More than 16,000 chemicals are used to produce plastics — and some are silently killing us.
Particularly worrisome is di-2-ethylhexylphthalate, or DEHP, a chemical used to soften plastic products. Colorless and nearly odorless, DEHP is found in everything from shower curtains and shoes to medical tubing, and it’s long been linked to health harms like cancer.
New research indicates the class of chemicals is also causing deaths due to heart disease, particularly in developing countries. According to a peer-reviewed study published last week in The Lancet eBioMedicine, nearly 350,000 people died in 2018 from exposure to DEHP. The research represents the first global survey of cardiovascular mortality from the chemicals, and it attributes DEHP exposure from plastics to more than 13 percent of all deaths from heart disease among adults aged 55 to 64.
One of the researchers’ most striking findings was a strong geographic disparity in DEHP exposure and related mortality rates. Residents of the Middle East and South Asia, for example, are exposed to up to six times more DEHP than their European counterparts. A greater share of these regions’ cardiovascular deaths was also attributable to the chemicals. Researchers found that in 2018, 10 percent of heart disease-related deaths in the United States and 8 percent in Europe were attributable to DEHP exposure. That figure was as high as 17 percent in the Middle East and South Asia and more than 13 percent in East Asia and the Pacific.
DEHP and other phthalates contribute to cardiovascular mortality in part because they are endocrine disruptors, meaning they interfere with the body’s hormones in ways that can increase the risk of obesity and diabetes. Phthalates also contribute to inflammation, another risk factor for heart disease, and they coexist with micro- and nanoplastics, which were shown in a groundbreaking study last year to increase people’s risk of a heart attack, stroke, or “death from any cause.”
DEHP-laden plastics are like “a wrecking ball” on human tissues, said Leonardo Trasande, a professor of pediatrics at NYU Langone Health and one of the study’s authors. He said policymakers should do more to reduce the use of DEHP in plastic materials, potentially including restrictions on the use of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, the type of plastic in which DEHP is most commonly found. Some typical products made of PVC include pipes, upholstery, and children’s toys, as well as — in some parts of the world — food packaging. Overuse of these products has contributed to widespread DEHP contamination in air, soil, and water.
The study suggests the geographical disparities may be attributable to regional differences in plastic production, chemical regulations, and “underdeveloped waste management sectors.” India, for example, is experiencing a surge in the manufacturing and use of plastic products, including PVC products, and it only recently began to restrict DEHP in food packaging.
Many poorer countries also import plastic waste from abroad, creating another potential route for exposure. Countries like Malaysia, India, and Vietnam have received millions of tons of plastic waste from North America and Europe since 2021 — sometimes illegally, according to analyses of global trade data from the nonprofit Basel Action Network. In 2021, the U.S. alone exported 1.2 billion pounds of plastic waste to developing countries. Much of this plastic may be burned or dumped into unregulated landfills, where it can release chemicals such as DEHP.
Members of a coalition for health and environmental matters sounds the alarm over phthalates in PVC plastic toys during a press briefing in Manila, Philippines, in 2010.
Jay Directo / AFP via Getty Images
The paper builds on a rapidly growing body of evidence that the manufacturing, use, and disposal of plastic creates an outsize burden for the developing world. In 2023, an analysis from the nonprofit World Wide Fund for Nature found that the life-cycle costs of plastics are at least eight times higher for low- and middle-income countries than they are for high-income ones.
To reach their conclusions, Trasande and his team of researchers modeled phthalates’ contribution to cardiovascular mortality using a survey of phthalate concentrations in urine samples combined with causes of death 10 years later reported in the U.S.’s National Death Index. Then they looked at the total number of heart disease-related deaths in particular countries and regions and determined what fraction wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for DEHP.
Tracey Woodruff, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the new analysis, said the research was “consistent with what other studies have found” regarding health risks from phthalates. Last year, a study of one-third of the global population found that bisphenol A, or BPA — used in hard, clear plastic products, like food storage containers — contributed to 5.4 million cases of heart disease and 346,000 strokes in 2015. The same study found that polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs — used as a flame retardant in electronics and some textiles — caused the loss of 11.7 million IQ points.
DEHP is inconsistently regulated globally. The European Union restricts DEHP, along with several other phthalates, to no more than 0.1 percent by weight in children’s toys and clothing, and strictly limits its use in food-contact materials and cosmetics. China has similar restrictions, and Japan has banned DEHP from food packaging and children’s products since 2003. India passed legislation in 2022 limiting the amount of DEHP that’s allowed to leach from food packaging.
The U.S. restricts DEHP in children’s toys and some food packaging but not in cosmetics. In 2022, the federal Food and Drug Administration denied a petition from 11 public health and environmental groups to ban DEHP and seven other phthalates in food-contact materials outright.
“There’s no evidence for a threshold at which phthalate exposures are safe,” Trasande emphasized.
Trasande said his research could influence ongoing negotiations for the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, set to resume this August. The treaty’s mandate is to “end plastic pollution,” but delegates have increasingly turned their attention to hazardous chemicals in plastic products. Many scientists want the treaty to include lists of plastic types and plastic-related chemicals that must be limited or phased out. Both PVC and phthalates are top contenders for such lists.
Woodruff said research like Trasande’s should also drive home the need to limit overall plastic production, not just the chemicals used in plastics. “That there are important health benefits from capping the amount of plastic production,” she said. “Lowering our exposure to these chemicals in plastics is going to be a critical part of reversing the trend of chronic disease in the U.S.”
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For much of the 20th century, winter brought an annual ritual to Princeton, New Jersey. Lake Carnegie froze solid, and skaters flocked to its glossy surface. These days, the ice is rarely thick enough to support anybody wearing skates, since Princeton’s winters have warmed about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. It’s a lost tradition that Grace Liu linked to the warming climate as an undergrad at Princeton University in 2020, interviewing longtime residents and digging through newspaper archives to create a record of the lake’s ice conditions.
“People definitely noticed that they were able to get out onto the lake less,” said Liu, who’s now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon. “However, they didn’t necessarily connect this trend to climate change.”
When the university’s alumni magazine featured her research in the winter of 2021, the comment section was filled with wistful memories of skating under the moonlight, pushing past the crowds to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate by the frozen lakeside. Liu began to wonder: Could this kind of direct, visceral loss make climate change feel more vivid to people?
That question sparked her study, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, that came to a striking conclusion: Boiling down data into a binary — a stark this or that — can help break through apathy about climate change.
Liu worked with professors at Princeton to test how people responded to two different graphs. One showed winter temperatures of a fictional town gradually rising over time, while the other presented the same warming trend in a black-or-white manner: the lake either froze in any given year, or it didn’t. People who saw the second chart perceived climate change as causing more abrupt changes.
Both charts represent the same amount of winter warming, just presented differently. “We are not hoodwinking people,” said Rachit Dubey, a co-author of the study who’s now a professor of communications at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We are literally showing them the same trend, just in different formats.”
The climate binary
Both charts demonstrate the same warming trend, but the gradual temperature data is less striking than the binary lake data.
Winter temperature (°F)
Lake freeze status
The strong reaction to the black-or-white presentation held true over a series of experiments, even one where a trend line was placed over the scatter plot of temperatures to make the warming super clear. To ensure the results translated to the wider world, researchers also looked at how people reacted to actual data of lake freezing and temperature increases from towns in the U.S. and Europe and got the same results. “Psychology effects are sometimes fickle,” said Dubey, who’s researched cognitive science for a decade. “This is one of the cleanest effects we’ve ever seen.”
The findings suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change, they should highlight clear, concrete shifts instead of slow-moving trends. That could include the loss of white Christmases or outdoor summer activities canceled because of wildfire smoke.
The metaphor of the “boiling frog” is sometimes used to describe how people fail to react to gradual changes in the climate. The idea is that if you put a frog in boiling water, it’ll immediately jump out. But if you put it in room-temperature water and slowly turn up the heat, the frog won’t realize the danger and will be boiled alive. Although real frogs are actually smart enough to hop out when water gets dangerously hot, the metaphor fits humans when it comes to climate change: People mentally adjust to temperature increases “disturbingly fast,” according to the study. Previous research has found that as the climate warms, people adjust their sense of what seems normal based on weather from the past two to eight years, a phenomenon known as “shifting baselines.”
Many scientists have held out hope that governments would finally act to cut fossil fuel emissions when a particularly devastating hurricane, heat wave, or flood made the effects of climate change undeniable. Last year, weather-related disasters caused more than $180 billion in damages in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet climate change still hasn’t cracked into the ranks of what Americans say they’re most concerned about. Ahead of the 2024 election, a Gallup poll found that climate change ranked near the bottom of the list of 22 issues, well below the economy, terrorism, or health care.
“Tragedies will keep on escalating in the background, but it’s not happening fast enough for us to think, ‘OK, this is it. We need to just decisively stop everything we’re doing,’” Dubey said. “I think that’s an even bigger danger that we’re facing with climate change — that it never becomes the problem.”
One graph about lake-freezing data isn’t going to lead people to rank climate change as their top issue, of course. But Dubey thinks if people see compelling visuals more often, it could help keep the problem of climate change from fading out of their minds. Dubey’s study shows that there’s a cognitive reason why binary data resonates with people: It creates a mental illusion that the situation has changed suddenly, when it has actually changed gradually.
The importance of using data visualizations to get an idea across is often overlooked, according to Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “We know that [data visuals] can be powerful tools for communication, but they often miss their mark, partly because most scientists aren’t trained, despite the availability of many excellent resources,” Marlon said in an email. She said that binary visuals could be used to convey the urgency of addressing climate change, though using them tends to mean losing complexity and richness from the data.
The climate stripes visual was recently updated to reflect that 2024 was the hottest year on record.
Professor Ed Hawkins / University of Reading
The study’s findings don’t just apply to freezing lakes — global temperatures can be communicated in more stark ways. The popular “climate stripes” visual developed by Ed Hawkins, a professor at the University of Reading in the U.K., illustrates temperature changes with vertical bands of lines, where blue indicates cold years and red indicates warm ones. As the chart switches from deep blue to deep red, it communicates the warming trend on a more visceral level. The stripes simplify a gradual trend into a binary-style image that makes it easier to grasp. “Our study explains why the climate stripes is actually so popular and resonates with people,” Dubey said.
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Every several years for the past 25 years, the federal government has published a comprehensive look at the way climate change is affecting the country. States, local governments, businesses, farmers, and many others use this National Climate Assessment to prepare for rising temperatures, more bouts of extreme weather, and worsening disasters such as wildfires.
On Monday, however, the Trump administration told all of the more than 400 volunteer scientists and experts working on the next assessment that it was releasing them from their roles. A brief memo said the scope of the report was being “reevaluated” within the context of the Congressional legislation that mandates it.
The move throws the National Climate Assessment, whose sixth iteration is supposed to be released in late 2027 or early 2028, into even deeper uncertainty. Earlier this month, the Trump administration canceled funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the White House office that produces the report and helps coordinate research across more than a dozen federal agencies.
Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was among the authors who were dismissed on Monday. She and her colleagues had just submitted a draft outline for a chapter about coastlines, with information on how sea level rise could affect communities and urban infrastructure.
“It was an honor and I was looking forward to contributing,” Cleetus said. “This is the kind of actionable science that people need to help prepare for climate change and address the challenges that climate change is already bringing our way.”
Cleetus said it was “irresponsible” that the administration would dismiss hundreds of experts working on the assessment, seemingly without a plan for creating an alternative. Although the memo says participants may still have “opportunities to contribute or engage,” it doesn’t elaborate and the White House did not respond to a list of questions from Grist.
The Trump administration is required by the Global Change Research Act of 1990 to, among other things, commission a scientific report every four years on “global change, both human-induced and natural.” The report is supposed to cover the latest science on a wide range of climate and environmental trends and how they might affect agriculture, energy production, human health, and other areas for the next 25 to 100 years.
Since 2000, this report has taken the form of the National Climate Assessment. The last one, released in 2023, broke down climate impacts by topic and geography, with individual chapters on the Northeast, Midwest, Southwest, and so on. It also laid out the state of the science on mitigating and adapting to climate change, including examples of what many cities and states are already doing. The fourth assessment was published in 2018, during Trump’s first term in the White House.
Smoke billows from the Airport Fire in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, in September 2024.
Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
All of the science that informs the national assessments must be peer-reviewed, and the reports themselves don’t endorse specific policies. “They’re not telling anyone what to do,” said Melissa Finucane, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ vice president of science and innovation and an author of the fifth assessment. “They’re just providing information on how to best address problems with effective solutions.”
What’s next for the National Climate Assessment is unclear. Legally, only Congress can scrap it altogether, but experts say the Trump administration could decide to publish a dramatically scaled-back version or use it as a tool for misinformation — by, for instance, downplaying the link between global warming and the use of fossil fuels.
“One might be concerned that the administration will replace it with something much less robust, replacing it potentially with junk science,” Finucane said.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a list of policy recommendations that the Trump administration seems to have drawn from during its first 100 days, only mentions the National Climate Assessment in a short section about the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Russell Vought, now director of the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget, recommended that the program be scaled back to a limited advisory role. He wrote that the program typified “climate fanaticism” and “the woke agenda.”
Another possibility is that the experts involved in the assessment will continue their work, even without federal support. That’s what happened earlier this year with what was supposed to be the country’s first National Nature Assessment. When the Trump administration canceled work on it in February, its authors vowed to carry on and publish their results anyway.
Finucane said the Nature Assessment had been farther along than the sixth climate report, and that it wouldn’t be possible for a small group of volunteers to take on the massive amount of work and coordination required to put together the sixth assessment “I absolutely hope that the work that has been done can continue in some way, but we have to have our eyes wide open,” Finucane said.
Dave White, director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University, said there are some international and state-levelclimate reports that could fill in the gaps left by a scaled-back or canceled National Climate Assessment. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, synthesizes climate science on a global level every few years (although the Trump administration recently blocked federal scientists from participating in it).
“I’m disappointed, upset, frustrated on behalf of not only myself and my colleagues, but also on behalf of the American communities that benefit from the knowledge and tools developed by the assessment,” White said. “Those will be taken away from American communities now.”
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Adelaide Tovar, a University of Michigan scientist who researches genes related to diabetes, used to feel like an impostor in a laboratory. Tovar, 32, grew up poor and was the first in her family to graduate from high school. During her first year in college, she realized she didn’t know how to study. But after years of studying biology and genetics, Tovar finally got proof that she belonged.
Across seven decades and a dozen presidencies, America’s scientific prowess was arguably unmatched. At universities and federal agencies alike, researchers in the United States revolutionized weather forecasting, cured deadly diseases, and began monitoring greenhouse gas emissions. As far back as 1990, Congress directed this scientific might toward understanding climate change, after finding that human-induced global warming posed a threat to “human health, and global economic and social well-being.”
Donald Trump and his new administration evidently disagree. In the first 100 days of his second stint in the White House, the president has released a slew of orders that destabilize this apparatus. Earlier this month, the administration effectively scrapped the government’s comprehensive National Climate Assessment — a quadrennial report that provides scientifically-backed guidance for how towns, cities, and regions can prepare for a hotter climate — when it canceled a contract for the firm that facilitates the research. Recently leaked memos, reviewed by Grist, show the White House hopes to slash scientific research at NASA and eliminate all research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which is responsible for a host of climate, weather, and conservation science. And two weeks ago, the administration froze over $2 billion of research funding to Harvard — the latest in a series of punishments targeting the nation’s top schools that the president claims have become overrun by “woke” ideology.
Experts fear this siege against science could jeopardize the United States’ status as a global leader in climate research. Since Trump took office in January, the federal government has frozen billions of dollars in climate funding and grants for universities. At the same time, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has decimated the federal workforce, firing thousands of scientists, in a purported attempt to cut a trillion dollars in “waste and fraud” from the federal budget. This month, Musk’s team began canceling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of scientific grants distributed by the National Science Foundation. And last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shuttered the Office of Global Change, which oversees international climate negotiations.
“One of the things that has made America great and will keep America great is our scientific excellence and world leadership in climate science,” said Max Holmes, who leads the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “Gutting those things will send our country in a different direction.” While other countries may fill the void, he said, the loss of American research and expertise will affect the entire world.
Assistant professor and ecologist, Alex Manda, sets up a weather station as his graduate students from East Carolina University study the ground water on a farm field outside the coastal town of Engelhard in 2019. Eamon Queeney / The Washington Post via Getty Images
One way of measuring a country’s scientific heft is by looking at the number of papers its researchers publish. For the last quarter century, American scientists have churned out some 400,000 studies each year — an unrivaled pace that has remained consistent throughout presidential administrations until China’s scientists surpassed it in 2016. This is largely thanks to the federal government, which has been the country’s largest overall funder of science and research since World War II.
Until now, no former president — including Trump — has tried to dismantle this legacy. For example, the fourth edition of the National Climate Assessment, a recurring report mandated by Congress under the auspices of the U.S. Global Change Research Program in 1990, was nearly complete the first time Trump took office in 2016. Although his administration limited the report’s publicity when it was released, they did not alter the contents of the report, according to federal scientists who worked on it.
But this go-round is different: On April 9, the Trump administration ended the contract with the consulting firm responsible for running the U.S. Global Change Research Program — a likely fatal blow for the sixth National Climate Assessment, which was due to be published in the next few years.
“For hundreds and even thousands of years, we humans have been making decisions based on conditions of the past,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a leading author of the last four assessments and a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. “It’s like driving down the road looking in the rearview mirror. But now, thanks entirely to human actions, we are facing a curve in the road greater than we humans have ever confronted.”
Other consequences of ending the Global Change Research Program are more immediate. The program’s interagency working groups are the primary way that federal agencies collaborate on climate problems, sharing data and expertise on greenhouse gas monitoring and sea level rise. Federal scientists told Grist that the program was essential for efficient communication between agencies and that without it, continuing these collaborations may not be possible.
The program also facilitates the United States’ participation in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, through which scientists from nearly 200 countries work together to create a global report with the latest climate science.
“The U.S. has long had a profound presence at these reports — we have excellent research capacity,” said Kevin Gurney, an atmospheric scientist at Northern Arizona University and a leading author on several IPCC reports. “Politics aside, having the best available knowledge on climate change problems is crucial.”
A field technician transports a measuring chamber to record greenhouse gas fluxes during a study of geologic methane gas as it seeps out of Esieh Lake in northwest Alaska in 2024.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
Gurney noted that because America’s scientific workforce is so large and holds a wealth of research, climate models, and data, a diminished U.S. presence deprives other countries of crucial climate information. Pulling back could also dampen American input and influence over the contents of the IPCC report — which is used to inform international climate mitigation policies, such as a recently announced international shipping tax that aims to reduce emissions.
“There’s loss in both directions,” Gurney said. “I worry that it’s going to take us years to regain the momentum and capacity that it seems we’re just frivolously letting go of right now.”
In March, Gurney — who is not a federal employee — was one of a few U.S. scientists who attended an IPCC meeting in Japan after the Trump administration barred federal delegates from attending an IPCC planning meeting the previous month. In light of crumbling government support, a group of 10 American research institutions recently came together to form the U.S. Academic Alliance, which aims to preserve U.S. participation in the report. Hosted by the American Geophysical Union, the alliance is stepping up in place of the federal government to handle nominations for U.S. scientists to contribute to the next IPCC assessment.
The scientific research that fuels these assessments is under threat, too. In a recently leaked budget memo, known as a “passback,” the Trump administration laid out a plan to gut NOAA’s coffers by 27 percent, eliminating the agency’s entire research arm and closing all weather and climate labs. This includes the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai‘i, which has provided the longest running measure of atmospheric carbon dioxide, as well as ocean-monitoring stations that support seasonal hurricane forecasts and key projects for gauging sea level rise and cataloging impacts of warming in the Arctic.
Beyond losing crucial data on the changing climate, culling science at NOAA will “hurt every aspect of society,” said Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA under Joe Biden’s administration. The data produced by the agency’s research division supports a wide range of government services, such as disaster management and agricultural forecasting. And because the agency’s research capacity, equipment, and expert workforce took decades to build up, the losses can’t be easily recovered.
“The American public needs to understand that you can’t just turn a science switch off and then turn it back on again,” Spinrad said. “This is not like tariffs.” He pointed out that while NOAA’s budget is small — just 0.01 percent of the federal budget, by some estimates — it plays an outsize role in American lives. It also financially benefits taxpayers far more than it costs them: A recent study by the American Meteorological Society found that every dollar invested into the National Weather Service returns $73 in value for the public.
The Mauna Loa atmospheric observatory in Hawai‘i.
Wekeli / iStock via Getty Images
The passback budget document also includes guidance to reshuffle the small parts of NOAA’s research division that may be spared into other parts of the agency. But because NOAA’s various offices are so interconnected, Spinrad said breaking it up and reorganizing it will disrupt the entire agency’s ability to function.
“The idea that all of this is predicated on government efficiency is really contradictory,” he said. “The consequences will be risks to lives, property, and economic development. There’s no question of that.”
Over the past couple weeks, other agencies that conduct climate science have received passback budget memos too. The budget proposal for NASA reveals the administration’s plans to halve the space agency’s science funding — docking over $3 billion from its 2026 budget. The cuts would likely mean that NOAA and NASA will no longer be able to launch the next generation of Earth-observing satellites, which provide crucial data for climate and weather forecasting.
A forecaster monitors the action on the sun in January, in preparation for a space launch that will ferry new equipment to the primary satellite relied upon by NOAA for its space-weather prediction work.
MediaNews Group / Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s passback memo sent to the Department of Health and Human Services reportedly proposes slashing $40 billion from its budget. Many offices and programs inside the department — which houses the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control — would be shuffled, consolidated, or eliminated entirely. According to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica, National Institutes of Health programs and grants for studying the health impacts of climate change will no longer be funded, and the agency’s new policy is “not to prioritize” research related to climate change.
“Essentially everything that is related to how we understand climate is on the table for being cut,” said a scientist who has worked at NASA and who requested anonymity. “We’ll just be flying blind while the planet is undergoing some of the most significant impacts and changes that have been experienced.”
The funding cuts could also imperil climate research outside the government. Many federal agencies, such as NOAA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, play a large role in providing universities grants to pay for research and fund graduate students. But in recent weeks, the Trump administration has frozen billions of these dollars as part of its investigation into antisemitism at over 60 universities, catching climate research in the broad net.
In 2018, the last year that the Government Accountability Office took stock of federal climate funding, the government was spending over $13 billion on climate change research, with many agencies providing grants to universities or collaborating directly with them. The National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy have both revoked large chunks of funding to universities, sparking lawsuits. In mid-April, the National Science Foundation — which provided $800 million toward climate research in 2018 — froze all grant applications as Elon Musk’s team began combing through its books. Crowdsourced information from scientists shows that on April 18, DOGE had canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding. The agency has already been operating cautiously since Trump took office, funding 50 percent fewer grants than this time last year.
And in early April the Commerce Department announced $4 million of funding from NOAA would be pulled back from Princeton’s Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System, which helps create improved weather forecasts and model water availability. According to reporting in The Washington Post, the Trump administration says the initiatives are “no longer aligned” with the agency’s objectives and that the research contributes to climate anxiety by promoting “exaggerated and implausible climate threats.”
“Climate science is important in tackling a complicated problem, but a lot of this is not about the research,” said David Ackerly, dean of the Rausser College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. “The research funding is being used as a political pawn in a battle about something else.”
A scientist looks at radar on a smartphone as part of a group tracking a 2017 supercell thunderstormin Olustee, Oklahoma. Their research includes funding from the National Science Foundation and other government grants.
Ackerly said it’s too soon to know how the broadly applied cuts might reshape climate science done at universities, but expressed concerns that a generation of students could lose confidence in pursuing careers in higher education. International students — who earn roughly half of all graduate degrees in science and technology fields — may forgo coming to study in the U.S. at all. Some schools have already tightened their belts by freezing or restricting their graduate admissions. Because graduate students provide the workforce necessary to conduct scientific studies, run laboratories, help teach classes, and write papers, the slimming of student populations means less climate research can be produced in the United States.
“Our ability to educate the next generation of people to do this work is starting to be cut off,” said Gurney, the IPCC author. “It may take a while and we may not notice it at first, but we will. This is damage that could last for a long time.”
Holmes, of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, said that the escalating cuts signal to the international community that the U.S. is stepping back from leadership in climate research. With so much uncertainty, he said, scientists may begin to seek opportunities in other countries.
“Other countries will take the lead if we cede it, because we need leadership in climate solutions and science”
It appears the brain drain has already begun. According to a recent analysis from Nature, data from the scientific journal’s job board indicates that American scientists have submitted 32 percent more applications for international jobs during the beginning of this year compared to last year. In March alone, U.S.-based job seekers viewed international job listings 68 percent more than last year. At the same time, applications to U.S. institutions from European researchers fell by 41 percent.
Some European institutions are actively trying to attract American scientific talent, too. In March, France’s Aix-Marseille University said it was “ready to welcome American scientists” and created the Safe Place for Science program to sponsor those working in climate, health, and environmental fields. Germany’s top research institution, the Max Planck Society, announced in early April a new transatlantic program to create collaborative research centers with American institutions. After job applications from the U.S. researchers doubled over last year, the institution’s president said he is planning to tour U.S. cities to speak to Germany’s “new talent pool”. According to Nature, recruiters in China have also been targeting career ads toward fired American scientists.
“Other countries will take the lead if we cede it, because we need leadership in climate solutions and science,” Holmes said. “The sooner we can right the ship, the sooner we can get heading in the right direction again.”
Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that nothing should be considered final until Congress approves the federal budget later this year. “Congress needs to push back on these disastrous cuts, because this scientific enterprise has been built up by investments over decades from U.S. taxpayers,” she said. “This is the crown jewel of science and expertise for our nation — even the world.”
Even if the lost funding is restored, Ackerly said the Trump administration’s attacks represent an unprecedented breakdown in the government’s longstanding support of science and research. It is this relationship, he said, that fosters a uniquely robust network of both private and public universities, and has made higher education and science in the United States stand out among other countries for decades. But now, said Ackerly, a new normal is being established.
“This will always be part of a history we live with,” he said. “You can never fully go back to where things were before.”
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Throughout the Yangtze River Delta, a region in southern China famed for its widespread rice production, farmers grow belts of slender green stalks. Before they reach several feet tall and turn golden brown, the grassy plants soak in muddy, waterlogged fields for months. Along the rows of submerged plants, levees store and distribute a steady supply of water that farmers source from nearby canals.
This traditional practice of flooding paddies to raise the notoriously thirsty crop is almost as old as the ancient grain’s domestication. Thousands of years later, the agricultural method continues to predominate in rice cultivation practices from the low-lying fields of Arkansas to the sprawling terraces of Vietnam.
As the planet heats up, this popular process of growing rice is becoming increasingly more dangerous for the millions of people worldwide that eat the grain regularly, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Lancet Planetary Health. After drinking water, the researchers say, rice is the world’s second largest dietary source of inorganic arsenic, and climate change appears to be increasing the amount of the highly toxic chemical that is in it. If nothing is done to transform how most of the world’s rice is produced, regulate how much of it people consume, or mitigate warming, the authors conclude that communities with rice-heavy diets could begin confronting increased risks of cancer and disease as soon as 2050.
“Our results are very scary,” said Donming Wang, the ecological doctorate student at the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences who led the paper. “It’s a disaster … and a wake-up call.”
Back in 2014, Wang and an international team of climate, plant, and public health scientists started working together on a research project that would end up taking them close to a decade to complete. Wading through rice paddies across the Yangtze Delta, they sought to find out just how projected temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 in 2050 would interact with the arsenic in the soil and the rice crops planted there. They knew, from past research, that the carcinogen was a problem in rice crops, but wanted to find out how much more of an issue it might be in a warming world. The team didn’t look at just any rice, but some of the grain varieties most produced and consumed worldwide.
Although there are an estimated 40,000 types of rice on the planet, they tend to be grouped into three categories based on length of the grain. Short-grain rice, or the sticky kind often used in sushi; long-grain, which includes aromatic types like basmati and jasmine; and medium-grain, or rice that tends to be served as a main dish. Of these, the short-to-medium japonica and long-grain indica are the two major subspecies of cultivated rice eaten across Asia. Wang’s study modelled the growth of 28 varieties of japonica, indica, and hybrid rice strains central to cuisine for seven of the continent’s top rice consuming and producing countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, and Vietnam. India, Vietnam, and China are among the group of eight nations that lead the rest of the world in rice exports.
After nearly a decade of observing and analyzing the growth of the plants, the researchers discovered that the combination of higher temperatures and CO2 encourages root growth, increasing the ability of rice plants to uptake arsenic from the soil. They believe this is because climate-related changes in soil chemistry that favor arsenic can be more easily absorbed into the grain. Carbon-dioxide enriched crops were found to capture more atmospheric carbon and pump some of that into the soil, stimulating microbes that are making arsenic.
The more root growth, the more carbon in the soil, which can be a source of food for soil bacteria that multiply under warming temperatures. When soil in a rice paddy is waterlogged, oxygen gets depleted, causing the soil bacteria to rely further on arsenic to generate energy. The end result is more arsenic building up in the rice paddy, and more roots to take it up to the developing grain.
These arsenic-accumulating effects linked to increased root growth and carbon capture is a paradoxical surprise to Corey Lesk, a Dartmouth College postdoctoral climate and crop researcher unaffiliated with the paper. The paradox, said Lesk, is that both of these outcomes have been talked about as potential benefits to rice yields under climate change. “More roots could make the rice more drought-resistant, and cheaper carbon can boost yields generally,” he said. “But the extra arsenic accumulation could make it hard to realize health benefits from that yield boost.”
Arsenic comes in many different forms. Notoriously toxic, inorganic arsenic — compounds of the element that don’t contain carbon — is what the World Health Organization classifies as a “confirmed carcinogen” and “the most significant chemical contaminant in drinking-water globally.” Such forms of arsenic are typically more toxic to humans because they are less stable than their organic counterparts and may allow arsenic to interact with molecules that ramp up exposure. Chronic exposure has been linked to lung, bladder, and skin cancers, as well as heart disease, diabetes, adverse pregnancy, neurodevelopmental issues, and weakened immune systems, among other health impacts.
Scientists and public-health specialists have known for years that the presence of arsenic in food is a mounting threat, but dietary exposure has long been considered much less of a risk in comparison to contaminated groundwater. So policy measures to mitigate the risk have been slow-going. The few existing standards that have been enacted by the European Union and China, for example, are considered inconsistent and largely unenforced. No country has formally established regulations for organic arsenic exposure in foods. (In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration has established an action level of 100 parts per billion of inorganic arsenic in infant rice cereal, but that recommendation for manufacturers isn’t an enforceable regulation on arsenic in rice or any other food.)
Wang hopes to see this change. The levels of inorganic arsenic commonly found in rice today fall within China’s recommended standards, for example, but her paper shows that lifetime bladder and lung cancer incidences are likely to increase “proportionally” to exposure by 2050. Under a “worst case” climate scenario, where global temperatures rise above 2 degrees Celsius and are coupled with CO2 levels that increase another 200 parts per million, the levels of inorganic arsenic in the rice varieties studied are projected to surge by a whopping 44 percent. That means that more than half the rice samples would exceed China’s current proposed limit, which limits 200 parts per billion for inorganic arsenic in paddy rice, with an estimated 13.4 million cancers linked to rice-based arsenic exposure.
Because these health risks are in part calculated based on body weight, infants and young children will face the biggest health burdens. Babies, in particular, may end up facing outsize risks through the consumption of rice cereals, according to the researchers.
“You’re talking about a crop staple that feeds billions of people, and when you consider that more carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures can significantly influence the amount of arsenic in that staple, the amount of health consequences related to that are, for lack of a better word, enormous,” said study coauthor Lewis Ziska, a plant biologist researching climate change and public health at Columbia University.
But everyone should not suddenly stop eating rice as a result, he added. Though the team found the amount of inorganic arsenic in rice is higher than a lot of other plants, it’s still quite low overall. The key variable is how much rice a person eats. If you are among the bulk of the world that consumes rice multiple times a week, this looming health burden could apply to you, but if you do so more sporadically, Ziska says, the inorganic arsenic you may end up exposed to won’t be “a big deal.”
In that way, the study’s projections may also deepen existing global and social inequities, as a big reason rice has long reigned as one of the planet’s most devoured grains is because it’s also among the most affordable.
Beyond mitigating global greenhouse gas emissions — what Ziska calls “waving my rainbows, unicorns, and sprinkles wand” — adaptation efforts to avoid a future with toxic rice include rice paddy farmers planting earlier in the season to avoid seeds developing under warmer temperatures, better soil management, and plant breeding to minimize rice’s propensity to accumulate so much arsenic.
Water-saving irrigation techniques such as alternate wetting and drying, where paddy fields are first flooded and then allowed to dry in a cycle, could also be used to reduce these increasing health risks and the grain’s enormous methane footprint. On a global scale, rice production accounts for roughly 8 percent of all methane emissions from human activity — flooded paddy fields are ideal conditions for methane-emitting bacteria.
“This is an area that I know is not sexy, that doesn’t have the same vibe as the end of the world, rising sea levels, category 10 storms,” said Ziska. “But I will tell you quite honestly that it will have the greatest effect in terms of humanity, because we all eat.”
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Indulgent, vain and profligate, the all-female venture into space on the self-piloted New Shepard (NS-31) operated by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin was space capitalism and celebrity shallowness on full show, masquerading as profound, moving and useful.
The crew consisted of bioastronautics research scientist and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, pop entertainer Katy Perry, film producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA scientist and entrepreneur Aisha Bowe and Lauren Sánchez, fiancée of Jeff Bezos. The journey took 11 minutes and reached the Kármán line at approximately 96 kilometres above the earth.
Blue Origin had advertised the enterprise as an incentive to draw girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It also shamelessly played on the background of some of the crew, with Nguyen promoted as “the first Vietnamese and south-east Asian female astronaut” whose presence would “highlight science as a tool for peace” and also project a potent “symbol of reconciliation between the US and Vietnam”.
Phil Joyce, Senior Vice President of New Shepard, thought it a “privilege to witness this crew of trailblazers depart the capsule today”. Each woman was “a storyteller” who would “use their voices – individually and together – to channel their life-changing experience today into creating lasting impact that will inspire people across our planet for generations.”
What was more accurately on show were celebrity space marketers on an expensive jaunt, showing us all that women can play the space capitalism game as well, albeit as the suborbital version of a catwalk or fashion show. Far from pushing some variant of feminism in the frontier of space, with scientific rewards for girls the world over, we got the eclipsing, if not a wholesale junking, of female astronauts and their monumental expertise.
It hardly compared, at any stretch or by any quantum of measure, with the achievement of Russian cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, who piloted a Vostok 6 into earth’s orbit lasting 70 hours over six decades prior. To have Sánchez claiming to be “so proud of this crew”, tears cued for effect, gave the impression that they had shown technical expertise and skill when neither was required. It was far better to have deep pockets fronting the appropriate deposit, along with the necessary safe return, over which they had virtually no control over.
Dr Kai-Uwe Schrogl, special advisor for political affairs at the European Space Agency, offered a necessarily cold corrective. “A celebrity isn’t an envoy of humankind – they go into space for their own reasons,” he told BBC News. “These flights are significant and exciting, but I think maybe they can also be a source of frustration for space scientists”. How silly of those scientists, who regard space flight as an extension of “science, knowledge and the interests of humanity.”
The Guardianwas also awake to the motivations of the Bezos project. “The pseudo progressiveness of this celebrity space mission, coupled with Bezos’s conduct in his other businesses, should mean we are under no illusion what purpose these flights serve.” With Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the space tourism market, marked by its bratty oligarchs, is becoming competitive. In an effort to corner the market, attractive gimmicks are in high demand.
The cringingly superficial nature of the exercise was evident in various comments on the fashion aspect of the suits worn by the crew. Here was branding, and the sort that could be taken to space. As Sánchez stated: “Usually, you know, these suits are made for a man. Then they get tailored to fit a woman. I think the suits are elegant, but they also bring a little spice to space.” Blue Origin had capitalised on NASA’s own failings in 2019, which saw the abandoning of an all-female spacewalk for lacking appropriately fitting spacesuits.
On their return, the female cast performed their contractual undertakings to bore the press with deadly clichés and meaningless observations, reducing space travel to an exercise for the trivial. “Earth looked so quiet,” remarked Sánchez. “It was quiet, but really alive.” King, after getting on her knees to kiss the earth, merely wanted “to have a moment with the ground, just appreciate the ground for just a second”. (Surely she has had longer than that.) Perry, on her return after singing What a Wonderful World during the trip, overflowed with inanities. She felt “super connected to life”, as well as being “so connected to love.”
On the ground were other celebrities, delighted to offer their cliché-clotted thoughts. “I didn’t realise how emotional it would be, it’s hard to explain,” reflected Khloé Kardashian. “I have all this adrenaline and I’m just standing here.” From a family of celebrities that merely exist as celebrities and nothing else, she had some advice: “Dream big, wish for the stars – and one day, you could maybe be amongst them.”
Amanda Hess, reflecting on the mission in the New York Times, tried to put her finger on what it all meant. “The message is that a little girl can grow up to be whatever she wishes: a rocket scientist or a pop star, a television journalist or a billionaire’s fiancée who is empowered to pursue her various ambitions and whims in the face of tremendous costs.” Just not an astronaut.
In the dim twilight of an Arctic winter’s day, with the low sun stretching its orange fingers across the frozen sea, a group of researchers drill a hole through the ice and insert a hydrogen-powered pump. It looks unremarkable — a piece of pipe protruding from a metal cylinder — but it holds many hopes for protecting this landscape. Soon, it is sucking up seawater from below and spewing it onto the surface, flooding the area with a thin layer of water. Overnight this water will freeze, thickening what’s already there.
The hope is that the more robust the ice, the less likely it will be to disappear in the warm summer months.
The researchers are from Real Ice, a United Kingdom-based nonprofit on a mission to preserve this dwindling landscape. Their initial work has shown that pumping just 10 inches of ocean water on top of the ice also boosts growth from the bottom, thickening it by another 20 inches. This is because the flooding process removes the insulating snow layer, enabling more water to freeze. When the process is done, the patch of ice measured up to 80 inches thick — equal to the lower range of older, multi-year ice in the Arctic. “If that is proved to be true on a larger scale, we will show that with relatively little energy we can actually make a big gain through the winter,” said Andrea Ceccolini, co-CEO of Real Ice. Ceccolini and Cian Sherwin, his partner CEO, ultimately hope to develop an underwater drone that could swim between locations, detecting the thickness of the ice, pumping up water as necessary, then refueling and moving on to the next spot.
This winter, they carried out their largest field test yet: comparing the impact of eight pumps across nearly half a square mile off the coast of Cambridge Bay, a small town in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut, part of the Canadian Arctic. They now wait until June for the results.
During a January 2024 field test, a hydrogen-powered pump sucks water from Cambridge Bay, Canada and spews it onto the surface. The water will freeze and thicken the existing ice. Video courtesy of Real Ice
Their work is at the heart of a debate about how we mitigate the damage caused by global warming, and whether climate interventions such as this will cause more harm than good.
Loss of sea ice has consequences far beyond the Arctic. Today, the vast white expanse of this ice reflects 80 percent of the sun’s energy back into space. Without it, the dark open ocean will absorb this heat, further warming the planet. According to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, if our sea ice disappears entirely, it will add the equivalent warming of 25 years of carbon dioxide emissions. There are also huge implications for our weather patterns: Diminishing sea ice is already changing ocean currents, increasing storms, and sending warmer, drier air to California, causing increased wildfires. Within the Arctic, loss of ice means loss of habitat and food security for the animals, microorganisms, and Indigenous communities that depend on it.
“Personally I’m terrified,” said Talia Maksagak, Executive Director of the Kitikmeot Chamber of Commerce, about the changing sea ice. It’s freezing later and thinner each year, affecting her community’s ability to travel between islands. “People go missing, people are travelling and they fall through the ice,” she continues. They also rely on the ice for hunting, fishing, and harvests of wild caribou or musk ox, who migrate across the frozen ocean twice a year — although they, too, are increasingly falling through the thin ice and drowning.
Maksagak has been instrumental in helping Real Ice to consult with the local community about their research, and she is supportive of their work. “If Real Ice comes up with this genius plan to continue the ice freeze longer, I think that would be very beneficial for future generations.”
Researchers get ready to connect their pump system to the hydrogen battery that powers it. Real Ice
There are still many questions around the feasibility of Real Ice’s plan, both for critics and the Real Ice researchers themselves. First, they need to establish if the principle works scientifically — that the ice they’ve thickened does last longer, counteracting the speed of global warming’s impact on the region. At worst, adding salty seawater could potentially cause the ice to melt more quickly in the summer. But results from last year’s research suggest not: When testing its pilot ice three months later, Real Ice found its salinity was within normal bounds.
If all goes well with this year’s tests, the next step will be an independent environmental risk assessment. Noise is one concern. According to WWF, industrial underwater noise significantly alters the behaviour of marine mammals, especially whales. Similarly, blue cod lay their eggs under the ice, algae grows on it, and larger mammals and birds migrate across it. How will they be impacted by Real Ice’s water pumps? “These are all questions that we need to ask,” said Shaun Fitzgerald, Director of the Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University, which has partnered with Real Ice, “and they all need to be addressed before we can start evaluating whether or not we think this is a good idea.”
Fitzgerald predicts four more years of research are needed before the nonprofit can properly recommend the technology. For now, the Nunavut Impact Review Board, Nunavut’s environmental assessment agency, has deemed Real Ice’s research sites to cause no significant impact.
New ice forms on the surface of Cambridge Bay, Canada. Real Ice
But critics of the idea argue the process won’t scale. “The numbers just don’t stack up,” said Martin Siegert, a British glaciologist and former co-chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change. He pointed to the size of the Arctic — 3.9 million square miles of sea ice on average — and how many pumps would likely be needed to freeze even 10 percent of that. More importantly, who is going to pay for it?
Ceccolini is undaunted by the first question. Their technology is not complicated — “it’s technology from 50 years ago, we just need to assemble it in a new way” — and would cost an estimated $5,000 per autonomous pump. Their models predict that 500,000 pumps could rethicken about 386,000 square miles of sea ice each year, or an area half the size of Alaska. Assuming the thicker ice lasts several years, and by targeting different areas annually, Ceccolini estimates the technology could maintain the current summer sea ice levels of around 1.63 million square miles. “We’ve done much bigger things in humanity, much more complex than this,” he said.
As for who pays, that’s less clear. One idea is a global fund similar to what’s been proposed for tropical rainforests, where if a resource is globally beneficial, like the Amazon or the Arctic, then an international community contributes to its protection. Another idea is ‘cooling credits’, where organizations can pay for a certain amount of ice to be frozen as an offset against global warming. These are a controversial idea started by the California-based, geoengineering start-up Make Sunsets, which believes that stratospheric aerosol injections — releasing reflective particles high into the earth’s atmosphere — is another way to cool the planet. However its research comes with many risks and unknowns that has the scientific community worried, and has even been banned in Mexico. Meanwhile faith in the credits system has been undermined in recent years, with several investigations revealing a lack of integrity in the carbon credits industry.
A researcher looks out from a field site tent onto Cambridge Bay, Canada, where Real Ice ran back-to-back tests in 2024 and 2025. Real Ice
Panganga Pungowiyi, climate geoengineering organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, a nonprofit for environmental and economic justice issues, is vehemently against cooling and carbon credits in principle, explaining that they are “totally against our [Indigenous] value system.” She explained that, “it’s essentially helping the fossil fuel industry escape accountability and cause harm in other Indigenous communities — more pain, more lung disease, more cancer.”
This gets to the heart of the debate — not whether a solution like this can be done, but whether it should be done. Inuit opinion is divided. Whilst Maksagak is supportive of Real Ice, Pungowiyi says the technology doesn’t align with Indigenous values, and is concerned about the potential harms of scaling it. In addition to the environmental concerns, Pungowiyi notes that new infrastructure in the Arctic has historically also brought outsiders, often men, and an increase of physical and sexual assault on Indigenous women, many who end up missing or murdered. Ceccolini and Sherwin are aware of such risks and they are clear that any scaling of their technology would be done in partnership with the local community. They hope the project will eventually be Indigenous-run.
Scientists use augers to drill through Arctic ice to install the pumps. They do this work in the winter, with the hope that the thickened ice lasts longer during summer months. Real Ice
“We don’t want to repeat the kind of mistakes that have been made by Western researchers and organizations in the past,” said Sherwin.
Real Ice is not the only company that wants to protect the Arctic. Arctic Reflections, a Dutch company, is conducting similar ice thickening research in Svalbard; the Arctic Ice Project is assessing if glass beads spread over the ice can increase its reflectivity and protect it from melting; and engineer Hugh Hunt’s Marine Cloud Brightening initiative aims to increase the reflectivity of clouds through sprayed particles of sea salt as a way to protect the ice.
“I think these ideas are getting far too much prominence in relation to their credibility and maturity,” said Seigert, referring to conversations about Arctic preservation at annual United Nations climate change meetings, known as COP, and the World Economic Forum. It is not only that these technologies are currently unproven, Seigert noted, but that people are already making policy decisions based on their success. It’s an argument known as ‘moral hazard’ — the idea that developing climate engineering technologies will reduce people’s desire to cut emissions. “This is like a gift to the fossil fuel companies,” he said, allowing them to continue using oil, gas, and coal without change. “We have the way forward, decarbonization, and we need every effort to make that happen. Any distraction away from that is a problem.”
Freshly pumped seawater freezes to form layers of new ice in Cambridge Bay. Real Ice
“It’s a strong argument,” agreed Fitzgerald, of Cambridge University, when asked about moral hazard. “I am concerned about it. It’s the one thing that probably does cause me to have sleepless nights. However, we need to look at the lesser of two evils, the risk of not doing this research.”
Or as Sherwin said: “What is the cost of inaction?”
Those in support of climate intervention strategies stress that although decarbonization is vital it’s moving too slowly, and there is a lack of political will. Technologies like those being developed by Real Ice could buy ourselves more time. Paul Beckwith, a climate system analyst from the University of Ottawa, espouts a three-pronged approach: eliminating fossil fuels, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and protecting the Arctic.
“It should be less a conversation of one over the other and more how we run all three pillars at the same time,” said Sherwin. “Unfortunately we’re in a position now where if we don’t protect and restore ecosystems, we will face collapse.”
Hundreds of organized workers, representing a variety of unions including the United Auto Workers (UAW), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the National Educational Association (NEA), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Communication Workers of America (CWA), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE), among other groups, took to the streets in demonstrations across the country opposing planning Trump administration cuts to the National Institutes of Health.
The law enforcement breed can be a pretty dark lot. To be paid to think suspiciously leaves its mark, fostering an incentive to identify crimes and misdemeanours with instinctive compulsion. Historically, this saw the emergence of quackery and bogus attempts to identify criminal tendencies. Craniometry and skull size was, for a time, an attractive pursuit for the aspiring crime hunter and lunatic sleuth. The crime fit the skull.
With the onset of facial recognition technologies, we are seeing the same old habits appear, with their human creators struggling to identify the best means of eliminating compromising biases. A paper published by IBM researchers in April 2019 titled “Diversity in Faces” shows that doing so ends up returning to old grounds of quackery, including the use of “craniofacial distances, areas and ratios, facial symmetry and contrast, skin color, age and gender predictions, subjective annotations, and pose and resolution.”
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in identifying a form of predictive criminality perpetuates similar sins. Police, to that end, have consistently shown themselves unable to resist the attractions supposedly offered by data programs and algorithmic orderings, however sophisticated. These can take such crude forms as those advanced by Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco, a devotee of that oxymoronic pursuit “intelligence-led policing,” stacked with its snake oil properties. A 2020 Tampa Bay Timespiece on the exploits of that Florida county’s sheriff’s office made it clear that Nocco was keen on creating “a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened.”
The counter to this was impressive in its savagery. Such forms of law enforcement featured, in the view of criminologist David Kennedy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “One of the worst manifestations of the intersection of junk science and bad policing”, in addition to its utter lack of “common sense and humanity”.
The trend towards data heavy systems that supposedly offer insight into inherent, potential criminality has captured police departments in numerous countries. A recommendation paper from the European Crime Prevention Network notes the use of “AI tools in hopes of rendering law enforcement more effective and cost-efficient” across the European Union. Predictive policing is singled out as particularly attractive, notably as a response to smaller budgets and fewer staff.
In the United Kingdom, the government’s Ministry of Justice has taken to AI with gusto through the Homicide Prediction Project, a pilot program that hoovers up data from police and government data sets to generate profiles and assess the risk of a person committing murder. The program, commissioned by the Prime Minister’s Office in 2023 and involving the MoJ, the Home Office, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and the Metropolitan Police in London, only came to light because of a Freedom of Information request by the charity Statewatch.
According to the Data and Analysis unit within the MoJ the data science program explores “the power of MOJ datasets in relation to assessment of homicide risk”, the “additional power of the Police National Computer dataset” in doing the same, and “the additional power of local police data”. It also seeks to review the characteristics of offenders that increase such a risk, exploring “alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment and homicide.”
What stands out in the program is the type of data shared between the agencies. These include types of criminal convictions, the age a person first appeared as a victim (this includes domestic violence), and the age a person had their first encounter with the police. But also included are such matters as “health markers which are expected to have predictive power”, be they on mental health, addiction issues, suicide, self-harm and disability.
The use of predictive models is far from new for the wonks at the MoJ. Those used in the Offender Assessment System (OASys) have been previously found to profile people differently in accordance with their ethnicities. The National Offender Management service noted in a 2015 compendium of research and analysis of the system between 2009 and 2013, “Relative predictive validity was greater for female than male offenders, for White offenders than offenders of Asian, Black and Mixed ethnicity, and for older than younger offenders.”
Statewatch researcher Sofia Lyall has little to recommend the program, renamed for evidently more palatable consumption the Sharing Data to Improve Risk Assessment program. “Time and again, research shows that algorithmic systems for ‘predicting’ crime are inherently flawed.” The Homicide Prediction Project was “chilling and dystopian”, profiling individuals “as criminals before they have done anything.” She is also convinced that the system will, as with others, “code in bias towards racialized and low-income communities” while posing grave threats to privacy.
The unit claims that the work is only intended for dry research purposes, with “no direct operational or policy changes” arising because of it, or any individual application to a “person’s journey through the justice system.” This is a nonsensical assertion, given the sheer temptations open to officials to implement a program that uses hefty data sets in order to ease the task of rigorous policing. The representatives of law enforcement crave results, even those poorly arrived at, and algorithmic expediency and actuarial fantasy is there to aid them. The “precrime” dystopia portrayed in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956) is well on its way to being realised.
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In the summer of 2023, a dozen people willingly walked into a steel chamber at the University of Ottawa designed to test the limits of human survival. Outfitted with heart rate monitors and temperature probes, they waited in 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, while the humidity steadily climbed, coating their bodies in sweat and condensation. After several hours, their internal body temperatures began ratcheting upward, as the heat cooked them from the outside in.
“Few people on the planet have actually experienced temperatures like this,” said Robert Meade, a postdoctoral researcher in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who led the study. “Imagine moisture condensing on the skin like a glass of water on a hot day. That’s how hot it was, compared to skin temperature.”
Their experiment tested the body’s ability to cope with extreme heat by exposing participants to temperatures at which they could no longer cool themselves. Their study, published last week in the science journal PNAS, confirmed that this dangerous threshold is much lower than scientists had previously thought: a so-called wet bulb temperature, which accounts for heat and humidity, of 26 to 31 degrees C.
Scientists call this limit the point of “uncompensable” heat stress, “because the body cannot compensate for the heat load placed upon it,” Meade said. “With climate change driving heat waves, there’s been a lot of interest in defining these upper limits.”
When studying the health risks of heat, scientists often refer to wet bulb temperatures because moisture in the air can make heat waves much deadlier by blocking the body’s ability to sweat out heat effectively.
For over a decade, it was widely believed that the maximum wet bulb temperature that bodies could handle was 35 degree C — unlikely to become a common occurrence until global warming had reached a staggering 7 degrees C over preindustrial temperatures.
It wasn’t until 2022 that a group of researchers tested this limit with human subjects, and found that things could get dangerous much sooner, at wet bulb temperatures as low as 26 degrees C. This threshold means that vast areas of the planet could become risky to live in with 2 degrees C of global warming — which could be reached as early as 2045 if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t reduced.
“With a warming climate, we expect that those thresholds will start to be exceeded more often.” said Tony Wolf, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia who studies heat stress and coauthored the 2022 study. “The heat waves are larger in magnitude, and they last longer.”
Other studies, like Wolf’s, have tested this lower heat tolerance over a couple of hours. But Wolf says the latest study is the first to do so over nine hours, closer to what a person might actually experience during a heatwave. Only a few participants were unable to complete the full nine hours while exposed to the temperatures at the “uncompensable” heat limit, although the researchers estimated heat stroke would occur after 10 hours. At slightly lower temperatures, participants were on track to experience heat stroke within 35 hours.
“It’s very rare that you would have such high wet bulb temperatures for more than a day,” Meade said. “But if you think about what it would be like for a person actually exposed to these temperatures, that limit still indicates the point at which core temperature is on this crazy train, streaming up and up.”
Workers dump blocks of ice in a pool in the Philippines amid a 2024 heatwave in Southeast Asia, during which temperatures peaked at 53 degrees Celsius, or 127 degrees Fahrenheit. Ezra Acayan / Getty Images
Different factors can make heat stress more likely at lower temperatures, too. Working outdoors, having preexisting health conditions, and lacking access to air conditioning can make even moderate heatwaves deadly. And while Meade’s study tested young, healthy adults, Wolf’s research has found that older adults experience heat stress at lower temperatures.
“Any elderly person’s circulatory system isn’t going to be as good at dispersing heat,” said Radley Horton, a professor at the Columbia Climate School.“When the temperatures start to get really extreme, the body has to start making some difficult choices,” he said.
In February, Horton published a study in Nature that found 2 degrees C of warming could make more than a third of Earth’s land too hot for those over 60 years old — an estimated danger zone five times larger than it would be for younger adults. The study found that regions with especially hot and humid climates, like the Middle East, West Africa, and Southeast Asia, would be hit the hardest. Cities such as Karachi, Pakistan could bake under temperatures too hot for older adults 20 percent of the year.
The rising heat has already taken a serious toll. Between 1999 and 2023, heat deaths in the United States more than doubled, rising from roughly 1,000 fatalities a year to over 2,000. Over the same amount of time, nearly a quarter million people have died from heat worldwide. In 2023 alone, more than 47,000 Europeans died from heat, with countries in the Mediterranean — which is warming 20 percent faster than the rest of the planet — hit the hardest.
“People already die from heat waves now,” Wolf said. “So regardless of what happens to the climate of the future, it’s important to understand, right now, what are these thresholds above which we start to see greater risk of heat related illness and death?”
Heat pumps are essential for ditching fossil fuels. The appliances are many times more efficient than even the best gas furnaces, and they run on electricity, so they can draw power from renewables like wind and solar.
But the very thing that makes them such an amazing climate solution is also their biggest challenge. A common refrigerant called R-410A pumps through their innards so they can warm and cool homes and offices and anything else.But that refrigerant is also liquid irony, as it can escape as a greenhouse gas over 2,000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. (This is known as its “global warming potential,” or how much energy a ton of the gas absorbs over a given amount of time compared to the same amount of CO2.) Leaks can happen during the installation, operation, and disposal of heat pumps.
But this year the industry is rolling out alternative refrigerant formulations like R-454B and R-32, which have around 75 percent less global warming potential. That’s in response to Environmental Protection Agency rules mandating that, starting this year, heat pump refrigerants have a global warming potential of no more than 700. Manufacturers are looking even farther ahead at the possibility of using propane, or even CO2, as the next generation of more atmospherically friendly refrigerants.
“The whole industry is going to be transitioning away from R-410A, so that’s good,” said Jeff Stewart, the refrigeration chief engineer for residential heating, ventilation, and air conditioning at Trane Technologies, which makes heat pumps and gas furnaces. “We’re getting lower global warming potential. The problem is, it still has some, right? So there’s concern about ‘OK, is that low enough to really help the environment?’”
To be clear, heat pumps do not release greenhouse gases at anywhere near the scale of burning natural gas to heat homes, so their environmental impact is way smaller. “Even if we lost all the refrigerant, it still actually has a much smaller effect just having a heat pump and not burning gas,” said Matthew Knoll, co-founder and chief technology officer at California-based Quilt, which builds heat pump systems for homes. “I would actually want to make sure that doesn’t hamper the rapid adoption of heat pumps.”
But why does a heat pump need refrigerant? Well, to transfer heat. By changing the state of the liquid to a gas, then compressing it, the appliance absorbs heat from even very cold outdoor air and moves it indoors. Then in the summer, the process reverses to work like a traditional air conditioner.
The potential for refrigerant leaks is much smaller if the heat pump is properly manufactured, installed, and maintained. When a manufacturer switches refrigerants, the basic operation of the heat pump stays the same. But some formulations operate at different pressures, meaning they’ll need slightly different sized components and perhaps stronger materials. “It’s all the same fundamental principles,” said Vince Romanin, CEO of San Francisco-based Gradient, which makes heat pumps that slip over window sills. “But it does take a re-engineering and a recertification of all of these components.”
While Trane has transitioned to R-454B, Gradient and other companies are adopting R-32, which has a global warming potential of 675 and brings it in line with the new regulations. Gradient says that with engineering improvements, like hermetic sealing that makes it harder for refrigerants to escape, and by properly recycling its appliances, it can reduce the climate footprint of heat pumps by 95 percent. “Our math shows R-32, plus good refrigerant management, those two things combined solve almost all of the refrigerant problem,” said Romanin. “Because of that data, Gradient believes the industry should stay on R-32 until we’re ready for natural refrigerants.”
Those include CO2, butane, and propane. CO2 has a global warming potential of just 1, but it works at much higher pressures, which requires thicker tubes and compressors. It’s also less efficient in hot weather, meaning it’s not the best option for a heat pump in cooling mode in the summer.
Propane, on the other hand, excels in different conditions and operates at a lower pressure than the refrigerants it would replace. It also has a global warming potential of just 3. Propane is flammable, of course, but heat pumps can run it safely by separating sources of ignition, like electrical components, from the refrigerant compartments. “It is kind of perfect for heat pumps,” said Richard Gerbe, board member and technical advisor at Italy-based Aermec, another maker of heat pumps.
That’s why Europe is already switching to propane, and why the U.S. may soon follow, Gerbe said. A typical heat pump will run about 10 pounds of propane, less than what’s found in a barbeque tank. Gas furnaces and stoves, by contrast, are constantly fed with flammable natural gas that can leak, potentially leading to explosions or carbon monoxide poisoning. “If you’ve got a comfort level with a gas stove in your house,” Gerbe said, “this is significantly less of a source.”
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Almost 40 years ago, deep in the Pacific, a single voice called out a song unlike any other. The sound reverberated through the depths at 52 Hertz, puzzling those listening to this solo ringing out from the ocean’s symphony. The frequency was much higher than a blue whale or its cousin, the fin, leaving scientists to ponder the mystery of Whale 52.
The leviathan has been heard many times since, but never seen. Some suspect it might have some deformation that alters its voice. Others think it might simply exhibit a highly unusual vocalization — a tenor among baritones. But Marine biologist John Calambokidis of Cascadia Research Collective suggests another possibility: “The loneliest whale,” so named because there may be no one to respond to its unique call, may not be an anomaly, but a clue.
Calambokidis, who has spent more than 50 years studying cetaceans, suspects Whale 52 may be a hybrid: Part blue whale, part fin whale.
Such a creature, often called a flue whale, is growing more common as warming seas push blues into new breeding grounds, where they are increasingly likely to mate with their fin relatives. A survey of north Atlantic blues published last year found that fin whale DNA comprised as much as 3.5 percent of their genome, a striking figure given the two species diverged 8.35 million years ago. If Whale 52 is indeed a hybrid, its presence suggests genetic intermingling among Balaenoptera musculus, as blues are known among scientists, and Balaenoptera physalus has been occurring for decades, if not longer. The North Atlantic findings suggest it is accelerating.
Cetacean interbreeding has been documented before, notably among narwhals and belugas and between two species of pilot whales, combinations attributed largely to warming seas pushing these animals into new territory and closer proximity. But hybridization has been more closely studied among terrestrial creatures like the pizzly bears born of grizzlies and polar bears. It is scarcely understood in marine mammals, and little is known about what intermingling will mean for the genetics, behavior, and survival of the largest animal to have ever lived.
“Blue whales are still struggling to recover from centuries of whaling, with some populations remaining at less than 5 percent of their historical numbers,” Calambokidis said. While the number of confirmed hybrids remains low, continued habitat disruption could make them more common, eroding their genetic diversity and reducing the resilience of struggling populations.
A blue whale swims far below a diver off the coast of Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal. The cetaceans can reach 90 to 100 feet long and are the largest animal to have ever lived.
Gerard Soury / Getty
Before the arrival of genomics 30 years ago, marine biologists identified hybrids primarily through morphology, or the study of physical traits. If an animal displayed the features of two species — the dappled skin of a narwhal and stout body of a beluga, for example — it might be labeled a hybrid based on external characteristics or skeletal measurements. Anecdotal evidence might also play a role: Historical whaling logs suggest blues and fins occasionally interbred, though such pairings went largely unconfirmed. But morphology can, at best, only reveal the first-generation offspring of two distinct species.
By analyzing DNA, marine biologists like Aimee Lang can now identify intermingling that occurred generations ago, uncovering a far more complex history than was previously understood. This new level of detail complicates the picture: Are flues becoming more common, or are researchers simply better equipped to find them? As scientists probe the genetic signatures of whales worldwide, they hope to distinguish whether hybridization is an emerging trend driven by climate change, or a long-standing, overlooked facet of cetacean evolution.
In any case, some marine biologists find the phenomenon worrisome because flues are largely incapable of reproducing. Although some females are fertile, males tend to be sterile. These hybrids represent a small fraction of the world’s blue whales — of which no more than 25,000 remain — but the lopsided population of the two species suggests they will increase. There are four times as many fins as blues worldwide, and an estimate of the waters around Iceland found 37,000 fins to 3,000 blues.
“Three thousand is not a very high density of animals,” said Lang, who studies marine mammal genetics at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “So you can imagine if a female blue is looking for a mate and she can’t find a blue whale but there’s fin whales all over the place, she’ll choose one of them.”
This has profound implications for conservation. If hybrids are not easily identifiable, it could lead to inaccurate estimates of the blue whale population and difficulty assessing the efficacy of conservation programs. More troubling, sterile animals cannot contribute to the survival of their species. Simply put, hybridization presents a threat to their long-term viability.
“If it becomes frequent enough, hybrid genomes could eventually swamp out the true blue whale genomes,” Lang said. “It could be that hybrids are not as well adapted to the environment as a purebred blue or fin, meaning that whatever offspring are produced are evolutionary dead ends.”
This could have consequences for entire ecosystems. Each whale species plays a specific role in ensuring marine ecosystem health by, say, managing krill populations or providing essential nutrients like iron. Hybrids that don’t play the role evolution has assigned to them undermine this symbiotic relationship with the sea. “Those individuals and their offspring aren’t fully filling the ecological niche of either parent species,” Calambokidis said.
All of this adds to the uncertainty wrought by the upheavals already underway. Many marine ecosystems are experiencing regime shifts — abrupt and often irreversible changes in structure and function — driven by warming waters, acidification, and shifting prey distributions. These alterations are pushing some cetacean species into smaller, more isolated breeding pools.
There is reason for concern beyond blue whales. Rampant interbreeding among the 76 orcas of the genetically distinct and critically endangered Southern Resident killer whale population of the Pacific Northwest is cutting their lifespans nearly in half, by placing them at greater risk of harmful genetic traits, weakened immune systems, reduced fertility, and higher calf mortality. Tahlequah, the southern resident orca who became known around the world in 2018 for carrying her dead calf for 17 days, lost another one in January. The 370 or so North Atlantic right whales that still remain may face similar challenges.
Some level of cetacean interbreeding and hybridization may be inevitable as species adapt to climate change. Some of it may prove beneficial. The real concern is whether these changes will outpace whales’ ability to survive. Flue whales may be an anomaly, but their existence is a symptom of broader, anthropogenic disruptions.
“There are examples of populations that are doing well, even though they have low genetic diversity, and there are examples where they aren’t doing well,” said Vania Rivera Leon, who researches population genetics at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts. “They might be all right under current conditions, but if and when the conditions shift more, that could flip.”
“The effect could be what we call a bottleneck,” she added. “A complete loss of genetic diversity.”
These changes often unfold too gradually for humans to perceive quickly. Unlike fish, which have rapid life cycles and clear population booms or crashes, whales live for decades, with overlapping generations that obscure immediate trends. There have only been about 30 whale generations since whaling largely ceased. To truly grasp how these pressures are shaping whale populations, researchers may need twice that long to uncover what is happening beneath the waves and what, if anything, Whale 52 might be saying about it.
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In the decade since the world pledged to combat climate change under the Paris Agreement, global energy systems have undergone a revolution. The United States experienced a sixfold increase in solar power, and wind power more than doubled. And there are now more than 40 million electric vehicles on roads worldwide.
But ending our dependence on fossil fuels and adopting this new, greener technology requires a whole lot of metal.
It takes lithium and cobalt to build the batteries that power electric vehicles and e-bikes, nickel and rare earth elements to construct solar panels and wind turbines, and copper to build the wires that move renewable energy from the sunny and windy places it’s generated to the cities and factories where it’s most needed.
The faster we move away from fossil fuels, the more desperately we will need these metals and other so-called critical minerals. In an ambitious energy transition, global demand for them will quadruple by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. That means digging vast new open-pit mines, building powerful new refineries to distill raw ore, and opening new factories to manufacture batteries and turbines.
Just as the 20th century was defined by the geography of oil, the 21st century could be defined by the new geography of metal — in particular by snarled industrial supply lines that often flow from the developing world to the developed world and back again.
On his first day in office, U.S. President Donald Trump signed two separate executive orders that mentioned so-called critical minerals, saying the country was mining them at a pace “far too inadequate to meet our nation’s needs.” He has since tried to fast-track permitting for domestic mining projects, while at the same time looking abroad for more supply — including in Greenland, which he has said should be under U.S. control, and in Ukraine, where he has attempted to secure mineral access in exchange for protection against Russia.
Though Trump is taking every step he can to stymie the development of renewable energy, his fixation on these resources reflects an undeniable reality: The world’s growing need for critical minerals has huge implications for geopolitics, as well as climate and environmental policy.
Below, Grist demystifies critical minerals and the race to extract them. We outline the ways the world currently mines, refines, and deploys a few key metals that are essential for renewable energy and electric vehicles. Bringing order to the world’s mineral chaos will be no easy task, but the fight against climate change depends on getting it right.
The minerals
A renewable energy product, like an electric-vehicle battery or solar panel, contains dozens of minerals. Many of them aren’t difficult to find: Copper, for instance, which is a primary component in transmission wires, has been mass-produced around the world for more than 100 years. But many others needed for the technology are far more difficult to access, and governments and companies around the world are now rushing to shore up their supplies. Here’s the state of play for four of the minerals that are most critical to the energy transition: lithium, cobalt, and nickel, which are key components of energy-storing batteries, and rare earth elements, which help power wind turbines.
Hover over the gold circles below to see which minerals power modern society.
Magnetic rare earth elements — a class of elements that are essential components in electric motors — include neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium.
LITHIUM
Lithium is essential to clean technology because it can contain huge amounts of energy, making it the ideal basis for the batteries that juice up EVs and store the power produced by solar and wind. While the element is somewhat common around the world, it’s only economical to mine it in a few places where deposits are large and easy to access. Australia is by far the world’s largest producer of lithium, accounting for around 50 percent of global supply. In 2021, the nation’s massive Greenbushes mine produced around one-fifth of the world’s raw lithium. Miners have been digging it in former tin quarries on the country’s southwest coast since the 1980s, well before it was a keystone of the energy transition, when the metal was mostly used for nuclear technology and to make items like heat-resistant glass. The country now sees lithium as a key substitute for threatened exports like coal.
Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, make up the so-called “Lithium Triangle.” These three South American countries produce a relatively small amount of the mineral now, but together they hold well over half of the world’s proven lithium reserves. Unlike the hard rock resources in Australia, the deposits in Bolivia sit in the massive Uyuni salt flat, an ecological marvel that is also home to the Aymara, an Indigenous people. The left-wing government of Evo Morales has vowed that the state will lead lithium production and redistribute the benefits — his plan is called “¡100 percent Estatal!” — but residents in Uyuni have protested the idea, saying they’re concerned about the environmental impacts of mining on the playa.
The United States’ ambitions to create its own lithium supply chain rest to a large extent on aremote desert in northern Nevada. The area, known as Thacker Pass, is home to one of the world’s largest known lithium deposits, estimated to contain more than 40 million recoverable tons of the metal. A company called Lithium Americas is now constructing what will be the nation’s largest lithium mine there. The project received support from both the Biden and first Trump administrations, as well as more than $600 million in financial commitments from General Motors, which has sole rights to the first mineral product from the mine. It too generated protests and lawsuits from Indigenous tribes as well as local ranchers — efforts that were ultimately unsuccessful.
COBALT
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, dominates world production of cobalt, another critical ingredient of lithium-ion batteries. The DRC makes up 80 percent of global cobalt output, but China either owns or is a major stakeholder in the vast majority of the country’s mineral infrastructure, which has grown rapidly in recent years. Mining operations have forced thousands of people out of their homes, polluted the air with toxic cobalt dust, and dumped poisonous tailings into rivers and streams. The mines rely extensively on human trafficking and child labor, according to human rights groups.
A key dilemma is that no other country contains comparable reserves of cobalt. The DRC contains more than half of the world’s untapped land supply of the mineral, twice as much as Australia, which is next highest on the list. The other countries with known deposits, like Russia and Canada, only have enough proven supply to provide around one year of world cobalt production at current rates. Assuming that there are no major discoveries in other countries over the next few years, the path to a successful energy transition will likely run through the DRC.
International waters, however, are another thing. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a wide stretch of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaiʻi and Mexico, contains what are perhaps the world’s most robust reserves of cobalt. The region’s seabed, more than 10,000 feet below the surface, contains an estimated 50 million tons of cobalt, at least several times more than what can be found in the DRC. But even if the depth wasn’t a factor, dozens of countries have called for a ban on deep-sea mining, and members of the International Seabed Authority last year voted in a leader who was critical of the practice.
NICKEL
Nickel is the Swiss army knife of energy transition minerals: It’s used not only in EV batteries but also in solar panels, wind turbines, and even in the production of green hydrogen. Thankfully, supplies of the metal are far more distributed around the world than is the case for lithium and cobalt. All kinds of countries,from Russia to Australia to Brazil to Indonesia, boast huge nickel resources — and even some small island states like the French overseas territory of New Caledonia have gobs of the metal as well. Because nickel has long been used in stainless steel and other alloys, there are far more mature and production-ready mines than there are for cobalt.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country, currently accounts for half of global nickel production. The country has been mining the metal since it was a Dutch colony at the turn of the 20th century. Here, as in other countries, the global nature of the supply chain has proven politically contentious: The country depends on China to refine its raw nickel ore and invest in its mining infrastructure. In an effort to reduce this dependence, Indonesia imposed a ban on the export of raw nickel ore in 2020, forcing producers to invest in smelting resources in the country.
Brazil is home to among the largest untapped nickel deposits in the world, but political turmoil has made the future of this resource uncertain. Much like the United States, the country has swung between left-wing and right-wing leaders with radically different environmental policies. The current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has positioned himself as a defender of the Amazon rainforest and an environmental champion, unlike his conservative predecessor — but he seems to be warming to the industrial giant Vale, which hopes to invest billions of dollars in expanded copper and nickel mining.
RARE EARTHS
So-called rare earth elements are essential for modern wind power. They are major components of the ultra-powerful and long-lasting magnets through which turbines generate energy. While the substances aren’t quite as rare as we thought when we gave them that name, well over half of global production is concentrated in China, which has a stranglehold over the rare earth supply chain. The country has been mining the elements for decades, including in massive open-pit mines in inland areas such as the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. In Jiangxi province, which had a rare earth boom in the 1990s during the first tech boom, mining operations denuded forests and left behind contaminated wastewater pits.
China is far from the only country with a significant share of rare earth metals, but the other countries that have huge stores of the minerals have yet to extract much of them. Take Vietnam, for instance: The country has 22 million tons of rare earths underground, about 20 percent of the world’s known supply and enough to build millions of wind turbines, but it produced a relatively microscopic 600 tons in 2023 — the very same year it entered into an agreement with the U.S. to develop the sector. With corruption scandals implicating top executives at domestic mining authorities, Vietnam is not poised to emerge as a serious alternative to Chinese rare earth supply in the near future.
President Donald Trump appears to be serious about trying to seize Greenland from Denmark. The apparent aim of Trump’s recent diplomatic onslaught over the far northern territory is to secure a strategic military outpost in the Arctic, but the purchase would also have the added effect of giving the United States access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of rare earth metals. The European Union and China have also eyed these reserves.
Annual global mineral production
Today2050 (estimated)
Li
Lithium
180,000 metric tons
Rare Earths
72,000 metric tons
Co
Cobalt
230,000 metric tons
Ni
Nickel
3,600,000 metric tons
Because of inconsistencies in our datasets, a number of data sources were used for this series.
Data for current production of lithium, cobalt, and nickel comes from USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024. All 2050 projections come from IEA 2024 Global Critical Minerals Outlook. This report only includes data on the small subset of magnetic rare earth elements used in clean energy: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. For this reason, data for current production of rare earth elements is sourced from IEA, and only includes those four magnetic rare earth elements.
The supply chain
The bare rock that miners scrape out of the earth in a place like Australia or Indonesia is just at the beginning of its useful life — and it’s a long way from helping to spin a wind turbine or start up an EV. Once a chunk of something like lithium ore leaves the ground, it must undergo a complex refining process to become an adequate conductor of electricity, and then it must travel to a factory where workers can integrate it into a battery pack. These refining and manufacturing processes almost never happen where miners pull the minerals out of the ground, which creates something like a global game of hot potato.
Minerals: Where are they now?
Annual ProductionReserves
Loading world map data…
Because of inconsistencies in our datasets, a number of data sources were used for this series.
Data for the map comes from USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024. For proprietary reasons, current lithium production data was withheld from that dataset. Because of this, current U.S. lithium production came from The Energy Institute’s 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy. That U.S. figure (600 metric tons) was added to lithium’s global total.
REFINING
In their raw, rocky form, minerals like lithium and nickel are useless for the energy transition. In order to become component parts for EV batteries and wind turbines, these metals must be refined down to purer substances, often through energy-intensive smelting processes. This is the source of the world’s largest energy transition bottleneck: Virtually all mined metal, whether it comes out of the ground in Indonesia or Canada, must travel to China in order to be refined. The country controls 90 percent of the world’s rare earth refining capacity, around two-thirds of its lithium and cobalt refining capacity, and around a third of its nickel refining capacity.
Why is China such a refining behemoth? It’s simple: It has a massive head start. The Chinese state recognized early that critical minerals would be key to a future where fossil fuels were on the wane, and it has poured billions of dollars over the past few decades into the construction of new refineries, setting aside environmental concerns that led to the offshoring of some industrial plants from the United States. The country also invested in the upstream production of these minerals in other developing countries through its $1 trillion Belt and Road initiative, enabling it to achieve vertical integration through the supply chain for certain minerals.
As its foreign relations with China deteriorate, the United States has made halting attempts to build its own lithium refinery fleet, but it’s a slow grind. Thanks to the protectionist nature of U.S. climate policies — the Inflation Reduction Act restricts EV subsidies to cars made with battery material produced and refined in the United States — the entire U.S. energy transition is somewhat dependent on this halting progress. However, there are some large projects in the pipeline, such as Stardust Power, a 50,000-ton lithium refinery being built in Oklahoma. The state has also secured refinery projects for cobalt, nickel, and rare earth metals, but these projects require significant state and federal subsidies to get off the ground: Stardust is eligible for federal and state subsidies totalling around $257 million, almost a quarter of its $1 billion overall cost. Whether these subsidies will be enough for the U.S. to refine all the lithium it needs is very much an open question.
MANUFACTURING
The most promising effort to make the United States competitive in the minerals supply chain may not be a mine, or a refinery, or a factory — but a recycling plant. The startup Ascend Elements opened its first large facility for the recycling of lithium-ion batteries in Covington, Georgia, in 2023. Each year the facility crushes up battery packs containing the equivalent of the lithium in 70,000 spent EVs, and it uses a liquid solution to turn the ground-up dust into new cathode material. If the approach can scale up substantially, it could reduce U.S. reliance on the labyrinthine mining supply chain.
While refining is China’s biggest advantage, the country is also a major player in the manufacturing of batteries, cars, and wind turbines — the final destination industries for all the raw metals we’re mining around the world. Tariffs have prevented the country’s main car makes from going mainstream in the United States, but the affordable BYD (BuildYourDreams) brand now makes up around 15 percent of the global EV market — and just overtook Tesla as the world’s most popular electric car. On wind energy, the country is even more dominant: It produces 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines.
The fact that one of Tesla’s largest factories is located in Germany, thousands of miles away from lithium mines and lithium refineries, is a stark demonstration of a key irony in global development: Wealthy countries like the United States and Germany have done their best to retain well-compensated heavy manufacturing jobs, but they now rely on the developing world for the minerals that supply their manufacturing sectors.
