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FracTracker researchers tracked 12 data center proposals across six Southwestern Pennsylvania counties. Most sit on former industrial sites, two-thirds are in environmental justice areas, and nine plan their own fracked-gas power.

The post Insights on Southwestern Pennsylvania Data Center Proposals appeared first on FracTracker Alliance.

On Saturday, October 17, workers and their supporters gathered outside two different “Nail Fix in the 6ix” locations — one in Scarborough and the other...

The post Workers demand $70,000 in wages stolen by Toronto nail salon first appeared on Spring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unscrupulous employers

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

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

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

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

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

The missing link with workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on whether a lawsuit seeking damages for climate-change-related harm to Boulder County can proceed.

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Something ominous just hit California: rain. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What will it take for the federal government to get illegal, ultra-fast e-motos off the streets, and stop the wave of deadly crashes that have been falsely attributed to safe and legal e-bikes?

That’s the question on the lips of bike advocates across the country as a rising tide of state laws aimed at curbing e-bike use sweep the nation — despite evidence that low-speed pedal-assist vehicles aren’t actually to blame for many of the most headline-grabbing collisions.

Let’s break down where that confusion comes from — and how to end it once and for all.

What a legal e-bike is — and why we need them now more than ever

Clearly defined by the Consumer Product Safety Commission as “two- or three-wheeled bicycles with an electric motor of less than 750 watts, fully operational pedals, and a maximum speed of less than 20 mph when operated solely on electric power,” real e-bikes are widely regarded in advocacy circles as one of the most critical street safety tools around. 

That’s mostly because of their potential to reduce the constant driving that’s helped make American roads the deadliest of any high-income country. One study found that 46 percent of North American e-bike trips replaced a car trip, and those percentages may be even higher in European cities with more diverse mobility landscapes.

Recommended I Care About E-Bike Safety 0.02 Percent of The Time Andy Boenau September 11, 2026

Critically, many of those replaced car trips happen at conventional bicycle speeds, rather than the vehicles’ 20 mile per hour max; it just takes less effort (and sweat) for riders to pedal longer distances. And unlike many illegal e-motos, e-bike riders do have to pedal, or the bike won’t move.

Studies show that, on paths shared with pedestrians, e-bike riders average a super-safe 7.8 miles per hour, compared to 6.8 for conventional bikes; on all roadway segments, cyclists who use pedal-assist still tend to top out around 16 miles per hour, compared to 15.8 for those who don’t.

As e-bike use has grown, though, so has public frenzy over “e-bike crashes” — though many of the most-reported collisions ultimately didn’t involve what most cycling advocates or governments would even consider an “e-bike” at all.

Real crashes, wrong vehicle blamed

Of course, none of that is to say that the bloodshed isn’t real. A recent analysis of national data from 30 major US health systems recently reported a 760 percent increase across the last three year in emergency room visits for crashes involving some form of motorized, two-wheeled vehicle — and a 19.1-fold increase among children and adolescents.

Because the distinction between e-bikes and e-motos isn’t typically captured in emergency department records —and police officers who report on crashes don’t always know the difference, either — all of those crashes were recorded simply as “e-bike” injuries in the researchers’ press materials, which mentioned the term a staggering 70 times.

The role of drivers in those collisions, meanwhile, was not mentioned at all, even though the vast majority of all fatal bike crashes involve cars.

Recommended PART I: The E-Bike ‘Problem’ is an E-Moto Problem Matt Moore November 3, 2025

To be clear: some of those crashes almost certainly did involve a CSPC-legal e-bike — and the rate of actual e-bike crashes is likely rising, as both e-bike popularity and driver-on-cyclist violence continue to explode.

But time and again, media outlets have been forced to retract disturbing reports that an “e-bike rider” had killed or injured a pedestrian while traveling more than 30 miles per hour, or was killed or injured themselves in a single-vehicle crash — only to admit later that the vehicle involved was actually an e-moto instead.

“It used to be once a week I would see a crash with a teenager reported as an e-bike crash – now it’s almost every day,” said Matt Moore, General and policy council for PeopleForBikes. “But then you see the picture of [the vehicle], or when it’s corrected later on, and suddenly it’s, ‘Oh; police say that was actually an electric motorcycle.'”

More granular local data, meanwhile, suggests that e-moto use is on the rise — and horrifying crashes involving minors are, too. In California, for instance, “kids between the age of 11 and 14 accounted for 61.7 percent of e-motorcycle crashes, even though children under the age of 16 are legally prohibited from riding e-motorcycles,” ABC7 recently reported.

Moore says that shady e-moto manufacturers know kids like buying their product — and they have no serious incentive to stop selling it to them.

“That’s the target market, and they have hit that market,” he said. “And unless something is done to stop the importation of these products and their online sales …those statistics are going to continue to get more grim.”

What an illegal e-moto is — and why we have so many of them

Moore says most e-motos on US roads tend to slip in through loopholes in federal regulations, which are supposed to police what can be legally sold as an electric bicycle instead of an electric motorcycle — and what gets turned away at the border because it doesn’t meet either modes’ safety standards.

Faster two-wheeled vehicles that don’t meet the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s narrow definition of an “e-bike” are theoretically classified as motorcycles, which means they must have VIN numbers and meet strict safety and import standards set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Their riders, meanwhile, need to register their vehicles, maintain motorcycle licenses, and buy insurance.

Recommended Op-Ed: Don’t Let Fear Flatten Progress on E-Bikes Bike East Bay March 20, 2026

In practice, though, the Chinese manufacturers who dominate the production of all two-wheeled vehicles have become astonishingly adept at evading NHTSA and CSPC scrutiny, by slapping an “e-bike” label on an electric motorcycle box and adding design features to blur the line between the two modes.

And since one in four Chinese residents already own an “e-bike” — most of which, experts warn, are actually classed as throttled e-motos in the US — the companies have a lot of product to move, and a lot of incentive to break into the wide-open North American market.

“These manufacturers are all overseas, and they have very little interest or expertise in what our requirements are here — but they are pretty good at evading enforcement,” added Ash Lovell, PeopleForBikes’ Vice President of Government Relations.

Recommended The ‘Problem’ With E-Bikes? The Super Fast Illegal Ones Sophia Lebowitz October 21, 2025

Lovell and Moore say some e-moto manufacturers dodge US regulatory requirements by equipping their vehicles with fake, removable pedals that don’t even turn, since they’re actually powered by throttle alone. Others ship motorcycles with a 20-mile-per-hour setting, but offer another setting capable of reaching 80 miles per hour, and easy instructions on how to unlock it.

And when all else fails, manufacturers can just check a box that their vehicle is really an electric “dirt bike” intended “off road use only” — even if their marketing materials depict it being ridden on public roads, sometimes even by children.

“I think that the manufacturers and importers of e-motos, have tried to create a gray area,” Moore adds. “[Because] it costs money to make a motorcycle that’s certified and compliant … If you’re avoiding triggering the scrutiny of either [the CPSC or NHTSA], you might be able to get that product into the United States without any sort of regulatory framework.”

Because it’s “extremely difficult” for U.S. courts to get jurisdiction over Chinese companies, Moore says consumers typically have no recourse to sue when they buy an e-moto falsely advertised as an e-bike — even when someone gets hurt or killed. And in the rare case that a domestic e-moto company gets sued, accountability is still hard to come by.

“If I’m a brand called ABC E-Moto, and and I get a cease-and-desist letter or judgment or a lawsuit, I can say ‘well, ABC E-moto just went out of business’ — and it’s now DEF E-moto, and we’re selling the exact same product with a different label,” he adds.

State confusion leads to bad state laws

To complicate matters even more, all but eight states have added another layer of complexity to the conversation about what an e-bike is: the three class system, which divides the market into categories based on vehicles’ speed and the presence of a throttle.

While People For Bikes say it’s been essential to helping states dictate where different sub-types of e-bikes can legally be ridden, some advocates say the three class system has made it harder to define them in relationship to e-motos, since the Class I e-bike — 20 miles per hour max, no throttle — is the only one that neatly aligns with the federal definition of the term.

Class II models, meanwhile, can have a throttle, which isn’t explicitly mentioned by the CSPC — leading some consumers to assume that it’s actually a motorcycle, even though that “accelerator” is often only used to get a heavy cargo bike going from a full stop on a steep hill, and speeds are still capped at 20 miles per hour.

Class IIIs, meanwhile, flatly violate the CSPC definition because they can go 28 miles per hour to help cyclists keep pace when they’re riding in car traffic. But proponents argue they’re still safe, since state laws banish them from standard bike paths when they’re not operating at slower speeds — and because it’s intentionally challenging to actually get them to their top velocity, since they can’t have a throttle, and only speed up when the rider pedals as fast as she can.

Recommended Will New Jersey’s Terrible E-Bike Law Spread to Other States? Tom Fucoloro January 27, 2026

And then there’s New York.

By far the largest market for e-bikes and e-motos in the country thanks to its legion of 80,000 delivery workers and the fact that most people can easily live in New York City without a car, New York State adopted a different definition of a Class III e-bike than the rest of the country in 2020, dropping top speeds to 25 miles per hour — but allowing the use of a throttle, unlike class III’s everywhere else.

Moore says that simple shift transformed the class III e-bike into “essentially a moped,” and made it even harder for law enforcement to distinguish between e-bikes and e-motos. And as crashes involving faster, two-wheel vehicles on both sides of that blurry line mounted, neighboring New Jersey — where many deliveristas live — enacted a widely criticized law to require all e-bike riders to carry driver’s licenses, registration and insurance.

“What we’re seeing in New Jersey is that if you make it mandatory to do registration and insurance for electric bicycles, no electric bicycles will be sold,” added Lovell. “We have e-bike retailers that are going out of business in New Jersey because these requirements are on the books. But the overseas e-moto sellers that are still selling into New Jersey? Nothing has happened there.”

Recommended State Lawmakers Aim At Illegal E-Motos, But Hit E-Bikes Instead Ren Zaro Fitzgerald August 5, 2026

And New Jersey may not be the last. Lovell says she and her group have tracked over 400 e-bike related bills this year, which is “up dramatically from when I started five years ago”; shortly before the publication of this article, Ohio introduced a new law eerily similar to New Jersey’s.

“State legislators are seeing that nothing is really being done federally, and they’re all coming up with ‘solutions’ for the quote-unquote ‘e-bike problem,'” Lovell added. “That’s a huge challenge for the bicycle industry — because if there’s 50 different states with 50 different solutions, it’s going to be nearly impossible for anyone to sell bikes.”

That’s not to say that all states have embraced bad e-bike policy. California made headlines in September for a nation-leading law that drew a clearer line between e-bikes and e-motos, and more consequences for falsely advertising the latter as the former to Californians. Usually, states mostly regulate the use of vehicles on their roads, not their import or sale, which is typically the federal government’s purview.

In most states, Moore says getting laws like California’s passed has been a battle.

“In every meeting that I have with legislators and staff, there’s usually about half an hour explaining what an electric bicycle is and is not,” he added “In Minnesota, I had a legislator say, ‘So, the one I just got for my kid isn’t legal?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not.'”

How to fix this mess

At the end of the day, Moore says that the federal government is the one responsible for regulating all vehicles on the road, and they must stamp out the e-moto crisis once and for all — rather than leaving it to often-confused state leaders to try to make up for their failures.

That starts with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stepping up and treating e-motos as what they are: dangerous illegal motorcycles dressed in sheep’s clothing. He particularly urges officials to search and intercept more import shipments of fake “e-bikes” — and publicize those seizures far and wide.

“It’s a shot across the bow for these sellers,” he adds. “It’s [saying:] ‘You’re not going to be able to get away with it.’ Do you really want to risk your entire container being seized, and never getting it back, and maybe getting fined as well? That would change the landscape.”

Both NHTSA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, meanwhile, need more resources to conduct that market surveillance — something Congress could and should provide.

That would better position the CSPC to enact the Safe SPEEDS Act, which, if passed, would direct the agency to draw a clearer line between e-bikes and e-motos and require them to publish periodic studies on crashes involving both.

The bill would also help federal officials teach local governments, law enforcement agencies, and emergency medical workers how to standardize crash reports so media outlets are less confused about what kind of riders are actually getting hurt. And in the meantime, PeopleForBikes stresses that education is critical to help the public and media outlets understand the difference on their own.

Without these sorts of structural fixes, keeping dangerous illegal e-motos off our roads and protecting the good name of the humble e-bike will both be an uphill climb — and not the easy kind with pedal-assist.

by David Spratt

I want to explore why climate policymaking has reached a “zero point”. 

This term comes from Slavoj Zizek’s 2025 essay of the same name, in which he asks how we distinguish defeat from disaster, and confront despair without collapsing into it. He describes the “zero point” as the ground level, rock bottom, the place to which one retreats and where one regroups, a concept taken from Lenin.

Climate policy-making has failed in its core task, which was to stop dangerous climate change. The evidence, the destruction, is accumulating around us, at a pace that has shocked scientists. We have arrived at the rock bottom, though most policymakers seem loath to accept this proposition. 

Climate advocacy is dominated by the politics of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, where petrostates have the power of veto, and nominally science-based outcomes are politically mediated and scientifically reticent, underestimating the pace and scale of the transformative action required. 

Key components and outcomes such as the Paris Agreement, “net zero by 2050”, carbon budget overshoot and similar constructions are an artifice of poor approaches to risk, rather than a reflection of Earth System conditions. 

This hegemonic denial of existential climate risk and the proximity of collapse has brought us to this “zero point”. And collapse is not too strong a term. In their 2024 State of the Climate Report, 14 leading researchers warned that: 

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis… We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo.

Avoiding civilisational collapse requires governments and nations to make climate the first priority of economics and politics, especially for  the world’s largest and high-polluting economies. For a moment during Europe’s fire season from hell, there was a glimpse of recognition. The Spanish prime minister said the wildfire crisis must become a turning point for climate action and called for a nationwide pact to confront the "climate emergency".  The French President said the wildfire fight was the “toughest since World War Two”. 

Translating those sentiments into sustained action would mean making human security, not national security, the focus of geopolitics. It would mean the rich providing the capacity for developing nations to make a fast transition and adapt.

It would recognise that disruption is inevitable, dislocation is necessary and this is not a period for business and politics-as-usual. 

The action required to protect human civilisation is now without precedent. So why should we assume the existing system — in which climate policymaking is embedded — is capable of achieving the task? 

Let me start with some physical realities.

Global annual greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow. So far, renewables have added to energy supply, but are not displacing fossil fuels and other emissions in toto as energy demand grows. The data centre frenzy deepens the problem.

The fossil fuel industry is on the front foot.  Both oil and gas industries plan expanded production to 2050.  Big banks and big business are abandoning previous climate commitments. The political focus on, and mainstream media coverage of, climate are at a low point; climate disinformation is a growing force; and more right-wing political parties are denying climate change. 

The rate of warming has accelerated and almost doubled over the last two decades. Warming has reached 1.5°C, with the imminent El Nino likely to produce an astounding 1.75°C in 2026-27. Earth’s Energy Imbalance, an indicator of future warming, has doubled in the last 15 years and continues to increase, suggesting a warming trend of 2°C before 2040 is likely. 

Even global warming of 1°C, a threshold already passed, risks triggering some tipping points.  One study shows that at 1.5°C, six out of 10 studied climate subsystems already show large-scale abrupt shifts across multiple models. 

Beyond 2°C, says Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute:

“It’s very likely that we have caused so many tipping points that you have probably added another degree just through self-reinforcing changes… The moment that the Earth system flips over from being self-cooling — which it still is — to self-warming, that is the moment that we lose control”.

On the current emission path, warming will likely exceed 3°C. A plausible worst-case scenario is 4°C or more of warming by 2100.

Many impacts are occurring faster than forecast. Extreme events and their impacts have been underestimated in climate models, including the severity of heatwaves, wildfires and flooding. Tipping points have passed for some large Earth systems —  polar ice sheets, coral reefs — and others are close at hand, such as the Atlantic circulation and the Amazon. The recent Himalayan glacial collapse illustrates what abrupt change looks like. 

Scientists are now warning that the Atlantic circulation is on the edge of tipping, with a collapse of the transport of warm tropical waters northward. That would result in agriculture in north-west Europe becoming non-viable, and perhaps some countries, too. The government of Iceland has designated this potential collapse as a national security concern and an existential threat.

The current level of greenhouse gases is sufficient to produce levels of warming — and sea-level rises of tens of metres in the longer term — that would contribute to widespread social collapse and the end of the human project as we have known it. 

Sir David King, the former UK Chief Scientist, says that on our current path, civilisation as we presently know it will disappear: “If we meet current commitments only – net zero by 2050 – perhaps some form of humanity will survive, managing the challenges of continued extreme weather events, ice loss, and sea-level and temperature rises”.  

It is possible, but not probable, that climate action has been “too little, too late”, in the sense that political inertia means that the radical actions now necessary to arrest accelerated warming and prevent abrupt change are not remotely on the agenda.  And on present political trends, they are unlikely to be in the relevant time frame. 

Scientists describe climate as an existential risk, a circumstance in which the reaction time to an alert — the time it would take to correct the situation — may be greater than the intervention time, which is the time actually available to do it. The Titanic is a good example: the ship was too close to the iceberg to be able to turn in time. 

Once triggered, many changes in the Earth System cannot be reversed on timescales relevant to human survival and development. Above 1.5°C, there is also a physical “point of no return” risk, after which “it may be impossible to stabilise the climate close to conditions that we are able to adapt to”. Where this “point of no return” lies is not certain, but waiting to find out is suicidal. 

And an immediate challenge is derailment risk: society being too distracted by escalating crises and resources diverted to adaptation to address the root causes of climate change by reducing emissions and other actions. This dilemma would produce a feedback loop that if left unchecked, “could render societies incapable of undergoing a sustainable transition, leading to runaway climate change and nature loss.” 

Actions

At this moment, the climate zero point, there are two starting points in ascending the mountain.

Firstly, government leadership must be founded on a strategy of “acknowledgment rather than denial of a crisis’s reality; acceptance of responsibility to take action; and honest self-appraisal”, in the words of Jarod Diamond. 

Thus the assessment of climate risks should be carried out in line with risk-management best practices, taking into account the full range of outcomes, including tipping points and the risk of ruin. This must not be based only on historic experience, which may well be irrelevant to the future state, and must incorporate methods to understand unprecedented climate impacts. Only emergency precautionary action will address the level and speed of change required. Climate risk analysis must give particular attention to the high-end possibilities because that is where the greatest damage and disruption lies. This is the issue the Nordic Council is coming to grips with right now.

The second starting point is to establish normative goals, including identifying events that should be avoided at all cost, including crossing Earth system tipping points, the breakdown of critical ecosystems; and climate-driven forced displacement, conflict and mass death.

Current climate policymaking and advocacy goals are outdated and unsafe, and represent a political compromise, not a scientifically sound normative goal. Sir David King had collaborated with the small-island states in the lead-up to the 2015 Paris conference, arguing successfully that global temperature should not go above a 1.5°C rise for safety. But in 2021, The Independent journalist Donnachadh McCarthy reported that King “astounded me by saying he now realised this was wrong, and believes the passing of the Arctic tipping point has been reached... He said the 1.1°C rise that we already have is too dangerous — and candidly admitted he believed US climate professor James Hansen had been right after all in 1988, when he warned the US Congress that we should not pass 350 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” 

More recently Hansen has said that: “We will need to return to a global climate no warmer than the middle of the 20th century, and likely somewhat cooler, for the sake of maintaining global shorelines.“  That is a goal of less than half a degree of warming. 

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director-General of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, has said that: “Our survival would very much depend on how well we were able to draw down carbon dioxide to 280 parts per million”, that is, the pre-industrial level. 

And in 2022, a group of Australian scientists suggested that, from a geologic perspective: “In the long-term, the best target global temperature for the planet might be something akin to a pre-industrial climate.”

It is only on this ethical basis can we build actions commensurate with the scale of the problem. And the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on the Responsibilities of States in regard to climate change confirms that international law requires states to prevent significant harm to the climate, and failure to do so can trigger legal responsibility.

The key actions to mitigate climate impacts are well known: moving rapidly to reduce methane and other short-lived climate forcers, halting deforestation, and supercharging the energy transition on the path to zero emissions.
But due to the decreasing aerosol impacts, weakening carbon stores in nature, reducing planetary reflection and the delayed impact of past emissions, even a sharp reduction in carbon emissions will have little discernable impact on the rate of warming for the following two decades. 

This means that mitigation of emissions is not a sufficient strategy. 

Because a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is the pre-industrial level, working with nature to enhance large-scale carbon dioxide removal or drawdown is imperative, but it is a slow process that by itself is insufficient for the climate system to avoid catastrophic and abrupt change. 

Together with fast mitigation and drawdown, there is a need to establish a safe means of active cooling for the planet as a necessary action to avoid collapse, what might be thought of as an emergency brake. 

A range of potential solar reflection solutions exist to rapidly reduce Earth’s energy imbalance, reduce warming and mitigate the risk of tipping points. Climate interventions such as solar radiation management, are now the least-worst option in the short term, but most climate advocates and policymakers are either opposed, or silent on the issue.
There are valid concerns about the implications and potential unintended consequences of some of these methodologies; more research and testing is urgently needed to more fully understand these options, as well as efficacious governance and international cooperation which simply does not exist today. 

All this cries out for government policy and research funding, and global coordination. 

But climate policymaking has been built on two foundational pillars: a bedrock assumption that change should be slow and incremental in a manner that does not disrupt growth or inhibit the market, or leave capital stranded; and that levers for change should be market-focused. Hence the emphasis on such mechanisms as carbon prices, tradeable offsets, tax credits, new markets for carbon capture and storage with or without bioenergy, and even commodifying nature. This has failed and driven us to the edge of the precipice. 

With courageous state leadership, a fast transition is possible. Renewable stationary energy generation and batteries are now cheaper than fossil energy. In China, renewables have overtaken coal as a stationary energy source. More than half the cars sold in China are now electric. Most investment growth in China is in these sectors.  China is becoming the world’s first “electrostate” and now has the upper hand in its strategic and economic conflict with the USA. 

The richest one per cent emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity. Rapid emissions reduction requires recognition that the most affluent 10% of the global population are responsible for 50% of emissions.

Dragging the consumption level of that 10% back to the European average would by itself reduce global emissions by one-third. That is, the transition requires, amongst other things, a deep reduction in aggregate energy demand and the curtailment of hyper-consumption. This, of course, is anathema to the market. 

The UK Institute and Faculty of Actuaries has shown how the climate crisis qualifies as an existential emergency because it presents irreversible, existential risks to planetary systems; it undermines the foundations of national and human security; it exceeds the scope of conventional risk management; and it exceeds the capacity of governments working in incrementalist modes which ignore the most damaging, high-end risks. 

The transition is not impossible, but requires a level of political commitment and economic mobilisation comparable to an emergency or a large-scale war effort. Emergency mobilisation is not about panic but about priority and activating all available capacities toward a common goal, removing bottlenecks and bypassing market failure. Emergency mode is a shift in governance, mindset, and tempo. It replaces fragmented reform with coordinated transformation. 

It should not be assumed that strong state intervention requires an autocratic government. If, as a society, we are to engage in a rapid change, it will require the active democratic participation of the population, rather than its passivity. The tools exist and the capacity exists; what has been missing is the decision to act.

In 2011, Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption concluded that it was an illusion to think the contradictions can be resolved within the current economic frame and that disruption and chaos was now inevitable as system failure occurs. It laid out the reasons to “address the emergency with the commitment of our response to WWII and begin a real transformation to a sustainable economy.”

There is no longer any prospect of an orderly, market-driven transition. The physical changes in the climate system are often non-linear and hence difficult to project, but markets crave stability and fear disruption. Climate damages are deeply uncertain — that is, basically, unquantifiable — so that cost-benefit analysis, which is a basic tool of private-sector risk management,  breaks down. The risk cannot be priced and traditional risk calculations fail. 

It is now clear that, as bankers and economists such as Nicholas Stern and Mark Carney have recognised, the inability of risk and financial markets to respond adequately to the threat of climate collapse is the greatest market failure in history. Only governments can lead in correcting this huge market distortion. 

This requires explicit recognition of the leading role of the state in strategising, guiding and regulating the transition, as in any emergency mobilisation. This in turn requires a (further) turning away from the globalization/neo-liberal agenda. In the present economic circumstances — low growth, stagflation, disruption — the material needs of decarbonisation cannot be absorbed by growth, but only by reallocation of financial and physical resources.   

There is now a new opportunity for governments to assert the right, and necessity, of their leading role in defending humanity’s future by courageous leadership and incisive interventions, before it is too late. 

By abandoning failed global mechanisms and globalised coercive controls, there is a chance for nations to forge bilateral and regional agreements on climate action and other issues that reflect higher ambition, rather than lowest-common-demoninator compromises.  And to recognise that a crisis of civilisation-threatening proportions requires a government in emergency mode, and all that entails. 

This is our “zero point”. Now is the moment to set forth on the Long March in response to the climate emergency.

Note: This article is the text of  a keynote speech at the CLIMATEXLAW Conference,  Reconceptualising Legal Paradigms for Climate Change, held  at the University of Ljubljana on 10-11 September 2026

CRA Meeting

The next meeting will be November 6. The agenda and link will be sent to the mail list. If you need the link, email admin@climaterailalliance.org.

Amtrak is exploring a corporate restructuring, intending to improve service. There is detailed information on Amtrak’s website. Deadline for feedback is Oct. 30, 2026.

It took 18 years, but the Seattle Amtrak car service building is complete. Preliminary design in 2008 and a long wait for funds to build it. The new Airo trainsets require a specialized facility, moving this project from lines on paper to a real building. This will improve the ability to maintain Amtrak trains in Seattle.

Failed again!
Once again, a big service disruption on the Seattle Link light rail service. Dependable rail service is vastly more important than technocool rail service. Riders need to not think about whether it is working and just go to the station.

Federal Railroad Administration has announced  Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) program grant recipients:

• Wisconsin, the FRA awarded $218 million for an expansion of the Amtrak Hiawatha passenger-rail service.
• Massachusetts will receive $130 million in CRISI grant funding for the Springfield Hub Modernization Project
• $27 million in CRISI grant funding to modernize rail infrastructure owned by the Alabama & Gulf Coast Railway.
• In North Dakota, the FRA has awarded the Red River Valley & Western Railroad (RRVW) a $23.6 million grant to modernize aging infrastructure
• The Maine Department of Transportation has been awarded just over $37 million for the Northern Aroostook Rail Gateway Modernization and Safety Project.

Caltrain, the San Francisco – San Jose – Gilroy commuter rail agency tried a new radical approach to declining ridership. When commuter rail service began in the US, well over 160 years ago, the majority of suburban dwellers traveled into the central city in the morning and left in the evening, Monday through Friday. Commuter rail service was structured for exactly those people. A very large percentage of people traveling to or from suburban areas are not traveling for a 9-5 job in the central city. Some people see the response to the decline as less service. Caltrain took the opposite approach.

Metra, the Chicago area commuter rail agency is purchasing eight to 16 battery-electric trains. The trains will use the Beverly branch of the Chicago-Blue Island route. This route is perfect for this type of train. Stations are about four blocks apart. There is a limited amount of parking; it’s mostly walk-up or bus transfer passengers. They will be in service in 2028. The purchase is part of Metra’s plan to convert from 9 to 5er commuter railroad to all day regional service.

On Friday, September 25, SeaPort air published a full page press release/advertisement in “businesswire:” ““Billions in New Trains, Same Slow Route: Boeing Field Air Service SeaPort Airlines is Making New Amtrak Trains Obsolete.”” Here is our response to that propaganda piece.

The UP-NS merger application is live at Surface Transportation Board. CRA opposes this merger. There are many ways in which this merger will have a bad outcome. Wall Street activist investors will be thrilled, however. Our colleagues at Solutionary Rail and Public Rail Now have an ongoing campaign that allows comments on the merger to be made anonymously to Surface Transportation Board.

This coming election day, Colorado will be voting an a ballot measure to provide a dedicated funding source for rail passenger service. In a Trains.com article, former Federal Railroad Administration Administrator Amit Bose and former US Department of Transportation General Counsel John Putnam promote the Colorado program as model for the next generation of passenger rail. A successful dedicated measure depends upon demonstrating that the proposed program will work. Colorado has done the homework with successful light rail and commuter service in the Denver region, laying solid groundwork for this next step.

The 2027 Washington State Legislative Session is about to begin. CRA, along with the other members of the Rail Can’t Wait Coalition have developed our Legislative Priorities for Washington, the list of things that rail transportation needs that we would like legislators to fund and enable.

The New Cascades Airo sets started service between Vancouver BC and Eugene OR on October 30. Trains will be introduced as they arrive from testing. Right now, you can see and ride them on Trains 503 and 508 between Seattle and Eugene and trains 516 and 519 between Portland and Vancouver BC.

CRA joined Solutionary Rail, Duwamish River Community Coalition, Reconnect South Park, and Georgetown Community Council in a comment letter responding to the 2026 Washington State draft Freight System Plan. The plan was effectively a plan for trucking. It contained almost no reference to rail at all, about which we commented at length.

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, October 18, 2026 thru Sat, October 24, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (6 items)

• Warming oceans hit the battlefield Marine radar signal propagation is highly sensitive to fine-scale vertical changes in water vapour. Now research shows that long-term increases in sea surface temperatures are strengthening the frequency and intensity of the features that allow radar signals to travel further than expected. Nature Climate Change, David D. Flagg, Oct 15, 2026.
• Climate change affects the quality of one of the world's most important staple foods Phys.org, Technical University Munich, Oct 18, 2026.
• Latest Climate Report Warns of Major Upheaval to California Way of Life The dire projections come from the state’s Climate Change Assessment, which analyzes the impacts of changing weather patterns on the nation’s most-populous state. NYT, Soumya Karlamangla, Oct 19, 2026.
• US extreme weather survivors are a growing group - now they want to be a political force At a gathering in Texas, near where floods killed 136 people last year, survivors are united on the need for urgent action The Guardian, Oliver Milman, Oct 21, 2026.
• Europe’s killer heat this summer claims 50,000 lives. Climate change blamed for two-thirds of deaths. AP News, Seth Borenstein, Oct 22, 2026.
• Most of the World`s Shallow Coral Reefs Could Collapse in the Next 50 Years If ocean temperatures continue to rise, experts warn these precious ecosystems may no longer be able to sustain marine life or the people who depend on them. Inside Climate News, Teresa Tomassoni, Oct 23, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (5 items)

• Climate Trunk - Daily Life Summary post of John Lang's Climate Trunk visuals in the "Daily Life" ring Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler, Sept 20, 2026.
• `Weather under Fire`: The climate change film we`ve been waiting for Documentary chronicles how a broadcast meteorologist and his family encountered a life-changing onslaught of death threats for telling his audience some basic facts of physics. Yale Climate Connections, Jeff Masters, Oct 15, 2026.
• Who will pay for climate reporting? Against the backdrop of a steep drop in newsroom jobs, 38 climate and environment reporters gathered for two days of in-depth talks about to cover clmate change in an environment of increasing scarcity, with representation including big metro dailies, national print and radio outlets, and nonprofit pioneers. Circle of Blue, Brett Walton, Oct 18, 2026.
• How candidates are (quietly) talking about climate change - 3 election strategies you`ll see across the US The Conversation, Geoffrey Henderson and Nathaniel Geiger, Oct 19, 2026.
• `Voting is medicine`: These health professionals want you to vote in the midterms Physician Cynthia Mahoney says voting is a powerful prescription for health. Yale Climate Connections, Neha Pathak, Oct 23, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (5 items)

• The Ambiguous Costs of Climate Change To put a price tag on climate change, some approaches focus on whether it made an event more likely, whereas others focus on whether it made an event more severe and damaging. A new study examines the validity of both approaches. Eos, Rebecca Owen, Oct 16, 2026.
• A 24-year study uncovers a surprising climate benefit beneath forests In a surprising twist, warming temperatures and drier conditions are helping some forests absorb more methane, challenging scientists' expectations about climate change. ScienceDaily, University of Göttingen PR, Oct 17, 2026.
• Nepal’s disaster is an urgent wake-up call Record-breaking avalanches and floods are signs of things to come. Scientists must evaluate and respond to growing risks in mountain regions. Nature, Christian Huggel, Simon K. Allen, Emily Mark, Dan H. Shugar, Jakob Steiner & Kavita Upadhyay, Oct 20, 2026.
• How to study a swiftly melting climate disaster Scientists strive to assess the future of Arctic permafrost and how Arctic greening will balance against massive releases of carbon as permafrost warms and melts. MIT Technology Review, James Temple, Oct 20, 2026.
• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #43 2026 New information on the ''carbon bomb'' lurking within Artic permafrost features heavily in this week's collection, which includes 161 newly published academic papers and government/NGO reports. Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack, Oct 22, 2026.

Climate Law and Justice (3 items)

• Charting Climate Litigation in Asia: Emerging Cases, Strategies, and Frontiers Climate litigation has become a global phenomenon, but its future direction will increasingly be shaped by regions where comparatively little litigation has been documented, such as Asia. Climate Law Blog, Maria Antonia Tigre, Manasa Venkatachalam, Masako Ichihara and Moumita Das Gupta, Oct 19, 2026.
• Climate scientists face deluge of public-records requests about fossil-fuel studies A Nature investigation identified more than 30 requests since 2024 to US universities in a campaign questioning climate attribution science. Nature, James Dinneen, Oct 19, 2026.
• A Landmark Youth Climate Trial Against the Canadian Government Is About to Begin The trial, which starts Monday, comes as Canada rolls back climate policies. A new government report warns the country could experience 5 degrees Celsius of warming under current emissions trajectories. Inside Climate News, Dana Drugmand, Oct 23, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (3 items)

• The Cynicism of Trump`s Climate Policy The EPA’s latest emissions guidance is nihilistic—and also wrong. The Atlantic, Richard L. Revesz, Oct 20, 2026.
• Why have countries been pushing for a vital global climate report to be delayed? Saudi Arabia, Russia and China among those claiming developed countries have skewed findings of IPCC review. The Guardian, Fiona Harvey, Oct 20, 2026.
• Yes, There Is Some Global Action on Phasing Out Fossil Fuels Fifty-seven countries joined a “coalition of the willing” to create a roadmap for winding down fossil fuels, and there’s good reason to think the number could grow. Inside Climate News, Interview by Paloma Beltran, Oct 24, 2026.

Miscellaneous (2 items)

• 2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #42 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, October 11, 2026 thru Sat, October 17, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, Oct 18, 2026.
• The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream From the family car to the dream kitchen, fossil fuel companies sold a vision of prosperity that depended on their own products. Grist, Kate Yoder, Oct 22, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (2 items)

• Spinning Renewable Success Into a Climate Conspiracy: Co-opting the climate science story of RCP8.5 Indepth analysis by CAAD about the disinformation regarding RCP8.5 Climate Action Against Disinformation, CAAD, Oct 8, 2026.
• Oil Industry Consultant Joins Climate Denial Group Run by Tory Peer Kathryn Porter, an “independent” energy expert, has become a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. DeSmog, Adam Barnett, Oct 21, 2026.

Geoengineering (1 item)

• Desperate climate times call for desperate climate measures Ella Gilbert does a deep dive about geo-engineering Dr Gilbz on Youtube, Ella Gilbert, Oct 16, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Solutions (1 item)

• Why smart people believe the myth that natural gas is clean How the gas industry turned a half-truth into one of the most successful PR campaigns in fossil fuel history. HEATED, Emily Atkin, Oct 22, 2026.

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

How to build the integrated plan we never had

The UN officially noted in September 2026 that “exceedance of the 1.5°C global warming target is unavoidable” and we are now in era of overshoot and managing its consequences.

In some ways this was inevitable, as we had no detailed plan to achieve the target.

But we’ve started at the end of this part of the story.

So let’s back up ten years to COP 21 in Paris 2015, where the warming target was agreed amongst almost all the countries in the world.

Now, any serious multi-billion-dollar project normally has an objective, design, costs and schedules and controls. Even a house extension has these basics in place before a brick is laid, or money spent.

So Paris gave us the objective. But the rest could not yet be specified – no formal “design”, no working overall cost and schedule toward the objective, and little in the way of formal project controls.

But ten years of execution have now produced enough evidence to construct a working integrated plan, even if the original 1.5°C stretch pathway without material overshoot has been lost

The Climate Project Baseline Emerges

By a baseline I mean the current working project plan against which actual progress is measured: the objective, design, major milestones, cost estimates and critical dependencies such as technology developments.

What it is not – It is not a prediction of what might happen in various scenarios, and it is not a model to get us to a temperature destination eg 2 or 2.7°C.

What it is is the baseline plan we manage against until evidence requires a controlled change.

For the climate project, the objective baseline remains Paris.

The climate effort had fragmented baseline elements — the Paris goals, country plans (Nationally Determined Contributions, NDCs), analytical pathways, scenarios, milestones,— but no single integrated delivery baseline.

So a key act now is to simultaneously reconcile those original commitments and attempt the first integrated working baseline.

In project language –

The objective baseline — held (Paris, < 2°C)
The delivery baseline — developing and needing project controls

The Paris Agreement has in effect created a climate mega-project, but an odd one.

Take the climate “mega-project” compared to conventional project delivery systems:

Set a completion criterion (2°C, stretch 1.5°C)

→ Began executing thousands of uncoordinated work packages (solar, wind, CCS, nuclear, hydrogen, batteries, EVs, geo-thermal, low-carbon fuels…)

→ Discover the effective / ineffective design through deployment

→ And now – perhaps – gather enough information to contemplate an integrated design basis.

Most project plans would start with a clear design, and then the detailed engineering plans first and work to execute and construct them: this one executes various engineering concepts and then discovers the grand design and plan in retrospect.

This is not unknown – large IT projects, even the internet can be described this way.

But so far this activity still does not offer a design concept for the climate project, and how well we are doing in delivering it.

No agreed answer yet to how the temperature control outcome is produced: is it through solar and wind, through nuclear, through carbon capture, through behaviour change and efficiency, through some combination of these or a technology X not yet specified?

And it still has no explicit cost and schedule, beyond various estimates, scenarios and outlooks.

It also has no project organisation with the authority to own project progress, costs and milestones, check against them and hold anyone to account.

In project terms, Paris set an objective without constituting an integrated plan.

This is not a criticism of the early diplomatic and analytical efforts.

But it is a description of the climate project delivery problem.

When the key project objective requires cooperation between nearly two hundred sovereign states, each with its own politics, its own capital constraints and its own veto, you do not get a project schedule.

You at best get an accord.

That is what was achievable.

But an accord is not a plan: the problem is though, by having an explicit project objective that is well publicised, we have spent a decade treating it as one.

The consequence is now visible.

We have almost certainly breached the stretch target of 1.5°C.

Emissions are not falling fast enough, if at all, although it is likely a high-level plateau has been achieved. And this acts also as a major project signal, as it links closely to the objective.

There is a robust near-linear relationship between cumulative CO₂ emissions and warming, allowing a solid carbon budget to be estimated: in 2018 we calculated we had about 580 billion tonnes of CO2 we could emit and stay below 1.5degC, with a 50% chance.

In project terms that is known as a contingency – in normal projects this is usually expressed as the amount of money or time we have added to the plan estimate – as a buffer against events and errors. We used carbon emitted as a best alternative measure.

By early 2026 we had used up all but around170 billion tonnes of this carbon contingency, meaning that at our current rate of emissions, 42 billion tonnes per year (5 tonnes per human), we have about four years left before it is all gone, end 2029.

So – breaching the stretch target should be no surprise.

We had the clear warning signal for over a decade.

In that sense the temperature violation is a lagging project indicator – it confirms what we expected.

Emissions are more a current variable – telling us today what the status is.

And deployment of technologies or policies against a plan to reduce them are leading indicators – suggesting what should now be prioritised or reprioritised.

In sum – we need to re-baseline the project – we need to create a new plan.

Meanwhile, the energy transition carries on

And yet. Here is the thing.

In lock-step with the climate objectives is an underlying energy transition: staying with fossil fuel combustion which creates CO2 as waste and pollution, would leave us fully exposed to the volatilities of unchecked global temperature rise.

Hence the pivot over the past few decades to alternatives: zero or low-carbon energy sources as a substitute, to lower climate risk as fast as possible.

And here there is a better story – the energy transition on several major fronts is accelerating, some even ahead of “plan” or expectations at least — solar power, wind power, large scale storage batteries, electric vehicles and other electrification industries are becoming an economically preferred system, not merely an environmentally desirable one.

In project parlance, whilst the emissions / temperature levels are a negative variance to plan (ie behind expectations) wind, solar, batteries and electrotech such as EVs, are a positive variance to plan (ie doing better than imagined).

Both things (temperature target breached with emissions at a high plateau, but new technologies arriving more quickly) can be true at once.

The contradiction is not a failure of the original idea.

It is what happens when a project runs without an integrated project plan or dedicated programme control function.

The red signal of emissions persisting should have caused a resultant activity in the plan to address the negative variation: a shift in capital allocation, or a prioritisation of effective technologies the key examples.

The Climate Project Re-baseline

The useful move now is not to abandon the target climate objective, but also not to pretend it is still on schedule.

It is to do what any competent project does when reality overtakes the original plan:

– recognise the reality,

– preserve the objective,

– change the execution plan using new knowledge gained in the project

A re-baseline, in project phrasing.

But a re-baseline is legitimate only if it records rather than conceals the original variance.

The original objective remains visible; assumptions are changed because reality has changed.

Otherwise re-baselining is simply moving the goalposts.

A re-baseline is not an admission of failure. It is a normal, disciplined project act.

Every large programme does it, usually more than once.

Recognise reality.

The original baseline has moved. 1.5°C is no longer the planning case; the new planning case is overshoot.

And overshoot is no longer a scenario, it is the observed trajectory.

Recognition means writing down what has actually happened, not what we hoped would happen.

Much climate reporting still measures progress against the old plan as though nothing has changed — announcing record solar additions in the same breath as record emissions, without reconciling the two.

Many scenarios still record emissions targets for 1.5degC that involve almost impossible technical deployments aligned with a sudden collective policy consensus.

That is not a realistic plan being executed.

It is a disconnected series of desired outcomes.

Second, preserve the objective. This is where a re-baseline differs from abandonment.

The goal — limiting warming, minimising peak temperature, shortening the duration of overshoot — remains and is expressed in the UN report.

Every tenth of a degree still matters, and every single year spent above 1.5°C still adds major long-term risk.

What changes is not the destination.

What changes is the route and the pace required to reach it.

Third, change the execution plan and unearth the critical path. This is the part almost nobody is doing.

Without an integrated plan, the climate project has no “critical path”.

The critical path of any major project is a sequence of critical tasks – if any task on this path is delayed by even one day, the final completion date of the whole project slips by one day too.

An integrated plan needs to make that critical path clear and transparent.

While we have likely missed the original stretch target, we have still learned an enormous amount via the active pursuit of it.

If the old plan assumed a certain mix of technologies would deploy at a certain speed, and they have not, then the plan should be rewritten — not the target.

If solar and batteries have outperformed while grids and permitting have underperformed, then capital, policy attention and institutional effort must move accordingly.

That is what a re-baseline does: it learns from project actions – and then reallocates scarce resources against the actual critical path such as electric grids – not the one assumed previously such as renewable supply capacity.

In that example – if we are ahead on renewable capacity an integrated plan reallocates spare capital to the grid.

Conversely, with no integrated plan the climate project cannot see its critical path – it is guessing what is on it. Perhaps spending excess capital on solar deployment when grid capacity would better retain the cost and schedule.

And it is rare that an integrated plan retains “all of the above” for energy technologies and policies and generates multiple often contradictory scenarios. It is forced to select among them to keep to cost and schedule.

But we know the Climate Project is an odd one – so as we analyse it we should expect no single stable critical path: it is likely to move round at global and country level,

China may have a very different critical path eg less EV / electrotech investment vs more coal retirement compared to the path for the EU or US – where investment in electrotech remains behind plan.

Project Controls and the Design Concept

If the climate project can never have a project manager, it can still have project controls.

Absent a project manager it can still determine a baseline, a critical path (or paths) and a cost and schedule to monitor progress.

A project manager holds executive authority.

But – project controls hold the baseline, measure variance, and report what is actually happening — without owning the work.

In a normal project programme the two – Project Manager and Projects Control Lead – sit together.

In the not-so-normal climate project, only the second, integrated project controls function, is available. But it may be enough.

The project control function asks fundamental questions, constantly:

It asks:

• What was the plan?
• What is the dominant design concept?
• Where are we now?
• What are the key critical paths and what is now on them globally and by country
• What changed in the past 6 months?
• What is late?
• What is outperforming?
• What has become implausible?
• What corrective action follows?

It communicates the answers against the original and new baseline — for example the NDCs, the 2030 and 2035 milestones, the Net Zero dates — and lets the gaps speak for themselves.

This is deliberately unromantic work.

It does not advocate for solar over nuclear, or mitigation over adaptation, or ambition over realism.

It also has to deal with the fact that a single “design concept” is likely only going to be delivered or conceived in retrospect – eg “we achieved the climate target via the combination of ….”

It simply holds the best overall plan we have against reality and reports the delta.

That is precisely what makes it useful.

Climate debate under a target missed, under stress, seems to bifurcate into two positions (this is a rough summary, but it does condense a lot of latest commentary):

1.5°C is still achievable, keep saying it,

or

1.5°C has gone, pivot to adaptation.

Either way – both are more political, not project-based positions.

And neither answers the delivery question.

A project controls function dissolves the binary by refusing to take either side, and instead produces a more objective assessment: here is where the project actually stands against its baseline.

Three things make this function credible.

Independence — it cannot sit inside a negotiating body, or it becomes a party.

Evidence — it works from hard data, not relying on scenarios, and reports against physical progress measures: gigawatts connected, gigawatts approved – not gigawatts in a given scenario.

Consistency — it uses the same baseline every time, so that variance is measurable across time. Without that consistency, re-baselining becomes a habit of moving the goalposts. With it, it becomes a discipline.

None of this requires global governance reform, a new treaty, or anyone’s permission.

It requires a competent institution or globally agreed framework willing to hold the baseline and publish the differences —in public, and without advocating for anyone’s preferred outcome.

We’ll discuss this in more detail in Part 2

Writing the Plan We Couldn’t Write in 2015

There is a forgiveness that has to be said out loud.

We set the climate objective before we knew the design to deliver it; but pursuing the objective helped us discover it.

In 2015, the plan could not have been written. Not by diplomats, not by engineers, likely not by anyone.

The technologies were too immature to select.

The costs were unknowable.

The learning rates did not exist yet, because the deployment had not yet happened.

Asking the world to produce a design concept, a cost estimate and a schedule for “avoiding dangerous warming” was asking for something no institution on earth could have delivered.

What was achievable was a target.

That is what we got.

It was not a failure of will. It was a condition then of the world.

A decade later, the condition of the world has changed. Its knowledge and its climate situation have altered.

A design concept has started to emerge – and now we can perhaps create a continuing design that we can better define, allowing better execution.

The design was not declared at a conference, or frozen via internal expert analysis.

It was selected somewhat in the wild by cost curves and manufacturing scale.

Solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, electrification – not because anyone declared them the winner, but because repeated deployment has increasingly demonstrated their efficiency, economics and scalability

That is not the standard concept selection process. But it is likely the climate project will never look like a standard phased project from concept to operation.

A schedule has emerged too.

Peak emissions. Peak coal. Peak oil demand.

These are climate plan milestones whether anyone calls them that.

They sit in the data, in the global technical reviews, in the observed trend lines.

A schedule is simply a sequence of dates against which progress can be measured.

Ten years of deployment bought us the numbers that ten years of negotiation could not. The cost we could not devise in 2015 is more priceable now.

This is the odd shape of the climate project.

It was a de facto networked programme in which the design is still being discovered during execution rather than fixed before sanction.

That inversion is why it has always felt unmanageable.

It is not that the world failed to plan. It is that the plan could only be written after the attempt had started.

Which means the first task of project control is not to impose a plan.

It is to notice the one that has quietly begun assembling itself, so now hold it against the original objective, and write it down.

Deriving the climate project concept, cost and schedule retrospectively after creating its ultimate target is not just tidying up.

It is the act that converts a target into something that can be delivered, measured, and corrected.

Then governance remains the genuine gap.

We could not write this plan in 2015. We can draft it now.

The megaproject disciplines reveal what the climate effort is missing.

The analogy does not tell us that climate can be managed like a project.

It tells us which project disciplines now become valuable.

Coda, and Part 2

In Part 2 we change gears and propose a practical Action Plan.

And our plan will not start with primary energy consumed, but with the useful energy services delivered, and work backwards.

That is what we have learned.

The post The Climate Project After 1.5°C appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.