Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.”

Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.

It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.

But is this panic about low fertility driving human population collapse supported by any evidence?

https://archive.ph/rIycs

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump doubled down on his long-standing complaint about low-flow showerheads taking too long to clean his “beautiful hair.” He ordered his administration to repeal a rule, revived by the Biden administration, that aimed to save water by restricting flow from the fixtures. A White House fact sheet promised the order would undo “the left’s war on water pressure” and “make America’s showers great again.”

Efficiency standards used to have bipartisan support. But today, many Republican politicians see restrictions on gas stoves, refrigerators, and laundry machines as symbols of Democratic interference with people’s self-determination. That’s the idea Trump advanced when he signed an executive order targeting efficiency standards for home goods and appliances “to safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose.” The message echoes talking points from industry groups that have an interest in keeping homes hooked up to natural gas for stoves and water heaters.

"This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen efficiency standards thrust into the culture wars,” said Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, which advocates for stricter energy-efficiency legislation. “But President Trump has put that into overdrive.”

Jason Baldes drove down a dusty, sagebrush highway earlier this month, pulling 11 young buffalo in a trailer up from Colorado to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. His blue truck has painted on the side a drawing of buffalo and a calf. As the executive director of the Wind River Buffalo Initiative and Eastern Shoshone tribal member, he’s helped grow the number of buffalo on the reservation for the last decade. The latest count: the Northern Arapaho tribe have 97 and the Eastern Shoshone have 118.

“Tribes have an important role in restoring buffalo for food sovereignty, culture and nutrition, but also for overall bison recovery,” he said.

The Eastern Shoshone this month voted to classify buffalo as wildlife instead of livestock as a way to treat them more like elk or deer rather than like cattle. Because the two tribes share the same land base, the Northern Arapaho are expected to vote on the distinction as well. The vote indicates a growing interest to both restore buffalo on the landscape and challenge the relationship between animal and product.

The world has changed dramatically since the start of the second Trump administration. But how best to describe this shift? Many see it as potentially the end of American democracy, or the end of the Atlantic Alliance and the United States’ prime role in global multilateral institutions.

Here’s a less obvious take: maybe Trump’s ascent portends the end of Big Solutions. The latter have been necessitated by the eruption of Big Problems—i.e., global predicaments that are potential civilization killers, including climate change, worsening economic inequality, the spread of persistent toxins throughout the environment, and the accelerating loss of wild nature.

Meanwhile, can small solutions work? Many environmentalists have been promoting them all along. There is a rich literature on localization, degrowth, community resilience, and Indigenous attitudes and practices, and small environmental orgs have sprung up to further these strategies. Proponents of small solutions don’t claim that these actions will enable humanity to continue its current growth trajectory while canceling growth’s negative impacts on people and the planet. Rather, Small Is Beautiful promoters say we should preserve and repair as much as we humanly can of nature and durable human culture, and do this individually and in our households and communities, where we have the most agency. Small-scale, localized approaches can also build adaptive capacity and resilience as Big Solutions fail.

In the mid-1990s physicists Geoffrey West and Louis Bettencourt collaborated with biologists to study allometric scaling laws, where it is generally found that larger organisms are more efficient consumers of energy than smaller ones. After mathematically explaining these laws through fractal network effects, the researchers began applying them to the human built environment, particularly cities.

Certain environmentalists and sustainability advocates mistook the significance of these results, leading to decades of policy work and investments in urban growth that, West now admits, are doomed to fail.

The fact that so many, including the originators of the work, got this story wrong reflects the cultural blinders and techno-biases that typify most of us living in high energy modernity. Doing the opposite of our conditioned response to the overshoot predicament will likely lead to more favorable outcomes.

A huge 89% majority of the world’s people want stronger action to fight the climate crisis but feel they are trapped in a self-fulfilling “spiral of silence” because they mistakenly believe they are in a minority, research suggests.

Making people aware that their pro-climate view is, in fact, by far the majority could unlock a social tipping point and push leaders into the climate action so urgently needed, experts say.

The data comes from a global survey that interviewed 130,000 people across 125 countries and found 89% thought their national government “should do more to fight global warming”.

The existence of a silent climate majority across the planet is supported by several separate analyses. Other studies demonstrate a clear global appetite for action, from citizens of rich nations strongly supporting financial support for poorer vulnerable countries and even those in petrostates backing a phase-out of coal, oil and gas. A decades-long campaign of misinformation by the fossil fuel industry is a key reason the climate majority has been suppressed, researchers said.

Prof Teodora Boneva, at the University of Bonn, Germany, who was part of the team behind the 125-nation survey, said: “The world is united in its judgment about climate change and the need to act. Our results suggest a concerted effort to correct these misperceptions could be powerful intervention, yielding large, positive effects.”

https://archive.ph/hR3ws

More EVs than ever are on the road in the U.S., with a surge in sales over the last five years. The number of public EV charging ports in the U.S. has grown more than 6-fold over the last decade, from about 30,000 in 2016 to nearly 196,000 in January 2025.

Most of the charging infrastructure for the growing number of EVs is through private at-home chargers. But public charging infrastructure helps make EV ownership more broadly accessible, while also making long-distance zero-emissions travel possible.

This brief examines the growth and distribution of public charging infrastructure in the U.S. over the past decade (2016-2025), including along popular road trip routes.

Global food systems are responsible for around one third of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions each year.

Producing less meat, using less synthetic fertiliser, stopping food waste and integrating nature into farms are among the ways that scientists say can reduce environmental harms from producing food. However, some critics of these approaches note the possible trade-offs, such as lower yields compared to “conventional” forms of intensive farming.

Various terms are used to describe these more “climate-friendly” ways of farming. Some of these practices have set definitions and are evidence-based, while others are buzzwords whose meanings vary depending on the source. Many share similar approaches.

To break through the jargon, Carbon Brief has identified 25 commonly discussed climate-relevant farming methods and key terms.

When Angela Chalk first heard there were ways that ordinary people could offset flooding in New Orleans, she was skeptical.

Her neighbors in the Seventh Ward knew all about heavy rains that brought knee-high floodwaters, spilling into porches and marooning cars and homes, and were frustrated that it was something they felt powerless to stop.

Then she heard Jeff Supak, head of a nonprofit organization now called Water Wise Gulf South, talk about how simple fixes like rain gardens and vegetated ditches, also known as bioswales, could soak up extra rain.

A bioswale was installed alongside Ms. Chalk’s driveway, native species were planted, and clay in her backyard was replaced with absorbent soil.

During the next heavy downpour, Ms. Chalk looked outside. Storm water that previously had nowhere to go was seeping into the ground. She took photos and shared them with friends.

“What I saw at her home was a project that I had never witnessed before,” recalled one of the friends, Cheryl Austin, who works with a community organization, the Greater Treme Consortium. “I was so impressed.”

https://archive.ph/rkuYZ

First, it’s important to understand that climate change is a symptom of a larger issue: ecological overshoot, or the fact that humans are consuming resources faster than they can regenerate and producing more waste and pollution than nature can absorb, said William Rees, a human and ecological economist and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. The most effective solutions, then, address not just greenhouse gas emissions but overall consumption and pollution.

One of the most effective ways to avoid consumption in the first place, Dr. Rees said, is to have a smaller family. But that might not be a realistic option for many people, for all kinds of personal, cultural and other reasons.

“Take a moment to reflect on what a good life within planetary limits look like,” said Diana Ivanova, an environmental social scientist at the University of Leeds in England. “What does ‘enoughness’ look and feel like?”

https://archive.ph/U3G0C

A team of international researchers published a new U.N. report Wednesday that adds to the rising scientific call for transformative societal and economic changes to staunch critical environmental threats like global warming, plastic pollution and biodiversity loss.

“The science is clear on what needs to change,” said lead author Caitlyn Eberle. “Stop using fossil fuels, respect and protect nature, use resources sustainably. So if we know what we need to do to change things, why aren’t we doing it?”

The research in the report shows that many of today’s sustainability projects are superficial because they focus on small changes within the system without changing the system itself, she said. A good example is recycling, which is valuable, but doesn’t get to the core issue of why so much waste is produced in the first place, she added. “We cannot expect real change unless we examine the reasons behind our actions and question why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

The process may lead to some “uncomfortable” territory, said UNU-EHS deputy director Zita Sebesvari, another lead author of the report. Crises in Earth’s ecosystems, including the climate and human systems, require rethinking many basic assumptions and values, for example about consumption and waste. “If we bring this to our own life,” she said, “the question is, why do we think that convenience is more important than other values like nature and a pollution-free environment?”

https://archive.ph/QmXcB

If you were to drink improperly recycled toilet water, it could really hurt you — but probably not in the way you’re thinking. Advanced purification technology so thoroughly cleans wastewater of feces and other contaminants that it also strips out natural minerals, which the treatment facility then has to add back in. If it didn’t, that purified water would imperil you by sucking those minerals out of your body as it moves through your internal plumbing.

So if it’s perfectly safe to consume recycled toilet water, why aren’t Americans living in parched western states drinking more of it?

A new report from researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Natural Resources Defense Council finds that seven western states that rely on the Colorado River are on average recycling just a quarter of their water, even as they fight each other and Indigenous tribes for access to the river amid worsening droughts. Populations are also booming in the Southwest, meaning there’s less water for more people.

The report finds that states are recycling wildly different proportions of their water. On the high end, Nevada reuses 85 percent, followed by Arizona at 52 percent. But other states lag far behind, including California (22 percent) and New Mexico (18 percent), with Colorado and Wyoming at less than 4 percent and Utah recycling next to nothing.

The report found that if the states other than high-achieving Nevada and Arizona increased their wastewater reuse to 50 percent, they’d boost water availability by 1.3 million acre-feet every year. Experts think that it’s not a question of whether states need to reuse more toilet water but how quickly they can build the infrastructure as droughts worsen and populations swell.

https://archive.ph/e0dbc