Climate

If you’re an out-of-towner, it’s tempting to urge Californians to get the hell out. But please don’t do that

Why don’t you just leave? It’s always an incendiary question.

When you ask it of people in bad romances or miserable careers, they can be forgiven for ghosting. The word “just” is the poison. As if leaving were simple. It is never simple. The reasons to stay in a job or a relationship – children, money, comfort, love – can be every bit as compelling as the reasons to hit the road.

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Lawyers invoke philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Henry David Thoreau in bid to have long sentences of 16 protesters quashed

The philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Henry David Thoreau were aired in the court of appeal on Wednesday as 16 climate activists sought to convince England’s most-senior judge to quash their long sentences for disruptive acts of civil disobedience.

The appellants, prosecuted in four separate trials last year, appeared at a mass appeal in London before a panel led by Lady Justice Carr, the Lady Chief Justice, where they argued judges defied decades of precedent by ignoring their conscientious motives.

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On January 10, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released their annual analysis finding that 2024 was the hottest year on record globally and that global average temperatures likely surpassed an increase of 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

On the same day, NOAA released its US Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters analysis for 2024 and found that last year an estimated 568 people in the US lost their lives to 27 weather and climate disasters that each had $1 billion in damages or more with a total tallied cost of $182.7 billion.

The same agencies have found that the 11 warmest years in the historical record have all occurred in the past decade, and that each of the last 6 decades was hotter than the last.

Human-caused climate change, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, is contributing to the hotter climate and more severe disasters, which include extreme heat, wildfires, intensified storms, drought and flooding. More people living in risky areas and the higher costs of damages are also adding to the trend of increasing billion-dollar disasters. People’s lived experiences throughout these deadly and terrifying events are the reason communities are feeling a sense of whiplash when it comes to the frequency and intensity of climate disasters.

During these uncertain times, as President Trump is nominating individuals to lead federal agencies, if there is one agency that could truly benefit from a steady, experienced hand at the helm, it would be the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) whose sole mission is to help people before, during and after disasters.

 Here are five things the nation needs from the next FEMA Administrator:

1. Defend against mis- and disinformation about disasters

To have the US president spreading misinformation and disinformation when it comes to emergency management and disaster recovery is reckless and dangerous because it could literally be the difference between life and death. The next FEMA administrator will need to defend against a marathon of false information by President Trump who has a fondness for distorting facts when it comes to disaster response and recovery.

The president lied about the devastating Hurricanes Helene and Milton that created confusion among disaster survivors while local, state, and federal government officials took time and energy to repeatedly communicate the facts. The previous FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said the level of disinformation is at a point that she’s “never seen before.”

Then, as if witnessing the horrific wreckage of the LA fires isn’t disturbing enough, President Trump and some members of Congress spread mis- and disinformation about the cause of the fire and firefighting efforts. 

As my colleague Astrid Caldas explains, misinformation is the unintentional spread of false information while disinformation is spreading false information to be deliberately misleading. Given the level of harmful disinformation in the news regarding the LA fires, California Governor Newsom created a webpage to set the record straight. My colleague Juliet Christian-Smith wrote Six Facts About Water and Wildfire in the West to correct some misconceptions about why the fires are so bad.

I’m unclear as to why President Trump has decided to punt FEMA into the political crosshairs but one thing that is clear is the rampant misinformation about what FEMA actually does. The fact is, that disaster assistance has generally been a bottom-up approach in the US. For example, local/state/territorial and tribal governments already take the lead on emergency response, period. FEMA comes in only after a state has requested a disaster declaration for those catastrophic events in which the state does not have the financial or staffing capacity to respond on its own.  When it comes to disaster response and recovery, the role of FEMA is to supplement not replace state/state/territorial and tribal efforts.

The next FEMA Administrator is going to have to navigate skillfully, follow the science, ignore the bluster coming from the White House, and work overtime to overcome the public skepticism it creates. Lives and livelihoods will hang in the balance.

2. Defend the Stafford Act and ensure disaster relief is equitable and bipartisan 

The new FEMA head will have their work cut out for them to ensure that all states, localities, territories, and tribes are treated equally when disasters hit.

Adding salt to L.A.’s wounds, both President Trump, Congress and House Speaker Mike Johnson have been politicizing FEMA disaster assistance by suggesting that they support putting conditions on federal aid to help the victims of the Los Angeles wildfires.

Under President Trump’s first term, investigative reports found that President Trump initially refused to provide California disaster aid after the deadly wildfires in 2018 because of the state’s Democratic leadership. They also found that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) head, Russell Vought, delayed disaster aid to Puerto Rico for months after the Hurricane Maria devastation. Vought, a co-author of the dangerous Project 2025, is Trump’s pick again to lead OMB.

The notion of withholding disaster assistance unless a state or jurisdiction passes certain policies is simply against constitutional law according to Berkley Law expert Dan Farber.  As Mr. Farber points out, while the president does have broad discretion, Congress does not and must guide the use of executive discretion. Congress clearly notes this guidance in the first section of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Management Act (“the Stafford Act”) which is “to provide an orderly and continuing means of assistance by the Federal Government to State and local governments in carrying out their responsibilities to alleviate the suffering and damage which result from such disasters…”. 

If the president blatantly ignores the law, who knows what will happen to communities suffering as they try to recover and get their lives back after a disaster? The next FEMA Administrator must help set the record straight on FEMA’s mission and the Stafford Act to ensure the president provides disaster assistance to everyone who needs it, regardless of whether they live in a red or blue state.

3. Advocate for robust funding for FEMA, the Disaster Relief Fund, and preparedness

The next FEMA administrator should work to make the case to Congress and the White House for robust appropriations for the agency, its staffing (currently experiencing a 35% gap), the Disaster Relief Fund, and preparedness and risk reduction measures.

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the US averaged 25 major disaster declarations a year from 1979 to 1988 (the first decade of FEMA’s existence). That average rose to 63 over the last ten years, an increase of approximately 150%.

The same CRS analysis finds that in 2020, obligations from the Disaster Relief Fund exceeded an estimated $40 billion for the first time and have consistently reached that level every year since. While the “major disasters” portion of the Fund was initially expected to last into the middle of Danger Season (May through October), recent emergency funding was approved prior to the LA wildfires, the costs of which will be enormous.

The science is clear, as the planet continues to warm, we will see greater risks of chronic impacts, including higher rising seas, killer heat, and hurricanes that are dumping heavier rainfall.

Although FEMA and Congress have supported more funding for risk mitigation it’s not close to what is needed. The Fifth National Climate Assessment finds that the scale of adaptation (reducing risks and preparing for future risks) must accelerate dramatically given the unprecedented rate of climate change.

Currently FEMA spends 7x more on disaster response and recovery than on mitigating disaster risk even though data show the cost savings to FEMA (in addition to preventing the loss of life and disruptions to daily life) of reducing risk totals roughly $700 million annually. The next FEMA Administrator must advocate for funding levels necessary for both the ounce of prevention andthe pound of cure.

4. Play defense and offense: defend against Project 2025’s proposals and hold firm on climate science and integrity

We will need the next FEMA administrator to fend off Project 2025’s anti-science playbook. Project 2025 is the policy agenda put forth by the Heritage Foundation that has been described as an authoritarian playbook. My colleague Rachel Cleetus wrote passionately on the impacts of the agenda when it comes to climate action and disasters:

“Anyone sobered by the relentless rise in global average temperatures and the spate of devastating and costly extreme weather and climate disasters we’ve been experiencing, anyone who thinks policies to benefit the public should be informed by robust, independent science, should take this threat very, very seriously.”

The two page section on FEMA (see p. 153) explains how it would essentially gut the agency’s mission, reduce disaster assistance and resilience funding to state and local governments, and bury the agency within a different department from where it currently sits under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The FEMA Administrator should strive to leave the agency stronger, not weaker, than they find it and oppose Project 2025’s proposals. Instead, the new agency lead should embrace and advance the great strides accomplished by the office of Resilience including issuing guidance reports including its 2022-2026 strategic plan, Response and Recovery Climate Change Planning Guidance, adaptation planning, and alliances for climate action as well as training and tools such as the Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool (RAPT).  

5. Understand the inequities of fossil-fueled climate disasters and prioritize equitable preparedness

The next FEMA administrator must understand that fossil fueled, climate-related disasters and extreme weather do not discriminate when it comes to political boundaries or affiliations. They have to know that climate impacts aren’t distributed equally among underserved and marginalized communities who regularly face disproportionately worse impacts from these events.

Over the years, FEMA has worked to make their grant programs more equitable. The most visible effort has been through the implementation of the Justice40 program that set the goal for federal agencies to target at least 40% of certain federal resources to benefit historically disadvantaged communities.

In one broad brush stroke, President Trump rescinded 78 Biden-era executive orders, including the Executive Order 14008 “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad” which established the Justice40 program. Both FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) and Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) fall under the Justice40 Initiative to meet environmental justice and equity goals. FEMA announced in July 2024 that they exceeded that 40% goal for BRIC by 67% for the sub-applications and 70% for the national competition.

The FEMA mitigation grant programs, particularly the BRIC program, are continuously oversubscribed —for example, in 2024, FEMA received 1,234 sub-applications requesting $5.66 billion in federal cost share, yet FEMA had funding to award funding to 656 sub-applicants, that totaled more than $882.6 million in federal cost share.

Project 2025 put a target on environmental justice by proposing to eliminate the EPA Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and the Justice40 program, which President Trump did on his first day in office with his Executive Order entitled Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions.

Given the daunting risks and impacts of the climate crisis and the overwhelming need for risk mitigation and preparedness resources, the next FEMA administrator must make the case for robust funding for these pre-disaster mitigation grant programs and for the processes in place that make the distribution of these resources more equitable.

There is good news for advocates of just disaster relief

As the nation recently celebrated the life of President Jimmy Carter, one achievement of his that may have been overlooked is his establishment of FEMA 46 years ago. Since that time, FEMA has gone through many changes. But over the years, one hopeful note is that most former FEMA administrators have had considerable backgrounds in emergency management.

In normal times when we could rely on the adage that if the past is prologue, we could rest assured that the next FEMA administrator nominee will have an emergency management background. This is especially true given that the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 (see p. 245) law requires that the administrator shall have demonstrated emergency management and homeland security knowledge and background and have a minimum of 5 years of executive leadership and management experience in the public or private sector.

Unfortunately, President Trump has nominated inexperienced, anti-science and extremists to run cabinet level positions, see for example nominees for US Department of Agriculture, US Department of Energy and the Department of Justice, that pose great dangers to the missions of these departments and the communities and business they support. In a similar fashion, President Trump has nominated an inexperienced interim FEMA acting director, Mr. Cameron Hamilton, a former navy seal who has no disaster management experience.

However, an early report suggested that President Trump may pick the Florida Division of Emergency Management Executive Director Kevin Guthrie to run FEMA. Mr. Guthrie has been with with the Florida Division of Emergency management for over six years and has an additional ten years of emergency management experience. So while he certainly holds a limited resume in the emergency management field, he understands the field and has been working in a state in which from experienced 19 disasters from 2023 to 2024 that each cost over a billion dollars.

Here’s hoping the President Trump follows the law and the next FEMA nominee has an emergency management background.

Editor’s note: Updates first paragraph for clarity

In late 2024, as part of a bipartisan funding bill, Congress authorized $110 billion in disaster recovery funds across federal agencies. Following Congress’ appropriation, The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced how their $12 billion tranche of disaster recovery funding would be divided among disaster-impacted communities at the city, county, and state levels. This funding, known as Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery or CDBG-DR is intended to be flexible and allow recipients to design programs that respond to the local post-disaster needs. Usually CDBG-DR programs fall into one of three categories: housing, infrastructure repair, or economic revitalization.   

Disasters and the complicated process of recovering from them can deepen pre-existing inequality–a study of FEMA disaster aid on a county level found that awards exacerbated the racial wealth gap. The longer communities must wait for disaster funds to flow, the greater the financial and emotional strain on households.

Now that CDBG-DR funds have been allocated, there’s an enormous opportunity across 23 states and one territory not just to rebuild, but to create more equitable and resilient communities in the face of growing risk.  

What climate leaders and program administrators can do  

Following years of pressure by disaster survivors and advocates, HUD recently changed its program requirements to make disaster recovery more equitable. As cities, counties, and states that received CDBG-DR allocations create their required action plans to submit to the federal government, they should keep in mind the following recommendations alongside input from disaster survivors.    

Stick to 70%  

Federal rules around CDBG-DR funding require that 70% of funds be spent on activities that benefit low-to-moderate income households who find it harder to recover from increasingly severe and frequent disasters. Recipients of CDBG-DR funds can request to have that threshold lowered to 51%. An audit of CDBG-DR programs from 2001-2019 found that 137 of 193 grantees reviewed had reduced their requirement to 51%. At a time when more and more Americans are experiencing damage and displacement from extreme weather as a pocketbook issue, it’s critical that public officials from local governments all the way up to HUD staff honor the 70% requirement.   

Dovetail and Accommodate to Deepen Impact  

Disasters don’t occur in a vacuum–those that struggle to access long-term recovery assistance are often facing multiple challenges, something program administrators acknowledge, but find difficult to address.  In order to design and implement impactful long-term recovery, investments should be made in accommodations that ensure equitable access to recovery resources like providing transportation and home visit options for mobility-impaired residents and ensuring language accessible program materials.    

In addition to providing accommodations, administrators should also dovetail disaster recovery applications with trusted local programs that already reach vulnerable populations to deepen impact. A key challenge when homes are damaged or lost during a disaster is to ensure that eligibility requirements are inclusive and don’t worsen disparities. 

Take for example, the residents of heirs’ properties–where homes are passed down through generations without legal title. Heirs’ property is a common practice in Black communities born out of discrimination by lending institutions and the government and can make navigating disaster recovery programs especially difficult.

Following years of advocacy, including a lawsuit by disaster survivors in North Carolina, the federal government now requires programs to allow for alternate means of demonstrating ownership. After identifying heirs’ properties through disaster recovery efforts, survivors could be “funneled” into legal clinics to resolve their title issues and safeguard family wealth. Administrative pipelines between disaster programs and other services for populations that struggle to access aid hold enormous potential to improve public health outcomes and advance economic and racial justice.  

Remember Renters 

Across the country, more people rent their homes than ever before.  Despite a long-term trend in increased rentership and heightened political urgency around the affordable housing crisis, renters receive less initial disaster aid compared with homeowners. In the days and weeks after a disaster, renters may face dubious evictions and illegal price gouging when trying to secure alternative housing. 

While long-term recovery programs can’t prevent these costly and stressful experiences, they can be designed to be more responsive to renters’ needs. This might look like increasing the supply of meaningfully affordable housing by deepening subsidies for new development, repairing or providing resilience upgrades to existing affordable housing without pricing out tenants, preserving long-term affordability by transferring rental properties into a community land trust or investing in legal services for renters.   

A drop in the resilience bucket  

CDBG-DR funds will not meet all the resilience or housing needs of disaster impacted communities.  Other parts of the $110 billion disaster spending package passed will address different types of recovery efforts–from improving water systems to repairing public facilities and supporting agricultural recovery.

Still, this funding is a drop in the bucket.  Communities across the country deserve proactive and equitable investment in the face of growing climate risk and an affordable housing crisis. Until there’s the political will to make those life-saving investments–and to curb emissions to limit how much worse fossil-fueled climate disasters get–every drop in the resilience bucket counts and should be invested in ways that have the most equitable impact.

Their feathers, roosting behaviors and adaptability help birds survive the cold, “nature’s proving ground.”

The order is the latest Trump administration effort against Biden-era initiatives that intended to promote electric vehicles and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Towns and dams built on the assumption the surrounding ice would never melt are facing disaster

In the early days of the global warming debate there was a lot of optimism from the oil lobby about the upsides of the temperature increase for northern climes. One example, that has come to pass, was that warmer weather would create conditions for a flourishing wine industry in England.

Some scientists, particularly Russian advisors to the Kremlin, saw a strategic advantage in climate change. They calculated that a warmer climate would improve conditions for growing key food crops further north, particularly wheat. This would benefit Siberia. Droughts in the US would cut food production there, further altering the balance of power in Russia’s favour.

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Labour is constantly torn between its self-image as a party of radical change and its fear of alienating voters with the wrong kind of radicalism

When Keir Starmer became Labour leader he was unpractised in politics. For advice, he naturally turned to someone who had done his job before and with whom he had a good personal rapport: Ed Miliband.

As Starmer grew in confidence he stayed friendly with Miliband, deferential to his status as a veteran of government and appreciative of his sincere enthusiasm for the energy and climate brief. But the new leader was also ruthlessly focused on winning power, and increasingly alert to toxicities in the Labour brand. He was persuaded that the journey to Downing Street could be completed only by jettisoning policy baggage and paying less heed to people associated with past failure.

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Mete Coban, 32, says climate policy will bring ‘social, economic and racial justice’ to deprived communities

Working-class people and those from ethnic minorities will benefit most from a range of environmental policies being implemented in London, the capital’s deputy mayor has said.

Mete Coban, 32, grew up in a council flat in the borough of Hackney and saw for himself the difficulties the lack of green space, poor or overcrowded housing and polluted air can cause.

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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists shifted the hands of the symbolic clock to 89 seconds to midnight, citing the threat of climate change, nuclear war and the misuse of artificial intelligence.

A rule known as the endangerment finding requires the E.P.A. to regulate greenhouse gases. It has proved resilient against earlier attacks.

After a flood destroyed their town, Kentucky residents faced the agonizing choice of whether to stay or to relocate to new communities built on former strip mines.

Exclusive: Monash University study suggests those who rely more on newspapers and public broadcasters more likely to score highly on ‘civic values’

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Those who believe global heating is a conspiracy get most of their information about news and current events from commercial and social media, according to a study by researchers at Monash University.

The study, led by Prof Mark Andrejevic and Assoc Prof Zala Volcic, found that those who relied on social media as the main source of news scored lower on a measure of “civic values” than people who relied on newspapers and non-commercial media.

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The oil company plans to build natural gas power plants that will be directly connected to data centers used by technology companies for artificial intelligence and other services.

Businesses like Suay Sew Shop are trying to salvage piles of damaged textiles – and warn of the dangers of climate impact and overconsumption

At Suay Sew Shop in Los Angeles’s arts district, mounds of clothes are piled high in a warehouse. The T-shirts, socks, jackets and denim are surplus donations from the LA wildfires that community groups across the city were unable to distribute because they had too much already, or because the items were dirty, damaged or poorly made.

Instead of letting the clothes go to a landfill, where they can cause a host of environmental problems, Suay has rescued 50,000lbs of textiles so they can be cleaned, sorted and upcycled by professional designers and sewers. Since LA currently has no permanent textile recycling or collection, it’s up to groups like Suay to save as many textiles as possible before they get dumped or exported.

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As the risk of extreme flooding increases with climate change, an effort is underway to relocate hundreds of flood survivors to unique higher ground.

Climate crisis and pollution reported as possible reasons for dramatic fall in numbers of cockles, clams and mussels

A “catastrophic” collapse in shellfish numbers is being reported by Spanish fishers in Galicia, with some stocks falling by as much as 90% in the space of a few years.

Galicia is Europe’s principal source of shellfish and, after China, the world’s biggest producer of mussels, which are farmed in the estuaries.

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Chancellor reassures Labour colleagues that climate concerns go ‘hand in hand’ with economic ambitions

Rachel Reeves has told MPs the government needs to go “further and faster” to increase economic growth, as Downing Street sought to reassure people concerned about the environment that net zero and increasing output go “hand in hand”.

The chancellor has unnerved some Labour MPs and green campaigners with her increasingly punchy rhetoric about growth being a priority over preventing climate change, as she strives to improve the UK’s anaemic forecasts and drive up living standards.

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An economic shift raises alarming questions about government vision, priorities and commitment to transformative policies

To hear Labour’s economic message, one might wonder if Downing Street has developed an unlikely admiration for Liz Truss. Given its focus on growth through cutting planning regulations, reducing welfare budgets and removing dissenting bureaucrats, some believe Labour is in danger of echoing not just the spirit but the substance of Ms Truss’s brief, ill-fated tenure. For a party that rose to power criticising the Tory right’s ideological misadventures, this shift in tone is striking.

Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves may see Labour’s sinking poll ratings as reason to align with their opponents, adopting policies – like curbing legal challenges to planning decisions – few rightwingers would contest. In a speech later this week, Ms Reeves plans to give the go-ahead for a third runway at Heathrow, a divisive choice even within Labour that has earned support from the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch.

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Energy secretary insists there is ‘no contradiction between net zero and economic growth’ in hearing at Commons committee

The hearing has stopped for a short break. Heather Hallett, the chair, tells Badenoch that her evidence will be finished by lunchtime.

Keith is now asking Badenoch about the fourth report produced by the Race Disparity Unit. It was produced in December 2021.

Relevant health departments and agencies should review and action existing requests for health data, and undertake an independent strategic review of the dissemination of healthcare data and the publication of statistics and analysis.​​

Government is not necessarily great at delivering these systems. They tend to be big boondoggles for the private sector, but there are private sector companies that can deliver this. There need to be caveats around that.

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