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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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      Environmental groups alarmed as Doug Burgum picked for US interior secretary

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      Donald Trump’s nomination of North Dakota’s Republican governor, Doug Burgum, as the interior secretary has prompted swift backlash from environmental advocacy groups alarmed at the incoming administration’s plans to use federal lands for oil and gas drilling.Trump also announced in a statement on Friday his intention to make Burgum chair of a National Energy Council he intends to form to “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE” and to focus on “the battle for AI superiority”.Burgum, a former businessman, has been governor since 2016 of North Dakota, which is the third largest oil and natural gas producer in the country. Burgum, if confirmed by the Senate, would manage US federal lands including national parks and wildlife refuges, as well as oversee relations with 574 federally recognized Native American tribes.Major concerns have loomed over the country’s wildlife refuges and public lands as Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term. Throughout his campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly said “drill, baby, drill” and has vowed to carve up the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska’s northern tundra for oil and gas drilling.The Sierra Club, the country’s largest non-profit environmental organization, said: “It was climate skeptic Doug Burgum who helped arrange the Mar-a-Lago meeting with wealthy oil and gas executives where Donald Trump offered to overturn dozens of environmental rules and regulations in exchange for $1bn in campaign contributions.”The April meeting at Trump’s club earlier this year prompted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the country’s top ethics watchdog, as well as House Democrats, to investigate the dinner over constitutional and campaign violations.“If that weren’t disqualifying enough, he’s long advocated for rolling back critical environmental safeguards in order to let polluters profit. Doug Burgum’s ties to the fossil fuel industry run deep and, if confirmed to this position, he will surely continue Donald Trump’s efforts to sell out our public lands to his polluter pals. Our lands are our nation’s greatest treasure, and the interior department is charged with their protection,” the Sierra Club continued.Similarly, the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation policy organization focused on land and energy issues across the western states, said: “Doug Burgum comes from an oil state, but North Dakota is not a public lands state. His cozy relationship with oil billionaires may endear him to Donald Trump, but he has no experience that qualifies him to oversee the management of 20% of America’s lands.”It went on to add: “If Doug Burgum tries to turn America’s public lands into an even bigger cash cow for the oil and gas industry, or tries to shrink America’s parks and national monuments, he’ll quickly discover he’s on the wrong side of history.”The Center for Biological Diversity equally condemned the nomination, saying that Burgum would be a “disastrous secretary of the interior who’ll sacrifice our public lands and endangered wildlife on the altar of the fossil fuel industry’s profits”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBurgum was not always aligned with Trump’s extreme climate agenda. He has said he believes that climate change is real and in 2021 had called for North Dakota to be carbon neutral by 2030, advocating for a plan that retained the state’s fossil fuel industries while investing in carbon capture and storage technologies to offset emissions.At the time, environmental groups supported Burgum’s pledge, but noted the impracticality of relying on unproven carbon capture technology rather than a transition away from fossil fuels.“Could be worse for sure,” said Jared Huffman, a progressive Democrat of California and senior member of the House natural resources committee who has championed climate action. “I look forward to trying to work productively with him.”Burgum’s views on matters outside of climate and energy, however, have long been reactionary. He signed a number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ people in North Dakota, including ones that banned gender-affirming care for minors, restricted drag shows, and banned trans people from using bathrooms and shower facilities that match their gender identity in prisons, domestic violence shelters or state university families. 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. 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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

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      COP16 Talks in Colombia Adopt a Novel Way to Pay for Conservation

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      The meeting created a fund that would compensate countries for the use of genetic information.Diplomats from roughly 180 countries ended two weeks of environmental talks on Saturday after agreeing on a new fund that would shift some of the profits from nature’s DNA to global conservation efforts.The agreement calls for companies that make money from genetic information stored in databases, known as digital sequence information, to pay into a fund as a sort of fee for the use of biodiversity.Scientific advances have made it easier and cheaper for researchers to sequence genetic material. That means there are now vast amounts available in databases for pharmaceutical, cosmetic, biotechnology and other companies to analyze as they seek to develop new products.Delegates at the talks, known as COP16, shorthand for the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, called the agreement an important breakthrough.“Conservation is mostly funded by governments and philanthropy,” said Amber Scholz, who leads the science policy department at Leibniz Institute DSMZ, a German research institute that focuses on microbial and cellular biodiversity. “Now, businesses that profit from biodiversity will pay into a new fund.”The final declaration made the fund voluntary, saying that companies “should” contribute.The agreement lays out specifics on how much they should pay: 1 percent of their profits or 0.1 percent of their revenue, as a guideline. Governments are “invited” to take legislative or other measures to require companies to contribute.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      US lawmakers call on EPA to ban pesticide linked to Parkinson’s disease

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      More than 50 US lawmakers are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to join dozens of other countries in banning a widely used weedkiller linked to Parkinson’s disease and other health dangers.In a 31 October letter to the agency, seven US senators said that paraquat, a weedkiller commonly applied on US farms, was a “highly toxic pesticide whose continued use cannot be justified given its harms to farmworkers and rural communities”. The call for a ban from the senators came after 47 members of the US House of Representatives sent a similar letter to the EPA calling for a ban earlier in October.The lawmakers cite scientific links between paraquat use and development of Parkinson’s and other “life threatening diseases” as well as “grave impacts on the environment”. “Health risks include a higher risk of Parkinson’s disease, with some studies finding a 64% increase in the likelihood of developing Parkinson’s, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, thyroid cancer, and other thyroid issues,” they wrote.The New Jersey senator Cory Booker, organizer of the Senate letter, said the risks of paraquat exposure were “well documented” and that it was “irresponsible” for the EPA to continue to allow its use. “I hope the EPA will follow the science and ban paraquat,” Booker said.The EPA has long maintained that there is no “clear link” between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease, though the agency does have a number of restrictions on use of the chemical due to its acute toxicity. The agency issued a draft report earlier this year affirming its position.Still, the agency said at that time that it would be reviewing more scientific studies and would issue a final report by 17 January 2025.When asked about the congressional call for a ban, an EPA spokesperson said only that the agency “will respond to the letter appropriately”.Several California lawmakers pushed for a ban in the most recent state legislative session, also citing the risks of Parkinson’s. A compromise measure signed by the governor last month requires an expedited regulatory review of paraquat.The push to ban paraquat in the US was “long overdue”, said Ray Dorsey, a professor of neurology at the University of Rochester who studies the causes of Parkinson’s disease.“For 60 years, paraquat has been helping fuel the rise of Parkinson’s disease,” Dorsey said. “The evidence from human, laboratory and apparently even the company’s own research is overwhelming. When paraquat is banned, more lives will be spared the consequences of Parkinson’s.”Chinese-owned Syngenta, the longtime maker and marketer of paraquat products did not respond to a request for comment about the congressional letters. The company has denied there is any valid connection between Parkinson’s and paraquat. In response to previous reporting, it asserted that no “peer-reviewed scientific publication has established a causal connection between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease”.Internal Syngenta documents revealed by the Guardian show the company was aware many years ago of scientific evidence that paraquat could affect the brain in ways that cause Parkinson’s, and that it secretly sought to influence scientific research to counter the evidence of harm.Syngenta was allegedly aided in suppressing the risks of paraquat by a “reputation management” firm called v-Fluence, the Guardian reported in September.Thousands of US paraquat users who suffer from Parkinson’s are currently suing Syngenta, alleging the company should have warned them of the risk of developing the incurable brain disease, but instead worked to hide the evidence of risk.This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group More

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      Why a Memphis Community Is Fighting Elon Musk’s Supercomputer

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      Residents say Mr. Musk’s data center for artificial intelligence is compounding their pollution burden and adding stress on the local electrical grid.Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is building what he says will be the world’s largest supercomputer. Its electricity needs will rival those of 100,000 homes.The supercomputer’s neighbors in southwest Memphis have a problem with that.The project, part of Mr. Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence business, sits in an old manufacturing plant on more than 550 acres. Before beginning operations there in July, xAI rolled in flatbed trucks loaded with almost 20 mobile power plants, fueled by natural gas, to help meet its electricity demands.Residents of the heavily industrial community — already home to an oil refinery, a steel mill and chemical plants — see no upside. They contend that Mr. Musk’s project has made pollution worse in an area already enveloped in smog.“We’re getting more and more days a year where it is unhealthy for us to go outside,” said KeShaun Pearson, president of Memphis Community Against Pollution and a lifelong resident of the area near the xAI site.The xAI supercomputer center in Memphis is being built at the site of a former appliance factory.Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesThe center is to be used to train artificial intelligence models on thousands of powerful computer servers.Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesSo far, xAI is using the Memphis facility to develop its artificial intelligence models on a network of thousands of high-powered computer servers. Some of its models are trained on data from Mr. Musk’s social media platform, X.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More