Grist

Household appliances used to be a safe conversation topic, if a boring one. But these days, many Republican politicians see gas stoves, refrigerators, dishwashers, and laundry machines as symbols of the government meddling in people’s lives. Earlier this year, lawmakers in the House passed the “Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act” to make it harder for the Department of Energy to create new energy-saving standards, though it stalled in the Senate. Other appliance-related bills proposed this year included the “Refrigerator Freedom Act” and “Liberty in Laundry Act.”

The uproar over efficient appliances is just one of the ways that deepening polarization threatens efforts to cut carbon emissions. On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump revived longstanding complaints about energy-efficient dishwashers and showerheads and also railed against clean technologies, falsely claiming that wind turbines break down when exposed to saltwater and that hydrogen-powered cars are prone to blowing up like bombs. 

A growing portion of the public appears to share some of Trump’s reservations. Four years ago, 84 percent of Republicans supported new solar farms; by this spring, the number had slumped to 64 percent, according to polling from Pew Research Center. Wind power saw a similar dip in support, and the share of Americans who say they would consider buying an electric vehicle for their next purchase dropped from 38 percent in 2023 to 29 percent this year.

Dislodging climate change from the culture wars might feel nearly impossible. But scientists have found ways to talk about the changing weather that resonate with Fox News fans, a segment of the population that many climate advocates consider a lost cause, by taking a “just the facts” approach. 

“If you’re talking about just pure observations, there’s nothing political about that,” said Keith Sietter, a lecturer at the College of the Holy Cross and executive director emeritus at the American Meteorological Society. Telling people that hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly because they’re sitting over record-warm ocean water, for instance, lets them come to their own conclusions about how the world is changing.

Climate Central, a nonprofit that aims to be “scrupulously non-advocacy and non-partisan,” provides localized data and graphics to help newspapers, online news sites, meteorologists, and TV and radio programs explain the science behind our increasingly weird weather, from warming winters to longer allergy seasons. The organization has had success working with right-leaning media, like Fox affiliates, because of its apolitical approach, according to Peter Girard, Climate Central’s vice president for external communications.

“Audiences, regardless of what their political stripes are, want to know what the science is telling them about the weather and climatological experiences that they’re having in their backyards,” Girard said.

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Yet even as fires, floods, and heat waves become noticeably worse, Democrats and Republicans are further apart on the science of human-caused global warming than almost any other issue. Some observers have noted that the resistance to accepting climate science might not be about the science at all, but what attempts to fix the problem might entail. An experiment in 2014 found that Republicans who read a speech about the United States using environmentally friendly technologies to fuel the economy, versus a speech about enacting stringent environmental regulations and pollution taxes, were twice as likely as other Republicans to agree with mainstream climate science. In other words, it might be easier to just ignore a problem if you don’t like the proposed solution.

This concept of “solution aversion” might help explain how the culture war over climate solutions started. In the early 1990s, with the public freshly alerted by scientists that global warming had already begun, momentum began building for global action, with countries considering mandatory requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Corporations that had a stake in continuing to burn fossil fuels — oil companies, utilities, automakers, railroads, and steelmakers — saw this as an impending disaster and organized a counter-offensive. Conservatives began casting doubt on climate science and arguing that shifting away from fossil fuels threatened the economy and the American way of life. A gulf grew between Republicans and Democrats on a subject they used to mostly agree on, with congressional Republicans increasingly voting against environmental measures.

Climate change “became the stand-in for everything that’s wrong with the government,” said Aaron McCright, a sociologist at Michigan State University, in an interview with CNN last year. “‘You can’t tell me what I can and can’t do on my land. Federal government — stay away from me.’” Between 1992 and 2012, the gap in support for environmental action between Democrats and Republicans widened from 5 percent to 39 percent, according to Pew polling. 

The fault lines have deepened in recent years. When progressives pushed for a Green New Deal in 2019, Republicans falsely claimed, “They want to take away your hamburgers.” It became a refrain, with the right warning that Democrats were coming for your cars and your gas stoves. “This is all part of an agenda to control you, and to control your behavior,” said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in a speech last year, delivered in front of an oil rig in West Texas. “They are trying to limit your choices as Americans.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks at the Permian Deep Rock Oil Company site in Midland, Texas, in 2023. Brandon Bell / Getty Images

There have been efforts to position climate action in a way that appeals to conservative values, tying it to patriotism, innovation, or competition with China. But Kenneth Barish, a psychologist and the author of the upcoming book Bridging Our Political Divide: How Liberals and Conservatives Can Understand Each Other and Find Common Ground, says that in practice, conservatives might reject this kind of framing outright, because they feel like they haven’t been listened to. His formula for depolarization starts with a one-on-one conversation between two people who disagree. The goal is to learn why your discussion partner feels the way they do, and then work together to find solutions that address both of your concerns. 

This kind of dialogue creates opportunities for creative, pragmatic workarounds — perhaps ones that manage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while limiting the government’s power over household decisions. Matthew Burgess, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming, said it’s possible that simply making electric stoves more responsive to temperature adjustments, or making electric vehicles cheaper and charging stations more readily available, would dissolve some of the resistance to those technologies. 

“When you make this shift from having an opinion to understanding the concern that underlies the opinion, it’s really a different kind of conversation,” Barish said.

The approach is reminiscent of “deep canvassing,” an outreach method developed by LGBTQ+ advocates that involves listening to people’s worries without judgment and helping them work through their conflicted feelings. Personal conversations like these have been shown to change people’s minds, with lasting effects.

In one experiment in British Columbia, volunteers hoping to convince local governments to shift to 100 percent renewable energy kept running into roadblocks in the rural town of Trail, home to one of the world’s largest lead and zinc smelting plants. They spoke to hundreds of residents, listening to their concerns about lost jobs and working to find common ground. In the end, 40 percent of residents shifted their beliefs, and Trail’s city council voted in 2022 to move to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

It’s evidence that breakthroughs can happen, but also suggests there’s a lot of work for climate advocates ahead. Knee-jerk reactions are fast and easy; engaging in meaningful dialogue is slow and difficult. Barish said that better conversations require acknowledging that complex problems like climate change need to be seen from different perspectives. “If we come at someone who is opposing certain interventions and try and convince her why we’re right and she’s wrong, then we’re probably not going to get anywhere.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to take climate change out of the culture wars on Nov 26, 2024.

Delegates closed out this year’s United Nations climate conference on Sunday after agonizing debates over the right way to deliver on the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. In addition to approving a new framework for international climate aid, nearly 200 countries approved guidelines meant to make it cheaper and easier for them to reach their emissions reduction targets by trading in international carbon markets — in essence, allowing one country to pay another to make emissions cuts on its behalf. While some delegates applauded these developments, many experts and environmental groups are unhappy with the final agreement.

Among the flaws observers identified were a lack of transparency in the way countries count and report carbon credits and the absence of concrete consequences when agreed-upon guidelines aren’t followed. The final guidelines also failed to provide much specificity about the types of projects allowed to create carbon credits.

Carbon Market Watch, a European watchdog and research group, said in a statement that the agreements reached at the end of the conference risked “facilitating cowboy carbon markets at a time when the world needs a sheriff.” 

The carbon markets in question have to do with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. First outlined in 2015, the article imagined three ways for countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions cooperatively. Fleshing out the details, however, has remained the subject of contention through multiple COPs, the name for the annual climate meetings held by the United Nations.

Article 6’s first cooperative approach, under Article 6.2, allows countries to bilaterally trade carbon credits known as “internationally transferred mitigation outcomes” — certificates each representing 1 metric ton of carbon emissions that are prevented or removed from the atmosphere. The second approach, described in Article 6.4, envisions a global market for carbon credits — in this case dubbed “emission reduction units” — that are purchasable by governments and companies alike. Article 6.8 highlights nonmarket approaches, the third cooperative carbon-reduction mechanism. It wasn’t discussed much at COP29, but it’s supposed to create a platform for wealthy countries to donate money or climate technology to poorer countries.

According to the International Emissions Trading Association, a pro-carbon-market industry group, Articles 6.2 and 6.4 could reduce the cost of reaching countries’ emissions targets by up to $250 billion a year by 2030, since they incentivize countries to do the least expensive emissions reductions first. Simon Watts, New Zealand’s climate minister, said in a statement that the decision to greenlight Article 6 “sends a clear signal to the market to unlock investments in activities that reduce emissions and enable countries to be able to work together and support each other to meet their climate targets.”

Critics, however, say carbon trading mechanisms distract wealthy countries from the essential work of reducing their own emissions. They say Article 6 risks replicating some of the same fraud and human rights issues that have tainted existing carbon markets outside of the U.N.’s purview. 

The first big piece of news out of COP29, this year’s U.N. climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, was about Article 6.4, the global carbon market for countries and businesses. On November 11, the opening day of the summit, delegates approved two key documents to make the market work, and countries are now expected to begin using it as early as mid-2025.

COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev touted the market’s fast-tracked approval as a breakthrough “following years of stalemate,” an apparent attempt to set a positive tone for the rest of the two-week conference. But the announcement obscured broader disagreements over Article 6.

COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev leads a plenary on the opening day of the conference. Sean Gallup / Getty Images

One reason for conflict is that COP29’s initial agreements over Article 6.4 were not reached through negotiation. Rather, they were reached through a procedural sleight of hand by the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the 12-person technical group charged with designing standards for the new carbon market. Instead of asking national delegates to weigh in on and approve those two key documents, the Supervisory Body unilaterally adopted them in October and asked delegates to rubber-stamp them at COP29. 

The texts that were pushed through outline the types of carbon removal projects that are allowed to generate carbon credits, and the methodologies used to determine how much a carbon credit is worth.

Isa Mulder, an expert on global carbon markets for Carbon Market Watch, said the move sets a dangerous precedent for the Supervisory Body — and potentially other technical groups — to push forward controversial texts without submitting them to delegates for discussion or negotiation. 

Similar fears were raised by a host of other observers, as well as the delegate from Tuvalu. Erika Lennon, a senior attorney from the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law, called it in a statement a “rogue move from the Supervisory Body to prevail in the quest to start COP29 with a ‘win.’”

Critics voiced not only procedural concerns, but also substantive ones. Lennon criticized the Supervisory Body’s guidance for being too vague about the types of carbon projects allowed to generate credits — some projects, like storing carbon in rocks, are more reliable than others — and for failing to set monitoring requirements that ensure against “reversal,” the release of carbon that was supposed be locked up in perpetuity (like when a wildfire burns up a forest). 

“Governments now face the real possibility of having created a Paris-sanctioned carbon market that could be worse for people and the planet than the scandal-ridden voluntary carbon markets,” she said, referring to the unregulated marketplace that companies already use to claim they’ve offset their greenhouse gas emissions.

Injy Johnstone, a decarbonization research associate at the University of Oxford, said a lack of transparency and accountability could allow countries to exaggerate their emissions reductions achieved through offsets.

“Where there are loopholes, they will be exploited,” she said.

As negotiations closed on Sunday, those issues remained unresolved, along with others involving the transfer of credits from the Article 6.4 carbon market’s predecessor.

Article 6.2, the agreement allowing countries to bilaterally trade carbon credits, had already been in operation before COP29. Under what Lennon described as a “bare-bones” framework from the U.N., rich countries including Japan and Switzerland had set up agreements to exchange carbon credits with developing nations in order to claim progress toward their “nationally determined contributions” — the emissions-reduction pledges countries make under the Paris Agreement. 

The aim for COP29 was to flesh out Article 6.2 rules on transparency and accountability, including how countries should authorize carbon credits, so that more countries could participate.

That didn’t happen — at least, not to the extent that some had hoped. Environmental groups and some negotiating blocs — notably, the EU — sounded the alarm over countries “moving backwards” in terms of the mechanism’s reliability. Near the end of the conference, Mulder said the 6.2 mechanism had been watered down so significantly that it risked becoming “just a framework where it’s completely up to countries to do whatever they want.”

The exact disagreements are deeply technical. One of the main disputes concerns language in the final text that “requests” — rather than mandates — that countries pause the use of carbon credits flagged for integrity issues by a U.N. technical body. Another part of the text makes it optional for countries to share certain details about their carbon trading activities, including carbon projects’ risk of reversal.

Participants work in the common area during COP29. Dominika Zarzycka / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

The agreed-upon texts “put a lot of weight on the shoulders of independent observers, researchers, the media, and the countries themselves to scrutinize the actions of countries engaging in Article 6.2,” said Jonathan Crook, a policy expert at Carbon Market Watch, in a statement. Crook observed that the complexity of Article 6 will likely hinder would-be watchdogs from holding countries accountable for trading low-quality credits.

Last week, during the final days of COP29, an investigation from the Swiss nonprofit Alliance Sud highlighted the risks of nontransparency around Article 6.2’s carbon credits. It found that Switzerland’s agreement to offset its greenhouse gas emissions by selling clean-burning cookstoves to Ghana — facilitated by the pre-COP29 rules for Article 6.2 — was overestimating its climate benefits by up to 79 percent. But Alliance Sud was only able to discover this through Switzerland’s Freedom of Information Act; the project owner had initially refused to let the organization see an unredacted version of the project description, as well as the analysis used to calculate its emissions impact.

“The project is as opaque as dense fog,” Alliance Sud said. It concluded that “the possibility of public scrutiny remains crucial to ensuring that carbon mitigation projects do not endanger implementation of the Paris Agreement.”

With the Paris Agreement’s Article 6, some environmental advocates have found themselves in a tricky position. While they want to ensure the best outcome for its two market mechanisms, they also resent the fundamental idea of them.

“I get why people are there working on the minutiae of the text,” said Doreen Stabinsky, a professor of global environmental politics at the College of the Atlantic in Maine. “But for me, the bigger story that needs to be told is that carbon markets don’t actually stop climate change.” 

Just this month, an article in the journal Nature Communications found that fewer than 16 percent of carbon credits from more than 2,000 projects analyzed represented “real emission reductions.” On top of these integrity issues, Stabinsky said carbon markets incentivize rich countries to offset their emissions by funding mitigation projects in the developing world, rather than undertaking the difficult but necessary work of decarbonizing their own economies.

Lennon objected to the claim, often repeated at COP29, that carbon markets are a form of so-called “climate finance” — a term for much-needed funding for climate mitigation and adaptation in the developing world. An early draft of the COP29 agreement listed carbon markets as one of several types of climate finance that rich countries could funnel to poor countries. 

“Carbon markets are not climate finance and should not be seen as climate finance,” she told Grist. 

The explicit reference to carbon markets was struck from the final version of countries’ updated pledge to deliver $1.3 trillion to developing countries by 2035 — a main outcome of COP29. But the final agreement doesn’t prohibit countries from trying to use carbon markets to claim progress toward their financial obligations. 

“The best-case outcome,” Lennon said, would be for the U.N. to eschew these markets altogether. A coalition of African environmental groups shared a similar sentiment during the final days of COP29.

According to the groups, carbon markets “don’t actually decrease emissions; they just shift them around.” For that reason, they see them as a tool of the developed world to make it seem as if it is taking climate action, even as it appropriates more of the planet’s “carbon budget” — the amount of climate pollution that countries can collectively emit while remaining within safe planetary boundaries.

The groups “stand firmly against carbon markets, as we believe they can undermine the integrity of climate action and disproportionately impact developing nations,” they wrote.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At COP29, new rules for carbon markets made them even more controversial on Nov 26, 2024.

Two weeks ago, diplomats from almost 200 countries arrived at a sports stadium on the outskirts of Baku, Azerbaijan, to debate a subject that had never before been at the center of a United Nations climate conference: money.  

World leaders have long agreed, in theory, on a dire need to scale up international investment in climate action — investment in both renewable energy and infrastructure that can protect people from climate-fueled drought, fire, and floods. But it is one thing to agree that more money is needed and quite another to agree on who should pay up. That impasse made this year’s conference, COP29, one of the most difficult U.N. negotiations since the 2015 Paris Agreement, when the world finally set a numerical target for limiting global warming. 

But unlike in Paris, the outcome in Baku saw most diplomats leave disappointed and bitter. The talks, which officials described as “agonizing,” “toxic,” and “corrosive,” pitted wealthy countries — led by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union — against dozens of poorer nations from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In the end, negotiators for the richer nations managed to push through a deal despite opposition from major countries like India and Kenya, as well as a chorus of small states in the fast-disappearing islands of the Pacific. But even though a huge share of countries represented in Baku were furious with the final shape of the finance agreement, none exercised their right to veto the final text.

The so-called New Collective Quantified Goal, as the funding target is known in U.N. parlance, commits rich countries to leading an effort to triple their climate aid deliveries by 2035, when they must dispatch $300 billion per year. It also calls on them to help raise $1.3 trillion in global climate investments by that year, but doesn’t specify how. This mix of grants and loans will fund all manner of climate projects, from new power plants in rapidly-growing nations to disaster resilience efforts in the world’s most vulnerable countries. And for the first time, contributions from newer global power players like China and South Korea will count alongside those of historically wealthy countries centered in North America and Europe.

The agreement passed with no formal objections following an hours-long debate that lasted well into Sunday morning — almost 36 hours after the scheduled end of the conference. While leaders from the U.S. and Europe said they were satisfied with the result, much of the rest of the world dismissed it as what one climate envoy from Bolivia called “a joke.” Though the agreement nods to an ambitious $1.3 trillion annual target that developing countries had demanded, its heavy reliance on loans and private finance — and lack of minimum targets for disaster relief projects and vulnerable regions — are a far cry from the arrangement most diplomats from Africa, Asia, and Latin America had wanted.

Even António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, expressed disappointment with the final result.

“I had hoped for a more ambitious outcome,” he said, though he commended U.N. member countries for undertaking “a complex negotiation in an uncertain and divided geopolitical landscape.”

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The bitter agreement forged in Baku can be traced back to the disastrous 2009 U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark. In an effort to placate the developing world after rich countries scuttled a bid to slash carbon emissions, Hillary Clinton and Ed Milliband, who were then leading diplomats for the U.S. and the United Kingdom, respectively, offered a consolation prize: Rich countries would provide $100 billion in climate aid to poor countries every year from 2020 through 2025. The implicit logic of the offer was that early-industrializing countries like the U.S. and U.K. reaped the benefits of massive fossil fuel emissions for far longer than countries with much later economic development, and the latter now disproportionately pay the price for a warming planet.

But the rich countries blew through their self-imposed deadline. So when U.N. members began discussing a new financial target to replace the $100 billion goal, representatives from the developing world believed they had leverage to argue for something more ambitious: Not only should rich nations increase aid flows to support decarbonization, but they should also deliver more money to ill-funded disaster adaptation projects in vulnerable regions like sub-Saharan Africa — and they should replace debt-producing loans with no-strings-attached grants. 

The agreement in Baku did not secure these goals. It maintains the same open-ended logic of the first $100 billion promise, with a small number of added guarantees to appease vulnerable nations. Still, the text of the six-page agreement also opens the door for future changes that could free up the kind of climate aid that the most vulnerable nations believe they need. It proposes a shift away from debt financing, the elimination of time-consuming bureaucracy in the international grant funding process, and even potential taxes on polluting industries — all of which could fundamentally change the funding landscape for climate-vulnerable nations. It just doesn’t provide any mechanisms to make these things happen now.

Ali Mohamed, the climate envoy for Kenya, speaks during a plenary session at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Sean Gallup / Getty Images

The real test of how far the world moved forward in Baku will be far from the bureaucratic plenaries of the U.N. It will take place in island nations like St. Kitts and Nevis, which needs an up-front infusion of cash to replace its diesel-based power grid with the stores of geothermal energy it has underground; in Colombia, which is seeking foreign investment to diversify its economy away from a reliance on oil exports; and in underdeveloped nations like Malawi, where a recent drought has forced thousands of pastoral families into food insecurity.

“We did not get everything we wanted, but we did achieve something,” said Ali Mohamed, the Kenyan climate envoy and head negotiator for a bloc of African nations, in a press huddle after the talks ended. “I look forward to seeing what we can do with what we did get.”

For months leading up to the summit in Baku, the host government of Azerbaijan promised that COP29 would be “the finance COP.” A new agreement on finance was one of the last outstanding components of the Paris accords that still needed to be hammered out, but negotiators had been debating it for years without reaching anything close to consensus on the major questions: how much money the goal should be, what sorts of projects should be funded, which countries should contribute funding, and who should receive the most funding. As delegates squabbled over small-bore questions during the conference’s first week, these questions remained unresolved.

The U.S. and Europe, hesitant to guarantee more government grants as aid-skeptical nationalists gain traction with their voters, aligned themselves against negotiating blocs with different but overlapping demands. The influential “African group,” led by the mild-mannered Mohamed of Kenya, was pushing a $1.3 trillion target with a focus on funding climate adaptation infrastructure. The Alliance of Small Island States, led by the outspoken Samoan environment minister Cedric Schuster, wanted a minimum allocation guaranteed to its members alone, given their unique vulnerability to sea level rise, plus money to recover from already-inevitable losses. And the massive G77, which represents almost all developing countries, was standing behind China as it resisted calls to join the U.S. and Europe as an official contributor.

As the conference’s second and final week neared its close, negotiators found themselves leaving the talks after the official shuttle buses had departed, giving them no choice but to hail cabs from the side of an eight-lane highway. The conference venue itself became a visual metaphor for the stalemate: Talks took place in a makeshift structure erected on the floor of the Baku sports stadium, positioning negotiators like gladiators in a coliseum.

“We are exhausted,” said Edith Kateme-Kasajja, a climate finance negotiator for Uganda, during the first week. “They are making this impossible for us.”

The person who was supposed to untangle this knot was Yalchin Rafiyev, a 37-year-old diplomat from the Azerbaijani foreign service who acted as COP29’s lead negotiator. Compared to Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, the deep-voiced Emirati oil executive who chaired last year’s COP28 talks in Dubai, Rafiyev was a far less imposing personality. He often looked harried as he walked the halls of the conference, and toward the end of the summit he appeared on the verge of collapse.

The negotiation venue at COP29 sits inside the Baku Olympic Stadium in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Sean Gallup / Getty Images

After talks stalled in the first week, Azerbaijan moved the debate out of public view, huddling with hundreds of national environment and finance ministers who flew into Baku for the second week to decide the questions that career civil servants couldn’t resolve. Early in the second week, Rafiyev and his boss, a former state oil company official named Mukhtar Babayev who served as the conference’s formal “president,” took the writing process into their own hands. They told country leaders they would take everyone’s feedback and come back with a draft of their own. With no visibility into the drafting process, many negotiators began to worry that the Azerbaijani presidency lacked the diplomatic experience to handle such a complex and tense process.

For many, that skepticism was soon vindicated: The first Azerbaijani proposal on the finance goal, which appeared less than 36 hours before the official end of the conference, made almost no effort to bridge the gap between the parties, instead offering what one observer called a “caricature” of the most extreme proposals made by developed and developing countries. The presidency convened a massive plenary discussion in which leaders from dozens of countries castigated Rafiyev and his colleagues for taking a lax attitude toward a deal that needed to come together in a matter of days.

The next morning, after a series of all-night drafting sessions, Rafiyev at last produced a text that resolved the basic questions of the goal — and resolved them all in favor of wealthy countries. His proposed goal sought to raise $250 billion by 2035 — and not before — with rich nations “taking the lead” rather than owning the burden, and with ample flexibility for them to draw from the private sector. Gone were a suite of prior proposals to reduce developing countries’ debt loads, move money toward ill-funded adaptation projects in small island states, and funnel investments away from fossil fuels.

Yalchin Rafiyev, the lead negotiator at COP29, delivers a brief press conference on one of the conference’s final days.
Sean Gallup / Getty Images

Europe and the United States were willing to work with this draft, which ensured their political leaders weren’t on the hook for sums that might prove politically impossible, but almost every other country rejected the draft as a betrayal and an insult. The African group called the proposal “unacceptable,” island states called it “shameful,” and even the British economist Nicholas Stern, an architect of the Copenhagen goal, called it “insufficient.” Progressive advocates held enraged press conferences during which they urged developing countries to walk out, chanting that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” 

With just hours to go before delegates started to fly home and risk depriving the conference of a quorum, the only text available was proving unworkable. Longtime observers started to wonder if a total collapse of the talks wasn’t out of the question. In the early evening, as the conference officially entered overtime, Rafiyev gave a stiff, three-minute press conference during which he dourly admitted that the text was short of what Azerbaijan had hoped to achieve.

“We will continue to work with parties to make final adjustments,” he said, sweating beneath the glare of a camera light. His press team then hurried him away.

What followed over the next 36 hours was nothing less than a diplomatic coup for the developed world. A group of ministers and negotiators from the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom took matters into their own hands, working around the presidency to convince developing nations to accept a deal whose substance differed little from the draft they decried.

This cadre included some of the most experienced climate diplomats in the developed world. There was Sue Biniaz, a career climate negotiator for the United States, acting in concert with Biden administration climate advisor John Podesta. There was Ed Milliband, an architect of the original $100 billion goal, who had just returned to government after more than a decade out of power in England. There was Jennifer Morgan, the former Greenpeace leader who, as climate envoy for Germany, has made that country into a worldwide environmental leader. And there was Wopke Hoekstra, the tall and unruffled climate commissioner for the European Union. 

Fortified by after-hours food deliveries, this small group worked through the night and into Saturday morning to firm up a deal, even as venue staff started to break down delegate offices and bathrooms ran out of toilet paper. Milliband and Morgan conducted shuttle diplomacy between their offices and those of major delegations like India, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia, looking for ways to make the text more palatable without compromising on favorable core conditions.

Ali Mohamed, the lead climate envoy for Kenya, and Ed Milliband, the lead climate envoy for the United Kingdom, engage in a conversation at COP29 in Baku.
Sean Gallup / Getty Images

The hardest pill for developing countries to swallow was the $250 billion sum, which was only around 20 percent of what they had demanded. It had taken years for rich nations to put a number on the table, and they had offered a figure that climate envoy Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez of Panama said was “spit in the face.”

In inflation-adjusted terms, this figure represented only a small step up from the first goal set in 2009, and it was lower than what was proposed by U.N. economists and expert groups. But it also reflected a hard political reality in donor countries. The U.S. had just elected Donald Trump, who has signaled his intention to withdraw the country from the Paris Agreement and zero out climate aid. Germany had just seen a high court ruling limiting the size of its federal budget deficit, giving leaders little breathing room for new spending. The United Kingdom has a significant budget deficit and lackluster growth. While donor countries agreed to bump the number up to $300 billion in response to the fury of developing world negotiators, they held firm against going further.

Even when developing countries lowered their ask to $500 billion, developed-country ministers said $300 billion was the best they could offer. They were aided in their argument by a pessimistic electoral backdrop: The political will for big aid spending at future U.N. conferences could be even lower than it was in Baku, since right-wing parties will likely soon control even more parliaments in donor countries like Canada. Bridge-building ministers from Brazil, the host country of next year’s COP, also urged their developing country partners to accept the deal — and resolve the finance issue before it became Brazil’s responsibility. While Marina Silva, the country’s environment minister, told the press that $300 billion was well below the actual need, she argued that it was crucial to secure a deal.

“We all need to come back to the table,” she said.

Marina Silva, the Brazilian environmental minister, holds a press conference at COP29 in Baku.
Sean Gallup / Getty Images

The second problem for the donor countries was China, the world’s second-largest economy and by far its largest annual emitter. Amid repeated calls from Europe and the United States to join them in providing climate aid, Chinese negotiators arrived at the conference intent on insisting otherwise. Ding Xuexiang, the nation’s vice premier, announced in his opening speech that the country had “provided and mobilized” more than $24 billion “in support of other developing countries’ climate response” since 2016 — language meant to imply that China had voluntarily contributed to the first climate finance goal established in Copenhagen. This was a clear signal that the country was ready to talk. 

While China rejected calls to reclassify itself and other major emitters as developed countries, which have an agreed-upon responsibility to contribute, after days of bilateral meetings with Germany and the U.S. it agreed to language that would “encourage” it to “make contributions” and tally some of its spending. But negotiators opted not to specify what exactly China and other new donors would be “making contributions” to — that is, they were intentionally unclear about whether or not China’s flows would count toward the $300 billion goal.

By midday Saturday, after hours of overnight consultations, negotiators appeared to believe they had built consensus around some modified version of Rafiyev’s draft text. In the early afternoon, Rafiyev convened hundreds of diplomats in a negotiating room that grew so full that security started to bar key finance experts and foreign ministers from entering. As a scrum of reporters amassed outside the door, the presidency called the room to order.

But almost as soon as the meeting began, two key blocs walked out of the room. These blocs — the Alliance of Small Island States and the Least Developed Countries, a group that represents around 40 very poor economies across Africa and Asia — said $300 billion was far too low for them to consider. If that was all that rich countries were offering, these blocs wanted defined set-asides to ensure that other countries wouldn’t outcompete them for money that could guarantee the very survival of their countries.

“We need to be shown the regard which our dire circumstances necessitate,” said Cedric Schuster, the Samoan chair of the small-islands bloc.

Pandemonium reigned in the stadium for hours. Monterrey Goméz, of Panama, paced the venue telling any journalist who would listen that he would not accept anything less than $500 billion. John Podesta, the Biden administration’s climate czar, emerged from a negotiating room to find himself hounded by protestors, who chased him out of the main lobby area and up to the U.S. delegation office. Alden Meyer, a climate expert at the think tank E3G who has attended all but one U.N. climate conference, told reporters he was worried the talks would collapse thanks in part to the Azerbaijani presidency’s negligence. 

“We have a big breakdown in the negotiations here,” he said.

But the deal held together, thanks to a few last-minute concessions. First, Samoa’s Schuster led a group of ministers from the small islands and the least developed countries up to Rafiyev’s offices, where they held a meeting with representatives of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Behind closed doors, they worked out an agreement to add language that would call for easier financing arrangements in their countries. This was less than the dedicated carve-out the blocs had been seeking, but the leverage was all on the donor countries’ side — there was almost no chance that a deal in future years would be much better.

Sue Biniaz, the lead U.S. climate negotiator, speaks with another delegate on the plenary floor at COP29.
Sean Gallup / Getty Images

The rich countries now had to retail this agreement to African leaders, who were still frustrated with the small total and who were not receiving any special carve-out. Biniaz, the longtime U.S. negotiator often referred to as “the closer” in climate talks, conferred with African leaders and worked out a series of tweaks that made the text stronger: The funding goal would be “at least $300 billion,” it would discourage the use of debt, and it would come up for review and possible expansion in 2030. 

In a surreal moment of stage drama, Biniaz huddled with Ali Mohamed of Kenya, Susana Muhamad of Colombia, and a group of other African ministers in a corner of the packed conference plenary auditorium, running through the changes with them. While the Azerbaijani conference hosts gaveled through a number of procedural items at the front of the room, she presented a marked-up copy of the agreement to a growing scrum of leaders as the rest of the conference looked on in fascination, just out of earshot.

The final hurdle was India, which only the previous night had raised several objections to the goal text. It wasn’t just that the sum was too low and the language too flimsy, ministers said. It was also that the goal would tally India’s contributions to multilateral development banks as climate finance just as it proposed to do for China. This would be a subtle but significant gesture to count India as a contributor of climate aid rather than just a recipient.

With talks on the brink of success, and the hundreds of remaining summit attendees assembled in the plenary hall, Babayev suspended the proceedings so wealthy nations could try to appease India on the plenary floor. Podesta and Hoekstra engaged in a lengthy conversation with Chandni Raina, an Indian finance negotiator, and other senior members of the delegation. Then various senior ministers left the open plenary room to talk in private. (Representatives of India’s delegation did not respond to requests for comment.)

Babayev resumed the conference just after 3:00 am and gaveled through the goal agreement almost at once. Negotiators and delegates around the room rose to their feet in applause, and the Azerbaijani team fist-pumped and hugged on stage. But as soon as the applause died down, recriminations began. Ministers from Cuba, Bolivia, and Nigeria denounced the goal as weak, saying it would leave them unable to mitigate their emissions or adapt to disasters. Cedric Schuster, the head of the small-islands bloc, said he feared that the lack of adequate financing would put the goals of the Paris Agreement out of reach. Advocacy organizations and climate nonprofits issued a barrage of statements that called the outcome “a historic failure,” “a serious blow to climate action,” and “a global Ponzi scheme.”

Chandni Raina, a finance negotiator for India, speaks at the COP29 plenary to excoriate a global climate finance deal.
Sean Gallup / Getty Images

In the climactic moment, India’s Raina took the floor to deliver a coruscating 10-minute tirade against the donor countries, the presidency, and the entire United Nations, calling the goal a “paltry sum” that “does not deliver the climate action that is necessary for our country.” She also claimed she had tried to protest before Babayev brought down the gavel, but that he had ignored her.

“This has been stage-managed,” she said, eliciting around as much applause as the approval of the goal itself.

The lesson of Copenhagen is that the $300 billion number may not turn out to be the most significant part of the New Collective Quantified Goal. Like the previous $100 billion target, it is ultimately just another round number, which rich countries will either achieve or fail to achieve depending on their economic and political circumstances. If they do not succeed in tripling climate aid over the next decade, the rifts between developed and developing countries will likely open again.

The problem with the original promise was not only that developed countries did not fulfill it, but also that the finance they were promising to provide was not fit for purpose. The vast majority of climate aid comes in the form of loans, which increase countries’ debt and force them to choose between, say, expanding solar farms and providing social and health services. Adaptation and resilience projects, like water storage and sea walls, fail to attract even loans, since they don’t produce revenue. The funds that the U.N. has established to hand out grants to developing countries are slow-moving and under-funded, accounting for less than 5 percent of all aid flows, and many small countries struggle to navigate the application process for these funds.

Although developing countries failed in Baku to secure even a portion of what they came for, they may have secured a moral victory: Europe and the United States have at last acknowledged, after a great deal of resistance, that the Paris Agreement cannot succeed if the architecture of international finance remains as it is right now. 

Wopke Hoekstra, the European Union climate commissioner pictured standing at the right, rises to celebrate the approval of a deal on climate finance for developing countries, while officials from Bhutan remain seated.
Sean Gallup / Getty Images

This acknowledgement is explicit in the text of the goal, which was bolstered to appease developing nations. The final draft urges countries to spend far more money redressing climate damages, urges lenders to provide lower-interest loans to vulnerable countries, and urges climate funds to slash their bureaucratic red tape. It also sets up a “Baku to Belém road map,” a one-year effort that will explore how countries can scale up finance into the trillions “through grants, concessional and non-debt-creating instruments,” and potentially taxes on polluting industries. Proposals stemming from this road map will be presented at next year’s COP in Belém, Brazil.

In other words, while the new financial agreement does not change the world’s financial architecture, it does admit that the status quo is unsustainable, something that became painfully obvious in Baku.

“The [numerical aid target] was never expected to, and could never be, enough to meet the need,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, a climate finance expert at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “If the rest of the decision is fully implemented, it will be transformational.”

But to achieve that transformational change will require an immense amount of cooperation and political will from an international community that has almost always been short on both. As the last negotiators filtered out of the makeshift stadium complex toward taxis and shuttle buses, still bruised from weeks of diplomatic combat, such a long-term shift seemed far from guaranteed.

“We lost,” said Sandra Guzmán Luna, a former climate finance official for Mexico who now helps other developing countries negotiate for aid money. “You can see it with the glass half full, at least we have the path forward. But we lost.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘We lost’: How COP29 ended with a deal that made the whole world unhappy on Nov 25, 2024.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Deep South Today, a nonprofit network of local newsrooms providing essential journalism in underserved communities and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.

President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to kill offshore wind energy development “on day one” of his second term is already triggering project slowdowns on the East Coast, but the biggest wind farm proposed in the Gulf of Mexico will likely stay on track. 

That’s because the project is on such a long development timeline that Trump’s four-year term will be over before permitting and construction begin, according to RWE, the German energy giant that plans to build a 2,000-megawatt wind farm about 40 miles south of Lake Charles, Louisiana. The project, which could power more than 350,000 homes, isn’t expected to be operational for about a decade. 

“The project has a long-lead development timeline that is longer than any one federal administration, and with a planned operational date in the mid-2030s,” RWE spokesman Ryan Ferguson said. 

RWE, the world’s second-largest offshore wind developer, and other key players in the renewable energy industry announced shifts in funding priorities and warned of project delays and possible derailments after Trump was elected president this month. 

“The change of administration in the U.S entails risks for the timely implementation of offshore wind projects,” RWE Chief Financial Officer Michael Muller said at a press conference earlier this month. “The new Republican administration could delay specific projects. The realization of our Community Offshore Wind project near New York, for example, depends on outstanding permits from U.S. federal authorities.”

The “higher risks and delays” in the U.S. offshore wind market prompted RWE to initiate a $1.6 billion share buyback, RWE CEO Markus Krebber said during a call with investors. The buyback signaled a significant shift in the company’s short-term spending priorities but not waning confidence in the durability of U.S. demand for renewables, Muller said, noting that a growing number of states are setting goals for solar and wind energy. 

RWE’s recalibration makes sense, said Jenny Netherton, the Southeastern Wind Coalition’s Louisiana program manager.

“That was not unexpected,” she said. “Companies are always trying to find the best way forward in an uncertain environment.”

Trump’s opposition to offshore wind began in 2006, when he initiated a decade-long fight against the Scottish government over a proposed wind farm the future U.S. president said would spoil the view from a golf course he hoped to build. Trump lost the battle and was ordered to pay Scotland nearly $300,000 in legal fees. In recent speeches, Trump has said wind farms harm property values and wildlife. More outlandishly, he has claimed wind energy causes cancer, increases food prices, and prevents people from watching TV when the wind isn’t blowing. 

During his first term, Trump was accused of “slow walking” the permits for some of the first offshore wind farms in federal waters. RWE and other companies say wind farms already under construction will likely move forward, but projects slated to break ground over the next couple years may face setbacks. 

Of the 30 states with offshore wind potential, nine have statewide wind energy mandates. Two states — Massachusetts and Rhode Island — have deadlines to reach wind energy targets in the 2020s and four states — New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia — have deadlines in the 2030s. 

These goals and the U.S.’s ever-rising electricity needs are signs that Trump may slow but not kill wind energy development, Muller said. 

“We still believe U.S. offshore wind [energy] is still needed,” he said, noting New York in particular. “If they are going to keep up with demand, they need offshore wind.”

Louisiana set a goal of developing the capacity for 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035, but the target wasn’t legally binding. Proposed in 2021 during the administration of Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, the goal appears to have been abandoned by Governor Jeff Landry, who took office in January. The Republican governor has said little publicly about offshore wind development and has not responded to requests seeking his position on the matter. 

Many other Louisiana Republicans strongly back offshore wind, seeing it as an economic boon for the state. Louisiana companies that long served the offshore oil and gas industry have seen business flag in recent years. Several of them, including shipbuilders, engineering firms, and metal fabricators, have easily transitioned to helping plan and build offshore projects on the East Coast, including the U.S.’s first offshore wind farm.

Bipartisan legislation in Louisiana paved the way for a fast-tracked approval process for wind projects in state-managed waters, which extend 3 miles from the coast. Louisiana has approved agreements with two companies to build small-scale wind farms near Cameron Parish and Port Fourchon, the Gulf’s largest oil and gas port. The two projects will likely be built years before the RWE wind farm. 

The last federal lease auction in the Gulf was canceled in July due to weak interest from bidders, but two companies recently offered competing plans for a 142,000-acre area near Galveston, Texas. It’s unclear how Trump’s victory will affect those proposals. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is waiting to see if there’s more developer interest in the area and will likely initiate a competitive lease sale in the coming months. 

While Trump may cause uncertainty at the federal level, Louisiana isn’t likely to waver in its support for offshore wind energy, Netherton said. 

“It still enjoys broad support here,” she said. “Nationally, there’s very little control over what happens, but in Louisiana, offshore wind has a very clear path forward.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump has vowed to kill offshore wind energy — but it might not be easy on Nov 25, 2024.

When, at the annual United Nations climate conference in Paris in 2015, the countries of the world agreed to the goal of limiting global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, it seemed possible, probable even, that humanity was on track to avoid the worst effects of climate change. This new target was even more stringent than the one proposed seven years prior in Kyoto, reflecting advancements in scientific research and policymakers’ willingness to meet the urgency of the moment. Champions of the Paris Agreement, as it was called, included both the world’s mega-emitters like the United States and China and the small island nations most vulnerable to sea level rise.

“Today, the world meets the moment,” former President Barack Obama said in a speech in the Rose Garden on the date that the Agreement officially took effect. “And if we follow through on the commitments that this agreement embodies, history may well judge it as a turning point for our planet.”

President Barack Obama speaks about the Paris Agreement from the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C. on October 5, 2016.
Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images

Nearly a decade later, the Paris conference can hardly be called a turning point. Fossil fuel emissions have continued to rise steadily, dipping slightly during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 only to tick upwards again. Despite scientists’ widely accepted determination that no new fossil fuel projects can be greenlit if the world is to meet the 1.5 degree target, oil and gas companies have spent the last few years on a building frenzy, erecting new gas pipelines and drill sites from Mozambique to the Permian Basin. All the while, with deadly heat waves across Europe, drought in East Africa, and ever-worsening hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the effects of climate change have come into sharper focus. What could explain the discord between the stated goals of the Paris Agreement and the economy’s trajectory since?

In their new book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Wim Carton and Andreas Malm argue that the answer lies in the titular ideology of “overshoot,” which accepts that officially declared limits to global warming will be exceeded before technological innovations return temperatures to where they should be. This mode of thinking — really, an enticement to not think critically — they write, entered mainstream climate policy around the time of the Paris Agreement and flourished in part due to the widely celebrated treaty’s flimsy terms. The result: business as usual. Oil majors have since raked in record profits as the world heats up. 

“Overshoot is here not a fate passively acquiesced to,” Carton and Malm, both professors at Lund University in Sweden, write in the book’s introduction. “It is an actively championed programme for how to deal with the rush into catastrophe: let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out towards the end of this century.”

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Carton and Malm’s book, the first installment in a two-part series, is at once a detailed historiography, recounting the origins and development of the overshoot ideology, and a sweeping treatise on the political economy of late capitalism, using Marxist theory to argue that the very nature of the global economic system prizes fossil fuels over renewables.

The power of the book lies in its ability to name, at times with startling detail, the features of a logic that has affected all who work on climate change, from policymakers to journalists to academics to clean energy funders. Carton and Malm’s assertion that defeating overshoot requires confronting the churn of capitalist accumulation may frustrate those uninterested in considering the prospects of global revolution; however, the book offers valuable insights to sharpen any analysis of “how we got here.” It also has force as an intervention: If, according to overshoot’s own logic, we are to broadly deploy solutions in the coming years, then, Carton and Malm teach us, we must also consider those that may be branded “anti-capitalist.”

One of the first examples of overshoot thinking in the mainstream was an influential 1991 paper by the economist William Nordhaus, referred to by Carton and Malm as “the Genghis Khan of bourgeois climate economics.” The article, titled “To Slow or Not to Slow: The Economics of the Greenhouse Effect,” asked what an optimal economic policy would be for dealing with climate change. Nordhaus concluded that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels would carry a steep cost for the economy and that the task should be put off for future generations. Fossil fuels will help the world develop faster, he reasoned, making societies richer and better equipped to deal with climate fallout. (Despite experts flagging a number of errors with this logic, Nordhaus won a Nobel Prize for his life’s work in 2018.) 

Carton and Malm write that the idea of overshoot really picked up steam after the signing of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The treaty set the limit to global warming at 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but the European Union was unsure of what measures it should take to actually achieve that goal (the U.S. did not ratify the treaty, considering it too stringent). To answer this question, researchers began developing a set of computer models that integrated biophysical systems with basic economics to chart different paths towards 2 degrees.

A worker walks near part of a Canadian carbon capture system attached to a cement plant in June 2024.
Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images

Like all predictive models, these relied on a set of assumptions, such as the rational behavior of investors. Their results provided policymakers with rosy predictions about humanity’s ability to continue releasing fossil fuels and still meet internationally agreed-upon climate targets. The introduction of carbon capture and storage technology in the models supercharged their popularity. Suddenly, it became possible to simply subtract a massive amount of carbon dioxide from the computer-generated atmosphere with a few simple keystrokes. The assumed future success of CCS technology — which is still not proven to work at scale — wiped away the hassle of having to rapidly build out renewable energy infrastructure. The additional emissions from fossil fuel use could conveniently be deleted later. 

A group of Dutch researchers incorporated this strategy into an influential model with the acronym IMAGE to demonstrate how the world might achieve a “maximum” emission reduction, in line with the 2 degree warming threshold. Results in hand, they returned “to the EU and other governments with an astonishing finding: even very low limits are eminently feasible,” Carton and Malm write. “You just have to give yourself the freedom to first go beyond them.”

All of these models, however, omitted certain data points, like the thawing of the permafrost and large-scale climate migration. There is such a thing as too late. A new study published in the scientific journal Nature found that humanity’s ability to decrease the earth’s temperature after overshoot is not guaranteed. “Only rapid near-term emission reductions are effective in reducing climate risks,” the authors write.  

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Carton and Malm are not the first to identify limitations with these modeled predictions, whose promise underlies everything from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s annual reports to the logic of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. A body of criticism has identified integrated climate models as “grossly misleading” and suffering from a “lack of transparency” and “inappropriate input assumptions.” What the authors offer is a connection between the models’ evident limitations and the rise of the overshoot ideology. 

Indeed, Carton and Malm argue, as the integrated models gained momentum, it became more possible for countries like the U.S. to sign on to more stringent climate targets — as long as they didn’t have to commit to immediately slashing emissions. In the late 2000s, small island nations like the Maldives and the Marshall Islands began pushing hard for a sharpening of the 2 degree target from Kyoto, arguing that level of warming would send much of their territory underwater. Their goal was a target of 1.5 degrees Celsius, with legal requirements that heavy emitters slash emissions by certain dates. What they got was meaningfully different: a tightened warming standard, but without emissions caps or quotas or any obligation beyond reporting back on their climate progress every five years. 

“If there was equality in Paris, it came in the form of a shared unaccountability: The agreement required that no one was required to act at any certain level,” Carton and Malm write. “Now what do you get when a seemingly strict target is combined with such lax rules? You get overshoot.”

Among the outcomes of the Paris climate conference was the directive that the IPCC develop a report outlining the climate impacts of warming past 1.5 degrees. The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, published in October of 2018, contained sobering depictions of a world thrust into the pits of climate disaster: widespread crop failures, water scarcity, deadly heat waves, and the spread of viruses from animals to humans. Preventing these outcomes, the panel wrote, would require “systems transitions” of an “unprecedented” scale, including “effective planning” in urban areas and “a marked shift in investment patterns.” 

The Park Fire burns through the night on July 30, 2024 near Chico, California. David McNew / Getty Images

In the U.S., as with other mega-emitters, such a system overhaul has yet to transpire. The Biden administration has poured millions into everything from solar and wind development to the more controversial carbon capture technology, and yet, fossil fuel development continued apace, defying, it would seem, traditional economic logic. Why?

“The first place to look would be the base, not the superstructure,” Carton and Malm write in the introduction to the second part of their book. Here, the authors reference a classic Marxist concept that divides society into two parts: the means of production (the economy, in other words) and the relationships and ideas that follow from that system (i.e. culture, institutions, ideology). Located in the economic “base” are the investments that financial institutions and oil and gas companies have made in fossil fuel infrastructure, sunk costs that would result in massive profit losses if a speedy shift toward renewables were to occur. The logic of overshoot thus is born from an economic system deeply invested in fossil fuels — in pipelines mid-completion, in liquefied gas terminals only just coming online, in deep-water oil fields that have not run out. 

Read Next How to ‘decouple’ emissions from economic growth? These economists say you can’t. Akielly Hu & Joseph Winters

This is perhaps the greatest takeaway of the book, that the prospect of “stranded assets,” or fossil fuel projects rendered unprofitable before the end of their expected economic lives, are the primary force holding the world back from beating climate change. 

Carton and Malm argue that stranded assets are a typical feature of capitalism, since technological innovation often drives modes of production out of service, but fossil-fuel assets are a different beast entirely. Oil and gas are so deeply baked into every sector of the global economy that asset stranding on a massive scale would cause convulsions throughout the entire system, costing fossil fuel producers anywhere from $4 to $185 trillion dollars if warming were to be capped at 1.5 degrees, according to studies that Carton and Malm cite.

President Joe Biden speaks during a virtual meeting with members of his economic team on gas prices in 2022.
Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images

Asset stranding may explain why current fossil fuel projects can’t be abandoned, but what about the new ones in the early stages of planning and development? Why are Shell and Total Energies not choosing to build solar farms instead? Here, the authors reach for some fairly thorny economic theory. To summarize: even if it costs less to develop, renewable energy will always be less profitable than fossil power, because it requires significantly less labor to produce, and labor (human labor, more specifically) is the key ingredient to extracting value from a commodity in a capitalist system. 

Without something like a fracking ban or a carbon tax to make new pipelines or drill sites more cost prohibitive, we can probably expect the trend of the past several years — expanded fossil fuel use — to continue. Indeed, it is hard to imagine, in our fossil-driven world, the political success of an economic policy that drives up oil and gas prices. The recent election of Donald Trump, who ran on a platform of returning the country to the days of “drill, baby, drill”, should be sufficient evidence that such a policy would be hugely unpopular among the American electorate. It’s much easier, then, to kick the proverbial can down the road, to entrust human ingenuity with getting us out of this mess once it’s fully upon us, accepting that for many, it will by that point already be too late. That’s why we get an endless succession of integrated models ceaselessly computing new paths to 1.5 degrees. It’s also why the negotiations at COP29 in Azerbaijan, which officially ended on Friday, involved, like many U.N. conferences before it, more bureaucratic hand-wringing over climate finance than actual planning to cut fossil fuels. 

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Carton and Malm do not spend much time offering recommendations for how to break out of the overshoot cycle. What should not happen, they write, is a massive fossil fuel bailout where companies are paid billions to stop producing oil and gas — reparations, essentially, for destroying the planet. 

They write of one inspiring example that recently occurred in Latin America: the newly elected leftist president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, declared an end to oil and gas exploration and pledged to have zero extraction by 2034. 

“We are convinced that strong investment in tourism, given the beauty of the country, and the capacity and potential that the country has to generate clean energy, could, in the short term, perfectly fill the void left by fossil fuels,” Petro declared at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year. 

Tellingly, Petro did not spring this news on his people after being elected. It was the platform he ran on, and a promise he has since begun delivering — a shift in culture, in the superstructure, divorced from the economic base. This is what Carton and Malm leave the reader with, a sense that confronting the climate crisis will not come from policymakers beholden to fossil fuel giants and their trillions in assets, but from ordinary people, and their collective desire to shove the world toward real, lasting change.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the world gave up on 1.5 degrees on Nov 25, 2024.

In October, the Bureau of Land Management finalized a new resource management plan for Colorado’s Western Slope that will determine how 2 million acres of public land are managed for the next 15-20 years. 

The plan includes some conservation wins; it sets aside land designated as critical habitat, for example, and institutes extra protections for big game. But it also permits continued leasing in areas that have moderate and high potential for oil and gas development — with a particular focus on places with the unique geological conditions necessary for helium production.

Helium is a noble gas, meaning it is chemically inert and doesn’t react with other substances. These qualities mean that it’s in high demand for a variety of critical uses in medical technology, diving and national defense; diagnostic procedures like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), for example, and nuclear detection systems, including neutron detectors, all depend on helium. Currently, there are no synthetic substitutes for the gas that can replicate its low boiling point and low reactivity. 

While some helium is reused in some scientific areas, broader adoption of recycling is still limited by cost and infrastructure barriers. Some biotech companies are developing helium-free MRI systems and systems that use helium reclamation units, but helium remains an essential resource that many technologies need. And the world’s supply of the gas is rapidly dwindling. 

Sections of the Book Cliffs north of Grand Junction, Colorado, are identified as a low-potential gas drilling area, but also have helium drilling potential. Luna Anna Archey/High Country News with support from EcoFlight

This scarcity has put increasing pressure on federal public lands to produce a resource essential to industry and national security. Helium is nonrecoverable: Once it’s released, it escapes into the atmosphere and eventually into space. According to the BLM, it is “a nonrenewable resource found in recoverable quantities in only a few locations around the world; many of these are being depleted.” 

In its final plan for western Colorado, the BLM proposes closing 543,300 acres in the Grand Junction Field Office to oil and gas leasing, but keeping 692,300 open, including about 165,700 acres that have been identified for helium recovery. A BLM spokesperson said that the nation’s shrinking helium reserves influenced the management plan: “The final decision on this plan to keep the helium area open to future leasing was based on helium’s rarity and strategic importance.”

Keely Meehan, policy director for the Colorado Wildlands Project, a nonprofit focused on protecting public lands managed by the BLM, criticized the plan for prioritizing resource extraction over preserving critical habitat. 

“The environmental impacts and the impact to habitat and species is the same as for oil and gas,” said Meehan. “It disrupts habitat connectivity.”

The sensitive areas in question include migration corridors and seasonal ranges essential for species such as mule deer, elk, pronghorn and bighorn sheep, as well as habitat that the threatened Gunnison sage grouse relies on for breeding, nesting and feeding. 

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, which conducted a survey of helium resources across the country, there is plenty of recoverable helium available — approximately 306 billion cubic feet, or about 150 years of supply at the 2020 U.S. production level, which comes to about 2.15 billion cubic feet annually. It’s unclear how much of that helium is found on federal public lands. Helium tends to occur naturally in natural gas reservoirs, and since federal public lands in the West account for a significant share of natural gas production, much of the U.S.’s helium reserves likely reside on public lands. 

Some rural western Colorado communities, many of which have historically depended on resource extraction, welcome the prospect of ongoing helium production. The Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado (AGNC), a council of city and county governments in that part of the state, advocated for opening the area to helium extraction in public comments to the agency, citing the potential economic benefits. 

“Helium possesses substantial economic potential and could potentially serve as a vital resource in supporting communities grappling with impending economic challenges,” the AGNC wrote in the comments. 

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Other communities disagree, however, and the plan revealed the ongoing tension between rural communities that depend on resource extraction and those that rely on outdoor recreation, such as Pitkin and Eagle counties. The Mountain Pact, a coalition of local elected officials from over 100 mountain communities with outdoor recreation-based economies, argued in public comments that leaving the helium leases open would be detrimental to the natural resources that attract tourism dollars and investment.

“Protected public lands are tremendous assets to Western Colorado communities,” the Mountain Pact wrote to the BLM in a public comment. “They play a critical role in our way of life. They help make the communities where we live what they are while contributing to a healthier and better tomorrow for future generations.

In addition to the on-the-ground impacts of helium production, which echo those of natural gas extraction, opponents also brought up concerns about processing. Helium is separated from natural gas through a cryogenic process that uses cooling and pressure changes, which require energy, often from natural gas. 

Western Colorado currently lacks a facility that can process helium, however, and conservationists fear that building one, together with the necessary roads and other infrastructure, would disrupt wildlife habitat and potentially remove some parcels from consideration for future wilderness protections. 

“We’re really concerned about these wild places,” said Meehan, “and protecting areas that are currently not developed. There are really high-priority wildlands in this area, as well as high-priority habitat.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a dwindling helium supply is impacting public land management on Nov 24, 2024.

This story was originally published by St. Louis Public Radio.

Early on Election Day, highways in the St. Louis area were inundated with water. Over several days, intense storms battered Missouri, bringing six to 10 inches of rain — record-breaking amounts for November.

The flash flooding killed at least five people, including two elderly poll workers whose vehicle was swept from a state highway.

Mayors along the Mississippi River have watched for years as intensifying rain storms and flooding wreak havoc on their communities.

Take Grafton, Illinois, which escaped Election Day flash flooding but suffered $160,000 to $170,000 in damages from a heavy rain event in July. The town’s main intersection was blocked with logs and debris, and the storm blew out a water line and left streets in need of repair.

But Grafton never received a federal disaster declaration and was not eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Instead, it paid for road and water-line repairs through its Department of Public Works’ annual budget. As a result, the city could no longer purchase new trucks for snow plowing this year, as it had planned.

“What it means is that we’ll limp through another year, keep the vehicles running,” said Grafton Mayor Michael Morrow, who oversees the $1.2 million annual budget for the small riverfront city of about 600.

River communities have suffered repeated losses. But federal disaster funding can take weeks, months or even years to pay out. Traditional insurance programs are tied to property and require proof of loss for a payout, which can be burdensome and lengthy to assemble. 

So this fall, the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative (MRCTI) announced a new insurance pilot, with hopes of better helping river towns recover. 

MRCTI, which represents 105 cities along the 10 mainstem states of the Mississippi River Basin, is working with Munich Re, a German multinational insurance company, to create the insurance product. 

The resulting pilot will test a novel type of insurance pool — called parametric insurance — that is designed to rapidly fund emergency response after natural disasters such as flooding. 

Pilot will test usefulness of new “parametric” insurance policies

The likely cause of intensifying rainfall and floods is human-caused climate change, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a scientific report created every four years for the United States Congress and the President, to help explain the impacts, risks and vulnerabilities associated with a changing global climate.

In 2019, communities in the Basin saw months of flooding, spanning across the Mississippi, Missouri and Arkansas rivers. Reported losses totaled almost $25 billion across at least 17 states, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The central U.S. is emerging as a new flash flooding hotspot, according to research published in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment journal. With its new role as a hotspot comes more disaster damage – and need for insurance that addresses that.

While conventional indemnity insurance requires insured owners to prove specific losses by amassing evidence and presenting pre-storm documentation, parametric insurance pays out quickly after agreed-upon “triggers” – such as wind speeds or river heights – reach a certain level. 

Workers shore up a temporary levee across Main Street in Grafton, Ill., on May 29, 2019. Brent Jones / St. Louis Public Radio

For the MRCTI pilot, Munich Re has suggested using watershed data from the U.S. Geological Survey to determine the best gauges along the river to measure flood depth. Once the river flooding reaches a certain depth, the payout would be triggered. 

Getting that trigger right is key, said Kathy Baughman McLeod, chief executive officer of Climate Resilience for All, a nonprofit focused on climate adaptation.

“You want to have sufficient understanding of how you set the triggers at a certain place and why,” she said. “There’s a lot of engagement necessary to get everybody on the same page about what the product is, how it works, what the trigger should be.”

The goal of Munich Re’s pilot program is to demonstrate in real-time how a parametric insurance payout policy would function in current insurance-market conditions and how swift payouts could better assist a city’s disaster response in the immediate days following a flood.

First, Munich Re will develop a mock-up of the insurance policy for one hazard – flooding – with the understanding that multiple hazards, like intense heat, or drought, could be added later, said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of MRCTI, and, as of November 6, a newly elected state representative for Missouri District 105. 

The mock-up would calculate a range of premium costs and theoretical payout options that would be available for cities of varying sizes along the river. But the pilot won’t cost the cities a cent – and it won’t pay them anything either, until the pilot moves into implementation. It’s unclear which entities will ultimately foot the bill of the pilot and eventual product because it’s so early in development.

When Munich Re moves into implementation, individual city governments would hold the policies and receive payouts. Wellenkamp hopes to convince larger corporations that rely on a healthy and functioning Mississippi River hydrology to pick up the tab on the premiums, he said. 

Quick payouts could take burdens off cities

“In the first 24 to 72 hours after a disaster event, very little money can help a whole heck of a lot,” Wellenkamp said. “We use that time for evacuations and to move people out of additional harm’s way in the aftermath.”

But soon after the initial emergency response, municipalities start to look for funds for longer-term cleanup and repair. Under the current paradigm, that money can be hard to tap.  

In the spring of 2019, major flooding on the Mississippi inundated many communities, including Grafton, where the downtown partially closed and people were forced to evacuate. 

The Trump administration didn’t declare a major disaster until September of that year, months after flood waters had receded. It took until 2022 for federal money to reach Grafton, Morrow said.

“The former administration went through that flood,” Morrow said. “I’m the mayor now and I was getting some of the money that they had put in years ago.”

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That wait places stress on a city’s finances, especially smaller ones like Grafton, Morrow added. 

Traditional insurance doesn’t always help either. Grafton has a flood policy but it only covers property owned by the city. Residents and businesses in the community would need to take out their own flood protection. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which underwrites many flood insurance policies, has various coverage restrictions. For example, NFIP doesn’t cover roads or wastewater infrastructure. 

The policies also require proof of loss before issuing a check because they cover specific damage, like to a particular building or its contents. This “proof” can take days to document, and longer to process, which delays how fast a local government can begin repairs. Without proper pre-storm documentation, damage can sometimes be nearly impossible to prove.

Parametric insurance – which works with measurable triggers and isn’t tied to documentable losses – could ease the process. 

Cities from the headwaters to the mouth of the Mississippi could buy into the policy, creating a pool that spreads out the risk that any individual community faces. 

“Not every city is going to flood every year, but the flooding will impact at least one section of the river,” said Raghuveer Vinukollu, head of climate insights and advisory for  Munich Re in the U.S.

The insurance pool would protect a town from the risk of ruin, and a more timely payout would increase the town’s resiliency through swift reinvestment in its infrastructure, he added.

Parametric insurance in the Mississippi Delta and beyond

For flooding on rivers, this kind of insurance risk pool is new territory, Vinukollu said. As climate risks become more extreme, the insurance industry is working with a number of communities to address their evolving needs, he said.

While parametric insurance is still developing, one early example stands out to Vinukollu—the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF).

CCRIF pools risk for Caribbean countries, which face hurricane risks each year. By pooling risk together each island can receive a larger payout than if it had taken out an individual policy. 

In July, a mere 14 days after Hurricane Beryl devastated 90 percent of buildings and agriculture on the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, the government of Grenada received its first payout from CCRIF to fund disaster recovery. 

The tropical cyclone policy paid more than $42 million to Grenada, the largest single payout from CCRIF since its inception in 2007.

In the Mississippi River Basin, Vinukollu hopes to apply this kind of shared risk pool to insure cities at risk for inland flooding. 

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“The triggers are different, the perils are different, but the concept is the same,” said Vinukollu.

Given its position near the end of the Mississippi River, New Orleans is no stranger to the devastating impacts of extreme weather. Several city-run institutions, such as NOLA Public Schools, have taken out parametric insurance policies to protect important infrastructure. 

One of the first tests of these policies came in September when Hurricane Francine‘s storm surge, rain and winds pelted southern Louisiana. 

But NOLA Public Schools did not receive a payout from its policy with Swiss Re. 

While wind speeds were high, they were not high enough to meet the policy’s triggers of more than 100 miles per hour for one minute.

New Orleans is more likely to experience repetitive, severe losses from named storms than a city in the upper Basin, such as Minneapolis, so cities closer to the Gulf Coast may end up paying higher premiums once the policy officially rolls out, said Wellenkamp, of MRCTI.

Cities that choose to cover more hazards or lower-level disasters may pay higher premiums, because it could result in more frequent payouts, Wellenkamp said. Ultimately, municipalities could still end up footing the bill for events like the July flooding in Grafton or the Election Day storms in St. Louis.

McLeod argues communities shouldn’t expect payouts from parametric insurance all that often. “Just by the nature of the product it shouldn’t [pay every year],” she said. “Insurance is for the worst of the worst.”

Munich Re advises that parametric insurance works best to complement – not replace – traditional insurance policies. But company officials believe that these new policies offer the chance for insurance to adapt to changing risk landscapes, as weather events become more extreme.

Despite its potential to facilitate faster disaster response, parametric insurance is no silver bullet, said McLeod, of Climate Resilience for All. 

The best solution to her is reducing the underlying risk from climate change. 

“The big picture is it’s a really important tool in financing and managing the risks of climate change, and we need every tool,” she said. 

But more than any new financial tool, McLeod said, the most effective financial step would be addressing the root causes of climate change, and building – or rebuilding – more natural protections, like wetlands.

“You’ve got to reduce the risk [or] you won’t be able to afford the insurance on it,” she said. “It’s not insurance if you know this thing is going to happen.”

The Lens’ Marta Jewson contributed reporting to this story.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri. Disclosure: both the Desk and MRCTI receive funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Support our independent reporting network with a donation. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mississippi River towns pilot new insurance model to help with disaster response on Nov 23, 2024.

The most exciting part of the day at Spruce Pine Montessori School is when the truck arrives to empty the porta-johns. At that point in the afternoon, the kids abandon their toy dinosaurs and monkey bars, throw up their hands, and yell in excitement as they run to watch the truck do its work. It’s lucky that they find something to be so joyful about, Principal Jennifer Rambo said on a recent sunny afternoon, because things have been a mess for the past seven weeks.

The flooding that devastated western North Carolina during Hurricane Helene laid waste to communities all around the region, spitting up great torrents of mud and washing away homes, cars, and people. The landscape along the creeks and mountainsides has been forever changed. 

Jennifer Rambo washes her hands at one of the portable sinks the school installed at a cost of $600. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

Beyond the fallen trees, sliding hillsides, and damaged buildings, Helene took out critical infrastructure, like internet and electricity, water, and sewer. Everyone would have liked more time to get things in order, but working families were desperate for childcare and the desire to resume classes was too great. “We had to get open,” Rambo said. “The kids needed some routine and structure and consistency, and families needed to go back to work.”

Although folks in Spruce Pine were told Thursday they could finally stop boiling water before using it, the school still can’t flush its toilets because the sewers remain a mess. In addition to two portable toilets (and special seats so the smaller children wouldn’t fall in), it has had to buy water by the barrel and spend $600 to install portable hand-washing sinks. The bills continue adding up: $360 per week for the johns and $350 every time they need emptying. Everyone has had to adjust to these changes and more, even as they’ve dealt with similar problems at home.

The two portable toilets at Spruce Pine Montessori School needed seats designed to ensure the youngsters didn’t fall in. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

It’s been that way everywhere. The storm killed 103 people throughout western North Carolina and surrounding areas. Many more were injured. All told, the wind and the water damaged as many as 126,000 homes, and dozens of roads and bridges simply washed away.

Helene also decimated more than two dozen water utilities. For weeks after the storm, people had to boil anything that wasn’t poured from a bottle, and many of them drew from creeks and ponds just to flush their toilets. Folks in Asheville, where taps ran dry for three weeks, were told just this week that their water is safe to drink without boiling it first, but thousands of people served by 16 utilities still deal with sketchy water, low pressure, and other frustrations. In an effort to make their lives a little easier, officials dipped into a $273 million relief package to dot this end of North Carolina with 650 portable toilets and 15 “community care stations” with showers and washing machines.

Asheville was lucky enough to have upgraded its reservoir last year, something that prevented even worse flooding and allowed the region’s largest city and the communities that rely upon it for water to recover sooner than they otherwise might have. But for towns like Spruce Pine, the financial and engineering challenges of repairing their water systems are as formidable as the hurricane that broke them.

Residents and business owners in Spruce Pine haul away some of the debris and mud that inundated downtown.
Steve Exum / Getty Images

The water that flows into the North Fork Reservoir, which serves Asheville and the towns of Black Mountain and Swannanoa, always ran clear and clean from its headwaters high in Pisgah National Forest. But mud and debris have turned it murky brown and damaged much of the equipment needed to pump it. Crews have worked around the clock to set things right, reconnecting pipelines in record time and drawing muck from the lake.

Repairing municipal water systems leveled by a storm that washed away distribution lines, overwhelmed intakes, and inundated treatment plants is no easy feat. The challenge is acute in mountain communities, where geography is a hassle. Much of the infrastructure required to draw, treat, and distribute water often sits alongside reservoirs, placing them squarely in a floodplain when the torrent arrives and increasing the likelihood of damage. Reaching anything needing attention can take days or even weeks because the lines that carry water to customers meander through valleys, over ridgelines, and along roadways, many of which remain impassable. Spruce Pine Water & Sewer has restored service to 90 percent of its 2,000 or so customers, but can’t do much for the rest of them until the roads are fixed.

The sewer system remains a mess too. Town manager Darlene Butler has asked residents to conserve water as she works with county officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to erect a temporary treatment facility. The equipment is only now arriving and will, at best, be a Band-Aid for a multi-year fix. “We had a lot of damage there, so we’re trying to encourage people not to use a lot of water and put it into our sewer system,” she said.

Darlene Butler, the town manager of Spruce Pine, has had to ask residents to conserve water while crews scramble to erect a temporary treatment plant. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

A lot of these utilities struggled even before Helene. In many Appalachian towns, the companies that once paid to maintain water and sewer systems have shut down or moved on, and shrinking populations generate less revenue to keep things shiny and new. This is endemic throughout Appalachia. Residents in McDowell County, West Virginia — where one-third of families live in poverty — have for example given up on the often discolored water that flows from their taps and buy it by the case instead. Pipes in Martin County, Kentucky lose about 64 percent of what flows through them, a problem that started 24 years ago when a toxic coal slurry spill damaged them. The burden of these failures falls on customers who must adapt to the situation even as their rates climb. (Rates in Martin County, North Carolina, to offer one example, are among the nation’s highest.)

Yet other systems, particularly those in tourist towns, struggle to keep up with rapidly growing populations. The challenges are compounded by the difficulty of running new lines in the mountains and maintaining the complex pumps needed to maintain pressure over ridgelines. “This is a really, really great place to live,” said Clay Chandler, Asheville’s water resources information officer. “It’s beautiful. The people are amazing. But, man, it makes it hard to operate a water system.”

A broken water main lies alongside Lytle Cove Road in Swannanoa. Many roads remain impassable, hindering efforts to restore water.
Steve Exum / Getty Images

Spruce Pine’s system is so old that Butler has no idea when its pipes were laid, though she guesses it was 60 years ago. The pump station, recently upgraded with money from the American Rescue Plan, was built in 1967. It has seen overhauls as things broke, but rural utilities rarely make wholesale improvements because they are expensive and disruptive. “I think, like most small towns, we’ve struggled for the funds to be proactive instead of reactive,” Butler said.

Even as communities deal with the aftermath of so much deferred maintenance, others are facing the inescapable fact that rebuilding on a floodplain may no longer make sense. Spruce Pine is banking on hazard mitigation funding from FEMA and help from federal officials to move its wastewater treatment plant to higher ground.

The work needed to fully, and permanently, restore water and sewer service in these communities will by most estimates take two to four years and cost many millions of dollars. Meanwhile, crews continue playing whack-a-mole as aging lines break. Another one gave way in rural Yancey County last week, sending a geyser dozens of feet into the air. 

About 2,000 people live in Spruce Pine, a busy place with water-intensive businesses that have been impacted by the disruption. There’s the mine that produces some of the purest quartz in the world and sent heavy equipment to help restore service. There are the restaurants and kitschy attractions that drive a burgeoning tourism industry. And then there are the two state prisons, each of which holds about 800 people (who were relocated after spending a week in flooded cells) and, like prisons everywhere, burden the local water and sewer systems.

The ongoing crisis also has made providing basic services a challenge. Blue Ridge Regional Hospital, which serves three counties, has long had a standby power supply but scrambled to cope with losing water. Trucks haul in what’s needed, and enormous bladders collect what’s been used. “We had backup generators to supply the hospital in case of an emergency,” said Alex Glover, chair of the hospital’s board of directors. “But we never dreamed we would lose water and sewage capabilities, and we lost them all at once.”

With water in short supply, the volunteer fire department banned burning the yard waste, brush, and other debris people have been clearing for weeks. “If we had a big fire and we needed to take several thousand gallons or more out of the system, we don’t really know for sure how long that supply would hold up,” said firefighter Chris Westveer.

Firefighters Chris Westveer and his wife Barbara at the station house in Spruce Pine.
Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

The department has experienced some close calls. Westveer recalled one frightening night when wiring in a damaged home sparked a fire. The road had been washed away, forcing crews to approach on an all-terrain vehicle. With no water on tap, they drew what they needed from a river and hoped the wind wouldn’t spread the flames beyond their ability to fight them.

Such strains on public services, already scarce throughout mountain communities, compound the stress felt by those who have gone nearly two months without reliable water. People in Banner Elk, a community of 1,000 or so that had to rebuild a road before it could repair water and sewer lines, couldn’t flush their toilets for a month. County officials worried that the raw sewage would flow into the Elk River. Meredith Olan, director of the Banner House history museum, has been hauling water from the creek and boiling it just to do the dishes. “I’m very adept at carrying buckets now,” she said ruefully. Anyone wanting to take a shower had to rely upon the goodwill of friends with wells to draw from. But even that was no guarantee. Some were inundated with floodwaters and might have been contaminated with E. coli and other pathogens, and the electric pumps that pull water from the depths aren’t any good when the power is out. 

Meredith Olan, who leads the Banner House history museum in Banner Elk, stands next to some of the drinking water available in town. She has been hauling water from the creek and boiling it just to do her dishes. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

Even as these communities work nonstop to restore service, local and state officials are looking ahead to the next big storm. Members of the state Water Infrastructure Authority, a body tasked with financial planning for the state’s water and sewer utilities, gathered last month to ponder updates to North Carolina’s water infrastructure master plan. The document, created in 2017, explored ways of ensuring the financial stability of water utilities. Members of the panel, which includes several utility directors, a water engineer, and the head of the state Division of Water Infrastructure, acknowledged that local officials often have little idea how water and wastewater work and need help navigating the aftermath of a disaster and applying for grants to recover from it. 

Experts on the subject said consolidating the region’s patchwork of small systems may be the key to rebuilding and maintaining them. Some are doing just that. Four counties in southwestern Virginia are working together to install dozens of miles of water lines. Such efforts are easier among towns that are close together, like Mars Hill and Weaverville. These small towns, which are rapidly becoming suburbs of Asheville, have linked their water systems so they can ensure there’s enough to supply new housing. That connection allowed Weaverville to quickly buy and move water when the flood knocked out its municipal system. A similar arrangement proposed for nearby Marshall would cost about $15 million.

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Teamwork can provide a backup supply of water, reduce maintenance costs, and allow small utilities to share these essential resources and collaborate on, rather than compete for, grant applications. Such efforts will grow increasingly important as development and a warming world further burden these systems. “I think the fiefdom of water supply has to change for everyone to thrive in an era of climate catastrophe,” said Will Harlan, the Southeast director of the Center for Biological Diversity and a resident of Barnardsville, another community not far from Asheville.

Even if a physical collaboration isn’t possible, an organizational one might be. “If you’ve got three tiny towns and nobody can afford to hire a public works or public utilities director, the three of y’all go in together and hire a qualified utilities director,” one member of the master plan committee said during a public conference call. 

Repairing all of the damage the region’s water systems sustained could take many years and cost many millions of dollars. Katie Myers / Grist / Blue Ridge Public Radio

Barring any changes, the region is at risk of simply rebuilding what it has, only to watch it all wash away in the next big flood, said Francis de los Reyes. He is an engineering professor at North Carolina State University who focuses on sanitation systems. He’d like to see communities move their water infrastructure to higher ground, as Spruce Pine is doing, and relocate flood-prone neighborhoods, as is happening in eastern Kentucky. “Your choices are mitigation, adaptation, or staying in fight-or-flight,” de los Reyes said. 

But it takes more than a collaborative spirit and skilled leadership to repair a water system and harden it against future disasters. It requires communities to pool resources or seek federal support because they do not have the millions of dollars that work requires. Even before Helene struck, the bipartisan infrastructure law set aside $603 million to help North Carolina replace old pipes and other hardware. The fate of that money remains in question, however, because President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to undo much of the Biden administration’s climate work.

Back at Spruce Pine Montessori School, Jennifer Rambo is trying not to let uncertainty about the future get to her. It’s hard enough dealing with the present. Beyond the weeks without potable water, she is grappling with spotty internet access and electricity, and an inescapable sense of loss. In the days after Helene, she spent much of her time trying to determine if people were still alive. Her voice wavered as she said more or less the same words that so many in her community, and others like it, have echoed over the past two months: “Nobody was prepared.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Some towns still don’t have drinkable water months after Hurricane Helene. A full recovery could take years. on Nov 22, 2024.

For those who worry about climate change all the time, the results of the November election seemed to send a clear message: American voters just don’t care as much as you do. 

But even though President-elect Donald Trump took the popular vote while pledging to roll back the country’s landmark climate legislation, the overall results present a more complicated message. Exit polls show more Americans than ever prioritized climate change. And in several battleground states that backed Trump, Democratic senators who ran on environmental platforms also won their races. Across the country — in blue and red states alike — environmental ballot measures prevailed. So what exactly happened to the climate vote?

“There’s no question that, at the presidential level, climate was not on the ballot,” said Pete Maysmith, senior vice president of campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental nonprofit. “Voters are complex,” he said. “The economy really overrode a lot of other issues at play.”

Climate change was largely absent from this presidential election, with both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump remaining relatively quiet on the subject. The National Election Pool, the country’s largest exit polling consortium, didn’t include a question about the subject in its survey. But the second largest — a collaboration between Fox News and the Associated Press — did. When asked what they viewed as the most important issue facing the country, 7 percent of voters said climate change, a near doubling of climate concern since 2020, placing it as the fifth-most chosen issue out of the nine listed.

“This data shows that climate voters are wielding more political power than ever before, even though it’s still not nearly enough,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, the founder and executive director of the Environmental Voter Project, a nonprofit that tries to persuade environmentalists to get to the polls. Among the share of voters who consider climate change their top issue, the vast majority chose Harris — breaking harder for her than any other constituency did for any other candidate. Some 9 percent of them chose Trump. 

An advocacy group’s message is seen displayed on a residential lawn in Michigan in November 2024. Izzy Ross / Grist

But while climate change may not be a top issue for the majority of Americans, that doesn’t mean they don’t care. Environmental initiatives triumphed across the map: In California, for example, voters sent $10 billion toward climate prevention and resilience. In Washington state, a ballot measure to repeal the state’s landmark Climate Commitment Act, which created a cap-and-invest program, resoundingly failed. In Louisiana and South Carolina, places that Trump won handily, nature conservation funding initiatives got the public’s stamp of approval.
 
“Broadly speaking, large majorities of Americans want to take action on climate change, but it is a high priority for very, very few voters,” Stinnett said. “We saw that bear out in a lot of ballot initiatives, because when voters are presented with a binary choice, you either vote for climate leadership or you vote against it.” 

While other issues — like the economy, abortion, and immigration — appeared to guide Americans in their vote for president, downballot candidates seemed to benefit from voters’ climate concerns in battleground states that swung to Trump, such as Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Exit polls show that at least three incoming Democratic senators — Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, Nevada’s Jacky Rosen, and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin — won more than 90 percent of the votes of voters who prioritize climate change. 

Early voting gave another clue to where the climate vote went in these states. In Arizona and Nevada, environmentalists turned out in numbers large enough to boost Democratic candidates to slim margins of victory. Gallego gained his Senate seat by roughly 80,000 votes — a fifth of the number of early ballots cast by voters who prioritize environmental issues, according to data provided by the Environmental Voter Project. In Nevada, the organization found a similar ratio between early climate-first voters and the number of votes Rosen won by.

Democratic senator-elect Elissa Slotkin speaks at a rally hosted by Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Michigan State University campus two days before the 2024 election. Scott Olson / Getty Images

And in Michigan, which Trump took by a slim margin, economic anxieties collided with climate action. There, Democrat Elissa Slotkin squeaked out a victory for a Senate seat over the Republican Mike Rogers, who campaigned against Slotkin’s support of the state’s burgeoning electric vehicle industry, spending tens of millions of dollars on attack ads. 

“There are going to be political consequences if you mess with people’s livelihoods,” said Lori Lodes, the executive director of Climate Power, an advocacy group. Lodes believes a shift to clean energy technology, like EVs, will continue — even in red states, which have benefited more from Inflation Reduction Act funding than blue ones. “Democrats and Republicans know first hand the impact of these investments on their communities,” she said.

There’s evidence and precedent to suggest that climate progress will continue, regardless of the presidential election outcome. Some 28 percent of the roughly 400 state-level bills to reduce carbon emissions from 2015 to 2020 — encompassing the years that Trump was last in office —  passed through Republican-controlled legislatures. And this summer, 18 House Republicans signed a letter against rolling back clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. Exit polling showed that 24 percent of voters who support the expansion of clean energy alternatives to oil and gas also chose Trump.

“Long term durable climate progress has to be bipartisan,” said David Kieve, president of Environmental Defense Fund Action, an organization that supports environmentalist candidates, including Republicans friendly to their mission. “I don’t think we can continue to operate in the really divided, fractured way we have in recent years.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Where did all the climate voters go? on Nov 22, 2024.

On Monday, Senator Debbie Stabenow, a longtime champion of programs that support farmers and increase access to nutritious foods, introduced a new version of the farm bill, a key piece of legislation typically renewed every five years that governs much of how the agricultural industry in the U.S. operates. 

Stabenow, who is retiring next month after representing Michigan in the Senate for 24 years, has staked her career on her vision for a robust, progressive farm bill: one that, among other things, paves the way for farmers to endure the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

The text of her bill comes almost two months after the 2018 farm bill, which initially expired last year and was revived thanks to a one-year extension, expired for a second time on September 30. And it comes mere weeks before the end of the year, when funding for several programs included in the farm bill will run out. 

But more importantly, the bill comes after many months of infighting between Democratic and Republican lawmakers over what matters most in the next farm bill — and just weeks before the current congressional term ends. In order to pass the bill, Stabenow would need to gain the support of Republicans in the Senate agriculture committee and the House of Representatives, where Democrats lack the votes necessary to pass their own version of the legislation. 

It’s likely, even expected, that that won’t happen. Senator John Boozman, a Republican from Arkansas who is likely to chair the Senate agriculture committee after Stabenow’s retirement, criticized her bill on X, calling it an “insulting 11th hour partisan proposal.” Meanwhile, in the House, Republicans are reportedly hoping instead to pass another one-year extension of the farm bill, pushing negotiations over the new bill into next year, according to Politico. There’s virtually no reason for Republicans not to prolong the process of hammering out the next farm bill, as starting in January they will have majority control over the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the federal government.

By proposing legislation that’s all but doomed, Stabenow may be vying to secure her legacy as an environmental steward who understands how climate change is already impacting agricultural production, and why there should be more investment in climate initiatives that safeguard farmers now. 

In a speech presenting the details of her bill to the Senate on Monday, Stabenow said, “For more than two years I’ve been working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass my sixth Farm Bill, the third one that I’ve either been chair or ranking member of … the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.” 

She emphasized that farming is a risky business given its dependence on the weather. “But it’s getting even riskier now, because [of] what’s happening with the climate crisis, and we know that,” she said. “How many once-in-a-generation storms or droughts need to hit our farmers over the head before we take this crisis seriously?”

Agriculture industry groups, especially those that represent industrial livestock producers, have criticized Senator Debbie Stabenow’s farm bill as failing to meet their interests. Brendan Smialowski / Contributor / Getty Images

Certain advocacy groups have praised Stabenow’s farm bill. Rebecca Riley, the managing director for food and agriculture at the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said the bill reflects Stabenow’s “decades of leadership and dedication to strengthening America’s farmers and rural communities.” But other groups were slower to respond. In a statement, the American Farm Bureau Federation, an agricultural industry group, said simply: “We’re reviewing Chairwoman Stabenow’s newly released 1,300 pages of farm bill text,” adding that it’s “unfortunate that only a few legislative working days remain for Congress to act.” (Stabenow’s office did not reply to Grist’s requests for comment.)

One of the key features of Stabenow’s farm bill is funding for so-called “climate-smart” agriculture practices, an umbrella term that broadly refers to techniques that help farmers sequester carbon in the soil rather than emit more of it into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, allocated nearly $20 billion in funding for these practices, such as crop rotation and no-till farming. And in the spring, Stabenow introduced a framework that rolled over the leftover money from the IRA for “climate-smart” practices into a new farm bill. (Shortly afterwards, Senate Republicans put forward another draft of the farm bill without this provision.)

Climate is hardly the only focus of the text Stabenow introduced earlier this week, which, like all farm bills, seeks to address a dizzying array of agricultural and nutritional priorities. Chief among the provisions in her bill, titled the Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act, are policies that aim to increase access to crop insurance and make coverage more affordable by boosting premium subsidies. The bill also seeks to invest $4.3 billion in rural communities, seeking to improve their access to health care, childcare, education, and broadband internet. 

But other provisions indicate that Stabenow has long been thinking of how to further protect farmers from climate impacts such as extreme weather — and also make the U.S. food system more diversified and resilient. She proposes creating a permanent disaster program that would establish a consistent process for providing farmers with assistance after floods, wildfires, and other calamities. Stabenow also seeks to strengthen support for specialty crops — better known as fruits, nuts, vegetables, and herbs — and reminds the Senate during her press briefing that these crops “are almost half of what we grow.” 

These details represent some of the divisions that run deep through congressional negotiations. Senator John Hoeven, the Republican congressman from North Dakota, was quick to dismiss Stabenow’s vision, writing on X, “Unfortunately, the Senate bill released today does not meet the needs of farm country and fails to keep farm in the Farm Bill.” Boozman has signaled he fully intends to ignore Stabenow’s last-minute bill, telling reporters that Congress must push for another extension of the 2018 farm bill and meeting with agriculture industry groups to discuss their priorities.

Boozman’s and other Republicans’ concerns with the new farm bill text likely stem, at least in part, from lobbying groups representing large-scale, industrial farmers who wish to see fewer restrictions placed on how they do business. The National Pork Producers Council, or NPPC, for example, issued an instant rejection of Stabenow’s farm bill text, calling it “simply not a viable bill” for “fail[ing] to provide a solution to California Prop. 12.” That proposition prohibits the sale of veal, pork, and egg products by farm owners and operators who knowingly house animals “in a cruel manner.” The NPPC has followed this issue closely, arguing that forcing pork producers to comply with “arbitrary” animal housing specifications would wildly increase their costs (and prices for consumers). The group successfully lobbied for a provision in the House farm bill that essentially takes away California’s power to enforce such a law — by blocking state and local government from imposing conditions on the production of livestock sold in their jurisdiction (unless the livestock is actually produced within the state or local community).  

Stabenow seems highly aware of the zero-sum framework with which many different actors view the farm bill. When addressing the Senate, she mentioned that the version of the Farm Bill released by the House in May would have put “immense” resources into a small number of commodity farmers in the South. “I’m not saying that these farmers don’t need support. They do,” she said. “But it can’t be at the expense of millions of other farmers and ranchers in this country,” including those who run smaller, diversified operations or who grow fruits and vegetables. 

In her speech, Stabenow repeatedly framed the text of her bill as a bipartisan project, and projected an urgency to secure wider resources for more farmers now. Her vision, she says, “can pass and should pass.” But whether that’s true or not will depend an awful lot on her colleagues, who currently have no incentive to negotiate with her and other Democrats and could simply wait to push forward their own agenda. How long they wait remains to be seen. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Senate’s new farm bill would prioritize the climate. Too bad it’s basically doomed. on Nov 22, 2024.

Earlier this week, tens of thousands of people converged on Aotearoa New Zealand’s Parliament in a show of solidarity against a legislative onslaught against Indigenous rights. 

They had marched peacefully for nine days, in what Māori peoples call hīkoi, in an effort to stop the country’s new right-wing government from forcing through a bill that would dilute Indigenous influence on the government by reinterpreting one of its founding documents. 

“Māori have been here, we are going to be here forever. You’re never going to assimilate us,” said Catherine Murupaenga-Ikenn, one of the Māori activists who participated in the hīkoi. “This is a great time for revolution.” 

Proponents describe the Treaty Principles bill as a push for equal rights for all citizens of Aotearoa, which is how Māori refer to New Zealand: an effort to define principles underlying the Treaty of Waitangi, an English-language agreement signed by some of the country’s colonizing founders and Indigenous Māori that gave the Crown the right to govern the nation in exchange for enshrining Māori rights.

“Did the treaty give different rights to different groups, or does every citizen have equal rights? I believe all New Zealanders deserve to have a say on that question,” said David Seymour, a member of Parliament who leads ACT New Zealand, the country’s right-wing party. (Seymour has Māori ancestry, but leaders of his tribe do not claim him.) 

But Māori opponents say the measure would weaken Indigenous rights that not only help address long-standing social and economic inequities but are critical to protecting the country’s lands and waters. 

“That redefinition could diminish Māori participation and environmental governance, as the treaty currently ensures that Māori involvement in managing national natural resources,” said Mike Smith, a Māori climate activist who has two climate lawsuits pending before the country’s high court. “So by limiting these rights, the bill may weaken the environmental stewardship practices that are rooted in Māori morals and values and thereby impact the country’s ability to address all the environmental challenges, and more particularly combat climate change effectively.”  

Seymour pushed back on that characterization. “If it’s true no country can do conservation without something like the Treaty of Waitangi, the world is in trouble,” he said. “In any event, New Zealand has had its current conception of the treaty for over 30 years, and we are a solid, but not the best, environmental regulator, so others clearly do better without something like the treaty.”

The Treaty Principles bill isn’t expected to pass in the current Parliament, although it could eventually head to a referendum. But it’s just one part of a broader right-wing backlash against the significant gains that Māori have made in recent decades to win back stolen land and secure better representation and co-governance of government agencies. 

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“This is not just about Māori interests and rights. This is about the protection of all that we hold dear,” said Māori activist Tina Ngata, who has been hosting online education sessions about the bill. “Indigenous rights have been one of the strongest roadblocks to corporate exploitation.” 

Ngata was part of a successful push in 2018 to get Aotearoa New Zealand to ban oil and gas exploration in its waters. The country’s right-wing government, which vaulted into power last year, is now pushing to reverse that ban.

The government wants to double its mineral mining exports to $2 billion over the next decade, and has delayed a planned tax on agricultural emissions. It also repealed the Māori Health Authority — which addresses Indigenous health disparities, many of which are expected to worsen with climate change — and is in the processes of deleting references to the Treaty of Waitangi from existing laws. 

Smith said that even though his climate litigation isn’t specifically based on the treaty, it lends critical weight to his arguments regarding the government’s obligation to protect the environment. 

A website promoting the Treaty Principles bill says it wouldn’t have an effect on co-governance of Aotearoa New Zealand’s rivers and mountains, such as the Tūpuna Maunga Authority that gives Māori tribes of Auckland a say in how the city’s volcanic mountains are managed. It would, however, remove Māori co-governance of the country’s water services, which has been controversial since the prior government announced plans to nationalize water management.

Smith sees the measure as an effort to play upon the fears of the non-Māori population and make it easier for private interests to profit. “It’s an indicator that they want to stomp on Māori rights and philosophies and worldviews. It’s an indicator that they just are refusing to fight the challenge that climate change and the global biodiversity crisis demands of us,” he said.

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But he has been heartened by the huge amount of support for the Māori cause. A video of a Māori legislator leading the haka in Parliament went viral on social media, underscoring the force of the opposition, which expands beyond Māori peoples and includes a former prime minister and prominent lawyers, health care professionals, translators, church leaders, and the Waitangi Tribunal, a federal commission dedicated to reviewing Māori claims regarding the treaty.

That commission is expected to hold a hearing next week to consider the question of whether the Aotearoa New Zealand government has violated Māori rights in its response to climate change. The hearing has been overshadowed by the Treaty Principles controversy, but Smith is watching it closely. The tribunal only has the power to make recommendations, and can’t force the government to do anything, but its findings could help strengthen Smith’s climate cases before the high court.  

The debate is complicated by the fact that a vast majority of Māori chiefs signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi, a Māori-language treaty that never relinquished sovereignty. But for many years, the New Zealand government has relied on an English-language translation of the document, which does not match the Māori text. Murupaenga-Ikenn adds that for nearly a century, that incorrect translation has been elevated by the government to the status of actual “treaty”, giving the new government the opportunity to reinterpret its principles, despite its origins as a translated artifact.

Murupaenga-Ikenn said she’s been excited by how the Treaty Principles bill has spurred her people into action. She was part of a massive hīkoi 20 years ago to rally in favor of Indigenous ownership of the seabed, but last week’s gathering was far larger, with as many as 55,000 people, and activists hope it’ll bleed into more local protests and stronger voter participation. 

If she saw Seymour, the ACT politician behind the bill, Murupaenga-Ikenn said she would thank him. “Thank you very much for putting a reenergized fire under my people to just shake us up and wake us up,” Murupaenga-Ikenn said. “The time is now for a revolution. Thank you, David Seymour.”

This story has been updated.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mass protests against New Zealand’s effort to weaken Māori rights — and hurt the planet on Nov 22, 2024.

Editor’s note: Grist is hosting a free virtual event on January 9, 2025, at 2 pm EST / 11 am PST to analyze the progress and challenges seen at the U.N. climate conference known as COP29. Join Grist’s Jake Bittle in conversation with attendees and experts about where global climate negotiations go from here. Register here.

After a painstaking deadlock lasting nearly a week, the annual United Nations climate conference appeared to veer off course on Thursday. New negotiating texts were released in the morning, just as a rancid smell from what seemed to be a sewage leak spread throughout a central area of the conference venue in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

These half-dozen templates incensed countries as disparate as Zambia and New Zealand. Negotiators from both the developed and developing world argued that the Azerbaijani officials leading the conference, which is known as COP29, hadn’t done enough to push forward an ambitious deal that would build upon the so-called UAE consensus — a deal brokered at last year’s COP28 in Dubai, in which the nearly 200 countries of the world finally agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels and accelerate decarbonization within the next 10 years. As of now, this year’s tentative agreement contains almost none of the COP29 proposals, like those ventured by European nations and small island states in the Pacific, that would advance this ambition.

In fact, the new text released on Thursday did not even mention the landmark COP28 agreement — or even affirm the world’s commitment to a clean energy transition at all. It also omitted last year’s promises to triple renewable energy deployment and double energy efficiency. Proposals to phase out coal and fossil fuel subsidies, which many climate-ambitious nations like Germany had pushed, were nowhere to be found, either. 

“This is actually going in the opposite direction,” said Wopke Hoekstra, the European Union climate commissioner, in a gaggle with reporters. “That is not acceptable. We cannot accept the view that apparently for some, the previous COP did not happen.” 

With just a day to go until the summit closes, climate-ambitious ministers from around the world have begun to blast the Azerbaijani conference presidency for what they say is a slide backwards on the all-important issue of ditching fossil fuels. In U.N. parlance, the “presidency” is a neutral party made up of political operatives and ministers from the country hosting a given year’s climate talks. Although they hail from the host country, they co-administer COP along with the bureaucracy of the United Nations, and they aren’t supposed to put their thumb on the scale for their own government’s interests — or anyone else’s.

Even so, presidencies have immense control over the negotiating process, which inevitably gives them the power to steer the process to their desired ends — especially when talks break down early. This became clear last year when the United Arab Emirates, which hosted COP28 in Dubai, intervened to push through a deal to transition away from fossil fuels over the objections of many other oil-producing nations.

There has been a sense of déjà vu in Azerbaijan, a country where oil makes up an even larger share of economic output, and where attendees can see oil refineries from the windows of shuttle buses that ferry them to the conference. Even before the conference began, a watchdog group caught a senior Azerbaijani official on video suggesting he would use COP29 to facilitate deals for the nation’s state-owned oil company. On the second day of the summit, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, called fossil fuels a “gift from God.”

Negotiators’ fears that the COP presidency would tip the scales grew stronger when Saudi Arabia, which produces around 12 percent of the world’s crude oil, began to throw diplomatic wrenches in almost every negotiation arena last week. Officials from the oil-rich kingdom delayed and disputed agenda items even in talks that had nothing to do with fossil fuels, forcing discussion of untenable language and refusing to attend meetings where their presence was necessary for talks to progress.

At the end of the first week, the Saudis seemed to have gotten their way. Not only was the draft text on global decarbonization in miserable shape, but negotiators couldn’t even agree about where to place it on the agenda — a dispute akin to arguing over where to park at the grocery store before you even go in and start shopping. The dummy text even included a menacing caveat: ”Parties have strongly diverging views on whether or not the following textual elements should be discussed.”

The 60,000-odd people at COP waited days as ministers and heads of state consulted with each other and the Azerbaijani presidency in closed-door meetings. With more than a week of negotiations in the rearview, it fell to COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev and his deputies to sort out a mess of diverging positions. Most country leaders who spoke at the conference on Thursday said he has so far failed to do that.

Eamon Ryan, the Irish environment minister, gives a speech during a plenary session at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Ryan and other European leaders said decarbonization talks were stalling out. Photo by Dominika Zarzycka / SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

“I think there’s a divide,” said Eamon Ryan, the environment minister for Ireland, in a gaggle with reporters early Thursday. He accused the most recent U.N. proposal on mitigation — the term of art for the U.N.’s decarbonization agenda — of “sticking just to the status quo for vested interests in the current fossil fuel system.”

It’s not just major oil producers who may oppose a more ambitious mitigation proposal: Several countries in the large G77 group of developing nations have been wary of endorsing a document with a firmer commitment to the energy transition without a complementary commitment from the world’s high-emitting, wealthy nations to help pay for it. 

Harjeet Singh, the global director of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, an organization advocating for the global phaseout of oil and gas, said the developing countries’ opposition to a decision that restates last year’s UAE consensus is an attempt to push for more funding from the developed world. These countries don’t want to re-endorse the energy transition decision from last year without a clear signal they’ll get money to help move away from oil and gas and build out renewable energy.

“It’s a sequencing problem,” he said. “We wanted [in Dubai] to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency. Who will provide finance for that?”

There is also some evidence that the presidency has given space to the interests of major fossil fuel producers on the sidelines of the conference. Negotiators from several countries, who spoke to Grist on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of ongoing negotiations, have decried the presidency’s last-minute appointment of a new leader to an official forum on the negative impacts of decarbonization efforts. The three negotiators who spoke to Grist have accused the presidency of making this decision on behalf of Saudi Arabia, despite widespread objections.

This alleged intervention came during negotiations over a little-noticed agenda item titled “impact of implementation of response measures.” This unassuming item, which has been on COP agendas for decades, is a key forum for oil-producing countries. That’s because “response measures” refers to policies that mitigate carbon emissions and climate change, and the forum is an opportunity to highlight the adverse effects of climate-friendly policies. 

Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries have traditionally used the response measures group as an opportunity to decry the harms that more climate-ambitious nations are causing them, according to negotiators who have held senior roles in response measures discussions. The forum’s main task this year was to agree on the topics it should discuss over the next five years. The proposals under consideration include “economic diversification” and “impacts of the implementation of response measures on human rights” — topics of special interest to the Saudis, who have an oil-centric economy and have been accused of violating human rights.

A Saudi delegate looks on during a plenary session at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Several countries have accused Saudi Arabia of obstructing progress on deals to move away from fossil fuels. Photo by Sean Gallup / Getty Images

The talks progressed well for the first few days at COP29, according to the three negotiators who were involved. But at the end of the week, Saudi Arabia moved to discredit negotiators from Botswana and Iceland who were leading the discussion, telling the presidency they weren’t qualified and hadn’t produced any results. On the first day of the conference’s all-important final week, the Azerbaijani presidency then intervened to replace the two negotiators criticized by the Saudis and install a replacement named Andrei Marcu, a veteran COP negotiator from Brussels, Belgium, who is currently affiliated with the Honduran delegation and has represented Belize and Papua New Guinea in past climate talks.

The decision to appoint Marcu incensed developing countries and the United States, who saw it as a favor to Saudi Arabia, according to the three delegation members who were involved in the response measures talks. In past COPs, Marcu has sought to chair the “response measures” agenda item, but developing countries have protested and forced him out, alleging him of steering the committee’s work to favor the interests of oil-producing countries.

“We’ve had problems with him before,” said one negotiator from a developing country who has been deeply involved in the talks.  Marcu resigned from the role on Tuesday amid criticism from Africa and the United States, but the presidency re-appointed him the following day. (The COP29 presidency, the Saudi Arabian delegation, and Marcu all did not respond to requests for comment from Grist.)

Stagnation on the issue of fossil fuels appears likely to push the conference past its final scheduled day and into the weekend. As accusations flew at press conferences and huddles, the Azerbaijani presidency on midday Thursday convened a plenary session which it styled a qurultay, an Azerbaijani word for convention that also refers to a type of ancient military council. During the plenary, several countries voiced their dissatisfaction with the status quo on decarbonization and fossil fuels or chastised the presidency for failing to make progress on the goal to mobilize as much as $1.3 trillion in international climate finance.

“We have heard clearly in this room that this text is completely disconnected from real lives,” said Tina Stege, the climate envoy from the Marshall Islands, during the plenary. “We cannot play geopolitics with the lives of our citizens.”

A representative from Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, asserted at the plenary — in apparent disregard for his country’s own endorsement of the UAE consensus last year — that it and other Arab countries “will not accept any text that targets specific sectors, including fossil fuels.”

After the plenary, Stege told Grist that the text on mitigation was “not a starting point that works.” At the time, the conference was just over 24 hours away from its scheduled end.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As a COP29 deal on fossil fuels falters, the blame game begins on Nov 21, 2024.

When Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, he inherited environmental protection agencies in shambles and deforestation at a 15-year high. His predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, had dismantled regulations and gutted institutions tasked with enforcing environmental laws. Lula set out to reverse these policies and to put Brazil on a path to end deforestation by 2030. 

Environmental protection agencies have been allowed to resume their work. Between January and November of 2023, the government issued 40 percent more infractions against illegal deforestation in the Amazon when compared to the same period in 2022, when Bolsonaro was still in office. Lula’s government has confiscated and destroyed heavy equipment used by illegal loggers and miners, and placed embargoes on production on illegally cleared land. Lula also reestablished the Amazon Fund, an international pool of money used to support conservation efforts in the rainforest. Just this week, at the G20 Summit, outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden pledged $50 million to the fund.  

Indeed, almost two years into Lula’s administration, the upward trend in deforestation has been reversed. In 2023, deforestation rates fell by 62 percent in the Amazon and 12 percent in Brazil overall (though deforestation in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savannas, increased). So far in 2024, deforestation in the Amazon has fallen by another 32 percent.      

Throughout this year, Brazilians also bore witness to the effects of climate change in a new way. In May, unprecedented floods in the south of the country impacted over 2 million people, displacing hundreds of thousands and leaving at least 183 dead. Other regions are now into their second year of extreme drought, which led to yet another intense wildfire season. In September, São Paulo and Brasília were shrouded in smoke coming from fires in the Amazon and the Cerrado.  

And yet, despite the government’s actions, environmental protections and Indigenous rights are still under threat. Lula is governing alongside the most pro-agribusiness congress in Brazilian history, which renders his ability to protect Brazil’s forests and Indigenous peoples in the long term severely constrained. 

“I do believe that the Lula administration really cares about climate change,” said Belen Fernandez Milmanda, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Trinity College and author of Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Latin America. “But on the other side, part of their governing coalition is also the agribusiness, and so far I feel like the agribusiness is winning.”

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Brazilian politics has always been fragmented, with weak parties. The current Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s equivalent to the House of Representatives, is made up of politicians from 19 different parties. “It makes it really difficult to govern without some kind of coordination device,” said Fernandez Milmanda. Weak party cohesion makes it easier for interest groups to step into the vacuum and act as this coordination device. 

Agribusiness has long been one of the most powerful interest groups in Brazilian politics, but its influence has grown steadily over the past decade as the electorate shifted to the right and the sector developed more sophisticated strategies to affect politics. In Congress, agribusiness is represented by the bancada ruralista, or agrarian caucus, a well-organized, multi-party coalition of landowning and agribusiness-linked legislators that controls a majority in both houses of congress. Of the 513 representatives in the Chamber of Deputies, 290 are members of the agrarian caucus. In the senate, they make up 50 of 81 legislators. 

Today, the agrarian caucus is larger than any single party in the Brazilian legislature. “Members of the agrarian caucus vote together. They have high discipline and most Brazilian parties don’t,” said Fernandez Milmanda. “This gives them immense leverage towards any president.” 

Much of the coordination around the legislative agenda takes place away from congress, at the headquarters of Instituto Pensar Agropecuária (IPA), a think tank founded in 2011 and financed largely by major agribusiness corporations, including some in the U.S. and the European Union. Among IPA’s main backers are Brazilian beef giant JBS, German pesticide producer BASF, and the U.S.-based corporation Cargill, the world’s largest agribusiness. Core members of the agrarian caucus reportedly meet weekly at IPA headquarters in Brasilia’s embassy row to discuss the week’s legislative agenda. 

“IPA is really important because they are the ones doing all the work, all the technical work,” says Milmanda. “They are drafting the bills that they then give to the legislators, and the legislators will present it as their own.” 

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The agrarian caucus has tallied several long-awaited victories in the current congress, which took office alongside Lula in January 2023. Late last year, they overhauled Brazil’s main law governing the use of pesticides. The new legislation, which Human Rights Watch called a “serious threat to the environment and the right to health,” removes barriers for previously banned substances and reduces the regulatory oversight of the health and environment agencies. Instead, the Ministry of Agriculture, which has traditionally been led by a member of the agrarian caucus, now has the final say in determining which pesticides are cleared for use. Lula attempted to veto parts of the bill, but was overruled by congress. In the Brazilian system, an absolute majority in each chamber is enough to overrule a presidential veto.

Another recent victory for the agrarian caucus came as a major blow to Indigenous rights. Agribusiness has long been fighting in the courts for a legal theory called marco temporal (“time frame,” in English), which posits that Indigenous groups can only claim their traditional lands if they were occupying it in 1988, the year the current Brazilian constitution was drafted. Opponents of the theory argue it disregards the fact that many Indigenous groups were expelled from their native lands long before that date. It has dire implications for the hundreds of Indigenous territories in Brazil currently awaiting demarcation, and could even impact territories that have already been recognized by law. 

The theory had been making its way through the Brazilian justice system for 16 years, until it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court last year. Blatantly flouting the court’s ruling, congress passed a bill codifying marco temporal into law. Lula tried to veto the bill, but he was overruled by the agrarian caucus again. The bill is currently being discussed in conciliation hearings overseen by the Supreme Court, which is tasked with figuring out how the new law will work in light of the court’s 2023 decision. The legal gray area in which many Indigenous groups occupying disputed lands now find themselves has contributed to a wave of attacks by land-grabbers and farmers in recent months. 

These are only two examples of legislation that are part of what environmentalists have come to call the “destruction package,” a group of at least 20 bills and three constitutional amendments currently proposed in congress that take aim at Indigenous rights and environmental protections. 

“The executive has to put a stop to this, because otherwise the tendency will be towards very serious setbacks,” said Suely Araújo, Public Policy Coordinator at Observatório do Clima, a coalition of climate-focused civil society organizations. 

But the government has limited tools at its disposal to block anti-environmental legislation. In the past, the executive branch had greater control over discretionary spending and was able to use this to its advantage while negotiating with congress. The past decade has seen a major power shift in Brazilian politics. Congress has managed through a series of legislative maneuvers to capture a significant portion of the federal budget, weakening the hand of the executive. 

Among projects which have a high likelihood of passing, according to analysis by Observatório do Clima, are bills that weaken Brazil’s Forest Code, the key piece of legislation governing the use and management of forests. “It would make control much more difficult because illegal forms of deforestation would become legal,” said Araújo. 

One such bill reduces the amount of land farmers in the Amazon must preserve within their property from 80 to 50 percent. The move could open almost 18 million hectares of forest to agricultural development, according to a recent analysis that the deforestation mapping organization MapBiomas conducted for the Brazilian magazine Piauí. That is an area roughly the size of New York state, New Jersey, and Massachusetts combined.

In a similar vein, another bill in the package removes protections for native grasslands, including large parts of the Cerrado and the Pantanal (the world’s largest tropical wetland). In theory this would affect 48 millions hectares of native vegetation. Yet another bill, which has already been approved in the Chamber of Deputies, overhauls the process of environmental licensing, essentially reducing it to a rubber stamp. “It does away with 40 years of environmental licensing in Brazil,” said Araújo. “You might as well not have licensing legislation.” 

Part of the reason many of these bills have a chance of passing is the Lula government’s limited leverage. With little support in congress and less control over the budget, bargaining with the agricultural caucus becomes a necessary tool to pass even legislation unrelated to the environment, such as economic reforms. During these negotiations, some environmentalists believe concerns over Brazil’s forests fall by the wayside. 

“Perhaps there is a lack of leadership from the president himself, with a stronger stance in response to the demands of the ruralistas,” said Araújo. “There are political agreements and negotiations that must be made. The bargaining chip cannot be environmental legislation.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can Lula still save the Amazon? on Nov 21, 2024.

Editor’s note: Grist is hosting a free virtual event on January 9, 2025, at 2 p.m. EST / 11 a.m. PST to analyze the progress and challenges seen at the U.N. climate conference known as COP29. Join Grist’s Jake Bittle in conversation with attendees and experts about where global climate negotiations go from here. Register here.

The essence of the Paris climate agreement was distilled into a single number. The almost 200 countries that signed the pact in 2016 agreed they would try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Over the past decade, as these countries have rolled out renewable energy installations and decommissioned coal plants, we have been able to evaluate their efforts against this number. (The results have not been promising.)

But the 1.5-degree target was just one element of the Paris accord. The world also committed to throw its weight behind efforts to adapt to the global warming already baked in by centuries of fossil-fueled industrialization. Even if emissions fall, disasters over the next century will displace many millions of people and destroy billions of dollars in property, particularly in developing countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Those countries fought to ensure that adaptation to those hazards was a key pillar of the agreement.

But there’s no one way to measure the success of this commitment. Should the U.N. measure the number of deaths from disasters, or the value of property destroyed in floods, or the incidence of hunger, or the availability of clean water? How will the international community determine the efficacy of adaptation measures like sea walls and drought-resistant crops, given that the disasters they prevent remain so unpredictable?

“There is no one single measure you can use that will apply to all adaptation globally,” said Emilie Beauchamp, an adaptation expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank, who is participating in adaptation talks at COP29, this year’s U.N. climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. “It’s not like when we say, ‘We reduce our emissions.’ You can say we need to reduce vulnerability, but that’s going to change according to whose vulnerability you’re talking about.”

This question is far from academic: Climate change is fueling more frequent and severe disasters, ravaging places with vulnerable infrastructure. In Zambia, electricity service has been reduced to just a few hours a day thanks to drought emptying out a key reservoir. Meanwhile, a year’s worth of rainfall deluged the Valencia region of Spain in just a few days last month, causing flooding that killed more than 200 people. In the United States, warming helped juice the intensity of several major hurricanes that made landfall this year.

Despite the urgency, adaptation hasn’t received much attention at recent U.N. climate talks. This year’s COP is no exception. While the conferences often open with rich countries making major new funding pledges, this year just $60 million in new pledges went to the world’s biggest adaptation fund. That total, raised by European nations and South Korea, is well short of the $300 million the fund had hoped to raise.

While the main target of COP29 is a new agreement on a global finance goal — which could end up well over a trillion U.S. dollars and is intended to help the developing world with all aspects of the climate fight — wealthy countries have refused to reserve a portion of that target for adaptation, in part because adaptation efforts attract far less private investment than renewable energy. In finance talks, developing nations have asked that billions of dollars be set aside for adaptation — a far cry from the $60 million announced at the start of the conference.

Read Next Can you solve the world’s trillion-dollar climate finance puzzle? Jake Bittle

Despite the funding impasse, the world is inching closer to finally defining an effort that could make the difference between life and death for millions of people around the world. The U.N. is halfway through a two-year attempt to finally pick “adaptation indicators,” or global yardsticks that will allow every country to measure its climate resilience. This decade-delayed effort to complete the ambitions of the Paris Agreement will in theory give the world a way to measure adaptation success.

“We’re hopeful,” said Hawwa Nabaaha Nashid, an official at the environmental ministry of the Maldives, an island state in the Indian Ocean. “If there’s a high-quality [outcome], we can answer the question—how well are we adapting and what needs to be done differently?”

There are still big hurdles to clear. The latest text of the adaptation negotiators were considering, which appeared early Thursday, left out some priorities of developing countries, but negotiators expressed more optimism about the adaptation item than they did about other items such as decarbonization and climate finance.

And the task of selecting indicators is daunting in itself. Last year’s COP saw agreement on specific target areas for adaptation, including water, health, biodiversity, food, infrastructure, poverty, and heritage. But to measure progress in these target areas, negotiators have proposed a whopping 10,000 potential indicators. This eye-popping sum highlights just how fluid and context-dependent the notion of “climate adaptation” really is. 

Some potential indicators, like “area of contorta pine” (a European Union proposal on biodiversity) and “number of boreholes drilled” (a water proposal from developing countries) seem far too specific, since most of the world doesn’t have significant amounts of contorta pine or get its water by drilling boreholes. Others, such as “types of synergies created” seem so vague as to be almost useless. Some, such as “number of mining operations in protected areas reviewed and temporarily suspended” don’t seem to have anything to do with adapting to climate disasters.

“By the very nature of adaptation being more diffuse and broad, you get a multitude of indicators, sub-indicators, and criteria,” said Kalim Shah, a professor of environmental science at the University of Delaware who has assisted small island states like the Marshall Islands with adaptation planning. “It’s much more diffuse, and maybe that’s part of the problem: too many cooks in the kitchen.”

The major roadblock in these discussions is money. In every negotiation, poor countries have demanded clear language acknowledging that adaptation is impossible without adequate funding, while rich countries have tried to exclude such language and focus on planning and logistics. In the fight over the indicators, the developing world is seeking a commitment to include an indicator that measures “means of implementation” — in other words, a metric for how capable countries are of carrying out their adaptation plans. This would amount to an acknowledgment that funding and capacity are critical to climate adaptation of any kind, whether it’s building new sand dams for pastoral herders or tracking the spread of dengue fever. But even that acknowledgment appears to be controversial.

“It is still a big contention,” said Portia Adade Williams, who is negotiating adaptation needs on behalf of Ghana. “I’m still not sure how we are going to end it. But from a developing country point of view, this would be a complete red line, to have a decision that doesn’t allow us to track [capacity].” 

Nashid, of the Maldives, said the country can’t consider scaling up its adaptation efforts without more money.

“We have to exhaust our limited domestic budget to finance our adaptation efforts, taking away from other priority areas such as healthcare and education,” she told Grist.

The country has used huge amounts of reclaimed land to build quasi-artificial islands that can house displaced populations from lower-lying isles.

The capacity issue is especially acute for island nations with small populations, who don’t always have the infrastructure needed to navigate the complex bureaucracy of the multilateral U.N. funds that support adaptation. These low-lying nations often face an almost existential threat from rising sea levels, so they won’t necessarily benefit from just one capital project paid for by these funds — they have to adapt their entire territories in order to survive.

“By the time all these little things have happened for you to get the money, the risks have increased,” said Filomena Nelson, an adaptation negotiator from Samoa who works for the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, an intergovernmental authority that manages environmental protection across Pacific islands. “It takes forever, it’s complicated, it’s a vicious cycle.”

When negotiators can’t discuss money, adaptation talks tend to get mired in the realm of the abstract. This was evident in Baku this week, where negotiators in one adaptation talk confronted a multi-dimensional graph about “transformational adaptation” with three axes: “time,” “changes in paradigms,” and “changes in the fundamental attributes of socio-ecological systems.” That chart was accompanied by another evaluation matrix that resembled a Rubik’s cube. One observer joked that she wanted to get it printed on a shirt.

In the meantime, the need for action is only getting more urgent. 

The United Nations’ annual report on adaptation, which became public just before COP29 began, underscored the life-or-death stakes of an issue that often feels like a forgotten middle child at global climate talks. The U.N. expert who led the report introduced it by saying that “people are already dying, homes and livelihoods are being destroyed, and nature is under assault.” The report estimated the unmet need for adaptation investment at up to $359 billion every year. Notably, this need was not expressed in forested acres or boreholes drilled, but in U.S. dollars.

In recent years, as developed countries have belatedly endorsed the idea of a fund for redressing climate-fueled damage — and as the world has verged on breaching the 1.5 degrees C threshold laid out by the Paris accord — some have started to discuss the demise of small island states as an inevitability rather than a possibility. But Nelson said that while some disaster losses are inevitable, Samoa and other countries aren’t ready to admit that they will have to leave their homelands, an outcome that many experts fear will be likely with 1.5 degrees or more of warming. 

“We will not give up our land just because we’re facing these issues,” she said. “This is where we come from — if we give up now, it sends the wrong signal.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips2','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How do you define climate adaptation? Here are 10,000 ways. on Nov 21, 2024.

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The vision

The tarp shade snaps and flutters in the breeze above the harvest volunteers. The CSA is bountiful this spring — crunchy lettuce, sweet strawberries, and even some cherries from the new windbreak. Stores around here sell produce this tasty, organic, and local for a fortune, but our volunteers feed families on it for just an hour of work a week and some dirty fingernails. The model is spreading. Vacant lots and brownfield sites all over the city have started sprouting biodigesters and sunflower fields, compost vessels and prairie plantings, communities of care: the phytoremediating foot soldiers of food sovereignty in recovery.

— a drabble by Looking Forward reader Betsy Ruckman

The spotlight

There are more than 450,000 brownfield sites across the U.S. — previously developed parcels of land that have been left abandoned, with some form of contamination. They may be former industrial facilities, gas stations, mines, landfills, dumping sites. And before they can be reused, they need to be cleaned, or remediated.

So, what does that mean exactly? It’s not as if a bunch of volunteers can go out with sponges and buckets of soapy water to rid the land of pollution. Brownfield remediation may involve a number of tactics — like digging up contaminated soil and carting it offsite for safe disposal or treatment; putting some sort of barrier between the contaminated ground and whatever’s going to be built on top of it; injecting chemicals or microbes into the soil that can break down harmful substances; or planting plants that can suck them up.

Using plants to treat pollution is known as phytoremediation, and it’s been used successfully to remediate heavy metals, petroleum, fertilizer runoff, and even radioactive elements in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster.

Any of these efforts can be costly and time-consuming, which is why brownfields often sit idle for years or even decades (although President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law mobilized billions of dollars to address a backlog of Superfund sites, brownfields, and abandoned oil and gas wells). Still, despite high barriers, some communities have taken their own initiative to remediate brownfields and return the land to use. Looking Forward reader Betsy Ruckman, who submitted the drabble above, described “phytoremediating foot soldiers” — envisioning a world in which small-scale, community-led remediation efforts give rise to a patchwork of healthy and communal green spaces.

“I was inspired by the Chicago-area Green Era Campus,” Betsy said, which is “turning brownfields into productive organics-recycling hubs, teaching gardens, and productive fields.”

The Green Era Campus is just one example of how community leaders are taking remediation efforts into their own hands, investing in returning land to beneficial uses and testing strategies for dealing with some of the toughest soil contaminants.

Revitalizing an abandoned lot on Chicago’s South Side

Erika Allen has been working in urban agriculture for over two decades. “I was at that time, and still, really focused on juvenile justice diversion,” she said. She began with art therapy as an intervention that could keep young people from going down a path toward incarceration, but quickly realized that the food system offered a more promising opportunity — “because it’s also economic,” she said. “We can all grow food and consume it and sell it and create other products.”

In 2002, she founded the Chicago chapter of Growing Power, which has since reorganized as Urban Growers Collective — an organization focused on food security, job training, and community engagement through farming. While working on other growing projects, Allen and other partners began to develop a vision for a multidimensional site that could be a hub for energy development, composting, education, community events, and of course, growing food: the Green Era Campus.

In 2015, the team acquired a 9-acre piece of abandoned land in the neighborhood of Auburn Gresham that had formerly been used as an impound lot. They bought it from the city for just $1.

“Everybody on the South Side knows the space because if you had your car towed, it was usually towed to this place,” Allen said. Prior to that, it was owned by a manufacturer of agricultural equipment.

The site of the Green Era Campus, before remediation efforts began. Courtesy of Green Era Educational NFP

The site had a mixture of contaminants, including petroleum and motor oil from the cars that had been held there and debris from illegal dumping. The crew also discovered a submerged tank that was still filled with linseed oil, dating back to the manufacturing days. “That was a surprise,” Allen said.

The remediation process took years. After being denied once, the team was awarded an EPA grant for brownfield remediation in 2017. They contracted the environmental firm Terracon to lead the remediation efforts, which included a variety of strategies.

Some of the remediation tactics were tailored to the variety of intended uses for the site. “We built on top of some of the contamination, so a lot of it was treated on-site,” Allen said. For instance, one of the key elements of the campus is a commercial-scale anaerobic digester to process food waste from local restaurants, manufacturers, and residents (which may have inspired the “biodigesters” referenced in Betsy’s drabble). That facility is built on top of concrete, which acts as a barrier. In other places, the team excavated contaminated soil and brought in clean soil to replace it.

The price tag was ultimately in the millions. “It was absolutely astronomical,” said Jason Feldman, co-founder of Green Era Sustainability, an investment entity that is one of several partner organizations working on the project. “The cost of the cleanup was more than the value of the land, even if it was clean.”

But, Feldman and Allen stressed, they see that investment in the land as a key value that the project is bringing to the community, flipping a narrative of chronic disinvestment. “We were able to figure it out and innovate and educate the community, but also take away the extreme expense of what the community is required to do to be able to address environmental racism that created those issues in the first place,” Allen said.

The new-and-improved Green Era Campus. Courtesy of Green Era Educational NFP

Although phytoremediation was the focus of Betsy’s vision, it wouldn’t have been appropriate for the Green Era site — plant roots, while amazing, can’t clear away debris or a submerged tank. But Feldman says he’s interested in that approach for future projects and partnerships. The Green Era team also hopes that the compost produced at their facility might be able to help out other remediation projects in the future. “One of the biggest costs of the whole remediation process at the Green Era Campus was actually bringing in the clean soil,” Feldman said. “Which is a resource that’s being taken from one place and brought to another place. We could use this beautiful, nutrient-rich material that we’ve got to help remediate other sites.” He’d also like to see the compost be used to support urban reforestation efforts, which he views as a form of phytoremediation of city soil, even in places that aren’t designated as brownfields.

As far as the campus goes, phase one is now officially complete. The site is clean and the digester is built and operating, creating compost and capturing gas that is already being sent to the grid as energy. “I’m in the process of raising the funds to build the rest of the campus,” Allen said, which will include a vertical farm, a community education center, a plant nursery and produce store, and a stormwater mitigation area.

Cleaning up PFAS in the northeast corner of Maine

Halfway across the country, another group of community partners is testing the limits of phytoremediation on one of the most pernicious substances in the environment.

In 2009, the Mi’kmaq Nation in Maine acquired around 800 acres of land that had been part of the Loring Air Force Base. Due to contamination from fuel, pesticides, on-site landfills, and other hazards, the base was declared a Superfund site in 1990 (four years before it officially closed, and one year before the Mi’Kmaq tribe received federal recognition). Superfund sites differ from brownfields in their level of contamination, and because of the hazard they pose to human health, the federal government is obligated to clean them. Loring Air Force Base remains on the EPA’s National Priorities List, but some efforts to date have included capping the former landfills and removing low-level radioactive waste from nuclear weapons operations.

But the tribe discovered there was another contaminant on their new land: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Sometimes known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are a class of toxic chemicals that have been used in a huge variety of industrial and household items since the 1940s, though in recent years, governments have taken steps to regulate them due to mounting evidence linking the chemicals to health issues. PFAS are often found on military bases, in the residue of firefighting foams.

Meanwhile, Chelli Stanley, the founder of a small environmental remediation organization called Upland Grassroots, was studying ways that hemp might be used to clean toxic substances from polluted ground. “It’s a bioaccumulator, it’s very versatile in phytoremediation, in that it can take up a lot of different chemicals,” Stanley said of the plant. “Once it became legalized, I just started reaching out to people to see if we could start testing its abilities on different chemicals.”

Stanley reached out to Richard Silliboy, vice-chief of the Mi’Kmaq Nation. “He was very interested in finding solutions to cleaning land — that we could do it ourselves, and we didn’t have to wait on anybody,” Stanley said. “And we could further the science so that it could help to further the ability to clean the land in the future.” In 2019, the tribe began a research project to find out if hemp could help rid the land of PFAS contamination, working with Stanley and Upland Grassroots as well as researchers at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, and now also at the University of Virginia.

Left: Richard Silliboy plants hemp seeds on the land the Mi’Kmaq tribe owns at the site of the former Loring Air Force Base. Right: Chelli Stanley tends the experimental hemp plot. Courtesy of Upland Grassroots

Five years in, their experiments have shown that hemp does remove PFAS from the soil. But Sara Nason, one of the lead researchers from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, said that it stops short of being a total solution. “For most organic chemicals, an important aspect of phytoremediation is that plants and the soil bacteria around them help to break down the contaminants and detoxify them,” Nason said. But PFAS are synthetic chemicals, and as their nickname, ‘forever,’ would suggest, they can’t easily be broken down. “Even if the plants remove PFAS from the soil, we still need other methods to destroy the PFAS in the plants.”

That has been one of the greatest challenges to date, Stanley said. “There’s no way to destroy the PFAS at this point, and we don’t want to put it in a landfill or just have a bunch of hemp sitting around that’s full of PFAS.” Currently, all of the hemp from the site is going to labs where scientists are working on a variety of techniques that might help to break the chemicals down. This fall, the group received a four-year grant from the EPA to continue the research.

All of the partners involved are taking a long view of this work, with the goals of continuing to clean the land as much as possible, contributing to the scientific understanding of PFAS, and, for the tribe, being able to someday harvest plants from the land without fear of what may lurk inside them.

“Our actual phytoremediation results have not been as impressive as we would like them to be,” Nason said, “but in some ways, that has not mattered as much as I would have thought. There are very few ways for communities to take action on PFAS-contaminated soil right now, and doing something that helps in a small way has been very motivating for the people participating.”

Although questions remain about how to fully remediate the persistent chemicals, Stanley noted that working with hemp or other bioaccumulating plants is a low-cost, low-tech option available to any land steward dealing with different forms of contamination in soil and water.

“Phytoremediation is very accessible. You don’t need a degree, you don’t need specialized training,” Stanley said. “As long as you know how to grow plants, then you would be able to do it” — much like the grassroots vision Betsy shared in her drabble.

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

• Read: more about the story of Green Era Campus and the progress of its various projects (Block Club Chicago)
• Read: more about the PFAS remediation work on the former Loring Air Force Base in Maine (Grist)
• Read: about how the bipartisan infrastructure law has quadrupled spending on brownfield remediation — and what could happen to future funding under the new administration (The Guardian)
• Read: a Q&A with a toxicologist who has been cleaning up contaminated sites with fungi — “mycoremediation” (Yale Environment 360)
• Browse: a citizen’s guide to phytoremediation, from the EPA

A parting shot

After their successful use at Chernobyl, sunflowers were planted in Japan in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011. In this case, the efforts were not as effective, likely due to the variety of sunflowers planted. But as Reuters reported at the time, the cheerful yellow flowers stood for more than literal phytoremediation, bringing a sense of hope and agency to residents in impacted areas. This photo from 2011 shows a sunflower farm in full bloom in Fukui, Japan, about 300 miles from the disaster.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Courtesy of Green Era Educational NFP; Courtesy of Upland Grassroots

Parting shot: Buddhika Weerasinghe / Getty Images

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How communities are giving new life to polluted land on Nov 20, 2024.

Like wildfires chewing through dried-out forests, hurricane after hurricane fed on extra-hot ocean water this summer and fall before slamming into communities along the Gulf Coast, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damages and killing more than 300 people. The warmer the sea, the more potent the hurricane fuel, and the more energy a storm can consume and turn into wind. 

Human-made climate change made all of this season’s 11 hurricanes — from Beryl to Rafael — much worse, according to an analysis released on Wednesday from the nonprofit science group Climate Central. Scientists can already say that 2024 is the hottest year on record. By helping drive record-breaking surface ocean temperatures, planetary warming boosted the hurricanes’ maximum sustained wind speeds by between 9 and 28 miles per hour.

That bumped seven of this year’s storms into a higher category on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, including the two Category 5 storms, Beryl and Milton. “Our analysis shows that we would have had zero Category 5 storms without human-caused climate change,” said Daniel Gilford, climate scientist at Climate Central, on a press call. “There’s really this impact on the intensity of the storms that we’re experiencing in the real world on a day-to-day basis.”

In a companion study also released Wednesday, Climate Central found that between 2019 and 2023, climate change accelerated hurricane wind speeds by an average of 18 mph. More than 80 percent of the hurricanes in that period were made significantly more intense by global warming, the study found. 

That’s making hurricanes more dangerous than ever. An 18 mph boost in wind speeds might not sound like much, but that can mean the difference between a Category 4 and a Category 5, which packs sustained winds of 157 mph or higher. Hurricanes have gotten so much stronger, scientists are considering modifying the scale. “The hurricane scale is capped at Category 5, but we might need to think about: Should that continue to be the case?” said Friederike Otto, a climatologist who cofounded the research group World Weather Attribution, on the press call. “Or do we have to talk about Category 6 hurricanes at some point? Just so that people are aware that something is going to hit them that is different from everything else they’ve experienced before.”

Hurricanes need a few ingredients to spin up. One is fuel: As warm ocean waters evaporate, energy transfers from the surface into the atmosphere. Another is humidity, because dry air will help break up a storm system. And a hurricane also can’t form if there’s too much wind shear, which is a change in wind speed and direction with height. So even if a hurricane has high ocean temperatures to feed on, that’s not necessarily a guarantee that it will turn into a monster if wind shear is excessive and humidity is minimal. 

Climate Central

But during this year’s hurricane season — which runs through the end of November — those water temperatures have been so extreme that the stage was set for catastrophe. As the storms were traveling through the open Atlantic, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico, they exploited surface temperatures made up to 800 times more likely by human-caused planetary warming, according to the Climate Central analysis. Four of the most destructive hurricanes — Beryl, Debby, Helene, and Milton — had their wind speeds increased by an average of 17 mph, thanks to climate change. In early November, Hurricane Rafael managed to jump from Category 1 to Category 3.

Climate Central’s companion study, published in the journal Environmental Research: Climate, looked at the five previous years and found that climate change boosted three hurricanes — Lorenzo in 2019, Ian in 2022, and Lee in 2023 — to Category 5 status. That isn’t to say climate change created any of these hurricanes, just that the additional warming from greenhouse gas emissions exacerbated the storms by raising ocean temperatures. Scientists are also finding that as the planet warms, hurricanes are able to dump more rain. In October, World Weather Attribution, for instance, found that Helene’s rainfall in late September was 10 percent heavier, making flooding worse as the storm marched inland.

All that supercharging might have helped hurricanes undergo rapid intensification, defined as an increase in wind speed of at least 35 mph within 24 hours. Last month, Hurricane Milton’s winds skyrocketed by 90 mph in a day, one of the fastest rates of intensification that scientists have ever seen in the Atlantic basin. In September, Hurricane Helene rapidly intensified, too. 

This kind of intensification makes hurricanes particularly dangerous, since people living on a stretch of coastline might be preparing for a much weaker storm than what actually makes it ashore. “It throws off your preparations,” said Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist who studies hurricanes at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “It means you have less time to evacuate.”

Researchers are also finding that wind shear could be decreasing in coastal areas due to changes in atmospheric patterns, removing the mechanism that keeps hurricanes in check. And relative humidity is rising. Accordingly, scientists have found a huge increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore in recent years.

The hotter the planet gets overall, and the hotter the Atlantic Ocean gets specifically, the more monstrous hurricanes will grow. “We know that the speed limit at which a hurricane can spin is going up,” Gilford said, “and hurricane intensities in the real world are responding.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change made all of this year’s Atlantic hurricanes so much worse on Nov 20, 2024.

Recent data analysis conducted by a human rights advocacy organization found that nearly a dozen international finance institutions directed over $3 billion to animal agriculture in 2023. The majority of those funds — upwards of $2.27 billion — came from development banks and went towards projects that support factory farming, a practice that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions as well as biodiversity loss. 

The researchers behind the analysis are calling on the development banks — which include the International Finance Corporation, or IFC, part of the World Bank — to scrutinize the climate and environmental impacts of the projects they fund, especially in light of the World Bank’s climate pledges.

The analysis comes from the International Accountability Project, which reviewed disclosure documents from 15 development banks and the Green Climate Fund, established in 2010 at COP16 to support climate action in developing countries. Researchers found that 10 of those development banks, as well as the Green Climate Fund, financed projects directly supporting animal agriculture. The data serves as the basis for a new white paper from Stop Financing Factory Farming, or S3F, a coalition of advocacy groups that seeks to block development banks from funding agribusiness, released last month. 

The International Accountability Project, which advocates for human and environmental rights, hopes that its findings will pressure international financial institutions like the World Bank to see the contradiction in financing industrial animal agriculture projects while also promising to help reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

Agriculture accounts for a significant portion of global greenhouse gas emissions, so much so that research has suggested limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is not possible without changing how we grow food and what we eat. Within the agricultural sector, livestock production is the main source of greenhouse emissions — as ruminants like cows and sheep release methane into the atmosphere whenever they burp. 

Factory farms, which aim to produce large amounts of meat and dairy as quickly and cheaply as possible, present a problem for the climate and the environment. They can hold anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of animals (fewer if the animals are bigger in size, like cattle, and more if they’re smaller, like chickens). These operations result in tremendous amounts of manure, which, depending on how it’s stored, can pollute waterways or release ammonia into the air. They also contribute to global warming: A nonprofit research organization once looked at the 20 meat and dairy companies responsible for the greatest amount of greenhouse gas emissions and found that, put together, their emissions surpassed those of countries like Australia, Germany, and the U.K. 

The primary goal of development banks is to provide funding for projects in developing countries that help achieve some social or economic good. In recent years, these banks have included climate among their considerations when selecting initiatives to support. In its Climate Change Action Plan for 2021 to 2025, the World Bank stated its commitment to funding “climate-smart agriculture,” with the goal of nudging the agricultural sector towards lower emissions without sacrificing productivity. The plan says the IFC, a member of the World Bank Group that funds private-sector projects in developing countries, will seek to finance “precision farming and regenerative” agriculture, but also “make livestock production more sustainable.” 

But this framework has not precluded development banks from supporting industrial animal agriculture — despite the abundance of information about how factory farming harms people, the planet, and animals themselves. “I think it’s just business as usual,” said Alessandro Ramazzotti, the International Accountability Project researcher who spearheaded the data analysis.

In order to determine how much money development banks are sending to industrial animal agriculture projects in the form of loans, investments, and technical and advisory services, Ramazzotti utilized a tool that scrapes bank websites for public disclosures. From there, he and a team of researchers analyzed the information collected, identifying 62 animal agriculture projects and reading the disclosures closely for detail on each one. They found that, of the $3.3 billion spent on animal agriculture, $2.27 billion — or 68 percent — was put towards projects that support industrial animal agriculture, or factory farming. 

Only $77 million — or 2 percent — went towards non-industrial operations or small-scale animal agriculture. The remaining project disclosures did not contain sufficient information for the researchers to determine one way or another what sort of initiative it was being funded. 

A livestock farmer who implemented a pasture rotation system to raise livestock without deforesting the Amazon under a program of the French Development Agency.
RAUL ARBOLEDA / Contributor / Getty Images

Ramazzotti noted that the analysis was subjective based on interpreting the language of bank disclosures — which, he pointed out, can largely be considered marketing material for the banks. As a result, sometimes projects that sound small in scale may still feed into industrial animal operations. 

He gave the example of the World Bank, which over the years has sought to connect smallholder farmers in Latin America to greater market opportunities. Depending on the exact context of such investments, that can be “quite concerning,” he said. Supporting small-scale cattle ranchers in Brazil could, for example, end up increasing beef supply for the Brazilian-based meat processing giant JBS S.A., which works with suppliers in the region. Such a development would be concerning to environmentalists, as cattle ranching is considered a major driver of deforestation in the Amazon. JBS, along with three smaller slaughterhouses, was sued last year by Brazilian authorities for allegedly purchasing cattle raised illegally on protected lands in the Amazon. JBS declined to comment for this article but has previously said it is “committed to a sustainable beef supply chain.”

The IFC, the World Bank Group member that funds private-sector projects in the developing world, told Grist that its goals concern “food security, livelihoods, and climate change.” 

“There are 1.3 billion people whose livelihoods are tied to livestock and we also know this sector is responsible for over 30 percent of the global GHG emissions,” a spokesperson for the member bank said, using an abbreviation for greenhouse gas. 

Read Next Trump’s second term is already derailing food talks at COP29 Ayurella Horn-Muller

The spokesperson added that the bank seeks to fund projects that increase both livestock production and efficiency while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The IFC also noted that as of July 1, 2025, all its investments will be required to align with the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), and that it asks recipients of livestock financing to adhere to their countries’ commitments under the Paris Agreement. 

Lara Fornabaio, a senior legal researcher at Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Investment, said she was “not surprised at all,” by the S3F report’s findings. She argued that development banks, rather than being profit-motivated, should consider the big picture when choosing the kinds of projects they fund. But she also emphasized that banks need to be rigorous when discerning whether an initiative fits into their stated climate goals. 

Even the rubric of “reducing emissions” is likely not rigorous enough to ensure banks are not inadvertently supporting industrial agriculture, Fornabaio said. In some factory farming settings, because growers are so efficient at producing livestock, “the emissions per animal are probably lower than the emissions of a cow [grazing] on a field,” she said. That’s partly because, in industrial agriculture operations, farmers can control every aspect of an animal’s feed — and certain feed choices can help reduce ruminants’ methane emissions. But because large animal agriculture operations grow so many animals, their cumulative emission footprints can be enormous. This big picture lines up with research that says shifting diets away from meat is crucial to curtain global warming.

Ramazzotti says his team will continue to monitor bank disclosures for new financing of animal agriculture and hopes to release updated findings on a regular basis going forward. He mentioned that the S3F coalition would consider supporting animal agriculture in the developing world if done on a local, small scale — such as by family farms or pastoral or Indigenous communities. However, he said, the coalition would prefer to see development banks putting money towards vegetable farming and plant-based diets. 

Ramazzotti is hopeful about the possibility of pressuring financial institutions to stop supporting factory farming. Recently, the team found that the IFC was considering a loan of up to $60 million to expand a company’s meat-processing operations in Mongolia. “It’s a direct investment in the expansion of factory farming,” he said. “And that’s exactly the [type of] investments we don’t want to see anymore because we believe that the impacts on the local level, but also on the global climate, are very deep.” 

The  coalition reached out to the IFC team considering this project with concerns, and the team has since postponed a discussion of the project with their board of directors twice, according to Ramazzotti. Following up, Ramazzotti said, is “not always” proven to be effective, but he’s optimistic that engaging with financial institutions can still lead to change. 

Fornabaio agreed. “If I didn’t believe in change, I wouldn’t do this work, probably. … There’s always a way to put pressure,” she said. “I think this type of work is key.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled Lara Fornabaio’s last name.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The World Bank has a factory-farm climate problem on Nov 20, 2024.

It’s November and it’s unseasonably warm as John John Brown, a Muscogee elder, works to replant peach saplings. “I haven’t had much luck growing them from seed,” he says. The reason, he thinks, is because peaches need lower temperatures. 

Around him, tiny peach trees the size of pencils stand above the browning grass underneath their parent tree. Brown harvested around 200 peaches this year from his small orchard — enough for his family and neighbors — but he had competition: A fox has been poking around. “The animals know when the peaches are ripe quicker than I do,” Brown laughs. “They start coming in and stealing my peaches.”

Brown’s peaches aren’t your everyday peaches, they’re heirlooms: direct descendants of peach seeds brought across the continent on the Trail of Tears. Brown calls them “Indian peaches” while other Muscogees call them “Trail of Tears peaches.” There has been little research on this particular variety, and it’s unknown just how many genes they share with commercial peaches. While grocery store peaches are soft and fleshy, Indian peaches don’t get much bigger than a lemon and are extremely firm but sweet.

The Indian peach is threatened by climate change. Where hurricanes, flooding, and higher temperatures have massive impacts on crops, including peaches, around the nation, heirloom varieties, like the Indian peach, are also threatened. This fruit, that crossed a planet, carried by traders and travelers, and eventually by a few Muscogees along The Trail before they found a new home outside Sapulpa, Oklahoma, is a connection to another time and place. 

“One of the greatest gifts Creator gave me is these peaches and the ability to share these trees with our community and everyone,” Brown said. 

These “Indian peaches” are direct descendants of peach seeds brought across the continent on the Trail of Tears. Courtesy of John John Brown

There are only 50 Indian peach trees on the Muscogee reservation that Brown knows of — some grow in some peoples’ backyards, and some at a local daycare — and between climate-driven changes to growing cycles and high temperatures, they face a difficult future. Luckily, they have people like Brown working to protect them.

Peach cultivation is thought to have begun around 8,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley in China. One of the first mentions of peaches in literature appears in the fictional novel Journey to the West, written in 1592, that describes peaches as a fruit that could grant longevity and “make a man’s age equal to that of Heaven and Earth, the sun and the moon.”

From China, peaches made their way to Europe, then to the Americas in the 1600s on Spanish ships — the beginning of a kind of crop exchange between the continents: potatoes and tomatoes from South and Central America went to Europe while peaches made their way to the Georgia coast, and quickly, into Indigenous diets. 

“Indigenous people were already caring for and managing forests and other kinds of tree foods,” said Jacob Holland-Lulewicz at Pennsylvania State University, who studies archaeology and ethnohistory. “That would have allowed them to adopt peaches super quickly and know really well how to create healthy peaches.”

Within a few decades, and with the help of a vast network of trade routes, peaches made their way across the continent, as far as the Southwest, where tribes like the Navajo sun-dried and stewed them. 

Around 1780, thousands of peach trees tended by the Seneca and Cayuga tribes along the Finger Lakes in western New York State were destroyed by President George Washington, in an attempt to ethnically cleanse Indigenous peoples from the region. Washington wrote in a letter to one of his generals that the goal was “to lay waste all the settlements.” He added, “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.”

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act that led to the Trail of Tears — a death march that forced around 60,000 Indigenous people to leave their homes and move west, across the Mississippi River, to Oklahoma. 

Vernon Courtwright grew up eating Indian peaches. Now 75 years old, the Muscogee elder and veteran says his family brought Indian peach seeds and planted them when they were done walking The Trail. “That was the beginning of our life and the peaches’ life in Oklahoma,” he said. When he was a child, his grandmother, Emma Bruner, was the one who taught him about how to grow and tend to the fruit. “We grew up eating these peaches.”

Courtwright says in the 1970s, he began to see Indian peaches disappear. With each passing year, there was less on the landscape. “I just knew that our orchard had to be taken care of,” he said. When his grandparents passed, he took on the work of caring for the trees, and eventually, met John John Brown, who helped cultivate seeds and saplings to give out to other Muscogees.

“It’s our legacy,” said Courtwright. “It’s my family’s legacy to the tribe.”

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Georgia, the Peach State, produces nearly 25,000 tons of peaches every year, but falls far behind California, which produces nearly 475,000 tons each year. Globally, nearly 24 million tons of peaches are grown each year, with most coming from China.

Climate change is having a big impact on those numbers, though. One of the biggest threats to the peach industry is rising temperatures. Peaches need “peach chill” — a certain amount of time in temperatures that are under 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Without adequate peach chill, peach trees won’t produce, and with rising temperatures, blooms will sprout too early. In 2017, around 70 percent of peach losses could be attributed to lack of peach chill. “Lack of chill is something that we think is going to be the biggest issue for us and our industry,” said Dario Chavez, a peach geneticist at the University of Georgia. “If you are in a northern climate, you don’t worry too much about the chill. But I think they’re starting to see the physiological responses to issues with chill.”

Then there are extreme weather events supercharged by climate change that can inflict immediate, wide-spread damage. This year, Hurricane Helene killed at least 226 people. It also devastated Georgia’s agricultural economy to the tune of nearly $6.5 billion dollars.

But Helene’s path was only the beginning. Hurricanes bring flooding, which is especially bad for peaches — peach trees don’t like to be too wet and can prematurely drop fruit if under water. They’re also susceptible to diseases like brown rot, which can be triggered after heavy storms.

For the Indian peach, peach chill and extreme weather aren’t as big a threat as they are in the South. However, Oklahoma is expected to become around two and a half degrees hotter in the next 20 years. Even though the peach is a resilient plant, peach chill will become an issue. Natural disasters like floods become more of a threat to the lives and livelihoods of tribal members — tribal lands in Oklahoma are the most prone to flooding in the state. 

But to protect Indian peaches, and a little part of tribal history, John John Brown has been giving out saplings for the better part of a decade to anyone interested in growing them.

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Brown regularly travels to Georgia and Alabama to visit the proposed Ocmulgee Mounds National Park and Preserve — located on Muscogee homelands. On his drives, he often passes peach orchards filled with the variety most Americans are used to. “You don’t think they would be able to produce peaches,” he says as he eyes the tightly-pruned rows. “They cut ’em back real small.” 

He goes down to the homelands to remind settlers in the area that the Muscogee survived despite the United States attempts at genocide and demos making canoes and bows the traditional way out of local wood during the annual Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration. To Brown the peaches are a symbol of resilience. 

“When our ancestors brought these peaches up from the South you think about how devastating it was, to lose loved ones, and not know if the seeds will sprout,” he said. “I do this to honor them, and their strength.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Meet the peach that traveled the Trail of Tears and the elders working to save it on Nov 20, 2024.

In the constellation of renewable energy technologies that the U.S. has sought to deploy in order to battle climate change, offshore wind has had perhaps the rockiest path in recent years. In 2023, high interest rates and the global supply chain shocks brought a slew of developments across the country to an end. Even without these macroeconomic obstacles, offshore wind is a mammoth undertaking. It’s difficult to overstate the sheer scale of the endeavor that is the construction of an offshore wind farm. The largest turbines are the length of football fields and require specially built ships to transport them. 

If offshore wind can take off anywhere, it’s New England, whose waters provide the highest wind capacity factor (the amount of energy a turbine can produce over time) in the continental U.S. In October 2023, three states — Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts — signed a first-of-its-kind multistate procurement agreement to collectively share the costs and benefits of adding new offshore wind generation. The vision behind the plan was to reduce the cost per megawatt of the electricity generated. So far, the results of this deal have been uneven: two of the states have selected developers for new projects, but Connecticut has not.

But the election of Donald Trump could arrest the region’s momentum before it has had a genuine chance to take off. Trump has made a point of demonizing the technology (“I hate wind,” he is reported to have bluntly told oil and gas executives at a fundraiser) and has repeatedly made false claims about its impact on wildlife. In a campaign rally in May, Trump pledged to ensure that offshore wind projects come to a halt “on day one” of his second term. That could have been mere campaign-trail bluster, but of the clean energy technologies that the Inflation Reduction Act flooded money into, offshore wind is perhaps the most vulnerable to an unfriendly president.

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In addition to the political calculations, the question of whether this coalition of states can build and deploy the offshore wind projects amounts to a test of American industrial capacity. To bolster the case to state governments for doubling down, there is growing support in the region from a somewhat unlikely corner: New England’s industrial unions, a group of whom published a report last week, in partnership with the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, outlining an ambitious vision for supplying the region with not only offshore wind turbines but a locally based industrial manufacturing base to support it.

“This entire industry that we’re trying to get launched has thousands and thousands of job opportunities, whether you’re talking about port construction or port renovations to make sure that offshore wind can be developed at a larger scale, whether you’re talking about component manufacturing, whether you’re talking about vessel manufacturing — all of these things are going to be critically important,” said Patrick Crowley, the president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO. “We’re not talking about just individual energy projects. We’re talking about developing an entire energy industry and everything that goes into it.”

At a launch event for the report on Tuesday, Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said the unions’ proposal “supports the region’s continued progress building a robust, worker-centered offshore wind industry. This is an incredible opportunity to lower costs and create good jobs for working people in our region while achieving energy independence, cleaner air and a climate-resilient future.”

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There are just three operational wind farms in the country. According to Timothy Fox, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington research firm, those power stations generate only about 200 megawatts of electricity — a fraction of the 50 gigawatts (50,000 megawatts) that states have committed to building, if their renewable energy targets are tallied together. The federal government has approved leases for wind projects that would generate 15 gigawatts of energy, and the onus now is on states to build the turbines — and to require their utility companies to buy electricity from it. 

The unions’ report calls for building 9 gigawatts of offshore wind energy in the waters off Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts by 2030 — scaling up to 30 gigawatts by 2040, and 60 gigawatts by 2050.

To meet these goals, the report suggests states employ “a climate and jobs strategy, built around new investments, active government facilitation of industry growth, and reliance on a skilled union workforce.” It argues offshore wind’s success will depend on a combination of investment in the region’s ports, regionally based component manufacturing, domestically built installation vessels, coordinated transmission planning between the states involved, and strong labor standards.

To maximize the benefits of offshore wind, the three states will need to coordinate their efforts on a range of tasks, from building transmission lines (which often requires tricky interstate negotiations) to collective procurement — and that’s one area where, Crowley argued, unions are uniquely positioned to help, by leveraging the power of their mass membership across state borders and political influence in Democratic state governments.

“There isn’t another organization except the labor movement that has a presence in all of these states in such a way that, if my counterpart in New York, Vinny Alvarez, calls up and says, ‘Patrick, there’s a hearing at the Rhode Island Coastal Resource Management Council about a transmission line for a project that we’re doing. Can you get a couple of people to go testify?’ — ‘Absolutely.’ And we’re there within hours,” Crowley said.

As an example of this leadership in action, Crowley cited the tri-state procurement agreement, which he described as “a paradigm shift in thinking that I don’t think would be possible except for the labor movement pushing this agenda.” He cast the agreement as a departure from the standard practice by which states attract investment and industry: “All of these states compete with each other when it comes to the economic marketplace,” Crowley said. 

“We’re dealing with something right here in Rhode Island,” he continued. “One of our major employers, Hasbro Toys, is being courted by Massachusetts to move up from Providence up to Cambridge to move their headquarters there; we might lose a thousand jobs and Massachusetts will gain them. We’re not going to stop that kind of competition. But when we can eliminate it from the beginning, at the beginning of this industry — oh my God. This is a total economic paradigm shift that I don’t think folks have fully digested yet.”

But to get the unions’ vision past the finish line, especially against the headwinds of an unfriendly federal government, will be no easy feat — and crucially depends on private investment. This is also somewhere that Crowley believes unions can play a role. “The labor movement, through our pension funds, has access to a vast amount of investable capital,” he said. “And maybe what we’ve got to do is be creative about how we can leverage the funds that are in our pension systems, both private and public sector, to be a funding mechanism for developing this industry.”

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Jeff Plaisted, an electrician in Massachusetts, worked on the crew that laid six miles of cable from the Vineyard Wind wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard to a power substation on Cape Cod, passing under the streets of the town of Hyannis.

“Since the Vineyard Wind project broke ground, and that project really got off the ground,” Plaisted said, “we had full employment in Local 223” — southeastern Massachusetts’ branch of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, of which Plaisted is now the business agent and organizer of membership development.

The project brought an unusual amount of work to the region. “We had travelers from other jurisdictions coming and signing our book to work in our jurisdiction because we needed the manpower from outside what we had to offer just to fill the job calls. That substation in Hyannis had 70 to 80 electricians on, and we very rarely see jobs in our jurisdiction that require that kind of manpower,” Plaisted said.

When Plaisted began working on the Vineyard Wind project, “What surprised me personally is the magnitude, the size of the turbines themselves,” he said. The job itself was a far cry from the normal work of a union electrician. “You’re not just stripping wires. The splicing operations, everything involved with it is highly skilled and very technical. The guys that are offshore, they’re taking a boat to work, five-plus hours offshore,” Plaisted said.

He is part of a growing number of union leaders who have spent the Biden years making the case that organized labor will need to play a starring role in the nationwide transition away from fossil fuels — not just in offshore wind, but in the vast landscape of industrial work, from electric vehicles to transmission buildout, that the transition will require. 

Plaisted said that trade unions are reckoning with the fact that “climate change, it’s not a theory. It’s an actual thing, it’s not a belief system, it’s an issue that we’re going to have to deal with. If the goal is to get off fossil fuels, then everything should be brought to the table — solar, wind, battery. And union labor is the way to make those things happen,” Plaisted said.

Their efforts were bolstered in some respects by Biden’s attachment of labor-friendly requirements to many of the grants for clean energy, as well as an unusually friendly National Labor Relations Board. But unions now face a set of strategic decisions around how to engage with a Republican administration expected to be far less friendly to organized labor. “We’re at a crossroads,” said Keith Brothers, business manager of the Connecticut Laborers’ District Council.

Under a new Trump administration, unions’ efforts may be directed more locally. “We’ll fight in Congress and in the halls of agencies,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the Bluegreen Alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental organizations, in an interview before the election. “But I would expect our members and the members of our partners to be in the streets more, in the fullest sense of that term, and on the shop floor, and working much more in state capitals, while not taking our eyes off of all the dangerous actions that a Trump administration would pursue.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips2','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can unions save offshore wind from Trump? on Nov 20, 2024.

The Biden administration has backtracked from supporting a cap on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.

According to representatives from five environmental organizations, White House staffers told representatives of advocacy groups in a closed-door meeting last week that they did not see mandatory production caps as a viable “landing zone” for INC-5, the name for the fifth and final round of plastics treaty negotiations set to take place later this month in Busan, South Korea. Instead, the staffers reportedly said United States delegates would support a “flexible” approach in which countries set their own voluntary targets for reducing plastic production.

This represents a reversal of what the same groups were told at a similar briefing held in August, when Biden administration representatives raised hopes that the U.S. would join countries like Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom in supporting limits on plastic production. 

Following the August meeting, Reuters reported that the U.S. “will support a global treaty calling for a reduction in how much new plastic is produced each year,” and the Biden administration confirmed that Reuters’ reporting was “accurate.” 

After the more recent briefing, a spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality told Grist that, while U.S. negotiators have endorsed the idea of a “‘North Star’ aspirational global goal” to reduce plastic production, they “do not see this as a production cap and do not support such a cap.”

“We believe there are different paths available for achieving reductions in plastic production and consumption,” the spokesperson said. “We will be flexible going into INC-5 on how to achieve that and are optimistic that we can prevail with a strong instrument that sends these market signals for change.” 

Jo Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit advocating for fenceline communities in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” said the announcement was a “jolt.”

“I thought we were on the same page in terms of capping plastic and reducing production,” she said. “But it was clear that we just weren’t.”

Frankie Orona, executive director of the nonprofit Society of Native Nations, which advocates for environmental justice and the preservation of Indigenous cultures, described the news as “absolutely devastating.” He added, “Two hours in that meeting felt like it was taking two days of my life.”

Delegates follow the day’s proceedings at the third round of negotiations over a global plastics treaty in Nairobi, Kenya. James Wakibia / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

The situation speaks to a central conflict that has emerged from talks over the treaty, which the U.N. agreed to negotiate two years ago to “end plastic pollution.” Delegates haven’t agreed on whether the pact should focus on managing plastic waste — through things like ocean cleanups and higher recycling rates — or on tamping down the growing rate of plastic production.

Nearly 70 countries, along with scientists and environmental groups, support the latter. They say it’s futile to mop up plastic litter while more and more of it keeps getting made. But a vocal contingent of oil-exporting countries has pushed for a lower-ambition treaty, using a consensus-based voting norm to slow-walk the negotiations. Besides leaving out production limits, those countries also want the treaty to allow for voluntary national targets, rather than binding global rules.

Exactly which policies the U.S. will now support isn’t entirely clear. While the White House spokesperson told Grist that it wants to ensure the treaty “addresses … the supply of primary plastic polymers,” this could mean a whole host of things, including a tax on plastic production or bans on individual plastic products. These kinds of so-called market instruments could drive down demand for more plastic, but with far less certainty than a quantitative production limit. Bjorn Beeler, executive director of the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, noted that the U.S. could technically “address” the supply of plastics by reducing the industry’s projected growth rates — which would still allow the amount of manufactured plastic to continue increasing every year.

“What the U.S. has said is extremely vague,” he said. “They have not been a leading actor to move the treaty into something meaningful.”

To the extent that the White House’s latest announcement was a clarification and not an outright reversal — as staffers reportedly insisted was the case — Banner said the Biden administration should have made their position clearer months ago, right after the August meeting. “In August, we were definitely saying ‘capping,’ and it was never corrected,” she said. “If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”

Another apparent change in the U.S.’s strategy is on chemicals used in plastics. Back in August, the White House confirmed via Reuters’ reporting that it supported creating lists of plastic-related chemicals to be banned or restricted. Now, negotiators will back lists that include plastic products containing those chemicals. Environmental groups see this approach as less effective, since there are so many kinds of plastic products and because product manufacturers do not always have complete information about the chemicals used by their suppliers.

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Orona said focusing on products would push the conversation downstream, away from petrochemical refineries and plastics manufacturing facilities that disproportionately pollute poor communities of color.

“It’s so dismissive, it’s so disrespectful,” he said. “It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”

At the next round of treaty talks, environmental groups told Grist that the U.S. should “step aside.” Given the high likelihood that the incoming Trump administration will not support the treaty and that the Republican-controlled Senate will not ratify it, some advocates would like to see the high-ambition countries focus less on winning over U.S. support and more on advancing the most ambitious version of the treaty possible. “We hope that the rest of the world moves on,” said a spokesperson for the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic, vesting hope in the EU, small island developing states, and a coalition of African countries, among others. 

Viola Waghiyi, environmental health and justice program director for the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, is a tribal citizen of the Native Village of Savoonga, on the island of Sivuqaq off the state’s western coast. She connected a weak plastics treaty to the direct impacts her island community is facing, including climate change (to which plastics production contributes), microplastic pollution in the Arctic Ocean that affects its marine life, and atmospheric dynamics that dump hazardous plastic chemicals in the far northern hemisphere.

The U.S. “should be making sure that measures are in place to protect the voices of the most vulnerable,” she said, including Indigenous peoples, workers, waste pickers, and future generations. As a Native grandmother, she specifically raised concerns about endocrine-disrupting plastic chemicals that could affect children’s neurological development. “How can we pass on our language, our creation stories, our songs and dances, our traditions and cultures, if our children can’t learn?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US no longer supports capping plastic production in UN treaty on Nov 18, 2024.