Sunday, April 22nd, marked nearly 50 years since millions of people gathered for the first Earth Day. Their celebration raised awareness in the US and across the globe of modern environmental threats, including those posed by agriculture. Just one year later, Frances Moore Lappé published Diet for a Small Planet, one of the first books advocating that people adopt vegetarian diets for environmental reasons.

Earlier this month, I saw a lot of fanfare about Apple Inc’s announcement that it is now powered by 100% renewable energy. Based on the headlines alone, many will assume that total decarbonization is now a theoretically solved problem, if only other companies and countries had the eco-consciousness motivating them to replicate Apple’s success.

What the headlines said: “White House May Share Nuclear Power Technology With Saudi Arabia.” What they actually meant: White House looks to restart negotiations for a bilateral agreement with Saudi Arabia, which would simply allow US companies to compete for nuclear tenders in Saudi Arabia.

Nuclear closures are dramatic affairs. The past week has been a tragedy for FirstEnergy. It announced the planned retirement of three of its nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy for its subsidiaries, and requested an unlikely emergency subsidy — putting the fate of its nuclear plants in the hands of the federal government. The maelstrom of uncertainty surrounding FirstEnergy illustrates the challenges facing American nuclear as a whole. Nuclear is politically unpopular and economically undercut by natural gas; at least a dozen nuclear plants across the country are scheduled for retirement in the next ten years.

Does humanity’s growing use of materials mean that decoupling is impossible? In a word, no, and attempts to reduce all resource and environmental problems to our material footprint won’t help us solve problems of resource scarcity or environmental impacts.

This month’s federal budget deal includes a tax credit for each ton of carbon dioxide pulled out of the atmosphere, which has reignited the debate over carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The change to Section 45Q provides a tax credit of $50 per ton of captured CO2 to be sequestered and $35 per ton of CO2 to be reused. Carbon capture has long divided industry, activists, and analysts. Some solar advocates have been critical of CCS, pointing to its high costs, unproven results, and messianic expectations. It is undoubtedly an early-stage, high-risk technology. But solar was too, until very recently. It is because of this risk — not in spite of it — that carbon capture deserves patient government support.

I have long been a believer that the best way to ascertain people’s intentions is to pay attention to what they do, not what they say. This concept is known in the parlance of economists and political scientists as “revealed preference.” People’s priorities as revealed by their observed behaviors often diverge quite substantially from what they say those priorities are.

The rapid growth of solar power in the 2010s, both in the United States and worldwide, is one of the big success stories in recent energy history. However, as many analysts have pointed out, this success is one government agencies failed to foresee. Why have forecasts consistently underestimated the growth of solar and how can forecasts be improved in the future? This is an important question, since as we think about the options for decarbonizing the world’s energy system, we need to know what different technologies can do.

Many environmental writers and experts, such as Stan Cox, Lloyd Alter, and Michael Hamm, dismiss vertical and other fully indoor farms as being overly energy intensive. These farms rely on artificial lighting, heating and cooling systems, and vertical stacking of crops to dramatically raise crop productivity. Their critics are right in one respect: high energy use is an unavoidable downside of vertical farms.

Conservation International recently launched the world’s biggest tropical reforestation project in the Amazon. The scale of it is huge: 73 million trees covering 70,000 hectares of degraded land. Only China and Africa’s Great Green Wall projects are more ambitious.

The scheme is clearly good news. But even as we celebrate restorative efforts like this one, we need to remain focused on the root causes of deforestation. Protecting primary forests requires concrete steps to address the greatest threat of all: agriculture.