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      Biden must Trump-proof US democracy, activists say: ‘There is a sense of urgency’

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      The skies above the White House were cold and grey. Joe Biden greeted the championship winning Boston Celtics basketball team, quipping about his Irish ancestry and tossing a basketball into the crowd. But the US president could not resist drawing a wider lesson.“When we get knocked down, we get back up,” he said. “As my dad would say, ‘Just get up, Joe. Get up.’ Character to keep going and keep the faith, that’s the Celtic way of life. That’s sports. And that’s America.”Such events continue to be among the ceremonial duties of a “lame duck” president with waning influence. Biden has cut a diminished figure in recent months, first surrendering his chance to seek re-election, then finding himself sidelined by the doomed presidential campaign of his vice-president, Kamala Harris.But with his legacy imperiled by Donald Trump, the president is facing calls to mitigate the oncoming storm. Advocacy groups say Biden, who turned 82 this week, can still take actions during his final two months in office to accelerate spending on climate and healthcare, secure civil liberties, and Trump-proof at least some fundamentals of US democracy.Trump’s signature campaign promise was a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration. He has nominated officials including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, architects of family separations at the southern border during his first term, and vowed to use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.The plans include mandatory detention, potentially trapping immigrants in inhumane conditions for years as they fight deportation. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is leading an opposition effort, urging Biden to halt the current expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities, especially those with records of human rights abuses.Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU national prison project, said Ice detention facilities “characterised by abusive conditions, pervasive neglect and utter disregard for the dignity of people in their custody” are key to Trump’s logistical plan.Dozens of people have died in Ice detention facilities – mostly owned or operated by private prison corporations – over the past four years, according to the ACLU, and 95% were likely preventable if appropriate medical care had been provided. Yet the Biden administration has backed new Ice detention facilities in states where they did not existed before, such as Kansas, Wyoming and Missouri.“We are calling on the Biden administration to take action now, in the final days of the administration, to halt any efforts to expand immigration detention and to shut down specifically abusive facilities once and for all,” Cho told reporters on a Zoom call this week. “We don’t need to put down runway for the Trump administration to put in place these mass detention and deportation machines.”She warned: “We know that the anti-immigrant policies of a second administration are going to be far more aggressive than what we saw in the first term, and mass arrest and detention is going to become perhaps the norm to create and carry out these deportation operations unless we can do all we can to put a halt to them.”View image in fullscreenAnother crucial area for Biden to make a last stand is criminal justice. In his first term, Trump oversaw the execution of more people than the previous 10 presidents combined. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, then imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021.Trump has indicated his intention to resume such executions and even expand the death penalty. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as Florida’s top law enforcement officer after she sought to delay the execution of a convicted killer because it conflicted with a fundraiser for her re-election campaign.Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s capital punishment project, told reporters via Zoom that Trump said “he will work to expand the death penalty. He’s going to try to expand it to people who do not even commit killings. He’s called for expanding the death penalty to his political opponents.“But perhaps most dangerously in Project 2025 [a policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation thinktank] – and we believe every word of it is this – he promised to try to kill everyone on death row, and the reason why we have to believe this and take it so seriously is the record that Donald Trump left where he, in a span of six months, carried out 13 executions.”The ACLU and other groups are therefore pressing Biden to commute the sentences of all individuals on federal death row to life in prison, fulfilling a campaign promise and preventing potential executions under Trump. Commuting “is really the thing that Biden can do to make it harder for Trump to restart executions”, Stubbs added.Pastor Brandi Slaughter, a board member of the pressure group Death Penalty Action, told reporters this week: “We know what the next president plans to do if any prisoners are left under a sentence of death under the Biden administration. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.”Biden has also received 8,000 petitions for clemency from federal prisoners serving non-death penalty sentences that he could either reduce or pardon. The former senator has long been criticised for his role in drawing up a 1994 crime law that led to the incarceration of thousands of Black men and women for drug offences.This week, members of Congress including Ayanna Pressley and James Clyburn led 64 colleagues in sending a letter to Biden urging him to use his clemency power “to reunite families, address longstanding injustices in our legal system and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration”.They were joined at a press conference on Capitol Hill by Maria Garza, 50, from Illinois, a prison reform advocate who spent 12 years in a state prison. She said in an interview: “There is a sense of urgency because a lot of the people that are sitting waiting for clemency are people that have de facto life sentences that will die in prison if they don’t [receive clemency]. A lot of their unjust sentencing was because of the 1994 crime bill that he was the founding father of.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMitzi Wall, whose 29-year-old son Jonathan is incarcerated on a seven-and-a-half-year federal cannabis charge, called on Biden to keep a campaign promise to grant clemency to more than 4,000 people in federal prison for nonviolent cannabis crimes.“We voted for President Biden,” she said. “He gave us hope and we’re asking him to do nothing more than keep his promise.”Wall, 63, from Maryland, added: “President Biden was partly responsible for writing the 1994 crime bill that thrust families into abject poverty and pain. I know he feels bad about that and he can right that wrong with the power of the pen. I’m appealing to him as a father whose son [Hunter] could very possibly be going to prison.”In other efforts to protect civil liberties, the ACLU is recommending a moratorium on all federal government purchases of Americans’ personal data without a warrant. It is also asking Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act to prevent potential abuse of surveillance technologies under the Trump administration.Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare law and stop clean-energy development projects. White House officials are working against the clock to dole out billions of dollars in grants for existing programmes to minimise Trump’s ability to rescind or redirect these funds. Earlier this month, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, announced more than $3.4bn in grants for infrastructure projects across the country.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, notes that Trump will have the power of impoundment to stall the money flowing out of the government and can order rescissions to programmes funded by Congress.“The singular thing that Joe Biden can do is expedite the flow of federal dollars in all the programmes,” Schiller said.“Any money that is supposed to leave the treasury to go to schools, food safety, environmental protection – anything that is not yet distributed needs to get distributed. It’s like emptying literally the piggy bank before you go on a trip. President Biden needs to be literally getting as much money out the door in the hands of state, local and community organisations as he can.”Another priority for the White House is getting Senate confirmation of as many federal judges as possible, given the potential impact of the judiciary in challenging Trump administration policies. The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organisation, noted: “Federal judges restricted hundreds of Trump administration policies during his first term, and will likely play a significant role in determining the trajectory of his second.”Senate Republicans forced numerous procedural votes and late-night sessions this week in attempt to stall confirmations. Eventually a deal was struck that will bring Biden within striking distance of the 234 judicial confirmations that occurred in Trump’s first term – but four of Biden’s appellate court nominees will not be considered.The outgoing president could also engage with Democratic-led states and localities to bolster protections and establish “firewalls” against Trump’s agenda, particularly in areas such as immigration. These collaborations could involve reinforcing sanctuary city policies and providing resources to states that are likely to face pressure from the Trump administration.Chris Scott, former coalitions director for Harris, said: “What will be interesting is how or what can President Biden to work with states, especially where we have Democratic leadership in place, to be able to brace themselves and arm themselves with more protection. We already have places like a Michigan or Illinois where you have governors vowing to make sure that they have protections – even in the Trump presidency.”As Barack Obama discovered before handing Trump the keys to the Oval Office in 2017, however, lame duck presidents can only do so much. Trump will come into office with a flurry of executive orders, a supportive Congress and fewer guardrails than the first time around.Bill Galston, a former adviser in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “On January 20 Donald Trump will control all the instruments of government and, at that point, it’ll be up to the courts – and public opinion – to restrain him.” More

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      As we wait for national legislation, let’s launch a Green New Deal from below | Jeremy Brecher

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      As Trump and Trumpism devastate the American political landscape, how can people counter this destructive juggernaut? For the past five years, I have been studying how people are actually implementing the elements of the Green New Deal through what has become a Green New Deal from Below. This framework, which ordinary people are already putting into practice, is an approach to organizing that can form a significant means for resisting and even overcoming the Trump agenda.The Green New Deal is a visionary program designed to protect the Earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice and eliminating poverty. The Green New Deal erupted into public attention as a proposal for national legislation, and the struggle to embody it in national legislation is ongoing.But there has also emerged a little-noticed wave of initiatives from community groups, unions, city and state governments, Indigenous American tribes and other non-federal actors designed to contribute to the core principle of the Green New Deal: to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for creating good jobs and social justice. The US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who helped start the campaign for a Green New Deal, has called it “a Green New Deal from Below”.My new book, The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy, details more than a 100 such initiatives in over 40 states. Some of these initiatives use names like “The DeKalb Green New Deal” and “The Green New Deal for Education”; others don’t use the moniker but apply the same principles. Here are some examples.In DeKalb county, Georgia, on 17 September, the DeKalb Green New Deal presented a 100% clean energy and transportation transition plan. Since it started in 2020, the DeKalb Green New Deal has passed 20 climate action policies, resolutions and initiatives. A local official, Ted Terry, told a news outlet: “Our Green New Deal is specifically a DeKalb Green New Deal – it’s what we think we can do with our own resources, our own land, our own people.”On New York’s Long Island, a co-op led by women of the Indigenous American Shinnecock Nation have fought for and are now exercising their traditional right to cultivate and harvest kelp in Long Island Sound. Their ocean farming extracts carbon and nitrogen from the polluted waters of Long Island Sound and produces an environmentally friendly alternative to fertilizer derived from fossil fuel. It is also producing jobs for impoverished tribal members. This and similar programs are often referred to as a “Blue New Deal”.In Minneapolis, unionized workers who clean downtown commercial office high-rises struck to demand that their employers take action on climate change. The janitors, members of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local 26 who are mostly immigrants and women, won a green education initiative that includes training in climate-friendly cleaning and building management, funded by their employers.In Illinois, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, promoted by a broad coalition of labor and community groups, sets the state on a path to a carbon-free power sector by 2045 with the nation’s strongest labor and equity standards. The bill will slash emissions, create thousands of new clean energy union jobs, expand union apprenticeships for Black and Latino communities and increase energy efficiency for public schools. It also contains a transition program for families and communities currently reliant on jobs in the fossil fuel industry. Journalist Liza Featherstone has called the legislation a “miniature Green New Deal” for Illinois.In southern states like Texas and Virginia, the Green Workers Alliance has organized poorly paid solar panel installers to establish “a strong, worker-led movement that supports the Green New Deal and a just transition to a renewable economy”. They have connected with hundreds of workers in Facebook groups and listening tours. They have won back lost wages, organized struggles against temp agency abuses and campaigned to pressure large utility companies to transition to renewable energy.With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress we can still create local programs like the DeKalb Green New Deal with its comprehensive municipal plan for clean energy and its score of concrete climate initiatives. We can still create co-ops like the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers that protect the environment, eliminate carbon pollution, create jobs for deprived communities and increase the power of those marginalized in our political system. Workers like the union janitors in Minneapolis can organize, strike and win both better working conditions on the job and demands that their employers protect the climate.States can follow the lead of Illinois and pass legislation to transition to carbon-free power while creating union jobs for those who need them most and providing a just transition for workers transitioning out of the fossil fuel economy. Workers in the still-burgeoning green industries can organize both to challenge employer abuses and to fight to expand renewable energy to create good jobs and protect the climate.One of the leading proponents of a Green New Deal from Below is Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston. Her programs have included solarization and resilience in poor neighborhoods, a massive construction program called the Green New Deal for Boston Public Schools, a Youth Clean Jobs Corp, and provision of free, nutritious breakfasts and lunches to all of Boston’s 50,000 public school students, prepared by an employee- and Black-owned food service company.Wu has already shown how action by a Green New Deal from Below can resist the coming Trump onslaught. On 12 November she told the Boston Globe that the city’s authorities will not assist federal law enforcement in any mass deportation efforts and pledged to fight the fear that might take hold among some Bostonians when President-elect Donald Trump takes office.The role of the Green New Deal from Below in the Trump era can go beyond such defensive measures. To paraphrase Wu, the impact of the Green New Deal has been to “expand the sense of what is possible”. A core goal of Trump and Trumpism is to obliterate that sense of possibility – the knowledge that through collective action people can improve their lives and their world. The Green New Deal from Below resists that obliteration, with people organizing to build the blocks of possibility right in their own backyards.

      Jeremy Brecher is the author of the new book The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy. He is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements and the co-founder and senior advisor of the Labor Network for Sustainability More

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      The Long Wave: Unearthing the real story of Black voters at the US election

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      Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I had a chat with Lauren N Williams, the deputy editor for race and equity at the Guardian US, about the country’s election results and the role Black voters played. I wanted to discuss the reported swing among Black voters to Donald Trump, which seemed pretty significant. However, talking to her made me see things from a different angle. But first, the weekly roundup.Weekly roundupView image in fullscreenBarbados PM invites Trump for climate talks | At the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mia Mottley told the Guardian that she would “find common purpose in saving the planet” with the president-elect of the US. Trump’s re-election has aggravated fears about the future of climate action.Malcolm X family sues over assassination | The family of Malcolm X have filed a $100m federal lawsuit against the CIA, FBI and New York police department over his death. The lawsuit alleges that law enforcement agencies knew of the plot to assassinate the civil rights leader in 1965 but did not act to stop it.Kenyans embrace standup comedy | Comedy is booming in Kenya, with new venues and a fresh wave of standups picking up the mic. As our east Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi, reports: “Topics encompass daily life and the entire range of challenges that beset the country … as performers tap into the power of standup to make people laugh about their difficulties.”Steve McQueen reveals cancer treatment | The Oscar-winning film director and artist Steve McQueen underwent treatment for prostate cancer in 2022. The Blitz producer, whose father died of the disease in 2006, has helped raise awareness of the higher risk of prostate cancer among Black men, and directed a short campaign film, Embarassed.Evaristos connect at Rio book festival | The British Booker prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo and Brazil’s most celebrated living Black author, Conceição Evaristo, met for the first time at Festa Literária das Periferias in Rio de Janeiro last Wednesday. The two Evaristos, who are unrelated, spoke on a panel discussion about their shared surname and its ties to Brazil and the transatlantic slave trade.In depth: A Black political shift – math or myth?View image in fullscreenThe headlines seemed clear: Trump’s support among Black voters had soared. In the US election this month, some media reported that he doubled his share of the Black male vote and won more Black voters than any other Republican in almost 50 years. This was history! Well, not quite, Lauren N Williams tells me. “The numbers overall are almost identical to how people voted in 2020,” she says. According to exit polls, Black voters turned out for Harris at 85%, and for Joe Biden at 87%. The only real difference is that the number of Black men who voted for Kamala Harris dropped slightly, while Black male Trump support increased slightly from 19% in 2020 to 21% in 2024. But, she says, more than 7 million fewer people voted for Harris than Biden. While Trump picked up more Black male voters than he did back then – a detail heavily emphasised in media coverage before and after the election – the prevailing narrative does not account for the fact that: “It’s not only this switch to Trump,” Lauren says. People stayed home, or people voted third party. If you don’t look at the whole picture, then yes, you arrive at the narrative that Black people are swinging one way.”Why was this contextualisation missing from post-election analysis? Because it doesn’t make for a sexy story. “It’s really interesting to people when you have a character like Trump and he attracts folks who you wouldn’t normally think would be into his policies and persona,” Lauren says. “It’s typical that white male voters vote for him overwhelmingly – but what’s not typical is when people of colour do so. For a lot of news media, that is a really attractive story.”I asked her about the viral clip of Barack Obama scolding Black male voters for seemingly not turning out as strongly for Harris as they did for him when he ran. Even I flinched when I saw it, and thought, wow, the Democrats must really be in trouble. But, according to Lauren, the emergency button on that narrative had so constantly been pressed by poll analysts (a narrative that, if I may, the Guardian avoided), that even the Democrats panicked and fell for it, sending Obama to “finger-wag” at prospective voters.‘Complicating the narrative’View image in fullscreenIt’s still interesting to me that a candidate like Trump, with his record on racism, could win over more Black men, even in context. But Lauren calls my attention to a far bigger and more interesting story that has been reduced to a footnote of the election: Harris won almost the entire Black female vote. “If you had white women voting 90%-plus for a candidate, you would not hear the end of that story. It would be endlessly curious and interesting and fascinating. We lose a lot by not applying that same level of curiosity to the ways that other demographics vote.” I can see that this also applies to Black men, three-quarters of whom still voted Democrat. “This story could have been ‘look at the power that Black voters wield’, but that’s just not the American narrative.”And what we lose is a big deal. By writing off those who voted for Harris as doing so simply out of blind loyalty, the reasons for Trump’s victory risk becoming detached from reality. Another broad headline after the election was that there was actually nothing sinister going on – it was “just” the economy. But the Black people who voted for Harris are disproportionately working class, Lauren says, and have made informed decisions despite their economic status because they are accustomed to making compromises and always thinking about “the greater good”. “In the discussions that a lot of the media has about the working class, the undertone is that they are only talking about the white working class”, because considering Black voters as part of the American working class “complicates the narrative”. People would have to reckon with the fact that “Black Americans who experience disfranchisement and a huge racial wealth gap were not wooed by this idea of economic anxiety”.Anti-racism has fallen out of fashionView image in fullscreen“Complicating the narrative” raises the question: why is it that white people are seemingly more anxious about the economy than Black people who are less well off? There is little interest in the answer to this question, says Lauren. “I think people have decided that race is boring,” she says, even though it’s “at the root of so much. Any time we talk about identity politics, we’re talking about people of colour, even though Trump ran on white male identity.” By only treating white people as rational economic voters, we pay “an undue amount of attention” to factors outside race, even though it’s “right up there”. I have definitely noticed a shift since Trump’s first election victory eight years ago. The myriad “white rage” takes of 2016 are thin on the ground this time, despite Trump’s 2024 campaign being even more explicitly racist.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA growing backlash to Black Lives Matter also played a role. “We shifted so far after George Floyd,” Lauren says, “whether we saw corporations – symbolic or not – changing their behaviour and relationships to racism and people were pissed about that. Not everyone was on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon.”What next for Black Americans?View image in fullscreenIf this is how the election analysis has played out, it does not bode well for the next four years. Perhaps we’ll see wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s “appeal” to the white working class and continued disregard for the millions of Black people who didn’t vote for him, who now have to live under a regime that “aims to dismantle federal anti-discrimination policies”. Lauren’s approach is to widen the historical lens. “One thing that has helped me is just remembering that we have been here before. Any time there is progress, there is always a backlash to it. One step forward, two steps back. That is peak American history.”As a journalist, Lauren says showing Black lives as fuller than they are often depicted in the mainstream media, insisting on art, culture, and “the Black rodeo down in Mississippi”, is the way to plough ahead. In other words: if you’re a glass-half-full person, which I am, it’s focusing on that one step forward and then the next one. Or, to borrow from Harris, “weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning”.What we’re intoView image in fullscreen

      I am broadly not a fan of beauty pageants. But I can’t lie, the variations of African dress during this year’s Miss Universe had me mesmerised. It’s impossible to pick a favourite as each one was more stunning the next. Nesrine

      The Afrikan Alien mixtape by Pa Salieu is going platinum on my phone. I love his musings on family, alienation and freedom (he was released from a 21-month prison stint in September). Jason

      I know we are at a saturation point with social media, but hear me out: Bluesky is like the old, less toxic Twitter, and has a handy way of grouping users so you can follow by theme. I mass followed Blacksky, a selection of interesting Black accounts on the app. Check it out. Nesrine

      I can’t wait to catch Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba in the film Wicked. She is a generational talent and I can’t stop watching her perform an R&B rendition of The Sound of Music on The Tonight Show. Jason
      Black catalogueView image in fullscreenWhen the prominent Fani-Kayode family fled the civil war in Nigeria, the UK gained a curious and radical artist and photographer in Rotimi Fani-Kayode, famous for his portraits exploring race, culture, sexuality, desire and pain. He had a short career, with much of his work accomplished between 1983 and his death from Aids-related complications in London in 1989. Fani-Kayode was a member of the Brixton Artists Collective and a founding member of the Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers), and much of Rotimi’s never-before-seen works are being presented at a new exhibition in London that captures his legacy and impact.Tap inDo you have any thoughts or responses to this week’s newsletter? Share your feedback by replying to this, or emailing us on thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue. More

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      How Trump 2.0 might affect the wildfire crisis: ‘The harms will be more lasting’

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      In the days that followed Donald Trump’s election win, flames roared through southern California neighborhoods. On the other side of the country, wildfire smoke clouded the skies in New York and New Jersey.They were haunting reminders of a stark reality: while Trump prepares to take office for a second term, the complicated, and escalating, wildfire crisis will be waiting.As the climate crisis unfolds, communities across the country are spending seasons under smoke-filled skies. Federal firefighters are overworked and underpaid, the cost of fire suppression has climbed, and millions of people are at risk of losing their insurance. Landscapes and homes alike have been reduced to ash as the world continues to warm.The president-elect has offered few plans to address the emergency. Instead, he’s promised to deliver a wave of deregulation, cripple climate-supporting agencies, and clear departments of logistical experts relied upon during disasters.His allies, including the authors of Project 2025, a conservative playbook for a second Trump administration, have recommended privatizing parts of the federal government that now serve the public good.In the past week, Trump’s announcements for key cabinet nominations has already shown he’s begun to solidify an anti-science agenda.“Whatever happens at a broad scale is going to affect our ability to manage risks, respond to emergencies, and plan for the future, “ said University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain. “I don’t see any way there won’t be huge effects.”Here are the challenges ahead:Setting the stakesLooking back at his first term, Trump had a poor record managing large wildfire emergencies – and he had many opportunities. After presiding over the response to destructive blazes that left a devastating toll, including the Camp fire that claimed the lives of 85 people in and around the town of Paradise, in 2020 he told a crowd in Pennsylvania that high-risk fire states such as California, and their residents, were to blame.“I said you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests – there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up,” he said. That year, a record 10.2m acres were charred across the US.In a signal of how politicized disaster management in the Trump era became, he added: “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.”Such comments raised fears among experts and officials working to protect these landscapes and the neighborhoods near them that Trump didn’t understand the magnitude of the risks US forests faced.He’s been unwilling to embrace the strategies that the scientists and landscape managers recommend to help keep catastrophic fire in check, including a delicate and tailored approach to removing vegetation in overgrown forests, protecting old-growth stands, and following those treatments with prescribed burning.The risks and challenges have only intensified since his first term.Some in the wildfire response communities are hopeful that Trump will cut red tape that’s slowed progress on important forest treatments, but others have highlighted a blunt approach could do more harm than good.Many have voiced concerns over ambitions set out in Project 2025 to curb prescribed burning in favor of increasing timber sales.Meanwhile, federal firefighters are waiting to see whether Trump and a Republican-led Congress will secure long-overdue pay raises.The US Forest Service (USFS), the largest employer of federal firefighters, has seen an exodus of emergency responders over abysmally low pay and gaps in support for the unsustainable and dangerous work they do.Federal firefighters who spend weeks at a time on the fireline and rack up thousands of hours in overtime each summer, make far less than their state- and city-employed counterparts with paychecks that rival those of fast-food employees. That exodus has hampered its ability to keep pace with the year-round firefighting needs.“Doing less with your resources makes a task like fire suppression and fuels management extremely more challenging,” said Jonathan Golden, legislative director of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.Joe Biden facilitated a temporary pay raise for federal wildland firefighters, but those expire at the end of the year. With Trump promising large cuts to federal budgets and the bureaucrats who operate them, many fear the Republican leadership in Congress won’t push the legislation needed to ensure these essential emergency responders keep their raise.If the pay raises are allowed to expire, many more federal firefighters will walk out the door – right when they are needed most.“The job isn’t going to get any easier,” Golden said. “My hope is that we continue to have a well-staffed and well-funded professional workforce that can answer the call year-round – because that’s what is required.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEmergencies on the riseBillion-dollar weather and climate disasters are on the rise. There was a historic number in the US in 2023 with a total of 28 – surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2022. With more than a month left, there have already been 24 this year.Trump has a history of stalling in the aftermath of natural disasters, opting instead to put a political spin on who receives aid. For wildfires during his first term, that meant threatening California and other Democratic-majority states with delayed or withheld funding to punish them for their political leanings.This time, some fear he may also reduce the amount of aid provided by Fema. Project 2025 has called for a shift in emergency spending, putting the “majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government” and either eliminating or armoring grants that fund preparedness to push Trump’s political agenda.The framework advises the next president to remove all unions from the department and only give Fema grants to states, localities and private organizations who “can show that their mission and actions support the broader homeland security mission”, including the deportation of undocumented people.These tactics could hamper both preparedness and recovery from wildfires and other disasters, especially in high-risk blue states such as California and others across the west.The administration has also been advised by Project 2025 authors to dismantle or severely hamper the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose forecasting has been essential to warn when dangerous weather arises, and remove all mention of the climate crisis in federal rhetoric and research.Trump’s picks of a former congressman Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum as the Department of Interior secretary – two agencies deeply connected to US climate policy – indicate his strong skepticism of the climate crisis. Zeldin and Burgum have clear directives to oversee rampant deregulation and expedite extraction on public lands.“Folks at federal agencies are already being gently advised to think about the language they use to describe things,” Swain said. He thinks the effects will be far-reaching, especially when it comes to wildfire preparedness and response. Disabling science and weather-focused agencies could reduce important intel that responders rely on, reduce nimbleness and hamper efforts to plan into the future.“A lot of people are thinking this is going to be the second coming of the first Trump administration and I don’t think it’s the right way to be thinking about it,” Swain said.“This time, it’s highly plausible that the disruption and the harms will be a lot deeper and more lasting – it will be much harder to reverse.”Big picture problemsEven before Trump retook the White House, the US was missing the mark on its ambitious climate goals. But scientists and experts have offered clear warnings about how Trump’s policies could accelerate dire outcomes.“Climate change is a huge crisis and we don’t have time to spare,” said Julia Stein, deputy director of the Emmett Institute on climate change and the environment at the UCLA School of Law.Stein pointed to the potential for many of these policies to be challenged in court, much like they were the first time around. States such as California, which is also home to one of the world’s largest economies to back it, are already preparing to challenge Trump’s policies. The directives of the first Trump administration were often legally vulnerable, Stein said, and she thinks they might be again this time around, especially if he attempts to rid the agencies of career bureaucrats and their deep knowledge of how things work.In a state where wildfires are always a risk, California is also bolstering its own approach, doubling down on landscape treatments and investing in preparation, mitigation, and response according to Stein, who noted the $10bn climate bond just passed by voters there that will go toward wildfire prevention and mitigation.Still, fires don’t recognize borders. The threats continue to push into areas that aren’t accustomed to them, and larger swaths of the country will be forced to grapple with smoke. Without partners in federal agencies that manage lands across the US, states will struggle to address the mounting challenges on their own.“Continuing to enforce those laws in California will blunt some of the impact for Californians,” she said. “The unfortunate thing – especially when it comes to climate change – there are going to be national and global consequences for inaction at the federal level.” More

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      Trump picks oil and gas industry CEO Chris Wright as next energy secretary

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      Donald Trump said on Saturday that Chris Wright, an oil and gas industry executive and a staunch defender of fossil fuel use, would be his pick to lead the US Department of Energy.Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, an oilfield services firm based in Denver, Colorado. He is expected to support Trump’s plan to maximize production of oil and gas and to seek ways to boost generation of electricity, demand for which is rising for the first time in decades.He is also likely to share Trump’s opposition to global cooperation on fighting climate change. Wright has called climate change activists alarmist and has likened efforts by Democrats to combat global warming to Soviet-style communism.“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year.Wright, who does not have any political experience, has written extensively on the need for more fossil fuel production to lift people out of poverty.He has stood out among oil and gas executives for his freewheeling style, and describes himself as a tech nerd.Wright made a media splash in 2019 when he drank fracking fluid on camera to demonstrate it was not dangerous.US oil output hit the highest level any country has ever produced under Biden, and it is uncertain how much Wright and the incoming administration could boost that.Most drilling decisions are driven by private companies working on land not owned by the federal government.The Department of Energy handles US energy diplomacy, administers the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – which Trump has said he wants to replenish – and runs grant and loan programs to advance energy technologies, such as the Loan Programs Office.The secretary also oversees the aging US nuclear weapons complex, nuclear energy waste disposal and 17 national labs.If confirmed by the Senate, Wright will replace Jennifer Granholm, a supporter of electric vehicles and emerging energy sources like geothermal power, and a backer of carbon-free wind, solar and nuclear energy.Wright will also likely be involved in the permitting of electricity transmission and the expansion of nuclear power, an energy source that is popular with both Republicans and Democrats but which is expensive and complicated to permit.Power demand in the United States is surging for the first time in two decades amid growth in artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and cryptocurrencies.Trump also announced on Saturday that he had picked one of his personal attorneys, Will Scharf, to serve as his White House staff secretary. Scharf is a former federal prosecutor who was a member of Trump’s legal team in his successful attempt to get broad immunity from prosecution from the supreme court.Writing on Twitter the day after Trump’s election, Scharf greeted the news that Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted the former president for his attempt to subvert the 2020 election, was winding down the Trump case and planned to resign with the words, “Bye Jack.” More

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      The Guardian view on Cop29: 1.5C has been passed – so speed up the green transition | Editorial

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      Predictions that this will be the first calendar year in which the 1.5C warming limit enshrined in the Paris agreement is surpassed provide a stark backdrop to the UN’s 29th climate conference. This year – 2024 – has already seen the hottest-ever day and month, and is expected by experts to be the hottest year too. Addressing delegates on Tuesday, the UN chief, António Guterres, referred to a “masterclass in climate destruction”. The escalating pattern of destructive weather events, most recently in Valencia, is a warning of what lies ahead.When the 1.5C figure was included in the 2015 deal, it was known to be a stretch. The treaty says countries must hold the average temperature “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels” and aim for 1.5C. Busting this target in 2024 will not mean it has been definitively missed; the measurement of global temperatures relies on averages recorded over 20 or more years. But the crossing of this threshold is a menacing moment. Around the world, people as well as governments and climate specialists should take notice – and act.Whether temperature data will sharpen minds and negotiations in Azerbaijan remains to be seen. Cop29 got off to a rocky start with a row over carbon markets, which are used by rich countries and businesses to offset their emissions by paying for environmental protection elsewhere. New rules were pushed through despite objections regarding the sector’s history of fraud and false promises. Donald Trump’s victory last week points to renewed conflict regarding the role of the US, not only in relation to fossil fuel expansion, but also institutions such as the World Bank, which must lead on climate finance – and in which the US is the dominant stakeholder.The fallout from Mr Trump’s election and the political crisis in Germany mean that leaders of several of the world’s richest nations did not travel to Baku. But Sir Keir Starmer took the opportunity to announce an ambitious new climate goal for the UK. Several months ahead of the deadline for updated nationally determined contributions – as the carbon pledges made by governments are known – Sir Keir accepted the recommendations of the UK’s Climate Change Committee and committed to cut emissions by 81% compared with 1990 levels by 2035.Especially given the poor record of the last prime minister, Rishi Sunak, on climate, this is a significant step from the UK and builds on recent announcements on green investment for which the climate secretary, Ed Miliband, deserves credit as well. There is no doubt that the threat to life from climate disruption is rising – and with it the threat of the political instability that is caused when lives and livelihoods are destroyed, as they have been in eastern Spain.The priority for this round of climate talks is the financing of the green transition, and the urgent necessity for rich countries to support poorer ones. New taxes on fossil fuel companies, which have vastly inflated their profits since the Ukraine war, are among measures being argued for, along with frequent-flyer levies and loan guarantees enabling poorer countries to borrow. Petrostates including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates should also become contributors. All of the above, and more, will be needed if the targets set in Paris are not to be pushed beyond the realms of possibility. The transition to clean energy needs to be faster. More

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      US climate envoy says fight against climate crisis does not end under Trump

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      The US climate envoy John Podesta said the fight “for a cleaner, safer” planet will not stop under a re-elected Donald Trump even if some progress is reversed, speaking at the Cop29 UN climate talks on Monday as they opened in Baku, Azerbaijan.“Although under Donald Trump’s leadership the US federal government placed climate-related actions on the back burner, efforts to prevent climate change remain a commitment in the US and will confidently continue,” said Podesta, who is leading the Biden administration’s delegation at the annual talks.Trump has pledged to deregulate the energy sector, allow the oil and gas industry to “drill, baby, drill”, and pull the US from the Paris climate agreement, which committed countries to taking steps to avoid the worst impacts of the crisis. Yet while Trump will try to reverse progress, “this is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet”, Podesta said.Last week’s re-election of Trump to the White House, which will see him inaugurated for a second term in January, has cast a shadow on the UN talks after the Republican defeated Kamala Harris. Harris had been expected to continue the climate policies of Joe Biden, who passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest down payment on the green transition seen in US history.Experts say Trump’s second term could be even more destructive, as he will be aided by an amenably conservative judiciary and armed with detailed policy blueprints such as the Project 2025 document published by the rightwing Heritage Foundation.Trump’s incoming administration is already reportedly drawing up executive orders to erase climate policies and open up protected land for ramped-up oil and gas production. “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world,” the president-elect said on Wednesday.Staff at the US Environmental Protection Agency, which was targeted the last time Trump was president, are already bracing for a mass exodus. Swaths of work done by the EPA under Biden, such as pollution rules for cars and power plants, as well as efforts to protect vulnerable communities living near industrial activity, are set to be reversed.A June analysis warned that Trump’s forthcoming rollbacks could add 4bn additional metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere by 2030 when compared with a continuation of Biden’s policies. That “would be a death sentence to our planet”, said Jamie Minden, the 21-year-old acting executive director of Zero Hour, the US-based youth-led climate non-profit, at a press conference about the election result in Baku on Monday.Trump’s looming presidency could also place a damper on other countries’ climate action plans, said Todd Stern, who was the US special envoy for climate change and the United States’ chief negotiator at the 2015 Paris climate agreement – especially China, which is currently the top global contributor to planet-warming emissions.“The two biggest players in the ring are the US and China, and China is extremely aware of that. It has just got a guarantee that the US president won’t be bringing up climate change with them for the next four years and that means something,” he said. “It will make things easier on China and that can’t help but have some impact.”Yet “the fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle in one country,” said Podesta. The UN climate conference in Baku represented a “critical opportunity to cement our progress”, he said.At Cop29, activists are pushing the Biden administration to file a bold climate plan under the Paris climate agreement – known as a nationally determined contribution – and to make big pledges to support global climate finance efforts.And the president “still has critical opportunities to cement his climate legacy” on the domestic level as well, said Allie Rosenbluth, co-manager of the climate NGO Oil Change International, including by rejecting pending permits for fossil fuel projects.At least $1tn is needed to help poor countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, shift to a low-carbon economy and adapt to the impacts of climate disasters. If the US fails to meaningfully contribute, other countries can also fill the climate finance gap left by the US, noted Teresa Anderson, the global climate justice lead at the climate non-profit ActionAid, at another Monday press conference.“This is a test for rich countries,” she said. “If they believe in the climate emergency then they should be willing to pay more than their fair share, not less.”The US senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a climate hawk who will arrive at Cop29 later this week, said Trump and other US Republicans were “aiming a torpedo” at climate progress, but that the pressure to slash US emissions would stay strong.“I’m heading to Baku to reassure the international community that large swaths of the US remain committed to steering the planet away from climate catastrophe, a catastrophe that is already doing massive economic harm and driving up prices for insurance, food, and other goods and services,” he wrote in an email.Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, noted that the Paris agreement had 195 signatories and “will not collapse in the face of a single election result”.“The Paris agreement has survived one Trump presidency and it will survive another,” she said. More

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      Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth – and it will take a progressive revolution to stop him | George Monbiot

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      We were losing slowly. Now we are losing quickly. Democracy, accountability, human rights, social justice – all were rolling backwards as money swarmed our politics. Above all, our life-support systems – the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, ice and snow – have been hammered and hammered, regardless of who is in power. Donald Trump might strike the killer blows, but he is not the cause of an ecocidal economic system. He is the embodiment of it.Under Joe Biden, the US was missing its own climate goals, and those goals were insufficient to meet the global objective of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. That target in turn might not be tight enough to prevent a tipping of Earth systems. Already, at roughly 1.3C of heating, we see what looks alarmingly like climatic flickering: the ever wilder perturbations that tend to precede the collapse of a complex system.Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth, ripping up US climate commitments and reverting to unrestrained fossil fuel extraction and burning. If he follows the Project 2025 agenda, he will leave the UN climate framework altogether, making his assault on Earth systems much harder to reverse.His evangelical base, eager to advance the biblical apocalypse, will love him for it. Most simply deny climate breakdown. Others perceive events such as floods and fires not as warnings, but as joyous portents of the end of times: a great cleansing, in which the righteous will be uplifted to sit at the right hand of God, while their enemies will be cast into the fiery pit. What we will see under a new Trump presidency is a neat alignment of the interests of fossil fuel companies and a constituency gunning for Armageddon (and hoping that Benjamin Netanyahu will assist its delivery).But let’s not forget: the greatest predicament that humanity has ever faced scarcely featured in this election campaign. If Trump mentioned it, it was to denounce climate breakdown as “one of the great scams of all time”, while Kamala Harris was almost silent on the issue. Perhaps that’s unsurprising, when both candidates relied so heavily on billionaire funding. Capital is always hostile to restraint, and effective environmental policy would be the greatest restraint of all.On almost all fronts, decency and humanity have been retreating for years. Genocide, colonial conquest, the seizure of resources from the poor: all are resurgent, even before Trump returns to the White House. The rich have learned how to game our political systems. Capital has found the means of solving its longstanding problem: democracy.Trump’s conquest of the US is widely seen as something new. But it looks to me like a reversion to the default state of centralised, hierarchical societies. For many centuries, these societies were characterised by extreme power vested in the leader. This power was brokered by a favoured caste, which drew on a justifying belief in the inherent superiority of some groups over others. This caste was empowered to treat other people’s lives as disposable, to criminalise dissent and inflict extreme violence and cruelty upon those who challenged the leader or his ideology. Instead of rational argument, it used symbols, slogans, ceremony and pageantry to reinforce power and create social consensus.A centralised democratic system was always a contradiction. However enlightened the founding fathers of the US (or the liberal reformers in the UK) may have seemed, they created systems in which elite power would never fully relinquish control. These systems were highly vulnerable to capture and reversal. Only a far more decentralised, participatory democracy could resist the reversion to autocratic rule.We have laboured for years under a folk theory of democracy: to win power, you must “make the case” for the politics you want to see, using reasoned argument. Voters will assess the competing arguments. On this basis, and considering the records of the candidates, they will decide which of the factions operating from a distant centre they will elect to govern them for the next four or five years. Then they will trust those representatives to act on their behalf until the next election, on the basis of presumed consent. It was always a fairytale.People seek to destroy what they feel excluded from. Centralised “democracies” exclude all but a rarefied circle from genuine power. Disempowered people tend to be profoundly unimpressed by “rational arguments” for this faction or that one: they have an entirely reasonable desire – however unreasonable its expression may be – to kick the system over. There are constructive ways of doing so, and destructive ways. The majority of US voters have now chosen the destructive path. The message of Trump’s victory seems clear: to hell with your reasoned arguments. Give us reassuring homilies and blood sacrifice.Trump could still be reined in by the midterm elections, but his appointments to the supreme court and its reciprocal grant of almost full-spectrum immunity will enable him to rule in some respects without restraint. In some ways, he can exercise greater power than medieval monarchs could have dreamed of, as the inequality of arms between state and citizens has grown massively in the “democratic” era.Sophisticated propaganda on new media channels, surveillance technologies, new means of crowd control, targeted assassination: as we have seen in other countries, these can be used to snuff out dissent with horrifying efficiency. When I saw the mini drones being used by the Russian government to drop grenades on individual citizens in the Ukrainian city of Kherson, I thought: one day, that could be any of us.Monstrous as he is, Trump is no outlier. He is the distillation of capitalist pseudo-democracy. His values, entirely extrinsic – fixated on prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth – are the dominant values projected for years on to every screen and into every mind. His criminality is the system’s criminality. His abuse of women, of staff, of customers, of Muslims, of immigrants, of disabled people, of ecosystems, is the abuse the majority of the world’s people have suffered for centuries.What do we do? Stop it from happening in our own countries. This, I believe, requires a massive decentralisation, a devolution of politics to the people, the creation of a genuine democracy that cannot so easily be captured, the building of an ecological civilisation that subordinates economics to Earth systems, not the other way round. No one would claim any of this is easy. But right now, we are readily handing our lives to the Donald Trumps that lurk in every country.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More