This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Oil and chemical companies who created a high-profile alliance to end plastic pollution have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the waste they diverted from the environment, according to new data obtained by Greenpeace.
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) was set up in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies, and ChevronPhillips, some of the world’s biggest producers of plastic. They promised to divert 15 million metric tons of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy.
Documents from a PR company that were obtained by Greenpeace’s Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian, suggest a key aim of the AEPW was to “change the conversation” away from “simplistic bans of plastic” that were being proposed in 2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health.
Early last year the alliance target of clearing 15 million metric tons of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as “just too ambitious”.
The new analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie looked at the plastics output of the five alliance companies; chemical company Dow, which holds the AEPW’s chairmanship; the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies; and ChevronPhillips, a joint venture of the US oil giants Chevron and Phillips 66.
“It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry…has been at this for decades.”
The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132 million metric tons of two types of plastic, polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), in five years—more than 1,000 times the weight of the waste plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period. The waste plastic was diverted mostly by mechanical or chemical recycling, the use of landfill, or waste to fuel, AEPW documents state.
The amount of plastic produced is likely to be an underestimate as it only covers two of the most widely used polymers: polyethylene, which is used for plastic bottles and bags; and polypropylene, used for food packaging. It does not include other major plastics such as polystyrene.
The new data was revealed as delegates prepared to meet in Busan, South Korea, to hammer out the world’s first treaty to cut plastic pollution. The treaty has a mandate to agree on a legally binding global agreement to tackle plastic pollution across the entire plastics life cycle.
But the talks, which have been subject to heavy lobbying by the alliance and fossil fuel companies, are on a knife-edge in a row over whether caps to global plastic production will be included in the final treaty.
Will McCallum, a co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, said the revelations had stripped off the thin layer of greenwash hiding the growing mountain of plastic waste oil companies were producing.
“The recycling schemes they’re promoting can barely make a dent in all the plastic these companies are pumping out,” he said. “They’re letting the running tap flood the house while trying to scoop up the water with a teaspoon. The only solution is to cut the amount of plastic produced in the first place.”
Bill McKibben, a US environmentalist, said: “It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry—which is pretty much the same thing as the plastics industry—has been at this for decades.”
In response to the allegations, a spokesperson for the AEPW said it “respectfully disagrees with the allegations and inferences, including that the organization’s purpose is to greenwash the reputation of its members…The alliance aims to accelerate innovation and channel capital into the development of effective scalable solutions to help end plastic waste and pollution.”
The AEPW has had a significant lobbying presence at the UN plastic waste talks, which entered their final stages on Monday. Its representatives have consistently argued that reductions in plastic production should not be included in the treaty.
The UK’s new Labour government has shifted the country’s stance and signed a ministerial declaration calling for the inclusion of reductions in production and consumption of primary plastic polymers to sustainable levels in the treaty. The United States under President Biden also shifted its position this summer to support caps on global production. It is not known yet the position of the incoming Trump administration.
A UK government source said: “The government supports an effective treaty which covers the full life cycle of plastics including reducing the production and consumption of plastics to sustainable levels.”
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Oil and chemical companies who created a high-profile alliance to end plastic pollution have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the waste they diverted from the environment, according to new data obtained by Greenpeace.
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) was set up in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies, and ChevronPhillips, some of the world’s biggest producers of plastic. They promised to divert 15 million metric tons of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy.
Documents from a PR company that were obtained by Greenpeace’s Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian, suggest a key aim of the AEPW was to “change the conversation” away from “simplistic bans of plastic” that were being proposed in 2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health.
Early last year the alliance target of clearing 15 million metric tons of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as “just too ambitious”.
The new analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie looked at the plastics output of the five alliance companies; chemical company Dow, which holds the AEPW’s chairmanship; the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies; and ChevronPhillips, a joint venture of the US oil giants Chevron and Phillips 66.
“It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry…has been at this for decades.”
The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132 million metric tons of two types of plastic, polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), in five years—more than 1,000 times the weight of the waste plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period. The waste plastic was diverted mostly by mechanical or chemical recycling, the use of landfill, or waste to fuel, AEPW documents state.
The amount of plastic produced is likely to be an underestimate as it only covers two of the most widely used polymers: polyethylene, which is used for plastic bottles and bags; and polypropylene, used for food packaging. It does not include other major plastics such as polystyrene.
The new data was revealed as delegates prepared to meet in Busan, South Korea, to hammer out the world’s first treaty to cut plastic pollution. The treaty has a mandate to agree on a legally binding global agreement to tackle plastic pollution across the entire plastics life cycle.
But the talks, which have been subject to heavy lobbying by the alliance and fossil fuel companies, are on a knife-edge in a row over whether caps to global plastic production will be included in the final treaty.
Will McCallum, a co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, said the revelations had stripped off the thin layer of greenwash hiding the growing mountain of plastic waste oil companies were producing.
“The recycling schemes they’re promoting can barely make a dent in all the plastic these companies are pumping out,” he said. “They’re letting the running tap flood the house while trying to scoop up the water with a teaspoon. The only solution is to cut the amount of plastic produced in the first place.”
Bill McKibben, a US environmentalist, said: “It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry—which is pretty much the same thing as the plastics industry—has been at this for decades.”
In response to the allegations, a spokesperson for the AEPW said it “respectfully disagrees with the allegations and inferences, including that the organization’s purpose is to greenwash the reputation of its members…The alliance aims to accelerate innovation and channel capital into the development of effective scalable solutions to help end plastic waste and pollution.”
The AEPW has had a significant lobbying presence at the UN plastic waste talks, which entered their final stages on Monday. Its representatives have consistently argued that reductions in plastic production should not be included in the treaty.
The UK’s new Labour government has shifted the country’s stance and signed a ministerial declaration calling for the inclusion of reductions in production and consumption of primary plastic polymers to sustainable levels in the treaty. The United States under President Biden also shifted its position this summer to support caps on global production. It is not known yet the position of the incoming Trump administration.
A UK government source said: “The government supports an effective treaty which covers the full life cycle of plastics including reducing the production and consumption of plastics to sustainable levels.”
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Biden administration has backtracked from supporting a cap on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.
According to representatives from five environmental organizations, White House staffers told representatives of advocacy groups in a closed-door meeting last week that they did not see mandatory production caps as a viable “landing zone” for INC-5, the name for the fifth and final round of plastics treaty negotiations set to take place later this month in Busan, South Korea. Instead, the staffers reportedly said United States delegates would support a “flexible” approach in which countries set their own voluntary targets for reducing plastic production.
This represents a reversal of what the same groups were told at a similar briefing held in August, when Biden administration representatives raised hopes that the US would join countries like Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom in supporting limits on plastic production.
Following the August meeting, Reuters reported that the US “will support a global treaty calling for a reduction in how much new plastic is produced each year,” and the Biden administration confirmed that Reuters’ reporting was “accurate.”
“If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”
After the more recent briefing, a spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality told Grist that, while US negotiators have endorsed the idea of a “‘North Star’ aspirational global goal” to reduce plastic production, they “do not see this as a production cap and do not support such a cap.”
“We believe there are different paths available for achieving reductions in plastic production and consumption,” the spokesperson said. “We will be flexible going into INC-5 on how to achieve that and are optimistic that we can prevail with a strong instrument that sends these market signals for change.”
Jo Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit advocating for fenceline communities in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” said the announcement was a “jolt.”
“I thought we were on the same page in terms of capping plastic and reducing production,” she said. “But it was clear that we just weren’t.”
Frankie Orona, executive director of the nonprofit Society of Native Nations, which advocates for environmental justice and the preservation of Indigenous cultures, described the news as “absolutely devastating.” He added, “Two hours in that meeting felt like it was taking two days of my life.”
The situation speaks to a central conflict that has emerged from talks over the treaty, which the UN agreed to negotiate two years ago to “end plastic pollution.” Delegates haven’t agreed on whether the pact should focus on managing plastic waste—through things like ocean cleanups and higher recycling rates—or on tamping down the growing rate of plastic production.
Nearly 70 countries, along with scientists and environmental groups, support the latter. They say it’s futile to mop up plastic litter while more and more of it keeps getting made. But a vocal contingent of oil-exporting countries has pushed for a lower-ambition treaty, using a consensus-based voting norm to slow-walk the negotiations. Besides leaving out production limits, those countries also want the treaty to allow for voluntary national targets, rather than binding global rules.
“It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”
Exactly which policies the US will now support isn’t entirely clear. While the White House spokesperson told Grist that it wants to ensure the treaty addresses “the supply of primary plastic polymers,” this could mean a whole host of things, including a tax on plastic production or bans on individual plastic products. These kinds of so-called market instruments could drive down demand for more plastic, but with far less certainty than a quantitative production limit.
Bjorn Beeler, executive director of the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, noted that the US could technically “address” the supply of plastics by reducing the industry’s projected growth rates—which would still allow the amount of manufactured plastic to continue increasing every year. “What the US has said is extremely vague,” he said. “They have not been a leading actor to move the treaty into something meaningful.”
To the extent that the White House’s latest announcement was a clarification and not an outright reversal—as staffers reportedly insisted was the case—Banner said the Biden administration should have made their position clearer months ago, right after the August meeting. “In August, we were definitely saying ‘capping,’ and it was never corrected,” she said. “If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”
Another apparent change in the US’s strategy is on chemicals used in plastics. Back in August, the White House confirmed via Reuters’ reporting that it supported creating lists of plastic-related chemicals to be banned or restricted. Now, negotiators will back lists that include plastic products containing those chemicals. Environmental groups see this approach as less effective, since there are so many kinds of plastic products and because product manufacturers do not always have complete information about the chemicals used by their suppliers.
Orona said focusing on products would push the conversation downstream, away from petrochemical refineries and plastics manufacturing facilities that disproportionately pollute poor communities of color. “It’s so dismissive, it’s so disrespectful,” he said. “It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”
At the next round of treaty talks, environmental groups told Grist that the US should “step aside.” Given the high likelihood that the incoming Trump administration will not support the treaty and that the Republican-controlled Senate will not ratify it, some advocates would like to see the high-ambition countries focus less on winning over US support and more on advancing the most ambitious version of the treaty possible. “We hope that the rest of the world moves on,” said a spokesperson for the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic, vesting hope in the EU, small island developing states, and a coalition of African countries, among others.
Viola Waghiyi, environmental health and justice program director for the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, is a tribal citizen of the Native Village of Savoonga, on the island of Sivuqaq off the state’s western coast. She connected a weak plastics treaty to the direct impacts her island community is facing, including climate change (to which plastics production contributes), microplastic pollution in the Arctic Ocean that affects its marine life, and atmospheric dynamics that dump hazardous plastic chemicals in the far northern hemisphere.
The US “should be making sure that measures are in place to protect the voices of the most vulnerable,” she said, including Indigenous peoples, workers, waste pickers, and future generations. As a Native grandmother, she specifically raised concerns about endocrine-disrupting plastic chemicals that could affect children’s neurological development. “How can we pass on our language, our creation stories, our songs and dances, our traditions and cultures, if our children can’t learn?”
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Biden administration has backtracked from supporting a cap on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.
According to representatives from five environmental organizations, White House staffers told representatives of advocacy groups in a closed-door meeting last week that they did not see mandatory production caps as a viable “landing zone” for INC-5, the name for the fifth and final round of plastics treaty negotiations set to take place later this month in Busan, South Korea. Instead, the staffers reportedly said United States delegates would support a “flexible” approach in which countries set their own voluntary targets for reducing plastic production.
This represents a reversal of what the same groups were told at a similar briefing held in August, when Biden administration representatives raised hopes that the US would join countries like Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom in supporting limits on plastic production.
Following the August meeting, Reuters reported that the US “will support a global treaty calling for a reduction in how much new plastic is produced each year,” and the Biden administration confirmed that Reuters’ reporting was “accurate.”
“If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”
After the more recent briefing, a spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality told Grist that, while US negotiators have endorsed the idea of a “‘North Star’ aspirational global goal” to reduce plastic production, they “do not see this as a production cap and do not support such a cap.”
“We believe there are different paths available for achieving reductions in plastic production and consumption,” the spokesperson said. “We will be flexible going into INC-5 on how to achieve that and are optimistic that we can prevail with a strong instrument that sends these market signals for change.”
Jo Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit advocating for fenceline communities in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” said the announcement was a “jolt.”
“I thought we were on the same page in terms of capping plastic and reducing production,” she said. “But it was clear that we just weren’t.”
Frankie Orona, executive director of the nonprofit Society of Native Nations, which advocates for environmental justice and the preservation of Indigenous cultures, described the news as “absolutely devastating.” He added, “Two hours in that meeting felt like it was taking two days of my life.”
The situation speaks to a central conflict that has emerged from talks over the treaty, which the UN agreed to negotiate two years ago to “end plastic pollution.” Delegates haven’t agreed on whether the pact should focus on managing plastic waste—through things like ocean cleanups and higher recycling rates—or on tamping down the growing rate of plastic production.
Nearly 70 countries, along with scientists and environmental groups, support the latter. They say it’s futile to mop up plastic litter while more and more of it keeps getting made. But a vocal contingent of oil-exporting countries has pushed for a lower-ambition treaty, using a consensus-based voting norm to slow-walk the negotiations. Besides leaving out production limits, those countries also want the treaty to allow for voluntary national targets, rather than binding global rules.
“It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”
Exactly which policies the US will now support isn’t entirely clear. While the White House spokesperson told Grist that it wants to ensure the treaty addresses “the supply of primary plastic polymers,” this could mean a whole host of things, including a tax on plastic production or bans on individual plastic products. These kinds of so-called market instruments could drive down demand for more plastic, but with far less certainty than a quantitative production limit.
Bjorn Beeler, executive director of the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, noted that the US could technically “address” the supply of plastics by reducing the industry’s projected growth rates—which would still allow the amount of manufactured plastic to continue increasing every year. “What the US has said is extremely vague,” he said. “They have not been a leading actor to move the treaty into something meaningful.”
To the extent that the White House’s latest announcement was a clarification and not an outright reversal—as staffers reportedly insisted was the case—Banner said the Biden administration should have made their position clearer months ago, right after the August meeting. “In August, we were definitely saying ‘capping,’ and it was never corrected,” she said. “If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”
Another apparent change in the US’s strategy is on chemicals used in plastics. Back in August, the White House confirmed via Reuters’ reporting that it supported creating lists of plastic-related chemicals to be banned or restricted. Now, negotiators will back lists that include plastic products containing those chemicals. Environmental groups see this approach as less effective, since there are so many kinds of plastic products and because product manufacturers do not always have complete information about the chemicals used by their suppliers.
Orona said focusing on products would push the conversation downstream, away from petrochemical refineries and plastics manufacturing facilities that disproportionately pollute poor communities of color. “It’s so dismissive, it’s so disrespectful,” he said. “It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”
At the next round of treaty talks, environmental groups told Grist that the US should “step aside.” Given the high likelihood that the incoming Trump administration will not support the treaty and that the Republican-controlled Senate will not ratify it, some advocates would like to see the high-ambition countries focus less on winning over US support and more on advancing the most ambitious version of the treaty possible. “We hope that the rest of the world moves on,” said a spokesperson for the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic, vesting hope in the EU, small island developing states, and a coalition of African countries, among others.
Viola Waghiyi, environmental health and justice program director for the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, is a tribal citizen of the Native Village of Savoonga, on the island of Sivuqaq off the state’s western coast. She connected a weak plastics treaty to the direct impacts her island community is facing, including climate change (to which plastics production contributes), microplastic pollution in the Arctic Ocean that affects its marine life, and atmospheric dynamics that dump hazardous plastic chemicals in the far northern hemisphere.
The US “should be making sure that measures are in place to protect the voices of the most vulnerable,” she said, including Indigenous peoples, workers, waste pickers, and future generations. As a Native grandmother, she specifically raised concerns about endocrine-disrupting plastic chemicals that could affect children’s neurological development. “How can we pass on our language, our creation stories, our songs and dances, our traditions and cultures, if our children can’t learn?”
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The internationally agreed goal to keep the world’s temperature rise below 1.5 Celsius is now “deader than a doornail”, with 2024 almost certain to be the first individual year above this threshold, climate scientists have gloomily concluded— even as world leaders gather for climate talks on how to remain within this boundary.
Three of the five leading research groups monitoring global temperatures consider 2024 on track to be at least 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) hotter than pre-industrial times, underlining it as the warmest year on record, beating a mark set just last year. The past 10 consecutive years have already been the hottest 10 years ever recorded.
Although a single year above 1.5 Celsius does not itself spell climate doom or break the 2015 Paris climate agreement, in which countries agreed to strive to keep the long-term temperature rise below this point, scientists have warned this aspiration has in effect been snuffed out despite the exhortations of leaders currently gathered at a United Nations climate summit in Azerbaijan.
“The goal to avoid exceeding 1.5 Celsius is deader than a doornail. It’s almost impossible to avoid at this point because we’ve just waited too long to act,” said Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. “We are speeding past the 1.5 Celsius line an accelerating way and that will continue until global emissions stop climbing.”
Last year was so surprisingly hot, even in the context of the climate crisis, that it caused “some soul-searching” among climate scientists, Hausfather said. In recent months there has also been persistent heat despite the fading of El Niño, a periodic climate event that exacerbated temperatures already elevated by the burning of fossil fuels.
“It’s going to be the hottest year by an unexpectedly large margin. If it continues to be this warm it’s a worrying sign,” he said. “Going past 1.5 Celsius this year is very symbolic, and it’s a sign that we are getting ever closer to going past that target.”
“Every fraction of a degree is worth fighting for.”
Climate scientists broadly expect it will become apparent the 1.5 Celsius target, agreed upon by governments after pleas from vulnerable island states that they risk being wiped out if temperatures rise further than this, has been exceeded within the coming decade.
Despite countries agreeing to shift away from fossil fuels, this year is set to hit a new record for planet-heating emissions, and even if current national pledges are met the world is on track for 2.7 Celsius (4.8 Fahrenheit) warming, risking disastrous heatwaves, floods, famines and unrest. “We are clearly failing to bend the curve,” said Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, an analyst at Climate Analytics, which helped produce the Climate Action Tracker (Cat) temperature estimate.
However, the COP29 talks in Baku have maintained calls for action to stay under 1.5 Celsius. “Only you can beat the clock on 1.5 Celsius,” António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, urged world leaders on Tuesday, while also acknowledging the planet was undergoing a “masterclass in climate destruction.”
Yet the 1.5 Celsius target now appears to be simply a rhetorical, rather than scientifically achievable, one, bar massive amounts of future carbon removal from as-yet unproven technologies. “I never thought 1.5 Celsius was a conceivable goal. I thought it was a pointless thing,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa. “I’m totally unsurprised, like almost all climate scientists, that we are shooting past it at a rapid clip.
“But it was extremely galvanizing, so I was wrong about that. Maybe it is useful; maybe people do need impossible targets. You shouldn’t ask scientists how to galvanize the world, because clearly we don’t have a fucking clue. People haven’t got a magic set of words to keep us to 1.5 Celsius, but we have got to keep trying.
“What matters is we have to reduce emissions. Once we stop warming the planet, the better it will be for the people and ecosystems that live here.”
The world’s decision-makers who are collectively failing to stem dangerous global heating will soon be joined by Donald Trump, who is expected to tear down climate policies and thereby, the Cat report estimates, add at least a further 0.04 Celsius to the world temperature.
Despite this bleak outlook, some do point out that the picture still looks far rosier than it did before the Paris deal when a catastrophic temperature rise of 4 Celsius or more was foreseeable. Cheap and abundant clean energy is growing at a rapid pace, with peak oil demand expected by the end of this decade.
“Meetings like these are often perceived as talking shops,” said Alexander De Croo, the Belgian prime minister, at the COP29 summit. “And yes, these strenuous negotiations are far from perfect. But if you compare climate policy now to a decade ago, we are in a different world.”
Still, as the world barrels past 1.5 Celsius there lie alarming uncertainties in the form of runaway climate “tipping points”, which once set off cannot be halted on human timescales, such as the Amazon turning into a savanna, the collapse of the great polar ice sheets, and huge pulses of carbon released from melting permafrost.
“1.5 Celsius is not a cliff edge, but the further we warm up the closer we get to unwittingly setting off tipping points that will bring dramatic climate consequences,” said Grahame Madge, a climate spokesman at the UK Met Office, who added that it would now be “unexpected” for 2024 to not be above 1.5 Celsius.
“We are edging ever closer to tipping points in the climate system that we won’t be able to come back from; it’s uncertain when they will arrive, they are almost like monsters in the darkness,” Madge said.
“We don’t want to encounter them so every fraction of a degree is worth fighting for. If we can’t achieve 1.5 Celsius, it will be better to get 1.6 Celsius than 1.7 Celsius, which will be better than getting 2 Celsius or more.”
Hausfather added: “We aren’t in for a good outcome either way. It’s challenging. But every tenth of a degree matters. All we know is that the more we push the climate system away from where it has been for the last few million years, there be dragons.”
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
For people involved with research and advocacy about climate change, the results of last week’s presidential election sting.
To get a sense of what’s to come and what’s needed to ensure domestic climate action continues, I spoke with Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and author who teaches at Texas Tech University and is chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy.
She is one the country’s best-known communicators about climate change and often talks about how her religious faith informs her views about protecting the environment. Her 2021 book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, was not written for this moment, but might as well have been.
She specified that she was speaking for herself and not for her employer or any organization. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
How are you feeling about the election results?
Disappointed and concerned. I was a lead author of the National Climate Assessment under the last Trump administration, and, as you know, I am firmly of the conviction that a thermometer does not give you a different answer depending on how you vote. A hurricane does not knock on your door and ask you which political party you’re registered with before it destroys your home.
Climate change is no longer a future issue. It’s already affecting us today. It’s affecting our health. It’s affecting the economy, which was a big factor in this election. It’s affecting the safety of people’s homes, the cost that they’re paying for insurance and for groceries, and it’s putting our future and that of our children on the line.
I want to see politicians arguing over who has the best solutions to climate change. I want them arguing over how to accelerate the clean energy transition. I want them to have competing proposals for how to build resilience and how to invest in the infrastructure and the food and the water systems that we need to ensure that people have a better and more resilient future. And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what we’re going to see with this administration. Of course, I would be absolutely delighted to be proved wrong.
What’s a good mindset going forward for people who care about supporting the energy transition?
That’s a great question, because our mindset really determines what we focus on and what we can accomplish. So in terms of our mindset, I am an advocate for recognizing, first of all, that the situation is dire, and on many fronts. It’s already getting worse. People might be surprised to hear me say that, because often I’m tagged as a relentless optimist. But for me, hope begins with recognizing how bad the situation is, because you don’t need hope when everything’s fine. And I’m a scientist, so I have a front row seat to what’s happening in terms of climate impacts, and the biodiversity crisis, the pollution crisis and more. So our mindset has to begin with a realistic look at what’s happening and how it is already affecting us. We cannot sugar coat it.
But that is only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin has to be focused on what real solutions look like. And when we lose hope, we tend to look for silver bullets, for one solution that if everybody did this, it would fix the problem. There are no silver bullets, but there’s a lot of silver buckshot, so to speak. If we put it all together, we have more than enough of what we need.
And often, too, when we lose hope and when we’re discouraged and frustrated, I see a tendency to turn on each other, to say, ‘Well, you know, you’re not doing exactly what I think should be done, so I’m not going to talk to you or even work with you. I’m going to criticize what you’re doing.’ Now, more than ever, is a time to come together, to focus on what unites us rather than what divides us, to be focused on what we can accomplish together, even if different people come at it for different reasons.
I really feel like, in the next four years, we need to lean into collaborations and partnerships and solutions that have multiple wins for both people and the planet. So one group of people might be advocating for solutions because it has an immediate health benefit. Others might see the immediate economic benefit. Others might see the benefit for nature. For too long, we’ve worked in silos, and now we don’t have time for single wins. We need multiple wins. We need partners that are in it for multiple reasons, and the more we focus on what we can accomplish together, I think the more positive outcomes we’re going to see, and the more allies we’re going to gain, especially at the local to regional level.
You’ve talked about your faith and how it informs your thinking about climate. Does that help when facing the potential for adversity like we’re seeing now?
Oh yes, it definitely does. If you’re familiar with the Bible, you know that there are many, many passages that talk about incredibly negative circumstances and our mindset when confronting and addressing those. All through the Bible, whether you’re looking at David or whether you’re looking at the apostle Paul, there are so many stories and histories of people who confronted suffering and felt discouraged and frustrated at the situation that they were in.
I love the fact that you’re bringing up mindset multiple times. The most important part of my faith is not what it says about nature, but what it says about our attitudes and our mindsets. For example, there’s this one verse in Second Timothy, where Paul’s writing to Timothy, who he mentored, and he says, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, rather a spirit of power, of love and a sound mind.” And for me, that’s so impactful, because when I start to feel overcome or overwhelmed by fear, as many of us do when we’re dealing with these situations, I remind myself that that’s not coming from God.
What God has given us is a spirit of power, which is a bit of an old-fashioned way to say that we should be empowered, because research shows that when people are overwhelmed with fear it will paralyze us, and that’s the last thing we need right now. We need to be empowered to act.
The second part is the spirit of love, because love considers others. It’s not just about ourselves, it’s not selfish. It’s about other people and other things that are being affected, in most cases, more than we are.
And then the last part is about a sound mind. Our sound mind can use the information that we have to make good decisions, and so that is really my own litmus test for how I’m making decisions…not out of fear, but out of power, love and a sound mind.
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.
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
For people involved with research and advocacy about climate change, the results of last week’s presidential election sting.
To get a sense of what’s to come and what’s needed to ensure domestic climate action continues, I spoke with Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and author who teaches at Texas Tech University and is chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy.
She is one the country’s best-known communicators about climate change and often talks about how her religious faith informs her views about protecting the environment. Her 2021 book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, was not written for this moment, but might as well have been.
She specified that she was speaking for herself and not for her employer or any organization. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
How are you feeling about the election results?
Disappointed and concerned. I was a lead author of the National Climate Assessment under the last Trump administration, and, as you know, I am firmly of the conviction that a thermometer does not give you a different answer depending on how you vote. A hurricane does not knock on your door and ask you which political party you’re registered with before it destroys your home.
Climate change is no longer a future issue. It’s already affecting us today. It’s affecting our health. It’s affecting the economy, which was a big factor in this election. It’s affecting the safety of people’s homes, the cost that they’re paying for insurance and for groceries, and it’s putting our future and that of our children on the line.
I want to see politicians arguing over who has the best solutions to climate change. I want them arguing over how to accelerate the clean energy transition. I want them to have competing proposals for how to build resilience and how to invest in the infrastructure and the food and the water systems that we need to ensure that people have a better and more resilient future. And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what we’re going to see with this administration. Of course, I would be absolutely delighted to be proved wrong.
What’s a good mindset going forward for people who care about supporting the energy transition?
That’s a great question, because our mindset really determines what we focus on and what we can accomplish. So in terms of our mindset, I am an advocate for recognizing, first of all, that the situation is dire, and on many fronts. It’s already getting worse. People might be surprised to hear me say that, because often I’m tagged as a relentless optimist. But for me, hope begins with recognizing how bad the situation is, because you don’t need hope when everything’s fine. And I’m a scientist, so I have a front row seat to what’s happening in terms of climate impacts, and the biodiversity crisis, the pollution crisis and more. So our mindset has to begin with a realistic look at what’s happening and how it is already affecting us. We cannot sugar coat it.
But that is only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin has to be focused on what real solutions look like. And when we lose hope, we tend to look for silver bullets, for one solution that if everybody did this, it would fix the problem. There are no silver bullets, but there’s a lot of silver buckshot, so to speak. If we put it all together, we have more than enough of what we need.
And often, too, when we lose hope and when we’re discouraged and frustrated, I see a tendency to turn on each other, to say, ‘Well, you know, you’re not doing exactly what I think should be done, so I’m not going to talk to you or even work with you. I’m going to criticize what you’re doing.’ Now, more than ever, is a time to come together, to focus on what unites us rather than what divides us, to be focused on what we can accomplish together, even if different people come at it for different reasons.
I really feel like, in the next four years, we need to lean into collaborations and partnerships and solutions that have multiple wins for both people and the planet. So one group of people might be advocating for solutions because it has an immediate health benefit. Others might see the immediate economic benefit. Others might see the benefit for nature. For too long, we’ve worked in silos, and now we don’t have time for single wins. We need multiple wins. We need partners that are in it for multiple reasons, and the more we focus on what we can accomplish together, I think the more positive outcomes we’re going to see, and the more allies we’re going to gain, especially at the local to regional level.
You’ve talked about your faith and how it informs your thinking about climate. Does that help when facing the potential for adversity like we’re seeing now?
Oh yes, it definitely does. If you’re familiar with the Bible, you know that there are many, many passages that talk about incredibly negative circumstances and our mindset when confronting and addressing those. All through the Bible, whether you’re looking at David or whether you’re looking at the apostle Paul, there are so many stories and histories of people who confronted suffering and felt discouraged and frustrated at the situation that they were in.
I love the fact that you’re bringing up mindset multiple times. The most important part of my faith is not what it says about nature, but what it says about our attitudes and our mindsets. For example, there’s this one verse in Second Timothy, where Paul’s writing to Timothy, who he mentored, and he says, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, rather a spirit of power, of love and a sound mind.” And for me, that’s so impactful, because when I start to feel overcome or overwhelmed by fear, as many of us do when we’re dealing with these situations, I remind myself that that’s not coming from God.
What God has given us is a spirit of power, which is a bit of an old-fashioned way to say that we should be empowered, because research shows that when people are overwhelmed with fear it will paralyze us, and that’s the last thing we need right now. We need to be empowered to act.
The second part is the spirit of love, because love considers others. It’s not just about ourselves, it’s not selfish. It’s about other people and other things that are being affected, in most cases, more than we are.
And then the last part is about a sound mind. Our sound mind can use the information that we have to make good decisions, and so that is really my own litmus test for how I’m making decisions…not out of fear, but out of power, love and a sound mind.
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As dozens of heads of state arrived in Azerbaijan for the annual United Nations climate talks this week, one absent world leader’s name was on everyone’s lips. At press conference after press conference, questions arose about the election of Donald Trump. The president-elect has threatened to pull the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement—for a second time—and slow down the country’s transition to renewable energy.
The Biden administration has tried to project confidence in the early days of the conference, which is known as COP29, given the country’s status as the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of planet-warming carbon. At a packed-house presser on the conference’s first day, President Joe Biden’s senior climate advisor, John Podesta, said he expected many of Biden’s clean energy achievements—which are projected to put the US within close reach of its international climate commitments—will endure a second Trump administration.
He added that the US will still release a document detailing its updated plan to do its part to limit global warming below the 2 degrees Celsius threshold outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement, as required under that treaty. “The work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief,” he said.
But other signs at the conference suggest that the US has already receded from a starring role in the fight against climate change. Developing countries have long criticized the US as an obstacle to major climate agreements, in particular on the issue of overseas aid to help poor countries fund their energy transitions and protect themselves from climate-fueled natural disasters.
Establishing a new global goal for this sort of international aid is the main agenda item for this year’s conference, but the center of gravity in negotiations has clearly shifted away from the U.S. and toward Europe, China, and the dozens of developing countries pushing for a big increase in international assistance.
Even Canada, which just announced a $1.5 billion program to help the world’s most vulnerable countries pursue climate adaptation projects, is beginning to outshine the US on this issue. Likewise, the headline item from the first day of the conference—an arcane spat over the implications of the agenda structure, which pitted a bloc of developing countries against the European Union over the latter’s carbon tariff system—did not feature the US in a starring role.
In a gaggle with reporters on the second day of the conference, White House climate czar Ali Zaidi seemed to acknowledge a diminished US role in climate talks. He vowed that the Biden administration would continue working toward an ambitious international finance goal, but he admitted that climate-conscious Americans may want to “look for other countries to step up to the plate” during the Trump administration. “We may have less to offer in terms of a projection of leadership certainty,” he said.
Perhaps the clearest indication of the diminished US role in the global climate puzzle is the maze of national pavilions that sprawls across the conference venue at the Baku Olympic Stadium. The US national pavilion is one of the most humble in the entire complex: a plain white room with white chairs, white desks, a television screen, and no other decorations save a single potted plant and a few foam-board posters.
The Kazakhstan pavilion next door, by contrast, has a massive light-up display with the country’s name and a stage on risers surrounded by handsome blond wood. The United Kingdom pavilion has a free, full-service cappuccino bar and a full-size model depicting London’s signature red telephone booths. The Brazil pavilion is embowered in tropical foliage and features a display of baskets by traditional artisans. In the home-country pavilion of Azerbaijan, waitstaff serve fresh tea on demand.
“You’re not the first person to say this,” said a member of the US delegation when Grist mentioned the apparent lack of effort put into his country’s pavilion. The member said he was “shocked” when he first saw the space, and he added that a more ambitious effort would have helped “show that we care.”
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Johnny Appleseed’s heart was in the right place when he walked all over the early United States planting fruit trees. Ecologically, though, he had room for improvement: To create truly dynamic ecosystems that host a lot of biodiversity, benefit local people, and produce lots of different foods, a forest needs a wide variety of species. Left on their own, some deforested areas can rebound surprisingly fast with minimal help from humans, sequestering loads of atmospheric carbon as they grow.
New research from an international team of scientists, recently published in the journal Nature, finds that 830,000 square miles of deforested land in humid tropical regions—an area larger than Mexico—could regrow naturally if left on its own. Five countries—Brazil, China, Colombia, Indonesia, and Mexico—account for 52 percent of the estimated potential regrowth. According to the researchers, that would boost biodiversity, improve water quality and availability, and suck up 23.4 gigatons of carbon over the next three decades.
“A rainforest can spring up in one to three years—it can be brushy and hard to walk through,” said Matthew Fagan, a conservation scientist and geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a coauthor of the paper. “In five years, you can have a completely closed canopy that’s 20 feet high. I have walked in rainforests 80 feet high that are 10 to 15 years old. It just blows your mind.”
That sort of regrowth isn’t a given, though. First of all, humans would have to stop using the land for intensive agriculture—think big yields thanks to fertilizers and other chemicals—or raising hoards of cattle, the sheer weight of which compacts the soil and makes it hard for new plants to take root. Cows, of course, also tend to nosh on young plants.
“Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”
Secondly, it helps for tropical soil to have a high carbon content to nourish plants. “Organic carbon, as any person who loves composting knows, really helps the soil to be nutritious and bulk itself up in terms of its ability to hold water,” Fagan said. “We found that places with soils like that are much more likely to have forests pop up.”
And it’s also beneficial for a degraded area to be near a standing tropical forest. That way, birds can fly across the area, pooping out seeds they have eaten in the forest. And once those plants get established, other tree-dwelling animal species like monkeys can feast on their fruits and spread seeds, too. This initiates a self-reinforcing cycle of biodiversity, resulting in one of those 80-foot-tall forests that’s only a decade old.
The more biodiversity, the more a forest can withstand shocks. If one species disappears because of disease, for instance, another similar one might fill the void. That’s why planting a bunch of the same species of tree—à la Johnny Appleseed— pales in comparison to a diverse rainforest that comes back naturally.
“When you have that biodiversity in the system, it tends to be more functional in an ecological sense, and it tends to be more robust,” said Peter Roopnarine, a paleoecologist at the California Academy of Sciences, who studies the impact of the climate on ecosystems but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”
Governments and nonprofits can now use the data gathered from this research to identify places to prioritize for cost-effective restoration, according to Brooke Williams, a research fellow at the University of Queensland and the paper’s lead author. “Importantly, our dataset doesn’t inform on where should and should not be restored,” she said, because that’s a question best left to local governments.
One community, for instance, might rely on a crop that requires open spaces to grow. But if the locals can thrive with a regrown tropical forest—by, say, earning money from tourism and growing crops like coffee and cocoa within the canopy, a practice known as agroforestry—their government might pay them to leave the area alone.
Susan Cook-Patton, senior forest restoration scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said that more than 1,500 species have been used in agroforestry worldwide. “There’s a lot of fruit trees, for example, that people use, and trees that provide medicinal services,” Cook-Patton said. “Are there ways that we can help shift the agricultural production towards more trees and boost the carbon value, the biodiversity value, and livelihoods of the people living there?”
The tricky bit here is that the world is warming and droughts are worsening, so a naturally regrowing forest may soon find itself in different circumstances. “We know the climate conditions are going to change, but there’s still uncertainty with some of that change, uncertainty in our climate projection models,” Roopnarine said.
So while a forest is very much stationary, reforestation is, in a sense, a moving target for environmental groups and governments. A global goal known as the Bonn Challenge aims to restore 1.3 million square miles of degraded and deforested land by 2030. So far, more than 70 governments and organizations from 60 countries, including the United States, have signed on to contribute 810,000 square miles toward that target.
Sequestering 23.4 gigatons of carbon over three decades may not sound like much in the context of humanity’s 37 gigatons of emissions every year. But these are just the forests in tropical regions. Protecting temperate forests and sea grasses would capture still more carbon, in addition to newfangled techniques like growing cyanobacteria. “This is one tool in a toolbox—it is not a silver bullet,” Fagan said. “It’s one of 40 bullets needed to fight climate change. But we need to use all available options.”
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Private jet flights have soared in recent years, with the resulting climate-heating emissions rising by 50 percent, the most comprehensive global analysis to date has revealed.
The assessment tracked more than 25,000 private jets and almost 19 million flights between 2019 and 2023. It found almost half the jets traveled less than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles) and 900,000 were used “like taxis” for trips of less than 31 miles. Many flights were for holidays, arriving in sunny locations in the summertime. The FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022 attracted more than 1,800 private flights.
Private flights, used by just 0.003 percent of the world’s population, are the most polluting form of transport. The researchers found that passengers in larger private jets caused more CO2 emissions in an hour than the average person did in a year.
The US dominated private jet travel, representing 69 percent of flights, and Canada, the UK, and Australia were all in the top 10. A private jet takes off every six minutes in the UK. The total emissions from private jet flights in 2023 were more than 15 million metric tons, more than the 60 million people of Tanzania emitted.
The jets “are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget…and their emissions are soaring.”
Industry expectations are that another 8,500 business jets will enter service by 2033, far outstripping efficiency gains and indicating that private flight emissions will rise even further. The researchers said their work highlighted the vast global inequality in emissions between wealthier and poorer people, and tackling the emissions of the wealthy minority was critical to ending global heating.
Stefan Gössling, the professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden who led the research, said: “The wealthy are a very small share of the population but are increasing their emissions very quickly and by very large levels of magnitude.” He added: “The growth in global emissions that we are experiencing at this point in time is coming from the top.”
The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, took data from the ADS-B Exchange platform, which records the signals sent once a minute by transponders on every plane, recording its position and altitude. This huge dataset—1.8 terabytes—was then filtered for the 72 plane models marketed by their manufacturers as “business jets.” The emissions figures are most likely an underestimate, as smaller planes and emissions from taxiing on the ground were not included.
The analysis found the number of private jets increased by 28 percent and the distance flown jumped by 53 percent between 2019 and 2023. Fewer than a third of the flights were longer than 620 miles and almost 900,000 flights were less than 31 miles.
“We know some people use them as taxis, really,” Gössling said. “If it’s just [31 miles], you could definitely do that by car.” Outside the US and Europe, Brazil, the Middle East, and the Caribbean are private jet hotspots.
Much of the use is for leisure, the researchers found. For example, private jet use to Ibiza in Spain and Nice in France peaked in the summer and was concentrated around weekends. In the US, Taylor Swift, Drake, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey are among those who have been criticized for heavy private jet use.
The researchers also looked at some business events in 2023, with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, resulting in 660 private jet flights and the COP28 climate summit in Dubai having 291 flights.
Gössling said the driving factors behind the large recent increase in private jet use have not been analyzed but might include an increasing reluctance to share cabins on commercial flights that began during the Covid pandemic. Industry documents describe private jet users as “ultra-high net worth,” comprising about 250,000 individuals with an average wealth of $123 million. US private jet users are increasingly using “privacy ICAO addresses,” which mask the identity of the plane and could make tracking them much harder in the future.
According to Gössling, passengers should pay for the climate damage resulting from each ton of CO2 emitted, estimated at about $216: “Very basically, it would seem fair that people paid for the damage they are causing by their behavior.”
A second step would be to increase the landing fees for private aircraft, which are currently very low, he added. A landing fee of $5,400 could be an effective deterrent, roughly doubling the cost of common private flights.
Alethea Warrington, head of aviation at the climate charity Possible, said: “Private jets, used by a tiny group of ultra-wealthy people, are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget to avoid climate breakdown, and their emissions are soaring, even as the impacts of the climate crisis escalate.”
“It’s time for governments to act,” she said. “We need…a supertax, rapidly arriving at an outright ban on private jets.”
The US Private Aviation Association did not respond to a request for comment.
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Johnny Appleseed’s heart was in the right place when he walked all over the early United States planting fruit trees. Ecologically, though, he had room for improvement: To create truly dynamic ecosystems that host a lot of biodiversity, benefit local people, and produce lots of different foods, a forest needs a wide variety of species. Left on their own, some deforested areas can rebound surprisingly fast with minimal help from humans, sequestering loads of atmospheric carbon as they grow.
New research from an international team of scientists, recently published in the journal Nature, finds that 830,000 square miles of deforested land in humid tropical regions—an area larger than Mexico—could regrow naturally if left on its own. Five countries—Brazil, China, Colombia, Indonesia, and Mexico—account for 52 percent of the estimated potential regrowth. According to the researchers, that would boost biodiversity, improve water quality and availability, and suck up 23.4 gigatons of carbon over the next three decades.
“A rainforest can spring up in one to three years—it can be brushy and hard to walk through,” said Matthew Fagan, a conservation scientist and geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a coauthor of the paper. “In five years, you can have a completely closed canopy that’s 20 feet high. I have walked in rainforests 80 feet high that are 10 to 15 years old. It just blows your mind.”
That sort of regrowth isn’t a given, though. First of all, humans would have to stop using the land for intensive agriculture—think big yields thanks to fertilizers and other chemicals—or raising hoards of cattle, the sheer weight of which compacts the soil and makes it hard for new plants to take root. Cows, of course, also tend to nosh on young plants.
“Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”
Secondly, it helps for tropical soil to have a high carbon content to nourish plants. “Organic carbon, as any person who loves composting knows, really helps the soil to be nutritious and bulk itself up in terms of its ability to hold water,” Fagan said. “We found that places with soils like that are much more likely to have forests pop up.”
And it’s also beneficial for a degraded area to be near a standing tropical forest. That way, birds can fly across the area, pooping out seeds they have eaten in the forest. And once those plants get established, other tree-dwelling animal species like monkeys can feast on their fruits and spread seeds, too. This initiates a self-reinforcing cycle of biodiversity, resulting in one of those 80-foot-tall forests that’s only a decade old.
The more biodiversity, the more a forest can withstand shocks. If one species disappears because of disease, for instance, another similar one might fill the void. That’s why planting a bunch of the same species of tree—à la Johnny Appleseed— pales in comparison to a diverse rainforest that comes back naturally.
“When you have that biodiversity in the system, it tends to be more functional in an ecological sense, and it tends to be more robust,” said Peter Roopnarine, a paleoecologist at the California Academy of Sciences, who studies the impact of the climate on ecosystems but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”
Governments and nonprofits can now use the data gathered from this research to identify places to prioritize for cost-effective restoration, according to Brooke Williams, a research fellow at the University of Queensland and the paper’s lead author. “Importantly, our dataset doesn’t inform on where should and should not be restored,” she said, because that’s a question best left to local governments.
One community, for instance, might rely on a crop that requires open spaces to grow. But if the locals can thrive with a regrown tropical forest—by, say, earning money from tourism and growing crops like coffee and cocoa within the canopy, a practice known as agroforestry—their government might pay them to leave the area alone.
Susan Cook-Patton, senior forest restoration scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said that more than 1,500 species have been used in agroforestry worldwide. “There’s a lot of fruit trees, for example, that people use, and trees that provide medicinal services,” Cook-Patton said. “Are there ways that we can help shift the agricultural production towards more trees and boost the carbon value, the biodiversity value, and livelihoods of the people living there?”
The tricky bit here is that the world is warming and droughts are worsening, so a naturally regrowing forest may soon find itself in different circumstances. “We know the climate conditions are going to change, but there’s still uncertainty with some of that change, uncertainty in our climate projection models,” Roopnarine said.
So while a forest is very much stationary, reforestation is, in a sense, a moving target for environmental groups and governments. A global goal known as the Bonn Challenge aims to restore 1.3 million square miles of degraded and deforested land by 2030. So far, more than 70 governments and organizations from 60 countries, including the United States, have signed on to contribute 810,000 square miles toward that target.
Sequestering 23.4 gigatons of carbon over three decades may not sound like much in the context of humanity’s 37 gigatons of emissions every year. But these are just the forests in tropical regions. Protecting temperate forests and sea grasses would capture still more carbon, in addition to newfangled techniques like growing cyanobacteria. “This is one tool in a toolbox—it is not a silver bullet,” Fagan said. “It’s one of 40 bullets needed to fight climate change. But we need to use all available options.”
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Private jet flights have soared in recent years, with the resulting climate-heating emissions rising by 50 percent, the most comprehensive global analysis to date has revealed.
The assessment tracked more than 25,000 private jets and almost 19 million flights between 2019 and 2023. It found almost half the jets traveled less than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles) and 900,000 were used “like taxis” for trips of less than 31 miles. Many flights were for holidays, arriving in sunny locations in the summertime. The FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022 attracted more than 1,800 private flights.
Private flights, used by just 0.003 percent of the world’s population, are the most polluting form of transport. The researchers found that passengers in larger private jets caused more CO2 emissions in an hour than the average person did in a year.
The US dominated private jet travel, representing 69 percent of flights, and Canada, the UK, and Australia were all in the top 10. A private jet takes off every six minutes in the UK. The total emissions from private jet flights in 2023 were more than 15 million metric tons, more than the 60 million people of Tanzania emitted.
The jets “are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget…and their emissions are soaring.”
Industry expectations are that another 8,500 business jets will enter service by 2033, far outstripping efficiency gains and indicating that private flight emissions will rise even further. The researchers said their work highlighted the vast global inequality in emissions between wealthier and poorer people, and tackling the emissions of the wealthy minority was critical to ending global heating.
Stefan Gössling, the professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden who led the research, said: “The wealthy are a very small share of the population but are increasing their emissions very quickly and by very large levels of magnitude.” He added: “The growth in global emissions that we are experiencing at this point in time is coming from the top.”
The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, took data from the ADS-B Exchange platform, which records the signals sent once a minute by transponders on every plane, recording its position and altitude. This huge dataset—1.8 terabytes—was then filtered for the 72 plane models marketed by their manufacturers as “business jets.” The emissions figures are most likely an underestimate, as smaller planes and emissions from taxiing on the ground were not included.
The analysis found the number of private jets increased by 28 percent and the distance flown jumped by 53 percent between 2019 and 2023. Fewer than a third of the flights were longer than 620 miles and almost 900,000 flights were less than 31 miles.
“We know some people use them as taxis, really,” Gössling said. “If it’s just [31 miles], you could definitely do that by car.” Outside the US and Europe, Brazil, the Middle East, and the Caribbean are private jet hotspots.
Much of the use is for leisure, the researchers found. For example, private jet use to Ibiza in Spain and Nice in France peaked in the summer and was concentrated around weekends. In the US, Taylor Swift, Drake, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey are among those who have been criticized for heavy private jet use.
The researchers also looked at some business events in 2023, with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, resulting in 660 private jet flights and the COP28 climate summit in Dubai having 291 flights.
Gössling said the driving factors behind the large recent increase in private jet use have not been analyzed but might include an increasing reluctance to share cabins on commercial flights that began during the Covid pandemic. Industry documents describe private jet users as “ultra-high net worth,” comprising about 250,000 individuals with an average wealth of $123 million. US private jet users are increasingly using “privacy ICAO addresses,” which mask the identity of the plane and could make tracking them much harder in the future.
According to Gössling, passengers should pay for the climate damage resulting from each ton of CO2 emitted, estimated at about $216: “Very basically, it would seem fair that people paid for the damage they are causing by their behavior.”
A second step would be to increase the landing fees for private aircraft, which are currently very low, he added. A landing fee of $5,400 could be an effective deterrent, roughly doubling the cost of common private flights.
Alethea Warrington, head of aviation at the climate charity Possible, said: “Private jets, used by a tiny group of ultra-wealthy people, are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget to avoid climate breakdown, and their emissions are soaring, even as the impacts of the climate crisis escalate.”
“It’s time for governments to act,” she said. “We need…a supertax, rapidly arriving at an outright ban on private jets.”
The US Private Aviation Association did not respond to a request for comment.
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Donald Trump’s new term as US president poses a grave threat to the planet if it blows up the international effort to curb dangerous global heating, stunned climate experts have warned in the wake of his decisive election victory.
Trump’s return to the White House is widely expected to result in the US, yet again, exiting the Paris climate agreement and may even remove American involvement in the underpinning United Nations framework to deal with the climate crisis.
While campaigning for president, Trump has called climate change “a big hoax,” scorned wind energy and electric cars, and vowed to gut environmental rules and the “green new scam” of the Inflation Reduction Act, a major bill passed by Democrats to support clean energy projects.
Trump’s agenda, analysts have found, risks adding several billion metric tons of extra heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, further imperiling goals to stave off disastrous global heating that governments are already failing to meet. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the US is now a “failed democracy” and that “we now pose a major threat to the planet.”
The election result will send shockwaves through annual UN climate talks that start in Azerbaijan on Monday. “The election of a climate denier to the US presidency is extremely dangerous for the world,” said Bill Hare, a senior scientist at Climate Analytics, who warned a Trump administration would likely “damage efforts” to keep the world from heating by more than 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, a Paris target that now appears even further out of reach.
While President Joe Biden’s administration will send a delegation to the COP29 summit next week, this will be overshadowed by an incoming Trump government that threatens to disengage with other major carbon emitters, such as China, to address the climate crisis. “The nation and world can expect the incoming Trump administration to take a wrecking ball to global climate diplomacy,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Across Europe, climate activists and politicians who support stronger action to cut pollution reacted with despair to the news of Trump’s win. “This is a dark day in the US and globally,” said Thomas Waitz, an Austrian member of the European Parliament and co-chair of the European Green Party.
Luisa Neubauer, a German climate activist from the Fridays for Future movement, who went door-knocking for Kamala Harris, compared the feeling to a bad breakup. “A decision over parts of the near future has been made and most of us didn’t have a say in it,” she said. “And for a moment, it feels like the world is going to end. It’s not. But the heartbreak is real.”
“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable and our country is not turning back.”
But they also urged supporters of climate action to not give up.
Areeba Hamid, joint executive director of Greenpeace UK, said it was “an election won with corporate cash, big polluter backers, and disinformation,” but a global movement was already fighting to rein in the damage.
“We simply don’t have any more time to waste,” she added. “Whatever a Trump presidency chooses to do on global climate action, we know that damage can be contained if the grown-ups in the room speak up.”
When he was last president, Trump took several months to decide to remove the US from the Paris deal, raising fears the agreement would collapse. Countries did manage to avoid such a fate prior to Biden reentering the pact, and there is some optimism that the transition to cleaner energy isn’t something that Trump—despite his demands that the US “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas—can reverse.
“The US election result is a setback for global climate action, but the Paris agreement has proven resilient and is stronger than any single country’s policies,” said Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and a key architect of the Paris deal.
“The context today is very different to 2016,” she said. “There is powerful economic momentum behind the global transition, which the US has led and gained from, but now risks forfeiting. The devastating toll of recent hurricanes was a grim reminder that all Americans are affected by worsening climate change.”
Much like after the previous withdrawal, cities and state within the US committed to climate action will try to fill the void of federal indifference, acting as de facto representatives at global summits and even engaging with other countries on how to cut emissions.
“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable and our country is not turning back,” said Gina McCarthy, former climate adviser to Biden and co-chair of the America Is All In coalition of climate-concerned states and cities.
“Our coalition is bigger, more bipartisan, better organized, and fully prepared to deliver climate solutions, boost local economies, and drive climate ambition,” she said. “We cannot and will not let Trump stand in the way of giving our kids and grandkids the freedom to grow up in safer and healthier communities.”
Domestically, environmental groups have said they will attempt to rally Democrats, as well as some Republicans, to oppose Trump’s tearing down of climate policies, which is anticipated to include major cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and weakened pollution rules for coal plants, cars, and fossil fuel drilling. “President Trump will face a bipartisan wall of opposition if he attempts to rip away clean energy incentives now,” said Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute.
However, Trump’s election victory has been a deeply sobering one for those concerned about the climate crisis. The issue was barely championed by Harris, the Democratic nominee, with polling showing that voters considered it a minor priority despite scientists’ warnings of record-breaking temperatures and two devastating, heat-fueled hurricanes that smashed into the Southeast just a few weeks before Election Day.
“This should be a wake-up call—the climate movement urgently needs more political power because the climate crisis is moving infinitely faster than our politics right now,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project, which sought to turn out the vote among environmentalists in the US.
“We must work every day to build an unstoppable bloc of climate voters, because we’re running out of time.”
On a multispectral satellite image of the West Bank, Ramón Bieri, an analyst at SITU Research, shows me how to watch the vineyards. A box in the bottom right-hand corner displays the year, beginning in 1984. As the map moves forward in time, orange and yellow spots, inside the blue outlines, shift to deep green and eventually spill out beyond their squiggly boundaries.
Bieri explains to me the variegated colors represent vegetation signatures and the time-lapse displays olive groves, and other untended land, transforming into neatly rowed vineyards. The underlying map, he says, shows areas of the West Bank where Israeli settlers have forcibly taken over Palestinian villages. The colors I am watching are not simply a record of agricultural planning. It is, SITU Research Director Brad Samuels claims, empirical evidence of apartheid.
Prosecuting the crime of apartheid is tricky in any context, but especially in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. SITU believes this novel technology could finally unlock legal cases that have long eluded activists in the West Bank.
In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an advisory opinion declaring the Israeli military’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza illegal and suggesting that its policies and practices amounted to a system of apartheid. Organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al-Haq, and B’tselem—not to mention Palestinian activists themselves—have drawn similar conclusions. As HBO’s John Oliver recently pointed out, even prominent Israelis, including former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, as well as a former Mossad chief and a former IDF general, have deployed the term “apartheid” when describing the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Some find apartheid a harsh characterization. In a recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said the term was “appropriate” but worried the label would “shut some people’s minds down.” It leads the conversation, Klein worried, into the “technical.” The “technical” minutiae of definition may be ill-suited to the conversation Klein hopes to have, but it is fundamental to the legal mechanisms of proving and prosecuting apartheid in international courts.
The technology, an expert said, may make it possible for prosecutors to secure the first apartheid conviction in history.
Over the past few years, a growing chorus of states, human rights organizations, and international legal bodies have applied an apartheid legal framework to the Israeli occupation, hoping to seek justice. Yet no one has successfully prosecuted allegations of Israeli apartheid in any jurisdiction.
Samuels, along with collaborators from Israeli human rights organizations Yesh Din and Bimkom, and researchers at Princeton University’s Department of Geosciences, hope to change that. In his West Bank investigation, Samuels is one of many researchers attempting to actually prove the existence of a widespread, systematic regime enforcing one group’s dominance over another in a way that could be accepted by legal systems.
For the past nine months, the team used remote sensing methodologies and satellite imagery to document three hallmarks of apartheid in the West Bank: land dispossession, restriction of access, and forced displacement.
To Samuels, the body of evidence they have amassed so far is moving “towards an evidentiary file” for prosecutors everywhere. It’s a proof of concept, one that he and his collaborators hope will encourage apartheid litigation across domestic and international jurisdictions.
The project began in the summer of 2023. Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer and activist with Yesh Din, met up with Samuels in New York while on an advocacy trip in the United States. The two had known each other since 2009, when Sfard enlisted Samuels to help him with the case of Bassem Abu Rahma, an unarmed Palestinian man attending a nonviolent protest in the West Bank whom the Israeli military killed with a tear-gas canister.
Over breakfast, the two discussed a legal opinion Sfard had published on apartheid. As a litigator, Sfard could easily point to evidence of apartheid in law books and testimony. But Samuels, an architect and visual investigator, was curious whether apartheid in the West Bank had any spatial representations. In other words, how can we see apartheid?
Spatial representations of apartheid aren’t new: photographer Johnny Miller’s famous drone footage, for example, shows the legacy of South African apartheid and segregation through stark aerial images of wealthy, verdant neighborhoods on one side of an invisible line, and crowded plots of shacks on another. But the legal fight has been more complex.
No one has ever been prosecuted for apartheid—not even in South Africa. As international law scholars Gerhard Kemp and Windell Nortje wrote, “There remains a significant accountability deficit pertaining to this crime against humanity.”
Defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid is not only specific but multilayered. It is “inhumane acts…committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
These specific elements can put successful litigation of the crime out of reach even for skilled prosecutors in favorable jurisdictions. “You have to prove things like a special intent of domination by one racial group over another,” Kemp told me, “which is more difficult than, say, using the same facts to prosecute war crimes.” Then there’s the added challenge of collecting evidence under an occupation that limits outside access and keeps Palestinian institutions weak—all in the midst of war.
Sfard told Samuels that even with dossiers of testimony evidence, it can be nearly impossible to get remedies for their Palestinian clients in domestic Israeli courts. “Justice for Palestinians whose lands were taken does happen—but at the rate of miracles,” Sfard said. “It’s not a neutral court. We’re not in the Hague. We’re not in some Swiss Tribunal. It’s the court of the occupier.”
For decades, legal systems have grown more skeptical of subjective human accounts in general, as scientific approaches and forensic evidence became the “evidentiary holy grail,” said Sfard. This is especially true of Palestinian testimony in Israeli courts. To prove apartheid in court, Sfard explained, this meant olive groves could be key. In the West Bank, settler expansion is all about land. “When settlers take over Palestinian land, they uproot it and plant their own stuff,” Sfard said. “And I told Brad this is, for example, one thing we can see.”
There are exceptions, but typically Palestinian farmers cultivate olive groves using traditional methods, and settlers build industrially irrigated vineyards. Samuels and Sfard hypothesized that this distinct cultural approach to agriculture could serve as a reliable proxy for land dispossession—one of the essential components of the apartheid system—and that remote sensing technology could detect these changes over time from space.
Documenting this is not as simple as firing up Google Earth Pro. Satellites can produce imagery with a resolution high enough to make out neat rows of grape leaves versus patches of olive trees. But this documentation only dates back a few years—long after the point in the late-1970s when the settler land grab dramatically increased. Other restrictions, such as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, also limited the quality and availability of US satellite imagery over Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories from 1997 until the law was repealed in 2020.
Samuels and his team brought the puzzle to Adam Maloof, a professor in Princeton University Department of Geosciences, and Ryan Manzuk, a researcher who recently obtained his PhD from Maloof’s department. Though access to satellite imagery with high spatial resolution was limited, they realized that one particular US government satellite called Landsat provided free access to high spectral resolution imagery, which uses colors and wavelengths undetectable to the human eye. With Landsat’s Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the team could track differences in vegetation health and lushness over time, allowing them to differentiate vineyards from olive groves in areas of the West Bank dating back to Landsat’s launch in 1975.
Landsat had another advantage: evading the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment restrictions. “It’s a blind spot,” Samuels said. “The government scrambled US space agency satellites that had high spatial resolution, but not high spectral resolution, probably because they didn’t perceive Landsat as a threat.”
The team then narrowed their investigation to three villages that illustrated different aspects of apartheid: land dispossession, restriction of access to land, and forced displacement. “There are all different kinds of ways in which settler expansion presents itself,” Samuels said. “And the fact that we focused on three really was a function of time, resources, and fit, in terms of remote sensing.”
When Samuels and his team presented their initial analysis to Sfard and Yesh Din, there was a long silence. “This is remarkable,” Sfard remembered a colleague finally saying. “This is science fiction come true.”
Still, he could not help but feel the remarkable dissonance between believing Palestinians and having to show it on a map: “We already know all of this,” he said. The maps could corroborate testimony in a scientific, clinical way. “It was like a new set of glasses was placed on our eyes, and we suddenly saw more,” he said. But, with it, there was still a realization that Palestinian voices would not be believed without overwhelming evidence.
Sfard hopes that with this new tool, the courts, both Israeli and non-Israeli, will also start to see more—or at least differently. Now, when alleging that the Israeli government declared a parcel of land as state property and allocated it to settlers, “it’s not just the head of the village that is telling you this and making this allegation,” Sfard said. “We have scientific proof that this is the history of it.”
Apartheid has been firmly established as a crime against humanity for decades. And some hope to expand it, including new distinctions like gender apartheid. “But the difficulty,” Kemp explained, has been “to apply the legal standard to the facts on the ground. And this is where the project comes in.” Kemp said that SITU and Yesh Din may make it possible for prosecutors to secure the first apartheid conviction in history.
The ultimate goal is for prosecutors to apply this new approach in courtrooms, but the project faced its first test in a German museum. On October 8—just a day after the one-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks—the project premiered as one of several case studies in a new exhibition called “Visual Investigations: Between Advocacy, Journalism, and Law” at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich. SITU’s corner of the exhibition centers around a giant map of the West Bank, sprawled across a 25-foot long wall, with time lapses of land dispossession, archival photographs of olive groves and Palestinian farms, videos, and a lengthy methodology section.
“I wanted to make clear that this is a super-focused, very specific, and rigorous unpacking of the question of the manifestation of apartheid,” Samuels said. “And not just an ideological rant.”
After Samuels walked a crowd through the findings and dense methodology on opening day, an Israeli student who had concerns about the project during its planning phase approached him. In an emotional exchange, she expressed her gratitude over the fairness and rigor with which Samuels and his collaborators approached the investigation.
Exchanges like that one make Sfard hopeful about the investigation’s potential, but he is careful not to let forensic analysis eclipse the human element.
“Palestinian accounts of the crimes committed against them are of utmost importance,” he said. “While I’m ecstatic about the project, and I think that its fruits are extremely important, they do not replace the direct Palestinian account. I hope that this project will not only allow us to prove in a court of law that certain land was dispossessed, but will also give Palestinians a stage to tell their story.”
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa has volunteered as a trauma surgeon in Ukraine, Haiti, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. But when he went to Gaza in March and April of this year, it changed him. Sidhwa had never seen so much horror in his life.
“There’s nothing like Gaza right now,” he said. “Almost 100 percent of Gaza’s population is homeless and displaced…does that sound like a place where people are going to survive?”
With international journalists banned from Gaza and Palestinian journalists openly targeted by the Israeli military, international medical aid workers have become some of the few people able to tell the world about the toll of the war.
Sidhwa has spent the past six months speaking widely about his time in Gaza. He went to the Uncommitted movement panel at the Democratic National Convention, wrote an article for Politico about what he’s seen, and organized a group of nearly 100 doctors to sign a letter to President Joe Biden begging him to stop sending weapons.
When the New York Times approached Sidhwa to write for its opinion section about what he saw in Gaza—widespread starvation, collapsed sanitary systems—he took it as an opportunity. He went beyond writing from his own experience and corroborated his account with 64 other doctors. In particular, he was haunted by something he saw again and again: children shot in the head.
“Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die,” he wrote. At first, he thought this was an anomaly, the work of “a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby.” But when he asked other health care workers, he found that dozens were seeing the same thing.
After his essay in the Times was published, prominent right-wing accounts on X and Instagram, as well as publications like the New York Sun and Israel Hayom, began insisting that the CT images included in Sidhwa’s essay—showing bullets embedded in children’s skulls—had been photoshopped and that Sidhwa was a propagandist desperate for the fall of Israel.
The New York Times did something unusual in response: It released an editors’ note defending its own fact-checking process. “While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos—of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck—were too horrific for publication,” Times editor Kathleen Kingsbury wrote. “We made a similar decision for the additional 40-plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds.”
Sidhwa found the pushback odd. “I don’t really care about Palestinian nationalism. In fact, I don’t really care about any nationalism as a concept,” he told me. The issue, he said, is simpler than that: “My government, meaning me, is involved in major crimes, and I don’t want that.”
On October 18, as reported by the Washington Post, Israel banned six medical aid organizations—including the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), which Sidhwa has worked with—from entry to Gaza going forward. The WHO received no explanation from Israel as to why.
I spoke with Sidhwa by Zoom between surgeries about his work in Gaza, his advocacy since then, and why he’s still hoping—even now—that the US government might be pressured to change course.
Let’s go back to before all the media attention. How did you end up going to Gaza?
So a very large number of physicians, and especially surgeons, have been killed and probably about an equal number have fled.
Mark Perlmutter, he was involved in a telemedicine project with Gazans. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. He was looking at pre- and post-op X-rays, and he was like, “What on earth is this stuff? Who’s doing these operations?” He found out it was just junior residents or sometimes medical students. And he asked, “Where’s your attending?” And they said, “Well, he’s dead.”
We said: Well, we will go provide that service.
I was at European Hospital from March 25 to April 8. At that time, European Hospital was easily the best-resourced city block in all of Gaza—and it was still a total disaster. There were 10,000 to 15,000 people sheltering on the grounds of the hospital. I walked the hospital grounds several times. I was able to find four toilets, so 10,000 to 15,000 people, four latrines, one water spigot.
I got the chance to go to Rafah, before it was obliterated, and drive through Khan Younis. And while we’re driving through, there was a group of four boys, probably like 10 to 12 years old. Young kids. They’re going through a garbage heap, trying to find anything, and they’re working together to do it. It’s pretty obvious that this wasn’t the first time they had done this.
On the way through Khan Younis, I told the driver to stop. He said it’s not safe, but I asked him to stop, just for a second. I got out and I looked around.
I don’t think, if I grew up at this intersection, I would know where I am. There weren’t any buildings that were more than 3 feet tall anymore. It looked like an atomic bomb hit the place.
Since your New York Times article came out, you’ve been the subject of a backlash campaign, with people claiming to be former law enforcement officers suggesting that the X-rays of children with bullets in their skulls embedded in the article were fabricated. What’s your reaction to those claims?
The article polled 65 American health care workers—doctors, nurses, one paramedic—and gathered their experience in the Gaza Strip. How many of them saw children who had been shot in the head? How many of them regularly? How many of them saw malnourishment and easily treatable infections? How many of them saw infants die from malnutrition or dehydration? How many saw such extreme, universal psychiatric distress in small children, to the point that small children were actually suicidal?
It’s 65, which represents, as far as I can tell, about half of the health care workers in the US that have been to Gaza since October 7 [of 2023].
The New York Times fact-checking process is fanatical. It’s beyond anything I could have possibly imagined. I don’t know if people realize it took months to write this. It was an incredible effort of time and resources, on my part and theirs—the team of four people working on it.
So then when all this manufactured nonsense from people claiming to be either doctors or ballistics experts, none of whom are either one of these things, came up…
I asked them: Guys, how are we going to prove that? They’re like: Oh, Feroze, we have photographs of these kids. We have the entire CT image on video. Like, there’s no question. I saw 13 kids who had been shot in the head. So there were almost certainly more kids who came in when I wasn’t in the ER, got shot in the head, died, and were sent directly to the morgue.
On the occasions where the child survived, and I think this only happened once, honestly—on the occasion when the child survived long enough and there was family available in the ICU the next day to ask what happened—they would say, the kids were just playing. I never heard from a family that they were in a crossfire, that there was lots of fighting and the bullet went through the window; I never heard that.
What do you think people are getting out of ignoring the evidence here? When you spoke at the Uncommitted press conference at the DNC, you referenced the book Slavery by Another Name and talked about what Douglas Blackmon calls “moral rationalization”—when people know something’s wrong and illegal and continue to do it anyway. Is that part of what’s happening here?
The book is about how slavery was resurrected in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. And it’s quite literally chattel slavery was just reinstituted in the South, maybe on a smaller scale, but nevertheless reinstituted. And this is under Northern occupation, with the Northern judicial systems, you know?
It’s interesting, because you read through it and you think, how could this have happened? Like, slavery was a large part of the reason for the war, and then after the war…the whole society just knew when to lie and when to tell the truth. They knew who to beat up and who not to beat up. They knew who to kill, who not to kill, who to torture, who not to torture.
I don’t remember the exact words I used at the DNC, but I said something like, lying became a virtue. It just turned all of our normal moral values on their head when the whole society committed to this transparently and obviously immoral enterprise.
It’s hard not to see that here.
I hope the fact that this piece was published in the New York Times—and you gotta remember that the Times opinion section reached out to me, I didn’t go to them—I hope that it represents a change in the elite consensus around Gaza.
I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding. They say, “Oh, look, the mainstream is becoming pro-Palestine.” I seriously doubt that. I think there’s a recognition that the Israelis have kind of gone nuts in Gaza and that American objectives there have been achieved. And the extent of what has been done to Gaza—it takes about 10 minutes just to describe the actual extent of destruction and devastation of the Gaza Strip in any accurate form.
How does it feel to see people online refusing to believe these images are real?
I think that’s just, it’s completely amongst die-hard believers.
I’m not Israeli, I’m not Jewish, I’m not Palestinian, I’m not Arab, I’m not Muslim, I’m not Christian—like, I don’t know how much further away I can get from the conflict. It’s just got nothing to do with me, except for the fact that I’m an American.
After this is done, we Americans need to take a long, hard look at ourselves. What does it say that the United States doesn’t have a mainstream political party for which genocide is just a no-go?
The US entered four or five caveats to its signing of the of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. So it basically immunized itself from the convention. And yeah, that was [under then-President Ronald] Reagan. But still, we don’t have a mainstream political party that is opposed to genocide on principle.
That’s very scary, given the power of the state that we live in. My intention in writing the piece was to bring people to such realizations. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
Beyond your media work, you helped lead this effort to send Joe Biden a letter signed by, I think, 99 volunteer medical professionals who served in Gaza. And in that letter, you all asked him to meet with you and support an arms embargo. Have you received any response to that letter from the administration?
No, nothing, which is quite frustrating. I don’t know how often almost a hundred doctors send a letter to the president of the United States, but it doesn’t happen very often. So I’m kind of surprised that we received literally no response whatsoever.
I’m not that important of a person, I understand that. But I mean, on that letter are veterans, are reservists, are people whose names don’t sound scary like mine: Monica, Nina, Mike, Mark, Adam. It’s not just people that you can dismiss, and yet they’re dismissing them. It’s a little scary to see the American elite kind of ignoring its own. You kind of wonder how extreme that can get.
There’s no shortage of information about this. It’s not like Brett McGurk [the White House coordinator for the Middle East] and people like him and [Secretary of State] Antony Blinken—they know what’s going on. They’re not idiots. They can read English, just like I can. There’s no way they didn’t see that New York Times piece, or at least one of their aides did and told them about it.
If I could, I’d say: “Mr. Biden, the Israelis have decided to turn Gaza into a howling wilderness, and there are a million children there. You don’t have to let the Israelis keep spitting in your face like this. You can just tell them the money’s gone, the arms are gone. Withdraw from Gaza, withdraw from the West Bank, remove the settlements.”
Did you stay in touch with the folks you met at European Hospital? What have you been hearing from them?
There was a young man whose name was Abdulrahman Al-Najjar. And he was a third-year med student, a smart kid. If he was born in the US, he really would have gone far. He was probably 21 or 22 when I met him. The medical students were all at European Hospital because it was the safest place to be, and they had all been displaced from Gaza City and were living in tents just like everybody else. But they would come to the hospital, and they would help run the ER. Even the first-year med students, who know literally nothing about anything, they just came and did their job, and these are 18- and 19-year-old kids.
But Abdulrahman, he was a good kid. He wanted to be a plastic surgeon or maybe a neurosurgeon. And I remember when I left, he said: “Don’t remember Gaza like this. Come back when there’s no war, and we’ll go to the beach and we’ll have tea. And that’s how you should remember Gaza.” He’s a sweet kid, smart, you know?
He was killed in an airstrike on August 31. That’s the same day Hersh Goldberg-Polin is thought to have been killed. The 23-year-old Israeli American guy who was taken hostage at the music festival and was found dead in a Hamas tunnel, probably executed before he could be rescued.
When I saw the pictures of him in the news, I thought, good lord, he looks exactly like Abdul. If you look at them side by side, they’re almost identical human beings. They have the same smile. They have the same ears, the same nose. And I didn’t find out Abdul was dead until the day after.
I’m still in touch with some people. They don’t have much cell service. And my Arabic is as close to zero as you can imagine, so it’s hard.
As you know, six medical aid groups were banned from sending doctors to Gaza, including PAMA, the group that you’ve worked with. What was your reaction to that?
It’s kind of wild. COGAT, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories—the part of the Israeli government that’s supposed to coordinate between humanitarian groups and the military—COGAT apparently provides nothing to the WHO in writing. I couldn’t believe that. I was like, this is insane, what are you talking about? All of this is just by word of mouth. It’s actually not even clear how many organizations have been banned or who they are. So who the hell knows?
They were western NGOs—some were American, some were Canadian, and one was from Australia or New Zealand. But they have Arab boards. That’s all it is. Arab names on their boards. It’s just outrageous. They knew they could get away with it, and they did. No one even claims that there has ever been a security incident associated with any of these people that any of these groups have brought to the territories.
It tells you something about our own society. I just got an email five minutes ago from the [Kamala] Harris campaign saying, oh my God, Michigan is in play, and we’re so screwed. Like, yeah, that’s your fault. I’m sure everybody wants to vote because they’re so frightened of Donald Trump. I mean, it’s a sensible thing to be frightened of; I am, too.
But all she would have to do is get on TV and say, “Israel has banned several Arab-led western NGOs, I find this totally unacceptable, and when I’m president, I will tell the Israelis they have to reverse that immediately.” If she did that, she’d probably get, like, 90 percent of that Arab vote back. She won’t even do that. It’s pathetic. It’s so crazy how committed this administration, including very clearly its vice president, is to this insane project of just obliterating Gaza. It’s just a fanatical dedication to this project, and it’s weird.
There’s been some speculation that the ban might’ve had to do with how doctors like yourself are serving as these sort of de facto international spokespeople. What do you think about that?
I’ve had several people tell me this is my fault, for the New York Times article. And I have to tell them, honestly, you might be right. I don’t think you are, but it’s entirely possible, you know? They were trying to help people. They feel like that’s been cut away from them. They’re angry about it. If they want to blame me for it, that’s understandable.
The Israelis have always had veto power over who goes in when. I suspect that this has been in the works for a while, and the timing probably just is happenstance, but I can’t prove it. I don’t know.
You mentioned wanting to go back. Why do you want to go back to Gaza?
I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t want to leave. I think it’s kind of a universal thing. Everybody, as they exit, suddenly has an existential crisis, like, why do I get to leave and these people have to stay?
And then you’re thinking, man, I’ve got to come back somehow. These people need help, they need protection. They need a hand to hold. They need—anything.
When the vans were coming to pick us up, we had all gathered there at 8 in the morning, 7:30 in the morning. The sun’s just come up. And there was this security guard who was there with his one-and-a-half-year-old, 2-year-old son, just kind of playing with him, babying him, you know. I remember Mark, like, force-feeding the kid all the candy he had left over. At one point, the conversation stopped, and we all just kind of looked at each other, and then we looked at that kid, and we were all thinking exactly the same thing. Why does this kid have to live in this Hobbesian hellhole of violence and hunger and fear and terror, and we just get to leave?
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
On Wednesday, during a routine operation in Gaza, Israeli soldiers reportedly killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—seemingly stumbling into realizing a major military objective. Despite over a year’s worth of efforts, Israeli soldiers appear to have found Sinwar by accident. After killing three people during a normal operation, they apparently realized that one of the men resembled the Hamas leader. The Israeli military confirmed Sinwar’s death on Thursday.
“I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”
Israel and the United States have been trying to find and kill Sinwar since last October. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cast his death as one of the main reasons for Israel’s unceasing bombardment of Gaza, saying a main war objective is “eliminating” Hamas leadership.
With this objective met, Sinwar’s death could present a chance to end what has become a regional war. Vice President Kamala Harris said after the killing that Sinwar’s death gave “us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza.” But it seems unlikely that Israeli and American leaders will fully press in this moment.
A former Biden administration official said they do believe that Sinwar’s death will be viewed by the administration as “somewhat of an opportunity to secure an end to the conflict,” particularly ahead of the elections as they try to win back votes that they “certainly have lost.” The problem, the former official explained, is that “I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”
The next move from Israel’s government, at the moment, is unclear. On Thursday, Netanyahu stated that “the mission ahead of us has not been completed.” In an initial statement Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, said that while Sinwar’s death is a vital goal it would not mean the end of the war in Gaza.
Sinwar was killed just over a year after he orchestrated the October 7 attack in which Hamas killed nearly 1,200 Israelis. In response, the Israeli military has leveled Gaza, killing at least 42,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry. (The full death toll is feared to be more than double that number, according to some public health experts.)
Sinwar’s death comes at a time when ceasefire talks to end the war in Gaza have effectively fallen apart and the conflict has expanded throughout the region.
Israel recently launched a major invasion of Lebanon, where more than 2,000 people have now been killed. And Israel is on the verge of striking Iran in response to the ballistic missiles it launched against Israel on October 1. Iran’s decision to strike Israel came after a series of increasingly aggressive Israeli escalations in Lebanon—including extensive bombardment of residential areas in Beirut—that seemed all but guaranteed to provoke an Iranian retaliation. Hezbollah officials supported multiple ceasefire offers in early October, none of which Netanyahu accepted. (The US is not currently pushing publicly for a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel.)
The Biden administration could use Sinwar’s death as leverage to push for an end to what is now a regional war. This would build on a letter the United States recently sent to Israel that gave Israel 30 days to allow in more humanitarian aid to Gaza, or face potential restrictions on US weapons exports to Israel. “I don’t think [the Israeli government] will be responsive to the letter,” the former Biden official said. “I don’t think they take our threat seriously. I don’t think the US government would withhold weapons. I think this is a signal that won’t be followed through on.” (Human rights groups, according to a report in Politico, voiced similar concerns that “rules don’t apply” to Israel.)
Israel has now killed the top leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah: Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27, and in July, Israeli is widely understood to have assassinated Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. (Haniyeh, who was Hamas’ key ceasefire negotiator, was considered to be more moderate than Sinwar.)
Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble following one of the most intense aerial bombardment campaigns in modern history. The IDF has dropped at least 75,000 tons of bombs on the territory, killed at least one out of every 55 people in Gaza, and has cut off nearly all humanitarian aid. Its actions in Gaza have reportedly violated international human rights law and—along with Hamas’ actions on October 7—constitute potential war crimes in the view of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. A case in the International Court of Justice asserting Israel is actively committing a genocide is proceeding as well.
Both Iran and Hezbollah, which is closely aligned with Iran, have signaled they would like to avoid a full-scale war with Israel that could potentially further involve the United States. The question remains whether the Biden administration is willing to use its extensive leverage as Israel’s primary weapons supplier to force an end to the conflict.
Update, October 17: This post has been updated to reflect a new statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a new statement from Vice President Kamala Harris.
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