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The Guardian Climate Change

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Latest Climate crisis news, comment and analysis from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice
Updated: 4 hours 17 min ago

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

November 11, 2024 - 12:49

Even if president-elect rolls back climate progress, John Podesta reaffirms commitment to a clean planet at Cop29

The US climate envoy John Podesta said the fight “for a cleaner, safer” planet will not stop under a re-elected Donald Trump even if some progress is reversed, speaking at the Cop29 UN climate talks on Monday as they opened in Baku, Azerbaijan.

“Although under Donald Trump’s leadership the US federal government placed climate-related actions on the back burner, efforts to prevent climate change remain a commitment in the US and will confidently continue,” said Podesta, who is leading the Biden administration’s delegation at the annual talks.

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Categories: Climate

Trump 2.0 could make even the most optimistic climate observers cynical - but it's not the whole story | Adam Morton

November 11, 2024 - 09:00

Much is unclear about how Donald Trump’s return to power will affect efforts to tackle global heating, but there are a few things we can say

You’ve likely already heard the worst-case takes: that a second Trump presidency is a disaster for the climate, and will almost certainly lead to emissions being higher than they otherwise would have been. There’s obvious truth in that. But it’s also true that Trump 2.0 will almost certainly not play out in line with immediate post-election predictions.

We have been here before. As the writer and analyst Ketan Joshi points out, in 2016 it was projected that Trump’s policies would lead to a steep rise in US emissions – a fork in the road at odds with the decline forecast if Hillary Clinton had won.

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Categories: Climate

Work to regulate one of Australia’s biggest sources of carbon dioxide stalls, FoI documents reveal

November 11, 2024 - 09:00

Exclusive: Environmental group says it is ‘concerned’ to hear progress on cleaning up air pollution from diesel-burning may have hit a wall

Work to regulate one of Australia’s biggest sources of carbon dioxide and other pollutants “has stalled”, despite the project beginning six years ago and comparable nations limiting emissions years earlier, New South Wales government documents have revealed.

State and federal environment ministers agreed in 2018 to examine pollution from non-road diesel engines as part of the national clean air agreement. These machines totalled more than 640,000 – ranging from mining trucks, outboard motors and forklifts to electricity generators – and were forecast to reach 945,000 by 2043.

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Categories: Climate

This is climate breakdown: a new series exploring the real impacts on people

November 11, 2024 - 07:00

How do you capture the effects of the climate crisis on people right now? We have collected testimonies from around the world

In March 2024, the Guardian’s environment desk began collaborating on a project that we hope will give voice to the growing number of people around the world living through the daily impact of climate breakdown. Our journalists have worked alongside researchers and humanitarian workers at the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) in Canada and the International Red Cross to compile a series of testimonies from survivors of recent extreme weather events.

CDP is an international teaching newsroom coordinated out of the University of Victoria in Canada that collaborates with disaster survivors. The teams are trained in trauma-informed interview skills, and spent hours speaking with people, listening to their stories and then relaying them in a way that takes us all through the experience. In publishing these testimonies and sharing them with you, we were able to help fulfil the project’s aim of creating “a people’s history of climate change” that would honour the dignity of the survivors.

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Categories: Climate

Developing world needs private finance for green transition, says Cop president

November 11, 2024 - 03:00

UN’s top climate official warns ‘no country is immune’ from climate disaster as conference begins in Azerbaijan

Businesses in the private sector must stump up cash for the developing world to invest in a low-carbon economy or face the consequences of climate breakdown, the president of the UN climate summit has said.

Mukhtar Babayev, the environment minister of Azerbaijan, the host of this year’s climate conference, wrote in Monday’s Guardian: “The onus cannot fall entirely on government purses. Unleashing private finance for developing countries’ transition has long been an ambition of climate talks.

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Categories: Climate

At Cop29, we must treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as Covid – history shows it can be done | Mukhtar Babayev

November 11, 2024 - 03:00

This emergency will cost trillions of dollars, and is beyond the reach of developing nations. Private investors have to step up

  • Mukhtar Babayev is president of the Cop29 UN climate change conference

To avert climate catastrophe, the world needs more climate finance. At Cop29, the UN climate summit in Baku that begins today, agreeing a new climate finance goal is the top priority of Azerbaijan’s Cop presidency.

Developing countries require assistance to tackle their emissions and build resilience against growing climate threats. The $100bn annual target, set in 2009, was intended to be fulfilled by 2020. It is now outdated and falls far short of what is needed for countries at the sharp end of the climate crisis.

Mukhtar Babayev is president of the Cop29 UN climate change conference

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Categories: Climate

A ‘Cop of peace’? How can authoritarian, human rights-trashing Azerbaijan possibly host that? | Greta Thunberg

November 11, 2024 - 02:00

The ‘theme’ chosen for Cop29 must be some kind of dark joke. This summit, like those before it, is a mere act of greenwashing

During rapidly escalating climate and humanitarian crises, another authoritarian petrostate with no respect for human rights is hosting Cop29 – the UN’s latest annual climate summit that starts today and is being held after the re-election of a climate-denier US president.

Cop meetings have proven to be greenwashing conferences that legitimise countries’ failures to ensure a livable world and future and have also allowed authoritarian regimes like Azerbaijan and the two previous hosts – the United Arab Emirates and Egypt – to continue violating human rights.

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish activist and international climate crisis campaigner

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Categories: Climate

Monday briefing: What to expect as Cop29 starts in the shadow of Trump’s victory

November 11, 2024 - 01:49

In today’s newsletter: As delegates gather for the world’s biggest climate conference, many are asking what the re-election of the man who thinks global heating is ‘a hoax’ will mean for the planet

Sign up here for our daily newsletter, First Edition

Good morning.

It is now “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the warmest year in recorded history. And just like 2023, the past 12 months have been characterised by extreme weather events – from cyclones in Australia to wildfires in Brazil to last month’s lethal floods in Spain made more intense and more frequent by the climate crisis.

US election | Donald Trump has been declared the winner in Arizona, completing the Republicans’ clean sweep of the so-called swing states and rubbing salt in Democrats’ wounds as it was announced that the president-elect is scheduled to meet with Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the presidential handover. Trump reportedly spoke on the phone with Vladimir Putin on Thursday and discussed the war in Ukraine, telling the Russian ruler not to escalate the conflict and reminding him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”.

House of Lords | The Liberal Democrats will try to hijack the government’s bill to ban Lords from inheriting their seats in parliament this week in an attempt to force a vote on an entirely elected upper chamber. MPs are expected to vote overwhelmingly in favour of the Labour legislation but the Lib Dems want to go drastically further.

Immigration and asylum| A Home Office artificial intelligence tool that proposes enforcement action against adult and child migrants could make it too easy for officials to rubberstamp automated life-changing decisions, campaigners have said.

Health | The government is likely to offer a financial lifeline to the hospice sector amid fears end-of-life care providers are at risk of closure due to the double blow of the employers’ national insurance rise and higher wage bills, the Guardian understands.

Nursing | Increasing numbers of UK-trained nurses are set to leave the profession in England within a decade of registering, in a trend that could jeopardise the government’s overhaul of healthcare, according to a union.

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Categories: Climate

‘Take a deep breath on being Trump-esque’: senior Coalition figures reject backbench push to rethink net zero

November 10, 2024 - 22:31

Nationals senator Matt Canavan and MP Keith Pitt both spoke out about the party’s climate policy in the wake of Donald Trump’s win

Nationals leader David Littleproud, shadow transport minister Bridget McKenzie and Senate Liberal leader Simon Birmingham have all rejected a backbench push to use Donald Trump’s election in the US to abandon support for net zero by 2050.

The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has said he is completely committed to the target, attempting to fight the next election on the Coalition’s vague taxpayer-funded nuclear plan that will likely extend the use of coal and gas rather than the 2050 target.

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Categories: Climate

Extreme weather cost $2tn globally over past decade, report finds

November 10, 2024 - 19:01

US suffered greatest economic losses, report commissioned by International Chamber of Commerce finds, followed by China and India

Violent weather cost the world $2tn over the past decade, a report has found, as diplomats descend on the Cop29 climate summit for a tense fight over finance.

The analysis of 4,000 climate-related extreme weather events, from flash floods that wash away homes in an instant to slow-burning droughts that ruin farms over years, found economic damages hit $451bn across the past two years alone.

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Categories: Climate

The Guardian view on the rise of eco-poetry: writing cannot ignore global heating | Editorial

November 10, 2024 - 13:25

Verse’s connection to nature can inspire awareness and hope amid the climate crisis, offering clarity beyond data

Poetry has a big debt to nature, its muse and source of metaphor for centuries. As the UN climate conference begins, it is time to pay it back. Poetry must give nature a voice to express its dire predicament. “I will rise,” declares the furious river in the Scottish makar Kathleen Jamie’s poem What the Clyde Said, After Cop26 – just as the River Xanthus in Homer’s Iliad rose in revenge against Achilles for filling it with so many bodies.

Ms Jamie’s poem appears in a new anthology, Earth Prayers, edited by the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. “We are in the age of anthropogenic climate breakdown, possibly the Age of Grief,” Ms Duffy writes in the foreword. The 100 poems, ranging from classics such as Matthew Arnold’s 1867 Dover Beach to #ExtinctionRebellion by Pascale Petit, remind us not just of the beauty of the natural world, but its fragility.

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Categories: Climate

Fifty-year extension for one of Australia’s biggest CO2 emitters likely after WA ditches emissions-reduction rules

November 10, 2024 - 09:00

Critics say extending life of Woodside’s North West Shelf gas processing plant on Burrup Peninsula could result in billions of tonnes of climate pollution

The Western Australian Labor government appears all but certain to give one of Australia’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters the green light to operate until 2070 after it announced it would abolish state emissions-reduction requirements.

Scientists have warned the proposal to extend the life of the North West Shelf gas processing plant on the Burrup Peninsula in the country’s remote north-west is linked to the development of at least three major gas fields and could ultimately result in billions of tonnes of climate pollution being released into the atmosphere.

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Categories: Climate

Three things with Yael Stone: ‘Please just remember – I am not talking about a vibrator’

November 10, 2024 - 09:00

In Guardian Australia’s weekly interview about objects, the actor turned activist tells us about her ‘dooga dooga’ – and a childhood cassette tape

Yael Stone scored her big break with her role as inmate Lorna Morello in the hit Netflix prison drama Orange Is the New Black. But instead of pursuing a Hollywood career after the series ended in 2019, Stone walked away from it all.

After securing a coveted US green card, Stone’s initial plan was to live and work between the US and Australia. Then the black summer bushfires hit, and the carbon emissions required to jet between the two countries no longer felt right. So the Sydney-born talent quit acting, returning to Australia to join the climate fight and founding Hi Neighbour, a not-for-profit that trains steel and coal workers to work in renewables.

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Categories: Climate

Who’s who at Cop29? The world leaders and others who will attend

November 10, 2024 - 07:00

Crucial question for summit will be how to help developing countries cope with extreme weather caused by high temperatures

Cop29 officially opens on Monday 11 November in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the conference is scheduled to end on 22 November, although it is likely to run later. World leaders – about 100 have said they will turn up – are expected in the first three days, and after that the crunch negotiations will be carried on by their representatives, mostly environment ministers or other high-ranking officials.

The crucial question for the summit is climate finance. Developing countries want assurances that trillions will flow to them in the next decade to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with the rapidly receding hope of limiting global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, and to enable them to cope with the increasingly evident extreme weather that rising temperatures are driving.

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Categories: Climate

Thousands call for Valencia’s leader to resign over deadly floods response

November 9, 2024 - 15:52

About 130,000 Spaniards protest against perceived failings by Carlos Mazón’s regional government

Spaniards have taken to the streets of Valencia to demand the resignation of the regional president who led the emergency response to the recent catastrophic floods that killed more than 200 people.

Floods that began on the night of 29 October have left 220 dead and nearly 80 people still missing.

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Categories: Climate

‘Devastating’: California fire victims return to sift through rubble of homes

November 9, 2024 - 15:50

Ten people have been injured so far by the Mountain fire, which was 17% contained by Saturday morning

As firefighting crews continued to battle the Mountain fire on Saturday, some residents were allowed to return to areas destroyed by the blaze to sift through the destruction to their homes.

As of 7am Pacific time on Saturday, the fire had been 17% contained, according to Cal Fire, the state’s wildfire-fighting agency.

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Categories: Climate

Tory former energy secretary facing conflict of interest claim over JCB owner links

November 9, 2024 - 15:00

Shadow cabinet secretary Claire Coutinho accepted donation from Lord Bamford while overseeing millions awarded to his family businesses in green grants

A Conservative former cabinet ­minister who took donations from the billionaire boss of the JCB digger dynasty – including a £7,000 trip on his VIP private helicopter – oversaw decisions to award his family’s business empire millions in taxpayer-funded green energy grants.

Claire Coutinho also posed for ­pictures promoting Lord Bamford’s personal £100m hydrogen engine project and accepted a £7,500 donation from JCB to her local election campaign while she was the energy secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government.

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Categories: Climate

After Trump re-election, UK will lead efforts to save Cop29, says Miliband

November 9, 2024 - 14:00

Energy secretary says Britain must work on vital alliances with other countries following victory of climate-denier Trump

The UK must ramp up its efforts on renewable energy to foster national security in an increasingly uncertain world, the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has warned, on the eve of a fraught global summit on the climate crisis.

He pledged that the UK would lead efforts at Cop29 to secure the global agreement needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate breakdown, in talks that have been thrown into turmoil by the re-election of Donald Trump as US president.

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‘He thrives on chaos’: to dismiss Trump pledges as campaign rhetoric is a triumph of hope over experience | Kim Darroch

November 9, 2024 - 14:00

The lesson of his first term is that he does what he says he is going to do: the UK must prepare

Wednesday 9 November 2016: a misty, drizzly day in Washington DC, an overwhelmingly Democrat city in trauma after the shock victory of Donald Trump in the election the previous day. A Washington rarity, a declared Trump supporter, was among a group of guests for lunch in the residence that day. I took him aside and asked whether Trump would be as radical and disruptive as the giants of American political journalism were predicting. “Not at all,” he said: “I know the guy. All that red meat was just for the campaign. I expect him to govern as a mainstream Republican.”

Fast forward to London, Wednesday 6 November 2024. I’m speaking at a business dinner about the election outcome and what will come next. I mention Trump’s commitment to levy 20% tariffs on all imports into America. One participant says he has just spoken to a friend in Arizona who knows Trump personally. This friend has said: “It’s not about instant action. Trump will use the tariffs as a threat, to persuade countries to act to get trade flows into balance.” Another participant says: “Trump has won his second term now. So he doesn’t need to fight any more. Surely he’ll calm down and focus on his legacy?”

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Categories: Climate

The Australians who sounded the climate alarm 55 years ago: ‘I’m surprised others didn’t take it as seriously’

November 9, 2024 - 14:00

Australia will join other countries at Cop29 to discuss the escalating climate crisis, but some political and scientific leaders have been talking about it for decades

Half a century ago, Richard Gun stood on the floor of parliament and became the first known Australian political figure to warn about the “sinister” threat posed by climate breakdown. Today his maiden speech is a distant memory.

“I never thought of myself as the first politician to issue a warning about climate change,” he says. “At the time it seemed to me an existential threat to our civilisation and it seemed like a sufficiently important issue to mention.

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Categories: Climate