‘You Need This’ Doc, 5 Min EV Charge, Public Data Archivists, and More!

Hey climate heroes! Welcome to The Climate Roundup, where we round up the change, er the news about climate and the environment. As part of the Gen E community, we thank you for making climate action part of everyday life. (Reading this newsletter counts!)

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In Pop Culture:

🤑 “You Need This” is a new documentary debuting at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival that exposes how modern society’s insatiable appetite for consumerism is destroying our planet – by using humor. Adam McKay (“The Big Short”, “Don’t Look Up”) is a producer on the film, which is still looking for a US distributor, but here’s hoping. Watch the trailer here, and read an interview with the director here.

The film’s description sums it up best: “As you read this, millions of products are being bought and soon thrown away. We are filling our shopping carts, thinking less and longing for more. Our basic needs have become cogs in a profit machine where we work and consume until we die. But who really controls the system and can we break free? ‘You Need This’ explores how consumerism and hyper-capitalism shape our lives, society and planet.” Imagine if films like this (assuming it’s factual and good) were shown in schools alongside courses on environmental stewardship? We could cultivate little environmentalists vs little budding hyper-consumers.

Philanthropy At Work:

🤝 The National Forest Foundation is partnering with local indigenous and environmental groups in southeast Alaska to restore wetlands, streams, and forests in order to revitalize fish and other wildlife populations that were decimated by industrial-scale logging. To learn more about the history and current efforts, watch this video.

In Environmental News:

😞 Environmental nonprofit, Greenpeace, lost. Energy Transfer, the oil company suing them for protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline back in 2016-17 (you may remember it, it got national attention), won a reward of $660 million, which is likely to bankrupt Greenpeace and force them to rename as Rest-In-Peace. They will appeal, but this isn’t exactly a good sign for environmental groups and warriors who want to be creative about ending the fossil fuel era, for fear of demise.

⚡️Chinese electric car maker, BYD, announced it has developed a new EV charging platform that can recharge an EV with 250 miles of range in just 5 minutes. That’s about equal to the time it takes to fill an old-school car with dirty fuel. Huge. Critics say it’ll be expensive (though we know that never stops China, just look at their execution of EV adoption and renewable energy infrastructure), and that these super fast chargers likely won’t be coming to the US anytime soon. One would hope this achievement would motivate companies in the US to build a competing product asap because this technological gap is widening fast.

🚨 Trump issued a new executive order to expand mining and drilling on federal and protected lands that tells “the Interior Department to prioritize extraction over other activities on lands with deposits”, as Axios reports, with the Interior Dept also planning to reopen 82% of lands in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, plus areas of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for development. The executive order also promotes fast-tracking permits. ‘Move fast and break things’ should never be a government tagline, yet here we are. But our country’s trademark slow pace with these types of projects should help buy time for groups to try and stop them.

🦸‍♀️ This is awesome: a group of people, including university researchers, archivists, students, and environmental, justice, and policy orgs have been archiving federal data in order to preserve and provide public access to federal environmental data. This is in response to the Trump admin deleting public data, and climate data in particular. Thank you to these Citizens Doing Good. I mean, damn, there really are some straight up heroes out there.

🙅⚫️ 28 states now get more electricity from clean solar and wind than from the dirtiest offender, coal. See if your state is moving in the right direction, in charts! How is coal still a thing in 2025? Well, it shouldn’t be, as coal is the most polluting energy source, but also it’s no longer economical, and because of this, 120 coal plants are set to close in the next 5 years (unless Trump finds a way to keep them polluting, as he’s vowed). Twenty years ago, coal-fired power plants supplied half our electricity, but today it’s down to 15%. Wind and solar represent 17% of our nation’s electricity.

😎 Utah will be the first state to approve ‘balcony solar’, pending the final signature from the Governor. Balcony solar became popular in Germany, and it is just what it sounds like. Apartment owners can install solar panels on their balconies, providing them with free energy that powers at least some of their energy needs and operates separately from utility grids, which again means FREE. You really gotta wonder why this form of energy independence has not caught on across the aisle in America. Strike that, Utah gets it.

Second-Hand On The Rise

👖 According to a new report from clothing resale company, ThredUp, the market for second-hand apparel comprised 10% of global category spending last year, or $227B, growing 15% versus the previous year. Analysts at Bloomberg think the market will continue its double digit growth trajectory due to the Trump tariffs that will likely increase prices for new clothing, shoes, and most items, making the cheaper prices of used clothing that much more appealing.

Nowadays there are many ways to buy and sell used clothing, which is notably better for the environment because it keeps the items out of landfills and lengthens their lifespan, plus it avoids the negative environmental impacts from producing new clothing, such as fresh water use, manufacturing and transportation emissions, toxic chemical production, etc. Personally, I’ve used a three-pronged strategy to sell items from my past life as a hyper-consumer: The RealReal for higher value goods, ThredUp for mid-tier brands, and for anything else, I find organizations that reuse textiles. In NYC, there are dropoff stations at many local farmer’s markets. Brands and retailers like Patagonia and Net-a-Porter are also creating their own resale operations for buyers and sellers. We are seeing a new circular economy being built right before our eyes. Now if we can drastically reduce new and virgin material goods from being made in the first place, we may be on to something here.