More than 70,000 diplomats, politicians, business leaders and environmental advocates from all around the world are expected in Dubai on Thursday for COP28, the United Nations’ flagship climate change summit. 

Each year, delegates from nearly 200 nations gather at the conference to discuss how they can limit rising global temperatures through the end of the century in hopes of avoiding the most dire consequences of climate change, including upwards of three-quarters of Earth’s species disappearing for good.

But this year’s conference could be an especially important one as carbon emissions continue to reach historic highs and the planet approaches potential tipping points that scientists fear could send global warming spiraling out of control. With climate and energy experts stressing the need to immediately reduce the use of fossil fuels if nations hope to keep the Paris Agreement targets alive, and with wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, world leaders face significant challenges at the talks. 

These six indicators help illustrate the extent of those challenges and what’s at stake if nations fail to reach some key agreements, including a deal to phase down fossil fuels.

1 percent

That’s how much of the global investment in renewable energy last year came from fossil fuel companies, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency, a nonpartisan energy watchdog group and one of the world’s most respected energy analyst firms.

Clean energy saw record growth last year, with new capacity increasing nearly 10 percent globally from the previous year, data shows. But 2022 was also a blockbuster year for fossil fuel companies, which took in $200 billion in profits—more than double what the industry made the prior year.

Taken altogether, the numbers show that fossil fuel companies, whose products are largely responsible for causing the climate crisis, are not taking the clean energy transition seriously and are in fact planning to dramatically expand their oil and gas production decades into the future.

That’s a major problem if nations actually want to achieve the Paris Agreement targets of limiting the planet’s average warming to at least 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with the hopes of keeping it below 1.5 degrees, the IEA’s new report said. The agency has previously said that global installations of renewable energy must triple by 2030 to keep those targets alive.

“The oil and gas industry is facing a moment of truth at COP28 in Dubai. With the world suffering the impacts of a worsening climate crisis, continuing with business as usual is neither socially nor environmentally responsible,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol in a statement. “Oil and gas producers around the world need to make profound decisions about their future place in the global energy sector.”

3 percent

That’s how much U.S. carbon emissions are expected to fall by the end of this year, E&E News reports, marking some positive news for climate advocates after the nation failed to reduce its emissions in 2022 and 2021. In fact, it would be one of the largest annual emission declines of the last decade.

The projection comes from two recent analyses, one from the International Energy Agency and the other from Carbon Monitor, a multi-university effort to track emissions. But the outlook also comes with notable caveats. 

For one, the U.S. was already trending downwards before the Covid-19 pandemic upended the global economy, and a 3-percent drop essentially resumes that previous trajectory rather than pointing to an accelerated effort to tackle climate change. And secondly, while that reduction is historic in its own right, the U.S. would need to reduce its carbon emissions by 6 percent every year through 2030 just to keep on track with its climate goals under the Paris Agreement.

Considering the U.S. is historically the largest contributor to climate change and wields outsized influence in global negotiations, this could be an ominous signal for the climate talks this week. Surely, other nations will be watching how the Biden administration addresses this gap and whether it offers any solutions to help close it.

16 percent

That’s how much of the total carbon emissions released in 2019 globally came from  just 77 million of the world’s richest people, according to a new report from the Guardian, Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute. That means the activities of a tiny fraction of the global population contributed a whopping 5.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere that year—more CO2 than released by the planet’s poorest 66 percent, the report added.

It has long been known that wealthy nations are largely responsible for causing climate change, releasing far more greenhouse gas emissions than developing countries, which disproportionately bear the brunt of climate-related harms. The new report is the latest to highlight just how astonishingly wide of a gap exists between wealthy and poor individuals with regards to their carbon footprints.

This will be a key issue delegates plan to address at COP28, as they attempt to map out the details for the United Nations’ loss and damages fund. The landmark fund was established during last year’s summit, but nations have yet to decide how exactly it will operate, including who must pay into the fund and by how much. It’s a touchy subject, and wealthier countries like the United States have frequently opposed such a fund, arguing that the effort should remain voluntary. 

135 million

That’s how many metric tons of methane were released into the atmosphere in 2022, according to the U.N. It’s a significant amount with serious implications considering that methane is roughly 80 times more potent at warming the planet than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

That’s why nailing down a deal on slashing methane emissions will be a priority at this year’s COP, Reuters reports. While more than 150 countries have promised since 2021 to reduce their methane emissions 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030 under the Global Methane Pledge, few have detailed how they will achieve this.

Climate scientists have said curbing global warming is impossible without addressing the world’s methane emissions, and advocates are watching closely on whether nations commit to robust plans to address this critical issue. 

$150 billion

That’s the annual cost to the U.S. economy due to related disasters, including hurricanes, droughts and wildfires, according to the latest National Climate Assessment released earlier this month. 

The White House report said it considers that estimate to be conservative. It also said that cost would only balloon further as climate change accelerates, making extreme weather events more frequent and severe across the nation. The U.S. now experiences a billion-dollar disaster every three weeks, on average, the report said, opposed to every four months during the 1980s.

That cost includes things like water stress, agricultural loss, tourism impacts, falling real estate value and damage to property and infrastructure. As delegates at COP28 debate how to best adapt to the new climate reality, the steep cost faced by the United States alone offers a glimpse at the growing scope of the problem.

1.8°C

That’s how much hotter the month of September was compared to pre-industrial levels, scientists announced last month, a stunning revelation that one researcher described as “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

Scientists now say there’s no doubt that 2023 will be the hottest year on record. Still, September was an especially notable month, shattering the previous record by half a degree Celsius, the largest year-to-year jump in monthly temperatures ever observed by humans.

The outcome of COP27 last year was widely viewed by climate advocates as underwhelming. With 2023 turning out to be a record-breaking year on several climate fronts, September’s outlandish temperatures may offer the best representation to date of what’s at stake if COP28 follows suit.

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UAE Planned to Use COP28 Climate Talks to Make Oil Deals: Leaked briefing documents reveal that the United Arab Emirates planned to use its role as the host of the United Nations COP28 climate talks, which start Thursday, as an opportunity to strike oil and gas deals, Esme Stallard reports for BBC News. The documents, obtained by BBC and the Centre for Climate Reporting, include notes prepared for meetings between UAE and at least 27 foreign governments to discuss potential deals for new oil and gas development, including liquified natural gas projects in Mozambique, Canada and Australia. 

Biden Missing COP28 Could Raise Concerns Among Young Voters: President Joe Biden is not expected to attend the opening of the global climate summit in Dubai this week, with other officials, including Special Envoy John Kerry set to take his place, CNN reports. While it isn’t uncommon for a president to skip the summit, the move has the potential to frustrate climate advocates both at home and abroad at a time that Biden faces low approval ratings, especially among young voters who have accused the president of balking on key climate commitments.

People Are Buying Bigger Cars and Erasing Gains from Clean Tech: A new report from the Global Fuel Economy Initiative suggests that the world’s appetite for big cars is driving up global carbon emissions substantially, Alexa St. John reports for the Associated Press. Sport utility vehicles, or SUVs, now account for more than half of all new car sales worldwide, the report said, resulting in a more than 30 percent increase in tailpipe emissions between 2010 and 2022 than if people had bought smaller cars like sedans. Transportation is responsible for roughly one-quarter of global CO2 emissions.

Just a week after Texas voters approved billions of dollars to build new gas-fired power plants, the state’s education board will decide if it wants schools using science textbooks that acknowledge that burning fossil fuels warms the planet.

The Texas Board of Education could vote as early as next Tuesday on whether it will recommend state school districts to use a batch of new science textbooks, which include accurate descriptions of the causes and effects of climate change. While recommendations by the Republican-dominated board do not carry legal weight, they have an outsized influence on the educational priorities in Texas and can have rippling effects in other school districts nationwide.

Before the board votes, it will hear testimony from the public, including from the state’s top energy regulator, who is urging the board to reject the books, saying they “could promote a radical environmental agenda.”

In a letter addressed to the board on Nov. 1, Republican Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian criticized climate science as a “woke environmental agenda” and encouraged the board to adopt books that promote the importance of fossil fuel energy. 

“Despite what the mainstream media reports, the debate over climate change is far from settled, as none of the catastrophic events they predicted in the last 20 years have occurred,” Christian wrote. “These catastrophists are using the CO2 boogeyman and the threat of apocalypse to frighten people into submission.”

That message appears to fall in line with guidance the state education board adopted earlier this spring, which urges schools to emphasize the “positive” aspects of fossil fuels in science textbooks, E&E News reported.

There is overwhelming consensus among peer-reviewed research on climate change, which shows that Earth’s average temperature has risen at an unprecedented rate since the Industrial Revolution, predominantly because humans have been burning fossil fuels. The world has already warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and climate scientists say the planet is on track for 3 degrees of warming by the end of this century if fossil fuel production isn’t drastically reduced in the coming years.

The result of such warming, scientists warn, will be that the kind of extreme weather experienced this summer will become even more frequent and severe. This week, a new peer-reviewed study found that the last 12 months were the hottest ever recorded on Earth, with climate change largely responsible for the record-high temperatures felt by much of the world between November 2022 and October 2023.

Despite that evidence, Republican lawmakers and right-wing activists have increasingly framed climate science through culture war rhetoric, often downplaying the consequences of global warming and spreading misleading and false claims about its causes—including that natural phenomena are responsible.

This spring, for example, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee published an educational magazine aimed at children titled “The Kids Guide to the Truth About Climate Change,” which some education advocates denounced as ideological propaganda. The magazine asserts that climate change is occurring as part of the planet’s natural cycle and ignores the scientific evidence that shows that temperatures warmed 10 times faster in the last century than they did in the previous 5,000 years—a trend change that corresponds with industrialization and fossil fuel use.

In fact, climate change is now among the several topics that conservative politicians call “woke” and are attempting to ban from being taught in schools.

Book bans in the United States have skyrocketed in recent years, jumping 400 percent this year compared to last year, according to the free speech advocacy nonprofit PEN America. The group has tracked more than 2,800 individual book titles that have been banned by school districts in the last two years alone, with nearly 6,000 instances of a district implementing some kind of ban policy.

Texas has implemented more book bans than every other state except Florida, a recent PEN America report found, with 625 bans currently in place as of this summer. Authors whose books are targeted are most frequently female, people of color and individuals who identify as LGBTQ, the report noted.

In that sense, if the Texas Board of Education decides next week to oppose the use of the new science textbooks, which accurately describe climate change, it may encourage some school districts to ban such books from being used in their classrooms and potentially create a new generation of climate skeptics.

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What Would Joe Manchin’s Open Senate Seat Mean for Climate Policy? West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin—the Democrats’ most conservative member—announced he would not seek re-election next year, almost certainly handing his seat over to the Republican party, Burgess Everett reports for POLITICO. Considering the GOP only needs two seats to gain a majority in the Senate, the move will undoubtedly affect future climate policy. 

US and China Reach “Understanding” on Climate Ahead of COP28: The United States and China have reached “understandings and agreements” on climate issues, David Stanway reports for Reuters, potentially dismantling key barriers to progress at the United Nations’ COP28 global climate summit being held later this month in Dubai. Common ground between the world’s two top economies and biggest greenhouse gas emitters is considered crucial for any consensus at COP28, which is expected to focus on issues like climate finance and more ambitious energy transition goals.

Many California Cities Are Understaffed and Unprepared to Mobilize Climate Funds: Local governments across the country have the opportunity to access an unprecedented amount of federal funding to combat climate change thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. But a new report has found that potentially a third of California’s cities and counties lack the workforce necessary to capitalize on those investments, Sharon Udasin reports for The Hill. Of the jurisdictions that responded to the survey, 33 percent said they have no staff working on climate-related efforts.

Texas voters will decide today whether to allocate billions of taxpayer dollars to build new gas-fired power plants. The referendum, which is likely to pass, is reigniting a debate over the role of clean energy in Texas and its passage will most certainly result in additional greenhouse gas emissions.

Supporters of the measure—known as Proposition 7—say it’s needed to reinforce the state’s power grid against extreme weather events, such as the devastating winter storm of 2021 that resulted in nearly 250 deaths and caused millions of Texans to lose power for up to three days.

“After Winter Storm Uri, it was clear for all to see that Texas needed more reliable dispatchable power because renewable energy sources failed to keep the lights on for millions of Texans,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a statement earlier this year.

But environmentalists and other critics of Prop 7 question whether it will truly improve grid reliability. They point to multiple expert analyses, including a joint investigation from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which found that the failure of gas power plants was a leading factor in those outages—not just frozen wind turbines.

Specifically, Prop 7 would create the “Texas Energy Fund.” The Republican-controlled legislature passed the measure this summer and Gov. Greg Abbott signed it into law. It allocates $7.2 billion in low-interest loans for “dispatchable” generation such as gas power plants, $1.8 billion in grants and loans for creating microgrids and another $1 billion for power infrastructure outside the jurisdiction of the state’s main grid operator. The law also explicitly excludes battery storage, which is also considered dispatchable, making it likely that the money will predominantly go to gas infrastructure.

Some energy experts say the measure actually limits the state’s ability to respond to extreme weather, and that the funds would be better spent on batteries and energy efficiency efforts that help lower overall electricity demand, which skyrockets on hot days as residents crank up their air conditioning.

“In a complex situation, you want every tool in the toolbox,” Michael Webber, an energy policy expert and mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told the San Antonio Express-News. “But the Legislature saying you can only use a wrench when you need a hammer, pliers or a screwdriver seems silly.”

Voters will ultimately decide whether to implement Prop 7 when they cast their ballots Tuesday. As the Washington Post reported, such referendums in Texas have rarely failed to pass. Houston Public Media also reported that a recent poll found that 68 percent of likely voters plan to vote in favor of Prop 7, while just 15 percent oppose it.

Texas has a history of issues with its grid, and public scrutiny of those problems has only grown in recent years as extreme weather, made worse by climate change, has increasingly highlighted the state’s vulnerabilities. Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s main grid operator, narrowly avoided rolling blackouts this fall and summer amid record-breaking heat waves. In fact, renewable energy and battery storage played a critical role in keeping the lights on during those hot spells as gas, coal and nuclear power plants strained in the triple-digit heat.

In June, when a coal-fired plant went offline, battery storage helped restore 75 percent of the lost electricity in minutes, Texas-based energy consultant Doug Lewin told me in an interview that month. 

The state leads the nation in clean energy capacity and has also made impressive gains in terms of installing utility-scale battery storage. Yet Texas Republicans have repeatedly blamed renewable energy for the state’s grid problems. And many top GOP lawmakers, as well as Gov. Greg Abbott, have been openly hostile to anything related to clean energy and climate change.

While clean energy advocates largely criticized Prop 7, some also saw a silver lining in the funding for microgrids, which studies have shown can help prevent widespread outages by limiting grid issues to smaller regions.

“I think the microgrid piece will be the most impactful thing that the legislature has actually done for the grid,” Lewin told the Post. “But it’s not a super high bar because they haven’t done all that much.”

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Texas Could Spend Federal Climate Funds to Expand Its Highways: Texas will receive $641 million in federal funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law aimed at cutting transportation-related carbon emissions. The Texas Department of Transportation has earmarked a chunk of that funding for its highway program, saying highway expansions could be eligible for the money since they reduce congestion and lessen car idling time, Erin Douglas reports for the Texas Tribune. Environmentalists and public transit advocates say the plan will hardly cut emissions and waste public money.

Amazon Drought Sparks Fears of Climate Tipping Points: The Rio Negro, one of the world’s largest rivers and major tributary of the Amazon, is facing an unprecedented drought, leading to record low water levels and raising concerns among scientists that it might signal larger implications for Earth’s climate, the Financial Times reports. The Amazon plays a vital role sequestering carbon emissions. But the drought could make forest fires more common and severe, ultimately releasing an enormous amount of carbon dioxide that pushes the climate past crucial tipping points.

Climate Activists Crack Glass Cover of Famous Painting in London’s National Gallery: Two climate change protesters were arrested Monday after they smashed a protective glass panel covering a famous Diego Velázquez oil painting at London’s National Gallery, Sylvia Hui reports for the Associated Press. The activists demanded that Britain’s government immediately halt the licensing of fossil fuel projects in the U.K, saying “it is time for deeds, not words.” Climate protests have grown increasingly disruptive in recent years amid lagging progress to slash global carbon emissions.

At least 14 people are dead and millions remain without power as of Friday afternoon after a bomb cyclone whipped through much of western Europe in what may be yet another sign of climate change not only driving up the severity of extreme weather, but also pushing them into places that aren’t accustomed to such harsh conditions.

Storm Ciarán on Thursday brought hurricane-strength winds and torrential rain to France, the Channel Islands and southern England, shattering windows, tearing roofs off homes and forcing hundreds of schools to close. By Friday morning, much of Italy’s Tuscany region was inundated. The floods swept away cars, trapped drivers in underpasses and forced people to climb onto the roofs of their homes to escape the deluge.

Among the dead was a five-year-old child struck by a falling tree in Belgium and an 85-year-old man found dead on the ground floor of his flooded home in Italy. The storm broke several records, including in France, which saw sustained winds of 75 miles per hour and gusts of more than 124 miles per hour, according to the country’s meteorological agency Meteo-France.

Without a proper attribution study, it’s difficult to determine whether climate change had any real influence over a single storm, wildfire or heat wave. Still, scientists say that global warming is generally making extreme weather events more severe and long-lived, with weather disaster seasons starting earlier in the year and ending later. In the case of storms like Ciarán, they’re being supercharged by warmer oceans and can hold more water because of warmer air, which translates to stronger winds and more rain.

“There are a lot of attribution studies and other lines of evidence showing that autumn/winter storms like this are more damaging because of climate change,” Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, said in an interview with CNN about Ciarán. “The rainfall associated with these types of storms is more severe due to climate change, and the storm surges are higher and thus more damaging due to the higher sea levels.”

There’s also a growing body of evidence that suggests natural disasters are cropping up in unexpected places, where—at least in modern history—such extreme weather was thought to be especially rare. In fact, Ciarán comes just weeks after northern England was slammed by flash floods and powerful winds from Storm Babet, which killed at least seven people.

Just last week, Hurricane Otis surprised many residents and tourists near Acapulco, a popular resort town on Mexico’s western shore, when it made landfall as a catastrophic Category 5 storm. It was the first storm on record to hit the region at that strength, bringing devastating winds of up to 165 miles per hour. At least 48 people have been confirmed dead and at least 36 are still missing, among them 11 Americans.

People in the famous party town were so unprepared, an untold number of fishermen and boat crews were still out at sea, ABC News reported, and they are now among those missing. That’s in large part because of how quickly Otis grew in strength, siphoning energy from the warm ocean waters of the Pacific.

“Because the storm intensified so quickly, with wind speeds increasing by 115 mph within 24 hours, the more than one million people living in and around the city had very little time to prepare for the monster storm ahead of landfall,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said this week in a report.

The autumn storms add to a record-breaking year for natural disasters. This summer in particular was marked by sweltering heat waves, torrential rainfall and raging wildfires that shook communities around the globe at a dizzying pace. In August, a massive wildfire in Hawaii killed at least 99 people and razed an entire town. And in July, torrential rain and flash floods contributed to dozens—if not hundreds—of deaths in India, South Korea, China and in the U.S. Northeast.

Among those killed was Katheryn Seleym, a 32-year-old Pennsylvanian mother, and her 2-year-old daughter Matilda Sheils, who were caught by a flash flood while driving. Authorities never found Seleym’s 9-month-old son, Conrad Sheils, and he’s presumed dead.

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Michigan House Passes Sweeping Climate Reforms in Potential Win for Gov. Whitmer: Michigan House lawmakers passed a major package of environmental bills designed to quickly transition the state’s utilities toward renewable energy, Kelly House reports for Bridge Michigan. The bills require utilities to get 100 percent of their energy from state-approved clean sources by 2040. The Senate must approve the House amendments before the bill goes to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer—a rising Democratic star who is being floated as a potential party leader—setting her up for a major political win.

Who Is and Isn’t Attending the COP28 Global Climate Talks: President Joe Biden is unlikely to attend the United Nations’ COP28 climate summit later this month in Dubai, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Reuters, saying the president’s attention has largely been split between the escalating war in Israel and a showdown with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives over federal spending. It’ll be the second U.N. climate conference the president missed this year. Pope Francis, however, will attend the summit, the Agence France-Presse reports. The leader of the Catholic Church recently shamed world leaders for not acting more quickly on addressing rising temperatures.

Ørsted Cancels Major Offshore Wind Project in Substantial Blow to Industry: Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, said on Tuesday it will cease development of a massive New Jersey wind project, Benjamin Storrow reports for E&E News, in the biggest setback to the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry to date. The announcement comes after offshore lease sales for wind development in the Gulf Coast saw surprisingly low interest earlier this year, raising major concerns among clean energy advocates who say the hurdles could harm the nation’s transition away from fossil fuels.

American farmworkers are increasingly at risk of heat-related illness and death as climate change drives temperatures around the world to record highs. That’s pushing more and more workers to harvest crops at night to avoid extreme heat, according to recent reports, which is creating a host of new risks that experts say need to be more thoroughly studied.

More than 2 million U.S. farmworkers, who typically toil outdoors under a hot summer sun, are exceptionally at risk of succumbing to heat-related illness, the Environmental Defense Fund warned in a July report, with heat-related mortalities 20 times higher for crop workers than in other private industries, as well as employees in local and state government. About three weeks of the summer harvest season are now expected to be too hot to safely work outdoors, the report’s authors added, and that number will only increase as global warming continues.

Government data and other studies have found that an average of 43 farmworkers die every year from heat-related illness. But top officials with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which oversees U.S. working conditions, say that number is significantly undercounted, largely because heat doesn’t get factored into deaths from cardiac arrests and respiratory failures. One advocacy group estimated that heat exposure could be responsible for as many as 2,000 worker fatalities in the U.S. each year.

In fact, this summer was the hottest on record for the entire northern hemisphere, federal scientists announced in September, in large part because of climate change. Parts of the Midwest and large regions of Europe are also experiencing record hot Octobers.

As the daytime heat has gone up, a growing number of agriculture workers—many of whom are Latino and undocumented—now work while it’s still dark out. But that could be trading one risk for a set of others, labor and safety advocates are warning.

“What concerns me most is the negative impacts on workers,” Heather Riden, program director at UC Davis Western Center on Agriculture Health and Safety, said in an interview with Civil Eats. “What does it mean to have a person work three or four hours in the morning, then come back in the evening to work another three or four hours? And what does that do for their sleep schedule, their family life, and their ability to stay awake when they’re driving at two in the morning? That is where we don’t have data; we don’t know the bigger-picture implications.”

The UC center published a report in 2019 that pointed to the increasing trend of nighttime crop harvesting, noting that such work could be causing more accidents due to poor visibility and tired employees. Working at early hours is especially dangerous for farmworkers who operate machinery, the report said, and the practice could even lead to disrupted sleep and hormone cycles that contribute to long-term health issues for workers, including an increased chance for miscarriages.

Lorena Abalos, who harvests cherries and blueberries in Washington state with her teenage son, told NPR that they began starting their shifts at 3 a.m. or earlier after an especially severe heat wave killed hundreds of people in 2021 across swaths of the Pacific Northwest. Harvesting at night, however, proved to be its own danger, she said, so she stopped bringing her son along.

“I no longer wanted to take him when we started to go in at 3 a.m. because it was very dangerous,” she said. “We would run into snakes, other animals and we pick blindly because they gave us a little lamp and we barely see our hands.”

Some states have passed safety standards for outdoor agricultural work that takes place at night. California, for example, approved standards in 2020 that require adequate lighting that minimizes glare, rear lighting for self-propelled equipment, pre-shift safety meetings and reflective safety gear for workers to wear. But it’s unclear how well those standards are being enforced, and because there are no federal regulations, many other outdoor workers in states without requirements remain unprotected. 

Advocates have been calling for such federal protections for years, but to no avail. That means—at least for now—many farmworkers will be stuck choosing between which threat they want to face: the heat or the dark.

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It’s Likely Earth Will Officially Cross 1.5°F Threshold in 2029, Scientists Say: Researchers are warning in a new study that Earth’s carbon budget is set to run out in less than six years, Seth Borenstein reports for the Associated Press. That means the planet will officially cross the critical climate threshold set by the Paris Agreement to limit the average global temperature to 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Beyond that temperature increase, the United Nations says, the world will experience a drastic uptick in climate-related consequences, including losing most of its coral reefs.

Global Discord Threatens COP28 Climate Talks, EU Commissioner Says: The need to strike a deal over mitigating climate change is “higher than ever,” but international cooperation has never been harder as geopolitics grow increasingly complicated. That’s the message delivered Monday by the European Union’s climate chief ahead of next month’s COP28 climate talks, Alexander Cornwell reports for Reuters. Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s climate action commissioner, pushed for an agreement to phase out fossil fuels and warned about backsliding on climate pledges due to the escalating Gaza conflict.

Carbon Removal Isn’t Just for Corporations. Individuals Are Paying For It, Too: Corporations and governments may not be the only ones pouring billions of dollars into the carbon removal industry in the coming years, Coco Liu reports for Bloomberg. A small but growing number of people are also paying companies to use controversial technologies that suck carbon emissions from the air. “We need to do everything we can,” said one Amsterdam resident who recently paid a company $930 to remove nearly 1,500 pounds of CO2 from the atmosphere.

With war raging in both Israel and Ukraine, this year’s military spending bills are widely viewed as among the most important and contentious items facing Capitol Hill.

Into the already pitched battle over the Fiscal 2024 budget, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has introduced an item designed to blow up a key item of President Biden’s climate agenda. He is sponsoring an amendment to the military construction and Veterans’ Affairs bill that would block federal agencies from tightening energy efficiency standards for new homes that they finance.

Although construction standards for low-income housing may seem far afield from construction funding for the Pentagon, a wide array of wish-list items often hitch a ride on such must-pass pieces of legislation. The riders then become subject for negotiation between the House and Senate. Or, as has been the case this year, they result in a standoff that nearly shuts down the federal government. The Republican-led House packed its version of the bill with cuts to clean energy programs, restrictions on reproductive health care and other riders that drew a Biden veto threat.

Now, Rubio, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has proposed using the legislation to address a top agenda item of the home building industry. His amendment would put a hold on proposed upgraded efficiency standards for new homes and apartments subsidized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Agriculture’s rural housing loan program. 

Rubio, who won reelection last year, was the top Senate recipient of campaign contributions from the home building industry in the 2022 election cycle, with at least $86,000 in donations, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Rubio’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

The standards upgrade he is seeking to block would require installation of higher-grade insulation and other efficiency measures in federally subsidized homes and apartments. HUD and USDA concluded earlier this year the new standards would provide more than $14,000 in energy savings over the life of a home, and more than $5,000 for a multi-family unit, because of reduced heating and cooling demand.

The National Association of Home Builders strongly opposes the upgrades, arguing that the agencies’ economic analysis is flawed, and in fact homeowners would not be able to recoup the increased cost of construction in energy savings in any reasonable time period. In comments filed with the agency this summer, the association said that the effect of the rule would be less availability of low-income housing.

“HUD and USDA have not given proper consideration to the challenges that even marginal construction cost increases present to builders who are trying to serve low-to-moderate income renters,” the association wrote.

But in a letter sent Wednesday to Senate leaders, a broad array of environmental, justice and business advocates urged rejection of the Rubio amendment. The cost of the requirements is only 2 percent of the average cost of a new home under the federal programs, paying for itself in less than 3 years on average, wrote the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and other advocates of upgraded standards.

“Without the new energy standards, low-income households will unnecessarily endure decades of higher energy bills and homes that are less safe in the face of extreme heat and cold,” the advocates said.

There is little debate that energy efficiency is one of the cheapest approaches to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But in a nation where building standards are set at the state and even local level, it has been difficult to enact nationwide policy to take a bite out of energy consumption by buildings, which generate more than a quarter of carbon emissions globally.

Setting standards for building construction that the federal government subsidizes is one of the few levers national policymakers have under current law. That’s why Congress, in its 2007 energy bill, required that HUD and USDA upgrade their energy efficiency standards regularly. 

The last time the agencies upgraded their standards was during President Barack Obama’s administration.

The Biden administration is attempting to sidestep the budget bill morass for top priorities like aid to Ukraine and Israel, which the White House is expected to seek in a separate supplemental funding request.

Proposals like Rubio’s will be in the mix as Congress, without a House speaker and facing another government shutdown deadline in November, decides the fate of the military construction and Veterans Affairs bill, the separate Defense bill, and 10 other spending measures. The dozen federal appropriations bills typically end up in massive omnibus budget bills, passed under pressure, with little time to spare—a process that often ends with at least some riders being enacted into law, even measures that would have little chance of passage as stand-alone legislation.

In such an unsettled environment, the fate of Rubio’s amendment is uncertain, at best, but veteran Hill observers are loath to rule out passage, given the strength of special interests like the home builders.

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Migrant Workers Face Dangerous Heat Ahead of COP28 Climate Talks in UAE: A human rights group is sounding alarm bells, saying migrant workers in Dubai have been working in dangerously hot temperatures to get conference facilities ready for world leaders attending this year’s international COP28 climate talks, Nina Lakhani reports for the Guardian. According to FairSquare, the migrants toiled on two days of extreme heat and humidity last month, even working through UAE’s “midday ban,” which prohibits outdoor work during the hottest hours over the summer months.

Biden Administration Announces $3.5 Billion for Grid Resilience Measures: The Biden administration on Wednesday announced it will put $3.5 billion toward electrical grid resilience projects, Zack Budryk reports for The Hill. It’s the nation’s largest ever single federal investment in the electrical grid and comes as energy experts warn that a lack of power lines is impeding the global clean energy transition. Biden officials said the funds, provided by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will cover 58 projects across 44 states and will allow more than 35 gigawatts of new renewable energy to be brought online.

Expect an El Niño Winter With a Climate Change Wild Card, NOAA Says: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its winter outlook this week, saying that the combination of a strong El Niño in the tropical Pacific Ocean and record high global ocean temperatures are likely to shape the upcoming winter season across the U.S., Andrew Freedman reports for Axios. That means that the Lower 48 states will have higher than average odds for an unusually mild winter. But forecasters say it’s still uncertain how that’ll translate to precipitation, and that there’s “still hope for snow-lovers.”

Officials from declining coal communities in Wyoming worry that the Biden administration’s environmental justice agenda is hurting their ability to compete for billions of dollars in federal clean energy and infrastructure grants, including funding that’s intended to help communities that stand to lose the most from the nation’s transition away from fossil fuels.

According to reporting from Wyofile, historic coal towns like Gillette, Wyoming, are failing to obtain federal clean energy grants despite a faltering economy and what they call strong applications. Local officials and economists from the University of Wyoming say it’s because Campbell County, in which Gillette is located, doesn’t qualify as a “disadvantaged community” under President Joe Biden’s Justice40 initiative.

Like many rural towns that have long depended on revenue from the coal industry, Gillette could be walking toward a financial cliff amid plummeting coal prices and as a growing number of the nation’s coal-fired power plants shut down. Since 2008, coal production in the region has declined by half and coal mine employment has shrunk by a third. A University of Wyoming report projects that the state’s coal mining industry will lose nearly a quarter of its customer base in the next decade.

“You would think Gillette would show up as a disadvantaged community because of the economic impacts they’ve had due to changes in coal markets,” Kara Fornstrom, director of the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources’ Center for Energy Regulation and Policy Analysis, told Wyofile. “But they don’t show up because a lot of the screening factors are per-capita income compared to the national average.”

Federal officials and environmental justice advocates, however, say the situation is not that simple.

Biden created Justice40 through executive order in 2021 as part of his broader effort to address the nation’s persistent socioeconomic and health disparities. It directs federal agencies to deliver 40 percent of the “overall benefits” of their environmental and energy investments to “disadvantaged communities that have been historically marginalized and overburdened by pollution and underinvestment.” 

The directive has broadly compelled federal agencies to prioritize so-called disadvantaged communities when awarding grants for clean energy or environmental projects—sparking a national debate over which communities should be included in that definition.

The White House has developed an online tool to identify those communities but has been criticized by some activists who say the tool leaves out important demographics.

Robert Bullard, a prominent environmental justice activist and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, has rebuked the tool’s methodology, saying it excludes middle-class Black families who live in disproportionately polluted neighborhoods due to racist policies like redlining. He promised to “fight just as hard” for any ailing rural Wyoming community that gets left out like those Black families were.

But Maria Lopez-Nunez, another member of the White House advisory council, said Justice40 isn’t meant to help just any community currently experiencing economic turmoil. While many rural areas have begun to face financial hardships in recent years, Lopez-Nunez said, the point of Justice40 is to help communities that have been historically overburdened by pollution and disenfranchised from political power and wealth.

“What we’re trying to do with Justice40 is fix old legacy issues,” she said. “It’s not meant to address what might happen when we move away from fossil fuels.”

By definition, Lopez-Nunez added, Justice40 only accounts for 40 percent of the federal clean energy funding, meaning 60 percent remains for municipalities that fall outside the current scope of the program.

Various federal agencies also interpret Justice40 slightly differently, meaning there is some flexibility in the way they reward their grants and who they decide qualifies to receive them, said a spokesperson for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 8 office, which oversees Wyoming.

The Department of Energy, for example, uses its own screening tool with its own set of metrics to identify disadvantaged communities, the EPA spokesperson said. And both the DOE and the EPA have expressed a willingness to award funding related to environmental justice to communities that aren’t initially identified as “disadvantaged” but provide compelling reasons for receiving the grants, the spokesperson added.

In fact, the Biden administration has anticipated that the clean energy transition would harm coal communities and has set aside federal funding specifically for that issue. Earlier this year, federal officials announced new policies that aim to ensure that rural regions hit by mine closures and shuttered power plants can get an economic boost from new federal energy and infrastructure funding. Those policies include access to nearly $38 billion in existing federal funding that coal communities can use to build new infrastructure, reclaim old industrial sites and revitalize their economies.

The Department of Energy, for example, announced $450 million from the infrastructure law that can be used to build clean energy projects on current and former mine sites.

“Coal workers and residents in energy communities have been the backbone of the American economy for decades,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in April, announcing the new policies, “and they must be at the center of our nationwide economic investment.”

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War in the Middle East Jeopardizes Climate Talks: A lasting war between Israel and Hamas could complicate climate talks next month in the United Arab Emirates by raising tensions between nations with fragile alliances and triggering a race to secure energy resources over reducing carbon emissions, Sara Schonhardt reports for E&E News. “Instability provides challenges to any attempt at trying to build a difficult bridge to consensus,” one analyst said. “This was the problem with Ukraine. You know, the world is getting hotter, but Ukraine was on fire. And this is going to be a problem in Dubai.”

Power Grids Aren’t Keeping Up With Green Transition, IEA Says: A new International Energy Agency assessment warns that stalled spending on electrical grids worldwide is slowing the rollout of renewable energy and could put efforts to limit climate change at risk if millions of miles of power lines are not added or refurbished in the next few years, David McHugh reports for the Associated Press. To meet their climate goals, world governments must add or refurbish some 50 million miles of power lines in the next two decades, amounting to more than $600 billion annually through 2030, the report said.

To Slow Climate Change, Some Want to “Engineer the Ocean”: A controversial idea known as “engineering the ocean” is gaining renewed interest among scientists as the climate crisis worsens, Barbara Moran reports for WBUR. Oceans currently sequester nearly a third of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions every year, but some marine researchers think it could absorb more. One idea involves adding iron to encourage kelp growth, which would suck up more carbon. But CO2 can also increase ocean acidification—a major threat to corals and other marine life.

Religious beliefs may play an important role in whether someone believes humans are warming the planet by burning fossil fuels, new polls found. The findings come as Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic Church, released his latest papal letter, rebuking the “irresponsible lifestyle” of Westerners and chastising those who try to delay efforts to address the climate crisis or deny its very existence.

“Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident,” Francis wrote in his exhortation released Wednesday, urging world leaders to do far more to address global warming ahead of the COP28 climate talks next month. “No one can ignore the fact that in recent years we have witnessed extreme weather phenomena, frequent periods of unusual heat, drought and other cries of protest.”

But despite the pope’s strong words, the second time he has in writing sought to raise awareness about climate change, a pair of surveys released over the last two weeks found that people who strongly identify with their religious beliefs tend to dismiss the overwhelming scientific consensus that the planet is warming at an unprecedented rate and humans are behind it.

A Pew Research Center survey, released last week, found that just 44 percent of American Catholics believe in human-caused climate change, while 29 percent believe the warming climate is due to “natural patterns” and 13 percent don’t believe Earth is warming at all. A second survey, released Wednesday by the Public Religion Research Institute, found that the higher someone valued their religious beliefs, the less likely they were to believe that Earth is warming because of human activity.

Among Americans who said that religion is the most important thing in their lives, only 39 percent agreed that humans are causing global warming, that survey found, compared with 56 percent of those who said religion is one among many important things, 65 percent of those who said religion is not as important as other things and 78 percent among those who said religion is not important at all. White evangelical Protestants, it found, were the least likely of all to believe in human-caused climate change—at just 31 percent.

The findings stand in stark contrast with the pope’s message Wednesday, which called for “lucidity and honesty in order to recognize in time that our power and the progress we are producing are turning against us,” underscoring the complex ways religion intersects with personal, cultural and political identities. The findings also suggest that spiritual leaders could be key in alleviating the political gridlock that continues to stymie global climate action.

“The work of spiritual leaders around the world may be our best chance of getting hold of things,” Bill McKibben, a prominent climate activist and journalist who founded 350.org and the Third Act movement, said in his recent newsletter. “Yes, the engineers have done their job. Yes, the scientists have done their job. But it’s high time for the human heart to do its job. That’s what we need this leadership for.”

But religion isn’t the only important factor at play. In fact, recent research suggests that Americans have generally become less religious over time. An Associated Press-NORC poll this year found that nearly a third of Americans say they have no religious affiliation, an 8 percent increase from 2021. Other surveys suggest that religion has also become increasingly entwined with political affiliations and nationalism, especially among conservatives. A Gallup poll published last month found that the more religious a person was, the more likely they identified as a Republican.

It’s a trend that some climate disinformation experts have warned about over the last decade, as right-wing media like Fox News and Breitbart actively stoke the flames of the American culture wars, framing efforts to address climate change and other hot button topics as an attack on personal, cultural and religious freedoms.

When Pope Francis published his seminal papal letter on climate change—Laudato Si—in 2015, pundits on Fox News called him “the most dangerous person on the planet” and suggested that he had aligned with “extremists who favor widespread population control and wealth redistribution.”

“Conservative media persistently erode trust in scientists by likening climate change to a ‘religion’ ad nauseum,” Media Matters America, the progressive media watchdog group, said in a report that year. “By doing so, they implicitly frame climate change skeptics as ‘brave dissidents against an oppressive set of beliefs.’”

Five years later, when the pope urged the newly elected President Joe Biden to inject new life into the nation’s climate efforts, political pundits on Breitbart were quick to label him the “woke pope,” utilizing a term that has become the go-to insult that Republicans hurl at any progressive priorities. As Francis urged the world to do more on Wednesday, conservative media again used it as an opportunity to stoke the country’s political divisions and cast doubt on well-established climate science.

“There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent,” Thomas Williams wrote for Breitbart, citing the false and misleading talking points of a known climate disinformation campaign. “However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.”

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Researchers Call for Urgent Emissions Cuts as Antarctic Sea Ice “Drops Off a Cliff”: Dozens of researchers studying Antarctica’s environment are calling for urgent reductions of global greenhouse gas emissions as the region’s sea ice levels during both the winter and summer reach the lowest point in 44 years of satellite record-keeping, Eloise Gibson reports for Radio New Zealand. “We are missing between seven and 10 New Zealands’ worth of sea ice,” an atmospheric and marine scientist told reporters at a recent press briefing in New Zealand.

Interior Department Official Who Announced Willow Project Approval Resigns: Tommy Beaudreau, the Interior Department’s second-highest ranking official, said he will step down from his post before the end of the month, Zack Budryk reports for The Hill. While no reason was cited for his departure, Beaudreau—a career staffer who previously worked in the Obama administration—has been criticized by progressives for being too close to the fossil fuel industry. He was also the official who announced the approval of the highly controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska.

U.S. Not Among Developed Nations That Pledged $9.3 Billion to Global Climate Fund: Developed nations pledged $9.3 billion for the Green Climate Fund, the 2010 fund based out of South Korea that has acted as the United Nations’ main money pool for helping vulnerable countries cope with climate change. But that falls short of the $10 billion target set for this year, Riham Alkousaa and Kate Abnett report for Reuters, after wealthy nations including the United States declined to contribute. A separate loss and damage fund is being established to cover the ongoing shortfalls of the Green Climate Fund.

Companies that want to do business in the European Union will soon have to pay extra if the carbon footprints of their products are too high.

The EU on Sunday officially began phase one of its carbon tariff. The first-of-its-kind tax scheme could help reduce the climate-warming emissions of industries that are notoriously hard to decarbonize, including cement and steel manufacturing.

Under the EU’s new policy, foreign companies must now report all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with certain imported goods: cement, steel, iron, aluminum, fertilizers, hydrogen fuel and electricity. Starting in 2026, any of those imports that don’t meet the bloc’s emissions standards will face an additional fee when crossing the border. Other goods will be considered for the tax in the coming years, the European Commission said.

The tax policy has drawn criticism from countries like China and Russia, which argue it undermines the principles of free trade and worsens geopolitical tensions. Supporters say the program is necessary to put EU companies on an even playing field with nations that have lower environmental standards. They also say it will incentivize industries to more quickly reduce their carbon emissions and encourage other countries to follow suit by adopting their own carbon tariffs.

The EU’s carbon tariff “is not about trade protection,” Paolo Gentiloni, the European economy commissioner, told Reuters. “It is about protecting the EU’s climate ambition and seeking to raise the level of climate ambition worldwide.”

By law, the EU must reduce its emissions 55 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

The way a carbon tariff works is relatively simple. A company in China, for example, might sell relatively cheap cement, but with a high carbon footprint because the product is made in factories that run on electricity from coal-fired power plants. That puts EU cement makers, which are required to have lower emissions, at a cost disadvantage.

The EU company has had to invest extra money to switch to cleaner energy sources, buy carbon offsets and install more energy efficient equipment—meaning that, for now at least, it must sell its cement at a higher price. A carbon tariff essentially reduces the price differences between the domestic products and the more carbon-intensive foreign imports, incentivizing companies sending goods to the EU to reduce their emissions to avoid the additional fee.

Climate activists have long called on nations to adopt carbon tariffs, saying they’re a crucial tool in the fight to curb global warming. If enough nations adopt similar tax schemes, they say, even the companies and governments most resistant to calls for climate action could be forced to play ball.

In the United States, where climate policy has been highly politicized, the concept of a carbon tariff has recently emerged as a rare opportunity for bipartisan support.

While Republicans have generally opposed any new domestic taxes, some have now jumped on board with the idea of taxing the carbon emissions of foreign imports, seeing it as a way to give the U.S. a leg up on rivals like China.

Earlier this year, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, introduced a bill in Congress proposing a carbon tariff. Called the “Foreign Pollution Fee,” Cassidy said the legislation “would curtail China‘s ability to undercut U.S. manufacturers by penalizing China for not meeting the same reasonable environmental standards to which domestic manufacturers are held” and “level the playing field for American workers, making it less likely that jobs migrate to China.”

Democrats proposed a similar bill last year, called the “Clean Competition Act,” championed by U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. The Whitehouse bill, however, would also charge domestic companies a fee if their emissions exceeded the average for their industry, E&E News reported.

With the two parties still fighting over budget issues, including efforts by GOP lawmakers to cut climate related funding made available under the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s unclear how either of the carbon tariff proposals will shake out this year.

Still, there are signs that the idea is gaining support. In August, a group of bipartisan lawmakers introduced the “PROVE IT Act,” which would require the Department of Energy to study the carbon intensity of U.S. industries with the intention of informing a future carbon tariff.

“The United States manufactures and produces domestic goods and resources with some of the highest environmental standards in the world—far cleaner than many of our global competitors,” U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, said in a statement announcing the bill. “I’m glad to join this commonsense legislation that will demonstrate to the world our environmental standards and promote the continuation of clean production.”

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NYC Subway Flood-Protection Projects Are Behind Schedule, Audit Says: New York City is working to make its subways more resilient to climate-driven flooding. But a new audit from the state comptroller office, coincidentally released on the same day the city saw torrential rain that shut down several subway lines, found that some of the city’s flood resilience projects are behind schedule or over budget, Michelle Kaske reports for Bloomberg. Work to revamp part of the F line damaged by Superstorm Sandy, for example, didn’t start until 2020 despite a planned 2014 completion date.

Organizers Cancel Twin Cities Marathon Amid Record Heat: The U.S. Northeast isn’t the only region that saw nasty weather over the weekend. Unseasonably high temperatures paired with high humidity over the weekend forced organizers of the Twin Cities Marathon in Minnesota to cancel the event for safety reasons, Minnesota Public Radio reports. Temperatures hit a record 92 degrees Sunday, an exceptionally hot day for a Midwest October. Some 300,000 spectators and 20,000 runners were anticipated to attend the event—a major race in which participants can qualify for the Boston Marathon. 

Treasury Warns of Climate Change’s “Substantial Financial Costs” on Americans: A new Treasury Department report warned that climate change is expected to impose “substantial financial costs” on U.S. households in the coming years due to severe flooding, wildfires and other extreme weather events that can drive up consumer prices, disrupt wages and damage property, Annie Nova reports for CNBC. It found that weather and climate disasters cost Americans more than $617 billion between 2018 and 2022—a record high for the country.

The United Auto Workers union expanded its strike Friday, bringing the number of employees who walked off the job to demand higher wages and better benefits from Detroit’s Big Three carmakers to 25,000. Republicans vying for the White House next year are using the moment as an opportunity to rail against President Joe Biden’s climate policies.

“Yesterday, Joe Biden came to Michigan to pose for photos at the picket line. But it’s his policies that sent Michigan autoworkers to the unemployment line,” former President Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, told a crowd of non-unionized autoworkers in Michigan on Wednesday. “He’s selling you out to China, he’s selling you out to the environmental extremists and the radical left.” 

That message was parroted later that evening by his rivals at the second GOP presidential debate, which Trump skipped.

“It’s not climate change we need to worry about,” said North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. “It’s the Biden climate policies.”

“One of the signature accomplishments of our administration was in just a few short years we achieved energy independence,” former Vice President Mike Pence added. “But on day one, Joe Biden declared a war on energy.”

As much of the world pivots at an unprecedented speed toward cleaner sources of transportation and energy to mitigate the worsening climate crisis, the United Auto Workers union strike has become the latest GOP culture war talking point and a new front line in the 2024 presidential race.

It’s unclear if the GOP’s message is resonating with the striking autoworkers. Some have publicly expressed support for Trump and disdain for EVs. Union leadership, however, has made it clear that they’re not buying it.

“I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for,” UAW President Shawn Fain said about Trump in an interview with CNN. “He serves the billionaire class and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”

More than 10 million electric vehicles were sold worldwide last year, accounting for a record 14 percent of total new car sales, according to the International Energy Agency. And more than 670,000 hybrid and fully electric vehicles were sold in the United States alone during the first half of 2023. Global manufacturers of EVs and batteries have also been expanding their operations in the U.S., signaling what could become a new green energy hub in the American South. 

Much of that growth, at least in the U.S., is being driven by the roughly $370 billion made available for clean energy and climate efforts from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ sweeping spending package passed last year and Biden’s signature accomplishment in the fight against global warming. 

More recently, the law has fallen in the crosshairs of Republicans promising to put an end to “Bidenomics” and “woke finances.” GOP lawmakers, mostly following the lead of a small group of rightwing hardliners in the House, have tried several times this year to force spending cuts to IRA clean energy tax credits, including during the debt ceiling debate this spring and during the federal budget negotiations this summer. 

That fight reignited this month, threatening to send the U.S. into a government shutdown over the weekend. If Congress can’t come up with a timely resolution, the consequences would go beyond federal employees missing their paychecks. Those hoping to buy a new home, for example, might be unable to obtain flood insurance if Congress doesn’t reauthorize the National Flood Insurance Program. And billions of dollars in federal disaster aid could be withheld from some of the communities hardest hit by climate change, including Puerto Rico.

On Thursday, Republican Sen. J.D. Vance from Ohio, introduced the latest GOP bill aimed at curbing Biden’s climate agenda. Not only would Vance’s bill eliminate federal tax credits for electric vehicles, but it would also establish a new $7,500 tax credit specifically for American-made gas-powered vehicles. “We can secure a bright future for American autoworkers by passing this legislation and reversing the misguided policies of the Biden administration,” he said.

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Food Prices Are Rising. Blame Climate Change, El Niño and Russia’s War: Global food prices for staples like rice, cooking oil and onions are on the rise as nations impose export restrictions to mitigate their own food shortages, caused in part by climate change, Aniruddha Ghosal, Evelyne Musambi and Joeal Calupitan report for the Associated Press. Historic drought, floods and other climate-driven extreme weather is damaging crops and adding to other stress points on the world’s food systems, including rising transportation costs associated with the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine.

Biden Administration Says It Will “Phase Down” Offshore Oil and Gas Drilling: The Biden administration released a new oil and gas lease plan today, calling it a “phase down” of the nation’s offshore drilling in line with the president’s goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It includes the fewest lease sales ever offered in a five-year plan, including none off the Atlantic, Pacific or Alaskan coasts. But any new drilling beyond what’s already approved jeopardizes international climate goals under the Paris Agreement, and climate advocates see the plan as another reminder of Biden’s broken promise to end fossil fuel development on federal lands and waters. —Nicholas Kusnetz

Reaching Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Is Still Within Reach, Says IEA: Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. But the path is still open to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which scientists say is necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change, Jeff Brady reports for NPR. That’s the message from the International Energy Agency’s latest report, which found that the Paris Agreement goals can still be reached if nation’s curb fossil fuel production and triple renewable energy investments to $4.5 trillion a year by the early 2030s.