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When Peace Collapses, So Does Climate: A Call for Peace Ecology
The damaged planetary ecology can only recover if people and societies see themselves as an integral part of nature and live in peace with one another.
Jan 24, 2026
Peace ecology considerations make it clear that a long-neglected aspect of armament and military activities is the massive environmental destruction caused worldwide by the military, especially during and after wars (Trautvetter 2021, Scheffran 2022, Moegling 2025). But even in its normal day-to-day operations and military exercises, the military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. In addition, the environmental destruction and emissions caused by the production of weapons must be taken into account. Emissions from the reconstruction of destroyed cities must also be considered.
The concept of peace ecology has high analytical value and normative appeal and should be used in the future as an important subfield of peace studies and research. Peace ecology addresses peace between people and societies, as well as peace between humans and their ecological context, and in particular the connection between these two perspectives. The point here is that the damaged planetary ecology can only recover if people and societies see themselves as an integral part of nature and live in peace with one another. Only through peaceful coexistence can the energy and necessary measures be generated to curb or reverse the environmental destruction that is already occurring.
Military Domination of Nature
The poisoning and destruction of the environment, with serious consequences for the biosphere, i.e., for the earth, air, water, humans, animals, and plants, is only now gradually coming to public attention on the fringes of the current protests by the environmental and peace movements. However, Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung already addressed this aspect in 2004 from a peace-ecological perspective:
One thing is the damage done to the ecosystem, another is the reinforcement of the general cultural code of domination over nature, which is also part of the rape syndrome. Countless millions of people are watching not only how people are being killed and wounded, but also how nature is being destroyed and going up in flames.
Wars not only kill and injure people and destroy infrastructure, they also destroy the planet's ecology in various ways. Wars are an extreme expression of the separation of ruling powers and warring states and groups from their natural environment. What humans do to nature—and thus to the conditions necessary for all life on this planet—is of little interest to the ruling circles that wage wars and attack other states.
The fact that they are destroying the conditions for the survival of future generations is of no concern to imperialist states and governments. And there is no difference between the US and Russia in this regard. Imperialist warfare and the ecological destruction it causes are, in an extreme way, a crime of generational selfishness.
And Vice Versa: If the Climate Collapses, so Does Peace
Peace ecology, as a newer subdiscipline of peace studies and research, makes it clear that wars are not only the cause of climate damage, but that the climate crisis that is already occurring is in turn a further cause of military conflicts and the destruction of political systems, especially in the poorer regions of the world, according to Michael T. Klare (2015), professor of peace and global security at Hampshire College in Massachusetts"
The strongest and richest states, especially those in more temperate climate zones, are likely to cope better with these stresses. In contrast, the number of failed states is likely to increase dramatically, leading to violent conflicts and outright wars over the remaining food sources, agriculturally usable land, and habitable areas. Large parts of the planet could thus find themselves in situations similar to those we see today in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Some people will stay and fight for their survival; others will migrate and almost certainly encounter much more violent forms of the hostility that immigrants and refugees already face in their destination countries today. This would inevitably lead to a global epidemic of civil wars and other violent conflicts over resources.
In addition, those states that are at war with each other—but also those societies that feel threatened by this—will then use the resources necessary to combat the climate crisis to finance warfare and weapons systems. In particular, the huge sums of money within the European Union, but also in Germany, that will be spent in the future on special programs for the procurement of weapons systems will be lacking in a sensible climate policy—not to mention the enormous arms investments of the US and Russia and their unwillingness to combat the climate crisis.
Some Figures on Environmental Destruction Caused by the Military
The environment is destroyed by wars, but also by normal military operations in peacetime.
A study by Stuart Parkinson (Scientists for Global Responsibility) not only took into account direct carbon dioxide emissions from transport and exercises, but also emissions from weapons production, infrastructure construction, and supply chains. Parkinson calculated 340 million tons of CO2 equivalents for 2017 for the US military, by far the largest in the world, and this figure is unlikely to have decreased. For the global situation, Parkinson calculated that 5.5% of worldwide CO2 emissions are attributable to the military of all nations. This does not include wartime emissions. It can therefore be assumed that the percentage of global CO2 emissions caused by the military is significantly higher.
A study by de Klerk et al (2023) found that during one year of war in Ukraine, both sides of the conflict emitted approximately as much CO2 as Belgium did in total during the same year. This amounted to 119 million tons of CO2 equivalents.
Stuart Parkinson and Linsey Cottrell (2022) summarize their study on climate damage caused by the military and wars as follows:
If the world's armed forces were a country, they would have the fourth largest national carbon footprint in the world—larger than Russia's. This underscores the urgent need to take concerted action to reliably measure military emissions and reduce the associated carbon footprint—especially as these emissions are likely to increase as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Olena Melnyk and Sera Koulabdara (2024) estimate that approximately one-third of Ukrainian soil has been contaminated by toxic substances such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury as a result of the war. Soil and its fertile layer took thousands of years to form and have now been poisoned by the war within a few years, rendering it unusable for agriculture.
The war in Ukraine is leaving behind a devastated environment, for which the Russian Federation would have to pay billions of euros in reparations, although ultimately only the superficial damage could be repaired. The profound impact on human health due to inhaled emissions, drinking contaminated water, and exposure to radiation cannot be compensated for with money.
Hungarian climate researcher Bálint Rosz (2025) summarizes the CO2 emissions caused by the war in Ukraine in the first two years of the Ukraine war up to February 2024 and compares this with the annual emissions of 90 million vehicles with combustion engines.
Israel's campaign of destruction against the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, as a disproportionate response to the brutal attack by Hamas, is also causing considerable environmental destruction, in addition to the appalling suffering of the Palestinians. For example, Neimark et al. (2024) estimated that the CO2 emissions from the necessary reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, destroyed by the Israeli military, would be so high that they would exceed the emissions of 130 countries and be comparable to the emissions of New Zealand.
These are just a few examples of military-induced ecological destruction. This anthropocentric madness could be illustrated with numerous other examples (Moegling 2025).
The Common Interest of the Peace and Environmental Movements
Global military activities can be both a cause and a consequence of environmental destruction.
The environmental and peace movements therefore have a substantial common ground in their understanding of peace ecology: The demand for an end to environmental destruction by the military and wars, combined with the demand for internationally coordinated disarmament, should be addressed by both the environmental and peace movements as central expectations of politics.
Furthermore, the analyses and research findings of peace ecology could help both the environmental and peace movements to take targeted action against planetary destruction based on facts.
Who Pays the Ecological Costs?
In this context, the question of financing the remediation of environmental damage caused by the military must also be addressed. In addition to the warring parties responsible, the producers in the arms industry should also be called upon to contribute. It is particularly unacceptable for the arms industry that the (considerable) profits are privatized while the costs are socialized and passed on to the state and taxpayers. Such externalization of costs and internalization of profits in the arms industry, which is typical of capitalist conditions, is no longer acceptable. It is completely incomprehensible why, for example, the manufacturers of landmines should not also pay for their removal and for compensation claims by the victims.
Above all, the exclusion of the military as a climate polluter from the Kyoto Protocol and the attempt to leave this non-binding in the Paris Agreements, particularly under pressure from the US at the time, further highlights the international dimension of the problem. The United Nations in particular is called upon to include environmental issues related to military activities and war missions more bindingly in international climate agreements. This should be easier for them if corresponding international civil society pressure were to be built up via interested governments and internationally coordinated NGO initiatives, e.g., via the Fridays for Future movement, Indigenous NGOs, ICAN, IPPNW, Greenpeace, and the traditional Easter March movement or other activities of the peace movement.
Peace ecology also makes it clear that the more peaceful societies are internally and externally, the more they can work to restore the destroyed ecological order. This is the common interest of the peace and environmental movements.
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Trump Planning to Destroy Planet
When it comes to climate change, the fact that Donald Trump is distinctly a terrorist first-class should be a daily part of the headlines in our world.
Jul 15, 2025
Yes, he’s done quite a job so far and, in a way, it couldn’t be simpler to describe. Somehow he’s managed to take the greatest looming threat to humanity and put it (excuse the all-too-appropriate image) on the back burner. I’m thinking, of course, about climate change.
My guess is that you haven’t read much about it recently, despite the fact that a significant part of this country, including the city I live in, set new heat records for June. And Europe followed suit soon after with a heat hell all its own in which, at one point, the temperature in part of Spain hit an all-time record 114.8°F. And oh yes, part of Portugal hit 115.9°F as both countries recorded their hottest June ever. Facing that reality, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said (again all too appropriately), “Extreme heat is no longer a rare event—it has become the new normal.” The new normal, indeed! He couldn’t have been more on target!
And why am I not surprised by all this? Well, because whether you’re in the United States or Europe (or so many other places on this planet) these days, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ve noticed that June is indeed the new July, and that, thanks to the ever increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that continue to flow into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, heatwaves have grown more frequent and more intense. After all, we’re now on a planet where, without a doubt, heat is at an all-time-record high. After all, 2024, was the hottest year in history and the last 10 years, the hottest decade ever known. Worse yet, in the age of Donald Trump, this is clearly just the beginning, not the end (though somewhere down the line, of course, it could indeed prove to be exactly that).
An Ongoing Act of Global Terrorism
While this old man is online constantly reading publications ranging from The Washington Post to the British Guardian, he still reads the paper New York Times. And if that isn’t old-fashioned of me, what is? Can you even believe it? And its first section of news, normally 20-odd pages long, does regularly tell me something about how climate change is (and isn’t) covered in the age of Donald Trump. Let me give you one example: On June 21, that paper’s superb environmental reporter Somini Sengupta had a piece covering the droughts that, amid the rising heat, are now circling this planet in a major fashion from Brazil to China, the U.S. to Russia. And yes, she indicated clearly in her piece that such droughts, bad as they may always have been from time to time, are becoming significantly worse thanks to the overheating of this planet from fossil fuel use. (As she put it: “Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and exacerbating extreme weather.”)
The next day that piece appeared in the paper newspaper I read—a day when, as always, the front page was filled with Donald Trump—and where was it placed? Yep, on page 24.
And on the very day I happened to be writing this sentence, Trump was the headline figure in, or key, to 3 of the 6 front-page Times stories, including ones headlined “The Supreme Court’s Term Yields Triumphs for Trump” and “Trump’s Deal with El Salvador Guts MS-13 Fight.” On the other hand, you had to turn to page eight to read “Heat Overcoming Europe Turns Dangerous, and There’s More to Come” in which the eighth and 24th paragraphs quote experts mentioning climate change. I don’t mean to indicate that the Times never puts a climate piece on the front page. It does, but not daily like Donald Trump. Not faintly. He is invariably the page-one story of our present American world, day after day after day. Whatever he may do (or not do), he remains the story of the moment (any moment). And for the man who eternally wants to be the center of attention, consider that, after a fashion, his greatest achievement. Yet, at 79 years old, he, like this almost 81-year-old, will, in due course, leave this country and this planet behind forever. But the climate mess he’s now helping intensify in such a significant way won’t leave with him. Not for a second. Not in any foreseeable future.
Consider it an irony that the administration that wants to deny atomic weaponry to Iran on the grounds that a nuclear war would be a planetary disaster seems perfectly willing to encourage a slow-motion version of the same in the form of climate change.
In short, despite everything else he’s doing in and to this world of ours, there’s nothing more devastating (not even his bombing of Iran) than his urge to ignore anything associated with climate change, while putting fossil fuels back at the very center of our all-American world. Yes, he can no longer simply stop solar and wind power from growing rapidly on this planet of ours, but he can certainly try. And simply refusing to do anything to help is—or at least should be—considered an ongoing act of global terrorism.
And don’t think it’s just that either. For example, Trump administration cuts to the National Weather Service have already ensured that, when truly bad weather hits (and hits and hits), as it’s been doing this year, whether you’re talking about stunning flash flooding or tornadoes, there will be, as the Guardian‘s Eric Holthaus reports, ever fewer staff members committed to informing and warning Americans about what’s coming or helping them once it’s hit. Meanwhile, cuts to the government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network will ensure that we’ll know less about the effects of climate change in this country.
To put it bluntly, when it comes to climate change, the fact that Donald Trump is distinctly a terrorist first-class should be a daily part of the headlines in our world (though, if he has his way, it may not be “our” world for long). We’re talking about the president who is already doing everything he can to cut back on clean energy and ensure that this country produces more “clean, beautiful” coal, not to speak of oil and natural gas, and so send ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, Republicans in the House and Senate, bowing to Trump, have only recently passed a “big, beautiful bill” that would “quickly remove $7,500 consumer tax credits for buying electric cars,” among so many other things, while negating much of what the Biden administration did do in relation to climate change (even as it, too, let the American production of oil rise to record levels).
A Drill, Baby, Drill Presidency
Of course, given a president who once labeled climate change a “Chinese hoax” and “one of the greatest scams of all time,” who could be faintly surprised that his administration seems remarkably intent on sending ever more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere? And sadly, if that reality, which was all too clear from his first term in office, had been the focus of the news last year, perhaps he wouldn’t have been voted back into the White House by 1.6% more Americans than opted for former Vice President Kamala Harris who, to give her full (dis)credit, didn’t run a campaign taking out after him in any significant fashion on the issue of climate change and planetary suicide.
So here we are distinctly in Donald Trump’s world and what a world it’s already proving to be. We’re talking, of course, about the fellow who quite literally ran his 2024 presidential campaign on the phrase “drill, baby, drill.” In a sense, he couldn’t have been blunter or, in his own fashion, more honest than that. Still, it pains me even to imagine that, for the next three and a half years, he will indeed be in control of U.S. environmental policy. After all, we’re talking about the guy whose (now wildly ill-named) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “plans to repeal limits on greenhouse gas emissions and other airborne pollutants from the nation’s fossil fuel-fired power plants.” Brilliant, right? And the fellow now running the EPA, Lee Zeldin, couldn’t have been more blunt about it: “Rest assured President Trump is the biggest supporter of clean, beautiful coal. EPA is helping pave the way for American energy dominance because energy development underpins economic development, which in turn strengthens national security.”
Clean, beautiful coal. Doesn’t that take the air out of the room? Or perhaps I mean, shouldn’t it? Because, sadly enough, in this Trumpian world of ours, all too few people are paying all that much attention. And yet it’s the slow-motion way that we humans have discovered to destroy this planet and ourselves. Consider it an irony that the administration that wants to deny atomic weaponry to Iran on the grounds that a nuclear war would be a planetary disaster seems perfectly willing to encourage a slow-motion version of the same in the form of climate change. After all, to take but one example, only recently it opened up millions of acres of previously protected Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling.
While President Trump and his officials essentially try to devastate this planet, a kind of self-censorship on the subject remains in operation and not just in the media, but among all the rest of us, too.
It’s not that there are no strong articles in the mainstream world about what’s happening. Check out, for instance, this article by Simmone Shah of Time Magazine on the increasing number of heat domes on this planet of ours. Or if you look away from the mainstream and, for instance, check out the work of Mark Hertzgaard at The Nation magazine considering the climate-change costs of war or environmentalist Bill McKibben at his substack writing on how Trump and crew want to create an all too literal hell on Earth, you would certainly have a stronger sense of what’s truly happening on this planet right now.
For a moment, just imagine the reaction in this country and in the media if Donald Trump suddenly started openly talking about actually using atomic weaponry. And yet, in a slow-motion fashion, that’s exactly what his officials and the president himself are doing in relation to climate change and it all continues to be eerily normalized and largely ignored amid the continuing chaos of this Trumpian moment.
Who, for instance, could imagine this headline anywhere in the media: Trump Planning to Destroy Planet. Or perhaps: American President Attempting to Create a Literal Hell on Earth. Or even how about a milder: End of World as We’ve Known It Now Underway. Or… well, you’re undoubtedly just as capable as I am of imagining more such headlines.
Instead, we increasingly live in a world where, while President Trump and his officials essentially try to devastate this planet, a kind of self-censorship on the subject remains in operation and not just in the media, but among all the rest of us, too. We lead our lives largely not imagining that our world is slowly going down the drain—or do I mean up in flames?
And in some grim sense, that reality (or perhaps irreality would be the better term) may prove to be—I was about to write “in retrospect,” but perhaps there will be no “retrospect”—Donald Trump’s greatest “triumph.” He is indeed in the process of doing in, if not us, then our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and clearly couldn’t give less of a damn about it. (If anything, it leaves him feeling distinctly on top of the world.)
Of all the wars we shouldn’t be fighting on this planet of ours from Ukraine to Gaza, Iran to Sudan, there is indeed one that we all should be fighting, including the president of the United States, and that’s the war against our destruction of this planet (as humanity has known it all these endless thousands of years) in a planetary heat hell.
If only.
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Trump, Zeldin, and Wright Want to Set America’s Rivers on Fire Again
The Trump administration is trying to turn back the clock on environmental and climate regulations. But they can’t control physics. Or the falling cost and rising efficiency of renewable energy.
Mar 14, 2025
I spent part of the morning reading the Powell memo—the famous document written by the future Supreme Court justice in August of 1971 arguing that American business and industry had to get its act together so it could dominate the country’s political life and prevent the threats to “the American system” from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
In the short run, Justice Lewis Powell was unsuccessful—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had been formed a few months before his memo, the Clean Water Act passed a few months after. As William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the EPA (and a Republican appointed by a Republican president) said, the agency “has no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.” Over the next years the agency enacted a critical series of rules that—with surprising speed—cleaned America’s air, rivers, and lakes, and became the template for similar laws around the world.
The job for those of us who care about the future is to continue insisting on reality.
But the forces Powell helped set in motion with his memo to the Chamber of Commerce never accepted the premise that American business should be regulated—as he had recommended, they built a powerful set of institutions—think tanks, tv stations, publishers, and above all political lobbies—and now, 54 years later, they would appear, on the surface, to have won their final victory. Lee Zeldin, a distant successor to Ruckelshaus as EPA head, announced what he called the “greatest day of deregulation in American history.”
As the Times explained, under Zeldin’s plan the agency
would unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.
In addition, when the agency creates environmental policy, it would no longer consider the costs to society from wildfires, droughts, storms, and other disasters that might be made worse by pollution connected to that policy, Mr. Zeldin said.
In perhaps its most consequential act, the agency said it would work to erase the EPA’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by reconsidering decades of science that show global warming is endangering humanity. In his video, Mr. Zeldin derisively referred to that legal underpinning as “the holy grail of the climate change religion.”
The reason, he said, was to help the president “usher in a golden age of American success.”
It was language echoed in a second extraordinary speech, this one by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, speaking to fellow oilmen in Houston, who promised to “unleash human potential” mostly through the use of artificial intelligence, which would require “unlimited energy.” Yes, he said, we’ve already increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by 50%, but climate change is simply “a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world.” (That is a phrase that will live in infamy)
The triumphalism of those speeches is in some ways well founded—as the Trump administration ravages university budgets, as its allies turn once-great newspapers into mouthpieces, and as the GOP Congress marches in complete lockstep threatening even to impeach those judges who might rule against this crusade, it’s hard to see precisely how they’ll be stopped. Yes, there will be widespread resistance (join us at Third Act and many other groups on April 5, for the next big round of rallies), and yes there will be lots and lots of court cases. (Some good news on that front this week, as the Supreme Court denied an industry request to keep states and cities from suing them for climate damages). But for the moment these hard-faced men with greed as their compass occupy the political high ground. For the moment they can do much of what they will.
And yet and yet and yet. There are some forces they can’t control. One is physics. You can prattle all you want, as Zeldin did, about how ending efforts to address climate change will “decrease the cost of living for American families,” but thanks to global warming the price of insurance is going through the roof—the latest data I’ve seen from, say, Summit County, Utah shows premiums doubling, and in some cases going up 300%. That’s if you can get it at all—in the wake of the LA fires, California’s largest insurer said this week that “writing new policies doesn’t make any sense at this time.”
And if you can’t control physics, you also can’t control—at least completely—engineering and economics, the disciplines that have led in recent years to the breakout of renewable energy. On the same day as Wright’s speech belittling clean power, these numbers emerged from the consultant Wood MacKenzie:
The U.S. installed 50 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity in 2024, the largest single year of new capacity added to the grid by any energy technology in over two decades. That’s enough to power 8.5 million households.
Why do you think the energy industry spent record amounts on Trump’s election? (Fracking baron Wright and his wife gave $475,000). It’s precisely because of the size of this threat.
As Abby Hopper, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association put it: “Solar and storage can be built faster and more affordably than any other technology, ensuring the United States has the power needed to compete in the global economy and meet rising electricity demand. America’s solar and storage industry set historic deployment and manufacturing records in 2024, creating jobs and driving economic growth.”
As the CEO of NextEra Energy (which builds both gas and renewable plants) explained at the same conference that Wright addressed:
The cost of gas turbines and the skilled labor to install them are both up threefold from just two years ago, and new gas infrastructure faces years-long delivery backlogs. Renewables plus batteries, he said, are the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to meet the surging power demand from data centers driven by the acceleration in artificial intelligence.
“We’ve got to be really careful here, from an affordability standpoint, about the choices that we’re making. What we don’t want to do is drive ourselves to only one solution—that being a gas-fired solution—that’s now more expensive than it ever has been in its history,” he said. “It just so happens that the most economic solution comes with clean energy benefits, as well.”
And as the technology keeps getting better, so do the numbers—a U.K. study released today found that rooftop solar alone could supply two-thirds of the world’s electricity.
Zeldin, Wright, Trump—they want to take us back to the glory days before 1970, when rivers caught on fire. And to do so they’ll try to take us back to the days before 1958—word came yesterday that the federal government was planning to break the lease on the Hawaii facility that supports the carbon observatory on Mauna Loa.
“It would be terrible if this office was closed,” atmospheric scientist Marc Alessi, a fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists advocacy group, said.
“Not only does it provide the measurement of CO2 that we so desperately need to track climate change, but it also informs climate model simulations.”
Others said the Trump administration had already made their work harder, after the White House froze credit cards held by agency employees for a 30-day period under DOGE’S “cost efficiency initiative.”
“It has already become very difficult to continue our global greenhouse gas monitoring network,” an atmospheric scientist involved in NOAA’s measurements said, asking not to be named.
“It requires continuous shipping of sampling equipment black and forth all over the world. Suddenly, we cannot use our government-issued credit cards anymore… It looks like our monitoring program will soon be dead,” the scientist said.
But even if they stop monitoring carbon it will continue accumulating—in fact, the instrument at Mauna Loa showed that CO2 passed the 430 parts per million mark for the first time this week. And even if the federal government does all that it can to shut down renewable energy, the embarrassing numbers will keep piling up—Texas, world capital of hydrocarbons, set remarkable records this week for renewable energy generation.
In just the first week of March, the ERCOT power grid that supplies nearly all of Texas set records for most wind production (28,470 megawatts), most solar production (24,818 megawatts), and greatest battery discharge (4,833 megawatts). Only two years ago, the most that batteries had ever injected into the ERCOT grid at once was 766 megawatts. Now the battery fleet is providing nearly as much instantaneous power as Texas nuclear power plants, which contribute around 5,000 megawatts.
The job for those of us who care about the future is to continue insisting on reality (hats off to those Texans who rallied outside the conference that Wright addressed, and that’s why you’re supposed to set aside Sept 20-21 for Sun Day). Wright, Zeldin, Musk, Trump—they have powerful sticks to try and beat reality into submission. But reality has a way of biting back.
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Vermont Sued for New Law Requiring Big Oil to Pay for Climate Damage
'For too long, giant fossil fuel companies have knowingly lit the match of climate disruption'
Jan 05, 2025
The US Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute - representing the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world - are suing the State of Vermont over its new law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the state's damage caused by climate change.
The lawsuit, filed last Monday in the US District Court for the District of Vermont, asks a state court to prevent Vermont from enforcing the law passed last year. Vermont became the first state in the country to enact the law after it suffered over $1 billion in damages from catastrophic summer flooding and other extreme weather.
Vermont’s Attorney General’s Office said as of Friday, Jan. 3, they had not been served with the lawsuit.
The lawsuit argues that the U.S. Constitution precludes the act and that the federal Clean Air Act preempts state law. It also claims that the law violates domestic and foreign commerce clauses by discriminating “against the important interest of other states by targeting large energy companies located outside of Vermont.”
The Chamber and the American Petroleum Institute argue that the federal government is already addressing climate change. Because greenhouse gases come from billions of individual sources, they claim it has been impossible to measure “accurately and fairly” the impact of emissions from a particular entity in a specific location over decades.
“For too long, giant fossil fuel companies have knowingly lit the match of climate disruption without being required to do a thing to put out the fire,” Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said in a statement. “Finally, maybe for the first time anywhere, Vermont is going to hold the companies most responsible for climate-driven floods, fires and heat waves financially accountable for a fair share of the damages they’ve caused.”
The complaint is an essential legal test as more states consider holding fossil fuels liable for expensive global warming-intensified events like floods, fires, and more. Maryland and Massachusetts are among the states expected to pursue similar legislation, modeled after the federal law known as Superfund, in 2025.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed a similar climate bill into law - the Climate Change Superfund Act- on Dec. 26, pointing to the need to fund climate adaptation projects.
Downtown Montpelier, Vermont was under water on Monday, July 10, 2023 caused by the flooding of the Winooski River.
(Photo: John Tully for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Heavy Rains Cause Catastrophic Flooding In Southern Vermont
(Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Flooding is seen in downtown Montpelier, Vermont
(Photo: John Tully for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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Alarming Heat Streak Continues as February Shatters Temperature Record
"As remarkable as this might appear, it is not really surprising as the continuous warming of the climate system inevitably leads to new temperature extremes," said the head of the E.U. climate service.
Mar 07, 2024
Last month was the warmest February on record, the European Union’s climate service said Wednesday, marking the ninth consecutive month of unprecedented heat as the climate crisis continues to drive up global temperatures.
Climate scientists say the climate crisis, without a doubt, is to blame for increased temperatures.
Not only was it warm above sea level—global ocean temperatures also reached a record high last month. That's not just for February but for any month on record.
"Ocean warming has prompted concerns about the mass bleaching of coral reefs. It also raises global sea levels and can help to fuel higher intensity hurricanes," the BBC reports. "Unusually warm waters may also have been a factor in another exceptional month for Antarctic sea ice. The three lowest minimum extents in the satellite era have now occurred in the last three years."
The #C3S's monthly climate bulletin is out now:
📈 February 2024 was globally the warmest on record;
📈 Global Sea Surface Temperatures hit record highs.
▶️https://t.co/XEmBnArhh6 pic.twitter.com/uUubVY9c05
— Copernicus ECMWF (@CopernicusECMWF) March 7, 2024
Arctic sea ice is also disappearing, and the Arctic could be virtually ice-free during the summer within a decade.
"February joins the long streak of records of the last few months," said Carlo Buentempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. "As remarkable as this might appear, it is not really surprising as the continuous warming of the climate system inevitably leads to new temperature extremes."
“The climate responds to the actual concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so, unless we manage to stabilize those, we will inevitably face new global temperature records and their consequences,” Buentempo added.
The last year has been over 1.5°C above pre-industrial averages—1.56°C, to be exact—but that won't signify a breach of the goals set in the Paris Agreement unless temperatures remain elevated for the next few years.
"A year ago, the fact that the global temperature for a particular month would reach 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level would have been considered exceptional," Julien Nicolas, a senior scientist at Copernicus, told The New York Times.
The world will have to get off of fossil fuels in order to halt runaway warming, and this year could help determine the future of the climate, considering one of the people running to lead the nation appears destined to unleash billions of tons of additional planet-warming emissions should he return to office.
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NOAA, NASA Confirm Last Decade Was Hottest in Human History
"The science is clear: Transformative and comprehensive climate action, including a rapid transition away from fossil fuels and investments in resilience, are essential to ensure a livable future for generations to come."
Jan 12, 2024
A pair of U.S. agencies confirmed Friday that not only was 2023 by far the warmest year on record, it also capped off the hottest decade ever documented—underscoring the need for far more ambitious action to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maintain separate temperature records, as do other institutions and scientists worldwide.
"NASA and NOAA's global temperature report confirms what billions of people around the world experienced last year; we are facing a climate crisis," declared Bill Nelson, NASA's administrator. "From extreme heat, to wildfires, to rising sea levels, we can see our Earth is changing."
"It's driven primarily by our fossil fuel emissions, and we're seeing the impacts in heatwaves, intense rainfall, and coastal flooding."
NASA, whose records date back to 1880, found that Earth's average surface temperature last year was about 1.2°C above the average for the agency's baseline period, which is 1951-1980, and 1.4°C above the late 19th-century average.
"Every month from June through December 2023 came in as the hottest month on record. July ranked as the hottest month ever recorded," NASA noted in an article explaining last year's record heat, which addresses greenhouse gases, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), warming oceans, decreasing aerosols, and an undersea volcanic eruption.
"The exceptional warming that we're experiencing is not something we've seen before in human history," emphasized Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "It's driven primarily by our fossil fuel emissions, and we're seeing the impacts in heatwaves, intense rainfall, and coastal flooding."
NOAA, which has a climate record back to 1850, similarly found that the average land and ocean surface temperature last year was 1.18°C above the 20th century and 1.35°C above the preindustrial average, or 1850-1900. Sarah Kapnick, the agency's chief scientist, said that "after seeing the 2023 climate analysis, I have to pause and say that the findings are astounding."
"Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA's 174-year climate record—it was the warmest by far," she highlighted. "A warming planet means we need to be prepared for the impacts of climate change that are happening here and now, like extreme weather events that become both more frequent and severe."
Both agencies found that the 10 hottest years in their records have all been in the past decade. NOAA pointed out that there is a one-in-three chance that this year will be even warmer than 2023, and a 99% chance that 2024 will be among the five hottest years.
"We will continue to see records broken and extreme events grow until emissions go to zero," Kapnick warned. "Government policy can address both emissions, but also actions to reduce climate impacts by building resilience."
NASA and NOAA's findings are in line with not only scientists' predictions amid extreme conditions last year but also data released Tuesday by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service and Friday by the United Kingdom's Met Office—which has records back to 1850 and found that the global average temperature for 2023 was 1.46°C above the preindustrial baseline.
"It is striking that the temperature record for 2023 has broken the previous record set in 2016 by so much because the main effect of the current El Niño will come in 2024," said Adam Scaife, a principal fellow at the U.K. agency. "Consistent with this, the Met Office's 2024 temperature forecast shows this year has strong potential to be another record-breaking year."
El Niño and La Niña are the warm and cool phases of the climate phenomenon ENSO in the Pacific Ocean. As Common Dreams reported Thursday, a study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences found that 2023 was the hottest year on record for the world's oceans, which capture an estimated 91% of excess heat from greenhouse gases.
Government scientists were not the only ones who responded with alarm to the new climate data this week. Kristina Dahl, a principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Friday, "The latest data confirms heartbreaking and unprecedented scientific truths: The last decade has been the hottest in human history while heat-trapping emissions are continuing to rise."
"During this consequential decade, nations across the globe must swiftly reduce their heat-trapping emissions and enact widespread climate adaptation policies to limit the devastating climate harms and the toll they take on humans and ecosystems," she stressed, noting the "unrelenting onslaught of climate impacts" communities have already ensured. "Continuing to make only incremental policy changes will further jeopardize the safety of people around the world, especially those on the frontlines of the climate crisis."
Dahl argued that "as the largest historical emitter of global carbon emissions and the wealthiest nation, the United States has a moral imperative to lead on aggressive climate action. The science is clear: Transformative and comprehensive climate action, including a rapid transition away from fossil fuels and investments in resilience, are essential to ensure a livable future for generations to come."
"It's time for U.S. policymakers to place the needs of people over ill-gotten corporate profits by resisting and rejecting the potent allure of greenwashing narratives and false solutions that the fossil fuel industry has long pushed upon elected officials."
"Fortunately, the United States already has proven technologies to do this, including energy efficiency, renewable energy, and energy storage, at its fingertips," she added. "It's time for U.S. policymakers to place the needs of people over ill-gotten corporate profits by resisting and rejecting the potent allure of greenwashing narratives and false solutions that the fossil fuel industry has long pushed upon elected officials."
While making historic progress on climate during his first term, U.S. President Joe Biden has also faced criticism from scientists and campaigners for backing some false solutions, enabling more fossil fuel projects, and skipping COP28, the United Nations climate summit held late last year.
Global scientists called COP28—which was led by an oil CEO in the United Arab Emirates—a "tragedy for the planet" because its final agreement did not endorse a phaseout of fossil fuels, and have already expressed concerns about COP29, given host country Azerbaijan's recent announcement that the upcoming conference will also be overseen by an oil executive.
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Drilling Operations, Wildfires Emitting Far More Methane Than Previously Known: Studies
One study found that methane pollution from gas and oil fields during a recent decade was 70% higher than EPA figures.
Apr 18, 2023
Amid climate experts' urgent warnings to keep planet-heating fossil fuels in the ground, two recently published studies show that methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas fields as well as megafires exacerbated by rising temperatures are even worse than scientists thought.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide during its first two decades in the atmosphere.
The study on focused on emissions from drilling sites, published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, notes that the United States is the world's largest emitter of methane from the oil and gas industry, and cutting those emissions is a key piece of the U.S. government's stated climate action plan.
Based on surface and satellite observations, the researchers estimate that methane pollution from the nation's oil and gas industry was 70% higher than reported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2010-19.
"While emissions in Canada and Mexico decreased over the period, U.S. emissions increased from 2010 to 2014, decreased until 2017, and rose again afterward," the study states. "Increases were driven by the largest production regions (Permian, Anadarko, Marcellus), while emissions in the smaller production regions generally decreased."
Study co-author and Harvard University professor Daniel Jacob explained to CNN how the findings expose the inadequacy of the EPA and fossil fuel industry's current monitoring practices, which rely on engineering models and handheld devices. The agency requires companies to do quarterly searches for methane leaks using infrared cameras and sensors.
"This has been known for a while, at least in the atmospheric science community," he said of the flawed approach. "When we observe methane in the air, we find concentrations much higher than one would expect from the EPA inventories."
Jacob added that "a leak that goes on for some days and then gets fixed, or some operator venting gas at a particular time of day—if you're just cruising around and trying to observe hotspots, you might miss them."
As CNN reported:
Jacob and other atmospheric scientists say there should be more monitoring of methane from the air, which can catch a huge plume that has gone undetected for weeks or months. But that's not the silver bullet for the problem either, since monitoring from the air isn't precise and can't drill down to locate which specific faulty equipment or well is causing a leak.
This is leading to even further advancements in technology in which satellites can monitor leaks with more precision to figure out exactly where it is coming from.
The findings align with those of other recent studies, including an International Energy Agency (IEA) analysis from February that found global methane emissions from the energy sector are about 70% higher than what national governments officially report.
At the time, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol described the "massive underreporting" as "alarming" and stressed the need to dramatically reduce methane pollution, pointing out that cutting such emissions from human activities 30% by the end of this decade "would have the same effect on global warming by 2050 as shifting the entire transport sector to net-zero CO2 emissions."
As methane, CO2, and other greenhouse gases from human activities like fossil fuel use continue to drive global heating, the world faces more extreme droughts, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires—and as a study published Friday in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics highlights, fires produce more emissions that further warm the planet.
"Wildfires have become deadlier, more destructive, and more frequent globally over the past few years," states the study. "Particularly, the 2020 wildfire season saw massive wildfires in the western USA, Australia, Brazil, and the Arctic. The California 2020 wildfire season was exacerbated by abnormally high temperatures and dry conditions and emitted 10 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the 2000-19 annual average wildfire emissions."
The University of California, Riverside (UCR) research team—which used a new detection method, relying on a remote sensing technique rather than air samples collected via aircraft—also found that methane pollution from the state's top 20 wildfires in 2020 was over seven times the average from fires the previous 19 years.
"Fires are getting bigger and more intense, and correspondingly, more emissions are coming from them," study co-author and UCR professor Francesca Hopkins said Monday. "The fires in 2020 emitted what would have been 14% of the state's methane budget if it was being tracked."
While California currently does not measure methane from natural sources, the study aserts that given the importance of reducing methane emissions and the significant contribution from wildfires, the state should start monitoring how much comes from them.
"Typically, these sources have been hard to measure, and it's questionable whether they're under our control. But we have to try," said Hopkins. "They're offsetting what we're trying to reduce."
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The Hottest Years
The past decade, from 2010 to 2019, has almost certainly been the warmest in records dating back to the 19th century.
Dec 02, 2019
This year has been one of the hottest on record, as the world comes to the end of a decade of "exceptional" heat, the World Meteorological Organisation has said.
The past decade, from 2010 to 2019, has almost certainly been the warmest in records dating back to the 19th century, and the past five years from 2015 have also been the hottest on record, the UN body said.
This year temperatures have been 1.1C above pre-industrial levels, putting 2019 on course to be the second or third hottest year on record, data from January to October shows.
Extreme
The WMO provisional statement on the state of the global climate also warns that sea levels are rising ever faster, ice is melting and "once in a century" heatwaves and floods are now becoming more regular occurrences.
Millions of people were forced from their homes as a result of extreme events such as cyclones, hurricanes and flooding.
The past year has also seen droughts in many parts of the world and two major heatwaves in Europe in late June and late July - with a new temperature record of 38.7C set in the UK.
WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas: "If we do not take urgent climate action now, then we are heading for a temperature increase of more than 3C by the end of the century, with ever more harmful impacts on human well-being.
"On a day-to-day basis, the impacts of climate change play out through extreme and "abnormal" weather.
Melting
And he warned: "One of the main impacts of climate change is more erratic rainfall patterns.
"This poses a threat to crop yields and, combined with population increase, will mean considerable food security challenges for vulnerable countries in the future."
The report is released as countries meet in Madrid for the latest round of UN climate negotiations, known as "Cop25", amid pressure to increase their ambitions to cut the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change.
The assessment warns concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached new record levels in 2019.
And the rate at which sea levels are rising has increased as a result of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, reaching new highs this year.
Temperature
The world's oceans take in much of the extra heat and carbon dioxide caused by human activity, but it has serious impacts for the marine environment.
Ocean heat is at record levels, there have been widespread marine heatwaves and sea water is increasingly acidic, damaging wildlife.
At the poles, Arctic sea ice is in long term decline and has been a relatively low levels in Antarctica since a sudden drop in late 2016.
The year 2016, which began with an exceptional "El Nino" weather phenomenon in the Pacific that pushes up global temperatures, remains the hottest year on record.
The report draws on information from other UN bodies and three major global temperature datasets, including from the Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit
Warmest
Colin Morice, of the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: "Our global temperature figures are in agreement with other centres around the world that 2019 is set to join each of the years from 2015 as the five warmest years on record.
"Each decade from the 1980s has been warmer than the previous decade. 2019 will conclude the warmest decade in records that stretch back to the mid-19th century."
Prof Tim Osborn, from UEA's Climatic Research Unit, said: "The five warmest years for average global surface temperature since records began in 1850 have all occurred in the last five years; by contrast the five coldest years all occurred before 1912.
"This is climate change and not a coincidence."
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Earth 'Locked Into' Hitting Temperatures Not Seen in 2 Million Years: Study
New research predicts rise of up to 9° Celsius within next several thousand years—surpassing most other predictions
Sep 27, 2016
Earth is the warmest it's been in 100,000 years, a new reconstruction of historical temperature data finds, and with today's level of fossil fuel emissions the planet is "locked into" eventually hitting its highest temperature mark in 2 million years.
The new research published Monday in Nature was done by Carolyn Snyder, now a climate policy official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as a part of her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, according to the Associated Press.
Snyder "created a continuous 2 million year temperature record, much longer than a previous 22,000 year record. [Snyder's reconstruction] doesn't estimate temperature for a single year, but averages 5,000-year time periods going back a couple million years," AP writes.
"We do find this close relationship between temperature and greenhouse gases that is remarkably stable, and what the study is developing is the coupling factor between the two," Snyder told National Geographic.
AP further reports:
Temperatures averaged out over the most recent 5,000 years--which includes the last 125 years or so of industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases--are generally warmer than they have been since about 120,000 years ago or so, Snyder found. And two interglacial time periods, the one 120,000 years ago and another just about 2 million years ago, were the warmest Snyder tracked. They were about 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) warmer than the current 5,000-year average.
With the link to carbon dioxide levels and taking into account other factors and past trends, Snyder calculated how much warming can be expected in the future.
"Snyder said if climate factors are the same as in the past--and that's a big if," AP notes, "Earth is already committed to another 7 degrees or so (about 4 degrees Celsius) of warming over the next few thousand years."
Nature described Snyder's findings in greater detail in an article accompanying her published study: "Even if the amount of atmospheric CO2 were to stabilize at current levels, the study suggests that average temperatures may increase by roughly 5deg C over the next few millennia as a result of the effects of the greenhouse gas on glaciers, ecosystems and other factors. A doubling of the pre-industrial levels of atmospheric CO2 of roughly 280 parts per million, which could occur within decades unless people curb greenhouse-gas emissions, could eventually boost global average temperatures by around 9deg C."
"This is not an exact prediction or a forecast," Snyder told Nature, advising caution regarding her study's temperature predictions. "The experiment we as humans are doing is very different than what we saw in the past."
There has been some controversy in the scientific community following the publication of Snyder's research: several climate scientists told National Geographic that they felt Snyder's estimate of future temperature rise, far higher than many previous estimates, was an outlier, signaling that her methods were faulty.
Michael Mann, an influential climate researcher at Penn State University who was not involved in Snyder's research, told Mashable "I regard the study as provocative and interesting, but the quantitative findings must be viewed rather skeptically until the scientific community has thoroughly vetted the analysis."
Other scientists said they were intrigued by Snyder's findings and hoped her study would lead to additional research. Jeremy Shakun, a climate researcher at Boston College, told AP, "Snyder's work is a great contribution, and future work should build on it."
"It's a useful starting place," Snyder told Nature about her research. "People can take this and improve upon it as more records become available."
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As Southwest Burns, Climate Scientists Warn: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
"If we continue with business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels, by mid-century what we think of as extreme summer heat today will become a typical summer day."
Jun 22, 2016
Wildfires in the southwestern U.S. continued to rage on Wednesday. The combination of extreme heat and erratic winds fueled the devastation, and firefighters warned that blazes near Los Angeles were only about 10 percent contained.
As residents flee and emergency crews attempt to contain the infernos, climate scientists warn that these deadly fires are climate change in action.
More than 20 fires are also burning in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Washington state, Colorado, Montana, and New Mexico. Meanwhile, record-breaking heat reached 123degF in Palm Springs and 115degF in Phoenix. Death Valley recorded the country's hottest temperature on Monday at 126degF. At least six deaths have been attributed to the extreme heat.
Michael Mann, a professor of meteorology at Penn State University who was in Phoenix for the Democratic National Platform committee meeting last weekend when the temperatures hit 106degF, told the panel that the extreme weather was "an example of just the sort of extreme heat that is on the increase due to human-caused climate change."
The California cities of Azusa and parts of Duarte were evacuated as twin wildfires burned through the San Gabriel Valley, destroying more than seven square miles combined. Firefighters with the Angeles National Forest Service told ABC News that the conditions were the hottest they'd ever encountered.
Mann warned on Tuesday that the worst is yet to come.
"The likelihood of record heat has already doubled in the U.S. due to human-caused warming, and that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg," he told the Huffington Post.
The high temperatures have stymied emergency workers' efforts to extinguish the fires, which began burning before the heatwave hit.
Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told the HuffPost that there was no question the fires and scorching temperatures were the result of human-caused climate change.
The added heat from rising greenhouse gases equated to "running a small microwave oven over every square foot, at full power for 6 minutes, for every month of drought conditions" in the affected region, Trenberth said. "So what used to be a regular heat wave now has extra oomph, and the danger is not just heat" but also a wildfire risk.
Mann also warned that if immediate action is not taken to curb climate change, scorching heat in the region could become the new normal by 2050.
"If we continue with business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels, by mid-century, what we think of as extreme summer heat today will become a typical summer day," he said.
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