Other writing

When car manufacturers’ rampant emissions cheating exploded into the headlines in 2015, Dieselgate became one of the biggest corporate scandals in history. Four-and-a-half years later, Volkswagen and its peers have yet to clean up their mess.

I love a good biography. But even so, when contemplating a multi-volume, 3,000-pages-and-counting study of a US president, I might have been tempted to cheat a bit, and skip straight to the one about the subject’s time in the White House. That’s not really an option with Robert Caro’s epic The Years of Lyndon Johnson series.

As an environmental journalist, I’ve been covering the frightening acceleration of climate change for more than a decade. As a person who believes in the tenets of liberal democracy, I’ve watched the rise of white-supremacist, anti-immigrant and nationalistic ideologies with similar dread over the past few years. But I always thought of those two trends — looming ecological dangers and the gathering strength of the far right — as unrelated.

As its refugee crisis recedes, Europe’s increasingly powerful nationalist and populist parties have found a new cause — attacking what they view as elitist hysteria over climate change. Will these movements succeed in blunting European action on cutting CO2 emissions?

As public concern about plastic pollution rises, consumers are reaching for canvas bags, metal straws, and reusable water bottles. But while individuals fret over images of oceanic garbage gyres, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries are pouring billions of dollars into new plants intended to make millions more tons of plastic than they now pump out.

While most of us do not have the power to make the air cleaner, there are some ways to protect yourself.