This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The deadly collapse of a 12-story condominium tower on a barrier island north of Miami Beach early Thursday morning has spurred new calls to survey buildings in areas vulnerable to sea level rise and subsidence, highlighting one of the lesser-known threats of climate change.

The cause of the disaster, which killed at least four people and left more than 150 missing as of Friday, remains unclear as rescuers pick through the rubble for survivors. But scientists have long feared for the future of this densely populated strip of land atop porous limestone as rising global temperatures increase sea levels. 

Land beneath buildings tends to sink as dirt and rock shift as a result of removal or erosion. From 1993 to 1999, the Champlain Towers South high-rise on the Surfside beachfront sank roughly 2 millimeters per year, according to satellite data used in a study that Florida International University researcher Shimon Wdowinski published in April 2020. At the same time, sea levels are rising approximately one-eighth of an inch per year.  

Wdowinski’s findings, first reported in USA Today, put a new focus on how ocean waters that have risen more than a foot over the past century can destabilize the porous ground on which many coastal cities sit. 

“The land is moving downward,” he said. “It’s very devastating what happened.”

John Englander, an author and expert on sea level rise, said he expects the deadly incident will lead to a review of coastal development and building integrity in the Miami metropolitan area, which is home to more than 6 million people. He said officials should “quickly and carefully” examine the impact of both ground subsidence and the intrusion of saltwater, which can corrode concrete and steel. Miami is plagued by so-called king tides, which flood areas of the city with saltwater and are becoming worse as sea levels rise.

“The questions certainly need to be asked,” Englander said. “It’s important to recognize this is not just a Miami problem. But certainly the density of coastal development in Miami kind of makes it a poster child for the problem.”

A 2020 report from Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, concluded that Miami is “one of the most at-risk cities in the world from the damages caused by coastal flooding and storms.”

The disaster’s timing emphasized the cascading crises linked to global warming. As the Biden administration struck a deal with Republicans to potentially water down an infrastructure package experts already dubbed insufficient to drastically curb emissions, a historic heatwave roasted the American West, with temperatures in the high triple digits expected in the normally temperate northwestern states of Washington and Oregon this weekend. Climate policy fights have long focused on slashing pollution from power plant smokestacks and automobile tailpipes, but buildings―which burn gas and oil for heating and cooking, directly producing at least 13 percent of US emissions―are increasingly coming under scrutiny. 

Most of those efforts have zeroed in on banning natural gas in new construction and requiring real estate developers to accommodate electric cars and induction stovetops. But the costly project of retrofitting old buildings for electrification could now give way to new calls to guard against those structures becoming unsafe as climate change worsens. 

The technology Wdowinski employed in his study could be used to review all of Miami’s infrastructure. Satellites equipped with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, or InSAR, use radar signals to measure changes in land-surface altitude from space, according to the US Geological Survey. An existing constellation of European satellites offers the data free, so buildings could be surveyed relatively cheaply, relying primarily on skilled analysts to make sense of the information. 

This week’s disaster wouldn’t be the first to trigger a broad environment-linked investigation in the Sunshine State. In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew slammed into South Florida as a massive Category 5 storm—one of the most powerful cyclones to make landfall in the United States. It destroyed more than 63,000 homes, killed 61 people and caused $26.5 billion in damage, which at the time was more than any hurricane in US history.

In response, Florida conducted an evaluation of its building codes and enacted stronger statewide standards in 2002. A later study from the University of Florida concluded that the changes helped limit damage during subsequent hurricanes. 

But the updated rules applied only to new structures, meaning buildings constructed prior to 2002 were exempt. One of those buildings was the 12-story condo building that collapsed Thursday, which was built in 1981.

Though it remains unclear what caused the structure to fall, Kenneth S. Direktor, an attorney who represents the association that operates the building, told the New York Times that the condo was about to undergo major repairs to address rusted steel and damaged concrete. Direktor said an engineer identified those issues during a recent inspection but that there was no indication the building could collapse. Miami-Dade County requires older buildings to be recertified as structurally sound every 40 years.

Harold Wanless, a geography professor and sea level rise expert at the University of Miami, expects a combination of factors led to the disaster and called for a thorough investigation. “Some of the possible causes would be unique to this structure,” he said in an email. “Others would have broader implications to other coastal high-rises. I am not sure why this particular building had some kind of subsidence occurring. That is really the target question.” 

Wanless questions the likelihood that saltwater intrusion played a major role, noting that sea levels in the area have risen about 6 inches in the 40 years since the building was constructed. “That seems small for a saline inundation story, but there are so many questions at this point,” he said.

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The White House is facing mounting pressure from Democrats to yank federal permits for Line 3, the controversial oil pipeline under construction in Minnesota. 

Eight Democratic senators and nearly two dozen House members criticized the Biden administration for allowing pipeline giant Enbridge to continue building Line 3 across wetlands in a letter sent Monday that HuffPost viewed. The lawmakers say President Joe Biden should suspend the Clean Water Act permits the Trump administration had granted until the Army Corps of Engineers completes a more thorough analysis of the potential environmental impacts. 

“The Trump Administration aggressively expanded fossil fuel infrastructure projects under a new policy of ‘energy dominance’ and severely limited public scrutiny on those projects,” said the letter, which Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) led. 

Carrying out a new assessment, they said, would “ensure a full and significant environmental review that includes assessing the project’s real costs on environment, public health, and climate change and ensuring the public is aware of those costs.”

The Army Corps conducted “almost no independent evaluation of the risk of oil spills at the crossings it authorized, despite the fact that the route for Line 3 crosses 227 lakes and rivers, including the headwaters of the Mississippi River and rivers that feed directly into Lake Superior,” the letter said.

The lawmakers complained that the Army Corps’s final permitting analysis last November of how the pipeline would affect climate change came down to “a single paragraph in which greenhouse gas emissions from construction and operation of a major tar sands pipeline are dismissed as ‘de minimis.’” They asked instead that the administration examine how the potential for serious drought across the region could “exacerbate the environmental costs of an oil spill.”

Yet “the most serious areas of omission” appeared in the infrastructure agency’s failure to adequately consult local tribes, many of whose members have led the ongoing protests against the pipeline’s construction, braving assaults from police and private security and blasts of debris from deliberately low-flying federal helicopters.

The lawmakers singled out the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ June approval of Enbridge’s plan to pump 10 times more water away from the construction site than was approved last November.

“The magnitude of this transfer will have grave implications for the ecosystems near the pipeline, including the wild rice beds that are a staple food for the Anishinaabe people and core to the way of life,” the letter read. “It is our understanding that the Red Lake and White Earth tribes were not consulted on this dramatic increase, despite the fact that it will directly impact them.”

The White House referred questions to the Army Corps, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a lengthy statement, Enbridge said its “pipelines have coexisted with Minnesota’s most sacred and productive wild rice waters for over seven decades” and insisted it has “demonstrated ongoing respect for tribal sovereignty” and “a commitment to addressing climate change with real action.” 

Enbridge, based in Canada, boasted earlier this year that the 1,031-mile pipeline is nearly finished, with just a portion of the 337-mile stretch through Minnesota still awaiting completion. In June, the Biden administration defended the water permits granted to the pipeline during the Trump administration and asked a federal judge to toss out a complaint from Native Americans and environmental groups challenging the project. 

Support for the project has thus far become one of the darkest bruises to Biden’s nascent climate record, which includes reducing how much a coal company has to pay in federal royalties and approving a massive wave of new oil and gas drilling permits on public lands. 

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President Joe Biden vowed Tuesday to double US spending on international climate aid to $11.4 billion per year by 2024, a move that would significantly expand the pot of money available for poorer countries to develop clean energy and adapt to the already brutal effects of warming. 

The pledge, announced during the first-year president’s debut speech before the United Nations, comes almost exactly six months after Biden doubled the previous US commitment to $5.6 billion.

The decision showed a clean break from former President Donald Trump, who withdrew the US from the global pact to cut carbon emissions and canceled all payments to the world’s main climate aid fund. Trump’s predecessor, former President Barack Obama, had pledged $3 billion to the fund, but paid out just $1 billion before his Republican successor took office. 

“We’ll work with the Congress to double that number again, including for adaptation efforts,” Biden said before the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan. “This will make the United States a leader in public climate finance.”

Yet even the quadrupled annual figure falls far short of what US allies are contributing, and represents roughly one-eighth of what the world’s largest historical emitter would need to pay to account for its cumulative share of carbon heating the planet. 

The US has spewed the second-most carbon into the atmosphere each year since 2006, when China, with its ravenous appetite for coal, took the top slot. But Americans’ love of gas guzzlers, big suburban houses, and cheap plastic goods makes the U.S. the largest per capita emitter by far. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for over a century, preventing the sun’s heat from escaping back into space and heating the planet all the while, meaning the US’s nearly 200 years of industrial pollution make up the lion’s share of the emissions causing climate change today. 

Accounting for that reality, the US would need to spend $800 billion on climate aid to the rest of the world by 2030, according to an analysis put forward earlier this year by a diverse coalition of more than 1,300 civil society groups. That’s close to $89 billion per year, nearly eight times what Biden pledged Tuesday. 

The new proposal even fails to match more conservative estimates of what the US owes the rest of the world. The U.S. fell dead last on a list of countries that compared total historical emissions to existing climate finance pledges. The ranking from the Overseas Development Institute, a London-based think tank, calculated that the US should have donated a little over $43 billion between 2017 and 2018.

Tuesday’s pledge is even shy of the $12 billion per year an alliance of US nonprofits, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Oxfam America, proposed this week. 

“This was a very significant ramp up, however it’s definitely not the US’s fair share,” Rachel Cleetus, the climate policy director at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said by phone Tuesday after the president’s speech. “More will need to be done in the years ahead.” 

The rich world promised more than a decade ago to muster $100 billion per year to help countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America skip the fossil fuel phase of economic development and fortify themselves against the droughts, flooding, and extreme weather already disproportionately afflicting them.

Yet by 2019, the North American and European nations that grew wealthy burning fossil fuels and chopping down forests over the past two centuries contributed just $79.6 billion to the fund, more than $20 billion less than was promised, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of rich countries, found in a report published last week.  

The European Union and its members already give developing countries about $25 billion per year, and the European Commission vowed this month to increase that by nearly $4.7 billion. 

“My message today is that Europe is ready to do more,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in her State of the European Union speech last Wednesday. “But we expect the United States and our partners to step up too.” 

A truly “fair share” spending figure from the US would amount to an eye-popping number. But the US spent $714 billion on its military in 2020 alone, despite repeated warnings that the Pentagon does too little to root out profligate spending and graft by private contractors, going as far as to hide an internal study that estimated wasteful bureaucratic costs at $125 billion.

For comparison, the cost of building a single US aircraft carrier this year will likely exceed what Biden has proposed to help other countries deal with climate change by more than $1 billion. 

Military spending is often contrasted with policy issues the US badly needs to fund but fails to prioritize, such as basic infrastructure, education, or health care. But the comparison is uniquely relevant with climate change. Already, increasingly scarce freshwater supplies are stoking regional tensions. Some researchers connect the civil war in Syria, which created a refugee crisis that served to destabilize Europe and neighboring countries, to a prolonged drought that drove more than a million rural workers from the countryside to cities as crops failed. Twelve of the 20 countries deemed most vulnerable to warming impacts are mired in conflict, and studies indicate that number will likely grow as average temperatures rise.  

The Pentagon, even under Trump, indicated that extreme weather and less predictable resources pose an almost certain risk of more wars, terrorism, and the very violence a well-armed military is supposed to guard the American population against. Helping other countries cut their emissions and avoid social and ecological upheaval should decrease the likelihood of armed conflict.

“The ambitious call we’re making actually makes sense when you look at it juxtaposed to what we spend on the military,” said the Rev. Michael Malcom, an ordained minister and the executive director of The People’s Justice Council, a grassroots climate justice group. “If we would take away from our death-dealing devices and invest in life-giving measures, we can make it happen.” 

Yet Biden will need Congress to authorize the $11.4 billion per year in aid funding at a time when members of the president’s own party say they are reluctant to approve a politically popular $4 trillion budget aimed at building infrastructure and hastening the transition to clean energy and electric vehicles. 

Despite the White House’s request to keep the Pentagon budget flat at $715 billion, congressional Democrats voted with Republicans this month to increase the military’s spending by $24 billion. 

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Caesars Entertainment, one of the world’s largest casino-resort operators, is set to host the Super Bowl of climate change denial this month at its iconic Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

On October 15, the Illinois-based Heartland Institute is scheduled to convene its three-day “International Conference on Climate Change,” an annual confab at which the right-wing think tank that cut its teeth shilling for the tobacco industry in the 1990s parades its stable of pundits and contrarians who reject climate science.

This year’s event, dubbed “The Great Reset: Climate Realism Vs. Climate Socialism,” will dive headfirst into the conspiracy that world governments are simply using climate change to control people’s lives.

“The global climate agenda, as promoted by the United Nations, is to overhaul the entire global economy, usher in socialism, and forever transform society as one in which individual liberty and economic freedom are crushed,” reads a description of the event.

The list of keynote speakers is a who’s who of the denial movement, including William Happer, the retired Princeton University physics professor who served as an adviser to President Donald Trump and has declared Earth is in the midst of a “CO2 famine”; Myron Ebell, director of the right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute who led the Trump EPA transition team and was a key figure in Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the historic Paris climate agreement; and Steve Milloy, a former cigarette and coal lobbyist who also served on the Trump EPA transition team.

Like most casinos, Caesars Entertainment hosts all kinds of events. The company itself donates to candidates across the ideological spectrum, but, since 2012, has generally contributed more to Democratic campaigns each election cycle. But the Heartland event runs counter to the $25 billion casino giant’s own corporate pledges on climate change, which includes “using the methodology prescribed by” United Nations scientists to design plans to eliminate planet-heating emissions throughout its supply chain. 

The company’s website features an entire page on climate change and its “commitment to science-based goals.” On it, the company touts its “climate leadership” and says it is “committed to developing science-based” climate targets and “dedicated to collaborating with other organizations to advance industry-wide and overall corporate climate leadership.”

The firm, which owns Caesars Palace and dozens of other casino resorts, did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment Monday. But less than two months ago, the company pulled the plug on a conference it was set to host in Las Vegas on behalf of a group that espouses the fringe conspiracy known as QAnon. 

The Heartland Institute’s conference was initially christened the “Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change,” or NIPCC. The name was an unsubtle attempt at branding Heartland’s modest gathering of fringe scientists and political cranks as a legitimate alternative to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the premiere global climate science body made up of top researchers from more than 100 countries. 

Heartland’s hard-line climate denial may have filled its coffers throughout the early 2000s as oil and coal companies pumped money into its campaigns to harass scientists and confuse the public over what accumulated carbon does to the atmosphere. But by the early 2010s, even ExxonMobil Corp., one of the fiercest opponents of climate science, stopped giving Heartland money. 

Far-right megadonors stepped in to fill the void. Hedge fund billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer began giving the nonprofit millions. The donations helped prop up the institution, giving Heartland newfound influence in Washington when former President Donald Trump, a fellow recipient of Mercer money, took office and began a damaging but quixotic quest to blind the federal government to the long-understood realities of fossil-fuel-induced warming.  

Still, it didn’t take long for the group to wither under fresh scrutiny. In 2017, while goading the new Environmental Protection Agency leadership to host a public debate over climate science, Heartland proposed as one of its debaters a convicted child sex offender. Within months, HuffPost revealed that one of Heartland’s top officials had defended the nonprofit’s former marketing chief against charges that he stalked and harassed a young female employee. 

In 2019, the once-ascendant think tank retreated back into its ideological fortress, denying HuffPost and other major news outlets press credentials to cover that year’s conference, held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC. “HuffPost won’t be getting any credentials for this conference,” Heartland’s Jim Lakely wrote at the time. “You can watch the live-stream if you want to cover it.”

By 2020, Heartland’s brand of outright climate denial had begun to lose sway as mounting disasters made tangible what scientists had warned for decades would come of unchecked emissions. It attempted to win back relevance by plucking from obscurity a German teenager who, with her blond hair and serious tone, superficially offered deniers their own version of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen whose climate protests inspired a global movement. 

But Naomi Seibt, the so-called anti-Greta, quickly drew more negative attention once the teen’s links to neo-Nazis and white nationalist agitators surfaced. Seibt is also slated to speak at Heartland’s conference in Las Vegas.

By the end of winter 2020, Heartland laid off at least 10 staffers amid worsening financial woes. 

“Heartland is broke,” one long-time staffer said in a text message HuffPost obtained at the time.

Tickets for Heartland’s event at Caesars Palace go for $250 per head. 

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Plastics are everywhere. From the stomachs of deep-sea fish to human feces, Arctic snow to gusts of wind in the remote wilderness, the oil and gas byproduct has, barely a century after it was first synthesized in a laboratory, become a ubiquitous feature of virtually every ecosystem on Earth and every aspect of modern life.

It’s also playing a key role in permanently changing the climate of the planet it has come to dominate.

Plastics already produce 3.8 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions throughout their lifecycle, roughly double the planet-heating pollution spewed by airplanes. By the end of this decade, the plastics industry in the United States alone is on pace to eclipse the carbon footprint of the country’s remaining coal-fired power plants, according to a new analysis from Bennington College’s Beyond Plastics think tank.

Newly compiled data on the 10 stages of plastic production, usage and disposal show the U.S. plastics industry is releasing at least 232 million tons of greenhouse gases per year, equivalent to 116 average-sized coal-fired power plants.

Roughly 65 percent of the country’s active coal-fired plants retired over the past decade, yet the stupendous growth of the U.S. plastics industry threatens to offset whatever climate progress the world’s largest historical emitter has made at a moment when the nation is struggling to codify its transition from fossil fuels into law.

While emissions from power plants, transportation, and industry are expected to take center stage at next month’s United Nations climate summit in Scotland, plastics are virtually absent from the global climate agenda. And despite attention paid to the crisis of plastic trash piling up on buildings and killing aquatic wildlife, the Biden administration’s proposal to decarbonize the U.S. economy similarly overlooks the industry’s carbon footprint.

“When most people think of the plastic problem, they think of water pollution and the fact that plastic recycling has been such a failure. They don’t think about climate change,” said Judith Enck, the president of Beyond Plastics who previously spent eight years as a regional administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency. “But this is a significant and growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Across the country, particularly in states where hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has made the fossil fuel raw materials for plastics production cheap and readily available, the industry and its emissions have grown rapidly. In 2020, plastics emissions increased by 10 million tons compared to the previous year, even as the world’s output of climate-changing gases overall temporarily decreased as the pandemic lockdowns idled cars and factories.

Another 12 plastics facilities are currently under construction, with 15 more in the works, likely adding another 40 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution each year by 2025.

Heat-trapping carbon is hardly the only pollutant these plants spew. Air pollution near cracker plants ― the type of facility where gas is heated to a high enough temperature to break the fuels into smaller molecules, a main feedstock, or baseline ingredient, for plastics ― contains more than 100 chemicals including cancer-causing benzene, toluene and xylene. Communities in which these facilities are built experience such disproportionate rates of lung cancer, asthma and organ diseases that Louisiana’s infamously dense petrochemical corridor is known internationally as “Cancer Alley.”

More than 90 percent of the carbon emissions the plastics industry reports to the Environmental Protection Agency pollutes just 18 communities, primarily along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, the report found. Residents there are more likely to be poor and nonwhite. Those living within three miles of these petrochemical clusters earn 28 percent less than the average U.S. household and are 67 percent more likely to be people of color, according to the report.

To conduct the research, Beyond Plastics enlisted the Maine-based environmental research firm Material Research to collect the public emissions data plastics companies submit to the EPA, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Energy. The industry-reported data showed 114 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2020 alone.

But that offered only a narrow view of plastics’ carbon footprint. After collating the regulatory data, researchers then calculated emissions from plastic imports and exports and pipelines carrying the feedstock fuels. By doing so, they identified another 118 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution just last year.

In reality, the actual number is likely even higher. That estimate does not include, for example, gases that plastic waste deteriorating in the ocean releases. Sarah-Jeanne Royer, a research scientist at Hawai’i Pacific University’s Center for Marine Debris Research who has studied emissions from plastics, said public understanding of how quickly plastics deteriorate and emit gases has not yet caught up to recent findings.

“Whether it’s plastic pollution or plastic that is basically in use, it will be producing different types of greenhouse gases,” said Royer, who was not involved in the report but reviewed its findings for HuffPost. “We very often think about emissions from the production process or maybe from the end-of-life recycling facilities. But we don’t yet have a number for the total amount for when plastic is exposed in the environment.”

Adding to that crisis, she said, is the fact that as plastic waste breaks apart in the ocean or in landfills, it expands the exposed surface area and increases emissions from each piece of trash over time. “If anything,” she said of the Beyond Plastics report, “this is an underestimate.”

Among the more worrying trends the report documents is the rise of a nascent sector known as chemical recycling. Sometimes called “advanced recycling,” the process involves melting solid plastics down in high-heat furnaces. The resulting liquid feedstocks―rather than becoming new plastics, as the term “recycling” implies―are, in many cases, sold as fuel oil.

The chemical recycling industry, though still emerging, is littered with failures, including the collapse of projects across three continents, a Reuters investigation published in July found. Of the 35 chemical recycling projects the EPA assessed last December, just six were operating at commercial or demonstration scale, while several ended in lawsuits and settlements for unpaid services and two resulted in the chief executives facing multi-million-dollar fraud judgements.

Still, states across the country are enacting legislation to spur the industry on by exempting chemical recycling plants from local environmental regulations. If all the country’s proposed chemical recyclers are built, the plants and the burning of their resulting fuel could emit another 18 million tons of greenhouse gases per year, the Beyond Plastics report found.

“I am not surprised by the main conclusions,” said Sangwon Suh, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, who was not involved in the report but reviewed an advanced copy for HuffPost. “Plastics produce a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions throughout the life cycle, while they are barely noticed by the public as their emissions tend to be hidden behind the supply chain.”

He cautioned that coal, too, emits more carbon through its life cycle than most figures that cite the pollution it produces when burned reveal. But unlike coal, which scientists say needs to be phased out in the next decade or so to keep global warming from reaching catastrophic levels, “net-zero greenhouse gas emission plastics is possible at a global scale” if producers actually recycle material, use plant matter as a feedstock, and equip facilities with carbon capture technology, Suh said, pointing to a study he co-authored and published in the journal Science this month.

The plastics industry’s waste and climate impact are hardly the only social problems that should invite government scrutiny. Plastic prices are soaring, with polypropylene, a main ingredient in most plastics, skyrocketing 135 percent over the course of 2021, according to a separate report published this week by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. The analysis concluded that the industry requires more pricing oversight of the companies that produce most feedstocks, particularly the oil and gas giants that have increasingly relied on their plastics divisions to compensate for declining profits from drilling.

“As countries finally begin to eliminate the burning of fossil fuels for power and transportation, the demand for fossil fuels is falling. In desperation, the fossil fuel industry is looking to plastics as a replacement market, as this report details,” Enck wrote in the introduction to the report. “Plastics is the fossil fuel industry’s Plan B. But there is no Plan B for the rest of us.”

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.