Some Inconvenient Questions
Climate change questions worth asking — regardless of where you stand
If the stakes are as high as we’re told, why does the conversation feel so narrow?
Why is fear the primary currency of this debate rather than curiosity and innovation?
Where is the open dialogue — the comparison of approaches, the honest accounting of tradeoffs?
Why are the solutions receiving the most attention and investment so consistently the ones that require the most infrastructure?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They have specific answers. And the answers are worth examining.
The most effective, most affordable, most locally implementable solutions are available today — and promising innovations are being developed that could go even further. Almost none of them get much attention or investment. Why is that?
What’s Not on the List
The soil beneath your feet.
Healthy agricultural soil contains a living ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, nematodes and other microorganisms — what soil scientists call the soil food web — that performs functions no synthetic input can replicate. It cycles nutrients, builds soil structure, retains water, suppresses disease, and sequesters carbon simultaneously. The USDA’s Soil Biology Primer documents this in detail. Decades of peer-reviewed research in soil microbiology confirms it.
When that ecosystem is intact, farmers need fewer synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Crops are more resilient to drought. Waterways receive less chemical runoff. And carbon that would otherwise enter the atmosphere gets stored in stable form in the soil instead — for decades, potentially centuries.
The use of glyphosate yields the opposite. Over 280 million pounds are used in the United States annually. Think of it not as a pesticide but as an antibiotic — one that disrupts the microbial communities that make healthy soil function. More than 21 countries have banned or restricted its use. Each has faced documented coordinated pressure from industry and the US government to reverse course. How open and fair is a debate when one side can mobilize the trade apparatus of the world’s largest economy? [footnote: USGS National Water Information System, glyphosate use estimates; Navdanya International, glyphosate global bans database; The New Lede, April 2023; Pesticide Action Network, April 2024; Liao et al., “Herbicide selection promotes antibiotic resistance in soil microbiomes,” Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2021]
Regenerative agriculture — the umbrella practice that includes soil food web restoration, no-till farming, cover cropping, and rotational grazing — is among the most documented large-scale carbon sequestration methods available. The Rodale Institute’s 2014 white paper found that regenerative practices applied to the world’s 3.5 billion tillable acres could sequester nearly 40 percent of current CO2 emissions. Their 2020 updated research concluded that a global switch to regenerative crop and pasture systems could drawdown more than 100 percent of annual CO2 emissions. The land already exists. The knowledge already exists. The investment required is in farmer training and transition support, not in new infrastructure.
Why does the regulatory environment compound the problem? Food safety compliance costs designed for factory farms run six to seven times higher as a percentage of revenue for small farms than for large industrial operations — documented by the USDA’s own Economic Research Service. Regulations presented as improving safety or reducing emissions consistently impose costs that large agricultural operations absorb easily and small farms cannot. The effect is accelerated consolidation toward the industrial model that regenerative agriculture is designed to replace. [footnote: USDA Economic Research Service, FSMA Produce Rule compliance cost analysis; SEC Scope 3 emissions reporting requirements, House Committee on Agriculture testimony, February 2023]
Biochar offers a complementary approach. Produced by heating organic waste — agricultural residue, wood chips, municipal waste — at high temperatures without oxygen, biochar is a stable carbon compound that when incorporated into soil sequesters carbon for centuries rather than years. It also improves water retention, reduces fertilizer runoff into waterways, and remediates contaminated soil. Documented by the International Biochar Initiative across multiple continents, it requires no rare earth minerals, produces no toxic byproducts, and can be produced locally from material that would otherwise be burned or landfilled.
Even biochar faces regulatory headwinds. The EPA proposed relief from solid waste incineration rules in 2020 then reversed course in 2023. A technology with no toxic byproducts now carries the same permitting burden as a municipal incinerator. [footnote: US Biochar Initiative, NABC24 presentation, 2024; EPA Other Solid Waste Incineration Units rule revision, May 2023]
Industrial hemp grows up to 16 feet in four months and absorbs 8 to 15 tons of CO2 per hectare in a single growing cycle — roughly twice the annual rate of managed forests according to Cambridge University research. It requires no pesticides, remediates contaminated soil by absorbing toxins directly through its roots, and produces fiber, food, building materials, and biofuel from a single crop. Its remediation capacity has been demonstrated at scale since the 1990s at Chernobyl — where hemp planted in contaminated fields extracts heavy metals from the soil and can be distilled into ethanol rather than entering the food chain. Despite federal legalization in 2018, it remains entangled in DEA oversight and receives minimal research funding and institutional support. [footnote: Darshil Shah, Cambridge University Centre for Natural Material Innovation, 2020; University of Florida IFAS Extension, May 2023; Vyacheslav Dushenkov, Phytotech Inc., presentation on hemp phytoremediation at Chernobyl, 1999; USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Hemp Production Program]
Peer-reviewed research in mycology has documented how fungal networks function as the connective tissue of ecosystems — decomposing organic matter, cycling nutrients, building soil structure, and sequestering carbon in ways that support everything living above them. Specific fungal species have demonstrated capacity to break down petroleum products, sequester heavy metals, and restore degraded land. The research is extensive. The policy attention is not.
These four approaches share more than documented effectiveness. None require a utility company, a mining operation, a battery manufacturer, or a centralized distribution system. All are local — implementable at the farm, community, or regional level. All address the full environmental picture simultaneously — soil, water, air, biodiversity, and carbon — rather than targeting carbon alone. None appear on the official remedies list in any significant way. And for all of them, the biggest benefits flow to local communities — not to the investors who profit from centralized infrastructure.
The Efficiency Question
If the goal is reducing the environmental impact of transportation and energy use, efficiency seems like an obvious starting point. Use less fuel, produce less pollution, spend less money. No new infrastructure required.
Fuel efficiency standards have faced consistent resistance in the United States. Their introduction after the 1973 Oil Crisis led to a doubling of fleet efficiency in a decade but have stalled since. The automotive companies have found that lobbying Congress is cheaper than improving efficiency. [footnote: NHTSA, Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards historical data; Center for Responsive Politics, automotive industry lobbying records, 2017]
The shipping industry tells the same story at much larger scale. Applying existing practices across the major ship types — tankers, containerships, bulk carriers — could reduce fuel consumption by 40-60% without any new technology. That gap between the most and least efficient ships already in the water represents hundreds of millions of tons of annual emissions that could be eliminated through operational and design improvements alone. The investment required is in implementation, not invention. And shipping is impossible to accomplish with electric power. [footnote: International Maritime Organization, Fourth IMO Greenhouse Gas Study, 2020; International Council on Clean Transportation, efficiency gap research]
Some of the problems with the massive and rapid buildout of data centers have made it to the mainstream media but you won’t hear much talk about diesel generators. In just five years, diesel generator capacity at data centers nearly tripled — from 20 gigawatts in 2018 to 55 gigawatts in 2024. In Virginia alone, the largest data center market globally, over 10,500 diesel generator units were permitted by end of 2025. The artificial intelligence infrastructure being built at extraordinary speed runs on a grid still largely powered by fossil fuels, with diesel generators as the safety net — a safety net that has nearly tripled in capacity in five years. [footnote: International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2024; Virginia State Corporation Commission, data center permitting records, 2025]
These are not marginal sources. Shipping and data centers together represent a significant and growing share of global emissions. The policy conversation about individual consumer choices — your car, your thermostat, your diet — proceeds with urgency. The conversation about industrial-scale inefficiency in shipping, heavy equipment, and data infrastructure proceeds much more quietly.
Timothy Winey, writing at his Substack publication, has been conducting and documenting experiments challenging fundamental assumptions about how fuel behaves at the molecular level. In 2014 the UK government funded a study under the Evalu8 scheme testing structured fuel combustion at Hertfordshire University. The results were, by the study’s own characterization, a potential clean air breakthrough. Emissions testing showed carbon monoxide dropping from 1,400 parts per million to effectively zero — with the sensor registering negative readings, meaning the exhaust was cleaner than the ambient air used to calibrate the instrument. Hydrocarbon readings followed the same pattern.
According to the readings, the engine wasn’t just burning cleaner — it was functioning as an air scrubber. The combustion process was consuming pollutants already present in the intake air. Any agency with environment in its name should have been clamoring to get this into a lab.
Winey has documented his attempts to bring these findings to institutional attention. In 2015 he found himself in the same train car as then-London Mayor Boris Johnson and his deputy mayor for the environment. He explained the study. He followed up. They never responded.
The institutional silence isn’t necessarily malicious. It may be simpler than that: the results don’t fit any existing category. As Winey himself observed — they don’t have a box for exhaust that is cleaner than intake. Without a box, the finding has nowhere to go. The evaluation process itself is designed to assess only what the framework already permits.
Winey wasn’t the only one experimenting with negative emissions. In March 2025 Mazda published details of their SKYACTIV-Z engine currently under development — describing, through a different technical approach, the potential for carbon-negative internal combustion engines that clean the air the more they are driven. Two independent lines of research pointing toward the same possibility. The policy environment points in the opposite direction. The EU and California are headed toward outlawing internal combustion vehicles. They’ve decided the technology, not the criteria the technology must meet. [footnote: Mazda Motor Corporation, “Where Engine Dreams Meet Possibilities: The SKYACTIV-Z Challenge,” Mazda Mirai Base, March 19, 2025; EU Regulation 2023/851; California Air Resources Board, Advanced Clean Cars II regulation]
There isn’t a box for exhaust that’s cleaner than air. But there is one for lower profits — and that one gets all the investors’ attention. The fossil fuel industry has obvious incentives to keep things inefficient. But are the preferences for EVs and electric technology self-serving as well? BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street together managed approximately $31.7 trillion in assets at year-end 2025. When firms of that scale set the criteria for what gets funded, no individual industry needs to lobby for anything. The criteria do the work. The incentive to favor certain technologies over others doesn’t require a conspiracy. It just requires a profit motive — and a capital allocation system that rewards it. [footnote: BlackRock Q4 2025 earnings release; Vanguard Group, AUM data, December 2025; State Street Corporation, 2025 annual report]
First, Do No Harm
The Hippocratic principle applied to medicine is straightforward: before any intervention, the burden of proof lies with demonstrating that the treatment does not cause harm. It’s a reasonable standard to apply to any proposed solution to a serious problem.
Electric vehicles are the centerpiece of the official climate remedies list. They are presented as zero emissions transportation — a clean replacement for the internal combustion engine. But the do no harm standard asks a more complete question: zero emissions where, measured how, and by whose accounting?
The battery in an electric vehicle requires lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese. Lithium extraction in Chile and Argentina’s Atacama desert consumes extraordinary quantities of water in some of the driest ecosystems on earth. Cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo — which produces roughly 70% of the world’s supply — has been extensively documented by Amnesty International in their landmark report “This Is What We Die For” as a supply chain dependent on child labor and dangerous working conditions, with children as young as seven working underground for less than two dollars a day. Nickel processing produces sulfur dioxide emissions and toxic tailings that have devastated ecosystems around major processing facilities. [footnote: Amnesty International, “This Is What We Die For: Human Rights Abuses in the DRC Cobalt Supply Chain,” January 2016; US Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, cobalt supply chain report, 2024]
Does the zero emissions claim account for any of this? Who decided what gets counted in the calculation and what doesn’t?
The vehicle itself raises additional questions. Electric vehicles are much heavier and research by Emissions Analytics found that tire wear produces 1,850 times more particle pollution by mass than modern exhaust emissions. These particles — containing hundreds of chemical compounds including known carcinogens — go directly into soil and water rather than the air, making them harder to detect and nearly impossible to remove once dispersed. As vehicle fleets electrify and tailpipe emissions fall, tire and brake wear is becoming the dominant source of traffic-related particulate emissions. Research has linked tire wear chemicals to mass mortality events in coho salmon in urban waterways. The tailpipe emissions are zero. The tire emissions are not — and they’re growing. [footnote: Emissions Analytics, “Tyre Wear Particles: An Underestimated Source of Pollution,” 2022; Grist, “The tires on EVs wear out faster,” June 2022; Tian et al., “A ubiquitous tire rubber-derived chemical induces acute mortality in coho salmon,” Science, 2021]
Then there is the grid. An electric vehicle is only as clean as the electricity charging it. In most of the United States and much of the world, that electricity comes substantially from fossil fuels. The emissions haven’t disappeared. They’ve moved upstream, out of sight, and off the official ledger.
Why are fossil fuel companies among the leading investors in the technologies designed to replace them — and what does that mean for how those technologies develop? Solid state batteries — which promise significantly higher energy density, longer life, and greater safety than current lithium-ion technology — would also be 20-40% lighter, directly reducing the tire wear pollution that current EV battery weight creates. They remain largely in research phase despite decades of development. The development path of the technology designed to replace fossil fuels is increasingly shaped by the same industrial interests that currently profit from them — through patent concentration, manufacturing partnerships, and direct investment. Whether that shapes what gets developed, and for whose benefit, is a question the official remedies framework doesn’t ask. [footnote: solid state battery patent filing data, 2025; Toyota Motor Corporation and Idemitsu Kosan partnership announcement, 2024]
The do no harm standard doesn’t require perfection. It requires honesty. The questions above aren’t arguments against cleaner transportation — they’re arguments for a full and honest accounting. And that raises the most important question of all: who decided what counts?
Go Deeper
Part Two of this piece examines the science the official framework doesn’t discuss, who made the remedies list, and what a different kind of attention might look like.
More resources
Timothy Winey
Mazda
All footnotes reference primary sources. Where links are provided in the text they have been verified. Footnote citations can be searched by author, title, and publication date.