With each passing year, the effects of climate change become seemingly more obvious. According to NASA, June 2023 was the hottest June on record for the planet. In the United States, this summer has been marred by severe flooding in Vermont, record breaking heat waves in Arizona and Florida, and intermittent air quality alerts across much of the country resulting from thousands of wildfires in Canada. Experts have linked each of these events to man-made climate change.

Despite the increasingly destructive effects of climate change, the United States continues to pump billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. From 2020 to 2021, America’s energy-related carbon emissions jumped by 6.9%, or nearly 317 million metric tons.