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As Turkey prepares to host the world’s largest climate summit in Antalya, its official rhetoric masks a long-running policy of expanding fossil fuel exploration and accelerating nuclear projects under foreign dependency. In this context, COP31 is bound to become yet another greenwashing spectacle. Still, Turkey’s grassroots movement continue to resist the government’s authoritarian push for more extraction, fighting instead for energy democracy and ecological justice.

The 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31) will be held from 9 to 20 November in the Turkish city of Antalya. Touted as the “implementation COP”, the hope is that it will provide a platform for forging global consensus on realistic emission cuts and fossil fuel phaseout.

This edition of the world’s largest climate summit will be held against a backdrop of intense geopolitical rivalry and tension. China, the world’s foremost producer of green energy, has signalled its intent to use the conference to push back against Western tariffs on its clean technology, including solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric cars. Meanwhile, the US under Trump 2.0 has cast its lot with fossil fuels, while the EU faces energy insecurity due to oil and gas supply chain disruptions, and slashes green policies in the name of competitiveness despite growing climate impacts.

Turkey itself is heading to this COP as a country that imports two-thirds of its primary energy – nearly all of it fossil fuels. Still, a centrepiece of the summit is Ankara’s “35 by 35” proposal, a global target for electricity to ‌meet 35 per cent of the world’s energy demand by 2035 (compared to today’s approximately 20 per cent). This comes even as, under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has made no secret of its ambitions to become a major fossil fuel transit hub between the Middle East and Europe. And while Ankara has struck deals with China covering mining, critical minerals, renewables, and nuclear power, it has also intensified oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean, putting it at loggerheads with Greece and the EU.

For the Turkish government, COP31 is an opportunity to divert attention from a prolonged macroeconomic crisis. Climate diplomacy serves Erdoğan not as a genuine ecological commitment but as a pragmatic instrument of governance, designed to attract foreign capital and secure international legitimacy in a domestic context where social opposition has already been silenced.

Greenwashing continues

Just as Egypt (COP27), the UAE (COP28) and Azerbaijan (COP29) used their host status to pursue energy deals worth billions, and Brazil (COP30) pressed ahead with oil licensing and auctions in the run-up to its summit, Turkey is approaching COP31 with a dual strategy: it is leveraging the global electrification narrative to mask deep-seated policy contradictions and position itself as a hub for clean technology.

On the one hand, the Turkish government has negotiated with China on battery investments, urging Western donors to shift defence spending toward climate finance, and staging high-profile domestic events including the state-sponsored “NextGenCOP30.5” youth summit on Yassi Island (renamed Democracy and Freedom Island in commemoration of the 1960 coup). On the other hand, rather than outlining a coal phaseout strategy, Ankara has said it would raise national emissions through 2035, signed new international natural gas agreements, and regularly issues emergency expropriation decrees for domestic oil and gas exploration activities. In other words, COP31 will be another act of greenwashing by a government that is actively increasing carbon emissions and promoting fossil fuels.

This contradiction became most evident on 10 October, when a presidential decree authorised urgent land expropriations across Antalya and the Mediterranean coast to accelerate oil and gas exploration led by the Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO). Indeed, this institutional greenwashing was already embedded in Turkey’s official climate commitments for the 2053 net-zero goal, as the state’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) promised a 41 per cent reduction by 2030, which in fact implies an additional 11 per cent increase beyond the roughly 30 per cent emission level that would occur without mitigation measures. After the launch of Turkey’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) in August, this policy environment became even more complex, as the system risks legitimising continued industrial pollution through tradable allowances instead of enforcing real emissions limits.

In fact, with Turkey’s emissions expected to rise by 16 per cent by 2035, absolute reduction targets have been deferred to an unspecified future date. This trend is also confirmed by 2026 data from the European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. According to these data, Turkey rose two places in the global emitter ranking, now accounting for 1.13 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and standing as the world’s 14th-largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Ultimately, behind Ankara’s climate diplomacy lies a familiar calculus of regime survival. Just as growth in the construction and energy sectors was leveraged to maintain political hegemony in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the government now regards ESG funds, green loans, and the revenues expected from COP31-related economic activity as vital liquidity to manage macroeconomic tensions before the 2028 presidential election. These pressures stem from inflation, which peaked at 85 per cent in late 2022 before stabilising at around 30 percent, as well as the roughly 80 percent depreciation of the Turkish lira.

Murky renewables

Beyond political rhetoric, an analysis of the Turkish Electricity Transmission Corporation’s national power grid data reveals that these contradictions have roots in the energy system itself. At first glance, while fossil fuels constitute 38 per cent of total installed capacity – with imported natural gas alone making up 19 per cent – the remaining 62 per cent is officially labelled as renewable energy. However, 40 per cent of this renewable share comes from hydroelectric projects that disrupt river flows, exacerbate regional water stress, and face persistent local opposition, while solar and wind account for only 21 per cent and 15 per cent of installed capacity, respectively.

But that is not the full picture. According to Ember Climate data, actual production levels reveal the structural limitations of Turkey’s renewable energy production more clearly. For instance, solar energy accounted for only 6 per cent in January 2026; in June, one of the peak summer months, solar contributed just 16.5 per cent of total generation, while wind contributed 13.5 per cent. In contrast, countries with broadly comparable solar resources, such as Portugal and Italy, regularly derive around 20 to 30 per cent of their monthly electricity generation from solar during peak months. Italy’s renewable energy output can exceed 40 per cent of total electricity demand during high-generation summer periods, while Germany, despite having only a third of Turkey’s solar potential, generates more than 20 per cent of its summer electricity from solar through more effective use of its infrastructure.

Addressing these structural shortfalls requires a drastic acceleration: as officially declared in its 2053 net-zero targets, Turkey must urgently develop a concrete roadmap to deploy 120 GW of solar and wind energy by 2035. This has not been done so far, and current solar generation capacity remains limited due to institutional barriers. Moreover, the lack of mechanisms within the current legal framework to encourage households or local communities to feed the electricity they generate back into the grid has left small-scale projects mired in licensing procedures, bureaucratic delays, and inadequate grid capacity.

Complicating these problems is the fact that while small-scale initiatives are systematically obstructed, land allocations and financial support flow directly to large corporations and foreign capital. For example, despite having 185 GW of solar energy potential and 300 sunny days per year, Turkey has instead signed an intergovernmental agreement with Saudi Arabia, akin to the Akkuyu nuclear deal with Russia, for energy production on its own territory. In domestic discourse, the government portrays such projects as cost‑free investments that will leave Turkey with new facilities. Yet these agreements in fact oblige Turkey to purchase the energy from the producing state, turning these ventures into a source of economic loss in the long run, even if they appear beneficial in the short term before elections. What is more, when renewable energy projects are pursued through centralised state‑backed deals, they also trigger dispossession, which in turn fuels social opposition.

The nuclear gamble

The critical reliance on foreign sources embedded in Turkey’s energy policy is most evident in its long-standing nuclear ambitions, officially framed as a 20-GW capacity target under the 2053 net-zero strategy. Beyond the 4.8-GW Akkuyu plant currently under construction, revised plans include a 5.6-GW facility in Thrace, a 4.8-GW plant on the Black Sea coast in Sinop, and a 4.8 GW allocation for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

As the Akkuyu project illustrates, this ambitious roadmap faces serious limits: 16 years after the intergovernmental agreement with Russia to complete the plant was signed, not a single reactor has entered commercial operation. That is more than double the global average construction timeframe of seven to eight years. As the world’s first nuclear power plant built under the “Build-Own-Operate” (BOO) model, Akkuyu does not reduce dependence on Russian energy, as Turkish officials initially claimed. On the contrary, by granting a foreign state ownership over sovereign national territory, it deepens Turkey’s strategic dependence on Russia. Moreover, while officials often claim Akkuyu NPP will meet 10 per cent of national electricity demand, long-term energy projections suggest that its contribution will be lower. With electricity consumption projected to approach 500 TWh by 2035, Akkuyu’s expected annual generation of 35 TWh would cover only about 7 to 8 percent of demand.

This structural mismatch is compounded by severe ecological risks: Akkuyu relies on cooling water from the Mediterranean Sea, which is warming 20 per cent faster than the global average, heightening the risk of climate-driven operational disruptions. Yet, instead of adapting ecological safeguards to these climate realities, the government has granted regulatory exemptions. Crucially, the discharge water temperature from the Akkuyu plant has been exempted from the 35°-Celsius thermal limit set by the national Water Pollution Control Regulation.

The project’s waste management framework exposes another structural inequality in the allocation of risk. Although official statements suggest that spent fuel will be managed domestically, existing regulations and international practice indicate that fuel from the VVER‑1200 reactors, which are also used at Akkuyu, will instead be shipped to Russia for reprocessing. Under Russian federal law, foreign radioactive waste cannot be permanently stored on Russian territory. Consequently, once plutonium and uranium are extracted, the remaining high-level waste must be returned to Turkey. As a result, while Russia extracts usable materials for strategic and industrial purposes, Turkey is left with the burden of managing high-level radioactive waste that will remain hazardous for up to a million years.

This waste will force Ankara to confront the question of long-term disposal, and there is even a possibility that the management of long-lived isotopes may ultimately compel Turkey to build a deep geological repository; a multi-billion-euro infrastructure project akin to Finland’s Onkalo facility, which is designed to isolate waste for 100,000 years. Under centralised and authoritarian governance, however, even the siting of a radioactive waste management facility follows a rigid top-down approach. Indeed, in 2022, Turkey’s Ministry of Energy was reportedly considering Polatlı, an agrarian region near the capital Ankara with relatively lower seismic activity, as a potential site for a radioactive waste facility, without consulting local populations or securing community consent.

In addition to environmental and strategic risks, the Akkuyu project fails to integrate with Turkey’s labour market and technical infrastructure. While official sources reported that construction employment once approached 30,000, Russia’s economic bottlenecks due to the ongoing war in Ukraine have already reduced this figure to 10,000; it will decline even further upon operational launch, requiring only about 4,000 long-term workers. Because the specific terms of the BOO agreement with Turkey explicitly exclude technology transfer, local engineers and workers will be confined largely to mid-level technical support roles, reinforcing structural dependence on foreign expertise. This institutional gap is tied to a longer historical legacy: during the restructuring that followed the 1980 military coup, the ranks of experienced scientists in Turkey’s public nuclear research sector were severely diminished.

Resistance and repression

Between 2018 and 2025, Turkey issued 22,855 mining licenses and received 13,342 initial applications, systematically converting agricultural land and ecologically sensitive zones into industrial sites. This expansion of extractive concessions and large-scale energy projects unfolded alongside escalating administrative and legal pressures on civil society and local environmental movements. By narrowing the channels of public participation in environmental decision-making and repressing opposition in the public sphere, the central government has systematically suppressed local resistance to secure compliance with large state-backed initiatives.

In recent years, a common thread among COP host countries has been not only high carbon emissions but also authoritarian forms of governance that refuse dialogue with social opposition and systematically rely on administrative coercion. In Turkey, grassroots activism against ecologically destructive projects has faced severe repression, particularly since the 2016 state of emergency, proclaimed after an attempted coup. Environmental activism is not merely a debate among urban intellectuals; as state-backed mining and energy projects steadily expand into rural areas, it has evolved into a direct struggle by local communities to defend their land, water, and livelihoods. As Human Rights Watch has documented in the lead‑up to COP31, the state increasingly employs criminal investigations, arbitrary detentions, and administrative fines to suppress this local resistance.

For instance, in Mugla’s Akbelen Forest, where local villagers have mobilised against coal mine expansion since 2019, state authorities have deployed law enforcement to safeguard corporate extraction. Security forces have repeatedly dispersed nonviolent protesters with tear gas, water cannons, and pepper spray. Turkish activists and residents also face arbitrary detentions, administrative fines, and continuous identity checks around their protest encampments; a police strategy of spatial surveillance designed to intimidate the community and erode ongoing resistance.

Similar dynamics unfolded in the Black Sea region during the 2026 protests against gold mining on the Perşembe Plateau. Situated across the Korgan and Aybastı districts of Ordu city, this high-altitude plateau sustains pastoral livelihoods and livestock farming. Although the area holds legally protected pasture status, the Ministry of Environment granted a mining permit in 2024 without public consultation. Residents only became aware of the project after preliminary site operations directly contaminated their drinking and irrigation water supplies. In June 2026, a court-appointed expert report validated these concerns, warning that gold extraction through cyanide leaching posed a lasting threat to the region’s groundwater reserves. Yet, despite these judicial findings and ongoing legal challenges, security forces repeatedly suppressed peaceful local demonstrations with pepper spray, tear gas, and arbitrary detentions.

Meanwhile, In Rize province’s İkizdere Valley, state intervention assumed an explicitly coercive form when a limestone quarry was opened to supply raw materials for a state-backed logistics port. The quarry directly threatened local tea cultivation, old-growth forests, and essential water sources. To bypass community opposition, the government issued urgent expropriation decrees and imposed district-wide movement restrictions under the pretext of maintaining public order. Despite heavy security blockades and administrative fines, residents, spearheaded by rural women, sustained road blockades, direct physical interventions to protect trees, and legal petitions against the project.

Autocratic greenwashing vs. energy democracy

These cases demonstrate that Turkish state institutions and security forces have acted in tandem to guarantee corporate access to natural resources. By bypassing community consultations, disregarding judicial and scientific assessments, and criminalising nonviolent protest, the central government systematically shuts down public participation. Under the guise of regional development and energy security, state authority dispossesses local populations of their land, water, and livelihoods.

In countries where domestic opposition is suppressed, international climate conferences provide host governments with an opportunity to project a progressive image and secure foreign capital in a politically sanitised environment. For foreign investors and state delegations, this authoritarian arrangement ensures predictability and shields large‑scale energy and infrastructure deals from public scrutiny.

At the same time, grassroots initiative networks such as the People’s Climate Summit (PCS) – formed as a collective platform for excluded civil society to articulate a common voice against COP31, encompassing the local struggles discussed above in Akbelen, Persembe, and Ikizdere – are building solidarity across environmental, labour, and human rights movements. By confronting extractivist projects and demanding community‑led energy democracy, these alliances articulate the most vital alternative vision of a just transition: they embody alternative imaginaries of ecological justice and democratic transition.

Trade measures that impose tariffs and penalties on cleantech and emissions-intensive goods are poised to re-emerge as a challenging issue at the UN climate talks in Türkiye next month, after China signalled it wants COP31 to focus on ensuring the free flow of green technologies.

China, which dominates global manufacturing of cleantech equipment, has staunchly denounced US and EU tariffs and measures restricting the import of Chinese green technologies, which Washington and Brussels argue receive unfair government subsidies that threaten their nascent domestic industries.

China’s vice-minister of ecology and environment, Li Gao, told a press conference last week that COP31 should discuss the free flow of green technology as well as trade “unilateralism ​and protectionism”, warning that Beijing would give a “firm response” to attacks against it.

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Trade tensions spilled over into the climate negotiations at COP30 in Brazil last year, quickly becoming one of the talks’ major flashpoints after large emerging economies, including China, India and South Africa, pushed to get “unilateral trade measures” on the agenda of the UN climate negotiations.

Observers of the UN talks told Climate Home News trade is likely to re-surface as a major sticking point between the EU and emerging economies, including China, during COP31 this November after newly created spaces for dialogue on climate and trade adjacent to the formal negotiations have so far failed to yield practical solutions on a way forward.

“We should be prepared for the climate-trade issue to be one of the prominent issues in Antalya,” said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

China’s game plan unclear

Although there is currently no designated track in the negotiations to discuss trade issues, China and other large emerging economies have repeatedly used the climate conference to air their grievances over trade barriers. How far China is willing to push the issue within the UN climate process and what it hopes to achieve remain unclear, however.

The vehemence which characterised the trade discussions at COP30 could be tempered in Antalya next month, Li said.

“My expectation is that all sides will be mindful of the trade issue creating more frictions to the multilateral system and will be more measured at COP31,” Li told Climate Home News. “That said, we should continue to expect rhetoric around this issue. Domestic politics in different countries will demand emotions on this issue to be unleashed.”

An EU-China deal struck earlier this month to halve exports of Chinese hybrid vehicles to the bloc could also help ease tensions, with further talks planned in March.

The Trump administration did not send an official delegation at COP30 and is not expected to attend COP31 either, after it quit the Paris Agreement and is also withdrawing from the UN climate convention.

A space for dialogue

At COP30, China and other large emerging economies used the trade discussions to take aim at the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which they staunchly oppose.

The mechanism imposes a border levy on imports of high-emitting products from countries with less stringent emissions regulations to protect European industries from unfair competition and help drive down emissions. The UK is set to implement its own version from January.

But China and other developing countries argue that the levy violates international trade rules and disproportionately punishes countries with fewer resources to clean up their industries or pay a premium for greener products in their supply chains.

Delegates during the session on trade and climate change in Bonn in June (Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth)

To keep the issue outside the formal negotiations, the COP30 Brazilian presidency bundled trade with other contentious issue into an overarching political decision, in which governments agreed to establish the first UN climate and trade dialogue.

The “Global Mutirão” decision repeated previously agreed language that unilateral measures to address climate change “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade”. Brazil also launched a voluntary climate and trade forum for countries to discuss how trade can support sustainable economic growth.

But recent discussions “have remained stuck at the level of principled debate and have failed to identify practical solutions”, said Ellie Belton, who tracks climate and trade issues for think-tank E3G.

Voluntary dialogue off on wrong foot

During the first of three trade dialogues scheduled annually between now and COP33, countries largely reiterated their existing positions at the June session in Bonn.

The EU defended its carbon border mechanism, and noted that the dialogue “should not become a space to address trade disputes or make judgements about the legitimacy of climate measures”. A spokesperson for the European Commission told Climate Home News that the bloc “welcomes continued dialogue” to enhance cooperation on measures to prevent carbon leakage.

Russia and the group of African countries suggested the creation of a formal negotiation track for trade discussions at the UN climate talks. But the EU and other developed economies will be reluctant to reopen the matter in Antalya, said Belton.

Meanwhile, the first meeting of the Integrated Forum on Climate Change and Trade (IFCCT) – also held during the Bonn climate talks – was poorly attended after last-minute participation by Russia, which led many developed countries skipping the dialogue, three attendees told Climate Home News.

Countries that joined the session “had a useful discussion but it wasn’t the meeting it was originally envisioned to be”, one delegate said.

Can UN climate talks deliver trade progress?

Although the World Trade Organization is the obvious venue to discuss trade issues, it does not assess the climate impacts of trade interventions – a gap the UN climate talks could help bridge, observers say.

“Trade can generate real economy benefits to help advance global climate action – failing to address this at the UNFCCC is a missed opportunity,” said Belton, of E3G. “Unfortunately, it is likely to remain challenging to focus attention on the positive role of trade co-operation at COP31 if these longstanding tensions continue to consume so much bandwidth,” she added.

Some of the solutions proposed by countries in the first trade dialogue included ways to make different carbon markets work together, including by exchanging data, and using free trade agreements to lower barriers for clean technologies.

Access to affordable clean energy technologies such as solar panels, EVs and batteries has become a key issue for developing countries seeking to wean their economies off expensive and polluting fossil fuels. At the same time, nations want a share of cleantech value chains to create jobs and spur development.

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A background paper for the climate and trade forum, seen by Climate Home News, shows that some of the areas identified for co-operation include reducing the cost of low-carbon trade, protecting trade flows after climate-induced disasters, and better connecting systems to report and verify the sustainability of traded goods.

Alden Meyer, a senior associate at E3G, said the forum is meant for countries to “hold hands and move together in a more ambitious and faster way” without the need for global consensus required by formal negotiations.

Meanwhile, the accompanying trade dialogues are designed to “feed into the negotiations over the second Global Stocktake” at COP33, where countries will issue a set of recommendations to ramp up global climate policies. This package could include trade provisions for the first time.

“That could be useful if the next two years demonstrate that there’s a willingness to look for ways in which the UNFCCC can be constructive in the trade space, and make trade a driver of climate ambition rather than a finger-pointing exercise and an irritant,” Meyer said.

The post Tensions set to flare over trade at COP31 as China makes it a priority appeared first on Climate Home News.

At a campaign rally on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said his administration is going to dismantle restrictions on methane, one of the most common and potent planet-warming greenhouse gases. 

The new rule, proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency in response to complaints from the oil and gas industry, revises a Biden-era rule targeting methane leaks and would relax methane monitoring and emission-control requirements. 

The agency has planned to repeal these rules for months, saying that they posed a “monumental threat” to the economy and an “undue burden” on the oil and gas industry. But it wasn’t until the rally on Tuesday night in Lubbock, Texas, where Trump was campaigning on behalf of Ken Paxton’s bid for the Senate, that the president announced the long-awaited changes. 

“Tonight, I’m officially terminating Biden’s expensive and unnecessary methane regulations to save consumers and energy producers $45 billion in costs, unlock vast quantities of Texas natural gas, and produce 210 million barrels of oil,” Trump said in between rants in which he described praise from Chinese President Xi Jinping and claimed to have more “Indian blood” than Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts. 

The EPA’s proposal follows other sweeping reversals of Biden-era environmental policies that are also likely to exacerbate global warming, pushing the planet closer to a climate hotter than any humans have experienced before. Just last month, the EPA repealed a rule that limits carbon emissions from power plants, a move which is likely to extend the lifespan of coal-fired power plants. Environmental groups say weaker restrictions on methane would also worsen air pollution in communities that live near oil and gas operations. 

“Any proposed rollback to the federal methane rule is a slap in the face to families who are exposed to oil and gas pollution where they live, work, and play,” said Celerah Hewes, a campaign manager at the nonprofit Moms Clean Air Force. Hewes recently protested alongside other environmental activists outside of an industry conference in New Mexico where Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, spoke about the agency’s plan earlier this month.

Methane, the greenhouse gas at the center of the EPA’s new proposal, is emitted by oil and gas operations, landfills, and cattle farms. It’s also the primary component of natural gas used to heat homes. Methane emissions make up about 12 percent of the greenhouse gases released by the United States every year and are roughly 80 times more potent at warming the planet than carbon dioxide over a period of 20 years.

“Cutting methane emissions from the oil and gas industry is the fastest way to fight climate change,” said Tsion Amare, a policy expert at the Environmental Defense Fund. “This rule could severely set back the advances we’ve made over the years.”

The earlier methane rule, finalized at the end of 2023 under the Clean Air Act, was among the Biden administration’s most ambitious attempts to reform the oil and gas industry. It required operators to monitor their overall emissions, inspect their wells and pipelines for leaks, and upgrade their equipment to prevent escaping gas. They were also required to phase out or sharply cut back the routine practice of flaring, in which excess methane is burned off rather than being captured for use as natural gas.

Methane is flared off during an oil drilling operation in the Permian Basin in 2022 in Midland, Texas. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Amare said these limits were some of the “strongest in the world“ and positioned the United States as an international leader in curbing the climate pollutant. The EPA estimated the rule would prevent 58 million tons of methane from being emitted in the next 15 years, as well as prevent 400 billion cubic feet of natural gas — enough to heat nearly 8 million American homes during winter — from being wasted every year. 

In March 2025, Trump’s EPA said it would no longer enforce the methane rule and began the process of formally rescinding it. The newly released proposal would cancel the Biden administration’s Super Emitter Program, which used satellite imagery and other remote-sensing methods to catch large leaks, and required operators to investigate and address them. It also reverses Biden-era limits on routine flaring, loosens requirements on certain types of wells, and gives operators a 30-day window to repair a leak.

The recent changes are all part of President Trump’s so-called “energy dominance” agenda, a catchphrase used to justify similar roll backs since the first hours of his second term in office. In a recent action proclaiming this October as “National Energy Dominance Month,” the president boasted that his administration has “unleashed” millions of acres for oil, gas, and coal, approved thousands of drilling permits, “saved” more than 100 coal plants, and pulled out of international climate agreements. 

Read Next Trump vowed to stop an ‘energy emergency.’ Then he created a real one. Jake Bittle

“The Trump EPA is committed to fixing this so the U.S. can reach its full energy potential,” Zeldin said in a statement about the Biden administration’s methane regulations earlier this month. 

The weakened methane restrictions will especially benefit companies that run low-producing “stripper” wells by allowing them to pollute more. These wells account for just 5 percent of the country’s oil and gas but more than half of the industry’s emissions. According to reporting by ProPublica, lobbyists from this industry have gained “unprecedented influence” during the second Trump administration. One owner of a company that buys up stripper wells, Jeffery Hildebrand, has also been one of the oil industry’s biggest donors to Trump’s political campaigns. 

“Under crooked Joe Biden, Democrats crushed the small oil and gas operators,” Trump said while announcing the changes. “They’re great operators, too.”

The president’s statement leans into a false narrative about these operators, experts said. Stripper-wells are often discussed as if they’re run by small, mom-and-pop companies that don’t have the financial means to comply with the stricter regulations. But in reality, more than half of them are owned by large companies that operate more than a thousand wells, said Darin Schroeder, the methane legal and regulatory director at the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental nonprofit. Hildebrand’s Hilcorp Energy Company, for instance, is thought to own nearly 19,000 low-producing wells. Another company, Diversified Energy, owns more than 50,000 of them. “Just because they’re a marginal producer doesn’t mean they’re a marginal polluter,” Schroeder said.

An oil pumpjack in the Permian Basin oil field in 2022 in Crane, Texas.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Because these stripper wells make up more than half of the oil and gas industry’s emissions, letting them off the hook is going to have a significant climate impact, Schroeder said. Allowing more of these emissions gives the world less time to tackle climate change before the worst consequences take hold. “Reducing methane in the short term really gives you a big bang for your buck, and gives us more of an on-ramp to address carbon dioxide,” he said.

Pollutants released alongside methane also pose a health risk to people living in oil-producing regions by contributing to the buildup of ground-level ozone, which can damage lungs and worsen asthma. The Biden-era rule would have incidentally filtered out these toxins, such as benzene, a known carcinogen, and other volatile organic compounds, which can also cause ozone to form, along with methane. 

Nearly 1 in 10 Americans live in a county with more than 1,000 stripper wells. And Texans may have the most to lose, said Amare, who is based in Dallas and specializes in the state’s energy and environmental issues. The state has more oil and gas than any other and an estimated 136,000 stripper wells. The public health consequences tend to disproportionately affect people of color who live near wells in places such as Texas’s Eagle Ford, she said.

The Biden administration had tasked states with implementing its regulations. But Texas has repeatedly delayed creating and adopting the necessary plans. Now, experts like Amara say that without pressure from the federal government the state is unlikely to curb its methane emissions, which amount to 19 percent of the U.S. total.

Other states, including Colorado and New Mexico, already have more stringent methane regulations on the books, and some, like Pennsylvania, are making plans to comply with the former Biden administration’s rule. Experts say that makes them less likely to lower their standards just because the federal government has.

And states may be financially motivated to capture methane anyway. An Environmental Defense Fund analysis found that New Mexico has saved an estimated $125 million worth of natural gas each year that would have otherwise been leaked, vented, or flared. The nonprofit also estimates that the entire industry has lost some $7 billion worth of natural gas since the Trump administration stopped enforcing the methane rule last year. “All of this waste of gas is something that definitely needs to be discussed more,” Amare said.

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s EPA is letting America’s leakiest oil and gas companies off the hook on Oct 27, 2026.

Countries’ climate plans would cut global emissions only half as much by 2035 as the UN projected a year ago, its annual assessment showed, after the US exit from the Paris Agreement and weaker new pledges worsened the outlook.

Taking into account the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) of 154 countries, which cover about 71% of global emissions, and current policies in the rest of the world, global emissions would fall to about 6% below 2019 levels by 2035. Last year’s update, based on 113 countries, put the figure at 12%.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, emissions need to go down by 60% over the same period to limit global warming to 1.5C – a threshold that is now inevitably going to be breached, at least temporarily.

The latest NDCs put the world on course for between 2.1C and 3.2C of warming by the end of the century, depending on what countries do beyond 2035. That is slightly higher than the 1.9C–3.0C range that the UN climate body estimated in last year’s update, published during COP30.

• Oct 23, 2026 News Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31 Just 77 heads of state or government are scheduled to address the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, a third less than the COP28 peak Read more
• Oct 20, 2026 News Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs More than 30 countries have failed to submit an NDC, but only three have repeatedly ignored the committee’s efforts to engage with them Read more

US exit worsens picture

A major factor is the US, the world’s second-largest emitter. Last year’s UN assessment included the pledge to cut emissions by between 61% and 66% by 2035, made under the administration of former President Joe Biden. 

But, since the US has officially left the Paris Agreement, its NDC has been excluded from the tally and its emissions projections have now been derived from current policies, which point to far higher levels of pollution. 

US emissions grew significantly last year as a result of growing electricity demand and the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration, which has rolled back support for clean energy and backed the burning of fossil fuels.

Weak new NDCs

Another reason for weaker emission reduction projections is that the approximately 40 new NDCs submitted since last year’s update have been less ambitious than the earlier UN modelling had hoped for.

India, the world’s third-largest emitter, submitted its NDC in April. Its plan would let emissions climb to 6.3 billion tonnes by 2035, almost 64% above 2023 levels, according to analysis by Climate Action Tracker (CAT). Its targets are weaker than India’s current policies and it could meet them as early as 2030.

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Saudi Arabia’s plan, submitted at the end of last year, sets no 2035 target, but has only a 2040 goal to reduce, avoid or remove 335 million tonnes a year against an undisclosed baseline. CAT rates it “critically insufficient”, estimating 2035 emissions at between 13% below and 18% above 2019 levels.

About 30 countries, including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina, have still not produced an updated NDC, which all governments should have submitted more than a year and a half ago. 

UN climate chief Simon Stiell said this year’s assessment report demonstrates again that collective progress remains insufficient, that global transitions are very uneven and that many countries face substantial barriers to delivering their targets and pledges.

He added that COP31 in Türkiye can help address some of the key gaps highlighted in this year’s reports, through ambitious outcomes on emission-cutting efforts, adaptation, climate finance and just transitions, as well as presidency-led initiatives on electrification, curbing methane emissions and progressing towards zero waste.

The post National climate plans now promise half the emission cuts expected by UN appeared first on Climate Home News.

The chemical industry has known for decades that ingested microplastic particles can reach vital organs, an investigation has found.

Read more on E360 →

When 83-year-old Sam Getsinger thinks about the future, she pictures her five grandchildren and the world she wants to leave them. An important part of that world, Getsinger said, is a healthy democracy. So when she first heard about an initiative to limit Michigan utilities’ influence in political campaigns, she immediately volunteered to support it. 

“I don’t want our politics to continue so that the person with the most money wins everything,” Getsinger said. “I don’t think that’s a very sound democracy.” 

Getsinger spent months knocking on doors throughout northern Michigan. She said nearly all the people behind those doors agreed with her that utilities shouldn’t wield as much political influence as they do. 

Keeping corporate money out of elections is notoriously difficult in the United States, but next week Michiganders are going to vote on whether they should try it anyway, with a particular focus on the state’s electricity and gas utilities. Saying they are sick of power outages and high bills, advocacy groups and volunteers are pushing for a ballot measure they say will roll back utilities’ influence over state elections, freeing lawmakers to hold them accountable. Polls from supportive organizations show strong voter approval of the initiative, but even if it passes, and even if it survives legal challenges, some experts say it still won’t get all utility money out of politics.

The ballot proposal comes as customer dissatisfaction with Michigan utilities mounts — the state sees some of the highest utility rates in the country and the least reliable service. Rounds of extreme weather events like ice storms and tornadoes over the last few years left people without power for extended periods of time. Residents are angry at the increasing footprint of data centers in the state and the utilities that power them.

“Everything is more expensive. The quality of service is worse, and we are dealing with more air and water pollution as a result of utility influence in Lansing,” said Christy McGillivray, co-chair of Michiganders for Money Out of Politics, a coalition of local groups that collected 560,000 signatures to put the proposal on the ballot. “So we have to put a stop to it.”

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The measure is designed to plug up leaks in Michigan’s laws restricting corporate influence over politics. The state already prohibits corporations, including investor-owned utilities, from giving directly to political campaigns, but corporate dollars have plenty of other avenues into elections. The classic example is for companies to establish and fund nonprofit organizations known as political action committees, or PACs, which then contribute to campaigns or launch political advertisements. Last year, Michigan lawmakers and committees on both sides of the aisle accepted $421,000 in corporate utility donations, according to the Michigan League of Conservation Voters. In the 2022 election cycle, donations totaled more than $1.6 million across state and local races.

Proposal 2 would end some of that spending, prohibiting utility-funded PACs from giving directly to campaigns. It would also go a step further by prohibiting utility executives, board members, and even the family members of those individuals from giving to campaigns or parties. The same would go for other companies that provide services to state or local governments with contracts larger than $250,000. 

The measure would also tighten some loose bolts in Michigan’s campaign finance laws, making the funding of certain political ads more transparent and adding legal definitions to online political advertisements.

For Getsinger and many of the voters she spoke to, climate was an important motive in wanting to limit utilities’ political power. Michigan has set ambitious climate goals that require utilities to get 100 percent of their energy from clean and renewable sources by 2040, but utilities in Michigan have been seen as impeding climate and environmental progress.

Michigan utilities have lobbied against community solar, arguing that these programs would increase electricity rates. Legislation that would force utilities to pay to clean up contaminated sites has stalled at the state house because of industry pushback. And previous attempts to introduce legislation on what this year’s ballot proposal aims to do — curb utilities’ influence in the state capitol — have failed.

DTE Energy’s Monroe Power Plant lies on the shore of Lake Erie near Monroe, Michigan. The coal-fired plant is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the United States. DTE says it will close the plant by 2035. Jim West / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

However, it appears that Michigan lawmakers have become aware of the unpopularity of utility influence in politics. When the Michigan League of Conservation Voters launched its “No Utility Money Challenge” in 2025, pushing lawmakers to promise they wouldn’t accept money from utilities or associated groups, fewer than 10 candidates signed on. Today, that number has jumped to 126 candidates for state office, including Democrats and Republicans.

“These pledges are reflective of how toxic utility money has become, and that’s new,” said Karlee Weinmann, a research and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a think tank that focuses on utilities. “It used to not even be controversial in the state capitol to be connected with the utilities as a lawmaker.”

Critics like utilities and interest groups argue that Prop 2 infringes on freedom of speech and fails to address the outsize influence of out-of-state groups.

John Sellek, spokesperson for the opposition group Protect MI Free Speech, said supporters are using voters’ frustration with high costs of living “to carry out a much wider sneak attack” on Michiganders who can’t support candidates “simply because of who they are related to or contract with.” The group formed after Prop 2 was first proposed in 2025. Protect MI Free Speech has received $232,000 from utility interest groups, out of a total of about $851,000 from all sources, according to campaign finance disclosures tracked by the Michigan Transparency Network. In contrast, Michiganders for Money Out of Politics, also known as Mop Up Michigan, has received more than $8.7 million in contributions from individuals and voter interest groups. 

Consumers Energy, one of the state’s largest publicly regulated utilities, said it follows all campaign finance laws and reports political donations transparently. 

“Mop Up Michigan’s approach won’t eliminate money in politics — it will simply shift influence away from Michigan companies and toward wealthy national donors and special interests,” said Katie Carey, a spokesperson for the company. 

Supporters for Prop 2 in Lansing, Michigan, dropping off signatures for the ballot measure in May.
Photo courtesy of Michiganders for Money Out of Politics

Twenty-one states have made it illegal for corporations to donate directly to campaigns, but very few have tried to expand those limits as far as Prop 2 would, and none have done so by specifically targeting utilities. The coalition that helped write the ballot question said the goal was to rein in some of the “worst spenders” in state politics. “Nothing happens in our state legislature if regulated gas and electric utilities don’t greenlight it,” said McGillivray with Michiganders for Money Out of Politics.

Hawai‘i lawmakers passed a law in 2026 that would prevent all kinds of political spending by organizations, whether they’re corporations or nonprofits. (That law has already received two challenges in court.) Montana voters will see a similarly ambitious effort on their ballot in November. And states including Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine have set limits on utilities’ ability to fund political lobbying with ratepayer money.

If voters pass the measure, Michigan will almost certainly test the limits of what states can legally do to limit corporate money’s influence in politics. Though residents of many states might want restrictions like the ones listed in Prop 2, they probably haven’t materialized because the Supreme Court has severely limited their options. 

In 50 years of cases, culminating in the 2010 Citizens United case, courts have ruled that political spending is protected as a form of free speech, and that corporations have speech rights like individuals. As a result, governments have limited legal means to control corporate spending on elections. 

Governments can ban direct corporate contributions to candidates, courts have said, because it helps prevent corruption and its appearance, as well as the circumvention of contribution limits. States and federal lawmakers can also limit the amount that anyone, including corporate-aligned nonprofits, donates to campaigns. But lawmakers cannot prevent corporations from funding PACs that donate to campaigns. And governments can put almost no limits on some other kinds of political spending, namely expenditures on political advertising that supports a campaign without coordinating directly with that campaign. Corporations can contribute unlimited amounts of money to aligned nonprofit organizations that run these kinds of ads, trying to convince voters in one direction or another.

With those court decisions in place, some experts believe it would take nothing short of a constitutional amendment to put meaningful limits on corporations’ or wealthy individuals’ political spending. 

Opposition groups have vowed to sue Michigan if the ballot initiative wins. Experts point to limitations on PAC spending and family members’ political contributions as particularly vulnerable to legal attack.

And even if it beats those challenges, the measure still wouldn’t address the amount of corporate spending on politics, including lobbying and political spending on uncoordinated advertisements. 

“If one avenue is closed off to them, they can redirect that money to other entities that can effectuate pretty much the same goal,” said Karley Abramson, a research associate at the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan research organization. 

Advocates for the initiative, like the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, acknowledge the limits on what it can do. It doesn’t matter, they say: Even if the measure can’t satisfy the system-wide frustration voters are feeling, it’s a step in the right direction. And anyway, it will let politicians know how serious their constituents are about holding utilities accountable.

“This is a really solid first step in starting to kind of push forward some more transparency,” said Nick Dodge, senior director of programs for the Michigan League of Conservation Voters.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline High power bills, blackouts land Michigan utilities on the ballot on Oct 27, 2026.

Subjecting the incarcerated residents of Texas to extreme heat constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and prisons statewide must install air-conditioning by the end of 2029.

Although the ruling Judge Robert Pitman issued last month is unique in its invocation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, it is an explicit recognition of an idea increasingly reflected in laws and policies nationwide: As extreme heat becomes more dangerous, even deadly, access to cooling is increasingly seen as a necessity rather than a luxury. This shift has been especially active in housing, where renters often face structural hurdles to accessing cool air, from high costs to explicit bans on the installation of air-conditioning.

This summer, jurisdictions across the U.S. passed policies setting maximum indoor temperatures, requiring landlords to provide AC, or otherwise expanding tenants’ access to cooling. The state of Maryland, for instance, said property owners with 10 or more units must install AC if they renovate. In Spokane, Washington, where 14 people died during a heat wave in July, landlords must now provide “adequate cooling” in at least one room of each unit.

“You can no longer responsibly rent a place if you don’t have a way of keeping it cool, because people will die,” said Brian Henning, director of the Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment at Gonzaga University and a leading advocate for the Spokane policy.

Indeed, a study from 2024 found that renters were three times more likely than homeowners to need medical attention due to heat exposure at home, and researchers estimate as many as 50,000 people died during the five heat waves Europe experienced this summer. But unlike the incarcerated in Texas, whose protection rests on the Eighth Amendment, renters’ claim to safe indoor temperatures rests on a different and less explicit legal foundation.

It’s based, in part, on the “implied warranty of habitability,” a legal principle requiring landlords to provide the basic necessities for life — things like running water — even when they aren’t explicitly guaranteed in a lease or by law. Heating has long been understood as part of that warranty. As extreme heat poses an increasing threat to health, advocates argue that protection from dangerously high indoor temperatures should be as well.

“You can’t rent a place without heat,” said Doug Ruley, director of the Environmental Justice Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law. “The same is exactly true for cooling. I think the rights framing is powerful, and very consistent with how we Americans tend to think about things we care about.”

Tenants could, in theory, ask courts to recognize heat protection as part of the implied warranty of habitability. But rather than rely on judges, advocates have largely pursued explicit protections through housing codes and landlord-tenant laws. 

Exactly what those protections should guarantee — and how they are implemented — is far from settled.

The first question is whether they should require air-conditioning, as the ruling in Texas does, or simply establish a maximum allowable indoor temperature that property owners can comply with however they see fit. Clinton Andrews, director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University, believes the latter approach could encourage passive, energy-efficient methods, like planting trees or installing window shades. A well-designed performance standard also makes clear exactly what landlords are expected to achieve. Unlike a law that simply requires them to install AC or provide “adequate cooling,” a temperature threshold gives tenants and regulators something concrete to measure against.

A Los Angeles woman attempts to keep her infant daughter cool during the heat wave that hit Southern California in September. The apartment she shares with her parents and brother does not have air-conditioning.
Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Such a standard still requires deciding how hot is too hot, and there’s no universally accepted science on this. Some jurisdictions have settled on 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Others, like several cities in Canada, are exploring a limit closer to 79 degrees F. Stefano Schiavon, a professor of architecture and civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said this is to some extent influenced by physiology and culture, because people regularly exposed to high temperatures can more readily adapt to hotter weather.

The same flexibility that appeals to Andrews, however, can also be a liability. Some housing advocates worry that a performance standard could allow a landlord to avoid providing the most effective — and costly — means of cooling: air-conditioning.

“The only intervention that is going to protect people’s lives in a heat event is AC,” said Chelsea Kirk, advocacy and policy director for the L.A. nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. During a major heat wave, she added, “tree shade is not gonna get us there.”

Jurisdictions are already experimenting with different approaches. Houston’s right-to-cooling ordinance, approved in August, requires AC. It establishes air-conditioning as a health and safety standard for all rental housing, closing a loophole that had allowed landlords to forgo it in apartments with window screens. Spokane stops short of requiring AC, but says landlords must reimburse their tenants up to $500 if they want to install it themselves.

Los Angeles County has taken the performance-standard approach in its unincorporated communities. Beginning January 1, landlords must provide a “safe and code-compliant method” of maintaining a maximum indoor air temperature of 82 degrees F. The city of Los Angeles voted in February to explore a similar measure, though adoption has been delayed.

Other jurisdictions have adopted variations on these protections. Since 2020, New Orleans, New York City, and Austin, Texas, have passed cooling requirements, while Washington and Oregon have barred landlords from prohibiting tenants from installing their own AC units. In Arizona, the attorney general’s aggressive interpretation of housing laws has established what amounts to a de facto statewide AC requirement.

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Henning said he’s been in talks with advocacy groups and state legislators about taking Spokane’s right-to-cooling policy statewide, while lawmakers and officials elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada are weighing similar measures.

One hurdle advocates will likely continue to face is cost. Landlords argue cooling requirements will lead to higher rents, though researchers say there’s scant evidence to support that. Some tenant advocates and other experts worry greater reliance on AC could mean higher utility bills. Supporters of such mandates concede that is a significant concern, but not a reason to deprive people of AC.

“Tenants can make their own choices. I don’t think somebody’s going to be, like, ‘Well, I’d rather risk dying tonight because I don’t want to turn on the AC,” said Michele Thomas, director of policy and advocacy for the nonprofit Washington State Housing Alliance.

C.J. Gabbe, an associate professor of environmental studies and sciences at Santa Clara University, said one way to help cover cooling costs would be to expand the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. The Trump administration fired the federal staff that administered the program last year and has proposed eliminating it, but Congress continues funding it. This month, the administration released about $3.6 billion for the current fiscal year.

Experts Grist spoke with stressed that expanding access to cooling can’t be a substitute for addressing the climate change that is making it increasingly necessary. Ultimately, Henning said, governments must address the underlying causes of the crisis by stopping the burning of fossil fuels. “Otherwise, these problems will continue to outstrip our ability to address them,” he told Grist. “We can’t just AC the world.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As extreme heat worsens, renters are gaining a ‘right to cooling’ on Oct 27, 2026.

However you vote, fossil fuels win Channel Comment brendan 27th October 2026 Teaser Media

The surprise re-election of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Sunday, in a tight race against right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, has raised hopes the country can meet a flagship target to end deforestation in all its biomes by 2030 and advance international fundraising to protect rainforests.

Defying expectations to win an unprecedented fourth term in office, Lula – who turns 81 this week – said in his acceptance speech that “we will show the world how climate policy is handled in this country”, and highlighted that, during his last four years as leader, the country has reduced deforestation every year.

Earlier this month, new data from Brazil’s space agency showed that forest-clearing in the Amazon fell to its lowest on record, after the introduction of a deforestation action plan that constrained illegal cattle ranching from expanding into the world’s largest rainforest.

Brazil leads “encouraging” decline in global rainforest destruction in 2025

At an international level, the country has long championed forest conservation, spearheading the creation of the newly established Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). As president of last year’s COP30 climate summit, the country is also developing a global roadmap to halt forest loss by the end of the decade, in line with a global goal, which will be presented at the upcoming UN climate summit in Antalya.

‘Much more needs to be done’

In 2023, Lula’s previous administration introduced a deforestation action plan that set a target of zero deforestation by 2030, achieving swift results. His re-election paves the way for this downward trend to continue.

Carlos Nobre, a veteran Brazilian climate scientist and co-chair of the Science Panel for the Amazon, said Brazil now has a “historic opportunity” to prevent a tipping point where large parts of the Amazon rainforest could turn into savanna, with dangerous impacts for the planet’s climate.

“The reduction in deforestation over recent years has been crucial, but much more needs to be done. Ending deforestation by 2030, tackling forest degradation and accelerating large-scale forest restoration are urgent priorities,” he said.

Anders Haug Larsen, advocacy director at the Norway Rainforest Foundation, described the election result as a “relief”, adding it makes it more attractive for donors to support rainforest protection in the country.

“Hope is a scarce commodity these days,” he said. “The international community must grasp this opportunity to strengthen efforts towards zero deforestation in the Amazon.”

Rainforest fund boosted by election result

Brazil was the original proponent of the TFFF, one of the highest-profile initiatives aimed at channelling new finance to protect the world’s rainforests. The fund aims to raise public seed capital to invest in financial markets, and then pay rainforest countries from the returns on those investments.

Despite being a developing country, Brazil has pledged $1 billion to the fund and is expected to play a key role in helping reach its goal to raise $10 billion from governments by the end of this year.

“We need more countries to come on board to meet the mobilisation target of $10 billion this year, and this election should inject trust in the calls from rainforest countries for support to their forest protection efforts,” Larsen said.

Brazil confident new rainforest fund will reach $10bn donor milestone

On Monday, the day after the election result, the Netherlands announced a contribution of up to $500 million to the fund, which will be disbursed over ten years and is still subject to parliamentary approval. This brings the total pledged to the TFFF from a range of countries to $7.8 billion.

Norway’s climate minister Sigrun Aasland told a TFFF event on the sidelines of the UN biodiversity summit in Yerevan that she was hopeful the $10bn goal could be achieved by the end of this year.

Brazilian officials have led the TFFF’s fundraising efforts and said they are in conversations with more potential donors including China, Korea and Japan.

File photo of Amazon forest in Brazil. (Photo: SFBflorestal/EYEPRES) File photo of Amazon forest in Brazil. (Photo: SFBflorestal/EYEPRES) Congress shifts further to the right

Sonia Guajajara, former minister of Indigenous Peoples in Lula’s government, celebrated the president’s re-election but cautioned that the 20 indigenous territories created under his current administration must be consolidated, as they are “essential to tackling the climate crisis and preserving our biomes”.

Veteran Brazilian diplomat Bráulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, meanwhile, noted that Lula faces a difficult political scenario, as right-wing pro-Bolsonaro lawmakers have gained more seats in both legislative chambers. He added that the courts will become key battlegrounds to challenge anti-climate legislation.

Observatório do Clima, a network of Brazilian green groups, said seven out of every ten representatives and senators who will make up the next legislature are likely to vote against the climate and environmental agenda, urging Lula’s administration to strengthen its action in parliament and expand alliances.

Still, Ferreira de Souza Dias echoed the widespread view among climate policy-makers that a Bolsonaro win would have been “terrible” for the rainforest and Indigenous peoples, and said the country had avoided a scenario where deforestation threatened to increase again.

This story was amended after publication to correct the currency of the Dutch TFFF pledge from euros to dollars.

The post Lula’s election win in Brazil raises hopes for zero deforestation drive appeared first on Climate Home News.

African governments are developing policies to manage waste from solar panels, batteries and other clean tech equipment as installations surge, with officials warning the energy transition could create a new environmental problem unless it is accompanied by investment in recycling and reuse.

Many African households and businesses are increasingly turning away from unreliable grid power or deciding not to wait for access, and are installing more solar panels and battery storage. Data from energy think-tank Ember, published in August, projects that the continent will install a record 17 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity in 2026 – equal to around 100,000 solar panels every day. This would mark the third consecutive year of record growth, following increases of 51% in 2025 and 25% in 2024.

While generally a welcome sign of progress towards a cleaner energy mix, this trend could also create a headache for African officials. Anselm Marungu, Namibia’s deputy minister of environment, forestry and tourism, believes rules should be put in place to ensure that valuable materials can be recovered from discarded solar panels, batteries and inverters at the end of their useful life.

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Some of the materials and minerals the world needs for manufacturing clean energy technologies – including glass, aluminium, copper, cobalt, lithium and nickel – can be obtained by recycling solar panels, inverters and batteries.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that recycling could reduce growth in new mining needs by 40% for copper and cobalt and by 25% for lithium and nickel by 2050, thereby reducing the social and environmental impacts associated with conventional extraction.

Speaking at a pan-African policy conference on circular value chains this month, Marungu said the success of these technologies depends not just on how quickly they are installed, but also on whether the materials are sourced responsibly, the equipment maintained and its components recovered to create economic opportunities across their entire life-cycle.

He called for sound policies, sustainable investment and circular business models that can become the foundation of new industries, green jobs and stronger African value chains. Solar panels, batteries, inverters and tubes “must not become tomorrow’s environmental burden”, he added. 

From importation to end of life

When not properly disposed of or handled during recycling, discarded solar panels and batteries can release hazardous substances into the environment, contaminating soil and water and exposing waste workers and nearby communities to toxic materials which can cause lung cancer and damage vital organs.

Innocent Barikor, director-general of Nigeria’s National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA), said the rapid uptake of off-grid renewable energy has made it necessary to strengthen waste management rules and develop a framework for reusing materials from equipment. 

UN sets steep emission cuts to reverse 1.5C overshoot by end of century

Nigeria is Africa’s second-largest importer of solar technologies, bringing about 400 billion naira ($295 million) worth of equipment into the country in 2025. This has led to the drafting of a national policy on waste management for off-grid renewable energy equipment, which has been validated by relevant government institutions, regulators and development partners, and is now awaiting cabinet approval. 

According to Barikor, once approved, the policy will require producers, distributors and importers of renewable energy technologies in Nigeria to “to take responsibility for these products from the beginning to their end of life”. Commonly known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), the policy is expected to support the development of a recycling value chain by requiring companies to take back and properly manage products once they become waste, Barikor said.

“We believe a policy will enable us to be able to manage what will become a very rowdy outcome of this particular [renewable energy] space,” he said.

Some countries develop regulation

Last week, energy ministers of the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) adopted a regional framework on the deployment of battery energy storage systems and similar technologies, with requirements for the safe management, dismantling, reuse, recycling and disposal of batteries.

Some other African countries have previously strengthened rules on e-waste involving renewable technologies.

In 2024, Kenya introduced the Sustainable Waste Management (Extended Producer Responsibility) Regulations, requiring producers and importers of listed products, including electrical and electronic equipment and batteries, to put in place a system for dealing with them even after consumers stop using them. Companies are required to arrange for or finance the collection of discarded products, as well as their recycling and safe disposal.

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Namibia, meanwhile, is preparing investment opportunities for waste buy-back centres and innovation hubs, said Marungu, with pilot projects already incentivising recycling in the country. The southern African country’s Sixth National Development Plan, launched last year, includes plans for modern recycling infrastructure aimed at reducing landfill waste, attracting private investment and creating green jobs.

The country wants to move from a linear to a circular society through the principles of reduce, reuse, recycle and regenerate to minimise waste and reduce environmental impacts, according to the plan.

Regional corporation and investment

Policies alone, however, cannot guarantee success, the conference heard. Diana Dalton, deputy high commissioner and development director at the British High Commission in Nairobi, said collaboration is needed. The African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) offers a platform to strengthen regional value chains and promote a more integrated approach to recycling renewable energy equipment, she said.

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Regional coordination could help harmonise standards, align regulatory approaches, strengthen markets and enable cross-border trade, creating the scale needed to attract investment and develop regional recycling value chains, she added.

Dalton said this would require investment in infrastructure and skills, as well as collaboration between governments, industry, academia and development partners. She also called for stronger systems to collect, repair, refurbish and recycle renewable energy equipment, alongside support for local manufacturing and innovation.

Namibia’s Marungu said regional cooperation will enable the recycling of large volumes of materials and improve commercial viability, adding that African countries should share experiences, harmonise standards so that equipment and materials can move across borders, and pursue shared treatment and recovery solutions. 

The continent needs a plan to tackle renewable energy waste before large volumes of obsolete equipment accumulate, he said, urging development partners and financial institutions such as the African Development Bank to de-risk investments that can support a circular materials value chain. 

Nigeria’s Barikor said international support could help African countries develop data systems and a regional registry to track producers’ responsibilities for managing waste. He added that countries could also align their Extended Producer Responsibility rules through the African Continental Free Trade Area, helping ensure that global manufacturers face similar requirements across African markets.

“Africa needs to have common standards,” he emphasised.

The post African governments strengthen waste rules as solar and battery use surges appeared first on Climate Home News.

In 2015 the Chinese government announced an ambitious plan to build the world’s largest national park system. China started with Sanjiangyuan, a massive park 13,000 square miles larger than Germany and 14 times the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, located in what the government called the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. State media recently described the region as containing “vast, unspoiled alpine ecosystems” and “pristine rivers and mountains.”

To many environmentalists, this was big news. Over the next few years, groups like Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, WWF, and others eagerly signed up to play a role in helping China build this system. Reports and articles from then focused on how this would protect wildlife like snow leopards, giant pandas, yaks, Tibetan antelopes, and provide opportunities for China to learn from America’s long experience with conservation and national parks management.

But for Tibetans like Kyinzom Dhongdue, there was a big problem. Of the 10 initially planned parks, four — including Sanjiangyuan — were in areas that had been part of the then-independent nation of Tibet prior to the 1950 invasion by China’s People’s Liberation Army.

By Quigley – Own work, CC0, Link

“In Tibet, you have an authoritarian colonial power presenting to be some kind of a green hero,” says Dhongdue, former member of the Tibetan Parliament in exile who is now an Australia-based human rights activist. “The environmental movement is in danger of normalizing what China is doing and without really looking at the darker side of these programs.”

She and others fear that history is repeating in Tibet and other regions under Chinese control, such as Xinjiang, homeland of Turkic Uyghurs and Kazakhs, and Inner Mongolia.

In each of these locations, the designation of new national park and land protections systems and increased efforts to promote ecotourism have resulted in the ongoing displacement of locals from the land they’ve lived on for generations. In their place, Chinese park officials or tourism interests have taken control.

“These parks are displacing the very same people who have lived on and looked after those lands for generations,” Dhongdue says. “A colonial, foreign government is coming in and protecting a landscape by removing the traditional custodians. And that is a huge problem.”

Nonprofit conservation groups, meanwhile, have mostly remained silent, their messaging focusing more on snow leopards, argali, and other endemic and endangered species over the communities who have lived alongside them for generations.

Environmental Colonialism

According to the East West Center at the University of Hawai‘i, The Nature Conservancy introduced the idea of national parks to the Chinese government as early as 1997 and has played an active role in knowledge sharing and exchanges between the U.S. and China. Conservation International claims to have helped conserve 4.9 million acres of land in China, and one of their first projects was in Southeastern Tibet. To them China’s 2015 national parks announcement was a major achievement.

While the imagery of parks like Sanjiangyuan evokes an empty landscape untouched by humans, the reality is quite different. According to an article in National Geographic, there were an estimated 652,600 people living inside the boundaries of China’s initial 10 parks.

While comprehensive data is lacking, so far these national parks have resulted in the displacement of tens of thousands Tibetan nomads and villagers from their land — and likely many Uyghurs and Mongols, too — often to newly constructed urban villages in less desirable locations.

It’s a similar story to what happened with America’s Yosemite National Park, often glorified as the origin of the global conservation movement. There the park’s formation led to the expulsion of the Miwok and Ahwahneechee peoples and eventually their erasure from the landscape, which was promoted to wealthy tourists as an unspoiled wilderness, not a longtime home of thriving cultures.

The same happened to at least 26 Indigenous groups at other well-known national parks or monuments in the United States — including Glacier, Yellowstone, and Shenandoah. For decades this history was erased and nearly forgotten.

Today it’s recognized that in the push to protect landscapes and forests in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, environmentalists turned a blind eye to the sometimes-violent displacement of native peoples. In recent years groups like the Sierra Club, the National Parks Conservation Organization, and even — at least prior to January 2025 — the National Park Service have begun to reckon with their role in erasing native peoples from landscapes.

The Nature Conservancy also acknowledges the harms of colonialism and the need to involve including local communities and Indigenous peoples in land conservation, as do Conservation International and WWF.

In the United States, it was mostly white settlers who displaced Natives from their land — and it was mostly white rangers and officials who managed national parks. Positions of power, and often voting rights, were withheld from native peoples. At the time millions of Native Americans and other oppressed groups lacked voting rights or representation.

For many nonprofits, understanding this harmful past didn’t stop them from actively working with China, despite its ranking as one of the world’s most repressive countries. China’s authoritarian single-party government has criminalized most protests, especially for so-called ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uyghurs, who face collective punishment and far more surveillance and censorship than the Han Chinese majority.

“Protest has become a very sparse and dangerous thing in Tibet and Xinjiang,” says Dawa Lokyitsang, a Tibetan anthropologist currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in the Netherlands.

The Environmental Cost of Displacement

Removing communities from landscapes isn’t just bad for people. It can be bad for the landscapes themselves.

In the same ways that European colonialism and America’s westward expansion were disastrous for iconic species like bison and passenger pigeons, many point to the invasion of Tibet as when deforestation, mining, and river damming began to transform landscapes.

“Extraction has been happening for a long time, [starting] right after Tibet’s invasion,” says Lokyitsang. “Deforestation and mining, since the 1950s, it’s been classic industrial, colonial, resource development, and extraction.”

Today science is finally starting to recognize the many ways that Native Americans molded the ecological landscape of much of North America. Other published science has found that in seemingly wild places like the Amazon rainforest, humans are often part of the ecosystem and removing them can have adverse impacts.

In Tibet, too, the role of traditional nomads and other communities should be valued, not displaced, by national parks, says Dhongdue.

“It’s also very important to understand that Tibetans are environmental actors,” Dhongdue says. “We have lived on and conserved this land for generations, and that traditional knowledge is not being taken into account by China.”

A report published last year by the Institute for Security & Development Policy presented evidence that removing Tibetans from these seemingly harsh landscapes has led to increased erosion, biodiversity loss, and land degradation.

Silence, Again

Not too long ago, global conversation groups were happy to speak about their work in China, which was highlighted in annual reports. Journalists were welcomed on tours of parks like Sanjiangyuan or Giant Panda National Park, where, sometimes, they saw showcase projects where some Tibetans had been provided housing or low-level jobs at parks.

But critics say these organizations failed to see past propaganda or ask difficult questions about what was really happening.

“The danger is if you’re not addressing both the environmental aspect and people’s rights, these organizations risk legitimizing a colonial system that is in place,” Dhongdue says.

WWF China, The Nature Conservancy, and Conservation International all declined to be interviewed for this story, while Snow Leopard Trust, the Paulson Institute (a sustainability think tank), and Chinese nonprofits like Shan Shui didn’t respond to interview requests. This echoes Dhongdue’s experience when she was working on a report about Tibetan nomads and land displacement in 2019.

“I’m not surprised, but, yes, quite saddened by that,” she says. “I had the same response: people not willing to engage on issues relating to Tibet.”

Gabriel Lafitte, an independent researcher focused on Tibet, fears that these organizations have self-censored due to policies that limit their space to operate in China.

“They have to operate within Beijing’s constraints,” says Lafitte. “Beijing has learned how to co-opt, control, and manage international nonprofit engagement across the entire spectrum of environmental issues.”

An NGO law passed in 2016 requires anyone operating in China to have their yearly plans approved by a branch of Chinese government, limiting direct criticism. Even actions taken by overseas offices staff are risky, as statements that anger or upset China could lead to Chinese staff being threatened or even arrested or detained. It’s one reason that human rights and labor nonprofits like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Transparency International have no presence in China.

Worryingly, some of this is now repeating in the United States, where Donald Trump has also backtracked on quite recent efforts to recognize the erasure of the Miwok, Ahwahneechee, and others from national parks, returning the government, after a brief window, back to silence about the treatment of Native Americans.

The good news? So far U.S. conservationists are mostly fighting back against these changes and refusing to forget the dark history. But Lafitte doubts they’ll be willing to speak about the same injustices happening today in China.

“At this particular moment, it’s hard to imagine who might speak up for Tibetans or Uyghurs.”

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Tear Down the Walls: The Racist Roots of ‘Fortress Conservation’

The post China’s National Parks: Green Goals Through Authoritarian Measures? appeared first on The Revelator.

Plug-in cars, including both plug-in hybrids and fully electric vehicles, accounted for two in three new passenger vehicles sold in China in September, according to industry data.

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The share of renewables in Europe’s energy production is growing slowly but surely. Yet as Europe races to build its green energy economy, the workers doing the building are too often facing weaker unions, unsafe conditions, and employers who resist collective bargaining. Without them on board, the transition can’t achieve the social consent it depends on for its success. What would it take to make green jobs good jobs?

Europe is, slowly, moving along the transition to green energy. In 2025, just over 9 per cent of the EU’s electricity came from coal and in the first three months of 2026, close to half came from renewable sources.

For a continent that has repeatedly come face to face with the economic, security, and environmental risks of relying on fossil fuels, this transition is both urgent and crucial. However, the question of whether it is a “just transition” is still open, particularly when it comes to the rights of the workers who are being affected as Europe’s economy shifts towards renewables.

Determining who falls into that group is not straightforward, as the green transition cuts across numerous sectors. “If you look at the standard statistical classification of activities, you don’t have brown or black sectors and green sectors separately,” says Bela Galgóczi, senior researcher at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI). Brown and black sectors commonly refer to carbon-intensive, polluting industries. While some workplaces – such as an oil refinery – might sit squarely in that category, chemical production and vehicle manufacturing are too complex to be put in a particular category, he notes.

However, the work done so far – often using imperfect data – tends to show that brown and black sectors have slightly higher wages and union density, greater coverage from collective bargaining agreements, and lower use of agency workers than green sectors. This is in part because these sectors have existed and workers have been organising for a century. “I would never suggest that for the wind sector we will need 100 years, or even 10 or 20. But there is a little bit of a build-up time for structures and representation and settlements,” Galgóczi says.

The work done so far tends to show that brown and black sectors have slightly higher wages and union density, greater coverage from collective bargaining agreements, and lower use of agency workers.

Unscrupulous employers

The multinational companies active in Europe’s green transition have tended to respond differently in each jurisdiction to protest action by their workers. For instance, in 2023, workers in Germany concluded a 123-day strike, the last of a series of industrial actions, against their employer, the Danish renewables giant Vestas. The strike was in protest against the company’s refusal to enter into a collective bargaining agreement with the workers’ union – something that was and is standard practice in Denmark itself. The workers ultimately succeeded and established a collective bargaining agreement. Meanwhile, workers at electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla’s Swedish subsidiary conceded defeat in August of this year following a three-year strike aimed at establishing a collective bargaining agreement.

Another pattern that has emerged in the behaviour of major players in the green industry, according to Galgóczi, are attempts to erode the pay, terms, and conditions of workers as part of company restructuring. In 2022, the state-owned French energy company EDF was forced to abandon a restructure named “Projet Hercule” that would have moved their renewables business into a new company, which was opposed by unions on the grounds that it would privatise a public service, and criticised by the European Commission over EU competition rules.

In the UK, North Sea oil still provides a significant number of well-paid and unionised jobs. But since production peaked in 1999, many have believed the future to lie in offshore wind. However, the workers’ ability to participate in that future is not guaranteed. “Nobody ever speaks to renewable workers, and I think there’s a massive missing piece of the jigsaw,” says Connor Watt, worker organiser at Platform, an NGO working on the just transition. Watt and his colleagues have been talking to workers across oil, gas, and renewables, particularly those who have moved over from fossil fuels – usually in search of long-term job stability – about their experiences.

Many of these workers find that renewables projects are often more poorly managed and workplace accidents are more frequent, in part because safety practices have not been transferred from the oil and gas sector nor developed specifically for renewables. Watt points out that safety processes and union engagement were transformed in the North Sea oil and gas industry following the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, where 167 workers died following a catastrophic explosion on an oil rig.

Watt feels the situation in renewables means a disaster is only a matter of time, particularly once workers are in international waters – a mere 12 miles from the British shore. “If you’re just on a vessel at sea and it’s not under a UK flag and you might just be waiting for weather or for a shout from somebody, there isn’t any legislation which protects the vessel that you’re on, and that’s a common thing,” he notes. In international waters, companies can exploit casualised migrant labour and pay less than minimum wage. “We’ve developed this massive [offshore wind] industry, second in the world. However, there are just these oversights in the regulations and legislation, so that’s worrying,” Watt adds.

The missing link with workers

The problem has its roots in the tendency in European countries, including the UK, to prioritise greener industries even at the cost of workers’ rights, terms, and conditions – a bargain that could undermine the transition itself.

“A lot of people who want renewable energy to be built, want it to be built quickly because of the urgency of the climate crisis, and so relatively few questions are asked about how it’s built and the conditions under which that happens,” says William Westgard-Cruice, a human geographer at the Clark University Graduate School of Geography.

He points to the construction of solar farms in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, where in a number of cases workers’ rights have been violated and where migrants have been hired to work under harsh circumstances. “There’s a lot of focus on local communities and their concerns, and relatively little focus on the workers who are actually building and operating these power plants,” Westgard-Cruice adds.

One of the reasons why there is localised opposition to renewables projects, he believes, is that communities where they are built are not offered clear and defined benefits in the form of good and decent jobs. Moreover, he says that political parties from across the spectrum are failing to engage with these issues sufficiently, if at all.

There’s a lot of focus on local communities and their concerns, and relatively little focus on the workers who are actually building and operating these power plants.

Westgard-Cruice believes that politicians can make an effective intervention by incorporating stronger labour protections into the auctions for offshore wind projects. At present, he explains, European countries are including measures around environmental sustainability and skills into these contracts, but they could go much further and mandate collective bargaining. There were, he adds, unsuccessful efforts on a European level by some MEPs to add protections into the Net-Zero Industry Act, but worker protection didn’t appear to be a “dealbreaker” for either the Greens or the Social Democrats – and certainly not for the European Commission.

Westgard-Cruice believes that unions, social and climate movements, as well as green, social-democratic and left parties must push for better working conditions and standards to be a much greater political priority and to use the power of the state to raise them in the renewables sector. “This is the only way that there’s going to be social consent for the development of renewable energy in rural areas that feel like they’re being turned into sacrifice zones,” he emphasises. “These political debates could have a very different character if people all knew someone who’s working in offshore wind, and who’s saying, ‘Oh, the conditions are great in here. I’m so glad that I left my old job in the fossil fuel industry to be able to go to this.’”

The way forward

IndustriAll is a global trade union federation representing around 800 unions and 50 million workers worldwide. As a union focused on manufacturing, it sees a lot of potential for the green transition to generate new manufacturing jobs further down the supply chain.

Both IndustriAll and the ETUI are pushing for a just transition framework directive, says Corinna Zierold, head of just transition at IndustriAll Europe. This is because their experience of negotiating at the sector level has not been successful. For example, in 2022, IndustriAll started to negotiate a just transition agreement for gas workers at Eurogas, a European association representing the gas industry. However, after two years of talks aimed at reaching a voluntary agreement, Eurogas said it would not sign it.

That said, there are also positive examples, according to Zierold. For instance, Poland has established projects to retrain coal miners to work in wind power, which the country is aiming to expand to provide around a quarter of its energy. The UK and Scottish governments are also establishing projects to fund retraining of offshore oil and gas workers (however, this was before the announcement that the UK would grant permission for more gas production in the North Sea.).

IndustriAll’s member unions are also facing pressure from employers, backed by right-wing governments. In Hungary, battery manufacturing plants stepped up hiring of migrant labour, with the support and facilitation of the government of far-right former prime minister Viktor Orbán. At the same time, workers were facing increased health and safety risks from exposure to toxic substances. Unions have continued to push for change since a new government came into power earlier this year.

There are also structural issues at work in the new green energy economy. “The net zero sectors are basically small businesses, and maybe some of them do manufacturing… I would put that under the general bundle of the installation economy,” says Dr Nicholas Beuret, a lecturer in management and ecological sustainability at the University of Essex. According to Beuret, many green jobs are in assembling and installing rather than producing the components that go into key infrastructure like heat pumps or smart metres, so the full value of the green transition does not trickle down to workers.

“There’s often a fraught relationship with working conditions, and not only are they [small installation businesses] at risk of going under themselves, and there’s lots of competition, and then they’re fighting larger businesses, but there’s also quite a lot of underhanded economic behaviour that undermines the very conditions of green transition in itself,” he laments. This includes, for example, installation companies fitting faulty insulation and defrauding green energy schemes.

The economic geopolitics of green energies is another factor, with European renewables manufacturing contending with China, which supplies 95 per cent of the solar panels used in Europe and manufactures 39 per cent of wind turbines installed outside the country. In the long term, this could relegate Europe to largely being a continent where solar panels, wind turbines, and other green technologies are assembled, while economic giants in China capture the value created through manufacturing.

Beuret also highlights the heavier dependence on government grants and support, which is a “really politicised revenue scheme”.  As he sees it, the larger problem is how policymakers are approaching the transition. “They’re not interested in running public companies or public investment or public research,” he says. “They want to incentivise businesses to do it, and the problem is the businesses they’re trying to incentivise all have a lot of money to lose in fossil fuels.”

As the backlash to green policies gathers across Europe, supporters of the transition to a green economy need to understand better how to bring workers on board – both in old industries that are in the process of transition and the new ones that are meant to provide better, greener jobs.

By her own admission, Marjorie Steele doesn’t get along with many people in the climate movement. She runs a Michigan-based activist group that advocates against large-scale industrial development. Though she considers herself a political independent, her opposition often puts her into conflict with both climate advocates and Trump-aligned conservatives. She spends most of her time these days focusing on data centers, but she founded the activist group Economic Development Responsibility Alliance to oppose a Chinese electric vehicle battery plant near the city of Big Rapids. She has also campaigned against solar farms, battery storage systems, and transmission lines, one of which is being built on the property adjacent to hers.

“When the progressives look at me and say, ‘You’re MAGA’ because of the green energy issue, it really hurts me,” Steele told Grist. As she has crossed the state opposing new development projects, she has encountered fierce pushback from climate-conscious progressives.

There has been one notable exception. Earlier this year, when she was in Lansing to lobby state lawmakers for a data center ban, she met William Lawrence, a Democrat who is running for U.S. Congress in Michigan’s 7th District. She knew that Lawrence was a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, one of the nation’s most prominent climate organizations, so she wasn’t sure how he would receive her. The two sat down to eat Jimmy John’s, and she spoke to him at length about what she sees as the negative consequences of clean energy development, including noise pollution and the destruction of prime farmland.

“I let him have it,” she said. “I just gave him the whole spiel rather forcefully. And he listened and he asked amazing questions. He’s clearly actual grassroots, otherwise he wouldn’t be at my table, because mainstream establishment politicians do not like talking to me.” A few weeks later, she saw Lawrence do an interview where he seemed to be repeating many of her points. The Economic Development Responsibility Alliance later endorsed him, something it seldom does for major-party candidates.

Like many parts of the country, the Lansing area has experienced a fierce uproar against the data center boom. Several hyperscale projects have appeared in communities across the state, including a $16 billion Oracle-OpenAI campus being built near Ann Arbor, and more than a dozen local governments have attempted to ban them. Local backlash tanked a smaller proposal in Lansing called Deep Green earlier this year, despite the developer’s promises to recycle waste heat and use minimal water. Activist fears about these data centers run the gamut from water and power usage to noise and light pollution, and the coalition appears to span partisan lines, from MAGA conservatives to progressives. It also includes many people, like Steele, who don’t want renewables built in their backyards, either.

The race in Lansing represents a test of whether major party candidates can channel these anti-development sentiments into electoral victory. Lawrence emerged from the mainstream climate movement and, like many Democrats, wants to see new restrictions on data center development. But running in Lansing has also required him to make common cause with skeptics of solar and clean energy. As Lawrence sees it, the stakes are extraordinarily high. The success of his coalition-building effort could determine not only control of the House of Representatives but also the success of the country’s efforts to ditch fossil fuels.

“I think it’s all up in the air right now,” he said. “It’s really hard to tell which way it will lean…It is genuinely cross-partisan. People do not believe that anybody at the top of business and government is looking out for them.”

The 7th District, which encompasses Lansing and a swath of its suburbs, is one of the few true swing districts in the country. Moderate Democrat Elissa Slotkin won it three times by slim margins, but Republican Tom Barrett won it back by a narrow margin when Slotkin vacated the seat to run for the U.S. Senate in 2024, and he’s running for reelection this year. 

On paper, the 36-year-old Lawrence is not a good fit for such a purple seat. He is tall and lanky, with a cerebral speaking style, and projects the image of a graduate student much more than that of a farmer or an auto worker. He co-founded the Sunrise Movement in 2015 on the theory that solving climate change required disruptive activism and sweeping government intervention. In November 2018, he and his fellow founders organized a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s congressional office calling for a Green New Deal that would see massive public investment in clean energy. He was once a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, though he now says he no longer considers himself a socialist, and in since-deleted tweets from 2020 he called for “free and open migration” as well as police abolition.

Yet Lawrence secured 40 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary in August, beating two centrist candidates who appear to have split the moderate vote between them. Since then he has secured an endorsement from the Democratic Party’s congressional leaders, who tried to defeat him in the primary. He has also kept pace with Barrett on fundraising in what has become one of the most expensive House races, as Barrett has pulled in money from major Republican PACs as well as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 

Construction proceeds on a $16 billion data center developed for Oracle and OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan. Many residents of the community opposed the project, worried about the loss of farmland and the project’s impact on energy and water.
Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Lawrence has done this in part by campaigning like a community organizer. His campaign has knocked on more than 100,000 doors in the district, and Lawrence has held dozens of unscripted town halls where he takes direct questions from constituents. He has also inserted himself into local campaigns, in particular around data centers: Last month, he showed up to a city council meeting in the town of Mason to oppose a potential data center proposal, joining locals who appeared at the meeting wearing crimson-red baseball caps. 

But the anti-development opposition in areas like Lansing is not only about data centers. It also extends to solar farms, battery storage systems, and transmission lines that carry renewable energy to cities. These technologies are some of the cheapest and most effective solutions for replacing fossil fuels on the power grid, but they also take up a lot of land, which makes them more likely to produce pushback from locals. 

“We’ve definitely seen some bleed over from data center opposition to all types of infrastructure development,” said Ed Rivet, who runs the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, a right-leaning group that advocates for clean energy. He said this “infrastructure fatigue” is “unfortunate … because these other types of projects will have tangible benefits for customers in terms of cost, reliability, and cleaner energy.”

Solar has become a particular source of controversy in Michigan, which aims to transition its power grid fully to clean energy by 2040. After several local governments passed zoning laws that banned new solar farms, the state legislature in 2023 passed a law that preempted those statutes. Developers can now apply for direct approval from the state if they don’t succeed in securing a local permit. 

The first project permitted under this state law, Assembly Solar, just finished construction on the eastern edge of Lawrence’s district, outraging many locals. Lawrence told Grist that a homeowner in the area took him on a tour of the solar farm last month and showed him how it has disrupted the area’s agrarian lifestyle. More projects are already underway in his district under the state authority. Lawrence has criticized this policy in a number of public fora — he said in a radio appearance that wind and solar critics have “some good points” and that the state solar preemption has allowed utilities to “build mega projects without community buy-in.”

The Cereal City Solar project, a 100-megawatt solar farm in Marshall, Michigan, is seen above. The state legislature passed a law giving the state government more jurisdiction over solar siting.
Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Lawrence explains his skepticism of large-scale clean energy by arguing that the process of economic development in the United States is broken. Most communities have little say over whether a data center or a solar farm gets built near them, and they don’t have any reason to believe that these projects are good for them. While these projects sometimes produce construction jobs and tax revenue for local governments, they create very few long-term jobs, and most of their revenue goes elsewhere. Meanwhile, residents have to deal with construction noise and aesthetic disruptions.

“What’s clear is that people just don’t believe that investments that are directed from outside of the district, from somewhere else in the state or somewhere else in the country or the world, are going to benefit them,” he said, adding that he’s heard “a lot of concerns” about the state solar law in particular and that he thinks those concerns should be taken “very seriously.”

Lawrence acknowledged that it’s unclear what another model of development would look like: “It’s an open question,” he said, “and I’ll leave it at that.” He advocates for a public bank that could build infrastructure without seeking high profit margins, and he wants to use the “convening power” of the congressional office to bring developers and community members together for talks about “what we want to build, why, and how.” Perhaps developers could allay opposition by sharing revenue with the communities where they build data centers or solar projects, or by committing to more conservation and water protection when they build. In the meantime, he’s calling for a national pause on data center construction.

Lawrence concedes that his past efforts with Sunrise are in tension with this new focus on community control over economic development. The Sunrise Movement’s marquee proposal was the Green New Deal, which argued that the federal government should build massive amounts of new energy infrastructure while also taking control of sectors like housing and healthcare. The implication of such a program is that the government, not individual communities, would decide what to build and where. Lawrence left the organization in 2020 and spent years working as a tenant organizer in Michigan, where he grew up, and he said he now sees the climate issue differently.

“I think in that era, you know, we were thinking about the necessity of the outcome, and now I’m thinking more about what is necessary in the process,” he said. “And I’m reckoning with just how little trust we all have.”

Anti-development Michiganders like Steele say they aren’t opposed to solar per se, but to large-scale projects that erase farmland and generate profits for utilities. Steele’s group does support “community solar,” smaller solar farms that provide electricity to specific communities, as well as agrivoltaic projects that allow for continued farming of cropland under solar panels.

“I don’t want to make it seem like green energy is a big boogeyman,” said Steele. “We’re solutions-oriented.” Her group has envisioned an “agricultural renaissance community” that would feature small businesses, farmland, open park space, and light manufacturing, perhaps powered by community solar.

Will Lawrence speaks in opposition to data centers at a city council meeting in Mason, Michigan. Lawrence has staked his congressional campaign on opposition to data center projects.
Nic Antaya / Getty Images

The problem with these proposals is that they won’t produce power at a large enough scale to replace coal and natural gas plants, said Doug Bessette, a professor who studies energy development at Michigan State University and has worked with groups pushing community solar and agrivoltaics. Michigan has about 14,000 megawatts of natural gas capacity, and the typical community solar project has a capacity of between 1 and 5 megawatts. 

“In order to fully transition our economy to clean energy, you have to build huge solar and huge wind and huge batteries and you have to do it fast,” said Bessette. “The smaller-is-better approach honestly would be ineffective at actually mitigating emissions at the rate at which we need to do it” — and would also be more expensive. 

If Michigan and other states don’t find a way to appease critics of solar, each new project will only create more backlash, making it harder to build. Hundreds of counties across the Midwest have tried to limit solar and wind construction, and activist groups on the Eastern Seaboard have organized against offshore wind proposals. Lawrence is far more open to acknowledging this problem than many climate activists, who sometimes dismiss anti-renewable opposition as astroturfing by conservative groups. 

Not everyone is convinced that Lawrence’s vision of a cross-partisan coalition is possible. Barrett, the Republican incumbent, has also cast himself as a skeptic of data centers. It’s unclear that Lawrence’s strength on the issue will convince Republicans to cross partisan lines en masse, said Jean Hardy, a professor at Michigan State University who has studied local government decisions around data center development.

“Data center opposition is so bipartisan at this point that I don’t think it’s an issue that is going to activate people to switch sides or is going to organize independents in a particular way,” he said. 

But Lawrence believes that Democrats have to channel this opposition, and not just in order to win an election in Lansing. As he sees it, fixing the American model of economic development is a necessary step in order to transition to clean energy. Unless voters feel that energy infrastructure is benefiting them, and that they have a say in what their communities look like, any attempts to build clean power at scale will be bound to fail.

“The question is who can effectively connect the big ‘no’ that we’re all saying to data centers into an affirmative ‘yes’ about what we want to build,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Michigan climate candidate courting opponents of Big Solar on Oct 26, 2026.

A single glacier sitting at the bottom of the world may be all that is holding back catastrophic amounts of sea level rise. As it melts away faster than ever, scientists are racing to get a better understanding of when it might fail. Unfortunately, they’ve recently found more bad news. 

The Antarctic bulwark known as Thwaites, or the “Doomsday Glacier,” is gargantuan — roughly the size of Florida — and holds enough ice to push the planet’s coastlines up 2 feet. But the edge of Thwaites also acts as a cork, holding up the rim of the West Antarctic ice sheet, much of which sits below sea level. As Thwaites deteriorates, more ice in this bowl becomes exposed to the ocean, creating a feedback loop that makes it melt faster. And if Thwaites were to succumb entirely, the whole interior of the sheet might follow suit, raising sea levels by as much as 10 feet. 

It’s easy to track Thwaites’ demise from space, but predicting its future has been much trickier. For years, computer models used to simulate Thwaites’ retreat weren’t able to pass the simple test of accurately re-creating the retreat that satellites have captured over the last few decades, marking them unreliable tools for looking ahead.

But now, scientists have plugged in a major missing piece. A new paper, published in Nature Communications earlier this month, appears to be the first to account for what’s happening underneath Thwaites to simulate how quickly it may lose ice. Using this model to simulate the future paints a grim picture: Thwaites could contribute twice as much to sea level rise by the end of the century as previously projected.

“There are many other unknowns, but this solves a specific and very important piece of the puzzle,” said Mattia Poinelli, a glaciologist at the University of California Los Angeles and the lead author of the paper. 

The problem area is where the icy underbelly of Thwaites rests on the seabed, known as the grounding zone. Only relatively recently did scientists realize this zone was not a fixed boundary, but one that oscillates with the tides. As it bobs up and down, warm water pushes underneath the glacier — creating cracks and miles-long channels that allow even more melting. 

Previous simulations of how Thwaites might melt didn’t account for this dynamic, Poinelli said. By doing so, his team’s model was able to match the changes to the glacier that satellites had observed. It also showed that Thwaites could become permanently unpinned from the seafloor as early as 2038, with a 60 percent chance that this could happen by the end of the century, an eventuality which would likely cause the melting to ratchet up even more.

If the climate remains as warm as it is now, the model shows that Thwaites would be on track to add 3 centimeters of sea level rise by the end of the century. That may not sound like much, but it doubles the projections made by previous models, according to the study. Thwaites contributes about 4 percent to sea level rise, which over the past three decades amounts to some 10 centimeters. That’s enough to have sent homes in North Carolina crashing into the sea, while forcing coastal communities in places like the Solomon Islands and Senegal to move to higher ground. 

Of course, global warming is not holding steady but rather continuing to ramp up, with each decade expected to be hotter than the one before. As a result, the world should brace for even more melt than the model predicts, Poinelli said. 

But what if humans get their act together and slow down climate change, or find a way to safely cool the oceans with geoengineering? A separate study, published in Geophysical Research Letters in July, used a model that tested this kind of hypothetical scenario with Thwaites and its comparably large neighbor, the Pine Island glacier, which is the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica.

Together, the two glaciers account for the bulk of sea level rise coming from Antarctica. Ocean melt is the primary culprit, so the researchers “switched it off completely” in their model as a way of understanding the condition of each glacier, said Rosie Williams, an ice sheet modeler at the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the paper.

For all their similarities, it turns out that Pine Island and Thwaites would respond very differently, according to the study. In cooler ocean temperatures, Pine Island would be able to recover ice within a decade, and eventually regrow to where it was 80 years ago — in part thanks to its relatively intact outer shelf. Thwaites, on the other hand, would keep losing ice and raising sea levels worldwide for at least 150 years. The researchers hypothesize that’s because Thwaites is in much worse shape, with the eastern half significantly diminished and the western half disintegrated into many icebergs. While the speed of ice loss would slow down, the glacier may be doomed even in this fictional best-case scenario.

But “that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do,” Williams said. Each fraction of a degree of warming makes a difference in how quickly Thwaites disintegrates, and lowering greenhouse gas emissions could protect other glaciers around Antarctica. “The more we can slow it down,” she said, “the longer we have to adapt to any change that’s coming.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Thwaites is a runaway climate disaster. New studies show how. on Oct 26, 2026.

Climate change gets a rare day in court today when 15 Canadian youth will accuse the federal government of violating their constitutional rights by failing to adequately address the country’s role in global warming. Although thousands of similar cases have been filed across the globe, legal experts said this long-awaited case is arguably the most consequential to reach trial.

The lawsuit is the latest in a yearslong campaign by young people who are using the courts to force elected officials to mitigate climate change. Like similar cases in the United States, including the landmark Held v. Montana, the plaintiffs in La Rose v. His Majesty the King argue that the government has violated their constitutional rights by allowing the crisis to continue.

Set in Vancouver, the proceedings are slated to last five weeks, with the 15 plaintiffs expected to testify alongside climate scientists and other experts. “It’s the chance for the young people to tell their story,” said Kelly Matheson, deputy director for global strategy at Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit behind this case and many similar efforts around the world. 

The outcome, while not precedent-setting outside of Canada, could prove persuasive in other climate litigation or spur new cases. “We found that some of the positive decisions from some countries have been inspirational in other countries,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “This trial will be closely watched.” 

The case began in 2019, when the youth, six of whom identify as Indigenous, filed suit. They alleged, among other things, that by not doing enough to combat climate change, the government had violated Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees “the right to life, liberty, and security of the person.” They also argued that federal action breached their equality protections granted under Section 15 of the charter because, as young people, they will bear a disproportionate share of the impacts of the crisis.

The original lawsuit took aim at much of Canada’s approach to climate change. The plaintiffs argued that the government had allowed emissions to remain dangerously high, set targets that fell short of what scientists said was necessary to avoid the worst outcomes, repeatedly failed to meet those targets, and continued supporting the development and expansion of fossil fuels.

Although the government did not challenge the reality of climate change, its arguments included a claim that the accusations were overly broad and the lawsuit improperly asked the court to resolve a political matter. A federal judge agreed and dismissed the case without a trial in 2020. The plaintiffs appealed. In 2023, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the dismissal of the Section 15 claim but allowed the Section 7 arguments to proceed if the plaintiffs more specifically detailed the government conduct that violated their protected rights.  

The plaintiffs amended their complaint to focus on the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act of 2021, which commits the country to achieving the law’s objectives by 2050, and the 2030 emissions reduction plan adopted under that law. They argue that the efforts don’t go far enough to avoid violating their charter rights in the context of climate change and that the government committed to the net-zero law. 

“Increasingly, people across Canada and the world are seeing the direct impacts of climate change,” said Andrew Gage, a staff lawyer for West Coast Environment Law who has worked on this case alongside Our Children’s Trust. “The plaintiffs will have their day in court.”

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The Canadian Department of Justice referred a request for comment to Environment and Climate Change Canada, which declined an interview request but provided a written statement to Grist. “Our commitment to net-zero by 2050 has not wavered, and we are implementing an ambitious climate agenda,” a spokesperson, Samantha Bayard, wrote in an email. “The Government of Canada respects the role of the courts, the right of Canadians to bring matters before the courts, and the important role that an independent judiciary plays in our democracy.” 

All 15 youths, who were between the ages of 10 and 19 when the suit was filed, are expected to testify. They will be joined by expert witnesses in climate science, renewable energy, children’s health, and economics. Closing arguments are scheduled for February with a decision expected sometime in 2027, although an appeal could delay a resolution. Still, it is unusual for such a case to even be heard.

“Seldom has climate been put on trial,” said James May, an environmental law professor at Washburn University who isn’t involved in this case but has supported some of Our Children’s Trust’s past work. He estimated that more than 3,000 climate cases have been filed worldwide over the past few decades, but most never reached a courtroom. The Hawai’i state Department of Transportation, for example, settled a lawsuit filed by 13 young people and agreed to develop a plan to zero out emissions from the transportation sector by 2045. The landmark case Juliana v. the United States was dismissed after years of litigation, and the Supreme Court declined to consider it.

Held v. Montana was a rare exception. After a seven-day trial in 2023, a judge ruled that the state’s energy permitting policies violated the plaintiffs’ right to “a clean and healthful environment,” which is enshrined in the state constitution. The state Supreme Court upheld that decision in 2024.

A similar outcome in Vancouver could have implications in other British commonwealth countries and beyond, said Matheson. “These courts are looking to each other,” she said. “There is momentum building.”

But even if the plaintiffs don’t win, May considers the trial a victory even before it starts. “It could serve as a blueprint for how to do this elsewhere,” he said. “It has already succeeded.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change rarely goes on trial. This one could be a landmark. on Oct 26, 2026.

Something ominous just hit California: rain. 

The life-giving water that normally hydrates people and crops is bringing an aura of dread this autumn, thanks to the strongest El Niño ever recorded. While the phenomenon causes severe drought and heat in many parts of the world, historically it’s brought extraordinary rainfall to the Golden State. The monstrous El Niño of 1997 and 1998, for instance, caused widespread flooding and debris flows (made not just of water and dirt, but big chunks of rock), destroying property and killing residents.

The state can’t stop rain from falling, so in the last few decades it has been renegotiating its relationship with precipitation. As climate change makes California whiplash from years of intense drought to years of intense rain, water agencies have been capturing as much H2O as they can to reduce reliance on using canals to bring it in from afar. That’s set the state up to avoid at least some flooding as this El Niño takes hold and bank the bounty for the dry spells to come.

“Heavy storms can affect regional infrastructure, construction schedules, and areas vulnerable to debris flow or power disruptions,” said a spokesperson with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in a statement provided to Grist. “However, these rain events also present a significant opportunity. Stormwater capture is a critical pillar of LADWP’s long-term plan to reduce reliance on purchased imported water.” 

The threat isn’t just more rain overall, but the way it arrives. If one storm hits, water can build up and flood, but some of it will soak into the ground, preventing further inundation. But if a succession of storms rolls through, the soils get saturated. “Even one can be very big and impactful,” said Steven Springhorn, supervising engineering geologist in the California Department of Water Resources’ sustainable groundwater management office. “But if they start to come in a series, that’s where you start to get into some situations where you have a lot of excess water.”

Water, like any material thing, moves through time and space but brings unique challenges in both realms. For one, it’s heavy, so channeling it requires using pumps or gravity, like when draining water out of a reservoir. And for humans, at least, the rain’s timing isn’t always ideal: A lot can fall at once, or it doesn’t fall for months on end. 

To address the timing problem, California operates nearly 1,500 reservoirs. But that creates a challenge with space, as the dams can only hold back so much water — during especially wet winters, the reservoirs occasionally release water to keep from overfilling or even breaking apart. That’s to say nothing of the plethora of environmental harms that come from damming rivers, like destroying migratory routes for fishes.

So in recent years, California has been turning its attention underground, to its sprawling aquifers. In 2014, the state passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires local water agencies to tackle the crisis of dwindling subterranean supplies. California has long been extracting an unsustainable amount of groundwater, due in part to droughts exacerbated by climate change. The issue is particularly acute in the agricultural Central Valley, where farmers have drawn so much groundwater that aquifers have been collapsing like empty plastic bottles, causing the land to sink by nearly 30 feet.

But that problem is also an opportunity. Whereas the state’s major reservoirs currently hold around 21 million acre-feet of water — that is, the amount it’d take to cover an acre in a foot of the stuff — its land could hold something like a billion acre-feet underground, according to Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “So the potential room for storage is immense,” Kiparsky said. “The enticing question is: Is there a way to grab those flood flows before they flow out to sea, and hold them underground, and therefore expand our capacity?”

That strategy is known as managed aquifer recharge, which tweaks how water moves through space and time. California water agencies, for instance, have been diverting excess rainfall into big dirt bowls on the landscape. This slows it down, allowing it to seep into the underlying aquifer. “If that fills up, then they go and talk to the growers in the area and see if there could be opportunities to put that water on agricultural land,” Springhorn said. 

Whether it’s in basins or on fields, the water moves underground where, as a bonus, it’s not lost to the evaporation that inevitably occurs in a reservoir. When summer rolls around, water managers and farmers can pump that groundwater back up. Indeed, in an average year, this subterranean stash provides about 40 percent of California’s supply. “But in a drought, it makes up even more,” Springhorn said. “So that’s why we want to use the wet years, and the excess water that might be there, to replenish the aquifers so that there’s more there year to year.”

As a bonus, managed aquifer recharge can boost biodiversity. California has lost 95 percent of its wetlands, which used to mitigate flooding and provide critical habitat, especially for migrating birds. To help restore them, a Nature Conservancy project called BirdReturns incentivizes farmers in the Central Valley to flood their acreage, replicating the erstwhile ecosystems. “The local landowners can make a profit off doing a service for this really valued part of ecology,” Kiparsky said, “and it functions also as a groundwater-recharge project.”

But what about the state’s cities? Like metropolises the world over, California’s were designed to move water into sewers and out of the built environment quickly. But as climate change intensifies rainfall — a warmer atmosphere by default holds more moisture — wastewater systems are struggling to keep up. “The gray infrastructure that we built in the 20th century was really built for a climate that is no longer here,” said Edith de Guzman, a water equity and adaptation policy cooperative extension specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We can’t just engineer our way out of the problems — we need to actually kind of reverse-engineer a little bit and think about the way that nature does things.”

Simply put: Gray infrastructure like concrete is a liability, whereas green and brown spaces are assets. So in 2018, Los Angeles County voters passed a tax of 2.5 cents per square foot of impermeable land, like driveways, raising nearly $300 million annually. That finances preserving local watersheds and developing stormwater-capture projects, helping the region pioneer a better way to manage urban water by getting “spongier.” As it develops roadside gardens and retrofits public parks, Los Angeles creates more spaces for the liquid to soak into the ground. It’s also built several spreading grounds, a series of bowls where water accumulates. 

All told, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said that in the 2025-2026 water year, it captured around 37 billion gallons of stormwater. (The average resident uses around 100 gallons a day.) “While intense downpours require active management, they allow us to maximize local groundwater replenishment and capture as much precious rainfall as possible when it arrives,” said the spokesperson for the LADWP.

By building out as much spongy infrastructure as possible, California cities like L.A. better prepare themselves not just for the aquatic ravages of El Niño, but for the hotter summers ahead. Green spaces significantly cool the neighborhoods lucky enough to have them, while urban farms go a step further in producing nutritious food for residents. “The psychological and societal benefits,” de Guzman said, “are really not something to be ignored in this era of ever-increasing needs for us to have more connection and more reasons to celebrate where we live, rather than reasons to stay on our phones indoors with our air-conditioning on.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California has a plan for El Niño’s torrential rain: Save it for later on Oct 26, 2026.

Network failures obstruct community solar Channel News brendan 26th October 2026 Teaser Media

This year, Philadelphia is on track to have the lowest number of homicides since 1963. But over Fourth of July weekend, a heat dome stretching from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico descended, leaving 165 million people facing major or extreme heat.

Cities including Boston, Baltimore, and Raleigh saw record temperatures, and readings in Philadelphia topped 100 degrees for three consecutive days.

The sweltering city also saw a busy weekend for gun violence. Between July 2 and July 4, the Gun Violence Archive recorded nine shootings, leaving three dead and nine wounded.

“Those who commit gun violence are in a vulnerable population that have limited economic ability to make sure that they have air conditioning,” said Marion Campbell, executive director of Eddie’s House, a Philadelphia nonprofit that provides violence prevention and social services to such populations. “When you get hot you get irritated, OK! I’m just going to keep it real. You get irritated and your inability to manage your frustration could be heightened.”

Research confirms what Campbell and others see on the ground: When temperatures rise, gun violence increases. What was previously unknown was the effect of climate change on gun violence.

A new finding shared with The Trace by Climate Central, a nonprofit focused on climate change research and communication, estimates that approximately 2,000 shootings between 2021 and 2025 in the 100 U.S. cities with the most gun violence are attributable to high temperatures made more likely by climate change.

In fact, the baking July Fourth weekend in Philadelphia was at least twice as likely to occur due to climate change, according to Climate Central.

And this is only the beginning. As temperatures continue to rise, even more upward pressure on gun violence is likely.

“Across all of these cities, we see that in aggregate, climate change is raising the risk of gun violence,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central. “Short of really swift and deep cuts to heat-trapping emissions globally, we expect the planet to continue to warm,” Dahl said.

The theory that increased temperatures correspond with increased violence is well established, said John Roman, a distinguished senior fellow at the University of Chicago’s NORC social research center, whom The Trace asked to review the Climate Central analysis.

It can be confusing for observers, because this summer has seen record high temperatures but record low gun violence in many cities. But that doesn’t mean that climate change isn’t having an effect, Roman said.

“I think if we still had the same climate we had in 1980, I think we’d see even lower violence than we see today,” he said.

Understanding how

Until now, researchers haven’t pinned a number on the effect of climate change on violence.

“We’re talking about close to 2000 shootings that we can attribute to climate change’s influence on high temperatures,” Dahl said. “So, that’s still a lot of people who are being exposed to this kind of traumatic event because of climate change.”

No individual shootings were attributed to climate change. There are multiple stressors and contributing factors, and shooters themselves would never say they committed violence because it’s unusually hot outside. 

Instead, Climate Central researchers looked at the aggregate relationships between climate change, temperature, and gun violence for each of the 100 cities studied.

They started by identifying the relationship between outside temperature and gun violence. This is complicated, given a 95-degree summer day is sweltering in the humid northeast, but barely noteworthy in Phoenix. So each city got its own gun violence model, an equation based on historical values that gives back the expected number of shootings for any given temperature.

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Next they applied the model to find the number of shootings that would have occurred if cities had seen cooler temperatures without climate change. 

To simulate that cooler world, researchers used 22 climate models from leading scientists around the globe, combined with real-world temperature records, to calculate hypothetical daily temperatures for each of the 100 cities.

Comparing these temperatures to actual recorded temperatures returned estimates that climate change has made the typical day in those cities about 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, ranging from about 1.7 F in San Francisco and Miami to 3.8 F in Fresno, California. 

Once researchers know the gap, they can use a city’s temperature model to estimate the number of shooting incidents associated with it. 

Added up over five years and 100 cities, the difference comes to about 1,950 shootings, roughly 1.7 percent of the 116,281 total shootings recorded in the Gun Violence Archive for the cities during that time period.

In Philadelphia, the gap was about 2.7 degrees F, associated with an estimated 149 additional shootings from 2021 to 2025. “Estimated” is key. The simulated temperatures are estimates, as are the number of shootings associated with them. And climate is just one of many facets that affect the rate of shootings in a city.

“There are a lot of factors that go into a city’s gun violence incident rate. Temperature is just one,” Dahl said. However, “we can actually parse out the signal of climate change in this data,” she said.

In other words, 149 additional shootings in Philadelphia is an estimate, but the direction is clear: Climate change is pushing up the number of shootings.

Who’s most vulnerable

In any given city, not all neighborhoods are equally vulnerable to the effects of increased temperatures. Instead, the burden of climate change’s effects will likely fall on neighborhoods where gun violence is already high.

The leafy green New York City where the movie characters Harry and Sally strolled is real. But just three miles away from the Upper West Side of Manhattan lies the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighborhood, a place that sees more than its share of gun violence.

The median income is about $100,000 less, and there is 40 percent less green space, according to city health department data. Pavement traps and concentrates heat, raising the surface temperature about 5 degrees on the average day — a gap that can literally mean life or death.

Neighborhoods like Mott Haven are known as urban heat islands, and nationally, they disproportionately affect residents who are not white. Mott Haven itself is 97 percent Black and Latino.

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At a recent community meeting, residents gathered to organize around the stifling effects of heat. 

About 84 percent of households in the neighborhood have air-conditioning units, leaving 16 percent without access, the health department data shows. But even for those with air conditioners, the cost can be prohibitive. One mother brought a monthly electric bill of $1,000.

“You can’t run your AC all day,” said Soledad Alvarado, a longtime Mott Haven resident who is a climate justice fellow at the Waterfront Alliance. Instead, residents use it just to survive the hottest hours.

When residents leave home, they find little relief. Major bus routes are on streets with little shade. Underground subway stations are essentially heat traps and can be up to 18 degrees hotter than the street-level temperature. Playgrounds — covered in asphalt, not grass — become unbearable.

For workers who work outside, heat stress accumulates all day. Currently the city has no requirement that work stop, no matter how extreme the temperature is.

These conditions are not an accident, but rather reflect the historical realities of how cities decided to invest — or not invest — in neighborhoods, said Dahl of Climate Central. 

“We know that the hottest parts of cities tend to be places where there hasn’t been an investment in the sort of natural environments that would help to keep the environment cooler,” Dahl said. “Trees and parks that can really create a lot of shade and help cool the city down are less likely to be present.”

“This is one example among many, many, many,” she said, “in which climate change falls hardest on the people who have the fewest resources to cope with it.”

When this heat burden falls on disadvantaged communities, it can be more likely to translate into increased violence, said Kimberly Meidenbauer, an assistant psychology professor at Washington State University who leads an environmental neuroscience lab there.

Financial strain, resource scarcity, discrimination, and exposure to violence put the body in a stressed state known as allostatic load. When the stressors are chronic, she said, it becomes difficult for the human body to calm back down. 

“In the context of heat, we’re talking about an additional stressor. Well, if your body’s already dysregulated and under a lot of stress it’s just probably not going to be able to handle an additional stressor quite in the same way,” she said.

Science of why

Why would heat lead to shootings, when most people have been miserably hot without harming anyone? Scientists have two main explanations, and they aren’t mutually exclusive.

The first has to do with human physiology.

It begins when heat throws our bodies into disequilibrium, Meidenbauer said.

The hypothalamus region of the brain detects when the body is too hot and starts trying to move heat from the core of the body to the periphery by initiating sweating, and expanding veins and vessels near the surface of the skin.

“Thermoregulation is pretty effective at keeping our bodies in a safe range, but it is also uncomfortable,” she said.

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That discomfort, in turn, ushers in negative emotional states like irritability, hostility, and frustration, while simultaneously impairing parts of the brain that normally help us keep our emotions in check.

Research is also starting to point to the possibility that our brains aren’t good at placing blame for stress where it belongs, she said. Trapped in a hot subway car, a person might blame their stress on a crying baby instead of the heat.

What’s worse, this state also seems to change how a person understands the emotional states of others.

“When you’re hot, you actually perceive others as being more hostile and aggressive, so it actually alters your perception of the intentions and threat of other people, which we think also might be driving, in part, what we see here,” Meidenbauer said.

Scientists are still working on showing definitively that heat as a stimulus causes aggression toward others, she said. In the Washington State University lab, they put study participants in an infrared sauna and asked them to play a video game against a (non-existent) player in a different room that allowed stealing from opponents as part of game play. Warmer temperatures were associated with the “impulsive aggression” of stealing, she said.

The other possible cause, known as routine activities theory, originated in the 1970s and suggests that violence increases with temperature because people are outside more and thus more likely to encounter potential sources of conflict. An example of this is the ubiquity of shootings at high school sporting events. These shootings are almost never planned, they occur because games bring together a large number of people, some of whom are carrying guns.

Roman said he sees evidence for this behavior in the data itself. Gun violence starts going up at relatively moderate temperatures, and keeps increasing — up to a point. Then at extremely high temperatures, there is a signal that gun violence goes down again, he said.

“If it’s 95, I don’t care how mad you are at somebody else, you’re gonna wait until it’s not 95 to go out and do something about it,” Roman said. When it’s really hot, he said, “people go inside.”

This also points to an unexpected way climate change could change gun violence patterns, he said, because it won’t just increase very hot days, it will also increase the number of days per year that clear the minimum temperature threshold.

“The more days you have that are warm enough to be outside, the more people are exposed to violence, and so now it isn’t that July is super hot and people are madder or shorter fuse. It’s that April and March and October and November are much nicer to be out and about,” he said.

Stereotypes

Back in Mott Haven, community members said they worry that connecting temperature and gun violence could stir up old stereotypes about heat and its effect on Black and brown people.

“People who are not from here, they might see a cluster of people outside in the Bronx and think that something violent is going to happen,” she said, but she wants people to know that the time-honored tradition of hanging out outside in warm weather can be both peaceful and joyful.

This summer’s outdoor celebrations around the World Cup and the Knicks’ victory parade showed people of all races and backgrounds could be outdoors, together, in the city, peacefully, she said

Indeed, climate, race, and violence have been bogusly linked throughout history.

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Climatic determinism, the idea that hot climates produce hot-tempered, less civilized people, was used for centuries to justify slavery and colonialism.

In 1967, civil unrest occurring in 128 cities in protest of racial discrimination, police mistreatment, and economic oppression, was given the minimizing moniker of “long hot summer.” Before that summer, the FBI warned that racial unrest had become “a summer phenomenon” driven by hot weather, and it pointed to Communist agitation.

“Temperature is only one of many factors that go into why someone might pull out a gun on a hot day,” Dahl said. “There’s a whole constellation of supports and services and policies that could help to alleviate some of the other stressors people are facing that might lead to these kinds of decisions.”

Solutions

Many cities give residents access to cool spaces, like libraries, swimming pools, and community centers so their bodies can at least take breaks from extreme heat. New York City operates hundreds of these heat shelters during heat emergencies. The mayor’s office also recently announced vans that can travel to older residents’ homes and pop-up cooling centers that can be set up at job sites to give relief to outdoor workers.

Still, resources are limited. The city’s first-come, first-served program that gives air conditioners to the most vulnerable households, people over 60, young kids, and people with heat-sensitive conditions, stopped taking applications before summer even started, earlier than any previous year. And the program does nothing to help families pay for running the units once they have them. 

Another idea might be to warn people about what to expect, Meidenbauer said. “So much of our public messaging right now is about ‘on hot days, stay cool and watch out for signs of heat exhaustion and heat illness,’” she said. “We also know that heat affects us psychologically. So telling people to look out for changes in how they’re feeling, whether they’re thinking clearly, and disrupted sleep due to nighttime heat.”

Longer-term solutions involve addressing the underlying causes of heat islands.

Back in Philadelphia, a 2018 study found that removing trash and adding grass to randomly selected vacant lots was associated with about a 29 percent reduction in nearby gun violence in neighborhoods below the poverty line. 

Now, the city is undertaking a massive greening project called Tree Plan, which is city-funded but run by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. The goal: 30 percent tree canopy citywide. Some neighborhoods have as little as 2 percent tree cover and are up to 22 degrees hotter than leafier areas.

Such efforts are needed because models predict warming will only get worse.

“We know when it gets hot outside people get angrier, and when people get angrier and there’s guns present, it’s more likely to end up violent,” said Adam Garber, executive director of CeaseFirePA, a nonprofit advocacy group. And, he said, “We know it’s getting hotter every year because of climate change.”

Climate Central and The Trace collaborated on this story and the analysis behind it. As experts on climate science and gun violence, respectively, we each wanted to explore how climate change is affecting violence, and we knew that neither of our organizations could do so without the input and expertise of the other. Over the course of the project, we have met regularly to define and refine the analytical approach, identify places to dig into with on-the-ground reporting, and review results.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Higher temperatures fuel gun violence. Now we know how much is from climate change. on Oct 25, 2026.

For Elijah Lee, protecting the environment has always been about what’s happening close to home.

He grew up in a predominantly Black, low-income community in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and went to school next to a paper mill that filled the air with pollution. He always wondered why it seemed like the only employment option for people in town. 

Now, as data centers expand in Virginia, where he moved as a teenager, he fears the political promises of data center-driven economic growth won’t reach him or his generation. 

At 18, Lee is preparing to vote in his first midterm election. Climate policy ranks among his top concerns. But he understands why people struggling to pay their bills might not put it first.

“It’s hard to care about the quality of your air or your food that you eat and whether or not that food is actually clean when you can’t even afford the food in the first place,” he said.

New polling suggests that tension is widespread. Black voters may not name climate change as their biggest election concern, but they still want leaders to address it. 

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In a seven-state survey conducted by HIT Strategies for the Climate Equity Action Fund and the League of Conservation Voters, only 9 percent of Black registered voters ranked climate change among their top three issues motivating them to vote, compared with 74 percent who selected the cost of living. 

At the same time, most respondents said they wanted climate policy to be a top issue for their elected officials. Even among Black Republicans, 79 percent said it was important for candidates to prioritize addressing climate change.

Interviews with voters and advocates suggest the gap is not simply a messaging issue, but also about whether voters see the connection between environmental policy and their immediate needs. Increasingly, it is also a question if voters should even prioritize climate positions when voting because they cannot trust elected officials to deliver lower bills, cleaner water, and protection from corporate pollution.

“Young people today want to ensure we have a future where we can live prosperously,” Lee said. “We understand that the future requires environmental protections. But we also understand that it is not being prioritized today.” 

Climate politics at the kitchen table

The survey, taken from September 24 through October 10 this year, included 2,000 Black and Latino registered voters in swing states in the 2024 election. Seven in 10 respondents in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania said they are likely to vote in the November midterm elections. 

Across both groups, 89 percent said it was important for candidates to prioritize lowering energy costs, 86 percent said the same about reducing air and water pollution, and 82 percent wanted candidates to prioritize addressing climate change.

Erica Tebbs, a senior analyst at HIT Strategies, said the problem is not convincing Black voters that environmental threats exist.

“The proof that is needed is that their concerns will be addressed and responded to by elected officials and that a vote will result in a real impact in their community,” Tebbs said. “That’s where the doubts lie.”

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For Tebbs, those answers show why climate’s relatively low ranking on a list of election issues should not be read as indifference. When questions turn to the cost of electricity, safe drinking water, or extreme weather, the concerns become personal and immediate. By contrast, the phrase “climate change,” can feel abstract.

Bill Hairston, national field director for the League of Conservation Voters, sees a similar dynamic in conversations with residents. Data center development, he said, has become one of the issues bringing people into discussions about energy and environmental policy. Residents worry about what the facilities will mean for their bills, air pollution, and housing costs and gentrification. 

“I think it’s actually just putting the two and two together,” Hairston said.

Hairston grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, where his grandparents’ home sat in a poor, Black neighborhood. Daily, coal trucks passed nearby. He remembers the grass around the house looking yellow, with soot on it. 

“I never saw my grandmother’s grass green,” he said. 

He didn’t fully connect those conditions to the decisions shaping his neighborhood when he was young, but he said voters should be making those connections more often.

For Hairston, conversations about data centers offer an opportunity to connect an industry’s presence with questions about health, affordability, and government oversight. Rather than treating those as separate concerns, he wants residents to consider who makes the decisions and whose interests those decisions serve.

Who pays for the data center boom?

The poll found substantial concern among Black voters about what data centers could mean for electricity costs.

Black voters also showed skepticism that policy promises actually benefit their households.  

Respondents were told Congress was considering a policy requiring companies building data centers to pay for the electricity they use rather than passing costs to consumers. Even with that protection described, 52 percent of Black voters expected data centers to raise electricity costs for everyday Americans.

“They don’t necessarily trust that this type of policy will really protect the public from taking on these costs,” Tebbs said.

For Andrea Cristina Mercado, who leads Climate Equity Action Fund, the results show clearly that Black communities are confronting failed policies related to climate change and the environment.

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Lee, who now lives in the data center capital of the U.S., is an example of this. He questions the tax breaks offered to data center developers and the promises of jobs used to promote the facilities. He worries that communities will be asked to accept the costs without receiving the benefits they were promised.

“I understand the importance of wanting to bring money into Virginia,” Lee said. But “to pass these things off as mass sources of employment is just not true.”

For Mercado, that is why climate policy cannot be separated from affordability and the economy.

“We actually believe that climate policy has to address the needs of working people,” she said, and that is why affordability is leading to “the emergence of a massive organic movement against data centers.”

Shared concerns across party lines

Concern about climate change among Black voters extended across party identification more than it did among Latino voters in the survey.

Among Black Republicans, 79 percent said it was important for candidates to prioritize addressing climate change. Among Latino Republicans, 59 percent said the same.

Hairston said this had to do with the lived experience of Black voters, who are subjected to more pollution and climate change-related issues like flooding. 

He sees those experiences as an opening to organize around protections that reach beyond party labels. For climate advocates, the challenge is persuading people that taking action can produce results.

Nearly half of respondents said that powerful interests and wealthy corporations would always block meaningful efforts to reduce climate harm, regardless of what ordinary people did, and that they believed it was already too late to reduce that harm.

But 45 percent of Black voters said people working together through voting, petitions, and boycotts could hold government and corporations accountable and reduce the harmful effects of climate change.

Tebbs said those doubts about political power mattered especially to younger voters. 

But the possibility of change is still visible among young people, said Lee, who is a first-year college student. He pointed to a group of high school students in Spartanburg, South Carolina, organizing against a proposed data center as an example of students seeking a say in the future being built around them.

He wants older voters to listen to those concerns rather than assume a generation raised with technology will welcome every project built to support it.

“We know that this is the future that we’re inheriting, the markets that we’re inheriting, the housing that we’re inheriting, the food prices that we’re inheriting,” he said. “And so I think more than anything, I’m being driven by deep concerns, but also by a deep hope that we can turn this around.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For Black voters, climate action means little without relief from rising costs on Oct 24, 2026.