The University of the South Pacific (USP) is at the heart of a global legal victory with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivering a historic opinion last week affirming that states have binding legal obligations to protect the environment from human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.

The case, hailed as a triumph for climate justice, was driven by a student-led movement that began within USP’s own regional classrooms.

In 2021, the government of Vanuatu took a bold step by announcing its intention to seek an advisory opinion from the ICJ on climate change. But what many may not have realised is that the inspiration behind this unprecedented move came from a group of determined young Pacific Islanders — students from USP who formed the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC).

• READ MORE: How Pacific students took their climate fight to the world’s highest court. And won
• The Pacific Community (SPC) climate justice resource
• Climate Justice at the ICJ
• Other Pacific climate justice reports

According to the United Nations background information, these USP students led the charge, campaigning for years to bring the voices of vulnerable island nations to the highest court in the world.

Their call for accountability resonated across the globe, eventually leading to the adoption of a UN resolution in March 2023 that asked the ICJ two critical legal questions:

• What obligations do states have under international law to protect the environment?
• What are the legal consequences when they fail?

The result
A sweeping opinion from the ICJ affirming that climate change treaties place binding duties on countries to prevent environmental harm.

As the ICJ President, Judge Iwasawa Yuji, stated in the official delivery the court was: “Unanimously of the opinion that the climate change treaties set forth binding obligations for States parties to ensure the protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.”

USP alumni lead the celebration
USP alumna Cynthia Houniuhi, president of the PISFCC, shared her pride in a statement to USP’s official news that this landmark opinion must guide not only courtrooms but also global climate negotiations and policy decisions and it’s a call to action.

“The law is on our side. I’m proud to be on the right side of history.”

Her words reflect the essence of USP’s regional identity, a university built not just to educate, but to empower Pacific Islanders to lead solutions to the region’s most pressing challenges.

Why is the ICJ’s climate ruling such a big deal?         Video: Almost

Students in action, backed by global leaders
UN Secretary-General Antόnio Guterres, in a video message released by the UN, gave credit where it was due.

“This is a victory for our planet, for climate change and for the power of young people to make a difference. Young Pacific Islanders initiated this call for humanity to the world, and the world must respond.”

Vishal Prasad, director of PISFCC, in a video reel of the SPC (Secretariat of the Pacific Community), also credited youth activism rooted in the Pacific education system as six years ago young people from the Pacific decided to take climate change to the highest court and today the ICJ has responded.

“The ICJ has made it clear, it cemented the consensus on the science of climate change and formed the heart of all the arguments that many Pacific Island States made.”

USP’s influence is evident in the regional unity that drove this case forward showing that youth educated in the Pacific are capable of reshaping global narratives.

A win for the Pacific
From coastal erosion and rising sea levels to the legacy of nuclear testing, the Pacific lives with the frontline effects of climate change daily.

Coral Pasisi, SPC Director of Climate Change & Sustainability, highlighted in a video message, the long-term importance of the ruling:

“Climate change is already impacting them (Pacific people) and every increment that happens is creating more and more harm, not just for the generations now but those into the future. I think this marks a real moment for our kids.”

Additionally, as Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s Minister for Climate Change, noted to SPC, science was the cornerstone of the court’s reasoning.

“The opinion really used that science as the basis for its definitions of accountability, responsibility, and duty.”

Among the proud USP student voices is Siosiua Veikune, who told Tonga’s national broadcaster that this is not only a win for the students but for the Pacific islands also.

What now?
With 91 written statements and 97 countries participating in oral proceedings, this was the largest case ever seen by the ICJ and it all began with a movement sparked at USP.

Now, the challenge moves from the courtroom to the global stage and will see how nations implement this legal opinion.

Though advisory, the ICJ ruling carries immense moral and legal weight. It will likely shape global climate negotiations, strengthen lawsuits against polluting states, and empower developing nations especially vulnerable Pacific Islands to demand justice on the international stage.

For the students who dreamed it into motion, it’s only the beginning.

“Now, we have to make sure this ruling leads to real action — in parliaments, at climate summits, and in every space where our future is at stake,”  said Veikune.

Vahefonua Tupola is a second-year student journalist at University of the South Pacific’s Laucala Campus. Republshed from Wansolwara News, the USP student journalism newspaper and website in partnership with Asia Pacific Report.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Wansolwara.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s EPA took a major step toward changing that. At a truck dealership in Indianapolis, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a formal proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, which has been in the works since the beginning of Trump’s second presidency. At the same time, Zeldin announced a plan to repeal all federal greenhouse gas emissions regulations for motor vehicles. “If finalized, today’s announcement would amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States,” he said at the press conference.

Zeldin accused his predecessors at the EPA of making “many, many, many mental leaps” in the 2009 declaration, and he argued that the “real threat” to people’s livelihoods is not carbon dioxide but instead the regulations themselves, which he claimed lead to higher prices and restrict people’s choices.

If the EPA succeeds in reversing the endangerment finding, it would “eviscerate the biggest regulatory tool the federal government has” to keep climate change in check, said Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Republicans in Congress have already repealed much of former President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, which aimed to put the U.S. within reach of its Paris Agreement targets primarily by funneling money to renewable energy sources. Rescinding the endangerment finding targets the other main tool the U.S. government can use to address climate change: the executive branch’s power to limit emissions through regulatory action. In other words, Republicans have already eliminated many of the federal government’s proverbial climate carrots — now they’re going after the sticks. 

“We will not have a serious national climate policy if this goes through,” said Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor of climate policy and environmental law at Vermont Law School.

But that’s a big “if.” Experts say that the EPA’s plan is bound to be embroiled in years of lawsuits, perhaps one day making its way to the Supreme Court, which blessed the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases in 2007 and declined to hear a challenge to the endangerment finding as recently as December 2023. And even if the EPA does manage to overturn the endangerment finding after all court challenges have been exhausted, it would result in sweeping consequences — including some that the administration’s allies in the oil industry may not like. Indeed, the risk is serious enough that some fossil fuel industry groups have urged the Trump administration not to repeal the finding.

The tussle over the endangerment finding stems from differing interpretations of the Clean Air Act. When Congress expanded the law in 1970, it tasked the EPA with regulating air pollutants that threaten public health, but it kept the definition of “pollutant” broad. “They had the foresight to understand that they could not foresee every potential air pollutant that would endanger public health and welfare in the many decades to come,” said Zealan Hoover, who was a senior adviser to the EPA under Biden. That gave the EPA some leeway to determine exactly what it should be regulating — a question that presidents have approached very differently, with Democrats typically trying to expand the agency’s power and Republicans trying to limit it. With its 2009 endangerment finding, the Obama administration added carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to the list.

Now that Zeldin has announced a plan to strike down the finding, the EPA will open a 45-day period for the public to weigh in on the proposal. The agency is supposed to take that feedback into account before moving to finalize the rule. At that point, states and environmental groups may sue the EPA in what’s expected to be a yearslong court battle.

“The lawyering that’s going to go on is going to make a lot of people rich,” Parenteau said. In the meantime, Zeldin would likely work to undo existing regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, unless the courts were convinced to pause the implementation of the new rule. 

Any lawsuit would probably end up in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases concerning federal policymaking. Law experts say the EPA’s argument may not fare well with those judges, as the circuit has upheld the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act in the past. On top of that, when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, Democrats amended the Clean Air Act to explicitly declare carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases as air pollutants, bolstering the foundation for regulating them. Republicans did not repeal that language when they gutted much of the rest of the Biden-era law, and challengers are likely to invoke those amendments in court, Carlson said.

But that wouldn’t necessarily be the end of it, because such a case might go all the way to the Supreme Court. The court’s conservative majority could then choose to undermine Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 decision that gave the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and led to the endangerment finding. “That may be the ultimate aim here,” Carlson said, “to get the Supreme Court to revisit Massachusetts v. EPA to make it basically impossible to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.”

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Undoing the finding wouldn’t just dismantle the foundation of U.S. climate regulation — it might also weaken oil companies’ best legal defense in the flood of climate lawsuits brought against them by cities and states. For years, oil companies have relied on a different Supreme Court ruling to argue that federal law shields them from state lawsuits over climate change. In the 2011 ruling American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found that because the EPA was already regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, states couldn’t separately sue polluters under federal “nuisance” law — a type of legal claim used when someone’s actions interfere with public rights, such as the right to a healthy environment.

The court’s reasoning was that Congress had delegated the task of regulating emissions to the EPA, leaving no room for federal courts to step in on making climate policy. But if the endangerment finding is revoked, and the EPA no longer regulates those emissions, that argument could fall apart, leaving fossil fuel companies vulnerable in courts across the country.

“There is great concern that reversing the finding would open the door to a lot more nuisance lawsuits against all types of energy companies,” Jeff Holmstead, a partner with energy law firm Bracewell, told E&E News earlier this year. The oil industry may then pursue a backup plan: Companies could ask Congress, which is currently controlled by a narrow Republican majority, to grant them legal protection from climate lawsuits, according to Parenteau.

Undoing the endangerment finding could leave fossil fuel companies navigating a patchwork of state laws instead of a single cohesive federal policy. If greenhouse gas emissions are no longer regulated under the Clean Air Act, states would presumably be free to make their own rules, Carlson added. Among other consequences, that could strengthen California’s case against the Trump administration over its right to place stricter-than-federal standards on vehicle emissions. “There’s potential for a lot of chaos,” she said. 

It’s possible that a more liberal presidential administration could one day reinstate the endangerment finding, even if Zeldin manages to revoke it. But it would be a while before that could translate to any meaningful action on climate change, according to Hoover.

“Unfortunately, for anyone who wants to see government solve a big problem, there’s very little you can achieve through regulations in four years,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s EPA is attacking its own power to fight climate change on Jul 30, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

The obliteration of the clean vehicle standards is part of Trump’s frontal attack on the U.S. government’s ability to act on climate—the administration is also attempting to eliminate the 2009 “endangerment finding,” (EF) a bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives. See the Sierra Club’s statement on the EF here.

The endangerment finding requires the federal government to regulate climate pollution under the Clean Air Act. Eliminating it would gut key tools Congress gave EPA to address the immense harm wrought by the climate crisis and would undo regulations of industrial sources of greenhouse gas emissions like vehicles or power plants.

The transportation sector accounts for 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions—more than any other sector in the US. The clean vehicle standards continue EPA’s decades-long effort under the Clean Air Act to set standards that successfully reduce vehicle pollution, improve public health and prevent the worst of the climate crisis. For this latest round of final standards, the EPA engaged in a years-long, multi-stakeholder, comprehensive rulemaking process that engaged industry and civil society alike and would collectively avoid over 8 billion tons of carbon emissions.

In response to the announcement, Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All Director Katherine García released the following statement:

“Vehicle pollution kills, and Donald Trump’s catastrophic rollback of the vehicle standards will eviscerate one of our most effective tools to tackle the nation’s top polluting industry. Trump’s short-sighted, anti-regulatory agenda will deny Americans the option to choose cleaner vehicles over inefficient gas guzzlers. In one fell swoop just months into office, Trump’s pro-polluter administration is trying to destroy the United States’s ability to fight climate change and protect our health and well-being while making us less globally competitive.

“Our federal clean vehicle standards protect American families by cutting down on toxic air pollutants and climate-disrupting emissions. Strong standards also protect our wallets by ensuring manufacturers produce cleaner, more fuel efficient cars that are cheaper to fuel and own long-term.

"These standards are the product of years of public engagement, in which a broad coalition—including thousands of Sierra Club members and supporters—advocated for the strongest possible protections. Time and time again, Trump has proposed irrational policies that fundamentally hurt Americans and the planet. And, once again, the Sierra Club will fight this senseless attack tooth and nail.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Both the Biden EPA standards to reduce pollution from cars and trucks and the Obama EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding were based on overwhelming scientific evidence that has only become more robust. The proposals, if adopted, will create more pollution and lock in more damage to our air and climate in the future.

“This cynical one-two punch allows Trump’s Flat Earth EPA to slam the brakes on reducing auto pollution and ignore urgent warnings from the world’s leading scientists about the need for climate action,” said Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign. “By revoking this key scientific finding Trump is putting fealty to Big Oil over sound science and people’s health. These proposals are a giant gift to oil companies that will do real damage to people, wildlife and future generations. The administration can’t even pretend the science facts have changed. It’s purely a political bow to the oil industry.”

Revoking life-saving clean air standards that slash auto pollution will allow automakers to make cars that guzzle more gas and pollute more. Rescinding the endangerment finding will make it harder for federal agencies to take steps that cut heat-trapping greenhouse gas pollution from cars, trucks, power plants, factories and agriculture.

The administration falsely claims that U.S. pollution doesn’t matter. The United States is the second-largest carbon polluter in the world after China, and the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses. The U.S. emitted 11% of the world’s greenhouse gases in 2021, and during Trump’s first term his administration admitted that emissions in excess of 3% were “significant.”

“This is the most pro-combustion administration since Nero. Trump is delivering higher gas pump sales to Big Oil and higher gas pump costs and unhealthy air to us and our kids,” said Becker. “To famous lies like ‘cigarettes don’t cause cancer,’ we can now add Trump’s claim that pollution from millions of cars is healthier than rules cleaning them up. Trump’s lies have serious consequences, and this one is far worse than taking a Sharpie to a hurricane map. Generations of Americans will suffer because of it.”

The vehicle rules Trump plans to scrap would cut 7 billion metric tons of emissions and saved the average American driver $6,000 in fuel and maintenance costs over the lifetimes of the vehicles made under the standards.

“The EPA is revoking the biggest single step any nation has taken to save oil, save consumers money at the pump and combat global warming. The Trump administration’s actions will worsen heart and lung disease, sicken kids with asthma, and stoke deadly wildfires, storms and floods,” Becker said. “It’s outrageous to justify this recklessness with the ridiculous claim that cutting planet-warming pollution is more expensive than the billions it will cost consumers at the pump and the hospital because of climate devastation. We’ll fight them every step of the way.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Vietnam, the world’s second-largest exporter of coffee, is known for growing robusta beans. Earthier and more bitter than the arabica beans grown in Brazil, Colombia, and other coffee-growing regions near the Equator, robusta beans are often thought of as producing lower-quality coffee. 

In an effort to rebrand robusta, Mullin signed deals with coffee farming cooperatives in Vietnam and created smooth blends. Over the years, she helped a cohort of farmers convert their operations to organic. “We put in huge investments and were certified as the first organic specialty-grade coffee farms ever in Vietnam,” said the CEO and founder. In a few weeks, Copper Cow is planning to launch its first line of organic coffee at Whole Foods and Target.

But the second Trump administration has changed the calculus of her business. Mullin said she “was bullish” about her company’s prospects when President Donald Trump first took office, believing that Vietnam would likely be exempt from exorbitant tariffs since the president has many supporters in the coastal Southeast Asian country. Then, in April of this year, the White House announced a 46 percent tariff on goods from Vietnam. 

The shock left Mullin rethinking the very thesis she had set out to prove. “A big part of our mission is about how robusta beans, when treated better, can provide this really great cup of coffee at a lower price,” she said. “Once you put a 46 percent tariff on there, does this business model work anymore?”

Trump soon paused his country-specific tariffs for a few months, replacing them with a near-universal 10 percent tax. This month, Trump announced on social media that he would lower Vietnam’s eventual tariff from 46 to 20 percent — a sharp price hike that still worries Mullin. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to impose an astounding 50 percent tariff on goods from Brazil, the nation’s largest importer of coffee, starting August 1. 

“I joke with my partner that I feel like I’m in a macroeconomics class,” said Mullin. In lieu of raising its prices, Copper Cow, which sells directly to consumers as well as to retailers, has scrambled to cut costs by reconsidering its quarterly team get-togethers and slowing down its timeline for helping more farmers go organic. The price of coffee hit an all-time high earlier this year, a dramatic rise due in part to ongoing climate-fueled droughts in the global coffee belt. As the U.S. considers fueling a trade war with coffee-producing countries, “it just feels like such an insult to an injury,” said Mullin. “It’s like, let’s have an earthquake hit a place that is in the middle of a hurricane.”

Economists like to say that demand for coffee is relatively inelastic — drinkers are so attached to their daily caffeine fix that they keep buying it even when prices increase. As the Trump administration mounts its retaliatory trade agenda, that theory will be put to the test. Coffee growers, as well as the roasters and sellers that purchase them in the U.S., are now facing unforeseen geopolitical and economic challenges. “We have not seen tariffs of this magnitude before,” said David Ortega, a professor of food and economics policy at Michigan State University. “There’s no playbook for this.” 

Should Trump’s threatened tariffs go into effect next month, it will likely hurt consumers, as many businesses will pass on the costs by raising prices. But it could also have ripple effects on coffee farms, as companies may cut costs by pulling back on investments in environmentally-conscientious practices like organic or regenerative agriculture. “Our goal was always to slowly convert the rest of our products to certified organic,” said Mullin. “And we feel like that is not an option anymore because of the tariffs.”

Even if the tariffs do not go into effect in August, the ongoing economic uncertainty will likely impact coffee growers in Brazil, which provided 35 percent of America’s unroasted coffee supply as of 2023. As U.S. coffee companies navigate the Trump administration’s evolving trade policies, they are likely to seek out new, cheaper markets for coffee beans. “Suddenly, they become less attached to where they source their coffee from,” said João Brites, director of growth and innovation at HowGood, a data platform that helps food companies measure and reduce carbon emissions along their supply chain. 

The problem with that, according to Ortega, is that other countries in the coffee belt, such as Colombia, do not have the production capacity to match Brazil’s and meet U.S. demand for coffee. If the threat of punitive tariffs on Brazil kickstarts an increase in demand for coffee from other countries, that will likely raise prices. For coffee drinkers, “there are very few substitutes,” said Ortega.

These pressures on coffee farmers and buyers are coming after a period of worsening climate impacts. A majority of coffee grown in Brazil — about 60 percent — comes from smallholder farms, grown on about 25 or fewer acres of land. “The current reality they’re operating in is that they’re already very stretched,” particularly because of weather disruptions, said Brites. Coffee grows best in tropical climates, but in recent years unprecedented droughts in Brazil have stunted growers’ yields, forcing exporters to dip into and almost deplete their coffee reserves. Vietnam has been rocked by drought and heat waves — and though robusta beans need less water to grow than arabica beans, making them a relatively climate-resilient crop, growers have also seen their yields decline. (Mullin said she is seeing early signs of harvests rebounding this year.)

Brites speculated that U.S. companies buying from smallholder farms in Brazil may be able to pressure growers into selling their beans at lower prices, adding to the economic precarity that these growers face. “For a lot of these coffee growers, the U.S. is such a big market,” he said, adding that it would take time for them to find new buyers in other markets.

Growers themselves are worried. Mariana Veloso, a Brazilian coffee producer and exporter, said producers are facing logistical challenges — and anticipating more. “If we want to ship a coffee in the next month, we will probably not be able to,” said Veloso, remarking that sometimes cargo ships holding coffee sit at Brazilian ports for weeks before setting out. Shipping companies seem to be delaying shipments from Brazil, said Veloso, perhaps in anticipation of the looming tariffs.

In the U.S., not every coffee company sources from Brazil or Vietnam. But the Trump administration’s existing 10 percent across-the-board tariffs are still rattling the coffee business. “We source coffees from all around the world. So we’re not immune to anything,” said Kevin Hartley, founder and CEO of Cambio Roasters, an aluminum K-cup coffee brand. He added, “You know, 10 percent here and 30 percent there, that’s not trivial.”

Hartley added that one of the impacts of droughts on coffee growers is that younger farmers worried about the future are considering leaving the business. “In coffee farming families around the world, it’s a tough life and the current generation is showing reticence to take off where their parents began,” he said. 

Regardless of whether the U.S. imposes prohibitive tariffs on individual coffee-growing countries, climate change is already taking a toll on this workforce. “Everyone’s looking for a solution for this,” said Mullin, who believes robusta beans can offer a drought-resistant alternative to the ever-popular arabica beans. 

Copper Cow has even started experimenting with a lesser-known varietal of coffee beans called liberica, which requires even less water to grow than robusta beans. “And it’s delicious,” Mullin said. It’s an extremely labor-intensive crop because the coffee plant grows so tall, but one of the farmer cooperatives she works with is starting to plant them now, thinking the investment will be worth it as temperatures keep rising. 

This new era of environmental, economic, and geopolitical challenges has shaken coffee brands. “Everybody’s wondering, in 50 years, will there be much coffee anymore? People are trying to be really realistic about what that world is going to look like,” said Mullin. In the midst of that broader uncertainty, the impact of Trump’s tariffs is another question only time can answer.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher. on Jul 29, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

This February, a team of scientists was working on Svalbard when irony took hold. Drilling into the soil, they gathered samples of bacteria that proliferate when the ground thaws. These microbes munch on organic matter and burp methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas and significant driver of global warming. Those emissions are potentially fueling a feedback loop in the Arctic: As more soil thaws, more methane is released, leading to more thawing and more methane, and on and on. 

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In some parts of Svalbard, though, the scientists didn’t need to drill. Air temperatures climbed above freezing for 14 of the 28 days of February, reaching 40 degrees Fahrenheit, when the average temperature at this time of year is 5 degrees. Snow vanished in places, leaving huge pools of water. “I brought my equipment to drill into frozen soil and then ended up sampling a lot of soil just with a spoon, like it was soft ice cream,” said Donato Giovannelli, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Naples Federico II and co-lead author of a paper describing the experience, published last week in the journal Nature Communications. “That was really pretty shocking.”

Scientists can now dig with silverware in the Svalbard winter because the Arctic has descended into a crisis of reflectivity. Until recently, the far north had a healthy amount of sea ice, which bounced much of the sun’s energy back into space, keeping the region cool. But as the planet has warmed, that ice has been disappearing, exposing darker water, which absorbs sunlight and raises temperatures. This is yet another Arctic feedback loop, in which more warming melts more sea ice, leading to more local warming, and on and on. 

Making matters worse, as temperatures rise in the far north, more moisture enters the atmosphere. For one, warmer seawater evaporates more readily, adding water vapor to the air. And two, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. This leads to the formation of more low-level clouds, which trap heat like blankets — especially in the dark Arctic winter — amplifying the warming. That, combined with the loss of sea ice, is why the Arctic is warming up to four times as fast as the rest of the planet, with Svalbard warming even faster than that. 

Researchers on Svalbard say rising Arctic temperatures have led to reduced sea ice cover and rapidly thawing permafrost. These conditions are part of a feedback loop that makes the region especially vulnerable to climate change. Courtesy of James Bradley

During the winter, Svalbard’s soils have historically frozen solid, and scientists assumed this made microbial activity grind to a halt. Reindeer could push through the snow to graze on vegetation. But February’s heat and rain melted the snow, forming vast pools of water that froze once temperatures dropped again. That created a layer of ice that reindeer couldn’t break through. “What we encountered was just so powerful, to be in the middle of this event,” said James Bradley, a geomicrobiologist at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography and Queen Mary University of London, co-lead author of the paper. “It really almost all melted over large, large, large areas of the ground. That ground remained frozen, so the water didn’t have too many places to drain away to, so what we also saw was huge pooling of liquid water over the tundra.”

This new climate regime could be profoundly altering the soil microbiome. Scientists assumed that methane-producing bacteria, known as methanogens, stopped proliferating when Svalbard’s soils froze in the winter, just like food in your freezer keeps for months because it’s in a hostile environment for microbes. But with warm spells like this, thawing could awaken methanogens, which could still produce that greenhouse gas even if it then rains and a layer of ice forms at the surface. In addition, that solid cap on the soil will stop the exchange of atmospheric gases into the ground, creating anaerobic, or oxygen-poor, conditions that methanogens love. “In some areas, deeper layers might never freeze completely, which means the methanogens and microbes at depth remain active,” Giovannelli said. “There’s no real winter period.”

Vegetation, too, is changing up there, a phenomenon known as Arctic greening. As temperatures rise, trees and shrubs are creeping north to conquer new territory. The good news is that those plants capture carbon as they grow, mitigating global warming to a certain extent. But the bad news is that dark-colored vegetation absorbs more of the sun’s energy and raises temperatures, just like the exposed ocean does. And shrubs trap a layer of snow against the landscape, preventing the chill of winter from penetrating the soil and keeping it frozen.

The speed of transformation in the Arctic is shocking, even for stoic scientists. And as nations keep spewing greenhouse gases, the feedback loops of the far north are threatening to load the atmosphere with still more methane. “We call this the new Arctic — this is not something that is a one-off,” Giovannelli said. “And on the other side, we’ve probably been a bit too cautious with our warnings regarding the climate. It’s not something for the next generation. It’s something for our generation.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Troubling scenes from an Arctic in full-tilt crisis on Jul 29, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

Mahi G’s song “Heatwave,” which was produced in collaboration with Greenpeace India, dropped in June, just as the country was reeling under soaring temperatures. Last year, more than 100 people died across India because of an extreme heatwave during the summer. Prolonged heat exposure can lead to heat strokes, a risk disproportionately borne by outdoor workers. 

In India, those workers typically occupy the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. The country’s caste system divides people into four main groups based on birth. Those who are placed outside the system — referred to as Dalits — are often relegated to the most hazardous jobs. Members of tribes or indigenous communities — referred to as Adivasis — also fall outside this structure and face systemic discrimination. Successive governments in India have evicted Adivasis from their ancestral lands to clear the way for exploiting mineral resources.

Mahi G’s music primarily speaks to the experiences of Dalits and Adivasis. She belongs to the Mahadev Koli tribe, a community found in the western state of Maharashtra, and lives in Mumbai. She has released 12 songs so far since she first began rapping in 2019.  Nearly half of them are about climate justice.

Growing up, the 28-year-old rapper witnessed her community struggle to access clean drinking water. “It always made me sad to see women walk long distances to fetch water,” she said. As an Adivasi woman, her drive to research and write about the environment comes from a deep, personal space, she said, and she chose to rap about sociopolitical issues because “you can talk about a big issue in a short, powerful, and aggressive way.”

India’s mainstream hip-hop scene has been mostly dominated by upper-caste male artists, primarily from Maharashtra and Punjab, a northwestern state. But in recent years, a handful of Dalit and Adivasi rappers have broken into the mainstream, using their music to challenge caste hierarchies, critique government policies, and spotlight social injustices.

Among them is Arivu, who shot to fame with his track “Anti-national,” a bold critique of the Indian government led by Narendra Modi, a right-wing Hindu nationalist, whose party and supporters routinely label dissenting voices as anti-national. In another song, Arivu lays bare feudalism and its contemporary manifestations while paying homage to his grandmother, a landless labourer in a tea plantation. The video has garnered more than half a billion views on YouTube.

Mahi G’s videos haven’t had that level of reach, but she draws support from activists and nongovernmental groups working on environmental and social justice causes. Her videos typically garner tens of thousands of views, and one song about Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a social reformer and architect of the Indian constitution, has more than 300,000 views. But the music hasn’t made much money so far. She hasn’t monetized her YouTube channel and is instead funding her music through her salary as an engineer at a private company. 

“Heatwave” is not the first time Mahi G has used her music to talk about climate justice. In her first rap song, “Jungle Cha Raja” — King of the Jungle — Mahi G explored the relationship between tribal communities and the natural environment, highlighting how they have long worked to protect it. In another song, “Vikasacha Khul,” she raps about the cost of development — how the building of roads, skyscrapers, and shopping malls has come at the expense of forests, lakes, and clean air.

Rappers like Mahi G and Arivu are often making music that challenges the political establishment at great risk to themselves. In 2023, Umesh Khade and Raj Mungase, two rappers from Maharashtra, were jailed after the right-wing political party ruling the state alleged they had made defamatory statements about their politicians. Despite these concerns and looming threats, Mahi G said the response to her songs keeps her going. Her music has compelled people to think about the environment and has helped them realize that they don’t want industrialization that destroys forests, she said. Even though her community members, who are often new to rap, do not understand her music, she said they have appreciated her work to spotlight climate change, which has directly affected their lives. Shifting rainfall patterns and depleting water resources have taken a toll on the Mahadev Koli tribe’s ability to sustain themselves.

Asim Siddiqui, who teaches at Azim Premji University in southern India’s Bengaluru city and works on the educational and cultural politics of youth, said that rappers from lower-caste and indigenous communities who have been historically marginalised grow up in contexts where they are intimately connected to their social and natural environment. Ecological destruction or social injustice has a personal impact on their emotions and identity. “It becomes obvious for them to bring out these themes in their musical expression,” he said.

Siddiqui said that singing was historically stigmatised in India as a degrading occupation and, therefore, confined to lower-caste communities. But once India gained independence from British rule and embarked on its nation-building project, “some of the music traditions got classicized and later commodified, which excluded singers and performers from Dalit and Adivasi communities,” Siddiqui said. Hip-hop provided access to marginalised communities across the world, he added,  as it enabled young rappers like Mahi G to tell their stories through music.

For Mahi G, music is a platform for activism. “My rap focuses on protecting natural resources,” she said. “If you can’t plant a tree, at least don’t cut one down.” These basic principles form the core of her message.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This Indian rapper is spitting bars about climate justice, caste, and Indigenous rights on Jul 29, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Haziq Qadri.

Last week, the UN’s highest court issued a stinging ruling that countries have a legal obligation to limit climate change and provide restitution for harm caused, giving legal force to an idea that was hatched in a classroom in Port Vila. This is how a group of young students from Vanuatu changed the face of international law.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Jamie Tahana for RNZ Pacific

Vishal Prasad admitted to being nervous as he stood outside the imposing palace in the Hague, with its towering brick facade, marble interiors and crystal chandeliers.

It had taken more than six years of work to get here, where he was about to hear a decision he said could throw a “lifeline” to his home islands.

The Peace Palace, the home of the International Court of Justice, could not feel further from the Pacific.

• READ MORE: Other climate justice reports

Yet it was here in this Dutch city that Prasad and a small group of Pacific islanders in their bright shirts and shell necklaces last week gathered before the UN’s top court to witness an opinion they had dreamt up when they were at university in 2019 and managed to convince the world’s governments to pursue.

“We’re here to be heard,” said Siosiua Veikune, who was one of those students, as he waited on the grass verge outside the court’s gates. “Everyone has been waiting for this moment, it’s been six years of campaigning.”

What they wanted to hear was that more than a moral obligation, addressing climate change was also a legal one. That countries could be held responsible for their greenhouse gas emissions — both contemporary and historic — and that they could be penalised for their failure to act.

“For me personally, [I want] clarity on the rights of future generations,” Veikune said. “What rights are owed to future generations? Frontline communities have demanded justice again and again, and this is another step towards that justice.”

And they won.

The court’s president, Judge Yuji Iwasawa, took more than two hours to deliver an unusually stinging advisory opinion from the normally restrained court, going through the minutiae of legal arguments before delivering a unanimous ruling which largely fell on the side of Pacific states.

“The protection of the environment is a precondition for the enjoyment of human rights,” he said, adding that sea-level rise, desertification, drought and natural disasters “may significantly impair certain human rights, including the right to life”.

After the opinion, the victorious students and lawyers spilled out of the palace alongside Vanuatu’s Climate Minister, Ralph Regenvanu. Their faces were beaming, if not a little shellshocked.

“The world’s smallest countries have made history,” Prasad told the world’s media from the palace’s front steps. “The ICJ’s decision brings us closer to a world where governments can no longer turn a blind eye to their legal responsibilities”.

“Young people around the world stepped up, not only as witnesses to injustice, but as architects of change”.

A classroom exercise
It was 2019 when a group of law students at the University of the South Pacific’s campus in Port Vila, the harbourside capital of Vanuatu, were set a challenge in their tutorial. They had been learning about international law and, in groups, were tasked with finding ways it could address climate change.

It was a particularly acute question in Vanuatu, one of the countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis. Many of the students’ teenage years had been defined by Cyclone Pam, the category five storm that ripped through much of the country in 2015 with winds in excess of 250km/h.

It destroyed entire villages, wiped out swathes of infrastructure and crippled the country’s crops and water supplies. The storm was so significant that thousands of kilometres away, in Tuvalu, the waves it whipped up displaced 45 percent of the country’s population and washed away an entire islet.

Cyclone Pam was meant to be a once-in-a-generation storm, but Vanuatu has been struck by five more category five cyclones since then.

Among many of the students, there was a frustration that no one beyond their borders seemed to care particularly much, recalled Belyndar Rikimani, a student from Solomon Islands who was at USP in 2019. She saw it as obscene that the communities with the smallest carbon footprint were paying the steepest price for a crisis they had almost no hand in creating.

Each year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was releasing a new avalanche of data that painted an increasingly grim prognosis for the Pacific. But, Rikimani said, the people didn’t need reams of paper to tell them that, for they were already acutely aware.

On her home island of Malaita, coastal villages were being inundated with every storm, the schools of fish on which they relied were migrating further away, and crops were increasingly failing.

“We would go by the sea shore and see people’s graves had been taken out,” Rikimani recalled. “The ground they use to garden their food in, it is no longer as fertile as it has once been because of the changes in weather.”

The mechanism used by the world to address climate change is largely based around a UN framework of voluntary agreements and summits — known as COP — where countries thrash out goals they often fail to meet. But it was seen as impotent by small island states in the Pacific and the Caribbean, who accused the system of being hijacked by vested interests set on hindering any drastic cuts to emissions.

So, the students argued, what if there was a way to push back? To add some teeth to the international process and move the climate discussion beyond agreements and adaptation to those of equity and justice? To give small countries a means to nudge those seen to be dragging their heels.

“From the beginning we were aware of the failure of the climate system or climate regime and how it works,” Prasad, who in 2019 was studying at the USP campus in Fiji’s capital, Suva, told me.

“This was known to us. Obviously there needs to be something else. Why should the law be silent on this?”

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the main court for international law. It adjudicates disputes between nations and issues advisory opinions on big cross-border legal issues. So, the students wondered, could an advisory opinion help? What did international law have to say about climate change?

Unlike most students, who would leave such discussions in the classroom, they decided to find out. But the ICJ does not hear cases from groups or individuals; they would have to convince a government to pursue the challenge.

Together, they wrote to various Pacific governments hoping to discuss the idea. It was ambitious, they conceded, but in one of the regions most threatened by rising seas and intensifying storms, they hoped there would at least be some interest.

But rallying enough students to join their cause was the first hurdle.

“There was a lot of doubts from the beginning,” Rikimani said. “We were trying to get the students who could, you know, be a part of the movement. And it was hard, it was too big, too grand.”

In the end, 27 people gathered to form the genesis of a new organisation: Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC).

A couple of weeks went by before a response popped up in their inboxes. The government of Vanuatu was intrigued. Ralph Regenvanu, who was at that time the foreign minister, asked the students if they would like to swing by for a meeting.

“I still remember when [the] group came into my office to discuss this. And I felt solidarity with them,” Regenvanu recalled last week.

“I could empathise with where they were, what they were doing, what they were feeling. So it was almost like the time had come to actually, okay, let’s do something about it.”

The students — “dressed to the nines,” as Regenvanu recalled — gave a presentation on what they hoped to achieve. Regenvanu was convinced. Not long after the wider Vanuatu government was, too. Now it was time for them to convince other countries.

“It was just a matter of the huge diplomatic effort that needed to be done,” Regenvanu said. “We had Odi Tevi, our ambassador in New York, who did a remarkable job with his team. And the strategy we employed to get a core group of countries from all over the world to be with us.

“It’s interesting that, you know, some of the most important achievements of the international community originated in the Pacific,” Regenvanu said, citing efforts in the 20th century to ban nuclear testing, or support decolonisation.

“We have this unique geographic and historic position that makes us able to, as small states, have a voice that’s much louder, I think. And you saw that again in this case, that it’s the Pacific once again taking the lead to do something that is of benefit to the whole world.”

What Vanuatu needed to take the case to the ICJ was to garner a majority of the UN General Assembly — that is, a majority of every country in the world — to vote to ask the court to answer a question.

To rally support, they decided to start close to home.

Hope and disappointment
The students set their sights on the Pacific Islands Forum, the region’s pre-eminent political group, which that year was holding its annual leaders’ summit in Tuvalu. A smattering of atolls along the equator which, in recent years, has become a reluctant poster child for the perils of climate change.

Tuvalu had hoped world leaders on Funafuti would see a coastline being eaten by the ocean, evidence of where the sea washes across the entire island at king tide, or saltwater bubbles up into gardens to kill crops, and that it would convince the world that time was running out.

But the 2019 Forum was a disaster. Pacific countries had pushed for a strong commitment from the region’s leaders at their retreat, but it nearly broke down when Australia’s government refused to budge on certain red lines. The then-prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, accused Australia and New Zealand of neo-colonialism, questioning their very role in the Forum.

“That was disappointing,” Prasad said. “The first push was, okay, let’s put it at the forum and ask leaders to endorse this idea and then they take it forward. It was put on the agenda but the leaders did not endorse it; they ‘noted’ it. The language is ‘noted’, so it didn’t go ahead.”

Another disappointment came a few months later, when Rikimani and another of the students, Solomon Yeo, travelled to Spain for the annual COP meeting, the UN process where the world’s countries agree their next targets to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

But small island countries left angry after a small bloc derailed any progress, despite massive protests.

That was an eye-opening two weeks in Madrid for Rikimani, whose initial scepticism of the system had been validated.

“It was disappointing when there’s nothing that’s been done. There is very little outcome that actually, you know, safeguards the future of the Pacific,” she said.

“But for us, it was the COP where there was interest being showed by various young leaders from around the world, seeing that this campaign could actually bring light to these climate negotiations.”

By now, Regenvanu said, that frustration was boiling over and more countries were siding with their campaign. By the end of 2019, that included some major countries from Europe and Asia, which brought financial and diplomatic heft. Other small-island countries from Africa and the Caribbean had also joined.

“Many of the Pacific states had never appeared before the ICJ before. So [we were] doing write shops with legal teams from different countries,” he said.

“We did write shops in Latin America, in the Caribbean, in the Pacific, in Africa, getting people just to be there at the court to present their stories, and then of course trying to coordinate.”

Meanwhile, Prasad was trying to spread word elsewhere. The hardest part, he said, was making it relevant to the people.

International law, The Hague, the Paris Agreement and other bureaucratic frameworks were nebulous and tedious. How could this possibly help the fisherman on Banaba struggling to haul in a catch?

They spent time travelling to villages and islands, sipping kava shells and sharing meals, weaving a testimony of Indigenous stories and knowledge.

In Fiji, he said, the word for land is vanua, which is also the word for life.

“It’s the source of your identity, the source of your culture. It’s this connection that the land provides the connection with the past, with the ancestors, and with a way of life and a way of doing things.”

He travelled to the village of Vunidologa where, in 2014, its people faced the rupture of having to leave their ancestral lands, as the sea had marched in too far. In the months leading up to the relocation, they held prayer circles and fasted. When the day came, the elders wailed as they made an about two kilometre move inland.

“That’s the element of injustice there. It touches on this whole idea of self-determination that was argued very strongly at the ICJ, that people’s right to self-determination is completely taken away from them because of climate change,” Prasad said.

“Some have even called it a new face of colonialism. And that’s not fair and that cannot stand in 2025.”

Preparing the case
If 2019 was the year of building momentum, then a significant hurdle came in 2020, when the coronavirus shuttered much of the world. COP summits were delayed and the Pacific Islands Forum postponed. The borders of the Pacific were sealed for as long as two years.

But the students kept finding ways to gather their body of evidence.

“Everything went online, we gathered young people who would be able to take this idea forward in their own countries,” Prasad said.

On the diplomatic front, Vanuatu kept plugging away to rally countries so that by the time the Forum leaders met again — in 2022 — they were ready to ask for support again.

“It was in Fiji and we were so worried about the Australia and New Zealand presence at the Forum because we wanted an endorsement so that it would send a signal to all the other countries: ‘the Pacific’s on board, let’s get the others’,” Prasad recalled.

“We were very worried about Australia, but it was more like if Australia declines to support then the whole process falls, and we thought New Zealand might also follow.”

They didn’t. In an about-turn, Australia was now fully behind the campaign for an advisory opinion, and the New Zealand government was by now helping out too. By the end of 2022, several European powers were also involved.

Attention now turned to developing what question they wanted to actually ask the international court. And how would they write it in such a way that the majority of the world’s governments would back it.

“That was the process where it was make and break really to get the best outcome we could,” said Regenvanu.

“In the end we got a question that was like 90 percent as good as we wanted and that was very important to get that and that was a very difficult process.”

By December 2022, Vanuatu announced that it would ask the UN General Assembly to ask the International Court of Justice to weigh what, exactly, international law requires states to do about climate change, and what the consequences should be for states that harm the climate through actions or omissions.

More lobbying followed and then, in March 2023, it came to a vote and the result was unanimous. The UN assembly in New York erupted in cheers at a rare sign of consensus.

“All countries were on board,” said Regenvanu. “Even those countries that opposed it [we] were able to talk to them so they didn’t oppose it publicly.”

They were off to The Hague.

A tense wait
Late last year, the court held two weeks of hearings in which countries put forth their arguments. Julian Aguon, a Chamorro lawyer from Guam who was one of the lead counsel, told the court that “these testimonies unequivocally demonstrate that climate change has already caused grievous violations of the right to self-determination of peoples across the subregion.”

Over its deliberations, the court heard from more than 100 countries and international organisations hoping to influence its opinion, the highest level of participation in the court’s history. That included the governments of low-lying islands and atolls, which were hoping the court would provide a yardstick by which to measure other countries’ actions.

They argued that climate change threatened fundamental human rights — such as life, liberty, health, and a clean environment — as well as other international laws like those of the sea, and those of self-determination.

In their testimonies, high-emitting Western countries, including Australia, the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia maintained that the current system was enough.

It’s been a tense and nervous wait for the court’s answer, but they finally got it last Wednesday.

“We were pleasantly surprised by the strength of the decision,” Regenvanu said. “The fact that it was unanimous, we weren’t expecting that.”

The court said states had clear obligations under international law, and that countries — and, by extension, individuals and companies within those countries — were required to curb emissions. It also said the environment and human rights obligations set out in international law did indeed apply to climate change, and that countries had a right to pursue restitution for loss and damage.

The opinion is legally non-binding. But even so, it carries legal and political weight.

Individuals and groups could bring lawsuits against their own countries for failing to comply with the court’s opinion, and states could also return to the ICJ to hold each other to account, something Regenvanu said Vanuatu wasn’t ruling out. But, ultimately, he hoped it wouldn’t reach that point, and the advisory opinion would be seen as a wake-up call.

“We can call upon this advisory opinion in all our negotiations, particularly when countries say they can only do so much,” Regenvanu said. “They have said very clearly [that] all states have an obligation to do everything within their means according to the best available science.

“It’s really up to all countries of the world — in good faith — to take this on, realise that these are the legal obligations under custom law. That’s very clear. There’s no denying that anymore.

“And then discharge your legal obligations. If you are in breach, fix the breach, acknowledge that you have caused harm. Help to set it right. And also don’t do it again.”

Vishal Prasad still hadn’t quite processed the whole thing by the time we met again the next morning. In shorts, t-shirt, and jandals, he cut a much more relaxed figure as he reclined on a couch sipping a mug of coffee. His phone had been buzzing non-stop with messages from around the world.

“Oh, it definitely does not feel real. I don’t think it’s settled in,” he said. “I got, like, a flood of messages, well wishes. People say, ‘you guys have changed the world’. I think it’s gonna take a while.”

He was under no illusions that there was a long road ahead. The court’s advisory came at a time when international law and multilateralism was under particular strain.

When the urgency of the climate debate from a few years ago appears to have given way to a new enthusiasm for fossil fuel in some countries. He had no doubt the Pacific would continue to lead those battles.

“People have been messaging me that across the group chats they’re in, there’s this renewed sense of courage, strength and determination to do something because of what the ICJ has said,” he said.

“I’ve just been responding to messages and just saying thanks to people and just talking to them and I think it’s amazing to see that it’s been able to cause such a shift in the climate movement.”

Watching the advisory opinion being read out at 3am in Honiara was Belyndar Rikimani, hunched over a live stream in the dead of the night.

“What’s very special about this campaign is that it didn’t start with government experts, climate experts or policy experts. It started with students.

“And these law students are not from Harvard or Cambridge or all those big universities, but they are students from the Pacific that have seen the first-hand effects of climate change. It started with students who have the heart to see change for our islands and for our people.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

And so island nations in the South Pacific region of Melanesia, where Indigenous communities have had to flee their traditional lands due to landslides and rising seas, filed a case that was ultimately joined by more than 130 countries. Together, they urged the International Court of Justice to decide whether nation-states have a legal obligation to address climate change, and whether those harmed by a warming world have a right to reparations. 

Justices considered testimony in Indigenous Pacific languages, heard arguments from Indigenous attorneys, and learned how Indigenous traditions are being harmed by the typhoons, rising seas, and other extreme weather events worsened by the burning of fossil fuels.

Last week, the court issued a landmark ruling that climate harm violates international law. The seismic decision, although advisory, opens the door for countries like Vanuatu to seek reparations from some of the world’s biggest polluters, and it is widely expected to shape current — and future — climate lawsuits as early as this week.

“What the court has done has come in and made it crystal clear that affected frontline nations and communities that have been devastated by climate harm — harm that can be traced to the conduct of specific countries and corporations — those communities, those nations, they absolutely have the right to redress and reparations,” said Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law. 

The court’s decision, handed down Wednesday, said that all nations have a legal obligation to limit greenhouse gas emissions and failing to do so, through the support of fossil fuel production, could violate international law. The justices didn’t disclose how much major polluters might owe, and said the level of reparations would be determined on a case by case basis. But Chowdhury said she expects the ruling to immediately influence ongoing climate litigation worldwide, and prompt new lawsuits. “There are litigators all over the world that are looking to this case and will absolutely bring it into the courtroom,” she said.

Kelly Matheson, deputy director of global strategy for Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit law firm representing youth in climate litigation, said the organization is already incorporating the language of the advisory opinion into an amicus brief that it plans to file in a case in Latin America this fall. She also expects the ruling to feature heavily in La Rose v. His Majesty the King, a Canadian climate case youth plaintiffs brought against the Canadian government scheduled for trial next year, as well as a climate case pending before the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights. 

Government attorneys also are studying the decision to determine whether their countries can sue. Malik Amin Aslam Khan, former minister of the environment in Pakistan, said the ruling “opens up a legally grounded pathway for claiming climate damages and demanding reparations for countries like Pakistan, which has continuously been one of the world’s worst climate sufferers and has credibly recorded climate damage costs crossing $40 billion in the past decade alone.”

Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister of climate change, said Vanuatu plans to immediately push for a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly to implement the advisory opinion. The government also plans to use the ruling to advocate for better climate financing for the Pacific and better regional and domestic policies to address the climate crisis.

“For the first time in history, the ICJ has spoken directly about the biggest threat facing humanity, which is climate change,” Regenvanu said during a press conference at The Hague last week. ”It’s very important now, as the world goes forward that we make sure our actions align with what was decided or what came out today from the court.”

The ruling builds upon a growing consensus in international law that states have a legal obligation to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled that the 169 countries that have signed the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea — a list that includes China and India, but not the U.S. — must reduce emissions. It was another victory led by Pacific island nations as well as island nations in the Caribbean and West Indies.

Earlier this month, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a regional court for Latin and South America, ruled that a healthy climate is a human right and governments should limit emissions. The court also said they should prevent harm to marginalized communities such as Indigenous peoples and emphasized their role in combatting climate change.

“Indigenous peoples play an essential role in the preservation and sustainable management of these ecosystems because their ancestral knowledge and their close relationship with nature proved essential for the conservation of biodiversity and the mitigation of climate change,” the court wrote. “Therefore, states should listen to them and facilitate their continuing participation in decision-making.”  

Matheson said that when Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Indigenous Inuk woman who then chaired the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, brought a climate case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights wo decades ago, it dismissed her claims within two pages. Several years later, Palau brought a similar case before the ICJ to no avail. 

“For the law to be moving at this speed —  to go from dismissals and no consideration of the impact that climate change has on human rights 20 years ago, when the first case was filed, to now you have opinions from all but one of the highest courts in the world — is amazing,” she said, noting that an African court is expected to weigh in soon. 

While the ICJ ruling did not expound on the rights of Indigenous peoples and focused on the responsibilities of nation-states, it did clarify a question that has long troubled leaders of countries like Tuvalu and Kiribati that are losing land to rising seas: What happens to their borders if their islands disappear? On that note, the ICJ said any recognized borders should remain unchanged, which is important to ensure they continue to have a political voice on the international stage and control over their waters. “That presumption of statehood and sovereignty is a critical bit,” said Johanna Gusman, a senior attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law. 

The case was initiated six years ago by a group of law students in Vanuatu and led by the government of Vanuatu and the Melanesian Spearhead Group, which represents several nations in that region of the Pacific and the Indigenous people of New Caledonia.

“By affirming the science, the ICJ has mandated countries to urgently phase out fossil fuels because they are no longer tenable for small island state communities in the Pacific, and for young people and for future generations,” Vishal Prasad, director of Pacific Islands, Students Fighting Climate Change, said during a press conference at The Hague. “This opinion is a lifeline and an opportunity to protect all that we hold dear, and all that we love.”

The United Nations established the International Court of Justice in the wake of World War II to help the global community address conflicts and concerns peacefully and judicially. It has heard cases on issues ranging from  nuclear testing to fishing rights to the status of entire territories, such as Western Sahara. While not binding, its decisions are significant because they interpret international law and clarify states’ legal responsibilities. In this case, the court reviewed several treaties, including the 2015 Paris Agreement climate accord, and concluded that under those  treaties and under customary international law, all nations have a legal obligation to limit emissions and may owe compensation to countries that are harmed. 

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There are limits to who can bring cases before the ICJ, which only hears cases brought by nation-states and not, for example, Indigenous political entities such as First Nations in Canada. Gusman said that Indigenous peoples may instead use the language of the cases in domestic disputes or through other U.N. venues. For example, “Indigenous nations and First Nations within Canada now have stronger legal backbones to take cases against Canada,” she said.

The court’s ruling will also be dulled somewhat in the United States, which has long rejected the ICJ’s authority and under President Donald J. Trump has been retreating even further from climate action. The U.S. and China are two major polluters whose rejection of the ICJ’s jurisdiction could prevent a country like Vanuatu from suing them directly over their emissions. 

Korey Silverman-Roati, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said the ruling is a seminal moment for climate litigation but that the effects in the U.S. will be muted because U.S. courts don’t traditionally recognize the ICJ’s authority. “I don’t think we can expect that the direct language of the ruling will impact cases in the U.S.,” he said. He thinks the advisory opinion will likely instead influence other countries whose judicial systems give more weight to the ICJ, and influence the U.S. through the ruling’s use in international negotiations. 

Already, the ruling is expected to figure heavily at this year’s Conference of the Parties, or COP, in November in Brazil. Last year, negotiations fell apart in the waning minute to the disappointment of Pacific island nations and many climate advocates who criticized the amount of money pledged by U.N. member states as woefully insufficient. 

“The advisory opinion will be an essential tool that we in the Global South will use at the next meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the U.N.’s climate change and biodiversity conferences, and everywhere to advocate for climate justice,” said Ilan Kiloe, acting director general of the Melanesian Spearhead Group. He said Pacific peoples have already suffered forced relocations due to climate change. “We have already lost much of what defines us as Pacific Islanders.”

Tik Root contributed reporting to this story. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the world’s highest court bolstered the fight for climate reparations on Jul 28, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

As I wander through tents emblazoned with the logos of organizations like the Nature Conservancy and Generation180, volunteers explain how fans can reduce their carbon footprints and join the clean energy transition. The longest line emanates from Reverb’s flagship tent, where batches of limited-edition blue-and-yellow Nalgene bottles hang from tent poles like so many coconuts from a grove of palm trees. 

Fans acquire the bottles by making a $20 donation, which enters them into a raffle to win a guitar signed by Matthews; they can fill their bottles at a nearby filtered water station. It’s all part of “RockNRefill,” a partnership between Reverb, Nalgene, and the Nature Conservancy. The program has raised $5 million for climate and conservation nonprofits and eliminated an estimated 4 million single-use plastic bottles. 

“It’s cutting down on single-use plastics, so we hope everybody takes a bottle home or brings it back to another show,” says Dan Hutnik, Reverb’s onsite coordinator. “We’re trying to help save the planet — I like to say, one water bottle at a time.” (I bought one of the Nalgenes, but didn’t win a signed guitar.)

With this year’s summer touring season in full swing, the Dave Matthews Band’s efforts are just one example of the increased focus on sustainability in live music over the past several years. Decades after trailblazers like Bonnie Raitt began to prioritize climate, more and more artists are embracing sustainability and pushing for change — both inside and outside the industry — with the help of organizations like Reverb. 

Founded in 2004 by environmentalist Lauren Sullivan and her husband Adam Gardner, a guitarist and vocalist of the alt-rock group Guster, Reverb has become a leading force in greening live music. The nonprofit sends staffers like Hutnik out on the road with acts from Matthews to Billie Eilish, setting up eco-villages and organizing volunteers. Reverb staffers serve as the bands’ de facto sustainability coordinators, allowing initiatives like RockNRefill to be scaled up, rather than every artist having to build something similar from scratch.

Reverb also coordinates with concert promoters and venues, which have their own sustainability teams and programs. As part of the recent renovation of Jones Beach, for example, Live Nation added a sorting facility out back where employees handpick recyclables and compostables out of the garbage. The company’s Road To Zero campaign, a partnership with Matthews, diverted 90 percent of landfill-bound waste at the majority of the band’s shows last summer.

Live music has grown immensely since the pandemic — the top 100 tours grossed roughly $10 billion last year, nearly double what they reached in 2019. (For various reasons unrelated to climate, the 2025 number will likely be lower.) 

If abandoning climate projects is the new normal in our current political moment, the music business hasn’t gotten the memo. According to a recent Reverb study, 9 out of 10 concertgoers are concerned about climate change and are prepared to take action — and artists are ready to lead the way.

“As more and more artists are asking for the same things, it makes sense for these venues to make it a permanent change and not something where they just say, ‘OK, put away all the Styrofoam and all that crap, we’ll save it for the next band,’” said Gardner. “And that’s where the power really starts coming into play.”

Five days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Coldplay played the biggest — and almost certainly the most overtly eco-friendly — stadium show of the 21st Century. A crowd of 111,000 streamed into Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, India, to see the latest stop on the band’s Music of the Spheres Tour. Coldplay has grossed nearly $1.3 billion in the first three years of the tour, making it the second-most lucrative of all time behind Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. 

Coldplay has notched quite a few firsts on the climate front. After the group’s 2016-2017 tour, front man Chris Martin and his bandmates were so concerned about their carbon footprint that they took a break from the road until they could forge a more sustainable path. They eventually began planning the Music of the Spheres Tour with a pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by 50 percent compared to their last tour, and to hold themselves accountable with transparent reporting.

Coldplay committed to offsetting unavoidable emissions as responsibly as possible, drawing on the Oxford Principles for Net-Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting, a guide that aims to ensure the integrity of carbon credits. The group has also used a portion of its tour proceeds to support new green technologies and environmental causes. Above all, the band wanted to push the envelope industry-wide with a sustainability rider — a set of requests that artists make as a condition for performing — covering everything from venues’ power connections to free water for fans.

Concert promoters are accustomed to accommodating all manner of demands on big acts’ riders (ranging from peppermint soap to actual kittens) and have proven open to doing the same for climate initiatives.

“Any artist could add sustainability considerations to their rider and try to influence promoters and venues to do things in a lower-impact way,” said Luke Howell, the band’s head of sustainability. “While not all artists can change how a venue operates at the macro scale, they can all ask for no single-use plastics, more veggie options on menus, or make sure the kit they are using is efficient and specced correctly to minimize energy use. And they can all engage their fans.”

To that end, while operating at a scale that few other acts can approach, Coldplay has introduced a bevy of novel green touring concepts. The band partnered with BMW to develop the first mobile show battery, which can power 100 percent of a concert with renewable energy. These clean sources include solar panels that come along for the ride, as well as power-generating bicycles and kinetic floors that quite literally draw energy from dancing fans.

Coldplay, of course, isn’t the first group to care about its impact on the planet, or try to reduce it. Environmental activism in the modern pop music world dates back more than half a century to conservation-focused songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” 

Similarly, early benefit concerts — many organized by late folk singer Tom Campbell — focused on causes like protecting forests in the Pacific Northwest. After Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne played one such show in Oregon, their crews needed a police escort out of town to stave off a convoy of chainsaw-wielding loggers.

As the science around global warming went mainstream at the turn of the millennium, artists turned their focus toward climate change. Raitt’s 2002 summer tour launched Green Highway, a traveling eco-village where fans could learn about environmental issues and check out the newest hybrid vehicles from Honda. She and her manager, Kathy Kane, convinced tour bus companies to let them power their vehicles with biodiesel, booking the tour well in advance so as to route buses efficiently instead of wasting fuel hopscotching the country. 

At every venue, Raitt’s rider called for replacing disposable silverware with real cutlery, and she began bringing her own water bottle refill stations to reduce backstage plastic use. If there wasn’t a proper recycling system on-site, the crew would bring paper scraps on the bus and dispose of them properly in the next town. And Raitt inspired a new generation of artists who were concerned about live music’s environmental footprint.

“All I had to do was look at the ground when the lights came up at the end of the show to see all the plastic,” said Guster’s Gardner. “I just didn’t feel good about it.”

His wife, Lauren Sullivan, was working for the Rainforest Action Network when a venue refused to let them set up a table at a Dave Matthews show. Apparently, the nonprofit had been rallying against old growth woodcutting practices of one of the venue’s major sponsors. When Matthews threatened to skip the gig, the venue relented. 

The episode inspired Sullivan to team up with her husband to channel the power of live music into climate action. Sullivan reached out to Raitt, who was on the Rainforest Action Network’s board, and learned that the touring gear from Green Highway was in storage. Raitt offered it up — and pledged to incubate Sullivan’s project via her own nonprofit, until Reverb was officially launched in 2004.

Sullivan and Gardner wanted their new nonprofit to be an organization that all acts could use to make their tours greener. In their vision, fans walking into any venue would be greeted by a Reverb volunteer wearing a band-branded T-shirt, ready to engage on environmental issues. Concertgoers would be incentivized to take action — like reducing their own carbon footprint or pushing elected officials to enact eco-friendly legislation — with chances to win goodies like ticket upgrades and signed instruments. 

On the artists’ side, Reverb helped institutionalize practices that not only reduced waste, but saved dollars — like replacing single-use batteries with rechargeable battery packs for performers’ in-ear monitors. Over time, due to artist demand, these rechargeable packs became the norm.

It turned out that, when big acts demanded a certain standard of sustainability, the live music industry was willing to make meaningful changes. Adam Met, from the alt-pop band AJR, remembers realizing this while planning a tour five years ago and asking venues to eliminate single-use plastics.

“Every place we went, the venue [employees] said, ‘Oh, like Jack Johnson,’” recalled Met, who now serves on Reverb’s advisory board. “That was the artist bringing the requests to the table, and an organization like Reverb.”

As the nonprofit grew, one challenge was broadening its reach beyond alt-rock, whose artists and audiences skew heavily white, male, and middle-aged. To that end, Reverb worked increasingly with emerging artists to help them weave sustainability into their touring process from day one.  

Perhaps the best example is Billie Eilish, who started teaming up with Reverb six years ago when she rose to stardom with her 2019 album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” On her 2022 Happier Than Ever Tour, Reverb helped her eliminate 117,000 single-use plastic bottles, save 8.8 million gallons of water, and push venues to offer plant-based meals — for the same prices as meat-based meals. She also introduced the pricier Changemaker Ticket, with proceeds supporting climate projects. Eilish even fueled her 2023 Lollapalooza set with solar-backed batteries.

Other young artists have also joined the movement. Last year, for the first time, solar panels fueled the batteries behind festivals in the world of country music (Tyler Childers’ Healing Appalachia) and hip-hop (Tyler, the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw). And concert promoters continue to step up to meet artist and fan demand. In 2022, Live Nation invested in Turn Systems, purveyor of a leading reusable cup setup; earlier this month, AEG hosted its first solar-backed battery-powered festival.

“As touring infrastructure becomes normalized where we don’t have to go out of our way to bring along our reusables and compostables, it’s just part of what’s happening at those venues,” said Gardner. “If that becomes the new normal, then there’s massive savings there, both with carbon and with dollars.”

On a bright Monday morning, I was walking through Central Park with AJR’s Met — discussing the future of green touring — when, appropriately, we happened upon the seasonal amphitheater at Rumsey Playfield. Perched on a hill overlooking Bethesda Fountain, it has hosted acts ranging from Pitbull to the Barenaked Ladies. The venue is largely constructed with repurposed shipping containers.

“So the infrastructure itself is already reused, which is great,” said Met, who then wondered aloud how this sort of space could be used during the venue’s downtime — perhaps as a seasonal solar farm. “There are all of these different ways to think about how to use the venue itself as a producer for sustainability initiatives.”

For Met, though, what’s even more powerful is the collective ability of fans to mobilize around the causes championed by their favorite artists. That’s the focus of his new book, Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connectivity to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World. 

He believes that, with a little encouragement, audiences can be particularly potent around local causes. For example, during last summer’s AJR tour stop in Phoenix — where temperatures reached 109 degrees — thousands of fans signed petitions to FEMA asking the agency to designate extreme heat as a type of emergency, thereby unlocking additional funds for response. In Salt Lake City, concertgoers phone-banked around increasing the Great Salt Lake’s water levels because of the economic benefits it provides to seven different states; Met noted that each state later voted for progressive climate policies, even the ones that went for Trump.

This sort of activity might strike some as preachy, but it turns out most fans don’t mind. According to a survey of 350,000 concertgoers organized by Met’s nonprofit, Planet Reimagined, most fans encourage it. A full 70 percent of respondents said they had no problem with musicians publicly addressing climate change; 53 percent believed artists had an obligation to do so.

Perhaps the most important thing an artist can do on the climate front is spotlight the collective carbon footprint of concertgoers — a facet that has more to do with advocating for a greener society than a greener music industry. As part of its Music Decarbonization Project, Reverb recently released a concert travel study that found the average amount of CO2 emissions generated by the thousands of fans getting to a given show is 38 times larger than that of the typical act — including artist and crew travel, hotel stays, and gear transportation. 

That makes sense: 80 percent of fans at the average show arrive in a personal vehicle, usually gasoline-powered. Yet the study also found that fans are hungry for greener ways to attend concerts — 33 percent would prefer to use public transit, but only 9 percent say they can and do.

Rock stars can’t make cities build more subways. But they can work with municipalities to run more routes on show nights, and keep trains and buses open later than usual. They can also team up with businesses like Rally and Uber that can offer deals on group shuttles. That’s something Raitt and her peers never had back in the day.

“I mean, what were you going to do, send postcards to people in the ’90s: ‘Let’s meet up at 8 o’clock and catch a ride to the show?’” said Raitt’s manager, Kane. “The development of technology has been able to allow fans to connect into a community, and artists to connect to their fans, in more real time.”

Music — and the special energy and sense of community that forms around a concert — has a unique power, whether that’s starting fashion trends or catalyzing social change. It shouldn’t be a stretch for acts to inspire fans to choose more sustainable options, especially if artists and venues do the work to make those options more accessible. 

At its best, live music can be a launching pad for all sorts of climate-friendly ideas — from the plant-based concessions championed by Eilish to the kinetic dance floors pushed by Coldplay — making them not only available, but desirable to the broader public.

In the meantime, back at Jones Beach, as Dave Matthews winds down his set, thousands of cars sit in the parking lot beyond the grandstand, dimly illuminated by a strawberry moon rising over the ocean. While many fans will be leaving with new reusable water bottles, they’ll still have to burn dinosaur bones to get home. But the singer offers a message of hope.

“The world is a little bit crazy at the moment,” Matthews tells the crowd. “We should take care of each other a little bit more.”

One Nalgene at a time.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How musicians and concert venues are upping the tempo on climate action on Jul 25, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zack O’Malley Greenburg.

Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change Adaptation, Ralph Regenvanu, has welcomed the historic International Court of Justice (ICJ) climate ruling, calling it a “milestone in the fight for climate justice”.

The ICJ has delivered a landmark advisory opinion on states’ obligations under international law to act on climate change.

The ruling marks a major shift in the global push for climate justice.

• READ MORE: UN’s highest court finds countries can be held legally responsible for emissions
• ICJ climate crisis ruling: Will world’s top court back Pacific-led call to hold governments accountable?
• Do countries have a duty to prevent climate harm? The world’s highest court is about to answer this crucial question
• Other climate crisis reports

Vanuatu — one of the nations behind the campaign — has pledged to take the decision back to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to seek a resolution supporting its full implementation.

Climate Change Minister Regenvanu said in a statement: “We now have a common foundation based on the rule of law, releasing us from the limitations of individual nations’ political interests that have dominated climate action.

“This moment will drive stronger action and accountability to protect our planet and peoples.”

The ICJ confirmed that state responsibilities extend beyond voluntary commitments under the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement.

It ruled that customary international law also requires states to prevent environmental and transboundary harm, protect human rights, and cooperate to address climate change impacts.

Duties apply to all states
These duties apply to all states, whether or not they have ratified specific climate treaties.

Violations of these obligations carry legal consequences. The ICJ clarified that climate damage can be scientifically traced to specific polluter states whose actions or inaction cause harm.

As a result, those states could be required to stop harmful activities, regulate private sector emissions, end fossil fuel subsidies, and provide reparations to affected states and individuals.

“The implementation of this decision will set a new status quo and the structural change required to give our current and future generations hope for a healthy planet and sustainable future,” Minister Regenvanu added.

He said high-emitting nations, especially those with a history of emissions, must be held accountable.

Despite continued fossil fuel expansion and weakening global ambition — compounded by the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement — Regenvanu said the ICJ ruling was a powerful tool for campaigners, lawyers, and governments.

“Vanuatu is proud and honoured to have spearheaded this initiative,” he said.

‘Powerful testament’
“The number of states and civil society actors that have joined this cause is a powerful testament to the leadership of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and youth activists.”

The court’s decision follows a resolution adopted by consensus at the UNGA on 29 March 2023. That campaign was initiated by the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change and backed by the Vanuatu government, calling for greater accountability from high-emitting countries.

The ruling will now be taken to the UNGA in September and is expected to be a central topic at COP30 in Brazil this November.

Vanuatu has committed to working with other nations to turn this legal outcome into coordinated action through diplomacy, policy, litigation, and international cooperation.<

“This is just the beginning,” Regenvanu said. “Success will depend on what happens next. We look forward to working with global partners to ensure this becomes a true turning point for climate justice.”

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The announcement followed a high-level visit to Beijing by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa, who met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior officials on Thursday. As the United States steps back from international climate diplomacy, the EU–China statement signals a clear intent to reinforce global ambition and multilateral cooperation.

Notably, the statement comes just one day after the International Court of Justice handed down a landmark ruling reinforcing states’ legal obligations to protect people from the impacts of climate change.

Key elements of the EU-China joint statement include:

• The EU and China call for “policy continuity and stability” among major economies and a clear “step up” in efforts to address climate change, signaling the need for more ambitious 2035 NDCs. Both parties confirm their intent to submit updated 2035 NDCs (national climate plans) before COP30, covering all sectors and greenhouse gases, aligned with the 1.5°C goal.
• Reaffirming the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement as the cornerstone of international climate cooperation.
• Emphasizing that climate collaboration holds “great and special significance” for upholding multilateralism and global climate governance.
• Noting a “solid foundation and broad space” for deepening green cooperation, even amid rising trade tensions. The EU and China commit to enhanced bilateral cooperation in areas such as the energy transition and green economy.

Andreas Sieber, Associate Director of Policy and Campaigns at 350.org says:

"This joint statement offers a timely stabilizing signal in an increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape and the United States’ withdrawal from climate diplomacy. While this statement reflects a welcome willingness for cooperation, real and ambitious action must follow. Current ambition remains far too low. With COP30 fast approaching, the EU and China must go beyond committing to update their climate targets. Drawing the line for global heating at 1.5°C will require urgent, credible action, not just diplomatic symbolism."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

In a landmark decision, the International Court of Justice found that polluting countries are now legally obligated to address global warming. In a unanimous ruling by a panel of 15 judges, the court said high-emitting countries do have legal obligations under international law to address the “urgent and existential threat” of climate change. The case was brought forward by the island nation Vanuatu, which has faced the brunt of the climate crisis with extreme weather events and rising sea levels. “Countries in the Pacific, communities in the Pacific, are suffering from something which they did not cause,” says Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister for climate change. “It’s been caused by private actors that are being regulated by states in the West.” Sébastien Duyck, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, which supported Vanuatu in its case, agrees. He says, “What we really need is to end an era of impunity and just actually rely on existing legal principles to hold polluters accountable, whether they are corporate or governmental.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

President Donald Trump has explicitly targeted climate- and justice-related programs and funding, but the resulting cuts have gone deep into services communities rely on to survive, like food aid in rural areas or improvements to failing wastewater infrastructure. Farmers have lost grants and support that help keep them going through increasingly volatile weather. Even your favorite YouTube creators may be affected.

We asked those who have lost their federal jobs or funding to tell us about what’s being lost: What was their work providing to communities, and what happens now?

Their stories, reflecting just a small sample of the many people who’ve been affected, illuminate  how deep these cuts go, not only into programs explicitly working to reduce emissions, but also into those keeping us safe, healthy, fed, and informed.

Have you been impacted, or know someone who has? We want to hear about it. Message us on Signal at 206-876-3147 or share your story using this form. (Learn more about how to reach us and how we will use your information.)

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline They lost their jobs and funding under Trump. What did communities lose? on Jul 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist staff.

A whole lot of carbon, in fact: Worldwide, some 13 billion tons of CO2 flows from plants to mycorrhizal fungi every year — about a third of humanity’s emissions from fossil fuels — not to mention the CO2 they help trees capture by growing big and strong. Yet when you hear about campaigns to conserve and plant more trees to slow climate change, you don’t hear about the mycorrhizal fungi. Humanity may be missing the forest for the trees, in other words, in part because without going somewhere and digging, it’s hard to tell what mycorrhizal species are associating with what plants in a given ecosystem.

A new research project is trying to change that. The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, has launched the Underground Atlas, an interactive tool that maps mycorrhizal fungi diversity around the world. It’s a resource for scientists and conservationists to better understand where to focus on protecting these species so they can keep sequestering carbon and provide other critical services in ecosystems. “We’ve known for a long time that these mycorrhizal fungi are very important in ecosystems, and that they exist all over the planet and partner with lots of different plants,” said fungal ecologist Michael Van Nuland, lead data scientist at SPUN and lead author of a new paper describing the work in the journal Nature. “But it’s been hard to match that sense of scale with large datasets or large-scale, high-resolution maps.”

To build this atlas, Van Nuland and his colleagues didn’t visit every square foot of vegetation on Earth and take soil samples, because they didn’t have to. Instead, they analyzed the DNA of mycorrhizal fungi samples from 130 countries. Because they knew the conditions where the samples were taken — local temperatures, precipitation, vegetation type, even the pH of the soil — they could teach a computer model to associate those characteristics with different species of fungi. 

Now the system could predict what mycorrhizal species should live in a given place, even if scientists haven’t been at that exact spot to collect a sample. In the map above, brighter colors indicate a greater diversity of a group known as ectomycorrhizal fungi, which grow as sheaths around roots. Notice the glowing areas in the far north, which include boreal forests. “It is nice to see that their model recapitulates the patterns that we mostly know to expect of high diversity in those temperate boreal regions,” said fungal ecologist Laura M. Bogar, who studies ectomycorrhizal fungi at the University of California, Davis, but wasn’t involved in the research.

The map above inverts that dynamic. It shows the predicted richness of the second group, the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. (You can play with the map here. To toggle between the two groups, hit the button at lower right.) Instead of encasing the roots, these penetrate them. Notice their species richness beyond the boreal forests, especially in the tropics. Interestingly, an arbuscular fungi hot spot isn’t the Amazon rainforest, but the adjacent savanna in Brazil. “When you think where the hottest hot spots on the planet for biodiversity are, most people are going to think about the Amazon rainforest,” Van Nuland said. “But for this type of mycorrhizal fungal group, that’s in the surrounding ecosystem.”

Scientists are still working out what influences the global distribution of ectomycorrhizal and arbuscular fungi. Complicating matters, though, is the fact that the two groups can overlap in the same environments. Bogar, for instance, works in Northern California with Douglas fir trees, which have ectomycorrhizal fungi, and redwoods, which have arbuscular fungi. “Even though to me standing on the ground, they both look like just really tall, beautiful trees that probably have similar ecology,” Bogar said. “From the perspective of a fungus interacting with their roots, they’re profoundly different.”

Globally, the researchers found that just 9.5 percent of fungal biodiversity hot spots lie within existing protected areas. If an area is deforested to make way for cattle grazing — a particularly acute problem in the Amazon — mycorrhizal fungi lose the partners they need for energy, and the planet loses a powerful symbiosis that naturally draws down carbon into soils. Without a robust population of fungi, nutrients leech out of the system, and soil erosion increases. “There are all these other cascading benefits, beyond just how much carbon physically goes into the bodies of the fungi,” Van Nuland said.

Not only do mycorrhizal fungi have to deal with humans degrading their habitats, but the climate around them is rapidly changing. Van Nuland and his colleagues included historical data in their model, which found that climates that were stable over long periods allowed unique and rare symbioses to evolve between plants and fungi. With the atmosphere now in flux — both with rising temperatures and worsening droughts — those unique symbioses may be at risk, imperiling both plant and mycorrhizal fungus. 

Equipped with the atlas, scientists might be able to better prioritize where they venture in the field to study the fungi, Bogar said. Van Nuland, meanwhile, is trying to determine the best way to conserve these essential fungi, especially the biodiversity hot spots popping up on the map. “We don’t know if the same protection strategies work for mycorrhizal fungi like they do for plant and animal biodiversity,” Van Nuland said. “We are actively researching that right now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There’s a surprising climate solution right under your feet on Jul 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

The United Nations’ highest court has found that countries can be held legally responsible for their greenhouse gas emissions, in a ruling highly anticipated by Pacific countries long frustrated with the pace of global action to address climate change.

In a landmark opinion delivered yesterday in The Hague, the president of the International Court of Justice, Yuji Iwasawa, said climate change was an “urgent and existential threat” that was “unequivocally” caused by human activity with consequences and effects that crossed borders.

The court’s opinion was the culmination of six years of advocacy and diplomatic manoeuvring which started with a group of Pacific university students in 2019.

• READ MORE: ICJ climate crisis ruling: Will world’s top court back Pacific-led call to hold governments accountable?
• Do countries have a duty to prevent climate harm? The world’s highest court is about to answer this crucial question
• Other climate crisis reports

They were frustrated at what they saw was a lack of action to address the climate crisis, and saw current mechanisms to address it as woefully inadequate.

Their idea was backed by the government of Vanuatu, which convinced the UN General Assembly to seek the court’s advisory opinion on what countries’ obligations are under international law.

The court’s 15 judges were asked to provide an opinion on two questions: What are countries obliged to do under existing international law to protect the climate and environment, and, second, what are the legal consequences for governments when their acts — or lack of action — have significantly harmed the climate and environment?

Overnight, reading a summary that took nearly two hours to deliver, Iwasawa said states had clear obligations under international law, and that countries — and, by extension, individuals and companies within those countries — were required to curb emissions.

Iwasawa said the environment and human rights obligations set out in international law did indeed apply to climate change.

‘Precondition for human rights’
“The protection of the environment is a precondition for the enjoyment of human rights,” he said, adding that sea-level rise, desertification, drought and natural disasters “may significantly impair certain human rights, including the right to life”.

To reach its conclusion, judges waded through tens of thousands of pages of written submissions and heard two weeks of oral arguments in what the court said was the ICJ’s largest-ever case, with more than 100 countries and international organisations providing testimony.

They also examined the entire corpus of international law — including human rights conventions, the law of the sea, the Paris climate agreement and many others — to determine whether countries have a human rights obligation to address climate change.

Major powers and emitters, like the United States and China, had argued in their testimonies that existing UN agreements, such as the Paris climate accord, were sufficient to address climate change.

But the court found that states’ obligations extended beyond climate treaties, instead to many other areas of international law, such as human rights law, environmental law, and laws around restricting cross-border harm.

Significantly for many Pacific countries, the court also provided an opinion on what would happen if sea levels rose to such a level that some states were lost altogether.

“Once a state is established, the disappearance of one of its constituent elements would not necessarily entail the loss of its statehood.”

READ HERE: The summary of the #ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change. https://t.co/7TWc7ifwfX pic.twitter.com/vVxxwpZpbX

— CIJ_ICJ (@CIJ_ICJ) July 23, 2025

Significant legal weight
The ICJ’s opinion is legally non-binding. But even so, advocates say it carries significant legal and political weight that cannot be ignored, potentially opening the floodgates for climate litigation and claims for compensation or reparations for climate-related loss and damage.

Individuals and groups could bring lawsuits against their own countries for failing to comply with the court’s opinion, and states could also return to the International Court of Justice to hold each other to account.

The opinion would also be a powerful precedent for legislators and judges to call on as they tackle questions related to the climate crisis, and give small countries greater weight in negotiations over future COP agreements and other climate mechanisms.

Outside the court, several dozen climate activists, from both the Netherlands and abroad, had gathered on a square as cyclists and trams rumbled by on the summer afternoon. Among them was Siaosi Vaikune, a Tongan who was among those original students to hatch the idea for the challenge.

“Everyone has been waiting for this moment,” he said. “It’s been six years of campaigning.

“Frontline communities have demanded justice again and again,” Vaikune said. “And this is another step towards that justice.”

‘It gives hope’
Vanuatu’s Climate Minister Ralph Regenvanu said the ruling was better than he expected and he was emotional about the result.

“The most pleasing aspect is [the ruling] was so strong in the current context where climate action and policy seems to be going backwards,” Regenvanu told RNZ Pacific.

“It gives such hope to the youth, because they were the ones who pushed this.

“I think it will regenerate an entire new generation of youth activists to push their governments for a better future for themselves.”

Regenvanu said the result showed the power of multilateralism.

“There was a point in time where everyone could compromise to agree to have this case heard here, and then here again, we see the court with the judges from all different countries of the world all unanimously agreeing on such a strong opinion, it gives you hope for multilateralism.”

He said the Pacific now has more leverage in climate negotiations.

“Communities on the ground, who are suffering from sea level rise, losing territory and so on, they know what they want, and we have to provide that,” Regenvanu said.

“Now we know that we can rely on international cooperation because of the obligations that have been declared here to assist them.”

The director of climate change at the Pacific Community (SPC), Coral Pasisi, also said the decision was a strong outcome for Pacific Island nations.

“The acknowledgement that the science is very clear, there is a direct clause between greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and the harm that is causing, particularly the most vulnerable countries.”

She said the health of the environment is closely linked to the health of people, which was acknowledged by the court.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

According to a New York Times article published July 22nd, the EPA is drafting a ruling that is set to eliminate the 2009 bedrock scientific finding, known as the "endangerment finding." The finding established that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane pose a direct threat to public health and the environment, and underpins much of the federal government’s authority to regulate emissions and address the climate crisis.

On Friday, July 18, the EPA had already announced plans to dismantle its scientific research arm and lay off hundreds of staff. Now, as climate advocates are pointing out, the agency is targeting the science itself.

Anne Jellema, Executive Director of 350.org, says:

“This administration is making a mockery of the institutions set up to protect us all. It’s one thing to wilfully ignore the science in favour of profit, but to attempt to cancel it altogether beggars belief. Canceling the endangerment finding would declare open season on all of humanity, and cause irreversible harm to the entire planet, not just within the boundaries of the United States.”

For decades now, scientists have agreed, with a greater than 99% consensus, on climate change being caused by human beings. Yesterday, in an address titled ‘The Moment of Opportunity’, the United Nations Secretary General emphasized that “the climate crisis is laying waste to lives and livelihoods, and the 1.5 degree limit is in unprecedented peril. To keep it within reach, we must drastically speed up the reduction of emissions – and the reach of the clean energy transition.”

In Washington this week, a protest was brought to the steps of the White House with 27 colourful trunks representing the children whose lives were tragically lost to the floods in Texas that claimed at least 135. Their families brought this protest to the White House to condemn a broader failure to address the climate crisis and hold the fossil fuel industry accountable. They demanded immediate policy changes, full funding for weather and disaster response agencies, and a rapid transition away from coal and oil.

“We are already bearing witness to the impacts of the chaotic policy changes being pushed through by this administration. These have cost us lives, and will continue to do so long into the future. We will not sit back and let this administration unravel the protections we have fought so long and hard for. We are standing by - with the full force of the global climate movement behind us - to denounce this proposal as soon as it is published for public notice and comment,” concluded Anne Jellema.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

• World Court rules countries that don’t act on climate crisis may be liable for violating human rights law;
• UN Security Council debates Gaza crisis amid questions over role of UN, humanitarian law;
• Civil disobedience at Wells Fargo offices in SF, NYC protest bank dropping DEI, climate goals;
• California AG asks judge to put LA juvenile detention facilities into receivership over poor conditions, abuse of power;
• Florida AG investigating restaurant that held LGBTQ pride event;
• UN says food deprivation, shattered health system leading to catastrophic birth outcomes for pregnant women and newborns

The post World Court rules countries failing to act on climate may be violating human rights law; UN Security council debates Gaza war, humanitarian crisis – July 23, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

In 2019, a group of law students at the University of the South Pacific, frustrated at the slow pace with which the world’s governments were moving to address the climate crisis, had an idea — they would take the world’s governments to court.

They arranged a meeting with government ministers in Vanuatu and convinced them to take a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ top court, where they would seek an opinion to clarify countries’ legal obligations under international law.

Six years after that idea was hatched in a classroom in Port Vila, the court will today (early Thursday morning NZT) deliver its verdict in the Dutch city of The Hague.

• READ MORE: Other climate crisis reports

If successful — and those involved are quietly confident they will be — it could have major ramifications for international law, how climate change disputes are litigated, and it could give small Pacific countries greater leverage in arguments around loss and damage.

Most significantly, the claimants argue, it could establish legal consequences for countries that have driven climate change and what they owe to people harmed.

“Six long years of campaigning have led us to this moment,” said Vishal Prasad, the president of Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change, the organisation formed out of those original students.

“For too long, international responses have fallen short. We expect a clear and authoritative declaration,” he said.

“[That] climate inaction is not just a failure of policy, but a breach of international law.”

More than 100 countries — including New Zealand, Australia and all the countries of the Pacific — have testified before the court, alongside civil society and intergovernmental organisations.

And now today they will gather in the brick palace that sits in ornate gardens in this canal-ringed city to hear if the judges of the world’s top court agree.

What is the case?
The ICJ adjudicates disputes between nations and issues advisory opinions on big international legal issues.

In this case, Vanuatu asked the UN General Assembly to request the judges to weigh what exactly international law requires states to do about climate change, and what the consequences should be for states that harm the climate through actions or omissions.

Over its deliberations, the court has heard from more than 100 countries and international organisations hoping to influence its opinion, the highest level of participation in the court’s history.

That has included the governments of low-lying islands and atolls in the Pacific, which say they are paying the steepest price for a crisis they had little role in creating.

These nations have long been frustrated with the current mechanisms for addressing climate change, like the UN COP conferences, and are hoping that, ultimately, the court will provide a yardstick by which to measure other countries’ actions.

“I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity,” Vanuatu’s Minister for Climate Change Ralph Regenvanu said in his statement to the court last year.

“Let us not allow future generations to look back and wonder why the cause of their doom was condoned.”

But major powers and emitters, like the United States and China, have argued in their testimonies that existing UN agreements, such as the Paris climate accord, are sufficient to address climate change.

“We expect this landmark climate ruling, grounded in binding international law, to reflect the critical legal flashpoints raised during the proceedings,” said Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney at the US-based Centre for International Environmental Law (which has been involved with the case).

“Among them: whether States’ climate obligations are anchored in multiple legal sources, extending far beyond the Paris Agreement; whether there is a right to remedy for climate harm; and how human rights and the precautionary principle define States’ climate obligations.”

What could this mean?
Rulings from the ICJ are non-binding, and there are myriad cases of international law being flouted by countries the world over.

Still, the court’s opinion — if it falls in Vanuatu’s favour — could still have major ramifications, bolstering the case for linking human rights and climate change in legal proceedings — both international and domestic — and potentially opening the floodgates for climate litigation, where individuals, groups, Indigenous Peoples, and even countries, sue governments or private companies for climate harm.

An advisory opinion would also be a powerful precedent for legislators and judges to call on as they tackle questions related to the climate crisis, and give small countries a powerful cudgel in negotiations over future COP agreements and other climate mechanisms.

“This would empower vulnerable nations and communities to demand accountability, strengthen legal arguments and negotiations and litigation and push for policies that prioritise prevention and redress over delay and denial,” Prasad said.

In essence, those who have taken the case have asked the court to issue an opinion on whether governments have “legal obligations” to protect people from climate hazards, but also whether a failure to meet those obligations could bring “legal consequences”.

At the Peace Palace today, they will find out from the court’s 15 judges.

“[The advisory opinion] is not just a legal milestone, it is a defining moment in the global climate justice movement and a beacon of hope for present and future generations,” said Vanuatu Prime Minister Jotham Napat in a statement ahead of the decision.

“I am hopeful for a powerful opinion from the ICJ. It could set the world on a meaningful path to accountability and action.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

SBTi’s mandatory fossil fuel transition policy requires financial institutions to immediately cease all financing for coal expansion, immediately cease all new project financing for oil and gas expansion, and phase out general purpose financing for companies engaging in oil and gas expansion no later than 2030.

The final standards failed to incorporate some recommendations, including requiring financial institutions to issue transition plans, closing loopholes on what constitutes “in-scope” financial transactions, and expanding the list of emissions-intensive activities and sectors. The final standard also waters down language around deforestation policies, and gives financial institutions years of leeway before requiring an end to general purpose financing for fossil fuel expansion, which will likely lock in decades of dependence on oil and gas due existing expansion plans.

“SBTi’s finalized guidelines clarify what constitutes credible net-zero plans for financial institutions. It is encouraging that this new standard makes clear, in no uncertain terms, that financing fossil fuel expansion is fundamentally incompatible with any serious net-zero commitment. While there are opportunities to further strengthen this standard, it is an important and necessary step forward for the financial sector. It is imperative that global financial institutions adopt this standard and align their strategies accordingly,” said Jessye Waxman, Policy Advisor for the Sierra Club’s Sustainable Finance campaign.

“Today's final standard for financial institutions exemplifies the critical role SBTi plays in the fight against climate change—in a fractured and often dysfunctional policy ecosystem, ensuring a science-based and credible net-zero architecture for financial institutions is more important than ever,” said Ernesto Archila, climate and financial regulation policy director with Public Citizen’s Climate Program. “FI’s should adopt and implement this standard because of the vitally important elements it contains, especially the clear recognition that carbon removals and credits cannot be used in calculating portfolio emissions, the inclusion of insurance underwriting of fossil projects as in-scope, and the immediate cessation of project financing for new fossil fuel infrastructure. Unfortunately, it fails on a number of dimensions to live up to the needs of the moment, including by watering down deforestation requirements, postponing until 2030 a requirement to cease general purpose finance for oil and gas, and failing to require transition plans.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

So what exactly is a heat dome, and why does it last so long? And what gives with all the extra moisture? 

A heat dome is a self-reinforcing machine of misery. It’s a system of high-pressure air, which sinks from a few thousand feet up and compresses as it gets closer to the ground. When molecules in the air have less space, they bump into each other and heat up. “I think about it like a mosh pit,” said Shel Winkley, the weather and climate engagement specialist at the research group Climate Central. “Everybody’s moving around and bumping into each other, and it gets hotter.”

But these soaring temperatures aren’t happening on their own with this heat dome. The high pressure also discourages the formation of clouds, which typically need rising air. “There’s going to be very little in the way of cloudiness, so it’ll be a lot of sunshine which, in turn, will warm the atmosphere even more,” said AccuWeather senior meteorologist Tom Kines. “You’re just kind of trapping that hot air over one part of the country.”

In the beginning, a heat dome evaporates moisture in the soil, which provides a bit of cooling. But then, the evaporation will significantly raise humidity. (A major contributor during this month’s heat dome will be the swaths of corn crops across the central U.S., which could help raise humidity in states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana above that of Florida.) This sort of high pressure system also grabs moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, which evaporate more water the hotter they get. And generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere becomes, the more moisture it can hold. Once that moisture in the landscape is all gone, more heat accumulates — and more and more. A heat dome, then, essentially feeds off itself, potentially for weeks, a sort of giant blow drier pointed at the landscape. 

On their own, temperatures soaring over 100 are bad enough for human health. Such high humidity makes it even harder for the human body to cool itself, because it’s harder for sweat to evaporate. Hence 100 degrees on the thermometer feeling more like 110. The elderly and very young can’t cool their bodies as efficiently, putting them at higher risk. Those with heart conditions are also vulnerable, because the human body tries to cool itself by pumping more blood. And those with outdoor jobs — construction workers, garbage collectors, delivery drivers on bikes or scooters — have little choice but to toil in the heat, with vanishing few laws to protect them.

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The humidity effect is especially pronounced in areas whose soils are soaked with recent rainfall, like central Texas, which earlier this month suffered catastrophic flooding. There’s the potential for “compound disasters” here: relief efforts in inundated areas like Kerr County now have to reckon with soaring temperatures as well. The Gulf of Mexico provided the moisture that made the flooding so bad, and now it’s providing additional humidity during the heat dome.

A heat dome gets all the more dangerous the longer it stagnates on the landscape. And unfortunately, climate change is making these sorts of heat waves longer and more intense. According to Climate Central, climate change made this heat dome at least five times more likely. “These temperatures aren’t necessarily impossible, but they’d be very hard to happen without a fingerprint of climate change,” Winkley said.

Summer nights are warming almost twice as fast as summer days, Winkley adds, which makes heat waves all the more dangerous. As this heat dome takes hold, nighttime low temperatures may go up 15 degrees above average. For those without air conditioning — or who can’t afford to run it even if they have AC — their homes will swelter through the night, the time when temperatures are supposed to come down and give respite. Without that, the stress builds and builds, especially for those vulnerable groups. 

“When you look at this heat wave, yes, it is going to be uncomfortable during the day,” Winkley said. “But it’s especially those nighttime temperatures that are the big blinking red light that this is a climate-change-boosted event.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

• Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

• Are you affected by the flooding in Texas? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.

• Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The science behind the heat dome — ‘a mosh pit’ of molecules on Jul 22, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

The District’s 2020 lawsuit against Exxon, Chevron, BP, and Shell argues that the companies violated D.C.’s consumer protection law by engaging in misleading acts and practices around the marketing, promotion, and sale of fossil fuel products. In April, a court rejected the Big Oil companies’ motions to dismiss the case, bringing it one step closer to trial.

In June, 16 Republican attorneys general asked U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to help erect a “liability shield” for fossil fuel companies against climate lawsuits. Among its tactics, the attorneys general recommended that the federal government “Restrict federal funding for ‘States that seek to impose liability on, or require payment from, energy companies for climate change[.]’”

Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, released the following statement:

“The fossil fuel industry and its allies are trying to kill any and all lawsuits that would hold Big Oil companies accountable for their climate lies and the damage they’ve caused — and this assault on D.C.’s ability to enforce its own consumer protection laws is part of their playbook. No industry should be above the law, especially one as powerful and harmful as Big Oil. Members of Congress must reject this underhanded attempt to help Big Oil escape accountability and protect access to the courts for every community.”

Background on U.S. Climate Accountability Lawsuits Against Big Oil:

Ten U.S. states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai`i, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont — and the District of Columbia, along with dozens of city, county, and tribal governments in California, Colorado, Hawai`i, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Washington, and Puerto Rico, have filed lawsuits to hold major oil and gas companies accountable for deceiving the public about their products’ role in climate change. These cases collectively represent more than 1 in 4 people living in the United States. Last year, the attorney general of Michigan announced plans to take fossil fuel companies to court.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ABC (7/15/25) reports on the death toll of Texas’ fossil fuel–fueled floods.

In Texas, at least 134 people are dead, including 36 children, and a hundred are missing after a devastating flash flood swept through the central part of the state on July 4. A late June/early July heatwave in Europe claimed 2,300 lives across the continent. These events, of the kind made more extreme and frequent by climate change (ABC, 7/7/25; New York Times, 7/9/25), occur as EU leaders roll back climate policy and the Trump administration guts climate protections, staying true to the slogan of “Drill, baby, drill!”

Despite this dire backsliding on climate policy, with consequences that are clear as day, it’s business as usual in the realm of business news. Recent pieces in the widely read business publications Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the business section of Reuters misleadingly suggested the fossil fuel industry’s profits and losses happen in a vacuum.

A clear consensus

Global leaders ignoring the climate crisis clearly aren’t making its tragic effects go away. The scientific consensus has been unmistakable for years: Fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change. In order to avoid surpassing the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit, beyond which the most devastating impacts from global heating will be felt, we need to phase out fossil fuels—and fast (Union of Concerned Scientists, 1/21/21).

Many journalists have expressed this urgency while covering extreme weather and other impacts, making the connection to human-caused climate change and fossil fuel emissions (FAIR.org, 5/17/24). While these in-depth stories serve as clear explainers in outlets’ science and environment sections, the connection is still being ignored when business is discussed.

If not for the grotesque profits of fossil fuel companies—which knew about their industry’s environmental impact since the 1970s—resistance to a clean energy transition would not exist.

Industry coverage

Reuters (7/8/25) reported that “the US will produce less oil in 2025 than previously expected as declining oil prices have prompted producers to slow activity this year”—with no acknowledgment of the climate impact of this slowdown.

In early July, Exxon and Shell announced lower second-quarter profits from weaker oil and gas trading. Coverage in Bloomberg (7/7/25), the Wall Street Journal (7/7/25) and Reuters (7/7/25) discussed these announcements as indicative of how the rest of the fossil fuel industry will fare in Q2. Stories attributed these dips to Trump’s tariffs, Middle East tensions, excess supply and uncertain demand. Oil prices creeping up over the past two weeks were due to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, projected lower US oil production and Trump tariffs, Reuters (7/8/25) reported.

Meanwhile, reports on renewable energy stocks dipping after the passing of Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” also failed to mention the consequences of this backslide (Reuters, 7/7/25; Bloomberg, 7/8/25): If we keep our carbon emissions at current rates, we are poised to hit the 1.5°C threshold before 2030, leading to more deadly extreme weather events worldwide (Health Policy Watch, 5/6/24).

Discussing Chevron’s efforts to cut costs, Bloomberg (7/9/25) mentioned low oil prices and an “uncertain outlook for fossil fuels.” A passing mention of an “uncertain outlook” was the closest any of these pieces gets to hinting at the relevant need to phase out fossil fuels and invest in renewables, regardless of geopolitical events and market trends.

Increased demand

The Wall Street Journal (7/10/25) euphemized Trump’s wholesale attack on renewable energy as “a rising tide of pushback and scrutiny over climate-transition plans.”

The Wall Street Journal (7/10/25) reported “Oil Age Is Far From Over, OPEC Says,” citing increased energy needs globally as a reason fossil fuels will continue to be extracted. Oil correspondent Giulia Petroni wrote:

Meanwhile, OPEC also said energy policies across major economies are shifting as countries grapple with a growing array of challenges. While ambitious policy goals remain in place, a rising tide of pushback and scrutiny over climate-transition plans is emerging, particularly in the US and other advanced economies, according to the cartel.

Petroni did not cite any scientists or climate activists to push back against OPEC’s claims, let alone any of the litany of studies, data and reports that warn that if we want life on earth as we know it to continue, we simply cannot keep drilling for more oil. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (9/25/24) explained:

Peer-reviewed science shows there is no room for new coal, oil and gas development under the 1.5°C global warming limit agreed in Paris. In 1.5°C-aligned scenarios, coal production declines by 95% by 2050, and oil and gas production by at least 65%.

Another Journal piece (7/9/25) discussed a decrease in diesel supply, which could increase transport and heating costs next winter. “Lack of refining capacity growth is also a problem in the US, where the green energy movement has turned some refiners away from making diesel, said Flynn of the Price Futures Group,”  Anthony Harrup reported—as if it’s a “problem” that green activists have succeeded in steering producers away from a climate-wrecking fuel. (No experts on renewable alternatives were cited.)

The argument that renewable energy sources can’t power the world is also not supported. According to the UN, renewables have the potential to meet 65% of the world’s energy demands by 2030 and 90% by 2050. And contrary to fossil fuel propaganda parroted by corporate media, renewable energy sources are already the cheapest power option in the majority of the world.

The AI boom

Bloomberg‘s report (7/4/25) worried that ending tax credits for renewable energy would fail to “quench the thirst of data centers that power artificial intelligence”—not that it would accelerate the climate catastrophe. 

Reports about AI’s profligate energy usage from Reuters and Bloomberg also largely left out discussions about its climate impact. Reuters (7/9/25) did a story on the crisis facing the largest power grid in the country due to AI demand, as chatbots “consume power faster than new plants can be built.” The piece reported Trump ordering two oil and natural gas power plants in Pennsylvania to continue operating through the summer, despite their scheduled retirement in May, without mentioning the effect on climate.

Bloomberg (7/4/25) reported on Trump’s tax package curbing renewables even as AI’s need for power increases. The piece discussed the economic implications of the policy, but left out the dire environmental consequences.

Another Bloomberg piece (7/7/25) about AI’s utility needs did briefly make the climate connection. Reporter Josh Saul alluded at the end of the article to the arguments of “critics,” who warn these data centers can “hurt climate efforts by extending the lives of carbon-emitting coal and gas plants.” But he did not quote or cite specific groups, scientists or activists.

Ironic omissions

“Europe’s fleet of coal and gas plants could come to the rescue,” Bloomberg (7/7/25) reported. “The likely comeback for the region’s legacy fossil-fuel plants shows just how important they are.”

More puzzling reporting discussed European countries needing to fill energy gaps with fossil fuels during June and July’s deadly heatwaves.

“Fossil Fuels Set to Fill Europe’s Power Gap as Wind Plunges” (Bloomberg, 7/7/25) quoted an energy strategist from Rabobank: “The longer the wind lull continues amid the scorching heat, the longer fossil fuels will have to fill the evening demand gap in power markets.”

“Europe is steadily refilling storage sites that ended last winter severely depleted after a colder-than-usual heating season triggered hefty withdrawals,” another Bloomberg piece (7/7/25) stated. “Still, the region remains vulnerable to sudden shifts in supply or demand—especially as hot weather drives up energy use for cooling.”

“Risks remain as most of July is expected to be hotter than usual across Europe, possibly boosting gas consumption to meet demand for cooling,” said another (Bloomberg, 7/10/25).

This “hotter than usual” weather in Europe has claimed thousands of lives, with research suggesting 1,500 of the 2,300 estimated heat deaths could be connected to climate change, which, as we know, is caused by the burning of fossil fuels (New York Times, 7/9/25). But this clear connection and ironic chicken-and-egg scenario is not explained in any of these articles.

The Wall Street Journal (7/5/25) refers to the rolling back of “Biden’s climate law”—but never explains what energy and climate have to do with each other.

The Wall Street Journal (7/5/25) covered Trump’s rollback of President Joe Biden’s climate law, which offered subsidies for wind and solar power, electric vehicles and other green projects, in a piece headlined “The Moment the Clean-Energy Boom Ran Into ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’”

The piece quoted Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society and director of the Bureau of Land Management under Biden; Reagan Farr, chief executive of solar developer Silicon Ranch; and Cierra Pearl, a young Maine resident who recently lost her job building solar arrays. These sources decried Trump’s sabotage of the green energy transition, but none of them were cited discussing broader climate impacts.

“The clashing visions have left many developers and workers around the country in a lurch,” Journal oil reporter David Uberti wrote. Uberti made sure to quote a statement by Tom Pyle, president of the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Alliance: “If repealing these subsidies will ‘kill’ their industry, then maybe it shouldn’t exist in the first place.” (The $20 billion the fossil fuel industry receives annually in direct US government subsidies was not discussed.)

The impacts Trump’s anti–green energy policies will have on fossil fuel workers are certainly relevant, and it makes sense that business news articles would center broadly defined economic implications. But it is a glaring omission to discuss EVs, renewable energy and the possibility of oil drilling on public lands without any mention of environmental impacts and our all-but-guaranteed surpassing of the Paris Agreement threshold if we continue along this path.

Siloing the connection

Bloomberg (7/10/15) puts a story about how climate change is killing Europeans in its special “Green” section.

These outlets have no shortage of resources to report on climate change—and the culpability of the fossil fuel industry for its ramifications. Some are already doing it in other sections of the paper.

“We need to start acting against climate change and this means, first, trying to reduce the heat in cities,” a Bloomberg piece (7/10/15) about Europe’s heatwave said, quoting environmental epidemiologist Pierre Masselot. “But at the end of the day, all these measures won’t probably be as efficient as just reducing climate change altogether, and so reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.” This article appeared in the site’s “Green” section.

In another  piece (7/7/25) regarding AI’s energy demands in the “Green” section, the outlet also makes the connection to climate change. Bloomberg quoted a statement from environmental law organization Earthjustice:

Coal, gas and oil fired power plants spew millions of pounds of health-harming and climate-warming pollution into the air each year, and cost consumers millions of dollars more than cleaner energy sources.

While thorough climate reporting and mentions of the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for global heating are difficult to find in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, its “Sustainable Business” section (6/30/25) recently covered how companies are reporting fewer details about how climate change and extreme weather are impacting their business.

In its “Sustainability” section, Reuters (7/1/25) discussed the EU heatwave’s links to climate change and fossil fuel emissions. “Scientists say greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are a cause of climate change, with deforestation and industrial practices being other contributing factors,” Clotaire Achi, Emma Pinedo and Alvise Armellini wrote. “Last year was the planet’s hottest on record.”

The ‘silent majority’

Recent studies have revealed that between 80–89% of people worldwide are concerned about climate change and want their governments to do more to address it. But this vast majority of global citizens is ignored by reporting that treats the relentless extraction of fossil fuels as a source of profit rather than an existential threat. The climate journalism resource group Covering Climate Now, of which FAIR is a partner, refers to these people as the “silent majority.” Public support is widespread, but public discourse is lagging behind.

Major publications should not relegate the causes of climate change to their science and environmental sections. They need to be front and center in pieces that focus on the industry responsible for driving it, profiting from it and lying to the public about it for decades.

This story is part of the 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

The New Zealand government needs to do more for its Pacific Island neighbours and stand up to nuclear powers, a distinguished journalist, media educator and author says.

Professor David Robie, a recipient of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM), released the latest edition of his book Eyes of Fire: The last voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior (Little Island Press), which highlights the nuclear legacies of the United States and France.

Dr Robie, who has worked in Pacific journalism and academia for more than 50 years, recounts the crew’s experiences aboard the Greenpeace flagship the Rainbow Warrior in 1985, before it was bombed in Auckland Harbour.

• LISTEN: Dr David Robie talks to RNZ Pacific last week
• Crimes NZ: David Robie on the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior — RNZ Afternoons
• Other Eyes of Fire reports

At the time, New Zealand stood up to nuclear powers, he said.

“It was pretty callous [of] the US and French authorities to think they could just carry on nuclear tests in the Pacific, far away from the metropolitan countries, out of the range of most media, and just do what they like,” Dr Robie told RNZ Pacific. “It is shocking, really.”

Speaking to Pacific Waves, Dr Robie said that Aotearoa had “forgotten” how to stand up for the region.

“The real issue in the Pacific is about climate crisis and climate justice. And we’re being pushed this way and that by the US [and] by the French. The French want to make a stake in their Indo-Pacific policies as well,” he said.

‘We need to stand up’
“We need to stand up for smaller Pacific countries.”

Dr Robie believes that New Zealand is failing with its diplomacy in the region.

He accused the coalition government of being “too timid” and “afraid of offending President Donald Trump” to make a stand on the nuclear issue.

However, a spokesperson for New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters told RNZ Pacific that New Zealand’s “overarching priority . . . is to work with Pacific partners to achieve a secure, stable, and prosperous region that preserves Pacific sovereignty and agency”.

The spokesperson said that through its foreign policy “reset”, New Zealand was committed to “comprehensive relationships” with Pacific Island countries.

“New Zealand’s identity, prosperity and security are intertwined with the Pacific through deep cultural, people, historical, security, and economic linkages.”

The New Zealand government commits almost 60 percent of its development funding to the region.

Pacific ‘increasingly contested’
The spokesperson said that the Pacific was becoming increasingly contested and complex.

“New Zealand has been clear with all of our partners that it is important that engagement in the Pacific takes place in a manner which advances Pacific priorities, is consistent with established regional practices, and supportive of Pacific regional institutions.”

They added that New Zealand’s main focus remained on the Pacific, “where we will be working with partners including the United States, Australia, Japan and in Europe to more intensively leverage greater support for the region.

“We will maintain the high tempo of political engagement across the Pacific to ensure alignment between our programme and New Zealand and partner priorities. And we will work more strategically with Pacific Governments to strengthen their systems, so they can better deliver the services their people need,” the spokesperson said.

However, former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, writing in the prologue of Dr Robie’s book, said: “New Zealand needs to re-emphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.”

Dr Robie added that looking back 40 years to the 1980s, there was a strong sense of pride in being from Aotearoa, the small country which set an example around the world.

“We took on . . . the nuclear powers,” Dr Robie said.

“And the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was symbolic of that struggle, in a way, but it was a struggle that most New Zealanders felt a part of, and we were very proud of that [anti-nuclear] role that we took.

“Over the years, it has sort of been forgotten”.

‘Look at history’
France conducted 193 nuclear tests over three decades until 1996 in French Polynesia.

Until 2009, France claimed that its tests were “clean” and caused no harm, but in 2010, under the stewardship of Defence Minister Herve Morin, a compensation law was passed.

From 1946 to 1962, 67 nuclear bombs were detonated in the Marshall Islands by the US.

In 2024, then-US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell, while responding to a question from RNZ Pacific about America’s nuclear legacy, said: “Washington has attempted to address it constructively with massive resources and a sustained commitment.”

However, Dr Robie said that was not good enough and labelled the destruction left behind by the US, and France, as “outrageous”.

“It is political speak; politicians trying to cover their backs and so on. If you look at history, [the response] is nowhere near good enough, both by the US and the French.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

When nations boost military budgets, they also boost their carbon emissions. With a bump of $157 billion, thanks to the budget the Trump administration passed earlier this month, the United States now spends $1 trillion each year on defense. That’s more than three times as much as China, the next highest spender, as well as the entire European Union. If combined, the world’s armed forces would have the fourth highest carbon footprint, behind India, the U.S., and China. 

Yet it’s been maddeningly difficult for researchers to monitor the emissions of militaries, which aren’t required to report these things. “There’s a guessing game involved,” said Nick Buxton, who has coauthored reports on military emissions from the Transnational Institute, an international research and advocacy group. “One of the overwhelming calls for everyone working in the sector is just for more open and transparent data, so we can come up with some reliable figures.”

To that end, using what data the Department of Energy has made publicly available between 1975 to 2022, researchers have calculated that if the U.S. consistently decreased military spending — by even a little — instead of increasing it, it’d be saving as much energy as Delaware and Slovenia use in a year. A decrease of less than 7 percent each year over about a decade would theoretically reduce energy consumption from about 640 trillion to 394 trillion British thermal units (a measurement of heat energy produced from burning fuels).

The study gives observers not just a better idea of how much carbon the American military is spewing, but also how effective it would be to reduce its funding. “We realize that the feasibility of military spending reductions taking place anytime soon within the U.S. context is probably quite questionable, to put it mildly,” said Andrew Jorgenson, professor of sociology and founding director of the University of British Columbia’s Climate and Society Lab and coauthor of the study, which was published June 2 in the journal PLOS Climate. “But it does highlight that it is a possible pathway to decarbonization and climate mitigation, just with very modest reductions in military spending.”

The researchers note that between 2010 and 2019, the Department of Defense’s emissions were over 636 million metric tons of atmosphere-warming emissions. (The DOD did not respond to a request to comment for this story.) And that’s a conservative and necessarily incomplete estimate, Jorgenson said. Fuel use can give researchers a general idea of how much carbon the armed forces are directly sending into the atmosphere, but there are also all kinds of indirect emissions that come with operating a military. Vegetables, for instance, took energy to grow and ship to bases, to say nothing of all the other supplies flowing around a military’s supply chain: bullets, blankets, boots. 

“If anything, our findings are then perhaps undercounting and underestimating the actual scope of the U.S. military’s contribution to energy consumption and carbon emissions and climate change,” Jorgenson said. “That’s a speculative statement — I just want to be clear about that.”

All these variables not only make it difficult for researchers to accurately determine the climate costs of war — governments themselves can be in the dark too. “Militaries are decades behind in their ability to even understand their emission sources and where they’re coming from,” said Ellie Kinney, military emissions campaigner at the nonprofit Conflict and Environment Observatory. “There is this lag compared to other industries, because no one’s asked them to.”

Calculations get even more complicated when a military actually goes to war. More jet flights require more fuel, and even missiles produce their own emissions. The resulting fires in conflict zones, like the ones that have been devastating Ukraine’s forests, release still more carbon into the atmosphere. While the U.S. spends an outsized amount of money on its armed forces, other nations, particularly those involved in active wars, seem intent to catch up. Russia is now spending a third of its federal budget on defense as its invasion of Ukraine drags on. Last year, Israel’s military spending jumped by 65 percent to $46.5 billion as the country assaulted Gaza. 

Last month, at President Trump’s urging, NATO allies committed to investing 3.5 percent of their gross domestic product each year on defense, and a further 1.5 percent on domestic security like new infrastructure, by 2035. That combined 5 percent is more than double their previous agreement to spend 2 percent of GDP. And on Monday, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte joined Trump in the Oval Office to announce a deal in which “billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment” will be purchased from the U.S. and delivered to Ukraine to support its defense against Russia. 

According to a Transnational Institute report, if every NATO state actually reaches its new military spending goal, by 2030 the alliance’s annual military carbon footprint would be 2.3 billion metric tons CO2 equivalent. (The group published the report prior to the formalization of the June agreement, hence the discrepancy of using 2030 in their modeling instead of 2035.) That’s nearly 700 million metric tons extra than if 2024 levels of military spending were sustained until that time. 

“We’re moving to a world which is readying itself constantly for war, which often makes war much more inevitable,” Buxton said. “And when war happens, emissions just skyrocket.”

All this additional military investment can create a feedback loop, Buxton and Kinney warn. Military leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere recognize climate change as a “threat multiplier,” meaning that it exacerbates existing hazards and conflicts. But with more investment in defense comes more emissions, and more warming, and more threats, which encourages more investment in armed forces. That also means less money for investing in renewable energy and adaptation measures: The richest nations are spending 30 times more on their militaries than on climate finance for the world’s most vulnerable countries.

“An escalation beyond control feels like the situation that we’re heading into,” Kinney said. “This is obviously deeply concerning from a broader security perspective, but really concerning from a climate perspective.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How reducing the U.S. military budget would also reduce emissions on Jul 16, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

A lot of information about the changing climate has disappeared under President Donald Trump’s second term, but the erasure of the National Climate Assessments is “by far the biggest loss we’ve seen,” said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The National Climate Assessments were one of the most approachable resources that broke down how climate change will affect the places people care about, she said. The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders — policymakers, farmers, businesses — to guide their decisions about the future. While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they’re no longer as easy to access. And it’s unclear what, if anything, will happen to the report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, which already existed in draft form.

So why did the reports survive Trump’s first term, but not his second? You could view their disappearance in a few different ways, experts said — as a flex of executive power, an escalation in the culture war over climate change, or a strategic attempt to erase the scientific foundation for climate policy. “If you suppress information and data, then you don’t have the evidence you need to be able to create regulations, strengthen regulations, and even to combat the repeal of regulations,” Gehrke said. 

Read Next

How your showerhead and fridge got roped into the culture wars

Kate Yoder

This isn’t climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. “I don’t know if we’re living in climate denial anymore,” said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at Columbia Climate School. “We have this new front of denial by erasure.”

By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing. In April, the administration pulled nearly $4 million in funding from a Princeton program to improve computer models predicting changes in the oceans and atmosphere, claiming the work created “climate anxiety” among young people. That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to submit its annual report to the United Nations detailing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ended its 45-year tradition of tracking billion-dollar weather disasters. Trump also hopes to shut down the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaiʻi, which has measured the steady rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since the 1950s — the first data to definitively show humans were changing the climate. 

“This kind of wholesale suppression of an entire field of federally sponsored research, to my knowledge, is historically unprecedented,” Aronowsky said.

In a response to a request for comment, the EPA directed Grist to a webpage containing past greenhouse gas emissions reports, as well as a version of what was supposed to be this year’s report obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund. However, the agency confirmed that the latest data has not been officially released. The White House declined to comment, and neither NASA nor NOAA responded in time for publication.

Last year, a leaked training video from Project 2025 — the policy roadmap organized by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — showed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.” The strategy appears to be designed to boost the fossil fuel industry at a time when clean energy has become competitive and the reality of climate change harder to dismiss, as floods, fires, and heat waves have become perceptibly worse. “We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said in his inauguration speech in January.

Read Next

In Trump’s new purge of climate language, even ‘resilience’ isn’t safe

Kate Yoder

The administration hasn’t exactly been subtle about its endgame. Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, doesn’t deny the reality of climate change (he calls himself a “climate realist”), but he’s zealously dismantled environmental programs and has recommended that the White House strike down the “endangerment finding,” the bedrock of U.S. climate policy. It comes from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling on the Clean Air Act that required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants since they endanger public health. If the administration can convince the courts that climate change isn’t a health consideration, it could end that regulatory obligation. 

“If you’re removing information about climate change, its reality, and its impact on people, then I think it’s a lot easier to make the case that it’s not an environmental health issue,” Gehrke said.

There’s a word for the idea that ignorance can serve political ends: agnotology (from the Greek “agnosis,” or “not knowing”), the study of how knowledge is deliberately obscured. What Trump is doing to information about climate change fits squarely in that tradition, according to Aronowsky: “If you remove it, then in a certain sense, it no longer exists, and therefore, there’s nothing to even debate, right?”

Climate denial first took off in the 1990s, when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about climate science. Over the decades, as the evidence became rock-solid, those who opposed reducing the use of fossil fuels gradually shifted from outright denying the facts to attacking solutions like wind and solar power. What the Trump administration is doing now marks a radical break from this long-term trend, said John Cook, a climate misinformation researcher at The University of Melbourne in Australia. “This is a 180, not just a turn, but diving into something we’ve never even seen before,” he said. On the other hand, Cook said, the administration is taking a classic climate denial tactic — painting scientists as “alarmists” or conspirators who can’t be trusted — and turning it into government policy.

Half a year in, the second Trump administration’s treatment of climate information hasn’t yet reached the “eradication” levels that Project 2025 aspired to, at least on government websites. The EPA’s climate change website, for instance, is still up and running, even though all references to the phenomenon were erased on the agency’s home page. Most of the website deletions so far have served to isolate climate change as an issue, erasing its relationship to topics such as health and infrastructure, Gehrke said. Up until the National Climate Assessments disappeared, she would have said that “climate erasure” was an inappropriate characterization of what’s happening. “But now, I’m really not so sure,” she said.

Rachel Cleetus, the senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks that the administration’s actions actually go beyond erasure. “They’re literally trying to change the basis on which a lot of policymaking is advanced — the science basis, the legal basis, and the economic basis,” she said. Her biggest concern isn’t just what facts have been removed, but what political propaganda might replace them. “That’s more dangerous, because it really leaves people in this twilight zone, where what’s real, and what’s important, and what is going to affect their daily lives is just being obfuscated.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why the federal government is making climate data disappear on Jul 14, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

The fossil fuels industry’s ‘climate realism’ displaces decades of science in the worldwide struggle with two likely outcomes for the climate system by 2050:

1. Net Zero is achieved, resulting in a livable climate system.
2. Global temperatures ramp up +2-3-4°C pre-industrial, resulting in hothouse Earth, much of the planet unlivable.

By all counts, the ‘B’ option has the highest probability because ‘A’ is based upon wishful thinking and a very bumpy record. Whereas ‘B’ is based upon factual data of the current trajectory of climate change, which is well ahead of scientist’s expectations, going in the wrong direction, with some claiming it may already be too late. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry pretends, and hopes for, the ‘A’ option with adaptation measures. This is the genesis of fossil fuel ‘Climate Realism’. In a soft-spoken manner, they claim they can fix what emissions harm.

It’s ten years since Paris ’15 when 195 nations agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions to Net Zero by 2050. Yet, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), ten years later (2025) fossil fuels still account for roughly 80% of the world’s energy supply. This is the same percentage as Paris 2015. It also includes ten years of positive renewable energy development throughout the world, but it’s still 80% fossil fuels. Alas, Net Zero paradoxically looks farther away every year. Is it ever attainable?

Moreover, what is ‘climate realism’ in the eyes of the fossil fuel industry, and what’s the likelihood it’ll keep civilization humming along? The oil and gas industry’s ‘climate realism’ inherently provides for abandonment of efforts to deal with the principal cause of the climate crisis, which is burning of fossil fuels. This new genre calls for focusing on “adaptation” whilst burning more fossil fuels. According to their climate realism school of thought, energy transitions have taken place slowly over the past couple hundred years. So, it is simply unrealistic to expect it could change faster now. In fact, according to Al Gore, the new theory claims society has “no right” to expect anything other than a slow transition, or maybe no transition, like what history has shown to be true. But Gore takes issue: “According to ‘climate realism’, it is cheaper and more practical to continue using the sky as an open sewer than to rapidly reduce the principal cause of the climate crisis, or the burning of fossil fuels.”

In that regard, the United States, arguably the economic model for the world since WWII and seen as the fortress of some brand of capitalism, has literally tossed in the towel on fighting the climate crisis, wholeheartedly adopting “climate realism,” informing the world: Deal With It!

But Al Gore, in his TED talk, referencing current scientific research, challenges ‘Climate Realism’ by exposing real climate realism, to wit: (1) at current rates of change, scientists estimate two billion climate refugees by 2050 (2) the past ten years were the hottest ever recorded with recent readings in the Persian Gulf of 126.7°F and Pakistan 122.9°F and summer’s just started (3) already, a couple million climate refugees have prompted a political upheaval of authoritarianism and ultranationalism, what of 2 billion? (4) whole regions of the world are becoming property-uninsurable, especially in the US West and Deep South (5) mainstream sources’ estimates claim world housing could lose $25 trillion in value because of climate change (6) Deloitte claims climate inaction will cost the world economy $178 trillion but over the same time frame climate action would add $43 trillion (7) Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice every hour, threatening coastal megacity sea levels (8) Antarctica’s acceleration of ice loss threatens sea levels more so than scientific models ever expected, as 450 polar climate scientists recently held an emergency meeting (9) sea level rise has doubled since 1990s satellite monitoring (10) the worst droughts in history have clobbered the Brazilian Amazon rainforest as 90% of Amazon River in Columbia went dry (11) third year in a row of massive apocalyptic scale wildfires in Canada (12) particulate air pollution from burning fossil fuels and petrochemicals kills nine million per year. Gore’s real climate realism list goes on and on, well beyond the items listed above because of the worldwide impact of a raging out of kilter global climate system principally caused by fossil fuels. And everybody knows it. Yes, everybody sees it on nightly news programs.

In China, 200 million Gig Workers are eligible to receive a “heat wave allowance” or danger money when working in extreme heat conditions. (Bloomberg Green Daily) In 2024 China recorded the hottest year on record. According to The Lancet, heat-related deaths in China have doubled this century.

A Positive Trend Versus Fossil Fuel Emissions

Gore’s speech noted positives in the alternatives space. For example, the costs for renewables have plummeted to levels making fossil fuels unproductive in comparison. Exxon’s own predictions that solar capacity would only achieve 850GW by 2040 was dead wrong; as of year-end 2024, it is already at 2,280 GW, nearly triple the Exxon projection for 2040. Solar is now the least expensive source of electricity in human history. Since the Paris Agreement, solar electricity generation has soared by 732%. And electric vehicle sales have increased 34x since 2015.

In April 2025 China installed 45 gigawatts of new solar capacity. This is equivalent to 45 brand new giant nuclear reactors installed in one month. (ed. Technocrats in America want to build risky nuclear plants… why?) Regarding intermittence, the cost of utility-scale batteries has dropped a whopping 87%, making solar w. battery-back-up extremely attractive. Who needs expensive, risky nuclear?

Nevertheless, Gore claims: “In spite of this progress, we are still moving too slowly to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. We have got to accelerate it. We have the ability to do so. But the single biggest reason we have not been able to do so is because of ferocious opposition to virtually every policy proposal to speed up this transition and reduce the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.”

The fossil fuel industry has been using sleight of hand to convince the public that fossil fuels are just great, no problem, e.g., carbon capture and storage and direct air capture and recycling of plastics will handle everything. Oh please! “These things are much better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions!” (Gore)

They are also very adept at using politicians to fool the public, for example: Tony Blair, speaking on behalf of his foundation, which gets massive funding from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Middle East producers, in a speech claimed, “the center of the battle has to be carbon capture and direct air capture.” Gore: “He really should know better.” His foundation discovered a fountain of riches in the battle for how to approach climate change.

Carbon Capture – If inefficient, the ‘climate realism’ argument is destroyed.

Al Gore: “Carbon capture is a fraud.” It is like fool’s gold taken to the bank and not worth the costs to get it. Carbon capture cannot physically costs-effectively reduce emissions: “Carbon Capture Has a Long History of Failure,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept. 1, 2022.

“Carbon Capture Simply Won’t Work to Meet Net-Zero Targets,” S&P Global, Sept. 2, 2022.

“If you spend $1 on carbon capture instead of on wind, water, and solar, you are increasing CO2, air pollution, energy requirements, energy costs, pipelines, and total social costs.” “Researchers (Stanford) Uncover Major Flaw in Technology Used by Top Corporations: It Should be Abandoned,” TCD, March 20, 2025.

“Why Carbon Capture and Storage is Not the Solution,” Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, July 10, 2024: “Carbon capture and storage (CCS) continues to be hailed as a potential way to reduce emissions, even though it is more likely to increase them.”

If there’s any chance of hitting net zero, forget about carbon capture, instead, it’s imperative that funds be made available for developing countries. They are totally underfinanced and overlooked. For example, the entire continent of Africa has fewer solar panels than Florida. Yet, the continent has 60% of the world’s prime solar resource space. The potential for renewables is huge, but lo and behold, new plans for pipelines to remove fossil fuels from Africa to be shipped to developed countries have tripled as the fossil fuel industry ups the ante in Africa.

In the final analysis, Al Gore believes there is hope with renewables. Of all the new electricity installed in the world in 2024, 93% was renewables, mostly solar. This is a telltale sign of hope but still overpowered by a fossil fuel industry that is fighting for every last dollar by rebranding climate change as “climate realism” with shiny objects (carbon capture) falsely saving the day. Climate realism Newspeak promotes fossil fuel production, and it is winning to the tune of $7 trillion globally per year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in government subsidies such as direct payments, tax breaks, subsidized loans, and the provision of resources at below market rates.

Just imagine $7 trillion per year invested in renewables. Visionary leaders would switch the $7T to renewables. According to Bloomberg NEF, renewable investments in 2024 amounted to 10% of fossil fuel subsidies or $728 billion. But the United States is cutting renewable subsidies at the very moment when record global temperatures and disruptive ecosystems are awakening people throughout the world to Al Gore’s real climate realism. It’s on TV, almost nightly.

Still, the “it’s already too late” core of climate scientists should prompt world leaders to fight back harder than ever and not allow doom and gloom to dictate the future, making US anti-science, anti-renewables policies seem devilishly out of sorts, flashing danger to the world.

*****

NB: An excellent 23-min. video that explains in detail the climate issue: “The Ruling Class is Causing Climate Collapse,” Our Changing Climate (Charlie Kilman – Creator), May 2025.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

Nuclear-free and independent Pacific advocates are treating Aucklanders to a lively week-long exhibition dedicated to the struggle for nuclear justice in the region.

It will be opened today by the opposition Labour Party’s spokesperson on disarmament and MP for Te Atatu, Phil Twyford, and will include a range of speakers on Aotearoa New Zealand’s record as a champion of a nuclear-free Pacific and an independent foreign policy.

Speaking at a conference last month, Twyford said the country could act as a force for peace and demilitarisation, working with partners across the Pacific and Asia and basing its defence capabilities on a realistic assessment of threats.

• READ MORE: ‘Storm clouds are gathering’: 40 years on from the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior

The biggest threat to the security of New Zealanders was not China’s rise as a great power but the possibility of war in Asia, Twyford said.

Although there have been previous displays about the New Zealand nuclear-free narrative, this one has a strong focus on the Pacific.

it is called the “Legends of the Pacific: Stories of a Nuclear-free Moana 1975-1995” and will run from tomorrow, July 13 until Friday, July 18.

Veteran nuclear-free Pacific spokespeople who are expected to speak at the conference include Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua; Bharat Jamnadas, an organiser of the original Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) conference in Suva, Fiji, in 1975; businessman and community advocate Nikhil Naidu, previously an activist for the Fiji Anti-Nuclear Group (FANG) and Dr Heather Devere, peace researcher and chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).

A group of Cook Islands young dancers will also take part.

Knowledge to children
One of the organisers, Nik Naidu, told Asia Pacific Report, it was vital to restore the enthusiasm and passion around the NFIP movement as in the 1980s.

“It’s so important to pass on our knowledge to our children and future generations,” he said.

“And to tell the stories of our ongoing journey and yearning for true independence in a world free of wars and weapons of mass destruction. This is what a Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific is.”

The exhibition is is coordinated by the APMN in partnership with the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, with curator Tharron Bloomfield and coordinator Antony Phillips; Ellen Melville Centre; and the Whānau Communty Centre and Hub.

It is also supported by Pax Christi, Quaker Peace and Service Fund, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).

It recalls New Zealand’s peace squadrons, a display of activist tee-shirt “flags”, nuclear-free buttons and badges, posters, and other memorabilia. A video storytelling series about NFIP “legends” is also included.

Timely exhibition
Author Dr David Robie, deputy chair of the APMN, who wrote the book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior just published on Thursday, and dedicated to the NFIP movement, said the the exhibition was timely.

“It is a sort of back to the future situation where the world is waking up again to a nuclear spectre not really seen since the Cold War years,” he said.

“With the horrendous Israeli genocide on Gaza — it is obscene to call it a war, when it is continuous massacres of civilians; the attacks by two nuclear nations on a nuclear weapons-free country, as is the case with Iran; and threats against another nuclear state, China, are all extremely concerning developments.”

• “Legends of the Pacific: Stories of a Nuclear-free Moana 1975-1995”, daily, 10am-4pm, Ellen Melville Centre’s Paddy Walker Room, Freyberg Place, July 13-18.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Rescue teams in central Texas are still searching for about 160 people who went missing in the catastrophic flash floods on July 4. The official death toll has climbed to at least 121 victims. State policymakers are now in the spotlight, as questions swirl around Texas’s lack of emergency precautions and the climate denialism of Republican political leaders. “Many of those lost lives could have been saved if links in our disaster response chain hadn’t been broken,” says Monica Medina, a former official at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal administration that, among other tasks, monitors extreme weather. NOAA has been hit by major cuts to funding and staffing under Trump, despite the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters from climate change. Medina is among many climate and policy experts sounding the alarm on the defunding of NOAA and other meteorological and disaster preparedness services. “We are firing the people. We’re stopping taking in the data. We’re ending the research. We’re turning off the satellites. We’re doing everything we possibly can to put our heads in the sand in the midst of what is increasingly dangerous weather.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Join us for this guided “virtual tour” around the Rainbow Warrior III in Auckland Harbour on the afternoon of 10 July 2025 — the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original flagship.

The Rainbow Warrior is a special vessel — it’s one of three present-day Greenpeace ships.

The Rainbow Warrior works on the biggest issues affecting the future of our planet. It was the first ship in our fleet that was designed and built specifically for activism at sea.

Virtual tour of the Rainbow Warrior.        Video: Greenpeace

It also represents a continuation of the legacy of the previous two Rainbow Warriors.

On this anniversary day we explored the ship and talked to key people about the current campaign to protect the world’s oceans.

Programmes director Niamh O’Flynn presented the tour, starting on Halsey Wharf.

Thanks to third mate Adriana, oceans campaigner Ellie; author David Robie, who sailed on the original Rainbow Warrior on the 1985 Rongelap relocation mission and whose new anniversary edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior is being launched tonight, radio engineer Neil and Captain Ali!

Watch the commemoration ceremony this morning on 10 July 2025.

More information and make donations.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

I didn’t know much about the surrounding context of the infamous Rainbow Warrior bombing 40 years ago on Thursday. All I knew was that we, as a country, have not forgotten.

I was born in 1996, and although I didn’t know much about the vessel’s bombing, which galvanised anti-nuclear sentiment across Aotearoa further, the basics were common knowledge growing up.

So, when I got the opportunity to read the Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior (40th Anniversary edition) by veteran journalist David Robie, who was on board the ship during its mission to the Marshall Islands, I dove in.

On 10 July 1985, French secret agents destroyed the Rainbow Warrior at Marsden Wharf in Auckland, killing Portuguese-born Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira and sparking global outrage.

The Rainbow Warrior protested nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, specifically targeting French atmospheric and underground nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.

Their efforts drew international attention to the environmental devastation and human suffering caused by decades of radioactive fallout.

There’s plenty to learn from this book in terms of the facts, but what I took away from it most is its continued relevance since its original publication in 1986.

The opening prologue is former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark’s reflection on the Warrior’s bombing, Pereira’s death and the current socio-political climate of today in relation to back then.

Clark makes remarks on AUKUS, nuclear weapons and geopolitical pressures, describing it all as “storm clouds gathering again”.

Nuclear fallout
It has been a tumultuous period for the Pacific region in the political realm, between being at the mercy of a tug-of-war between global superpowers and the impending finality of climate change to the livelihoods of many.

With EOF’s 40th Anniversary edition, it is yet another documentation of these turbulent times for the Pacific, which have never really stopped since colonial powers first made contact.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 atmospheric and underwater tests in the Marshall Islands. Then, in 1966, the French launched 46 atmospheric tests between 1966 and 1974, followed by 147 underground bombs from 1975 to 1996 after widespread international protest and scrutiny.

Specifically, the US 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test, the largest atmospheric hydrogen bomb test, resulted in the fallout’s ash coating Rongelap Atoll. Though the US evacuated residents days later, they returned them in 1957, leaving them to suffer from health effects like miscarriages, cancer, and birth deformities.

Eventually, the Rainbow Warrior helped evacuate the Rongelap people in 1985 over several trips, where the locals packed down their homes and brought them onboard.

Throughout history to today, there’s a theme of constant disregard and dehumanisation of my people by the West.

• Listen to David Robie’s full interview with Aui’a Vaimaila Leatinu’u here

When does it stop?
A decade prior to the Rongelap evacuation, the infamous Dawn Raids occurred, where it wasn’t until 1986 that a Race Relations investigation found Pacific people comprised roughly a third of overstayers yet represented 86 per cent of all prosecutions.

The 506-day Bastion Point protest also occurred between 1977 and 1978, where Ngāti Whātua, led by Joe Hawke, pushed back against a proposed Crown sale of that land.

In the end, around 500 NZ police and army forcefully evicted the peaceful protestors.

So, while this was all happening, the Pacific, specifically the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia region, were reeling from the decades of nuclear testing and consequential sickness, pain and death.

Today, the Pacific is stuck between geopolitical egos, the fear of being used as a resource stepping stone, internal struggles, economic destabilisation and pleas for climate change to be made a priority not to save sinking islands but the world.

Amid this “political football”, it constantly feels like Pacific and Māori end up being the ball.

Robie’s book tells heartfelt moments with its facts, which helps connect to its story at a deeper level beyond sharing genealogy with the people involved.

Voices within it don’t hold back their urgency or outrage towards what happened, especially how that past negligence by bodies of power continues today.

When I read books like EOF 40th, whether it’s about my tangata Māori or Tagata Moana, I often close them and wonder: When do we get a break? When does it stop?

I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. At least we will always have answers on what happened to the Rainbow Warrior and why.

No matter what, it is indisputable that an informed generation will navigate the future better than their predecessors, and with EOF 40th, they’ll be well-equipped.

Republished from PMN News with permission.

• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie (Little Island Press)

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

I didn’t know much about the surrounding context of the infamous Rainbow Warrior bombing 40 years ago on Thursday. All I knew was that we, as a country, have not forgotten.

I was born in 1996, and although I didn’t know much about the vessel’s bombing, which galvanised anti-nuclear sentiment across Aotearoa further, the basics were common knowledge growing up.

So, when I got the opportunity to read the Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior (40th Anniversary edition) by veteran journalist David Robie, who was on board the ship during its mission to the Marshall Islands, I dove in.

On 10 July 1985, French secret agents destroyed the Rainbow Warrior at Marsden Wharf in Auckland, killing Portuguese-born Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira and sparking global outrage.

The Rainbow Warrior protested nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, specifically targeting French atmospheric and underground nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.

Their efforts drew international attention to the environmental devastation and human suffering caused by decades of radioactive fallout.

There’s plenty to learn from this book in terms of the facts, but what I took away from it most is its continued relevance since its original publication in 1986.

The opening prologue is former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark’s reflection on the Warrior’s bombing, Pereira’s death and the current socio-political climate of today in relation to back then.

Clark makes remarks on AUKUS, nuclear weapons and geopolitical pressures, describing it all as “storm clouds gathering again”.

Nuclear fallout
It has been a tumultuous period for the Pacific region in the political realm, between being at the mercy of a tug-of-war between global superpowers and the impending finality of climate change to the livelihoods of many.

With EOF’s 40th Anniversary edition, it is yet another documentation of these turbulent times for the Pacific, which have never really stopped since colonial powers first made contact.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 atmospheric and underwater tests in the Marshall Islands. Then, in 1966, the French launched 46 atmospheric tests between 1966 and 1974, followed by 147 underground bombs from 1975 to 1996 after widespread international protest and scrutiny.

Specifically, the US 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test, the largest atmospheric hydrogen bomb test, resulted in the fallout’s ash coating Rongelap Atoll. Though the US evacuated residents days later, they returned them in 1957, leaving them to suffer from health effects like miscarriages, cancer, and birth deformities.

Eventually, the Rainbow Warrior helped evacuate the Rongelap people in 1985 over several trips, where the locals packed down their homes and brought them onboard.

Throughout history to today, there’s a theme of constant disregard and dehumanisation of my people by the West.

• Listen to David Robie’s full interview with Aui’a Vaimaila Leatinu’u here

When does it stop?
A decade prior to the Rongelap evacuation, the infamous Dawn Raids occurred, where it wasn’t until 1986 that a Race Relations investigation found Pacific people comprised roughly a third of overstayers yet represented 86 per cent of all prosecutions.

The 506-day Bastion Point protest also occurred between 1977 and 1978, where Ngāti Whātua, led by Joe Hawke, pushed back against a proposed Crown sale of that land.

In the end, around 500 NZ police and army forcefully evicted the peaceful protestors.

So, while this was all happening, the Pacific, specifically the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia region, were reeling from the decades of nuclear testing and consequential sickness, pain and death.

Today, the Pacific is stuck between geopolitical egos, the fear of being used as a resource stepping stone, internal struggles, economic destabilisation and pleas for climate change to be made a priority not to save sinking islands but the world.

Amid this “political football”, it constantly feels like Pacific and Māori end up being the ball.

Robie’s book tells heartfelt moments with its facts, which helps connect to its story at a deeper level beyond sharing genealogy with the people involved.

Voices within it don’t hold back their urgency or outrage towards what happened, especially how that past negligence by bodies of power continues today.

When I read books like EOF 40th, whether it’s about my tangata Māori or Tagata Moana, I often close them and wonder: When do we get a break? When does it stop?

I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. At least we will always have answers on what happened to the Rainbow Warrior and why.

No matter what, it is indisputable that an informed generation will navigate the future better than their predecessors, and with EOF 40th, they’ll be well-equipped.

Republished from PMN News with permission.

• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie (Little Island Press)

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

As the Trump administration barrels forward with its pro-fossil fuel agenda, and European and Asian governments and financial institutions debate whether to increase investments in U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) projects, a report published today by Greenpeace USA, Earthworks, and Oil Change International highlights the climate threats and financial risks posed by five major new liquefied gas export projects proposed for the US Gulf Coast, all but one of them still awaiting a final investment decision.

“What we found was crystal clear – any further investment in LNG is not compatible with a livable climate,” says Andres Chang, Senior Research Specialist at Greenpeace USA and lead author of the report. “The massive growth in infrastructure along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast has already created significant public health and ecosystem impacts, threatening entire coastal communities. But it doesn’t stop there. This report shows that if built, these projects would put global climate goals even further out of reach.”

The report analyzes five major U.S. LNG projects – Venture Global CP2, Cameron LNG Phase II, Sabine Pass Stage V, Cheniere Corpus Christi LNG Midscale 8-9, and Freeport LNG Expansion – and finds that each and every one fails a “climate test” derived from models in the DOE’s 2024 LNG Export public interest studies. Contrary to industry claims, the report shows that decreasing methane venting and leaking during gas drilling, transportation, and liquefaction is not enough to make these projects “climate neutral.”

“Focusing the Department of Energy’s model on individual US LNG terminals that are yet to be built, we found that they all result in increased greenhouse gas emissions because they pollute the climate, displace renewable energy, and drive up gas demand,” says Lorne Stockman, Oil Change International Research Director and report co-author. “It is very clear that governments, investors, and insurers must stop supporting the reckless LNG buildout now and instead invest in a rapid and just transition to renewable energy that will protect our communities from toxic pollution and climate-fueled superstorms.”

Future administrations could revoke export authorizations that were rubber-stamped under Trump based on their failure to pass the DOE “climate test,” which introduces a new layer of uncertainty to these already-risky projects. This report adds to a rapidly growing body of evidence that financing U.S. LNG is not a sound decision for insurers, investors, or purchasers – something the EU and America’s Asian allies must keep in mind as President Trump pressures them to increase their imports of U.S. LNG under threat of sweeping tariffs. “Countries with climate commitments, such as those in the EU, should be very wary of the climate cost of importing US LNG,” says Dr. Dakota Raynes, Senior Manager of Research, Policy, and Data at Earthworks and report co-author.

“Fossil fuel dependency has long externalized its true costs, forcing communities to bear the burden of pollution, sickness, and economic instability,” says James Hiatt, founder and director of For a Better Bayou. “For decades the oil and gas industry has known about the devastating health and climate impacts of its operations, yet it continues to expand, backed by billions in private and public financing. These harms are not isolated – they’re systemic, and they threaten all of us. This report is a call to conscience. It’s time we stop propping up deadly false solutions and start investing in a transition to energy systems that sustain life, not sacrifice it.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“The most important thing that we have to do right now is hold the Republicans that voted for this bill accountable for the devastation that they are causing and the lives that will be impacted.” Democratic Congressmember Yassamin Ansari of Arizona explains how Trump’s new federal budget, which introduces major cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, housing and education, will worsen wealth inequality and the health disparities, while actually increasing the U.S. deficit by trillions of dollars and supercharging spending for immigration and border enforcement. The congressmember shares her recent experience visiting a detention center outside of Phoenix, calling some of the conditions there the most “dehumanizing” she has ever seen. Ansari, the first Iranian American Democrat to serve as a member of Congress, also condemns the Trump administration’s strikes on Iran in June. “I do not believe that the president of the United States should be conducting unilateral military action without authorization from Congress,” she says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“It’s the worst-case scenario for a very extreme, very sudden, literal wall of water,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, during a livestream Monday morning. “I don’t think that’s an exaggeration in this case, based on the eyewitness accounts and the science involved.”

It will take some time for scientists to do proper “attribution” studies here, to say for instance how much extra rain they can blame on climate change. But generally speaking, this disaster has climate change’s marks all over it — a perfect storm of conspiring phenomena, both in the atmosphere and on the ground. “To people who are still skeptical that the climate crisis is real, there’s such a clear signal and fingerprint of climate change in this type of event,” said Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

Read Next

Disaster 101: Your guide to extreme weather preparation, relief, and recovery

Lyndsey Gilpin

This tragedy actually started hundreds of miles to the southeast, out at sea. As the planet has warmed, the gulf has gotten several degrees Fahrenheit hotter. That’s turned it into a giant puddle of fuel for hurricanes barreling toward the Gulf Coast, since those storms feed on warm seawater. 

Even when a hurricane isn’t brewing, the gulf is sending more moisture into the atmosphere — think about how your bathroom mirror fogs up when you draw a hot bath. This pushes wet, unstable air higher and higher into the atmosphere, condensing into clouds. As these systems release heat, they grow even more unstable, creating a towering thundercloud that can drop extreme amounts of rainfall. Indeed, preceding the floods, the amount of moisture above Texas was at or above the all-time record for July, according to Swain. “That is fairly extraordinary, in the sense that this is a place that experiences very moist air this time of year,” Swain said. 

That meant the system both had the requisite moisture for torrential rainfall, plus the instability that creates the thunderstorms that make that rain fall very quickly. This storm was dumping two to four inches of rain an hour, and it was moving very slowly, so it essentially stalled over the landscape — a gigantic atmospheric fire hose soaking Central Texas.

Making matters worse, the ground in this part of Texas is loaded with limestone, which doesn’t readily absorb rainwater compared to places with thick layers of soil at the surface. Rainwater rapidly flowed down hills and valleys and gathered in rivers, which is why the Guadalupe rose so fast. “That means that not very much of the rain is going to soak into the ground, partly because the soil is shallow and partly because there’s steep slopes in the terrain, so that water is able to run off fairly quickly,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas’ state climatologist and director of the Southern Regional Climate Center at Texas A&M University

This is exactly the kind of precipitation event that’s increasing fastest in a warming climate, Swain added. In California, for instance, alternating periods of extremely wet conditions and extremely dry ones are creating “weather whiplash.” As the world’s bodies of water heat up, more moisture can evaporate into the atmosphere. And due to some basic physics, the warmer it gets, the more moisture the atmosphere can hold, so there’s more potential for heavier rainfall. 

“The Gulf of Mexico has been going through several marine heat waves recently, and so it’s just adding that much more heat to the atmosphere, loading it up for more extreme rainfall events,” said Brett Anderson, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather. “A lot of these places, 1-in-100-year floods may be becoming more like 1-in-50, even 1-in-10.” AccuWeather’s preliminary estimate puts the economic damage of the flooding at between $18 billion and $22 billion.

The Trump administration did make deep staffing cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration earlier this year, but it’s too early to tell why some people didn’t get warnings in time. The National Weather Service did indeed provide multiple flood warnings, and some people are reporting they got alerts on their cell phones, prompting them to escape. Still, with so many people dead or missing, they either didn’t get the alerts or didn’t adequately understand the danger they were in. Officials in Kerr County previously considered a more robust warning system for Guadalupe River floods, but rejected it as too expensive.

For the girls and staff at the summer camp, the deluge arrived at the worst possible time, in the early hours of the morning while they slept. “In my view — and this seems to be the consensus view of meteorologists — this is not really a failure of meteorology here,” Swain said. “To my eye, the Weather Service predictions, they certainly weren’t perfect, but they were as good as could have been expected given the state of the science.”

Swain warns that if the administration follows through on its promises of further more cuts to NOAA, forecasts of flooding could well suffer. “That really could be catastrophic,” he said. “That will 100 percent be responsible for costing lives.” 

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

• Are you affected by the flooding in Texas and North Carolina? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.
• Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.
• Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The science behind Texas’ catastrophic floods on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

We speak with investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz about how President Trump’s major tax and spending bill hurts environmental justice efforts in Louisiana communities affected by the climate crisis and pollution from oil and gas facilities. The Trump administration had already canceled much of the funding for local environmental monitoring and advocacy, and the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill further entrenches the power of the fossil fuel industry. “It’s a frontal assault on environmental and climate justice, and it will set us back significantly unless we take action to confront the climate crisis,” says Juhasz, who wrote about the bill’s impact for Rolling Stone.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This is the idea behind the “cool roof.” Last month, Atlanta joined a growing number of American cities requiring that new roofs be more reflective. That significantly reduces temperatures not just in a building, but in the surrounding urban environment. “I really wanted to be able to approach climate change in the city of Atlanta with a diversity of tactics,” said City Council member Liliana Bakhtiari, who authored the bill, “because it’s far easier to change a local climate than it is a global one.”

Because cities set their own building codes, they can regulate roofs regardless of the whims of the Trump administration, which is aggressively rolling back climate policies. Experts say cool roofs are a simple, relatively cheap, and effective way to save people from extreme heat. “I like to say that reflective materials transform rooftops from problem to power,” said Daniel J. Metzger, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Cool roofs give homeowners the power to improve health outcomes and air quality while saving money on their own energy bills.”

Other cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, have also passed cool-roof ordinances, but they often only cover flat roofs, like you’d see on a commercial building. Atlanta’s ordinance covers all roofs, though it only mandates that new ones be made cool — it’s not forcing anyone to rip theirs off if it’s not time to replace. So it’ll take some time for every roof in the city to change, but Atlanta is also rapidly growing with new construction. “It’s going to be kind of a gradual, ongoing, but ideally a permanent response to rising temperatures,” said Brian Stone, director of the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech. “This is pushing Atlanta into one of the more forward-looking cities.”

The Smart Surfaces Coalition — a nonprofit that works with cities to enact cool roof ordinances — estimates that Atlanta’s new building code will cool the city overall by 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit during peak summer temperatures, and by as much as 6.3 degrees in the city’s hottest neighborhoods. It further calculates that over a 35 year period, the ordinance will result in $310 million in energy savings, due to residents having to run their air conditioners less. “It’s a super cost-effective way to make the city healthier, more competitive, cut energy bills, and protect jobs,” said Greg Kats, founder and CEO of the Smart Surfaces Coalition.

A cool roof is a passive technology that keeps working on its own. For the flat roof of a commercial building, a simple coat of white paint will do. Manufacturers also make special cool roof shingles that reflect more sunlight. Whatever the strategy, cool roofs are no more expensive to install than traditional ones, and can even be cheaper. They also extend the life of a roof because there’s less wear and tear of the material expanding in the heat, then contracting when it cools down. 

Like any other city, Atlanta is struggling with the urban heat island effect: As a summer day wears on, the built environment of asphalt, brick, and concrete absorbs more of the sun’s warmth. This raises temperatures perhaps 20 degrees Fahrenheit above the surrounding countryside, where there’s more vegetation releasing water vapor to cool the air. At night, that stored heat slowly releases from a city, keeping temperatures abnormally high into the morning. 

The urban heat island effect gets especially bad in lower-income neighborhoods, where there’s typically less tree cover than in richer areas. “These folks are getting the triple whammy,” said Mark Conway, a councilmember who sponsored Baltimore’s cool roof ordinance. “Not only is it hotter in those areas of the city, but then also, they don’t have the trees and the shade to help them, nor can they pay for the AC.” 

The urban heat island effect gets extra dangerous during heat waves that stretch several days, because human bodies can’t get a break from relentlessly high temperatures. The stress builds and builds, in particular imperiling those with asthma and heart conditions, as the body tries to pump more blood to cool itself off. Infants and the elderly are also at higher risk because their bodies don’t cool as efficiently as other people. Accordingly, extreme heat kills twice as many people in the United States each year as hurricanes and tornadoes combined.

While getting more air conditioners into more homes will help save lives as cities get hotter, it’s not a cure-all. For one, the units use a lot of energy, and Atlanta’s residents already deal with some of the highest energy burdens in the country, meaning a significant proportion of their income goes to electric bills. Two, air conditioners actually make urban heat worse: They work by extracting heat from indoor air and pumping it outside — that’s why you feel a blast of hot air if you walk by one of them. And if the grid goes down because too many people are running their AC and other appliances at once, everyone’s now at much higher risk. “When a house loses power, if its only intervention to stay cool is air conditioning, it’s very likely that people inside of that home are going to quickly overheat,” said Grace Wickerson, senior manager of climate and health at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit thinktank.

At the same time, American cities are complementing cool roofs with more trees — Cleveland, for example, has set a goal of getting all its residents within a 10-minute walk of a green space by 2045. Trees provide shade and also release cooling water vapor, like rural vegetation does. Parks and gardens also soak up rainwater, preventing flooding. “There’s just a long litany of good reasons to plant as many trees as possible, and cool roofs don’t take away from that,” Metzger said. “They work together to overall cool the city.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Atlanta is embracing a cheap, effective way to beat urban heat: ‘cool roofs’ on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

This is the idea behind the “cool roof.” Last month, Atlanta joined a growing number of American cities requiring that new roofs be more reflective. That significantly reduces temperatures not just in a building, but in the surrounding urban environment. “I really wanted to be able to approach climate change in the city of Atlanta with a diversity of tactics,” said City Council member Liliana Bakhtiari, who authored the bill, “because it’s far easier to change a local climate than it is a global one.”

Because cities set their own building codes, they can regulate roofs regardless of the whims of the Trump administration, which is aggressively rolling back climate policies. Experts say cool roofs are a simple, relatively cheap, and effective way to save people from extreme heat. “I like to say that reflective materials transform rooftops from problem to power,” said Daniel J. Metzger, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Cool roofs give homeowners the power to improve health outcomes and air quality while saving money on their own energy bills.”

Other cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, have also passed cool-roof ordinances, but they often only cover flat roofs, like you’d see on a commercial building. Atlanta’s ordinance covers all roofs, though it only mandates that new ones be made cool — it’s not forcing anyone to rip theirs off if it’s not time to replace. So it’ll take some time for every roof in the city to change, but Atlanta is also rapidly growing with new construction. “It’s going to be kind of a gradual, ongoing, but ideally a permanent response to rising temperatures,” said Brian Stone, director of the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech. “This is pushing Atlanta into one of the more forward-looking cities.”

The Smart Surfaces Coalition — a nonprofit that works with cities to enact cool roof ordinances — estimates that Atlanta’s new building code will cool the city overall by 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit during peak summer temperatures, and by as much as 6.3 degrees in the city’s hottest neighborhoods. It further calculates that over a 35 year period, the ordinance will result in $310 million in energy savings, due to residents having to run their air conditioners less. “It’s a super cost-effective way to make the city healthier, more competitive, cut energy bills, and protect jobs,” said Greg Kats, founder and CEO of the Smart Surfaces Coalition.

A cool roof is a passive technology that keeps working on its own. For the flat roof of a commercial building, a simple coat of white paint will do. Manufacturers also make special cool roof shingles that reflect more sunlight. Whatever the strategy, cool roofs are no more expensive to install than traditional ones, and can even be cheaper. They also extend the life of a roof because there’s less wear and tear of the material expanding in the heat, then contracting when it cools down. 

Like any other city, Atlanta is struggling with the urban heat island effect: As a summer day wears on, the built environment of asphalt, brick, and concrete absorbs more of the sun’s warmth. This raises temperatures perhaps 20 degrees Fahrenheit above the surrounding countryside, where there’s more vegetation releasing water vapor to cool the air. At night, that stored heat slowly releases from a city, keeping temperatures abnormally high into the morning. 

The urban heat island effect gets especially bad in lower-income neighborhoods, where there’s typically less tree cover than in richer areas. “These folks are getting the triple whammy,” said Mark Conway, a councilmember who sponsored Baltimore’s cool roof ordinance. “Not only is it hotter in those areas of the city, but then also, they don’t have the trees and the shade to help them, nor can they pay for the AC.” 

The urban heat island effect gets extra dangerous during heat waves that stretch several days, because human bodies can’t get a break from relentlessly high temperatures. The stress builds and builds, in particular imperiling those with asthma and heart conditions, as the body tries to pump more blood to cool itself off. Infants and the elderly are also at higher risk because their bodies don’t cool as efficiently as other people. Accordingly, extreme heat kills twice as many people in the United States each year as hurricanes and tornadoes combined.

While getting more air conditioners into more homes will help save lives as cities get hotter, it’s not a cure-all. For one, the units use a lot of energy, and Atlanta’s residents already deal with some of the highest energy burdens in the country, meaning a significant proportion of their income goes to electric bills. Two, air conditioners actually make urban heat worse: They work by extracting heat from indoor air and pumping it outside — that’s why you feel a blast of hot air if you walk by one of them. And if the grid goes down because too many people are running their AC and other appliances at once, everyone’s now at much higher risk. “When a house loses power, if its only intervention to stay cool is air conditioning, it’s very likely that people inside of that home are going to quickly overheat,” said Grace Wickerson, senior manager of climate and health at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit thinktank.

At the same time, American cities are complementing cool roofs with more trees — Cleveland, for example, has set a goal of getting all its residents within a 10-minute walk of a green space by 2045. Trees provide shade and also release cooling water vapor, like rural vegetation does. Parks and gardens also soak up rainwater, preventing flooding. “There’s just a long litany of good reasons to plant as many trees as possible, and cool roofs don’t take away from that,” Metzger said. “They work together to overall cool the city.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Atlanta is embracing a cheap, effective way to beat urban heat: ‘cool roofs’ on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

Decades of scientific research has proven that human-caused climate change is making some disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat, warms the planet, and alters the conditions in which extreme weather forms. These changes are happening more rapidly than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to climate records. 

Below, we break down what experts know — and what they don’t — about the connections between climate change and extreme heat. 

The relationship between climate change and heat waves is perhaps the most straightforward of any disaster. “If we have an extreme heat wave, the null hypothesis is, ‘Climate change is making that worse,’” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, told Grist after a record-breaking heatwave hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021. The planet has already warmed 2 degrees Fahrenheit compared to pre-industrial times, and most heat waves we’ve experienced since have either been caused or strengthened by that. In 2020, scientists concluded that extreme heat in Siberia — with temperatures nearing 100 degrees in the Arctic Circle — was made 600 times more likely because of greenhouse gas emissions. 

Cities in the U.S. are seeing 100-degree days more often, and they’re not just reserved for the dead of summer. Some places, like Houston, have hit triple digits in February. Cities with mild climates might be ill-equipped to respond to the new normal, and will need to invest in interventions like better warning systems and outreach, subsidizing air conditioning installations in low-income housing, maintaining a network of public cooling centers and transportation services during heat waves, and strengthening the electrical grid to withstand the additional energy load. 

Policies barring utility companies from disconnecting electric services can also protect vulnerable residents, who may be afraid to run their AC all day due to the costs. Forty states have disconnection moratoriums during extreme cold — but only 21 have similar laws for extreme heat. 

Nighttime temperatures are rising as well, intensifying the risk of heat waves. This is especially troubling for people who don’t have access to air conditioning (over 35 million people in the U.S., for example), or those who live in urban heat islands, where the abundance of heat-trapping concrete combined with a lack of trees and shade in some neighborhoods can cause temperatures to rise 15 to 20 degrees higher than neighborhoods with parks and green spaces.  

Extreme heat can cause a myriad of health problems and even be deadly, particularly for the elderly, those who work outdoors, unhoused people, and people with pre-existing heart or lung conditions. Even for healthy adults, extreme heat can make it difficult for the body to cool itself off, which puts acute stress on the heart and kidneys. A recent study found that chronic heat exposure ages the body more than habitual smoking. Between 2004 and 2021, the number of Americans who officially died from heat exposure rose by 439 percent. On average over the last 30 years, heat waves have killed more people than hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes. 

Even though it’s becoming more common and more dangerous, FEMA still does not classify extreme heat as a natural disaster, so federal funding to support local relief efforts is not available. Labor unions, environmental groups, and health professionals are pushing the federal agency to change that. Some advocates even say that heat waves should be named and ranked on a simple scale, like hurricanes are, to increase public awareness about the risks of extreme heat. For example, a pilot program in Seville, Spain, named heat waves (similar to hurricanes), and ranked them in three classifications based on severity. Each category triggered specific alerts and public health interventions like cooling centers and wellness checks. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change is worsening extreme heat on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amal Ahmed.

Decades of scientific research has proven that human-caused climate change is making some disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat, warms the planet, and alters the conditions in which extreme weather forms. These changes are happening more rapidly than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to climate records. 

Below, we break down what experts know — and what they don’t — about the connections between climate change and extreme heat. 

The relationship between climate change and heat waves is perhaps the most straightforward of any disaster. “If we have an extreme heat wave, the null hypothesis is, ‘Climate change is making that worse,’” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, told Grist after a record-breaking heatwave hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021. The planet has already warmed 2 degrees Fahrenheit compared to pre-industrial times, and most heat waves we’ve experienced since have either been caused or strengthened by that. In 2020, scientists concluded that extreme heat in Siberia — with temperatures nearing 100 degrees in the Arctic Circle — was made 600 times more likely because of greenhouse gas emissions. 

Cities in the U.S. are seeing 100-degree days more often, and they’re not just reserved for the dead of summer. Some places, like Houston, have hit triple digits in February. Cities with mild climates might be ill-equipped to respond to the new normal, and will need to invest in interventions like better warning systems and outreach, subsidizing air conditioning installations in low-income housing, maintaining a network of public cooling centers and transportation services during heat waves, and strengthening the electrical grid to withstand the additional energy load. 

Policies barring utility companies from disconnecting electric services can also protect vulnerable residents, who may be afraid to run their AC all day due to the costs. Forty states have disconnection moratoriums during extreme cold — but only 21 have similar laws for extreme heat. 

Nighttime temperatures are rising as well, intensifying the risk of heat waves. This is especially troubling for people who don’t have access to air conditioning (over 35 million people in the U.S., for example), or those who live in urban heat islands, where the abundance of heat-trapping concrete combined with a lack of trees and shade in some neighborhoods can cause temperatures to rise 15 to 20 degrees higher than neighborhoods with parks and green spaces.  

Extreme heat can cause a myriad of health problems and even be deadly, particularly for the elderly, those who work outdoors, unhoused people, and people with pre-existing heart or lung conditions. Even for healthy adults, extreme heat can make it difficult for the body to cool itself off, which puts acute stress on the heart and kidneys. A recent study found that chronic heat exposure ages the body more than habitual smoking. Between 2004 and 2021, the number of Americans who officially died from heat exposure rose by 439 percent. On average over the last 30 years, heat waves have killed more people than hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes. 

Even though it’s becoming more common and more dangerous, FEMA still does not classify extreme heat as a natural disaster, so federal funding to support local relief efforts is not available. Labor unions, environmental groups, and health professionals are pushing the federal agency to change that. Some advocates even say that heat waves should be named and ranked on a simple scale, like hurricanes are, to increase public awareness about the risks of extreme heat. For example, a pilot program in Seville, Spain, named heat waves (similar to hurricanes), and ranked them in three classifications based on severity. Each category triggered specific alerts and public health interventions like cooling centers and wellness checks. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change is worsening extreme heat on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amal Ahmed.

Decades of scientific research has proven that human-caused climate change is making some disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat, warms the planet, and alters the conditions in which extreme weather forms. These changes are happening more rapidly than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to climate records. 

Below, we break down what experts know — and what they don’t — about the connections between climate change and flooding. 

Flooding is one of the most common natural disasters that can devastate a community. Between 2000 and 2019, nearly 1.6 billion people globally were impacted by floods, according to a study published in Nature. 

In the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been criticized for outdated and incomplete maps that severely underestimate the number of people living in areas with a high risk of flooding. In 2018, a study estimated 41 million Americans live within a 100-year flood zone, or a region with a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year — over three times FEMA’s estimate of 13 million. 

In 2023, for example, thousands of homes in Vermont flooded during a historic storm, and some that weren’t officially listed on any floodplain maps were inundated with 5 feet of water. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 flooded some 200,000 homes or businesses, including tens of thousands of structures not classified as being in the flood zone.  

This undercount results in fewer people holding flood insurance policies than are actually at risk, leaving homeowners without financial support when disaster hits (regular home insurance does not cover floodwater). And because there are no federal requirements for a seller to disclose previous floods, potential home buyers might not even know they should have a policy. 

Floods can happen almost anywhere — not just next to bodies of water. Heavy rain can cause rivers and even small creeks to overflow. Strong winds can create storm surges, causing ocean water to inundate coastal communities. In urban and suburban areas, flash flooding takes place when heavy rain can’t drain through paved, concrete surfaces; it pools in streets and overwhelms sewer systems. 

Climate change is creating more extreme rainstorms, as warmer air can hold more moisture that will eventually come down as rain. Put another way: Earth “sweats” more as warmer air causes more water to evaporate and then condense and fall as rain. Models suggest that these storms can also stall for an extended period of time, deluging an area with more water than it can handle. Making matters worse, these storms can hit after extreme droughts and heat waves, a climate trend known as “weather whiplash.” When soil becomes hard and dry, it acts more like concrete, unable to soak up the excess water as effectively as it would in normal conditions. 

The warming oceans are also affecting rainfall: The Gulf of Mexico’s waters supercharged Hurricane Helene, for example, which made landfall in Florida before quickly moving inland and dumping 40 trillion gallons of water across the Southeast and into Appalachia. 

As rainfall becomes more extreme, experts have warned that existing flood control infrastructure won’t be adequate to protect communities in the future and is struggling under current conditions. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual infrastructure report card rates the nation’s dams, levees, and stormwater systems. This year, none of these categories received a grade above a D. These systems are in need of billions of dollars of repair and upgrades already, on top of the added stresses of climate change. In 2025, the Trump administration pulled funding for these types of projects as it reversed course from the previous administration’s climate goals, so many planned improvements are tied up in legal battles. Meanwhile, other projects being studied and planned aren’t factoring in the risks posed by climate change. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change is worsening flooding and heavy rainfall on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amal Ahmed.

Decades of scientific research has proven that human-caused climate change is making some disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat, warms the planet, and alters the conditions in which extreme weather forms. These changes are happening more rapidly than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to climate records. 

Below, we break down what experts know — and what they don’t — about the connections between climate change and tornadoes. 

Readers from southern and central U.S. states are likely accustomed to the sound of tornado sirens during spring and summer. But tornadoes are not exclusive to that part of the world — they have been recorded everywhere except Antarctica. All it takes is a mass of cold, dry air colliding with a warmer, moist one, which usually happens during a thunderstorm. If these air masses begin to rotate, a funnel-shaped cloud forms, bringing dangerous high-speed winds that can rip homes from their foundations. 

In the U.S., these storms most frequently form in “tornado alley,” an area in the central U.S. that includes Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, and the Dakotas. But they’re also common in southern states, including Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and some parts of the Midwest. 

Predicting exactly when, why, and where a tornado may hit has long mystified meteorologists and forecasters. Tornadoes form fast and move unpredictably. The temperature, humidity, and wind speeds might be exactly right, but some thunderstorms produce dozens of tornadoes while other storm patterns don’t produce any. Forecasting and warning systems have gotten much better over the years, but the lead time for a tornado warning is still about 10 minutes, compared to days for a hurricane evacuation. 

Climate scientists haven’t yet established if global warming has impacted the frequency or strength of tornadoes. But there have been some unusual events in recent years, as more tornadoes have touched down in the eastern United States. In December 2021, an outbreak of thunderstorms and tornadoes made headlines after nearly 100 people were killed across several states in the Midwest, South, and Great Plains. Typically, tornadoes don’t occur late into winter months, so these communities were caught off guard, leaving many to scramble to seek shelter. Warmer winter temperatures may contribute to tornado conditions, but more research is needed to understand the link.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change may be affecting tornadoes on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amal Ahmed.

Decades of scientific research has proven that human-caused climate change is making some disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat, warms the planet, and alters the conditions in which extreme weather forms. These changes are happening more rapidly than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to climate records. 

Below, we break down what experts know — and what they don’t — about the connections between climate change and wildfires. 

In a hotter, drier world, wildfires have become more frequent and destructive. Scientists have definitively linked anthropogenic climate change to increased wildfire risks: A 2016 study found that, because of human-caused carbon emissions, the total number of large fires since 1984 had doubled. A 2021 study supported by NOAA similarly concluded that climate change is primarily responsible for wildfire conditions, like hotter and drier summers. Wildfires themselves also release carbon when trees and other vegetation go up in flames. Globally, in 2023, wildfires caused 8.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. 

The Western United States is the epicenter of the country’s growing wildfire crisis: Dry, hot conditions are getting more dangerous, snow is melting earlier in the spring, and summer droughts have become more severe. Warming temperatures also encourage outbreaks of pests like bark beetles, weakening or killing wide swaths of forests. This dead and dried out vegetation becomes kindling waiting for a spark — whether that’s trash or debris fires, lightning strikes, or ill-advised fireworks. 

But these risky conditions are now more common in other parts of the country as well. On the East Coast, states are experiencing more “fire weather” days per year than they were 50 years ago. In New Jersey’s Pine Barren forest, for example, dry fall and winter conditions mean that deciduous trees shed drier leaves onto the forest floor — essentially, kindling waiting for a spark. 

As the conditions that fuel wildfires have worsened, so too has the number of people living in wildfire-prone zones. Between 1990 and 2010, according to the Forest Service, housing developments in the “wildland-urban interface” — a vulnerable ecological area where housing abuts or intermingles with the edges of forest — increased by 41 percent. 

Like most climate events, wildfires are an inherent natural process, and plant species have adapted to live alongside lower-intensity, cyclical fires. For thousands of years, Indigenous tribes reduced fire risks by using controlled or cultural burns, strategically clearing areas of dried-up vegetation before nature takes its course. European settlers, and later the federal government, did not have the same relationship to fires and forests. The cultural and ecological practice was banned for centuries in some states, including California. The U.S. Forest Service also had a “10 a.m. policy” for decades that instructed fire agencies to extinguish every blaze the same day it started — even those burning low and slow. Abandoning controlled burns and focusing on fire suppression caused a buildup of dead vegetation that helped fuel larger fires. Only recently have some ecologists and lawmakers reversed course, collaborating with tribes to reintroduce controlled burns to improve forest management. 

“There are solutions we have in our knowledge and in our management approaches that can help restore these ecosystems and can also benefit the public,” U.S. Forest Service research ecologist Frank K. Lake, a descendant of the Karuk tribe, told Grist in 2020. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change is supercharging wildfires on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amal Ahmed.

Decades of scientific research has proven that human-caused climate change is making some disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat, warms the planet, and alters the conditions in which extreme weather forms. These changes are happening more rapidly than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to climate records. 

Below, we break down what experts know — and what they don’t — about the connections between climate change and hurricanes. 

Every spring, the Climate Prediction Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, releases its forecast for the upcoming hurricane season, which lasts from June 1 through November 30. The agency’s projections for the Atlantic Ocean — and the communities living along the United States’ Eastern and Gulf coasts — paints an increasingly grim picture: Most seasonal predictions are now what NOAA considers “above normal,” with more hurricanes forming and warmer ocean waters fueling these storms to rapidly intensify into larger, more dangerous ones. Smaller-scale climate trends, like the El Niño and La Niña climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean, can also influence hurricane season. 

Hurricanes are intensifying at the same time that sea levels are rising, worsening the risks of flooding from dangerous storm surges. An unusual Pacific Ocean hurricane that hit Alaska in 2022, for example, caused a storm surge so powerful that a town 18 miles inland experienced major, unexpected flooding. 

Hurricanes are also developing stronger wind speeds, going through rapid intensification, and growing wetter — dropping more rain when they make landfall — as ocean waters heat up and air becomes warmer, thereby holding more moisture. In 2024, 11 hurricanes formed in the Atlantic Ocean. Five strengthened to major storms, Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Two of them — Beryl, which hit Houston in July, and Milton, which landed in Florida in October — peaked as Category 5 storms, the highest rating on the scale. 

“We would have had zero Category 5 storms without human-caused climate change,” Daniel Gilford, a climate scientist, told Grist in 2024. 

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Hurricanes or tropical storms are also increasingly moving slowly or stalling over land, unleashing devastating wind and rain on communities for days at a time, rather than the typical hours. Hurricane Harvey in 2017, for example, hit Texas as a Category 4 storm and sat over the southeastern part of the state for nearly four days, dumping upwards of 50 inches of rain and causing widespread flooding.

As storms become more intense, some scientists have cautioned that the current hurricane rating system might need an upgrade. The Saffir-Simpson scale’s categories — which only measure wind speed — are no longer a good proxy for potential danger or damage. Several recent storms have either exceeded Category 5 wind speeds or packed a wallop in other ways, from devastating rain or storm surge, not measured by the system. Meanwhile, researchers at Louisiana State University have also found that the official length of hurricane season, starting in June and ending in November, may also need to be extended. In 2023, a storm was observed forming over warm ocean waters as early as January. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change is intensifying hurricanes on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amal Ahmed.

Author David Robie and Little Island Press are about to publish next week a 40th anniversary edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, a first-hand account of the relocation of the Rongelap people by Greenpeace’s flagship Rainbow Warrior in 1985.

Dr Robie joined what turned out to be the ill-fated voyage of the Rainbow Warrior from Hawai’i across the Pacific, with its first stop in the Marshall Islands and the momentous evacuation of Rongelap Atoll.

After completing the evacuation of the 320 people of Rongelap from their unsafe nuclear test-affected home islands to Mejatto Island in Kwajalein Atoll, the Rainbow Warrior headed south via Kiribati and Vanuatu.

• READ MORE: Other Eyes of Fire reports

After a stop in New Zealand, it was scheduled to head to the French nuclear testing zone at Moruroa in French Polynesia to protest the then-ongoing atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by France for decades.

But French secret agents attached bombs to the hull of the Rainbow Warrior while it was tied up at a pier in Auckland. The bombs mortally damaged the Warrior and killed Greenpeace photographer Fernando Peirera, preventing the vessel from continuing its Pacific voyage.

The new edition of Eyes of Fire will be launched on July 10 in New Zealand.

“This edition has a small change of title, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, and has an extra 30 pages, with a new prologue by former Prime Minister Helen Clark,” Dr Robie said in an email to the Journal.

“The core of the book is similar to earlier editions, but bookended by a lot of new material: Helen’s Prologue, Bunny McDiarmid’s updated Preface and a long Postscript 2025 by me with a lot more photographs, some in colour.”

Dr Robie added: “I hope this edition is doing justice to our humanitarian mission and the Rongelap people that we helped.”

He said the new edition is published by a small publisher that specialises in Pacific Island books, often in Pacific languages, Little Island Press.

• For more information about the new book: https://littleisland.nz/books/eyes-fire

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“This bill will leave America a far crueler and weaker place,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, in a statement. It “races the United States and the world toward climate catastrophe, ending support for renewable energy that is absolutely vital to avert worst-case climate scenarios.”

The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” has now been approved by both chambers of Congress; all it needs now is Trump’s signature before it can become law. Trump is expected to sign it during an evening ceremony on July 4, Independence Day, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

One of Republicans’ biggest victories in the bill is the extension of deep tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term, which are estimated to cost the country more than $4 trillion over 10 years. The legislation also directs roughly $325 billion to the military and to border security, while cutting nearly $1 trillion in funding for Medicaid, the joint state and federal program that covers medical costs for lower-income people.

To pay for the tax breaks, the bill sunsets clean energy tax credits that were put in place by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, making wind and solar projects ineligible unless they start construction before July 2026 or are placed in service by 2027. It also imposes an expedited phaseout of consumer tax credits for new and used electric vehicles — by September 30 this year instead of by 2032. Green groups described the legislation as “historically ruinous” and “a self-inflicted tragedy for our country.”

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The IRA’s tax credits and additional incentives for green energy from the bipartisan infrastructure act, also passed under former president Joe Biden, were projected to reduce the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent by 2030. Combined with additional action from states, cities, and private companies, they could have put the U.S. on track to meet the country’s emissions reduction target under the United Nations Paris Agreement.

Once Trump signs the megabill, however, the U.S. will have no federal plan to address the climate crisis.

“Every lawmaker who voted for this cynical measure chose tax cuts for the wealthiest over Americans’ health, pocketbooks, public lands, and waters — and a safe climate. They should be ashamed,” said Manish Bapna, president of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement.

Agriculture experts have also objected to Trump’s policy bill, which removes the requirement that unobligated climate-targeted funds from the IRAInflation Reduction Act be funneled toward climate-specific projects — in part so they can be directed toward programs under the current farm bill, an omnibus bill for food and agriculture that the federal government renews every five to six years. The Trump megabill seeks to increase subsidies to commodity farms by about $50 billion.

The final version of the bill doesn’t include a proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands; this was dropped following outcry from the public and some conservation-minded GOP lawmakers. It also lacks stringent limits on the use of Chinese components in renewable energy projects that were proposed in an earlier version of the bill. Some Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate voted for the legislation in exchange for carveouts in their states, like reduced work requirements for food stamps and less severe health care cuts.

Read Next

Trump’s tax bill could be a major win for Big Ag. Everyone else? Not so much.

Ayurella Horn-Muller

In the Thursday House vote, only two Republicans broke with their party to vote against Trump’s megabill: Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes measures that would increase the federal deficit, and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who had hesitated to support cuts to Medicaid.

All Democrats voted against the bill. Immediately preceding the House vote, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York railed against the policy in a record-breaking 8 hour and 45-minute House floor speech invoking scripture: “Our job is to stand up for the poor, the sick, and the afflicted,” he said. 

Members of the Congressional Progressive have promised to hold Republicans accountable. More than three dozen of its members have said they’ll hold “Accountability Summer” events lambasting Republican lawmakers who supported the bill. “As Democrats, we must make sure they never live that down,” the group’s chair, Greg Casar, a Democrat of Texas, said in a statement.

Similarly, Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat for Hawaiʻi, told The New York Times that his party should use the megabill’s spending cuts as a cudgel against Republicans ahead of next year’s midterm elections: “Our job is to point out, when kids get less to eat, when rural hospitals shutter, when the price of electricity goes up, that this is because of what your Republican elected official did,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘A self-inflicted tragedy’: Congress approves reversal of US climate policy on Jul 3, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Immediately after killing Fernando Pereira and blowing up Greenpeace’s flagship the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, several of the French agents went on a ski holiday in New Zealand’s South Island to celebrate.

Such was the contempt the French had for the Kiwis and the abilities of our police to pursue them.  How wrong they were.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the French terrorist attack Little Island Press has published a revised and updated edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, first released in 1986.

• READ MORE: Clark warns in new Pacific book renewed nuclear tensions pose ‘existential threat to humanity’
• Other Rainbow Warrior articles

A new prologue by former prime minister Helen Clark and a preface by Greenpeace’s Bunny McDiarmid, along with an extensive postscript which bring us up to the present day, underline why the past is not dead; it’s with us right now.

Written by David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report, who spent 11 weeks on the final voyage of the Warrior, the book is the most remarkable piece of history I have read this year and one of those rare books that has the power to expand your mind and make your blood boil at the same time. I thought I knew a fair bit about the momentous events surrounding the attack — until I read Eyes of Fire.

Heroes of our age
The book covers the history of Greenpeace action — from fighting the dumping of nuclear and other toxic waste in European waters, the Arctic and the Pacific, voyages to link besieged communities across the oceans, through to their epic struggles to halt whaling and save endangered marine colonies from predators.

The Rainbow Warrior’s very last voyage before the bombing was to evacuate the entire population of Rongelap atoll (about 320 people) in the Marshall Islands who had been exposed to US nuclear radiation for decades.

This article is the first of two in which I will explore themes that the book triggered for me.

Neither secret nor intelligent – the French secret intelligence service

Jean-Luc Kister was the DGSE (Direction-générale de la Sécurité extérieure) agent who placed the two bombs that ripped a massive hole in the hull of the Warrior on 10 July 1985. The ship quickly sank, trapping Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira inside.

Former colonel Kister was a member of a large team of elite agents sent to New Zealand. One had also infiltrated Greenpeace months before, some travelled through the country prior to the attack, drinking, rooting New Zealand women and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that led all the way to the Palais de l’Élysée where François Mitterrand, Socialist President of France, had personally given the order to bomb the famous peace vessel.

Robie aptly calls the French mission “Blundergate”. The stupidity, howling incompetence and moronic lack of a sound strategic rationale behind the attack were only matched by the mendacity, the imperial hauteur and the racist contempt that lies at the heart of French policy in the Pacific to this very day.

Thinking the Kiwi police would be no match for their élan, their savoir-faire and their panache, some of the killers hit the ski slopes to celebrate “Mission Accompli”. Others fled to Norfolk Island aboard a yacht, the Ouvéa.

Tracked there by the New Zealand police it was only with the assistance of our friends and allies, the Australians, that the agents were able to escape. Within days they sank their yacht at sea during a rendezvous with a French nuclear submarine and were evenually able to return to France for medals and promotions.

Two of the agents, however, were not so lucky. As everyone my age will recall, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, were nabbed after a lightning fast operation by New Zealand police.

With friends and allies like these, who needs enemies?
We should recall that the French were our allies at the time. They decided, however, to stop the Rainbow Warrior from leading a flotilla of ships up to Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia where yet another round of nuclear tests were scheduled. In other words: they bombed a peace ship to keep testing bombs.

By 1995, France had detonated 193 nuclear bombs in the South Pacific.

David Robie sees the bombing as “a desperate attempt by one of the last colonial powers in the Pacific to hang on to the vestiges of empire by blowing up a peace ship so it could continue despoiling Pacific islands for the sake of an independent nuclear force”.

The US, UK and Australia cold-shouldered New Zealand through this period and uttered not a word of condemnation against the French. Within two years we were frog-marched out of the ANZUS alliance with Australia and the US because of our ground-breaking nuclear-free legislation.

It was a blessing and the dawn of a period in which New Zealanders had an intense sense of national pride — a far cry from today when New Zealand politicians are being referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes associated with the Gaza genocide.

The French State invented the term ‘terrorism’
I studied French History at university in France and did a paper called “La France à la veille de révolution” (France on the eve of revolution). One of the chilling cultural memories is of the period from September 1793 to July 1794, which was known as La Terreur.

At the time the French state literally coined the term “terrorisme” — with the blade of the guillotine dropping on neck after neck as the state tried to consolidate power through terror. But, as Robie points out, quoting law professor Roger S. Clark, we tend to use the term today to refer almost exclusively to non-state actors.

With the US and Israel gunning down starving civilians in Gaza every day, with wave after wave of terror attacks being committed inside Iran and across the Middle East by Mossad, the CIA and MI6, we should amend this erroneous habit.

The DGSE team who attached limpet mines to the Rainbow Warrior did so as psychopathic servants of the French State. Eyes of Fire: “At the time, Prime Minister David Lange described the Rainbow Warrior attack as ‘nothing more than a sordid act of international state-backed terrorism’.”

Don’t get me wrong. I am not “anti-French”. I lived for years in France, had a French girlfriend, studied French history, language and literature. I even had friends in Wellington who worked at the French Embassy.

Curiously when I lived next to Premier House, the official residence of the prime minister, my other next door neighbour was a French agent who specialised in surveillance. Our houses backed onto Premier House. Quelle coïncidence. To his mild consternation I’d greet him with “Salut, mon espion favori.” (Hello, my favourite spy).

What I despise is French colonialism, French racism, and what the French call magouillage. I don’t know a good English word for it . . .  it is a mix of shenanigans, duplicity, artful deception to achieve unscrupulous outcomes that can’t be publicly avowed. In brief: what the French attempted in Auckland in 1985.

Robie recounts in detail the lying, smokescreens and roadblocks that everyone from President Mitterrand through to junior officials put in the way of the New Zealand investigators. Mitterrand gave Prime Minister David Lange assurances that the culprits would be brought to justice. The French Embassy in Wellington claimed at the time: “In no way is France involved. The French government doesn’t deal with its opponents in such ways.”

It took years for the bombshell to explode that none other than Mitterrand himself had ordered the terrorist attack on New Zealand and Greenpeace!

We the people of the Pacific
We, the people of the Pacific, owe a debt to Greenpeace and all those who were part of the Rainbow Warrior, including author David Robie. We must remember the crime and call it by its name: state terrorism.

The French attempted to escape justice, deny involvement and then welched on the terms of the agreement negotiated with the help of the United Nations secretary-general.

A great way to honour the sacrifice of those who stood up for justice, who stood for peace and a nuclear-free Pacific, and who honoured our own national identity would be to buy David Robie’s excellent book.

I’ll give the last word to former Prime Minister Helen Clark:

“This is the time for New Zealand to link with the many small and middle powers across regions who have a vision for a world characterised by solidarity and peace and which can rise to the occasion to combat the existential challenges it faces — including of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence. If our independent foreign policy is to mean anything in the mid-2020s, it must be based on concerted diplomacy for peace and sustainable development.”

You cannot sink a rainbow.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz

• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie. This article was first published by Solidarity website and is the first part of a two-part series.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Immediately after killing Fernando Pereira and blowing up Greenpeace’s flagship the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, several of the French agents went on a ski holiday in New Zealand’s South Island to celebrate.

Such was the contempt the French had for the Kiwis and the abilities of our police to pursue them.  How wrong they were.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the French terrorist attack Little Island Press has published a revised and updated edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, first released in 1986.

• READ MORE: Clark warns in new Pacific book renewed nuclear tensions pose ‘existential threat to humanity’
• Other Rainbow Warrior articles

A new prologue by former prime minister Helen Clark and a preface by Greenpeace’s Bunny McDiarmid, along with an extensive postscript which bring us up to the present day, underline why the past is not dead; it’s with us right now.

Written by David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report, who spent 11 weeks on the final voyage of the Warrior, the book is the most remarkable piece of history I have read this year and one of those rare books that has the power to expand your mind and make your blood boil at the same time. I thought I knew a fair bit about the momentous events surrounding the attack — until I read Eyes of Fire.

Heroes of our age
The book covers the history of Greenpeace action — from fighting the dumping of nuclear and other toxic waste in European waters, the Arctic and the Pacific, voyages to link besieged communities across the oceans, through to their epic struggles to halt whaling and save endangered marine colonies from predators.

The Rainbow Warrior’s very last voyage before the bombing was to evacuate the entire population of Rongelap atoll (about 320 people) in the Marshall Islands who had been exposed to US nuclear radiation for decades.

This article is the first of two in which I will explore themes that the book triggered for me.

Neither secret nor intelligent – the French secret intelligence service

Jean-Luc Kister was the DGSE (Direction-générale de la Sécurité extérieure) agent who placed the two bombs that ripped a massive hole in the hull of the Warrior on 10 July 1985. The ship quickly sank, trapping Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira inside.

Former colonel Kister was a member of a large team of elite agents sent to New Zealand. One had also infiltrated Greenpeace months before, some travelled through the country prior to the attack, drinking, rooting New Zealand women and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that led all the way to the Palais de l’Élysée where François Mitterrand, Socialist President of France, had personally given the order to bomb the famous peace vessel.

Robie aptly calls the French mission “Blundergate”. The stupidity, howling incompetence and moronic lack of a sound strategic rationale behind the attack were only matched by the mendacity, the imperial hauteur and the racist contempt that lies at the heart of French policy in the Pacific to this very day.

Thinking the Kiwi police would be no match for their élan, their savoir-faire and their panache, some of the killers hit the ski slopes to celebrate “Mission Accompli”. Others fled to Norfolk Island aboard a yacht, the Ouvéa.

Tracked there by the New Zealand police it was only with the assistance of our friends and allies, the Australians, that the agents were able to escape. Within days they sank their yacht at sea during a rendezvous with a French nuclear submarine and were evenually able to return to France for medals and promotions.

Two of the agents, however, were not so lucky. As everyone my age will recall, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, were nabbed after a lightning fast operation by New Zealand police.

With friends and allies like these, who needs enemies?
We should recall that the French were our allies at the time. They decided, however, to stop the Rainbow Warrior from leading a flotilla of ships up to Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia where yet another round of nuclear tests were scheduled. In other words: they bombed a peace ship to keep testing bombs.

By 1995, France had detonated 193 nuclear bombs in the South Pacific.

David Robie sees the bombing as “a desperate attempt by one of the last colonial powers in the Pacific to hang on to the vestiges of empire by blowing up a peace ship so it could continue despoiling Pacific islands for the sake of an independent nuclear force”.

The US, UK and Australia cold-shouldered New Zealand through this period and uttered not a word of condemnation against the French. Within two years we were frog-marched out of the ANZUS alliance with Australia and the US because of our ground-breaking nuclear-free legislation.

It was a blessing and the dawn of a period in which New Zealanders had an intense sense of national pride — a far cry from today when New Zealand politicians are being referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes associated with the Gaza genocide.

The French State invented the term ‘terrorism’
I studied French History at university in France and did a paper called “La France à la veille de révolution” (France on the eve of revolution). One of the chilling cultural memories is of the period from September 1793 to July 1794, which was known as La Terreur.

At the time the French state literally coined the term “terrorisme” — with the blade of the guillotine dropping on neck after neck as the state tried to consolidate power through terror. But, as Robie points out, quoting law professor Roger S. Clark, we tend to use the term today to refer almost exclusively to non-state actors.

With the US and Israel gunning down starving civilians in Gaza every day, with wave after wave of terror attacks being committed inside Iran and across the Middle East by Mossad, the CIA and MI6, we should amend this erroneous habit.

The DGSE team who attached limpet mines to the Rainbow Warrior did so as psychopathic servants of the French State. Eyes of Fire: “At the time, Prime Minister David Lange described the Rainbow Warrior attack as ‘nothing more than a sordid act of international state-backed terrorism’.”

Don’t get me wrong. I am not “anti-French”. I lived for years in France, had a French girlfriend, studied French history, language and literature. I even had friends in Wellington who worked at the French Embassy.

Curiously when I lived next to Premier House, the official residence of the prime minister, my other next door neighbour was a French agent who specialised in surveillance. Our houses backed onto Premier House. Quelle coïncidence. To his mild consternation I’d greet him with “Salut, mon espion favori.” (Hello, my favourite spy).

What I despise is French colonialism, French racism, and what the French call magouillage. I don’t know a good English word for it . . .  it is a mix of shenanigans, duplicity, artful deception to achieve unscrupulous outcomes that can’t be publicly avowed. In brief: what the French attempted in Auckland in 1985.

Robie recounts in detail the lying, smokescreens and roadblocks that everyone from President Mitterrand through to junior officials put in the way of the New Zealand investigators. Mitterrand gave Prime Minister David Lange assurances that the culprits would be brought to justice. The French Embassy in Wellington claimed at the time: “In no way is France involved. The French government doesn’t deal with its opponents in such ways.”

It took years for the bombshell to explode that none other than Mitterrand himself had ordered the terrorist attack on New Zealand and Greenpeace!

We the people of the Pacific
We, the people of the Pacific, owe a debt to Greenpeace and all those who were part of the Rainbow Warrior, including author David Robie. We must remember the crime and call it by its name: state terrorism.

The French attempted to escape justice, deny involvement and then welched on the terms of the agreement negotiated with the help of the United Nations secretary-general.

A great way to honour the sacrifice of those who stood up for justice, who stood for peace and a nuclear-free Pacific, and who honoured our own national identity would be to buy David Robie’s excellent book.

I’ll give the last word to former Prime Minister Helen Clark:

“This is the time for New Zealand to link with the many small and middle powers across regions who have a vision for a world characterised by solidarity and peace and which can rise to the occasion to combat the existential challenges it faces — including of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence. If our independent foreign policy is to mean anything in the mid-2020s, it must be based on concerted diplomacy for peace and sustainable development.”

You cannot sink a rainbow.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz

• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie. This article was first published by Solidarity website and is the first part of a two-part series.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Though the move was celebrated by Governor Gavin Newsom as he signed the bills into law, it has exposed tensions between the progressive priorities that motivate Democratic lawmakers. Housing affordability advocates have clashed with those promoting environmental justice, with the former boosting the bills and the latter remaining wary. More broadly, the move exposes divisions between those who want more tools to mitigate climate change and environmentalists who would rather maintain strict limits on what can be built and how.

The reforms target the California Environmental Quality Act, which then-governor Ronald Reagan signed more than 50 years ago. Known as CEQA, the legislation requires public agencies and decision-makers to evaluate the environmental impact of any project requiring government approval, and to publicize any effects and mitigate them if feasible.

Supporters say the law has prevented or altered scores of projects that would have been detrimental to the environment or Californians’ quality of life. But CEQA has also become the basis for a regular stream of formal complaints and lawsuits that pile substantial costs and delays onto projects that are ultimately found to have minimal harmful effects — sometimes killing them entirely. In one infamous instance, opponents of student housing near the University of California, Berkeley argued that the associated noise would constitute environmental pollution under CEQA, which led to a three-year legal battle that the university only won after it went to the state Supreme Court. Examples like this have led CEQA, which was once a national symbol of environmental protection, to become vilified as a cause of the state’s chronic housing shortage.

After this week’s reforms, most urban housing projects will now be exempt from the CEQA process. The new legislation also excepts many zoning changes from CEQA, as well as certain nonresidential projects including health clinics, childcare centers, and advanced manufacturing facilities, like semiconductor and nanotech plants, if they are sited in areas already zoned for industrial uses. (A related bill also freezes most updates to building efficiency and clean energy standards until 2031, angering climate advocates who otherwise support the push for denser housing.) Governor Newsom used a budgetary process to push the long-debated changes into law, with strong bipartisan support. 

Some activists welcomed the changes, saying they will lead to denser “infill” housing on vacant or underutilized urban land, slower growth in rents and home prices, and shorter commutes — with the welcome byproduct of fewer planet-warming emissions. 

“For those that view climate change as one of the key issues of our time, infill housing is a critical solution,” read one op-ed supporting the measures. Other environmentalists, however, lambasted the changes as environmentally destructive giveaways to developers. After Newsom signed the legislation, the Sierra Club California put out a statement calling the changes “half-baked” measures that “will have destructive consequences for environmental justice communities and endangered species across California.”

At a time when President Donald Trump’s assaults on climate policy and environmental protections have galvanized opposition from the left, what unfolded in California serves as a reminder that, even among Democrats, a divide remains on the extent to which regulation can help — or hurt — the planet. It’s the type of pickle that liberals across the country may increasingly face on issues ranging from zoning to permitting reform for renewable energy projects, which can face costly delays when they encounter procedural hurdles like CEQA. (Indeed, in California, CEQA has been an impediment to not just affordable housing but also solar farms and high-speed rail.)

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“How do we make sure the regulations we pass to save the planet don’t harm the planet?” asked Matt Lewis, director of communications for California YIMBY, a housing advocacy organization and proponent of the CEQA reforms. Transportation accounts for the largest portion of California’s carbon footprint, and Lewis argues that denser housing will be key to keeping people closer to their jobs. But, he said, people with a “not in my backyard” attitude have abused CEQA to slow down those beneficial projects. (His organization’s name is a play on this so-called NIMBY disposition, with YIMBY standing for “yes in my backyard.”)

“One of the leading causes of climate pollution is the way we permit or do not permit housing to be built in urban areas,” Lewis said, adding that more urban development could reduce pressure to build on unused land in more sensitive areas. He pointed to other legal backstops, like state clean water and air laws, that can accomplish the environmental protection goals often cited by supporters of the CEQA process. “CEQA isn’t actually the most powerful law to make sure that manufacturing facilities and other industrial facilities protect the environment,” he said.

In short, Lewis believes that any downsides of the new reforms pale in comparison to their benefits for both people and the planet. “Did we fix it perfectly this time? I’m willing to admit, no,” he said, adding that any shortcomings that environmentalists are concerned about could be repaired in future legislative sessions.

But many environmentalists contend that the downsides in the new legislation are too large.

“We put one foot forward but we take another step back,” said Miguel Miguel, director of Sierra Club California, noting his opposition to the nonresidential exemptions. He said that CEQA often acts as a first line of defense that allows community input on development projects. Without it, he argues, community voices will be marginalized. Miguel speaks from personal experience: CEQA helped save the mobile home park where he grew up from being replaced by more expensive apartments. 

Kim Delfino, an environmental attorney and consultant who followed the legislation, said that the scope of the reforms expanded from simple support for urban housing development to become “a potpourri of industry and developer desires.” She added that CEQA requires biological surveys that can be the first step to invoking other environmental protections.

“If you never look, you will never know if there are endangered species there,” she said. “We’ve decided to take a head-in-the-sand approach.”

This impasse between environmentalists and housing-focused advocates like Lewis is now decades-old and among the reasons that CEQA reforms — or rollbacks, depending on whom you ask — have taken so long to come about. As the fight has drawn out, skepticism has become entrenched. 

“Maybe I’m wrong,” California YIMBY’s Lewis said of his optimism that the latest changes can thread the needle between the state’s housing needs and environmental priorities. But, he added, he’d rather defer to elected lawmakers than environmentalists, who have long opposed his housing advocacy. “The environmental movement in California has been fundamentally dishonest about housing,” he charged.

The Sierra Club’s Miguel, for his part, hopes for more cooperation between the competing parties, lest the disagreements poison future legislative efforts. At the end of the day, all parties involved share the same broad goals, if with different levels of emphasis.

“We have to do everything and anything all at once,” he said, referring to climate and environmental policy. “That is fine art.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can weaker environmental rules help fight climate change? California just bet yes. on Jul 2, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

Ten years after the Paris Agreement, nations are still nowhere near ambitious enough in their commitments to reduce emissions and avoid the worst consequences of climate change. More than that, they haven’t shown enough follow-through on the goals they did set. Instead, it’s been cities and other local governments that have taken the lead. According to a new report by the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy and C40 — a global network of nearly 100 mayors prioritizing climate action, collectively representing nearly 600 million people —  three quarters of the cities in the latter group are slashing their per capita emissions faster than their national governments. As global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, per capita emissions across C40’s cities fell 7.5 percent on average between 2015 and 2024.

“The untold story is that cities and local leaders really mobilized in a big way in Paris, but also in the decade since,” said Asif Nawaz Shah, co-author of the report and the head of impact and global partnerships at C40 and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy. “It’s where the action happens, and it’s also where people are suffering the impacts the most.”

Cities are adapting because they’re experiencing especially acute effects of climate change as their populations rapidly grow. They’re getting much hotter than surrounding rural areas due to the urban heat island effect, in which the built environment soaks up the sun’s energy during the day and slowly releases it at night. Because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, they’re suffering increasingly catastrophic flooding as rains overwhelm sewer systems designed for the climate of yesteryear. And coastal cities have to deal with sea-level rise, in addition to fiercer tropical storms.

Mayors can more quickly deploy fixes than national governments can, climate experts say. Cities are less politically divided, for instance, and officials are more in tune with the immediate needs of their residents than a faraway federal government is. “I think that’s part of what makes it easier for mayors to make the case for climate action, because they’re not just addressing a concept that can seem a little abstract,” Shah said. “They’re addressing it through the lens of what people’s lived realities and experiences are.”

By making their cities more liveable, mayors also make them more sustainable, especially when it comes to walkability, bikeability, and vehicle transportation. The report notes that Melbourne, Australia is on a quest to create “20-minute neighborhoods,” in which people can reach most of their daily needs — work, schools, grocery stores — within a 20-minute return walk from home. Over in Shenzhen, China, officials have electrified 16,000 buses, reducing annual CO2 emissions by over 200,000 tons. 

And by literally greening their cities, mayors solve a bunch of their citizens’ problems at once. In Quezon City in the Philippines, the government turned unused land into 337 gardens and 10 model farms, while training more than 4,000 urban farmers. The report also notes that Freetown, Sierra Leone, planted more than 550,000 trees, creating more than 600 jobs. In addition to significantly reducing urban temperatures, these green spaces also mitigate flooding by soaking up rainwater. “It is becoming clear, I think, to a lot of municipalities that this type of action will be absolutely essential,” said Dan Jasper, senior policy advisor at the climate solutions group Project Drawdown, which wasn’t involved in the report. “It’s not just about being uncomfortable. This is about protecting people’s lives.”

Mayors are also improving access to clean energy and more efficient appliances. The report notes that Buenos Aires, Argentina installed solar panels on more than 100 schools, while Qab Elias, Lebanon went a step further by partnering with a private supplier to allow half of its homes to install solar. 

It’s not as if all nations are leaving cities to their own devices, though. The Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships, for instance, is an initiative signed by more than 70 national governments to help cities, states, and regions with planning and financing climate action. “I find it very heartening, to be honest, that cities really are taking the lead,” Jasper said. “I think they’re going above and beyond in some respects, about planning for the future, as well as actually implementing some of the things that the federal governments have signed on to.”

Still, not nearly enough funding is flowing to cities and other local governments to do all the climate action they need. Unlike national governments, they can’t print their own money, so they’re strictly limited by their budgets. Conservative governments like the Trump administration are also slashing funds for climate action. Last year, 611 cities disclosed 2,500 projects worth $179 billion, but urban climate finance has to rise to $4.5 trillion each year by 2030, the report says. These are not donations but investments with returns: Spending money now to adapt to climate change means spending less on disaster recovery and health care in the future. “It’s not a call for handouts or for freebies,” Shah said. “It’s a call for genuine long-term investment that will yield results to protect citizens and livelihoods.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As nations lag on climate action, their cities are stepping up. Here’s proof. on Jul 2, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

If approved by the House of Representatives and signed by Trump, the legislation will make the deepest cuts to America’s social safety net in decades and unravel the country’s only existing federal plan to diminish the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. 

“This sweeping legislation is the most anti-environmental bill of all time and will do extreme harm to our communities, our families, our climate, and our public lands,” the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group, said in a statement. 

The estimated cost of the GOP’s top policy priority — extending tax cuts from 2017 — is more than $4 trillion over 10 years. In order to offset those tax cuts, Senate Republicans sought to slash spending on green energy approved by Democrats during former president Joe Biden’s term, among other programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. The clean energy subsidies formed the heart of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the largest climate spending bill in American history.

The legislation now goes back to the House of Representatives, which passed a less expensive version of the megabill in May, before it goes to Trump’s desk for his signature. The House legislation would have sunsetted the IRA’s investment and production tax credits for wind and solar power within 60 days of the bill’s enactment, an aggressive timeline that renewable energy groups said would weaken their their industry and disincentivize new renewable projects. Fears over regulatory changes have already led to the cancellation of $15.5 billion in clean energy investments this year. 

The Senate legislation is only marginally less punitive to the clean energy industry. Wind and solar projects that either start construction before July 2026 or are placed in service by 2027 would be able to take full advantage of existing tax credits. Under the IRA, those credits were set to continue in some form until the country achieved substantial emissions reductions.

An earlier version of the Senate bill also included an extra “excise” tax on wind and solar, which an analysis by the American Clean Power Association showed would increase consumer energy prices up to 10 percent and cost clean energy businesses as much as $7 billion by 2036. That tax was removed from the legislation before the final vote on Tuesday. Conservative lawmakers disclaimed responsibility for the tax’s initial inclusion in the text. “I don’t know where it came from,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina, told NBC. 

The earlier House bill placed strict limits on using Chinese components in renewable energy projects. The Senate version eased that proposal to include fewer penalties for moderate use of China-linked hardware. But Senate Republicans sped up the House’s proposed phaseout for consumer tax credits for new and previously owned electric vehicles by two months, from the end of this year to September 30. Consumers previously had until 2032 to take advantage of them. 

The bill does not include the massive and controversial sell-off of public lands championed by Senator Mike Lee, from Utah, who withdrew that amendment after facing backlash in his state and across the country. 

The Senate-approved phaseout of tax credits for wind and solar comes at a time when demand for industrial power is skyrocketing in the U.S. as energy-hungry data centers and clean technology factories crop up across the country. “The intentional effort to undermine the fastest-growing sources of electric power will lead to increased energy bills, decreased grid reliability, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs,” the American Clean Power Association, a clean energy lobbying group, said in a statement. “We can’t afford to pick winners and losers when it comes to reliable, American-made energy.” 

The changes made by the Senate during a 24-hour period of intense debate could set up many more hours of debate in the lower congressional chamber. The House squeaked through its version of the bill by striking a balance between moderate Republicans from blue states like California and New York who wanted higher caps on state and local income tax deductions and fiscal hawks from deep-red states who wanted deeper spending cuts. The Senate’s version is about $800 billion more expensive, an increase that could tee up a fight over clean energy tax credit timelines and more. Chip Roy, Republican lawmaker from Texas who wants deeper cuts to green spending, already called it “a deal-killer of an already bad deal.”

Some Republican senators think that’s a good thing. 

Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska who sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune this April asking him to preserve the clean energy tax credits, was the last holdout in the Senate after Paul, Tillis, and Collins made it clear they were going to vote against the Senate bill. Despite the bill’s consequences for clean energy, Murkowski agreed to support the bill after obtaining a set of carveouts for her state on food stamp work requirements and healthcare cuts. 

After voting for the bill, Murkowski expressed misgivings about its contents. “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet,” she told reporters.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Senate Republicans just voted to dismantle America’s only climate plan on Jul 1, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

This year’s term, which began in October and ended last week, was a bit different. The justices issued a number of decisions related to climate and the environment, but none of them was a “blockbuster,” according to University of Vermont Law and Graduate School emeritus professor Pat Parenteau. 

Arguably, the decisions that will have the greatest potential consequences for climate and environmental policy came from cases that weren’t explicitly about the planet at all. 

Rather, they were decisions that legitimized the executive branch’s actions to fire personnel and block funding already appropriated by Congress. These actions may have far-reaching effects on federal agencies that work on climate and environmental issues, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, and the Department of Agriculture, which have already been affected by layoffs and funding cuts, as well as early retirement offers intended to get longtime staffers to voluntarily leave their posts.

“What’s being done is irredeemable,” Parenteau added. “The brain drain, the firing of people, the defunding — those are causing really, really long-term damage to the institutional capabilities of the federal government to implement and enforce environmental law.” 

Three of the court’s decisions help illustrate what has happened. 

Two of them — Trump v. Wilcox and Office of Personnel Management v. American Federation of Government Employees — which came earlier in the session, have made it possible for decisions by President Donald Trump to move forward while they are being litigated in lower courts, reversing orders from federal judges that had temporarily paused them. These decisions have effectively allowed firings without cause at the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, and have stopped six federal agencies from bringing back probationary employees that the Trump administration had fired. 

Then last week, on the last day of its term, the Supreme Court issued a sweeping decision in Trump v. CASA that limits the power of the country’s more than 1,000 district court judges to issue nationwide injunctions against presidential orders. Those judges’ injunctions are now supposed to target only the plaintiffs in a given case. 

“Trump is the big winner in this decision,” Parenteau said. 

One of the the decision’s most immediate consequences is that it will allow Trump’s unconstitutional limits to birthright citizenship to go into effect in July. In theory, it also means that Trump could issue an executive order illegally rolling back some environmental policy, and district courts would have less power to stop it while a legal challenge makes its way through the courts. District court judges can still issue nationwide injunctions against rules from federal agencies, and they can issue nationwide injunctions against executive orders that are challenged by a large number of plaintiffs, as in a class action lawsuit. Circuit court judges’ injunction powers remain unchanged.

Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA Law, said the court’s decisions affecting funding and personnel have “giant implications.” They raise “huge questions about the balance between the executive branch and Congress, and the executive branch’s ability and authority to simply ignore what Congress has appropriated.”

Kirti Datla, director of strategic legal advocacy for the nonprofit Earthjustice, said this term’s Supreme Court decisions have been “enabling” the Trump administration in its attempts to shrink the size of the government and eliminate institutional expertise. “It’s hard to quantify, but it’s impossible to deny.”

Although the justices didn’t release any landmark environmental decisions this term, the court took up multiple “unusual cases” that showed its continued interest in environmental statutes and administrative actions, according to Datla. For example, in Ohio v. EPA the court decided not to temporarily block an EPA policy requiring power plants to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, and in Diamond Alternative Energy LLC v. EPA it decided to allow oil company plaintiffs to sue the EPA for having allowed California to set its own stricter auto emissions standards than the federal government’s.

The Ohio case was “just a regular decision,” Datla said — ”getting deep into the weeds of the record and ultimately disagreeing with what a lower court had done, which is not usually how the Supreme Court spends its time.” Neither case changed existing law or resulted in a big-picture pronouncement about how to apply or interpret the law. And the Diamond case may become irrelevant anyway, since the Senate recently voted — controversially — to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke California’s auto emissions waiver. 

Other notable decisions from the Supreme Court’s term included Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which limited the scope of environmental reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. The court essentially said that such reviews don’t have to look at upstream consequences of a given project — such as oil drilling and refining, for projects like railroads that are only directly associated with transporting these fuels — and that courts should defer to federal agencies when deciding what to include in environmental impact statements.

City and County of San Francisco v. EPA found that some of the EPA’s pollution permits under the Clean Water Act are unenforceable unless the EPA writes out specific steps that water management agencies should take to comply with them. But Datla said this was a “quite narrow case” whose national implications are unclear.

The justices have not yet added any explicitly climate- and environment-related cases to their docket for its next session. But Parenteau, the emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, said he’s nervous that the court will take up a challenge to Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. That decision from 2000 said residents of South Carolina had legal standing to sue an industrial polluter, even without proving they had been harmed in a particular way. They just had to show that the pollution had impacted the “aesthetic and recreational values” of the river they liked to swim in. Overturning the case could make it more difficult for environmental advocates to file similar lawsuits. “The Laidlaw case has me very worried,” Parenteau said.

For Carlson, the UCLA Law professor, a longer-term worry is that the court’s conservative supermajority will eventually overturn the “endangerment finding,” a precedent set in 2009 saying that carbon dioxide and several other greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated by the EPA. “It’s going to get challenged, and it will get challenged up to the Supreme Court,” Carlson said.

Overall, the outlook isn’t good. The executive branch and the Supreme Court “are exhibiting extraordinary hostility to actions on climate change at a time when the planet is burning,” she said. “It’s a pretty depressing story overall.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Supreme Court just ended its term. Here are the decisions that will affect climate policy. on Jul 1, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Two recent studies — one historical and the other forward-looking — examine how rising temperatures have made and could continue to make agricultural production less efficient, fundamentally reshaping the global food system as producers try to adapt to hotter growing seasons.

The findings illuminate the bind that farmers and consumers find themselves in. Agricultural production is a driver of climate change; it’s estimated to be responsible for somewhere between a quarter and a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. But it is also hampered by the changes in weather patterns associated with climate change. While producers struggle to harvest the same amounts of food in the face of droughts, heat waves, and hurricanes, shoppers are more likely to face climbing food prices.  

The forward-looking study, published June 18 in Nature, analyzes the impact of warming temperatures on the caloric output of agricultural production. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability found that for every additional degree Celsius of warming above the 2000-2010 average, the global food system will produce roughly 120 fewer calories per person per day.

In a scenario where the Earth experiences 3 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, that’s the equivalent of everyone on the planet missing out on breakfast, said Andrew Hultgren, lead author of the study.

Hultgren and his colleagues compiled a massive dataset on the production of six staple crops in more than 12,000 regions spread out over 54 countries. They then modeled how different warming scenarios might impact crop production; they also factored in how farmers around the world are adapting to higher temperatures. What they found is that, even with adaptation, global warming is associated with an “almost a linear decline in caloric output,” said Hultgren, who is also an assistant professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Measuring agricultural adaptation and its impact on output was important, said Hultgren, because research often assumes that farmers either adapt perfectly to global warming or not at all. The reality is that adapting to any growing season challenges comes at some cost, and farmers are constantly weighing the business benefits of implementing new techniques.

For example, one tool that corn farmers in the U.S. Midwest have to prevent hot days from thwarting their harvest is planting crop varietals that mature relatively quickly. “Corn is very sensitive to extreme heat,” said Hultgren, “so one very hot day can actually be bad for your entire growing season yield.”

But fast-maturing varietals also often produce lower yields overall, meaning these farmers likely can’t sell as much corn as they would have under cooler weather conditions, said Hultgren. “So there’s literally a cost of avoiding that extreme heat,” he said. 

A drop in the global supply of crops will also lead to an uptick in food prices. But Hultgren noted that the impacts of reduced agricultural output won’t be evenly distributed. In wealthier countries such as the U.S., for example, those who can afford higher food prices will likely eat the cost. In poorer countries, these shifts could worsen food insecurity. 

Additionally, rising temperatures will impact producers unevenly; the study estimated that in a high-warming climate scenario, corn farmers in the U.S. will experience 40 to 50 percent losses in yield by the end of the century. Based on these projections, “you wonder if the Corn Belt continues to be the Corn Belt,” said Hultgren. Meanwhile, other regional producers — like rice farmers in South and Southeast Asia — will see yields grow in the same time frame.  “There are absolutely regional winners and losers in this global aggregate,” he said.

The historical study, published June 20 in Nature Geosciences, looks at one of the ways agricultural production contributes to global warming: land clearing. When farmers want to cultivate new cropland, they often start by removing the plants that are already growing there, whether that’s grass, shrubs, or trees. When land clearing happens in carbon-rich regions in the Global South, like the Amazon rainforest, it increases deforestation and carbon emissions, said Jessica Till, the study’s co-lead author. 

“Deforestation in tropical areas is one of the most urgent issues and biggest areas of concern,” said Till, a research scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. (Till and Hultgren were not involved in each other’s studies.) “The more land you clear, the more forest you remove to create cropland, that’s going to have a negative effect on the climate.”

Till and the other study authors examined this feedback loop between agriculture and the environment: When crop production becomes less efficient due to extreme weather and heat, farmers must acquire and clear more land to boost production. That expansion in croplands then in turn results in higher greenhouse gas emissions, which exacerbates warming and makes crop production even less efficient. 

They found that, even with improvements in agricultural productivity (due to technological improvements like new seed varieties and precision fertilizer application), climate change was responsible for 88 million hectares, or 217 million acres, in cropland expansion globally — an area roughly twice the size of California — between 1992 and 2020. 

They also determined that this expansion was led by major agricultural producers, including the United States, India, China, Russia, and Brazil. Unsurprisingly, these countries were also the top five highest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions stemming from climate-driven expansions in cropland. 

Both Till and Hultgren noted that these shifts can also influence global trade. When certain regions see a decline in agricultural productivity, said Till, other regions will gain a competitive advantage in the international market for agricultural commodities. 

Erwan Monier, co-director of the Climate Adaptation Research Center at the University of California Davis, said he was not surprised by either studies’ findings, and said they contribute to the growing body of research on climate impacts on agriculture. 

But he added that both come with caveats. Monier noted that the Nature study on caloric output fails to consider possible future advances in technologies like genetic editing that could make crops much more resilient to climate change. He said the paper demonstrates that “in order to really limit the impact of climate on our ability to grow food, we’re going to need a scale of innovation and adaptation that is really substantial, and that’s going to be a real challenge.”

Referring to the Nature Geosciences paper on the feedback loop between agriculture and climate, Monier said that it similarly does not take into account how farmer behavior might change in response to global warming. 

“The fact is we have an ability to change what grows where,” said Monier. In the U.S., for example, where corn and soy production reign, farmers could choose to plant different crops if they see yields fall consistently. These growers will not “continue growing corn with very low yields and invest more capital and land with very, very low returns,” said Monier. “Farmers are going to move away to something that actually is more valuable and grows well” — and that, in turn, could reduce the need to clear more land.

Monier acknowledged that the latter study might come across as quite pessimistic. But, he said, it underscores the importance of having difficult conversations now about how to grow enough food to feed the world’s population as temperatures climb. 

In order to avoid serious losses in agricultural production, he said, climate researchers and institutions must work hand-in-hand with farmers, helping them understand the risks of global warming and seek out new ways of adapting. This work should be “bottom up,” said Monier, rather than “top down.” “We need to engage the people who are going to be actually growing the food.”

He added that this will involve work that extends beyond the academic sphere. “I don’t know if publishing in Nature and Nature Geoscience is the way to really drive the bottom-up adaptation at the scale that is necessary.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What does climate change mean for agriculture? Less food, and more emissions on Jun 30, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark has warned the country needs to maintain its nuclear-free policy as a “fundamental tenet” of its independent foreign policy in the face of gathering global storm clouds.

Writing in a new book being published next week, she says “nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present.

“The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now sits at 89 seconds to midnight,” she says in the prologue to journalist and media academic David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior.

• READ MORE: 40 years on: Reflecting on Rainbow Warrior’s legacy, fight against nuclear colonialism
• Other Eyes of Fire reports

Writing before the US surprise attack with B-2 stealth bombers and “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, Clark says “the Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons”.

The Doomsday Clock references the Ukraine war theatre where “use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia”.

Also, the arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals, she says.

“North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity.”

‘Serious ramifications’
Clark, who was also United Nations Development Programme administrator from 2009 to 2017, a member of The Elders group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, and is an advocate for multilateralism and nuclear disarmament, says an outright military conflict between China and the United States “would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.”

She advises New Zealand to be wary of Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States.

“There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry,” Clark says.

“This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.

“Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development
of more lethal weaponry.”

In the face of the “current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.

Clark says that the years 1985 – the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 — and 1986 were critical years in the lead up to New Zealand’s nuclear-free legislation in 1987.

“New Zealanders were clear – we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”

Chronicles humanitarian voyage
The book Eyes of Fire chronicles the humanitarian voyage by the Greenpeace flagship to the Marshall Islands to relocate 320 Rongelap Islanders who were suffering serious community health consequences from the US nuclear tests in the 1950s.

The author, Dr David Robie, founder of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, was the only journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior in the weeks leading up to the bombing.

His book recounts the voyage and nuclear colonialism, and the transition to climate justice as the major challenge facing the Pacific, although the “Indo-Pacific” rivalries between the US, France and China mean that geopolitical tensions are recalling the Cold War era in the Pacific.

Dr Robie is also critical of Indonesian colonialism in the Melanesian region of the Pacific, arguing that a just-outcome for Jakarta-ruled West Papua and also the French territories of Kanaky New Caledonia and “French” Polynesia are vital for peace and stability in the region.

Eyes of Fire is being published by Little Island Press, which also produced one of his earlier books, Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific.

• Greenpeace executive director Dr Russel Norman is launching Eyes of Fire at the Ellen Melville Centre Pioneer Women’s Hall at 6pm on the bombing anniversary day, July 10, following a memorial vigil in the morning on board the current flagship Rainbow Warrior III.
• Eyes of Fire microsite (Little island Press)

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

On May 16, 2025 a tornado tore through predominantly Black north St. Louis, killing 5, and leaving thousands of homes, businesses and schools either destroyed or with roofs ripped off. A month later, many buildings still had blue tarps over the top as the only way to protect them from hot summer downpours.

Without consulting the teachers’ union, School Superintendent Millicent Borishade outlined a policy to move students from seven damaged buildings to other schools which were selected according to “bell schedules, proximity from the original schools, space utilization, athletics and principal input.”

Upon learning of the proposal, Ray Cummings, presidents of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 420 in St. Louis, wrote to the superintendent that it could result in serious conflicts between students. He explained that there is often mistrust between students from different neighborhoods. Cummings warned that violence could easily erupt by cramming such groups together.

Missouri AFT President Carron “CJ” Johnson told me during an interview that she agreed with Cummings that Borishade’s proposal “threatens to create unsafe conditions by consolidating students from different areas into overcrowded, unfamiliar environments, heightening tensions and security risks to those who may not be wearing the right color shoes for that neighborhood.” She also emphasized that St. Louis already has problems with school buses and that the administration should not be making the transportation situation worse.

But the superintendent’s plan would crowd Yeatman-Liddell Middle School into Gateway Middle, which has a capacity of 658 students. Their combined total would be 737 students. Johnson pointed out that “Dunbar Middle School never should have been closed and if it could be re-opened it could accommodate students from Yeatman-Liddell or any other school that would be able to enter it.”

The capacity of Miller Career Academy is 1013 students. A similarly dubious part of the superintendent’s measure would be to transfer students from two damaged schools to Miller, bringing its enrollment to 1253.

Superintendent Borishade relocated from Seattle to St. Louis in 2023. AFT’s president Johnson said that the superintendent “is not in tune with students, families or workers. She is not listening to people on the ground. She is not changing her narrative to fit with the people of St. Louis.”

One of the big concerns for Cummings and Johnson, as well as other union members and parents, is that schools hit hard by the May 2025 tornado may never be reopened and that the buildings could be sold to charter school operators. For years, pro-privatization groups such “Opportunity Trust” have provided money to those pushing charter schools in St. Louis. They try, and often succeed, in electing candidates to the St. Louis Board of Education (i.e., “School Board”) who typically advocate closing as many public schools as possible. Others run for the School Board to win approval for their own charter school.

Privatizers push hard to open charters in Black neighborhoods, claiming that Black parents must send their children to charter schools if they want them to learn how to read. The two great ironies of this argument are that (a) those coordinating such charter school schemes are typically white and (b) there is no evidence that Black children who attend Missouri charters have better reading scores than those attending public schools.

Critics have documented that charter schools represent a range of threats to public education. Charters typically do not require professional and non-professional staff to have the same level of degrees and qualifications as do public schools. As a result, they offer lower pay and fewer benefits to staff that may result in greater turn-around and less bonding with students.

Charters often offer fewer academic hours and extra-curricular activities as do public schools. They can “cream” students, meaning that they only admit students with the best academic records or fewest behavioral problems. Even if they do not “cream,” they are very likely to “dump” problem students back to public schools.

Charter schools may not test the proficiency of students the same way public schools do, meaning it is harder to evaluate their claims of success. Above all, decision-making processes for charters are not done by publicly elected boards, meaning that parents and others may have little to no ability to influence governing bodies set up to increase corporate profits.

When Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans in 2005 privatizers smelled a gold mine. The May 7, 2025 webinar on “Defending Public Education” was co-hosted by the Green Party of St. Louis and AFT Local 420. Dave Cash, President of the United Teachers of New Orleans, described how the “near total privatization of New Orleans public schools had devastating consequences for communities, teaching staff and students.”

Like St. Louis, New Orleans teachers have had a hard time getting decision-makers to listen to them, a task made more challenging to those organizing a union when the privatizers are motivated by profit rather than concern with education. Like New Orleans, those in St. Louis are worried that those interested in undermining public education will let no catastrophe be overlooked as an opportunity to destroy what should be our right as citizens. As climate-related crises escalate, so will openings to dismantle public services.

The problem of top administrators ignoring sound advice from those who carry out daily tasks brings up the very old question of “workers control.” Should unions limit themselves to “bread and butter” issues like pay, benefits, sick leave and vacation? Or, should unions seek more control over the work lives and decision-making power for employees? It is a core question of whether working people should accept their roles as mere cogs in the wheel of production or seek to humanize labor by defining their own jobs.

One of the best known current advocate of workers’ control is Michael Albert, who originated the idea of “participatory economics” or “parecon.” Albert emphasizes ways tasks can be shared so that there are “more and more people having a more and more appropriate level of say over their own lives.”

Historically, the concept of workers control has been emphasized as a safety and health issue. People working in factories are worried about injuries from unsafe use of tools or speed-up causing accidents and injuries. But now that a huge number of union members are in professional jobs, workers’ control applies to issues such as stress, treatment by administrators and how work affects the public – such as students who could be endangered by poorly thought out policies that could increase clashes at school.

The dispute over what should be done for St. Louis schools following the climate disaster has deeper ramifications than might meet the eye. More that just asking how students should be relocated after the 2025 tornado, it brings up the question of how decisions should be made. Teachers know student strengths and weaknesses because they are in touch with them daily. It may not be enough to say school bureaucrats must listen to teachers. Is it time to establish veto power for elected worker representatives who are themselves directly affect by decisions and represent others who are similarly affected?

• Source of article is Green Social Thought.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Don Fitz.

But those who attended this week’s conference in Bonn, which concluded on Thursday, say that negotiators made only halting progress. While diplomats made headway on measures to help countries adapt to the effects of global warming and prepare their workers for the energy transition, they stalled out on two critical issues that could derail negotiations at COP30, this year’s United Nations climate conference in Belém, Brazil, in November. As a result, there is still little clarity on the path to mobilizing $1.3 trillion in climate-related funding for developing nations, a key promise made at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, last year. Countries also failed to move beyond procedural discussions about how to phase out fossil fuels worldwide, in accordance with an agreement made at the climate talks in Dubai nearly two years ago. 

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We have a lot more to do before we meet again in Belém,” said Simon Stiell, executive secretary for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body which oversees UN climate talks. “There is so much more work to do to keep 1.5 alive, as science demands,” he added, referring to the landmark goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, itself a result of COP negotiations, to keep planetary warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit compared to preindustrial levels.

As at past climate summits, the key conflicts in Bonn appeared to be about money. In Baku last year, countries were locked in a protracted debate over how much funding richer, developed nations should provide to help poorer, industrializing nations move away from fossil fuels and adapt to climate change. Although researchers estimated that developing countries need trillions of dollars to do so, wealthy nations only committed to $300 billion in transfers per year by 2035. And while the decision in Baku recognized a larger need by calling on rich countries to help raise $1.3 trillion in global climate investment, it provided no specifics on how this will be accomplished. 

In order to develop a pathway to expand and clarify those financial goals, Brazilian and Azerbaijani climate diplomats began an effort to develop what they called the “Baku to Belém roadmap,” a report intended to lay out how rich nations could mobilize the $1.3 trillion in funding. At Bonn, Brazilian officials were expected to begin finding common ground with other countries to make the roadmap a reality. Instead, however, the meeting began with a contentious debate over whether a provision on climate finance from developed to developing countries should be on the agenda at all. The dispute, which suggested that tensions between developed and developing countries over who would pay for climate action and how have only grown, consumed the first two days of the conference. That left little time to discuss the roadmap.

“Countries are quite uncertain about the roadmap, how it’s going to look, and to what extent it will reflect the views of all countries,” said Sandra Guzmán Luna, who has attended every COP since 2008 and is the general director of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean, a research and advocacy initiative in the region. “There are more doubts about the roadmap than support.”

The uncertainty around finance has ripple effects on the scale of climate ambition that developing nations are willing to display. Countries are required to submit plans for lowering their greenhouse gas emissions — formally called Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs — every five years. Despite a deadline looming later this year, only two dozen or so countries have submitted updated NDCs. Guzmán Luna said that many developing countries are refusing to submit new NDCs with more ambitious climate goals because of a lack of financial support from wealthy nations. Given that rich, early-industrializing countries caused the lion’s share of global warming so far, the argument goes, it’s only fair that they should shoulder most of the burden of financing the energy transition.

“There is a clear political statement from many developing countries that if there is no money, they are not going to increase ambition,” said Guzmán Luna. “It’s a legitimate point from developing countries to say so — but obviously, it’s a huge risk for climate action.”

These disagreements don’t bode well for negotiations at COP30 in Belém, where world leaders will gather amid mounting frustration over a growing pile of unfulfilled promises from previous COPs.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This year’s UN climate talks are already behind — 5 months before COP30 kicks off in Brazil on Jun 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

Nearly 1,000 UNESCO chair positions have been established in universities across 120 countries. But only a handful of them — fewer than 10 — have been explicitly dedicated to issues facing Indigenous peoples.

Now, two Indigenous researchers from Canada and India have been tapped to co-chair a new role dedicated to advancing Indigenous rights through strengthening data sovereignty, stemming language loss, and improving research practices. Amy Parent, a member of the Nisga’a Nation in British Colombia, and Sonajharia Minz of the Oraon Tribal Peoples in India have been named co-chairs of the UNESCO Chair in Transforming Indigenous Knowledge Research Governance and Rematriation. 

Indigenous knowledge has long suffered under colonial rule, and now, Indigenous languages and ways of life are increasingly at risk due to climate change. More than half of the world’s 7,000 languages are on track for extinction, an end which could be hastened by the climate crisis. Sea level rise, storms, and rising heat are forcing Indigenous peoples to leave their homelands and making it harder for communities to maintain traditional languages, lifestyles, and cultural practices. Those same extreme weather events are exacerbating existing health risks for elders and other knowledge holders, some of whom are the last in their communities to be native language speakers. At the same time, traditional ecological knowledge, often captured within Indigenous languages, is increasingly seen as a climate solution. 

“When we look at Indigenous knowledge systems, everything’s connected,” Parent said. “Language is connected to land, land is connected with language, it’s connected to thinking, it’s connected to health. It’s connected to how we learn. And so when we start damaging one, we damage everything.” 

Grist spoke with Parent about Indigenous knowledge systems, their connection to climate change, and what she hopes she and Minz can accomplish in this new role. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. One of your goals is help stem the loss of Indigenous languages, which are rapidly disappearing. How would you characterize what’s at stake? 

A. Language is everything. Language teaches us how to think and how to know and how to connect with our land and with all living beings and teaches us our relationships with everything. If the languages continue to be taken, then we lose so much knowledge and so many values and ways of living within the world that can support us in ways where all of humanity can survive. I think we’re in a really critical moment and we need to do everything we can. If we don’t have our languages, they can’t teach us how to live well in the lands and the places where we currently reside.

For example, in my nation, we have five percent of fluent speakers left. And certainly, we are seeing a reawakening of Indigenous languages around the world. But it’s also a pressing priority for us to continue restoring and revitalizing them. So that’s something that we really want to continue in terms of our work supporting the goals of the U.N. decade for Indigenous languages and continuing to work with as many language champions and language educators and teachers as possible. 

Q. Can you share more about the relationship between Indigenous languages, land, and climate? 

A. In a Nisg̱a’a teachings — considered a “total way of life” — our seasonal calendar is more than a way to mark time, it is a governance framework encoded in language. Each month carries a land-based teaching that guides how we relate to land, water, and each other. For example, X̱maay — the month “to eat berries,” aligning with July — signals the time when salmonberries and other plants ripen. But this is not only about harvesting; it’s a land-based teaching that also marks the return of the salmon. The color of the salmonberry is a cue to prepare nets, clean our jars, and get our smokehouse ready. These signals are remembered and passed on through language, linking living ecological cycles to our collective responsibilities.

This is why Indigenous languages are inseparable from land. A single word like X̱maay contains generations of climate knowledge, laws, and cultural practices. When we revitalize our languages, we are not just preserving communication, we are restoring relational systems practiced across generations.

When Indigenous languages are lost, these intergenerational signals  — our original “climate science” — are at risk of vanishing too. But when we respect, revitalize, and uphold Indigenous knowledge systems, we restore these living relationships and the teachings that uphold not only our lifeway but the renewal of Mother Earth. 

Q. What needs to happen to prevent the extinguishing of Indigenous languages? 

A. I think we need to start listening to Indigenous peoples and what’s being said first and foremost about our languages, why they’re important. We need to prioritize them in our education systems. Here in Canada, we have French and English as our dominant languages. When we look at French language funding, it is a healthy, thriving language that is disproportionately funded by the Canadian government compared to Indigenous languages. And I think sometimes as Indigenous peoples, we need to remind our own governments of the importance of our language in terms of priorities. It can be very challenging for our leaders when they’re grappling with funding issues, resource issues, health and healing crises amongst everything, that sometimes our languages get put on the back burner. And so I think it’s really important that we prioritize them in everything that we do.

Q. A decade ago, the United Nations adopted sustainable development goals to address poverty, hunger, climate change, and many other ambitious goals. Yet since then, the situation for Indigenous peoples has worsened, according to the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. What do you think about its conclusion, and what that says about the relationship between sustainable development goals and Indigenous ways of thinking? 

A. It’s a necessary critique of the work right now. These U.N. bodies are doing their best but that’s a clear example of what happens when we don’t connect these green priorities with Indigenous systems and languages. Ultimately we’re just tapping something onto an existing framework: We’re not changing capitalism or questioning anything. We’re just perpetuating ongoing systems of inequality that keep on impacting the land, the roles of women, our language, and our future generations. 

If you look at the conditions of Indigenous peoples around the world, they’ve gotten worse. That, to me, was more of an impetus for the work that we need to do. We can greenwash anything but we’re not going to change anything. Until we start to recognize the knowledge systems and the languages and the places from where we currently have the opportunity to reside and the privilege to reside, we’re not going to know how to live well within the living systems that we’re a part of and how to protect them and how to preserve them and promote them for future generations.

Q. You mentioned that you adopted the term “rematriation” rather than repatriation in part because the Nisga’a Nation is a matrilineal society. Now rematriation is part of your job as U.N. chair. What does rematriation mean to you? 

A. Repatriation itself is really still about patriarchal authority, it’s still about reinforcing colonial logics, laws, and practices. And if we’re really to honor all of the amazing women that have gotten us to where we are today, then we need to change that term and make it more relevant. Rematriation has other dimensions, but most certainly it has to do with the restoring of our matriarchal authority within our own communities that’s been impacted by colonialism. I think it’s about honoring and recognizing that as Indigenous peoples. What, for me, rematriation represents is a balancing of all the roles in our communities with our men, with two-spirit gender diverse people, with their children, with our elders, with the matriarchs, with their chiefs, and it’s about trying to bring that balance back in that’s been disrupted by colonialism. And so, for me, it’s also a process of healing and restoring and reclaiming what was really never given up. 

Q. How would you describe the significance of your new UNESCO role for Indigenous peoples? 

A. It means that we have another door open to us to be able to talk to some of those who are in power who can make decisions and shape policies to allow us to create the space that we need to support our own languages and cultures. It’s a door that I’m still learning about because I haven’t been in those rooms. But it’s the door to further conversations that can support our people. It’s for everybody and anybody who feels that they’re a rights holder for Indigenous systems and for our ways of knowing, being, and doing. 

Our roles are to keep that door open and to allow as many Indigenous peoples as possible to get into that room.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline UNESCO appoints Indigenous co-chairs to protect languages and knowledge amid climate crisis on Jun 25, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

Current CO₂ readings at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, as of June 15, 2025: 430.07 ppm, which is the highest daily average on record. Excessive atmospheric CO₂ is the primary source of extreme heat. One needs to go back millions of years to find higher levels. In 2016, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a global body of climate scientists stated: “CO2 at 430 ppm would push the world beyond its target for avoiding dangerous climate change.” We are there!

No business or government on Earth is impacted by climate change more so than the insurance industry. It’s the biggest canary in the coal mine. Swiss Re Ltd (founded 1863) is one of the world’s largest reinsurers. The company’s 2025 SONAR Report essentially puts the world on notice that global warming has become one of the world’s biggest killers.

Swiss Re says “extreme heat,” is the designated killer, to wit: “Extreme heat events can have a large impact on human health. Recent data show that around 480, 000 deaths per year can be attributed to extreme heat events.” (“Extreme Heat More Deadly Than Floods, Earthquakes and Hurricanes Combined, Finds Swiss Re’s SONAR Report,” Swiss Re Group, Media, Press Release, June 12, 2025)

According to Jérôme Haegeli, Swiss Re Group Chief Economist: “Extreme heat used to be considered the ‘invisible peril’ because the impacts are not as obvious as other natural perils… With a clear trend to longer, hotter heatwaves, it is important we shine a light on the true cost to human life, our economy, infrastructure, agriculture and healthcare system,” Ibid.

The SONAR 2025 Report claims extreme heat threatens industry as well as human life. For example, “the telecommunications industry faces significant risks from failing cooling systems in data centers or damage to terrestrial cables.”

Trump Administration re Extreme Heat

According to Time magazine: “What’s At Stake This Summer As Trump Targets Heat and Climate Experts,” June 16, 2025:  “Heat experts at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) were told in early April that their positions would be eliminated as part of the cuts made by the Trump Administration’s Department of Governmental Efficiency. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) entire environmental health unit was cut, though some jobs were restored … What was lost there is just a giant value to communities, according to V. Kelly Turner, associate professor of urban planning at University of California, Los Angeles.”

Trump does not recognize climate change as a threat to humanity, dropping out of the Paris Agreement of 2015, cutting $4 billion in prior pledges, no longer submitting carbon-cutting plans to the UN, removing electric vehicle mandates, and destroying Biden administration climate change mitigation plans while over-emphasizing and directing national attention to burning fossil fuels. These are sure-fire ways to increase the global warming hazard, in turn, leading to more severe extreme heat, thus, putting Trump in opposition to Swiss Re’s warnings about the death count of “extreme heat.”

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center, the entire country will see above-normal temperatures—with the only difference being in severity. Across the contiguous United States, average temperatures have already risen about 60% more than the global average since 1970 (US EPA). In due course, the American South and Southeast will feel like the Persian Gulf countries of today, where it is currently too hot to safely work outside during the day for much of the summer.

On a global basis, America’s extraordinary push for fossil fuel emissions contributes to atmospheric CO₂ build up, thus impacting the world climate system by trapping more planetary heat. This direct relationship between increasing CO₂ emissions and increased global warming is established scientific fact. According to WMO (World Meteorological Organization) Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett: “We have just experienced the ten warmest years on record. Unfortunately, this WMO report provides no sign of respite over the coming years, and this means that there will be a growing negative impact on our economies, our daily lives, our ecosystems and our planet.”

Richard Betts, head of Climate Impacts Research at the UK Met Office and a professor at the University of Exeter, May 28, 2025, informed the Associated Press. “With the next five years forecast to be more than 1.5 degrees C warmer than preindustrial levels on average, this will put more people than ever at risk of severe heat waves, bringing more deaths and severe health impacts unless people can be better protected from the effects of heat. Also, we can expect more severe wildfires as the hotter atmosphere dries out the landscape.”

Swiss Re’s SONAR Report warns the world of existential dangers of climate change by focusing, in part, on deaths caused by extreme heat, but the report goes on to suggest a threat to the entire infrastructure of economies. Swiss Re endorses policies to limit climate change, which are diametrically opposite Trump policies, to wit: Swiss Re suggests a multi-pronged approach to climate change mitigation: (1) reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (2) investing in carbon removal technologies (3) increasing climate resilience through adaptation measures (4) emphasize the importance of the Paris-aligned carbon reduction path (5) complemented by carbon removal strategies, and (6) advocate for collaboration and knowledge sharing to accelerate action.

Trump’s policies don’t jive with any, not even one, of the six suggestions by one of the world’s oldest most prestigious insurance companies. If his administration is not listening to one of the world’s leading providers of insurance coverage that’s on the front line of climate change, then who?

It’s shameful that the US government fails to recognize the most rapidly developing threat to existence, especially in the face of alarms set off by the staid insurance industry, as premiums go sky-high with claims choking the biggest players. The economy can’t handle it; homeowners can’t handle it; businesses can’t handle it. Solution: Stop burning fossil fuels oil, gas, and coal.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

The mayor, whose term ended in 2022, planned to achieve this through the Climate Mobilization Act, which later passed the city council and aims to cut municipal emissions 85 percent by 2050. Shortly before de Blasio was scheduled to speak, however, Trump Tower employees began blasting music to drown him out. Reporters were forced to shout questions over the vocal stylings of Tony Bennett.

Six months into the second Trump administration and the theatrics surrounding de Blasio’s 2019 announcement seem almost quaint. Although New York’s climate goals remain among the nation’s most ambitious, the city has struggled to fulfill them. 

While transportation emissions are down about 10 percent since de Blasio announced the Climate Mobilization Act, those from buildings — which account for roughly 70 percent of the city’s total, due largely to the heating and cooling needs of 8 million people — are down approximately 2 percent, nowhere near what’s needed to meet the 2050 target. Local Law 97, a key component of de Blasio’s climate plan, set emissions limits for buildings greater than 25,000 square feet and instituted fines for owners who refuse to comply. (Because the city has limited control over the subway and public utilities, so efforts to retrofit buildings, encourage public transit use are among its most meaningful ways to control emissions locally.)

With Adams’ popularity in free fall after a scandal-plagued tenure, this year’s mayoral race will likely sweep a newcomer into office — and with it a chance to realize de Blasio’s thwarted ambitions. (The general election is in November, but the city’s partisan skew means the Democratic primary probably will determine the winner.) In recent debates, however, climate change has been overshadowed by New York’s affordability and quality of life. This, activists say, elides the scale of the problems the city faces. 

“We need someone who has vision and who isn’t just giving [voters] ‘green-lite,’” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the Brooklyn-based climate justice nonprofit Uprose. Yeampierre wants to see the next mayor “really looking deeply at the possibilities for New York City to lead when it comes to preparing such a huge population of people for disaster.” 

Nine candidates are competing in the Democratic primary, but the field has narrowed to two front-runners: Andrew Cuomo, the state’s former governor and the son of former governor Mario Cuomo, and Zohran Mamdani, a state legislator and member of the Democratic Socialists of America. 

Cuomo’s governorship ended in controversy when sexual harassment allegations, which he has denied, led to his resignation in 2021. During his tenure, he drew fire for approving gas pipelines, defunding public transportation, and supporting the Independent Democratic Caucus, or IDC. The nine Democrats of that group caucused with Republicans, giving them control of the State Senate despite having fewer seats. The IDC blocked the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, a statewide commitment to decarbonization, which that later passed after an activist coalition ousted IDC members.  

“We didn’t see any major climate legislation passed until 2019,” said Keanu Arpels-Josiah, an organizer with the youth climate justice group Fridays for Future NYC.  “And that’s because of Governor Cuomo.” 

The former governor’s opponents worry Cuomo will do more of the same as mayor. Although the city is making good progress in reducing building emissions – nearly half of the city’s largest buildings already meet 2030 targets – Cuomo has shown a willingness to gut the law. He tried to undermine it as governor, his candidacy is supported by lobbyists representing landlords who oppose it, and he’s met with co-op and condo leaders to let them know he’s open to weakening the law’s requirements. 

Cuomo’s campaign disputed this characterization, and not all environmentalists oppose the former governor. The New York League of Conservation Voters argues that Cuomo’s detractors are an unavoidable byproduct of his time in office. That group endorsed Cuomo and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, and they say Cuomo’s statewide fracking ban, instituted in 2014, and offshore wind victories under the first Trump administration show he’ll be able to advance green energy in the current political environment. 

Others aren’t convinced. The Director of Policy at the American Institute of Architects warned that the changes Cuomo proposed to Local Law 97 as governor would effectively render it toothless, and Cuomo did not release a climate plan, which puts many environmentalists on edge. “Andrew Cuomo is ruled by his resentments,” said Pete Sikora, the Climate and Inequality Campaigns Director for New York Communities for Change. “He does whatever powerful lobbies want.”

New York Communities for Change, a nonprofit focused on affordability, has endorsed Mamdani. His climate plan includes free bus rides, expanding renewable energy on municipal land, and an ambitious “Green Schools” plan. The proposal calls for renovating 500 public schools to make them resilience hubs that would serve as evacuation centers during floods and cooling centers in the event of extreme heat. Mamdani has also pledged to prioritize more resilient waterfront infrastructure, oppose utility rate hikes, and direct more money toward NYC Accelerator, which helps building owners figure out how to decarbonize their energy systems. 

“The climate crisis is growing increasingly dire,” Sikora said. “The opportunity is there to create lots of good jobs and save people money through reducing pollution and moving to clean energy.”

Mandani enthusiastically supports Local Law 97, which provided a long grace period for building owners to comply. That ended this year, and the city will begin levying fines against violators in  August. “It’s a pretty good bet that if [Cuomo] became our mayor, he would be looking for ways to weaken Local Law 97,” said Laura Shindell, the New York state director at the nonprofit Food and Water Watch, which has urged voters to choose anyone but Cuomo. The Cuomo campaign insisted he had not tried to undermine the law as governor, but did not speak to his plans if elected mayor.  

Cuomo’s failure to release a climate plan also rankles activists, especially when the climate threats facing New York City are far from theoretical. For example, a report from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene identified flash flooding as the city’s most pressing problem. 

“Not enough attention is being paid to what could reduce the impacts that people are suffering now in the short term, before we figure out what makes sense to do in the long term,” said Malgosia Madajewicz. She is an economist and associate research scientist at the Columbia Climate School who has studied the effects of flooding on neighborhoods around Jamaica Bay. Some will have to relocate, like those who experienced the worst flooding wrought by Hurricane  Sandy in 2012. Others may be able to adapt, but it’s difficult for residents to make that decision without help from experts — and funding from the city.

“There’s a big information gap there that wouldn’t be very difficult to address,” said Madajewicz, explaining that small changes, such as helping individual homeowners raise their boilers and electrical systems, could have a big impact. “A little bit of public assistance would go a long way.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New York’s mayoral race could decide the city’s climate future on Jun 20, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Rebecca Egan McCarthy.

That idea defies conventional political wisdom, which typically holds that people hate taxes. It emerged in a survey of 40,680 people in 20 nations that found strong support for a carbon tax that would transfer wealth from the worst polluters to people in developing nations. Most of them support such policies even if it takes money out of their own pocket. 

Adrian Fabre, lead author of the study published in Nature, wasn’t surprised by the results. He studies public attitudes toward climate policy at the International Center for Research on Environment and Development in Paris, and said this is the latest in a long line of studies showing that climate-related economic policies enjoy greater support, on the whole, than people assume.

This study asked people how they’d feel about a global carbon tax: The larger an individual’s contribution to climate change, the more they’d pay. In exchange, everyone in the world would receive about $30 per month. “People with a carbon footprint larger than the world average would financially lose, and those with a carbon footprint lower than the world average would win,” Fabre said.

The survey included 12 high-income countries and eight “middle-income” countries like Mexico, India, and Ukraine. The researchers surveyed at least 1,465 people in each nation over several weeks in May 2024. Japan showed the highest support, with 94 percent of respondents backing the idea of linking policies that combat inequality and climate change. 

That said, the policy was least popular in the United States, where the average person is responsible for about 18 tons of CO2 a year. About half of Americans surveyed supported the tax. (Three in 4 Biden voters favored the idea. Among Trump voters, just 26 percent did. In contrast, support ran as high as 75 percent across the European Union, where per-capita emissions are 10 tons. “We found that people in high-income countries are willing to let go of some purchasing power, if they can be sure that it solves climate change and global poverty,” Fabre said. Americans would end up foregoing about $85 a month, according to the study. 

That’s not to say such policies would remain popular once enacted. Canada learned this lesson with its tax-and-dividend scheme, which levied a tax on fossil fuels and returned nearly all of that money to households — most of which ended up receiving more money in dividends than they lost to the tax. People supported the plan when the government adopted it in 2019. But support slid as fuel prices rose, and the government scrapped it earlier this year amid pressure from voters and the fossil fuel industry.

“What matters ultimately is not the actual objective benefits that people receive,” said Matto Mildenberger, “but the perceived benefits that they think they are receiving.” 

Mildenberger studies the political drivers of policy inaction at the University of California Santa Barbara. In Canada’s case, the higher prices people paid at the gas pump weighed more heavily in their mind than the rebate they received later — especially when opponents of such a tax told them they were losing money. “One of the most critical factors in my mind that generates friction for these policies is interest group mobilization against them,” Mildenberger said.

Regardless of whether carbon pricing is the answer to the world’s climate woes, the fact that people are more supportive of climate policies that also fight poverty is telling, he said. 

“Inequality-reducing policies are a political winner, and integrating economic policy with climate policy will make climate policies more popular,” he said. “The public rewards policies that are like chewing gum and walking at the same time.” The question now is whether governments are listening. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A majority of people around the world support a carbon tax — even if they’re paying it on Jun 20, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sophie Hurwitz.

It’s the kind of bureaucratic alert that rarely makes national headlines. But in a city where permafrost thaw buckles roads, homes lack air conditioning, and the high at this time of year is generally in the low 70s, the warning comes as a sign of rapidly shifting climate. Alaska is warming more than twice as fast as the global average. 

In Alaska, where hazardous cold is historically more of a concern, weather offices in Fairbanks — just 120 miles south of the Arctic circle as the raven flies — didn’t have the option of issuing heat advisories until the beginning of this month, when it was added to a list of possible public alerts. “It gives us a more direct way of communicating these kinds of hazards when they occur,” Santiago said.

The heat bearing down on Alaska isn’t entirely unprecedented, at least in meteorological terms. On the heels of a cold spring, a dome of high pressure, known as an upper-level ridge, has settled over the Interior, a fairly common pattern that traps warm air. In the state’s central valleys, that can spell high temperatures and dry conditions. Temperatures on Friday reached a high of 82 degrees Fahrenheit. An updated advisory on Sunday warned the hot conditions would last until Tuesday, with “temperatures up to 87F to 89F… Isolated areas up to 90F are possible, especially in the Yukon Flats.”

“People in [the] Lower 48 might think that’s nothing, but here those temps could feel like 110,” Santiago said.

With nearly 22 hours of sunlight approaching the solstice, daytime heat accumulates and lingers — not just outside, but indoors. Unlike the Lower 48, most homes in Alaska weren’t built to keep heat out, but to keep it in during months of subzero cold. The thick insulation this requires turns houses into ovens during extended periods of hot temperatures. In Europe, where infrastructure is similarly designed for cold climates, a brutal 2003 heat wave exposed the potential risks: It killed 35,000 people.

That’s part of why the state’s new heat advisory matters. It’s not just a weather bulletin. It’s a warning for a state where most people don’t have the coping mechanisms taken for granted elsewhere — shaded porches, central air, even knowing the signs of heatstroke.

The sudden temperature jump also poses its own challenges. “I’m originally from Texas,” Santiago said. “I’m so used to hot summers that in the 50s, I start putting on a jacket. Now living in Alaska, I’m wearing dresses at that temperature.” But it’s not just a matter of clothing: When your body adapts to higher temperatures, the volume of blood expands, allowing your heart to pump more efficiently and reducing heat stress. You begin sweating earlier, and produce more sweat per gland. But it generally takes one to two weeks of exposure to adapt, making sudden swings in temperature riskier. 

The office Santiago works for, like many National Weather Service offices, have recently lost staff under Trump administration cuts. More than 560 members were laid off across the country, reducing its capacity by about a third, and leaving many stations critically understaffed. As a result, the Fairbanks office that made the state’s first heat warning must now suspend operations overnight. “We’re working to the best of our ability with what we have,” Santiago said. The early start to summer heat comes after a winter with low snow levels and early melt, raising concerns about fire season. Layoffs have also affected firefighting staff, where both technical expertise and basic manpower are in question. Concerned about federal capacity, California Gov. Newsom launched a firefighter recruitment effort this week, but in Alaska, much of the wildland firefighting force is federal, raising the question of whether those like Santiago who must prepare for threats ahead will have the resources they need.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alaska just hit a climate milestone — its first-ever heat advisory on Jun 16, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lois Parshley.

By Laura Bergamo in Nice, France

The UN Ocean Conference (UNOC) concluded today with significant progress made towards the ratification of the High Seas Treaty and a strong statement on a new plastics treaty signed by 95 governments.

Once ratified, it will be the only legal tool that can create protected areas in international waters, making it fundamental to protecting 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030.

Fifty countries, plus the European Union, have now ratified the Treaty.

• READ MORE: Pacific civil society groups challenge France over hosting UN oceans event as political ‘rebranding’
• Other UNOC reports

New Zealand has signed but is yet to ratify.

Deep sea mining rose up the agenda in the conference debates, demonstrating the urgency of opposing this industry.

The expectation from civil society and a large group of states, including both co-hosts of UNOC, was that governments would make progress towards stopping deep sea mining in Nice.

UN Secretary-General Guterres said the deep sea should not become the “wild west“.

Four new pledges
French President Emmanuel Macron said a deep sea mining moratorium is an international necessity. Four new countries pledged their support for a moratorium at UNOC, bringing the total to 37.

Attention now turns to what actions governments will take in July to stop this industry from starting.

Megan Randles, Greenpeace head of delegation regarding the High Seas Treaty and progress towards stopping deep sea mining, said: “High Seas Treaty ratification is within touching distance, but the progress made here in Nice feels hollow as this UN Ocean Conference ends without more tangible commitments to stopping deep sea mining.

“We’ve heard lots of fine words here in Nice, but these need to turn into tangible action.

“Countries must be brave, stand up for global cooperation and make history by stopping deep sea mining this year.

“They can do this by committing to a moratorium on deep sea mining at next month’s International Seabed Authority meeting.

“We applaud those who have already taken a stand, and urge all others to be on the right side of history by stopping deep sea mining.”

Attention on ISA meeting
Following this UNOC, attention now turns to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) meetings in July. In the face of The Metals Company teaming up with US President Donald Trump to mine the global oceans, the upcoming ISA provides a space where governments can come together to defend the deep ocean by adopting a moratorium to stop this destructive industry.

Negotiations on a Global Plastics Treaty resume in August.

John Hocevar, oceans campaign director, Greenpeace USA said: “The majority of countries have spoken when they signed on to the Nice Call for an Ambitious Plastics Treaty that they want an agreement that will reduce plastic production. Now, as we end the UN Ocean Conference and head on to the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations in Geneva this August, they must act.

“The world cannot afford a weak treaty dictated by oil-soaked obstructionists.

“The ambitious majority must rise to this moment, firmly hold the line and ensure that we will have a Global Plastic Treaty that cuts plastic production, protects human health, and delivers justice for Indigenous Peoples and communities on the frontlines.

“Governments need to show that multilateralism still works for people and the planet, not the profits of a greedy few.”

Driving ecological collapse
Nichanan Thantanwit, project leader, Ocean Justice Project, said: “Coastal and Indigenous communities, including small-scale fishers, have protected the ocean for generations. Now they are being pushed aside by industries driving ecological collapse and human rights violations.

“As the UN Ocean Conference ends, governments must recognise small-scale fishers and Indigenous Peoples as rights-holders, secure their access and role in marine governance, and stop destructive practices such as bottom trawling and harmful aquaculture.

“There is no ocean protection without the people who have protected it all along.”

The anticipated Nice Ocean Action Plan, which consists of a political declaration and a series of voluntary commitments, will be announced later today at the end of the conference.

None will be legally binding, so governments need to act strongly during the next ISA meeting in July and at plastic treaty negotiations in August.

Republished from Greenpeace Aotearoa with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

EPA is proposing to repeal outright greenhouse gas standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants in part on the false assertion that power plant emissions do not contribute “significantly” to climate change. In fact, coal- and gas-fired power plants are the largest stationary source of U.S. heat-trapping emissions and the United States is the second-largest contributor of annual heat-trapping emissions globally.

Additionally, EPA is proposing to strike critical amendments to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS). These protections, which had closed mercury polluter loopholes, lowered limits on hazardous air pollutants, and set important pollution monitoring requirements, had been finalized following an evaluation of ongoing public health risks and available pollution control technologies.

Below is a statement by Julie McNamara, associate director of policy for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

“Yet another day when the Trump administration proves it can somehow go lower still in its disregard for people’s health and well-being. These are astoundingly shameful proposals. It’s galling to watch the U.S. government so thoroughly debase itself as it sacrifices the public good to boost the bottom line of fossil fuel executives.

“In repealing the carbon standards, Administrator Zeldin is flagrantly disregarding incontrovertible evidence and long-standing precedent, intentionally sidelining EPA from the climate fight and letting fossil fuel companies freely pollute. There’s no meaningful path to meet U.S. climate goals without addressing carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants—and there’s no meaningful path to meet global climate goals without the United States. This repeal would condemn people across the country and around the world to a future of worsening climate impacts and devastating costs.

“Mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal-fired power plants are actively damaging people’s health. By walking back protections that address these harms, despite solutions being readily available, Administrator Zeldin is going out of his way to benefit the worst-of-the-worst polluters while forcing the public to bear the costs.

“People across the country—and around the world—unequivocally deserve better than this. These actions can, should, and will be challenged in court.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

For those who were pregnant at the time, enduring these extreme conditions wasn’t just uncomfortable — it may have left a lasting imprint on their children’s brains. That’s according to a new study published on Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One. Using MRI scans, researchers at Queens College, City University of New York, found that children whose mothers lived through Superstorm Sandy had distinct brain differences that could hinder their emotional development. The effects were even more dramatic when people were exposed to extreme heat during their pregnancy, in addition to the tropical storm, the researchers found. 

“It’s not just one climate stressor or one isolated event, but rather a combination of everything,” said Donato DeIngeniis, the lead author of the study and a doctoral student in neuropsychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. DeIngeniis’ study is the first of its kind to examine the joint effects of natural disasters and extreme heat — events that often coincide. A few years ago, scientists dubbed summer “danger season” since it’s a time of colliding risks, including heat, hurricanes, wildfires, and toxic smoke. And summertime temperatures keep climbing to new heights. 

The study analyzed brain imaging data from a group of 34 children, approximately 8 years old, whose mothers were pregnant during Superstorm Sandy — some of whom were pregnant at the time that Sandy made landfall, and some of whom were exposed to heat 95 degrees F or higher during their pregnancy. While the researchers didn’t find that heat alone had much of an impact, living through Superstorm Sandy led to an increase in the basal ganglia’s volume, a part of the brain that deals with regulating emotions. 

While that larger size could be a compensation in response to stress, changes in the basal ganglia have been linked to behavioral challenges for children, such as depression and autism, DeIngeniis said.

“What we are seeing is compelling evidence that the climate crisis is not just an environmental emergency, it is potentially a neurological one with consequence for future generations who will inherit our planet,” said Duke Shereen, a co-author of the study and the director of the MRI facility at CUNY Graduate Center, in a press release. Global warming made Superstorm Sandy more damaging as a result of rising sea levels and higher ocean temperatures that might have amped up its rainfall.

Yoko Nomura, a co-author of the study and a psychology professor at the Queens College, CUNY, said that the time before birth is “very, very sensitive” for development because the fetus’ body is changing so drastically. The human brain grows the most rapidly in the womb, reaching more than a third of its full adult volume before birth, according to the study. Any added stress at that time, even if small, “can have a much bigger impact,” Nomura said.

But that extra-sensitive period also presents a window of opportunity. “Developmental science, including the science in this paper, is exciting because it not only tells us what we can do to protect children from the effects of climate change, but it also tells us when we can step in to protect children to make the greatest difference,” Lindsey Burghardt, chief science officer at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, said in an email.

Although there’s a lot of evidence that prenatal stress generally can affect child brain development, according to DeIngeniis, research on climate-related stress specifically is lacking. “It is still a field that has potential for explosive growth,” said Jennifer Barkin, a professor at Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, Georgia, who is studying the effects of last year’s Hurricane Helene on maternal health.

DeIngeniis’ study offers concrete evidence of how climate-charged events can affect the brain, Barkin said. “People have a hard time sometimes with mental health, because it’s not like you can take an X-ray and see a broken bone.” But it’s easier to understand imaging showing a difference in brain volume based on exposure to environmental stress, she said. 

Barkin, who developed an index for measuring maternal health after childbirth, says that people are beginning to pay more attention to mothers and their mental health — not just in terms of delivering a healthy baby, but over the long term. “We tend to focus things on the child’s outcome, which is important, but to keep the child healthy, the mother has to be healthy, too,” she said. “Because when Mom’s struggling, the family’s going to struggle.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate disasters can alter kids’ brains — before they’re even born on Jun 11, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

“We have some heavy mapping to do today!” Francis announced, breaking into a toothy smile, her dark hair pulled back neatly into a bun. 

Most of St. Lucia, which sits at the southern end of an archipelago stretching from Trinidad and Tobago to the Bahamas, is poorly mapped. Aside from strips of sandy white beaches that hug the coastline, the island is draped with dense rainforest. A few green signs hang limp and faded from utility poles like an afterthought, identifying streets named during more than a century of dueling British and French colonial rule. One major road, Micoud Highway, runs like a vein from north to south, carting tourists from the airport to beachfront resorts. Little of this is accurately represented on Google Maps. Almost nobody uses, or has, a conventional address. Locals orient one another with landmarks: the red house on the hill, the cottage next to the church, the park across from Care Growell School.

Our van wound off Micoud Highway into an empty lot beneath the shade of a banana tree. A dog panted, belly up, under the hot November sun. The group had been recruited by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, or HOT, a nonprofit that uses an open-source data platform called OpenStreetMap to create a map of the world that resembles Google’s with one key exception: Anyone can edit it, making it a sort of Wikipedia for cartographers.

The organization has an ambitious goal: Map the world’s unmapped places to help relief workers reach people when the next hurricane, fire, or other crisis strikes. Since its founding in 2010, some 340,000 volunteers around the world have been remotely editing OpenStreetMap to better represent the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, parts of Africa and other regions prone to natural disasters or humanitarian emergencies. In that time, they have mapped more than 2.1 million miles of roads and 156 million buildings. They use aerial imagery captured by drones, aircraft, or satellites to help trace unmarked roads, waterways, buildings, and critical infrastructure. Once this digital chart is more clearly defined, field-mapping expeditions like the one we were taking add the names of every road, house, church, or business represented by gray silhouettes on their paper maps. The effort fine-tunes the places that bigger players like Google Maps get wrong — or don’t get at all.

As we filed out of the bus, Christopher Williams, a consultant for the World Bank, stood waiting for us in a tangerine-colored polo, jeans, and gym shoes. He looked ready to trek through the Amazon, handing out bottles of water and clutching a stack of clipboards as everyone crowded around him. Each held a map, created with satellite images gleaned from Microsoft Bing, of the area we were about to walk. “OK, everyone,” Williams announced. He squinted at the document from behind square-framed glasses. “We just want to get a baseline of what is out there. What is the street layout, where are the houses, what are the types of businesses, what are their names? That’s pretty much it. Just map out what is there.” 

Gros Islet village is a largely residential community. It sits at the northwestern tip of St. Lucia, hugged by dense forests to the east and the Caribbean to the west. There is little to protect from storms that race across the ocean. The last time the government counted, in 2020, 981 people lived there. Fewer live there today. Those who can afford to move to areas with better infrastructure. 

“Where do we start?” Alaine Weeks asked as she examined her map, clutching a pen with 3-inch pink acrylic nails. Weeks, like the other women, were volunteers from the Youth Emergency Action Committee, which teaches young locals how to be first responders. The group has been at the forefront of these island expeditions, believing, as Francis explained to me, that its mission was to “do a good deed while having fun.”

“We’ll begin at the farthest point on the grid,” Williams told her, tracing his thumb over the perimeter of the map, where the sea met land. He divided the women into groups of three; each was assigned a section of the village. Soon, everyone splintered off in different directions. The charts they were supposed to complete covered about half a square mile of the village and a fraction of Gros Islet district, which is a little larger than Manhattan in New York City. Eventually, they hope to account for every foot of St. Lucia, which covers 238 square miles and includes more than a dozen peaks and ridges, broad valleys, and lush rainforest. 

They are running out of time. Rising sea levels, dangerously high temperatures, and coastal erosion threaten the very existence of St. Lucia and other Caribbean islands, which are warming rapidly and experiencing sea level rise at rates as much as 67 percent faster than the global average, leading to more extreme weather. The climate crisis will only deepen, but maybe, with a more complete picture of the country’s geography, its most adverse outcomes can still be mitigated.

The central challenge in drawing an accurate map of the world has plagued cartographers for centuries: The world is spherical and paper is flat. They’ve tried and failed to get around this problem since the second century, when Ptolemy drew the first intelligible representation of the world in Geographia. His handiwork showed a lattice of blue oceans and bulges of undefined land, with more than half the world as we now know it missing. Its lines of latitude and longitude gestured toward a working scale of the planet — an attempt to think of Earth’s magnitude beyond what the eye could see. It would take many centuries before the full expanse of terra incognita came to light. As navigators sailed ever farther from shore and, later, airplanes took to the sky, once unknown features came into view. The Space Age widened the lens further as satellites allowed humanity to view Earth from the heavens. Still, the puzzle that stymied cartographers for millennia remained, raising the question of whether it would ever be possible to create a map so accurate as to represent reality itself. 

Google was among the first to get around this. In 2001, a software startup called Keyhole developed an innovative approach to mapping. The California company combined a bunch of satellite and aerial images purchased from commercial suppliers, then chopped them up to create tiles a user could zoom in on. Rudimentary data from the two largest digital map providers at the time, TeleAtlas and NavTeq, helped with roads and addresses. The result was a truly interactive digital tool that allowed users to zoom, pan, and drag a 3D simulation of the world. Yet early iterations were flawed. The geospatial data they started with was not always of the best quality, and although Keyhole could provide a realistic sense of the Earth’s scale, users couldn’t always discern what they were zooming in on. “We had a very spotty Earth,” Brian McClendon, who co-founded Keyhole and was a Google vice president until 2015, told me. 

Google acquired Keyhole in 2004 and used the company’s satellite imagery to help create a nascent version of Google Earth — whose core technology was integrated into what would become Google Maps. The acquisition led to a bigger budget, and the new Google team purchased higher-quality aerial imagery to get around the coverage problem. The following year, Google Maps used the technology to launch its first digital, interactive map, with the goal of helping “People get from Point A to Point B.” Within a few years, Google was flying planes over as much of the world as possible — excluding places like North Korea or China that didn’t allow them in their airspace — to create a live digital image of the world we live in. 

This fundamentally changed the concept of mapping. “People had never seen satellite imagery before.” McClendon told me. “The most important thing that people got out of this was they could see their house, they could see how their space fit into the world. They could go to Iraq and see how the Iraqis were living.” The map data, however, was a disaster. While the app marked the first time anyone could see the entire planet, then zoom in on a particular city or town, the data that makes such a thing useful — the names of streets and roads and towns and buildings — was sparse and inaccurate. Entire towns were misidentified or even unidentified. Roads disappeared into an abyss. Earth could be seen from above, but not always from the ground up.

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One day in 2004, McClendon recalled how Google executives Marissa Mayer, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page were driving around Stanford University when Page took out a camcorder and started recording. “Why can’t we do this?” Page asked them. Three years later, Google bolted a panoramic camera to the hood of a van and sent it to five cities, capturing spherical images every 30 feet or so. It worked, but it was slow and expensive. That led to “ball and stick” cameras mounted on hundreds of cars. Google dispatched some 100 drivers to cover every possible inch of the country. Entire towns that hadn’t been mapped began to appear on a scale that made it seem almost as if users were standing inside the map itself. Google named the feature Street View and today has covered over 10 million miles of roads.

The problem with trying to create a life-size digital version of the world is that the world is not static. “Mapping everywhere all the time in 3D, even today, is impossible,” McClendon said. “You have to make choices about what data to get and where to fly.” Google’s choices mostly came down to two priorities: population density and revenue. It focused resources where it enjoyed the easiest access: North America and much of Western Europe. Photographing streets in places like China or North Korea was impossible. It didn’t focus on countries like South Sudan or Cambodia because there was little profit to be made there. Until it started using AI and machine learning, the company relied on contractors to do much of the grunt work — just covering North America was a task that, in its first iteration, took 18 months. Today, the map is updated every second — more than 100 million updates made each day.

One of Google’s competitors, OpenStreetMap, took a different approach. The company, founded six months before Google Maps and launched by a physics student in London named Steve Coast, started with a simple question: What if a map were free and open to all? And what if it could be a collaborative effort involving people all over the world? When OpenStreetMap launched in 2005, it enjoyed immediate popularity in Western countries with access to the technology required to fill in the map. 
Yet even as the modern, digitized representation of the world began coming together quickly, a fundamental cartographical inequity emerged. Street View provided excellent data in big cities and tourist destinations. OpenStreetMap was beloved by adventurers and hikers in Europe. But no one offered much data from developing nations or corners of the world that remained off the grid. But it was precisely in those kinds of places that the threat of disaster — intensified by  climate change— was most severe. Who would map the spaces that remained terra incognita? And how?

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake ravaged Haiti, creating one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes to date. Rescue teams were ill-prepared. Maps of the country were imprecise, and with so many major landmarks destroyed, first responders had trouble orienting themselves even as aftershocks hit. By some estimates, a quarter of a million people died and at least four times that many were left homeless. Many of those displaced crowded into unsanitary, makeshift camps that led to a cholera epidemic, creating a crisis within the crisis. 

That same day, Mikel Maron, a freelance software engineer who’d been involved with OpenStreetMap, or OSM, from its start, helped assemble a team. In the five years since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, he’d seen the humanitarian potential of OSM’s method — a way, as he put it to me, “to make a map that could be as dynamic as disasters are.” A friend who volunteered in New Orleans following the inundation noticed that the Red Cross was sending workers on a route where a bridge had been destroyed because it still existed on Google Maps, which was slow to incorporate updates. “At the time it was a really crazy idea to suggest that we use OpenStreetMap for disaster,” Maron told me. “OSM was a hacker project. We were still trying to figure out how to make it work — it wasn’t something you’d want to rely on in an emergency.” 

But by the time the earthquake struck Haiti, the technology had become much more user-friendly. Word spread quickly and within two weeks some 600 volunteers around the world were contributing to a map that grew intricately detailed, like a spider spooling out its web. The challenge shifted to getting it into the hands of aid workers. 

Ivan Gayton was in Port-au-Prince working for Doctors Without Borders when the cholera epidemic erupted. Gayton was overwhelmed. Clinics were flooded with desperate Haitians, their numbers multiplying faster than he could count. He’d never seen an epidemic of this scale before. His priority was to figure out how to stop the transmission. To do that, he needed to locate the source of the outbreak. It was standard to ask people who came into the clinic where they’d just come from, but he quickly realized that they lacked the tools and data to make use of any of the answers. When Gayton tried to pinpoint their responses on Google Maps, he drew a blank. Villages were improperly labeled, and aside from a few major highways, entire districts were a giant lacuna of pale yellow.

Then one day, a software engineer from Google brought a hard drive full of data generated by the nascent Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and introduced the mapping system to Gayton. “The trick to OSM was that it was wide open,” Gayton told me. “I could take the data and do what I wanted with it to get what I needed. That was demonstrably, evidence-based life saving.” 

The tool also was surprisingly accurate after months of contributions. It provided proper names of many villages, districts, makeshift shelters, and hospitals. Like the British physician John Snow who, in 1854, used addresses of cholera victims and a map of London to trace the outbreak to a single contaminated pump, Gayton used a similar method to pinpoint clusters of cases. To his great surprise, it worked, and his team identified several transmission hot spots, including in a neighborhood called Mariani, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. “To this day I maintain that if we’d had a proper map of Haiti from the start,” Gayton said, “we could’ve stopped cholera dead.”

Not long after HOT’s official launch in 2010, some of the worst natural disasters of the century struck. Earthquakes throughout Asia and the Middle East. A typhoon in the Philippines. Major flooding, then major drought, in India. Wildfires in the Amazon. Hurricane Maria in the Caribbean. HOT’s small team found themselves inundated with requests from aid workers who needed better maps of the disaster zones. “We were basically running on a crisis-by-crisis model,” Kate Chapman, one of the startup’s co-founders, told me.

In its early days, HOT had just three full-time employees and about 20 contractors working in Indonesia. By 2015, the small organization had grown to around 11,000 online volunteers. Yet with so many crises hitting, it was difficult to measure their progress — or predict where the next emergency would strike. HOT’s team started collaborating with humanitarian organizations to find a way to work together when a disaster hit. “The question became, Could you map ahead of time?” Chapman explained. “Then that question became, What if we mapped ahead of time?” 

Their projects grew more targeted, focusing not just on vulnerable and unmapped places, but on the specific issues facing communities in those places. In Tanzania in 2017, for example, HOT supported a local mapping group, Crowd2Map, to help young girls escape mandatory genital mutilation ceremonies. Its network of online cartographers identified buildings, roads, and villages in the Serengeti district where the illegal ceremonies often occurred. Over 277,000 buildings in the district were added to the map. According to The Guardian, the new map helped a legal aid worker locate a 16-year-old girl who was being held against her will in her home days before she was to be circumcised. 

But there were too many places in the world that were on the brink of extreme poverty, civil war, and migration crises, as well as prone to climate disasters. HOT’s team realized that while it could start remote mapping projects anywhere, completing them required being on the ground. They would have to narrow their focus. But that, too, proved impossible. There were too many places that were poorly charted — 94 countries, the organization estimated in 2019, and roughly a billion people. The only way to change that was if people in those countries showed a desire to do the work. HOT decided to open four regional hubs – informal offices in Kenya, the Philippines, Senegal, and Uruguay. One of its earliest priorities was getting a project up and running in the Caribbean — a region the United Nations’ secretary general called “ground zero for climate change.”

The sun had climbed high and grown unwaveringly intense as the women set off on their expedition of Gros Islet. From where I stood, studying Google Maps on my phone, I realized we were entering what felt like a modern version of terra incognita. Satellite imagery captured the basic contours of the village with all its streets and silhouettes of buildings, but few businesses or roads were labeled accurately. Alleyways and roads were missing. Buildings that lay in ruins still stood according to Google Maps.  

I followed my mapping group toward an empty road. A few chickens broke into a trot in front of us. I was already disoriented: Without street names or addresses, it was difficult to find our place on the map. We reached an intersection where a grand stucco church with gilded windows stood before us. A few women in the group already knew it as St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church, which they used as a landmark to orient us on the map. Then, Weeks spotted a green street sign, likely leftover from a century of British and French colonial rule, its white lettering all but faded by the sun. It wasn’t until we were a few feet away that we could make out the faint word “Marina.” Weeks pinpointed the narrow lane on the map on her clipboard and labeled it. We took a left, down a street named Church, toward the shoreline. 

Weeks was 24 when she discovered HOT’s cartography through a charity at her church. In 2021, she joined a field-mapping trip in St. Lucia’s southernmost city, Vieux Fort. With a small group, Weeks went door-to-door to record houses, street names, and businesses. Afterward, everyone went to a school computer lab to add their findings to OpenStreetMap. When Weeks pulled up the map of St. Lucia, she was stunned. She’d used Google Maps before, mostly to check traffic patterns, but had never seen her island from above. She spent hours correcting mistakes. Weeks was hooked. “It’s so addictive!” she told me as we stood at an abandoned bar near the water, surveying where we were. In the past two weeks alone, she’d made 5,584 edits, clicking away online, filling in the contours of buildings as seen from above.

We rounded another corner, passing a row of single-story wood homes, each no larger than a few hundred square feet. The stillness of the village felt deafening. We passed many abandoned houses and empty lots, which the women labeled “R” for ruins on their maps. But many places were still very alive, painted bubble-gum pink and lime green, azure blue and canary yellow. On the side of one bar, someone had painted a mural of a man gazing through binoculars with the words “Stay curious.” Near the shore, Weeks stopped in the middle of the road, furrowing her brow at her clipboard as she tried to position herself. A woman in a fitted, tan beach dress picking at a box of plantains and salted fish looked up at her. “Are you lost?” she asked.

Weeks nodded. “We are just mapping out the village. Is this a bar?” she asked, pointing at a two-story building with shuttered windows and a sign that read “Whispering Lionz.” The woman clapped her hands together excitedly. “It’s my new bar!” she replied. “We’re opening in two weeks.” Weeks noted the name on her map, while the woman helped identify the rest of the bars lining the street. She’d never used a map to orient herself in the neighborhood before. 

All was still and quiet, the Caribbean Sea gently lapping the shore of Rodney Bay, the November sun burning intensely down, casting shadows onto the road in front of us. Stray dogs napped in the underbrush of leafy banana trees. It hardly seemed like the sort of place where a perilous, life-threatening storm could strike with little warning. But that was exactly the point of the mapping project: being prepared for the inevitable disasters long before they hit. The ability to identify who lived where could help apportion resources to poorer areas like Gros Islet. In times of acute crisis, the goal was for rescue teams to use the map to find people.

Like many residents of many island nations, St. Lucians live on the front lines of climate change. They are surrounded by turquoise waters that are slowly rising. Dense rainforest is prone to wildfires. Warming seas feed devastating hurricanes. Acidification threatens the marine habitat. Despite having some of the lowest greenhouse gas emissions in the world, small island nations are paying the highest price for the warming planet. “The problem is the governments of the developed countries, they still believe that there’s time or that this is not as serious as we make it out to be,” said Dr. James Fletcher, St. Lucia’s former minister of public service, sustainable development, energy, science, and technology. “I don’t think they appreciate just how much of a life-or-death threat it is for us. I think this whole question of mapping is a very important one: How do we use empirical data to determine which are the most vulnerable communities?”

In 2013, an unexpected storm struck St. Lucia on Christmas Eve — a time typically in the dry season. The “Christmas trough,” as locals now call it, shredded roads, destroyed houses, and flooded low-lying areas. Rescue workers found it nearly impossible to know where to go, or how to find people. Five people died. The disaster made the government and first responders realize that their Achilles heel lay in not being able to locate communities that were off the grid. “A lot of the communities might have an official route to reach them, and then when you go, it might be covered or doesn’t exist,” Marcia Haywood, the regional coordinator of Caritas Antilles, a  nongovernmental organization  focused on poverty and disaster relief, told me. “I want to see a map of St. Lucia that is a living, breathing document.”

After a few hours of exploration, my team reached an impasse: a busy highway leading into a dense forest. Weeks knew about a croissant stand at the corner — a business that didn’t appear on Google Maps but that she swore existed. We climbed a dusty hill and, sure enough, found a little wood lean-to with a red, white, and blue sign reading “Bonne Café Authentic French Bistro.” It was shuttered. None of the women knew how long it had been out of business or whether to include it on their maps. Williams decided it was time to turn around. Our team had covered about 0.05 square miles and labeled 15 businesses. “That’s a lot!” Williams told them encouragingly. The women seemed more dubious. We began making our way back to the van, where Proann Francis doled out fish sandwiches and brownies in white Styrofoam containers. Standing by the bus, I noticed a small sign reading “Centre for Adolescent Renewal and Education: the C.A.R.E. Grow Well School,” which Google had told me was in India. I logged onto OpenStreetMap on my phone to update the map. Someone had beaten me to it.

It is not until you get into the business of trying to map far-flung, disaster-prone areas that the question of what a map is becomes muddled. As HOT began expanding its mission in different parts of the world, from Zimbabwe to Dominica to Syria, the nuances of each place made creating a universal map ever more difficult. Roads, borders, buildings, and village names have a different meaning depending on whom you talked to. Once, during a project in an informal neighborhood in Dar es Salaam, a city on the Tanzanian coast that experiences regular flooding, HOT’s team was collecting data on historical inundations. They noticed that the information varied wildly, with households next door to each other reporting large variations in flood height. The next day, rather than asking people to estimate the water’s depth, they asked people to indicate where on their bodies the water had reached: their ankles, feet, knees, or hips. The findings were much more consistent. “From a traditional cartographic angle, you think that’s not good data,” Rebecca Firth, HOT’s executive director, told me. “But that’s the language people talk in. And that is actually extremely important data.”

For many people in developing countries whose villages or neighborhoods are poorly mapped, the very idea of a Western, Cartesian map can be antithetical to how they navigate the world. “When you take data out there in the world and reduce it to a line on a map, you are making an inherent argument about that place,” Robert Soden, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto and co-founder of HOT, told me. “And it tends to be people who are more powerful who make these datasets.” The OpenStreetMap model, in theory, is intended to hand that power to anyone who wants it.

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Just as Wikipedia relies on the honesty of its community to keep its pages up to date, HOT is at the mercy of its 339,000 or so volunteers. It is easy to make mistakes while editing OpenStreetMap. Although the software relies on a seasoned “editor” to “approve” edits before they are published, the sheer number of revisions outweighs the expertise. An even greater challenge lies in the fact that users’ intentions are sometimes nefarious. As Sam Colchester, who leads disaster response for HOT, explained to me, “online vandalism” is a challenge. Malicious users might mislabel or even eliminate things. “It often happens in conflict areas,” Colchester told me. “Russians were deleting data in Ukraine, or renaming all the streets in western Ukraine to Russian names.” While HOT’s volunteers keep watch for such things, he said, they are often difficult to catch quickly.

The best way to ensure a map’s accuracy is to chart the place in person. But HOT’s limited resources make it impossible to launch expeditions in the 94 counties it has identified as most needing to be chronicled. Building the community needed to keep that document current is even harder. Sodden discovered that as he visited Haiti several times in 2010 and 2011, training locals on how to do just that. Eventually, the funding fell through, and it became difficult to keep the project going. “I don’t think we were successful in creating any sort of long-term map in Haiti,” he told me. “I think it’s safe to say we didn’t build a robust and self-sustaining community of mappers there.”

In the week I spent in St. Lucia, I found myself wondering what it would take to keep any map alive. How could HOT build a self-sustaining community of mappers to continuously update the ever-changing world we live in? No one who participated in the effort to document Gros Islet had returned to finish the project. Other, more pressing projects lay ahead, like Bexon, which sits between two rivers, in a basin in the middle of the island, just barely above sea level. When heavy rains come, the highway floods and the residents are cut off like a severed artery.

One day, HOT’s regional coordinator, Louise Mathurin-Serieux, picked me up in her SUV to take me to Bexon. She wanted to survey the work of a field-mapping trip taken a year ago. It had proven more challenging than Gros Islet: The small community of a few hundred people lay off a major highway that had seen frequent fatal accidents, and the rainforests teemed with venomous snakes. Houses sat in clusters and it could take 10 minutes to walk from one neighborhood to the next.

“This is the flood zone,” Mathurin-Serieux explained to me ominously, parking at the side of the road just after we crossed a yellow bridge spanning a trickle of water. When the rain is heavy, flash floods wash over the bridge, effectively cutting off everyone in Bexon. “Water!” Francis, who’d joined our trip along with Weeks, chimed in. “Water is our biggest problem!” 

We stood before a handful of dilapidated houses built on stilts. Water coursing over the land during a flood last year had left its mark on many of them. One had been destroyed and lay in a pile of kindling. The government tried to get people to move to higher ground, but few wanted to budge. “A hurricane is like childbirth,” Francis explained. “You forget how bad the pain gets.”

As I walked around the houses, I met an older woman named Olive, who sat watching us curiously from her front porch. She’d grown up in the same house; it was passed down to her from her grandparents. Leaving was out of the question. But she was getting increasingly worried about the changing weather. She kept a card near her front door that the government had provided that reads “Flood Warning Messages.” It was part of a system devised for locals, color-coded to rate the severity of an incoming storm. Red indicated serious flooding, orange meant inundation was expected anytime, yellow meant it is possible, be prepared. When a storm was coming, residents were instructed to run down the road to compare their cards to a sign that would indicate the severity of an incoming storm. The card was, for her, a personal map to navigate future storms. 

A life-threatening storm was hard to imagine as we stood surveying Bexon, under the bright sun, with not a cloud in the sky. But that was part of the irony of HOT’s work: The success of the projects would only truly be put to the test when a major disaster hit. Since its founding 15 years ago, HOT’s small troupe of online volunteers has mapped more than 2.1 million miles of roads and 156 million buildings. Despite that progress, it is hard not to feel like their mission is a game of whack-a-mole with impending crises. Nobody had seen the Gaza invasion coming, for example, or the outbreak of an impending civil war in Haiti. More often than not, the crises were coming faster than the mappers could complete their work. Mathurin-Serieux was not deterred by this. “When it comes to mapping, we are still in our infancy,” she told me as we climbed back into her vehicle. “But if we don’t have a thriving community, then we have an outdated map in five years.”

As our car left Bexon, ascending the large hill out of town — one that was prone to landslides that would further entrench the village during heavy rain –—Weeks pointed out two new houses that had gone up since the last flood. She pulled out her phone to add the structures to OpenStreetMap. In the stillness of the calm sun, it was hard to feel the gravity of adding two small wooden lean-to residences to the map of St. Lucia. But tomorrow, those could be two lives saved.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can a crowdsourced map of the world help save millions of people from climate disaster? on Jun 11, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maddy Crowell.

Pacific advocacy movements and civil society organisations have challenged French credentials in hosting a global ocean conference, saying that unless France is accountable for its actions in the Pacific, it is merely “rebranding”.

The call for accountability marked the French-sponsored UN Ocean Conference (UNOC) in Nice this week, during which President Emmanuel Macron will be hosting a France-Pacific Summit.

French officials have described the UNOC event as a coming together “in the true spirit of Talanoa” and one that would be inconceivable without the Pacific.

• READ MORE: Former Congress staffer allowed to return to Kanaky New Caledonia
• Other France in the Pacific reports

While acknowledging the importance of leveraging global partnerships for urgent climate action and ocean protection through the UNOC process, Pacific civil society groups have issued a joint statement saying that their political leaders must hold France accountable for its past actions and not allow it to “launder its dirty linen in ‘Blue Pacific’ and ‘critical transition’ narratives”.

‘Responsible steward’ image undermined
France’s claims of being a “responsible steward” of the ocean were undermined by its historical actions in the Pacific, said the statement. This included:

● A brutal colonial legacy dating back to the mid-1800s, with the annexation of island nations now known as Kanaky-New Caledonia and Ma’ohi Nui-French Polynesia;

● A refusal to complete the decolonisation process, and in fact the perpetuation of the colonial condition, particularly for the those “territories” on the UN decolonisation list. In Kanaky-New Caledonia, for instance, France and its agents continue to renege on longstanding decolonisation commitments, while weaponising democratic ideals and processes such as “universal” voting rights to deny the fundamental rights of the indigenous population to self-determination;

● 30 years of nuclear violence in Ma’ohi Nui-French Polynesia with 193 test detonations — 46 in the atmosphere and close to 150 under the Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls, irradiating both land and sea, and people. Approximately 90 percent of the local population was exposed to radioactive fallout, resulting in long-term health impacts, including elevated rates of cancer and other radiation-related illnesses;

● Active efforts to obscure the true extent of its nuclear violence in Maʻohi Nui-French Polynesia, diverting resources to discredit independent research and obstructing transparency around health and environmental impacts. These actions reveal a persistent pattern of denial and narrative control that continues to undermine compensation efforts and delay justice for victims and communities;

● French claims to approximately one-third of the Pacific’s combined EEZ, and to being the world’s second largest ocean state, accruing largely from its so-called Pacific dependencies; and

● The supply of French military equipment, and the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior by French secret service agents — a state-sponsored terrorist attack with the 40th anniversary this year.

Seeking diplomatic support
“Since the late 1980s, France has worked to build on diplomatic, development and defence fronts to garner support from Pacific governments.

This includes development assistance through the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), Asian Development Fund, language and cultural exchanges, scientific collaboration and humanitarian assistance.

A strong diplomatic presence in Pacific capitals as well as a full schedule of high-level exchanges, including a triennial France-Oceania leaders’ Summit commencing in 2003, together function to enhance proximity with and inclination towards Paris sentiments and priorities.

The Pacific civil society statement said that French leadership at this UNOC process was once again central to its ongoing efforts to rebrand itself as a global leader on climate action, a champion of ocean protection, and a promoter of sovereignty.

“Nothing can be further from the truth,” the groups said.

“The reality is that France is rather more interested in strengthening its position as a middle power in an Indo-Pacific rather than a Pacific framework, and as a balancing power within the context of big-power rivalry between the US and China, all of which undermines rather than enhances Pacific sovereignty.”

New global image
The statement said that leaders must not allow France to build this new global image on the “foundations of its atrocities against Pacific peoples” and the ocean continent.

Pacific civil society called on France:

● For immediate and irreversible commitments and practical steps to bring its colonial presence in the Pacific to an end before the conclusion, in 2030, of the 4th International Decade on the Eradication of Colonialism; and

● To acknowledge and take responsibility for the oceanic and human harms caused by 30 years of nuclear violence in Maʻohi Nui–French Polynesia, and to commit to full and just reparations, including support for affected communities, environmental remediation of test sites, and full public disclosure of all health and contamination data.

The statement also called on Pacific leaders to:

● Keep France accountable for its multiple and longstanding debt to Pacific people; and

● Ensure that Ma’ohi Nui-French Polynesia and Kanaky-New Caledonia remain on the UN list of non-self-governing territories to be decolonised (UN decolonisation list).

“Pacific leaders must ensure that France does not succeed in laundering its soiled linen — soiled by the blood of thousands of Pacific Islanders who resisted colonial occupation and/or who were used as test subjects for its industrial-military machinery — in the UNOC process,” said the statement.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Pacific advocacy movements and civil society organisations have challenged French credentials in hosting a global ocean conference, saying that unless France is accountable for its actions in the Pacific, it is merely “rebranding”.

The call for accountability marked the French-sponsored UN Ocean Conference (UNOC) in Nice this week, during which President Emmanuel Macron will be hosting a France-Pacific Summit.

French officials have described the UNOC event as a coming together “in the true spirit of Talanoa” and one that would be inconceivable without the Pacific.

• READ MORE: Former Congress staffer allowed to return to Kanaky New Caledonia
• Other France in the Pacific reports

While acknowledging the importance of leveraging global partnerships for urgent climate action and ocean protection through the UNOC process, Pacific civil society groups have issued a joint statement saying that their political leaders must hold France accountable for its past actions and not allow it to “launder its dirty linen in ‘Blue Pacific’ and ‘critical transition’ narratives”.

‘Responsible steward’ image undermined
France’s claims of being a “responsible steward” of the ocean were undermined by its historical actions in the Pacific, said the statement. This included:

● A brutal colonial legacy dating back to the mid-1800s, with the annexation of island nations now known as Kanaky-New Caledonia and Ma’ohi Nui-French Polynesia;

● A refusal to complete the decolonisation process, and in fact the perpetuation of the colonial condition, particularly for the those “territories” on the UN decolonisation list. In Kanaky-New Caledonia, for instance, France and its agents continue to renege on longstanding decolonisation commitments, while weaponising democratic ideals and processes such as “universal” voting rights to deny the fundamental rights of the indigenous population to self-determination;

● 30 years of nuclear violence in Ma’ohi Nui-French Polynesia with 193 test detonations — 46 in the atmosphere and close to 150 under the Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls, irradiating both land and sea, and people. Approximately 90 percent of the local population was exposed to radioactive fallout, resulting in long-term health impacts, including elevated rates of cancer and other radiation-related illnesses;

● Active efforts to obscure the true extent of its nuclear violence in Maʻohi Nui-French Polynesia, diverting resources to discredit independent research and obstructing transparency around health and environmental impacts. These actions reveal a persistent pattern of denial and narrative control that continues to undermine compensation efforts and delay justice for victims and communities;

● French claims to approximately one-third of the Pacific’s combined EEZ, and to being the world’s second largest ocean state, accruing largely from its so-called Pacific dependencies; and

● The supply of French military equipment, and the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior by French secret service agents — a state-sponsored terrorist attack with the 40th anniversary this year.

Seeking diplomatic support
“Since the late 1980s, France has worked to build on diplomatic, development and defence fronts to garner support from Pacific governments.

This includes development assistance through the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), Asian Development Fund, language and cultural exchanges, scientific collaboration and humanitarian assistance.

A strong diplomatic presence in Pacific capitals as well as a full schedule of high-level exchanges, including a triennial France-Oceania leaders’ Summit commencing in 2003, together function to enhance proximity with and inclination towards Paris sentiments and priorities.

The Pacific civil society statement said that French leadership at this UNOC process was once again central to its ongoing efforts to rebrand itself as a global leader on climate action, a champion of ocean protection, and a promoter of sovereignty.

“Nothing can be further from the truth,” the groups said.

“The reality is that France is rather more interested in strengthening its position as a middle power in an Indo-Pacific rather than a Pacific framework, and as a balancing power within the context of big-power rivalry between the US and China, all of which undermines rather than enhances Pacific sovereignty.”

New global image
The statement said that leaders must not allow France to build this new global image on the “foundations of its atrocities against Pacific peoples” and the ocean continent.

Pacific civil society called on France:

● For immediate and irreversible commitments and practical steps to bring its colonial presence in the Pacific to an end before the conclusion, in 2030, of the 4th International Decade on the Eradication of Colonialism; and

● To acknowledge and take responsibility for the oceanic and human harms caused by 30 years of nuclear violence in Maʻohi Nui–French Polynesia, and to commit to full and just reparations, including support for affected communities, environmental remediation of test sites, and full public disclosure of all health and contamination data.

The statement also called on Pacific leaders to:

● Keep France accountable for its multiple and longstanding debt to Pacific people; and

● Ensure that Ma’ohi Nui-French Polynesia and Kanaky-New Caledonia remain on the UN list of non-self-governing territories to be decolonised (UN decolonisation list).

“Pacific leaders must ensure that France does not succeed in laundering its soiled linen — soiled by the blood of thousands of Pacific Islanders who resisted colonial occupation and/or who were used as test subjects for its industrial-military machinery — in the UNOC process,” said the statement.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Many of the young plaintiffs have taken part in similar lawsuits before, and won. Now, they’re using the lessons learned in previous fights to improve their odds of success.

“Trump’s fossil fuel orders are a death sentence for my generation,” Eva Lighthiser, the named plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “I’m not suing because I want to — I’m suing because I have to. My health, my future, and my right to speak the truth are all on the line. He’s waging war on us with fossil fuels as his weapon, and we’re fighting back with the Constitution.”

Lighthiser v. Trump, filed May 29 in federal district court in Butte, Montana, names Trump; several Cabinet secretaries and agencies, including the Energy and Transportation departments; and the EPA as defendants. 

At issue are two orders Trump signed on his first day in office: one, declaring “a national energy emergency” and a second boosting production of “American energy”. A third order, signed in April, aimed to reinvigorate “America’s beautiful, clean coal industry.” Together, the youth plaintiffs — who are between 7 and 25 years old — argue these actions prioritize fossil fuels, suppress climate science, and undermine federal laws designed to protect public health, promote environmental safety, and maintain scientific integrity. They also argue that the orders “amount to a wholesale attack on clean renewable energy and climate science — escalating the climate emergency” and violating their Fifth Amendment right to life and liberty.

“These are the three executive orders that are the basis for the administration’s efforts to both unleash new fossil fuels and block the build-out of renewable energy,” said Nate Bellinger, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs. “They’re often referencing these executive orders when they’re doing things like expedited environmental reviews for oil and gas development or expanding coal mines.”

Lighthiser v. Trump enumerates the many ways Trump’s orders adversely impact the plaintiff’s lives. The young people, described as “students, ranchers, scientists-in-training, artists, and educators,” claim their economic and academic opportunities have been jeopardized by the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign to wipe climate data from the internet. They’ve endured heat waves that kept them indoors and fled wildfires or floods that threatened their homes. Some have been hospitalized for lung problems, and five of them live with respiratory ailments exacerbated by pollution.

“Future generations should not have to foot the bill of the [left’s] radical climate agenda,” said White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers in response to the lawsuit. “The American people are more concerned with the future generations’ economic and national security.” Representatives for the federal agencies being sued did not respond to requests for comment. 

Many of the plaintiffs in the suit won key climate victories against the state of Montana and the Hawai‘i Department of Transportation in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Then, as now, they argued that policies prioritizing the production of fossil fuels violated their right, enshrined in the constitutions of those two states, to a clean and healthful environment — rulings lawyers hope will set precedent for the case against Trump.

Like Lighthiser v. Trump, those suits were brought by Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to achieving legal recognition of children’s climate rights. This is not the first time it has taken the federal government to court — Our Children’s Trust spent a decade in court arguing Juliana v. United States, a pioneering case that argued the government wasn’t doing enough to protect them from climate change. 

They lost that case in March, but their fight sparked a global movement to defend children’s rights to a healthy climate and shaped the strategy behind the current lawsuit.

“The hill that the plaintiffs need to climb here is not as steep as what they faced in Juliana,” said Michael Gerrard,  founder and faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “In Juliana, they were asking the court to direct the federal government to prepare and implement a plan to change the entire energy system in the U.S. Here they are simply asking for the revocation of certain executive orders.”

Beyond that, “This new case is really grounded in previously recognized constitutional rights, rather than trying to argue there’s a new constitutional right to a stable climate system,” said Bellinger. He played a key role in winning the Montana case, where a judge agreed that the state’s enthusiastic support of the fossil fuel industry violated his clients’ constitutional rights. Ten of those young people from Montana are now among the 22 plaintiffs in the Trump lawsuit. 

“What we really need to be doing,” Bellinger said, “is addressing the climate emergency, not unleashing fossil fuels that will worsen the plaintiffs’ injuries.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Youth climate activists won lawsuits in Montana and Hawai‘i. Now they’re targeting Trump. on Jun 6, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sophie Hurwitz.

The New York Times (12/2/19) apparently doesn’t think Greta Thunberg is an icon Gaza desperately needs.

When Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was fighting for climate justice in her home country and the world stage, the New York Times gave her top billing. She co-authored an op-ed (8/19/21), and was the subject of a long interview (10/30/20).

Acclaimed film director Darren Aronofsky wrote a piece for the Times (12/2/19) headlined “Greta Thunberg Is the Icon the Planet Desperately Needs.” Seeing a photo of her at 15, staging her first environmental protest, he said: “Here was the image—one of hope, commitment and action—I needed to see. An image that could spark a movement.” Her work was highlighted constantly in the Paper of Record (e.g., New York Times, 2/18/19, 8/29/19, 9/18/19, 1/21/20, 4/9/21, 11/4/21, 6/30/23).

Now Thunberg is sailing to Gaza with a group of 11 other activists in what AP (6/2/25)  called an “effort to bring in some aid and raise ‘international awareness’ over the ongoing humanitarian crisis.” The Israeli blockade of Gaza and the ongoing military strikes on the devastated territory is leading to a massive starvation crisis (UN News, 6/1/25; FAIR.org, 4/25/25).

No fawning coverage of Thunberg’s activism from the Times this time. No Hollywood big shot saying that he hoped her trip would “spark a movement.”

‘Professional tantrum-thrower’

Fox News‘ Greg Gutfeld (6/3/25) decried Thunberg’s “promiscuity of activism.”

The right-wing press is upset about Thunberg’s voyage and Palestine advocacy, of course. The Israeli military “says it is ‘prepared’ to raid the ship, as it has done with previous freedom flotilla efforts,” reported the Daily Mail (6/4/25), adding IDF spokesperson Gen. Effie Defrin’s remark: “We have gained experience in recent years, and we will act accordingly.” Israeli security sources have reportedly vowed to stop the vessel before it gets to Gaza (Jerusalem Post, 6/4/25, 6/5/25).

The British Spectator‘s Julie Burchill (6/4/25) said:

When we consider child stars through the ages, the girls generally age better than the boys; Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Billie Piper all made the seamless switch from winsome cuties to gifted entertainers. The same cannot be said of Greta Thunberg, though she’s certainly remained consistently irritating. Neither a singer nor a thespian, she is a professional tantrum-thrower, more comparable to the fictional horrors Violet Elizabeth Bott and Veruca Salt than the trio of troupers listed above.

“Hope Greta and her friends can swim!” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (X, 6/1/25), a ghoulish statement suggesting that an attack on the ship was imminent. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (6/2/25) called the message a “grotesque social media post suggesting a possible Israeli state terrorism attack on peaceful international activists aboard a humanitarian aid ship bound for Gaza.”

The pro-Israel media criticism website HonestReporting (6/4/25) called Thunberg’s participation in the aid mission an “anti-Israel publicity stunt.” “Greta Thunberg’s beliefs are as shallow as her need for attention,” said Fox News host Greg Gutfeld (6/3/25). Rita Panahi of Australia’s Sky News (6/4/25) called Thunberg a “doom goblin.”

These comments aren’t just mean-spirited but ominous, considering that the group’s previous mission was aborted when their ship suffered a drone attack (Reuters, 5/6/25), and an aid flotilla to Gaza 15 years ago ended up with Israeli special forces killing ten activists (Al Jazeera, 5/30/20).

From star to nonentity

Greta Thunberg (AP, 6/2/25): “No matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide.”

And yet while the New York Times (5/2/25) covered the aborted mission and Thunberg’s involvement, it has not yet reported on the current mission and Thunberg’s role. As noted earlier, AP (6/2/25) covered the launch of the current mission, with Thunberg aboard, which was re-run in the Washington Post (6/2/25). She has done interviews with other media from the boat (Democracy Now!, 6/4/25).

How could she have gone from a star in the Times‘ pages to such a nonentity? Given how much attention she received in the Times for leading a movement for climate justice, one might think that her dedication to the strife in Gaza might warrant some attention, too.

For activists and journalists who have covered the press response to the crisis in Gaza, this is all part of the Palestine exception, where liberal groups and outlets might show concern for humanitarian crises around the world, but lower their outrage or stay completely silent on the subject of Palestine.

FAIR (5/22/25) recently noted another example of this phenomenon at the Times. An op-ed by its publisher, ​​A.G. Sulzberger (5/13/25), decried attacks on the freedom of the press around the world, but omitted that the biggest killer of journalists in the world today is the Israeli government.

‘Money from Hamas’

The New York Times (5/14/25) treated the idea that Hamas might be bankrolling an American children’s entertainer as a plausible allegation.

The New York Times (5/14/25) recently covered the backlash children’s entertainer Rachel Griffin Accurso, aka Ms. Rachel, has received from pro-Israel activists for using her platform to speak out for Palestinian children. The most eyebrow-raising bit from the piece:

Last month, the advocacy group StopAntisemitism labeled Accurso the “Antisemite of the Week” and, the New York Post reported, sent a letter urging Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Accurso is receiving funding to further Hamas’s agenda.

Accurso “posted nearly 50 times about the children of Gaza, most of which is filled with misinformation from Hamas, and only five times about Israeli children,” the group, which monitors statements about Israel on social media accounts of prominent figures, said on its website. “In the case of the Israeli children, she only posted due to widespread public backlash, never condemning Hamas and the Palestinians.”

Accurso, 42, in an emailed response denied having received money from Hamas. “This accusation is not only absurd, it’s patently false,” she said.

It’s impossible to imagine that if Accurso had been speaking about Ukrainian children suffering under Russia’s invasion, the Times or any other US establishment outlet would entertain the notion that she was working on behalf of the Azov Battalion or another extremist Ukrainian faction. Alas, this is how the Palestine exception works in US media like the Times.

Accurso and Thunberg’s advocacy for Palestinian civilians is dangerous to those cheerleading the slaughter in Gaza, because their status as clear-eyed and big-hearted people give public legitimacy to the Palestinian cause. The Times invoking the Palestinian exception against them is a part of a larger effort to keep public opinion from turning against Israeli militarism.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

To better understand how this heat island effect plays out in Laredo, the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last summer and enlisted more than 100 volunteers to drive around the city taking temperature readings. Edgar Villaseñor, the center’s advocacy campaign manager, taught himself to organize all that data and used it to create the map below. (Red shows where it’s hottest in the afternoon and blue where it’s coolest — notice the disparities between neighborhoods.) 

But Villaseñor wanted a more professional map to make it easier to navigate. He also wanted to hire someone to take thermal pictures on the ground in the hottest neighborhoods so that the center could create an interactive website for Laredo’s residents. He reckoned the city council could use such a site to figure out where to install more shading for people waiting at bus stops, for instance. So he applied for a $10,000 grant through NOAA’s Center for Heat Resilient Communities, which was funded through the Biden administration’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The research center was ready to announce on May 5 that the Rio Grande nonprofit, along with 14 city governments, had been selected to work closely with its researchers to tailor plans for addressing urban heat, according to V. Kelly Turner, who co-led the Center for Heat Resilient Communities. But the day before the announcement, Turner received a notice from NOAA that it was defunding the center. Turner says it sent another termination of funding notice to a separate data-gathering group, the Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring, which was created with the same IRA funding. (When contacted for this story, a NOAA representative directed Grist to Turner for comment.) “The funding just stopped,” Villaseñor said. “I’m stuck with this valuable data that not a lot of people have.”

It’s the latest in a flurry of cuts across the federal government since President Donald Trump took office in January. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has canceled hundreds of grants meant to help communities curb pollution and make themselves more resilient, such as by updating wastewater systems. NOAA announced last month that it would axe a database that tracks billion-dollar disasters, which experts said will hobble communities’ ability to assess the risk of catastrophes. Major job cuts at NOAA also have hurricane scientists worried that coastal cities — especially along the Gulf Coast — won’t get accurate forecasts of storms headed their way.

The defunding of the Center for Heat Resilient Communities came as a surprise to the group’s own leaders, who said they will continue collaborating with cities on their own. Though its budget was just $2.25 million, they say that money could have gone a long way in helping not just the grantees, but communities anywhere in the U.S. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm and momentum for doing this kind of work, and we’re not going to just let that go,” said Turner, who’s also associate director of heat research at the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We’re going to continue to interface with [communities], it’s just going to be incredibly scaled down.”

The program would have been the first of its kind in the U.S. In an ideal scenario, the Center for Heat Resilient Communities could have developed a universal heat plan for every city in the country. The challenge, however, is not only that heat varies significantly from neighborhood to neighborhood — richer areas with more green spaces tend to be much cooler — but also that no two cities experience heat the same way. A sticky, humid 90 degrees in Miami, for example, will feel a whole lot worse than 90 in Phoenix. 

Turner and her colleagues at the research center had planned to work with a range of communities — coastal, rural, agricultural, tribal — for a year to craft action plans and discuss ways to construct green spaces, open more cooling centers for people to seek shelter, or outfit homes with better insulation and windows. “If the community was in a heavily vegetated, forested area, maybe urban forestry wouldn’t be the strategy that they’re interested in learning more about,” said Ladd Keith, director of the Heat Resilience Initiative at the University of Arizona, who co-led the center. “It might be something more about housing quality.”

The researchers had also planned to help communities determine who’s most at risk from rising heat, based on local economies and demographics. Rural economies, for example, have more agricultural workers exposed in shade-free fields, whereas office workers in urban areas find relief from air conditioning. Some cities have higher populations of elderly people, who need extra protection because their bodies don’t handle heat as well as those of younger folks. 

While each city has a unique approach to handling heat, the 15 communities chosen represented the many geographies and climates of the U.S., Keith said. With this collaboration, the researchers would have been able to piece together a publicly available guide that any other city could consult. “We would have also learned quite a lot from their participation,” Keith said. “We would have had a really robust roadmap that would be really applicable to all cities across the country.”

The funding from NOAA might be gone, but what remains is the expertise that these researchers can still provide to communities as independent scientists. “We don’t want to leave them completely hanging,” Turner said. “While we can’t do as in-depth and rigorous work with them, we still feel like we owe it to them to help with their heat resilience plans.”

Villaseñor, for his part, said his work won’t stop, even though that $10,000 grant would have gone a long way. He might rely on volunteers, for instance, to take those thermal images of the Lardeo’s hot spots. “I’m still trying to see what I can do without funding,” Villaseñor said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Funding to protect American cities from extreme heat just evaporated on Jun 4, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

The problem with plant-based alternatives, for the moment, is that most consumers just don’t seem interested in buying them instead of conventional meat. This year alone, U.S. retail sales for refrigerated plant-based burgers fell by more than a quarter. 

But there are signs that consumers might be perfectly happy to reduce their meat consumption in other ways. New research shows that meat eaters already prefer the taste of some “balanced proteins” — items like hamburgers and sausages that replace at least 30 percent of their meat content with vegetables — over conventional meat. While that may sound like a small change, the climate impact could be surprisingly large at scale: Initial research suggests that, if Americans replaced 30 percent of the meat in every burger they consume in a year, the carbon emission reductions would be equivalent to taking every car off the road in San Diego County. 

Taste and price are often listed as reasons for sluggish consumer interest in plant-based proteins. That’s where Nectar, the group that conducted the new research, comes in: Part of the philanthropic organization Food System Innovations, Nectar conducts large-scale blind taste tests with omnivores to determine exactly how much consumers prefer meat over veggie options, or vice versa. 

To be clear, balanced proteins — sometimes called “blended meats” — are a far cry from the vegetarian or vegan options that are most climate-friendly. Balanced proteins are still meat products, just with less meat. These novel foods incorporate plant-based protein or whole-cut vegetables into the mix. Companies experimenting with balanced proteins — which include boutique brands as well as meat titans like Purdue — frame these additions not as filler, but as a way to boost flavor and sneak more nutrients into one’s diet. It may not be a hard sell; after all, Americans are among the most ravenous meat consumers in the world, and they are estimated to eat 1.5 times more meat than dietary guidelines recommend.

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What Nectar found in its latest research is that the balanced protein category is already relatively popular with meat eaters: Participants reported they were more likely to buy balanced protein product than a vegan one. That means that balanced proteins could serve as one way to get consumers to eat less meat overall, lowering the carbon footprints of omnivores reluctant to give up burgers entirely.

In other words, while profit-minded companies like Purdue might sell blended meats as a win-win for consumers looking for better taste and higher nutritional content, the fact that substituting these products for conventional meat could cut down on greenhouse gas emissions is an unspoken perk for the planet.

“Taste has to be at the forefront” if animal protein substitution is going to take off, said Tim Dale, the Category Innovation Director at Food System Innovations.

Mixing vegetables and whole grains directly into meat products is nothing new. Onion, garlic, and parsley often appear in lamb kofta; breadcrumbs help give meatballs their shape and improve their texture. Dale noted that chefs sometimes mix mushrooms into burgers to keep their patties from drying out. Replacing one third of a sausage with, say, potatoes and bell peppers, is “just doubling down on that logic and doing so because of this new motivation of sustainability,” he added.

To gauge how consumers perceive balanced proteins, Dale and his team designed a series of blind taste tests in which participants sampled both traditional meat products — burgers, meatballs, chicken nuggets, and a half-dozen other popular meats — as well as balanced protein options of the same type. The consumers then responded to survey questions asking them to evaluate flavor, texture, and appearance. (Like previous studies done by Nectar, the taste tests were done in a restaurant setting, rather than a laboratory.)

Nearly 1,200 people — all of whom reported eating their product category (say, meatballs) at least once every month or two — participated in these taste tests. The results revealed that participants preferred the taste of three balanced protein brands — the Shiitake Infusion Burgers from Fable Food Co., the Purdue PLUS Chicken Nuggets from Purdue, and the Duo burger from Fusion Food Co. — over that of the “normal” all-meat alternatives. A fourth item, the BOTH Burger from 50/50 Foods, was ranked evenly with an all-meat burger, reaching what Nectar calls “taste parity”. 

Dale called balanced proteins “a re-emerging category,” one that has been around but might be well-positioned to pick up steam in a climate-changing world as both consumers and producers of meat struggle to make more sustainable choices. Nectar likens balanced proteins to hybrid cars, because they represent a midpoint on the path to going meatless. Cara Nicoletta, a fourth-generation butcher who founded Seemore Meat & Veggies, experimented with sneaking vegetables like bell peppers, mushrooms, and carrots into her sausages for a decade before launching her business around 2020. She has said that, while working as a butcher, the amount of meat she saw her customers purchase day in and day out did not “seem like a sustainable way to eat.”

While brands may not spell it out in their marketing, the reason why cutting the amount of beef or pork or chicken in your sausage is better for the environment is because raising meat for human consumption is a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2024, the United Nations found that the agrifood system is responsible for one third of global greenhouse gas emissions; in that same report, the U.N. stated that livestock was the single largest source of these emissions within the food system, followed by the deforestation required for the farmland and pasture that support omnivorous diets. This is difficult to talk about, and brands rarely do. (Purdue’s line of blended chicken nuggets instead highlights its hidden cauliflower and chickpea content as a nutritious plus for kids.)

For the climate-minded, of course, there’s no better way to reduce meat consumption than by cutting it out entirely. “Ideally, I’d love to see a future where we moved away from animals in the food system completely,” said Brittany Sartor, who co-founded Plant Futures, a curriculum at the University of California, Berkeley, geared towards preparing students for careers in the plant-based alternatives industry. (Sartor was not involved in the Nectar study.)

But she added that Nectar’s findings on balanced proteins are promising, and she believes these items “have potential to reduce animal consumption and its related health and environmental impacts — especially among certain consumer demographics.”

Dale put it this way: Whether people give up meat entirely or not, framing the veggie-forward option as superior can start with centering taste: “We are trying to promote and say that the sustainable choice is the more delicious way to cook.”

So far, meat eaters agree.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The sneaky way even meat lovers can lessen their climate impact on Jun 4, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

Thomasville, Georgia, has a water problem. Its treatment system is far out of date, posing serious health and environmental risks.

“We have wastewater infrastructure that is old,” said Sheryl Sealy, the assistant city manager for this city of 18,881 near the Florida border, about 45 minutes from Tallahassee. “It’s critical that we do the work to replace this.”

But it’s expensive to replace. The system is especially bad in underserved parts of the city, Sealy said.

In September, Thomasville applied to get some help from the federal government, and just under four months later, the city and its partners were awarded a nearly $20 million Community Change grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to make the long-overdue wastewater improvements, build a resilience hub and health clinic, and upgrade homes in several historic neighborhoods.

“The grant itself was really a godsend for us,” Sealy said. 

In early April, as the EPA canceled grants for similar projects across the country, federal officials assured Thomasville that their funding was on track. Then on May 1, the city received a termination notice.

“We felt, you know, a little taken off guard when the bottom did let out for us,” said Sealy.

Thomasville isn’t alone. 

Under the Trump administration, the EPA has canceled or interrupted hundreds of grants aimed at improving health and severe weather preparedness because the agency “determined that the grant applications no longer support administration priorities,” according to an emailed statement to Grist.

The cuts are part of a broader gutting of federal programs aimed at furthering environmental justice, an umbrella term for the effort to help communities that have been hardest hit by pollution and other environmental issues, which often include low-income communities and communities of color. 

In Thomasville’s case, the city has a history of heavy industry that has led to poor air quality. Air pollution, health concerns, and high poverty qualified the surrounding county for the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, which prioritized funding for disadvantaged communities. Thomasville has some of the highest exposure risks in Georgia to toxic air pollutants that can cause respiratory, reproductive, and developmental health problems, according to the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Vulnerability Index. The city’s wastewater woes don’t only mean the potential for sewage backups in homes and spills into local waterways but also the risk of upper respiratory problems, according to Zealan Hoover, a former Biden administration EPA official who is now advising the advocacy groups Environmental Protection Network and Lawyers for Good Government.

“These projects were selected because they have a really clear path to alleviating the health challenges facing this community,” he said.

Critics argue there’s a disconnect between the Trump administration’s attack on the concept of environmental justice and the realities of what the funds are paying for.

“What is it about building a new health clinic and upgrading wastewater infrastructure … that’s inconsistent with administration policy?” Democratic Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff asked EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin at a recent hearing. 

Zeldin repeatedly responded by discussing the agency’s review process intended to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, particularly those related to diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, but Ossoff cut him off, pushing for a specific answer about Thomasville’s grant. “Is a new health clinic for Thomasville, Georgia, woke?” he asked.

Thomasville’s Sealy said she understands that the federal government has to make hard funding decisions — that’s true locally too — but losing this grant has left her city in the lurch. In addition to the planned work on the wastewater collection system, the city needs to update its treatment plant to meet EPA standards. That overhaul will likely cost $60 million to $70 million, she said.

“How do you fund that?” Sealy asked. “You can’t fund that on the backs of the people who pay our rates.”

The funding cuts have left cities across Georgia — including Athens, Norcross, and Savannah — as well as nonprofit groups, in a state of uncertainty: some grants terminated, some suspended then reinstated, some still unclear. This puts city officials in an impossible position, unable to wait or to move forward, according to Athens-Clarke County Sustainability Director Mike Wharton. 

“Do you commit to new programs? Do you commit to services?” he said. “Here you are sitting in limbo for months.” 

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Like Thomasville, Athens was also awarded a nearly $20 million Community Change grant. The city was going to use the money for backup generators, solar power, and battery storage at its public safety complex — ensuring 911, police, the jail, a domestic violence shelter, and other services could all operate during a power outage. That grant has been terminated.

The problem, Wharton said, goes beyond that money not coming in; the city had already spent time, resources, and money to get the grant.

“We spent $60,000 in local funding hiring people to write the grants,” he said. “Over a period of 14 months we invested over 700 hours of local personnel time. So we diverted our services to focus on these things.”

These frustrations are playing out for grant recipients throughout the state and country, according to Hoover. He said it’s not just confusing — it’s expensive.

“They are causing project costs to skyrocket because they keep freezing and unfreezing and refreezing projects,” he said. “One of the big drivers of cost overruns in any infrastructure project, public or private, is having to demobilize and remobilize your teams.”

Thomasville and Athens officials both said they’re appealing their grant terminations, which require them to submit a formal letter outlining the reasons for their appeal and requesting the agency reconsider the decision. They’re also reaching out to their elected officials, hoping that pressure from their senators and members of Congress can get them the federal money they were promised.

Other cities and nonprofits, as well as a group of Democratic state attorneys general, have sued, arguing that terminating their grants without following proper procedures is illegal. But that’s a difficult step for many localities to take.

“Suing the federal government to assert your legal rights is very daunting, even if the law is on your side,” Hoover said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump cuts hundreds of EPA grants, leaving cities on the hook for climate resiliency on Jun 2, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Jones.

Last summer, ExxonMobil sponsored week-long camps to teach grade school students from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi about the virtues of these aquifers, specifically their ability to serve as carbon capture and sequestration wells, where oil, gas, and heavy industry can bury harmful emissions deep underground. In one exercise, students were given 20 minutes to build a model reservoir out of vegetable oil, Play-Doh, pasta, and uncooked beans. Whoever could keep the most vegetable oil (meant to represent liquified carbon dioxide) in their aquifer, won. 

This kind of down-home carbon capture boosterism is a relatively new development for the oil and gas giant. Over recent years, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies have spent millions lobbying for government support of what they see as industry-friendly green technology, most prominently carbon capture and storage, which many scientists and environmental activists have argued is ineffective and distracts from eliminating fossil fuel operations in the first place. According to Exxon’s website, it’s evidence that they are leading “the biggest energy transition in history.” 

Now that Congress has turned its attention to rolling back government spending on renewable energy, it appears that most of the climate “solutions” being left off the chopping block are the ones favored by carbon-intensive companies like Exxon. Corporate tax breaks for carbon capture and storage, for instance, were one of the few things left untouched when House Republicans passed a budget bill on May 22 that effectively gutted the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation. What remained of the IRA’s clean energy tax credits were incentives for nuclear, so-called clean fuels like ethanol, and carbon capture. When the IRA was passed in 2022, there was immediate backlash against the provisions for carbon capture. 

“Essentially, we, the taxpayers, are subsidizing a private sewer system for oil and gas,” said Sandra Steingraber, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Science and Environmental Health Network.

The tax credits for nuclear power plants, which produce energy without emitting greenhouse gases, are meant to spur what President Donald Trump hopes will be an “energy renaissance,” bolstered by a flurry of pro-nuclear executive orders he issued a day after the budget bill cleared the House. Projects will be able to use the tax credits if they begin construction by 2031; wind and solar companies, however, will lose access to tax credits unless they begin construction within 60 days of Trump signing the bill, and are fully up and running by 2028.

That the carbon capture tax credit was never in danger of being revoked is a testament to its importance to the oil and gas industry, said Jim Walsh, the policy director at the nonprofit Food and Water Watch. “The major beneficiaries of these tax credits are oil and gas companies and big agricultural interests.” 

The carbon capture tax credit was first established in 2008, but the subsidies were more than doubled when it was tacked on to the IRA in order to get former Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia’s vote. Companies now receive $60 for every ton of CO2 captured and used to drive oil out of the ground (a process known as “enhanced oil recovery”) and up to $85 for a ton of CO2 that is permanently stored. As roughly 60 percent of captured C02 in the United States is used for enhanced oil recovery, detractors see the tax credit as something of a devil’s bargain, a provision that props up an industry at taxpayer expense. 

How much carbon is actually captured by these projects is also a matter of debate. The tax credit requires companies that claim it to self-report how much CO2 they inject to the Internal Revenue Service. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, is in charge of tracking leaks. There are tax penalties if captured carbon ends up leaking, but those penalties only apply if the leaks occur in the first 3 years after injection. Holding companies accountable is made more complicated by the fact that tax returns are confidential, and Walsh cautions that there is very little communication between the EPA and the IRS. Oversight is “very, very minimal,” added Anika Juhn, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a research firm.

“You can keep some really played out oil fields going for a long time, and you can get the public to pay for it,” said Carolyn Raffensberger, the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, explaining the potential impact of the budget bill. “So the argument is, ‘This is a win for the climate, it’s a win for energy dominance.’ [But] it’s really a budget buster with no guardrails at all.” 

Existing carbon-capture facilities have been plagued by technical and financial issues. The country’s first commercial carbon capture plant in Decatur, Illinois, sprung two leaks last year directly under Lake Decatur, which is the town’s main source of drinking water. When concentrated CO2 hits water it turns into carbonic acid, which then leaches heavy metals from rocks within the aquifer and poisons the water. Although a certain level of public health concerns come with many emerging technologies, critics point out that all of this risk is being taken for a technology that has not been proven to work at scale, and may actually increase emissions by incentivizing more oil and gas production. It could also strain the existing electrical grid — outfitting a natural gas or coal plant with carbon capture equipment can suck up about 15 to 25 percent of the plant’s power. 

The tax credits exist “to pollute and confuse people,” said Mark Jacobsen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, who has argued that there is essentially no reasonable use for carbon capture. They “increase people’s [energy] costs and do nothing for the climate.”

But the technology does have its defenders among scientists. The 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called an increase in carbon capture technology “unavoidable” if countries  want to reach net-zero emissions. Jessie Stolark, the executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an umbrella organization of fossil fuel companies, unions, and environmental groups, contends that arguments like Jacobsen’s unnecessarily set the technology against renewables. “We need all the solutions in the toolkit,” she said. “We’re not saying don’t deploy these other technologies. We see this very much as a complementary and supportive piece in the broader decarbonization toolkit.” 

Stolark said that carbon capture didn’t make it out of the budget process entirely unscathed, as the bill specified that companies could no longer sell carbon capture tax credits. So-called “transferability” — the ability to sell these tax credits on the open market — has been invaluable to small energy startups that have struggled to secure financing in their early stages, according to Stolark. The Carbon Capture Coalition is urging lawmakers to restore transferability now that the bill has moved from the House to the Senate.

Still, the kinds of companies likely to claim carbon capture tax credits — often major players in oil and gas, ammonia, steel, and other heavy industries — are less likely to rely on transferability than more modest companies (often providers of renewable energy), whose smaller tax bills makes it harder for them to realize the value of their respective tax credits. 

“A lot of the factories, the power plants, the industrial facilities deploying within the next ten years or so, are expected to be these really big [facilities] with the big tax burdens,” said Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at Energy Innovations, a clean energy think tank based in San Francisco. “They’re not the type of smaller producers — like small solar companies — that are reliant on transferability in order to monetize the tax credit.” 

To some observers, keeping the carbon capture credit looks like a flagrant giveaway to the oil and gas industry. Juhn estimated that the credit could end up costing taxpayers more than $800 billion by 2040. Given the House bill’s aggressive cuts to social programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Juhn finds the carbon capture credit offensive. “When we look at these other programs, where we’re nickel and diming benefits to folks that could really use them, what does that mean? It’s gross.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’s likely to survive from Biden’s climate law? The controversial stuff. on May 30, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Rebecca Egan McCarthy.

“Lethal climate disasters are the foreseeable, and foreseen, consequences of specific actions by fossil fuel corporations, CEOs, and boards of directors. They caused the climate crisis and deceived the public about the dangerousness of their products in order to block and delay solutions that could prevent heat deaths like Juliana’s. These fossil fuel actors should be held accountable to the victims of their lethal conduct, and this wrongful death suit provides a compelling new approach for climate victims moving forward.

“Wrongful death suits provide private remedies. But Big Oil companies have wronged the public, too, which is why this suit may also help lay the groundwork for another approach to climate accountability: criminal homicide prosecutions. The purpose of criminal law enforcement is to deter future crimes, promote public safety, punish wrongdoers, and encourage the convicted to pursue less harmful practices. All of these public safety goals apply to Big Oil’s continuing contributions to climate change, and prosecutors across the country should take note of this new wrongful death suit and carefully consider how the climate effects their constituents are experiencing fit the criminal laws they are charged with enforcing.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Andersson.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

This story is not subject to our Creative Commons license.

NEWTOK, Alaska — A jumble of shipping containers hold all that remains of the demolished public school in Newtok, Alaska, where on a recent visit, a few stray dogs and a lone ermine prowled among the ruins.

Late last year, the final residents of this sinking village near the Bering Sea left behind the waterlogged tundra of their former home, part of a fraught, federally funded effort to resettle communities threatened by climate change.

Nearly 300 people from Newtok have moved 9 miles across the Ninglick River to a new village known as Mertarvik. But much of the infrastructure there is already failing. Residents lack running water, use 5-gallon buckets as toilets and must contend with intermittent electricity and deteriorating homes that expose them to the region’s fierce weather.

Newtok’s relocation was supposed to provide a model for dozens of Alaskan communities that will need to move in the coming decades. Instead, those who’ve worked on the effort say what happened in Newtok demonstrates the federal government’s failure to oversee the complex project and understand communities’ unique cultural needs. And it highlights how ill-prepared the United States is to respond to the way climate change is making some places uninhabitable, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, ProPublica and KYUK radio in Bethel, Alaska.

Dozens of grants from at least seven federal agencies have helped pay for the relocation, which began in 2019 and is expected to cost more than $150 million. But while the federal government supplied taxpayer dollars, it left most of the responsibility to the tiny Newtok Village Council. The federally recognized tribal government lacked the expertise to manage the project and has faced high turnover and internal political conflict, according to tribal records and interviews with more than 70 residents as well as dozens of current and former members of the seven-person village council.

Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.

But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.

“We’re physically seeing the impacts of a changing climate on these communities,” said Don Antrobus, a climate adaptation consultant for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. “And the fact that we don’t have a government framework for dealing with these issues is not just an Alaska problem, it’s a national problem.”

Newtok’s relocation follows the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, where land vanished under rising sea levels. Both relocations have been labeled as “blueprints” for the federal government’s response to climate change. Both have been mired in complicated and disjointed funding systems and accusations that the government neglected traditional knowledge.

For centuries, the area’s Indigenous Yup’ik residents lived a nomadic subsistence lifestyle, timing their seasonal movements with the arrival of migratory birds in spring, fish in summer and the ripening of berries in early fall. But that changed in the 1950s after a barge, loaded with construction materials to build a school, got stuck near present-day Newtok and couldn’t navigate farther upriver. So the Bureau of Indian Affairs built the school there.

At the time, elders knew the location wasn’t fit for permanent settlement because the low-lying ground would shift as the permafrost froze and thawed seasonally, said Andy Patrick, 77, one of two residents who remember life in the old village before Newtok.

“My grandma used to tell me, ‘It’s going to start wobbling,’” he said. But they moved because the BIA required their children to attend its school.

Born and raised in Newtok, Jack Charlie was relieved when he moved into a modest brown house in Mertarvik in 2022. His old plywood home in Newtok was moldy and sinking into the tundra as the permafrost that supported the land thawed.

But within months, the light fixtures in his new house filled with water from condensation, and gaps formed where the walls met the ceiling in his bedroom. Charlie started stuffing toilet paper into the cracks to keep out the persistent coastal winds.

“Once I found it was leaking and cold air drifting in, I said: ‘Hell! What kind of house did they build?’” he said.

Charlie is one of multiple residents who complained about problems with their newly built houses. When KYUK asked for inspection reports, the tribe and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said they didn’t have any. In the absence of an official inspection, KYUK hired a professional with expertise in cold climate housing to examine seven of the 46 homes in Mertarvik, which were built by three different contractors.

According to the inspection performed last year, Charlie’s home is among 17 houses, built by one contractor, that are rapidly deteriorating because they were designed and constructed the same way. The foundations are not salvageable, and the buildings do not meet minimum code requirements, said the inspector, Emmett Leffel, an energy auditor and building analyst in Alaska.

“This is some of the worst new construction I’ve ever seen, and the impact is so quickly realized because of the coastal climate,” Leffel said in an interview.

His inspection report concluded: “The totality of the work needed to correct these conditions and issues may cost substantially more than the original construction.”

There are other problems beyond housing. The BIA committed more than $6 million for roads but failed to coordinate with other agencies to install water pipes underneath, according to a former project manager, the tribal health consortium and the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency tasked with providing critical infrastructure support to Alaska’s most remote communities. As a result, none of the houses in Mertarvik has a flush toilet or shower. Residents go to the town’s small well to fill jugs for household use.

As more people have moved to Mertarvik, the town’s power plant hasn’t kept up with electricity demand, leaving residents without heat or power in the winter, said Calvin Tom, the tribal administrator. And a wastewater system that handles sewage from the school, health clinic and a dormitory for construction workers has been overwhelmed for more than a year, he said. Last spring, sewage backed up into the school’s basement.

The BIA, the largest funder of the relocation that helped plan the community, did not agree to an interview request. The agency said in an email that it’s working closely with the Newtok Village Council and that the council has established a plan to repair the homes. The tribe’s attorney, Matt Mead, said, “NVC does have a repair plan and is seeking funding from multiple sources to allow for implementation of the plan.”

That was news to council secretary Della Carl and council member Francis Tom, whose home has some of the worst problems. Both said they knew of no such plan, and Mead declined to provide one. Four other council members (one seat is vacant) declined to comment or didn’t return calls or emails. Mead said the plan to fix the houses needs to be better communicated to council members and residents. He said the tribe disagrees that the homes are deteriorating and declined to comment about its management of the project.

Patrick LeMay, the Anchorage-based contractor whose company was hired by the tribe to build Charlie’s and 16 other deteriorating houses, was fired last year because of the construction and design problems, according to tribal council members. LeMay didn’t respond to questions or comment on Leffel’s report other than to say, “I do not work for Newtok any longer.”

Greg Stuckey, administrator for HUD’s Office of Native American Programs in Anchorage, said the agency is not required to inspect the LeMay houses because the grant went directly to the tribal government. Federal law allows tribes to administer government programs themselves to recognize their independence and cultural needs.

“So they can’t say it’s the federal government,” Stuckey said, “because they chose this.”

Mead said the Newtok Village Council didn’t dispute that.

The Government Accountability Office, however, has repeatedly recommended that federal agencies provide more technical assistance to small tribes in climate relocations.

“When you have 20 or 30 different programs that can all interact together and they all have different rules,” said Anna Maria Ortiz, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment, “that’s going to cost more in the long run and can be nearly impossible for some villages.”

In 1996, after decades fighting erosion from storms and the deteriorating permafrost, the Newtok tribe began negotiating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to exchange land for the relocation. Congress approved the trade in 2003. For the next two decades, the tribe worked with federal and state agencies to plan the new community at Mertarvik. Storm damage shut down the public school for good last year, and the Newtok Village Council voted to finish the evacuation.

Dozens of remote communities in Alaska face similar threats from climate change, according to a 2019 report by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The issues affecting such communities are well understood in Arctic regions around the world, but policymakers aren’t heeding warnings from relocation experts, said Andrea Marta Knudsen, a relocation and disaster recovery specialist in the Iceland prime minister’s office.

“It’s not like this is a new thing or hasn’t been researched,” she said. “The government should maybe say: ‘Oh wow, we’re dealing with a disaster or relocation. Who knows this? Let’s have a team of experts working with the government on this.’”

Over the years, several government bodies tried to coordinate efforts in Newtok. At first, Alaska’s commerce department formed the Newtok Planning Group to coordinate assistance for the relocation. But in 2013, the group’s work stalled because the BIA paused its funding for the tribe after a political dispute resulted in two competing tribal governments. The planning group has met only three times since 2019.

The Denali Commission took on project management responsibilities in 2016 but ceded control to the BIA three years ago after the agency announced a $25 million grant funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

This inconsistent oversight and coordination has significantly affected the quality of housing, according to experts who have worked on the relocation.

The first two housing projects in Mertarvik received high ratings from Leffel, the inspector hired by KYUK. The Alaska-based nonprofit Cold Climate Housing Research Center designed 14 homes to maximize energy efficiency and withstand the harsh weather. The houses also provide space for residents to cut fish, dress moose and host large family gatherings — activities integral to the Yup’ik lifestyle. An additional 15 houses were built by a regional housing authority that has decades of experience on Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Charlie’s home and 16 others were part of a third round of houses, designed and built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. At various times, LeMay was also employed by the tribe in other roles, including tribal administrator and relocation coordinator. Representing the tribe while simultaneously earning money from it could create a potential conflict of interest, said Ted Waters, an attorney who specializes in federal grants administration.

According to Leffel’s inspection, the foundations of Charlie’s home and the others designed and built by LeMay “do not meet minimum code requirements for corrosion resistance, adequate supports” or “structural integrity requirements.” Two years of fuel usage data provided by the tribe shows residents in the LeMay houses pay more than twice as much for energy each year compared with the other two housing projects.

Francis Tom, the council member, said outside entities like LeMay and federal agencies often ignored his community’s needs. “They don’t know. They weren’t born here,” he said. “They don’t spend enough time here.”

A year before Leffel examined the houses, a group of BIA officials took a tour and saw the water pooling in light fixtures and moisture damage in several of the LeMay homes, council members said. It’s unclear what they did with that information. The BIA said its staff has made three trips to Mertarvik since, and the tribe’s attorney said multiple homes were inspected by independent engineers this past year, something both council members Carl and Tom disputed. Charlie and nearly a dozen other residents said no one other than Leffel had been inside their homes to inspect them. The attorney declined to provide copies of any inspections.

HUD was also made aware of problems after a 2022 report submitted by the tribe showed occupancy numbers that exceeded the agency’s overcrowding standards.

In addition to the problems with the LeMay homes, several other residents said they’re facing similar issues with some of the temporary tiny homes that were shipped in by barge in the fall because of the urgent need to move. Rosemary John’s was among the last families to relocate. John, who grew up in Newtok and raised her six kids there, said the move has been agonizing. Seven people are now living in her house. This winter, John posted a video to social media that showed water running down a wall and pooling on the floor.

Next door, in Dionne Kilongak’s temporary house, the windowsills are already covered in mold. She works at her kitchen table every day while her children, ages 2 and 4, scurry up and down the narrow hallway. She said winds bring water into her house.

“I think these aren’t for Alaska,” she said.

With no solution in sight, Charlie has tried to make his house feel more homey. Tired of white paint that did nothing to hide the water damage, he found scrap paneling from one of the housing authority’s projects and fastened it to his walls.

Like most people in these houses, he said he hopes they’ll be fixed, but he’s unsure where to turn.

“I have no idea who’s gonna be responsible for these homes,” he said.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Emily Schwing, KYUK.

“Unfortunately,” Bibb said, “that’s not the case for many of our residents in the city of Cleveland.”

A native of Cleveland, Bibb was elected the 58th mayor of the city in 2021. Immediately after taking office, he took inspiration from the “15-minute city” concept of urban design, an idea that envisions people reaching their daily necessities — work, grocery stores, pharmacies — within 15 minutes by walking, biking, or taking public transit. That reduces dependence on cars, and also slashes carbon emissions and air pollution. In Cleveland, Bibb’s goal is to put all residents within a 10-minute walk of a green space by the year 2045, by converting abandoned lots to parks and other efforts. 

Cleveland is far from alone in its quest to adapt to a warming climate. As American cities have grown in size and population and gotten hotter, they — not the federal government — have become crucibles for climate action: Cities are electrifying their public transportation, forcing builders to make structures more energy efficient, and encouraging rooftop solar. Together with ambitious state governments, hundreds of cities large and small are pursuing climate action plans — documents that lay out how they will reduce emissions and adapt to extreme weather — with or without support from the feds. Cleveland’s plan, for instance, calls for all its commercial and residential buildings to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. 

For local leaders, climate action has grown all the more urgent since the Trump administration has been boosting fossil fuels and threatening to sue states to roll back environmental regulations. Last week, Republicans in the House passed a budget bill that would end nearly all the clean energy tax credits from the Biden administration’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. “Because Donald Trump is in the White House again, it’s going to be up to mayors and governors to really enact and sustain the momentum around addressing climate change at the local level,” said Bibb, who formerly chaired Climate Mayors, a bipartisan group of nearly 350 mayors.

City leaders can move much faster than federal agencies, and are more in-tune with what their people actually want, experts said. “They’re on the ground and they’re hearing from their residents every day, so they have a really good sense of what the priorities are,” said Kate Johnson, regional director for North America at C40 Cities, a global network of nearly 100 mayors fighting climate change. “You see climate action really grounded in the types of things that are going to help people.”

Shifting from a reliance on fossil fuels to clean energy isn’t just about reducing a city’s carbon emissions, but about creating jobs and saving money — a tangible argument that mayors can make to their people. Bibb said a pilot program in Cleveland that helped low- to moderate-income households get access to free solar panels ended up reducing their utility bills by 60 percent. The biggest concern for Americans right now isn’t climate change, Bibb added. “It’s the cost of living, and so we have to marry these two things together,” he said. “I think mayors are in a very unique position to do that.”

To further reduce costs and emissions, cities like Seattle and Washington, D.C. are scrambling to better insulate structures, especially affordable housing, by installing double-paned windows and better insulation. In Boston last year, the city government started an Equitable Emissions Investment Fund, which awards money for projects that make buildings more efficient or add solar panels to their roofs. “We are in a climate where energy efficiency remains the number one thing that we can do,” said Oliver Sellers-Garcia, commissioner of the environment and Green New Deal director in the Boston government. “And there are so many other comfort and health benefits from being in an efficient, all-electric environment.”

To that end, cities are deploying loads of heat pumps, hyper-efficient appliances that warm and cool a space. New York City, for instance, is spending $70 million to install 30,000 of the appliances in its public housing. The ultimate goal is to have as many heat pumps as possible running in energy-efficient homes — along with replacing gas stoves with induction ranges — and drawing electricity from renewables.

Metropolises like Los Angeles and Pittsburgh are creating new green spaces, which reduce urban temperatures and soak up rainwater to prevent flooding. A park is a prime example of “multisolving”: one intervention that fixes a bunch of problems at once. Another is deploying electric vehicle chargers in underserved neighborhoods, as Cleveland is doing, and making their use free for residents. This encourages the adoption of those vehicles, which reduces carbon emissions and air pollution. That, in turn, improves public health in those neighborhoods, which tend to have a higher burden of pollution than richer areas.

Elizabeth Sawin, director of the Multisolving Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, said that these efforts will be more important than ever as the Trump administration cuts funding for health programs. “If health care for poor children is going to be depleted — with, say, Medicaid under threat — cities can’t totally fix that,” Sawin said. “But if they can get cleaner air in cities, they can at least have fewer kids who are struggling from asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses.”

All this work — building parks, installing solar panels, weatherizing buildings — creates jobs, both within a city and in surrounding rural areas. Construction workers commute in, while urban farms tap rural growers for their expertise. And as a city gets more of its power from renewables, it can benefit counties far away: The largest solar facility east of the Mississippi River just came online in downstate Illinois, providing so much electricity to Chicago that the city’s 400 municipal buildings now run entirely on renewable power. “The economic benefits and the jobs aren’t just necessarily accruing to the cities — which might be seen as big blue cities,” Johnson said. “They’re buying their electric school buses from factories in West Virginia, and they’re building solar and wind projects in rural areas.” 

So cities aren’t just preparing themselves for a warmer future, but helping accelerate a transition to renewables and spreading economic benefits across the American landscape. “We as elected officials have to do a better job of articulating how this important part of public policy is connected to the everyday lived experience,” Bibb said. “Unfortunately, my party has done a bad job of that. But I think as mayors, we are well positioned to make that case at the local level.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mayors are making climate action personal. It’s working. on May 28, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

Several weeks ago, Michael Langley, the head of US Africa Command (or AFRICOM), testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and stated that Ibrahim Traoré, the current president of Burkina Faso, “is using the country’s gold reserves for personal protection rather than for the benefit of its people,” an absurd claim, considering that the US Department of Defense, which Langley works for, has stolen $1 trillion from US taxpayers in this year’s budget alone. What’s more, AFRICOM itself has a deadly, well-documented history of plundering the African continent, often in coordination with NATO.

Take a guess why Langley might want to delegitimize Traoré’s governance and the larger project of the Alliance of Sahel States/AES (made up of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, all of which have recently allied under a confederation after recent seizures of power). Any takers? Hint: the answer is natural resources and military presence. Traoré has nationalized Burkina Faso’s foreign-owned gold mines in an attempt to actually use the land’s resources to benefit its people. Similarly, upon taking power in Niger, the current president, Abdourahamane Tchiani, nationalized uranium and banned foreign exports. Notably, a quarter of Europe’s uranium, crucial for energy usage, comes from Niger. Considering Traoré’s crucial role in developing the identity of the AES as one of the more vocal and charismatic leaders, targeting Traoré is part of a larger project by the US/EU/NATO axis targeting the AES project at large. Recently, this new AES leadership has launched new green energy and educational initiatives. Meanwhile, the US has pulled out of the Sahel states as the AES asserts its sovereignty in defiance of decades of Western-backed instability.

Traore’s Burkina Faso is not the first Pan-African project to come under attack by the US/EU/NATO axis of power. Just as the vague claims from Langley serve to cast doubt on Traore’s ability to lead a nation, past Pan-African leaders who have dared to challenge imperialism and prioritize their citizens have also come under fire. For instance, former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, was assassinated in 1987 after putting the Burkinabè people’s needs first by rejecting IMF loans and demands, implementing nationwide literacy and vaccine campaigns, and spearheading housing and agrarian reform. Time and again, France and the US have taken decisive action against leaders who have promoted Pan-Africanism and environmental stability over the interests of Western powers. We’re watching it happen live now, and have a responsibility to stand up for Traorè and the AES before it’s too late.

When a country doesn’t bend its knees to Washington, the standard US playbook is one of environmental death, either via hybrid or classic warfare. Venezuela has refused to grant US corporations unfettered access to its oil reserves – the world’s largest –  and thus has been forced to use them as a lifeline. The US has punished Venezuela by imposing unilateral sanctions that have prevented the proper maintenance of the country’s oil pipelines, resulting in harmful leaks. In the Congo–one of the lungs of the Earth–the West’s decades-long quest for uranium and other rare minerals has led to mass deforestation, destroyed water quality, and unleashed military forces that have killed millions. And of course, the US is backing the ecocide/genocide in Palestine in order to maintain the existence of a proxy-state in an oil-rich region.

When the US military – the #1 institutional polluter in the world – “intervenes”, the only environmental outcome is climate collapse. And even when countries play by Washington’s rules, the US will still militarize, build more toxic bases, seek continued extraction, and create mass poverty. For the survival of the people and planet, we must resist this imperial expansion.

Any movement concerned with transitioning from an extractive to a regenerative economy must stand against US and Western intervention in the Sahel and advocate for Pan-African projects and a multilateral world. The emergence of a multipolar world means that projects like the AES have partners beyond the region: during Traoré’s most recent visit to Moscow, he met with the heads of state of Russia, China, and Venezuela. The US, of course, threatened by the loss of its dominion, insists on pursuing a dangerous cold war against China, to contain China’s influence, refuses to cooperate on green technology, and plows through any region that it views as a battleground, be it the Asia-Pacific or the Sahel. And always at the expense of life in all forms.

So if we are in a project for life, why, then, are we often met with hesitation in climate spaces to stand against this imperialist extraction? We need to reflect on a few questions. Whose lives do we sacrifice for “strategy”? Which environmental sacrifice zones are we silent about because of the “bigger picture?” What extraction and militaristic build-up do we let happen to theoretically prevent planetary death that is already happening via our own government down the road? Are we avoiding building connections with popular movements because of donors who only fund dead ends? We have a choice to make: allow the doomsday clock threatening climate death and total catastrophe to keep ticking or reverse course and breathe life into something new.

Traorè’s historic meeting with China, Russia, and Venezuela is a glimpse of what’s on the horizon. As people of the world rise against imperialism and neocolonialism, it is up to us in the US climate movement to stand unequivocally in support of projects of self-determination.

Although our lifestyles will certainly look different once we no longer have uninhibited access to the gold, cobalt, uranium, and other resources that are routinely extracted from the African continent and its people, we must prioritize building a more just and healthy relationship with the planet and all its people. If leaders such as Traore succeed in revolutionizing agriculture and resource extraction at a sustainable pace that benefits workers, what might that signal for a new world order in which exploited Africans and their lands do not form the cheap material base for the world? What might we build in place of extractive economies to usher in a green future for all?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aaron Kirshenbaum and Jasmine Butler.

Then the plane’s whir gave way to the swarm’s buzz. It was 1952, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture was conducting a series of field tests with male screwworm flies that had been sterilized with gamma radiation. The experiment’s aim was to get them to mate with their female counterparts, reduce the species’ ability to reproduce, and gradually shrink the population — and its screw-shaped larvae’s propensity to burrow into living mammals before swiftly killing their host — into oblivion. 

It didn’t fully work, but the population did diminish. So the team of scientists tried again; this time in an even more remote location — Curaçao, an island in the Dutch Caribbean. That quickly proved to be successful, a welcome development after a decades-long battle by scientists, farmers, and government officials against the fly, which was costing the U.S. economy millions annually and endangering colossal numbers of livestock, wildlife, and even the occasional human. Within months, the screwworm population on Curaçao fell, and the tactic would be replicated at scale. 

The USDA took its extermination campaign first throughout much of the south, and then all the way west to California. From then on, planes loaded with billions of sterilized insects were also routinely flown over Mexico and Central America. By the 1970s, most traces of the screwworm had vanished from the U.S., and by the early 1990s, it had all but disappeared from across the southern border and throughout the southernmost region of North America.  

Since 1994, the USDA has partnered with the Panamanian government to control and wipe out established populations all the way down to the country’s southeastern Darién province, where the Comisión Panamá–Estados Unidos para la Erradicación y Prevención del Gusano Barrenador del Ganado, or COPEG, now maintains what’s colloquially called the “Great American Worm Wall.” Each week, millions of sterilized screwworms bred in a nearby production facility are dropped by plane over the rainforest along the Panama-Colombia border — an invisible screwworm biological barrier zone, complete with round-the-clock human-operated checkpoints and inspections. But questions are now surfacing about its efficacy. 

The pest is attracted to open wounds as small as tick bites and mucous membranes, such as nasal passages, where the female fly lays her eggs. A single female can lay up to 300 eggs at a time, and has the capacity to produce thousands during her short lifespan. Those eggs then hatch into larvae that burrow into the host animals with sharp mouth hooks and feed on living flesh. 

To save the host, the larvae must be removed from the infested tissue. Otherwise the infestation can cause serious harm, and can even be fatal within a matter of days.

Female flies generally mate only once in their lifespan, but can continuously lay more than one batch of eggs every few days, which is why the sterile insect technique has long been considered a fail-safe tactic, when accompanied by surveillance, host treatment and quarantine, for wiping out populations. The best way to prevent infestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is to avoid exposure.

About 20 years after the “Worm Wall” was created, the screwworm was spotted in the Florida Keys, the first sighting in the Sunshine State since the 1960s. An endangered deer population in Big Pine Key was discovered with the tell-tale symptoms of gaping wounds and erratic, pained behavior. The USDA responded rapidly, deploying hordes of sterilized flies, setting up fly traps in affected areas, and euthanizing deer with advanced infections. In totality, the parasite killed more than 130 Key deer, a population estimated at less than 1,000 before the outbreak. Though the threat was contained by the following year, the incident stoked concerns throughout the country. 

No one really knows why the “Worm Wall” has started to fail. Some believe that human-related activities, such as increasing cattle movements and agricultural expansion, have allowed the flies to breach the barrier that, until recently, has been highly effective at curbing the insect’s range expansion. Max Scott, professor of entomology and genetics at North Carolina State University, researches strains of livestock pests for genetic control programs, with a focus on the screwworm. 

“Why did it break down after being successful for so long? That’s the million-dollar question,” said Scott. 

Bridget Baker, a veterinarian and research assistant professor at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, thinks climate change may have had something to do with the screwworm’s sudden reappearance in the Florida Keys. “There was a major storm just prior to the outbreak. So the question is, ‘Were flies blown up from, like Cuba, for example, into the Florida Keys from that storm?’” said Baker. Though invasive in the U.S., the screwworm is endemic in Cuba, South America, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. 

“And if there’s more major storms, could that potentially lead to more of these upward trajectories of the fly? With climate change, all sorts of species are expected to have range shifts, and so it would be reasonable to assume that the flies could also experience those range shifts. And those range shifts are expected to come higher in latitude.”

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In the past few years, we may have seen just that happen. In 2023, an explosive screwworm outbreak occurred in Panama — the recorded cases in the country shot up from an average of 25 cases annually to more than 6,500. Later that year, an infected cow was found in southern Mexico not far from the border of Guatemala. In response, last November, the USDA halted Mexico’s livestock imports from entering Texas and increased deployments of sterile screwworm males south of the border. Early this year, the suspension was lifted, after both nations agreed to enhanced inspection protocols. 

Then, on May 11, the USDA suspended live cattle, horse, and bison imports from Mexico yet again. The fly had been spotted in remote farms in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, only 700 miles from the southern U.S. border. Experts worry it may just be on the verge of resurging in the U.S. 

If the screwworm does regain its stronghold in the U.S., estimates suggest it will result in  billions in livestock, trade, and ecological losses, and the costs of eradication will be steep. It could also take years to wipe out again, and decades for sectors like the cattle industry to recover. But with President Donald Trump’s USDA overtly refusing to acknowledge climate change or fund climate solutions, and federal cuts resulting in a skeleton agency to tackle the issue, any attempts to halt the range expansion of the fly may ultimately be doomed.

In a press release about the temporary ban, the USDA noted that it would be renewed “on a month-by-month basis, until a significant window of containment is achieved.”

“This is not about politics or punishment of Mexico, rather it is about food and animal safety,” stated Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who previously criticized Mexico for imposing restrictions on a USDA contractor conducting “high-volume precision aerial releases” of sterilized flies in its southern region.

New Mexico Senator Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat and member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, co-sponsored the STOP Screwworms Act, a bill introduced to the Senate on May 14 that would authorize $300 million for USDA to begin construction on a new sterile fly production facility.

“It is vital that Congress act to pass this legislation to protect our farmers and ranchers and prevent an outbreak in the U.S.,” Luján told Grist. When asked about the absence of climate change in the USDA’s messaging about the screwworm, Luján said he’d “long fought to ensure our agricultural communities have the tools they need to confront climate change and its growing impact on farmers and ranchers. Unfortunately, this administration does not share those priorities.” 

The bill has bipartisan support, but another major concern is the USDA’s shrinking capacity to contain the screwworm threat. As part of an effort by the administration to gut spending across most federal agencies, the USDA has cut more than 15,000 staffers since January, leaving behind a skeleton workforce. Several hundred were employees at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service who were working to prevent invasive pest and disease outbreaks. The budget reconciliation bill currently making its way through Congress includes proposals to further cut USDA spending and gut the agency’s research arms.  

A spokesperson for the USDA declined to comment for this article, and did not respond to Grist’s questions about the role of climate change in escalating the screwworm expansion risk.

Andrew Paul Gutierrez, professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, has been investigating the relationship between invasive pests and weather since the 1970s. In 2014, he found that the screwworm moves northward to new regions on anticyclonic winds, or a high-pressure weather system, which scientists believe warming may be affecting — leading to prolonged and more intense heatwaves and shifting wind patterns.

Before it was widely eradicated, the screwworm had been considered somewhat of a seasonal problem in more northern climates where it wasn’t endemic, as it was routinely killed off by freezing temperatures. Though the metallic green-blue fly thrives in tropical temperatures, it doesn’t tend to survive in conditions lower than 45 degrees Fahrenheit, though the movement of livestock and wildlife has shown that colder spells aren’t a silver bullet. As the planet heats up, rising temperatures are creating more favorable conditions for a legion of agricultural pests, like the parasitic fly, to spread and thrive.

Thirty-year average coldest temperatures are rising almost everywhere in the U.S., a new Climate Central analysis found. Future climatic modeling predicts those average temperatures will only continue to climb — further influencing which plants and insects thrive and where across the country.

“With climate change … if it becomes warm enough, and you can get permanent establishment in those areas, then we got a problem,” said Gutierrez. 

By skirting the role of climate change and weather dynamics in escalating the threat, Gutierrez questions whether the USDA’s response and longer-term plan to combat the threat from screwworm flies is destined to fall short. The agency’s response is missing what Gutierrez designates “really critical” insight into how screwworms interact with temperature conditions, and what climate-induced shifts in those means for its survival and reproduction. 

The USDA, said Gutierrez, “spends an awful lot of money” on dealing with the screwworm issue, but he argues that is being hindered by a lack of understanding of the weather-pest-biology relationship, or how weather drives the dynamics of such a species. “And if you don’t know that, then you can’t, say, model the interaction of the invasive species and its natural enemies, or the effects of weather on the invasive species itself,” he said. 

“Without that kind of platform, you’re kind of flying blind.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s climate denial may help a livestock-killing pest make a comeback on May 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

Familia Torres is already installing irrigation at its vineyards in Spain and California and is planting vines on land at higher altitudes as it tries to adapt to more extreme conditions.

“Irrigation is the future. We do not rely on the weather,” said its 83-year-old president, Miguel Torres. “I don’t know how long we can stay here making good wines, maybe 20 or 30 years, I don’t know. Climate change is changing all the circumstances.”

The family business has been making wine in Catalonia since 1870, but Torres said: “In 30 to 50 years’ time, maybe we have to stop viniculture here.

“Tourists are very important for Catalonia and we are very close to Barcelona. This area could be for activity for tourists but viniculture, I don’t think is going to be here.”

The group, which invests 11 percent of its profits every year to combatting and adapting to the climate crisis, may instead have to move at least some of its vineyards “more to the west because it is cooler and we have to have water.”

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Familia Torres has more than 1,000 hectares of vineyards in Catalonia, mainly in the Penedès region, as well as sites in other parts of Spain, Chile, and California.

It is now expanding to higher altitudes, producing grapes in Tremp, in the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees, at 950 meters, and acquiring plots in Benabarre, in the Aragonese Pyrenees, at 1,100 meters, where it is still too cold to grow vines. It is also using a variety of techniques to reduce or reuse water in its growing and processing practices.

That came after the family recorded a 1 degree Celsius rise in the average temperature in the Penedès region over the past 40 years. The change is causing the harvest to take place 10 days earlier than it did a few decades ago, while the family employs a variety of techniques to slow the ripening of the grapes to protect the right qualities for winemaking.

Torres’ comments come after a difficult few years for European vineyards. He said production was down as much as 50 percent in some of the winemaker’s regions in 2023 — “the worst year I have ever seen” — and still down on historic averages last year amid extreme heat and drought.

This year so far has been better — amid winter and spring rains and wider use of irrigation — but Torres said he was concerned that damper conditions bring the threat of mildew.

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“In the future if we want to have more continuity in the harvest we have to stop the warming,” he said. “The warming is killing the trade.”

The additional costs of irrigation are eating into profits in a highly competitive market with potential threats from U.S. import tariffs on top of additional duties imposed on wine in the U.K. in recent years, as well as a new packaging tax that is particularly high for glass bottles and jars.

Torres said exports to the U.K. have fallen by as much as 10 percent and absorbing some of the cost increases has further knocked profits.

“We have no profit in exports to the U.K., that is the reality. Hundreds of thousands of English people come to Spain on holiday and know the brand. We have to keep it alive in the U.K.”

He said Torres was considering bottling some of its cheaper wines in the U.K. in order to reduce cost — as it is less costly to import in bulk in tankers.

“At least by next year we should be already importing that way in the U.K.,” Torres said. “British consumers are paying more for wine and there is not another possibility [to importing]. Production in the U.K. is very little.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Top winemaker ‘may have to leave its Spanish vineyards due to climate crisis’ on May 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sarah Butler, The Guardian.

Familia Torres is already installing irrigation at its vineyards in Spain and California and is planting vines on land at higher altitudes as it tries to adapt to more extreme conditions.

“Irrigation is the future. We do not rely on the weather,” said its 83-year-old president, Miguel Torres. “I don’t know how long we can stay here making good wines, maybe 20 or 30 years, I don’t know. Climate change is changing all the circumstances.”

The family business has been making wine in Catalonia since 1870, but Torres said: “In 30 to 50 years’ time, maybe we have to stop viniculture here.

“Tourists are very important for Catalonia and we are very close to Barcelona. This area could be for activity for tourists but viniculture, I don’t think is going to be here.”

The group, which invests 11 percent of its profits every year to combatting and adapting to the climate crisis, may instead have to move at least some of its vineyards “more to the west because it is cooler and we have to have water.”

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Familia Torres has more than 1,000 hectares of vineyards in Catalonia, mainly in the Penedès region, as well as sites in other parts of Spain, Chile, and California.

It is now expanding to higher altitudes, producing grapes in Tremp, in the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees, at 950 meters, and acquiring plots in Benabarre, in the Aragonese Pyrenees, at 1,100 meters, where it is still too cold to grow vines. It is also using a variety of techniques to reduce or reuse water in its growing and processing practices.

That came after the family recorded a 1 degree Celsius rise in the average temperature in the Penedès region over the past 40 years. The change is causing the harvest to take place 10 days earlier than it did a few decades ago, while the family employs a variety of techniques to slow the ripening of the grapes to protect the right qualities for winemaking.

Torres’ comments come after a difficult few years for European vineyards. He said production was down as much as 50 percent in some of the winemaker’s regions in 2023 — “the worst year I have ever seen” — and still down on historic averages last year amid extreme heat and drought.

This year so far has been better — amid winter and spring rains and wider use of irrigation — but Torres said he was concerned that damper conditions bring the threat of mildew.

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“In the future if we want to have more continuity in the harvest we have to stop the warming,” he said. “The warming is killing the trade.”

The additional costs of irrigation are eating into profits in a highly competitive market with potential threats from U.S. import tariffs on top of additional duties imposed on wine in the U.K. in recent years, as well as a new packaging tax that is particularly high for glass bottles and jars.

Torres said exports to the U.K. have fallen by as much as 10 percent and absorbing some of the cost increases has further knocked profits.

“We have no profit in exports to the U.K., that is the reality. Hundreds of thousands of English people come to Spain on holiday and know the brand. We have to keep it alive in the U.K.”

He said Torres was considering bottling some of its cheaper wines in the U.K. in order to reduce cost — as it is less costly to import in bulk in tankers.

“At least by next year we should be already importing that way in the U.K.,” Torres said. “British consumers are paying more for wine and there is not another possibility [to importing]. Production in the U.K. is very little.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Top winemaker ‘may have to leave its Spanish vineyards due to climate crisis’ on May 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sarah Butler, The Guardian.

The 2022 climate law on the chopping block, the Inflation Reduction Act (or IRA), was the first legislation in more than a decade to attempt to slash American greenhouse gas emissions and the centerpiece of former president Joe Biden’s legislative agenda. It provides hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits, loans, subsidies, and grants to utility companies, automakers, consumers, and others to become more energy efficient and switch to sources of carbon-free power.  

Until recently, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that lawmakers in districts receiving this cash would be disincentivized to undo the legislation supplying it, even under an ultra-conservative president like Donald Trump. “Repeal is extremely unlikely,” Neil Chatterjee, a former Republican commissioner of the United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill last August titled “The Solar Investment Tax Credit is safe from repeal even if Republicans win in 2024.” In March, 21 House Republicans signed an open letter calling for any changes to the IRA tax credits to “be conducted in a targeted and pragmatic fashion.”

Yet the House voted 215-214 on Thursday to wind down the IRA’s clean energy tax credits ahead of schedule, including the solar investment tax credit that Chatterjee was sure would be safe. Just two Republicans voted against the bill, one voted present, and two abstained — including only one of the March letter’s signatories. 

Originally, the incentives were set to continue through at least 2032. Under the House bill, tax credits for all clean energies except for nuclear, which Republicans tend to view favorably, will apply only to projects that break ground within 60 days of the bill’s enactment and begin sending energy to the grid by the end of 2028, a timeline that could seriously undercut the country’s clean energy industry. Federal tax credits to help consumers adopt clean energy technologies like heat pumps, rooftop solar, battery storage, and electric vehicles would be phased out by the end of this year. 

The House bill needs to be passed by the Senate and signed by President Trump in order to become law, and it is likely to change during negotiations in the upper chamber.

Renewable energy developers warn that the House’s timeline for getting projects in service is prohibitively tight and would effectively make some of the tax credits obsolete. “If Congress does not change course, this legislation will upend an economic boom in this country that has delivered an historic American manufacturing renaissance,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, in a statement.

The repeals would impact major utility-scale projects that are already underway, like wind projects, said Katrina McLaughlin, an associate on the World Resources Institute’s U.S. energy team, because it takes a long time to get most renewable projects up and running. 

“Placed in service means everything has to go right. We have interconnection queue delays, we have permitting delays, there can be challenges with getting different materials and resources,” McLaughlin said. “So getting in service by 2028 is actually a pretty aggressive timeline.” 

In the two years since the IRA was passed, analyses show that the federal funding has catalyzed more than $400 billion in investments in manufacturing, electric vehicles, hydrogen power, renewable energy, and other green initiatives, and spurred more than 400,000 new jobs. Analyses show that the vast majority of IRA clean energy tax credits and grants — 78 percent — have gone to red districts in rural and suburban areas.

As House Speaker Mike Johnson sought to unite his party behind Trump’s domestic agenda, two warring factions emerged: a far-right coalition focused on attaining deeper spending cuts by slashing the IRA and Medicare, and a moderate group agitating to retain clean energy funding in their districts and increase the cap on how much state and local tax can be deducted from one’s federal taxes — a change that would benefit high earners in blue states. 

Unsurprisingly, the lawmaker leading the fight against the IRA comes from an area that hasn’t gotten much money from it. Representative Chip Roy, leading the ultra-conservative crusade, represents a district in Texas that has a little less than a dollar per person in announced IRA investments. Meanwhile, one of his colleagues on the other side of the fight, moderate Republican Representative Nancy Kiggan, comes from a district in Virginia that is slated to receive $85.50 worth of investments per capita. 

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Republicans represent 18 of the top 20 congressional districts benefiting the most from clean energy investments since the passage of the IRA, according to the research firm Atlas Public Policy. The top three districts on that list, in North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada, had together received nearly $30 billion from the legislation as of March this year. But in the end, all of the Republican lawmakers representing those 18 districts voted in favor of effectively ending the investments. Democrats, whose caucus has shrunk due to the deaths of three members this year, were united in opposition. 

In the end, the moderate Republican caucus was willing to trade IRA tax credits for other policy priorities. Moderates in high-tax states like New York were willing to use Biden’s tax credits as a bargaining chip for a higher limit on itemized state and local tax deductions — $40,000, up from the current cap of $10,000 —  a political win that those lawmakers could reap the benefits of immediately and allowed them to sidestep having to defend legislation passed by a Democratic administration. 

Republicans might also be banking on the fact that many of their constituents don’t know about the IRA. A University of Chicago and Associated Press survey last year found that, two years after the IRA passed, most Americans had a supremely flawed understanding of what the legislation is and does, if they knew about it at all. Only 21 percent of adults polled, for example, thought tax credits for individuals to buy electric vehicles were helpful. Nearly 40 percent didn’t know enough to weigh in on the EV tax credits and a shocking 15 percent of those polled thought the policy — which gives consumers up to $7,500 for a new plug-in EV — hurt people like them. 

According to Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way, part of the problem is that the IRA’s clean energy incentives — like new union jobs, major infrastructure projects and new union jobs — take years to manifest. “Not enough clean energy funding got out the door quickly enough,” he said. “It’s having a big impact, don’t get me wrong, but it hasn’t become part of the fabric of communities yet in a way that would freak people out if it disappeared.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Moderate Republicans defended Biden’s climate law — then voted to repeal it on May 22, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

“When you arrive, you have boxes that have been sometimes sitting outside in Antarctica for a month or two in a cold warehouse,” said Boyer, a PhD student in atmospheric science at the University of Helsinki. “And we’re talking about sensitive instrumentation.”

But the effort paid off, because Boyer and his colleagues found something peculiar about penguin guano. In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, they describe how ammonia wafting off the droppings of 60,000 birds contributed to the formation of clouds that might be insulating Antarctica, helping cool down an otherwise rapidly warming continent. Some penguin populations, however, are under serious threat because of climate change. Losing them and their guano could mean fewer clouds and more heating in an already fragile ecosystem, one so full of ice that it will significantly raise sea levels worldwide as it melts.

A better understanding of this dynamic could help scientists hone their models of how Antarctica will transform as the world warms. They can now investigate, for instance, if some penguin species produce more ammonia and, therefore, more of a cooling effect. “That’s the impact of this paper,” said Tamara Russell, a marine ornithologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who studies penguins but wasn’t involved in the research. “That will inform the models better, because we know that some species are decreasing, some are increasing, and that’s going to change a lot down there in many different ways.” 

With their expensive instruments, Boyer and his research team measured atmospheric ammonia between January and March 2023, summertime in the southern hemisphere. They found that when the wind was blowing from an Adelie penguin colony 5 miles away from the detectors, concentrations of the gas shot up to 1,000 times higher than the baseline. Even when the penguins had moved out of the colony after breeding, ammonia concentrations remained elevated for at least a month, as the guano continued emitting the gas. That atmospheric ammonia could have been helping cool the area.

The researchers further demonstrated that the ammonia kicks off an atmospheric chain reaction. Out at sea, tiny plant-like organisms known as phytoplankton release the gas dimethyl sulfide, which transforms into sulphuric acid in the atmosphere. Because ammonia is a base, it reacts readily with this acid. 

This coupling results in the rapid formation of aerosol particles. Clouds form when water vapor gloms onto any number of different aerosols, like soot and pollen, floating around in the atmosphere. In populated places, these particles are more abundant, because industries and vehicles emit so many of them as pollutants. Trees and other vegetation spew aerosols, too. But because Antarctica lacks trees and doesn’t have much vegetation at all, the aerosols from penguin guano and phytoplankton can make quite an impact. 

In February 2023, Boyer and the other researchers measured a particularly strong burst of particles associated with guano, sampled a resulting fog a few hours later, and found particles created by the interaction of ammonia from the guano and sulphuric acid from the plankton. “There is a deep connection between these ecosystem processes, between penguins and phytoplankton at the ocean surface,” Boyer said. “Their gas is all interacting to form these particles and clouds.”

But here’s where the climate impacts get a bit trickier. Scientists know that in general, clouds cool Earth’s climate by reflecting some of the sun’s energy back into space. Although Boyer and his team hypothesize that clouds enhanced with penguin ammonia are probably helping cool this part of Antarctica, they note that they didn’t quantify that climate effect, which would require further research.

That’s a critical bit of information because of the potential for the warming climate to create a feedback loop. As oceans heat up, penguins are losing access to some of their prey, and colonies are shrinking or disappearing as a result. Fewer penguins producing guano means less ammonia and fewer clouds, which means more warming and more disruptions to the animals, and on and on in a self-reinforcing cycle. 

“If this paper is correct — and it really seems to be a nice piece of work to me — [there’s going to be] a feedback effect, where it’s going to accelerate the changes that are already pushing change in the penguins,” said Peter Roopnarine, curator of geology at the California Academy of Sciences.

Scientists might now look elsewhere, Roopnarine adds, to find other bird colonies that could also be providing cloud cover. Protecting those species from pollution and hunting would be a natural way to engineer Earth systems to offset some planetary warming. “We think it’s for the sake of the birds,” Roopnarine said. “Well, obviously it goes well beyond that.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The weird way that penguin poop might be cooling Antarctica on May 22, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.