By CALEIGH WELLS

This idea of a carbon footprint comes up a lot in news coverage about personal climate impact.

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The concept is simple: It includes anything that you add to planet-warming emissions, ranging from the gas consumed by your car to the energy required to produce the food you eat. Reducing your carbon footprint means contributing less of these gases to the atmosphere.

But figuring out how to lower your carbon footprint is more complicated. That’s why several mobile tracking apps help people figure out which actions create the most emissions and how to avoid them.

Researchers have found that people often misjudge how their actions contribute to climate change, but can do better with more information. Apps are one way to learn more about emissions and build better habits.

So, I downloaded three popular ones. Here’s how it went.

Calculating my own carbon footprint

Two of the apps started by calculating my personal footprint. And I’ll be honest. I thought I was going to look pretty good. I was wrong.

I take my climate impact seriously. I only eat meat on weekends, and it’s almost always low-impact options like chicken and turkey. I share my car (a plug-in hybrid) with my spouse, and we both work from home. I compost, I buy in bulk and I bring plastic containers to the restaurant for leftovers, so I produce very little trash. I mean, that’s a pretty standup environmental citizen, right?

Earth Hero and Pawprint both told me I emit around 17 tons of pollution every year. Earth Hero estimates the average American emits nearly 22 tons, so I was below that. But my footprint is still three times higher than the average person globally.

The biggest culprits were the energy spent heating and cooling my old house along with twice-yearly flights I take to see my family 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away.

So, armed with guilt and panic-induced enthusiasm, I set out to reduce my impact, with the help of the apps.

The lifestyle recording apps

Earth Hero and Pawprint both started with a survey about eating, travel and spending that yielded the carbon footprint calculation. (I compared it with the EPA’s calculator, and the results lined up.)

Then I scrolled through actions that could reduce my footprint. Pawprint assigns values to each action with the help of a climate impact consulting group. Earth Hero says it relies on volunteer scientists to research values for each action based on scientific data. Most of Earth Hero’s actions came with points to “level up,” but actions that can’t be easily quantified (like, “join a green team at work,”) didn’t impact my score.

Some were easy (wash clothes in cold water) and some were ambitious (install rooftop solar energy). Earth Hero allowed me to mark ones that went on my list of goals. Pawprint incentivized doing small actions repeatedly to build my list of habits, which reduced my calculated footprint.

Pawprint gave me “Pawpoints” that I could redeem for investments into climate causes. Earth Hero’s actions reduced my emissions score and leveled up my profile, which appealed to my competitive nature.

Earth Hero CEO Ben Gerhold said the average person who signs up for the app — which has 150,000 users — reduces their calculated annual emissions score by one ton.

I kept this up for two weeks. As my enthusiasm waned, so did my participation. The self reporting made for a personalized experience and set of goals, but I didn’t want to keep opening Pawprint every time I skipped a shower or ate a vegan meal. I stopped opening Earth Hero too, because after the easy stuff, I was left with pretty lofty goals, such as installing a water heater. That is on my list, but it’s not a quick task.

The passive one that monitors spending

The third app I downloaded, called Commons, didn’t require the same daily commitment.

The app, which monitors credit cards, generated weekly reports on what I’m buying. It didn’t require ongoing inputs.

After getting over nervousness about sharing credit card data, I was flooded with insights. It listed every purchase in reverse chronological order and provided a rough estimate of its carbon impact, encouraging less spending in general and more sustainable purchases.

I got rewards when I bought from a sustainable brand, which I could then redeem for gift cards. The weekly report gave me kudos for spending less on gas and for no-purchase streaks for brands that it has given poor climate ratings.

It also encourages spending goals. This month’s challenge, for example, is to buy secondhand, and I get extra rewards if I, with the 1,800 others who accepted the challenge, collectively reach our target.

Their calculations can be based on broad formulas. For example, my grocery bill is based how much I bought and not what I bought, so the $10 I spent on tofu counted the same as if I’d bought beef.

Beyond the carbon tracking

Commons’ founder, Sanchali Pal, acknowledged the carbon footprint measurements are blunt. She said monitoring purchases is meant to get users to vote with their dollars and have a larger collective impact.

“A few individuals offsetting their footprint is great, but it’s not going to shift systems,” she said. “This idea of being able to send the signal to companies to shift their behavior was a lot more powerful.”

Many of the actions in Earth Hero’s app were also about collective action. I’d get points if I wrote to my political representative or signed a petition. Gerhold said those kinds of actions are going to have a “bigger ripple effect and just go beyond a niche app.”

After using the apps, I don’t have a dramatically lower carbon footprint score to report, partly because life changes take longer than two weeks.

Still, I’m inspired to see how small I can make my footprint. I did book a more climate-friendly Christmas trip to see my family with a mixed plane and train itinerary, rather than flying the whole way. I am also planning home energy upgrades.

Might as well keep chipping away and see how far I get.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Neither Minnesota Wild general manager Bill Guerin nor the camp representing star forward Kirill Kaprizov are saying much after the team’s potentially history-making first contract offer was reportedly rejected.

Speaking on the 10K Takes podcast this week, Guerin urged that Wild fans stay calm, saying he feels the team is “still in a really positive place with Kirill.”

The team would clearly like to have a deal in place before Game 1 of the regular season — Thursday, Oct. 9 in St. Louis — for multiple reasons. But if an impasse is reached, the nuclear option for Guerin and the Wild would be to explore an in-season trade and see what they can for Kaprizov rather than watch him walk away with no benefit, immediate or long-term, to the franchise.

Pittsburgh Penguins’ Bill Guerin celebrates his goal against the Philadelphia Flyers during the first period of an NHL hockey game in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2009. The previous spring. he was traded from the New York Islanders and helped the Penguins win a Stanley Cup. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

It’s a scenario Guerin knows from first-hand experience. In March of 2009, when he was captain of the New York Islanders, Guerin was traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins and won his second career Stanley Cup there a few months later. The Islanders got what became a third-round draft pick in exchange for Guerin.

For Wild fans, one more potentially troublesome factor iis the history of moves like that one. In general, teams that acquire a star player do better in the short term than the team getting multiple role players and draft picks in exchange for one top-level asset.

The Wild are likely a long way from even considering that idea for Kaprizov, who has been the offensive leader since he joined the team for the 2020-21 season — 185 goals and 386 points in 319 games — but if he were to waive his no-movement clause and allow the Wild to shop him around, he would command considerably more than a third-round pick.

Big names in new places

Just last season, the Colorado Avalanche reached an impasse with their leading scorer, star forward Mikko Rantanen, who was in the final year of his contract with the team. Rather than see him walk away as a free agent last summer, Colorado traded Rantanen to the Carolina Hurricanes in January. In return, the Avalanche received two players and two draft picks.

Rantanen’s tenure in Raleigh was barely long enough to sell any replica sweaters. He also was unable to reach a long-term contract agreement with the Hurricanes and was traded again, to Dallas, after just 13 games in Carolina. Worse, Rantanen and the Stars wound up eliminating Colorado in Round 2 of the NHL playoffs last spring.

It was medical treatment, less than money, that prompted the Buffalo Sabres to unload their biggest star, former Hobey Baker winner Jack Eichel, to the Vegas Golden Knights in November 2021.

After being the second overall pick in the 2015 NHL Draft behind Oilers superstar Connor McDavid, Eichel had put up impressive numbers for a Sabres team that was going nowhere. After injuries cost Eichel much of the previous season, and he was at loggerheads with Buffalo management about his best path back to good health, the Sabres sent him to Vegas in exchange for two players and two high draft picks.

Buffalo remains solidly on the outside of the playoff picture, and Eichel was a key factor in the Golden Knights’ winning their first Stanley Cup in 2023.

San Jose Sharks’ Joe Thornton is pictured during an NHL hockey game against his former team the Boston Bruins on Oct. 29, 2019, in Boston. Traded to San Jose in 2005, the center later helped the Sharks reach the Stanley Cup final. (AP Photo/Winslow Townson)

Moves with mixed results

Two decades ago, star defenseman Joe Thornton forced his way out of Boston, and the Bruins traded the former first overall draft pick to San Jose for a trio of regulars — Marco Sturm, Wayne Primeau and Brad Stuart. One could argue that the trade was a win for Boston, which won a Stanley Cup six years later, while the Sharks reached the final once with Thornton but still have no NHL titles on their resume. But Sturm, Primeau and Stuart were all employed elsewhere by the spring of 2011, when the Cup last visited Boston.

Current Islanders head coach Patrick Roy has some experience with the in-season trade game. After backstopping the Montreal Canadiens’ most recent Stanley Cup win in 1993, a strained relationship with coach Mario Tremblay blew up in December 1995 when Tremblay left Roy in the net for nine Red Wings goals in an eventual 11-1 loss to Detroit.

When Roy finally left the ice, he demonstratively told team owners seated behind the home bench that he had played his final game in Montreal. Forced to move their puck-stopping mainstay, Montreal shipped Roy to Colorado, and five months later in the spring of 1996, Roy was the defensive catalyst for the first Avalanche Stanley Cup title.

There is likely still much discussion that will be had between the Wild brass and the Kaprizov camp, but if an impasse is reached, NHL history shows there are in-season trade options. They just tend to favor the team, in this equation, that would receive Kaprizov.

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By Jamie Ducharme, KFF Health News

After losing 50 pounds on the injectable weight loss medication Zepbound, Kyra Wensley received a surprising letter from her pharmacy benefit manager in April.

Her request for coverage had been denied, the letter said, because she’d had a body mass index of less than 35 when she started Zepbound. The 25-year-old who lives in New York had been taking Zepbound without incident for months, so she was confused: Why was her BMI, which had been around 32 when she started, becoming an issue only now?

Wensley had no interest in quitting an effective drug. “Going right off like that, it’s easier said than done,” she said.

Her doctor fought to keep her on the GLP-1 agonist, the category that includes weight loss and Type 2 diabetes drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound. But Wensley ultimately had to switch from Zepbound to Wegovy to meet her plan’s requirements. She said she doesn’t like Wegovy as much as her old medication, but she now feels lucky to be on any GLP-1.

Kyra Wensley’s doctor fought to keep her on the injectable weight loss medication Zepbound, but Wensley ultimately had to switch to Wegovy, a different GLP-1 agonist, to meet her health plan’ s requirements. ((Lori Wensley)/KFF HEALTH/TNS)

Lots of research suggests such medications must be used indefinitely to maintain weight loss and related health benefits. But with list prices of roughly $1,000 a month, public and private payers are struggling to keep up with ballooning demand for GLP-1 weight loss drugs and in some cases are eliminating or restricting their coverage as a result.

North Carolina Medicaid plans to end GLP-1 coverage for weight loss on Oct. 1, just over a year after starting the coverage. Pennsylvania is planning to limit Medicaid coverage to beneficiaries at the highest risk of complications from obesity. And despite recent reports of a potential federal pilot program to extend coverage of GLP-1 obesity drugs under Medicaid and Medicare, all state Medicaid programs are likely to be under pressure due to steep spending cuts in the budget reconciliation package recently signed into law by President Donald Trump.

Already, many GLP-1 users quit within a year, studies suggest — often due to side effects, high costs, or insurance issues. Now a growing number of researchers, payers, and providers are exploring deliberate “deprescription,” which aims to taper some patients off their medication after they have taken it for a certain amount of time or lost a certain amount of weight.

The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which creates guidance for the National Health Service, recommends two-year limits on the use of some weight loss medications, such as Wegovy. And the concept was raised in a recent Institute for Clinical and Economic Review report on affordable access to obesity drugs.

A. Mark Fendrick, who directs the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan, has argued that if some people using GLP-1s to lose weight were eventually transitioned off, more people could take advantage of them.

“If you’re going to spend $1 billion or $100 billion, you could either spend it on fewer people for a long period of time, or you can spend it on a lot more people for a shorter period of time,” he said.

Fendrick’s employer, the University of Michigan, indeed does that. Its prescription drug plan caps coverage of GLP-1 drugs at two years if they’re used solely for weight loss.

Jamie Bennett, a spokesperson for Wegovy and Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk, declined to comment on the concept of deprescription, noting that its drugs are intended for chronic conditions. Rachel Sorvig, a spokesperson for Zepbound and Mounjaro manufacturer Eli Lilly, said in a statement that users should “talk to their health care provider about dosage and duration needs.”

Studies have shown that people typically regain a substantial amount of weight within a year of stopping GLP-1 medications, and that many people who quit ultimately go back on the drugs.

“There’s no standard of care or gold standard on how to wean right now,” said Allison Adams, an obesity and internal medicine doctor with UK HealthCare in Kentucky.

But the math shows why time-limited coverage is appealing to payers that struggle to pay for beneficiaries’ GLP-1 prescriptions, said Michelle Gourdine, chief medical officer for the pharmacy benefit manager CVS Caremark.

And states are “between a rock and a hard place,” said Kody Kinsley, who until January led North Carolina’s Health and Human Services Department. “They’re going to have to look at every single thing and trim dollars everywhere they can.”

Pennsylvania was looking for cost-saving strategies even before the new federal tax-and-spending law, according to Brandon Cwalina, press secretary for the state’s Department of Human Services. Pennsylvania projects it will spend $1.3 billion on GLP-1 drugs this year.

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Plans could see real savings, Fendrick said, if they covered GLP-1s for initial weight loss then moved people to cheaper options — such as more affordable drugs or behavioral health programs — to maintain it.

Plenty of companies are eager to sell insurers, employers, and individuals on behavioral alternatives. One is Virta Health, which advertises its nutrition-focused weight management program as “a proven approach for deprescribing GLP-1s when clinically appropriate.” A Virta-funded study assessed 154 people with Type 2 diabetes who stopped using GLP-1 medications but continued following Virta’s program, concluding that their weight did not significantly increase after a year.

Researchers affiliated with a European weight management company also recently reported that slowly tapering off the medications may help maintain weight loss.

For employers and insurers, the “initial question” was whether to cover GLP-1s for obesity, said Virta CEO Sami Inkinen. “Now, basically, everyone’s coming to the middle and asking, ‘How do we responsibly cover these drugs?’”

Part of responsible coverage, Inkinen said, is providing other forms of support to patients who stop using GLP-1 medications, by choice or otherwise.

For some people, however, maintaining weight loss without a GLP-1 remains a challenge, even with other options available.

Lily, who lives in Michigan, lost almost 80 pounds in roughly 18 months on Wegovy. But she had to quit the drug when she turned 26 and left her parents’ insurance plan this year. The plan her employer offers stopped covering GLP-1s for weight loss right around the time she joined.

Lily, who asked to be identified by only her first name because she is not out to her family as transgender, has tried other medications since then, and previously tried lifestyle programs to control her weight. But she said nothing works as well for her as Wegovy.

She has regained 20 pounds since going off the drug at the beginning of the year and worries that number will continue to rise, potentially contributing to future health problems.

“Just give people the drugs,” she said. “It seems cheaper and safer in the long run.”

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

God help us.

On Wednesday, I watched some of the worst footage I’ve seen in my life. An assassin’s bullet cut down Charlie Kirk, one of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists and commentators, at a public event on the campus of Utah Valley University.

Kirk was a husband and the father of two small children. He was also a hero to countless conservative college students. And now he’s gone.

Kirk might have been the most successful conservative political personality in America not named Donald Trump. He helped found Turning Point USA in 2012 and built it into the most influential conservative youth organization in the United States.

And that was only one part of Kirk’s empire. He put together a vast get-out-the-vote operation for the 2024 election. He hosted a popular podcast. But to simply recite a list of his accomplishments is to understate the impact of his life and of his death.

As Emily Jashinsky, a Washington correspondent for Unherd, put it on social platform X: “Charlie Kirk is a fixture of the Gen Z social media diet. People feel like they know him. This will hit very, very close to home in ways we are not prepared for.”

That is exactly right. When an assassin shot Kirk, that person killed a man countless students felt like they knew, and the assassin killed him on a college campus. Many students will take this loss personally. Many others will now feel a sense of dread on their own campuses.

Who can feel safe? Where can they feel safe? Whatever you think of Kirk (I had many disagreements with him, and he with me), when he died he was doing exactly what we ask people to do on campus: Show up. Debate. Talk. Engage peacefully, even when emotions run high.

In fact, that’s how he made his name, in debate after debate on campus after campus.

One of the worst elements of modern political discourse is that we tend to learn about our opponents entirely through the words and actions we find offensive. We’re subjected to a constant barrage of posts that begin with words like, “Can you believe Charlie Kirk said this?” or “Did you see this nonsense?” and then point to the clips or quotes that make us the angriest.

We don’t ever see the points of agreement. We rarely see the person outside his political context. Post by post, our hearts harden until some people reach a point where they will celebrate the deaths of people they’ve grown to despise.

Just a few days ago, I watched gutting footage of Kirk’s daughter running up to hug him when he was on the set of Fox News. Kirk wasn’t just an avatar for a political point of view; he was a person whom many, many people loved. If politics prevents us from mourning a wife’s loss of a husband or two kids’ loss of a father, then we are lost.

When I speak on college campuses, I’m often asked what single thing worries me most about American politics and culture. I have an easy answer — it’s hatred. Even vast political differences can be managed when people acknowledge the humanity and dignity of their opponents. At the same time, however, small conflicts can spiral into big ones when hatred and vengeance take away our eyes and ears.

Every threat, every assault, every shooting, every murder — and certainly every political assassination — builds the momentum of hate and fear.

You can look at the history of American conflict and unrest and see the same pattern time and again. What starts as a political difference becomes a blood feud the instant someone is hurt or killed. And so each act of political violence has a double consequence. It shatters families, and — over time — it breaks nations.

Already we’re seeing calls for vengeance online. In post after post, Kirk’s grieving friends and allies are declaring that “we’re at war” and “THIS IS WAR.”

Assassination can cost us our country. We lose it when we stop seeing our opponents as human, when we crave vengeance more than peace, when the motivation for our political engagement stops being the common good of our constitutional Republic (or even just the security of our families), but is rather inflicting pain and anguish on our political enemies.

I only met Kirk once, in 2021. We were speaking at the same Christian conference, and a mutual acquaintance introduced us. We’d already had some disagreements, so I was curious about how he’d respond when we met. He was perfectly civil, even friendly and self-deprecating. We talked a bit about our families, talked through a few points of disagreement and discussed the possibility of debating our differences on campus someday.

That’s one thing I respected about Charlie — and it’s worth emphasizing because the assassin attacked him as he spoke on campus — he wasn’t afraid of a debate. He was willing to talk to anyone. And when he was shot in the middle of a debate, the assassin didn’t just take aim at a precious human being, created in the image of God, he took aim at the American experiment itself.

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I’m reminded of the famous closing words of Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address. With a national calamity looming, he ended with a plea that subtly captured the danger ahead: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

The Confederacy rejected Lincoln’s appeal, but our generation faces its own choice. We have to work through our deep divide, recover our decency. The ballot box exists. Free speech exists. The gun cannot rule the day.

David French writes a column for the New York Times.