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

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80 billion of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50 billion in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.

“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going.”

“This was our chance to enter the race for clean technologies while everyone else, not just China, but South Korea and Nigeria and countries in Europe, do the same.”

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150 billion in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

Doing this may be politically fraught, even with Republican control of Congress, due to the glut of new jobs and factories in conservative-leaning areas. But should Trump’s plan prevail, planned US manufacturing projects would be canceled, according to the new report, leaving American firms reliant upon overseas suppliers for components.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going, ceding the ground to others,” the report states.

Exports would also be hit, the analysis predicts, allowing US competitors to seize market share. “These plans suggest a complete misunderstanding of how the global economy works,” said Allan. “If we don’t have a manufacturing base, we aren’t going to get ahead.”

Trump has talked of forging “American energy dominance” that is based entirely upon fossil fuels, with more oil and gas drilling coupled with a pledge to scrap offshore wind projects and an end to the “lunacy” of electric cars subsidies. The president-elect is expected to lead a wide-ranging dismantling of environmental and climate rules once he returns to the White House.

These priorities, coming as peak global oil production is forecast and pressure mounts to avert climate breakdown, could further cement China’s leadership in clean energy production.

“China already feels puzzled and skeptical of the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Li Shuo, a climate specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Throw in Trump and you deepen Chinese skepticism. This is political boom and bust. When it comes to selling clean energy to third country markets, China isn’t sweating at all.”

But even Trump’s agenda is not expected to completely stall clean energy’s momentum. Renewables are now economically attractive and are set to still grow, albeit more bumpily. Solar, which has plummeted by 90 percent in cost over the past decade, was added to the American grid at three times the rate of gas capacity last year, for example.

“We will see a big effort to boost the supply of fossil fuels from the US but most drilling is at full blast anyway,” said Ely Sandler, a climate finance expert at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. “That’s quite different from demand, which is how power is generated and usually comes down to the cheapest source of energy, which is increasingly renewables. If Donald Trump eases permitting regulations, it could even lead to more clean energy coming online.”

At the UN Cop29 talks in Azerbaijan, which started on Monday, countries are again having to grapple with a bewildering swing in the US’s commitment to confront the climate crisis. The outgoing Biden administration, which is trying to talk up ongoing American action at the talks, hopes its climate policies have enough juice to outlast a Trumpian assault.

“What we will see is whether we’ve achieved escape velocity or not and how quickly the booster packs are about to fall off,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s top climate adviser, at the Cop summit.

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

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80 billion of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50 billion in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.

“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going.”

“This was our chance to enter the race for clean technologies while everyone else, not just China, but South Korea and Nigeria and countries in Europe, do the same.”

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150 billion in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

Doing this may be politically fraught, even with Republican control of Congress, due to the glut of new jobs and factories in conservative-leaning areas. But should Trump’s plan prevail, planned US manufacturing projects would be canceled, according to the new report, leaving American firms reliant upon overseas suppliers for components.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going, ceding the ground to others,” the report states.

Exports would also be hit, the analysis predicts, allowing US competitors to seize market share. “These plans suggest a complete misunderstanding of how the global economy works,” said Allan. “If we don’t have a manufacturing base, we aren’t going to get ahead.”

Trump has talked of forging “American energy dominance” that is based entirely upon fossil fuels, with more oil and gas drilling coupled with a pledge to scrap offshore wind projects and an end to the “lunacy” of electric cars subsidies. The president-elect is expected to lead a wide-ranging dismantling of environmental and climate rules once he returns to the White House.

These priorities, coming as peak global oil production is forecast and pressure mounts to avert climate breakdown, could further cement China’s leadership in clean energy production.

“China already feels puzzled and skeptical of the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Li Shuo, a climate specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Throw in Trump and you deepen Chinese skepticism. This is political boom and bust. When it comes to selling clean energy to third country markets, China isn’t sweating at all.”

But even Trump’s agenda is not expected to completely stall clean energy’s momentum. Renewables are now economically attractive and are set to still grow, albeit more bumpily. Solar, which has plummeted by 90 percent in cost over the past decade, was added to the American grid at three times the rate of gas capacity last year, for example.

“We will see a big effort to boost the supply of fossil fuels from the US but most drilling is at full blast anyway,” said Ely Sandler, a climate finance expert at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. “That’s quite different from demand, which is how power is generated and usually comes down to the cheapest source of energy, which is increasingly renewables. If Donald Trump eases permitting regulations, it could even lead to more clean energy coming online.”

At the UN Cop29 talks in Azerbaijan, which started on Monday, countries are again having to grapple with a bewildering swing in the US’s commitment to confront the climate crisis. The outgoing Biden administration, which is trying to talk up ongoing American action at the talks, hopes its climate policies have enough juice to outlast a Trumpian assault.

“What we will see is whether we’ve achieved escape velocity or not and how quickly the booster packs are about to fall off,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s top climate adviser, at the Cop summit.

I meet Baba Anwar in a crowded, chaotic market in the city of Lagos, Nigeria. He claims he’s in his early 20s, but he looks 15 or 16. Maybe all of 5 feet tall, he’s wearing plastic flip-flops, shorts, and a filthy “Surf Los Angeles” T-shirt and clutching a printed circuit board from a laptop computer, which he says he found in a trash bin. That’s Anwar’s job, scrounging for discarded electronics in Ikeja Computer Village, one of the world’s biggest and most hectic marketplaces for used, repaired, and refurbished electronic products.

The market fills blocks and blocks of narrow streets, all swarming with people jostling for access to hundreds of tiny stalls and storefronts offering to sell, repair, or accessorize digital machinery—laptops, printers, cellphones, hard drives, wireless routers, and every variety of adapter and cable needed to run them. The cacophony of a thousand open-air negotiations is underlaid with the rumbling of diesel generators, the smell of their exhaust mixing with the aroma of fried foods hawked by sidewalk vendors. Determined motorcyclists and women in brightly colored dresses carrying trays of little buns on their heads thread their way through the crowds.

It’s no place for an in-depth conversation, but with the help of my translator, local journalist Bukola Adebayo, I gather that Anwar arrived here about a year before from his deeply impoverished home state of Kano. “No money at home,” he explains. In Lagos, a pandemoniac megalopolis of more than 15 million, he shares a room with a couple of friends from home, also e-waste scrappers. On a good day, he says, he can make as much as 10,000 naira—about $22 at the time of my visit.

Thousands of Nigerians make a meager living recycling e-waste, a broad category that can consist of just about any discarded item with a plug or a battery. This includes the computers, phones, game controllers, and other digital devices that we use and ditch in ever-growing volumes. The world generates more than 68 million tons of e-waste every year, according to the UN, enough to fill a convoy of trucks stretching right around the equator. By 2030, the total is projected to reach 75 million tons.

Only 22 percent of that e-waste is collected and recycled, the UN estimates. The rest is dumped, burned, or forgotten—particularly in rich countries, where most people have no convenient way to get rid of their old Samsung Galaxy phones, Xbox controllers, and myriad other gadgets. Indeed, every year, humanity is wasting more than $60 billion worth of so-called critical metals—the ones we need not only for electronics, but also for the hardware of renewable energy, from electric vehicle (EV) batteries to wind turbines.

Millions of Americans, like me, spend their workdays on pursuits that lack any physical manifestation beyond the occasional hard-copy book or memo or report. It’s easy to forget that all these livelihoods rely on machines. And that those machines rely on metals torn from the Earth.

Consider your smartphone. Depending on the model, it can contain up to two-thirds of the elements in the periodic table, including dozens of metals. Some are familiar, like the gold and tin in its circuitry and the nickel in its microphone. Others less so: Tiny flecks of indium make the screen sensitive to the touch of a finger. Europium enhances the colors. Neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium are used to build the tiny mechanism that makes your phone vibrate.

Your phone’s battery contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Ditto the ones that power your rechargeable drill, Roomba, and electric toothbrush—not to mention our latest modes of transportation, ranging from plug-in scooters and e-bikes to EVs. A Tesla Model S has as much lithium as up to 10,000 smartphones.

The millions of electric cars and trucks hitting the planet’s roads every year don’t spew pollutants directly, but they’ve got a monstrous appetite for electricity, nearly two-thirds of which still comes from burning fossil fuels—about one-third from coal. Harvesting more of our energy from sunlight and wind, as crucial as that is, entails its own Faustian bargain. Capturing, transmitting, storing, and using that cleaner power requires vast numbers of new machines: wind turbines, solar panels, switching stations, power lines, and batteries large and small.

You see where this is going. Our clean energy future, this global drive to save humanity from the ever-worsening ravages of global warming, depends on critical metals. And we’ll be needing more.

A lot more.

In all of human history, we have extracted some 700 million tons of copper from the Earth. To meet our clean energy goals, we’ll have to mine as much again in 20-odd years. By 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates, global demand for cobalt for EVs alone will soar to five times what it was in 2022. Demand for nickel will be 10 times higher. Lithium, 15 times. “The prospect of a rapid increase in demand for critical minerals—well above anything seen previously in most cases—raises huge questions about the availability and reliability of supply,” the agency warns.

Metals are natural products, but the Earth does not relinquish them willingly. Mining conglomerates rip up forests and grasslands and deserts, blasting apart the underlying rock and soil and hauling out the remains. The ore is processed, smelted, and refined using gargantuan, energy-guzzling, pollution-spewing machines and oceans of chemicals. “Mining done wrong can leave centuries of harm,” says Aimee Boulanger, head of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, which works with companies to develop more sustainable extraction practices.

“The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies.”

The harm is staggering. Metal mining is America’s leading toxic polluter. It has sullied the watersheds of almost half of the rivers in the American West. Chemical leaks and mining runoff foul air and water. The mines also generate mountains of hazardous waste, stored behind dams that have a terrifying tendency to fail. Torrents of poisonous sludge pouring through collapsed tailings dams have contaminated waterways in Brazil, Canada, and elsewhere and killed hundreds of people—in addition to the hundreds, possibly thousands, of miners who die in workplace accidents each year.

To get what they’re after, mining companies devour natural resources on an epic scale. They dig up some 250 tons of ore and waste rock to get just 1 ton of nickel. For copper, the ratio is double that. Just to obtain the metals inside your 4.5-ounce iPhone, 75 pounds of ore had to be pulled up, crushed, and smelted, releasing up to 100 pounds of carbon dioxide. Mining firms also suck up massive quantities of water and deploy fleets of drill rigs, trucks, diggers, and other heavy machinery that collectively belch out up to 7 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

These operations are not popular with the neighbors. Irate locals and Indigenous communities at this moment are fighting proposed critical-metal mines across the United States, in addition to Brazil, Canada, the Philippines, Serbia, and many other countries. At least 320 anti-mining activists have been killed worldwide since 2012—and they are just the ones we know about.

All this said, while researching my book Power Metal, I was surprised to learn that the mining industry no longer gets away—not easily, anyway—with much of the nasty behavior it has been known for. Some collateral damage is inevitable, but a growing awareness of the industry’s history of human rights abuses and dirty environmental practices—as well as public pressure on consumer-facing companies like Apple and Tesla to clean up their supply chains—has made for some real improvements in how big mining firms operate.

Yet even these beneficial developments come with an asterisk: In the 1950s, it took three or four years to bring a new copper mine online in the United States. Now the average windup is 16 years. “The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies,” the International Energy Agency warned in 2022.

If this demand can’t be met, the agency added, nations will fail “to achieve the goals in the Paris Agreement,” the 2016 UN treaty aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (and from which President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to withdraw—again—during his second term).

And then we’re really in trouble.

It’s a vexing conundrum. In my reporting, I have talked to a wide range of people who are deeply and justifiably concerned about the threats our new mining frenzy will pose to the environment. While acknowledging their fears, I would always ask, “Yes, but what’s the alternative?”

Their answer, almost always, was, “Recycling!”

That may sound straightforward. It isn’t. Metal recycling is a completely different proposition from recycling the paper and glass we toss into our home bins for pickup. It turns out that retrieving valuable raw materials sustainably from electronic products—toasters, iPhones, power cables—is a fiendishly complex endeavor, requiring many steps carried out in many places. Manufacturing those products required a multistep international supply chain. Recycling them requires a reverse supply chain almost as complicated.

Part of the problem is that our devices typically contain only a small amount of any given metal. In developing countries, though, there are lots of people willing to put in the time and effort required to recover that little bit of value—an estimated tens of thousands of e-waste scavengers in Nigeria alone. Some go door to door with pushcarts, offering to take or even buy unwanted electronics. Others, like Anwar, work the secondhand markets, buying bits of broken gear from small businesses or rescuing them from the trash. Many scavengers earn less than the international poverty wage of about $2.15 per day.

I ask Anwar where he’s planning to take his circuit board. “To TJ,” he replies, as if I’d asked him what color the sky is.

TJ is Tijjani Abubakar, an entrepreneur who has built a thriving business turning unwanted electronics into cash. His third-floor office, in a dingy concrete building across a roaring four-lane road from the Ikeja market, is a charnel house of dead mobile phones. At one end of the long, crowded room, two skinny young men with screwdrivers pull phone after phone from a sack and crack them like walnuts. Their practiced fingers pull out the green printed circuit boards and toss them with a clatter onto a growing heap at their feet.

Thousands of such boards gleam flatly under the glaring LED ceiling lights. More young men sit around on plastic stools sorting them into piles and pulling aside those with the most valuable chips. The air is thick with sweat despite the open windows.

At a scuffed wooden desk sits Abubakar himself—a big man with a steady demeanor, lordly in an embroidered brown caftan, red cap, and crisp beard. I await an audience as he fields calls and messages on three different phones and a laptop while negotiating a deal with a couple of visiting traders over an unlabeled bottle of something.

Abubakar, who looks to be in his mid-40s, has been in the trade nearly 20 years. He, too, hails from Kano, where his father sold clothes—“not a rich man,” he tells me in his even baritone. He earned a business degree from a local university and made his way to Lagos, where a friend introduced him to the e-waste business. “We started small, small, small, small,” he says. But getting a foothold was easier then. Scrap was cheap, even free, because few people were willing to pay for it. Then, as the trade mushroomed, deep-pocketed foreign buyers—from India, Lebanon, and, above all, China—began flocking to Nigeria in search of deals.

“Now everybody knows the prices,” Abubakar says. But his business has flourished. He exports several shipping containers full of e-waste every month to buyers in China and Europe. He’s grown wealthy enough to donate textbooks, meals, and cows to families back in Kano. Dead cellphones converted into education and food. Trash into possibilities.

In 2022, some 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded globally. Placed end to end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back.

Abubakar handles all manner of e-waste, but the phones are his specialty. There is just shy of one mobile account for every one of Nigeria’s 220 million people. “What do I see here?” he asks, indicating his roomful of workers. “I don’t know whether any of these people have a computer. But I know all of them have a phone.” And all of those phones will one day wear out, malfunction, or get tossed by someone eager for a newer model. In 2022, an estimated 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded worldwide. If you put them end to end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back.

Abubakar deploys a vast network of buyers and pickers to source spent phones from Nigeria and neighboring countries, and occasionally as far away as France. They arrive by truck, train, and in sacks carried by people like Anwar. These precisely engineered products were manufactured in sophisticated, high-tech factories under ultra-clean conditions. Here, they are eviscerated by hand on a grimy concrete pad.

Abubakar estimates he has about 5,000 workers bringing in millions of phones each year. When I express polite skepticism, he rises and gestures for me to follow. A door in the back of the office leads into a warren of rooms filled either with enormous sacks stuffed with phones, people cracking and sorting phones, or bales of circuit boards ready for shipping.

The most desirable components are those circuit boards, etched with copper and often precious metals, including gold, that carry signals among the soldered-on chips and capacitors. The chips are removed for assessment. If they still work, they can be sold for use in refurbished phones. Abubakar shows me a lunch bag-sized sack of Android chips with serial numbers so tiny I can barely make them out. “This bag is worth around $35,000,” he says. A sack of phone cameras—consisting of the lens you see from the outside attached to a strip of metal foil on the inside—is also valuable. Abubakar trains security cameras on his workers to discourage pilfering. He fired someone the week before for stealing chips, he tells me.

None of the phones were made in Nigeria, and their remains won’t stay here either. Extracting the metals therein requires sophisticated and expensive equipment that no facility in Africa has, so Abubakar sells to recyclers in China and Western Europe that do.

The problem of rich countries “dumping” e-waste on poorer ones has received plenty of attention over the past couple of decades. But in West Africa and other parts of the developing world, most e-waste is now generated domestically. The gadgets passing through Abubakar’s facility were largely imported as new or refurbished products, sold to Nigerian consumers, and later discarded. Relatively little goes to waste. If you live on $2 a day, after all, making a dime from a discarded electric toothbrush is worth your effort. The result is that about 75 percent of Nigeria’s e-waste is collected for some kind of recycling. In nearby Ghana, estimates run as high as 95 percent.

The landscape is different in the United States, where fewer than 1 in 6 dead mobile phones is recycled. The same stat holds in Europe, where roughly two-thirds of all e-waste never makes it into official recycling streams. This is “surprising,” says Alexander Batteiger, an e-waste expert with the German development organization GIZ, “because we have fully functioning recycling systems.”

Or maybe not so surprising. Nobody in the rich world, after all, goes house to house asking for old iPhone 6s or Bluetooth speakers. Sure, there are e-waste collection drives at schools and churches, and you can take old electronics to Best Buy or the local hazardous waste facility—but few people bother. Instead, countless millions of phones and laptops and blenders and microwaves accumulate in attics, closets, junk drawers, garages, and, all too often, the dump.

In Africa, businesses like Abubakar’s keep countless tons of toxic trash out of landfills, reduce the need for mining, and create thousands of jobs—hardly a trivial consideration in a nation where nearly two-thirds of people live in poverty. There’s much to celebrate here. But neither is it the whole story.

An hour’s drive from Abubakar’s office, through a maelstrom of Lagos traffic, sits the Katangua dumpsite, a sprawling, teeming maze of tiny workshops, scrapyards, wrecking zones, and slums, loosely built around a mountain of trash at least 20 feet tall.

This colossus is surrounded by a corroded tin fence held up with bits of scrap wood. Plumes of thick black smoke wend upward from within. The squalor here is unfathomable. The ground underfoot consists of churned-up mud and trampled-in plastic trash. Barefoot children wander among shacks of cardboard, plywood, and plastic sheeting. Adebayo, the local journalist helping me out, and I pick our way around huge puddles, following men and women carrying sacks of discarded metals, all of us retreating to the roadside as trucks piled high with aluminum cans and other scrap wallow past.

Practically every type of metal and e-waste is recycled somewhere in this labyrinth. The resourcefulness of the people is as astonishing as the conditions are appalling. At one yard, owner Mohammed Yusuf proudly shows me his aluminum recycling operation. Pickers bring him cans from all over the city, 2 or 3 tons a day. At the rear of the yard, there’s a covered area with a brick-lined, rectangular hole in the ground about the size of a bathtub, and a smell reminiscent of rotting chicken.

At night, Yusuf tells me, his workers fill the hole with cans, melt them down with a gas-powered torch, then scoop the molten metal into molds using a long ladle. This results in silvery, 2-kilogram ingots pure enough to sell to a manufacturer that makes new cans. The process generates intensely toxic fumes and dust, and his workers wear protective masks. “What about the others nearby?” I ask him. Yusuf nods sagely. That’s why they do it at night, he explains, when the people who live near the yard are asleep in their shacks.

Later, squeezing through a gap in the ragged fence, Adebayo and I find ourselves in an open area at the base of the towering garbage pile. There, four young men are tending small fires, burning the coatings off piles of wire to get at the copper inside. The flames are beautiful—deep cupric blues and greens licking up amid the orange. The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the reproductive system. The men are wearing shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops—no respirators or other safety gear in sight.

The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the reproductive system.

Between the open-air smelting, wire burning, and other miscellaneous wrecking, I’m horrified by the thought of how thoroughly poisoned Katangua must be. “Do you worry about breathing the smoke?” I ask one of the burners, a muscular 36-year-old named Alabi Mohammed. He shrugs: “We don’t know any other job. We don’t have any other option.” He’s been living here since he was 8, he says.

There are other harmful recycling practices I don’t see at Katangua. Scrapped circuit boards are a good source of palladium, gold, and silver—according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, a ton of circuit boards contains from 40 to 800 times the amount of gold found in a ton of ore. You can run them through a shredder and ship the fragments to special refineries, typically in Europe or Japan, where the gold is extracted with chemicals. “It’s a precise, mostly clean method of recycling, but it’s also very, very expensive,” author Adam Minter explains in his 2014 book, Junkyard Planet. In many developing countries, he notes, the gold is “removed using highly corrosive acids, often without the benefit of safety equipment for the workers. Once the acids are used up, they’re often dumped in rivers and other open bodies of water.”

The latter poses clear health and environmental hazards, but it’s cheap and easy, just as extracting copper from plastic-coated wires requires no special equipment—only gasoline and matches. Which is why low-wage laborers around the globe risk their lives burning old extension cords or dousing circuit boards with chemicals to retrieve metals that other low-wage workers risked their lives to dig up in the first place. In Guiyu, home to China’s biggest e-waste recycling complex, studies have found extremely high levels of lead and other toxins in the blood of local children. A 2019 study by Toxics Link, an Indian nonprofit, identified more than a dozen unlicensed e-waste recycling “hotspots” around Delhi employing some 50,000 people—unprotected workers exposed to chemical vapors, metallic dusts, and acidic effluents—and where hazardous wastes were improperly dumped.

Spent lithium batteries present their own recycling challenge. They are potentially among the world’s best sources for critical metals—one study found that battery recycling theoretically could satisfy nearly half of global demand for certain metals. Yet only about 5 percent of them get recycled because they are uniquely hard to handle—and dangerous.

Nigeria, for example, is awash in lithium-ion batteries, but no place on the continent recycles them. They need to be exported. Shippers don’t want to take them, however, because of their disturbing tendency to burst into flames when punctured, crushed, or overheated. Battery fires can exceed 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. They also emit toxic gases and are very hard to extinguish. American consumers are asked to bring unwanted lithium batteries to a domestic recycler or a hazardous waste site, and for good reason. Every year, batteries from everything from old Priuses to sex toys cause hundreds of fires in US scrapyards, landfills, and even on garbage trucks, causing millions of dollars in damage. Residents of Fredericktown, Missouri, even had to evacuate their homes earlier this month when a local battery recycling facility exploded dramatically into flames.

Even in developing countries, unwanted batteries often end up in local landfills, where, beyond the fire risk, they leak toxic chemicals. Or unscrupulous exporters mislabel them, bribing port officials to not examine their shipments too closely. “I’ve heard there’s a major fire every six months,” says Eric Frederickson, vice president of operations at Call2Recycle, America’s largest battery-collection organization, “but you never hear about most of them, because they just tip the container over the side of the boat.”

Reinhardt Smit is trying something different. He’s the supply chain director for Closing the Loop, a Netherlands-based startup that aims to recycle phones from Africa using certifiably sound environmental and social methods: no burned cables, battery fires, trashed plastics, or unprotected workers—every step of the process done responsibly, the way Western consumers like it.

In a 2021 pilot project, Closing the Loop collected and sent 5 tons of phones—plastic, batteries, cables, and all—from Nigeria to a Belgian recycler in what it claims was the first such legally sanctioned shipment ever. The project succeeded from a sustainability standpoint, but it was a money-loser. Clean recycling, it turns out, is hideously expensive.

The phones were sourced from Hinckley Recycling, one of Nigeria’s two (yes, only two) fully licensed e-waste handlers. At Hinckley’s compound on the outskirts of Lagos, workers dismantle phones, computers, and TVs in a clean and well-lit warehouse, wearing reflective vests and protective gloves. It’s clearly a safer and more humane workplace than the others I witnessed, but that adds to the cost.

Convincing a shipper to transport the batteries also required a pricey workaround: They were removed from the phones and placed in barrels filled with sand, eliminating the fire danger. But that meant Closing the Loop had to pay extra to transport hundreds of pounds of sand per shipment.

“It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group Chairman Ola Källenius noted in 2021.

Dealing with unwanted materials was another cost. “If I recycle every component in a phone, I lose money,” explains Adrian Clewes, Hinckley’s managing director. Everyone wants copper, for instance, but phones are mostly plastic, which Closing the Loop must pay a recycler to take. Clewes talks about “positive” and “negative” fractions, meaning the profitable components vs. those that cost him money.

Some fractions toggle between positive and negative depending on the prevailing prices. Say you want to sell a bag of circuit boards containing a total of 1 pound of copper. And say it will cost the smelter $2 to extract the metal. If copper is selling for $4 a pound, the smelter can buy the boards for $1 and make a tidy profit. If copper drops to $3, the deal’s off and the boards are sitting in your warehouse. If you have ample space, you can wait for prices to bounce back. If not, maybe you’re tempted to bring those boards to the dump.

Finally, you have your administrative costs. Global regulations preventing rich countries from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones have, ironically enough, made it harder to get waste out of the poor countries. The Basel Convention, for one, requires any ship carrying e-waste to get approval from the exporting and importing countries and consent from any country where it might dock en route. This creates oceans of red tape. “Observing the Basel notifications can be painful. It takes months,” says Batteiger, the German e-waste expert. “The Basel Convention is valuable—without it, there would be more dumping—but it has the side effect of blocking exports from the developing world to industrialized countries.”

All told, the cost of doing things by the book makes it almost impossible to turn a profit. Smit’s idea is to get green-minded corporations to cover the difference by paying him to recycle one dead African phone for each new phone it buys.

The concept is akin to selling carbon offsets, and it’s gaining some traction. Closing the Loop now operates in some 10 African countries and has collected several million dead electronic devices. Its near-future target is 2 million phones per year, though that’s admittedly a drop in the bucket. “There are 2 billion phones sold every year,” concedes founder Joost de Kluijver. “We can’t collect all that.”

Comparing the efforts of companies like Closing the Loop and those of the “informal” sector in Nigeria and elsewhere, which provides jobs for thousands of desperate people, it’s hard to say which is better. One might ask, better for whom? Unregulated dumping, wire burning, and the lack of safety equipment don’t meet Western environmental and labor standards. But those standards aren’t top of mind for people who can barely feed and house themselves.

There are other geopolitical aspects to the race for critical metals. Russia, for example, is a prodigious exporter of copper, nickel, palladium, and other metals so crucial that they were spared from international sanctions after Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine. And then there’s China, which—via its own resources, lax standards, diplomatic clout, and overseas investments—has come to dominate the global supply chain.

Regardless of origin, most critical metals will at some point pass through China, which controls more than half of global refining capacity for cobalt, graphite (another battery ingredient), and lithium, and almost as much for nickel and copper. Using those metals, its factories pump out most of the world’s solar panels, a hefty share of its wind turbines, and a majority of its EVs. It also produces nearly three-quarters of lithium-ion batteries and recycles far more of them than any other nation. A subsidiary of CATL, China’s biggest battery maker, can now recycle up to 120,000 tons per year and is investing billions in new plants.

Congress, having deemed China’s dominance in these sectors a threat “to economic growth, competitiveness, and national security,” has responded by sinking money into alternative sources. The 2022 infrastructure bill included $7 billion to develop a domestic supply chain for battery minerals, and the Inflation Reduction Act, passed the same year, unlocked billions more to subsidize batteries and EVs manufactured with domestically sourced metals—though some of the funds may be clawed back or left unspent under the new Republican leadership.

“The economics are very challenging…There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.”

In the United States and elsewhere, major automakers are partnering with recyclers and even building their own plants, recognizing that old batteries are a cheaper, cleaner, and more appealing source of critical metals than mining is. “It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group Chairman Ola Källenius said at a 2021 climate summit. In remote Nevada, a company called Redwood Materials has built an enormous EV battery recycling operation. Redwood has inked deals with Tesla, Amazon, and Volkswagen and has attracted nearly $2 billion in capital.

Redwood’s main rival is Canada-based Li-Cycle, which had more than 400 employees at the time of my visit. The company partners with commodities giant Glencore and boasts facilities in Arizona, Alabama, New York; Kingston, Ontario; and elsewhere. Earlier this month, Li-Cycle secured a $475 million line of credit from the Department of Energy. It is now capable of processing about 53,000 tons a year of shredded battery material, which consists mainly of copper and aluminum flakes, plus a grainy sludge known as “black mass” that contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel.

At the company’s Kingston headquarters, I get a tour from Ajay Kochhar, a chemical engineer with neatly combed black hair who co-founded Li-Cycle in 2016 with a metallurgist pal. “We heard lots of people say, ‘You guys are too early,’” he tells me with a smile. The company produced its first batch of shredded battery material that year. “It took us three months to get 20 tons,” Kochhar says. Five years later, his company went public at a valuation of almost $1.7 billion. (As of this writing, the number is considerably lower.)

On the day of my visit, an aggregator had delivered a truckload of batteries from laptops, cellphones, and power tools. I watch as the batteries are loaded onto a conveyor belt, where workers strip off plastic casings and packaging and check labels to make sure they are indeed lithium-ion batteries. Further along, the batteries are dumped into a column of water leading to a shredder whose mighty steel teeth rip them into tiny pieces. Any remaining plastic floats to the surface and is skimmed off. The metals are separated in further steps. Breakfast-cereal-sized flakes of copper and aluminum are poured into large, heavy plastic bags, leaving the black mass behind. Li-Cycle currently sells the former metals to companies like Glencore, which make them into ingots. The black mass goes to other firms that use chemicals to extract the remaining metals.

Perhaps the biggest immediate challenge for companies like Li-Cycle, oddly, is a dearth of batteries to shred. It’s mostly pre-consumer factory scrap and defective batteries from manufacturers keeping their conveyers busy. EVs are so new to the market that few have been junked—and even those are often snapped up for uses such as off-grid power storage. Most consumer lithium batteries aren’t collected at all. “We’ve looked at doing the collection ourselves, but the economics are very challenging,” Kochhar told me. “There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.”

The sap of Pycnandra acuminata, which grows on the nickel-rich island of New Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel.

So how can more e-waste be brought into the reverse supply chain? One approach is to shift the onus onto the firms that manufactured the gadgets in the first place, a policy known as “extended producer responsibility.” China and much of Europe have codified this policy in laws that govern not only e-waste, but also glass, plastics, and even cars. Sometimes, it just means charging manufacturers a fee to help cover the downstream recycling costs. In the EU, though, carmakers are responsible for collecting and recycling their own dead vehicles. China, which since 2018 has required manufacturers to collect and recycle lithium-ion batteries, also mandates that new batteries contain minimum amounts of certain recycled materials.

China now recycles at least half of its batteries, according to CATL. “In North America, it’s mainly us and Redwood,” Kochhar says. “There are many more in Europe.” But what’s happening in China, he says, “is way ahead of what we’re doing here.”

As a strictly economic proposition, it’s often cheaper to mine fresh metals than recycle them. And some of the relevant products are tremendously hard to recycle: Less than 5 percent of rare earth magnets are currently recycled, for example, and an estimated 9 in 10 spent solar panels—which cost roughly $20 to $30 to recycle vs. $1 to $2 to bring to the dump—end up in landfills. Ditto the massive blades on wind turbines, of which more than 720,000 tons are projected to be trashed by 2040. The bottom line is that meaningful e-waste recycling in the United States is probably going to require government support.

And why not subsidize? China, our biggest rival in the clean energy sector, offers tax breaks to metal recyclers, even as US taxpayers spend billions subsidizing fossil fuels and mining operations. Under the Biden administration, Congress directed some $370 billion to bolster renewable energy technologies, including nearly $40 billion for nuclear energy and more than $12 billion to promote sales and manufacturing of EVs and their batteries, but has included only a couple of billion toward recycling.

If you’re dissatisfied with your old iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in developing countries who would love to have it.

New technologies might help somewhat. British researchers are working on inexpensive reactors they hope can facilitate recovery of rare earths. In Texas, Apple is testing a robot that can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour to aid in recycling. Mining giant Rio Tinto is experimenting with ways to extract lithium that exists in boron mining waste, and a Canadian startup is working to recover rare earths from tin-mine tailings.

Scientists are even studying plants that can suck up trace metals through their roots and concentrate them in their sap, stems, or leaves. The sap of Pycnandra acuminata, a tree that grows on the nickel-rich Pacific island of New Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel. Other “hyperaccumulators” slurp up cobalt, lithium, and zinc. Startups are springing up, hoping to capitalize on these special properties, which could also be used to clean up polluted soil.

None of this is a silver bullet. Even if humanity could recover all of the critical metals in use—and we can’t—we’d still have to mine more to meet rising demand. Consider that we now recycle less than 1 percent of the lithium used around the world, and we’ll be mining hard-to-recover rare earths for decades to come. “Nothing—nothing—is 100 percent recyclable, and many things, including things we think are recyclable, like iPhone touch screens, are unrecyclable,” Minter writes in Junkyard Planet. “Everyone from the local junkyard to Apple to the US government would be doing the planet a very big favor if they stopped implying otherwise, and instead conveyed a more realistic picture of what recycling can and can’t do.”

Recycling is important, yes. But it is also utterly insufficient to meet our needs. We tend to think of it as the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it often can be one of the worst. Consider a glass bottle. To recycle it, you have to smash it to pieces, melt down the bits, and mold them into a whole new bottle—an industrial process that requires a lot of energy, time, and expense.

Or you could just wash it and reuse it.

That’s a better alternative—and hardly a new idea. For much of the last century, gas stations, dairies, and other companies sold products in glass bottles that they would later collect, wash, and reuse.

Rendering a phone, car battery, or solar panel down to its constituent metals requires a great deal more energy, cost, and, as we’ve seen, unsafe labor than refurbishing that product. You can buy refurbished computers, phones, and even solar panels online and in some stores. But refurbishing is only really widespread in the developing world. If you’re a North American no longer satisfied with your iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in less-affluent countries who would be happy to take it.

There are important lessons here, and perhaps the most important of all is this: As we look ahead, we will need to start thinking beyond merely replacing fossil fuels with renewables and increasing our supplies of raw materials. Rather, we will need to reshape our relationship to energy and natural resources altogether. That seems like a tall order, but there’s a range of things we can do—as consumers, as voters, as human beings—to assuage the downstream effects of our technological arms race.

Moving forward, our critical metals will come from all sorts of mines and scrapyards and recycling centers around the globe. Some will emerge from new sources, using new methods and technologies. And the choices we make about where and how we get those metals, and who prospers and suffers in the process, are tremendously important. But no less important is the question of how much of all these things we truly need—and how to reduce that need.

We’re lucky in one respect: We’re still only at the beginning of a historic worldwide transition. The key will be figuring out how to make it work without repeating the worst mistakes of the last one.

Follow Vince Beiser’s ongoing reporting at powermetal.substack.com.

In the last five years, as the movement to ditch gas-fueled stoves and heaters has spread across the country—it’s also ignited a backlash.

In 2019, Berkeley, California, became the first American city to ban gas hookups in new buildings, a rule intended to reduce carbon emissions—and improve indoor air quality in light of growing evidence that gas stoves emit pollutants linked to asthma and cancer. Dozens more cities followed suit.

The California Restaurant Association sued Berkeley, and the city eventually backed down and repealed its policy. Places with similar laws, including New York state and Washington, DC, were slapped with lawsuits too. Conservatives at the highest levels of government warned the public, misleadingly, that liberals were coming for people’s gas stoves. About half of US states, mostly but not all red, have since passed laws preemptively barring local governments from regulating gas.

This slice of the culture wars is now on the ballot in Washington, one of the country’s most climate-forward states. I-2066, a measure funded by fossil fuel and construction groups to “protect energy choice,” wouldn’t merely prevent local governments from banning “natural” gas in new buildings—with its broad language, climate advocates say, the measure might also be used to block state incentives encouraging people to switch to energy-efficient electric appliances. If it passes, they worry, it could provide a blueprint for the fossil fuel industry to oppose similar policies nationwide.

“This is a national threat,” says Leah Missik, a researcher and policy developer at Climate Solutions, a Washington State environmental group opposing the initiative. “Washington is somewhat of a testing pool for them to see if they can go further in weaponizing the initiative process to threaten climate progress.”

So how did Washington—the state that gave us REI, modern backpacks, and the “greenest governor” in America—come to consider a measure to preserve gas appliances?

I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state,” says one advocate, “which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”

Experts told me I-2066 is largely a response to two progressive climate policies. First, there was a tweak to Washington’s building codes: About a quarter of the state’s carbon emissions come from heating and powering buildings. Last year, the State Building Code Council voted to require new buildings to meet certain energy efficiency standards, a policy that favored electric appliances like heat pumps over more wasteful, gas-powered ones. (Seattle went further, passing a policy requiring many large, existing buildings to reach net zero emissions by 2050.)

Then, earlier this year, the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a wonky, but impactful green energy law, House Bill 1589, which requires Washington’s largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to outline a plan for full electrification.

When that passed, the Building Industry Association of Washington, a major funder of I-2066, released a statement claiming the law “clears the path” for Puget Sound Energy to “force its 800,000 natural gas customers to convert their homes to all-electric,” at a cost of “$40,000 to $50,000 per household.”

According to Puget Sound Energy, the bill doesn’t “force” electrification—it is, primarily, a law to help the utility plan to go electric. Plus, climate advocates say, the switch to all-electric buildings is inevitable, given the climate and health dangers of gas. And helping utility companies prepare, they argue, will reduce costs for customers in the long run.

We can do the energy transition “in a chaotic and unmanaged way, or we can do it in a fair and managed way,” says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle-based senior attorney at Earthjustice, an organization that opposes I-2066. HB 1589 aimed to help ease the state into the transition, he says, but “this initiative is a chaos bomb thrown into the middle of that process that will make energy more expensive and the future more complicated.”

The notion that Washington was shoving clean energy down people’s throats gained traction nonetheless. Let’s Go Washington, a group run by hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, and backed by the National Association of Home Builders and Koch Industries, which is heavily invested in fossil fuels, took up a signature drive and successfully got I-2066 on the ballot, along with three other measures. One of the others, I-2117, would roll back Washington’s cap-and-invest program, which has raised about $2 billion for state green energy programs, but also, critics say, pushed up the price of gasoline. (Heywood was unavailable for an interview with Mother Jones, and the Building Industry Association of Washington did not respond to an interview request.)

“It’s the perception that is important,” explains Aseem Prakash, a political science professor at the University of Washington. “And the perception is that these climate laws are imposing new costs that people are not willing to undertake.”

If passed—and polling suggests its odds are good—I-2066 would repeal key parts of HB 1589 and, as Axios reports, require the state to revise the new building codes next year to no longer disadvantage gas. To supporters, that would mean preserving consumers’ “energy choice.” To opponents, it’d be a major setback to the state’s ability to address the climate crisis.

I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state,” says Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium, an affordable housing advocacy group, “which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”

More broadly, the measure’s passage would serve as a symbolic rebuke to progressive electrification policies. “We had a lot of success,” Hasselman says. “We moved the ball forward quite a bit, and now we’re seeing a real pushback.”

“I do worry,” he adds, “if the billionaires and the fossil fuel companies pour enough money into these initiatives to be successful, it sends a terribly chilling message for the whole nation.”

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

A large majority of people tell pollsters they support renewable energy. But when ordinances and projects come before local governments, opponents show up more often than supporters.

Greenlight America, a new national nonprofit, wants to change this. I spoke with its co-founders this week in one of their first interviews about their mission and strategy.

The group launched last year, has raised $5 million and has a staff of about 20. It is incorporated in Washington, DC, with employees all over the country.

Matt Traldi, CEO and co-founder, said he takes inspiration from the way the labor movement prioritizes local voices and focuses on organizing. He was a co-founder of Indivisible, an advocacy group formed to counter the policy agenda of Donald Trump, and previously he spent a decade working for labor unions.

“There’s a lot of support out there for clean energy projects,” he said. But he found that supporters sometimes “don’t know when and where to show up.”

The stakes are high. The United States needs to add vast amounts of renewable energy to be able to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and avoid the worst effects of climate change. Local opposition has slowed or canceled many projects.

“One way to think about Greenlight is as a counterweight to groups that oppose renewable energy, such as Virginia-based Citizens for Responsible Solar.”

Greenlight America aims to alert local groups and people of the issues in their communities, and foster greater participation by people who support a shift to cleaner energy.  “The reality is that most people aren’t reading agendas or minutes of their local government proceedings, and most organizations in the nonprofit space aren’t focused at the local level,” said Ari Appel, chief program officer and co-founder.

He previously ran campaigns for environmental and renewable advocacy organizations, such as Building Back Together, which seeks to support the implementation of President Joe Biden’s climate and clean energy legislation.

Ethan Todras-Whitehill, chief communications officer and co-founder, said Greenlight wants to give renewable energy supporters “the information and the training they need to feel comfortable going up there and standing up in front of their town council.”

He previously founded Swing Left, which works to elect Democrats in state legislatures.

While the co-founders have deep ties to groups that support Democrats, they emphasized that Greenlight is nonpartisan. Public opinion research, such a 2023 report from Pew Research Center, shows that support for renewable energy is strong across partisan lines.

And yet opponents of renewable energy projects are often highly organized at the local level to the point that supporters of projects feel ostracized and are reluctant to speak.

People fight renewable energy for a variety of reasons. The most common one I’ve observed is concern about how a project will change the look and feel of a place, which is something I can sympathize with, especially for people who live closest to the site. The benefits of development—for the environment and the local tax base—get talked about much less.

One way to think about Greenlight is as a counterweight to groups that oppose renewable energy, such as Virginia-based Citizens for Responsible Solar.

“We’re very much students of the opposition,” said Traldi, the CEO. He compared this to how Indivisible took lessons from how the Tea Party movement organized against President Barack Obama.

But it would be an oversimplification to say Greenlight is a pro-renewables version of groups that oppose the projects. Opposition organizations tend to focus on disseminating misleading information to make people fear renewable energy. A common message is to say or imply that solar farms are a threat to human health—which isn’t true.

In contrast, Greenlight views itself as more of an organizer and convener, and won’t necessarily get into the specifics of what is discussed in local campaigns.

Greenlight’s agenda overlaps with that of renewable energy developers, but it doesn’t take money from developers.

An example is how the group participated in a debate this year in Erie County, Pennsylvania: The County Council was considering revisions to its solar ordinance that contained a provision saying a project needed to have an interconnection agreement with the regional grid operator to be able to apply for a building permit.

The provision would essentially shut down new permits because the grid operator is working through a years-long backlog of processing applications for interconnection. In most other jurisdictions, a developer would get their building permit at the same time they are waiting in a queue for grid access.

It’s not clear to me whether the proposal was a deliberate attempt to hinder development. Regardless, Greenlight learned of it and then got in touch with groups that typically support renewable energy to speak to the County Council.

Records from council meetings show that local representatives from Solar United Neighbors and PennFuture, nonprofits that support renewable energy development, spoke about what the proposal would do and urged the council to remove the provision. The council followed this advice.

“A coalition came together really quickly,” said Jenny Tomkins, a PennFuture clean water campaign manager, who is based near Erie.

The ability of local and national groups to collaborate was essential and Greenlight helped to bring the parties together, she said.

“Local folks provide firsthand knowledge of the proposed projects, community concerns and tight-knit relationships with local elected officials,” she said. “The statewide and national groups bring lessons learned from other communities, relationships with the solar industry and legal and policy expertise.”

Greenlight’s agenda overlaps with that of renewable energy developers, but it doesn’t take money from developers. This is an important distinction because opposition campaigns like to say supporters are acting out of financial self-interest.

Success for the organization means local people show up to participate, and this helps to nudge officials. Don’t expect Traldi or his colleagues to stand up to speak in your town. But if Greenlight can find ways to fill seats and dockets, it could change the dynamics of local debates.

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

Here is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: The Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90 percent chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-clichéd run of disasters: Open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars through streets somewhere. It is starting to make life on this planet very difficult, and in some places impossible. And it’s on target to get far, far worse.

Here’s the second-biggest thing happening on our planet right now: Finally, finally, renewable energy, mostly from the sun and wind, seems to be reaching some sort of takeoff point. By some calculations, we’re now putting up a nuclear plant’s worth of solar panels every day. In California, there are now enough solar farms and wind turbines that day after day this spring and summer they supplied more than 100 percent of the state’s electric needs for long stretches; there are now enough batteries on the grid that they become the biggest source of power after dark. In China it looks as if carbon emissions may have peaked—they’re six years ahead of schedule on the effort to build out renewables.

And here’s the third biggest thing in the months ahead: the American presidential election, which looks as if it is going down to the wire—and which may have the power to determine how high the temperature goes and how fast we turn to clean power.

Donald Trump gave an interview last week, in which he laid out his understanding of climate change:

You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that any more, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said—it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming…These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.

I’ve quoted this at length because this could again be the most important man on the planet, talking about the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And he’s gotten every word of it wrong. It’s gibberish.

But it’s gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition, in America and around the world. His friends at Project 2025 have laid out in considerable detail how you translate that gibberish into policy. It lays out in loving detail many of the steps his administration would use to bolster oil, gas, and coal while sidetracking sun and wind. These include ending the effort to spur EV production in Detroit; ending support for renewables (Trump has promised to “kill wind,” whatever that means); and reversing a crucial 2009 finding from the EPA that carbon dioxide causes harm, a position that undergirds much of the federal effort to rein in climate pollution.

He has also—chef’s kiss—promised to close down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, otherwise known as the people who measure how much the temperature is rising. That’s on the grounds that those measurements are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

In return for this endless largesse (beginning on day one, Trump said, he would become a dictator in order to “drill, baby, drill”), he has asked the industry for only (Austin Powers moment here) “one billion dollars” in campaign contributions. Big Oil is doing its best. As the Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago, Harold Hamm, one of the country’s most prominent frackers, is working the phones to come up with as much cash as possible. Hamm is working “incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector,” said a Trump campaign aide. “We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.”

Can Trump reverse the tide towards renewable energy? No, not entirely—it’s too strong, based on the ever-falling cost of sun, wind and batteries. Even in Texas, HQ of the hydrocarbon cartel where the state legislature has tried to pass laws limiting renewables, the undeniable economics of clean power continue to surge. The Lone Star state is now leading the nation in installing batteries on its grid, a good thing given the ongoing spate of climate disasters that strain and stress the state’s system.

But he can slow it down considerably. America’s buildout of renewables is dependent, among other things, on overcoming the bewildering array of permitting requirements that make every transmission line a harrowing bureaucratic battle. At the moment, the Biden-Harris White House has a dedicated team at work, with senior officials assigned to senior projects, constantly bird-dogging them to make sure that they get built on schedule. That would disappear, replaced with a new set of bureaucrats deeply invested in making sure these projects didn’t happen.

If a Trump administration was merely going to be a four-year interregnum, it would be annoying. But it comes at precisely the moment when we need, desperately, acceleration.

At least as bad would be the effect around the world. Last time, Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate accords, badly denting the momentum those talks had produced. This time he’d do the same and more—he’s promised, for instance, to end Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas export terminals. These are designed to take huge volumes of US gas and ship it to Asia, where it will undercut the move to renewables. It is the last real growth strategy the oil industry has, and it is the biggest greenhouse gas bomb on the planet.

In essence, Trump would give every other oligarch in the world—Vladimir Putin, the king of Saudi Arabia, and on down the list—license to keep pumping away. If the biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases is not going to play a role, why should anyone else feel any pressure? As Project 2025 quite clearly declares, Trump would “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs” and “cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world.” (Though Trump has claimed not to know anything about Project 2025.) The global climate talks in Brazil next year and the 2026 version in Australia—currently shaping up to be the last huge chance for global cooperation—would be turned on their heads.

There are ways to calculate the meaning of all this. The UK-based NGO Carbon Brief, for instance, said earlier this year that “a victory for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election could lead to an additional 4 billion metric tons of US emissions by 2030 compared with Joe Biden’s plans.” Just for perspective, that’s a lot: “This extra 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030 would cause global climate damages worth more than $900 billion, based on the latest US government valuations. For context, 4 GtCO2e is equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.” It’s like finding an extra continent full of greenhouse gases.

But worse than the totals is the timing. If a Trump administration was merely going to be a four-year interregnum, it would be annoying. But in fact it comes at precisely the moment when we need, desperately, acceleration. We’re on the edge of breaking the planet’s climate system—we can see it cracking in the poles (the Thwaites glacier now undermined by warm seawater), in the Atlantic (the great currents now starting to slow), and in the Amazon (where savannafication seems to be gathering speed). The earth’s hydrological system—how water moves around the Earth—has already gone kaflooey, as warm air holds far more water vapor than cold.

The world’s climate scientists have done their best to set out a timetable: Cut emissions in half by 2030 or see the possibilities of anything like the Paris pathway, holding temperature increases to about 2.7 degrees above preindustrial levels, disappear. That cut is on the bleeding edge of the technically possible, but only if everyone is acting in good faith. And the next presidential term will end in January 2029, which is 11 months before 2030.

If we elect Donald Trump, we may feel the effects not for years, and not for a generation. We may read our mistake in the geological record a million years hence. This one really counts.

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

Following the release of a major climate report last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the “climate time bomb” was ticking. Standing behind a podium emblazoned with the United Nations symbol of a globe encircled by olive branches, Guterres declared, “Our world needs climate action on all fronts—everything, everywhere, all at once.”

That call to action (possibly inspired by the movie of the same name) turns out to be a decent summary of what it takes to tackle rising carbon emissions. According to a new study out Thursday in the journal Science, countries have managed to slash emissions by putting a price on carbon, but the biggest cuts came from adopting a combination of policies. Seventy percent of the instances where countries saw big results were tied to multiple actions that generated “synergy.”

“There really isn’t a silver bullet,” said Felix Pretis, a co-author of the study and an economics professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. “That goes a bit against the conventional wisdom that economists have been saying that carbon pricing is the one thing we should push for.”

“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policies, that nothing really happens, but actually, we’ve made a fair amount of progress.”

Pretis and researchers in Germany, France, and the UK looked for big drops in countries’ emissions and compared those results against the policies that had been adopted. Using machine learning, they analyzed 1,500 policies across 41 countries between 1998 and 2022, and found just 63 instances in which countries substantially slashed emissions. In total, these cuts added up to between 600 million and 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. 

“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policies, that nothing really happens, but actually, we’ve made a fair amount of progress,” Pretis said.

Part of the reason that the study only found 63 success stories is because it set a high bar in terms of emissions reductions, Pretis said. “But at the same time, we also see lots of policies having been implemented that don’t really bite.”

Governments are falling short of their climate targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement by about 23 billion metric tons of CO2. The problem isn’t just caused by a lack of ambition, the study says, but a lack of knowledge in terms of what policies work in practice.

Carbon pricing, whether through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program, was “a notable exception” in that it sometimes led to large emissions cuts on its own, the study says, and worked particularly well for emissions from industry and electricity. However, “it works even better if you complement and package it up as a policy mix,” Pretis said.

The study doesn’t capture policies “that would have been wildly successful but didn’t pass precisely because they would have been so effective.” 

For example, the United Kingdom saw a 19 percent drop in emissions from the electricity sector between 2012 and 2018 after the European Union introduced a carbon price for power producers. Around the same time, the UK had implemented a host of other steps, including stricter air pollution standards, incentives for building solar and wind farms, and a plan to phase out coal plants. Similarly, China cut its industrial emissions by 20 percent from 2013 to 2019 through a pilot emissions-trading program, but also by reducing fossil fuel subsidies and strengthening financing for energy-efficiency investments.

To cut emissions from transportation and buildings, the study shows that it’s an even better idea to pair together multiple tools. Regulation is the most powerful policy for reducing emissions from transportation, and it can work well alongside carbon pricing or subsidies. The study also stresses that different policies might be effective in different contexts. The researchers found that carbon pricing was less effective in developing economies, places where regulations to limit pollution and investments in green technologies might be a better fit.

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said the study shows what measures to curb carbon emissions have been politically possible, but it shouldn’t necessarily serve as a guide for future policymaking. “It doesn’t capture policies that never passed—including those that would have been wildly successful but didn’t pass precisely because they would have been so effective.” 

Because of the bounds of the study, it also missed some of the most significant climate policies, Wagner said, pointing to the carbon taxes Sweden’s government passed in the early 1990s and the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden in 2022. The United States’ landmark climate law invests hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy and tax credits toward low-carbon technologies like heat pumps. The law is estimated to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this exercise gets repeated five, 10 years from now, the Inflation Reduction Act would show up” as causing a big drop in emissions, Wagner said.

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

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed exactly two years ago, was pitched as a policy that puts the “middle class first.” But the spending bill’s residential tax credits have so far disproportionately benefited wealthy families, new data indicates.

That’s a major challenge for the efforts to decarbonize the US economy in time to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. “If going green is just a niche lifestyle choice for the upper middle class, it won’t move the needle on emissions at a societal level,” said Matt Huber, a geography and environment professor at Syracuse University and the author of the 2022 book Climate Change is Class War.

A Treasury Department report published this month shines a light on the use of two IRA renewable energy tax credits: one that helped Americans boost the energy efficiency of their homes by installing heat pumps, electric water heaters, efficient windows and doors, or other upgrades; and another that helped households install small-scale renewable energy production—most commonly rooftop solar panels.

Households living paycheck to paycheck “do not have the savings or credit to buy a new heating/cooling system…even with a complicated incentive to do so.”

In 2023, about 3.4 million households, representing 2.5 percent of all tax filers, took advantage of at least one of these two subsidies, both of which were expansions of pre-existing incentive programs. That represents a 30 percent rise in the use of efficiency and clean energy tax credits over 2021 levels.

Nearly half of those who claimed at least one of these credits last year had incomes lower than $100,000. Yet roughly 75 percent of tax filers had incomes lower than $100,000 in 2023, and a closer look at the use of the credits by households within that bracket shows that wealthier Americans more frequently adopted both tax credits.

Of all filers making less than $100,000, just 0.7 percent claimed the clean energy tax credit, and just 0.9 percent claimed the efficiency incentive. In the over-$100,000 bracket, those percentages rose to 1.6 percent and a stunningly high 4.0 percent.

This dynamic, said Huber, was predictable. Tax credit programs can be difficult to navigate, especially for families who can’t afford to hire tax accountants, he said.

Further, though tax credits can make upgrades more affordable, they may not bring them into reach for Americans with lower incomes, especially because the programs come with spending caps for each household. “Most working-class Americans, living paycheck to paycheck, do not have the savings or credit to buy a new heating/cooling system…even with a complicated incentive to do so,” he said.

The tax incentives also favor those with higher tax burdens. If an upgrade is eligible for up to $2,000 in credits, for instance, filers must owe that amount or more in taxes to receive the full incentive amount.

This marked a substantial change from earlier proposals, which would have made the incentives available even for those with no tax burden. Lew Daly, a senior fellow with the climate justice group Just Solutions, said this was “a tragic political error” that should be changed by Congress.

“Without refundability, most of our country’s millions of moderate- and low-income homeowners are intentionally being excluded from the clean energy transition and its benefits in their everyday life, even as we are giving a massive fortune of tax dollars to big corporations and affluent households through the energy credits program as codified,” he said.

Instead of creating individual incentives, “why not work with utilities on a program that would aim to install heat pumps in every household for free.”

The two credits also require Americans to pay the up-front cost of home upgrades and wait until tax season to recoup costs—an option some households cannot afford.

It’s a major problem for lower-income Americans who are grappling with rising utility bills and a “threadbare social safety net,” said Daly. “The exclusionary design of the energy credits program is just piling on to create a future of worsening inequity.”

Despite these issues, when compared with similar tax incentives that pre-dated the IRA, the distribution of these credits has been more even, said James Sallee, energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley. One study showed 60 percent of benefits went to the top 20 percent of households from 2006 to 2020.

“But, the benefits are still regressive,” Sallee said. “In every income category, the more money you make, the more money on average people are claiming per tax return.”

The IRA does include provisions aimed at promoting equal distribution. The renewable energy tax credit, for instance, can be used to enroll in community solar—a helpful arrangement for renters and apartment dwellers who tend to have lower incomes than house-owners.

The bill also includes point-of-sale rebates for efficient appliances and upgrades, though their rollout has been slow because they are being distributed locally. Only two states have yet to offer rebates, though others could launch their programs within months.

Other changes could help change the distribution of tax credits, said Sallee. One of them: placing income caps on eligibility.

But ultimately, said Huber, to create green benefits that are easier for all Americans to access, they should be universal rather than means-tested.

“Instead of putting out incentives for individual households, why not work with utilities on a program that would aim to install heat pumps in every household for free,” he asked. “That might sound outlandish, but if we see solving climate change [as] critical to the public good, there’s no reason why decarbonization shouldn’t be seen as a core public service like healthcare or education.”