What Is the Climate Crisis?
The climate crisis refers to the destabilization of the climate conditions that have allowed human communities and current ecosystems to survive and thrive on Earth. It is caused by a rise in global temperatures that scientists conclude is “unequivocally” driven by human activity — primarily the burning of fossil fuels and secondarily the destruction of forests and other natural carbon sinks. Since humans began using fossil fuels in earnest at the start of the industrial revolution, global temperatures have risen to 1.1 degrees Celsius above the 1850 to 1900 average. Global heating has now reached a rate of increase of more than 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. This warming has already led to the melting of Arctic sea ice, the retreat of glaciers, and more frequent and intense extreme weather events like heat waves, foods and droughts. These events have already claimed lives, driven species to extinction and forced more than 13 million people from their homes in Africa and Asia in 2019 alone. With every further warming increase, the risks of additional harms become ever more severe.
Luckily, there is something we can do about it, but we have to act quickly. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that we must curb greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent of 2019 levels by 2035 in order to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and save hundreds of millions from suffering and poverty by 2050. Unfortunately, temperature projections based on current policies and pledges put the world on track for 2 to 3.2 degrees of warming. The climate crisis is therefore a crisis in two senses of the word. It is both “a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger” and “a time when a difficult or important decision must be made.” We can choose to drive our gas-powered SUVs down what UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the “highway to climate hell,” or we can turn off the ignition, take our feet off the gas pedal and walk together down a greener path.
What Are Greenhouse Gases?

Greenhouse gases get their name because they contribute to something called the greenhouse effect. When the sun’s rays penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere, these gases stop some of the heat from escaping back into space, acting like the walls of a greenhouse. Greenhouse gases already exist in the atmosphere without human intervention, and this is normally a very good thing: Without the greenhouse effect, Earth’s surface temperatures would be around 33 degrees Celsius cooler. However, human activity has released more of these gases into the atmosphere in the last two centuries, throwing the system out of balance, trapping more heat and causing global temperatures to rise.
What Are the Main Greenhouse Gases That Contribute to the Climate Crisis?
There are four main greenhouse gases causing additional warming.
Carbon Dioxide

Carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas most responsible for heating the planet. It is a naturally occurring molecule that can be released through events like volcanic eruptions. However, since 1750, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels have increased by 50 percent to reach levels not seen since around four million years ago, when sea levels were as much as 25 meters higher (approximately 82 feet) than today. In 2021, carbon dioxide reached a record 415.7 parts per million. Humans also emitted record levels of carbon dioxide over the past decade — 54 gigatonnes a year between 2012 and 2021.
Methane

Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — producing 28 times more warming than carbon dioxide over a 100 year period. At the same time, it lingers in the atmosphere for much shorter — around 12 years to carbon dioxide’s hundreds. The combination of methane’s potency and shorter lifespan makes reducing methane emissions a strategic priority for limiting global warming in the short term.
Methane is released both naturally — by plants decaying in wetlands — and by human activities including landfills, rice farming, the digestion of livestock animals like cows and the use of fossil fuels. Natural gas is 70 to 90 percent methane. These activities account for 50 to 65 percent of global methane emissions, and overall the gas has caused 30 percent of the post-industrial temperature hike. Indeed, the amount of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled, reaching a record 1,908 parts per billion in 2021.
Nitrous Oxide

Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas primarily released by the production and use of agricultural fertilizers, though it is also emitted when fossil fuels or plant matter are burned. It is released naturally as part of the nitrogen cycle, but around 40 percent of current emissions comes from human activity. While it’s been called “a forgotten greenhouse gas” when compared to carbon dioxide and methane, it is still responsible for around 6 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also very powerful — a single molecule of nitrous oxide has 300 times the warming potential of a single molecule of carbon dioxide — and it persists in the atmosphere for around 114 years. In 2021, its atmospheric concentration reached a record 334.5 ppb, which is 124 percent of its pre-industrial levels.
Chlorofluorocarbons

Chlorofluorocarbons are the one greenhouse gas that does not occur naturally. They were created for industrial purposes and used as refrigerants, solvents and propellants for spray cans until it was discovered that they were burning a hole in the ozone layer. World leaders came together and agreed to phase out their use under the Montreal Protocol of 1987. It’s a good thing they did, because it turns out that CFCs are thousands of times more effective by mass at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. A study found that the agreement to restrict their use reduced global warming by as much as 25 percent. However, they are still occasionally emitted. A spike in 2013 was tied to illegal use in China that the nation later dealt with, but they are still released from CFC “banks” — pre-1987 insulation or cooling systems that continue to emit the chemicals.
What Are the Main Human Activities Causing the Climate Crisis?
Scientists often refer to “anthropogenic,” or human-caused, climate change. But there are really a few main human activities that are largely to blame.
Burning Fossil Fuels

The burning of fossil fuels is responsible for more than 75 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. This is because fossil fuels are made from dead and decaying lifeforms fossilized over millions of years — and carbon is the building block of life. The carbon that once helped form the DNA and proteins of ancient plants and animals is concentrated by time and pressure into coal, oil and natural gas. When these fuels are burned, that carbon once stored beneath the Earth enters the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Leaks from fossil fuel extraction, production and transportation are also an important source of methane emissions. Many human activities currently rely on fossil fuels, from industry to heating and electricity generation to transportation. We need to find an alternative way to power these activities in order to stop overheating the atmosphere.
Land-Use Change

The second most important contribution to the climate crisis is deforestation, agriculture and other land use change, accounting for around a quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions and around 13 to 21 percent from 2010 to 2019. Trees and other plants store carbon in their trunks, leaves and roots and in the soil beneath them. When those trees are cut down or that soil is disturbed, the carbon ends up in the atmosphere and contributes to the climate crisis. What’s more, those trees and plants are no longer there to suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Agriculture

Tree clearing for agriculture drives more than 90 percent of tropical deforestation worldwide. In addition to getting rid of carbon sinks, the global food system emits greenhouse gases through the production and use of fertilizers and the methane-laden burps and manure of cows and other ruminants. The livestock sector as a whole is responsible for between 11.1 percent and 19.6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
What Are the Main Impacts of the Climate Crisis Now and in the Future?
The climate crisis has already impacted every region on Earth. The latest IPCC report finds that both these current impacts and the risks of each increment of future warming are more severe than previously anticipated.
Hotter Temperatures

The most obvious impact of the climate crisis is an increase in temperature. Since 1970, global temperatures have increased faster than during any other 50-year period during at least the last two centuries. The last nine years are the nine warmest since record keeping began 143 years ago, and all of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2010. Some scientists think 2024 might be the hottest year yet. How much temperatures continue to rise will depend on how quickly we can wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Policies in place as of 2020 put the world on track for 3.2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, but that could be lowered to 2 degrees Celsius if we cut greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent by 2035 and 1.5 degrees Celsius if we cut emissions by 60 percent by the same date.
More Extreme Weather Events
The climate crisis has already led to more frequent and extreme weather events. The IPCC says it is “virtually certain” that heat waves have become more common and intense in most regions since the 1950s, with climate change the “main driver.” These heat waves have already claimed tens of thousands of lives. Most marine heat waves since at least 2006 were also likely caused by climate change, and these have doubled since the 1980s.

Because warmer air holds more moisture, the climate crisis can also lead to more extreme precipitation events, which have increased in intensity and frequency over most land areas since the 1950s. Hurricanes and other tropical storms have become wetter and more intense. Climate change has led to more or longer droughts in some regions, making the megadrought in the U.S. West 42 percent more severe. Higher temperatures and drier conditions have led to more frequent, larger and longer-lasting wildfires. If the climate continues to warm, combined heat waves and droughts and ideal wildfire conditions are expected to become more frequent. Tropical storms will continue to become more intense.
Ice Melt and Sea Level Rise

Warmer temperatures are melting ice in the world’s mountains and polar regions. The Arctic is warming nearly four times as fast as the global average, and the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost 255 gigatons of ice each year between 2008 and 2016, while Arctic sea ice has declined since 1978, with the rate of decline increasing in the last two decades and 95 percent of the oldest and thickest ice already gone. In Antarctica, ice sheets are melting at a rate of around 150 billion tons per year.
The polar ice sheets hold around two thirds of the globe’s fresh water. When they melt, that water enters the ocean, raising sea levels. To date, their melting has caused around a third of sea level rise since 1993. However, the melting of glaciers and ice sheets had driven the majority of accelerated sea level rise between 2006 and 2015. As of 2018, global sea levels had risen by 0.2 meters (approximately eight inches). In addition to polar melting, the sea level is rising because water expands as it warms. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would raise sea levels by 23 feet, while the melting of all glaciers and ice sheets would raise them by more than 195 feet. While this would occur over a period of centuries, even relatively small amounts of sea level rise can threaten coastal communities with erosion, flooding, saltwater intrusion into aquifers, habitat loss and more powerful storm surges. Sea levels along the coastal U.S. are expected to rise by a foot by 2050 and two feet by 2100.
Mountain glaciers are melting as well — between 85.3 percent of Northern Hemisphere glaciers, including Greenland’s, retreated between 2000 and 2020, and nearly half of non-polar glaciers could melt by 2100 even if temperature rise is limited to 1.5 degrees. This would have devastating impacts on communities that rely on glaciers for water, power and cultural identity.
Ocean Impacts

The ocean has absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat added to the planet in the last decades, with the past 10 years being the ocean’s warmest since the 19th century. Most of this heating is occurring between zero and 700 meters (approximately 2,297 feet) from the surface. In addition to contributing to sea level rise, more intense tropical storms and the melting of sea ice, the additional heat threatens marine biodiversity through deadly marine heat waves. One of the most infamous impacts of these heat waves is coral bleaching, when warmer than average temperatures compel corals to expel the algae that give them both color and food. If temperatures rise to 2 degrees, 99 percent of tropical reefs could be lost. In general, ocean warming last century has combined with the impacts of overfishing to reduce the amount of certain fish species available for fishers.
Heat isn’t the only product of fossil fuel emissions that the ocean absorbs. It takes in around 30 percent of the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere, leading to something called ocean acidification. Carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater into carbonic acid, which further breaks down into hydrogen ions and bicarbonate ions. Through this process, the ocean has gotten about 30 percent more acidic since the industrial revolution. When there is more hydrogen floating around in the ocean, it easily bonds with the carbonate that shell-making animals like corals and oysters need to form their shells. The decrease in carbonate is already impacting these animals, and further acidification could actually dissolve their shells. A more acidic ocean could also harm other animals like clownfish, who struggle to find their ideal habitat during their larval stage when acidity increases.
Biodiversity Loss

The ocean isn’t the only habitat where the climate crisis threatens the abundance and variety of lifeforms. The Earth is currently in the midst of a sixth mass extinction driven by human activity — losing species at a rate 1,000 times greater than any other moment in written history – and the climate crisis is an important contributor to this loss. As many as a million plant and animal species face extinction, several of them within decades.
The climate crisis is making life harder for at least 10,967 species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, hastening extinction through extreme weather events, wildfires, and the spread of pests and diseases. As conditions change within a species’ range, some will be able to move into better conditions but not all will be able to relocate quickly enough. A 2020 study found that plants and animals living in areas that saw a significant increase in maximum possible temperature were more likely to be wiped out locally. By 2070, 30 to 55 percent of those species could become entirely extinct depending on how successful we are at controlling emissions.

Food and Freshwater Scarcity
All of these changes to natural processes and ecosystems will not leave human society unaffected. Already, the climate crisis is increasing both food and water insecurity through drought, ocean warming and acidification and the loss of sea ice that Indigenous Arctic communities rely on for hunting. Partly because of climate change, around half of the world’s population endures “severe water scarcity” for at least some of the year.

All of this will only get worse. Around 22 percent of the world’s population relies on glaciers for their primary source of drinking water, and future melting could deprive them of this essential resource. Saltwater intrusion from sea level rise also threatens to inundate the freshwater supply of people living on low-lying atolls. As crop yields decrease as temperatures rise, this could push 43 million people below the poverty line by 2030 just in Africa.
Poverty, Conflict and Displacement

A decrease in water and food resources will inevitably push populations into poverty, exacerbate conflicts between them and force people from their homes in search of a better life. As the climate warms, its impacts will interact more often with other factors like resource competition or political tension to exacerbate conflict. For example, while the civil war in Syria cannot be blamed on climate change alone, there is evidence that it was inflamed by the worst multi-year drought the country had seen in 900 years.
The war sparked a refugee crisis, with 5.5 million Syrians now living in other countries after fleeing the violence. Between 2010 and 2019, extreme weather events directly displaced around 23.1 million people each year. A recent Somalia-based study found that a 50 millimeter reduction in monthly rainfall could increase displacement by a factor of two, and a monthly temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius could increase displacement by a factor of 10. Depending on how much is done to curb emissions, one billion people could be climate refugees by 2050.
Human Health
The Lancet’s 2022 report on climate change and health concluded that human health was already “at the mercy of fossil fuels.” The number of heat-related deaths for people older than 65 increased by around 68 percent from 2000 to 2004 and from 2017 to 2021. Extreme weather events expose people to health hazards like increased wildfire smoke and infectious diseases that spread when drought puts sanitation at risk. Heat waves and other extreme weather events can have a negative impact on mental health, not to mention the growing issue of climate anxiety.

The range of disease-carrying organisms is already expanding as temperatures warm. For example, between 2012 and 2021, the ideal climate for the transmission of dengue by the Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes increased by 11.5 percent and 12 percent respectively. In the future, even more climate change could interact with other factors like urbanization to increase the risk of future pandemics.
Who Is Most Responsible?
All of humanity is not equally responsible for the climate crisis. Certain nations, companies and individuals have emitted significantly more greenhouse gases than others.
Countries

Historically, the U.S. is the country that has emitted the most climate-warming emissions, contributing around 20 percent to the total between 1850 and 2021. It is followed by China at 11 percent, Russia at 7 percent, Brazil at 5 percent and Indonesia at 4 percent. The culpability of the latter two is largely because of deforestation. Former colonial and industrial powers Germany and the UK contributed 4 and 3 percent respectively, but this doesn’t include emissions from their overseas colonies. A different set of calculations found that the UK and EU were together responsible for 22 percent of emissions between 1751 and 2017, while the U.S. was responsible for a quarter.
Today, China emits the most of any nation followed by the U.S., India, the EU, Russia, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran and Canada. Together, these countries are responsible for more than two-thirds of global emissions, and the top three are responsible for 42.6 percent. In comparison, the 100 least-emitting countries only contribute a modest 2.9 percent.

Companies
Certain companies — especially fossil fuel and meat and dairy companies — contribute disproportionately to the climate crisis because their business models are bound up with either burning oil, gas or coal or clearing biodiversity for agriculture. Only 100 fossil fuel companies — including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron — have contributed 71 percent of global emissions since 1988, one study found. Not to be left out, the top five meat and dairy companies in the world have a carbon footprint equal to Exxon’s.

But the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility extends beyond its product. In recent years, evidence has emerged that most if not all of the major oil and gas companies were aware of the dangers posed by their actions in the 1970s and 80s but instead chose to fund climate denial and lobby politicians against shifting to renewable energy. Based on both their emissions and their political actions, a recent study calculated that the 21 largest fossil fuel companies owe the world at least $5.4 trillion in reparations.
Individuals
For the most part, individuals are not the driving force behind climate change. Even if you drive a gas-powered car an hour and back to work each day or heat your home with electricity from a coal-powered plant, your choices are largely shaped by the economic pressures and energy and transportation infrastructure that scaffolds your life. However, there is an exception: uber-wealthy individuals who ride in private jets and invest in polluting industries.
A 2022 study found that the wealthiest 10 percent of people on Earth were responsible for almost half of global emissions. While there is a large gap between the emissions of individuals in wealthier and poorer countries, there is now a greater gap between the emissions of wealthy and poorer individuals within the same country. The poorest 50 percent of the U.S population, for example, is actually emitting at close to the nation’s 2030 per capita emissions goal, while the richest 10 percent would need to slash their emissions by 86 percent to meet it.
Why Is the Climate Crisis a Social Justice Issue?
The disparity in responsibility for the climate crisis is why the IPCC emphasized climate justice in its most recent report. “Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected,” report author Dr. Aditi Mukherji said in a statement upon its release. “Almost half of the world’s population lives in regions that are highly vulnerable to climate change. In the last decade, deaths from floods, droughts and storms were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions.”

What’s more, the climate crisis can exacerbate existing inequalities, making life harder for racial minorities trapped by historic redlining in urban heat islands, women in agriculture who already face pay discrimination before having to contend with climate shocks or low-income people in previously colonized countries who must now endure drought or severe storms. Responding urgently and equitably to the climate crisis is therefore essential from a social justice perspective, both to avoid the widening of existing gaps and to take the opportunity to close them as we reimagine society along more sustainable lines.
What Has Been Done About It So Far?
The international community has been talking about taking action on climate change since 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted. Since then, world leaders have held 27 conferences of the parties to this convention, or COPs, at which they have made varying degrees of progress. Perhaps the most significant COP was COP 21, which met in Paris in 2015. It was here that nations negotiated the Paris Agreement to keep warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and ideally limit it to 1.5 degrees. Nations were supposed to submit voluntary nationally determined contributions (NDC) every five years to say how much they would reduce emissions, with the end goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
To date, the world is not on track to honor the Paris Agreement. For one thing, there is an “implementation gap” as current policies lag behind countries’ NDCs. Policies in place as of 2020 would put the world on track for 3.2 degrees Celsius of warming, while aligning policies with pre-COP26 NDCs through 2030 would limit it to around 2.8 degrees. Since COP26, nations have come forward with more ambitious pledges and net-zero promises. Accounting for these pledges could lower warming to 2.4 to 2.6 degrees Celsius. By considering longer term or net-zero pledges, Climate Action Tracker saw a possibility for 2 degrees of warming, and an even more optimistic 1.8 degrees when including net zero promises in effect or in discussion from around 140 countries.
While existing actions and policies are not sufficient, they have already made a difference. Policies to improve energy efficiency, halt deforestation or develop renewable energy sources have likely prevented several gigatons of carbon dioxide a year from entering the atmosphere. Progress already made has rendered the worst-case emissions scenario, which assumed a 500 percent increase in coal use and projected a 6-degree-Celsius temperature rise by 2100, “exceedingly unlikely.” That said, a 3-degree warmer world would still mean the near eradication of both coral reefs and Arctic sea ice and more days in which heat and humidity would reach dangerous levels for human survival. And the latest IPCC assessment cycle found that the temperature threshold for various risks — such as extreme weather events or threatened systems — was lower than previously estimated. Honoring the Paris Agreement goal is more urgent than ever.
What Still Needs to Be Done?
Climate action falls into two broad categories: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means actively reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to stabilize global temperatures, while adaptation means adjusting to the changes in sea level or weather patterns that are already locked in.
Mitigation
The most important thing that can be done to stave off additional climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. This means both not developing any new fossil fuel projects and even ceasing to exploit the deposits that already exist. The IPCC found that emissions from already existing fossil fuel infrastructure would gobble up the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, unless those emissions were somehow offset or removed from the atmosphere with still-unreliable carbon capture technology.
In order to have a 50 percent shot at the 1.5 target, greenhouse gas emissions must fall by 60 percent by 2035. This can be achieved by shifting rapidly to renewable sources of energy like wind and solar, replacing gas-fueled cars and trucks with electric vehicles and improved public transit, designing more sustainable cities, boosting the energy efficiency of buildings, decarbonizing industry, making agriculture more sustainable, protecting and restoring natural carbon sinks like forests and actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through carbon capture and storage.
Adaptation
Human activity has warmed the atmosphere enough that some climate impacts are already occurring and likely to continue. However, we can change how we design communities and infrastructure to make them more resilient to these changes. For example, the Billion Oyster Project in New York is restoring the city’s oyster reefs in part to protect it against storm surges and sea level rise, while the government of California is learning from the once-banned Indigenous practice of controlled burns to prevent larger fires. Farmers on the coast of Vietnam have begun keeping bees to help with mangrove restoration instead of gathering dwindling snails and crabs, while El Salvador is protecting itself from floods and landslides by restoring its surrounding forests.
When it comes to adaptation, there is still more work to be done. The 2022 UN Adaptation Gap report found that 84 percent of countries participating in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change had some kind of adaptation plan, up 5 percent from the year before. However, funding for adaptation in the Global South is five to 10 times less than it needs to be, and the gap is widening instead of shrinking.
Political and Social Change
The climate crisis isn’t merely a technological problem caused by how we power our daily lives. It’s a political problem caused by an economic and political system that often prioritizes the short-term profits of large corporations over the long-term well-being of communities and ecosystems and considers nature as “resources” to be exploited for economic gain.
Therefore, solving the climate crisis means making fundamental changes to the way we write our laws and structure our society. This could include things like giving rights to nature, so that communities have a legal recourse to protect forests from destruction or waterways from pollution, or ideas like degrowth and doughnut economics that seek to reorganize the economy around meeting everyone’s essential needs without overtaxing our planetary support system. Many activists are calling for ideas like a Green New Deal or a just transition that would use mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis as an opportunity to address and resolve long-standing inequalities and make sure that when we transition to a new form of energy, no one is left behind.

Takeaway
The climate crisis may be the single greatest challenge humans have faced as a species. Every day seems to bring a new unprecedented weather event or another study warning about unsustainable emissions use or unavoidable climate impacts. But that doesn’t mean we should give up hope. While not everyone is equally to blame for climate change, everyone can play a role in the solution, from reducing one’s carbon footprint to experimenting with alternative, more sustainable forms of community to participating in climate activism to put pressure on world leaders or fossil fuel executives. The good news is that many climate solutions — from clean energy to urban trees — would make the world healthier, greener, more just and all around more pleasant to live in. Change is inevitable, but if we come together to stop burning fossil fuels and adapt in a way that prioritizes the most vulnerable among us, there’s still a chance that it can be change for the better.

The post Climate Crisis 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-crisis-facts-ecowatch.html
Green Living
Buy or DIY: Summer Beauty Survival Kit
With summer in full swing, most of us find ourselves reaching for sunburn soothers, dry skin remedies, and frizz-taming hair masks. Get everything you need all in one place with a handy summer beauty survival kit made from picks you can either buy or make yourself. Read on for ideas you’ll love.
Editor’s note: Earth911 teams up with affiliate marketing partners to help fund our Recycling Directory. If you purchase an item through one of the affiliate links in this post, we will receive a small commission.
The Problem: Shiny Skin
Buy It: S.W. Basics Toner
Buy It: S.W. Basics Toner
A shiny T-zone is one of summer’s minor inconveniences, but you don’t need a harsh chemical formula to fix it.
Made from organic apple cider vinegar, witch hazel, and organic essential oils, the S.W. Basics Toner is a five-ingredient formula that balances oil production without stripping moisture. The brand sources only fair trade, certified organic, or family-farmed ingredients and holds EWG’s lowest toxicity rating for face toners. It’s also widely available now at Kroger, Fred Meyer, and other grocery chains if you’d rather pick it up locally.
DIY It: Rosewater Toner

Due to its protective and healing properties, rosewater has been used to revitalize skin and hair for centuries. It’s even said that Cleopatra used rosewater as part of her much-lauded beauty routine.
Give the Queen of the Nile’s beauty secret. You can make your own rosewater toner with easy-to-follow instructions from The Healthy Maven in a few simple steps.
Apply lightly to your face to reduce inflammation and alleviate shine without over-drying. Simple, easy, and effective!
The Problem: Sunburn
Buy It: COOLA Radical Recovery After-Sun Lotion
If you’ve spent too much time in the sun without protection, this is the recovery option. COOLA’s Radical Recovery After-Sun Lotion is EcoCert certified with 99% natural-origin ingredients, built around organic agave and aloe vera as the moisture-locking base. Organic agave has been used in traditional skincare for its moisture-binding properties and vitamin content since the time of the Aztecs. The formula also includes lavender, sunflower, sweet orange, and mandarin peel oils for antioxidant support. Paraben- and phthalate-free.
DIY It: Summer Avocado Honey Mask

Store-bought face masks can be pricey. So, if you’re looking for a more budget-friendly sunburn solution, a ripe avocado is one of the most effective sunburn soothers in the produce aisle. Its high content of healthy fats, vitamins E and K, and antioxidants reduces redness and eases discomfort on irritated skin. Weelicious has a straightforward guide to making a homemade avocado honey mask that you can put together in minutes.
The Problem: Chapped Lips
Buy It: Loving Naturals Lip Balm SPF 30
DIY It: Beeswax & Rosewater Lip Balm

The Problem: Frizzy Hair
Buy It: Maple Holistics Silk18 Conditioner
DIY It: Basic Leave-In Conditioner Spray

The Problem: Dry Skin
Buy It: Juice Beauty Hydrating Mist
DIY It: Whipped Shea Butter Lotion

The Problem: Mosquitoes and Bugs
Buy It: Badger Bug Spray
DIY It: Essential Oil Bug Spray
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2013 by Mary Mazzoni, and was updated in 2016, 2017, 2019, and July 2026.
The post Buy or DIY: Summer Beauty Survival Kit appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/living-well-being/summer-beauty-survival-kit/
Green Living
Cheat Sheet: Composting
Food is the single most common material Americans send to landfills. About 24 percent of everything buried there, according to the EPA, is food waste. Add yard trimmings, wood, paper, and other other organic materials make up more than half of what fills a U.S. landfill. Almost all of it could be composted instead.
That gap matters because buried food doesn’t just take up space — it rots without oxygen and releases methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide over the near term. Composting handles the same scraps aerobically, with oxygen, and turns them into a soil amendment your garden can actually use. Here’s how the process works and how to start a pile that does the job.
What Is Composting?
Composting is the natural decomposition of organic materials sped up by managing the conditions microorganisms need to thrive, and when they thrive, they eat. It is managed, aerobic biological decomposition: aerobic meaning oxygen is present, which is exactly why compost avoids the methane problem that landfills create. The result is a stable, nutrient-rich soil amendment often called humus.
For households: composting cuts your waste output while turning kitchen scraps and yard trimmings into a soil booster for the garden.
For small-scale farms: composting manages the residual plant and animal material a farm generates and puts it back to work as fertilizer and a soil-builder for future crops.
Why Composting Is Worth the Effort
Municipal solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the United States. Wasted food is responsible for 58 percent of the methane those landfills release, the EPA reported in its 2023 study Quantifying Methane Emissions from Landfilled Food Waste, the agency’s first peer-reviewed national estimate of that figure.
Food waste drives so much of the problem because it breaks down fast. The EPA found that half the carbon in landfilled food degrades within about 3.6 years, so most of the methane escapes before a landfill’s gas-collection system can capture it. Keeping food out of the landfill in the first place is the more effective fix.
Composting sits in the fourth tier of the EPA’s Wasted Food Scale, after prevention (buying less), donation, and feeding animals, in the 2023 update to the agency’s decades-old Food Recovery Hierarchy. But for the peels, coffee grounds, and yard debris that no one is going to eat, composting is one of the most beneficial things you can do with them.
Finished compost enriches the soil while reducing CO2 emissions. The EPA’s 2025 report, Environmental Value of Applying Compost, documents how compost improves soil health, helps retain moisture during drought, reduces erosion and runoff, reduces the need for chemical fertilizer, and sequesters carbon in the soil.

The Science of Composting
So how does composting work? According to researchers at Cornell University, microorganisms break down organic matter, producing heat, carbon dioxide, water, and humus. When a pile is managed well, it moves through three phases:
- The mesophilic, or moderate-temperature phase, lasts a couple of days.
- The thermophilic, or high-temperature phase, can last anywhere from a few days to several months, depending on what’s in the pile.
- The cooling and maturation phase lasts several months.
In the first stage, mesophilic microorganisms rapidly break down easily degradable material, and the heat they generate raises the pile’s temperature. As it climbs above about 40°C (104°F), heat-loving thermophilic microbes take over. At 55°C (131°F) or higher, those microbes destroy many plant and human pathogens and accelerate the breakdown of proteins, fats, and complex carbohydrates such as cellulose.
There’s an upper limit, though. The Cornell team notes that temperatures above roughly 65°C (149°F) begin killing off the microbes that do the work, slowing decomposition. That’s why aerating — turning the pile — matters: it moderates the temperature and moves the pile toward the cooling phase, where activity settles down, and the compost matures for garden use.
What To Put in Your Compost Pile
Knowing what belongs in your backyard compost pile is most of the battle.
The core idea is balance: you need a mix of “green” (nitrogen-rich) and “brown” (carbon-rich) materials, plus enough oxygen to keep the pile aerobic. When a pile runs short on oxygen, often due to too much nitrogen and not enough carbon, or from never being turned, it goes anaerobic and starts to smell. A well-managed pile shouldn’t have a bad odor at all.
Green Materials
Greens are rich in nitrogen. Some examples:
- Food scraps: Fruit and vegetable trimmings are ideal. Skip animal-based leftovers, such as fat, meat, cheese, and milk, since the oils don’t suit a backyard pile and tend to attract pests.
- Fresh grass clippings
- Manure from herbivores like horses, cows, sheep, goats, or chickens speeds decomposition. It’s helpful but not required. Never use manure from carnivores.
- Plants and cuttings: Freshly pulled weeds (as long as they haven’t gone to seed), flower tops, and shredded green leaves all work.
- Coffee grounds
Tip: Freeze your scraps.
Storing kitchen scraps in an airtight container in the freezer cuts down on trips to the pile and keeps the smell of food sitting on the counter at bay. Freezing also helps you manage balance: if a dinner party leaves you with a flood of greens and no browns on hand, freeze the scraps until you’ve gathered enough carbon-rich material to even things out.
Brown Materials
Browns provide carbon, which gives microbes the energy they need to function. Shredding most brown ingredients first reduces the microbes’ workload and speeds decomposition. Some examples:
- Dead, dry leaves
- Hay and straw
- Simple paper products: newspaper, plain paper, and cardboard
- Crushed eggshells
- Tea bags and loose-leaf tea (check that the bag itself is paper or cotton, not nylon)
- Wood ashes and sawdust: use sparingly, as ashes can make a pile very alkaline and limit microbial activity, and sawdust is slow to break down.
Getting the Moisture Right
Moisture is the other lever. The microorganisms doing the work need water to survive, and water also carries nutrients and organic matter through the pile so it doesn’t stall. Cornell’s composting research puts the target range at roughly 50 to 60 percent moisture, because below about 35 to 40 percent, decomposition slows sharply; too wet, and the pile turns anaerobic and starts to smell.
The classic field test, echoed in New York City’s composting guidance: your materials should feel about as damp as a wrung-out sponge; clearly moist to the touch, but not releasing liquid when you squeeze them.
If you get regular rain, it often does the job with a slow soak that’s ideal for a pile. In a drier climate, you’ll likely need to water, adding it slowly and turning the pile so it reaches every section.
Your climate has a real effect here, so expect to experiment a little.
What You Can Do
Ready to start? A few concrete steps:
- Pick a spot and a system. A dry, shady, easy-to-reach corner works best. Match the method to your space — an open pile or bin, a tumbler you crank to aerate, or a worm bin for small indoor setups.
- Layer greens and browns. Start with a rough balance and adjust by feel. Smelly and wet means add browns and turn; dry and cool means add greens and water.
- Turn it regularly. Aerating keeps the pile oxygenated, moderates the temperature, and keeps odors down. Once a week is a reasonable habit.
- Keep food out of the trash even if you can’t compost it all. Many cities now run curbside organics collection. Check what’s available where you live with the Earth911 Recycling Search, or find a drop-off site through the EPA’s Excess Food Opportunities Map.
- Support organics diversion where you live. A growing number of states and municipalities are restricting the landfilling of food and yard waste. Backing those programs multiplies the impact of any single backyard pile.
Editor’s Note: Originally published by Haley Paul on August 31, 2009, this article was updated with recent statistics and guidance in July 2026.
The post Cheat Sheet: Composting appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/home-garden/cheat-sheet-composting/
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: GoodPower’s Leah Qusba on Selling Clean Energy as Pocketbook Power
In 2024, 91% of new large-scale renewable projects around the world made electricity for less money than any fossil-fuel option, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. Solar power was 41% cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel, and onshore wind was 53% cheaper. The technology that can lower energy bills, keep the grid stable, and create jobs is now the most affordable way to build power almost anywhere. So, here’s the big question our guest faces every day: if clean energy is this good and this affordable, why is it still so tough to get people to support it? Leah Qusba leads GoodPower, a nonprofit focused on strategic communications and research. For almost twenty years, it was known as Action for the Climate Emergency, but it changed its name during Climate Week 2025. Since Leah took over, the group has grown about ten times bigger, built a network of over 8,500 content creators who share facts about renewables, and started running live messaging tests through its Good Data Lab. The new name highlights that renewable power is good power, and the best way to win support is by showing how it affects people’s monthly bills. The decision to rebrand was based on data. Leah’s team learned that words like “climate” and “emergency” can shut down conversations in rural, conservative areas where most new wind and solar projects are built. GoodPower shifted its message to focus on jobs, community investment, and steady power bills.

GoodPower also works to fight anti-renewables disinformation, which Leah says spreads fastest in the first day or two after a grid emergency. When Winter Storm Fern knocked out power in more than 20 states in January, the organization had a few days’ notice and quickly got its creator network ready to “prebunk” the usual claim that renewables caused the blackouts. This strategy, based on the Debunking Handbook, starts with the truth, points out the false claim, and then repeats the truth to make it stick. GoodPower uses the same idea in its AI tools: CleanCast predicts where local fights over new projects might start so communities can get accurate information early, and TrueVoice spots AI-generated comments in public records. Still, Leah says the best messengers are neighbors, since people trust those who share their experiences. For instance, when Boulder City, Nevada’s Republican mayor, Joe Hardy, talks about how solar and storage helped his town’s budget, it connects with other conservative communities in a way ads can’t.
GoodPower’s network of creators shares clean-energy messages through car-repair, food, and gaming videos. Leah calls this the raisin bread theory: the regular content is the bread, and the renewables message is the raisin. For communities already dealing with climate impacts, she highlights groups like Extreme Weather Survivors, which gives wildfire and flood survivors a way to push for policy changes from the ground up.
To learn more, visit goodpower.org and follow Leah Qusba on LinkedIn, where she is active and easy to reach.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:10
Hello! Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. And I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today. Let’s talk about accelerating that shift to renewables in detail.
The technology to lower our energy bills, build a more secure grid, and create millions of jobs already exists. Renewables are now the cheapest and fastest power to deploy almost anywhere on the planet, so here’s the puzzle my guest today wrestles with every single day. If the solutions are this good and this affordable, why is it so hard to build public support for them?
Part of the answer is that we’re trying to make the case for sustainable technologies in an openly hostile environment. Federal climate policy has been rolled back, and there are coordinated disinformation campaigns ready to blame wind and solar within hours of any grid emergency, whether or not the facts support those accusations. And the social platforms where most people get their information will quietly bury anything labeled climate, handing it only to people who already agree that it’s a concern. The audiences you need to reach most never see your message about sustainability.
Leah Qusba has built a career breaking through the noise to reach audiences intent on climate progress. She’s the CEO of GoodPower, an organization you may have known until recently as Action for the Climate Emergency, or ACE. She’s led it for more than 15 years, growing it roughly tenfold into one of the sharpest media and research operations in the climate space, and she runs real experiments on what messaging actually changes behavior, working with thousands of content creators to carry the conversation to people the movement has never reached before. Her own path started along Wisconsin’s Fox River, in a stretch of water she played in as a kid that later became an EPA Superfund site before she finished high school.
We’re going to explore how to sell the benefits of clean energy when the word climate itself becomes a liability, and how you fight disinformation when a lie travels faster than the truth, and why Leah ultimately believes affordability, not alarm, is the door most people will actually walk through when asked about climate. So, what can we do to shift the climate conversation? Let’s find out after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 2:41
Leah Qusba, welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?
Leah Qusba 2:45
I’m doing great. How are you?
Mitch Ratcliffe 2:46
Well, I’m well, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. It’s always interesting to speak to somebody who’s been dedicated to climate awareness for so long. You grew up in Wisconsin’s Paper Valley, and a river you played in, the Fox, became an EPA Superfund site while you were in high school. How much of your work derives from the experience of having played in that river, which was polluted and needed a cleanup?
Leah Qusba 3:10
Yeah, I certainly didn’t know it at the time, growing up in small-town USA in northeastern Wisconsin. I think it has impacted me dramatically and greatly. I kind of look back — it’s over, you know, 25 to 30 years ago at this point. I look back at that time and think, wow, there’s nobody organizing people around that type of environmental disaster. People were angry, they felt powerless. It took over a decade, and then the EPA said, well, we did our best, we can’t really fully clean this up in terms of all the PCBs in the river. So I look back on that time, and I think it did set me on the path that I’m on today.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:52
We know so much more about the world, and part of the experience of living by a river that turned out to be so polluted is your own recognition. How do you use that approach to storytelling to help other people make the leap to understand where we are with regard to the climate?
Leah Qusba 4:09
Well, I often think about my dad, and what’s interesting about my dad is he’s a staunch conservative — he believes climate change is not man-made — and he recently became a supporter of solar, not because of me, not because of his own daughter’s influence, but actually his HVAC guy has a side business doing rooftop solar, and it was that conversation that convinced my dad. So I think what I take away is: rural speaks to rural, conservative speaks to conservative, neighbor speaks to neighbor.
I think in an internet environment where people trust what’s on the internet less and less, and with the rise of artificial intelligence and related content, I think all we have left is really each other, and so we really leverage that. How do we find stories of communities that already have solar, wind, and batteries, for example, to demystify what these technologies are for a neighboring town, county, or state? It really works.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:11
In September, you changed the name of the organization from Action for the Climate Emergency to GoodPower. What stopped working about the words climate emergency?
Leah Qusba 5:21
Yeah, I mean, I think as the years went on and we were using this brand, we don’t want to fall into traps where climate, decarbonization, and energy issues are sort of unfairly politicized as left versus right. When we say words like climate in a rural conservative community, that can be a non-starter. When we say things like emergency, do we fall into the trap of being climate alarmists, as we have been dubbed? There’s a different way — there’s a bigger-tent approach where, depending on the audience you’re speaking to, there’s different ways in to showing the economic promise of the energy transition.
Right, what do communities get? Jobs, community investment, long-term leases for farmers and landowners that are, you know, nervous private equity is coming to buy their land for an Amazon logistics warehouse or a data center or something like that. So I think for us, our brand wasn’t working for enough of the American people, especially where, you know, ground zero for the energy transition happens to be rural red America, where a lot of this infrastructure needs to be built and is being built.
So we did it because we wanted a bigger tent that more people could get under and feel a sense of belonging — that, wow, I see something for me in the energy transition. I see something for me in what community benefits I could potentially reap from decarbonized power being built in my town or community. So it was really about creating that bigger tent for more people to get under.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:51
Well, your dad’s experience is recognizing that there’s economic opportunity in advanced technology. Funny thing, it wakes you up to the opportunity, but it doesn’t address the fact that we’re being told that there’s a crisis all the time, and one of the issues that I seem to run into a lot is that even within the climate community there are very rigid differences of opinion about where to focus our effort and investment. How has the movement torn itself apart to a degree, even as it establishes real credibility because of the fact of the climate changing so rapidly?
Leah Qusba 7:25
I mean, when you just break it down to scientific terms, right? Climate change happens very slowly, and then all at once, I think, is the famous quote, right? How did I go broke? It started slowly, and then all at once. I think for us, what we have learned — we’ve been in business for about 18 years, and I’ve been at GoodPower for about 17 of those years — the number one voting issue, cycle after cycle, and now even young people in 2024, in the last presidential, even young people rated the economy as number one. Usually they’re voting on values issues, you know, racial justice and all sorts of other things. They rated the economy. So the economy isn’t working for most people. Nearly 70% of us in the US live paycheck to paycheck.
So we really, at GoodPower, recognize that people want immediate change. How are my energy bills going to go down? Why are prices at the gas pump going up and down like the stock market? Why aren’t they more predictable? The answer: homegrown power — solar, wind, batteries. It’s not exposed to global commodity risks like oil and gas, right? There’s no far-off war that is going to make the cost of the wind and the sun, which happen to be free — there is no fuel cost — it’s not going to make those go up and down in that way.
So I think it’s about connecting the everyday experiences and things people are constantly worried about. How am I going to keep my job? Am I going to be laid off? Will I be able to afford groceries this week? My energy bill doubled in the last year, and there’s no sight. How do we look at the energy transition as unlocking this generational economic opportunity, right? This potential economic renaissance for the middle class. It’s not just saving money and having more predictability and control and autonomy around one’s bills. It’s also about the wealth regenerating and the economic investment.
I’m from a rural community. These communities are emptying out. Young people are leaving. They need investment. They need new schools, new infrastructure, new roads. Farmers are struggling — hundreds close every year in the US. Well, great: let’s farm 300 acres of solar, along with my 3,000 acres of soybeans and corn. When I have a rough year, the solar still pays the bill. So I think there’s incredible economic potential here, and that hasn’t really been communicated effectively.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:39
You argue that renewable power is good power, but at the same time, as you just pointed out, our energy bills are going through the roof. Are you arguing for truly distributed energy generation, or are you saying that there is a path to a collectively owned — whatever form that takes — infrastructure that allows us to really meet the electrical demands of the era we’re entering?
Leah Qusba 10:00
I think that’s a false choice. Our position is all of it. We are huge proponents of distributed energy resources, dispatchable power, some of the virtual power plant policies and investments that we’ve seen. We’re huge proponents of utility-scale and community-level renewable projects. We think battery energy storage — when you pair that, right, that’s the invention of the battery — is how we get to more reliable power. So all of it. I think we need all of it.
I think, you know, global energy volatility is really a hidden tax on American families that people are really exhausted having to pay, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis where everything else is going up — healthcare, housing, groceries. When energy goes up, by the way, everything else goes up too. So I think it’s the predictability, it’s having more control and not being at the whims of these sort of global markets and importing that volatility into people’s lives that already feel chaotic.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:59
And yet we need to press through the capital investment phase of this with determination, and it seems like the determination is being shaken by, let’s say, people at the White House. How do you tell a story in the face of such rigorous and often completely misleading responses from the other side of the political argument?
Leah Qusba 11:20
Well, I think the American people are pretty smart. Only 40% of Republicans actually approve of their own president’s energy policies right now. That’s from GoodPower’s own national poll we did with the University of Chicago back in mid-March. So there’s extremely low approval. People understand — they feel it. You have to fill your gas tank up, right, probably once, maybe twice a week. If you’re going on vacation, a lot more than that. You have to pay that energy bill and open it up, or go online and pay it every month. So it’s in your face constantly. Nobody’s seeing change, and when you have only 40% of your own party approving your energy policies and your agenda, that’s pretty abysmal.
So I think, from my perspective, when we look at the sort of all-of-government approach to kill renewables, we’re choosing energy winners and losers, and Americans are left kind of holding the bill. It’s simple economics 101 here — supply and demand. If we’re restricting the fastest, most affordable electrons from coming online, which happen to be from solar, storage, and wind right now, we’re going to drive up bills. I mean, my 11-year-old daughter would understand the economics of that.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:28
AI is going to play a big part in how we ultimately tell the story, and part of the solution in terms of how we optimize everything that we do — simply because we have visibility into how things work in ways we would never have been able to pre-AI. How do you integrate that part of the story, that some of this investment is necessary to develop the intelligence that is going to help us untangle the crisis that we face?
Leah Qusba 12:53
I think the stark reality is that data centers are highly unpopular right now, and land use in general — land use projects across the country are really facing increasing public opposition. I am seeing some really bright lights within the news cycle around land-use development that is being done very responsibly, transparently, in an innovative way. I think about some of the Google data center announcements recently in the MISO region, where they’re looking creatively at how do we get electrons through virtual power plants, how do we invest in infrastructure, how do we invest in community benefits, how do we procure clean electrons to power our digital infrastructure. So I think there are some really good actors out there lifting up those stories where these developments are happening in a very positive way.
I think we can look to the utility-scale renewable energy sector — I mean, this is a lot of GoodPower’s work — but just telling the stories: people have reaped enormous benefits and are very happy with this infrastructure when it’s done in the right way, and it’s transparent, and it’s with stakeholder input. I think there’s a way to do land use that can be really uplifting to communities, but getting their input and involving them as stakeholders, I think, is absolutely essential.
I think the other piece of the story that we forget: big tech, right — technology has been the number one global procurer of decarbonized electrons on planet Earth for the last 15 years. So in other words, the growth of the renewable energy sector has been commensurate with the growth and advancement in the sort of digital revolution and technology. So again, there’s a right way to do it, and if we can uplift stories of where the community is on board with this infrastructure — because they’ve been consulted and they’ve gotten to weigh in, and they’re really getting a good deal out of it — I think the more we can do that, the better off we’ll be.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:47
On the other hand, AI is also part of the problem, because it is used by algorithms to direct people away from the issue. You’ve said that when you mention climate in a video, it immediately gets relegated to a pile of links to people who already agree. In other words, we’re talking to the converted. How do you articulate that to somebody who is focused on the concerns they have about their community — particularly a rural community, where I live in one as well — when talking about the need for the investment in electrification and AI, which is also potentially part of the problem that we face in terms of being relegated to pools of people who agree and never get the opportunity to evangelize to others?
Leah Qusba 15:28
We don’t say anything to rural communities. We let rural communities talk to each other, so that’s what we enable. We basically find stories that are under-told and under-platformed. For example, here’s a farmer in rural Oklahoma, in western Oklahoma. They’ve had wind on their land for 20 years, put their kids through college. They were able to keep their generational farm that was handed down to them for six generations, and they wouldn’t have been able to keep it without the wind industry, right? So that could be very convincing to another farmer who’s facing closure in a neighboring plains state, or even within the Midwest generally.
So brands, I think, need to say less. I think what we need to do more of is find and mine those stories where the projects were built responsibly, the land-use development was done in a way that enriched the community and, you know, consulted the community. How do we find those stories? We’ve produced hundreds of these now over the last five years, all over the United States, all over Brazil, the UK, right, where we were trying to really build positivity and social permission and social acceptance of this infrastructure. The stories are all out there, and it’s just about platforming and telling them and breaking through when we see this news cycle that has been so anti-renewable from this particular administration. This is the counterbalance. Just go and ask the communities, and they’ll tell you how they feel about this infrastructure.
Mitch Ratcliffe 16:55
Can you give an example of a story that, for lack of a better word, sells the idea of economic prosperity built on renewables?
Leah Qusba 17:03
Yeah, I mean, really authentic, genuine stories. I’m thinking of a story from Mayor Joe Hardy in Boulder City, Nevada. Mayor Hardy is a Republican. He’s a staunch conservative. His story is about how economically secure Boulder City, Nevada, is for the next 25 years. He talks about solar and storage. He takes us out to the fields and shows us what that looks like, and that the community has no economic worries in terms of property tax revenue, and where those revenues are going, and how it’s investing in community infrastructure, schools, etc.
I think of another story in Oklahoma, of a school superintendent who talks about how the community benefit agreement that they signed with this wind developer built a new school, and what that means for children in a community that has not seen a lot of investment over the last few decades. And then we have countless stories of farmers, landowners, neighbors to these projects who talk about the community benefits agreements — what’s in them: long-term leases, new infrastructure, donations of emergency management vehicles, police cars, fire trucks.
And again, when you position the community as a stakeholder and it’s transparent and you consult them, we can strike deals here that really work for the industry and for building decarbonized power, and that really work for people in the communities who feel like, “Wow, I’m being invested in, I’m not being extracted from.” We’re not replicating those systems of extraction; we’re investing in building something together. I think that’s really special.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:35
Is there a risk in the movement swinging so hard toward pocketbook messaging that it no longer talks about climate, or clean in contrast to the dirty systems — or is that exactly the point?
Leah Qusba 18:45
I also think this is a false question, because we do talk about climate. It’s important to talk about climate. 8% of voters under 35 rated climate as their number one issue in 2024. So a front-door climate message, and increasing the awareness and the pie — you know, the slice of people who are really motivated by a climate message that’s front-door — I think there is a huge audience out there. We speak to that audience.
I think the point is, this is not a one-size-fits-all solution, right? The internet and social media are increasingly fractured. Audiences are tribalized. Knowing what platform you’re on and who you’re speaking to — once you know that information, you should have a very sophisticated segmented strategy. How do we connect audience to messenger and message? If you’re trying to have a silver bullet, sort of, you know, one campaign to rule them all, I think that’s a recipe for failure, and in fact you can have polarizing effects. You can make people feel less inclined to support energy and climate policies that are going to drive forward a decarbonized economy by not having the right messenger, or even a polarizing messenger that could make them more entrenched in that opinion. So I think you can do more harm than good in some cases.
I think having empathy — whether you’re talking to somebody on the left side of the ideological spectrum or the right side of the ideological spectrum, or somewhere in between — really knowing who those people are and what moves them and what they’re about, and really trying to seek to understand them and not label them as something other, or “these are not my people.” I kind of hear a lot of that sometimes. Everybody’s our people. If you’re a person, you’re our people. And I think there’s a way to speak to literally anybody about these issues in a way that’s going to land with them, and that’s really the science of communication.
Mitch Ratcliffe 20:37
To be a people person takes real work, especially when you’re telling stories. There’s a lot to unpack in this strategy. Let’s take a quick commercial break and come back to continue this fascinating discussion. Stay tuned, folks.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s continue the conversation with Leah Qusba. She is CEO of GoodPower, which is a strategic communications nonprofit working to highlight the need for and benefits of renewable energy. Leah, how do you see the world of storytelling changing because we have the tools that AI unlocks to target and reach people better? Or are we going to be overwhelmed by misinformation? I’m just — where should we set the bar in our expectations about the future of storytelling?
Leah Qusba 21:25
What a deep and complex and fascinating question. So let me start with the platforms themselves, where people are now using Claude and ChatGPT and other AI platforms almost as Google search platforms, right? So they’re looking for information. So I think one way that we’re using these tools is really, how do we set the terms of what information comes up when people are searching around: is solar good or bad? You know, will this raise my bills, lower my bills? Right, so it’s basically like SEO, but for these AI platforms — it’s called AEO and GEO. So how do you do search optimization and get the facts, not the fiction, to pop up in search results? So we do some of that work, going to the source of when people are searching, what information are they getting.
I think then, you know, we think about AI as a technology when it’s really a set of complementary capabilities, right? We’ve got automation — how do we automate the tedious and repetitive things that humans don’t want to do, so we can focus on higher-level creative work? Predictive — right, how do we forecast where siting and permitting battles are going to be through 2030 around clean energy projects, or where opposition might be forming? So how do we predict the future? And then we’re all familiar with the generative capabilities around doing better analysis and communications and content creation, etc. And the way we look at these capabilities at GoodPower, it’s less about a single piece of technology; it’s about leveraging these capabilities to build custom models. So I can walk you through a few pieces of those technologies that we’ve sort of housed.
One product is called CleanCast, and this is a piece of predictive, AI-enabled technology. It helps us forecast where the renewable energy industry might build their projects, so it pipes in public opinion research from local counties, it pipes in the governmental, environmental, and regulatory constraints that might exist. Are there existing bans and moratoria? How does that state do permitting? Does it do it at the county level through a county commission, or is it a state process through a PUC or PSC? So all sorts of intelligence to help us predict: where are these projects going to be built? What’s the prime location? Can we get there first and inoculate the public to disinformation? Can we make them resilient and less vulnerable to disinformation?
The disinformation we see out there is astounding. There was a disinformation cluster last week trying to scare potato farmers, saying Frito-Lay won’t buy your potatoes if you host solar on your land, because they’ll have glass shards in them — your potatoes will have glass inside from the solar panels. We traced this disinformation to some potato trade industry associations that are funded predominantly by the fertilizer industry, and fertilizer is petrochemicals, right? So if you follow the money — how do we anticipate where disinformation or opposition is going to be? Where is the industry going, and how do we get there first? Generally, people remember what they hear first, right? So before the public understanding hardens around the disinformation, how do we get there first? So that’s an example of one product. I have a few more I could share with you as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:41
Well, you also have a small army in what you call the Creator Collective — 8,500 creators, 350 to 400 million followers in food and fashion and gaming and all the things that creators do. How does the sustainability message travel through a network like that? Maybe the message begins with a car influencer, then you run into it in a fashion commentary as well.
Leah Qusba 25:03
Well, I think, going back to your previous question around the tribalization problem on social media — like, how do we break through when the algorithms just sort us into the, you know, left-of-center green climate bucket? We don’t want to be sorted into that bucket. So creator marketing is a way to get around that. We don’t generally lead with a sustainability message with everyone. We lead with the message we think is going to work with that audience.
So if we’re trying to reach a bunch of car bros or commuters that really could save thousands of dollars annually from switching to an EV — maybe they live in a rural commuter town, they drive to the city for work — we want to hire a bunch of car bros, right, creators that are talking about fixing cars, and they slip EV messaging into their regular content streams that are more entertaining for their audience. We call it the raisin bread theory, where most of the content stays the bread, and you’re sprinkling in the raisins.
You could apply this to any one of these content verticals. If we’re talking about regenerative agriculture and getting toxic chemicals out of our food supply, MAHA moms are a great example — suburban white women in the MAHA movement, right? We want to find a bunch of them, or doctors and nurses who are really universally credible messengers who talk about health content. So depending on the audience and the campaign’s goals, we look into that community and we decide: okay, who do we want to engage for this campaign, and who’s the right credible messenger for the audience?
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:26
So would you describe that as: you coordinate and plan a sequence of messages? Or is this something that continues to happen organically based on your urging?
Leah Qusba 26:35
We do both. We do long-term campaigns that are multi-year, sort of patient-capital investments to changing an entire community’s way that they think about these technologies, where maybe there was a huge gap in understanding. One example would be: over 55% of Americans say they’ve never or rarely even heard about battery energy storage. They don’t know what it is. Great — it’s a fantastic opportunity to provide some baseline education to a huge group of people, where these projects are probably going to be built. We can get there first, before any disinformation gets out around these projects.
Then we have things that are more reactive and tied to the news cycle. So, almost two decades I’ve been in this work, and we keep losing during these rapid-response, sort of high-attention moments. The wildfires in LA are a really great example from last January, and we actually lost that narrative — DEI was blamed, that we were too busy with DEI in California to, you know, do proper forest management. It was ridiculous, but when you looked online and did advanced social listening analysis of the narrative, there were more mentions where the disinformation around DEI took over the conversation, instead of “hey, climate change is making these disasters more costly, more dangerous, and by the way, insurers are leaving the market in California.” Who’s holding the bag for that? It’s not the polluters that caused the problem; it’s the ratepayers, the premium holders that live in that state. So how do we make those connections? So there’s both a rapid-response element where we’re gathering this intelligence from the news cycle and responding, and then there’s more long-term strategies that we’re building as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:14
Talk a little about the rapid response. In January, Winter Storm Fern caused up to $6.7 billion in damage, and there were a lot of disinformation initiatives around that storm almost immediately, and they were blaming wind and solar for the grid not having stayed as resilient as it needed to be, ignoring the fact that it’s an ancient grid. What does an effective, fast counter-messaging effort look like? How do you move the truth at the speed of a lie when lies are propagating so quickly?
Leah Qusba 28:46
We actually did a rapid-response activation with our creator community that last weekend in January — I remember that vividly — and because Winter Storm Fern was a forecasted storm, we actually had a few days of lead time, so it wasn’t a same-day activation. We could plan and really activate our community.
So what we did: we used the best practices — sort of the gold standard for inoculation, or prebunking, is another way you can name it. It’s to prepare the audience for disinformation they might see, so that when they see it, it bounces off of them instead of sinks into them. So we follow the Debunking Handbook, and there’s a way to do it where you’re not reinforcing the disinformation. There’s a huge risk in social science of actually reinforcing the lie if you don’t do it in the right way, in terms of introducing the truth, talking about the disinformation, and ending with the truth. We call it the truth sandwich.
So we did that. We activated a couple dozen creators who got millions of views on their content, basically saying, look, the lights are going to go out because of this storm. It’s affecting over 20 states. It’s happening this weekend. If you see blaming or scapegoating — that, oh, the power went out because of those unreliable renewables — don’t be fooled, that’s not the reason. It’s actually inter-regional transmission in our aging grid, and literally frozen coal and gas supply.
And we can look back — we had people who went through Winter Storm Uri. We had some Texas moms who were in our rapid-response creator community that could talk about their own experience. Oh, the same thing: Governor Abbott actually said disinformation on national television in Texas, saying, “Oh, those frozen wind turbines, that’s why the lights went out.” So we actually had people from Winter Storm Uri, who went through that in ’21, that were part of this collection of creators that were activated and were able to speak to their own experience — that, oh, every time there’s extreme weather and the lights go out, renewables are scapegoated. Don’t be fooled, that’s not what it is, it’s this. And so it was very effective.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:45
Now, you do a lot of randomized trials of different kinds of messaging, and I’m wondering if there’s an example of something that you didn’t expect to work but really did when you put it in the market — or conversely, something you thought was a surefire win that didn’t work at all.
Leah Qusba 30:59
You know what was surprising? We saw a speech that was televised on the Senate floor with Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii. He was giving a speech on the Senate floor around how the Trump administration’s policies to block renewable energy were driving up the cost of electricity and utility bills for Americans, and that that will continue to happen. We said, wow, this is great — most people in our testing think Congress isn’t talking about these issues. So we said, why don’t we give this speech to our creators, have them clip it up and add some commentary to it, and we’ll have a bunch of them share it. And then we’ll do a randomized control trial, where the treatment audience saw the content — one of the pieces of creator content — and the control group saw nothing, or a placebo. Let’s see how this works.
And our research question was: does this help Democrats, or does it help Republicans? Like, what happens when we have people in Congress talking about this? And it turns out not only was it extremely effective at solidifying the idea that these policies to block renewables from being built are driving up bills — so it was very effective at education and awareness — it was very bad for the Republican party generally. Eleven points we were able to get in the treatment group on disfavor for how Republicans were handling energy policy and utility issues. So we found that to be fascinating. We didn’t think a single exposure of a speech of somebody in Congress talking about these issues would be that effective, or have that outsized of an impact.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:27
One of the things I noted: you started off focused primarily on youth climate education, but as you pivot toward everyone’s energy bill — which is a very dinner-table kind of 30s-and-40s, you-got-kids, you-got-to-think-about-this-stuff kind of problem — how do you stay relevant to youth who continue to grow up into what they can see plainly is a crisis, but that is increasingly being cast as a pocketbook issue?
Leah Qusba 32:53
I think what’s fascinating, and the unique part of this story, is that I’ve been at GoodPower almost the entire time, so many of the young people I personally worked with in high school are now into their 30s. They’re working for social impact investors, they’re working at the EPA, they’re working for big foundations, some are working for hyperscalers and AI companies, and what’s fascinating is they’re taking those values around these issues into their professional lives.
I think, you know, this idea of kind of growing up and maturing within the movement — and I think post-COVID, when we see how COVID really affected the youth movement in general, and college campus organizing: nobody was in person, and you kind of got to be in person to do organizing, to build those relationships and pass the baton to underclassmen, etc. So I think, for us, seeing some of these young people mature themselves into the professional working world — this generation has now permeated the private sector, the public sector, and they’ve carried this sort of generational youth climate movement, sparked by Sunrise, you know, sparked by our organization, Power Shift Network. They have a whole new view, I think, that they’re bringing into corporate America right now, around their values and around how much they prioritize climate and energy policies that make sense.
I think they’re also living in a world where they can’t attain the same things their parents did financially. They can’t own a home, they can’t afford to buy a car, or even move out of their parents’ house. So I think our messaging around the economy — I think it works for young people that have kind of grown up in this movement and are very angry, like most Americans are, around this cost-of-living crisis.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:37
The number of jobs represented by the capital that is being held in abeyance because of the misinformation must be incredibly frustrating for younger people. I mean, we can see the explosion of economic opportunity that would happen — it might look more like China, for instance. I was reading your 2030 plan; you’re leaning into AI and product development and breakthrough technology, and I’m wondering what those breakthrough technologies that you think are most important to understanding where we can go might be.
Leah Qusba 35:07
I think geothermal is really fascinating. Of course, anything that is zero carbon, I think, is really interesting to our organization when we think about the climate problem and decarbonizing the global economy. I think it’s a very nascent technology, so there’s some fair criticism there, but I would say uniquely it has this bipartisan support because it uses the same rigging and tools and equipment and skills as the fossil fuel industry, right — oil and gas and fracking workers. So I think there’s incredible bipartisan support as well, and I think as these technologies mature, we’ll be in a front-row seat, kind of looking and seeing how these develop and mature over time.
When we think about artificial intelligence tools, we think about it in a bit of a different way. I think one pervasive issue we’re seeing right now is AI manipulation and fabricated opposition in local siting — so AI-generated comments flooding decision-makers, and they don’t know what’s real and who’s real. So we built a product for that called TrueVoice that separates authentic local input from AI-manufactured opposition. We’re going to give it to community stakeholders, county commissioners, public service commissioners, the developers — everybody deserves to know: okay, what’s the probability that there was AI manipulation on this docket, and now how much do we weigh this? Maybe it’ll create new systems of what we prioritize and how we gather community input. Maybe there’ll be a premium on in-person hearings and showing up, you know, and reinvesting in local organizing.
So I think our use of these tools is really around identifying the cracks that could become fissures that could become huge cliffs for the work that we do in our pathway to accelerating decarbonization — and how do we fit within those, and how do we problem-solve and deliver solutions that don’t just solve our own problems at GoodPower, but sort of solve big, big systemic, sectoral problems.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:04
As you think about where we are right now, and everything you just said in the context of what we’re looking toward in terms of the world we want to build — what are you most hopeful about right now?
Leah Qusba 37:13
Well, I think the market forces, much to President Trump’s chagrin, are just too strong to stop the industry. You know, we have a deadline coming up on July 4, where the PTC and ITC — right, if you haven’t begun substantial construction, and now this is being litigated, or this 5% test, you know, have you spent 5% of the project budget — you will not be eligible for the PTC and ITC, these important tax credits that make these projects more lucrative and more profitable and more desirable from a financial investment perspective.
But when you look at the impacts of this sort of arbitrary deadline that we’re all racing toward — yes, Rhodium Group says, you know, the industry is going to take a hit, and a lot fewer projects will be built, there’ll be more consolidation — but the industry is too mature, and decarbonized power is too attractive and affordable and clean and just desirable and homegrown and stable and secure. There’s just too many good things, I think, wrapped up in decarbonized power to stop it.
I think the same is true for electric transportation. If we look to the global south — we work in the global south and non-OECD economies — where you see these two-wheelers and people buying electric vehicles in droves, because they don’t want to import this volatility of the global oil market into their households either. We look to food and agriculture, the MAHA movement of regenerative agriculture, the best carbon capture solution nature offers. People don’t want poison in their food, and we’re seeing a movement around that, and we’re seeing people get very exhausted and disgusted with, you know, the administration’s actions with Monsanto recently.
And so I think there is too much momentum for any one person or one administration to stop what’s happening right now. Can we throw roadblocks? Can we create friction? Can we run interference? Of course. We see our role as removing those bottlenecks, and kind of the counterbalance to that. So I think that gives me hope. The question is, how much time will it take? Time is our greatest enemy, and if we can save time, I think that’s the point. That’s where we avoid the worst consequences, and we seize the most opportunity. So how do we save time?
Mitch Ratcliffe 39:22
How does the adaptation story fit into what you’re doing today? Obviously, we’re going to need to prepare for this.
Leah Qusba 39:28
I think there are fantastic organizations out there working more on adaptation, disaster relief, mutual aid — community-based organizations that are doing a lot of that work. I think it’s hugely, hugely important. We’re going to need to figure out how to live and thrive and support people. The stories out of New Orleans, you know — hey, people have to move; this is going to be us; we’re going to lose 60 miles inland, right? So it has to happen. That’s not work that GoodPower is leading.
There’s a group of organizations, and also environmental disaster survivors. Extreme Weather Survivors is a great organization led by a dear friend of mine named Sierra Kos. They’re doing incredible work to really platform disaster survivors and what it’s like to live through wildfires, lose everything, lose your insurance — what does it look like to be on the front lines of these climate consequences, and how do we really tell those stories and use them, I think, as a warning signal, but also as an education tool to move local, state, and federal policies further toward supporting people.
I think the last thing I’ll say is some of the insurance subrogation laws that are being proposed in Rhode Island and New York, California, Hawaii. These are some of the leadership states saying, wait a second, polluters caused this knowingly for four decades — why are my constituents being left holding the bag? Why are they footing the bill when this industry was complicit? There’s actually a huge state policy movement right now called insurance subrogation, where insurance companies can actually go and make the industry pay for this and clean up — have a superfund, basically, where these companies pay into it, and when these disasters happen, they have to help clean it up, and that bill should not go necessarily to the community or the homeowner. And the insurance companies, too, I think, always get the blame and the ire, but as this continues to happen, that market is going to be more and more difficult over time. So I think having a solution where those most responsible and complicit with driving this situation are also going to be helping to pay for it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 41:46
Leah, thanks so much for this incredibly inspiring conversation. How can folks keep track of what GoodPower is up to?
Leah Qusba 41:52
Oh, good. Go to goodpower.org. We’d love to hear from you. You can contact us, you can reach me on LinkedIn, where I’m active as well, and we’d love to be in touch. Thanks for having me.
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:02
Thank you very much for spending time with us today.
Leah Qusba 42:04
Take care.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:11
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Leah Qusba. She’s CEO of GoodPower, the climate and media research organization known until recently as Action for the Climate Emergency, and you can learn more about Leah and her team’s work at goodpower.org. GoodPower is all one word, no space, no dash — goodpower.org.
Let’s consider what it means when an organization that spent 18 years with the words climate emergency in its name concludes those words themselves have become an obstacle to connecting with an audience. Now, this was a data-driven decision. Only 8% of voters under 35 rated climate as their top issue in 2024, and young people ranked the economy first and most important. And that’s the movement’s critical base. If it’s to transform this economy, affordability is what people — especially young people, who want to buy their first home, want to buy their first EV, or would like to be able to put their kids through school. Those folks are the ones who are going to make the change that we’re talking about, who are going to vote — both with their wallet and at the ballot box — for a new world. GoodPower’s rebrand is a bet that the movement can meet them at the crossroads of economics and sustainability.
Leah accurately described global energy volatility as a hidden tax on American families. Every far-off war and commodity swing shows up in the utility bill and at the pump, while wind and sun carry no fuel costs at all. There’s only the capital investment involved in building the solar and wind systems in the first place; then you get free power. But with oil, those taxes are effectively paid to companies, not governments. And as we heard in last week’s interview with Shareholder Democracy’s Gabriel Grant, shareholders have not yet leveraged their voting power to exert control over the companies whose stocks they own, and those companies are ultimately accountable to those shareholders.
When you see the problem through the lens of the Trump administration’s hypocritical approach to market competition, in which they suppress emerging technology, the renewables argument becomes simple supply-and-demand mathematics. The fastest, cheapest form of energy is being blocked from coming to market, and the result is rising rates rather than economic resilience. This isn’t the proverbial 500-miles-per-gallon carburetor purportedly suppressed by the oil industry in the 1970s. This is a real technology ready to reduce the cost of living while doing immense good for the environment, and people see this. GoodPower’s polling with the University of Chicago found just 40% of Republicans approve of their party’s current energy policy.
There’s a real tension as we continue to reinvent the economy, and Leah’s decision to lean entirely on pocketbook messaging is a clear path to building support for solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewables, which will only become more plentiful, not run dry, over the next century, like fossil fuels ultimately will. Leah’s answer is audience segmentation: one message — a front-door climate message — for the audience that wants one, the people who are already convinced and who want to share that message; and on the other side, economics-based messaging for everyone else. The messenger now matters more than the message, and in an era of influencers, this really comes through bright and clear.
Leah’s father, a conservative who doubts human-caused climate change, went solar because his HVAC contractor made the case — not his daughter, who runs one of the country’s largest climate communication shops, but an HVAC contractor. As Leah said, rural speaks to rural, neighbor speaks to neighbor, and GoodPower has operationalized that instinct at scale. They have a creator collective of more than 8,500 content makers with a combined audience in the hundreds of millions, and they’re slipping what Leah calls raisins of clean energy content into the bread of car videos, food channels, and gaming streams. And they measure it. That’s a discipline that separates persuasion from wishful thinking. What you can measure, you can change. It remains too rare in a movement that too often assumes its urgent warnings will carry the day by themselves.
The last idea to revisit is a leading indicator, and that is that artificial intelligence has become the new front line of the information fight, on both sides of the aisle.
Mitch Ratcliffe 46:29
People now ask Claude and ChatGPT whether solar will raise their electric bills, so GoodPower practices answer engine optimization to make sure accurate information surfaces in the first AI response. Its CleanCast tool predicts where siting battles over solar installations, wind installations, and so forth will erupt, so that developers can inoculate communities before disinformation arrives — like the recent industry-funded campaign that told potato farmers that solar panels would result in glass shards in their crops. Another tool that GoodPower has come up with, the TrueVoice tool, launching now, separates authentic public comments from AI-manufactured opposition flooding county permitting dockets and congressional mailboxes.
So one of the good things about AI, at least, is that it allows us to cut through a lot of the noise that we’re being flooded with. But look, this is an arms race, and Leah is candid about the tools being young. These are nascent movements and a nascent set of technologies we’re building on. But the prebunking playbook worked with Winter Storm Fern in January, when creators reached millions with the truth about the aging grid before the wind-turbine scapegoating could harden into what would be perceived as truth by many people. There’s a clear strategic method evolving in real time, and we will keep tracking that race for the American mind here on Sustainability In Your Ear.
Hey, look, if today’s conversation was useful to you, could you pass it along? Sharing an episode with a friend or leaving a review on your favorite podcast website is a great way to get the word out there, because folks, you are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. And you can tell folks they can find more than 560 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear at Earth911.com/podcast, or you can check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer.
Thanks for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and of course, let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
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https://earth911.com/business-policy/sustainability-in-your-ear-goodpowers-leah-qusba-on-selling-clean-energy-as-pocketbook-power-2/
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