Photo courtesy of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).
Happy Earth Day!
I know things may not feel happy regarding the environment.
Here’s how things may feel to you right now: like an actual dumpster fire.
Photo by Toms River Fire Dept on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Or this might describe how everything feels:
Photo by fikry anshor on Unsplash.
But I’m asking you not to give up hope.
We have to keep trying.
“You dodge despair by not taking the deluge of problems full-bore. You focus on what can work, what can help, or what you can do, and you seize it, and then – you don’t let go…That’s what hope is: the belief that things can get better. The world belongs to people who don’t give up.” -Carl Safina, Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth’s Last Dinosaur
What can you do?
You can do any of the following at any time. You don’t need a special day to do them!
Love.
Back in my 2019 Earth Day article, I wrote: “Love the Earth. Then help spread that love.” Let’s spread love to every person and creature on Earth, too. We need it now more than ever!
Digital art by Gianluca from Pixabay.
Plant a tree.
Arbor Day is Friday, April 25, 2025. And if you can’t plant one on Arbor Day, go plant a tree any day!
“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is now.” -Proverb
Photo by Eyoel Kahssay on Unsplash.
Clean up trash.
Go to a trash clean-up event. If there isn’t one, pick an area where you like to hike or walk, and bring a trash bag with you. Bring some friends!
Photo by OCG Saving The Ocean on Unsplash.
Gather.
Get together with like-minded people. We all must come together and understand the big, important challenges when it comes to the environment.
“To be on the same page, you must first read from the same book.” —Joshua Fields Millburn
Photo by bradford zak on Unsplash.
Get out in nature.
Go for a walk or a hike. Bring your dog! Travel to the closest waterfall or lake and take in its beauty. Jog in the park, play on a playground, or ride a bike. It doesn’t matter where or how. Just get outside. Take in nature, breathe fresh air.
“I really believe that nature is everybody’s mother – and I think our disconnection from it is the reason for so many of the problems we have now. We haven’t experienced nature, neither its beauty nor its nourishment.” Alice Waters, Coming To My Senses
Photo by Etienne Swanepoel on Unsplash.
Learn.
We are the only species that intentionally harms their own habitat. We need to change that. We need to understand that pollution only destroys our health; that plastic production is growing exponentially while recycling is a lie; that biodiversity is essential for the health of our planet; that the climate crisis is here and present and has never been a hoax. There are so many solutions out there, but we cannot wait for governments and corporations to do the right thing, because they won’t. That’s why we all need to learn more about these topics.
Donate.
Giving feels good. Whether you’re donating money to your favorite cause or place of worship, donating used towels to the local pet shelter, donating time to a soup kitchen, planting trees with a local college, giving blood at a blood drive, or building houses with Habitat for Humanity, it all feels good!
“The surest path to contentment is generosity. Giving forces us to recognize all we possess and all we have to offer. It allows us to find fulfillment and purpose in helping others.” -Joshua Becker
Advocate.
Advocate for the environment. Tell lawmakers and corporations that you want change. The best way to inform them is to affect their bottom line and stop rampant consumerism. For example, if we all stopped buying plastic straws tomorrow and stopped patronizing restaurants that serve them, the production of plastic straws would drop dramatically. The same with fast fashion (aka cheap clothing), new cars, and cheap plastic toys.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” -Margaret Mead
Use less plastic.
Avoid buying plastic items or items with excessive plastic packaging. There are so. many. alternatives!
Photo by Onno Blaauw on Unsplash.
“Each and every one of us holds the power to create change through the everyday choices that we make: what we choose to eat, what we purchase, how we get to work, who we vote for, which businesses we support. We all have a role to play. But, we all must begin to act and act now.” -Geoff Blackwell and Ruth Hobday, Human Nature: Planet Earth In Our Time, Twelve Photographers Address the Future of the Environment
Small things matter.
Sometimes we can spread love through food. I’m baking Earth Day cookies and bringing them to work to share with my coworkers tomorrow. Of course, I’ll save some for my son, too!
Leave me a comment below to let me know how you celebrated Earth Day! Thanks for reading, please share and subscribe!
“Mermaid’s Grotto,” by Marie Cullis, 2023. Plastic pieces collected from the beach in Duck, North Carolina. Background is acrylic paint on wood board. Copyright Marie Cullis.
About
This was my second plastic art project from beach trash my family collected. We collected the pieces in 2022 and I created this plastic ocean scene in the fall of 2023. Like my previous piece, some of the items are highly recognizable, like the goggles, plastic fork, bottle caps, dental picks, straws, and of course, a broken mermaid doll. Measures 24″ x 24″.
Picking Up Beach Trash
Sunset from our balcony in Duck, North Carolina, June 2022.
My family vacationed on the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 2022, traveling to many of the towns up and down the barrier islands. But we stayed in Duck, North Carolina, which is where many of our beach walks and swim days happened. As usual, we picked up trash on all of our walks. When we returned to our rental, I saved as many pieces as I could for a future art piece and washed them. These are a few of the trash piles resulting from the bags of trash we picked up and emptied:
I had quite a bit to sort through! We found several big pieces, but we found many more small pieces of plastic on this end of the island. Especially in the less populated areas of the beach. Those are wonderful to both get off the beach and to use in plastic art projects.
Items We Didn’t Keep
Since we had a long way to travel and a small car, I had to limit what I carted home to a single bag. So, first I decided to recycle all I could – water bottles, soda bottles, paper, and plastic from products like the Sun In and Hawaiian Tropic sunscreen. I opted to throw away very dirty pieces, socks and degraded plastic films. We left behind beach toys for the next family and kept a few too, like these diving toys:
These barnacled and very dirty snorkel goggles were super cool, but there was no way to clean them enough to travel home with. So I took multiple photos of them:
Another cool item that I didn’t keep was this work or fishing glove because it had so many things stuck to it!
My Process
I washed everything again when I returned home and dried it thoroughly before storing it for my art project (it was over a year before I had time to work on the art project).
When I found the broken mermaid doll, I immediately knew this would be the center of my piece. Inspired by The Little Mermaid, this piece of art came together using plastic pieces that look like everyday items, as if she’d collected the items from shipwrecks. Plastic caps became cups and kitchen items. I turned candy wrappers into purses. Other plastic pieces became tools or beauty items, such as the paintbrush, flower barrette, and mini bubble wands. And of course, I had a piece of a fork – that is, a dinglehopper!
Additionally, plastic parts from fireworks became jellyfish and stars. There is a cellophane sun in the upper right corner. Water bottle caps appear as bubbles. Solo cup pieces became sea plants.
I bought a medium-sized piece of wood, a 24-inch square, at the hardware store. I painted the background with acrylic paint.
The Final Piece
I used Tacky Glue to attach the pieces. I forgot to take photos as the project progressed, though it came together pretty quickly. In this detail, to right of the mermaid doll, you can “items” stacked on her “shelves” that look like beauty item, kitchen items, and maybe even tools. She’s also holding a “purse” and a “wand”:
In the next detail, to the left of the mermaid doll, you can other items such as a paintbrush, part of a pen, a straw, caps, a Swisher Sweets tip, and a disposable razor handle. Below are a couple of “purses” I made from plastic string and wrappers we found. Above those is a plastic piece that looks like a fish!
The next image, showing the bottom right corner, are larger items I used to create sort of a storage bin of items which includes nylon rope, a juice or milk bottle, straws, bottle caps, broken toys, two pairs of broken glasses, and other miscellaneous plastic parts.
Below, in the left corner, I made sea plants from various plastic items including red and yellow broken Solo cups, foam, nylon rope fragments, coiled keychain, orange and black plastic pieces, and green plastic string pieces that likely came from a beach chair that was falling apart.
For these jellyfish, I used the plastic from exploded fireworks and plastic ribbon pieces for the tentacles, and plastic wrappers and film bundled on top to create the bodies.
Next
Since I did not use all of the pieces from our Outer Banks trip, I’m saving those for a future art project or teaching project.
My next project is going to be created from items I collected on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, during a holiday weekend. Stay tuned for my article on that Plastic Art project!
Feel free to check out my Plastic Art Projects page for other projects that people have done. If you have a plastic trash art piece you’d like to share, please leave me a comment below! Thank you for reading, please share and subscribe!
Photo of “St. Augustine, Florida 2021” by Marie Cullis.
About
This was my first plastic art project from beach trash I collected. I collected the pieces in 2021 and created this plastic ocean scene in the summer of 2023. Some of the items are highly recognizable, like the toothbrush, plastic spoons, and dental pick. There’s even the rolled end of an old latex condom in there (sanitized, of course). Measures 12″ x 12″.
Picking Up Beach Trash
My family and I have always picked up trash at beaches wherever and whenever we get to visit them. In fact, on our honeymoon, my husband helped me clean up tires and other debris from St. Pete Beach in Florida. We dutifully bag up collected trash and put it in a dumpster or covered trash receptacle. We donate items like unbroken beach toys and usable clothing (after cleaning).
We spent a week at the beach in St. Augustine, Florida in October 2021, and as usual, we collected all sorts of trash and plastic pieces. This time, I cleaned and saved some of it for a future art piece.
I Didn’t Keep EveryPiece
First, I separated the undesirable, donatable, recyclable, and other miscellaneous items that I didn’t intend to use in my artwork. This included items such as a glass bottle we found in the surf (since glass is fully recyclable) that had living barnacles attached to it:
We carefully removed the barnacles and put them back in the water. I couldn’t leave a glass bottle in the surf for obvious reasons, so we tried our best to save the creatures.
Other items I didn’t keep for artwork included rusty metal cans, recyclable plastic water bottles, complete beach toys (which I donated), and oversized objects. Additionally, there was a large white blanket (which we washed and donated), a crusty hat brim, and a used vape pen (which, though pretty, I threw away due to concerns about leftover chemicals):
A large white blanket we found on a night walk.
Vape pen, pretty but possibly toxic.
Baseball hat brim, covered in sticky sand.
Last, I found this unidentifiable gelatinous piece, which I then believed to be plastic but have now discovered that it may have been a washed-up tunicate, colloquially called a ‘sea pork’:1
My Process
While we were still on vacation, I rinsed everything I planned to cart home. In groups, I washed all the pieces thoroughly in dish soap and water and then laid them out to dry:
I began by painting a sea background on a square piece of wood using acrylic paint. Next, I arranged the plastic pieces, starting with the largest ones, and secured them with glue. At first, I didn’t have a clear vision, but as I experimented with the pieces—arranging and rearranging them like a puzzle—a fishing scene gradually emerged. Here’s a progression of the piece:
Completed art piece by Marie Cullis.
So we have a fisherperson paddling a boat, hauling ‘sea treasures’ in a net behind them, while a giant fish, a jellyfish, and other sea creatures swim below near a coral reef. Last, I took a soda bottle cap, wrote the title on it, and glued it near the top, as if it represented the sun.
Next
Since this was a small board (12″x12″), I did not use all of the trash pieces, so I’ve saved those for a future art project or teaching project!
My next project was created from items I collected in Duck, North Carolina, in the Outer Banks. Read my article on Plastic Art Project #2!
Feel free to check out my Plastic Art Projects page for other projects that people have done. If you have a plastic trash art piece you’d like to share, please leave me a comment below! Thank you for reading, please share and subscribe!
I haven’t published much since the November 2024 election, mostly because I don’t know what to write about. I feel like I’m at a loss and am grieving. Like all hope is lost.
I feel like the climate crisis fight is over.
I feel like there’s nothing more to say. Half of us voted against the climate crisis and environmental issues and endangered species. The half of us who care about our environment lost the election.
I have cried and I am sad. I want to hug a tree and save the polar bears and protect the sea turtles.
The Climate is not Political
I am angry. I hate politics and I hate money – though don’t misunderstand, I know we need politics in a democracy and we need money to survive. I just wish ethics ruled and money didn’t.
I can’t remain politically neutral anymore, mainly because the climate crisis and environmentalism have become left-aligned. These are NOT POLITICAL ISSUES though, and they never should have been. I am angry with those politicians who made it a political issue.
Humans will suffer with rising sea levels and the coral reefs will die out. Rainforests, which are like the Earth’s lungs, will perish. Human activity and climate change are killing off our species at an extremely high rate. And we’re next, as we endanger our own existence and that of our children.
These issues are actually SURVIVAL issues. We cannot survive without a specific climate, plant and animal biodiversity, or clean air, water, and soil.
Photo by Ivan Radic on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).
The Election
The election happened. Trump, the Republican right, and their allies won the presidency, the Senate, the House, and they have the Supreme Court too. They’ve been telling us what they want to do all along, even publishing their plans in a manifesto called Project 2025. They fully plan to trash any plans related to improving the environment or curbing the climate crisis. They’ve been clear about this.
“To say that you’re going to increase fossil fuel production and then to turn around and promise people clean air and clean water is clueless.” -Ben Jealous, Executive Director of the Sierra Club1
New Leaders
The people Trump is choosing for his cabinet are often unqualified and anti-environment. For example, Chris Wright, a fracking magnate, is the confirmed U.S. Energy Secretary. He makes a moral case for fossil fuels! He explained that “the world’s poorest people need oil, gas and coal to realize the benefits of modern life that Americans and others in rich nations take for granted. Only fossil fuels, he says, can bring prosperity to millions who still burn wood, dung or charcoal for basic needs like cooking food and heating homes.”2
Lee Zeldin is confirmed as the leader of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where he will dismantle environmental regulations and reduce the EPA itself, per Project 2025. Zeldin has little experience in environmentalism and has taken money from fossil fuel companies. Environmental regulations seem doomed. “He is expected to work to erase rules to fight climate change and chemical pollution, while shutting down programs designed to help poor and minority communities that are disproportionately affected by pollution.”3
There are dozens of federal agencies being shuttered or at risk of being closed. Federal employees have already been furloughed or laid off entirely. The Trump administration has warned more than 1,100 Environmental Protection Agency employees that they could be fired at any time. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) might be on the chopping block next.
The Climate Crisis is about to get a whole lot worse
Photo by Maria Lupan on Unsplash.
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill.” -Donald J. Trump4
Climate change is no hoax. A warmer climate is causing stronger storms and worse natural disasters. This is causing human suffering across the planet. As Lisa Friedman recently wrote in the New York Times, “On the heels of the hottest year in recorded history, one that brought the planet to a dangerous temperature threshold, President Trump effectively told the world on [January 20] that the United States is out of the climate fight.”5 Trump is withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement. He wants to curb the expansion of renewable energy efforts, expand oil drilling, and end federal regulation of dangerous emissions from fossil fuels.
This is after global temperatures reached record highs last year in 2024. We have surpassed the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels that scientists warned us against. They indicate that “every fraction of a degree of warming above that level brings greater risks from deadly heat waves, wildfires, drought, storms and species extinction.”6
“Mr. Trump ordered the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement on global warming for a second time. He initiated plans to open vast areas of public land and federal waters, including fragile wilderness in Alaska, for oil drilling and mining. He ordered the elimination of government offices and programs aimed at protecting poor communities from pollution. And he said he would repeal regulations aimed at promoting electric vehicles and would halt approvals of new wind farms in federal waters.” –New York Times7
The glaciers are melting. Scientists studying the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica discovered that it is “melting at an accelerating rate and could be on an irreversible path to collapse…Thwaites holds enough water to increase sea levels by more than 2 feet. But because it also acts like a cork, holding back the vast Antarctic ice sheet, its collapse could ultimately lead to around 10 feet of sea level rise, devastating coastal communities from Miami and London to Bangladesh and the Pacific Islands.”8 Countries like Vanuatu have already experienced sea level rise and had to relocate an entire village because of it.
Worse, without United States leadership on the climate crisis, other countries are less likely to put forth efforts to curb the crisis.
Photo by Tania Malréchauffé on Unsplash.
The Climate Crisis is Creating an Insurance Crisis
Parts of the Los Angeles area burned to the ground and the Trump administration and Congress can’t agree on distributing aid to the thousands who lost everything. In fact, they want to shut down the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Some of the people in California lost their homeowners insurance before the crisis! Increasingly, insurance is getting more difficult to obtain and more expensive. This is a direct result of climate change. “As climate-fueled disasters get worse, home insurance is becoming a money-losing business in more of the country. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home.”9 Perhaps the elites want everyone to be renters, ensuring we remain dependent on them.
“Nationally, over the past decade, insurers paid out more in claims than they received in premiums, and, since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped.”10
Photo by Ross Stone on Unsplash.
Where do we go from here?
Everything might get worse before it gets better, especially for the environment. Changes to the Constitution could hurt our economy or even lead to war.
Are we transitioning to an oligarchy? Wealthy elites and billionaires are calling the shots. Forbes reported that at least 26 billionaires donated to Trump’s campaign. The main industries among these backers are casinos, finance, and oil and gas. What is their number one priority? Money. Not climate or trees or polar bears or humanitarian causes or philanthropy. One, in particular, wants to figure out how to live on Mars. Why don’t we just protect the beautiful planet and life we already have?
I wish he’d go to Mars. We don’t want him on Earth!
These billionaires support Trump due to money and greed, not because they believe he will do the right thing.
Because everyone knows Trump won’t do the right thing.
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash.
I’m here to tell you that we should not despair. There are so many of us who feel powerless and alone. But we aren’t alone. We need to come together, unite, and stand up. We can’t give up, and we can’t keep quiet. We must object, call on our representatives, and protest.
What other choice do we have?
UPDATE February 10, 2025:
Trump is planning to sign an executive order to end a Biden administration plan that would have phased out plastic straws and switched to paper straws within the federal government. “Back to plastic,” he says, regarding the straws. As the New York Times explained, “The U.S. government is considered the world’s biggest buyer of consumer goods, and its planned shift away from plastic had been considered a significant milestone in a global effort to tackle a plastics pollution crisis.”11 Is this really what we need to spend our time on – reversing a plan to eliminate one single type of plastic? It must be important to the billionaire oil executives who support and donate to Trump, since plastic is made from fossil fuels.
Footnotes:
Article, “Trump’s questionable ‘clean water and clean air’ claims,” by David Gelles, Climate Forward newsletter, New York Times, October 29, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous,” by Lisa Friedman, New York Times, December 12, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “Senate Confirms Lee Zeldin to Head E.P.A.,”by Coral Davenport, New York Times, January 29, 2025. ↩︎
Article, “Trump Signs Orders to Promote Fossil Fuels and End Climate Policies,” by Lisa Friedman, Brad Plumer, Rebecca F. Elliott, and Eric Lipton, New York Times, January 20, 2025. ↩︎
Article, “3 of Trump’s most important executive orders on climate,” by Lisa Friedman, Climate Forward newsletter, New York Times, January 21, 2025. ↩︎
Article, “A Big Climate Goal Is Getting Farther Out of Reach,” by Brad Plumer and Mira Rojanasakul, New York Times, updated November 15, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “Trump Signs Orders to Promote Fossil Fuels and End Climate Policies,” by Lisa Friedman, Brad Plumer, Rebecca F. Elliott, and Eric Lipton, New York Times, January 20, 2025. ↩︎
Article, “Scientists looked deep beneath the Doomsday Glacier. What they found spells potential disaster for the planet,” by Laura Paddison, cnn.com, September 20, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “A climate crisis at your doorstep,” by Christopher Flavelle, Climate Forward newsletter, New York Times, December 19, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “A climate crisis at your doorstep,” by Christopher Flavelle, Climate Forward newsletter, New York Times, December 19, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “‘BACK TO PLASTIC’: Trump Vows to Keep the Government on Plastic Straws,” by Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times, February 7, 2025. ↩︎
Toilet paper is something we use every single day. It’s something we don’t question. It’s a given in our culture. We take it for granted. We even hoard it!
But are there alternatives to toilet paper?
Bidets
Modern bidet. Photo by Basan1980 at German Wikipedia/Wikimedia.
A bidet is a bathroom fixture much like an additional toilet, used for washing your ‘bathroom’ areas. “The classic bidet is a miniature, bathtub-like fixture situated next to the toilet, with taps on one end. Its tub is filled with water, and the user straddles themselves over it to wash below the belt,” an article in The Atlantic described.1 Bidets have adjustable water pressure, temperature, and sometimes a drying function. They are considered very hygienic and they are eco-friendly alternatives to toilet paper. But bidets are more popular in Europe, Japan, and Venezuela than in North America.
Does the use of a bidet reduce toilet paper consumption, and hence save trees? Yes, according to an article in Scientific American, they save trees and also they save water, from the production of toilet paper!2
I’d love to try this but there is just no room in our small bathroom. But in a future residence, perhaps!
Wipes
First, do not buy disposable wipes – even if they use words like ‘flushable’ or ‘septic-safe’ or ‘biodegradable’ on the packaging. They might even be sold in green packaging, like the example above. They are most likely made of plastic, are not biodegradable, and cause major damage to sewer systems. “Once flushed, the wipes glom together with any fat from food waste and can form what are called “fatbergs”—iceberg-style blockages that can clog a whole system.”3 They are expensive to extract and it is costly to repair the damage they cause. Disposable wipes also end up in waterways, the ocean, and beaches.
If you must buy these, please throw them in the trash can – even if they are advertised as ‘flushable.’
Cloth wipes, sometimes referred to as family cloths or reusable toilet paper, are reusable cloth wipes that you launder after each use. I had a family member who made her own to use while she was pregnant because she was peeing so frequently – brilliant! Many people have strong opinions for and against this process.4 I sewed some family cloths for our home to use instead of disposable wet wipes. I simply took cotton flannel scraps and old t-shirt fabric and made two-layer rectangular wipes. We have found them very useful as a supplement. We rinse them out after use and wash them in the washing machine.
Family cloths, very similar to the ones I’ve made. Photo by Joan on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Paper Scraps
I’ve never tried this, but in a pinch, why not? Especially paper already bound for the trash or recycling. Just don’t flush the paper scraps – throw them in the trash!
Leaves
This is a classic, reliable option for camping or hiking. Many of us have had to do it at one time or another. However, I don’t recommend this one for home use. And definitely don’t flush them. I’ve seen how leaves clog up my gutters, so I can’t imagine what they’d do to my drainage pipes.
Tree-Free Toilet Paper
Toilet paper rolls from Who Gives A Crap. Photo by Marie Cullis.
This is my favorite! I first wrote about plastic-free, recycled toilet paper in 2018, specifically about the company Who Gives A Crap. They make both recycled and bamboo-sourced toilet paper. You can read all about it here.
Other Ideas?
Have you tried one of these alternatives, or another that I did not cover? I’d love to know if you’ve thought of something else, leave me a comment! Thank you for reading, and please share and subscribe.
I don’t usually write about politics, and especially not elections. But this year is different.
The stakes are super high.
If Trump wins, his administration will enact an initiative called Project 2025. Written by the Heritage Foundation, is the far-right’s 900-page policy playbook (their words, not mine) for the next Republican president. If you’re not familiar, I encourage you to learn about it.1 It changes many things, from the basic structure of our government to demolishing the Department of Education, to mass deportations and the reduction of human rights. Many in the Republican Party take it very seriously.
Today I want to tell you how Project 2025 will harm us, the environment, and the climate crisis. It will halt all progress on the climate crisis and worsen, especially since the U.S. is one of the biggest contributors to climate change.
Simply put, Project 2025 “seeks to gut the country’s 250-year-old system of checks and balances in order to implement extreme policies that would increase global temperatures and undercut developing countries’ efforts to remain resilient in the face of climate impacts.”2
It saddens me to write this article and I’ve avoided it for a long time.
But with the election upon us and the polls so closely tied, I think people should know the risks.
“Simply put, Project 2025 would be game over for climate progress.” -Sierra Club3
Project 2025 Will Negatively Impact the Environment
We will become a nation of “Profit over Planet” if we elect Trump. Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.
“An analysis conducted by the United Kingdom-based Carbon Brief found that a Trump presidency would lead to 400 billion metric tons of additional emissions in the U.S. by 2030 — the emissions output of the European Union and Japan combined.” -Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections4
Project 2025 tells us exactly what the far-right intends to do. They’re not even trying to hide it – they’ve published it! You can download the book for free and read it yourself.
But protecting the environment, endangered species, and climate change are not part of their agenda. They intend to roll back many environment-related laws and policies. Here are the highlights of Project 2025’s goals regarding the environment, courtesy of the Sierra Club:
“Eliminating or rolling back safeguards that protect Americans’ access to clean air, clean drinking water, and protected public lands.
Handing our public lands over to oil and gas companies to drill whenever and wherever they want, including in some of our most precious and pristine public lands, while leaving us to deal with the pollution and toxic waste they leave behind.
Halting all government action to reach our climate goals, putting Americans and the U.S. economy at further risk of more extreme weather and a faster-warming planet.
Privatizing the National Weather Service and preventing it from forecasting extreme weather events and providing research on the advancing climate crisis.”5
In short, “The document calls for ‘unleashing all of America’s energy resources’ by eliminating federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands, curtailing federal investments in renewable energy technologies, and easing environmental permitting restrictions and procedures for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants.”6
Project 2025 intends to let the oil and gas corporations take the lead, because of greed. The authors of Project 2025 erroneously wrote, “Environmental ideologues would ban the fuels that run almost all of the world’s cars, planes, factories, farms, and electricity grids.” This is nowhere close to the truth. No one wants to ban these fuels. We want to reduce our reliance on them. Project 2025 advises that “The next conservative President should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offense, asserting them around the world. America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth.”7 But we know that there are many other sources of economic growth.
“[Project 2025] would effectively abandon America’s critical leadership role in addressing the climate crisis.” -Center for American Progress8
Moreover, Project 2025 recommends withdrawing the U.S. from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement. Trump already withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement during his first term.
“If enacted, the policies proposed in Project 2025 would seriously jeopardize the world’s ability to avoid the worst impacts of climate change associated with breaching the 1.5 degree Celsius temperature rise limit set out in the Paris Agreement.” -Center for American Progress9
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.
Project 2025 intends to reduce the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They will mandate that states handle their own environmental issues. The playbook indicates that the federal EPA can provide some expertise, a few resources, and be supportive under the guise that the people living in states should make decisions about where they live. “EPA’s structure and mission should be greatly circumscribed to reflect the principles of cooperative federalism and limited government. This will require significant restructuring and streamlining of the agency.”10 However, the states have never had the resources to manage environmental problems, often created by wealthy corporations. This is why the EPA was established in the first place.
“The environmental oversight capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency would be curbed significantly or eliminated altogether, preventing these agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, and conducting climate change research.” -Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections11
Furthermore, when regulating the dumping of chemicals or agricultural runoff into a river, a state downstream would have no authority over what an upstream state discharges. This could result in the upstream state inadvertently polluting the water for those downstream. State-level regulation alone is insufficient to protect people from environmental pollution and toxic chemicals.
What this is really about is profit from energy, whether dirty or clean. The government wants to profit, and ensure its corporate affiliates profit to the fullest extent from energy production. The language in Project 2025, such as that “bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rulemaking processes,” is just ridiculous.12
Project 2025 specifically calls out the Obama and Biden Administrations for pursuing renewable energy. Renewable anything, is a no-brainer. Of course we should be looking at renewable energy. But the authors use inflammatory language to describe their version of recent history: “The Biden Administration’s assault on the energy sector as the Administration uses its regulatory might to make coal, oil, and natural gas operations very expensive and increasingly inaccessible while forcing the economy to build out and rely on unreliable renewables. This approach has also been applied to pesticides and chemicals as the Biden Administration pushes the ‘greening’ of agriculture and manufacturing among other industrial activities.”13
There is no assault on the energy sector. Those administrations are trying to reduce our sole reliance on fossil fuels, not ban them. We lack the infrastructure needed to eliminate their total use anyway. And the ‘greening’ of pesticides and chemicals is weak among all administrations – we are exposed to toxic chemicals in everything. We certainly don’t need more chemical exposure!
The absurd language in Project 2025 persists: “Although the U.S. environmental story is very positive, there has been a return to fear-based rhetoric within the agency, especially as it pertains to the perceived threat of climate change. Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.”14 Again, the science about the changing climate is clear and climate change is not a perception. There is a ninety-seven percent consensus among scientists across the world. And no side or administration is trying to scare Americans.
“In effect, the Biden EPA has once again presented a false choice to the American people: that they have to choose between a healthy environment and a strong, growing economy.”15 This is false. This is not anything close to what the Biden Administration, or any other administration, has ever indicated. Not once.
“[Project 2025] would also undermine the country’s extensive network of environmental and climate policies and alter the future of American fossil fuel production, climate action, and environmental justice.” -Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections11
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Photo courtesy of NOAA Photo Library on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) mission is “to better understand our natural world and help protect its precious resources extends beyond national borders to monitor global weather and climate, and work with partners around the world.” The organization states that “From daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings, and climate monitoring to fisheries management, coastal restoration and supporting marine commerce, NOAA’s products and services support economic vitality and affect more than one-third of America’s gross domestic product.”17 This is an important agency!
But Project 2025 does not agree: “The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”18
NOAA consists of six main offices:
The National Weather Service (NWS)
The National Ocean Service (NOS)
The Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR)
The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS)
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)
The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and NOAA Corps
According to Project 2025: “Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”19
Climate change alarm industry? The only alarm is that the climate is changing. And we have to figure out how we humans can adapt and survive the changes. Or we won’t.
Political Appointees, Not Federal Employees
Photo by Jose M on Unsplash.
Further, Project 2025 intends to “Ensure Appointees Agree with Administration Aims. Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.”20 This refers to the fact that Project 2025 plans to change all federal workers to ‘political appointees’ that align with the conservative right only. They will not appoint anyone who does not align with their beliefs, regardless of education or expertise. This means that no one who believes in environmentalism or climate change will be working for the federal government. That is beyond disturbing.
The National Weather Service
Photo courtesy of NOAA Photo Library on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).
The National Weather Service (NWS) is super important. They provide the very data that provides us with weather predictions and tracks major storms, tornados, hurricanes, flooding, wind, etc. This organization is how we all get our weather data (weekly forecasts) and major announcements (i.e., hurricane warnings).
From Project 2025: “Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”21 There is no debate; the science is clear. And, the NWS is not politically aligned.
So Project 2025 wants to change the NWS: “Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather.”22 The authors cited a study that Accuweather was the most accurate than competitors and implied they are better than NWS – but the National Weather Service was not one of the listed competitors. This is because Accuweather and other weather outlets get their data from the NWS.
The fact is that “NWS forecasts, warnings, and data and products form a national information database and infrastructure used by other governmental agencies, the private sector, the public, and the global community.”23 This is a free service the government provides. Every news and weather station gets their data from the National Weather Service and translates it to us.
If you’ve ever received a flood, tornado, or hurricane warning, that is the National Weather Service.
If you have a weather radio, that is the National Weather Service.
But Project 2025 wants the NWS to fully commercialize its forecasting operations. They believe private companies, like Accuweather, will pay for it. They want the government to sell this information. So it’s really about money and greed.
“[Project 2025] appears to leave the National Hurricane Center intact, saying the data it collects should be ‘presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.’ But the National Hurricane Center pulls much of its data from the National Weather Service, as do most other private weather service companies, and eliminating public weather data could devastate Americans’ access to accurate weather forecasts.” -Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections24
What’s worse, Project 2025 plans to eliminate the National Flood Insurance Program and have flood insurance sold by private insurers. “That notion skates right over the fact that the federal program was initially established because private insurers found that it was economically unfeasible to insure the nation’s flood-prone homes — long before climate change began wreaking havoc on the insurance market.”25 So if you live in a flood zone, you must vote against Trump and Project 2025. Or you’ll likely not be able to afford flood insurance or a new home.
Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research
View of a hurricane from the International Space Station. Image courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).
Project 2025 would seek to downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). OAR, also called NOAA Research, “enables better forecasts, earlier warnings for natural disasters, and a greater understanding of the Earth.”26 The Project 2025 authors wrote, “OAR provides theoretical science, as opposed to the applied science of the National Hurricane Center. OAR is, however, the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded. OAR is a large network of research laboratories, an undersea research center, and several joint research institutes with universities. These operations should be reviewed with an aim of consolidation and reduction of bloat.” We must vote climate deniers out. It is not alarmism nor is it theoretical. We can see climate change every day with our own eyes.
30×30 and America the Beautiful
Photo by Adam Kool on Unsplash.
Under Executive Order 14008, President Biden issued a call to action to conserve, connect, and restore at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030 for the sake of our economy, our health, and our well-being. America the Beautiful is “a decade-long challenge to pursue a locally led and voluntary, nationwide effort to conserve, connect, and restore the lands, waters, and wildlife upon which we all depend,” with eight key principles that help the environment, people, and the economy.27
Project 2025 calls for withdrawing both initiatives. “The 30×30 Executive Order and the American the Beautiful Initiative are being used to advance an agenda to close vast areas of the ocean to commercial activities, including fishing, while rapidly advancing offshore wind energy development to the detriment of fisheries and other existing ocean-based industries.”28 These initiatives would provide for more Marine Protected Areas. We’ve overfished many parts of the ocean, and other activities such as deepsea mining and oil drilling have harmed marine life. If we kill off all of the fish, we aren’t going to have any left.
“Don’t boo. Vote.” -Barack Obama
Endangered Species Act(ESA)
The bald eagle, our national bird, was saved by the removal of DDT and the Endangered Species Act. Image by Dee from Pixabay.
The Trump Administration passed two regulations that limited the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The first one made it easier “to remove a species from the endangered list” and weakened protections for threatened species. Regulators were also “allowed to conduct economic assessments — for instance, estimating lost revenue from a prohibition on logging in a critical habitat — when deciding whether a species warrants protection.”29 It also made it more difficult for regulators to factor in climate change.
The second Trump Administration regulation limited the definition of ‘critical habitat’ for imperiled species and required regulators not to designate areas as critical habitat if there would be greater economic benefit from developing them.30 AP News wrote that this “forced the agency to disprove ‘speculative claims of economic harm made by industries such as mining, logging, and oil and gas’ as they sought to extract resources from public lands,” citing Earthjustice.org.31 The Biden Administration repealed both. Project 2025 calls to “rescind the Biden rules and reinstate the Trump rules regarding” the Endangered Species Act rules defining Critical Habitat and Critical Habitat Exclusions.32
But it gets worse.
Project 2025 also wants to:
Delist the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems.
Delist the gray wolf in the lower 48 states under the ESA.
Direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to end its abuse of Section 10(j) of the ESA by re-introducing so-called “experiment species” populations into areas that no longer qualify as habitat and lie outside the historic ranges of those species, which brings with it the full weight of the ESA in areas previously without federal government oversight.33 This means that the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) may designate a listed species as experimental and release them in an area outside of its current range that is also geographically isolated from other populations of the species. “Treating the experimental population as threatened allows the FWS the discretion to devise management programs and special regulations for that population.”34 It is unclear what Project 2025 considers “abuse” of said section, but we can assume it will pose restrictions on the Fish & Wildlife Service’s protections.
Abolish the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and obtain necessary scientific research about species of concern from universities via competitive requests for proposals.35Currently, the “USGS is the biological research arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior, providing unbiased science to support the conservation of public lands and their resources.”36 We don’t need to take the lowest bid on any scientific research, which is the purpose of requests for proposals.
Direct the Fish & Wildlife Service to design and implement an Endangered Species Act program that ensures independent decision-making by ending reliance on so-called species specialists who have obvious self-interest, ideological bias, and land-use agendas. Of course, scientists who study specific species have a vested interest in them and their survival. We wouldn’t want someone without interest to make these decisions.
Modify Regulations Implementing the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. These acts are currently being abused at a cost to fisheries and Native American subsistence activities around the U.S.37 It is not clear what abuses Project 2025 is referring to here. The Marine Mammal Protection Act is a vital law protecting species we are at risk of losing forever.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act(MBTA)
Photo by REGINE THOLEN on Unsplash.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), passed in 1918, prohibits the killing, capturing, selling, trading, and transporting of protected migratory bird species, eggs, and nests without prior authorization by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). “For decades the FWS, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, interpreted the rule to prohibit ‘incidental take’—the unintentional but predictable killing of birds, often at industrial sites. The FWS typically enforced only egregious cases of incidental take, such as when it levied a $100 million fine against BP for the deaths of an estimated one million birds in its 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. But the threat of prosecution gave the government leverage to urge companies to adopt often simple and inexpensive practices to prevent avian deaths, such as covering oil pits and spacing power lines far enough apart to avoid electrocuting raptors.”38 This act protected birds for over one hundred years.
However, in January 2021, the Trump administration implemented a rule permitting companies and individuals to kill migratory birds, provided it was unintentional. Then the Biden administration repealed this rule in September 2021, restoring protections for the birds. Project 2025 plans to reinstate the Trump-era regulations regarding the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA).39
Please Vote Accordingly
Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.
The risks are far above and beyond what I’ve covered here. Project 2025 is a blueprint for completely restructuring the government at almost every level, every department, and every sector. It’s a gut job affecting far more than climate change and the environment. I encourage you to read it for yourself.
I felt it important to highlight some of the proposed changes in Project 2025. Especially with the election less than two weeks away. People deserve to know the devastating effects it could have on our lives, endangered species, and the environment. I’ve only covered a few of the environmental topics in this article. But the more I read of the 900-page document, the worse it gets.
Thank you for reading – please share and subscribe. Most importantly, go vote!
Additional Resources:
Article, “What Project 2025 Would Do to the Environment – and How We Will Respond,” earthjustice.org, August 30, 2024.
Article, “Conservation Groups Say Project 2025 Would Gut Wildlife and Public Land Protections,” sierraclub.org, August 20, 2024.
Blog, “New Modeling Shows How Bad Project 2025 Would Be Compared to a Clean Energy Future,” evergreenaction.com, August 15, 2024.
Footnotes:
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023. Even if you only read the Foreword of this manifesto, you will find the entire basis of the conservative right’s agenda. ↩︎
Article, “Project 2025 Would Jeopardize Global Climate Action,” Center for American Progress, August 19, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “What is Project 2025 and why would it be devastating for the environment?” Sierra Club, accessed October 16, 2016. ↩︎
Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “What is Project 2025 and why would it be devastating for the environment?” Sierra Club, accessed October 16, 2016. ↩︎
Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Foreword. The rhetoric gets even worse, asserting that the left would stop relying on human intelligence, which is insulting: “Abandoning confidence in human resilience and creativity in responding to the challenges of the future would raise impediments to the most meaningful human activities. They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.” ↩︎
Article, “Project 2025 Would Jeopardize Global Climate Action,” Center for American Progress, August 19, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “Project 2025 Would Jeopardize Global Climate Action,” Center for American Progress, August 19, 2024. ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 13, “Environmental Protection Agency.” ↩︎
Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Foreword. ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 13, “Environmental Protection Agency.” ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 13, “Environmental Protection Agency.” ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 13, “Environmental Protection Agency.” ↩︎
Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
Page, “About our agency,” noaa.gov, updated May 2, 2024. ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
Page, “About the NWS: Forecasts and Service,” weather.gov, accessed October 20, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
Page, “About NOAA Research,” noaa.gov, accessed October 22, 2024. ↩︎
Page, “America the Beautiful,” Department of the Interior, accessed October 21, 2024. ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
Article, “U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act,” by Lisa Friedman, New York Times, August 12, 2019. ↩︎
Press Release, “Trump Administration Finalizes Another Rule To Gut Endangered Species Act,” EarthJustice.org, December 17, 2020. ↩︎
Article, “Biden administration reverses Trump endangered species rule,” by John Flesher, AP News, July 21, 2022. ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 16, “Department of the Interior.” ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 16, “Department of the Interior.” ↩︎
Fact Sheet, “What is a 10(j) Rule?,” US Fish & Wildlife Service, October 2018. ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 16, “Department of the Interior.” ↩︎
Page, “Biology,” usgs.gov, accessed October 22, 2024. ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
Article, “Trump to Birds: Drop Dead,” by Andy McGlashen, audubon.org, January 5, 2021. ↩︎
Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 16, “Department of the Interior.” ↩︎
Regardless of its cause or origin, the climate crisis is unfolding right before our eyes, every single day.
I’m tired of holding back when it comes to discussing climate change. From now on, I won’t worry about offending anyone or sparking political debate. Enough is enough.
Climate change and the climate crisis are not hoaxes. They are not, and should never have been, political issues. It’s absurd that they’ve become so polarized, and it infuriates me.
It’s certainly not a partisan issue — it should be a bipartisan one.
An everyone issue.
Because the climate crisis affects everyone, everywhere.
“Were summers this hot when you were a kid? Wasn’t there less torrential rain? Don’t you remember more snow on the ground in winter? However we measure the facts, people are waking up and seeing that the climate is fundamentally different now.” -Erin Brockovich1
The Storms are Getting Stronger
Asheville, North Carolina after Hurricane Helene caused massive destruction. Photo by Bill McMannis on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0).
You don’t have to look very long or very hard to find real-life evidence of the climate crisis. Hurricane Helene, which has taken the lives of over 230 people as of today, is a recent result of the changing climate. This hurricane destroyed areas in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee – where people never expected a storm like this to affect them with such severity. These areas are hundreds of miles inland.
That hurricane also hit Florida and caused massive flooding. Now, another major hurricane—Hurricane Milton—will make landfall in Florida sometime tomorrow. That’s two major storms in just a couple of weeks!
Hurricane Milton “explosively” intensified from a Category 1 storm to a Category 5 in just about 12 hours. This is the strongest storm in the Gulf of Mexico since 2005. Florida hasn’t even had a chance to finish cleaning up from the last storm, and the ground is already saturated. Some areas are still partially buried in feet of sand. This is a terrible situation. UPDATE 10/11/2024: Hurricane Milton made landfall as a Category 3 at Siesta Key, Florida, spawned an unexpected number of tornados, and left a lot of destruction behind. So far, 16 people are dead.
What’s worse, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, doesn’t believe in climate change. In fact, in May 2024, he signed legislation that removed the words “climate change” from many Florida state laws.2 I’m not sure how he ignores the obvious climate issues in his own state.
We’re seeing record-breaking weather extremes in storms and weather patterns. We’re also seeing drastic changes in climate, such as air temperature and ocean temperatures.
Climate change creates a downward spiral because everything in nature connects. The more carbon dioxide, the warmer the planet gets, including the ocean. The warmer the ocean, the more strength hurricanes gain as they develop. The bigger the storm, the more moisture it accumulates. The warm water is their fuel.
“The impact of global warming is obvious with the hurricanes because the frequency is increasing so dramatically, especially over the last 10 or 20 years. The hurricanes are thriving off of the warmer ocean temperatures and intensifying as they’re making landfall, especially in the Gulf of Mexico.” -Dr. Reed Timmer, Extreme Meteorologist3
It’s Hotter
We’ve set heat records every year in recent decades. July 2024 was the warmest July on record for the planet in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 175-year record.4 Last year, 2023 became the warmest year on record for land and ocean areas individually in both hemispheres.5
There have been 14 consecutive months of record-hot global temperatures, spanning from June 2023 through July 2024. This breaks the previous record (May 2015 through May 2016) for longest record-warm global temperature streak in modern record (since 1980). Each month of record global temperatures, compared to the 1991-2020 average, is shown in sequence. Places that were warmer than average are red; places that were cooler than average are blue. Image by NOAA Climate.gov, based on data from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.
Remember when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned of global warming levels reaching 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels? Well, we are already at 1.2°C!6
Here’s what the 1.5°C means: “Climate scientists have long warned that, to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need to drastically cut climate pollution and limit global warming as close as possible to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Every fraction of global warming beyond this level exponentially increases climate harm, as well as the risk of crossing tipping points in the climate system – which would trigger abrupt and irreversible changes and accelerate warming. In other words, tipping points are points of no return.”7 This is the downward spiral I referred to above.
The Ice Really is Melting
Melting glacier ice, Alpefjord, Northeast Greenland National Park. Photo by GRID-Arendal on Flickr, Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Glaciers, of which there are approximately two hundred thousand on the planet, are melting. In daily life, this may not be so evident. However, to those monitoring the glaciers, it is very evident. We have accelerated glacial loss from 6.7 inches per year in the 1980s, to 11 inches per year in the 1990s, to 1.6 feet per year in the 2000s, and to 2.9 feet per year for the 2010s.8 This is directly causing sea level to rise, among many other problems. For example, warmer water expands, furthering the rise.
“Glacier front positions of Jakobshavn Isbræ from Khan et al. (2015) (1850–1985) and CCI products derived from ERS, Sentinel-1 and Landsat data by ENVO (1990–2016). The background map is a Landsat-8 image from 16 August 2016 (from the U.S. Geological Survey). Location names that occur in the text are marked. The inset shows the location of Jakobshavn Isbræ in Greenland.”9
“The blue line shows the current boundary between the Jakobshavn Glacier (right side, light gray) and the floating ice (center, white) between the valley walls (top and bottom, dark gray). The other colored lines show where this boundary was in previous years.” Graphic by Michalea King, Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND).
“The bleak face of rapid climate change is everywhere, from the shattered surfaces of Greenland’s glaciers to the marble-white branches of bleached coral forests; from the increased number of more ferocious storms to the migrations of some marine species to new, cooler locations; accompanied, throughout, by the rapid die-off of other species already stressed by human predation, pollution, and habitat destruction.” -Sylvia A. Earle10
Sea Level is Rising…And Entire Islands are Disappearing
Photo by Chris Boese on Unsplash.
Seas rose in the 1800s by half an inch. The 1900s saw almost 7 inches in sea level rise. In just the first two decades of the 2000s, we’ve reached a rate of 12 inches, and it continues to accelerate. Scientists expect another rise of 10 to 12 inches in just 30 years, by 2050.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the projections for U.S. sea level rise depend on the path we follow. “If we are able to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, U.S. sea level in 2100 is projected to be around 0.6 meters (2 feet) higher on average than it was in 2000. But on a pathway with high greenhouse gas emissions and rapid ice sheet collapse, models project that average sea level rise for the contiguous United States could be 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) by 2100 and 3.9 meters (13 feet) by 2150.”11
Loss of Land
More severe storms, combined with sea level rise, are causing the loss of lands, especially islands. Vanuatu has already relocated one village and the country is one of the most vulnerable to sea level rise. But the Maldives, Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Marshall Islands are at a high risk of island loss as well. In 2018, Hurricane Walaka wiped out a whole island near Hawaii; an island that was a critical habitat for several endangered species.12
“When sea levels rise, people will be displaced – likely those least responsible for the climate crisis…If these peoples are forced to leave a no longer habitable island nation, who is responsible for providing refuge?” -Leah Thomas13
We Must Do Better
What can we do? Yes, we can all make small changes in our daily lives, but the most critical step is voting. Once we’ve voted, we must hold our elected leaders accountable and push them to take meaningful, large-scale actions to slow the climate crisis. While it can no longer be entirely stopped, we can still slow its progress. It’s time to get everyone involved, set aside the “hoax” claims, and focus on moving forward together.
We must do better.
Thank you for reading – share articles like Climate Change, Simply, and subscribe to learn more!
Footnotes:
Book, Superman’s Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We the People Can Do About It, by Erin Brockovich, Pantheon Books, New York, 2020. ↩︎
Transcript, “Florida Gov. DeSantis signs bill that deletes climate change from state law,” Morning Edition, NPR, May 17, 2024. ↩︎
Page, “The hurricane hunter: Meet extreme meteorologist Reed Timmer and his tornado-chasing terrier Gizmo,” News24.com, September 30, 2021. ↩︎
Article, “Global climate summary for July 2024,” by NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information AND Global Precipitation Climatology Project (University of Maryland), August 13, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “Climate Change: Global Temperature,” by Rebecca Lindsey AND LuAnn Dahlman, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, January 18, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “Have we already gone past 1.5 degrees of warming?” by the Climate Council, June 24, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “Have we already gone past 1.5 degrees of warming?” by the Climate Council, June 24, 2024. ↩︎
Article, “Climate Change: Mountain glaciers,” by Rebecca Lindsey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, May 10, 2024. ↩︎
Image from article, “Simulated retreat of Jakobshavn Isbræ since the Little Ice Age controlled by geometry,” The Cryosphere, July 12, 2018. ↩︎
Book, “Ocean: A Global Odyssey,” by Sylvia A. Earle, National Geographic, Washington, D.C., 2021. ↩︎
Article, “Climate Change: Global Sea Level,” by Rebecca Lindsey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, August 22, 2023. ↩︎
Article, “Hurricane Walaka practically wiped an island off the map,” Hawaii News Now, updated October 24, 2018. ↩︎
Book, The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet, by Leah Thomas, Hachette Book Group, New York, 2022. ↩︎
