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nobel prize
'Guilty of Genocide': Protesters Condemn Trump-Netanyahu Meeting and Ethnic Cleansing Push
At the White House, Trump and Netanyahu once again discussed plans to forcibly remove Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Jul 08, 2025
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he'd nominated U.S. President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize during an Oval Office meeting on Monday. He did so shortly after the two reiterated their goal of forcibly removing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, a policy that humanitarian groups have described as "ethnic cleansing."
The meeting went on with protesters assembled outside the White House from both Muslim and Jewish groups and other anti-war organizations who called on Trump to end military support for the Israeli government led by Netanyahu, who has been charged, along with his former defense minister, for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
One demonstrator held a banner that read, "U.S. + Israel Guilty of Genocide."
"This is not a diplomatic visit. This is a disgrace," said Robert McCaw, Director of Government Affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "Every handshake, every deal, every photo op [of Netanyahu] with American leaders stains the hands of all Americans with the blood of children from Gaza."
According to official estimates, more than 57,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's military campaign in Gaza since 2023, including over 17,000 children. The total casualty number does not include the more than 11,000 estimated to be buried beneath rubble.
Other estimates suggest that the death toll is potentially much higher when factoring in the indirect effects of Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid, which have caused widespread hunger and disease.
"Netanyahu doesn't belong in D.C. He belongs in The Hague," wrote Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group CodePink on X.
Anti-war Jewish groups and figures were among some of the loudest voices.
Another protester, Yehuda Cohen, the father of an Israeli hostage who has been trapped in Gaza since October 7, 2023, called on Trump to "force Netanyahu to end the war and go for a hostage deal," which would allow his 21-year-old son Nimrod to return home.
He echoed the accusation that the families of many other hostages still in Gaza have leveled at Netanyahu, that he has sabotaged efforts at a cease-fire to maintain his tenuous hold on power.
"He's got right-wing extremists in his coalition who want the total occupation of the Gaza Strip," Cohen said. "They want to rebuild settlements there, and that's why they are threatening that they will withdraw from the coalition if we go for a cease-fire."
Cohen was part of a separate rally organized by the group New Jewish Narrative, which brought dozens of protesters to the White House in anticipation of Netanyahu's visit.
"When Trump sits across from Netanyahu on Monday, I hope he doesn't just nod along," said Hadar Susskind, the group's president. "I hope he demands an end to the war. I hope he uses all of the leverage he has to bring an end to this war, to rush humanitarian aid into Gaza, and to bring all of the hostages home."
Those calls not only fell on deaf ears, they were thoroughly doused once the meeting began. Trump and Netanyahu seemed to be moving in lockstep, with both reiterating their desire to carry out a plan to permanently expel Palestinians from Gaza, which Trump first proposed publicly in February.
Netanyahu told reporters that he and Trump were working on negotiations with other countries that could take in the people of Gaza who'd been relocated.
"We're working with the United States very closely about finding countries that will seek to realize what they always say, that they wanted to give the Palestinians a better future. I think we're getting close to finding several countries."
Netanyahu framed this as a humanitarian effort to allow Palestinians to leave the "prison" in Gaza and suggested that those who want to stay "can stay." However, the prime minister's recent comments to the Israeli Knesset have shown that making Gaza uninhabitable so its residents will be forced to move is his explicit goal.
In leaked comments obtained by the Israeli magazine +972 in June, Netanyahu assured legislators: "We’re destroying more and more homes—they have nowhere to return to. The only natural outcome will be that Gazans will want to emigrate out of the Strip. Our main problem is with receiving countries."
In comments to NBC News Tuesday, Mustafa Barghouti, a politician with the Palestinian National Initiative Party, described Netanyahu's claim that migration from Gaza would be "voluntary" as a farce.
"When they say it would be voluntary, that is so misleading," Barghouti said. "When you bomb people every day, when you starve people for 126 days, who can call that a voluntary decision?"
[Update: This article has been edited to clarify that the rally hosted by New Jewish Narrative, at which Yehuda Cohen spoke, was a separate event from the one organized by the group American Muslims for Palestine.]
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'Start Over From Scratch': Nobel Laureate Economists Denounce GOP Budget Bill
"The House bill addresses none of the nation's key economic challenges usefully and exacerbates many of them."
Jun 02, 2025
Half a dozen Nobel Prize-winning economists on Monday expressed their "grave concerns" about the sprawling budget reconciliation package passed last month by the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, warning that slashing an already frayed social safety net and exploding the record deficit in service of massive tax cuts for the wealthiest households will worsen the nation's economic woes.
"The most acute and immediate damage stemming from this bill would be felt by the millions of American families losing key safety net protections like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits," Daron Acemoglu, Peter Diamond, Oliver Hart, Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz wrote in an open letter published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C.
"The Medicaid cuts constitute a sad step backward in the nation's commitment to providing access to healthcare for all," the economists continued. "Proponents of the House bill often claim that these Medicaid cuts can be achieved simply by imposing work reporting requirements on healthy, working-age adults. But healthy, working-age adults are by definition not heavy consumers of health spending, so achieving the budgeted Medicaid cuts will obviously harm others as well."
🚨NEW: 6 Nobel laureate economists signed an open letter opposing the House budget bill 🚨 The bill adds significantly to the national debt while reducing incomes for the bottom 40%, they say. The most acute & immediate damage? Millions losing Medicaid & SNAP benefits: www.epi.org/publication/...
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— Economic Policy Institute (@epi.org) June 2, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Addressing the bill's staggering impact on public debt, the letter asserts that "U.S. structural deficits are already too high, with real debt service payments approaching their historic highs in the past year."
"The House bill layers $3.8 trillion in additional tax cuts ($5.3 trillion if all provisions are made permanent) on top of these existing fiscal gaps—and these tax cuts are overwhelmingly tilted toward the highest-income households," the Nobel laureates noted. "Even with the safety net cuts, the House bill leads to public debt rising by over $3 trillion in coming years (and over $5 trillion over the next decade if provisions are made permanent rather than phasing out). The higher debt and deficits will put noticeable upward pressure on both inflation and interest rates in coming years."
"The combination of cuts to key safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP and tax cuts disproportionately benefiting higher-income households means that the House budget constitutes an extremely large upward redistribution of income," the economists warned. "Given how much this bill adds to the U.S. debt, it is shocking that it still imposes absolute losses on the bottom 40% of U.S households."
"The United States has a number of pressing economic challenges to address, many of which require a greater level of state capacity to navigate—capacity that will be eroded by large tax cuts," the letter concludes. "The House bill addresses none of the nation's key economic challenges usefully and exacerbates many of them. The Senate should refuse to pass this bill and start over from scratch on the budget."
The so-called Big Beautiful Bill is now in the Senate, where Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has vowed on behalf of Democrats to "fight it with everything we've got."
"The Republican plan is simple: Sell out working and middle-class families to pay off the rich and well-connected," Schumer said in a "dear colleague" letter on Sunday. "The bill would raise costs and taxes by an average of more than $800 for 40% of American families. Twenty million Americans would see their healthcare costs skyrocket, while almost 14 million would lose their health insurance all together, including millions of children and seniors."
Furthermore, Schumer noted that "11 million people, including 4 million children, could lose access to safe and affordable food, while every one of the 40 million Americans receiving federal food assistance would get less support every month. All the while, their radical plan would see double-digit energy cost increases for American households and businesses, and threaten close to 800,000 good-paying jobs in the clean-energy economy."
"Their entire agenda," Schumer said of Republicans, "can be boiled down to this: Billionaires win and families lose."
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Nobel Prize for mRNA Researchers Shows Power of Public Funding for Vaccines, Campaigners Say
"Public funding delivers incredible medical advances and that should be a priority for all countries, but pharmaceutical companies cannot be trusted to share technology with the world."
Oct 02, 2023
Scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for research that paved the way for the messenger RNA vaccines against Covid-19—critical work that, as campaigners quickly pointed out, benefited from substantial U.S. government funding.
Dr. Mohga Kamal-Yanni, policy co-lead for the People's Vaccine Alliance, said in a statement that "this award challenges the claim that it was solely big pharmaceutical companies who saved the world from Covid-19."
"Just like the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, Karikó and Weissman's groundbreaking work on mRNA vaccines received a huge amount of public funding," said Kamal-Yanni. "Pharmaceutical companies have refused to share mRNA technologies with developers and researchers in developing countries."
The Nobel Prize committee credited Karikó and Weissman with fundamentally changing "our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system."
"The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times," the committee said.
As The Washington Post summarized, the pair "discovered how to chemically tweak messenger RNA, turning basic biology into a technology ready to change the world when the pandemic struck. Their discovery is incorporated into the coronavirus vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, which have now been given billions of times."
But the Post and other major outlets covering Karikó and Weissman's Nobel prize-winning contributions did not emphasize—or even mention—that some of the scientists' work was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Karikó and Weissman patented their findings in 2006 and later licensed the patents to Moderna and BioNTech, Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine partner.
According to an analysis by Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Weissman "appears as the principal investigator on a total of 42 projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1998 and 2020, representing $18,323,060 in costs."
"Karikó was the principal investigator of four projects funded by the NIH between 2007 and 2011, totaling $1,234,462 in costs," KEI observed. "In other words, the United States government funded and has certain rights over at least some of the foundational Karikó and Weissman patents directed to mRNA discoveries."
"As governments discuss how to prepare for the next pandemic, they should learn from the story of mRNA."
Throughout the pandemic and into the present, vaccine makers such as Pfizer and Moderna have opposed global calls to share their vaccine recipes and technology with the world, fiercely clinging to their monopoly control over production and using that control to force governments into one-sided contracts favorable to the pharmaceutical industry—even though their vaccines were developed with massive public support.
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study published in The BMJ earlier this year estimated that the U.S. government pumped nearly $32 billion into the development, production, and purchase of mRNA coronavirus vaccines.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, has declined to use its ownership of key patents or the leverage provided by public funding to force pharmaceutical companies to do everything they can to ensure the equitable distribution of lifesaving vaccine technology.
Kamal-Yanni of the People's Vaccine Alliance said Monday that "fortunately, Weissman is helping a WHO-backed mRNA program which aims to develop mRNA technology in lower-income countries, even while pharmaceutical companies refuse to share their know-how."
"As governments discuss how to prepare for the next pandemic, they should learn from the story of mRNA," said Kamal-Yanni. "Public funding delivers incredible medical advances and that should be a priority for all countries, but pharmaceutical companies cannot be trusted to share technology with the world."
Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines program at Public Citizen, echoed that message, saying in a statement that "today's Nobel must ring as a call for equity and health justice, and a call to change a massively unjust pharmaceutical industry."
"Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech still largely control the available vaccines and in some countries have significantly increased their price, despite the billions in public funding on which the vaccines rely," said Maybarduk. "By supporting initiatives to share science and technology, and by funding vaccine infrastructure, governments can help blunt the effects of disease, and bring a coda of justice to a terribly unjust time."
This story has been updated to include a statement from Public Citizen.
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Demanding 'Global Peace Dividend,' Nobel Laureates Call for 2% Cut in World's Military Spending
"We propose that half of the resources freed up by this agreement are allocated to a global fund, under U.N. supervision, to address humanity’s grave common problems: pandemics, climate change, and extreme poverty."
Dec 15, 2021
In a move they say will save $1 trillion over five years "to fight planetary emergencies" like "pandemics, climate change, and extreme poverty," a group of over 50 Nobel laureates this week published an open letter calling on countries to generate a "global peace dividend" by reducing their military spending by 2%.
"Humankind faces risks that can only be averted through cooperation. Let us cooperate, instead of fighting among ourselves."
"World military spending has doubled since 2000. It is approaching $2 trillion U.S. dollars per year, and is increasing in all regions of the world," the letter--which is being coordinated by physicists Carlo Rovelli and Matteo Smerlak--states.
"Individual governments are under pressure to increase military spending because others do so," the signers continue. "The feedback mechanism sustains a spiraling arms race--a colossal waste of resources that could be used far more wisely."
The letter's signatories include mostly Nobel science and medicine laureates, as well as a handful of winners in the peace, economics, and literature categories. The heads of several national academies also signed, and Tibetan spiritual leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner the Dalai Lama expressed his "appreciation and support" for the initiative.
"Past arms races have often had the same outcome: deadly and destructive conflicts," the signers note. "We have a simple proposal for humankind: The governments of all U.N. member-states should negotiate a joint reduction of their military expenditure by 2% every year for five years."
"We propose that half of the resources freed up by this agreement are allocated to a global fund, under U.N. supervision, to address humanity's grave common problems: pandemics, climate change, and extreme poverty."
"The other half remains at the disposal of individual governments," the signers explain. "All countries will therefore have significant new resources. Some of these can be used to redirect the strong research capacities of military industries towards urgently needed peaceful applications."
"History shows that agreements to limit the proliferation of weapons are achievable: thanks to the SALT and START [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and Strategic Arms Reduction] treaties, the United States and the Soviet Union have reduced their nuclear arsenals by 90% since the 1980s," the letter states--its only reference to specific countries.
With a military budget of $778 billion, the United States spends more annually on its armed forces than the next 11 nations combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The U.S. is followed by China ($252 billion), India ($72.9 billion), Russia ($61.7 billion), and the United Kingdom ($59.2 billion)--all of which increased their military spending in 2020.
"Such negotiations can succeed because they are rational: each actor benefits from its adversaries' armaments reduction, and so does humanity as a whole," the letter's signatories assert. "Humankind faces risks that can only be averted through cooperation. Let us cooperate, instead of fighting among ourselves."
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Empty Gestures or Substantive Change? On the Nobel Prize in Literature and Its Discontents
To be meaningful, post-colonial writers who adhere to what should have remained a radical form of anti-colonialism should become the heart and soul of the literary movement, not only in the Global South but throughout the world.
Oct 19, 2021
The fact that Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah has won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature is welcome news, especially as the Swedish Academy is historically known for lacking in diversity, as if intellectual creativity is largely confined to Western intellectual circles.
It is premature to suggest that the Academy has finally decided to break away from its ethnocentric past and genuinely embrace the incredible literature constantly originating from the Global South. One can be excused for appearing too cynical--after all, since its inception in 1901, over 80% of those who have received the award hail from Europe and North America. In the last decade, Chinese novelist, Mo Yan, was the only non-Western author to receive the award in 2012.
What is required is a systematic rewriting of history, from the point of view of the colonized, and the reclaiming of every part of the literary narrative, starting with the very research methodology.
This raises several grim possibilities:
First, the Academy does not believe that the Global South is making real intellectual, literary contributions to world culture and literature, and that only Western authors are capable of producing literature that is relatable and truly speaks to the human condition.
Second, the Academy and its judges have not done their due diligence in uncovering the literary brilliance that can be found in every nation throughout the Global South.
Third, the award is, essentially, political and is denied to authors and writers who attempt to correct fallacious colonial narratives, push for radical decolonization--in politics, culture, literature and language--and do not adhere to the watered-down version of post-colonialism as championed by Western academic institutions of today.
Gurnah, I am sure, is most deserving of the award. However, what truly matters is not that an author of African origin has finally won the award after the Academy's neglect of Africa for nearly fifteen years. The last African novelist was a white British-Zimbabwean author, Doris Lessing (born to British parents in Iran, in 2007. What matters is that we--Western academia and audience, especially--truly engage with the writings of these great intellectuals.
If such awards merely serve as a simple nod and symbolic acknowledgment of how Western colonialism in Africa--and throughout the Global South--has resulted in irreversible harm to shattered, impoverished and colonized societies, then the gesture is an empty one. To be meaningful, post-colonial writers who adhere to what should have remained a radical form of anti-colonialism should become the heart and soul of the literary movement, not only in the Global South but throughout the world.
It does matter that Kenya's celebrated author, novelist, poet and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o is yet to win the Nobel prize in literature. The man who has challenged the world's view on language and literature in his book 'Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature', is the very manifestation, not only of Africa's literary genius but of the true organic intellectual. Thiong'o was once imprisoned in post-colonial Kenya for writing a play in Gikuyu, his mother tongue, and not in English.
"Black intellectual tradition has given so much to the rest of the world, but this is often invisible," he wrote in his seminal book. The reason behind the invisibility of the 'Black intellectual tradition'--among others--is that they write in languages other than dominant European languages.
However, it is not just the language, but what the language itself relays. When authors write in their mother tongue, their target audience is their own people. They appeal to their grievances and priorities; they speak of their aspirations, and their words are rooted in the collective history of their own nations. Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, this is of no relevance to a Stockholm-based Academy, which was established decades before the formal end of Western colonialism in Africa.
In his consequential book 'The Wretched of the Earth', Black intellectual Frantz Fanon was one of the early revolutionary voices to address the issue of intellectual decolonization.
" Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well," he wrote. This is not done for the sake of an award, an academic recognition or a literary honor. Instead, it is a prerequisite to truly liberating Africa--and the rest of the Global South--from its ongoing dependency on the validation of the West.
For true decolonization to take place, radical language on its own is hardly enough. What is required is a systematic rewriting of history, from the point of view of the colonized, and the reclaiming of every part of the literary narrative, starting with the very research methodology. According to Maori author, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, modern research is modeled around Western priorities.
"From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term 'research' is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, 'research', is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary," Tuhiwai Smith wrote in her important book, 'Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.'
History "is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others," she wrote.
Sometimes, conditional validations and limited concessions through awards and other similar nods of approval can themselves be an attempt at "dominating others."
Ultimately, it is not the awards that matter but what has been researched and written, and its impact on making the world a more equitable place.
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Three Scientists Share Nobel Prize in Physics for 'Revolutionary' Climate Work
"It's clear that for the future generations, we have to act now in a very fast way," said newly minted Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi, a theoretical physicist at the Sapienza University of Rome.
Oct 05, 2021
Three scientists on Tuesday were awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for their "revolutionary contributions" to the world's understanding of the climate--and how human activity, such as the emission of carbon dioxide, impacts it.
"The discoveries being recognized this year demonstrate that our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation."
Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University and Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany were jointly awarded half of the prize for their work on "the physical modeling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability, and reliably predicting global warming," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a press release.
Giorgio Parisi, a theoretical physicist at the Sapienza University of Rome, was awarded the other half of the prize for "the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales."
Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement that "the discoveries being recognized this year demonstrate that our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of observations."
"This year's laureates have all contributed to us gaining deeper insight into the properties and evolution of complex physical systems," Hansson added.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prizes for physics and chemistry, summarized the three scientists' contributions:
Syukuro Manabe demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the Earth's climate and was the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. His work laid the foundation for the development of current climate models.
About ten years later, Klaus Hasselmann created a model that links together weather and climate, thus answering the question of why climate models can be reliable despite weather being changeable and chaotic. He also developed methods for identifying specific signals, fingerprints, that both natural phenomena and human activities imprint in he climate. His methods have been used to prove that the increased temperature in the atmosphere is due to human emissions of carbon dioxide.
Around 1980, Giorgio Parisi discovered hidden patterns in disordered complex materials. His discoveries are among the most important contributions to the theory of complex systems. They make it possible to understand and describe many different and apparently entirely random materials and phenomena, not only in physics but also in other, very different areas, such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience, and machine learning.
Asked during a press conference Tuesday whether he has a message for world leaders ahead of the pivotal COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland later this month, Parisi said that "it is very urgent that we take a very strong decision and move at a very strong pace" to tackle the planetary crisis.
"It's clear that for the future generations," Parisi added, "we have to act now in a very fast way."
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Nobel Laureates Urge Humanity to Stop 'Taking Colossal Risks With Our Common Future'
"We need to reinvent our relationship with planet Earth. The future of all life on this planet—humans and our societies included—requires us to become effective stewards of the global commons."
Apr 29, 2021
Warning that "time is running out to prevent irreversible changes" to the planet, a group of academics including 13 Nobel laureates on Thursday issued an "urgent call for action" in the form of "effective planetary stewardship" to address the climate emergency, global health threats including pandemics, and various forms of inequality.
"The long-term potential of humanity depends upon our ability today to value our common future. Ultimately, this means valuing the resilience of societies and the resilience of Earth's biosphere."
--Academics' statement
In a statement acknowledging that "humankind faces new challenges at unprecedented scale"--including the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the climate emergency, inequality, and what they call an "information crisis"--the academics assert that "time is the natural resource in shortest supply."
"The next decade is crucial," they write. "Global greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut by half and destruction of nature halted and reversed. An essential foundation for this transformation is to address destabilizing inequalities in the world. Without transformational action this decade, humanity is taking colossal risks with our common future. Societies risk large-scale, irreversible changes to Earth's biosphere and our lives as part of it."
The statement continues:
We need to reinvent our relationship with planet Earth. The future of all life on this planet, humans and our societies included, requires us to become effective stewards of the global commons--the climate, ice, land, ocean, freshwater, forests, soils, and rich diversity of life that regulate the state of the planet, and combine to create a unique and harmonious life-support system. There is now an existential need to build economies and societies that support Earth system harmony rather than disrupt it.
The academics note that geologists believe that around 70 years ago the Earth transitioned from the Holocene epoch of the past 12,000 years into the Anthropocene, a period in which human activity has been the primary influence on climate and the environment.
"The Anthropocene epoch," they write, "is more likely to be characterized by speed, scale, and shock at global levels."
The statement urges a "decade of action" in service of "effective planetary stewardship," a transformational endeavor that "requires updating our Holocene mindset."
"We must act on the urgency, the scale, and the interconnectivity between us and our home, planet Earth," it says. "More than anything, planetary stewardship will be facilitated by enhancing social capital--building trust within societies and between societies."
To this end, the signers offer seven proposals, including redefining measures of economic success to include human well-being; boosting science-based education and developing new models for the "free sharing of scientific knowledge"; combating the "industrialization of misinformation"; and fairly pricing economic, environmental, and social externalities.
"Humanity is waking up late to the challenges and opportunities of active planetary stewardship. But we are waking up."
--statement
"Global sustainability offers the only viable path to human safety, equity, health, and progress," the statement says. "Humanity is waking up late to the challenges and opportunities of active planetary stewardship. But we are waking up. Long-term, scientifically based decision-making is always at a disadvantage in the contest with the needs of the present."
"Politicians and scientists must work together to bridge the divide between expert evidence, short-term politics, and the survival of all life on this planet in the Anthropocene epoch," the academics conclude. "The long-term potential of humanity depends upon our ability today to value our common future. Ultimately, this means valuing the resilience of societies and the resilience of Earth's biosphere."
The academics' call to action follows the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit, a first-of-its-kind virtual event at which scientists, policymakers, business leaders, and youth activists explored near-term solutions to set the planet on a path "to a more sustainable, more prosperous future for all of humanity."
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101 Nobel Laureates Urge World Leaders to 'Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground'
"Fossil fuels are the greatest contributor to climate change. Allowing the continued expansion of this industry is unconscionable."
Apr 21, 2021
On the eve of Earth Day and the start of U.S. President Joe Biden's Leaders Summit on Climate, a group of 101 Nobel laureates published a letter urging world leaders and governments to "keep fossil fuels in the ground" as a critical first step toward addressing the climate emergency.
"Urgent action is needed to end the expansions of fossil fuel production, phase out current production, and invest in renewable energy."
--Nobel laureates' letter
The letter--which was signed by Nobel peace, literature, medicine, physics, chemistry, and economic sciences laureates--notes that the climate emergency "is threatening hundreds of millions of lives, livelihoods across every continent, and is putting thousands of species at risk." It adds that "the burning of fossil fuels--coal, oil, and gas--is by far the major contributor" to the crisis.
Signers of the letter--who include Mairead Corrigan-Maguire, the Dalai Lama, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Jody Williams, and Muhammad Yunus--said that "urgent action is needed to end the expansions of fossil fuel production, phase out current production, and invest in renewable energy."
The letter continues:
The burning of fossil fuels is responsible for almost 80% of carbon dioxide emissions since the industrial revolution. In addition to being the leading source of emissions, there are local pollution, environmental, and health costs associated with extracting, refining, transporting, and burning fossil fuels.
These costs are often paid by Indigenous peoples and marginalized communities. Egregious industry practices have led to human rights violations and a fossil fuel system that has left billions of people across the globe without sufficient energy to lead lives of dignity.
For both people and the planet, continued support must be given to tackling climate change through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Paris agreement. Failure to meet the Paris agreement's temperature limit of 1.5degC risks pushing the world towards catastrophic global warming. Yet, the Paris agreement has no mention of oil, gas, or coal.
Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry continues to plan new projects. Banks continue to fund new projects. According to the most recent United Nations Environment Program report, 120% more coal, oil, and gas will be produced by 2030 than is consistent with limiting warming to 1.5degC. Efforts to meet the Paris agreement and to reduce demand for fossil fuels will be undermined if supply continues to grow.
The signatories urge world leaders to do the following "in a spirit of international cooperation":
- End new expansion of oil, gas, and coal production in line with the best available science as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and United Nations Environment Program;
- Phase out existing production of oil, gas, and coal in a manner that is fair and equitable, taking into account the responsibilities of countries for climate change and their respective dependency on fossil fuels, and capacity to transition; and
- Invest in a transformational plan to ensure 100% access to renewable energy globally, support dependent economies to diversify away from fossil fuels, and enable people and communities across the globe to flourish through a global just transition.
"Fossil fuels are the greatest contributor to climate change," the letter concludes. "Allowing the continued expansion of this industry is unconscionable. The fossil fuel system is global and requires a global solution--a solution the Leaders Climate Summit must work towards. And the first step is to keep fossil fuels in the ground."
The Nobel laureates' letter comes two days after United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that humanity stands "on the verge of the abyss" as the climate crisis pushes the world "dangerously close" to hitting the 1.5degC target limit of warming.
Guterres said that the world is "way off track" of the goal of reducing by 2030 global greenhouse gas emissions by 45% from 2010 levels and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, which scientists say is necessary to avert the worst impacts of the climate emergency.
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For Second Year Straight, Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
Without Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, "the climate issue would not have been on the agenda to such an extent as it is today."
Feb 02, 2020
Swedish 17-year-old Greta Thunberg, founder of the global youth-led climate action movement Fridays for Future, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for the second consecutive year.
"The main reason she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize is that despite her young age, she has worked hard to make politicians open their eyes to the climate crisis."
--Jens Holm and Hakan Svenneling, Swedish parliamentarians
Nominations for the 2020 award were due Feb. 1. Thunberg was nominated by Jens Holm and Hakan Svenneling, members of Sweden's Left Party.
" Greta Thunberg is a climate activist, and the main reason she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize is that despite her young age, she has worked hard to make politicians open their eyes to the climate crisis," Holm and Svenneling reportedly wrote to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
"The climate crisis will produce new conflicts and ultimately wars. Action for reducing our emissions and complying with the Paris agreement is therefore also an act of making peace," the parliamentarians continued. Without Thunberg and the movement she sparked, they added, "the climate issue would not have been on the agenda to such an extent as it is today."
Although Thunberg was considered a favorite to receive the 2019 prize, it ultimately went to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for his "efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighboring Eritrea."
Thunberg has been granted several other honors since she started skipping school to protest outside the Swedish Parliament in 2018, at the age of 15, which inspired other students worldwide to walk out of classrooms and take to the streets to call for more ambitious efforts to combat the climate crisis.
Last year, Thunberg was named TIME magazine's Person of the Year and received Amnesty International's top human rights award. She also was one of four recipients of the Right Livelihood Award, often called the "alternative Nobel Peace Prize."
In October 2019, Thunberg declined the Nordic Council's annual environmental award after being nominated by her home country and Norway. At the time, she called the award "a huge honor" but explained that "the climate movement does not need any more awards. What we need is for our politicians and the people in power start to listen to the current, best available science."
The teen activist urged the Nordic countries that make up the council to "act in accordance with what the science says is needed to limit the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees Celsius," referencing key targets from the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
As of press time, Thunberg had not publicly commented on her second nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. However, the news came after Thunberg participated in a press conference on Friday that aimed to pressure the international community, and particularly global media, to pay more attention to the work of climate activists across Africa and how human-caused global heating is already impacting the continent.
Addressing reporters alongside Ell Ottosson Jarl, another Swedish Fridays for Future activist, Thunberg said Friday that "we have noticed that wherever we show up, people like us show up, there's a huge media interest... and since we have a platform, we must make sure that the voices of the people who should be heard are heard as well."
"That's why we're doing this press conference today, so that people who need to be heard can share their stories to the media," she added. "Today we will be focusing on Africa--activists and scientists from Africa--as the African perspective is always so under-reported."
The African participants of the press conference were three Fridays for Future activists--Vanessa Nakate of Uganda, Makenna Muigai of Kenya, and Ayakha Melithafa of South Africa--and Ndoni Mcunu, a climate scientist at the Global Change Institute at University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.
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Newest Nobel Economics Laureates Praised for Experimental Research Into Poverty--and Their Work's Real-World Impact
The work of Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer "has great potential to further improve the lives of the worst-off people around the world," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
Oct 14, 2019
Three researchers on Monday were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their groundbreaking work in studying poverty-stricken communities around the world and developing ways to make a difference in poor people's lives through education and healthcare.
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of M.I.T. and Michael Kremer of Harvard were named the winners of this year's award, receiving recognition for their two decades of experiment-based research and the concrete impact they've had on the communities they study--a departure for a prize which has often been given to economists whose work is grounded in theory.
"The research conducted by this year's Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said (pdf). "In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research."
Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer examine ways to alleviate poverty through interventions in some of the systems that leave the poorest people behind, including schools and healthcare.
In one experiment, the researchers found that access to extra textbooks did not have a meaningful impact on improving students' outcomes in Kenya--but that tutors for low-performing students in India did help them to learn more effectively in school.
"As a direct result of one of their studies, more than five million Indian children have benefited from effective programs of remedial tutoring in schools," the Academy of Sciences wrote.
The international charity Save the Children, which counts Banerjee among its trustees, praised the Academy of Sciences for recognizing the researchers' work.
The researchers also conducted an experiment in which residents in more than 200 villages in India spread information about vaccinations, finding that families were more likely to receive immunizations when the information was shared in the community.
"This is probably the first 21st-century prize in economics," Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, told the New York Times. "We've given lots of prizes for the advances of the 20th century."
"Their methods, and this is not stuff worked on 20, 30 years ago--this is stuff that, none of it started until the 2000s," he added. "This really is 21st-century economics, and it's wonderful that we're moving into the 21st century with the Nobel prize, in my view."
In a profile published by the New Yorker in 2010, Duflo said that as a graduate student, "I wrote in all the introductions of my papers, 'The ideal experiment to measure the effect of this would be...'"
"I just got fed up of writing about what the ideal experiment would be," she said. "Why don't we just do it?"
Duflo is only the second woman to be awarded the novel prize in economics. The late Elinor Ostrom won the prize in 2009 for her research into how people in small communities share natural resources with one another.
Economist Paul Krugman called the Academy's recognition of Dufko, Banerjee, and Kremer "heartening."
The economists' work "has great potential to further improve the lives of the worst-off people around the world," wrote the Academy.
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