Climate Desk

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A collaboration of more than a dozen news organizations dedicated to exploring the human, environmental, economic, and political impacts of our changing climate, and sharing our work with a wide audience. Find us at: ClimateDesk.org

Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Earlier this week, at the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston, the Interior Department and the French oil supermajor TotalEnergies unveiled a very strange settlement. The Trump administration announced that it would give Total almost $1 billion to scrap its proposed offshore wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean, and in exchange Total would invest around $1 billion in US oil and gas projects. Many climate activists and media outlets described this settlement as the government deploying taxpayer money to get a company not to build something, and the Trump administration itself almost seemed to invite that interpretation. The truth, as my Grist colleague Rebecca McCarthy and I point out in our story this week, is a little weirder. The Interior Department has already tried to cancel five almost-complete offshore wind farms in the Atlantic, and has lost in court on all five attempts. If the administration were to cancel other leases like Total’s, the courts would likely order it to pay out the leaseholders. The nearly $1 billion payment to Total is the exact amount Total paid to lease the ocean territory in the first place. In that sense, it represents a preemptive admission of legal defeat by the government.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Who’s responsible when a town gets eaten alive by data centers? In Archbald, Pennsylvania, that’s the subject of a lot of debate. When I first drove up there last October, I thought I was chasing a relatively quick-turnaround story for Grist. I’d seen a brief article about a trailer park called Valley View Estates being evicted to make way for a data center. At the time, only two campuses were planned for the area. Today there are six, totaling 51 buildings that will cover 14 percent of the town. It quickly became clear that this was a much more complicated story. Archbald is in the heart of anthracite coal territory, and a maze of abandoned mines runs beneath it. That it was about to be consumed by the tech industry’s race to create artificial general intelligence was infuriating, residents said, but not surprising. Coal barons had squeezed the area dry a long time ago, they said. Then it had become a Mafia stronghold, then a hub for warehouses and landfills.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Israel and America's war on Iran, barely a fortnight old, is already unfolding as an environmental outrage. The choking smoke and the black acid rain that fell from the skies after last Sunday's attacks on Tehran's fuel depots, followed by Iran's retaliatory bombings of fuel tankers in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, were just the most visible aspects of the environmental crimes perpetrated during the war’s first two weeks. “There will be a real cocktail of chemistry, including significant amounts of aromatic compounds that are known to interact with DNA and have been linked to cancers,” University of London chemist Andrea Sella told me for my story in the Guardian, in reference to the Tehran bombing.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS As a veteran science reporter, I have long tracked how research can be distorted for profit. The tobacco industry may be the most famous practitioner, but efforts to besmirch independent evidence of a product’s potential harm as “junk science” have been financed by the chemical, fossil fuel, pharmaceutical, and sugar industries, among others. Now Republican power players are taking things even further by censoring science they dislike. Notably, last month, the Federal Judicial Center—an educational agency Congress created in 1967 to serve the judicial branch—deleted a chapter on climate science from an influential reference manual federal judges have long used to parse complex science issues in the courtroom. The deletion was orchestrated by 27 Republican attorneys general who called for the chapter’s immediate withdrawal in order to retain the “judiciary’s impartiality” in climate and energy cases.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS We have reached a critical moment for the climate. For the first time, a three-year temperature average—2023 through 2025—has exceeded the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming over pre-industrial levels set at the Paris climate conference a decade ago. Climate scientists are predicting devastating consequences, just as the world’s governments appear to have lost their appetite for tackling the emissions that cause the warming.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS If you happen to be driving through Altoona, Iowa, anytime soon, you’ll probably take Interstate 80. If you do, you’ll spot the Altoona water tower and the roller-coaster peaks of Adventureland theme park, empty in the off-season. You’ll also likely notice, just off the highway, a hulking, windowless warehouse complex stretching hundreds of acres. That’s Meta’s Altoona Data Center, now the subject of a $5 million industry advertising campaign. As a reporter for Grist, I spend a lot of time thinking about data centers, which are proliferating to enable Silicon Valley’s AI frenzy. More and more Americans are thinking about them, too, and many folks aren’t so sure they want the facilities in their neighborhoods. They’re worried about air and noise pollution, and that developers may be less than entirely honest about how many jobs the facilities will bring.
View in browser Support our nonprofit journalism Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Who gets to decide whether oil companies have to pay for their role in coastal destruction? That’s the big question at the center of Chevron USA, Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, a case that my colleague Marianne Lavelle and I wrote about this past week for Inside Climate News. It stems from a landmark $745 million verdict handed down by a Louisiana jury in April 2025, wherein jurors found Chevron liable for decades of erosion of the state’s coastline and wetlands. It and other oil companies appealed the verdict all the way to the US Supreme Court, which heard arguments in the case on Monday.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS The Western United States is distinguished by its vast public lands—hundreds of millions of acres of forests, deserts, and grasslands that, in theory, belong to all Americans. Some areas are slated for conservation. Others allow commercial operations ranging from ski resorts to oil fields, which (also in theory) benefit the public while minimizing damage to the land. Among the biggest is livestock: About 240 million acres of federal public land—an area about two-and-a-half times the size of California—are available to ranchers for cattle and sheep grazing at a bargain monthly rate. Who ultimately benefits from this arrangement and what does it cost us? To tackle that question, investigative reporter Jimmy Tobias, representing Climate Desk partner High Country News, teamed up with ProPublica’s Mark Olalde. Their joint three-part investigation, which I co-edited, is based on 14 months of reporting and more than 100 public records requests. It reveals how generous ranching subsidies flow disproportionately to the very wealthy—including families with names like Murdoch and Rockefeller. Tobias and Olalde also document the erosion of environmental oversight by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, and document cozy relationships between ranchers and politicians that reward rule-breaking.
You would think things like basic sanitation—clean water, decent sewage treatment, etc.—would transcend partisan politics. But we live in Donald Trump’s America now. Shortly after his second term began, the Trump administration reneged on federal funding to fix a failed septic system in predominantly Black Lowndes County, Alabama. County and state officials had neglected the problem for decades—even as raw sewage spewed onto people’s lawns. Under President Joe Biden, those officials were found to have violated residents’ civil rights, and the EPA launched a program to channel money into Lownes and other similarly afflicted “Black belt” communities to fix the problems. Trump put an end to all of that. Author and activist Catherine Coleman Flowers, who lived in Lowndes as a teenager, works on the forefront of what she calls “sanitation justice,” the notion that things like sewage treatment and clean water are universal health issues, not some "woke" DEI thing. “We have to expand the definition of environmental justice because we can’t let people think that if you are not Black and poor, you’re not going to be victimized,” she says. “We all drink the same water.”
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS David Stevenson is a 75-year-old grandfather with a gruff voice and an easy grin. He drives a hybrid and has rooftop solar. He also helped launch a national movement that, when I first met him in early 2023, was working on the GOP fringes to thwart the construction of wind farms off the US coast. I had pitched a profile to my editor at The Post and Courier, the South Carolina newspaper where I was then working, but at the time, Stevenson seemed like little more than a gadfly to the multibillion-dollar offshore wind industry that was taking off under the Biden administration. I put my piece on the back burner, though we stayed in touch. Today, President Donald Trump’s war on offshore wind has become a scorched-earth campaign. Stevenson, until recently a policy director with the Caesar Rodney Institute, a GOP think tank, had long predicted this moment. In fact, he says, he’s dreamed of it.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS As a senior reporter for climate justice at the Guardian, I often cover the communities most impacted by extreme weather, as well as those left behind in climate adaptation and mitigation efforts. I've spent a lot of time this year in Appalachia, where former coal communities are being hit increasingly hard by destructive storms, compounding the economic, environmental, and social harms from mining—and its demise—as well as the opioid crisis. This is a region that has shifted from the Democrats to Donald Trump. Still, in 2022, the Biden administration earmarked billions of dollars through the Inflation Reduction Act to help coal country transition from extractive industries into a hub for renewable energy technologies. On his first day in office, however, Trump began dismantling Biden’s programs and vowed to roll back clean air, transport, and other pollution standards and protections while boosting incentives for coal, oil, and gas. He gave his billionaire donor and consigliere, Elon Musk, free rein as head of the quasi-legal Department of Government Efficiency. Musk promptly took a chainsaw to the government, terminating grants designed to create decent jobs in former mining regions, and gutting agencies—including the National Science Foundation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—that help communities prepare for, and respond to, the climate emergency.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS The world climate summit known as COP30—officially the 30th UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—kicked off in Belém, Brazil, this past Monday to such a thunderous rainstorm that the venue flooded. There’s climate change for you. These annual COP meetings were responsible for the groundbreaking Paris Agreement, ratified in 2016, wherein almost 200 nations made pledges intended to limit global warming to 2 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels—and ideally keep it to 1.5 C. Despite considerable progress on clean energy, the world is already busting through that lower threshold. This week, two reports estimated we’re on track for 2.6 C by century’s end, which, in the words of one expert, “means global disaster.” Meanwhile, for the first time ever, the US government is officially absent from the climate talks—as are, shamefully, four of the major US broadcast networks. President Donald Trump announced America's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement for the second time—the first was in 2017, but Joe Biden reversed it—immediately upon re-taking office, and thenput the full force of his presidency into promoting fossil fuels and killing renewables.
Day three begins at Cop30 Dharna Noor The second day of Cop29 ended with a bang, as dozens of Indigenous protestors forced their way into the conference center. The demonstrators, some of whom wore headdresses and carried instruments, pulled doors from their hinges, shoved through security scanners, and tussled with guards before successfully entering the venue. “Our forests are not for sale,” one protestor’s sign read. It’s a sign that this year marks the return of major protests at UN climate talks, after several years of repression. More demonstrations are planned at the venue for the rest of the week, both on and off site. Some 50,000 people are attending Cop30, from the civil society groups holding rallies, to the researchers poring over esoteric documents, to the politicians huddling together in brightly lit rooms. One group, however, is conspicuously absent from the climate talks: a delegation from the US, the world’s largest historical greenhouse gas polluter. It’s the first time the US has sat out the negotiations completely, research organization Carbon Brief confirmed on Tuesday. US president Donald Trump, who calls the climate crisis a “hoax,” pulled the country from the Paris Agreement in January as part of an all-out assault on climate policy. California governor Gavin Newsom, who arrived at the climate talks on Tuesday, strongly condemned Trump’s anti-environmental agenda: “He’s an invasive species, he’s a wrecking ball president,” he said at a press conference. “He’s trying to roll back progress of the last century, he’s trying to recreate the 19th century, he’s doubling down on stupid.” Newsom, whose state has the world’s fourth-largest economy, is the topmost US official at Cop29. Everywhere he went on Tuesday, he was followed by hoards of spectators. In meetings and press conferences, he assured crowds that California is committed to climate action.
5h ago 07.14 EST Negotiations begin at Cop30 after agenda agreed Jonathan Watts Jonathan Watts Thunder, lightning and torrential rain tore down on the Cop30 conference centre in Belém on the opening day yesterday, but the climate gathering has so far avoided the political storms that often shake the early phases of the annual talks, writes Jonathan Watts, the Guardian’s global environment writer. How long the calm lasts will be clearer over the next two days, when the Brazilian presidency holds consultations with key nations on the items that will be discussed over the coming two weeks. This is a diplomatic sleight of hand that has so far enabled the host to avoid the usual wrangles over the formal agenda, which have often taken several days in past conferences, holding up all other work. Yesterday, however, the agenda breezed through. Plus an image of chairs with rain on them.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Public health has improved over the past few decades in almost every country on Earth, thanks largely to better access to antibiotics, vaccines, and other interventions that keep diseases at bay. Well-being, life expectancy, maternal health, and other metrics of progress have gotten better. So why is the World Health Organization warning that humanity is on the precipice of a health crisis? The answer is that our public health innovations are predicated on the assumption that our environment will continue to function largely as it has since the end of the last Ice Age. But this fails to account for a century-plus of rampant fossil fuel use. I’m Zoya Teirstein, senior staff writer at Grist, where we recently launched an ambitious new series called “Vital Signs.” Over the next seven months, we'll take readers around the world to explore how climate change is threatening human health in ways that transcend borders. These changes, building slowly for decades, have only begun to spill into plain view: record outbreaks of dengue fever in Latin America last year, widespread drought-driven malnutrition in the Horn of Africa, wildfire smoke and impaired cognitive development in Australia, deadly waterborne bacteria moving up our own Atlantic Coast. We have tools to tackle these problems. The question is: Will humanity acknowledge the baseline shift in time to deploy them?
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS As a former Mother Jones fellow turned senior climate reporter and extreme-weather correspondent for the Guardian, I’ve grown accustomed to being the bearer of bad news. But amid the endless cycle of missed emissions targets, compounding disasters, and attempts to gut climate protections, inspiring stories occasionally pop up to remind us there are still solutions—and people willing to fight for them. That’s how I got to bear witness to the rebirth of the Klamath River. After the last of four major hydroelectric dams was removed late last year—the largest such project in US history—the mighty waterway that straddles the Oregon–California border, a river at the heart of Indigenous culture, has undergone a recovery that has astounded scientists and casual observers alike. Wildlife (bald eagles, beavers, bears, salmon, etc.) is rebounding, along with, as I write in the piece, the “insects, algae, and microscopic features of the flourishing systems that feed this ecosystem.” One year into this grand experiment, we’ve also gotten to see how the Indigenous leaders who spearheaded the work are ensuring the story doesn’t end there.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS When people think of Madagascar, the island nation off Africa’s east coast and setting of that silly 2005 animated film from DreamWorks, we tend to picture abundance: lemurs leaping through lush forests, chameleons blending into trees, coral reefs teeming with life. But that’s just not the reality anymore. Nearly all lemur species are now threatened with extinction, reef ecosystems are collapsing, and forests are shrinking at alarming rates. I’m Paige Vega, climate editor at Vox, where we’ve been digging into one of the biggest stories shaping our planet’s future: how the loss of biodiversity is unfolding in real time, even in places people think of as wild and untouched. In an ambitious new project led by Vox senior environmental correspondent Benji Jones, we explore what biodiversity loss looks like in a place that’s synonymous with wildlife—and what it will take to turn things around. Because in Madagascar, saving nature isn’t just about protecting animals, it’s about giving people a way to live.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Hello! I’m Maria Gallucci, a senior reporter at Canary Media, the newest member of the Climate Desk collaboration. Canary Media is a nonprofit newsroom covering the clean energy transition, and this week I’ve got a story on the hollowing-out of a little-known federal office that was helping make that transition happen. Congress created the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) four years ago to solve a “chicken-and-egg situation” for climate solutions, Zahava Urecki at the Bipartisan Policy Center told me. Emerging technologies that could unlock major environmental and climate benefits need serious capital to scale up and prove themselves, and investors are often unwilling to shoulder those financial risks alone. That’s where the OCED comes in. During the Biden administration, Congress gave the office about $27 billion to back projects that could drastically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from heavy industries such as steel manufacturing—including at a plant in JD Vance’s hometown—along with more controversial initiatives like hubs for hydrogen production and direct air capture. These subsidies, contingent on private investment, act as a force multiplier such that “a relatively small investment from taxpayers,” notes one expert, is expected to yield “an enormous benefit.”
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS We’ve long known that meat is bad news for the environment, responsible for everything from land loss and carbon emissions to massive, noxious lagoons of pig shit. And eating too much of it isn’t great for you—or anybody. Last week, Climate Desk partners covered the unveiling of a proposed “planetary health diet” whose creators say it could curb food-related emissions by half and prevent 15 million premature deaths annually. Big Agriculture, of course, is guarding its turf at all costs. The Guardian reports that nearly 60 percent of EU Parliament members voted this week in favor of the industry’s demand to reserve words like “steak” and “sausage” for animal products rather than plant-based alternatives. While the measure passed, it would still need to be approved by the majority of member states. “Veggie burgers, seitan schnitzel, and tofu sausage do not confuse consumers, only right-wing politicians,” one critic quipped.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS The federal government is shut down and National Park employees are bracing for another disaster. The last Trump shutdown, which began in late December 2018 and lasted 35 days, was a period of “chaos and destruction” for America's national parks. “Prehistoric petroglyphs were vandalized at Big Bend,” recalls the Guardian’s Gabrielle Canon, and “Joshua trees, some more than a century old, were chopped down at Joshua Tree.” Animals were illegally killed, trash was strewn across the landscape, park toilets overflowed with feces, and fights broke out over campsites. The administration’s plan is similar this time around, our Climate Desk partners report. The parks will use recreation fees to keep basic services like bathrooms open, even though tens of thousands of employees are furloughed—a move found unlawful by the Government Accountability Office in a 2019 opinion.
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Happy Climate Week! We’ve got good and bad news. Let's start with the good: President Donald Trump can hate on wind and solar all he wants, but he can’t stop the global march toward cleaner energy. Investment in renewable power rose by 10 percent in the first half of 2025, the Guardian reports, and, in spite of Trump’s cynical efforts, 19 American states and 304 large companies—together representing nearly two-thirds of US corporate revenues—remain committed to “net zero.”
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS It’s only the most important story in the world. True, the Epstein files, the Kirk assassination, the Trump administration’s assault on science, creeping authoritarianism—all of these things are exceedingly newsworthy, but they pale in comparison to the epic story that touches on virtually every newsroom beat, one that will outlast this fraught moment and affect generations to come, here in the United States and globally: the story of our changing climate. I’m Michael Mechanic, a longtime Mother Jones senior editor and point person for Climate Desk, a collaboration of 15 newsrooms covering the interplay of climate and environmental issues with, well, just about everything: agriculture, art, business, corruption, courts, culture, economics, energy, fashion, food, global relations, housing, history, incarceration, land use, migration, politics, pollution, poverty, race, tribal sovereignty, science, sports, technology, wealth, wildlife, war & peace—you name it. As I said, this story is epic.
A video with b-roll of storms, wildfires, and solar panels alongside graphics of Climate Desk and partner logos.
A chart showing the cost of solar in USD/kWH going from .45 to less than .1 Titled: "Globally the cost of utility-scale solar has plumetted" Subtitled: "Global utility solar levilized cost of energy (USD/kWh)"
A chart that says "The emergence of wind energy across the country" and "Wind power capacity in gigawatts (GW)" "Land and Offshore" It shows that wind has grown in every state from 2000 and is projected to grow into 2050.
A chart that says "In two decades, wind capacity has increased 23x" "US wind net summer capacity (in gigawatts)" In November 2024, wind capacity reached 151 GW) The chart shows a line going from 0 in 1985 to 151 in 2024. Behind the chart is an illustration of wind turbines. "Source: US Energy Information Administration"