September, 07 2021, 03:32pm EDT
Sunrise Movement Responds to Biden's Comments at Press Briefing in New Jersey
Today, following Joe Biden's comments at the New Jersey Press Briefing where he saw firsthand the devastating impact of Hurricane Ida, Ellen Sciales, Communications Director of Sunrise Movement, released the following statement:
WASHINGTON
Today, following Joe Biden's comments at the New Jersey Press Briefing where he saw firsthand the devastating impact of Hurricane Ida, Ellen Sciales, Communications Director of Sunrise Movement, released the following statement:
"President Biden's visit to the site of climate disasters today makes clear that he wants to be the Climate President, but now we must ask -- is he willing to let Joe Manchin stand in the way of his legacy? The Build Back Better agenda he's proposed is the bare minimum of what is needed for history to judge this Presidency in any sort of positive light.
"Biden must do everything in his power - from using his bully pulpit to moving members of his Party - to pass at least a $3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation package. He can begin to stop this endless suffering, if he chooses to. If Biden does not deliver on at least a $3.5 trillion investment through budget reconciliation, while he has a potentially fleeting Democratic majority, future generations will ask why he didn't do more when we still had the chance."
Sunrise Movement is a movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process.
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Bonn Conference Confirms Climate Action Impossible Unless Corporate Capture of UN Process Ends
"A climate process that remains vulnerable to obstruction and corporate influence cannot deliver the action this crisis demands," said one group.
Jun 18, 2026
As international climate talks backed by the United Nations wrapped up Thursday in Bonn, Germany, campaigners stressed that policymakers must do more to curb the influence of polluting industries if such negotiations are going to have any hope of helping the world bring the fossil fuel era to an end.
The Bonn climate talks—officially the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Mid-Year Subsidiary Bodies meetings, or SB64—serve as a technical and diplomatic staging ground for the next UN Climate Change Conference, or COP31, which is scheduled to take place in Antalya, Türkiye this November.
With current national climate pledges remaining far from what's needed to limit planetary warming to 1.5°C—the increasingly moribund target at the heart of the Paris Climate Agreement—experts and campaigners are taking aim at the UNFCCC’s reliance on consensus-based decision-making, which allows a handful of fossil fuel-producing nations and the oil, gas, and coal industries to block ambitious climate action and weaken international agreements.
“At the climate talks in Bonn, States failed to make meaningful progress and pushed back on already established agreements, exposing a critical truth: Climate justice should not be vetoed, and reform of the UNFCCC is needed to enable climate action at the speed and scale the crisis demands," Lien Vandamme, senior campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said in a statement Thursday.
The #JuneClimateMeetings further exposed the structural barriers slowing climate action: 🤝#ConsensusKillsAmbition, 🕴️Corporate influence,🪑Barriers to participation. It's high time for States to #FixTheUNFCCC.Read more in our statement: www.ciel.org/news/june-cl...
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— Center for International Environmental Law (@ciel.org) June 18, 2026 at 6:27 AM
Vandamme added that "effective multilateralism is the only way out of the climate crisis, and this process does not live up to that expectation."
Rallying under a "Friends of Science" banner, dozens of nations are calling out coordinated attacks by fossil fuel producers and the oil, gas, and coal industries on science that threatens their economic prospects.
“We see coordinated efforts to cast doubt on the best available science driven by a narrow set of interests, not by the needs of our people,” lead Panamanian negotiator Ana Aguilar said during a Wednesday press conference.
“We have seen this playbook before," she added. "Manufacture doubt, delay the response, and let the vulnerable people pay this bill.”
Lead Fijian negotiator Sivendra Michael put it more bluntly, telling reporters, "Anyone that is blocking references to science—they are not our friends."
There has been some progress. As CIEL noted:
It is encouraging that, after more than three decades, the UNFCCC has begun to acknowledge concerns around the corporate capture of the process. The open dialogue on transparency and integrity that happened in Bonn represents an important—but long overdue—step towards addressing the influence of polluting industries in the climate negotiations. This dialogue must be the start toward a meaningful, comprehensive policy to address corporate capture of climate negotiations. A climate process that remains vulnerable to obstruction and corporate influence cannot deliver the action this crisis demands.
Erika Lennon, CIEL's senior attorney, pointed to April's First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, as a hopeful sign. The Santa Marta conference, which was free of major polluters like the United States, China, Russia, and India, took aim at what climate defenders called the “shamefully weak” draft text—called the Multirão Decision—produced at last November’s COP30 in Brazil. The final document removed all mentions of fossil fuels amid pressure from oil and gas-producing nations like the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, and the presence of a record number of industry lobbyists.
“The Santa Marta Conference demonstrated that a fossil fuel phaseout is not out of reach," Lennon said Thursday. "But Bonn showed that the institutions meant to deliver that accountability remain constrained by outdated rules and undue influence from polluting interests."
"We need effective multilateralism and an effective climate regime, not one that is incapable of delivering accountability or tackling the root cause of the climate crisis, fossil fuels, at the speed and scale the crisis demands," she added. "As attention turns to COP31, governments must confront the structural barriers that continue to delay meaningful action, from consensus rules that allow a small number of states to block progress, to the absence of robust safeguards against conflicts of interest, or violations of the rights of meaningful participation of representatives from climate-vulnerable communities."
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Thanks to Trump's Iran War Disaster, Fossil Fuel Industry to Enjoy $700 Billion Windfall in 2026
"We witness not only a massive fossil fuel crisis but a vast upward transfer of wealth built on instability of fossil fuel markets and pain," said an expert at 350.org.
Jun 18, 2026
US President Donald Trump’s war with Iran may finally be reaching a close. But consumers and businesses around the world will continue to pay the price in the months ahead as still-elevated energy costs funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to fossil fuel giants.
That’s according to a report from the environmental group 350.org released Thursday, following Trump’s signing of a memorandum of understanding with Iran this week to begin the process of formally ending a war that has sent global oil prices skyrocketing and saddled ordinary people with record fuel prices.
The group estimated that just 110 days of war resulted in the transfer of an additional $374 billion from consumers and businesses into the coffers of oil and gas companies beyond what would have been expected had the war never been launched.
And while Trump claims his agreement to end the war this week will avert an “economic catastrophe,” there will likely still be tremendous pain even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens promptly.
Using oil and gas pricing scenarios from the International Monetary Fund’s April 2026 World Economic Outlook and data on global consumption, 350.org predicted that by the end of the year, consumers and businesses will spend an additional $199.8 billion on oil and $128.1 billion on gas above a non-war scenario, making for a grand total of more than $700 billion as a result of the war.
This, the group said, is a conservative estimate, as it does not even take into account knock-on effects. The war will ultimately end up costing much more when factoring in inflation across the rest of the economy, resulting from higher fuel costs or fertilizer shortages caused by the strait's closure, which has affected food prices.
It also does not take into account the resulting effects on economic output or employment as rising costs and lower consumer spending force companies to tighten their belts.
"The oil and gas industry is draining billions from people and businesses on the back of a war that has killed thousands and pushed millions toward poverty and hunger," said Andreas Sieber, head of political Strategy at 350.org.
"Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow, we should expect prices to remain above pre-crisis levels," he said. "We witness not only a massive fossil fuel crisis but a vast upward transfer of wealth built on instability of fossil fuel markets and pain."
While the war has brought it into starker relief, previous reports from 350.org have shown that even if the US had never attacked Iran, the continued global dependence on fossil fuels was resulting in trillions of dollars of avoidable costs each year, including $9.3 trillion to mitigate climate-related damages and air pollution-related deaths each year, costs that disproportionately fall on the world's poorest.
In order to alleviate economic strain from the war, Sieber said, "governments should tax these excess profits now and use the revenues to protect people, cut bills, and rapidly deploy renewables that make households and small businesses less vulnerable to the next fossil fuel shock.”
Estimates of inflation also do not account for how the war has heightened global instability and poverty, which will require additional resources for humanitarian relief efforts. In late April, the United Nations Development Program estimated that even if the conflict had ended then, more than 32 million people worldwide would be pushed into economic precarity.
This is not to mention the resources that will need to be expended to address the harms caused by the war itself.
In exchange for negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, a portion of the memorandum of understanding requires the US to work with "regional partners," presumably other Persian Gulf allies, to scrounge up at least $300 billion to help Iran pay for reconstruction and economic development after the country was devastated by American and Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure and millions were displaced.
As a report from the International Rescue Committee detailed last week, the Iran war has also had cascading effects on other conflicts and catastrophes.
"Six months ago, the IRC warned that a New World Disorder was emerging," said David Miliband, the humanitarian group's president and CEO. "Since then, disorder has not only grown but accelerated. A war with Iran. A million people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon. A brewing global food security catastrophe that risks plunging millions more people into acute hunger. An expanding Ebola outbreak. Defanged diplomacy and collapsing aid budgets."
"The Iran war couldn’t have happened at a worse time," Miliband said in a New Yorker article published Thursday. "It set off a chain of events that’s very damaging.”
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'Another Unauthorized Trump Fund': Democrats Fume Over $300 Million in Taxpayer Money for Ballroom
"While Republicans slash healthcare and other programs Americans depend on, President Trump is reportedly using hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for a White House ballroom," said US Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi.
Jun 18, 2026
Democratic lawmakers are reacting with disgust amid new reporting on how the White House has been using sneaky budget maneuvering to get US taxpayers to fund President Donald Trump's luxury ballroom that was never approved by Congress.
According to a Thursday report in The Washington Post, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mysteriously shifted $352 million within the US Secret Service budget that had been earmarked for training and recruitment, but that will now be spent on White House security measures.
An insider familiar with the process told the Post that the redirected funds were related to the construction of the ballroom.
A White House spokesperson did not deny that the money was going toward the ballroom project, while insisting that "the East Wing Modernization Project is inextricably tied to the security of the president, the White House grounds, and the certain security infrastructure assets."
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, told the Post he was concerned that money "intended to pay Secret Service agents and ensure they have the technology and resources they need to keep individuals under their protection safe" is now being spent on the president's "vanity project."
In a Wednesday interview with NOTUS, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said it appears Trump "was just flat out lying when he said the taxpayers will not pay a dime for his ballroom," adding that it appears "he is now trying to find ways to funnel public money into it."
In a Thursday social media post, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) contrasted Trump's willingness to use taxpayer cash for his ballroom with cuts he and the GOP made to vital healthcare and food assistance programs.
"While Republicans slash healthcare and other programs Americans depend on," Krishnamoorthi wrote, "President Trump is reportedly using hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for a White House ballroom he claimed would be privately funded."
Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) similarly argued that while the GOP's 2025 budget law "kicked 4.3 million people off SNAP and 5 million people off [Affordable Care Act] health insurance coverage," the administration is now "dishonestly spending millions of dollars of YOUR money to fund a ballroom instead of helping struggling Americans put food on the table and receive essential medical care."
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) linked the ballroom money to other Trump schemes to enrich himself through the presidency, including his acceptance of a luxury jet from the government of Qatar and his $1.8 billion slush fund for political allies.
"Now we learn that Trump’s bad architecture obsession is costing us all $600 million," Raskin wrote, in reference to earlier reporting on how the ballroom project has ballooned in costs from the White House's early estimates. "Turn your illegal Qatari jet over to the people and we’ll sell it for $400 million and we’ll take the rest out of other illegal emoluments and slush funds, including the $1.776 billion fund for insurrectionists, and the Board of Peace, another unauthorized Trump fund bankrolled by money misallocated from the State Department."
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