The world’s first Ohlone restaurant is nestled in a lush outdoor space at the edge of the University of California, Berkeley, campus. Cafe Ohlone/mak-’amham (“our food” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language) tempts customers with soft-boiled quail eggs, black oak acorn soup, and chia-seed flour brownies. Also, Cowgirl Creamery cheese with herb bread. “Some people ask why these foods are on the menu, even though our ancestors didn’t have that,” says co-founder Vincent Medina. “It’s because Ohlone people like it.”

Part of a growing movement of Indigenous restaurants dedicated to reclaiming cultural heritage and educating the public, Cafe Ohlone opened in 2018 with the goal of bringing oṭṭoy (repair) to a place where the Ohlone were long denied sovereignty. Kickapoo chef Crystal Wahpepah runs Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, and there’s Mitsitam Cafe at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. “Indigenous foods are the original foods of this continent,” writes Sean Sherman, who helms Owamni in Minneapolis. “It’s important we recognize that and start celebrating those foods.”

Thousands of Ohlone once lived along California’s coast and inland in roughly 50 groups, but Spanish missionaries and 19th-century state-backed massacres fractured their communities and left some survivors in exile. Medina (East Bay Ohlone), who runs the cafe with his partner, Louis Trevino (Rumsen/Carmel Valley), notes that the Ohlone presence has endured despite the hardships: “Our culture is beautiful, and we have always been here.”

At Cafe Ohlone, traditional foods meet modern tastes, highlighting continuity and adaptation. The restaurant incorporates recordings, storytelling, and education into the dining experience. Medina, an Indigenous language activist fluent in Chochenyo, is a powerful orator who often enlightens diners about Ohlone traditions. When I stopped by in May for a sunny lunch on the patio, I appreciated the recorded sounds of crickets, birds, and Chochenyo songs sung by the tribe’s youngest and eldest members. My grandma, a We Wai Kai Nation member, would adore the multigenerational Chochenyo rendition of “Angel Baby.”

The cafe serves another role, too: an attempt by the university to atone for past wrongs. For much of a century, the adjacent anthropology museum housed a vast collection of Native artifacts and bones. As I walk by, I queasily remember Ishi, one of the last Yahi Tribe members, who lived in the museum and was made to fashion arrows at the behest of anthropology professor Alfred Kroeber. In 1925, Kroeber controversially declared the Ohlone people “extinct” in Handbook of the Indians of California. This led to the Ohlone Tribe losing its federal recognition, while the building housing the museum was later christened Kroeber Hall.

After much upheaval, the university removed Kroeber’s name in 2021, but his legacy endures. He and other anthropologists of his era had led the widescale theft of 9,000 Native American remains and around 200,000 sacred artifacts. The campus still houses thousands of them, which it has been slow to return to tribal nations, though a university spokesperson tells me that some of the resources of the museum, now closed to the public, have been “redirected to the repatriation efforts.”

Medina sits on a university committee working to ensure that the remains are returned in accordance with the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Looking to “our ancestors as property,” Medina says, “has never been appropriate or right.”

He and Trevino are also trying to increase Ohlone visibility beyond the restaurant’s walls. For the past year, they’ve been raising money to buy a piece of local land. They imagine native plant gardens, a tearoom, and a dining space in a traditional tule house—a place for the Bay Area Ohlone to gather and practice cultural traditions. Their efforts align with the Land Back movement, which advocates for restoring Indigenous lands taken by colonization.

Obstacles include a hot real estate market and the considerable cost and complexity of launching and funding a nonprofit—easier tasks for federally recognized tribes. In late 2023, the pair were close to inhabiting a site with historical and symbolic meaning in Sunol, some 37 miles southeast of Berkeley. That deal fell through, but they remain optimistic. “Our work,” they note on their website, “is an act of love.”

The world’s first Ohlone restaurant is nestled in a lush outdoor space at the edge of the University of California, Berkeley, campus. Cafe Ohlone/mak-’amham (“our food” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language) tempts customers with soft-boiled quail eggs, black oak acorn soup, and chia-seed flour brownies. Also, Cowgirl Creamery cheese with herb bread. “Some people ask why these foods are on the menu, even though our ancestors didn’t have that,” says co-founder Vincent Medina. “It’s because Ohlone people like it.”

Part of a growing movement of Indigenous restaurants dedicated to reclaiming cultural heritage and educating the public, Cafe Ohlone opened in 2018 with the goal of bringing oṭṭoy (repair) to a place where the Ohlone were long denied sovereignty. Kickapoo chef Crystal Wahpepah runs Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, and there’s Mitsitam Cafe at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. “Indigenous foods are the original foods of this continent,” writes Sean Sherman, who helms Owamni in Minneapolis. “It’s important we recognize that and start celebrating those foods.”

Thousands of Ohlone once lived along California’s coast and inland in roughly 50 groups, but Spanish missionaries and 19th-century state-backed massacres fractured their communities and left some survivors in exile. Medina (East Bay Ohlone), who runs the cafe with his partner, Louis Trevino (Rumsen/Carmel Valley), notes that the Ohlone presence has endured despite the hardships: “Our culture is beautiful, and we have always been here.”

At Cafe Ohlone, traditional foods meet modern tastes, highlighting continuity and adaptation. The restaurant incorporates recordings, storytelling, and education into the dining experience. Medina, an Indigenous language activist fluent in Chochenyo, is a powerful orator who often enlightens diners about Ohlone traditions. When I stopped by in May for a sunny lunch on the patio, I appreciated the recorded sounds of crickets, birds, and Chochenyo songs sung by the tribe’s youngest and eldest members. My grandma, a We Wai Kai Nation member, would adore the multigenerational Chochenyo rendition of “Angel Baby.”

The cafe serves another role, too: an attempt by the university to atone for past wrongs. For much of a century, the adjacent anthropology museum housed a vast collection of Native artifacts and bones. As I walk by, I queasily remember Ishi, one of the last Yahi Tribe members, who lived in the museum and was made to fashion arrows at the behest of anthropology professor Alfred Kroeber. In 1925, Kroeber controversially declared the Ohlone people “extinct” in Handbook of the Indians of California. This led to the Ohlone Tribe losing its federal recognition, while the building housing the museum was later christened Kroeber Hall.

After much upheaval, the university removed Kroeber’s name in 2021, but his legacy endures. He and other anthropologists of his era had led the widescale theft of 9,000 Native American remains and around 200,000 sacred artifacts. The campus still houses thousands of them, which it has been slow to return to tribal nations, though a university spokesperson tells me that some of the resources of the museum, now closed to the public, have been “redirected to the repatriation efforts.”

Medina sits on a university committee working to ensure that the remains are returned in accordance with the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Looking to “our ancestors as property,” Medina says, “has never been appropriate or right.”

He and Trevino are also trying to increase Ohlone visibility beyond the restaurant’s walls. For the past year, they’ve been raising money to buy a piece of local land. They imagine native plant gardens, a tearoom, and a dining space in a traditional tule house—a place for the Bay Area Ohlone to gather and practice cultural traditions. Their efforts align with the Land Back movement, which advocates for restoring Indigenous lands taken by colonization.

Obstacles include a hot real estate market and the considerable cost and complexity of launching and funding a nonprofit—easier tasks for federally recognized tribes. In late 2023, the pair were close to inhabiting a site with historical and symbolic meaning in Sunol, some 37 miles southeast of Berkeley. That deal fell through, but they remain optimistic. “Our work,” they note on their website, “is an act of love.”

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A hundred years ago, the plant scientist Arthur Watkins launched a remarkable project. He began collecting samples of wheat from all over the globe, nagging consuls and business agents across the British empire and beyond to supply him with grain from local markets.

His persistence was exceptional and, a century later, it is about to reap dramatic results. A UK-Chinese collaboration has sequenced the DNA of all the 827 kinds of wheat, assembled by Watkins, that have been nurtured at the John Innes Centre near Norwich for most of the past century.

In doing so, scientists have created a genetic goldmine by pinpointing previously unknown genes that are now being used to create hardy varieties with improved yields that could help feed Earth’s swelling population.

Strains are now being developed that include wheat which is able to grow in salty soil, while researchers at Punjab Agricultural University are working to improve disease resistance from seeds that they received from the John Innes Centre. Other strains include those that would reduce the need for nitrogen fertilisers, the manufacture of which is a major source of carbon emissions.

The collection includes lost varieties that “will be invaluable in creating wheat that can provide healthy yields in the harsh conditions that now threaten agriculture.”

“Essentially we have uncovered a goldmine,” said Simon Griffiths, a geneticist at the John Innes Centre and one of the project’s leaders. “This is going to make an enormous difference to our ability to feed the world as it gets hotter and agriculture comes under increasing climatic strain.”

Today, one in five calories consumed by humans come from wheat, and every year the crop is eaten by more and more people as the world’s population continues to grow.

“Wheat has been a cornerstone of human civilization,” added Griffiths. “In regions such as Europe, north Africa, large parts of Asia, and subsequently North America, its cultivation fed great empires, from ancient Egypt’s to the growth of modern Britain.”

This wheat was derived from wild varieties that were originally domesticated and cultivated in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, 10,000 years ago. Many of these varieties and their genes have disappeared over the millennia, a process that was accelerated about a century ago as the science of plant breeding became increasingly sophisticated and varieties with properties that were then considered of no value were discarded.

“That is why the Watkins collection is so important,” said Griffiths. “It contains varieties that had been lost but which will be invaluable in creating wheat that can provide healthy yields in the harsh conditions that now threaten agriculture.”

The project’s other leader, Shifeng Cheng, a professor with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said: “We can retrace the novel, functional and beneficial diversity that were lost in modern wheats after the ‘green revolution’ in the 20th century, and have the opportunity to add them back into breeding programmes.”

Watkins realized that “genes that were then thought to be of little use and which were being deleted from strains might still have future value.”

Scientists had wanted to pinpoint and study the wheat genes in the Watkins collection after the development of large-scale DNA sequencing more than a decade ago, but faced an unusual problem. The genome of wheat is huge: it is made up of 17 billion units of DNA, compared with the 3 billion base pairs that make up the human genome.

“The wheat genome is full of ­little retro elements and that has made it more difficult and, crucially, more expensive to sequence,” said Griffiths. “However, thanks to our Chinese colleagues who carried out the detailed sequencing work, we have overcome that problem.”

Griffiths and his colleagues sent samples from the Watkins collection to Cheng and were rewarded three months later with the arrival of a suitcase crammed with hard drives. These contained a petabyte—1 million gigabytes—of data that had been decoded by the Chinese group using the Watkins collection.

Astonishingly, this data revealed that modern wheat varieties only make use of 40 percent of the genetic diversity found in the collection.

“We have found that the Watkins collection is packed full of useful variation which is simply absent in modern wheat,” said Griffiths.

These lost traits are now being tested by plant breeders with the aim of creating a host of new varieties that would have been forgotten if it had not been for the efforts of Arthur Watkins.

Arthur Watkins’ introduction to agriculture was unusual. At the age of 19, he was sent to fight in the trenches in the first world war. He survived, and for several months after the armistice he was ordered to remain in France to act as an assistant agricultural officer, tasked with helping local farmers feed the troops who were still waiting to be shipped home.

The post triggered his interest in agriculture and he applied to study it at Cambridge when he returned to Britain, said Simon Griffiths of the John Innes Centre. After graduating, Watkins—a shy, reserved academic—joined the university’s department of agriculture, where he began his life’s work: collecting wheat samples from across the planet.

“Crucially, Watkins had realized that, as we began breeding new wheat varieties, genes that were then thought to be of little use and which were being deleted from strains might still have future value,” said Griffiths.

“His thinking was incredibly ahead of its time. He realised that genetic diversity—in this case, of wheat—was being eroded and that we badly needed to halt that.

“Very few scientists were thinking of this issue in those days. Watkins was clearly thinking well ahead of his time, and we have much to be grateful for that.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A hundred years ago, the plant scientist Arthur Watkins launched a remarkable project. He began collecting samples of wheat from all over the globe, nagging consuls and business agents across the British empire and beyond to supply him with grain from local markets.

His persistence was exceptional and, a century later, it is about to reap dramatic results. A UK-Chinese collaboration has sequenced the DNA of all the 827 kinds of wheat, assembled by Watkins, that have been nurtured at the John Innes Centre near Norwich for most of the past century.

In doing so, scientists have created a genetic goldmine by pinpointing previously unknown genes that are now being used to create hardy varieties with improved yields that could help feed Earth’s swelling population.

Strains are now being developed that include wheat which is able to grow in salty soil, while researchers at Punjab Agricultural University are working to improve disease resistance from seeds that they received from the John Innes Centre. Other strains include those that would reduce the need for nitrogen fertilisers, the manufacture of which is a major source of carbon emissions.

The collection includes lost varieties that “will be invaluable in creating wheat that can provide healthy yields in the harsh conditions that now threaten agriculture.”

“Essentially we have uncovered a goldmine,” said Simon Griffiths, a geneticist at the John Innes Centre and one of the project’s leaders. “This is going to make an enormous difference to our ability to feed the world as it gets hotter and agriculture comes under increasing climatic strain.”

Today, one in five calories consumed by humans come from wheat, and every year the crop is eaten by more and more people as the world’s population continues to grow.

“Wheat has been a cornerstone of human civilization,” added Griffiths. “In regions such as Europe, north Africa, large parts of Asia, and subsequently North America, its cultivation fed great empires, from ancient Egypt’s to the growth of modern Britain.”

This wheat was derived from wild varieties that were originally domesticated and cultivated in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, 10,000 years ago. Many of these varieties and their genes have disappeared over the millennia, a process that was accelerated about a century ago as the science of plant breeding became increasingly sophisticated and varieties with properties that were then considered of no value were discarded.

“That is why the Watkins collection is so important,” said Griffiths. “It contains varieties that had been lost but which will be invaluable in creating wheat that can provide healthy yields in the harsh conditions that now threaten agriculture.”

The project’s other leader, Shifeng Cheng, a professor with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said: “We can retrace the novel, functional and beneficial diversity that were lost in modern wheats after the ‘green revolution’ in the 20th century, and have the opportunity to add them back into breeding programmes.”

Watkins realized that “genes that were then thought to be of little use and which were being deleted from strains might still have future value.”

Scientists had wanted to pinpoint and study the wheat genes in the Watkins collection after the development of large-scale DNA sequencing more than a decade ago, but faced an unusual problem. The genome of wheat is huge: it is made up of 17 billion units of DNA, compared with the 3 billion base pairs that make up the human genome.

“The wheat genome is full of ­little retro elements and that has made it more difficult and, crucially, more expensive to sequence,” said Griffiths. “However, thanks to our Chinese colleagues who carried out the detailed sequencing work, we have overcome that problem.”

Griffiths and his colleagues sent samples from the Watkins collection to Cheng and were rewarded three months later with the arrival of a suitcase crammed with hard drives. These contained a petabyte—1 million gigabytes—of data that had been decoded by the Chinese group using the Watkins collection.

Astonishingly, this data revealed that modern wheat varieties only make use of 40 percent of the genetic diversity found in the collection.

“We have found that the Watkins collection is packed full of useful variation which is simply absent in modern wheat,” said Griffiths.

These lost traits are now being tested by plant breeders with the aim of creating a host of new varieties that would have been forgotten if it had not been for the efforts of Arthur Watkins.

Arthur Watkins’ introduction to agriculture was unusual. At the age of 19, he was sent to fight in the trenches in the first world war. He survived, and for several months after the armistice he was ordered to remain in France to act as an assistant agricultural officer, tasked with helping local farmers feed the troops who were still waiting to be shipped home.

The post triggered his interest in agriculture and he applied to study it at Cambridge when he returned to Britain, said Simon Griffiths of the John Innes Centre. After graduating, Watkins—a shy, reserved academic—joined the university’s department of agriculture, where he began his life’s work: collecting wheat samples from across the planet.

“Crucially, Watkins had realized that, as we began breeding new wheat varieties, genes that were then thought to be of little use and which were being deleted from strains might still have future value,” said Griffiths.

“His thinking was incredibly ahead of its time. He realised that genetic diversity—in this case, of wheat—was being eroded and that we badly needed to halt that.

“Very few scientists were thinking of this issue in those days. Watkins was clearly thinking well ahead of his time, and we have much to be grateful for that.”

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

As president, Donald Trump’s tax policy heavily favored corporations and the wealthy. Trump’s signature tax legislation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, overwhelmingly benefited those groups. 

But as a presidential candidate, Trump campaigns as a populist. In his 2024 campaign, he’s touting a proposal to end federal taxation on tips. He made the announcement last month in Nevada, a key battleground state with a large service industry that relies on tips. 

“For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy, because when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips,” Trump said. “We’re going to do that right away first thing in office because it’s been a point of contention for years and years and years, and you do a great job of service.” 

This week, Trump’s proposal to end taxes on tips was one of 20 “promises” included in the official 2024 Republican Party platform: “LARGE TAX CUTS FOR WORKERS, AND NO TAX ON TIPS!”

Trump’s plan to end taxes on tips may help him politically with service industry workers. His campaign is urging people to write “Vote for Trump for NO TAX ON TIPS!” on their restaurant receipts.

Republicans in Congress have already introduced legislation to implement Trump’s plan and end federal taxation of tips. Notably, the bill would only exempt tips from income taxes, and not payroll taxes, which represents the majority of federal taxes owed by low-income workers. 

Only the best-paid workers would benefit, but why should a waiter who earns $60,000 a year pay less taxes than someone making the same amount in a grocery store?

But the proposal, if it were ever implemented, could have a detrimental effect on most tipped workers. The primary beneficiaries would be people who own and operate hotels, restaurants, and other businesses that employ tipped workers—in other words, people like Trump. 

First, many people who rely on tips earn so little money that they already pay no federal income taxes. For example, half of all servers earn $32,000 or less. A server with a family who earns $32,000 does not owe any federal income tax and, therefore, would not benefit at all from Trump’s proposal. 

The bigger issue is that the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour. The tipped minimum wage has not increased since 1991. Combined with tips, these workers are supposed to earn a minimum of $7.25 an hour. That is not close to a living wage in the United States in 2024. 

As a result, seven states (Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) have eliminated the tipped minimum wage and require all employers to pay their employees the same minimum wage regardless of whether they receive tips. The Biden Administration requires “federal contractors to pay tipped workers the same minimum wages as others.” Major cities like New York and Chicago have recently implemented similar policies. Numerous other cities and states are considering following suit. 

The hotel and restaurant industry has been desperate to halt the momentum of state initiatives to raise the minimum wage. The National Restaurant Association, which represents restaurant owners, has endorsed Trump’s proposal. 

Historically, “many restaurants and rail operators embraced tipping because it allowed them to ‘hire’ newly freed slaves without having to pay them.”

Eliminating taxation on tips could sap support from efforts both to eliminate the tipped minimum wage and raise the minimum wage overall. While most service industry workers would receive little or no benefit from eliminating income taxes on tips, many would benefit from increasing their minimum wage to $15 an hour or higher. The Tax Policy Center notes that this tradeoff would be particularly brutal for “‘back of the house’ staff such as dishwashers, who often receive only a small share of tips, enough to qualify as tipped workers but not enough to live on, or to pay taxes.”

That’s why the Restaurant Workers United, a labor union that represents many of the industry’s workers, opposes Trump’s plan. “The call to end taxes on tips is just a misguided way of trying to fix a problem of uplifting the lower class,” Elyanna Calle, a bartender and RWU organizer in Austin, said. Saru Jayaraman, president of the labor advocacy group One Fair Wage, calls Trump’s proposal “not just the wrong solution, but a fake solution.”

There are some tipped employees—including the 10 percent of servers that earn $60,000 or more—who would significantly benefit from ending income taxes on tips. But why should these higher-paid tipped workers get a special tax benefit while those making the same income in industries without tips are excluded? Why should a waiter who earns $60,000 a year pay less taxes than someone making the same amount in a warehouse or a grocery store? 

There is no clear answer to these questions, other than the proposal to end taxes on tips may have political benefits for Trump.

Ending federal taxation of tips could prompt more industries to shift from paying wages to soliciting tips. In addition to potential tax benefits for employees, it would transfer some of the responsibility for paying workers from the business to its customers. For example, the Wall Street Journal notes that “[a]n auto-body shop could restrain its prices and wages and strongly encourage tipping as a way to get untaxed income to workers.”

If there is a significant shift to tipping over wages, it would also increase the cost of the proposal. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that incentivizing more tipping by ending federal taxation could cost the federal government up to $500 billion over 10 years.

According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, “tipping in the United States is rooted in a racist system which was designed to keep African Americans in an economically and socially subordinate position following the end of slavery.”

Prior to the Civil War, notes a conference fact sheet, “tipping was frowned upon: it was viewed by many as an aristocratic, European practice that was incompatible with American democracy.” But after the elimination of slavery, “many restaurants and rail operators embraced tipping because it allowed them to ‘hire’ newly freed slaves without having to pay them—they would be forced to work for tips alone.” The practice was designed “to keep African Americans in an economically and socially subordinate position.” 

Even today, it continues, “40 percent of people who work for tips are people of color.” Further, studies show that “customers discriminate against African-American servers, consistently tipping them less than White servers regardless of the quality of service.”

The movement to end the tipped minimum wage to create a single fair wage for all workers is about recognizing the dignity and worth of all workers. Trump’s proposal would push the United States in the opposite direction, making millions of Americans even more dependent on wealthy patrons. 

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

As president, Donald Trump’s tax policy heavily favored corporations and the wealthy. Trump’s signature tax legislation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, overwhelmingly benefited those groups. 

But as a presidential candidate, Trump campaigns as a populist. In his 2024 campaign, he’s touting a proposal to end federal taxation on tips. He made the announcement last month in Nevada, a key battleground state with a large service industry that relies on tips. 

“For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy, because when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips,” Trump said. “We’re going to do that right away first thing in office because it’s been a point of contention for years and years and years, and you do a great job of service.” 

This week, Trump’s proposal to end taxes on tips was one of 20 “promises” included in the official 2024 Republican Party platform: “LARGE TAX CUTS FOR WORKERS, AND NO TAX ON TIPS!”

Trump’s plan to end taxes on tips may help him politically with service industry workers. His campaign is urging people to write “Vote for Trump for NO TAX ON TIPS!” on their restaurant receipts.

Republicans in Congress have already introduced legislation to implement Trump’s plan and end federal taxation of tips. Notably, the bill would only exempt tips from income taxes, and not payroll taxes, which represents the majority of federal taxes owed by low-income workers. 

Only the best-paid workers would benefit, but why should a waiter who earns $60,000 a year pay less taxes than someone making the same amount in a grocery store?

But the proposal, if it were ever implemented, could have a detrimental effect on most tipped workers. The primary beneficiaries would be people who own and operate hotels, restaurants, and other businesses that employ tipped workers—in other words, people like Trump. 

First, many people who rely on tips earn so little money that they already pay no federal income taxes. For example, half of all servers earn $32,000 or less. A server with a family who earns $32,000 does not owe any federal income tax and, therefore, would not benefit at all from Trump’s proposal. 

The bigger issue is that the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour. The tipped minimum wage has not increased since 1991. Combined with tips, these workers are supposed to earn a minimum of $7.25 an hour. That is not close to a living wage in the United States in 2024. 

As a result, seven states (Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) have eliminated the tipped minimum wage and require all employers to pay their employees the same minimum wage regardless of whether they receive tips. The Biden Administration requires “federal contractors to pay tipped workers the same minimum wages as others.” Major cities like New York and Chicago have recently implemented similar policies. Numerous other cities and states are considering following suit. 

The hotel and restaurant industry has been desperate to halt the momentum of state initiatives to raise the minimum wage. The National Restaurant Association, which represents restaurant owners, has endorsed Trump’s proposal. 

Historically, “many restaurants and rail operators embraced tipping because it allowed them to ‘hire’ newly freed slaves without having to pay them.”

Eliminating taxation on tips could sap support from efforts both to eliminate the tipped minimum wage and raise the minimum wage overall. While most service industry workers would receive little or no benefit from eliminating income taxes on tips, many would benefit from increasing their minimum wage to $15 an hour or higher. The Tax Policy Center notes that this tradeoff would be particularly brutal for “‘back of the house’ staff such as dishwashers, who often receive only a small share of tips, enough to qualify as tipped workers but not enough to live on, or to pay taxes.”

That’s why the Restaurant Workers United, a labor union that represents many of the industry’s workers, opposes Trump’s plan. “The call to end taxes on tips is just a misguided way of trying to fix a problem of uplifting the lower class,” Elyanna Calle, a bartender and RWU organizer in Austin, said. Saru Jayaraman, president of the labor advocacy group One Fair Wage, calls Trump’s proposal “not just the wrong solution, but a fake solution.”

There are some tipped employees—including the 10 percent of servers that earn $60,000 or more—who would significantly benefit from ending income taxes on tips. But why should these higher-paid tipped workers get a special tax benefit while those making the same income in industries without tips are excluded? Why should a waiter who earns $60,000 a year pay less taxes than someone making the same amount in a warehouse or a grocery store? 

There is no clear answer to these questions, other than the proposal to end taxes on tips may have political benefits for Trump.

Ending federal taxation of tips could prompt more industries to shift from paying wages to soliciting tips. In addition to potential tax benefits for employees, it would transfer some of the responsibility for paying workers from the business to its customers. For example, the Wall Street Journal notes that “[a]n auto-body shop could restrain its prices and wages and strongly encourage tipping as a way to get untaxed income to workers.”

If there is a significant shift to tipping over wages, it would also increase the cost of the proposal. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that incentivizing more tipping by ending federal taxation could cost the federal government up to $500 billion over 10 years.

According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, “tipping in the United States is rooted in a racist system which was designed to keep African Americans in an economically and socially subordinate position following the end of slavery.”

Prior to the Civil War, notes a conference fact sheet, “tipping was frowned upon: it was viewed by many as an aristocratic, European practice that was incompatible with American democracy.” But after the elimination of slavery, “many restaurants and rail operators embraced tipping because it allowed them to ‘hire’ newly freed slaves without having to pay them—they would be forced to work for tips alone.” The practice was designed “to keep African Americans in an economically and socially subordinate position.” 

Even today, it continues, “40 percent of people who work for tips are people of color.” Further, studies show that “customers discriminate against African-American servers, consistently tipping them less than White servers regardless of the quality of service.”

The movement to end the tipped minimum wage to create a single fair wage for all workers is about recognizing the dignity and worth of all workers. Trump’s proposal would push the United States in the opposite direction, making millions of Americans even more dependent on wealthy patrons. 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

René Heiden pulls two glass yogurt jars off the shop shelf, and lists the nearby supermarkets in which they can be returned once empty.

His Berlin grocery shop avoids single-use packaging in favor of reusable containers, a waste reduction model that is having something of a revival in Germany. But it’s surprisingly hard to get right.

“You need a range of packaging to make it as convenient as possible for the consumer,” says Heiden. An oil bottle, for example, needs a thin neck and a small spout to help it drip—“you would never put yogurt in one of those.” Marmalade and spreads, on the other hand, work best in cylindrical jars that a knife can fully scrape.

Germany has long been praised for its recycling prowess, but its efforts to reuse packaging are perhaps more impressive. Three of its favorite drinks—beer, water and milk (arguably in that order)—are covered by nationwide deposit schemes. Food companies are starting to embrace the refill movement for other foods as well.

Europe’s packaging problems have piled up as consumerism spreads and countries across Asia have closed their ports to ships full of western trash.

“I’m seeing more and more products that use reusable packaging,” says Heiden, who has devoted a wall of his shop Samariter Unverpackt to dispensers of grains and cereals from which customers can fill home-brought containers. “But I also see some producers who are trying to expand, but have to go back because the handling costs are too high.”

The problem that Heiden and others are trying to tackle is a glut of garbage that is fouling waterways, killing wildlife and—after plastics break down into tiny particles—infiltrating our organs. In 2021, the average German generated about eight times their bodyweight in waste: a whopping 651 kilograms, more than the average residents of all but four countries in Europe. Germany created 64 percent more plastic waste that year than it did two decades earlier, and it burned most of it.

But it’s not just a problem here. Europe’s packaging problems have piled up as consumerism has spread and countries across Asia have closed their ports to ships full of western trash. As part of efforts to stop harmful garbage clogging landfills or being burned in incinerators, the EU has set targets to reduce packaging 5 percent by 2030, 10 percent by 2035 and 15 percent by 2040.

Recycling is one option, but plastic recycling is a knotty and unresolved issue. Besides, the European hierarchy of waste has put prevention and reuse above recycling since 2008. But campaigners say rules to reduce packaging are riddled with loopholes—and are calling not just for tighter regulations, but also a culture shift.

“The best packaging is the one you don’t produce,” says Nathan Dufour, who leads efforts to promote reuse systems at the campaign group Zero Waste Europe. If you need to use it—for hygiene reasons, say—“then that packaging needs to stay in the loop for as long as possible.”

Germany has a head start on many of its neighbors with its bottle deposit schemes, in which customers are charged a bit more upfront for their purchase—whether fancy juice from an organic store or cheap beer from an off-license—and given the money back when they return the empty glass. The bottles, which get dropped off in “reverse vending machines” in supermarkets, are then transported, cleaned and refilled.

Hidden behind this process is a delicate alliance of companies that have agreed to standardise and share their packaging, some of which go back a long way. The Milch Mehrweg Pool—Milk Reuse Pool (MMP)—for example, was started by the German dairy industry in the 80s and formalised in the 90s.

Countries that lack Germany’s infrastructure to process bottles—and the culture around returning them—may also find it tricky to build up such a system from scratch.

The process has not been smooth sailing, and after 2008, the organisation was disbanded. The system continued, ungoverned, until 2022 when it was reactivated as the Mach Mehrweg Pool (“Make Reuse Pool”). Now it is working on strengthening cooperation between members and increase efficiency. It has also expanded to include other foods and drinks.

“Reusable systems are most efficient if they are scaled, if they are used a lot, if they are used in every region,” says Julia Klein, a former engineer from Siemens who runs the MMP. “Only keeping this to the dairy sector limits the potential.”

One customer is the coffee retailer Truesday; its brown bottles are on the shelves of Heiden’s store. The aim is to sell the beans for their “true price”—accounting for hidden costs and compensating for damages that can’t be avoided. To cut down on plastic waste, its founder, Henning Reiche, decided to sell the beans in MMP bottles, which he thinks also helps with the marketing. The brown glass keeps the beans safe from sunlight but customers can still see through it. “It’s a nice symbol of the transparency that we want to express with the pricing.”

The MMP has little raw data on its environmental footprint—an issue Klein chalks up to years of inactivity—but based on numbers from the mineral water industry, it estimates the average milk bottle in its pool lasts about 50 cycles in the system.

The benefits of a reuse pool include economies of scale and lower barriers to entry for newcomers. The standardisation process means bottles can be used by all companies in the pool, so “empties” need only to be taken to the nearest buyer. This cuts transport costs—and emissions.

But there are also costs. Glass bottles are heavier than single-use packaging, which increases emissions from transport, and they may need expensive cleaning equipment that small firms lack. Heide, who runs Samariter Unverpackt, says they also take more time to process within the store—and the extra seconds add up.

Countries that lack Germany’s infrastructure to process bottles—and the culture around returning them—may also find it tricky to build up such a system from scratch.

“I realized it’s a totally different story for other European countries that are starting from zero,” says Klein. Brands don’t know which labels and machinery to use, supermarkets don’t have space to stack crates and consumers aren’t used to returning empty containers.

But starting a new system offers the chance to make it more efficient than Germany’s, she adds.

“If you look from an outside perspective, it doesn’t make so much sense to carry dirty empty jars and bottles back to the supermarket,” says Klein. “In the long run, what makes much more sense is if reusable packaging is being picked up at home.”

In a Princeton University lecture hall one morning last December, Peter Singer, one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—living philosophers, offered his Philosophy 385 (“Practical Ethics”) students a brief overview of their upcoming final. The registrar, he noted, had scheduled the exam for the following Sunday evening. This, he proclaimed, “seems unethical.”

The line got a good laugh. A hint of winter chill hung in the air, the undergrads having just sloughed off their Canada Goose parkas and settled into the seats of Wood Auditorium in McCosh Hall, a Tudor Gothic behemoth that was once the largest building on campus. It was here, 102 years earlier, that Albert Einstein described his theory of relativity to a packed house.

The 200 students enrolled in Philosophy 385—about as many as in all other Princeton philosophy classes combined—were acutely aware, per the course syllabus, that they were his final crop:

This course will challenge you to examine your life from an ethical perspective. NOTE: This will be the last time I teach this course before my retirement from Princeton University.

In May, following a two-day farewell conference, the now-78-year-old Australian bade farewell to Princeton and, with a perceptible measure of good riddance, the United States, his second home for more than a quarter-century. For his final class, Singer had prepared a PowerPoint looking back on his years at Princeton—and America.

It’s striking to consider the extent to which the United States has been shaped by Singer’s version of utilitarianism—the belief that actions are ethical insomuch as they increase our collective pleasure and limit our collective suffering. His addition to this ancient idea is simple and profound: Singer believes that all pain experienced by sentient beings counts the same.

The logical extensions of his intellectual positions have on occasion caused great controversy, as when Singer’s belief that newborns lack sentience led him to assert that in extreme cases, parents should have the right to end the life of a severely disabled infant. In response, a disability rights organization dubbed him “the most dangerous man on earth.” Generally speaking, Singer sees few ideas as off-limits. He recently helped launch the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which last fall published an article on whether zoophilia is morally permissible.

Whatever one might think of Singer’s ideas, there’s no doubt they’ve had a great deal of impact. Interest-based utilitarianism is at the root of Singer’s path-breaking advocacy for animal rights and, somewhat controversially, of effective altruism, the charitable principle famously espoused by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud last year. Earlier this year, along with Polish philosopher Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, Singer launched a podcast exploring how to live an ethical, meaningful life.

Perhaps most profoundly, his philosophy flicks at the core of America’s democratic project. While the Founding Fathers were most influenced by John Locke, it was John Stuart Mill—a utilitarian—whose ideas shaped the evolution of constitutional liberalism in the second half of the 20th century. As we face one of the most fraught political periods in recent memory, it’s sobering to hear Singer’s take on America’s shortcomings—and his assessment of what’s to come.

Singer first arrived in the US in 1973, shortly after finishing his graduate work at Oxford University. He was accompanied by his wife, Renata, who’d recently given birth to their first child. The couple had planned to return to Australia to raise their daughter but wanted to spend some time in the States first. “Obviously, everything in America is a big presence growing up in Australia,” Singer told me during one of several interviews.

On the advice of philosopher Derek Parfit, another influential philosopher of Singer’s generation, Singer accepted a visiting professorship at New York University and settled into university housing on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

The NYU position came with the possibility of a two-year extension, but the college was then on the verge of bankruptcy. It ultimately sold off its uptown campus, and the administrators informed Singer that they wouldn’t renew his contract. “We were reasonably okay with that,” he recalls. “We didn’t want our children to grow up as Americans, really.” He quickly landed an appointment at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

“‘Animal Liberation’ lit the fire for me,” says the attorney and activist Cheryl Leahy. “You cannot overstate the importance of Singer’s work in influencing and launching this movement.”

With time to kill between jobs, he spent the fall of 1974 teaching a continuing education course. In it, he presented a draft of a manuscript based on an essay he’d published the year before in the New York Review of Books. The piece was inspired in part by Singer’s decision, four years earlier on Earth Day, to stop eating meat. It was persuasive enough to convince the Review’s founder and editor, Robert Silvers, to become a vegetarian.

Published in 1975 with the same title, Animal Liberation is almost inarguably the most important book in the history of animal rights. It has remained in print for 50 years and been read by almost everyone in the field. Cheryl Leahy read it at age 13, after a classmate accused her in the lunchroom of eating the “decomposing flesh of a tortured animal.”

Today, Leahy is executive director of Animal Outlook, a nonprofit focused on animal protection, and has spent her 20-year career as an attorney advocating for the interests of nonhuman beings. “Animal Liberation lit the fire for me,” she told me. “It probably did for countless people. You cannot overstate the importance of Singer’s work in influencing and launching this movement.”

Thanks in part to Singer, vegetarianism in the United States has increased over the years. In 1994, barely 1 percent of Americans self-identified as vegetarian or vegan. Recent surveys put the rate at 5 to 8 percent. Yet with population growth, the US public now consumes more meat than ever, and the vast majority of factory-farmed animals still live short, miserable lives. Even “cage-free” hens, Singer laments, are generally crowded into giant sheds with thousands of birds. “I’m disappointed [the animal welfare movement] hasn’t gone further,” he told the class I attended.

Some 25 years after the couple’s NYU adventure, Singer received an invitation to teach at Princeton. Their kids were grown, and he and Renata had been contemplating a move anyway. “In fact,” he says, “we’d been talking about going to a Third World country for something quite different.” But a friend, animal rights activist Henry Spira, argued that Singer had a greater obligation: “Henry said to me at some stage, ‘You ought to come over the United States because it’s a much bigger pond and you’ll have a much bigger impact. The United States needs your ideas just as much as Australia, but it’s 15 times bigger and you’ll have more of a world influence.’” The offer proved “just a bit too tempting to turn down.”

Back in the lecture hall, with Australian understatement, Singer informed his students that his 1999 hiring “caused something of a stir.” Indeed, the New York Times ran a front-page article declaring that no academic appointment had caused such controversy since 1940, when City College had tried to hire atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Editorial writers, the story noted, “have compared Mr. Singer’s hiring to that of a Nazi.” Then-Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, a Princeton alum and supporter, threatened to stop donating to the university if the appointment stood. Protesters blocked the entrance to Nassau Hall, the administration building, because of Singer’s support of euthanasia in extreme circumstances. But Princeton President Harold Shapiro stood behind Singer, and the hubbub subsided.

Given all of this year’s campus upheaval over Israel’s activities in Gaza, Singer’s hiring kerfuffle seems almost quaint today. I asked several of his students whether their professor had stirred up any serious controversy during the semester—all said no. During the lecture, when Singer spoke proudly of his role in launching the Journal of Controversial Ideas, no one seemed to bat an eye.

Near the end of his lecture, Singer addressed an elephant in the room—Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency exchange founder who’d just been convicted of defrauding customers and investors out of at least $10 billion. Bankman-Fried also ranked among the most prominent champions of effective altruism (EA), a movement inspired in significant part by Singer’s 1971 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”   

EA proponents generally advocate for using data and reason to maximize the future benefits of any charitable action. In his paper, Singer argued that the failure of wealthy people to contribute to humanitarian causes was akin to failing to help a child drowning in a shallow pond. He was referring in this case to a famine afflicting Bangladeshi war refugees, but the argument applied generally.

In 2009, inspired by Singer’s work, Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and Will MacAskill launched an organization, Giving What We Can, framed around their pledge to donate at least a tenth of their income to effective charities. The next year, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett invited fellow billionaires to take the Giving Pledge, a vow to dedicate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. When a group of 17 billionaires signed the pledge in late 2010, the press release included a statement from Singer.

Singer explained to his students how Sam Bankman-Fried had claimed he’d never intended to commit fraud and “sometimes life creeps up on you.” He lowered his voice and added, “Well, be warned: Don’t let life creep up on you.”

Although their causes and motivations have been questioned, the notion that rich people ought to be more altruistic—the “A” in EA—is not a matter of serious dispute. It’s the “E” where things get complicated.

In 2013, Singer co-founded The Life You Can Save, an organization named after one of his books that attempts to quantify and maximize charitable impact, often in terms of quality-adjusted life years, a metric borrowed from the public health universe. In practical terms, this usually means steering money to causes that benefit developing nations as opposed to, say, your elementary school PTA.

At the heart of MacAskill’s own 2016 book, Doing Good Better, is the idea that a dollar spent by a citizen of a rich country could do 100 times more good if spent in an impoverished nation. This notion is not particularly controversial either, at least not among ethicists, who by and large would agree that giving to the opera is neither charitable nor effective by any meaningful definition of the words.

But then there’s “longtermism,” an EA offshoot that prioritizes the elimination of existential risks such as biological and nuclear weapons, climate change, and malicious AIs, which longtermers say could wreak havoc on future humans or other forms of life—which could include (non-malicious) sentient AIs. In a more recent book, What We Owe the Future, MacAskill casts protecting the denizens of the distant future as the moral imperative of our time—the ultimate cause.

This view is highly controversial. The New School for Social Research philosophy professor Alice Crary, a prominent critic, calls longtermism “toxic” because of the stark utilitarian tradeoff it embraces. The focus on “existential risk,” she writes, “marks a dramatic shift from the concern with present and near-term suffering that is the hallmark of their effective altruist progenitors.”

Effective altruism, which Singer’s work helped inspire, “makes students in places like Princeton feel like they’re the heroic rescuers of the world,” says philosopher Alice Crary. “And these institutions have enriched themselves off of it.”

Singer distances himself from strong longtermism in part for this reason. He’s also skeptical of the longtermers’ more speculative projects, like aiming to protect the interests of sentient nonhumans. Utilitarians, Singer says, are split on whether hypothetical beings deserve the same consideration as actual humans. “That I still regard as one of the most difficult and baffling issues in ethical theory,” he says.

He’s also doubtful that we can meaningfully adjust our actions to do good in the distant future and is thus careful to distinguish between the dangers from asteroids and viruses—“where we can significantly reduce risks for modest amounts of money”—and more abstract projects. As for general artificial intelligence, AI that broadly matches or surpasses human capabilities, “we don’t know whether that will come, we don’t when it is coming, and we don’t really know what we could do now that would reduce that risk.”

But Singer is more tolerant of the notion of pursuing a high income with the intent to donate a sizable portion to charity. The EA community calls this “earning to give,” and it’s a significant part of the work of effective altruist Benjamin Todd’s organization 80,000 Hours (the average person’s work longevity); its disciples included Bankman-Fried, who claimed he aspired to accumulate near-infinite wealth so he could redistribute it.

For his students, Singer put up a slide reading, “Do Good But Don’t Be Sketchy!” explaining how Bankman-Fried had told journalist Kelsey Piper he’d never intended to commit fraud, and “sometimes life creeps up on you.” A father of three and grandfather of four, Singer then lowered his voice. “Well, be warned,” he said. “Don’t let life creep up on you.”

But Singer’s admonition begs the question of whether EA can be used to justify unethical behavior. It certainly seem to rationalize the existence and inform the ethos of elite colleges like Princeton, an institution that admits more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 60 percent, and where graduates’ most common career path is “business.”

EA arguably relieves such institutions of the pressure to embrace a more socioeconomically diverse group of students and encourage them toward public-interest careers. “EA makes students in places like Princeton feel like they’re the heroic rescuers of the world,” Crary says. “And these institutions have enriched themselves off of it.”

“Australia does elections better than America. We have ranked-choice voting and we have proportional representation for the Senate. We vote on Saturdays…We have an independent electoral commission, which draws up electoral boundaries.”

Singer might not go that far, but he was willing to sign on as an unpaid adviser (in name only) to Class Action, a nonprofit I co-founded that advocates against inequitable admissions policies at so-called elite colleges and the funneling of graduates into investment banking and management consulting careers.

To his students, Singer said: “You will get asked to donate to various charities after you graduate, and one of them might be to improve education here at Princeton. The question can be raised: Is this the most effective thing that you can do with your donations?”

He acknowledged that they might feel a debt to their alma mater: “But I think you should think of your charitable donations like that in a different pocket from donations where you want to really do the most good in the world.”

While Singer is best known for his influence on animal rights and effective altruism, his Oxford graduate thesis, later published as his first book, focused on the ethics of civil disobedience in democracies. In it, he argues that our voluntary participation in a democratic process obligates us to accept its outcome.

“After the election,” Singer wrote in 1973—amid the Watergate scandal that would lead to then-President Richard Nixon’s resignation—“it is too late to say that one never accepted its validity.” It’s thus only natural that he has followed American politics closely, and critically, ever since the Supreme Court declared George W. Bush president in 2000, shortly after Singer arrived at Princeton. Now, like much of America, he’s anxious about November.

“One of the things that’s absurd about American politics is first-past-the-post voting,” Singer says, citing the practice of allowing voters to select only one candidate and awarding the seat to whomever has the most votes—as opposed to alternative voting systems that are used around the world and widely perceived as fairer. “The reason that Bush was president instead of [Al] Gore was Ralph Nader running for the Greens,” he says. “That was terrible of him, and I’ve never forgiven him, but it also shows how stupid this voting system is. [Donald] Trump never would have gotten the nomination in 2016 if they’d used ranked-choice voting.”

“Australia does elections better than America,” he adds, citing a litany of practices he views as beneficial. “We have ranked-choice voting and we have proportional representation for the Senate. We vote on Saturdays, not a weekday. We have an independent electoral commission, which draws up electoral boundaries—we don’t have politicians do it. We don’t have primaries. We have parliamentary parties elect their leaders, which means they’ve been through the scrutiny of their colleagues, so it’s a much better proving ground for who’s going to be a good leader.”

He holds special enmity for the Electoral College. “Hillary [Clinton] got nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, so she should have been president,” Singer says. “And the gerrymandered electorates are disgraceful as well.”

Singer points to the “great pity” of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire when she could: “Does Joe Biden really want his legacy to be the reelection of Donald Trump and everything that that will mean?”

Whatever his debt to the United States and its institutions, Singer’s national allegiance is clear. “I’ve never thought of myself as an American,” he says, as we talk about how difficult it is for his countrymen to accept the insanity of US politics. “They are astounded about the gun laws,” he says. “Australia has very tough gun laws, and they were brought in by a conservative prime minister, John Howard. It’s just incredible to me that America cannot see how obviously terrible it is to have guns available to everybody.”

The critiques continue. “America lacks universal health care coverage, which is something that we Australians all take for granted,” Singer says. “This is perhaps more controversial, but we generally don’t think that it’s a good idea to have a Supreme Court that decides issues like abortion.”

Australians, he adds, have difficulty grappling with the outsize sway of money over politics and policy here. “It’s not that money has no influence in Australia,” he explains, “but it doesn’t have the same kind of influence on individual elected representatives, because what matters is the political party—and individual candidates for Parliament don’t have to raise their own money.”

Prior to Trump’s recent criminal conviction, over a vegan lunch at a Princeton dining hall, I ask Singer what he sees in America’s future. “You think philosophers have crystal balls, do you?” he asks with a smile. I counter that I do not, but that readers would be keenly interested in an astute traveler’s observations of our embattled democratic order. “You’re Alexis de Tocqueville in this story,” I say.

“I hope I can live up to it.”

He thinks for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says, finally. “Until recently, I thought that Trump was not going to be electable. I thought he had this 40 percent of hardcore supporters, but that wasn’t going to be enough. But obviously, the polls that have come out recently have been more scary than that. I wish there were a strong Democrat running for office who is not in his 80s, but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.”

Trump’s behavior has polarized the nation and “encouraged this idea that we have our own set of facts,” he emphasizes. “Bush did some of that, too. I think Karl Rove said something like, ‘You’re living in the reality world.’ But Trump has made it so much worse, talking about the fake news stuff just to get people to believe that there were no facts you can agree on. I think that’s been very damaging to democracy.” (Rove has denied that he was the source of the quote in question, which the New York Times Magazine attributed to an anonymous “senior adviser to Bush.”)

Trump would not “do what needs to be done” on climate, and that problem “dwarfs the others,” Singer says. “Another four years, then it’s almost past the time where we can prevent catastrophic climate change.”

Most utilitarians believe that engaging with ideas—even patently false ones—generally serves the greater good, but on the eve of the first presidential debate, which was disastrous for President Joe Biden, Singer said he thought Trump might be the rare exception. Debating Trump, he told me in an email, “would be unethical if this would-be despot, crazy person were not the overwhelmingly likely nominee of one of America’s two major political parties.”

Yet based purely on a political-utilitarian calculus, he figures Biden didn’t have much choice. “I think it would look weak to refuse to debate him,” Singer said. “Trump would make a lot of hay with that. He would say, ‘He’s old and senile and can’t do it.’”

After the debate, Singer wrote on X that “Biden should announce that at the Democratic Convention he will release his delegates to vote for the candidate with the best chance of defeating Trump.” In a follow-up email, he cited the “terrible blot” of Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign on Nader’s own career as a consumer advocate and the “great pity” of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire from the Supreme Court while Democrats controlled the Senate, which resulted in the reversal of Roe v. Wade “and now is denying the EPA the power to issue essential environmental regulations.”

“Does Joe Biden really want his legacy to be the reelection of Donald Trump and everything that that will mean for the US and the world?” he said.

He fears what a second Trump term might portend. He’s particularly worried about Trump’s fossil-fuel cheerleading and hostility toward climate action. “He’s not going to do what needs to be done, and that’s a huge problem that dwarfs the others. Another four years,” Singer told me, “then it’s almost past the time where we can prevent catastrophic climate change.”

The demise of the founders’ grand experiment isn’t far behind on his worry list: “Would it be the end of American democracy? Probably not is my guess, but there’s a much greater chance of it being the end of American democracy if Trump is elected than if he’s defeated. I wouldn’t like to take that risk. And the fact that he would not support Ukraine against his friend [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, whom he understands so well, is also a big worry. Because that’s not just about the plight of Ukraine, it’s about the rule of law in international affairs.”

His concern extends to the Gaza situation. “Trump is such a loose cannon” that he’s difficult to predict, Singer says. “But given the idea that he’s all about putting America’s interests first and he doesn’t seem to show that he cares much about other people, he may well believe that it’s in America’s interest for the Netanyahu government to do as it wishes. And that may be much worse for the Palestinian people than if Biden, who is at least trying to put some pressure on the Netanyahu government to have a ceasefire, remains in office.”

Back in McCosh Hall, the hour drew to a close—and with it Singer’s Princeton career.    

After nearly a quarter-century, there was a palpable sense he’d had enough. His farewell slide to his last-ever Practical Ethics class—which was followed by a rousing standing ovation from the students—had nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy or politics or even ethics.

It was a photo of Singer in a wetsuit, surfboard in hand, practicing a hobby he took up in his 50s. “Bye,” it said. “I’ve gone surfing.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

René Heiden pulls two glass yogurt jars off the shop shelf, and lists the nearby supermarkets in which they can be returned once empty.

His Berlin grocery shop avoids single-use packaging in favor of reusable containers, a waste reduction model that is having something of a revival in Germany. But it’s surprisingly hard to get right.

“You need a range of packaging to make it as convenient as possible for the consumer,” says Heiden. An oil bottle, for example, needs a thin neck and a small spout to help it drip—“you would never put yogurt in one of those.” Marmalade and spreads, on the other hand, work best in cylindrical jars that a knife can fully scrape.

Germany has long been praised for its recycling prowess, but its efforts to reuse packaging are perhaps more impressive. Three of its favorite drinks—beer, water and milk (arguably in that order)—are covered by nationwide deposit schemes. Food companies are starting to embrace the refill movement for other foods as well.

Europe’s packaging problems have piled up as consumerism spreads and countries across Asia have closed their ports to ships full of western trash.

“I’m seeing more and more products that use reusable packaging,” says Heiden, who has devoted a wall of his shop Samariter Unverpackt to dispensers of grains and cereals from which customers can fill home-brought containers. “But I also see some producers who are trying to expand, but have to go back because the handling costs are too high.”

The problem that Heiden and others are trying to tackle is a glut of garbage that is fouling waterways, killing wildlife and—after plastics break down into tiny particles—infiltrating our organs. In 2021, the average German generated about eight times their bodyweight in waste: a whopping 651 kilograms, more than the average residents of all but four countries in Europe. Germany created 64 percent more plastic waste that year than it did two decades earlier, and it burned most of it.

But it’s not just a problem here. Europe’s packaging problems have piled up as consumerism has spread and countries across Asia have closed their ports to ships full of western trash. As part of efforts to stop harmful garbage clogging landfills or being burned in incinerators, the EU has set targets to reduce packaging 5 percent by 2030, 10 percent by 2035 and 15 percent by 2040.

Recycling is one option, but plastic recycling is a knotty and unresolved issue. Besides, the European hierarchy of waste has put prevention and reuse above recycling since 2008. But campaigners say rules to reduce packaging are riddled with loopholes—and are calling not just for tighter regulations, but also a culture shift.

“The best packaging is the one you don’t produce,” says Nathan Dufour, who leads efforts to promote reuse systems at the campaign group Zero Waste Europe. If you need to use it—for hygiene reasons, say—“then that packaging needs to stay in the loop for as long as possible.”

Germany has a head start on many of its neighbors with its bottle deposit schemes, in which customers are charged a bit more upfront for their purchase—whether fancy juice from an organic store or cheap beer from an off-license—and given the money back when they return the empty glass. The bottles, which get dropped off in “reverse vending machines” in supermarkets, are then transported, cleaned and refilled.

Hidden behind this process is a delicate alliance of companies that have agreed to standardise and share their packaging, some of which go back a long way. The Milch Mehrweg Pool—Milk Reuse Pool (MMP)—for example, was started by the German dairy industry in the 80s and formalised in the 90s.

Countries that lack Germany’s infrastructure to process bottles—and the culture around returning them—may also find it tricky to build up such a system from scratch.

The process has not been smooth sailing, and after 2008, the organisation was disbanded. The system continued, ungoverned, until 2022 when it was reactivated as the Mach Mehrweg Pool (“Make Reuse Pool”). Now it is working on strengthening cooperation between members and increase efficiency. It has also expanded to include other foods and drinks.

“Reusable systems are most efficient if they are scaled, if they are used a lot, if they are used in every region,” says Julia Klein, a former engineer from Siemens who runs the MMP. “Only keeping this to the dairy sector limits the potential.”

One customer is the coffee retailer Truesday; its brown bottles are on the shelves of Heiden’s store. The aim is to sell the beans for their “true price”—accounting for hidden costs and compensating for damages that can’t be avoided. To cut down on plastic waste, its founder, Henning Reiche, decided to sell the beans in MMP bottles, which he thinks also helps with the marketing. The brown glass keeps the beans safe from sunlight but customers can still see through it. “It’s a nice symbol of the transparency that we want to express with the pricing.”

The MMP has little raw data on its environmental footprint—an issue Klein chalks up to years of inactivity—but based on numbers from the mineral water industry, it estimates the average milk bottle in its pool lasts about 50 cycles in the system.

The benefits of a reuse pool include economies of scale and lower barriers to entry for newcomers. The standardisation process means bottles can be used by all companies in the pool, so “empties” need only to be taken to the nearest buyer. This cuts transport costs—and emissions.

But there are also costs. Glass bottles are heavier than single-use packaging, which increases emissions from transport, and they may need expensive cleaning equipment that small firms lack. Heide, who runs Samariter Unverpackt, says they also take more time to process within the store—and the extra seconds add up.

Countries that lack Germany’s infrastructure to process bottles—and the culture around returning them—may also find it tricky to build up such a system from scratch.

“I realized it’s a totally different story for other European countries that are starting from zero,” says Klein. Brands don’t know which labels and machinery to use, supermarkets don’t have space to stack crates and consumers aren’t used to returning empty containers.

But starting a new system offers the chance to make it more efficient than Germany’s, she adds.

“If you look from an outside perspective, it doesn’t make so much sense to carry dirty empty jars and bottles back to the supermarket,” says Klein. “In the long run, what makes much more sense is if reusable packaging is being picked up at home.”

In a Princeton University lecture hall one morning last December, Peter Singer, one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—living philosophers, offered his Philosophy 385 (“Practical Ethics”) students a brief overview of their upcoming final. The registrar, he noted, had scheduled the exam for the following Sunday evening. This, he proclaimed, “seems unethical.”

The line got a good laugh. A hint of winter chill hung in the air, the undergrads having just sloughed off their Canada Goose parkas and settled into the seats of Wood Auditorium in McCosh Hall, a Tudor Gothic behemoth that was once the largest building on campus. It was here, 102 years earlier, that Albert Einstein described his theory of relativity to a packed house.

The 200 students enrolled in Philosophy 385—about as many as in all other Princeton philosophy classes combined—were acutely aware, per the course syllabus, that they were his final crop:

This course will challenge you to examine your life from an ethical perspective. NOTE: This will be the last time I teach this course before my retirement from Princeton University.

In May, following a two-day farewell conference, the now-78-year-old Australian bade farewell to Princeton and, with a perceptible measure of good riddance, the United States, his second home for more than a quarter-century. For his final class, Singer had prepared a PowerPoint looking back on his years at Princeton—and America.

It’s striking to consider the extent to which the United States has been shaped by Singer’s version of utilitarianism—the belief that actions are ethical insomuch as they increase our collective pleasure and limit our collective suffering. His addition to this ancient idea is simple and profound: Singer believes that all pain experienced by sentient beings counts the same.

The logical extensions of his intellectual positions have on occasion caused great controversy, as when Singer’s belief that newborns lack sentience led him to assert that in extreme cases, parents should have the right to end the life of a severely disabled infant. In response, a disability rights organization dubbed him “the most dangerous man on earth.” Generally speaking, Singer sees few ideas as off-limits. He recently helped launch the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which last fall published an article on whether zoophilia is morally permissible.

Whatever one might think of Singer’s ideas, there’s no doubt they’ve had a great deal of impact. Interest-based utilitarianism is at the root of Singer’s path-breaking advocacy for animal rights and, somewhat controversially, of effective altruism, the charitable principle famously espoused by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud last year. Earlier this year, along with Polish philosopher Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, Singer launched a podcast exploring how to live an ethical, meaningful life.

Perhaps most profoundly, his philosophy flicks at the core of America’s democratic project. While the Founding Fathers were most influenced by John Locke, it was John Stuart Mill—a utilitarian—whose ideas shaped the evolution of constitutional liberalism in the second half of the 20th century. As we face one of the most fraught political periods in recent memory, it’s sobering to hear Singer’s take on America’s shortcomings—and his assessment of what’s to come.

Singer first arrived in the US in 1973, shortly after finishing his graduate work at Oxford University. He was accompanied by his wife, Renata, who’d recently given birth to their first child. The couple had planned to return to Australia to raise their daughter but wanted to spend some time in the States first. “Obviously, everything in America is a big presence growing up in Australia,” Singer told me during one of several interviews.

On the advice of philosopher Derek Parfit, another influential philosopher of Singer’s generation, Singer accepted a visiting professorship at New York University and settled into university housing on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

The NYU position came with the possibility of a two-year extension, but the college was then on the verge of bankruptcy. It ultimately sold off its uptown campus, and the administrators informed Singer that they wouldn’t renew his contract. “We were reasonably okay with that,” he recalls. “We didn’t want our children to grow up as Americans, really.” He quickly landed an appointment at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

“‘Animal Liberation’ lit the fire for me,” says the attorney and activist Cheryl Leahy. “You cannot overstate the importance of Singer’s work in influencing and launching this movement.”

With time to kill between jobs, he spent the fall of 1974 teaching a continuing education course. In it, he presented a draft of a manuscript based on an essay he’d published the year before in the New York Review of Books. The piece was inspired in part by Singer’s decision, four years earlier on Earth Day, to stop eating meat. It was persuasive enough to convince the Review’s founder and editor, Robert Silvers, to become a vegetarian.

Published in 1975 with the same title, Animal Liberation is almost inarguably the most important book in the history of animal rights. It has remained in print for 50 years and been read by almost everyone in the field. Cheryl Leahy read it at age 13, after a classmate accused her in the lunchroom of eating the “decomposing flesh of a tortured animal.”

Today, Leahy is executive director of Animal Outlook, a nonprofit focused on animal protection, and has spent her 20-year career as an attorney advocating for the interests of nonhuman beings. “Animal Liberation lit the fire for me,” she told me. “It probably did for countless people. You cannot overstate the importance of Singer’s work in influencing and launching this movement.”

Thanks in part to Singer, vegetarianism in the United States has increased over the years. In 1994, barely 1 percent of Americans self-identified as vegetarian or vegan. Recent surveys put the rate at 5 to 8 percent. Yet with population growth, the US public now consumes more meat than ever, and the vast majority of factory-farmed animals still live short, miserable lives. Even “cage-free” hens, Singer laments, are generally crowded into giant sheds with thousands of birds. “I’m disappointed [the animal welfare movement] hasn’t gone further,” he told the class I attended.

Some 25 years after the couple’s NYU adventure, Singer received an invitation to teach at Princeton. Their kids were grown, and he and Renata had been contemplating a move anyway. “In fact,” he says, “we’d been talking about going to a Third World country for something quite different.” But a friend, animal rights activist Henry Spira, argued that Singer had a greater obligation: “Henry said to me at some stage, ‘You ought to come over the United States because it’s a much bigger pond and you’ll have a much bigger impact. The United States needs your ideas just as much as Australia, but it’s 15 times bigger and you’ll have more of a world influence.’” The offer proved “just a bit too tempting to turn down.”

Back in the lecture hall, with Australian understatement, Singer informed his students that his 1999 hiring “caused something of a stir.” Indeed, the New York Times ran a front-page article declaring that no academic appointment had caused such controversy since 1940, when City College had tried to hire atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Editorial writers, the story noted, “have compared Mr. Singer’s hiring to that of a Nazi.” Then-Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, a Princeton alum and supporter, threatened to stop donating to the university if the appointment stood. Protesters blocked the entrance to Nassau Hall, the administration building, because of Singer’s support of euthanasia in extreme circumstances. But Princeton President Harold Shapiro stood behind Singer, and the hubbub subsided.

Given all of this year’s campus upheaval over Israel’s activities in Gaza, Singer’s hiring kerfuffle seems almost quaint today. I asked several of his students whether their professor had stirred up any serious controversy during the semester—all said no. During the lecture, when Singer spoke proudly of his role in launching the Journal of Controversial Ideas, no one seemed to bat an eye.

Near the end of his lecture, Singer addressed an elephant in the room—Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency exchange founder who’d just been convicted of defrauding customers and investors out of at least $10 billion. Bankman-Fried also ranked among the most prominent champions of effective altruism (EA), a movement inspired in significant part by Singer’s 1971 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”   

EA proponents generally advocate for using data and reason to maximize the future benefits of any charitable action. In his paper, Singer argued that the failure of wealthy people to contribute to humanitarian causes was akin to failing to help a child drowning in a shallow pond. He was referring in this case to a famine afflicting Bangladeshi war refugees, but the argument applied generally.

In 2009, inspired by Singer’s work, Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and Will MacAskill launched an organization, Giving What We Can, framed around their pledge to donate at least a tenth of their income to effective charities. The next year, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett invited fellow billionaires to take the Giving Pledge, a vow to dedicate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. When a group of 17 billionaires signed the pledge in late 2010, the press release included a statement from Singer.

Singer explained to his students how Sam Bankman-Fried had claimed he’d never intended to commit fraud and “sometimes life creeps up on you.” He lowered his voice and added, “Well, be warned: Don’t let life creep up on you.”

Although their causes and motivations have been questioned, the notion that rich people ought to be more altruistic—the “A” in EA—is not a matter of serious dispute. It’s the “E” where things get complicated.

In 2013, Singer co-founded The Life You Can Save, an organization named after one of his books that attempts to quantify and maximize charitable impact, often in terms of quality-adjusted life years, a metric borrowed from the public health universe. In practical terms, this usually means steering money to causes that benefit developing nations as opposed to, say, your elementary school PTA.

At the heart of MacAskill’s own 2016 book, Doing Good Better, is the idea that a dollar spent by a citizen of a rich country could do 100 times more good if spent in an impoverished nation. This notion is not particularly controversial either, at least not among ethicists, who by and large would agree that giving to the opera is neither charitable nor effective by any meaningful definition of the words.

But then there’s “longtermism,” an EA offshoot that prioritizes the elimination of existential risks such as biological and nuclear weapons, climate change, and malicious AIs, which longtermers say could wreak havoc on future humans or other forms of life—which could include (non-malicious) sentient AIs. In a more recent book, What We Owe the Future, MacAskill casts protecting the denizens of the distant future as the moral imperative of our time—the ultimate cause.

This view is highly controversial. The New School for Social Research philosophy professor Alice Crary, a prominent critic, calls longtermism “toxic” because of the stark utilitarian tradeoff it embraces. The focus on “existential risk,” she writes, “marks a dramatic shift from the concern with present and near-term suffering that is the hallmark of their effective altruist progenitors.”

Effective altruism, which Singer’s work helped inspire, “makes students in places like Princeton feel like they’re the heroic rescuers of the world,” says philosopher Alice Crary. “And these institutions have enriched themselves off of it.”

Singer distances himself from strong longtermism in part for this reason. He’s also skeptical of the longtermers’ more speculative projects, like aiming to protect the interests of sentient nonhumans. Utilitarians, Singer says, are split on whether hypothetical beings deserve the same consideration as actual humans. “That I still regard as one of the most difficult and baffling issues in ethical theory,” he says.

He’s also doubtful that we can meaningfully adjust our actions to do good in the distant future and is thus careful to distinguish between the dangers from asteroids and viruses—“where we can significantly reduce risks for modest amounts of money”—and more abstract projects. As for general artificial intelligence, AI that broadly matches or surpasses human capabilities, “we don’t know whether that will come, we don’t when it is coming, and we don’t really know what we could do now that would reduce that risk.”

But Singer is more tolerant of the notion of pursuing a high income with the intent to donate a sizable portion to charity. The EA community calls this “earning to give,” and it’s a significant part of the work of effective altruist Benjamin Todd’s organization 80,000 Hours (the average person’s work longevity); its disciples included Bankman-Fried, who claimed he aspired to accumulate near-infinite wealth so he could redistribute it.

For his students, Singer put up a slide reading, “Do Good But Don’t Be Sketchy!” explaining how Bankman-Fried had told journalist Kelsey Piper he’d never intended to commit fraud, and “sometimes life creeps up on you.” A father of three and grandfather of four, Singer then lowered his voice. “Well, be warned,” he said. “Don’t let life creep up on you.”

But Singer’s admonition begs the question of whether EA can be used to justify unethical behavior. It certainly seem to rationalize the existence and inform the ethos of elite colleges like Princeton, an institution that admits more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 60 percent, and where graduates’ most common career path is “business.”

EA arguably relieves such institutions of the pressure to embrace a more socioeconomically diverse group of students and encourage them toward public-interest careers. “EA makes students in places like Princeton feel like they’re the heroic rescuers of the world,” Crary says. “And these institutions have enriched themselves off of it.”

“Australia does elections better than America. We have ranked-choice voting and we have proportional representation for the Senate. We vote on Saturdays…We have an independent electoral commission, which draws up electoral boundaries.”

Singer might not go that far, but he was willing to sign on as an unpaid adviser (in name only) to Class Action, a nonprofit I co-founded that advocates against inequitable admissions policies at so-called elite colleges and the funneling of graduates into investment banking and management consulting careers.

To his students, Singer said: “You will get asked to donate to various charities after you graduate, and one of them might be to improve education here at Princeton. The question can be raised: Is this the most effective thing that you can do with your donations?”

He acknowledged that they might feel a debt to their alma mater: “But I think you should think of your charitable donations like that in a different pocket from donations where you want to really do the most good in the world.”

While Singer is best known for his influence on animal rights and effective altruism, his Oxford graduate thesis, later published as his first book, focused on the ethics of civil disobedience in democracies. In it, he argues that our voluntary participation in a democratic process obligates us to accept its outcome.

“After the election,” Singer wrote in 1973—amid the Watergate scandal that would lead to then-President Richard Nixon’s resignation—“it is too late to say that one never accepted its validity.” It’s thus only natural that he has followed American politics closely, and critically, ever since the Supreme Court declared George W. Bush president in 2000, shortly after Singer arrived at Princeton. Now, like much of America, he’s anxious about November.

“One of the things that’s absurd about American politics is first-past-the-post voting,” Singer says, citing the practice of allowing voters to select only one candidate and awarding the seat to whomever has the most votes—as opposed to alternative voting systems that are used around the world and widely perceived as fairer. “The reason that Bush was president instead of [Al] Gore was Ralph Nader running for the Greens,” he says. “That was terrible of him, and I’ve never forgiven him, but it also shows how stupid this voting system is. [Donald] Trump never would have gotten the nomination in 2016 if they’d used ranked-choice voting.”

“Australia does elections better than America,” he adds, citing a litany of practices he views as beneficial. “We have ranked-choice voting and we have proportional representation for the Senate. We vote on Saturdays, not a weekday. We have an independent electoral commission, which draws up electoral boundaries—we don’t have politicians do it. We don’t have primaries. We have parliamentary parties elect their leaders, which means they’ve been through the scrutiny of their colleagues, so it’s a much better proving ground for who’s going to be a good leader.”

He holds special enmity for the Electoral College. “Hillary [Clinton] got nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, so she should have been president,” Singer says. “And the gerrymandered electorates are disgraceful as well.”

Singer points to the “great pity” of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire when she could: “Does Joe Biden really want his legacy to be the reelection of Donald Trump and everything that that will mean?”

Whatever his debt to the United States and its institutions, Singer’s national allegiance is clear. “I’ve never thought of myself as an American,” he says, as we talk about how difficult it is for his countrymen to accept the insanity of US politics. “They are astounded about the gun laws,” he says. “Australia has very tough gun laws, and they were brought in by a conservative prime minister, John Howard. It’s just incredible to me that America cannot see how obviously terrible it is to have guns available to everybody.”

The critiques continue. “America lacks universal health care coverage, which is something that we Australians all take for granted,” Singer says. “This is perhaps more controversial, but we generally don’t think that it’s a good idea to have a Supreme Court that decides issues like abortion.”

Australians, he adds, have difficulty grappling with the outsize sway of money over politics and policy here. “It’s not that money has no influence in Australia,” he explains, “but it doesn’t have the same kind of influence on individual elected representatives, because what matters is the political party—and individual candidates for Parliament don’t have to raise their own money.”

Prior to Trump’s recent criminal conviction, over a vegan lunch at a Princeton dining hall, I ask Singer what he sees in America’s future. “You think philosophers have crystal balls, do you?” he asks with a smile. I counter that I do not, but that readers would be keenly interested in an astute traveler’s observations of our embattled democratic order. “You’re Alexis de Tocqueville in this story,” I say.

“I hope I can live up to it.”

He thinks for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says, finally. “Until recently, I thought that Trump was not going to be electable. I thought he had this 40 percent of hardcore supporters, but that wasn’t going to be enough. But obviously, the polls that have come out recently have been more scary than that. I wish there were a strong Democrat running for office who is not in his 80s, but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.”

Trump’s behavior has polarized the nation and “encouraged this idea that we have our own set of facts,” he emphasizes. “Bush did some of that, too. I think Karl Rove said something like, ‘You’re living in the reality world.’ But Trump has made it so much worse, talking about the fake news stuff just to get people to believe that there were no facts you can agree on. I think that’s been very damaging to democracy.” (Rove has denied that he was the source of the quote in question, which the New York Times Magazine attributed to an anonymous “senior adviser to Bush.”)

Trump would not “do what needs to be done” on climate, and that problem “dwarfs the others,” Singer says. “Another four years, then it’s almost past the time where we can prevent catastrophic climate change.”

Most utilitarians believe that engaging with ideas—even patently false ones—generally serves the greater good, but on the eve of the first presidential debate, which was disastrous for President Joe Biden, Singer said he thought Trump might be the rare exception. Debating Trump, he told me in an email, “would be unethical if this would-be despot, crazy person were not the overwhelmingly likely nominee of one of America’s two major political parties.”

Yet based purely on a political-utilitarian calculus, he figures Biden didn’t have much choice. “I think it would look weak to refuse to debate him,” Singer said. “Trump would make a lot of hay with that. He would say, ‘He’s old and senile and can’t do it.’”

After the debate, Singer wrote on X that “Biden should announce that at the Democratic Convention he will release his delegates to vote for the candidate with the best chance of defeating Trump.” In a follow-up email, he cited the “terrible blot” of Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign on Nader’s own career as a consumer advocate and the “great pity” of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire from the Supreme Court while Democrats controlled the Senate, which resulted in the reversal of Roe v. Wade “and now is denying the EPA the power to issue essential environmental regulations.”

“Does Joe Biden really want his legacy to be the reelection of Donald Trump and everything that that will mean for the US and the world?” he said.

He fears what a second Trump term might portend. He’s particularly worried about Trump’s fossil-fuel cheerleading and hostility toward climate action. “He’s not going to do what needs to be done, and that’s a huge problem that dwarfs the others. Another four years,” Singer told me, “then it’s almost past the time where we can prevent catastrophic climate change.”

The demise of the founders’ grand experiment isn’t far behind on his worry list: “Would it be the end of American democracy? Probably not is my guess, but there’s a much greater chance of it being the end of American democracy if Trump is elected than if he’s defeated. I wouldn’t like to take that risk. And the fact that he would not support Ukraine against his friend [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, whom he understands so well, is also a big worry. Because that’s not just about the plight of Ukraine, it’s about the rule of law in international affairs.”

His concern extends to the Gaza situation. “Trump is such a loose cannon” that he’s difficult to predict, Singer says. “But given the idea that he’s all about putting America’s interests first and he doesn’t seem to show that he cares much about other people, he may well believe that it’s in America’s interest for the Netanyahu government to do as it wishes. And that may be much worse for the Palestinian people than if Biden, who is at least trying to put some pressure on the Netanyahu government to have a ceasefire, remains in office.”

Back in McCosh Hall, the hour drew to a close—and with it Singer’s Princeton career.    

After nearly a quarter-century, there was a palpable sense he’d had enough. His farewell slide to his last-ever Practical Ethics class—which was followed by a rousing standing ovation from the students—had nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy or politics or even ethics.

It was a photo of Singer in a wetsuit, surfboard in hand, practicing a hobby he took up in his 50s. “Bye,” it said. “I’ve gone surfing.”