Amid climate doom, here’s an Earth Day reminder about spectacular environmental wins

April 22, 2026

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Amid climate doom, here’s an Earth Day reminder about spectacular environmental wins

This Earth Day three environmental experts share stories about times when environmental action succeeded in saving the planet—and explain why this can be done again

By Rachel Feltman, Sushmita Pathak & Alex Sugiura

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. And today, in honor of Earth Day, we’re going to talk about why you should actually be excited about our planet’s future—yeah, really.

At Scientific American, we’re very aware that most folks don’t need a calendar reminder to make them think about issues like pollution and climate change. You probably read or listen to news stories about the environment more days than not—after all, we’re often the ones reporting and publishing them. And most of those stories probably don’t make you feel like celebrating at all.

But while it’s true that our planet’s environmental outlook is, in many ways, extremely dire, giving in to despair simply isn’t an option. I know that this sort of radical climate optimism, where we’re aware of and invested in environmental issues without, like, spiraling, is... tricky to figure out. I actually have a degree in environmental science, and I’ll be honest: knowing more about the field doesn’t always help me feel more optimistic.

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But to help you actually celebrate this year’s Earth Day, we’re here to remind you that humans have as much power to save the planet as we do to destroy it. How do we know this? Because we’ve done it before.

Today we’ll hear from three environmental experts about past wins that give them hope—and what we can learn from those historic victories to help us work smarter in the future.

Our first story comes from climate scientist Kate Marvel, a former NASA research physicist who is now with the nonprofit Project Drawdown. And this story is about how London managed to stop looking like a production of Sweeney Todd.

Kate Marvel: When you think about the famous London fogs that you imagine during the Victorian [era], with Jack the Ripper and all sorts of dark things going on, those are actually not fog in the sense of low-cloud San Francisco fog; those are smogs. Essentially, those are created by pollution.

Feltman: While the industrial revolution—powered largely by coal—kicked off Britain’s smog problem, air quality would continue to worsen until the so-called Great Smog of 1952. That’s when a meteorological phenomenon known as a temperature inversion occurred. Basically, this is when there’s warmer air higher up in the atmosphere and cooler air down below. The warm air acts like a lid and keeps pollution from escaping.

Marvel: Essentially, the sky turned orange. The fog got incredibly thick—you couldn’t see anything—and thousands, or even tens of thousands, of people got sick or died.

Feltman: It wasn’t actually news to anyone that London had dirty air, but this tragedy pressured the government into forming a committee about it. The members found that the smog was mainly driven by smoke from the cheap, dirty coal that people were using to heat their homes.

Marvel: This real gross, real dirty, real soot-burning stuff called, of all things, nutty slack.

Feltman: Switching to a different method for heating would be the ideal solution, obviously, but the committee found that even changing to less nasty coal would make a big difference. So that seems pretty straightforward, right?

Marvel: Well, initially they were ignored, and the reason it was ignored was that Britain was in a real bad state at the time. It was still struggling to recover from World War II. It had huge debts, so it was selling a lot of the, quote, unquote, “better quality” coal on the export market, so people were burning nutty slack in their houses. And the government thought, “Well, this is unacceptable. We can’t tell people not to do that, and we can’t not export the better quality coal, and it seems like tyranny, the tyranny that we just fought and defeated, to tell people what to do in their own houses.”

Then what happens is we get a very unlikely—I don’t want to say hero. Let’s call him a protagonist. So this man is called Sir Gerald Nabarro. He has the most magnificent upper-class British mustache you have ever seen in your life. He was not an aristocrat. He wa