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We chat with data scientist Clayton Page Aldern about neuroplasticity, the problem of consciousness, and his new book, The Weight of Nature.
Thinking is physical. Thankfully, one of the many wonderful things about the human brain is that we don’t have to confront this unsettling fact very much — that the environment around us shapes our perceptions and reactions, that all human experience is the result of secreted hormones and synaptic transmission. In other words, our brains let us think we’re in charge.
Unfortunately, as with so many other things, climate change is interfering. “As the environment changes, you should expect to change too,” writes author, neuroscientist, and Grist senior data scientist Clayton Page Aldern in his gripping new book, The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains. “It is the job of your brain to model the world as it is,” he goes on. “And the world is mutating.”
You may already be familiar with some of his examples — that the heat can make us dumber and more aggressive, and that people who survive traumatic weather events can get post-traumatic stress disorder. But Aldern’s book — which, in spite of its author’s technical background, is immensely readable and literary — pushes far past the familiar, touching on topics as wide-ranging as brain-eating amoebas, language death, and free will. The common theme throughout, though, is that climate is our unseen “puppeteer.”
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You use the phrase “the weight of nature” in several contexts throughout the book. It made me think of both Altas, as in “the weight on our shoulders,” and also the idea of determinism that you get into a bit. At what point in the writing process did you come up with the title?
It was early on that the title came to me, but it was not the original title. I’ve been working on this project for six or seven years, and initially my working title was something awful like Nature’s Marionette, which sought to communicate this notion of forcing our hands — the puppetmaster behind our decision-making.
But I wanted to be able to communicate this feeling of being guided by the environment — in addition to carrying said burden — because it felt like weight. It does feel heavy, and heaviness does a lot of things, including forcing our hands.
Is there something about brains that makes them uniquely vulnerable to climate change? I ask because I’m sure books could be written about how climate change hurts our hearts or lungs, too. But it seems to impact our brains in a variety of terrifying forms.
Hearts do one thing: They beat. Brains are always reaching outward, and so, by extension, they’re enmeshed in the same manner in which one can imagine our entire bodies to be enmeshed in this “environment.”
More specifically, in addition to the reaching-out action, brains are actively modeling the world around us. That is what they do. This notion of having an active organ, as opposed to a somewhat passive organ, makes the difference because brains are always integrating new information about the world. And the world is changing.
As we come to terms with this changing world — and when I use the phrase “come to terms,” I’m not seeking to deploy some kind of intellectual or emotional metaphor here. I mean, on a biophysical level, as we’re coming to terms with these changes — then neurochemical changes result accordingly. We respond in kind. Certainly, our other organs are adaptive to various degrees, but the whole point of the brain is its adaptive nature, right? It seeks to model the world around us, and it implements change through a system known as neuroplasticity. It is an organ that is built for modeling and integrating change. And so, is it any wonder that climate change acts directly on this organ in ways it may not act on others?
The chapter about Karl Friston and the give-and-take of perception — in which you write, “our actions are the world’s sensations, and our sensations are the world’s actions” — completely blew my mind.
I haven’t even told this to my editor, but I think if I’m ever granted the privilege of writing a book again, I might try to pitch a biography of Karl Friston. His research is unbelievably interesting.
Is his work well-known among neuroscientists, or is it kind of fringe even within the community?
That’s a fabulous question, and I'll tell you why: Karl is one of the most cited neuroscientists of all time, but most neuroscientists have not heard of him. The reason that paradox is true is because, early in his career, he developed some of the basic algorithmic technology underlying functional resonance in functional magnetic resonance imaging: fMRI. And so, anytime anybody uses fMRI, which most neuroscientists do, there’s this casual Fristonian citation that goes back to his early work.
Far fewer people have paid attention to his groundbreaking work on what’s called the free energy hypothesis. If you Google, like, “the most influential neuroscientists of all time,” he’s always on these lists, but nobody knows who he is. Well, nobody is a stretch; he’s reasonably well-known in sub-communities. But by and large, he’s such an abstract thinker, and his material is so difficult to internalize, that most people who are attracted to his work fall into the neuro-theory community, computational neuroscientists, theoretical neuroscientists — and that’s, frankly, the vast minority of neuroscientists. So he is somewhat of an unknown entity, which is just astounding because he has literally been in the running for the Nobel.
Something that struck me was how many gaps there are in the science of understanding our own brains — we often seem to know the general region where thoughts or impulses originate but not quite the mechanics of how they work. Are there certain mysteries about our consciousness and perception that might always remain slightly out of our reach?
There’s a huge body of research that seeks to address whether or not the question of consciousness, and understanding it, is unravelable at all. This is known as the hard problem of consciousness. Have we made progress in our understanding of consciousness over the past 100 or 200 years? Well, almost certainly, yes. And in neuroscience, we’ve come closer to an understanding of what perception is and what consciousness is.
Will another 20 years or so get us closer to an ultimate, grounded, and internalized rational scientific representation there of? Maybe! But there are also people today who argue with just as much empirical backing that the notion of solving consciousness — the notion of, basically, a self coming to understand itself — is a logically impossible act.
I’m not a consciousness researcher, so I’m not sure if I have enough background to really say that I’ve made my mind up. But there are certainly folks out there who say consciousness is not something that’s solvable, it’s not something that we will ever understand in the same materialistic terms that, perhaps, we understand the heart.
I’m going to be obnoxious and ask the AI question. You didn’t really get into the possibility and pitfalls of technology, but I’m wondering if it was back of mind at all while you were writing?
I’m going to give you an obnoxious answer. In fact, it’s a decades-old obnoxious answer. When I’m thinking about this stuff, my instinct is to think about technology in terms of the manners in which it removes us from nature. So much of the promise in this area of research — and I do think there’s promise, I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom — is that this intimate relationship we have with the planet is also that which can be leveraged to help mediate some of these detrimental effects.
There’s a fabulous book from a couple of years ago, The Nature Fix, by Florence Williams; I have come to understand my book as its dark version. The Nature Fix details all the manners in which interacting with nature, as opposed to the built environment, is essential for mental, psychological, spiritual, and neurological health.
This is an obnoxious answer because it’s the classic “Oh, kids are all looking at their phones!” But I think that’s real — the handheld devices and the omniscience of the all-knowing screen, which, perhaps we can extend that to the LLMs. As it were, there’s this suite of technologies that mediates our relationship both with knowledge writ large and the broader environment outside of ourselves. In my estimate, it filters the world in a way that I suspect is preventing us from interacting with some of the benefits that the environment has to offer.
The same things that make our brains incredible — their ability to adapt, create, and use language — are also what allowed us to invent the combustion engine, organize global commodities markets, and design machines for fracking. In a sense, the climate fight requires beating back against the weight and consequences of our own brains, right?
When I think about this question, it’s less about “how can we ensure we’re using the tools of evolution, the powers of the brain, for good,” and more about coming to terms with the fact that something like free will doesn’t exist.
There’s this thinker, Timothy Morton, who writes a lot about our enmeshment with the environment and the degree to which one cannot separate the self from the greater universe. Taken to its extreme, that thinking — which I think is very powerful — implies that what we need to wrap our heads around and come to terms with is the fact that we’re not really making decisions, per se. It’s just a universe of particles in motion. So grappling with what Morton calls the ecological thought, grappling with this notion of determinism and enmeshment, and trying to suss out the moral responsibilities that fall out of that relationship — that, to me, is a worthy task and, frankly, an unsolved problem.
As a neuroscientist working in the climate space, what keeps you up at night?
The 20-year timeline keeps me up at night. A lot of the research that we’re coming to terms with today is going to make itself known on a much more visceral level over the next 20 to 50 years. If it is in fact the case that cyanobacterial blooms are releasing a neurotoxin that is spurring an increased risk of ALS, that neurodegenerative disease isn’t necessarily going to manifest in people whom it is likely to affect for a number of years. We’re not going to see in tangible, visceral terms a corresponding spike in this disease in the general population for another couple of decades.
I just published a piece in The Guardian about some of these effects, and one of the researchers I interviewed for that piece basically said what I’m trying to communicate now, which is: We’re in the midst of a grand experiment. It’s not like a lab where you’ve got a rat, and you’re selectively exposing it to one toxin over the course of some fixed time period and measuring the results. The lab that we’re in is the Earth and we are exposed to climatic and environmental stressors in this soup, chronically, for years and years, and in unknown quantities. At some point, we’re going to look around and say, “Oh, this is really bad. We should do something about this.” And for many people, it will be too late.
What gives you hope?
I don’t like hope. I think that hope breeds complacency — or, at least, false hope does. I tend personally not to look for vectors of hope per se, which is not to say that I’m a pessimist or a nihilist or anything like that. I look for climate solutions, for example, or sources of resilience, or stories of the capacity of the human spirit that inspire me with a feeling of desire. I’m interested in having images out there in the world that point my compass toward a future that I would like to realize.
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.