Rishika Pardikar is a climate change and wildlife reporter based in India.
Wealthy countries don’t want to pay climate reparations, but they’re going to have to. COP27 officials are currently grappling with who will pay for climate-related catastrophe and how. They could look to postwar Germany for a model.
US and EU officials recently suggested targeting livestock and agriculture in Asia and Africa to reduce methane emissions. Far more emissions, however, come from oil and gas production in the US — but reducing them requires taking on fossil fuel companies.
Fossil fuel companies are suing countries that enact climate change policies, arguing that they are illegally cutting into their profits — and they’re winning 72 percent of the time. Now governments risk being sued for billions when enacting climate policies.
At COP26, the US and its rich allies refused to consider how to pay for the damage their emissions are wreaking on developing nations.
By refusing to define “climate finance,” the United States and other wealthy nations are avoiding their responsibilities to fight climate change and forcing poorer nations into never-ending debt traps.
California’s emissions reduction program is going up in smoke because regulators severely underestimated the impact of climate change–fueled wildfires.
The fossil fuel industry is trying to rebrand, using terms like “unabated coal” and “responsibly sourced gas” in an attempt to greenwash their commitment to continue burning fossil fuels.
In recent weeks, Instagram and Facebook have censored posts focused on COVID-19 in India and protests in Colombia and Palestine — with little explanation as to why.
President Joe Biden has announced a new emissions reduction plan. It doesn’t do nearly enough to address the US’s climate impacts on the rest of the world.