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Tag: Climate change
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Opinion | The U.N. Blinks on Its Carbon Tax
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Leaders delay a vote on its taxation-without-representation scheme.
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The Editorial Board
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Community groups identify Bay Area
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A big chill just passed through the Bay Area. The first storm of the season brought a cold, drenching rain to our backyards and dropped snow in the Sierra Nevada.
But at a recent gathering of community groups, a city council member, students, and climate activists, the talk was not about the cold. It was all about heat – very extreme heat – and the phenomenon of record-breaking temperatures largely driven by climate change.
On a table were items used to make emergency heat kits, including air filters, portable fans, blackout curtains, special ice pack kits for medications, and powdered electrolytes.
Some of the kits were assembled by Menlo Park advocacy group Belle Haven Action. Others came courtesy of the Palo Alto Student Climate Coalition and the coalition’s newly-formed Cool Cities Coalition.
“When it comes to climate change, we’re prepared. We’re ready to provide the resources,” said Belle Haven Action member Shonelle Watkins.
The climate resiliency kits are intended to help communities and neighborhoods when the next record-breaking heatwave occurs next summer. Participants explained it was never too early to get ready.
“We have a real crucial period right now to prepare,” said Stanford undergraduate Julia Zeitlin, who is majoring in environmental systems engineering with a focus on sustainable urban systems. Zeitlin is also co-founder of the Palo Alto Student Climate Coalition, a student assistant to the California Energy Commission, and a Schultz Energy Fellow at the California Air Resources Board.
Zeitlin explained how the focus for all involved is on how to protect vulnerable community members.
“We know what future summers are going to look like,” noted Zeitlin. “We know they’re unfortunately going to be worse, more extreme heat events.”
With climate change, extreme heat-related deaths are on the rise, especially in some urban settings known as urban heat islands. The first step for the Coalition was to identify or map the local heat islands or hotspots in the neighborhoods at highest risk for significant heat. Once mapped, the group can direct localized cooling solutions to residents.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with federal and local partners, worked with community scientists to map the heat islands as part of a national campaign called “Heat Watch.” Climate action group CAPA Strategies and NOAA’s National Integrated Heat Health Information System head up the campaign. Last year, the Student Climate Coalition headed up the Bay Area effort.
The volunteers attached special sensors to their cars and on one hot day, they drove on predetermined routes in three cities: Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, and Menlo Park.
“They would go out three times a day. So, at 7 a.m., 2 p.m., and 6 p.m. And these sensors would basically capture temperature, humidity and location,” explained Stanford PhD student and Cool Cities Coalition member Kristy Mualin.
The raw data was crunched by CAPA, which came up with a report that included heat maps. The findings revealed several hot spots in Menlo Park’s Belle Haven neighborhood and in East Palo Alto retained heat, staying hot overnight at a time when the human body should be recovering from daytime heat.
Belle Haven resident and city council member Cecilia Taylor was impressed by the data.
“Their project was amazing. And it was also necessary because there are so many challenges here,” Taylor said.
“We were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, our summers have been so different, especially this one. We felt the high humidity,” said East Palo Alto Mayor Martha Barragan.
Heat islands typically have fewer trees and parks, darker roofs, as well as more heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt. They are also found in historically underserved communities, like Belle Haven and East Palo Alto.
“We have about 7% tree canopy,” Taylor said.
“Throughout the day, we can feel [the heat],” Barragan added.
Recently, the coalition met to assemble about 100 climate resiliency kits for a pilot project.
“We have water bottles, Pedialyte, and electric fans, medication cooling pouches,” student Jessica Wong said as she looked over the items that would be packed into colorful water-resistant backpacks.
“This is something that I really care about because of the implications for our future,” said Caitlin Hopkins, part of the Student Climate Coalition.
Also on hand assembling the kits was Mayor Barragan’s mother, Yolanda. She told CBS News Bay Area that she is convinced these kits will make a difference.
“Because the seniors are going to feel that somebody is going to care for them,” she said.
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Molly McCrea
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Louisiana judge orders review of Gulf Coast liquefied natural gas facility’s climate change impacts
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NEW ORLEANS — NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A Louisiana judge has tossed out a key permit for a liquefied natural gas facility that won approval from President Donald Trump’s administration, ordering a state review of how the facility’s planet-warming emissions would affect Gulf Coast communities vulnerable to sea-level rise and extreme weather.
Last week, a judge from Louisiana’s 38th Judicial District Court effectively halted construction of Commonwealth LNG by ordering state regulators to analyze the facility’s climate change and environmental justice-related impacts, in conjunction with the broader LNG buildout in southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish.
Three of the nation’s eight existing LNG export terminals are located in Cameron Parish, and several more are proposed or under construction there.
Louisiana’s attorney general vowed to appeal the ruling, which vacated the Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy’s coastal use permit for the facility.
“This is the first time any court has vacated a permit for an LNG facility based on the government’s refusal to consider climate change impacts,” said Clay Garside, an attorney representing the Sierra Club and other environmental groups.
Earlier this year, Trump reversed a Biden-era pause on exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, as part of his goal to boost natural gas exports and promote “energy dominance.”
Last year, the Biden administration’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s had warned that “unfettered exports” of liquefied natural gas would increase planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions — a statement reflecting the findings of a Department of Energy report released in December.
Trump-appointed Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fossil fuel executive, has moved to fast-track the buildout of LNG facilities, including Commonwealth LNG, which received an export authorization within weeks of Trump’s inauguration.
“Cameron Parish is ground zero for the relentless expansion of the gas export industry,” said Anne Rolfes, founder of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental group involved in the litigation. “We’re going to stop it and this is an important step in that process.”
Lyle Hanna, a Commonwealth LNG spokesperson, said that “we are disappointed with the District Court’s decision, and we are exploring all available legal options.”
A spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy declined to comment, citing the potential of pending litigation. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said that the state planned to appeal.
“Sadly even state court judges are not immune from climate activism,” Murrill said.
Last year, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., had ordered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reassess Commonwealth LNG’s air pollution, including its greenhouse gas emissions. In June, the commission gave the project a greenlight on the grounds that its construction was in the public interest.
In regulatory filings, the Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy said that “climate change is currently beyond the scope” of the state’s regulatory review.
But District Judge Penelope Richard rejected this position, saying state environmental regulators have a duty to consider how the LNG facility, along with others clustered nearby, would impact extreme weather events, storm severity and sea-level rise in a state where a football field-worth of land disappears every 100 minutes.
Richard also ordered state regulators to analyze the facility’s impacts on local communities, especially those living in poverty or relying on fishing for their livelihoods — which she noted was the “defining characteristic” of the parish. While the facility could destroy marshes, harm water quality and displace residents, the judge wrote, “none of it was considered in terms of impacts on environmental justice communities.”
Commercial fisherman Eddie LeJuine, a lifelong Cameron Parish resident, applauded the ruling. He said the buildout of LNG infrastructure, including dredging for shipping channels, has significantly harmed the fishing industry.
“The fishermen are barely hanging on with a thread,” LeJuine said. “These plants are killing the estuary and killing our livelihoods. We’re getting extinct.”
In August, a dredging channel being developed by LNG firm Venture Global leaked into a nearby estuary. Local fishermen like LeJuine say the onslaught of saltwater and sediment will kill off large amounts of oyster, crab and fish.
Venture Global, which is in the process of constructing a second LNG export terminal in the parish, said it is “committed to conservation” and is working with state regulators and the community to respond to the incident.
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Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
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Impossible Foods CEO Thinks a Hybrid Burger Could Help Overcome the Political Divide
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Beyond Meat went public in 2019 with the promise that plant-based artificial burgers would be the future of meat. Well, we’re in the future, and no one is really buying (or eating) it. With the once-booming meat replacement market hanging on by a thread in the MAHA-led beef tallow and raw milk era, the head of Impossible Foods believes he can heal the meat divide by making a burger for everyone: half meat, half plant.
According to Semafor, Impossible’s CEO Peter McGuinness told audiences at the World Economy Summit that the alt-meat market went wrong when they went all in on positioning themselves as a climate-friendly alternative to Big Beef. He argued the industry was “mismarketed and mislaunched” and invited their product, high-end veggie burgers, to get caught up in the culture war. Alternative meats were virtue signaling, basically, and the meat eaters were never going to get on board with it.
So, he’s going back to the drawing board, and he’s sketched out the cure to the sickness at the heart of our culture: the hybrid burger. It’s one of those solutions that is so simple, so obvious that it gives you the impression that you actually didn’t put any thought into it at all, and that if you did think about it for more than a second, you would conclude that it’s probably a terrible idea that serves no one. But McGuinness doesn’t have that second. “If that got meat eaters to try it and like it, I think it’s a win,” he said.
Getting meat eaters to make the switch was kind of the whole pitch with alternative meats in the first place, because vegans and vegetarians are already not eating meat and don’t need to be tricked with meat-like textures. Why else would you need to make fake burgers bleed? And back in 2019, when these fake meats were all the rage, it was meat eaters who were switching up their diets who made up the majority of the sales, with 90% of the people eating non-meat burgers not identifying as being committed to vegetarian or vegan diets. Nielsen data from that time period found that 98% of alternative meat buyers were also buying meat and just liked the variety.
Novelty is nice for a while, but if the idea was to slowly convert those real meat eaters to alt meats, that never really took. A 2022 study found that people who bought plant-based meat at least once ended up buying slightly more ground meat after their first purchase of a meat alternative. Getting people to convert full-time requires them to make a change in lifestyle, and because plant-based products tend to cost more than real meat options, you kind of have to count on them making that change for reasons that reflect their morals or values, because it’s not going to help their budget. Trying to position alt meats as a health product also didn’t quite work, as more research into the products showed that plant-based patties were often higher in sugar and sodium and lower in important nutrients found in real meat.
There probably is a market for plant-based meat replacements beyond just existing vegans, vegetarians, and recent converts. While McGuinness’s hybrid burger is, frankly, a solution for no one, he is probably right that “People don’t want to eat tech food or climate food.” But the odds of the current big players in the alt-meat game cracking the code are getting longer. Last year, McGuinness revealed that Impossible still hasn’t turned a profit and could be sold off entirely. Rival fake meat-slinger Beyond Meat just completed a deal to reduce its debt, which drove its stock price under $1—just a little bit lower than its peak of nearly $250 per share shortly after its IPO in 2019.
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AJ Dellinger
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Drought impacts Halloween pumpkins and Christmas trees in Alabama and leaf peeping in other states
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Parts of Alabama are experiencing extreme drought conditions right now. The Forestry Commission has put the entire state under a fire danger advisory. The lack of rain is impacting many crops, which could affect our fall and winter holidays — including pumpkins and Christmas trees.And Alabama isn’t alone, as some states and regions from New England to the Rocky Mountains, which count on tourism dollars from leaf-peeping season, seeing, in some cases, leaves change colors earlier, muted colors, and fewer leaves to peep.According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than 40% of the country was considered to be in a drought in early October, the Associated Press reports.That’s more than twice the average, Brad Rippey, a U.S. Department of Agriculture meteorologist, told the AP.Rippey, an author of the drought monitor — which is a partnership between the federal government and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln — told the AP that drought has hit the Northeast and Western U.S. especially hard. Related video below: Colorful foliage started early this year because of drought conditionsAt The Great Pumpkin Patch in Hayden, Alabama, they grow some of their pumpkins; many of the small pie pumpkins come from their own fields. But because of a lack of rain, most are from farms in other states.For a day at the pumpkin patch, this dry, warm weather is perfect, but it’s not so great for the pumpkin growing season.Pumpkin Patch owner Julie Swann said, “We have not had rain, probably for us it’s been since August. And then prior to that, it was probably the good rains that we had, you know, April, maybe some of June.”The Great Pumpkin Patch is parched, and the drought does have an impact on the gourds they grow there.”It doesn’t necessarily affect the size simply because pumpkins take so long to produce. But it does the quantity, it affects that, you don’t have as many, you know, to produce as far as vines won’t produce as much without the rain,” Swann said. So the owners have to reach out to farmers in Tennessee and Michigan and buy their pumpkins to sell in Hayden, which is around 30 miles from Birmingham. And Halloween may not be the only holiday impacted by the drought. Paul Beavers at Beavers Christmas Tree Farm in Trafford, Alabama, said the lack of rain is particularly hard on his youngest, smallest trees.“If it continues all the way through winter, it might kill some of my smaller trees. Hopefully, it’ll stop sometime in the next month or two,” Beavers said.A lack of rain means the trees will just stop growing, so the drought could impact the size of your Christmas tree. But the trees tagged for sale are five years old or more, so problems might not be realized till Christmas of 2030.“We’re still going to have over 3000 trees ready to sell this year,” Beavers said. When the owners of the pumpkin patch have to buy more pumpkins from out-of-state farms, their costs increase, but they say this year, they are not raising prices for customers.They’ll have to re-evaluate that next fall. ___The Associated Press contributed to this report.
HAYDEN, Ala. —Parts of Alabama are experiencing extreme drought conditions right now. The Forestry Commission has put the entire state under a fire danger advisory. The lack of rain is impacting many crops, which could affect our fall and winter holidays — including pumpkins and Christmas trees.
And Alabama isn’t alone, as some states and regions from New England to the Rocky Mountains, which count on tourism dollars from leaf-peeping season, seeing, in some cases, leaves change colors earlier, muted colors, and fewer leaves to peep.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than 40% of the country was considered to be in a drought in early October, the Associated Press reports.
That’s more than twice the average, Brad Rippey, a U.S. Department of Agriculture meteorologist, told the AP.
Rippey, an author of the drought monitor — which is a partnership between the federal government and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln — told the AP that drought has hit the Northeast and Western U.S. especially hard.
Related video below: Colorful foliage started early this year because of drought conditions
At The Great Pumpkin Patch in Hayden, Alabama, they grow some of their pumpkins; many of the small pie pumpkins come from their own fields. But because of a lack of rain, most are from farms in other states.
For a day at the pumpkin patch, this dry, warm weather is perfect, but it’s not so great for the pumpkin growing season.
Pumpkin Patch owner Julie Swann said, “We have not had rain, probably for us it’s been since August. And then prior to that, it was probably the good rains that we had, you know, April, maybe some of June.”
The Great Pumpkin Patch is parched, and the drought does have an impact on the gourds they grow there.
“It doesn’t necessarily affect the size simply because pumpkins take so long to produce. But it does the quantity, it affects that, you don’t have as many, you know, to produce as far as vines won’t produce as much without the rain,” Swann said.
So the owners have to reach out to farmers in Tennessee and Michigan and buy their pumpkins to sell in Hayden, which is around 30 miles from Birmingham.
And Halloween may not be the only holiday impacted by the drought. Paul Beavers at Beavers Christmas Tree Farm in Trafford, Alabama, said the lack of rain is particularly hard on his youngest, smallest trees.
“If it continues all the way through winter, it might kill some of my smaller trees.
Hopefully, it’ll stop sometime in the next month or two,” Beavers said.A lack of rain means the trees will just stop growing, so the drought could impact the size of your Christmas tree. But the trees tagged for sale are five years old or more, so problems might not be realized till Christmas of 2030.
“We’re still going to have over 3000 trees ready to sell this year,” Beavers said.
When the owners of the pumpkin patch have to buy more pumpkins from out-of-state farms, their costs increase, but they say this year, they are not raising prices for customers.
They’ll have to re-evaluate that next fall.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Kansas town devastated by tornado rebuilds with focus on sustainability
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Nearly two decades ago, a devastating tornado all but wiped out a town in eastern Kansas. But now, Greensburg has new life. CBS News’ Ian Lee reports.
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UN agency says C02 levels hit record high last year, causing more extreme weather
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GENEVA — GENEVA (AP) — Heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere jumped by the highest amount on record last year, soaring to a level not seen in human civilization and “turbo-charging” the Earth’s climate and causing more extreme weather, the United Nations weather agency said Wednesday.
The World Meteorological Organization said in its latest bulletin on greenhouse gases, an annual study released ahead of the U.N.’s annual climate conference, that C02 growth rates have now tripled since the 1960s, and reached levels not seen in at least 800,000 years.
Emissions from burning coal, oil and gas, alongside more wildfires, have helped fan a “vicious climate cycle,” and people and industries continue to spew heat-trapping gases while the planet’s oceans and forests lose their ability to absorb them, the WMO report said.
The Geneva-based agency said the increase in the global average concentration of carbon dioxide from 2023 to 2024 amounted to the highest annual level of any one-year span since measurements began in 1957. Growth rates of CO2 have accelerated from an annual average increase of 2.4 parts per million per year in the decade from 2011 to 2020, to 3.5 ppm from 2023 to 2024, WMO said.
“The heat trapped by CO2 and other greenhouse gases is turbo-charging our climate and leading to more extreme weather,” said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett in a statement. “Reducing emissions is therefore essential not just for our climate but also for our economic security and community well-being.”
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare called the new data “alarming and worrying.”
Even though fossil fuel emissions were “relatively flat” last year, he said, the report appeared to show an accelerating increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, “signaling a positive feedback from burning forests and warming oceans driven by record global temperatures.”
“Let there be no mistake, this is a very clear warning sign that the world is heading into an extremely dangerous state — and this is driven by the continued expansion of fossil fuel development, globally,” Hare said. “I’m beginning to feel that this points to a slow-moving climate catastrophe unfolding in front of us.”
WMO called on policymakers to take more steps to help reduce emissions.
While several governments have been pushing for further use of hydrocarbons like coal, oil and gas for energy production, some businesses and local governments have been mobilizing to fight global warming.
Still, Hare said very few countries have made new climate commitments to come “anywhere near dealing with the gravity of the climate crisis.”
The increase in 2024 is setting the planet on track for more long-term temperature increase, WMO said. It noted that concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide — other greenhouse gases caused by human activity — have also hit record levels.
The report was bound to raise new doubts on the world’s ability to hit the goal laid out in the 2015 Paris climate accord of keeping the global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
United Nations climate chief, Simon Stiell, has said the Earth is now on track for 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit).
Meanwhile, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s global data for this year through June reveals that carbon dioxide rates are still rising at one of the highest rates on record, yet not quite as high as from 2023 to 2024.
The agency’s monthly data for the long-running Hawaii monitoring location for 2025 through August also showed CO2 rates are still increasing, but not as much as between 2023-2024.
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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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Race on to find shelter for hundreds from remote Alaskan villages slammed by typhoon’s remnants
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More rain and wind were forecast Wednesday along the Alaskan coast where two tiny villages were decimated by the remnants of Typhoon Halong and officials were scrambling to find shelter for more than 1,500 people driven from their homes.
The weekend storm brought high winds and surf that battered the low-lying Alaska Native communities along the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the southwestern part of the state, nearly 500 miles from Anchorage. At least one person was killed and two were missing.
Search and rescue efforts by numerous agencies using drones, boats and aircraft were called off Tuesday evening, state troopers said in a statement.
The Coast Guard plucked two dozen from their homes after the structures floated out to sea.
Hundreds were staying in school shelters, including one with no working toilets, officials said. The weather system followed a storm that struck parts of western Alaska days earlier.
Across the region, more than 1,500 people were displaced. Dozens were flown to a shelter set up in the National Guard armory in the regional hub city of Bethel, a community of 6,000 people, and officials were considering flying evacuees to longer-term shelter or emergency housing in Fairbanks and Anchorage.
The hardest-hit communities included Kipnuk, population 715, and Kwigillingok, population 380. They are off the state’s main road system and reachable this time of year only by water or by air.
“Catastrophic” damage described
“It’s catastrophic in Kipnuk. Let’s not paint any other picture,” Mark Roberts, incident commander with the state emergency management division, told a news conference Tuesday. “We are doing everything we can to continue to support that community, but it is as bad as you can think.”
Among those awaiting evacuation to Bethel on Tuesday was Brea Paul, of Kipnuk, who said in a text message that she had seen about 20 homes floating away through the moonlight on Saturday night.
“Some houses would blink their phone lights at us like they were asking for help but we couldn’t even do anything,” she wrote.
The following morning, she recorded video of a house submerged nearly to its roofline as it floated past her home.
Paul and her neighbors had a long meeting in the local school gym on Monday night. They sang songs as they tried to figure out what to do next, she said. Paul wasn’t sure where she would go.
“It’s so heartbreaking saying goodbye to our community members not knowing when we’d get to see each other,” she said.
About 30 miles away in Kwigillingok, one woman was found dead.
The school was the only facility in town with full power, but it had no working toilet and 400 people stayed there Monday night. Workers were trying to fix the bathrooms; a situation report from the state emergency operations center on Tuesday noted that portable toilets, or “honey buckets,” were being used.
A preliminary assessment showed every home in the village was damaged by the storm, with about three dozen having drifted from their foundations, the emergency management office said.
Power systems flooded in Napakiak, and severe erosion was reported in Toksook Bay. In Nightmute, officials said fuel drums were reported floating in the community, and there was a scent of fuel in the air and a sheen on the water.
The National Guard was activated to help with the emergency response, and crews were trying to take advantage of any breaks in the weather to fly in food, water, generators and communication equipment.
Officials warned of a long road to recovery and a need for continued support for the hardest-hit communities. Most rebuilding supplies would have to be transported in and there is little time left with winter just around the corner.
“Indigenous communities in Alaska are resilient,” said Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “But, you know, when you have an entire community where effectively every house is damaged and many of them will be uninhabitable with winter knocking at the door now, there’s only so much that any individual or any small community can do.”
Thoman said the storm was likely fueled by the warm surface waters of the Pacific Ocean, which has been heating up because of human-caused climate change and making storms more intense.
The remnants of another storm, Typhoon Merbok, caused damage across a massive swath of western Alaska three years ago.
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Big Oil should help foot the bill for lost school time, students say
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This story originally appeared in Hechinger’s climate and education newsletter. Sign up for it here.
Last January, Diego Sandoval’s high school in San Diego County closed abruptly one Friday because of wildfires menacing the Southern California area. Classmates evacuated their homes as the fire spread. Frida Vergara, whose school was among the few in the area that didn’t close, recalls that friends with asthma were coughing and wheezing from the smoke.
It wasn’t the first time the students — both 17-year-old seniors in the Sweetwater Union High School District — saw how extreme weather disrupted learning. A year earlier, floods swamped parts of the county, damaging school buildings and closing one for more than a month. The problem is global: At least 242 million students in 85 countries or territories, or 1 in 7 students, lost education time in 2024 because of heat waves, fires, floods and other disasters, according to UNICEF.
Sandoval and Vergara say the connection between events like these and climate change is clear, and scientists agree: Greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the atmosphere and making disruptive and deadly weather events more common. And the two high schoolers say it’s also apparent who should pay for the damage: fossil fuel companies producing the materials that emit those gases.
That’s why, on Oct. 24, they and hundreds of other students across California plan to lead walkouts at their schools in support of state legislation that would put oil companies on the hook financially for infrastructure damage and other costs associated with the climate crisis. Young people at more than 50 high schools have signed on so far.
Known as the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act, the legislation is modeled on a 1980 law, passed in response to the infamous Love Canal disaster, that compels companies to pay to clean up hazardous waste they’ve created. Since 2024, two states — New York and Vermont — have adopted laws similar to the California bill that take the superfund concept and apply it to the climate crisis.
“Youth are now seeing that the ones responsible for this are the ones that are profiting billions of dollars off of climate change,” said Sandoval, who attends Eastlake High School, in Chula Vista.
Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
The California climate bill, introduced in February, lists climate-resilient schools, electric buses, green workforce development and job training as investments that could be covered by the superfund.
But after fierce opposition from the oil and gas industry and the California’s State Building and Construction Trades Council, a union that has often allied with the industry, the bill stalled. Esther Portillo, western environmental health director for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, which supports the bill, said concerns about a major oil refinery closing and about gas prices rising also deterred legislators, including some Democrats.
Dawn Addis, a Democratic assembly member and one of the bill’s authors, said the legislation will continue to be negotiated when the legislative session resumes in January. Supporters have made progress in responding to legislators’ questions about the bill’s details, she said, adding that she was optimistic about its passage. Addis, a former public school teacher, also commended the students and their activism.
“We want obviously students in the classroom learning but this is an extreme situation,” she said. “The effects of the climate crisis are incredibly, incredibly real for kids.”
The Trump administration and a coalition of conservative states led by West Virginia have filed separate lawsuits to block the New York and Vermont laws. The administration’s lawsuits call the state laws a “brazen attempt to grab power from the federal government and force citizens of other States and nations to foot the bill for its infrastructure wish list.” Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has canceled billions in clean energy projects, proposed rescinding rules that underpin regulation of greenhouse gases, and backed legislation that cut funding for schools to reduce their climate toll.
Like the California bill, the Vermont and New York laws single out the education system. Vermont’s, for example, talks about the fund paying for energy-efficient cooling systems and building upgrades in schools, among other types of buildings.
“This bill is an incredibly important way to provide states with the ability to pay for necessary projects they should be implementing to save lives,” said Kimberly Ong, senior attorney and senior director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is representing New York and Vermont in some of the lawsuits.
In California, perhaps more than any other state, the costs to schoolchildren of climate change are mounting quickly. Kids there have already missed more than 54,000 hours of school time so far this year because of extreme weather events, according to an analysis by the nonprofit UndauntedK12, which helps schools green their operations. The Los Angeles Unified School District, which sustained damage in the Palisades Fire in January, says it was forced to set aside $2.2 billion to help pay for repairs.
“Polluter pay bills are interesting and innovative ways to create new revenue for climate adaptation and mitigation without raising taxes on everyone or approving another state bond,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder of UndauntedK12. “Fossil fuel companies have profited billions of dollars, essentially creating this crisis,” he added, “and they knew what they were doing for decades.”
He noted that it will be important for education groups and students to help ensure that schools are a priority for any revenue that does materialize from such legislation.
Juan Alanis, a Republican state assembly member who voted against the bill when it was before the Standing Committee on Natural Resources, wrote in an email that he was concerned that it unfairly penalized companies that have already contributed money through California’s cap-and-trade program to reduce emissions. “While we all share a bipartisan commitment to combating climate change and protecting Californians from its devastating impacts, AB 1243 takes us down a troubling path of retroactive punishment that creates unnecessary uncertainty for businesses,” he wrote.
His colleague on the committee, assembly member Josh Hoover, called the bill “just another attempt by Sacramento politicians to virtue signal.”
Sandoval and Vergara, the San Diego County students, say they see the influence of Big Oil. Fossil fuel companies spent more than $38 million on lobbying and related activities in California last year, nearly $12 million more than the previous high set in 2017, according to an analysis by Last Chance Alliance, a coalition of environmental, health, climate and labor groups.
Sandoval said that growing up, his schools taught him about the impact of climate change on the environment but little about what he and other students might do to stop it. Getting involved in climate activism has made him see there are steps young people can take beyond, say, using less plastic.
“When I dedicate time to doing this, I know it’s more impactful than, say, my math homework,” he said. “We’re really seeing youth advocate for something that should be so common sense, yet we’re seeing incredible opposition on the other side.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about the impact of climate change was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter on climate and education.
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Caroline Preston
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Fall foliage colors muted in several regions due to drought
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Portland, Maine — Leaf-peeping season has arrived in the Northeast and beyond, but weeks of drought have dulled this year’s autumn colors and sent leaves fluttering to the ground earlier than usual.
Soaking in the fall foliage is an annual tradition in the New England states as well as areas such as the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina and Upper Peninsula of Michigan. As the days shorten and temperatures drop, chlorophyll in leaves breaks down, and they turn to the autumn tones of yellow, orange and red.
But dry weather in summer and fall can change all that because the lack of water causes leaves to brown and fall more quickly. And that’s happening this year, as more than 40% of the country was considered to be in a drought in early October, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
That’s more than twice the average, said Brad Rippey, a U.S. Department of Agriculture meteorologist and an author of the drought monitor, which is a partnership between the federal government and University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Drought has hit the Northeast and western U.S. especially hard, he said.
It all adds up to fewer leaves to peep.
“I think it might be a little bit of a short and less colorful season, for the most part,” Rippey said. “The color is just not going to be there this year for some hillsides.”
Brittany Peterson / AP
Despite the gloomy forecast, autumn enthusiasts said it’s still a great year to get out and enjoy nature’s fireworks display. There is still a lot of color in New England’s trees, said Andy Finton, senior conservation ecologist with The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts.
Climate change is stressing forests with severe weather and heat waves, but autumn in New England remains a beautiful time of year to experience the wonderment of forest ecosystems firsthand, he said.
“Our trees and our forests have an inherent resilience,” Finton said. “They are still very resilient, and I am constantly surprised at how wonderful the fall season is despite these stresses.”
Leaf-peepers undeterred for most part
The tourism business built around leaf peeping has also proven resilient. At the Mills Falls Resort Collection at the Lake in Meredith, New Hampshire, general manager Barbara Beckwith said business is good at the four inns that have 170 rooms. The number of Canadian tourists is down, Beckwith acknowledged, but she said that’s been made up with domestic leaf peepers, mostly from New England.
Beckwith said her properties were booked solid on weekends through mid-October and had been for weeks.
“This year is actually going to be better than last year,” Beckwith said. “Last year was an election and that put a lot of trepidation in people. Now, they are traveling. The uncertainty of the election is over. We all know whose president now and we are traveling.”
Holly Ramer / AP
Chris Proulx, executive director of the Mount Washington (New Hampshire) Valley Chamber of Commerce, said the decline in Canadian tourists by as much as 80% seen this summer has continued into the fall. But the region is faring better, he said, thanks to an uptick in travelers from other countries and its reputation for having one of the country’s best leaf peeping seasons.
“This is the one season where people make plans in advance to come in addition to travelers from all of the country and all over the world,” Proulx said.
Leaf peeping was so popular in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains this year that one town temporarily closed its highway offramp to alleviate gridlock. The area put on a display of yellow aspen trees dotting the mountains between evergreens, their delicate leaves vibrating in the wind.
But there were signs of a dry spring in the central part of the state, one that is more severe the farther west you travel, said Colorado State Forest Service entomologist Dan West, who spends many fall days in a plane looking at how insect infestations are affecting tree health.
Crispy edges, muted colors, and dropping leaves before they can take on a red or purple hue are all signs of drought stress, West said.
“The tree is shutting down processes early and we basically just see this muted kind of a show for the fall,” he said.
In Denver, arborist Michael Sundberg also said he’s seeing less vibrant color than usual, and autumn feels like it arrived earlier than usual this year. It’s still a beautiful time of year, but there might be less of it to enjoy, he said.
“It’s weird to have color peaking this early in the mountains and then for Denver to be peaking at the same time,” he said. “Usually we’re later in October before we really go off.”
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1 dead, 2 missing after severe Alaska flooding Coast Guard official says left
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One person was dead and two were missing in western Alaska on Monday after the remnants of Typhoon Halong brought hurricane-force winds and ravaging storm surges and floodwaters over the weekend that swept some homes away, authorities said. More than 50 people had been rescued – some plucked from rooftops.
Officials warned of a long road to recovery and a need for continued support for the hardest-hit communities with winter just around the corner. A U.S. Coast Guard official, Capt. Christopher Culpepper, described the situation in the villages of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok as “absolute devastation.”
Alaska State Troopers said at least 51 people and two dogs were rescued in Kipnuk and Kwigillingok after the storm system walloped the communities. Both areas saw significant storm surge, according to the National Weather Service.
A woman was found dead and two people remained unaccounted for in Kwigillingok, troopers said. The agency earlier said it was working to confirm secondhand reports of people who were unaccounted for in Kipnuk but IT SAID late Monday that troopers had determined no one there was missing.
Troopers said it and several other agencies were searching by boat and from the air for the missing people. Troopers said they also sent a helicopter from Fairbanks to aid in the search and deliver generators and fuel to the communities.
Coping as storm was hitting
According to the nonprofit Coastal Villages Region Fund, most of the residents in both communities had taken shelter in local schools.
In addition to housing concerns, residents impacted by the system across the region reported power outages, a lack of running water, subsistence foods stocked in freezers ruined and damage to home-heating stoves. That damage could make the winter difficult in remote communities where people store food from hunting and fishing to help make it through the season.
Jamie Jenkins, 42, who lives in another hard-hit community, Napakiak, said the storm was “the worst I’ve ever seen.” She described howling winds and fast-rising waters Sunday morning.
Her mother – whose nearby home shifted on its foundation – and a neighbor whose home flooded came over to Jenkins’ place. They tried to wait out the storm, she said, but when the waters reached their top stairs, they got in a boat and evacuated to the school.
Jenkins said “practically the whole community” was there. The men in town gathered their boats and went house to house to pick up anyone else who was still in their homes, she said.
Adaline Pete, who lives in another community, Kotlik, said she had never experienced winds so strong. An unoccupied house next door flipped over but she said her family felt safe in their home.
Climate funds in doubt
During a news conference organized by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Alaska’s two U.S. senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, said they would continue to focus on climate resilience and infrastructure funds for Alaska. Sullivan said it was the congressional delegation’s job to ensure the Trump administration and their colleagues understood the importance of such funds.
Earlier this year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would end a program aimed at mitigating disaster risks. The decision is being challenged in court.
Murkowski said erosion mitigation projects take time to complete. “But our reality is, we are seeing these storms coming … certainly on a more frequent basis, and the intensity that we’re seeing seems to be accumulating as well, and so the time to act on it is now because it’s going to take us some time to get these in place,” she said of such projects.
About 380 people live in Kwigillingok, a predominately Alaska Native community on the western shore of Kuskokwim Bay and near the mouth of the Kuskokwim River. A report prepared for the local tribe in 2022 by the Alaska Institute for Justice said the frequency and severity of flooding in the low-lying region had increased in recent years. The report listed relocation of the community as an urgent need.
Erosion and melting permafrost pose threats to infrastructure and in some cases entire communities in Alaska, which is experiencing the impacts of climate change.
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Nations Meet to Consider Regulations to Drive a Green Transition in Shipping
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The world’s largest maritime nations are gathering in London on Tuesday to consider adopting regulations that would move the shipping industry away from fossil fuels to slash emissions.
If the deal is adopted, this will be the first time a global fee is imposed on planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Most ships today run on heavy fuel oil that releases carbon dioxide and other pollutants as it’s burned.
That would be a major win for the climate, public health, the ocean and marine life, said Delaine McCullough at the Ocean Conservancy. For too long, ships have run on crude, dirty oil, she said.
“This agreement provides a lesson for the world that legally-binding climate action is possible,” McCullough, shipping program director for the nonprofit environmental advocacy group, said.
Shipping emissions have grown over the last decade to about 3% of the global total as trade has grown and vessels use immense amounts of fossil fuels to transport cargo over long distances.
The regulations would set a pricing system for gas emissions
The regulations, or “Net-zero Framework,” sets a marine fuel standard that decreases, over time, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions allowed from using shipping fuels. The regulations also establish a pricing system that would impose fees for every ton of greenhouse gases emitted by ships above allowable limits, in what is effectively the first global tax on greenhouse gas emissions.
There’s a base-level of compliance for the allowable greenhouse gas intensity of fuels. There’s a more stringent direct compliance target that requires further reduction in the greenhouse gas intensity.
If ships sail on fuels with lower emissions than what’s required under the direct compliance target, they earn “surplus units,” effectively credits.
Ships with the highest emissions would have to buy those credits from other ships under the pricing system, or from the IMO at $380 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent to reach the base level of compliance. In addition, there’s a penalty of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent to reach direct compliance.
Ships that meet the base target but not the direct compliance one must pay the $100 per ton penalty, too.
Ships whose greenhouse gas intensity is below a certain threshold will receive rewards for their performance.
The fees could generate $11 billion to $13 billion in revenue annually. That would go into an IMO fund to invest in fuels and technologies needed to transition to green shipping, reward low-emission ships and support developing countries so they aren’t left behind with dirty fuels and old ships.
Looking for alternative fuels
Ships could lower their emissions by using alternative fuels, running on electricity or using onboard carbon capture technologies. Wind propulsion and other energy efficiency advancements can also help reduce fuel consumption and emissions as part of an energy transition.
Large ships last about 25 years, so the industry would need to make changes and investments now to reach net-zero around 2050.
If adopted, the regulations will enter into force in 2027. Large oceangoing ships over 5,000 gross tonnage, which emit 85% of the total carbon emissions from international shipping, would have to pay penalties for their emissions starting in 2028, according to the IMO.
The International Chamber of Shipping, which represents over 80% of the world’s merchant fleet, is advocating for adoption.
Concerns over biofuels produced from food crops
Heavy fuel oil, liquefied natural gas and biodiesel will be dominant for most of the 2030s and 2040s, unless the IMO further incentivizes green alternatives, according to modeling from Transport and Environment, a Brussels-based environmental nongovernmental organization.
The way the rules are designed essentially make biofuels the cheapest fuel to use to comply, but biofuels require huge amounts of crops, pushing out less profitable food production, often leading to additional land clearance and deforestation, said Faig Abbasov, shipping director at T&E.
They are urging the IMO to promote scalable green alternatives, not recklessly promote biofuels produced from food crops, Abbasov said. As it stands now, the deal before the IMO won’t deliver net-zero emissions by 2050, he added.
Green ammonia will get to a price that it’s appealing to ship owners in the late 2040s — quite late in the transition, according to the modeling. The NGO also sees green methanol playing an important role in the long-term transition.
The vote at the London meeting
The IMO aims for consensus in decision-making but it’s likely nations will vote on adopting the regulations.
At the April meeting, a vote was called to approve the contents of the regulations. The United States was notably absent in April, but plans to participate in this meeting.
Teresa Bui at Pacific Environment said she’s optimistic “global momentum is on our side” and a majority of countries will support adoption. Bui is senior climate campaign director for the environmental nonprofit, which has consultative, or non-voting, status at the IMO.
If it fails, shipping’s decarbonization will be further delayed.
“It’s difficult to know for sure what the precise consequences will be, but failure this week will certainly lead to delay, which means ships will emit more greenhouse gases than they would have done and for longer, continuing their outsized contribution to the climate crisis,” said John Maggs, of the Clean Shipping Coalition, who is at the London meeting.
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025
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World Falling Far Behind Deforestation Goals With Farms and Fires Driving Loss, Report Says
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SANTIAGO (Reuters) -The world is falling far behind a global goal to reverse deforestation by 2030, with losses being largely driven by agricultural expansion and forest fires, according to the 2025 Forest Declaration Assessment.
The report said the world permanently lost 8.1 million hectares (20 million acres) of forest, an area about the size of England, in 2024 alone, putting the planet 63% behind the goal set by over 140 countries in the 2021 Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use.
The Forest Declaration Assessment brings together research organizations, think tanks, non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups, and the report was coordinated by advisory company Climate Focus.
Fires were the leading cause of forest loss, accounting for 6.73 million of those hectares around the world, with the Amazon rainforest hit particularly hard, releasing nearly 800 million metric tons of CO2 from fires in 2024.
“Major fire years used to be outliers, but now they’re the norm. And these fires are largely human-made,” said Erin Matson, lead author of the Forest Declaration Assessment. “They’re linked to land clearing, to climate change-induced drought, and to limited law enforcement.”
Earlier reports also found Amazon fires led to unprecedented forest loss, with Brazil leading tropical forest loss and Bolivia’s forest loss surging by 200% in 2024.
This year’s global forest assessment also found that on average, 86% of annual global deforestation over the last decade was caused by permanent agriculture. It also listed gold and coal mining as growing sources of deforestation.
“Demand for commodities like soy, beef, timber, coal, and metals keeps rising, but the tragedy is we don’t actually need to destroy forests to meet that demand,” Matson said, adding over $400 billion in agricultural subsidies are helping drive deforestation.
“The incentives are completely backwards,” she said, noting international public finance for forest protection and restoration averaged just $5.9 billion a year. The report estimates that $117 billion to $299 billion in financing is needed to reach the 2030 goals.
With the COP30, the United Nations climate change conference, set to start in Brazil in November, Matson points to the country’s proposed Tropical Forest Forever Facility, which aims to raise $125 billion in funding for long-term forest finance as a way to help stem forest loss.
The fund, which would be financed by governments and private investors, could disperse $3.4 billion a year with 20% going to indigenous and local communities.
“Looking toward COP30 in Belem, a successful launch of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, TFFF, could start to channel long-term reliable finance to keeping forests standing,” Matson said. “So looking at the global picture of deforestation, it is dark, but we may be in the darkness before the dawn.”
(Reporting by Alexander Villegas; Editing by Chris Reese)
Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.
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New Report Finds One of Earth’s Most Precious Ecosystems Has Already Crossed a Scary Climate Tipping Point
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At a conference in 2019, marine biologist and coral reef conservationist Melanie McField was caught off guard by a question from another attendee: How does it feel to have dedicated your life to studying an ecosystem that will be the first one wiped off the planet?
“I’m rarely dumbfounded,” McField, who now serves as director of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People initiative, told Gizmodo. Though she was well aware of the dire state the world’s coral reefs were in, the idea that these ecosystems could be the first to succumb to climate change came as an alarming new realization. “I just didn’t know what to say,” she said.
Today, McField is one of 160 authors of a landmark report confirming that the questioner that day may have been right. The 2025 Global Tipping Points Report, released by the University of Exeter and international partners on Sunday, finds that the world’s warm-water coral reefs have become the first Earth system to cross its thermal tipping point.
The report comes as global ministers gather in Brazil to meet in preparation for the 30th annual UN Climate Change Conference in November. During these meetings, leaders attempt to reach some consensus on the key climate issues facing the planet. The report’s authors hope their findings will help drive decision makers to take meaningful action to curb global warming.
“We need to have stubborn people at the table in these negotiations who say, ‘We want to keep coral reefs on the planet,’” McField said.
The rising threat of ocean warming
Higher ocean temperatures are forcing many of the world’s corals to expel the symbiotic algae, or zooxanthellae, that live in their tissues—a process known as coral bleaching. These algae not only give corals their signature bright colors, but also provide them with oxygen and essential nutrients through photosynthesis.
Earth is in the midst of its fourth global coral bleaching event, according to NOAA. Since January 2023, bleaching-level heat stress has impacted 84.4% of the world’s coral reefs, with scientists documenting mass coral bleaching in at least 83 countries and territories. This is the second such event in the last 10 years and the largest on record.
The good news is this: Bleached corals are not necessarily dead corals. If ocean temperatures return to a cooler state for a sustained period of time, algae can recolonize a bleached reef. The bad news, however, is that climate change is increasing the severity of bleaching events while decreasing the amount of recovery time between them. As a result, the odds of corals bouncing back are rapidly dwindling.
“This is why ocean warming is such a scary thing,” Mark Hixon, a leading coral reef expert and professor of marine biology at the University of Hawaii who was not involved in the report, told Gizmodo. “Especially now with the ocean starting to warm very, very rapidly, we’ll be seeing more frequent and more severe bleaching events.”
At what point does the global average temperature of Earth’s oceans become so warm that the majority of coral reefs won’t be able to survive bleaching events? This is where the idea of a thermal tipping point comes in. Researchers estimate the thermal tipping point for warm-water coral reefs to be 2.16 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) of global surface warming above pre-industrial levels. The planet is already past that point.
Entering uncharted waters
Crossing this threshold doesn’t mean that all the world’s reefs are going to die tomorrow. “That’s not what we’re saying,” McField said. “We’re saying we’re in the zone where death—the tipping of the whole ecosystem—is underway.”
Each coral reef is unique, with different species, local water temperatures, non-thermal stressors, ecosystem intactness, and resilience levels. These and other factors shape a reef’s survivability. But in a warming world, all reefs—regardless of their individual conditions and characteristics—are at greater risk.
“Let’s say we’ve got 100 humans, and they all go to the doctor,” McField said. “All of them have cholesterol levels of 300—which is incredibly dangerous. They’re still going to die at different rates.”
The report finds that Earth’s global surface temperature may rise 2.7°F (1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels within the next 10 years. This is the upper range of the thermal tipping point for warm-water coral reefs.
At that point, “We’re in new territory,” McField said. Even under the most optimistic scenario, in which global warming stabilizes at 2.7°F without any overshoot, warm-water coral reefs are “virtually certain” to tip, the report states.
Where we go from here
Scientists around the world are working to protect and restore coral reefs. Some strategies center on improving coral resilience through genetic modification—selectively breeding them for resiliency traits.
“This can work to some degree, to keep from losing species entirely,” McField said.
“But when you think about how that could ever be applied on an ecosystem scale, with so little money going into on-the-ground work in reef countries… how is that going to be an economic option?”
Other strategies aim to minimize other potential stressors, like pollution or destructive fishing practices. Hixon, for example, is working to improve water quality and protect herbivorous fish species in Hawaii, which could reduce the overall strain on coral reefs and help them rebound from bleaching events.
Still, this work can’t mitigate all the effects of rapidly rising temperatures. The report states that the Earth needs stringent emission mitigation and enhanced carbon removal to bring the global average surface temperatures back down to 1.8°F (1°C) above pre-industrial levels. “These temperatures are essential for retaining functional warm-water coral reefs at meaningful scale,” the report says.
“It’s incumbent upon the scientific community to engage with stakeholders of all kinds on the threats to the reefs, how they’re accelerating, and how there are certain tangible steps we can take to try to save our reefs from loss,” Hixon said.
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Coral reefs become first environmental system on Earth to pass climate
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Coral reefs around the globe have for years suffered publicly in warming oceans, periodically making headlines when iconic underwater landscapes lose their colors and wither during repeated mass bleaching events caused by climate change. Now, reefs are the first environmental system on Earth to pass a climate “tipping point,” according to a new report by climate scientists who call the situation an “unprecedented crisis.”
Researchers at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute in England have released their second Global Tipping Points report, which examines some of the fundamental processes that support life on this planet in terms of their proximity to benchmarks that may signal permanent damage.
“Tipping points represent critical thresholds in Earth’s climate system where small changes can lead to significant, often irreversible consequences,” the authors said in their report. Steve Smith, a research fellow at the Global Systems Institute and one of the report’s co-authors, told CBS News that tipping points are “all about that point at which change becomes self-propelling, kind of a self-accelerating change.”
LM Otero / AP
The report, published Sunday, comes three years after the institute released its first iteration in 2022 and about a month before the United Nations hosts COP30, an annual climate change conference, in Belém, Brazil, a city in the Amazon rainforest that is itself an example of a major global ecosystem on the brink of a climate emergency. Tim Lenton, the director of the Global Systems Institute and lead author of the report, said in a statement that he hopes his team’s findings make it onto the agenda.
“We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world, with devastating consequences for people and nature,” his statement said. “This demands immediate, unprecedented action from leaders at COP30 and policymakers worldwide.”
The 2015 Paris Agreement set upper limits for global warming at 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius — between 2.7 and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit — above average levels in preindustrial times. But leaders have repeatedly warned in the years since that countries are falling short of the emissions targets necessary to meet those temperature goals, with the U.N. declaring greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere reached all-time highs in 2023. By 2024, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported temperatures had risen to about 1.4 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average.
“A new reality”
Higher ocean temperatures have already degraded coral reefs, which are crucial for marine life and provide habitats for roughly one-fourth of all underwater species. The new report points out that reefs also support the livelihoods of about a billion people, so their deterioration is as much an economic threat as an environmental one.
Scientists have determined that the “tipping point” for coral reefs begins when global warming reaches about 1.2 degrees Celsius, with somewhere between 70 and 90% of coral dying when that number climbs to 1.5 degrees.
“We’re very confident that, unfortunately, we’re in the middle of the coral reef dieback,” Smith said, which, he explained, essentially means “the collapse of coral reefs worldwide.”
Reef death is often catalyzed by bleaching, when heat stress causes coral to purge the colorful algae that sustains it and, in turn, become pale and weak. If the stress persists and bleaching is severe or prolonged, the coral can completely break down.
Andrew Ibarra / National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration via AP
The International Coral Reef Initiative announced in April that an estimated 84% of the world’s coral reefs were under heat stress. As the new report notes, this is “the most extensive and intense” mass bleaching event ever recorded.
Small pockets of coral are expected to survive, Smith said, and preserving them while minimizing the progression of warming temperatures should be everyone’s top priority.
“We’re in a new reality whereby we can now say that we’ve passed the first major climate tipping point, which is the coral reefs,” he said. “And obviously we’ll have to, as we say, try to reduce the damage. The quicker that we can decarbonize and take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, the better.”
Ice sheets, ocean currents and the Amazon rainforest
Other environmental systems are on the verge of passing their tipping points, too, according to the report. In addition to coral reefs, it cited the potentially catastrophic effects of a warming world on the Amazon rainforest, ocean currents that influence weather patterns, and glaciers like the Greenland ice sheet, which is currently melting and shedding the equivalent of three Niagara Falls’ worth of freshwater into the North Atlantic every hour.
“It’s a race against time, really,” said Smith. “We have to transform the whole energetic basis of society within a generation, away from fossil fuels and toward this cleaner, safer future to avoid these further tipping points beyond coral reefs and the devastating consequences that they would bring.”
The report acknowledged meaningful headway has been made in the shift toward renewable energy, highlighting “positive tipping points” that have been crossed as the use of electric vehicles, solar power and wind power becomes more widespread. The rise of solar power, in particular, is one positive transition that Smith singled out as especially “remarkable” — although he emphasized that more still needs to be done, urgently, to bring the Earth back on track.
“Getting that into the heads of our senior decision-makers is going to be important,” said Smith, “because what is traditionally thought of as high impact, low likelihood events, they’re actually becoming high impact, high likelihood, if we don’t do something now.”
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At Least 44 People Dead After Torrential Rains in Mexico
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MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -At least 44 people were killed in Mexico after days of heavy rains and flooding, the government said on Sunday.
Torrential rains from tropical storms Priscilla and Raymond triggered landslides and flooding across five states.
There were 18 people killed in Veracruz state, 16 in Hidalgo, nine in Puebla and one in Queretaro, a government statement said.
The government of President Claudia Sheinbaum was managing a response plan to support 139 affected towns.
Photos posted by the Mexican military showed people being evacuated by soldiers using life rafts, homes that were flooded with mud and rescue workers trudging through waist-height waters through town streets.
“We continue with attention to the emergency in Veracruz, Hidalgo, Puebla, Queretaro, and San Luis Potosí, in coordination with the governor and the governors, as well as various federal authorities. The National Emergency Committee is in permanent session,” Sheinbaum said on X.
(Reporting by Cassandra Garrison; Editing by Mark Porter)
Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.
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US Threatens Visa Restrictions, Sanctions Against UN Members That Back IMO Emissions Plan
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(Reuters) -The United States on Friday threatened to use visa restrictions and sanctions to retaliate against nations that vote in favor of a plan put forward by a United Nations agency to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from ocean shipping.
U.N. member nations are scheduled to vote next week on the International Maritime Organization’s Net-Zero Framework proposal to reduce global carbon dioxide gas emissions from the international shipping sector, which handles around 80% of world trade and accounts for close to 3% of global greenhouse gases.
Large container carriers, under pressure from investors to fight climate change, generally agree that a global regulatory framework is crucial to speeding up decarbonisation. Still, some of the world’s biggest oil tanker companies said they had “grave concerns” about the proposal.
“The Administration unequivocally rejects this proposal before the IMO and will not tolerate any action that increases costs for our citizens, energy providers, shipping companies and their customers, or tourists,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a joint statement.
The “proposal poses significant risks to the global economy and subjects not just Americans, but all IMO member states to an unsanctioned global tax regime that levies punitive and regressive financial penalties,” they said.
Without global regulation, the maritime industry would face a patchwork of regulations and increasing costs without effectively curbing climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions, supporters of the IMO proposal have said.
The U.S. is considering retaliation against U.N. countries that support the plan, the U.S. officials said in Friday’s statement.
That includes potentially blocking vessels flagged in those nations from U.S. ports, imposing visa restrictions and fees, and slapping sanctions on officials “sponsoring activist-driven climate policies.”
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil and Lisa Baertlein; Editing by Costas Pitas and Tom Hogue)
Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.
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New Pope Offers Same Headaches for Trump
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Leo probably doesn’t envision Jesus in a MAGA hat.
Photo: Maria Grazia Picciarella/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty ImagesDonald Trump and his team are currently working overtime to convince Americans that anyone who opposes his agenda represents a “radical left” full of “terrorists” who hate America, and for that matter, Christianity. The MAGA movement can’t be happy that one of the world’s oldest and most conservative institutions, the Roman Catholic Church, remains hostile to his mass-deportation program, his efforts to cut government assistance to poor people, and his militant opposition to climate-change initiatives.
During the tenure of the late Pope Francis, Trump allies and many traditionalist Catholics viewed the pontiff as fundamentally misguided (in all but his hard-line position opposing abortion). They hoped his American-born successor would be more “reasonable,” from their point of view. Indeed, as the Washington Post reports, Leo IV “has comforted traditionalists by embracing formal vestments and other reverent trappings of his office more than Francis did.” But in the last week he’s sent a series of signals that he shares Francis’s position on many of the issues that grated on MAGA Republicans, as the Post notes:
At an Oct. 1 Vatican summit, Leo condemned deniers of global warming and issued a blunt call to climate action. And last Sunday, in St. Peter’s Square, he declared a new “missionary age” against the “coldness of indifference” to migrants.
On Wednesday, he met privately with Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, a critic of the Trump administration’s migrant crackdown, along with other U.S. pro-migrant activists, to receive letters and testimonies from those living in “fear” of detention and deportation in the United States.
Leo “was very clear that what is happening to migrants in the United States right now is an injustice,” said Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Texas-based Hope Border Institute, who attended the meeting. “He said the church cannot remain silent.”
In the middle of this drumbeat of events, the pontiff intervened in an American church dispute over the proposed presentation of an award to pro-choice Catholic Senator Dick Durbin, with these words:
“Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” he said Tuesday. “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Then today, the pontiff released his first major teaching document, an “apostolic exhortation,” as the National Catholic Reporter explains:
“In a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people,” the pope wrote. “We must not let our guard down when it comes to poverty.” …
While the document’s pastoral tone urges a renewed spiritual concern for the marginalized, it also carries sharp edges. For example, it denounces people who internalize indifference by placing their faith in the free market instead of allowing themselves to be consumed by compassion for their neighbor.
[The papal document] calls out Christians who “find it easier to turn a blind eye to the poor,” justifying their inaction by reducing faith to prayer and teaching “sound doctrine,” or by invoking “pseudo-scientific data” to claim that “a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty.”
Sounds “radical left” to me, or perhaps even communist.
The Vatican acknowledged that preparation of this document began under Francis, and those who didn’t like its tone and scope probably hope it was more of a tribute to Leo’s predecessor rather than a statement of his own views. But as the Post noted, there’s another possibility:
Leo holds Peruvian nationality from his years as a missionary there in addition to U.S. citizenship. His critique of market capitalism in particular suggests that in key ways, those who thought they were getting the first American pope are actually getting the second Latin American, one whose stances, like Francis, echo perceptions common in the Global South.
Vatican hostility to Trump could have a limited effect on American Catholics, who, after all, widely disregard church teachings on contraception and other matters. But one of the under-discussed success stories of the president’s 2024 campaign is that he carried self-described Catholics by a 12-point margin over Kamala Harris after splitting this vote right down the middle with Joe Biden four years earlier. Regular criticism from a pontiff who is (so far) wildly popular in the U.S. won’t help Trump’s own flagging popularity. And it’s particularly noteworthy that for the most part America’s conservative-leaning Catholic bishops are in lockstep with the Vatican on the duty owed to immigrants even if they disagree on other issues. Vice-President J.D. Vance was very isolated in his effort to provide a Catholic doctrinal defense of his administration’s mass-deportation effort. And Francis, near the end of his earthly journey, pretty much handed Vance’s ass to him in an exchange on the subject.
As Trump’s armed and masked agents begin assaulting Pope Leo’s home town of Chicago in search of brown people to terrorize or deport, they might want to keep in mind the Vatican is watching and isn’t particularly afraid of MAGA.
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Ed Kilgore
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