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A new ruling from the International Court of Justice means that, at least in theory, the U.S. could be held liable for trashing climate regulations—and made to pay up.

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In a packed court thousands of kilometres from home, Cynthia Houniuhi saw years of work come to fruition with the landmark ICJ opinion on climate harm

A joint statement promised new efforts to cut emissions at a time when China is positioning itself as the world’s one-stop shop for clean energy technologies.

Trump’s bitter dislike of renewable energy first erupted publicly 14 years ago in a seemingly trivial spat over wind turbines visible from his Scottish golf course. As Trump returns to Scotland this week, though, he is using the US presidency to squash clean power, with major ramifications for the climate crisis and America’s place in the world.

Although Trump failed in his legal attempt to halt the Scottish wind farm, an enduring scorn towards renewables appears to have been seeded that now has global consequences.

As president, Trump has declared wind and solar projects unwelcome in the US, barring them from federal lands and signing a vast spending bill that demolishes support for a nascent industry that held the promise of revamping the American economy while cutting dangerous planet-heating pollution.

What do you think is missing from climate communications today?

The oil industry and its fellow travelers, aiming to preserve the economic supremacy of carbon energy, have poured more than a billion dollars into erecting a powerful infrastructure of misinformation. They have built a false climate narrative to discredit the scientific consensus, abetted by the parallel ascension of Fox News.

The industry’s communications playbook, developed to undermine environmental concern, has like Frankenstein escaped from the lab and infected public discourse in almost every sphere. Their techniques of kneecapping facts have proven so effective that agnotology has become a subject of growing academic attention—agnotology being the study of the deliberate creation of ignorance.

American journalism at the local level especially has probably never been in such a weakened condition. It remains a dire national emergency. Yet this emergency is largely being treated as a business story, a form of “creative destruction,” a trend to adapt to rather than the existential threat to democracy that it is, even by many of those who are trying to rescue it.

The public square has acquiesced to the notion of a “post-fact world” far too easily and thoughtlessly, without a fight. Yet facts govern our lives, and will continue to do so, even if we lose the ability to recognize them.

In the case of climate change, what we refuse to know is already killing us. What’s missing from climate communications? Maybe that’s not the right question. Maybe the right question is how to flood the zone with truth.

A recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California found additionally that 60% were very concerned, a remarkable increase from 47% last year

Forests play a major role pulling planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. As the world heats up, some forests are becoming emitters in their own right.

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