Before 2010, scientists knew very little about how the sensation of touch begins its journey into a person’s consciousness. They knew that nerve endings help carry the message from different parts of our bodies to our brains. But they didn’t know what kind of receptor on the nerve ending causes the message to fire — for example, when a person touches an ice cube or places a hand on a hot stove. You could say that researchers understood the wires, but not the light switch.

Then came Ardem Patapoutian.

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In 2010, Patapoutian and his colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute discovered the proteins that serve as two kinds of switches — proteins called Piezo1 and Piezo2 (piezo is Greek for the verb “to press”). This week, Patapoutian shared a Nobel prize with David Julius, who similarly discovered how sensations of heat and cold enter our awareness.

In mammals like humans, piezo receptors transmit mechanical sensations to the nervous system. When cells that contain these piezo receptors are stretched, the receptors open up, letting in ions (charged particles) and setting off an electrical pulse.

But each type of receptor has a slightly different use. Piezo1 is part of our body’s built-in blood pressure monitoring system, as well as other internal systems that rely on pressure-sensing. Piezo2, on the other hand, is “the principle mechanosensor for touch and proprioception,” Patapoutian told me in 2019.

That is, without Piezo2, we couldn’t feel another person’s hand graze our own.

Proprioception, which also relies on Piezo2, is less well-known than the sense of touch, but it’s sometimes referred to as the body’s “sixth” sense. It’s our sense of where our bodies are in three-dimensional space.

It’s easier to explain proprioception with a demonstration. If you put a cup out in front of you and then close your eyes, you can still find the cup with your hand. Proprioception is what guides your intuition of how far to move your hand and in which direction.

“It’s truly fascinating that we are not aware of it,” Patapoutian said of proprioception during a 2019 interview with Vox. “When I give lectures, even to college students or graduate students, I sometimes ask: “How many people know of proprioception?” Even specialized biologists often don’t know anything about it.”

I spoke to Patapoutian for a story about people who are missing Piezo2 receptors in their bodies because of a genetic inheritance. When they close their eyes, “it’s like I am lost,” one of them told me. With their eyes closed, they cannot reach for the cup in front of them. They have no idea where it is. They have no idea where their arms are in space.

Patapoutian helped me understand that the human sense of touch contains multitudes — and to this day, scientists don’t fully understand it. But as scientists learn more about touch receptors, they’re also figuring out how to tend to a body that’s in pain.

This conversation, which took place in 2019, has been edited for length and clarity.

Brian Resnick

What is the sense of touch?

Ardem Patapoutian

We think about the five senses: vision, olfaction, taste, hearing, and touch. If you really start digging deep into touch, it’s so different than the rest of the senses.

When you talk about touch, there’s so many modalities to it: There’s different physical forces we sense, like temperature and mechanical force. There’s itch. There’s this [spectrum] of pleasant touch to noxious to painful.

It’s a very complex system. The demarcation of when pleasant touch ends and painful touch starts is actually very flexible. If you have a sunburn, for example, the same amount of touch that could have been pleasant becomes painful.

All of what I was just talking about is sensation on skin.

Again, if you put on top of it proprioception and internal organ sensation, it’s a very complicated sense that we don’t really understand. There’s no totally, well-agreed terminology even to describe clearly what we mean by touch and somatosensation.

Brian Resnick

How is proprioception related to touch?

Ardem Patapoutian

Proprioception is dependent on your sensory system detecting muscle stretch. When that muscle gets stretched, these nerve endings that are wrapped around it can sense it. Piezo2 is actually sitting right at the ends of these nerves, where [they] wrap around the muscle.

When you close your eyes and touch your nose, how are you doing this? What’s the information that you’re basing this on? It’s all about learning, as you grow up, to sense how much each of these muscles are being stretched when you’re making these complex motions of your hand. From that, you know exactly where things are.

People sometimes call it muscle memory. It’s actually mostly these proprioceptive neurons that are giving you this understanding of where your limbs are compared to your body — simply from detecting how much your tendons and muscles are being stretched.

Brian Resnick

Touch and proprioception use the same receptor: Piezo2. But all those other sensations you described — temperature, itch, pain — do those all enter us through different receptors? Is it the case that all these different types of touch feelings have a different specific molecule responsible for them?

Ardem Patapoutian

Absolutely, the molecules are different. There are temperature sensors at very different ranges of temperature. Cold, heat, warm are all different.

From 2000 to 2010, my lab studied temperature sensation. We, for example, identified the first cold-activated ion channel. It ended up also being the receptor for menthol. Anytime you use one of these chewing gums or toothpastes that gives that cooling sensation in your mouth, it hijacks the cold-activated channel.

Brian Resnick

Is the goal to try to find the sensor responsible for each sensation?

Ardem Patapoutian

Yeah. What seems to have worked is starting with a very reductionist approach, in the sense of finding the sensor.

Brian Resnick

Are some of these sensors still elusive?

Ardem Patapoutian

Absolutely. Without Piezo2, you don’t have touch, you don’t have proprioception. However, acute touch — the hammer hitting your finger “ouch” kind of feeling — the identity of these ion channels that account for acute pain is still unknown.

Brian Resnick

I don’t know if this gets more into philosophy than science, but are we just the sum of all these inputs?

Ardem Patapoutian

I think the clear thing one has to realize is that sensory biology is not telling us about reality. It is representing reality.

[Reality is] very related to these senses. But that’s the thing I would emphasize — it’s kind of an approximation. We’re interpreting the world according to what sensory systems we have.

You’ve probably heard it by now: Covid-19 is not going away. The broad consensus among experts is that it’s not realistic to think we’re going to totally eradicate this virus. We will, however, see it move out of the pandemic phase and into the endemic phase.

That means the virus will keep circulating in parts of the global population for years, but its prevalence and impact will come down to relatively manageable levels, so it becomes more like the flu than a world-stopping disease.

For now, “we have to remember that we are still in a pandemic with this virus,” said Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “We’re not yet at a point where we’re living with endemic Covid. When we get to that point some of this will be much easier, but we’re not there.”

So, how will we know when we are there? Is there some clear threshold or some magical metric that will tell us, objectively and undeniably?

Yes and no.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has made our future vulnerability to biological pathogens — and what we can learn to help prevent the next pandemic — a salient concern. We don’t have much evidence one way or the other whether Covid’s emergence into the world was the result of a lab accident or a natural jump from animal to human. And while the US intelligence community’s current best guess is that the virus “probably was not genetically engineered,” the theory has been the subject of much debate and has not been definitively ruled out.

The many unknowns we confront underscore the need for a much bigger toolkit to deal with pathogenic threats than we currently have — which is why a recent paper about a new advance in tracing genetic editing is particularly exciting.

Bioengineering often leaves traces — characteristic patterns in the RNA or DNA of an engineered organism that are a product of a plethora of design decisions that go into synthetic biology. That fact about bioengineered genomes raises an interesting question: What if those traces that gene editing leaves behind were more like fingerprints? That is, what if it’s possible not just to tell if something was engineered but precisely where it was engineered?

That’s the idea behind genetic engineering attribution: the effort to develop tools that let us look at a genetically engineered sequence and determine which lab developed it. A big international contest among researchers earlier this year demonstrates that the technology is within our reach — though it’ll take lots of refining to move from impressive contest results to tools we can reliably use for bio detective work.

The contest, the Genetic Engineering Attribution Challenge, was sponsored by some of the leading bioresearch labs in the world. The idea was to challenge teams to develop techniques in genetic engineering attribution. The most successful entrants in the competition could predict, using machine-learning algorithms, which lab produced a certain genetic sequence with more than 80 percent accuracy, according to a new preprint summing up the results of the contest.

This may seem technical, but it could actually be fairly consequential in the effort to make the world safe from a type of threat we should all be more attuned to post-pandemic: bioengineered weapons and leaks of bioengineered viruses.

One of the challenges of preventing bioweapon research and deployment is that perpetrators can remain hidden — it’s difficult to find the source of a killer virus and hold them accountable.

But if it’s widely known that bioweapons can immediately and verifiably be traced right back to a bad actor, that could be a valuable deterrent.

It’s also extremely important for biosafety more broadly. If an engineered virus is accidentally leaked, tools like these would allow us to identify where they leaked from and know what labs are doing genetic engineering work with inadequate safety procedures.

The fingerprint of a virus

Hundreds of design choices go into genetic engineering: “what genes you use, what enzymes you use to connect them together, what software you use to make those decisions for you,” computational immunologist Will Bradshaw, a co-author on the paper, told me.

“The enzymes that people use to cut up the DNA cut in different patterns and have different error profiles,” Bradshaw says. “You can do that in the same way that you can recognize handwriting.”

Because different researchers with different training and different equipment have their own distinctive “tells,” it’s possible to look at a genetically engineered organism and guess who made it — at least if you’re using machine-learning algorithms.

To be clear, this work, called genetic engineering attribution, is very different from genetic engineering detection: it’s not about determining whether a sequence is engineered, but looking at sequences already known to be engineered and figuring out who built them.

The algorithms that are trained to do this work are fed data on more than 60,000 genetic sequences different labs produced. The idea is that, when fed an unfamiliar sequence, the algorithms are able to predict which of the labs they’ve encountered (if any) likely produced it.

A year ago, researchers at altLabs, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and other top bioresearch programs collaborated on the challenge, organizing a competition to find the best approaches to this biological forensics problem. The contest attracted intense interest from academics, industry professionals, and citizen scientists — one member of a winning team was a kindergarten teacher. Nearly 300 teams from all over the world submitted at least one machine-learning system for identifying the lab of origin of different sequences.

In that preprint paper (which is still undergoing peer review), the challenge’s organizers summarize the results: The competitors collectively took a big step forward on this problem. “Winning teams achieved dramatically better results than any previous attempt at genetic engineering attribution, with the top-scoring team and all-winners ensemble both beating the previous state-of-the-art by over 10 percentage points,” the paper notes.

The big picture is that researchers, aided by machine-learning systems, are getting really good at finding the lab that built a given plasmid, or a specific DNA strand used in gene manipulation.

The top-performing teams had 95 percent accuracy at naming a plasmid’s creator by one metric called “top 10 accuracy” — meaning if the algorithm identifies 10 candidate labs, the true lab is one of them. They had 82 percent top 1 accuracy — that is, 82 percent of the time, the lab they identified as the likely designer of that bioengineered plasmid was, in fact, the lab that designed it.

Top 1 accuracy is showy, but for biological detective work, top 10 accuracy is nearly as good: If you can narrow down the search for culprits to a small number of labs, you can then use other approaches to identify the exact lab.

There’s still a lot of work to do. The competition looked at only simple engineered plasmids; ideally, we’d have approaches that work for fully engineered viruses and bacteria. And the competition didn’t look at adversarial examples, where researchers deliberately try to conceal the fingerprints of their lab on their work.

How genetic fingerprinting can help keep the world safer

Knowing which lab produced a bioweapon can protect us in three ways, biosecurity researchers argued in Nature Communications last year.

First, “knowledge of who was responsible can inform response efforts by shedding light on motives and capabilities, and so mitigate the event’s consequences.” That is, figuring out who built something will also give us clues about the goals they might have had and the risk we might be facing.

Second, obviously, it allows the world to sanction and stop any lab or government that is producing bioweapons in violation of international law.

And third, the article argues, hopefully, if these capabilities are widely known, they make the use of bioweapons much less appealing in the first place.

But the techniques have more mundane uses as well.

Bradshaw told me he envisions applications of the technology could be used to find accidental lab leaks, identify plagiarism in academic papers, and protect biological intellectual property — and those applications will validate and extend the tools for the really critical uses.

The past year and a half should have us all thinking about how devastating pandemic disease can be — and about whether the precautions being taken by research labs and governments are really adequate to prevent the next pandemic.

The answer, to my mind, is that we’re not doing enough, but more sophisticated biological forensics could certainly help. Genetic engineering attribution is still a new field. With more effort, it’ll likely be possible to one day make attribution possible on a much larger scale and to do it for viruses and bacteria. That could make for a much safer future.

Correction, October 25, 9:50 am: A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)

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It’s become a time-honored tradition in certain segments of American society: two families cross-reference their respective calendars to find a spot free of school or soccer or other obligations. On the appointed day, one child travels to the other’s house, typically accompanied by a parent. The children build a Lego village or glue googly eyes on felt or participate in some other ostensibly wholesome activity. Snacks are consumed. The parents, meanwhile, hang out and complain lightly about their children or spouses, stopping periodically to intervene in tantrums or boredom or failures of sharing.

This is — or was — the playdate. Prior to 2020, it had become the primary mode of non-school social life for a lot of American kids, replacing the more unstructured play that many millennials and Gen X-ers remember from their childhoods. As Charis Granger-Mbugua, a Georgia mother of two, put it, “that’s how children play now.”

The pandemic, of course, put a stop to playdates for a lot of families. Granger-Mbugua’s two children, now 7 and almost 5, barely saw anyone outside the family from March 2020 until this spring. “They were super isolated for that entire school year,” Granger-Mbugua said.

Now that adults and teenagers can be vaccinated, and shots for younger kids are on the horizon, families are starting to have playdates again. “We’re already seeing birthday parties, we’re already seeing weddings and funerals,” Tamara Mose, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and the author of The Playdate: Parents, Children, and the New Expectations of Play, told Vox. As more kids get vaccinated, “people will feel more comfortable, and so the playdates will continue.”

The return of the playdate, though, may not be an unalloyed good. Some fear that parent-organized socializing deprives kids of the chance to explore and build self-sufficiency. “It’s a lost childhood,” Stacey Gill, a mom of two who has written about playdates, told Vox.

The rise of the scheduled, structured “date” for children in the decades preceding the pandemic also increased the burden on parents, especially moms, who were expected to spend their weekends curating social experiences for their kids.

Then there were the social implications. For middle- and upper-middle-class families, playdates could be exclusionary — a way for parents to shore up connections with others they saw as “like them” in terms of class, race, politics, and a host of other factors. “You’re basically selecting the friends of your children based on the networks you’re creating as adults,” Mose said.

Now that children’s play, like so many other sectors of society, has been disrupted by Covid-19, some say there’s a chance to rethink what it should look like. We might not go back to the days when kids “went outside and didn’t come in till the streetlights came on,” as Granger-Mbugua remembers from her childhood. But there’s an opportunity to make play more equitable, less labor-intensive for parents, and maybe even more fun. As Gill put it, “kids need a little more freedom to just be kids.”

The playdate as we know it was invented in the ’90s

The playdate is a fairly new phenomenon. Growing up in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Gill remembers spending Saturday mornings playing in the basement and watching cartoons with her sister. At a certain point, their mom would send them outside to play — and lock the door. If they got together with other kids, it wasn’t anything organized: “You just hung out,” Gill said.

Beginning in the ’90s, however, middle- and upper-middle-class parents, especially in cities, began pulling their kids back from unstructured play in public spaces out of concerns about crime. Highly publicized kidnapping and child murder cases such as that of Polly Klaas in 1993, along with the rise of crime shows like America’s Most Wanted, helped contribute to a climate of fear among more affluent American parents. Over time, more play took place inside families’ homes and other private spaces. “It felt safer for parents to have something that was organized and looked after,” Mose said.

By the 2000s, the word “playdate” — meaning organized play for children, typically directed by parents — was in common parlance. For parents, such a date wasn’t just a time for kids to get together: “It was a presentation of self,” Mose said. “You wanted to present yourself in a particular manner so that parents would know that you were a ‘good parent.’”

That meant providing the right kind of food — “people really snubbed their nose at fast food or junk food,” Mose said. It also meant offering not just supervision but, ideally, a fun yet wholesome activity to keep kids entertained. Far from locking them out to play in the street, Gill joked, “You have to have, like, a craft fair at your house.”

All this was also, of course, a performance of a certain class status. It’s no accident that the concept of playdates started with upper-middle-class families and trickled down to the middle class, remaining less common among working-class people. The requirements of a playdate, from healthy food (ideally organic) to art supplies to a private indoor space big enough for multiple kids, could get expensive quickly.

That performance of affluent, “good” parenting wasn’t for kids — it was for other parents, who often joined their kids on playdates, especially at younger ages. “Kids might be in one room playing together but the parents are socializing in another room,” Mose said.

When planning play for their kids, parents would select people they wanted to get to know better, often because they shared common traits from neighborhoods to values. “People tend to find people like themselves,” Mose said. “That’s who they feel comfortable with.”

That tendency, coupled with the expense of playdates, led to a stratification along race and class lines. While kids organically coming together at a playground might form friendships across such divisions (at least within the limits of America’s segregated neighborhoods), playdate culture instead reinforced socioeconomic rifts as wealthier parents encouraged their kids to socialize within a carefully curated social bubble.

For those able to afford them, though, playdates essentially became a form of networking — the kid-friendly version of having the boss over to dinner. “In an office, you tend to network with certain types of people and exclude other types of people, and it’s a similar type of interaction when we have a playdate,” Mose said. “We tend to create an environment that’s sanitized in order to facilitate certain social networks.”

The creation of such an environment may not have been conscious — few parents would say they set out to segregate their children’s social worlds. But it led to the concentration of a number of advantages — from the small, like organic snacks, to the large, like a group of well-connected and affluent parent-friends — among those who could afford the entry fee to the playdate in-crowd. It may not be the most glaring example, but playdate culture belongs in any conversation about “nice white parents” and privilege-hoarding.

It was also just a huge amount of work for parents. Most of that work fell to moms, who historically have shouldered not just the majority of child care responsibilities but also the mental load of juggling kids’ schedules. The demands of playdates are probably part of the reason that parents today spend significantly more time on child care every week than they did in the 1960s, even though many more moms are also working outside the home.

The demands of kids’ social calendars meant parents could “no longer have a life,” Gill said. “I understand when the kids are young, they need constant attention and supervision. But it just extended indefinitely, to forever.”

Yet throughout the 2000s and 2010s, parents kept shuttling their kids to playdates. Even if you weren’t consciously trying to “network,” the custom could be hard to break out of. After all, letting children play unsupervised is now deeply stigmatized — and for low-income people and people of color, who already face discrimination as parents in America, it can even lead to arrest. For middle- and upper-middle-class kids, meanwhile, opportunities to just “hang out” have fallen victim to the rise of extracurricular activities like organized sports.

In her neighborhood outside New York City, “there’s a million kids you could play with,” Gill said. “Only now you can’t play with them because they’re all scheduled.”

The pandemic put a stop to playdates — for a while

That is, they were scheduled. Then, in March 2020, millions of Americans began sheltering in place to help limit the spread of Covid-19. “For many people, playdates simply ceased,” Mose said. “We were all afraid of people spreading germs, and as we know, children are very germy.”

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Not everyone took Covid-19 protocols seriously, and there has been widespread disagreement over how to weigh the risks of the virus among children, who are less likely than adults to become severely ill. Still, for many American children, the first year or so of the pandemic was a very isolated time. Granger-Mbugua’s son and daughter, for example, didn’t have playdates, and other social outlets like in-person school, church, and storytime at the local library were on hold as well. “We didn’t have a lot of interaction with friends,” Granger-Mbugua said. Her kids “have some family, but that’s about it.”

As the pandemic wore on, however, families started experimenting with socializing again. Some formed “pods” with one or two other families so that kids could play while still limiting exposure. Others allowed their kids to see friends, but only outdoors. “Playdates changed in terms of location,” Mose said.

Now, as American society inches toward reopening, playdates are fraught terrain for a lot of parents. It’s not just the risk of Covid-19, it’s also the etiquette — do kids wear masks in the house? Do adults? What about snack time? What if your approach to Covid-19 safety doesn’t align with that of your hosts (or guests)? Arguments among adults over Covid-19 protocols — and the politicization of those protocols — have caused a lot of anxiety among kids, Eugene Beresin, executive director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Vox. “It’s put a great deal of tension into certain situations.”

Tension or not, playdates are returning. “I think most people have already gone back” at least in some capacity, Mose said. And vaccines for children aged 5-11, which could arrive as soon as November, are likely to accelerate the process. “There will be a lot more freedom once everybody’s vaccinated,” Mose said. “Or a sense of freedom, anyway.”

The time may be ripe to rethink play

Many parents are looking forward to that day with bated breath. But rather than going back to playdates-as-usual, this time, when many families are rebuilding their social lives from scratch, could be an opportunity to reimagine what play should look like.

Part of that is rethinking who’s in charge of a child’s social life. “I think if we allowed it to be somewhat children-led, we would see a difference in how children play together,” Mose said. Adults may gravitate to people they perceive as being like them, but “children don’t have that lens yet when they’re little,” she explained. “They truly just want to play with whoever is nice to them.”

Giving kids more of a say in who they play with can make playdates less exclusionary, and open up the social world of the whole family to new people and experiences. “Our kids naturally have a diversity about them that they’re interested in exploring in terms of their outlook on social life,” Mose said.

Letting kids choose what they do at a playdate, within reason, is also important, Beresin said. Rather than setting up a craft fair in the living room, parents can let kids pick out their activities and work out any disagreements about what to play on their own (again, within reason). Offering choices helps kids feel empowered and like they have control over the situation, Beresin said.

After all, kids’ play is “a very, very important part of development,” Beresin said. “Play is the way they work out their anxieties, it’s the way they work out their conflicts, it’s the way they share with each other, it’s the way they learn how to be respectful of other kids.” Learning to be independent and make your own choices is part of that process, too.

It’s hard to imagine a return to the world that Gill or Granger-Mbugua remember from their childhoods, when kids ran around with little interference from adults. But even before the pandemic, some efforts were afoot to give kids a bit more autonomy in their play. “Adventure playgrounds,” for example, which deemphasize traditional play structures in favor of more interactive (and chaotic) elements like old electronic equipment and hammers, have spread across Europe and popped up in the US. One such playground on New York’s Governors Island explicitly bans parents.

The Free-Range Kids movement, meanwhile, advocates for more independence for children, including unsupervised play. Started in 2008 by a mom who was criticized for letting her 9-year-old take the subway alone, the movement has helped inspire laws in Utah and elsewhere that protect parents from prosecution if they let kids play or walk home by themselves.

Individual parents are also finding less regimented ways to help their kids socialize. “There’s a lot of anxiety that I feel around structured, organized play,” Granger-Mbugua said. “I really prefer more organic play in spaces where children are naturally together,” whether that’s a church function or a birthday party with extended family.

As pandemic restrictions lift, “I would like my children to get to know the people in the neighborhood, I would like to get them to know the people in their classes that they feel most comfortable with and pursue friendships and relationships that way,” Granger-Mbugua said. “I want my children to seek out friendships that feel good to them, and let me know, and then I will do my part to support that.”

Such a kid-centric approach may find adherents at a time when a lot of the strictures of pre-pandemic society, from wardrobes to office jobs, are being questioned. And for anyone wanting to reevaluate their own kids’ social lives in our new reality, Gill, for her part, advocates a back-to-basics approach: “Let them be. Let them figure it out. Let them use their brains.”

In other words: “Just let them play.”

“David is a great transplant surgeon. Five of his patients need new parts — one needs a heart, the others need, respectively, liver, stomach, spleen, and spinal cord — but all are of the same, relatively rare, blood-type. By chance, David learns of a healthy specimen with that very blood-type. David can take the healthy specimen’s parts, killing him, and install them in his patients, saving them.”

So goes a story, one of the most famous in modern philosophy, told by the late Judith Jarvis Thomson in 1976.

The story raises many important ethical questions, but the core one is simple: Is it okay to sacrifice one life to save five? In this case, only the most hardened utilitarian would say yes. Treating a human being as nothing but a container for organs strikes many as intuitively repugnant, even if so doing would spare five others an early death.

Until recently, the question of trading a life for another through organ donation was largely hypothetical, grist for prize-winning sci-fi novels. But on September 25, Robert Montgomery showed that you could implant a pig kidney in a human, and the question became very concrete, very fast. No, we’re not killing humans to harvest their organs, as Thomson or Kazuo Ishiguro imagined. But we’re killing intelligent animals for their organs, and the moral consequences of that should weigh on us.

Montgomery, a surgeon who runs the Transplant Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center, performed the landmark operation on a dead subject. With the consent of the family, the body of the deceased was maintained using a ventilator for 54 hours, to see how an implanted pig kidney would function.

The kidney functioned about as well as a human kidney transplant, at least during that short window of time. At a press conference announcing the surgery, Montgomery noted that the implanted kidney, attached to a leg, “began functioning and making large amounts of urine within minutes,” a key function of the kidneys. He also said that levels of creatinine (a waste product produced by muscles and filtered out by the kidney) in the donor’s blood were normal, another sign of sound kidney functioning. He predicted that we could be seeing transplants of pig kidneys into living human donors within a year or two.

“If human organs are imagined as the fossil fuel of the organ supply, then pig kidneys are the wind and solar: sustainable and unlimited,” Montgomery concluded.

For the 750,000 Americans with end-stage renal disease and the millions of others who care for them, this news is a massive game changer. A recent study found that some 43,000 people die every year in the US for lack of a kidney donation. That’s more people than die annually due to homicide, HIV, or car accidents. Pig kidneys could drop that number to zero.

But here’s the thing that should give us pause: The pig used in Montgomery’s surgery was subsequently euthanized. There are some 63,000 new patients every year who might benefit from a kidney donation. Assuming each donor pig is stripped of both of its kidneys and then euthanized, that’s more than 30,000 pigs killed every year to extend human lives.

Now, in fairness, that 30,000 is a blip next to the 131.6 million pigs slaughtered for their meat in the US in 2020 — a rounding error, given the scale of factory farming.

Nevertheless, Montgomery’s breakthrough forces us to confront two questions: Is it morally justifiable to slaughter thousands of pigs annually to keep humans alive? And is it more morally justifiable than other methods that could also end the kidney shortage?

The ability to transplant pig kidneys into humans would undoubtedly save many human lives, which is, of course, a good thing. But it behooves us to take seriously the moral consequences of such an act, especially if we begin performing it on a wide scale.

The pig kidney breakthrough

Implanting other species’ organs and tissues into humans — or xenotransplantation, to use the technical medical term — is a very old idea.

In the 1920s, the con man John Brinkley became a national celebrity for his surgeries implanting goat testicles into human scrotums, which he claimed could cure impotence (among other ills); he gained such support he almost got elected governor of Kansas in a revenge bid after the state revoked his medical license.

But more reputable figures have attempted xenotransplantations too. Keith Reemtsma at Tulane University performed 13 chimpanzee-to-human transplants in the 1960s, all but one of which failed within a couple of weeks of the procedure due to organ rejection or a resulting infection. One patient lived for another nine months before dying.

In 1984, Leonard Bailey at Loma Linda University implanted a baboon heart into a dying infant with the pseudonym Baby Fae. The baby rejected the organ, dying soon thereafter (and partly inspiring a pretty good Paul Simon song).

A major problem in all these efforts was rejection: the recipient’s immune system interpreting the donated organ as a foreign body and attacking it as if it were a hostile organism. This is also sometimes a problem with human-to-human transplants. But rejection has become less of an issue with humans after the development of better immunosuppressant drugs, which prevent immune attacks on donated organs.

The NYU team went a few steps further than immunosuppressants: They used organs from genetically engineered pigs.

The pig whose kidney was implanted in the NYU surgery was a GalSafe pig, a genetically modified pig variety approved by the Food and Drug Administration this past December. It’s produced by Revivicor, a subsidiary of the biotech firm United Therapeutics; Montgomery specifically thanked Martine Rothblatt, United Therapeutics’ chief executive, in his announcement. The FDA did not evaluate GalSafe pigs for xenotransplantation per se, but Revivicor has been vocal about its ultimate intention being the use of gene-edited pigs as a source for transplants.

The gene modification prevented production of what’s known as the alpha-gal biomolecule. Alpha-gal is present in all mammals besides primates (including humans), and its presence causes primate immune systems to reject organs. By preventing these pigs from producing that molecule, the gene edits enabled them to act as human donors much more effectively.

The ethical quandary posed by pig kidneys

The benefits of pig-to-human kidney transplantation are obvious and profound. A recent study in the American Journal of Nephrology estimated that between 5 million and 10 million people worldwide suffer from kidney failure severe enough to require dialysis, or another kidney-replacement treatment (like transplantation).

Dying for lack of a transplant is awful, but so is being forced to live on dialysis. Dialysis is immensely physically draining, often preventing people from working or traveling; the rate of depression in people on dialysis is more than double that in the general population.

Some kidneys can be recovered from deceased donors, and indeed that serves as the source of most kidneys in the US. In 2020, 17,583 deceased donor kidney transplants were performed. But while there are actions that could be taken to improve recovery of kidneys from deceased donors, the simplest way to solve the kidney shortage would be for living humans to step up and give more. Humans only need one kidney, and only 0.014 percent of people in the US would need to donate a kidney each year to end the waitlist.

Pig kidneys, in that sense, are not strictly medically necessary. Voluntary living human donors could fill the gap.

But in practice, a much lower percentage than that donates a kidney. In 2020, there were only 5,234 living donor transplants — a far smaller number than deceased kidney transplants and a waitlist of more than 106,000.

Indeed, in only one country in the world are there enough human donors to provide kidneys to all who need one: Iran. And there’s one likely reason for that: Kidney donors in Iran are paid for their service. Here in the US and in most of the world, paying a kidney donor is illegal.

Having donated a kidney myself, I can report that while totally manageable, it’s also inconvenient and temporarily painful. And yet we ask people to provide this service, and save a life, for free — or worse, if they have to take unpaid leave for the surgery, we ask them to pay for the privilege of saving a life.

But some bioethicists are vocally opposed to compensating donors for saving a life, for fear that such a system would harm poor people. Such objections make compensation very politically difficult to enact. Polling suggests a strong majority of Americans would support paying for kidney donations if so doing would improve the supply of kidneys (which it would), but it’s hardly a political issue driving many votes.

Until policy on compensation changes, the advancement of pig-organ transplantation could be our best bet for ending the kidney waitlist.

Which forces us to consider the moral quandary of exchanging a pig life for a human one.

Pigs are remarkably intelligent animals. They have good memories, love to play and explore, recognize each other, and have sophisticated social lives. Purdue animal scientist Candace Croney even taught pigs to play video games. (The pigs loved it.)

So imagine an animal like your dog, but perhaps smarter, being killed to save the life of a human. Would you be willing to kill your dog in that case? Does the question disturb you?

Montgomery agreed that the practice raises important animal welfare questions. When I asked him about the euthanizing of the donor pig, he raised the question, “Is it more humane to euthanize the pig and remove both kidneys for two transplants, or to remove one kidney and have the pig sustain the recovery period, where there’s pain and risk of infection?” It’s also not clear who would care for a donor pig that did survive, and who could pay for that care.

The question is even tougher when you get to organs like hearts, lungs, and pancreases, which cannot be given by a living donor. Currently only a few thousand people a year receive heart transplants, mostly because there is such a minimal supply, but the American Heart Association has argued as many as 100,000 people a year could benefit, which is plausible when you consider that heart disease is the single biggest cause of death in the US, killing more than 650,000 people in 2018.

Genetically engineered pig hearts that could work for humans could dramatically extend lifespans for people with heart disease, and the same goes for lungs, liver, and other organs. But in each such surgery, a pig would have to die for a human to live.

A question for philosophers

Peter Singer, the moral philosopher at Princeton who helped launch the modern animal rights movement and is also a vocal advocate for kidney donation, told me in an email that he is cautiously supportive of even lethal pig donations.

“I would not insist on the pig surviving the surgery, because that’s an uncertain benefit and would require twice as many pigs to be used,” Singer wrote. “What I would like to see is that all pigs involved in the procedure — including at the research stage, which obviously will continue for some years, and including the pigs’ parents — are reared in conditions that meet not only their physical needs but their psychological and social needs — so not in a factory farm. That seems a minimum quid pro quo for the benefit the pig is conferring on humans.”

(Revivicor declined to comment when asked about the living conditions of its pigs.)

Singer is a utilitarian. He believes that ethics is about maximizing the welfare of humans and animals, and so is willing to make trade-offs like these that still involve the deaths of sentient animals.

Christine Korsgaard, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, is very much not a utilitarian. She’s perhaps the most eminent Kantian philosopher in the world today. Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century thinker who serves as Korsgaard’s main inspiration, argued human beings must treat each other’s common humanity as an end in itself, not a means to their own ends.

This idea can be hard to grasp, but the important thing to know is it places limits on how much harm you can inflict on someone or some animal in order to produce some greater good. You have to respect the humanity or dignity of all rational beings (including animals).

Korsgaard objects to pig-to-human organ transplants on basically those grounds. “I do not think it is justifiable to kill an animal so that we can use her organs for a person, any more than it would be justifiable to kill one person to use his organs for another person,” Korsgaard wrote me in an email. “I think the pig does have a prior claim on her own life and her own organs. If you kill a pig for her organs, you are treating her as if she is ours, a mere resource for human use, as if she exists for us rather than for herself.”

Genetically modifying the pig compounded this wrong, she wrote, as humans changed the pig’s biology so it could better serve human ends. “Women don’t exist to make homes for men; people of color don’t exist to provide cheap labor for white people; animals don’t exist to provide food, labor, and organs for people,” Korsgaard concluded.

I am more of a consequentialist like Singer than a Kantian like Korsgaard. But Korsgaard’s arguments have incredible force. Just like factory farming, using pigs for organs turns them into a kind of industrial commodity for humans, rather than living creatures who deserve to live full, wonderful lives. There is something distasteful about that, even if the good of increased organ supply outweighs the concern.

Mostly, the development makes me sad that humans have been so unwilling to step up and donate kidneys to each other — or create the policies that would encourage such an act — that they are resorting to taking them from another species. Donating a kidney is a routine, safe procedure, one that humans could and would likely be more willing to provide if compensated.

If the alternative to a world where thousands of pigs are killed for their kidneys every year were one where Medicare carefully screened kidney donors and paid them each $50,000 or however much is necessary to get a full supply of kidneys, then the latter world seems infinitely preferable. No person, and no pigs, would have to die.

But that is not the actual counterfactual at hand. The counterfactual is the current world, where politicians have banned compensation for organ donation and organs are in persistently short supply. Compared to that counterfactual, pig organs seem like a step forward.

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After a major setback on a historic package of climate legislation, President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress are scrambling to find other ways to slash US emissions. As they race to create a Plan B for an escalating climate crisis, they stand to learn a lot from the Obama era — a history that’s littered with similar setbacks and climate policies that never saw the light of day.

One of the most impactful climate policies that Congress has ever considered, the clean electricity payment program (CEPP), is on the chopping block. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) says he will not support a bill that penalizes coal and natural gas for the outsized role they play in US pollution. Democrats can’t pass their budget bill, the Build Back Better Act, without his support, and its size and scope has been shrinking.

Meanwhile, a key window for progress is closing: Top Democrats have promised to hammer out a domestic climate deal by the time Biden speaks at a pivotal United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, which begins October 31. If Congress fails to enshrine key climate policies as federal laws, Biden’s Plan B includes executive orders and major regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, the New York Times reported.

The problem is that executive actions aren’t an ideal substitute for federal laws, and may last only as long as Biden’s presidency. EPA regulation also “tends to lag [behind] the technological realities,” meaning it may only modestly nudge the economy in a new direction, Jesse Jenkins, an environmental engineering professor at Princeton University, told Vox. It’s also vulnerable to intervention by the Supreme Court.

In some respects, Democrats have been here before. Under President Barack Obama, a similar political bind in Congress made his climate actions weaker and open to reversal. “I am not sure there are easy ways to avoid the pitfalls the Obama administration faced in taking regulatory action on climate change,” Matto Mildenberger, a University of California Santa Barbara political scientist who has written on the history of US climate policy, told Vox.

Democrats have options left. The $500 billion Democrats have promised for climate funding would represent historic congressional investment, and roughly a third of the funding in the possible Build Back Better plan. But it still would not make up for the policies that have been cut. If the past is any guide, their best chance is to throw the kitchen sink at the climate crisis, consistently and relentlessly, on every level of government.

To make sweeping and lasting progress, they’ll need to outdo the Democrats of the Obama era by pushing not only for executive and state action, but also funding for smaller climate policies that can fill what experts described as the “CEPP-sized hole” in the budget bill. If Democrats do that, Mildenberger still believes the US could manage to have a “world-leading” climate agenda.

Democrats run the risk of repeating mistakes they made in the Obama era

Obama’s strategy for tackling climate change counted on Congress passing a bipartisan bill, which would have capped climate pollution and created a market for trading credits. Success depended on the support of wary Democrats as well as some Republicans. By summer 2010, Obama appointees admitted they didn’t have the votes in the Senate. The bill quietly died that summer, and the path to passing a federal law closed when Tea Party-backed Republicans swept the midterm elections.

As the New Yorker reported at the time, “Obama said that he knew ‘the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months.’ He never found them, and he didn’t appear to be looking very hard.”

The Obama administration didn’t charge ahead to find other ways to deliver pollution cuts, at least not right away. Climate activists spent the subsequent years accusing Obama of “climate silence,” according to the Washington Post. It wasn’t until his 2013 State of the Union that he made his lengthiest comments on climate change in years and promised: “If Congress won’t act soon … I will … with executive actions.”

By summer 2013, well into Obama’s second term, the administration was pushing forward with a new comprehensive strategy for tackling climate change, relying primarily on executive and regulatory action to clean up power and transportation emissions. For the first time, a president began to realign the executive branch, especially the EPA, to issue landmark standards for cleaner cars, power plants, and methane from gas operations.

But Obama was not able to replicate what Congress could have accomplished. As ambitious as his first-ever coal regulations seemed at the time, for example, they were halted by the Supreme Court before taking effect. Even without them, utilities ended up keeping pace with most targets on their own, showing how moderate the regulations were.

There are other reasons that a new wave of EPA action won’t be as powerful as federal climate legislation. Regulations still take time to draft and finalize and are frequently challenged in court. The Supreme Court swung to the right under former President Donald Trump and seems even more skeptical of the EPA’s powers.

In hindsight, the Obama administration arguably miscalculated the odds that its climate policy would outlast his presidency. The office of Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN), who sponsored the clean electricity plan, told Vox that politicians can’t take for granted that all climate policies will last. Smith’s staff said that Biden’s Plan B must find other ways to cut emissions, even as Manchin insists on cuts and the bill’s price tag keeps shrinking.

Obama-era Democrats left other climate policies in a precarious place: For example, key tax breaks for wind and solar energy repeatedly expired throughout the 2000s and were only renewed after the fact, slowing gains in the two renewable energy sectors. Even when Democrats controlled Congress during Obama’s presidency, these credits received short-term extensions. And by waiting until Obama’s second term to roll out key climate regulations for the power sector and transportation, the administration took a risk that some wouldn’t be finalized before the next administration, making it that much easier for the incoming Trump to halt.

Trump easily blocked methane rules for existing oil and gas facilities because they were still being drafted. “There are tiers of executive actions, each of which have different relative permanency,” CNN explained in 2016. And finalized rules take longer for an incoming president to reverse than rulemaking that’s still underway.

The Biden White House’s climate strategy in 2021 may end up not so different from the course of the Obama administration. Obama, facing the reality of a gridlocked Congress, relied on executive action to push the country forward on climate. And when Trump reversed course on climate policy, some states tried to continue their own shifts toward clean energy.

Still, Democrats can learn from this history and take action in three important ways: 1) pushing the executive branch to quickly finalize regulations of the biggest emitters, such as coal-fired power plants and oil and gas producers; 2) writing climate standards into their subsidies for other polluting sectors, like industry, transportation, and buildings; and 3) updating the Build Back Better budget bill so that it funds every possible incremental way to close the gap in emissions.

They also have to remember what has changed: The political movement urging climate action is far bigger than it was a decade ago. The problem is, the warnings in climate science of inaction are also more dire. The Biden administration will have to outdo the Obama administration in the pace and the scale of its ambitions.

Biden’s goals are bigger than Obama’s, but he has less margin for error

A decade of inaction by Congress has now cost the world precious time to avoid the most severe consequences of climate change. A global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, enshrined in the 2015 Paris agreement, could slip through our fingers in a matter of years, according to the World Meteorological Organization and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Every fraction of a degree of warming can claim lives and livelihoods as it ripples through ecosystems, water supplies, agriculture, and more.

The US is making progress, but not quickly enough. Domestic climate pollution has fallen by less than 22 percent between 2005 and 2020. After rejoining the Paris climate agreement this year, Biden announced a new target: cutting US climate pollution by at least 50 percent by 2030.

The best way of ensuring the US reaches this target, climate experts told Vox, would be ambitious congressional action. Federal laws could transition the electricity sector off fossil fuels and replace gas-guzzling cars with electric vehicles.

Now that the Senate appears to have sunk its best single weapon against climate change, the clean electricity payment program, the White House is falling back on a “three-pronged approach” to meet its goal.

One prong still depends on Congress passing historic clean energy funding as part of the Build Back Better Act (albeit a smaller package than the White House wanted). The second relies on the White House preparing ambitious regulations of electricity, transportation, a natural gas production. And the third prong depends on states — especially the 25 that are already committed to climate action — ramping up energy efficiency, fuel standards, and clean energy to match the most ambitious regions in the nation.

This Plan B will be difficult to pull off, and is less ambitious than climate activists had hoped for. A clean electricity policy would have accounted for roughly 25 percent of the package’s pollution cuts, according to a Princeton Zero Lab analysis from Jenkins and his colleagues. Democrats may also scrap their second major climate proposal, a plan to fine oil and gas producers for methane pollution, from the Build Back Better Act. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that, over the short term, warms the planet even more than carbon dioxide.

Other powerful levers in the fight against climate change, like a carbon tax or specific penalties on fossil fuels, are just as unlikely to make it into the final plan. So the final infrastructure package and budget bill likely won’t make as big of a dent in climate pollution as many Democrats once hoped.

But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost for US climate action. “Even with what some would view as moderate congressional action, there is still a pathway to meeting the target,” John Larsen, climate director of the energy research firm Rhodium Group, told Vox. “It’s just going to mean that there needs to be sustained effort by other parts of the federal system and state level to really follow through.”

How Democrats can still make lasting progress on climate policy

In a Monday speech in New Jersey, Biden projected optimism that his Build Back Better agenda is “going to address the root cause of ever-increasing extreme weather and destruction.”

For him to follow through on this promise, he’ll have to avoid the pitfalls that Obama faced. The past decade highlights how critical it is for a Build Back Better plan that closes the gaping holes likely left without the clean electricity payment program and methane fees — and for Democrats to maintain a sense of urgency and chip away at the climate crisis at every level.

• The first, most important lesson from the Obama era is that there is no time to waste. Regulations take years to draft and finalize, so the earlier in Biden’s term that his administration creates them, the better shot they’ll have at outlasting his presidency.

Biden has seemed to appreciate this lesson. His EPA has been busy preparing and finalizing upgrades for Obama-era climate regulations for the power sector, transportation, and oil and gas production. “If you don’t have the methane fee, then the methane regulations that EPA is cooking up are going to be that much more important,” Larsen pointed out.

• It’s still possible to meet Biden’s goals even without the CEPP and methane fees, according to a Rhodium Group analysis that Larsen coauthored last week. Rhodium estimated the impact of extremely aggressive action, including almost a dozen core executive actions the Biden administration would need to take. Some of these would have to build on what Obama originally planned, but at a far more ambitious scale, like far-reaching new climate standards for the power sector. Larsen also suggested that Biden would have to test the Clean Air Act in new ways; for example, by issuing the first-ever climate regulation for industrial pollution, and requiring that every new natural gas terminal and chemical plant is equipped with carbon capture technology.
• Congress still needs to pass as many climate priorities as possible in the infrastructure deal and Build Back Better plan. Democrats still have a shot at funding clean energy tax breaks, improving electricity transmission to connect renewables to new areas of the country, and expanding access to electric vehicles.

“My view on climate policy is you just keep accelerating things as much as you can, wherever you can,” Jenkins said. Some Democratic senators hope to redirect the CEPP’s $150 billion price tag to other programs.

“Carbon pollution is all throughout the American economy,” making it possible to pull levers that “together create something that would fill the CEPP-sized hole,” said Mildenberger, the USC political scientist. Those cuts could come from energy efficiency in industrial manufacturing, building electrification, or preventing nuclear plants from retiring.

Democrats could tweak requirements for projects that receive funding from new infrastructure spending. For example, Congress can require that federally funded building projects meet higher energy efficiency standards.

What are the other climate policies could benefit from an infusion of cash? Sen. Smith’s office suggested funding for renewable energy and transmission — though Manchin, as chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, might still have influence over that.

The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer also pointed to long-distance electricity transmission:

The U.S. must triple its transmission infrastructure in order to decarbonize by 2050, according to a landmark Princeton study. As Steve Cicala, an economics professor at Tufts University, recently told me, solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of electricity generation in some parts of the country. But those cost declines only matter if the largest power markets are connected—via new transmission!—to those areas.”

The group We ACT for Environmental Justice suggested the funding should be used to clean up highway pollution that disproportionately affects communities of color — for example, by increasing funding for clean cars and zero-emissions heavy-duty trucks.

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Meanwhile, Mildenberger suggested, funding for nuclear power would ensure that the US doesn’t lose the 20 percent of its carbon-free energy that currently comes from nuclear. Otherwise, that electricity could be replaced with gas and coal.

Biden will need to multitask to make his Plan B work, Larsen said. “If any one component were not to take place in the timeframe that we’re talking about, then something else is going to have to happen,” he said. “That could be additional regulations, it could be new states that are leading; it could be future congressional action. But you would need to see other actions somewhere else to make up the difference.”

Four executives from Big Oil — “the richest, most powerful industry in human history,” according to environmentalist Bill McKibben — testified before Congress on Thursday at a hearing meant to reveal how the oil business has undermined government action on climate change.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform questioned the CEOs of ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell, alongside the presidents of two powerful lobbying groups, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the US Chamber of Commerce. The Democratic lawmakers who control the committee interrogated the executives about how their institutions misled the public and funded misinformation campaigns that questioned the severity of climate change.

But the executives, testifying virtually, were evasive. “As science has evolved and developed, our understanding has evolved and developed,” said ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, answering a question about why his company rejected climate science throughout the 2000s, when scientists already agreed that global warming was an urgent threat. Republican lawmakers argued the hearing was a farce, a distraction from other issues, and a veiled attempt to ban oil production.

Big Oil’s big secrets about its climate change activities may begin to unravel in any paperwork committee staff can get their hands on. For 40 years, the oil industry has worked to delay and obstruct policies that would hurt the profitability of its products, even when their own scientists warned that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change. Thousands of pages of documents in the public record — obtained through lawsuits, leaks, and undercover videos — patch together a portrait of how the oil industry has fostered climate change denial.

The Oversight committee requested additional documents dating back to 2015, but so far witnesses “have failed to adequately comply with the Committee’s request,” according to a statement by Democratic lawmakers. When reached for comment, an API spokesperson countered that the group has been actively working to comply “and has already produced thousands of pages responsive to their request.”

After nearly five hours of questioning, House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) closed the hearing by announcing she would issue subpoenas for the documents the committee did not receive, saying it had received only financial reports, social media posts, and press releases that were already publicly available. Maloney called for detailed funding information, board memos, and senior executive communications to help the committee “understand their payments to shadow groups and to over 150 public relations companies and advertisements on social media, payments that today’s witnesses seem intent on continuing.”

“I do not take this step lightly,” Maloney added, saying that the committee’s goal is to “get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign, and with these subpoenas we will.”

Climate activists hope that this moment could be an inflection point for accountability in the oil industry, similar to when Congress investigated other industries that have profited from misleading the public, including tobacco, asbestos, and lead companies. “There’s ongoing pressure to get these companies to fess up in one way or the other, or pay up,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the advocacy research group Climate Investigations Center, who has collected his own database of oil documents. “How and when that comes, and how much they can do to blunt that, is the drama that’s playing out this week.”

What secrets are oil companies still keeping from the public? There are at least five key areas Congress can dig into to discover the truth about Big Oil’s activities on climate change. The documents Democrats are after could also paint a fuller, more recent picture of the oil industry’s own climate change goals. Some purport to aim for net-zero emissions in the coming decades, but they could turn out to be hot air.

How much has the oil industry spent trying to undermine climate legislation?

In the words of one ExxonMobil lobbyist, the company has worked with “shadow groups” against early efforts to regulate the fossil fuel industry.

In June, the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace published a video of then-lobbyist Keith McCoy speaking on what he thought was a recruiting call. “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” McCoy said. “Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.” McCoy no longer works for ExxonMobil.

Similarly candid admissions about oil’s attitude toward climate action may lurk in their internal records.

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Oil companies are finally promising to change, but how much of their climate commitments are just greenwashing?

According to McCoy, the ExxonMobil lobbyist in Greenpeace’s exposé, the company had also been feigning support for a carbon tax, a policy that would increase the cost of fossil fuels to reduce demand.

“Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans, and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point that we can say, ‘Well, what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax,’” McCoy said.

There are other ways oil companies have inflated their records on climate, a tactic known as greenwashing. As of December 2019, the world’s five biggest oil companies had spent a combined $3.6 billion in advertising over the previous 30 years. One of Exxon’s recent marketing pushes has been in promoting its investments in research for using algae for car fuel. Someone who watches these ads might assume Exxon spends a significant portion of its budget on algae, when it accounted for 0.2 percent of its refining capacity.

Despite the rhetoric, the oil industry seems likely to stay true to its core products. As BP America CEO David Lawler said in the hearing, “This doesn’t mean BP is getting out of the oil and gas business.”

Who is calling the shots for the politicians and groups that deny climate change?

Astroturfing is the “practice of creating an illusion of public support for a cause,” according to the environmental news outlet Grist. Instead of expressing skepticism of climate science or promoting controversial policies directly, oil companies and their allies have spent big sums on other organizations that promote its priorities.

One example is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has received more than $1.7 million from Exxon and its affiliates before the company left the council in 2018. ALEC has helped reverse renewable portfolio standards and plastic bag bans by pushing model legislation in states. Between 1998 and 2014, Exxon also led corporate donors in giving almost $31 million to special interest groups that promote climate change denial.

This is only a small glimpse into the grants Big Oil has given to third-party groups. The public doesn’t yet know what, exactly, the grants were for.

How much current polarization on climate change can be traced back to early disinformation campaigns by the industry?

In 2015, the LA Times and Inside Climate News published separate investigations showing that scientists in the oil industry had urged companies to consider how its products were fueling global warming via internal memos dating all the way back to the 1960s. Instead of heeding these calls, Exxon worked with other top oil companies to form a coalition that would sink a binding global climate agreement in 1998, according to documents.

From the LA Times:

How did one of the world’s largest oil companies, a leader in climate research, become one of its biggest public skeptics?

The answer, gleaned from a trove of archived company documents and the recollections of former employees, is that Exxon, now known as Exxon Mobil, feared a growing public consensus would lead to financially burdensome policies.

What are the end goals of Big Oil’s enormous marketing push?

One of the mysteries of the oil industry is the type of work it contracts out to consulting and public relations groups, which have helped Big Oil craft a benevolent public image.

Davies, of the Climate Investigations Center, wonders what the oil industry deems a PR “success.” “Who’s measuring the success of these ads? You’re spending millions of dollars on these ads, how do you measure the win?” he added.

Shedding light on the PR world’s activities could pressure the biggest firms to consider severing their ties with oil giants.

The efforts of oil companies to market themselves also loom large in a growing number of lawsuits alleging malfeasance. Rep. Ro Khanna said Thursday’s hearing is likely just the first part of a series getting to the bottom of oil industry campaigns, with a second focused on the PR industry’s role working with oil companies.

“We have a huge amount of documentation going back 40 years,” said Harvard history of science professor Naomi Oreskes ahead of the hearing, during a call with the progressive group Our Revolution.

On Thursday, the company executives claimed their position reflects the overwhelming scientific consensus that fossil fuels cause climate change. But the industry has not focused on climate-friendly policy in its lobbying.

The four oil companies present at the hearing, along with API, have spent nearly $453 million combined to lobby the federal government in the past decade, according to an analysis released Thursday by Democrats on the House Oversight committee. The analysis suggests the industry has been far more concerned with protecting tax breaks for fossil fuels than it has protecting the planet.

For example, the industry has publicly said it supports the Paris climate agreement, but in the halls of Congress, it lobbied on the matter only eight times out of 4,597 lobbying examples in the analysis. The industry devoted more than half its time lobbying on tax-related issues.

“I don’t think we really need more research … on what these companies have done, and the way they have misrepresented the truth, the facts, and continue to propagate dangerous practices,” Oreskes said on the Our Revolution call. But she thinks the hearing can help the public realize this. “We’ve been lied to … we have work to do to really get that message out.”

Corporations and countries around the world are promising to eliminate their contributions to climate change. But many of their targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions are prefaced by a slippery phrase: “net-zero.”

More than 130 countries have set or are considering net-zero emissions goals, and many are stepping up as they prepare for next week’s COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. The United States, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Japan, and Argentina all aim to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The European Union aims to be “climate-neutral,” another way of framing net-zero. Even Russia and Saudi Arabia (the world’s top oil exporter) now have net-zero emissions targets.

Private companies are getting into the game, too. At least 20 percent of the 2,000 largest companies have set net-zero emissions targets, including giants like Apple, Ford, and Microsoft.

But “net-zero” is different from zero emissions, and this nebulous term can obscure a lot of important differences in how countries and companies actually plan to limit their contributions to climate change.

There are no standards that govern what activities actually count as net-zero. “The ‘net’ is always there in front of the ‘zero,’ but the ‘net’ part is a bit vague, especially with country-level commitments,” Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told Vox.

When a country aims for net-zero emissions — as opposed to simply zero emissions — it’s essentially promising to balance out its climate pollution, so that overall, it doesn’t harm the global climate.

For example, if a factory owner can’t figure out how to eliminate their emissions with current technologies, they can pay to restore a mangrove swamp that will absorb an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. If the mangrove absorbs roughly what the factory pollutes, the factory theoretically won’t contribute to warming. (The idea of net-zero sometimes goes beyond carbon dioxide and accounts for other heat-trapping gases, like methane.)

In principle, the idea of net-zero offers countries and companies flexibility in meeting climate goals. But in practice, critics say that net-zero pledges delay meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases and provide cover to those unwilling to take immediate steps to limit emissions.

“On the road to COP26, corporations are using ‘net-zero’ to block effective climate policy and greenwash their image while maintaining business-as-usual,” according to a report from the nonprofit group Corporate Accountability.

Not all net-zero commitments are equal. So the question is: How seriously should we take a given net-zero target? And how do we separate the good ones from the bad ones? If bad net-zero targets take root, they could shield the worst emitters from scrutiny and allow greenhouse gases to continue to rise, even as the window for averting climate catastrophe slams shut.

What makes a good net-zero emissions target

To stop the planet from warming further, all of humanity will need to achieve a version of net-zero emissions. Any greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere will need to be sucked out again, whether by trees, microorganisms, or carbon-scrubbing machines.

That’s because carbon dioxide, the main human-produced greenhouse gas, can linger in the atmosphere for centuries. Even if CO2 emissions slow to a trickle, they will still accumulate and continue warming the planet, albeit at a slower rate.

The Paris climate agreement, for instance, set a goal for limiting warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius, with a more optimistic goalpost of staying below 1.5°C (compared to global average temperatures before the industrial revolution). Reaching either of these objectives would require humanity to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions, but on different timelines. The longer it takes, the worse the warming.

In the context of climate change, the atmosphere doesn’t care where the emissions are coming from or where they go, just the overall quantity that makes it into the sky. So in theory, matching greenhouse gas outputs with withdrawals can eliminate impacts on the climate.

However, it takes a lot of work to truly counter the damage of emissions. “I think just saying, ‘I’m going to be net-zero,’ with no concrete plans to achieve that goal, is not legitimate,” said Kelley Kizzier, vice president for global climate at the Environmental Defense Fund. “We have to understand what that company or country is going to do to make that a reality.”

Here are questions to ask about net-zero commitments.

Is the country or company making actual reductions in emissions?

There is no substitute for reducing overall emissions. Preventing greenhouse gases from spewing into the sky in the first place is the most meaningful and straightforward way to curb humanity’s impact on the climate. That means phasing out fossil fuels like oil and gas as completely as possible, as quickly as possible.

This also has positive effects beyond mitigating climate change. A smokestack can pollute its neighborhood and make people sick, even if a forest is counteracting its CO2 emissions, for example. Compared to net emissions reductions, “The marginal benefits of [total] emissions reductions and avoided emissions are far higher,” according to Broekhoff.

Another concern is that there are only so many options out there for balancing emissions. If too many companies and governments try to buy their way to net-zero emissions without making their own reductions, there won’t be enough carbon-absorbing tactics to go around. The largest burden of reducing emissions may then end up falling on the people with the fewest means to do so.

A strong net-zero emissions plan should therefore have large and immediate reductions in absolute emissions at its core.

Are they setting interim targets?

Many countries and companies have set their net-zero finish line in 2050. That’s less than 30 years away — 2050 is closer to us than 1990. And meeting the 1.5°C goal of the Paris agreement requires action on an even shorter time frame. Hitting this target would require halving global emissions as soon as 2030, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2018.

That’s why emissions reductions have to begin now. A credible net-zero plan should have concrete benchmarks between now and the middle of the century. Milestones also provide opportunities for observers like citizens and investors to gauge progress and hold institutions accountable. For instance, in April, the US set a goal of cutting 42 percent of its current greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

How much money is being invested, and where?

There are few better ways to show you’re serious than by spending money. How much a business or government is willing to spend on reducing emissions and the clean-energy transition reflects the strength of their commitment.

But where that money is spent matters too. Deploying zero-emissions energy to displace fossil fuels, capturing leaking methane, and phasing out hydrofluorocarbons yield immense climate benefits over the near term. Funding research and development could lead to breakthroughs that mitigate climate change over decades.

Paying to offset emissions could yield climate benefits too, but if that’s the only pillar of a net-zero plan, it could just end up as a way for wealthy corporations and countries to buy their way out of their climate obligations.

Are the offsets measurable and lasting?

The transition to clean energy isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s also going to be more difficult for some places, like developing countries that need cheap fuel and remote regions with few renewable energy options.

Even for countries and companies that can aggressively ratchet down their emissions, the last mile of greenhouse-gas production may prove especially difficult to eliminate. That includes activities like steel, cement, and chemicals manufacturing. Sectors like international aviation are particularly difficult to decarbonize because cleaner alternatives are not yet available on large scales.

“We know that all emissions won’t be driven to zero, and we need to address those emissions through removals,” said Kizzier.

In these instances, countries and companies will have little choice but to pay others to reduce emissions on their behalf. This is the most contentious aspect of net-zero. There are a lot of ways to compensate for emissions, but some have serious drawbacks. Restoring forests that have been degraded is one popular mechanism. As trees and vegetation grow, they can take in vast quantities of carbon dioxide from the air, but the accounting has proven tricky. Many of these projects have failed to deliver the promised reductions and some have even backfired, leading to more emissions.

There are other strategies to balance out emissions. An emitter can finance clean energy sources and use them to drive coal, oil, and natural gas off the market, zeroing out their own emissions. They can also install carbon capture and storage systems on fossil-fuel power plants. There are even companies building machines that can suck carbon dioxide straight out of the air. Of course, many of these measures are expensive, technologically immature, and could run into the same accounting issues as nature-based offsets.

Despite these challenges, some experts say it is possible to create viable offsets with proper measurement and verification. And given the amount that humans have already polluted, it may soon be necessary not just to zero out human impacts on the climate but to achieve net negative emissions — that is, withdraw more CO2 from the air than goes in.

Every scenario for stabilizing the global climate around 1.5°C of warming involves net-negative emissions after the middle of the century, the IPCC reported in 2018. Its low-end estimate was that humanity would have to withdraw 100 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the air by 2100, roughly double the amount that humanity produces in a year today. The high-end estimate was 1,000 gigatons.

So the work needed to limit climate change won’t end in 2050 and can’t stop at net-zero.

Will net-zero pledges build a more just future?

The US is the world’s largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases and currently the second-largest emitter, behind China and ahead of India.

Many of the countries that have historically emitted the most greenhouse gases have become some of the world’s wealthiest. Yet the countries that have historically emitted the least greenhouse gases, like island countries, stand to suffer the most from climate change.

A national net-zero target should therefore be evaluated on how well it addresses this discrepancy. “You could easily argue that the wealthy countries of the global north and companies operating in those countries should go well beyond net-zero to effectively net negative emissions,” said Broekhoff. “They need to reduce their emissions as much as possible, and they need to help the rest of the world get to net-zero.” And many environmental activists argue that 2050 is too late as a target.

Wealthier countries also have to ensure that they don’t hinder vital activities like food production or development in other countries. And again, offsets have to complement overall emissions reductions, not substitute them. Otherwise, rich nations and corporations could simply pay others to fulfill their obligations to reduce emissions.

Many net-zero climate targets have a dirty loophole: exports

The net-zero plans that countries are putting out ahead of the COP26 meeting provide an opportunity to test out these principles. At this meeting, countries are expected to come to the negotiating table with stronger climate change commitments than they presented when the Paris agreement was assembled in 2015.

But many of the newer commitments are inward-looking, focused solely on emissions within national borders and ignoring their exports of fossil fuels.

Australia, for example, published a proposal for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 that relies heavily on investments in low-emissions technologies. But its interim target for 2030 hasn’t budged. And while Australia’s government expects domestic greenhouse gas emissions to fall, it remains the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter and will continue selling coal and natural gas abroad. “Australia’s coal and gas export industries will continue through to 2050 and beyond, supporting jobs and regional communities,” according to the plan.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia is aiming for net-zero emissions by 2060 and is investing $186 billion in cutting its emissions, but it expects to continue exporting oil in the meantime. Even the US has urged countries like Saudi Arabia to boost oil production to stimulate the global economy.

Norway, which is aiming to cut its domestic emissions by 55 percent by 2030, is also aiming to expand its oil and gas industry. As long as these countries are extracting fossil fuels and inviting other countries to burn them, they’ll never be able to credibly claim that they are having zero impact on the global climate. In fact, they’re profiting from this destruction.

While countries are only taking responsibility for the emissions within their borders, mitigating climate change requires looking beyond them. Getting these countries to reduce exports of dirty fuels looms as one of the biggest challenges of the upcoming climate talks.

Despite all the caveats and drawbacks, net-zero targets could still benefit the global climate. It will be hard to make progress without them. But these promises, and the steps countries and companies take to try to fulfill them, deserve intense scrutiny to ensure that they deliver.

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