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Two decades from now, children born into a world shaped by COVID-19 will be coming of age, and while the pandemic’s lasting imprint is unclear, one detail is coming into focus: Baby’s first car will probably be electric.
Despite the slump in the global electric vehicle market this year, a new analysis from the research firm BloombergNEF suggests that electric vehicle adoption will accelerate, eventually. The researchers’ annual outlook estimates that by 2040, 58 percent of new passenger cars sold will be electric, up from 2 percent today, and electric models will make up 31 percent of all of the cars on the road.
But it’s going to be a bumpy road to get there. A report by research firm Wood Mackenzie released in early April predicted a 43 percent drop in global electric vehicle sales by the end of the year. The new analysis by BNEF estimated that sales would only dip by 18 percent. Either way, it’s a sharp change of course for the industry, which has been growing steadily for over a decade.
Automakers were also forced to shut down factories and suspend production to help contain the outbreak, delaying the release of some new electric models, such as the latest Chevy Bolt and the electric Hummer. And with oil prices at record lows, some experts predict that buyers won’t be able to justify the up-front costs of electric cars with savings on gas.
So how does any of this spell a fast and furious adoption of electric vehicles in the future? The short answer: cheaper cars and more aggressive climate change policy. In a statement, Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport for BNEF, said the firm’s analysis suggested that internal combustion engine car sales already peaked back in 2017, and that electric car prices will finally be on par with their gas counterparts by 2025, thanks to falling prices for lithium-ion batteries. That day could come even sooner for Tesla vehicles: The company claims to be on the verge of introducing a new, more-affordable, long-lasting battery in its Model 3 sedan as early as later this year that it says will make the car cost competitive with gas models. But it will only be available in China to start.
The outlook is even brighter for electric buses, expected to make up 67 percent of all buses on the road by 2040, according to the analysis, as well as two-wheeled vehicles like mopeds and motorcycles, which are expected to be 47 percent electric by that year. To make this electric future viable, the world is going to need about 290 million charging stations, with a total price tag of around $500 billion, said Aleksandra O’Donovan, head of electrified transport for BNEF. Electric vehicles will increase electricity demand by about 5 percent.
Much of the sales growth will be in Europe and China, at least in the near term, where there is more policy support. There are now 13 countries around the world that have plans to phase out gas-powered cars altogether. The United States isn’t one of them. The U.S. government is currently in the process of phasing out a tax credit that helped spur electric vehicle adoption.
But states are attempting to pick up the slack. In Colorado, a new plan unveiled last month promises to add almost 1 million electric cars to the road in the next ten years and fully transition trucks and buses to electric options. Connecticut released a similar roadmap, with the goal of ramping up electric vehicle use by more than 100,000 vehicles in just five years. While budget drains endanger both of those plans, officials are optimistic that the momentum for electric vehicles is pandemic-proof.
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Papua New Guinea has one of the largest expanses of tropical rainforest on the planet. But in recent years the island nation just north of Australia has seen a surge in deforestation from logging and mining, which has threatened to release large stores of carbon into the atmosphere.
Deforestation has left behind patches of bare land across the country, and indigenous communities bear the brunt of the environmental consequences. Many are wary of companies that clear the land without providing something to the local community in return. So in 2017, when the Malaysian timber company Maxland secured a permit to clear rainforest on the country’s Manus Island, it promised to plant three to five million rubber trees and said it would benefit nearby communities through jobs, royalty payments, and improved infrastructure.
Critics say that Maxland is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. According to a new report released this month by the human rights and environmental watchdog Global Witness, Maxland has not planted a single rubber tree, despite being two years into its five-year contract. Instead, the report claims that the company has prioritized illegal logging and exporting the island’s valuable hardwood timber, raking in millions of dollars in the process.
What’s more, Global Witness discovered that the company is linked to some of the world’s most prominent financial institutions, including BlackRock — the planet’s largest asset manager — which announced in January that it would place sustainability at the center of its investment approach and divest from companies that present significant climate-related risks. The non-governmental organization’s investigation found that BlackRock is among the top 20 shareholders of the three banks financing Maxland’s “mother company,” the Joinland Group, a Malaysian conglomerate with a history of logging projects in Papua New Guinea.
Norway’s $1 trillion Government Pension Fund Global, which just last week decided to blacklist large coal-dependent companies from its portfolio, is also among the top 20 shareholders of those banks — despite the fact that it publicly divested from a slew of companies tied to deforestation last year. Other financial supporters include The Vanguard Group, T. Rowe Price Associates, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). At the time of Global Witness’ analysis, these financial institutions had hundreds of millions of dollars tied to the banks that made Maxland’s Manus Island project possible.
“It’s broadly understood now that unregulated finance is contributing to climate change by propping up the fossil fuel industry, and the same is true of the financing of industries involving deforestation,” said Lela Stanley, the lead investigator for the Global Witness report. “Ordinary people whose savings are invested with these financiers may be unwittingly connected as well.”
Grist reached out to BlackRock for comment on how this fits into their sustainability goals but did not receive a response in time for publication. In an email to Grist, a spokesperson for the Norweigan pension fund said that, in 2019, it continued “dialogue with banks in Southeast Asia on their policies for lending to companies that contribute to deforestation.” The Vanguard Group told Global Witness it would incorporate the report into its “ongoing analysis with the companies in question.” T. Rowe Price did not comment on its specific investments, but it told Global Witness that environmental and social factors were key components in its investment approach. Meanwhile, CalPERS declined Grist’s request for comment.
Maxland’s Manus Island venture, the Pohowa Integrated Agro-Forestry Project, has frustrated the indigenous residents of Manus Island, according to Global Witness. The local villages are still in dire need of critical infrastructure and services such as major roads, as well as additional air and water transportation options. Some villages are nestled between the rainforest and the sea — and the only way to reach the main market in the island’s port and provincial capital on the opposite side of the island is by boat, which requires a fare and takes two hours each way.
Maxland promised residents that it would build a road to make their lives easier, while also culling the forest and replacing it with millions of rubber trees that would potentially open up rubber farming jobs. Many locals thought it was a good deal, but when Global Witness visited the site in October 2019, Maxland seemed to have failed to deliver on its promises. The investigators did observe a few thousand rubber seedlings on the far side of Manus Island, on a site that did not belong to Maxland, but they appeared neglected and were in poor condition. And by that time, the company had already exported nearly 19 thousand cubic meters of hardwood timber worth roughly $1.8 million to China and Japan.
Josephine Kenni, the head of Papua New Guinea’s National Rubber Board, which manages the rubber industry in the country, told Global Witness that 60,000 more rubber seedlings were expected to arrive from Malaysia by the end of May. However, Kenni also told Global Witness that Maxland was violating the law and the board’s project plan. As of April, Global Witness received local reports confirming that no rubber has yet been planted at the project site. However, a huge logging camp appeared to be operating in full swing, with water tanks emblazoned with Joinland’s company name and a petrol station to serve the company’s fleet of trucks.
Thomas Hah, a Malaysian entrepreneur and founder of the Joinland Group, responded to Global Witness by denying its findings and warning that the organization would receive “an official letter” from his lawyer. (Hah did not reply to Grist’s request for comment in time for publication.)
“For your information, all our projects in Papua New Guinea are granted by the National Forest Authority,” Hah said in an email to Global Witness. “We reserve our legal rights towards any baseless and false allegations.”
The approval of Maxland’s permits was initially rejected by the Provincial Forest Management Committee. However, Papua New Guinea’s National Forest Authority overruled that decision and issued a permit, as Hah noted, despite what Global Witness determined to be the company’s violation of the Forestry Act, which requires permit applicants to submit “evidence of past experience in any agriculture or other land use developments.” Maxland lacks prior experience with rubber plantations, according to the report. On top of that, an earlier Global Witness report documented Maxland’s parent company Joinland performing a similar logging operation on the island of New Hanover.
Since Maxland laid eyes on Manus Island, the company worked hard to court and gain the trust of major players and leaders on the island. The report found that Maxland bought houses for public officials in the area and paid police officers to perform private security functions (a relatively common practice for logging companies that set up shop in the country).
For now, Global Witness told Grist it hopes the report will spur the government of Papua New Guinea into action.
“We hope … that this report prompts the government to thoroughly investigate this instance,” Stanely said, “and to finally enforce its own laws that protect the land and forests that its rural communities depend on.”
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Who’s financing deforestation in Papua New Guinea? A new report follows the money.
The U.S. oil market was in a tailspin when dozens of oil tankers began approaching California’s coast in late April. The vessels, some as long as three football fields, were filled with millions of barrels of oil that suddenly had no place to go.
Amid the combined effects of a price war between oil-rich states Saudi Arabia and Russia and the COVID-19 pandemic’s curbing of demand, American refineries slashed production while onshore facilities filled to the brim. As a result, U.S. oil prices plunged to negative levels for the first time in history.
Tankers are still anchored near southern California today, and as they wait, they’ve switched from running their primary diesel engines to smaller auxiliary engines. While idling doesn’t create the carbon emissions of actually transporting cargo, the fleet is still generating the equivalent daily footprint of driving roughly 16,000 passenger cars. The giant ships burn fuel to keep lights on, power equipment, and heat the large volumes of crude oil resting in their tanks. Given the turbulent economy, oil analysts say the tankers might sit in suspended animation for weeks or months.
In recent days, as many as 32 tankers were anchored near Los Angeles and Long Beach, with some vessels leaving and new ones arriving as oil very slowly trickles in and out of ports. On May 11, 18 tankers filled designated spots as if in a “truck stop parking lot” three miles offshore, said Captain Kit Louttit, who monitors port traffic for the Marine Exchange of Southern California. That is about triple the typical number of tankers in those spaces.
Tankers along the U.S. West Coast, mainly off of California, held some 20 million barrels of oil on Monday, or nearly enough to satisfy a fifth of the world’s daily oil consumption, according to market data firm Kpler. The floating supply glut should gradually clear once new deliveries from the Middle East and Asia stop arriving.
But while the idling ships remain near California, they “could pose an ongoing risk to air quality,” said Bryan Comer, a senior researcher at the environmental think tank International Council on Clean Transportation, or ICCT. “Especially because you have these ships lumped together.” The cluster, he noted, concentrates the pollution that drifts ashore.
ICCT gathers annual emissions and fuel-use data for the world’s shipping fleet. By its estimates, the largest oil tankers burn nearly 4 tons of petroleum-based fuel every day they’re at anchor. That means each ship emits more than 11 tons of carbon dioxide per day — the equivalent of driving nearly 800 passenger vehicles. Anchored tankers also emit about 15 pounds of sulfur dioxide and 8 pounds of particulate matter daily, contributing to smog and air pollution. (Those global data points hold true even off the coast of California, Comer said, despite cargo ships of all kinds having to meet some of the strictest air-quality rules in the region.)
Worldwide, shipping regulators are cracking down on sulfur pollution, which is linked to heart and lung disease — and is thought to raise the risk of dying from COVID-19. As of this past January, oceangoing vessels can burn fuel with only 0.5 percent sulfur content, a significant drop from the previous limit of 3.5 percent. However, since 2009, California has required ships sailing within 28 miles of its coastline to use lighter “distillate” fuels with just 0.1 percent sulfur content. (A similar rule now applies to most coastlines in the United States and Canada.) Still, even the cleaner-burning distillate fuel has nearly 70 times the sulfur content of on-road diesel fuel.
It’s not yet clear how the tankers will affect shipping pollution overall — especially in light of pandemic-induced disruptions across the industry. Container ships and other cargo vessels are sailing far less frequently to ports around the world as measures taken to slow the spread of coronavirus upend trade flows and squeeze consumer demand. In Los Angeles, home of the busiest U.S. container port, cargo volumes fell by 15.5 percent in the first four months of 2020, with no growth expected in the near future. Comer said researchers haven’t yet calculated the net effect of fewer trips and idling tankers on shipping-related emissions.
Much like in California, oil tankers are crowding ports in places like India, Singapore, and the U.S. Gulf Coast, serving as temporary storage units or waiting indefinitely for customers. With cities and countries on lockdown, global oil demand fell sharply in April to levels last seen in 1995, according to the International Energy Agency. Russia and Saudi Arabia only agreed last month to cut output to ease the glut.
According to ICCT’s Comer, some of these stranded vessels pose pollution concerns beyond air quality. Certain tankers burn dirty bunker fuel — a byproduct of the petroleum refining process — and use “open-loop” scrubbers to reduce the ship’s sulfur output in line with regulations. The scrubber systems mix water with exhaust gas, filter it, then dump the resulting washwater — an acidic mixture that contains carcinogens like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals that can harm marine life. ICCT estimates that large vessels emit nearly 40 tons of scrubber washwater every hour.
This particular problem doesn’t apply to California, where state regulators prohibit scrubber use. And while anchoring so many massive tankers could raise the risk of collisions and spills, Capt. Louttit said that every vessel’s movement is monitored and planned in advance to prevent such a catastrophe. The U.S. Coast Guard also flies helicopters over California’s San Pedro Bay to ensure the vessels aren’t leaking oil or dumping trash or sewage.
The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, which monitors air quality in the state, said that given the tankers’ “fairly low” power needs while idling, their emissions “are not likely as high as” when the ships are at berth and running pumps to load crude oil onto ships or shore. Nevertheless, storing the excess crude at sea doesn’t come without some environmental cost.
“We are experiencing a unique and extraordinary situation,” CARB spokesperson Karen Caesar said about the tankers. “We are closely monitoring the situation and tracking these ships.”
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As the coronavirus pandemic cripples the U.S. economy, corporate giants are turning to Congress for help. Polluting industries have been among the first in line: Congress has already bailed out airlines, and coal companies have snagged over $30 million in federal small-business loans. Big Plastic is next in line with what might seem a surprising request: $1 billion to help fix the country’s recycling.
A group of plastic industry and trade groups sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on April 16, asking Congress to allocate $1 billion to municipal and state recycling infrastructure in the next pandemic stimulus bill. It would be part of legislation known as the RECOVER Act, first introduced in Congress last November. Recycling sounds great, and has long been an environmental policy that almost everyone — Republicans and Democrats both — can get behind. To some environmentalists and advocates, however, the latest push is simply the plastic industry trying to get the federal government to clean up mountains of plastic waste in an attempt to burnish Big Plastic’s image.
“Plastic recycling has been a failure,” said Judith Enck, a former regional director for the Environmental Protection Agency and the founder of the organization Beyond Plastics. “And there’s no reason to try to spend federal tax dollars to try to prop up plastic recycling when it really hasn’t worked for the last 30 years anyway.”
Put simply, very little of your plastic recycling actually gets recycled. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, less than 10 percent of the plastic produced in the past four decades has been recycled; the rest has wound up in landfills or been incinerated. In 2017, the U.S. produced over 35 million tons of plastic, yet less than 3 million tons was made into new products.
Part of the problem is that some items are composed of different types of plastic and chemicals, making them difficult to melt down and process. Only plastics with a “1” or “2” symbol are commonly recycled, and even then, they are more often “downcycled” into different types of products. A container of laundry detergent or a plastic soda bottle might be used for a new carpet or outdoor decking, but rarely into a new bottle. And downcycling is one step closer to the landfill. “The logo of recycling is the arrow that goes around and around — but that’s never been the case with plastic,” said Enck.
Big plastic-producing companies also have little incentive to use recycled materials rather than virgin materials. Plastics are made from petroleum, and when the price of crude oil is as low as it is now, it costs more to manufacture goods from recycled polymers than from crude.
Some analysts say that the RECOVER Act doesn’t take on these larger issues. The act is aimed at the “curbside” aspect of recycling: funding city and state recycling collection, improving sorting at processing plants, and encouraging consumer education — teaching people what can (and cannot) go into recycling bins. (The legislation is also backed by the American Chemistry Council, which represents Dow Chemical and ExxonMobil, and has long fought against municipal plastic bag bans.)
There are some curbside problems with recycling. If plastic bags or containers covered with food waste get into recycling bins, they can contaminate other items and make sorting and reuse more difficult.
But Jonathan Krones, a professor of environmental studies at Boston College, said the real problem isn’t at the curb. It’s that “there aren’t robust, long-term resilient end markets for recycled material.” Even if cities manage to collect and sort more recycling, without markets all those perfectly processed plastics have nowhere to go.
For decades the U.S. solved part of the problem by selling hundreds of thousands of tons of used plastics to China. Then, in 2018, the Chinese government implemented its “National Sword” policy, forbidding the import of 24 types of waste in a campaign against foreign trash. The U.S. suddenly had lost the biggest market for its used plastics, and cities across the U.S. began burning recyclables or sending them to landfills. Some cities have stopped recycling plastic and paper altogether.
Piles of plastic and paper at a city recycling processing plant in Brooklyn, New York. Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty Images
So why is Big Plastic pushing the RECOVER Act? Some argue that petroleum companies are trying to paper over the failures of plastic recycling. If consumers realized that only 10 percent of their plastics are ultimately recycled, they might push for bans on plastic bags and other single-use items, or more stringent restrictions on packaging. Keeping the focus on recycling can distract public attention from the piles of plastic waste clogging up our landfills and oceans. And a recent investigation by NPR and Frontline revealed that since the 1970s the plastics industry has backed recycling programs to buttress its public image.
“Had this bill been proposed 10 years ago, I think I would have said it was a good idea,” Krones said, referring to the RECOVER Act. “But what has been revealed after National Sword is that this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a technology problem. It’s a consumption problem and a manufacturing problem.” He argues that any attempt to fix plastic recycling should come with constraints on the production of new materials — only manufacturing plastics that can be easily broken down and reused, for example, or mandating that companies include a certain percentage of recycled materials in their products.
There are other ways to deal with the plastic problem. In February, Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, a Democrat, introduced the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, which would phase out many single-use plastic items like utensils and straws and require big companies to pay for recycling and composting products — what’s known as “extended producer responsibility.” Other countries have similar laws on the books: Germany has required companies to take responsibility for their own packaging since 1991, and it’s been credited with dramatically reducing waste.
For now, plastic use is on the rise. According to Meidl, the pandemic is bringing piles of takeout boxes and plastic bags to landfills, as cities ban reusable bags and enforce social distancing. She thinks that the RECOVER Act could be helpful, but that it needs to be coupled with other interventions.
“No matter how much government funding is allocated towards recycling efforts, there first needs to be a significant paradigm in human behavior,” she said. “Where plastic is viewed as a resource, not a waste.”
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Plastic recycling is broken. So why does Big Plastic want $1 billion to fix it?
Stay-at-home orders and other social distancing measures have dramatically improved outdoor air quality in cities around the world, but a new study published Tuesday shows that indoor air quality may pose acute risks of its own — especially now that the novel coronavirus has us all spending so much time at home.
The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health study found that after just an hour of using a gas-fired stove or oven, levels of nitrogen dioxide — one of a group of gases that contribute to smog formation and are considered harmful to human health — inside California homes reached levels that exceeded both state and national ambient air-quality standards. The compromised indoor air quality caused by gas-powered furnaces, stoves, and water heaters could increase the likelihood of respiratory and cardiovascular disease and premature death, according to the study.
“The goal of this report is to provide information to Californians on how pollution from gas-fired appliances affects the air they breathe, and the related health effects,” Yifang Zhu, the study’s lead researcher, said in a statement. “California’s state agencies often focus on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts, but there has been much less focus on how fossil fuel use in household appliances can adversely impact indoor air quality and public health.”
The research, commissioned by Sierra Club, comes as recent studies have linked air pollution to higher rates of COVID-19 mortality. Inhaling nitrogen oxides poses especially acute risks to children and the elderly. Meanwhile, residential gas appliances emit approximately 16,000 tons of nitrogen oxides to outdoor air each year — which Rachel Golden, deputy director of Sierra Club’s building electrification program, notes is more than twice the NOx emissions from all of California’s gas-fired power plants combined.
Air pollution concentration matters a great deal, so residents of smaller homes and apartments often have it worse. Researchers found that after an hour of cooking in a small household, more than 90 percent of smaller residences had peak levels of nitrogen oxides that exceeded national ambient air quality standards. As Grist’s resident advice columnist Eve Andrews reminded us last week, indoor air quality isn’t always better than what you’re breathing outdoors.
The study also highlights environmental justice issues, since low-income households tend to have less space and more unmet maintenance needs, which can increase indoor emissions on top of being more at-risk for poor outdoor air quality. These factors may contribute to higher rates of respiratory challenges among low-income communities — particularly communities of color — which in turn may make residents more vulnerable to developing serious complications if they contract COVID-19.
To decrease indoor air pollution, the study proposes that households transition to zero-emission electric appliances. If all residential gas appliances in California were immediately replaced with clean energy alternatives, the resulting decrease in pollution would result in approximately 350 fewer deaths, 600 fewer cases of acute bronchitis, and 300 fewer cases of chronic bronchitis annually.
Without a massive public intervention, however, it seems unlikely that these appliances will be replaced at that scale, at least not in the homes of many low-income residents that could benefit the most. Golden says that policymakers can prioritize a just transition by focusing on efforts to reduce pollution and lower energy bills for vulnerable households, especially given the economic fallout from COVID-19.
“State agencies have a central role to play in helping people replace polluting gas appliances with clean, pollution-free electric alternatives like heat pumps and induction stoves,” Golden told Grist.
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Study: Gas-powered appliances may be hazardous for your health
This story has been updated.
If Joe Biden had released his $1.7 trillion climate plan in a vacuum last year, the proposal would have been hailed as the most ambitious climate platform introduced by a presidential candidate in United States history. The 22-page plan aims to zero out emissions by 2050, protect disadvantaged communities from pollution, and create 10 million new jobs to boot.
Unfortunately for the former vice president, his proposal paled in comparison to plans from a number of his primary challengers that were three, five, and even 10 times as expensive. Bernie Sanders, for example, put out a $16 trillion climate plan called the Green New Deal that had the elderly pied piper of the progressive left collecting endorsements from climate groups like a Vermonter picking blueberries in July.
Whether progressives like it or not, Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. And on Monday, he snagged his first environmental endorsement from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), a powerful environmental group that helps elect climate hawks to office and scores members of the House and Senate based on how they vote on environment and climate bills.
“We are confident that as president, Biden will immediately put our country on track for a 100 percent clean energy economy with policies centered in justice and equity that restore America’s global climate leadership,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs for LCV Action Fund, the political arm of the group, said in a statement.
Given that the choice in the general election comes down to Donald Trump, who has left no stone unturned in his effort to roll back environmental protections, and Biden, who has an 83 percent lifetime score for his environmental voting record from LCV, it’s not surprising that the group decided to endorse the former senator from Delaware.
What is surprising, and what might be welcome news to voters for whom climate change is a top priority, is that Biden plans to expand his climate platform. In his own statement in response to the LCV’s announcement, the former vice president said he was “honored” to receive the endorsement and indicated that there’s more to come. “In the months ahead, expanding this plan will be one of my key objectives,” he said, adding that he knows the issue “resonates” with young voters.
Biden’s statement said he aims to “campaign on climate change and win on climate change,” which isn’t a bad plan if he’s looking to convince a wider swath of Democratic voters — and maybe even pick up a Republican or two. In poll after poll after poll, climate change and health care are the top two issues for Democrats this election cycle. And the issue is no longer relegated to one side of the political aisle. Polls also show that young Republicans may care as much about the warming planet as their blue counterparts.
By his own admission, Biden has a lot of work to do to earn the progressive movement’s vote. Many local chapters of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate group that backed Bernie Sanders in the primary and has emerged as a powerful force in the activist landscape, have said they aren’t endorsing Biden. But that could change if the candidate steps up his climate game.
“We’ve tried to be super clear about the way that we need them to improve on not only their climate policy but their immigration, criminal justice, and financial regulation policies,” Varshini Prakash, Sunrise co-founder and executive director, told Vice News, referring to the Biden campaign. “We’ll see if that conversation translates into policy changes.” In an interview on the New York Times’ The Daily podcast, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat from New York who is one of the architects of the Green New Deal, expressed a similar sentiment and said she was waiting to fully endorse him.
Will Biden be able to win over diehard Sanders supporters? Probably not. Biden’s campaign is premised on returning to a time of relative normalcy, not turning the economic system on its head. But if he does scale up his climate plan, he might be able to rack up a few more endorsements from environmental heavyweights.
Update: On Tuesday, a group of more than 50 scientists and climate experts wrote an open letter endorsing Biden for president. “We are confident that, unlike President Trump, Joe Biden will respect, collaborate with, and listen to leaders in the scientific community and public health experts to confront the existential climate crisis and other environmental threats,” the letter said. Prominent climate scientists Michael Mann and Jane Lubchenco (formerly head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under President Obama) are among the letter’s signatories.
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What does Joe Biden have to do to win over the climate movement?
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