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Opinion
Two Negotiations, One Crisis: Why COP30 and the UN Tax Convention Must Finally Speak to Each Other
The world can no longer afford two disconnected frameworks for the same global emergency.
Nov 19, 2025
This week, governments are negotiating climate finance in Belém, Brazil and new global tax rules in Nairobi, Kenya. The coincidence of these talks happening at the same time—yet with almost no structured conversation between them—may be the clearest indicator of how disconnected the global response still is.
Climate negotiators discuss financing needs without asking where predictable public resources will come from, while tax negotiators debate revenue rules without acknowledging the rising costs of the climate crisis.
Treating these as separate worlds is no longer viable. Both deal with cross-border harms and deep inequality, and both require cooperation grounded in equity and responsibility.
The world cannot afford two disconnected frameworks for the same global emergency.
What tax negotiations can learn from climate governance
The climate regime learned early that unequal responsibility cannot be ignored. Under the Paris Agreement, global standards are paired with nationally determined plans. The system links international expectations with domestic realities.
The climate crisis has made the links between public finance, inequality, and environmental survival impossible to ignore.
International taxation has never made this leap. Failure to cooperate has allowed multinational corporations and wealthy individuals to underpay tax by shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions and hiding wealth behind secrecy. As a result, countries lose an estimated US$492 billion each year to cross-border tax abuse, according to research by the Tax Justice Network. These losses directly undermine governments’ ability to fund the climate action, social protection, care systems and economic diversification essential for a just transition.
With this round of Nairobi negotiations now concluded, countries have signaled a rare opportunity to advance a stronger UN tax convention—one that delivers fairer rules on taxing rights, tackles profit shifting, and strengthens transparency.
The convention represents a historic chance to shift the burden from ordinary people to those who profit most from pollution and extraction, and to build an international system that restores countries’ tax sovereignty—the ability of states to use tax to deliver on their people’s aspirations.
Subnational leaders are already doing what global systems have failed to do
Cities, states, and regions are carrying the weight of climate action. They build early warning systems, reinforce infrastructure, manage disaster response, and support communities during heatwaves, floods, and droughts. In practice, this means that the vast majority of climate implementation takes place at the subnational level—in many countries this accounts for 70 percent or more of climate-significant public expenditure, rising to over 80 percent in some cases. Yet these same actors receive only around 10 per cent of climate finance.
This mismatch is structural. Global climate finance is built around national governments and large international funds, with access that is slow, complex, and tilted toward institutions with high administrative capacity. Local authorities dealing with climate impacts every day are left without the stable resources they need.
Despite this, subnational governments are modelling practical, fair climate finance. Kerala’s 1 percent flood levy helps rebuild homes, roads, and schools after major floods and strengthens community readiness for future shocks. Elsewhere, solidarity arrangements between neighbouring jurisdictions channel revenue from polluting activities into joint adaptation projects. Together, these examples show how small, well-designed levies can generate stable public revenue and ensure those with greater responsibility contribute more.
These local approaches matter far beyond their borders. They show that progressive, people-centred taxation can be implemented at scale and can complement national and international systems. They are blueprints for how global rules could be designed to be more equitable and more closely aligned with lived realities.
Global South leadership on solidarity levies shows what climate and tax reform can achieve together
A coalition of eight countries—including Kenya, Colombia, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Mozambique, Tanzania, France, and Spain—launched the Premium Flyers Solidarity Coalition, backing levies on business class, first class, and private jet travel. These charges target the highest emitters and, if coordinated across willing countries, could raise around €121 billion a year, depending on design—offering a major new source of finance for adaptation, resilience, and loss and damage.
This approach builds on existing practice: more than 52 countries already apply some form of aviation levy. Several governments in the Global South are now examining just and equitable air-passenger levies that place higher costs on higher-income and higher-emitting travellers. In Kenya, for example, the new Air Passenger Service Charge sets fees at KSh 600 (about US $4) for domestic flights and KSh 6,500 (about US $50) for international flights, with higher rates for premium-class travel and the possibility of future increases through Gazette notice. These measures demonstrate how countries can advance climate ambition while strengthening the revenue tools needed to deliver it.
For many countries across Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, fiscal space is tightening, debt is rising, and private finance cannot meet essential adaptation needs. Solidarity levies are not a replacement for existing commitments, but they remain one of the most practical tools for generating reliable, debt-free public revenue at the scale highlighted in the Baku-to-Belém roadmap.
The Nairobi negotiations cannot become another exercise in managed ambition
A familiar dynamic has emerged in Nairobi. Countries from Africa and the wider South are pushing for meaningful shifts, while some high-income countries and tax havens are using procedural delays and vague language to avoid commitments. Concerns about sovereignty are raised selectively, even as the climate crisis shows that sovereignty today is strengthened through cooperation, shared rules, and predictable public finance—not through isolation.
A new global tax system is being designed, but many negotiators do not yet seem aware of the scale of this moment or its implications for climate action, inequality, and development. Without mechanisms to tax major emitters, high-net-worth individuals, and multinational polluters, the emerging convention risks becoming another symbolic agreement.
The reforms under discussion are not abstract. Ending harmful tax incentives, tackling profit shifting, and strengthening transparency could raise US$2.6 trillion a year for governments worldwide—more than enough to meet climate-finance needs and expand fiscal space for development. These are the tools countries require to invest in resilience and reduce debt pressures. Choosing not to adopt them is, in effect, choosing climate austerity—underfunded systems facing ever-rising climate costs.
Tax rules decide who carries the costs of the climate crisis
The climate crisis has made the links between public finance, inequality, and environmental survival impossible to ignore. Since 2015, the richest 1 percent have captured US$33.9 trillion in newly created wealth—an amount that dwarfs the total wealth owned today by the entire bottom half of the world’s population
Alongside this, the world's largest oil and gas companies made around US$200 billion in profits in 2022, much of it in the form of windfall gains amid the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And all of this sits atop a global economy that still directs more than US$7 trillion a year in fossil fuel subsidies—public money that props up the very industries driving the crisis.
It is against this concentration of wealth and public resources that this week’s negotiations show how closely climate action and revenue systems are intertwined. Recognizing that connection—and acting on it—will determine the future governments choose to build, and whose pockets they expect to fund it.
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Gigs That Work For All
A California pilot program offers a new blueprint for workforce development.
Nov 19, 2025
For over a decade, academics and progressive policymakers have been fretting about the “future of work” and the “gigification” of labor. And for good reason. Since the ascendance of companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart in the early 2010s, hundreds of thousands of people have taken on the work of fulfilling “gigs” provided by such apps. Consumers have become habituated to getting their rides, groceries, and household goods at the push of a button.
Workers often turn to “gig” jobs because they need flexible work schedules due to caregiving responsibilities or the need for multiple jobs to make ends meet. However, this work is usually low paying, precarious, and unprotected by employment or labor laws. That’s by design, and it’s a big problem: Those laws were created with the intention of protecting just these sorts of workers. The companies behind the apps argue that this is simply the price of flexibility.
There’s no reason that flexible work should require sacrificing the protections, rights, and opportunities provided by employment, like a guaranteed minimum wage and overtime for long hours; the right to a healthy and safe workplace; protections against discrimination and harassment; and insurance against the downside risks arising from the loss of jobs or workplace injuries.
Treating workers as independent contractors without rights and protections has become standard practice for many platform companies. Promoted by venture capital funders, the practice feeds a narrative that the acquisition of skills, experience, and on-the-job savvy—traditionally a responsibility of employers—falls on individual workers to “entrepreneurially” pick up such training on the job. Yet this perspective contradicts a fundamental principle of workforce development, which recognized the wider economic benefits arising from building a skilled workforce.
The Long Beach pilot demonstrates that flexibility can also come with good jobs and opportunities to enhance skills while meeting pressing employer staffing needs.
An innovative public pilot in Long Beach has shown it is possible for gig work to benefit workers, employers, and the broader community. The Workers Lab, an organization that funds innovations for and with workers, and Pacific Gateway, the City of Long Beach’s public workforce board, have invested in a platform called WorkLB. The technology behind the platform, originally developed with the British Labor government, plays a matchmaking role by connecting employers and workers based on needs, skills, and schedules.
Pacific Gateway is demonstrating that flexible schedules and the opportunity to do short-term work can go hand in hand with decent earnings, protections, rights at work, and upward mobility. Moreover, the program shows that such opportunities can also benefit businesses and public agencies looking for workers and seeking to improve the workforce development system.
This simultaneously undermines the dominant narrative of a trade-off between flexibility and workers’ rights, and shows how government intervention can effectively address issues arising from the so-called Gig Economy.
The Long Beach model allows Pacific Gateway to either act as, or delegate the responsibility to vet and oversee workers, ensure proper payroll management, provide healthcare, abide by labor law, and pay for liability insurance.
To participate, employers must be willing to pay the local minimum wage (currently $16.50 per hour in Long Beach), with a markup of 2.5% ($0.40 per hr) to help defray the costs of administration. For workers, this unique model helps them find the best work opportunities based on their skills, interests, and scheduling needs. Whether short or long-term, these work opportunities are W-2 jobs providing good wages, benefits, and labor protections. All that, and flexibility.
Pacific Gateway credentials workers through its formal intake process, awarding them “badges” to market their skills. Unlike traditional, for-profit staffing agencies, which have also proliferated in the gig economy space, that treat workers’ skill levels as proprietary data, Pacific Gateway makes this information readily available to prospective employers.
By using a public workforce agency in this staffing agency role, Pacific Gateway is fulfilling the original intention of the federal Employment Services program—to match workers with employers, connect workers to the appropriate training opportunities, and then place them in actual jobs.
In a reversal of gig work common sense, WorkLB’s app allows workers to review their employers, which helps ensure that Pacific Gateway recruits employers providing good jobs rather than placing workers in exploitative and precarious work. While the app currently does not allow employers to rate the workers, it enables them to track the progression of a worker to incentivize full-time work conversion where desired.
Participating workers in Long Beach report high satisfaction with the program, saying that it provides quality jobs with transparent pay, clear expectations, and legal protections and allows them to demonstrate their skills to prospective employers. Employers get a vetted, skilled workforce for on-demand jobs that serve their longer-term workforce needs. The federal workforce system was created to do this, but perpetually lacks the funding to do so at the appropriate scale.
Given its success thus far, there is growing interest in adopting similar pilots in other parts of the country. Additionally, these pilots may provide a salient avenue for much-needed workforce development at the state and local level that meets both workers' and employers’ needs, especially as the current Trump administration slashes federal programs, such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and mandate greater work requirements that may impact state and local workforce funding. However, the greatest challenge is funding these pilots, especially as federal funding is cut. The Long Beach pilot was primarily funded through philanthropic dollars, but given the need to scale future efforts, public funding is critical. Now is the time for states and localities to think creatively, whether by developing sector-based partnerships with employers and unions where all partners have “skin in the game,” or identifying other public funding streams, to support this growing workforce.
Workers often accept low-paid and precarious gig jobs because they need them to shore up failing household budgets while juggling complicated schedules. The Long Beach pilot demonstrates that flexibility can also come with good jobs and opportunities to enhance skills while meeting pressing employer staffing needs, thereby benefiting workers, families, and the wider community.
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Trump's Data Deletions Will Make It Harder to See How His Policies Harm Children
Without this data, the impacts of manifest Trump administration policies on vulnerable children are hidden from view.
Nov 19, 2025
On Thursday, the federal government is expected to release jobs data that was not available during the 44 days of the shutdown. As an advocate and expert on the economic security of women and families, I’m happy this data will be updated. But I’ve been thinking about other important federal data that the Trump administration eliminated, related to children’s health and well-being, which doesn’t seem likely to be reinstated.
For example, the US Department of Agriculture announced in September that it will be discontinuing the Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS) and the accompanying Household Food Security report. The annual Household Food Security report shows how many children and families across the country are struggling to obtain enough healthy food. We know that Black and brown children are at disproportionate risk of poverty and food hardship, and actions by the Trump administration—including cuts to food aid intended for food banks earlier in the spring, the refusal to pay full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits during the shutdown, and the historic cuts to SNAP made by the budget reconciliation bill in July ($287 billion over the next 10 years)—can only be expected to make it worse. But we will no longer have the data to confirm those expected increases in food insecurity.
Here’s another example: The Division of Reproductive Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) monitors pregnancy risk, and maintains a dataset that shows disparities in maternal and infant health. Unfortunately, earlier this year, the Department of Government Efficiency cuts slashed the staff in the office responsible for that data. (What’s more, there is now a banner on the web page that states in part, “This page does not reflect reality and therefore the [Trump] Administration and [the US Department of Health and Human Services] reject it,” which kind of undermines confidence.) Instead of addressing the crisis of Black women’s maternal health, we are erasing evidence of it. This is likewise problematic since the budget bill also made trillion-dollar cuts to healthcare.
And critical data besides the Department of Labor’s Employment Situation Summary, such as the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, was suspended during the shutdown—making it harder for us to know how Black and brown children are doing. (The Census Bureau’s website, incidentally, says this data will be released “as soon as possible.”)
By getting rid of federal data about Black and brown children, women, and families, this administration is making it impossible to see the harm they are wreaking—harm to a generation, harm that will have lifelong effects.
The lack of this data makes it harder and harder for us to see how some kids, especially kids of color, are doing—whether they are hungry, whether they are healthy, much less if they are in trouble. Without this data, moreover, the impacts of these and manifest other Trump administration policies on vulnerable children are hidden from view.
To be sure, this data is only part of the Trump administration’s efforts to make Black and brown children—and their parents—invisible. The federal government has used President Donald Trump’s “anti-DEI” executive order to eviscerate programs like Head Start and rewrite history. The pictures of workers on the Department of Labor’s website are now all white men. Immigrant children and families are literally disappearing from their homes, from their jobs, and from their schools into detention centers. Why should we pay attention when the data showing ongoing racial disparities in hunger or health outcomes disappears—or fight to reinstate it?
By getting rid of federal data about Black and brown children, women, and families, this administration is making it impossible to see the harm they are wreaking—harm to a generation, harm that will have lifelong effects. All of us, parents, families, and communities, need that data back because we can’t help heal that harm, until we know where our kids hurt.
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Did Centrism Help Democrats Win in Virginia and New Jersey? Or Was It ICE's Brutality?
With the Republicans becoming ever more authoritarian, centrism moves the entire political spectrum to the right.
Nov 19, 2025
The Democratic centrists are at it again, looking to show that the road to success is paved with middle-of-the-road candidates like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York is being written off as the fluke product of a deep blue city, while the newly elected governors are hailed as the very model of successful centrist Democratic messaging.
Rahm Emanual, former Obama staffer, Mayor of Chicago and Wall Street advisor said:
If you are trying to win national campaigns that bring in a whole slew of swing voters, is the test Park Slope, Brooklyn — or what happens in New Jersey and Virginia? I am less interested in the Upper West Side and more interested in the Upper Peninsula. That is how you win.
Others argue that in substance Mamdani’s platform is not radically different from those of the moderate governors. Ry Rivard and Madison Fernandez wrote in Politico:
For all their ideological differences, Zohran Mamdani, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger found a shared language that aims at the heart of President Donald Trump’s populism: the high cost of everyday life.
Their wins suggest a recalibration of Democratic politics — from moral crusades to kitchen-table math.
Affordability is the new mantra, to be sure, but the moderates are not ready to take on the fundamental causes of unaffordability. Those require you to take on the Democratic donor class. To truly make America affordable again, you need to slap major controls on Wall Street-financed oligopolies and rein in the wealth extraction machines that are private equity and hedge funds. Since the Democrats are not about to bite the donors’ hands that feed them, moderation is their best and only policy.
But maybe that timid moderation isn’t the reason the Dems won in this abbreviated cycle. Maybe the moderates won for a completely different reason that has little or nothing to do with affordability, like the fact that ICE has been coming after Hispanic immigrants, often with extreme violence, often arresting citizens and jailing them without cause. This everyday cruelty is ripping people from their communities and families across the country. It’s ugly and lots of voters of all persuasions don’t like it.
If that’s the case, I would think we would see a big shift in Hispanic votes from Trump in 2024 to Sherrill and Spanberger in 2025. And as best I can tell, that’s exactly what happened.
About 16 percent of all eligible voters in New Jersey are Hispanic. The two counties with the largest concentration are Hudson and Passaic. In Hudson County, the Hispanic vote shifted away from Trump by 23 percent, while it shifted away by 18 percent in Passaic County. “Sherrill carried Latino men and women alike, and even flipped 18% of Latino Trump voters,” reported CBS News.
While only 9 percent of Virginians are Hispanic, the two counties with the highest Hispanic concentrations (over 40 percent) are Manassas and Manassas Park. Although these are small counties, in Manassas Spanberger picked up 9 percent more votes than Harris did in 2024, while also picking up 13 percent more in Manassas Park.
It’s not hard to understand why Hispanic voters might be turning against Trump and his ICE machine. Many Hispanic citizens live with some undocumented immigrants, often family members. And Hispanic citizens have friends, neighbors, and co-workers who are Hispanic, all of whom know they might get stopped by masked members of ICE based on how they speak or the way they look or during a raid of their workplaces. Trump promised to deport serious criminals, but his administration has pivoted to targeting anyone who might be in the US without papers based on how they look. That includes many hardworking immigrant citizens.
The latest Kaiser Family Fund/New York Times poll confirms these fears:
“One in five immigrants say they personally know someone who has been arrested, detained or deported since January. Four in ten worry they or a family member could face such action. Many immigrants, including naturalized citizens and those who are lawfully present, say they feel less safe, are avoiding activities outside their home, and no longer view the U.S. as a good destination for immigrants.”
The Democrats would be wise and righteous to come to the defense of these working people, rather than dance the moderate two-step (“let’s work on affordability but leave the wealthy alone”).
As we’ve noted repeatedly, a strong majority of voters want a path to citizenship for undocumented workers. Our Rust Belt survey showed that 63 percent of the voters of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin support granting citizenship to undocumented workers who have been here three years, paid their taxes, and have not committed a felony crime. That support includes 36 percent of 2024 Trump voters.
Mamdani openly supports a path to citizenship, but do the new governors?
Instead of giving marathon speeches and shutting down the government, Democrats would make a powerful statement if they went out into the streets to protect immigrants from deportation. What would the public’s reaction be if every Democratic member of Congress got arrested standing up for due process and immigrants at ICE raids and facilities? Their mugshots would be a badge of honor, noticed by a public hungry for human solutions to real problems, not political terror. They would likely have more impact than counting on “affordability centrism” to stop Trump and his billionaire friends.
With the Republicans becoming ever more authoritarian, centrism moves the entire political spectrum to the right. It is just an excuse for ducking the hard task of taking on the monied elites who are sucking wealth away from working people.
Jim Hightower, the old-school populist columnist who served as Texas Commissioner of Agriculture for eight years, always had disdain for political centrists. As he pointed out many moons ago, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”
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