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      Kamala Harris urged to flesh out climate plan amid warnings about Trump

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      As the US south-east struggles to rebuild after two deadly and climate-fueled hurricanes, some environmental advocates are demanding Kamala Harris flesh out a strong climate plan.Since Hurricanes Helene and Milton ravaged parts of the country, the vice-president has slammed Donald Trump’s climate record by airing a new campaign ad showing the oft-criticized moment the former president redrew a hurricane’s path with a marker, and taking aim at Trump’s spread of climate misinformation and history of withholding disaster aid.Harris has also raised the alarm about Trump’s plans to slash environmental regulations. Yet she has not said much about her plans to deal with the climate crisis, instead pledging not to ban gas-powered cars in a Michigan speech and touting “record energy production” from the oil and gas industries during her vice-presidency on her website.The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, said that Harris had failed to build upon the strongest moments during her TV debate with Trump when she referenced the mounting costs of climate-driven disasters and their toll upon Americans’ ability to get home insurance.Since then, he said, the campaign had been “understating the depth of the danger”.“The American public need to know there are storm clouds ahead,” said Whitehouse, who chairs the Senate budget committee. “We will have to see if Harris and Walz are elected how they will move forward on policy but at the moment most Americans are not well informed of how serious this is going to get.”The lack of a climate focus from the campaign has been “frustrating” but was probably a calculation that there is little political benefit to bringing up such a glaringly obvious divide with Trump, according to Paul Bledsoe, who was an adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House on climate.“That might be the right political decision,” he said.But others are skeptical that Harris’s climate approach will deliver electorally. Though polls show that voters place more importance on other issues, such as the economy and immigration, they also indicate that a strong majority of US voters would prefer to vote for a candidate who supports climate action. Many surveys indicate there is broad support for renewable energy even in fossil fuel-heavy areas.“Pundits say she can’t risk losing any potential voters in Pennsylvania,” said Edward Maibach, the director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. “Taking a strong pro-climate action stance would almost certainly not cost her votes in [Pennsylvania] because more than half of voters in the state want to see the president take more, not less, climate action.Many national climate policies – from job training for fossil fuel workers to full fossil fuel phaseout by 2050 – also enjoy majority support.“I’m not convinced it’s good electoral strategy, because climate is an issue where voters trust Democrats more than Republicans so it actually would be a good issue to lean into to highlight the difference,” said Michael Greenberg, founder of the controversial activist group Climate Defiance, which endorsed Harris last month after meeting with her top climate aide.A major hurdle for Harris’s campaign, polls show, is that undecided voters feel they don’t know what she stands for, said Collin Rees, campaign manager at advocacy group Oil Change US.“It’s actively electorally harming her to not be more detailed,” he said.If Harris wins the election, Bledsoe said, “she will need to level with the American people about how emissions reductions need to happen or these storms, heatwaves and floods will get far worse”.But Rees said her approach has left space open for Trump to convince voters that climate policies are harmful, and that he is skeptical that Harris would make such a shift if elected.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I don’t know that there’s ever been an issue in history where somebody didn’t talk about it on the campaign trail … but then turned around and prioritized it after they were elected,” Rees said.Further irking advocates have been Harris’s attempts to appeal to conservatives. Last week, she pledged to create a bipartisan council of advisers if elected. The same day, she boasted her endorsements from former vice-president Dick Cheney and George W Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who helped craft a legal case justifying torture.“We’re talking about courting neocons who support endless war when the military is one of the largest triggers of the climate crisis,” said Rees. “She’s courting members of a party that we know is not serious on climate even though we are all around us seeing the climate emergency.”Other Harris allies are sanguine about the absence of climate from her campaigning, pointing to her record as a prosecutor in taking on big oil and their expectation that she will push for aggressive climate action if she claims the White House.“She needs to talk about what will win this election, there’s only so much time for subjects and people have a limited bandwidth,” said Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington and a prominent climate advocate. “I’m not critical of the way she’s run her campaign, they’ve made decisions on how to use limited communication time and I’m confident when she’s in the White House she’ll be an effective leader on clean energy.”But the issue is not only one of messaging, but also of substance, said Rees.“I don’t think climate has to be the only issue or the top issue, but right now she’s denigrating climate policy, boasting about oil and gas exports, playing to the right,” he said. “But the terrible disasters of Helene and Milton provide an opening to show how climate is very closely connected to people’s lives and economic struggles. I don’t think it’s too late.”The youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement, which also endorsed Harris, is also demanding she “change course”, noting Trump is gaining ground in swing states.“In 2020, Joe Biden won because he ran on bold climate action and economic justice, showing that you can both win swing voters and the Bernie Sanders base,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the group’s communication director. “In the last 20 days, we’re giving everything we’ve got to contact millions of people and turn out young voters to elect Harris. What we’re asking is that the Harris campaign help us do that.” More

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      The hurricanes shaking the US election – podcast

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      In the last few weeks, the United States has been hit by two hurricanes, Helene and Milton. Oliver Milman, an environment reporter for Guardian US, tells Michael Safi: “The rapid analysis found that global heating had caused the rains to be heavier, the winds to be stronger, and in both the cases of Helene and Milton. Storms of this size were made about twice as likely because of the climate crisis.” Why have these storms not put the climate crisis front and centre in the presidential campaign? Oliver tells Michael that the environment is a complicated issue for Democrats, because oil and gas production in the US has hit a record high under Joe Biden’s premiership. Oliver also discusses the disinformation and conspiracy theories that have been spread – in part by Donald Trump – in the aftermath of the hurricanes. Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More

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      Our dystopian climate isn’t just about fires and floods. It’s about society fracturing | Bill McKibben

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      Even as the good people of Florida’s west coast pulled the soggy mattresses from Helene out to the curb, Milton appeared on the horizon this week – a double blast of destruction from the Gulf of Mexico that’s a reminder that physics takes no time off, not even in the weeks before a crucial election. My sense is that those storms will help turn the voting on 5 November into a climate election of sorts, even if – as is likely – neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump spend much time in the next 25 days talking about CO2 or solar power.That’s because these storms show not only the power of global heating (Helene’s record rains, and Milton’s almost unprecedented intensification, were reminders of what it means to have extremely hot ocean temperatures). More, they show what we’re going to need to survive the now inevitable train of such disasters. Which is solidarity. Which is something only one ticket offers.I confess that I’ve been all in to beat Trump for any number of reasons – Third Act, the group I founded to organize Americans over age 60 for action on climate and democracy, has been flooding the swing states with hundreds of thousands of postcards, and our silver wave door-knocking tour hits Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada in the days ahead But if there was one way to sum up what this election means to me, it would be: solidarity. In the 40 years since Ronald Reagan’s election, we’ve gone a long way down the path of hyper-individual, everyone for themselves. Joe Biden has tried to wrench the wheel back towards the FDR America-as-group-project model with tools like the spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s a work in progress. The climate crisis, above all, requires the return of that solidarity.That’s because there’s no way to keep it from getting worse without joint public action: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us we have five years left to cut emissions in half, which means it will not be accomplished one Tesla at a time; it requires aggressive public action of the kind the current White House is coordinating, as it sets up battery factories and shepherds new transmission lines through various regulatory fences.But there’s also no way to survive it, even in its current form, without intense cooperation. To give one example: Florida’s insurance system is clearly breaking down, as one storm after another drives private insurers out of the state.As the Tampa newspaper put it in June: “As the crisis escalates, state leaders are desperately trying to convince insurance companies to stick around. States are offering them more flexibility to raise premiums or drop certain homes from coverage, fast-tracking rate revisions and making it harder for residents to sue their insurance company.” But as that seawall begins to fail, “a flood of new policyholders are joining state-backed insurance ‘plans of last resort’, leaving states to assume more of the risk on behalf of residents who can’t find coverage in the private sector.”Indeed, so many people are swamping the “state-backed insurance plans” they’re becoming overloaded with risk. Ten months ago, the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse and his budget committee colleagues wrote to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to ask for proof that Florida’s public Citizens Insurance could survive disasters like the one now bearing down on Tampa. DeSantis may have given his most eloquent response in May, when he signed a bill essentially outlawing the phrase “climate change” in Florida statutes. “I’m not a global warming person,” he explained.Meanwhile, across the upland terrain drenched by Helene, rightwing forces have been relentlessly spreading rumors: most prominently, that the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema) spent all its money on migrants and has none left for Americans. This is not true. (Indeed, its closest approach to truth came during the Trump years when Fema did divert relief funds to “tighten the border”.) But it’s one more way to divide people, to use their very real trauma for political gain.The dystopian future is not just about the endless fires and floods; it’s also about a society that pulls apart in their face, where people can’t work together because they’ve been so divided by disinformation and hate. It feels like Harris and Tim Walz are offering, above all, one last chance at an America where people actually work together on things, a United States. They even imagine a world where the world keeps working together, imagine that – one where we have, say, effective climate negotiations. That these things seem farfetched to us now is probably the strongest proof of how much they’re needed.

      Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College. He is the founder of Third Act, organizing people over 60 for progressive change More

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      Leonard Leo-linked group attacking efforts to educate judges on climate

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      A rightwing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightwing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Trump’s supreme court nominees, the Guardian has learned.The Washington DC-based non-profit Environmental Law Institute (ELI)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation”, according to ELI’s website.The American Energy Institute (AEI), a rightwing, pro-fossil fuel thinktank, has been attacking ELI and their climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying ELI was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science”.ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project is “falsely portraying itself as a neutral entity teaching judges about questionable climate science”, the report says. In reality, AEI claims, the project is a partner to the more than two dozen US cities and states who are suing big oil for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the climate dangers of coal, oil and gas usage.In a PowerPoint presentation about the report found on AEI’s website, the group says the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) is a “wholly aligned with the climate change plaintiffs and helps them corruptly influence judges behind closed doors”.“Their true purpose is to preview the plaintiffs’ arguments in the climate cases in an ex parte setting,” the presentation says.Both the report and the PowerPoint presentation link AEI to CRC Advisors, a public relations firm chaired by rightwing dark money impresario Leo. Given his outsize role in shaping the US judiciary – Leo helped select multiple judicial nominees for former president Donald Trump, including personally lobbying for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment – his firm’s role in opposing climate litigation is notable.“He was greatly responsible for moving our federal court systems to the right,” said David Armiak, the research director for Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group tracking money in politics, of Leo. CRC Advisors’ work with AEI, Armiak said, seemed “to delegitimize a group that’s seeking to inform judges or the judicial system of climate science, something that [Leo] also opposed with some of his other efforts”.The AEI report’s document properties show that its author was Maggie Howell, director of branding and design at CRC Advisors. And the PowerPoint’s document properties lists CRC Advisors’s vice-president, Kevin Daley, as the author.Neither CRC Advisors nor Leo responded to requests for comment.In an email, the American Energy Institute CEO, Jason Isaac, said: “American Energy Institute employed CRC Advisors to edit and promote our groundbreaking report on the corrupt relationship between our federal court system and leftwing dark money groups.”But Kert Davies, the director of special investigations at the non-profit Center for Climate Integrity, who shared the report and PowerPoint with the Guardian, said ELI is “far from leftwing”.The institute’s staff include a wide variety of legal and climate experts. Its board includes executives from Shell Group and BP, oil companies who have been named as defendants in climate litigation, and a partner at a law firm which represents Chevron. Two partners with the law firm Baker Botts LLP, which represents Sunoco LP and its subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum Ltd, in a climate lawsuit filed by Honolulu, also sit on ELI’s leadership council, E&E News previously reported.“ELI’s seminars are giving judges the ABCs of climate change, which is a complicated subject that they ought to know about,” said Davies. “The idea that they’re corruptly influencing the court from the left … is complete disinformation.”Asked for comment about ELI’s connection to oil companies, the AEI CEO, Isaac, said that “all of those companies have embraced and/or are pushing political agendas” that are “contrary to the best interest of Americans, American energy producers, and human flourishing”, including environmental social and governance (ESG) investing and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).“They are the appeasers, the ones feeding the crocodiles,” he said. He did not respond to questions about the extent of the relationship between AEI and CRC Advisors.In a statement, Nick Collins, a spokesperson for ELI, called the AEI report “full of misinformation and created by an organization whose leadership regularly spreads false claims about climate science”, and described the CJP curriculum as “fact-based and science-first, developed with a robust peer review process that meets the highest scholarly standards”.Pending climate litigationAEI’s attack on the judicial climate education program comes as the supreme court considers litigation that could put big oil on the hook for billions of dollars.Honolulu is one of dozens of cities and states to sue oil majors for allegedly hiding the dangers of their products from the public. Hawaii’s supreme court ruled that the suit can go to trial, but the defendants petitioned the US supreme court to review that decision, arguing the cases should be thrown out because emissions are a federal issue that cannot be tried in state courts.This past spring, far-right fossil fuel allies launched an unprecedented campaign pressuring the supreme court to side with the defendants and shield fossil fuel companies from the litigation. Several of the groups behind the campaign have ties to Leo.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn June, the supreme court asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the defendants’ request. Biden officials could respond as soon as Monday.“It’s doubtful that AEI’s timing of their report release was a coincidence,” said Davies.The supreme court may weigh in on another case as early as Monday, too: in April, 20 Republican state attorneys general filed “friend of the court” briefs asking the supreme court to prevent states from being able to sue oil companies for climate damages. All of the signatories are members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, to which Leo’s Concord Fund is a major contributor.CRC AdvisorsIn the weeks since its publication, AEI’s report attacking ELI has received a surge of interest from rightwing media. Fox News featured the report, as did an array of conservative websites. On Thursday, the Hill published an op-ed by Ted Cruz attacking the ELI project. Other rightwing groups have previously questioned the motives of ELI.CRC Advisors has counted Chevron, one of the plaintiffs in Honolulu’s lawsuit, as a client. In 2018, the Leo-led PR firm also worked on a campaign aimed at exonerating the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh from accusations of sexual assault.Davies said it “would not be surprising” if CRC Advisors had a “large role” in the creation or promotion of the AEI report attacking ELI’s judiciary trainings. “They’re known for running campaigns for corporate interests and rightwing interests,” he said.American Energy InstituteIn addition to his work with AEI, Isaac also serves as a fellow at Texas Public Policy Foundation – a thinktank backed by oil and gas companies which has recently garnered scrutiny for its role in drafting the ultraconservative policy playbook Project 2025.A former Republican Texas state representative, Isaac has dedicated much of his career to disputing climate research and promoting misinformation to justify deregulation of the fossil fuel industry. Isaac recently responded to a Twitter post about Climate Week by the EPA, calling the conference on climate change “nothing more than a celebration of people suffering from mental illness, #EcoDysphoria, with those attending insisting the rest of us catch it.”On a 25 September episode of the rightwing Wisconsin talk radio show The Vicki McKenna Show, Isaac offered a defense of the fossil fuel industry, describing oil and gas as keys to prosperity. “I live a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. “I wish the rest of the world could, too.”Formerly known as Texas Natural Gas Foundation, AEI on its face appears to contribute little more than public relations work in defense of the fossil fuels industry. The group publishes blogposts defending carbon emissions and denouncing the push for climate action. It has also produced a handful of longer reports promoting laws that restrict environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing and opposing the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.Among AEI’s board members are Steve Milloy, who served on Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, once ran a tobacco industry front group, and is a well-known climate denier. Milloy did not respond to a request for comment.According to the group’s most recent tax filings, AEI, which lists four staffers and a CEO on its website, is not a lavish operation. The group brought in about $312,000 in revenue in 2022 and appears to fund its operations at least partly by selling merchandise – among other products, AEI offers T-shirts, tote bags and beer koozies emblazoned with the words “I Embrace The High Carbon Lifestyle”. More

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      Amazon, Tesla and Meta among world’s top companies undermining democracy – report

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      Some of the world’s largest companies have been accused of undermining democracy across the world by financially backing far-right political movements, funding and exacerbating the climate crisis, and violating trade union rights and human rights in a report published on Monday by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).Amazon, Tesla, Meta, ExxonMobil, Blackstone, Vanguard and Glencore are the corporations included in the report. The companies’ lobbying arms are attempting to shape global policy at the United Nations Summit of the Future in New York City on 22 and 23 September.At Amazon, the report notes the company’s size and role as the fifth largest employer in the world and the largest online retailer and cloud computing service, has had a profound impact on the industries and communities it operates within.“The company has become notorious for its union busting and low wages on multiple continents, monopoly in e-commerce, egregious carbon emissions through its AWS data centres, corporate tax evasion, and lobbying at national and international level,” states the report.The report cites Amazon’s high injury rates in the US, the company challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), its efforts in Canada to overturn labor law, the banning of Amazon lobbyists from the European parliament for refusing to attend hearings on worker violations, and refusal to negotiate with unions in Germany, among other cases. Amazon has also funded far-right political groups’ efforts to undermine women’s rights and antitrust legislation, and its retail website has been used by hate groups to raise money and sell products.At Tesla, the report cites anti-union opposition by the company in the US, Germany, and Sweden; human rights violations within its supply chains; and Elon Musk’s personal opposition to unions and democracy, challenges to the NLRB in the US, and his support for the political leaders Donald Trump, Javier Milei in Argentina and Narendra Modi in India.The report cites Meta, the largest social media company in the world, for its vast role in permitting and enabling far-right propaganda and movements to use its platforms to grow members and garner support in the US and abroad. It also cited retaliation from the company for regulatory measures in Canada, and expensive lobbying efforts against laws to regulate data privacy.Glencore, the largest mining company in the world by revenue, was included in the report for its role in financing campaigns globally against Indigenous communities and activists.Blackstone, the private equity firm led by Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire backer of Donald Trump, was cited in the report for its roles in funding far-right political movements, investments in fossil fuel projects and deforestation in the Amazon.“Blackstone’s network has spent tens of millions of dollars supporting politicians and political forces who promise to prevent or eliminate regulations that might hold it to account,” the report noted.The Vanguard Group was included in the report due to its role in financing some of the world’s most anti-democratic corporations. ExxonMobil was cited for funding anti-climate science research and aggressive lobbying against environmental regulations.Even in “robust democracies” workers’ demands “are overwhelmed by corporate lobbying operations, either in policymaking or the election in itself”, said Todd Brogan, director of campaigns and organizing at the ITUC.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is about power, who has it, and who sets the agenda. We know as trade unionists that unless we’re organized, the boss sets the agenda in the workplace, and we know as citizens in our countries that unless we’re organized and demanding responsive governments that actually meet the needs of people, it’s corporate power that’s going to set the agenda.“They’re playing the long game, and it’s a game about shifting power away from democracy at every level into one where they’re not concerned about the effects on workers – they’re concerned about maximizing their influence and their extractive power and their profit,” added Brogan. “Now is the time for international and multi-sectoral strategies, because these are, in many cases, multinational corporations that are more powerful than states, and they have no democratic accountability whatsoever, except for workers organized.”The ITUC includes labor group affiliates from 169 nations and territories around the world representing 191 million workers, including the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, and the Trades Union Congress in the UK.With 4 billion people around the world set to participate in elections in 2024, the federation is pushing for an international binding treaty being worked on by the Open-ended intergovernmental working group to hold transnational corporations accountable under international human rights laws. More

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      Jane Fonda rallies disaffected young US voters: ‘Do not sit this election out’

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      Young people’s understandable unhappiness with the Biden administration’s record on oil and gas drilling and the war in Gaza should not deter them from voting to block Donald Trump from again becoming president of the United States, the Hollywood actor and activist Jane Fonda has warned.“I understand why young people are really angry, and really hurting,” Fonda said. “What I want to say to them is: ‘Do not sit this election out, no matter how angry you are. Do not vote for a third party, no matter how angry you are. Because that will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States … If you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice, so you can do something about it. And then, be ready to turn out into the streets, in the millions, and fight for it.’”View image in fullscreenFonda’s remarks came in a wide-ranging interview organized by the global media collaborative Covering Climate Now and conducted by the Guardian, CBS News and Rolling Stone magazine.Making major social change requires massive, non-violent street protests as well as shrewd electoral organizing, Fonda argued. Drawing on more than 50 years of activism, from her anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s to later agitating for economic democracy, women’s rights and, today, for climate action, Fonda said that: “History shows us that … you need millions of people in the streets, but you [also] need people in the halls of power with ears and a heart to hear the protests, to hear the demands.”During the Great Depression, she said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with helping the masses of unemployed. But FDR said the public had to “make him do it”, or he could not overcome resistance from the status quo. “There is a chance for us to make them do it if it’s Kamala Harris and Tim Walz [in the White House],” she said. “There is no chance if Trump and Vance win this election.”View image in fullscreenScientists have repeatedly warned that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by half by the next decade, Fonda noted, so a President Harris would have to be pushed “to stop drilling, and fracking, and mining. No new development of fossil fuels.” Trump, on the other hand, has promised to “‘drill, baby, drill.’ For once, let’s believe him. The choice is very clear: do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”Fonda launched the Jane Fonda Climate political action committee three years ago to elect “climate champions” at all levels of government: national, state and local. “The Pac focuses down ballot – on mayors, state legislators, county councils,” she said. “It’s incredible how much effect people in these positions can have on climate issues.”Forty-two of the 60 candidates the Pac endorsed in 2022 won their races. In 2024, the Pac is providing money, voter outreach and publicity to more than 100 candidates in key battleground states and in California, Fonda’s home state. California is “the fifth-biggest economy in the world, and an oil-producing state”, she explained, “so what happens here has an impact far broader than California”.Fonda is also, for the first time in her life, “very involved” in this year’s presidential campaign, “because of the climate emergency”. She plans to visit each battleground state, she said: “And when I’m there, we give our schedule to the Harris campaign. Then they fold in Harris campaign [get-out-the-vote events], volunteer recruitment, things like that … and then I do them for our Pac candidates” as well.View image in fullscreenHer Pac has a strict rule: it endorses only candidates who do not accept money from the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s “stranglehold over our government” explains a crucial disconnect, Fonda said:polls show that most Americans want climate action, yet their elected officials often don’t deliver it. In California, she said, “we’ve had so many moderate Democrats that blocked the climate solutions we need because they take money from the fossil fuel industry … It’s very hard to stand up to the people that are supporting your candidacy.”Fonda also faulted the mainstream news media for not doing a better job of informing the public about the climate emergency and the abundance of solutions. Watching the Harris-Trump debate, she thought that “Kamala did very well”. But she “was very disturbed that the No 1 crisis facing humanity right now took an hour-and-a-half to come up and was not really addressed”, she added. “People don’t understand what we are facing! The news media has to be more vigilant about tying extreme weather events to climate change. It’s starting to happen, but not enough.”Given her years of anti-nuclear activism – including producing and starring in a hit Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, released days before the Three Mile Island reactor accident in 1979 – it’s perhaps no surprise that Fonda rejects the increasingly fashionable idea that nuclear power is a climate solution.“Every time I speak [in public], someone asks me if these small modular reactors are a solution,” she said. “So I’ve spent time researching it, and there’s one unavoidable problem: no nuclear reactor of any kind – the traditional or the smaller or the modular, none of them – has been built in less than 10 to 20 years. We don’t have that kind of time. We have to deal with the climate crisis by the 2030s. So just on the timeline, nuclear is not a solution.” By contrast, she said: “Solar takes about four years to develop, and pretty soon it’s going to be 30% of the electricity in the world.”The reason that solar – and wind and geothermal – energy are not prioritized over fossil fuels and nuclear, she argued, is that “big companies don’t make as much money on it”. Noting that air pollution from fossil fuels kills 9 million people a year globally, she added: “We’re being poisoned to death because of petrochemicals and the fossil fuel industry. And we [taxpayers] pay for it! We pay $20bn a year [in government subsidies] to the fossil fuel industry, and we’re dying … We need that industry out of our lives, off of our planet – but they run the world.”The two-time Academy Award winner’s decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars has given her an appreciation of the power of celebrity, and she applauds Taylor Swift for exercising that power with her endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket.“I think she’s awesome, amazing and very smart,” Fonda said of Swift. “I’m very grateful and excited that she did it, and … I think it’s going to have a big impact.”“My metaphor for myself, and other celebrities, is a repeater,” Fonda added. “When you look at a big, tall mountain, and you see these antennas on the top, those are repeaters. They pick up the signals from the valley that are weak and distribute them so that they have a larger audience … When I’m doing the work I’m doing, I’m picking up the signals from the people who live in Wilmington and the Central valley and Kern county and are really suffering, and the animals that can’t speak, and trying to lift them up and send [their stories] out to a broader audience. We’re repeaters. It’s a very valid thing to do.”View image in fullscreenClimate activism is also “so much fun”, she said, and it does wonders for her mental health.“I don’t get depressed anymore,” she said. “You know, Greta Thunberg said something really great: ‘Everybody goes looking for hope. Hope is where there’s action, so look for action and hope will come.’” Hope, Fonda added, is “very different than optimism. Optimism is ‘everything’s gonna be fine’, but you don’t do anything to make sure that that’s true. Hope is: I’m hopeful, and I’m gonna work like hell to make it true.”

      Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent for the Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now More

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      Biden’s green policies will save 200,000 lives and have boosted clean energy jobs, data shows

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      The environmental policies of Joe Biden’s administration will save approximately 200,000 Americans’ lives from dangerous pollution in the coming decades and have spurred a surge in clean energy jobs, two independent reports outlining the stakes of the upcoming US presidential election have found.The first full year of the Inflation Reduction Act, the sprawling climate bill passed by Democratic votes in Congress in 2022, saw nearly 150,000 clean energy jobs added, according to a new report by nonpartisan business group E2.Nearly 3.5 million people now work in these fields in the US, more than the total number of nurses nationwide, with 1m of these jobs centered in the US south, a region politically dominated by Republicans.Clean energy jobs grew by 4.5% last year, nearly twice as fast as overall US employment growth, and account for one in 16 new jobs nationally, the report found. New roles in energy efficiency led the way, followed by an increase in jobs in renewable energy, such as wind and solar, electric car manufacturing and battery and electric grid upgrades.But the future of the IRA, which provides tax credits and grants for new clean energy activity, is a flashpoint in the election campaign, with Donald Trump vowing to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds”.The former president and Republican nominee has accused Harris, his Democratic opponent, of waging a “war on American energy” and called for an end to incentives encouraging Americans to drive electric cars.Harris, who has promised in unspecified ways to build upon the IRA, has attacked Trump for “surrendering” on the climate crisis as well as in the US’s attempts to compete with China, the world’s clean energy manufacturing powerhouse.Bob O’Keefe, executive director of E2, said the IRA has helped lead “an American economic revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations”.“But we’re just getting started,” Keefe added. “The biggest threats to this unprecedented progress are misguided efforts to repeal or roll back parts of the IRA, despite the law’s clear benefits both to American workers and the communities where they live.”Should Trump return to the White House, he will need congressional approval to completely repeal the IRA, although his administration could slow down and even claw back funding allocated but not yet released for clean energy projects, such as the $500m pledged for a green overhaul of a steel mill in JD Vance’s home town of Middletown, Ohio.A new Trump administration would have more discretion, though, over the future of air pollution regulations set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Biden. “One of the things that is so bad for us is the environmental agencies, they make it impossible to do anything,” Trump has complained while on the campaign trail.Any major rollbacks will have a heavy toll upon public health, however, with a new analysis of 16 regulations passed by the EPA since Biden’s term started in 2021 finding that they are on track to save 200,000 lives and prevent more than 100m asthma attacks by 2050.The analysis, conducted by the Environmental Protection Network, a group founded by retired EPA staff, calculated the public health benefits of the suite of new rules that aim to limit pollution flowing from cars, power plants and oil and gas operations.Jeremy Symons, a former climate policy adviser at the EPA and a co-author of the report, said the findings were “jaw-dropping”. He added: “The EPA’s accomplishments have been nothing short of lifesaving over the last four years. These are real people who wouldn’t be alive if not for the non-partisan work of the EPA to start doing its job again after the last administration.”It’s unclear what Trump’s exact plan for the EPA would be should he regain power but he attempted to radically cut the agency’s budget when he was president, only to be rebuffed by Congress, and oversaw the elimination and weakening of a host of pollution rules.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has directly promised oil and gas industry executives a fresh wave of deregulation should he return to the White House, in return for $1bn in campaign contributions.Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials but disavowed by the Trump campaign, demands the dismantling of parts of the agency, a rollback of environmental rules and a politicization of decision making.“This would put polluters in charge of air regulations and put millions of Americans at needless risk of cancer, heart disease and asthma,” said Symons.“Several of the authors of Project 2025 used the years of working at the EPA under Trump as a training ground for more reckless plans should they get their hands on the agency again. This plan would be a wrecking ball to the EPA.”Asked to comment, the Trump campaign criticized the Biden-Harris administration on inflation and what it called its “war on energy”.“Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which actually created the worst inflation crisis in a generation. She proudly helped Joe Biden implement all of his disastrous policies including his war on American energy that is driving up prices astronomically for American consumers,” said Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary.“President Trump is the only candidate who will make America energy dominant again, protect our energy jobs, and bring down the cost of living for all Americans,” Leavitt added.An EPA spokesperson said: “We appreciate the work of the Environmental Protection Network and look forward to reviewing their report. EPA remains committed to protecting public health and the environment by implementing science-based pollution standards that address climate change and improve air quality for all Americans.” More