Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. STOCKHOLM — It’s complicated being Greta. Small, shy, survivor of crippling depression, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl skipping school to shame the world into addressing climate change, drew a parade of fans one Friday in February on a frozen square in Stockholm. Six Swiss students had traveled 26 hours by train to seek her support for their petition for a tougher Swiss carbon emissions law. An Italian scientist told her she reminded him of his younger, activist self. A television news crew hovered around her. Women from an antismoking group came to give her a T-shirt. Greta nodded, whispered, “Thanks,” posed for pictures. Made exactly zero small talk. All this attention, she said out of earshot of the others, is great. It means “people are listening.” But then, a knife-blade flash of rage revealed...

Buying an electric car is a drop in the bucket compared with raising fuel-efficiency standards sharply. Conscientiously flying less is a lot easier if there’s more high-speed rail around. And if I eat fewer hamburgers a year, so what? But if cattle farmers were required to feed their cattle seaweed, which might reduce methane emissions by nearly 60 percent according to one study , that would make an enormous difference. That is what is meant when politics is called a “moral multiplier.” It is also an exit from the personal, emotional burden of climate change and from what can feel like hypocrisy about living in the world as it is and simultaneously worrying about its future. We don’t ask people who pay taxes to support a social safety net to also demonstrate that commitment through philanthropic action, and similarly we shouldn’t ask anyone — and certainly not everyone — to manage...

Is Nancy Pelosi a climate skeptic? Of course not — and I would know . But you might be excused for thinking so, given the curt wave-off the House speaker delivered to the liberally ballyhooed, legislatively stillborn Green New Deal. “The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?” That was Pelosi talking about the deal as if it were a grandchild’s latest video game obsession. The San Francisco Democrat is nothing if not a political realist, and that kind of realism means that no Congress is going to mobilize the country to fight climate change as if it were an alien invasion, as my colleague Farhad Manjoo recently suggested . Higher mileage standards, more subsidies for wind and solar, signing the Paris climate deal? Those are the sorts of policies Nancy Pelosi believes in, and would happily endorse if stars align...

Given the available data on the effect of PFAS chemicals, environmentalists criticized the E.P.A.’s response as inadequate to the threat. Scott Faber, an expert on chemical policy with the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization, called it a “drinking water crisis facing millions of Americans.” But the E.P.A., he said, is “just not treating the crisis the way it deserves.” In particular, critics of the E.P.A. have sited the role of Nancy Beck, a former senior director of regulatory science policy at the American Chemistry Council, in a slowdown of the agency’s response to addressing PFASs. Last May, Scott Pruitt, the previous administrator of the E.P.A., convened a summit aimed at addressing the threat of PFAS chemicals, an announced that, as a first step, the E.P.A. would decide whether to set a national drinking water standard for PFOA and PFOS. Mr. Wheeler said Thursday that the agency intends to act quickly...

Our carbon emissions are not mainly about the price of gasoline or electricity. They’re about infrastructure. For every human being, there are over 1,000 tons of built environment: roads, office buildings, power plants, cars and trains and long-haul trucks. It is a technological exoskeleton for the species. Everything most of us do, we do through it: calling our parents, getting to work, moving for a job, taking the family on vacation, finding food for the evening or staying warm in a polar vortex. Just being human in this artificial world implies a definite carbon footprint — and for that matter, a trail of footprints in water use, soil compaction, habitat degradation and pesticide use. You cannot change the climate impact of Americans without changing the built American landscape. So the proposals to retrofit buildings, retool transportation and build a clean-energy system are simply ways of tackling the problem where it starts....

And, of course, we’d want to throw in solar power. Very efficient, very clean and Donald Trump hates that, too. Much more of a conversation-starter than the Green New Deal, which is great but way more complicated. For instance, it calls for more investment in high-speed rail just when the governor of California is basically throwing in the towel on the dream of a high-speed rail service from San Francisco to Los Angeles. (“There simply isn’t a path. … I wish there were.”) Green also included a gabby, rather unfortunate memo that explained the goal of zero greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years had to be tweaked a bit because “we aren’t sure that we will be able to fully get rid of, for example, emissions from cows or air travel before then.” The memo — which seemed to have been accidentally released — was taken down, but Republicans demanded that...

This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday. The Green New Deal is not a good piece of policy. But I’m glad it exists. I’m glad it exists because climate change and the stagnation of mass living standards are both defining challenges for this country. And the authors of the Green New Deal — Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have the admirable ambition to take on both. The plan doesn’t ask what is politically possible today. It asks what needs to be done and tries to change the definition of politically possible. “Climate change is an unprecedented emergency that requires unprecedented action,” Michael Grunwald writes in Politico, “so America needs to try to do seemingly impossible things.” [ Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt. ] The Green New...

Even if you strive for a sustainable lifestyle at home, it may be tempting to avoid thinking about the impact your travels could have on the environment. No one wants to feel guilty on vacation. But the effects traveling has on the environment are significant. A study published last year by the University of Sydney found that global tourism accounts for 8 percent of total carbon emissions, three times higher than previously thought. “As global travel is becoming cheaper and more accessible, the usage of airplanes, cruise ships, trains and buses is increasing and giving off a tremendous amount of carbon and other harmful substances,” said Samantha Bray, managing director of the Center for Responsible Travel , a nonprofit organization that supports sustainable tourism practices. However, being a sustainable, or green, traveler — one who considers the impact travel has on both the physical and the cultural environments visited — is...

The United States is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions far too slowly to help avert the worst effects of global warming. But what would happen if the country adopted seven of the most ambitious climate policies already in place around the world? Together, these seven policies would slash greenhouse gas emissions in the United States roughly 29 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, and roughly 50 percent by 2050, according to Energy Innovation’s climate policy modeling. To put that in context, under the Paris climate agreement, the United States vowed to cut emissions at least 26 percent by 2025 and laid out a broad goal of reducing emissions 80 percent by midcentury. Assuming these policies worked as intended, they would take the country a big chunk of the way toward deep decarbonization. These are not the only steps the United States could take to address global warming. Many of these policies...

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday passed a sweeping public lands conservation bill, designating more than one million acres of wilderness for environmental protection and permanently reauthorizing a federal program to pay for conservation measures. The Senate voted 92 to 8 in favor of the bill, offering a rare moment of bipartisanship in a divided chamber and a rare victory for environmentalists at a time when the Trump administration is working aggressively to strip away protections on public lands and open them to mining and drilling. “It touches every state, features the input of a wide coalition of our colleagues, and has earned the support of a broad, diverse coalition of many advocates for public lands, economic development, and conservation,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, the majority leader. Western lawmakers of both parties...