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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding how

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s most vulnerable

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

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

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

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

Read Next Nebraskans couldn’t escape the heat this summer — not even at night Anila Yoganathan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science of why

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

The first has to do with human physiology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stereotypes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate politics at the kitchen table

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who pays for the data center boom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shared concerns across party lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Via Campesina expresses unwavering solidarity with the peasants and working people in Myanmar and their revolution against the military dictatorship and their resistance against capitalist exploitation

The post La Via Campesina expresses unwavering solidarity with the peasants and working people in Myanmar appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

We join the voices in New York City and the nation in denouncing the most recent ICE shooting and subsequent kidnapping of 28 year old Dominican immigrant and father Oscar Belgal.

On October 8, Oscar was surrounded by ICE agents and shot at seven times while in his vehicle during a busy afternoon when many children and parents were around. One of the shots hit his neck. Eyewitnesses describe how he was held by ICE agents and NYPD officers as 20 minutes passed before any ambulance arrived at the crime scene. Oscar was taken to nearby Allen Pavilion hospital and then later kidnapped by ICE agents to an unknown location. We demand his immediate freedom.

The shooter has been identified as Kevin Brodowsky. Also on the scene was notorious ICE goon Brenden Cuni who was wearing a construction vest, and was brandishing a AR-15-style rifle, putting the lives of children and passerby at risk. Cuni has terrorized people in NYC (Chinatown, Bushwick, Queens), in Columbus, Ohio, and in Minneapolis, where he participated in the brutal assault and dragging of a pregnant woman across the snowy pavement. Brenden is of Dominican & Puerto Rican descent, which shows that people of any ethnicity can be class traitors and oppressors. We join the mass clamor demanding that Kevin be tried for attempted murder.

This reckless act is a continuation of Trump’s murderous and racist anti-immigration policies currently affecting our communities.

We condemn the attempts by NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch and DHS to justify this brutal act by citing Oscar’s previous interactions with the police and his affiliations. This is a blatant act of racism. No criminal record and interaction with the repressive state justifies being shot by ICE in front of your kid. We demand DHS retract that statement and stop criminalizing Dominican and Haitian immigrants as well as Black people and all oppressed immigrant communities.

Furthermore, we also condemn Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inaction for not firing Jessica Tisch and for not having taken steps to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG) as he promised during his campaign. Instead, Mamdani has allowed the NYPD to continue colluding with ICE, brutalizing protestors who demand the release of our neighbors and demand ICE out of our streets. Mayor Mamdani claims to be on the side of immigrants but actions speak louder than words: we are fed up with promises from “progressive” politicians who are afraid to break their ties with the two-party system and the status quo.

As Dominicans in the diaspora, we stand in solidarity with Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent in Dominican Republic, who are also victims of government profiling and repression in the island. What happened to Oscar on October 8, has been happening to Haitian and Black Dominicans for decades in DR. The Dirección General de Migración (DGM) operates as ICE does, raiding public and private spaces and terrorizing neighbors to disappear them into the immigration enforcement system.

We stand against ICE the same way we stand against DGM, and all repressive forces.

Finally, we call on all workers, parents, high school, and college students in NYC to unite, organize and mobilize, and take part in school walkouts, teach-ins, boycotts, ICE watch in their communities, occupations, strikes, and all actions necessary until NYC is free of ICE terror.

We demand:

1. The immediate release of Oscar Belgal to his family
2. Fire Jessica Tisch
3. The end of NYPD collaboration with ICE
4. Mamdani to fulfill his promise to disband the SRG
5. Abolish ICE once and for all

Compas de la Diáspora, October 10, 2026

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: ARTIST NAME; modified by Tempest.

The post Justice for Oscar Belgal appeared first on Tempest.

The editor-in-chief of Russian-language news site Meduza tells Anne Schumacher about Putin's objectives and circumventing censorship

The post Making the Kremlin sad – an interview with Ivan Kolpakov appeared first on Red Pepper.

In this episode, Kate and Aaron talk to Robert Lull, author of the book Our Natural Lab: Remarkable Stories of Science from America’s National Parks, about the amazing discoveries that have come out of science that took place in our national parks. Kate and Aaron also talk about the negative impacts the Senate permitting bill, also known as the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, could have on public lands.

News

• The Senate permitting bill would lock in data centers and nuclear waste on public lands. It only gets worse from there – Westwise
• Senate permitting bill would cut the public out of public lands and lock in Trump-era data center, nuclear, and fossil fuel approvals – CWP
• Over 100 Groups Oppose Sweeping Attacks on Public Lands in Permitting Bill – Center for Biological Diversity

Resources

• BLM Data Center Tracker
• Watch this episode on YouTube

Produced by Aaron Weiss, Lauren Bogard, Kate Groetzinger, and Lilly Bock-Brownstein
Feedback: podcast@westernpriorities.org
Music: Purple Planet
Featured image: Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park; Source: Dietmar Rabich/Wikimedia Commons

The post From lead paint to DNA tests: surprising discoveries from America’s national parks appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

The Justice Department asked federal judges this week to revoke Interior’s approvals for three offshore wind farms, including Revolution Wind, which has been delivering power to New England’s grid since March. The DOJ also targeted the 2.2-gigawatt Maryland Offshore Wind and 2.6-gigawatt New England Wind projects.

The requests land weeks before a Senate vote on a bipartisan permitting bill that would bar agencies from altering any permit in effect on or after September 16, 2026, without “clear and convincing evidence.” Under that framework, Trump’s wind and solar cancellations would stand, while the data centers, drilling, and nuclear projects Interior Secretary Doug Burgum approves over the next two years would be nearly impossible for a future administration to undo.

Tony Irish, a former Interior associate solicitor, called it “outrageous for Secretary Doug Burgum to take active energy production off the grid in New England as winter approaches.”

Over 100 groups oppose attacks on public lands in permitting bill
More than 100 groups urged Congress in a letter Thursday to reject the Senate permitting bill from Senators Whitehouse, Heinrich, Capito and Lee due to its negative impacts on public lands.

The coalition warns it would fast-track mining, drilling, logging, and gas pipelines across hundreds of millions of acres of public lands, from the Arctic to Bears Ears. Mining companies, including foreign-owned firms, would gain rights to permanently seize public land for roads and waste dumps, and Tribal consultation would become optional. It would also lock in data center development and nuclear waste storage on public land, according to an analysis of the bill by Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Aaron Weiss.

Quick hits Analysis warns bipartisan Senate permitting bill would lock in Trump-era data center, fossil fuel approvals

Common Dreams

Will $1 billion for the Great Salt Lake materialize? Senator Curtis says he’s working on it

Utah News Dispatch 

US Park Police spend $343,000 on mobile surveillance cameras in Washington DC

The Guardian

Lawyers say DOJ watchdog won’t probe failed Reflection Pool prosecution

MS NOW

Agriculture secretary says agency is moving ahead on Forest Service reorganization

Associated Press | The Hill

Environmental groups sue EPA over weedkiller polluting Western waterways

KUNR

Yellowstone receives largest donation in park service history

Boise State Public Radio

Geothermal lease sale on federal land in Nevada nets $4.8M

Utility Dive

Quote of the day

Senator Heinrich says his bill ‘will age very well over time.’ As it’s currently written, it will indeed age, locking in data centers and a new nuclear legacy on our public lands for generations—after all, the half-life of plutonium-239 is about 24,000 years… Senator Heinrich should pump the brakes on this bill during the lame duck session and work with leaders in the next Congress to get it right.”

—Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities

Picture This

@mypubliclands

More trails, more ways to explore!

We’re thrilled to announce the completion of the North Fruita Desert Trails Master Plan, with the grand opening of K2-Play, a brand new, 3-mile mountain biking trail along the stunning Book Cliffs. This milestone marks the final phase in a nearly 30-mile expansion of the 18 Road trail system, made possible by years of teamwork among public land managers, local partners, trail builders, and dedicated volunteers.

This project is a shining example of how partnerships can create new recreation opportunities, boost local communities, and ensure our public lands remain accessible and vibrant for generations to come. Whether you’re a seasoned rider or just starting out, there’s something for everyone to discover!

Feature image: The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project, Source: Photo by Stephen Boutwell/BOEM

The post DOJ moves to kill offshore wind permits as Congress weighs permitting bill appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

The Los Angeles Times took a deep dive into the controversy surrounding the Newsom administration’s agreement to pay a private investment firm $180 million for a relatively small amount of additional water for Sacramento River salmon.

At roughly $36,000 per acre-foot, dozens of times what cities pay for a single year of water on average, the water comes at a steep price. As Barry Nelson, an advisor for the Golden State Salmon Association, told the LA Times, “This is extraordinarily expensive water… [it] seems like a really bad investment for the public.” 

In addition to its exorbitant cost to California taxpayers, the agreement leaves the amount of water provided in any given year largely up to Reclamation District 108.

Peter Drekmeier, policy director at Yosemite Rivers Alliance, raised similar concerns about the agreement’s value and accountability: “The taxpayers are expected to pay top dollar for an amount of water that’s not really going to move the needle, and that’s just wrong… How do you track this water? Are we really getting what we’re paying for? We know it’s really, really expensive water, and we don’t know how much of it’s actually going to end up in the ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, the Newsom administration is after more agreements like this one that environmental groups cite as a prime example of the types of deals that voluntary agreements depend on in the Bay-Delta Plan update. On October 28-29, the State Water Resources Control Board is scheduled to consider the voluntary agreements (VAs) as part of new rules governing water in the Delta.

Environmental groups across the Delta and California are raising concerns about these agreements’ impact on critical ecosystems and cost to taxpayers. With the total price tag potentially reaching $5.6 billion compared to initial estimates of $1.1 billion, advocates are calling on the State Water Board to recognize the VA framework as costly and ineffective.

Read the full Los Angeles Times piece here. 

This article was co-written with Brien Weiner of the South Shore Audubon Society, serving the southern half of Nassau County on Long Island, New York.When researchers fitted 20 Black Skimmers at Lido...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Western Environmental Law Center holds more than 30 years of deep and expansive expertise regarding public lands and health protection, energy development, watershed and wildlife protection, and climate action in the West. We are acutely cognizant of the imperative to build green infrastructure in a way that respects people and place. Yet we are alarmed at the depth of harm the newly proposed “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act” (BAAJA) would inflict on bedrock public health and environmental laws and, by extension, to the people and places of the West. This bill, if passed into law, would recklessly transform the legal and policy landscape, taking power away from the public and giving new and enhanced powers to technology, energy, finance, and other development interests.

Our experts prepared a short policy analysis on the concerning provisions in BAAJA (S. 5653). This sprawling bill would stack the deck for fossil fuels, strip states’ and Tribes’ rights, reduce the National Environmental Policy Act to a mere box-checking exercise without force, and diminish the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act in ways that would cause widespread harm.

Read our policy analysis here, and please reach out if you have any questions.

“This permitting deal is a betrayal of public lands, water and wildlife, and environmental justice values that Westerners depend on for clean air and water, places to hike, hunt, and fish, and the inestimable sense of freedom the West provides us all,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center. “The permitting deal concedes to fossil fuel and data center interests while falsely pitting the imperative to build green infrastructure against people and place. It is a surrender to President Trump’s noxious agenda and pathology of ‘energy dominance’ that emerged from Project 2025. We will fight this terrible deal tooth and nail.”

Contacts:

Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, Western Environmental Law Center, eriksg@westernlaw.org

Marlyn Twitchell, 541-485-2471, ext. 144, twitchell@westernlaw.org

The post Media advisory: “Permitting reform” bill analysis available to reporters appeared first on Western Environmental Law Center.

Climate change is becoming a major threat for farmers globally, impacting communities everywhere. States and the UNFCCC (Climate COPs) have failed us, driving our planet towards a +3/5 °C by the end of the century, in an accelerating phenomenom.

The post LVC Statement on El Niño and the Climate Crisis Ahead of COP31 appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Ron and Jeanne Crumly on their land on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route in Holt County, Nebraska (2014)

It’s not the same companies or exactly the same route this time, but their playbook will still be to use eminent domain to seize farmers’ property to build a dangerous tarsands pipeline that is all risk and no reward, a threat to our land and water. Join us Nov. 19 for a virtual meeting to learn about your rights as a landowner, and how we can stop this risky project. We will reawaken the NoKXL coalition and inform Pipeline Fighters and Water Protectors about this new proposal to build the Keystone XL pipeline across the country.

• WHAT: How We Stopped the Keystone XL Pipeline (and Will Do It Again)
• WHO: Speakers will include veterans of the fight to stop Keystone XL (2009 – present)
• WHEN: Thursday Nov. 19, 6:00 p.m. CT
• WHERE: Click this link to join at 6pm on Nov. 19: bit.ly/keystone-pipeline
• JOIN BY PHONE: 312-626-6799 (Meeting ID: 862 0389 2831)

We’ll share the history of how we stopped the Keystone XL pipeline before, and how we’re going to do it again.

Seasoned veterans from the NoKXL fight will provide an analysis of the viability of the new pipeline proposal, and the current legal and regulatory landscape. We’ll talk about actions that we will be taking, and that you can take in your own communities, from landowner and Indigenous organizing, to gathering petition signatures and submitting public comments, and potential litigation.

The post Nov. 19 (Webinar): How We Stopped the Keystone XL Pipeline (and Will Do It Again) appeared first on Bold Nebraska.

Registered nurses at UCI Health Irvine in Irvine, California, will hold a rally and picket on Wednesday, October 28, to highlight their increasing concerns about unsafe working conditions and the removal of certified nursing assistants (CNAs) from ICU night shifts.