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      TV meteorologist attacks Ron DeSantis over Florida’s ‘don’t say climate change’ law

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      A TV meteorologist condemned the Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s so-called “don’t say climate change” law on air and urged viewers to vote.Steve MacLaughlin of WTVJ in Miami addressed viewers on Saturday amid rising heat records across the state, saying: “On Thursday, we reported … that the government of Florida was beginning to roll back really important climate-change legislation and really important climate-change language.”MacLaughin condemned DeSantis’s position on the matter, saying that it came “in spite of the fact that the state of Florida over the last couple of years has seen record heat, record flooding, record rain, record insurance rates, and the corals are dying all around the state”.He said: “The entire world is looking to Florida to lead in climate change, and our government is saying that climate change is no longer the priority it once was.“Please keep in mind the most powerful climate change solution is the one you already have in the palm of your hands – the right to vote. And we will never tell you who to vote for, but we will tell you this: we implore you to please do your research and know that there are candidates that believe in climate change and that there are solutions. And there are candidates that don’t.”McLaughlin delivered his comments after DeSantis recently signed several bills the governor claimed sought to “restore sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots”.“Radical green zealots want to impose their climate agenda on people through restrictions, regulations and taxes,” a notice posted by DeSantis said.In addition to prohibiting windfarms offshore and near coastlines, the bill prioritizes the expansion of natural gas and bolsters protections against gas appliance bans and repeals climate policies enacted during Barack Obama’s presidency.The gas industry has helped drive climate change and its resulting effects, including severe weather becoming more commonplace.Over the weekend, south Florida saw record temperatures, with Fort Lauderdale and Miami each reaching record highs of 95F (35C) on Sunday. Typical highs for this time of year are about 86F (30C), the Palm Beach Post reported.Since McLaughlin shared his segment on X on 18 May, it has been viewed nearly 407,000 times on the platform, with more than 3,300 likes and 1,400 reshares.Many were quick to praise McLaughlin for speaking out, with one user saying: “I know there’s often pressure on meteorologists not to speak. Thank you for speaking.”Another user wrote: “Thank you, Steve, for giving us the facts.”Someone else said: “So needed. Thank you for this.”Meteorologists across the US have faced harassment over their climate crisis reporting.Speaking to the Associated Press last year, Sean Sublette, a former TV meteorologist who now works at Virginia’s Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper, said: “More than once, I’ve had people call me names or tell me I’m stupid or these kinds of harassing type things simply for sharing information that they didn’t want to hear.”Meanwhile, last July, meteorologist Chris Gloninger announced he was stepping down from Des Moines’s CBS TV station affiliate KCCI due to post-traumatic stress disorder that he developed as a result of threats over his climate-crisis coverage. More

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      Biden administration moves to restrict oil and gas leases on 13m acres in Alaska

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      The Biden administration said on Friday it will restrict new oil and gas leasing on 13m acres (5.3m hectares) of a federal petroleum reserve in Alaska to help protect wildlife such as caribou and polar bears as the Arctic continues to warm.The decision – part of an ongoing, years-long fight over whether and how to develop the vast oil resources in the state – finalizes protections first proposed last year as the Biden administration prepared to approve the controversial Willow oil project.The approval of Willow drew fury from environmentalists, who said the large oil project violated Biden’s pledge to combat the climate crisis. Friday’s decision also cements an earlier plan that called for closing nearly half the reserve to oil and gas leasing.The rules announced on Friday would place restrictions on future leasing and industrial development in areas designated as special for their wildlife, subsistence or other values and call for the Bureau of Land Management to evaluate regularly whether to designate new special areas or bolster protections in those areas. The agency cited as a rationale the rapidly changing conditions in the Arctic due to the climate crisis, including melting permafrost and changes in plant life and wildlife corridors.Environmentalists were pleased. “This huge, wild place will be able to remain wild,” Ellen Montgomery of Environment America Research & Policy Center said.Jeremy Lieb, an attorney with Earthjustice, said the administration had taken an important step to protect the climate with the latest decision. Earthjustice is involved in litigation currently before a federal appeals court that seeks to overturn the Willow project’s approval. A decision in that case is pending.Earlier this week the Biden administration also finalized a new rule for public land management that is meant to put conservation on more equal footing with oil drilling, grazing and other extractive industries on vast government-owned properties.A group of Republican lawmakers, led by Alaska’s junior senator, Republican Dan Sullivan, commented ahead of Friday’s announcements about drilling limitations in the national petroleum reserve in Alaska even before it was publicly announced. Sullivan called it an “illegal” attack on the state’s economic lifeblood, and predicted lawsuits.“It’s more than a one-two punch to Alaska, because when you take off access to our resources, when you say you cannot drill, you cannot produce, you cannot explore, you cannot move it – this is the energy insecurity that we’re talking about,” Alaska’s senior senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski, said.The decision by the Department of the Interior does not change the terms of existing leases in the reserve or affect currently authorized operations, including the Willow project.The Biden administration also on Friday recommended the rejection of a state corporation’s application related to a proposed 210-mile (338km) road in the north-west part of the state to allow mining of critical mineral deposits, including copper, cobalt, zinc, silver and gold. There are no mining proposals or current mines in the area, however, and the proposed funding model for the Ambler Road project is speculative, the interior department said in a statement.Alaska’s political leaders have long accused the Biden administration of harming the state with decisions limiting the development of oil and gas, minerals and timber.“Joe Biden is fine with our adversaries producing energy and dominating the world’s critical minerals while shutting down our own in America, as long as the far-left radicals he feels are key to his re-election are satisfied,” Sullivan said on Thursday at a Capitol news conference with 10 other Republican senators.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden defended his decision regarding the petroleum reserve.Alaska’s “majestic and rugged lands and waters are among the most remarkable and healthy landscapes in the world”, are critical to Alaska Native communities and “demand our protection”, he said in a statement.Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, a group whose members include leaders from across much of Alaska’s North Slope region, has been critical of the administration’s approach. The group’s board of directors previously passed a resolution opposing the administration’s plans for the reserve.The petroleum reserve – about 100 miles (161km) west of the Arctic national wildlife refuge – is home to caribou and polar bears and provides habitat for millions of migrating birds. It was set aside about a century ago as an emergency oil source for the US navy, but since the 1970s has been overseen by the interior department. There has been ongoing, longstanding debate over where development should occur.Most existing leases in the petroleum reserve are clustered in an area that is considered to have high development potential, according to the Bureau of Land Management, which falls under the interior department. The development potential in other parts of the reserve is lower, the agency said.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      ‘Grownup’ leaders are pushing us towards catastrophe, says former US climate chief

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      Political leaders who present themselves as “grownups” while slowing the pace of climate action are pushing the world towards deeper catastrophe, a former US climate chief has warned.“We are slowed down by those who think of themselves as grownups and believe decarbonisation at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic,” said Todd Stern, who served as a special envoy for climate change under Barack Obama, and helped negotiate the 2015 Paris agreement.“They say that we need to slow down, that what is being proposed [in cuts to greenhouse gas emissions] is unrealistic,” he told the Observer. “You see it a lot in the business world too. It’s really hard [to push for more urgency] because those ‘grownups’ have a lot of influence.”But Stern said the speed of take-up of renewable energy, its falling cost, and the wealth of low-carbon technology now available were evidence that the world could cut emissions to net zero by 2050. “Obviously it’s difficult – we’re talking about enormous change to the world economy – but we can do it,” he said.View image in fullscreenStern would not name any world leaders, but he said the UK was in “retrenchment” over climate issues. Rishi Sunak and Claire Coutinho, the energy secretary, made several U-turns on climate policy last year, and have repeatedly said climate policies imposed “unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families” and that by slowing such action they were “being pragmatic and protecting family finances”.Stern said that, in fact, delaying action to cut greenhouse gas emissions was leading to disaster, given the rapid acceleration of the climate crisis, which he said was happening faster than predicted when the Paris agreement was signed. “Look out your window – look at what’s happening,look at the preposterous heat. It’s ridiculous.”Leaders who claimed to be grownups by saying the pace of action had to be slowed had to be honest about the alternatives, he said. Just as political leaders took swift action to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in 2020, so must they confront the consequences of slowing climate action now.“All hard questions of this magnitude should be considered by way of a ‘compared to what’ analysis. The monumental dangers [the climate crisis] poses warrant the same kind of ‘compared to what’ argument when leaders in the political and corporate worlds balk at what needs to be done.”He warned of the backlash against climate action by “rightwing populism” in Europe. “Hopefully, it doesn’t go very far,” he said. “If that kind of attitude gets some purchase among parts of the population, that’s not helpful.”Stern praised Joe Biden for “an extraordinarily good first term”, including the Inflation Reduction Act, which he called “far and away the most significant climate legislation ever in the US, and it’s quite powerful”.But he warned that if Donald Trump were to be elected this November, the US would exit the Paris agreement and frustrate climate action globally.“He will try to reverse whatever he can in terms of domestic policy [on climate action],” he warned. “I don’t think anybody else is going to pull out of Paris because of Trump, but it’s highly disruptive to what can happen internationally, because the US is a very big, very important player. So [without the US] you don’t move as fast.”Stern called for stronger demonstration from civil society of support for climate action. “What we need, broadly, is normative change, a shift in hearts and minds that demonstrates to political leaders that their political future depends on taking strong, unequivocal action to protect our world,” he said.“Normative change may seem at first blush like a weak reed to carry into battle against the defenders of the status quo, but norms can move mountains. They are about a sense of what is right, what is acceptable, what is important, what we expect and what we demand.”Stern first gave his warning in a lecture at the London School of Economics on Friday night, in honour of the British civil servant Pete Betts, who served as the EU’s chief climate negotiator for the Paris agreement. He died last year. More

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      ‘In a word, horrific’: Trump’s extreme anti-environment blueprint

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      The United States’s first major climate legislation dismantled, a crackdown on government scientists, a frenzy of oil and gas drilling, the Paris climate deal not only dead but buried.A blueprint is emerging for a second Donald Trump term that is even more extreme for the environment than his first, according to interviews with multiple Trump allies and advisers.In contrast to a sometimes chaotic first White House term, they outlined a far more methodical second presidency: driving forward fossil fuel production, sidelining mainstream climate scientists and overturning rules that curb planet-heating emissions.“Trump will undo everything [Joe] Biden has done, he will move more quickly and go further than he did before,” said Myron Ebell, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team for Trump’s first term. “He will act much more expeditiously to impose his agenda.”The prized target for Trump’s Republican allies, should the former president defeat Joe Biden in November’s election, will be the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark $370bn bill laden with support for clean energy projects and electric vehicles. Ebell said the legislation, signed by Biden in 2022 with no Republican votes, was “the biggest defeat we’ve suffered”.Carla Sands, a key environment adviser to the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute who has criticized Biden’s “apocalyptic green fantasies”, said: “Our nation needs a level regulatory playing field for all forms of energy to compete. Achieving this level playing field will require the repeal of the energy and environment provisions within the Inflation Reduction Act.”View image in fullscreenThe GOP-controlled House of Representatives has already pushed bills to gut the act. But fully repealing the IRA, which has disproportionally brought popular funding and jobs in solar, wind and battery manufacturing to Republican districts, may be politically difficult for Trump even if his party gains full control of Congress.However, Trump could still slow down the progress of the clean energy transition as president by redrawing the rules for the IRA’s generous tax credits.He would, his allies say, also scrap government considerations of the damage caused by carbon emissions; compel a diminished EPA to squash pollution rules for cars, trucks and power plants; and symbolically nullify the Paris climate agreement by not only withdrawing the US again but sending it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, knowing it would fail.“The Paris climate accord does nothing to actually improve the environment here in the United States or globally,” said Mandy Gunasekara, Trump’s former EPA chief of staff. She argued that the agreement puts too little pressure on China, India and other developing countries to reduce their emissions.In recent rallies, Trump, the likely Republican nominee, has called renewable energy “a scam business” and vowed to “drill, baby, drill”. On his first day in office, Trump has said he would repeal “crooked Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate” and approve a glut of new gas export terminals currently paused by Biden.View image in fullscreenAreas currently off-limits for drilling, such the Arctic, will also probably be opened up to industry by Trump. “I will end his war on American energy,” Trump has said of the incumbent president, even though in reality the US hit record levels of oil and gas production last year.“I expect the Republicans will put together their own very aggressive reconciliation bill to claw back the subsidies in the IRA,” said Tom Pyle, president of the free market American Energy Alliance and previous head of the US Department of Energy’s transition team under Trump.“The president will benefit from having the experience of being in office before, he’ll get a faster head start on his agenda. He won’t be encumbered by the need to be re-elected, so there will be a short window of time but he may be more aggressive as a result.”‘There is no logic to it’Critics of Trump, who are already fretting over his potential return to the White House, warn this agenda will stymie clean energy investment, place Americans’ health at the mercy of polluters, badly damage the effort to address the climate crisis and alienate America’s allies.“A return of Trump would be, in a word, horrific,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, now fellow at the University of New Hampshire.“It would also be incredibly stupid. It would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety, there is no logic to it other than to destroy everything. People who support him may not realize it’s their lives at stake, too.”View image in fullscreenA second Trump term would be more ideologically extreme than the first, with fewer restraints, Rosenberg claimed. “There were people part of a reasonable mainstream in his first term who buffered against his craziest instincts – they won’t be there any more,” he said.Should Trump manage to repeal the IRA and water down or scrap EPA pollution rules, there would be severe consequences for a world that is struggling to contain an escalating climate crisis, experts say.The US, the world’s second biggest carbon polluter, would still see its emissions drop under Trump due to previous policies and a market-led shift away from coal to gas as an energy source, but at only half the rate of a second Biden term, according to an analysis by Energy Innovation shared with the Guardian.This would deal a mortal blow to the global effort to restrain dangerous global heating, with scientists warning that the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half this decade, and eliminate them entirely by 2050, to avoid breaching agreed temperature limits and plunge billions of people into worsening heatwaves, floods and droughts.“I don’t think Donald Trump would actually be able to replace the IRA, but you couldn’t rule it out,” said Anand Gopal, executive director at Energy Innovation.“If he did, the global effect would be potentially disastrous. It would encourage everyone else to go backwards or slow down their climate pledges and put the world way off track to where it needs to be. It could prove the difference between staying under 1.5C warming or not.”Much will hinge upon any new Trump administration’s ability to better navigate arcane regulatory procedures and the courts. His previous term saw an enormous number of legal defeats for his hurried attempts at environmental rollbacks, as well as the departure of scandal-plagued cabinet members overseeing this effort.“You can’t just snap your fingers,” said Jeff Navin, a former chief of staff at the US Department of Energy. “You need to spend a lot of time redoing regulations. Is that something Trump really wants to do rather than just pursue other grievances? I don’t think so.”View image in fullscreenBut some conservatives believe Trump will prove more successful second time around, pointing to an amenably conservative supreme court and more detailed planning ahead of the election, such as the Project 2025 document put out by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, which details severe cuts to the EPA and Department of the Interior, as well as a greater politicization of the civil service to push through Trumpian goals.“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, told E&E News last year. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”Jeff Holmstead, who ran the EPA’s air office during George W Bush’s administration, said Trump’s administration would be “much more prepared” for a second term.“They know what they need to do to undo rules in a in a legally defensible way,” he said. A new Trump administration would take a more “surgical approach” to deregulation, he said, taking more of its cues from industry.Under Biden, Gunasekara said, there has been an “unnecessary tension” between the oil sector and regulators.“You have to work with the industry players,” she said. “Agencies should not be about suppressing or boosting particular technologies.”Early on, Trump officials will probably work with Congress to kill certain rules through a parliamentary procedure called the Congressional Review Act. The Clinton-era statute empowers Congress and the president to work together to overturn major federal regulations within 60 legislative days of finalization, by passing a joint resolution of disapproval signed by the president.“Generally in the past, anything that is finalized after mid- to late May is likely to be within that window,” said Holmstead. “So speed is of the essence for the Biden administration.”A fresh Trump term could engulf federal climate scientists, too, who were ignored but largely allowed to issue their work during Trump’s last term. A new Trump White House could intervene more to alter climate reports, or even stage a previously mooted public debate on the merits of climate science.View image in fullscreen“I expect that idea will be revived and I think we would get a much wider view of climate science that wouldn’t be controlled by a small cabal,” said Ebell. “That will start very quickly.”Trump’s plans come as Biden has struggled to inspire younger, climate-conscious voters who have been angered by his ongoing leasing of public lands and waters to the fossil fuel industry, such as the controversial Willow oil project in Alaska.Biden has overseen a boom in liquified natural gas exports that he has belatedly attempted to restrain and his administration has floundered in its attempts to sell the IRA to the American public, with most voters unaware of the climate legislation or its significance in driving down emissions.Still, the president’s position on climate change is incomparable to Trump’s, according to Rosenberg. “The contrast is incredibly stark between Biden and Trump,” he said. “Do I think Biden is the best of the best? Of course not. But compared to Trump? That’s just scary.“Anyone who cares about public health, the environment, science, international relations, you could go on, should be scared about another Trump presidency.” More

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      A message to Starmer from the US: ditching your £28bn climate plan isn’t just cowardly – it’s bad politics | Kate Aronoff

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      It’s hard, from the US, to feel all that confident about the state of our climate policies. The Inflation Reduction Act – the Biden White House’s trademark legislative achievement, which revolved around green investments – was a major accomplishment. Still, the US is breaking new records for its production and export of fossil fuels, last year extracting more oil and gas than ever before. Even more worrying is just how tenuous the country’s modest progress on the climate feels in advance of November’s presidential election: Donald Trump continues to lead Joe Biden in just about every poll.However, at the very least, the Biden administration has set a bar for the scale of green investment that centre-left parties should undertake. The same can’t be said of the Labour party, which has reportedly now scrapped its laudable £28bn green spending pledge in favour of some bizarre fealty to its leadership’s own strange idea of fiscal responsibility. So what can Labour learn from the Democratic president’s approach?To his great credit, Biden took seriously the need to win over progressive supporters of his main opponent in the Democratic primary in 2020. Bernie Sanders was an early adopter of the climate movement’s calls for a “green new deal”, laying out an expansive $16tn plan to tackle global heating and inequality. Biden’s $3.5tn Build Back Better agenda, produced with Sanders and his supporters in consultative roles, was decidedly not a green new deal. It did, however, reflect that platform’s most valuable components, positing climate action as a job creator and driver of 21st-century economic dynamism. Inherent in that was a willingness to spend lots of money, fast, on the things that matter.Almost as soon as Biden took office, however, climate advocates in the US watched the White House’s already too modest jobs and climate agenda get whittled down to what eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act’s roughly $400bn in new spending on climate and environmental priorities. It’s a shamefully slender programme, given how wealthy the US is, and its outsized historical responsibility for the climate crisis. But it’s also the best we might have hoped for, given the political influence of a fossil fuel industry that’s captured the Republican party virtually wholesale, along with key Democrats such as the West Virginia senator, Joe Manchin.Without the idiosyncrasies that weakened US climate policy, why do some members of the Labour party seem so keen to negotiate against themselves? The party’s £28bn a year green prosperity plan has now been dropped, thanks to the political cowardice of people such as the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who was already distancing herself from the policy in an interview with LBC earlier this week. The Labour veteran and podcast host Ed Balls suggested the problem with the plan was the number attached to it – urging Starmer and Reeves to “U-turn” away from it, so as to project fiscal responsibility and deflect repeated attacks from the right that Starmer would raise taxes to fund it. The party establishment is clearly spooked by the spectre of rightwing attacks, as Labour’s latest move so clearly shows.If the US can offer any lessons about how to deal with a right wing yammering on about how green policies allegedly hurt “ordinary people” while preaching painful austerity, it’s that it won’t give you a lick of credit for giving in to its ideas. Neither, moreover, will voters. The planet is even less forgiving. The costs of the climate crisis far outweigh the costs of acting on it. Under present policies, the climate crisis could cost the UK 3.3% of GDP a year by 2050. By 2100, that jumps to 7.4% of GDP a year; in today’s terms, that would be about £168bn.Labour needn’t look to the future, though, to make a straightforward case for going big on green spending. The Conservatives’ long-running war on good climate policy has already made life more expensive for working-class Britons. David Cameron’s bid to cut the “green crap” entailed doing away with a successful home insulation programme in 2013. And the average household could be paying gas bills of up to £400 lower if the Tories hadn’t axed the energy price guarantee scheme.While Labour’s green prosperity plan was designed with the Inflation Reduction Act in mind, there was an opportunity for Starmer to improve on it by emphasising the short-term benefits, such as the money households could save from national home insulation projects. Though it’s a hot topic among wonkish types in the US, UK and other parts of Europe, very few people here could tell you what the Inflation Reduction Act actually is. As of last August – a year on from the act’s passage – 71% of US residents said they knew “little or nothing” about it. Why is the White House’s high-profile accomplishment so far from most Americans’ minds? For one, the consultancy McKinsey has found that $216bn of the act’s $394bn in climate and energy-related tax credits will flow to corporations. Meanwhile, many benefits, such as incentives for pricey items such as electric vehicles and solar panels, are completely inaccessible to lower-income people and renters, who account for about 36% of US households.Driving investment in low-carbon energy and technologies makes a lot of sense: green industries grew four times faster than the rest of the British economy in 2020-21. But courting private-sector investment in green industries above all else – a sadly salient critique of the Inflation Reduction Act – threatens to leave voters in the dark about the benefits of climate action to their pockets. An active green industrial strategy should go hand in hand with an expansion of the public goods, services and planning capacities it will need to succeed. Upgrading public transit infrastructure and ensuring an abundant, affordable supply of low-carbon energy will be key to the success of the emerging green industries. More important, though, is that these can be the foundation on which Labour – should it ever choose to – builds both a broadly shared green prosperity and its electoral mandate for ever-stronger climate policies.The last few years of climate policymaking in the US point to at least one clear conclusion: Reeves and those who pushed to kill Labour’s green spending pledge are dead wrong. Labour should be sparing no expense on reducing emissions and improving livelihoods; if anything, £28bn a year is much too little. If party top brass can summon even an ounce of political courage they’ll make another U-turn away from disastrous, outdated economic orthodoxy and revive their more ambitious climate plans. Should that happen, the party can make voters acutely aware of the choice before them – to live a good, green life under Labour, or to let another Tory government take away more of their hard-earned money. Otherwise, the differences between Tory and Labour rule will keep getting harder and harder to spot.
      Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back More

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      John Podesta to succeed John Kerry as Biden’s top climate adviser

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      The White House senior adviser John Podesta will add international climate policy to his job responsibilities, replacing the special climate envoy, John Kerry, as the top US official on international climate issues, the White House said on Wednesday.Kerry announced in mid-January that he would step down from the climate job to work on Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. Podesta will take over Kerry’s responsibilities, though not his title, when he departs, probably this spring, the White House said.Podesta was a behind-the-scenes veteran on climate in past Democratic administrations. He was brought back to the White House last year to put into place an ambitious US climate program revived with the $375bn approved in the 2022 climate law. He also led the administration’s climate taskforce.Kerry’s job was created by the Biden administration specifically to fight climate change on the global stage. Kerry has been in the position since the president took office in 2021.Kerry’s appointment did not require confirmation by the Senate, but a law passed in 2022 requires that special envoys reporting to the secretary of state will have to win Senate approval.In a step that avoids a potential partisan fight in the Senate, Podesta was not named as climate envoy, but rather a senior adviser to the president for international climate policy.As outlined Wednesday by the White House, Podesta will continue to be involved in overseeing federal spending under the climate law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, along with domestic climate priorities, adding the international portfolio that Kerry handled. The job will not require Senate confirmation.The White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients, said Kerry “has tirelessly trekked around the world” to help confront the climate crisis, most recently at a UN climate conference in Dubai late last year.“There is no one better than John Podesta to make sure” the US continues to “meet the gravity of this moment”, Zients said, calling Podesta “a fierce champion for bold climate action” who has served three Democratic presidents and has Biden’s trust.The Washington Post first reported Podesta’s appointment. More

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      Climate crisis ignored by Republicans as Trump vows to ‘drill, baby, drill’

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      In the wake of an Iowa primary election chilled in a record blast of cold weather – which scientists say may, counterintuitively, have been worsened by global heating – Republican presidential candidates are embracing the fossil fuel industry tighter than ever, with little to say about the growing toll the climate crisis is taking upon Americans.The remaining contenders for the US presidential nomination – frontrunner Donald Trump, along with Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis – all used the Iowa caucus to promise surging levels of oil and gas drilling if elected, along with the wholesale abolition of Joe Biden’s climate change policies.Trump, who comfortably won the Iowa poll, said “we are going to drill, baby, drill” once elected, in a Fox News town hall on the eve of the primary. “We have more liquid gold under our feet; energy, oil and gas than any other country in the world,” the multiply indicted former president said. “We have a lot of potential income.”Trump also called clean energy a “new scam business” and went on a lengthy digression on how energy is important in the making of donuts and hamburgers. The Trump campaign has accused Biden of trying to prevent Americans from buying non-electric cars – no such prohibition exists – and even for causing people’s dishes to be dirty by imposing new efficiency standards for dishwashers.Haley, meanwhile, has called the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate bill that provides tax credits for renewable energy production and electric car purchases, a “communist manifesto” and used the Iowa election to promise to “roll back all of Biden’s green subsidies because they’re misplaced”. DeSantis, who came second in Iowa, said that on his first day as president he would “take Biden’s Green New Deal, we tear it up and we throw it in the trash can. It is bad for this country.”Last year was, globally, the hottest ever recorded, and scientists have warned of mounting calamities as the world barrels through agreed temperature limits. Last year, the US suffered a record number of disasters costing at least $1bn in damages, with the climate crisis spurring fiercer wildfires, storms and extreme heat.Such concerns were largely unvoiced in frigid Iowa, however, apart from by young climate activists who disrupted rallies held by Trump, Haley and DeSantis. On Sunday, a 17-year-old activist from the Sunrise climate group interrupted a Trump speech to shout: “Mr Trump your campaign is funded by fossil fuel millionaires. Do you represent them, or ordinary people like me?”She was drowned out by boos from Trump supporters, and then scolded from the stage by the former president, who told the activist to “go home to mommy.” He then said the protester was “young and immature”.The continued championing of fossil fuels, and dismissal of young people’s worries about climate change, shows that the Republican candidates are “determined to drag us into a chaotic world just to make a bit more money”, said Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of Sunrise.“Not a single Republican is addressing root causes of the climate crisis. They’ve been bought out by oil and gas billionaires,” said Shiney-Ajay, who added that young climate activists were also dismayed at Biden, who has overseen a record glut of oil and gas drilling, despite Republican claims he has hindered US energy production.“The reality is that every presidential candidate, including Joe Biden, is falling so far short of the climate ambition we need, despite there being millions of lives at stake,” she said.Some Republicans have warned that the party must take climate change seriously if it is to remain viable electorally, with increasing numbers of Americans alarmed about the impacts of global heating. “If conservatives are scared to talk about the climate, then we’re not going to have a seat at the table when decisions are made,” said Buddy Carter, a Republican congressman from Georgia. “We are right on policy, so we need a seat at the table.”Still, polling has shown that the climate crisis remains of minor importance to Republican voters, compared to issues such as the economy and inflation, with just 13% of them saying it is a top priority in a Pew survey last year. None of the party’s leading presidential candidates have sought to significantly change this dynamic, to the frustration of some climate-conscious conservatives.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Republican candidates can’t lose sight of the big picture amid the primary season,” said Danielle Butcher Franz, the chief executive of the advocacy arm of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate group.“Beyond the primary, the next Republican nominee must win over the hearts and minds of young Americans by speaking to the issue they care most about: climate change.”Butcher Franz said there must be “more productive rhetoric and real policy solutions from Republicans. The race for 2024 is an opportunity to do so that no candidate has fully seized.”Even if the candidates aren’t talking much about climate change, its effects are still being directly felt as the Republican primary field moves on to New Hampshire. Icily cold temperatures have gripped much of the US – the Iowa caucus was the coldest on record – due to a blast of Arctic-like weather that has triggered power blackouts, halted flights and caused schools to shut in parts of the country.The Arctic is heating up at four times the rate of the global average, and scientists think this is affecting the jet stream, a river of strong winds that steers weather across the northern hemisphere, and the polar vortex, another current of winds that usually keeps frigid Arctic air over the polar region. Both these systems risk becoming “wavier”, recent research has found, meaning Arctic-like conditions can meander far further south than normal.The current blast of cold weather is “certainly much more likely given how much the planet is warming” said Judah Cohen, a meteorologist at Verisk Atmospheric and Environmental who has studied the phenomenon. “There is scientific evidence that makes severe winter weather consistent or explainable in a warming world. One does not negate the other.”Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at Woods Hole Research Center, said that while it seems counterintuitive, the science was “becoming clear” that extreme cold spells will be a consequence of global heating.“The irony is pretty rich” that Iowa has experienced such conditions during a Republican presidential primary, Francis added. “Of course, the deniers won’t see it that way, and won’t listen to any science that says otherwise.” More

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      in US Politics

      Young voters helped Biden to victory. They may abandon him this year

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      Elise Joshi stumped for Joe Biden as a college freshman, motivated in no small part by her sense of urgency about climate change. The environmental policy student campaigned before the 2020 election as part of TikTok for Biden, in hopes of persuading other young people to show up to the polls.The work undertaken by Joshi and her peers paid off for Democrats – youth voter turnout surged in 2020, and has been widely credited as playing a key role in propelling Biden to victory.But as the Israeli bombing of Gaza has killed more than 22,000 Palestinians to date, Joshi is feeling disillusioned with the president she once “happily” voted for. She’s not alone. With US military support for Israel holding steady, Joshi says that the White House’s current handling of the situation in Palestine is alienating young people – the very demographic Biden will need to win re-election in 2024.“My generation is appalled. There’s a lot of people who are not willing to put their votes towards this administration as a result of their actions in Gaza,” she said.And if Democrats think their climate track record will be enough to redeem them, she said, then they’re miscalculating how young people view the current administration’s actions on climate in the first place.Biden has sometimes been described as the “climate president” for signing into law the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the largest investment in clean energy in American history. But many young people in Joshi’s cohort are more concerned with the oil and gas provisions within the IRA, as well as Biden’s unwillingness to declare a climate emergency. Joshi also says her peers are frequently disappointed over the Willow Project, an oil-drilling project approved by the Biden administration early last year that’s estimated to emit more climate pollution per year than 99.7% of all single-point sources in the country.Joshi is just one leader connected to the youth climate movement trying to warn the current administration about the potential consequences of its stance on Gaza. She signed an open letter to that effect in her capacity as executive director of Gen-Z for Change – the organization formerly known as TikTok for Biden — alongside leaders from groups like the Sunrise Movement and March for Our Lives this fall.“The vast majority of young people in this country are rightfully horrified by the atrocities committed with our tax dollars, with your support,” the letter read. “The position of your administration is badly out of step with young people and the positions of Democratic voters, whom have been shown to support a ceasefire by supermajorities in multiple polls.”Numerous polls have indeed shown Biden trailing Trump among young voters, in stark contrast to their overwhelming preference for Biden in 2020. Recent polling by the New York Times suggests that young people’s support of Biden is wavering in light of his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The young Biden ’20 voters with anti-Israel views are the likeliest to report switching to Mr Trump,” the Times’ analysis read.That prospect would be extremely concerning to the youth climate vote, who understand the risk Trump poses to the environment.War as environmental injusticeWhile many big green groups and climate-focused news organizations in the US have been slow to address Israeli attacks on Gaza, the youth climate movement globally has overwhelmingly expressed solidarity with Palestinians, and staunchly rejected the idea that criticizing the actions of the Israeli government is inherently antisemitic. From Greta Thunberg posting a picture of herself holding a “Stand with Gaza” sign to activists at COP28 staging pro-Palestine rallies, climate-focused youth have made clear that they see the war as an environmental justice issue.For climate activists used to raising the alarm about the ways that climate change is causing displacement and forced migration, increasing food and water insecurity and ravaging beloved landscapes and ecosystems, it’s not hard to draw a parallel to the way that Israel’s bombing is having the same impacts on Gaza and its inhabitants. That’s not to mention the emissions associated with military operations, nor the symbolic connection many environmentalists, whom some call “tree huggers”, might feel to Palestinians who have been photographed hugging olive trees after their orchards were attacked by Israeli settlers.“Many of these people that are from global south countries had an unwavering support for Palestine,” said Isaias Hernandez of his experience meeting other young people at the UN climate conference in Dubai. Hernandez, who posts environmental content under the username @queerbrownvegan, is one of more than 120 content creators with a combined audience of millions who signed onto an open letter of their own in support of a “free Palestine”.Youth climate activists are often close with their peers in other countries, connecting via social media, meeting up and working together to stage actions at global conferences multiple times a year. That sense of global solidarity is helping bolster US youth in their convictions about Gaza.“We are a nonviolent movement that is fighting for the safety and well-being of all people in their communities,” said Michele Weindling, the political director of the Sunrise Movement. “We feel a direct link and a stake in what’s happening in Gaza in that we believe that no people should lose access to life-sustaining resources like water.”Even for young people who might be hesitant to weigh in on a geopolitical conflict with a long, complex and painful history, the simple math of US spending is enough to spark outrage.“Our president has, time and time again, told us we don’t have the money or the resources to implement climate solutions at the scale that we’re asking for; that we can’t forgive student debt at the scale that we need; but that we have the resources to send more bombs to the Israeli military,” Weindling said. “And young people are really upset about that.”The road to NovemberBoth Weindling and Joshi want to make clear that they’re not asking their movement to withhold votes in the primary election. On the contrary, they want young people to vote.“I really hope young people don’t become apathetic to voting in the first place and stop showing up to the polls, because the president is an important job,” Joshi said. “I’m incredibly worried about that.”But both organizers want to warn the current administration about where the youth vote is currently headed. What’s more, they argue that the administration’s reluctance to call for a ceasefire in Gaza will make it increasingly challenging for grassroots groups to mobilize youth voters who are disillusioned with Biden’s “pro-war” stance.“This is not only a morally problematic direction of leadership, but it’s also politically a very risky one,” said Weindling. “We cannot explain [Biden’s] position to our generation, and that will have significant effects, not just on how young people turn out in 2024 to vote, but also on whether or not they volunteer and get their friends and family out to vote.”Still, the alternative – potentially four more years of Trump – is “frightening”, according to Joshi. Not only did Trump make the US dirtier and the planet warmer in his four years in office, weakening environmental regulations, pulling the nation out of international climate agreements and more, but he recently promised to expand oil drilling on day one of the presidency if he’s re-elected.This – along with the havoc Trump wreaked on immigration rights, voting rights and the democratic process, among other things – is why Hernandez said he plans to vote. He sympathizes with his peers who plan to opt out, but he wants “to help reduce harm and violence throughout the world”.If Biden wants to lure more young people back to the voting booth come November, he may still have time to course-correct, the young activists said, but he needs to act decisively, and soon.“The first step toward preventing a Trump administration is calling for a ceasefire right now,” said Joshi. “Climate voters and voters that care about Palestinians – they’re one and the same.” More