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As Oceans Warm, Predators Are Falling Out of Sync with Their Prey
In the sea as on land, climate change is driving shifts in the abundance and distribution of species. Scientists are just beginning to focus on why some fish predators and prey — like striped bass and menhaden on the U.S. East Coast — are changing their behavior as waters warm.
The 8 talking points fossil fuel companies use to obstruct climate action
To the extent that X ever was the “public square” of the internet, it is clearly no longer such a place. The platform — known as Twitter until it was rechristened in 2023 by Elon Musk — has become an echo chamber for extremist conspiracy theories and hate speech — or, depending on what you’re looking for, a porn site.
Even before this transformation, however, years of research suggested that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests. In 2015, oil and gas companies were active on Twitter during international negotiations over the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, promoting the incorrect notion that Americans did not support taking action on climate change. More recent research has shown similar industry messaging in the lead-up to climate negotiations in Glasgow and Dubai, and one multi-year analysis of more than 22,000 tweets from Exxon Mobil-funded think tanks and industry groups found that they have frequently disseminated the ideas that climate change is not threatening, and that former president Joe Biden’s energy plans hurt economic growth.
Other branches of the fossil fuel industry — including plastic producers and agrichemical companies, both of which depend on oil and gas and their byproducts — have also taken to social media to discourage actions to reduce the use of their products. In a new paper published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers suggest that climate communications from these three sectors — oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals — are “aligned and coordinated … to reinforce existing infrastructure and inhibit change.”
“They were all talking to each other,” said the study’s lead author Alaina Kinol, a public policy doctoral candidate at Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities in Boston.
According to the authors, the study represents the first attempt to characterize the network of misleading climate communications from these three distinct but connected nodes of the fossil fuel industry. They said the connections between these sectors are often underappreciated, even among those advocating for a fossil fuel phaseout. “You don’t want to look only at energy, which is where a lot of the attention goes,” Kinol said. Oil and gas companies see plastics as a “plan B” for their industry as policymakers try to transition to clean energy, and the agricultural sector is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for everything from fertilizers to pesticides.
Kinol and her team downloaded more than 125,000 tweets posted between 2008 and 2023 by nine Twitter accounts — one industry association per sector, plus two of each sector’s largest corporations — and then conducted a two-part analysis, first examining the connections between the accounts (“who’s ‘at-ing’ who,” as Kinol put it) and then analyzing the content of the tweets.
The network analysis revealed that companies and their trade groups across all sectors were frequently tagging each other, with accounts owned by Exxon Mobil, the chemical company Dow, and the trade group the American Petroleum Institute among the most mentioned.
For the contextual analysis, Kinol read every single tweet to identify common themes. With the 12,000 tweets that related to five selected categories — the economy, the Environmental Protection Agency, pipelines, sustainability, and water — she categorized them using a framework she dubbed “discourses of climate obstruction,” which builds on existing research to describe the way the industry groups either deny the existence of climate change or downplay the possibility and importance of responding to it. The framework includes eight types of arguments — four that represent outright climate denial, and four that represent a more nuanced form of “climate delay.”
Denial discourse 1: It isn’t happening Denial discourse 2: It isn’t that bad Denial discourse 3: It isn’t us Denial discourse 4: It’s taken care ofThe four types of denial rhetoric argue that climate change is either not happening, not that bad, or not caused by humans, or that it’s being adequately taken care of — arguments that have become all too familiar to those tracking the history of fossil fuel obstructionism. The tweets that promoted delay either redirected responsibility for climate change, advocated for nontransformative solutions, emphasized the downsides of climate regulations, or “surrendered” to the idea that solving climate change isn’t feasible.
According to Jennie Stephens, a co-author of the report and a professor of climate justice at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, talking points about delay and denial were happening together in concert between 2008 and 2023. “There was climate denial — like, ‘It’s not really a problem,’” she said — “but also delay, which was, ‘We’re already reducing emissions,’ to promote the notion that they don’t need to be regulated to further reduce emissions or fossil fuel use.
“It all connects back to this overarching strategy of trying to control the narrative, … reinforcing this sense that there’s no way we’re ever going to phase out fossil fuels, no matter how bad the climate crisis gets,” she added. (Editor’s note: Stephens was selected as a Grist New England Fixer in 2019.)
Delay discourse 1: Redirection Delay discourse 2: Nontransformation Delay discourse 3: Downside emphasis Delay discourse 4: SurrenderThe study also found that the nine companies and trade groups frequently mentioned schools and universities, which the authors interpreted as “a focused effort to shape or at least interact with teaching and learning at all levels.” Stephens said this finding was “striking” and that it reinforced other research showing how fossil fuel companies have been “very strategically investing in education as a way to normalize and demonstrate their beneficial contributions to society.”
In response to Grist’s request for comment, a spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council said “chemistry plays a vital role in the creation of innovative products that make our lives and our world healthier, safer, more sustainable, and more productive.” Mike Tomko, communications director of the Farm Bureau said, “I can’t speak to a tweet that’s almost a decade old, but I can tell you that we’ve contributed positively to developing voluntary, market-based programs that are advancing climate-smart farming and helping America reach its sustainability goals.”
Six of the other organizations — the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Corteva, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and FMC Corporation — did not respond to questions. DuPont declined to comment.
Jill Hopke, an associate professor of journalism at the DePaul University College of Communication, was not involved in the new study but has done her own research on climate-related misinformation on Twitter. She praised the PLOS Climate study as “innovative” and grounded in prior research, although she said she’d be interested in further analysis of how the relative proportions of obstructive tactics — delay vs. denial, and nuances within those categories — have changed over time, and of the fraction of tweets that were promoted as ads.
“You can’t do everything in one paper,” she conceded.
Irena Vodenska, a professor of finance at Boston University who has experience researching climate misinformation on Twitter, agreed that the PLOS Climate paper was “comprehensive in its approach,” although she suggested additional analysis is needed to confirm whether the organizations in question really intended to obstruct climate action. This constitutes the difference between misinformation and disinformation, the latter of which refers to intentionally disseminated falsehoods and is usually much harder to prove — though it could be possible by looking at more accounts on X and across social media platforms, she suggested.
Vodenska also noted that the transition from Twitter to X has brought changes in algorithms and content moderation policies that could complicate the extraction and analysis of future data.
Kinol readily acknowledged this. “This paper was written in a previous era, when Twitter was sort of the central meeting place of the world,” she said. “That’s changed, but social media is still part of a major communications strategy [from industry groups] to use various methods of denial and delay to prevent the implementation of successful climate policy.”
Despite the rapidly changing social media landscape, Kinol is confident companies are still using the same strategies to minimize the need for climate action. “We’re at the stage of climate change where it’s all hands on deck, and I hope that our paper is helpful as a tool to combat this denial and delay,” she continued. “If you’re aware that something’s happening, it’s a lot easier to push back against it.”
toolTips('.classtoolTips4','An acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are a class of chemicals used in everyday items like nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and food packaging that have proven to be dangerous to human health. Also called “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down over time, PFAS can be found lingering nearly everywhere — in water, soil, air, and the blood of people and animals.');
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The 8 talking points fossil fuel companies use to obstruct climate action on Jan 21, 2025.
Israel-Palestine: The Conditions of Lasting Peace
The ceasefire deal will bring some respite to the people of Gaza and the war-ravaged Middle East. But lasting peace can only be achieved by granting Palestinians the right to self-determination, and ending Israel’s colonial expansion. A conversation with Palestinian historian Leena Dallasheh and Israeli-born political scientist Yoav Shemer-Kunz.
Konrad Bleyer-Simon: What has the conflict in Gaza really been about? There are people who see the war as a response to the attacks on 7 October 2023, while others consider it an attempt from the side of Israel to eradicate an enemy or to commit genocide.
Leena Dallasheh: I think the first point that needs to be made clear is that the conflict did not start on 7 October 2023 – this is only claimed by Israeli propaganda. In fact, the conflict started with the Zionist movement’s intention to replace the Palestinian population, who has been living in this land for centuries, with people who came from Europe. This was done with a programme of enforcing a particular type of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine that is tied to European colonialism and nationalism.
I say this in a careful way, because there were Jews who lived in Palestine prior to the emergence of the Zionist movement. They immigrated to Palestine throughout the centuries and lived in Jewish holy cities alongside Palestinians. The conflict only started with the introduction of a colonial project, consolidated by the British colonial system in Palestine – initially in 1917 during the occupation and then in 1922 with the introduction of the Mandate. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the settler community captured over 78 per cent of the territory of historical Palestine, and in the process depopulated and dispossessed the vast majority of the Palestinians. 750,000 Palestinians became refugees, either in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, or in neighbouring Arab states. The Palestinians call this the Nakba (“catastrophe”) and Israel calls it the War of Independence. Ever since, Israel has been dominating the small minority of Palestinians who remained within the State of Israel – who became Palestinian citizens of Israel, like me.
In 1967, Israel continued to occupy the rest of historic Palestine and forcefully dominate the remaining Palestinians, many of whom were and are descendants of refugees forced out in 1948. Even though there has been a so-called disengagement in the Gaza Strip since 2005, the occupation did not end there, it just changed form. It turned Gaza into what has been widely referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison. Israel still tightly controls everything, including access to food and medication. So, if you frame it this way, the conflict started with Israeli aggression, a long time ago.
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Konrad Bleyer-Simon: What did 7 October 2023 mean in this context?
Leena Dallasheh: It was a horrendous crime. The killing of innocent people is never acceptable – I, as a Palestinian, reject it. At the same time, we should understand the context. It was a Palestinian attempt to break out of the impasse created by Israel’s continued domination of the Palestinian population and the escalation of the aggression that has been led by the Netanyahu government, which included deepening and increasing the settlement of the West Bank. Israeli policies can be seen as an attempt to de facto annex the West Bank and to further sideline and undermine any Palestinian attempt to change the current situation.
In the past decades, Palestinians were willing to negotiate and give up most of historic Palestine. Israel was constantly undermining Palestinian efforts for statehood, and the so-called normalisation agreements with Arab states (Abraham Accords) completely disregarded the issue of Palestine. This created distress in Palestinian society, which Hamas decided to respond to with an atrocious attack on Israeli civilians.
Yoav Shemer-Kunz: The Israeli narrative is significantly different. It is almost completely the opposite of what the Palestinians experience and think.
Most Israelis would agree that the conflict didn’t start with the 7 October attack, but they see other dynamics in the background. They bring with them the trauma from previous wars and conflicts: from the first and the second Intifada, the Yom Kippur War, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. They feel that the Arabs – they don’t usually refer to them as Palestinians – never accepted the presence of Israel in this land. In fact, for Israelis, the narrative is about the existence of the state of Israel in the Middle East. Members of society get indoctrinated with this message when they go through the Israeli education system and later serve in the Israeli army.
For many Israelis, 7 October was the start of a new world, but not the start of the conflict.
Until 7 October, life seemed normal for Israelis. Most of them didn’t really care about the human rights violations [against Palestinians], so they lived their life quite comfortably. They felt there was relative peace, and even believed that there was improvement: Israel had good relations with the West and was normalising its relations with some Arab states. However, the Abraham Accords ignored the settlement violence and the apartheid policies in the West Bank. The state was managing the never-ending conflict, and it seemed it was doing so successfully. For many Israelis, 7 October was the start of a new world, but not the start of the conflict. This was, in fact, the day when Israelis paid the price for repression, and now there is an increased feeling of insecurity and instability in society.
Konrad Bleyer-Simon: In the public discussion, there is no clarity on who has been fighting whom in Gaza. On one side, it could be Hamas, the Palestinian community, or a coalition of Iran, Lebanon, and terrorist groups, and, on the other side, it could be the Jewish Israelis, the state of Israel, or the administration of Netanyahu.
Leena Dallasheh: Unfortunately, the last year has proven that a lot of Israeli Jews are willing to be fully complicit in the war crimes against the Palestinians and the genocidal war in Gaza. Still, I think that the framing has to be the struggle between the Palestinians as the indigenous people of this land and the Israeli state as a settler colonial project.
Yoav Shemer-Kunz: Israelis see their state as the great success of the Zionist movement and the Zionist ideology. Most of them want to keep Israel as it is, they are loyal to the state, and they wave the flag of the State of Israel with pride. Israel is not the kind of dictatorship that we see in many other parts of the world. It is a state with many loyal citizens, who voluntarily serve in the military. Of course, they are obliged to do so, but many of them do more than the minimum. They encourage their children to do the same. In this sense, the conflict is indeed against the Palestinians as a whole – it is not against Hamas, or before that, against the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). For many Israelis, the opposing parties are all the Palestinians, wherever they are. That includes the refugees, the people living in East Jerusalem, and also the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The framing has to be the struggle between the Palestinians as the indigenous people of this land and the Israeli state as a settler colonial project.
Leena Dallasheh: The year 2021, when Netanyahu lost power after 12 years, and the “change government” was formed, was, in fact, the deadliest year for Palestinians since the war in 2014. According to the human rights organisation B’Tselem, Israel killed 319 Palestinians in the occupied territories; and in five years of house demolitions, 895 Palestinians lost their homes. This trend continued in 2022 and 2023, before 7 October. So, the Netanyahu government is not the only one to blame on the Israeli side. The human rights violations were accelerated by the Netanyahu government, but Israelis didn’t feel the problems at all: there was a rave party at the borders of Gaza. This shows the extent to which the Israeli population disregarded the situation of Palestinians, particularly the dire situation in Gaza.
Konrad Bleyer-Simon: What would a long-term solution look like? Would it be possible to coexist in this land – is it large enough to provide a home to the Jews who live there and all the Palestinians, including the millions of refugees who have a right to return?
Leena Dallasheh: Talking about long-term solutions is not conducive to a conversation that should be held right now. The first thing that needs to happen is to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians. We need to end the starvation and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and then also stop the violence in the West Bank.
The future solution is not up to us who are having this discussion here. The Palestinians are the ones who have the right to self-determination, which has not been achieved until today. They should lead the conversation about how this can be achieved.
That being said, Israel keeps declaring itself a state of the Jewish people rather than the state of the people who live in it. That is a part of the settler colonial framework. If Israel thinks that all the Jews in the world can come and live here, then there should be sufficient space for the Palestinian refugees too. There are more Jews in other countries than Palestinians. That leaves us to ask what the issue is, and the issue is the rejection of the Palestinians’ right to live in Palestine. According to international law and according to international declarations, the Palestinians have the right to return – as recognised by United Nations Resolution 194, rejected only by Israel and its staunch backers.
Is it going to be a one or two-state solution? I don’t know, but right now a one-state solution is the farthest from imagination. Most Israelis and Palestinians don’t want to live together, as most Israelis essentially want the Palestinians to disappear. They have accepted by silence, or often by outspoken support, the genocide against the 2.2 million Palestinians living in Gaza. In parallel, the Palestinians, over and over since the 1970s, have expressed willingness to live side by side with Israel, in a state in a small part of historic Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They do not relinquish the right of return for their refugees, nor can any leadership do so, because according to international law, the right of return is an individual one.
That being said, Israel keeps declaring itself a state of the Jewish people rather than the state of the people who live in it.
What we should agree on and demand is justice and the rights of the Palestinians being protected. In addition, something that is not talked about is the protection of the physical safety of Palestinians. In the West, everyone is concerned with the fears and the security of Israelis. 7 October was a vicious crime, but Israel has killed and injured tens of thousands of Palestinians in each round of aggression over the years. It has imprisoned thousands of Palestinians and continues to hold them. Many of them are in prison without due process.
Yoav Shemer-Kunz: I totally agree. Europeans like this question of the long-term solution instead of focusing on what is happening on the ground. I’ve been discussing solutions for many years – federal solutions, one state or two states, but I had to realise that it doesn’t lead anywhere, as long as the occupation and ethnic cleansing continue. The reality on the ground is that, as long as the colonial expansion of Israel continues, we cannot jumpstart a discussion about peace, reconciliation, and transitional justice.
This is a mistake that we have made for three decades now in Europe. We organised conferences about peace between the two peoples and forgot about the fact that every day we have more and more settlers on Palestinian territory, more Palestinians in prison, and unlawful killings.
We need to focus on stopping the massacres. Then, the solution starts with accountability for the genocide. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister of the State of Israel. These warrants should be implemented and respected by all Western countries. For now, we have seen hesitation in Europe. We also have the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice from 19 July 2024, stating that Israel should withdraw from the West Bank to the 1967 borders “as rapidly as possible”. The United Nations General Assembly voted on that in September, giving Israel one year. But it doesn’t seem like Israel is going in that direction. Instead of talking about solutions for the future, we need to see how the international community, the European Union, and its member states push for the respect of international law. It’s obvious that Israel has a lot to accomplish in that field.
We have a very radical, fundamentalist government in Israel. Talking about a solution is very far-fetched, but in case the discussion can start, we need self-determination for both peoples – we cannot have a state only for the Jewish Israelis.
As long as the colonial expansion of Israel continues, we cannot jumpstart a discussion about peace, reconciliation, and transitional justice.
Clearly, the Palestinians have a right to this land, but the Jews do as well. In the 1970s, the PLO clearly recognised the presence of Israeli Jews as legitimate in Palestine. The security of both people should be guaranteed. But for now, we have a situation that resembles apartheid.
Konrad Bleyer-Simon: Why didn’t the international community manage to stop or de-escalate the conflict in 2023 and 2024? Were there any relevant attempts from the United States or European countries?
Yoav Shemer-Kunz: The level of violence is much worse than in previous years, but the impunity of Israel is nothing new. Despite UN resolutions, we saw the de facto illegal annexation of the West Bank; already in 1981, we saw the de jure annexation of East Jerusalem, and the international community didn’t do anything. Israel is left to do whatever it wants. Every wave of settlement construction was accompanied by an official statement of concern by European governments or the US administration. But that’s it. There was never any action.
But I would go even further: the State of Israel does not only benefit from negligence or ignorance, it is also supported by the West, through weapons trade or UN vetoes. Western states continue what they always did, it is all statements and rhetoric. Joe Biden was not different. Already in 2023, his administration could have stopped this war by not vetoing the UN Security Council resolution.
Leena Dallasheh: The Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi has referred to the US as “brokers of deceit”. It has been undermining Palestinian aspirations for decades, it has actually been part and parcel of the prevention of the creation of a Palestinian state. So, if we look at it through the prism of long-standing US policy priorities, we can understand why the last administration’s policy did not radically deviate from the past US policy against the Palestinians. Biden did not fail to prevent the conflict – he played an active role in enabling the continuation of the genocide in Gaza.
There is also the issue of racism and the colonial past of Europe, which we need to confront. On 7 October and immediately after, the Western media and Western leaders reverberated many Israeli claims that have since been debunked – about beheaded children, for example – and they have done so in a language that resonated with colonial tropes about the savage, colonised people. This narrative, in turn, became part of the support of European leaders for Israel’s “right to defend itself’. While the Israeli victims of 7 October get to have the sympathy and the support of Europe and the US, the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims do not gain the same attention. It took months for the Palestinians to be able to push back, and to make the world realise that there was a genocide happening against them.
The State of Israel does not only benefit from negligence or ignorance, it is also supported by the West, through weapons trade or UN vetoes.
Yoav Shemer-Kunz: At the same time, we have witnessed the use of international law to advance the Palestinian cause. There are human rights organisations in Palestine, like Al Haq, that are doing amazing legal work, and many NGOs in Gaza have been documenting crimes and holding Israel to account. The main international law responses in this situation have been through the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC arrest warrant and South Africa’s application to implement the Genocide Convention are important international efforts. If the states in the West ignore the ICJ and the ICC, that can lead to a massive crisis of international law.
Konrad Bleyer-Simon: How should European nations, especially Germany, deal with their historical guilt? Due to the crimes perpetrated 80 years ago, they feel responsible towards Israel, but in practice, this has meant unconditional support for Netanyahu’s actions. In your opinion, what should this historical responsibility entail?
Yoav Shemer-Kunz: There is still a strong feeling of guilt and responsibility, and many people in Europe mean well and want to help. Nevertheless, Europe’s nations don’t behave like good friends of Israel. They act as if they don’t care. And Israel seems to be exploiting this guilt in a cynical way. It is not a healthy relationship for either side.
I would also emphasise that a friend of the Israelis should help the people, not the regime. In fact, many Jews around the world start to distance themselves from Israel and start to think that our present and our future are unrelated to the State of Israel. Many of us think that it’s not something we want to be part of, we don’t go visit, we don’t think of living there, and we feel like our life is threatened because this state speaks in the name of all Jews and feeds this false perception that the Israeli position is the Jewish position.
Leena Dallasheh: If Europe indeed learned something from the Holocaust, it should be a humanist message that you cannot allow crimes against humanity to happen to any group. It’s a slippery slope when you start distinguishing between whose rights you can protect and whose you cannot. In the current context, especially left-leaning audiences in Europe should be able to notice that the greatest supporters of the current Israeli settlement project and the genocide in Gaza are the parties of the European extreme right. Many of these parties are clearly antisemitic, and enemies of the Jewish people in Europe. It is really hard to believe that their support is genuine.
Konrad Bleyer-Simon: What can Greens or progressives in Europe do?
Leena Dallasheh: The Greens have a lot of influence, and they are, for now, part of the government in Germany. They should push for sanctions, an arms embargo on Israel, and protection of the Palestinians. They also need to protect pro-Palestinian speech in their countries.
Yoav Shemer-Kunz: Many far-right parties in Europe try to whitewash themselves by posing as good friends of Israel. Greens need to propose an alternative. Instead of supporting Israel with some reservations, they need to clearly stand up against illegal settlements and war crimes. That would mean that they support the Palestine solidarity movement, as well as speak out for Palestinians’ freedom of expression and assembly. They should also stand with Jews – but that should not mean the state of Israel, but those Israelis and people of the diaspora who are against violence. There are, for example, Israeli citizens who call for international pressure and sanctions.
Konrad Bleyer-Simon: How have 7 October and the following conflict impacted your life?
Leena Dallasheh: I’m a Palestinian who lives in Haifa, in rocket range from Lebanon, and have had to run to shelter many times; but I’m also still very privileged because I have a shelter to run to – unlike the Palestinians in Gaza and the Lebanese under Israeli aggression. At the same time, I’m also a citizen of Israel who’s been now subjected to extreme exclusionary measures – these are a part of the historical Israeli attitude towards Palestinians, but have taken a sharp extremist turn in the last two years with this government. Four hundred Palestinian Israeli citizens have been arrested since the start of the war in Gaza for incitement to terror and violence – in most cases based on social media posts. So, there’s been a lot of fear among Palestinians. There’s also repressive new legislation, including steps to further exclude Palestinians from elections.
Yoav Shemer-Kunz: The conflict has impacted my life much less than it has impacted Leena’s. I live in France now, far from the missiles. Still, it is overwhelming to see the footage of all the violence, and to accept that my own people – family and friends – are supportive of the war or are indifferent about the genocide. Part of Israeli society has become extremely violent, and that makes life for many others unbearable. We’ve seen many Israeli Jews who decided to leave the country in the past year. We, Israelis who live abroad, are mourning the illusion of a country where people could have fun with friends, enjoy a beer at the beach, hang out with tourists, or visit the Old City of Jerusalem. This Israel was nice until it lasted, but now it is gone.
Leena Dallasheh: In fact, such an Israel never existed, because the illusion was created at the expense of the repression of Palestinians.
Yoav Shemer-Kunz: Yes, it took a lot of denial to enjoy the beach in Tel Aviv or to go to a rave party a few kilometres from the wall of Gaza. So, this might be a nostalgia for something that never really was – but it is still emotional.
This last year gave me a push to think about ways of becoming more engaged politically. I am still learning more about this conflict, learning the Arabic language, and trying to better understand the Palestinians’ point of view. There is so much to do, and it is overwhelming.
This discussion took place before the ceasefire deal was sealed on 17 January 2025.
Indian start-ups mine e-waste for battery minerals but growing industry has a dark side
Mohammad Abrar wakes up coughing most mornings. It’s not yet dawn but New Delhi is already blanketed in thick smog when he sets off for work.
By 4am, Abrar, aged 50, reaches Seelampur, a small neighbourhood in the capital’s north-east suburbs, which is home to India’s largest electrical-waste market.
The market’s narrow lanes are lined with small scrapstores overflowing with piles of broken computers, telephones, TVs, microwaves, washing machines, ACs and end-of-life batteries.
Abrar is one of more than 50,000 informal workers, including women and children, who make a living sifting through thrown-out goods to recover valuable materials that can be recycled and eventually reused in modern technologies.
In recent years, Abrar and his peers have become the backbone of a fast-growing network of start-ups seeking to extract energy transition minerals from e-waste in a process known as “urban mining”.
Seelampur’s e-waste market is a vast treasure trove for the highly-coveted metals and minerals the world needs to shift from fossil fuels to clean energy systems and curb climate change.
Charging cables for everyday items contain copper, a conductive metal which is used in virtually all electricity-related technologies. The aluminium in electronic components is needed to manufacture solar panels.
But most sought after still are batteries. The majority of electronics such as mobile phones, laptops and vapes use batteries that contain lithium, cobalt and nickel. The same minerals are used to make batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and storing renewable energy.
Read the story here.
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Trump unravels US climate agenda as he promises to ‘drill, baby, drill’
Within hours of being sworn into office on Monday, President Donald Trump announced a spate of executive orders and policies to boost oil and gas production, roll back environmental protections, withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and undo environmental justice initiatives enacted by former president Joe Biden.
Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and appointed oil industry executives and climate skeptics to his Cabinet. His first-day actions represent a complete remaking of the country’s climate agenda, and set the tone for his administration’s approach to energy and the environment over the next four years.
‘Drill, baby, drill‘
Among the most significant actions Trump took Monday was declaring “an energy emergency,” which he framed as part of his effort to rein in inflation and reduce the cost of living. He pledged to “use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure,” an unprecedented move that could grant the White House greater authority to expand fossil fuel production. He also signed an executive order “to encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf,” and another expediting permitting and leasing in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“We will have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it,” Trump said during his inaugural address. “We are going to drill, baby, drill.”
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve can store 714 million barrels of crude oil, but currently holds about 395 million. Under his administration, he said, the cache will be filled “up again right to the top.” He also said the country will export energy “all over the world.”
“We will be a rich nation again,” he said, standing inside the Capitol Rotunda, “and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help.”
Richard Klein, a senior research fellow for the international nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute, noted that fossil fuel companies extracted record-high amounts of oil and gas during the Biden administration. Even if it is technologically possible to boost production further, it’s unclear whether that will reduce prices.
Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, said it is a “direct falsehood” that increasing fossil fuel extraction would drive down inflation. He agreed that the U.S. should declare a national energy emergency — but for reasons exactly the opposite of what Trump had in mind. “We need to quickly move to clean energy, to invest in new companies across the U.S.,” Kammen told Grist.
Exiting the Paris Agreement (again)
Trump delivered on his promise to once again withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Nations pact agreed upon by 195 countries to limit global warming that the new president referred to on Monday as a “rip-off.” In addition to signing an executive order saying the U.S. would leave the agreement — titled Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements — Trump also signed a letter to the United Nations to set the departure in motion. Due to the rules governing the accord, it will take one year to formally withdraw, meaning U.S. negotiators will participate in the next round of talks in Brazil at the end of the year. By this time next year, however, the U.S. could join Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only nations that aren’t part of the accord.
“It simply makes no sense for the United States to voluntarily give up political influence and pass up opportunities to shape the exploding green energy market,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the nonprofit World Resources Institute, said in a statement. Only 2 in 10 Americans support quitting the Paris Agreement, according to a poll by the Associated Press.
Trump’s announcement came just 10 days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2024 Earth’s hottest year on record, one marked by life-threatening heat waves, wildfires, and flooding around the world. Experts say things will only get worse unless the U.S. and other countries do more to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
“Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled,” climate scientists wrote last October. They noted then, even before Trump’s election, that global policies were expected to cause temperatures to climb 2.7 degrees Celsius (6.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. One analysis by Carbon Brief estimated that a second Trump administration would result in an extra 4 billion metric tons of climate pollution, negating all of the emissions savings from the global deployment of clean energy technologies over the past five years — twice over.
Reversing course on electric vehicles
Trump also took action to revoke “the electric vehicle mandate,” in keeping with his campaign promise to support autoworkers.
“In other words, you’ll be able to buy the vehicle of your choice,” he said during his inaugural address — even though there is no national mandate requiring the sale of electric vehicles and consumers are free to purchase any vehicle of their liking. The Biden administration did promote the technology by finalizing rules that limit the amount of tailpipe pollution over time so that electric vehicles make up the majority of automobiles sold by 2032. Under Biden, the U.S. also launched a $7,500 tax credit for consumer purchases of EVs manufactured domestically and planned to funnel roughly $7.5 billion toward building charging infrastructure across the country.
“Rolling back incentives to build electric vehicles in the United States is going to cost jobs as well as raise the price of travel,” said Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who served as a senior policy leader in the Biden White House. “Fueling up an electric vehicle costs between one-third and one-half as much as driving on gasoline, not to mention the benefits for reducing air pollution. Ultimately, to lower the price of energy for U.S. consumers, we need to diversify the sources of energy that we’re using and ensure that these are clean, affordable, and reliable.”
Rescinding environmental justice initiatives
Trump signed a single executive order undoing nearly 80 Biden administration initiatives, including rescinding a directive to federal agencies to incorporate environmental justice into their missions. The Biden-era policy protected communities overburdened by pollution and directed agencies to work more closely with them.
That move was part of a broader push that Trump described as an attempt to create a “color-blind society” by stopping the government from “trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Klein said the objective was “embarrassing.” Kammen said it was a “huge mistake” to move away from environmental justice priorities.
Blocking new wind energy
Trump officially barred new offshore wind leases and will review federal permitting of wind projects, making good on a promise to “end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.” The move is likely to be met with resistance from members of his own party. The top four states for wind generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are solidly red, and unlikely to acquiesce. Even Trump’s pick for Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, refused to disavow wind power during a hearing last week, saying he would pursue an “all of the above” energy strategy.
Many state and local policymakers, including the members of America Is All In, a climate coalition made up of government leaders and businesses from all 50 states, pledged to take up the mantle of climate action in the absence of federal leadership.
“Regardless of the federal government’s actions, mayors are not backing down on our commitment to the Paris Agreement,” said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, in a statement. “Our constituents are looking to us to meet the moment and deliver meaningful solutions.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump unravels US climate agenda as he promises to ‘drill, baby, drill’ on Jan 20, 2025.
Izrael Netanjahu i skrajna prawica Europy: małżeństwo z (nie)rozsądku
Netanjahu w zasadzie przyznał, że Izrael pod jego rządami obrał populistyczny, eurosceptyczny kurs, wykorzystując relacje z V4 i innymi krajami Europy Wschodniej, by oddziaływać strategicznie na unijną politykę zagraniczną.
Kiedy w lutym 2019 roku Viktor Orbán odwiedził Izrael, premier Benjamin Netanjahu zwrócił uwagę na mocne więzi łączące Izrael z Węgrami, kierując swoje słowa do Brukseli i społeczności międzynarodowej. Owa więź zdaniem Netanjahu wynika z „wielu aspektów”, które „łączyły” i „łączą” oba kraje. Netanjahu zauważył, że Izrael i Węgry to „dwa niewielkie narody, demokracje, które łączy wspólnota wartości i interesów”.
Sojusz Izraela Netanjahu z Węgrami Orbána pokazuje zasadniczy zwrot Izraela w kierunku prawicowej, populistycznej, nieliberalnej władzy, doskonale licującej z europejskimi skrajnie prawicowymi, populistycznymi partiami i rządami. Pod rządami Netanjahu Izrael zacieśnił związki z europejskimi populistami, przyklaskując fali opartego na interesach narodowych eurosceptycyzmu, by w ten sposób zagwarantować sobie niczym niezmąconą ekspansję na okupowanych terytoriach palestyńskich, jednocześnie realizując szeroko pojętą politykę zagraniczną i krajową.
Zjednoczeni w walce z islamemKiedy Netanjahu doszedł po raz pierwszy do władzy w 1996 roku, Żydom nie groziło żadne powszechne prześladowanie w Europie, a Izrael miał dobrą dyplomatyczną reputację na całym kontynencie. Niemniej Netanjahu i jego partia Likud podjęli starania, by nawiązać bliskie relacje z populistycznymi skrajnie prawicowymi partiami i rządami – sukcesorami, w bezpośredniej linii, europejskiego historycznego antysemityzmu. Nie trzeba było długo czekać, by te awanse w ramach nowych sojuszy zostały odwzajemnione.
Na uwagę zasługuje choćby przypadek belgijskiej partii Vlaams Belang (VB, Interes Flamandzki). Choć jej założyciele kolaborowali z nazistami, a wcześniejsze kierownictwo cechował sceptycyzm wobec Holokaustu, partia ta należy obecnie do zagorzałych stronników Izraela. Były lider VB, Filip Dewinter twierdzi, że Vlaams Belang „bardzo często… jako jedyna staje w obronie Izraela”, choć krytycy oskarżają ją o zdradę „ideałów nacjonalizmu w zamian za żydowskie pieniądze” i „płaszczenie się przed międzynarodowym syjonizmem”. Od wczesnych lat dwutysięcznych partię oskarżano o antysemityzm niezwykle rzadko – kreuje się ona na obrończynię żydowskich interesów. Dewinter uważa, że „narody żydowski i flamandzki łączy wspólny interes, a mianowicie walka z islamem w Europie” i zachęca Żydów, by do tej walki dołączyli: „Żydzi są naszymi towarzyszami broni w boju z islamskim ekstremizmem… Przynależą do kultury europejskiej. Czego nie można powiedzieć o islamie”.
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Pozująca na „sojusznika [Izraela] w walce z radykalnym islamem” partia dołączyła do delegacji innych europejskich ugrupowań populistycznych, które udały się do Jerozolimy w grudniu 2010 roku. Działacze spotkali się z wiceministrem w Knesecie i z liderami żydowskich osadników na okupowanych terytoriach palestyńskich. Podczas wizyty Dewinter i jego partyjni koledzy wydali „Deklarację jerozolimską”, w której wyrazili poparcie dla „istnienia państwa Izrael” oraz jego prawa „do samoobrony w obliczu każdej agresji, zwłaszcza zaś przed islamskim terrorem”.
Po masakrze dokonanej przez Hamas 7 października i wszczęciu przez Izrael wojny w Gazie członkowie VB otwarcie opowiedzieli się za Izraelem. W lipcu 2024 roku partia wyraziła poważne obawy, że ogromny napływ Palestyńczyków do Belgii może potencjalnie iść ramię w ramię z muzułmańskim fundamentalizmem i antysemityzmem. Sam van Rooy, poseł w belgijskim parlamencie wywodzący się z partii VB, stwierdził, że ma zamiar skonfrontować z tą kwestią przyszłego sekretarza stanu ds. azylu i migracji. Van Rooy chciałby zrozumieć, „dlaczego tylu Palestyńczyków wybiera Belgię oraz w jaki sposób docierają oni do naszego kraju z Gazy”. Przytoczył badania, które sugerują wzrost poparcia dla Hamasu wśród Palestyńczyków: rzekomo 72 proc. z nich popiera atak z 2023 roku.
Niespodziewany sojusznik z NiemiecRelacje Izraela z niemiecką Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) były nieco bardziej powściągliwe ze względu na otwarcie głoszony w partii antysemityzm i powiązania z neonazistami. Mimo to niektóre postacie z izraelskiego życia publicznego okazjonalnie nawoływały do zacieśnienia relacji z tym właśnie ugrupowaniem. W sierpniu 2019 roku w „Israel Hayom”, dzienniku będącym tubą Likudu, pojawił się apel wzywający do oficjalnego dialogu z AfD, podyktowany przekonaniem, że Izrael powinien realizować własne interesy narodowe przez zjednywanie sobie sojuszników wszędzie, gdzie się da. Gazeta przekonywała, że „obecnie największym zagrożeniem dla Izraela i europejskich Żydów nie jest prawica, tylko lewica i jej solidarnościowy elektorat z arabskich i muzułmańskich społeczności imigracyjnych”.
W maju 2020 roku syn premiera, Jair Netanjahu, stał się twarzą AfD za sprawą tweeta, w którym nawoływał do obalenia UE. W reakcji na unijną delegację w Izraelu napisał na Twitterze: „Strefa Schengen jest martwa. Wkrótce podobny los czeka waszą nikczemną globalistyczną organizację. Europa znów będzie wolna, demokratyczna i chrześcijańska!”. Joachim Kuhs, były członek Parlamentu Europejskiego z AfD wykorzystał ten tweet i stworzył grafikę z podobizną Jaira Netanjahu obok jego posta. W połowie października 2023 roku, po masakrze z 7 października, Alexander Gauland z AfD oświadczył w Bundestagu, że „radosne manifestacje na cześć Hamasu na niemieckich ulicach są nie do zniesienia”. Partia domagała się odebrania niemieckiego obywatelstwa zwolennikom Hamasu.
„Izrael to my”Co prawda rząd Netanjahu zachowuje pewną ostrożność w kontaktach z AfD, jednak w relacjach z włoską partią Lega próżno szukać podobnej powściągliwości. Jej lider Matteo Salvini uważa, że Izrael to „twierdza stojąca na straży bezpieczeństwa w Europie” i „bastion zachodnich praw i wartości”, jednocześnie nie szczędząc krytyki unijnemu „niewyważonemu” stanowisku wobec konfliktu izraelsko-palestyńskiego i potępianiu „co kwadrans” Izraela przez Unię. To towarzystwo wzajemnej adoracji szczególnie uwidacznia się, kiedy Salvini sam mówi o sobie jako „o przyjacielu i bracie Izraela” (a Netanjahu nazywa go „wielkim przyjacielem Izraela”). Z kolei były izraelski minister ds. bezpieczeństwa publicznego, spraw strategicznych i informacji Gilad Erdan zwrócił uwagę na wspólne cele: „Jesteśmy partnerami w walce z radykalnym terrorem islamskim, zagrażającym Europie i Izraelowi”.
Wilders za młodu spędził w Izraelu 18 miesięcy jako wolontariusz w jednym z żydowskich osiedli, później odwiedzał ten kraj jeszcze dziesiątki razy i otwarcie wyraża swój podziw dla izraelskich władz.
Salvini podziela ten pogląd, stawiając znak równości między antysemityzmem i nastrojami antyizraelskimi oraz przypisując europejski antysemityzm islamistycznym ekstremistom. Obiecał, że będzie zwalczać „antyizraelskie tendencje” w UE. W połowie października 2023 roku Salvini oświadczył, że ataki Hamasu w Izraelu to „nie była [wojna], tylko barbarzyństwo”. Miesiąc później we włoskich mediach Salvini stwierdził, że „Hamas wykorzystuje cywilów jako ludzkie tarcze”, i dodał, że „świadczy to o bestialstwie tych ludzi. […] Jednakże mam nadzieję, że reakcja Izraela, która po tym, co się stało, jest nieunikniona, będzie mimo wszystko bardzo rozważna”.
Izrael pod rządami Netanjahu nawiązał wyjątkowe relacje z Geertem Wildersem i jego ugrupowaniem Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Partia Wolności), znanym ze swojej antyislamskiej postawy. W przeciwieństwie do innych europejskich skrajnie prawicowych partii Izrael nie postrzega PVV jako ugrupowania antysemickiego czy mającego faszystowskie korzenie. Wilders za młodu spędził w Izraelu 18 miesięcy jako wolontariusz w jednym z żydowskich osiedli, później odwiedzał ten kraj jeszcze dziesiątki razy i otwarcie wyraża swój podziw dla izraelskich władz. „Izrael to światło przewodnie, jedyna demokracja w tym mrocznym, tyrańskim regionie” – oświadczył. „Jest częścią nas i naszej europejskiej tożsamości. Izrael walczy w naszej wojnie. Wojna przeciwko Izraelowi to wojna przeciwko nam. Izrael to my”.
Wilders zdaje się urzekać kierownictwo Likudu swoją retoryką ideologiczną. Twierdzi, że „konflikt izraelsko-palestyński nie ma charakteru terytorialnego, a ci, którzy tak uważają, nie mają pojęcia, o czym mówią. Nawet jeśli Zachodni Brzeg i część Jerozolimy zwrócono by Palestyńczykom, nie będzie to oznaczało końca tego konfliktu. Minie trochę czasu, miesiąc, rok, dekada i zapragną reszty tej ziemi, bowiem mamy do czynienia z konfliktem ideologicznym. Dlatego również rozwiązanie musi być ideologiczne, a nie terytorialne”. Po ataku na izraelskich kibiców piłki nożnej w Amsterdamie w listopadzie 2024 roku, dokonanym przez grupy rzekomo obierające sobie za cel Żydów, Wilders stwierdził, że napastnikami byli „wyłącznie muzułmanie”, „głównie” Marokańczycy, dodając, że „staliśmy się [jako Holandia] Gazą Europy”.
Wilders otwarcie podziwia kierownictwo Likudu. Przyznaje, że podobnie jak on sam, również były premier Ariel Szaron „był mocno demonizowany przez Zachód, jednak był wielkim mężem stanu, który jest dla mnie wzorem”.
Podkopywanie UENetanjahu podjął również zabiegi mające zjednać mu kraje z Grupy Wyszehradzkiej (V4), tj. Węgry, Polskę, Czechy i Słowację. W lipcu 2017 roku odwiedził Węgry podczas szczytu V4. Była to pierwsza wizyta izraelskiego premiera na Węgrzech od czasu przywrócenia węgiersko-izraelskich relacji dyplomatycznych w 1989 roku, która przeszła do historii ze względu na pewien niespodziewany „incydent podsłuchowy”. Podczas spotkania za zamkniętymi drzwiami z liderami V4 ktoś przez nieuwagę nagrał Netanjahu, kiedy ten krytykował UE i zabiegał o poparcie mające podważyć unijny konsensus w sprawie Iranu i konfliktu izraelsko-palestyńskiego. Strategia Netanjahu polegała na stworzeniu sojuszu dyplomatycznego, w którym w zamian za poparcie ze strony V4 na forum UE i ONZ Izrael podzieli się z jego krajami członkowskimi swoim doświadczeniem i kompetencjami w zakresie bezpieczeństwa, cybernetyki, high-tech, rolnictwa i technologii. Okazało się to strzałem w dziesiątkę i doprowadziło do coraz większego zacieśniania więzi między Izraelem i narodami V4.
W lutym 2019 roku w Jerozolimie miał odbyć się pierwszy poza Europą szczyt V4. Został jednak odwołany ze względu na spór dyplomatyczny między Izraelem i Polską, wywołany przez komentarze urzędującego izraelskiego ministra spraw zagranicznych na temat polskiego antysemityzmu, co jednak nie przeszkodziło premierowi Netanjahu ugościć w swojej rezydencji premierów Węgier, Czech i Słowacji. W okresie, kiedy miał odbyć się odwołany szczyt, członkowie V4 wyrażali swoje poparcie dla rządu Netanjahu przez rozmaite działania dyplomatyczne. Wbrew oficjalnym unijnym wytycznym dotyczącym Jerozolimy Czechy otworzyły w tym mieście Instytut Czeski, Słowacja ogłosiła plany otwarcia przedstawicielstwa kulturalno-handlowego, a Węgry otwarły przedstawicielstwo handlowe, uznając je za jerozolimską filię swojej ambasady w Izraelu.
Krajom z V4, w szczególności Węgrom Orbána, silne związki z Izraelem pomagają odpierać krytykę rzekomych antysemickich i ksenofobicznych działań politycznych, a podejście Netanjahu koreluje z ich interesami. Liderzy V4, którzy na domowym podwórku promują etnonacjonalizm, podziwiają asertywną realizację interesów dyplomatycznych i kroków na rzecz bezpieczeństwa Izraela przez Netanjahu, a także wprowadzane przez niego rozwiązania polityczne mające zachować etniczny charakter Izraela. Wyłamując się z zasadniczego stanowiska UE liderzy V4 popierają podejście izraelskich władz do konfliktu izraelsko-palestyńskiego i podzielają izraelski punkt widzenia na sporne kwestie, takie jak migracja, bezpieczeństwo czy ocena zagrożenia.
W sierpniu 2018 roku Netanjahu odwiedził podczas szczytu Krajów Nadbałtyckich Litwę. Tak jak w przypadku węgierskiej wizyty rok wcześniej, również tam izraelski premier przybył po raz pierwszy, co było historycznym momentem, podkreślającym coraz bliższe relacje między dwoma narodami. Jednak waga wizyty wykraczała daleko poza stosunki dwustronne, zahaczając o terytorium szerzej pojętej polityki europejskiej. Po przybyciu do Wilna Netanjahu w zasadzie przyznał, że Izrael pod jego rządami obrał populistyczny, eurosceptyczny kurs, wykorzystując relacje z V4 i innymi krajami Europy Wschodniej, by oddziaływać strategicznie na unijną politykę zagraniczną. Netanjahu oświadczył: „Pragnę, by w nie zawsze przyjaznych stosunkach Unii Europejskiej z Izraelem zapanowała równowaga, która zagwarantuje bardziej sprawiedliwe relacje. […] W tym celu wykorzystuję kontakty z blokami krajów [unijnych], wschodnioeuropejskich, a teraz również z krajami bałtyckimi, choć oczywiście nie koniec na tym”.
Zamykanie uszu na obawy europejskich ŻydówW 2015 roku izraelskie Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych (MFA) wprowadziło „Wytyczne dla komunikacji z populistycznymi skrajnie prawicowymi partiami w Europie”. Dokument jest tajny, jednak wiadomo, że znalazły się w nim trzy główne założenia. Pierwsze: izraelscy ministrowie rządowi i organy rządowe mają zakaz utrzymywania kontaktów z antysemickimi i neonazistowskimi skrajnie prawicowymi partiami populistycznymi, których liderzy i/lub członkowie domagali się unicestwienia Izraela i europejskich komun żydowskich. Drugie: rząd Izraela nie będzie nawiązywać dialogu z daną skrajnie prawicową partią, jeżeli będzie się temu sprzeciwiać lokalna społeczność żydowska. Trzecie: rząd izraelski będzie brać pod uwagę stosunek „krajów o podobnej mentalności” do danej skrajnie prawicowej partii.
Aktualny rząd Netanjahu nie tylko zignorował wytyczne MFA, ale wręcz oficjalnie je zniósł. Minister ds. diaspory Amichaj Szikli jasno i wyraźnie ogłosił koniec izraelskiego bojkotu skrajnie prawicowych partii w Europie.
Pragmatyczne interesy i ideologiczne sympatieKonflikt arabsko-izraelski kształtuje relacje między Europą i Izraelem od 1967 roku. Izrael konsekwentnie postrzega stanowisko Europy wobec konfliktu jako wrogie interesom bezpieczeństwa i bezkrytycznie pokrywające się z perspektywą arabską. Na przestrzeni lat Europa podejmowała próby mediowania w tej napiętej sytuacji w ramach wielostronnych inicjatyw, jak choćby Partnerstwo Eurośródziemnomorskie (EMP), czy jego następczyni, Unia na rzecz Regionu Morza Śródziemnego (UfM). Jednak izolacja Izraela w strukturze tak EMP, jak UfM paradoksalnie popchnęła ten kraj w ramiona europejskich skrajnie prawicowych i populistycznych partii i rządów. Cóż za ironia! EMP, UfM, Europejska Polityka Sąsiedztwa (ENP) zostały stworzone z myślą o budowaniu dialogu wśród partnerów z regionu Morza Śródziemnego, tymczasem jednym z najistotniejszych, choć niezamierzonych skutków tych inicjatyw było zmobilizowanie Izraela, by zbratał się ze skrajną prawicą Europy.
Sojusz Izraela Netanjahu i europejskich sił populistycznej skrajnej prawicy wykracza poza czysto „realistyczne” interesy i obejmuje wspólne wartości i sympatie ideologiczne, które często są otwarcie sprzeczne z podstawowymi unijnymi normami społeczno-politycznymi. Na poziomie pragmatycznym ich relacje oparte są na zasadzie „coś za coś”: europejskie skrajnie prawicowe populistyczne partie i rządy wykorzystują swoje związki z Izraelem, by odpierać zarzuty antysemityzmu, ksenofobii i opowiadania się przeciwko prawom człowieka, jednocześnie uzyskując dostęp do izraelskiej skarbnicy wiedzy i kompetencji w zakresie bezpieczeństwa, technologii cybernetycznych, rolnictwa i branży high-tech. Izrael posługuje się swoimi populistycznymi i nieliberalnymi sojusznikami, by usprawiedliwić kolonialne poczynania i forsować swoje interesy w parlamentach narodowych, unijnych instytucjach, organach ONZ i na innych międzynarodowych forach.
Za tą praktyczną wymianą kryje się głębszy mariaż ideologiczny. Jak na ironię, owe partnerstwa odzwierciedlają wspólne wartości i cele, które mają podważać normy liberalne, tradycyjnie stanowiące fundament unijnej polityki.
Sojusze Izraela z europejskimi skrajnie prawicowymi populistami przede wszystkim mają podkopać podstawowe normy „Europy jako mocarstwa normatywnego”. A ponieważ są to normy kontestowane również wewnątrz UE, zdolność Brukseli do egzekwowania podejścia opartego na koncepcji „potęgi normatywnej” w polityce wewnątrzunijnej i zagranicznej jest coraz mniejsza, co ogranicza również szanse Unii, by wpływać na Izrael. Pod rządami Netanjahu populizm i eurosceptycyzm stały się strategicznymi narzędziami do realizacji celów politycznych Izraela i przekształcania polityki zagranicznej UE tak, by wpisywała się w izraelskie interesy.
Likud Netanjahu i jego europejscy skrajnie prawicowi populistyczni sojusznicy mają te same podstawowe założenia ideologiczne.
Podejście Netanjahu zapewnia wzajemną legitymizację w tym układzie: europejskie populistyczne skrajnie prawicowe partie i rządy przymykają oko na izraelskie zapędy kolonialne na okupowanych terytoriach palestyńskich, a nawet opowiadają się za Jerozolimą jako stolicą Izraela, Izrael z kolei lekceważy ich neonazistowskie korzenie ideologiczne i współczesne tendencje antysemickie.
Netanjahu, tak jak europejscy skrajnie prawicowi populiści i nieliberałowie, utożsamia europejską lewicę i społeczności arabsko-muzułmańskich imigrantów z podstawowymi wyzwaniami na tym kontynencie, upatrując w nich głównego europejskiego zagrożenia dla Żydów w Izraelu i w Europie. Europejskie skrajnie prawicowe populistyczne partie i rządy, głoszące swoje zaangażowanie w zwalczanie antysemityzmu w całej Europie, służą Izraelowi jako sojusznicy ideologiczni na płaszczyźnie etnicznego nacjonalizmu w nadrzędnej walce przeciwko „globalnemu islamowi”. Obie strony zasadniczo sprzeciwiają się imigracji, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem migracji arabskiej i muzułmańskiej.
Owa wspólna perspektywa była szczególnie widoczna podczas spotkania Netanjahu z Orbánem w Jerozolimie, gdzie ten pierwszy oświadczył: „Obaj mamy świadomość, że zagrożenie ze strony radykalnego islamu jest realne. Może on zagrozić Europie. Może zagrozić całemu światu. […] Będąc tutaj, w pierwszej linii walki z radykalnym islamem, Izrael na wiele sposobów broni Europy”.
Likud Netanjahu i jego europejscy skrajnie prawicowi populistyczni sojusznicy mają te same podstawowe założenia ideologiczne: odrzucenie wielokulturowości, odporność na krytykę mediów, wrogość wobec mniejszości i pogarda dla prawa międzynarodowego – czego dowodem jest lekceważąca reakcja Netanjahu na nakaz jego aresztowania wydany przez Międzynarodowy Trybunał Karny. Jest to sojusz, który opiera się na głęboko zakorzenionych rasistowsko-natywistycznych poglądach.
Państwa hubyNetanjahu i jego skrajnie prawicowi populistyczni sojusznicy w Europie dążą do utworzenia tego, co węgierska historyczka Andrea Pető nazwała „nieliberalnym państwem-hubą”. Huba to pasożytujący grzyb, który rośnie na drzewach i przyspiesza ich butwienie. Trudno o trafniejszą metaforę tego typu transformacji politycznej. Niczym grzyb pożerający swojego gospodarza Izrael Netanjahu i europejskie skrajnie prawicowe rządy populistyczne pasożytują na zasobach zdobytych przez ich liberalnych demokratycznych poprzedników, tworząc zależne struktury państwowe. Tego typu model sprawowania władzy wchłania istniejące liberalne demokratyczne instytucje, mechanizmy, kanały finansowania, przekierowując zasoby ze świeckich, nowoczesnych społeczeństw obywatelskich ku nieliberalnym stronnikom po to, by zagwarantować sobie wpływy i pogłębiać je.
W tym sensie związki między Izraelem Netanjahu i skrajnie prawicowymi populistycznymi siłami w Europie wykraczają daleko poza zwykłą instrumentalizację mającą stanowić przeciwwagę dla zewnętrznych nacisków i wprowadzać podziały wśród krajów unijnych oraz organów ONZ. Odzwierciedlają one bowiem głębokie ideologiczne pokrewieństwo i wspólnotę wartości z hubami Europy.
Green Climate Fund looks at capital-market borrowing to meet COP29 goal
The UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF) is considering borrowing money from banks and other investors in order to meet a goal set by governments at COP29 in November to increase spending by a group of funds that support developing countries.
At the talks in Baku, under pressure from small island nations and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), all governments agreed to “pursue efforts to at least triple annual outflows” between 2022 and 2030 from UN climate funds like the GCF.
But with climate finance from wealthy governments faltering, Alain Beauvillard, the GCF’s director of strategy, policy and innovation, told Climate Home that the fund was considering tapping capital markets to help meet this goal.
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He said the GCF has an “ambitious” goal to manage $50 billion by 2030 – set in 2023 by its executive director – but foreign aid budgets are “not growing fast, some are falling and basically Ukraine is taking the greatest part”, so “we need some other sources of funding”.
The GCF will also look at accessing international financial assets called Special Drawing Rights and benefiting from proposals for global taxes on polluting economic sectors, he added.
Climate justiceBut borrowing is controversial. Harjeet Singh, a frequent observer of GCF board meetings and director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation in India, told Climate Home that “turning to capital markets to scale up climate finance may address short-term funding gaps but fundamentally undermines the principles of climate justice”.
In his view, it “prioritises profit-driven projects like renewable energy over critical adaptation efforts and addressing loss and damage – both of which are essential for vulnerable communities bearing the brunt of the climate crisis”.
Those lending money to the GCF on financial markets would expect to be paid back with interest. While clean energy projects generally produce revenue which the GCF could use to pay off lenders, it is harder to make profit from rebuilding a hurricane victim’s house or constructing a seawall to defend against rising sea levels.
The COP29 language about tripling outflows from the climate funds was only added into the finance agreement at midnight on the last night of the tense summit, giving governments no time to debate the exact wording. The amounts and details have yet to be worked out.
Michai Robertson, finance negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), told Climate Home that its inclusion was a compromise made to them and the LDCs, following a dramatic temporary walk-out on the last afternoon of the talks.
While government aid agencies like USAID and multilateral development banks (MDBs) like the World Bank are at least largely controlled by developed countries, the GCF has a board made up of an equal number of developed and developing country representatives.
Aid agencies and MDBs often favour finance in the form of loans, emissions-cutting projects and big countries as recipients of their money. But the GCF has a mandate to invest half of its money in adapting to climate change, 50% of which goes to LDCs, small island developing states and African governments.
Open to interpretationRichard Sherman, a South African climate negotiator who was at COP29, told Climate Home that developing countries assumed that tripling outflows from these funds also meant tripling inflows “and definitely not doing three times more with what they are currently getting”.
“Now it seems the Baku language means everything to anyone,” he said. “This will probably be the start of endless negotiations of what we actually agreed to.”
Sherman warned that the GCF’s board and its trustee – the World Bank – would have to agree if the GCF is to enter the capital markets, adding that getting money from SDRs and solidarity levies would also be “complicated”. He called these proposals “stock-standard developing-country treasury approaches”.
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Some UN funds already borrow money. In 2022, the International Fund for Agricultural Development was the first UN agency other than the World Bank to access the capital markets to lend to rural communities in poverty.
Last Tuesday, the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) – one of the world’s largest multilateral climate funds – issued its first bond, borrowing $500 million to lend to clean technology project developers in developing countries. This process was begun by former CIF head Mafalda Duarte, who now leads the GCF.
Current CIF head Tariye Gbadegesin called the bond issue “a historic moment for climate finance” which would “multiply the funds available for scaling up clean technology and infrastructure in developing countries – not in ten years, but now, when it’s most critically needed”.
She noted that demand for the bonds was more than six times higher than supply, describing this as “an enormous vote of confidence and a sign of the keen market interest in backing high-quality clean energy projects”.
Carbon levy for adaptation fundingWhen it comes to adaptation, the business case for going to the financial markets is far less clear. That leaves the UN climate funds that are focused on supporting projects to help vulnerable communities protect themselves from extreme weather and rising seas with fewer options for meeting the COP29 goal.
The UN’s Adaptation Fund, which has blazed a trail for this type of finance for 17 years, has to go cap in hand to wealthy government donors every year to solicit contributions in a bid to meet an annual target that is now set at $300 million. That is a challenge when national budgets are tight and needs are growing across proliferating climate funds.
For example, the fund garnered contributions of only around $133 million through COP29 last year – and while it’s not living hand to mouth, it has a significant pipeline of projects seeking funding. Given this tough backdrop, its head Mikko Ollikainen told Climate Home it was encouraging to see donor governments commit to tripling outflows, which he took as “a vote of confidence” in the Adaptation Fund’s work.
“The direction of travel is quite clear – that the needs are increasing and the adaptation finance gap is growing, and the decision from Baku would enable us to partly bridge that gap,” he said. “But, of course, this needs to be implemented – and then the finance, the funds would need to materialise to match this target that the (government) parties have set.”
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For the Adaptation Fund, the COP29 decision means increasing its allocations to projects and programmes to $400 million a year by 2030, which translates into an annual growth rate of 25%, Ollikainen said.
There is one other source of finance the Adaptation Fund can look to: countries have agreed it can receive a 5% levy on emissions reductions registered with the new UN carbon market – which could see credits start to change hands this year after its rulebook was finalised at COP29.
But previous experience with a similar levy on an earlier version of a UN offsetting regime, the Clean Development Mechanism, was disappointing. Revenue amounted to only 10% of the Adaptation Fund’s resources due to rock-bottom emissions permit prices.
Ollikainen said “there hasn’t been any sort of authoritative estimate of what we might be expecting” from the new market but welcomed the fact that countries had set a quantitative target for UN climate funds for the first time, signalling they are willing to ensure it is met.
Pressure on fundsTwo other multilateral funds that mainly channel money for adaptation projects in poorer countries – the Least Developed Countries Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund – have struggled even more to get what they need, cancelling donor events at COP29 due to a lack of commitments.
Joe Thwaites, senior advocate for international climate finance with the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council, said the COP29 goal amounts to tripling outflows from all the funds combined to an annual $5.2 billion.
Donor governments will need to make new pledges to help them reach the the target, but it also puts pressure on the funds themselves to do more with the money they have in their coffers, he said, noting that “getting the money out of the door… has been one of the challenges”.
“It doesn’t get countries off the hook but if [the funds] can manage their money better, they could leverage that and get greater outflows off the same capital base,” Thwaites said.
(Reporting by Joe Lo; additional reporting by Megan Rowling; editing by Megan Rowling)
The post Green Climate Fund looks at capital-market borrowing to meet COP29 goal appeared first on Climate Home News.
What happens to kids when their schools are destroyed?
Kids lose so much when a disaster strikes. Too many have lost family members to the wildfires that have raged across Los Angeles in recent days. They’ve lost homes. They’ve lost the sense of security and predictability that so many kids depend on. And, to add insult to injury, many of them have lost their schools.
At least nine schools in the Los Angeles area have been destroyed or severely damaged by the fires. Video posted by the principal of Odyssey Charter School’s south campus in Altadena shows flames still smoldering in the buildings as smoke rises from the playground, blotting out the sky. Marquez Charter Elementary School in Pacific Palisades “is dust,” one parent told The Cut. Meanwhile, thousands more schools were closed last week as communities faced evacuation warnings, power outages, and smoke-filled air, leaving more than 600,000 students out of school.
Unfortunately, these disruptions are part of a new normal for kids as climate disasters become more frequent. Last year, Americans experienced 27 weather-related disasters costing $1 billion or more in damage, the second-highest number ever — meanwhile, the number of days American schools are closed for extreme heat has doubled in recent years.
There’s often nothing officials can do to avoid a closure, especially if schools are damaged or without power. But “when schools close, kids aren’t learning,” said Melinda Morrill, an economics professor at North Carolina State University who has studied the impact of closures.
Research on school closures after hurricanes Matthew and Florence in North Carolina is sobering. Especially in the early grades, “students didn’t bounce back,” said Cassandra R. Davis, a professor of public policy at UNC Chapel Hill who studied the closures. In some cases, the academic impact persisted for more than a year.
Beyond academics, millions of students rely on their schools for mental health support or services like speech therapy; millions more need the free or reduced-price food school cafeterias provide. Schools are also a crucial source of stability in many children’s lives, a place they go five days a week to see their friends, their teachers, their favorite books, their art on the walls, the special stuffed animal in the calm-down corner. Losing all that can be a huge emotional blow.
The students from Odyssey Charter School are meeting for now at a local Boys and Girls Club, where teachers and staff have been visiting them, principal Bonnie Brimecombe told me. Some kids who used to have big, vibrant personalities are “just not talking, and they just sort of sit,” she said. Others “are just hugging you so tight and they don’t let go.”
Read Next Climate change threatens the mental well-being of youths. Here’s how to help them cope. Bernard J. Wolfson, KFF Health NewsExperts, educators, and families are just beginning to understand what helps students recover after storms or fires devastate their schools. But one thing they agree on is that districts and policymakers need to start preparing schools and students for the next disaster — today. “It’s going to keep happening over and over and over,” said Susanna Joy Smith, a mom of two in Asheville, North Carolina, whose kids were out of school for a month last year after Hurricane Helene. “We need to learn from these experiences and we need to adapt.”
Losing school hurts kids academically and emotionallyIn the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD, all schools closed for at least two days last week as the fires raged. Many reopened on Monday, but as of Monday evening around 10 remained closed, some because they were in evacuation zones and three because they had been badly damaged or destroyed, the office of LAUSD Deputy Superintendent of Business Services and Operations Pedro Salcido told me. Students from Marquez and another destroyed elementary school will be relocated to two nearby schools for the rest of the school year. All 23 schools in the Pasadena Unified School District, which includes Altadena and other areas devastated by the Eaton Fire, remain closed this week.
It’s a disruption sadly familiar to more and more kids and families around the country. In 2018, the Camp Fire destroyed 8 of the 9 schools in Paradise, California. The same year, Hurricane Florence raged through North Carolina, forcing some schools to close for as long as 26 days. Then, last year, Hurricane Helene hit the western part of the state, destroying at least one school and leaving others closed for weeks due to flood damage and lack of power or water.
School closures after Hurricane Florence were associated with significant drops in students’ math and reading test scores, Morrill found, with the impact seen across demographic groups and among both higher- and lower-performing students. “All students are affected,” Morrill said.
For Smith’s older son, “missing a month of the second grade is just huge,” especially since the early grades are so important for building reading skills.
Many school districts are shifting to remote instruction for at least some weather-related closures, like snow days. But remote school was difficult for many students during COVID lockdowns, a time when kids experienced significant learning loss. Not every kid has access to a laptop or internet connection, and neurodivergent students or those with learning differences may especially struggle with virtual learning.
The students at Odyssey are scared of a return to the days of pandemic virtual learning, Brimecombe told me. “There’s so much trauma from their experiences being on Zoom.”
The impact of missed days can also compound when disaster strikes the same kids again and again. In places like North Carolina, where “we typically get hit by a tropical storm every other year,” students can find their education disrupted again and again, pushing them further behind, Davis said. “It’s like a constant catch-up.”
Read Next Extreme heat is making schools hotter — and learning harder Jessica Kutz, The 19thMeanwhile, students can struggle emotionally long after a disaster is over. Months after Hurricane Matthew, teachers had to stop class during rainstorms to help students who were afraid of getting “washed away,” Davis said.
In the wake of Helene, Smith’s younger son, who is 4, is very aware of the fact that “the lights could go out overnight and they might not go on for weeks,” she told me. “It’s heartbreaking, but it’s also the reality these kids are growing up in.”
Kids face a complicated recovery, tooAdults can still help kids cope with this reality, experts say. That means learning how to adjust curricula to account for lost time as well as providing mental health support to both students and teachers, Davis said.
Kids also need to learn about climate change and disaster preparedness in school, Smith said. “They’re just life skills for kids today.” Vox’s Allie Volpe has tips for preparing kids for climate disasters; LAist has a list of resources for talking to kids about fires, specifically.
Making school buildings more climate-resilient is also important, experts say, something school districts around the country are already working on. And when disaster does strike, districts need to figure out how to get kids back to school as quickly as possible and arrange makeup time for the days they missed, Morrill said. It’s not enough to hold “weekend classes for the bottom 10 percent,” she told me. “Everybody is going to experience some harm.”
At Odyssey, the first priority is finding classroom space kids can return to — school leaders are reaching out to local churches and rental spaces, and have launched a GoFundMe to help with costs. They hope to be back in person next week.
When they are together in a new space, “we’re not going to start with learning,” Brimecombe said. “We’re going to start with community. We’re going to start with social-emotional lessons. We’re going to start with joy.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What happens to kids when their schools are destroyed? on Jan 19, 2025.
Global economy could shrink 50% between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries
The global economy could face a 50 percent loss in gross domestic product between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonize and restore nature, according to a new report.
The stark warning from risk management experts at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, or IFoA, hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic well-being from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises, and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses math and statistics to analyze financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.
Their report was published after data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service showed climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5 Celsius target for the first time in 2024, supercharging extreme weather.
Without urgent action to accelerate decarbonization, remove carbon from the atmosphere, and repair nature, the plausible worst-case hit to global economies would be 50 percent in the two decades before 2090, the IFoA report said.
At 3 C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.
Read Next New data shows just how bad the climate insurance crisis has become Tik RootSandy Trust, the lead author of the report, said there was no realistic plan in place to avoid this scenario.
He said economic predictions, which estimate that damages from global heating would be as low as 2 percent of global economic production for a 3 C rise in global average surface temperature, were inaccurate and were blinding political leaders to the risks of their policies.
The climate risk assessments being used by financial institutions, politicians and civil servants to assess the economic effects of global heating were wrong, the report said, because they ignored the expected severe effects of climate change such as tipping points, sea temperature rises, migration, and conflict as a result of global heating.
“[They] do not recognize there is a risk of ruin. They are precisely wrong, rather than being roughly right,” the report said.
If these risks were taken into account the world faced an increasing risk of “planetary insolvency,” where the Earth’s systems were so degraded that humans could no longer receive enough of the critical services they relied on to support societies and economies.
“You can’t have an economy without a society, and a society needs somewhere to live,” said Trust.
“Nature is our foundation, providing food, water, and air, as well as the raw materials and energy that power our economy. Threats to the stability of this foundation are risks to future human prosperity, which we must take action to avoid.”
Read Next Does talking about climate ‘tipping points’ inspire action — or defeat? Kate YoderThe report, named “Planetary Solvency — finding our balance with nature,” criticizes the dominant economic theory used by governments in the U.K., U.S. and across the developed world, which focuses on what humans can take from the planet to create growth for themselves and fails to take into account the real risks from nature degradation to societies and economies.
The report called for a paradigm shift by political leaders, civil servants, and governments to tackle global heating. It said: “Leaders and decision-makers across the globe need to understand why these changes are needed.
“It is these extremes that should drive policy decisions … policymakers are currently unable to hear warnings about risks to ongoing human progress or unwilling to act upon them with the urgency required.”
The report proposes a planetary solvency risk dashboard, to provide information to support policymakers to drive human activity within the finite bounds of the Earth.
Tim Lenton, the chair of climate change and Earth systems science at the University of Exeter, and a co-author on the report, said: “Current approaches are failing to properly assess escalating planetary risks or help control them. Planetary solvency applies the established approaches of risk professionals to our life-support system and finds it in jeopardy. It offers a clear way of seeing global risks and prioritizing action to limit them.”
toolTips('.classtoolTips2','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Global economy could shrink 50% between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries on Jan 18, 2025.
Wildfire smoke is always toxic. LA’s is even worse.
Rachel Wald always has a bit of a cold. That’s life when you have two kids younger than 5, she says. You’re always a little sick. But it wasn’t until after Wald and her family voluntarily fled the fires in Los Angeles that she realized the cough, sore throat, and itchy eyes she couldn’t shake were being exacerbated by the fires plaguing the city. “I don’t think I was really recognizing how much of it was not the cold, but the smoke,” she said.
Wald, who is a director at a health and environment center at the University of Southern California, is among the lucky ones. Her neighborhood in central L.A. was never directly threatened. Her house is intact; her children, husband, and all they own are safe. Nevertheless, Wald, like millions of other Angelenos, can’t escape the health effects of the blazes. Experts expect those impacts to linger.
The wind-driven fires that have leveled a broad swath of Los Angeles have killed at least 25 people, consumed approximately 12,000 homes, schools, and other structures, and burned more than 40,000 acres since January 7. In the aftermath of such disasters, the focus is rightfully on treating the injured, mourning the dead, and beginning the long process of recovery. In time, though, attention shifts to the health consequences that reverberate days, weeks, even years after the danger has passed.
Wildfires, a natural part of many ecosystems, particularly in the West, typically occur in forests or where wildlands meet communities. It is extraordinarily rare to see them penetrate an American city, but that’s exactly what happened in the nation’s second-largest metropolis.
As state and federal agencies assess the damage, researchers say the health effects of the wildfires must be tallied just as meticulously.
“These fires are different from previous quote-unquote ‘wildfires,’ because there are so many structures that burned,” said Yifang Zhu, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Everything in the households got burned — cars, metal pipes, plastics.”
Wildfire smoke is toxic. Burning trees and shrubs produce very fine particulate matter, known by the shorthand PM 2.5, which burrow deep into the lungs and can even infiltrate the bloodstream, causing cold- and flu-like symptoms in the short term, and heart disease, lung cancer, and other chronic issues over time.
But the fires that raced through Los Angeles burned thousands of homes, schools, historic buildings, and even medical clinics, blanketing the city in thick smoke. For several days after the first fire started, the city’s air quality index, or AQI, exceeded 100, the threshold, typically seen during wildfires, at which air becomes unhealthy to breathe for children, the elderly, and those with asthma. In some parts of the city, the AQI reached 500, a number rarely seen and always hazardous for everyone.
At the moment, air pollution experts know how much smoke fills the air. That’s shown improvement in recent days. But they don’t know what’s in it. “What are the chemical mixtures in this smoke?” asked Kai Chen, an environmental scientist at the Yale School of Public Health. “In addition to fine particulate matter, there are potentially other hazardous and carcinogenic organic compounds — gas pollutants, trace metals, and microplastics.”
Previous research shows that the spikes in unhealthy air quality seen during such events lead to higher rates of hospitalizations for issues like asthma, and even contribute to heart attacks among those with that chronic disease. A 2024 study on the long-term effects of smoke exposure in California showed that particulate matter from wildfires in the state from 2008 to 2018 contributed to anywhere from 52,000 to 56,000 premature deaths. A health assessment of 148 firefighters who worked the Tubbs Fire, which burned more than 36,000 acres in Northern California in 2017 and destroyed an unusually high number of structures, found elevated levels of the PFAS known as forever chemicals, heavy metals, and flame retardants in their blood and urine.
The L.A. County Department of Public Health has formally urged people to stay inside and wear masks to protect themselves from windblown toxic dust and ash. Air quality measurements don’t take these particles into account, which means the air quality index doesn’t reveal the extent of contaminants in the air.
Zhu and her colleagues have been collecting samples of wildfire smoke in neighborhoods near the fires. It’ll be months before that data is fully analyzed, but Zhu suspects she will find a dangerous mix of chemicals, including, potentially, asbestos and lead — materials used in many buildings constructed before the 1970s.
The risk will linger even after the smoke clears. The plumes that wafted over the landscape will deposit chemicals into drinking water supplies and contaminate soil. When rains do come, they’ll wash toxic ash into streams and across the land, said Fernando Rosario-Ortiz, an environmental engineer and interim dean of the University of Colorado Boulder environmental engineering program. “There’s a lot of manmade materials that are now being combusted. The potential is there for contamination,” he said, noting that little research on how toxic ash and other byproducts of wildfires in urban areas currently exists. “What we don’t have a lot of information on is what happens now.”
After the Camp Fire razed Paradise, California, in 2018, water utilities found high levels of volatile organic compounds in drinking water. Similar issues have arisen in places like Boulder County, Colorado, where the Marshall Fire destroyed nearly 1,000 structures in 2021, Rosario-Ortiz said, though the presence of a contaminant in a home doesn’t necessarily mean it will be present in high levels in the water. Still, several municipal water agencies in Los Angeles issued preemptive advisories urging residents not to drink tap water in neighborhoods near the Palisades and Eaton fires. It’ll be weeks before they know exactly what’s in the water.
As wildfires grow ever more intense and encroach upon urban areas, cities and counties must be prepared to monitor the health impacts and respond to them. “This is the first time I’ve ever even witnessed or heard anything like this,” said Zhu, who raised her daughter in Los Angeles and has lived there for decades, said. “Even being in the field studying wildfires and air quality impacts, I never imagined that a whole neighborhood, a whole community in Palisades, would burn down.”
Wald is back home. She’s still got a nasty cough, but her other symptoms are starting to subside as the smoke in her neighborhood clears. The fires gave her a scare, but she’s not making long-term plans to move on. “I wouldn’t say that here where I am right now, I’m that worried,” she said. “But, I mean, it’s not great.”
toolTips('.classtoolTips4','An acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are a class of chemicals used in everyday items like nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and food packaging that have proven to be dangerous to human health. Also called “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down over time, PFAS can be found lingering nearly everywhere — in water, soil, air, and the blood of people and animals.');
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfire smoke is always toxic. LA’s is even worse. on Jan 17, 2025.
Wall Street’s faltering on climate action opens up opportunity for European banks
Lucie Pinson is the founder and executive director of Paris-based NGO Reclaim Finance.
The abrupt exit of the six biggest US banks from the UN’s Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) is a disturbing sign of the shallowness of these institutions’ professed commitment to acting on climate. It is also a sign of their willingness to preemptively show subservience to the incoming Trump administration.
The question now is whether other banks will follow the example of their US counterparts – especially given the rise of right-wing politicians in Europe and Canada who seek to halt action on climate – or if the remaining banks in the NZBA will now push for more ambition from the alliance, and strengthen their own climate commitments.
Some European bank officials have privately complained in the past that they would like the NZBA guidelines to be stronger but that US members were blocking progress. The European and other banks in the NZBA can now show that they were not just hiding behind the US banks’ obstructionist skirts, and act to increase the NZBA’s ambition.
The recent exodus of the Wall Street banks is hardly a surprise. At least some of them reportedly threatened to leave the NZBA two years ago when red-state officials threatened them with antitrust lawsuits. The banks stayed in then because the NZBA and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), an associated alliance for all types of financial institutions, both clarified that none of their recommendations were compulsory.
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The suspension of activities by another net-zero alliance representing big money managers is one more sign of financial firms’ fear of retribution from the Trump administration and emboldened right-wing politicians at the state level.
The Net Zero Asset Manager (NZAM) initiative’s requirements of its members were so weak as to be to mainly symbolic – and it shows how much fossil fuel companies are concerned about their continued access to capital that the politicians they fund will attack even the most milquetoast climate initiative from the finance sector.
Action with or without voluntary bodyRegardless of their NZBA membership, the big US banks have never exhibited any real interest in restricting fossil fuel finance. JPMorgan Chase provided US$41 billion in finance for oil and gas and coal companies in 2023, billions more than any other bank. Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo were all in the top five global bankers of fossil fuels between 2016 and 2023.
In contrast, some of the largest European banks have shown that another path is possible.
While still falling short of the action required by science to stop fuelling climate change, particularly on LNG (liquefied natural gas), French giants BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole have both committed to end the facilitation of bond issuances for oil and gas companies. Société Générale has a target to cut its credit exposure to oil and gas producers by 80% by 2030. These three banks have each more than halved their volumes of fossil fuel finance between 2020 and 2023. Additionally, Dutch bank ING will stop funding LNG projects after next year.
LA fires show human cost of climate-driven ‘whiplash’ between wet and dry extremes
Yet none of these robust measures and targets were due to the banks’ membership of the NZBA.
The NZBA does not require its members to restrict financing for oil, gas or coal – not even for those companies that are doing the most to expand fossil fuel production. Members are required to set targets for high-emitting sectors, but although the targets are recommended to be 1.5°C-aligned, the NZBA does nothing to ensure this.
No clear target-setting requirementsA lack of clear requirements on target-setting from the NZBA means that its members have a bewildering array of target types, many of which are deeply flawed and unlikely to lead to real-world emission reductions. The most problematic targets are those based on “financed emissions”.
This methodology attributes the emissions from corporations to their banks using a formula that divides lending exposure by corporate value. The resulting number changes as the market value of the companies in a bank’s sectoral portfolio rises, so the bank’s financed emissions for that sector will fall even if real emissions stay the same.
French bank BPCE, like most other major European banks such as HSBC, Deutsche Bank or UBS, has set only a financed emissions target for the oil and gas sector - in sharp contrast to the banks mentioned above that have set targets to reduce their lending to oil and gas companies.
Provided oil and gas company share prices rise sufficiently, BPCE could meet its target without reducing its finance to these companies, and without these companies cutting their emissions – as Barclays did in 2023, seven years ahead of the target year.
European banks must push NZBA for more ambitionGiven their mixed track record so far, it is also possible that European banks could use the US exodus as an excuse to backtrack on their climate commitments, and even for pushing back on recently adopted related regulations. BPCE’s “Vision 2030”, published in June last year, is one example of an important European bank moving backwards on climate.
Some EU business groups have successfully lobbied to reopen key Green Deal legislation. And while we do not yet know how far the changes will go, some banks may join their push to go beyond mere clarifications and simplifications, and dismantle new reporting and due diligence obligations.
To reform climate COPs, we should start with the voting rules
The last of the US banks to announce they were quitting the NZBA was JPMorgan Chase. Their announcement was made on January 7 — the very same day that the catastrophic fires broke out in Los Angeles.
Wall Street may escape the wrath of Trump by appearing not to care about climate change, but financial institutions will not escape the wrath of climate change unless they show the courage to stop financing the expansion of fossil fuels.
The post Wall Street’s faltering on climate action opens up opportunity for European banks appeared first on Climate Home News.
Ted Cruz Wrongly Accuses Biden Administration of ‘Slow Walking’ LNG Project Application Review
At this week’s Transportation Secretary hearing, Senator Ted Cruz accused the Biden Administration of “thoughtlessly and needlessly” forcing the Delfin LNG project to restart its application from scratch, “after slow-walking it for more than five years.”
But Cruz has it wrong. Delfin made major changes to their application that didn’t align with what was originally approved, wasting valuable federal resources and taxpayer money—and they’re not the only ones struggling to prove new offshore LNG export terminals are in the public’s best interest.
At this week’s Transportation Secretary hearing, Senator Ted Cruz accused the Biden Administration of “thoughtlessly and needlessly” forcing the Delfin LNG project to restart its application from scratch. But Cruz has it wrong. Read more in our blog: https://t.co/XVraWaRKuK pic.twitter.com/fcJLcY5VkT
— Earthworks (@Earthworks) January 17, 2025 What is the Delfin LNG ProjectDelfin LNG is one of many new and expanding LNG projects concentrated in Texas and Louisiana that are facing widespread opposition due to the harmful impacts fracking and LNG exports have on air and water quality, as well as their contribution to the climate crisis. Despite these concerns, Senator Cruz has been a vocal advocate for expanding LNG export capacity through projects like Delfin. This push comes even as the U.S. already holds the title of the world’s largest LNG exporter and global demand for U.S. LNG declines.
Texas-based Delfin Midstream is heavily invested in exporting domestically fracked gas from “floating” LNG export terminals to international buyers. The Delfin LNG project was their flagship effort to get into the export game with an LNG export terminal located off the coast of Cameron Parish, Louisiana that would receive gas from onshore pipelines, liquefy it on-site, and then load it onto LNG carriers for global distribution. Delfin could make record-breaking profits at the expense of the marine environment and frontline communities—including Cruz’s own constituents. Delfin Midstream has already invested millions in pipelines, compressor stations and tankers for the project, so they are pushing hard for federal approval of their offshore port.
Delfin LNG is one of many new and expanding LNG projects concentrated in Texas and Louisiana that are facing widespread opposition The Truth Behind Delfin’s Application DenialOn March 13, 2017, two years after the application was received, the Maritime Administration (MARAD) approved the Delfin LNG project with certain conditions outlined in a Record of Decision (ROD). However, Delfin LNG failed to comply with the original conditions of the ROD and made significant changes without the required review, ultimately causing the project to fall out of compliance. If Delfin LNG wants to pursue the project, they will have to reapply.
“In the seven years since the ROD was issued, widespread changes were made to the project, including to the project ownership, design, financing, and operations,” MARAD said in their decision. “These changes resulted in a revised proposal that is not the same as that approved under the ROD, and as noted below, will require a thorough, statutorily required, interagency and public review.”
An article in Trade Winds publicizes the application denial. Exporting More LNG Can Jeopardize Energy IndependenceContrary to Cruz’s and Trump’s stated values, increasing LNG exports risks undermining energy security and affordability. Exporting large quantities of LNG threatens energy independence by straining domestic reserves, leaving the U.S. more vulnerable to supply shortages during extreme weather events, geopolitical conflicts, or unexpected demand spikes. Expanding LNG exports further embeds the U.S. in volatile global energy markets, making domestic energy prices more susceptible to international events and competition.
Sen. Ted Cruz speaks at the nomination hearing for the Transportation Secretary on January 15, 2025. Other Offshore Applications Highlight Issues Facing the LNG IndustryDelfin LNG is not the only company struggling to prove their proposals for new offshore LNG export terminals are in the public’s best interest.
- West Delta LNG: on hold for six years because applicants can’t demonstrate financial capability, compliance with navigation and high-seas use, and use of best technology to minimize environmental impact. In a recent letter, LNG 21’s CEO cited “broader challenges in the LNG industry” as reasons for needing more time.
- New Fortress Energy FLNG: Since October 2022, MARAD has been waiting for an updated, safer design of the project that the applicant has yet to provide. This setback is particularly damaging to New Fortress, which had planned eight more projects in Texas and Louisiana and invested hundreds of millions in old platforms.
Delfin LNG and other company’s inability to support their project plans undermines the crucial review process that federal agencies like MARAD use to assess a project’s impact on communities, the environment, and the economy. Our senators should support a review process that prioritizes the public’s interest, not align with corporate interests that undermine responsible decision-making for the benefit of fossil fuel executives.
The post Ted Cruz Wrongly Accuses Biden Administration of ‘Slow Walking’ LNG Project Application Review appeared first on Earthworks.
Climate Change and Sewage: A Dangerous Combination for Coastal Communities
As rising sea levels and climate change-induced storms batter coastlines the world over, one threat often flies under the radar: sewage pollution.
Today many tropical coastal communities on the frontlines of climate change find themselves battling not just erosion and flooding, but also crumbling sanitation systems. Sea-level rise and storm surges, especially in rural and low-resource areas, bring saltwater pouring into inland spaces, where it corrodes pipes, damages pit latrines, and floods freshwater aquifers with sewage-laden salty water.
More frequent and severe storms flood pit latrines and septic tanks and overwhelm treatment plants with stormwater, causing uncontrolled discharge. As these systems fail, overflowing waste contaminates groundwater, soil, and water bodies, increasing the risk of waterborne diseases, exacerbating existing inequalities, and creating unsafe conditions for sanitation workers.
As we’ve seen in our work studying coastal pollution, the damage to sanitation systems is not just a human health issue (though that’s bad enough). It has profound environmental consequences. Sewage carries pathogens and high concentrations of nutrients and organic matter that cause coral disease and mortality, generate algae blooms that smother seagrass meadows, weaken the root systems of mangroves, and kill fish.
The waste also increases the vulnerability of coastal ecosystems to climate change. For instance, sewage makes corals more sensitive to marine heatwaves. The weakened mangrove forests are more susceptible to erosion from sea-level rise and are less able to store carbon. Nutrients and higher temperatures combined amplify algae blooms.
Degradation of coastal ecosystems, meanwhile, creates a vicious cycle in which damaged sanitation systems lead to more pollution that further harms ecosystems, making them less resilient to climate impacts and less able to protect coastal communities — and results in yet more damage to sanitation systems.
To break this dangerous pattern, we must adopt integrated approaches that link sanitation with ecosystem conservation. The benefits are clear — climate-resilient sanitation systems result in healthier coastal communities and ecosystems.
So why does so much sewage continue to enter our coastal ecosystems? One reason is a lack of funding. Pollution mitigation activities received just 3.9% of all philanthropic funding for oceans between 2010 and 2022. Public funding and development finance for sanitation similarly lags, with the annual funding gap estimated to be as high as $140 billion.
In response to these challenges, a growing alliance of international organizations, global research institutions, and practitioners in the fields of water, sanitation, and conservation have formed the Climate Resilient Sanitation Coalition. The Coalition has partnered with the Green Climate Fund, the world’s largest climate fund, to develop step-by-step advice on designing sanitation systems that can withstand climate impacts.
For the first time, sanitation projects that incorporate climate adaptation and mitigation strategies will soon be eligible for funding from the GCF.
For example, the fund could finance projects that reduce sanitation’s negative impact on coastal ecosystems and their ability to store carbon.
This is a game changer — a crucial shift recognizing that some of our greatest challenges can be tackled together. This framework also serves as a powerful basis for attracting additional funding streams, opening doors for other climate finance sources and conservation investments to support sanitation projects.
In facing the complex challenges of climate resilience, it’s clear that neither sanitation nor conservation can go it alone. These sectors, often seen as separate, are inherently linked — each affecting the other in profound and cascading ways.
Recognizing that the climate resilience of coastal communities is dependent on both robust sanitation systems and healthy coastal ecosystems may require a shift in perspective, seeing sanitation not just as an infrastructure and development challenge but as a vital piece of coastal ecosystem stewardship.
We must also shift our view of ecosystems as the passive recipients of waste to dynamic, protective systems essential to human health and resilience. In doing so we not only protect today’s coastal communities but lay the foundation for future generations to inherit coastlines that are not just resilient, but thriving.
Scroll down to find our “Republish” button Previously in The Revelator:Could Cleaning the Tigris River Help Repair Iraq’s Damaged Reputation?
The post Climate Change and Sewage: A Dangerous Combination for Coastal Communities appeared first on The Revelator.
Carbon Dioxide Levels Rose by a Record Amount Last Year
Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever before, putting hopes of limiting warming in jeopardy.
Joe Biden was America’s first climate president. Did it matter?
When Joe Biden first became president, some found it hard to believe that he cared very much about climate change.
With a global pandemic raging, the former vice president and longtime senator pitched his 2020 campaign as a return to normalcy and a referendum on the erratic leadership of Donald Trump. His campaign pledges to ban drilling on federal lands and spend trillions of dollars to decarbonize the economy — though they amounted to among the most ambitious climate agenda ever put forward by a major-party candidate — were widely seen as consolation prizes to skeptical progressives and climate hawks, like those who had backed Senator Bernie Sanders or former Washington Governor Jay Inslee in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
It’s clear now that these skeptics underestimated the outgoing president. Biden’s climate agenda, broader and more ambitious than that of any U.S. president before him, is poised to stand as the most consequential feat of his presidency, especially given his self-evident failure to “heal the soul of the nation” by ushering it into a post-Trump era. He succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, a misleadingly titled law that amounts to an unprecedented subsidy for renewable energy and climate-friendly technologies like electric vehicles. The measure triggered a wave of investment that has begun to reshape the nation’s economy and finally put the U.S. within reach of its commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
“I think Biden will go down in history as passing the biggest climate bill that was ever passed in the world’s history,” said Sean Casten, a Democratic member of Congress from Illinois (and former contributor to Grist).
If Biden’s presidency represents a major step forward in the climate fight, though, it is also a cautionary tale about the limits of climate policy in the United States. The success of the IRA shows that a massive clean energy push is politically viable, under the right circumstances. (Whether or not it’s politically advantageous, or even prudent, is a story that the 2024 election called into question.) But Biden’s attempts to restrict fossil fuel production throughout his presidency were far less successful — not only did his push to curb oil and natural gas production get mired in litigation before it could bear any real fruit, but it also generated political backlash that never really dissipated.
It’s too early to tell whether Biden’s comprehensive climate policy — feeding renewable energy with the proverbial carrot and punishing fossil fuels with the stick, essentially — is a historical anomaly or a preview of how future Democratic administrations might tackle the issue. An even more fraught question is whether Biden’s renewable energy victory will prove durable. Even though Biden revolutionized U.S. climate policy, the public was barely aware that he did anything at all on the issue. Donald Trump now has four years to claw that progress back.
Read Next Most Americans don’t know the country’s biggest climate law helps the climate Kate YoderBiden took office at a moment when passing a Green New Deal-inspired climate plan seemed almost feasible: Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic had demonstrated a new appetite for massive government spending to kickstart the economy, as demonstrated by the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that passed early in Biden’s term.
This was the political environment that gave birth to “Build Back Better,” a governing agenda that encompassed all the major legislative priorities that the Democratic Party had developed since the first Barack Obama administration. Months of public and private haggling within the Democratic party ensued. In the end, the only progressive priority that survived in anything close to its fullest form was climate change.
This surely has something to do with the fact that concern about climate change has only grown since Democrats’ first efforts to pass a major climate bill in 2010 — and the fact that activists like those in the Sunrise Movement staged dramatic demonstrations that kept the issue at the top of the party’s agenda. Still, to this day nobody can say for sure why the Democrats of 2022 ended up passing a pathbreaking climate bill rather than, say, the “care economy” proposals that were another major pillar of Build Back Better.
By many accounts, it was the war in Ukraine, which exposed the dangers of global reliance on Russian natural gas, that launched energy to the top of Democrats’ agenda. Suddenly, diversifying the country’s energy sources to include more wind, solar, and geothermal energy, along with increased battery storage, was something that all 50 Democratic senators could theoretically agree on — even the party’s most conservative member, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who’d once released a campaign ad in which he fired a rifle at the party’s Obama-era climate change bill.
“Joe Manchin clearly believed in this,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way. “He could have walked away at any point.”
But nothing — not Manchin’s willingness to play ball, not the war in Ukraine, and certainly not any clamoring from Biden’s 2020 majority — can fully explain what inspired the party to tackle climate change head-on. In the view of Casten, the Democratic representative from Illinois, the IRA got done thanks to the unsung work of a humble House committee.
In 2019, after Democrats took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi revived a committee that hadn’t existed since the chamber’s failed efforts to tackle climate change in the Obama years. The Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, Pelosi told The New York Times in 2018, would “prepare the way with evidence” for future climate legislation. In 2020, months before Trump left the White House, committee chair Kathy Castor, a representative from Florida, and her colleagues (including Casten) released a 500-page smorgasbord of recommendations that a future president could use to develop a climate agenda. Unlike prior reports from the first iteration of the committee, which focused on making carbon emissions more costly, this report was chock-full of incentives that could entice energy utilities and American homeowners alike to adopt clean energy.
“We relied almost exclusively on carrots rather than sticks,” Casten said. “Pelosi’s skill in holding all factions of the Democratic House together and figuring out how to get both the infrastructure bill and the climate bill done is really why that stuff survived.
“Kathy gave her the recipe, and Pelosi did the cooking,” Casten added.
House Democrats applaud after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill with $369 billion in tax breaks and other funding for clean energy programs. Drew Angerer / Getty ImagesBut Biden’s team knew that they had a limited window of time to turn this long-awaited policy platter into a bill that the Senate could pass and the president could sign. According to White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi, in his meetings with congressional leaders Biden insisted that climate and energy provisions remain at the center of Build Back Better. The result was the IRA.
“Every single time, he brought up the importance of carrying forward climate and clean energy,” Zaidi told Grist.
Now, as incoming president Donald Trump prepares to take a hatchet to the nation’s environmental policies for a second time, the power of the IRA is beginning to come into view. The climate component of the bill revolves around incentives that encourage households, businesses, state governments, and even school districts to adopt clean energy and reduce emissions. These were specifically designed to have political resilience: States and private parties don’t often turn down free money or readily pass up the opportunity for more economic development. If Trump tries to repeal Biden’s clean energy tax credits, the thinking is that he’ll run into opposition from members of his own party, who have constituents that are starting to feel the benefits of Biden-era investments in their communities.
According to projections from the Rhodium Group, a leading climate research firm, the IRA will reduce U.S. carbon emissions by up to 42 percent from its peak levels. While this assessment assumes cooperation from banks, corporations, and even oil companies, most other projections agree that the law will put the U.S. within striking distance of Biden’s goal of halving emissions by the end of this decade.
But the IRA only accomplishes the first part of what most climate advocates believe is supposed to be a two-step process: Entice decarbonization with incentives, punish carbon intensity with rules and regulations. Dangle the carrot, beat with the stick.
The passage of the IRA was a tremendous political feat. But all the while, the Biden administration’s other climate efforts were starting to run aground.
Read Next Lead in the water and chloroprene in the air: Whom does the EPA protect? Lylla YounesEven as climate hawks celebrated the passage of the IRA, the United States was on the brink of becoming the world’s largest-ever producer of fossil fuels, pulling almost enough crude oil out of the ground each day to supply all of Europe. The technological advances of the fracking boom had allowed drillers to more than double production of both oil and natural gas since 2010, and oil became a key part of the nation’s trade balance after President Obama lifted a long-standing ban on crude oil exports in 2015.
Biden’s main attempt to stem this massive tide was through an unambiguous campaign promise: “no new drilling on federal lands, period.” Though federal lands and waters account for only around a quarter of U.S. oil production, and around 10 percent of natural gas production, Biden’s pledge sent a clear signal: He was going to use the biggest tool available to the president to slow the growth of U.S. fossil fuel production.
But this attempt to restrict fossil fuel supply met with far greater opposition than the Inflation Reduction Act, and was far less successful. Just after taking office, Biden ordered the Interior Department, which manages federal lands and waters, to pause all new oil and gas lease sales pending a review of their climate impacts. This pause soon fell victim to a tangle of contradictory legal rulings around the scope of executive authority, an issue where courts have been happy to rein in presidential power. A federal court in Louisiana declared in early 2022 that the administration could not pause all lease sales, accepting a conservative argument that the executive branch was overreaching in its interpretation of federal law. But after the Interior Department held a lease sale, a separate court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the administration had erred in doing so without considering the climate impacts of increased oil production — boxing Biden in between contradictory mandates.
In the background, a post-pandemic spike in gasoline prices had changed the optics of Biden’s drilling pledge for the worse. While new drilling leases on federal lands have a negligible impact on gasoline prices — new leases wouldn’t produce new gas for the market for close to a decade — Republicans and oil industry figures slammed the administration at every opportunity for what Wyoming Senator John Barasso called “attack[ing] American energy.” The attacks seemed to stick. By the time Biden and Manchin negotiated the IRA in 2022, the anti-oil position had become a political loser, and Manchin was able to negotiate a provision in the climate law requiring new lease sales on federal lands and in the Gulf of Mexico.
The legal ping-pong continued after the IRA passed. With its hand finally forced by the courts in December 2023, the Interior Department held a large lease sale on a block of offshore waters that had been tied up in litigation for the better part of a decade. The sale drew almost $400 million in bids from oil majors like Hess, Occidental, and Shell, in what was the highest-grossing lease sale since before the pandemic. If there had been any doubt, Biden’s campaign pledge was officially dead.
The culmination of the Biden administration’s turnabout on fossil fuel production, and the decision that generated the greatest furor among climate activists, was the Interior Department’s March 2023 approval of the Willow oil project on the North Slope of Alaska. Former Vice President Al Gore called the approval “recklessly irresponsible”: Burning the 600 million barrels of oil that ConocoPhillips plans to produce from the project is poised to add the equivalent of 2 million cars’ worth of carbon dioxide to the air. Nevertheless, the final decision to approve the project reportedly came from the White House itself. Facing spiking gasoline prices at home and global upheavals in the oil market — plus the specter of lawsuits from ConocoPhillips, which had started the project well before Biden came on the scene — administration officials no longer appeared willing to try to meaningfully slow down the future rate of U.S. oil production.
Earlier this month, in the waning days of his administration, Biden revived the long-dormant lease issue, announcing that he would prohibit future oil drilling on more than 600 million acres of ocean territory on both coasts. The move drew praise from environmental advocates, and it would be hard for Trump or future presidents to undo — but it is largely symbolic, and won’t fundamentally change the trajectory of the oil industry. The shoreline sections that Biden has protected have never drawn much interest from drillers, and even Trump backed off a pledge to open them up for oil production during his first term. In the geographies where it matters, like the crude-rich Gulf of Mexico, the fight was long since over.
Read Next Is the Biden administration fast-tracking a ‘carbon disaster’ in Alaska? Adam FedermanIn the battle over oil leases, the Biden administration learned the hard way that it’s very difficult to restrict fossil fuel production, especially with high gas prices and a hostile court system. Last year, as the election approached, the administration had to learn another bruising lesson: Even if you do restrict fossil fuel production, it’s hard to know how much you’re influencing the climate fight. This lesson came during a political squabble over the export of liquefied natural gas, or LNG.
In the decade since the fracking boom, natural gas companies have built several huge facilities along the Gulf Coast that condense and export fracked gas to China and the European Union. Proponents of the industry argue that it helps the climate and national security by weaning other countries off coal (which emits about twice as much carbon per unit of energy produced) and Russian gas, respectively. But activists have come out in force against the industry in recent years, arguing that LNG exports encourage other countries to build out gas-dependent power rather than renewable energy.
In January of last year, young climate activists led a social media campaign urging the Biden administration to reject a permit for one of the largest proposed LNG export facilities. This campaign caught the attention of White House climate advisors Ali Zaidi and John Podesta, who believed they needed to win back young climate-engaged voters as the president’s reelection campaign approached. The Department of Energy controls export authorization for natural gas facilities, and the Biden administration soon announced a moratorium on new export permits for LNG, pending a study on whether they were in the “public interest.” This move drew support from studies showing that gas exports raise domestic energy prices and that methane leakage along the gas supply chain may make them more emissions-intensive than even the coal power that they replace in the best-case scenario.
Yet again, conservatives and oil industry figures seized on the move as evidence of a Green New Deal agenda and pilloried Biden for it, with a group of red-state leaders calling it evidence of a “reckless environmental agenda.” A coalition of Republican attorneys general sued to stop the pause, and a conservative judge ruled in their favor within a few months. The pause was dead, and very few supporters or detractors appeared to even notice.
But the move did appear to push oil-industry heavyweights even further toward the Trump campaign: A few months after the administration announced the pause, several industry leaders reportedly discussed it with Trump during a now-infamous summit at Mar-a-Lago at which Trump pressed the leaders for campaign contributions in exchange for a friendly agenda. (They ended up giving him around $75 million.)
By the time the election arrived, it became clear that the administration saw these supply-side efforts to limit U.S. fossil fuel production as a political liability rather than an asset. When Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, she touted the fact that the U.S. has produced a record amount of oil and gas in recent years, and reversed her prior position in favor of banning fracking in an unsuccessful attempt to win over swing voters in Pennsylvania. Trump, meanwhile, attacked the natural gas export pause as “Kamala’s ban.”
The controversy over LNG unfolded in spite of the fact that the climate impact of the policy was never clear. There is a large body of conflicting research about whether LNG exports, which are often used to replace coal plants in developing countries, increase or decrease emissions relative to an identical world without them. The answer depends on how much methane you think is leaking from U.S. gas fields (this depends where you are and whom you ask), as well as on shifting domestic energy policies in importing nations like China and Vietnam. Indeed, reputable studies reach opposite conclusions, sometimes on the very same day, about whether LNG will help the climate by displacing coal power or harm it by displacing renewables.
A flare shoots out of a smokestack at Venture Capital’s Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal. Biden’s decision to pause new LNG export approvals dominated the final year of his climate agenda. Courtesy of John AllaireEven after Trump won the 2024 election, the Biden administration hurried to finish its “public interest” study. This gave activists some tentative optimism: If Biden released a study finding that LNG exports raise energy prices or harm the climate, it might make it harder for the Trump administration to approve future terminals.
But the study the Energy Department ended up releasing was largely symbolic. While the department said that “unfettered” gas exports would be “neither sustainable nor advisable” and found that new exports would likely lead to more carbon emissions worldwide, it did not issue any concrete recommendations to guide future policy and stopped short of calling for a halt to new export approvals.
Most devastating of all for proponents of the LNG pause, the long-awaited study noted that the United States has already approved enough LNG capacity to meet global demand through the middle of the century, ensuring the country will remain a gas powerhouse regardless of what future administrations do. After years of campaigning, activists had succeeded in pushing the Biden administration to act on LNG. But by the time the administration made a move, it was already too late.
Read Next ‘Death stars on sinking land’: How liquefied natural gas took over the Gulf Coast Lylla Younes & Jake BittleThere is one objective metric by which Biden’s climate policy can be judged: the Paris Agreement, which vows to hold global temperature increases to less than 2 degrees Celsius. In order to help the world meet that agreement, the United States needs to cut its emissions by more than half relative to its 2005 levels.
Assuming Trump doesn’t gut the Inflation Reduction Act — a real possibility, but far from a certainty in a nearly evenly split Congress — Biden’s signature bill will get the United States a great deal of the way toward meeting that goal. But the country is still falling short, and time is running out.
Biden showed that “carrot” climate policy is both politically possible and effective at slowing down climate change — but he failed to create the same roadmap for “stick” policies to curb the expansion of fossil fuels. The president’s losses on oil leases and LNG were significant, because they were some of the few short-term actions Biden could have taken to restrict fossil fuels.
While the administration did also push several ambitious climate rules through the Environmental Protection Agency, including regulations that would eliminate power plant pollution and force a wholesale transition away from gasoline-powered vehicles, those high-profile moves are unlikely to bear fruit anytime soon. Designing the rules took almost the entire four years of Biden’s term, and they have yet to come into effect; the gas-powered vehicles rule, for instance, applies to cars of model year 2027 and later. Repealing the IRA requires help from Congress, but the incoming administration has the authority to unwind those rules on its own, and Trump reportedly wants to start doing so on day one.
Ford Motor Company’s electric F-150 Lightnings sit on the production line at the company’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan.Jeff Kowalsky / AFP via Getty Images
These defeats appear to have led to some soul-searching within the administration. When Zaidi, the White House Climate Advisor, reflected on Biden’s legacy in a press gaggle at last year’s United Nations climate conference, he questioned whether fossil fuel-restricting policies would ever be politically viable, though he hinted that future policy might have to try them anyway.
“I don’t think there is social license for a decarbonization playbook that puts upward price pressure for consumers in the marketplace,” Zaidi said. However, not everyone agrees. Jay Inslee, who passed a carbon tax as governor of Washington and then defended that tax against a repeal effort, says voters can get behind fossil fuel disincentives if they benefit from those policies.
“We tested that question [of support for a carbon tax], and it was not a narrow thing,” he said. “We emphasized what you’re getting for these investments, and people by thunderous applause accepted it.” (It helps that Washington state has not elected a Republican to statewide office since 2017.)
An even more urgent question is whether Biden’s carrots will themselves endure. From inside the Beltway, the IRA looked like a political miracle, and it is popular with Republican officials like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp — Georgia has seen more than $10 billion in investment from the IRA, resulting in almost 40,000 new jobs — but it has had a negligible impact on voters so far. In 2023, nearly a year after the bill had passed, a majority of voters thought it was still being considered or that lawmakers had given up on it — or didn’t know that such a bill had existed at all. This year, fewer than 3 in 10 voters said they thought the IRA had improved their lives. The 2024 election featured remarkably little discussion about Biden’s signature achievement at all.
Read Next The American Climate Corps is over. What even was it? Kate YoderThe issue may be one of scope. A truly successful climate policy would do nothing less than reshape the world economy — a tall order for an administration with four years and a slim legislative majority. The IRA, with its big bets on a wide array of both proven and new decarbonization technologies, may still succeed in this. But we won’t know until it’s too late for anyone to take credit for it.
“Long-term policy doesn’t have immediate impact,” said Freed, of the think tank Third Way. “Rising wages, better standards of living, better opportunities for communities were always going to take longer than one election cycle to be visible. They didn’t happen physically in communities quickly enough to shift voter perception.”
As Biden prepares to leave office, he will have to contend with the fact that voters may finally begin to feel the benefits of his signature law when Trump is in office — and that they may ascribe those improvements to Trump’s policies, rather than his own. Biden will have to bear that cross, Freed said.
“If our goal is to have clean energy [that is] durable and pervasive — and people start seeing the benefits in their communities and it makes them more amenable to clean energy and demand more — that’s a good thing,” he said. “The positive impacts of clean energy and decarbonization need to be able to transcend elections and partisan politics.”
toolTips('.classtoolTips2','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips3','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 Joe Biden was America’s first climate president. Did it matter? on Jan 17, 2025.
Young conservatives want to push Trump on climate change — the ‘America First’ way
For most environmentalists, the day that Donald Trump got elected president in November was “a dark day.” But there was one small, overlooked corner of the movement that celebrated. In a statement congratulating Trump on his victory, the leaders of the American Conservation Coalition saw a chance to bring “an America-first climate strategy” to fruition. “Now, we will build a new era of American industry and win the clean energy arms race,” they wrote.
The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit was founded in 2017 by college students who wanted to prove that there was a conservative case for climate action. Since then, it’s evolved from a group on the right’s fringes into a political force. The American Conservation Coalition has wide grassroots support, with some 60,000 members in branches around the country and connections all over Congress. Trump’s second term, which starts on Monday, will be a test of how strong its influence has become.
“I think there’s a golden opportunity right now for Republicans to shift the environment from a left-wing issue that Republicans lose on to a conservative issue that they can win on,” said Chris Barnard, the organization’s president. “And by the end of this administration, that is what we hope to achieve, and hope to have real, tangible progress and solutions that point back to that show that.”
The group has extensive ties to Trump’s Cabinet nominees, according to Barnard. Liberty Energy’s CEO Chris Wright, nominated for secretary of energy, is a “personal friend” to the American Conservation Coalition, or ACC, and recently hosted a fundraiser for the coalition. Former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Trump’s nominee to lead the Interior Department, led a town hall in New Hampshire with Barnard during his six-month presidential run in 2023; Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, has worked on various issues with the ACC.
“If that’s the yardstick — helping Republicans get engaged on climate — they’ve been a resounding success,” said Matthew Burgess, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming who studies how to depolarize climate change. In his estimation, the Republican Party has perceptibly shifted its stance on climate change, moving away from outright denial in recent years. “Whatever movement there’s been on the Republican side, the ACC is probably easily the single most important advocacy group on that.”
You wouldn’t mistake the American Conservation Coalition’s platform for one found on a progressive climate group’s website. The top three priorities are unleashing nuclear energy, reforming the permitting process to make it easier to build new energy projects, and beating China by “leading the world in all-of-the-above energy production.” That includes more oil and gas development, in line with Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. In his first week, Trump is expected to push to undo President Joe Biden’s limits on offshore drilling and federal lands, roll back emissions standards for vehicles, and end a freeze on new projects to export liquefied natural gas.
“Our approach will always be distinct from the approach of a progressive group, because it’s guided by conservative principles like innovation and deregulation and empowering individuals and local communities,” said Danielle Butcher Franz, the CEO of the ACC. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re not on the same page about the severity of these issues.”
Read Next How to take climate change out of the culture wars Kate YoderButcher Franz says that tackling climate change effectively means that both conservatives and progressives need to change their approach. Conservatives could be a lot bolder in the solutions they propose, she said: “They oftentimes have a reputation for being the party of ‘no’ and just striking down the things that they don’t like.” Progressives, on the other hand, could work harder to find common ground. “There are a lot of self-imposed litmus tests where if you don’t agree on everything, you’re not [seen as] worth working with,” Butcher Franz said. She said she’s seen potential partnerships with other climate groups collapse over a single area of difference, like support for fossil fuel production.
For some progressives, the ACC’s Republican ties are the problem. “I think people often try to hold us accountable for the views of high-profile Republicans that people don’t like,” Butcher Franz said. She gets asked questions like, “Well, President Trump has said that climate change is a hoax, so how can Republicans possibly make progress on this?” But that’s the wrong starting place, she said. “I think the better question is, Does somebody need to be bought into a progressive climate agenda to reduce emissions? And I would argue that, no, they don’t.”
The group’s approach creates a pairing of ideas that are rarely seen side by side. “Enough alarmism. Enough inaction,” a slogan on the ACC’s site reads.
Those feelings may be reflected by much of the country, regardless of political affiliation: 80 percent of Americans say that climate news makes them feel frustrated that there’s so much political disagreement over the problem, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.
“The interesting thing about the ACC is, I think a lot of what they say, if you look at polls, is pretty close to what the median voter is saying about climate change,” Burgess said. “You know, ‘It’s real, doing something is much better than doing nothing, and renewables and nuclear are good and we should be prioritizing them, but we don’t want to get off fossil fuels, and particularly natural gas, in the short term, especially insofar as it hurts our economy.’”
When the ACC began in 2017, talking about climate change with Republican politicians who had long shied away from the subject — or simply denied it existed — wasn’t easy. “In the early days, we were all volunteers who were just trying to chase each opportunity that presented itself,” said Stephen Perkins, now the coalition’s COO. “It was tough back then to even say ‘climate’ or ‘environment’ in conservative spaces. We found it difficult to get those meetings and to have those conversations with elected officials or with other leaders within the conservative movement.”
But as early as 2019, partway through Trump’s first term, some of this resistance started to fade. Trump’s EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, signed a memorandum of understanding with the ACC to find ways to get young environmental leaders involved in the agency’s programs. In 2020, Barnard and Benji Backer, the ACC’s founder, went on a hike with Senator John Curtis, who was in the House of Representatives at the time, in his home state of Utah. The conversation sparked the idea for the Conservative Climate Caucus, started by Curtis as a safe place for House Republicans to talk to each other about climate change. It now has more than 80 members, who have been more willing to support green technology than other Republicans, if still generally opposed to measures to curtail greenhouse gas emissions directly.
Read Next What will the GOP’s new ‘climate caucus’ accomplish? Zoya TeirsteinAs these changes unfolded, the American Conservation Coalition’s base grew. In 2021, Perkins was hired to build grassroots support for the group, which had about 5,000 members at the time. Across the country, through outreach and advertising, they now have 60,000 members, mostly college students and young professionals who are right-of-center, Perkins said. The goal is to reach 100,000 members by the end of 2025.
“A lot of our members are in government offices,” Perkins said. “In fact, it’s really hard for us now to walk into a member of Congress’ office without someone in the front room knowing about ACC because they were involved in college.” According to Eli Lehrer, president of the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank, the ACC’s grassroots support is crucial to its success. “They have an impact in D.C., because they have an impact around the country,” he said. “So they both can mobilize people locally, and that gives them a way to talk about the same issues in D.C.”
Over the last two years, the American Conservation Coalition reached the national stage. In August 2023, the Republican primary debate included a question from a college student, one of the group’s members, about how the presidential candidates would calm fears that their party didn’t care about climate change. Even as the candidates deflected, some young conservatives saw it as progress that the topic even came up. The ACC also sponsored the Republican National Convention last July and had a booth there for the first time, with Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, speaking at their reception.
“These are just signs that the narrative is changing, and that conservatives or Republicans are seeing that there’s an opportunity for them to engage that is authentically conservative,” Barnard said. “They don’t feel like they have to leave their values at the door when talking about this stuff.”
However, Barnard says he’s more concerned with achieving practical results than getting Republican politicians to say the right thing. If they pass a bill to boost nuclear power and clean energy, but it’s for economic reasons or national security reasons rather than climate reasons, it’s still a win, he said: “We need to focus a lot more on what actually works than what sounds good, and on tangible progress than on litmus tests that just further polarize both sides.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Young conservatives want to push Trump on climate change — the ‘America First’ way on Jan 17, 2025.
Justin Trudeau taxed fossil fuels — and paid the price
Justin Trudeau’s resignation as prime minister of Canada signals the departure of one of the world’s leading climate hawks. From the moment the charismatic young progressive took power a decade ago, he staked his career on aggressive climate action, pushing through a carbon tax, clean energy subsidies, and a slew of regulations loathed by the country’s large oil and gas industry.
The prime minister’s impending exit, announced January 6, comes as his Liberal party heads toward a wipeout in an election that must occur before October. Voters are furious over what they consider Trudeau’s failure to address housing costs and crime; his handling of the pandemic; and his climate action, which many blame for rising energy and gas costs. This popular swing against climate policy parallels a trend seen across the developed world, including Europe and the United States, where President-elect Donald Trump has promised to repeal the Biden administration’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.
Trudeau’s policies went well beyond Biden’s — he passed a federal carbon-pricing system and successfully defended it against several challenges, something Democrats in the United States have never been able to do. In the end, his ambitious carbon-pricing program contributed to his downfall. Pierre Poilievre, who leads the surging Conservative party, has over the past year launched a campaign to “Axe the Tax,” holding rallies that channeled voter frustration with energy costs and made climate policy a liability for the liberal government.
“It was a national, relatively universal carbon tax on consumers, and people were angry, they were feeling pinched,” said Cherie Metcalf, a law professor at Queen’s University in Ontario and an expert on Canadian climate politics.
The Trudeau government made substantial progress in almost every major area of climate policy. Trudeau rolled out clean energy subsidies, stepped up Canada’s overseas aid funding for climate disasters, and enshrined the country’s net-zero target into law. But the centerpiece of his legacy is a carbon tax based on a policy adopted in the left-leaning province of British Columbia. The tax, launched in 2019, requires big polluters to purchase emissions credits, much like the major cap-and-trade schemes in Europe and California, but it also imposes a surcharge of a few cents on every gallon of gasoline or heating oil that Canadians use.
It’s too early to say how the carbon tax has affected Canada’s emissions trajectory, but the government says the provision in British Columbia that inspired it has cut emissions by 15 percent from where they otherwise would be. Federal officials also say the tax will drive more than a third of Canada’s overall emissions reductions by 2030, by which point the government hopes to cut emissions by half from peak levels.
“Justin Trudeau has accomplished more on climate policy than any other Canadian prime minister so far,” Caroline Brouillette, executive director of the advocacy organization Climate Action Network Canada, said in a statement after his announcement. “The past 10 years have seen a revolution in how we tackle climate change in Canada, moving from a piecemeal and voluntary approach toward one where the government proactively plans … to reduce emissions to reach our climate targets.”
The Liberal leader’s climate record was far from perfect, however, particularly when it came to Canada’s $250 billion oil industry. He waffled for years on the issue of drilling in Alberta’s oil-rich tar sands, for example, at one point suggesting production should be “phased out” and at another saying that “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.”
Although he imposed stringent regulations on oil producers in the Alberta tar sands and the carbon tax made drilling much more expensive, critics considered his spending $9 billion on carbon-capture projects to make that work cleaner an attempt to prop up the industry. In 2018, his government purchased and completed the struggling Trans Mountain pipeline project, boosting Canada’s export capacity over the furious objections of indigenous First Nations groups. Oil and gas production, which comprises an astonishing 31 percent of Canada’s overall emissions (compared to around 4 percent in the United States) is the main obstacle to the country’s full-scale decarbonization.
Beyond his uneven action on fossil fuels, Indigenous leaders say Trudeau has a spotty history with environmental justice, and of addressing Canada’s colonial history of oppression and genocide.
“He took much more progressive action on climate than any other prime minister we’ve ever seen, but he lacked any clear justice element to address historical wrongdoings and the ongoing legacy of colonization,” said Eriel Deranger, an Indigenous climate activist and a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. Deranger has fought drilling in Alberta’s tar sands, her nation’s ancestral home, for more than a decade.
“Canada is a petrostate, and they haven’t figured out their just-transition strategy to transition out of that,” she added, noting that oil exports reached an all-time high of 4 million barrels per day in 2023, driven in large part by growth in the tar sands.
Trudeau’s exit comes as left-of-center parties suffer electoral defeats throughout the West. Republicans scored a convincing win in federal elections in the United States, while France and Germany are expected to see conservative governments take power this year. Climate issues have proven effective fodder for right-wing parties in countries like the Netherlands as well.
Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, at a press conference in Ottawa after Justin Trudeau’s resignation. Poilievre has campaigned heavily against Canada’s carbon tax.Dave Chan / AFP via Getty Images
Disaffected voters in many of these countries have latched on to climate issues: Cloudy weather that blocks solar energy has caused political furor over power prices in Germany, while the Dutch government’s efforts to reduce nitrogen emissions from farming triggered a political war that elevated a nativist far-right party. The Biden administration’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act was an attempt to meet these concerns head-on, but it failed to persuade voters outraged by rising costs.
Trudeau’s hold on power began slipping last year when polls showed that support for the Liberals had cratered, even in reliable strongholds like Toronto and Vancouver. According to the latest projections from election forecaster 338 Canada, Conservatives are on track to win more than two-thirds of the 343 seats in Parliament, more than doubling their current count. The Liberals, meanwhile, may end up with as few as 25, putting them behind both the progressive New Democratic Party and the Quebec separatist party known as the Bloc Quebecois.
The election of Donald Trump, who has promised to impose a devastating 25 percent tariff on all Canadian imports, further sank Trudeau’s fortunes. The prime minister flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to meet with the president-elect in November for what he called an “excellent conversation”; Trump later referred to Trudeau as the “governor” of Canada and said he wanted to annex the country. Around the same time, Trudeau announced a nationwide sales tax rebate, prompting a falling-out with his finance minister, Chrystia Freedland, another top Liberal politician. Freedland called the tax holiday a “costly political gimmick” that the country couldn’t afford given Trump’s impending tariffs. Dozens of other Liberal representatives soon called on him to resign.
Climate change is not the only issue dragging down Trudeau’s party. A sizable chunk of the electorate still hasn’t forgiven Trudeau for his aggressive response to the pandemic, which included a federal vaccine mandate. Concerns about crime and the cost of housing remain top of mind even in Liberal bastions such as Toronto and Vancouver. Trudeau’s own political brand, and a laundry list of personal scandals, including revelations that he wore blackface on at least three occasions as a young man, have also become wearisome for many voters.
But no issue has proven as effective for Conservatives over the past year as climate change, and in particular the impact of the carbon tax on gasoline and home heating oil. The tax raises the price of gasoline by the equivalent of around 3 cents per gallon, a charge that will continue ratcheting up in coming years. Conservatives tried to elevate the issue in national elections as early as 2019, but it didn’t take hold with voters until costs started to rise in every segment of the economy following the pandemic. That trend allowed the Conservatives to blame Trudeau’s climate policies for voters’ sticker shock, even though around 80 percent of Canadians receive more in tax rebates than they spend on carbon penalties.
“There was actually quite good support for action on climate change at first,” Metcalf told Grist. “The current backlash is really focused more on the consumer side of the carbon tax, given that we’ve been experiencing really high inflation. You also see some of the same aspects that you see in the U.S. or in Europe, you’ve got a populist disenchantment with top-down, directive federal policies.”
As heating and gas prices rose, Poilievre traveled the country holding dozens of rallies where he blamed Trudeau’s climate policy for inflation and high heating prices. In response to public outcry, the federal government in 2023 suspended the carbon tax for home heating oil in several provinces, but that only gave the Liberals’ opponents more ammunition. But then last spring, Trudeau raised the tax from around $45 to around $55 per ton of carbon, barely surviving a no-confidence vote forced by Poilievre.
With the Conservatives poised to take power, Metcalf said it’s too early to know how they will handle climate issues. Poilievre has pledged to eliminate the consumer carbon tax, but the fate of the rest of Canada’s climate policy is still up in the air, including Trudeau’s less controversial subsidies for clean energy. As in other countries that faced voter backlash, the success of the right has been more about frustration with past climate action than an alternate vision for how to tackle the emissions problem.
“It remains to be seen what Poilievre will do,” she told Grist. “Except for his slogans about axing the tax, we don’t have a lot of information.”
toolTips('.classtoolTips2','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Justin Trudeau taxed fossil fuels — and paid the price on Jan 17, 2025.
What sparks a wildfire? The answer often remains a mystery.
What’s shaping up to be one of the worst wildfire disasters in U.S. history had many causes. Before the blazes raged across Los Angeles last week, eight months with hardly any rain had left the brush-covered landscape bone-dry. Santa Ana winds blew through the mountains, their gusts turning small fires into infernos and sending embers flying miles ahead. As many as 12,000 buildings have burned down, some hundred thousand people have fled their homes, and at least two dozen people have died.
As winds picked up again this week, key questions about the fires remain unanswered: What sparked the flames in the first place? And could they have been prevented? Some theorize that the Eaton Fire in Pasadena was caused by wind-felled power lines, or that the Palisades Fire was seeded by the embers of a smaller fire the week before. But the list of possible culprits is long — even a car engine idling over dry grass can ignite a fire.
“To jump to any conclusions right now is speculation,” said Ginger Colbrun, a spokesperson for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the lead agency investigating the cause of the Palisades Fire, to the Los Angeles Times. Figuring it out will likely take months. It took the bureau more than a year to conclude that the fire in August 2023 that devastated Maui, which was similarly lashed by high winds, was started by broken power lines.
Even given enough time, the causes of the Los Angeles fires might remain a mystery. According to a recent study, authorities never find the source of ignition for more than half of all of wildfires in the Western U.S. — a knowledge gap that can hamper prevention efforts even as climate change ramps up the frequency of these deadly events. If authorities can anticipate likely causes of a fire, they can help build more resilient neighborhoods and educate the public on how to avoid the next deadly event.
“Fire research is so incredibly difficult. It’s more difficult than looking for a needle in the haystack,” said Costas Synolakis, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies natural disasters. Synolakis said fires with especially high temperatures, such as those in Los Angeles, often obliterate the evidence. “That’s why it’s so challenging to mitigate fire losses,” he said. “You just don’t know what triggers them.”
The U.S. Forest Service is teaming up with computer scientists to see if artificial intelligence can help crack old cases. A study led by data scientists at Boise State University, published in the journal Earth’s Future earlier this month, analyzed the conditions surrounding more than 150,000 unsolved wildfire cases from 1992 to 2020 in Western states and found that 80 percent of wildfires were likely caused by people (whether accidentally or intentionally), with lightning responsible for just 20 percent. According to Cal Fire, people have caused 95 percent of California’s wildfires.
Karen Short, a research ecologist with the Forest Service who contributed to the study and maintains a historical database of national wildfire reports, says understanding why they start is essential for preventing them and educating the public. Strategic prevention appears to work: According to the National Fire Protection Association, house fires in the U.S. have decreased by nearly half since the 1980s.
In 2024, Short expanded her wildfire archive to include more information useful to investigators, such as weather, elevation, population density, and a fire’s timing. “We need to have those things captured in the data to track them over time. We still track things from the 1900s,” she said.
According to Short, wildfire trends across the Western United States have shifted with human activity. In recent decades, ignitions from power lines, fireworks, and firearms have become more common, in contrast with the railroad- and sawmill-caused fires that were once more common.
Signage warns against the use of illegal fireworks in Pasadena, in June 2022. David McNew / Getty Images
The study found that vehicles and equipment are likely the number one culprit, potentially causing 21 percent of wildfires without a known cause since 1992. Last fall, the Airport Fire in California was just such an event, burning over 23,000 acres. And an increasing number of fires are the result of arson and accidental ignition — whether from smoking, gunfire, or campfires — that make up another 18 percent. In 2017, an Arizona couple’s choice of a blue smoke-spewing firework for a baby gender reveal party lit the Sawmill Fire, torching close to 47,000 acres.
But these results aren’t definitive. Machine learning models such as those used for the study are trained to predict the likelihood of a given fire’s cause, rather than prove that a particular ignition happened. Although the study’s model showed 90 percent accuracy selecting between lightning or human activity as the ignition source when tested on fires with known causes, it had more difficulty determining exactly which of 11 possible human behaviors were to blame, only getting it right half the time.
Yavar Pourmohamad, a data science Ph.D. researcher at Boise State University who led the study, says that knowing the probable causes of a fire could help authorities warn people in high-risk areas before a blaze actually starts. “It could give people a hint of what is most important to be careful of,” he said. “Maybe in the future, AI can become a trustworthy tool for real-world action.”
Synolakis, the USC professor, says Pourmohamad and Short’s research is important for understanding how risks are changing. He advocates for proactive actions like burying power lines underground where they can’t be buffeted by winds.
A 2018 study found that fires set off by downed power lines — such as the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, that same year — have been increasing. Although the authors note that while power lines do not account for many fires, they’re associated with larger swaths of burned land.
“We have to really make sure that our communities are more resilient to climate change,” Synolakis said. “As we’re seeing with the extreme conditions in Los Angeles, fire suppression alone doesn’t do it.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What sparks a wildfire? The answer often remains a mystery. on Jan 17, 2025.
Biden administration gives up on lower ocean speed limits to protect right whales
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.
Federal regulators are abandoning a proposal to expand ocean speed limits that were designed to protect North Atlantic right whales.
The whales, which give birth off Georgia’s coast in the winter, are nearing extinction: Just 370 remain, and vessel strikes are one of their leading causes of death.
Marine industry groups applauded the move to abandon a rule they have criticized as overly broad, while whale advocates said they were disappointed.
“The whales are going to suffer because of the inaction by the Biden administration,” said Gib Brogan, campaign director with the advocacy group Oceana.
There are already some seasonal speed limits on large ships designed to cut down the risk of strikes during times of year when the whales are known to be in certain areas — like off the Georgia coast during the winter calving season.
In 2022, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proposed expanding those restrictions to include smaller boats and to apply over larger areas of the ocean for longer periods. The agency also proposed making some voluntary speed limits mandatory.
Whale scientists and advocates had celebrated the proposal and pushed for its adoption because smaller boats can and do kill right whales. They also emphasized the urgency, as the North Atlantic right whale population numbers falter, and whale behavior shifts due to climate change.
But marine industry groups fought the proposed changes, which they argued could hurt the fishing and boating industries and other related businesses. Among other criticisms, they contended that smaller boats often need the ability to move fast to respond safely to changing ocean conditions. They also said the rules would cancel or alter thousands of recreational fishing trips that are important for coastal economies.
“The rule’s many blind spots would have created dire consequences for boater safety and accessibility, the economic vitality of coastal communities and marine manufacturers, and the livelihoods of countless supporting small businesses,” said Frank Hugelmeyer, president of the National Marine Manufacturers Association, in a statement.
He added that the rule “failed to distinguish between large, ocean-crossing vessels and small recreational boats, which could not be more different from each other.”
The rule was never implemented, and now the agency is withdrawing it just days before a new administration enters the White House — a move whale advocates said was political, based on its timing.
Read Next Climate change and boat strikes are killing right whales. Stronger speed limits could save them. Emily JonesCongress can review and overturn some recent actions taken by federal agencies, under a law known as the Congressional Review Act. This often comes into play when a new presidential administration and new Congress take over, because it gives them the power to rescind recent actions taken by a prior administration. With this mechanism, Congress can also block the agencies from taking similar actions in the future.
Whale advocates worry that’s exactly what a Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress would have done with this rule had it gone into effect within the review window: They could have overturned the rule and prevented future changes to vessel speed rules to protect right whales.
“So the real deadline for the Biden administration was this past summer,” said Brogan. “They knew that they needed to act this past summer to put durable protections on for North Atlantic right whales, but with an election and other things in play, they chose not to.”
Whale advocates and scientists said they would continue to push for expanded right whale protections, despite what New England Aquarium conservation scientist Jessica Redfern called a “serious setback” in the effort to save right whales from extinction.
“I’m gonna have hope, because I do have hope that we can save this species,” she said.
The aquarium maintains one of the longest-running right whale research programs in the country, and Redfern said the evidence is clear: The whales can recover, “if we stop killing them.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden administration gives up on lower ocean speed limits to protect right whales on Jan 17, 2025.
Biden-Harris Administration Leaves Mining Reform Largely Untouched, Despite Promising Steps Forward
The Biden-Harris Administration ends without significant changes to our public lands mining policies. Despite proposing comprehensive changes to statute, regulation, and policy, the Administration finalized only a few. They were primarily about early outreach to Tribes and the public before mining occurred. To be sure, the Trump Administration may ignore or repeal these new instructions. However, honoring these steps forward can help avoid conflicts around permitting new mines.
For a quick refresher of the President’s term on mining reform:
- Feb 2021. Executive Order (EO) 14017 America’s Supply Chains directed all federal agencies to report within 100 days on how to improve ways to source metals, including from public land mines.
- June 2021. One hundred days later, as directed, the public lands agencies recommended updating their mining regulations. The report stated: “Congress should enact comprehensive reform of the GML (General Mining Law) of 1872 and USDA (Agriculture Department) and DOI (Interior Department) should strengthen the regulations governing mining on public lands.”
- Sept. 2021. Earthworks, along with a coalition of Tribes, Indigenous-led organizations, and conservation groups, petitioned the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management for better mining rules.
- Sept 2021. Congress passed Section 40206 of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law directing our public lands agencies to 1) calculate the time spent permitting hardrock mines, 2) develop mine permitting metrics, and 3) measure performance against those metrics to achieve better environmental outcomes.
- May 2022. In response to Congress and our petition, the Administration convened a meeting of stakeholders, including Earthworks, to announce an Interagency Working Group to deliver mining reform recommendations.
- Nov. 2022. At the annual Tribal Nations Summit, the Interior and Agriculture Secretaries announced mining reforms specifically to empower Tribal communities and improve consultation processes. The Administration chose these reforms to build upon their Uniform Standards for Tribal Consultation.
- Sept 2023. The Interagency Working Group delivered its final report. It contained more than 60 recommendations for updates to the 1872 Mining Law, regulation, policy, and permitting. Notably, the Government determined that the average and median times to permit public land mines is only three years. Further, they found the primary cause of permit delays stems from mining companies providing incomplete, inaccurate, and/or untimely information to under-resourced agencies. The Government also specifically refuted often-cited mining industry estimates that mine permit times span 7-10 years or longer- labeling the data “unsubstantiated.” These conclusions help bolster the advocacy from mining-impacted communities, raising fierce opposition against “sham permitting reform,” weakening the 1872 Mining law and limiting environmental reviews.
- Sept. 2024. Building upon the Tribal Nations Summit and IWG report, the BLM finalized the Instruction Memorandum, IM 2024-048. It directs field offices to notify neighboring Tribes when the BLM receives a notice for mine exploration. Before, mining companies could begin constructing roads, drilling, blasting, and conducting other exploration activities without any notice to Tribes. This memorandum invites Tribes to meet with BLM before exploration begins to confidentiality and share information that may help BLM preserve sacred sites or prevent mining in some areas. It also allows Tribes to withhold certain sensitive information.
- Nov. 2024. The BLM finalized their Information Bulletin, IB 2025-0013, notifying field offices of the Infrastructure Law’s permitting metrics for public participation and interagency coordination. These metrics include conducting Tribal outreach before exploration begins (IM 2024-048) and receiving input from other communities before the environmental reviews begin.
The government should put into practice its ongoing commitment—before and during environmental reviews and Tribal consultations—to listen, respect, and incorporate traditional knowledge and community input in mine plans if only to avoid or mitigate potential mine permitting conflicts early on. Now is the time to build power and organize for future Administrations, when more lasting reforms—including dozens more from the Interagency Working Group—can become law.
The post Biden-Harris Administration Leaves Mining Reform Largely Untouched, Despite Promising Steps Forward appeared first on Earthworks.
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