Forget Climate Doomerism. We Know What We Must Do to Protect the Planet.

A group of climate experts have several game-changing policies to preserve our right to a clean, healthy environment.

By James K. Boyce, C.J. Polychroniou

August 11, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

A barn and wind turbines in rural Illinois. (Wikimedia Commons)

2026 could turn out to be the hottest year on record. Yet, climate change is now on the back burner while the Trump administration intensifies its all-out assault on climate and environmental actions, as indicated by the president’s attack on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine for publishing what he called “fraudulent, biased, and misleading” material on climate change. Still, even the UN General Assembly recognizes that “a clean, healthy and sustainable environment” is a basic human right and this right must be defended.

In the interview that follows, author, naturalist, and a leading scholar of political economy and climate policy James K. Boyce spells out the game-changing policies needed to protect the environment and secure the future of the planet. His proposals are part of the Game Changers project launched by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Boyce is professor emeritus of economics and senior fellow at PERI. He is the author of many books, including Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change. He is also the recipient of awards including the 2025 Common Wealth Prize, the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award, and the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

The interview that follows has been lightly edited.

C. J. Polychroniou: On July 4, 2026, the United States turned 250 years old. Meanwhile, a record-setting heat wave disrupted celebrations of the event across the country, and this summer could end up as one of the U.S.’s hottest ever. An extraordinary heat wave also spread through Europe, triggering deaths and causing “severe infrastructure stress.” To say then that climate has reached the point of breakdown might be an understatement. Yet the Trump administration not only continues to treat climate change as a “hoax” but has launched an all-out assault on the environment, as if totally unaware of the fact that a “clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” is a basic human right. How do we translate this right into reality in the United States?

James K. Boyce: Rights never exist in the abstract; they are won and sustained through struggles. This is as true for environmental rights as it is for the rights to free expression, freedom of assembly, and free and fair elections. The constitutions of some U.S. states affirm the right to a clean and safe environment, and this right has been formally recognized by the United Nations. It is missing, however, from the U.S. Constitution. An important step for translating this right into reality would be a constitutional amendment that guarantees it, but this will take years. In the meantime, much can and should be done to secure a clean and safe environment for all.

For example, fenceline monitoring of air pollution from industrial facilities is now readily affordable. Monitors should be installed near significant pollution sources and their real-time readings made publicly available online. This is especially vital in communities currently overburdened with pollution, often from multiple sources, many of which are politically disadvantaged by race, ethnicity, and class. Information is a source of countervailing power.

There should also be a moratorium on the introduction of new pollution sources in communities already overburdened with pollution. A good model is the landmark environmental justice law passed in 2020 in New Jersey, which went into effect in 2023.

Overburdened communities ought to have priority in pollution abatement, too. Michael Ash and I propose a target of reducing pollution by 8 percent per year (a rate that would cut pollution in half in nine years) until the community no longer meets the criteria for being classified as overburdened. A similar policy for co-pollutants from fossil fuels is proposed in the Healthy Climate and Family Security Act introduced in 2024 by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) and Congressman Don Beyer (D-Virginia).

Many corporations are polluting the environment through destructive business practices and because they are simply greedy. Moreover, we have failed to hold such corporations accountable. How do we stop corporate polluters?

There are basically three ways to rein in corporate polluters. These are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they are mutually reinforcing. One is to make the invisible visible — reveal the sources of pollution and their human toll — through information, as in the pollution monitoring mentioned above. This alone would strengthen public pressure (and lawsuits) that can alter corporate behavior, a phenomenon known as “informal regulation.” The second is formal regulation: rules that mandate firms to curtail emissions or switch to cleaner technologies. Such rules require enforcement, and again this is facilitated by an informed public. The third is to compel polluters to pay for damages from the environmental harms they inflict. This gives them an incentive to do more than just comply with formal regulations by investing in R&D to find new and cleaner production methods.

We need to hold polluters to account for environmental damage they have inflicted in the past, too. This includes the escalating damages from extreme weather events due to climate destabilization. Today, the costs of disaster recovery and climate adaptation are seriously straining the budgets of households, businesses, and governments alike. The states of Vermont and New York have enacted climate superfund legislation to recover a significant share of these costs from fossil fuel producers based on their historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions. Michael Ash and I advocate this sort of policy at the national level to help fund the costs of recovery and adaptation.

The Trump administration’s policy toward the chemical industry is one of deregulation and rolling back limits on “forever chemicals” and other toxins. So much for a clean and safe environment. What’s the game-changing strategy when it comes to the chemical industry?

The chemical industry in the U.S. is currently stuck in outdated technologies of the past. Bold new policies are needed to break out of its toxic and fossil fuel-dependent impasse. The regulatory regime for chemicals in the U.S. is fragmented across multiple agencies; moreover, rather than encouraging improvements, it sometimes creates perverse incentives against them. For example, the Toxic Substances Control Act requires new chemicals to be screened for health and environmental effects prior to their introduction into the economy. This is a good thing, but the tens of thousands of chemicals already in use are not subject to comparable safeguards. In effect, the incumbents are presumed innocent until proven guilty, making it harder to replace them with safer substitutes.

Environmental health expert Joel Tickner proposes a comprehensive set of policies to create a cleaner, safer, and more sustainable chemical industry. These include the establishment of a single agency to coordinate national policy, as Sweden and the European Union have done, which will compile and distribute information on chemical safety, prioritize reductions in the most hazardous chemicals, and incentivize the adoption of superior alternatives.

To tackle the toxic legacies of the past, Tickner proposes to establish a National Remediation Fund financed by fees on the chemical industry to pay for clean-ups, site redevelopment, ecosystem recovery, and health cost reimbursement. He also proposes a National Transition Fund for Safer and Sustainable Chemistry to support R&D, pilot facilities, supply-chain reformulation, and just transitions for communities and workers in the industry affected by the changes.

Climate change poses an existential threat, and the supply of fossil fuels is the elephant in the room. So, when talking about climate breakdown, it should be obvious that we should leave fossil fuels in the ground as they are the main source of greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming. Wouldn’t this be the game changer for climate change? If so, what would a policy of phasing down fossil fuels look like?

You’re right: The basic goal of climate policy should be to keep fossil fuels in the ground. But it is vital to understand two realities. First, fossil fuels cannot and will not be abandoned overnight. We need to phase them out over time, ideally fast and on a predictable timeline. Second, restrictions on the supply of fossil fuels — which are almost certain to be necessary during the phasedown, since demand-reduction measures so far have proven insufficient — inevitably will raise fossil fuel prices. This is a feature of the policy, not a bug, since higher prices provide powerful incentives to invest in energy efficiency and alternative energy sources. For reasons of political feasibility as well as fairness, it is essential to anticipate this price effect and safeguard the energy security of households during the transition.

Michael Ash and I propose a policy to advance energy security both in the short run and the long run. The key to long-run energy security is to move to clean and renewable energy sources that do not have to pass through chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz and are not vulnerable to price manipulations by corporate cartels and petrostates. In the short run, the key is to make higher fossil fuel prices family-friendly by recycling the money straight back to the public.

Here’s how it works: (1) Set a timetable for the fossil fuel phasedown. We propose a 90 percent reduction over 25 years, with the remaining 10 percent needed to achieve a net-zero economy to be met by improved carbon sequestration. (2) Require corporations that bring fossil fuels into the economy via extraction or imports to surrender one permit for each ton of carbon dioxide that will be released when that fuel is burned, with the total number of permits declining each year in accordance with the timetable. (3) Distribute non-tradable permits via quarterly auctions, where their price is set by supply and demand. These become part of the cost of supplying fossil fuels, and most or all of this cost is passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. (4) Return 75 percent of the auction revenue to the public as equal per person payments called energy security cashbacks. These will protect the purchasing power of working families during the phasedown, more than offsetting the impact of higher fossil fuel prices. (5) Recycle 25 percent of the revenue to state and local governments in a Resilient Communities Fund. This will protect their own purchasing power and strengthen their ability to invest in climate resilience.Email

James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce is professor emeritus of economics and senior fellow of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change. He received the 2025 Common Wealth Prize, the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award, and the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

One Disaster After Another: Global Warming is Global Warning

John K. White

 August 12, 2026

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Photograph Source: Frenchbluesman – CC BY 4.0

Have we become so desensitized to alarm from the many life-jarring troubles around the world that we can’t see the reality of human-induced global warming? The same way violence in film, television, and 24-7 streamed news has desensitized us to war and conflict, compartmentalized as something from afar. Not in my backyard. I can’t hear you. Well, the heat is here, whether we admit it or not, no more evident than this summer in Europe.

Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and the UK have all suffered extreme heat events in 2026, breaking previous temperature records, while much of the northern hemisphere is undergoing increased hot and dry conditions, impacting agriculture and producing more fires. Record surface temperatures above 33 °C (91.4 F) in the Mediterranean Sea (warmer than the Gulf of Mexico) are also intensifying heat waves across Europe. The Romanian navy even blew up a large underwater rock in a controlled explosion to increase flow to the Old Danube river to provide more cooling to the Cernavodă nuclear power plant amid reduced electric grid output. Mitigation and adaptation may be all we have left.

In the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore presented a series of climate disasters in seemingly off-the-radar, underdeveloped countries, but those same disasters are now occurring in developed countries as global temperatures rise and extreme events become more frequent, producing stronger storms, worsening drought that is devastating farms, and generating more virulent fires across wide swathes of land. Amid the worst-ever fire season this past July in Spain and France, former Australian fire and rescue commissioner Greg Mullins stated, “Countries that have always burnt are burning more and countries like the UK, Norway, Greenland that have never burnt are now burning.”

Spain was first to dominate the news cycle this summer as temperatures soared past 40 °C (104 °F) throughout much of the country, intensifying wildfires in Almería that killed 13 people unable to evacuate through instant walls of fire ignited in dried-out vegetation. Wildfires west of Madrid and in Ávila destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, while some are still burning. One Zaragoza city temperature sign showed 56 °C in direct sunlight and Sumacàrcer in Valencia registered a sensación térmica (feels like) over 60 °C. Increased “desertification” across the Iberian Peninsula is now a major concern.

Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez called a climate emergency “to address the increasingly extreme impacts of climate change,” noting that “climate change denial is the worst fuel” as opposition leaders questioned the reality of human-induced global warming and extreme weather from the continued burning of fossil fuels. The politicization of climate stress is worsening, where ecology is blasted as a new kind of communism.

France especially suffered with 5,700 excess deaths in June, many in Paris among the elderly. In July, in the southwest of France, in the Gironde and Landes regions near Bordeaux, more than 250,000 people were evacuated and 240 homes destroyed amid horrific, out-of-control fires and record-breaking daily temperatures over 40 °C. As the fires threatened the city of Bordeaux, French authorities curtailed the final day of the Tour de France to provide more support.

Because of increased temperatures and longer summers, vegetation is becoming drier, creating more fires and drying out even more land in a horrific climate feedback. Apocalyptic scenes in the Gironde were described with 35-metre “Dantesque” flames as one resident who escaped the fire said, “It was like the end of the world.” Fifty firefighters were injured, while the world saw firsthand the effects of a new type of climate reality, the pirocumulonimbus or “fire cloud” that heats the air even more, spreading toxic ash as dry crisp vegetation is gobbled up. Lightning can also occur, threatening even more fires.

All of Wales was in drought after the driest July in 190 years as well as half of England, causing the natural environment to “deteriorate” and damaging agriculture and food supplies. The UK is undergoing a fifth summer heat wave as the countryside turns from green to brown. All 27 citiesmonitored by the Italian health ministry were under red alert as people were “advised to avoid sunlight, sweet carbonated drinks, coffee, and alcohol.”

Elsewhere, South Korea recorded the highest temperatures ever and issued an outdoor activity alert as temperatures passed 40 °C for five consecutive days. Hong Kong recorded its highest temperatures since 1884. This past year, wildfires began much sooner than usual in Canada, causing smoky skies across southern Ontario and parts of the United States, affecting FIFA World Cup matches and producing the world’s worst air quality in Toronto on July 15. This past week in British Columbia a state of emergency was declared. When does a local emergency become a global emergency?

Numerous regions have suffered unimaginable horrific scenes in the past few years, killing residents, destroying homes, and wiping out large parts of towns as yet another unprecedented fire is added to the record books: Fort McMurray, Alberta (2016), Lytton, British Columbia (2021), Jasper National Park in Alberta (2024). In 2009, 173 people died and thousands of homes were destroyed during Australia’s worst-ever “Black Summer” bushfires. In 2018 in Greece, 104 people died as fires approached Athens. In 2024, over 1,000 fires burnt in Portugal.

Today, BC and the northwest US are under constant threat. Few of us will forget the daily scenes in Los Angeles last year as over 18,000 homes and buildings were destroyed, aided by 100-mph hurricane-force Santa Ana winds. An independent wildfire map that uses data from NASA’s VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) shows over 27,000 current wildfires, almost 16,000 labelled as “critical.”

At the same time, oil companies are racking up record profits. The US president supports even more oil production, despite cartoonish comments by the oil industry’s number-1 lobbyist that oil companies are “making too much money,” showing that lawmakers are beholden to profits at all costs. The rah-rah war strategy in Iran that sustains $80/barrel oil prices is a boon to oil producers, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and BP, shamelessly profiting from yet another war over oil to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The Pentagon is the number-1 consumer of oil on the planet, costing billions of dollars annually and “a stunning volume of pollution.” War is now just another business. Eat, drink, and be merry, tomorrow will be even hotter.

It’s not like we didn’t know. Global warming was forecast as far back as the start of the Industrial Revolution. The French mathematician Joseph Fourier, the Anglo-Irish physicist John Tyndall, and the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius all did early work to establish the now well-known, heat-trapping properties of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane. Often overlooked, US scientist Eunice Foot was the first to posit that carbon dioxide could heat the air in her 1856 paper, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.”

Popular Mechanics has published numerous articles on climate change, including Remarkable Weather of 1911 (1912), Is Our Climate Changing? (1930), Coal Dust Speeds Melting of Ice by Absorbing Sun’s Heat (1940), and What’s Happening to the Weather (1957). American geochemist Wally Broeker coined the term “global warming” in a 1975 Science paper, “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?,” stating that “the exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content will tend to become a significant factor and by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1,000 years.” We have long known the science and the consequences.

In his 2010 book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, 350.org’s Bill McKibben wrote that “The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished.” Citing numerous examples, including hotter air (holding more vapor), increased rainfall, more desert, more lightening, increased ocean heat (more hurricanes), higher acidic seas, more drought, dry rivers (e.g. Lake Mead), lost seafront, lower farm yields, disappearing glaciers, no more coral reefs (perhaps by 2050), and vanishing species, he noted that more of the earth is “now experiencing a tropical climate.”

And yet every year, greenhouse gases continue to rise, carbon dioxide now at 429.12 ppm and methane at 1937.59 ppb. With a world population of over 8 billion, double 50 years ago, growth-based consumerism is exacerbating a runaway crisis, aided and abetted by profiteering corporations and denialist governments. Rome is literally burning as we fiddle.

So what can we do? Better forest management, warning systems, and fire breaks are all needed. Upon visiting the fire-ravaged Gironde, French president Emanuel Macron compared the situation to World War II and vowed to “rebuild a different kind of forest.” One hopes that includes ending subsidized industrial biomass that falsely accounted for 10% of Europe’s “green” energy.

Citing the buildup to the 2024 Olympics, former Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo championed a progressive green strategy with more green spaces, cycle lanes, and electric buses (1,000 now and counting). Solar canopies that provide both power and shade are now mandatory for large French parking lots.

Less is more: oil, plastic, mindless consumption. But will any of it be enough as temperatures continue to rise? Oddly, the newly reformed Schuman Square outside the EU headquarters in Brussels is mostly concrete, called “Europe’s largest frying pan,”while a green canopy was shelved from the plans,

Increased green energy will help. More solar and wind power has been installed in the past two years than in the previous 20 years. We may see a green grid and 100% EVs by 2050. The exponential growth of cheap renewable energy (95% new energy installations) and the rise of electric vehicles (20% of new car sales) are displacing more fossil fuels year on year.

Each year, electric vehicles cut into the global oil supply. At the current rate of conversion, China’s public transportation will be 100% electric by 2035, displacing more than 1 million barrels of diesel fuel per day. The “inflection point” – the moment of price parity between gasmobiles and EVs – will signal the end, coming soon as battery prices continue to fall. With increased EV adoption, roadside pollution is also being reduced.

We have no choice but to change our ways, sooner than later as our climate worsens. We are already in crisis, never mind a limited petroleum supply that will eventually run out this century. Where once we could choose to change, change is now being forced upon us despite our unwillingness and a callous oil industry spurred on by compliant politicians. The heat is on. The disaster spectacle is real.

John K. White, a former lecturer in physics and education at University College Dublin and the University of Oviedo. He is the editor of the energy news service E21NS and author of The Truth About Energy: Our Fossil-Fuel Addiction and the Transition to Renewables (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Do The Math!: On Growth, Greed, and Strategic Thinking (Sage, 2013). He can be reached at: johnkingstonwhite@gmail.com