our towns and cities.

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Nowhere is the power of local action demonstrated better than in Paris under Mayor Anne Hidalgo. Hidalgo is one of the only leaders of a global city who is approaching climate change with the gravity it deserves — under Hidalgo, the urban fabric of Paris has transformed, becoming both greener and a better place to live.

Since becoming mayor of Paris in 2014, Hidalgo has:

• Fundamentally reshaped the streetscape of Paris by installing 1300 kilometers (807 miles) of bike lanes, creating 300 car-free streets (with 500 more on the way), removing 50,000 parking spaces, and slashing speed limits.

• Made the city bloom by planting 145,000 new trees and turning highways along the Seine and the avenue of the Champs-Élysées into parks.

• Improved the efficiency and habitability of 50,000 buildings by retrofitting them with modern insulation and ventilation.

• Overseen the expansion of the Velib bikeshare system and supported the doubling of the size of the Metro.

All these actions have had profound effects on the daily lives of Parisians. Biking, walking, and public transit have grown and now vastly exceed car-use as a percentage of trips. And as “alternative” modes of transit have become the norm, accidents and hospitalizations have fallen dramatically for both cyclists and other road users. Meanwhile, air pollution has dropped by 40% in the last decade.

Further, the infrastructure upgrades have made Paris not just more green but more livable — the Seine is swimmable for the first time in a century, and all those new trees clean the air and provide shade, particularly important in a city expecting to suffer from more climate-fueled heat waves.

Hidalgo’s successes demonstrate the power of local leaders to improve the day-to-day lives of their residents, even without leadership from the national government.

Thus, it’s significant that in the same week that Congress passed the OBBBA, Democrats in New York City voted to elect (functionally) a mayor with a refreshingly pro-urban agenda: Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani’s policy proposals, if enacted, would transform the public realm in ways that Parisians would recognize:

• More bike lanes, bus lanes, busways, and bus rapid transit systems to promote non-automobile (and therefore less polluting) modes of transit.

• Expanded sidewalks, repurposed on-street parking, more open streets, and a return to year-round outdoor dining.

• Increased and densified housing supply, particularly around transit, and eliminated parking mandates to make housing more affordable and accessible.

• Renovated public schools with rooftop solar installations, improved insulation and ventilation, pedestrianized school streets, and the transformation of blacktop playgrounds into biophilic green schoolyards.

In other words, New York City voters chose someone who, like Hidalgo, wants to make their city greener — and by doing so, also make the city cleaner and safer, more walkable and bikeable, all-around more livable, and better for the Planet.

Even if you don’t like all of a candidate’s policies — I, like Brandon, am against free buses — Hidalgo’s mayoralty shows the power of local action, and Mamdani’s electoral success demonstrates that many voters in New York are ready for such action.

But Hidalgo wouldn’t have accomplished all this without the support of voters, activists, civil servants, and everyday citizens. In other words, everyone with an interest in making their city, town, or neighborhood better — everyone who wants to tend their own garden.

So go vote in your local elections, join your community board, volunteer to clean your neighborhood park. And if all else fails, you can always literally plant a garden.