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For Immediate Release
April, 27 2023, 11:33am EDT
Contact:
Melissa Garriga: melissa@codepink.org
Major Climate Organizations Demand Peace Talks in Ukraine
Letter Delivered to Congress Demanding Peace in Ukraine Now for the Sake of the Planet
CODEPINK members hand-delivered a letter today to Congress members on behalf of a coalition of major climate justice organizations. The large nationwide groups have one simple demand for President Biden and Congress - “immediately support a ceasefire and peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.” The letter addresses the need for Biden to use his power to leverage diplomacy and peace talks between Russia and Ukraine based on climate justice reasons alone.
Major national organizations signed on include Amazon Watch, Rainforest Action Network, Extinction Rebellion US, 198 Methods, and Beyond Extreme Energy. They are joined by regional organizations/chapters such as Extinction Rebellion DC, Extinction Rebellion San Francisco, Veterans for Peace Chapters 113 Hawaii and 106 North Texas, Waco Friends of the Climate, and North Alabama Peace Network. In total, nearly 50 groups are included as signatories.
The coalition focuses on the ecological devastation of war and militarism on the climate during an era when we are running out of time to address and reverse the collapse of a sustainable environment for future generations. The letter outlines a few points including the exponential increases in greenhouse gas emissions from rocket attacks and explosions and the sabotage of the underwater Nord Stream pipelines that led to the release of 300,000 tons of methane gas into the atmosphere - the largest release of methane gas emissions ever recorded.
It also points to the resumption of filthy coal-fired power generation and U.S. companies increasing their exports of dirty energy to Europe to supplement during the conflict.
During the delivery of the letter to Congressional members, CODEPINK organizer Olivia DiNucci learned that many congressional staffers were unaware of the deadly environmental consequences of militarism and active war.
Despite the efforts of organizations like CODEPINK and the damning report released by Brown University on the Cost of War, few are making the connection between the war industrial complex, the authorization of military aid packages, and our current climate crisis.
“We will continue to educate, organize, and disrupt until not only the connection is made but action is taken to save people and the planet,” said CODEPINK organizer Teddy Ogborn. “War can no longer be a policy option for nations. If any leader of a nation is even remotely serious about protecting the sanctity of life, they would push for a ceasefire and use their influence to establish peace talks.”
CODEPINK is a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs.
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Citing Child Cancer Risk, Lawsuit Targets Trump EPA Over Glyphosate
"The EPA's silence leaves families in the dark and falls far short of its responsibility to protect public health," said the Environmental Working Group's president.
Apr 21, 2026
Just days before the US Supreme Court is set to hear arguments related to glyphosate's health risks, the Environmental Working Group on Tuesday sued the Trump administration for unlawfully delaying its response to an EWG petition seeking stronger restrictions on "the most widely used herbicide in the United States and globally."
The filing at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit calls out the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to act on evidence that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, "is exposing infants and young children to harmful levels through everyday foods."
EWG and its co-petitioners filed a formal administrative petition under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 2018, during President Donald Trump's first term, and amended it the following year. They want the EPA to revoke or modify the glyphosate policy for oats, so it's stricter, and restrict its use as a pre-harvest drying agent.
"Congress required EPA to ensure that pesticide residues in food are safe, with particular protection for children," the new filing states. "Yet, more than seven years after being presented with substantial scientific evidence that the current tolerance for glyphosate in oats may not meet that standard, EPA has failed to make any final, reviewable determination."
EWG president and co-founder Ken Cook declared in a Tuesday statement that "parents shouldn't have to second-guess whether everyday foods like cereal and snack bars are putting their children at risk of cancer."
"The EPA's silence leaves families in the dark and falls far short of its responsibility to protect public health," he continued. "It's time for the agency to stop stalling and do its job."
The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic" to humanity over a decade ago, while the EPA has repeatedly claimed that it is not likely to cause cancer in humans despite mounting research, the recent retraction of a landmark study on the pesticide's supposed safety, and legal battles between patients and Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018.
Next week, the nation's top court is set to hear arguments in a case that, as EWG warned Tuesday, "could have sweeping implications for whether farmers and consumers can keep pursuing lawsuits for harms linked to glyphosate, and whether states can require warning labels on glyphosate products."
The Wall Street Journal noted Monday that while the company continues to insist on glyphosate's safety, it "wants anyone with a claim to join the settlement" negotiated with a team of lawyers representing around 40,000 claimants that "would bring Bayer's total price tag to resolve the Roundup litigation to roughly $22 billion."
Despite Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s campaign promise to "Make America Healthy Again," the administration has notably sided with Bayer in the case before the Supreme Court, and the president in February even issued an executive order mandating the production of glyphosate.
"If anyone still wondered whether 'Make America Healthy Again' was a genuine commitment to protecting public health or a scam concocted by President Trump and RFK Jr. to rally health-conscious voters in 2024, today's decision answers that question," Cook said at the time. "It's a shocking betrayal to all of us but especially the people who live and work near farm fields where glyphosate is used."
Still, EWG is plowing ahead with its legal action, arguing that "the EPA has a clear legal duty to act on this petition, and it has simply refused to do so," as the group's general counsel and COO, Caroline Leary, put it. "This kind of delay has real consequences for families who rely on the agency to ensure children are not exposed to toxic farm chemical residues like glyphosate."
"This is exactly the kind of situation where courts are meant to step in," Leary added. "The EPA cannot avoid its responsibilities simply by doing nothing."
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Amnesty Calls for Resistance to 'Predatory World Order' Pushed by Trump, Netanyahu in Annual Rights Report
"We must imagine a transformed and transformative human rights vision for the world that we are becoming, not merely defend human rights in terms of the world we once were."
Apr 21, 2026
Opening Amnesty International's annual report on human rights around the globe on Tuesday, the group's secretary general named the leaders of two powerful countries as being at the forefront of a push for a "predatory alternative world order."
While the US and Israel are viewed as two of the world's leading democracies, said longtime human rights advocate Agnes Callamard, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have spent the past year promoting "a global environment where primitive ferocity" is flourishing.
"Throughout 2025, voracious predators stalked through our global commons, hulking hunters plundering unjust trophies," wrote Callamard in the preface to the report, "The State of World's Human Rights."
"Political leaders like Trump, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and Netanyahu, among many others, carried out their conquests for economic and political domination through destruction, suppression, and violence on a massive scale," she added.
The report was published nearly two months after the US and Israel began attacking Iran in an unprovoked war—violating international law, including the United Nations Charter, according to legal experts. A temporary ceasefire deal was struck nearly two weeks ago, and Trump said Tuesday that he is unwilling to extend the truce and expects "to be bombing" Iran again soon if a permanent deal isn't reached.
More than 3,300 people have been killed in Iran since the US and Israel began the war, while the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have also killed at least 2,294 people in Lebanon as it wages what it says are attacks on the Iran-aligned group Hezbollah—an assault that has displaced about 1.2 million people, representing more than 20% of Lebanon's population, and included attacks on schools, healthcare facilities, and journalists.
Israeli officials have said they are using Gaza as a "model" for the IDF's assault on Lebanon. Israel's US-backed war on Gaza began in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, and has killed more that 72,000 Palestinians, including at least 777 people since a ceasefire was agreed to in October 2025. Leading human rights groups including Amnesty as well as Holocaust scholars have said the war on Gaza is a genocide, and South Africa has filed a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for Netanyahu's arrest, accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
In addition to waging war on Iran, in the past year the Trump administration has invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, accusing them of drug trafficking; bombed more than 50 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing at least 180 people in an operation officials have also claimed is aimed at stopping the drug trade; and imposed an oil blockade on Cuba while threatening military intervention there.
Meanwhile, the White House has slashed foreign aid spending, threatening millions of lives worldwide, as well as investments in domestic social programs, as it's pushed to further increase the United States' astronomical military budget.
"The predatory world order discards racial and gender justice, mocks women’s rights, declares civil society a common enemy, and rejects international solidarity," wrote Callamard. "It directs an unprecedented hike in military investments, enables unlawful arms transfers, and imposes sweeping cuts to international aid budget, risking millions of avoidable death and decimating thousands of organizations working for human rights, sexual and reproductive rights, or press freedom."
Callamard warned that far too many world leaders—confronted with superpowers that "recklessly poured" accelerants over "dry kindling" and took "sharp U-turns... away from the international order that had been imagined out of the ashes of the Holocaust and the utter destruction of world wars"—either appeased Trump and Netanyahu over the past year, attempted to imitate their authoritarian tendencies, or "ducked for cover under their shadow."
She noted that a "handful chose to stand up to them," such as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who refused to allow the US to use its airspace and military bases for the Iran war, and countries that joined South Africa's genocide case at the ICJ.
But overall, Callamard wrote, "one firebreak after another was breached: through complicity in, or silence about, the commissions of genocide and crimes against humanity; and through imposition of crippling sanctions against those working to deliver justice. That’s how 2025 will be remembered: for its bullies and predators; for the pouring of the politics of appeasement onto burning betrayals of international obligations; for self-defeatism; for states playing with a fire that threatens now to burn us all and scorch the future too, for generations to come."
Callamard emphasized that around the world in 2025, countries showed that "predatory" leaders can still be held accountable and that "reports of the death of the international rule-based order are greatly exaggerated":
Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, was handed over to the ICC under a warrant for the crime against humanity of murder. In the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, 156 states voted for negotiations on an international instrument on autonomous weapons systems. In July, the EU extended the scope of goods covered by its pioneering Anti-Torture Regulation. Significant progress was made in 2025 towards a binding UN tax convention. At COP30, civil society and trade union pressure helped adoption of a Just Transition Mechanism for the protection of workers and communities as countries shift to clean energy and a climate-resilient future. The International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued advisory opinions affirming state human rights obligations to respond to climate damage. Colombia and the Netherlands agreed to co-host the First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in April 2026. Countrywide strikes and actions by dockworkers mounted in France, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Spain, and Sweden disrupted arms shipment routes to Israel. The governments of Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Slovenia, South Africa, and Spain committed in 2025 to modify or halt arms trade with Israel. Women gained expanded abortion rights in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Luxembourg, and Malawi. In Nepal, a youth-led uprising against corruption toppled the government.
Those victories, suggested Callamard, don't change the fact that the world is now facing a "challenging moment, threatening to destroy all that was built up over the last 80 years."
"Today 'still we rise' means focusing on what must be defended as a matter of priority and at all costs, not only for the sake of our human rights but those of future generations too," said Callamard. "In our resistance, we must also clearly identify what must be disrupted as a matter of absolute priority, among the tsunami of laws, policies, and practices unleashed by predatory state and nonstate actors."
"We must imagine a transformed and transformative human rights vision for the world that we are becoming, not merely defend human rights in terms of the world we once were," she wrote. "Together, we must then lead that transformation into existence, with all our creativity, determination, and resilience."
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$2 Billion Per Day Spent by US on Iran War Could Have Saved 87 Million Lives, Says UN Humanitarian Chief
A UN official said a proposal to provide food, water, medicine, and shelter to tens of millions of those facing war and poverty could have been funded “in less than a fortnight of this reckless war.”
Apr 21, 2026
US President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is costing nearly $2 billion per day, according to a Harvard analysis based on estimates from the Pentagon. The head of the United Nations’ humanitarian agency said the money could instead be used to save more than 87 million lives around the world.
Tom Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), spoke at Chatham House on Monday about a “cataclysmic” funding crisis for the UN, in large part due to the termination of billions of dollars in funding from the US and other major powers such as the UK. Fletcher said his agency has seen its budget cut by around 50%.
"We're already overstretched, underresourced, and literally under attack," Fletcher said, citing the more than 1,000 humanitarians who have been killed in conflicts around the world over the past three years.
The Iran war, launched at the end of February by the US and Israel, Fletcher said, has stretched UN budgets even further, both by causing chaos within Iran and Lebanon—where more than 5,000 people in total have been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 4 million displaced collectively—but also by creating economic upheaval that has exacerbated crises elsewhere.
"You have the [Strait] of Hormuz—fuel prices up 20%, food prices up almost 20%, our humanitarian convoys blocked," Fletcher said. "We've had to take those convoys by air and by land. And the impact, which I think we'll be feeling for years, of those price rises on Sub-Saharan and East Africa, pushing way more people into poverty."
Fletcher said that just a fraction of what the US has spent waging the war could have been used to provide a full year of funding for a plan he laid out in January to provide lifesaving food, water, medicine, and shelter to those in dozens of countries facing war and poverty.
“For every day of this conflict, $2 billion is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritized plan to save 87 million lives is $23 billion," he said. "We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”
Beyond the financial toll, he said, US actions may have done irreparable damage to the authority of international humanitarian law and to UN bodies tasked with enforcing it.
He noted the dramatic increase in the number of humanitarian workers killed around the world over the past three years. According to a UN report earlier this month, of the more than 1,010 of them who were killed in the line of duty, over half were killed during Israel's genocide in Gaza and escalating attacks in the West Bank.
"A thousand dead humanitarians in three years," Fletcher said. "When did that become normal?"
He called out the UN Security Council, where the US is one of the permanent members with veto power, for its weak responses to the killing of humanitarians and other flagrant violations of the laws of war.
"Don't just give us a generic statement where you say humanitarian workers should be protected," he said. "Make the phone call, call out the people killing us, stop arming those who are doing it."
He said "big powers" view geopolitics in a highly "transactional" way and do not use the Security Council as a mechanism for defending international humanitarian law.
"I wouldn't have thought I'd need to say that a couple of years ago, that the Security Council should be defending international humanitarian law, and yet here we are," he said.
He said that Trump’s recent violent rhetoric toward Iran—which again verged into outright genocidal territory over the weekend when he pledged to “blow up the entire country” with overwhelming attacks on civilian infrastructure—has only further corroded international law.
“The idea that suddenly it’s okay to say, ‘We’re going to blow stuff up,’ ‘We’re going to bomb you back to the Stone Age,’ ‘We’re going to destroy your civilization,’ that kind of language is really dangerous,” Fletcher said. “It gives more freedom to all the other wannabe autocrats around the world to use that sort of language.”
But he said the aggression of the US and its allies has also made the world more warlike and less "generous," leading countries to put more money into defense that could otherwise go toward alleviating global suffering.
"Whether you're making the cuts [to UN funding] for ideological reasons or because you're too busy bombing someone else or because now you feel more insecure at home and so you have to invest more of your money in defense and less in generosity," he said, "all of that ultimately has an impact on the over 300 million people that we're here to serve."
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