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Ultraprocessed clothing is bad for the environment and bad for you.
News broke in early November that the U.S. federal dietary guidelines might soon warn Americans against eating “ultraprocessed food.”
It’s far from a done deal — an advisory committee is merely examining the issue, with no action expected before 2025. But it’s still somewhat of a duh moment for the millions of people who, over the past two decades, have turned away from food that comes in instant packets, boxes, and cans, and toward things that come from the produce aisle or the farmers market. Recent research makes a strong case that — more than individual villains like sugar, corn syrup, trans fats, and salt — it’s the way all these ingredients and more are pounded, mixed, extruded, and stuffed into shelf-stable forms that lead to health problems and weight gain.
Michael Pollan — the author who brought you the mantra “Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants” — is arguably one of the biggest catalysts for the real food movement. In a lesson from his Masterclass on intentional eating, he warns against foods with “very long ingredient lists,” saying that “the simplest way to think about an ultraprocessed food is you can’t imagine making it at home.”
You’ve heard of fast food and its linguistic child: the environmental scourge that is fast fashion. I would like to add a new term to the health and environmental zeitgeist:
Ultraprocessed fashion.
In the early 2010s, I saw my own health and happiness vastly improve after overhauling my diet to eat whole, farm-fresh foods. But I wanted to take it further. I figured that if it matters to the environment and our health where we buy our food from, it might matter where we get other things, like beauty products, home goods, and fashion.
Still, for a long, the argument for U.S. shoppers in favor of buying more sustainable fashion — the kind of classic, durable pieces skillfully made of natural fibers by artisans and American factories — was largely an altruistic one. Sustainable fashion purchases were meant to benefit a cotton farmer in India you would never meet, to protect a river in Kenya you would never see, or support a community of craftspeople in Thailand you would never have the privilege of knowing.
Even more nebulous, arguments that purchasing this instead of that would prevent the release of (super rough estimate) a few pounds of invisible climate-polluting gas into the atmosphere have not proven to be a very strong motivator for shoppers. In survey after survey, consumers swear up and down that they care deeply about sustainability … as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them, cost more money, or look too crunchy.
That’s an impossible standard. Sustainable fashion, whether it takes the form of a 100% wool sweater from California, a hand-block-printed cotton sundress, or a naturally dyed button-down, is always going to be more expensive than its synthetic counterpart made in a sweatshop somewhere where the workers are cheap and the laws are loose. Neither does slow fashion keep up with TikTok trends, by definition.
I initially had a hard time connecting sustainable fashion to Western shoppers’ well-being beyond the argument that an overstuffed, chaotic closet full of fast fashion can’t be good for your mental health or time management. After all, we’re not eating our clothing, right?
That all changed in 2019, when I first heard that Delta Air Lines attendants were suing Lands’ End, the maker of their uniforms, saying the new clothes were making them sick.
If you could call any clothing ultraprocessed, it would be these uniforms. While old airline outfits were made of traditional wool suiting and cotton button-downs in staid colors, the uniforms introduced in the past decade or so at Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta, and Southwest all were made of synthetic blends. They came in super-saturated colors and were coated in layers of performance chemicals: flame retardants, Teflon for stain resistance, and formaldehyde-based wrinkle-free finishes. They were made fast and cheap by suppliers in countries with lax environmental standards.
As I reported in my book To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick – and How We Can Fight Back, at every single one of those four major airlines, up to a quarter of the attendants reported having health reactions, including rashes and skin burns, breathing problems, hair loss, blurry vision, brain fog, and extreme fatigue. Some attendants had to be taken off their planes and brought to the ER. Though the lawsuit by Delta flight attendants didn’t move forward, in November of this year a jury awarded over $1 million to four American Airlines flight attendants who said their Twin Hill uniforms made them sick.
The next question that arises is: Is this happening to regular folks, too? And the answer is yes, but in more subtle and insidious ways. For example, the kinds of dyes used on synthetic materials like polyester (disperse dyes) are well-known to dermatologists to be common skin sensitizers. But many people may not know it’s clothing exacerbating their toddler’s eczema or setting off their own skin problems.
But the issue is more serious than just rashes, though rashes are often the first sign that something is wrong. Researchers and advocacy groups have tested fashion from well-known brands and counterfeits alike and found heavy metals like lead, chromium, and cadmium; endocrine disruptors like Bisphenol A (BPA), phthalates, and per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS); biocides, pesticides, and fungicides; and known carcinogens like benzene, certain azo dyes, and formaldehyde. (This is an abbreviated list, by the way.)
We’ve known for a long time these chemicals end up in our water and environment. PFAS, a toxic class of chemicals used for imbuing synthetics with water resistance, has been found all over Mount Everest’s summit, for example. But what we’re increasingly seeing is that our fashion, like our diets, affects our physical health.
Take microfibers, which in Heatmap’s recent survey were deemed to be a problem by 61% of respondents, and an “extremely serious” problem by 25% of respondents. When microfibers come off our clothes in the wash or break off our clothes and become part of our house dust, they bring with them everything that is in and on clothing. Given that we’re ingesting microfibers every day, we are eating our clothes. We’re also breathing in their VOCs, and our sweat is pulling those chemicals out of fibers onto our skin, where they can be absorbed into our bloodstream.
One of the main reasons fashion has turned from a field-to-closet endeavor to a chemistry experiment is the same as for food: It’s more profitable to sell highly processed, branded products made exclusively from petrochemicals and with a lot of marketing promises than it is to sell traditional pieces made from natural materials.
This happens at both ends of the fashion spectrum. At the low end, as Shein has shown, you can grow your company at an unprecedented speed by sourcing huge volumes of $5 polyester minidresses from garment factories with dubious working conditions, according to numerous reports.
At the other end, a company can add proprietary, brand-name chemistry like Gore-Tex to outdoor gear and sell it at a huge markup. Just observe a bit currently going around on TikTok where a spouse or partner requests you wear your most expensive clothing to an event or to meet the parents, so you show up in hiking gear.
Sure, if you’re a professional fisherman plowing through rough seas for your catch, a first responder, or a scientist living in the Arctic, you may well need high-performance gear. But for the rest of us, it’s just aspirational marketing, kind of like drinking Gatorade while you’re on the couch watching football.
Like the food industry before it, the fashion industry’s focus when it comes to safe and non-toxic fashion has been on individual chemicals or classes of chemicals instead of the holistic picture. The (completely voluntary) standards used by some fashion brands and certifications will test a textile for a tiny percentage of the tens of thousands of possible chemical substances in circulation, and if each is under the (often arbitrary) limit, the fashion piece will be declared safe.
This approach, however, doesn’t take into account how chemicals can mix to have synergistic effects on the same organs or cause the same health effects.
For example, it’s completely within the realm of possibility for one clothing item or outfit to have BPA, phthalates, and PFAS, each of which by itself wreaks havoc on our hormonal system, even in tiny, tiny amounts. Some of these chemicals are used to process fibers. Some chemicals such as finishes, dyes, and glues are used deliberately and are meant to stay in and on the fashion. Some chemicals are accidental contaminants, as fabrics and components flow through an opaque, unregulated, and just plain sloppy supply chain.
That then can affect everything from our reproductive system and energy levels to our skin appearance and weight. And all this while you’re trying to take care of your health by taking a hike or hitting the gym. It kind of reminds me of when cereal brands will brag about the vitamins they’ve added to their sugary, processed cereal.
What’s more, unlike food, cleaning products, and beauty products, clothing doesn’t come with a complete ingredient list. Anything under 5% of the weight of the product doesn’t have to be included. So what kind of finishes, dyes, threads, or contaminants are present in any piece of fashion is somewhat of a mystery.
When people ask me what they should buy or what they should clean out of their closets, I usually give them a list of things to look for and things to avoid — yes to natural fibers like cotton, wool, linen, bamboo rayon, and silk; no to toxic “vegan” leather polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and other synthetics, which are more likely to contain hazardous or sensitizing chemicals; avoid neon bright colors and buy naturally dyed or undyed products when you can; don’t dry clean your clothes.
But a simpler way to think about it would be to avoid clothing and accessories that your grandparents would look askance at, just like Pollan has encouraged us to do at the grocery store. Wait, what is Pertex® 20D Diamond Fuse Ripstop nylon? Or a polyester Lycra® elastane blend with anti-odor technology? What does it mean when something has Durable Water Repellant? What is actually in Memory Foam™ or the smelly glue that bonds it to the bottom of a sneaker? Do you really believe that a piece of clothing that smells like gasoline out of the box is okay for your health — or for anyone’s health? Which sounds better to you: chromium-tanned leather or vegetable-tanned leather?
Sure, it may take a bit more time, skill, and investment than buying synthetic clothing that you drop off at the dry cleaner. But then again, so does making a nutritious meal from ingredients you get at the farmer’s market. And, I would argue, both are a core part of cultivating a healthier, more vibrant, community-oriented, and nurturing life.
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Why the new “reasoning” models might gobble up more electricity — at least in the short term
What happens when artificial intelligence takes some time to think?
The newest set of models from OpenAI, o1-mini and o1-preview, exhibit more “reasoning” than existing large language models and associated interfaces, which spit out answers to prompts almost instantaneously.
Instead, the new model will sometimes “think” for as long as a minute or two. “Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes,” OpenAI announced in a blog post last week. The company said these models perform better than their existing ones on some tasks, especially related to math and science. “This is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability,” the company said.
But is it also a significant advancement in energy usage?
In the short run at least, almost certainly, as spending more time “thinking” and generating more text will require more computing power. As Erik Johannes Husom, a researcher at SINTEF Digital, a Norwegian research organization, told me, “It looks like we’re going to get another acceleration of generative AI’s carbon footprint.”
Discussion of energy use and large language models has been dominated by the gargantuan requirements for “training,” essentially running a massive set of equations through a corpus of text from the internet. This requires hardware on the scale of tens of thousands of graphical processing units and an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity to run.
Training GPT-4 cost “more than” $100 million OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said; the next generation models will likely cost around $1 billion, according to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, a figure that might balloon to $100 billion for further generation models, according to Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
While a huge portion of these costs are hardware, the energy consumption is considerable as well. (Meta reported that when training its Llama 3 models, power would sometimes fluctuate by “tens of megawatts,” enough to power thousands of homes). It’s no wonder that OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman has put hundreds of millions of dollars into a fusion company.
But the models are not simply trained, they're used out in the world, generating outputs (think of what ChatGPT spits back at you). This process tends to be comparable to other common activities like streaming Netflix or using a lightbulb. This can be done with different hardware and the process is more distributed and less energy intensive.
As large language models are being developed, most computational power — and therefore most electricity — is used on training, Charlie Snell, a PhD student at University of California at Berkeley who studies artificial intelligence, told me. “For a long time training was the dominant term in computing because people weren’t using models much.” But as these models become more popular, that balance could shift.
“There will be a tipping point depending on the user load, when the total energy consumed by the inference requests is larger than the training,” said Jovan Stojkovic, a graduate student at the University of Illinois who has written about optimizing inference in large language models.
And these new reasoning models could bring that tipping point forward because of how computationally intensive they are.
“The more output a model produces, the more computations it has performed. So, long chain-of-thoughts leads to more energy consumption,” Husom of SINTEF Digital told me.
OpenAI staffers have been downright enthusiastic about the possibilities of having more time to think, seeing it as another breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could lead to subsequent breakthroughs on a range of scientific and mathematical problems. “o1 thinks for seconds, but we aim for future versions to think for hours, days, even weeks. Inference costs will be higher, but what cost would you pay for a new cancer drug? For breakthrough batteries? For a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis? AI can be more than chatbots,” OpenAI researcher Noam Brown tweeted.
But those “hours, days, even weeks” will mean more computation and “there is no doubt that the increased performance requires a lot of computation,” Husom said, along with more carbon emissions.
But Snell told me that might not be the end of the story. It’s possible that over the long term, the overall computing demands for constructing and operating large language models will remain fixed or possibly even decline.
While “the default is that as capabilities increase, demand will increase and there will be more inference,” Snell told me, “maybe we can squeeze reasoning capability into a small model ... Maybe we spend more on inference but it’s a much smaller model.”
OpenAI hints at this possibility, describing their o1-mini as “a smaller model optimized for STEM reasoning,” in contrast to other, larger models that “are pre-trained on vast datasets” and “have broad world knowledge,” which can make them “expensive and slow for real-world applications.” OpenAI is suggesting that a model can know less but think more and deliver comparable or better results to larger models — which might mean more efficient and less energy hungry large language models.
In short, thinking might use less brain power than remembering, even if you think for a very long time.
On Azerbaijan’s plans, offshore wind auctions, and solar jobs
Current conditions: Thousands of firefighters are battling raging blazes in Portugal • Shanghai could be hit by another typhoon this week • More than 18 inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours in Carolina Beach, which forecasters say is a one-in-a-thousand-year event.
Azerbaijan, the host of this year’s COP29, today put forward a list of “non-negotiated” initiatives for the November climate summit that will “supplement” the official mandated program. The action plan includes the creation of a new “Climate Finance Action Fun” that will take (voluntary) contributions from fossil fuel producing countries, a call for increasing battery storage capacity, an appeal for a global “truce” during the event, and a declaration aimed at curbing methane emissions from waste (which the Financial Times noted is “only the third most common man-made source of methane, after the energy and agricultural sectors”). The plan makes no mention of furthering efforts to phase out fossil fuels in the energy system.
The Interior Department set a date for an offshore wind energy lease sale in the Gulf of Maine, an area which the government sees as suitable for developing floating offshore wind technology. The auction will take place on October 29 and cover eight areas on the Outer Continental Shelf off Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. The area could provide 13 gigawatts of offshore wind energy, if fully developed. The Biden administration has a goal of installing 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030, and has approved about half that amount so far. The DOI’s terms and conditions for the October lease sale include “stipulations designed to promote the development of a robust domestic U.S. supply chain for floating wind.” Floating offshore wind turbines can be deployed in much deeper waters than traditional offshore projects, and could therefore unlock large areas for clean power generation. Last month the government gave the green light for researchers to study floating turbines in the Gulf of Maine.
In other wind news, BP is selling its U.S. onshore wind business, bp Wind Energy. The firm’s 10 wind farm projects have a total generating capacity of 1.3 gigawatts and analysts think they could be worth $2 billion. When it comes to renewables, the fossil fuel giant said it is focusing on investing in solar growth, and onshore wind is “not aligned” with those plans.
The number of jobs in the U.S. solar industry last year grew to 279,447, up 6% from 2022, according to a new report from the nonprofit Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Utility-scale solar added 1,888 jobs in 2023, a 6.8% increase and a nice rebound from 2022, when the utility-scale solar market recorded a loss in jobs. The report warns that we might not see the same kind of growth for solar jobs in 2024, though. Residential installations have dropped, and large utility-scale projects are struggling with grid connection. The report’s authors also note that as the industry grows, it faces a shortage of skilled workers.
Interstate Renewable Energy Council
Most employers reported that hiring qualified solar workers was difficult, especially in installation and project development. “It’s difficult because our projects are built in very rural areas where there just aren't a lot of people,” one interviewee who works at a utility-scale solar firm said. “We strive to hire as many local people as possible because we want local communities to feel the economic impact or benefit from our projects. So in some communities where we go, it is difficult to find local people that are skilled and can perform the work.”
The torrential rain that has battered central Europe is tapering off a bit, but the danger of rising water remains. “The massive amounts of rain that fell is now working its way through the river systems and we are starting to see flooding in areas that avoided the worst of the rain,” BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor explained. The Polish city of Nysa told its 44,000 residents to leave yesterday as water rose. In the Czech Republic, 70% of the town of Litovel was submerged in 3 feet of flooding. The death toll from the disaster has risen to 18. Now the forecast is calling for heavy rain in Italy. “The catastrophic rainfall hitting central Europe is exactly what scientists expect with climate change,” Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist with Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, toldThe Guardian.
A recent study examining the effects of London’s ultra-low emissions zone on how students get to school found that a year after the rules came into effect, many students had switched to walking, biking, or taking public transport instead of being driven in private vehicles.
Welcome to Decarbonize Your Life, Heatmap’s special report that aims to help you make decisions in your own life that are better for the climate, better for you, and better for the world we all live in. This is our attempt, in other words, to assist you in living something like a normal life while also making progress in the fight against climate change.
That means making smarter and more informed decisions about how climate change affects your life — and about how your life affects climate change. The point is not what you shouldn’t do (although there is some of that). It’s about what you should do to exert the most leverage on the global economic system and, hopefully, nudge things toward decarbonization just a little bit faster.
We certainly think we’ve hit upon a better way to think about climate action, but you don’t have to take our word for it. Keep reading here for more on how (and why) we think about decarbonizing your life — or just skip ahead to our recommendations, below.