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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
Shortly after he was elected, Donald Trump announced an economic gambit that was aggressive even by his standards. He vowed that, on the first day of his second term, he would slap 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, and boost those already placed on Chinese products by another 10 percent.
The move set off a frenzy of pushback. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even flew to the president-elect’s Florida resort to make his case. Economists say the potential levies threaten to upend global trade — including on green technologies, many of which are manufactured in China. The moves would cause price spikes for everything from electric vehicles and heat pumps to solar panels.
“Typically, with tariffs, we’ve seen [companies] pass them along to the consumer,” said Corey Cantor, electric vehicles analyst at Bloomberg NEF. Ansgar Baums, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan foreign policy think-tank Stimson Center, said retaliatory moves from the three targeted countries would only make things worse. “It will drive up consumer costs and hurt those who cannot afford it.”
Trump acknowledges that possibility. But he has argued that tariffs are necessary to force Canada and Mexico to crack down on drugs, particularly fentanyl, and migrants crossing the border into the U.S.
It’s not the first time Trump has turned to tariffs as a foreign policy tool. In 2018 and 2019, he imposed them on a litany of goods, from steel and aluminum to photovoltaic solar panels and washing machines. While the Biden administration eased some of those duties, it kept many in place, especially those targeting China, and recently raised tariffs on Chinese items including electric vehicles, solar cells, and electrical vehicle batteries. Experts say these efforts have done little more than raise prices.
“The consensus on the first round of Trump tariffs is that [they] generally did not improve American productivity,” said Alex Muresianu, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank. The nonprofit calculated that, in the long run, Trump’s first round of tariffs will hurt gross domestic product and cost the United States some 142,000 jobs. Baums was even more blunt about their impact: “They were a big failure. They didn’t achieve much.”
The recently threatened tariffs would ratchet prices even higher on things like solar panels, but are also much more far reaching because of their broad application to North American trading partners. One sweeping impact would be on gasoline prices because, although the U.S. is world’s largest oil producer, older domestic refineries can only process the type of heavier crude that comes from Canada. GasBuddy projects that tariffs could add 35 to 75 cents to a gallon of gas.
Automakers will also be hard hit, as $97 billion in parts and some four million vehicles come from Canada and, especially, Mexico. That’s where some of the more affordable electric vehicles, such as Ford’s Mustang Mach-E and the Chevrolet Equinox, are manufactured. Wolfe Research said that “given the magnitude, we’d expect most investors to assume Trump ultimately does not follow through with these threats” but that, if they were put in place, tariffs would add $3,000 to the price of the average car, regardless of whether it’s powered by gasoline or a battery.
Cantor, at Bloomberg NEF, says adding even a few thousand dollars to the price can drastically expand or contract the potential market of buyers for a vehicle. For example, about 70 percent of consumers consider a $35,000 car, a number that jumps to about 87 percent when a car is $30,000.
“People adjust their behavior,” he said. That could further harm an EV sector that will also likely be reeling from Trump’s rollback of federal tax-credits for electrified vehicles.
Baums doesn’t believe that more tariffs will meaningfully shift industries to the US and the Trump administration “underestimates” how complicated that process would be. Others say some relocation could occur. Michelle Davis, director and head of global solar for research firm Wood Mackenzie, wrote that the levies “would undoubtedly increase domestic manufacturing activity to meet market needs.” But even then, she adds, that “this would result in a more expensive market for domestic buyers.”
In addition to prices, Muresianu also worries that the type of protectionism that Trump favors could stymie innovation. He points to the U.S. shipbuilding industry as an example: it once supplied most of the world’s ships but, in large part due to policies meant to shield domestic shipyards from competition, American vessels have since become drastically more expensive than those made overseas and now account for less than 1 percent of the global total. Tariffs could impose similar stagnancy on other U.S. industries, Muresianu says.
Baums’ concerns are more existential. Trump, he says, is geo-politicizing issues like climate change in ways that will ultimately make it more difficult to share technology, lower costs, and combat greenhouse gas emissions. He would like countries to instead come together and agree that some industries — including cleantech — are too important to put at the center of a trade war.
“The planet is burning,” said Baums. “If there’s anything we should try to cooperate on, it’s stuff that makes a clean transition happen.”
Fiji’s coalition government has come under scrutiny over allegations of human rights violations.
Speaking at the commemoration of International Human Rights Day in Suva on Tuesday, the chair of the Coalition of NGOs, Shamima Ali, claimed that — like the previous FijiFirst administration — the coalition government has demonstrated a “lack of commitment to human rights”.
Addressing more than 400 activists at the event, the Minister for Women, Children, and Social Protection Lynda Tabuya acknowledged the concerns raised by civil society organisations, assuring them that Sitiveni Rabuka’s government was committed to listening and addressing these issues.
Ali criticises Fiji government over human rights Video: FBC News
The “Human rights for all” theme at Fiji’s World Human Rights Day march in downtown Suva. Image: FBC News
Shamima Ali claimed that freedom of expression was still being suppressed and the coalition had failed to address this.
“We are also concerned that there continue to be government restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly through the arbitrary application of the Public Order Amendment Act, which should have been changed by now — two years into the new government that we all looked forward to,” she said.
A “Girls wanna have fundamental human rights” placard at the World Human Rights Day march in Suva. Image: FBC News
Ali alleged that serious decisions in government were made unfairly, and women in leadership continued to be “undermined”.
“Nepotism and cronyism remain rife with each successive government, with party supporters being given positions with no regard for merit, diversity, and representation,” she said.
“Misogyny against certain women leaders is rampant, with wild sexism and online bullying.”
An “Our rights, our future now” placard at Fiji’s Human Rights Day rally. Image: FBC News
Responding, Minister Tabuya acknowledged the concerns raised and called for dialogue to bring about the change needed.
“I can sit here and be told everything that we are doing wrong in government,” Tabuya said.
“I can take it, but I cannot assure that others in government will take it the same way as well. So I encourage you, with the kind of partnerships, to begin with dialogue and to build together because government cannot do it alone.”
A “Stop fossil fuel production, consumption and distribution” placard at Fiji’s World Human Rights Day march . . . climate crisis is a major human rights issue in the Pacific. Image: FBC News
The minister stressed that to address the many human rights violation concerns that had been raised, the government needed support from civil society organisations, traditional leaders, faith-based leaders, and a cross-sector approach to face these issues.
Vanuatu has reaffirmed its global leadership in climate action as the first country to launch a technical assistance programme under the Santiago Network for Loss and Damage.
This historical achievement has been announced by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), according to a statement from the Department of Climate Change (DoCC) and the National Advisory Board (NAB) on Climate Change.
“Vanuatu will benefit from US$330,000 from the new Santiago Network to design a loss and damage country programme as a first step towards getting money directly into the hands of people who are suffering climate harm and communities taking action to address the unavoidable and irreversible impacts on agriculture, fisheries, biodiversity infrastructure, water supply, tourism, and other critical livelihood activities. With such a L&D programme,” the statement said.
“Vanuatu aims to be first in line to receive a large grant from the new UN Fund for responding to Loss and Damage holding US$700 million which has yet to be used.
“Loss and damage is a consequence of the worsening climate impacts being felt across Vanuatu’s islands, and driven by increases in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) concentrations which are caused primarily by fossil fuels and industry.
“Vanuatu is not responsible for climate change, and has contributed less than 0.0016 percent of global historical greenhouse gas emissions.
“Vanuatu’s climate vulnerability is one of the highest in the world.
“Despite best efforts by domestic communities, civil society, the private sector and government, Vanuatu’s climate vulnerability stems from insufficient global mitigation efforts, its direct exposure to a range of climate and non-climate risks, as well as inadequate levels of action and support for adaptation provided to Vanuatu as an unfulfilled obligation of rich developed countries under the UN Climate Treaty.”
The Santiago Network was recently set up under the Warsaw International Mechanism for loss and damage (WIM) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) to enable technical assistance to avert, minimise and address loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change at the local, national and regional level.
The technical assistance is intended for developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.
The statement said that because Vanuatu’s negotiators were instrumental in the establishment of the Santiago Network, the DoCC had worked quickly to ensure direct benefits begin to flow to communities who are suffering climate loss and damage now.
“Now that an official call for proposals to support Vanuatu has been published on the Santiago Network website www.santiago-network.org, there is an opportunity for Vanuatu’s local Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), private sector, academic institutions, community associations, churches and even individuals to put in a bid to respond to the request,” the statement said.
“The only requirement for local entities to submit a bid is to become a member of the Santiago Network, with membership open to a huge range of Organisations, Bodies, Networks and Experts (OBNEs).
“Specifically defined, organisations are independent legal entities. Bodies are groups that are not necessarily independent legal entities. Networks ate interconnected groups of organisations or individuals that collaborate, share resources, or coordinate activities to achieve common goals.
“These networks can vary in structure, purpose, and scope but do not necessarily have legally established arrangements such as consortiums. Experts – individuals who are recognised specialists in a specific field.”
According to the statement, to become a member, a potential OBNE has to complete a simple form outlining their expertise, experience and commitment to the principles of the Santiago Network.
“The membership submissions are reviewed on a rolling basis, and once approved, OBNEs can make a formal bid to develop Vanuatu’s Loss and Damage programme for the UN Fund for responding to L&D,” the joint DoCC and NAB statement said.
“Vanuatu’s Ministry of Climate Change prefers that Pacific based OBNEs apply to provide this TA because they have deep cultural understanding and strong community ties, enabling them to design and implement context-specific, culturally appropriate solutions. Additionally, local and regional OBNEs have been shown to invest in strengthening national skills and knowledge, leaving behind lasting capacities that contribute to long-term resilience, and build strong local ownership and sustainability.”
The deadline for OBNEs to submit their bids is 5 January 2025.
There will be an open and transparent selection process taken by the UN to determine the best service provider to help Vanuatu and its people most effectively address growing climate losses and damages.
In addition to Vanuatu’s historic engagement with the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage, Vanuatu will also hold a board seat on the new Fund for Responding to L&D, as well as leading climate loss and damage initiatives at the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, advocating for a new Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty, developing a national Loss and Damage Policy Framework, undertaking community-led Loss and Damage Policy Labs and establishing a national Climate Change Fund to provide loss and damage finance to vulnerable people across the country.
Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.
Riley says it as a joke, a way to make light of surviving three weather-related scares over the past three years. The first time was in 2022, a year after Riley and their partner moved to Alachua County in the northern part of the Sunshine State. On the June day that they brought their then-newborn baby home, a record-setting heat wave overwhelmed the air conditioner until it broke. The next summer, extreme heat struck again, leading to the explosion of a lawn mower’s battery close to where the family’s two dogs were sleeping. Then, this past September, Hurricane Helene sent an oak tree smashing through the roof of their home, bringing a ceiling rafter down on Riley’s partner. Though the branches missed their second child — then 4 months old — by about 5 feet, the infant was showered with insulation foam.
“When I talk about it, I have to keep from crying,” they said. “But you know, nothing stops when you’re a hurricane survivor. You still have to go to work.”
About two months after the hurricane, Riley found themself in like-minded company. As Alachua County’s sustainability manager, the 35-year-old spent a recent Saturday helping lead the inaugural Alachua County Climate Action Summit in Gainesville. Facing a crowd of residents, local leaders, activists, and scientists, one presenter asked, “Who has lived through a hurricane when the power went out?” Hands flew into the air.
Steven Hofstetter, director of the Alachua County Environmental Protection Department, speaks to a crowd at the Alachua County Climate Summit in November 2024.
Grist
The daylong program was intended to tell the community about climate impacts in store for Alachua County, and to get feedback on an official climate action plan, which organizers hope to finalize and begin executing early next year. Within the conference center’s rooms, the atmosphere hummed with urgency, and it was hard to believe that preparing for climate change was at all controversial. For decades, Alachua County has remained a haven for liberals, a blue dot in a deeply red state: Democrats hold most local offices and Democratic candidates for president have garnered landslide majorities since the county backed President Bill Clinton in 1992.
But in Republican-dominated Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has scrubbed several mentions of “climate change” from the state’s laws, Alachua County’s ambition looks like an easily popped bubble. Even though a large majority of Floridians say they want action on climate change, the state has become increasingly hostile toward many such policies. Recent headwinds, like state laws written to override local ones, precarious federal funding, and a battle over a local utility, threaten to derail the county’s efforts. “To be a Floridian and to be an Alachua County citizen is to hold profoundly different realities,” said Cynthia Barnett, an environmental journalist, in a speech at the summit.
Alachua County sits squarely in North Central Florida, with several hours of interstate buffering residents from coastlines and the nearest big cities, Orlando and Jacksonville. On the day of the summit, downtown Gainesville — the city at the county’s center — bustled with weekend traffic. The city is home to the University of Florida, and some of its 60,000 students were biking to brunch, while others joined throngs of orange-and-blue clad tailgaters in front of the football stadium.
The university is the county’s largest employer, and its progressive influence radiates throughout Gainesville and its 150,000 residents. Leave the city, and the bohemian coffee shops and pride flags vanish, replaced by boiled peanut stands, billboards advertising fireworks, and “Make America Great Again” lawn signs. A little further, and the Spanish moss-draped canopies of live oak trees give way to farmland and pine forests grown for timber. In this perimeter lie the county’s eight other towns, with populations ranging from less than 1,000 to nearly 10,000.
Highway Route 441 cuts through Paynes Prairie, a state park and nature preserve in Alachua County. Jeffrey Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A person bikes along a road near the University of Florida Campus. Jeffrey Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Regardless of where Alachua County’s 285,000 residents live, climate change is expected to upend their daily lives. According to the county’s climate vulnerability assessment, finalized this past summer, the next century will likely bring a litany of disasters, from intensified hurricanes to long periods of drought. An upswing in extreme rainfall events could flood large swathes of the low-lying region, which is built around wetlands. By the end of the century, residents can expect a heat index, a measure of temperature and humidity, of over 130 degrees Fahrenheit for more than a third of the year.
“It’s critical that we have a climate action plan that considers these future challenges,” said Stephen Hofstetter, the director of the county’s environmental protection department, which organized the summit.
To protect all these people as climate change ramps up, Alachua County is in the final stages of drafting its climate action plan — the first inland county in the state to do so. Gainesville, the county’s largest city, finished creating its climate action agenda in the spring, part of the City Commission’s goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2045. The two have worked closely together, and each plan focuses on different issues to create a comprehensive series of mitigation and resilience strategies, including establishing more cooling centers, limiting development on floodplains, investing in renewable energy production and electric vehicles, protecting agricultural land, and decreasing waste.
“It’s about maintaining the quality of life for the people,” said Dan Zhu, Gainesville’s chief resilience officer. She hopes that the City Commission formally adopts the plan at the beginning of next year.
Dan Zhu, Gainesville’s chief resilience officer, presents an update to the Gainesville Climate Action Plan to the City Commission in November, 2024 Grist
Alachua County and Gainesville are facing an uphill battle, and it starts with the way they discuss their plans with residents. In May, DeSantis signed a sweeping “don’t say climate change” bill that erased most references to global warming from state laws. The next month, climate change references were removed from textbooks after state officials pressured publishers and school boards to take related content out of grade school curriculums.
The hostile political climate has already undercut the county’s work. The organizers of the climate action summit originally included programming specifically for kids, but after local teachers expressed concerns about getting involved with anything labeled “climate,” the youth portion of the summit was canceled — save for an intergenerational panel with college and high-school students.
“You never know when the next shoe is going to drop,” said Bryan Eastman, a city commissioner. To Eastman, Gainesville’s climate work is swept up with other issues in a larger culture war. “Climate’s not the only one, but it’s a big one.”
The state law with arguably the most potential for kneecapping the county and city’s plans was passed in 2023, when DeSantis signed a measure that overhauled Gainesville Regional Utilities, or GRU, the largest utility in Alachua County. The measure took control of the public utility from the City Commission and gave it to DeSantis’ hand-picked GRU Authority board. It also mandated that the city’s utilities be managed with only financial benefits in mind, rather than considerations like climate change and affordability.
“We can’t control our climate action initiatives unless we control our power source,” said John “Ronnie” Nix, a recently retired energy conservation specialist and member of the local citizen climate advisory committee, which works with the city and county’s Joint Water and Climate Policy Board. Gainesville Regional Utilities provides gas, electricity, and water to nearly all of Gainesville. In 2021, 72 percent of that energy came from natural gas or coal. Nearly all the rest comes from a controversial biofuel plant. “We can’t do it without GRU, we need to make it work with GRU,” he said.
John “Ronnie” Nix stands in front of the Alachua County Public Schools administrative office building, where he worked as an energy conservation specialist. Grist
The utility’s new CEO, Ed Bielarski, eliminated its office of sustainability and reliance a week after the board appointed him in June. Since then, the utility has stopped sending a representative to attend the county’s climate meetings. The board has also reduced incentives for residential solar energy, and cut the utility’s usual contribution to the city budget — typically millions of dollars that fund essential services — by more than half.
During the November election, Gainesville’s voters overwhelmingly backed a ballot referendum to return the utility back to the city, with 72 percent in support. Because the GRU authority board had challenged the referendum before the vote, a judge is expected to rule on whether the city can act on the results in mid-December. Even if the referendum doesn’t stick, Nix is hopeful that the citizen committee’s efforts to maintain a good relationship with the utility will be successful. A spokesperson from GRU did not respond to a request for comment.
Other utilities in the area may be able to support some of the county’s goals, but funding remains an open question for Alachua County and Gainesville’s climate action plans. The Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s largest climate bill, allocated money for renewables and cleaning up pollution when it was passed in 2022, but DeSantis rejected the money, blocking local governments from accessing it. And while the city can apply directly for some federal grants, it hasn’t always been eligible.
“Gainesville has been missing out on a lot of funding because we’re not big enough,” Riley said, explaining that some federal climate funding is earmarked for cities of a certain size. In other cases, the city was required to show it had a climate action plan in its grant application. Now, just as the plan is nearly ready, Donald Trump’s return to the White House with Republican control of Congress means any unspent funds from Biden’s climate law will likely wind up elsewhere. “The timing couldn’t be worse,” Riley said. “The scale of what we can accomplish is going to be so much less.”
Betsy Riley speaks with Grist about Alachua County’s climate action plan at Sweetwater Wetlands Park, one of Alachua County’s 11 nature preserves. Grist
Stephen Hofstetter, John Nix, and Betsy Riley listen to Dan Zhu present an update to the Gainesville Climate Action Plan during a Citizen Climate Advisory Comittee meeting. Grist
While local proponents of climate action acknowledge the coming years won’t be easy, many are self-described optimists, scattered to various corners of city government and community organizations. Hofstetter hopes that the economic benefits associated with renewable power will encourage the federal government and utility to embrace it, while Zhu points out that key parts of Gainesville’s plan are already underway, like the rollout of electric buses, bolstered by federal grants.
Alachua County residents have also been taking action on climate change on their own. Last spring, the University of Florida student senate passed a Green New Deal, a first of its kind in the nation. The Community Weatherization Coalition, a local group that started in a church, has spent decades helping low income neighborhoods fortify homes to be more energy efficient. It’s also part of a larger collaboration creating a community solar project for the county. Other organizations, like the local Sierra Club chapter, have tried to nudge the utility’s new board toward solar energy as a cheaper alternative to gas.
Riley also sees an opportunity for building public support for the plan in more conservative parts of the county by exchanging the word “climate” for less politicized synonyms. “Words really matter, but it’s about doing the work,” they said. In the town of Hawthorne, located in the far east corner of Alachua county, organizers ended up holding a sustainability and resilience summit instead of a climate one earlier this year. Zhu’s title also recently changed from “chief climate officer” to “chief resilience officer.”
Nix, who speaks to churches on behalf of the climate action committee, says that once people understand how preparing for climate change can protect them, they have no problem with using the word “climate.”
“The best way to communicate climate impacts is to meet people where they are,” he said. “Find out how it impacts them. Get them to feel it’s personal. People will work a little bit harder to do the small things that they can.”
The Cook Islands has used its first-ever appearance at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to advocate for the “decolonisation” of international law.
While making an oral statement for an advisory opinion on the obligations of states regarding climate change, Auckland University senior lecturer Fuimaono Dr Dylan Asafo placed the blame on “our international legal system” for “the climate crisis we face today”.
He said major greenhouse gas emitters have relied “on these systems, and the institutions and fora they contain, like the annual COPs (Conference of Parties)” for many decades “to expand fossil fuel industries, increase their emissions and evade responsibility for the significant harms their emissions have caused.”
“In doing so, they have been able to maintain and grow the broader systems of domination that drive the climate crisis today — including imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy and ableism.”
Fuimaono called on nations to “dismantle these systems and imagine and build new ones capable of allowing everyone to live lives of joy and dignity, so that they are able to determine their own futures and destinies.”
He said the UN General Assembly’s request for an advisory opinion offers the ICJ “the most precious opportunity to interpret and advise on existing international law in its best possible light in order to empower all states and peoples to work together to decolonise international law and build a more equitable and just world for us all.”
The Cook Islands joined more than 100 other states and international organisations participating in the written and oral proceedings — the largest number of participants ever for an ICJ proceeding.
Fuimaono said the Cook Islands believes states should owe reparations to climate vulnerable countries if they fail to meet their adaptation and mitigation obligations, and the adverse effects to climate change lead to displacement, migration, and relocation.
The island nation’s delegation was led by its Foreign Affairs and Immigration director of the treaties, multilaterals and oceans division Sandrina Thondoo; foreign service officer Peka Fisher; and Fuimaono as external counsel.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific presenter/Bulletin editor
Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr is inviting US President-elect Donald Trump to “visit the Pacific” to see firsthand the impacts of the climate crisis.
Palau is set to host the largest annual Pacific leaders meeting in 2026, and the country’s leader Whipps told RNZ Pacific he would “love” Trump to be there.
He said he might even take the American leader, who is often criticised as a climate change denier, snorkelling in Palau’s pristine waters.
Whipps said he had seen the damage to the marine ecosystem.
“I was out snorkelling on Sunday, and once again, it’s unfortunate, but we had another heat, very warm, warming of the oceans, so I saw a lot of bleached coral,” he said.
“It’s sad to see that it’s happening more frequently and these are just impacts of what is happening around the world because of our addiction to fossil fuel.”
Bleached corals in Palau. Image: Dr Piera Biondi/Palau International Coral Reef Center/RNZ Pacific
“I would very much like to bring [Trump] to Palau if he can. That would be a fantastic opportunity to take him snorkelling and see the impacts. See the islands that are disappearing because of sea level rise, see the taro swamps that are being invaded.”
Americans experiencing the impacts
Whipps said Americans were experiencing the impacts in states such as Florida and North Carolina.
“I mean, that’s something that you need to experience. I mean, they’re experiencing [it] in Florida and North Carolina.
“They just had major disasters recently and I think that’s the rallying call that we all need to take responsibility.”
However, Trump is not necessarily known for his support of climate action. Instead, he has promised to “drill baby drill” to expand oil and gas production in the US.
Palau International Coral Reef Center researcher Christina Muller-Karanasos said surveying of corals in Palau was underway after multiple reports of bleaching.
She said the main cause of coral bleaching was climate change.
“It’s upsetting. There were areas where there were quite a lot of bleaching.
Most beautiful, pristine reef
“The most beautiful and pristine reef and amount of fish and species of fish that I’ve ever seen. It’s so important for the health of the reef. The healthy reef also supports healthy fish populations, and that’s really important for Palau.”
Bleached corals in Palau. Image: Palau International Coral Reef Center/RNZ Pacific
University of Hawai’i Manoa’s Dr Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka suspects Trump will focus on the Pacific, but for geopolitical gains.
“It will be about the militarisation of the climate change issue that you are using climate change to build relationships so that you can ensure you do the counter China issue as well.”
He believed Trump has made his position clear on the climate front.
“He said, and I quote, ‘that it is one of the great scams of all time’. And so he is a climate crisis denier.”
It is exactly the kind of comment President Whipps does not want to hear, especially from a leader of a country which Palau is close to — or from any nation.
“We need the United States, we need China, and we need India and Russia to be the leaders to make sure that we put things on track,” he said.
Bleached corals in Palau. Image: Palau International Coral Reef Center/RNZ Pacific
For the Pacific, the climate crisis is the biggest existential and security threat.
Leaders like Whipps are considering drastic measures, including the nuclear energy option.
“We’ve got to look at alternatives, and one of those is nuclear energy. It’s clean, it’s carbon free,” he told RNZ Pacific.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Angela Bishop has been struggling with what she describes as “the cost of everything lately.” Groceries are one stressor, although she gets some reprieve from the free school lunches her four kids receive. Still, a few years of the stubbornly high cost of gas, utilities, and clothing have been pain points.
“We’ve just seen the prices before our eyes just skyrocket,” said Bishop, who is 39. She moved her family to Richmond, Virginia from California a few years ago to stop “living paycheck to paycheck,” but things have been so difficult lately she’s worried it won’t be long before they are once again barely getting by.
Families nationwide are dealing with similar financial struggles. Although inflation, defined as the rate at which average prices of goods or services rise over a given period, has slowed considerably since a record peak in 2022, consumer prices today have increased by more than 21 percent since February 2020. Frustration over rising cost of living drove many voters to support president-elect Donald Trump, who campaigned on ending inflation.
Simply put, inflation was instrumental in determining how millions of Americans cast their ballots. Yet climate change, one of the primary levers behind inflationary pressures, wasn’t nearly as front of mind — just 37 percent of voters considered the issue “very important” to their vote. Bishop said that may have something to do with how difficult it can be to understand how extreme weather impacts all aspects of the economy. She knows that “climate change has something to do with inflation,” but isn’t sure exactly what.
In 2022, inflation reached 9% in the U.S. — the highest rate in over 40 years. That was part of a global trend. The lingering impacts of the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, higher fuel and energy prices, and food export bans issued by a number of countries contributed to a cost of living crisis that pushed millions of people worldwide into poverty.
Extreme weather shocks were another leading cause of escalating prices, said Alla Semenova, an economist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. “Climate change is an important part of the inflationary puzzle,” she said.
In February of 2021, Winter Storm Uri slammed Texas, causing a deadly energy crisis statewide. It also caused widespread shutdowns at oil refineries that account for nearly three-quarters of U.S chemical production. This disrupted the production and distribution of things necessary for the production of plastics, which Semenova says contributed to ensuing price hikes for packaging, disinfectants, fertilizers and pesticides.
Food prices are another area where the inflationary pressure of warming has become obvious. A drought that engulfed the Mississippi River system in 2022 severely disrupted the transportation of crops used for cattle feed, increasing shipping and commodity costs for livestock producers. Those added costs were likely absorbed by consumers buying meat and dairy products. Grain prices jumped around the same time because drought-induced supply shortages and high energy prices pushed up the costs of fertilizer, transportation, and agricultural production. Not long after, lettuce prices soared amid shortages that followed flooding across California, and the price of orange juice skyrocketed after drought and a hurricane hit major production regions in Florida.
Though overall inflation has cooled considerably since then, the economic pressures extreme weather places on food costs persist. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that weather disruptions drove global food prices to an 18-month high in October. In fact, cocoa prices surged almost 40 percent this year because of supply shortages wrought by drier conditions in West and Central Africa, where about three-quarters of the world’s cocoa is cultivated. This can not only impact the price tag of chocolate, but also health supplements, cosmetics, and fragrances, among other goods that rely on cocoa beans.
“What we have seen, especially this year, is this massive price spike,” due to abnormal weather patterns, said Rodrigo Cárcamo-Díaz, a senior economist at U.N. Trade and Development.
But the impact on consumers “goes beyond” the Consumer Price Indicator, which is the most widely used measure of inflation, said Cárcamo-Díaz. His point is simple: Lower-income households are most affected by supply shocks that inflate the price of goods as increasingly volatile weather makes prices more volatile, straining households with tighter budgets because it can take time for wages to catch up to steeper costs of living.
Rising prices are expected to become even more of an issue as temperatures climb and extreme weather becomes more frequent and severe. In fact, a 2024 study found that heat extremes driven by climate change enhanced headline inflation for 121 countries over the last 30 years, with warming temperatures expected to increase global inflation by as much as 1 percent every year until 2035. Lead researcher and climate scientist Maximilian Kotz noted that general goods, or any physical things that can be bought, broadly experienced “strong inflationary effects from rising temperatures.”
All told, the inflationary impact of climate change on cost of living is here to stay and will continue to strain American budgets, said Semenova. “The era of relatively low and stable prices is over,” she said. “Costs have been rising due to climate change. It’s the new normal.”
That’s bad news for families like the Bishops, who are simply trying to get by.
Australia’s government is being condemned by climate action groups for discouraging the International Court of Justice (ICJ) from ruling in favour of a court action brought by Vanuatu to determine legal consequences for states that fail to meet fossil reduction commitments.
In its submission before the ICJ at The Hague yesterday, Australia argued that climate action obligations under any legal framework should not extend beyond the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.
It has prompted a backlash, with Greenpeace accusing Australia’s government of undermining the court case.
“I’m very disappointed,” said Vepaiamele Trief, a Ni-Van Save the Children Next Generation Youth Ambassador, who is present at The Hague.
“To go to the ICJ and completely go against what we are striving for, is very sad to see.
“As a close neighbour of the Pacific Islands, Australia has a duty to support us.”
RNZ Pacific reports Vanuatu’s special envoy to climate change says their case to the ICJ is based on the argument that those harming the climate are breaking international law.
Special Envoy Ralph Regenvanu told RNZ Morning Report they are not just talking about countries breaking climate law.
Republished from ABC Pacific Beat with permission.
Climate @CIJ_ICJ hearings day 1 recap: called for climate justice, self-determination & accountability talks of climate leadership but argues against binding human rights exposed polluters hiding behind the #ParisAgreement to dodge accountability.https://t.co/PB86XFpwzApic.twitter.com/KI1hOKAM0G
— Center for International Environmental Law (@ciel_tweets) December 3, 2024
Vanuatu’s special envoy to climate change says their case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is based on the argument that those harming the climate are breaking international law.
The case seeks an advisory opinion from the court on the legal responsibilities of countries in relation to climate change, and dozens of countries are making oral submissions.
Hearings started in The Hague with Vanuatu — the Pacific island nation that initiated the effort to obtain a legal opinion — yesterday.
Vanuatu’s Special Envoy for Climate Change and Environment Ralph Regenvanu told RNZ Morning Report they are not just talking about countries breaking climate law.
He outlined their argument as: “This conduct — to do emissions which cause harm to the climate system, which harms other countries — is in fact a breach of international law, is unlawful, and the countries who do that should face legal consequences.”
He said they were wanting a line in the sand, even though any ruling from the court will be non-binding.
“We’re hoping for a new benchmark in international law which basically says if you pollute with cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions, you cause climate change, then you are in breach of international law,” he said.
“I think it will help clarify, for us, the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) process negotiations for example.”
Regenvanu said COP29 in Baku was frustrating, with high-emitting states still doing fossil fuel production and the development of new oil and coal fields.
He said a ruling from the ICJ, though non-binding, will clearly say that “international law says you cannot do this”.
“So at least we’ll have something, sort of a line in the sand.”
Oral submissions to the court are expected to take two weeks.
Another Pacific climate change activist says at the moment there are no consequences for countries failing to meet their climate goals.
Pacific Community (SPC) director of climate change Coral Pasisi said a strong legal opinion from the ICJ might be able to hold polluting countries accountable for failing to reach their targets.
The court will decide on two questions:
What are the obligations of states under international law to protect the climate and environment from greenhouse gas emissions?
What are the legal consequences for states that have caused significant harm to the climate and environment?
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This year’s annual global climate negotiations, COP29, concluded with an inadequate commitment on climate finance which countered the Paris Agreement’s foundational principles of global climate justice.
When countries signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, they agreed that wealthy countries would provide financing to the most vulnerable countries (often referred to as the Global South) to help advance global climate action and respond to climate disasters. Meeting this promise of climate finance was the priority at this COP.
Over 190 nations gathered to negotiate the new climate finance commitment. The negotiations are challenging – but wealthy countries did not show up with the funds for collective climate action, and therefore did not show up with a fair spirit of delivering what they had committed to under the Paris Agreement. The final decision was steamrolled through despite opposition from the world’s most vulnerable nations.
Experts recognize that over $1.3-trillion must be mobilized every year to transition away from fossil fuels, scale up clean energy, and adapt to climate damages. Only $300-billion was offered as a commitment at COP29, and even this was rife with loopholes. A $300-billion commitment sounds like a lot, at first. But by contrast, countries provide subsidies to oil and gas companies that exceed $1.3-trillion each year, and these companies collect trillions in profits as a result. Those funds could be redirected towards financing climate action globally.
We all know a dollar does not go as far as it used to. When you account for inflation, the new target of $300 billion barely exceeds the previous global commitment that was set in 2009, despite increasing climate damages and the growing urgency of climate action.
In the past years, we experienced climate damages that harmed communities and cost billions of dollars, at home in Canada and around the world. Mitigating climate change by ending pollution from oil and gas is the only way to reduce these damages. Countries like Canada owe a climate debt to vulnerable communities based on our historically high emissions; yet even independent of this, providing financing for climate action to the Global South is important. Climate action is a team sport. We can only win if everyone brings all they have onto the rink to help any teammate score a goal.
The outcome of COP29 advanced the conversation on global climate finance and provided a foundation to build on. The commitment itself fell short, but increases and improvements in the years ahead are possible. For next year’s negotiations to be more successful, wealthy high emitting countries need to play our role on the global team.
Moving to COP30, countries like Canada must deliver finance that actually meets what is needed. We also need to strengthen our own climate action at home. For example, the next round of national climate plans under the Paris Agreement are due in February. Canada’s current emissions reduction plan is currently not on track to keep our homes and communities safe from climate disaster. We will need to deliver a stronger plan, both to reduce emissions at home and scale up climate finance globally, to align with our fair share.
A landmark case that began in a Pacific classroom and could change the course of future climate talks is about to be heard in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The court will begin hearings involving a record number of countries in The Hague, in the Netherlands, today.
Its 15 judges have been asked, for the first time, to give an opinion about the obligations of nations to prevent climate change — and the consequences for them if they fail.
The court’s findings could bolster the cases of nations taking legal action against big polluters failing to reduce emissions, experts say.
They could also strengthen the hand of Pacific Island nations in future climate change negotiations like COP.
Vanuatu, one of the world’s most natural disaster-prone nations, is leading the charge in the international court.
The road to the ICJ — nicknamed the “World Court” — started five years ago when a group of University of the South Pacific law students studying in Vanuatu began discussing how they could help bring about climate action.
“This case is really another example of Pacific Island countries being global leaders on the climate crisis,” Dr Wesley Morgan, a research associate with UNSW’s Institute for Climate Risk and Response, said.
“It’s an amazing David and Goliath moment.”
Environmental advocates and lawyers from around the world will come to the International Court of Justice for the court case. Image: CC BY-SA 4.0/ Velvet
Meanwhile, experts say the Pacific will be watching Australia’s testimony today closely.
So what is the court case about exactly, and how did it get to this point?
From classroom to World Court Cynthia Houniuhi, from Solomon Islands, remembers clearly the class discussion where it all began.
Students at the University of the South Pacific’s campus in Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, turned their minds to the biggest issue faced by their home countries.
While their communities were dealing with sea level rise and intense cyclones, there was an apparent international “deadlock” on climate change action, Houniuhi said.
And each new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change painted a bleak picture of their futures.
“These things are real to us,” Hounhiuhi said. “And we cannot accept that . . . fate in the IPCC report.
“[We’re] not accepting that there’s nothing we can do.”
Their lecturer tasked them with finding a legal avenue for action. He challenged them to be ambitious. And he told them to take it out of their classroom to their national leaders.
So the students settled on an idea: Ask the World Court to issue an advisory opinion on the obligations of states to protect the climate against greenhouse gas emissions.
“That’s what resonated to us,” Houniuhi, now president of Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change, said.
Students were motivated to take action after seeing how sea level rise had affected communities across the Pacific. Image: Britt Basel/RNZ Pacific
They sent out letters to Pacific Island governments asking for support and Vanuatu’s then-Foreign Minister Ralph Regenvanu agreed to meet with the students.
Vanuatu took up the cause and built a coalition of countries pushing the UN General Assembly to send the matter to its main judicial body, the International Court of Justice, for an advisory opinion.
In March last year, they succeeded when the UN nations unanimously adopted the resolution to refer the case — a historic first for the UN General Assembly.
Speakers at the UN General Assembly hailed the decision to send the case to the International Court of Justice as a milestone in a decades-long struggle for climate justice. Image: X/@UN
It was a decision celebrated with a parade on the streets of Port Vila.
Australian National University professor in international law Dr Donald Rothwell said Pacific nations had already overcome their biggest challenge in building enough support for the case to be heard.
“From the perspective of Vanuatu and the small island and other states who brought these proceedings, this is quite a momentous occasion, if only because these states rarely have appeared before the International Court of Justice,” he said.
“This is the first occasion where they’ve really had the ability to raise these issues in the World Court, and that in itself will attract an enormous amount of global attention and raise awareness.”
Dr Sue Farran, a professor of comparative law at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, said getting the case before the ICJ was also part of achieving climate justice.
“It’s recognition that certain peoples have suffered more than others as a result of climate change,” she said.
“And justice means addressing wrongs where people have been harmed.”
A game changer on climate? Nearly 100 countries will speak over two weeks of hearings — an unprecedented number, Professor Rothwell said.
Each has only a short, 30-minute slot to make their argument.
The court will decide on two questions: What are the obligations of states under international law to protect the climate and environment from greenhouse gas emissions?
And, what are the legal consequences for states that have caused significant harm to the climate and environment?
Vanuatu will open the hearings with its testimony.
Regenvanu, now Vanuatu’s special envoy on climate change, said the case was timely in light of the last COP meeting, where financial commitments from rich, polluting nations fell short of the mark for Pacific Islands that needed funding to deal with climate change.
Vanuatu’s climate change envoy Ralph Regenvanu said the ICJ case was about climate justice. Image: Hilaire Bule/RNZ Pacific
For a nation hit with three cyclones last year — and where natural disaster-struck schools have spent months teaching primary students in hot UNICEF tents – the stakes are high in climate negotiations.
“We just graduated from being a least-developed country a few years ago,” Regenvanu said.
“We don’t have the financial capacity to build back better, build back quicker, respond and recover quicker.
“We need the resources that other countries were able to attain and become rich through fossil fuel development that caused this crisis we are now facing.
“That’s why we’re appearing before the ICJ. We want justice in terms of allowing us to have the same capacity to respond quickly after catastrophic events.”
He said the advisory opinion would stop unnecessary debates that bog down climate negotiations, by offering legal clarity on the obligations of states on climate change.
Three cyclones struck Vanuatu in 2023, including Tropical Cyclone Lola, which damaged buildings on Ambrym Island. Image: Sam Tasso/RNZ Pacific
It will also help define controversial terms, such as “climate finance” — which developing nations argue should not include loans.
And while the court’s advisory opinion will be non-binding, it also has the potential to influence climate change litigation around the world.
Dr Rothwell said much would depend on how the court answered the case’s second question – on the consequences for states that failed to take climate action.
He said an opinion that favoured small island nations, like in the Pacific Islands, would let them pursue legal action with more certainty.
“That could possibly open up a battleground for major international litigation into the future, subject to how the [International Court of Justice] answers that question,” he said.
Regenvanu said Vanuatu was already looking at options it could take once the court issues its advisory opinion.
“Basically all options are on the table from litigation on one extreme, to much clearer negotiation tactics, based on what the advisory opinion says, at the forthcoming couple of COPs.”
‘This is hope’ Vanuatu brought the case to the ICJ with the support of a core group of 18 countries, including New Zealand, Germany, Bangladesh and Singapore.
Australia, which co-sponsored the UN resolution sending the case to the ICJ, will also speak at today’s hearings.
“Many will be watching closely, but Vanuatu will be watching more closely than anyone, having led this process,” Dr Morgan said.
A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson said Australia had engaged consistently with the court proceedings, reflecting its support for the Pacific’s commitment to strengthening global climate action.
Some countries have expressed misgivings about taking the case to the ICJ.
The United States’ representative at the General Assembly last year argued diplomacy was a better way to address climate change.
And over the two weeks of court hearings this month, it’s expected nations contributing most to greenhouse gases will argue for a narrow reading of their responsibilities to address climate change under international law — one that minimises their obligations.
Other nations will argue that human rights laws and other international agreements — like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — give these nations larger obligations to prevent climate change.
Professor Rothwell said it was hard to predict what conclusion the World Court would reach — and he expected the advisory opinion would not arrive until as late as October next year.
“When we’re looking at 15 judges, when we’re looking at a wide range of legal treaties and conventions upon which the court is being asked to address these questions, it’s really difficult to speculate at this point,” he said.
“We’ll very much just have to wait and see what the outcome is.”
There’s the chance the judges will be split, or they will not issue a strong advisory opinion.
But Regenvanu is drawing hope from a recent finding in a similar case at the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea, which found countries are obliged to protect the oceans from climate change impacts.
“It’s given us a great deal of validation that what we will get out of the ICJ will be favourable,” he said.
For Houniuhi, the long journey from the Port Vila classroom five years ago is about to lead finally to the Peace Palace in The Hague, where the ICJ will have its hearings.
Houniuhi said the case would let her and her fellow students have their experiences of climate change reflected at the highest level.
But for her, the court case has another important role.
Highway Route 441 cuts through Paynes Prairie, a state park and nature preserve in Alachua County.
A person bikes along a road near the University of Florida Campus.
Betsy Riley speaks with Grist about Alachua County’s climate action plan at Sweetwater Wetlands Park, one of Alachua County’s 11 nature preserves.
Stephen Hofstetter, John Nix, and Betsy Riley listen to Dan Zhu present an update to the Gainesville Climate Action Plan during a Citizen Climate Advisory Comittee meeting.
called for climate justice, self-determination & accountability
talks of climate leadership but argues against binding human rights
exposed polluters hiding behind the #ParisAgreement to dodge accountability.https://t.co/PB86XFpwzA pic.twitter.com/KI1hOKAM0G
