The Guardian Climate Change

Trees are being cleared for rainforest mega-event – but state governor says a ‘new history’ is under way

Fake metal trees have been set into the concrete ground of the Amazonian host city of this year’s climate summit, prompting scandalised contrasts with the once-living vegetation that has been cleared in preparation for Cop30 in Brazil.

But in an unlikely convergence of views, both the centre-right state governor and leftwing social movements insist this is a storm in a plant pot compared with the darkening geopolitical threats to the world’s biggest diplomatic gathering, which will take place in November in Belém.

Hurricane Katrina: Mississippi Remembers captures the grief and resilience of survivors in the Magnolia state

Twenty years ago this August, the United States Gulf coast was irrevocably changed when Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest and costliest storms to ever hit the country, made landfall. Making landfall as a strong category 3, the storm, which was so vast it stretched the length of the Mississippi Gulf coast all the way into Alabama, hit the Mississippi-Louisiana coastal border before continuing northward.

Since then, superstorms fueled by the climate crisis have become relatively commonplace in the country, but the impact of Katrina endures to this day. Immediately following the storm, the country and world were enthralled by tragic stories out of New Orleans, where the levees failed to a catastrophic effect and the local, state and federal responses were disastrous. But Mississippi, which received the maximum impact from the storm surge, was largely left out of the national narrative around Katrina.

The Herds project from the team behind Little Amal will travel 20,000km taking its message on environmental crisis across the world

Hundreds of life-size animal puppets have begun a 20,000km (12,400 mile) journey from central Africa to the Arctic Circle as part of an ambitious project created by the team behind Little Amal, the giant puppet of a Syrian girl that travelled across the world.

The public art initiative called The Herds, which has already visited Kinshasa and Lagos, will travel to 20 cities over four months to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

Hearing scheduled for Friday as residents receive anonymous leaflets that downplay pollution dangers

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is stirring controversy in Memphis, Tennessee. That’s where he’s building a massive supercomputer to power his company xAI. Community residents and environmental activists say that since the supercomputer was fired up last summer it has become one of the biggest air polluters in the county. But some local officials have championed the billionaire, saying he’s investing in Memphis.

The first public hearing with the health department is scheduled for Friday, where county officials will hear from all sides of the debate. In the run-up to the hearing, secretive fliers claiming xAI has low emissions were sent to residents of historically Black neighborhoods; at the same time, environmental groups have been amassing data about how much pollution the AI company is likely generating.

Latest denial of disaster funding comes as Trump has repeatedly stated he wants to eliminate Fema

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Donald Trump has denied federal disaster relief funds to the people of Arkansas, which saw dozens of people die from a series of deadly tornadoes last month, as legislators plead for him to reconsider.

More than 40 people have been found dead after a series of tornadoes and severe storms hit Arkansas and neighboring states Mississippi and Missouri in March, according to CNN.

Decision will affect mostly low-income Alabama residents as DoJ dismisses agreement over untreated sewage as DEI

The Trump administration has killed a landmark civil rights settlement requiring Alabama to address raw sewage pollution in majority-Black, residential areas south-west of Montgomery, dismissing it as an “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) agreement.

The decision could condemn low-income people in Lowndes county, about 40 miles south-west of Montgomery, to indefinitely continue living with no or failing sanitation infrastructure.

Americans have often moved between states for opportunities. Now they’re being forced to uproot themselves to escape hostile forces under Trump

Virtual meeting of leaders also hears UN’s António Guterres proclaim ‘no group or government’ can stop green revolution

China will continue to push forward on the climate crisis, Xi Jinping has said while appearing to criticise the “protectionism” of Donald Trump’s tariff policies.

The Chinese president was attending a closed-door virtual meeting with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and about a dozen other heads of state and government to discuss the climate crisis.

Spokesperson for Tory leader says she agrees with colleague that ‘we need to bring centre-right voters together’

Rosie Duffield, the independent MP who left Labour after the election in part because she felt her gender critical views made her unwelcome in the party (although her resignation letter focused on welfare issues), has claimed that Keir Starmer no longer arguing a trans woman is a woman shows he is a “manager rather than a leader”.

Speaking on LBC, Duffield said:

It’s just another sign of the prime minister’s lack of leadership skills. I’m bound to say that, he’s a manager rather than a leader. He responds and reacts rather than leads from the front, and this is what we’re seeing again from him.

Nigel Farage is peddling a dangerous fantasy by claiming the UK can be self-sufficient in gas.

After sixty years of drilling, the truth is the UK has already burned most of its gas. That’s down to geology, not politics, and no amount of hot air from Farage will change that.

Support for climate action is growing in the US, but partisan divides and fossil fuel interests hold sway

Over the last 12 months, the United States has endured a rash of disasters worsened by the climate crisis: devastating wildfires in southern California, a catastrophic hurricane in western North Carolina, and deadly heatwaves across the country.

Americans increasingly believe global heating is a serious threat that will affect them personally – and 74% want to see more climate action. Yet while that sounds high, it is still lower than most other countries around the world. What explains this disparity?

American Lung Association’s study says almost 156 million people live in areas with unhealthy levels of soot or smog

Almost half of Americans are breathing in dangerous levels of air pollutants, a new report shows, a rise compared with a year ago and likely to further increase in coming years thanks to the climate crisis and the Trump administration’s sweeping environmental rollbacks.

Just over 156 million people live in neighborhoods with unhealthy levels of soot or smog – a 16% rise compared with last year and the highest number in a decade, according to the American Lung Association (ALA) annual state of the air report.

About 89% of the public want their governments to do more to tackle the climate crisis – but don’t know they’re the majority

• The Guardian is joining forces with dozens of newsrooms around the world to launch the 89% Project – and highlight the fact that the vast majority of the world’s population wants climate action. Read more

A superpower in the fight against global heating is hiding in plain sight. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people in the world – between 80% and 89%, according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies – want their governments to take stronger climate action.

As co-founders of a non-profit that studies news coverage of climate change, those findings surprised even us. And they are a sharp rebuttal to the Trump administration’s efforts to attack anyone who does care about the climate crisis.

Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope are the co-founders of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now

Take that Antony Greem

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Labour must deliver the green transition voters want, leaving Reform and the Tories on the side of economic decline and dictators

Which former British prime minister described the climate emergency as “a clock ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines … quilting the Earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2”?

The florid style gives it away. You’d guess Boris Johnson even if you’d forgotten that the master of Brexit bombast also had a sideline in net zero evangelism. It wasn’t the most memorable part of his repertoire and it didn’t catch on as a Conservative catechism.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

An ashen pallor and an eerie stillness all that remains where there should be fluttering fish and vibrant colours in the reefscape, one conservationist says

The world’s coral reefs have been pushed into “uncharted territory” by the worst global bleaching event on record that has now hit more than 80% of the planet’s reefs, scientists have warned.

Reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to turn corals white since the global event started in January 2023, the latest data from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch shows.

Al Gore launched an attack on the Trump administration saying there were 'important lessons' to be learned from similarities with the early rise of Nazi Germany. In a speech at a climate week event in San Francisco, Gore said: 'We've already seen, by the way, how popular authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise to power, and power-seeking is what this is all about'

Former VP said the administration was creating its ‘own preferred reality’ and slammed it for green energy U-turn

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Al Gore said there were “important lessons” to be learned from similarities between the early rise of Nazi Germany and the recent actions of the Trump administration, in scathing comments made Monday during remarks about climate change.

During a speech at an event to mark the beginning of San Francisco’s Climate Week, the former vice-president and established climate advocate, said that the Trump administration was “trying to create their own preferred version of reality”, akin to the Nazi party during the 1930s in Germany, Politico reported.

Blocking sunlight could temporarily slow the climate crisis but the technologies remain highly controversial

UK scientists are to launch outdoor geoengineering experiments as part of a £50m government-funded programme.

The experiments will be small-scale and rigorously assessed, according to Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), the UK government agency backing the plan, and will provide “critical” data needed to assess the potential of the technology. The programme, along with another £11m project, will make the UK one of the biggest funders of geoengineering research in the world.

As temperatures rise and countries back off their decarbonization efforts, we must confront a reality central banks can’t correct

Inflation is, at base, a tax on consumption – and it hits the poor the hardest, since they consume more of their incomes and the rich consume less.

That’s one reason for concern over Donald Trump’s tariffs, which will disproportionately affect the poor. When the 90-day pause on the tariffs expires, it is reasonable to expect prices to rise, and by a lot.

Mark Blyth is a political economist and professor at Brown University. Nicolò Fraccaroli is a visiting scholar at Brown University

Geopolitical tensions are heating up on Canada’s borders, but the biggest threat may be from wildly fluctuating temperatures transforming the tundra and ocean

In early February, during the depths of winter, Twin Otter aircraft belonging to the Canadian military flew over the vast expanse of the western Arctic looking for sea ice. Below, sheets of white extended beyond the horizon.

But the pilots, who were searching for a suitable site to land a 34-tonne (76,000lb) Hercules transport plane a month later, needed ice that was 1.5-metres (5ft) thick.