Green News

A new report examining more than a dozen of the Earth’s life-sustaining systems paints a pretty bleak picture. Published last week in BioScience, the seventh annual State of the Climate report shows how global warming is producing significant shifts in the planet’s overall health and destabilizing the climate as a whole. 

Key climate indicators are going in the wrong direction: greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise, glacier thickness, ice mass, and more. These shifts should no longer be taken as warning signs about some distant future, the authors write; instead, they amount to a “diagnosis” of how climate change is impacting the planet today — and where things will go if human behavior doesn’t change quickly or sufficiently enough. 

Concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, stemming primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, hit record highs this year. Meanwhile, glacier thickness and Greenland ice mass are at record lows. Things are also not looking good for the Earth’s energy imbalance, a measure of how much energy the planet absorbs from the sun versus how much of that energy exits the atmosphere. This measure has been rising, a sign of how the planet, essentially, is heating up. 

Of the 16 climate indicators examined by the authors, seven — or 44 percent — are at record extremes. The paper also discusses worrisome feedback loops, or how existing warming might be further accelerated by phenomena like wildfires or permafrost melting that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and are themselves made more likely by climate change. 

Read Next The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream Kate Yoder

But the authors also wanted to delve into how human activities like agriculture, transportation, and energy usage — in other words, things within our control — contribute to climate change. Changes within our food system in particular present some of the easiest opportunities for individuals to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane. 

That’s because some animals raised for human consumption — such as cattle, sheep, and goats — emit methane as part of their digestive process. These animals are called ruminants, and in 2024, there were more ruminant livestock than at any other point since the 1960s, according to the study. Per capita meat production also hit a record high in 2024. 

These two figures reflect “important pressures from the global food system,” said William Ripple, professor of ecology at Oregon State University and one of the report’s lead authors. They point to meat’s growing role in our global diet, as well as the environmental cost of that shift. Ripple said they looked at ruminant livestock populations because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas; it only stays in the atmosphere for roughly 10 years, but it is 28 times better than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. There is a silver lining to that, though: For these same reasons, reducing methane emissions is an effective tool to curb warming in the short term.

One way of doing that, clearly, is producing and eating less meat. “I think this is an important opportunity for climate action that sometimes gets overlooked,” said Ripple. “Shifting toward more plant-based diets, especially in countries with high meat consumption, could make a meaningful difference.”

Raising cattle for human consumption is also one of the main drivers of deforestation, which contributes to warming by eliminating carbon sinks. Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University who studies the relationship between agriculture and the climate, noted that “we can’t solve climate change unless we stop” such clearing of carbon-rich habitats, “and we probably cannot stop that unless the world’s wealthy eat less meat, and particularly less beef.” (Searchinger was not involved in the report.)

He added, “Just eating 1.5 hamburgers a week on average instead of 3 is one of the basic ways Americans can help address climate change.”

Ripple and his co-authors also point out that such high levels of meat production create a wildly inefficient agricultural system, since cattle need so much land to graze and farmers are compelled to dedicate land to grow crops like corn and soy that ultimately go to feed cattle. That land could be used instead to grow carbon-sinking ecosystems or food that feeds people directly. 

“At a time when climate change is threatening food security, we can hardly afford a food system that uses so much of its productive capacity inefficiently,” said Ripple.

The bottom line, he said, is that there is no way to address global warming without also making changes to what we eat and how it’s produced. “Our growing demand for meat is putting enormous pressure on the climate, land, and water at a time when all three are already under stress,” he said. 

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

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The planet’s vital signs are getting worse. One of the easiest fixes is your diet. on Oct 23, 2026.

Washington has a gift for cloaking unpopular ideas in appealing names. One recent example is the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, or BAAJA, a sweeping “permitting reform” measure introduced this September by Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, Mike Lee, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Martin Heinrich. Once stripped of its deceptive branding, the bill is an out-and-out assault on the National Environmental Policy Act, the bedrock environmental law that has for more than 50 years required the federal government to look before it leaps.

NEPA’s genius is its modesty. As the Supreme Court has repeatedly noted, it’s a purely procedural statute. It dictates no outcomes but requires agencies to stop and think — to generate, consider, and disclose the potential environmental consequences of their actions before shovels hit the ground. Often called the “Magna Carta” of environmental law, NEPA has been emulated worldwide.

BAAJA keeps NEPA’s title while hollowing out nearly everything that makes it work: detailed review of environmental risks, rigorous analysis of available alternatives with less harmful effects, meaningful public input before agencies commit to harmful actions, and — most dangerously — the ability of courts to enforce any of it.

The bill has a minor positive or two; it would restore some of the authority of the Council on Environmental Quality that two courts in 2024 appeared to strip away, allowing the Council to standardize federal agencies’ NEPA procedures. The deal, however, is terribly lopsided and devalues NEPA’s essential purposes.

BAAJA dramatically expands NEPA’s “categorical exclusions,” removing scrutiny and shutting the public out of commenting on excluded projects. It expands the categories of proposals that aren’t “major Federal actions,” reducing agencies’ responsibility to prepare in-depth environmental impact statements. The newly excluded categories could cause significant harm, including projects such as electric transmission facilities, methane gas pipelines, and water resources and geothermal energy development programs.

When review does occur, the bill guts its substance. It instructs agencies to eliminate alternatives that don’t “meet the goals of an applicable non-Federal project sponsor.” The comparison of alternatives is the heart of an EIS, but the bill would let developers define that heart out of existence. The bill then freezes the science: Agencies could ignore research that becomes available after it publishes a project’s notice of intent to prepare a NEPA document.

The bill also imposes rigid deadlines that trace back to a report the Congressional Research Service thoroughly debunked. The real culprits delaying infrastructure projects are inadequate financing, local opposition, and under-resourced agencies. Arbitrary clocks will pressure agencies to cut corners, inviting project-slowing litigation while doing little or nothing to address the most important causes of delay.

Congress passed NEPA because development-minded agencies often treated environmental concerns as obstacles. This bill hands those agencies — and the developers they serve — the keys to making the go or no-go decisions. A project sponsor could force an agency to veto deadline extensions and dictate which alternatives get studied. This is the essence of agency capture, transforming a public safeguard into a private convenience.

The most alarming provisions concern courts. Building on the Supreme Court’s vilification of NEPA in its Seven County Infrastructure Coalition decision, BAAJA forces judges to give “substantial deference” to agency determinations in NEPA documents. This ignores an important impetus for NEPA’s adoption: the incentives of development-oriented agencies to sweep adverse effects under the rug if they threaten project implementation.

Even when a plaintiff wins, courts generally could not halt projects pending preparation of NEPA-compliant documents. By the time they’re completed, the projects may already have caused irreparable environmental harm. These measures go well beyond the already restrictive judicial limits in recent permitting legislation and the Seven County decision and remove agency incentives to conscientiously apply NEPA’s requirements.

The bill also penalizes agencies for protecting the public. If an agency suspends or revokes a permit, it would need to prove that doing so “is necessary to prevent specific, urgent, substantial, and proximate harm or damage to life, property, national security, or defense” — but not, perversely, to the environment!

A defeat for a NEPA plaintiff would enable private project proponents to recover a significant percentage of all project costs they incurred. Faced with that exposure, no rational agency would ever correct a mistaken approval. A law meant to improve decisions would instead make them irreversible.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Real reform would fund agencies properly, reserve any streamlined track for projects that genuinely benefit the environment, make mitigation binding and monitored, and preserve the public’s access to courts to redress statutory violations.

We should build clean energy and critical infrastructure faster, but not bulldoze the one law that makes sure we know what we’re building before it’s too late to change course. Before Congress votes on whether to “reform” NEPA — which is scheduled to happen immediately after the midterms — its members need to heed the statute’s original vision and look before they leap.

Further reading:

• • Hundreds of Organizations Oppose Endangered Species Attacks in Permitting Legislation

Our publisher, the Center for Biological Diversity, offers an opportunity to take action against this bill.

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

NEPA: The Accepted Lies and Mistakes About This Critical Environmental Law

 

The post A ‘Bipartisan’ Bill to Dismantle the Nation’s Bedrock Environmental Law appeared first on The Revelator.

Extreme weather events provide unique opportunities for misinformation to spread widely: rumors swirl on social media, telecom lines go down, and people’s worst fears and angers come to the surface.

Join Grist and Climate Central for a virtual conversation with meteorologists, journalists, and researchers about how we can communicate more accurately and thoughtfully before, during, and after extreme weather. Speakers include: Deanne Criswell, former FEMA administrator; Shel Winkley, senior engagement epecialist and chief meteorologist at Climate Central; Ginny Katz, hazard adaptation researcher and founder of HazAdapt Community Resilience Tools; and Jake Bittle, staff writer at Grist.

We’ll answer your questions and offer tips for your future conversations — whether they’re public or private, online or offline.

Date: October 28 at 1 p.m. ET
Location: Virtual
RSVP: Register here

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Event: Distorted, October 28, 2026 on Oct 23, 2026.

Other than the Australian and Turkish co-hosts, the only G20 nations to address the COP31 leaders’ summit with speakers at the “head of state or government” level will be the UK, Brazil and China, according to a provisional list released on Wednesday.

The list, which is published by the United Nations and subject to change, includes 77 countries whose leaders are listed to speak at the summit in Antalya on November 11-12. That would be nearly a third fewer than the 116 who spoke at COP28 in Dubai three years ago.

Yvo de Boer, a former head of the UN’s climate secretariat, told Climate Home News that the low turnout and “the absence of many nations that should be showing leadership on climate action and support for developing nations” sends “the wrong signal at a difficult time”.

Amid geopolitical conflicts, a struggling global economy and an inevitable overshoot of the 1.5C global warming limit, de Boer said that “climate action needs a strong show of support, not empty seats at a leaders’ summit”.

• Oct 21, 2026 News UN sets steep emission cuts to reverse 1.5C overshoot by end of century Emissions must by reduced by nearly 6% a year for the world to have a good chance of bringing global warming back down to the Paris Agreement limit, the Emissions Gap Report says Read more
• Oct 21, 2026 Investigations Turkish giant sponsoring COP31 cut climate goals then cashed in on oil boom COP31 sponsors should be screened for “climate integrity”. Yet Koç Holding has become a top partner while its oil refiner runs flat out and its climate targets slip Read more

Earlier this week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said G20 countries should lead on climate action, adding that while they have varying responsibilities in tackling global warming, “all countries, especially the big emitters, must do more”. As major economies spanning developed and developing nations, G20 countries account for more than three-quarters of annual global emissions.

China is likely to be represented at COP31 by Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang, as in the past three years, rather than President Xi Jinping, who has rarely left China since the COVID-19 pandemic and has not attended a climate COP since Paris in 2015.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham is scheduled to speak, after telling parliament in September he would do so as part of his efforts to “meet the climate challenge” following a series of deadly heatwaves.

UK approves gas drilling despite admitting blow to “climate leadership” status

Brazil’s President Lula has also said he will attend. Depending on the result of Sunday’s election against his far-right rival Flávio Bolsonaro, he will speak at COP31 as either a recently re-elected or outgoing president.

While the COP31 summit is being hosted by Türkiye in Antalya, Australia has the formal role of President of Negotiations and its prime minister, Anthony Albanese, will speak at the summit. Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not on the UN’s speaker list but is likely to give an opening speech.

Brazilian President Lula shakes hands with Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang at COP30 in Belem in 2025. (Photo by Wagner Meier/Getty Images)

Many of the countries whose leaders are due to attend COP31 are those suffering the worst effects of climate change. About a third are African countries and a quarter are small island developing nations. Türkiye’s Central Asian and Balkan neighbours are also well-represented. 

COP31 no-shows

Among the major emitters not on the list are French President Emmanuel Macron, German leader Friedrich Merz, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, India’s Narendra Modi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Canada’s Mark Carney and Japan’s Sanae Takaichi.

Macron, who is struggling to deal with rising social unrest across France, will reportedly attend commemorations marking the end of the First World War and a European Political Community summit instead. It is not known whether the others will eventually decide to attend COP31, or what they will do instead. 

Climate change-sceptic US President Donald Trump has never attended a COP and is withdrawing the US from the UN climate convention (UNFCCC), under which COP meetings are held, after quitting the Paris Agreement for a second time.

Argentina’s Javier Milei has considered exiting the Paris Agreement but has so far not done so, although his government is one of around 30 countries yet to submit an updated national climate plan to the UN.

The post Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.

More than a year after a devastating wildfire destroyed the Hawaiian town of Lahaina, residents were found to have high levels of arsenic and other toxic metals in their bodies.

Read more on E360 →

Must whale sanctuary mean the sea? Channel News brendan 23rd October 2026 Teaser Media

Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is director of the China-Indonesia Desk at the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS). Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara is executive director of CELIOS.

Indonesia bills its plans to mix wood with coal at dozens of power plants as a way to cut electricity generation emissions as the country transitions towards clean energy. But look closer, and the biomass co-firing plan could do far more harm than good. 

Biomass co-firing involves mixing a small amount of wood or other plant matter, usually wood chips or wood pellets, into the coal that a power plant burns.

State electricity company PLN wants to use it at 52 coal-fired plants across the Southeast Asian nation – a target set out in its national electricity supply business plan and tied to Indonesia’s pledge, under its Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement, to raise renewables to 23% of the energy mix. PLN originally aimed to secure 10.2 million tonnes of biomass a year by 2025; that target has already slipped to 2031, as the country struggles to line up enough supply. 

Most plants only mix in a small amount of wood, often between 1% and 5% of the fuel load, meaning they do not even have to change machinery. In truth, it lets coal plants keep doing what they have always done, just with a little wood added to the mix.  

That presents two big problems.  

• Oct 13, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier SE Asia speeds up plan for connected clean power grid after oil shock Countries are redoubling efforts to link their grids to bolster energy security and reduce their dependence on fossil fuels – but many challenges remain Read more
• Aug 20, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain Chinese capital and technology turned Indonesia into the world’s top nickel supplier, but its dependence on China and the rise of nickel-free batteries could upset its battery ecosystem plans Read more
• Aug 5, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier Southeast Asia’s fragile grids threaten billions in clean energy investment Renewables developers need reliable electricity infrastructure and stable policies to help the region meet climate goals and surging demand for power Read more

Firstly, creating additional demand for wood would put further deforestation pressure on the country’s thick and biodiverse tropical forests, already at risk from mining and palm oil plantations. 

Secondly, by making old coal plants look a little greener on paper, the plan could hand them a reason to keep operating well beyond when they would otherwise be retired, meaning the fleet keeps emitting for longer than a genuine phase-out would allow. 

This is not a real climate solution. It is coal wearing a green mask. 

A threat to forests

To meet its co-firing mandate, Indonesia would need more than 10 million tonnes of wood pellets every year, an area of forest equivalent to 3.27 million football fields, according to a 2024 assessment by a group of NGOs.

The same report warned this could push deforestation as high as 2.1 million hectares a year, and found that a 10% cut in coal use through co-firing could threaten 10 million hectares of untouched forest in the areas where wood is collected. At Indonesia’s biggest power plants alone, switching just 10% of coal to wood could clear an area of forest roughly 35 times the size of Jakarta. 

PLN and the forestry companies that supply it insist the wood comes from dedicated “energy plantation forests” – land set aside to grow fast-growing trees for fuel, not from clearing natural forest. But the same assessment found that of the 1.2 million hectares already designated for these plantations, more than 400,000 hectares still contain undisturbed tropical forest, which will come under growing pressure as demand rises. The claim that this wood comes from already-degraded land does not hold up to scrutiny. 

Advocates of co-firing say wood is a clean fuel because trees can grow back. But when old natural forests are cleared to make way for fast-growing forestry plantations to grow trees for fuel, they release carbon that took decades or centuries to build up. 

One study, by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), estimated that co-firing with just 10% wood across 52 power plants could create up to 26.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions each year, once the clearing of land and the production of wood pellets are counted. 

Wood pellets for export 

Government rules have made this easier, not harder. Companies that already hold industrial timber plantation permits can convert them into energy plantations, giving them a ready-made legal route into the wood pellet business without applying for new forest land.

Indroyono Soesilo, chairman of the Indonesian Forestry Entrepreneurs Association (APHI), has publicly called on the government for tax breaks and relief from state forestry levies in exchange for making that switch. 

Research by Trend Asia found that the push into energy plantations for biomass is dominated not by small or informal loggers but by large companies already notorious for deforestation, including APP Group, Korindo Group, Barito Pacific and Wilmar International. In short, some of the same companies long associated with clearing forests are being given an easier path and a green label to keep doing it. 

• May 13, 2026 Nature COP30 roadmap to end deforestation will invite countries to draft domestic plans After promising at COP30 to produce a voluntary global roadmap to stop forest loss by 2030, Brazil provided an update on the consultations this week Read more
• Nov 4, 2025 Energy Big banks’ lending to coal backers undermines Indonesia’s green plans  Foreign banks involved in Indonesia’s $20-billion Just Energy Transition Partnership have also funded companies working on coal power expansion, a TBIJ and Climate Home News investigation reveals Read more
• Dec 17, 2025 Energy Indonesia and Vietnam set for surge in coal use this decade despite transition deals Rising demand in Southeast Asia and India is expected to prevent coal use from falling significantly this decade, the International Energy Agency predicts Read more

Much of this wood does not even stay in Indonesia. Japan and South Korea have bought more than 99% of Indonesia’s wood pellet exports since 2021, using them to meet their own clean energy targets. 

Perhaps the biggest risk in Indonesia’s co-firing plan is what it could do to the coal fleet itself. Mixing in a small amount of wood does not require a plant to shut down or upgrade. It simply gives the plant a reason to keep running, dressed up as progress. Every year a coal plant stays open because of a paper-thin green label is a year that real clean energy, such as solar and wind, is pushed further down the road. 

None of this means biomass is always bad. Using leftover farm waste or city waste to make power can make sense. 

But the scale of Indonesia’s co-firing plan cannot be met by leftovers alone, which is exactly why forests are being pulled into the supply chain. The countries and banks funding Indonesia’s energy transition, along with Japan and South Korea, should stop counting co-firing as a climate win. 

Real progress means closing coal plants, not feeding them wood. 

The post Coal in a green mask: Indonesia’s co-firing plan will harm, not help, the climate  appeared first on Climate Home News.

Climate scientists have already established that Europe’s sweltering summer was the hottest on record. Now they are saying it was likely the deadliest as well, with their models showing that the extreme heat led to more than 50,000 excess deaths in cities alone.

The continent has endured five scorching heat waves since May, with record-shattering temperatures in several countries. On the whole, it was about 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.9 degrees Celsius) above the 1991 to 2020 average. Some days exceeded the norm by nearly 22 degrees F, or 12 degrees C. Researchers modeled the impact of those extremes across 854 urban areas, representing roughly 40 percent of the population, and the 2026 data, released today, showed that this summer was by far the deadliest on record. 

“We’re seeing significantly higher modeled deaths,” said Clair Barnes, an extreme weather and climate change researcher at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy. The next closest years were 2022 and 2003, with 29,000 and 28,000 excess deaths, respectively. 

Climate change is making extreme heat more likely, frequent, and persistent. As the mercury climbs, conditions become increasingly dangerous, Barnes said, with even fractions of a degree dramatically raising health risks. She and her colleagues attributed some two-thirds of the 50,000 deaths in their study, which the journal Nature Health will publish next week, to human-caused warming. 

“Any one of those heat waves would have been deadly, but we’ve had five,” Barnes said, compared to maybe one or two most years. “It’s not just summer. It’s been turbocharged by climate change and now it’s dangerous.” 

The teams’ method of attributing extreme heat deaths to climate change is pretty standard, said Kai Chen, faculty director of the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health, who was not involved in the study. Researchers, he explained, essentially modeled the temperatures and associated death levels Europe would have experienced with and without climate change, then reported the difference. 

“This tells people that climate change is not a distant threat anymore,” said Chen, who was also struck by how quickly the analysis was released. “That is critical information to communicate in near-real time.” 

Read Next Yes, this summer really was as hot as you think it was Matt Simon

Europe saw an especially searing stretch from June 17 to July 1, when daily average temperatures across the entire region were more than 9 degrees F, or 5 degrees C, above the 30-year average. Schools closed, public transit networks shuttered, wildfires erupted, and preparedness plans were put to the test. The heat even disrupted the Tour de France.

Overall, southern and western Europe bore the brunt of this summer’s heat impacts, with Italy seeing the greatest number of modeled excess deaths at 13,303, followed by France at 7,268. One reason Europeans are so vulnerable to heat deaths, said Chen, is that air conditioning is less prevalent than in the United States, where his research shows that the amenity can cut fatalities by more than half. 

The elderly are at a particularly elevated risk, as heat can exacerbate underlying conditions. The latest modeling reflected that, with all but about 6,000 of the excess deaths occurring in those over 65 years old. “People don’t realize how dangerous extreme heat can be,” said Barnes. “It’s really important to bring home those risks.”

The World Health Organization called 2026 a “dress rehearsal”  for what’s to come, and Barnes thinks research like this can help raise public awareness about the importance of preparing for extreme heat and the need to mitigate climate change. The research, Barnes noted, can also be used to project dangers ahead of coming heat to help authorities plan. “There’s no reason,” she said, “that the model couldn’t be run on forecast temperatures.”

Barnes hopes to expand her work to include other parts of the world too, especially historically marginalized regions such as Africa, where people often feel the effects of heat but may not attribute them to climate change. Limited data availability could impede those efforts in some places, she said. Those numbers do, however, mostly exist for the United States, where Chen is among those trying to implement this type of analysis. 

“That will be very important for the U.S. conversation too,” he said. “It can raise awareness and motivate policy action.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Europe’s hottest summer ever was also its deadliest — by far on Oct 22, 2026.

The board of the UN’s Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage agreed on Thursday to set aside $20 million to help Nepal recover from the devastating climate-driven flood it suffered in August.

At an extraordinary online meeting, board members unanimously invited Nepal’s government to submit a proposal for how to use the money, which will be considered at a future board meeting.

The board’s co-chair Camila Minerva Rodriguez described the decision as “truly historic” as it is the first time the new fund has allocated any money since it was set up three years ago. It is expected to approve its first set of projects at its next board meeting in December.

Maheshwar Dhakal, a senior official at Nepal’s climate ministry, told the meeting the decision was “a powerful expression of humanity, compassion, solidarity and hope” and, for the flood victims, a “recognition of their suffering, respect for their dignity and hope that they are not alone in their darkest hour”.

A woman carries belongings recovered from her destroyed home following flash floods, on August 29, 2026 in Devighat, Nepal. (Photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)

While board members were united in approving the $20 million, plus $1.6 million of administrative costs, representatives of developed and developed countries were divided over the extent to which the decision should set a precedent for the fund’s long-term way of operating.

Germany and Czechia’s board members said it should not set a “precedent” while Japan’s representative said the decision is “truly exceptional” and that the fund’s support must be “in accordance with established rule and procedure”.

Learning the lessons?

Responding, Pakistan’s Ali Sheikh said the lessons from the Nepal case should “feed the long-term model and its work on rapid disbursement” of funds.

He added that he had heard Jan Dusik, Czechia’s board member saying that “we are open for learning but not in setting precedent”. “Please do not define the boundaries for learning,” he emphasised.

Sheikh complained that the decision approved by the board – the result of negotiations between a group of four developed and four developing-country representatives – was narrower than developing countries had hoped for.

“We are saying it is a one-time and Nepal-only window, a sentiment against which many developed countries have raised their voice,” he said, adding there had been no time to review the decision.

Walter Schuldt from Ecuador echoed Sheikh, saying “we should not put limits on lesson learning”. He said the decision, which he was involved in negotiating through “intense exchanges”, tells the fund’s staff to assess the lessons learned.

The fund is currently in a start-up phase and the board will debate its long-term model – including whether and how to rapidly disburse funds in response to climate-driven disasters – at its next board meeting in the Philippines in December.

At Thursday’s meeting, several developing-country board members called for wealthy nations to put more money into the fund. Recovery and reconstruction from Nepal’s flood alone is estimated to cost $4.8 billion – in comparison, the fund has only around $350 million available to allocate to countries, with a current cap of $20 million per project.

Climate justice experts welcomed the decision to allocate money to Nepal as a sign of solidarity but lamented that it came only after significant pressure and is a tiny amount compared with the country’s recovery needs.

“Setting aside millions is not the same as delivering billions,” said Lien Vandamme, a climate justice campaigner with the Centre for International Environmental Law. “What’s clear is that a fund that is desperately under-resourced will remain toothless in the face of escalating climate disasters.”

Editor’s Desk: Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap

Communities on the frontline of those disasters are owed reparations “as a matter of legal obligation”, she added, referring to last year’s advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice which made clear that states most responsible for the climate crisis have a duty to repair the harm it causes.

Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns with ActionAid USA, noted that three years after being established, the loss and damage fund has yet to send any money to countries hit by climate impacts and has not provided a concrete timeline for paying out the money it reserved for Nepal this week.

“If the fund were adequately resourced, an immediate disbursement to Nepal would be an absolute no-brainer. But it seems rich countries are terrified that the fund – which has received a paltry $500 million to date – will run dry, thus putting more pressure on them to provide the money they owe,” he added.

This story was updated after publication to add comment from climate justice campaigners.

The post Loss and damage fund agrees $20m for Nepal but rich nations warn it should not set precedent appeared first on Climate Home News.

We could all use a little extra environmental inspiration these days, so here are 15 new books for readers of all ages.

We’ve adapted the books’ official descriptions below, and the link in each title goes to the publisher’s page. You can also find any of these titles through your local bookseller and library.

Spooky Rivers: 25 Strange and Mysterious Rivers That Snake Across Our Planet

By Geo Rutherford

A thrilling nonfiction book that follows the winding histories of 25 mysterious rivers around the world. Explore natural phenomena, scientific oddities, historical events, and environmental disasters, as well as the myths and legends tied to these waterways, which are increasingly threatened by climate change.

Rivers are the Earth’s restless travelers — carving landscapes, shaping history, and holding secrets. Some are forces of destruction, sweeping away everything in their path, while others are lifelines, sustaining civilizations for millennia. And some are both, bringing prosperity and devastation in equal measure. From deadly whirlpools to lost cities submerged beneath their waves, these rivers challenge everything we think we know about the natural world. There are rivers that catch fire, rivers that boil, and rivers so deep they seem bottomless. Some slither beneath the ground you stand on, while others vanish without a trace.

Who knew rivers could be so … spooky?

Big Cats

By Steve Winter and Sharon Guynup

National Geographic photographer Steve Winter has spent his career photographing big cats around the world, from the graceful jaguars of Brazil’s Pantanal to elusive Himalayan snow leopards. His photographs astound; his stories, even more so. Winter and environmental journalist Sharon Guynup share experiences behind the lens.

In chapters on every key species — cougar, jaguar, leopard, snow leopard, tiger, and lion — readers will witness the power of Winter’s work, including uplifting stories of how his photographs have made a difference and powered important conservation efforts on behalf of these mighty creatures.

Winter and Guynup’s work has changed the world — and it continues to awe and inspire us. But you don’t have to be a serious-minded conservationist to be pulled into their new book. All animal lovers, especially those who love cats, big and small, are invited to look deeply into the eyes and lives of these iconic species.

Wild Work: Adventures of Women Field Biologists

By Sophie A. H. Osborn and Susan B. Adams

More than 40 real-life adventure stories by 37 women field biologists take readers behind the scenes with wolves, condors, bats, bears, and other wild animals, highlighting the important work of women in field science and wildlife conservation. This is an inspiring and entertaining anthology that brings to light the often-untold stories of women in wildlife science, featuring first-person accounts by dozens of adventurous field biologists, immersing readers in the thrilling and compelling reality of studying and conserving fish and wildlife across the globe.

From playing tag with wolves or cuddling wild foxes to wading through rivers filled with venomous snakes or evading poachers, these women share stories of courage, curiosity, and resilience. And they share the delicate balancing act of juggling demanding fieldwork with family life, the lifelong friendships they forge in the wild, and the transformative power of connecting deeply with the natural world. They also bear witness to the fact that while women have been integral to fish and wildlife research for decades, their stories have rarely been represented in literature.

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

By Gil Durán

When Silicon Valley says it’s ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,” the world is bullied into perceiving the chaos as a “necessary cost” of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule. The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.

Using insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern “messiahs” — Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk — and shows how the promise of technological liberation has become a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.

More than a hidden history, this book is an urgent warning: Democracy is being dismantled by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back — if we act now.

Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era

By Jacob Weisberg

History will be particularly harsh to Trump enablers who share and covet money and power. They represent intuitions that are central in determining whether America remains a free, functioning democracy or not — and they know very well they are committing crimes. In this bitterly humorous book, Weisberg has written a defining book of the Trump era — how this pitch-black political moment happened, why so few resisted, and what it reveals about the character of American leadership.

Big Tech, Wall Street, mega-corporations and the U.S. Congress are encapsulated in eight individuals who together form an entwined network of power in America, giving us a new way to understand how authoritarianism can take root in an open society — not by overthrowing institutions, but by bending and bullying them into submission.

We’ve Been Here the Whole Time! A Not So Sacred Guide to All Things Native America

By Joey Clift

Foreword by Shane Hawk / Illustrated by Julie Fiveash

Comedian Joey Clift (Cowlitz nation) takes you on a hilarious journey to discover the largest population you don’t know in this sharp debut for fans of Michael Harriot and Phoebe Robinson. Put away the construction paper: This contraband book contains everything your high school refused to teach you about Native American history, people, and culture — illustrated in an irreverent textbook-meets-notebook style by Diné artist Julie Fiveash.

Clift walks you through a wide range of misconceptions, weird questions, and even weirder assumptions, covering everything from Pocahontas and sports mascots to ancestry claims and the Land Back movement. This hilarious, NDN-approved guide to Native America is a great gift for history buffs, teachers, and comedy fans.

Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy

By Amy Westervelt

A gripping account of the corporate propaganda that has invaded our media, our democracy, and now the very nature of truth itself from investigative reporter and Drilled podcast host Amy Westervelt.

Whether it’s the tobacco industry lying about the health dangers of cigarettes, Big Pharma burying studies that make its products less marketable, or Big Oil misleading the public on the dangers of the climate crisis, we all know corporations use doubt and science denial to avoid responsibility. So why do we continue to let them get away with it?

Westervelt exposes the plot hidden within the familiar story of science denial. Over the last century, Big Industry has built a vast apparatus of think tanks, lobbyists, sponsored university labs, and obliging news networks to con the public and fool decision-makers, poisoning the informational ecosystem and warping the nature of truth along the way.

Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp

By David Helvarg

A spectacular cold-water paradise 30 million years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one of Earth’s most wonderous and underappreciated marine habitats. It’s an ethereal light-infused realm of sharks, otters, eels, sea stars, crabs, rockfish, and myriad other species vital to a functioning ocean and the countless coastal communities that make their living from the sea. Unlike coral reefs, whose similar plight plays out in tropical waters highly visible to vacationing tourists, kelp forests thrive along cold-water coastlines far from tourist centers. What will it take to stop the decline before these underwater playgrounds bursting with colorful life become vast fields of lifeless urchin barrens?

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet

By Jason Dove Mark

A rallying cry and resistance manual from one of the leaders breathing new life into the environmental movement. As the climate emergency worsens and biodiversity shrinks, we somehow get used to it. We struggle to remember what summers were like before the unrelenting heat, in those years before wildfires became an annual routine. We adapt, we normalize. Scientists call this “shifting baseline syndrome,” and they warn that it’s why we are increasingly sleepwalking toward disaster.

Read an excerpt.

Great Reads for Young People (and some adults too!)

Beatrix Potter’s Botanical: The Art of Flowers and Fungi

By Marta McDowell

A rare collection of Beatrix Potter’s own botanical art, and an exploration of the role these plants played in her personal and literary life. This beautiful book showcases 65 plants and fungi that Potter made special study of in her often-overlooked career as a botanical artist. For each species we see Potter’s original pencil and watercolor renderings, learn about the specimen’s role in her various beloved gardens, and hear the stories of how it inspired or appeared in her literary work. The result is a new look at the celebrated illustrator as a pioneering botanical artist and budding scientist.

Liars, Cheats, and Copycats: Trickery and Deception in Nature

By James O’Hanlon

Meet some of the world’s most dastardly creatures, who lie, cheat, and deceive for a living. There’s the deadly praying mantis that looks like an innocent pink flower. The assassin bug that strums spider webs to lure in a tasty snack. The cuttlefish that changes color to hide its romantic intentions.

To understand how these creatures swindle their way to survival, this book reveals the science behind camouflage, mimicry, and masquerade, taking readers on a journey from tropical rainforests to the darkness of deep ocean trenches to examine how animals and plants use deception to avoid predators, lure in prey, and even reproduce.

Let’s Explore Foxes: An Urban Wildlife Explorers Book

By Siski Kalla

Perfect for home or school, the new book for children in the acclaimed Urban Wildlife Explorer series takes a close look at foxes, one of the most common but least understood wild urban animals. Ideal for curious young minds, they’re bursting with laugh-out-loud moments, fascinating science, and beautiful watercolor illustrations. The series is also packed with tips on how kids can help protect and interact safely with local wildlife. Whether you’re a budding naturalist or just want to find out more, these are the perfect guides for young urban explorers.

A Raven of the Rainforest

By Rosanne Parry

A stand-alone addition to the New York Times and Indie bestselling Voice of the Wilderness novels by Rosanne Parry, which include A Wolf Called Wander, A Whale of the Wild, A Horse Named Sky, and A Wolf Called Fire.

On Westerly’s otherwise ink-black tail, one bright white feather stands out. Westerly stands out, too. She isn’t like her brother and sister — she’s different. Everyone knows it, including the roost’s story keeper, who proclaims that Westerly alone is destined to save her fellow ravens from a terrible fate. Questioning her destiny, isolated from her family, and full of doubt, Westerly takes to the sky, vowing never to return. But when a once-in-a-lifetime volcanic eruption finds her, she has no choice but to flee in the direction of home.

The Butterfly Season: What 64 Butterflies Taught Me About Nature’s Great Mysteries and the Meaning of Life

By Lea Korsgaard

Combining nature writing, philosophy, myth, science, and 64 beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, The Butterfly Season is a luminous account of one woman’s quest to see all 64 species of butterflies native to Denmark in a single year. Part field diary, part mythological tapestry, part existential reflection, Lea Korsgaard’s journey unfolds across seasons and geographies, through meadows, marshes, and ancient coastal lands as she discovers the mysteries and miracles of the natural world.

The Science of History: Ingenious Inventions From the Ancient Romans to Pirates, Vikings, Cowboys, Samurai, and More

By Mark Brake and Benjamin Bryant

We may think of ancient cultures as rudimentary — but in reality, the humans living hundreds and even thousands of years ago were remarkably savvy, establishing the foundations of the science we rely on today. From early Mesopotamia to the Stone Age, through Ancient Greece and Rome, the pirates of medieval England, and the seafaring Vikings of Scandinavia, the time of the Samurai, Chinese dynasties, and cowboy cultures from the American West to South American ranches and the Mongolian tundra, This fascinating book showcases how different peoples at different times have observed nature, reached rational conclusions, developed scientific techniques, invented revolutionary tools, and devised shockingly creative ways not only to explain the world about them, but to thrive in it.

Within the Earth humans found medicine; within the Air, navigation; within Fire, warfare; and within Water, the ability to manipulate their environment. Discover the origins of surprisingly sophisticated ancient science in this fascinating look at human ingenuity, such as: Terraced Farming (Ancient Andes, China), Samurai Land Stewardship (c. C16th), Roman Concrete (c. 3rd century BC), Stonehenge (c. 3100 BC, England), Samurai Armor Crafting (c. C16th), Viking Battlefield Herbalism (793–1066 AD, Scandinavia), The Pirate Compass (C17th–18th, England) and so many more clever stories and fun facts, textboxes, lists, and features, readers can open any page of The Science of History and learn something new.

 

You can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives.

And let us know what you’re reading: Drop us a line at comments@therevelator.org

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy.

The post New Environmental Books to Inspire Your Autumn appeared first on The Revelator.

What does going on a date have to do with fossil fuels? Everything, according to the petroleum industry. 

One advertisement from the pipeline company Energy Transfer follows two people getting ready for a date, the man primping with hair gel, the woman applying lipstick, before meeting at a bar. “That connection was brought to you by petroleum products,” the narrator says. “But what if we lived in a world without oil and natural gas?” 

The story rewinds to the beginning, except this time, the woman looks bewildered as her phone with the dating app evaporates in her hands. She gets lipstick all over her cheek when the car she’s riding in hits the pavement without its tires. As his hair gel disappears, the man looks into the mirror, baffled. When they sit down across from each other, makeup, hair dye, and glasses fade away. In the game playing on a TV in the bar, a football disintegrates a second before the kicker swings his leg at empty air.

The commercial, which has racked up 7.4 million views since it appeared four years ago, taps into the fact that fossil fuels have become embedded in American life (what’s more American than football?). Oil and gas not only influence how people get around town, but also where they live, how they dress, and how they cook food in their kitchens. This all feels so ordinary that most people don’t notice how pervasive petroleum is, powering our lives while hiding in plain sight. Though it might seem inevitable that we live this way, a Grist investigation found that this idea of what’s “normal” was shaped by decades of advertising, public relations propaganda, and broader efforts to sway American culture, from radio programs to Hollywood films.

“Our dependence on oil didn’t just happen,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University.

More in this series Fossil fuels are hiding all over your house. We built a model home to show how. Kate Yoder

This campaign started about a century ago, when companies began strategizing how to create long-term demand for fossil fuels and the products that ran on them. Billboards showcased happy families on the road in their cars, films showed stylish women cooking over the flame of a gas stove, and magazines featured men pushing their gas-powered mowers across soon-to-be perfectly manicured lawns. The message was often left unsaid: The American way of life runs on fossil fuels. 

There’s a well-documented history showing that Exxon and other oil giants understood the dangers of global warming by the 1970s based on their own research and still spent decades publicly downplaying, or outright denying, the science. But the story of how oil and gas companies coaxed Americans into accepting — even desiring — a life built on fossil fuels has largely escaped attention, buried in the pages of obscure trade journals. 

In the 1940s and 1950s, the oil industry spent millions of dollars a year on campaigns to “educate” the public about the wonders of petroleum and how it advanced the “American way.” The natural gas industry promoted all-gas “dream kitchens” and paraded them in front of the editors of Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. They sold a vision of the American Dream that required their products — a cultural legacy that has been devastating for efforts to rein in climate change and shift to a cleaner future.

This history offers an explanation for why Americans have had such a strong reaction to the idea of banning polluting gas ranges (“they can pry it from my cold dead hands”) or requiring more sales of electric vehicles over gas-powered cars. Is this debate really just about technology, or about what the burning of fossil fuels represents — freedom and a sense of identity? President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda is deeply nostalgic for what oil once promised: economic might, a higher standard of living, the chance to rise above your station and maybe make a fortune. In his inauguration speech last year, Trump promised a return to these ideals. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” he said.

As the world enters an “age of electricity” powered increasingly by solar, wind, and other low-carbon energy sources, the United States often appears to be stuck in the past. The Trump administration has prolonged the life of coal plants and opened up new areas to oil drilling, while paying companies billions of dollars to stop offshore wind projects. The explanation, when it’s offered, often returns to the same theme. Earlier this year, when the Trump administration scrapped Biden-era rules to cut emissions from cars, along with the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate climate change, it touted the effort as “restoring the American Dream.” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers summed up the sentiment this summer: “President Trump was given a mandate to roll back the radical climate policies that are burning a hole through taxpayers’ wallets and jeopardizing the American Dream for future generations.”

The words echo what the oil industry has been telling Americans for a century: Without fossil fuels, there is no “good life,” only sacrifice.

How oil became the ‘American way’

Before highways, parking lots, and suburban sprawl took over the United States, people moved about very differently. Americans traveled between cities by railroad; towns bustled with horses, buses, bicycles, and trolleys. Then the automobile rolled in, and forests, meadows, and swampland became pavement, changing the scenery forever. 

It wasn’t a sure bet that automobiles would run on gasoline. At the turn of the 20th century, electric vehicles were quieter and easier to drive, and they quickly became a popular choice, making up a third of vehicles on the road. But Henry Ford’s cheaper, mass-produced Model T, unveiled in 1908, was the vehicle that took off, powered by gasoline.

Up to that point, gasoline was basically a useless byproduct of kerosene, but the new automobile industry gave it a market. Automakers promoted their vehicles as superior to public transit, offering a step up in social status. In an advertisement that appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1917, the Willys-Overland Company, an Ohio automaker, sold its automobiles as “chock full of healthy activity, wholesome fun, and lots of fresh air” — which would make for “a bigger life.” That was supposedly in contrast to the “wrong way,” where families were subjected to suffering through “long rides in hot trolley cars and listless conversation.”

An ad from the Willys-Overland Company portraying cars as superior to crowded trolleys appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1917. Internet Archive

It was a preview of a major shift in marketing leading up to the 1930s. Previously, advertisements for cars had touted their features: the “favorable” ratio of their light weight to their horsepower, their seats upholstered with “fine, long-grain French leather.” But companies began marketing the benefits of using their products instead, painting situations in which a car could improve your life and status. Selling the American Dream meant selling leisure, enjoyment, beauty, good taste, and popularity along with the “mundane product,” as Roland Marchand, a cultural historian, once wrote.

Most advertisers were aiming to reach Americans with means, and the everyday luxuries they depicted clashed with reality as the Great Depression set in. The photographer Margaret Bourke-White captured that sort of contrast after the Ohio River flood in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937. A billboard ad from the National Association of Manufacturers shows a white family smiling as they drive through the countryside, while Black people waited for Red Cross relief under a sign proclaiming “There’s no way like the American way.”

A 1937 photograph in Life magazine shows Black refugees from the Ohio River flood waiting for Red Cross relief. An advertisement behind them broadcasts the “world’s highest standard of living,” exemplified by car ownership. Margaret Bourke-White / Life

As the Great Depression began to recede, automakers saw an opportunity to pitch Americans on a brighter future — one that relied, of course, on cars. At the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York City, where the theme was “The World of Tomorrow,” General Motors had the most popular exhibit, seen by millions of people: the seven-acre “Highways and Horizons.” Its centerpiece, “Futurama,” was a sprawling diorama of a futuristic city in far-off 1960, covering 35,000 square feet, complete with skyscrapers and 14-lane highways. People looked down on the display from moving chairs on a conveyor-belt ride, as if they were viewing it from an airplane. It was the visual representation of a new American mindset — a Futurama booklet promised that highways would “set the pace for advancing civilization” and improve “welfare and happiness.” Afterward, visitors were handed pins saying, “I Have Seen the Future.” 

Visitors tour General Motors’ Futurama exhibit in 1939. Futurama was the largest scale model ever built at the time, including more than 500,000 buildings and 50,000 motor vehicles, many of them in motion. Bettmann / Getty Images The Futurama display at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York depicts a futuristic American city in 1960. The model was designed by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors. Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images

From automobiles to oil, industry leaders grasped that appealing to a sense of national identity could legitimize their business. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, the oil industry boomed, producing fuel for planes and explosives. The wider public had been deeply suspicious of big corporations ever since the Depression, but the oil industry had a new way to defend itself, painting itself as patriotic and essential to the success of the broader American project.  

“The petroleum industry deserves a better public opinion,” James H. Tanham, an executive at the Texas Company (now known as Texaco), wrote to a member of the Petroleum Industry War Council in 1943. “If properly handled, there probably never was a better time to undertake this work. There is nothing inimical about the prosecution of this war and this job. Both have to do with protection of a way of life, wholly American, against enemies without and within the country.”

That same year, the Union Oil Company of California (later part of Chevron) launched an initiative specifically to “sell [the] public on [the] American way of life,” according to the trade journal National Petroleum News. Within five years, it was spending 30 percent of its advertising budget on the effort, promoting how a “free enterprise” economic system contributed to a higher standard of living. A Union Oil advertisement in Central Oregon’s Bend Bulletin in 1944 celebrated how American factory workers could afford more cigarettes and bread with an hour’s wages than those in Germany, Great Britain, or Russia. This success, the ad claimed, came down to “two fundamental principles: PROFIT and COMPETITION.” Provided that Americans didn’t tamper with these principles, it promised, a man might someday be “working only half as long to earn a radio, a house, a hat, a vacation, or anything else he needs.” 

After the war ended, the “American way” increasingly required a car. Suburbanization started taking off in earnest after 1946, when the Levitt family began acquiring 4,000 acres of potato farms outside Long Island, 25 miles east of New York City. They leveled the land, had trucks drop building materials every 60 feet, and eventually built more than 17,000 cookie-cutter homes. Other “Levittowns” soon followed suit, built across the country as developers converted apple orchards, garbage dumps, and barren desert into neat subdivisions. They proved to be model neighborhoods for the entire country. From the end of World War II to 1954, some 9 million people settled into suburbs. As Americans moved far away from where they worked and ran errands, they became locked into a car-dependent lifestyle that consumed vast amounts of petroleum. 

“Oil is basically the fuel that allows this dispersal of the population,” said Matthew Huber, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University.

Yet oil companies worried that the public still didn’t properly appreciate how the fuel had transformed their lives. In response to a survey finding an “opinion vacuum” on the oil business, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s biggest lobbying group, formed the Oil Industry Information Committee in 1948, intending to fill the void. “There is a great vacuum represented by men’s minds,” George H. Freyermuth, who led the public relations department for Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Exxon), said at the time. “We can’t let others fill the vacuum. We have got to create the knowledge to fill people’s minds.” 

It was much more than an advertising campaign: The group built the infrastructure for promoting petroleum through schools, community parades, and exhibits, carried out by local industry ambassadors who could give the effort a friendly face. The committee produced pamphlets, sponsored films, radio programming, and educational materials for classrooms, but its signature initiative was Oil Progress Week: a national ad blitz that encouraged local events celebrating how oil fueled innovation and everything people loved about modern life.

In 1950, an advertisement in Life magazine as part of Oil Progress Week attributed the marvels of daily life to the advent of oil drilling. Internet Archive

It was part of a trend toward what’s called institutional advertising — promoting industries and brands themselves, rather than products. Fortune magazine surveyed this growing field in 1950 and found that the oil industry was pouring $10 million a year into these programs — roughly $142 million in today’s dollars. Executives insisted that such messaging was just telling the facts to the American public. But Fortune pushed back. Not since wartime ads, the magazine wrote, “have we been insulted with such noxious interpretations of the American Dream.”

As much as Americans were already driving, they could be driving more. Automakers and oil companies had been working together to promote highway construction for decades. In the 1950s, advertisements urged families to see the U.S. by car, framing the road trip as a matter of national pride. In the iconic jingle “See the USA in a Chevrolet,” the TV star Dinah Shore urges viewers to get on the road to take in everything America has to offer, from the “fields of golden wheat” to the “Rockies way out West.” Anyone who isn’t doing so is missing out, the lyrics imply: “Life is complete-r in a Chevy,” Shore sings.

The singer Dinah Shore closed her weekly TV variety show, sponsored by Chevrolet, with the jingle “See the USA in a Chevrolet.” Chevrolet Philippines

After the success of freeways in Los Angeles and a “miracle turnpike” in New Jersey that became the busiest toll road in the country, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, calling for a 41,000-mile superhighway system across the country. Futurama was becoming reality, roughly on schedule. 

The Oil Industry Information Committee, meanwhile, had been busy making sponsored films glorifying oil’s contributions to American prosperity. The films were shown all over the country, from small-town Michigan to the heart of Texas oil country, at Rotary Club luncheons, at meetings of religious organizations, in high school classrooms, and eventually on TV. The committee claimed that its films had been screened 92,500 times and seen by more than 12 million people in 1955 alone — about 7 percent of the U.S. population.  

Its 1956 film, Destination Earth, follows a cartoon Martian who visits the United States and is amazed by how powerful and efficient cars are. After doing research in the local library, he concludes that “the big secret is, of course, oil!” and that this miracle substance has provided “a whole galaxy of things to make a better life on Earth.” The result, the film’s narrator declares: “a higher standard of living in the USA than in any other country on the whole planet.”

Destination Earth, a film sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, tells the story of an alien who visits Earth, learns how oil powers cars, and brings that knowledge back to Mars. shaggylocks

During the postwar boom, profits from 14 big petroleum companies tracked by the Federal Reserve more than tripled during the postwar boom, rising from $269 million in 1946 to $917 million in 1956. All that money brought scrutiny. Critics in Congress and the media wondered if the Oil Industry Information Committee’s so-called “education” efforts, especially the pamphlets distributed to schoolchildren, should be considered propaganda, or even indoctrination. Henry Stewart McKenzie Burns, president of Shell Oil Company, admitted there was “a little ulterior motive” to the committee’s work when a congressman grilled him about it in 1956.

“I have had a good deal of experience in public relations,” Burns said during questioning, “and you never can stop telling people that you are good. They might forget.”

But oil companies had done more than simply tell people they were good. They had helped define what kind of life was good, steeping the American Dream in oil.

‘A Word to the Wives’: Fossil fuels invade the home

An unusual performance took place on Atlantic City’s Steel Pier in 1923, during an American Gas Association convention in New Jersey. The wives and sisters of the assembled industry delegates settled in to watch “Progress,” a play that pitted an old-fashioned kitchen against a modern one, starring “Miss Polly Old Time” and “Miss Mary Modern Way.” As charming as the old ways were, there was no doubt whose vision would win.

Miss Mary was played by Ada Bessie Swann, home services director for the Public Service Electric & Gas Company of New Jersey. She led the industry’s push to introduce women to appliances powered by manufactured gas, the predecessor to natural gas. In the early 20th century, most women weren’t familiar with all the expensive stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines that had come onto the market. They were used to cooking on wood or coal stoves and doing laundry by hand. So gas and electric utilities performed a “service,” as they called it: extensive efforts, led by women, to show homemakers how these appliances worked and convince them of their benefits. For years, Swann had been running the New Jersey utility’s experiment to foster “‘better, happier homes’ with the help of gas,” according to an industry publication. (It openly called the effort propaganda.) She was soon heralded as “an apostle of home service,” spreading the mission of gas appliances far and wide.

By 1925, these kinds of industry-sponsored lectures, demonstrations, and classes were reaching thousands of women every day. In Connecticut, New Haven Gas Light Company’s domestic experts visited nearly 13,400 homes that year to instruct residents on the “proper use” of gas ranges. A daily radio show from the Laclede Gas Light Company in St. Louis aided the “home manager” with recipes and cooking advice; the company also held free cooking classes every day to show off its model gas-powered kitchen. 

It was a clever strategy to speed up adoption and lock in future demand for gas — a parallel track to how selling cars as a cornerstone of American life led to increasing gasoline consumption. “Teaching [women] the art of home management as it has become today, is a duty of the gas company,” Swann wrote in a trade journal, pondering the industry’s future in 1925, “because by so doing it must reap for itself the profit of such service — Profits in goodwill. Profits in increased gas consumption. Profits in increased sales of gas heating equipment.” The industry also had to convince people to install the lines to deliver gas. In California, workers would track local building permits and talk homeowners and contractors into connecting gas lines to new construction.

It wasn’t inevitable that so many Americans would switch to gas appliances. Electric competitors were selling their “flameless fuel” as superior, and gas companies saw this competition as an existential threat. By 1930, gas executives were aggressively promoting their stoves, the core of their business. “The public mind has been inculcated with the gas cooking idea, but just as no business is secure, no idea is secure nowadays,” Rodger K. Tenney of Chicago’s North Shore Gas Company wrote in American Gas Journal that year. “Constant pressure brought to bear on the public mind will make that mind thoroughly gas cooking conscious,” he concluded.

To do so, gas companies embarked on a decades-long campaign to influence the influential. In 1934, Swann’s utility in New Jersey recruited newspaper staff and heads of home economics departments of colleges to advertise the modern gas kitchen. The industry also worked to get favorable coverage in The Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, The American Home, and other women’s magazines; Swann soon got a job working for Woman’s Home Companion.

Gas executives also sought to bring gas propaganda to the radio and Hollywood films. When the phrase “now you’re cooking with gas” started taking off on radio routines in 1939, the industry quickly capitalized on the free advertising, recruiting radio stars such as Jack Benny and Fred Allen to use the phrase. C. E. “Deke” Houlgate, a representative of the American Gas Association, also launched an effort to establish gas appliances as standard props in Hollywood films. By 1941, motion pictures had featured 202 all-gas kitchens, along with 360 gas ranges and 238 gas-powered refrigerators, according to Houlgate. “Today, Hollywood uses gas appliances 100 percent in its outstanding pictures,” he told the audience at a gas appliance and equipment convention in Los Angeles.

A 1939 advertisement from the American Gas Association in the Ladies’ Home Journal promises to make cooking easier: “‘Why, they do the cooking almost by themselves!’ women exclaim when they see the remarkable things an Automatic Gas Range can do.”
Ladies’ Home Journal

As World War II came to a close, the gas industry latched onto the patriotic mood and promised to take the “‘irk’ out of work” with its “New Freedom Gas Kitchen” campaign. Freedom, that is, from the drudgery of cooking. The actual model kitchens varied, but they had streamlined, step-saving layouts built around gas-powered ranges, fridges, and automatic water heaters that could “speed up clean-up” by providing endless hot water. 

It was the perfect time to market new gadgets, because mass consumption had rapidly taken hold of American culture. Economic growth after the Great Depression and World War II relied on an expanding middle class buying more, more, and more: A Bride’s Magazine handbook from the postwar era urged newlyweds to keep an eye out for brand names when buying “dozens of things you never bought or even thought of before,” for the purpose of “greater security” for the country’s industries. “[W]hat you buy and how you buy it is very vital for your new life — and to our whole American way of living,” it read. 

A Word to the Wives, a short film sponsored by the American Gas Association in 1955, showcased a modern home equipped with gas appliances, such as refrigerators and dryers. When a busy homemaker, Jane, visits her friend Alice’s home filled with this technology, she has to decline Alice’s offer of a shopping trip because she’s too busy with chores at home. “Remember, I haven’t got your dream kitchen to make things easier. Mine’s strictly the nightmare type,” Jane says, sighing. Alice sells her on how gas appliances can provide “freedom from unnecessary drudgery,” and they plot to leave Jane’s husband to suffer through chores without her for the weekend, so that he’ll want to buy a “dream kitchen,” too.

The American Gas Association’s 1955 film A Word to the Wives follows a woman’s scheme to convince her husband they need modern gas appliances. Internet Archive

The battle over what would power American homes — gas or electricity — would continue to play out over decades. But petroleum had quietly found a way into households, too. In 1957, the Shell Oil Company celebrated women’s work as part of an ad campaign, “From A to Z: An Alphabet of Good Things about Petroleum.” M was for Mother: “Housewife, cook, chauffeur, hostess, teacher, glamor girl — she does dozens of jobs well … who’s responsible for so many of these new time-saving products? Mother’s little helper — Oil,” the advertisement says. 

A 1957 advertisement from Shell promises that oil will make life easier for women. Lifeblood

Soon, it seemed like almost everything in the American dream house was made from petrochemicals, which some oil executives had predicted would be “the most dramatic future field of development.” As chemists experimented with petroleum derivatives, plastics began taking off, and Tupperware containers, polyester clothes, and synthetic carpets arrived in households. Shell’s alphabetical ad campaign pointed out that “oil research helps with quick-drying paints, no-polish floor tiles, durable plastic table tops, weather-defying asphalt-shingled roofs.”

“In many ways,” the ad says, “your home is a house that oil built.”

‘The American lifestyle is not up for negotiation’

As the years passed, people forgot where this version of the fossil-fueled American Dream had come from. Like most successful propaganda, it simply became taken for granted. The country’s growing reliance on petroleum was seen as a sign of progress for much of the 20th century, an article of faith in the American project.

In the 1960s, however, the pollution from fossil fuels and all the products companies were pumping out was increasingly visible. Smog blanketed Los Angeles on more days than not; an oil spill off the California coast washed sludge onto beaches; the polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught on fire, again. The decade saw the federal government’s first serious effort to crack down on pollution, starting with the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963, followed by the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Act in 1965. The environmental movement was born on Earth Day in April 1970, when an estimated 10 percent of the country’s population joined in demonstrations demanding that political leaders do more to clean up the environment. 

Then, the cheap, plentiful fuel that had enabled the American “way of life” was suddenly no longer cheap and plentiful. In 1973, oil-producing Arab countries stopped exporting petroleum to the United States because of its support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and oil prices nearly quadrupled. President Richard Nixon instituted a rationing program, and gas stations started running out of fuel.

The oil crisis threatened the car-powered American way of life that people had come to rely on, and as if on cue, “freedom” became a hot talking point. “For many the ‘energy crisis’ was seen as a contrived threat to justify more government control of everyday life,” Matthew Huber writes in Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. One advertisement from the New Car and Truck Dealers of America in 1979 asked readers to “Help us protect your freedom to drive.” From whom? The people who cared about the environment. “There are people in government, and others, whose only answer to our environmental and energy problems is to restrict the use of the automobile.” Businesses that relied on fossil fuels were now on the defensive.

Another challenge for the oil and gas industry arrived when the American public grew concerned over global warming. During an unusually hot summer in 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at the time, warned Congress that the greenhouse effect had already been detected. Global warming became front-page news around the country, climate bills proliferated in Congress, and the United Nations created the building blocks for global climate policy. President George H.W. Bush went into office declaring himself “the environmental president” and promising to counter the “greenhouse effect” with the “White House effect,” but as soon as it became clear that doing something about climate change meant curbing the use of fossil fuels, his administration reversed course. By 1992, when countries met to sign a global climate treaty at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Bush refused to commit to targets for emissions reductions. U.S. delegates insisted over and over that “the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation.”

The idea that addressing climate change required a sacrifice of American values — and the lifestyles and products that supported them — came up whenever the country was seriously considering limits on fossil fuels. In 1997, President Bill Clinton stood prepared to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which required countries to cut carbon emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. But the oil company Mobil responded with alarm: “Committing to binding targets and timetables now will alter today’s lifestyles and tomorrow’s living standards,” it warned in an ad in The New York Times. “Flexibility will be constrained. Carpooling in; sport utility vehicles out. High fuel and electric bills. Factory closures. Job displacement.” 

A 1997 ad from the Global Climate Coalition, a group of 100-plus companies including Shell and General Motors that worked to block climate policies, shows smiling children beside the warning that signing the Kyoto Protocol “would force American families to restrict our use of the oil, gasoline, and electricity.” Climate Investigations Center

A pattern was established: Oil companies ramped up their PR campaigns whenever there was a push for climate action in Congress, helping to thwart efforts to limit emissions or negotiate binding treaties. They poured money into political campaigns and lobbying, played up doubts about the science of global warming, and commissioned studies showing that climate policies would hurt the economy. They also argued that cutting fossil fuels would threaten the American way of life — the one they had spent so many decades championing. 

But as fossil fuel emissions continued to rise, and hurricanes and wildfires grew more severe, Americans became increasingly worried about climate change. In the late 2010s, progressives channeled their energy into proposals for a Green New Deal, calling for bold investment in a clean economy that would tackle climate change and inequality at the same time. By tapping into nostalgia for the New Deal, one of the most ambitious political projects in U.S. history, they were articulating a competing vision of the “good life,” divorced from fossil fuels. 

The ascendant right wing of the Republican Party had a ready-made response: The Green New Deal was an attack on freedom. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office released a fact sheet that mentioned the difficulty of eliminating emissions from “farting cows and airplanes” in 2019, critics seized on it as evidence of climate activists trying to control their choices. At the Conservative Political Action Conference that year, Sebastian Gorka, a Trump administration official, said, “They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers.”

After years of failed climate proposals, politicians knew that mandates and regulations would be politically tricky. When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, promising to tackle climate change, the energy behind the Green New Deal was whittled down into a less ambitious, more politically palatable project. In 2022, Congress passed the only comprehensive climate law in American history, the Inflation Reduction Act, full of tax credits and incentives to switch to clean energy and green technologies. The Biden administration instituted many regulations that mandated more efficient technology, including for household appliances, and conservatives keyed in on the upfront costs. In 2023, The Alliance for Consumers, a conservative advocacy group, posted a visual of “Biden’s Dream House,” purporting to reveal how the Biden administration’s policies would force Americans to pay for costly remodeling jobs. 

“Welcome to Biden’s Dream House, where the American dream just got significantly more expensive …” Alliance for Consumers posted on X in 2023. The campaign focused on the cost of upgraded appliances and the idea that the government was trying to control household decisions. “If you like your living room and kitchen, you can keep your living room and kitchen … just with a few additional ‘upgrades’ to comply with Progressive Lifestyle Choices™.”

Welcome to Biden's Dream House, where the American dream just got significantly more expensive…

Join us on a tour and see the green "upgrades" that the Biden Administration wants to bring (by mandate) to a home near you, very soon. pic.twitter.com/7cg7yMRCXZ

— Alliance For Consumers (@for_consumers) October 26, 2023

The clear message was that “elitist climate liberals” wanted to force people “to have a worse life and sacrifice to solve this,” said Huber, the author of Lifeblood. 

As Republicans geared up for Trump’s presidential run in 2024, they leaned into this narrative. That September, Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the far-right policy playbook Project 2025, told the audience at a New York Times climate event: “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American Dream.”

Another way of looking at it, though, is that climate change itself is threatening the American Dream. Global warming pushes up the cost of food and energy, causing spikes in home insurance rates that can price people out of owning a home, and destroys homes with floods and fires. Fossil fuels, long sold as the key to achieving comfort and prosperity, have now begun pushing those goals further out of reach.

Can a ‘petroculture’ dream up something new?

The idea that sinister, left-wing climate killjoys want to get rid of hamburgers, pickup trucks, and other iconic American standbys is often dismissed as culture war nonsense. But it begins to make sense if you see it as the result of a century-long campaign tying fossil fuels to the “good life.” 

From the cars we drive to the plastics that surround us, oil has become part of daily life. Brulle, the sociologist at Brown, says the MAGA movement that has captured the Republican Party taps into a “cultural belief in the rightness of petroleum” in the American imagination more broadly. 

The rise of MAGA Republicans has coincided with a sharp shift among members of the party toward embracing fossil fuels. In 2020, 65 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. prioritizing wind and solar development over oil, coal, and gas, according to polling from Pew Research Center. Today, that picture has completely flipped, with 71 percent preferring fossil fuels. Across party lines, the idea of moving on from oil and gas has lost some of its appeal. Less than half of Democrats polled by Pew in 2024 said the U.S. should completely phase fossil fuels out of the energy supply. Scholars call the United States a “petroculture” — an “oil society through and through.” 

It can be difficult to peer beyond the rumbling of an engine, even when stuck in stop-and-go traffic, to a different way of life. In the U.S., our lives are so saturated with oil, it’s hard to know where to begin untangling our connection with petroleum, said Stephanie LeMenager, an English professor at the University of Oregon who wrote a book about oil’s cultural resonance. “There’s a sense of despair, paralysis, and also just not really being able to clearly see a path forward, because of how embedded oil is in everything that we do,” LeMenager said. 

So how does a country begin to rid itself of a century’s worth of oil and gas propaganda? It might start with understanding that none of this was predestined, as much as it might feel like it. The early 20th century began with electric cars and electric stoves; things might have stayed that way, with a push or pull one way or the other, and the same sort of PR campaign that put petroleum at the center of American life. 

From the Green New Deal to the more recent focus on “abundance,” parts of the left have tried to move past the narrative that tackling global warming requires sacrifice. But it will take more than catchy slogans to convince people that a comfortable life is possible without fossil fuels. Oil helped deliver a higher standard of living — the stretch was that people needed to consume ever more of it to live their best lives. The fossil fuel industry spent decades reaching ordinary Americans with that message, broadcasting it over the airwaves and across movie screens, and carrying it into towns around the country through schools and public events. Now, there are cleaner, safer options to power the world.  

Petroleum runs so deep in American culture that building another, cleaner version of the good life will take time — and probably a lot of money. “Crafting the American Dream is the thing that advertisers have been doing for decades,” said Duncan Meisel, the former executive director of Clean Creatives, an initiative pressuring PR companies and advertisers to stop working with fossil fuel clients. 

The American Dream was invented, so maybe we can invent it again.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream on Oct 22, 2026.

After decades of losses, mangrove trees are gaining ground on coastlines around the world, often in places they have never grown before. Paradoxically, scientists say, warming temperatures and the destruction of inland forests are helping to power the revival.

Read more on E360 →

'People vote their real lives' Channel Comment brendan 22nd October 2026 Teaser Media

June Rubis is a Macquarie University Research Fellow working on Indigenous rights and biodiversity governance and a steering committee member for the Cali Fund. She writes here in her personal capacity.

At COP16 in Cali, governments made a significant commitment: at least half of the funding from the new Cali Fund should support the self-identified needs of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, including women and youth. It was a watershed moment for multilateral benefit-sharing.

The challenge now is to translate that commitment into access arrangements that recognise the different institutions, priorities and decision-making processes of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

For generations, biodiversity and traditional Indigenous knowledge have provided significant value to companies who depend on nature’s genetic diversity to discover new drugs that fight diseases, create products that improve health, and grow crops resilient to extreme heat and flooding events. While some compounds are sampled directly from the source country, increasingly the digital blueprints are held in online public databases which are freely accessible to use for innovation and research.

Countries urged to ramp up “insufficient” nature policies at COP17

The Cali Fund was established at COP16 to encourage commercial users of Digital Sequence Information, or DSI, to share benefits arising from its use. Estimates suggest it could generate over $3.5 billion a year – a stark contrast to the modest $10,656 currently committed to the fund from just five SMEs, underlining how much progress must be made at COP17 over the next two weeks.

The COP16 decision that set up the fund offers two routes for money to reach Indigenous Peoples and local communities: through government authorities, and through direct payments to institutions identified by Indigenous Peoples and local communities themselves. 

Varied ways of organising

Indigenous Peoples and local communities organise through a wide range of institutions. Some have national or regional organisations experienced in managing international grants. Others work through territorial organisations, customary institutions, community associations, cooperatives or networks. Some have professional finance teams and audited accounts; others have extensive experience governing territories, collective resources or conservation work without having been organised around international funding requirements.

For direct access, some questions are already apparent. Which institutions should be able to receive funds? How should they be identified? What fiduciary standards should apply? How should safeguards and accountability work where institutional capacities differ? What support may be needed where institutions have strong community mandates but less experience with international finance?

Comment: Protecting nature is a public duty, not a Wall Street profit opportunity

If access is designed mainly around institutions that already meet the expectations of large international finance mechanisms, early funding will tend to favour those already familiar to funders. They will gain further experience and become better positioned for future funding, while institutions with less administrative capacity may remain outside the system despite strong community mandates and long histories of stewardship.

These first decisions matter most, because they set the terms for everyone who follows.

The role of intermediaries requires care. Some Indigenous organisations may want a fiscal host to hold and manage funds on their behalf. Communities may choose to work through an NGO they trust. Government-facilitated arrangements may work well in particular national contexts.

What matters is the function an intermediary performs and the authority that comes with it. Providing administrative support is different from deciding which Indigenous organisations qualify, which priorities can receive support, or how success will be assessed. Direct access means communities keep that decision-making authority.

Decision-making power

The COP16 decision refers to institutions that Indigenous Peoples and local communities identify. But authority among Indigenous Peoples does not sit in one kind of body. It may sit with territorial organisations, customary institutions, community associations or combinations of these. Legal recognition and customary authority do not always align neatly.

Global deforestation slowed in 2025 but Brazil’s election could undo “fragile” gains

An important feature of the Cali Fund’s governance is that Indigenous Peoples and local communities participate as full members of the Steering Committee, rather than as observers. Seven Indigenous Peoples and local community representatives, one from each of the seven socio-cultural regions, participate in consensus-based decision-making alongside representatives of governments and UN entities. Six additional representatives from civil society, scientific institutions and the private sector participate as observers.

That representation carries responsibility. Institutional legitimacy, access and representation take different forms across the seven socio-cultural regions. Indigenous Peoples and local communities members therefore have an important role in bringing those differences into the Fund’s governance and in ensuring that arrangements developed for one context do not become the assumed model for everyone else. 

Safeguards and clear responsibilities

COP17 can establish the core principles and direction, while allowing operational pathways to develop in ways that respond to different regional contexts. The decisions countries take in Yerevan will shape how that flexibility is realised in practice. 

The choices made around access will influence which institutions are able to participate, which routes become established and which forms of authority are recognised within the funding architecture. The aim should be an architecture with enough structure to maintain confidence while allowing for different forms of Indigenous and community governance.

A credible direct-access pathway will need safeguards, financial oversight and clear responsibilities. This would give the 50% commitment a stronger institutional foundation.

The Cali Fund’s importance will ultimately depend not only on how much funding reaches Indigenous Peoples and local communities, but on whether they are able to determine how the money is accessed, governed and used. This requires access pathways that recognise their institutions, priorities and decision-making processes, rather than requiring them to conform to a single predetermined model.

The post COP17 must settle who decides how Cali Fund money is disbursed appeared first on Climate Home News.

The UK government has approved extraction at the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea, despite acknowledging that this decision could make it harder for Britain to convince other countries to move away from fossil fuel production.

UK energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh approved the drilling on Wednesday after months of high-profile debate, fuelled in part by interventions from US President Donald Trump. She argued that the project would boost energy security in the wake of the Middle East fossil fuel crisis, protect hundreds of jobs and add £2.9 billion ($3.88bn) to the UK economy.

She said Jackdaw’s gas would be cleaner than imported gas and would not prevent the UK from meeting its legally-binding carbon targets and its goal of net zero by 2050. As the field is already licensed, she said extraction was consistent with the Labour Party’s 2024 manifesto promise not to issue any new oil and gas licenses.

The same morning, the government announced a new Energy Wealth Fund to reinvest oil and gas revenues in the climate transition. It will start with £2 billion ($2.67bn) from the government and be topped up over time with tax revenues from offshore oil and gas production.

Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh and Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey leave 10 Downing Street following Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first cabinet meeting, on July 21, 2026 in London, England. (Photo by Ben Montgomery/Getty Images)

Climate campaigners in the UK and abroad were quick to condemn the decision, while a leading legal expert told Climate Home News it goes against the advice of the International Court of Justice. Meanwhile, the government’s own documents reveal that it recognises the drilling could damage the UK’s reputation and its ability to push forward the global transition away from fossil fuels.

“Climate leadership” blow

The 92-page decision document says Fahnbulleh “acknowledges that international standing on climate is important and accepts that a decision to grant consent may not further the UK’s international climate leadership.”

It adds: “She acknowledges concerns about the potential implications for the UK’s credibility and influence – including the difficulty inherent in encouraging other states to move away from fossil fuel production while the UK continues, in a limited and transitional way, to draw on its own domestic resources.”

While noting that Jackdaw has not been issued with a new license – just permission to extract gas – the document says Fahnbulleh “accepts this does not fully resolve the underlying tension in the UK’s position” but “considers this alongside the substance of the UK’s wider record [on emissions reduction], which remains significant”.

It continues that she accepts these concerns are “legitimate” and weigh against approving gas extraction, but only gives this argument a “moderate negative weight” set against the benefits of gas production.

“Huge” wrong signal

In international climate talks, the UK has long supported the transition away from fossil fuels and is one of very few major oil and gas producers to ban new licenses. Across the North Sea, the Norwegian government continues to make offshore areas available for oil and gas exploration through annual licensing rounds.

Climate experts and campaigners shared the concern, acknowledged in the decision document, that approving Jackdaw could set a precedent for fossil fuel production elsewhere. Sam Fankhauser, professor of climate change economics at Oxford University, said the direct climate impact of Jackdaw is “much smaller than the debate around it would suggest” but the “wrong signal it sends, however, is huge”.

• Oct 14, 2026 Energy Carbon capture industry faces tough future, as UK raids green spending Despite a spate of projects getting underway, the mood at an industry conference in London this week was low with government subsidies set to shrink Read more
• Oct 20, 2026 News Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs More than 30 countries have failed to submit an NDC, but only three have repeatedly ignored the committee’s efforts to engage with them Read more
• Oct 21, 2026 Investigations Turkish giant sponsoring COP31 cut climate goals then cashed in on oil boom COP31 sponsors should be screened for “climate integrity”. Yet Koç Holding has become a top partner while its oil refiner runs flat out and its climate targets slip Read more

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said that while Jackdaw’s output will be very small, “it will signal to other fossil fuel producers that they too should carry on with business as usual, less than a month before the COP31”.

Kenyan campaigner Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, called the decision “a serious blow to Britain’s international climate credibility” as “the UK cannot expect developing countries to move away from fossil fuels while giving the green light to new drilling in its own backyard”.

International Court of Justice

In July 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advised that government failure to take appropriate climate action “including through fossil fuel production” may amount to an internationally wrongful act.

The UK voted in favour of a United Nations resolution welcoming the advisory opinion. Yet, in its Jackdaw decision document, it notes that the ICJ opinion is not legally binding and says the UK does not accept the court’s opinion that the customary international law duty to prevent significant harm to the environment applies to climate change.

Fahnbulleh concludes that, although it will have “significant effect on the environment”, gas drilling in Jackdaw “would not lead to significant harm to the environment” – and so does not breach any duty to prevent such harm. Instead, the government document says the duty should be considered “as a matter of policy rather than legal obligation”.

Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh, who led Vanuatu’s legal team pushing for the ICJ’s advisory opinion, told Climate Home News that treating the duty as a matter of policy rather than legal obligation is “not how international law works”. “An advisory opinion is not a judgement,” she said, “but it states the law as it stands, and that law binds the UK whether or not it accepts it.”

“Even as a matter of policy,” she added, “the decision asks the wrong question: whether Jackdaw on its own would cause significant harm. The Court found that accumulated emissions are already causing significant harm. What matters is whether approving new production is consistent with the stringent due diligence the duty requires.”

Public support for decision

While the decision was criticised by climate campaigners and the opposition Green party, polling reported by Politico suggests that 55% of British adults support drilling at Jackdaw, with just 14% opposed. Even supporters of the UK’s net zero target back new drilling by more than two to one, the polling found.

Jackdaw is one of two North Sea oil and gas fields the government has been debating whether to extract more from for months. While Jackdaw is a small gas field, the other, Rosebank, is a much larger field that holds mostly oil.

Rosebank’s emissions are estimated to be around seven times higher than Jackdaw’s. Fahnbulleh told Sky News that Rosebank is “different” to Jackdaw because its oil would be exported, whereas Jackdaw’s gas will be used in the UK, adding that she will consider it “in its own right”.

The Guardian reported on Wednesday that UK officials say Fahnbulleh is minded to refuse approval for Rosebank. She has not yet taken a final decision on Rosebank, the newspaper said, but a ruling is expected later this year.

The post UK approves gas drilling despite admitting blow to “climate leadership” status appeared first on Climate Home News.

Adapted from Chapter 5 of The Last Animal: Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth From the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction (Princeton University Press).

Blame the word wizardry of Charles Dickens. In 1852 the great Victorian novelist described a long-forgotten naval admiral with the coinage “as dead as the Dodo.” The phrase was catchy. It appeared just a few years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which stoked almost as much interest in the ends of species as in their beginnings. The poor dodo then appeared, as a clownish figure, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The bird’s reputation was sealed, and the dodo became not just an emblem of extinction but a byword for doomed obsolescence. To go the way of the dodo meant to succumb to inevitable oblivion.

In truth, the dodo’s fame is out of proportion to its significance. And yet the bird, rightly understood, is the perfect allegory for the fate of island biota in modern times. That is to say, if we understand its story correctly in place and time, the precise way that its evolutionary history intersects our own, the dodo can help us understand the true depth of human impact — and why the conventional ways we measure that impact threaten to understate the damage we have done.

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) lived on the island of Mauritius in the Mascarene archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The species was a flightless member of the pigeon/dove family (Columbidae). Dodos boasted long and colorful beaks. They ate fruit and perhaps small crabs. The portrayal of the dodo as ridiculous or clumsy is absurdly unfair. Mauritius lacked native mammals (with the exception of one bat, now endangered), so the niches normally occupied by mammals were infilled by birds, reptiles, and even crabs. The dodo, far from a defective product of evolution, was a stroke of creative genius, executed under the severest constraints — a plump pigeon playing the part of a mammal. Until we showed up, they thrived.

The Mascarenes make a rich case study in the annals of extinction history because, as Anthony Cheke and Julian Hume have observed, “Their despoilers took good notes.” This is no accident. The Mascarenes were ground zero for some of the first environmental thinking — and activism — in recognizably modern form. Deforestation and defaunation startled European observers. Mauritius, in the words of the historian Richard Grove, acquired “a disproportionate significance in the history of European colonial environmental policy.” The phrase “dead as a dodo” was not only catchy — it had been primed for success by two centuries of awareness and angst about European impact on this exotic landscape.

Even so, the exact date of the most famous extinction is still fuzzy: The dodo was last securely observed in the 1630s, but they may have survived for a few more decades. The precise cause of their demise is also obscure — in large part because the bird suffered all the usual forces of ecological upheaval at once. Their habitat was destroyed by farms. Their eggs were eaten by invasive species. And, certainly, we hunted the dodos.

The dodo symbolizes the total biotic chaos instigated when Europeans showed up on these islands. At some point or another, more than seventeen mammals, roughly three dozen birds, over a dozen reptiles, a handful of frogs, and numerous invertebrates (among them the nasty predator known as the rosy wolf snail) were introduced. The archipelago’s new residents made their presence felt: Pigs ran rampant, rats gorged on birds and their eggs, and the crab-eating macaque, a monkey native to Southeast Asia, feasted on unwary endemic animals. The effects rippled. Since the first caravel cast its shadow on these shores, more than fifty species have vanished from the Mascarenes.

Human arrival unthreaded a unique fabric woven over incomprehensible reaches of geological time. Islands confront us with the active role of geology in evolution. Islands broadly fall into two types, oceanic and continental, with distinctive evolutionary dynamics. Oceanic islands are usually volcanic in origin (e.g., Palmyra, Hawaii, the Mascarenes), though sometimes they are created by uplift (e.g., Cyprus). Continental islands are bits of landmasses that have become stranded (e.g., the British Isles). Unlike oceanic islands, continental islands start with life, a random sample drawn from continental flora and fauna, like a handful of trail mix grabbed in the dark.

Evolution will work with whatever it is given, and since the constraints are heavy, island biogeography is, in the words of David Quammen, “a catalogue of quirks and superlatives.” Physical barriers drive evolutionary divergence; island populations, separated from the continents, follow unique evolutionary paths. With predators absent and competition sparse, natural selection tilts in unexpected directions. Traits that make no sense on continents — like flightlessness in birds — flourish. Entire systems of interdependence evolve around these peculiarities. And the result is that a staggering share of the world’s species diversity has been hatched on islands.

With great distinctness comes great fragility. Small populations on islands are always vulnerable to shocks, and island species often lack defenses that continental animals must acquire in constant competition against predators, parasites, and even disease. In sum, it is exactly that which makes islands different that leaves them especially vulnerable to us. Their essence is isolation; ours is connectivity. Their tempo is Earth time; our schedules are manic. And when the two collide, the result is often catastrophic.

The Portuguese first set foot on Mauritius around 1507 CE. This timing is of enormous consequence. The year 1500 has come to denote a stark boundary in the literature on the Sixth Extinction (in essence, because the IUCN started noting known extinctions since that date in its Red List). In order to compare past and present rates of extinction, it is commonplace to start tallying species that have disappeared since that time. Round numbers are always suspect, but this one is unusually complicated. Scientists, with a solemn duty to measure things precisely, must start somewhere. Historians, whose tapestry is woven of countless threads, prefer to linger over complexity, to insist on a mix of continuity and change in all human affairs. As a scholar of divided loyalties, I can sympathize with, and become frustrated by, both sides.

Even if the year 1500 is asked to bear an unrealistic amount of weight, the choice is not arbitrary. Around this time, Europeans started crossing oceans with some regularity. The pace of change accelerated. The human impact on biodiversity not only became more pronounced in the Age of Discovery, but the record of our impact also became much richer. No one denies that something dramatically changes around the year 1500, but as the ecologist Robert Whittaker put it, “Using a baseline of AD 1500 is to begin in the middle of the movie.” Whittaker describes our impact on islands in terms of “successive waves of transformation, a form of anthropogenic ratchet effect.”

Human impact on island fauna goes back to the original Ice Age dispersal of humans. Since the Pleistocene, colonization has often meant the onset of hunting and the beginning of the end for large animals, like the pygmy hippos and dwarf elephants on Cyprus. In general, the bigger the animal and the higher up the food web, the more likely it was to vanish. Flightless birds and big reptiles bore the brunt. The giant ground birds of New Zealand, the moas, are a striking case. Geology destined it to be a land of birds. With no mammals (apart from a few bats), the avian fauna of New Zealand gives us a sense of what evolution might have done if the asteroid had wiped out the mammals. The Polynesians who arrived found an Edenic landscape: nine moa species, some towering up to 12 feet tall and weighing hundreds of pounds. Tens to hundreds of thousands of these birds roamed the islands. Within two or three centuries, every species of moa was extinct.

European colonization in the Age of Discovery marked a new era within this much longer story. What makes this period stand out is that the fate of island biodiversity became entangled with novel power dynamics between human societies. Virgin islands like Mauritius were long since rare by 1500 CE, so in most cases, Europeans arrived on already-inhabited islands, disrupting socioecological balances of long standing. The Caribbean offers a quintessential case. Even before European contact, human impact unfolded in distinct waves, but the arrival of Columbus brought a cascade of new pressures: invasive animals, unfamiliar pathogens, and extractive technologies. Indigenous societies and island ecosystems were thrown into turmoil.

The result is measured in rapid faunal turnover. In the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico), there were 116 species of mammals at the beginning of the Holocene. Around 60 of them are gone. If bats are excluded, more than 4 out of every 5 mammals have gone extinct. Cuba, which includes the largest island in the Caribbean plus an archipelago of more than three thousand small islands, has seen approximately 24 of its 59 native mammals go extinct. Deforestation and direct exploitation were important drivers, but the role of invasive species was primary: Over 40 nonnative mammals have been introduced. To the east, on Hispaniola, virtually all the nonflying mammals are gone. On Puerto Rico, all seven are gone.

Mammals were not the only victims. Caribbean birds were threatened by new predators like rats and cats, and they were evicted from their shrinking forests. More than 60 species of birds have certainly gone extinct, and most that remain are threatened or endangered. Over half of the endemic parrots of the Caribbean have been snuffed out. Reptiles have suffered a similar fate. Although modern research has skewed away from our cold-blooded cousins, reptiles are integral to Caribbean ecosystems. Yet since European arrival, turtles, snakes, and lizards have been in freefall. On Guadeloupe, for instance, half to two-thirds of snakes and lizards have gone extinct. Many of the ecological jobs undertaken by reptiles go unreplaced, making the loss of functional diversity even greater.

The story of island biodiversity will thread through future chapters too. As steam replaced sail, the problem of invasive species only became more acute. In the last century, pollution and climate change have become new threats. There was a long pre-history to human impact before 1500 CE; European colonization marks not a beginning but a distinct new phase, a speeding up; and now the Anthropocene is somehow accelerating human impact again.

All in all, the human-dominated planet leaves less life on islands. What endures is quieter, more uniform, less exuberant than before. The raw numbers are revealing. Consider that since the beginning of the late Pleistocene — roughly 126,000 years ago — about 600 bird species are known to have gone extinct, and the real number is probably twice as high. Around 80% of the extinct species were island endemics. Even more generally, around three out of every four anthropogenic extinctions to date have involved island species. If global biodiversity is a great library, written over tens of millions of years, then we have erased an inordinate portion of its rare books collection — the most archaic, most colorful, and most singular volumes.

The year 1500 always saw a speeding up of human impact on ocean life, but the contrast between oceans and islands puts the proposition of the Sixth Extinction, its limits and its strengths, in a distinct light. Oceans are vast and resilient. Islands are small and fragile. If we measure human impact by counting extinctions alone, we will underestimate what we have done to life in the oceans. At the same time, extinction is a reasonable measure of our impact on islands, at least so far, even if we rarely count or even consider the losses before 1500 CE. And counting extinctions is only one crude measure of what we care about. Conceivably, the rate of island extinction could slow down, only because we have already done so much damage to the most vulnerable ecosystems. This is hardly cause for complacency. In fact, just the opposite: Because we have already lost so much diversity on islands, we might strain all the more to protect what remains.

Previously in The Revelator:

For Bald Eagles, the Descendants of the Destroyers Became the Restorers

The post The Way of the Dodo: Thinking Historically About Extinction appeared first on The Revelator.

Current climate policies put the world on a course for 2.8 degrees C of warming this century, well beyond international climate targets, according to a new U.N. report.

Read more on E360 →

'A betrayal of all of our futures' Channel News brendan 21st October 2026 Teaser Media

When the Turkish COP31 presidency presented its priorities to international business leaders for the first time in New York in September, among those invited to give the private sector’s first response was Ali Koç, scion of one of Türkiye’s wealthiest families.

On stage, the vice chair of the board of Koç Holding said the family company, which weeks earlier had been announced as one of the top sponsors for the UN climate summit, can be seen as “quite exemplary” for its climate record.

What Koç did not mention was that the group’s biggest money-making arm – Türkiye’s largest oil refiner Tüpraş – plans to keep running its refineries “at maximum potential”. Nor did he say that, in 2025, both parent company and subsidiary cut their 2030 climate targets to a level they had already nearly achieved, as Climate Home News’ analysis of company records reveals.

The decision to hand Koç Holding a prominent role at COP31 – the company is also the summit’s “Global Business Partner” – has reignited a long-running controversy over the platforming of fossil fuel interests at the annual UN climate conference.

It has also thrown into question how COP sponsors are chosen and screened. The hosting agreement between the Turkish government and the UN climate secretariat (UNFCCC) says that a partner company’s “climate integrity” should be taken into account.

COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment

But how that test is applied is unclear and the process for picking sponsors remains largely opaque. The Turkish COP31 presidency has not published its selection criteria, nor the financial terms of any of its partnership agreements, including Koç’s. The UNFCCC declined to clarify how it advises on such deals.

Campaigners have long argued that accepting sponsorship from polluting companies is wrong because it gives them a global stage, visibility and access to policymakers at talks that are meant to move the world away from fossil fuels, and tarnishes the reputation of the COPs.

Koç’s energy division, which is dominated by oil refiner Tüpraş, accounted for three-quarters of the parent firm’s income in the first half of 2026.

“How was Koç Holding ever chosen as a COP31 sponsor? Any corporation that makes most of its money from oil refining should not qualify as sustainable,” said Pascoe Sabido, a campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory, which exposes company lobbying. “This is hugely embarrassing for the UNFCCC and its climate integrity check, which doesn’t appear to be worth the paper it’s written on.”

Koç Holding “is not just standing still but walking backwards”, he told Climate Home News.

Koç Holding and Tüpraş did not reply to multiple requests for comment. The UNFCCC secretariat and the Turkish COP31 presidency declined to respond to questions from Climate Home News on the sponsorship agreement.

Oil refining windfall

Türkiye’s biggest industrial group, Koç Holding has stakes in several key sectors of the economy, spanning vehicle manufacturing in a joint venture with Ford to electronics, home appliances and banking.

But the conglomerate’s crown jewel is oil refiner Tüpraş, which Koç controls. Last year its four refineries turned crude oil into 26.8 million tonnes of petrol, diesel, jet fuel and other products, enough to fill about 36 Olympic swimming pools every day. 

The company plans to raise its production to 29 million tonnes in 2026 – already a bumper year so far with soaring profits, thanks to sky-rocketing refining margins driven by a crunch in global oil processing capacity caused by the Middle East crisis. 

Click to enlarge Click to enlarge

The oil business boom sits awkwardly with the climate and energy transition plans Koç and Tüpraş unveiled in 2021, when both pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050. Then, Tüpraş set out its aim to become “a leading carbon-neutral energy company”.

Despite these promises, in 2025, both companies lowered their targets for cutting emissions from their own operations by 2030, from 27% to 20% below 2017 levels. Tüpraş also cut its 2035 goal from 35% to 25%. The company still technically retains its long-term target of carbon neutrality by 2050, but the new plan will require much more drastic cuts after 2035. 

Lowering the climate bar

Tüpraş blamed its weakening of climate ambition on “changing market dynamics, economic conditions and technological developments”. In a presentation announcing the revision to investors, the refiner said the energy outlook had changed since 2021.

The reasons it listed included elevated geopolitical tensions, increased investment in oil and gas extraction, which it said showed refined fuels remain vital for energy security – and even the depletion of the carbon budget to keep global warming to 1.5C. 

Its parent company Koç pointed the finger at the slow pace of green hydrogen development, which the group said now had a “low feasibility” of transforming the energy sector after it had previously pinned much of its transition plan on the sustainable fuel. 

The Turkish company’s new 2030 targets are certainly within reach. Tüpraş had already cut its operational emissions by 17% from 2017 levels by 2025, with nearly all of that progress achieved before the transition plan was unveiled, while Koç had reduced them by 16%. 

Click to enlarge Click to enlarge

The softer targets also exclude the bulk of the group’s climate impact. Most of its emissions come not from its own refineries and factories but from the products it sells: petrol, diesel and jet fuel burned in the engines of cars or planes.

These so-called Scope 3 emissions make up about 97% of Koç’s carbon footprint. They rose by around a sixth between 2019 and 2024, and neither Koç nor Tüpraş has set a target to cut them.

Efe Baysal, Türkiye team lead at campaign group 350.org, said there is a “clear contradiction” between talking about climate action while weakening emission targets and seeing emissions from the use of petroleum products keep rising. 

“If the company is serious about the transition, it needs a clear plan to wind down fossil fuel operations, rather than relying on efficiency measures and technologies that let business as usual continue,” she told Climate Home News. 

‘Sustainable refining’ push

Tüpraş’s updated transition plan rules out expanding its oil refineries, but commits to “maintaining the existing capacity” and running it “at maximum potential”. Oil refining is expected to remain its main source of earnings for years to come. Koç listed “growing oil demand and diesel deficit” in Türkiye as a competitive advantage for its energy business in a pitch to investors last month.

The biggest component of the Tüpraş transition plan is what the company calls “sustainable refining”. It plans to invest $3.9 billion between 2025 and 2035 in programmes to modernise its refineries, improve their energy efficiency and bring down the direct emissions they generate. The company is also shifting some of its production to petrochemicals, which it expects to reduce its Scope 3 emissions.

Australia says COP31 co-presidency will work on a cover decision

Alongside these “sustainable refining” efforts, Tüpraş is also investing in renewable power. 

Four years ago, it bought Entek, which produces electricity primarily from six hydropower plants and one gas plant. Since the acquisition, Tüpraş has started building a utility-scale solar farm in Romania and a wind power plant with storage in Türkiye, alongside smaller solar energy installations at some of its refineries. A dozen more renewable energy projects are currently in the pipeline, according to its latest annual report. 

In a self-declared bid to become “Türkiye’s leading producer of zero-carbon electricity”, Tüpraş wants to reach installed capacity of 1.6 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 – a target it raised in its updated plan – and 2.5GW by 2035. The Turkish government has committed to rolling out 120GW of wind and solar capacity nationwide by then. 

Setback for green fuels

Tüpraş plans to supply most of its low-carbon electricity to run its future production plants for green hydrogen, an alternative fuel that can replace fossil fuels in some heavy industries and long-distance transport. 

A few years ago, green hydrogen looked set to become a key pillar of the global energy transition, with companies pitching visionary projects and governments rolling out strategies for the fuel to decarbonise economies. But inflated forecasts, high costs and weak demand have led to a reality check for prospective producers like Tüpraş. 

The Turkish refiner significantly scaled back its green hydrogen plans last year. While it originally hoped to start producing the clean fuel in 2025, it now targets a first pilot project by 2030 with commercial large-scale production not expected before 2035. That’s primarily because the cost of electrolysers, the machines that split water into hydrogen and oxygen, has risen fourfold since its original projections, the company said.

Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy?

Tüpraş’s ambition to become Türkiye’s leading producer of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has also seen a partial rethink. The firm originally said it would convert by 2026 a unit in its sprawling oil refinery in the port city of Izmir into a plant that would produce SAF from waste cooking oil into “green” jet fuel. 

But it is now planning to build a dedicated plant which is expected to be commissioned towards the end of 2028. That means its SAF output will be added to its existing fossil fuel refining capacity rather than replacing any of it.

A Tupras refinery in Turkiye. Photo: Tüpraş A Tupras refinery in Turkiye. Photo: Tüpraş Dividends dwarf green spending

Under its updated blueprint, Tüpraş plans to invest $4.35 billion in zero-carbon power, SAF and green hydrogen by 2035. Last year, it spent $137 million on activities that qualify as green under EU rules, leaving much ground to make up in the next 10 years. Most of its green investment in 2025 went on solar and wind farms, and a quarter on a unit making propylene, a refinery by-product used to produce plastic packaging and bottle caps.

Over the same year, it paid out about five times as much – roughly $740 million – to shareholders, under a policy of distributing around 80% of its profits. About half went to Koç Holding, which in turn paid its own shareholders some $460 million. The Koç family and companies it controls hold the majority of the group.

Kelly Trout, research director at energy think-tank Oil Change International, said a company like Koç should not be the face of the COP31 climate summit as it doesn’t pass the test of “climate integrity” the UN requires of a sponsor. 

The hosting agreement struck between Türkiye and the UNFCCC says that the government has to consult the secretariat of the UN body to obtain advice on which “entities of concern” it should not conclude sponsorship or partnership agreements with. The document adds that the advice should give appropriate consideration to the partner’s climate integrity, but it does not specify how that should be judged.

‘Climate integrity’ mystery

Climate Home News asked the UNFCCC and the Turkish COP31 presidency if this process was followed for the Koç Holding sponsorship, but had not received a response at the time of publication. 

The same provision featured in the host country agreement for COP29 in Azerbaijan, according to a leaked copy published by Human Rights Watch.

COP31 attendees told not to interfere in Türkiye’s “internal affairs”

The clean energy arm of state-owned oil and gas company SOCAR was named “Energy Transition Partner” for that summit, alongside other firms which an investigation from the Organized Crime and Corruption Project (OCCRP) found were owned by the country’s ruling family or people associated with them. 

Koç is not the first fossil fuel-linked company to bankroll a UN climate summit. At COP24 in the Polish coal-mining city of Katowice in 2018, sponsors included the state coal power company PGE and the coking coal miner JSW. 

‘A real story to tell’

COP sponsors typically get the right to promote themselves inside the conference venue and appear at official events. When it unveiled the agreement, the COP31 presidency called Koç Holding a “vital partner” in its efforts to unite the public and the private sector “to demonstrate Türkiye’s unwavering commitment to global climate action”.

The presidency declined to answer Climate Home News’ questions on how Koç Holding will be involved in the summit. 

Koç itself has revealed little about its plans for the Antalya talks. When the deal was announced, the group said it would use the summit to share its experience of turning climate solutions into “concrete business results” and to forge new partnerships. 

View this post on Instagram

Speaking at a high-level roundtable on energy at UN headquarters in New York last month, Ali Koç said the industrial group has “a real story to tell”, having undertaken a “comprehensive transformation process in climate matters”. 

Campaigners, however, want companies that retain their high-emitting businesses to be excluded from the COP climate summits and have long demanded an “accountability framework” to protect the negotiations from fossil fuel influence. 

“If the UNFCCC and its secretariat wants to salvage a bit of credibility, the UNFCCC needs to urgently address conflicts of interest in the UN talks,” said Corporate Europe Observatory’s Sabido. 

The post Turkish giant sponsoring COP31 cut climate goals then cashed in on oil boom appeared first on Climate Home News.

The United Nations has said the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 6% per year to limit global warming enough to be able to return to the 1.5C goal by 2100, as decades of insufficient climate action have now made an overshoot inevitable. 

In a video message accompanying the 2026 Emissions Gap Report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the world could no longer avoid overshooting the 1.5C limit and that the consequences were already devastating. However, he said it was still possible to return average global temperatures to 1.5C above preindustrial times by the end of the century.

“Overshoot is not surrender,” he said, adding that the report, released on Wednesday, sets out what is needed to limit warming. That entails cutting global greenhouse gas emissions by 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040, all compared with 2025 levels.

This implies average annual reduction rates of 5.7% for 2025-2035, higher than the pathways laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its last major scientific report, which required annual reduction rates of about 5%, UNEP said.

Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs

The more ambitious emissions reductions – which countries are still far off achieving – would put the world on the lowest-possible overshoot pathway, giving a 50% chance of limiting peak warming to 1.7–1.8C around mid-century before bringing global temperatures back to 1.5C or below by 2100, the report said. Reaching this scenario will also require carbon removal from the atmosphere, it added.

UNEP noted that if countries fully implement their current national climate plans (NDCs), they would only reduce emissions by 5-8% by 2030 and 11-15% by 2035, relative to 2025 levels.

UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said the world must not give up on the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious warming limit, adding that every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of heating above 1.5C increases climate change impacts and risks, such as the deadly floods, heatwaves and wildfires that have plagued many nations this year. 

“We must pull out all the stops to minimise peak warming and return to 1.5C by the end of the century. This is possible,” she said, adding that governments must urgently implement policies that deliver rapid and sustained emissions reductions.

Climate pledges fall short

In 2025, global greenhouse emissions reached a total of 58.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) equivalent, which is estimated to be a very slight decline from 2024 levels, but UNEP said it is too soon to conclude that global emissions are plateauing or peaking.

Total net anthropogenic GHG emissions, 1990–2025. Source: UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2026 Total net anthropogenic GHG emissions, 1990–2025. Source: UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2026

New climate pledges since last year’s report have made a negligible difference to projected emissions and warming, UNEP said. Under current policies, the world is on course for 2.8C of warming this century, while full implementation of national climate pledges and continued similar efforts would limit warming to 2.6C, the report found.

UNEP said its projections had deteriorated, attributing this to the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement under President Donald Trump and revised estimates of historical emissions. 

Even with the most optimistic pledge-based scenario – which assumes countries deliver both their current national climate commitments and additional net-zero targets – warming would now only be limited to 2.1C this century, the report found.

IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock

Speaking to journalists ahead of the report’s launch, co-author Anne Ohlhoff said the US exit from the Paris accord meant that its previous national climate target was no longer included in UNEP’s global projections. The country has also dropped its net-zero emissions goal, she said, affecting the outlook because the US is the world’s second-largest emitter.

She warned that there is still a large gap between countries’ emissions commitments for 2035 and the reductions needed under the report’s lowest-possible 1.5C overshoot scenario.

Every five years of CO₂ emissions at current levels pushes peak warming up by around 0.1C, she said, adding that without urgent action, it could quickly become impossible to keep peak warming below 1.7–1.8C.

Describing the emissions gap as a “leadership gap”, UN chief Guterres warned that current national climate plans and policies “fall dangerously short” of what is needed to limit warming. He urged countries to adopt credible roadmaps for transitioning away from fossil fuels, accelerate clean energy deployment and electrification, invest in electricity grids and storage, cut methane emissions and halt deforestation.

Projections of global warming under the pledge-based scenarios assessed in the report. Source: UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2026 Projections of global warming under the pledge-based scenarios assessed in the report. Source: UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2026 Carbon removal needed, but risky 

Alongside deep emissions cuts, removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere needs to be accelerated throughout the century, the report found. The world will need to remove and permanently store about 320 billion tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere to return global temperatures to around 1.5C by 2100.

The estimated carbon removal is equivalent to around eight years of global CO₂ emissions at 2024 levels. However, UNEP cautions that removing carbon at this scale remains uncertain because of technological and socio-economic challenges.

Keywan Riahi, a contributor to the report, said carbon could be removed through nature-based approaches, such as planting forests and improving wetland management, which help ecosystems absorb carbon emissions, as well as engineering solutions that capture emissions from energy production or remove carbon directly from the air.

A view of Brazil’s Pantanal wetland (Photo: Silas Ismael/Wetlands International Brazil office) A view of Brazil’s Pantanal wetland (Photo: Silas Ismael/Wetlands International Brazil office)

However, he warned that both nature-based and technological approaches face risks and might not deliver carbon removal at the scale needed. This is because nature solutions such as planetary sinks are weakening because of climate change while techno-fixes remain uncertain, he added.

“All of those technologies come with risks,” Riahi told reporters, adding that what the world needs is to try “to keep the overshoot as low as possible, so that we do not need to rely on these technologies to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere later on”.

Renewable energy supports emissions cuts

Despite the expected overshoot of the 1.5C warming limit, the UNEP Emissions Gap Report underscored that the rapid growth of renewable energy and the impact of climate policies so far show that deeper emissions cuts remain possible. 

It stated that since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, global renewable electricity capacity has grown three times faster than anticipated, while solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment has increased sevenfold compared with projections made a decade ago.

Maintaining the recent pace of renewable energy expansion, alongside stronger policies, could put the world on track to meet the global goal of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030, the report said. It could also increase the share of wind and solar in electricity generation to levels consistent with the pathway that limits the overshoot of 1.5C to the lowest possible level, it added.

SE Asia speeds up plan for connected clean power grid after oil shock

Andersen said the explosion of renewable energy and slower-than-projected growth in coal energy supply showed that accelerating climate action is possible. However, she warned that progress remains insufficient, particularly in phasing down fossil fuels and halting forest loss.

“Nations must understand that the point of return begins now, not later,” she said, calling for “fast, deep and sustained emissions reductions”. She urged governments to strengthen their climate action at upcoming UN climate talks and accelerate efforts to keep the 1.5C pathway within reach.

Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, said major fossil fuel-producing countries need to take greater responsibility for reducing their emissions, saying that big polluters such as the US and Saudi Arabia need “to stop playing politics and face the scientific reality”. 

“Right now they are looking at the fire, denying it exists and pouring more petrol on it, while their own citizens increasingly face searing heat, wildfires and other impacts,” he said. “Governments [need] to get on with enacting policies that cut fossil fuel use as soon as possible.”

The post UN sets steep emission cuts to reverse 1.5C overshoot by end of century appeared first on Climate Home News.