The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest in the world. Spanning eight countries, it has been called the “lungs of the planet” for its vital service of converting enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Now, Brazilian lawmakers have approved a bill to allow conservation funds to be used to pave a highway — BR-319 — that cuts through the middle of the Amazon; researchers say the road could threaten the rainforest’s existence, reported Reuters.

The bill would allow use of the funds for the “recovery, paving and increasing the capacity of the highway,” according to Reuters.

This means capital such as the Amazon Fund’s $1.3 billion — supported by European and United States allies to be used for conservation — could go toward the project.

“I don’t think it makes any sense. This project does not fit into any of the fund’s planned support lines,” Tasso Azevedo, one of the creators of the Amazon Fund, told Climate Home News in September.

BR-319 was built in the early 1970s by the country’s then-military dictatorship, but quickly deteriorated, and by 1988 had become impassable.

Preventing more access is one of the biggest defenses the Amazon has against deforestation. A new road opening up in the undisturbed rainforest provides a way in for loggers, farmers, miners and developers, who often conduct their activities illegally.

Since 1978, the Amazon has lost more than 185 million acres to deforestation, and the rate of destruction is accelerating, according to the Amazon Conservation website.

Nearly all Amazon deforestation — 95 percent — happens within 3.4 miles of a roadway, Leanderson Lima of Amazônia Real and Micael Pereira of Expresso reported in The Guardian in June.

“Deforestation follows a fairly predictable pattern,” NASA Earth Observatory said, referring to satellite images on its website. “The first clearings that appear in the forest are in a fishbone pattern, arrayed along the edges of roads. Over time, the fishbones collapse into a mixture of forest remnants, cleared areas, and settlements. This pattern follows one of the most common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon. Legal and illegal roads penetrate a remote part of the forest, and small farmers migrate to the area. They claim land along the road and clear some of it for crops. Within a few years, heavy rains and erosion deplete the soil, and crop yields fall. Farmers then convert the degraded land to cattle pasture, and clear more forest for crops. Eventually the small land holders, having cleared much of their land, sell it or abandon it to large cattle holders, who consolidate the plots into large areas of pasture.”

The old BR-319 highway — which has become a dirt road full of potholes that is untraversable five months of the year, during the rainy season — stretches approximately 559 miles from Rondonia state’s Porto Velho to Manaus in Amazonas, reported Reuters.

Those defending the paving project say it is needed to connect Amazonas and Rondonia, as Manaus is frequently inaccessible except by air and river.

The bill to approve the paving of BR-319 refers to the highway as “critical infrastructure, indispensable to national security, requiring the guarantee of its trafficability,” as Reuters reported.

The bill was approved by the lower house of Congress, but still needs approval by the Senate.

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What are we waiting for? The future is a picture each of us will contribute…

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When salmon all but vanished from western Alaska in 2021, thousands of people in the region faced disaster. Rural families lost a critical food source. Commercial fisherfolk found themselves without a major stream of income. And Alaska Native children stopped learning how to catch, cut, dry, and smoke fish — a tradition passed down since the time of their ancestors.

Behind the scenes, the salmon shortage has also inflamed a long-simmering legal fight among Native stakeholders, the Biden administration, and the state over who gets to fish on Alaska’s vast federal lands.

At the heart of the dispute is a provision in a 1980 federal law called the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which gives rural Alaskans priority over urban residents to fish and hunt on federal lands. Most rural families are Indigenous, so the law is considered by some lawyers and advocates as key to protecting the rights of Alaska Natives. State officials, however, believe the law has been misconstrued to infringe on the state’s rights by giving federal regulators authority over fisheries that belong to Alaskans.

Now, a lawsuit alleges the state has overstepped its reach. Federal officials argue that state regulators tried to usurp control of fishing along the Kuskokwim River in western Alaska, where salmon make up about half of all food produced in the region. The suit, originally filed in 2022 by the Biden administration against the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, escalated this fall when the state’s lawyers effectively called for the end of federal oversight of fishing across much of Alaska. Indigenous leaders say the state’s actions threaten Alaska Native people statewide.

“What’s at stake is our future,” said Vivian Korthuis, chief executive officer of the Association of Village Council Presidents, a consortium of more than 50 Indigenous nations in western Alaska that’s one of four Alaska Native groups backing the Biden administration in the case. “What’s at stake is our children. What’s at stake is our families, our communities, our tribes.” 

The lawsuit is a microcosm of how climate change is raising the stakes of fishing disputes around the world. While tensions over salmon management in Alaska aren’t new, they’ve been exacerbated by recent marine heat waves in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska and rising temperatures in rivers like the Yukon and Kuskokwim, where king, chum, and coho salmon populations have plummeted. In warmer waters, salmon burn more calories. They’re more likely to become malnourished and less likely to make it to their freshwater spawning grounds. With fewer fish in places like western Alaska, the question of who should manage them — and who gets access to them — has become even more urgent.

The Alaska dispute erupted in 2021, when state regulators on the Kuskokwim issued fishing restrictions that conflicted with regulations set by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. People along the river, who are predominantly Yup’ik, were forced to navigate contradictory rules about whether and when they could fish legally — adding to the pain and frustration of an already disastrous season shaped by the coronavirus pandemic and historic salmon shortages. 

“We can face large penalties and fines if we make mistakes,” Ivan M. Ivan, an elder in the Yup’ik village of Akiak, said in an affidavit. 

The conflict spilled into 2022, another year of abysmal salmon returns, when state and federal regulators again issued contradictory restrictions. Alaska officials blamed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for opening up fishing prematurely, before salmon had begun their migration upstream, and with an “apparent lack of concern” for the species’ conservation. The Biden administration sued, arguing that the state illegally imposed its own rules in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, a federal reserve of wetlands and spruce and birch forest that encircles more than 30 Indigenous communities. 

The fight played out quietly for more than a year — until September, when the state’s attorneys filed a brief that explicitly asked the court to undo legal precedent widely viewed as a safeguard for rural, mostly Indigenous families who depend on salmon. That move caused Alaska’s biggest Indigenous organization, the Alaska Federation of Natives, to join three smaller Native groups that had intervened on behalf of the federal government. 

Those organizations are concerned that the state wants to reverse a string of court decisions, known as the “Katie John” cases, which held that rural Alaskans have priority to fish for food in rivers that flow through federal conservation areas, including long sections of the Yukon, Kuskokwim, and Copper rivers. Alaska Native leaders fear that doing away with that priority would endanger salmon populations and limit access for locals by opening fishing up to more people. 

“It really will put a lot of pressure on stocks,” said Erin Lynch, an Anchorage-based attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, which is representing the Association of Village Council Presidents. 

That concern isn’t limited to western Alaska. Ahtna Inc., a corporation owned by Indigenous shareholders in the Copper River region — some 500 miles east of the Kuskokwim — has also sided with the Biden administration. Without federal protections on the Copper River, Ahtna anglers would risk getting “pushed out,” according to John Sky Starkey, a lawyer representing Ahtna.

“There are only so many fish. There are only so many places [to fish],” Starkey said.  “It’s a significant danger.” 

State officials see the issue differently. They say there would be no threat of overfishing or competition between urban and rural residents, partly because rivers like the Yukon and Kuskokwim are so hard to reach from cities like Anchorage. They note that state law explicitly protects the subsistence rights of all Alaskans, including Alaska Natives. And they blame the feds for picking the fight by taking the issue to court.

“We did not initiate this lawsuit,” said Doug Vincent-Lang, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “We provide for subsistence priority, and we take that seriously.”

The state’s lawyers also claim that federal policy is unfair for Alaska Natives who have moved to cities because it bars them from fishing with relatives in rural areas. Some Indigenous leaders see it as flawed, too, but they disagree with the state about the solution. Rather than do away with federal management, they have called on Congress to strengthen protections for Alaska Natives. 

The case, now before the U.S. District Court for Alaska, is likely to heat up even more in the coming months. A ruling is expected in the spring.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As salmon disappear, a battle over Alaska Native fishing rights heats up on Dec 22, 2023.

The United States Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to hear oral arguments in a case looking to stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from implementing a federal regulation — the “Good Neighbor” Rule — that protects people in states downwind from industrial and coal plant pollution that drifts across state lines, a press release from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) said.

The request was made by the states of Indiana, West Virginia and Ohio; the U.S. Steel Corporation; pipeline operators; and energy providers. The court will hear the oral arguments in February of 2024.

“EPA’s Good Neighbor Protections will ensure healthier longer lives for millions of people impacted by upwind smokestack pollution. The law and the science are clear and compelling that EPA’s common sense pollution limits are vitally needed and thoroughly reasonable,” said Vickie Patton, general counsel for EDF, in the press release. “It would be a radical departure from settled law for the U.S. Supreme Court to damage these proven life-saving protections under our nation’s clean air laws – based on the same bedrock legal protections overwhelmingly affirmed by the Court in 2014.”

Last year, the Supreme Court voted to limit the authority of the EPA to establish broad rules for reducing carbon emissions from gas- and coal-fired power plants under the Clean Air Act (CAA), reported Reuters.

The current disagreement involves the regulation of ozone gas in states the EPA said did not comply with the Good Neighbor provision of the CAA.

“Every community deserves fresh air to breathe. EPA’s ‘Good Neighbor’ plan will lock in significant pollution reductions to ensure cleaner air and deliver public health protections for those who’ve suffered far too long from air-quality related impacts and illness,” said Michael S. Regan, EPA administrator, when the Good Neighbor Plan was announced in February, according to a press release from the EPA. “We know air pollution doesn’t stop at the state line.”

The EPA said a federal program was necessary to reduce emissions in 23 states with insufficient plans, Reuters reported. Lawsuits brought in several lower courts have already paused the rule’s enforcement in a dozen states.

The plaintiff states argue that the EPA rule will cause the destabilization of their power grids and require them to have to pay unreasonable costs.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice defended the EPA, saying to block the rule would “seriously harm downwind states that suffer from their upwind neighbors’ emissions” and endanger public health, as reported by Reuters.

“With more than 127 million people residing in regions plagued by harmful ozone levels, the Good Neighbor Rule protects public health,” said Earthjustice attorney Kathleen Riley following a September U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruling in favor of the EPA, a press release from Earthjustice said.

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Beer lovers know the joys of nitrogenated canned beers. A polypropylene nitrogen “widget” in the…

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Some of the most jarring ways the United States will feel the impacts of climate change began to reveal themselves this year. 

The U.S. saw a record-setting 25 billion-dollar natural disasters. Maui experienced the country’s deadliest wildfire in the last century. Phoenix suffered temperatures over 110 degrees Fahrenheit for 31 consecutive days. Vermont endured epic floods. Despite all this, the Biden administration reneged on its promise and approved the Willow oil project in Alaska. 

But this year was also filled with news of encouraging, inspiring, and groundbreaking progress in the U.S., not least of which was its joining a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels and pledging with its biggest rival, China, to accelerate renewables. 

Reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 will require decarbonizing the nation’s energy production, transportation, homes and buildings, and industries. Here’s a look back at some of the progress the U.S. made in 2023, seen through the lens of the stories Grist told.

Shoring up clean energy

Electricity generation accounts for about one-quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Eliminating them means transitioning to renewable energy. The country made new commitments to do so this year: In addition to the COP28 agreement, the U.S. and China bilaterally agreed to accelerate renewable energy deployment this decade. 

That will require speeding up the rate at which such projects are permitted. The Biden administration proposed a rule to streamline this process while requiring agencies to consider environmental justice in their reviews. For its part, the Bureau of Land Management approved 50 clean energy projects on federal lands in the last two years, including a 732-mile transmission line across the West. It also proposed lowering the fees for wind and solar development by 80 percent.

States, tribes, and U.S. territories are trying to accelerate progress too: New Yorkers voted to allow its public power authority to build renewable energy projects, and Michigan’s legislature passed a package of bills requiring the state to run off 100 percent clean energy by 2040. Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community approved the nation’s first solar canal project, and Puerto Rico is receiving half a billion dollars to bring rooftop solar to those who need it most. 

Speaking of solar, a recycling industry is cropping up to take in old photovoltaic panels. Washington state even passed a law requiring companies take back and recycle them upon retirement.

Retiring fossil fuels

Ramping up renewable energy capacity makes it possible to retire fossil fuel energy. Coal-fired electricity capacity in the U.S. is down 42 percent from its peak in 2011, and 40 percent of what remains is expected to retire by 2030. 

Still, ditching coal requires supporting communities whose economies have long depended on it. Southwestern Virginia has been mining coal since 1880, but the area is beginning to benefit from solar. The industry is gaining trust by creating local jobs and building arrays for schools, saving them money on their utility bills. Even the mines are getting a second chance — scientists are finding rare species like the green salamander returning to areas once stripped for extraction. 

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Looking beyond old coal sites, hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil wells dot the country, polluting the air and water. A federal cleanup program is directing more money than ever before toward capping these wells while creating jobs.

Still, the country broke its oil production records this year. But there are efforts to restrain that boom: New Mexico issued a moratorium on new oil and gas leases near schools and daycare centers, and the Interior Department banned them within a 10-mile radius of the state’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. The Environmental Protection Agency introduced sweeping regulations that it says could reduce methane emissions from oil and gas by 80 percent. 

Capturing carbon

Despite the nation’s best efforts to stop emissions, research shows that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will also require removing hundreds of gigatons of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Whether to do that with machines or through natural solutions is a matter of intense debate. 

Opponents of technologies like direct-air capture warn the oil and gas industry could use them to justify prolonging fossil fuel use. But the Biden administration is supporting direct air capture by sending $1 billion to two planned facilities on the Gulf Coast each designed to initially capture up to 1 million metric tons of CO2 annually.

Meanwhile, we’re gaining a better understanding of how natural solutions can promote sequestration. Wetlands, for example, can serve as vast carbon sinks. Louisiana has begun a $3 billion project to restore them, hoping to bring back 21 square miles of land to the coast. Trees are also powerful carbon keepers, and restoring them can cool urban heat islands. As part of a tree-equity “collaborative,” Seattle pledged to plant 8,000 trees and 40,000 seedlings in an effort to cover one-third of the city in tree canopy by 2037.

Scientists are even finding that returning animals to their native ecosystems can help sequester carbon in the soil. The Biden administration is funding the restoration of American bison, which help grasslands retain carbon in the soil as they graze and stomp.

Reimagining mobility

Some of the most encouraging signs of progress this year came from electric vehicles. Transportation accounts for nearly one-third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and most of that pollution comes from cars and trucks. People in the U.S. bought more than 1 million EVs this year, and the country could have 30 million of them by 2030. 

To manage this transition, the nation needs hundreds of thousands of public charging ports, and it is racing to build them. A $5 billion federal program is underway to install them along the nation’s highways. California hit 10,000 public EV fast chargers this year, and Walmart announced plans to build its own network. Tesla is opening its vast charging network to other automakers. 

EVs won’t just change how we get around — their batteries can transform how we power our homes and even the grid. When those batteries retire, they could lead a productive second life as storage for clean energy before being recycled at one of the numerous recycling facilities being built all over the country.

While 95 percent of the critical materials in batteries are infinitely recyclable, we need to reduce our reliance on cars to minimize how much of these materials we extract from the earth. Electric buses or new passenger rail lines like the one that opened in Honolulu will help, as will micromobility programs like a nonprofit community-led bikeshare in New Orleans. 

Building better 

Heating, cooling, and powering homes and other buildings takes a lot of energy. Although emerging technologies can lower the impacts of doing so, the first place to start is improving the efficiency of those structures so they require less power in the first place.

People nationwide discovered efficiency hacks like insulated shades and exterior window awnings as they battled extreme heat. The Lower Sioux in Minnesota are creating sustainable home insulation using “hempcrete,” which they grow and process in their own facility.

But even the most efficient homes still need some heating and cooling. That’s why 20 governors went all-in on heat pumps, pledging to install 20 million of them by 2030. They can take lessons from Maine, which has the highest per-capita adoption in the country. In 2024, states will start administering Inflation Reduction Act rebates on electric appliances like heat pumps, making them more affordable. Of course, installing them will require training a whole lot of electricians. And while Berkeley, California’s ban on natural-gas in new buildings was struck down in court this April, other cities are finding workarounds to the ruling, like requiring apartment buildings to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Some researchers are looking at mobile homes as a climate solution, because prefabricated homes can come equipped with solar panels and heat pumps. An equity-driven program in Ithaca, New York, is installing them in already existing mobile homes. 

Cleaning up dirty business 

As consumers make their own efforts toward decarbonization, it’s becoming easier for them to see what commitments businesses are making toward net-zero. Although a federal requirement that they disclose greenhouse gas emissions is still forthcoming, California passed its own climate disclosure laws requiring companies that make over $1 billion annually to reveal all of their greenhouse gas emissions and the content of the carbon offsets they buy. 

Companies that rely on or produce plastics also experienced more pressure to improve their practices. New York State is suing PepsiCo for its role in polluting the Buffalo River watershed. Businesses that over utilize single-use packaging are getting competition from zero-waste entrepreneurs who offer customers better options for refilling containers like shampoo and detergent bottles.

There’s still a long way to go on decarbonizing some of the country’s most polluting industries, like steel and concrete. The race for green steel is on, as evidenced by big investments in ideas for removing coal from its production. Startups are also working on carbon-negative concrete and even formulas that store carbon inside the material.

Even the U.S. cattle industry could see disruption, since the USDA approved the sale of lab-grown meat. Perhaps an even bigger threat to Big Ag? Teenagers. A Los Angeles teen sued her school district and the USDA over their milk mandates. 

Which leads us to perhaps the most encouraging solutions story of the year: The mobilization of young people who are fighting for their right to a safe, healthy, and promising future. Kids won big in Held v. Montana, which could bode well for the 14 youth in Hawaiʻi who are taking their state’s transportation department to court, and the 18 young Californians who just filed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency for discriminating against children by not protecting them from pollution. With kids like these leading the climate movement, next year could have much more to celebrate.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A look back at US climate solutions this year on Dec 21, 2023.

Sámi reindeer herders have reached a partial agreement with Norway over the Fosen wind farm, Europe’s largest onshore wind power project located in Central Norway, closing one chapter of a more than 20-year conflict over the wind turbines. 

In October 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that the Fosen wind farm violated the Sámi’s human rights, sparking multiple demonstrations in Oslo, the nation’s capital. The latest demonstration marked the two-year anniversary of the ruling and drew attention to Norway’s refusal to take on the case, resulting in 11 ministries being closed and entrances to Statskraft, the state-owned company behind the project, being blockaded by human rights campaigners. Sámi youth eventually met with King Harald V of Norway in a final effort to secure support.

“I am happy that those in south Fosen now have security and a guarantee that they can continue their livelihood and culture with reindeer husbandry,” said Silje Karine Muotka, President of the Sámi Parliament of Norway. “But what has happened here is gravely serious. It is a human rights violation.”

The agreement, reached earlier this week, only covers reindeer herders to the south of the Fosen wind farm, but there are two communities, known as “siidas,” that have been impacted by the project. For siidas to the south of Fosen, Statskraft will pay 7 million Norwegian crowns ($674,211) each year, for 25 years — the expected lifespan of the wind turbines. The wind farm will continue operating for that time, after which the south Fosen siida will be able to decide on the project’s future, preventing Statkraft from applying for license extensions or renewals at the site without Sámi consent. As well, the Norwegian government will help reindeer herders to use additional winter grazing areas near the Fosen reindeer-herding district with the aim of securing those lands by the winter of 2026. 

“The Fosen case has been challenging for all parties,” said Terje Aasland, Minister of Petroleum and Energy. “I am therefore pleased that the parties and the state, through the mediation process, have arrived at a mutually agreed, good, and forward-looking solution. My hope is that this will enable new generations to continue reindeer herding at Fosen.”

However, no agreement has been made with the impacted siida north of Fosen, which has continued to demand the demolition of more than 40 wind turbines which are owned by a different company, Aneo — a Norwegian renewables group.

“I do not want to criticize the south Fosen siida, though I do imagine that the government now sees this as a possibility to invade first and solve it later with payment,” said Terje Haugen, a reindeer herder from the impacted siida. “We in the north Fosen district are standing firmly in our decision.”

Stig Tore Laugen, communications director for Aneo and a spokesman for its subsidiary Roan Vind, said that ongoing mediation is confidential, adding that in the case of south Fosen “it has been crucial that the government, which is responsible for the violation of the reindeer owners’ rights, has taken responsibility for finding replacement grazing-areas, and that the reindeer owners have been positive about moving.”

Minister Aasland said that it’s the government’s position that the best solution for all parties will be to reach an amicable agreement. 

Around 98 percent of electricity in Norway comes from renewable resources, and nearly 20 percent is exported to the European Union. The Fosen wind park produces enough energy to power the nearby city of Trondheim, population 220,000. 

“I can’t imagine that it is a good business idea for governments and companies to invade, violate human rights, and then pay for it,” said President Muotka. “Never again Fosen is what I say, and hope, and expect from the government.”

Editor’s note: this story has been updated to include comment from Aneo and Roan Vind.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Norway to pay Sámi reindeer herders millions for violating their human rights on Dec 21, 2023.

This year’s COP28 climate conference featured a historic agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels. One less-ballyhooed undercurrent was renewed enthusiasm for nuclear energy as a means toward getting there.

International climate negotiators explicitly mentioned the technology as a route to decarbonization in their first-ever “stocktake” of global emissions. Looking back across the final texts agreed on at the annual U.N. climate conference since the 2015 Paris Agreement, this is the first time the word “nuclear” has ever been used.

Twenty-five countries made the point even more emphatically at the start of the conference in Dubai, where — led by the U.S. — they pledged to triple nuclear electricity capacity by 2050. 

“We’ve never had anything like this on nuclear at a COP before,” said Ted Nordhaus, executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, which promotes technological solutions to environmental challenges. “It reflects how much attitudes have changed over the last decade.”

Nordhaus is among those who have, for decades, been arguing that splitting atoms can be an important tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and combating climate change. Critics, however, have cited safety concerns, particularly for the Indigenous communities that are disproportionately impacted throughout a reactor’s lifecycle. Some also contend that expensive investments in reactors could distract from the need to build out other options, such as solar and wind. In 2015, one commentator went as far as to call advocating for nuclear a new form of “climate denialism.”

Whatever the reasons, nuclear has been on a downward trajectory of late. The share of global electricity derived from it has slumped to 9.2 percent, its lowest level since the 1980s. By the 2040s, more nuclear facilities are expected to be decommissioned than come online. The latest commitments at COP28 are an attempt to not only reverse that trend but dramatically expand the world’s nuclear footprint. But multiple nuclear experts say that the tripling target is almost certainly unattainable, if not irresponsible.  

“It’s an essentially meaningless commitment,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He noted that some of the countries who signed the pledge don’t even generate nuclear power right now, so a tripling would still technically be zero. And it doesn’t include China or Russia, which are global leaders in regard to nuclear ambition. Even Nordhaus admits that “it’s not really clear that anybody has a particularly credible plan.” 

Attempts to both maintain and expand nuclear have stumbled recently. The Biden administration recently had to provide a $1.1 billion lifeline to keep a legacy nuclear plant in California running, and a highly anticipated foray into smaller-scale reactors fell apart. This points to perhaps the most significant impediment to a more nuclear future: cost. 

“Nuclear is so much more expensive than solar,” said Allison Macfarlane, the former chair of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, estimating that it would take tens, or even hundreds, of billions of dollars to bring some of the proposed technology to market. “The only people that have that kind of money is governments”

Even if the financials make sense, she said, time is not on nuclear’s side. It can take a decade or two for a facility to come online, which makes it difficult to scale quickly enough to meet climate goals and make a dent in the climate crisis. While that might have been possible if the nuclear revival had begun a decade or two ago, she said it’s now too late. 

“Nuclear is not a short-term solution to climate change. We need a solution yesterday,” said Macfarlane, who is currently the director of the school of public policy and global affairs at the University of British Columbia. Instead she argues for putting money toward technologies that can be deployed today, such as solar and wind. “We need to direct our energies toward whatever we can build immediately.”

To Lyman, the nuclear pledges at COP28 are worse than empty — they could be detrimental or even dangerous. “It damages the credibility of the U.S. and any other countries that signed on,” he said. That includes Japan, which was home to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Broken promises could mean that future declarations are taken less seriously. 

Beyond politics, Lyman worries that a renewed push on nuclear could lead companies, governments, or both to cut corners or curb regulations in the name of financial gain or expediency. That, he said, “is a recipe for disaster.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nuclear had a moment at COP28 — but it may be short-lived on Dec 21, 2023.

If you are shifting toward plant-based eating, you’ll be delighted to know you don’t need…

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