This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In a dramatic twist of political defections and contentious concessions, the longest ever federal shutdown came to a close last week as Congress finally managed to agree on a deal to reopen the government. Federal agencies are now beginning to […]
Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez is on a mission at COP30 to save the trees — specifically the untold numbers that are sacrificed for the production of UN reports that no one reads.
A new report titled “Data Crunch: How the AI Boom Threatens to Entrench Fossil Fuels and Compromise Climate Goals” from the Center for Biological Diversity warns the booming artificial intelligence industry’s high resource consumption threatens the world’s climate goals, despite rosy prognoses of AI’s projected benefits. Co-author Jean Su says that the increasing use of AI for military applications offsets any positives it offers for climate change mitigation. “What we need to do is empower communities and countries, especially in the Global South, to ask what is the public benefit that they are supposed to get from AI, and weigh it very carefully against the severe cost to their climate, to their electricity prices and to their water.”
Sudanese climate diplomacy researcher Lina Yassin is supporting the Least Developed Countries Group at the U.N. climate summit in Belém, Brazil. The group is composed of 44 countries, including Sudan, whose cumulative emissions amount to less than 1% of total global emissions. “They are the countries that have the least amount of resources to respond to the climate crisis,” explains Yassin.
Yassin also discusses the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, where the estimated death toll is now at 150,000. “This is a proxy war funded by foreign nationals who have vested interests in Sudan’s resources. … The UAE has been using the RSF militia to illegally smuggle gold out to finance the war and finance their own gold reserves. The UAE is also really interested in Sudan’s agricultural lands.”
Wealthy countries promised billions of dollars to help developing nations adapt to climate change, but the result rests on a shaky foundation of fuzzy accounting.
At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil, we sit down with Colombian environmentalist Susana Muhamad, who served as Colombia’s minister of environment and sustainable development from 2022 to 2025. Muhamad discusses the U.N.'s mandate to mitigate the acceleration of human-caused climate change and condemns the powerful, diverting influence of the fossil fuel lobby. Muhamad, who is of Palestinian descent, also responds to the United States' attacks on boats in the Caribbean and to the ongoing Israeli genocide of Gaza. “These are not issues that are not correlated,” she says. “Humanity can do better. [We] can be very proactive and productive in shifting this situation of climate crisis, rather than continue investing in arms, in armies and in defense.”
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Restrictions on solar and wind farms are proliferating around the country, with scores of local governments going as far as to forbid large-scale clean-energy developments. Now, residents of an Ohio county are pushing back on one such ban on renewables—a move that […]