B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

While fuel shortages due to the Iran war made some countries double down on electrification, they also highlighted one industry that could be quite literally grounded without fossil fuels: aviation. Flying relies on fossil-based jet fuels and is extremely hard to decarbonize.

Researchers in China now report a process that could help bring down flying’s carbon emissions while also tackling the plastic waste crisis. The two-step process converts plastic waste into high-quality jet fuel more efficiently and at much less cost than other methods researchers have reported in the past to convert plastic waste to fuels.

The team’s preliminary analysis, reported in published in Nature Energy, shows that the plastic-based fuel would cut carbon dioxide emissions by 73% compared with petroleum-based jet fuel.

The plastic that the researchers break down is polystyrene. This lightweight polymer, often commonly called Styrofoam, is used to make packaging and insulation. It is notoriously expensive and challenging to recycle. Besides usually being contaminated, it is composed mostly of air, which makes sorting and transportation difficult. Nearly all waste polystyrene goes to landfill today.

The team from Nanjing Forestry University and Tsinghua University designed a new catalyst that breaks down polystyrene at high temperatures in the presence of hydrogen. Their process runs continuously in a tandem reactor.

 

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The first reactor heats the polystyrene to 460°C in a hydrogen atmosphere step. This breaks the long polymer chains in polystyrene to shorter strands. In the second reactor, the fragments are passed over the ruthenium catalyst at 160°C. The resulting chemical reactions convert the fragments into molecules called alkanes. These are energy-dense hydrocarbon molecules that work for jet fuel.

Past work on making fuels from plastic waste include a one-step, low-temperature process as well as a method that is powered by sunlight and also utilizes carbon dioxide. This new method needs higher temperatures, but it is faster, has a much higher yield and requires lower pressures. But still, whether or not it can be cost-effectively scaled up remains to be seen.

In their study, the researchers show that the method converts 94.8% of waste polystyrene to liquid fuels. And their preliminary analysis shows that the fuel would sell for a minimum of $1–1.80 per kilogram, competitive with conventional fossil-based jet fuel.

Source: Jia Wang et al. Ambient-pressure conversion of plastic waste to jet fuel cycloalkanes by tandem hydropyrolysis and vapour-phase hydrogenation. Nature Energy, 2026.

Image: Simply Flying

This chapter of the Seeds Series explores "relationality" as a foundation for regenerative cultures, drawing on insights from various interviewees to show how empathy, accountability, place-based belonging, and interdependence can help heal the social and ecological fractures of modern life.

For 6,000 years, human societies have sought to control water through ever-larger infrastructure. As climate change brings more extreme floods, droughts and heatwaves, a growing number of cities are exploring a different path: adapting to water's rhythms rather than trying to dominate them.

Nandita Bajaj, executive director of Population Balance, defies stereotypes. She chose not to have children and has dedicated her life to research and advocacy on how pronatalism, overpopulation, and human supremacy fuel social inequality and ecological overshoot, and to confronting tough questions about humanity’s outsized footprint on Earth.

Sprawl kills.

That’s the unmistakable conclusion drawn by researchers at Johns Hopkins University earlier this month in an update of their landmark 2014 report on the nation’s ongoing crisis of land misuse: sprawl chokes life out of our cities, undermines opportunities for our children, and, yes, even raises the risk of disease.

Riverside, the Southern California suburb, and Atlanta were at the bottom of the list for “most sprawling” while San Francisco and New York City topped the list as “most compact,” based on established metrics such as density of development and concentration of jobs.

The report, which comprises 233 metropolitan areas in the lower 48 states and covers 85 percent of the U.S. population, is not just about geography, of course, but about the most-basic quality-of-life issues facing the country today. Residents of compact and connected neighborhoods have “lower energy costs, better health outcomes, lower exposure to vector-borne diseases such as Lyme disease, well-connected social lives and greater opportunities for children to thrive,” according to the report, “Who Sprawls the Most? Mapping Sprawl and Assessing Its Impact on Everyday Life” [PDF].

And in a counter-intuitive development, given the debate over “abundance,” housing in compact cities was found to be more affordable than those in sprawling suburbs when the cost of transportation and energy are taken into account. (Transportation and energy costs are much lower for residents of compact and connected areas.)

Shima Hamidi

The overall housing cost surprised the report co-author.

“The amount we pay for energy is becoming more and more a challenge for people,” said Shima Hamidi, director of the Center for Smart Transportation at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “We found that in compact and connected neighborhoods, residents pay substantially less of their income on residential energy bills, and if you add that to transportation, the savings on these two budget items in a compact and connected neighborhood saves offsets the higher cost of housing in this area.”

Hamidi told Streetsblog that the report hits at a crucial time because of the ongoing debate about high housing costs in the most-walkable, most-livable parts of our greatest cities.

“Sprawl is getting attention these days because there are so many critics of smart growth and growth management policies these days who are arguing that these policies would restrict housing production and will lead to more expensive housing and less housing affordability for residents,” Hamidi said.

But, she added, there are other factors that cast sprawl in a bad light, including the level of social isolation, which leads to disconnected youth, not to mention “heat-related health outcomes … linked to climate change.”

Quality-of-life is simply worse in areas where people are disconnected from each other, job sites and social venues.

“A typical suburban neighborhood is very low density or exclusively single-family housing,” she said. “You don’t see much more other types of uses, like coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores, grocery stores. They are not within a walking distance of residents of these housing units, so residents have to drive long distances. … These neighborhoods are mostly characterized as having cul-de-sacs or dead ends that accommodate privacy and driving, but not really connection.

“In a neighborhood that’s more compact, you have a mix of uses: different coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores within walking or biking distance. [These are] livable and vibrant types of neighborhoods.”

Can you put a value on that? The report and Hamidi suggests you can: As a result of sprawl, the U.S. has about double the number of “disconnected youth” as Europe — and it
“costs taxpayers an estimated $94 billion each year in lost productivity … with profound impact on the lives of these individuals and their families,” she said. “The future of these individuals is being shaped, and they just are kind of isolated and disconnected, and not getting the opportunities that they need.”

They’re also at higher risk of disease. And the very edge of sprawl, where low-density residential development meets forests or grasslands, creates conditions for higher risk of human-tick interactions, the report stated.

“A 10-percent increase in the county [sprawl] score reduces the risk of Lyme disease by
about 21 percent,” the report said.

The report is not all bad news. Atlanta had a bottom-of-the list score of 41 in the original report and remains second-to-last in the update, but a decade of effort has led to significant improvements in connectivity resulting in a score of 57.2 — a 40-percent improvement (take that, Lyme disease!).

“Atlanta is becoming more compact over time,” Hamidi said. “It takes a long time for urban sprawl to be mitigated, but the progress can be made. Atlanta [officials have had] a sizable impact.”

Save yourself: Recommendations from the report

Sprawl doesn’t have to be like the weather — that thing that everyone complains about but no one does anything about. The report offered extensive recommendations for urban planners and policy makers. Among them:

• Zoning reform: Allow higher residential and mixed-use densities near transit corridors and employment centers
• Provide incentives for infill with tax breaks, density bonuses, and reduced parking minimum requirements (which reduce development cost).
• Transit-oriented upzoning: Require higher densities within walking distance (e.g., 800 feet of major transit stations).
• Affordable housing integration: Pair density increases with inclusionary zoning and affordable housing mandates to ensure equitable access to transit-rich, high-demand areas.
• Parking reform: Reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements. (Maryland is clearly listening.)
• Design guidelines for livability: Ensure that higher-density areas include green spaces, community facilities, and active transportation infrastructure so density contributes to livability, not overcrowding.

“Local elected officials, state leaders, and federal lawmakers can all help communities grow in ways that support these improved outcomes,” the report concluded. “This study recommends local governments and elected and public officials to consider land-use planning strategies and policies that create more connections and facilitate healthier
transportation choices in walkable, vibrant, and connected neighborhoods that offer both
local and regional accessibility to residents.”

• The World Cup will stress both the capacity and finances of transit systems in host cities, with special service in New Jersey costing $6 million per match to carry the majority of 82,000 fans to Met Life Stadium. Some cities, though, are treating the tournament as an opportunity to showcase their transit systems to a global audience, adding rail frequency and charter buses at little to no cost to fans. (CBS News)
• Whether it’s because of overpolicing, lack of investment or urban freeways cutting of neighborhoods, mobility for Black Americans is often limited, with devastating social and economic consequences, according to urban planner and author Charles T. Brown. (Planetizen)
• The environmental impact of driving an electric vehicle is greater for people who drive a lot and live in an area with a clean power grid, but EVs almost always come out ahead compared to gas-powered cars no matter what, according to an MIT study. (Anthropocene)
• A startup is using old Waymo batteries to provide energy storage for the power grid. (Fast Company)
• A lot of supposedly public EV charging stations are actually located at places like car dealerships that aren’t really public at all. (Electrek)
• Amtrak offered a preview of what a renovated Penn Station in New York City might look like, but failed to answer questions about who will pay the $7 billion price tag. (NY Times, Streetsblog NYC)
• Drivers in one of New York’s largest suburb sued to stop Westchester County from using license plate readers to catch them breaking traffic laws. (Associated Press)
• Tampa area drivers have killed more than 600 pedestrians in the past five years. (Tampa Bay Times)
• Lexington, Kentucky is considering a ban on parking in bike lanes, but with a lot of exceptions for drop-offs, pickups and deliveries. (Herald-Leader)
• New Orleans is seeking public input on improving its streetcar system. (Times-Picayune)
• The Dutch government introduced a discounted pass for unlimited off-peak rail travel at just 49 euros per month. (Rail Journal)
• Uber and British company Wayve are rolling out robotaxis in London, followed by Tokyo and several other cities. (CNN)
• University of Zurich students invented a brick evaporative cooling system that can significantly cool down spaces like bus stops during hot summer months. (Times of India)

There’s some good news growing along the coasts of countries around the world.

Mangrove forests, the imperiled ecosystems championed for their ability to store carbon and protect land from storm-driven flooding, are bouncing back.

These woodlands that thrive at the soggy boundary between land and sea suffered alarming declines through much of the 20th century, chopped down chiefly to make way for fish ponds, rice paddies and other kinds of agriculture. But in the last decade, mangroves have been gaining ground, erasing nearly all of the losses since 1980, according to research recently published in Science.

“After decades of loss, we’re finally seeing a global turning point for mangroves,” said Zhen Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at Tulane University and lead author of the study.

Zhang and colleagues used computer programs to comb through 40 years of satellite images from around the world. The distinctive way mangrove forests reflect light enabled them to train the computers to pick out this vegetation and track its ebb and flow over time.

The analysis revealed that in much of the world, years of loss began changing course in recent decades. Between the 1980s and 2010, global mangrove forests shrank from around 155,000 square kilometers to 152,000 square kilometers, a loss equal to half of Rhode Island. While that might not sound like a lot, mangroves often grow in relatively narrow coastal strips, so their coast-protecting benefits are outsized compared to their overall dimensions.

Since 2010, forests have rebounded to nearly 154,000 square kilometers, almost enough to recover from the losses dating back to the 80s.

 

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“While some mangroves are still being lost, this could make them a rare conservation success story and an important source of optimism for climate action,” said Daniel Friess, a co-author who heads The Mangrove Lab at Tulane.

The greatest gains have come in southeast Asia, home to roughly a third of the world’s mangrove forests. The region gained more than 1,000 square kilometers of mangroves since 2010, the researchers found. Forests have begun bouncing back in other parts of Asia, South America and the Middle East as well.

While the reasons for the rebound vary from place to place, the researchers say many of the gains appear to be from forests colonizing terrain created by abandoned aquaculture ponds and from mudflats emerging along shorelines as sediment builds up. That is coupled with efforts to plant new mangrove forests, as governments and conservation groups have come to better appreciate their benefits.

In Indonesia, once a center for mangrove declines, the recent gains appear to be linked to increased awareness and restoration on the heels of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, coupled with increased legal protections and management, the authors reported.

It’s not all good news, however. Some regions continue to lose ground, notably in Africa. There, mangroves have declined in recent years in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, the continent’s largest mangrove system, due at least in part to damage from oil pollution.

And some places that are making gains still haven’t recovered from previous losses. Myanmar has witnessed a 10% increase in mangrove forests since 2010. But that still leaves it with a net 29% decline since the 1980s.

The tree’s remarkable ability to quickly colonize land suggests that rather than pursuing tree-planting projects, conservation work might be better spent protecting existing forests and the earth-building dynamics that create mudflats, the authors noted. The trees can then spread on their own. Sometimes the most important thing humans can do for restoring nature is get out of the way.

Zhang, et. al. “Unexpected expansion and regrowth in Earth’s mangrove forests over the past four decades.” Science. June 4, 2026.

Photo by Kristin Hoel on Unsplash

While coffee chains across North America generate mountains of disposable cups and lids every day, Italy's traditional café culture offers a different model. By serving coffee in reusable cups and encouraging customers to stay rather than rush away, Italian bars show that convenience and sustainability do not have to be at odds.

For more than a decade, Sue “Seabird Sue” Schubel’s lifelike decoys have anchored a global seabird restoration effort built on “social attraction,” luring colony-nesting birds back to lost or safer habitats, a strategy that has aided about a third of the world’s seabird species, including some of the most endangered.

Resilient, self-reliant food systems. A new IPES-Food report says they’re key to addressing food price volatility amid rising geopolitical tensions.

Mayor Mamdani’s executive budget added $95.9 million in new money to build out pedestrian and bike greenways over the next five years — an infusion welcomed by advocates who nevertheless cautioned that the funds are not enough to fulfill New York’s growing need for car-free paths.

The city routinely takes more than a decade to roll out new greenways, which serve both as recreational spaces and key transportation corridors. When those greenways finally open, however, the city often allows them to slowly deteriorate by delaying or entirely foregoing basic maintenance, such as fixing sinkholes and repairing cracks.

“Projects that were funded many, many years ago, it takes such a long time to actually implement them,” said Hunter Armstrong, executive director of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative. “We just cut the ribbon on a project a couple of weeks ago that was years in the works,” he added, referring to a project on Sunset Park’s waterfront.

Significantly, the new money for the Department of Transportation will pay for capital construction of greenways, which refers to projects that involve hardened infrastructure — not the usual paint and flimsy plastic bollards. The transportation-focused mayor also gave the agency some $200 million over the next four years to quickly build out bus and bike lanes and public realm upgrades as part of the Streets Master Plan.

Cycle of disrepair

Past mayors treated greenways as an afterthought and let crumbling sections languish, from the country’s first bicycle path on Ocean Parkway to the nation’s busiest one on the Hudson River Greenway.

This cycle of disrepair forces city leaders to spend costly political capital to fund overdue renovations, whose costs rise as conditions worsen over time. During those renovations, the Parks Department and DOT have repeatedly refused to repurpose excess car lanes for safe passage, and instead directed cyclists onto unsafe detours for months on end. New sections of greenway still require years to install.

For example, the city recently wrapped up a stretch of two-way bike paths along one mile of Brooklyn’s Third Avenue that took 14 years to finish – as long as it took to construct the Brooklyn Bridge in the 19th century. Another proposal has already broken that record: a two-way raised bike path on three blocks of Commercial Street in Greenpoint will finally break ground sometime in 2028 – 16 years after city officials identified the route for upgrades in 2012.

These projects, like a $217-million esplanade stretching for eight blocks along the East Midtown waterfront, carry sky-high price tags. “Unfortunately the cost of these projects does add up, so ideally there will be ways to efficiently and wisely spend this money,” said Armstrong.

The greenway bucks come as a $7.25 million federal grant for greenways is set to run out next year. Under Mayor Eric Adams, the city spent that grant on planning new routes across the five boroughs but never provided a timeline or funding for the proposals, which included paths along the Bronx’s Harlem River and the western Queens waterfront.

Federal grant money yielded this plan in 2023. to add 40 miles of greenways.

DOT said the new cash will help turn those proposals into reality. “This historic investment gives NYC DOT the largest budget in its history, including the biggest-ever funding pool for bus and bike projects,” agency spokesperson Vin Barone told Streetsblog. “That means more staff and additional capacity to deliver for all New Yorkers for years to come.”

Mamdani’s executive budget labels the new funds as “Bike Network Development 2030.” The money is dedicated to greenways now, but City Hall spokesperson Jeremy Edwards said the mayor could repurpose it for non-greenway bike lanes that are more immediately, pressing.

Still, the funding amounts to a small drop in the city’s $124.7 billion annual fiscal spending plan. The NYPD, by contrast, plans to spend nearly the same amount on overtime this summer alone, as Commissioner Jessica Tisch deploy cops on 12-hour shifts to patrol events like the upcoming FIFA World Cup and the celebrations around the United States’s 250th anniversary.

Capital woes

The Parks Department controls the majority of greenways and has its own $674-million pot of money for some longstanding greenway-related projects and spanning to mid-2034, according to agency rep Chris Clark.

But the agency does not have the staff and resources to realize its projects at a faster pace, according to the city’s greenspace advocates. Amid continuous budget cuts recent years, the agency hemorrhaged dozens of project managers, landscape architects and engineers.

“[These are] the very people who would be facilitating, if not spearheading, the capital projects that people want to see happen,” said Adam Ganser, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. “The agency has been somewhat notorious in their ability to do capital projects, but it’s hardly their fault when they don’t have the staffing to do them.”

For example, the East River Esplanade alone has a $358.4 million budget for its renovation, but it has been crumbling into the water for years. “The funding has been there for a long time, but the project just continues to languish with no leadership or urgency,” Ganser said. “They’re in a tough spot because they don’t have the resources to push forward the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that have been advocated.”

Like other city agencies that perform capital work, Parks must submit new projects to an extensive design, procurement and construction process. This inevitably requires Parks to correspond and collaborate with other entities — such as DOT, ConEd and National Grid — whose infrastructural assets overlap with their own.

But most bureaucratic friction actually arises in the intermediate stage where Parks solicits and chooses third-party contractors to construct projects. This stage is layered with city and state regulations, whose architects originally designed them to prevent city leaders from corruptly favoring their cronies. In practice, these rules slow down routine work, a former senior Parks official argued.

“Procurement sucks. So much of it is out of the agency’s hands. It’s really hard to reform procurement on a simple agency level,” said Sam Biederman, who was the agency’s chief of staff during the late de Blasio administration and now runs a communications consultancy. “I get the point of not wanting this thing to be corrupt – I’m from Chicago – but the effect of all these decades and decades of laws … is to catastrophically slow down the procurement process.”

Former Mayor Eric Adams convened a task force to improve the capital process, and the new administration should look into reforms, and fund planning staff at Parks to be able to advance projects, according to Ganser.

“It is fixable and it would require both that the agency just decide that this is going to be their top priority… and then having the mayor and the administration focus on the procurement and capital process citywide,” he said.

Parks’s greenway repairs heavily rely on the goodwill of local elected officials to allocate their own discretionary funds for projects. In 2019, the agency finally began renovating a mile of the historic Ocean Parkway malls. That project cost more than $4 million over five years, after officials secured funds from then-Council Member Mark Treyger and Eric Adams, who was still Brooklyn’s borough president at the time.

The agency lacks the budget to maintain its vast portfolio of greenways, playgrounds, pools, boardwalks and miscellaneous greenery in a state of good repair, so officials have relied on lengthy and expensive capital projects rather than routine maintenance.

“Because the agency doesn’t have the money to maintain, it almost becomes part of a strategy,” Ganser said. “The only way they get these things repaired is if they become capital projects. It’s the most expensive way to do this. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The circumferential loops of Central Park and Prospect Park offer two vivid counterexamples. These drives are relatively well-maintained because they fall under the jurisdiction of DOT and its robust road resurfacing program — a legacy of those paths allowing car traffic until 2018, when former mayor Bill de Blasio banned motor vehicles from both.

Consequently, advocates have repeatedly urged the city to reassign greenway maintenance to DOT. Conversely, some advocates have argued for Parks to take over trimming greenery along DOT’s greenways, a task with which the latter agency has struggled.

The missing one percent

On the campaign trail, Mamdani vowed to increase Parks’s budget to one percent of the city’s overall spending plan, but he has allocated only around 0.55 percent, or $685.4 million, in his annual budget.

“I am going to take the mayor at his word that he is going to get to one percent in his first term,” said Ganser. “It’s a difficult budget year. At the same time, the Parks Department budget is a tiny fraction over the overall city budget, so there’s no reason we can’t make significant progress.”

The city should select a few projects to show how they can speed up implementation, said Jon Orcutt, a safe streets advocate and former DOT policy director under the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations. “Pick a couple of projects already in the pipeline… and try to make them models for speeding them up,” he said.

The city should finally link three existing greenways in southern Brooklyn, Ocean Parkway, Shore Parkway, and the Jamaica Bay Greenway, by installing a bikeway on overly-wide Neptune Avenue and the Cropsey Avenue bridge.

How about filling in this gap in southern Brooklyn’s greenway network?

“Let’s use some of the Mamdani political capital honeymoon period to finally connect these three routes that have sat there with this big gap in the middle since the time of Robert Moses,” Orcutt said.

• One reason why American roads are so deadly is that we let habitually bad drivers keep driving no matter how many wrecks they cause. (Everyone Is Welcome)
• One way to keep such drivers off the road is passive drunk driving detection technology that, if it detects alcohol on the driver’s breath, won’t let them start the car. A provision in the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill required all new cars to have it within five years. But now Congress might block its implementation. (Love of Place)
• A new Federal Transit Administration dashboard will measure how “family friendly” transit systems are. (Metro)
• Crowdsourcing can help cities find broken sidewalks and fix them. (Next City)
• An NYU study found that bike lanes increase bikeshare ridership, especially among riders over 60. (Planetizen)
• Beloved Chicago bike planner Riley O’Neil was killed by a truck driver while riding his bike when he swerved out of an unprotected bike lane to avoid being doored. (Tribune, Streetsblog Chicago)
• Austin businesses are preparing to relocate to make way for light rail construction (KVUE). But the project still faces financial headwinds even after it was cut back from 20 miles to 10 (Free Press).
• High-speed rail would generate billions of dollars in property tax revenue for Arlington and Fort Worth, Texas. (KERA)
• Portland transit agency TriMet could be entering a doom loop. (Willamette Week)
• Jersey City is doing 100 quick-build traffic safety projects, while Hoboken is creating 25 all-way stops (NJ.com). Famous for going nine years without a traffic death, Hoboken did it in part simply by using cheap plastic bollards to daylight intersections (Carscoops).
• Kansas City is beefing up transit service for the World Cup. (KCTV)
• Celebrities are popularizing bike dates in New York City. (Times)
• Yes, it is possible to move an entire apartment’s worth of furniture by bike. (streets.mn)
• Dentures, wedding gowns and an ankle bracelet are among the strangest things people left in an Uber over the past year. (Mashable)

Energy price increases such as those triggered by the war in Ukraine make faster decarbonization more cost effective, according to a new analysis of the EU energy system. The net benefits could amount to roughly 3% of the bloc’s projected GDP in 2050, the study suggests.

In the past, the EU has been highly dependent on imported oil and gas. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 caused fossil fuel prices to spike and prompted EU leadership to reduce or eliminate imports of Russian natural gas.

In turn, this sudden drop in energy supply has left the EU with an “energy gap.” In the new study, researchers use a pair of computer models to conduct a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of short- and long-term solutions to filling in the gap.

Short-term strategies to increase the energy supply such as burning more coal or biomass involve high costs, a heavy public health burden, or both, the analysis shows. Meanwhile, demand-side solutions like reducing private transportation by 20% or turning down thermostats by 3 °C to reduce heating demand have limited impact.

With short-term solutions inadequate and geopolitical developments in the Middle East and elsewhere suggesting the energy crisis is likely to persist and can’t simply be white-knuckled through, the researchers turned their attention to solutions that would fundamentally reorganize the EU’s energy system in the coming decades.

Three scenarios that involve increasing electrification, increasing renewable sources of energy like solar and wind power, and reducing private transportation while filling in the remaining energy gap with renewables would all reduce net costs to society by 2050, the researchers found.

New infrastructure and equipment required for electrification and building out renewables costs money. A lot of money. But the savings from lower fuel prices, reduced public health burden from air pollution, and lower costs to society from climate change are greater than those costs.

“Eastern EU countries such as Poland, Latvia, Slovakia, and Hungary are more reliant on Russian imports and exhibit the largest benefits,” the researchers write.

In fact, why wait for 2050 to complete the greening of the energy system? The analysis shows that if high energy prices persist, an even faster rollout of renewables and decarbonization is cost effective.

With energy prices as high as they were in August 2022, the benefits of moving the EU’s current 2050 renewables target ahead by 5, 10, or even 20 years outweigh the costs. The savings on fuel, public health, and climate change costs are greater than the expense of quickly building new power plants and other renewable energy infrastructure.

However, in some of the scenarios analyzed the outcomes differ by country: Even if the EU as a whole shows a net benefit, individual countries might not, highlighting the need to develop strategies tailored to each country’s situation to keep things equitable across the bloc.

The researchers also modeled an even more ambitious energy transition goal, a net-zero-emissions push that would require increasing the EU’s share of renewables to 80%. In this scenario, an accelerated green transition looks good at moderate fuel prices, not just high ones.

“This suggests that once energy prices surpass a certain threshold, initiating the transition earlier becomes increasingly beneficial,” the researchers write.

Source: Meng W. et al. “Rethinking energy transition strategies for the European Union amid rising energy prices.” 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

As Japan coins a new term for “cruelly hot days,” its linguistic and institutional adaptation to extreme heat starkly contrasts with growing climate denial among U.S. political elites, revealing an emerging global split between fossil-fuel holdouts and nations pushing for a rapid energy transition.

As rising sea levels threaten low-lying island nations, questions once confined to legal theory are becoming urgent realities. From Tuvalu to the Maldives, climate change is forcing governments and communities to reconsider what sovereignty and nationhood mean when territory itself is disappearing.

Opening with a personal reflection on his own relationship to dread, Nate describes how the chronic anticipation of collapse affects the human nervous system long before any single crisis fully arrives.

No money, mo’ problems.

Amtrak honchos officially showed off renderings for President Trump and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s renovation of Penn Station on Monday, but left unsaid amid the unveiling of pretty pictures was the only aspect of the Penn Station redevelopment that matters: How much will it cost, and who’s paying?

One possible answer: Tenant railroads Amtrak, the MTA and New Jersey Transit. According to the development company vice president Peter Cipriano (who was a senior adviser to the U.S. DOT during President Trump’s first term), those tenants might have to pony up “availability payments” to cover a share of the project costs.

“Presumably there will be some level of availability payment at the end of the road on this project, like Amtrak has on 30th Street Station in Philadelphia,” the Halmar executive told reporters.

This type of payment scheme — which the railroads will almost certainly pass on to their riders — was the linchpin of the Halmar/ASTM plan that Cipriano’s team pitched the MTA in 2023. That plan would have involved Halmar and its parent company ASTM funding the renovation upfront, then collecting $250 million per year over 50 years from each over the three tenant railroads.

But neither Cipriano nor Andy Byford, Amtrak’s special adviser for Penn Station, would put a pricetag or timeline on the “availability payments.”

Byford, who has openly bragged about using President Trump to strong-arm New York into accept the project, insisted he would not allow an “unaffordable” funding scheme.

“I made it very clear in the RFP to the bidders: do not come with a proposal that saddles the railroads, of which Amtrak is obviously one, with unaffordable availability payments, because you won’t get through, you will not win,” said Byford. “My strategy is to minimize the gap between the overall cost and what we can raise through capital, like loans and grants, and what remains to be paid for via availability payments.”

One type of “availability payment” that Byford insisted is not in play is a surcharge on train tickets for trips originating from Penn Station. But riders will wind up paying in one way or the other if Amtrak plans to charge the railroads they ride, and the MTA is already raising objections to the proposal.

“Gov. Hochul has been clear from the day President Trump took over this project: if he wants it, then he’ll have to pay for it,” said MTA spokesperson Mitch Schwartz. “Secretary Duffy didn’t have any problem with that arrangement when he told Congress that his administration was ready to ‘give’ Penn Station $8 billion — the full cost of the project. Now, they’re admitting their real plan is to charge New York taxpayers billions. Their position may have changed. Ours hasn’t: we’re not interested in that deal.”

Amtrak held Monday’s press briefing in order to reveal renderings of the project, some of which were previously published in Gothamist. Cipriano, Byford and architect Vishaan Chakrabarti did not seem eager to discuss the project’s funding despite a barrage of criticism and concerns from Manhattan pols including Rep. Jerry Nadler.

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Penn Station Belongs to New Yorkers
Jerry Nadler

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Byford eventually copped to a vague total cost of between $7 billion and $8 billion — the reported price for the previous Halmar plan in 2023. Part of that cost included paying Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan $500 million to buy the Hulu Theater (formerly the Felt Forum) and knock it down to make way for a station entrance on the Eighth Avenue side of the station.

Other wild cards remain in the offing: A recently passed amendment to the proposed federal Build America 250 Act would give Amtrak the power to seize local property tax funding to pay for station rehab projects.

The redesign promises a grand interior.

The amendment is not yet law, but if it passes critics warn it will enable a federal land grab that could allow real estate titan Vornado to redevelop the area and send its billions in property taxes that otherwise would have gone to New York City to pay for what is essentially a facelift for Penn Station.

For his part, Cipriano suggested that proposed scheme was no different than what New York state had previously proposed for the project (somethong local critics also opposed).

“If Amtrak got that authority, Andy would probably go through a process that looks somewhat similar to the one that [New York State] undertakes now. He would go to the city and say, ‘This is what we want to do. Can we work together?’ Should this thing get built, I think it’s fair to speculate that the surrounding property values will go up,” he said. “People call that ‘value uplift.’ What we’re talking about is Amtrak, by virtue of having delivered this, especially if the state’s not participating in costs, Amtrak should get a piece of that value which it created. That’s all. It’s fair. It’s done throughout the world,:

Cipriano alluded to, but did not directly mention, the previous Penn Station redevelopment plan floated by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and briefly pursued by Gov. Hochul to do a similar value capture scheme in which New York seized zoning power around Penn Station through the creation of a land-use action called a General Project Plan.

Through the GPP, the state planned to give Vornado the power to develop multiple office buildings around Penn, and pay payments in lieu of taxes to cover the costs of the Penn Station renovation.

But the Cuomo-Hochul plan had built-in guardrail — including a chance for the state’s Public Authorities Control Board to review plans for each parcel of land. Critics of the GPP and the House amendment passed last week threw cold water on Cipriano’s spin.

“The so-called ‘Transit Oriented Development’ amendment … is an unprecedented power grab from the Trump administration and Vornado to steal New York City tax revenues for what appears to be an unnecessarily expensive facelift for Penn Station,” said Reinvent Albany Senior Policy Advisor Rachael Fauss. “It overrides all local authority over taxation and zoning in the area around Penn Station. Even if Amtrak did agree to consult with local officials, there is no requirement they do so and they could stop at any time if they don’t like what they hear.”

• World Cup host cities like Seattle, Atlanta, Boston and Kansas City are using the event to beef up their transit systems in ways that will hopefully outlast the global soccer tournament. (Next City)
• Both the location of housing near transit and the frequency of transit service are important for getting people to ride transit. Surprisingly, Los Angeles is at the top of the Urban Institute’s metric, followed by San Francisco and New York City. Less surprisingly, Sun Belt cities Dallas, Houston and Atlanta are at the bottom.
• A private company hires and trains bus drivers for Boston public schools. TransDev drivers were responsible for at least 60 deaths nationwide in the past decade, but most were not reported by the federal database that tracks such crashes, which means communities contracting with TransDev don’t know about its record. (ProPublica)
• The new Penn Station renderings are in, but the cost accounting isn’t. (Streetsblog NYC)
• Delays in Sound Transit projects have led to calls to reform the Seattle transit agency. (The Urbanist)
• California is cracking down on polluted runoff from parking lots. (Los Angeles Times)
• What’s the point of even having city governments if the Texas legislature can override anything they do? (Tribune)
• Passenger trains were delayed Saturday when a barge hit a rail bridge in Maryland. (New York Times)
• The Utah Transit Authority is addressing gaps in service. (Utah Public Radio)
• The D.C. Metro is closing three Red Line stations for construction this summer. (WTOP)
• Las Vegas is lowering the speed limit on Centennial Parkway as part of a Vision Zero effort to reduce deadly crashes. (Fox 5)
• Are Honolulu residents treating bikeshare like a mere novelty? (Civil Beat)
• Arkansas cities should do a better job of maintaining sidewalks. (Democrat-Gazette)
• Ann Arbor is experimenting with asphalt made from recycled tires. (Equipment World)
• Carmel, the small Indiana town of 100,000, has more than 150 roundabouts that have cut car crashes by 80 percent. (CNU Public Square)
• Feel like taking a scenic train trip this summer? Travel + Leisure suggests a few Amtrak routes.

California’s leaders have spent years telling the public that fighting climate change requires giving people alternatives to driving.

They were right.

The transportation sector remains California’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. If California hopes to meet its climate goals, it must give people realistic alternatives to getting behind the wheel. That means better transit, more homes near jobs and transit stations, safer streets for walking and bicycling, and communities designed around choices instead of traffic.

Unfortunately, Sacramento just made that job much harder.

Last month, the California Air Resources Board approved sweeping changes to the state’s cap-and-trade program, which the state insists on calling cap-and-invest. State officials argued the changes would reduce costs for consumers and provide relief to industries facing increasingly stringent climate regulations.

The changes will significantly reduce the amount of money generated through emissions allowance auctions that will go into the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the same fund the state uses to support public transit, affordable housing near transit, active transportation projects, and other programs designed to reduce driving and greenhouse gas emissions. Some estimates say they will reduce available transit funding by hundreds of millions of dollars. Others put the estimates even higher.

As we noted last week, for transit agencies, the decision could not have come at a worse time.

And for California’s climate goals, it raises an uncomfortable question: How does the state expect to meet its emissions targets while cutting funding for the programs that are supposed to help achieve them?

After slashing funding for the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, regulators with the Air Resources Board who oversee the cap-and-trade program gave us the answer: lobby your legislator.

“Nothing that we’re doing here is setting the priority for how the legislature may decide to appropriate funds,” Rajinder Sahota, deputy executive officer for climate change and research at the Air Resources Board, told KQED.

Climate Goals and Policy Changes

California’s self-created climate mandate is to reduce statewide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, in accordance with Senate Bill 32. Furthermore, the 2022 Scoping Plan maps an aggressive trajectory aiming for an even deeper 48% reduction by 2030 to eventually reach carbon neutrality by 2045.

These are great goals, and California is making some progress. Emissions are dropping, but at an average annual pace of roughly 2.8%, whereas a 4.4% year-over-year reduction is required to meet the 2030 deadline. The state would need to double the decrease in emissions every year between now and 2030 to make its own goals. 

The Legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom reauthorized the cap-and-trade program last year but changed how revenues are distributed. High-speed rail now receives guaranteed funding. A substantial portion is also directed toward broader state budget priorities. Transit and many other climate programs were left to compete for whatever money remains.

That may have seemed manageable when policymakers assumed auction revenues would remain robust. As we’re seeing, that is no longer a safe assumption.

But as noted above, it’s the legislature and governor that ultimately decides how funds are spent. If there’s less money to spend, then the elected leaders have choices to make.

California’s budget year goes from July 1 until the following June 30. The state has a habit of passing budgets at the last possible moment, and this year is no exception. Last month, Newsom unveiled his final proposed budget and it did not include increased funding for transit to offset the changes to the cap-and-trade system. However, in recent years the legislature has acted to fix the governor’s shortcomings on transit funding.

In 2024, lawmakers rejected Newsom’s proposal to slash funding for the Active Transportation Program and intercity rail projects, arguing that California could not afford to abandon climate and mobility investments simply because they were politically easier targets than highway spending. While the final budget did not fully restore every dollar, legislators significantly softened the proposed cuts and preserved funding for programs that had been slated for the chopping block.

The same thing happened last year. Newsom’s May Revision proposed deep reductions to transit funding and declined requests for additional emergency operating support. After weeks of negotiations, legislative leaders restored much of the threatened funding and approved a package designed to prevent devastating service cuts at transit agencies across the state. The lesson from the past two budget cycles is clear: the governor’s May budget proposal is often the opening bid, not the final word.

So in 2026, as lawmakers negotiate the final state budget, they should be asking a simple question: if cap-and-trade revenues decline as expected, where will the replacement funding come from?

The answer cannot be nowhere.

Otherwise, the state is effectively admitting that its climate goals are aspirational rather than operational.

The most recent US dietary guidelines have taken a sudden U-turn, suggesting that there should be doubling of animal protein intake in the country. In a recent analysis, scientists warn that the new diet—which also recommends reducing the intake of ultraprocessed foods—would more than offset any benefits of that move with the suggested spike in animal proteins, triggering rising greenhouse gas emissions, land, and fertilizer use.

The guidelines result from the work of a scientific panel called the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC), which meets every five years to review and update dietary recommendations for the United States. Those are usually adopted into the official guidelines: these were the focus of the current PNAS research.

In it, the scientists looked at the environmental outcomes of current and previous dietary recommendations. They simulated diets in which ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) were completely eradicated, alongside varying levels of suggested protein intake—in one scenario matching animal protein intake to previous years’ guidelines, which suggested Americans should consume about 0.8 grams per kilogram weight of protein. In another, they simulated a diet that reflected the upper bound of what the new guidelines recommend, which is a doubling of that previously suggested protein intake to 1.6 grams per kilogram weight.

In each case they explored the greenhouse gas impact, land-use, and fertilizer consumption effects of the particular diet, and compared the findings with the mean American diet.

This revealed that even though the new diet does cut environmental impacts by reducing intake of UPFs—which have a high animal protein content overall—this was more than offset by the rising animal protein intake. In fact, the analysis shows that increasing protein intake would cancel out the environmental benefits of UFPs by an excess of 32%.

 

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The paper highlights one plus of the new suggested diet, which is a reduction in water use by between 7 and 19%, compared to the mean American diet. However it notes that the suggested diet would otherwise “confer net environmental harm” across almost all environmental metrics. And besides, a diet low in UPFs but higher in plant-based proteins would tick all boxes, the study finds, lowering water use even further, bringing down greenhouse gas emissions, fertilizer, and land use. 

“There is considerable potential benefit for both public and planetary health if prevailing diets remove UPFs, and replace them with plant dominated whole foods,” the researchers write.

Meanwhile, nonprofits, scientists, and health professionals not involved in the research have collectively noted that the new guidelines reject the majority of recommendations made by the DGAC science panel, and that the process this time around involved significant conflicts of interest with the US meat and dairy industries.

As a closing note in the PNAS paper, the researchers call for an urgent realignment of the guidelines with established science and evidence, which time and time again has shown the harmful effects of excess meat and dairy consumption on human and planetary health. 

Shepon et. al. “The 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans are associated with higher land, water and nitrogen use, and greenhouse gas emissions.” PNAS. 2026. 

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine