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The mood was grim at a town hall meeting called by the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday. The gathering came one day after The New York Times reported a bombshell — Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, plans to dismantle its Office of Research and Development, eliminating 50 to 75 percent of its 1,500 or so chemists, toxicologists, biologists, and other experts. The department, which conducts essential research to inform federal policies, plays a critical role in the agency’s mission to safeguard public health and the environment. Laying off most of its staff, many of whom are career scientists, would leave the EPA without the independent and rigorous science needed to develop effective regulations. No one consulted the office’s leaders about the plan.

Maureen Gwinn, who leads the Office of Research and Development, or ORD, is not a political appointee, and her team learned about the specifics of the proposal when they read about it in the Times. Managers quickly set up an all-hands with the department staff to discuss it.

“There was no preparation,” Holly Wilson, an EPA employee and president of the union that represents its employees, told Grist. “They were caught off guard, and acting as good leaders, wanted to bring their folks together and add some context around what happened.”

Employees from all over the country dialed into the call, which lasted about 30 minutes. They wanted to know when the layoffs would begin, how they would be notified if they were being terminated, and whether buyouts would be offered. One person asked if they could publish their research after being fired. Management had few specific answers.

The Times’ reporting was based on documents the EPA provided to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. The proposal, which was submitted to the White House last week and could change in the coming days, calls for dissolving the research office, firing most of its employees, and reassigning those who remain to other roles. Under the plan, the agency would seek a waiver to halve the standard notice period for a “reduction in force” from 30 to 60 days. 

“We don’t know which jobs, which pieces are going to go away and which ones stay,” said Wilson. “The uncertainty is what’s causing a lot of the angst.”

It is the latest assault on the agency. Over the last two months, the Trump administration has fired more than 400 of its probationary workers, only to reinstate them after a court mandated it. The agency also shuttered its Office of Environmental Justice and froze funding for various climate programs. 

EPA employees had been bracing for these changes. In implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order to reduce the federal workforce, the Office of Management and Budget has required agencies to submit phase two of their “reduction in force” plans by April 14. The Office of Research and Development is the largest department within the agency, and often the subject of presidential efforts to rein it in or expand it. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term, specifically foreshadowed the current events. It recommended eliminating “several ORD offices and programs,” and called the department “bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals.”

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Still, the scale of the proposed rollbacks has caught almost everyone off guard. “What’s new is the extreme nature of this,” said a senior EPA official, who requested anonymity given the sensitivity of the topic. “This is not designed to cut expenses, it’s designed to destroy” the department. 

Democrats have pushed back, arguing that the office’s functions are protected by federal law and eliminating it is illegal. “Every decision EPA makes must be in furtherance of protecting human health and the environment, and that just can’t happen if you gut EPA science,” Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), ranking member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, said in a statement to Grist. “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are putting their polluter buddies’ bottom lines over the health and safety of Americans.”

Republican members of the committee did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Heritage Foundation, a major backer of Project 2025, or the EPA. 

The Office of Research and Development supports six research programs through offices in 10 facilities. It works alongside EPA offices that oversee air and water quality, chemical safety, toxic chemicals, and children’s health, and its research division is responsible for answering key questions that others within the agency rely on to develop policies. This split of duties has allowed its researchers to produce independent science detailing, among other things, the health impacts of algal blooms, soot exposure, and toxic chemicals such as hexavalent chromium, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde, and chloroprene. 

This work provides the foundation for many of the environmental and public health regulations safeguarding people nationwide. For instance, its work was central to regulation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of compounds abbreviated as PFAS and nicknamed “forever chemicals” because they do not easily degrade in the environment. Nearly two decades ago, EPA researchers collected water samples along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina where a chemical facility was discharging its waste. They found these chemicals in the samples, and in the drinking water supply for the nearby city of Wilmington. This research made the ubiquity of PFAS clear and established that the public was being exposed to it through drinking water. 

In the years since, the Office of Research and Development helped develop methods to identify and measure PFAS in the environment, understand the risks of human exposure, and develop the technologies that would destroy them, said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, who worked at the EPA for 40 years and led the research office during part of President Trump’s first term. Last year, the agency finalized the first rules governing PFAS levels in drinking water. 

The office has “played a huge role in characterizing and opening our awareness of the contamination of our environment by PFAS compounds,” Orme-Zavaleta said. 

Without the research office, it’s unclear where the EPA might turn for scientific analysis. To a degree, officials could increasingly classify decisions as policy rather than science-based and minimize, or skip, research altogether. Some functions could shift to other parts of the agency, like the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, which is now headed by Nancy Beck, a former chemical industry lobbyist. The government also could simply rely upon science funded by the very industries it regulates.

“That’s the fox guarding the hen house,” said the senior official. “The EPA makes critical decisions that determine our public health. Do you want those informed by industry hearsay or real facts?”
Eliminating the Office of Research and Development is the most drastic proposal from the Trump administration to reshape the EPA — but it’s unlikely to be the last. The research office accounts for just 10 percent of the agency’s resources, according to Orme-Zavaleta, a short way toward Zeldin’s stated goal of eliminating 65 percent of the agency’s spending. As Orme-Zavaleta puts it, “many more shoes are going to be dropping.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','An acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are a class of chemicals used in everyday items like nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and food packaging that have proven to be dangerous to human health. Also called “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down over time, PFAS can be found lingering nearly everywhere — in water, soil, air, and the blood of people and animals.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Caught off guard’: EPA proposes to fire hundreds of scientists on Mar 20, 2025.

Juliana Arciniegas is a former negotiator of climate and environmental treaties from Colombia. She currently leads the Nature agenda at the Latin American Think-Tank Transforma.

With Brazil – a global leader in addressing hunger and home to the largest share of the Amazon rainforest – hosting COP30, hopes have been running high that food system transformation will finally be central to the UN climate negotiations. 

Held in the city of Belém, gateway to the Amazon, the summit places the climate-nature nexus in the spotlight, as leaders make decisions that will shape the future of the rainforest and communities they are guests of.

Yet food systems, the biggest driver of deforestation and responsible for around one-third of global emissions, have once again been sidelined. Despite being highly vulnerable to climate change, they also hold immense potential for keeping climate change in check. Overlooking them is not just a missed opportunity for Brazil to reinforce its leadership, it risks undermining critical initiatives like forest protection. 

Why, then, has one of the most powerful climate solutions been left off the agenda for COP30, recently set out by president-designate André Aranha Corrêa do Lago?

Broken food system

Worldwide, countries are facing the consequences of a broken food system which is fuelling the climate crisis threatening food production. Our current system feeds the profits of food giants while leaving family farmers struggling, consumers facing rising food costs and governments having to answer to it. This will continue unabated under business as usual. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is unambiguous. Its Sixth Assessment Report stated that climate change has already reduced food security, and will increasingly put pressure on food production and access, especially in vulnerable regions.

“Not silver bullets”: COP30 CEO downplays impact of yearly climate summits

The world’s agricultural sector is a climate culprit, as well as a casualty. Not only does it produce 30% of anthropogenic emissions, agriculture is also responsible for up to 80% of tropical deforestation around the world. There is simply no way to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement without dramatic reductions in emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU). 

The good news is the sector also holds vast potential. Practices like agroforestry, biochar, crop diversification, reduced tillage, and sustainable fertiliser use could reduce some 10-12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year and shave 0.3°C off peak warming.

Support for family farmers

Brazil is acting on some of these challenges. During its G20 presidency, it launched the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty. At COP28, it co-founded the Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation. This year, it is set to establish the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, which promises to generate transformative funding to tackle deforestation. Nonetheless, if COP30 does not address the role of food and farming in driving this deforestation, it risks treating the symptom, not the disease. 

COP president do Lago has, rightfully, emphasised the need to elevate adaptation as a priority at the climate talks. Family farmers are key to this: they are critical to global supply chains and hold the solutions to ensuring food security in a changing climate. 

However, within the current system, they often lack the finance and political backing to do so. In 2021-22, just 14% ($1.3 billion) of international public climate finance for agriculture and land use was targeted at small-scale farmers. 

UN biodiversity talks agree finance roadmap, postponing decision on a new fund

This is another area where Brazil is taking action. Last year, President Lula da Silva launched a National Plan for Agroecology and Organic Production which, among other things, helps family farmers become more climate-resilient. 

Do Lago is clear on the need for COP30 to deliver. “Words and text must be translated into actual practice and transformations on the ground,” he writes. What does this mean for food and farming?

Financing for sustainable agriculture

First, Andrea do Lago has rightly highlighted the importance of the Global Stocktake (GST) to shift gear from agreements to action. Building on food system transformation goals from the first GST in 2023, Belem should see countries and non-state actors decide on a roadmap, with guiding options and economic incentives, to support national efforts to transition to sustainable agricultural practices. 

Second, COP30 must define concrete measures for countries to achieve the GST goal to halt and reverse forest degradation by 2030, in line with the UN biodiversity targets. This must include support for countries to tackle specific causes of deforestation including agriculture, mining and infrastructure. 

Third, with countries due to submit their new action plans – NDCs – by September 2025, these need to include targets, timetables and funds to transform their national food systems. They aren’t starting from scratch – at COP28 over 150 countries signed up to the Emirates Food Systems Declaration with measures such as reducing AFOLU emissions, access to healthy and sustainable diets, and putting farmers at the heart of implementation. 

Fourth, COP30 is a pivotal moment to bridge the climate finance gap. Brazil has consistently urged wealthier nations to fund developing countries’ adaptation and transition to sustainable agriculture. The Baku-to-Belém roadmap from COP29 must show progress in mobilising at least $1.3 trillion a year by 2035 and allocating specific funds for nature and sustainable food systems. The financial policies discussed at the climate talks must align with fair trade, tariffs, and subsidies that incentivise ecosystem protection and support farmers and local communities.

COP30 chief calls for global unity on climate action as cooperation falters

Against a backdrop of tense geopolitics and international aid spending being slashed, it’s more important than ever that leaders recognise the importance of investing in a global sustainable food system to safeguard national priorities. 

 A transformed system that addresses malnutrition, properly compensates farmers, improves productivity, and protects the environment could deliver net economic benefits of US$5-10 trillion annually. With deep expertise in addressing hunger, supporting family farmers and stewardship of the Amazon, Brazil is uniquely positioned to seize the opportunity for COP30 to inspire a food system revolution – an ecological imperative and economic necessity for us all. 

The post Food systems are the missing ingredient from the COP30 menu  appeared first on Climate Home News.

After decades of producing planet-heating fuels, depleted oil and gas fields in Malaysia and Indonesia may have a new purpose: putting carbon dioxide from some of Asia’s top emitters back underground, in a big but risky bet by state oil giants and governments. 

Malaysia’s oil company Petronas has signed at least 24 memoranda of understanding with nine countries – among them Japan and South Korea – to store their excess CO2 emissions in exploited fossil fuel sites off the coast of peninsular Malaysia and Borneo island, in the gas-producing region of Sarawak.

These plans have sparked accusations of “carbon colonialism” from climate activists, who see exporting emissions for storage in another country as a “get out of jail free” card for continued fossil fuel use.

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While large carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities exist all over the globe, with many new ones under development, the scale of Petronas’ ambition is untested in the region. 

The state-run company is looking to develop three CCS hubs and two flagship projects across Malaysia, for a total storage capacity of 15 million tonnes of CO2 per annum (mtpa) by 2030 – equivalent to Senegal’s emissions in a year. All the world’s CCS plants combined can currently hold about 51 mtpa.

Petronas plans to put 20% of its capital expenditure into decarbonisation projects between 2022 and 2026, with CCS making up a significant portion of the billions of dollars it wants to invest. 

These projects are part of Malaysia’s broader energy transition strategy and its bid to become a carbon capture and storage hub for Asia, a goal shared by neighbouring Indonesia. 

A carbon capture and storage facility in Hokkaido, Japan, a country that plans to capture CO2 and then ship it to Southeast Asian countries (Photo: ERIA)

Some of Asia’s top emitters are set to become key clients, as Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which oversees energy policy, deemed CCS “indispensable” for reducing power-sector emissions. Out of nine projects Japan has selected to test the viability of CCS, four aim to export carbon overseas, including to Malaysia and Indonesia.

While the International Energy Agency says a small amount of carbon capture will be needed in sectors where emissions are hard to reduce, like cement production, campaigners criticised Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan’s bet on carbon capture as a bid to prolong the lifespan of fossil fuel infrastructure.

Exporting emissions

Some experts consider both Indonesia and Malaysia as favourable locations to store captured CO2 because of their abundance of depleted oil reservoirs and saline aquifers, which could in principle hold the gas below ground.

Under the proposed deals, big industrial emitters in Asia would capture CO2 released when burning fossil fuels in their plants and factories, turn it into a liquid form, and ship it to Southeast Asia for storage.

Last September, Petronas agreed with eight Japanese companies and the Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security, a government body, to design a project to capture and ship CO2 from Japan, then store it in a compressed “supercritical state” in a depleted gas field off the Sarawak coast. 

The Japanese entities will be responsible for capturing and liquefying the carbon emitted from power plants and industrial facilities, including steelworks and chemical plants, in Japan’s Setouchi region. Together with Petronas, they will also design the transport, injection and storage stages.  

Meanwhile in Indonesia, Japanese utility Chubu Electric Power has expanded its CCS collaboration with energy giant BP to connect Japan’s Nagoya port with the BP-owned Tangguh gas field in West Papua.

Through initiatives like the Asia Zero Emission Community, Japan has pushed fossil fuel developments in Southeast Asia, including exporting and storing overseas the equivalent of up to one-tenth of its current emissions by 2050, according to a report by Japan’s Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth. 

In shifting their climate burden and responsibilities to tackle it onto lower-income nations, Japan and other developed countries are engaging in “carbon colonialism”, campaigners say – mimicking a pattern seen in the export of plastic waste from the Global North to the Global South. 

“Wealthy, high-emitting countries get to keep burning fossil fuels while offloading their carbon onto nations that have done far less to cause the crisis,” said Sisilia Nurmala Dewi, 350.org Indonesia team lead. 

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Risky business

Oil and gas giants like Petronas, BP and Indonesian state oil firm Pertamina, as well as the Malaysian and Indonesian governments, have proposed projects worth billions of dollars, anticipating growing demand for CO2 storage. But analysts are more cautious, citing high uncertainties in the CCS market and technical difficulties in keeping the carbon below ground.

Given its high cost, CCS is largely unfeasible in Malaysia and Indonesia without the existence of cross-border projects, said I Gusti Suarnaya Sidemen, CCUS research fellow at the Jakarta-based Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA), which founded the Asia CCUS Network together with the Japanese government. These are the kind of projects Japan and South Korea are keen to develop.

By financing projects in Indonesia, Japan is creating a strong incentive for Jakarta to pursue these ventures, said Dwi Sawung of WALHI Indonesia, an environmental NGO. “It’s really Japan who will pay.”

On the back of that, both Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta are providing incentives for developers – with the Indonesian government even bearing some of the expense of enhanced gas recovery, a method that uses the captured CO2 to extract more fossil fuels, said ERIA research associate Ryan Wiratama Bhaskara.

A demonstrator at the 2024 climate strike in Jakarta, Indonesia, calls carbon capture and storage a false solution. (Photo: Agung Wilis Yudha Baskoro/350.org)

Grant Hauber, strategic energy finance advisor for Asia at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a US-based think tank, said there is a “dangerous lack of knowledge in decision-makers worldwide” about the capabilities, risks and costs of CCS.

Hauber said even widely cited success stories, such as the Sleipner and Snøhvit projects in Norway, have struggled with the unpredictable nature of CO2 storage. The captured carbon has been found to leak and is difficult to measure. Gas giant Equinor’s Sleipner project, for example, overreported its carbon savings by 28% from 2017 to 2021, due to defective monitoring equipment, according to DeSmog.

Injecting carbon into depleted oil and gas fields, where there are many potential paths for leakage or failures, is particularly tricky, Hauber noted, adding that geologies change across regions, making it more complex. “The chemistry is different. The conditions are different. Storage sites will perform differently. It’s what makes it so expensive,” he said.

To date, the vast majority of captured carbon has been used for a process known as enhanced oil recovery, which uses the CO2 to squeeze out hard-to-get oil in depleted fields. But 78% of new projects planned globally are destined for CO2 storage, according to the Global CCS Institute.

The risk of these high-cost abatement schemes, experts say, is that they divert funds away from proven climate solutions, prolong the burning of fossil fuels and, ultimately, cause more emissions. “The real solution isn’t to bury carbon; it’s to stop digging up more,” said 350.org’s Dewi.

“Not silver bullets”: COP30 CEO downplays impact of yearly climate summits

Tool for meeting climate goals?

Malaysia and Indonesia, however, view CCS as essential to meeting their net zero goals while they remain dependent on fossil fuels. For example, by mid-century, Indonesia plans to fit 76% of its coal-fired power plants with CCS technology. 

According to ERIA’s estimates, Malaysia has the highest storage potential – around 130 billion tonnes of CO2 – out of all assessed Southeast Asian countries, followed by Indonesia with 51 billion tonnes of CO2. 

Both countries are building up their legal frameworks in preparation. Last year, Indonesia adopted regulation that allocates 30% of storage capacity for imported CO2. Malaysia’s parliament approved its first CCS bill this month. In both cases, critics point to a lack of clarity around who is responsible for ensuring CO2 storage in the long run, and whether companies would be liable for damages.

Some projects have already moved forward. The Kasawari gas field off the Sarawak coast is set to become the world’s biggest offshore CCS facility potentially as early as this year and Malaysia’s first large-scale project of its kind. 

Kasawari’s gas reserves contain high levels of CO2 and Petronas, the plant’s owner, aims to remove the carbon and inject it under the sea in a depleted gas field to cut the emissions of its extractive activities.

Yet, even if the facility meets its target of storing 3.3 mtpa of CO2, this would amount to only a 1% reduction in Petronas’ current emissions, says a group of Malaysia-based NGOs.

The projects have also received criticism for their lack of transparency. “The environmental impact assessment for Kasawari was approved with absolutely no consultation,” said Meenakshi Raman, president of environmental justice non-profit Sahabat Alam Malaysia. Pollution threats to fishing communities are among the concerns.

Raman also cited a 2023 report pointing to a “huge gap” between the optimistic goal of CCS plants capturing 90% of emissions and real-world results, which show capture rates of around 50% on average. 

The report by policy institute Climate Analytics warned that under-performing plants could become a source of increased emissions for many countries, Raman said, making CCS a “false solution” to the climate crisis.

*This piece was edited to correct the figures in the graph to include storage capacity from saline aquifers, depleted oil fields and enhanced oil recovery.

The post Carbon colonialism? Malaysia and Indonesia plan storage hubs for Asian emissions  appeared first on Climate Home News.

Three years ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed off on the country’s strongest plastic reduction policy. The legislation, known as SB 54, gave the state recycling agency until 2025 to write rules to dramatically slash sales of single-use plastic. At the time, Newsom called the law “nation-leading,” and said he was “holding polluters responsible and cutting plastics at the source.”

California’s recycling agency, CalRecycle, has been crafting rules around the law’s implementation since 2022, negotiating the specifics with industry groups and environmental advocates and incorporating public feedback. Earlier this month, however, the governor’s office unexpectedly rejected CalRecycle’s proposed rules. He told the agency to go back to the drawing board, leaving California no closer to addressing its plastic waste management problem.

“It’s kind of like we just got slapped with a wet fish,” said Shira Lane, founder and CEO of a zero-waste organization in Sacramento called Atrium 916. Lane said she’d participated in two years of long, complicated meetings with CalRecycle officials to provide input on the regulations, and that it was unclear why the governor had now decided to reject them. His office’s statements on the issue pointed only vaguely to concerns about fairness and “minimizing costs for small businesses and working families.”

Newsom’s one-eighty arrived as plastics industry groups — many of which claim publicly to support the legislation — ramped up complaints behind closed doors about the potential impact of the law. In the absence of a clear explanation from the governor, many environmental groups suspect that he responded to industry pressure. “A lot of people were hurt,” Lane said, describing the good-faith effort they had put into shaping the rules only for them to be rejected for unclear reasons.

When it passed in 2022, SB 54 was hailed as the United States’ “most comprehensive policy for reducing sources of plastic waste,” and a “huge win” in the fight against ocean plastic pollution. It gave companies until 2032 to reduce their in-state sales of single-use plastic packaging and foodware, both by weight and by the number of items, by 25 percent. It also required them to achieve significantly higher recycling rates for plastic products, finance a $500 million annual fund to clean up existing pollution, and make all of their single-use packaging and foodware — even if it wasn’t made of plastic — recyclable or compostable by 2032. 

CalRecycle was in charge of writing more specific rules to enforce the law, like delineating which products it applied to. Another body, known in industry parlance as a “producer responsibility organization,” would coordinate companies’ cooperation, requiring plastic producers to become paying members, managing the $500 million fund, and making sure the industry was complying with the law. An existing organization called Circular Action Alliance, composed of plastics industry representatives, was designated as the producer responsibility organization for SB 54.

SB 54 had gained ground in the California legislature thanks to the threat of a more aggressive ballot initiative, which would have given plastic producers less control over the implementation of plastic reduction targets, placed a 1-cent-per-item tax on plastic producers and distributors, and banned polystyrene food packaging outright. 

A trash can overflowing with plastic and other waste.
Getty Images

Supporters of the referendum, which had received the requisite 623,212 signatures to be included on the ballot, mostly included grassroots environmental groups. The initiative’s three sponsors agreed to withdraw it in exchange for the passage of SB 54, which was seen as preferable by business and industry groups. The American Chemistry Council, for instance — a plastics and petrochemical trade group — said in 2022 that SB 54 was “not the optimal legislation to drive California toward a circular economy,” but that it was a better outcome than the withdrawn ballot initiative. The group pledged to “work constructively with lawmakers and CalRecycle to support appropriate implementation of SB 54.”

The California Chamber of Commerce similarly said that the policy would ensure “long-term policy certainty around recycling and packaging.” The Plastics Industry Association declined to endorse SB 54 but said it was better than the ballot initiative.

Still, industry groups appeared to hold out hope in 2022 that unidentified changes would be made to the legislation. The American Chemistry Council vowed to “support subsequent legislation to make the necessary improvements to help ensure the intent of SB 54 is carried out effectively.” The California Chamber of Commerce’s president noted that the bill “allows the Legislature to make changes to the proposal in the future,” and the president of the California Business Roundtable said in a CalMatters op-ed that lawmakers should “come back to the conversation prepared to make changes that can open doors for a more circular economy.”

After the passage of the law, CalRecycles held several information sessions and workshops about its forthcoming rules, with opportunities for participation from the public and plastic producers. The agency began the formal rulemaking process for SB 54 on March 8, 2024 and held two comment periods, during which industry groups provided feedback, over the course of that year. CalRecycles finished drafting the regulations in the fall, and in September began notifying industry groups that they would soon be going into effect. The rules were set to be adopted one year from the start of rulemaking, on March 8, 2025.

Ben Allen, a Democratic senator who represents parts of Los Angeles and who sponsored SB 54, learned that industry groups objected to the rules less than a week before the March 8 deadline. He sat down with Circular Action Alliance and came up with what he called a “roadmap” to address their concerns: If industry groups would not object to CalRecycle’s regulations moving forward on schedule, then he and other lawmakers would pass legislation to make minor changes to the law itself and to empower CalRecycle to make slight adjustments to the rules it had spent so long working on.

The proposed changes, laid out in a letter shared with Grist, included exemptions for biosciences packaging, less frequent reporting from packaging companies, and a more lenient timeline for plastic producers to become members of the producer responsibility organization. Allen said he had nearly reached a compromise by the time the governor’s office made its announcement. “People were not expecting the governor to pull back the drafted regulations,” Allen said. “That was a surprising development.”

Newsom’s office declined to say whether it had held meetings with business or industry groups, and emphasized that the rulemaking delay would not change “the timeline” for SB 54, presumably referring to the statutory deadlines for plastic companies to reduce the amount of packaging they sell and meet certain recycling rates. When asked to elaborate on its cost concerns, a spokesperson for the governor pointed Grist to a regulatory impact assessment published by CalRecycle last October, which estimated SB 54-related compliance costs for California businesses and individuals.

California state Senator Ben Allen, right, confers with Senator Mike McGuire in 2023.
AP Photo / Rich Pedroncelli

For businesses that sell more than $1 million of products covered by SB 54 each year, the annual costs would average about $791,000, the report found. The typical small businesses would see increased expenses of just $309. Households could end up paying a mean of $329 a year by 2032, though the report said this number would likely be mitigated by increases in personal income, as well as health and environmental benefits totaling more than $40 billion over 10 years.

Allen objected to Newsom’s characterization of the bill’s toll on entrepreneurs and families. The whole point of the bill, he said, was to address an “untenable” rise in the cost of waste collection and pollution management in California, as cities are being forced to manage ever-increasing amounts of plastic garbage.

“We knew that there might be some modest increases in consumer costs, but they would be more than made up for in ratepayer benefits on the back end,” he added. 

Of the six business and industry groups that Grist reached out to, only Circular Action Alliance elaborated on its specific concerns over CalRecycle’s proposed rules for SB 54. A spokesperson said these had involved “clarifying producer obligations, compiling data to build the program plan, and fixing timing and sequencing issues.” The group said it had “actively engaged with interested parties” including the governor’s office, CalRecycle, and Allen “to address any feasibility concerns and ensure the successful implementation of the legislation.”

“We look forward to continued engagement with all parties to move SB 54 forward,” the spokesperson said.

Two groups — the American Chemistry Council and California Chamber of Commerce — sent Grist statements affirming their support for SB 54. The California Business Roundtable, the California Retailers Association, and the Plastics Industry Association did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment, though Plastics Industry Association President and CEO Matt Seaholm released a statement calling for policymakers “to craft practical, effective regulations that drive economic growth, foster innovation, and enhance circularity.”

In the absence of clearer information about Newsom’s intentions, environmental advocates are concerned that business and industry groups are trying to claw back parts of the statute, despite their nominal support for it in 2022.

“The more they can delay the implementation, the more they can make a case for the deadlines being unreasonable,” said Jennifer Savage, associate director of California policy for the nonprofit Surfrider.

Plastic makers and business groups are already seizing on the SB 54 kerfuffle to argue that similar legislation shouldn’t be pursued in other jurisdictions. Last weekend, more than 100 companies and groups signed a letter obtained by Politico opposing a proposed New York bill on the grounds that it would “go beyond the California statute in key areas, … indicating that the impacts of New York’s proposal would be even more severe.”

Allen said the governor’s office wants to move “expeditiously” to complete CalRecycle’s revisions by this summer. That includes initiating another 45-day public comment period, incorporating any changes, and submitting final documents to the state’s Office of Administrative Law to make sure they are clear and legal. 

Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste, said his organization will be ready to participate however possible, whether by engaging in a public workshop or by submitting written comments on a draft of the new rules. He also hinted that the ballot initiative that environmentalists withdrew when SB 54 was passed may still be on the table.

“We remain committed to reevaluating all possible avenues,” Lapis said, “including reviving the initiative to let voters decide on this.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Gavin Newsom delayed his own ‘nation-leading’ plastic policy. Why? on Mar 20, 2025.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region.

Reverend Brian Sauder had good news in January for 58 faith-based organizations across the Midwest. His Chicago environmental nonprofit, Faith in Place. would be giving each of them a grant to fund tree planting in low-income communities and create urban forestry jobs to maintain them. Those additional trees would help mitigate the effects of climate change and air pollution.  

But the good news didn’t last long. 

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed his “Unleashing American Energy” executive order, which abruptly froze the distribution of funds from the Biden administration’s sweeping climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. The move has left critical initiatives in limbo, including urban and community forestry programs like Sauder’s Faith in Place.

“To have to call up those grant awardees and say to them: ‘Hey, you need to stop work on this. We can’t reimburse you. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now.’ [It] was absolutely devastating,” said Sauder, whose organization has already had to lay off five employees as a result of the federal freeze. 

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The Inflation Reduction Act had pledged $1.5 billion to plant more trees in cities and ensure their survival, too. The funding, roughly 40 times what the federal government typically had spent on urban forestry, promised to transform the urban environment across the country. Nonprofits and local governments staffed up to administer the historic level of funding and made big promises to low-income and minority communities to help “green” their neighborhoods. Now, organizations like Faith in Place, still unable to access federal funds, are facing the financial fallout.

“We’re a microcosm of what’s happening all across the country with these uncertainties and the government not keeping its commitment to these contracts,” Sauder said.

In response, Faith in Place has signed onto a lawsuit spearheaded by Earthjustice, a nonprofit that litigates national environmental issues. The suit seeks to compel the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which distributes the funds, to honor its financial commitments. 

“The President cannot come in and say: ‘We’re not doing that, we’re not following the law that Congress legislated.’ That’s a violation of separation of powers,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.

Reverand Brian Sauder is the head of Faith in Place, an environmental nonprofit based in Chicago. The Trump administration has frozen funds he had promised to nearly 60 faith-based programs so they could increase the tree canopy in their communities. Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco / Grist

The legal challenge comes as federal judges have ordered the government to release the Inflation Reduction Act funds already appropriated by Congress, but the USDA has yet to do so. To date, the freeze has stalled hundreds of urban forestry projects nationwide, including one to improve Portland’s shrinking tree canopy, an initiative to restore the more than 200,000 trees lost in New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina and plans to redress the longstanding disparity in tree coverage across Chicago’s majority Black and Latino communities on the city’s South and West sides.

In a statement the USDA said it was in the process of reviewing all grants and while it had authorized certain “mission critical” services to resume, it could not provide information on individual grants.

A 20 minute drive west of the city’s downtown sits the historic Stone Temple Baptist Churchi, once a local touchpoint of the civil rights movement, hosting rallies and speakers like Reverend. Martin Luther King Jr.. Federal money was supposed to cover the cost of planting fruit trees in its community garden, providing the majority Black community with seasonal access to pears, peaches, apples and plums. 

“The goal was to get the trees in the ground this spring,” Sauder said. But that’s not happening amidst the funding uncertainty. 

As cities like Chicago grapple with rising global temperatures, improving the urban canopy — the layer of collective tree cover in a city —  isn’t just about beautifying the neighborhood. Trees help reduce air pollution and are increasingly among the most cost effective ways to mitigate the impacts of climate change, according to Vivek Shandas, who researches climate change at Portland State University and is a member of the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council. 

Read Next Another casualty of Trump’s funding freeze: New Orleans’ tree canopy Tristan Baurick

“Trees are there very quietly, providing essential ecosystem services,” Shandas said. “Every single day, they’re cleaning the air, they’re cooling the neighborhoods, they’re absorbing the rainwater, and they’re doing all of these things for absolutely free.”

The problem: Chicago’s urban tree canopy is unevenly distributed across the city — often favoring whiter, weather neighborhoods — and it’s also shrinking due to disease and urban development. The city’s canopy cover dropped from 19 percent to 16 percent between 2010 and 2020, according to a report from The Morton Arboretum, a public garden and center for tree research  in suburban Chicago. 

The funding freeze has also halted plans to plant trees statewide.  

The Trump administration paused nearly $14 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding promised to the state of Illinois for projects that included hazard tree removal and pruning, tree plantings, tree inventories, and other work related to tree canopy management in Illinois communities.

“It’s really upsetting that the government’s not keeping their end of the bargain,” Sauder said. “We’ve kept our commitment, and they aren’t keeping their commitment to us.”

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 Why a tree-planting nonprofit in Chicago is suing the Trump administration on Mar 20, 2025.

Pesticide concerns for COP30 host Brazil Channel News brendan 20th March 2025 Teaser Media

He may be dubbed “Carbon Tax Carney” by his political rivals, but upon becoming Canada’s prime minister last Friday, Mark Carney cancelled the unpopular carbon levy on consumers.

The former governor of the central banks of England and Canada, who has never before held elected office, will lead the world’s second-largest country amid a punishing trade war with Washington and threats from US President Donald Trump to annex Canada.

His first order of business? With the cameras clicking, Carney slashed the carbon tax rate to zero for consumers, effectively ending what had been the governing Liberal Party’s signature climate change policy since its national launch in 2019.

“This will make a difference to hard-pressed Canadians, but it is part of a much bigger set of measures that this government is taking to ensure that we fight against climate change, that our companies are competitive, and the country moves forward,” Carney, 60, said on his first day in office after replacing Justin Trudeau.

The move signals an about-face for Carney, a former UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, raising broader questions about the best policy tools for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in today’s tricky geopolitical environment.

“Meaningful carbon prices are a cornerstone of any effective policy framework,” the former investment banker wrote in his 2021 book Value(s): Building a Better World for All. “To meet the 1.5C [global warming] target, more than 80 per cent of current fossil fuel reserves (including three-quarters of coal, half of gas, one-third of oil) would need to stay in the ground, stranding these assets.”

Analysts said Carney’s backpedalling on the carbon tax highlights the success of political attacks by the opposition Conservatives. But, they added, it does not undermine a broader strategy of asking large polluters to pay for their climate-damaging behaviour.

Industrial carbon price remains

While individuals, farmers and small businesses will no longer pay a carbon tax at the gas pump, industrial emitters will still be charged for their carbon footprint under national regulations launched in 2019.

“When it comes to reducing emissions, Canada’s industrial carbon pricing system has done most of the heavy lifting,” said Colleen Kaiser, program director of governance and policy innovation with the Smart Prosperity Institute, a Canadian research group. “It makes sense to continue this program.”

To get voters onside, Carney’s team ditched carbon levies on gasoline and heating oil for consumers – some of whom previously got rebates according to their income – in favour of increased support to go green by retrofitting homes or installing heat pumps.

This Australian coal community is co-designing its own green future

Experts say using a carrot rather than a stick to catalyse energy-saving behaviour still needs to be funded somehow. 

“My sense is the money to pay for that, instead of coming from a consumer carbon price, will come from large heavy emitters,” Chris Severson-Baker, executive director of the Pembina Institute, a clean energy think-tank, told Climate Home. “Something will need to be done to replace what the consumer carbon price was designed to do.”

Popular attitudes on who should pay for climate action have shifted since the carbon tax was announced. In 2020, when asked to choose between protecting the environment and creating jobs, 50 percent of Canadians said jobs should come first, according to polling data from the Consortium on Electoral Democracy, a research group.

Today, amid a cost-of-living crisis, 60 percent prioritise jobs over climate action.

Election politics in play

Against this backdrop, the opposition Conservative Party has rallied around the slogan “axe the tax,” suggesting Carney isn’t serious about doing that beyond a national election expected in the next few months.

“Carbon Tax Carney is pausing the carbon tax until after the election when he no longer needs your vote but still needs your money,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre posted on social media on March 14, when Carney became PM. “He’s flip-flopping on his beliefs to trick Canadians into a 4th Liberal government.”

The Conservatives had been far ahead in opinion polls prior to Carney coming onto the national scene and Trump’s tariffs. However, polling data released by Angus Reid this week, indicates a major shift in the political landscape. 

“With the Liberals at 42 percent in vote intention, what was a tired, discardable brand just three months ago would be on its way to a fourth term, this time with a majority,” the pollster said.

“Not silver bullets”: COP30 CEO downplays impact of yearly climate summits

Aside from ending the consumer carbon tax, specifics on Carney’s green policies remain sketchy. In his first speech after being sworn in as prime minister, he did not mention climate change or carbon taxes.

A spokesperson for Carney referred Climate Home to his official website but did not immediately provide responses to detailed questions about his proposals.

A spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada, the national government department responsible for climate policy, said it “is currently in a period of transition”.

Former Canadian environment minister Catherine McKenna said Carney’s decision to end the carbon tax was “unfortunate”. “Ironically, we’re killing a policy that works and now people are going to be less well off,” McKenna, a Carney supporter, told “Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast”, released on March 20.

She said she understood the political calculation behind the move, even though she still supports the idea of a carbon tax. “There are definitely lessons learned but we’re just going to move forward,” she added, calling for the carbon price to rise for heavy emitters of oil and gas.

The oil lobby

In his acceptance speech to lead the Liberal Party, Carney said he wants to make Canada “an energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy”, echoing phrasing from a former Conservative prime minister who had close ties to the oil patch.

Canada is the largest foreign oil exporter to the US and fossil fuels are its most valuable export by far, worth $152 billion CAD in 2023, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the main oil industry lobby group.

Much of this crude comes from the Alberta tar sands, which environmentalists consider some of the world’s dirtiest oil for carbon dioxide emissions. Expanded tar sands production stands in direct opposition to Canada’s pledge to hit net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, analysts say.

But public discussions around building new pipelines from western Canada’s tar sands to consumers in the country’s east have intensified amid Trump’s annexation threats.

Tar sands are relatively energy-intensive and costly to exploit (Pic: Flickr/ The Cooperative) Tar sands are relatively energy-intensive and costly to exploit (Pic: Flickr/ The Cooperative)

The Pembina Institute’s Severson-Baker expects “lots of talk” about new pipelines in the coming months, even though he said “there is no actual economic case behind them”.

“The government truly has failed to reduce emissions from the oil sands sector,” he said. “That highlights how difficult it is for any government in Canada to regulate that sector.”

The CAPP did not respond to specific questions on Carney’s record and Canada’s shifting climate policies, but provided a statement.

“Canada is in a precarious position partly because for too long the federal government neglected the importance of our own energy and economic security,” said the group’s president and CEO, Lisa Baiton. “Following the imminent federal election, the next Government of Canada will need to address these critical issues with urgency, both for Canadians and for the oil and natural gas industry.”

Shifting business priorities

In what analysts consider an olive branch to the oil sector, Carney has removed carbon tax supporter Steven Guilbeault from the environment ministry, shuffling the former Greenpeace activist who regularly drew ire from Alberta politicians to culture minister and other roles.

The new environment minister is Terry Duguid, a lawmaker from Manitoba province who had not previously held a cabinet role.

Carney may also feel the need to appease members of the financial elite he once courted, as they jettison their support for net-zero investment goals.

Back in 2021, the central banker helped spearhead the the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, an initiative of major investors that pledged to support companies with clear climate goals.

After the election of Trump, US stalwarts including J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock quit the initiative. Most of Canada’s big banks followed later in another sign of shifting commercial priorities.

The world’s biggest climate finance coalition is in crisis. Is it worth saving?

Back in 2021, making the financial case for investing in net-zero, Carney told an interviewer at the UN: “Don’t assume that your politician cares about this issue as much as you do.”

How much Canada’s new prime minister cares about the climate today – and the amount of political capital he’s willing to invest in protecting it – will be tested in the coming months by electoral pressures and businesses emboldened by the US dumping its climate promises.

This story was updated on March 20 to add comment from former Canadian environment minister Catherine McKenna.

The post Canada’s new leader culls carbon tax seen as burden on voters  appeared first on Climate Home News.

California’s Surface Mining and Reclamation Act is one of the state’s most important laws to protect communities and the environment from the impacts of mining. 

Passed in 1975, SMARA requires mining projects to get a reclamation plan (for site cleanup after the mine closes) approved and provide financial assurances to prevent abandoning open pits, drill sites, and access roads if they go bankrupt. This protects the public from being left on the hook for cleaning up the mining industry’s toxic mess, as is the case with abandoned mine lands throughout the country.

Mining projects in California disproportionately threaten Indigenous lands, disrupting sacred sites and local ecosystems.

Because SMARA requires state or local approvals, it also triggers a review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) for the entire mining or exploration project. This provides an important opportunity for tribal consultation and public comment, even for projects on private land or that the federal government has approved without proper scrutiny.

But SMARA was passed with a mining industry loophole. Public Resources Code Section 2714 (f) gives the State Mining and Geology Board authority to exempt mining projects that will have “minor surface disturbance” or are of an “infrequent nature.” But it includes no definition of those terms. In 2024, a gold mining company abused this exemption to evade an environmental review of a controversial exploration project that will disturb the habitat of the threatened Mojave Desert Tortoise. Now, SMGB is proposing a new regulation to guide the 2714 (f) exemption process. 

While we would prefer a long-term solution that closes the loophole and provides no mining project exemptions under 2714 (f), Earthworks welcomes the board’s effort to standardize the exemption procedure. 

However, the proposed regulation falls short in three key areas:

1. Meaningful Tribal Consultation

Mining projects in California disproportionately impact the lands of Indigenous communities. To approve a mining project, agencies must conduct robust and meaningful consultation with impacted California Native American Tribes, even those without federal recognition. However, if the SMGB exempts a project from SMARA, it’s unclear how and when that consultation will occur. The board must revise the regulation to outline the consultation process.

2. Accessible Public Hearings

As written, the regulation allows public hearings on an exemption decision to be held in the local county or Sacramento. These hearings should only be held in the local county to encourage accountability and public participation. This will also allow the SMGB to visit the project site and hear directly from local community members, learning as much information as possible about a project before deciding whether or not to grant an exemption.

3. Clear Rationale for Exemption

As written, the regulation allows the board maximum discretion to grant an exemption. There are no definitions or criteria to help the board decide whether a project should be considered “minor” or “infrequent.” The regulation must be revised to require the board to issue findings explaining its decision-making. Otherwise, the SMGB risks becoming even more of a black box that grants exemptions without providing a rationale to the public.

Make your voice heard! If you live in California, please sign a comment to the board now.

The post It’s Time to Close California’s Mining Loophole appeared first on Earthworks.

As the impacts of climate change and other threats mount, conservationists are racing to preserve endangered plant species in botanical garden “metacollections” in the hope of eventually returning them to the wild. But what happens when there is no suitable habitat to return them to?

Read more on E360 →

The world expects too much from the annual COP climate summits, said the CEO of COP30 to be held in Brazil this November, stressing the importance of implementing climate action all year round and outside of the UN climate talks.

Brazil’s National Secretary for Climate Change Ana Toni told a conference at Chatham House in London on Tuesday that “COPs are not silver bullets – people are expecting COPs to deliver things that COPs cannot deliver, because change happens every day.”

“We don’t need to wait for COP to start implementing,” she added, emphasising the crucial roles of the private sector and sub-national governments like provinces and cities. She also recommended celebrating green measures as a way of inspiring more such action.

One limitation of COPs, she said, is that country delegations are usually led by their climate or environment ministers whereas a lot of key climate decisions are made by ministers of finance, transport, agriculture and energy who “are not there”. “We have to go beyond the walls of the Paris Agreement,” she urged.

Brazil decides leaders will speak before COP30, easing logistics crunch

At COP29, where governments agreed a collective annual finance target of $300bn by 2035, the UK’s delegation was led by climate minister Ed Miliband. Three months after that COP last November, the UK cut the aid budget, which is its main source of climate finance, despite Miliband’s reported unease.

Emissions still rising

COP30 CEO Toni’s words this week contrast with the grandiose rhetoric of some previous COP leaders. At the opening of COP26 in Scotland in 2021, then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Glasgow summit “must mark the beginning of the end” of climate change, and in his closing speech in Dubai, COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber proclaimed that the summit “set the world in the right direction”.

But global greenhouse gas emissions have yet to peak and temperatures look set to breach the lowest 1.5C warming limit in the Paris pact, leading many campaigners and climate-change sceptics to question the value of UN climate negotiations and their flagship annual conferences. COPs attract tens of thousands of government officials, business executives, activists and journalists each year.

Rich nations ignore polluting past to claim climate plans are 1.5C-compatible

Sitting beside Toni in London, the UK’s climate envoy Rachel Kyte said that, in hindsight, governments had been too slow to act on the 2015 Paris Agreement. “A lot of countries went OK, we’ve done Paris” – and have put little effort into aspects of the agreement like Article 2.1c, which says finance flows should be “consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development”.

Two key tasks for Brazil’s COP30 presidency team will be to encourage governments to publish more ambitious climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), and to oversee the development of the “Baku to Belem Roadmap” which aims to mobilise $1.3 trillion a year from all sources, including the private sector, for climate action in developing countries by 2035.

The post “Not silver bullets”: COP30 CEO downplays impact of yearly climate summits appeared first on Climate Home News.

One balmy summer’s day in 2007, a trade union veteran with a Hells Angel beard and a penchant for disruption turned up at a town-hall meeting in Collie, Western Australia (WA), with the unwelcome news that the local coal industry was living on borrowed time. 

“Absolutely got my head kicked in,” recalled Steve McCartney, state secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU), whose no-nonsense, invective-prone manner belies a deep-seated altruism and care for those on the frontline of the energy transition. “They weren’t interested in anything I had to say. They kept reminding me there was 150 years of coal left in that hill outside town.”

Collie came into being in the 1880s after coal was discovered in the area. It soon became the heart of coal mining and coal-fired energy production in the state, and its two coal mines and three coal-fired power plants have powered the South West Interconnected System, WA’s main electricity grid, since 1931. 

Today, 130 years on, coal still runs as deep through its culture as the rich seam of fossilised carbon beneath the ground, with around 1,800 of the town’s 9,000-strong population working in coal-related jobs.

But as the planet heats up and the need to move away from the main culprit – fossil fuels – becomes more urgent, this small town is a microcosm of the transformation underway in the global coal industry. As the world’s coal-producing regions grapple with how to decarbonise their economies by mid-century without devastating local communities, Collie offers a promising blueprint for a “just transition” away from coal. 

Ending Australia’s coal dependence

The energy transition is set to cost nearly 1 million coal-mining jobs worldwide by 2050, and Australia is particularly exposed. The country is the world’s second-largest coal exporter, and nearly three-quarters of its electricity generation is coal-dependent – contributing over a third of its carbon emissions.

But as the country aims to shut 90% of its coal-fired power plants by 2035, Collie has successfully garnered close to A$700 million (US$445 million) in investment to help it attract new green industries, including battery energy storage, green steel, graphite processing and magnesium refining. The money will also go to retrain and repurpose the coal workforce and revitalise the town’s high street and tourist economy.

This plan, however, was not imposed from above by officials or corporate executives. Rather it is the result of a community-led, cross-sector collaboration, forged by almost two decades of painstaking struggle. 

Having powered the region for over a century, Collie’s public coal-fired power plants, the Muja and Collie power stations, will gradually be switched off by 2029. That clearly threatens the future of the town’s coal mining firms, Griffin Coal and Premier Coal, and its sole private coal power station Bluewaters.

The Muja coal-fired power plant in Collie (Photo: IHRB/Oliver Gordon) The Muja coal-fired power plant in Collie (Photo: IHRB/Oliver Gordon)

In response, the government, unions, businesses, and – most importantly – local people have jointly developed a transition plan that will support jobs, community stability and economic diversification. 

“The world has no choice but to move on from coal – but coal communities like Collie need to have a renewed future that guarantees workers the support, income and opportunities they need to transition to new sustainable industries,” said Sharan Burrow, special advisor to the International Energy Agency’s Global Commission on People-Centred Clean Energy Transitions and former head of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). 

“Collie is a remarkable example that has all the right ingredients…  It’s not a done deal yet, but it’s certainly on the right track.”

After Baku setback, activists call for ‘just transition’ to be front and centre at COP30

Anger, acceptance, action

After a decade of efforts by the likes of McCartney, Collie’s transition began in earnest in 2017 when the WA Government first announced plans to close Synergy’s Muja A and B sites. Initially, much of the community was in denial, recounted Ian Miffling, current President of the Shire (Mayor) of Collie. “People thought, ‘It won’t happen’. But gradually, it dawned on people that it was inevitable.” 

Over the subsequent years, initial conversations evolved into hard plans. By the time the state government arrived to announce the staged retirement of Muja C in 2019, the town was ready for them, armed with a solid vision and principles to guide the transition. 

“We wanted the town to decide its future, not the government,” McCartney explained. Residents emphasised the need for sustainable “jobs that create other jobs”, utilising the town’s long-established industrial skills – ones that wouldn’t leave future generations in the same plight. They also wanted to evolve from being a “one-job town,” recognising the vulnerabilities of relying solely on coal.

Steve McCartney, WA State Secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (Photo: IHRRB/Oliver Gordon) Steve McCartney, WA State Secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (Photo: IHRRB/Oliver Gordon)

Jodie Hanns, member of WA’s Legislative Assembly for Collie-Preston, remembered the emotionally fraught task of announcing the coal-plant closure timelines alongside WA Premier Mark McGowan. “I had to stand in front of my husband, friends and neighbours and tell them their jobs at Muja power plant would have to end. It was one of the hardest days of my life.”

The establishment of the Just Transition Working Group (JTWG) in 2019 – and its state-run secretariat the Collie Delivery Unit (CDU) – was a pivotal moment. The JTWG brought together all the partners in the transition – the community, employers, government and unions. “We had everyone at the table,” said trade unionist McCartney. “Decisions could then be made without going back and forth to Perth.” 

Sub-committees tackled specifics, from job creation to retraining, ensuring every worker had a personalised plan. “We wanted paid training to happen while people were still working, so they didn’t fall behind,” he added. “We saw what happened when Australia’s car industry transitioned: if you wait until after the closures to retrain the workers, it’s already too late.” 

In 2020, the JWTG and the State Government published a Just Transition Plan for Collie built on four pillars: maximising opportunities for affected workers, diversifying the local economy, celebrating Collie’s history and promoting its future, and committing to a just transition as defined in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Financing the transformation

Collie’s approach has already yielded results. The WA Government has so far committed A$662 million to the cause, earmarked for retraining programmes, industrial diversification and infrastructure projects. The town will also benefit from the state’s wider A$3.8-billion renewable energy development programme, including a A$1-billion battery energy storage system (BESS) currently being constructed in Collie.

The funding support for the transition started in 2019, with the State Government committing $115 million to Collie support initiatives. As part of this, $38 million was allocated for new tourism attractions including public murals, adventure trails, redeveloping recreation sites and renovating the high street, which has since seen a surge of visitors. 

In 2022, the WA Government announced that, alongside A$300 million for decommissioning Collie’s state-owned coal assets, $200m would be allocated to the Collie Industrial Transition Fund to support new large-scale industrial projects in priority sectors such as green manufacturing, minerals processing and clean energy. 

Magnium’s new green magnesium pilot plant has been one of the beneficiaries. The facility produces low-carbon magnesium metal, a critical material for electric vehicles and other green technologies. It opened in January 2025, aiming for full-scale production by 2030. “We’re targeting 5% of global magnesium demand,” explained CEO Shilow Shaffier. “The full-scale facility will span 40 hectares, create over 1,000 construction jobs, and provide 400 permanent positions.” 

Similarly, the Collie Battery Energy Storage System, run by state utility Synergy, will be one of the world’s largest battery systems. It will provide 500 megawatts of power with 2,000 megawatt hours of storage to the South West Interconnected System, which can power 785,000 average homes for four hours. Liz Baggetta, Synergy’s head of transition, said it offers a “great opportunity” to the company’s employees, with some already working on the project as part of their individual transition plans.

The town is pinning even greater hopes on Green Steel WA, another cornerstone of Collie’s economic diversification strategy. The company plans to build a 450,000-metric-tonne electric arc furnace, powered by renewable energy. The facility will recycle scrap steel into low-emission products, with the potential to cut 800,000 tonnes of CO2 annually compared to traditional steelmaking. The company is hoping to generate around 220 direct jobs in Collie, and hundreds more in supporting roles.

A drone shot shows Magnium’s green magnesium pilot plant, which opened in January 2025. (Credit: Bill Code) A drone shot shows Magnium’s green magnesium pilot plant, which opened in January 2025. (Credit: Bill Code) Tailored plans for workers

The final piece in Collie’s transition puzzle is its retraining programme. In 2022, the government announced a training support package that would expand the existing Collie Jobs and Skills Centre (JSC) to deliver a facility situated – very deliberately – in the middle of the high street to provide tailored career and training assistance to residents.

“We can’t train everyone at once – new industries are still evolving,” explained JSC manager Nat Cook. “So we adapt to meet changing needs, offering everything from resume writing to on-site consultations.”

Separately, Synergy has set up a Workforce Transition Program to provide individualised pathways for workers affected by the closure of the Muja and Collie power stations, offering retraining, redeployment, voluntary redundancy or retirement. “When the closure announcements were made, we spent six months listening to workers to understand their concerns and goals,” explained Baggetta, who heads up the programme. Based on these conversations, Synergy developed tailored plans to help employees navigate their futures.

Coal workers hold a union meeting. (Photo: IHRB/Oliver Gordon) Coal workers hold a union meeting. (Photo: IHRB/Oliver Gordon)

And while Collie’s transition is still in its infancy, these efforts are starting to bear fruit. Maintenance workers at Griffin Coal have received a 43% pay rise, paid-time training, a 25% uplift to their redundancies, a A$30,000 retention package and the establishment of ‘work councils’. Similarly, Synergy workers have agreed wage increases of inflation plus 1.5% guaranteed until 2029, paid-time training and a three-month uplift to their redundancies. 

“Just transition should change people’s lives right now, not sometime in the future; that is how you start to make the connection in a worker’s mind between climate action and their life changing for the better,” said Darcy Gunning, AMWU’s campaigns organiser. 

The transition’s early successes are also filtering through to the town’s wider economy. Since 2019, Collie’s labour force has grown by 5.4%, its population by 4%, and building approvals have risen fivefold. Median house prices have surged 21% in the past year, while annual visitor numbers have also climbed. 

A global blueprint?

The global push toward net-zero emissions is accelerating the decline of coal, but the polluting fuel still provides 36% of the world’s electricity and supports the livelihoods of 8.4 million workers worldwide, with many regions almost entirely dependent on it to fuel their economies. For instance, the half a million coal workers of India’s Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh states, 90,000 of South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, and 80,000 in Poland’s Silesian coal basin are all staring down the barrel of their countries’ energy transitions.

Without proper transition strategies, these communities face high unemployment, social dislocation and growing inequality – the impacts of which will reverberate throughout their societies for decades to come.

Coal-reliant South African provinces falling behind on just transition

Globally, effective transition strategies are still thin on the ground, explaining why policy-makers and researchers in Australia and beyond are taking notice of Collie’s nascent success. Australia’s new Net Zero Economic Authority (NZEA) has recognised its potential as a model for other transitioning coal towns in the country. And according to mayor Miffling, the town has received enquiries about its plans from the United Arab Emirates, the US Eastern Seaboard and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.

The Ewington coal mine near Collie (Drone shot: IHRB/Bill Code) Rehabilitated mining land at Ewington coal mine (Photo: Oliver Gordon / IHRB) The Ewington coal mine near Collie (Drone shot: IHRB/Bill Code) Rehabilitated mining land at Ewington coal mine (Photo: Oliver Gordon / IHRB)

Collie has benefited from a set of unique conditions: a highly unionised workforce, historic ties to the Labor Party and state ownership of key assets like the Muja and Collie power stations. Such conditions, which enable collaboration across different economic actors, can also be found in Germany and Scandinavia, but remain rare elsewhere. “In places like in Appalachia [in the US], the absence of organised labour and political commitment often leads to disaffection and even the rise of far-right politics,” said Bradon Ellem, labour historian and co-author of a recent paper on coal transitions in WA. 

Additionally, Collie’s compact size and proximity to emerging industries like green steel and renewables are a distinct advantage. Because of these specific factors, Caleb Goods, senior lecturer of management and employment relations at the University of Western Australia (UWA) Business School, and a leading expert on labour and energy transitions, believes the model’s replicability will be limited.

Large and more dispersed coal regions like Appalachia and Poland’s coal basin will find it much tougher to create enough new jobs and infrastructure, he said. “Even in Collie, bridge transition opportunities are only beginning to emerge,” he noted. “Reaching the finish line, where a community has secure, green job opportunities, is an incredibly hard task – and one that will look different for every region.”

Nonetheless, Goods praised Collie’s approach as a leading example of a “progressive and dynamic” consultation process that prioritises the voices of workers. “Not all are enthusiastic about the transition; some are sceptical or see coal as part of the town’s future. But they recognise the transition’s value for their children and the community,” he explained.

Union veteran McCartney knows how hard it is to get them onside, but is convinced there is no other route to success.

“If we don’t empower local people when we’re trying to create wholesale change inside their communities, then we’re in the wrong game,” he said.

This is an abridged version of original reporting by Oliver Gordon for JUST Stories – a global project from the Institute for Human Rights and Business dedicated to finding and telling stories of people working together to advance just transitions.

The post This Australian coal community is co-designing its own green future appeared first on Climate Home News.

Temperatures and carbon dioxide levels hit new highs last year, according to a U.N. report detailing the dire state of the global climate.

Read more on E360 →

Loading… How the Klamath Dams Came Down By Anita Hofschneider and Jake Bittle Illustrations by Jackie Fawn March 19, 2025

Last year, tribal nations in Oregon and California won a decades-long fight for the largest dam removal in U.S. history.

This is their story.

• Part 1 Fish and Paper
• Part 2 A Business Decision
• Part 3 The Backup Plan
• Part 4 Blue Creek
• Part 5 Homecoming

Part

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

I.

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Underscore Native News.

At 17 years old, Jeff Mitchell couldn’t have known that an evening of deer hunting would change his life — and the history of the Klamath River — forever.

Over Thanksgiving week in 1974, Mitchell and three friends were driving home to Klamath Falls, Oregon, when their truck hit black ice, careened off the road, crashed into a ditch, and rolled over violently, throwing Mitchell from the vehicle and knocking him unconscious. When he woke up, Mitchell’s leg was pinned underneath the pickup truck, and he could feel liquid pooling around him. At first he thought it was blood. Then he smelled the gasoline. A concerned bystander walked up to him with a lit cigarette in his mouth. “My god, I’m going to burn up,” Mitchell thought. The crash put two of his friends in comas, while the third had emerged unscathed.

If not for the black ice that nearly killed him, Mitchell might never have helped launch one of the biggest victories for Indigenous rights and the contemporary environmental movement in North American history: the demolition of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, a degraded 263-mile waterway that winds through Mitchell’s ancestral homeland and that of four other Indigenous nations. He might never have witnessed the fruit of that victory, the largest dam removal in United States history, when nearly 1.5 million cubic yards of earth and concrete finally came down in October of last year, more than 100 years after the first dam was built. He might never have seen the restoration of one of the largest salmon runs on the West Coast, an event that set a profound new precedent for how the U.S. manages its water.

As climate change causes more extreme swings between wet and dry weather, straining scarce water resources and threatening the survival of endangered species, it has forced a reckoning for the thousands of dams erected on waterways across the country. These dams were built to produce cheap power and store water with little regard for Indigenous rights or river ecosystems, and they continue to threaten the survival of vulnerable species and deprive tribes of foodways and cultural heritage — while in many cases only providing negligible amounts of electricity to power grids. For decades, Indigenous peoples and environmentalists have highlighted how these structures destroy natural river environments in order to generate electricity or store irrigation water, but only recently have state politicians, utilities, and bureaucrats begun to give serious credence to the notion that they should come down.

The Copco 1 dam on the Klamath River outside Hornbrook, California. The construction of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath degraded hundreds of miles of salmon habitat. Jeff Barnard / AP Photo

The removal of the four dams on the Klamath, which were owned by the power utility PacifiCorp, represents the first real attempt at the kind of river restoration that Indigenous nations and environmentalists have long demanded. It is the result of an improbable campaign that spanned close to half a century, roped in thousands of people, and came within an inch of collapse several times. Interviews with dozens of people on all sides of the dam removal fight, some of whom have never spoken publicly about their roles, reveal a collaborative achievement with few clear parallels in contemporary activism.

The fight began, however improbably, with Mitchell’s accident. 

After several surgeries, he found he couldn’t get to his university classes on crutches, so he moved back home to Klamath Falls. Not knowing what else to do, Mitchell, an enrolled citizen of the Klamath Tribes, trained to be a paralegal and began attending council meetings for his tribal government. His job was to take notes during meetings at the tribe’s office, a repurposed beauty shop in the town of Chiloquin along the Klamath River. 

But a year later, a resignation on the tribal council thrust Mitchell into the leadership body. Suddenly, the 18-year-old was a full-fledged tribal council member, setting policy for the entire nation and getting a crash course in Klamath history. 

“I wanted answers,” he said. “I wanted to know why my homelands were gone.”

The free-flowing Klamath River near Orleans, California, before the construction of the hydroelectric dams. The power utility that built the dams promised to provide passage facilities for salmon but never built them. Nextrecord Archives / Getty Images

The Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin-Paiute tribes had been forced to cede 22 million acres of land to the United States in 1864, after settlers violently claimed their territory. The 1864 treaty established a 2.2 million-acre reservation in what is currently Oregon and secured the tribes’ fishing, hunting, and trapping rights, but that reservation got whittled down further over the years due to fraud and mistakes in federal land surveys. 

By 1954 — three years before Mitchell was born — the Klamath Tribes no longer existed on paper. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States “terminated” the Klamath and more than 100 other tribes. The bipartisan termination movement aimed to assimilate Indigenous peoples by eliminating their status as sovereign nations, removing their land from federal trusts, and converting tribal citizens into Americans. Much of what remained of the Klamath’s ancestral homelands was taken by the federal officials and turned into national forests or sold to private interests. 

By the time Mitchell joined the tribal council in 1975, the Klamath Tribes were about to head to court, arguing that the federal government’s termination policy had no effect on their fishing, hunting, or trapping rights. They were also fighting for their rights to Klamath River water. “Marshes were drying up because water was being taken and diverted,” Mitchell said. “We had to protect water rights so we could protect fish and animals and plants and other resources that we depended on.” 

The Klamath River had once hosted one of the West Coast’s largest salmon runs, with thousands of adult Chinooks swimming upstream every autumn. But in 1911, a local power utility called the California-Oregon Power Company began to build a hydroelectric dam along the river, erecting a 10-story wall of tiered concrete that looked like the side of a coliseum. Over the next few decades, the company built three more dams to generate added power as its customer base grew in the farm and timber towns of the Pacific Northwest. 

Together these four dams blocked off 400 miles of the Chinook salmon’s old spawning habitat, depriving them of access to the rippling streams and channels where they had once laid eggs in cool water. Before the dams, nearly a quarter of the Klamath Tribes’ diet came from wild salmon. 

“In a blink of an eye, you’re talking about losing one-quarter of all your food source,” Mitchell said. “I just sit back and think, It must have been one hell of an impact on my people.”

Jeff Mitchell got his start as a paralegal-in-training before joining the Klamath Tribal Council in 1975. Courtesy of Jeff Mitchell

In 1981, six years after Mitchell joined his tribal council, a report crossed his desk, which had been relocated from its makeshift beauty parlor digs to those of an old movie theater. The study, conducted for the federal Department of the Interior, provided official confirmation for what Indigenous leaders and tribal members already knew: The dams were responsible for the missing salmon. 

“Although the builders of the dam promised to provide fish-passage facilities, none were built,” the report read. “There is no evidence that any consideration was given to the fish loss suffered by the Indians of the Klamath Indian Reservation despite continued protests by the Indians and by officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of the Indians.”

The Klamath Tribes were still busy in court defending their water rights, and they were making headway in their fight to regain their status as a federally recognized tribe. When Mitchell discussed the report with other tribal council members, they agreed that they probably had grounds to sue either the utility that built the dams or the federal government that allowed construction to happen. But suing over the missing salmon would mean spending money that the nation didn’t have. 

So Mitchell filed the report away and moved on with his life. He got married, had kids, and the Klamath Tribes regained their federal recognition in 1986. Government services like health care and housing were rebuilt from the ground up, and the tribes successfully gained endangered species protections for two Klamath Basin suckerfish that were critical to tribal tradition. But the river’s water quality continued to decline, and the Klamath Tribes continued to fight for its water rights in the court system with no end in sight.

By the turn of the century, Mitchell was in his 40s and serving as tribal chairman. It was then that he received a letter from PacifiCorp, the company that had absorbed the California-Oregon Power Company and now owned the dams: Would the Klamath Tribes like to join meetings to provide input on the company’s application for a new dam license?

Mitchell didn’t have to think about it. He said yes.

II.

The Klamath River watershed begins as a large lake in what is currently southern Oregon. It winds its way south through the northern edges of the Sierra Nevada mountain range for more than 250 miles before emptying into the Pacific Ocean in what is now northwest California. The lake provides a haven for C’waam and Koptu — gray suckerfish with round, blunt noses that exist nowhere else on the planet — and its vast expanse of surrounding marshes are a stopover for migrating tchikash, such as geese and ducks. Every fall for thousands of years, as the mountain forests flashed gold and red, tchíalash, or salmon, raced upstream through the cold mountain waters and laid their eggs, feeding the people who lived along the riverbanks. 

In 1901, a local newspaper called the Klamath Republican said the fish were so plentiful that they could be caught with bare hands: “Five minutes’ walk from Main Street brings one to the shores of Klamath rapids, where every little nook, bay, and tributary creek is so crowded with mullets that their backs stick out of the water. … Mullets, rainbow trout, and salmon — splendid fish, giants of their size, and apparently anxious to be caught.” 

By then, white settlers had spent decades seizing land and water from the tribes and manipulating the landscape. Once they had established a permanent hold on the Klamath River, the settlers set about draining lakes and diverting streams to service industries like agriculture, mining, and timber. The federal Bureau of Reclamation then established a massive irrigation project at the head of the river and, within a few years, settlers cultivated thousands of acres of alfalfa nourished with irrigation water. Today, the basin produces mostly beets and potatoes, the latter often used for french fries.

Farmers in Klamath County, Oregon, preparing potatoes for shipment. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built a large canal system to deliver irrigation water to potato farms in the area. Dorothea Lange / Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty Images

The four dams constructed over the first half of the 20th century held back water from the lower reaches of the Klamath, forcing salmon to navigate a smaller and weaker river. Salmon also need oxygen-rich cold water to thrive, but the water of the Klamath grew hotter as it sat in stagnant reservoirs and flowed shallower down toward the Pacific, which made it harder for salmon to breathe and reproduce. This warm water also encouraged the growth of toxic algae and bristleworms that emitted microscopic parasites.

The dams blocked off the upstream Klamath, making it impossible for adult salmon to swim back to their ancestral tributaries. As they raced upstream toward the frigid mountain waters, they ran into the earthen wall of Iron Gate, the southernmost dam on the river, flopping against it futilely. Over the decades, these conditions drove the fish toward extinction, threatening the survival of a species that was central to the Yurok, Karuk, and Shasta peoples who had lived around the downstream Klamath Basin for thousands of years.

This might have remained true forever were it not for a quirk of federal bureaucracy. In order to run dams, power companies in the U.S. must secure a license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the nation’s independent energy regulator, and those licenses have to be renewed every 30 to 50 years. In 1999, the license for the Klamath dams was less than a decade away from expiring. 

The California-Oregon Power Company, the utility that built the dams, had passed through a series of mergers and acquisitions since its founding in 1882, eventually becoming part of a for-profit regional company known as PacifiCorp, which owned power plants across the Pacific Northwest. In order to keep running the Klamath dams, PacifiCorp needed to secure new state water permits, get operational clearance from federal fish regulators, and solicit feedback from local residents, including the Klamath Tribes, which again had federal recognition. For most hydroelectric dams, the process was lengthy but uncontroversial. 

Jeff Mitchell had other ideas. He wanted the company to install fish ladders, essentially elevators that would allow the salmon to pass through the dams. The power company had promised to build them nearly a hundred years before, when construction was still underway, but had never followed through. He wasn’t the only one who was frustrated. While the Klamath Tribes lived farthest upstream and no longer had access to salmon, there were other tribes on Klamath tributaries — the Karuk, the Hoopa, and the Yurok — who could still fish but had been watching their water quality decline and salmon runs dwindle.

The Hoopa and Yurok tribes had spent years in court fighting each other over land. But when they all crowded into windowless hotel conference rooms to hear PacifiCorp’s plans, the tribal representatives quickly realized they had the same concerns. 

There was Leaf Hillman, the head of the Department of Natural Resources for the Karuk Tribe, who had grown up eating salmon amid increasingly thin fish runs. “It was a struggle,” he said, recalling the meager amounts of fish he and his uncle would catch on the river. “Frequently all the fish that we got were given away or went to ceremonies before any of them ever got home.”

There was Ronnie Pierce, a short, no-nonsense, chain-smoking Squamish woman who was trained as a biologist and structural engineer and now worked as a fisheries biology consultant for the Karuk Tribe. Pierce had short, slicked-back hair, wore champagne-colored glasses and black leather boots, and had zero patience for corporate-speak. “I went through your draft application, and I can’t tell if a goddamn salmon even lives in the Klamath River,” she once told company executives.

Ronnie Pierce stands beside a stack of binders containing PacifiCorp’s draft application to relicense its dams on the Klamath River. Courtesy of Leaf Hillman

Then there was Troy Fletcher, executive director of the Yurok Tribe. A tall, charismatic man with a resemblance to Tony Soprano, Fletcher had spent years building up a Yurok program for studying and managing the river’s fish population before taking the helm of the tribal government. Fletcher knew the fishery was one of the only economic drivers for the Yurok nation, and a decline in salmon meant unemployment, exodus, and, eventually, cultural collapse. “As one of our elders put it, the Klamath River is our identity as Yurok people,” Fletcher said.

The group quickly noticed a pattern: Company executives’ eyes would glaze over when the tribes discussed the cultural importance of salmon. In March of 2001, during a public comment process that lasted more than a year, Mitchell submitted a formal comment to PacifiCorp that argued, “Fish passage on the Klamath River has been ‘blocked’ and interferes with the property rights and interests of the tribe.” The company responded to his comment in an official report by saying, “Comment noted.”

Pierce took to storming out of the room every time she got fed up with the company. Once, she got so upset at a meeting in Yreka, California, that she slammed her binder shut and drove several hours home to McKinley Grove, California, more than 400 miles away. She had little tolerance for the ignorance some PacifiCorp executives revealed about the landscape their dams had remade. “Where’s Blue Creek?” one of them asked in one meeting, clearly unfamiliar with the sacred tributary within Yurok territory. The pristine tributary, which flowed through conifer-covered mountains and across expanses of smooth rock on its way toward the Klamath main stem, was one of the most beautiful places in the entire river basin, and the first refuge that salmon encountered as they entered from the Pacific.

“‘Blue Creek? Where is Blue Creek?’” Pierce snapped. “You are really asking that? You dammed our river, killed our fish, attacked our culture, and now you ask where Blue Creek is?” 

As the license meetings continued, Pierce wanted the group to take a harder line. She invited Hillman, Fletcher, and other tribal officials to dinner at her home in California. Over drinks, the group strategized about how to deal with PacifiCorp. 

“You guys are fools if you go for anything but all four dams out,” Pierce said. “You’ve got to start with all four — and now — and the company pays for it all. That’s got to be the starting position.” 

It was a radical idea, and one with no clear precedent in American history. Hillman, the Karuk leader who worked with Pierce, knew that for many farmers and politicians in the West, dams symbolized American conquest and the taming of the wilderness. He couldn’t see anyone giving that up. But he felt inspired by Pierce, who was so hardheaded that the Interior Department once threatened to pull the Karuk Tribe’s funding if the nation kept employing her, according to one dam removal campaigner.

Pierce’s vision that evening propelled the dam removal campaign to ambitions that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier, but she wouldn’t live to see it realized. She soon received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and just a few years later she would find herself sitting with Hillman and others around that same table, making them promise to get the job done. She wanted them to scatter her ashes on Bluff Creek along the Klamath River after the dams were removed, no matter how many years it took. 

“A lot of us tried to emulate her, how she was,” Hillman said. “There was no surrender.” The campaign would need Pierce’s determination to survive after her death. The fight was only heating up.

III.

The year 2001 arrived at the start of a megadrought that would last more than two decades and transform the American West, sapping massive rivers like the Colorado and driving farms and cities across the region to dramatically curtail their water use. This drought, which scientists say would be impossible without climate change, delivered the worst dry spell in the Klamath’s recorded history. All along the river’s banks, forests turned brown and wildfires sprang up. Small towns lost their drinking water. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote at the time that “signs of desperation are everywhere … birds are dying as ponds dry up in wildlife refuges … sheep grazing on bare ground run toward the road when a car stops, baaing furiously and wrapping their mouths around the strands of barbed-wire fence.”  

That spring, the federal government shut off water deliveries to Klamath farmers in order to protect endangered salmon and suckerfish on the river. The once-green fields of the basin, which had bloomed thanks to irrigation water from the vulnerable river, turned to dust. The earth cracked.

With no water, farmers were forced to abandon their beet and potato fields. More than 200,000 acres of crops shriveled, wiping out as much as $47 million in farm revenue and driving up potato prices as the harvest in the Klamath collapsed. Dozens of farmers filed for bankruptcy, school enrollments plummeted, businesses closed as farm families fled the region, and reports of depression and suicide skyrocketed. 

Farmers and their supporters gathered by the thousands to stage a series of protests at the federal canal that released water from Upper Klamath Lake. First, they organized a ceremonial “bucket brigade,” led by girls from the local 4-H agriculture club, stretching 16 blocks from the lake into an irrigation canal. On multiple occasions, including the Fourth of July, protestors used a chainsaw and blowtorch to force open the headgates of the canal and siphon a small amount of water. It wasn’t enough to save anybody’s farm, but it was enough to prove they were serious.

When local authorities sympathetic to the farmers refused to intervene, U.S. marshals were brought in to guard the canal and quell protests. For the rest of the summer, locals loudly floated the idea of open revolt to overthrow the government.

Protestors try to open a Bureau of Reclamation head gate on the Klamath River to release irrigation water to farms in Oregon. The federal government shut down water deliveries to farmers in 2001 in order to protect endangered salmon and suckerfish on the river. Don Ryan / AP Photo

“The battle of Klamath Falls will go down in history as the last stand for rural America,” said one resident in an interview with The Guardian. The New York Times adopted the same narrative: An article that summer described the endangered animals as “all-but-inedible, bottom-feeding suckerfish” and framed the fight as one between environmentalists and hardworking farmers, erasing the tribes from the narrative altogether. 

At Klamath Tribes’ headquarters in Chiloquin, half an hour from the headgates of the Bureau of Reclamation canal, Jeff Mitchell and other tribal leaders warned tribal citizens not to go into town. There had always been tensions with settlers over water, but now the farmers were blaming the tribes for the death of their crops, since the tribes were the ones that advocated for the protection of the endangered fish. 

One afternoon that December, three drunk men drove through Chiloquin in a metallic gold pickup truck and used a shotgun to fire shots at the town. “Sucker lovers, come out and fight!” they yelled. They shot above the head of a child after asking him if he was Indian.

In 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney intervened. The former congressman from Wyoming maneuvered to open the headgates and divert a full share of irrigation water to the farms, regardless of how little water would be left in the Klamath for salmon and suckerfish. The 2002 diversion dried out the lower reaches of the Klamath just as salmon were starting to swim upstream from the Pacific Ocean to spawn. The low water levels resulting from Cheney’s decision heated up the river even more and made conditions prime for a gill rot disease, a fungal infection that thrives in warmer temperatures. As the salmon crowded into these small stretches of water, packed more densely than usual, they contracted the disease and gasped for air. Cheney’s water diversion was a violation of the Endangered Species Act, and Congress would later ask the vice president to speak about his role in the fish kill. He declined.

The Yurok saw the effects first. Adult salmon weighing as much as 35 pounds surfaced with their noses up and mouths open in the hot, shallow drifts. After they dove back down, they then rose to the surface belly-up. Hundreds of dead salmon appeared in the river, then thousands. Within weeks, tens of thousands of dead salmon piled up on the riverbanks and became food for flies as their flesh baked in the sun. When their bodies turned gray and their skin ruptured, meat bubbled out, and birds pecked at their eyeballs. The stench was overwhelming.

“It was a moment of existential crisis, it was a form of ecocide,” said Amy Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe member who was a college student working on the river that year.

A week earlier, a judge had sentenced the three men who shot their guns at the child in Chiloquin. They admitted their attack was motivated by racism and received 30 days behind bars and community service.

IV.

As the fight in the Klamath unfolded, PacifiCorp had continued to slog away on its attempt to relicense the four Klamath dams. After years of back-and-forth, the company closed in on finishing its draft application. It mailed copies to everyone involved in the more than 200 meetings held by the company. The application was so long that it filled several binders in multiple cardboard boxes. When Ronnie Pierce stacked the binders on top of one another, they were taller than she was.

The application was comprehensive, but Pierce, Mitchell, Fletcher, and others noticed that despite the massive die-off of salmon they’d just witnessed, the company still had not committed to build the fish ladders it had promised almost a century earlier.

“That’s when we decided to go to war with PacifiCorp,” said Mitchell.

On January 16, 2004, more than 80 years after the first dam was built, members of the Karuk, Yurok, Klamath, and Hoopa tribes gathered at the Red Lion in Redding, California, a two-star hotel off the freeway with a Denny’s and trailer parking in the back. They were joined by Friends of the River, a tiny nonprofit and the only environmental organization willing to stand with the tribes at the time. 

As the tribes and farmers fought with PacifiCorp and the George W. Bush administration, one major player had escaped notice altogether, ducking responsibility for destroying the river’s ecosystem and remaining largely in the shadows. That was PacifiCorp’s parent company, ScottishPower, which owned the utility from across the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles away. 

Leaf Hillman had learned about ScottishPower during a meeting with a PacifiCorp executive in the company’s Portland, Oregon, headquarters. Frustrated that she wouldn’t consider dam removal, Hillman asked to speak to the executive’s boss. “If you’re going to talk to my boss, you’re going to have to go to Scotland,” she replied, laughing. As he sat in the meeting at the Red Lion, he could still hear her laughter.

Six months later, Hillman and his allies walked through immigration at Glasgow Airport. A United Kingdom customs officer asked them to state the purpose of their visit.

“We’re here to get those damn dams off the Klamath River,” Dickie Myers of the Yurok Tribe replied.

Part 2 A Business Decision V.

In the summer of 2004, water flowed through the 90-foot-wide gates of a hydropower dam along the Tummel River in Perthshire, Scotland. Salmon and sea trout swam safely past the turbines on their way upstream, wiggling up and down the fish ladders required by Scottish law. 

The difference wasn’t lost on Jeff Mitchell, who was visiting the dam for a press conference highlighting how ScottishPower’s subsidiary, PacifiCorp, had refused to install those same fish ladders in their dams on the Klamath River.

As they toured Scotland demanding that the company remove its subsidiary’s dams in Oregon and California, Mitchell and his allies from the Klamath River Basin were surprised to meet an outpouring of empathy and support. The Scottish people knew and loved salmon — so much so that Glasgow’s coat of arms had two salmon on it. A local Green Party leader embraced their cause, filing a parliamentary motion criticizing ScottishPower for its hypocrisy. At one point, The Herald, Scotland’s longest-running newspaper, even gave ScottishPower’s CEO a nickname: “Stops Salmon Leaping.”

“If it wasn’t for these fish I wouldn’t be here today. My people would have died off a long time ago,” Mitchell told reporters during their visit. “We can’t walk away from this and we will not walk away from this.”

Members of the Yurok tribe protest outside ScottishPower’s annual general meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland. The tribes sought to force the utility, which owned the dams until 2005, to install fish passage facilities that would save endangered salmon. Maurice McDonald / PA Images / Getty Images

The pressure campaign produced immediate results, with left-wing members of the Scottish Parliament calling on political leaders to intervene in favor of the tribes. After the tribes’ visit in July, PacifiCorp’s chief executive officer, Judi Johansen, had told news media that “all options [were] on the table, including dam removal.”

But the momentum did not last. The following spring, ScottishPower executives decided to pivot back to a focus on United Kingdom energy markets and offload some of their assets. They sold PacifiCorp for $5.1 billion, washing their hands of the Klamath River crisis.

The new owner of the dams was a far more familiar face. The firm that now owned PacifiCorp was called MidAmerican Energy Holdings, and it was controlled by Berkshire Hathaway, the massive conglomerate owned by billionaire Warren Buffett.

VI.

Mitchell, Troy Fletcher, and their fellow tribal leaders knew at once that they had to adjust their strategy. During their campaign in Scotland, they had tried to stir up moral outrage over the death of the Klamath salmon, arguing to ScottishPower executives and Scottish citizens that the company needed to put the needs of the fish above its own profits. That argument didn’t seem like the right fit for Buffett, whose reputation was that of American capitalism personified: He made his fortune riding the swings of the free market, and every year thousands of Berkshire shareholders converged on the company’s Nebraska headquarters to get stock tips from the so-called “Oracle of Omaha.” 

After doing some digging, Craig Tucker, a spokesman for the Karuk Tribe, discovered that Buffett’s family seemed to have an affinity for Indigenous people. Buffett’s youngest son, Peter, was a composer who had written music for the 1990 film Dances With Wolves, plus an eight-hour documentary on Native Americans helmed by Kevin Costner. Tucker also discovered that Peter and his brother, Howard, had co-sponsored the Buffett Award for Indigenous Leadership, a cash prize recognizing Indigenous leaders.

In an attempt to get Buffett’s attention, Tucker nominated Leaf Hillman for the award for his work restoring salmon on the Klamath. Hillman made it to the final round, but in the days leading up to the awards ceremony, Tucker got ahead of himself and told a few journalists that Hillman was being considered for the Buffett prize. The flurry of media attention scuttled Hillman’s chances, Tucker said.

The tribes’ strategy was multipronged, combining loud protests with quiet legal maneuvering. In 2007, Hillman and his son, Chook Chook Hillman, drove to Omaha to disrupt Berkshire’s annual shareholders meeting. When they arrived, local police pulled their RV over and told them to behave. “We’ll be watching you,” Chook Chook recalled one officer saying. The Hillmans were required to stand in a designated “free speech” spot for protestors down the road from the auditorium as Buffett fans walked by. “Get a job!” one passerby shouted. Another woman spit on them.

The hostile response inspired Chook Chook to train with the Indigenous Peoples Power Project, which schooled Native activists in nonviolent protest, to strengthen his civil disobedience skills. The following year, he managed to address Buffett directly during Buffett’s annual town hall before thousands of Berkshire shareholders, but the tycoon rebuffed Chook Chook and the other protestors, telling them the government and not Berkshire would determine the dams’ fate. The protests in Omaha became so disruptive that Berkshire representatives flew to the Klamath Basin to ask Chook Chook and the other activists to stay away from Nebraska.

But Mitchell, Fletcher, and the others had discovered an argument that Buffet couldn’t dismiss so easily. They’d spent years immersing themselves in the intimate details of how the dams operated, poring over company filings and utility commission reports. They found that by the turn of the 21st century, the dams had become, in Mitchell’s phrasing, “losers.” The dams generated at most around 163 megawatts of electricity during the wettest years, or enough to power 120,000 homes, far less than the average coal or gas plant. That was just a small percentage of the power that PacifiCorp generated across its six-state fleet — and even less in dry years, when the turbines couldn’t run at full capacity. Even with recent renewable energy requirements in California and Oregon, the dams didn’t really move the needle compared to the more powerful solar, wind, and natural gas assets the company was adding.

PacifiCorp’s relicensing fight at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had been playing out for almost seven years. But tribal leaders were simultaneously pursuing another strategy: persuading federal fish agencies to impose new environmental rules on the company’s license. This would make the dams even more expensive to operate, leading to thinner margins, and open up PacifiCorp to pressure from its utility customers to consider dam removal.

“If anything would change Berkshire Hathaway’s mind,” said Mitchell, “it would be a good business decision.”

Thanks to the dogged work of advocates like the late Ronnie Pierce, there were years of documentation of the devastating ecological effects of the Klamath dams, and state and federal governments had ample evidence that the dams had been in violation of the Endangered Species Act as well as the Clean Water Act. In early 2006, responding to the dire state of the river’s fish population, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service mandated that PacifiCorp build fish ladders around the dams in order to avoid killing off the salmon altogether. California and Oregon then told the company that they would not grant it permits under the Clean Water Act unless it cleaned up its reservoirs, which were contaminated with toxic algae.

These decisions meant hundreds of millions of dollars of added costs for PacifiCorp — the bill for the fish ladders alone would exceed $300 million. The company contested them, leading to a lengthy FERC hearing that pitted almost a dozen tribes, government agencies, and environmental groups against the utility. During the hearing, PacifiCorp argued it could trap adult fish below the dams and transport them upstream on the river by truck instead of building fish ladders. The company also argued that salmon had never swam that far upstream before the dams existed. 

The tribes believed that the company’s proposals for handling the salmon were ludicrous, but they also knew they would need more than studies and statistics to persuade the judge in the FERC hearing to rule against the company. That summer, the tribal leaders took the hearing judge and executives from PacifiCorp on a boat ride up the river to give them a firsthand look at what the dams had done. The day was so hot that they almost cut the trip short, but Mike Belchik, the Yurok Tribe’s biologist, insisted that the judge see the Williamson River, which drains into Klamath Lake, far upstream from the PacifiCorp’s dams. When they arrived, the water in the undammed river was cool, and large trout were leaping in droves. 

“Your Honor, this is where the salmon are going to. This is the prize right here,” Belchik remembers the group telling the judge. “This place will sustain salmon.” 

The judge in the FERC hearing ruled against PacifiCorp in September of 2006. The company would have to pay for the costly dam improvements, and the tribes now had the leverage they’d been working for. The company could keep operating the dams in the meantime with a series of one-year license extensions, but it had to fix the issues on the river if it wanted a new license.

”This is going to be the thing that really motivates PacifiCorp to negotiate,” said Craig Tucker, the Karuk Tribe’s spokesman, in a statement at the time.

Faced with the mounting cost of running the dams and an onslaught of negative press, PacifiCorp brass deputized Andrea Kelly, a trusted company veteran and an expert in utility law, to find a solution. Company leaders tasked her with exploring potential settlements that would maximize revenue for PacifiCorp while minimizing the costs of regulatory paperwork, lawyers’ fees, and public-image maintenance.

‘If anything would change Berkshire Hathaway’s mind, it would be a good business decision.’

Kelly had read all the same paperwork as Fletcher, Mitchell, and Pierce, and after PacifiCorp’s regulatory losses, she came to the same conclusion that the tribes had — it might be cheaper to remove the dams. But she didn’t say so just yet. First, in late 2007, PacifiCorp commissioned a confidential study that compared the cost of dam removal to that of the fish ladders and river cleanup that the federal agencies were demanding. The analysis, which has never been made public in full, found that meeting the agencies’ fish and water conditions would be significantly more expensive than the cost of removing the dams, provided the company didn’t have to cover the whole removal bill. 

The study also found that trying to relicense the dams was a massive financial risk. The tribes’ campaign had made the dams so controversial that Oregon and California were almost certain to keep opposing the license. The inevitability of additional protests and litigation meant that PacifiCorp would likely need to spend hundreds of millions more to get through the FERC process. Even then, there was no guarantee it would get its new license.

To protect its customers and investors from the costs of a protracted fight over the Klamath, PacifiCorp’s best option was no longer trying to keep the dams up, but figuring out how to get them down.

VII.

As the tribes worked to put PacifiCorp on defense, they were also trying to forge a truce with an aggressive adversary: the farmers of the Klamath Basin, who just years earlier had been on the brink of starting an all-out armed conflict with the tribes and the federal government to control the basin’s scarce water.

Troy Fletcher, the Yurok Tribe executive director and longtime tribal leader, had spent decades fighting with farmers for the water the tribe needed — and was legally owed — to build up its struggling fisheries. But Fletcher was also amiable by nature, and as years of conflict passed, he realized that the animosity between the tribes and the farmers wasn’t serving either of them. The tribes had spent millions of dollars on litigation and lobbying against the farmers’ interests — and had blasted them in the news media for years — but had no more water to show for it.

“It didn’t make any of us sleep any better, because the big issues were still out there, and we still had to resolve them,” he said. 

In 2005, as the FERC dam relicensing process rolled on, Fletcher and other tribal leaders found themselves stuck in another series of meetings with farmers and ranchers from around the Klamath Basin. The Bush administration had brought the groups together in an effort to achieve a long-term resolution to the contentious water issues and avoid more violence. For once, tribal members and agricultural interests weren’t meeting at protests or sparring in the press, but rather sitting across the table from one another in the same windowless conference rooms, eating the same bad food, and filling their coffees from the same pots. 

During one meeting, in a room full of tribal leaders and farmers, Fletcher decided to propose a truce: Why didn’t the two sides stop criticizing each other publicly, and start talking? 

In the months that followed, Fletcher befriended veteran farm lobbyist Greg Addington, whom the Klamath farmers had hired after the 2001 water war to serve as their advocate. Addington had spent almost his entire career lobbying on behalf of farming interests, but he knew the farmers could not afford a repeat of their standoff with the government. He and Fletcher started talking over beers in the evening and playing golf. It wasn’t long before Klamath water issues came up.

Farmers had gotten cheap power from the hydroelectric dams for decades, but now PacifiCorp, which wasn’t making much money off the systems, was trying to raise their rates. Fletcher was getting pressure from his environmentalist friends to support the rate increase because it would hurt the farmers who were sapping the river, but he didn’t like the idea of the farmers going bankrupt. He decided to strike out on his own: In private conversations with Addington, he vowed that the Yurok would support continued power subsidies for the farmers if Addington and the farmers supported the removal of the dams. PacifiCorp was screwing the tribes and the farmers, he told Addington — so why didn’t the two join together?

Troy Fletcher was frustrated with how tribal officials like himself were excluded from negotiations between the feds and PacifiCorp and urged Interior officials to get dam removal done. Courtesy of Matt Mais / Yurok Tribe

“Nothing brings people together like a common enemy,” Fletcher said. “We’ve been in the fight for ages, but we can’t afford to litigate for decades and watch our fish continue to die.” The farmers began to back the tribes’ campaign for dam removal, and in return the tribes backed them on the power-rate issue.

“I believed that Troy cared about the ag community in the Klamath Basin, and it made me really want to care about the tribal community,” Addington said.

The truce soon opened up a broader dialogue between the farmers, the tribes, environmentalists, and fish advocacy organizations on the Klamath. The stakeholders on the river had been trying to solve each of these crises on its own, suing each other whenever their interests came into conflict, but now they began to talk about a comprehensive settlement deal that would put an end to the litigation. Everyone would have to give up something, but everyone would get something they needed.

VIII.

The final piece to the Klamath puzzle was the Bush administration, which controlled Klamath irrigation through a canal system run by the Bureau of Reclamation and would play a key role in any water settlement. Both farmers and Indigenous nations had come to detest the administration — the farmers for the 2001 water shutoff and the tribes for the subsequent fish kill caused by Vice President Dick Cheney’s emergency diversion of water to the farmers. 

The crisis was a stain on the administration’s record in the water-stressed West, and Bush was desperate to resolve the tensions in the Klamath. The president directed Dirk Kempthorne, a compromise-oriented Idaho governor brought in to run the Interior Department during Bush’s second term, to defuse the Klamath conflict — even if it meant departing from the traditional Republican line on water issues, which was unconditional support for dams and agriculture.

President George W. Bush looks on as Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne is sworn in as Secretary of the Interior. After years of conflict in the Klamath basin, Kempthorne and his staff helped negotiate a settlement that led to dam removal. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Kempthorne and his deputies flew to the Klamath Basin to join the settlement talks, but they got a frosty reception. Despite Fletcher and Addington’s breakthroughs, the alliance was still fragile.

In early 2008, Fletcher, Mitchell, and Hillman met with senior Interior officials at Klamath Falls, near the headquarters of the Klamath Tribes. John Bezdek, a senior Interior Department lawyer, asked for tribal leaders’ thoughts on a long list of items in the proposed settlement, including water deliveries to farmers and ecosystem restoration.

But Fletcher wanted something more from them. Staring at the Interior bureaucrats from across the table, he laid it out for them straight. The negotiations had made progress, he said, but without a guaranteed agreement to remove the dams, a larger water settlement was impossible. Somebody would need to force PacifiCorp’s hand.

“You guys need to get this done for us,” Fletcher told the two Bush administration officials.

Bezdek said he would try. He and another Interior bureaucrat, Michael Bogert, flew to Portland to visit Robert Lasich, the president of PacifiCorp and the boss of the company’s Klamath czar, Andrea Kelly. The two government officials felt like they had momentum: With federal agencies insisting that the company provide fish passage, and the once-rebellious farmers now calling for dam removal as well, it seemed like the company would have to acquiesce.

But as soon as they entered Lasich’s office, the PacifiCorp executive rebuffed them, saying the utility would never abandon the dams unless Interior came up with a deal that worked for the company.

“You’re asking us to voluntarily walk away from revenue-generating assets,” he told them, Bezdek recalled. “If you want this to happen, you two need to man up and put something real on the table.” Bogert later made Bezdek a T-shirt that said, “MAN UP.”

In a last-ditch effort to work out a deal, Bezdek called a meeting with PacifiCorp’s Andrea Kelly and representatives from the two states at a federal conservation training center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia — a site so remote that negotiators had to walk 15 minutes to a bridge and stand on its railing to get cell service. 

Bezdek also invited three lawyers representing the Yurok Tribe and a few conservation groups, but they didn’t get to join the settlement talks until the last day, when most points had already been decided. PacifiCorp’s Kelly was the only woman there, and there were no tribal leaders present, a fact for which Fletcher, of the Yurok Tribe, would later upbraid Bezdek and the Interior bureaucrats.

Behind closed doors in Shepherdstown, Kelly reiterated the company’s conditions for dam removal. The company did not want to spend more than $200 million, she said. It also wanted full protection from any legal liability that resulted from the dam removal project, which would detonate dynamite on century-old structures and release millions of tons of sediment and algae into a fragile river ecosystem.

For three days, Bezdek and Kelly hashed out how dam removal would work. The solution to the money problem came from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who agreed to issue a state bond that would raise $250 million. That money, combined with $200 million PacifiCorp would get from its customers in Oregon, would cover the costs. The liability problem was harder: PacifiCorp refused to conduct the dam removal itself. In order to appease the company, the parties ended up settling on the idea that the federal Bureau of Reclamation itself would remove the dams and assume the risk.

‘If you want this to happen, you two need to man up and put something real on the table.’

After days of exhausting talks, the parties brought the framework to Interior Secretary Kempthorne, who secured Bush’s blessing to approve it. This was a stunning reversal from six years earlier, when Cheney had caused the fish kill to protect the interests of Klamath farmers. The Bush administration and the states were able to tout the deal as a solid business decision — Oregon’s governor called the deal “a model … of how the federal and state governments and private industry can work together.”

“President Bush made clear to me that we were there to solve problems,” said Kempthorne. “We never took a position other than to say that we supported a business decision.” At the Bush administration’s final White House Christmas party in December of 2008, the president shook hands with Michael Bogert, one of the senior Interior officials who had worked on the negotiations. 

“It’s a good deal,” Bush told Bogert.

The 2008 accord represented a triumph of diplomacy and compromise in a region that just a few years earlier had been on the verge of war. The settlement, finalized across two legal agreements, not only promised to remove all four PacifiCorp dams from the Klamath River, but also called for a billion dollars in federal funding to restore the decaying parts of the river ecosystem, undoing a century of damage. 

The deal guaranteed water deliveries to the Oregon farmers during all but the driest periods, laid out a plan to protect salmon and suckerfish during droughts, and returned 90,000 acres of forest land to the Klamath Tribes. The basin tribes, environmental nonprofits, commercial fishing groups, and irrigators all endorsed it. The state governments of California and Oregon gave it their blessing in a matter of months as well. 

But not everyone was happy: The residents of conservative Siskiyou County, California, which was home to three of the dams, were angry that PacifiCorp was going to drain the reservoirs that gave them lakefront property and a place to water ski. Some farmers around Upper Klamath Lake hadn’t received the water guarantees they were seeking. And the Hoopa Tribe, a nation that had also campaigned for dam removal, walked away from the settlement talks, frustrated that PacifiCorp would not have to bear the whole cost of dam removal. 

Mitchell, too, had reservations about the company walking away with its hands clean, and about the fact that the deal had come together with no tribal leaders present. But in his eyes, the benefits far outweighed the costs.

“This gave us the pathway of getting these dams out and restoring this watershed more quickly than fighting a much longer battle where fish may not survive,” he said. “If it took us another 10, 15 years to do this, we may lose those fish completely.”

The only step left was to get Congress’ approval for the settlement deal, which would unlock a billion-dollar infusion of restoration funding. After so many years of hard-fought negotiations, the campaigners, assured by their federal allies, thought that passing a settlement bill through Congress would be straightforward by comparison. 

They had no idea what lay ahead.

Part 3 The Backup Plan IX.

In February of 2010, Jeff Mitchell shook California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hand before reporters at the state capitol building in Salem, Oregon, with the governor of Oregon and the secretary of the interior looking on. 

“Hasta la vista, Klamath dams,” Schwarzenegger said as he leaned over to sign the agreement to demolish the four dams, settle rights to the river’s water, and return land to the Klamath Tribes. Beneath the capitol dome, the former bodybuilder joked that, even for him, the deal had been “a big lift” to get over the finish line.

The mood in Salem that day was ecstatic. After years of protest and negotiation, the entire basin — the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath tribes, the region’s conservative farmers, and environmentalists — had come together behind a plan to take the dams down, and they’d brought both the federal Department of the Interior and the dams’ corporate owner over to their side. Because the deal hinged on millions in federal restoration funding, as well as a legal directive to let Interior take the lead on dam removal, the last remaining step was for Congress to pass a bill that authorized the demolition and allocate money to restore the river to its original undammed state.

Later that year, the Republican Party scored a resounding victory in the 2010 midterm elections, riding a wave of backlash against the election of Barack Obama two years prior. Many of those elected to the congressional majority that emerged in the House of Representatives were partisans of the far-right Tea Party movement. They advocated a scorched-earth opposition to the Obama administration’s entire agenda, rejecting bipartisan achievements like the Klamath deal, despite its origins in the Bush administration.

“I think there was a whole lot of just blocking of anything that could be a potential positive legacy for the Obama administration,” said Leaf Hillman, the former vice chairman of the Karuk Tribal Council. “Congress was hell-bent on making sure he got nothing to be proud of.”

Like many legal settlements, the Klamath deal had an expiration date at the end of 2012. If Congress didn’t ratify the deal and the settlement lapsed, the parties had to start all over again to negotiate a new one. After the 2010 election, a few years suddenly didn’t seem like much time at all. 

The Republican resurgence also elevated a man Mitchell knew well: Greg Walden, a longtime congressman for the Oregon side of the Klamath Basin and now an influential leader in the House Republican caucus. For years, Mitchell had known Walden as a fierce advocate for the state’s agricultural interests and a critic of the Endangered Species Act. The two men had spoken about fish issues on the river, but Mitchell had never felt like Walden cared much about what he had to say. Still, Walden had expressed his support for the Klamath settlement when it came together in 2008, saying that the negotiators “deserved a medal.”

“He kept saying, ‘If you guys can develop an agreement, I’ll do my job and I’ll get it through Congress and get it funded,’” recalled Mitchell.

Walden had been engaged on Klamath issues since the 2001 water crisis, and had secured funding for financial relief and infrastructure in the basin. He had even enabled the dismantling of a very small dam on a tributary in Chiloquin, Oregon. As a high-ranking Republican and the member representing Oregon’s side of the basin, he seemed to be in an ideal position to advance a bill that would ratify the settlement. But despite urging from farmers, tribal leaders, and other elected officials, Walden failed to push for the settlement — a decision that many advocates saw as an attempt to block dam removal. Before long, he became public enemy number one for the settlement parties, who soon found themselves forced to extend the ratification deadline to the end of 2015.

Representative Greg Walden, center, walks in the U.S. Capitol in early 2011, just after Republicans retook the majority in the House of Representatives. Walden, who represented the Oregon side of the Klamath in Congress, was seen as a major obstacle to dam removal. Bill Clark / Roll Call / Getty Images

In the summer of 2013, after multiple years of stagnation in Congress, Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden held a public hearing on the Klamath deal in an attempt to generate some forward momentum. Mitchell, Hillman, and Troy Fletcher of the Yurok Tribe came to Washington to testify in support of the deal and urge legislators to pass it.

“We hope that you will work with us to make sure that [the settlement] gets passed,” said Fletcher in his impassioned remarks to the Senate natural resources committee. “People have got to move off their entrenched positions.” 

Part of the reason for Walden’s resistance to moving the agreement through the House was that the landmark Klamath agreement, which brought together dozens of parties, was still not inclusive enough for his tastes. The settlement, he said, had left a number of groups out, including local residents who lived around the dams. Most important to him were a small group of farmers and ranchers that worked land upstream of Upper Klamath Lake and had walked away from initial settlement talks. 

In an attempt to satisfy Walden, Oregon’s governor deputized Richard Whitman, the state’s lead environmental official, to work out a separate deal that would resolve a water conflict between these farmers and the Klamath Tribes. Over the next two years, with the other campaigners waiting in the background, Whitman dutifully managed to negotiate an irrigation settlement the holdouts could accept.

Walden praised the settlement and suggested he would help push through the broader Klamath deal, including the dam removal, according to Whitman. Then he never did.

“Congressman Walden refused to move legislation notwithstanding that we had satisfied his conditions,” said Whitman. “He never lived up to that commitment.”

Walden said he did not recall making this commitment to Whitman and defended his engagement on the settlement. He said that even if he had backed the settlement, it would never have made it through Congress with a dam removal provision. There were a slew of dam supporters in charge of House committees at the time, and since 2013 Walden’s counterpart on the California side of the basin had been the far-right Doug LaMalfa, a former rice farmer and stalwart supporter of western agriculture. LaMalfa was dead-set against the dam removal agreement, and his constituents were on his side — residents of Siskiyou County, California, which was home to three of the dams, had voted 4-to-1 against dam removal in a symbolic local referendum.

“It just hit a brick wall, and that brick wall was just the realities of control of Congress,” said Walden. “I kept saying … ‘I realize you want to blame me, but tell me the path.’”

As the extended deadline got closer, Fletcher, Mitchell, Hillman and other dam removal advocates escalated their pressure campaign. They held a rally in Portland, boosted an anti-dam campaign in Brazil, and organized countless meetings between irrigators, tribal leaders, and elected officials. But nothing happened in Congress. When Senator Wyden introduced a Klamath bill in the Senate in early 2015, with just months to go until the settlement expired, it went nowhere, failing to secure even a hearing in the chamber’s energy committee.

“In my lifetime, I’ve seen moments where Congress could really do bipartisan stuff, and try to really solve problems,” said Chuck Bonham, who participated in Klamath negotiations first as a lawyer for the fish advocacy organization Trout Unlimited, and later as California’s top fish and wildlife official. “When the negotiations started, that was the prevailing theory. By the time we got there, that was impossible.”

X.

By the start of 2015, campaigners had been trying to pass the settlement for almost five years. Senior officials at the Department of the Interior, which had brought the deal together under the Bush administration, were desperate to get something through Congress before the uncertainty of the following year’s election.

That fall, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and longtime Interior lawyer John Bezdek decided to try a last-second gambit. They conveyed to Walden they would support a broader Klamath settlement bill without a dam removal provision. The bill would provide hundreds of millions of dollars to restore the river and settle the water conflict between the Klamath Tribes and the farmers, and it would even preserve the Klamath Tribes’ land restoration agreement — but it would allow the dam agreement to expire, leaving the basin with no guarantee that PacifiCorp’s dams would come down.

”We couldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Jewell said. 

Meeting with Bezdek in a side room in the U.S. Capitol, Walden again sounded an optimistic note. If the dam removal mandate disappeared, he thought the rest of the settlement could pass, despite hesitance from other Republicans. But it took him until the final month of 2015 to introduce a settlement bill, and that bill stood no chance of passing — it opened up thousands of acres of federal forest land to new logging operations, a carve out that Democrats and Indigenous nations dismissed as unacceptable. The bill went nowhere. 

Walden said he didn’t remember the specific conversation with Bezdek, but said he thought his final bill had a chance of passing.

“This one got away,” he said. “I couldn’t figure out how to do it.”

Mist rises after a rain at Blue Creek, a tributary of the Klamath River in California. The creek is the first spawning place for salmon that arrive from the Pacific Ocean and is a sacred place for the Yurok Tribe and other Indigenous communities in the Klamath basin. Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images

With the settlement’s expiration imminent, the fragile coalition that had come together around the dams’ removal began to fall apart. Leaders from the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath Tribes had put decades of work into the negotiations, and some tribal leaders, like Fletcher, had made removing the dams their life’s work. Watching all that progress vanish due to Congress’s inaction felt like an echo of previous betrayals.

“There was a sense of extreme frustration, because these agreements were very difficult to negotiate,” said Amy Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe member who came on as its lead counsel in 2014. Cordalis had decided to go to law school after witnessing the mass die-off of salmon on the river in 2002. Most of her work since then had led up to this moment, and now it was about to vanish.

In September of 2015, the leadership of the Yurok Tribe announced that it was withdrawing from the Klamath deal, essentially dooming the watered-down agreement. In a press release, the tribe said that the “benefits of the agreements have become unachievable.” The Karuk and Klamath tribes said they would follow suit by the end of the year if Congress didn’t act.

A few weeks after Yurok leadership announced they were pulling out of the deal, Yurok Tribe biologist Mike Belchik met up with Fletcher on a scorching day while the Yurok director was hitting golf balls. Belchik was frustrated with Fletcher for abandoning the deal, but Fletcher was adamant that the move was a strategic maneuver designed to bring everyone back to the table. 

“The dam removal deal won’t die,” he told Belchik. “It’s got too much life in it. It’s going to happen.” 

Two weeks later, during a meeting on Klamath water issues on the Yurok reservation, Fletcher suffered a fatal heart attack. His sudden death at age 53 was a blow not only to the Yurok Tribe but to the entire Klamath Basin: The breakthrough deal to restore the river was no more, and the man who had done so much to bring it together was gone.

“It was just such a terrible shock, it was awful,” said Belchik, who had spent countless hours with Fletcher — driving to and from PacifiCorp meetings, playing poker and golf, and strategizing about how to bring the dams down. 

“He really in a lot of ways gave his life to Klamath dam removal and to the river,” said Cordalis.

XI.

With Fletcher gone and Congress having failed to pass the settlement into law, it seemed like there was just one strategy left for the Klamath, albeit one that negotiators had rejected a decade earlier. 

PacifiCorp’s overriding priority was that some other entity — any other entity — take responsibility for demolition of its dams, allowing the company to avoid legal liability for the removal process. The Klamath settlement deal had come together around the appealing idea that the federal government would be that entity — having the Interior Department take the dams down had always made the most sense, given the federal government’s sheer size, expertise, and funding. 

As Congress stalled, longtime dam opponent and tribal counsel Richard Roos-Collins thought back to the early days of the settlement talks. He had been involved in Klamath negotiations for more than 10 years, and had been one of the tribes’ only representatives at the tense West Virginia talks back in 2008. He recalled that, during those early stages, before the Bush administration had signed on to the deal, environmental groups had proposed that PacifiCorp transfer the dams to a new corporation run by the tribes or by the states — essentially a holding company that would accept the dams only to destroy them using money from PacifiCorp and the states.

At the time, PacifiCorp had rejected the idea as ridiculous and unproven, and negotiators had given up on it, putting their hopes in the Interior Department. But Roos-Collins remembered that a group of environmentalists and local organizations in Maine had created a nonprofit trust to purchase two dams on the Penobscot River back in 2004. The trust had since destroyed those dams, reopening the river for fish migrations. He thought there might be a chance that the same idea could work with PacifiCorp: The utility would apply to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for permission to transfer the hydroelectric dams to a nonprofit entity, and that nonprofit would take them down, shielding PacifiCorp from liability and costs.

It was still an outlandish plan. The Klamath dams were several times the size of the ones in Maine, and far larger than any other dams that had ever come down in the United States. FERC had a history of support for hydropower, and there was no way to know if it would endorse the idea of demolishing an active power facility if the Interior Department wasn’t the one doing it. Neither the states, the tribes, nor the environmental groups wanted to take ownership of the dams, which meant the “removal entity” would have to be a bespoke nonprofit created for that express purpose. 

“There was resignation, and kind of a demoralization, that was, ‘Well, we only have one option left, and that is FERC,’” said Chuck Bonham, who had helped negotiate the original settlement at Trout Unlimited and was now the lead Klamath negotiator for the state of California. 

PacifiCorp executives worried the system was a Trojan horse to keep the utility involved: If the process cost more than projected, would the dam removal entity come back to the company for more money? If the sediment that got released from behind the dams turned out to be toxic enough to kill off downstream wildlife, would lawsuits drive the removal company into bankruptcy? Federal, state, and company negotiators went back and forth over the details for months toward the end of 2015 as the settlement fell apart in Congress. They made little progress.

Remembering his meeting with Fletcher back in 2008, when Fletcher demanded that the Bush administration bring PacifiCorp to the table on dam removal, Interior lawyer John Bezdek called another closed-door meeting at the same remote site in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Once again, he bartered with PacifiCorp official Andrea Kelly late into the night, pushing her to endorse the idea of transferring ownership of the dams. She refused to commit: The proposal left PacifiCorp too exposed to liability.

As Kelly and Bezdek debated utility law, they grew increasingly frustrated. After dinner one evening, the two got into an argument and stormed off to their respective dormitories, fed up with one another.

“I actually thought for sure it was done,” Bezdek said. “I went back to my room, and I called my wife, and I said, ‘I think it’s done. I don’t think we can get there.’”

Some time after midnight, Bezdek got a call from Kelly, who couldn’t sleep either. They threw on their coats, met on a bench outside the dormitories, and started talking again. Bezdek emphasized that the entire Klamath Basin, from the tribes to the farmers, had come together in the belief that the dams needed to go. It was time for PacifiCorp to do the same; the fight would never be over until the company let go.

By the time the sun came up, Kelly had agreed to the new plan. California and Oregon would endow a joint nonprofit dedicated to the dams’ removal, and PacifiCorp would apply to FERC for permission to transfer the dams to that nonprofit. Bezdek took the agreement to his boss at Interior, Sally Jewell, who approved it. There was no need, with this new arrangement, to get Congress involved.

Walden said he wishes he had known it was possible for the dam removal to take place without Congress’ involvement. If he had, he said, he would have pushed to pass the rest of the Klamath settlement and advocated for the FERC path toward dam removal, potentially saving the settlement and speeding up removal by several years. 

“Had I understood that, dam removal would never have been a federal issue, because it didn’t need to be, and we might have been able to find a different solution,” he said. “That’s my fault.” 

A few months after the second Shepherdstown summit, on a hot April day at the mouth of the Klamath River in Requa, California, tribal leaders gathered with Jewell, Bezdek, and the governors of California and Oregon to celebrate the revived dam removal agreement. They signed the documents on a traditional Yurok fish-cleaning table, a long white plank of stone that tribal members had cleaned for the occasion. Then the dam removal advocates took the group on a boat up to Blue Creek, the same part of the river where the devastating fish kill had occurred in 2002.

U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, center, poses with representatives from California, Oregon, PacifiCorp, and the Yurok and Karuk tribes at an event in April of 2016. The federal government, the states, and PacifiCorp agreed in 2016 to pursue dam removal through an alternative path after Congress failed to ratify an earlier settlement agreement. U.S. Department of the Interior

There was a notable absence: Jeff Mitchell of the Klamath Tribes was not part of the celebratory photo op at the fish table. There was still a path toward dam removal, but the broader Klamath settlement had died in Congress, dashing hopes for a water accord between the Klamath Tribes and the irrigators. The Klamath Tribes did not sign the amended dam removal agreement because it did not have the same protections for their treaty rights as the original deal.  

“I wish that we would’ve been able to work through that,” Mitchell said. “The price that we paid for that was pretty, pretty deep — pretty, pretty big price — because it took us away from the table.”

For the other tribal leaders who had been fighting for dam removal, the day felt momentous.

“I was naively stoked,” said Amy Cordalis. To her, the memory of the dead salmon was still fresh, even 15 years later — she could still smell the rotting flesh. It had been a moment of clarity of her life’s purpose.

“I felt like my great-grandmother, who had passed away when I was 6, came to me and was like, ‘You need to make sure that this never happens again,’” she said. Cordalis was part of a new generation of tribal leaders and their allies who were determined to carry on the fight. 

But neither Sally Jewell, nor the governors of California and Oregon, nor the tribal activists knew whether or not FERC, a government body that operates independently of the presidential administration, would accept the new transfer proposal. It would take years to refine the details of the new agreement, and it was far from certain that the coalition would hold together: Not only was Fletcher gone, but PacifiCorp’s Kelly was about to retire. Bezdek was about to leave the negotiations as well, since the Interior Department would no longer have direct involvement in the dam removal.

More than a decade after the fight to remove the Klamath dams began, none of the campaigners could have known that the new agreement would next have to survive a global pandemic.

Part 4 Blue Creek XII.

Amy Cordalis was on maternity leave, but she spent her days on phone calls and in Zoom meetings. The deal to remove the four Klamath River dams, which had inspired her life’s work for nearly two decades, was falling apart. Again.

It was late summer 2020, just months after the COVID-19 pandemic forced massive shutdowns across the globe. Millions of people were out of work and more than 100,000 people in the United States alone had died from the novel coronavirus. On the Yurok Tribe’s reservation in northern California, the nation had closed all government offices and schools and barred nonessential visitors from entry. A record-setting wildfire season heightened the community’s challenges, as thick wildfire smoke turned the sky orange and made every hour feel like dusk. Swaths of forest in the Klamath Basin burned.

Cordalis’ days were a blur of breastfeeding, interrupted sleep, and troubleshooting her newborn’s cries. But when she learned that the dams’ owner, PacifiCorp, was threatening to pull out of the agreement to transfer its dams to a state-backed entity for demolition, she knew she needed to return to her role as the tribe’s lawyer.

For four years, Cordalis and other tribal attorneys had been working on finalizing PacifiCorp’s dam removal plan with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But the agency’s makeup had changed after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. The new commissioners decided that PacifiCorp, and the states that the Klamath ran through, needed to put up more money to fund dam removal on top of the $450 million they had already pledged. The commission also contended the company needed to keep its name on the dam licenses — a requirement PacifiCorp had long rejected, fearing it would subject the utility to potential lawsuits if anything went wrong during removal. 

“Here we go again,” Cordalis thought.

Without PacifiCorp, the tribes would have to restart the relicensing process they’d been pursuing in the early 2000s.   

The process had gone on so long that many of the people at PacifiCorp and in the federal government who had negotiated the original 2016 deal were no longer around. That left Richard Whitman and Chuck Bonham, the lead environmental officials for Oregon and California, to try to hold together the collapsing dam removal settlement. The two bureaucrats raced to come up with a new legal arrangement that would satisfy both FERC and PacifiCorp, even offering more money from their two states for dam removal if the company would match it. But PacifiCorp refused to give any more than the $200 million it had already promised. California Governor Gavin Newsom even wrote an open letter to Warren Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway, and urged him not to pull out of the deal, but the company’s position did not change.

In a last-ditch effort at diplomacy, leaders of the Yurok Tribe, Karuk Tribe, and Klamath Tribes emailed Buffett to invite him to the Yurok reservation to talk. Buffett declined, but he agreed to send a cadre of his top executives, including Greg Abel, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy; Bill Fehrman, the president and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy; Stefan Bird, the CEO of PacifiCorp’s power plant unit; and Scott Bolton, a PacifiCorp vice president. The Yurok Tribal Council passed a resolution to open the COVID locked-down reservation just for the executives.

Cordalis and the others came up with a plan for the meeting: They would take the executives up to Blue Creek — the southernmost cold-water tributary on the Klamath, the first stop for salmon heading upstream, and one of the most precious places on the river. There, they would persuade them to re-sign the deal. It would’ve been easier to meet at the reservation’s hotel, but they felt like they needed to do more to win over company officials. The executives needed to see the kind of ecosystem that the dams had destroyed.

The executives agreed to go up the river.

XIII.

Chook Chook Hillman, a Karuk Tribe citizen, knew Berkshire Hathaway well. He had been 23 years old when he confronted Warren Buffett at the 2008 Berkshire shareholders’ meeting in Omaha. Company representatives had come to his house in California and asked him to stay away from the annual gatherings while PacifiCorp hashed out the details of the dam settlement. 

Chook Chook and other activists had toned down their Omaha protests slightly after that. But they remained committed to their goal, forming a group called the Klamath Justice Coalition. “Direct action is the logical, consistent method of anarchism,” they wrote on their Facebook page, quoting the Lithuanian-born author and anarchist Emma Goldman, who embraced confronting injustice with uncompromising force.

While tribal officials negotiated with federal bureaucrats in conference rooms, Chook Chook and other activists trained youth in nonviolent direct action and spoke at public hearings about Klamath water issues. In 2014, several members even flew down to Brazil to show solidarity with Indigenous peoples of the Amazon fighting against the construction of a dam.

Chook Chook Hillman, a member of the Karuk tribe, sits along the banks of the Klamath River. Hillman and a group of other young Indigenous activists spent years pushing PacifiCorp and its parent company Berkshire Hathaway Energy to remove the dams on the Klamath. Gillian Flaccus / AP Photo

By 2020, Chook Chook was 35 with a family of his own, and had spent countless hours bringing his kids to meetings and protests over the years. He was not about to let the dam removal deal fall apart. Tribal leadership had not invited him and his fellow Klamath Justice activists to the meeting on the river, a move that Chook Chook saw as an attempt to appease Berkshire’s executives. But he knew when and where the meeting on the river would take place, and that was information enough. They decided to make their presence known, invitation or not.

“They’re not going to meet with us as people, then we’ve got to do what we got to do,” he said.

The executives’ planned tour of the river immediately went awry. Just a quarter-mile into their trip to Blue Creek, the boat carrying Cordalis and some of the masked-up Berkshire Hathaway executives broke down, right in front of Cordalis’ family fishing hole. Another boat carrying PacifiCorp executives Bird and Bolton as well as Yurok biologist Mike Belchik ran aground in shallow waters and started overheating.  Both groups had to hop in other Yurok tribe boats in order to continue up the river.

After another mile and a half, they were forced to stop again: The river was blockaded by protestors from the Klamath Justice Coalition who had draped a rope across it and stood in their boats holding signs saying, “Undam the Klamath.” Balanced defiantly on their boats, the activists put themselves face-to-face with Abel, Fehrman, and the other Berkshire and PacifiCorp executives.

Chook Chook’s son approached the executives first. The 11-year-old handed them a white flag. Chook Chook reminded them that his son had been just a week old when PacifiCorp executives first visited and promised to remove the dams. 

“We’ve kept up our end of the bargain, we’ve given you 11 years to do it,” Chook Chook said. “I don’t know what you guys are going to decide at your meeting, but what needs to happen, has to happen. We don’t have any more time.”

Activists handed Fehrman a jug filled with foul-smelling river water. “Take the lid off and smell it,” said Annelia Hillman, a Yurok Tribe citizen and Chook Chook’s wife at the time. The Berkshire executive opened the bottle and sniffed the algae-tainted water.

PacifiCorp executives smell a bottle of toxic algae-infused water taken from the Klamath River during a standoff with Klamath Justice Coalition activists in 2020. Courtesy of Sammy Gensaw III

“Our fish are drinking that,” said Dania Rose Colegrove from the Hoopa Valley Tribe. “They have to swim in that.”

“We understand that’s a challenge,” one of the executives replied. Sammy Gensaw III, one of the Yurok youth activists, implored the executives to understand the stakes. 

“This isn’t just about the Klamath River. What goes down in the Klamath Basin will be echoed throughout generations,” Gensaw said. “The rest of history will look at the decisions that we make here today.”  

Gensaw’s younger brother, Jon Luke Gensaw, spoke next. “If this doesn’t end, you’re going to see more of us,” he said, surrounded by hundreds of people from all of the Klamath’s tribes. “I take my mask off because I want you to remember my face, because you’ll see me again.” 

Frankie Myers, the vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, who was on the boat with the executives, reminded the younger activists that the tribal leaders shared their goals, and that they had a schedule to keep with the company. Myers’ father, Dickie, had been one of the original dam removal campaigners who had traveled to Scotland more than a decade earlier. Chook Chook and the others felt they had made their message clear, and decided to let the executives through. 

“We’re sorry we had to do this, but you know, this is what we do,” Colegrove said as they parted. “We didn’t get invited to the meeting, so we invited ourselves. You have to hear the people — it’s just how it is.” 

‘What goes down in the Klamath Basin will be echoed throughout generations.’ 

The executives and tribal leaders finally made their way to Blue Creek. Myers urged them not to abandon the deal, and Cordalis presented an offer from the states and tribes to provide additional insurance and funding. Abel and the other PacifiCorp executives agreed to take a term sheet from the tribal campaigners, and responded to their entreaties politely, but they did not commit to meeting FERC’s new demands. 

It was a beautiful day: Salmon were swimming in the cool waters, and a bald eagle flew over Abel as he defended the company’s position. Tribal leaders could not have picked a more serene place to make their case for what was at stake, but PacifiCorp didn’t concede. After lunch, the group drove their boats back to the reservation and thanked the executives for coming. At the Yurok Tribe’s debriefing meeting, the disappointment was so profound that some broke down in tears. 

But a few days later, Cordalis got a call from Bill Fehrman, the Berkshire Hathaway Energy executive who had gone to Blue Creek. The voice on the other end of the line said something that stopped her in her tracks. 

“Let’s talk, we need to get the dams out,” Fehrman said, according to Cordalis’ recollection. 

A few months later, PacifiCorp and the two states announced that they had come to an agreement: The company and the states would each provide an additional $15 million, helping meet FERC’s demand for backup cash, and California and Oregon would add their names to the dam licenses, resolving the company’s demands about liability. Those two moves were enough to appease FERC once and for all. 

For Cordalis, for Leaf Hillman, and for Jeff Mitchell, the fight was over at last. The dams were coming down.

XIV.

In January of 2024, almost a quarter-century after the dam removal campaign began in earnest, construction crews began draining the reservoir behind Iron Gate Dam, the southernmost dam on the Klamath River. The official dam removal had begun the previous year with the dismantling of Copco 2, which was by far the smallest of the four dams, but the emptying of Iron Gate marked the real beginning of the end.

Belchik arrived early to watch the moment with Cordalis, who had wanted to get there at sunrise to pray. As Belchik waited for the drawdown to proceed, he noticed the group of PacifiCorp executives standing nearby. He thought they looked a little forlorn. Belchik approached one of them and started a conversation.

The executive revealed to Belchik what had happened after the trip to Blue Creek, which many campaigners had seen as the final blow for dam removal. After the executives boarded their company jet and left the river behind, Greg Abel, the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, had turned to his employees and said that they needed to figure out how to get the dams off of the river. 

Belchik had never understood until that moment why the company had made such an abrupt about-face, but now it made sense to him. “Blue Creek changes people,” he said. At the start of the dam removal campaign, Ronnie Pierce had berated PacifiCorp executives for not knowing where the waterway was, and 20 years later, the company’s leaders had fallen under its spell.

Leaf Hillman, left, hugs his family as construction crews remove the final portion of Iron Gate Dam, the lowest dam on the Klamath River, in August 2024. The river flowed freely in 2024 for the first time in more than a century. Carlos Avila Gonzalez / San Francisco Chronicle / Getty Images

In a statement, a representative for PacifiCorp said the company “remained steadfast in its goals to come to a resolution agreeable to all parties and reach the ultimate successful outcome.”

The dam removal process took the better part of last year. The first step was for engineers to drain all the reservoirs behind the Klamath dams, sending millions of tons of long-stagnant sediment downstream toward the Pacific. As crews opened these dams one by one, the river grew cloudy and brown before clearing up again. Demolition teams then used 800 pounds of dynamite to blast apart Copco 1, hauling away the wreckage with bulldozers. They carved apart the earthen mass of J.C. Boyle, the highest dam on the river and the closest to the Klamath Tribes, dismantling it one scoop of dirt at a time. They started to break apart Iron Gate, the downstream dam closest to the Yurok reservation and the last barrier to salmon passage.

Only then, in the fall of 2024, did tribal leaders get to watch the Klamath flow uninterrupted once more. The water tumbled downstream, from Upper Klamath Lake, where Jeff Mitchell had first joined his tribal government in 1975 and where the C’waam and Koptu suckerfish swam through placid water, to the forested mountainsides of the Yurok Tribe, where Cordalis had watched fish die in 2002 along the warm, weak waters of the lower river. From there, the Klamath wound to the vastness of the Pacific, where the salmon were waiting to come home.

Part 5 Home­coming XV.

Last November, two months after the final dam fell, Jeff Mitchell heard that salmon were spotted in Spencer Creek along the upper Klamath River in Oregon. He drove to the creek, which fed into the river just upstream from where the concrete behemoth of J.C. Boyle Dam had once stood.

Staring into the shallow Klamath River waters, Mitchell couldn’t see any salmon at first. Then he spotted a few carcasses resting on the bottom of the river. Anyone else might have been disappointed to find only dead fish. But to Mitchell, it felt like a glimpse of the salmon completing their life cycles after spawning, resting peacefully in an area that for so long had been denied to them. 

“They’re telling me that they have come home,” he said. “And they also told me that there is work to do.”

Here was a shift, a tangible correction, to more than a century of theft, injustice, and cultural and environmental harm. Just a few weeks after the dams came down, salmon arriving from the Pacific had pushed through the reconnected river and returned to the frigid upstream tributaries that had been closed to them for decades, navigating the same rills and rapids that their ancestors did. Yurok Tribe members captured videos of spotted gray fish dashing and flopping back and forth in the reopened waterways. The waters of the Klamath, which had been depleted and laden with algae and parasites, were now flowing free, replenishing their formerly barren channels. For the first time in more than a century, the fish were spawning their eggs in a reopened river.

The fight to undam the Klamath only succeeded thanks to the tenacity of the tribes in the Klamath Basin. But it took thousands of people to make it happen — everyone from fish scientists and Bush administration bureaucrats to utility executives and environmental activists.  

Many of these people may never be recognized for their roles in the campaign, but their contributions were essential. These were people like Kathy Hill, a Klamath Tribes citizen who coined the slogan, “Bring the salmon home,” that became the campaign’s rallying cry; Ron Reed, a Karuk Tribe member who had sought to persuade PacifiCorp executives of the cultural importance of salmon; and environmentalists like Kelly Catlett, who attended that first campaign meeting in Redding in 2004, and Glen Spain, who supported the agreement on behalf of deep-sea commercial fishermen. 

Countless staffers working behind the scenes in tribal, state, and federal governments, as well as environmental organizations like Trout Unlimited, helped ensure the dam removal agreement survived when politicians and executives threatened to kill it. Many people who were critical to the cause never lived to see the dams come down, like Howard McConnell, a Yurok Tribe chairman, and Elwood Miller of Klamath Tribes — or Ronnie Pierce and Troy Fletcher, who had started the campaign.

Today there is a new generation of tribal members — some of them the children and grandchildren of the original dam removal advocates — who are stepping up to be stewards of the river. They are drawing their inspiration from the success of the dam removal campaign, a victory as significant as the derailment of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal.

“It just wouldn’t have happened if the Indigenous people didn’t have that vision,” said Amy Cordalis of the Yurok Tribe.

But to Mitchell, now 67, the victory is bittersweet. Throughout the past 25 years, the Earth has grown warmer, and water is becoming scarcer. He isn’t sure how he feels about passing down the responsibility for protecting the fish to his children and grandchildren. He and his fellow campaigners freed the river from the PacifiCorp dams, but they weren’t able to protect it from the ravages of climate change and water scarcity. 

“Honestly, I just want them to enjoy this land and enjoy life,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to have them fight like I had to fight.”

Young members of the Yurok Tribe gather at the mouth of the Klamath River, where it meets the Pacific Ocean. The tribe is working to restore the land around the old dam sites and monitor salmon populations as they return upstream. Michael Macor / The San Francisco Chronicle / Getty Images

The Klamath River Basin has no shortage of challenges, even with the dams down. The former reservoir land will have to be replanted and preserved, which will require years of stewardship by the Yurok and Karuk tribes. The waters of Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon are still contaminated with runoff from farms and ranches in the area, and the lake often sees toxic algal blooms like those that once occurred in the PacifiCorp reservoirs. Relationships between farmers and tribal communities are back to being “tenuous,” according to a lead advocate for the Klamath farmers, and the comity established between Troy Fletcher and Greg Addington has long since faded. 

The biggest remaining conflict on the river is over water, the same issue that supercharged the dam removal campaign after the 2002 fish kill. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation still controls a large dam and canal system at the top of the river, which it uses to deliver irrigation water to potato farmers in the Klamath. During dry years, the bureau must choose between leaving water in Upper Klamath Lake for C’waam and Koptu suckerfish, releasing it to the farmers, or letting it flow down the Klamath River for the salmon to swim in.

Dam removal took PacifiCorp out of the Klamath and opened up hundreds of miles of former salmon habitat, but it did not resolve the question of where the government should send water during years when there is not enough of it. That was the promise of the original Klamath settlement agreement, which died in Congress owing to inaction from former Oregon Representative Greg Walden and other Republican leaders. 

Neither farmers nor tribal nations are benefiting from this stalemate. Recent water shortages, which have been intensified by climate-fueled drought, have forced farms in the basin to downsize crop production. Populations of C’waam and Koptu have shrunk as well, despite restrictions on water deliveries to Klamath Basin farmers. Klamath Tribes and the Yurok Tribe are still in the middle of long-running fights over this water crisis. The Klamath Tribes want to protect rights to water from Upper Klamath Lake, and Cordalis and the Yurok Tribe are trying to compel the government to ensure endangered salmon always have enough water to swim upstream, even if it means cutting irrigation for farmers.

“We have been spending millions and millions and millions of dollars [on the lawsuits] and neglecting other areas that we need to be paying attention to to help our people,” said Mitchell. “But we understood and knew that if we didn’t fight this fight, we could lose all of our resources. Everything needs water. And all we wanted was enough water.” 

Mitchell isn’t sure how long it will take to resolve these cases, or whether he’ll live to see them come to a conclusion. As he sees it, the outlook for the river is grim: With Donald Trump in office again and already moving to gut the Endangered Species Act, it’s possible that the suckerfish in Upper Klamath Lake may fall even closer to extinction. Farmers and tribes reached an agreement under Joe Biden’s administration to restore degraded river ecosystems, but that agreement depends on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act that Trump may withhold.

But nothing, not even the Trump administration, can put the PacifiCorp dams back up on the Klamath, or take away the victory that the dam removal campaigners achieved. The precedent has been set: For more than a century, governments and private utilities built dams with impunity, blocking forest streams from the mountains of Appalachia to massive waterways like the Colorado River. Today, Indigenous youth are planning to paddle the full length of the Klamath River for the first time.

The dam removal is a victory in itself, but it also ensures that tribes will never stop fighting for the Klamath and other rivers like it, said Cordalis. That will be true no matter how many setbacks they face.

“Dam removal is just the beginning,” she said.

Credits

This story was reported and written by Anita Hofschneider and Jake Bittle. Illustration was done by Jackie Fawn, with art direction and design by Mia Torres. Development by Parker Ziegler. Meredith Clark handled fact checking.

The project was edited by Tristan Ahtone, John Thomason, Katherine Lanpher, and Katherine Bagley. Teresa Chin provided design edits. Jaime Buerger managed production. Megan Merrigan and Justin Ray handled promotion. Rachel Glickhouse coordinated partnerships.

About the Artist

Jackie Fawn (Yurok/Washoe/Filipina) is a graphic illustrator from Del Norte County, California. She currently lives in Akwesasne, Mohawk territory in New York with her husband and daughter.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the Klamath Dams Came Down on Mar 19, 2025.

In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the U.S. military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the U.S. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples — Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others — that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.” 

When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the U.S. approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?  

Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes. 

“Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.” 

But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The U.S. military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals and 55-gallon drums. 

Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic. 

Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land. 

“By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says. 

This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October. 

The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.” 

“We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities.

A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded. 

The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Dept. of Environmental Conservation which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape.

“These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted. 

“DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said.

That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness. 

“It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages. 

“We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.” 

The U.S. military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through military training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and  Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70% of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more U.S. military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland. 

In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion. 

The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to U.S. federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the U.S. government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land. 

The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.” 

“The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint. 

“This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste on Mar 19, 2025.

The heat is on Channel News brendan 19th March 2025 Teaser Media

Late last month, Rebecca Howard was fired from her dream job. With less than two hours’ notice, the research biologist was told to leave her position with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, surveying Alaskan shellfish and pollock populations. 

Howard is one of the more than 1,000 employees affected by the recent layoffs at NOAA. As a science branch of the Department of Commerce, the agency plays a crucial role in climate research, ecosystem restoration, and oversight of commercial fisheries. The National Weather Service, which provides the data that powers weather apps on phones and informs local meteorologists, is an agency within NOAA. 

As part of the Trump administration’s effort to slash the federal budget across various departments, over the last month the agency has fired hundreds of probationary employees — staff that were hired or promoted to a new position in the last year — regardless of their duties.  The agency is now reportedly preparing to lay off an additional 1,029 employees, representing a cumulative 20 percent reduction of its workforce. Last week, federal judges in California and Maryland ordered the Trump administration to rehire probationary staffers who were let go. 

Howard was one of the probationary employees affected by the first round of layoffs, and said the fisheries management projects she was involved in were being conducted by understaffed teams. As researchers like her leave, she said it’s not clear how the work will continue.

“We need these types of data to know how many fish and crabs we can catch each year, where those populations are going as the oceans change, and to keep track of environmental trends,” Howard said during a press conference organized by Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat representing Washington. Howard pointed out that when a survey of shellfish in the Bering Sea was missed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Alaska’s $200 million snow crab fishery collapsed the following year. “Firing people like me will make it incredibly hard for NOAA Fisheries to fulfill its mission,” she said.

The Department of Government Efficiency, the budget-cutting entity spearheaded by Elon Musk, has also proposed terminating leases for 19 properties used by NOAA for its operations. Separately, the General Services Administration designated an additional 13 buildings owned by the agency as “not core to government operations.” The buildings include law enforcement offices for fisheries, a control room that oversees a fleet of 15 weather satellites, and an information center that houses more than a century of climate data archives. 

Climate scientists are also worried about the possible closure of an office that supports the Mauna Loa Observatory, which supplies the longest-running record of atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements. The research station supplies the data behind the Keeling Curve, a graph that shows how much of the planet-warming gas has accumulated in the atmosphere since it was established in 1958.

“Political leadership in this administration doesn’t know the agency’s mission, and they don’t care,” said Richard Spinrad, the former NOAA chief who led the agency during the Biden administration, during the press conference. “These actions are not the strategic moves of a government looking out for its pockets. They are the unnecessary and malicious acts of a shambolic administration.”

NOAA’s $9.8 billion budget represents just 0.097 percent of all federal spending, and its employees represent less than 0.5 percent of the entire federal workforce. But because of the agency’s wide-ranging duties and the indiscriminate nature of the cuts, Spinrad says the damage will be felt through virtually “every business sector, every geographic region of the country, and every component of American society.” And as extreme weather services — like flood forecasts, hurricane outlooks, tsunami warnings, and wildfire monitoring — are compromised, American lives will be threatened, he said. 

The reduction in staff is already hampering operations. The agency has suspended the launch of some weather balloons, which are a key tool in recording atmospheric conditions and real-time storm tracking. NOAA launches these balloons daily to collect crucial data, and without it, weather forecasts could become less accurate over time. The agency has also canceled its long-standing monthly briefings with reporters about seasonal forecasts and global climate conditions.

“The cuts already have been hugely disruptive, and the impacts are growing,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, told Grist. “Some of [the problems] will manifest during extreme events, and then some of them will probably just take some time to show themselves.”

Swain pointed to the recent deadly outbreak of tornadoes and wildfires as examples of when “the 24/7 life-saving duties of the National Weather Service are on full display.” A spate of  wildfires torched nearly 300 homes in Oklahoma, and at least 40 were left dead after a surge of tornadoes and dust storms tore through the Midwest and South. During these types of extreme weather events, NOAA meteorologists provide real-time updates to first responders, issue public alerts, and help local authorities track storms as they develop. But key hubs for this work, such as The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, are among the NOAA facilities that DOGE is considering closing. Local news outlets reported that there may not be enough staff left to adequately respond to tornado events due to layoffs. 

“This is the kind of moment where you might start to see the tangible, real-world, and genuinely life-threatening impacts of these staffing gaps,” Swain said. “These people, despite being in lifesaving roles, were fired without notice or justification.”

On Monday, some NOAA probationary employees who were fired, including Howard, the fisheries research biologist, were rehired as mandated by federal court orders. Howard said the reinstatement email she received placed her on administrative leave, and that there’s been “no indication” when she will be allowed to return to work.

“I had been working toward a career in marine science since I was a child,” she said. “Being put back in that stressful situation is not something I would look forward to, but this is what I wanted to do with my career.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline You rely on this agency’s data for weather and climate forecasts. DOGE is decimating its workforce. on Mar 18, 2025.

New research finds that, pound for pound, grazing cattle generate at least as much heat-trapping gas as those raised in feedlots.

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A dozen countries ravaged by conflict and humanitarian crises have joined forces to urge the international community to deliver the funding they need to absorb and respond to worsening climate shocks, calling for a growing gap to be tackled at critical talks this year.

In a statement agreed on Monday and seen by Climate Home News, the newly created network – which includes countries such as Chad, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen – said fragile states, which are “so often forgotten by climate action”, bear the brunt of climate change despite being among the least responsible for its causes.

As “hundreds of millions of the world’s most climate vulnerable remain left behind by climate finance”, the group said it is “determined to bring this issue to the forefront and centre in climate discussions”.

A united voice

The call to action follows the network’s first meeting in Abu Dhabi last month, when fragile states discussed how to make the intersection of climate, conflict and humanitarian needs a priority in climate negotiations.

Representatives from 13 fragile nations attended the meeting, including ministers from Burundi, Chad, Somalia and Yemen and high-level officials representing Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Iraq and South Sudan.

The network, created at the COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan last December, aims to be a diplomatic force advocating for more and better climate financing tailored to conflict and humanitarian settings.

It will allow fragile states to speak with a united voice in climate negotiations, where their experiences are “overlooked”, Liban Obsiye, executive director of Somalia’s National Climate Fund, told Climate Home.

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Failure to build long-term resilience

More than half of the world’s 25 most climate-vulnerable countries are affected by armed conflict, violence or high levels of humanitarian need, according to think-tank ODI Global, which is supporting the network.

Poor governance and conflict leave people more vulnerable to climate change, with every flood, drought and storm making it more difficult to develop the ability to cope and adapt to future impacts.

Yet funding for these countries falls seriously short, amid real and perceived risks associated with working in unstable settings, including weak institutions, lack of data and limited capacity to formulate proposals and manage projects. Available funding often focuses on short-term humanitarian needs rather than longer-term climate resilience.

Between 2014 and 2021, a group of 13 states identified as “extremely fragile” by the OECD received only $2 per person in multilateral climate finance compared to $162 per person for non-fragile states, a UN study found.

“This conflict blind spot represents a damning failure at the heart of the international climate system,” said the network.

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“Our message to all countries is clear: we can no longer afford to ignore this,” Yemen’s minister of water and environment Tawfiq al-Sharjabi told Climate Home in a statement.

“We urge governments, climate funds and international organisations to take immediate action to close this funding gap by increasing finance dedicated to climate change adaptation, simplifying bureaucratic procedures, and building capacity in developing countries,” he said.

Iraqi workers harvest potato crops, damaged by a heatwave and environmental and climatic changes, in Mosul, Iraq, July 15, 2023. REUTERS/Khalid Al-Mousily A key issue for COP30

To make their case, the network has written to COP30 president André Aranha Corrêa do Lago urging him to keep the issue “high on the agenda” of the UN climate summit Brazil will host in November.

In a letter dated Tuesday and seen by Climate Home, countries representing the alliance called on Brazil to ensure fragile states are “kept front and centre of efforts to scale up climate finance” and to hold a thematic day on climate, relief, recovery and peace, which took place at COP28 and COP29.

“COP30 is an irreplaceable moment to bring the agenda forward, to align the needs of climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected countries with global development objectives,” the letter says.

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Setting out his vision for COP30 last week, Brazilian diplomat Corrêa do Lago, who is the country’s chief climate negotiator, emphasised the need to remove barriers for developing countries to access climate finance and to scale funding for them from all sources to at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 – a goal agreed at COP29 last year.

Large and growing gap

Collectively, fragile countries need an estimated $41.5 billion annually by 2030 to mitigate and adapt to climate change, nearly four times the $11 billion they received in 2022, according to ODI analysis shared with Climate Home.

The projection is based on the needs of 37 countries on the World Bank’s 2025 fragility list (excluding Palestine and Ukraine, whose conflicts would raise it substantially) as identified in their carbon-cutting and adaptation plans submitted to the UN.

The US contributed nearly 9% of the climate finance committed by wealthy nations to fragile states in the decade to 2022 – financial flows which President Donald Trump, a climate change-sceptic, has now halted.

The US retreat and cuts to European aid budgets could further increase the existing funding gap and create more competition for already-scarce funds, said Habib Ur Rehman Mayar, deputy general secretary of the g7+ Secretariat, a grouping of conflict-affected countries.

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Closing that gap will be a first step. But fragile nations’ needs will continue to grow as climate impacts intensify, said Mauricio Vazquez of ODI. “That makes it more urgent to invest in adaptation today before it becomes loss and damage. What these countries need is resilience finance to anticipate, adapt to and absorb shocks,” he told Climate Home.

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The lack of funding could have catastrophic implications for countries like Somalia, which has been gripped by political instability, ethnic tensions and an Islamist insurgency. In recent years, the East African country suffered a deadly drought made more severe by rising temperatures and devastating flooding, compounding an existing humanitarian crisis.

Today, there is “an enormous gap” to finance flood defences and roll out measures to address soil erosion and curb impacts on food security and farmers’ livelihoods, said Obsiye, who heads the country’s climate fund.

Last year, the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF) announced plans to invest $100 million in Somalia under the first national programme of its kind. Stephanie Speck, the GCF’s head of special initiatives, told Climate Home the fund has been “laser focused“ on getting finance to under-served countries and is currently discussing how to support climate action in South Sudan.

Once disbursed, the money will partly help strengthen Somalia’s capacity to access more finance from other donors and institutions, said Obsiye. It’s a “historic” but small start to meet the country’s huge needs, which run into the billions, he added.

The post “Forgotten” fragile states unite to end climate-finance blind spot appeared first on Climate Home News.

Electric utilities across the United States are shutting off power to a growing number of households, according to a recent report that also found most shutoffs happened during last year’s record-hot summer, a reminder that climate change fuels more intense, frequent, and prolonged heat waves. 

Shutoffs can be deadly, especially during extreme freezes and blistering heat. And while health issues are the most worrisome risk, there are other threats to daily life such as losing access to phone, internet, medical equipment, and food storage. Basic physical comfort can prove impossible. 

The report by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity revealed that six investor-owned utilities disconnected customers between January and September 2024 more than 662,000 times, an over 20 percent jump from the same period in 2023. Those companies included Georgia Power, DTE Energy, Duke Energy, Ameren Corporation, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Arizona Public Service. 

But all shutoffs, and the harms they cause, are avoidable, said Selah Goodson Bell, lead author of the report. States and local governments have the power to protect customers by enacting policies like comprehensive shutoff bans during extreme heat and reining in utility rate hikes. While most states already ban shutoffs during cold weather, more and more are starting to ban it during heat waves. “It’s going to be up to cities, municipalities, and states to remedy ongoing energy injustices and hold these utility companies accountable,” he said.

It’s hard to know the true extent and nature of shutoffs because only a patchwork of data exists nationwide. Twenty-two states don’t require utilities to report disconnections at all, and among the ones that do, only 20 states and Washington, D.C., have up-to-date data. Report authors analyzed the six power companies because they provide current disconnection data and collectively serve more than 200 million customers, spanning most regions of the U.S. from California to the Carolinas. 

In Georgia, the state’s largest electric utility Georgia Power disconnected customers for nonpayment over 180,000 times from January to September 2024 — a more than 20 percent increase from the same period in 2023. Duke Energy in North and South Carolina also increased shutoffs by nearly 20 percent last year. DTE Energy in Michigan disconnected customers more than 150,000 times, and Ameren in Illinois and Missouri shut off power more than 120,000 times, with both raising shutoff rates in the past few years. 

While Pacific Gas & Electric in California and Phoenix-based Arizona Public Service cut off power to fewer customers than the other utilities, the report still found a steady growth in shutoffs since 2022.

Lingering inflation, rate hikes, and climate change have all contributed to the rise in shutoffs, the report found. But the core issue is an “antiquated and broken” utility business model that effectively punishes low-income customers by aggressively raising rates, and then cutting off power when households can’t pay, said Goodson Bell. 

As shutoffs increased, the six utilities analyzed in the report also netted $10 billion in profits between January and September 2024, a more than 20 percent increase from the same period in 2023. Less than 2 percent of their shareholder dividends would have prevented all shutoffs last year, the report found. “Customers are losing access to an essential service they need to survive while shareholders line their pockets with lavish returns,” Goodson Bell said.

Besides using more electricity to cope with extreme temperatures, customers are also paying for the mounting costs of repairing and hardening the grid after disasters like wildfires or hurricanes. Yet the report documents efforts by utilities that would worsen climate-driven costs: Almost all the utilities mentioned in the report have worked to expand gas infrastructure and fossil fuel energy supply, and lobbied to weaken rooftop solar and other climate policies. 

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Representatives from Ameren, Arizona Public Service, DTE Energy, and PG&E told Grist that disconnection is a last resort, and that the utilities offer a range of energy assistance and flexible payment plans. “We recognize that higher costs, including energy bills, can be a challenge for customers,” said PG&E spokesperson Mike Gazda. Duke Energy and Georgia Power did not respond to a request for comment.

For most of the utilities in the report, shutoffs peaked in the summer. 

While 42 states already ban shutoffs during cold weather, 23 have now passed heat-based shutoff bans, including Washington state in 2023 and Virginia in 2024. Last year, Illinois strengthened an existing ban by lowering the previous threshold of 95 degrees Fahrenheit to 90. That change appears to have already had a measurable impact: According to the Center for Biological Diversity’s report, summertime shutoffs in Illinois were 13 percent lower in 2024 than in 2023.

But in Michigan and California, which both have temperature-based shutoff bans for extreme heat, disconnections by DTE Energy and PG&E still peaked during the summer. Temperature-based shutoff bans in those states fail to adequately protect customers because they don’t require utilities to automatically restore power to households that get disconnected prior to a heat event, said Goodson Bell. That means that even if a household gets their power shut off right before a ban takes effect, if they can’t pay in time, “They will be forced to endure harsh conditions without access to electricity.”

Arizona Public Service, on the other hand, has avoided a summertime spike in shutoffs by using a date-based shutoff moratorium from June 1 to October 15. The policy was introduced by state regulators after Arizona Public Service cut off power to a 72-year-old woman who owed $51 on her electricity bill, resulting in her death in 2018. But even date-based protections may not be enough because extreme heat is increasingly happening on days outside summer months, Goodson Bell pointed out.

States should instead use both temperature and date-based restrictions to widen the period of time customers are protected, and ban shutoffs completely for certain customers such as those with medical conditions, he said. Such measures are small steps to address widespread harms, said Sanya Carley, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies utility disconnections. “When it comes to disconnections, I think states need to adopt as many protections as they possibly can.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Utilities are shutting off power to a growing number of households on Mar 18, 2025.

Every Friday, as he’s done for the last year and a half, Mark Broyles hops in his truck and drives 20 minutes from his home in Big Stone Gap to Duffield, Virginia, to pick up two boxes of free food. Though their contents are always a surprise, as the retired mechanic describes it, he’s able to get “fresh produce and stuff that a lot of us can’t afford because of the price of groceries.” 

On any given week, the boxes, which are provided by Appalachian Sustainable Development, a local nonprofit food hub that also helps small farmers sell fresh goods to public schools and grocery stores, are filled with lean meat, half a gallon of milk, and an assortment of seasonal produce.

It’s been a lifeline for Broyles, who injured his shoulder in 2022 and has been unable to work since. His mother, who broke an arm and is unable to cook, relies on him for meals. Given the variety of ingredients available to him through the food boxes, the 57-year-old has been expanding his cooking repertoire, whipping up chicken, broccoli, and rice casseroles, apple dump cobbler, and roasted butternut squash. The food ends up feeding Broyles’ family of four, his mother, and her husband. Sometimes, if there were unclaimed boxes at the end of the distribution period, Broyles would pick them up and share them with his neighbors.

“Not only is it food that you can put on the table, but it’s good food that you can put in your body,” said Broyles. “And it’s good food that can build bonds in the community.”

Big Stone Gap is in the mountainous southwest corner of the state, wedged between Kentucky and Tennessee. At the 2020 census, the town recorded a population of 5,254. Nestled in the heart of coal country, more than 80 percent of the residents in the area voted for President Donald Trump in November. 

Just last month, the region was hit hard by torrential rain and flash floods. While Broyles escaped the brunt of it, his home is in a floodway, and surging water from the river nearby flooded parts of his yard. “I’m dreading that it’s going to flood again,” said Broyles. 

A couple of weeks later, the team at Appalachian Sustainable Development learned that the USDA funding they relied on to be able to afford this farm-to-donation work was going to be delayed and they may only end up being reimbursed a portion of a $1.5 million grant that was supposed to last them through July. Then, one of those programs they were counting on for future funding was suddenly terminated by the USDA. So, about a week ago, Appalachian Sustainable Development shuttered the food box program.

Director of development Sylvia Crum described the situation as “heartbreaking” for the thousands of people throughout Central Appalachia they feed and the 40 farmers they work with that will now lose income. “We don’t have the money,” said Crum. It costs them roughly $30,000 to fill the 2,000 or so boxes that, up until March 7, they distributed every week. 

Food insecurity has long been a widespread problem across the region, where residents in parts of Kentucky, for one, grapple with rates of food insecurity that more than double the national average. In the last year alone, a barrage of devastating disasters has magnified the issue, said Crum, causing local demand for the nonprofit’s donation program to reach new highs. 

“[This region] has really dealt with so much, with the recent hurricanes and mudslides and tornadoes. And our farmers are hurting, and our people are hurting, and our people are hungry,” she said. “It’s an emotional roller coaster for everybody.” 

Volunteers pick up Appalachian Harvest Food Box program donations to distribute throughout the region.
Appalachian Sustainable Development

For decades, the USDA has funded several programs that are meant to address the country’s rising food insecurity crisis — a problem that has only worsened as climate change has advanced, the COVID-19 pandemic led to layoffs, and grocery prices have skyrocketed. A network of nonprofit food banks, pantries, and hubs around the country rely extensively on government funding, particularly through the USDA. The Appalachian Sustainable Development is but one of them. The first few months of the Trump administration have plunged the USDA and its network of funding recipients into chaos. 

The agency has abruptly canceled contracts with farmers and nonprofits, froze funding for other long-running programs even as the courts have mandated that the Trump administration release funding, and fired thousands of employees, who were then temporarily reinstated as a result of a court order. Trump’s funding freeze and the USDA’s subsequent gutting of local food system programs has left them without a significant portion of their budgets, money they need to feed their communities. Experts say the administration’s move to axe these resources leaves the country’s first line of defense against the surging demand for hunger relief without enough supply.

The USDA disperses funding for food aid groups through multiple programs. Some of them were established decades ago, while others are recent additions to the maze of hunger prevention programs shepherded by the agency. Among the more prominent programs are the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program, Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, and The Emergency Food Assistance Program. Although each program has a separate mandate, combined, they help nonprofits and community groups purchase food goods from small and mid-sized farms, distribute them to those in need, and bolster local and regional food supply chains. 

Over the last few weeks, the USDA has upended that order, cutting billions of dollars for food assistance programs. To get a more comprehensive understanding of the fallout from the chaos, Grist reached out to the state agriculture departments for nine states. Here’s what we learned.

The USDA has ended future rounds of funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. The two programs were slated to dole out $1.13 billion throughout the ongoing fiscal year to states, tribes, and territories, which would then distribute funding to emergency food providers, childcare centers, and schools. Additionally, farm and food programs like the Working Lands Conservation Corps as well as seven other programs have had funding frozen while another three have had individual contracts canceled, according to Civil Eats. 

At least two major food banks based in the Midwest and Northeast — the Northern Illinois Food Bank and the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, both of which are part of the Feeding America network — have lost critical funds through The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, which was established in 1981 to provide direct food assistance to low-income families. It is a primary way that states and the federal government have distributed food to local communities in the aftermath of a climate-fueled disaster like a hurricane or heatwave. 

The USDA stopped the flow of some of the money that pays for products like meats, eggs, and vegetables that are termed “bonus commodities” through TEFAP. Normally, those bonus commodities are distributed to charitable food organizations where they show up as monthly shipments. (The first Trump administration initiated this additional funding in 2018 as part of an effort to bailout farmers suffering from retaliatory tariffs in the U.S.-China trade war.) 

Robert Desio, a senior manager of public policy and benefits at the Northern Illinois Food Bank, said that without those shipments the quantity and quality of food they will be able to serve will be greatly reduced. About 570,000 residents depend on Northern Illinois; since October, the food bank has distributed roughly 3.1 million meals made up of bonus commodities. 

The loss of that program is now compounding with the loss of future Local Food Purchase Assistance funding, a “significant chunk of money” that, for Northern Illinois, Desio said would have amounted to an estimated $1.5 million. They’re also waiting on $165,000 in reimbursements they already spent against the grant this year — before the USDA began freezing and rescinding funds — that they aren’t sure they’ll get back. 

“We are already serving more neighbors than ever,” said Desio. An even bigger issue, he said, is that nobody — from the state to the USDA — seems to know exactly what’s going on. 

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Policy analyst Teon Hayes of the Center for Law and Social Policy said the funding freeze and corresponding food and farm program terminations are going to “send a shockwave” throughout the nation, given the growing demand for charitable food donations. “A federal funding freeze of this magnitude definitely amplifies this strain, and the reduction in funding of these programs … is definitely going to weaken local food systems,” said Hayes. All of this is compounding with an ongoing push by Congressional Republicans to drastically reduce nutrition program funding in the farm bill and the budget reconciliation bill, she said. 

The team at the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank is also scrambling amid all the uncertainty, said CEO Joe Arthur. Earlier this month, their bonus commodities-funded shipments and Local Food Purchase Assistance funding, which amounts to about 12 percent of their food budget every month, were canceled, too. 

The sudden dearth of federal funding has forced them to pull the plug on a farm-to-donation acquisition program. That money allowed them to source fresh goods like milk, eggs, and meat directly from local farmers, which was then donated to hungry families across 27 counties statewide. 

“We’re hustling like crazy to raise food from our food donors and money from our financial donors. But these two sources are substantial, and you just really can’t make them up privately,” said Arthur. 

The state agricultural departments that Grist reached out to said they receive tens of millions in funding for food aid from the USDA. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture said the agency has been awarded more than $55 million through five USDA programs to fight hunger and promote resilient food systems in the state. 

“Federal funding from the USDA is critical to our ability to serve Pennsylvanians who struggle with food insecurity, including vulnerable seniors and families with children,” the spokesperson said. “Frozen or reduced funding will hurt these families.”

Neither Feeding America nor the USDA responded to Grist’s requests for comment. 

In an interview last week with Fox News, USDA secretary Brooke Rollins said, “We will use every tool that we have as we move into the next few months, the next year, and beyond to ensure that our farmers are protected.” Much of her pitch for helping “family farmers” had to do with incentivizing international trade for their products. So far, though, the Trump administration has imposed harsh tariffs on the U.S.’s biggest trade partners, which has only resulted in counter tariffs that overwhelmingly target American farmers. 

When asked to justify the funding cuts, Rollins responded, “We spend billions and billions and billions of dollars on nutrition programs for lower income and socioeconomically disadvantaged kids, but the Biden administration used that to often push money out, taxpayer dollars out, that is not reaching its intended target. … We’re pulling that back.” Rollins continued, “As we have always said, if we are making mistakes, we will own those mistakes and we will reconfigure.” Without specifying which discontinued food programs she was referring to, Rollins reiterated that the cuts were limited to “nonessential” programs, or what she termed, “an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.” 

Food banks across the U.S. are seeking increased donations while the demand for food handouts are increasing.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

The termination of some USDA programs and the funding standstill of others isn’t merely preventing food banks and pantries from getting the supplies they need to feed the hungry. It has also forced some businesses to cut internal operations. Because of the USDA’s abrupt decisions, 4P Foods, a food hub in Warrenton, Virginia, is out of roughly $4 million, or some 25 percent of the work they had planned for the year. As a result, founder Tom McDougall has had to tell five members of his team he can no longer afford to keep them on payroll. 

“We work with Virginians, with families with children who’ve been with us for years, who don’t deserve to be laid off, but they are going to be because we will not have food to put into places and deliver it the way that we had planned,” said McDougall. 

Still, he’s “cautiously optimistic” that the administration and USDA will reverse course on the decision to pull the plug on these programs that McDougall says are necessary lifelines for communities like his after a disaster strikes — a reality increasingly likely for more people as warming makes many types of extreme weather events more frequent and severe. 

“When, not if, when the next disaster hits, we’re going to need to turn back to what we did during COVID, which was local and regional supplied [food] webs,” he said. “The next hurricane, who’s going to have food available? We’re going to have food available. We’re going to be able to get into these communities again and again and again. This is a conversation not just about the economy, but about resiliency.” 

For aid recipients like Broyles, the end of Appalachian Sustainable Development’s food box program means rethinking how to feed his family. For now, he has frozen produce that he can rely on, but in the long term, Broyles said he will either turn to other food programs in the region, even though none of them provide fresh produce, or scour grocery aisles for deals. 

“Mountain folk are very proud people,” Broyles said. “Mountain folk don’t usually ask for help, but sometimes when help is offered, we reluctantly go to get it. … I hope our president and our representatives can see how crucial this program is. Instead of using a broad axe approach to cut some of these programs, that they would go more with the scalpel and trim off the fat.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Our people are hungry’: What federal food aid cuts mean in a warming world on Mar 18, 2025.