Last Thursday, workers with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were told they would be laid off without severance and with little notice, according to the DNC’s union. The cuts included some longtime workers of the organization, the union said.

With the election over, the DNC intends to downsize from about 680 staff to fewer than 200. Some degree of seasonality is expected in political campaign jobs. But this degree is unusual—and has affected DNC staffers who’ve stayed with the organization across several campaigns, or even multiple decades, according to the union.

One former DNC union member, whose last day was Friday, said she was shocked. “For a lot of folks, this is life-altering,” said the laid-off employee, who spoke with Mother Jones on the condition of anonymity.

“Amongst the members that were laid off includes one deeply beloved union member who worked at the DNC for 38 years,” the staffer said. “So I push back against the claim that this is normal, because we have members who have been here for decades who are shocked and angry and trying to figure out how they’re going to survive this layoff.”

In a statement to the Washington Post, the DNC said that “while the DNC has met the terms of the union agreement negotiated by the CBA, we share the entire DNC family’s frustration and continue to provide resources to all members of the team to support them in this transition.”

A DNC official told Mother Jones that all workers were informed of the possibility of layoffs as early as September 13, and that 95 percent of those being let go had a post-election end date in their offer letter.

But one laid-off worker who spoke with Mother Jones said that she, like some other employees, felt pressured into leaving a full-time role for a temporary contract position prior to the election. 

“I was told in order to get a title change or a promotion or any raises, it would only be if I agreed to sign a contract that had an end date of November 15,” she said. The staffer said management had said an extension was expected.

“We tried to get answers about why this was happening, and we were stonewalled over and over again by management,” she said. DNC representatives would not comment on specific workers’ cases, but stated that all of the terms of the workers’ collective bargaining agreement are being upheld.

The DNC workers are not trying to get their jobs back. Instead, the union is organizing for a severance package, similar to what workers on the Harris-Walz campaign got. (Run for Something, a major Democratic campaign support PAC, also faced a wave of post-election layoffs in recent weeks, letting go off 35 percent of its staff—and well over half of its staff union.) A DNC spokesperson told Mother Jones that the DNC is in ongoing negotiations with SEIU Local 500, the union representing DNC workers.

Among those DNC employees who have not been laid off, the mood is uncertain, said one employee who was unaffected by the layoffs but requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the DNC. 

“One thing that has been a common thread during my employment has been that we’re trying to break the boom and bust cycle of democratic infrastructure. So I’d say this feels very antithetical to that,” she said. She plans to look for another job soon—but calls that decision “heartbreaking” as someone who’s spent years working in Democratic electoral politics. 

Workers said that DNC donors have reached out to them, concerned about how, exactly, the money the Harris campaign raised is being spent, if not to allow them severance pay. 

“We find it very cruel that DNC management is trying to claim that layoffs are just part of the job,” a DNC union member said. “And we feel strongly that losing an election has not absolved the organization of its responsibility to treat its workers with basic dignity.”

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

When Miguel Zablah bought his five-bedroom home in Miami’s leafy Shenandoah neighborhood in June of 2020, he said he paid $7,000 a year for homeowner’s insurance. 

The house, built in 1923, sits on high ground and has survived a century of famously volatile South Florida weather. But in just four short years, Zablah said his homeowner’s insurance premium has more than doubled to $15,000 a year. Quotes for next year’s premiums are looking even worse. 

“Some insurance companies are now quoting me at $20,000, $25,000 on my house, which is ridiculous,” said Zablah, who works in private equity. The premium increases are so steep that he’s considering just paying off his mortgage—and foregoing the insurance that his lender requires him to carry. “I’m very grateful that I’m in a good position,” he added. 

Zablah’s premium increases are a symptom of a broader insurance crisis plaguing real estate markets across America. Experts say it’s fueled, in large part, by the disastrous effects of human-caused climate change. 

Flooding is more frequent. Higher temperatures stoke stronger hurricanes. Wildfires burn more acres. And Americans have spent generations moving to sunny places that are often the most in harm’s way, including Florida, Texas, and California. 

In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t get coverage. 

So, the cost of insuring homes against natural disasters is spiking along with atmospheric temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.

Now, new research shows that higher insurance premiums like the one Zablah is paying significantly increase the probability of people falling behind on their mortgages—or motivate them to pay the debt off early. The outcomes spell trouble for banks, and for homeowners. 

How significant is the increase in mortgage trouble? A $500 spike in annual insurance premiums was linked to a 20 percent higher mortgage delinquency rate.

That figure was extracted from findings in a recent study, which will be expanded and then undergo peer review, according to Shan Ge, an assistant professor of finance at New York University and one of the paper’s authors.

“What we found, which is the first in the literature, is that as insurance premiums go up, we have seen an increase in delinquency of mortgages,” Ge said. The research adds to a growing body of scientific literature proving that the climate crisis is also a housing crisis.

It’s a crisis with a brutal, but important side effect: Higher premiums may convince people in vulnerable areas like Miami to move out of harm’s way. 

“The market is clearly adapting, and there will be winners and losers…but ultimately there should be more winners to the extent that it sends signals and people get out of the way,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University who was not involved in the study. 

Zablah also heads the board of the Brickell Roads condominium association in Miami, where he owns an investment property. The effects of climate change are felt there too.

Brickell Roads residents had been paying $350 a month in condo fees in 2022. But then Weston Insurance, the carrier of the association’s windstorm policy, went bust. 

It was the fifth Florida insurance carrier to fold that year in the wake of Hurricane Ian, which slammed into the Southeast United States, causing an estimated $112 billion in damage. It was the most expensive storm ever in Florida and third most expensive in US history. 

As the association scrambled to find a replacement policy, it confronted a stark reality: Monthly condo fees would more than triple under their new insurance policy. On October 1, 2023, it raised the condo fee at Brickell Roads to $1,000 a month. (The board has since found another insurance carrier and hopes to lower the fee to $700 a month, according to Zablah.) 

“In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their policies.” 

Climate change has blown a hole through insurance markets across the United States. In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t find companies willing to insure their homes. 

In California, that state’s Department of Insurance has barred carriers from not renewing policies in certain fire-prone zip codes, essentially forcing the companies to insure properties there. And in Florida, a volatile mix of fraud, litigation, floods, and hurricanes has left homeowners like those in Brickell Roads scrambling for coverage. 

One major reason for the spike in insurance prices is a rise in the cost of the insurance coverage that insurance companies purchase for themselves, known as reinsurance. Globally, reinsurers raised prices for property insurers by 37 percent in 2023. (Prices stabilized somewhat in 2024.)

Insurers have passed those costs on to customers, said industry analyst Cathy Seifert during a Bloomberg TV appearance on November 4. “The insurance industry will leverage climate change into pricing strength,” she said. 

Analysts and scholars who study the nexus between climate change and housing had long theorized that higher insurance rates would negatively affect property markets. 

An August 2024 report by the Congressional Budget Office noted that in 2023, 30 percent of losses from natural disasters went uninsured. Those losses further constrict an already tight supply of housing. Researchers have also found that higher insurance rates affect the availability of affordable housing. It turns out, housing markets might be more sensitive to premium spikes than many thought.

Using a dataset that links insurance policies with mortgages for 6.7 million borrowers, Ge and two other researchers established that spikes in insurance premiums led a significant number of borrowers to either pay off their mortgages early or fall behind. Obviously, many homeowners can’t afford to accelerate their mortgage payoff.

The researchers found that the effect of premium increases on mortgage delinquency is twice as large for borrowers with a high loan-to-value ratio, meaning they owe a lot of money on their homes compared to the home’s value.

“This is how many people across the country are beginning to directly experience how climate change is changing our world and the cost it’s going to have,” said Moira Birss, a research fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. “In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their (insurance) policies.” 

Conversely, the NYU study found that people who took out jumbo mortgages—large loans for expensive houses that regular loans won’t cover—were three times less likely to end up falling behind on payments. Because more than two-thirds of mortgages are backed by the federal government, it’s taxpayers who could be left holding the bag from rising climate-caused delinquencies.

“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg.” said Wayne Pathman, a Miami-based land use attorney who has spent years working on resilience issues in the region. “I think it is going to get a lot worse.”

Pathman says he is seeing similar premium increases in the commercial property insurance market—and is also witnessing owners of office buildings consider choices similar to that of Zablah, the homeowner. 

Pathman recounted how one of his clients, a hotel operator, handled a looming increase in his insurance premiums. He paid off the mortgage on the building and decided to forego the $1-million-a-year premiums for windstorms. 

So next time a hurricane blows in, he’ll be on his own.

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

When Miguel Zablah bought his five-bedroom home in Miami’s leafy Shenandoah neighborhood in June of 2020, he said he paid $7,000 a year for homeowner’s insurance. 

The house, built in 1923, sits on high ground and has survived a century of famously volatile South Florida weather. But in just four short years, Zablah said his homeowner’s insurance premium has more than doubled to $15,000 a year. Quotes for next year’s premiums are looking even worse. 

“Some insurance companies are now quoting me at $20,000, $25,000 on my house, which is ridiculous,” said Zablah, who works in private equity. The premium increases are so steep that he’s considering just paying off his mortgage—and foregoing the insurance that his lender requires him to carry. “I’m very grateful that I’m in a good position,” he added. 

Zablah’s premium increases are a symptom of a broader insurance crisis plaguing real estate markets across America. Experts say it’s fueled, in large part, by the disastrous effects of human-caused climate change. 

Flooding is more frequent. Higher temperatures stoke stronger hurricanes. Wildfires burn more acres. And Americans have spent generations moving to sunny places that are often the most in harm’s way, including Florida, Texas, and California. 

In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t get coverage. 

So, the cost of insuring homes against natural disasters is spiking along with atmospheric temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.

Now, new research shows that higher insurance premiums like the one Zablah is paying significantly increase the probability of people falling behind on their mortgages—or motivate them to pay the debt off early. The outcomes spell trouble for banks, and for homeowners. 

How significant is the increase in mortgage trouble? A $500 spike in annual insurance premiums was linked to a 20 percent higher mortgage delinquency rate.

That figure was extracted from findings in a recent study, which will be expanded and then undergo peer review, according to Shan Ge, an assistant professor of finance at New York University and one of the paper’s authors.

“What we found, which is the first in the literature, is that as insurance premiums go up, we have seen an increase in delinquency of mortgages,” Ge said. The research adds to a growing body of scientific literature proving that the climate crisis is also a housing crisis.

It’s a crisis with a brutal, but important side effect: Higher premiums may convince people in vulnerable areas like Miami to move out of harm’s way. 

“The market is clearly adapting, and there will be winners and losers…but ultimately there should be more winners to the extent that it sends signals and people get out of the way,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University who was not involved in the study. 

Zablah also heads the board of the Brickell Roads condominium association in Miami, where he owns an investment property. The effects of climate change are felt there too.

Brickell Roads residents had been paying $350 a month in condo fees in 2022. But then Weston Insurance, the carrier of the association’s windstorm policy, went bust. 

It was the fifth Florida insurance carrier to fold that year in the wake of Hurricane Ian, which slammed into the Southeast United States, causing an estimated $112 billion in damage. It was the most expensive storm ever in Florida and third most expensive in US history. 

As the association scrambled to find a replacement policy, it confronted a stark reality: Monthly condo fees would more than triple under their new insurance policy. On October 1, 2023, it raised the condo fee at Brickell Roads to $1,000 a month. (The board has since found another insurance carrier and hopes to lower the fee to $700 a month, according to Zablah.) 

“In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their policies.” 

Climate change has blown a hole through insurance markets across the United States. In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t find companies willing to insure their homes. 

In California, that state’s Department of Insurance has barred carriers from not renewing policies in certain fire-prone zip codes, essentially forcing the companies to insure properties there. And in Florida, a volatile mix of fraud, litigation, floods, and hurricanes has left homeowners like those in Brickell Roads scrambling for coverage. 

One major reason for the spike in insurance prices is a rise in the cost of the insurance coverage that insurance companies purchase for themselves, known as reinsurance. Globally, reinsurers raised prices for property insurers by 37 percent in 2023. (Prices stabilized somewhat in 2024.)

Insurers have passed those costs on to customers, said industry analyst Cathy Seifert during a Bloomberg TV appearance on November 4. “The insurance industry will leverage climate change into pricing strength,” she said. 

Analysts and scholars who study the nexus between climate change and housing had long theorized that higher insurance rates would negatively affect property markets. 

An August 2024 report by the Congressional Budget Office noted that in 2023, 30 percent of losses from natural disasters went uninsured. Those losses further constrict an already tight supply of housing. Researchers have also found that higher insurance rates affect the availability of affordable housing. It turns out, housing markets might be more sensitive to premium spikes than many thought.

Using a dataset that links insurance policies with mortgages for 6.7 million borrowers, Ge and two other researchers established that spikes in insurance premiums led a significant number of borrowers to either pay off their mortgages early or fall behind. Obviously, many homeowners can’t afford to accelerate their mortgage payoff.

The researchers found that the effect of premium increases on mortgage delinquency is twice as large for borrowers with a high loan-to-value ratio, meaning they owe a lot of money on their homes compared to the home’s value.

“This is how many people across the country are beginning to directly experience how climate change is changing our world and the cost it’s going to have,” said Moira Birss, a research fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. “In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their (insurance) policies.” 

Conversely, the NYU study found that people who took out jumbo mortgages—large loans for expensive houses that regular loans won’t cover—were three times less likely to end up falling behind on payments. Because more than two-thirds of mortgages are backed by the federal government, it’s taxpayers who could be left holding the bag from rising climate-caused delinquencies.

“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg.” said Wayne Pathman, a Miami-based land use attorney who has spent years working on resilience issues in the region. “I think it is going to get a lot worse.”

Pathman says he is seeing similar premium increases in the commercial property insurance market—and is also witnessing owners of office buildings consider choices similar to that of Zablah, the homeowner. 

Pathman recounted how one of his clients, a hotel operator, handled a looming increase in his insurance premiums. He paid off the mortgage on the building and decided to forego the $1-million-a-year premiums for windstorms. 

So next time a hurricane blows in, he’ll be on his own.

At a rally Saturday in Gastonia, North Carolina, Donald Trump thanked God for an October jobs report that showed a slow-down in job growth due in part to the recent hurricane that decimated the western part of the state.

“How good was that?” Trump asked the crowd. “To get those numbers four days before the vote was…” Trump said, trailing off. Then he paused and looked upward, presumably to God, who he told: “Thank you very much sir. Thank you.”

“He’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the US economy added just 12,000 jobs in October. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su attributed the slow growth to “significant impacts from hurricanes and strike activity.” That’s a reference to Hurricanes Helene and Milton and an ongoing strike by Boeing machinists. Noting the unemployment rate remains at 4.1 percent and inflation is falling, Su said the jobs report “reflects an atypical month rather than a shift in the broader economic outlook.”

Trump’s jobs remarks were hardly the worst thing he said this weekend. He labeled journalists covering his rally “monsters,” mocked trans people, and called his opponent a product of political correctness and “stupid,” with a racist and sexist subtext hard to miss. He defended his racist Madison Square Garden rally. On Friday night in Milwaukee he inexplicably expressed frustration with audio issues by pretending to perform fellatio on a microphone stand.

But the reaction to the jobs report was revealing in the gusto with which Trump embraced bad news for Americans as good for him. To be fair, he did describe the numbers as “bad news” during his Friday address. But in North Carolina on Saturday, he celebrated the political benefit he claimed to be getting from the new report—without mentioning the hurricane economists say helped slow hiring by causing catastrophic flooding and hundreds of deaths, including more than 100 in the state he spoke in.

“I mean, how good is that if you happen to be running against the people that did that?” Trump, referring to the jobs report.

This wasn’t the only time he seemed to be rejoicing in doom. Elsewhere in the speech, Trump celebrated, as he generally does at his rallies, an increase in border crossings that followed his exit from office. He has consistently made few bones about his belief that problems at the border are good for him. Early this year, Trump successfully lobbied to jettison a bipartisan bill aimed at toughening security on the Mexican border. Trump’s push was widely understood as an effort to stop Congress from trying to solve a problem that he wanted to use to attack Democrats. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was a key author of the bill, has said that critics of the measures argued: “We don’t want President Trump to lose that issue.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has faulted Trump’s opposition to the measure, calling it evidence that “he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Nothing in Trump’s remarks Saturday refuted that criticism.

At a rally Saturday in Gastonia, North Carolina, Donald Trump thanked God for an October jobs report that showed a slow-down in job growth due in part to the recent hurricane that decimated the western part of the state.

“How good was that?” Trump asked the crowd. “To get those numbers four days before the vote was…” Trump said, trailing off. Then he paused and looked upward, presumably to God, who he told: “Thank you very much sir. Thank you.”

“He’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the US economy added just 12,000 jobs in October. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su attributed the slow growth to “significant impacts from hurricanes and strike activity.” That’s a reference to Hurricanes Helene and Milton and an ongoing strike by Boeing machinists. Noting the unemployment rate remains at 4.1 percent and inflation is falling, Su said the jobs report “reflects an atypical month rather than a shift in the broader economic outlook.”

Trump’s jobs remarks were hardly the worst thing he said this weekend. He labeled journalists covering his rally “monsters,” mocked trans people, and called his opponent a product of political correctness and “stupid,” with a racist and sexist subtext hard to miss. He defended his racist Madison Square Garden rally. On Friday night in Milwaukee he inexplicably expressed frustration with audio issues by pretending to perform fellatio on a microphone stand.

But the reaction to the jobs report was revealing in the gusto with which Trump embraced bad news for Americans as good for him. To be fair, he did describe the numbers as “bad news” during his Friday address. But in North Carolina on Saturday, he celebrated the political benefit he claimed to be getting from the new report—without mentioning the hurricane economists say helped slow hiring by causing catastrophic flooding and hundreds of deaths, including more than 100 in the state he spoke in.

“I mean, how good is that if you happen to be running against the people that did that?” Trump, referring to the jobs report.

This wasn’t the only time he seemed to be rejoicing in doom. Elsewhere in the speech, Trump celebrated, as he generally does at his rallies, an increase in border crossings that followed his exit from office. He has consistently made few bones about his belief that problems at the border are good for him. Early this year, Trump successfully lobbied to jettison a bipartisan bill aimed at toughening security on the Mexican border. Trump’s push was widely understood as an effort to stop Congress from trying to solve a problem that he wanted to use to attack Democrats. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was a key author of the bill, has said that critics of the measures argued: “We don’t want President Trump to lose that issue.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has faulted Trump’s opposition to the measure, calling it evidence that “he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Nothing in Trump’s remarks Saturday refuted that criticism.

In the last five years, as the movement to ditch gas-fueled stoves and heaters has spread across the country—it’s also ignited a backlash.

In 2019, Berkeley, California, became the first American city to ban gas hookups in new buildings, a rule intended to reduce carbon emissions—and improve indoor air quality in light of growing evidence that gas stoves emit pollutants linked to asthma and cancer. Dozens more cities followed suit.

The California Restaurant Association sued Berkeley, and the city eventually backed down and repealed its policy. Places with similar laws, including New York state and Washington, DC, were slapped with lawsuits too. Conservatives at the highest levels of government warned the public, misleadingly, that liberals were coming for people’s gas stoves. About half of US states, mostly but not all red, have since passed laws preemptively barring local governments from regulating gas.

This slice of the culture wars is now on the ballot in Washington, one of the country’s most climate-forward states. I-2066, a measure funded by fossil fuel and construction groups to “protect energy choice,” wouldn’t merely prevent local governments from banning “natural” gas in new buildings—with its broad language, climate advocates say, the measure might also be used to block state incentives encouraging people to switch to energy-efficient electric appliances. If it passes, they worry, it could provide a blueprint for the fossil fuel industry to oppose similar policies nationwide.

“This is a national threat,” says Leah Missik, a researcher and policy developer at Climate Solutions, a Washington State environmental group opposing the initiative. “Washington is somewhat of a testing pool for them to see if they can go further in weaponizing the initiative process to threaten climate progress.”

So how did Washington—the state that gave us REI, modern backpacks, and the “greenest governor” in America—come to consider a measure to preserve gas appliances?

I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state,” says one advocate, “which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”

Experts told me I-2066 is largely a response to two progressive climate policies. First, there was a tweak to Washington’s building codes: About a quarter of the state’s carbon emissions come from heating and powering buildings. Last year, the State Building Code Council voted to require new buildings to meet certain energy efficiency standards, a policy that favored electric appliances like heat pumps over more wasteful, gas-powered ones. (Seattle went further, passing a policy requiring many large, existing buildings to reach net zero emissions by 2050.)

Then, earlier this year, the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a wonky, but impactful green energy law, House Bill 1589, which requires Washington’s largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to outline a plan for full electrification.

When that passed, the Building Industry Association of Washington, a major funder of I-2066, released a statement claiming the law “clears the path” for Puget Sound Energy to “force its 800,000 natural gas customers to convert their homes to all-electric,” at a cost of “$40,000 to $50,000 per household.”

According to Puget Sound Energy, the bill doesn’t “force” electrification—it is, primarily, a law to help the utility plan to go electric. Plus, climate advocates say, the switch to all-electric buildings is inevitable, given the climate and health dangers of gas. And helping utility companies prepare, they argue, will reduce costs for customers in the long run.

We can do the energy transition “in a chaotic and unmanaged way, or we can do it in a fair and managed way,” says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle-based senior attorney at Earthjustice, an organization that opposes I-2066. HB 1589 aimed to help ease the state into the transition, he says, but “this initiative is a chaos bomb thrown into the middle of that process that will make energy more expensive and the future more complicated.”

The notion that Washington was shoving clean energy down people’s throats gained traction nonetheless. Let’s Go Washington, a group run by hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, and backed by the National Association of Home Builders and Koch Industries, which is heavily invested in fossil fuels, took up a signature drive and successfully got I-2066 on the ballot, along with three other measures. One of the others, I-2117, would roll back Washington’s cap-and-invest program, which has raised about $2 billion for state green energy programs, but also, critics say, pushed up the price of gasoline. (Heywood was unavailable for an interview with Mother Jones, and the Building Industry Association of Washington did not respond to an interview request.)

“It’s the perception that is important,” explains Aseem Prakash, a political science professor at the University of Washington. “And the perception is that these climate laws are imposing new costs that people are not willing to undertake.”

If passed—and polling suggests its odds are good—I-2066 would repeal key parts of HB 1589 and, as Axios reports, require the state to revise the new building codes next year to no longer disadvantage gas. To supporters, that would mean preserving consumers’ “energy choice.” To opponents, it’d be a major setback to the state’s ability to address the climate crisis.

I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state,” says Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium, an affordable housing advocacy group, “which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”

More broadly, the measure’s passage would serve as a symbolic rebuke to progressive electrification policies. “We had a lot of success,” Hasselman says. “We moved the ball forward quite a bit, and now we’re seeing a real pushback.”

“I do worry,” he adds, “if the billionaires and the fossil fuel companies pour enough money into these initiatives to be successful, it sends a terribly chilling message for the whole nation.”

On October 26th, Donald Trump promised that “WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” But it is Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who, earlier today, announced she had actually done something about it. 

The day before Trump’s proclamation, the United States Copyright Office announced a new copyright exemption that will grant some small business owners and franchisees—such as those operating the 13,000 McDonald’s in the United States—the “right to repair” the machinery within their own shops. Back in March, the FTC submitted a comment to the US Copyright Office asking to extend the right to repair certain equipment, including commercial soft-serve equipment. 

The saga is in miniature a good example of how to potentially combat Trumpism. There is a problem: To many, the McDonald’s soft-serve extruders of this great nation seem perpetually broken (a fact that McDonalds itself has acknowledged). Trump vaguely promised to do something about it. Khan—on the vanguard of a new class of anti-monopolistic Democrats—moved aggressively to try to push a change unpopular with business interests, solve the problem, and get you ice cream more easily.

The new ruling could be a game-changer for drive-through employees, too. They often contend with rageful customers over broken devices. “Victory is sweet,” wrote Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixIt. “This is a big win—and we’ll be celebrating with ice cream!—but copyright law still needs fixing before we’re free to fix everything we own.”

McDonald’s soft serve machines are manufactured by the Taylor Company. Since 1956, those soft-serve machines could only be legally repaired by Taylor Company licensed technicians—and if anyone without that license attempted to repair the machines, they voided the warranty. That, the FTC said, squashes competition for replacement parts and for repair technicians.

It shows Khan’s knack for proving the government can do things to help make life suck less. And it is a window into how Khan has used the FTC to respond to American grievances.

In 2020, an independent developer scraped data from delivery apps to create a constantly updating map of broken and unbroken ice cream machines. (Called McBroken, it showed that 32 percent of all McDonald’s soft serve machines were out of order at the time of this writing.) In 2021, the FTC launched an inquiry that showed that the broken ice cream machine memes populating the internet contain a grain of truth. When they asked franchisees about the issue, they called the devices overly complicated and hard to fix. In 2023, iFixit, a DIY-focused website and tools retailer, published a breakdown of the machine’s “easily replaceable” parts which frequently break, and which McDonald’s workers were nonetheless forbidden to replace themselves. It seems simple and unspectacular when you lay it out, but the basics are here: hear about a problem, ask why it’s happening, try to find a solution.

Khan has earned a reputation for big moves. She has introduced sweeping crackdowns against companies the FTC considers to be monopolies, such as Amazon, and pushed for consumer-protection interventions like the “click to cancel” rule, designed to make the process of canceling unused gym and magazine subscriptions less arcane. On October 31st, the House Oversight Committee called for her to be replaced, claiming that she is infecting the agency with “left-wing ideology.” Elon Musk tweeted today that “[Khan] will be fired soon.” (Under Musk’s plan for a $2 trillion cut to the federal budget, it’s possible that the FTC would be eliminated entirely.) 

Even some Harris-aligned figures, such as billionaires Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, have publicly jostled for a less active FTC and to potentially replace Khan.

The ice cream saga may prove why her ways of running the FTC are so valuable.

On October 26th, Donald Trump promised that “WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” But it is Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who, earlier today, announced she had actually done something about it. 

The day before Trump’s proclamation, the United States Copyright Office announced a new copyright exemption that will grant some small business owners and franchisees—such as those operating the 13,000 McDonald’s in the United States—the “right to repair” the machinery within their own shops. Back in March, the FTC submitted a comment to the US Copyright Office asking to extend the right to repair certain equipment, including commercial soft-serve equipment. 

The saga is in miniature a good example of how to potentially combat Trumpism. There is a problem: To many, the McDonald’s soft-serve extruders of this great nation seem perpetually broken (a fact that McDonalds itself has acknowledged). Trump vaguely promised to do something about it. Khan—on the vanguard of a new class of anti-monopolistic Democrats—moved aggressively to try to push a change unpopular with business interests, solve the problem, and get you ice cream more easily.

The new ruling could be a game-changer for drive-through employees, too. They often contend with rageful customers over broken devices. “Victory is sweet,” wrote Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixIt. “This is a big win—and we’ll be celebrating with ice cream!—but copyright law still needs fixing before we’re free to fix everything we own.”

McDonald’s soft serve machines are manufactured by the Taylor Company. Since 1956, those soft-serve machines could only be legally repaired by Taylor Company licensed technicians—and if anyone without that license attempted to repair the machines, they voided the warranty. That, the FTC said, squashes competition for replacement parts and for repair technicians.

It shows Khan’s knack for proving the government can do things to help make life suck less. And it is a window into how Khan has used the FTC to respond to American grievances.

In 2020, an independent developer scraped data from delivery apps to create a constantly updating map of broken and unbroken ice cream machines. (Called McBroken, it showed that 32 percent of all McDonald’s soft serve machines were out of order at the time of this writing.) In 2021, the FTC launched an inquiry that showed that the broken ice cream machine memes populating the internet contain a grain of truth. When they asked franchisees about the issue, they called the devices overly complicated and hard to fix. In 2023, iFixit, a DIY-focused website and tools retailer, published a breakdown of the machine’s “easily replaceable” parts which frequently break, and which McDonald’s workers were nonetheless forbidden to replace themselves. It seems simple and unspectacular when you lay it out, but the basics are here: hear about a problem, ask why it’s happening, try to find a solution.

Khan has earned a reputation for big moves. She has introduced sweeping crackdowns against companies the FTC considers to be monopolies, such as Amazon, and pushed for consumer-protection interventions like the “click to cancel” rule, designed to make the process of canceling unused gym and magazine subscriptions less arcane. On October 31st, the House Oversight Committee called for her to be replaced, claiming that she is infecting the agency with “left-wing ideology.” Elon Musk tweeted today that “[Khan] will be fired soon.” (Under Musk’s plan for a $2 trillion cut to the federal budget, it’s possible that the FTC would be eliminated entirely.) 

Even some Harris-aligned figures, such as billionaires Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, have publicly jostled for a less active FTC and to potentially replace Khan.

The ice cream saga may prove why her ways of running the FTC are so valuable.

In a debate-night surprise, climate science got near-top billing during the vice presidential face-off between Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance in New York on Tuesday, as the sprawling impacts of Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 160 people, were still being felt across the Southeast.

Just after an opening that addressed the escalating crisis in the Middle East, CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell noted that climate change is only making storms like Helene worse and asked Vance if he agreed with Donald Trump’s assertion that climate change is a “hoax.” Vance, in a pattern that repeated across the night, couldn’t bring himself to contradict the former president.

Instead, he pointed a finger at his opponents. If Democrats “really believe that climate change is serious,” he argued, “what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America.” That’s because, he said, America is the “cleanest economy in the entire world” in terms of “carbon emissions” per “unit of economic output.” He also pushed for investing in nuclear and natural gas.

It’s unclear what Vance meant by “unit of economic output.” But by most metrics, the US is not a clean economy. The US has among the highest carbon emissions per capita, one of the highest total annual emissions, a mediocre record on carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, and was most recently ranked 34th in the world in its Environmental Performance Index, a measure of a country’s environmental stewardship, including climate change mitigation.

Walz countered that the Biden-Harris administration has made “massive investments” in green technology—the “biggest in global history“—with the Inflation Reduction Act. The law, Walz said, has created 200,000 jobs across the country. (As CNN noted in its fact-check of the debate, some of those jobs may be promised, but not yet created; it’s difficult to come up with an exact figure of jobs sparked by the IRA.)

As for Hurricane Helene, both Vance and Walz shared their condolences with the victims of the flooding. As Vance said, “It’s an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy.”

In a debate-night surprise, climate science got near-top billing during the vice presidential face-off between Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance in New York on Tuesday, as the sprawling impacts of Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 160 people, were still being felt across the Southeast.

Just after an opening that addressed the escalating crisis in the Middle East, CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell noted that climate change is only making storms like Helene worse and asked Vance if he agreed with Donald Trump’s assertion that climate change is a “hoax.” Vance, in a pattern that repeated across the night, couldn’t bring himself to contradict the former president.

Instead, he pointed a finger at his opponents. If Democrats “really believe that climate change is serious,” he argued, “what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America.” That’s because, he said, America is the “cleanest economy in the entire world” in terms of “carbon emissions” per “unit of economic output.” He also pushed for investing in nuclear and natural gas.

It’s unclear what Vance meant by “unit of economic output.” But by most metrics, the US is not a clean economy. The US has among the highest carbon emissions per capita, one of the highest total annual emissions, a mediocre record on carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, and was most recently ranked 34th in the world in its Environmental Performance Index, a measure of a country’s environmental stewardship, including climate change mitigation.

Walz countered that the Biden-Harris administration has made “massive investments” in green technology—the “biggest in global history“—with the Inflation Reduction Act. The law, Walz said, has created 200,000 jobs across the country. (As CNN noted in its fact-check of the debate, some of those jobs may be promised, but not yet created; it’s difficult to come up with an exact figure of jobs sparked by the IRA.)

As for Hurricane Helene, both Vance and Walz shared their condolences with the victims of the flooding. As Vance said, “It’s an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy.”

Kamala Harris is starting to respond to calls by media outlets and voters to share a detailed economic policy plan ahead of November, including making billionaires “pay their fair share.”

Harris delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on Wednesday, along with the release of a policy book that lays out her strategy to lower costs and “create an opportunity economy” for the middle class. 

In Pittsburgh, Harris attempted the delicate balance of reaching out to undecided voters while also appealing to those already excited by her campaign as she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. 

“I believe we shouldn’t be constrained by ideology, and instead should seek practical solutions to problems,” Harris said. “Part of being pragmatic means taking good ideas from wherever they come.”

The result was a speech that didn’t do much to elaborate on policy, instead seeking to avoid language or commitments that could reinforce Republicans’ description of Harris as a “Marxist.”

But the 82-page document, “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class,” gets into some of those details, including “making the wealthiest Americans play by the same rules as the middle class.” 

To do this, Harris proposes a minimum income tax for billionaires—at an amount yet to be disclosed—and “commonsense tax reforms for corporations.” 

The policy guide cites the federal budget for fiscal year 2025—according to which Donald Trump’s 2017 tax breaks brought effective corporate tax rates to less than 10 percent—and a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nongovernmental think tank, that found that large companies didn’t pass the profits from those cuts to workers or into other investments. 

Harris states that she will raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent—notably still less than the 35 percent rate for the richest companies that was in place from 1993 until Trump’s 2017 cuts. In the document, the vice president emphasized the difference with Trump’s tax policy, which by 2020 allowed at least 55 of the largest American corporations to pay no federal income tax and to make $3.5 billion in rebates. 

Voters remain concerned about economic policy. According to a September poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College among undecided voters in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, about one in eight said Harris’ handling of the economy was their most pressing concern. What her latest economic strategy means for such voters remains to be seen. 

Kamala Harris is starting to respond to calls by media outlets and voters to share a detailed economic policy plan ahead of November, including making billionaires “pay their fair share.”

Harris delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on Wednesday, along with the release of a policy book that lays out her strategy to lower costs and “create an opportunity economy” for the middle class. 

In Pittsburgh, Harris attempted the delicate balance of reaching out to undecided voters while also appealing to those already excited by her campaign as she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. 

“I believe we shouldn’t be constrained by ideology, and instead should seek practical solutions to problems,” Harris said. “Part of being pragmatic means taking good ideas from wherever they come.”

The result was a speech that didn’t do much to elaborate on policy, instead seeking to avoid language or commitments that could reinforce Republicans’ description of Harris as a “Marxist.”

But the 82-page document, “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class,” gets into some of those details, including “making the wealthiest Americans play by the same rules as the middle class.” 

To do this, Harris proposes a minimum income tax for billionaires—at an amount yet to be disclosed—and “commonsense tax reforms for corporations.” 

The policy guide cites the federal budget for fiscal year 2025—according to which Donald Trump’s 2017 tax breaks brought effective corporate tax rates to less than 10 percent—and a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nongovernmental think tank, that found that large companies didn’t pass the profits from those cuts to workers or into other investments. 

Harris states that she will raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent—notably still less than the 35 percent rate for the richest companies that was in place from 1993 until Trump’s 2017 cuts. In the document, the vice president emphasized the difference with Trump’s tax policy, which by 2020 allowed at least 55 of the largest American corporations to pay no federal income tax and to make $3.5 billion in rebates. 

Voters remain concerned about economic policy. According to a September poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College among undecided voters in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, about one in eight said Harris’ handling of the economy was their most pressing concern. What her latest economic strategy means for such voters remains to be seen. 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A handful of wealthy polluting countries led by the US are spending billions of dollars of public money on unproven climate solutions technologies that risk further delaying the transition away from fossil fuels, new analysis suggests.

These governments have handed out almost $30 billion in subsidies for carbon capture and fossil hydrogen over the past 40 years, with hundreds of billions potentially up for grabs through new incentives, according to a new report by Oil Change International (OCI), a non-profit tracking the cost of fossil fuels.

To date, the European Union (EU) plus just four countries—the US, Norway, Canada and the Netherlands—account for 95 percent of the public handouts on carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen.

“It is instructive that industry itself invests very little in carbon capture. This whole enterprise is dependent on government handouts.”

The US has spent the most taxpayer money, some $12 billion in direct subsidies, according to OCI, with fossil fuel giants like Exxon hoping to secure billions more in future years.

The industry-preferred solutions could play a limited role in curtailing global heating, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and are being increasingly pushed by wealthy nations at the annual UN climate summit.

But CCS projects consistently fail, overspend or underperform, according to previous studies. CCS—and blue hydrogen projects—rely on fossil fuels and can lead to a myriad of environmental harms including a rise in greenhouse gases and air pollution.

“The United States and other governments have little to show for these massive investments in carbon capture—none of the demonstration projects have lived up to their initial hype,” said Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. “It is instructive that industry itself invests very little in carbon capture. This whole enterprise is dependent on government handouts.”

With time running out to curtail climate catastrophe, critics of CCS and hydrogen say public money should be focused on proven, less risky solutions such as plugging leaky oil wells, energy efficiency for buildings, transport electrification, and renewables that will speed up the green transition.

The subsidies are a “colossal waste of money,” according to Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. “It is nothing short of a travesty that funds meant to combat climate change are instead bolstering the very industries driving it.”

The US and Canada have spent more than $4 billion to subsidize the capture of CO2 that is then used to extract hard to reach oil reserves, a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR), according to the OCI report shared exclusively with the Guardian.

“The history of CCS is depressing…and no significant innovations have improved CCS’s prospects.”

However, proponents argue that more investment is needed in developing CCS and hydrogen technologies, so they can help achieve global climate goals agreed under the Paris accords. “They are all part of the toolset we need to reach net zero,” Astrid Bergmål, state secretary in Norway’s ministry of petroleum and energy, told the Guardian.

Norway has so far approved $6 billion in subsidies for CCS, an energy-intensive process powered by fossil gas—which the country is also expanding.

The new analysis is based on two OCI databases: one tracking public awards distributed to companies from 1984 to 2024 for carbon capture and fossil-based hydrogen research and development, as well as grants for pilot and commercial projects. The other tracks government policies announced since 2020 in the US, Canada, Australia, the EU and countries in Europe that support grants, loans, tax credits, below market insurance plans and other financial incentives.

“Governments are pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into technologies that have consistently failed to deliver on their promises…allowing fossil fuel companies to continue business,” said Lorne Stockman, research director at OCI.

Subsidies from the US, the world’s biggest oil and gas producer where an estimated three-quarters of the CO2 currently captured is used for EOR, could top $100 billion, according to OCI analysis.

This is thanks to new policies from the Biden administration, particularly the landmark climate and infrastructure legislation—the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—which after intense industry lobbying expanded tax benefits for both CCS and hydrogen with few checks and balances.

Yet, experts warn that CCS technology is challenging and unlikely to deliver. “The history of CCS is depressing…and no significant innovations have improved CCS’s prospects,” said Charles Harvey, professor of environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-founded the first private CCS startup 15 years ago.

“Nonetheless, we are again wasting money on CCS that could be used instead to effectively cut emissions, distracting ourselves from the necessity of moving away from fossil fuels, and perpetuating a polluting industry whose local harms often fall on minority and economically disadvantaged communities.”

“I don’t think we should be directly subsidizing CCS ever…but we should directly subsidize clean things that are useful to people.”

Hydrogen, which is currently mostly used for refining oil, fertilizers, and processing metals and foods, could be green if companies chose to use water—not gas or coal—as the raw material, and power the process with renewables not fossil fuel. Yet globally, governments have spent $4.2 billion on projects that aim to produce blue hydrogen from fossil fuels using CCS.

The industry claims to have the technology to capture 90 percent to 95 percent of CO₂, but in reality, it’s closer to 12 percent when every stage of the energy-intensive process is evaluated, according to peer-reviewed research by scientists at Cornell University. “The greenhouse gas footprint for this hydrogen is actually greater than if we were to simply burn natural gas for the energy,” said Howarth, a co-author of the groundbreaking study.

Canada is the second largest funder of blue hydrogen after the US with $1.2 billion spent to date, mostly at an oil refinery in Alberta where hydrogen is used for upgrading dirty tar sands crude. The net CO2 capture rate from the plant is less than 70 percent.

The Canadian and US government’s did not respond to requests to comment.

Globally, governments hand over between $500 billion and $1 trillion in direct fossil fuel subsidies annually, though in 2022 the true figure was closer to $7 trillion—when the climate, environmental and health costs were taken into account, according to the IMF. But more than $1 trillion is now also spent supporting clean energy, according to International Energy Agency (IEA) trackers, so the amount allocated to CCS and hydrogen is relatively small.

Still, after the hottest year ever recorded—and as island nations and other developing countries face an existential threat from sea level rise, desertification, drought, extreme heat, wildfires and floods—only $700 million was pledged by governments to the new loss and damage fund at Cop28—far short of the estimated $400 billion needed annually. The financial shortfall for climate adaptation runs into hundreds of billions—and is rising.

“Companies are designed to make profits, they only consider what is priced, so subsidies should come with conditions.”

Singh, director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said: “While investing billions in technologies that further entrench fossil fuel use, developed countries simultaneously neglect their moral and financial responsibilities to fund crucial efforts in vulnerable communities…that’s the grim irony.”

While the decades-long reputation of CCS has largely been one of “underperformance” and “unmet expectations”, according to the IEA in 2023, many experts agree that it could play a role in reducing emissions in polluting industries such as cement, steel and chemicals.

But according to Chris Bataille, an IPCC expert on decarbonizing heavy industry, subsidies must come with conditions and target products, not processes, in order to achieve a just and economically sound green transition.

“I don’t think we should be directly subsidizing CCS ever…but we should directly subsidize clean things that are useful to people. Staggered subsidies for clean iron which is key to making steel, clean ammonia which is key for fertilizers and clean clinker for cement, would channel the market—which is the whole idea of government regulation.

“Companies are designed to make profits, they only consider what is priced, so subsidies should come with conditions, including mandatory net-zero transformation plans,” added Batallie, who is also adjunct research fellow at the Columbia University center for global energy policy.

At Cop28 in Dubai, the Netherlands launched a fossil fuel subsidy phase-out coalition amid growing public pressure to cut its financial support for oil and gas, which is currently estimated to be at least $43 billion a year.

The government has approved $2.6 billion for subsidies requested in 2020, with the vast majority allocated to the Porthos project—that will incentivize some oil majors and chemical companies at the Port of Rotterdam to store captured CO₂ in an empty North Sea offshore gas field. (The figure doesn’t include subsidies approved in 2022 or requested in 2023.)

A spokesperson from the Dutch climate ministry said that the final amount paid out was expected to be substantially lower as it depends on the market price of carbon and project costs, and that these fossil fuel-powered technologies were key to the country’s green transition.

“This money should be used to get away from fossil fuels and making industrial processes green, rather than these false solutions.”

“In the Netherlands, safeguards have been built in for subsidies for CCS, so that these do not come at the cost of alternative, clean energy technologies. Dutch policy aims at minimizing the future role of fossil fuels in the energy system and has set conditions and a time horizon for fossil CCS support.”

Climate advocates say the phase-out is too slow.

“This money should be used to get away from fossil fuels and making industrial processes green, rather than these false solutions that are a cash cow for industry—in part because governments take over the risks from market fluctuations in the price of carbon,” said Maarten de Zeeuw, a climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Netherlands.

Norway’s first full-scale heavily subsidized CCS project was attached to the Mongstad oil refinery and described in 2007 by then prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, as the country’s “moon landing.” The project failed, in part due to rising costs, though it did spawn a CCS test facility the government said is “instrumental in technology development.”

The country’s current flagship CCS project, the Longship, involves capturing CO₂ from waste incineration and cement production that will be shipped and stored offshore. Costs here have also been rising—though, according to state secretary Bergmål, rising inflation and supply chain instabilities are also affecting other climate technologies.

OCI claims that Norway is expanding CCS to justify more oil and gas expansion for use producing blue hydrogen for export to Europe—where it is enjoying renewed interest despite evidence that its viability as an alternative fuel will be limited.

Bergmål said: “Managing CO₂ from hard-to-abate industries has nothing to do with prolonged fossil fuel extraction. On the contrary, it is an urgently needed climate mitigation measure. One of the key goals of Longship is to provide learning and reduce costs for future projects…What matters is to produce enough volumes of hydrogen, with low to zero emissions, and at the lowest possible cost.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this year, the e-commerce corporation Amazon secured approval to open two new data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million venture is the company’s first foray into locating its data facilities, which guzzle massive amounts of electricity and water in order to power cloud computing services and online programs, in Latin America—and in one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion.

This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to make its cloud computing operations “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company’s web services division will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up.

The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similar water pledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power.

One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides.

Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance.

While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities. Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.

The powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than try to keep these rooms cool with traditional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as a coolant, running it past the servers to chill them out. The centers also need huge amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for around 3 percent of US power demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. On top of that, the coal, gas, and nuclear power plants that produce that electricity themselves consume even larger quantities of water to stay cool.

Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability for Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers in order to save on energy-intensive air conditioning units, thus reducing its reliance on fossil fuels. 

“Using water for cooling in most places really reduces the amount of energy that we use, and so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide to not use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.”

In order to save on energy costs, the company’s data centers have to evaporate millions of gallons of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry consumes, but the ballpark estimates are substantial. One 2021 study found that US data centers consumed around 415,000 acre-feet of water in 2018, even before the artificial-intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply around a million average homes annually, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark. 

In Pennsylvania, one Amazon data center consumes about 20 percent of the electricity capacity of the nuclear power plant nearby.

It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom, since AI programs such as ChatGPT require massive amounts of server real estate. Tech companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the last few years alone, and they are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. The on-site water consumption at any one of these companies’ data centers could now rival that of a major beverage company such as PepsiCo. 

Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on its absolute water consumption; Hewes told Grist the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water usage is likely lower than some of its competitors—in part because the company has built most of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require far less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on when temperatures get too high. The company pegs its water usage at around 10 percent of the industry average, and in temperate locations such as Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool down data centers except during peak summer temperatures. 

Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in temperate regions that have plenty of water, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, as well as the need to be close to major customers. Recent studies have found that data center water consumption in the US is “skewed toward water stressed subbasins” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has clustered much of its business farther east, especially in Virginia, which boasts cheap power and financial incentives for tech firms.

“A lot of the locations are driven by customer needs, but also by [prices for] real estate and power,” said Hewes. “Some big portions of our data center footprint are in places that aren’t super hot, that aren’t in super water stressed regions. Virginia, Ohio—they get hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year where we don’t need to use water for cooling.” Even so, the company’s expansion in Virginia is already causing concerns over water availability.

To mitigate its impacts in such basins, the company also funds dozens of conservation and recharge projects like the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and it has also helped restore the rivers that supply water-stressed cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, it has worked to install cover crop farmland that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways.

The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting each gallon recharged against a gallon it consumes at its data centers. Amazon said in its most recent sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water positive.” In other words, it has funded projects that recharge or conserve a little over 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons of water it uses. 

But despite all this, the company’s water stewardship goal doesn’t include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This consumption can be as much as three to 10 times as large as the on-site water consumption at a data center, according to Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water usage. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses around 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing.”

“They say they’re using very little water, but there’s a big water evaporation happening just nearby, and that’s for powering their data center,” he said.

Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water usage by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage down” both water and energy needs through a separate goal of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers need round-the-clock power, which means intermittently available renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far.

Amazon isn’t the only company dealing with this problem. CyrusOne, another major data center firm, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used more than eight times as much water to source power as it did on-site at its data centers. “As long as we are reliant on grid electricity that includes thermoelectric sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for the consumption of large amounts of water in the production of that electricity,” the report said.

As for replenishment projects like the one in Chile, they too will only go part of the way toward reducing the impact of the data center explosion. Even if Amazon’s cloud operations are “water positive” on a global scale, with projects in many of the same basins where it owns data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t still compromise water access in specific watersheds. The company’s data centers and their power plants may still withdraw more water than the company replenishes in a given area, and replenishment projects in other aquifers around the world won’t address the physical consequences of that specific overdraft.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not really reducing the actual consumption,” Ren said. “It masks out a lot of real problems, because water is a really regional issue.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this year, the e-commerce corporation Amazon secured approval to open two new data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million venture is the company’s first foray into locating its data facilities, which guzzle massive amounts of electricity and water in order to power cloud computing services and online programs, in Latin America—and in one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion.

This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to make its cloud computing operations “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company’s web services division will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up.

The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similar water pledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power.

One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides.

Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance.

While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities. Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.

The powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than try to keep these rooms cool with traditional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as a coolant, running it past the servers to chill them out. The centers also need huge amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for around 3 percent of US power demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. On top of that, the coal, gas, and nuclear power plants that produce that electricity themselves consume even larger quantities of water to stay cool.

Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability for Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers in order to save on energy-intensive air conditioning units, thus reducing its reliance on fossil fuels. 

“Using water for cooling in most places really reduces the amount of energy that we use, and so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide to not use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.”

In order to save on energy costs, the company’s data centers have to evaporate millions of gallons of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry consumes, but the ballpark estimates are substantial. One 2021 study found that US data centers consumed around 415,000 acre-feet of water in 2018, even before the artificial-intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply around a million average homes annually, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark. 

In Pennsylvania, one Amazon data center consumes about 20 percent of the electricity capacity of the nuclear power plant nearby.

It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom, since AI programs such as ChatGPT require massive amounts of server real estate. Tech companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the last few years alone, and they are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. The on-site water consumption at any one of these companies’ data centers could now rival that of a major beverage company such as PepsiCo. 

Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on its absolute water consumption; Hewes told Grist the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water usage is likely lower than some of its competitors—in part because the company has built most of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require far less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on when temperatures get too high. The company pegs its water usage at around 10 percent of the industry average, and in temperate locations such as Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool down data centers except during peak summer temperatures. 

Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in temperate regions that have plenty of water, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, as well as the need to be close to major customers. Recent studies have found that data center water consumption in the US is “skewed toward water stressed subbasins” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has clustered much of its business farther east, especially in Virginia, which boasts cheap power and financial incentives for tech firms.

“A lot of the locations are driven by customer needs, but also by [prices for] real estate and power,” said Hewes. “Some big portions of our data center footprint are in places that aren’t super hot, that aren’t in super water stressed regions. Virginia, Ohio—they get hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year where we don’t need to use water for cooling.” Even so, the company’s expansion in Virginia is already causing concerns over water availability.

To mitigate its impacts in such basins, the company also funds dozens of conservation and recharge projects like the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and it has also helped restore the rivers that supply water-stressed cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, it has worked to install cover crop farmland that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways.

The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting each gallon recharged against a gallon it consumes at its data centers. Amazon said in its most recent sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water positive.” In other words, it has funded projects that recharge or conserve a little over 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons of water it uses. 

But despite all this, the company’s water stewardship goal doesn’t include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This consumption can be as much as three to 10 times as large as the on-site water consumption at a data center, according to Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water usage. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses around 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing.”

“They say they’re using very little water, but there’s a big water evaporation happening just nearby, and that’s for powering their data center,” he said.

Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water usage by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage down” both water and energy needs through a separate goal of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers need round-the-clock power, which means intermittently available renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far.

Amazon isn’t the only company dealing with this problem. CyrusOne, another major data center firm, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used more than eight times as much water to source power as it did on-site at its data centers. “As long as we are reliant on grid electricity that includes thermoelectric sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for the consumption of large amounts of water in the production of that electricity,” the report said.

As for replenishment projects like the one in Chile, they too will only go part of the way toward reducing the impact of the data center explosion. Even if Amazon’s cloud operations are “water positive” on a global scale, with projects in many of the same basins where it owns data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t still compromise water access in specific watersheds. The company’s data centers and their power plants may still withdraw more water than the company replenishes in a given area, and replenishment projects in other aquifers around the world won’t address the physical consequences of that specific overdraft.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not really reducing the actual consumption,” Ren said. “It masks out a lot of real problems, because water is a really regional issue.”

It’s fair to say that Michelle Obama stole the show at the Democratic Convention on Tuesday. (Husband Barack was on point in noting how hard an act she was to follow.) And to a journalist like me who covers wealth and inequality, one line in particular stood out. Listen:

Michelle Obama: She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. pic.twitter.com/ywBjdwZl3E

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 21, 2024

The affirmative action of generational wealth. That’s a smart reframing of a longtime conservative hobby horse.

Republican politicians and right-wing media have regularly attacked programs designed to counter the generational impacts of government-sanctioned discrimination in housing, education, and veterans benefits. Now they’re targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—see JD Vance’s recently introduced “Dismantle DEI Act“—and trying to brand Kamala Harris a “DEI hire.” That’s a laughable assertion. (New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen argues that the moniker applies more aptly to Vance.)

But the critics of DEI and affirmative action want to have their cake and eat it too. For example, if you, like our Supreme Court, think the use of race as a factor in college admissions should be illegal, that’s your prerogative. But I hope you are similarly inclined to outlaw the practice of elite colleges giving an admissions boost to children of alumni and to students (like Jared Kushner) whose parents are major donors. Because isn’t that, too, a kind of affirmative action?

In just a handful of words, Michelle Obama managed to convey a simple truth, says Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that focuses on the racial wealth-and-opportunity gap: “It is not those asking to break up concentrated wealth and opportunity that are asking for an unfair advantage, but rather those who are hoarding concentrated wealth.”

“Most of us,” as Obama noted, “will never benefit” from generational wealth. And that’s true of everyone, but even truer when you are Black or Hispanic. In the Federal Reserve Board’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF)*, about 47 percent of white respondents said they’d either received an inheritance or expected to receive one. Their median inheritance expected was $195,500 (in 2019 dollars).

Only 16 percent of Black respondents had received or expected an inheritance—and their median expectation was about half the white figure. Less than 12 percent of Hispanic respondents had received or expected an inheritance.

The disparities are similar when you look at federally subsidized retirement savings, which, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), will cost US taxpayers a whopping $1.9 trillion from 2020-2024. Most of that cash goes to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, who tend to be, yep, pretty white.

In 2021, the JCT identified 8,000 Americans with Individual Retirement Account (IRA) balances in excess of $5 million who were still getting tax breaks for their annual contributions—which is “shocking but not surprising,” noted Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden. Peter Thiel, ProPublica reported, even managed, using questionable tactics, to amass a Roth IRA worth $5 billion.

Affirmative action for the rich.

According to the latest (2022) SCF, only 35 percent of Black families and less than 28 percent of Hispanic households even had a retirement account, compared with 62 percent of white families. The accounts of those white families were worth over $380,000 on average, more than triple the Black and Hispanic savings—and again, these numbers don’t account for the fact that a large majority of Black and Hispanic households have no private retirement accounts at all.

Then there’s land ownership—see “40 Acres and a Lie,” our acclaimed multimedia package exploring how the few Black families who received land reparations after the Civil War then had their acres cruelly rescinded a year and a half later. And consider these passages on the Homestead Acts, from a chapter of my 2021 book, Jackpot, titled “Thriving While Black.”

The two acts, passed during and after the Civil War, granted 160-acre parcels of public land—a foundation for generational wealth—to families willing to stake out the plots and make improvements. But the timing and circumstances made it extraordinarily difficult for Black Americans to participate:

It was a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza for white fortune-seekers. “The acquisition of property was the key to moving upward from a low to a higher stratum,” wrote author Everett Dick. “The property holder could vote and hold office, but the man with no property was practically on the same political level as the indentured servant or slave.” […]

Between the two acts, about 270 million acres of farmland—14 percent of the total landmass of the continental United States—was granted to 1.6 million white families, but only 4,000 to 5,000 Black families. [University of Michigan professor Trina] Shanks calculates that more than 48 million living Americans are direct descendants of those Homestead Act beneficiaries. Which means there’s a greater than one-in-four chance your forebears benefited directly from the biggest public-to-private wealth transfer in American history—if you’re white, that is. 

Affirmative action for the rich.

Obama hit the nail on the head. Asante-Muhammad says he was struck by her simple acknowledgement “that affirmative action for the privileged happens,” though “I wish there could have been a follow up to re-emphasize why programmatic affirmative action to advance more equal opportunity is necessary.”

But “it felt good,” he adds, “to hear a political speech that connects so personally with my political ideals, and to the challenges of the racial wealth divide and the action and ideals needed to bridge it.” 

*I used 2019 numbers here because the 2022 inheritance data was only available in raw form.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

More than half of the world’s population lives under an energy system that its advocates say can tackle fuel poverty, improve crumbling housing stock, and reduce energy demand. And to cap it off—when properly designed—it would not cost the taxpayer anything.

The so-called rising block tariff or national energy guarantee system (NEG) are almost unknown in Europe but operate successfully in many other countries and regions—from Japan, South Korea, and China, to Bangladesh, India, and California.

The idea is simple: The first block of energy, which is calculated to meet essential needs from heating to cooking and lighting, is either given at a reduced rate or free. The cost per unit then rises in additional blocks, meaning wealthier homes with excessive or nonessential consumption pay more.

According to its champions, the benefits that flow from this system are numerous: Fuel poverty is reduced or eradicated with those on the lowest incomes getting affordable energy to cover the essentials, from heating to cooking and light. Excessive consumption, overwhelmingly linked to wealthier households, is charged at a higher rate, subsidizing the cheaper tariff. And everyone is incentivized to reduce consumption and improve their homes through insulation, smart technology, and other energy efficiency measures in an effort to stay within the cheapest block.

A further advantage, its backers say, is that the lowest tariff could be directly linked to the rollout of renewable energy. In this scenario cheap wind and solar power would determine the size of the lowest tariff, which would then be split between all consumers, giving the public a direct stake in the transition to a low-carbon energy system.

Experts say the current energy pricing system in Europe and the UK needs an urgent overhaul, after the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine drove tens of millions of people into fuel poverty.

The crisis forced countries across Europe to pump billions of pounds into the energy markets. In the UK alone the government introduced an energy price guarantee costing about $25 billion—thought to be the most expensive energy policy in the country’s history.

Michael Pollitt, an energy expert professor from Cambridge university, said: “We had one of the most expensive energy policies ever implemented. But this cap applied to all consumption, which was crazy, because you were subsidizing people with swimming pools whereas, actually, we could have done something more sophisticated and targeted and cheaper, which has all these other benefits.”

“If we get this right the transition to renewables, energy efficiency, is the answer to a lot of problems people are experiencing.”

Governments in the UK and across Europe are now looking at wholesale reform of the energy market to reduce exposure to the international fossil fuel fluctuations, encourage a reduction in demand and rally support for renewable energy.

Enter the rising block tariff—also known as the increasing block tariff or the national energy guarantee. According to Alex Chapman, a senior economist at the thinktank the New Economics Foundation, who recently published a paper on the potential for a National Energy Guarantee scheme, there is growing interest in the idea in the UK and across Europe. “Over the next few years large amounts of cheap, new renewable energy will be connected to the grid, in the UK that is particularly thanks to the new government’s plans for onshore-wind and solar.”

He argues that rather than seeing this energy disappear into the mix of national consumption, it should be directed into a new rising block tariff. “An initial block of ultra-cheap energy should be offered to every household in the country as a dividend on our national mission to net zero,” he adds.

However, some assessments of the system, which is widely in use for water and energy utilities around the world, have been less sure of its benefits. A World Bank paper that looked at different kinds of water tariffs argued that “they are a blunt instrument at best and at worst can produce perverse outcomes,” citing large poor families that use more water and end up paying the higher rates.

The report concluded that a “(simple) uniform volumetric tariff where water provision is charged at its full cost could improve social welfare by removing price distortions and would be easier for households to understand.”

Jörg Mühlenhoff, the head of the European energy transition program at the German thinktank the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, said there was a growing interest in a radical reform of the energy market in the EU. He backed some sort of rising tariff reform but said the “devil would be in the detail.”

“We need to think carefully about how you define the right quantity of electricity for the lowest block, what is a household, is it based on the number of adults, do you take health vulnerabilities into account—there is a lot still to work out.”

He said the ideal model would have a reduced cost block to cover the essentials, with the higher rates linked to fluctuating market rates and energy generation to incentivize not just energy efficiency but also to steer consumers away from using electricity at times of high demand or when renewable generation is low.

“We need to have a system that as well as tackling the cost of living crisis enables people to tap into the potential of renewables, meaning they have access to enough electricity for the essentials but that they also know that when there is a lot of wind, a lot of sun, there will be lower wholesale market prices, so that is the time to switch on your electric devices, your electric vehicle, your electric heat pump etc,” he says.

Mühlenhoff said there could be wider benefits to a reformed energy system in the context of the rise of populist parties across the EU and in the UK.

He says: “You really need to ensure that the benefits of the switch to renewables come to households and that people can see it on their bill. Otherwise, as we saw during the European election campaign, the far right, the populists will pick it up and campaign against the energy transition, when in reality if we get this right the transition to renewables, energy efficiency, is the answer to a lot of problems people are experiencing.”

In the UK Chapman said the reform of the energy markets is also on the cards under the new Labour government. “Labour realize that the offer of a green dividend is paramount if they are to get the public behind their clean power mission. The NEG offers that and what’s more, it can do so in a cost-neutral way, not upsetting the chancellor in the process,” he says.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

More than half of the world’s population lives under an energy system that its advocates say can tackle fuel poverty, improve crumbling housing stock, and reduce energy demand. And to cap it off—when properly designed—it would not cost the taxpayer anything.

The so-called rising block tariff or national energy guarantee system (NEG) are almost unknown in Europe but operate successfully in many other countries and regions—from Japan, South Korea, and China, to Bangladesh, India, and California.

The idea is simple: The first block of energy, which is calculated to meet essential needs from heating to cooking and lighting, is either given at a reduced rate or free. The cost per unit then rises in additional blocks, meaning wealthier homes with excessive or nonessential consumption pay more.

According to its champions, the benefits that flow from this system are numerous: Fuel poverty is reduced or eradicated with those on the lowest incomes getting affordable energy to cover the essentials, from heating to cooking and light. Excessive consumption, overwhelmingly linked to wealthier households, is charged at a higher rate, subsidizing the cheaper tariff. And everyone is incentivized to reduce consumption and improve their homes through insulation, smart technology, and other energy efficiency measures in an effort to stay within the cheapest block.

A further advantage, its backers say, is that the lowest tariff could be directly linked to the rollout of renewable energy. In this scenario cheap wind and solar power would determine the size of the lowest tariff, which would then be split between all consumers, giving the public a direct stake in the transition to a low-carbon energy system.

Experts say the current energy pricing system in Europe and the UK needs an urgent overhaul, after the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine drove tens of millions of people into fuel poverty.

The crisis forced countries across Europe to pump billions of pounds into the energy markets. In the UK alone the government introduced an energy price guarantee costing about $25 billion—thought to be the most expensive energy policy in the country’s history.

Michael Pollitt, an energy expert professor from Cambridge university, said: “We had one of the most expensive energy policies ever implemented. But this cap applied to all consumption, which was crazy, because you were subsidizing people with swimming pools whereas, actually, we could have done something more sophisticated and targeted and cheaper, which has all these other benefits.”

“If we get this right the transition to renewables, energy efficiency, is the answer to a lot of problems people are experiencing.”

Governments in the UK and across Europe are now looking at wholesale reform of the energy market to reduce exposure to the international fossil fuel fluctuations, encourage a reduction in demand and rally support for renewable energy.

Enter the rising block tariff—also known as the increasing block tariff or the national energy guarantee. According to Alex Chapman, a senior economist at the thinktank the New Economics Foundation, who recently published a paper on the potential for a National Energy Guarantee scheme, there is growing interest in the idea in the UK and across Europe. “Over the next few years large amounts of cheap, new renewable energy will be connected to the grid, in the UK that is particularly thanks to the new government’s plans for onshore-wind and solar.”

He argues that rather than seeing this energy disappear into the mix of national consumption, it should be directed into a new rising block tariff. “An initial block of ultra-cheap energy should be offered to every household in the country as a dividend on our national mission to net zero,” he adds.

However, some assessments of the system, which is widely in use for water and energy utilities around the world, have been less sure of its benefits. A World Bank paper that looked at different kinds of water tariffs argued that “they are a blunt instrument at best and at worst can produce perverse outcomes,” citing large poor families that use more water and end up paying the higher rates.

The report concluded that a “(simple) uniform volumetric tariff where water provision is charged at its full cost could improve social welfare by removing price distortions and would be easier for households to understand.”

Jörg Mühlenhoff, the head of the European energy transition program at the German thinktank the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, said there was a growing interest in a radical reform of the energy market in the EU. He backed some sort of rising tariff reform but said the “devil would be in the detail.”

“We need to think carefully about how you define the right quantity of electricity for the lowest block, what is a household, is it based on the number of adults, do you take health vulnerabilities into account—there is a lot still to work out.”

He said the ideal model would have a reduced cost block to cover the essentials, with the higher rates linked to fluctuating market rates and energy generation to incentivize not just energy efficiency but also to steer consumers away from using electricity at times of high demand or when renewable generation is low.

“We need to have a system that as well as tackling the cost of living crisis enables people to tap into the potential of renewables, meaning they have access to enough electricity for the essentials but that they also know that when there is a lot of wind, a lot of sun, there will be lower wholesale market prices, so that is the time to switch on your electric devices, your electric vehicle, your electric heat pump etc,” he says.

Mühlenhoff said there could be wider benefits to a reformed energy system in the context of the rise of populist parties across the EU and in the UK.

He says: “You really need to ensure that the benefits of the switch to renewables come to households and that people can see it on their bill. Otherwise, as we saw during the European election campaign, the far right, the populists will pick it up and campaign against the energy transition, when in reality if we get this right the transition to renewables, energy efficiency, is the answer to a lot of problems people are experiencing.”

In the UK Chapman said the reform of the energy markets is also on the cards under the new Labour government. “Labour realize that the offer of a green dividend is paramount if they are to get the public behind their clean power mission. The NEG offers that and what’s more, it can do so in a cost-neutral way, not upsetting the chancellor in the process,” he says.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Proponents of the voluntary carbon market say it’s a mechanism not only to advance sustainability goals, but also to funnel much-needed cash to some of the world’s poorest countries. 

The idea is that companies seeking to “offset” their climate footprint will help pay for the development of projects that sequester or prevent greenhouse gas emissions—endeavors like planting trees to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, or protecting forests that were ostensibly in danger of being chopped down. These projects, which generate exchangeable “credits” representing 1 metric ton of greenhouse gas emissions each, come with the promise of jobs for local residents, and project developers often pledge to devote part of their revenue to public infrastructure like schools.

In Africa, the voluntary carbon market is “a powerful means to address climate change and uplift communities,” according to one nonprofit that writes nonbinding standards for the sector.

It’s increasingly unclear, however, whether that narrative holds up to scrutiny. A series of reports published since last November by the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch, or CMW, has highlighted a near-total lack of published research on how much money flowing into the carbon market actually winds up supporting climate mitigation projects or reaching local communities. One report called attention to a lack of fair and transparent benefit-sharing agreements, clauses in projects’ design documents that detail how they will distribute revenue and nonmonetary benefits to people they affect. 

Most recently, an analysis published by the group last week found that, while most carbon credit projects are located in poor countries, they are largely controlled by companies based in wealthier North American and European countries. The authors said there is “no evidence” that the voluntary carbon market, or VCM, brings economic benefits to communities where projects are based, a point that human rights and environmental groups have long been making.

“Rich countries are passing the burden of climate action from rich to the poorest countries.”

“When it comes to knowing if the VCM is actually working as a tool to channel finance from the Global North to the Global South, there’s no information there,” said Inigo Wyburd, a policy expert for Carbon Market Watch and the author of the newest report. “It raises serious questions as to, well, are these communities really benefiting?”

The most recent report looks at two samples of carbon credit projects: one composed of 30 from around the world, and another of 39 projects just in Africa. Only 13 percent of the projects in the global sample are located in countries with the highest level of “human development,” based on a UN metric encompassing education, health, and living standards. But nearly 60 percent of the companies that own, develop, monitor, and vet the projects are based in the world’s most developed countries.

The numbers are even more pronounced for the African sample, which shows that less than 10 percent of projects are based in countries with the highest UN development index. Sixty-two percent of all the projects’ developers and 63 percent of their owners are located in the most highly developed countries outside of Africa. 

According to Wyburd, this doesn’t necessarily mean that companies based in rich countries aren’t directing revenue to local communities. In a way, it makes sense that there would be more companies from wealthy countries participating in carbon credit projects, since they have better access to capital and technology. But paired with the lack of transparency on financial flows, the geographical disparity is concerning.

“As many companies are not based in the same region where their project is carried out, any money that is not directly assigned to project implementation is potentially diverted to become profit for actors located in the Global North,” the report says. Notably, the analysis found that at least 10 projects across both samples were missing documentation on things like monitoring and verification.

The CMW paper only hints at what African rights and environmental groups have been saying much more forcefully. Last year, a coalition of organizations across the continent published a scathing critique of the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative, an effort to develop the continent’s voluntary and government-run carbon markets and bring it $6 billion in annual revenue by 2050. 

While the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative has promised to share revenue equitably and transparently with local communities, the environmental groups called the program “a new form of colonialism,” saying it would exacerbate climate change and obstruct “the attainment of genuine African development pathways.” More broadly, they criticized all carbon credit projects, which they said would commodify Africa’s land and other resources in order to benefit foreign corporations.

“Rich countries are passing the burden of climate action from rich to the poorest countries,” the authors wrote, “in return for which African countries are asked to package up projects that fit the demands of the Northern companies to deliver tons of carbon.”

This problem has already played out across Africa, Asia, and South America, where communities have repeatedly reported being fleeced by companies seeking to generate carbon credits. In one instance, the Switzerland-based company South Pole and Carbon Green Investments—a firm founded by a wealthy Zimbabwean businessman to receive proceeds from South Pole—sought to generate credits by ostensibly preventing deforestation around Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe. Like other projects, part of its allure was that it would also raise money for local communities.

But an investigation from the news site Follow the Money, the Germany newspaper Die Zeit, and the Swiss broadcaster SRF could only account for a tiny fraction of the funds that were promised to support schools, health clinics, and vegetable gardens. Dozens of village chiefs, local politicians, and villagers told the outlets they had doubts about the project; some said there was no money reaching them.

Farai Maguwu, director of a Zimbabwean research and advocacy organization called the Centre for Natural Resource Governance—which was not one of the groups involved with the critique of the Africa Carbon Market Initiative—told Grist in an interview last year that the Kariba project developers had made the local community out to be “ignorant people” who would “destroy their environment” if not for the carbon credits. He said projects like Kariba were “shortchanging” locals: “using them to generate millions of dollars which are never plowed back into those communities.”

“It’s quite irritating when they present these self-serving projects as an opportunity for Africa,” he added.

South Pole told Grist it could not comment on “the actions of other organizations,” and that it had only acted as a “consultant” to the Kariba project; the responsibility for distributing funds to stakeholders “was never with South Pole.” The company said in a press release last year that the Follow the Money investigation had been published “out of context,” and that the company’s intention has always been to “do well as a business by doing good, including creating lasting impact in some of the world’s poorest places.” Several months later, the company cut ties with the Kariba project, though it said it “continues to believe in the significance” of the project for local communities.

The Africa Carbon Markets Initiative did not respond to Grist’s request for comment, and Carbon Green Investments could not be reached.

Meanwhile, carbon credit activity on the continent seems to be growing: Based on Carbon Market Watch’s analysis of publicly available data, 841 projects based in Africa issued 17 percent of global carbon credits between 2020 and 2024, up from 433 projects issuing 7 percent of credits between 2010 and 2020. 

Wyburd, with Carbon Market Watch, said he isn’t against carbon credits necessarily. “I think there are good projects,” he said. “I think there are developers and implementers trying to make a real difference. But it’s difficult to differentiate them from the bad, and that is inherently because of this lack of transparency.” 

Although the voluntary carbon market is not formally regulated, Wyburd called for stronger disclosure requirements from bodies like the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, a nonprofit governance body that aims to provide oversight for the sector. His report recommended that companies make project-level financial reports publicly available, and that standards bodies conduct regular audits to make sure documents are accurate and up to date.

Some environmental groups are less optimistic. In its publication last year, the coalition of African environmental groups asked African governments to “withdraw from and take no further interest” in any carbon market mechanisms. To fund sustainable development, they said African nations should: create a “polluters pay fund” that charges companies per ton of carbon they emit, demand that wealthy countries send more climate finance and cancel “odious debts,” and redirect fossil fuel subsidies toward renewable energy.