Quick Key Facts
- Global species populations have declined by an average of 69% since 1970.
- The Endangered Species Act was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1973 and has saved 99% of the species it protects from extinction.
- At least one-third of plants and animals in the U.S. are threatened with extinction.
- Habitat loss, low genetic variation and other human impacts like pollution, wildlife trafficking, agriculture and development, and climate change are major drivers of endangerment and extinction.
- The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains the international “Red List” of endangered and threatened species.
- Scientists warn that the loss of plant and animal species due to climate change could cause an “extinction domino effect.”
The Endangered Species Act
To understand what “endangered species” means, it’s important to unpack the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which followed the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, the first piece of federal endangered species legislation. Enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1973, the ESA states that the federal government has a responsibility to protect endangered and threatened species. They must also protect the areas or regions necessary for the survival of the threatened species, called “critical habitats.”
The ESA set forth definitions of both “endangered” and “threatened” species. As stated in the Act, endangered species are “any species which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range,” and threatened species are “any species which is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” Species in both categories are called “listed species,” and can become “delisted” if they are no longer endangered or threatened.
It’s important to note that species can be listed as endangered at the state, federal and international level. They are managed under the ESA if they are listed at the federal level, but many states have their own versions of endangered species laws too.

How Are Species Protected Under the Act?
Species listed as threatened or endangered species then get protections by the federal government. They are protected from trade, sale and “take,” which prohibits anyone to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct” with these species, as well as interfering with breeding and behavioral activities in their critical habitat.
Three major provisions included in the Endangered Species Act lend it strength:
- Citizen suit provision. Members of the public — whether individuals or public interest groups — can petition to have a species listed as threatened or endangered, ensuring that federal agencies are taking action.
- Critical habitat provision. Agencies must protect the lands and waters that a species needs to survive and recover. When a species is listed, a critical habitat is also designated so a recovery plant can be drawn up.
- Consultation provision. Federal agencies have to avoid doing anything that jeopardizes protected species, including “adversely modifying” their critical habitats.
Ultimately, the ESA has been very successful. By some estimates, it has saved 99% of the species it protects from extinction.
How Do Species Get ‘Listed’ Under the Act?
A status review is conducted by the USFWS and NOAA to determine whether a species warrants protection under the ESA by giving it one of these designations. It’s a lengthy process for a species to get listed. It’s supposed to take only two years, but on average it takes about twelve. “Candidate” species — that is, those petitioning to become listed species — have to qualify for protected status under the ESA based on several factors.
If any of the following five factors are met, a species must be listed as endangered or threatened, according to NOAA:
- Present or threatened destruction, modification, or curtailment of its habitat or range.
- Over-utilization of the species for commercial, recreational, scientific, or educational purposes.
- Disease or predation.
- Inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms.
- Other natural or manmade factors affect its continued existence.
Every five years, a review must be conducted of listed species to determine whether the criteria for the recovery plan set forward have been met. Now, more than 1,300 species are protected (or “listed”) as either endangered or threatened under the ESA in the United States.
The ‘Red List’
While the Endangered Species Act focuses on protection at the national level, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains the international “Red List” of endangered and threatened species. The IUCN compiles information on animals, plants and fungi from more than 100 countries and regions, and evaluates their risk of extinction. By their latest count, more than 44,000 species are threatened with extinction worldwide. This includes 41% of all amphibians, 37% of sharks and rays, 36% of reef-building corals, 34% of conifers, 27% of mammals and 13% of birds.
Red List Categories
The Threatened Species list identifies those listed as Critically Endangered (CR), Endangered (EN) or Vulnerable (VU). Evaluations are based on five criteria: population reduction rate, geographic range, population size, population restrictions and probability of extinction. Population reduction is measured over 10 years, or three generations.
Geographic range considers the “area of occupancy” or a species, and the “extent of occurrence” — or the smallest area that could encompass all the sites that the species lives in. Smaller numbers are usually indicative of a threatened population. Lastly, “population restrictions” is a combination of population number and area of occupancy.
Species are categorized by threat level based on the five evaluated criteria, ranging from “least concern” to “extinct”:
- Least concern. There is no concern about population numbers. Human beings, pigeons, houseflies and domesticated cats and dogs would all fall under this category.
- Near threatened. The species might not be currently threatened, but will likely fall under that category in the future.
- Vulnerable species. High risk of becoming extinct in the wild.
- Population reduction rate: 30-50%
- Geographic range: Extent of occurrence is under 20,000 square kilometers, and area of occupancy is under 2,000 square kilometers.
- Population size: Fewer than 10,000 mature animals.
- Population restrictions: Restricted to under 1,000 mature individuals, or area of occupancy is under 20 square kilometers.
- Probability of extinction: 10% within 100 years
- Endangered species. Very high risk of becoming extinct in the wild.
- Population reduction rate: 50-70%
- Geographic range: Extent of occurrence is under 5,000 square kilometers, and area of occupancy is under 500 square kilometers.
- Population size: Fewer than 2,500 mature animals, or if the population has declined by 20% or more within five years or two generations.
- Population restrictions: 150 mature animals
- Probability of extinction: 20% within 20 years or 5 generations
- Critically endangered species. Extremely high risk of becoming extinct in the wild.
- Population reduction rate: 80-90%
- Geographic range: Extent of occurrence is under 100 square kilometers, area of occupancy is under 10 square kilometers.
- Population size: Fewer than 250 mature animals, or if population has declined by 25% or more within three years or one generation.
- Population restrictions: 50 mature animals
- Probability of extinction: 50% within 10 years or 3 generations
- Extinct in the wild. Includes plants that only survive in cultivation, or animals only in captivity. The term also encompasses species that are only surviving outside of their historic range.
- Extinct. There are no known individuals of the species remaining.
How Do Species Become Endangered?
Take the passenger pigeon, for example. These birds used to fly by the thousands overhead in North America but not a single passenger pigeon remains. The cause of their extinction is twofold: many were shot by humans for sport and food, and their forest habitat was cut down to build cities and plant farmland in a rapidly expanding America. They are a prime example of how human intervention can damage a species to the point of extinction — even one that once comprised 25-40% of the total bird population in the United States.

A passenger pigeon stamp on a National Wildlife Federation stamp sheet in 1966. Kevin Dooley / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Loss of Habitat

Extinction and endangerment can also happen, however, outside of human intervention. Glaciers melt after an ice age, pushing out plants and animals that can’t adapt to new conditions. A volcano can erupt and kill off an entire species. Think of the dinosaurs, who lost their habitat during the Cretaceous period when an asteroid struck the Earth. The debris sent into the atmosphere prevented light and heat from reaching the ground, and the dinosaurs were unable to adapt to this different climate. Their populations became endangered, and eventually extinct.
Increasingly, however, human activity is the reason for habitat loss. We clear enormous amounts of space for housing, agriculture and industry, leaving it inhospitable to the creatures who once lived there. When huge swaths of rainforest in South America are razed (or “deforested”) to create grazing space for cattle, the entire habitat that a species depended on is destroyed, contributing to decreases in their population. Such destruction has indirect impacts as well — while a species might not have been directly impacted by this loss, they might have depended on another impacted species as a food source, now leaving them without the necessary resources to survive.

Loss of Genetic Variation
Genetic variations allow species to adapt to changes in their environment. Without variation, species don’t develop resistance to disease or other threats, putting them at greater risk of extinction. Inbreeding prevents new genetic information from entering the gene pool, so disease is much more common and deadly within the group. Cheetahs, for instance, went through a period of inbreeding during the last ice age, so they don’t have as much genetic variation. As a result, fewer cheetahs survive to maturity than other species. Human causes like overfishing/overhunting can reduce the number of mature individuals that can breed, contributing to inbreeding.

A cheetah at Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. Ray in Manila / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Other Human Impacts
Extinctions have historically occurred during the five mass extinction events throughout the planet’s history, which were largely the result of natural causes. However, extinction is now occurring at a rate 1,000-10,000 times faster due to humans. Through travel and trade, humans introduce new diseases to species by spreading pathogens to new locations, and also introduce non-native species to areas where they are not meant to live, therefore altering food chains and possibly pushing out other native species. As we encroach upon the habitat of wild animals, species are at greater risk of death by car collisions and hunting too.
Pollution and Toxicity
Toxins released into the environment by humans, including pesticides, can contribute to the threatened status of species. Bald eagles were heavily impacted by DDT, which was used on farms as an insecticide and then washed into waterways where it poisoned fish. After eagles ate the poisoned fish, they began laying eggs with thin, fragile shells that cracked before the babies could hatch. Since DDT was banned in 1972, bald eagle populations have bounced back.
The introduction of trash and plastic into ecosystems by humans — especially in our oceans — can also harm species. It’s estimated that 100 million ocean animals are killed as a direct result of plastic each year.

Wildlife Trafficking and Removal From Habitats

Wildlife trafficking involves the illegal trade, smuggling, poaching, capture or collection of wildlife that’s protected, endangered or managed. It’s the second biggest direct threat to species, following only habitat destruction. The IUCN found that 958 species are at risk of extinction due to international trade. African elephants, for one, are heavily trafficked for their ivory tusks to make products like jewelry and chess sets. Consequently, fewer than 420,000 of these elephants remain of the 1.2 million that once lived in 1980.
Climate Change

Given the expansiveness of climate change and its impact, it’s no surprise that it’s a major threat to biodiversity. By 2050, some biologists estimate that 25% of plants and animals will be extinct in the wild as a result of climate change. Warmer temperatures are altering habitats and leaving species without places to breed and find food, disrupting seasonal cues for migratory animals, and causing sea level rise to damage coastal ecosystems, among many other impacts. In 2010, phytoplankton populations had dropped 40% since their 1950 levels, and rising sea surface temperatures were identified as the cause. Losing this key species that consumes carbon dioxide and produces oxygen during photosynthesis would be devastating to ocean health.
What Are the Most Endangered Species on Earth?
Animals
Amur Leopard

Only about 100 amur leopards are left in the wild, surviving only in the far east of Russia and northeastern China. Although their populations have stabilized — rising from 30 individuals in the 1970s to roughly 100 now — they have been considered “critically endangered” since 1996. They are primarily threatened by poaching for their spotted fur, habitat loss and lack of prey. Their prey base isn’t sufficient to sustain big populations, and so to help the leopards, local deer and hare species need to be protected from hunting as well.
African Forest Elephant

Once listed together with African savanna elephants, African forest elephants are now considered separately. These critically endangered elephants are found in thirty-seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and are mainly threatened by poaching and habitat loss to agricultural development. Their ivory tusks are highly valuable, and are a main reason why these elephants are poached. However, even if poaching stopped now, it would take a long time for populations to recover, since elephants reproduce slowly. Between 1928 and 2021, their populations declined more than 80%. Now, only 415,000 individuals exist in the wild in about 25% of their historic range. African forest elephants are important agents of seed dispersal. Many seeds they eat — some too large for other animals to ingest — remain intact after digestion, and thus spread to other areas while the elephants roam.
Black Rhino

Black rhinos were heavily poached between 1960 and 1995 — largely for their two horns. Their population consequently dropped by an astounding 98%, but they’ve made a large comeback since then due to conservation efforts. They are still critically endangered, and around 6,000 exist in the wild today in Kenya, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Cross River Gorilla

A Cross River gorilla at the Limbe Wildlife Centre in Cameroon. Julie Langford / CC BY-SA 3.0
While they are very difficult to study given their habitat and wariness of humans, it’s estimated that between 200 and 300 Cross River gorillas are left in the wild. They live in the montane forests and rainforests of Cameroon and Nigeria in an area about twice the size of Rhode Island. This region has been increasingly encroached upon by humans, clearing their forest habitat for agriculture or raising livestock.
Javan Rhinos

Once found across southeast Asia, only one wild Javan rhino population of seventy-five individuals exists in Java, Indonesia inside the Ujung Kulon National Park. Their population has risen from about thirty in the 1960s, but they are still critically endangered and the most threatened of the five species of rhinos. Given their tiny population, their lack of genetic diversity through inbreeding is a cause for concern about their long-term survival. The invasive Arenga palm is a big reason for their downfall — it continues to threaten the rhinos as it overtakes the park and alters their historic habitat. Rising sea levels from climate change also threaten their geographic region, as does the threat of tsunamis and volcanos from Anak Krakatau nearby. Poaching for the rhino’s horns has historically been an issue as well and remains so.
Tigers

All subspecies of tigers — the Malayan, Sumatran, South China, Indochinese, Bengal, and Amur tigers — are either endangered or critically endangered. Three subspecies of tigers are already extinct. The South China Tiger is the most critically endangered of all. With no sightings in the last thirty years, it’s considered extinct in the wild, although 150 remain in captivity. Malayan tigers have an even smaller population, with only 80-120 mature individuals remaining in the wild in the forests of Malaysia. Sumatran tiger populations are of great concern as well — there are only about 400 left in the wild on the island of Sumatra: the only place left where elephants, orangutans, rhinos and tigers live together in the wild in a delicately balanced ecosystem. As apex predators, tigers play a crucial role in maintaining the balance of ecosystems. Currently, only 4,500 total individuals remain in the wild.
Hawksbill Turtle

One of only seven species of marine turtles, the hawksbill turtle is critically endangered. Since the 1990s, 80% of its population has been lost, leaving only between 20,000 and 23,000 in all of the world’s major oceans. Hawksbills are often bycatch in large-scale fishing operations, and are poached for their beautiful shells (known as “tortoise shells”) to make jewelry and other valuables — the IUCN estimates that millions have been killed within the last hundred years for their shells. Habitat destruction is another key factor. Their nesting grounds are heavily influenced by coastal development, and climate change is impacting the coral reefs that they feed on. These turtles are very important to the functioning of marine ecosystems, especially maintaining the health of seagrass beds and coral reefs.
Vaquita

This small porpoise only lives in the Gulf of California off of Mexico. The vaquita is critically endangered — but more than that, it’s the world’s rarest marine mammal and most endangered cetacean. Currently, only ten individuals remain. These creatures are highly susceptible to entanglement in the gillnets used to fish shrimp and finfish, and it’s still a victim of bycatch fishing for totoaba, although it’s illegal.
Kākāpō

The kākāpō is a fascinating nocturnal, flightless parrot native to New Zealand, and it almost went extinct. Habitat loss and the introduction of invasive species by European settlers like rats, stoats and cats — which were especially detrimental, given that the bird doesn’t fly and hadn’t adapted to mammalian predators — were major drivers of its population decline. Only about 250 are alive today, according to New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, but the species has seen some growth in recent years thanks to the efforts of Kākāpō Recovery.
Plants
When we think of endangered species, we might think only of animals, but plants are also in danger of extinction. Similarly to captive animals, some plants exist only in cultivation now, like the Middlemist Red (the rarest flower on Earth), the Franklin Tree and the Wood’s Cycad. Among the many listed by the IUCN Red List, these are three of the most highly threatened plant species.
Western Underground Orchid (Rhizanthella johnstonii)

The species Rhizanthella johnstonii occurs in Western Australia. Fred Hort / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
This orchid is considered crucially endangered in its native Australia with only fifty remaining individual plants. It lives its whole life underground and relies on a specific kind of mycorrhizal fungus to survive. Habitat loss is a big reason for its decline, particularly for agriculture. Drought has impacted species that it depends upon for nutrients, as has the invasion of weeds and compaction of soil by humans, particularly when hunting for it.
Texas Prairie Dawn Flower

Texas prairie dawn flowers. Carolyn Fannon / Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
Formerly known as Texas bitterweed, this plant was renamed by school children in an attempt to improve negative attitudes towards it during conservation efforts. Now dubbed the Texas prairie dawn flower, this extremely rare annual wildflower is only found in the Texas Gulf Coastal Plain in the Fort Bend, Gregg, Harris and Trinity counties of Texas. Harris County — the home of Houston — is rapidly developing and contributing to the destruction of the flower’s habitat.
Ceroxylon quindiuense (Quindio Wax Palm)

Colombia’s national tree, the Quindio Wax Palm, is native to the montane forests of the Andes in both Colombia and Ecuador. Its endangered status arose after deforestation and agriculture began encroaching upon its territory. The palms’ seedlings die in the hot sun or are eaten by other creatures, so they aren’t able to reproduce outside of a forest. Wax palm forests are important to the survival of the yellow-eared parrot, among other species.
Fungi
Even though we often can’t see them, fungi are a crucial component of our lives. They are in everything, from the water we drink, the ground under our feet and the air we breathe. According to National Geographic, about 168 mushrooms have been assessed as threatened worldwide.
White Ferula Mushroom

White ferula mushrooms. tripsis / Flickr / CC BY-SA 3.0
This extremely rare mushroom is only found north of the island of Sicily in an area of less than 100 square kilometers. Their critically endangered status is due largely to overharvesting — as a gourmet food item, two pounds of white ferula sells for fifty euros.
Why Should We Protect Endangered Species?
Once a species is gone from the Earth, there is no way of getting it back. Protecting natural biodiversity has benefits we can predict, and some that we can’t. No one creature exists in a vacuum, but is connected to a large, delicate web of all species. Losing one species has a great impact on the balance of that web, especially when we lose a “keystone” species that helps hold the whole system together.
Protection of Food Chains

Species depend upon one another to survive. Since one species is a source of food for another, losing one can be disastrous to countless others, sending a ripple of disturbance down the food chain. We can see examples of such “trophic cascades” — that cascading effect of species loss down the food chain — throughout history. From the late 1800s to the 1920s, wolves in Yellowstone National Park were hunted nearly to extinction. In response, the populations of elk and deer they once preyed upon exploded, and decimated aspens and other trees that held stream banks together and supported birds. Insect populations burgeoned without their avian predators. Wolves were listed as endangered in 1974 and their recovery was thus mandated under the ESA. After wolves were reintroduced in the park in the 1990s, these decimated food chains recovered. The loss of apex species — the largest predators at the top of the food chain — like Yellowstone’s wolves is especially harmful. Because they tend to live longer and reproduce at slower rates, it also takes longer to recover their populations.
Scientists warn that the loss of plant and animal species due to climate change could cause an “extinction domino effect” of “co-extinctions,” which occur when one species dies out because it depended on another, causing subsequent extinctions down the food chain. In the worst-case scenario, this could kill off all life on Earth, according to a recent study from Flinders University in 2018.
Maintaining Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services

Balanced ecosystems are important. They provide us with crucial ecosystem services like flood regulation, water purification and nutrient cycling, which won’t function as well without all native species. California sea otter populations, for example, dropped in the 19th century from unrestricted hunting. The otters used to eat purple sea urchins, which eat kelp. Now, urchin populations have grown in the absence of otter predators, meaning they consume more kelp. Kelp forests provide important ecosystem services — like protecting the coast from storm surges and absorbing climate-warming carbon dioxide — but are less successful as their population diminishes.

Pollinators also provide vital ecological benefits. Over the past several decades, pollinator populations have been declining in North America. As of 2020, seventy species of pollinators including bats, birds and insects are listed as threatened or endangered. An estimated 75% of leading food crops depend on pollinators to grow — our entire food system depends on them. About 300 species of fruit depend on bats to get pollinated, including mangos and bananas. All pollinators face different threats, like imported diseases, invasive species and shrinking habitats, especially if patches along their migration routes are too fragmented. Pesticides pose another significant danger to pollinators. These toxins impact reproduction or harm the health of bees during direct contact. Additionally, insects and other animals could be beneficial to farmers as biological controls to keep pests in check. If we lose these species, we will rely even more heavily on synthetic chemicals to replace this service.
Preservation of Knowledge
Plants and animals also provide us with resources, like materials and new types of medicine. They’ve helped us create anti-cancer agents, blood thinners, pain killers and antibiotics, including penicillin, which was derived from a fungus. In all, 50% of the 150 top prescribed medicines were originally derived from plants and animals. Biodiversity presents us with the opportunity for new ways of feeding and sustaining our growing population, but by losing species to extinction, we lose that opportunity to innovate.

Loss of Livelihood

Whale-watching tourists in the Pacific Ocean off Puerto Vallarta, Mexico on March 8, 2022. Troy Mai / Flickr
Biodiverse communities are a source of income for many communities. Taking fishing communities, for example; if the fish they depend on are overfished to extinction, these people won’t be able to make any money. Biodiversity also has recreational value, providing us with opportunities for watching species like whales and birds, hiking on trails full of natural beauty, and more. The wildlife tourism industry is a multi-billion dollar sector, and the loss of species means the loss of major aesthetic value in these places, meaning tourism-centric economies will suffer.

Takeaway
Endangered species protection is a complex and intersectional issue. Species become threatened or extinct in a lot of different ways, some more indirect than habitat loss or poaching. Thus, to meaningfully address extinction risks, we must also consider climate change, our food systems and agricultural practices, and pollution.

Legislation is one of our strongest tools in fighting extinction, with the Endangered Species Act being a highly successful example. The whooping crane is a famous success story: the tallest bird in North America suffered from loss of habitat and hunting. In 1941 when it was listed as endangered, there were only twenty-one individuals left in its population — but after being listed as endangered in 1970, it now has more than 500. Other influential pieces of legislation throughout history include the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940 and the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.
The Endangered Species Act turns 50 years old in 2023, but it and other legislation that protects endangered species are constantly under threat. Under the Trump administration, the ESA was stripped of vital provisions, ultimately paving the way for development, oil and gas drilling, and mining in critical habitats of endangered species. Although the Biden administration has begun restoring protections under the Act, these actions remind us that legislation is a powerful tool in preventing harm to threatened species: one that can be taken away under leadership that neglects environmental conservation. To protect endangered species and their habitats, it’s crucial that we vote for individuals who prioritize legislation related to environmental protection and large-scale action against climate change.

The post Endangered Species 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/endangered-species-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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