Vibrant Environment

The Biden Administration recently finalized the first phase of a two-part rulemaking process to reverse some of the Trump Administration’s revisions to CEQ rules for implementing NEPA. In mid-April, ELI hosted a panel to discuss how these new rules might alter federal agency reviews of climate change and environmental justice impacts.

Just over a half-century ago, Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé’s surprise best seller, exposed the harms of animal agriculture to a wide audience in the same way that Rachel Carson’s book of a decade earlier, Silent Spring, put to widespread shame the practice of applying pesticides to cropland. The title of Moore Lappé’s book encapsulates her thesis. The math in 1971 made a compelling case that abandoning meat is indeed necessary to avoid crossing planetary boundaries.

Rice is a primary food source for more than half of the world’s population—especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In China, the rice-consuming culture I’m most familiar with, rice is breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. Even the Chinese character for “cooked rice” simultaneously means “food.” Rice is security, sustenance, and life itself.

Tribal nations have been leading the way in climate change adaptation planning long before local governments even got started.

According to a 2020 report published in Nature, up to 20 percent of the global carbon budget could be consumed by construction over the next 30 years.

I encountered an induction cooktop for the first time recently, and my life has never been the same. Boiling water, which usually bores me to tears, took half as much time as it did on a gas stove. Garlic sizzled in seconds; broccoli softened in a minute or two. With a press of the on button, I sped up time itself, whizzing through a recipe that would take me an hour on a traditional electric stove, 45 minutes on a gas cooktop.

When Russian troops swarmed over the border last February, Ukraine became the first country possessing nuclear power plants to be invaded. The attackers seized several of the generating facilities and temporarily entrenched around the mothballed reactor at Chernobyl. At this writing, Moscow’s intentions with regard to the operating power plants was unclear.

In February 2022, the Biden Administration committed to spending over $1 billion on Everglades restoration efforts. Just this past month, the Administration proposed another nearly half billion. Why is there suddenly so much political pressure to save the Everglades? The truth is, this pressure is not new.