Brenda Mallory reports directly to President Joe Biden, but in a crowded building at Expo City in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, nobody recognizes her. Mallory is the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House department in charge of implementing some of Biden’s key climate priorities, and she’s promoting that agenda as the annual United Nations climate conference nears its close.

On Saturday, she’s seated on a couch in the middle of a bustling corridor listening intently to KM Reyes, a community organizer and conservation lobbyist based in the Philippines. With a notepad balanced on her lap, Mallory wants to hear what the U.S. can do to help grassroots advocates like Reyes. “I’m big on details,” she tells her.

“It’s ensuring that we get actual finance on the ground,” Reyes responds. “Because we’re nowhere near the target $20 billion by 2025 in order to fulfill the framework,” she adds, referring to a global biodiversity agreement signed last year.

Finance is an overarching concern at COP28, as the conference is abbreviated, and its predecessor gatherings. Global climate and environment agreements recognize that the planet is careening toward disaster largely as a result of carbon pollution by countries that industrialized relatively early in their histories — like the United States — as opposed to those whose economies began developing more recently, like the Philippines.

As a result, developed countries’ commitments to provide financial support to developing countries are at the crux of climate agreements. As the world’s largest historical polluter, the U.S. is expected to provide its fair share to support climate efforts, but it has failed to deliver in recent years. For instance, only $2 billion of the $3 billion that the U.S. pledged to a climate fund in 2014 has been delivered. Nevertheless, a few days prior to Mallory’s arrival in Dubai, Vice President Kamala Harris pledged another $3 billion to the same fund.

But looming over these promises are questions about a divided Congress’ ability to execute U.S. funding commitments, as well as the very real possibility that former president Donald Trump will defeat Biden in an election next year, throwing U.S. climate policy into disarray. After all, one of Trump’s signature policies was withdrawing the U.S. from the landmark Paris Agreement to limit global warming.

That tension was evident during COP28. On the very first day, negotiators made the unprecedented decision to adopt a so-called loss-and-damage fund to provide funding to developing countries facing the disastrous effects of warming that has already taken place. While the United Arab Emirates and Germany pledged $100 million each, the U.S. was roundly criticized for committing only $17.5 million, an amount climate justice advocates described as “paltry” and “shameful.” 

Without mentioning U.S. responsibility explicitly, Reyes emphasized the need for developing countries to receive funding. Just $50,000 could go a long way to protecting 100,000 acres of carbon-dense forests in the Philippines, she told Mallory. “It’s a drop in the bucket for global commitments, but it’s going to be completely transformational,” she said. 

Mallory nodded along, scribbling notes. Later on, Mallory told me that “everyone appreciates that none of this is going to happen unless we figure out mechanisms to finance.”  

Mallory is one of several high-ranking U.S. officials attending COP28 to tout the Biden administration’s accomplishments, and she’s in Dubai for three days “lifting up the work we’re doing that is supporting the president’s agenda on climate change,” she said. Grist spent half a day with Mallory as she led panels on the administration’s climate initiatives, spoke to the press, and recorded a video with a young ocean-justice activist.

Mallory promoted two major U.S. initiatives on Saturday. That morning, she announced that the U.S. would join an international partnership promoting nature-based climate solutions, like tree planting and mangrove protection. (Healthy ecosystems can remove carbon from the atmosphere, and they can also function as natural infrastructure that protects landscapes from climate-driven impacts like flooding.) Later, she moderated an event about a Biden administration conservation initiative called America the Beautiful, through which the president outlined ways to conserve 30 percent of the country’s land and water by 2030. (The commitment is in line with the so-called 30 by 30 goal codified in an international pact signed by many other countries, but the U.S. Congress has never ratified that convention.)

But while Mallory was touting the president’s initiatives, a group of Republican lawmakers were meeting with world leaders and emphasizing their country’s position as one of the world’s top fossil fuel producers. Earlier in the week, Republicans fired off statements condemning Vice President Harris’ commitment to provide $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, the largest international fund to support climate projects in developing countries. 

“I am appalled that the Biden administration will pledge billions more of taxpayer dollars, money that Congress has not even provided, to yet another bloated, mismanaged, and ineffective slush fund that will do nothing to change the temperature of the planet,” said Representative Mario Díaz-Balart, a Republican from Florida and chair of an appropriations subcommittee on state and foreign operations, which has jurisdiction over international climate spending.

Meanwhile, at the media center, reporters found postcards with the acronym IRA, a reference to the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark 2022 U.S. law that is expected to cut the country’s carbon emissions by roughly 45 percent, putting Paris Agreement targets within reach. The postcard rebranded the IRA as “Irresponsible Reckless Alarming” and included a QR code that linked to a report by Republican lawmakers titled “IRA Will Make the United States Poorer and China Richer.”

“It’s so hard when you’re depending on Congress actually coming around to support exactly what you’re doing,” Mallory said. “What I personally hope is that when people see the efforts to deliver on the commitments that we’re making on dollars combined with the other acts we’re also doing, that you look at those as a package.”

Coons chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee on state and foreign operations. His comments refer to $1.5 billion in climate finance that Congress appropriated last year, which led to the U.S. contributing an additional $1 billion to the Green Climate Fund earlier this year. The contribution came after years of U.S. disengagement from the Paris Agreement and international climate finance during the Trump administration, and it underscored the domestic challenges U.S. administrations face in fulfilling climate commitments. 

Such complexities are little comfort to those in developing countries.

“I just don’t care,” said Harjeet Singh, the head of global political strategy with the international environmental group Climate Action Network. “For decades, the United States has masked its lack of genuine political commitment behind the veil of complex domestic politics.”

The U.S. government should have worked to inform its citizens of the country’s historical responsibility in causing and exacerbating the climate crisis, he said: “This negligence towards its international duties exacerbates the plight of vulnerable communities and developing countries, who bear the brunt of a crisis they did little to create.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At COP28, Trump and GOP threaten Biden’s climate promises on Dec 12, 2023.

The drive from Seattle into the Cascade mountains quickly plunges into dense, green tunnels of evergreen forest — and just as rapidly, reveals patches where the forest has been cleared. Nestled among the trees is the small town of Darrington. A church welcomes visitors with a sign made from a saw blade. Its high school mascot is “the Logger.” And for more than a century, its residents’ lifeblood has been timber.

Logging has put Darrington squarely on the frontlines of rural conservation battles. Things reached a low point in the early 1990s, when environmentalists and timber companies fought over how much, if any, logging should take place on federal forests. Then, in 1994, the federal government quickly passed the Northwest Forest Plan, covering over 24 million acres in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. The largest forest and ecosystem management plan in the nation, the policy has safeguarded streams, salmon, and old-growth forests — now crucial for climate change mitigation. Since then, very little management has taken place on federal forest land in Washington. Forests have grown too dense, becoming unhealthy and susceptible to catastrophic wildfire.

And communities like Darrington suffered. As logging dwindled, residents left for jobs and amenities elsewhere, and businesses closed. Today, the population hovers around 1,100 people, and the median income is around $37,000 per year. The majority of people with jobs have to commute out of the area, often for more than an hour. 

As the Northwest Forest Plan gets updated this year, community-based groups like the Darrington Collaborative are working to show how conservation can more successfully co-exist with rural communities. They hope to find new solutions for other towns surrounded by federal forest land.

Collaboration is crucial

The Darrington Collaborative formed in 2015 to modernize ecological practices and innovate in ways that wouldn’t leave anyone behind. Its ten members include representatives from timber companies and environmental groups like The Wilderness Society, as well as key civic leaders like Darrington mayor Dan Rankin. Since then, the group has launched multiple demonstration projects. Each shows how management techniques can work in practice — like restoration thinning, which involves managers helping forests become more diverse and clearing space for remaining trees to grow.

When the collaboration began, Mayor Rankin said building trust took real time. “We’re 25 years out of the Northwest Forest Plan, and we were called traitors,” he said. “It was nasty. But we prevailed.” He said the group has focused on projects that can simultaneously bring timber to market, provide jobs, and restore the forest. 

The team’s first step was to get to know each other and figure out commonalities. Next, they wanted to test those areas of agreement in places that weren’t currently hosting critical wildlife species. The first two pilot projects, named Segelsen 1 and Segelsen 2, involved analyzing and thinning on 70-acre sections of forest. Both were full of Western hemlock and Douglas fir trees all about the same age and size that shaded out the understory. 

The goal was to make a healthier forest, with some open areas, and some places where trees grew densely, similar to a natural landscape. The Segelsen 1 project was purchased by Darrington-based Hampton Lumber, while another company, Sierra Pacific Industries, bought the Segelsen 2 project.

Restoration, unlike traditional logging, focuses more on what is left behind than what is taken to the mill. This kind of forest management increases biodiversity and also makes forests more resilient to fire, said Taylor Luneau, The Wilderness Society’s Western North Cascades conservation manager. 

“When you’ve reduced those small trees that act as ladder fuels,” or vegetation that allows a fire to climb upward from the forest floor, “you can get through a fire more sustainably,” Luneau said. This helps develop a diverse mix of small and large trees more similar to an old-growth forest, creating an ecosystem that supports wildlife habitat. “You’ve got a win-win right there, where you’re taking timber out of the forest, and you’re doing it in an ecologically sound way,” he said.

Hampton Lumber, which currently employs 175 people at its Darrington mill, supported the Segelsen projects. Tim Johnson, the Washington regional manager for the company, is part of the Darrington Collaborative. “[Thinning is] out of the ordinary for our company,” he said. “It takes a lot more effort. It’s harder to log, and it’s a little bit higher cost.” But if that’s what they need to do to bring money into the area and get wood out of overly dense federal forests, Johnson adds, Hampton is willing. 

The town’s government has stayed very involved. Mayor Rankin, who co-chairs the Collaborative, has been visiting the project sites each year. “The way the landscape responded was perfect,” he said. “It brought the complexity of that landscape to a different level that we didn’t anticipate.” Sunlight now shines through to the forest floor, and shrubs and other plant life have begun to grow below.

Now, animals like deer, bobcats, and squirrels are using these sections of forest, along with birds. “You can see where that trajectory is going,” Rankin said, “and it’s pretty reassuring that, ‘Hey, we did it right.’”

Along the way, the members of the Collaborative have found they share more common ground than they expected, said member Megan Birzell, Washington state director for The Wilderness Society. 

“When conservation and timber don’t talk to each other, there’s a perception that loggers and rural people don’t care about the environment and conservationists don’t care about people,” Birzell said. “That’s absolutely not true. There are things we’re never going to agree on, but on the 80% we do agree on, we can actually get a lot done—and we build trust that allows us to increase that zone of agreement.”

Seeding hope

In March of 2014, the Oso landslide seven miles outside town became the deadliest in U.S. history, killing 43 people. After the tragedy, Darrington found itself searching for new solutions that aimed to minimize environmental damage. 

The hope is that the Darrington Collaborative’s efforts will lead to more wood available for local communities to support existing sawmills as well as new economic opportunities. In 2020, the city government proposed the Darrington Wood Innovation Center, to pursue a new construction technique called mass timber. It involves nailing or gluing wood panels together to generate a strength approaching that of concrete, albeit with a much lower carbon footprint. 

Federal and state governments awarded the town up to $120 million to be a “one-stop shop” for the forest-based construction material. Its first phase involves a trial to create the material, followed by an expansion into modular construction using mass timber, and eventually maybe even a sawmill that would produce the material at scale.

The project could someday provide up to 120 jobs, including not only highly-skilled positions for engineers and architects, but also entry-level positions, said Rankin. “It could make a huge difference in encouraging young people to stay in Darrington,” he added. Watching high school students graduate is always exciting, he said. But “it’s also the saddest day, because you know the next stage of their life probably isn’t going to be here.” He hopes providing more jobs for young people might be part of the solution.  

Unlocking more from the outdoors

In the meantime, Darrington hopes to capitalize on another major economic driver: outdoor recreation. The picturesque area is a natural jumping-off point for adventurous types coming from Seattle. It’s close to rivers, glaciers, waterfalls, and the mountains. 

The town sits near a daredevil mountain bike network that offers sweeping views of Mt. Baker. It’s also close to a famed rock climbing area, Three O’Clock Rock in the Boulder River Wilderness. And for hikers, the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest offers trailheads that lead to crowd-pleasing spots like Glacier Peak and Granite Falls. 

Yet — mirroring national trends — teachers reported that many local kids were barely spending time outdoors. Darrington’s young people weren’t benefitting from these wilderness opportunities or their economic potential. So after the Oso landslide, Oak Rankin, Mayor Rankin’s nephew, helped found the Glacier Peak Institute. The institute offers 500 in-school and afterschool programs per year that expose participants to hiking, rafting, canoeing, foraging, navigation, wilderness survival, wilderness first aid, and planting trees.

“Multiple kids who’ve gone through the program are now continuing their education in areas like fisheries management and outdoor guiding,” Oak Rankin said. 

He says the next step is to develop more locally-owned companies, to ensure that tourism dollars stay in the community. Progress is already being made in that direction: After years of revolving-door restaurants that would close for the winter—or sometimes forever—Darrington now supports three consistent food establishments and a new brewery, River Time Brewing. They help give the town a sense of year-round life. 

That gives everyone from Mayor Rankin to environmental leaders like Luneau hope. To be truly sustainable, “we need to consider what the needs are of the local community,” Luneau said. “That’s likely going to include some level of timber harvest. But it’s also going to entail Darrington investing in its outdoor recreation infrastructure. There’s so much that could be done, and I’m really excited to see where Darrington takes things in the future.”

The Wilderness Society has been working since 1935 on uniting people to protect America’s wild places. With more than one million members and supporters, The Wilderness Society has led the effort to permanently protect nearly 112 million acres of wilderness in 44 states and ensure sound management of public lands. We believe that public lands can and should be a critical part of the solution to the climate crisis and a healthy future for all. We work to rapidly and fairly phase out fossil fuel development, responsibly ramp up renewable energy development, and protect and restore natural carbon sinks – like old-growth forests – on public lands and waters.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A more collaborative approach to conservation on Dec 12, 2023.

Congress created the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968 as a way for the federal government to bear a risk that private companies wouldn’t. Since then, Uncle Sam has backed the vast majority of flood insurance policies in the United States. 

Yet it is impossible to buy or renew such plans directly with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which administers the program. Instead, the government relies upon a network of private companies to sell and service its policies — and hands them nearly one-third of the premiums the program brings in. Lately, that’s come to almost $1 billion a year.

“It is certainly something that should be examined,” said Stephen Ellis, president of the watchdog organization Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It would be one thing if it were a very high performing program. Certainly that’s not been the case.” 

The government’s flood insurance program is plagued by low-participation rates and is deep in debt. How its run has often drawn scrutiny, and earlier this year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed legislation that would, among other things, cap the compensation paid to private brokers, who do not take on any risk. There also have been calls for FEMA to sell policies directly to consumers. Proponents of such changes say they would make it easier, and potentially cheaper, for property owners to obtain coverage, while saving taxpayers money.

“Flood insurance is a government service,” said Rob Moore, director of the Water & Climate Team at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “People should be able to buy it directly from FEMA. No question.”

FEMA and insurance companies say it isn’t quite that straightforward.

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The National Flood Insurance Act of 1968 established the National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP, to fill a gap as the private sector retreated from the market. Five years later, Congress mandated that homeowners in high-risk areas who have a federally backed mortgage buy adequate coverage. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter assigned FEMA the role of overseeing the NFIP. But insurance uptake remained relatively low.

In 1983, FEMA enlisted private insurance agents in the effort to sell more policies. The government agreed to reimburse the cost of writing policies and processing claims. The hope was that allowing homeowners to use the same agents that sold other types of insurance would boost participation.

As dozens of companies joined the so-called Write You Own, or WYO, program, flood insurance enrollment indeed grew. But the number of policies peaked in 2009, at 5.7 million, and has been declining since.

“Even with private insurance engaged, and advertising, it still sits right around 5 million policies,” Ellis said. (As of 2022, the figure is 4.7 million.) That’s a fraction of the roughly 100 million eligible properties.

Between 2017 and 2022, the NFIP paid brokers $5.82 billion in commission and expense reimbursements. That’s nearly 29 percent of all premiums brought in by the program, which is saddled with debt and loses billions of dollars annually. Reducing that cut by even a percentage point could save millions. But the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, has on at least two occasions critiqued FEMA’s approach to compensating brokers.

“FEMA sets rates for paying WYOs for their services without knowing how much of its payments actually cover expenses and how much goes toward profit,” the nonpartisan agency noted in a 2009 report. Three years later, Congress directed FEMA to reevaluate its compensation formula. But a 2016 GAO report found that hadn’t yet happened and recommended that FEMA “improve the transparency and accountability over the compensation paid to WYO companies and set appropriate compensation rates.”

The GAO still lists that recommendation as “unresolved,” and it remains unclear how much FEMA is over- or underpaying brokers. While the GAO found that some were not being reimbursed for all of their expenses, a 2019 FEMA rulemaking proposal noted that the 30.8 percent compensation rate that the agency pays them is well above the 25.3 percent in actual expenses they reported to an industry trade group. The difference is presumably profit, which could amount to many millions of dollars.

FEMA told Grist it has completed the congressionally mandated analysis of broker compensation, but declined to share details because it’s under internal review.

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What is known is that in fiscal year 2023, FEMA agreed to pay WYOs 29.7 percent of premiums. That is higher than the 20 percent cap that the Affordable Care Act generally places on the administrative, overhead, and marketing costs of health insurance sold through the government marketplace. It is also proportionally more than the 14 percent in expense payments that the Department of Agriculture has been giving companies to sell and service crop insurance for the last five years (the companies also get additional compensation as profit because, unlike WYOs, they take on crop insurance risk).

Roy Wright, who led the NFIP from 2015 to 2018, says such comparisons aren’t analogous because those programs are much larger. That allows for significantly lower overhead, he said. Still, he sees room for improvement.

“The operating costs have been the subject of a fair amount of debate,” said Wright, who is now the president of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. “I always think we should pay attention to how dollars are spent.”

One attempt to rein in costs came in June, when a bipartisan team of lawmakers introduced an NFIP reauthorization act that would, among other things, cap the compensation paid to private brokers at 22.46 percent. That would have saved the NFIP hundreds of millions of dollars last year alone.

“The NFIP has one million less policyholders than it did over a decade ago, but at the same time flooding, and subsequently premiums, has only increased,” said Senator Bob Menendez*, the New Jersey Democrat who is among the four lawmakers who sponsored the bill. “High administrative costs are an unnecessary burden to current policyholders and a barrier to those who want to enter. It’s time Congress rebalances the WYO compensation structure to provide premium relief and mitigation grants to grow the NFIP and reduce its risk profile.”

So far, little has happened with the bill.

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Looking beyond the matter of how much FEMA is paying brokers, some would like to see the agency interacting with consumers directly. That, they say, could cut costs while almost certainly improving access and transparency.

“Every intermediary adds one more step in the chain of telephone,” said Moore. “If more people bought directly from FEMA, there are some tangible benefits to the flood insurance programs.”

FEMA does run a program called NFIP Direct, which allows policyholders to make payments and file claims. It is somewhat similar to how the program ran before WYOs, except that today consumers must still buy a policy through a broker, who earns a 15 percent commision. According to one Democratic Senate aide, NFIP Direct’s overall expenses are about 22.46 percent, or the number proposed in the legislation. 

“This is an example of where the government is more efficient than the private market,” the aide said.

Still, NFIP Direct only comprises about 1 in 10 policies. That’s at least in part because agents have minimal incentives to sell them, said Joe Rossi, a broker who chairs the Flood Insurance Producers National Committee. Agents generally find it easier — or are required — to work with private insurers they already have relationships with. Doing so also can bring more in commissions.

“The WYOs are not restricted in how much they give to their agents,” Rossi said. “There are agencies that give 20 percent or more.”

The industry argues that agent expertise is critical to helping consumers navigate a complex subject fraught with questions like, say, whether getting an elevation certificate might reduce premiums.

“The agent is the NFIP whisperer, if you will,” said Lauren Pachman, director of regulatory affairs for the National Association of Professional Insurance Agents. She added that any cuts in government payments to insurance companies would almost certainly impact agents’ commissions, which would make it more difficult to attract and retain them. The number of Write Your Owns has already been dropping, she noted. “Carriers don’t make a ton of money on the flood program.”

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Less private sector involvement would require NFIP Direct to take on more of the burden — an outcome that worries her. “I guess it’s hard for me to imagine the NFIP operating like a well-run insurance company,” she said. “I worry that the federal government would be biting off more than it can chew.”

Nonetheless, FEMA says it wants to try to move closer to customers and is developing a “direct to consumer” online flood insurance quoting tool that it aims to have running by April 2025. In its initial request for information, which Grist obtained, the agency called a digital means of selling and servicing policies “imperative” and said, “Flood insurance remains behind the times, leading to potential customer frustration and the inability to protect one’s home or business.” 

The hope is that fixing those issues will lead more people to sign up. 

“If we’re serious about closing the insurance gap, we have to get more in tune about meeting our customers where they are,” said David Maurstad, senior executive of the National Flood Insurance Program. “What this would do is lead people through the process, at the end of which, if they decide they want to buy a policy, then we connect them with an agent who works on securing their policy.”

Maurstad did not say whether the new system would save the program money, but noted that bypassing private brokers would at the least be a logistical challenge, because insurance is regulated at the state level. The alternative would require FEMA to figure out how to have in-house agents registered in every state. 

“My sense is that that would not be as effective as the co-system that already exists,” he said. “It was decided a number of years ago, and it still makes sense today, to leverage the private sector and their capabilities to administer the program on behalf of the federal government.” 

Wright agrees that most people would probably benefit from professional guidance when buying flood insurance, but supports FEMA making more information easily and readily available to consumers. FEMA already has the technology needed to, say, allow someone to enter an address and get answers to most of their questions, he said: “They should find a way to turn it on.”

Whether NFIP can save money by moving more of the flood insurance process in-house is an open question, said Wright. But to the extent that there are savings, he said they should be passed on to the policy holders. 

“If the cost of the insurance has gone down,” he said, “the consumers should benefit.”

*This story has been updated to include a comment from Senator Bob Menendez.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The billion-dollar industry between you and FEMA’s flood insurance on Dec 12, 2023.

A federal air pollution rule successfully cut smog-forming emissions in 10 states by 18 percent this past summer, according to data collected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. During peak ozone season, which spanned May to September, states including Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania reduced nitrogen oxide emissions coming from coal-fired power plants under the agency’s recent “Good Neighbor” rule. Nitrogen oxide emissions can travel hundreds of miles downwind into neighboring states and form ozone, the main ingredient in smog. 

“This early data shows that the Good Neighbor plan is a workable and effective rule,” said Joseph Goffman, principal deputy assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, in a press release.

But the agency’s rule, which was finalized back in March, originally targeted a much broader group of 23 states. Twelve of the remaining states, including Alabama, Kentucky, Minnesota, Texas, and Utah, have yet to implement the rule due to ongoing legal challenges against the EPA’s regulation. (The thirteenth, California, is required to reduce pollution only from heavy industry, not power plants, and not until 2026.) State officials, fossil fuel industry groups, and utilities in those states have filed petitions to halt the rule, claiming the costs of compliance are too high and the standards unreasonable. Public health experts say these court actions are delaying much-needed relief for communities suffering the brunt of ozone’s impacts on human health. 

“It’s quite frustrating that so many states have chosen to litigate — to not be a good neighbor,” said Paul Billings, senior vice president for public policy at the American Lung Association. 

The Good Neighbor rule requires power plants and heavy industry to install and use pollution-control equipment to reduce their emissions of nitrogen oxide, which reacts with other molecules in the atmosphere to form ozone. Billings said that in many cases, power plants already have these controls installed but choose to not operate them to cut costs. 

Ozone is one of the most widespread air pollutants in the United States and reaches peak levels during the summer, when high temperatures and ample sunlight create ideal conditions for its formation. Exposure to ozone can cause coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath in healthy adults and exacerbate chronic respiratory illnesses. Some of its effects, like a higher risk of asthma attacks, can raise the likelihood of premature death.

In 2015, the EPA issued an updated ozone air quality standard, which sets maximum levels of ozone pollution across the nation. Under a provision of the federal Clean Air Act, which was passed in 1970, every state was required to submit a plan within three years of that update detailing how it would reduce the amount of ozone-forming air pollutants blowing downwind into nearby states. Two states, Pennsylvania and Virginia, failed to submit plans. In February, the EPA formally rejected another 21 states’ plans for failing to take sufficient action. The next month, the agency released its own plan — the Good Neighbor rule — setting cross-state ozone emissions standards that these states would be required to meet.

Since February, several states have challenged the EPA’s rejection of their original plans in federal courts across the country, effectively hitting pause on the federal Good Neighbor rule in those states, said Zachary Fabish, senior attorney at Sierra Club. That’s despite high levels of ozone pollution in those states, such as Texas and Utah. 

Fossil fuel industry groups, utilities, and states have also filed legal challenges against the Good Neighbor rule itself at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Petitioners in these cases are asking for a complete halt on the air pollution plan nationwide, including in states that are already implementing the federal rule. Filing groups include oil and gas companies Kinder Morgan and TransCanada Pipelines Limited; the electric utility PacifiCorp; trade associations like the American Chemistry Council, Interstate Natural Gas Association, and National Mining Association; and states including Indiana, Ohio, Utah, and West Virginia. 

Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and several industry groups have gone as far as filing emergency applications asking the Supreme Court to block enforcement of the rule while the court challenges play out. Fabish noted that while it’s unclear when or how the Supreme Court will act, the Good Neighbor plan has strong legal footing and is “entirely consistent” with previous federal ozone regulations. Fabish and the Sierra Club, along with other environmental groups, have submitted briefs before federal courts arguing on behalf of the Good Neighbor rule in these cases. 

“We’re all suffering from worse air quality than we should,” he said, adding that the EPA’s recent findings prove the tangible public health benefits that the 12 noncompliant states are missing out on. Ozone’s health impacts disproportionately hurt communities living close to power plants and industrial facilities, which are more likely to be communities of color and low-income communities. The air pollution also has an outsize impact on outdoor workers, children, and people living with chronic illnesses. Moreover, as climate change fuels hotter temperatures, the period of peak ozone levels during the summer will likely grow longer. 

“The reality is, while these court battles are ongoing, people are suffering,” Fabish said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline An EPA rule dramatically reduced smog pollution — in states that haven’t sued to stop it on Dec 12, 2023.

The United Nations climate summit in Dubai promises no shortage of drama in its final days — in part because negotiations over whether or not to phase out global fossil fuel use appear to have collapsed. One major goal of this year’s conference, known as COP28, is a “global stocktake” documenting the world’s climate progress and next steps on climate action. But as of Monday, any reference to ending oil and gas use had disappeared from the draft text, leading to widespread anger among climate advocates. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore declared that the conference was “on the verge of complete failure.”

But the well-publicized debate over fossil fuels threatens to overshadow another major question dogging negotiations as the clock runs out: whether or not world leaders can agree on how to adapt their countries’ infrastructure to withstand global warming. As climate-driven disasters continue to make headlines around the world, the fate of millions in especially vulnerable regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia hinges on this question. 

Though hundreds of international negotiators have spent the past fortnight tangling over a convoluted document that outlines how countries will adapt to climate change, they haven’t yet reached consensus on who exactly will pay for the phenomenally expensive undertaking — or even how to define successful climate adaptation in the first place. As the end of the conference approaches, stakeholders who spoke to Grist described the most recent draft text of the so-called global goal on adaptation as “watered-down,” “vague,” and “confusing.” 

The latest text is “much weakened,” said Pratishtha Singh, a policy analyst at the Canadian chapter of the Climate Action Network, an international advocacy organization. “It’s far from enough in terms of what’s needed by developing countries.” 

The “global goal on adaptation” is a sweeping framework that is supposed to guide how the world prepares for floods, fires, droughts, and other climate disasters. It’s also one of the last and biggest puzzle pieces in the implementation of the landmark Paris Agreement. The 2015 accord had three main pillars: mitigating future climate change by reducing carbon emissions, adapting to future climate disasters, and redressing the loss and damage that can’t be prevented. In the years since it was signed, countries have set goals for cutting carbon emissions and, much more recently, committed hundreds of millions of dollars to a loss-and-damage fund, but they haven’t yet agreed on a framework for climate adaptation.

This year’s COP is the final deadline for putting that framework together, but talks have moved at a snail’s pace in Dubai as negotiators clash over key issues. Despite holding at least eight technical discussions on the adaptation goal earlier this year, negotiators failed to agree on a draft document by the end of the conference’s first week, a sign of dismal progress. A parallel discussion about how vulnerable countries should design their national adaptation plans also broke down, and negotiators have punted that debate to a meeting in Bonn, Germany, next summer.

The reasons for the logjam are multiple. For one, the geopolitics of adaptation finance are highly contentious. In the past, rich countries in Europe and North America have promised to support adaptation in more vulnerable countries, but they have overwhelmingly failed to meet their previous commitments — and even those commitments were hundreds of billions of dollars short of what experts agree is needed. Negotiators from Africa and Southeast Asia entered the adaptation talks at COP28 seeking an acknowledgment that wealthy nations need to do more, plus a mechanism for monitoring international aid, which they say will help ensure that rich countries don’t renege on their funding commitments. Rich countries, however, sought to restrict the final agreement to a discussion of how to develop and implement adaptation policy.

“The main issue is the financial part,” said Idy Niang, a Senegalese negotiator who represents a bloc of the world’s least economically developed countries, during the first week of COP28. “We are not satisfied with the proposal coming from developed countries.”

The most recent draft text includes a lengthy discussion of adaptation finance, including a call for rich countries to pay more and a vague nod to their past failures, but it doesn’t include any clear commitment from wealthy nations. Nor does it outline any mechanism for tracking and monitoring adaptation aid. 

An earlier version included a provision that called for rich countries to provide at least $400 billion in adaptation finance per year by 2030, which would have represented a more than tenfold increase from recent years. But this line disappeared in later talks, as did any reference to equity principles underscoring developed countries’ responsibility to provide adaptation funding. Emilie Beauchamp, a climate policy expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canada-based environmental think tank, said such an agreement was a nonstarter for many nations.

“It’s not possible,” she told Grist. “This is an absolute red line for the developed countries.” She called the outcome on finance “quite disappointing.”

A second sticking point in the talks is the question of how to define successful adaptation. Outlining clear targets for adaptation is highly technical and challenging. Unlike goals for mitigating climate change, which can be pegged to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or global temperature increase, adaptation responses vary depending on local conditions. There’s no universal yardstick that countries can use to compare their progress. Adaptation efforts on a small island, for instance, look very different compared to a large urban city. 

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“Climate finance is messy, but the global goal on adaptation is even messier,” said Katherine Browne, a researcher at the Stockholm Environmental Institute who studies adaptation. “The problems with finance are political, but the problems with the goal are technical, because they’re trying to find a way to measure something that basically everyone agrees can’t be measured.”

The final framework needs to lay out a system for gauging progress on disaster resilience, but the term “adaptation” is so broad that negotiators have struggled to reach consensus on what categories of adaptation to include, or about how to measure the value of any given infrastructure project. The most recent text contains seven targets to meet by 2030, including a group of core themes for adaptation projects. These include food and water security, disaster readiness, universal healthcare, and land conservation. 

But these broad targets lack specificity and include language like “substantially” reducing poverty, “increasing” infrastructure resilience, and “reducing climate impacts on ecosystems.”

“The language is vague,” said Sandeep Chamling Rai, an adaptation expert with the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund. “Everything is there, but nothing is there.”

Given the unquantifiability inherent in the language, negotiators at COP28 are struggling to come up with a system allowing them to measure progress toward these goals. The best they’ve been able to do is punt the question to future COPs: Negotiators agreed to create a two-year working group that will sift through hundreds of potential adaptation “indicators” and try to create a global standard. These indicators might include the fatality rate for climate disasters, the percent of a population with access to clean water, or the number of acres of forested land in a country. 

The fact that adaptation has stalled out even as other issues move forward is a grim sign for vulnerable countries, said Beauchamp of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

“If you look at the broader COP … you have the loss-and-damage issue, which is zooming,” she said. “Adaptation, there’s nothing. It’s basically saying that the world does not care about the lives and ecosystems of people who are on the front lines of the climate crisis.”

This is ironic, because the question of whether or not rich nations should help less fortunate countries with climate adaptation has never been that contentious on its own, compared to the jostling over emissions reductions and funding for loss and damage. Unlike the latter, which amounts to paying what are essentially climate reparations, adaptation finance is often seen as a natural extension of the sustainable development framework that guides many forms of international aid.

Negotiators have set up several adaptation funds at previous COPs. Some of them, like the “Least Developed Countries Fund” and the “Special Climate Change Fund,” have been around for more than 20 years. A group of developed countries including Canada and Norway agreed to replenish these bank accounts last week with a new contribution of $174 million.

The problem is that the total amount of money in all these funds isn’t even close to what poorer countries need, and spending has plateaued in recent years. Global adaptation needs are outpacing adaptation finance by as much as $366 billion per year, according to the latest U.N. data, and the need is only growing as the world continues to warm. 

At the same time, rich countries such as the United States have failed to follow through on their prior pledges to fund adaptation: A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, found that international adaptation finance declined by around 15 percent between 2020 and 2021 — a time when it was supposed to be skyrocketing. Even global institutions like the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund only give out a few million dollars at a time for resilience projects. That’s enough to restore a small mangrove forest in Guinea-Bissau or build a wastewater treatment plant in Barbados, but not to armor a city against sea-level rise or help a country’s farming sector prepare for droughts. 

Another reason for the lag in funding is that the private sector has little incentive to invest in adaptation projects. Many banks and investors have backed solar farms and carbon capture projects across the developing world, because these initiatives promise future financial returns when people buy electricity or trade carbon credits. The same can’t be said for sea walls, desalination plants, and coastal conservation areas, which is why adaptation makes up only a quarter of all international climate finance.

While the most recent draft text obliquely nods to the need for scaled-up private finance, climate advocates who spoke to Grist called this a red herring. Singh, of the Climate Action Network, said such language is “wild and unacceptable,” given both private funding’s insufficiency compared to government-scale financing and the potential for private ventures to saddle developing countries with burdensome debt.

The United States, meanwhile, is championing the private sector as an adaptation savior. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry unveiled a report last week arguing that adaptation is profitable for the private sector, because companies can make money by protecting their supply chains against disasters, for instance, or by investing in government adaptation projects. 

“I think a ton of the incentives already exist, and I think the private sector is just awakening to those in a really significant way,” said Nathanial Matthews, the CEO of the Global Resilience Partnership, the coalition of governments and nonprofits that produced the report. He pointed to investors who issued loans to help build a flood-proof highway tunnel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and made money back through toll revenues.

But vulnerable countries can’t close the adaptation gap without significant public funding from wealthy nations, and that funding has yet to materialize.The next big test will arrive at next year’s COP29, where countries are hoping to ink a major new international funding agreement that will funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to adaptation. 

“We’re debating all these things about adaptation, but there’s absolutely no obligation for countries to implement it and to take it on,” said Beauchamp. “This framework would give a clear signal that the world actually cares about adaptation, but at the moment, we’re putting that signal in the bin.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As UN talks collapse, the world has no plan to adapt to climate change on Dec 11, 2023.