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!.
At least 10 people have died in the devastating Los Angeles wildfires as firefighters continue to battle multiple infernos in the area. Thousands of homes and other structures have been destroyed, and some 180,000 people are under evacuation orders. Multiple neighborhoods have been completely burned down, including in the town of Altadena, where our guest, climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus, lived until two years ago, when increasing heat and dryness pushed Kalmus to leave the Los Angeles area in fear of his safety. “I couldn’t stay there,” he says. “It’s not a new normal. … It’s a staircase to a hotter, more hellish Earth.” Kalmus discusses an op-ed he recently published in The New York Times about the decision, which he says was toned down by the paper’s editors when he attempted to explain that fossil fuel companies’ investment in climate change denial and normalization has only accelerated the pace of unprecedented large-scale climate disasters. “This is going to get worse,” he warns, “Everything has changed.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
After spending more than two years drafting a plan to manage and protect the nation’s old-growth forests as they endure the ravages of climate change, the Biden administration has abruptly abandoned the effort.
That decision by the U.S. Forest Service to shelve the National Old Growth Amendment ends, for now, any goal of creating a cohesive federal approach to managing the oldest trees on the 193 million acres of land it manages nationwide. Such steps will instead be taken at the local level, agency chief Randy Moore said.
“There is strong support for, and an expectation of us, to continue to conserve these forests based on the best available scientific information,” he wrote in a letter sent Tuesday to regional foresters and forest directors announcing the move. “There was also feedback that there are important place-based differences that we will need to understand in order to conserve old growth forests so they are resilient and can persist into the future, using key place-based best available scientific information based on ecological conditions on the ground.”
President Biden launched a wide-ranging effort to bolster climate resilience in the nation’s forests in an executive orderhe issued on Earth Day in April, 2022. In complying with the order, the Forest Service sought to bring consistency to the protection of mature and old-growth trees in the 154 forests, 20 grasslands, and other lands it manages. Such a change was warranted because the agency defines “old growth” differently in each region of the country depending on the characteristics of the local forest, but generally speaking they are at least 100 years old.
Much of the nation’s remaining ancient forests are found in places like Alaska, where some of the trees in the Tongass National Forest are more than 800 years old, and California. In the East, much old-growth is concentrated in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and North Carolina. All told, old-growth forests cover about 24 million acres of the land the Forest Service manages, while mature forests cover about 67 million.
The plan would have limited logging in old-growth forests with some exceptions allowed to reduce fire risk. The Forest Service spent months gathering public comment for the proposal, which the Associated Press said was to be finalized any day now. Many scientists and advocates worried the amendment would have codified loopholes that allow logging in old-growth forests. On the other side, Republican legislators, who according to the AP introduced legislation to block any rule, and timber industry representatives argued that logging is critical to many state economies and they deserved more input into, and control over, forest management. Such criticism contributed to the decision to scuttle the plan, the AP reported.
Ron Daines, the Republican senator from Montana, issued a statement calling the Forest Service decision “a victory for commonsense local management of our forests” and said “Montana’s old growth forests are already protected by each individual forest plan, so this proposal would have simply delayed work to protect them from wildfire, which is the number one threat facing our old growth forests.”
Political disagreements over old growth conservation are not new. Jim Furnish, a former deputy director of the Forest Service who retired in 2002, said that the Forest Service has become more responsive to calls for old growth protection over the years. In the 1950s and ’60s, “they typically looked at old growth for us as the place to get the maximum quantity of wood for the highest value,” Furnish said. The debate over conservation of the spotted owl, and the 2001 Roadless Rule, helped paved the way for more dedicated protection of virgin forest, and the creation of “new” old growth through the conservation of mature second-growth forests.
Ultimately, Furnish said, the Forest Service’s failure to move quickly after Biden issued his executive order doomed the amendment. Under the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to review and potentially overturn regulations issued by federal agencies, the new Republican-controlled Congress could have killed any new regulation within 60 days, precluding any future efforts to adopt such an amendment.
Will Harlan, the Southeast director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said the plan’s death may be for the best, as old-growth protection can continue at the local level under current regulations while leaving room for future protections.
“Probably for the next few years it’s going to be a project-by-project fight, wherever the Forest Service chooses a logging project,” he said. “Advocates and conservation groups are going to be looking closely at any old growth that might be in those projects and fighting to protect them.”
Raging wildfires continue to scorch communities across the Los Angeles area, killing at least five people, displacing about 100,000 more and destroying thousands of structures. With firefighters unable to contain much of the blaze, the toll is expected to rise. The wildfires that started Tuesday caught much of the city by surprise, quickly growing into one of the worst fire disasters in Los Angeles history. Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council have come under criticism for cutting the fire department’s budget by around 2% last year while the police department saw a funding increase. Nearly 400 incarcerated firefighters are among those who have been deployed to battle the fires. Journalist Sonali Kolhatkar, who evacuated her home to flee the destruction, says it has been “frustrating” to watch the corporate media’s coverage of the fires. “No one is talking about climate change in the media,” she says. We also speak with journalist John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, who says the L.A. wildfires should be a wake-up call. “This blind — frankly, suicidal — loyalty to the status quo of keeping fossil fuels preeminent in our energy system is creating an increasingly difficult situation and unlivable situation,” says Vaillant.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Harel Dor and Finn O’Brien were just finishing up dinner at a restaurant in Pasadena, California on Tuesday evening, when a friend texted them about an evacuation warning. A severe windstorm had spread what became the Eaton fire to the hills behind their home.
“Driving back up the house it was already feeling apocalyptic, with downed trees and visibility getting worse,” Dor said. As the couple returned to the house to evacuate their two cats, they could see the flames in the distance. Dor, who works nearby at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says while some coworkers have lost their homes, they don’t know if their apartment has survived the blaze.
“The emotions haven’t arrived yet,” Dor said. “A lot of it is just numbness and shock at the events unfolding.”
The hills around Los Angeles have become an inferno. Days after forecasters warned of dangerous fire weather conditions, twin blazes — driven by 100 mile per hour winds — began raging across some of Southern California’s most expensive neighborhoods, sending thousands of residents fleeing and threatening historic sites. Within five hours on Wednesday morning, both the Palisades Fire east of Santa Monica and the Eaton Fire across Pasadena exploded from 2,000 acres to over 10,000. So far, two people have been confirmed dead and more than 1,000 structures have burned, potentially making the Palisades Fire one of the country’s most destructive.
“I do expect it is plausible that the Palisades Fire in particular will become the costliest on record, period,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, during a livestream on Wednesday morning. That’s partly due to “the fact that some of those structures are some of the most expensive homes and buildings in the world.”
The fires have both immediate and underlying causes. The first ingredient for making such monstrous wildfires is the fuel. In the previous two years, some parts of coastal Southern California experienced their two wettest winters on record, spurring the growth of grass and brush. But now the region has had its driest start of winter on record, which parched that vegetation. The chaparral landscape turned into abundant tinder just waiting to burn.
“Under conditions of climate change, we will have wetter wet periods, very wet wet periods, and very dry dry periods,” said Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. “The climatic conditions that Southern California has experienced over centuries are simply going to be exacerbated.”
The second ingredient is the spark. It will take some time for investigators to determine what set off all these blazes, but where humans tread, wildfires start. It could be a wayward firework, or a chain dragging off the back of a truck on the highway, or arson. California also has a major problem with its electric equipment jostling in the wind, showering sparks into the vegetation below. As winds kicked up on Tuesday, utilities like Southern California Edison shut off power to areas of the city in an effort to prevent just such an event.
A resident fleeing the Palisades fire in Los Angeles on January 8, 2025.
Jon Putman/Anadolu via Getty Images
The third ingredient was high winds. This is Southern California’s prime season for Santa Ana winds, which form in the interior of the western United States. As that warm, dry air moves toward the sea, it drops down mountains, picking up speed. Scientists don’t expect climate change to boost the speed of these Santa Ana winds, though they may get drier and hotter. “They can dry vegetation even more,” said Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “The same slopes that get a lot of precipitation from atmospheric rivers also get the strong Santa Ana winds.”
So there’s more fuel in those places, and unfortunately more of the wind that drives catastrophic fires. Once there’s a spark, the winds shove the fire forward with oftentimes inescapable speed. That’s how the Camp Fire killed 85 people in 2018, as the flames raced through the town of Paradise, trapping people in homes and cars. And that’s why authorities are fearing for the worst for these new, fast-moving Los Angeles fires.
“The spread has been quite dramatic. The Eaton fire especially,” said Devin Black, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service. Because the winds are moving erratically, he said, the public should be cautious when driving around the flames. “They can move very quickly, and you might get trapped,” he said.
Wind-driven wildfires are also notoriously difficult to fight, and not just because they move so fast. Those Santa Ana winds are blowing embers ahead of the main wall of the fire, lighting new fires perhaps a mile ahead. So a large, intense fire can spawn smaller blazes that themselves burn out of control, as crews are already stretched thin across the landscape. In Los Angeles county on Wednesday afternoon, four separate fires were taxing the firefighting response, with some fire hydrants running dry. None of them were contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Part of the problem is that winds grounded the aircraft used to drop water.
The immediate emergency is containing the blazes and getting people to safety. The longer-term challenge is better adapting Los Angeles, and the rest of California, to a future of ever-worsening droughts and wildfires. “People talk about adapting to the climate,” Pincetl said. “We haven’t adapted to the climate we have, let alone the climate that’s coming.”
Janine Jackson: Welcome to The Best of CounterSpin 2024. I’m Janine Jackson.
This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us, in part, by showing how elite news media are clouding them. It’s not to say big media always get the facts wrong, but that what facts they point us toward day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners and sponsors, at the expense of the rest of our lives and our futures.
An important part of the work we do as producers and as listeners is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and to stay in conversation. As always, we are deeply thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. You’re listening to CounterSpin, brought to you each week by the mediawatch group FAIR.
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2024 included many reasons for public protest, which our guest reminded is both a fundamental right and a core tool for achieving other rights. Journalist and activist Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent.
Chip Gibbons: “There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech.”
Chip Gibbons: And I think it’s hard to talk about the future of dissent in this country this year without talking about what’s happening in Gaza, because that looms over everything. And we’re seeing a real outburst of protest around the ceasefire, around the occupation, around apartheid. And we’re also seeing a real heavy-handed attempt to demonize and repress these movements.
There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech. Palestine supporters have been censored, jailed, spied on for decades. So this isn’t entirely new, but the level of public vitriol, where you have Congress passing resolutions condemning student groups, Congress passing resolutions that condemn university presidents, Congress calling on the FBI (this isn’t a resolution, these are just letters from individual members of the Congress) to investigate media outlets for these conspiracy theories that they had freelancers who—and mainstream ones, like New York Times; they’re not talking about small left-wing publications—were somehow involved in October 7.
It’s a really dark time, and I know a lot of people I talk to feel very strongly that the repression will backfire, because the movement is so strong, and people are so disgusted by what our government is complicit in. And I think that’s potentially true.
But I do have to caution: Before World War I, the left was very powerful in this country. The Socialist Party had members of Congress, they had mayors. And the repression of that war completely decimated them.
In the run-up to the Cold War, the FBI had all these internal files about how powerful they think the Communist Party is, that people are taking them seriously, that liberals work with them, that the 1930s were a pink decade or a red decade, and the FBI security apparatus is going to be like penicillin to the spread of the pink decade.
So a lot of the periods of repression have followed the left when it was at its strongest, not when it was at its weakest. And I’m not saying we’re going to be decimated, like we were during World War I or during McCarthyism, but I do think we should be cautious, that repression does have an impact, and it does follow popular movement successes.
And I do think part of the reason why we see this unhinged level of repression around the Gaza War—if you want to call it war; it’s more of a genocide—is because the atrocities that are being committed are so horrifying that, even if you’re someone who doesn’t think Israel’s an apartheid state, even if you’re a centrist, it’s hard to watch and hear about hospitals being targeted, to hear about refugee camps being blown up, and not be morally repulsed by what you’re seeing.
And I do think that people know that, and that’s why they’re escalating the ratcheting up of oppression around the ceasefire protest. Because there’s no defense of bombing a refugee camp. There’s no defense of having snipers outside a Catholic church and shooting church women who are going to use the restroom. There’s not really a strong defense of this. You can either deny it, or try to shut everyone up.
Svante Myrick: “They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote.”
Svante Myrick: Especially after the 2020 election, led by Donald Trump, state legislators—people who are not household names, folks that you won’t often see on CNN or MSNBC—state legislators are taking their cues from Donald Trump and passing dozens and dozens…. I just came from Utah, where yet another law was passed that makes it harder to vote.
Utah used to have very good voting laws. Everybody got a ballot in the mail. You could just fill it out, send it back in. You had weeks and weeks to do it. They just repealed that. Why? Is it because Donald Trump lost Utah? No, it’s because the state legislators are trying to curry favor with a president that just, frankly, does not want everyone’s vote to count.
And if it’s OK, if I just say what probably is obvious to many of your listeners, but I think it deserves to be said: They’re not trying to take away everyone’s right to vote. They’re trying to take away certain people’s right to vote. I’m a Black American, and I just know for a fact that this Trump-led faction of the Republican Party would love for Black Americans’ votes not to be counted. And I know that because they are moving with almost surgical precision to disenfranchise people like me and my family.
JJ: I am surprised when people are surprised that people don’t vote. While I lament it, I see the fact that some people just don’t see a connection between this lever they pull, and the policies and laws governing their lives. I see that as an indictment of the system, and not of the people.
And so I wanted to ask you to talk about what we’ve seen labeled “low-propensity voters,” and different responses, like what People For is talking about, responses that are better than saying, “These people are so dumb, they don’t even know how to vote their own interests.”
SM: And that’s so well said. Certainly our system has failed in many ways. But extreme right-wingers have also been waging an 80-year war, maybe longer, to convince Americans that government does nothing for them, that their representatives don’t improve their lives. And so when they do things like starve schools and school budgets, starve road budgets so that there are potholes in the street, and try to shrink government down to a size where you can drown it in a bathtub, they make sure it is dysfunctional, from Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, they break the system, and then say, “Hey, see, government, it can’t work at all. Why bother? Why bother to vote at all?”
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JJ: Though it’s dropped from many outlets’ radar, police violence continued in 2024, but so did efforts to reimagine public safety without cops at the center. Monifa Bandele is an activist with Movement for Black Lives, as well as senior vice president and chief strategy officer at MomsRising. She talked about a new report mapping police violence.
Monifa Bandele: “We actually know what keeps us safe. We know that people need care and not punishment.”
Monifa Bandele: Black people are just like any other people, right, all over the world. And so, for a long time, people had no idea what options there could be, what alternatives there could be, for community safety other than policing.
It’s not just presented in our policies and what we see on the streets, we’re fed a daily dose of it in our larger popular culture. The police shows, the true crime series. All of your favorite actors at some point have been on the policing shows, or even if it’s shows about “gangsters” or “criminals,” it really has what we call this copaganda—which is police propaganda—storyline, which ultimately says, you need police, you need vigilantes, you need this tough-on-crime entity in order to have some semblance of safety in your community.
So I’m actually really proud and impressed in the Black community, because what our report shows is that, even though we are really bombarded, millions and millions of dollars are spent to convince people that this is the only way that you can get safety, and people have lived their entire lives only experiencing this one model, that large portions of our community are really questioning that, and are really listening to folks who are saying: “Hey, we actually know what keeps us safe. We know that people need care and not punishment.”
And this is something that, while we do it sometimes in our buildings and in our tenant associations or in our families, this could be scaled up community-wide. This could be scaled up citywide, statewide, nationally, where we actually figure out and get to the root of violence. You prevent most of it from happening, because you have the right mechanisms in place. And then when people are in crisis, and may cause harm to themselves or others, we combat that by giving them what they need to not be in crisis in that moment.
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JJ: Immigration stayed critical in 2024, but we didn’t hear much from folks particularly on the US southern border who don’t support aggressive unto lethal state responses. Aron Thorn joined us from the Rio Grande Valley. He’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Aron Thorn: “The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection.”
Aron Thorn: I think one angle of this story that we don’t always see, it’s been heartbreaking to see, for example, the state’s rhetoric of “come and cut it,” be very aggressive, “we have a right to defend ourselves,” etc., etc. The, in my opinion, overblown claims about just how many cartel members are among people, just how many drugs they’re finding on people, for example.
The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection, they’re in need of safety, they’re in need of stability. That is the very vast majority of people.
And so something that does not often show up in these stories, that is particularly pertinent right now, is, let’s be clear, Texas is fighting for its right to lay concertina wire so that people can get caught in it for hours, and get injured and languish there as punishment for trying to seek safety.
And what they want to do is push people back into Mexico where they are kidnapped, assaulted, raped, worse, as punishment for wanting to seek safety. That is what Texas is asserting its right to do. That’s what the Trump administration’s primary goal was on the US/Mexico border. That’s what Greg Abbott’s primary goal is at the US/Mexico border. And we don’t talk about that, as a country, of what that actually looks like every day, what that looks like on the ground.
What we talk about are US communities, we talk about people “taking our jobs,” we talk about the fentanyl that’s coming in—all real issues that are not touched, not controlled, by people who are desperate and are trying to seek safety. So to me, that is one of the biggest holes that I always see in these stories, that we don’t really take: our right to defend our border, but from what?
As a Texan, I don’t think what Texas is doing on the border day-to-day will actually improve the lives of Texans. We are spending billions of dollars of our own tax money for this political ploy that we are improving the lives of Texans, while we are stripping Texans off of Medicaid faster than any other state in the country. Texans are very strapped in an economy where inflation is still an issue, and nothing that we’re doing at our border is going to affect that.
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JJ: Media Matters took a look at coverage of climate disruption, finding that, where there were some improvements, they just didn’t match the severity of the crisis. Evlondo Cooper is a senior writer with the Climate and Energy Program at Media Matters.
Evlondo Cooper: “Even the best coverage we see…there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis.”
Evlondo Cooper: We look at coverage of, broadly, climate justice. I think a lot of people believe it’s representation for representation’s sake, but I think when people most impacted by climate change—and we’re talking about communities of color, we’re talking about low-income communities, we’re talking about low-wealth rural communities—when these folks are left out of the conversation, you’re missing important context about how climate change is impacting them, in many cases, first and worse. And you’re missing important context about the solutions that these communities are trying to employ to deal with it. And I think you’re missing an opportunity to humanize and broaden support for climate solutions at the public policy level.
So these aren’t communities where these random acts of God are occurring; these are policy decisions, or indecisions, that have created an environment where these communities are being most harmed, but least talked about, and they’re receiving the least redress to their challenges. And so those voices are necessary to tell those stories to a broad audience on the corporate broadcast networks.
JJ: Yes, absolutely.
Another finding that I thought was very interesting was that extreme weather seemed to be the biggest driver of climate coverage, and that, to me, suggests that the way corporate broadcast media are coming at climate disruption is reactive: “Look at what happened.”
EC: Totally.
JJ: And even when they say, “Look at what’s happening,” and you know what, folks pretty much agree that this is due to climate disruption, these houses sliding into the river, it’s still not saying, “While you look at this disaster, know that this is preventable, and here is who is keeping us from acting on it and why.”
EC: Yeah, that is so insightful, because that’s a core critique of even the best coverage we see, that there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis. And then there’s no real—solutions are mentioned in about 20% of climate segments this year. But the solutions are siloed, like there are solution “segments.”
But to your point, when we’re talking about extreme weather, when you have the most eyeballs hearing about climate change, to me, it would be very impactful to connect what’s happening in that moment—these wildfires, these droughts, these heat waves, these hurricanes and storms and flooding—to connect that to a key driver, fossil fuel industry, and talk about some potential solutions to mitigate these impacts while people are actually paying the most attention.
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JJ: The oft-heard phrase “crisis of journalism” means different things to different people. This year, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science ran an article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm.” It was co-authored by our guests, Collette Watson, co-founder of the group Black River Life, and Joe Torres, senior advisor at the group Free Press. The two are co-founders of the Media 2070 project.
Colette Watson: “What’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm.”
Collette Watson: What’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm. And when we talk about that—Joe and I are both co-creators of the Media 2070 project—when Media 2070 talks about this, we often say that, similar to our education system and our legal system, which so many people understand as oppressive, our media system is rooted in anti-Blackness, and in racism and racial hierarchy, since the very beginning.
When you look at the earliest colonial newspapers, which stayed afloat on the revenues that they were gaining from serving as brokers in the trafficking of enslaved African people, by not only posting ads, paid ads, for people who had emancipated themselves and run away, but also in the sales of enslaved folks and serving as a broker for those transactions.
We know that from that earliest root, right on through till now, our system of news, information, journalism—even entertainment media, book publishing—all of those are interconnected, and have been rooted in upholding a myth of Black inferiority, and have actually perpetuated white supremacy and even white nationalism. So you have to have that in mind, whenever you are thinking about journalism and the role it has played in society, and the role that we want it to play in the safe, just, multiracial democracy we want in the future. We can’t achieve that without acknowledging the history of harm.
Joseph Torres: “We’re asking the question: When hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy?”
Joseph Torres: There is this big debate happening right now about the future of journalism, and how it goes, is mostly a white-led space. And the way the discussion has taken place is, the democracy is in crisis and so is journalism, and we need to save local journalism to save democracy. But as Collette is describing, what that does not acknowledge is the role of local news organizations and in local journalism in undermining democracy for Black people and people of color.
At the Media 2070 project, we’re asking the question: When hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy? And these media institutions have played a direct role in undermining democracy.
These are all just within recent years, and within the future of journalism debate, there isn’t even acknowledgement that this actually happened, that these papers have actually apologized. What are we creating that’s different?
***
JJ: Throughout the year, more and more entities declared Israel’s violent assaults on Palestinians a genocide. But how did elite US media talk about it? Greg Shupak of the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and author of The Wrong Story: Palestine Israel and the Media, talked with CounterSpin.
Gregory Shupak: “Genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like.”
Gregory Shupak: First of all, genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like. And second of all, it’s also: Yes, brutal, violent oppression of Palestinians has been the case since Israel came into existence in 1948, and, in fact, in the years leading up to it, there were certainly steps taken to create the conditions for Israel. So it is a decades-old story. But there is a kind of hand-waving that creeps into public discourse, and I think does underlie some of this lack of attention to what continues to happen in Gaza and the West Bank.
In reality, this is a very modern conflict, right? It’s a US-brokered, settler-colonial insurgency/counterinsurgency. It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism. But it’s easier to just treat it as, “Oh, well, these backwards, savagebarbarian and their ancient, inscrutable blood feuds are just doing what they have always done and always will. So that’s not worthy of our attention.” But that, aside from being wildly inaccurate, just enables the slaughter and dispossession, as well as resistance to it, to continue.
***
JJ: As we all reeled from the presidential election results, I talked with FAIR’s own editor, Jim Naureckas, and senior analyst Julie Hollar, for some thoughts about how we got here.
Jim Naureckas: “Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of.”
Jim Naureckas: I think that there’s an interesting parallel between the Trump campaign strategy and the business strategy of corporate media; there was kind of a synergy there. I don’t think that MAGA Republicans and corporate media have the same goals, necessarily, but I think they share a strategy, which is “fear sells.”
And that is also the strategy that Donald Trump has hit on. His campaign ads were all about fear, all about the danger of Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration. And he played on a lot of issues that corporate media have used to sell their papers, to sell their TV programs.
Immigration is one of the most obvious ones: Corporate media have treated immigration as, “Here’s something that you should be afraid about. There’s this flood of immigrants coming over the border. It’s a border crisis.” Particularly since the beginning of the Biden administration, this has been a drumbeat.
And there’s been a lot of distortions of numbers, of presenting this as some kind of unprecedented wave of migrants, that is not true. But by presenting it as this brand new threat, they’re able to sell more papers than they would otherwise have done—or sell clicks, I guess is what they’re in the business of now.
And so Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of. And he was the person who was promising to do something about them.
Julie Hollar: “Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward.”
Julie Hollar: I was thinking about how the corporate media, to me, bear such responsibility on both the issues of immigration and trans rights, because those two issues are miscovered by the corporate media in a very similar way. They’re both this beleaguered, very small minority—although the right wing, of course, is trying to make everyone believe that they are not a small minority, either of them—but both are very small minorities who are the target of these really punitive campaigns, whose bottom-line goal really is eliminating them from our society, which is classic fascism.
So you would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups. For the past many years, they should have been reporting these issues from the perspective of immigrants, from the perspective of trans people, humanizing them, providing us with this understanding of who’s really being harmed here, which is the opposite story of what the right wing is trying to tell.
And by not doing that at all—and I should also interrupt to say that not every corporate media outlet has been doing that on trans issues; the New York Times does really stand out, in terms of being bad about this. On immigration, it’s pretty much across the board bad in corporate media.
But instead of doing the kind of democratic journalism that you need in a moment like this, you have them really just feeding into the same narrative that the right-wing movement is putting out there. So when they then turn around—well, I’m getting ahead of myself—and then blame the left for these losses, it’s very angering.
Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward. And I think we can’t just ignore the big corporate outlets and let them off the hook and say, “Well, write them off because they’re never going to get better.” I mean, there are structural issues that are going to always limit them, and we have to keep demanding better, always.
And at the same time, I think it’s really important that everybody dig deep and support tough, strong, independent journalism that exists all over this country. Local outlets, wherever you are, that are doing really important work in your city or in your neighborhood, all of the independent media that are working nationwide as well, all the media critics; everyone is going to need so much support for the coming years to help defend this democracy, and we all really need to step up and support them.
***
JJ: That was FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas. Before them, you heard Greg Shupak, Collette Watson and Joe Torres, Evlondo Cooper, Aron Thorn, Monifa Bandele, Svante Myrick and Chip Gibbons, just some of the voices it’s been our pleasure to bring you this past year.
Navigating the shared challenges of climate change, geostrategic tensions, political upheaval, disaster recovery and decolonisation plus a 50th birthday party, reports a BenarNews contributor’s analysis.
COMMENTARY:By Tess Newton Cain
Vanuatu’s devastating earthquake and dramatic political developments in Tonga and New Caledonia at the end of 2024 set the tone for the coming year in the Pacific.
The incoming Trump administration adds another level of uncertainty, ranging from the geostrategic competition with China and the region’s resulting militarisation through to the U.S. response to climate change.
And decolonisation for a number of territories in the Pacific will remain in focus as the region’s largest country celebrates its 50th anniversary of independence.
The deadly 7.3 earthquake that struck Port Vila on December 17 has left Vanuatu reeling. As the country moves from response to recovery, the full impacts of the damage will come to light.
The economic hit will be significant, with some businesses announcing that they will not open until well into the New Year or later.
Amid the physical carnage there’s Vanuatu’s political turmoil, with a snap general election triggered in November before the disaster struck to go ahead on January 16.
On Christmas Eve a new prime minister was elected in Tonga. ‘Aisake Valu Eke is a veteran politician, who has previously served as Minister of Finance. He succeeded Siaosi Sovaleni who resigned suddenly after a prolonged period of tension between his office and the Tongan royal family.
Eke takes the reins as Tonga heads towards national elections, due before the end of November. He will likely want to keep things stable and low key between now and then.
Fall of New Caledonia government
In Kanaky New Caledonia, the resignation of the Calédonie Ensemble party — also on Christmas Eve — led to the fall of the French territory’s government.
After last year’s violence and civil disorder – that crippled the economy but stopped a controversial electoral reform — the political turmoil jeopardises about US$77 million (75 million euro) of a US$237 million recovery funding package from France.
In addition, and given the fall of the Barnier government in Paris, attempts to reach a workable political settlement in New Caledonia are likely to be severely hampered, including any further movement to secure independence.
Possibly the biggest party in the Pacific in 2025 will be the 50th anniversary of Papua New Guinea’s independence from Australia, accompanied hopefully by some reflection and action about the country’s future.
Eagerly awaited also will be the data from the country’s flawed census last year, due for release on the same day — September 16. But the celebrations will also serve as a reminder of unfinished self-determination business, with its Autonomous Region of Bougainville preparing for their independence declaration in the next two years.
The shadow of geopolitics looms large in the Pacific islands region. There is no reason to think that will change this year.
Trump administration unkowns
A significant unknown is how the incoming Trump administration will alter policy and funding settings, if at all. The current (re)engagement by the US in the region started with Trump during his first incumbency. His 2019 meeting with the then leaders of the compact states — Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Republic of Marshall Islands — at the White House was a pivotal moment.
Under Biden, billions of dollars have been committed to “securitise” the region in response to China. This year, we expect to see US marines start to transfer in numbers from Okinawa to Guam.
However, given Trump’s history and rhetoric when it comes to climate change, there is some concern about how reliable an ally the US will be when it comes to this vital security challenge for the region.
The last time Trump entered the White House, he withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement and he is widely expected to do the same again this time around.
In addition to polls in Tonga and Vanuatu, elections will be held in the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, New Caledonia and for the Autonomous Bougainville Government.
There will also be a federal election in Australia, the biggest aid donor in the Pacific, and a change in government will almost certainly have impacts in the region.
Given the sway that the national security community has on both sides of Australian politics, the centrality of Pacific engagement to foreign policy, particularly in response to China, is unlikely to change.
Likely climate policy change
How that manifests could look quite different under a conservative Liberal/National party government. The most likely change is in climate policy, including an avowed commitment to invest in nuclear power.
A refusal to shift away from fossil fuels or commit to enhanced finance for adaptation by a new administration could reignite tensions within the Pacific Islands Forum that have, to some extent, been quietened under Labor’s Albanese government.
Who is in government could also impact on the bid to host COP31 in 2026, with a decision between candidates Turkey and Australia not due until June, after the poll.
Pacific leaders and advocates face a systemic challenge regarding climate change. With the rise in conflict and geopolitical competition, the global focus on the climate crisis has weakened. The prevailing sense of disappointment over COP29 last year is likely to continue as partners’ engagement becomes increasingly securitised.
A major global event for this year is the Oceans Summit which will be held in Nice, France, in June. This is a critical forum for Pacific countries to take their climate diplomacy to a new level and attack the problem at its core.
In 2023, the G20 countries were responsible for 76 percent of global emissions. By capitalising on the geopolitical moment, the Pacific could nudge the key players to greater ambition.
Several G20 countries are seeking to expand and deepen their influence in the region alongside the five largest emitters — China, US, India, Russia, and Japan — all of which have strategic interests in the Pacific.
Given the increasingly transactional nature of Pacific engagement, 2025 should present an opportunity for Pacific governments to leverage their geostrategic capital in ways that will address human security for their peoples.
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 over 25 years of experience working in the Pacific islands region. The views expressed here are hers, not those of BenarNews/RFA. Republished from BenarNews with permission.
With the door now shut on 2024, many will heave a sigh of relief and hope for better things this year.
Decolonisation issues involving the future of Kanaky New Caledonia and West Papua – and also in the Middle East with controversial United Nations votes by some Pacific nations in the middle of a livestreamed genocide — figured high on the agenda in the past year along with the global climate crisis and inadequate funding rescue packages.
Asia Pacific Report looks at some of the issues and developments during the year that were regarded by critics as betrayals:
The assembly passed a resolution on December 11 demanding an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, which was adopted with 158 votes in favour from the 193-member assembly and nine votes against with 13 abstentions.
Of the nine countries voting against, the three Pacific nations that sided with Israel and its relentless backer United States were Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Tonga.
The other countries that voted against were Argentina, Czech Republic, Hungary and Paraguay.
Thirteen abstentions included Fiji, which had previously controversially voted with Israel, Micronesia, and Palau. Supporters of the resolution in the Pacific region included Australia, New Zealand, and Timor-Leste.
Ironically, it was announced a day before the UNGA vote that the United States will spend more than US$864 million (3.5 billion kina) on infrastructure and military training in Papua New Guinea over 10 years under a defence deal signed between the two nations in 2023, according to PNG’s Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko.
Any connection? Your guess is as good as mine. Certainly it is very revealing how realpolitik is playing out in the region with an “Indo-Pacific buffer” against China.
However, the deal actually originated almost two years earlier, in May 2023, with the size of the package reflecting a growing US security engagement with Pacific island nations as it seeks to counter China’s inroads in the vast ocean region.
Noted BenarNews, a US soft power news service in the region, the planned investment is part of a defence cooperation agreement granting the US military “unimpeded access” to develop and deploy forces from six ports and airports, including Lombrum Naval Base.
Two months before PNG’s vote, the UNGA overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding that the Israeli government end its occupation of Palestinian territories within 12 months — but half of the 14 countries that voted against were from the Pacific.
Affirming an International Court of Justice (ICJ) opinion requested by the UN that deemed the decades-long occupation unlawful, the opposition from seven Pacific nations further marginalised the island region from world opinion against Israel.
Several UN experts and officials warned against Israel becoming a global “pariah” state over its 15 month genocidal war on Gaza.
The final vote tally was 124 member states in favour and 14 against, with 43 nations abstaining. The Pacific countries that voted with Israel and its main ally and arms-supplier United States against the Palestinian resolution were Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Palau, Tonga and Tuvalu.
Flags of decolonisation in Suva, Fiji . . . the Morning Star flag of West Papua (colonised by Indonesia) and the flag of Palestine (militarily occupied illegally and under attack from Israel). Image: APR
In February, Fiji faced widespread condemnation after it joined the US as one of the only two countries — branded as the “outliers” — to support Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory in an UNGA vote over an International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion over Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.
Fiji’s envoy at the UN, retired Colonel Filipo Tarakinikini, defended the country’s stance, saying the court “fails to take account of the complexity of this dispute, and misrepresents the legal, historical, and political context”.
However, Fiji NGOs condemned the Fiji vote as supporting “settler colonialism” and long-standing Fijian diplomats such as Kaliopate Tavola and Robin Nair said Fiji had crossed the line by breaking with its established foreign policy of “friends-to-all-and-enemies-to-none”.
Indonesian military forces on patrol in the Oksop regency of the West Papua region.
2. West Papuan self-determination left in limbo For the past decade, Pacific Island Forum countries have been trying to get a fact-finding human mission deployed to West Papua. But they have encountered zero progress with continuous roadblocks being placed by Jakarta.
Pacific leaders have asked for the UN’s involvement over reported abuses as the Indonesian military continues its battles with West Papuan independence fighters.
A highly critical UN Human Right Committee report on Indonesia released in May highlighted “systematic reports about the use of torture” and “extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of Indigenous Papuan people”.
But the situation is worse now since President Prabowo Subianto, the former general who has a cloud of human rights violations hanging over his head, took office in October.
Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka and Papua New Guinea’s James Marape were appointed by the Melanesian Spearhead Group in 2023 as special envoys to push for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ visit directly with Indonesia’s president.
Prabowo taking up the top job in Jakarta has filled West Papuan advocates and activists with dread as this is seen as marking a return of “the ghost of Suharto” because of his history of alleged atrocities in West Papua, and also in Timor-Leste before independence.
Already Prabowo’s acts since becoming president with restoring the controversial transmigration policies, reinforcing and intensifying the military occupation, fuelling an aggressive “anti-environment” development strategy, have heralded a new “regime of brutality”.
And Marape and Rabuka, who pledged to exiled indigenous leader Benny Wenda in Suva in February 2023 that he would support the Papuans “because they are Melanesians”, have been accused of failing the West Papuan cause.
Protesters at Molodoï, Strasbourg, demanding the release of Kanak indigenous political prisoners being detained in France pending trial for their alleged role in the pro-independence riots in May 2024. Image: @67Kanaky /X
3. France rolls back almost four decades of decolonisation progress
When pro-independence protests erupted into violent rioting in Kanaky New Caledonia on May 13, creating havoc and destruction in the capital of Nouméa and across the French Pacific territory with 14 people dead, intransigent French policies were blamed for having betrayed Kanak aspirations for independence.
While acknowledging the goodwill and progress that had been made since the 1988 Matignon accords and the Nouméa pact a decade later following the bloody 1980s insurrection, the French government lost the self-determination trajectory after two narrowly defeated independence referendums and a third vote boycotted by Kanaks because of the covid pandemic.
This third vote with less than half the electorate taking part had no credibility, but Paris insisted on bulldozing constitutional electoral changes that would have severely disenfranchised the indigenous vote. More than 36 years of constructive progress had been wiped out.
“It’s really three decades of hard work by a lot of people to build, sort of like a future for Kanaky New Caledonia, which is part of the Pacific rather than part of France,” I was quoted as saying.
France had had three prime ministers since 2020 and none of them seemed to have any “real affinity” for indigenous issues, particularly in the South Pacific, in contrast to some previous leaders.
In the wake of a snap general election in mainland France, when President Emmanuel Macron lost his centrist mandate and is now squeezed between the polarised far right National Rally and the left coalition New Popular Front, the controversial electoral reform was quietly scrapped.
New French Overseas Minister Manual Valls has heralded a new era of negotiation over self-determination. In November, he criticised Macron’s “stubbornness’ in an interview with the French national daily Le Parisien, blaming him for “ruining 36 years of dialogue, of progress”.
But New Caledonia is not the only headache for France while pushing for its own version of an “Indo-Pacific” strategy. Pro-independence French Polynesian President Moetai Brotherson and civil society leaders have called on the UN to bring Paris to negotiations over a timetable for decolonisation.
West Papuan leader Benny Wenda (left) and Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . “We will support them [ULMWP] because they are Melanesians.” Rabuka also had a Pacific role with New Caledonia. Image: Fiji govt/RNZ Pacific4. Pacific Islands Forum also fails Kanak aspirations
Kanaks and the Pacific’s pro-decolonisation activists had hoped that an intervention by the Pacific Islands Forum in support of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) would enhance their self-determination stocks.
However, they were disappointed. And their own internal political divisions have not made things any easier.
On the eve of the three-day fact-finding delegation to the territory in October, Fiji’s Rabuka was already warning the local government (led by pro-independence Louis Mapou to “be reasonable” in its demands from Paris.
Rabuka and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown and then Tongan counterpart Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni visited the French territory not to “interfere” but to “lower the temperature”.
But an Australian proposal for a peacekeeping force under the Australian-backed Pacific Policing Initiative (PPI) fell flat, and the mission was generally considered a failure for Kanak indigenous aspirations.
Taking the planet’s biggest problem to the world’s highest court for global climate justice. Image: X/@ciel_tweets
5. Climate crisis — the real issue and geopolitics
In spite of the geopolitical pressures from countries, such as the US, Australia and France, in the region in the face of growing Chinese influence, the real issue for the Pacific remains climate crisis and what to do about it.
Controversy marked an A$140 million aid pact signed between Australia and Nauru last month in what was being touted as a key example of the geopolitical tightrope being forced on vulnerable Pacific countries.
This agreement offers Nauru direct budgetary support, banking services and assistance with policing and security. The strings attached? Australia has been granted the right to veto any agreement with a third country such as China.
Critics have compared this power of veto to another agreement signed between Australia and Tuvalu in 2023 which provided Australian residency opportunities and support for climate mitigation. However, in return Australia was handed guarantees over security.
The previous month, November, was another disappointment for the Pacific when it was “once again ignored” at the UN COP29 climate summit in the capital Baku of oil and natural gas-rich Azerbaijan.
The Suva-based Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) condemned the outcomes as another betrayal, saying that the “richest nations turned their backs on their legal and moral obligations” at what had been billed as the “finance COP”.
The new climate finance pledge of a US$300 billion annual target by 2035 for the global fight against climate change was well short of the requested US$1 trillion in aid.
Climate campaigners and activist groups branded it as a “shameful failure of leadership” that forced Pacific nations to accept the “token pledge” to prevent the negotiations from collapsing.
Much depends on a climate justice breakthrough with Vanuatu’s landmark case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) arguing that those harming the climate are breaking international law.
The case seeks an advisory opinion from the court on the legal responsibilities of countries over the climate crisis, and many nations in support of Vanuatu made oral submissions last month and are now awaiting adjudication.
Given the primacy of climate crisis and vital need for funding for adaptation, mitigation and loss and damage faced by vulnerable Pacific countries, former Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Meg Taylor delivered a warning:
“Pacific leaders are being side-lined in major geopolitical decisions affecting their region and they need to start raising their voices for the sake of their citizens.”
CounterSpin is your weekly look behind the headlines of the mainstream news. This is the time of year when we take a listen back to some of the conversations from the past year that have helped us clarify the events that bombard us—in part by showing how elite media are clouding them.
It’s not to say Big Media always get the facts wrong; but that what facts they point us toward, day after day, whose interpretation of those facts they suggest we credit, what responses we’re told are worth pursuing—all of that serves media’s corporate owners’ and sponsors’ bottom line, at the expense of all of our lives and our futures. An important part of the work we do—as producers and as listeners—is to help create and support different ways to inform ourselves and stay in conversation.
At any given moment, crude oil is being pumped up from the depths of the planet. Some of that sludge gets sent to a refinery and processed into plastic, then it becomes the phone in your hand, the shades on your window, the ornaments hanging from your Christmas tree.
Although scientists know how much carbon dioxide is emitted to make these products (a new iPhone is akin to driving more than 200 miles), there’s little research into how much gets stashed away in them. A study published on Friday in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability estimates that billions of tons of carbon from fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — was stored in gadgets, building materials, and other long-lasting human-made items over a recent 25 year period, tucked away in what the researchers call the “technosphere.”
According to the study by researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, 400 million tons of carbon gets added to the technosphere’s stockpile every year, growing at a slightly faster rate than fossil fuel emissions. But in many cases, the technosphere doesn’t keep that carbon permanently; if objects get thrown away and incinerated, they wind up warming the atmosphere, too. In 2011, 9 percent of all extracted fossil carbon was sunk into items and infrastructure in the technosphere, an amount that would almost equal that year’s emissions from the European Union if it were burned.
“It’s like a ticking time bomb,” said Klaus Hubacek, an ecological economist at the University of Groningen and senior author of the paper. “We draw lots of fossil resources out of the ground and put them in the technosphere and then leave them sitting around. But what happens after an object’s lifetime?”
The word “technosphere” got its start in 1960, when a science writer named Wil Lepkowski wrote that “modern man has become a goalless, lonely prisoner of his technosphere,” in an article for the journal Science. Since then, the term, a play on “biosphere,” has been used by ecologists and geologists to grapple with the amount of stuff humankind has smothered the planet in.
“The problem is that we have been incredibly wasteful as we’ve been making and building things.” said Jan Zalasiewicz, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the University of Groningen study.
In 2016, Zalasiewicz and his colleagues published a paper that estimated the technosphere had grown to approximately 30 trillion tonnes, an amount 100,000 times greater than the mass of all humans piled on top of each other. The paper also found that the number of “technofossils” — unique kinds of manmade objects — outnumbered the number of unique species of life on the planet. In 2020, a separate group of researchers found that the technosphere doubles in volume roughly every 20 years and now likely outweighs all living things.
“The question is, how does the technosphere impinge upon the biosphere?” Zalasiewicz said. Plastic bags and fishing nets, for example, can choke the animals that encounter them. And unlike natural ecosystems, like forests and oceans that can absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, humans are “not very good at recycling,” Zalasiewicz said.
Managing the disposal of all this stuff in a more climate-friendly way is precisely the problem that the researchers from University of Groningen want to draw attention to. Their research looked at the 8.4 billion tons of fossil carbon in human-made objects that were in use for at least a year between 1995 and 2019. Nearly 30 percent of this carbon was trapped in rubber and plastic, much of it in household appliances, and another quarter was stashed in bitumen, a byproduct of crude oil used in construction.
“Once you discard these things, the question is, how do you treat that carbon?” said Kaan Hidiroglu, one of the study’s authors and an energy and environmental studies PhD student at the University of Groningen. “If you put it into incinerators and burn it, you immediately release more carbon emissions into the atmosphere, which is something we really do not want to do.”
Each year, the paper estimates, roughly a third of these fossil-products in the technosphere get incinerated. Another third end up in landfills, which can act as a kind of long-term carbon sink. But unfortunately, the authors acknowledge, these sites often leach chemicals, burp out methane, or shed microplastics into the environment. A little less than a third is recycled — a solution that comes with its own problems — and a small amount is littered.
“There’s so many different aspects to the problem and treating it properly,” Hubacek said. Nevertheless, he said, landfills are a good starting point if managed well. According to the study, the bulk of fossil carbon that’s put into landfills decays slowly and stays put over 50 years. Designing products in a way that allows them to be recycled and last a long time can help keep the carbon trapped for longer.
Ultimately, Hubacek said, the real solution starts with people questioning if they really need so much stuff. “Reduce consumption and avoid making it in the first place. But once you have it, that’s when we need to think about what to do next.”
With just a month left in office, the Biden administration is setting a bold new target for U.S. climate action. On Thursday, the White House announced a national goal that would see the country’s greenhouse gas emissions drop 61 to 66 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. That would keep the United States on a “straight line” trajectory toward Biden’s ultimate goal of hitting net zero emissions by 2050, officials said. If that happens, it would mean the country is only emitting as much carbon as it’s simultaneously sequestering through techniques like restoring forests and wetlands — in other words, that it’s no longer playing any part in warming the planet.
The announcement is the latest in a series of climate-related actions Biden is taking during his final months in office. In the last week alone, his administration pushed for an international deal to limit global fossil fuel finance and published a study that cautioned against new export infrastructure for liquefied natural gas. These actions are designed to shore up environmental action ahead of president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.
Just as he did during his first term, Trump is promising to boost fossil fuels when he takes office next year. He’s also pledged to claw back funding from Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks to supercharge renewable energy adoption, and to once again pull the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement, the 2015 United Nations accord intended to limit global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. (That withdrawal process took years when Trump first tried it, but it will likely move much faster this time.)
“The Biden-Harris administration may be about to leave office, but we’re confident in America’s ability to rally around this new climate program,” said John Podesta, the administration’s senior climate advisor, on a call with reporters. “While the United States federal government under President Trump may put climate action on the back burner, the work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief.”
Podesta maintained that the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, and other federal policies have created enough momentum that emissions will continue to decline without further federal encouragement. He noted that the private sector has announced $450 billion in investments in clean energy projects over the past four years, much of which was stimulated by the IRA, and more investment is likely to follow even under Trump’s tenure. A study from Princeton University found that the law will be enough to reduce U.S. emissions by as much as 48 percent by 2035 — a good portion of the way toward the new goal, but not all the way there.
Much of the work will fall on states, who regulate their own utilities and can promote the switch to renewable energy sources. Cities run their own public transportation systems and set energy-efficiency building codes. Governors and mayors have long collaborated on more ambitious goals than the federal government, even under Democratic administrations.
“Across the country,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi said in the press call Wednesday, “we see decarbonization efforts to reduce our emissions in many ways achieving escape velocity, an inexorable path, a place from which we will not turn back.”
A wide coalition of governors, mayors, tribes, and companies has pledged to continue climate progress over the next four years under Trump, and more than 200 of these entities have laid out their own climate plans. They can attempt their own decarbonization efforts, as New York state plans to do through its new congesting pricing policy in Manhattan, or by litigating against Trump’s emissions-boosting policies, as California Governor Gavin Newsom has said he plans to do.
Fundamental market forces are also at work. The prices of renewables like solar panels and wind turbines, plus the batteries to store that energy, have been plummeting. That’s partly why Texas — not exactly a bastion of climate action — now generates more renewable energy than any other state. And heat pumps — which move heat into a home using electricity instead of fossil fuels — now outsell gas furnaces in the U.S.
“Pioneering offshore wind farms are delivering clean power,” Zaidi said. “Retired nuclear plants are coming back online. America is racing forward on solar and batteries. Not just the deployment, but also the means to stamp those products ‘Made in America.’”
The new plan places particular emphasis on efforts to reduce emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that warms the earth around 80 times as fast as carbon dioxide but lingers in the atmosphere for a shorter time period. Biden has rolled out regulations designed to penalize the huge share of methane emissions that come from the oil and gas sector, a move that even ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods has asked Trump not to repeal. Last month, at the United Nations’ international climate meeting, COP29, the U.S. announced a partnership with China to track methane leakage from oil infrastructure and develop technologies to mitigate it. The administration said it expects methane emissions to fall by 35 percent over the next decade if the nation meets its broader climate target.
The United States is submitting its new target as part of its requirements under the Paris Agreement. The treaty calls on every country to outline its climate ambitions every five years in documents known as “nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs. When he took office in 2021, Biden set a national pledge to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. The new 61-66 percent target for 2035 puts the U.S. in the middle of the pack when it comes to this round of Paris climate plans, which are due from all countries in February. The United Kingdom announced a much more ambitious 81 percent reduction target at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, last month, while the United Arab Emirates has only committed to a 47 percent reduction over the same period. Brazil, which is hosting COP30 next year, has a goal that is similar to Biden’s.
Some advocacy organizations chastised Biden for not setting an even more ambitious target, one in line with that of the United Kingdom.
“With a climate denier about to enter the White House, the Biden administration’s new national climate plan represents the bare minimum floor for climate action,” said Ashfaq Khalfan, the climate justice director at Oxfam America, the U.S. chapter of the global anti-poverty advocacy organization. “It falls far short of the U.S.’s fair share of emissions reduction as the world’s largest historical polluter.”
But others praised Biden for trying to ratchet up climate ambition despite the dark short-term outlook. Rachel Cleetus, the climate policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said other nations would appreciate that the outgoing government had set a realistic target for the nation’s climate ambition.
“I think the international community will welcome the U.S. showing it understands the importance of doing its part to meet global climate goals,” she said. “There will be challenges, for sure, but what’s not reasonable is letting political winds dictate the future of the planet and the safety of people now and for generations to come.”
The A$140 million aid agreement between Australia and Nauru signed last week is a prime example of the geopolitical tightrope vulnerable Pacific nations are walking in the 21st century.
The deal provides Nauru with direct budgetary support, stable banking services, and policing and security resources. In return, Australia will have the right to veto any pact Nauru might make with other countries — namely China.
The veto terms are similar to the “Falepili Union” between Australia and Tuvalu signed late last year, which granted Tuvaluans access to Australian residency and climate mitigation support, in exchange for security guarantees.
In exchange for investment in military infrastructure development, training and equipment, the US gains unrestricted access to six ports and airports.
Also last week, PNG signed a 10-year, A$600 million deal to fund its own team in Australia’s NRL competition. In return, “PNG will not sign a security deal that could allow Chinese police or military forces to be based in the Pacific nation”.
These arrangements are all emblematic of the geopolitical tussle playing out in the Pacific between China and the US and its allies.
This strategic competition is often framed in mainstream media and political commentary as an extension of “the great game” played by rival powers. From a traditional security perspective, Pacific nations can be depicted as seeking advantage to leverage their own development priorities.
But this assumption that Pacific governments are “diplomatic price setters”, able to play China and the US off against each other, overlooks the very real power imbalances involved.
The risk, as the authors of one recent study argued, is that the “China threat” narrative becomes the justification for “greater Western militarisation and economic dominance”. In other words, Pacific nations become diplomatic price takers.
Defence diplomacy Pacific nations are vulnerable on several fronts: most have a low economic base and many are facing a debt crisis. At the same time, they are on the front line of climate change and rising sea levels.
The costs of recovering from more frequent extreme weather events create a vicious cycle of more debt and greater vulnerability. As was reported at this year’s United Nations COP29 summit, climate financing in the Pacific is mostly in the form of concessional loans.
At the country level, government systems often lack the capacity to manage increasing aid packages, and struggle with the diplomatic engagement and other obligations demanded by the new geopolitical conditions.
In August, Kiribati even closed its borders to diplomats until 2025 to allow the new government “breathing space” to attend to domestic affairs.
In the past, Australia championed governance and institutional support as part of its financial aid. But a lot of development assistance is now skewed towards policing and defence.
Kiribati: threatened by sea level rise, the nation closed its borders to foreign diplomats until 2025. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation
Lack of good faith At the same time, many political parties in Pacific nations operate quite informally and lack comprehensive policy manifestos. Most governments lack a parliamentary subcommittee that scrutinises foreign policy.
The upshot is that foreign policy and security arrangements can be driven by personalities rather than policy priorities, with little scrutiny. Pacific nations are also susceptible to corruption, as highlighted in Transparency International’s 2024 Annual Corruption Report.
Since 2019, my country has become a hotbed for diplomatic tensions and foreign interference, and undue influence.
Similarly, Pacific affairs expert Distinguished Professor Steven Ratuva has argued the Australia–Tuvalu agreement was one-sided and showed a “lack of good faith”.
Behind these developments, of course, lies the evolving AUKUS security pact between Australia, the US and United Kingdom, a response to growing Chinese presence and influence in the “Indo-Pacific” region.
The response from Pacific nations has been diplomatic, perhaps from a sense they cannot “rock the submarine” too much, given their ties to the big powers involved. But former Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Meg Taylor has warned:
Pacific leaders were being sidelined in major geopolitical decisions affecting their region and they need to start raising their voices for the sake of their citizens.
Unless these partnerships are grounded in good faith and genuine sustainable development, the grassroots consequences of geopolitics-as-usual will not change.
On October 29, the Spanish town of Paiporta, Valencia, was swept by more rain in four hours than it had received in the past three years. The resulting torrent gutted the entire community, killing over 200 residents. While Valencians have banded together to survive and rebuild, their solidarity of necessity is accompanied by a simmering fury at the government’s failures. The Real News reports from Valencia, Spain.
Producers: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt Videography: Mario Capetillo Torres Video Editor: Leo Erhardt
Transcript
David – Paiporta resident:
When the water rose all the way up there, that’s when the cell phone warnings came through. By then, my dog had already drowned here on the ground floor, that’s when the alarms went off, the warnings started coming in: “Peep peep! Watch out, the ravines are overflowing.” What happened here is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable.
Narrator:
On October 29th, 2024, the small Spanish town of Paiporta became a flashpoint in an unprecedented natural disaster. A rare weather event caused by the meeting of warm and cold fronts unleashed huge amounts of rainfall on the Spanish region of Valencia. More rain in 4 hours than the previous 3 years combined. The storm – referred to by the abbreviation DANA – claimed the lives of 220 people, with tens of people still missing. Today, the town’s residents are angry, they accuse the regional and central government of a slow and negligent response. But where the authorities have failed, volunteers have stepped in.
Goyo – Volunteer:
Well, it looks like some heads might roll. Watching the news, you get the impression they didn’t issue a very effective warning for people to take the necessary precautions, knowing that such a massive flood was on its way.
But groups like ours are really essential because, right now, we don’t see any military presence distributing food. It’s only the volunteer organizations and NGOs providing support to those in need.
Volunteer:
– Would you like some slices of melon?
– Yeah, we’ve got a Tupperware.
– Of course.
David – Paiporta resident:
They left us abandoned for the first 24 hours. We were alone for the first 48 hours. We were entering supermarkets, grabbing food trying to survive as if there were no government. It wasn’t until the third or fourth day that we finally started seeing some presence from the army and others. We felt completely alone and forsaken. In a country where we pay taxes, this should not be happening. And then, just last night, they pulled six more bodies out from under the mud along the tracks. Does it make sense that after ten days, they still haven’t sent enough personnel to find all the missing, or at least most of them? It’s unacceptable, completely unacceptable.
Paiporta resident:
But as I’m saying, this could happen to any Spaniard. The flood has impacted Valencia. But all of Spain, our leaders have abandoned us. Tomorrow, this could happen somewhere else in Spain. We’ll help, but bear in mind, our leaders won’t. What do we even need those leaders for? I don’t want them; I’ll govern myself, damn it.
Narrator:
It was here in Paiporta, that the King and Queen of Spain, the Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and the regional leader of Valencia, Carlos Mazon came to visit after DANA. And it was here where they were all greeted with mud and dirt thrown at them by angry locals. Whilst the King and Queen stayed to talk to locals, Prime Minister Sanchez and regional head Mazon, both made a hasty retreat.
David – Paiporta resident:
It’s a huge outrage, and the anger running through the town is impressive. There are a lot of inconsistencies; the numbers they’re giving about the missing don’t add up. They’re still finding people. There are garages they haven’t even been able to check because the walls have collapsed. So they can’t tell the truth. Three homeless people who lived there are nowhere to be found. They’re not listed as missing. In Picaña, there were three or four homeless people in a park who are also unaccounted for. They could write this off as other causes of death. We’re furious, indignant, and feeling a deep-seated rage that’s indescribable.
Chantings:
Where’s your mud? Where’s your mud?
Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!
You’re defending a murderer!
Narrator:
Over 130,000 protesters took to the streets to not only demand the resignation of regional leader Carlos Mazón, but to demand answers. Answers to questions like, why did Valencian residents only receive warning text messages 14 hours after the regional government had received a series of red weather alerts? For many the text messages came all too late.
Chantings:
Resign! Resign!
Where were you when you were needed? Where? You’re all dogs! You, you, and you are worthless!
Protester:
Mazón was completely absent. Here, the people are saving the people. That’s what’s happening here today in the Town Hall square, in this November 9 protest, demanding Mazón’s resignation.
Protester:
We’ve had to coordinate ourselves. We’re doing everything by ourselves. And now they try to paint us as heroes, we don’t have to take care of this, they have to take care of everything. And next week, now that the people are more or less safe, what has to happen is that instead of asking for forgiveness, they resign! Out of pure shame of what they’ve done.
Paul – Valencia resident:
My view is that the management by the Valencian government bordered on criminal negligence, by not warning people, downplaying the tragedy beforehand, and trying to hide their incompetence. The Spanish central government, too, treats us like a colony, more worried about getting the AVE train to Valencia and making sure tourists can still come to the beach. And companies prioritize their interests over the safety of their workers, both on the day of the disaster and in the days afterward.
Lucia – Valencia resident:
I believe it’s our duty as citizens to present our complaints against the entire political mismanagement of this DANA, which led to the loss of countless lives that could have been saved. And the chaos that followed the DANA has been even worse than the DANA itself.
Chantings:
Long live Valencia!
Volunteer:
Sandwiches! Go forward if you want one.
I’m making it with whatever little we have so they can enjoy a little taste of home. We need all of this to go into storage.
Carlota – Volunteer:
We’re all in this together. Nobody is anyone’s enemy. It would be easy for us to have a little disagreement and say you’re on one side, and I’m on the other. But right now, we all need to be together and find a solution. I have my opinions, but I’ll keep them to myself because, right now, the priority is for us all to be here, helping however we can with the resources we have.
Maria del Pilar – Volunteer & victim:
I’m personally very grateful to the youth, to the people of Valencia who came to the towns to help us, to help us clear everything out and clean our homes. I’m so grateful that, if I could, I’d thank every one of these people personally.
Jesus – Paiporta resident:
So many different people have come here — people from all over, from outside, from Valencia. Even people from abroad. It’s been remarkable. We can be proud of everyone who’s come to lend a hand. The people will save the people.
