Brad Plumer

More recently, in rallies and speeches, Trump has stepped up his attacks on wind turbines, suggesting their noise can cause cancer (there’s absolutely no evidence of this) and predicting power failures when the wind stops blowing (also not true).

Here’s a closer look at a few of his recent comments.

You might get cancer. (You won’t.)

During a sometimes rambling digression about wind turbines at the National Republican Congressional Committee's annual spring dinner in Washington on Tuesday, Trump said: “They say the noise causes cancer.”

The suggestion that turbine noises cause cancer is completely unfounded. “The American Cancer Society is unaware of any credible evidence linking the noise from windmills to cancer,” a spokeswoman for the group said in an email.

Separately, some researchers have been investigating claims that noise from wind turbines might cause other health problems like nausea, headaches or sleeplessness. So far, experts haven’t found strong evidence of links to those conditions, although that debate is likely to persist.

When compared to the research around coal power, an energy source that Trump has long championed, the difference is stark.

There is ample evidence linking the particulate pollution from coal plants to heart disease, respiratory problems and lung cancer. When Trump moved to relax restrictions on coal plant pollution last year, his own Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the change could lead to as many as 1,400 additional premature deaths each year by 2030.

Property values will plummet. (Unlikely.)

At the same dinner, Trump made this claim: “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value.”

There have been a few smaller studies suggesting that wind-farm development may have depressed property values in some areas. But the balance of evidence suggests that this is uncommon. Much larger studies, including an analysis of more than 50,000 home sales across nine states conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2013, have found no evidence that home values are generally affected by nearby wind projects.

In any case, Trump’s golf course in Scotland does not appear to have suffered financially after the construction of the wind farm nearby.

The lights will go out if the wind drops. (They won’t.)

At a rally in Ohio last month, Trump suggested that wind power was too unreliable to be useful. “Let’s put up some windmills,” he said. “When the wind doesn’t blow, just turn off the television darling, please. There’s no wind. Please turn off the television quickly!”

It’s true that wind turbines generate electricity only when the wind is blowing. But that doesn’t mean the power in your home will suddenly go out when the wind dies down.

Across the United States, regional grid operators typically rely on a diverse array of power sources throughout the day so that the lights stay on. During sunny hours, they can draw electricity from solar panels. When it’s windy, they can make use of power from wind farms. If power from those renewable sources starts to drop, operators can use power from natural gas turbines or hydroelectric dams to fill in the gaps.

So far, America’s grid operators have been very good at this balancing act, even as coal has declined and renewables have surged in popularity. Last year, wind power accounted for nearly one-fifth of the electricity generated in the Texas grid, and people were still able to watch TV there. When power failures around the country do occur, it’s almost always because of severe weather knocking out transmission lines, not because wind turbines stopped spinning.

However, it’s also fair to say that if wind and solar power continue to expand — the two sources produced 8.2 percent of the nation’s electricity last year and are growing rapidly — grid operators could face new challenges in juggling those intermittent sources.

Possible solutions for that might include adding batteries or other energy storage to balance supply and demand, or improving weather forecasts so that operators can better predict the output of wind farms. Or building more transmission lines to get access to wind power from distant regions, on the principle that the wind is usually blowing somewherein the country. Experts have concluded that it’s technically possible for the United States to manage a lot more wind and solar power than it uses today.

For instance, a 2016 modeling study published in Nature Climate Change found that, using existing technology, the country could get 55 percent of its electricity from wind and solar if it built a network of high-voltage transmission lines. That study analyzed reams of historical weather data and concluded that the lights would stay on even with daily and seasonal fluctuations in the wind.

To be sure, there are plenty of legitimate debates about what the power grid of the future should look like and how big a role renewable energy ought to play in that mix. But the fact that the wind can come and go is hardly a slam-dunk argument against using wind power.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/climate/trump-wind-power.html" id="a2f17929-4c80-3d00-a947-da6435541094">The New York Times</a>.

We Checked President Trump's Dubious Claims on the Perils of Wind Power

WASHINGTON — It’s no secret that President Donald Trump really, really dislikes wind power. He’s been vocal on the subject for years, ever since a battle with Scottish officials over a plan to build what he called a “really ugly wind farm” within sight of his golf resort in Aberdeen.

Then winter comes. And, like clockwork, those who want to deny the established science that humans are warming the planet will try to flip the script. In January, when large swaths of the country were gripped by bitter cold, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to mock climate fears: “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”

Welcome to the weather wars. As battle lines harden between supporters and opponents of climate action, both are increasingly using bouts of extreme weather as a weapon to try to win people to their side. Weather, after all, is one of the easiest things for people to bond over or gripe about, a staple of small talk and shared experience that can make it a simple but powerful opportunity to discuss global warming.

But, as Trump’s words show, it’s also a framing device that can be easily abused. That raises the stakes for how scientists, who have long tried to distinguish between short-term weather fluctuations and long-term climate shifts, draw out and discuss the links between the two.

“Weather, and especially extreme weather, is how most people will experience climate change,” said Susan Joy Hassol, director of the science outreach nonprofit group Climate Communication. “You don’t experience the slow change in average temperature. What you experience are the changes in extreme weather that are brought about. So how we talk about that is really important.”

One reason that the weather can offer a potent messaging opportunity may boil down to human psychology. Climate science itself is often complex and abstract. It can be tough to feel, on a gut level, the implications of a chart showing global temperatures ticking up over time, or statistics showing that, on average, 95-degree days or torrential downpours are becoming more frequent.

But an unusual weather event that hits today, like a brutal heat wave or heavy storm, is more visceral. Laboratory experiments have found that people’s beliefs about global warming can be swayed by their immediate environment. Put someone in a hot room and they’re more likely to agree the planet is warming. Thirsty people become more alarmed by drought forecasts.

Psychologists have suggested these visceral experiences make it easier for our brains to imagine future states of the world, and therefore make them seem more likely. An exceptionally hot or cold day, other studies have found, can play the same role.

Some messengers have long realized that emotion and immediacy can be a powerful force.

“Trump is a branding guy,” said David B. Srere, co-chief executive and chief strategy officer at Siegel+Gale, a brand consultancy. “He knows his audience and understands how to tell a clear, simple story. Climate advocates and the scientific community need to get better at understanding their audience and figure out how to tell a simple, repeatable story of their own.”

In recent years, some climate scientists have focused on trying to turn flare-ups of severe weather into teachable moments. “This is what global warming looks like,” scientists said during the summer of 2012, a season of widespread droughts, wildfires and extreme heat advisories.

And they have become increasingly comfortable drawing those connections.

Back in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, many researchers responded cautiously, saying it was difficult to attribute a single event to global warming. A few noted that rising ocean temperatures could make hurricanes more destructive, on average, in the future. But even that was fairly abstract.

Over time, that messaging has shifted.

Partly that’s because, as climate models have improved, scientists have been able to demonstrate more rigorously how rising greenhouse-gas emissions have made recent heat waves or droughts more intense or more likely to occur — a budding field known as “extreme weather attribution.” Scientists have also refined their communication strategies, using metaphors like “loaded dice” to talk about how global warming is now making certain severe weather events more likely.

“The conversation today couldn’t be more different than it was a decade ago,” said Hunter Cutting, director of strategic communications for Climate Nexus, a nonprofit group focused on climate issues. “Back then, at best, you might get scientists talking about what effects we could see by the year 2100. Now we’re seeing leaders connect the dots in a much more direct way.”

That strategy, though, can cut both ways. Deniers of climate change have also sought to use the daily weather to shape perceptions. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., once brought a snowball to the Senate floor to suggest that global warming wasn’t a problem. When cold spells strike, Trump will ridicule worries about climate change.

Parrying Trump’s tweets can be a challenge, some supporters of action on climate change concede. He can drive the conversation: One recent survey from Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group, found that broadcast television networks rarely discuss global warming when extreme weather is unfolding. But they do often note the president’s climate comments.

Scientists and environmentalists have tried various tactics to push back. They might note that record hot days are becoming far more frequent than record cold days, and that no one expects global warming to eliminate snow altogether. Or they’ll reiterate that the ups and downs of daily weather aren’t the same as broader long-term shifts in the Earth’s climate, and that a single cold day can’t disprove global warming any more than a single hot day proves it.

Still, a casual observer could be forgiven for feeling a bit of whiplash after a tweet from Trump. After all, haven’t we been hearing that severe weather is a manifestation of climate change when it’s hot out?

Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Georgia, isn’t convinced that the president’s tweets about cold weather have staying power.

“I see Trump’s tweets as an opportunity to discuss the science,” he said. “To the 9 or 10 percent of the population that are going to be dismissive of climate science no matter what, there’s not much you can say to them. But a lot of people out there are legitimately curious” about how global warming can be real if it’s cold out today.

That raises the question of whether the messaging skirmishes around severe weather and climate change are swaying public perceptions, or whether each side is just preaching to those who are already converted.

There are some signs opinion is shifting. One recent survey by researchers at Yale and George Mason University found that 69 percent of Americans were “worried” about global warming, an 8-point increase from the previous spring. One possible explanation, the researchers suggested, was the spate of extreme weather disasters in 2018, from wildfires to hurricanes, along with increased efforts by scientists and even local TV weathercasters to put that in a climate context.

“For a long time, Americans saw climate change as a distant threat,” said Edward Maibach, a professor at George Mason who works on climate change communication. “But as of our most recent survey, I don’t feel I can say that anymore. We’re seeing a lot of movement on people understanding that climate change is already happening.”

Others are more cautious about interpreting these trends. One 2017 study, for instance, found that people who experience extreme weather are, for a short period, more likely to support climate adaptation measures than they were before. But the effect was modest and diminished over time.

It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns quickly, updating their idea of what counts as normal. Politics may also play a role: In a polarized country, many Americans are already hardened in their beliefs about global warming.

Partly for that reason, David M. Konisky, an associate professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University and an author of that 2017 study, said he wonders whether better messaging can dramatically shift opinions. “It might be that climate has become so wrapped up in one’s identity and worldview that it’s not the sort of thing that’s susceptible to better messaging,” he said.

Wanyun Shao, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Alabama, lands in the middle. Her research has found that Democrats and Republicans do perceive severe weather differently: Democrats tend to see it as part of a broader pattern of climate change, Republicans as more of an aberration. But, she has also found, a consistent string of shifting weather — year after year of increasing summer heat, for instance — does start to chip away even at conservative doubt about global warming.

“For some people, it takes more time,” she said. “But eventually people start trusting their own experiences.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/climate/weather-climate-change.html" id="d52e0076-e9ed-33bf-a77d-30c022fb39d3">The New York Times</a>.

How the Weather Gets Weaponized in Climate Change Messaging

WASHINGTON — In the summer, when heat waves scorch cities or heavy rains flood the coasts, some climate scientists and environmentalists will point out any plausible connections to global warming, hoping today’s weather will help people understand tomorrow’s danger from climate change.

Welcome to the weather wars. As battle lines harden between climate advocates and deniers, both are increasingly using bouts of extreme weather as a weapon to try to win people to their side. Weather, after all, is one of the easiest things for people to bond over or gripe about, a staple of small talk and shared experience that can make it a simple but powerful opportunity to discuss global warming.

Parrying Trump’s tweets can be a challenge, some climate advocates concede. He can drive the conversation: One recent survey from Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group, found that broadcast television networks rarely discuss global warming when extreme weather is unfolding. But they do often note the president’s climate comments.

Scientists and environmentalists have tried various tactics to push back. They might note that record hot days are becoming far more frequent than record cold days, and that no one expects global warming to eliminate snow altogether. Or they’ll reiterate that the ups and downs of daily weather aren’t the same as broader long-term shifts in the Earth’s climate, and that a single cold day can’t disprove global warming anymore than a single hot day proves it.

Still, a casual observer could be forgiven for feeling a bit of whiplash after that line. After all, haven’t we been hearing that severe weather is a manifestation of climate change when it’s hot out?

Wanyun Shao, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Alabama, has found that Democrats and Republicans perceive severe weather differently: Democrats tend to see it as part of a broader pattern of climate change, Republicans as more of an aberration. But, her research has also found, a consistent string of shifting weather — year after year of increasing summer heat, for instance — does start to chip away even at conservative doubt about global warming.

It’s a different story at the state level, however: The midterm elections in the fall brought in a new wave of governors who are now setting climate goals for their states and laying out more ambitious plans to cut emissions and expand low-carbon energy.

In the past month, newly elected Democratic governors in Michigan, Illinois and New Mexico have joined the U.S. Climate Alliance, a group of 19 states and Puerto Rico that has vowed to uphold the Paris climate agreement despite President Donald Trump’s disavowal of the accord. With the new additions, the alliance now covers one-third of America’s greenhouse gas emissions and nearly half its population.

“It essentially says to the world that Michigan is going to live up to the promise that we, as a country, made at one point” to address climate change, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan said when she announced that her state would join the alliance and establish a new office of climate and energy.

States can only do so much to tackle global warming by themselves. But they can serve as laboratories of sorts, testing which climate policies work well and which ones are ineffective or too costly. And, by advancing technologies like wind, solar or electric vehicles, they could pave the way for more ambitious federal action — should that moment ever arrive.

Here are some of the biggest steps states have taken recently on climate policy.

More wind and solar power

For years, the go-to climate move for states has been to require utilities to use more renewable electricity, a task made easier by the rapid decline in costs for wind and solar power. Governors are now poised to accelerate those policies.

In Maine, the new governor, Janet Mills, a Democrat, has vowed to restore incentives for rooftop solar and to boost wind power locally — moves that had been stymied by her Republican predecessor.

In New Mexico, another Democrat, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, is backing a bill requiring electric utilities to get 50 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2030, keeping pace with neighbors like Colorado and Nevada. (Nevada voters in November approved their own requirement for 50 percent renewables by 2030.)

The most striking development, though, has been the array of governors who are now floating plans for their states to get 100 percent of their electricity from zero-carbon sources. Legislators in California and Hawaii have already set deadlines for utilities to meet this target by 2045. In recent months, the governors of Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey and New York have pledged to pursue similar goals.

These states are all venturing into uncharted territory, and there’s no guarantee they will succeed. As states rely on ever-larger amounts of wind and solar power, it becomes more challenging to juggle these intermittent sources. Getting all the way to 100 percent zero-carbon electricity, experts say, could require extensive new nationwide transmission lines, novel energy storage techniques or help from untested technologies like advanced nuclear power.

For now, states are experimenting with varied approaches. Hawaii, for example, wants to meet its goal entirely through renewable energy. In New Jersey, by contrast, Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed legislation to keep his state’s nuclear plants open as part of a broader low-carbon portfolio. And New York is soliciting bids for large new offshore wind farms.

Cutting pollution from cars

Electricity is responsible for about one-third of America’s carbon dioxide emissions. To go further, states will also have to clean up the cars and trucks on their roads, which account for another third.

In December, nine Eastern states and the District of Columbia announced they would work together to put a price on emissions from transportation fuels and invest the revenue in lower-carbon solutions, potentially including mass transit, electric buses or new charging stations to make it easier for people to own plug-in vehicles.

Some of the states involved, like Pennsylvania and Maryland, are in danger of missing their self-imposed climate goals unless they can halt the stubborn rise in driving emissions.

While the finer details of the policy will be hashed out this year, the states are modeling their efforts after the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade system in the Northeast that auctions a steadily dwindling supply of carbon pollution permits to power plants and uses the revenue to invest in efficiency and clean energy programs.

“Transportation is going to be even more complex than electricity — there are so many moving parts,” said Vicki Arroyo, the executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, which has been working closely with the states on the initiative. But, she said, referring to Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont, “It’s notable that we have three Republican governors here who are committed to stepping up on this.”

More carbon pricing

In November, voters in Washington state rejected a ballot initiative to impose a statewide tax on carbon emissions — a sign that putting a price on carbon, a favorite solution of many economists, remains a tough sell politically.

But the idea is far from dead: In neighboring Oregon, the Legislature is now considering a statewide cap-and-trade system that would put a price on emissions from a wide range of polluters, including manufacturers, paper mills, refineries and utilities. (Oregon already gets the vast majority of its electricity from hydropower dams, so it has less room to expand renewable power than other states.) The bill faces a tough battle, but if it were to pass, Oregon could link up with California and Quebec to create a carbon trading system.

Elsewhere, New Jersey and Virginia are planning to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Although Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, has faced intense pressure to resign over a racist yearbook photo, state regulators are still laying the groundwork to participate in the cap-and-trade program.

How far can states go?

In September, a report by America’s Pledge, a coalition of states, cities and businesses that have promised to stick with the Paris Agreement, found that current state and city climate policies would, if followed through, get the United States about two-thirds of the way toward its commitment under the accord.

Nathan Hultman, an author of that report and director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, said the flurry of new state policies could help push the United States closer to its Paris goal, a reduction of emissions at least 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, though it would take time to gauge their full impact.

“It’s still the case that federal leadership is going to be absolutely essential, and right now that’s absent,” he said. “But we also knew that federal action alone wasn’t going to be enough, because so many important decisions have to be made at the state and city level. And one thing we’ve seen in the past two years is that states are starting to think seriously about what more they can actually do to deliver real and meaningful emissions reductions.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/climate/states-global-warming.html" id="016f94a5-fb5c-3a07-aefb-73402c783c9d">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — Even though talk of a “Green New Deal” is getting louder in Congress, the odds of major federal climate legislation passing in the next two years remain extremely low.

A 'Green New Deal' Is Far From Reality, but Climate Action Is Picking Up in the States

Strikingly, the sharp uptick in emissions occurred even as a near-record number of coal plants around the United States retired last year, illustrating how difficult it could be for the country to make further progress on climate change in the years to come, particularly as the Trump administration pushes to roll back federal regulations that limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The estimate, by research firm Rhodium Group, pointed to a stark reversal. Fossil fuel emissions in the United States have fallen significantly since 2005 and declined each of the previous three years, in part because of a boom in cheap natural gas and renewable energy, which have been rapidly displacing dirtier coal-fired power.

Yet even a steep drop in coal use last year wasn’t enough to offset rising emissions in other parts of the economy. Some of that increase was weather-related: A relatively cold winter led to a spike in the use of oil and gas for heating in areas like New England.

But, just as important, as the U.S. economy grew at a strong pace last year, emissions from factories, planes and trucks soared. And there are few policies in place to clean those sectors up.

“The big takeaway for me is that we haven’t yet successfully decoupled U.S. emissions growth from economic growth,” said Trevor Houser, a climate and energy analyst at the Rhodium Group.

As U.S. manufacturing boomed, for instance, emissions from the nation’s industrial sectors — including steel, cement, chemicals and refineries — increased by 5.7 percent.

Policymakers working on climate change at the federal and state level have so far largely shied away from regulating heavy industry, which directly contributes about one-sixth of the country’s carbon emissions. Instead, they’ve focused on decarbonizing the electricity sector through actions like promoting wind and solar power.

The Rhodium Group created its estimate by using government data for the first three quarters of 2018 combined with more recent industry data. The U.S. government will publish its official emissions estimates for all of 2018 later this year.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/climate/greenhouse-gas-emissions-increase.html" id="6538e57f-db03-3d11-a7cf-dc4af2591fe6">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — America’s carbon dioxide emissions rose by 3.4 percent in 2018, the biggest increase in eight years, according to a preliminary estimate published Tuesday.

U.S. Carbon Emissions Surged in 2018 Even as Coal Plants Closed

But even as power generation has gotten cleaner, those overlooked industrial plants and factories have become a larger source of climate pollution. The Rhodium Group estimates that the industrial sector is on track to become the second-biggest source of emissions in California by 2020, behind only transportation, and the biggest source in Texas by 2022.

There’s a similar story in transportation: Since 2011, the federal government has been steadily ratcheting up fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks, although the Trump administration has proposed to halt the toughening of those standards after 2021.

There are signs that those standards have been effective. In the first nine months of 2018, Americans drove slightly more miles in passenger vehicles than they did over that span the previous year, yet gasoline use dropped by 0.1 percent, thanks in part to fuel-efficient vehicles and electric cars.

But, as America’s economy expanded last year, trucking and air travel also grew rapidly, leading to a 3 percent increase in diesel and jet fuel use and spurring an overall rise in transportation emissions for the year. Air travel and freight have also attracted less attention from policymakers to date and are considered much more difficult to electrify or decarbonize.

Demand for electricity surged last year, too, as the economy grew, and renewable power did not expand fast enough to meet the extra demand. As a result, natural gas filled in the gap, and emissions from electricity rose an estimated 1.9 percent. (Natural gas produces lower CO2 emissions than coal when burned, but it is still a fossil fuel.)

Even with last year’s increase, carbon dioxide emissions in the United States are still down 11 percent since 2005, a period of considerable economic growth. Trump administration officials have often cited that broader trend as evidence that the country can cut its climate pollution without strict regulations.

But if the world wants to avert the most dire effects of global warming, major industrialized countries, including the United States, will have to cut their fossil-fuel emissions much more drastically than they are currently doing.

Last month, scientists reported that greenhouse gas emissions worldwide rose at an accelerating pace in 2018, putting the world on track to face some of the most severe consequences of global warming sooner than expected.

Under the Paris climate agreement, the United States vowed to cut emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. The Rhodium Group report warns that this target now looks nearly unattainable without a flurry of new policies or technological advances to drive down emissions throughout the economy.

“The U.S. has led the world in emissions reductions in the last decade thanks in large part to cheap gas displacing coal,” said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who was not involved in the analysis. “But that has its limits, and markets alone will not deliver anywhere close to the pace of decarbonization needed without much stronger climate policy efforts that are unfortunately stalled if not reversed under the Trump administration.”

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer on whether paper or plastic bags are better for the environment. They both have downsides, but there are a few broad lessons to keep in mind when you are at the grocery store.

Plastic bags, which often take centuries to decompose, can create a dreadful waste problem even though they’re far from the largest source of plastic waste in America — about 12 percent of the total.

On the other hand, paper bags typically require more energy and greenhouse gas emissions to produce, which isn’t great from a global warming standpoint.

Reusable bags can be a decent compromise, provided you hold onto them and use them often. Ultimately, though, what you put insidethe bag, particularly your food choices, will most likely matter a lot more for the environment than what type of bag you use.

— The trouble with plastic bags: litter

American shoppers use more than 100 billion lightweight polyethylene plastic bags each year, and only a small portion are ever recycled. Most recycling centers can’t deal with them — they just clog up the machinery — and so the majority of plastic bags end up in landfills, where they can take up to 1,000 years to degrade.

To be fair, a plastic bag doesn’t cause toomuch harm sitting in a landfill. The bigger problem arises when people don’t dispose of their bags properly, and the plastic ends up fluttering around in the wild, clogging up waterways and threatening wildlife.

San Jose, California, for instance, found that plastic bags made up about 12 percent of the litter in its creeks before implementing a local bag ban in 2012. And, just last week, a dead sperm whale washed ashore in Indonesia with two dozen plastic bags in its gut, along with other trash.

So, even though plastic bags are only a small fraction of America’s overall plastic trash, they’ve become a highly visible sign of waste.

— The trouble with paper bags: carbon emissions

So does that mean paper bags, which degrade more easily, are a better option? Not necessarily. Climate change has become the biggest environmental issue of our time, so it’s worth looking at things from an emissions standpoint. And on that score, paper bags fare worse.

Even though paper bags are made from trees, which are, in theory, a renewable resource, it takes significantly more energy to create pulp and manufacture a paper bag than it does to make a single-use plastic bag from oil.

Back in 2011, Britain’s Environment Agency conducted a life-cycle assessment of various bag options, looking at every step of the production process. The conclusion? You’d have to reuse a paper bag at least three times before its environmental impact equaled that of a high-density polyethylene plastic bag used only once. And if plastic bags were reused repeatedly, they looked even better.

Paper bags can more easily be recycled or even composted, but the British study found that even these actions didn’t make a huge difference in the broader analysis. Unless you’re reusing your paper bags a lot, they look like a poorer option from a global warming standpoint.

— Reusable bags are a decent option — if you actually reuse them

That same British analysis also looked into reusable options, like heavier, more durable plastic bags or cotton bags. And it found that these are only sustainable options if you use them frequently.

Making a cotton shopping bag is hardly cost-free. Growing cotton requires a fair bit of energy, land, fertilizer and pesticides, which can have all sorts of environmental effects — from greenhouse gas emissions to nitrogen pollution in waterways.

The study found that an avid shopper would have to reuse his or her cotton bag 131 times before it had a smaller global warming impact than a lightweight plastic bag used only once. And, depending on the make, more durable plastic bags would have to be used at least 4 to 11 times before they made up for their heftier upfront climate costs.

So if you’re going to opt for a reusable bag for environmental reasons, make sure you actually reuse it — often.

— What’s in the bag most likely matters more than the bag itself

It never hurts to think about bag choices. But keep in mind that if you’re going to the grocery store, the food you purchase and place in that bag probably has a vastly bigger effect on the environment than whatever you use to haul it home.

Our global food system, after all, is responsible for one-quarter of humanity’s planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions — with meat and dairy having a disproportionately large impact. By contrast, packaging makes up only about 5 percent of the food system’s footprint. Compared with, say, the effects of clearing away vast swathes of forest to grow feed or raise livestock, our bags are a much smaller deal.

Put another way, a pound of beef bought at the supermarket will have roughly 25 times the global warming impact as the disposable plastic bag it’s carried in. So if you’re looking for ways to slim down your personal carbon footprint, taking a closer look at your dietary choices isn’t a bad place to start.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/climate/plastic-paper-shopping-bags.html" id="df39f0e5-d239-3c63-a50b-4902fa394b3d">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — The decision by New York state to ban single-use plastic bags from retail stores makes it a good time to revisit everyone’s favorite environmental quandary: paper or plastic?

Plastic Bags, or Paper? Here's What to Consider When You Hit the Grocery Store

Paper or Plastic? Your Choice of Bag Matters Less Than What's Inside

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Brad Plumer

Articles written by the author

We Checked President Trump's Dubious Claims on the Perils of Wind Power

How the Weather Gets Weaponized in Climate Change Messaging

How the Weather Gets Weaponized in Climate Change Messaging

A 'Green New Deal' Is Far From Reality, but Climate Action Is Picking Up in the States

U.S. Carbon Emissions Surged in 2018 Even as Coal Plants Closed

U.S. Carbon Emissions Surged in 2018 Even as Coal Plants Closed

Plastic Bags, or Paper? Here's What to Consider When You Hit the Grocery Store

Paper or Plastic? Your Choice of Bag Matters Less Than What's Inside