This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Thursday that she plans to sue fossil fuel companies for knowingly contributing to climate change, harming the state’s economy and ways of life.
“It’s long past time that we step up and hold the fossil fuel companies that are responsible for all these damages accountable,” she said.
Nessel said the case is an effort to recover some of what Michigan has lost due to climate change, pointing to severe weather events, risks to agriculture, and last winter’s short ski season and canceled sled dog races.
The department is asking outside lawyers to submit proposals to help with the case, which Nessel said could potentially bring billions to the state to address damages from climate change. Attorneys and law firms can submit proposals through June 5.
“A case like this is exhaustive in nature,” she told Interlochen Public Radio. “You’re going after Big Oil, so you need to have some support in terms of additional attorneys and support staff.”
Last month, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability referenced that reporting, saying that its own nearly three-year-long investigation gave a “rare glimpse into the extensive efforts undertaken by fossil fuel companies to deceive the public and investors about their knowledge of the effects of their products on climate change and to undermine efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.”
For instance, ahead of a recent congressional hearing, newly revealed documents showed that BP executives knew natural gas was contributing significantly to climate change but promoted it as a “bridge” fuel to replace coal.
Asked about Michigan’s plans to sue, Ryan Meyers, the American Petroleum Institute’s senior vice president and general counsel, said in an emailed statement that it is part of an “ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry and its workers.” Meyers added that climate policy should be handled in Congress, not the courts.
The attorney general’s department is working with state agencies to assess the impacts of climate change in Michigan.
Nessel said the state has successfully pursued similar legal efforts in the past, including against the opioid industry and chemical manufacturers that produce PFAS.
This story was originally published by ICT and is reproduced here as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.
A little more than a century ago the village of Taholah was built where the ocean meets the Quinault River. Today when there’s too much rain, or a storm surge, water will rush past Quinault Street, down 2nd, 3rd all the way across town, filling yards and homes with salt water.
Ryan Hendricks points to the sea wall and remembers one such flood. “It’s almost like a geyser shooting through the rocks,” said Hendricks, a member of the Quinault Indian Nation’s Tribal Council. “The water was coming in from the river and just coming directly into the village. And then over here … the water wasn’t coming really over the wall. It was just coming through the rocks like a geyser. So it was just pushing almost with the speed of like a natural river current.”
The Quinault Nation faces dangerous long-term currents. Taholah is barely inches above the ocean and the sea level is rising. On top of that there are a growing number of storm surges, where flood waters are propelled by high winds.
What makes the Quinault story so powerful is that it’s a window into our future: It’s the idea that a changing climate will determine where and how we will live, what we will eat, and how much it’s going to cost.
The Quinault Nation has been deliberate in its response, debating for the past couple of decades about how to protect its lands, its fish, people, and property. After many community meetings the conclusion was reached in a 2017 tribal master plan, a move to higher ground.
That plan included a new village, about a half-mile uphill, that will protect residents from storm surges or even a potential catastrophic tsunami. Relocation will “incorporate smart growth techniques including low-impact development and green infrastructure to better prepare the community for the future climate.”
Ryan Hendricks, a member of the Quinault Indian Nation’s Tribal Council, points to the village’s sea wall.
Stewart Huntington/ICT
The easy part of relocation is already done. The nation has constructed what’s needed for a new community. The streets are paved. The sewers are in. And only a couple of things are missing: houses and residents.
The new village “must be designed to be as resilient as possible,” the master plan said. “Even small events, such as windstorms, close roads and down power lines, isolating the village. Thus, planning for safe havens in case of disaster and alternative energy sources is a must when determining facility siting, sizing, orientation, and programming.”
In a reflection of Indigenous values, the first building opened by the nation was the Generations House, a 30,000-square-foot building serving elders, Head Start, day care, and adult education.
“This was our most modern effort to relocate our most vital citizens with all of our next generations,” Hendricks says. “This is a shared building with all of our most valuable resources, our children. And then, all of our most valuable information holders are our elders on the other side [of the building].”
The Generations House is also the gathering point should there be an emergency.
There are a lot of questions that still must be answered before any houses are built.
“We have penciled out what a house would cost. And right now we are sitting at somewhere between $350 and $400,000 per house,” Hendricks says. That is a number unaffordable for most tribal members.
And what about the people now living in Taholah who have paid off their mortgages — especially elders?
“Why would they come up with a new mortgage? Well, they already have a house for themselves. And then there’s someone who said, ‘Well, we don’t have the means to pay for a new home. Is the tribe going to buy my home?’” asks Hendricks.
That means the nation still must work through these scenarios and come up with individual solutions.
And that starts with a community-based plan.
“I had the chance to visit Quinault a year ago, and they are doing just amazing work on climate relocation and climate resilience,” said Bryan Newland, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for Indian affairs. “It’s one of three communities that are going to serve as kind of pilot projects, if you will, on community driven relocation. And they’re just doing amazing work. I was really impressed by their foresight in their planning and how they are really thinking through a lot of issues that aren’t intuitive and working to address them. And so I’ve been really impressed. And, you know, we shouldn’t be surprised that when tribes have resources, they’re able to do very impressive things. And so I look forward to seeing where they’re going to take that.”
For now the bottom line is that the Quinault Nation is not sure where more than $450 million will come from to pay for this relocation.
But here’s the thing. The Quinault Nation is further along in this sort of planning than nearly every community on the planet. When we drove up the coast to get here, we passed through low-elevation towns and even cities that reflect the scale of the problem. And it’s clear that neither the region nor the country are penciling out what has to be done and what it will cost.
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
One year ago, New York state passed one of the country’s most ambitious clean energy and climate justice laws. The Build Public Renewables Act authorized the New York Power Authority, or NYPA — a state-owned public power utility — to build and own clean energy projects for the first time. If the state falls short of its ambitious climate goals, the law mandates that NYPA step up to build renewables that will keep the state on track.
Heralded as a major win for environmental justice and climate advocacy groups, the law also introduced a program for low- and moderate-income residents to receive credits for clean energy produced by the public utility and allocated $25 million each year to renewable energy job training, among other measures.
But in the year since, progress on implementing the law has been spotty. Though NYPA says it has made carrying out the law a priority by laying the groundwork for future renewable power projects, activists and some policymakers say the utility has not been transparent in its planning thus far, making it hard to tell whether NYPA is on track to transform the state’s energy sector at the pace required by its 2019 climate law.
“The real problem is there is not sufficient transparency into what they are planning, so it’s hard for us to say how effective it is,” Michael Paulson, co-chair of the coalition Public Power NY, told Canary Media.
Paulson’s group, along with the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, labor unions, and climate justice organizations across the state, campaigned for four years to pass the Build Public Renewables Act. An amended form of the law eventually made it into the state’s annual budget early last May. Activists hoped that strengthening the role of publicly owned power would enable a swifter expansion of cleaner, cheaper electricity — and create a structure that’s more accountable to consumers than the dominant investor-owned utility model.
Over the past 12 months, the authority has taken some initial steps toward working with private renewable energy developers. In January 2024, NYPA issued a request for information from developers and contractors to learn about opportunities for wind, solar, and battery energy storage projects. In March, the authority followed up with a request for qualifications to evaluate and prequalify renewable developers to work with on future projects, to which it received more than 85 responses.
In January 2025, the power authority is required to publish a highly anticipated strategic plan, which will outline how and where the utility will develop renewable energy projects in a way that benefits disadvantaged communities and meets the state’s climate goals. “Our goal is to maximize the renewable generation we can bring online for New Yorkers,” Paul DeMichele, manager of media relations for NYPA, said in a statement to Canary Media.
But so far, advocacy groups and lawmakers heavily involved in the writing and passing of the legislation have criticized how NYPA has chosen to roll out the program. At a March 26 meeting of the authority’s board of trustees, NYPA President and CEO Justin Driscoll revealed that the organization has hired the consulting firm McKinsey to help implement the plan and “ensure our operating model internally and our internal governance around the buildout of renewables for the state.” DeMichele told the publication Hell Gate that “McKinsey was engaged, through an open bidding process, to help us better understand where private developers have been challenged while developing renewable projects.”
Sarahana Shrestha, a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly and longtime advocate of the Build Public Renewables Act, told Hell Gate that “McKinsey’s way of doing business is the complete opposite of what we designed the bill for.” The consultancy has come under fire for its role in a corruption scandal with South Africa’s electric utility, among other high-profile issues. Shrestha and New York State Senator Michael Gianaris recently introduced a bill to require more frequent public reports and hearings on the authority’s implementation of the Build Public Renewables Act.
Meanwhile, the power authority will need to navigate the challenges facing the offshore wind industry — a pillar of the state’s mandate to meet 70 percent of its electricity needs with clean power by 2030. In recent months, at least five offshore wind projects in New York have been canceled due to rising costs and supply chain issues, casting doubt on the state’s ability to meet its decarbonization target. New York is currently on track to meet less than 57 percent of forecasted 2030 demand with renewable energy.
To Public Power NY’s Paulson, the sector’s struggles are another reason to rely less on private developers and to strengthen the public power sector. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that the New York Power Authority and public power simply have to step up and play a significantly bigger role if we’re going to have any chance of reaching these legally mandated climate goals,” Paulson said.
Hundreds of leading climate scientists from around the world expect global temperatures to increase by at least 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100 — a full degree above internationally agreed targets — leading to catastrophic consequences for the planet, an exclusive poll by The Guardian has found.
All the respondents were from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Nearly 80 percent anticipated a rise to at least 2.5 degrees above the threshold, with almost half predicting a minimum three degrees of warming. Just six percent believed the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius was still a possibility.
Current policies have the world on course to warm approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius.
“Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken,” said climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota, as The Guardian reported. “After all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”
The reasons for the failure to adequately tackle the climate crisis were clear to the experts. Nearly three-quarters said not having the political fortitude was at the forefront, while 60 percent cited corporate interests like those of the fossil fuel industry.
“We asked them what the biggest barrier to climate action was – the top choice was lack of political will,” Damien Carrington, The Guardian’s environment editor, told EcoWatch in an email.
Carrington said humans must “rapidly phase out fossil fuel burning” to curb global heating as much as possible in the short- and long-term.
Numerous scientists surveyed envisioned a “semi-dystopian” future for the planet, with heat waves causing mass migrations, increasingly frequent and extreme storms and floods, wildfires and famines.
Many said they felt hopeless, angry and frightened by governments failing to act in the face of clear scientific evidence.
“[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future,” said Gretta Pecl, a professor of marine ecology at the University of Tasmania, as reported by The Guardian.
As global temperatures rise, a number of scientists said it is important to continue the climate battle since each fraction of a degree that can be avoided means less suffering.
Nearly half of the review editors and lead authors of IPCC reports contacted by The Guardian — 380 of 843 — replied.
The poll revealed that younger scientists — 52 percent of those under 50 — expected the planet’s temperatures to rise to at least three degrees Celsius.
Dr. Lisa Schipper, a professor of geography at Germany’s University of Bonn, expressed hope in the next generation for “being so smart and understanding the politics.”
Numerous respondents said inequality and the rich not being willing to aid the poor — who bear the brunt of climate impacts — contributed to the problem.
“If the world, unbelievably wealthy as it is, stands by and does little to address the plight of the poor, we will all lose eventually,” said Dipak Dasgupta of New Delhi’s Energy and Resources Institute, as The Guardian reported.
Roughly a quarter of the experts polled believed Earth’s average temperature would remain below two degrees Celsius. Some were cautiously optimistic.
“I am convinced that we have all the solutions needed for a 1.5C path and that we will implement them in the coming 20 years,” said Henry Neufeldt of the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Centre. “But I fear that our actions might come too late and we cross one or several tipping points.”
According to a new report by The Washington Post, last month at his private Mar-a-Lago club Donald Trump bluntly proposed a “deal” to more than 20 oil executives from some of the largest oil companies in the United States, suggesting they donate $1 billion to his presidential re-election campaign.
In exchange, Trump promised that once he was back in office, he would immediately reverse dozens of environmental regulations implemented during President Joe Biden’s presidency and prevent the passage of any new ones.
The offer followed one oil boss’ complaint about how — even though oil executives had contributed $400 million in the past year to lobby the Biden administration — the sector was still facing environmental rules that hampered operations.
Trump said the $1 billion gift from the petroleum CEOs — which included those of Exxon, Chevron and Continental Resources — would be considered a “deal,” considering the regulation and taxes the companies would be avoiding, people privy to the meeting said on condition of anonymity, as The Washington Post reported.
Trump is “putting the future of the planet up for sale,” Christina Polizzi, Climate Power’s deputy managing director of communications, told The Guardian. “He is in the pocket of big oil – he gave them $25bn in tax breaks in his first term – and now it’s clear he is willing to do whatever big oil wants in a potential second term.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has overturned 27 of Trump’s actions related to the fossil fuel industry, a Washington Post analysis said, and has been racing to implement new ones ahead of the November election.
“You’ve been waiting on a permit for five years; you’ll get it on Day 1,” Trump told them, the attendee recalled, as reported by The Washington Post.
Trump promised to get rid of Biden’s electric vehicle (EV) “mandate” — referring to recent rules finalized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that require automakers to reduce tailpipe emissions, rather than calling for a specific technology like EVs.
“Donald Trump is selling out working families to Big Oil for campaign checks. It’s that simple,” said Ammar Moussa, Biden campaign spokesperson, in a statement, as The Washington Post reported. “It doesn’t matter to Trump that oil and gas companies charge working families and middle-class Americans whatever they want while raking in record profits — if Donald can cash a check, he’ll do what they say.”
Climate Power senior oil and gas adviser Alex Witt said that with Trump “everything has a price. They got a great return on their investment during Trump’s first term, and Trump is making it crystal clear that they’re in for an even bigger payout if he’s reelected.”
Vitor Martinez, a 25-year-old musician and community organizer, lives in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul — the southernmost state in Brazil. Martinez’s neighborhood borders Guaíba Lake, around which Porto Alegre’s main attractions are clustered. On a sunny, 80-degree Fahrenheit day in late March, people biked, ran, and strolled along the promenade that surrounds the lake. Shoppers flocked to a mall on the bottom floor of a brand new Hilton DoubleTree hotel in the middle of the neighborhood. More than 23,000 people from all over the world gathered a few miles away at a conference center near the city’s historic downtown to talk about the future of technology and business in South America. That version of Porto Alegre — manicured and prosperous — is a distant memory now, Martinez said.
“There’s no precedent in Brazil for the crisis we are experiencing at the state level,” Jonatas Rubert, another resident of Porto Alegre, said Thursday evening. “The apprehension about what will happen in the next few days is immense.”
Martinez has been sheltering in his small apartment with his mother and grandparents, who were forced to evacuate their homes as the floodwaters advanced. The apartment, situated on elevated ground, was spared the worst of the flooding. In Porto Alegre and other parts of the state, people who lost their homes to the floodwaters are surviving on limited food supplies and dwindling sources of clean water. “Because the water is so high, we don’t know yet how many people have died,” Martinez said.
The flooding in Rio Grande do Sul is shaping up to be one of the worst environmental disasters in Brazil’s history. On Thursday, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a 50 billion reais ($9.7 billion) relief and redevelopment package to be deployed in southern Brazil right away — a historic investment that represents the “first” round of aid, he said.
Aerial view of the flooded Beira-Rio stadium of the Brazilian football team Internacional in Porto Alegre. Anselmo Cunha / AFP via Getty Images
Aerial view of a bridge partially destroyed by floods in Encantado, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil on Sunday. Gustavo Ghisleni / AFP via Getty Images
Many factors helped produce a catastrophe of this scale. Experts have named climate change and the El Niño, the natural weather phenomenon that periodically changes oceanic and atmospheric conditions, as chief culprits for the intensity and rapid onset of the flooding. But a series of decisions by the local, state, and federal government in Brazil over the past decade have also contributed to the devastating effect the flooding has had on communities in Rio Grande do Sul, shaped the inadequate humanitarian response to the ongoing suffering there, and limited Brazil’s broader capacity to adapt to the worsening impacts of climate change.
Experts told Grist that the astronomic scale and cost of the floods may mark an inflection point in the way Brazilians think about environmental policies and climate change, particularly climate change adaptation — systemic adjustments that can safeguard against future impacts.
“This is going to shake the mindsets of voters,” said Carlos R. S. Milani, senior fellow at the Brazilian Center for International Relations, a think tank, and the Brazilian Scientific Development Council, a government organization. Whether the disaster affects decisions made by their elected representatives is still an open question.
Soldiers from the Brazilian Air Force prepare donations to be sent to flood victims in Rio Grande do Sul at Brasilia Air Base, Brazil on May 10, 2024.
Evaristo Sa / AFP via Getty Images
“I have no doubt that climate change has to do with it,” said Raissa Ferreira, campaign director for Greenpeace Brazil, referring to these recent events. “The greenhouse gas effect is getting more potent.”
A ferry boat stranded due to drought in Manaus, a city in the Brazilian Amazon, last year. Michael Dantas / AFP via Getty Images
The climate impacts of the past 12 months should not have caught Brazil’s government by surprise. In 2014, the administration of the president at the time, Dilma Rousseff, commissioned a strategy document titled “Brazil 2040: Scenarios and alternatives for adapting to climate change.” The report was prescient, if overly conservative: Many of the climate impacts it projected, including extreme flooding, have come to pass more than 15 years ahead of schedule. The center-left Rousseff administration ultimately buried the report, and subsequent governments have failed to take up the mantle. The result is that Brazil, the sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases and an emerging global power, has a climate adaptation strategy in name only. “Climate adaptation needs to be implemented,” Ferreira said, “but we see very negative signs in Brazil that that is a political priority.”
Rio Grande do Sul, a state that is highly dependent on agricultural production, especially of rice and soybeans, twice voted for former Brazilian president and ardent climate denier Jair Bolsonaro by a substantial margin. Porto Alegre’s mayor and Rio Grande do Sul’s governor, both right-wing politicians, have stripped the local and state budgets of environmental and civil defense funding.
“The word on the street is that the governor left 50,000 reais for the possibility of a catastrophe like this,” said Giordano Gio, a 31-year-old filmmaker in Porto Alegre. “This is, like, the cost of a Honda Civic.” In a poll this week, 70 percent of Brazilians said infrastructure investments could have lessened the risks of the recent flooding.
Aerial view of floods in Eldorado do Sul, a city in Rio Grande do Sul.
Carlos Fabal / AFP via Getty Images
The floods raise a number of questions about what happens next in Rio Grande do Sul and Brazil in general. Before the floods hit, Lula’s government was trying to rebalance the federal budget, reduce the national deficit, and reinvest in Brazil’s middle class. The crisis may scramble those efforts. The floods, said Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist and professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, are “going to have a serious impact in terms of inflation, in terms of food prices in Brazil. It’s very bad news to the Lula government in a moment when the president already has many challenges on his plate.” One of those challenges, and a priority for Lula, is reducing the rapid deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Rainforest deforestation, much of it in service of exposing more arable land for agricultural production, is responsible for half of Brazil’s carbon emissions.
The influx of federal funding to Rio Grande do Sul will help rebuild the state, but experts Grist spoke to and people on the ground in Porto Alegre wonder what happens next from a climate preparedness perspective. “Lula was elected in a big coalition that has a lot of right-wing people in it,” said Gio, the filmmaker. Left-wing parties control only a quarter of the seats in Brazil’s House and Senate, which hinders Lula’s ability to pass climate change legislation. “There’s a lot of things going on politically that might affect” potential climate policy, Gio said.
More environmental disasters will affect Brazil in the coming months. High temperatures this year are expected to produce even more severe drought in the Amazon, for example, and the states that surround the rainforest are among the poorest in the country. Rio Grande do Sul, one of the wealthiest states in Brazil, is better positioned to recover from an event of this magnitude than most other regions of the country. “If this could happen in a richer area of the country, what if it happens next in a very poor one?” asked Milani. “The capacity to adapt, to respond, is much less.”
That question — what happens now? — will linger long after the floodwaters have receded. “I would have the intuition as a political scientist that climate and environment will very much be at the heart of debate in many municipal elections all over the country this year because of this event in Rio Grande do Sul,” Santoro said. “This is a political struggle more than anything else right now.”
In Porto Alegre, Martinez has been manning his local soup kitchen and working with his fellow community organizers to develop systems to handle the influx of relief aid they have been receiving from people all over the world. For him, watching people in his community help each other has been a small silver lining in the midst of the ongoing horror. “Local governments have abandoned us,” he said. “We will not watch our neighborhoods get destroyed and do nothing.”
Scotland’s climate hasn’t historically been supportive to large mosquito populations, as it tends to be cooler. But now, scientists have discovered widespread populations of mosquitoes around Scotland, and they fear warming temperatures could lead to increasing public health risks from mosquito-borne diseases.
Scientists at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Virus Research found 16 different types of mosquitoes around Scotland. In these findings, scientists discovered one of the most common mosquitoes in the world, the Culex pipiens, in Scotland for the first time.
A Culex pipiens mosquito. Ouwesok / Flickr
The leader of the research, Heather Ferguson, told the BBC that the research team was surprised by the widespread presence of mosquitoes in Scotland and warned that the population numbers could continue rising amid climate change.
According to the Central Massachusetts Mosquito Control Program, mosquitoes prefer temperatures around 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius), but they can’t function at temperatures below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius). As Wilderness Scotland reported, the average warm-weather temperature for Scotland is about 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius), while cooler seasons average 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius).
This has kept mosquitoes to a minimum in Scotland. However, as climate change causes rising temperatures, the mosquito populations have better odds of survival. This could also allow non-native mosquito species that carry diseases to spread in areas they haven’t thrived in before.
“Although relatively low in abundance, mosquitoes have been present in Scotland for millennia, and are a natural part of our ecosystems,” Ferguson explained, as reported by The Herald. “While they don’t present a risk to human health here currently, climate change could increase the risk of invasive mosquito species establishing in Scotland. It may also increase the risk for mosquito-borne diseases that are present in some other European countries to establish.”
Scientists found 16 different types of mosquitoes by placing traps at 24 locations all around Scotland. The highest concentrations of mosquitoes were found around Loch of Kinnordy in Angus in eastern Scotland and in Caithness in northern Scotland.
Scientists are asking the public for help with a citizen science project dubbed Mosquito Scotland. As part of the project, the public is being asked to report mosquito sightings via the project website. The Mosquito Scotland project will continue for three years, through 2026.
According to the University of Glasgow, which is leading Mosquito Scotland, vector-borne diseases, like those spread by mosquitoes, account for 700,000 deaths per year. The citizen science project aims to provide more details on mosquitoes and assess risks of mosquito-borne diseases, and this information can also help prepare to handle increased risks to public health.
“At a time of environmental change it is really important to investigate the current and potential risk posed by mosquitoes and mosquito-borne disease,” Dr. Jolyon Medlock, head of the medical entomology and zoonoses ecology team at project collaborator UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), said in a statement. “This programme of research will be crucial in improving our understanding and preparedness as we continue to tackle future threats to public health associated with a changing climate.’’
The five members of the Georgia Public Service Commission are publicly elected officials. That means anyone can attend their meetings, offer public comments, and give feedback on energy affordability, justice, and policy in the state.
Follow and reach out to the PSC
All commission hearings and meetings are open to the public and anyone can attend. You can find a calendar of meetings here. It meets at 244 Washington St. SW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30334-9052
Contact information:
Toll-free in Georgia (outside Metro Atlanta): 800-282-5813
Metro Atlanta: 404-656-4501
Fax: 404-656-2341
Email: gapsc@psc.ga.gov
Commission hearings and meetings also are livestreamed on the PSC YouTube channel, though viewers cannot ask questions or pose comments online. You can also follow the PSC on social media.
Before reaching out to or engaging with the commission, familiarize yourself with the roles and responsibilities of the commissioners, and initiatives the agency is working on so you can frame your request or response appropriately.
Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR member station, are engaged in an ongoing project demystifying energy policy and affordability in the state. You may find these resources may be useful.
Public comments are heard during the first hour of hearings and the last 15 minutes of committee meetings. Sign-up sheets are provided and speakers are called on a first-come, first-served basis.
You can learn more about filing a complaint, inquiry, or opinion to the PSC here. Comments must conform to certain guidelines, including a limit of three minutes at the lectern. Submit written comments here. People who regularly address the PSC say don’t be discouraged if you don’t receive a response right away. Follow up respectfully as time allows, and if you still aren’t satisfied reach out to commissioners through other means, such as calling their offices.
Get involved through community organizations
If you aren’t interested in or comfortable with testifying before the commission, several organizations regularly engage with the PSC and Georgia Power, which is the state’s largest electric utility and regulated by the commission. They include Georgia Conservation Voters, Black Voters Matter, Georgia WAND, and Georgia Watch, all of which offer volunteer opportunities for residents to participate in advocacy.
Local chambers of commerce also send comments to the PSC, as do city and county governments. You can also look into whether your employer is involved, as major employers sometimes appear in front of the PSC or go through trade groups like the Georgia Association of Manufacturers.
What is the value of a tree? It can provide a cool place to rest in the shade, a snack in the form of fruit, lumber to build a home, and cleaner air. But trees are increasingly being prized for one thing: their ability to capture carbon and counteract climate change.
Billions of dollars are flowing into projects to plant and protect trees so that governments and businesses can claim they’ve canceled out their emissions. Saving forests and planting trees are often portrayed as a “triple win” for the environment, economy, and people. According to a major report being presented on Friday at the United Nations Forum on Forests, however, that goal is proving more complicated than expected.
The conversation about how to manage forests “has been overtaken by the climate discussion,” said Daniela Kleinschmit, an author of the report and the vice president of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, the network behind the research. The result? Indigenous peoples are getting pushed out of their lands because of carbon offset projects. Native grasslands are getting turned into forests, even though grasslands themselves are huge, overlooked reservoirs of carbon. And offset projects in forests, more often than not, fail to achieve all of the emissions benefits their backers had promised.
The new report, the first comprehensive assessment of how the world is governing its forests in 14 years, offers some good news — global deforestation rates have slowed down slightly, from 32 million acres a year in 2010 to 25 million in 2020. But what the report calls the “climatization” of forests has led to the rise of carbon sequestration markets that prioritize short-term profits over long-term sustainability, it found. Experts say that it’s possible to pursue the global goal of sequestering carbon in forests while also keeping locals happy — it would just take a more thoughtful approach that considers the tradeoffs and involves the people most affected.
Daniel Miller, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Notre Dame, said that a narrow focus on forests’ environmental benefits misses “a huge part of the story.” Miller’s research has shown that forests can help fight poverty, since the edible goods found in them are often available during times of the year when people might go hungry. Having forests nearby can make land more productive, increasing crop yields by more than 50 percent in some cases. That’s because forests can enrich the soil, increase rainfall, and help with pollination. More than 3 billion people live within 1 kilometer (a little over half a mile) of forests and depend on them for jobs, like harvesting timber, and for food like nuts and mushrooms.
Forests can also help people adapt to a warming world. They regulate floods and landslides and sustain livelihoods that are jeopardized by climate change, said Ida Djenontin, a professor of geography at Penn State.
But what looks like a promising carbon sequestration effort can have unexpected consequences that undermine those benefits. For example, Finland’s ministry of agriculture is trying to fertilize its forests to make them grow faster, in the hope that they will suck up carbon quickly and help the country meet its goal of going carbon-neutral by 2035. But according to the new report, the government didn’t account for the energy-intensive process of producing and transporting fertilizer, a large source of carbon emissions. The report also points out that fertilizing forests can end up hurting reindeer herding, since it stifles the growth of lichen that reindeer eat; one study found that it could also reduce berry production in forests by 70 percent. “It seems that the ongoing climate crisis has, to some extent, legitimized excessive forest management techniques, such as fertilization,” the report concludes.
Many forest offset projects don’t work as intended. An investigation last year found that only eight out of 29 rainforest offset projects approved by Verra, the world’s biggest certifier, had meaningfully reduced deforestation. The rest of the projects “had no climate benefit,” according to The Guardian, partially because the threat of those forests getting cut down had been vastly overstated.
The narrative that forests can save the world from climate change is a tempting one for businesses and politicians — they can seemingly take care of their climate pledges if they’re willing to fork over the money, without having to do the hard work of reducing emissions. It also allows people to skip the hard conversations about cutting down on consumption, Kleinschmit said. The market for voluntary carbon offsets — the ones companies choose to buy — is predicted to grow from around $2 billion in 2021 to $250 billion by 2030.
Another problem is that “carbon cowboys” — a term for those seeking to profit off carbon offset schemes — can end up evicting Indigenous peoples from their homes. In 2015, Cambodian officials set aside more than 1,900 square miles of rainforest in the country’s Cardamom Mountains for a carbon offset project without consulting the Chong people that had lived there for centuries. Villagers were forced from their lands, and some were even arrested for collecting resin from trees, since carbon offset areas were monitored to stop locals from using the forest’s resources. In the United Arab Emirates, the company Blue Carbon has negotiated deals for millions of acres so it can launch offset projects aimed at protecting forests across Liberia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Much of that land has been held by Indigenous peoples. Since 1990, an estimated quarter-million people around the world have been pushed out of their homes in the name of conservation.
Global climate goals, of course, don’t have to come into conflict with local needs. Experts say it’s possible to balance the two effectively. Prakash Kashwan, an environmental studies professor at Brandeis University, said that locals can use resources from trees, at least on a smaller scale, without hurting a forest’s ability to sequester carbon, according to his research. Studies have demonstrated that involving Indigenous peoples and local residents in the process of decision-making is key to better social and environmental outcomes — including carbon sequestration.
“Allowing communities a say in how forests are managed is absolutely vital to more effective, lasting, and just forest governance, and for tackling these big global challenges that we face,” Miller said.
