The 119th Congress so far has not been particularly good for U.S. critical mineral security. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act introduced an earlier phaseout of production tax credits for critical minerals while extending them to metallurgical coal (which the U.S. exports heavily to China). Meanwhile, lawmakers have thus far failed to renew the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Mapping Resource Initiative after the program’s expiration at the end of September, leaving the U.S. further behind its competitors in collecting basic geoscience data.

The long-awaited permitting package, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), released on September 20, might just turn the record around for this Congress.

BAAJA is good for U.S. critical mineral security and Congress should pass it. The bill does not solve all the problems that mineral supply chains face. But BAAJA fixes a broken permitting system that needlessly raises the cost, risk, and time it takes to develop mines and build processing plants.

BAAJA does this by providing developers with project certainty, building social license with local community members disaffected by historically unregulated mining, and confirming longstanding waste disposal practices left in question by recent court rulings and rulemakings.

Ultimately, these provisions would leave critical mineral projects with a permitting system that actually assesses true environmental impacts and a public more willing to hear projects on their merits. This provides the routine functionality the U.S. needs to restore its reputation as a reliable place to produce minerals and regain basic competitiveness. From there, Congress will have a strong foundation to pursue the many sector-specific initiatives needed to fully secure U.S. critical mineral supply chains.

The help could not come soon enough. As other countries have built attractive mining jurisdictions, the U.S. has fallen from a 20% share of global investment in 1993 to just 11% in 2020 while experiencing a 70% decrease in the number of metal mines since 1983. As lawsuits and arbitrary permit revocations continue to raise the cost, risk, and time to develop projects, mineral supply chains will continue to hollow out in the U.S. in favor of more reliable countries.

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Legacy mine site cleanup

Mining has not always operated under strict environmental regulations, as it does today. Before the 1976 passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which requires companies to remediate mines after closure, mining operations left their sites in disrepair. These sites total in the thousands and have sat for decades in need of proper remediation. Even though projects today do not leave the same damage, the historic sites create understandable distrust among community members who may remain hesitant to support new projects.

BAAJA would help heal this distrust by providing funding to clean up and restore the landscape at historic non-coal mine sites (coal mine cleanup has its own funding source). Specifically, the bill would charge active non-coal mining operations $400 annual fees per parcel of federal land they occupy. Proceeds would go to a dedicated fund the federal government will use to pay for remediating inactive non-coal mine sites on federal land still in need of proper closure.

As new non-coal mines come online on federal land, mining companies will pump more fees into the cleanup fund. $400 per parcel each year may not seem like much. But mining operations can occupy hundreds of parcels, which, in total, should generate at least $125 million in dedicated cleanup funding over the next decade.

Project certainty

BAAJA creates a more reliable permitting system for project developers by alleviating key pain points that plague the industry.

First, the bill reduces the statute of limitations for bringing NEPA cases under the Administrative Procedure Act from 6 years to 150 days, and limits legal standing for lawsuits to parties that raised substantive issues showing direct harm during review comment periods. This will cut down on baseless lawsuits—three quarters of court opinions end up affirming agency decisions—which add a risk premium to project costs. Meanwhile, courts would have less ability to pause projects while lawsuits resolve, which takes an average of about 3 years for mines.

BAAJA would also limit the ability for the very agencies conducting environmental reviews to tank projects for political reasons. The mining industry has been burned by this recently.

For instance, the NorthMet mine proposed in Minnesota received its Clean Water Act 404 permit from the Army Corps of Engineers in 2019. The Biden-era EPA recommended its revocation in 2022. To address this, BAAJA would limit the EPA’s timing for vetoing 404 permits to the period before they are issued to developers, preventing revocations after developers already proceeded with the project. The bill would also deter revocation of other permits by granting damages to developers based on the cost incurred by the disruption.

Both the Obama and Biden administrations canceled mining leases for the Twin Metals Minnesota project out of largely political motives. The Biden administration even canceled the project’s in-progress environmental review, disregarding the regulatory process and showing no interest in scientifically assessing the project’s environmental impact. This interference epitomizes how administrations can hijack the permitting process to make sentimental public land use decisions that policymakers ought to pursue through more appropriate channels. When it comes to mining, the only mission of NEPA review is to disclose mine project impacts. Interfering with a NEPA review should not be acceptable as a way to stop projects administratively that are otherwise allowed under law. BAAJA would promote this by providing developers with recourse, letting companies sue agencies if an administration has categorically disfavored a type of project.

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Mine waste disposal practices

BAAJA would also provide greater predictability for the mine site planning process by clarifying longstanding mine waste management rules.

Unavoidably, mines produce waste rock and mill tailings that developers must safely secure on site. In the United States, the General Mining Law allows developers to use federal land open to mining for both excavations and for disposal of mine waste. When first applying to use the land, developers must segment the footprint of their project into individual parcels and declare which activity–excavation or disposal–they intend to conduct on each segment.

Agency rulemakings since the Clinton administration have attempted to arbitrarily restrict the number of waste disposal parcels to match the number of excavation parcels. Such limits have little to no bearing on environmental factors, and the General Mining Law itself requires no such limitation. Courts in 2024 affirmed the interpretation that these rulemakings were unreasonable. BAAJA would codify this decision to prevent future abuses.

Famously, the Rosemont court case in 2022 upended the historic practice of storing waste on parcels declared for excavations, adhering strictly to each parcel’s declared activity.

The Rosemont decision now requires mining companies to have a precisely optimized mine plan from the outset–an unrealistic and impossible expectation–and commit to working within the original plan even if it proves inefficient. Alternatively, mine managers can restart the whole mining claim and permitting process from scratch.

BAAJA would solve this unworkable ruling by allowing developers to revise the declared activity. Contrary to activist claims, this does not allow projects to indiscriminately dump waste where law would not otherwise allow or cause any additional impact to federal lands. Developers could just as easily have declared the same parcel for waste disposal initially. BAAJA simply saves developers the tedious process of abandoning their site and reapplying for hundreds of individual parcels, or needlessly expanding their footprint into new parcels.

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BAAJA is an opportunity that Congress should seize

Congress should pass BAAJA while it has the chance—for the benefit of critical minerals, for clean energy, and for a healthy, prosperous industrial sector in general. From a critical minerals perspective, no provisions require any major amendments in order to secure the proposal’s goals of making it easier to build things in the U.S.

Members of Congress hesitant to support mineral production must recognize that BAAJA is not a shortcut for the mining industry. The bill does not erode any of the strict environmental standards that projects must follow. Rather, BAAJA simply reestablishes a functional oversight apparatus that does not arbitrarily punish industry with unpredictable, unscientific disruptions.

After the Biden administration banned mining in Minnesota in the middle of the Twin Metals environmental review, industry made it clear, “We’re ready to do the work, meet the standards, and deliver responsibly mined minerals.” Furthermore, industry has supported contributing funds to clean up legacy sites that they did not themselves abandon, sending a meaningful signal of interest in a good-faith permitting system.

Now is the time for Congress to meet this good faith in kind and pass BAAJA. U.S. critical mineral security depends on it.

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The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) is poised to make major infrastructure projects easier to build and bring down costs for everyday Americans. But its impact goes beyond clean energy construction; BAAJA’s changes to environmental statutes will also make forest management easier. Even more promising, BAAJA comes on the heels of the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA), a recurring legislative proposal under consideration this Congress.

There is growing scientific consensus that removing flammable fuels from forests and grasslands with thinning and prescribed fire projects can bring down the severity of wildfires. But federal efforts have barely made a dent in the 117 million acres backlog of public land facing high or very high risk of wildfire.

One obstacle preventing wildfire mitigation is litigation brought under environmental statutes like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). These lawsuits can delay projects for years, even when federal agencies ultimately prevail. Forest and land management projects account for the bulk of NEPA cases filed in U.S. District and Circuit Courts, even more than energy or infrastructure projects. BAAJA’s judicial review reforms will reduce litigation risk, giving more project certainty to fuels reduction and forest restoration efforts.

FOFA, however, provides necessary authorities tailored to forest management that BAAJA alone does not. FOFA is a permitting bill in its own right that provides regulatory streamlining for wildfire mitigation projects in high-risk firesheds and aims to reduce the project paralysis that comes with litigation. Its key provisions include repealing the Cottonwood decision; creating forest-specific permitting authorities through a fireshed framework and larger categorical exclusions; and increasing implementation capacity through agency strike teams, contracting reforms, and a proposed Wildfire Intelligence Center.

FOFA is further along in the normal legislative process than BAAJA. A version of FOFA passed the House last year. A bipartisan Senate version was then negotiated, passed out of committee, and now awaits a full Senate vote. While things could move quickly for BAAJA in the final weeks of the 119th Congress, FOFA remains essential as well. By passing both bills, Congress can remove barriers to wildfire mitigation at scale.

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BAAJA Goes Further, Especially on NEPA Litigation

The reforms in BAAJA would make the path from federal approval to implementation of projects faster and more predictable. BAAJA seeks to streamline reviews under NEPA for many types of federal projects and shortens the deadline for legal challenges under the statute to 150 days. For forest management projects specifically, FOFA includes a similar provision, albeit with a slightly different trigger than BAAJA for when the 150-day clock starts. This deadline is consistent with when most NEPA suits are filed following completion of an environmental review.

BAAJA also goes further on standing than FOFA, requiring that plaintiffs bringing claims under NEPA must have submitted a substantive comment, if a comment opportunity existed. A similar provision was left out of the Senate version of FOFA.

Once a lawsuit is underway, BAAJA again goes further than FOFA on allowed remedies for environmental review claims. Under BAAJA, a court that finds an error in an agency’s NEPA review on a forest project would generally send the decision back for correction without canceling the project’s approval or pausing project work. This means project work will largely be able to continue while litigation plays out. FOFA takes a different approach, directing courts to give significant weight to considerations like wildfire risk, ecosystem health, and the consequences of inaction or delay, but preserves courts’ discretion to issue orders to delay or stop forest projects. While FOFA allows remand without vacatur and encourages courts to allow projects to continue unimpeded, it doesn’t require it.

Lastly, BAAJA would change where NEPA disputes are heard in the first place. Rather than beginning in federal district court and potentially proceeding through an appeal, these challenges would go directly to the appropriate federal court of appeals. This could shorten litigation timelines by eliminating the initial district court proceeding.

Beyond NEPA, BAAJA would also shorten litigation windows and reform judicial review under the National Historic Preservation Act and Clean Water Act, while establishing a 150-day window for challenges to Endangered Species Act biological opinions. Together, these reforms would substantially reduce the time that federally approved projects remain vulnerable to legal challenges. They would provide greater certainty about when legal disputes must be filed and how they will be resolved, and ultimately constrain the extent to which litigation can derail project implementation.

Stronger limits on project-stopping remedies matter for protecting wildlife, habitats, and landscapes. As an example, the Smokey Project was a roughly 7,000-acre fuels-reduction effort in California’s Mendocino National Forest that spent years tied up in litigation. Although a federal court allowed the project approval to remain in place while the Forest Service corrected deficiencies in its environmental review, it temporarily prohibited certain tree-removal activities. The Ninth Circuit ultimately upheld the agency’s review, but before the project could resume, the 2020 August Complex Fire burned across the entire project area before the planned treatments were fully implemented. This case illustrates the environmental risks of allowing litigation to delay time-sensitive forest projects.

Together, BAAJA’s changes to plaintiff standing, shortened legal challenge deadlines, and stricter limits on remedies will reduce both litigation risk overall and the risk of environmentally beneficial forest projects being delayed or halted while litigation plays out.

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Considering Endangered Species

BAAJA proposes faster Endangered Species Act (ESA) reviews for projects including forest management. The Senate deal cuts the deadline for ESA consultations from 90 to 60 days. Working in tandem for forest management projects in particular, FOFA would establish interagency “strike teams” to speed these up, as well as other environmental reviews.

However, there is an outstanding legal hurdle specific to forests that isn’t addressed by BAAJA or by making ESA consultations on individual projects faster. FOFA would address the Ninth Circuit’s 2015 Cottonwood decision, which expanded the circumstances in which the Forest Service must reopen ESA consultation on existing forest management plans, including new critical habitat designations or new endangered species listings.

Since Cottonwood, the Forest Service has been forced to delay wildfire mitigation projects as forest management plans are reassessed time and time again. This has paradoxically increased delays to projects intended to protect habitats from severe wildfire. In response to assertions by many stakeholders that Cottonwood has not resulted in any direct conservation benefit for threatened and endangered species, FOFA would repeal Cottonwood and clarify that while individual projects will still be subject to ESA consultations, agencies do not need to reinitiate ESA consults on existing land-management plans over new endangered species considerations.

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Additional Reasons for Congress to Pass FOFA

FOFA has other proposals, absent from BAAJA, that would further address procedural delays for forest management projects. FOFA would establish a Wildfire Intelligence Center and instate a “fireshed management” framework to enable agencies to identify priority regions where proactive thinning, prescribed burns, and restoration projects can help reduce wildfire risk.

Within those identified firesheds, FOFA would expand categorical exclusions under NEPA to encompass larger sized projects. That means agencies won’t need to prepare a project-specific environmental assessment or environmental impact statement, while projects remain subject to the other applicable environmental laws. FOFA expands certain existing categorical exclusion acreage limits, generally from 3,000 to 10,000 acres, which are specifically designed to speed up emergency fireshed management activities like hazardous-fuel management, fuel breaks, and vegetation management. BAAJA would complement these authorities by allowing agencies to combine different categorical exclusions for projects involving multiple qualifying activities.

While BAAJA would change how federal projects are reviewed and challenged in court, FOFA provides additional authorities and coordination tools tailored to wildfire mitigation and forest restoration. Congress should pass FOFA regardless of what happens with BAAJA. If both bills are passed this winter, even better. FOFA would in many ways layer on top of BAAJA to enable federal agencies to spur needed forest management on millions of acres nationwide.

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The clean energy benefits of permitting reform to the United States over the coming decades far outweigh whatever remaining influence Donald Trump has on the country’s energy system in his last two years in office.

The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) offers key reforms on everything from permitting to power plant interconnection to national transmission planning to provisions that ensure data center projects pay a societally fair share into their regional grid infrastructure.

Yet as Congress prepares to vote on this pivotal federal legislation after the elections, negotiations continue to revolve around how the White House could intervene in energy projects over the next two years. Based on the latest reporting, Congressional Democrats are “still waiting for key assurances that the Trump administration would end its blockade against permits for wind farms and some other forms of clean energy.”

So it’s urgent for members and their staff to recognize that a more efficient environment for building vast clean energy infrastructure is not worth jeopardizing over questions of what a lame duck administration might or might not do.

Democrats on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee have claimed the Trump administration “is slow walking and stalling” 73 gigawatts (GW) of solar, 43 GW of batteries, and 46 GW of wind (Figure 1). In contrast, to shift the electricity sector fully to low-carbon electricity, modeling studies estimate that the United States would have to build between 900 and 1360 GW of additional solar capacity, 120-200 GW of battery storage, and 500-1680 GW of wind projects. The stalled projects amount to less than one-tenth the volume of solar and wind that the country would need to build over coming decades to shift the power grid to low-carbon generation—and much of this stalled capacity will still eventually move forward.

Figure 1: Relative to the scale of wind, solar, and battery capacity waiting in interconnection queues nationwide and the future capacity needed to potentially decarbonize the U.S. power grid, the volume of projects currently “slow-walked or stalled” by the Trump administration is small.

Meanwhile the now-unfolding phaseout of federal solar and wind tax credits has lowered forecasts of the solar, wind, and battery capacity that the United States might build over the 2025-2035 period. The energy sector requires a structurally different environment to meaningfully revitalize deployment—stakes that greatly overshadow what amounts to a relatively small “blockaded” slice of stalled solar and wind capacity.

Indeed, BAAJA also promises a game-changing regulatory environment for other promising low-carbon technologies including nuclear, carbon capture and storage, and especially geothermal power, which receives special attention in the bill text. At the same time, renewables and batteries are expected to grow healthily in every future scenario from the interconnection queue, which reflects presently commercial technologies, to Breakthrough’s own “Advancing Nuclear” modeling, which identifies pathways under which nuclear power might generate as much as half of US electricity by midcentury.

The BAAJA draft bill provides that catalytic environment by, among other measures, improving the efficiency of the regulatory and interconnection processes nationwide, while granting the industry firm certainty—within 9 months of passage—that the federal government will not be able to interfere with future clean energy projects that manage to secure their permits. Forfeiting the decades-long clean energy benefits of the permitting deal out of fear over what President Trump could do in his last two years in office would be a strategic mistake.

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The Whole Clean Energy Ball Game Is Post-Trump

Accommodating rising electricity demand without saddling households with high power bills, modernizing the nation’s aging transmission network, and deploying clean energy at increasing scales all amount to a national power infrastructure campaign that will span decades. That present and future of America’s energy system evolution will overwhelmingly be a clean technology story, with much of that potential straining to be unshackled from the constraints of opportunistic lawsuits and regulatory red tape.

Over the past three years, clean energy technologies accounted for nearly 93% of newly-built generation and storage capacity across the United States (Figure 2). The marginal new electricity that these newly-built plants will generate on the U.S. grid each year will likely be at least 80% low-carbon (Figure 3). Meanwhile, capacity waiting in the country’s interconnection queues—the region-by-region approval process for giving new energy projects the green light to connect to the grid—is at least 85% dominated by clean technologies (Figure 4). Any policies that make power plant construction easier will heavily favor new clean energy buildout.

Figure 2: Actual new electricity generating capacity added to the U.S. grid in 2024 and 2025, in gigawatts, alongside planned 2026 capacity additions as reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (February 2026). Wind, solar, and battery installations overwhelmingly dominate recent new construction.

Figure 3: Rough calculation of marginal annual U.S. electricity generation from capacity newly deployed in each stated year, based on Figure 2. This aggressively assumes a 60% capacity factor for gas, while using 2024 EIA capacity factors for wind and solar. Nuclear generation shows 2024 data for Vogtle Unit 4.

Figure 4: Nationwide and regional interconnection queue capacity over recent years, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Queued Up: 2026 Edition report. In 2025, clean energy technologies accounted for over 85% of total queue capacity.

The BAAJA text includes a valuable provision requiring regional grids to offer a new interconnection option based on a fixed fee, helping accelerate interconnection queues that are predominantly filled with solar, battery, and wind projects. Streamlined permitting for high-voltage transmission projects would help reduce costs and speed up interconnection by opening up new headroom for new projects to connect to the grid at lower cost.

Such provisions would benefit hundreds, and eventually even thousands, of gigawatts of new clean energy capacity. The national map of where many solar projects are awaiting interconnection today illustrates just how federal permitting reform could disproportionately benefit clean energy deployment. Prospective capacity is disproportionately weighted in Western states where significant swaths of land remain federally-managed, with energy projects subject to NEPA review (Figure 5). Red lines show a handful of proposed major interstate transmission lines, for which BAAJA would also facilitate environmental review processes, potentially encouraging a blossoming of new transmission proposals. Previous analysis of the Inflation Reduction Act had warned that over 80% of modeled emissions reductions by 2030 depended upon expansion of transmission capacity beyond its recent growth rate of 1% per year. Such metrics highlight the degree to which transmission limits are increasingly constraining domestic power generation additions.

As evidenced by actual construction and interconnection queues, the country’s energy markets are heavily selecting for clean energy additions. At the same time, the further scale of new construction required to forge a pathway to U.S. power sector decarbonization remains immense. Relative to this larger long-term picture, currently-stalled projects are too small in scale to warrant missing an opportunity to permanently and dramatically improve the national development environment for the whole renewable energy sector.

Figure 5: Nationwide map of solar capacity waiting in interconnection queues, by county, alongside major proposed high-voltage transmission projects, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Queued Up: 2026 Edition report. Counties with the highest volumes of prospective solar projects are concentrated in Western U.S. states with high shares of federal land.

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Expanding Clean Energy Frontiers

Whereas the permitting bill arguably offers strong net positives for wind and solar no matter what the White House commits regarding delayed projects, its provisions are unambiguously positive for other clean energy technologies. The United States already leads the world with 1.66 GW of new geothermal power purchase agreements, with next-generation technologies accounting for 61% of that pending capacity. Just days ago on September 24th, Fervo Energy achieved commercial power output at its first plant in Utah, marking a world-first for enhanced geothermal systems. The permitting bill would accelerate geothermal mapping, preliminary testing, and geothermal energy leasing on federal lands, likely lending further momentum to a clean energy technology already showing major promise. Faster scale-up of a successful U.S. commercial geothermal sector would, in turn, encourage spillover development of next-generation geothermal projects globally—an American gift to the energy transition.

Such prospects should remind policymakers that U.S. clean energy progress has the potential to accelerate decarbonization efforts worldwide. Breakthrough Institute modeling that incorporates nuclear technology cost improvements with built capacity finds a potential national market ranging between 185 and 469 GW of advanced nuclear by 2050. All domestic nuclear projects—including much of the associated supply chain such as fuel enrichment and manufacturing facilities—must undergo federal permitting and can thus benefit considerably from greater NEPA efficiency and permitting certainty.

Long duration storage technologies like iron-air batteries, another innovation that American technology developers are spearheading, would see their own gains from faster interconnection and from policies like the exemption of federal innovation grants from NEPA review. Faster transmission project development will meanwhile facilitate deployment of grid-enhancing technologies like advanced transmission cables, line-monitoring instruments, and advanced power flow controllers that more efficiently redirect electricity. All of these technologies possess their own export potential, conferring global benefits well beyond the United States.

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On the Right Side of History

In taking the measure of what a BAAJA political deal offers for energy transition efforts, policymakers would do well to contemplate the key timelines and scale confronting the U.S. energy system—over the next couple of years and over coming decades.

At present, a new solar or wind project in the United States must regularly wait three to four years after submitting an interconnection request before being able to execute an interconnection agreement. If sued under NEPA, an energy project might spend a median of three years before obtaining a court decision that, based on historical data, tends to uphold the reviewing agency’s original environmental analysis in around 3 out of every 4 cases. Individually, such timespans are already increasingly exceeding anything the Trump administration could inflict upon the same project over its remaining tenure.

And while old-fashioned environmental groups worry that a permitting deal could also benefit fossil energy infrastructure, the Trump presidency is likewise running out of time to develop fossil fuel projects. While the administration sold new offshore oil and gas leases earlier this year, for example, leaseholders are unlikely to even finish years-long mapping of oil and gas in those areas before Trump’s term ends. Long lead times for pipelines, offshore oil and gas exploration, or new coal mines make it increasingly unlikely that the administration can plan and permit new major ventures before leaving office, particularly as a carousel of priorities like trade, conflict in the Middle East, AI, and macroeconomic policy compete for attention. Nor is private sector development interest certain amid unprecedented geopolitical turmoil and oil and gas market volatility that could rapidly change course, leaving projects with a much-weakened market case.

To be clear, oil and gas do likely benefit from BAAJA too. Durable, national energy infrastructure permitting reform cannot work if it isn’t bipartisan, giving both parties and all industries some skin in the game. Nor is more oil and gas activity the unmitigated black-and-white emissions ill that many of BAAJA’s opponents insist, considering the messiness of the energy “mid-transition.” Conventional natural gas plants remain key to balancing and supporting rising renewable energy deployments, with their emissions falling as they operate less over time—helping manage variable generation until clean, firm alternatives or carbon capture become sufficiently cheap. In regions like New England, increased pipeline capacity can still displace dirtier marine-shipped gas and oil. And it would remain both geopolitically and environmentally favorable for Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and India to consume American LNG instead of coal or Russian gas. Indeed, Europe and East Asia account for over one-half and one-quarter of U.S. LNG exports, while currently buying 46% and 48% of all Russian LNG exports.

New Rhodium Group forecasting suggests that even under current U.S. policies, the country is on track to reduce national annual greenhouse gas emissions by 616 to 769 million metric tons of CO2 by 2030. Even accounting for U.S. oil and gas exports, arguments that BAAJA risks raising emissions are essentially insisting that U.S. permitting reforms would reverse decarbonization trends that are gaining momentum globally, somehow producing worse outcomes than Rhodium’s worst-case assumptions. In the face of increasing clean energy deployment and a permitting status quo that already grants gas pipelines and oil drilling advantages over transmission lines and geothermal projects, such claims simply are not quantitatively credible.

In the context of ongoing negotiations, the scaling trajectory for clean energy technologies in the U.S. means that reforms enacted by this Congress can produce benefits that compound across decades over an expanding volume of projects. Even at its most arbitrary, this administration can only exert power over the nearest corner of this growing wedge. Laying the legislative foundation now will give both federal professionals and the private sector the earliest opportunity to plan for such growth.

In contrast, a breakdown in negotiations would postpone crucial reforms, shifting these self-amplifying energy system payoffs further away from reach. There’s reason to worry the political stars might not align like this for many years, with cascading climate policy effects. The policymaking effort and political capital spent reconstructing a fresh permitting package would also prevent a future Congress from pursuing the next key national opportunity, be that in the energy sector or elsewhere.

The remaining immediate energy project anxieties standing between lawmakers and a successful permitting and transmission package are small potatoes. Now is the time for Congress to seed a future clean energy harvest that future generations will thank them for.

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On Monday, the Supreme Court heard a threshold question in Suncor Energy (U.S.A.) Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County: whether cities and counties can sue oil companies for climate damages under state law, or whether federal law bars those suits before they begin. Dozens of similar cases are pending in state courts, seeking billions from energy companies for harms caused by global climate change.

While the Suncor complaint itself is vague on how to determine the precise economic damages caused by the defendants, subsequent litigation has relied more and more on event attribution that apportions the increased likelihood of a natural disaster, and its proportional economic harms, to the effects of global warming and even to specific emitters.

In May of this year, the Breakthrough Institute filed an amicus brief in Suncor, petitioning the Court to reverse the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that localities and other private parties could sue emitters under state tort law.

Then in July, the National Academies of Sciences released a report summarizing the state of the climate impacts attribution literature. As the NAS report concludes, the attribution methods that were becoming common when Suncor was filed in 2018 are “no longer considered best practice” and nowhere near justiciable under current US law.

What the Court rules in Suncor, which we will not know for certain until next year, could have a range of ramifications for state and local climate liability cases, and for the legal validity of claims relying on climate attribution science.

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The trouble with climate attribution science

The NAS report provides a useful update on the state of climate impacts attribution science. As the authors note, attribution science is now mature enough that studies are published within days of an event. The report found, with high confidence, that heat extremes and large-scale heavy rainfall become more likely and more severe due to planetary warming. But while these extreme climatic events cause real-world damage, the report does not support converting that estimate into a monetary figure, since such a conversion cannot be made with the same level of confidence.

Among other scholars, the NAS authors credit the work of Breakthrough Institute senior fellow Patrick Brown for advancing a major correction to the attribution literature.

Earlier attribution studies took an event’s total losses and multiplied them by the fraction of its probability that warming was responsible for. As Brown’s 2023 paper argued, this method assumes that an extreme weather event would have caused zero damage in the absence of global warming, which is almost always false. The main driver of extreme weather events remains the natural variability of the Earth’s climate, while climate change can be said to—in some cases—influence those events on the margin. Likewise, the total damage of any weather event is largely a function of exposure and vulnerability: the amount of wealth and infrastructure in harm’s way, and how resilient (or not) it is to climatic events.

Extra heat, energy, and moisture associated with anthropogenic carbon emissions can be estimated to have influenced an extreme weather event relative to a counterfactual. These estimates are contested, but they certainly tell us little about the “impact x fraction of attributable risk” (IFAR), or the portion of the social cost of an extreme event that can be attributed to global warming.

As the NAS authors conclude, this IFAR method “likely biases the cost of extreme event impacts” and is “no longer considered best practice.”

Suncor does not involve claims relying on single-event attribution, but it could clear the way for cases that do. There are dozens of climate litigation cases in state and local courts, many of which share the same kind of error the Academies have just flagged.

An analysis of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law’s database on climate litigation shows five damages suits of this kind were filed between 2005 and 2016. 34 have been filed since 2017, eight in 2024 alone. About 30 are pending now. Most are on hold until the Supreme Court rules on Suncor. In each one, a city, county, state or tribe is suing oil and gas companies in state court.

Though climate liability and damages litigation is in its third decade, no court has resolved the practical complaints within these cases. American courts have never awarded climate damages or ruled on how to calculate them. The cases that have reached appellate courts have been decided on grounds of removal and preemption, and they have been resolved without anyone examining the methodologies. The Court’s ruling in Suncor v. Boulder will be no different. It will not decide whether a share of emissions is a good enough answer to who caused the harm. It will decide whether anyone gets to ask.

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The science is out, but the jury is in.

The first studies to put a dollar figure on an event used IFAR, multiplying the whole bill by the share of the event’s probability attributable to warming. The Academies show the limits of these methods by working through how they were applied after Hurricane Harvey, which hit the US Southeast in 2017. Harvey caused about $90 billion in damage. Published attribution studies had put the fraction of the storm’s rainfall risk attributable to warming at roughly three-quarters. A 2020 paper in Climatic Change multiplied the two and reported $67 billion in damages attributable to climate change.

That is the calculation the Academies now recognize as severely limited because of the counterfactual it assumes. Using IFAR treats events as absolute. Either it happens and does its full damage, or warming never occurs and the damage is zero. But a storm made marginally worse by warming is still just a storm. If warming turned a 249-millimeter rainfall into a 250-millimeter rainfall, the attributable damages are only those caused by the additional millimeter of rainfall, not the damage done by the whole storm. In Brown’s example, the standard method assigns such a storm’s full $10 billion in damages to warming, though the extra millimeter caused only $100 million of it.

The complaints substitute a share of emissions for a share of the damage, replicating the same issue. A company’s share of historical emissions tells you how much of the warming it caused. It tells you nothing about how much of a county’s drainage bill is due to warming, rather than subsidence, or development on a floodplain, or local population growth since a sea wall went up. Multiplying the bill by the emissions share assumes all of it is the result of climate change, and that damage rises linearly with tons of greenhouse gases emitted.

The Academies recommend a different approach: model how damage actually responds as intensity rises, instead of assuming it scales. Instead of multiplying by a change in probability, they multiply by a change in intensity—how much hotter it got, how much more rain fell. Notably, Brown argues the same objection applies. Treating a rise in intensity as if it produced a proportional rise in damage assumes a relationship nobody has established, and these methods have not been examined as closely as the ones they replaced.

Boulder County’s litigators do not provide a figure for what Suncor and Exxon owe; a jury would decide that if the case reaches trial. The complaint lists some costs from recent extreme weather events: more than $100 million in damage to county roads and bridges from the 2013 flood, $27 million in damage to city property, and $24.6 million to buy out flooded homes. The complaint argues that climate change caused by the defendants’ emissions worsened these disasters, so the defendants should pay their “share of the costs” without ever calculating that share.

13 of the 39 climate lawsuits we identified cite Richard Heede’s Carbon Majors data as the source for each company’s emissions. Heede produces these figures by adding up what each company sold and converting it into the emissions released when those fuels were burned. That figure indicates roughly how much warming a company’s products caused, not how much of the county’s bill warming caused after a severe storm.

A court that lets one of these cases go forward will eventually have to pick a number, and it has no good way to do it. The FAR method used to derive costs from emissions is no longer accepted by the leading scientific authorities. If they reach trial, a judge will decide whether an expert’s method for pricing the damage is reliable enough to put before a jury, and the jury will pick a number. Once one court accepts a method, lawyers in the next case will point to it.

The legal test for expert evidence asks whether a qualified expert’s method is reliable enough to put before a jury. But that test is built for settled fields, where the judge ratifies a consensus rather than choosing one. For Hurricane Harvey, the 2020 Climatic Change paper gave a best estimate of $67 billion in damages attributable to climate change, with a likely range of $30 to $72 billion. A regulator can set a figure in that range and revise it later. But while neither the NAS, Brown, nor any climate impacts research body has settled on how to calculate such a figure, a jury will return just one number.

Whatever number the first court picks will outlive the case that produced it. While science corrects itself through replication, litigation simply relies on precedent. Suncor v. Boulder has the potential to set a standard for the 30 more climate lawsuits waiting for decisions.

In other words, no method for calculating damages from emissions is settled. Courts that rely on one would effectively set a standard rather than apply it. 30 courts doing that separately are unlikely to reach the same answer, and companies will have to defend the same conduct under each one.

Open-ended retroactive liability raises the cost of capital for infrastructure financed over decades, and those costs reach consumers. Justice Carlos Samour, dissenting when the Colorado Supreme Court allowed Boulder’s case to proceed, called it a “patchwork of inconsistent local standards that will beget regulatory chaos.”

It appears that climate liability litigators are wise to the flaws in attribution science, having begun to move on from tort claims to claims over consumer protection. As our analysis of the Sabin database shows, consumer protection suits are mounting, while tort claims may have already peaked.

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Climate policy legislated, not litigated.

The NAS report provides a helpful corrective to the activist litigators who treat climate attribution as settled science and climate liability as settled law. Neither is the case. Attribution science does not and cannot provide justiciable claims of harm, let alone put a dollar amount on those harms. The mechanism of harm is simply too disintermediated and uncertain for such a calculation to take place.

To the extent law and policy impose penalties on emitters, those penalties need to be legislated, not litigated, and they need to be prospective, not retroactive. No robust scientific or legal principle can produce the monetary legal liability that climate litigants are demanding.

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Earlier this year, I argued that reforming Clean Water Act Section 401 was a reasonable trade for transmission reforms. That argument was incomplete. Section 401 reform is necessary to make transmission reform work. An unreformed Section 401 would leave a backdoor veto in place for hostile state governments to kill major transmission lines.

The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) creates a clear and credible path to building the infrastructure we need to decarbonize our electricity sector and stabilize prices. A crucial piece of the bill’s design is that it also sharply constrains Section 401 as a tool for obstructing projects.

Section 401 lets states grant, condition, or deny water-quality certification for projects requiring a federal approval that “may result in a discharge” into waters of the United States within state borders. States can also waive certification. If a state denies certification, the federal government can’t issue its approval. Despite a statutory one-year deadline, loopholes and disputes can stretch the process across years without resolution.

BAAJA would narrow state Section 401 certification to specified, longstanding water-quality requirements. It introduces a higher bar for states to justify denials and conditions. BAAJA also gives covered transmission and gas pipelines a separate rule focused on direct point-source discharges, eliminating a state’s ability to use Section 401 to regulate the entire project. BAAJA makes state denials and conditions harder to defend, but leaves a path for litigation to challenge certification decisions. The courthouse is strictly closed if a state waives certification.

Opponents of BAAJA’s Section 401 reforms will cite two primary objections. First, they’ll say Section 401 reform will let more polluting projects get built. Second, they’ll argue BAAJA’s reforms deny states the ability to police impacts on their waters. The first argument ignores the projects we need, and the second is legally and practically inaccurate. Both are totally insufficient to justify the status quo.

Despite some environmental groups’ resistance, BAAJA’s Section 401 reforms will ensure better environmental and climate outcomes. Section 401 reform is a necessary adjunct of transmission backstop siting authority. Reform will end the nightmarish and expensive permitting cycles afflicting hydropower dams. And it will introduce more certainty to permitting processes that chill pro-climate project construction.

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Grid decarbonization is vulnerable to an unreformed Section 401

Famously, New York state used Section 401 to veto the construction of pipelines that would have expanded gas supply to downstate New York and to pipeline systems serving New England. The choice to stop the gas pipelines is among the reasons New York and New England remain dependent on dirtier, more greenhouse gas-intensive, and more expensive oil for heat and electricity.

And though both Democratic- and Republican-led states have fought transmission lines, red states have led the charge against them. Arkansas used its state laws to object to the Clean Line project that would’ve brought wind power from Oklahoma across Arkansas and into TVA’s system near Memphis, Tennessee.

That was more than ten years ago. Fast forward to today, and Elon Musk’s Memphis data center is getting power from disembodied airplane engines that belch greenhouse gases and noxious fumes into surrounding neighborhoods. The Clean Line cancellation may not have directly caused Musk to rely on dirty energy. But more local grid capacity might have limited the need for dirtier stopgap measures.

Rightly or wrongly, red states perceive these lines as costly and without adequate in-state benefits. Perhaps worse, transmission is now coded as a Democratic camel’s nose to distribute renewable energy.

Until BAAJA, the federal government’s tools couldn’t overcome state siting barriers. With BAAJA, these big lines are much more likely to get built.

To understand the stakes, it’s important to remember how broad Section 401 is. A state obtains jurisdiction to veto an entire project if it entails a federally permitted activity that “may result in a discharge” into “waters of the United States” within state boundaries. Even a small qualifying discharge could be all the jurisdictional hook a state needs to veto an entire multi-state power line. And because Section 401’s one-year time limit doesn’t prevent certifications from stretching across years, projects are vulnerable to late-stage denial.

Power lines regularly impact water bodies. Some lines have major underwater components, like the CHPE line carrying hydropower from Quebec to New York. Others, like the Grain Belt Express, entail substantial wetland conversion. One of DOE’s proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors went straight through Lake Erie. Transmission construction also often entails temporary water body disturbances, e.g., from access roads. All such water impacts could confer a veto on a hostile state government.

To date, states have had a variety of tools to stop lines they don’t like. To address these, BAAJA’s transmission provisions significantly limit state governments’ ability to oppose transmission projects. But that only highlights why Section 401 reform must happen alongside BAAJA’s transmission reforms. Otherwise, we’ll overcome state siting barriers only to leave states a backdoor veto under the Clean Water Act. This is a palpable danger to the bill’s clean energy ambitions.

BAAJA confers special Section 401 relief on transmission lines for a reason. The bill will not solve all future conflicts over transmission planning and cost allocation. But it consolidates those conflicts in a more singular decision-making process, rather than leaving them vulnerable to water quality certification abuse.

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Reform Section 401 to unshackle hydropower dams

Section 401 also impacts America’s oldest source of reliable clean energy: hydropower. Many of America’s hydropower dams require periodic FERC relicensing, with terms ranging from 30 to 50 years. These processes are broken, in large part because of Section 401.

Licenses regularly take many years and can stretch into decades. Section 401 delays can leave dams operating under old licenses, postponing the environmental protections that relicensing is supposed to deliver. Huge relicensing expenses are passed on to ratepayers. And as dams age, we place at risk one of the grid’s most important bulwarks of reliability, especially important for helping restart after blackouts.

One of the reasons these problems persist is that Section 401 confers leverage on states to impose expensive and onerous conditions on dam developers that are tenuously related to water quality. The statutory one-year deadline has not served as an effective time limit, so the disputes drag on and on. Some dam developers, faced with extreme state-imposed Section 401 conditions, can be pushed to abandon generation.

The National Hydropower Association reports that certification conditions have included support for a feral pig task force, funding for fish in unrelated water bodies, the construction of hiking trails and parking, and so on. These conditions creep into Section 401 certifications because of over-broad statutory text and a capacious reading at the Supreme Court, which together opened the door to states to assess the ‘activity as a whole’ in its certification decisions.

Some groups are worried BAAJA’s reforms would undercut states’ leverage to shape projects. BAAJA indeed reduces that leverage, including by imposing stricter limits on the conditions states can impose. And under BAAJA, those conditions must be tied to water quality.

But BAAJA very clearly preserves states’ ability to impose conditions based on specific, longstanding water quality provisions in the Clean Water Act. It’s just that Section 401 will no longer function as an all-purpose veto and leverage point for whatever states can extract from dam managers, all while delaying improved dam function and ecological outcomes.

For many states, water quality issues are concrete and severe. State leverage over dam licensing has been essential to Maryland’s ability to protect the Susquehanna River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the people and industries that depend on them. BAAJA’s reforms would preserve Maryland’s capacity to impose reasonable water-quality-related conditions on the Conowingo Dam. Maryland could still regulate recreational uses of the water, sediment, temperature, water flow, and potential harms to aquatic life. But states would need to justify those conditions under BAAJA’s tighter evidentiary and substantive standards.

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Cooperative federalism can’t mean endless veto points

The Clean Water Act gives states a major cooperative role in protecting the environment within their borders. Because of the new constraints in the bill, state attorneys general and some environmental advocacy groups are likely to oppose BAAJA’s Section 401 reform. Advocates’ primary reason to leave Section 401 unreformed is to ensure states and plaintiffs can aggressively shape or even kill projects they don’t like.

One problem with this approach is there’s no way to know before the laws are written which specific projects are objectionable. Meanwhile, Section 401 embeds the ability to veto projects that climate advocates would often deem valuable and good, e.g., powerlines and dam upgrades. Under some circumstances, even pipelines can facilitate greenhouse gas emissions reductions, as is the case with the NESE pipeline in New York.

Also, Section 401 places the judgment as to what constitutes a “bad” project in the hands of state elected figures and third-party plaintiff organizations with idiosyncratic political incentives.

The macro problem with bad-projects discourse is that it’s ruinous for predictable infrastructure planning and investment. Among other disasters, our war of energy project attrition has crippled the wind industry, and prolonged the use of dirty, expensive heat and electricity for vulnerable people in New York and New England.

Section 401 has been a weapon of choice in this democratically corrosive exchange of fire. Let’s pass BAAJA and its Section 401 reforms, and put this cycle behind us.

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Catastrophic flooding after the collapse of a Himalayan glacier kills thousands. Record heat across western Europe results in excess mortality in the tens of thousands. Raging wildfires in France and Spain spark large scale evacuations. Wildfires in Canada’s boreal forests spread smoke and particulate air pollution across the eastern seaboard.

The common thread across these disparate geographies and events this summer is that all of them plausibly implicate climate change. Hotter and longer heat waves are arguably the most predictable and detectable consequences of a warming climate and western Europe has experienced more warming than any other heavily populated region of the world. Glacial collapse is a feature of a warming climate. Hotter and drier weather, all else equal, really does increase the likelihood of larger and more intense wildfires.

Between the apocalyptic claims of the climate movement and the “nothing to see here” insouciance of climate skeptics is the reality that climate change is happening, it is having real impacts on human societies, and those impacts, in particular places, are having real human and economic costs. Climate change is almost certainly not the greatest threat that human societies or the global economy face. It will not bring human extinction or societal collapse. But it will have real costs in real places and there is good reason to enact policies to reduce those costs, both by reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades and, most especially, improving societal resilience to climatic extremes, whether they are being intensified by anthropogenic warming or not.

At the same time, the continuing effort by the climate movement to center the issue in the western imagination, to integrate it into a left-wing unicause inclusive of everything from Palestine to degrowth and anti-capitalism to resistance to artificial intelligence, and to tar anyone who demurs about any of it as an industry shill and science denier has been politically disastrous and has deeply compromised efforts to accelerate global decarbonization and adaptation.

At a moment when the liberal international order is under siege, climate catastrophism and the green transition have been broadly rejected by western publics, and the limits of both the green political coalition and its technological and policy agenda have been exposed, a reset of the climate issue is long overdue.

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Beating the Heat

The proclivity to reduce complex social and environmental phenomena to a simple story about climate change has served the discursive purposes of the climate movement but has broadly misrepresented the nature of most climate related impacts and the solutions to them. Consider this summer’s heatwaves and resulting mortality across western Europe. Record heat across the continent resulted in excess mortality somewhere north of 30,000 people. That number will probably be revised upwards as more data comes in. But it is well below the 70,000 or more excess deaths that resulted from the 2003 heat wave, which did not last as long, featured much cooler nighttime lows (which drive heat mortality), and impacted a nominally younger population.

Heat waves across western Europe have gotten worse over the last several decades due to climate change. There were no comparable excess mortality events due to heat waves before the turn of this century. But Europe is already adapting, hence mortality associated with increasingly intense summer heat waves has been flat, and is probably falling since the turn of the century.

That is without the continent getting serious about air conditioning, which it could easily afford.

Consider that over the last twenty years, as heat waves have intensified, the EU has spent somewhere in the neighborhood of €2 trillion on climate and decarbonization policies. Over that period, those policies have perhaps avoided one-hundredth of a degree Celsius of warming.

By contrast, using ChatGPT, I calculate the cost of achieving US levels of air conditioning across the entire EU, meaning 90% residential penetration. Even accounting for higher costs due to the prevalence of older housing stock with a much higher share of small, multi-unit, apartments, the cost would run to somewhere around €500 billion, around one quarter of the EU’s climate and clean energy expenditures. At lower levels of penetration, targeting vulnerable populations and deprioritizing parts of Northern Europe that aren’t at particular risk from extreme heat events, the cost would probably run closer to €200 billion.

For a wealthy region, there is not necessarily a reason to choose between the two. But there are tradeoffs. Climate policies have substantially increased the cost of electricity across much of the continent, raising the cost of space cooling for vulnerable populations. Worse, EU and many national level climate policies also actively discourage the installation of air conditioning.

So while there is plenty of good reason to invest in both climate adaptation and mitigation, the determination by the climate movement and its allies to reduce the issue to a manichean struggle to save lives by reducing fossil fuel use has resulted in European policies that have over-emphasized often ineffectual emissions and clean energy policies in lieu of taking very straightforward and cost effective action to dramatically ameliorate, or even entirely eliminate, the single greatest climate impact that the region faces, one that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives since the year 2000.

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Fires and the Flood

Similar dynamics are at play with all of the other extreme climate events that have captured headlines this summer. Fire weather, intensified by anthropogenic warming, played a major role in the wildfires that raged around Madrid and Bordeaux. But as my colleague Emily Bass recently wrote, “[r]egional land-use histories across Europe illustrate how recent wildfire disasters emerged from specific ecologies, management decisions, and local policy precedent.”

Rural depopulation, afforestation, and fire suppression over the last 150 years created the conditions that allowed those fires to burn as widely and intensely as they did. Bordeaux sits at the edge of a vast, manmade forest. “The wetlands were drained and what was a heterogeneous open landscape was replaced with far more continuous forest cover,” Bass writes. “The land conversion created what is still one of Europe’s largest planted forests with more than one million hectares (2.5 million acres) made up primarily of maritime-pine grown for timber, pulp, and resin.”

Even were there a knob that was easily turned to limit global temperatures, reducing wildfire risk across Mediterranean Europe will require far more than that, including efforts to manage fuel loads on abandoned agricultural lands, changes to forestry practices and EU afforestation policies, and a major shift in fire management practices to emphasize fire prevention rather than suppression.

Huge fires burning across Canada’s remote boreal forests, by contrast, can’t be attributed to land use change or fire suppression. My former colleague Zeke Hausfather published a good analysis recently demonstrating that the historic scale of those fires was almost certainly attributable to climate change. The consequences were widespread. An estimated 150 million people experienced at least one day of unhealthy air quality (above 100AQI) in North America. Reliable early mortality estimates from exposure to PM2.5 and other particulate pollutants are not yet available from the 2026 Canadian fires but a similar episode in 2023 was estimated to have affected as many as 350 million people across North America and Europe and ultimately resulted in over 80,000 premature deaths.

Those 2023 fires were truly exceptional, about four times larger than the 2026 fires and combining with unfavorable winds to spread toxic air pollution not only across heavily populated parts of the eastern seaboard but much of western Europe. But it is also worth putting those 80,000 deaths due to inhalation of particulate pollution from Canadian wildfires in perspective. Indoor particulate air pollution, primarily due to the use of wood, dung, and other biomass for cooking fuel in poor countries, kills 2.8 million people annually, every year, no matter the climatic conditions.

So while bigger and more intense wildfires across boreal forests in Canada, Siberia, and other regions, and premature deaths due to exposure to smoke from those fires, are plausibly attributable to warming resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels, the far greater death toll due to inhalation of indoor air pollution is largely attributable to the absence of fossil fuels. Clean cooking fuels, primarily liquified petroleum gas (LPG), could eliminate virtually all of those deaths, at a cost of around $10 billion annually for five years according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

As with air conditioning, a rich world doesn’t actually have to choose between reducing emissions that will someday help to mitigate wildfires around the world and eliminating deadly indoor air pollution. The added emissions from LPG would be de minimis, as is the cost. But there is also no globally influential, multi-billion dollar movement to bring an end to indoor air pollution (the global environmental movement’s annual spending alone, ironically, would probably be sufficient) and too often, both government and private efforts, overly mindful of the climate impacts of fossil fuel combustion, focus their efforts on biogas and other non-fossil based clean cooking technologies that are costly and impractical.

Finally, then, the tragic floods that have killed thousands in Nepal. Within hours after the source of the flood, the collapse of a massive Himalayan glacier, became known, a range of experts in major media outlets immediately leapt to the conclusion, based on little knowledge of what had actually precipitated the collapse, that climate change was to blame. A multiday heat wave and long-term melting of glaciers and permafrost beneath them were obviously the cause. A few days later, several geomorphologists examining better images of the failure zone observed that the collapse had been caused by a clean, structural fracture in the bedrock underneath the glacier, at the very least complicating the role that climate change might have played in the disaster.

The observed structural failure doesn’t eliminate the possibility that climate change contributed to the disaster. But it does make any potential contribution far more uncertain than virtually all of the initial reporting and analysis suggested. Climate change was an easy villain to seize upon and a far more convenient explanation than grappling with the many non-climate related human factors—large populations moving into an area prone to catastrophic flooding, the huge buildout of hydropower in the steep river valleys below unstable high mountain slopes, and the lack of early warning systems to give people a shot at getting out of the way. There will be more analysis in the coming weeks, no doubt, about the role that permafrost and meltwater penetration might have had in the structural failure. But the damage, to some degree, has already been done, turning a tragedy that should instruct us about the human cost of poverty and the imperative of development into an environmental story about the excesses of rich world consumption and emissions.

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“Shifting Baselines” Aren’t the Problem

That anthropogenic warming driven by fossil fuel consumption has clearly played a significant role in all of these events excepting, perhaps, the floods in Nepal is reasonably clear. A world without global warming would still have had heat waves across Europe and wildfires in the vast northwoods of Canada. But they wouldn’t likely have been as intense and widespread.

The New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells, in recent years, has taken to calling the normalization of such events over time “the shifting baseline syndrome.” It is a slightly less evocative version of the older idea that a frog in a pot of water that is slowly warming won’t get out until it cooks to death.

The problem with both notions is that neither humans nor frogs actually behave this way. The claim that a frog will comfortably luxuriate in warming water until it dies is an urban myth. The notion of a shifting baseline syndrome, as Wallace-Wells uses it, is only slightly less dubious. There is some evidence in the conservation literature that people do normalize environmental change of various sorts. But there is no evidence that normalizing the changing climate has reduced awareness or concern.

Strong majorities of Americans believe that climate change is affecting extreme heat (64%), wildfires (63%), droughts (61%), flooding (58%), and hurricanes (58%). Nor is there much evidence that younger cohorts who never experienced the more moderate climate of the past are less likely to be concerned about these events or to believe that climate change is making them worse. To the contrary, younger cohorts are more likely to believe that climate change is happening, that it is human caused, that it is a serious problem, and that governments should do something about it.

Nor is it the case that a raging climate has been imposing ever greater costs upon society that the public has normalized or failed to notice. The real driver of normalization, rather, is adaptation. The climate may be hotter and more extreme than it was a few decades ago. But we have also become far more resilient to it. Despite the warming climate, climatic extremes are less deadly to most publics around the world, and most especially the American public, than ever before. As Alex Trembath demonstrated in The Argument last year, deaths attributable to extreme weather or climate related disasters in the United States have fallen precipitously.

Public alarm about climate change hasn’t changed much over the last 35 years, not due to a shifting baseline syndrome or organized science denial but because virtually every American has become far more resilient to climate impacts. Americans, young and old, will tell pollsters that they are concerned about these risks. But compared with their many more prosaic social and economic travails, most Americans simply don’t care that much or prioritize climate action that highly.

Given these facts, there was never good reason to think that the climate issue, as a discursive frame and organizing political imperative, could ever succeed in carrying the agenda it has been asked over the last generation to carry. Even in less geopolitically fraught times, national interest, the exploitation of domestic resource endowments, and domestic social and economic concerns were always going to take precedence over sweeping and sustained multilateral action to jointly cut global emissions.

Despite the sustained political effort to galvanize action, explicit climate policies over the last three decades have had little impact on emissions or warming. Improving energy productivity, sectoral shifts in the structure of advanced developed economies, slowing population growth, the coal to gas transition, and a range of other economic and technological factors mostly account for observed decarbonization globally and nationally. The key drivers of improved climate resilience—rising societal wealth, urbanization, infrastructure, and improving technology—have similarly proceeded independently of climate policy making.

The implications for climate policy-making and politics are significant. Absent something on the scale of a nuclear winter, there is no plausible anthropogenic climatic shift that could conceivably overwhelm the vast improvements in societal resilience to climatic extremes that long term modernization, urbanization, and industrialization have wrought. Nor, given the centrality of high levels of energy consumption to both economic growth and modern living standards, will the world rapidly abandon fossil fuels in the name of saving the climate.

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Climate Advocates Are Politics Takers

Two decades after Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth moved climate change to the center of the Democratic Party’s political and economic agenda, eight years after Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez arrived on the national political stage touting the Green New Deal, and five years after President Biden’s “whole of government” climate commitment, the world is no closer to either a climate catastrophe or a climate breakthrough than it was when Gore started making the rounds with his famous slide show.

For progressive environmentalists, climate change was the issue that would “change everything.” Existential fears of climate change would not only motivate the transformation of the global energy system but make possible a future that was more equitable, less consumptive, and less capitalist.

Yet the politics of climate action over the last generation has told a very different story. The climate issue has always been a politics taker, not a politics maker—the sort of issue that benefits or suffers from various shifts in political fortune but does not determine them. In good economic times, and when left of center political parties are in power, we can expect to see substantial public investment in clean technology and modest regulation of fossil fuels and other polluting activities. When times are tough and right of center parties are in control, the pendulum swings back.

Even so, climate progress has not fallen neatly along these political lines anyway. Consider that while much of the French Left, after a summer of heat and fire, has deepened its degrowth delusions, much of the French Right, including presidential front-runner Marine Le Pen, has rallied around nuclear energy and air conditioning subsidies. The latter efforts would plausibly reduce emissions and improve resilience to climate extremes in contrast to the former, which would almost certainly increase the vulnerability of the French public to heat waves without appreciably impacting the warming climate.

The story is similar in the United States. Shale gas and nuclear energy have traditionally been Republican, not Democratic energy priorities and account for much of America’s declining emissions and low carbon electricity respectively. The Trump administration’s pedal to the metal approach to the permitting and build out of liquified natural gas export facilities, meanwhile, is likely to place upward pressure on domestic natural gas prices while offering global importers like Japan and western Europe an alternative to increased coal use. Both developments will likely be decarbonizing. Even President Trump’s ill-conceived live war with Iran and trade war with almost everyone may unintentionally speed the global shift away from fossil fuels.

So as the pendulum begins to swing back toward Democratic control of Congress and, perhaps, the presidency, the best thing that pragmatic left of center policy-makers could do to reset the climate agenda is to recognize the politics-taking nature of the issue. Calls to bold climate action are unlikely to win Democrats many votes.

At best, centering the issue just distracts from concerns and priorities that are far more salient and favorable for Democrats. At worst, ill-conceived climate and energy policies can cost Democrats dearly, when they impose cost or inconvenience on the public. In either event, explicit climate policy-making has limited ability to bend the arc of the very robust long term and global macro-economic, demographic, and technological dynamics that will ultimately determine the pace of decarbonization and adaptation.

The good news, though, is that neither the philippics nor the agenda are necessary to make progress on the problem. Building resilience to a changing climate and limiting the amount of warming we will face in the future requires neither. Instead, traditional Democratic priorities—growing the economy, building infrastructure, improving public services, and developing and commercializing better technologies—hold the key to making progress.

These have long been staples of American liberalism and the Democratic Party. And all have been making us safer from the climate and decarbonizing the economy since long before anyone had ever heard of climate change. For the last twenty years, Democrats have imagined that the best way to achieve these objectives was by making them subsidiary to a sweeping climate agenda when the opposite has been the case. Climate resilience and mitigation are best pursued when they are subsidiary to an agenda that centers growth, technology, infrastructure, and state capacity.

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It would shock you to know that Costco, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health methodology, caused 120,687 cases of cancer mortality nationally every year, simply due to living in close proximity to their warehouses. Private colleges accounted for 83,782 more. Harvard itself is responsible for 5,842 cancer deaths. Living near a Major League Baseball field causes almost 19 times as many cancer deaths as living near a Major League Soccer pitch. These conclusions are obviously absurd, but they come from the exact same methodology that researchers at Harvard use to “prove” that nuclear power plants cause cancer in nearby communities.

Earlier this year, Adam Stein and I called out a series of Harvard studies showing that nuclear power plants were associated with higher rates of cancer incidence and cancer mortality as nonsense. Now that we’ve spent the last few months replicating the analysis and expanding it, we are able to show that no matter what landmark you use, their methodology will show an increased cancer risk and mortality. The studies simply do not prove anything about cancer incidence.

Let’s recap: In December 2025, researchers led by Yazan Alwadi at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health published a paper in Environmental Health that claimed to find that cancer incidence increased for people living closer to nuclear power plants in Massachusetts. In March, the same researchers published an expanded nationwide study claiming a similar result—this time looking at cancer mortality rates, rather than incidence—in Nature Communications. This was followed by a paper in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology that looked at associations of lung, breast, and colon cancers. Most recently, a study of total mortality, not just cancer, was published in the European journal Environmental Epidemiology.

The papers construct a “proximity score” based on distance from nuclear plants, up to 120 km in Massachusetts and 200 km in the national studies (about 75 and 125 miles). Every ZIP code or county inside those radii is treated as exposed, with closer locations receiving higher weights. If a ZIP code or county is within range of multiple sites, then the effect is cumulative. That means that a county that is in close proximity to one nuclear power plant could have a smaller score than another county that is further away from any one power plant but within range of many.

From this proximity score, the authors run regressions testing the outcome (cancer incidence, cancer mortality, or total mortality) on the proximity of the county and a collection of covariates. From this, they use the statistical coefficients, construct the Relative Risk for each county, age, and sex group, and compute the Attributable Fraction, from which they derive the number of attributed deaths from the nuclear power plant from 2000 to 2018. The authors state that their methodology and results provide the scientific basis and public health justification for an expanded research program.

But proximity is not exposure. We have methods of measuring exposure for nuclear power plant workers. While the radiation exposure of nuclear workers will always be greater than or equal to that received by the surrounding public, most of the closely monitored US nuclear workforce receive no measurable annual dose. When workers are exposed to radiation, the average dose received is only 2 percent of the occupational limit. If operators and workers who are on-site at nuclear power plants receive an annual dose between zero and one-fiftieth of the occupational limit, how is it possible that residents 5, 10, 25, 50, 120, or 200 kilometers away would receive any measurable dose from the same plant?

In talks, the authors hedge that their papers are merely ecological studies that show association, but never prove causality. Ecological studies are used to understand the relationship between outcome and exposure at a population level. This leads us to ask: what would the mechanism of exposure be? Well, according to the authors, we can just ignore the broader literature and physics, and instead make up exposure pathways and mechanisms. The use of an “ecological study” allows a lot of leeway in terms of explaining the broader world.

Over the last several months, we have replicated the results of these papers. The authors supplied us with eight lines of code and answered a couple of questions about the covariates, which did not replicate the results. Most of our replication was done through first principles combined with trial and error. Once we were reasonably close to the results of the first national study on cancer mortality, we took the methodology and applied it to numerous other landmarks.

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Ridiculous things you can “prove” caused cancer mortality

Everything causes cancer. Sounds cliché; maybe those California warning tags were right all along. But thanks to the methodology created by Alwadi et al., we can now prove that anything and everything causes cancer. Oh, sorry, that is too strong of an assertion. To use the authors’ words, since they have claimed their papers don’t prove causality, we can create an association between any physical landmark and cancer and, from that association, figure out how much cancer is attributable to that thing. Which is totally not the same as saying “that thing causes cancer.”

For instance, living near a private four-year university is associated with a 15-fold increase in cancer mortality when compared to living near a nuclear power plant.

Costco has the largest effect of all the locations we have tested. Over 2.2 million cancer deaths can be attributed to Costco; that’s more than 20% of all cancer deaths between 2000 and 2018. Hot dogs, bulk spices, and reasonably priced clothes come with a cost. But it goes to show that the authors’ choice of nuclear power plants wasn’t serious. Private 4-year colleges, including Harvard, are associated with the deaths of 1.59 million people, public 4-year colleges 626,212, and Superfund sites 895,258. Once you include the attributable deaths from state capitals at 132,389, we can account for 5.54 million cancer deaths, over one-half of all cancer deaths, between 2000 and 2018.

If we look at professional sports venues, the spread looks even more bizarre. Living near an NFL stadium was associated with 418,520 deaths, NBA arenas 471,794, MLB fields 944,769, NHL rinks 126,751, and MLS pitches 50,889. None of these sports have any kind of emissions that leave the playing field, except for the occasional home run or foul ball. The difference across the sports might be the kinds of concessions being sold. Baseball is right up there with Costco, selling copious amounts of hot dogs. Perhaps most surprising of all in the realm of professional sports is NASCAR, which accounted for 79,278 cancer deaths. One would expect the emissions, noise, smoking, and copious amounts of light beer to be more impactful than the emission-free ball and puck sports, but moving closer to a speedway might just save your life. With sports added to the mix, over 7.85 million cancer deaths can be attributed across a variety of landmarks; that’s 3/4s of all cancer deaths between 2000 and 2018.

The supposed 115,586 attributable deaths from nuclear power plants look like chump change to the real perpetrators. Harvard, when singled out, accounts for 111,003 deaths. That’s just one institution threatening every community within 200 km. Once again, we are left asking what the mechanism could be. Plus, our study only goes from 2000 to 2018; the school has been around since 1636, so the actual death toll could be much higher.

According to a webinar presentation given by Dr. Koutrakis, one of the coauthors, the supposed release of radioactive effluence from nuclear power plants comes from the occasional refueling of the reactors, when operators open the reactor core, and radioactive dust escapes from the fuel assemblies, past the containment vessel, through the outer shielding, and out into the world without ever being detected by the myriad number of dosimeters and radiological sensors throughout the facility. If we really are so terrible at measuring radionuclides (we are actually very good at it), then it is entirely plausible that Harvard could have unlawful access to special nuclear materials and the brains of Cambridge could have built a nuclear reactor under the squash courts without the proper licensure.

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What does the methodology actually show?

Cancer is a scourge across the human race. You have a ~40% chance of getting cancer sometime in your life. Which is why we should take cancer studies very seriously. If one is showing a surprising result, we want to get to the bottom of it. All kinds of claims can be made with statistics, but if we want to make good policies based on evidence, it is worth spending time making sure the evidence upholds its claims.

In our original rebuttal, we remarked that the studies can’t prove their assertions because they lacked proper control. It seems they also neglected to do any placebo testing. They chose nuclear power plants because a story could be built around that framework. When the researchers got positive results across our nation’s nuclear power plants, they didn’t check what their shiny new methodology would do using other landmarks. This is their pitfall: by taking the easy way out—getting results and making up a story around those results without double-checking their method—the authors could have no idea that what they were actually capturing was the methodology itself. In our replication and expansion, we have shown that choosing a number of sites and landmarks from capitals to warehouse stores can all yield a positive result without any reasonable pathway for American citizens to become exposed to radiation, develop cancer, and then die. The variations are random noise, all sloping in a positive direction. Even when using randomized outcomes, the methodology outputs positive results.

The papers by Alwadi et al. don’t show a novel mechanism by which nuclear power plants meaningfully contribute to cancer mortality; instead, they show an association of data points across 400 km-wide circles. 48,519 square miles, about the size of Mississippi, is a massive area to claim any kind of exposure. Most studies measuring distance-based exposures look at much smaller distances, such as under 10 km (an area of 113 square miles). The methodology is blind, which can be a feature in research areas needing to avoid bias, but in this case it is a bug; it doesn’t understand radiation exposure or dose. All it understands are its inputs: coordinates, proximity, covariates, and cancer deaths. From these, it can give you a number and even a positive result, but it cannot explain why that result exists. It is still an ecological study, one with a sophisticated statistical technique, but not a very useful one.

Sophisticated statistics can produce extremely precise nonsense when the design fails to identify the causal mechanism. Bad science like this is especially dangerous when applied to something culturally plausible that gets a positive result—it is easy to twist a result into a compelling narrative, especially if it confirms one’s biases. Nuclear power plants create energy through radiation, and radiation causes cancer; therefore, nuclear power plants cause cancer.

It is especially telling that no matter what landmark we applied to the methodology, we have yet to get a negative result. There is, in fact, a real chance that you simply cannot get a negative result from this method.

The attributable number of deaths from this methodology is probably zero, but the attributable number of bad papers is at least four.

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This essay was originally published in The Dispatch.

This month, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) formally proposed eliminating federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, the principal cause of global climate change, under the Clean Air Act. This comes after last year’s rescission of the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” the scientific basis for those regulations, and this summer’s partial repeal of specific regulatory rules advanced by the Biden Administration.

This is merely the latest escalation of a nearly 20-year fight, with the Obama and Biden administrations championing emissions regulations as a key tool in the climate policy toolbelt and successive Trump administrations warning that the rules would cause catastrophic spikes in domestic energy prices.

Neither is correct. Federal emissions regulations have been, and will remain, modest in real-world impact. Breaking out of this partisan cycle will require Democrats to admit that Clean Air Act regulations will not contribute meaningfully to decarbonization, while Republicans need to understand that some sort of federal regulations may be preferable to the mess of state-based rules and “climate liability” lawsuits that are likely to result from vacating EPA’s authority.

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A Regulatory Tug-of-War

The EPA gained the authority to regulate greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane through a narrowly decided Supreme Court case. During the second George W. Bush administration, 12 states, led by Massachusetts, petitioned the agency to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which had historically only covered “criteria pollutants” like sulfur and nitrogen oxides, ozone, and particulate matter. The EPA denied the petition, and the Supreme Court ultimately sided with the petitioners in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007. Since then, the EPA has had the authority to determine and execute regulations against any emissions the agency deemed to “endanger public health or welfare.”

This regulatory approach was never a particularly good idea. Greenhouse gases are fundamentally different from conventional pollution. Ozone, particulates, carbon monoxide, lead, and the other criteria pollutants are significantly more toxic than carbon dioxide and methane, which are emitted when fossil fuels are combusted but are also exhaled from animal life, including humans. Greenhouse gases are emitted in vastly larger volumes than most conventional pollutants—indeed, since the carbon in fossil fuels bonds with oxygen during combustion, the greenhouse emissions are actually more massive than the fuel burned to produce them. Carbon is not a trace compound of a trivial economic activity; it is the essential element of the fossil fuels that provide the vast bulk of energy to modern human societies. Mitigating carbon emissions is not as technically simple as methods used to address criteria pollutants, such as installing smokestack scrubbers to reduce the pollution contributing to acid rain or catalytic converters in personal vehicles to prevent smog.

And indeed, the Obama administration at one point endorsed a congressional effort to preempt these regulations. The American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey legislation, would have created a national cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, obviating the need for more traditional “command and control” regulations like those under the Clean Air Act. But after Waxman-Markey died in Congress, EPA regulations became the Obama White House’s preferred regulatory approach to climate change.

Since then, these regulations have accomplished little, if any, emissions mitigation. President Barack Obama’s EPA proposed the Clean Power Plan in 2015 (which the Supreme Court stayed in 2016), President Donald Trump’s EPA proposed a different, much more limited version of the rule in 2019 (which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated in 2021), and President Joe Biden’s EPA proposed separate emissions rules for power plants and tailpipes in 2023. Only one of these rules, Biden’s emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles, ever went into effect, and that rule was functionally redundant to the longstanding Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations overseen by the Department of Transportation. And of course Trump’s EPA has since repealed the whole of the Biden-era emissions regulation regime, and then some.

But even before these recent repeals, the judiciary spent much of the last decade narrowing the potential scope of federal emissions regulations. In the 2016 Clean Power Plan stay and in 2022’s West Virginia v. EPA ruling, the Supreme Court asserted that regulations on the electric power sector had to be enforced at the level of individual power plants, not the sector as a whole. This made it much harder to write regulations that would, for instance, compel a systemic shift from coal to gas or gas to zero-carbon sources like solar and nuclear. With that ruling in hand, the Biden administration wrote power plant regulations predicated on deeply unrealistic assumptions about carbon capture technology and hydrogen co-firing at natural gas plants. Had Trump not taken back power in 2024, it’s likely that Biden’s “Clean Power Plan 2.0” would have been further picked apart by courts over its technical shortcomings.

So it would be little exaggeration to say that, over 20 years, federal greenhouse emissions regulations have accomplished nothing in the real world.

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After carbon partisanship.

That uninspiring history has not led to the boring, staid policy discussion one might expect of regulations that have never really taken effect.

When EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to rescind the endangerment finding, climate scientist Michael Mann called the scientific statement “the primary tool that we have had to actually regulate carbon emissions and meet our obligations under various global agreements to address the climate crisis.” Meanwhile, Zeldin described his regulatory repeal as “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

For all the reasons articulated above, these repeals will have little impact on the trajectory of U.S. emissions, which have been steadily declining since 2007 for technological, not regulatory, reasons. But the Trump administration should tread carefully here, too. Just as a national cap-and-trade program would have preempted the Clean Air Act emissions rules, EPA’s authority arguably preempts state-level emissions regulations and other forms of emissions liability. As experts at the law firm Van Ness Feldman recently observed, the Trump administration’s proposals “may complicate that argument because EPA has proposed that it lacks authority.” These issues will get adjudicated at the highest level next month when the Supreme Court hears Suncor v. Boulder, which could have implications for dozens of similar climate lawsuits around the country today.

However the court rules in that case, it’s time to stop this partisan merry-go-round. Neither the climate nor the U.S. energy system benefit from another round of sweeping repeals and bespoke rulemakings, nor from the open season of U.S. corporate climate liability the courts are currently sustaining. As of 2022, Congress has codified the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse emissions as well as criteria pollutants. At least until Congress relitigates national emissions policy, those regulations should be consistent and modest, and they should preempt the mess of retroactive torts and consumer protection litigation underway in the U.S. court system right now.

Achieving this policy and political equilibrium will not be easy. Doing so would require that Democrats stop treating emissions regulations like they will yield meaningful progress on decarbonization, and that Republicans stop treating them like they’re the leading cause of the nation’s energy system problems. Unfortunately, it’s long been clear that both parties prefer shadowboxing over symbolic climate action to pragmatic, bipartisan policymaking.

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Bill McKibben, the doyen of the climate movement, was recently in the pages of The New Yorker with something of a prediction: with drought, a shrinking domestic herd, and rising input costs driving beef prices to record highs, we may be headed for a fundamental reshuffling of how we eat. Beef will no longer be king, McKibben tentatively suggests, and that’s a good thing. He writes, “In the same way that, around the world, internal-combustion cars are suddenly, and rapidly, giving way to electric vehicles, it’s possible that a combination of technological, economic, ecological, and cultural factors might be lining up to challenge the hold of beef.”

McKibben is right on two fronts. First, U.S. beef prices are at historic levels. Since February of 2020, the national average price for a pound of ground beef in U.S. cities has increased by 79% from $3.86 to $6.92. Second, beef has the largest emissions and land footprint per kilogram of any common food.

But, McKibben’s confidence here tracks with his broader techno-determinism, in which cheap solar panels guarantee the end of coal and natural gas, and cheap electric vehicles (EVs) mean the end of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. His claim that the shift away from beef will follow a similar pattern as the shift away from ICE vehicles elides how complex these shifts actually are, as well as the current state of both the automotive and meat industries. Beef actually reveals the complexity of these transitions most clearly. Beef consumption already peaked in the U.S. and was replaced by chicken due to a combination of cost, marketing, convenience, and health concerns. Even still, Americans eat more beef than most of the world on a per-capita basis, and global beef consumption continues to rise.

Energy and consumption transitions rarely look like one technology neatly replacing another. They are messy and partial, with incumbents sticking around far longer than advocates expect. We should be skeptical of McKibben’s tidy story.

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First, it’s a weird choice to compare ICE vehicles losing market share to EVs with beef consumption dynamics. While EVs represented 25% of all worldwide car sales last year, thanks to high adoption rates in places like China and Norway, ICE vehicles are still far more common. And new sales aren’t what matters for emissions. A car bought today will be driven for a decade or more, so even rapid sales growth will take years to make a real dent in the total fleet. As of 2025, only about 5% of cars in the world were EVs. In comparison, beef makes up just about 20% of meat consumption, and is far from the main source of protein in most countries in the world.

Second, it’s even weirder that McKibben tries to make the comparison in the U.S. context. EV adoption in the U.S. has been slower than in other rich countries, and, as of 2025, 98% of American cars are still powered by internal combustion.

To add insult to injury, the U.S. has already gone through a significant beef consumption transition like the one McKibben predicts. The U.S. hit peak beef about fifty years ago, in the mid-1970s, and per capita beef consumption has drifted down more or less steadily ever since. Chicken overtook beef as the country’s most-consumed meat in the early 1990s, ending a roughly 30-year period of beef reigning as America’s favorite meat—preceded by pork, which had been the most-consumed meat for as far back as USDA data goes. Today, beef is only about a quarter of the U.S. meat supply, while chicken is close to half.

And despite McKibben’s predictions—and record-breaking beef prices—demand for beef from U.S. consumers is relatively flat. USDA expects Americans to eat about 1% less beef in total this year than last, which would be just about 8% more than in 2019 when beef prices were around half of what they are today. The current dip in beef consumption, according to USDA, also has less to do with prices, and more to do with limited supply.

The last time beef prices spiked like this, in the early 1970s, it did not drive Americans away from beef either. As feed prices soared, so did beef prices. The Nixon administration responded by putting price ceilings on meat. The U.S. beef cow herd was, at the time, the largest in history—around 45 million beef cows. Ranchers responded to high feed costs and the price ceiling by liquidating their herds and flooding the market. This glut was largely responsible for the 1970s peak in U.S. beef consumption. But what actually brought beef prices down over the next two decades was a combination of health concerns about red meat, a newly efficient poultry industry that lowered costs, and effective marketing that made chicken more appealing to the American consumer.

There is no similar confluence of events today. In the 1980s, health messaging pushed people away from beef. Today, the loudest health movement, MAHA, is pushing people towards it. And there is no new cheap alternative to take market share. McKibben conflates plant-based products and cultivated products in the essay, incorrectly suggesting that these alternatives, in general, can be cheaper than livestock products. But alternative meats simply have not yet become cheap enough or good enough to meaningfully impact beef consumption. Cultivated meat—literal meat grown in lab or factory settings—has only had very limited sales restricted mainly to short-run specials at expensive restaurants. And while plant-based meat made waves in the years immediately after COVID when beef prices were already on the rise, sales have fallen dramatically in the last few years.

Even if meat alternatives can outcompete beef on price, there is little evidence yet to say that they will attract American consumers the same way that chicken did in the last quarter of the 20th century. In the Netherlands, where a 2024 comparison found the cheapest plant-based burgers to be 31% cheaper than beef, plant-based meat was only 4.1% of all pre-packaged meat sales that same year. And between 2023 and 2025, sales of plant-based meat in the Netherlands fell 16.4% by volume. These alternatives have simply not yet won over the hearts and minds of consumers, even in places that have less polarization around topics like climate change and environmentalism, and have not experienced a meat culture war.

McKibben does, rightly, suggest that instead of alternative meats replacing beef, it’s more likely that chicken and pork may just take even more market share from beef. This, he correctly argues, would still be a real benefit for the climate. And while chicken and pork prices have also risen dramatically since the pandemic, they have not increased as much as beef prices. Since February 2020, chicken prices have increased by 38% and pork by 24%, to $4.17/lb and $4.23/lb respectively. If there is a substitution effect away from beef, it will likely be to one of these incumbents.

Still, McKibben’s analysis runs even shorter on logic when considering the rest of the world. No matter the dynamics driving American beef eating, global beef consumption is likely to continue rising. Projections from OECD and FAO suggest that global beef consumption will grow by about 13 percent over the next decade, with much of that growth in meat demand coming from middle-income countries. As populations in these countries increase, get richer, and urbanize, the demand for meat is expected to grow. Beef, in particular, represents a symbol of wealth in many parts of the world, so as people have more money to spend on food, they are more likely to choose beef.

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Ultimately, whether high prices today can reduce beef consumption by some small percentage doesn’t really matter. The beef industry will not be made redundant overnight by high prices alone.

Instead of dreaming beef away, McKibben might instead wield his mighty pulpit to advocate for ways to actually reduce the emissions of the beef industry, limit its impact on wild landscapes, and protect local environments. While beef remains one of the most greenhouse gas-intensive foods, beef production has gotten far more carbon efficient over time. A recent paper in the Journal of Animal Science found that American beef is 29% less emissions intensive, and uses 25% less water, 29% less land, and 39% less fossil fuel resources per KG of carcass weight, in 2022 than it was in 1972. Lowering beef’s environmental and climate impacts is possible through wider adoption of existing high-tech tools, further innovation in production practices in already highly efficient beef-producing regions, and promotion of already-proven practices to close productivity gaps everywhere else.

The last time Americans ate meaningfully less beef, it wasn’t because steak got too expensive. It was because an alternative was both cheaper and more appealing. Hoping for beef’s decline likely won’t get the climate movement anywhere. To actually reduce beef’s environmental and climate impacts, we’d need both better, and cheaper, alternatives, and better beef.

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In May 2021, the United States International Trade Commission reported there were over 2,600 data centers across the nation, with at least one in every state. Five years later, the number is closer to 3,000, with at least 1,500 new data center projects being proposed. But the future for data centers is uncertain. What had once been treated as ordinary industrial infrastructure is now being recast as a threat that must be stopped.

Opponents argue that data centers threaten electricity supplies, water resources, local land use, and neighborhood character. Some of those concerns are concrete, while others are speculative. Many of the concerns, faces, and organizations are familiar, the usual suspects, from earlier fights over energy, housing, transportation, agriculture, and communications infrastructure. Their gospel, that of “Stop,” “Not here,” and “Degrowth,” hasn’t changed, no matter the context.

In communities around the country, local officials are considering or adopting pauses on new construction while they “study” the issue. More than 300 counties have passed these pauses, moratoria, or outright bans on new data centers: DeKalb County, Georgia, extended its moratorium while officials worked on land-use rules. Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, adopted an eighteen-month pause. In Charlotte, the city council approved a temporary pause on new data-center construction. In Virginia, the politics of data centers moved from zoning meetings into statewide debate, culminating in sweeping executive action by Governor Spanberger. While no statewide restriction has been signed into law, sixteen state legislatures have introduced bills banning or restricting new data center projects. The New York state legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act in June, but Governor Hochul has yet to sign it and instead imposed a moratorium through an executive order a month later.

New York’s moratorium, and the “pauses” being pushed around the country, are being presented as short-term fixes. As the logic goes, when the long-term impacts of data centers are known and potentially mitigated, then local governments will lift their stoppages and let the technology in. Never mind that the US already has thousands of data centers, and has had them long enough for their impacts to be measured. The reality is that these “short-term” pauses have a habit of becoming permanent.

Government leaders treat uncertainty as sufficient grounds for prohibition. Instead of identifying whether a proposed project violates property rights, creates a nuisance, evades ordinary law, or imposes outsized costs on the community, officials reject plans wholesale simply because the community—or political class—is not comfortable with the future the technology represents. But that is an impossible test. How can the public, politicians, or even regulators understand the full consequences of a new technology before allowing it to develop?

Paradoxically, a moratorium is supposed to give the public and policymakers the time needed to solve problems, but its implementation prevents people from actually solving the problems.

Even with all of their flaws, we should not create a ban on bans. Some issues are too costly not to try to rein in. Some infrastructure and activities can need a closer look and longer timelines. If a moratorium is deemed necessary, it should have a sunset date. Under a limited set of conditions, moratoria can be a useful and effective tool when what’s being banned can cause massive and irreversible harm. Moratoria should be a temporary and rarely used tool, not a hammer that treats every new innovation, idea, and piece of infrastructure as a nail.

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How Moratoria Become Outright Bans

Moratoria appeal to communities and politicians alike because they offer the appearance of responsible action without requiring a hard choice. When a technology is unfamiliar, disruptive, or poorly explained, a temporary pause promises time to study the issue, talk to residents, and exercise democratic control. The word “moratorium” sounds modest. Yet, temporary prohibitions have a way of becoming infrastructure policy. A pause gives opponents time to organize, incumbents time to adapt, and officials a way to avoid defending either approval or rejection. The moratorium becomes politically satisfying because it says, “We heard you, and we acted,” to opponents without requiring the government to show that intervention is actually necessary.

The pattern is familiar across American life. Nuclear power was constrained for decades by state-level restrictions often justified by unresolved concerns about waste, safety, or public confidence. Those concerns were not imagined. Safety is important, and institutions sometimes fail, but restrictions adopted as safeguards hardened into durable barriers, persisting long after the policy conversation changed. In several states, the effective rule became that new nuclear power could not proceed until the Department of Energy and Congress solved a different, national problem first. California, for instance, instituted a moratorium on new nuclear power plants, conditional on the federal government approving technology for the disposal of nuclear waste. California’s moratorium was enacted in 1976 and remains in effect.

This is because moratoria often work in spaces where one institution waits on another to move forward. A moratorium appears to be a local response to a local concern. In practice, it can make the ability to build anything contingent on resolving every adjacent dispute in advance. A community worried about data-center noise demands a pause until energy planning is resolved. A state worried about nuclear waste prevents new reactors until federal waste policy is settled. A city worried about congestion blocks housing construction until transportation improves, even though the absence of housing may worsen the very regional pressures it is meant to address. A pause based on conditionals that may never be met is effectively a standing veto. Even if the conditions were met, nothing stops the locality from finding another reason to block projects.

The political benefits of stopping a project and appeasing objectors are immediate, visible, and legible. Residents can see what did not get built, and opponents can claim victory. Officials can say they prevented harm. Yet, there’s a huge opportunity cost. The counterfactuals cannot be precisely measured, as they are often diffuse, delayed, and difficult to pin down, but they are real. The jobs not created, the tax base not expanded, the power not generated, the homes not built, the services not improved, or the innovations not discovered—these don’t show up at the next public meeting.

In this way, moratoria can be hijacked by incumbent groups that have an economic stake in limiting new technologies. Some supporters are sincere residents worried about real tradeoffs, while others are ideological opponents of the underlying technology. Others are incumbents who benefit when new competitors are kept out. Public choice economics helps us describe this dynamic: regulations that appear to serve the public interest can also preserve economic rents, block new entry, and protect firms that already cleared the gate before it closed.

Moratoria usually do not affect infrastructure already built, meaning incumbents often keep operating while potential competitors are held back. An already-approved data center may continue while future projects are paused. A utility with existing assets may benefit when new generation and transmission are delayed. A business that entered a market before restrictions tightened can suddenly find itself protected by the very rules justified as public safeguards. Once the moratorium is in place, the already existing businesses may even approve of the ban or push for it to be extended. Some companies, like taxi services, get out ahead of new technologies and try to ban them preemptively.

The classic “Bootleggers and Baptists” story captures this logic. Moral reformers supported prohibition because they believed alcohol was a social evil. Bootleggers knew their illicit activities would benefit from banning alcohol because the price of alcohol would rise. The motives differed: Baptists fueled by morality and bootleggers by greed, but the policy served both; together, bootleggers and Baptists joined forces and made a powerful coalition. The Baptists did not approve of the bootleggers; this is a case of some people having good intentions, while others are happy to take advantage, and everyone is left worse off.

Similar coalitions appear whenever new technologies threaten established arrangements. A restriction can be sold in the language of public protection while functioning as a barrier to competition. The same dynamic appears in fights over housing, energy, transportation, and communications. Incumbents rarely have to say they oppose competition. They can say they want more study, more local control, more certainty, more process, or more time. Sometimes those demands are reasonable, while often they are not. The political genius of the moratorium is that it allows a ban to disguise itself under the auspices of caution.

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Undermining State Capacity

A free and abundant society should be especially skeptical of prospective bans imposed before actual harms have been shown. Learning occurs through trial, deployment, failure, adaptation, competition, and use. Technologies improve because people are allowed to discover what works. Institutions learn because real experience reveals trade-offs that speculation cannot. State capacity is the ability of governments to “analyze complex policy issues, assess the costs and benefits of different policy options, and make informed decisions.” A robust process of trial, error, and more trial increases that capacity.

Moratoria short-circuit the institutional capacity process by presuming that a government can (and does) know enough in advance to decide whether society (or itself) should be allowed to learn. Doing so elevates preemptive restraint over experimentation, while making the political system the gatekeeper for technological possibility. Such a posture is especially damaging when the technology at issue is part of a broader system. Data centers are not just buildings filled with servers. They are part of the infrastructure of cloud computing, logistics, medical research, finance, communications, scientific modeling, and artificial intelligence. Nuclear plants are not merely industrial facilities. They are sources of firm, low-carbon electricity. Transmission lines are not merely visual intrusions. They are the connective tissue of a cleaner and more reliable grid. Housing is not only a neighborhood change. It is the precondition for affordability, mobility, and growth.

To govern these systems well, policymakers have to ask not only “what might go wrong if this is built?” but also “what goes wrong if it is not?” The second question is usually ignored, but it is no less important. A community that blocks new energy infrastructure may preserve a landscape while increasing dependence on dirtier or less reliable power elsewhere. A city that blocks housing may preserve neighborhood aesthetics while exporting displacement to poorer households and longer commutes. A state that blocks data centers and other industry may reduce local impacts while sending investment to places with fewer environmental rules, weaker labor standards, or more carbon-intensive electricity.

The counterfactual is hard to see in advance, which is why moratoria are so politically tempting. Bans allow officials to treat the visible project as the relevant object of governance while ignoring downstream consequences. But infrastructure policy is always comparative. We should not ask whether a project has impacts. Every project does. We should ask whether stopping it produces better outcomes than allowing people to build under ordinary rules of property, contract, liability, and local nuisance law.

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When Can Moratoria Work?

But there is such a thing as a “good” or “justified” moratorium. If something is reversible, then of course we should try things and learn, but if we are risking irreversible damage, then prudence is actually warranted. The pause should address a specific, plausible harm, have a defined scope and expiration date, identify the evidence or institutional capacity needed for reopening, assign responsibility for producing that evidence, and include a presumption that the activity resumes unless the government affirmatively demonstrates a continuing need for restriction.

Moratoria should always have an expiration date and must be actively renewed to prevent them from hardening into bans based on past concerns that are no longer relevant. A moratorium without a deadline, a defined harm, reasonable criteria for lifting it, or an accounting of opportunity costs is simply avoidance.

Some bans or restrictions, like those for gain-of-function research, special nuclear materials, and dangerous weapons, can make sense. The harm caused by allowing free and unlimited access or pursuit far outweighs the benefits. It is reasonable for the US to impose restrictions on disease research that could be weaponized. The same goes for banning unlicensed individuals from accessing nuclear materials. A rogue scientist or an accidental outbreak of a deadly virus could harm thousands to millions of people. Unfettered access to certain nuclear materials could make it easier for paramilitary and terrorist organizations to create low-grade nuclear weapons. Even these moratoria should have to be renewed every so often. The bans may never be lifted, but we should not prevent ourselves the opportunity to lift them.

Governments should not assume that every new technology requires a bespoke regulatory regime before it can proceed. In most cases, the starting point should be ordinary legality: if a project complies with existing rules, respects property rights, bears its own costs, and does not impose clear harms on others, it should be allowed to move forward. Where existing rules are genuinely inadequate, the response should be narrow and retrospective wherever possible: address the specific harm, enforce neutral standards, and make costs transparent. Use liability where injuries can be identified or update zoning where the category truly does not fit, but do not treat the mere arrival of a new technology as a reason to suspend permissionless activity.

The future is uncertain and messy. That is not a reason to hogtie innovation in advance; uncertainty provides reason to preserve the freedom to experiment, build, compete, and learn. Societies do not become capable of progress by requiring innovators and builders to obtain a blessing before acting. They progress by allowing new things to emerge, then addressing real harms as evidence appears.

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The national debt has topped $40 trillion.

In response, the bond market is demanding higher interest from the U.S. Treasury. On Wednesday, looking at the bond market and worrisome signs of inflation, the Federal Open Market Committee’s 12 members unanimously supported a quarter-point hike in interest rates, the first since 2023. But it won’t be the last. Many economists fear that we are facing a sustained period of higher interest rates.

Nuclear energy was not the cause of any of this, but it could be the victim. Higher rates will hit a capital-intensive industry, and raise its high costs yet higher. This is bad news, but there is a Breakthrough Institute proposal that could ameliorate the problem, called Accelerating Commercialization Through Incentivizing On-time Nuclear, or ACTION.

ACTION addresses interest costs in two ways. It lowers interest rates for projects that hit certain milestones, which is intended to shorten the period for which money is borrowed before operations, and lower the rate at which it is borrowed. As the underlying interest rates rise, ACTION becomes ever more important.

Nuclear reactor construction costs are highly sensitive to interest rates; in fact, the cost of money ranks in importance with the cost of concrete, steel or skilled labor. If it is high enough, the cost of money could be more important than those ingredients. This is the industrial version of the lesson that high schools try to teach about credit cards in financial literacy classes: interest on debt compounds and can get out of hand. And rising rates are making front-page news as they shake up the bond markets.

A recent study by the New York State Public Service Commission and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority on what policies would be needed to achieve Governor Kathy Hochul’s goal of building new nuclear capacity concluded that interest costs were second, behind only tax credits from Washington. But Dr. Adam Stein, director of Breakthrough’s Nuclear Innovation program, pointed out, “if interest rates go high enough, that order could be flipped. In many cases interest is already a larger portion of total project cost than capital is.”

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All major private-sector projects carry the expense of borrowing money during the construction period, but nuclear plants, because they take longer to build, feel this most strongly. Reactor manufacturers talk about “overnight cost,” meaning how much a builder would have to pay for materials, labor, specialized equipment, engineering work, and other expenses, but this isn’t the way a developer sees the problem, because overnight cost omits the cost of borrowing money over the period when those costs were incurred until the day the plant starts producing.

And those can be substantial. Georgia Power said it spent $3.53 billion in interest on its portion of Vogtle 3 & 4, and it owned only 46 percent of the project, meaning that interest costs approached 20 percent of its expense. And it had an advantage: The Department of Energy offered a loan guarantee, essentially co-signing on the project, which allowed the utility to borrow money at a lower rate.

Georgia Power is hardly the first. In the 1980s, near the end of the Long Island Lighting Company’s struggle to finish its Shoreham nuclear plant and get it licensed, flaws were discovered in the emergency diesel generators, setting back the project by weeks. Interest on the $4 billion already spent (some of it on interest) was about $1 million a day.

A company with a lower credit rating than an old-line utility like Long Island Lighting or Georgia Power—for example, a start-up company developing data centers with reactors in tandem—would face even higher rates.

Whatever the relative position of the most credit-worthy companies and the riskier ones, all will probably be paying higher interest rates in the coming years. The Federal Reserve and other central banks are facing stubborn inflation, brought on by higher fossil fuel prices and other factors, and even before that happens, investors are demanding higher rates of return when they buy Treasury bills.

The Treasury rates on 30-year bonds bottomed out in 2020 at less than 1.7 percent but are now at 5.23 percent and expected to rise. And that is only the rate that Uncle Sam pays; interest rates on loans that the federal government makes have been between 0.375 percent and 2 percent above that.

Potential developers already have their eye on interest rates. High interest rates change the competitive rankings among power generation technologies and give an advantage to power plants that are cheap to build but have a higher fuel expense. That means hand-to-mouth plants that consume vast amounts of fossil fuels.

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As interest rates rise in the general economy, the ACTION proposal would become even more helpful.

Savings would increase with project size. At current interest rates, the approach could save $160 million in project finance costs on a $2 billion project and $780 million on a $10 billion project. And at a relatively low cost to the federal government, such a program could support more than 25 projects simultaneously.

That is an important point because over years of stagnation, the industry has lost its supply chain for hardware and skilled workers. To lower costs, the industry will need a stream of projects.

The milestones would be independent of particular technology, because they refer to steps that each project must take, regardless of reactor type.

For example, there are two main routes to licensing: a construction permit, or a Combined Operating License, known as a COL. A construction permit means that the project has an approved site (which may have been approved years earlier, and “banked” for use later, as a way to speed up the time between decision to build and project completion) and has enough of a design completed to provide assurance that a safe plant can be built. A COL means both an approved site, and a pre-approved design, so that if the plant is built according to the plans, an operating license will be issued promptly. Notably, the Westinghouse AP1000 has an approved design, and the Trump administration is trying to arrange a loan program for key components for ten of them.

Both the construction permit and the COL are easily identified starting lines.

A second milestone, already in use to judge how long construction took, is when workers begin pouring nuclear-grade concrete. That represents a more significant step than digging a foundation, putting in pipes for cooling water, and other generic construction activities.

Towards the end of construction, technicians load fuel and begin “power ascension,” slowly raising power levels in the core. The initial criticality, the first time the core sustains a chain reaction, is another milestone, although it may be at a power level that is a tiny fraction of operating capacity.

And the fourth, easily understood, is synchronizing the generator to the grid, and putting out power. The proposal is for the federal government to lower the developer’s interest expense by 0.25 percent at each milestone, for a total reduction of 1 percent.

Setting milestones for privately developed projects is not a new concept for the federal government; NASA did it for Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, for example. That was a program begun in 2006 to encourage private companies to build spacecraft that could carry cargo to the International Space Station. Rather than award a cost-plus contract, the space agency offered payments to three companies as they reached progressively more advanced milestones. One failed and two succeeded, and NASA’s conclusion was that the program had developed the capacity that the space agency needed, at lower costs.

Building a nuclear reactor is a different kind of project than the development of a supply chain for rockets that can carry cargo to orbit. But in some ways, milestone-based incentives are better suited to projects like nuclear plants, because such incentives will help mobilize private capital.

There is a synergistic effect to lowering interest costs for nuclear projects: as it makes projects more feasible, it helps developers attract commercial financing.

The years of payments on a construction loan even before construction has been completed are not the only reason that nuclear plants are sensitive to interest rates. Energy demand overall is highly sensitive to economic growth, which slows or reverses when interest rates are high. During the Great Recession of 2008-2009, total energy consumption fell by 5 percent. Energy consumption also fell during recessions in the early 1980s and in 2001. But blunting a nuclear buildout doesn’t require a drop in electricity consumption; simply slowing down or stopping demand growth would accomplish that. In periods of low growth or no growth in electricity demand, owners of older reactors are likely to retire them. The opposite is true today: owners are investing in raising legacy reactors’ output and getting license extensions to let them run for up to 80 years.

High interest rates present various sectors of the economy with a variety of challenges, but the largest will be felt by capital-intensive sectors, including nuclear. Anything that mitigates the high cost of debt should be high on the list of policy options aimed at assisting new nuclear construction.

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A recent Mother Jones’ investigation ran under the headline “We Are Bombarding America’s Forests With Roundup.” The authors claim that the use of herbicides as part of post-fire vegetation control efforts are a malicious plot turning national forests into tree farms and dead zones.

For many, this story might invoke images of aerial clouds of glyphosate blanketing forests, reminiscent of propeller planes leaving trails of DDT in their wake. And yet, today, glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and other herbicides, is used sparingly on National Forest System land. While it can be sprayed aerially, the U.S Forest Service most often applies glyphosate via targeted methods. Crews use backpack sprayers or ground equipment to spot-treat specific vegetation to support post-fire regeneration of trees for timber production, manage invasive species, and reduce hazardous fuels for fire management.

In some settings, manual removal or other non-chemical methods can produce better ecological outcomes; but, in others, herbicides, like glyphosate, represent the best and most cost-effective way to support forest management. And despite the alarmism from Mother Jones, glyphosate use in California and the rest of our National Forests is vanishingly small, has minimal environmental impacts relative to alternatives, and is crucial to conducting the forest management projects needed to mitigate wildfire risk and protect ecosystems from invasive species.

Glyphosate use, whether on farmland or in national forests, isn’t wholly without ecological effects. A 2024 study found glyphosate-based forest vegetation management can alter nutrient patterns in understory plants. However, the existence of ecological effects is not itself a good argument against use. Whether vegetation control is done with chainsaws or herbicides, active forest management will have ecological impacts. So do unchecked invasive species and catastrophic wildfires.

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Annual Forest Glyphosate Use, In Context

Public reporting on herbicide use, much less specifically glyphosate use, in the U.S. has been inconsistent over the years and today is totally unavailable. As recently as this June, Democrats in Congress asked the Forest Service to publicly report its current and planned use of glyphosate-based herbicides on federal forestlands. Even so, it’s safe to say glyphosate is used on a tiny fraction of America’s public lands.

In 1994, the United States Forest Service said less than 0.1% of National Forest land was treated with chemical herbicides in a typical year. Over a five year period from 2000-2004, the Forest Service applied a total of 173,000 pounds of glyphosate on around 84,000 acres, or about 2 pounds per acre. Across the Forest Service’s roughly 193 million acres, that works out to 0.009% of National Forest System land treated with glyphosate each year on average.

The Forest Service hasn’t regularly published national data on pesticide use broken down by active ingredients on public lands since 2004, making year over year trends on glyphosate use hard to track. Public lands agencies besides the Forest Service reported herbicides were used specifically for invasive plant management on just over 2.5 million acres from 2007 to 2013. This represents 0.5% of the nearly 500 million acres of public lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. National Park Service, and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Glyphosate was far and away the leading active ingredient both in terms of amount applied and area treated.

Still, these national glyphosate-use statistics are pretty old. So, understandably, Mother Jones attempted to provide a more recent accounting, reporting 266,000 pounds of glyphosate was used in California’s forests in 2023. This has led to renewed calls to oppose the Forest Service’s use of herbicides.

The problem? The vast majority of glyphosate use in forest contexts in California happens on private forestland, not in National Forests. This caveat is important because while states can impose restrictions on pesticide applications on private land or go so far as to restrict use of a specific pesticide altogether (though none have done this for glyphosate), the Forest Service has no regulatory oversight over private landowners or commercial timber practices on private property.

Using the same publicly available data as the Mother Jones analysis, we found that about three-quarters of California’s reported forest glyphosate use by weight occurred on private land. Only about 5% could be definitively assigned to National Forest land, leaving roughly 20% of reported use occurring in areas where there was a mix of private and public ownership. To better estimate use in these mixed-ownership areas, we conducted an additional spatial analysis and found that roughly 18% of California’s reported forest glyphosate use by weight occurred on National Forest land.

That works out to about 47,000 of the 266,000 pounds reported statewide. But even that figure can make glyphosate use on public lands sound more extensive than it is. Our analysis estimates roughly 16,750 glyphosate acre-treatments on National Forest land that year. Compared with approximately 20 million acres of National Forest land in California, that is equivalent to less than 0.1% of the land base. And because the state reports cumulative acre-treatments rather than unique acres—meaning the same acre can be counted more than once if it is treated repeatedly—the actual share of National Forest land treated could be smaller still.

Glyphosate can be applied at higher rates per acre in forestry than in agricultural settings, in part because forest vegetation management can involve controlling shrubs, hardwoods, and other woody plants. Application rate measures how much active herbicide is applied to an acre in a single treatment. Historical Forest Service data from 1998-2016 show that glyphosate used for site preparation or conifer release in the Pacific region averaged 2.4 lbs of acid equivalent per acre per application in the Pacific region, higher than typical application rates for many agricultural uses. But forestry herbicide applications vary considerably by purpose. Invasive-plant management on public wildlands often involves targeted treatments using a range of herbicides at much lower average quantities per treated acre relative to crop-production systems.

A higher application rate does not necessarily mean more intensive herbicide use over time. Especially when used for site preparation before planting, herbicides are typically applied once or twice over a rotation, which can be between 30 and 80 years depending on the species. By contrast, for some crops, multiple agricultural applications are used within a single year.

Application rates also differ substantially among herbicides, making pounds alone a poor measure for comparing how extensively different chemicals are used, or their cumulative effects. For example, in California forests, imazapyr looks much smaller than glyphosate in pounds but far closer to it in treatment acreage. Glyphosate accounts for about 2.84 million reported pounds and 1.32 million acre-treatments from 2000 through 2023, compared with imazapyr at about 498,000 pounds but 972,000 acre-treatments. Glyphosate use was nearly six times greater by weight, but only about 1.4 times greater by cumulative treatment acreage.

All of this context changes the picture considerably. California’s 266,000-pound figure is not evidence that state and federal land managers are broadly spraying glyphosate across public forests. Most reported forestry use occurs on private land that’s already engaged in commercial timber production. And while glyphosate is one of the widest used herbicides by weight, it is much less dominant by treated acreage.

Whatever the legitimate debates over where and when herbicides should be used, the scale of public-land use is far smaller than the rhetoric of forests being “bombarded” with glyphosate would suggest.

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The Uncomfortable Pros of Glyphosate Use in Forests

Glyphosate binds strongly to soil and does not substantially bioaccumulate, with a 30 day average half-life in temperate soils and water. In addition to low soil persistence, glyphosate has broad-spectrum efficacy, low volatility, and poses lower risks to non-target organisms than many alternative pesticides. This makes glyphosate a favorable product that forest managers rely on for a range of public and environmental benefits including forest regeneration, invasive-species control, and fuels management for wildfire risk reduction.

Aiding forest regeneration. In the Pacific Northwest, glyphosate is used against native shrubs, as well as grasses and broadleaved weeds when preparing timber sites for replanting. Controlling these species down to the roots can allow planted trees to reestablish and thrive. Hand-weeding or mechanical removal can do this work, but it’s far more expensive, time-consuming, and labor intensive.

A 25-year California research program led by the Forest Service found herbicide treatment was the most effective vegetation-management method studied on conifer plantations, domestic grazing was ineffective under the conditions studied, and large-machines worked only when followed by herbicide. Further illustrating what a ban would look like, litigation in the 1980s led a federal district court to temporarily prohibit herbicide use on National Forest lands in Oregon and Washington that was in effect until 1989. As a result, the Forest Service’s J. Herbert Stone Nursery in Oregon reported hand-weeding costs after the ban reaching as much as five times prior total weed-management costs.

Critics argue that using herbicides to favor planted conifers can suppress the more diverse mix of native trees, shrubs, and other vegetation that would otherwise regenerate after a fire. Those tradeoffs are real. But, planted forest regeneration and native ecosystem restoration are different objectives entirely. According to the latest National Forest System inventory, only about 4% of NFS forest land is planted rather than naturally regenerated, roughly 6 million acres nationally. Management objectives—whether reestablishing planted trees destined for timber production, restoring a diverse native understory, or controlling an invasive species—matter when evaluating useful tools.

Controlling invasive species. Allowing invasive species to persist can lead to ecological consequences like the decline of threatened and endangered species, reduced plant diversity, degraded wildlife habitat, degraded water quality, and decreased opportunities for recreation on public lands. For example, since its North American introduction in the late 18th century, Tree-of-Heaven threatens native ecosystems across eastern U.S. National Forests by secreting root toxins and acting as the primary host for the destructive spotted lanternfly—an invasive insect that devastates forest understories, agricultural crops, and timber species. Because simple cutting causes the invasive tree to aggressively resprout, land managers across Wayne, Allegheny, George Washington and Jefferson National Forests have used targeted “hack-and-squirt” applications to deliver glyphosate directly into the tree’s sapwood, killing the root network while protecting surrounding plants.

Invasive species can be controlled in other ways, including mechanical removal, hand weeding, prescribed fire, grazing, and biological controls, and herbicides are not necessarily the best option in every setting. A 2023 Forest Service-led systematic review of 165 studies found that invasive-plant treatments, including herbicides, could produce positive, negative, or neutral effects on native vegetation depending on the species, treatment, intensity, and duration. As one example, both glyphosate treatment and hand-pulling reduced English ivy, but plots where ivy was pulled by hand subsequently had more native seedlings and greater plant diversity than sprayed plots. The researchers suggested that soil disturbance from pulling may have helped the planted native seeds establish.

But that result does not generalize to every invasive plant or landscape. Manual removal can disturb soil, facilitate reinvasion, and become prohibitively expensive at larger scales. Many environmental reviews conducted by the Forest Service evaluate “no-chemical” alternatives. These reviews typically find that relying exclusively on hand-pulling or mechanical clearing costs significantly more per acre, limits the total acreage that can be treated under a fixed budget, and requires years of repeated labor compared to chemical treatments, all especially true for managing root-sprouting perennials. Other considerations like presence of desirable native vegetation, proximity to waterways, and chemical resistance can determine whether glyphosate is an appropriate tool amongst a broad slate of options for integrated vegetation management in forests.

Reducing wildfire risks. While not a leading hazardous fuel treatment strategy in the way large scale mechanical thinning or prescribed fire are, herbicide use can contribute to wildfire-risk reduction in some circumstances. BLM used herbicides while seeding following Idaho’s 280,000 acre Soda fire in 2015 to prevent exotic annual grass invasion and build fuel breaks to help stem the spread of future fires. In fire behavior simulations for areas dominated by exotic annual grasses, simulated flame height, fire spread rate, and heat were all reduced in areas treated with herbicides.

Critics often point to an EPA evaluation that found that glyphosate is “likely to adversely affect” 93% of listed species and 96% of critical habitats. This finding is not equivalent to concluding that existing glyphosate applications are causing population-level harm to 93% of endangered species. Further, avoiding herbicides will not eliminate risks to endangered species. Catastrophic wildfire can itself destroy critical habitat and threaten already-small populations. A 2017 wildfire in Arizona killed 217 of the 252 remaining Mount Graham red squirrels. Meanwhile, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has identified catastrophic wildfire as a major threat to species including the southern Sierra Nevada fisher and Sierra Nevada red fox. While glyphosate, or any other hazardous fuel treatment, won’t outright prevent catastrophic wildfire, it is a tool that can reduce the severity of future fires in some landscapes.

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The Bottom Line

Obviously it is possible to remove unwanted vegetation—invasive plants or hazardous fuels contributing to wildfire risk—from our forests without herbicides or machines or other technologies. But, doing it all by hand takes time, money, and labor. The reality is that we need to rapidly scale up active management of our forests in the face of growing wildfire and biological threats. Glyphosate offers real advantages in some situations.

There isn’t one-size fits all vegetation-management technique that is better for the environment. For a tiny infestation near a stream, manual treatment might clearly be preferable. For a steep 2,000-acre area being seeded after a fire, the calculus is completely different.

Good forest management requires balancing the ecological risks of treatment against the ecological risks of leaving vegetation unmanaged. Banning or rejecting herbicide use in national forests outright could result in higher forest management costs, slower restoration, and worse ecological outcomes without delivering meaningful environmental benefits.

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From 2019 to 2024, Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) electricity rates rose by 80% and Southern California Edison’s (SCE) by 71%—more than three times the rate of inflation over the same period. The primary cause of this remarkable increase was wildfire: the cost of vegetation management, grid hardening, liability insurance, and contributions to the state Wildfire Fund that California utilities pass through to their customers. PG&E customers now pay an extra $300 to $500 a year for wildfire mitigation.

Last month, Governor Gavin Newsom put forward a package to the Legislature that would have shifted some of that burden from ratepayers to property owners in high-risk areas. Those high-risk homeowners have long paid below-market insurance premiums for two reasons: Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that subjected insurance rate increases to the approval of an elected official; and the right of insurers to recoup uncapped damages from utilities in a process known as subrogation. Newsom’s proposal would have eliminated subrogation for utilities, bringing electricity customers relief and insurance premiums closer to market rate.

Instead of finally requiring homeowners in high-risk areas to pay what it actually costs to insure their homes, Democratic lawmakers rejected Newsom’s proposal to eliminate insurer subrogation under the banner of “preserving utility accountability” and opted for the status quo. In other words, ratepayers will continue subsidizing property insurance for residents of California’s most fire prone areas. Many of these residents are extremely wealthy: a recent Bloomberg analysis finds six of California’s ten highest fire liability zipcodes as determined by FAIR plan exposure are in wealthy enclaves and high-end resort communities including Beverly Hills, Malibu and Lake Tahoe.

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California’s next governor should pick up where Newsom left off and continue attempting to shift some of the wildfire burden from ratepayers to high-risk property owners. There are two important reasons for this.

First, the status quo is unfair to ratepayers. Only 10% of PG&E customers live in what the utility has designated as high fire threat districts—and yet the other 90% pay hundreds of dollars per year to subsidize mitigation and insurance for that small fraction of people. Many of the customers paying this subsidy are low-income households in California’s hot Central Valley, who need lots of air conditioning and are therefore seriously burdened by high electricity rates. A state bullish on affordability and social justice should not be compelling renters in Fresno to subsidize the wildfire risk of wealthy homeowners in Malibu.

Populist utility critics have argued that potential ratepayer burden is not a problem because utilities can simply get their shareholders to pay out damages instead. But that is not how utilities work. Utilities are among the most capital-intensive businesses in the economy and finance their infrastructure with borrowed money. When wildfire liability grows, investors demand higher returns to hold utility debt and equity—and that borrowing premium gets passed on to ratepayers. There is no free lunch.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, parking wildfire liability on utilities is not a cost-effective way to reduce wildfire risk.

Growing wildfire risk in California is the product of many factors aside from ignitions, including climate change, vegetation buildup from poor fuels management, and expansion into the wildland-urban interface (WUI) encouraged by the state’s restrictive urban land use policies and price controls on home insurance under Proposition 103.

Utilities control only one of these factors: ignitions.

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While utilities have made great progress in recent years at reducing ignitions, these efforts can only buy so much wildfire risk reduction. For one, utilities do not start most wildfires in California. CalFire data show they start only 6% of all wildfires in the state, and only 30% of the state’s most catastrophic ones.

There are also diminishing marginal returns to utility wildfire mitigation investment. An analysis by the Breakthrough Institute estimates it is about forty times more expensive to reduce utility ignitions by 95% than to reduce them by 80%. This is because the first 80% of ignitions can be eliminated by cheap operational measures like turning off power lines, while the “last mile” of risk can only be eliminated through the extremely expensive process of burying overhead transmission lines. Yet because of the existential implications of the current wildfire liability architecture, utilities are pursuing this expensive last mile, spending about 8 billion dollars a year on these efforts—a cost that is passed on to ratepayers.

California could be buying a lot more risk reduction for that money. Unlike utility ignition prevention, wildfire mitigation measures like forest management, home hardening, and community fuel breaks all reduce wildfire risk regardless of ignition source. Yet under the current paradigm, these investments are unlikely. When ratepayers underwrite utility mitigation, and insurers cover fire losses without pricing the risk into premiums, the property owners and local governments best positioned to reduce that risk have no market signal telling them to.

Utilities should still be responsible for their negligence—when a utility acts carelessly, its shareholders should pay. But shifting the residual risk of building in fire-prone areas onto ratepayers a hundred miles away is neither fair nor efficient. Newsom was right. His successor should finish the job.

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Last week, Breakthrough’s Executive Director, Alex Trembath, wrote in The Argument that so-called “climate hushing”—Democrats’ retreat from climate change as a central issue—is not a defeat for decarbonization and climate policy, but a return to the quieter, bipartisan, technology-and-abundance politics that actually has a track record of emissions reductions.

In his own words:

“The OG climate deniers were crank scientists who attributed climate change entirely to natural variability (or sunspots) instead of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. Their dubious work was cited at the highest levels of government, including by the Bush administration’s Council on Environmental Quality and, perhaps most notoriously, by the late U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, who suggested in 2003 that global warming was “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

That outright rejection of scientific consensus has largely lost in the court of public opinion: Recent surveys show strong majorities of Americans accepting the reality of climate change. With such denial in retreat, today’s climate activists have a new pejorative specifically for the Democratic elected officials and analysts who are conspicuously less outspoken on climate change during the second Trump era: climate hushing.

These so-called hushers are “meekly shying away from righteous and winnable fights against evildoers,” according to Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. Party moderates are the canonical hushers, at times directly urging Democrats “don’t say climate change,” as Searchlight Institute did last year. But the ranks of the hushers appear to grow larger by the day: The Washington Post recently reported that the word “climate” has vanished almost entirely from public statements by Sen. Ed Markey, a longtime Green New Deal champion who is now locked in a tense primary election against a more moderate challenger.

Democrats’ descent into infighting is most often taken as a sign of retreat for the causes of decarbonization and climate resilience. But that need not be the case.

Indeed, there are reasons to think that climate hushing will promote more ambitious and durable climate action than what came before. Unlocking the next wave of U.S. clean energy will require a return to the bipartisan compromise politics that have historically driven the country’s decarbonization. Maximalist climate activism can only harm these efforts.

In an era when voters are laser-focused on cost-of-living concerns and emerging challenges like artificial intelligence, climate hushing may well be the thing that saves the climate.”

Read the Essay HERE

Alex’s essay stands as an important intervention in the “climate hushing” debates, but its origins reach far further back than the current discourse. For years, Breakthrough has advocated for a quiet climate policy. In 2021, almost the entire Breakthrough staff put together research for a report advocating for a “quiet” climate policy that “swims with the tide of existing sociopolitical institutions and economic growth…uses technology and infrastructure as its main lever, and…disrupts, rather than exploits, political partisanship.”

“Historically, the US government has accelerated decarbonization through strategic investments in technology and infrastructure. Decarbonization of the American economy has depended upon the increasing affordability and scalability of lower-carbon alternatives to incumbent technologies: nuclear power plants, shale gas unlocked by the fracking revolution, solar photovoltaic and onshore wind plants, lithium-ion batteries, and biotechnology and other innovations that have improved the productivity of American agriculture. These were all enabled by decades of sustained, technology-specific research, development, demonstration, and deployment efforts made by the federal and state governments.”

Read the Report HERE

And the idea of quiet climate policy goes even further back. In an essay for Foreign Policy from 2019, Breakthrough Founder and President Ted Nordhaus argued that both carbon pricing and the Green New Deal—popular “solutions” to climate change at the time—wrongly assumed that public concern about climate would be strong enough to sustain a partisan, economy-wide approach to decarbonization. Instead, Ted argued, enduring climate progress needed to be made through quiet policymaking:

“In contrast to most current climate advocacy efforts, which seek to raise the salience of the climate problem in order to motivate politically difficult and economically costly climate action, quiet climate policy seeks to deescalate the political controversies associated with climate change and break up the costs of climate action.

Examples include establishing a federal clean energy standard that would require utilities to gradually transition entirely to zero-carbon technologies over the coming decades. Or government procurement at the U.S. Defense Department and national laboratories could be used to create initial markets for promising small nuclear reactors and geothermal and energy storage technologies. Providing U.S. farmers with technology and incentives to become more carbon efficient could bring huge benefits for the climate, as could government investment to develop zero-carbon technologies for industrial heat and power.

Working toward decarbonization, technology by technology and sector by sector, on a bipartisan basis and through careful negotiation with key stakeholders is the sort of thing that Congress still occasionally manages to do—as recent legislative efforts to support commercialization of advanced nuclear and carbon capture technologies demonstrate.”

Read the Essay HERE

While quiet climate advocacy, or “climate hushing,” has, for years, been the more effective approach to actually passing and enacting policy, it would be a mistake to understand the current climate hush as a tactical and strategic choice amongst the climate-pilled Democrats. Rather, Democrats—and the general public—have retreated on climate mainly because a whole slew of technological, political, and cultural developments have dramatically altered both discourse and the material world. Even before AI became the clear focus of the moment, the political tides had turned on climate.

In an essay from early 2024, entitled “The Era of the Climate Hawk Is Over,” Alex Trembath argued that “the political, economic, and cultural conditions that allowed for climate hawks’ advances over the last decade simply no longer hold.”

“So here we are, at the end of their era, and the signs are unmistakable. Of course the incoming Trump Administration quickly abandoned any talk of net-zero as well as the government’s commitments to the Paris Agreement. But corporate America is also abdicating net-zero commitments en masse. The taboo on criticizing radical climate activism seems to be breaking down. The effort to convert large swaths of the electorate into “climate voters” has demonstrably failed, and poll respondents increasingly identify a striking gap between Democrats’ values and their own on many issues, including climate change. Even segments of climate philanthropy, the ultimate benefactor of much of climate hawks’ activities over the years, are showing signs of adjusting to the new order of things.

The key question today is whether a critical mass of climate hawks themselves are willing to decenter or deescalate climate politics in service of building a lasting political coalition in support of energy abundance and climate resilience. Doing so, for many, would amount to a tacit acknowledgement that the existential claims of the climate movement have been more tactical than substantive. That may be a bridge too far for many or most committed climate hawks.

For everyone else, some cognitive therapy may be in order. Because it’s not just a dead-end strategy, but a dead-end identity. Climate hawks’ substantive and coalitional propositions can simply no longer be defended.

Frankly, the whole project was always a bit of a farce. Climate hawks’ nominal efforts to differentiate themselves and to move past cap-and-trade were almost entirely performative. Bill McKibben’s clarion call to build a climate movement was just an explicit bankshot strategy to fulfill the lost promise of carbon pricing. [David] Roberts’ obsequious genuflections towards environmentalists presaged the climate movement’s total inability to differentiate itself or prioritize among its various camps. The more recent move beyond carbon pricing may have felt like hard-headed realpolitik, but all the latter-day activist campaigns—from divestment to natural gas bans to liability lawsuits to “climate Superfund” bills—are just thinly veiled efforts to raise the price of fossil fuels. For their grand finale, climate hawks took longstanding bipartisan energy and technology policy and transfigured it into hyperpartisan environmental policy.

Those of us who have worked to construct an actual, coherent post-environmentalism have long seen the path of the climate hawk for what it was: a mirage. Efforts to center emissions and climate change meant de-centering innovation, jobs, and resilience—all things that voters of all stripes demonstrably care much more about. “Raising the salience” of climate change was a chimera—psychically intoxicating but politically dangerous. And draping climate policy in the cloth of “Green New Deal” mass employment or “Build Back Better” post-covid industrial policy ultimately couldn’t disguise the old-fashioned environmentalism underneath.”

Read the Essay HERE

With the backlash against artificial intelligence and data centers going full tilt at the moment, much of it centered around dubious environmental claims, I took to the Wall Street Journal opinion page this week to point out some of the remarkable opportunities that the massive build out of AI infrastructure offers America’s electricity grid, clean technology innovation, and the environment. Excerpted below:

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Opposition to artificial intelligence has intensified over the past year. A majority of Americans worry that AI will kill jobs, distrust the information it generates, and doubt that tech leaders will develop the technology responsibly. Opposition has crystallized in environmental concerns about data centers. More than 70% of Americans oppose their construction, and 10 times as many Americans told Pew Research that data centers are bad for the environment than said they are good for the environment.

The environmental movement has jumped on the bandwagon. The National Wildlife Federation calls the AI boom “an environmental justice crisis.” Student activists from the Sunrise Movement stormed the Washington lobbying offices of OpenAI last month, insisting that AI threatened their job prospects and access to clean drinking water.

But what if AI holds the key to a better environment? While concern about data centers focuses on dubious claims about water use, water quality, electricity prices and (somewhat more credibly) short-term carbon emissions, the environmental promise of this moment is being overlooked. AI and the build-out of data centers may offer a generational opportunity to clean up our electricity grid, improve water quality and water-use efficiency, and accelerate technologies to lighten the burden we impose on the planet.

How is this possible when hyperscalers are scrambling to build data centers and often powering them with carbon-emitting natural gas and sometimes even coal? Surging growth in electricity demand historically has accelerated the deployment of clean electricity-generation technology. The golden age of nuclear energy in the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s was a response to the rapid expansion of the grid in the postwar era. Rapid expansion of electricity grids in China, India and other developing countries has supercharged the adoption of solar, wind and batteries globally over the past 15 years. New research suggests this may be happening with the build-out of data centers in the U.S.

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America needs to generate more electricity, and that means transporting more electricity, too. Historically, transporting more electricity has required building transmission lines. But tech companies, environmental groups, and renewables developers are enthusiastically endorsing three grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) that they believe offer faster, cheaper alternatives to the slow, costly work of traditional grid expansion: dynamic line ratings, topology optimization, and advanced power flow control.

At a high level, GETs use digital technologies to give utilities more insight into or control over the grid. Their small price tags and short deployment timelines are making GETs especially popular with policymakers who want to rein in ballooning energy bills while also capturing the economic activity that comes with an expanded, more accessible electric grid. In essence, our elected officials want more energy now, and for a fraction of the price of traditional energy infrastructure.

Organizations from Amazon and Tesla to the Rocky Mountain Institute are telling policymakers that GETs can do just that. They claim that “upgrading” the existing grid network with GETs can expand the grid in under a year with payback periods of weeks or months, potentially yielding over $5 billion in annual production cost savings that would materialize as lower electric bills. According to a research commentary from MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, “supporting [GETs] adoption may be the closest energy policy analog we have today to finding a $20 bill on the table.”

If only it were that easy to undo decades of systemic underinvestment in a transmission network long enough to stretch from Earth to the Moon. GETs are near-term complements to, not substitutes for, an expensive and extensive transmission buildout.

Results from a few case studies and a more nuanced explanation of how GETs work can help policymakers and non-technical members of the public appreciate GETs for what they are: innovations that deserve policy support as tools for grid modernization, not as “non-wires alternatives” to transmission lines.

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Dynamic Line Ratings (DLRs)

Dynamic line ratings are a new class of transmission line ratings—estimates of the maximum amount of electricity a transmission line can carry without overheating. Line ratings are key metrics for transmission operators, since lines that regularly approach their thermal limits need closer monitoring and often trigger new investments in grid expansion studies.

Dynamic line ratings are best understood as the most accurate of 4 rating methods. In order of increasing accuracy, they are: static ratings, seasonal ratings, ambient air ratings (AARs), and dynamic line ratings (DLRs).

Static ratings assign each line with a single maximum value and typically err on the side of caution. Seasonal ratings approximate how colder, windier winter weather cools a transmission line, allowing it to carry more electricity without overheating than it could in summer. AARs look at local weather conditions and calculate ratings based on the recorded temperature. This finer spatial and temporal scale provides more accuracy than the seasonal approach. Lastly, DLRs improve on AARs by measuring both temperature and wind speed in real-time using sensors installed on individual wires. These data are used to calculate a highly accurate, localized rating.

But, despite frequent claims that DLRs universally unlock new capacity on the grid, more accurate data does not necessarily mean more capacity.

In certain cases, static ratings overestimate capacity, whereas the more accurate rating systems—both AARs and DLRs—demonstrate constrained capacity due to factors not represented in the static systems. A study performed by the AES Corporation—a utility and power generation firm—found that DLRs and AARs correctly identified lower capacity in certain lines—especially lines in less windy areas—than what static rating systems assumed.

For example, in figure 1 below, both AARs and DLRs consistently rated the specific line as lower capacity than the static rating. This line, according to AES Ohio, runs through “a narrow, low-wind and high vegetation corridor,” meaning that there was less wind available to cool down the line. Wind tends to cool a line more than low temperatures, so the lack of wind here made a pronounced difference.

Data from another segment on this 69kV line emphasizes another key feature of DLRs: their benefits are relative, not absolute. Figure 2 compares the line’s DLR and AAR to its seasonal rating, showing the summer-winter transition (upper) and the winter-summer transition (lower). As might be expected from more accurate rating systems, the DLR and AAR don’t see a step change on a single calendar date. But, in this case, AES’s winter rating exceeded the line’s real carrying capacity captured by the more accurate AAR and DLR.

If the real carrying capacity of a line is less than expected using cruder static, seasonal, or ambient air ratings, its dynamic line rating will show inferior performance. This is good. Such information is extremely valuable for grid operators, even if it doesn’t unlock new capacity on a line. This “situational awareness,” in AES’s words, lets the utility know that the segment from Figure 1 may need especially close monitoring or benefit from reconductoring. And the high winter rating in Figure 2 may indicate that AES is systematically overestimating how much electricity its wires can carry in the winter, potentially warranting a reevaluation of how it calculates seasonal ratings. Further, because a transmission line is only as strong as its weakest link, even favorable DLRs on other transmission line segments can be constrained by the conditions of a single quarter-mile swath—a far more nuanced picture than the prevailing view that DLRs unlock capacity for every transmission line they’re deployed on.

Lastly, because the freed-up capacity from DLRs stems mainly from wind chill, DLR potential varies across the nation based on wind speed and topology. The regional spread of potential for wind energy offers a rough estimate for DLR potential. Results from early DLR demos in windy Oklahoma or Texas should not be generalized to the entire nation. But some of the most-cited national estimates do just that. Their results are therefore highly overstated. State and national policymakers should evaluate DLR potential in their own territory before assuming their adoption can miraculously increase grid capacity.

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What About Topology Optimization and Advanced Power Flow Control?

Compared to DLRs, topology optimization (TO) and advanced power flow control (APFC) have seen less adoption in the U.S. or globally [Figure 4]. Still, communication from policymakers and advocacy groups emphasize the ability of TO and APFC to substitute for new energy infrastructure.

When a utility sees a line getting repeatedly congested, that usually prompts a utility to build more transmission to relieve the constraint. While DLRs are praised for their ability to “unlock” more capacity on existing lines, interest in TO and APFC stems from a belief that they will allow operators to circumvent congestion like you would avoid a busy freeway, thereby reducing curtailment of cheap renewables, and lowering production costs without building new lines.

This is nominally true, but overeager estimates leave out the most important limitations.

Traditional grid operations use a grid digital twin primarily for monitoring. TO takes that to the next level, turning grid operation from a mostly reactive role to an active one.

If TO is the brains of grid operation in the digital era, APFCs are its muscles. Power flow control has historically used bulky electro-mechanical devices like breakers that are mostly limited to switching on and off. Their sluggishness is another reason why the role of grid operators has historically been limited, only intervening to avoid significant incidents. APFC capitalizes on recent improvements in power semiconductor technologies to interact with the grid at “grid-speed.” This unlocks a range of new applications, mainly for operators to fine-tune the grid at a much more granular level than what was previously possible.

Figure 5 above shows an example of congestion being rerouted using APFC. In the counterfactual without APFC, the grid operator would likely have curtailed the solar and wind and, in their place, turned on a different generator with ample transmission capacity but that is likely more expensive.

At the same time, the above diagram reveals a limitation of TO and APFC. After APFC activation, three lines are loaded at 98%. In practice, that leaves almost no safety margin. So even though the depicted intervention relieves the constraint (the red wire in Figure 5’s left box), TO software would have tested the intervention, identified it was not safe, and chosen to curtail the renewables instead of putting the grid into an unstable mode. This is a real and documented consideration. The Southwest Power Pool piloted TO software in 2018 and made explicit to reject actions that cause a line to be loaded over 95%.

Additionally, actively interacting with complex electricity flow can easily spiral into unexpected disruptions. This is especially relevant in today’s highly interconnected grid. PJM, the largest grid operator in the country, raises concerns that TO “may shift a problem, or some level of congestion, to another part of the system.” In other words, large-scale adoption of TO in PJM could inadvertently worsen grid conditions for its neighbors. PJM also warns that real-time network changes can distort energy markets, which rely heavily on day-ahead predictions and long-term hedges against the exact congestion that TO and APFC relieve. It’s counterintuitive, but congestion relief isn’t necessarily good if it’s unpredictable and decoupled from the aspects of grid operation that are layered on top of the wires. In other words, TO and APFC need to overcome coordination and economic challenges in addition to those of electrical engineering. So while both technologies show promise when deployed, there remain steep barriers to implementation at scale that often get swept under the rug.

Adding enough excess transmission lines to provide significant headroom and redundancy is a common solution to both constraints. Say that a hypothetical new transmission line was added to the system in Figure 5, decreasing the current lines from being 98% loaded to 70% loaded. With the addition of more transmission, TO might find the APFC intervention safe to pursue, thereby reducing renewable curtailments, lowering production costs, and so on. This dependence is well documented across multiple case studies. Under mandate by California’s SB 1006, Southern California Edison studied feasibility of GETs across its entire service territory. It found zero suitable targets for APFC, citing “insufficient alternative routing options to meaningfully redistribute power” as the first reason for those results. Britain’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) raises that the island country’s “corridor-shaped landmass limits the number of alternative transmission routes available to redistribute power efficiently.”

Put differently, a grid with excess transmission capacity is a key enabler for TO and APFC to be utilized to their fullest potential. Yet these GETs are being misconstrued as ways to avoid the investments needed to build the environment in which they would thrive most.

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Conclusion

Recent years have seen Congress and state legislatures introduce scores of bills focused on studying, subsidizing, and prioritizing the use of GETs over planning new transmission. Meanwhile, the prospects of Congress passing a bipartisan permitting and transmission reform package are getting slimmer by the day.

A more accurate view of GETs treats them as tools for grid modernization, an evergreen pursuit that warrants policy support and private investment in its own right. Contrast this with marketing GETs as near-term solutions to load growth and rising electricity bills that risks collapsing if load growth doesn’t materialize as fervently as expected or if supposed cost reductions from GETs don’t materialize.

Put simply, GETs will benefit from more transmission, and transmission will benefit from more GETs. Policymakers need to pursue both with an acute sense of urgency, understanding that enhancing the grid is nothing more than a stopgap measure until the country can expand it.

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Wildfires and heatwaves have made headlines causing more than €3 billion in damages in Europe this summer. Major fires in France and Spain forced more than 350,000 people to evacuate, capturing global attention and mirroring a severe wildfire season already underway across the Atlantic in the United States and Canada.

Smoke-filled skies, evacuations, and lengthy heatwaves raised concern on both continents. Global coverage was quick to connect these events with rising temperatures and climate change, with headlines like “Extremely scary findings’ show climate crisis is supercharging Europe’s wildfire weather” and “Climate extremes fuel explosive wildfires in Canada and the U.S.”

Climate change is worsening an important driver of wildfire: fire weather. But fire weather is not synonymous with wildfire outcomes. Human land use decisions, accumulating fuel loads, and fire suppression policies play a huge role in transforming how easily fire spreads across the landscape.

Regional land-use histories across Europe illustrate how recent wildfire disasters emerged from specific ecologies, management decisions, and local policy precedent. Understanding the differences in these local drivers and how they interact with global climate change is necessary to better predict, mitigate, and adapt to wildfire risk.

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Why climate seems like a good explanation for severe wildfires

Climate attribution studies show that anthropogenic warming is making fire-conducive weather more likely or more severe. Heat waves can cause vegetation to dry out. Changes in temperature, drought, and precipitation affect fuel moisture, enabling fire to spread more rapidly. In parts of Europe, climate change is also lengthening the period during which extreme fire weather can occur. Observers of the 2026 wildfire season point to burned area in countries like France and Spain being well above the median for this point of the year as evidence of the climate connection.

It’s true that climate conditions, like temperatures, humidity, wind, and precipitation patterns, influence how readily fuels burn. But human activity and land management patterns strongly influence what fuels are available to burn, their structure, and continuity across the landscape. The combination of these factors determines how a fire spreads and how intensely it burns.

At the global scale, satellite records have shown a decline in burned area from wildfires despite rising temperatures. The decline is mainly driven by changes in land-use at the landscape scale, largely due to agricultural expansion and intensification in Africa. The global trend says little about the trajectory of wildfire risk in any particular European country. Wildfire risk is not declining everywhere. But, it does illustrate the broader point that human activity and land management decisions exert enough influence to complicate the narrative that climate change will always lead to a net increase in wildfire activity.

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Land conversion and planted forests near Bordeaux

The record fires seen across Mediterranean Europe this summer, especially in Bordeaux, demonstrate how human land-use decisions have the exact opposite effect, instead exacerbating fire risk.

Bordeaux sits on the northern edge of one of France’s largest forest zones, called the Landes de Gascogne. The landscape is especially prone to wildfire today in part due to a nineteenth-century land transformation and the continued replanting of maritime-pine trees.

Before the nineteenth-century transformation, much of the Landes was wetland, peat bog, and open moorland. Under Napoleon III, a 1857 law directed the development of large swaths of the area. The wetlands were drained and what was a heterogeneous open landscape was replaced with far more continuous forest cover. The land conversion created what is still one of Europe’s largest planted forests with more than one million hectares (2.5 million acres) made up primarily of maritime-pine grown for timber, pulp, and resin. Despite the economic boon, the increased forest continuity came at a cost. As one commenter described, “when you plant millions of the same, fire-adapted tree in even-aged stands, at high density, across a nearly unbroken block of landscape, you’re building a regional-scale fire conveyor belt.”

The vulnerability of this landscape predates modern warming trends. A catastrophic fire in 1949 near Cestas burned roughly 50,000 hectares in a matter of days killing 82 people and remains the deadliest wildfire in French history. Fires burned a record 130,000 hectares over the course of that year’s fire season.

Even more recent fire seasons demonstrate that the same fuel-continuity pattern built by centuries of dense, even-aged pine plantation continues to drive both burned area and evacuation scale. In the summer of 2022, a series of fires near Landiras and La Teste-de-Buch spread through the same forest, burning more than 30,000 hectares. Four years later, fires beginning near Saumos this summer burned 42,000 hectares within five days and forced roughly 220,000 evacuations.

The extraordinary 2026 fire reflects how extreme fire weather helped create conditions for rapid spread on a vast, highly connected forest shaped by more than a century of land-use decisions.

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Agricultural retreat transformed Europe’s fire landscape

Zooming out from France, Europe’s forests are growing. Forest area has increased by about 11% since 1990. Total cropland and grassland declined over the same period. The expansion is driven in part by intentional afforestation and in areas experiencing rural depopulation, abandoned agricultural land has undergone natural forest regeneration.

Especially in many parts of Mediterranean Europe, agricultural and pastoral abandonment is contributing to the expansion of forests, shrublands, and other woody vegetation. One ecological consequence of this is a build up of fuels across formerly managed landscapes. A grazed pasture, orchard, or cultivated field can interrupt the continuity of woody vegetation. Once abandoned, shrubs and young trees may recolonize, eventually connecting areas that were previously separated.

When farmland abandonment leads to a more homogenous landscape, fuel buildup and continuity increases. Landscape-fire simulations suggest that greater abandonment in Mediterranean agricultural landscapes can cause wildfires to become larger, more intense, and more likely to spread. A recent modeling study found that in eastern Spain, replacing active agriculture with abandoned vegetation tripled potential fire size and quadrupled exposure of human infrastructure. Conversely, population shifts from rural to urban areas can reduce the chances of fire ignitions caused by humans.

The balance of these competing forces has changed over time, varying by season and region. For example, from 1985 to 2011, despite increases in forested area, the total area burned annually across Portugal, Spain, southern France, Italy, and Greece declined by just over 300,000 hectares. The annual number of fires also declined overall.

Total burned area reflects the net effect of competing forces, not climate or fuel conditions alone. Land abandonment can increase underlying fire hazard by increasing fuel quantity and continuity, while investments in mitigating the likelihood of a fire starting or spreading (prevention) and quickly quelling fires once started (suppression) simultaneously reduce the amount of land that actually burns. In Mediterranean France, for example, fire size and burned area fell sharply after a strengthened suppression policy took effect in the mid-1990s—even as fuel accumulation and fire-weather hazard increased. Comparing the two decades before and after the suppression policy went into effect found that the number of fires fell about 25 percent and total burned area fell by 60 percent.

Reducing area burned through suppression alone often contributes to a ‘firefighting trap’: when allocating the vast majority of wildfire management resources to fire suppression paradoxically leads to fuel accumulation and continuity. This can ultimately contribute to larger and more severe fires that preclude suppression during extreme fire weather. Recent extreme fire seasons in the EU in 2017, 2022, and 2025 show how fires can overwhelm prevention and suppression efforts. As of August 2026, more than 600,000 hectares had burned in the EU—roughly twice the long term average of the last 20 years for this point in the year.

In response, some countries are putting a greater emphasis on prevention, fuel management, and prescribed fire. In 2017, prevention represented only 20% of Portuguese wildfire-management funding, but by 2021 it was 46%, bringing the share of prevention spending closer to that devoted to suppression and other response activities.

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Beyond the climate change headlines

Decarbonization and climate change mitigation remain essential for limiting future global warming. But even the most aggressive mitigation targets cannot remove the fuels or reduce the vulnerabilities that already exist on the landscape today.

Understanding wildfire requires asking not only how the climate has changed, but how people have changed the land. Weather, fuels, ignitions, suppression, and land-use changes interact differently across landscapes, seasons, and individual fires. Treating recent wildfires as manifestations of climate change alone makes for a simple headline, but a poor explanation of why landscapes burn.

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2026 has been the year of critical minerals for the Trump administration.

In January, the administration’s push to increase U.S. influence over the Arctic circle placed critical minerals at the center of foreign policy by raising the prospect of tapping into Greenland’s rare earth resources. The executive branch continued to show critical mineral ambitions abroad in February by establishing the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE) to replace the Biden-era Mineral Security Partnership as the vehicle for critical mineral trade agreements. Meanwhile, it seemed like a week could not go by without either the Department of Defense or Department of Energy announcing another grant for a critical mineral project.

Congress, on the other hand, saw little action, indicating a more constrained vision for U.S. critical mineral supply chains. In fact, despite introducing dozens of critical mineral-related bills, Congress only enacted a single proposal: H.J. Res. 140 which narrowly repealed the Biden-era mining ban at the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. Beyond that, only a meager few bills passed either chamber in 2026 so far.

Partisan tension combined with the Trump administration’s preference for unilateral action have paralyzed this Congress, leaving it unable to advance its own proposals—let alone forge them into a coherent national critical minerals strategy

Democrats in particular are stuck on the defensive. A long-standing hesitancy to support mineral production leaves simple procedural reforms in limbo like the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act (S.544; H.R.1366) which would expedite the mine permitting process by allowing developers to rearrange parcels of federal land if they need to revise their designs. The Senate first introduced the proposal in 2023 (S.1281) with later iterations adding funding for cleaning up abandoned mines left from operations that ceased before remediation laws came into effect in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, its passage remains unlikely even after this sweetener for environmentalist contingents.

Indeed, any regulatory reform to U.S. mineral production may ultimately need a home in a grander permitting bargain that Democrats feel sufficiently supports renewable energy. Chances for that, however, are dwindling as the 119th Congress nears its lame duck session and Democrats—hoping to protect renewables projects from Trump administration cancellations—eye their chances for a better bargaining position after midterm elections.

Meanwhile, oversight concerns over Trump administration spending on critical minerals projects deter Democrats from advancing proposals that authorize the executive branch to wield any additional financial support like the SECURE Minerals Act (S.3659; H.R.7126) which would buffer mineral producers from market volatility by strengthening market liquidity and trading in conjunction with physical commodity storage and financial support tools.

Thankfully, three proposals stand a chance of passing this Congress with bipartisan support:

• Reauthorization of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Mapping Resource Initiative;

• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act reforms that facilitate extraction of critical minerals from industrial waste; and

• Reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank.

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The United States is experiencing a once-in-a-generation surge in demand for the equipment that makes the electric grid. Driven by the replacement of aging infrastructure and growing electricity consumption from data centers, new manufacturing, and home electrification, America wants more grid components than its electro-industrial base can supply.

The symptoms of this supply-demand asymmetry are especially pronounced for transformers. U.S. transformer imports and prices doubled from 2019 to 2025, and lead times ballooned so much that some utilities are placing orders five years in advance. Grain-oriented electrical steel (GOES) is one of the key bottlenecks.

Every transformer on the grid runs on a core made of GOES, from the large power transformers (LPTs) that carry over 90% of the nation’s electricity to the 60 to 80 million distribution transformers feeding energy to homes and businesses. GOES prices doubled from 2020 to 2024, and U.S. imports of GOES transformer cores quadrupled from 2018 to 2025.

Yet domestic production remains constrained by the production capacity of a single steel mill. Located 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, the Butler Works mill—owned by Cleveland-Cliffs—is America’s only domestic source of grain-oriented electrical steel.

Conventional economics suggests the solution to America’s GOES shortage is simply to expand supply, perhaps by expanding Butler Works or by building a new steel mill. But the metallurgy says otherwise.

Across multiple metrics, GOES made by Butler Works is inferior to GOES made in nations like Japan and Korea. Because GOES imports and domestic GOES are non-substitutable, an expansion of existing production capacity would increase U.S. supply for a good that much of the U.S. market doesn’t want. The U.S. government has the resources and statutory authority to make meaningful progress toward onshoring transformer supply chains, but it is essential that support be directed at expanding production of the right kind of GOES rather than expansion without accompanying modernization.

Specifically, Cleveland-Cliffs GOES is too narrow for many LPT core manufacturers. It tops out at 920mm wide, while the market prefers at least 932mm and increasingly looks for widths over 1000mm. Manufacturers can fuse two pieces together, but the discontinuity at the seam can introduce new energy losses, and precision welding for thousands of paper-thin GOES laminations adds sizable labor costs.

Additionally, in distribution transformer cores, Cleveland-Cliffs GOES loses up to 39 percent more energy than GOES from Japanese steelmakers Nippon and JFE. This stems from a technique invented by JFE in the 1970s that, to this day, is only used by Nippon, JFE, and Korean steelmaker POSCO.

Japanese GOES loses substantially less energy than American GOES because Japanese steelmakers JFE and Nippon use more advanced processing technologies than Cleveland-Cliffs, the sole U.S. manufacturer of GOES

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The process lets these East Asian mills etch grooves into the GOES sheets that reduce energy losses; then, after sheets are wound into a core, they treat the core with heat to relieve mechanical stress from core winding and reduce energy losses even further. In contrast, the older etching process used at Butler Works makes grooves that deform if exposed to the temperatures needed for the heat treatment step, also known as annealing. As a result, Butler Works doesn’t anneal its GOES and misses out on the resulting improvements to energy efficiency.

The quality gap separating U.S. and foreign GOES has existed for decades, but protectionist policies and a quarter-century of stable electricity demand kept awareness of the problem confined to a few federal investigations on antidumping duties, countervailing duties, and Section 232 tariffs. The U.S. GOES dilemma only recently began making headlines thanks to new load growth and an aging electric grid that are driving a surge in demand for transformers.

Due in part to its technical nature, federal actions haven’t addressed the full scope of this problem. For instance, the Department of Defense recently ordered $400 million of GOES from Cleveland-Cliffs—a purchase agreement that nominally supports GOES production but does nothing to enable production of the right kind of GOES sought by domestic manufacturers of LPT and distribution cores.

Meanwhile, Section 232 tariffs and Liberation Day tariffs treated GOES—a highly differentiated, specialty good—as if it were an interchangeable commodity. Section 232 tariffs in 2018 initially applied only to GOES imports but not imports of manufactured goods containing GOES, including transformer cores. Firms responded by importing foreign GOES to Mexico and Canada, minimally manufacturing them into laminations or cores, then exporting them duty-free to the US.

U.S. imports of transformer cores grew over 400% from $126 million in 2018 to $524 million in 2025. The increase can be linked to a loophole in Section 232 tariffs on GOES, implemented in March 2018, as well as new electricity demand from data centers, manufacturing, and residential electrification.

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At the same time, US transformer manufacturers could only serve domestic demand for energy-efficiency by importing foreign GOES at a steep tariff premium. With GOES accounting for about 20 percent of a transformer’s total cost, these tariffs pushed up raw material prices for the US transformer industry. Rather than protecting American manufacturing, tariffs burdened it with a structural disadvantage.

The loophole that excluded GOES-derived goods was filled recently in August 2025, but its damage to the domestic transformer industry is already done. The emigration of transformer supply chains has made grid expansion more expensive and import-dependent.

U.S. imports of transformer cores grew over 400% from $126 million in 2018 to $524 million in 2025. The increase can be linked to a loophole in Section 232 tariffs on GOES, implemented in March 2018, as well as new electricity demand from data centers, manufacturing, and residential electrification.

Thankfully, the GOES bottleneck should not be too difficult to solve. A coordinated strategy that invests in domestic manufacturing and reforms trade policies would yield significant and swift returns by driving down the costs of transformers, electricity, and a modernized grid.

The cost of Butler Works retrofit or a modern greenfield GOES mill both fall in the range of $1-2 billion—a drop in the bucket compared to the $1.2 trillion in infrastructure spending authorized by IIJA and the half a trillion in loan authority of the Energy Dominance Financing (EDF) Office. New GOES projects announced in recent years qualify for the Innovative Clean Energy Loan Guarantee Program (Sec. 1703), as they would use “new or significantly improved technologies” and the reduced energy losses from more high-permeability GOES would “avoid, reduce, utilize, or sequester air pollutants or GHGs.” Just as easily, the Energy Dominance Financing Program (Sec. 1706) can fund GOES modernization, as such a project would “support or enable the provision of known or forecastable electric supply at time intervals necessary to maintain or enhance grid reliability or other system adequacy needs.”

Be it through EDF, U.S. Export-Import Bank, or Section 303 of the Defense Production Act, any office financing U.S. GOES production will have to coordinate investment strategy with the White House, Department of Commerce, and U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). Historical implementation of antidumping and countervailing duties and recent Section 232 tariffs merely placed levies on imported GOES and derived products without bridging the production quality gap. Tariffs can act as effective tools to protect a nascent industry from more mature, cheaper competitors, but the current moment chiefly calls for targeted investment over protectionism. Immediate tariff relaxation would allow grid modernization to proceed faster and at a lower cost to U.S. manufacturers, utilities, and ratepayers. The U.S. should not consider reinstating tariffs until modernized GOES production capacity has entered operation and navigated successfully down the cost curve.

Any LPTs and distribution transformers installed on the grid today will, in all likelihood, remain in service through 2060 or beyond. The nation’s electric grid for the remainder of the 21st century ought to run on high-efficiency transformers built using the best electrical steel technology can make in 2026. Over coming years, data centers, power plants, and manufacturing facilities will need faster access to best-in-class LPTs, and tens of millions of the country’s distribution transformers operating past their expected lifespan will require replacement. The limitations of GOES production at Butler Works loom large in the mind of the domestic transformer industry, as they must for any Congress or Administration serious about revitalizing America’s transformer supply chain.

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On June 3, a three-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas, was found with fly larvae feeding on a wound. While the calf recovered, the case reopened a chapter of agricultural history that Americans had largely forgotten: New World screwworm, a parasitic fly whose larvae eat the living flesh of cattle, wildlife, pets, and occasionally people.

The United States eradicated screwworm in 1966, partnering with Mexico and other countries to eventually kill off populations throughout Central America. Yet the fly lived on in South America and managed to cross back into Panama in 2023, spreading north until it reached Texas this summer. By late July, the state had reported more than 40 cases in cattle, dogs, and other animals.

To eradicate the fly again, the government began releasing millions more flies from planes and ground stations. This counterintuitive approach is known as the sterile insect technique, now used for a variety of pests. Factories rear enormous numbers of the target insect, sterilize them, and release them into the wild. When a wild female mates with a sterile male, she produces no offspring. Flood an area with enough sterile males for long enough and the population collapses.

Now genetic engineering could make this strategy far more powerful. In June, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted emergency authorization and proposed commercial approval for NovoFly, a genetically engineered, male-only strain of New World screwworm developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and North Carolina State University. While not yet used, USDA plans to incorporate the fly into its sterile insect program as it builds out its new Texas facility. EPA is also reviewing a gene-edited fruit fly, Knockout SWD, designed to suppress Spotted-wing drosophila, one of the most damaging pests of berries and cherries.

Both products turn an insect’s reproductive biology against it. They are living insecticides that search for their own targets without the risks of chemical insecticides. If scientists and regulators can bring these systems from research facilities to the field, they could transform pest control well beyond screwworm.

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Developing the trojan fly

The sterile insect technique began with what the New York Times Magazine referred to as “the single most original thought of the 20^th century.” In 1937, USDA entomologist Edward Knipling proposed controlling screwworm by releasing so many sterile males that wild females would struggle to find fertile mates. His colleague Raymond Bushland later developed a way to use X-rays to sterilize screwworm pupae while still preserving their ability to fly and mate. USDA soon tested and scaled up the approach, building screwworm rearing factories, creating systems to release the insects from aircraft, and launching a massive eradication campaign. By 1966, screwworm was gone from the United States.

The method works particularly well with screwworm as the females generally mate only once. A sterile male, however, can mate several times per day, suppressing the population.

The sterile insect approach can be effective for other insects too. Programs have since targeted Mediterranean fruit fly, Mexican fruit fly, melon fly, tsetse fly, pink bollworm, codling moth, and other pests.

Regardless of the insect, there has always been a fundamental biological challenge: the females. Sterile insect programs must ensure no fertile females are released. Screwworm facilities handle this by sterilizing the females too, which requires higher levels of radiation than optimal for the males. Programs for other insects sometimes separate and kill the females. Either way, rearing and feeding them is a waste of resources and complicates operations.

Genetic engineering can now handle some of those logistical challenges itself.

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Building a better bug trap

The engineered NovoFly contains a genetic switch that kills female embryos. In the breeding colony, workers add tetracycline to the insects’ diet which allows the females to survive and the colony to reproduce. The generation of insects produced for release aren’t so lucky. Without the tetracycline, the female embryos die and the batch develops almost entirely into males, which are still sterilized.

Producing only males could roughly double the number of useful insects generated by a factory and may allow a lower radiation dose, enabling the released males to be more competitive with wild flies.

The other engineered fly under development, Knockout SWD, uses genetics to handle both sex selection and sterilization. The underlying method is called precision-guided sterile insect technique, or pgSIT. It relies on two genetically engineered breeding that produce sterile offspring they mate with one another.

One line carries Cas9, a protein that acts like a pair of molecular scissors. The other carries guide RNAs, short molecules that provide Cas9 with a target in the genome. When the two lines are crossed, their offspring inherit both the scissors and the target for them. Cas9 then cuts genes required for normal female development and male fertility. The females fail to develop normally, while the surviving males are sterile.

Researchers are now trying to extend this precision sterilization approach to screwworm. The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research committed $150,000 this summer toward a project with Agragene and North Carolina State University to use CRISPR to produce sterile males without irradiation.

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Replacing spraying with egg-laying

Genetic biocontrol, the broader approach that these techniques fit under, gives farmers, ranchers, and other pest managers an alternative to spraying chemical insecticides.

Putting aside the risk some insecticides pose to farmworkers and ecosystems, spraying them is expensive and a logistical pain. Consider the Spotted-wing drosophila. Unlike most fruit flies, which lay eggs in damaged or rotting fruit, Spotted-wing drosophila cuts into healthy, ripening berries and cherries and deposits its eggs inside where the larvae will be protected from insecticides once they hatch.

Growers therefore spray preventively during ripening and harvest, often spraying weekly and rotating among different insecticides to slow the evolution of resistant flies. Unfortunately, some populations of flies have already evolved resistance to several classes of insecticides—pyrethroids and spinosyxns including spinosad, a mainstay of both conventional and organic production.

PgSIT, like other sterile insect technique programs, would allow growers to spray less often by suppressing and potentially eradicating fly populations before they start damaging crops. That can save growers money and also spare bees, predatory insects, and other organisms that might otherwise be harmed by conventional insecticides.

Many of those benefits can be seen in past sterile insect programs such as one that targeted the pink bollworm. For decades, the moth was one of the most destructive pests of cotton in the American Southwest. A program that combined sterile moth releases with cotton varieties genetically engineered to produce insecticidal Bt proteins effectively eradicated the moth. Arizona’s pink bollworm population fell from more than 2 billion in 2005 to zero in 2013, and growers were able to reduce insecticide treatments against all cotton pests by 82 percent, saving more than $500 million. Beneficial insects recovered as well, further helping farmers control pests with fewer sprays.

Genetically engineered insects could extend this success to pests that remain impractical to control with conventional sterile releases. Researchers have developed and studied self-limiting diamondback moths, a pest of cabbage, broccoli, and other brassicas, whose female offspring die after engineered males mate with wild females. A similar system for fall armyworm, one of the world’s most destructive crop pests, has been widely tested and even approved for commercial use in Brazil. Just this August, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) announced a nearly $2.5 million grant, matched by the Almond Board of California, to develop male-only navel orangeworms, the most destructive pest for California’s tree nut growers. And USDA is supporting further genetic-control research on various fruit flies, the spotted lanternfly, and other agricultural pests.

Some female-lethal systems could provide a second benefit: reversing the spread of insecticide resistance. Unlike pgSIT males, which are sterile, males in these systems can father surviving sons. If the males carry insecticide- or Bt-susceptible genes, their sons reintroduce susceptibility into the wild population even as their engineered sisters die and reduce their population, as several studies have demonstrated with the diamondback moth. It is a distinct strategy from sterile-insect control, but one that could help preserve the useful life of both chemical insecticides and insect-resistant crops.

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Driving a population to collapse

Genetic biocontrol’s potential extends far beyond farms. Government agencies, including around the US, still rely heavily on insecticides to suppress mosquito species that transmit dengue, Zika, West Nile virus, and other diseases. Repeated spraying is expensive, often misses breeding sites, exposes non-target insects, and selects for resistance.

Researchers have already adapted pgSIT to Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species that primarily spreads dengue and other viruses in urban areas. Other self-limiting engineered mosquitoes have reduced local Aedes populations in field trials.

Gene drives occupy a more powerful and less reversible branch of the same research. Rather than disappearing when releases stop, they bias inheritance so that an engineered trait can spread through a population. In one landmark experiment, a CRISPR drive targeting a gene required for female development spread through large indoor populations of the mosquito species that transmits malaria and caused them to collapse within several generations. Yet no insect gene drive has been released. Because they are designed to persist and spread, they require a different level of ecological assessment, regulatory oversight, and public consent than self-limiting systems, which has slowed progress.

Nonetheless, gene drives and other types of genetic control could eventually be applied to other pests that make people sick. Researchers are developing the genetic tools that would be needed to control ticks. The work remains perhaps a decade or more behind mosquitos, according to Dr. Gulia-Nuss who leads a lab focused on ticks and mosquitos at University of Nevada, Reno. Ticks’ longer life cycle and need to feed on a live host make sterile release less practical. But once genome engineering techniques are better established for them, it may be possible to develop gene drives to suppress their populations—perhaps first for cattle fever ticks, which have shorter lifecycles, but eventually for the species that carry Lyme disease and cause alpha-gal syndrome.

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Engineering the needed research and regulations

The original screwworm campaign succeeded because the Department of Agriculture supported it from research through scale-up. It funded the initial research, but also worked to improve the sterile insect technique and to conduct the actual rearing, dispersal and monitoring of the flies.

The next generation of genetic biocontrol needs a similar level of institutional commitment. NovoFly grew out of decades of USDA research and collaboration with North Carolina State. PgSIT emerged from university research supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and other public funders. Private companies can build upon this foundational research to develop products. But they need the government as a partner in developing insect factories and studying ecological impacts.

Public R&D will remain critical to improving genetic biocontrol and also extending it to more species. Many are too difficult to genetically engineer and study in field trials for companies to take the risk to invest in them.

Regulators play a critical role as well. EPA’s review of NovoFly and Knockout SWD could establish a clear pathway for other companies to follow, helping unlock financing and interest in the field. It lays out many of the key questions regulators must know: How often do females survive the production process? How often are released males fertile? What steps are being taken to ensure breeding lines can’t escape? How well do released males compete with wild males? How far do they disperse? Wherever possible, EPA should make it clear what evidence it needs, what types of studies are needed to establish it, and what protocols must be followed for deployment.

The return of the New World screwworm has brought with it an old lesson. Pest control doesn’t have to involve spreading a poison and hoping it reaches the target. Sometimes the best insecticide for the job is one that hatches and flies away, leaving little trace and no descendants.

Scientists with the U.S. government invented that approach nearly a century ago. Genetic engineering can now make it cheaper, more scalable, and useful against many more pests. Realizing that promise will require patient research, support for operational scale-up, and regulations designed to let innovations move as quickly as the insects they’re designed to stop.

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