FAS Launches New “Center for Regulatory Ingenuity” to Modernize American Governance, Drive Durable Climate Progress

WASHINGTON, D.C. — February 12, 2026 — The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) today announced the launch of the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity, a new hub designed to reimagine how the government tackles “wicked” modern problems while delivering everyday benefits for Americans.

“We can’t manage today’s problems with yesterday’s laws,” said Dr. Jedidah Isler, FAS Chief Science Officer. “The Center for Regulatory Ingenuity will bridge the gap between high-level policy design and on-the-ground implementation, ensuring that government promises translate into real-world results that Americans experience.”

FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs. CRI does this by (1) creating high-trust environments to brainstorm and refine the big ideas that will breathe new life into government, and (2) building a “network of networks” that supports policymakers and practitioners in implementing those ideas at scale.

“The administrative state has delivered extraordinary achievements in the past, but today’s operating model is a complete mismatch for the complexity we face. As a result, trust in government has been in the basement for decades,” said Loren DeJonge Schulman, Director of Government Capacity at FAS. “Strengthening government capacity is an investment in democracy and deeply intertwined with climate progress. It requires thinking creatively about how to build the government we need, not endlessly pointing fingers at the government we have–CRI aims to do just that.”

CRI is launching with a focus on climate: a space where there’s an increasingly evident mismatch between the functions the government needs to provide and the tools it has to deliver. FAS is pleased to welcome Climate Group North America, ICLEI USA, and the Environmental Law Institute as core partners in this initial work.

“Today’s rollback of the endangerment finding underscores that we are in a new era for U.S. climate policy,” said Dr. Hannah Safford, Associate Director of Climate and Environment at FAS. “To be clear: there’s no credible scientific basis for that rollback, which FAS strongly opposes. At the same time, it’s worth recognizing that while foundational environmental laws like the Clean Air Act worked to curb industrial pollution, they weren’t designed to guide the economy-wide transition to clean technologies that’s currently underway. There’s tremendous opportunity for innovation on how we design and deliver climate policies that are equitable, efficient, effective, and durable. With EPA stepping back on this front, it’s time for others to step forward.“

With the support of contributors from across the ideological spectrum, CRI is already charting paths for a renewed administrative state, a more responsive government, and ambitious climate policy that lasts. These paths are explored in CRI’s inaugural essay collection, Bureaucracy as Social Hope: An Argument for Renewing the Administrative State. The first two of these essays, “Rebuilding Environmental Governance: Understanding the Foundations”, by Jordan Diamond and collaborators at the Environmental Law Institute, and “Costs Come First in a Reset Climate Agenda”, by Devin Hartman (R Street Institute) and Neel Brown (Progressive Policy Institute) are available now; the remainder will be released in coming weeks. Other authors featured in the collection include:

In addition, CRI is today releasing “From Ambition to Action: Shovel-Ready Policy Solutions for Climate Leaders”. This policy primer, crowd-sourced from dozens of experts and policy entrepreneurs, outlines how motivated public leaders – especially at the state and local level – can turn big ideas into reality, cutting emissions while delivering cheaper electricity, ensuring affordable housing, and improving transportation for all of America.

Moving forward, CRI intends to deliver more detailed playbooks illustrating how an approach grounded in regulatory ingenuity can improve outcomes and achieve goals in these key sectors, which collectively account for two-thirds of U.S. emissions and contribute at least 25% of U.S GDP. 

More information about CRI is available here. For updates, and to stay connected, click here. 



ABOUT FAS

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) works to advance progress on a broad suite of contemporary issues where science, technology, and innovation policy can deliver transformative impact, and seeks to ensure that scientific and technical expertise have a seat at the policymaking table. Established in 1945 by scientists in response to the atomic bomb, FAS continues to bring scientific rigor and analysis to address national challenges. More information about FAS work at fas.org.

Media Contact: Katie McCaskey, kmccaskey@fas.org, (202) 933-8857

From Ambition to Action: A Policy Primer

How public leaders can boost climate progress, restore trust in government, and make lives better…starting today.

People across the nation are clamoring for solutions that make their lives better. And they’re frustrated by the responses they’re getting. Confronting massive inequality, Americans watch leaders finger-point on the price of eggs; yearning for security and stability, Americans watch politics lurch between radically different agendas. No wonder, then, that public trust in the U.S. government has been in the basement for decades. Americans are facing both everyday challenges and a deep, growing sense of discontent. But they’ve lost faith in government to resolve either.

That sense of stuckness doesn’t need to last. But change means focusing on outcomes, eliminating bottlenecks, and prioritizing delivery. It means embracing tools and talent that better connect big ideas to real-world results. It means resisting the temptation to chase buzzwords – from “abundance” to “dominance” to “affordability” – and focusing on the method over the message.

One place to start is with the shift to clean technologies, a place where there is powerful momentum. One in five cars globally are already electric, while heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the United States for four consecutive years. The vast bulk of new energy generation is renewable: globally, clean energy investment is now double the amount spent on all fossil fuels combined.

While the transition to clean technologies is unstoppably underway, it is also in its messy middle. Rival technologies and energy systems (and the economic and political systems on which they depend) are now colliding. Many counties and cities depend heavily on fossil fuel revenues; meanwhile, job quality and union density in the renewable energy industry leaves much to be desired. And core parts of our infrastructure – from the power grid to gas stations – are complex and expensive to convert to serve renewable and clean industries, even if those industries will ultimately boost affordability.

Put simply, remaining globally competitive on critical clean technologies requires far more than pointing out that individual electric cars and rooftop solar panels might produce consumer savings. But we also can’t afford to cede the space. Internationally, clean energy spending is booming. China’s clean energy industry by itself would be the world’s eighth largest economy if it were a country, and Europe’s investments have almost doubled over the last decade. Even if current estimates hold, fossil fuel demand will peak mid-century. If the U.S. continues to hold fast to existing policies until then, we’ll be 30 years behind the rest of the world’s energy economy, and it will be impossible to catch up. The bottom line? Good climate policy is good economic policy, and vice versa.

Good climate policy is also good politics. Climate-induced disasters are increasing by the day, and are impacting both safety and affordability. Americans generally see climate and energy policy as important as immigration. Most Americans, on both sides of the political aisle, support environmental regulations and clean energy development. Many say electricity costs are just as stressful as grocery bills, and they worry about higher insurance rates and local market problems. And they’re tired of entrenched corporate interests calling the shots.

What’s needed are creative, clever strategies that boost climate progress while delivering everyday benefits. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), as part of our new Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI), developed this primer to put a bunch of those strategies in one place. Our goal is for this primer to serve as a resource for public-sector leaders at the federal, state, and local levels who believe that government can do great things for our communities and our planet.

The strategies herein are open-sourced from a diverse network of contributors and collaborators, and are shovel-ready. Many of these strategies are already being deployed across the country. They’re designed to make energy, housing, and transportation better this year.

Indeed, we hope that readers see the actionability of these solutions not just as a benefit, but as an imperative. Americans aren’t looking for the magic message or the magic moment. They’re looking to government for leadership. Every day that government is paralyzed by gridlock, indecisiveness, or fear of failure is another day that it fails to realize the potential of the good that it can achieve, and that public trust in government further erodes. That’s a downwards spiral that we’ve got to stop.

Finally, we emphasize that this primer is a starting place. We’re at the precipice of a new era for climate and energy policy in the United States, and the strategies that will form the backbone of this new era – by adeptly fitting together government capacity, private innovation, and democratic decision-making – are just starting to come into view. As they do, CRI and its partners are committed to working hand-in-glove with bold doers and thinkers, sharpening our collective focus, and realizing the vision of a more responsive government, more optimistic society, and more resilient nation.

Getting to Work: Opportunities in Energy, Transportation, and Housing

Solving problems requires framing them accurately. As observed above, the truth is that clean technologies are increasingly dominant, and that the United States is rapidly falling behind. A response predicated on propping up the 20th-century fossil economy is doomed to fail. So too, we’ve learned, is a response that relies on the U.S. federal government to muscle the clean-technology transition forward single-handedly.

Fortunately, because so many clean technologies are now commercial, the opportunity for leadership on multiple levels, and multiple fronts, has never been more available – or more crucial. For example, simple economics will do much to propel wind, solar, and battery technologies if needed supporting infrastructure is in place and clean technologies are given the chance to compete on fair terms. Policymakers can worry less about expending political capital on expensive public subsidies for clean power, and focus instead on transpartisan policies enabling broad market access, streamlined interconnection processes, and swift power grid build-out. In the transportation sector, policies that ensure transparent vehicle pricing or increase market competition for legacy car companies may matter more than traditional regulatory standards.

This new reality also makes thoughtful economic, industrial, and social policy indispensable. The advent of new technology often comes with the promise of broad societal benefits, but making good on that promise is hardly a guarantee (witness the emergent effects of AI). It’s incumbent on government to ensure that the clean-technology transition reduces inequality and improves quality of life at scale, and that the transition doesn’t abandon workers in fossil-dependent regions and industries to the vagaries of the market. And it’s government, working across multiple scales, that can assess regional comparative advantages and figure out where the United States can still compete – as well as where it must innovate and diversify.

Government leaders, in short, have the unique ability to see all the way from the kitchen table to the commanding heights of the global economy, and to mediate between them.

We illustrate below the types of approaches that entrepreneurial policymakers can adopt to secure U.S. leadership on critical clean technologies, in ways that benefit all Americans. We focus on energy, transportation, and housing, which are collectively the largest sources of climate pollution and key elements of household and regional economies nationwide. The list below is not exhaustive, or comprehensive, but exemplary – a demonstration that there are real opportunities for change.

Unleashing Modern Energy

There’s massive untapped potential for clean energy in the United States. To realize it, we’ve got to make room for new energy to move.

This isn’t primarily a project of continued renewable energy subsidies: there’s good evidence that renewable energy can compete on a level playing field when it’s given the chance. Rather, the project is one of clearing away barriers to financing and building projects, fixing broken market incentives that favor existing players over new entrants and distort energy pricing, and accelerating construction of major grid infrastructure. 

This project looks a lot like the successful national push towards rural electrification that the United States led a century ago: a serious effort that aligns private and public investments to rethink how and where we deliver energy. In executing this effort, we must grapple with the full set of barriers to building – not just cost and permitting, but also thorny local siting processes, misaligned incentives for electric utilities, and lengthy wait times to connect projects to the grid. 

Today, of course, we’ve also got to reckon with the growing threats of cyberattacks and extreme weather to energy infrastructure, as well as the unprecedented, unpredictable energy demands of hyperscalers. Such challenges can only be managed by a mix of climate stabilization policies, economic risk-sharing strategies, and investments in infrastructure modernization. That’s not a cheap or easy proposition, but it is one with major lasting benefits.

At the consumer level, building more clean energy can help stabilize residential electricity prices (though many other factors also contribute to electricity prices and price volatility). More broadly, clean energy could unlock billions of dollars in potential efficiencies, such as by reducing costs associated with redundant natural gas transmission infrastructure. Expanding clean energy, especially distributed energy resources and virtual power plants, can also upgrade outdated grid infrastructure and secure it against cyber threats. But getting to these benefits requires government leadership.

Energy ingenuity could look like:

Making Transportation Cleaner and Cheaper

People just want to get to where they’re going safely, efficiently, and affordably. Yet despite record levels of federal transportation spending, traffic, emissions, and pedestrian deaths keep rising. And as the Cato Institute observes, “U.S. policy contributes to an inefficient and costly transportation system that reduces workers’ time and incomes.”

We can do better. This starts by recognizing that in much of the United States, cars are both essential and increasingly unaffordable. There’s opportunity for a suite of policies that break market strangleholds while expanding consumer choice, moving us away from involuntary dependence on expensive cars and towards a future with transit that people actually want to ride – as well as affordable yet excellent, and often zero-emission, personal transportation. Core federal clean transportation programs have supported $4.6 billion in domestic investments and created at least 14,000 jobs in manufacturing, demonstrating the large-scale benefits of such programs and the economic case for continued federal support. Because the tools involved are nearly all within the authorities of state and local governments, and independent of ongoing federal regulatory disputes, they also can go into effect quickly.

On the vehicle side, this agenda includes governmental efforts to address legacy company market power. Incentives and protections for domestic manufacturing are sensible so long as they boost local economies, support American workers, and drive American innovation – but they’ve got to be coupled with policies ensuring price transparency and other oversight mechanisms, to ensure that benefits flow to consumers rather than pad company profits. Unlocking a more affordable, competitive, zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) market – with more options for buyers at lower prices – is also a key political foundation to the next round of vehicle regulatory mandates, by creating a larger constituency for further progress.

On the system side, states and cities can significantly build up regional budgets with savvy transportation investments. The data are clear that transit and walkability investments bring more valuable housing into cities and connect people with jobs, raising economic activity and raising property values. Investments in electric-vehicle charging similarly boost local business revenue and spurs economic vitality. Communities thrive when their members have transportation options (that all work well), instead of being steered towards legacy vehicle technology and wrestling with creaky 20th-century infrastructure.

On the vehicle side, transportation ingenuity could look like:

On the system side, transportation ingenuity could look like:

Building Affordable, Abundant Housing

Housing shouldn’t be a luxury: it’s a prerequisite for a stable, healthy life. Yet Americans – facing prohibitively high (and increasing) rental costs as well as unrealistic down payments and pathways to ownership – are struggling to meet this basic need. And with extreme weather on the rise, renters and owners alike are facing concerns about physical safety and skyrocketing insurance as well as price hurdles. The emissions that the housing sector produces only worsen these problems.

Delivering more affordable, resilient, and climate-friendly housing means making it easier to build housing of all shapes and sizes; tailoring solutions to rural communities, urban communities, and different geographies generally; and striking a better balance between development for housing and development for other purposes. These strategies need to be paired with deep investments in government capacity to facilitate permitting and approval of new housing construction, as well as to facilitate more complex projects – like retrofits, infill development, and office-to-residential conversion – at scale. Also critical is reimagining community and stakeholder engagement on housing questions, aiming to maintain trust, democratic process, and local buy-in without overvaluing the perspectives of existing homeowners, developers, or any other particular constituency. at the expense of the rest of the community.

Housing ingenuity could look like:

Making Solutions Stick: The Cross-Cutting Benefits of Government Capacity, Pro-Democracy Design, and Innovative Financing

Each of the policy solutions above offers a way to boost climate progress while delivering everyday benefits across energy, transportation, and/or housing. But how do we make those solutions stick? With trust in government at historic lows, public-sector leaders must quickly follow ambition with action, investing in both ideas and the building blocks that turn ideas into reality. Below, we outline how public leaders can use three of these core building blocks – government capacity, financing, and pro-democracy design – to get on the scoreboard early…and stay there for the long term.

Government Capacity

Government capacity refers to the ability of government to get things done, whether through efficient processes, effective talent, or fit-for-purpose tools. Americans are frustrated by the slow pace of government, but they don’t want the functions that keep them safe and supported dismantled: they want them improved. Accomplishing this requires more than new programs or new funding streams or new inventions. It requires leaders to seriously (and systematically – not via a “wrecking ball” approach) consider which government functions are working, which need to be overhauled, and which should be retired.

Rebuilding government capacity is inseparable from strengthening democracy itself. Both of these goals are wholly intertwined with climate progress. When government acts competently, transparently, and in partnership across levels, it restores public faith that collective action is possible and worthwhile. When it can’t, even well-designed policies stall under the weight of fragmented authority, procedural burden, risk aversion, and institutional inertia. Treating government capacity as a core investment is therefore much more than administrative housekeeping. It’s a prerequisite for durable climate progress.

To boost government capacity, public leaders can:

Finance

Capital is a powerful tool for policymakers and others working in the public interest to shape the forward course of the economy in a fair and effective way. Very often, the capital needed to achieve major societal goals comes from a blend of sources; this is certainly true with respect to climate action and facilitating the transition to clean technologies.

States, cities, banks, community-driven financial institutions (CDFIs), impact investors, and philanthropies have long worked in partnership with the federal government on clean-technology projects – and are stepping up in a new way now that federal support for such projects has been scaled back. These entities are developing bond-backed financing, joint procurement schemes, and revolving loan funds – not just to fill gaps, but to reimagine what the clean technology economy can look like.

In the near term, opportunities for subnational investments are ripe because the now partially paused boom in potential firms and projects generated by recent U.S. industrial policy has generated a rich set of already underwritten, due-diligenced projects for re-investment. In the longer term, the success of redesigned regulatory approaches will almost certainly depend on creating profitable firms that can carry forward the clean-technology transition. Public sector leaders can assume an entrepreneurial role in ensuring these new entities, to the degree they benefit from public support, advance the public interest: connecting economic growth to shared prosperity.

To be sure, subnational actors generally cannot fund at the scale of the federal government. But they can have a truly catalytic impact on financing availability and capital flows nevertheless. 

To boost finance, public leaders can:

Public Participation

Public participation in climate action is often treated as a procedural requirement to be satisfied late in the process, rather than as a core function of governing well. The result is familiar: performative town halls, notice-and-comment processes that invite frustration rather than insight, and transparency tools that are easily weaponized by organized interests. This dynamic erodes trust, slows projects, and fuels the perception that government is both unresponsive and incapable. Yet participation, when designed well and tailored to the moment, is not an obstacle to effective governance:  it is how government discovers what will work, where friction will arise, and how to build solutions that communities will defend rather than resist. Treating participation as a functional component of state capacity means seeing it as an input to smarter design, faster implementation, and more durable outcomes.

Upgrading how government listens and engages is vital to upgrading how government delivers. When residents see clearly how their input shapes decisions, participation builds legitimacy and reduces the incentives for obstruction and litigation later in the process. When agencies invest in the infrastructure, tools, roles, and expectations that make participation meaningful, they create a feedback loop that improves policy design and strengthens democratic trust at the same time. And when climate leaders meet the public where they are in terms of how they experience and make consumer choices in the the climate transition, we can strengthen the connective tissue between government action and public trust.The recommendations below are aimed at helping public leaders move beyond compliance-driven engagement toward participation models that are relational, deliberative, and integrated into the machinery of experience and delivery. This approach ensures that climate solutions are not only technically sound, but socially resilient and democratically grounded. These take time, but we encourage recognition that they enable enormous time, risk and failure saved. 

To boost public participation, public leaders can:

About The Primer

Ambition to Action was authored by Angela Barranco, Zoë Brouns, Megan Husted, Kristi Kimball, Arjun Krishnaswami, Hannah Safford, Loren Schulman, Craig Segall, and Addy Smith.

Many individuals contributed ideas and input to this primer. The authors are grateful to the following individuals and organizations for their time, expertise, and constructive feedback: Patrick Bigger, Laurel Blatchford, Heather Clark, Ted Fertik, Danielle Gagne, Kate Gordon, Betony Jones, Nuin-Tara Key, Alex McDonough, Sara Meyers, Shara Mohtadi, Saharnaz Mirzazad, Beth Osborne, Alexis Pelosi, Sam Ricketts, Bridget Sanderson, Lotte Schlegel, Igor Tregub, Louise White, and Clinton Britt. The content of this primer does not necessarily reflect the views of individuals or organizations acknowledged. Any errors are the sole fault of the authors.

To scale up climate solutions, local governments need to accelerate system changes

When I ran for city council in Boulder, Colorado in 2023, everyone talked about climate change. Forum after forum, all ten candidates spoke up for the climate. 

And cities saying climate change matters is typical. The number of US cities with adopted climate action plans is in the hundreds. 

That’s what we need, since cities drive the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions and are on the front lines of climate havoc. 

More specifically, for large-scale climate solutions to work, cities have to really stretch. That’s according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says cities need to rapidly become compact, efficient, electrified, and nature‑rich urban ecosystems where we take better care of each other and avoid locking in more sprawl and fossil‑fuel dependence. 

Yet, big-picture progress in the United States is critically insufficient. Those are the words of Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific analysis evaluating climate commitments. The US has pledged to reduce 2030 GHG emissions levels by 50–52% below 2005, yet the latest projections show we are on track to achieve at best only 29–39%—assuming no further backsliding.

And earlier this month, the Trump administration withdrew our federal government from the international climate agreement process.

So when local governments say “we’re on it,” what is a concerned citizen to think?

What local government climate solutions look like 

Climate advocates are used to talking about climate action. But for local governments, the measuring stick for climate progress isn’t simply action. What counts is measurable progress towards specific, substantive transitions.

Transitions to walkable, compact neighborhoods where abundant, space-efficient middle housing near jobs and services let most residents meet daily needs within a short walk or bike ride, reducing trip lengths and housing and transport costs.

To transit-rich, highly bikeable towns where frequent, accessible service and a connected, protected network allow seniors and youth travel independently and where per-capita car dependence falls.

To fully-electrified communities in which homes and transportation run on clean, distributed power, working efficiently, that delivers lower bills, healthier indoor air, and outage resilience, with benefits accruing equitably to residents.

To enhanced landscapes of bioswales, permeable streets, restored wetlands, and drought- and fire-resilient shade trees that cool neighborhoods, absorb stormwater, and buffer heat, flood, and smoke risks.

To resilient local food systems that blend urban agriculture with regional producers, food hubs, cold storage, and compost-to-soil loops to deliver reliable, affordable, nutritious food even during heat, drought, or supply disruptions.

There is good news: The transitions we need, and the solutions and capacity we need to implement them, are showing new signs of life. That’s evident in two trends. 

One trend is local governments playing a bigger role in climate solutions. The number of U.S. cities reporting to the CDP, a global system for disclosing climate progress, has grown to over 150. Now more than 200 US cities have committed to 100 percent clean electricity. And cities’ climate action plans are showing a visible shift from a focus on municipal operations to community‑wide impacts of buildings, transportation, and waste, and more sophisticated thinking about resilience.

As the federal government has retreated, advocates are increasingly realizing cities and counties have tools to lead. Local governments manage streets, land use, buildings, public fleets, transit, and major service contracts. They can strongly influence state-level actors, like energy utilities and air quality programs, and be providers of those services directly.

There is proof of this awakening in the large numbers of people suddenly running for local office on climate. Political organizing coalitions such as Run on Climate and Climate Cabinet helped elect more than 50 local leaders running on climate in 2025. One of the year’s most high-profile candidates, Zohran Mamdani, won with “fast and free” buses–one of the measures IPCC has highlighted as a meaningful mitigation measure that saves more money than it costs–as a centerpiece of his campaign.

The other trend is a greater focus on wellbeing. Research included in the latest IPCC report shows demand-side measures can cut end-use emissions by roughly 40 to 70 percent by 2050 while improving daily life and making communities stronger. And wellbeing is the currency of local governments and local politics. Concrete quality of life issues dominate local elections and policymaking, which is where climate action takes root—or doesn’t.

Climate action prompted by a desire for healthier, happier, and less expensive lives is happening. People are adopting electric cars, e-bikes, heat pumps, and induction stoves because they work better, are cheaper to operate, and healthier. The intersection of climate solutions and wellbeing is central to a 2025 bestseller Abundance  and to the national conversation it kicked off about defining and achieving “abundance.” The topic of wellbeing was a bright spot at the COP30 climate talks via the World Health Organization’s report, “Delivering the Belém Health Action Plan.”

These two trends reinforce each other. Local governments oversee the services where wellbeing, decarbonization, and resilience meet. When those services are designed as a system, investments can compound to create more value for more people, who then have a stake in continuing the transition. And the importance of rallying around local governments to carry climate solutions forward is becoming clearer as U.S. national policy looks structurally less reliable than most experts used to think.

Difficult conditions for change 

But local governments face headwinds. Existing policies and markets, like those that have created widespread car dependence and extensive natural gas systems, create momentum that favors the status quo and encourages continued investments that lock us in further. Simply put, it’s easiest to keep doing it the way we’ve done it before, and then we dig ourselves in deeper.

Local governments purposefully design systems to keep things stable. Most likely, whatever your town or county is doing is based on the direction of long-term plans, from departmental plans to bigger comprehensive plans. Those plans often come up for renewal only every few years or longer, and if you miss that window or fail to follow procedures, making big change is nearly impossible. Related, local governments tend to have policies and practices for conducting community engagement that deliberately create a high bar for making major turns.

On top of all that, local governments in the U.S. are suffering a long-term decline in investment that leaves them with significant and growing cash flow constraints, heavy workloads, limited time to deliberate, and pressure to deliver. The pandemic and recent national political forces reduce their maneuverability even more.

Political will necessary but not sufficient—concrete transitions are needed

In order to drive climate transitions under such tough conditions, political will is necessary but it is not sufficient. For local governments to scale up climate solutions, they need to take tangible, visible steps to change systems, consistent with evidence-based recommendations, outlined by institutions like the IPCC. 

Here is what that can look like – and what advocates can look to encourage:

1. Transition plans  

Climate issues touch everything, so all local governments can point to doing climate things. But the difference between lists of activities and high-reward strategic commitments that make good use of time is everything. The latter requires a clear plan to make transitions happen, with defined outcomes and milestones, and dogged pursuit.

Ambitious climate action at the local government level means being clear about the transition(s) the community is focused on, which could include the previously mentioned examples, along with what successful completions looks like and by when. This involves working on at least two tracks concurrently—both integrating ambitious transformations into long-term planning exercises, for which adopting changes may or may not be available right away, and taking whatever more tactical action is possible now to support such planning and concrete action to the fullest extent possible.

2. User experience  

Cities often add a bike lane in one place or restore a bus line in another. What truly changes behavior is a complete experience that makes the pro-climate option the intuitive choice. Kids can bike around town without parents fearing they could be hit by a driver. You can count on bringing a large electric bike anywhere and park it safely. Buses are within a 10-minute walk of home and arrive every 10 minutes. Utility investments in electrification actually lower monthly bills. To make climate transitions attractive and sticky, we have to confront gaps that get in the way of people’s experience from their vantage point.

A practical opportunity for local governments is to use the tools of user experience (“UX”) and be responsible for how the ecosystem works and feels from the immersive standpoint of users. UX is an interdisciplinary field that uses research, psychology, and design to remove friction and ensure a seamless journey for users.

3. Public service delivery  

One of the core jobs of local government is to provide public services like zoning, safe transportation, building standards, air quality protections, and emergency management. Providing services is also generally the justification for spending public money. And services are where the planning activities that local governments tend to be so careful about materialize in the real world. So if local governments are going to be engines of climate action, then day-to-day service delivery—their core product—is where most of that action will show up. Climate action will appear in what gets approved, funded, built, maintained, enforced, measured, and improved.

Local governments already deliver public services. So the opportunity is to evaluate how core local government services can or should be tuned and/or reorganized to drive climate and resilience outcomes. This includes formal adoption in comprehensive plans, capital improvement programs, and strategic plans, and clear alignment with budget priorities. When leaders routinely report on progress and adjust course publicly, it signals that climate transitions are a core organizational responsibility rather than a side project.

4. High-level ownership 

Plans only come to life when people who have the right level of power and accountability own delivery. Inside local government, that means both the elected body (mayor, city council, and/or their equivalents) and executives (city manager, their deputies, and in the case of a “strong mayor” form of government, the mayor) adopt the initiative as their own. Roles and accountability are defined and gaps are addressed. Resources are allocated through direct investments and through partnerships that expand capacity.

High-level ownership of climate solutions in local government happens when transitions are included in the agency’s highest-level plans and strategies.This includes formal adoption in comprehensive plans, capital improvement programs, and strategic plans, and clear alignment with budget priorities. It also looks like leaders routinely communicating to the public about the transitions under way, the progress against them, and how community members can help support the journey.

5. Playbook of procedures

Local government commitments are heavily shaped and constrained by procedure, like protocols for what gets a hearing and when, annual or biennial work plans, and comprehensive plans that may come around only every few years or longer. Communications between elected officials and staff may be limited by city ordinance, and communications among elected officials may be very limited by state law. There are also often arcane, highly-localized meeting customs. Getting things done requires working through these procedures and often landing decisions in small windows that are easy to miss. 

A playbook for how climate transitions are going to make their way into staff proposals, planning processes,and budgeting is fundamental to turning a good idea into something real. Such a playbook is needed to spell out who does what, when, and through which formal channels, so that key decisions do not depend on heroic one-off efforts. It also helps new staff and elected officials quickly understand how to use existing procedures to advance climate goals, rather than be derailed by them.

Conclusion

To scale up climate solutions through local government, we need at least two things. First, political will, which is familiar to most advocates. Looking into 2026 and beyond, climate advocates have great opportunities to continue increasing the proportions of elected local bodies who are led by politicians serious about climate solutions. Everyone has a role to play: run for local office, support local climate candidates, use whatever powers of creativity and persuasion you have–from writing to speaking to organizing and beyond–to help make climate action a core election issue in your community. 

The second—and where we need greater shared focus—is to make local governments responsible for specific, strategic commitments to systems change. To do that, help build transition plans that commit to providing great user experiences, an approach to public service delivery that is aligned with those objectives, ownership by city council and the city manager or mayor, and a clear playbook for how strategic climate commitments are going to be adopted and rolled out.

Not everything is going right for the climate movement. But there are some fantastic bright spots, and one of those is big new local government innovations that are starting to unfold.  

Looking into 2026, I’m excited to be a part of the movement to help local governments drive the next generation of climate progress. And a big hat tip to FAS with its regulatory rethink and government capacity work as well as ICLEI USA, both partnering with local officials like me to map out how cities can translate ambitious climate goals into durable systems change. 

There are great things ahead, and so much room to work together.

Impacts of Extreme Heat on Children’s Health and Future Success

Extreme heat poses serious and growing risks to children’s health, safety, and education. Yet, schools and childcare facilities are unprepared to handle rising temperatures. To protect the health and well-being of American children, Congress should (1) set policies that guide childcare facilities and schools in preparing for and responding to extreme heat, (2) collect the data required to inform extreme heat readiness and adaptation, and (3) strategically invest in necessary infrastructure upgrades to build heat resilience.

Children are Uniquely Vulnerable to Extreme Heat Exposure and Acute and Chronic Health Impacts

At least five factors drive children’s vulnerability to negative health outcomes from extreme heat, like heat-related illnesses and chronic complications. First, children’s bodies take a longer time to increase sweat production and acclimatize to higher temperatures. Second, young children are more prone to dehydration than adults because a larger percentage of their body weight is water. Third, infants and young children have challenges regulating their body temperatures and often do not recognize when they should act to cool down. Fourth, compared with adults, children spend more time active outdoors, which results in increased exposure to high ambient heat. Fifth, children usually depend on others to provide them with water and protect them from unsafe outdoor environments, but children’s caretakers often underestimate the seriousness of the symptoms of heat stress. Research shows that extreme heat days are linked to increased emergency room (ER) visits for children, especially the 16% of children living at or below the federal poverty line. Extreme heat also exacerbates children’s chronic diseases, like asthma and eczema, increasing health care costs and decreasing children’s overall quality of life.

The Consequences of Chronic Extreme Heat Exposure on Children’s Learning and Well-Being 

Studies show that excess temperatures reduce cognitive functioning. Hot weather also impacts children’s behavior, making them more prone to restlessness, irritability, aggression, and mental distress. Finally, nighttime extreme heat exposure can disrupt sleep patterns, making it harder to fall asleep and stay asleep. These factors can all reduce children’s ability to focus, learn and succeed in school. For each 1°F rise in average annual temperature in school districts without air conditioning or proper heat protections, there is a 1% drop in learning. The Environmental Protection Agency found that these learning losses could translate into nearly $7 billion dollars in annual future income losses if warming trends continue.

Extreme Heat’s Threat to Schools and Childcare Facilities

Rising temperatures force school districts and childcare facilities into a dilemma: choosing between staying open in unsafe heat or closing and disrupting learning and care. 

Staying open can expose students and young children to extreme indoor and outdoor temperatures. The Government Accountability Office found that 41% of U.S. schools need to upgrade their heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems: upgrades that will cost billions of dollars that schools in low-income areas do not have. Similar infrastructure challenges extend to childcare facilities. Extreme heat also makes outdoor recess more dangerous, as unshaded playgrounds and asphalt surfaces can heat up far above ambient temperatures and pose burn risks. 

Yet when schools close for heat, children still suffer. Even five days of closures for inclement weather in a school year can cause measurable learning loss. Additionally, students may lose access to school meals; while food service continuation plans exist, overheated facilities can complicate implementation. Many children, especially in low-income families, also don’t have access to reliable cooling at home, meaning that when schools close for heat, these children receive little respite. Finally, parents are directly impacted as well: school closures also mean parents lose access to childcare, forcing many to miss work or pay for alternative arrangements, straining vulnerable households. 

Advancing Solutions that Safeguard American Children from the Impacts of Extreme Heat

To support the capacity of child-serving facilities to adapt to extreme heat, Congress should direct the Department of Education to develop extreme heat guidance, technical assistance programs, and temperature standards, following existing state-level policies as a model for action. Congress should also direct the Administration for Children and Families to develop analogous policies for early childhood facilities and daycare centers receiving federal funding. Finally, Congress should direct the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a waiver process for continuing school food service when extreme heat disrupts schedules during the school year. 

To support improved federal data collection efforts on extreme heat’s impacts, Congress should direct the Department of Education and Administration for Children and Families to collect data on how schools and childcare facilities are experiencing and responding to extreme heat. There should be a particular focus on the infrastructure upgrades that these facilities need to make to be more prepared for extreme temperatures — especially in low-income and rural communities.Lastly, to foster much-needed infrastructure improvements in schools and childcare facilities, Congress should consider amending Title I of the Elementary & Secondary Education Act or directing the Department of Education to clarify that funds for Title I schools may be used for school infrastructure upgrades needed to avoid learning losses. These upgrades can include the replacement of HVAC systems or installation of cool roofs, walls, and pavement, solar and other shade canopies, and green roofs, trees, and other green infrastructure, which can keep school buildings at safe temperatures during heat waves. Congress should also direct the Administration for Children and Families to identify funding resources that can be used to upgrade federally-supported childcare facilities.

Safeguarding Agricultural Research and Development Capacity

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) experienced a dramatic reduction in staff capacity in the first few months of the second Trump administration. More than 15,000 employees departed the agency through a combination of firings of probationary staff and two rounds of a deferred resignation program, shrinking USDA’s total workforce by 15%. 

The administration’s government downsizing campaign is just getting started. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently unveiled a reorganization plan aimed at moving key agency functions outside of the National Capital Region. While the plan does not include new reduction in force targets, further staff attrition is expected as positions are relocated. 

The agency’s reorganization plan is not just an organizational change in the name of shrinking the administrative state or reducing bureaucracy. The reorganization, replete with planned office closures and an explicit shrinking of agricultural research capacity, is poised to reshape the American food system, a driver of public health, environment, and economic outcomes across the country. 

Why Agricultural R&D is a Crucial Investment 

The federal government has historically played a significant role in improving the productivity of U.S. agriculture. By boosting yields and output, public agricultural research and development (R&D) has in turn reduced food prices, enhanced food security, and enabled farmers to produce more with less land and other inputs. Today, with farmers facing high input costs relative to returns, growing pest and disease pressures, and a rapidly shifting trade landscape, new innovations are needed to help producers face challenges. 

Every dollar invested in public agricultural R&D has generated $20 in returns—a huge historic return on USDA’s already small research budget. This is especially true relative to other industries. The Department of Energy spends roughly 7 times more on R&D than the Department of Agriculture. When it comes to climate-focused funding in particular, the federal government spent 22 times more on clean energy innovation than R&D agencies spent on climate mitigation in agriculture.

Continued agricultural R&D investments are expected to generate significant economic returns on investments and contribute to improved climate resilience, food security, and regional and rural economic development outcomes. For example, doubling public agricultural R&D funding over the next decade would increase U.S. productivity by about 60% compared to a business-as-usual scenario, while also expanding crop and livestock output more than 40%, reducing prices by more than a third, and substantially cutting greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from avoided deforestation. 

Despite the value for farmers and consumers alike, public investment in U.S. agricultural research from USDA, other federal agencies, and states declined significantly from $7.64 billion in 2002 to $5.16 billion in 2019—a nearly 30% reduction, adjusting for inflation. This decline is the leading contributor to a slowdown in agricultural productivity growth. The 2024 Global Agricultural Productivity Report found that U.S. agriculture has not been growing more productive, while India, for example, has a robust annual productivity growth rate of 1.7 percent.

Instead of doubling down to strengthen the nation’s agricultural research capacity and reverse this trend, the administration’s reorganization plan bets on consolidation as a path to efficiency.

Region-Specific Research is at Stake

Preceding USDA’s reorganization announcement, the Office of Management and Budget sent a memo advising all federal agencies to develop plans for programmatic reorganization and significant reductions in force. The memo emphasized several key principles to guide a government-wide reduction in force, including a reduced real property footprint. It is therefore no surprise that several branches of USDA that have vast networks of local and regional offices spanning the nation, including the Agricultural Research Service and Forest Service, would come under scrutiny. 

The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is USDA’s in-house research agency. At the start of 2025, there were 95 ARS laboratories and research units across 42 states employing 8,000 scientists and support staff. This vast network includes soil scientists improving crop water productivity in Texas, experts leading dairy forage systems research in Wisconsin, and plant breeders developing improved protein content in soybeans in North Carolina. On the surface, the real estate footprint of ARS could look inefficient. But, this interpretation fails to recognize the importance of region-specific research and the ability of researchers to deliver farmer-focused, regionally-relevant breakthroughs, exactly the type of service to USDA’s customers the Secretary claims as a goal in the reorganization plan. 

The administration justified the overhaul by citing the need to locate agency functions closer to USDA customers. However, more than 90% of USDA’s employees already work outside the National Capital Region, including all but one ARS site. The ARS site slated for closure in the reorganization plan is located in Beltsville, Maryland, outside of Washington, DC.

Appearing before the Senate Agriculture Committee, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Stephen Vaden assured Senators that only four research centers would be affected by USDA’s reorganization in addition to the closure of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center.

USDA has yet to announce which four ARS sites will be affected and whether the research done at the ARS location in Beltsville will be relocated and continued, or cancelled entirely.  

USDA’s reorganization comes as the agency implements a broader funding freeze on competitive research grants, further threatening the non-federal agricultural scientific research workforce. The administration’s decision to conduct an extended program-by-program review that significantly delayed research grant cycles impacts agricultural research programs at land grant universities across the country. ARS sites are often co-located with public Land Grant institutions, with both benefiting from shared resources and often partnering on research efforts. These delays and ongoing uncertainty threaten the economic returns that publicly funded research has consistently generated for both farmers and consumers.

Consolidation is Not Always a Solution for Efficiency

The Trump administration has often cited consolidation as a path to efficiency. But history shows that USDA reorganizations have weakened, not strengthened, the agency’s capacity. From the Obama administration’s 2012 “Blueprint for Better Services” to the 2019 Trump administration relocation of USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) and National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA), past efforts framed as efficiency measures instead led to staff attrition, loss of institutional knowledge, and setbacks in core research and grantmaking functions. The reorganization now under consideration risks repeating those mistakes at a far greater scale.

For example, the 2019 relocation of ERS and NIFA to Kansas City led to significant staff attrition and a loss of institutional knowledge. This worsened productivity at all levels, a performance hit that took years to  bounce back. In fact, it took USDA more than two years to recover from mass staff attrition and the agency is still facing challenges from the decision to relocate two of its major research facilities from Washington, DC. Two years after relocating, ERS and NIFA’s workforce size and productivity declined significantly. Many of the positions that were lost or left vacant were central to the agency’s functions. As a direct result, the relocation reduced the number of ERS reports and NIFA took longer to process scientific research grants. The Government Accountability Office found that USDA did not account for the cost of staff attrition that results from moving federal facilities and did not follow best practices for effective agency reforms and strategic human capital management. The 2019 relocation effort minimally involved USDA employees, Congress, and other key stakeholders. In addition, both agencies did not follow best practices related to strategic workforce planning, training, and development, which may have contributed to the time it took to recover to baseline staffing levels. 

We’re seeing a similar scenario replay in real time with the reorganization plan that was announced in July, but at a much broader scale that can have severe impacts to U.S. agriculture. So far, USDA has not released a detailed reorganization plan or provided any economic or workforce analysis to evaluate how relocation and consolidation would affect its mission or the communities it serves. USDA’s decision to shutter the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, its flagship research site near Washington, D.C., has drawn criticism from Congress, farm groups, and scientists alike. The agency conceded it had no supporting analysis for the closure, even as the decision threatens to upend vital research programs and dismantle longstanding collaborations.

Unlike the Obama administration’s 2012 proposal to end a dozen ARS programs, which was a direct response to a significant 12% reduction in discretionary funding from Congress, the current reorganization proposal has been announced during a period of strong bipartisan support for agricultural research. Thanks to this support, USDA’s R&D funding has recently rebounded, with funding for ARS and other research agencies surpassing $3.6 billion in 2024, just shy of the funding levels in the early- and mid-2000s. The administration’s reorganization plan threatens to stall or reverse this progress, jeopardizing whether the agency will be able to administer research funding allocated by Congress. Willingness to push forward a reorganization with little regard for legal or procedural constraints or Congressional oversight will cause staff and mission capacity to bear the brunt of the fallout. 

Policy Implications

Loss of Institutional Knowledge and Capacity 

USDA has begun to grapple with the implications of an unprecedented loss of experienced personnel. This mass exodus spans critical agencies from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and Farm Service Agency to research divisions like ARS, NIFA, and ERS. These losses undermine food safety, rural development, and science-based policymaking. Pressures on staff to take deferred resignation offers earlier this year culled some of the most seasoned and deeply knowledgeable staff. In a letter to Congress, union groups representing USDA employees outlined that “despite the importance of ARS research, 98 out of 167 food safety scientists have recently resigned”, leaving the future of food security research for all Americans at risk.

Reducing staff capacity also risks the agency’s ability to administer its slate of competitive grant programs that fund critical research. Even if Congress continues to fund research programs at existing discretionary spending levels, research funding will backslide if USDA lacks adequate staff to review applications and get funding out the door each year. Such delays could lead to rescission requests for unspent funds despite existing NIFA programs being regularly oversubscribed with applications from scientists at land-grant universities and other research institutions. The loss of experienced staff not only jeopardizes the continuity of ongoing agricultural R&D, but it also hobbles USDA’s capacity to pivot swiftly in crises like disease outbreaks, market shocks, or climate emergencies. Replacing this intellectual capital will be difficult, costly, and time-consuming, with long-lasting ramifications for program effectiveness, policy depth, and trust in USDA’s scientific and operational integrity.

Decline of U.S. Agricultural R&D Capacity

Sweeping freezes and cancellations of USDA research grants are dealing a severe blow to the non-federal agricultural R&D community, with entire programs suddenly paused or eliminated. The National Sustainable Agricultural Coalition estimates that across all programs, $6B of USDA grants have been frozen or terminated. These disruptions to extramural competitive research are compounded by the ongoing exodus of USDA’s most experienced in-house research staff, threatening to set back U.S. agricultural science for years. China already invests more heavily in agricultural R&D than the U.S., and these setbacks further erode America’s ability to compete on food security, climate resilience, and rural innovation. Unlike other scientific fields, agricultural research has direct and immediate end users. Farmers depend on improved cultivars, conservation practices, access to cheap energy, and pest management tools. When R&D pipelines stall, the consequences eventually ripple into the fields, orchards, and markets that sustain rural economies and national resilience. Agricultural research can have long lag times, making it even more dangerous to abandon investments in agricultural innovation today that will leave U.S. producers empty handed and less competitive in the years ahead.

Erosion of Trust and Stability in Rural Communities

Beyond the immediate impacts on research institutions, the sudden freezing and cancellation of USDA programs destabilize the very communities those programs are designed to serve. Farmers, rural co-ops, and community organizations build their planting, labor, and investment decisions around multi-year USDA commitments. When those commitments are abruptly halted, producers face stranded costs, disrupted harvest cycles, and foregone markets. Community-based organizations and local governments lose confidence in USDA as a reliable partner, undermining adoption of conservation practices, renewable energy, and local food initiatives. This breakdown in trust makes it harder to recruit farmers into new R&D pilots or climate-smart initiatives in the future, even if funding is later restored. The long-term result is a weakened feedback loop between federally funded science and its most critical end-users. This could lower the utility and on-farm adoption of tools, technologies and practices informed by future research. This weakens the economic return on taxpayer dollars dedicated to research projects. At worst, this broken feedback loop leaves rural economies more vulnerable to economic shocks.

Policy Recommendations

Congress holds the ultimate authority over federal appropriations and agency oversight, and thus has significant leverage to shape the future of USDA’s reorganization. How lawmakers exercise that authority will determine whether this reorganization strengthens or undermines the nation’s agricultural research and rural service infrastructure. Through targeted oversight, Congress can insist on transparency, protect against unlawful impoundments or relocations, and ensure continuity so that farmers and rural communities continue to benefit from the innovations generated by USDA’s research agencies. Options available to Congress include:

  1. Directing the USDA Office of Inspector General to assess USDA’s budget and legal authority for reorganization and relocation, ensuring taxpayer dollars are used lawfully and effectively.
  2. Requiring USDA to conduct an economic and workforce impact analysis with direct engagement of USDA staff to measure how reorganization affects agricultural research, rural economies, and service delivery.
  3. Calling for USDA to provide transparent justification for its decision to consolidate into five hubs, including criteria, alternatives considered, and implications for farmer access to research, extension services, and technical assistance.
  4. Requesting details on how USDA plans to retain staff expertise and capacity to operate existing grant programs at their current size, in accordance with funding appropriated by Congress, ensuring the continuity of vital agricultural research and services.

The proposed consolidation and reorganization of USDA illustrate both the risks and the possibilities ahead. Without careful oversight, these moves could erode research capacity, diminish workforce expertise, and disrupt vital services for farmers and rural communities. Yet we also know there are champions inside and outside government, across party lines, who recognize the value of agricultural R&D and its central role in national food security. With their leadership, there remains a pathway to repair what is broken, ensure transparency and accountability in reorganization efforts, and ultimately build an agricultural R&D infrastructure that delivers lasting benefits for all.

Beyond Binary Debates: How an “Abundance” Framing Can Restore Public Trust and Guide Climate Solutions

Public trust in U.S. government has ebbed and flowed over the decades, but it’s been stuck in the basement for a while. Not since 2005 have more than a third of Americans trusted the institution that underpins so much of American life.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Along with much progress, over the past two decades the U.S. became more unequal, saw stagnation or decline in many rural counties, stumbled into a housing crisis, and experienced worsening health outcomes. When the government can’t deliver (especially in core areas like health, housing, and economic vitality), trust in it wanes while the false promises of autocrats grow more appealing.

The strength of American democracy, in other words, hinges in large part on how well our government functions. This urgency helps explain why, at a moment when the United States is flirting with autocracy ever more vigorously, a book on precisely this topic became a #1 bestseller and prompted a debate around the “abundance agenda” that has turned quasi-existential for many in the policy world.

The abundance agenda, as described by Jonathan Chait, is “a collection of policy reforms designed to make it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work”, such as by streamlining regulations that constrain infrastructure buildout while scaling up major government programs and investments that can deliver public goods. 

Unfortunately, popular discourse often flattens the conversation around abundance into a polarized binary around whether or not regulations are good. That frame is overly reductionist. Of course badly designed or out-dated regulatory approaches can block progress or (as in the case of the housing policies that the book Abundance centers on) dry up the supply of public goods. But a theory of the whole regulatory world can’t be neatly extrapolated from urban zoning errors. In an era of accelerating corporate capture, both private and public power structures act to block change and capture profits and power. We need a savvier understanding of what happens at the intersections between the government and the economy, and of how policy translates to communities at local scales.

We should therefore regard “abundance” less as a prescriptive policy agenda than as a frame from which to ask and answer questions at the heart of rebuilding public trust in government. Questions like: “Why is it so hard to build?” “Why are bureaucratic processes so badly matched to societal challenges?” “Why, for heaven’s sake, does nothing work?”

These questions can push us in a direction distinct from the usual big vs. small government debates, or squabbles about the welfare state versus the market. Instead, they may help us ask about interactions within and between government and the economy – the network of relationships, complex causation, and historical choices – that often seem to have left us with a government that feels ill-suited to its times.

At the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), we, along with colleagues in the broader government capacity movement, are exploring these questions, with a particular focus on agendas for renewal and advancing a new paradigm of regulatory ingenuity. One emerging insight is that at its core, abundance is largely about the dynamics of incumbency, that is, about the persistence of broken systems and legacy power structures even as society evolves. A second, related, insight is that the debate around abundance isn’t really about de-regulation or the regulatory state (every government has regulations), but rather about how multi-pronged and polycentric strategies can break through the inertia of incumbent systems, enabling government to better deliver the goods, services, and functions it is tasked with while also driving big and necessary societal changes. And a third is that the abundance discourse must center distributive justice in order to deliver shared prosperity and restore public trust.

Moving the Boulder: Inertia, Climate Change, and the Mission State

The above insights are particularly helpful in guiding new and more durable solutions to climate change – a challenge that touches every aspect of our society, that involves complex questions of market and government design, and that is rooted in the challenges of changing incumbent systems.

Consider the following. It’s now been almost 16 years since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are a public danger and began trying to regulate them. To simplify a complex history, what happened on the regulatory front was this: the Obama administration tried to push regulations forward, the Trump administration worked to undo them, and then the cycle repeated through Biden and Trump II, culminating in the EPA’s recent move to revoke the endangerment finding.

We can certainly see the power of incumbency and inertia within this history. Over a decade and a half, the EPA regulated greenhouse gases from new power plants (though never very stringently), new cars and trucks (quite effectively cutting pollution, though never with mandates to actually electrify the fleet), and…that’s about it. The agency never implemented standards for the existing power plants and existing vehicles that emit the lion’s share of U.S. GHGs. It never regulated GHGs from industry or buildings. And thanks to the efforts of entrenched fossil-fuel actors and their political allies, the climate regulations EPA managed to get over the finish line were largely rolled back. 

None of this should be read as a knock on the dedicated civil servants at EPA and partner federal agencies who worked to produce GHG regulations that were scientifically grounded, legally defensible, technically feasible, and cost effective, even while grappling with the monumental challenges of outdated statutes and internal systems. But it certainly speaks to the challenge of securing lasting change.

The work of economist Mariana Mazzucato offers clues to how we might tackle this challenge; she paints a portrait of a “mission state” that integrates all of government’s levers to define and execute a particular objective, such as an effective, equitable, and durable clean energy transition. This theory isn’t a case for simplistic deregulation, nor is it a claim that regulations somehow “don’t work”. Rather, it suggests that (especially in a post-Chevron world) another round of battles over EPA authority won’t ultimately get us where we need to go on climate, nor will it help us productively reshape our institutions in ways that engender public trust.

The shift from one energy system foundation to another is messy – and it is inherently about power. As giant investment firms hustle to buy public utilities, enormous truck companies side with the Trump administration to dismantle state clean freight programs, and subsidies for clean energy are decried as unfair and market-distorting even though subsidies for fossil energy have persisted for nearly a century, it’s clear that corporate incumbents can capture public investments or capture government power to throttle change. Delivering change means thinking through the many ways incumbency creates systems of dependencies throughout society, and what options – from regulations to monetary policy to the ability to shape the rule of law – we have to respond. To disrupt energy incumbents and achieve energy abundance, in other words, we must couple regulatory and non-regulatory tools.

After all, the past 16 years haven’t just been a story of regulatory back-and-forth. They are also a story of how U.S. emissions have fallen relatively steadily in part due to federal policies, in part to state and local leadership, and in part to ongoing technological progress. Emissions will likely keep falling (though not fast enough) despite Trump-era rollbacks. That’s evidence that there’s not a one-to-one connection between regulatory policy and results.

We also have evidence of how potent it can be when economic and regulatory efforts pull in tandem. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was the first time the United States strongly invested in an economic pivot towards clean energy at scale and in a mission-oriented way. The results were immediate and transformative: U.S. clean energy and manufacturing investments took off in ways that far surpassed most expectations. And while the IRA has certainly come under attack during this Administration, it is nevertheless striking that today’s Republican trifecta retained large parts of the entirely Democratically-passed IRA, demonstrating the sticking power of a mission-oriented approach.

Conducting the Orchestra: The Need for an Expanded Playing Field

Thinking beyond regulatory levers (i.e., a multi-pronged approach) is necessary but not sufficient to chart the path forward for climate strategy. In a highly diverse and federalist nation like the United States, we must also think beyond federal government entirely.

That’s because, as Nobel-winning economist Dr. Elinor Ostrom put it, climate change is inherently a “polycentric” problem. The incumbent fossil systems at the root of the climate crisis are entrenched and cut across geographies as well as across public/private divisions. Therefore the federal government cannot effectively disrupt these systems alone. Many components of the fundamental economic and societal shifts that we need to realize the vision of clean energy abundance lie substantially outside sole federal control – and are best driven by the sustained investments and clear and consistent policies that our polarized politics aren’t delivering.  

For example, states, counties, and cities have long had primary oversight of their own economic development plans, their transportation plans, their building and zoning policies, and the make-up of their power mix. That means they have primary power both over most sources of climate pollution (two-thirds of the world’s climate emissions come from cities) and over how their economies and built environments change in response. These powers are fundamentally different from, and generally much broader than, powers held by federal regulatory agencies. Subnational governments also often have a greater ability to move funds, shape new complex policies across silos, and come up with creative responses that are inherently place-based. (The indispensable functions of subnational governments are also a reason why decades of cuts to subnational government budgets are a worryingly overlooked problem – austerity inhibits bottom-up climate progress.)

The private sector has similar ability to either constrain or drive forward new economic pathways. Indeed, with the private sector accounting for about half of funding for climate solutions, it is impossible to imagine a successful clean-energy transition that isn’t heavily predicated on private capabilities – particularly in the United States. While China’s clean-tech boom is largely the product of massive top-down subsidies and market interventions, a non-communist regime must rely on the private sector as a core partner rather than a mere executor of climate strategy. Fortunately, avenues for effectively engaging and leveraging the private sector in climate action are rapidly developing, including partnering public enterprise with private equity to sustain clean energy policies despite federal cutbacks.

An orchestra is an apt analogy. Just as many instruments and players come together in a symphony, so too can private and public actors across sectors and governance levels come together to achieve clean energy abundance. This analogy extends Mazzucato’s conception of a mission state into a “mission society”, envisioning a network that spans from cities to nation states, from private firms to civil actors, working in concert to overcome what Ben Rhodes calls a “crisis of short termism” and deliver a “coherent vision” of a better future.

Building Towards Shared Prosperity

For the vision to be coherent, it must resonate across socioeconomic and ideological boundaries, and it must recognize that the structures of racial, class, and gender disparity that have marked the American project from the beginning are emphatically still there. Such factors shape available pathways for progress and affect their justice and durability. For instance: electric vehicle adoption can only grow so quickly until we make it much easier for those living in rented or multifamily housing to charge. Cheaper renewables only mean so much when prevailing policies limit the financial benefits that are passed on to lower-income Americans.

To borrow, and complicate, a metaphor from Abundance: distributive justice questions are fundamentally not “everything bagel” seasonings to be disregarded as secondary to delivery goals. They are meaningful constraints on delivery as well as critical potentialities for better systems, and are hence central to policy and politics. No mission state or mission nation, addressing the polycentric landscape of networked change needed to shift big incumbent systems, can afford to dismiss or ignore them. Displacing those systems requires wrestling with inequality and striving to create shared prosperity through new approaches that are distributively fair.

That’s an approach rooted in orchestration, one that asks why some instruments drown out others, and how to alter relationships between players to produce better results. It understands that we can’t solve scarcity without centering distributive justice, because as long as deep structural disparities and structural power exist there is strong potential for the benefits of rapid energy or housing buildout to be channeled towards those who need them least. And it is capable of restabilizing the center of American society and restoring trust in U.S. government because it realistically grapples with the interests of incumbents while paying more than lip service to the interests of a dazzlingly diverse American public.

This re-fashioned abundance agenda can provide actual principles for administrative state reform because it knows what it is asking regulators, and the larger intersecting layers of government and civil society, to do: Systematically remove points of inertia to accelerate shared prosperity in a safe climate, while anticipating and solving for distributive risks of change.

Because again, the abundance debate isn’t really about whether or not regulations are good. It’s about unfreezing our politics by being clear and courageous about our goals for a society that works better and is capable of big things.

This is not the first time Americans have envisioned a better future in the midst of national crisis, or the first time we have collectively disrupted failed incumbent systems. From our messy foundation, to the beginnings of Reconstruction during the Civil War, to the architects of the New Deal envisioning an active and effective government in the midst of the Dust Bowl and Depression, the history of our nation is full of evidence that a compelling vision of truly democratic government can pull Americans back together despite deep and real problems. Each time, these debates have scrambled existing binaries, and driven realignment. We are on the verge of realignment again as the systems built up over the fossil era break down and our neoliberal order fragments. This is the right time to engage, together, in orchestrating what comes next.

Too Hot not to Handle

Every region in the U.S. is experiencing year after year of record-breaking heat. More households now require home cooling solutions to maintain safe and liveable indoor temperatures. Over the last two decades, U.S. consumers and the private sector have leaned heavily into purchasing and marketing conventional air conditioning (AC) systems, such as central air conditioning, window units and portable ACs, to cool down overheating homes. 

While AC can offer immediate relief, the rapid scaling of AC has created dangerous vulnerabilities: rising energy bills are straining people’s wallets and increasing utility debt, while surging electricity demand increases reliance on high-polluting power infrastructure and mounts pressure on an aging power grid increasingly prone to blackouts. There is also an increasing risk of elevated demand for electricity during a heat wave, overloading the grid and triggering prolonged blackouts, causing whole regions to lose their sole cooling strategy. This disruption could escalate into a public health emergency as homes and people overheat, leading to hundreds of deaths. 

What Americans need to be prepared for more extreme temperatures is a resilient cooling strategy. Resilient cooling is an approach that works across three interdependent systems — buildings, communities, and the electric grid — to affordably maintain safe indoor temperatures during extreme heat events and reduce power outage risks. 

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Too Hot not to handle
Resilient Cooling Policy and Strategy Toolkit

This toolkit introduces a set of Policy Principles for Resilient Cooling and outlines a set of actionable policy options and levers for state and local governments to foster broader access to resilient cooling technologies and strategies.

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This toolkit introduces a set of Policy Principles for Resilient Cooling and outlines a set of actionable policy options and levers for state and local governments to foster broader access to resilient cooling technologies and strategies. For example, states are the primary regulators of public utility commissions, architects of energy and building codes, and distributors of federal and state taxpayer dollars. Local governments are responsible for implementing building standards and zoning codes, enforcing housing and health codes, and operating public housing and retrofit programs that directly shape access to cooling. 

The Policy Principles for Resilient Cooling for a robust resilient cooling strategy are:

By adopting a resilient cooling strategy, state and local policymakers can address today’s overlapping energy, health, and affordability crises, advance American-made innovation, and ensure their communities are prepared for the hotter decades ahead.

Position on the Cool Corridors Act of 2025

The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 4420, the Cool Corridors Act of 2025, which would reauthorize the Healthy Streets program through 2030 and seeks to increase green and other shade infrastructure in high-heat areas.  

Science has shown that increasing sources of shade, including tree canopy and other shade infrastructure, can cool surrounding areas as much as 10 degrees, protecting people and critical infrastructure. The Cool Corridors Act of 2025 would create a unique and reliable funding source for communities to build out their shade infrastructure.

“Extreme heat is a serious threat to public health and critical infrastructure,” says Grace Wickerson, Senior Manager for Climate and Health at the Federation of American Scientists. “Increasing tree canopies and shade infrastructure is a key recommendation in FAS’ 2025 Heat Policy Agenda and we commend Reps Lawler and Strickland for taking action on this.”

Maintaining American Leadership through Early-Stage Research in Methane Removal

Methane is a potent gas with increasingly alarming effects on the climate, human health, agriculture, and the economy. Rapidly rising concentrations of atmospheric methane have contributed about a third of the global warming we’re experiencing today. Methane emissions also contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone, which causes an estimated 1 million premature deaths around the world annually and poses a significant threat to staple crops like wheat, soybeans, and rice. Overall, methane emissions cost the United States billions of dollars each year.

Most methane mitigation efforts to date have rightly focused on reducing methane emissions. However, the increasingly urgent impacts of methane create an increasingly urgent need to also explore options for methane removal. Methane removal is a new field exploring how methane, once in the atmosphere, could be broken down faster than with existing natural systems alone to help lower peak temperatures, and counteract some of the impact of increasing natural methane emissions. This field is currently in the “earliest stages of knowledge discovery”, meaning that there is a tremendous opportunity for the United States to establish its position as the unrivaled world leader in an emerging critical technology – a top goal of the second Trump Administration. Global interest in methane means that there is a largely untapped market for innovative methane-removal solutions. And investment in this field will also generate spillover knowledge discovery for associated fields, including atmospheric, materials, and biological sciences.

Congress and the Administration must move quickly to capitalize on this opportunity. Following the recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)’s October 2024 report, the federal government should incorporate early-stage methane removal research into its energy and earth systems research programs. This can be achieved through a relatively small investment of $50–80 million annually, over an initial 3–5 year phase. This first phase would focus on building foundational knowledge that lays the groundwork for potential future movement into more targeted, tangible applications. 

Challenge and Opportunity

Methane represents an important stability, security, and scientific frontier for the United States. We know that this gas is increasing the risk of severe weather, worsening air quality, harming American health, and reducing crop yields. Yet too much about methane remains poorly understood, including the cause(s) of its recent accelerating rise. A deeper understanding of methane could help scientists better address these impacts – including potentially through methane removal. 

Methane removal is an early-stage research field primed for new American-led breakthroughs and discoveries. To date, four potential methane-removal technologies and one enabling technology have been identified. They are: 

  1. Ecosystem uptake enhancement: Increasing microbes’ consumption of methane in soils and trees or getting plants to do so.
  2. Surface treatments: Applying special coatings that “eat” methane on panels, rooftops, or other surfaces. 
  3. Atmospheric oxidation enhancement: Increasing atmospheric reactions conducive to  methane breakdown. 
  4. Methane reactors: Breaking down methane in closed reactors using catalysts, reactive gases, or microbes. 
  5. Methane concentrators: A potentially enabling technology that would separate or enrich methane from other atmospheric components.

Figure 1. Atmospheric Methane Removal Technologies. (Source: National Academies Research Agenda)

Many of these proposed technologies have analogous traits to existing carbon dioxide removal methods and other interventions. However, much more research is needed to determine the net climate benefit, cost plausibility and social acceptability of all proposed methane removal approaches. The United States has positioned itself to lead on assessing and developing these technologies, such as through NASEM’s 2024 report and language included in the final FY24 appropriations package directing the Department of Energy to produce its own assessment of the field. The United States also has shown leadership with its civil society funding some of the earliest targeted research on methane removal.

But we risk ceding our leadership position – and a valuable opportunity to reap the benefits of being a first-mover on an emergent technology – without continued investment and momentum. Indeed, investing in methane removal research could help to improve our understanding of atmospheric chemistry and thus unlock novel discoveries in air quality improvement and new breakthrough materials for pollution management. Investing in methane removal, in short, would simultaneously improve environmental quality, unlock opportunities for entrepreneurship, and maintain America’s leadership in basic science and innovation. New research would also help the United States avoid possible technological surprises by competitors and other foreign governments, who otherwise could outpace the United States in their understanding of new systems and approaches and leave the country unprepared to assess and respond to deployment of methane removal elsewhere. 

Plan of Action

The federal government should  launch a five-year Methane Removal Initiative pursuant to the recommendations of the National Academies. A new five-year research initiative will allow the United States to evaluate and potentially develop important new tools and technologies to mitigate security risks arising from the dangerous accumulation of methane in the atmosphere while also helping to maintain U.S. global leadership in innovation. A well-coordinated, broad, cross-cutting federal government effort that fosters collaborations among agencies, research universities, national laboratories, industry, and philanthropy will enable the United States to lead science and technology improvements to meet these goals. To develop any new technologies on timescales most relevant for managing earth system risk, this foundational research should begin this year at an annual level of $50–$80 million per year. Research should last ideally five years and inform a more applied second-phase assessment recommended by the National Academies. 

Consistent with the recommendations from the National Academies’ Atmospheric Methane Removal Research Agenda and early philanthropic seed funding for methane removal research, the Methane Removal Initiative would:

  1. Establish a national methane removal research and development program involving key science agencies, primarily the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with contributions from other agencies including the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Interior, and Environmental Protection Agency. 
  2. Focus early investments in foundational research to advance U.S. interests and close knowledge gaps, specifically in the following areas:
    • The “sinks” and sources of methane, including both ground-level and atmospheric sinks as well as  human-driven and natural sources (40% of research budget), 
    • Methane removal technologies, as described below (30% of research budget); and 
    • Potential applications of methane removal, such as demonstration and deployment systems and their interaction with other climate response strategies (30% of research budget). 

The goal of this research program is ultimately to assess the need for and viability of new methods that could break down methane already in the atmosphere faster than natural processes already do alone. This program would be funded through several appropriations subcommittees in Congress, most notably Energy & Water Development and Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies. Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Interior and Environment also have funding recommendations relevant to their subcommittees. As scrutiny grows on the federal government’s fiscal balance, it should be noted that the scale of proposed research funding for methane removal is relatively modest and that no funding has been allocated to this potentially critical area of research to date. Forgoing these investments could result in neglecting this area of innovation at a critical time where there is an opportunity for the United States to demonstrate leadership. 

Conclusion

Emissions reductions remain the most cost-effective means of arresting the rise in atmospheric methane, and improvements in methane detection and leak mitigation will also help America increase its production efficiency by reducing losses, lowering costs, and improving global competitiveness. The National Academies confirms that methane removal will not replace mitigation on timescales relevant to limiting peak warming this century, but the world will still likely face “a substantial methane emissions gap between the trajectory of increasing methane emissions (including from anthropogenically amplified natural emissions) and technically available mitigation measures.” This creates a substantial security risk for the United States in the coming decades, especially given large uncertainties around the exact magnitude of heat-trapping emissions from natural systems. A modest annual investment of $50–80 million can pay much larger dividends in future years through new innovative advanced materials, improved atmospheric models, new pollution control methods, and by potentially enhancing security against these natural systems risks. The methane removal field is currently at a bottleneck: ideas for innovative research abound, but they remain resource-limited. The government has the opportunity to eliminate these bottlenecks to unleash prosperity and innovation as it has done for many other fields in the past. The intensifying rise of atmospheric methane presents the United States with a new grand challenge that has a clear path for action.

Frequently Asked Questions
Why might methane removal be a helpful tool?

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that plays an outsized role in near-term warming. Natural systems are an important source of this gas, and evidence indicates that these sources may be amplified in a warming world and emit even more. Even if we succeed in reducing anthropogenic emissions of methane, we “cannot ignore the possibility of accelerated methane release from natural systems, such as widespread permafrost thaw or release of methane hydrates from coastal systems in the Arctic.” Methane removal could potentially serve as a partial response to such methane-emitting natural feedback loops and tipping elements to reduce how much these systems further accelerate warming.

Can methane removal be used in place of methane emissions reduction?

No. Aggressive emissions reductions—for all greenhouse gases, including methane—are the highest priority. Methane removal cannot be used in place of methane emissions reduction. It’s incredibly urgent and important that methane emissions be reduced to the greatest extent possible, and that further innovation to develop additional methane abatement approaches is accelerated. These have the important added benefit of improving American energy security and preventing waste.

Is large-scale methane removal possible?

More research is needed to determine the viability and safety of large-scale methane removal. The current state of knowledge indicates several approaches may have the potential to remove >10 Mt of methane per year (~0.8 Gt CO₂ equivalent over a 20 year period), but the research is too early to verify feasibility, safety, and effectiveness. Methane has certain characteristics that suggest that large-scale and cost-effective removal could be possible, including favorable energy dynamics in turning it into CO2 and the lack of a need for storage.

How much methane removal do we need?

The volume of methane removal “needed” will depend on our overall emissions trajectory, atmospheric methane levels as influenced by anthropogenic emissions and anthropogenically amplified natural systems feedbacks, and target global temperatures. Some evidence indicates we may have already passed warming thresholds that trigger natural system feedbacks with increasing methane emissions. Depending on the ultimate extent of warming, permafrost methane release and enhanced methane emissions from wetland systems are estimated to potentially lead to ~40-200 Mt/yr of additional methane emissions and a further rise in global average temperatures (Zhang 2023, Kleinen 2021, Walter 2018, Turetsky 2020). Methane removal may prove to be the primary strategy to address these emissions.

Is methane removal permanent, and why would we want to oxidize methane if it only turns into carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas?

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 43 times stronger than carbon dioxide molecule for molecule, with an atmospheric lifetime of roughly a decade (IPCC, calculation from Table 7.15). Methane removal permanently removes methane from the atmosphere by oxidizing or breaking down methane into carbon dioxide, water, and other byproducts, or if biological processes are used, into new biomass. These products and byproducts will remain cycling through their respective systems, but without the more potent warming impact of methane. The carbon dioxide that remains following oxidation will still cause warming, but this is no different than what happens to the carbon in methane through natural removal processes. Methane removal approaches accelerate this process of turning the more potent greenhouse gas methane into the less potent greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, permanently removing the methane to reduce warming.

How much does methane removal cost?

The cost of methane removal will depend on the specific potential approach and further innovation, specific costs are not yet known at this stage. Some approaches have easier paths to cost plausibility, while others will require significant increases in catalytic, thermal or air processing efficiency to achieve cost plausibility. More research is needed to determine credible estimates, and innovation has the potential to significantly lower costs.

Can methane removal be used in place of carbon dioxide removal?

Greenhouse gases are not interchangeable. Methane removal cannot be used in place of carbon dioxide removal because it cannot address historical carbon dioxide emissions, manage long-term warming or counteract other effects (e.g., ocean acidification) that are results of humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions. Some methane removal approaches have characteristics that suggest that they may be able to get to scale quickly once developed and validated, should deployment be deemed appropriate, which could augment our near-term warming mitigation capacity on top of what carbon dioxide removal and emissions reductions offer.

How is methane removed from the atmosphere today? What are the natural methane sinks?

Methane has a short atmospheric lifetime due to substantial methane sinks. The primary methane sink is atmospheric oxidation, from hydroxyl radicals (~90% of the total sink) and chlorine radicals (0-5% of the total sink). The rest is consumed by methane-oxidizing bacteria and archaea in soils (~5%). While understood at a high level, there is substantial uncertainty in the strength of the sinks and their dynamics.

What are the drivers of the current rise in atmospheric methane levels?

Up until about 2000, the growth of methane was clearly driven by growing human-caused emissions from fossil fuels, agriculture, and waste. But starting in the mid-2000s, after a brief pause where global emissions were balanced by sinks, the level of methane in the atmosphere started growing again. At the same time, atmospheric measurements detected an isotopic signal that the new growth in methane may be from recent biological—as opposed to older fossil—origin. Multiple hypotheses exist for what the drivers might be, though the answer is almost certainly some combination of these. Hypotheses include changes in global food systems, growth of wetlands emissions as a result of the changing climate, a reduction in the rate of methane breakdown and/or the growth of fracking. Learn more in Spark’s blog post.

Methane’s atmospheric lifetime is only 9-12 years. Why would we need to remove it when it’s going to remove itself soon anyway?

Methane has a significant warming effect for the 9-12 years that it remains in the atmosphere. Given how potent methane is, and how much is currently being emitted, even with a short atmospheric lifetime, methane is accumulating in the atmosphere and the overall warming impact of current and recent methane emissions is 0.5°C. Methane removal approaches may someday be able to bring methane-driven warming down faster than with natural sinks alone. The significant risk of ongoing substantial methane sources, such as natural methane emissions from permafrost and wetlands, would lead to further accumulation. Exploring options to remove atmospheric methane is one strategy to better manage this risk.

When will these approaches be available?

Research into all methane removal approaches is just beginning, and there is no known timeline for their development or guarantee that they will prove to be viable and safe.

How could methane removal be paired with carbon dioxide removal? Could we just add methane sorbents or solvents to direct air capture systems?

Some methane removal and carbon dioxide removal approaches overlap. Some soil amendments may have an impact on both methane and carbon dioxide removal, and are currently being researched. Catalytic methane-oxidizing processes could be added to direct air capture (DAC) systems for carbon dioxide, but more innovation will be needed to make these systems sufficiently efficient to be feasible. If all planned DAC capacity also removed methane, it would make a meaningful difference, but still fall very short of the scale of methane removal that could be needed to address rising natural methane emissions, and additional approaches should be researched in parallel.

How much overlap is there between methane removal approaches and mitigation options, for example around landfills, rice paddies and dairy barns?

Methane emissions destruction refers to the oxidation of methane from higher-methane-concentration air streams from sources, for example air in dairy barns. There is technical overlap between some methane emissions destruction and methane removal approaches, but each area has its own set of constraints that will also lead to non-overlapping approaches, given different methane concentrations to treat, and different form-factor constraints.

Federal Climate Policy Is Being Gutted. What Does That Say About How Well It Was Working?

On the left is the Bankside Power Station in 1953. That vast relic of the fossil era once towered over London, oily smoke pouring from its towering chimney. These days, Bankside looks like the right:

Bankside Power Station in 1953 via A London Inheritance; Bankside today via the Telegraph.

The old power plant’s vast turbine hall is now at the heart of the airy Tate Modern Art Museum; sculptures rest where the boilers once churned.

Bankside’s evolution into the Tate illustrates that transformations, both literal and figurative, are possible for our energy and economic systems. Some degree of demolition – if paired with a plan – can open up space for something innovative and durable.

Today, the entire energy sector is undergoing a massive transformation. After years of flat energy demand served by aging fossil power plants, solar energy and battery storage are increasingly dominating energy additions to meet rising load. Global investment in clean energy will be twice as big as investment in fossil fuels this year. But in the United States, the energy sector is also undergoing substantial regulatory demolition, courtesy of a wave of executive and Congressional attacks and sweeping potential cuts to tax credits for clean energy. 

What’s missing is a compelling plan for the future. The plan certainly shouldn’t be to cede leadership on modern energy technologies to China, as President Trump seems to be suggesting; that approach is geopolitically unwise and, frankly, economically idiotic. But neither should the plan be to just re-erect the systems that are being torn down. Those systems, in many ways, weren’t working. We need a new plan – a new paradigm – for the next era of climate and clean energy progress in the United States.

Asking Good Questions About Climate Policy Designs

How do we turn demolition into a superior remodel? First, we have to agree on what we’re trying to build. Let’s start with what should be three unobjectionable principles.

Principle 1. Climate change is a problem worth fixing – fast. Climate change is staggeringly expensive. Climate change also wrecks entire cities, takes lives, and generally makes people more miserable. Climate change, in short, is a problem we must fix. Ignoring and defunding climate science is not going to make it go away.

Principle 2. What we do should work. Tackling the climate crisis isn’t just about cleaning up smokestacks or sewer outflows; it’s about shifting a national economic system and physical infrastructure that has been rooted in fossil fuels for more than a century. Our responses must reflect this reality. To the extent possible, we will be much better served by developing fit-for-purpose solutions rather than just press-ganging old institutions, statutes, and technologies into climate service. 

Principle 3. What we do should last. The half-life of many climate strategies in the United States has been woefully short. The Clean Power Plan, much touted by President Obama, never went into force. The Trump administration has now turned off California’s clean vehicle programs multiple times. Much of this hyperpolarized back-and-forth is driven by a combination of far-right opposition to regulation as a matter of principle and the fossil fuel industry pushing mass de-regulation for self-enrichment – a frustrating reality, but one that can only be altered by new strategies that are potent enough to displace vocal political constituencies and entrenched legacy corporate interests.

With these principles in mind, the path forward becomes clearer. We can agree that ambitious climate policy is necessary; protecting Americans from climate threats and destabilization (Principle 1) directly aligns with the founding Constitutional objectives of ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, and promoting general welfare. We can also agree that the problem in front of us is figuring out which tools we need, not how to retain the tools we had, regardless of their demonstrated efficacy (Principle 2). And we can recognize that achieving progress in the long run requires solutions that are both politically and economically durable (Principle 3).

Below, we consider how these principles might guide our responses to this summer’s crop of regulatory reversals and proposed shifts in federal investment.

Honing Regulatory Approaches

The Trump Administration recently announced that it plans to dismantle the “endangerment finding” – the legal predicate for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and transportation; meanwhile, the Senate revoked permission for California to enforce key car and truck emission standards. It has also proposed to roll back key power plant toxic and greenhouse gas standards. We agree with those who think that these actions are scientifically baseless and likely illegal, and therefore support efforts to counter them. But we should also reckon honestly with how the regulatory tools we are defending have played out so far.

Federal and state pollution rules have indisputably been a giant public-health victory. EPA standards under the Clean Air Act led directly to dramatic reductions in harmful particulate matter and other air pollutants, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and avoiding millions of cases of asthma and other respiratory diseases. Federal regulations similarly caused mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants to drop by 90% in just over a decade. Pending federal rollbacks of mercury rules thus warrant vocal opposition. In the transportation sector, tailpipe emissions standards for traditional combustion vehicles have been impressively effective. These and other rules have indeed delivered some climate benefits by forcing the fossil fuel industry to face pollution clean-up costs and driving development of clean technologies.

But if our primary goal is motivating a broad energy transition (i.e., what needs to happen per Principle 1), then we should think beyond pollution rules as our only tools – and allocate resources beyond immediate defensive fights. Why? The first reason is that, as we have previously written, these rules are poorly equipped to drive that transition. Federal and state environmental agencies can do many things well, but running national economic strategy and industrial policy primarily through pollution statutes is hardly the obvious choice (Principle 2). 

Consider the power sector. The most promising path to decarbonize the grid is actually speeding up replacement of old coal and gas plants with renewables by easing unduly complex interconnection processes that would speed adding clean energy to address rising demand, and allow the old plants to retire and be replaced – not bolting pollution-control devices on ancient smokestacks. That’s an economic and grid policy puzzle, not a pollution regulatory challenge, at heart. Most new power plants are renewable- or battery-powered anyway. Some new gas plants might be built in response to growing demand, but the gas turbine pipeline is backed up, limiting the scope of new fossil power, and cheaper clean power is coming online much more quickly wherever grid regulators have their act together. Certainly regulations could help accelerate this shift, but the evidence suggests that they may be complementary, not primary, tools.

The upshot is that economics and subnational policies, not federal greenhouse gas regulation, have largely driven power plant decarbonization to date and therefore warrant our central focus. Indeed, states that have made adding renewable infrastructure easy, like Texas, have often been ahead of states, like California, where regulatory targets are stronger but infrastructure is harder to build. (It’s also worth noting that these same economics mean that the Trump Administration’s efforts to revert back to a wholly fossil fuel economy by repealing federal pollution standards will largely fail – again, wrong tool to substantially change energy trajectories.)

The second reason is that applying pollution rules to climate challenges has hardly been a lasting strategy (Principle 3). Despite nearly two decades of trying, no regulations for carbon emissions from existing power plants have ever been implemented. It turns out to be very hard, especially with the rise of conservative judiciaries, to write legal regulations for power plants under the Clean Air Act that both stand up in Court and actually yield substantial emissions reductions. 

In transportation, pioneering electric vehicle (EV) standards from California – helped along by top-down economic leverage applied by the Obama administration – did indeed begin a significant shift and start winning market share for new electric car and truck companies; under the Biden administration, California doubled down with a new set of standards intended to ultimately phase out all sales of gas-powered cars while the EPA issued tailpipe emissions standards that put the industry on course to achieve at least 50% EV sales by 2030. But California’s EV standards have now been rolled back by the Trump administration and a GOP-controlled Congress multiple times; the same is true for the EPA rules. Lest we think that the Republican party is the sole obstacle to a climate-focused regulatory regime that lasts in the auto sector, it is worth noting that Democratic states led the way on rollbacks. Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Vermont all paused, delayed, or otherwise fuzzed up their plans to deploy some of their EV rules before Congress acted against California. The upshot is that environmental standards, on their own, cannot politically sustain an economic transition at this scale without significant complementary policies.

Now, we certainly shouldn’t abandon pollution rules – they deliver massive health and environmental benefits, while forcing the market to more accurately account for the costs of polluting technologies, But environmental statutes built primarily to reduce smokestack and tailpipe emissions remain important but are simply not designed to be the primary driver of wholesale economic and industrial change. Unsurprisingly, efforts to make them do that anyway have not gone particularly well – so much so that, today, greenhouse gas pollution standards for most economic sectors either do not exist, or have run into implementation barriers. These observations should guide us to double down on the policies that improve the economics of clean energy and clean technology — from financial incentives to reforms that make it easier to build — while developing new regulatory frameworks that avoid the pitfalls of the existing Clean Air Act playbook. For example, we might learn from state regulations like clean electricity standards that have driven deployment and largely withstood political swings.

To mildly belabor the point – pollution standards form part of the scaffolding needed to make climate progress, but they don’t look like the load-bearing center of it.

Refocusing Industrial Policy

Our plan for the future demands fresh thinking on industrial policy as well as regulatory design. Years ago, Nobel laureate Dr. Elinor Ostrom pointed out that economic systems shift not as a result of centralized fiat, from the White House or elsewhere, but from a “polycentric” set of decisions rippling out from every level of government and firm. That proposition has been amply borne out in the clean energy space by waves of technology innovation, often anchored by state and local procurement, regional technology clusters, and pioneering financial institutions like green banks.

The Biden Administration responded to these emerging understandings with the  CHIPS and Science Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – a package of legislation intended to shore up U.S. leadership in clean technology through investments that cut across sectors and geographies. These bills included many provisions and programs with top-down designs, but the package as a whole but did engage with, and encourage, polycentric and deep change.

Here again, taking a serious look at how this package played out can help us understand what industrial policies are most likely to work (Principle 2) and to last (Principle 3) moving forward.

We might begin by asking which domestic clean-technology industries need long-term support and which do not in light of (i) the multi-layered and polycentric structure of our economy, and (ii) the state of play in individual economic sectors and firms at the subnational level. IRA revisions that appropriately phase down support for mature technologies in a given sector or region where deployment is sufficient to cut emissions at an adequate pace could be worth exploring in this light – but only if market-distorting supports for fossil-fuel incumbents are also removed. We appreciate thoughtful reform proposals that have been put forward by those on the left and right.

More directly: If the United States wants to phase down, say, clean power tax credits, such changes should properly be phased with removals of support for fossil power plants and interconnection barriers, shifting the entire energy market towards a fair competition to meet increasing load, as well as new durable regulatory structures that ensure a transition to a low-carbon economy at a sufficient pace. Subsidies and other incentives could appropriately be retained for technologies (e.g., advanced battery storage and nuclear) that are still in relatively early stages and/or for which there is a particularly compelling argument for strengthening U.S. leadership. One could similarly imagine a gradual shift away from EV tax credits – if other transportation system spending was also reallocated to properly balance support among highways, EV charging stations, transit, and other types of transportation infrastructure. In short, economic tools have tremendous power to drive climate progress, but must be paired with the systemic reforms needed to ensure that clean energy technologies have a fair pathway to achieving long-term economic durability.

Our analysis can also touch on geopolitical strategy. It is true that U.S. competitors are ahead in many clean technology fields; it is simultaneously true that the United States has a massive industrial and research base that can pivot ably with support. A pure on-shoring approach is likely to be unwise – and we have just seen courts enjoin the administration’s fiat tariff policy that sought that result. That’s a good opportunity to have a more thoughtful conversation (in which many are already engaging) on areas where tariffs, public subsidies, and other on-shoring planning can actually position our nation for long-term economic competition on clean technology. Opportunities that rise to the top include advanced manufacturing, such as for batteries, and critical industries, like the auto sector. There is also a surprising but potent national security imperative to center clean energy infrastructure in U.S. industrial policy, given the growing threat of foreign cyberattacks that are exploiting “seams” in fragile legacy energy systems.

Finally, our analysis suggests that states, which are primarily responsible for economic policy in their jurisdictions, have a role to play in this polycentric strategy that extends beyond simply replicating repealed federal regulations. States have a real opportunity in this moment to wed regulatory initiatives with creative whole-of-the-economy approaches that can actually deliver change and clean economic diversification, positioning them well to outlast this period of churn and prosper in a global clean energy transition.

A successful and “sticky” modern industrial policy must weave together all of the above considerations – it must be intentionally engineered to achieve economic and political durability through polycentric change, rather than relying solely or predominantly on large public subsidies. 

Conclusion

The Trump Administration has moved with alarming speed to demolish programs, regulations, and institutions that were intended to make our communities and planet more liveable. Such wholesale demolition is unwarranted, unwise, and should not proceed unchecked. At the same time, it is, as ever, crucial to plan for the future. There is broad agreement that achieving an effective, equitable, and ethical energy transition requires us to do something different. Yet there are few transpartisan efforts to boldly reimagine regulatory and economic paradigms. Of course, we are not naive: political gridlock, entrenched special interests, and institutional inertia are formidable obstacles to overcome. But there is still room, and need, to try – and effort bears better fruit when aimed at the right problems. We can begin by seriously debating which past approaches work, which need to be improved, which ultimately need imaginative recasting to succeed in our ever-more complex world. Answers may be unexpected. After all, who would have thought that the ultimate best future of the vast oil-fired power station south of the Thames with which we began this essay would, a few decades later, be a serene and silent hall full of light and reflection?

AI, Energy, and Climate: What’s at Stake? Hint: A lot.

DC’s first-ever Climate Week brought with it many chances to discuss the hottest-button topics in climate innovation and policy. FAS took the opportunity to do just that, by hosting a panel to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), energy, and climate issues with leading experts. Dr. Oliver Stephenson, FAS’ Associate Director of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Policy, sat down with Dr. Tanya Das, Dr. Costa Samaras, and Charles Hua to discuss what’s at stake at this critical crossroads moment. 

Missed the panel? Don’t fret. Read on to learn the need-to-knows. Here’s how these experts think we can maximize the “good” and minimize the “bad” of AI and data centers, leverage research and development (R&D) to make AI tools more successful and efficient, and how to better align incentives for AI growth with the public good.

First, Some Level Setting 

The panelists took their time to make sure the audience understood two key facts regarding this space. First, not all data centers are utilized for AI. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) estimates that AI applications are only used in about 10-20% of data centers. The rest? Data storage, web hosting capabilities, other cloud computing, and more.

Second, load growth due to the energy demand of data centers is happening, but the exact degree still remains unknown. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) models project that data centers in the US will consume anywhere between 6.7% and 12% of US electricity generation by 2028. For a country that consumes roughly 4 trillion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity each year, this estimation spans a couple hundred billion kWh/year from the low end to the high. Also, these projections are calculated based on different assumptions that factor in AI energy efficiency improvements, hardware availability, regulatory decisions, modeling advancements, and just how much demand there will be for AI. When each of these conditions are evolving daily, even the most credible projections come with a good amount of uncertainty.

There is also ambiguity in the numbers and in the projections at the local and state levels, as many data center companies shop around to multiple utilities to get the best deal. This can sometimes lead to projects getting counted twice in local projections. Researchers at LBNL have recently said they can confidently make data center energy projections out to 2028. Beyond that, they can’t make reasonable assumptions about data center load growth amid growing load from other sectors working to electrify—like decarbonizing buildings and electric vehicle (EV) adoption.

Maximizing the Good, Minimizing the Bad

As data center clusters continue to proliferate across the United States, their impacts—on energy systems and load growth, water resources, housing markets, and electricity rates—will be most acutely felt at the state and local levels. DC’s nearby neighbor Northern Virginia has become a “data center alley” with more than 200 data centers in Loudoun County alone, and another 117 in the planning stages. 

States ultimately hold the power to shape the future of the industry through utility regulation, zoning laws, tax incentives, and grid planning – with specific emphasis on state Public Utility Commissions (PUCs). PUCs have a large influence on where data centers can be connected to the grid and the accompanying rate structure for how each data center pays for its power—whether through tariffs, increasing consumer rates, or other cost agreements. It is imperative that vulnerable ratepayers are not left to shoulder the costs and risks associated with the rapid expansion of data centers, including higher electricity bills, increased grid strain, and environmental degradation.

Panelists emphasized that despite the potential negative impacts of AI and data centers expansion, leaders have a real opportunity to leverage AI to maximize positive outcomes—like improving grid efficiency, accelerating clean energy deployment, and optimizing public services—while minimizing harms like overconsumption of energy and water, or reinforcing environmental injustice. Doing so, however, will require new economic and political incentives that align private investment with public benefit.

Research & Development at the Department of Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is uniquely positioned to help solve the challenges AI and data centers pose, as the agency sits at the critical intersection of AI development, high-performance computing, and energy systems. DOE’s national laboratories have been central to advancing AI capabilities: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was indeed the first to integrate graphics processing units (GPUs) into supercomputers, pioneering a new era of AI training and modeling capacity. DOE also runs two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers – Aurora at Argonne National Lab and Frontier at ORNL – cementing the U.S.’ leadership in high-performance computing.  

Beyond computing, DOE plays a key role in modernizing grid infrastructure, advancing clean energy technologies, and setting efficiency standards for energy-intensive operations like data centers. The agency has also launched programs like the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security and Technology (FASST), overseen by the Office of Critical and Emerging Tech (CET), to coordinate AI-related activities across its programs.

As the intersection of AI and energy deepens—with AI driving data center expansion and offering tools to manage its impact—DOE must remain at the center of this conversation, and it must continue to deliver. The stakes are high: how we manage this convergence will influence not only the pace of technological innovation but also the equity and sustainability of our energy future.

Incentivizing Incentives: Aligning AI Growth with the Public Good 

The U.S. is poised to spend a massive amount of carbon to power the next wave of artificial intelligence. From training LLMs to supporting real-time AI applications, the energy intensity of this sector is undeniable—and growing. That means we’re not just investing financially in AI; we’re investing environmentally. To ensure that this investment delivers public value, we must align political and economic incentives with societal outcomes like grid stability, decarbonization, and real benefits for American communities.

One of the clearest opportunities lies in making data centers more responsive to the needs of the electric grid. While these facilities consume enormous amounts of power, they also hold untapped potential to act as flexible loads—adjusting their demand based on grid conditions to support reliability and integrate clean energy. The challenge? There’s currently little economic incentive for them to do so. One panelist noted skepticism that market structures alone will drive this shift without targeted policy support or regulatory nudges.

Instead, many data centers continue to benefit from “sweetheart deals”—generous tax abatements and economic development incentives offered by states and municipalities eager to attract investment. These agreements often lack transparency and rarely require companies to contribute to local energy resilience or emissions goals. For example, in several states, local governments have offered multi-decade property tax exemptions or reduced electricity rates without any accountability for climate impact or grid contributions.

New AI x Energy Policy Ideas Underway

If we’re going to spend gigatons of carbon in pursuit of AI-driven innovation, we must be strategic about where and how we direct incentives. That means:

We don’t just need more incentives—we need better ones. And we need to ensure they serve public priorities, not just private profit. Through our AI x Energy Policy Sprint, FAS is working with leading experts to develop promising policy solutions for the Trump administration, Congress, and state and local governments. These policy memos will address how to: mitigate the energy and environmental impacts of AI systems and data centers, enhance the reliability and efficiency of energy systems using AI applications, and unlock transformative technological solutions with AI and energy R&D. 

Right now, we have a rare opportunity to shape U.S. policy at the critical intersection of AI and energy. Acting decisively today ensures we can harness AI to drive innovation, revolutionize energy solutions, and sustainably integrate transformative technologies into our infrastructure.

Extreme Heat and Wildfire Smoke: Consequences for Communities

More Extreme Weather Leads to More Public Health Emergencies

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke both pose significant and worsening public health threats in the United States. Extreme heat causes the premature deaths of an estimated 10,000 people in the U.S. each year, while more frequent and widespread wildfire smoke exposure has set back decades of progress on air quality in many states. Importantly, these two hazards are related: extreme heat can worsen and prolong wildfire risk, which can increase smoke exposure. 

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke events are independently becoming more frequent and severe, but what is overlooked is that they are often occurring in the same place at the same time. Emerging research suggests that the combined impact of these hazards may be worse than the sum of their individual impacts. These combined impacts have the potential to put additional pressure on already overburdened healthcare systems, public budgets, and vulnerable communities. Failing to account for these combined impacts could leave communities unprepared for these extreme weather events in 2025 and beyond.

To ensure resilience and improve public health outcomes for all, policymakers should consider the intersection of wildfire smoke and extreme heat at all levels of government. Our understanding of how extreme heat and wildfire smoke compound is still nascent, which limits national and local capacity to plan ahead. Researchers and policymakers should invest in understanding how extreme heat and wildfire smoke compound and use this knowledge to design synergistic solutions that enhance infrastructure resilience and ultimately save lives. 

Intersecting Health Impacts of Extremely Hot, Smoky Days

Wildfire smoke and extreme heat can each be deadly. As mentioned, exposure to extreme heat causes the premature deaths of an estimated 10,000 people in the U.S. a year. Long-term exposure to extreme heat can also worsen chronic conditions like kidney disease, diabetes, hypertension, and asthma. Exposure to the primary component of wildfire smoke, known as fine particulate matter (PM2.5), contributes to an additional estimated 16,000 American deaths annually. Wildfire smoke exacerbates and causes various respiratory and cardiovascular effects along with other health issues, such as asthma attacks and heart failure, increasing risk of early death. 

New research suggests that the compounding health impacts of heat and smoke co-exposure could be even worse. For example, a recent analysis found that the co-occurrence of extreme heat and wildfire smoke in California leads to more hospitalizations for cardiopulmonary problems than on heat days or smoke days alone. 

Extreme heat also contributes to the formation of ground-level ozone. Like wildfire smoke, ground-level ozone can cause respiratory problems and exacerbate pre-existing conditions. This has already happened at scale: during the 2020 wildfire season, more than 68% of the western U.S. – about 43 million people – were affected in a single day by both ground-level ozone extremes and fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke.

Impacts on Populations Most Vulnerable to Combined Heat and Smoke

While extreme heat and wildfire smoke can pose health risks to everyone, there are some groups that are more vulnerable either because they are more likely to be exposed, they are more likely to suffer more severe health consequences when they are exposed, or both. Below, we highlight groups that are most vulnerable to extreme heat and smoke and therefore may be vulnerable to the compound impacts of these hazards. More research is needed to understand how the compound impacts will affect the health of these populations.

Housing-Vulnerable and Housing-Insecure People

Access to air conditioning at home and work, tree canopy cover, buildings with efficient wildfire smoke filtration and heat insulation and cooling capacities, and access to  smoke centers are all important protective factors against the effects of extreme heat and/or wildfire smoke. People lacking these types of infrastructure are at higher risk for the health effects of these two hazards as a result of increased exposure. In California, for example, communities with lower incomes and higher population density experience a greater likelihood of negative health impacts from hazards like wildfire smoke and extreme heat. 

Outdoor Workers

Representing about 33% of the national workforce, outdoor workers — farmworkers, firefighters, and construction workers — experience much higher rates of exposure to environmental hazards, including wildfire smoke and extreme heat, than other workers. Farmworkers are particularly vulnerable even among outdoor workers; in fact, they face a 35 times greater risk of heat exposure death than other outdoor workers. Additionally, outdoor workers are often lower-income, making it harder to afford protections and seek necessary medical care. Twenty percent of agricultural worker families live below the national poverty line.

Wildfire smoke exposure is estimated to have caused $125 billion in lost wages annually from 2007 to 2019 and extreme heat exposure is estimated to cause $100 billion in wage losses each year. Without any changes to policies and practice, these numbers are only expected to rise. These income losses may exacerbate inequities in poverty rates and economic mobility, which determine overall health outcomes.

Pregnant Mothers and Infants

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke also pose a significant threat to the health of pregnant mothers and their babies. For instance, preterm birth is more likely during periods of higher temperatures and during wildfire smoke events. This correlation is significantly stronger among people who were simultaneously exposed to extreme heat and wildfire smoke PM2.5.

Preterm birth comes with an array of risks for both the pregnant mothers and baby and is the leading cause of infant mortality. Babies born prematurely are more likely to have a range of serious health complications in addition to long-term developmental challenges. For the parent, having a preterm baby can have significant mental health impacts and financial challenges.

Children

Wildfire smoke and extreme heat both have significant impacts on children’s health, development, and learning. Children are uniquely vulnerable to heat because their bodies do not regulate temperatures as efficiently as adults, making it harder to cool down and putting their bodies under stress. Children are also more vulnerable to air pollution from wildfire smoke as they inhale more air relative to their weight than adults and because their bodies and brains are still developing.  PM2.5 exposure from wildfires has been attributed to neuropsychological effects, such as ADHD, autism, impaired school performance, and decreased memory. 

When schools remain open during extreme weather events like heat and smoke, student learning is impacted. Research has found that each 1℉ increase in temperature leads to 1% decrease in annual academic achievement. However, when schools close due to wildfire smoke or heat events, children lose crucial learning time and families must secure alternative childcare.

Low-income students are more likely to be in schools without adequate air conditioning because their districts have fewer funds available for school improvement projects. This barrier has only been partially remedied in recent years through federal investments.

Older Adults

Older adults are more likely to have multiple chronic conditions, many of which increase vulnerability to extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and their combined effects. Older adults are also more likely to take regular medication, such as beta blockers for heart conditions, which increase predisposition to heat-related illness.

The most medically vulnerable older adults are in long-term care facilities. There is currently a national standard for operating temperatures for long-term care facilities, requiring them to operate at or below 81℉. There is no correlatory standard for wildfire smoke. Preliminary studies have found that long-term care facilities are unprepared for smoke events; in some facilities the indoor air quality is no better than the outdoor air quality.

Challenges and Opportunities for the Healthcare Sector

The impacts of extreme heat and smoke have profound implications for public health and therefore for healthcare systems and costs. Extreme heat alone is expected to lead to $1 billion in U.S. healthcare costs every summer, while wildfire smoke is estimated to cost the healthcare system $16 billion every year from respiratory hospital visits and PM2.5 related deaths. 

Despite these high stakes, healthcare providers and systems are not adequately prepared to address wildfire smoke, extreme heat, and their combined effects. Healthcare preparedness and response is limited by a lack of real-time information about morbidity and mortality expected from individual extreme heat and smoke events. For example, wildfire smoke events are often reported on a one-month delay, making it difficult to anticipate smoke impacts in real time. Further, despite the risks posed by heat and smoke independently and when combined, healthcare providers are largely not receiving education about environmental health and climate change. As a result, physicians also do not routinely screen their patients for health risk and existing protective measures, such as the existence of air conditioning and air filtration in the home. 

Potential solutions to improve preparedness in the healthcare sector include developing more reliable real-time information about the potential impacts of smoke, heat, and both combined; training physicians in screening patients for risk of heat and smoke exposure; and training physicians in how to help patients manage extreme weather risks. 

Challenges and Opportunities for Federal, State, and Local Governments 

State and local governments have a role to play in building facilities that are resilient to extreme heat and wildfire smoke as well as educating people about how to protect themselves. However, funding for extreme heat and wildfire smoke is scarce and difficult for local jurisdictions in need to obtain. While some federal funding is available specifically to support smoke preparedness (e.g., EPA’s Wildfire Smoke Preparedness in Community Buildings Grant Program) and heat preparedness (e.g. NOAA NIHHIS’ Centers of Excellence), experts note that the funding landscape for both hazards is “limited and fragmented.” To date, communities have not been able to secure federal disaster funding for smoke or heat events through the Public Health Emergency Declaration or the Stafford Act. FEMA currently excludes the impacts on human health from economic valuations of losses from a disaster. As a result, many of these impacted communities never see investments from post-disaster hazard mitigation, which could potentially build community resilience to future events. Even if a declaration was made, it would likely be for one “event”, e.g. wildfire smoke or extreme heat, with recovery dollars targeted towards mitigating the impacts of that event. Without careful consideration, rebuilding and resilience investments might be maladaptive for addressing the combined impacts.

Next Steps

The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission report offers a number of recommendations to improve how the federal government can better support communities in preparing for the impacts of wildfire smoke and acknowledges the need for more research on how heat and wildfire smoke compound. FAS has also developed a whole-government strategy towards extreme heat response, resilience, and preparedness that includes nearly 200 recommendations and notes the need for more data inputs on compounding hazards like wildfire smoke. Policymakers at the federal level should support research at the intersection of these topics and explore opportunities for providing technical assistance and funding that builds resilience to both hazards.

Understanding and planning for the compound impacts of extreme heat and wildfire smoke will improve public health preparedness, mitigate public exposure to extreme heat and wildfire smoke, and minimize economic losses. As the overarching research at this intersection is still emerging, there is a need for more data to inform policy actions that effectively allocate resources and reduce harm to the most vulnerable populations. The federal government must prioritize protection from both extreme heat and wildfire smoke, along with their combined effects, to fulfill its obligation to keep the public safe.