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The Guardian Climate Change

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Latest Climate crisis news, comment and analysis from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice
Updated: 12 hours 16 min ago

Xi contrasts China’s clean energy promises with Trump turmoil

April 23, 2025 - 12:51

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.

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Categories: Climate

Badenoch declines to criticise Jenrick over Reform coalition comments – UK politics live

April 23, 2025 - 10:16

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.

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Categories: Climate

A surprising number of Americans want climate action. But why aren’t there more?

April 23, 2025 - 09:19

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?

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Categories: Climate

Nearly half of Americans breathing in unsafe levels of air pollutants – report

April 23, 2025 - 06:00

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.

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Categories: Climate

A silent majority of the world’s people wants stronger climate action. It’s time to wake up | Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope

April 23, 2025 - 06:00

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

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Categories: Climate

Election 2025: will the Albo party win it? The polls are never wrong! | First Dog on the Moon

April 23, 2025 - 02:47

Take that Antony Greem

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Categories: Climate

Nigel Farage thinks net zero is the new Brexit. Starmer can prove him wrong | Rafael Behr

April 23, 2025 - 01:00

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

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Categories: Climate

More than 80% of the world’s reefs hit by bleaching after worst global event on record

April 23, 2025 - 00:00

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.

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Categories: Climate

Al Gore draws parallels between Trump and early Nazi Germany – video

April 22, 2025 - 22:07

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'

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Categories: Climate

Al Gore draws parallels between Trump 2.0 and early Nazi Germany in speech

April 22, 2025 - 09:56

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

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.

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Categories: Climate

UK scientists to launch outdoor geoengineering experiments

April 22, 2025 - 09:56

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.

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Categories: Climate

Tariffs will raise prices. But the climate crisis is the real inflation risk | Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli

April 22, 2025 - 08:00

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

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Categories: Climate

On thin ice: the brutal cold of Canada’s Arctic was once a defence, but a warming climate has changed that

April 22, 2025 - 05:00

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.

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Categories: Climate

US to impose tariffs of up to 3,521% on south-east Asia solar panels

April 22, 2025 - 04:42

Ahead of a global summit in London comes a warning that lessons on energy security have not been learned

US trade officials are preparing to impose tariffs of up to 3,521% on imports of solar panels from four south-east Asian countries, while the International Energy Agency has said lessons from the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had not been fully learned.

The US commerce department has announced the new tariffs, targeting companies in Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, after an investigation begun a year ago when American manufacturers of solar panels accused Chinese companies of flooding the market with subsidised, cheap goods.

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Categories: Climate

Most of the world’s population wants stronger climate action. They just don’t realize that they are a majority

April 22, 2025 - 01:35

The Guardian is joining forces with dozens of newsrooms around the world to launch a year-long exploration of the ‘silent majority’ of people who want to fight climate change

The Guardian US is launching a year-long collaborative reporting project that seeks to explore a pivotal but little-known fact about the climate crisis: the overwhelming majority of the world’s people want their governments to take stronger action.

The 89 Percent Project is a partnership between the Guardian US, Covering Climate Now, Agence France-Presse and dozens of other newsrooms across the globe. The collaboration builds on a slate of recent scientific studies finding that between 80-89% of the world’s population want stronger climate action. This overwhelming global majority, however, does not realize that they are a majority; most think their fellow citizens don’t agree. Experts agree breaking this “spiral of silence” could be pivotal to spurring critical climate action.

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Categories: Climate

‘Spiral of silence’: climate action is very popular, so why don’t people realise it?

April 22, 2025 - 01:00

Researchers find 89% of people around the world want more to be done, but mistakenly assume their peers do not

How much of a $450 (£339) pot would you give to a charity that cuts carbon emissions by investing in renewable energy, and how much would you keep for yourself? That was the question posed in a recent academic experiment. The answers mattered: real money was handed out as a result to some randomly chosen participants.

The average person gave away about half the money and kept the rest. But what if you had been told beforehand that the vast majority of other people think climate action is really important? Might you have given more to the charity?

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Categories: Climate

Pope Francis hailed as ‘unflinching global champion’ on climate crisis

April 22, 2025 - 01:00

Officials and campaigners from around world pay tribute to pontiff who put environment at heart of his papacy

He declared destroying the environment a sin, warned that humanity was turning the glorious creation of God into a “polluted wasteland full of debris, desolation and filth”, and located the cause of the climate crisis in people’s “selfish and boundless thirst for power”.

The messages Pope Francis delivered on the climate and environmental crises were forceful and direct. He called the leaders of fossil fuel companies into the Vatican to hold them to account; declared a global climate emergency, in 2019; and in his final months, held a conference on “the economics of the common good”.

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Categories: Climate

Activate climate’s ‘silent majority’ to supercharge action, experts say

April 22, 2025 - 01:00

Making concerned people aware their views are far from alone could unlock the change so urgently needed

A huge 89% majority of the world’s people want stronger action to fight the climate crisis but feel they are trapped in a self-fulfilling “spiral of silence” because they mistakenly believe they are in a minority, research suggests.

Making people aware that their pro-climate view is, in fact, by far the majority could unlock a social tipping point and push leaders into the climate action so urgently needed, experts say.

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Categories: Climate

Australia’s student strikers for climate believed they could change their future. Where are they now?

April 21, 2025 - 20:39

Young people rode a wave of hope and power when hundreds of thousands protested with them in 2019. Then, momentum was lost

On a stinking hot November day, seven years ago, Grace Vegesana and a handful of other young climate activists set up a small stage in a large square in Sydney’s CBD – and waited. Inspired by the first school striker for climate, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the high school students decided to organise their own rally.

Vegesana expected a hundred people to show up. Five thousand came. “It was like, oh my God, we’ve unleashed some kind of beast, people want more,” she recalls. In the months afterwards crowds doubled and then tripled.

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Categories: Climate

The Trump administration is sabotaging your scientific data | Jonathan Gilmour

April 21, 2025 - 10:00

Burying our heads in the sand won’t stop the climate crisis or pandemics. We’re taking action to preserve government tools

United States science has propelled the country into its current position as a powerhouse of biomedical advancements, technological innovation and scientific research. The data US government agencies produce is a crown jewel – it helps us track how the climate is changing, visualize air pollution in our communities, identify challenges to our health and provide a panoply of other essential uses. Climate change, pandemics and novel risks are coming for all of us – whether we bury our heads in the sand or not – and government data is critical to our understanding of the risks these challenges bring and how to address them.

Much of this data remains out of sight to those who don’t use it, even though they benefit us all. Over the past few months, the Trump administration has brazenly attacked our scientific establishment through agency firings, censorship and funding cuts, and it has explicitly targeted data the American taxpayers have paid for. They’re stealing from us and putting our health and wellbeing in danger – so now we must advocate for these federal resources.

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Categories: Climate