ice

State records reveal a faulty manure control structure noted in previous inspections, and “freshly dead fish with some stranded gasping for air, manure on top of ice, and dirty flowing water below ice…”

An unintended consequence of President Donald Trump’s trade policy could be a realization of the hazards of imported oil and gas.

“I like to remember how much more effective the oil and natural gas industry is at providing a real solution to climate change than any international treaty such as Paris or Kyoto” — Kathleen Sgamma, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management

A close oil and gas industry ally and Project 2025 author with a history of minimizing climate change may soon lead the federal agency that leases out public lands for drilling, speeding the way for the rampant exploitation of America’s national public lands for private profit.

President Donald Trump nominated Kathleen Sgamma, the longtime president of the Western Energy Alliance — a Denver-based oil and gas trade group — to run the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres of public lands, largely in western states.

If Sgamma is confirmed, oil and gas companies will have a close friend and former colleague in office to respond to industry wishes. Sgamma is likely to leave no favor ungranted for the wealthy fossil fuel executives who spent a shocking $450 million to fund Trump’s campaign and elect friendly lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Sgamma was one of a small group of people who wrote the Project 2025 section on the Department of Interior,^[1]^ claiming that the Biden administration declared a “war on fossil fuels” — a statement that ignores the reality that U.S. crude oil and natural gas production both set new records during the Biden administration.

Six thousand tax lobbyists descended on Capitol Hill in 2024. Out of the top 100 entities hiring the most tax lobbyists, all but two represented corporate interests.

• Over 800,000 metric tons of plastic from end-of-life vehicles in Europe end up in landfills or incinerators each year.
• However, despite the automotive industry’s sustainability commitments, less than 20% of these plastics are recycled.
• The Global Impact Coalition's Automotive Plastics Circularity project is working on recycling ELV plastics more efficiently.

Ways listed:

1. Rethinking the value chain: from waste to resource.
2. Regulatory incentives: setting the right targets.
3. Advancing recycling technologies: from limitation to innovation.
4. Financing circularity: sharing the cost, sharing the benefits.

Reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is not rocket science. Our policies need to make climate-related pollution more expensive via carbon pricing or more restrictive via performance regulations. Governments may also give tax breaks and grants to households and industries to foster low-GHG choices.

But climate-policy experts know from decades of evidence that without carbon pricing or regulations to decarbonize our energy system, population and economic growth will cause GHG emissions to rise.

Our analysis of the party platforms for the April 28 election shows that GHG emissions would fall by 2035 under the Liberal approach – even with the removal of the unpopular but effective consumer carbon tax. They would rise under the Conservative plan to axe existing performance regulations along with the carbon tax.

The Conservatives argue that investing in clean technologies – nuclear energy, hydroelectricity, tidal power and carbon capture, utilization and storage – and removing red tape around developing these options will reduce emissions, although they have not outlined the details of these promises.

However, experts have long known that energy-supply subsidy programs alone do not reduce emissions in the end-use sectors of industry, buildings, and transport.

In addition, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have announced details of the impact on emissions of any policies they might enact to combat U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war, such as short- or medium-term expansion of oil and gas production or building new pipelines. Therefore, these have only a modest effect in our analysis.

Main Takeaways

• Internal combustion vehicles – those that run on gasoline and diesel fuel – produce CO~2~ and a number of air pollutants.
• Over recent decades, big improvements have been made in reducing vehicle-emission pollution; however, it is still problematic at a global scale.
• Transport accounts for one fifth of CO~2~ emissions globally; of this portion the majority comes from road transport (cars, motorcycles, buses, and taxis).
• Rising atmospheric CO~2~ from vehicle emissions and other human activities has been driving recent global warming.
• Air pollution from vehicles has health effects like respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, and even an increased risk of getting cancer.
• You can reduce your vehicle pollution by using more sustainable transport options like electric vehicles, ride sharing, walking, bicycles, and public transport.

• As REDD projects around the world face setbacks, restoration projects in the Amazon are flourishing as a means of reviving market confidence in forest-based carbon credits.
• In Brazil, the golden goose for restoration, this business model has attracted companies from the mining and beef industries, banks, startups, and big tech.
• Federal and state governments are granting public lands to restoration companies to recover degraded areas.
• Restoration projects require substantial investments and long-term commitment, face challenges such as increasingly severe fire seasons, and deal with uncertainty over the future of the carbon market.

The world added the lowest amount of coal power in 20 years, as 44 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity came online in 2024, a strong signal for the continued decline of the most polluting fossil fuel, according to Global Energy Monitor’s definitive annual survey of the global coal fleet.

Now in its tenth year, the “Boom and Bust Coal” report strives to track nearly every coal plant and proposal in the world through the Global Coal Plant Tracker. Data in the tracker show that the coal fleet inched up less than 1% in 2024, for a net increase of 18.8 GW, as 25.2 GW of retired capacity cut into the record low additions — driven by a quadrupling of retirements in the European Union.

The trickle of new operating capacity was mirrored in most of the world by a drying up of the pipeline of under development coal capacity — projects that have been announced or are in the pre-permit, permitting and construction phases.

Just eight countries proposed new coal plants in 2024, down from twelve countries in 2023. In the wealthier 38 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), coal plant proposals are down from 142 in 2015 to five today.

New coal proposals have also dwindled in Southeast Asia, due to coal phaseout pledges in Indonesia and Malaysia, a moratorium on coal plant permitting in the Philippines, and the development of just transition planning in Vietnam. Indonesia was the only country to propose new coal plants in Southeast Asia in 2024, all captive coal plants.

Latin America is nearing zero coal proposals, with only Brazil and Honduras proposing new coal plants that have lingered for years. In 2024, Panama committed to phasing out coal power in two years, by 2026.

Progress towards phasing out coal from the global power mix continues to be undermined by developments in China and India. Record high construction starts for coal plants in China followed on the heels of the country’s 2022 to 2023 permitting resurgence. If not curtailed, the wave of new coal plants could undo President Xi’s pledge to strictly limit the growth in coal consumption through 2025.

India also proposed a record number of new coal plant proposals in 2024, as the government renewed the country’s support for coal power after a multi-year slowdown. The Indian government has committed to “phase down” the use of coal, but has not set a formal timeline for when such a phasedown in generation or capacity will begin.

In November 2024, Monica Feria-Tinta, a veteran of UN tribunals and the international criminal court, strode through a heavy black door into a Georgian building in London’s august legal district for a meeting about a tree in Southend. Affectionately known as Chester, the 150-year-old plane tree towers over a bus shelter in the centre of the Essex seaside town. The council wanted to cut it down and residents were fighting back – but they were running out of options. Katy Treverton, a local campaigner, had travelled from Southend to ask Feria-Tinta’s legal advice. “Chester is one of the last trees left in this part of Southend,” said Treverton, sitting at a large table in an airy meeting room. “Losing him would be losing part of the city’s identity.”

Feria-Tinta nodded, deep-red fingernails clattering on her laptop as she typed. She paused and looked up. “Are we entitled to nature? Is that a human right? I would say yes. It’s not an easy argument, but it’s a valid one.” She recommended going to the council with hard data about the impact of trees on health, and how removing the tree could violate the rights of an economically deprived community. Recent rulings in the European court of human rights, she added, reinforced the notion that the state has obligations on the climate crisis. This set a legal precedent that could help residents defend their single tree in Southend. “It isn’t just a tree,” said Feria-Tinta. “More than that is at stake: a principle.”

The meeting was just a tiny example of a much bigger shift in how law is being used to fight climate breakdown. Since the early 1980s, communities and campaigners have turned to the courts to fight back against polluting industries. But traditional environmental claims are geographically specific – as in West Virginia, say, where residents sued the chemical firm DuPont for failing to prevent toxic chemicals from leaking into their water supply. Climate litigation presents very different challenges. A vast number of actors are responsible for emissions, making it hard to establish legal responsibility, and often the worst harms occur in a different continent to the worst emissions. But in the last decade, a series of court cases around the world have sought to change the legal status quo. “It’s been a huge shift,” said Adam Weiss, chief programmes and impact officer at ClientEarth, an environmental law charity that has spearheaded this approach. “Judges now see the environmental issues we’re facing as existential, and have allowed the interpretation of human rights law to shift to grasp that.”

Feria-Tinta is one of the pioneers of this change. In 2017, she worked on the first case to argue before an international court that state failings on the climate crisis were violating the human rights of a group of Indigenous people. The case was successful, and since then, hundreds of claimants around the world have made similar arguments. Feria-Tinta is “one of a small group that’s really engaged in thinking strategically about how to use the law as a tool to push for greater ambition on climate change and biodiversity”, says Margherita Cornaglia, a barrister specialising in climate and environmental justice.

After the meeting with Treverton, Feria-Tinta explained to me how all of these grand legal debates related to Chester the tree. “It is not just that this tree is threatened, but that it’s valuable,” she said. “After the second world war we developed certain standards in human rights treaties because of the horrors humanity endured. But we separated what is human from nature. We are living in such a cataclysmic moment that only now are we realising how vital nature is for human beings. The law has to be reframed, rethought.”

Many observers see the law as the last hope for preventing catastrophic climate change. “It seems to me all other avenues have been exhausted,” says Brett Christophers, professor at Uppsala University and the author of The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet. “Governments and companies aren’t taking serious and significant action, but in theory, at least, both are beholden to the law.” This strategic shift also has limitations, since, put bluntly, states can ignore rulings made in faraway international courts (or, for that matter, in their own courts). Meanwhile, it is not just environmental groups who are embracing climate-related litigation. In the US, there has been a significant rise in cases filed by airlines, fossil fuel producers and even states arguing against the obligation to consider climate risk in their financial planning. Yet Feria-Tinta passionately believes in the power of the law to create change. As the world passes the grim benchmark of 1.5 degrees of global heating, can the law save us from environmental destruction?