Kate Yoder, Grist

How the recycling symbol lost its meaning

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It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment. “It’s crazy what we’re doing. It’s very, very, very bad,” she says in ABC’s prime-time Earth Day special, letting out heavy sighs and listing jumbled statistics about deforestation and the hole in the ozone layer.

The bartender, Kevin Costner, says he used to be scared, too — until he started doing something about it. “These?” he says, holding up a soda can. “I recycle these.” As Streep prepares to launch her beer can into the recycling bin, Costner cautions her, “This could change your life.”

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Recycling, once considered the domain of people with “long hair, granny glasses, and tie-dyed Ts,” as the Chicago Tribune described it at the time, was about to go mainstream. The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol, invented 20 years earlier, was everywhere in the early 1990s. Its tight spiral of folded arrows seemed to promise that discarded glass bottles and yellowing newspapers had a bright future, where they could be reborn in a cycle that stretched to infinity. As curbside pickup programs spread across the United States, the practice of sorting your trash would become, for many, as routine as brushing your teeth — an everyday habit that made you feel a little more responsible.

What no one anticipated was just how emotionally attached people would become to recycling as the solution to America’s ugly trash problem. When the chasing arrows’ promise of rebirth was broken, they could get angry. One cold winter day in 1991, people in Holyoke, Massachusetts, chased after garbage trucks, yelling for them to stop, after the drivers had nabbed their sorted glass, cans, and cardboard from the curb. Strained by an influx of holiday-related trash, the city had instructed workers to forgo recycling and just throw everything away.

Today, the recycling icon is omnipresent — found on plastic bottles, cereal boxes, and bins loitering alongside curbs across the country. The chasing arrows, though, are often plastered on products that aren’t recyclable at all, particularly products made of plastic, like dog chew toys and inflatable swim rings. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency said that the symbol’s use on many plastic products was “deceptive.”

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Recycling rules can be downright mystifying. For years, people were told pizza boxes were too greasy to be recycled, but now many recycling centers accept them. Some cities accept juice boxes lined with invisible layers of aluminum and plastic; others don’t. And do the screw-on caps stay on plastic bottles or not? Recycling experts ask people to do a “little bit of homework” to figure out what their local recycling system can handle, but since households have hundreds of items with different packaging to keep track of, that’s asking a lot.

The resulting confusion has made a mess of recycling efforts. Plastic wrap tangles around sorting equipment at recycling facilities, shutting down operations as employees try to cut it out of the equipment. Huge bales of paper shipped overseas can contain as much as 30 percent plastic waste. “Contamination is one of the biggest challenges facing the recycling industry,” the EPA said in a statement to Grist. It takes time and money to haul, sort through, and dispose of all this unwanted refuse, which makes recycling more of a burden for city budgets. Many cities have ended up cutting costs by working with private waste companies; some don’t even bother trying at all. About a quarter of Americans lack access to any recycling services.

The difficulty of recycling plastic can make the chasing-arrows symbol near meaningless, with environmental groups calling plastic recycling a “false solution.” Only around 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States gets shredded or melted down so that it can be used again. Much of the rest flows into landfills or gets incinerated, breaking down into tiny particles that can travel for thousands of miles and lodge themselves in your lungs. Plastics threaten “near-permanent contamination of the natural environment,” according to one study, and pose a global health crisis, with plastic chemicals linked to preterm births, heart attacks, and cancer.

So where did the three arrows go wrong? The trouble is that their loop has ensnared us. If some recycling is good, the thinking goes, then more recycling is better. That creates enormous pressure for packaging to be made recyclable and stamped with the arrows — regardless of whether trying to recycle a glass bottle or plastic yogurt container made much sense in the first place. David Allaway, a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, says that the facts just don’t support the recycling symbol’s reputation as a badge of environmental goodness. “The magnetic, gravitational power of recycling,” he said, has led “policymakers and the public to just talk more and more and more about recycling, and less and less and less about anything else.”

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In the spring of 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans — 10 percent of the population — showed up for the first Earth Day, taking part in rallies, marches, and teach-ins, calling for clean air and clean water. Pollution had pushed its way into the national conversation. The year before, oil-soaked debris had caught fire in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, sending flames towering five stories high, and a drilling accident in Santa Barbara had spread an oil slick over more than 800 square miles of water. Smog regularly clouded skies from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles, dimming cities in the middle of the day.

The idea of recycling seemingly burst onto the scene in 1970. Earth Day organizers educated people about the value of sorting through their trash and advocated for community recycling programs. People would gather up their bottles and cans in plastic crates and bags and drive to designated sites to drop them off, sometimes earning a few bucks in return. “The environmental crisis has come into the public consciousness so recently that the word ‘recycle’ doesn’t even appear in most dictionaries,” the environmentalist Garrett De Bell wrote a couple weeks before the Earth Day event. He pitted recycling as “the only ecologically sensible long-term solution” for a country “knee-deep in garbage.”

It wasn’t long before the concept acquired its signature symbol. At the time, Gary Anderson was finishing up his master’s degree in architecture at the University of Southern California. He came across a poster advertising a contest to design a symbol for recycling, sponsored by the Container Corporation of America, a maker of cardboard boxes. Inspired by M.C. Escher’s Möbius strip, Anderson spent just a couple of days coming up with designs using the now-famous trio of folded, rotating arrows. The simplest of his designs won, and Anderson was awarded a $2,500 scholarship in 1970. The Container Corporation quickly put the logo in the public domain, hoping it would be adopted on all recycled or recyclable products in order to “spread awareness among concerned citizens.”

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The Möbius loop he created soon passed from his mind. “I just didn’t really think of the symbol that much,” he recalls. “It wasn’t used very much in the first couple of years.” One day several years later, however, Anderson was wandering through the streets of Amsterdam in the haze of jet lag when he came across a row of oversized bins emblazoned with a beach ball-sized version of his logo. The Netherlands, purportedly, was the first country to launch a nationwide recycling program in 1972. “It just really shocked me into a realization that there must be something about this symbol,” he said.

Refashioning old materials into new things is a longstanding American tradition. Paul Revere, folk hero of the American Revolution, collected scrap metal and turned it into horseshoes. In the 19th century, used rags were turned into paper, and families stitched together scraps of fabric to create quilts. The desperation of the Great Depression taught people to make underwear out of cotton flour sacks, and the propaganda posters of World War II positioned recycling as a patriotic duty: “Prepare your tin cans for war.”

“It was not in our DNA to be this wasteful,” said Jackie Nuñez, the advocacy program manager at the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a communications nonprofit. “We had to be trained, we had to be marketed to, to be wasteful like this.”

One of the first lessons of “throwaway society” came in the 1920s, when White Castle became the first fast-food restaurant to sell its burgers in single-use bags, advertising them as clean and convenient. “Buy ’em by the sack,” the slogan went. In 1935, the big breweries that survived the Prohibition era started shipping beer in lighter, cheaper-to-transport steel cans instead of returnable glass bottles. Coca-Cola and other soda companies eventually followed suit.

All those paper sacks and cans soon littered the sides of American roadways, and people started calling on the companies that created the waste to clean it up. Corporations responded by creating the first anti-litter organization, Keep America Beautiful, founded in 1953 by the American Can Company and the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. Keep America Beautiful’s advertisements in the 1960s looked like public service announcements, but they subtly shifted the blame for all the garbage to individuals. Some featured “Susan Spotless,” a girl in a white dress who would wag her finger at anyone who soiled public spaces with their litter.

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The pressure on American businesses didn’t go away, though. On the Sunday after Earth Day in April 1970, some 1,500 protesters showed up at Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta to dump hundreds of cans and glass bottles at its entrance. Two years later, Oregon passed the country’s first “bottle bill” requiring a 5-cent deposit on bottles and cans sold in the state, incentivizing people to return them, while Congress was considering banning single-use beverage containers altogether. Manufacturers successfully lobbied against a federal ban, arguing that jobs would be lost, as the historian Bartow J. Elmore recounts in the book Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. But corporations still wanted to relieve the public pressure on them and outsource the costs of dealing with the waste they were creating. Luckily for them, recycling was in vogue.

In New York City, the war on waste was spearheaded by the Environmental Action Coalition, an organization raising funds for its “Trash Is Cash” community recycling program, with the long-term goal of getting recyclables picked up by city workers outside homes. Curbside recycling seemed to serve everyone’s interest: Environmentalists wanted to waste less, and companies could use it as an opportunity to shift the cost of dealing with waste onto city governments. Businessmen who volunteered with the Environmental Action Coalition solicited millions in donations from their colleagues in the 1970s, writing that recycling had “substantial promise” to fend off any legislation to ban or tax single-use containers.

The campaign was a deliberate attempt to divert attention from more meaningful solutions like bottle bills, yet environmental groups embraced it, according to Recycling Reconsidered, a 2012 book by Samantha MacBride, who worked in New York City’s sanitation department for two decades. The New York City Council started its mandatory curbside pickup program in the late 1980s, several years after the first one began in Woodbury, New Jersey, requiring residents to set out their paper, metal, glass, and some types of plastic in bins at the curb. The idea picked up in cities across the country, with the number of curbside programs growing from 1,000 to 5,000 between 1988 and 1992, spreading the chasing arrows along with them.

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“It was in the late ’80s and early ’90s that this thing just becomes everywhere,” said Finis Dunaway, a professor of history at Trent University in Canada. America was running out of places to put its trash, a dilemma captured by the story of a nomadic garbage barge in 1987. In March of that year, a barge teeming with 6 million pounds of trash left Long Island, New York, looking to unload its freight where the landfills weren’t already full. States from North Carolina to Louisiana turned it away, and the barge spent months traveling around the Atlantic coast — all the way to Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas — looking for a place to dispose of the garbage.

In October, the barge made its way back to Brooklyn, where a court ordered that its contents be incinerated — but not before Greenpeace activists hung a giant banner on the boat: “NEXT TIME … TRY RECYCLING.” Annie Leonard, the former executive director of Greenpeace, told PBS Frontline in 2020 that she wonders whether that banner was a mistake. “I think we were overly optimistic about the potential of recycling,” she said, “and perpetuating that narrative led us astray.”

There’s an iconic scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, gets cornered at his college graduation party by one of his parents’ friends. “I just want to say one word to you, just one word: plastics,” the older man says. “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it.” One generation’s earnest advice for a successful career clashed with a new, skeptical attitude toward plastic, which had already become a byword for “fake.”

By the early 1970s, scientists had learned that whales, turtles, and other marine life were getting tangled up in plastic debris, a problem that was killing 40,000 seals a year. They knew, too, that small plastic fragments were making their way into the ocean, and that plastic residues had entered people’s bloodstreams, presenting what an official from President Richard Nixon’s Council of Environmental Quality deemed a significant health threat, “potentially our next bad one.” The more people learned, the more plastic’s reputation transformed from all-purpose, indestructible wonder into something that maybe shouldn’t be trusted in your new microwave. Between 1988 and 1989, the percentage of Americans who believed plastic was damaging the environment rose from 56 to 72 percent. Larry Thomas, the president of the Society of Plastics Industry, warned in an internal memo that companies were starting to lose business, writing, “We are approaching a point of no return.”

Beverage companies and the oil industry hoped to advertise their way out of the PR problem, laying out plans to spend $50 million a year to tout the polymer’s virtues with slogans like “plastics make it possible.” They also turned to recycling. Lewis Freeman, the former vice president of government affairs at the Society of the Plastics Industry, an industry group, told Grist that he has a vivid memory of a colleague coming into his office, saying, “We’ve got to do something to help the recyclers.”

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Freeman tasked the Plastic Bottle Institute — made up of oil giants like BP and Exxon, chemical companies, and can manufacturers — with figuring out how to clarify to recycling sorters what kind of plastic was what. In 1988, they came up with the plastic resin code, the numbering system from 1 to 7 that’s still in place.

Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET (1), is used to make soft drink bottles; high-density polyethylene (2) is used for milk jugs; polyvinyl chloride (3) is used for PVC pipes in plumbing, and so on all through 7, the catch-all category for acrylic, polycarbonate, fiberglass, and other plastics. The Plastic Bottle Institute surrounded these numbers with the chasing arrows logo, giving the public the impression that they could throw all kinds of plastics into recycling bins, whether there was infrastructure to process them or not. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Conservation warned that the confusion it would cause “will have a severe impact on the already marginal economic feasibility of recycling plastics as well as on recycling programs as a whole.”

Once the symbol was operational, Freeman said, “then everybody started putting it on everything.” Companies worked to make it official: Starting in 1989, the Plastic Bottle Institute lobbied for state laws mandating that the code numbers appear on plastic products. Their express purpose was to fend off anti-plastic legislation, according to documents uncovered by the Center for Climate Integrity. The laws eventually passed in 39 states.

By the mid-1990s, the campaign to “educate” the public about plastic recycling had succeeded: Americans had a more favorable opinion of plastic, and efforts to ban or restrict production had died down. But recycling rates — the share of materials that actually get reprocessed — had barely improved. Instead, the United States started exporting plastic waste to China, where turning old plastic into new materials helped meet growing demand from manufacturers. Polling conducted for the American Plastics Council in 1997 showed that people who worked in waste management were losing hope that plastics could be recycled, while the public, journalists, and government officials believed they could be recycled at unrealistically high rates.

The problem was, fulfilling what companies called the “the urgent need to recycle” wasn’t as easy as the advertisements made it look. For decades, industry insiders expressed serious doubts that recycling plastic would ever be profitable, with one calling the economic case “virtually hopeless” in 1969. There are thousands of plastic products, and they all need to be sorted and put through different processes to be turned into something new. The way packaging is molded — blown, extruded, or stamped — means that even the same types of plastic can have their own melting points. A PET bottle can’t be recycled with the clear PET packaging that encases berries. A clear PET bottle can’t be recycled with a green one.

The plastics that do happen to get sorted and processed can only be “downcycled,” since melting them degrades their quality. Recycled plastic, it turns out, is more toxic than virgin plastic, liable to leach dangerous chemicals, so it can’t safely be turned into food-grade packaging. It’s also more expensive to produce. The result of this morass is that there is virtually no market for recycled plastics beyond those marked with 1s and 2s; the rest are incinerated or sent to landfills. Only 9 percent of the plastics ever produced have gone on to be recycled.

As plastic waste piled up and public frustration mounted, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition — backed by corporate giants including Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Exxon Mobil — launched a bigger, more specific recycling initiative in 2008 called “How2Recycle.” It came with new labels that appeared to provide clarity about which elements of a product could be recycled, distinguishing between plastic wrap and coated trays, sometimes qualifying the recycling logo with “store drop-off” labels for plastic bags and film.

But environmental advocates say that the How2Recycle labels, used by more than a third of the companies that package consumer goods, may be even more misleading than the resin code. For example, plastic yogurt containers made of polypropylene, number 5s, are considered “widely recyclable” under the system, yet only 3 percent of all the polypropylene containers produced actually get recycled.

The plastic resin code with the chasing arrows certainly confused people — 68 percent of Americans surveyed in 2019 said they thought anything labeled with the code could be recycled. But the How2Recycle labels “put the lies on steroids,” said Jan Dell, the founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup. It’s not just a tiny triangular indent on the bottom of a container anymore, but a large, high-contrast recycling logo that “stares you in the face.”

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Given the dismal state of plastic recycling, it might seem like the best thing to do is throw the chasing arrows in the garbage. But not all recycling is a failure. “Metals are the true success story,” said Carl Zimring, a waste historian at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. As much as three-quarters of all the aluminum that’s ever been produced is still in use, he said. Paper is also relatively easy to process, with more than two-thirds making its way into new products in the U.S. Even for a recycling standby like glass, though, less than a third gets broken down into fragments for new jars and bottles.

The recycling logo still gives anything it touches — whether feasible to recycle or not — a green aura. Surveys show that a majority of Americans believe recycling is one of the most effective ways they can fight climate change, when experts say it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a credit to the iconic triangle, which has had 50 years to entrench itself in our culture. “It’s easy to bash on the image, or bash on corporations, without seeing this as something that is very powerful,” said Dunaway, the environmental historian. So is there a way to give the recycling symbol meaning again?

When recycling started taking off in the early 1990s, there was no definitive, agreed-upon definition of what it meant. “Anything is recyclable, at least theoretically,” one lawyer pointed out in a legal journal in 1991. The effort to impose some sort of order came from California, often the national laboratory for environmental protection. The state passed the country’s first restrictions on green claims in 1990, prohibiting advertisers from using terms like “ozone-friendly” and “recyclable” on items that didn’t meet its standards (though that stipulation didn’t survive a challenge in court).

Wider efforts to restrict the symbol, however, lacked strength and enforcement. In 1992, the Federal Trade Commission told advertisers they could call a product “recyclable” even if only 1 percent of their product was recycled. Not much else happened on that front until 2013, when the group that administers the plastic resin code, ASTM International, announced that it was replacing the chasing arrows with a solid triangle to reduce public confusion. It didn’t require manufacturers to rework their labels, though.

Today, that might finally be changing. When China banned the import of most plastics in 2018, it revealed problems that had long remained hidden. The United States had been shipping 70 percent of its plastic waste to China — 1.2 billion pounds in 2017 alone. States set about finding ways to fix the recycling system, with some focusing on the confusion generated by the symbol itself. In 2021, California — the world’s fifth-largest economy — passed a “truth in labeling” law prohibiting the use of the chasing arrows on items that are rarely recycled. To pass the test, 60 percent of Californians need to have access to a processing center that sorts a given material; on top of that, 60 percent of processors have to have access to a facility that will remanufacture the material into something else.

Though the bill faced opposition from companies right until it passed, the idea resonated with legislators, said Nick Lapis, the director of advocacy at Californians Against Waste. “It was pretty easy to understand that putting the chasing arrows symbol on a product that is not ever going to get recycled is not fair to consumers. Like, it just made so much intuitive sense that I think it kind of went beyond the lobbyist politics of Sacramento.”

Across the country, public officials in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, and Washington state are considering similar legislation. This spring, Maine passed a law to incentivize companies to use accurate recycling labels on their packaging. New rules around the recycling logo are also brewing at the national level. Last April, Jennie Romer, the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for pollution prevention, called for the FTC to put an end to the “deceptive” use of the iconic chasing arrows on plastics in its upcoming revisions to the Green Guides for environmental marketing claims. “There’s a big opportunity for the Federal Trade Commission to make those updates to really set a high bar for what can be marketed as recyclable,” Romer told Grist. “Because that symbol, or marketing something as recyclable, is very valuable.”

Once California’s law goes into effect next year, state laws will clash with each other, since many states still require the resin numbers on plastic packaging. “The question on everyone’s mind is, who’s going to win out?” said Allaway, the Oregon official.

Talk of truth-in-labeling legislation has coincided with another trend — states trying to turn the costs for dealing with waste back on the manufacturers that produced it. Laws requiring “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, for packaging have already been approved in Maine, Oregon, California, and Colorado. It’s already led to problems in California, since the EPR bill refers to the state’s truth-in-labeling law to determine which materials can be recycled, creating incentives for everything to be labeled as recyclable, Dell said.

Even if the Federal Trade Commission updates the Green Guides to prohibit the deceptive use of the recycling symbol, it doesn’t change the fact that the guides are just suggestions. They don’t carry the weight of law. “The FTC itself has never enforced a false recyclable label, ever, ever, on plastics, not once,” Dell said. One of Dell’s favorite metaphors: “It’s the wild, wild West of product claims and labeling, with no sheriff in town.”

So Dell has appointed herself de facto sheriff, suing companies over their false claims. In 2021, her organization reached a settlement with TerraCycle, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and six other companies that agreed to change labels on their products. Dell recently filed a shareholder proposal with Kraft Heinz in an attempt to force it to remove recyclability claims from marshmallow bags and mac-and-cheese bowls destined for the landfill.

Another promising legal push is coming from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has been investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for what he called “an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.” Despite mounting awareness of plastic’s threat to public health, oil and chemical companies around the world make 400 million metric tons of the polymer every year, and production is on track to triple by 2060. It’s the oil industry’s backup business plan in the expectation that wealthy countries will shift away from gasoline in an effort to tackle climate change, since petroleum is the basic building block of plastics. Exxon Mobil, the world’s third-largest oil producer, ranks as the top plastic polymer producer.

Stricter enforcement around the use of the chasing arrows could lead to more accurate labels, less public confusion, and better outcomes for recycling centers. But it’s worth asking whether more recycling should even be the goal, rather than solutions that are much better for the environment, like reducing, reusing, refilling, and repairing. As Anderson, the symbol’s inventor, says, “I don’t think it’s really fair to blame a graphic symbol for all of our lack of initiative in trying to do better.”

Correction: This story originally mischaracterized Samantha MacBride’s position.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Taking Big Oil to court for ‘climate homicide’ isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds

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A new legal theory suggests that oil companies could be taken to court for every kind of homicide in the United States, short of first-degree murder.

The idea of “climate homicide” is getting attention in law schools and district attorney’s offices around the country. A paper published in Harvard Environmental Law Review last week argues that fossil fuel companies have been “killing members of the public at an accelerating rate.” It says that oil giants’ awareness that their pollution could have lethal consequences solidly fits within the definition of homicide, which, in its basic form, is causing death with a “culpable mental state.” In other words, the case can be made that oil companies knew what they were doing.

“It’s sparking a lot of conversation,” said Aaron Regunberg, senior policy counsel at the advocacy group Public Citizen. After discussing the idea with elected officials and prosecutors, Regunberg said, many of them have moved from “‘Oh, that’s crazy’ to ‘Oh, that makes sense.’”

Starting around the 1970s, oil companies like Exxon understood the dangers that burning fossil fuels would unleash — unprecedented warming that would render parts of the globe “less habitable,” submerge coastal cities, and lead to extensive drought and mass famine. Yet instead of switching away from coal and oil, they doubled down, working to block legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and spreading doubt about the science of climate change. Today, with atmospheric CO2 climbing to levels last seen 14 million years ago, the predicted consequences have begun to arrive. Since the start of the 21st century, climate change has killed roughly 4 million people, according to one conservative estimate.

By 2100, that same number of people could be killed by the effects of climate change every single year, according to the new paper by David Arkush, the director of Public Citizen’s climate program, and Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington University. “[T]he scope of the lethality is so vast that, in the annals of crime, it may eventually dwarf all other homicide cases in the United States, combined,” they write.

Criminal law cases are normally brought against individuals, but Regunberg says there’s a strong case for applying it more broadly. “It’s supposed to be about protecting us from dangerous actors that would harm our communities. What if we actually use this system to protect us from dangerous corporate actors that are doing incomprehensible harm?”

Homicide opens up a new flank in the strategy to bring climate change into the courts. Climate litigation is now in its “third wave,” according to Anthony Moffa, a professor at the University of Maine School of Law. The first lawsuits sought to force power companies to limit their emissions by way of federal public nuisance claims, a strategy the Supreme Court shot down in 2011. Then people started suing the U.S. and state governments using the argument that they had a duty to protect their citizens from climate change. The approach bore fruit last year, when young climate activists won a suit against Montana that claimed the state’s failure to evaluate climate risks in approving fossil fuel projects violated their constitutional right to a healthy environment.

That phase also includes a flood of climate lawsuits filed against oil companies in state courts using laws meant to protect people from deceptive advertising, and those cases are finally moving closer to trial after years of delays. Now the strategy has expanded to include racketeering lawsuits, which use the laws that took down the Mafia against Big Oil, and potentially criminal law cases including homicide or reckless endangerment.

Arkush and Braman’s paper suggests that all types of homicide are on the table except for first-degree murder, which requires premeditated intent. One option is “involuntary manslaughter,” or engaging in reckless conduct that causes death, even if it’s unintentional. “Negligent homicide” is similar, but for neglectful behavior. There’s also “depraved heart murder,” which requires engaging in conduct where you knew there was a substantial risk someone would be killed. Other variants include “felony murder” and “misdemeanor manslaughter.” Criminal law differs between states, so an attorney general or district attorney’s approach would depend on the jurisdiction.

Homicide suits could be a powerful force for holding oil companies accountable and forcing them to change their polluting ways. “Where tort law merely prices harmful conduct, criminal law prohibits it — and provides tools to stop it,” Arkush and Braman wrote in the Harvard Environmental Law Review paper. A successful lawsuit could result in courts requiring fossil fuel companies to restructure as “public benefit corporations” that have to balance profits with a commitment to the public good, replace their boards with new members, or make legally binding commitments to forgo certain practices.

To promote the idea of “climate homicide,” Public Citizen has been organizing panel discussions in recent weeks at law schools including Yale, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and the University of Chicago. Another panel will be held at Vermont Law School on Monday. Public Citizen is also looking into staging mock trials to see how jurors might react to these kinds of cases and what evidence they find compelling.

“There are a number of prosecutorial offices that seem interested in giving these legal theories serious consideration,” Regunberg said. “They understand that climate disasters — extreme heat, wildfires, floods, and more — are endangering their communities, and if there’s a way to stop criminally reckless conduct that’s contributing to these threats, they’re going to explore that possibility.”

The idea has been embraced by Sharon Eubanks, who led the United States’ racketeering lawsuit against tobacco companies in 2005, in which the court found that companies had conspired to deceive the public by covering up the health dangers of smoking. “There were a lot of people who said we were crazy to charge big tobacco with racketeering and that we could never win,” Eubanks told The Guardian. “But you know what? We did win. I think we need that same kind of thinking to deal with the climate crisis.”

So why has no one seriously considered suing oil companies for homicide until now? Recent years have brought advances in the science that connects climate change to extreme weather events and quantifies how corporate emissions have fueled disasters like wildfires, paving the way for these types of cases. Still, the need to include attribution science adds a layer of complexity that hasn’t been present for similar litigation against tobacco or opioid companies, according to Moffa.

And then there’s the fact that prosecutors are reluctant to take corporations to court with criminal law charges. The first time that a corporation was charged under a criminal statute for manslaughter was in 1904, when a steamship owner was found guilty after its ship caught fire and 900 passengers drowned, but the legal strategy never really took off. “So then to say, ‘Why haven’t they ever done this in the environmental law?’ They haven’t really done it in almost any context,” Moffa said.

In their paper, Arkush and Braman argued that fossil fuel companies have been acting as if they were above the law. “Under a plain reading of the law in jurisdictions across the United States, they are committing mass homicide,” they conclude. “Prosecutors should act accordingly.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/big-oil-court-climate-homicide-lawsuits/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

California towns are banning new gas stations. Big Oil is paying attention.

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Some activists view the industry's response as a badge of success.

When oil and gas companies attack a climate campaign, activists usually focus on the obvious negative: One of the world’s biggest industries, with its wealth of resources, is trying to quash their efforts to, for instance, ban natural gas in buildings.

But in Northern California, where grassroots activists have succeeded in getting towns across Napa and Sonoma counties to prohibit new gas stations, some consider the emerging backlash a sign of validation.

The news of Big Oil’s opposition came to Jim Wilson in late January. The longtime climate activist in Napa County found a flyer in his mailbox one day with a picture of a gas nozzle next to an empty wallet, along with the message “Banning gas stations = higher gas prices.” The mailer, sponsored by the Western States Petroleum Association, the West Coast’s oil industry trade group, warned that efforts to limit new gas stations could lead to less competition and increased costs for the drivers of gas-powered cars.

“I believe that Napa County is the first in the U.S. to have all of the municipalities ban new gas stations,” Wilson said. “And so maybe we’ve rocked the boat.”

As the urgency of addressing climate change grows across the United States, one unprecedented heat wave and flood at a time, cities are finding ways to cut fossil fuels out of their future. But any action that has meaningful consequences, whether it’s an electrification ordinance in Seattle or a prohibition on new gas stations in California, is bound to grab the attention of the powerful industries it hurts.

Wilson, with 350 Bay Area and Napa Climate Now, advises climate activism efforts for local teenagers, who have led the push to prohibit new gas stations in the area. Liliana Karesh, a junior at Napa High School and a co-president of Napa Schools for Climate Action, said her group has reached out to government officials, participated in public comments, and presented to city councils to get their message across. “We’re in such a state of climate emergency, yet our government continues to approve the building out of these fossil fuel infrastructures,” Karesh said.

The movement to prohibit new gas stations began in 2021 when Petaluma, California, in the neighboring Sonoma County, became the first town in the United States to prohibit new gas stations. From there, bans spread throughout Sonoma and Napa counties; the idea has also been proposed in Los Angeles; Sacramento; Eugene, Oregon; and north into Kelowna, Canada.

For a while, activists were puzzled why they weren’t seeing more opposition to their efforts, said Woody Hastings, an environmental activist in Sonoma County who helped form the Coalition Opposing New Gas Stations. He sees the flyer, along with a new bill introduced in the California State Senate that would limit gas station bans, as a sign that the movement has gained enough traction to matter to opponents. “It’s really something,” Hastings said. “It tells us that the Western States Petroleum Association, which is big guns, cares about this.”

In recent years, California has seen catastrophic fires, unhealthy pollution from smoke, and wild swings between drought and heavy rain, all enhanced by climate change. Towns across Sonoma and Napa counties have declared a “climate emergency,” and activists see the prohibition of new gas stations as one way to follow through on those words.

The bans aren’t really aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions — it’s unclear what kind of effect they have on the climate — but rather ending investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. “We’ve been told it’s a silly thing to do because, you know, it doesn’t matter, because people will just be able to fill up at the existing gas stations,” Hastings said. But he says that residents aren’t clamoring for more gas stations, so local governments don’t need to spend staff time and resources approving and supporting what might soon turn into outdated infrastructure. California plans to phase out sales of gas-powered cars by 2035 and zero out its carbon emissions by 2045. Gas station developers, Hastings said, “are assuming that they’ll be able to sell gas just like they’ve been selling gas for 100 years.”

Activists also oppose gas stations for the same reason they would oppose the construction of any other pollution-spewing facility. Beneath every neighborhood station sit underground tanks storing thousands of gallons of gasoline and diesel. These tanks are the source of toxic vapors, vented aboveground through pipes. They’re also famous for leaking, infusing the surrounding soil and groundwater with a host of contaminants. Nearly all underground storage tanks eventually leak, and the cost of cleaning up a single site can top $1 million. Gas stations account for nearly half of the country’s 450,000 contaminated brownfields, sites where the presence of hazardous substances make them difficult to redevelop.

For the oil industry, gas stations are crucial: They’re the end of a long supply chain that starts in the oil fields and ends with people filling up their vehicles. “We’re paying attention across the state where these types of bans are being proposed,” said Kevin Slagle, a spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Association. He believes the prohibition on new gas stations in parts of California are “a mix of symbolic bans and bans that really would limit fuel supplies in the community.”

Slagle said that restricting the supply of gas stations would lead to increased costs for consumers. For support, the trade group’s flyer points to a working study from University of California, Berkeley, not yet peer-reviewed, in which economists studied more than 1,000 stations in Mexico and found that adding nearby gas stations led to slightly lower gasoline prices. The flyer is part of the industry’s “Facts Per Gallon” campaign that launched late last year to draw attention to how California policies, from its cap-and-trade program to low-carbon fuel requirements, contribute to some of the highest gas prices in the country.

That same Berkeley study is also mentioned in the text of a bill introduced in late January by Aisha Wahab, a Democratic state senator representing the district east of the Bay Area. The bill, as written, calls for the California Energy Commission to conduct a study on gas stations and alternative fueling infrastructure, such as electric vehicle chargers. If enacted, it would block local governments from imposing bans starting in January 2025 and lasting until the study is completed, potentially as late as January 1, 2027.

A representative for Wahab told Grist that the original bill contained a “double negative” that was being fixed and said that the bill wouldn’t prevent moratoriums on gas stations, but did not provide further details. Since bills in California can’t be amended for 30 days after they’re introduced, the official text can’t be changed until February 29, according to the state Senate office.

In the meantime, the bans are already having an effect. “We have seen projects in Napa County stranded, and applicants for new gas stations strongly discouraged, because of [Napa] Schools for Climate Action’s work and success,” Wilson said. “This industry must be furious about the progress that children are making in trying to describe their vision for a fossil-free future.”

Washington’s key climate law is under attack. Big Oil wants it to survive.

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How did a cap-and-trade program considered the "gold standard" gain the support of oil companies?

It took Washington state more than a decade to put a price on carbon pollution. The effort to make corporations pay for the greenhouse gases they produce started in 2009 with a string of failed bills in the legislature. Frustrated, climate advocates in Washington took the idea directly to voters, putting initiatives on the ballot in 2016 and again in 2018, but both ballot measures flopped — the first defeated by infighting among environmentalists, the second by a $30 million publicity campaign paid for by oil money.

So it was a surprise when the state legislature finally managed to pass a cap-and-trade program in 2021, requiring that Washington slash its carbon emissions nearly in half by 2030, using 1990 levels as the baseline. Even more surprising, perhaps, was that the law was supported by BP, the same oil giant that had spent $13 million to kill one of the ballot initiatives three years earlier. Now the landmark law, the Climate Commitment Act, is under attack, threatened by a repeal effort bankrolled by a hedge-fund manager, and representatives for oil companies say they have nothing to do with it. In fact, oil giants want to keep it alive.

“We have never been against the Climate Commitment Act,” said Kevin Slagle, vice president of communications for the Western States Petroleum Association, a lobbying group that represents oil companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell.

In 2023, its first year in operation, the state’s program generated more than $2 billion for projects to clean up transportation, shift to clean energy, and help communities adapt to the effects of a changing climate. But this fall, voters will get a chance to shut it all down. A ballot initiative started by Brian Heywood, a hedge fund manager exasperated with Washington state’s taxes and liberal politics, would kill the law and block the state from ever instituting a cap-and-trade program again.

The existing legislation requires companies to buy pollution “permits” at quarterly auctions, a way to encourage emissions reductions and generate money for climate solutions. Heywood argues that the program has helped give the state some of the highest gas prices in the country and says that Governor Jay Inslee and other officials weren’t upfront about its potential effects on consumers. Last month, the state certified that the measure had gathered enough signatures to head to the ballot this fall.

Heywood’s campaign, called “Let’s Go Washington,” raised $7 million last year to qualify a total of six initiatives for the ballot. The proposals would repeal the state’s capital gains tax and reverse policing restrictions, among other things. Some $6 million of that money came from Heywood, but other donors include the state Republican Party and the Washington Bankers Association. The closest it gets to oil money is a $25,000 contribution from Five Point Capital, a private investment firm in Houston with a focus on oil, natural gas, and water infrastructure. The newly formed “No on 2117” committee opposing Heywood’s initiative has raised $1 million so far this year from the co-founder of Tableau Software, Chris Stolte, plus a $1,500 contribution attributed to Trudi Inslee, the governor’s wife.

While the Western States Petroleum Association isn’t backing the repeal, that doesn’t mean oil companies are happy with the current program. Slagle describes it as broken because the auctions have yielded high prices for pollution permits. His lobbying group has been releasing advertisements that align with Heywood’s message, connecting the climate law to high gas prices. It’s hard to know exactly how much the program has driven up prices, but estimates range from about a quarter to 50 cents a gallon, depending on whom you ask.

Slagle doesn’t agree with Heywood’s approach, though: He wants to work with legislators to address these shortcomings, not throw the law out. “I think what’s missed is that this can be solved without an initiative, right?” Slagle said. “This is what we’re saying. We’re actually in the middle of this, saying, ‘Hey, let’s fix this program.’”

BP, which left the Western States Petroleum Association in 2020 over the trade group’s opposition to certain climate policies in Washington state, is also in favor of keeping the Climate Commitment Act alive. “We believe that the market-based, economy-wide carbon pricing program will work, and we oppose the initiative to overturn it,” a spokesperson said in an email to Grist.

The stakes of the repeal are high: Eliminating the cap-and-invest program would rip a $5 billion hole in the state’s transportation budget, taking away free public transit rides for young people, funding for bus routes, and more. The legislature would have to rework the budget, making tough calls on what bridges they want to replace and what roads they’ll have to close because they can’t be repaired, said Lennon Bronsema, vice president of campaigns at the Washington Conservation Action, a nonprofit that’s part of the No on 2117 committee.

Voting down the law would also take away funding for improving air quality in the state’s most polluted communities. “Those people who want to repeal the Climate Commitment Act are going to try to foist down our throats, and our kids’ lungs, more pollution,” said Governor Inslee in comments to the press last month. “They want to destroy our protection for our kids’ breathing.” And it would add more carbon to the atmosphere as the state struggles with the effects of climate change: freak heat waves, unusually large and destructive forest fires, and declining snowpack on mountains, a key water source for the region.

The repeal could have repercussions at the national level, too. New York recently unveiled plans for a cap-and-invest program, and officials are monitoring the backlash in Washington state. “If this repeal initiative succeeds, it would be a blow to that momentum,” said Caroline Jones, a senior analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund. Last year, an Environmental Defense Fund analysis found that the United States can’t meet its international commitments under the Paris Agreement without follow-through from states on their goals. Washington is one of the few states on track to meet its carbon-cutting targets, thanks largely to the Climate Commitment Act, Jones said.

So how did the state end up with a law that Jones considers a “gold standard” for state climate policy — and also something that oil companies support?

For the oil industry, part of the appeal lies in the law’s exemptions. Since BP and other crude refiners fall under the category of “emissions-intensive, trade-exposed” industries, they get some pollution permits free, making it cheaper to comply with the law. When the cap-and-invest program was rolled out, about 50 percent of the credits were handed out to major polluters to use, said Caitlin Krenn, a climate and clean energy campaign manager at Washington Conservation Action.

Refineries get 100 percent of their allowances at no cost for the first four years of the program — after that, it’ll go down to 97 percent. That’s because of fears that these facilities would relocate elsewhere if Washington put strict regulations on them. But the fuel suppliers of gas and diesel, which might be owned by the same company that operates a refinery, don’t get any credits for free, Krenn said.

After the Climate Commitment Act passed in 2021, BP, which owns the state’s largest oil refinery near Bellingham, spent about $270 million on efficiency upgrades at its facility, estimated to reduce the refinery’s emissions by 7 percent. Cutting its emissions earlier than necessary gave BP the leeway to bank, trade, or sell its allowances. “The Climate Commitment Act rewards us for that. So, it’s not just a stick. It’s also a carrot,” Tom Wolf, a BP government relations manager for the West Coast, told the Seattle Times several months after Inslee signed the legislation into law. “We were doing this anyway … but there’s no doubt that it [the act] makes it even better.”

If the Climate Commitment Act gets shot down in November, it would also make it hard for companies to plan for the future. “If the program disappeared, then we’re kind of back at square one,” said Slagle, of the Western States Petroleum Association. “And so then, what might happen down the road?”

The hidden cost of gasoline

This story was originally published by Grist and co-published with Crosscut. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

A black, electric-powered Nissan Leaf pulled up to a gas station — not to fuel up, of course. Matthew Metz, the founder of Coltura, a nonprofit trying to speed up the country’s shift away from gasoline, climbed out of his car with printed maps in hand, prepared to give me a tour.

It was a sunny spring day, and the Arco station in North Seattle looked like any other on a busy street corner, with cars fueling up and a line of bored people waiting to buy snacks and drinks inside the convenience store. Metz knows a lot about gas stations, and it changes what he sees. Looking around, he marveled at the risks that everyone was taking, even if they weren’t aware of it. “This is a hazardous materials facility,” he told me.

Drivers pumped their tanks with gas, breathing carcinogens like benzene, the source of gasoline’s signature sweet smell. On the east side of the property, tall white pipes that vent toxic vapors from petroleum kept underground stood just 10 feet away from the window of a childcare center. Hidden below the station is a tract of contaminated soil that extends underneath a neighboring apartment building.

The Arco station has a long history of leaking, with petroleum products discovered floating in the septic tank beneath it in 1990. After decades of efforts to remove and break down that pollution — a host of contaminants including lead, benzene, and the suspected carcinogen methyl tertiary-butyl ether — trace amounts remain, with some highly polluted patches in the soil. One sample taken late last year showed levels of gasoline-related compounds 72 times higher than Washington state’s allowable limit.

a man in a jacket and sunglasses walks in front of a gas station Matthew Metz, the founder of the nonprofit Coltura, walks in front of an Arco gas station in Seattle. Grist / Jesse Nichols

This Arco station is hardly unique. Almost every gas station eventually pollutes the earth beneath it, experts told Grist. The main culprit: the underground storage tanks that hold tens of thousands of gallons of fuel, one of the most common sources of groundwater pollution. Typically, two or three of these giant, submarine-shaped tanks are buried under a station to store the gasoline and diesel that gets piped to the pump. A large tank might be 55 feet long and hold as many as 30,000 gallons; a typical tank might hold 10,000 gallons. Leaks can occur at any point — in the storage tank itself, in the gas pumps, and in the pipes that connect them. Hazardous chemicals can then spread rapidly through the soil, seeping into groundwater, lakes, or rivers. Even a dribble can pollute a wide area. Ten gallons of gasoline can contaminate 12 million gallons of groundwater — a significant risk, given that groundwater is the source of drinking water for nearly half of all Americans.

As a result, time-consuming cleanup efforts are unfolding all across the country, with remediation for a single gas station sometimes topping $1 million. Leaks are such a huge liability that they’ve led to a high-stakes game of hot potato, where no one wants to pay for the mess — not the gas station owners, not the insurance companies that provide coverage for tanks, not the oil companies that supply the fuel. In some states, polluters have shifted tens of millions of dollars in remediation costs onto taxpayers. Roughly 60,000 contaminated sites are still waiting to be cleaned up, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA — and those are just the ones that have been found. Washington state has about 2,500 in line, one of the biggest backlogs in the country.

“The whole financial underpinnings of gas stations are starting to crumble.

Much of this pollution has been stagnant for decades. Forty years ago, steel storage tanks began corroding, setting off a slow-motion environmental disaster all over the United States. Leaks often weren’t discovered until long after petroleum had poisoned the groundwater, when neighbors of gas stations began complaining that the water from their taps smelled like gasoline. In 1983, the EPA declared leaking tanks a serious threat to groundwater, and Congress soon stepped in with new regulations. One of the largest spills was in Brooklyn, where a 17 million-gallon pool of oil gradually collected beneath a Mobil gas station — a larger spill than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, when a tanker ran aground in Alaska and poured oil into Prince William Sound.

Fast-forward to today, and more than half a million leaks have been confirmed around the country. The Government Accountability Office estimated in 2007 that the total bill for cleanups would top $22 billion. Those old, decrepit storage tanks have left a legacy: overgrown, empty lots that real-estate developers don’t want to touch. Of the roughly 450,000 brownfields in the country, nearly half are contaminated by petroleum, much of it coming from old gas stations.

As the contamination from these spills lingers, underground storage tanks are becoming a problem again as the next generation of tanks — installed in a rush after the old steel ones started breaking — begin nearing the end of their 30-year warranties, when there’s broad consensus they are highly likely to leak. In Washington state, for instance, the average tank is about 29 years old. The tanks at the Arco station in North Seattle were replaced in 1990, soon after contamination was discovered, putting them a few years past the 30-year cutoff.

a gas station with a blue awning and chain link fence. Graffiti covers an abandoned gas station in Seattle. Grist / Jesse Nichols

Congress passed a series of amendments to the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act in the 1980s introducing federal regulations to find and prevent spills. The law mandated that owners of underground storage tanks demonstrate they can cover $1 million in damages from contamination, a requirement often met by buying insurance from private companies and special state cleanup funds. States are responsible for implementing the regulations, and take different approaches to enforcement, cleanup, and insurance.

But states are discovering that many private insurers, which have long hesitated to provide coverage, are even more reluctant as tanks get older. “I don’t think they’re super thrilled to insure them anymore,” said Cassandra Garcia, the deputy director of Washington state’s Pollution Liability Insurance Agency. “This isn’t generally the most profitable business line for them.”

If gas stations don’t have insurance, states can shut them down. This predicament prompted Washington state to adopt a new law this spring providing fully state-backed insurance for gas stations. But critics like Metz wonder whether stations need to be saved at all. With electric vehicles on the rise, Metz thinks that selling gasoline is a dying business. “The whole financial underpinnings of gas stations are starting to crumble,” Metz said.

Gas stations often bear the names of major oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron, but that doesn’t mean those companies actually own the stations. Usually, they supply the fuel to independent business owners who signed agreements to sell their products and pay royalties to use their branding. Back in the day, oil companies owned a lot of stations (and thus the tanks beneath them); today, the top five largest oil companies own about 1 percent of gas stations.

The number of stations overall has been in decline for decades thanks to mediocre profits, rising land values in cities, and more fuel-efficient cars. An analysis from Boston Consulting Group found that between 25 and 80 percent of gas stations nationwide could be unprofitable in 12 years — and that analysis was conducted in 2019, before a slate of new policies, including federal tax credits, were passed to promote electric vehicles. Under vehicle-emissions rules unveiled by the Biden administration in April, EVs would make up as much as two-thirds of all U.S. car sales by 2031. Last year, Washington state set a target of ending the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2030, just seven years away; it has also adopted California’s stricter deadline of 2035, along with five other states.

That shift could lead to a pileup of vacant gas stations that the existing cleanup programs won’t be able to handle. There are more than 145,000 fueling stations in the U.S., according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. Even if the country manages to break off its century-long attachment to gasoline, the fuel’s legacy may live on in the soil and water. The question of who pays to clean up the contamination is a mess in itself: In theory, station owners are supposed to pick up the tab, but sometimes they’re unable to pay — or unable to be found — when the bill comes due. So then, who pays? Sometimes it’s an insurance company, sometimes it’s an oil company, and sometimes it’s the government. It’s up to lawyers and courts to hash it out.

“This is a huge problem nationally,” Metz said. “It’s all over the country. There are all these abandoned gas stations, and it’s just going to get worse.”

Behind just about every environmental program in the United States is an environmental disaster that brought it into being, and leaking gas stations are no exception. In this case, the disaster became public in December 1983, when a 60 Minutes segment warned Americans that underground storage tanks were a “time bomb” in their neighborhoods. The show documented the daily struggles of families in a small Rhode Island town whose drinking water had long been contaminated by Mobil and Exxon stations uphill. With 2 or 3 of every 10 gas stations in the country leaking, the show’s host, Harry Reasoner, told viewers that it promised to be the pollution disaster of the 1980s.

The catastrophe was set in motion in the years after World War II, when many Americans bought cars and moved to the suburbs, spurring demand for gasoline. Oil companies helped build hundreds of thousands of gas stations around the country and installed steel storage tanks beneath them. But those steel tanks and piping, exposed to soil, corroded over time, and petroleum began seeping through cracks and holes, carrying carcinogens into the groundwater.

The petroleum industry knew the risks. In 1961, advertisements in the trade magazine National Petroleum News acknowledged that “rusty, leaky storage tanks” were a problem. The pipes that connected tanks to the pumps were prone to breaking, too. In 1962, a B.F. Goodrich ad touting flexible connectors warned that “the settling or shifting of underground storage tanks can cause pipelines to crack, leak, and break apart.”

Three ads from the National Petroleum News trade journal Ads from the National Petroleum News trade journal ranging from 1962 to 1972. National Petroleum News Archive

Within a few years, safer fiberglass tanks emerged as a substitute, though the steel industry later argued that the fiberglass couldn’t handle the alcohol-blended fuels that were being used. Manufacturers started offering leak detectors, promising that the technology could help stave off lawsuits and bad press. “With Red Jacket Leak Detectors, you’ll probably never have to reckon with contamination from piping leak losses … litigation and bad publicity … unhappy dealers … or even disaster,” read an advertisement in 1972.

By the early 1970s, oil companies were well aware that the tanks they owned beneath gas stations posed a huge liability. “Large sums of money, time, and effort are exhausted on a continuing basis in the location and detection of leaking tanks and lines,” a report from Exxon said in 1973.

The realization came at a time when public concern over pollution was taking off. In 1969, floating debris caught fire in Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, sending flames five stories high, and a drilling accident near Santa Barbara, California, spread an oil slick over more than 800 square miles of the Pacific Ocean. The modern environmental movement was born a year later, when some 20 million Americans demonstrated on the first Earth Day in April 1970. The protests led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and a slew of regulations to protect the air and water.

For companies selling gasoline, it was a worrying development. “The oil companies started to realize that they could be liable for a lot of environmental harm caused by these little gas stations,” said Peter Lehner, who investigated underground storage tank leaks for the Natural Resources Defense Council as well as the New York attorney general’s office in the late 1990s.

Oil giants found ways to unload some of that risk. In a lawsuit brought by residents of West Point, Indiana, against Shell in 1993, the oil company admitted that it began replacing steel tanks with fiberglass ones at the stations that it owned in the mid-1970s — but not at independently owned stations that sold Shell gasoline and touted its brand, according to court documents. The company adopted a policy that independent dealers were “on their own” when it came to technical advice or leaks from tanks, and refused to allow them to attend the company’s “tank camp” that provided intensive training on handling the equipment, the plaintiffs’ lawyers alleged in a court brief. They argued that the strategy saved thousands of dollars per station and noted a trial court had found that “the oil companies used their purported independence as a shield against liability.”

Shell ended up losing the case after the Indiana Supreme Court held it legally responsible for tanks that had leaked at a station that it operated but never owned, ordering the company to pay millions in cleanup costs and attorneys’ fees.

a black and white photo of firemen hosing off a gas station near a pump In a photo from 1979, firefighters clean up gasoline that spilled when an underground storage tank at a Texaco service station in Aurora, Colorado, was being filled from a tanker. The problem was apparently due to an improper fitting on a hose, resulting in an 825-gallon spill. Glen Martin / The Denver Post via Getty Images

Another tactic was to sell stations — along with the liability for underground tanks — to new owners. The purchase and sale agreements for gas stations often contained a clause that indemnified the oil company for all harm caused by a leak, regardless of whether they were at fault, leaving the new owner responsible for the costs. An undated contract from Texaco, for instance, spells out that the purchaser would agree “to maintain all storage facilities” to prevent spills and “indemnify Seller for all claims, fines and expenses relating thereto.”

“I have talked to several gas station owners that have purchased gas stations from Big Oil,” said Ryan Bixby, the managing principal at the environmental consulting firm SoundEarth, who oversees cleanups in Washington state. “I think that some of the property owners really didn’t understand what they were getting into when they released that liability.”

Oil companies knew that gasoline posed a major health threat. In Rockaway, New Jersey, in 1980, a Shell scientist found that seven plumes were leaking from underground storage tanks, contaminating the groundwater with gasoline and methyl tertiary-butyl ether, or MTBE — a common gasoline additive that posed health risks and was particularly difficult to clean up. At Shell, an internal joke circulated that MTBE stood for “Most Things Biodegrade Easier”; later iterations of the acronym included entries like “Menace Threatening Our Bountiful Environment” and “Major Threat to Better Earnings.” In 1981, Arco noted in a memo that tanks were polluting the U.S. water supply with toxic chemicals such as benzene.

Leaking tanks went from a source of private hand-wringing to a public scandal in 1983, the year the 60 Minutes segment ran. The New York Times reported that millions of gallons of gasoline were seeping from storage tanks each year. Congress soon moved to protect groundwater supplies. Within a year, it had formed a national underground tank program and directed the EPA to develop a regulatory system to prevent and detect leaks and clean up tanks.

By 1985, the industry’s concern over regulations and liability had reached a fever pitch. National Petroleum News reported that “the day of reckoning” was nearly at hand, with tank leak liability giving “equipment distributors and oil marketers the cold sweats.”

That year, California created its own underground tank regulations, sending the oil industry into shock. In response, the oil company Unocal sent California dealers who were leasing its stations special legal agreements asking them to pay for inspection costs. “[Major oil companies] could also try to make lessees pay for repairs, registration fees and damages associated with leaks,” U.S. Oil Week reported, noting that Chevron was already pushing maintenance and insurance costs for leak-prone tanks onto its independent dealers.

a large cylinder gas storage tank is lowered into a pit by a crane Double-walled, fiberglass storage tanks are prepared and lowered onto a gravel bed at a gas station site, circa June 1985 in Los Angeles. Bob Riha, Jr. / Getty Images

Another response to impending regulations was to lobby allies in Congress. Representative Billy Tauzin, a Democrat from Louisiana with heavy campaign funding from oil companies, proposed limiting liability for the owners and operators of leaking tanks to $3 million. Critics labeled the proposed bill the “Exxon Relief Act.” Tauzin also tried to codify a loophole allowing oil companies to be absolved of financial responsibility for leaks simply by selling off tanks to gas station owners. But that failed when Congress took another step and passed an amendment to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1986, which held that no owner or operator of an underground storage tank could transfer that liability to someone else.

Regardless, gas station owners were facing another financial problem. Private insurers, being in the business of making money instead of losing it, began dropping out of their pollution liability contracts or rewriting them to exclude coverage for tanks in 1986. For some insurance companies, it was already too late — some went bankrupt from the soaring costs of covering pollution from gas stations, said Alexandra Kleeman, an attorney in Seattle who helps people buy and sell contaminated properties.

That left gas station owners in a tight spot. “The insurance companies seem to be conspiring to avoid the risk entirely by all dropping the pollution coverages at the same time,” read a newsletter from the Southern California Service Station Association in 1985. The association argued that small gas station owners had been left in a “catch-22,” forced to provide financial responsibility for tanks with “no means of doing so.” The situation led states to set up programs, such as Washington’s Pollution Liability Insurance Agency, to help gas station owners meet the financial requirement.

The EPA devised more fully fleshed out regulations for underground storage tanks in 1988, requiring that they have devices to prevent spills and corrosion on any metal parts. Gas station owners were given 10 years to upgrade their tanks or install ones that met the new standards. Mom-and-pop stations were not well-equipped to do so, and many were forced out of business after the 1999 deadline.

Hoping to make oil companies pay for groundwater pollution, local residents turned to litigation in the mid-1990s. A lawyer named Scott Summy was winning lawsuits against oil companies all around the country, arguing that oil companies knew that MTBE-laced gasoline would spread far and wide, contaminating drinking water supplies. Over the years, Summy won more than $1 billion in settlements for residents and public water providers.

With a fleet of upgraded and newly replaced tanks in the ground, and at least some justice served, underground storage tanks soon faded from national attention. Behind the scenes, however, some states quietly shifted the cleanup costs from polluters to taxpayers.

a large broken storage tank covered in dirt being held up by construction equipment Workers remove an underground tank from a gas station. Nycshooter via Getty Images

In Indiana, for example, taxpayers spent more than $21 million decontaminating gas stations owned by former Vice President Mike Pence’s family after their company, Kiel Bros. Oil Co., went bankrupt in 2004. “Indiana has been especially amenable to using public money to pay for heavily contaminated soil to be excavated and for high-powered pumps to suck toxic liquid and vapor from the soil,” the Associated Press reported in 2018.

Arizona shifted the primary responsibility for cleanups from tank owners to taxpayers in 2004, an investigation by the Arizona Republic found. From 2011 to 2013, almost $45 million in taxpayer dollars was spent cleaning up leaks and spills from gas stations in the state because gas station owners were unable to pay the bill. At the time, more than one-third of gas station owners in the state had no financial coverage for their tanks, despite legal requirements.

The same story played out in Tennessee, too, according to reporting by the Tennessean. In 2016, the newspaper found that the state’s residents were footing 90 percent of the bill for cleanups. By 2021, the oil industry’s environmental fees that fed the state’s remediation fund had been eliminated entirely, while taxpayers were paying roughly $14 million each year through a tax on gasoline.

Anyone filling up their tank in the United States pays a 0.1 cent tax on each gallon of fuel that goes into the EPA’s trust fund for cleaning up leaking tanks, created in 1986 to pay for remediation when no viable owner could be found. More than $1.3 billion is sitting in the fund right now; last fiscal year, $67 million of it went toward remediating spills.

Depending on who you’re talking to, the subject of underground storage tanks either elicits warnings of an impending disaster or praise as one of the country’s overlooked success stories.

Federal officials point to the hundreds of thousands of sites that have been remediated over the past 40 years. Last March, the EPA announced that it had reached the “significant milestone” of cleaning up more than 500,000 underground storage tank leaks.

The federal regulations put in place in the 1980s — such as banning bare steel tanks and requiring spill-protection equipment — have prevented countless disasters. New technology has emerged that helps detect problems sooner, with some detection systems able to find a leak by monitoring vapor, said Bixby of SoundEarth. That’s a more reliable way than the old “dipstick” method in which a worker manually dips a long pole into a tank to measure fuel levels, a practice that can eventually wear a hole in the bottom of the tank. Newer tanks also come with two walls and monitors that can detect when petroleum slips through the first wall of defense.

In Washington state, the Department of Ecology is finding fewer leaks. Back in 1990, it discovered 900 leaks a year; since 2016, the number has hovered around 30.

An ARCO gas station with pumps An Arco gas station pictured next to an apartment building in Seattle. Grist / Jesse Nichols

Brand-new tanks are fairly reliable when maintained and monitored correctly, experts told Grist — but these aren’t the ones environmental advocates are worried about. The aging tanks installed at the beginning of the 1990s were “still pretty rudimentary,” Bixby said. Many of these older systems, especially the sumps, weren’t designed to handle the corrosive mix of gasoline and ethanol sold in the United States. On top of that, only 57 percent of underground storage tanks in the country meet all federal requirements to prevent and detect leaks. In Washington state, just over half are in compliance with federal rules, according to the most recent EPA data from this spring. That means that at least 600 fail to meet safety standards.

“Failing to meet regulatory requirements increases the risk of a release, and/or reduces the chance that a release will be quickly discovered,” a spokesperson for the EPA said in a statement to Grist. States have a variety of tools to enforce the requirements, including fines and the ability to prevent gas stations from having more fuel delivered, the EPA said. But the fact that such a large share of gas station owners aren’t following the rules suggests that states are wary of making such moves.

Kleeman, the environmental attorney in Seattle, thought that one reason Washington state wasn’t cracking down was because it had other environmental priorities, such as climate change. “We do have a crazy number of impacted sites for being so green, but I wouldn’t say that abandoned gas stations or contaminated gas station sites are really that big of a concern,” she said. “On the scale of things that are probably keeping Governor [Jay] Inslee up at night, it’s not, you know, the big issue.”

Dangerous spills are still turning up across the country. In Monmouth, Oregon, a small town outside the capital of Salem, a 76 gas station spilled 14,000 gallons of gasoline into nearby groundwater in April 2021. The leak, discovered when workers at a sewage treatment plant a mile away noticed the scent of gasoline, was caused by a line failure at the top of an underground storage tank. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that if somebody had lit a match at the wrong time, people would have died,” said a state official who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “The vapor from that escaped fuel was definitely above the ignitability threshold.”

It’s hardly an isolated anecdote. In Provo, Utah, 55,000 gallons of gasoline escaped from a storage tank into the soil and groundwater in March 2018; the state’s environmental department called the incident “catastrophic.” In Lily Lake, Illinois, a rural town outside Chicago, a Shell gas station under construction spilled nearly 8,000 gallons of gasoline after heavy rain flooded tanks last April, sending petroleum into a nearby wetland. And in November last year, a gas station in Bloomington, Indiana, spilled several thousand gallons of fuel due to a leak in the storage tank or piping.

Washington state has the sixth-biggest backlog of leaking underground storage tanks, behind Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, according to the EPA. Long waiting lists aren’t necessarily signs of indifference. They can be a result of stringent groundwater standards or geography. West of the Cascade mountains in Washington, high groundwater levels can cause leaked gasoline to spread further.

Barry Rogowski, the program manager for the Washington Department of Ecology’s toxic cleanup program, said that underground storage tanks are one of his agency’s priorities. Over 4,000 sites have been cleared by the state, with some 2,500 to go. A lot of the remaining contamination is hard to reach — with contaminated water sitting under, say, a railroad track or major roadway — and requires additional resources, Rogowski said. The Department of Ecology recently hired six staffers to help with tasks like sampling and site assessments to chip away at the backlog.

The reluctance of private insurers to cover aging tanks left Washington looking for new options. Under a longstanding program, private insurers provide $75,000 of the total $1 million of insurance for the tanks, with the state backing the rest. But if insurance companies decided to back out of the reinsurance program entirely, as some officials feared they might, the Department of Ecology would have to go around shutting down gas stations that no longer complied with the law, according to Garcia of the state’s Pollution Liability Insurance Agency.

So this year, Garcia’s agency worked with state legislators to pass a bill, HB1175, implementing a new system. For each gas station that enters the new program, the state will cover $1 million for old leaks and $2 million for future ones. The funding comes from a small tax on oil companies when selling their products in the state — which is increasing from 0.15 percent to 0.3 percent — along with premiums from gas station owners. Garcia said that the new approach gives the state more control over gas station cleanups by taking out “the insurance middleman.” Governor Inslee signed the law in April.

Critics of the law, such as Metz — the anti-gasoline advocate — called it a “bailout” of a dying industry. He sees gas stations as a link in a long supply chain that originates in the oil fields and ends with carbon pollution spewing from tailpipes. The transportation system has become the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, much of which comes from vehicles pumped full of gasoline and diesel at the pump.

a bald man with sunglasses in front of an ARCO station Matthew Metz, the founder of the nonprofit Coltura, walks in front of a gas station in Seattle. Grist / Jesse Nichols

Some environmental advocates are skeptical that the new policy will cover all the costs. “If we have 2,000 tanks that need to be cleaned up, that’s basically a billion-dollar liability,” said Clif Swiggett, who leads policy analysis at Carbon Washington, a climate policy nonprofit. “So that’s a huge amount of costs that’s about to come over the horizon. … These gas stations are going to go out of business, and in a big wave, if we successfully electrify transportation.”

One of Metz’s complaints with the legislation is that it doesn’t prioritize prevention. When asked which states had done a good job preventing spills, the EPA pointed to Colorado, which has spent the past several years using its petroleum industry-funded cleanup money not just to address leaks, but to stop them from happening in the first place. Mahesh Albuquerque, the director of Colorado’s Division of Oil and Public Safety, said the state rewards gas station owners for removing their tanks by offering $1 for every gallon removed, up to $30,000. The thinking is that better equipment (and fewer tanks) could save the state money in the long run by cutting down on remediation costs.

Colorado has spent $4.3 million on these kinds of incentives over the last two decades, and its tank-removal reimbursement program has helped take nearly 500 old tanks out of the ground, Albuquerque said. The average age of an underground storage tank in Colorado was roughly 27 years when the program started in 2019, in line with the national average calculated by the EPA at the time; today, Colorado’s average is down to about 25 years. (The EPA does not maintain current data on the average age of tanks, a spokesperson told Grist.)

“The benefit has been huge for our state, where it’s incentivized owners to actually be a little more proactive,” Albuquerque said. “The focus needs to be on prevention rather than cleanup.”

The approach has resulted in more gas stations adhering to federal standards. In Colorado, 93 percent of gas stations are in compliance with the EPA’s rules for preventing leaks, the second-highest compliance among states after Wyoming. Gas station owners who fail to follow these standards face consequences: In the event of a leak, owners are eligible for $2 million in reimbursement for cleanup costs from the state — but how much they get reimbursed depends on their track record of meeting the guidelines. The state might cover only 75 percent of the costs for an owner who violated the rules, for example, or deny all reimbursements for particularly egregious violations, Albuquerque said.

Even with these measures in place, new leaks continue to be discovered in Colorado, running the state about $37 million in cleanup costs every year.

Electric vehicles could well be the biggest shift in American transportation since cars replaced horses. But what happens to gas stations — and the tanks beneath them — when hardly anyone needs gasoline anymore?

Looking at an abandoned gas station today gives you a preview of what might be coming. At the Bigfoot gas station in North Seattle, unleaded gas is priced at $2.69 — one indication it’s been closed for a few years, along with the graffiti covering the building. When I visited the site in March, a biker zooming by craned his neck to call out, “Check out that sinkhole!” A chain-link fence guarded a cavernous hole in the ground by the old gas pumps, concrete breaking off around its edges. At the tiny, pink cannoli stand next door, a barista waited at the window, looking on at the forlorn facility.

a sign outside of a gas station A sign stands over the shuttered Bigfoot gas station and car wash in Seattle, Washington. Grist / Jesse Nichols

The common-sense solution for the future of gas stations is to turn them into EV charging stations. But the convenience store model might not translate. Most people charge their vehicles at home. Road-trippers require fast-charging stations along the highway. Public parking lots are a good place for chargers, but running into a convenience store to buy peanut M&Ms doesn’t take more than five minutes or so, not long enough to get much juice from even the fastest chargers. People might prefer to charge up while running longer errands, like grocery shopping. Walmart, for example, recently announced it would install thousands of chargers at stores around the country.

In theory, a gas station lot could turn into anything. But developers are reluctant to take on contaminated lots. The process of excavation might unearth complications, such as an old tank that no one realized was there, or contamination that went undetected in the initial inspection process. “You often don’t find these impacts until much, much later,” Bixby said.

Developers hesitate to get involved with a contaminated property, but if they do, they can push the cleanup process forward. “It’s rare that a landowner just says, ‘Oh, well, I’m aware of the contamination, it’s on my property, it’s my responsibility, so I will clean it up,’” Bixby said. “It’s more common that that cleanup happens when somebody is interested in buying the property and a lender says, ‘Well, that’s great, but I’m not going to loan you any money on it until your property is clean.’”

Bixby recently finished cleaning up a property in the Rainier Valley in South Seattle that had been contaminated for more than a decade. Property transactions kept falling through until a developer came along who wanted to put in below-grade parking. That made it easier to sell, because it cut down on the costs of hauling in new soil: A contaminated site generally requires digging up the dirt, trucking away the contaminated soil, and backfilling the giant hole.

In that case, the big oil company that was responsible for the contamination settled a case for $1.8 million, Bixby said. The total cost of the cleanup was even higher. It’s common for oil companies to settle cases long before they get to court. That’s because if the case goes to trial, the polluter may not only have to cover the cleanup costs, but also the plaintiff’s attorney fees, which can be almost as high, Bixby said.

Some abandoned gas stations have ended up with a more creative future, but even those come with headaches. A group of artists recently converted an abandoned gas station in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, across from Boeing Field, into a community center and art museum called Mini Mart City Park. It took 15 years of environmental studies and soil cleanup, with the project totaling close to $2.3 million.

Given the toxic legacy of gas stations, some communities have begun pushing back against their development. Two years ago, Petaluma, California, became the first town in the country to ban new gas stations, following its declaration of a “climate emergency” in 2019. In March, Sonoma County prohibited their construction. Even famously car-centric Los Angeles has considered a similar ban.

For Beth Doglio, one of the Democratic state representatives who introduced HB1175, seeing new gas stations has become a source of frustration. “The energy right now to fuel our vehicles is this totally toxic, gross shit that’s underground,” Doglio said. Getting rid of the storage tank problem is a benefit of going electric that hardly anyone thinks about, she said.

“It’s not going to cost a fortune, $1 million, to fix a charging station. It’s kind of exciting. That, to me, was like, ‘Oh, wow, here’s yet another benefit of the clean energy transition.’”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The laws that took down mobsters are now being turned against Big Oil

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The flood-prone city of Hoboken, New Jersey, sued Exxon, Chevron, and other oil companies three years ago, hoping to put them on trial for deceiving the public. Like other lawsuits set in motion by “Exxon Knew” investigations, Hoboken made the case that they breached state consumer protection laws by hiding the risks of burning fossil fuels.

But the lawsuit recently took a novel twist. Hoboken’s lawyers amended the complaint in late April, alleging that Big Oil had violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, as first reported by the accountability site ExxonKnews. New Jersey’s statute is modeled after a federal RICO law passed in 1970 designed to take down organized crime. These racketeering lawsuits aren’t just for the Mafia anymore; they’ve also been successful against tobacco companies, such as Philip Morris, and pharmaceutical executives tied to the opioid epidemic.

It could be the start of a new wave of climate lawsuits, said Korey Silverman-Roati, a fellow at Columbia Law School. Thirty-three states and two U.S. territories have RICO laws, and judgments in these cases can award plaintiffs triple the damages. The use of RICO is another sign that cities and states are trying to learn from “the successes and failures of the tobacco litigation movement and the opioid litigation movement,” Silverman-Roati said.

It’s already proving to be a big year for climate court cases. Last month, the Supreme Court rejected petitions from Chevron, Shell, BP, and other companies in many cases filed by cities and states, unleashing lawsuits to proceed in state courts that had been stuck in limbo for years. This week, the court also allowed Hoboken’s case to move forward, potentially toward a jury trial. The city aims to make the oil giants pay hundreds of millions of dollars for updating local infrastructure to withstand stronger storms, rising seas, and other effects of climate change.

Hoboken’s lawsuit is the second to argue that Big Oil colluded in a “fraudulent scheme” to conceal how their products contribute to climate change. In November, cities across Puerto Rico accused Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other fossil fuel companies of violating the federal RICO law. The towns seek to make companies pay billions of dollars for the extensive damages suffered during hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017.

Both lawsuits argue that evidence of a conspiracy traces back to 1989, just as governments around the world started talking about reining in global warming. That year, ExxonMobil, Shell, and the industry’s largest trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, helped form a group to block climate action audaciously named the Global Climate Coalition. Even though these companies had privately understood the risks of climate change for decades, they developed a robust public relations campaign that cast doubt on the science. The corporate coalition lobbied politicians, reviewed international climate science reports, and gave the industry a voice in global climate negotiations.

The latest lawsuits also point to the American Petroleum Institute’s creation of a front group called “Global Climate Science Communications Team” in 1998, mirroring the tobacco industry’s efforts to discredit the science that linked cigarette smoke to cancer. (The oil industry’s “science” team did not include a single scientist.) It had the stated goal of getting a majority of Americans to recognize “that significant uncertainties exist in climate science,” declaring that “victory will be achieved” when uncertainty became part of the “conventional wisdom.”

“They’ve made it easy to prove,” Melissa Sims, an attorney at Milberg, the Tennessee-based law firm representing the Puerto Rican cities, told Grist earlier this year, “because unlike all the other racketeering cases that have been on file, none of them included a written battle plan with a detailed division of labor on how they were going to accomplish their deception.”

In response, oil companies say that courtrooms aren’t the right place to address the big question of climate change. After Puerto Rico’s suit was filed, a lawyer for Chevron told Reuters said it was “a baseless distraction from the serious challenge of global climate change, not an attempt to find an effective solution.” An Exxon spokesperson said that these kinds of cases “waste millions of dollars of taxpayer money.”

Hoboken, on the other hand, says that the campaign of deception that started 40 years ago never stopped. Today, advertisements showcasing oil companies’ clean energy ventures “dupe consumers into believing that they are committed to addressing climate change,” the city’s complaint says.

Both RICO lawsuits highlight “this decades-long pattern of fossil fuel companies knowing that their products are harmful, deceptively marketing them to the public as safe, and then public communities being on the hook for huge sums to pay for those harms,” Silverman-Roati said. “It’s really a way of underlining that pattern aspect of the behavior, the conspiratorial aspect of the behavior, and tying that to criminal violations like fraud.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/hoboken-rico-lawsuit-oil-companies/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

Walmart just illustrated how mainstream electric vehicles are now

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In the latest sign that corporate behemoths are getting behind the shift to electric vehicles, Walmart announced on Thursday that it would install fast-charging stations at thousands of locations around the country. The rollout would quadruple the company’s network of charging stations, currently available at more than 280 Walmart and Sam’s Club stores.

Walmart’s move could help allay a common concern about buying an electric car — range anxiety, the fear of getting stranded with a dead battery and no chargers in sight.

“We’ve got a Walmart store or Sam’s Club within 10 miles of 90 percent of the population in this country,” Vishal Kapadia, the company’s senior vice president of energy transformation, told the Washington Post. “We know we can address range anxiety in a way that no one else can.”

Seen as a pipe dream not long ago, the shift to electric vehicles is finally becoming a concrete reality. This year, the United States hit the milestone of 3 million electric vehicles on the road. That’s only about 1 percent of America’s vehicles, but sales are growing fast, with EVs making up 7 percent of new vehicle registrations in January, almost double the year before.

New laws and recent business pivots are nudging electric vehicles further into the mainstream. President Joe Biden plans to build a national network of 500,000 charging stations by 2030, with the government recently allocating $7.5 billion to that effort. California has banned the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, with at least a half-dozen other states following along. On the business side, automakers are going all in on the trend — albeit in the American tradition of oversized trucks and SUVs. With Walmart adding chargers nationwide, the country’s largest retailer is now on board, too. After a century, the internal combustion engine’s century-long grip on the country is beginning to look shaky.

The adoption of electric vehicles has long been plagued by worries that they won’t be able to meet people’s everyday driving needs. A study last spring, for example, found that people underestimated how many daily tasks electric vehicles could fulfill by as much as 30 percent. Perhaps in response to those concerns, automakers have been churning out cars with longer ranges. Ram recently announced that its upcoming electric pickup, the Ram 1500 REV, will carry a battery option that can go 500 miles on a single charge — roughly enough for an eight-hour road trip.

The sticker shock of buying an electric car has also been a hindrance to sales. But Tesla, which controls about two-thirds of the EV market in the United States, slashed its prices in January, pressuring its rivals to follow suit. The Model Y, for example, went from $65,990 to $52,990, a 20 percent drop, and the company has said it will prioritize affordability in its next generation of vehicles. Mass-market electric vehicles could become as cheap as gasoline-powered cars this year, according to the New York Times. That’s partly thanks to subsidies and tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate legislation that Biden signed last year. For people buying new EVs, the IRA offers up to a $7,500 tax credit; this week, Ford announced that its whole lineup of EVs are eligible for either half or all of that credit.

One indicator that Americans are starting to get comfortable with electric cars is that they are becoming less polarizing. In the first decade of the 2000s, the hybrid Toyota Prius, became a cultural flashpoint, after it became associated with a moralizing brand of environmentalism. Fast-forward to last spring, and America’s long-time bestselling vehicle and a Republican favorite — the Ford F-150 pickup truck — went all electric, with a waitlist three years long at the time of its release. The IRA may also help change the political calculus by sending billions of dollars flowing into EV and battery factories in red states such as South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Georgia.

To be sure, some Republicans are still dead-set against electric-powered cars. But up against Walmart, Ford, and billions in green investment, it’s hard to imagine that they could stop the growing momentum behind electric vehicles.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

How Washington state raised $300 million for climate action from polluters

This article originally appeared in Grist.

A new effort to tackle climate change in Washington state just got a boost of cash.

On Tuesday, the state announced the results of its first “cap-and-invest” auction. It raised an estimated $300 million from polluting companies to fund projects such as building clean energy, reducing emissions from buildings and transportation, and adapting to the effects of rising global temperatures.

Washington has set a goal to cut its carbon emissions 95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. In that effort, the state is putting a statewide limit on carbon emissions that gradually lowers over time. Under the cap-and-invest system, businesses buy “allowances” for the greenhouse gases they emit. But these permits will become more expensive over time — both an incentive to cut emissions and a method of raising money to address climate change.

In Washington’s first auction, held last week, the permits sold out, averaging about $49 per ton of carbon dioxide. The price was nearly double that of the most recent cap-and-trade auction held by California and Quebec, where the average was $28 per ton.

“The auction price is potentially higher because Washington’s program requires stronger climate pollution cuts than anywhere else in the country,” said Kelly Hall, the Washington director for the regional nonprofit Climate Solutions. “There is strong competition for these allowances.”

Washington’s auctions, which will take place four times a year, are projected to raise nearly $1 billion annually. At least 35 percent of the revenue is slated to go toward projects that benefit communities historically and disproportionately impacted by pollution. By the end of April, once the budgeting process is ironed out, the state will begin the process of setting up these various climate initiatives, said David Mendoza, the director of public engagement and policy at The Nature Conservancy in Washington.

The state’s cap-and-invest system, which began in January, follows in the footsteps of several state and regional cap-and-trade systems — with a few key changes. It relies less on carbon offsets and is also designed to address some equity concerns around cap-and-trade. In California, for example, studies have shown that pollution in Black and Latino communities actually increased in the years since that state’s cap-and-trade program began.

Washington’s system takes the novel approach of pairing cap-and-trade with a regulatory air quality program intended to crack down on large and small sources of pollution in the hardest-hit areas. While the state is still figuring out the details, last week, its Department of Ecology announced that it had identified 16 communities where it plans to concentrate efforts to improve air quality. South Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane made the list, as did some rural areas.

Cap-and-trade programs are now up and running in more than a dozen U.S. states, including Oregon and a regional program in the Northeast. Still, the approach remains controversial. Washington’s program has gathered criticism for giving some large emitters, such as petroleum refineries and paper mills, a free pass. While these polluters can buy allowances at little or no cost for the next dozen years, they are still covered under the program’s declining cap on emissions.

The state is currently looking into linking up its cap-and-trade program with California and Quebec, which have already joined markets. In Washington, there’s a requirement that they can only link the markets if the state determines that it won’t result in a “negative impact on overburdened communities in either jurisdiction,” Mendoza said.

After researching the potential benefits — and consequences — of linking the programs, the state is expected to issue a recommendation on whether to join California’s market by the end of summer.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org