Every month you pay an electricity bill, because there’s no choice if you want to keep the lights on. The power flows in one direction. But soon, utilities might desperately need something from you: electricity.
A system increasingly loaded with wind and solar will require customers to send power back into the system. If the traditional grid centralized generation at power plants, experts believe the system of tomorrow will be more distributed, with power coming from what they call the “grid edge” — household batteries, electric cars, and other gadgets whose relationship with the grid has been one way. More people, for example, are installing solar panels on their roofs backed up with home batteries. When electricity demand increases, a utility can draw power from those homes as a vast network of backup energy.
The big question is how to choreograph that electrical ballet — millions of different devices at the grid edge, owned by millions of different customers, that all need to talk to the utility’s systems. To address that problem, a team of researchers from several universities and national labs developed an algorithm for running a “local electricity market,” in which ratepayers would be compensated for allowing their devices to provide backup power to a utility. Their paper, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, described how the algorithm could coordinate so many sources of power — and then put the system to the test. “When you have numbers of that magnitude, then it becomes very difficult for one centralized entity to keep tabs on everything that’s going on,” said Anu Annaswamy, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the paper’s co-author. “Things need to become more distributed, and that is something the local electricity market can facilitate.”
At the moment, utilities respond to a surge in demand for electricity by spinning up more generation at power plants running on fossil fuels. But they can’t necessarily do that with renewables, since the sun might not be shining, or the wind blowing. So as grids increasingly depend on clean energy, they’re getting more flexible: Giant banks of lithium-ion batteries, for instance, can store that juice for later use.
Yet grids will need even more flexibility in the event of a cyberattack or outage. If a hacker compromises a brand of smart thermostat to increase the load on a bunch of AC units at once, that could crash the grid by driving demand above available supply. With this sort of local electricity market imagined in the paper, a utility would call on other batteries in the network to boost supply, stabilizing the grid. At the same time, electric water heaters and heat pumps for climate control could wind down, reducing demand. “In that sense, there’s not necessarily a fundamental difference between a battery and a smart device like a water heater, in terms of being able to provide the support to the grid,” said Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the new research.
Along with this demand reduction, drawing power from devices along the grid edge would provide additional support. In testing out cyberattack scenarios and sustained inclement weather that reduces solar energy, the researchers found that the algorithm was able to restabilize the grid every time. The algorithm also provides a way to set the rates paid to households for their participation. That would depend on a number of factors such as time of day, location of the household, and the overall demand. “Consumers who provide flexibility are explicitly being compensated for that, rather than just people doing it voluntarily,” said Vineet J. Nair, a Ph.D. student at MIT and lead author of the paper. “That kind of compensation is a way to incentivize customers.”
Utilities are already experimenting with these sorts of compensation programs, though on a much smaller scale. Electric buses in Oakland, California, for instance, are sending energy back to the grid when they’re not ferrying kids around. Utilities are also contracting with households to use their large home batteries, like Tesla’s Powerwall, as virtual power plants.
Building such systems is relatively easy, because homes with all their heat pumps and batteries are already hooked into the system, said Anna Lafoyiannis, senior team lead for transmission operations and planning at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. By contrast, connecting a solar and battery farm to the grid takes years of planning, permitting, and construction. “Distributed resources can be deployed really quickly on the grid,” she said. “When I look at flexibility, the time scale matters.”
All these energy sources at the grid edge, combined with large battery farms operated by the utility, are dismantling the myth that renewables aren’t reliable enough to provide power on their own. One day, you might even get paid to help bury that myth for good.
The Trump administration’s decision to eliminate more than 90 percent of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) funding means “nothing’s safe right now,” a regional political analyst says.
President Donald Trump’s government has said it is slashing about US$60 billion in overall US development and humanitarian assistance around the world to further its America First policy.
Last September, the former Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said that Washington had “listened carefully” to Pacific Island nations and was making efforts to boost its diplomatic footprint in the region.
Campbell had announced that the US contributed US$25 million to the Pacific-owned and led Pacific Resilience Facility — a fund endorsed by leaders to make it easier for Forum members to access climate financing for adaptation, disaster preparedness and early disaster response projects.
However, Trump’s move has been said to have implications for the Pacific, which is one of the most aid-dependent regions in the world.
Research fellow at the Australian National University’s Development Policy Centre Dr Terence Wood told RNZ Pacific Waves that, in the Pacific, the biggest impacts of the aid cut are likley to be felt by the three island nations in a Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the US.
He said that while the compact “is safe” for three COFA states – Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau – “these are unprecedented times”.
“It would be unprecedented if the US just tore them up. But then again, the United States is showing very little regard for agreements that it has entered into in the past, so I would say that nothing’s safe right now.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Dr Terence Wood speaking to RNZ Pacific Waves. Video: RNZ Pacific
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
In the year marking 40 years since the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents and 71 years since the most powerful nuclear weapons tested by the United States, Greenpeace is calling on Washington to comply with demands by the Marshall Islands for nuclear justice.
“The Marshall Islands bears the deepest scars of a dark legacy — nuclear contamination, forced displacement, and premeditated human experimentation at the hands of the US government,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Shiva Gounden.
To mark the Marshall Islands’ Remembrance Day today, the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior is flying the republic’s flag at halfmast in solidarity with those who lost their lives and are suffering ongoing trauma as a result of US nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.
On 1 March 1954, the Castle Bravo nuclear bomb was detonated on Bikini Atoll with a blast 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
On Rongelap Atoll, 150 km away, radioactive fallout rained onto the inhabited island, with children mistaking it as snow.
The Rainbow Warrior is sailing to the Marshall Islands where a mission led by Greenpeace will conduct independent scientific research across the country, the results of which will eventually be given to the National Nuclear Commission to support the Marshall Islands government’s ongoing legal proceedings with the US and at the UN.
Still enduring fallout
Marshall Islands communities still endure the physical, economic, and cultural fallout of the nuclear tests — compensation from the US has fallen far short of expectations of the islanders who are yet to receive an apology.
Former Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony deBrum’s “nuclear justice” speech as Right Livelihood Award Winner in 2009. Video: Voices Rising
“To this day, Marshall Islanders continue to grapple with this injustice while standing on the frontlines of the climate crisis — facing yet another wave of displacement and devastation for a catastrophe they did not create,” Gounden said.
“But the Marshallese people and their government are not just survivors — they are warriors for justice, among the most powerful voices demanding bold action, accountability, and reparations on the global stage.
“Those who have inflicted unimaginable harm on the Marshallese must be held to account and made to pay for the devastation they caused.
“Greenpeace stands unwaveringly beside Marshallese communities in their fight for justice. Jimwe im Maron.”
Rainbow Warrior crew members holding the Marshall Islands flag . . . remembering the anniversary of the devastating Castle Bravo nuclear test – 1000 times more powerful than Hiroshima – on 1 March 1954. Image: Greenpeace InternationalChair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission Ariana Tibon-Kilma . . . “the trauma of Bravo continues for the remaining survivors and their descendents.” Image: UN Human Rights Council
Ariana Tibon Kilma, chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission, said that the immediate effects of the Bravo bomb on March 1 were “harrowing”.
“Hours after exposure, many people fell ill — skin peeling off, burning sensation in their eyes, their stomachs were churning in pain. Mothers watched as their children’s hair fell to the ground and blisters devoured their bodies overnight,” she said.
“Without their consent, the United States government enrolled them as ‘test subjects’ in a top secret medical study on the effects of radiation on human beings — a study that continued for 40 years.
“Today on Remembrance Day the trauma of Bravo continues for the remaining survivors and their descendents — this is a legacy not only of suffering, loss, and frustration, but also of strength, unity, and unwavering commitment to justice, truth and accountability.”
The new Rainbow Warrior will arrive in the Marshall Islands early this month.
Alongside the government of the Marshall Islands, Greenpeace will lead an independent scientific mission into the ongoing impacts of the US weapons testing programme.
Travelling across the country, Greenpeace will reaffirm its solidarity with the Marshallese people — now facing further harm and displacement from the climate crisis, and the emerging threat of deep sea mining in the Pacific.
This week on CounterSpin: Just because we might witness the daylight robbery of the social benefits we’ve been paying for and counting on for the entirety of our working lives, and just because Black people are no longer officially allowed to even mentor Black people coming in to fields they’ve been historically excluded from, and just because any program receiving public funding will now have to pretend there are “two genders”—doesn’t mean the environment isn’t still in immediate peril. It is.
But the lawsuits of deep-pocketed fossil fuel corporations against any and everyone who dares challenge their profiteering destruction are really also about our ability as non-billionaires to use our voice to speak out about anything. Not speaking out is increasingly a non-option. So where are we? We’ll learn about a case that is “weaponizing the legal system” against anyone who wants a livable future from Kirk Herbertson, US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the FCC, the Washington Post and Medicaid.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist, BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina, WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region, and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
On a recent Friday afternoon, Marie Richards sat in her living room in northern Michigan. She was having a hard time talking about her job at the U.S. Forest Service in the past tense.
“I absolutely loved my job,” she said. “I didn’t want to go.”
Richards, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, was a tribal relations specialist at the Huron-Manistee National Forests. In mid-February, she found out she was one of the some 3,400 workers who had been targeted for layoffs — an estimated 10 percent of the workforce — as part of the Trump administration’s move to cut costs and shrink the federal government.
Richards watched as some of her colleagues were laid off on February 14 — the so-called Valentine’s Day massacre, when the Trump administration laid off thousands of probationary employees, generally hired within the past two years. She got a call from her supervisor that Saturday informing her that she had been let go, too. The letter she received cited performance issues, even though she, along with others in a similar position, had received a pay raise less than two months earlier.
“None of us deserved this,” Richards said. “We all work hard and we’re dedicated to taking care of the land.”
The U.S. Forest Service, which stewards 193 million acres of public lands from Alaska to Florida, was in trouble even before Trump took office. Chronically understaffed, the service was already under a Biden-era hiring freeze, all the while on the front lines of fighting and recovering from back-to-back climate disasters across the country.
Marie Richards loved her job as a tribal relations specialist for the U.S. National Forest Service. She was one of 3,400 workers targeted for layoffs.
Izzy Ross / Grist
For now, workers with the Forest Service fear this isn’t just the end of the line for their dream careers, but also a turning point for public lands and what they mean in the United States.
“It’s catastrophic,” said Anders Reynolds with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit that litigates environmental issues in the southeastern U.S. “We are losing an entire generation of talent and passion.”
The federal agency does more than ensure that Americans have a place to hunt, hike, fish, or paddle. In the South, forest workers played a key role in helping western North Carolina and other communities recover from impacts of Hurricane Helene. In the West, they’re taking on fire risk mitigation and fighting wildfires. They’re also involved in fisheries management in places like Alaska. Across the country, agency biologists and foresters are busy working to strengthen the over 150 national forests and 20 grasslands it monitors in the face of changing climate.
Increasingly, the service is getting spread thin.
The agency has experienced a steady decrease in staffing over the last decade and the workers that remain are often overworked and underpaid, according to Reynolds.
“That means you’re going to see those campgrounds close, the trails go unmaintained, roads closed, you’re going to feel the effects of wildfire and hurricane recovery work that’s just going to remain undone,” said Reynolds. “Communities are going to struggle.”
The Forest Service has reduced its capacity over many years, causing headaches for staff.
A report from the National Association of Forest Service Retirees showed the agency losing a little over half of staff who supported specialty ecological restoration projects — meaning a whole range of jobs, from botanists to foresters to wildlife and fisheries biologists — between 1992 and 2018. As a result, understaffed Forest Service ranger districts, hemorrhaging staff positions, have consolidated.
Former employees report they saw serious financial and staffing shortages during their time. Bryan Box, a former timber sale administrator with the Forest Service who took some time out of the agency to care for his aging mother, said he found the working conditions unsuitable for a stable, normal life. Box worked for the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin, where he said he made so little he biked around on his off days rather than wasting money on gas. While he was working, multiple national forests around him consolidated, causing a downward spiral on organizational capacity.
“We decommissioned buildings, we decommissioned the infrastructure that we had back in the ‘80s and ‘90s when we had this huge staff,” Box said. “And that put us into a position where we couldn’t hire seasonal employees anymore because we didn’t have housing for them. In rural northern Wisconsin, you know, just there’s not any housing available really. I think at one point our firefighters were all living above a bar.”
Other foresters he knew failed to make rent and were evicted or lived itinerantly, couch-surfing, for the love of the work they did. For Box, the financial realities became untenable. So, too, had the restrictions on his work, which grew as budgets failed to grow.
Box’s program was expensive to run and required travel, often to reduce fire fuels by harvesting timber after an emergency. The program he worked for, Box said, ended up needing to reduce costs by cutting travel funds and ending overtime, making it difficult for him to do his job well.
Much of their work involves emergency response, not only fighting fires but also picking up the pieces after conflagrations and hurricanes leave potentially thousands of acres of dead timber.
Matthew Brossard works as the current business representative and organizer for the National Federation of Federal Employees, and was formerly the general vice president for the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Forest Service Council, which represents around 18,000 employees of the Forest Service, 6,000 of whom are probationary, meaning they have either recently been hired or moved to a new position within the agency. Typically, probation — a part of every federal hiring process — is one or two years. Probationary employees were primarily targeted in the layoffs, meaning a generation of hires is potentially interrupted. Brossard said even though the administration maintains they have not fired positions essential to public safety, there’s more to fighting fires than just the firefighters. Support and logistical personnel are essential. “Extra dispatchers, security to close off roads, food unit leaders, base camp managers, all these very important, 100 percent-needed positions. Those people are getting terminated right now,” Brossard said.
In another instance recounted by Brossard, someone on assignment to help with long-term hurricane recovery in Louisiana was fired while he was there. The employee lived in Oregon and reported having no financial support for his trip home.
The loss of a seasonal workforce will also be felt, Brossard added. “Without that influx of seasonal workforce, it puts a huge amount of work onto the permanent staff if they’re still employed to do all the work,” he said, meaning not only trailwork and campground maintenance, but also research and other essential work. “So the work that in the summer that should have been done by 15 or 20 people are now going to be done by five or six.”
As workers continue to struggle with the fallout of their abrupt firings, their union is jumping in to protect them, Brossard said. The NFFE-FSC has joined in multiple lawsuits to challenge the firings, including one filed February 12, provided to Grist, that aims to put a stop to the firings and reverse the ones that have already happened, on grounds that the terminations are unlawful. A decision on the lawsuit is still to come, with more potential legal action following, Brossard said.
“You’re not reducing, you know, the stereotypical bureaucrats,” Brossard said. “You’re reducing the boots on the ground that are going out and doing work.”
In an emailed statement to Grist, a spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the new agricultural secretary, Brooke Rollins, supported Trump’s directive to cut spending and inefficiencies while strengthening the department’s services. “As part of this effort, USDA has made the difficult decision to release about 2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees from the Forest Service. To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters.”
The statement continued, “Released employees were probationary in status, many of whom were compensated by temporary IRA funding. It’s unfortunate that the Biden administration hired thousands of people with no plan in place to pay them long term. Secretary Rollins is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.”
Back in northern Michigan, Marie Richards, the former tribal relations specialist, crunched down the snowy driveway, pointing toward the Huron-Manistee National Forests where she worked. It spans nearly 1 million acres and covers land tribal nations ceded in two treaties, which the federal government has a responsibility to keep in trust.
Richards said workers like her are also a vital part of pushing the federal government to meet its trust responsibility to tribal nations. She helped connect the region’s federally recognized tribes with officials and staff at the forest service, set up meetings, and ensured work was being carried out responsibly.
“It’s not just the damage to that trust relationship with the Forest Service,” said Richards, who left her job as a repatriation and historic preservation specialist for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians to work at the agency. “It’s across the board for so many things, and tribes trying to work through that freeze, and making people understand that this isn’t DEI — that this is governmental affairs.”
Richards doesn’t know what’s next; she wants to finish her dissertation (about the impact of the lumber industry on traditional cultural landscapes and Anishinaabe bands and communities) and continue her work.
“It still really hurts that this dream of mine is kind of shattered, and we’ll see, and find a new dream,” she said. “But ultimately, my career, my livelihood, is in tribal relations for our heritage and I will find a home somewhere.”
Two weeks ago, we wrote about the EXPLORE Act — an expansive piece of legislation aimed at expanding and improving outdoor access, which passed Congress unanimously in 2024. What the EXPLORE Act’s success seemed to show was that a love of nature transcends party lines, even in our current climate where just about everything feels politicized. That can translate into climate solutions everybody can get behind. In today’s newsletter, we’ll look at this on a community level, exploring how investing in neighborhood parks has transformed climate resilience in some at-risk areas — just one example of how a focus on parks, green spaces, and public amenities can lead to popular climate action. In a few weeks, we’ll take it all the way down to the personal level, with a look at how to proactively cultivate this connection to nature in (or rather, outside of) your own home.
“Climate change has become politically divisive,” Mike Bybee, senior director of federal relations at the Trust for Public Land, told me when we spoke a few weeks ago. “What’s not divisive are those impacts of things like flooding and fires and drought and heat.” Everyone agrees that the weather is changing, Bybee said — they can see that with their own eyes, in their own communities, whether it’s stronger and more frequent storms, floods, heat, or wildfires.
And, he said, the popularity of creating and preserving parks and outdoor spaces creates an opening for doing something about it. In the 2024 election, state and local ballot initiatives passed across the country, in both red and blue states, that supported building parks or restoring natural areas. In some cases, those initiatives even specifically mentioned climate resilience. “The work of protecting open space, creating parks and playgrounds that provide stormwater mitigation and rainwater runoff in the face of these storms — everyone agrees on that,” Bybee said.
Bybee and others at Trust for Public Land see that message in the success of these ballot measures, as well as national legislation like the EXPLORE Act and even the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, which included funding for park and restoration projects with a climate resilience aspect to them.
You might not think of parks as connected to mitigating the risks of extreme weather. Of course, green spaces have a broad positive effect when it comes to climate: Plant life sequesters carbon, helps clean the air, and reduces the urban heat island effect.
But parks can contribute to much more than that when they’re built as green infrastructure with climate resilience in mind. Green infrastructure is a general term for systems that either use or mimic nature to maximize natural benefits and minimize the effects of things like flooding, erosion, and pollution. It can include rain gardens, green roofs, living shorelines — even urban street trees may be considered part of green infrastructure.
Public parks, from large nature preserves down to neighborhood playgrounds, can include many different types of green infrastructure in their designs, tailored to the unique needs of specific locations and communities.
In the city of Atlanta, that has had a lot to do with water. In one example, a new park helped to make the city more drought resilient — Shirley Clarke Franklin Park, Atlanta’s largest green space, is a former quarry that was transformed into a 35-acre reservoir, shoring up the city’s water supply. In other areas, it’s an overabundance of water that’s the problem.
Vine City, a historically Black neighborhood in Atlanta, has long had problems with flooding. In 2002, heavy rains brought a flood combining stormwater and sewage that was so severe, it rendered 60 homes unlivable.
“There were houses where the first floor was completely submerged under the water,” said George Dusenbury, who at the time was leading the district office for Georgia Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. “People were out there in boats.”
Faced with the near certainty of continued flooding in the area, the city offered to purchase the most damaged homes, and residents accepted the deal to relocate. The city demolished those homes, and the 16-acre parcel of land — about seven city blocks — sat vacant for several years. “In the meantime, the community around the park continued to flood. We did not solve the problem,” Dusenbury said.
And residents wanted to see something done with the space that would benefit the surrounding community. “If you look at five city blocks of grass, people started saying, ‘We need a park here,’” Dusenbury recalled. In 2010, an Atlanta organization called Park Pride put forth a “green infrastructure vision” for the watershed that includes Vine City and two adjacent neighborhoods, informed by a yearlong public outreach process. The vision was to address recurring flooding in the area through a series of connected green spaces, and the empty lot — what would later become Rodney Cook Sr. Park — was one of them.
“I wouldn’t refer to it as a common city planning activity, but fortunately some really innovative leaders in the city and nonprofits saw the value in that,” said Jay Wozniak, a landscape architect and director of Trust for Public Land’s urban parks program in Georgia, who became the project manager for the site.
In 2016, the city of Atlanta brought in the Trust for Public Land to help raise funds for, design, and build a park on the vacant Vine City lot that would not only provide a recreation space for the community, but also mitigate its flooding. The organization, along with local partners and residents, broke ground a year later.
Designed in collaboration with the community, Rodney Cook Sr. Park features walking trails and bridges, a playground, a splash pad, climbing boulders, restrooms, and a public performance space. But what’s underneath is just as vital.
“When I talk about the park, I talk about it being like a layer cake — and the bottom layer is this green infrastructure,” said Dusenbury, who is now the Trust for Public Land’s Georgia state director. The core of that green infrastructure is a pond with an adjoining field, which sits at the park’s lowest point — a low point for the entire Vine City neighborhood — and doubles as a stormwater retention basin, able to hold around 9 million gallons of water and then slowly release it through specially engineered soil that helps to filter out pollutants as the water drains after a heavy rain.
Cook Park opened in 2021, and in recent years it has faced down extreme weather events.
“We got two 100-year floods in two years,” Dusenbury said.
The second of those floods was caused by Hurricane Helene, the deadly Category 4 storm that brought destruction across its path from Florida to Tennessee, and broke a record for rainfall in Atlanta. When those rains came, Cook Park went underwater — exactly as it was designed to.
Top to bottom: Cook Park on September 27, 2024, the day after Hurricane Helene arrived in Georgia, and the park three days later, on September 30. Jay Wozniak
“It was supposed to flood,” Dusenbury said. “Those walkways were supposed to be underwater. We have trees and vegetation that are planted to be flooded. We even have mulch that stays in place better when it gets flooded.” Within just a few days, the park had returned to its unsubmerged state, as the collected water slowly seeped through the specially engineered soil and made its way into the city’s stormwater system. Although it’s difficult to pinpoint just how much the park reduced flooding in the surrounding area during a specific event like this, local reports noted that there was very little flooding in the park’s immediate vicinity.
In another part of the city, Historic Fourth Ward Park, which was completed in 2012, boasts a 2-acre lake that also doubles as a stormwater retention basin. It, too, helped to protect surrounding communities from the worst impacts of Helene.
Atlanta isn’t alone in these types of efforts. Trust for Public Land integrates green infrastructure into almost all of its park projects, Dusenbury said, and other organizations and governments are doing the same. The city of Seattle, no stranger to rain, has considered green infrastructure a critical part of its stormwater management plans for over a decade, installing rain gardens in parks and medians and offering rebates for homeowners to put them in their yards. Boston, which appointed its first director of green infrastructure in 2022, recently broke ground on a park renovation project that will include both flood-resilient infrastructure as well as shade trees and water features that will help protect residents from the impacts of extreme heat.
“That being said, I still think we’re at the early stages of this becoming an overall best practice,” Dusenbury added.
One thing he would like more cities to recognize is that green infrastructure, in addition to being widely desirable, can also be incredibly cost-effective. “Too often, cities default to what they know, which is building a big pipe or building a cistern underground,” he said. Those types of targeted solutions can be costly — and they don’t offer the same benefits to the community that green spaces do. Dusenbury pointed to Historic Fourth Ward Park as an example: “The estimated cost of building the park was about $16 million. And the estimated cost of building a giant underground pipe to hold all the water and prevent the flooding was more than $20 million,” he said. The city was able to actually save money by choosing green infrastructure. “And then it has this wonderful 16-acre amenity that people can use.”
Read: about Babcock Ranch, a town in Florida that was designed with hurricane resilience in mind — including a large area of preserved wetland — and housed evacuees after Hurricanes Helene and Milton (The New York Times)
An example of green infrastructure in a totally different setting — the San Diego Bay Native Oyster Living Shoreline Project is an effort to restore oyster reefs to a bay where they once flourished, using “reef balls” made out of a mixture of cement, rock, and oyster shells. The artificial reef, shown below, aims to reproduce a habitat that should act as a natural buffer against increasingly powerful waves that cause coastal erosion. The project is an alternative to conventional forms of “gray infrastructure,” like seawalls, that have in many cases exacerbated problems of habitat loss and erosion.
The city of Alto Hospicio, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is one of the driest places on Earth. And yet its population of 140,000 continues to balloon, putting mounting pressure on nearby aquifers that haven’t been recharged by rain in 10,000 years. But Alto Hospicio, like so many other coastal cities, is rich in an untapped water resource: fog.
New research finds that by deploying fog collectors — fine mesh stretched between two poles — in the mountains around Alto Hospicio, the city could harvest an average of 2.5 liters of water per square meter of netting each day. Large fog collectors cost between $1,000 and $4,500 and measure 40 square meters, so just one placed near Alto Hospicio could grab 36,500 liters of water a year without using any electricity, according to a paper published on Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.
By placing the collectors above town — where the altitude is ideal for exploiting the region’s predictable band of fog — water would flow downhill in pipelines by the power of gravity. So that initial investment for collectors would keep paying liquid dividends year after year. “If you’re pumping water from the underground, you will need a lot of energy,” said Virginia Carter Gamberini, a geographer and assistant professor at Chile’s Universidad Mayor and co-lead author of the paper. “From that perspective, it’s a very cheap technology.”
A view of Alto Hospicio, Chile.
Virginia Carter Gamberini
It’s a simple idea that’s already in use around the world. Fog is just a cloud that touches the ground. Like a puffy cloud higher in the atmosphere, it teems with tiny water droplets that gather in the mesh of a fog collector, dripping into a trough that runs into a tank. Communities across South America, Africa, and Asia have been deploying these collectors, though on very small scales compared to other methods like pumping groundwater.
So why haven’t cities expanded their use? For one, if a region gets rain, that volume of water is much higher than what can be extracted from fog, and communities can store that rainfall in reservoirs. Fog collection also requires constant attention, as the devices can break in fierce winds, requiring repairs.
The economics are tricky, too. Water remains very cheap in places with modern infrastructure, disincentivizing fog collection, said Daniel Fernandez, an environmental scientist at California State University, Monterey Bay who studies the technology but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “They’re going to catch a few gallons, if you’re lucky, in a day,” said Fernandez, who also founded a company that installs collectors. “That’s kind of cool to get that much from fog. But how much is that going to cost you to turn on your tap and get that much?”
A fog collector at work near the port city of Antofagasta, Chile.
Daniel Fernandez
The investment is more enticing where water is scarcer and therefore more expensive, Fernandez said. As climate change makes droughts more intense, communities struggling to get enough water might find the economics make sense. Supplementing aquifers, reservoirs, and other established sources with fog would help a region diversify its water system, in case one of them dries up or gets contaminated. Alto Hospicio can’t just rely on its aquifers, since they’re no longer being replenished by rain. “Without thinking outside the box, including fog harvesting, that solution places a limit on how long human habitation can exist there,” said Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn’t involved in the new paper.
Dense cities, though, may struggle to deploy fog collectors compared to the countryside. “The wind load on a fog collector is like that on the sail of a sailing ship,” said Robert S. Schemenauer, executive director of FogQuest, a Canadian nonprofit that advises on collection projects. “It has to be very strongly anchored. Therefore, placing it on the building could lead to building damage or material ending up on the street below.”
Beyond drinking water, using the fog for hydroponic farming could help Alto Hospicio and other parched communities grow their own food. Gamberini is already doing additional research elsewhere in the Atacama to expand this kind of farming, growing tomatoes, lettuce, and other crops with fog water and bountiful desert sunlight.
Even in the United States, where water is comparatively cheap, gardeners are experimenting with fog collectors. Peter Weiss, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been installing them in Pacifica, just south of San Francisco. In the summertime, fog can provide enough water to sustain a home’s established plants without turning on the hose.
For Weiss’ next project, he wants to bring fog collection to California’s vineyards. “That could be a way to make it more sustainable, less water intensive,” he said. “At first I hated fog because it’s so dreary. But then I started collecting it, and I loved it.”
A New Zealand-based community education provider, Dark Times Academy, has had a US Embassy grant to deliver a course teaching Pacific Islands journalists about disinformation terminated after the new Trump administration took office.
The new US administration requested a list of course participants and to review the programme material amid controversy over a “freeze” on federal aid policies.
The course presentation team refused and the contract was terminated by “mutual agreement” — but the eight-week Pacific workshop is going ahead anyway from next week.
Dark Times Academy’s co-founder Mandy Henk . . . “A Bit Sus”, an evidence-based peer-reviewed series of classes on disinfiormation for Pacific media. Image: Newsroom
“As far as I can tell, the current foreign policy priorities of the US government seem to involve terrorising the people of Gaza, annexing Canada, invading Greenland, and bullying Panama,” said Dark Times Academy co-founder Mandy Henk.
“We felt confident that a review of our materials would not find them to be aligned with those priorities.”
The course, called “A Bit Sus”, is an evidence-based peer-reviewed series of classes that teach key professions the skills needed to identify and counter disinformation and misinformation in their particular field.
The classes focus on “prebunking”, lateral reading, and how technology, including generative AI, influences disinformation.
Awarded competitive funds Dark Times Academy was originally awarded the funds to run the programme through a public competitive grant offered by the US Embassy in New Zealand in 2023 under the previous US administration.
The US Embassy grant was focused on strengthening the capacity of Pacific media to identify and counter disinformation. While funded by the US, the course was to be a completely independent programme overseen by Dark Times Academy and its academic consultants.
Co-founder Henk was preparing to deliver the education programme to a group of Pacific Island journalists and media professionals, but received a request from the US Embassy in New Zealand to review the course materials to “ensure they are in line with US foreign policy priorities”.
Henk said she and the other course presenters refused to allow US government officials to review the course material for this purpose.
She said the US Embassy had also requested a “list of registered participants for the online classes,” which Dark Times Academy also declined to provide as compliance would have violated the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.
Henk said the refusal to provide the course materials for review led immediately to further discussions with the US Embassy in New Zealand that ultimately resulted in the termination of the grant “by mutual agreement”.
However, she said Dark Times Academy would still go ahead with running the course for the Pacific Island journalists who had signed up so far, starting on February 26.
Continuing the programme
“The Dark Times Academy team fully intends to continue to bring the ‘A Bit Sus’ programme and other classes to the Pacific region and New Zealand, even without the support of the US government,” Henk said.
“As noted when we first announced this course, the Pacific Islands have experienced accelerated growth in digital connectivity over the past few years thanks to new submarine cable networks and satellite technology.
“Alongside this, the region has also seen a surge in harmful rumours and disinformation that is increasingly disrupting the ability to share accurate and truthful information across Pacific communities.
“This course will help participants from the media recognise common tactics used by disinformation agents and support them to deploy proven educational and communications techniques.
“By taking a skills-based approach to countering disinformation, our programme can help to spread the techniques needed to mitigate the risks posed by digital technologies,” Henk said.
Especially valuable for journalists
Dark Times Academy co-founder Byron Clark said the course would be especially valuable for journalists in the Pacific region given the recent shifts in global politics and the current state of the planet.
Dark Times Academy co-founder and author Byron Clark . . . “We saw the devastating impacts of disinformation in the Pacific region during the measles outbreak in Samoa.” Image: APR
“We saw the devastating impacts of disinformation in the Pacific region during the measles outbreak in Samoa, for example,” said Clark, author of the best-selling book Fear: New Zealand’s Underworld of Hostile Extremists.
“With Pacific Island states bearing the brunt of climate change, as well as being caught between a geopolitical stoush between China and the West, a course like this one is timely.”
Henk said the “A Bit Sus” programme used a “high-touch teaching model” that combined the current best evidence on how to counter disinformation with a “learner-focused pedagogy that combines discussion, activities, and a project”.
Past classes led to the creation of the New Zealand version of the “Euphorigen Investigation” escape room, a board game, and a card game.
These materials remain in use across New Zealand schools and community learning centres.
Gabriel Filippelli got the form letter from the U.S. State Department on a Monday morning two and a half weeks ago. Since October, Filippelli has been teaching students and faculty in Pakistan how to use air quality devices to monitor air pollution exacerbated by rising temperatures — a consequence of climate change. The letter from the State Department, which had awarded the $300,000 underpinning the collaboration, said the funding was suspended, effective immediately. The project, it said, “no longer effectuates the priorities of the agency.”
Since President Donald Trump took office on January 20, his administration has sought to pause, eliminate, and claw back federal funding for research across the federal government.
Filippelli, the executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University, is a poster boy for the on-the-ground effects of these new policies. One of his research proposals at the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, the federal agency that funds and executes medical research, is frozen. Another proposal and four grants at the National Science Foundation, the country’s non-medical science and engineering research agency, are on pause. The institute he directs relies on a $5 million grant from the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the law Democrats passed in 2022 that directs hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investments to climate and environmental justice projects. The institute has been pulling from that money, which was authorized by Congress, since 2023 — but Filippelli is worried that Trump will try to take the remaining balance away.
Practically overnight, the steady stream of funding that allows Filippelli to conduct research, collaborate with colleagues, pay graduate students, and keep his institute running has become an endangered resource. He had to cancel upcoming trips to Pakistan, and reports experiencing confusion and doubt — unusual sensations for a veteran researcher long used to navigating the intricacies of the federal funding ecosystem.
Filippelli is not alone. Most researchers working in this country benefit from the roughly $200 billion the government makes available annually via various agencies and initiatives for research and development at some point in their careers. Hundreds of thousands of scientists, and their institutions by association, are sustained by this funding, which is responsible for some of humanity’s biggest scientific breakthroughs: weather forecasting technology, the flu vaccine, the Human Genome Project, the first nuclear reactor, the Internet, and GPS.
But that funding, which comprises a tiny fraction of total federal spending, is now in jeopardy, as Trump undertakes what will likely go down as one of the most abrupt and profound shifts in federal research and development policy in American history. In its first few weeks, the Trump administration sought to freeze all federal grants and loans — and has defied judges who have ordered the executive branch to release the funding. Trump’s staff also issued a list of phrases, including the words “underrepresented,” “socioeconomic,” and “community,” that will cause a federal research grant at the National Science Foundation to get flagged for further review. The president summarily dismissed government watchdogs responsible for making sure federal dollars get to where they’re supposed to go. The administration has also offered buyouts to more than 2 million federal employees, many of whom are tasked with distributing federal funding for research.
If these changes become permanent, they will have far-reaching consequences for the country’s understanding of and response to climate change for years, experts told Grist. “What it looks like to me is an absolute full-on brakes moment for any further climate advances at least in the short term,” Filippelli said. “But I think what people don’t fully recognize is that if you disrupt funding on a wide scale, even for a short time, the hangover effect lasts for a long time.”
Researchers funded by the National Science Foundation are studying melting glaciers and the long-term ramifications in Greenland and beyond. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Before 2022, the federal government spent less than $15 billion annually on all of its climate change programs, including climate research and development initiatives. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate spending bill in U.S. history, marked the beginning of a new era. Most of the roughly $370 billion in climate-focused spending in that legislation was earmarked for the deployment of clean energy and technologies, infrastructure development, and incentives for consumers to adopt climate-friendly technologies.
But the law also authorized hundreds of millions for climate research, including $200 million for oceanic and atmospheric research and $300 million to the Department of Agriculture for greenhouse gas emissions research programs — the pot of funding that sustains Filippelli’s institute. This money is already funding projects that will help better predict future climate-related flooding, more accurately forecast extreme weather events, and develop techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere. In his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order ordering agencies to pause the disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, and his administration has followed through on halting payments related to the law.
Researchers who receive grants from NIH also receive a certain amount of money that goes toward supporting the universities they work in. These are called “indirect costs.” A researcher who receives a $1 million grant from NIH to study the effects of rising temperatures on seasonal allergies, for example, might also get awarded $300,000 on top of that that goes to their university to cover the costs of running laboratories, paying administrative staff, leasing buildings, and buying equipment. In this way, the federal government doesn’t just fund research — it funds the infrastructure that makes that research possible.
And that infrastructure helps drive the U.S. economy. Writ large, NIH investments support jobs and millions of dollars in economic activity in all 50 U.S. states, comprising an even more substantial portion of the economy in states like California, Texas, New York, and Massachusetts, which get billions of dollars from the agency. Last week, NIH announced that it would be capping indirect costs across the board at 15 percent. For the federal government, which spends more than $6 trillion annually, taking aim at the roughly $9 billion it spends annually on these indirect research costs is somewhat akin to looking for nickels in a couch. But the new policy could have profound consequences for American research and medical universities that depend on that funding to operate and serve communities.
“For a large university, this creates a sudden and catastrophic shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars against already budgeted funds,” said Carl T. Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, in a post on Bluesky. “It is difficult to overstate what a catastrophe this will be for the U.S. research and education systems.”
Sarah Hengel, an assistant professor in the biology department at Tufts University, which has an indirect cost rate of upward of 50 percent, researches how chemicals in the environment affect female reproductive health. She has three doctoral students whose salaries are paid for by federal funding. “These NIH grants and those costs enable our students to be trained,” she said. “We just want to do research.”
Trump’s efforts to drain federal funding out of research institutions are already encountering legal roadblocks and pushback from researchers who say they’re not going down without a fight. On Monday, 22 states sued the Trump administration over its indirect costs policy and successfully requested that a federal judge block the NIH from implementing its new cap. For the time being, Hengel said, Tufts is still receiving its grant funding from NIH, but she said that the chaos created by that policy change and the other spending freezes and purges occurring throughout the federal government are fueling panic and confusion. That, too, she said, takes a toll on science.
An activist protests against Trump’s plan to stop most federal grants and loans during a rally near the White House in late January. Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
“These are clear attempts to undermine the scientific community,” said Richard Ostfeld, a senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who researches the effects of climate change on tick-borne illnesses. “Somehow science and scientists, information and facts, are perceived as the enemy. The casualties of all this, in addition to the scientists, are the American people.”
Meanwhile, on January 29, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to release billions of dollars in federal grants it had frozen, noting the obvious fact that the executive branch doesn’t have the constitutional authority to revoke funding approved by Congress. The administration has refused to comply for weeks, openly disobeying that judicial mandate,violating a number of other federal statutes, and raising the specter of a constitutional crisis.
On Wednesday, NIH leadership issued an internal memorandum ordering staff to unfreeze grants across the agency, citing the federal judge’s order. Crucially, the memo said that the grants do not have to adhere to the indirect cost cap of 15 percent. NIH will “effectuate the administration’s goals over time,” the memo said, a warning to researchers that more changes are coming. Federal funding for research from other agencies across the government remains in limbo.
A few days after Filippelli got the letter from the State Department telling him that his project in Pakistan was frozen, he got a message from the U.S. embassy in Pakistan telling him that it would reinstate his award on the condition that he remove the word “underrepresented” from the grant.
“One can wonder whether this is just simply a case of we keep doing exactly what we’re doing but screen through our own proposals to make sure that we don’t use those oh-so-offensive terms such as ‘diversity’ and ‘equity,’” he said. “I think we can do all the same stuff without saying those words, but what really pushes my buttons and makes me want to fight back is why should we? How far do you bend until you’re complicit in the whole thing?”
The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the move by the small Pacific nation to sign a strategic partnership with China in Beijing this week.
It is the latest in a string of island nations that have signalled a closer relationship with China, something that rattles nerves and sabres in Wellington and Canberra.
The Chinese have politely told the Kiwis to back off. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that China and the Cook Islands have had diplomatic relations since 1997 which “should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party”.
“New Zealand is rightly furious about it,” a TVNZ Pacific affairs writer editorialised to the nation. The deal and the lack of prior consultation was described by various journalists as “damaging”, “of significant concern”, “trouble in paradise”, an act by a “renegade government”.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters, not without cause, railed at what he saw as the Cook Islands government going against long-standing agreements to consult over defence and security issues.
“Should New Zealand invade the Cook islands?” . . . New Zealand Herald columnist Matthew Hooton’s view in an “oxygen-starved media environment” amid rattled nerves. Image: New Zealand Herald screenshot APR
‘Clearly about secession’
Matthew Hooton, who penned the article in The Herald, is a major commentator on various platforms.
“Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown’s dealings with China are clearly about secession from the realm of New Zealand,” Hooton said without substantiation but with considerable colonial hauteur.
“His illegal moves cannot stand. It would be a relatively straightforward military operation for our SAS to secure all key government buildings in the Cook Islands’ capital, Avarua.”
This could be written off as the hyperventilating screeching of someone trying to drum up readers but he was given a major platform to do so and New Zealanders live in an oxygen-starved media environment where alternative analysis is hard to find.
The Cook Islands, with one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zones in the world — a whopping 2 million sq km — is considered part of New Zealand’s backyard, albeit over 3000 km to the northeast. The deal with China is focused on economics not security issues, according to Cooks Prime Minister Mark Brown.
Deep sea mining may be on the list of projects as well as trade cooperation, climate, tourism, and infrastructure.
The Cook Islands seafloor is believed to have billions of tons of polymetallic nodules of cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese, something that has even caught the attention of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Various players have their eyes on it.
Glen Johnson, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, reported last year:
“Environmentalists have raised major concerns, particularly over the destruction of deep-sea habitats and the vast, choking sediment plumes that excavation would produce.”
All will be revealed
Even Cook Island’s citizens have not been consulted on the details of the deal, including deep sea mining. Clearly, this should not be the case. All will be revealed shortly.
New Zealand and the Cook Islands have had formal relations since 1901 when the British “transferred” the islands to New Zealand. Cook Islanders have a curious status: they hold New Zealand passports but are recognised as their own country. The US government went a step further on September 25, 2023. President Joe Biden said:
“Today I am proud to announce that the United States recognises the Cook Islands as a sovereign and independent state and will establish diplomatic relations between our two nations.”
A move to create their own passports was undermined by New Zealand officials who successfully stymied the plan.
New Zealand has taken an increasingly hostile stance vis-a-vis China, with PM Luxon describing the country as a “strategic competitor” while at the same time depending on China as our biggest trading partner. The government and a compliant mainstream media sing as one choir when it comes to China: it is seen as a threat, a looming pretender to be South Pacific hegemon, replacing the flip-flopping, increasingly incoherent USA.
Climate change looms large for island nations. Much of the Cooks’ tourism infrastructure is vulnerable to coastal inundation and precious reefs are being destroyed by heating sea temperatures.
“One thing that New Zealand has got to get its head round is the fact that the Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord,” Dr Robert Patman, professor of international relations at Otago University, says. “And this is a big deal for most Pacific Island states — and that means that the Cook Islands nation may well be looking for greater assistance elsewhere.”
Diplomatic spat with global coverage
The story of the diplomatic spat has been covered in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. Eyebrows are rising as yet again New Zealand, a close ally of Israel and a participant in the US Operation Prosperity Guardian to lift the Houthi Red Sea blockade of Israel, shows its Western mindset.
Matthew Hooton’s article is the kind of colonialist fantasy masquerading as geopolitical analysis that damages New Zealand’s reputation as a friend to the smaller nations of our region.
Yes, the Chinese have an interest in our neck of the woods — China is second only to Australia in supplying much-needed development assistance to the region.
It is sound policy not insurrection for small nations to diversify economic partnerships and secure development opportunities for their people. That said, serious questions should be posed and deserve to be answered.
Geopolitical analyst Dr Geoffrey Miller made a useful contribution to the debate saying there was potential for all three parties to work together:
“There is no reason why New Zealand can’t get together with China and the Cook Islands and develop some projects together,” Dr Miller says. “Pacific states are the winners here because there is a lot of competition for them”.
I think New Zealand and Australia could combine more effectively with a host of South Pacific island nations and form a more effective regional voice with which to engage with the wider world and collectively resist efforts by the US and China to turn the region into a theatre of competition.
We throw the toys out
We throw the toys out of the cot when the Cooks don’t consult with us but shrug when Pasifika elders like former Tuvalu PM Enele Sopoaga call us out for ignoring them.
In Wellington last year, I heard him challenge the bigger powers, particularly Australia and New Zealand, to remember that the existential threat faced by Pacific nations comes first from climate change. He also reminded New Zealanders of the commitment to keeping the South Pacific nuclear-free.
To succeed, a “Pacific for the peoples of the Pacific” approach would suggest our ministries of foreign affairs should halt their drift to being little more than branch offices of the Pentagon and that our governments should not sign up to US Great Power competition with China.
Ditching the misguided anti-China AUKUS project would be a good start.
Friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
A sudden surge in tree planting across New Orleans has come to an even more sudden halt.
When President Donald Trump issued a series of orders that froze billions of dollars in federal climate funding late last month, he also slammed the brakes on the most ambitious replanting initiative in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina wiped out more than 200,000 trees across the city. The blocked funding could also spell the end of the nonprofit group spearheading the restoration of New Orleans’ tree canopy, which has suffered an almost 30 percent decrease over the past 20 years.
“Overnight, our operations were paralyzed,” said Susannah Burley, executive director of Sustaining Our Urban Landscape, also known as SOUL Nola. “We can’t afford to wait this out. We only have enough funding to keep operating until mid-April.”
Former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, earmarked $1.5 billion for urban and community-based forestry initiatives across the nation, an amount the U.S. Forest Service called an “historic level of investment.” The money was directed to hundreds of nonprofits, schools and city and state governments. A large share of the funding is now in doubt.
The IRA had budgeted $3.5 million to support a sharp rise in SOUL’s city-wide planting efforts, amounting to 80 percent of the group’s budget over the next five years. SOUL had been ramping up operations when Trump’s orders ground everything to a halt.
SOUL was adding staff, increasing the number of volunteer planting events and had set a goal of nearly doubling its output to about 3,000 trees per year. The IRA funding was passing to SOUL via the Arbor Day Foundation, which allocated $1 million, and the New Orleans Office of Resilience and Sustainability, which planned to give SOUL $2.5 million to help the city meet climate action goals that rely heavily on trees and other carbon offsets to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Federal judges have in recent days ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze the IRA and other federal funding. But the administration is digging in, refusing to release the pent-up funds and triggering what many legal experts are calling a constitutional crisis.
Trump has derided the IRA, which was approved by Congress in late 2022, as a “green new scam” that the country can ill afford. His decision to put an immediate hold on disbursements has thrown many nonprofits into crisis. Some groups are worried about having to lay off staff, cancel contracts, delay projects or close down entirely.
Burley had to nix a $20,000 order with a North Shore tree farm and contract with a delivery company. She also had to take back a job offer and put a hold on a new position she planned to advertise in the coming weeks. SOUL’s four remaining staff jobs are on shaky ground.
“It took me eight years to build the team we have, and they’re impeccable at what they do,” Burley said. “If I lost them because I had to put them on furlough, I can’t start over. I’m too old, too tired. I don’t have the energy or the flexibility in my life to rebuild SOUL.”
New Orleans’ lack of trees makes the city less able to cope with heavier rainfall, rising temperatures and other challenges from climate change. Trees offer shade, reducing ambient air temperatures and air conditioning costs. They also lower flood risk by absorbing water and altering the soil, making it more spongy. That’s crucial for a city shaped like a bowl, where more than half its area sits below sea level.
The monumental task of replanting the city has fallen largely on nonprofits like SOUL and the NOLA Tree Project. The groups, which depend on volunteer labor and donations, have together planted more than 80,000 trees since Katrina, but the city’s tree canopy isn’t nearly what it was before 2005 and doesn’t come close to comparable cities.
“New Orleans has one of the lowest tree canopy coverage rates in the country,” said Chris Potter, a former NASA scientist who uses satellite imagery to study urban development. “It’s a special case because of all the floods and hurricanes and particularly the Katrina impact.”
New Orleans’ tree coverage ranked last among 10 comparable cities in the South, according to a report SOUL produced for the city in 2022. While most of the cities, including Atlanta, Memphis, Tenn. and Jacksonville, Fla., had tree coverage of more than 30 percent, New Orleans’ coverage was only 18 percent.
Remove two unusually large wooded areas in New Orleans — City Park and Bayou Sauvage Urban National Wildlife Refuge — and the coverage rate falls to about 10 percent. The park and Bayou Sauvage, one of the country’s largest urban refuges, do little to reduce heat and flooding in other parts of the city, especially the many neighborhoods that were subjected to discriminatory, race-based housing practices, according to Burley.
“The neighborhoods that were historically redlined are often more flood-prone, hotter and they have less trees,” she said.
SOUL has focused most of its efforts on low-income neighborhoods. The group had planned to finish planting the Lower 9th Ward and much of Gentilly, and were getting ready for a big push in Hollygrove. All three areas are majority Black and have large numbers of low-income residents. The Lower 9th, for instance, is 90 percent Black and has an average household income of $49,000 — less than half the U.S. average, according to the Data Center.
Alex Dunn, president of the Algiers Riverview Association, credited SOUL with “completely transforming the canopy and aesthetics” of his neighborhood.
“They do this work more efficiently and cost-effectively than the city or its contractors ever could,” he said. “Losing SOUL would be a major setback for our city.”
Some supporters have offered donations, but Burley said the group’s needs are likely beyond the scope of New Orleans alone.
“We have only one Fortune 500 company and Entergy already gives to us,” she said of the New Orleans-based power company.
Instead, SOUL has urged supporters to lobby Louisiana’s mostly Republican congressional delegation and Gov. Jeff Landry, who could, in turn, push the Trump administration to restore IRA funding.
Burley knows it was risky to tie so much of SOUL’s growth to one federal source.
“I put all our eggs in one basket, and that’s never wise,” she said. “But we’ve never had the chance to have funding at that level before. We had to try because we could have done so much good with it.”
Rats are in many ways better adapted to cities than the humans that built them. While urbanites struggle with crowds, sparse parking spaces, and their upstairs neighbors stomping around at 4 a.m., rats are living their best lives. Huddled safely underground, they pop up at night to chew through heaps of food waste in dumpsters and hot dogs left on stoops.
Now scientists have found yet another gnawing advantage for rats. A study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances found that as temperatures climb in cities, rat populations are growing, even as city dwellers suffer. “In cities that have experienced the fastest warming temperatures, they tended to have faster increases in their rat numbers as well,” said Jonathan Richardson, an urban ecologist at the University of Richmond and lead author of the paper. “Females will reach sexual maturity faster. They’re able to breed more, and typically their litters are larger at warmer temperatures in the lab.”
The analysis used public complaints about rats and inspection records from 16 cities between 2007 and 2024, which collectively served as a proxy for rat populations. In 11 of those cities, rat numbers surged during that period. The winner of the Most Rats Gained award goes to Washington, D.C., with a 390 percent increase according to the city’s last decade of data, followed by San Francisco (300 percent), Toronto (186 percent), and New York City (162 percent). Meanwhile, a few cities actually saw their rat populations decrease, including New Orleans, Tokyo, and Louisville, Kentucky, due in part to more diligent pest control.
“It’s a first step at answering this question, that if you get a bunch of rat scientists into a room we’re bound to ask each other: How might climate change play into rat populations?” said Kaylee Byers, a health researcher at Simon Fraser University in Canada, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Beyond the physiological factors that influence breeding, rat behavior changes with temperature, too. If it’s too cold out, the rodents tend to huddle underground — in basements, sewers, and really anywhere else in the subterranean built environment. Once it warms up, rats emerge and gorge, but also bring food back to their nests to store in caches. Climate change is also altering the timing of seasons: If the weather stays warmer a week or two longer into the early winter, and if spring comes a week or two earlier, that’s more time to forage. “Rats are really well-adapted to take advantage of a food resource and convert that to new baby rats that you’ll see in your neighborhood,” Richardson said.
While temperatures are rising globally, they’re getting particularly extreme in cities thanks to the urban heat island effect. Buildings and concrete absorb the sun’s energy, raising temperatures up to 27 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in surrounding rural areas and releasing that heat at night. That’s especially dangerous in the summer for urbanites during prolonged heat waves. But in the winter, that bit of extra heat could be helping rats.
Rising temperatures were the dominant force helping rat populations grow, but they weren’t the only factor, the study found. Urban human populations are exploding around the world, and they’re wasting a lot of food for rats to find. As cities expand around their edges, they have to add new infrastructure, which rats colonize. And when cities build new sewer systems to handle more people, they often leave the old ones in place, providing a welcoming environment for rats. “The vestigial urban infrastructure that’s down there, it doesn’t really matter for us,” Richardson said. “But for a rat, that’s like a free highway.”
The researchers also found that cities with fewer green spaces had higher growth of rat populations. It’s not clear yet why that might be, they said. No two green spaces are the same: A small urban park might teem with rats because office workers flock there to eat lunch, then drop their leftovers in trash bins, whereas the interior of a larger space like Central Park might provide less food and fewer places for rodents to hide from predators like hawks and coyotes.
So how can a city control its rat population as temperatures rise? For one, by getting more data like the numbers found in this study. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” said Niamh M. Quinn, who studies human-wildlife interactions at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources but wasn’t involved in the research. “We live in an infinite sea of rats, so you can’t just manage small pockets. You have to have municipal rat management.”
New Orleans has succeeded by being proactive, Richardson said, such as with education campaigns teaching building owners how to rat-proof their structures, and insisting that if they do see rats to call the city for eradication. Cities can’t just poison their way out of this problem without hurting other animals, he said, because that poison makes its way into the stomachs of rat-eating predators.
“Right now, our approach to rat management is very reactive,” Byers said. “We’re not thinking about the future at all. We need to do that if we’re actually concerned about rats, and if we want to manage the risks associated with them.”
In a fervent appeal to the global community, Prime Minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea has called on US President Donald Trump to “rethink” his decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and current global climate initiatives.
Marape’s plea came during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland, on 23 January 2025.
Expressing deep concern for the impacts of climate change on Papua New Guinea and other vulnerable Pacific Island nations, Marape highlighted the dire consequences these nations face due to rising sea levels and increasingly severe weather patterns.
“The effects of climate change are not just theoretical for us; they have real, devastating impacts on our fragile economies and our way of life,” he said.
The Prime Minister emphasised that while it was within President Trump’s prerogative to prioritise American interests, withdrawing the United States — the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide– from the Paris Agreement without implementing measures to curtail coal power production was “totally irresponsible”, Marape said.
“As a leader of a major forest and ocean nation in the Pacific region, I urge President Trump to reconsider his decision.”
He went on to point out the contradiction in the US stance.
US not closing coal plants
“The United States is not shutting down any of its coal power plants yet has chosen to withdraw from critical climate efforts. This is fundamentally irresponsible.
“The science regarding our warming planet is clear — it does not lie,” he said.
Marape further articulated that as the “Leader of the Free World,” Trump had a moral obligation to engage with global climate issues.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape’s plea to President Trump. Video: PNGTV
“It is morally wrong for President Trump to disregard the pressing challenges of climate change.
He must articulate how he intends to address this critical issue,” he added, stressing that effective global leaders had a responsibility not only to their own nations but also to the planet as a whole.
In a bid to advocate for small island nations that are bearing the brunt of climate impacts, PM Marape announced plans to bring this issue to the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum (PIF).
He hopes to unify the voices of PIF member countries in a collective statement regarding the US withdrawal from climate negotiations.
US revived Pacific relations
“The United States has recently revitalised its relations with the Pacific. It is discouraging to see it retreating from climate discussions that significantly affect our region’s efforts to mitigate climate change,” he said.
Prime Minister Marape reminded the international community that while larger nations might have the capacity to withstand extreme weather events such as typhoons, wildfires, and tornadoes, smaller nations like Papua New Guinea could not endure such impacts.
“For us, every storm and rising tide represents a potential crisis. Big nations can afford to navigate these challenges, but for us, the stakes are incredibly high,” he said.
Marape’s appeal underscores the urgent need for collaborative and sustained global action to combat climate change, particularly for nations like Papua New Guinea, which are disproportionately affected by environmental change.
It didn’t come as a surprise to see President Donald Trump sign executive orders to again pull out of the Paris Agreement, or from the World Health Organisation, but the immediate suspension of US international aid has compounded the impact beyond what was imagined possible.
The slew of executive orders signed within hours of Trump re-entering the White House and others since have caused consternation for Pacific leaders and communities and alarm for those operating in the region.
Since Trump was last in power, US engagement in the Pacific has increased dramatically. We have seen new embassies opened, the return of Peace Corps volunteers, high-level summits in Washington and more.
All the officials who have been in the region and met with Pacific leaders and thinkers will know that climate change impacts are the name of the game when it comes to security.
It is encapsulated in the Boe Declaration signed by leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum in 2018 as their number one existential threat and has been restated many times since.
Now it is hard to see how US diplomats and administration representatives can expect to have meaningful conversations with their Pacific counterparts, if they have nothing to offer when it comes to the region’s primary security threat.
The “on again, off again” approach to cutting carbon emissions and providing climate finance does not lend itself to convincing sceptical Pacific leaders that the US is a trusted friend here for the long haul.
Pacific response muted
Trump’s climate scepticism is well-known and the withdrawal from Paris had been flagged during the campaign. The response from leaders within the Pacific islands region has been somewhat muted, with a couple of exceptions.
Vanuatu Attorney-General Kiel Loughman called it out as “bad behaviour”. Meanwhile, Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape has sharply criticised Trump, “urging” him to reconsider his decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement, and plans to rally Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) leaders to stand with him.
It is hard to see how this will have much effect.
The withdrawal from the World Health Organisation – to which the US provides US$500 million or about 15 percent of its annual budget – creates a deep funding gap.
In 2022, the Lowy Pacific aid map recorded that the WHO disbursed US$9.1 million in the Pacific islands across 320 projects. It contributes to important programmes that support health systems in the region.
In addition, the 90-day pause on disbursement of aid funding while investments are reviewed to ensure that they align with the president’s foreign policy is causing confusion and distress in the region.
Perhaps now the time has come to adopt a more transactional approach. While this may not come easily to Pacific diplomats, the reality is that this is how everyone else is acting and it appears to be the geopolitical language of the moment.
Meaningful commitment opportunities
So where the US seeks a security agreement or guarantee, there may be an opportunity to tie it to climate change or other meaningful commitments.
When it comes to the PIF, the intergovernmental body representing 18 states and territories, Trump’s stance may pose a particular problem.
The PIF secretariat is currently undertaking a Review of Regional Architecture. As part of that, dialogue partners including the US are making cases for whether they should be ranked as “Strategic Partners” [Tier 1] or “Sector Development Partners [Tier 2].
It is hard to see how the US can qualify for “strategic partner” status given Trump’s rhetoric and actions in the last week. But if the US does not join that club, it is likely to cede space to China which is also no doubt lobbying to be at the “best friends” table.
With the change in president comes the new Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He was previously known for having called for the US to cut all its aid to Solomon Islands when then Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare announced this country’s switch in diplomatic ties from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China.
It is to be hoped that since then Rubio has learned that this type of megaphone diplomacy is not welcome in this part of the world.
Since taking office, he has made little mention of the Pacific islands region. In a call with New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters they “discussed efforts to enhance security cooperation, address regional challenges, and support for the Pacific Islands.”
It is still early days, a week is a long time in politics and there remain many “unknown unknowns”. What we do know is that what happens in Washington during the next four years will have global impacts, including in the Pacific. The need now for strong Pacific leadership and assertive diplomacy has never been greater.
Dr Tess Newton Cain is a principal consultant at Sustineo P/L and adjunct associate professor at the Griffith Asia Institute. She is a former lecturer at the University of the South Pacific and has more than 25 years of experience working in the Pacific islands region. This article was first published by BenarNews and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
From the first reports of wildfires breaking out around Los Angeles earlier this month, scientists could say that climate change had worsened the blazes. Sure, wildfires would burn in California regardless of planetary warming, but extra-dry fuels had turned the landscape into tinder. The resulting blazes, fanned by 100-mile-per-hour Santa Ana wind gusts, burned 50,000 acres. They killed at least 28 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, causing perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars of damage and economic losses.
A more thorough analysis published Tuesday found that those extremely dry and hot conditions were about 35 percent more likely thanks to climate change. Rains starting in October normally dampen the Southern California landscape, reducing wildfire risk, but the almost nonexistent rainfall this autumn and winter was about 2.4 times more likely when compared to a preindustrial climate, according to the study by World Weather Attribution, a U.K.-based research group. The region now has 23 additional days of fire-prone conditions each year, the analysis found, meaning more opportunities for blazes to spread out of control.
“Drought conditions are more frequently pushing into winter, increasing the chance a fire will break out during strong Santa Ana winds that can turn small ignitions into deadly infernos,” said Clair Barnes, a World Weather Attribution researcher at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy, in a statement. “Without a faster transition away from planet-heating fossil fuels, California will continue to get hotter, drier, and more flammable.”
A major driver of these catastrophic wildfires is “weather whiplash,” the report notes. Wet seasons are getting wetter, a result of a hotter atmosphere being able to hold more moisture, while dry seasons are getting drier. In the two previous winters, Los Angeles got significant rainfall, leading to the explosive growth of grasses and shrubs. But then an atmospheric switch flipped, and the metropolis got almost no rainfall between May 2024 and this January, so all that extra vegetation dried out. “Very wet years with lush vegetation growth are increasingly likely to be followed by drought, so dry fuel for wildfires can become more abundant as the climate warms,” said Theo Keeping, a wildfire researcher at Imperial College London’s Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires and co-author of the report, in the statement.
In a separate analysis released on January 13, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that climate change could be blamed for roughly a quarter of the dryness of the vegetation that burned in the fires, which they described as a conservative estimate. The study also found that the region’s weather whiplash set the stage for disaster. “Under a warmer climate, you also have what people would call a ‘thirstier’ atmosphere trying to draw up as much moisture as it can,” said Chad Thackeray, a climate scientist at UCLA and co-author of the report.
And then came the seasonal Santa Ana winds at the start of January, which blew strong and dry. In a matter of hours or even minutes, that air can desiccate the vegetation further still. All it took was sparks for several wildfires to rapidly spread. The Santa Ana winds not only shoved those fires along with breathtaking speed, but also created unpredictable swirls that made the blazes behave erratically. That made the wildfires exceedingly difficult to fight — especially for crews already spread thin fighting on multiple fronts, as the disabled and elderly in particular struggled to evacuate in time. “Realistically, this was a perfect storm when it comes to conditions for fire disasters,” said John Abatzoglou, a climatologist at the University of California, Merced, and co-author of the World Weather Attribution report, on a press call Tuesday morning.
And conditions in Southern California will probably get worse from here. The World Weather Attribution analysis estimates that fire-prone conditions in the region will become 35 percent more likely still if the world warms by 2.6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
For as much as climate change influenced the Los Angeles wildfires, a few factors operate separately. For one, climate change doesn’t create Santa Ana winds. And scientists don’t expect Santa Ana winds to get stronger as the planet warms — they might even get slightly weaker — though that will require more research to fully tease out. And two, humans spark the vast majority of wildfires in California, be it with electrical lines, fireworks, or arson. And lastly, developers keep building homes in the densely vegetated “wildland urban interface,” where the risk of wildfire is extreme.
This growing risk presents a daunting challenge for communities as they rebuild. Homeowners, for instance, have to keep their yards clear of vegetation and adopt fire-proof building materials, which gets expensive. “Communities can’t build back the same because it will only be a matter of years before these burned areas are vegetated again and a high potential for fast-moving fire returns to these landscapes,” said Park Williams, a geographer at UCLA and co-author of the World Weather Attribution report, in the statement.
What will happen to Australia — and New Zealand — once the superpower that has been followed into endless battles, the United States, finally unravels?
With President Donald Trump now into his second week in the White House, horrific fires have continued to rage across Los Angeles and the details of Elon Musk’s allegedly dodgy Twitter takeover began to emerge, the world sits anxiously by.
The consequences of a second Trump term will reverberate globally, not only among Western nations. But given the deeply entrenched Americanisation of much of the Western world, this is about how it will navigate the after-shocks once the United States finally unravels — for unravel it surely will.
Leading with chaos Now that the world’s biggest superpower and war machine has a deranged criminal at the helm — for a second time — none of us know the lengths to which Trump (and his puppet masters) will go as his fingers brush dangerously close to the nuclear codes. Will he be more emboldened?
The signs are certainly there.
President Donald Trump 2.0 . . . will his cruelty towards migrants and refugees escalate, matched only by his fuelling of racial division? Image: ABC News screenshot IA
So far, Trump — who had already led the insurrection of a democratically elected government — has threatened to exit the nuclear arms pact with Russia, talked up a trade war with China and declared “all hell will break out” in the Middle East if Hamas hadn’t returned the Israeli hostages.
Will his cruelty towards migrants and refugees escalate, matched only by his fuelling of racial division?
This, too, appears to be already happening.
Trump’s rants leading up to his inauguration last week had been a steady stream of crazed declarations, each one more unhinged than the last.
Denial of catastrophic climate consequences
And will Trump be in even further denial over the catastrophic consequences of climate change than during his last term? Even as Los Angeles grapples with a still climbing death toll of 25 lives lost, 12,000 homes, businesses and other structures destroyed and 16,425 hectares (about the size of Washington DC) wiped out so far in the latest climactic disaster?
The fires are, of course, symptomatic of the many years of criminal negligence on global warming. But since Trump instead accused California officials of “prioritising environmental policies over public safety” while his buddy and head of government “efficiency”, Musk blamed black firefighters for the fires, it would appear so.
Will the madman, for surely he is one, also gift even greater protections to oligarchs like Musk?
“…pave the way for my Administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal agencies”.
So, this too is already happening.
All of these actions will combine to create a scenario of destruction that will see the implosion of the US as we know it, though the details are yet to emerge.
The flawed AUKUS pact sinking quickly . . . Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with outgoing President Joe Biden, will Australia have the mettle to be bigger than Trump. Image: Independent Australia
What happens Down Under?
US allies — like Australia — have already been thoroughly indoctrinated by American pop culture in order to complement the many army bases they house and the defence agreements they have signed.
Though Trump hasn’t shown any interest in making it a 52nd state, Australia has been tucked up in bed with the United States since the Cold War. Our foreign policy has hinged on this alliance, which also significantly affects Australia’s trade and economy, not to mention our entire cultural identity, mired as it is in US-style fast food dependence and reality TV. Would you like Vegemite McShaker Fries with that?
So what will happen to Australia once the superpower we have followed into endless battles finally breaks down?
‘Trump has promised chaos and chaos is what he’ll deliver.’
His rise to power will embolden the rabid Far-Right in the US but will this be mirrored here? And will Australia follow the US example and this year elect our very own (admittedly scaled down) version of Trump, personified by none other than the Trump-loving Peter Dutton?
If any of his wild announcements are to be believed, between building walls and evicting even US nationals he doesn’t like, while simultaneously making Canadians US citizens, Trump will be extremely busy.
There will be little time even to consider Australia, let alone come to our rescue should we ever need the might of the US war machine — no matter whether it is an Albanese or sycophantic Dutton leadership.
It is a given, however, that we would be required to honour all defence agreements should our ally demand it.
It would be great if, as psychologists urge us to do when children act up, our leaders could simply ignore and refuse to engage with him, but it remains to be seen whether Australia will have the mettle to be bigger than Trump.
Republished from the Independent Australia with permission.
The two years of heat have created a scientific mystery, with 450 straight days of record high global sea surface temperatures from April 2023 to July 2024 — a streak that exceeded climate scientists’ predictions even when accounting for climate change and the natural climate pattern known as El Niño. A study published on Tuesday by researchers at the University of Reading helps solve the puzzle and points to one prominent culprit: the sun.
The study in Environmental Research Letters found that the rate of ocean warming has more than quadrupled over the past 40 years, driven by Earth’s growing energy imbalance — accounting for roughly 44 percent of the extra heat in recent El Niño years. Thanks to heat-trapping greenhouse gases and a decrease in reflectivity, the planet is absorbing more energy from the sun than is escaping back into space. Since 2010, according to the study, that disparity has doubled.
“There’s been an uptick in that imbalance and that has led to an uptick in the rate of ocean warming,” said Christopher Merchant, a professor of ocean and earth observation at the University of Reading in the U.K. and the study’s lead author.
By looking back through satellite observations since 1985 and developing a statistical model that isolated the trends in both ocean warming and Earth’s energy imbalance, the researchers found they were escalating in lockstep. According to Merchant, the study is possibly the first to connect the two phenomena over recent decades. “It’s a very tight correlation,” he said.
This relationship is bad news for the oceans, which have absorbed some 90 percent of the excess warming from human activity. Some of that heat will continue to seep down into the planet’s depths, while some will cycle back up toward the surface and escape into the atmosphere. According to the study, the next 20 years could warm up the oceans more than the last 40.
If you think of the oceans as a bath, Merchant says, it’s like the hot tap was only a trickle in the 1980s — but now, it’s been cranked up. “And what’s turning the tap more open, making the warming pick up speed, is an increase in greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide and methane — which are both still rising, largely from the fossil fuel industry,” he said.
There are other factors turning up the heat. The El Niño pattern that began in 2023 added around 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Celsius, before the inverse La Niña pattern took over in December 2024.
Another piece of the puzzle is the planet’s diminishing reflectivity, according to Brian McNoldy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. The ocean’s dark surface helps it absorb heat, whereas white clouds and aerosol particles in the atmosphere help bounce the sun’s radiation back into space. In 2020, the International Maritime Organization adopted a new rule to cut back on sulfur pollution from shipping fuel, but because the aerosol particles in emissions acted as a seed for clouds, the regulation had the unintended effect of dimming the marine layer of clouds that blanket the ocean.
“So you get rid of a lot of those, and now more of the sun’s energy can be absorbed in the ocean instead of reflecting off clouds,” McNoldy said. According to Merchant, efforts to curb air pollution from factories in countries like China also had the side effect of cutting back reflective aerosols.
The excess ocean warmth has had wide-ranging consequences. In April 2024, as the oceans started simmering, 77 percent of the world’s coral reefs became imperiled in the most extensive bleaching event on record, threatening the livelihoods of a billion people and a quarter of marine life. Changing ocean temperatures also shift weather patterns, potentially intensifying droughts, downpours, and storms alike.
“Hurricanes love warmer water. So all other things be equal, a warmer ocean can produce stronger hurricanes with maybe more frequent instances of rapid intensification,” McNoldy said. Last September, Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast after surging from a Category 1 to a Category 4 storm in a single day.
“The oceans really set the pace for global warming for the Earth as a whole,” Merchant said. The knock-on effects — like wildfires, drought, and floods — will continue to escalate, too. “That really needs to be understood, but it also needs to filter through to governments that changes might be coming down the line faster than they’re currently assuming.”
Vanuatu’s top lawyer has called out the United States for “bad behavior” after newly inaugurated President Donald Trump withdrew the world’s biggest historic emitter of greenhouse gasses from the Paris Agreement for a second time.
The Pacific nation’s Attorney-General Arnold Loughman, who led Vanuatu’s landmark International Court of Justice climate case at The Hague last month, said the withdrawal represented an “undeniable setback” for international action on global warming.
“The Paris Agreement remains key to the world’s efforts to combat climate change and respond to its effects, and the participation of major economies like the US is crucial,” he told BenarNews in a statement.
The withdrawal could also set a “troubling precedent” regarding the accountability of rich nations that are disproportionately responsible for global warming, said Loughman.
“At the same time, the US’ bad behavior could inspire resolve on behalf of developed countries to act more responsibly to try and safeguard the international rule of law,” he said.
“Ultimately, the whole world stands to lose if the international legal framework is allowed to erode.”
Vanuatu’s Attorney-General Arnold Loughman at the International Court of Justice last month . . . “The whole world stands to lose if the international legal framework is allowed to erode.” Image: ICJ-CIJ
Trump’s announcement on Monday came less than two weeks after scientists confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first in which average temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Agreed to ‘pursue efforts’
Under the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015, leaders agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit warming under the 1.5°C threshold or, failing that, keep rises “well below” 2°C by the end of the century.
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said on Wednesday in a brief comment that Trump’s action would “force us to rethink our position” but the US president must do “what is in the best interest of the United States of America”.
Other Pacific leaders and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) regional intergovernmental body have not responded to BenarNews requests for comment.
The forum — comprising 18 Pacific states and territories — in its 2018 Boe Declaration said: “Climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and [we reaffirm] our commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris Agreement.”
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka speaks at the opening of the new Nabouwalu Water Treatment Plant this week . . . Trump’s action would “force us to rethink our position”. Image: Fiji govt
Trump’s executive order sparked dismay and criticism in the Pacific, where the impacts of a warming planet are already being felt in the form of more intense storms and rising seas.
Jacynta Fa’amau, regional Pacific campaigner with environmental group 350 Pacific, said the withdrawal would be a diplomatic setback for the US.
“The climate crisis has for a long time now been our greatest security threat, especially to the Pacific,” she told BenarNews.
A clear signal
“This withdrawal from the agreement is a clear signal about how much the US values the survival of Pacific nations and all communities on the front lines.”
New Zealand’s former Minister for Pacific Peoples, Aupito William Sio, said that if the US withdrew from its traditional leadership roles in multilateral organisations China would fill the gap.
“Some people may not like how China plays its role,” wrote the former Labour MP on Facebook. “But when the great USA withdraws from these global organisations . . . it just means China can now go about providing global leadership.”
Analysts and former White House advisers told BenarNews last year that climate change could be a potential “flashpoint” between Pacific nations and a second Trump administration at a time of heightened geopolitical competition with China.
Trump’s announcement was not unexpected. During his first term he withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, only for former President Joe Biden to promptly rejoin in 2021.
The latest withdrawal puts the US, the world’s largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases, alongside only Iran, Libya and Yemen outside the climate pact.
In his executive order, Trump said the US would immediately begin withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and from any other commitments made under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
US also ending climate finance
The US would also end its international climate finance programme to developing countries — a blow to small Pacific island states that already struggle to obtain funding for resilience and mitigation.
Press releases by the Biden administration were removed from the White House website immediately after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Image: White House website/Screen capture on Monday
A fact sheet published by the Biden administration on November 17, which has now been removed from the White House website, said that US international climate finance reached more than US$11 billion in 2024.
Loughman said the cessation of climate finance payments was particularly concerning for the Pacific region.
“These funds are essential for building resilience and supporting adaptation strategies,” he said. “Losing this support could severely hinder ongoing and future projects aimed at protecting our vulnerable ecosystems and communities.”
George Carter, deputy head of the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University and member of the COP29 Scientific Council, said at the centre of the Biden administration’s re-engagement with the South Pacific was a regional programme on climate adaptation.
“While the majority of climate finance that flows through the Pacific comes from Australia, Japan, European Union, New Zealand — then the United States — the climate networks and knowledge production from the US to the Pacific are substantial,” he said.
Sala George Carter (third from right) hosted a panel discussion at COP29 highlighting key challenges Indigenous communities face from climate change last November. Image: Sera Sefeti/BenarNews
Climate actions plans
Pacific island states, like all other signatories to the Paris Agreement, will this year be submitting Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, outlining their climate action plans for the next five years.
“All climate actions, policies and activities are conditional on international climate finance,” Carter said.
Pacific island nations are being disproportionately affected by climate change despite contributing just 0.02 percent of global emissions, according to a UN report released last year.
Low-lying islands are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and extreme weather events like cyclones, floods and marine heatwaves, which are projected to occur more frequently this century as a result of higher average global temperatures.
On January 10, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) confirmed that last year for the first time the global mean temperature tipped over 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.
WMO experts emphasised that a single year of more than 1.5°C does not mean that the world has failed to meet long-term temperature goals, which are measured over decades, but added that “leaders must act — now” to avert negative impacts.
Harry Pearl is a BenarNews journalist. This article was first published by BenarNews and is republished at Asia Pacific Report with permission.
The International Court of Justice heard last month that after reconstruction is factored in Israel’s war on Gaza will have emitted 52 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. A figure equivalent to the annual emissions of 126 states and territories.
It seems somehow wrong to be writing about the carbon footprint of Israel’s 15-month onslaught on Gaza.
The human cost is so unfathomably ghastly. A recent article in the medical journal The Lancet put the death toll due to traumatic injury at more than 68,000 by June of last year (40 percent higher than the Gaza Health Ministry’s figure.)
An earlier letter to The Lancet by a group of scientists argued the total number of deaths — based on similar conflicts — would be at least four times the number directly killed by bombs and bullets.
Seventy-four children were killed in the first week of 2025 alone. More than a million children are currently living in makeshift tents with regular reports of babies freezing to death.
Nearly two million of the strip’s 2.2 million inhabitants are displaced.
Ninety-six percent of Gaza’s children feel death is imminent and 49 percent wish to die, according to a study sponsored by the War Child Alliance.
Truly apocalyptic
I could, and maybe should, go on. The horrors visited on Gaza are truly apocalyptic and have not received anywhere near the coverage by our mainstream media that they deserve.
The contrast with the blanket coverage of the LA fires that have killed 25 people to date is instructive. The lives and property of those in the rich world are deemed far more newsworthy than those living — if you can call it that — in what retired Israeli general Giora Eiland described as a giant concentration camp.
The two stories have one thing in common: climate change.
In the case of the LA fires the role of climate change gets mentioned — though not as much as it should.
But the planet destroying emissions generated by the genocide committed against the Palestinians rarely makes the news.
Incredibly, when the State of Palestine — which is responsible for 0.001 percent of global emissions — told the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, last month, that the first 120 days of the war on Gaza resulted in emissions of between 420,000 and 650,000 tonnes of carbon and other greenhouse gases it went largely unreported.
For context that is the equivalent to the total annual emissions of 26 of the lowest-emitting states.
Fighter planes fuel
Jet fuel burned by Israeli fighter planes contributed about 157,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
Transporting the bombs dropped on Gaza from the US to Israel contributed another 159,000 tonnes of CO2e.
Those figures will not appear in the official carbon emissions of either country due to an obscene exemption for military emissions that the US insisted on in the Kyoto negotiations. The US military’s carbon footprint is larger than any other institution in the world.
Professor of law Kate McIntosh, speaking on behalf of the State of Palestine, told the ICJ hearings, on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, that the emissions to date were just a fraction of the likely total.
Once post-war reconstruction is factored in the figure is estimated to balloon to 52 million tonnes of CO2e — a figure higher than the annual emissions of 126 states and territories.
Far too many leaders of the rich world have turned a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza, others have actively enabled it but as the fires in LA show there’s no escaping the impacts of climate change.
The US has contributed more than $20 billion to Israel’s war on Gaza — a huge figure but one that is dwarfed by the estimated $250 billion cost of the LA fires.
And what price do you put on tens of thousands who died from heatwaves, floods and wildfires around the world in 2024?
The genocide in Gaza isn’t only a crime against humanity, it is an ecocide that threatens the planet and every living thing on it.
Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and his Towards Democracy blog is at Substack.
Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister Biman Prasad has told an international conference in Bangkok that some of the most severely debt-stressed countries are the island states of the Pacific.
Dr Prasad, who is also a former economic professor, said the harshest impacts of global economic re-engineering are being felt by the poorest communities across this region.
He told the conference last month that the adaptation challenges arising from runaway climate change were the steepest across the atoll states of the Pacific — Kiribati, Tuvalu and Marshall Islands.
Dr Prasad said at no time, outside of war, had economies had to face a 30 to 70 percent contraction as a consequence of a single cyclone, but Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga had faced such a situation within this decade.
He said the world must secure the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“There is no Plan B. The two options before the world are to either secure the goals, or face extreme chaos,” he said.
“There is nothing in the middle. Not this time.”
Extreme chaos risk
Prasad said there will be extreme chaos if the world went ahead and used the same international financial architecture it had had in place for years.
“And if we continue with the same complex processes to actually access any grant funding which is now available, then we cannot address the issue of this financing gap, as well as climate finance — both for mitigation and adaptation that is badly needed by small vulnerable economies.”
More and more Pacific states would approach a state of existential crisis unless development funding was sorted, he said.
Dr Prasad said many planned projects in the region should already be in place.
“We don’t have time on our hands plus the delay in accessing financing, particularly climate resilient infrastructure and for adaptation — then the situation for these countries is going to get worse and worse.”
He wants to “decolonise” aid, giving the developing countries more control over the aid dollars.
More direct donor aid
This would involve more donor nations providing aid directly into the recipient nation’s budgets.
Dr Prasad, who is also the Fiji Finance Minister, has welcomed the budget funding lead taken by Australia and New Zealand, and said Fiji’s experience with Canberra’s putting aid into the Budget had been a great help for his government.
“It allows us, not only the flexibility, but also it allows us to access funding and building our Budget, building our national development planned strategy, and built in with our own locally designed, and locally led strategies.”
He said the new Pacific Resilience Facility, to be set up in Tonga, is one way that this process of decolonising aid could be achieved.
Prasad said the region had welcomed the pledges made so far to support this new facility.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This week on CounterSpin: While the New York Timesrolls out claptrap about how both “the left and the right” have ideas about causes behind the devastating Los Angeles wildfires—the right blame DEI hires, while the left blame climate change—many people have moved beyond that sort of stultifying nonsense to work that directly confronts the fossil fuel companies, and their political enablers, for the obvious role that fossil fuels play in climate disruption, and that climate disruption plays in extreme weather events. Many are also now calling out insurance companies that take folks’ money, but then hinder their ability to come out from under when these predictable and predicted crises occur.
Would you be surprised to hear that these powerful industries—fossil fuels and insurers—are intertwined? We talked about it last year with writer and historian Derek Seidman. We’ll hear that conversation on this week’s show.
Also on the show: Did you see the coverage of how people with disabilities are dealing with the California fires’ impact? Probably not, given that the place of people with disabilities in elite media coverage ranges roughly from afterthought to absent. We talked about that last year with disability rights advocate and policy analyst Ariel Adelman, in the wake of a Supreme Court case that considered dismantling civil rights protections for people with disabilities, by criminalizing the ways that we learn about whether those protections are actually real. We’ll hear that too.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
When Joe Biden first became president, some found it hard to believe that he cared very much about climate change.
With a global pandemic raging, the former vice president and longtime senator pitched his 2020 campaign as a return to normalcy and a referendum on the erratic leadership of Donald Trump. His campaign pledges to ban drilling on federal lands and spend trillions of dollars to decarbonize the economy — though they amounted to among the most ambitious climate agenda ever put forward by a major-party candidate — were widely seen as consolation prizes to skeptical progressives and climate hawks, like those who had backed Senator Bernie Sanders or former Washington Governor Jay Inslee in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
It’s clear now that these skeptics underestimated the outgoing president. Biden’s climate agenda, broader and more ambitious than that of any U.S. president before him, is poised to stand as the most consequential feat of his presidency, especially given his self-evident failure to “heal the soul of the nation” by ushering it into a post-Trump era. He succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, a misleadingly titled law that amounts to an unprecedented subsidy for renewable energy and climate-friendly technologies like electric vehicles. The measure triggered a wave of investment that has begun to reshape the nation’s economy and finally put the U.S. within reach of its commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
“I think Biden will go down in history as passing the biggest climate bill that was ever passed in the world’s history,” said Sean Casten, a Democratic member of Congress from Illinois (and former contributor to Grist).
If Biden’s presidency represents a major step forward in the climate fight, though, it is also a cautionary tale about the limits of climate policy in the United States. The success of the IRA shows that a massive clean energy push is politically viable, under the right circumstances. (Whether or not it’s politically advantageous, or even prudent, is a story that the 2024 election called into question.) But Biden’s attempts to restrict fossil fuel production throughout his presidency were far less successful — not only did his push to curb oil and natural gas production get mired in litigation before it could bear any real fruit, but it also generated political backlash that never really dissipated.
It’s too early to tell whether Biden’s comprehensive climate policy — feeding renewable energy with the proverbial carrot and punishing fossil fuels with the stick, essentially — is a historical anomaly or a preview of how future Democratic administrations might tackle the issue. An even more fraught question is whether Biden’s renewable energy victory will prove durable. Even though Biden revolutionized U.S. climate policy, the public was barely aware that he did anything at all on the issue. Donald Trump now has four years to claw that progress back.
Biden took office at a moment when passing a Green New Deal-inspired climate plan seemed almost feasible: Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic had demonstrated a new appetite for massive government spending to kickstart the economy, as demonstrated by the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that passed early in Biden’s term.
This was the political environment that gave birth to “Build Back Better,” a governing agenda that encompassed all the major legislative priorities that the Democratic Party had developed since the first Barack Obama administration. Months of public and private haggling within the Democratic party ensued. In the end, the only progressive priority that survived in anything close to its fullest form was climate change.
This surely has something to do with the fact that concern about climate change has only grown since Democrats’ first efforts to pass a major climate bill in 2010 — and the fact that activists like those in the Sunrise Movement staged dramatic demonstrations that kept the issue at the top of the party’s agenda. Still, to this day nobody can say for sure why the Democrats of 2022 ended up passing a pathbreaking climate bill rather than, say, the “care economy” proposals that were another major pillar of Build Back Better.
By many accounts, it was the war in Ukraine, which exposed the dangers of global reliance on Russian natural gas, that launched energy to the top of Democrats’ agenda. Suddenly, diversifying the country’s energy sources to include more wind, solar, and geothermal energy, along with increased battery storage, was something that all 50 Democratic senators could theoretically agree on — even the party’s most conservative member, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who’d once released a campaign ad in which he fired a rifle at the party’s Obama-era climate change bill.
“Joe Manchin clearly believed in this,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way. “He could have walked away at any point.”
But nothing — not Manchin’s willingness to play ball, not the war in Ukraine, and certainly not any clamoring from Biden’s 2020 majority — can fully explain what inspired the party to tackle climate change head-on. In the view of Casten, the Democratic representative from Illinois, the IRA got done thanks to the unsung work of a humble House committee.
In 2019, after Democrats took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi revived a committee that hadn’t existed since the chamber’s failed efforts to tackle climate change in the Obama years. The Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, Pelosi told The New York Times in 2018, would “prepare the way with evidence” for future climate legislation. In 2020, months before Trump left the White House, committee chair Kathy Castor, a representative from Florida, and her colleagues (including Casten) released a 500-page smorgasbord of recommendations that a future president could use to develop a climate agenda. Unlike prior reports from the first iteration of the committee, which focused on making carbon emissions more costly, this report was chock-full of incentives that could entice energy utilities and American homeowners alike to adopt clean energy.
“We relied almost exclusively on carrots rather than sticks,” Casten said. “Pelosi’s skill in holding all factions of the Democratic House together and figuring out how to get both the infrastructure bill and the climate bill done is really why that stuff survived.
“Kathy gave her the recipe, and Pelosi did the cooking,” Casten added.
House Democrats applaud after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill with $369 billion in tax breaks and other funding for clean energy programs.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
But Biden’s team knew that they had a limited window of time to turn this long-awaited policy platter into a bill that the Senate could pass and the president could sign. According to White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi, in his meetings with congressional leaders Biden insisted that climate and energy provisions remain at the center of Build Back Better. The result was the IRA.
“Every single time, he brought up the importance of carrying forward climate and clean energy,” Zaidi told Grist.
Now, as incoming president Donald Trump prepares to take a hatchet to the nation’s environmental policies for a second time, the power of the IRA is beginning to come into view. The climate component of the bill revolves around incentives that encourage households, businesses, state governments, and even school districts to adopt clean energy and reduce emissions. These were specifically designed to have political resilience: States and private parties don’t often turn down free money or readily pass up the opportunity for more economic development. If Trump tries to repeal Biden’s clean energy tax credits, the thinking is that he’ll run into opposition from members of his own party, who have constituents that are starting to feel the benefits of Biden-era investments in their communities.
According to projections from the Rhodium Group, a leading climate research firm, the IRA will reduce U.S. carbon emissions by up to 42 percent from its peak levels. While this assessment assumes cooperation from banks, corporations, and even oil companies, most other projections agree that the law will put the U.S. within striking distance of Biden’s goal of halving emissions by the end of this decade.
But the IRA only accomplishes the first part of what most climate advocates believe is supposed to be a two-step process: Entice decarbonization with incentives, punish carbon intensity with rules and regulations. Dangle the carrot, beat with the stick.
The passage of the IRA was a tremendous political feat. But all the while, the Biden administration’s other climate efforts were starting to run aground.
Even as climate hawks celebrated the passage of the IRA, the United States was on the brink of becoming the world’s largest-ever producer of fossil fuels, pulling almost enough crude oil out of the ground each day to supply all of Europe. The technological advances of the fracking boom had allowed drillers to more than double production of both oil and natural gas since 2010, and oil became a key part of the nation’s trade balance after President Obama lifted a long-standing ban on crude oil exports in 2015.
Biden’s main attempt to stem this massive tide was through an unambiguous campaign promise: “no new drilling on federal lands, period.” Though federal lands and waters account for only around a quarter of U.S. oil production, and around 10 percent of natural gas production, Biden’s pledge sent a clear signal: He was going to use the biggest tool available to the president to slow the growth of U.S. fossil fuel production.
But this attempt to restrict fossil fuel supply met with far greater opposition than the Inflation Reduction Act, and was far less successful. Just after taking office, Biden ordered the Interior Department, which manages federal lands and waters, to pause all new oil and gas lease sales pending a review of their climate impacts. This pause soon fell victim to a tangle of contradictory legal rulings around the scope of executive authority, an issue where courts have been happy to rein in presidential power. A federal court in Louisiana declared in early 2022 that the administration could not pause all lease sales, accepting a conservative argument that the executive branch was overreaching in its interpretation of federal law. But after the Interior Department held a lease sale, a separate court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the administration had erred in doing so without considering the climate impacts of increased oil production — boxing Biden in between contradictory mandates.
In the background, a post-pandemic spike in gasoline prices had changed the optics of Biden’s drilling pledge for the worse. While new drilling leases on federal lands have a negligible impact on gasoline prices — new leases wouldn’t produce new gas for the market for close to a decade — Republicans and oil industry figures slammed the administration at every opportunity for what Wyoming Senator John Barasso called “attack[ing] American energy.” The attacks seemed to stick. By the time Biden and Manchin negotiated the IRA in 2022, the anti-oil position had become a political loser, and Manchin was able to negotiate a provision in the climate law requiring new lease sales on federal lands and in the Gulf of Mexico.
The legal ping-pong continued after the IRA passed. With its hand finally forced by the courts in December 2023, the Interior Department held a large lease sale on a block of offshore waters that had been tied up in litigation for the better part of a decade. The sale drew almost $400 million in bids from oil majors like Hess, Occidental, and Shell, in what was the highest-grossing lease sale since before the pandemic. If there had been any doubt, Biden’s campaign pledge was officially dead.
The culmination of the Biden administration’s turnabout on fossil fuel production, and the decision that generated the greatest furor among climate activists, was the Interior Department’s March 2023 approval of the Willow oil project on the North Slope of Alaska. Former Vice President Al Gore called the approval “recklessly irresponsible”: Burning the 600 million barrels of oil that ConocoPhillips plans to produce from the project is poised to add the equivalent of 2 million cars’ worth of carbon dioxide to the air. Nevertheless, the final decision to approve the project reportedly came from the White House itself. Facing spiking gasoline prices at home and global upheavals in the oil market — plus the specter of lawsuits from ConocoPhillips, which had started the project well before Biden came on the scene — administration officials no longer appeared willing to try to meaningfully slow down the future rate of U.S. oil production.
Earlier this month, in the waning days of his administration, Biden revived the long-dormant lease issue, announcing that he would prohibit future oil drilling on more than 600 million acres of ocean territory on both coasts. The move drew praise from environmental advocates, and it would be hard for Trump or future presidents to undo — but it is largely symbolic, and won’t fundamentally change the trajectory of the oil industry. The shoreline sections that Biden has protected have never drawn much interest from drillers, and even Trump backed off a pledge to open them up for oil production during his first term. In the geographies where it matters, like the crude-rich Gulf of Mexico, the fight was long since over.
In the battle over oil leases, the Biden administration learned the hard way that it’s very difficult to restrict fossil fuel production, especially with high gas prices and a hostile court system. Last year, as the election approached, the administration had to learn another bruising lesson: Even if you do restrict fossil fuel production, it’s hard to know how much you’re influencing the climate fight. This lesson came during a political squabble over the export of liquefied natural gas, or LNG.
In the decade since the fracking boom, natural gas companies have built several huge facilities along the Gulf Coast that condense and export fracked gas to China and the European Union. Proponents of the industry argue that it helps the climate and national security by weaning other countries off coal (which emits about twice as much carbon per unit of energy produced) and Russian gas, respectively. But activists have come out in force against the industry in recent years, arguing that LNG exports encourage other countries to build out gas-dependent power rather than renewable energy.
In January of last year, young climate activists led a social media campaign urging the Biden administration to reject a permit for one of the largest proposed LNG export facilities. This campaign caught the attention of White House climate advisors Ali Zaidi and John Podesta, who believed they needed to win back young climate-engaged voters as the president’s reelection campaign approached. The Department of Energy controls export authorization for natural gas facilities, and the Biden administration soon announced a moratorium on new export permits for LNG, pending a study on whether they were in the “public interest.” This move drew support from studies showing that gas exports raise domestic energy prices and that methane leakage along the gas supply chain may make them more emissions-intensive than even the coal power that they replace in the best-case scenario.
Yet again, conservatives and oil industry figures seized on the move as evidence of a Green New Deal agenda and pilloried Biden for it, with a group of red-state leaders calling it evidence of a “reckless environmental agenda.” A coalition of Republican attorneys general sued to stop the pause, and a conservative judge ruled in their favor within a few months. The pause was dead, and very few supporters or detractors appeared to even notice.
But the move did appear to push oil-industry heavyweights even further toward the Trump campaign: A few months after the administration announced the pause, several industry leaders reportedly discussed it with Trump during a now-infamous summit at Mar-a-Lago at which Trump pressed the leaders for campaign contributions in exchange for a friendly agenda. (They ended up giving him around $75 million.)
By the time the election arrived, it became clear that the administration saw these supply-side efforts to limit U.S. fossil fuel production as a political liability rather than an asset. When Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, she touted the fact that the U.S. has produced a record amount of oil and gas in recent years, and reversed her prior position in favor of banning fracking in an unsuccessful attempt to win over swing voters in Pennsylvania. Trump, meanwhile, attacked the natural gas export pause as “Kamala’s ban.”
The controversy over LNG unfolded in spite of the fact that the climate impact of the policy was never clear. There is a large body of conflicting research about whether LNG exports, which are often used to replace coal plants in developing countries, increase or decrease emissions relative to an identical world without them. The answer depends on how much methane you think is leaking from U.S. gas fields (this depends where you areandwhomyouask), as well as on shifting domestic energy policies in importing nations like China and Vietnam. Indeed, reputable studies reach opposite conclusions, sometimes on the very same day, about whether LNG will help the climate by displacing coal power or harm it by displacing renewables.
A flare shoots out of a smokestack at Venture Capital’s Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal. Biden’s decision to pause new LNG export approvals dominated the final year of his climate agenda.
Courtesy of John Allaire
Even after Trump won the 2024 election, the Biden administration hurried to finish its “public interest” study. This gave activists some tentative optimism: If Biden released a study finding that LNG exports raise energy prices or harm the climate, it might make it harder for the Trump administration to approve future terminals.
But the study the Energy Department ended up releasing was largely symbolic. While the department said that “unfettered” gas exports would be “neither sustainable nor advisable” and found that new exports would likely lead to more carbon emissions worldwide, it did not issue any concrete recommendations to guide future policy and stopped short of calling for a halt to new export approvals.
Most devastating of all for proponents of the LNG pause, the long-awaited study noted that the United States has already approved enough LNG capacity to meet global demand through the middle of the century, ensuring the country will remain a gas powerhouse regardless of what future administrations do. After years of campaigning, activists had succeeded in pushing the Biden administration to act on LNG. But by the time the administration made a move, it was already too late.
There is one objective metric by which Biden’s climate policy can be judged: the Paris Agreement, which vows to hold global temperature increases to less than 2 degrees Celsius. In order to help the world meet that agreement, the United States needs to cut its emissions by more than half relative to its 2005 levels.
Assuming Trump doesn’t gut the Inflation Reduction Act — a real possibility, but far from a certainty in a nearly evenly split Congress — Biden’s signature bill will get the United States a great deal of the way toward meeting that goal. But the country is still falling short, and time is running out.
Biden showed that “carrot” climate policy is both politically possible and effective at slowing down climate change — but he failed to create the same roadmap for “stick” policies to curb the expansion of fossil fuels. The president’s losses on oil leases and LNG were significant, because they were some of the few short-term actions Biden could have taken to restrict fossil fuels.
While the administration did also push several ambitious climate rules through the Environmental Protection Agency, including regulations that would eliminate power plant pollution and force a wholesale transition away from gasoline-powered vehicles, those high-profile moves are unlikely to bear fruit anytime soon. Designing the rules took almost the entire four years of Biden’s term, and they have yet to come into effect; the gas-powered vehicles rule, for instance, applies to cars of model year 2027 and later. Repealing the IRA requires help from Congress, but the incoming administration has the authority to unwind those rules on its own, and Trump reportedly wants to start doing so on day one.
Ford Motor Company’s electric F-150 Lightnings sit on the production line at the company’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan. Jeff Kowalsky / AFP via Getty Images
These defeats appear to have led to some soul-searching within the administration. When Zaidi, the White House Climate Advisor, reflected on Biden’s legacy in a press gaggle at last year’s United Nations climate conference, he questioned whether fossil fuel-restricting policies would ever be politically viable, though he hinted that future policy might have to try them anyway.
“I don’t think there is social license for a decarbonization playbook that puts upward price pressure for consumers in the marketplace,” Zaidi said. However, not everyone agrees. Jay Inslee, who passed a carbon tax as governor of Washington and then defended that tax against a repeal effort, says voters can get behind fossil fuel disincentives if they benefit from those policies.
“We tested that question [of support for a carbon tax], and it was not a narrow thing,” he said. “We emphasized what you’re getting for these investments, and people by thunderous applause accepted it.” (It helps that Washington state has not elected a Republican to statewide office since 2017.)
An even more urgent question is whether Biden’s carrots will themselves endure. From inside the Beltway, the IRA looked like a political miracle, and it is popular with Republican officials like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp — Georgia has seen more than $10 billion in investment from the IRA, resulting in almost 40,000 new jobs — but it has had a negligible impact on voters so far. In 2023, nearly a year after the bill had passed, a majority of voters thought it was still being considered or that lawmakers had given up on it — or didn’t know that such a bill had existed at all. This year, fewer than 3 in 10 voters said they thought the IRA had improved their lives. The 2024 election featured remarkably little discussion about Biden’s signature achievement at all.
The issue may be one of scope. A truly successful climate policy would do nothing less than reshape the world economy — a tall order for an administration with four years and a slim legislative majority. The IRA, with its big bets on a wide array of both proven and new decarbonization technologies, may still succeed in this. But we won’t know until it’s too late for anyone to take credit for it.
“Long-term policy doesn’t have immediate impact,” said Freed, of the think tank Third Way. “Rising wages, better standards of living, better opportunities for communities were always going to take longer than one election cycle to be visible. They didn’t happen physically in communities quickly enough to shift voter perception.”
As Biden prepares to leave office, he will have to contend with the fact that voters may finally begin to feel the benefits of his signature law when Trump is in office — and that they may ascribe those improvements to Trump’s policies, rather than his own. Biden will have to bear that cross, Freed said.
“If our goal is to have clean energy [that is] durable and pervasive — and people start seeing the benefits in their communities and it makes them more amenable to clean energy and demand more — that’s a good thing,” he said. “The positive impacts of clean energy and decarbonization need to be able to transcend elections and partisan politics.”
CBS Evening News (1/13/25) cited Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire as another example of how climate disruption is making wildfires more destructive.
The devastation of the ongoing Los Angeles fires is an alarm going off, but also the result of society having hit the snooze button long ago (Democracy Now!, 1/9/25; CBS, 1/13/25). Game-changing fires destroyed Paradise, California (NPR, 11/8/23), in 2023, and Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2024—clear warnings, if any were still needed, that the climate catastrophe had arrived.
“The evidence connecting the climate crisis and extreme wildfires is clear,” the Nature Conservancy (7/9/24) said. “Increased global temperatures and reduced moisture lead to drier conditions and extended fire seasons.”
The scientific journal Fire Ecology (7/24/23) reported that “climate change is expected to continue to exacerbate impacts to forested ecosystems by increasing the frequency, size and severity of wildfires across the western United States.”
Now we are watching one of America’s largest cities burn. It’s a severe reminder that the kind of disruption we experienced in the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020 is the new normal under climate change.
The right-wing media, however, have found a culprit—it’s not climate change, but Democratic Party–led wokeness. The coverage demonstrates once again that the W-word can be used to blame literally anything in the Murdoch fantasyland.
‘Preoccupation With DEI’
Alyssia Finley (Wall Street Journal, 1/12/25): “A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans.” Another cynic might wonder if the Journal publishes smears without evidence as part of its business model.
“Megyn Kelly sounded off on Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley and Mayor Karen Bass,” the New York Post (1/8/25) reported. Former Fox News host Kelly said “that the officials’ preoccupation with diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] programs distracted them from the city’s fire-combating duties.”
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (1/12/25) echoed the charge: “Bloated union contracts and DEI may not have directly hampered the fire response, but they illustrate the government’s wrongheaded priorities.” In other words, the paper didn’t have evidence to blame the fires on firefighter salaries or department diversity, but decided to insinuate as much anyway.
Other conservative journalists were more direct, like CNN pundit Scott Jennings, who went on CNN NewsNight (1/8/25) to assert:
As a matter of public policy in California, the main interest in the fire department lately has been in DEI programming and budget cuts, and now we have this massive fire, and people are upset.
As the Daily Beast (1/9/25) noted, “His response was part of a Republican kneejerk reaction that included President-elect Donald Trump blaming ‘liberals’ and state Gov. Gavin Newsom.”
The Washington Post (1/10/25) reported that Trump-supporting X owner Elon Musk
has been inundating his 212 million followers with posts casting blame for the blazes on Democrats and diversity policies, amplifying narratives that have taken hold among far-right activists and Republican leaders.
Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large at the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, blamed the LA devastation on the “woke religion” (New York Post, 1/9/25).
“There are many things we’ve learned that the Los Angeles Fire Department needs—and more women firefighters isn’t one of them,” moaned National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry (New York Post, 1/15/25). “Los Angeles for years has been in the grips of a bizarre obsession with recruiting more women firefighters.”
Blaming gay singers
Mentioned by Fox News (1/10/25): $13,000 allocated to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month programs. Not mentioned by Fox News: a $126 million boost to the LAPD budget.
Fox & Friends (1/9/25, 1/9/25) blamed the city’s Democratic leaders and the fire chief for the destruction. Fox NewsDigital (1/10/25) said:
While Los Angeles officials were stripping millions in funding from their fire department ahead of one of the most destructive wildfires in state history, hundreds of thousands of dollars were allocated to fund programs such as a “Gay Men’s Chorus” and housing for the transgender homeless.
You may notice the shift from “millions” to “hundreds of thousands”—the latter, obviously, can’t explain what happened to the former. What can far better explain it is that the city focused much more on funding cops than firefighters (Intercept, 1/8/25). The mayor’s budget plan offered “an increase of more than $138 million for the Los Angeles Police Department; and a decrease of about $23 million for the LA Fire Department” (KTTV, 4/22/24). KABC (1/9/25) reported more recent numbers, saying the “fire department’s budget was cut by $17.6 million,” while the “city’s police department budget increased by $126 million,” according to the city’s controller.
And in 2023, the LA City Council approved salary increases for cops over objections that these pay boosts “would pull money away from mental health clinicians, homeless outreach workers and many other city needs” (LA Times, 8/23/23). The cop-pay deal was reportedly worth $1 billion (KNBC, 8/23/23).
LAFD cuts under Mayor Bass were, in fact, big news (KTTV, 1/15/25). Fox overlooked the comparison with the police, one regularly made by city beat reporters who cover public safety and city budgets, and went straight to blaming gay singers.
Crusade against ‘woke’
Contrary to the Daily Mail‘s headline (1/14/25), former California first lady Maria Shriver Maria Shriver did not “tear into LA’s woke leaders”; rather, she complained about LA’s insufficient funding of public needs.
Or take the Daily Mail (1/14/25), a right-wing British tabloid with a huge US footprint, whose headline said former California first lady “Maria Shriver Is Latest Celebrity to Tear Into LA’s Woke Leaders.” But the story went on to say that Shriver had decried the cuts to the LAFD, citing no evidence that she was fighting some culture war against women firefighters.
Shriver, the ex-wife of actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was pointing the finger at austerity and calling for more public spending. In other words, Shriver was siding with LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley, who had complained that city budget cuts had failed her department (CNN, 1/12/25). The Mail’s insistence on calling this a crusade against “woke” is just another example of how tediously the conservative media apply this word to almost anything.
While these accusations highlight diversification in the LA firefighting force, the right never offers real evidence that these hiring practices lead to any kind of hindering of fire response, as University of Southern California education professor Shaun Harper (Time, 1/13/25) noted. If anything, the right admits that miserly budgeting, usually considered a virtue in the conservative philosophy, is the problem.
Equal opportunity disasters
These talking points among right-wing politicians and their sycophants in the media serve several purposes. They bury the idea that climate change, driven by fossil fuels and out-of-control growth, has anything to do with the rise in extreme weather. They pin the blame on Democrats: LA is a blue city in a blue state. And they continue the racist and sexist drumbeat that all of society’s ills can be pinned on the advancement of women and minorities.
There is, of course, an opportunity to look at political mismanagement, including the cutbacks in the fire department. But natural disasters—intensified by climate change and exacerbated by poor political leadership—have ravaged unwoke, Republican-dominated states, as well, meaning Democrats don’t have a monopoly on blame.
Hurricane Ian practically destroyed Sanibel Island in Florida, a state that has been living with Trumpism for some time under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Hurricane Helene also ravaged that state, as well as western North Carolina, a state that went to Trump in the last three elections. Hurricane Harvey drowned Texas’ largest city, Houston, and the rest of Texas has suffered power outages and shortages, due to both extreme cold and summer spikes in energy demand.
Climate change, and the catastrophes it brings to the earth, does not discriminate against localities based on their populations’ political leanings. But conservative media do.
Metastasizing mythology
Ari Paul (In These Times, 8/31/15): “The more progress made in racial and gender diversity, the more white male firefighters will denounce the changes and say that increased diversity is only the result of lowering standards.”
Meanwhile, real firefighters know what the real problem is. The Western Fire Chiefs Association (3/5/24) said:
Global warming pertains to the increased rise in Earth’s average surface temperature, largely caused by human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. These practices emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat, resulting in a gradual increase in global temperatures over time. Recent data on fire and trends suggests that global extreme fire incidents could rise by up to 14% by the year 2030, 30% by 2050, and 50% by the end of the century. The impact of global warming is seen particularly in the western United States, where record-setting wildfires have occurred in recent years. Fourteen of the 20 largest wildfires on record have been in California over the past 15 years.
Conservative media can ignore all this, because the notion that cultural liberalism has tainted firefighting isn’t new. I covered efforts to diversify the New York City Fire Department as a reporter for the city’s labor-focused weekly Chief-Leader, and I saw firsthand that the resistance to the efforts were based on the idea that minority men weren’t smart enough and women (white and otherwise) weren’t strong enough (PBS, 3/28/06; New York Times, 3/18/14; In These Times, 8/31/15).
What I found interesting in that case was that other major fire departments had achieved higher levels of integration, and no one was accusing those departments of falling behind in their duties. At the same time, while the FDNY resisted diversification, the New York Police Department, almost worshipped by right-wing media, embraced it (New York Post, 9/8/14, 6/10/16).
This racist and sexist mythology has metastasized in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus for years. With Trump coming back into power, these media outlets will feel more empowered to regurgitate this line of thinking, both during this disaster in LA and in the disasters ahead of us.
Giorgio Zampaglione loved his two-hour commute from the town of Mount Shasta into the surrounding northern California forests last summer. The way the light filtered through the trees on the morning drive was unbeatable, he said. He ate lunch with his crew, members of the new Forest Corps program, deep in the woods, usually far from cell service. They thinned thickets of trees and cleared brush, helping prevent the spread of fires by removing manzanita — a very flammable, shoulder-high shrub — near campsites and roads.
“The Forest Service people have been super, super happy to have us,” Zampaglione said. “They’re always saying, ‘Without you guys, this would have taken months.’”
Zampaglione, now 27 years old, had previously worked analyzing environmental data and mapping, but he was looking to do something more hands-on. Then he saw an ad on YouTube for the Forest Corps and applied through the AmeriCorps site. He didn’t realize until his first week on the job last summer that he was part of the first class of the American Climate Corps, an initiative started by President Joe Biden to get young people working in jobs that reduce carbon dioxide emissions and protect communities from weather disasters.
It also appears to be the Climate Corps’ last class, as the Biden administration has quietly been winding down the program ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20. “It’s officially over,” said Dana Fisher, a professor at American University who has been researching climate service projects for AmeriCorps. “The people who were responsible for coordinating it have left office or are leaving office. Before they go, they are shutting it all down.”
Think of it as a precautionary step. When Trump takes over, any federal program with “climate” in the name will likely have a target on it. Republican politicians have fiercely opposed the idea of the Climate Corps ever since Biden proposed it at the start of his term in 2021, with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky blasting the notion of spending billions of dollars on a “made-up government work program” that would essentially provide busywork for “young liberal activists.”
But the American Climate Corps’ thousands of members across the country will keep their jobs, at least for the time being. That’s in part because the Climate Corps isn’t exactly the government jobs program people think it is. Environmental advocates hyped the corps’ creation as a “major win for the climate movement,” while news headlines declared that it would create 20,000 jobs. But the Climate Corps didn’t employ people directly — it was actually a loose network of mostly preexisting positions across a slew of nonprofits, state and local governments, and federal agencies, with many different sources of funding. Take away the “American Climate Corps,” and little changes. The jobs survive, even if the branding doesn’t.
“People say it’s the American Climate Corps, but like, what does that mean?” said Robert Godfried, the program manager for the recently launched Maryland Climate Corps, part of the larger network. “There isn’t really any meat on those bones.”
Two AmeriCorps NCCC Forest Corps members participate in field training in California last summer. AmeriCorps
Some of the jobs roped into the American Climate Corps have funding locked down for much of Trump’s term. Zampaglione’s program, the Forest Corps, has $15 million in funding from the U.S. Forest Service that should last it five years, according to Ken Goodson, the director of AmeriCorps NCCC, which recruits young adults for public service.
Other federal agencies, however, will likely see funding cuts that hit these climate jobs, especially as Elon Musk has promised to cut $2 trillion from the government’s budget — about one-third of existing spending — as co-lead of Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE.
“The big challenge,” Fisher said, “is going to be a question having to do with funding for these federal programs, and the degree to which they’re going to be even allowed to say ‘climate.’”
The American Climate Corps was supposed to be a New Deal-era program brought back to life. In Biden’s first days as president, he called for a Civilian Climate Corps that would employ hundreds of thousands of young people across the country. The vision was inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps — which put about 3 million men to work outdoors during the Great Depression, planting trees and building trails — but reimagined for the needs of the 21st century. Young people would get paid to protect neighborhoods from fires and floods and learn trade skills for installing heat pumps, solar panels, and electric vehicle chargers, building up a workforce that could accelerate the United States toward a cleaner future.
The idea had been inserted into Biden’s platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, a result of some olive-branch efforts to reach progressive voters after Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the Democratic primary. The party’s task force on climate policy, including Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Varshini Prakash from the youth-led Sunrise Movement, recommended a climate corps, and it reportedly caught Biden’s attention. Young activists were enthusiastic about the possibility. In May 2021, members of the Sunrise Movement marched 266 miles across California to pressure Congress to pass funding for the program, from Paradise, a town almost completely destroyed by a wildfire in 2018, to San Francisco.
Climate activists with the Sunrise Movement demonstrate outside the White House in June 2021, calling for a Civilian Climate Corps.
Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
But the New Deal-inspired jobs program seemed to lose resonance as unemployment recovered from its huge spike during the 2020 lockdowns, and power in the labor market shifted toward employees in 2021, the year of the “Great Resignation.” While the Democratic-controlled House managed to pass $30 billion to start a Climate Corps in late 2021, as part of Biden’s Build Back Better bill, it didn’t make it past the divided Senate. Money for the Climate Corps got cut out of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law that passed in 2022, during negotiations. By early 2023, with Republicans taking control of the House from Democrats, the vision of reviving the Civilian Conservation Corps looked dead.
“I think the title American Climate Corps was really the Biden administration sort of placating, looking for younger votes,” said Jeff Parker, executive director of the Northwest Youth Corps. “During early conversations, many of us, myself included, were in conversations where we were really asking for the word ‘resiliency’ to replace the word ‘climate,’ just because it’s a hot issue. And they were like, ‘Well, of course it’s hot. That’s why we want it, because that’s who we’re trying to market this to.’” (Officials from the Biden administration did not agree to an interview for this article, despite several requests.)
After the Climate Corps’ official announcement, a pressing question loomed: How on Earth do you create 20,000 jobs without any money from Congress? “There are no new appropriated dollars for American Climate Corps,” confirmed Michael Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps, the independent federal agency tasked with becoming the hub for the American Climate Corps. The White House formed an interagency group to figure out how to bring climate programs together, because without funding, the obvious path was to take advantage of what was already out there.
Climate service programs had been expanding independently, across agencies in the federal government and also through nonprofits and state and local governments. AmeriCorps, for example, had moved almost $160 million toward its environmental work, including trail restoration and urban forestry, before the national initiative was up and running, Smith said.
“What the American Climate Corps did was look at all programs that were currently involved in that type of land management and conservation work. And instead of everybody sort of being off in their own space, doing those efforts, helped bring them together under the American Climate Corps umbrella,” said Goodson, the director of AmeriCorps NCCC.
Even though the Climate Corps didn’t get any help from Congress, it found resources in other places. The MacArthur Foundation, which often funds climate projects, gave a $500,000 grant to AmeriCorps last year to support it. Meanwhile, corps programs within the larger network used existing funding from federal agencies and supported some of their work with money from the bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act.
The American Climate Corps jobs site appeared last April, directing anyone interested to apply for positions on the sites of the network’s partners. Since the jobs weren’t centralized, term limits and pay were all over the place. Nonetheless, the first cohort was sworn in virtually in June 2023. In talking to organizers of programs that had been bundled into the national network, Fisher encountered confusion about their status as part of the American Climate Corps. “Some of them recounted being told last-minute about opportunities to be sworn in and told that they could get a T-shirt,” she said.
The White House claimed that it had gathered 15,000 members by last September, but the way this number got presented was somewhat misleading, because most of these jobs aren’t new jobs, or even jobs created by the federal government. The positions just came with a new label.
“I think they can claim that there are 15,000 young people doing climate-related work under this umbrella, but I think it would be disingenuous if they called those new or added jobs,” Parker said. His Northwest Youth Corps accounted for roughly 300 positions with the American Climate Corps across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.
Even some of the jobs that were new can’t be attributed directly to the Climate Corps. The Forest Corps program that Zampaglione is participating in, for example, was set in motion about a year before Biden established the national corps. According to Goodson, the U.S. Forest Service had asked AmeriCorps to help with reforestation and managing wildfires, as well as training up a new generation of land conservation workers. Funded by the Forest Service, 80 Forest Corps members started their terms last July. “When the American Climate Corps was announced and launched, the timing was such that it really lined up with the Forest Corps program coming together,” Goodson said.
President Biden delivers an Earth Day speech mentioning the Climate Corps at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia in April 2024.
Andrew Harnik / Getty Images
Another program that recently launched, the Maryland Climate Corps, wouldn’t have happened without that state’s governor, Wes Moore. The Democratic governor made creating a service-year option for young people a priority once he took office in 2023, said Godfried, the manager of Maryland’s climate corps. Some of the money for the 40-person program comes from the state, and the rest comes all the way across the country from the California Volunteers Fund, affiliated with California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office. That fund, in turn, is supported by AmeriCorps and philanthropic donors.
“California Volunteers Fund, in my mind, is actually one of the unsung heroes of this movement,” Godfried said. The program, along with AmeriCorps, is helping to establish state-level efforts modeled after the California Climate Action Corps, which launched in 2020 and has put tens of thousands of volunteers to work planting trees, fighting food waste, and making communities more resilient to wildfires. The effort has expanded to a dozen other states: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. The state level, Godfried said, “is where the action is.”
Credit for this nationwide expansion of climate service work should go to the many governors’ offices that have been working hard to create these jobs, Godfried said. Yet the American Climate Corps is what gets people’s attention. “When the White House does something, everyone wants to report on it,” he said. “When I do something, when the folks in state government do, to be frank, no one really cares that much.”
So the New Deal-style climate jobs program that Biden envisioned never really materialized — but the cobbled-together, low-budget version wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The White House’s megaphone brought public attention to the fact that you can volunteer to help address climate change and get paid for it. Climate Corps members have replaced old fluorescent lights with energy-efficient LEDs, put solar panels on homes, and educated kids about the effects of a warming planet.
The people managing these efforts say that their participation in the national network increased their visibility, bringing in more applicants through the federal jobs site. The Forest Corps, for example, got 800 applications for just 80 positions, according to Goodson.
This kind of work won’t end under the Trump administration, though it has already put a damper on ambitions to expand it. “The American Climate Corps will evaporate as a Biden initiative, as if it never happened, because it really didn’t get the runway to take off,” Parker said.
The effects of Trump’s presidency could also trickle down to the state-level climate corps. Many leaders were hoping to supplement their existing funding with federal money that no longer looks like it’ll be coming, Fisher said. Governor Moore has said he’ll trim $2 billion out of Maryland’s budget and cut environmental projects that he thinks won’t get federal support from a Trump White House, though he hasn’t said anything about the Climate Corps specifically.
Parker asked for the Northwest Youth Corps to be taken off the Climate Corps site, because he was worried that the affiliation might jeopardize his funding, which has historically received bipartisan support, given Trump’s hostility to climate initiatives. A lot of organizations, he said, just want to put the American Climate Corps behind them and not attract too much attention so that their work will survive without the Biden-era branding.
After all, the idea of creating programs to fight fires, plant trees, and do conservation work modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps doesn’t need to be a partisan issue. Polls show it has cross-party appeal: One from 2020 found that 84 percent of Republican voters, compared to just 78 percent of Democratic voters, were in favor of starting these kinds of corps at the state level. But that Republican support for the general idea dropped dramatically after Biden announced his national program that swapped “climate” for “conservation” in the name. “In our current political climate, it just has sort of been collateral damage,” Parker said.
The irony is that the work that the American Climate Corps promised is needed more than ever. “Climate shocks are going to come, and they’re going to come more and more frequently with more severity,” Fisher said. “We need communities to be prepared and capable of responding. And service corps programs are a wonderful way to do that.”
We speak with Leah Stokes, a researcher on climate and energy policy, who says the scale of the Los Angeles wildfires is a result of burning fossil fuels and destabilizing the planet’s equilibrium. “The ultimate driver here is climate change,” says Stokes. She says that as people begin to consider rebuilding their communities, they should think about how to build more resilient homes or whether the risk is simply too great in some areas. “Are these places where people really want to be building back at that same density, with that same risk?” she asks. “We do have to be asking tough questions because of the climate crisis, because we have not stopped burning fossil fuels, about where it is safer and less safe to be building back.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
