BRUSSELS — The EU’s centrist powers need to move to the right to reflect the new political reality, according to Manfred Weber, the leader of the European People’s Party. The EPP caused uproar in Brussels last year when it voted alongside the far right rather than with its traditional allies, the socialists and liberals. Weber’s remarks are the strongest signal yet that he wants to repair bridges with the other two parties that have ruled the EU for decades. However, he made clear that those same allies must be willing to adapt, in an exclusive interview with POLITICO, reflecting on 2025 and looking forward to 2026. The S&D and Renew were furious at the perceived betrayal, saying the EPP had gone too far by voting with the far right and smashed the firewall meant to keep the far right away from decision-making. But Weber was adamant he had done nothing wrong, saying: “I want to stop populism and anti-Europeans,” and adding that he’s happy to work alongside the centrist parties, but they need to listen to voters. The outcome of the 2024 EU election, which changed Parliament’s arithmetic in favor of right-wing and far-right parties, “has to be reflected” and “translated” into policy to show that Brussels is listening to its citizens, Weber said. There are more challenges to come for the old coalition — a deregulation package targeting environmental rules, a reversal of the ban on combustion engines, and a bill to boost deportations of migrants. “We can solve problems in the center when it is about the questions of migration, the big fear and uncertainty for a lot of people who are afraid to lose jobs … we have to take this seriously.” According to Weber, the way to fight Euroskeptic and populist parties is by tackling the issues they campaign on: “Please also consider … what we have to do to take away the campaign issues from the populists, that is what is at stake,” he added in the interview, which took place in late December. In his logic, if citizens are worried about migration, the EU should deport more people who are in Europe illegally; if people see green policy as hampering economic growth, Brussels should scrap environmental reporting requirements; and if thousands of jobs are being lost in the car sector, Brussels should give industry more leeway in the transition to electric vehicle production.   “My invitation goes really to the socialists and liberals and others: Please come back to this approach.“ MEET ME HALFWAY Weber — who has been an MEP since 2004, leader of the EPP group in the Parliament since 2014 and leader of the Europe-wide EPP since 2022 — said the center-right is “delivering via successes” and that he “will not be stopped by anyone” in implementing the party program. He argued that when the EPP has voted alongside the far right — to dilute an anti-deforestation bill, to pass green reporting requirements for businesses, and to ease rules to deport migrants to third countries — these were not “radical positions” and reflected the views of national governments and the European Commission. The votes are “not a kind of radicalization.” He said half of the liberal Renew Europe group voted in favor of slashing green reporting requirements for businesses and the EPP has voted with the S&D on “more than 85 percent of all votes in the European Parliament,” on issues ranging from housing to climate, including on a 2040 carbon reduction target, which he said should remain in place, even though parts of his group want to scrap it. Manfred Weber has called for the centrists to work with the Brothers of Italy, the party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, which is to the right of the EPP. | Ettore Ferrari/EPA “The EPP delivered on this, we are committed to the 2040 targets … It was also not easy in my party, I have to be honest.” MAKING FRIENDS WITH MELONI Since the start of the 2024 EU election campaign, Weber has called for the centrists to work with the Brothers of Italy, the party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, which is to the right of the EPP. This has angered Socialists and liberals, who argue that Meloni is a far-right populist who should be excluded from EU decision-making. When Commission President Ursula von der Leyen granted Italy an executive vice-presidency in her second team, Meloni nominated Raffaele Fitto for the role, prompting an unsuccessful bid by Socialists and Liberals to block his appointment. The EPP defended Fitto’s candidacy, citing Meloni’s pragmatism and reliability at the EU level. Fitto is now executive vice-president for cohesion and reforms. Weber said time has proven him right. A year-and-a-half after the election, “I think nobody can really say that Raffaele Fitto is a right extreme populist … he’s a very serious colleague.” He blamed his centrist allies for focusing on rhetoric and “ideological debate” instead of looking at the “reality on the ground” and understanding Europe’s new right-wing political reality. Meloni is “behaving,” Weber said, and “she’s ready to find compromises.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell.” Studies claiming to have revealed micro- and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries, and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian and Mother Jones. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years. However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked. > One scientist estimates there are serious doubts over “more than half of the > very high impact papers” on microplastics in biological tissue. The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics. There is an increasing international focus on the need to control plastic pollution but faulty evidence on the level of microplastics in humans could lead to misguided regulations and policies, which is dangerous, researchers say. It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded. While researchers say analytical techniques are improving rapidly, the doubts over recent high-profile studies also raise the questions of what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies. “Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising” was the shocking headline reporting a widely covered study in February. The analysis, published in a top-tier journal and covered by the Guardian, said there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024. However, by November, the study had been challenged by a group of scientists with the publication of a “Matters arising” letter in the journal. In the formal, diplomatic language of scientific publishing, the scientists said: “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.” One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60 percent fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study. Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue. Matthew Campen, senior author of the brain study in question, told the Guardian: “In general, we simply find ourselves in an early period of trying to understand the potential human health impacts of MNPs and there is no recipe book for how to do this. Most of the criticism aimed at the body of work to date (ie from our lab and others) has been conjectural and not buffeted by actual data. “We have acknowledged the numerous opportunities for improvement and refinement and are trying to spend our finite resources in generating better assays and data, rather than continually engaging in a dialogue.” But the brain study is far from alone in having been challenged. One, which reported that patients with MNPs detected in carotid artery plaques had a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than patients with no MNPs detected, was subsequently criticized for not testing blank samples taken in the operating room. Blank samples are a way of measuring how much background contamination may be present. Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system.” But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.” This study was by Campen and colleagues, who responded: “To steal/modify a sentiment from the television show Ted Lasso, ‘[Bioanalytical assays] are never going to be perfect. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can and if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving toward better.’” > “This isn’t a dig…They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything > better available to us.” Further challenged studies include two reporting plastic particles in blood—in both cases the researchers contested the criticisms—and another on their detection in arteries. A study claiming to have detected 10,000 nanoplastic particles per liter of bottled water was called “fundamentally unreliable” by critics, a charge disputed by the scientists. The doubts amount to a “bombshell,” according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.” While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyze samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr. Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.” These include measures to exclude background contamination, blanks, repeating measurements and testing equipment with samples spiked with a known amount of MNPs. “So you cannot be assured that whatever you have found is not fully or partially derived from some of these issues,” Béen said. A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporizing it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.” “This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.” She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy.” > “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological > barriers,” but today’s instruments “cannot detect nano-size particles.” Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolyzing the sample—heating it until it vaporizes. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them. The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains, the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives. Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometers can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.” “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.” Further criticism came in July, in a review study in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the journal of the German Medical Association. “At present, there is hardly any reliable information available on the actual distribution of microplastics in the body,” the scientists wrote. Plastic production has ballooned by 200 times since the 1950s and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion metric tons a year by 2060. As a result, plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion metric tons now contaminating the planet, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled. An expert review published in the Lancet in August called plastics a “grave, growing and underrecognised danger” to human and planetary health. It cited harm from the extraction of the fossil fuels they are made from, to their production, use and disposal, which result in air pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals. > Insufficiently robust studies might help lobbyists for the plastics industry > downplay known risks of plastic pollution. In recent years, the infiltration of the body with MNPs has become a serious concern, and a landmark study in 2022 first reported detection in human blood. That study is one of the 18 listed in Rauert’s paper and was criticized by Kuhlman. But the study’s senior author, Marja Lamoree, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, rejected suggestions of contamination. “The reason we focused on blood in the first place is that you can take blood samples freshly, without the interference of any plastics or exposure to the air,” she said. “I’m convinced we detected microplastics,” she said. “But I’ve always said that [the amount estimated] could be maybe twice lower, or 10 times higher.” In response to Kuhlman’s letter, Lamoree and colleagues said he had “incorrectly interpreted” the data. Lamoree does agree there is a wider issue. “It’s still a super-immature field and there’s not many labs that can do [these analyses well]. When it comes to solid tissue samples, then the difficulty is they are usually taken in an operating theatre that’s full of plastic.” “I think most of the, let’s say, lesser quality analytical papers come from groups that are medical doctors or metabolomics [scientists] and they’re not driven by analytical chemistry knowledge,” she said. Improving the quality of MNP measurements in the human body matters, the scientists said. Poor quality evidence is “irresponsible” and can lead to scaremongering, said Rauert: “We want to be able to get the data right so that we can properly inform our health agencies, our governments, the general population and make sure that the right regulations and policies are put in place. “We get a lot of people contacting us, very worried about how much plastics are in their bodies,” she said. “The responsibility [for scientists] is to report robust science so you are not unnecessarily scaring the general population.” > “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume.” Rauert called treatments claiming to clean microplastics from your blood “crazy”—some are advertised for £10,000 (about $13,400). “These claims have no scientific evidence,” she said, and could put more plastic into people’s blood, depending on the equipment used. Materić said insufficiently robust studies might also help lobbyists for the plastics industry downplay known risks of plastic pollution. The good news, said Béen, is that analytical work across multiple techniques is improving rapidly: “I think there is less and less doubt about the fact that MNPs are there in tissues. The challenge is still knowing exactly how many or how much. But I think we’re narrowing down this uncertainty more and more.” Prof Lamoree said: “I really think we should collaborate on a much nicer basis—with much more open communication—and don’t try to burn down other people’s results. We should all move forward instead of fighting each other.” In the meantime, should the public be worried about MNPs in their bodies? Given the very limited evidence, Lamoree said she could not say how concerned people should be: “But for sure I take some precautions myself, to be on the safe side. I really try to use less plastic materials, especially when cooking or heating food or drinking from plastic bottles. The other thing I do is ventilate my house.” “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume,” said Materić. “But real hard proof on how much is yet to come. There are also very easy things that you can do to hugely reduce intake of MNPs. If you are concerned about water, just filtering through charcoal works.” Experts also advise avoiding food or drink that has been heated in plastic containers. Rauert thinks that most of the MNPs that people ingest or breath in probably expelled by their bodies, but said it can’t hurt to reduce your plastics exposure. Furthermore, she said, it remains vital to resolve the uncertainty over what MNPs are doing to our health: “We know we’re being exposed, so we definitely want to know what happens after that and we’ll keep working at it, that’s for sure.”

BRUSSELS — On Greenland’s southern tip, surrounded by snowy peaks and deep fjords, lies Kvanefjeld — a mining project that shows the giant, barren island is more than just a coveted military base. Beneath the icy ground sits a major deposit of neodymium and praseodymium, rare earth elements used to make magnets that are essential to build wind turbines, electric vehicles and high-tech military equipment. If developed, Greenland, a semi-autonomous part of Denmark, would become the first European territory to produce these key strategic metals. Energy Transition Minerals, an Australia-based, China-backed mining company, is ready to break ground. But neither Copenhagen, Brussels nor the Greenlandic government have mobilized their state power to make the project happen. In 2009, Denmark handed Greenland’s inhabitants control of their natural resources; 12 years later the Greenlandic government blocked the mine because the rare earths are mixed with radioactive uranium. Since then the project has been in limbo, bogged down in legal disputes. “Kvanefjeld illustrates how political and regulatory uncertainty — combined with geopolitics and high capital requirements — makes even strategically important projects hard to move from potential to production,” Jeppe Kofod, Denmark’s former foreign minister and now a strategic adviser to Energy Transition Minerals, told POLITICO. Kvanefjeld’s woes are emblematic of Greenland’s broader problems. Despite having enough of some rare earth elements to supply as much as 25 percent of the world’s needs — not to mention oil and gas reserves nearly as great as those of the United States, and lots of other potential clean energy metals including copper, graphite and nickel — these resources are almost entirely undeveloped. Just two small mines, extracting gold and a niche mineral called feldspar used in glassmaking and ceramics, are up and running in Greenland. And until very recently, neither Denmark nor the European Union showed much interest in changing the situation. But that was before 2023, when the EU signed a memorandum of understanding with the Greenland government to cooperate on mining projects. The EU Critical Raw Materials Act, proposed the same year, is an attempt to catch up by building new mines both in and out of the bloc that singles out Greenland’s potential. Last month, the European Commission committed to contribute financing to Greenland’s Malmbjerg molybdenum mine in a bid to shore up a supply of the metal for the EU’s defense sector.  But with United States President Donald Trump threatening to take Greenland by force, and less likely to offer the island’s inhabitants veto power over mining projects, Europe may be too late to the party. “The EU has for many years had a limited strategic engagement in Greenland’s critical raw materials, meaning that Europe today risks having arrived late, just as the United States and China have intensified their interest,” Kofod said. In a world shaped by Trump’s increasingly belligerent foreign policy and China’s hyperactive development of clean technology and mineral supply chains, Europe’s neglect of Greenland’s natural wealth is looking increasingly like a strategic blunder. With Donald Trump threatening to take Greenland by force, and less likely to offer the island’s inhabitants veto power over mining projects, Europe may be too late to the party. | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images A HOSTILE LAND That’s not to say building mines in Greenland, with its mile-deep permanent ice sheet, would be easy. “Of all the places in the world where you could extract critical raw materials, [Greenland] is very remote and not very easily accessible,” said Ditte Brasso Sørensen, senior analyst on EU climate and industrial policy at Think Tank Europa, pointing to the territory’s “very difficult environmental circumstances.”  The tiny population — fewer than 60,000 — and a lack of infrastructure also make it hard to build mines. “This is a logistical question,” said Eldur Olafsson, CEO of Amaroq, a gold mining company running one of the two operating mines in Greenland and also exploring rare earths and copper extraction opportunities. “How do you build mines? Obviously, with capital, equipment, but also people. [And] you need to build the whole infrastructure around those people because they cannot only be Greenlandic,” he said.  Greenland also has strict environmental policies — including a landmark 2021 uranium mining ban — which restrict resource extraction because of its impact on nature and the environment. The current government, voted in last year, has not shown any signs of changing its stance on the uranium ban, according to Per Kalvig, professor emeritus at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, a Danish government research organization. Uranium is routinely found with rare earths, meaning the ban could frustrate Greenland’s huge potential as a rare earths producer. It’s a similar story with fossil fuels. Despite a 2007 U.S. assessment that the equivalent of over 30 billion barrels in oil and natural gas lies beneath the surface of Greenland and its territorial waters — almost equal to U.S. reserves — 30 years of oil exploration efforts by a group including Chevron, Italy’s ENI and Shell came to nothing. In 2021 the then-leftist government in Greenland banned further oil exploration on environmental grounds.  Danish geologist Flemming Christiansen, who was deputy director of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland until 2020, said the failure had nothing to do with Greenland’s actual potential as an oil producer. Instead, he said, a collapse in oil prices in 2014 along with the high cost of drilling in the Arctic made the venture unprofitable. Popular opposition only complicated matters, he said. THE CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECT From the skies above Greenland Christiansen sees firsthand the dramatic effects of climate change: stretches of clear water as rising temperatures thaw the ice sheets that for centuries have made exploring the territory a cold, costly and hazardous business. “If I fly over the waters in west Greenland I can see the changes,” he said. “There’s open water for much longer periods in west Greenland, in Baffin Bay and in east Greenland.” Climate change is opening up this frozen land. Climate change is opening up this frozen land. | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images Greenland contains the largest body of ice outside Antarctica, but that ice is melting at an alarming rate. One recent study suggests the ice sheet could cease to exist by the end of the century, raising sea levels by as much as seven meters. Losing a permanent ice cap that is several hundred meters deep, though, “gradually improves the business case of resource extraction, both for … fossil fuels and also critical raw materials,” said Jakob Dreyer, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen.   But exploiting Greenland’s resources doesn’t hinge on catastrophic levels of global warming. Even without advanced climate change, Kalvig, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, argues Greenland’s coast doesn’t differ much from that of Norway, where oil has been found and numerous excavation projects operate.     “You can’t penetrate quite as far inland as you can [in Norway], but once access is established, many places are navigable year-round,” Kalvig said. “So, in that sense, it’s not more difficult to operate mines in Greenland than it is in many parts of Norway, Canada or elsewhere — or Russia for that matter. And this has been done before, in years when conditions allowed.”    A European Commission spokesperson said the EU was now working with Greenland’s government to develop its resources, adding that Greenland’s “democratically elected authorities have long favored partnerships with the EU to develop projects beneficial to both sides.” But the spokesperson stressed: “The fate of Greenland’s raw mineral resources is up to the Greenlandic people and their representatives.” The U.S. may be less magnanimous. Washington’s recent military operation in Venezuela showed that Trump is serious about building an empire on natural resources, and is prepared to use force and break international norms in pursuit of that goal. Greenland, with its vast oil and rare earths deposits, may fit neatly into his vision. Where the Greenlandic people fit in is less clear.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Friday morning, the US House of Representatives approved a bill that would get the Department of Energy (DOE) out of the business of energy standards for mobile homes, also known as manufactured homes, and could set the efficiency requirements back decades.  Advocates say the changes will streamline the regulatory process and keep the upfront costs of manufactured homes down. Critics argue that less efficient homes will cost people more money overall and mostly benefit builders.   “This is not about poor people. This is not about working people,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), who grew up in a manufactured home, on the House floor before the vote. “This is about doing the bidding of corporations.” The average income of a manufactured home resident is around $40,000, and they “already face disproportionately high energy costs and energy use,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy at Environment America. That, she said, is why more stringent energy codes are so important. But the Energy Department, which oversees national energy policy and production, didn’t always have a say over these standards.  Starting in 1974, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, became tasked with setting building codes for manufactured homes. But HUD last updated the relevant energy-efficiency standards in 1994, and they have long lagged behind modern insulation and weatherization practices. So in 2007, Congress assigned that task to the DOE. It still took 15 years and a lawsuit before President Joe Biden’s administration finalized new rules in 2022 that were projected to reduce utility bills in double-wide manufactured homes by an average of $475 a year. Even with higher upfront costs taken into account, the government predicted around $5 billion in avoided energy bills over 30-years. At the time, the manufactured housing industry argued that DOE’s calculations were wrong and that the upfront cost of the home should be the primary metric of affordability. Both the Biden and now Trump administrations have delayed implementation of the rule and compliance deadlines, which still aren’t in effect.  This House legislation would eliminate the DOE rule and return sole regulatory authority to HUD. Lesli Gooch, CEO of the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade organization, describes it as essentially a process bill aimed at removing bureaucracy that has stood in the way of action. “The paralysis is because you have two different agencies that have been tasked with creating energy standards,” Gooch said. “You can’t build a house to two different sets of blueprints.” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), agreed and called the move “commonsense regulatory reform” in a letter urging his colleagues to support the bill. Ultimately, 57 Democrats joined 206 Republicans in voting for the bill, and it now moves to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain.  If the bill becomes law, however, the only operative benchmark would be HUD’s 1994 code and it could take years to make a new one. While more than half of the roughly 100,000 homes sold in the US each year already meet or exceed the DOE’s 2022 efficiency rules, the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy estimates that tens of thousands are still built to just the outdated standard. “Families are struggling,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the council, and he does not expect HUD under Trump to move particularly quickly on a fix. “I have not seen this administration lowering energy bills.” For now, though, it’s the Senate’s turn to weigh in.

At least two members of the Slovak government responded on Sunday to a violent attack on a prominent journalist by criticizing his writing. Slovak political commentator Peter Schutz, 70, was attacked by an unknown assailant on Saturday afternoon at a shopping center in Košice, eastern Slovakia. He required hospital treatment including surgery on a broken femur. The assault happened in a public washroom in a well-frequented mall in Slovakia’s second-largest city, according to the Sme national daily. Schutz, a leading comment writer for Sme since the 1990s who frequently appeared on political talk shows, has been roundly critical of the current government, led by Prime Minister Robert Fico, now in his fourth term. Interior Minister Matúš Šutaj Eštok, who heads the country’s police force, condemned violence in general but added “it must be noted that the public space [in Slovakia] has long faced polarizing and dehumanizing statements, which increase tensions in society. Not even an alleged attack on a commentator can diminish his responsibility for words that helped inflame emotions and divide the public.” Environment Minister Tomáš Taraba, meanwhile, wrote on social media that “Commentator Schutz” is known for his “extremely aggressive statements toward people.” Taraba, who was elected to the Slovak parliament in 2020 for the far-right Our Slovakia People’s Party, said “such violent attacks must be condemned, even with people who belong in the hands of the law.” He added that the Slovak justice system “does not work and pretends that journalists are above the law.” Police in Košice said they were “actively and intensively” investigating the attack on Schutz as an assault, with spokesperson Jana Illésová saying the journalist had been discovered by a passerby on the floor of the washroom. Slovakia has experience of violence on media, none more shocking than the 2018 murders of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, which led to the resignation of the government at the time, also led by Fico. The prime minister himself was severely injured in a shooting in May 2024 that he blamed at least partly on Slovak media. “Why did they shoot me in the stomach? You hounded us like bloodthirsty bastards from morning to night,” he told journalists in October 2024 after having recovered from his wounds. General Prosecutor Maroš Žilinka wrote on Facebook following the attack on Schutz that “physical attacks on another person must not be a means of ventilating the tensions and frustrations that have accumulated in society.” Roman Krpelan, Sme editor-in-chief, wrote that “we want to believe that this attack on our colleague was not related to his work.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Thursday, Republicans in the House failed to override President Donald Trump’s first two vetoes in office: a pipeline project that would bring safe drinking water to rural Colorado, and another that would return land to the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians in Florida. Their inability to block the president’s move signals their commitment to the White House over their prior support for the measures.  The Miccosukee have always considered the Florida Everglades their home. So when Republicans in Congress voted to expand the tribe’s land base under the Miccosukee Reserved Area Act—legislation that would transfer 30 acres of land in the Everglades to tribal control—the Miccosukee were thrilled. After years of work, the move would have allowed the tribe to begin environmental restoration activities in the area and better protect it from climate change impacts as extreme flooding and tropical storms threaten the land. “The measure reflected years of bipartisan work and was intended to clarify land status and support basic protections for tribal members who have lived in this area for generations,” wrote Chairman Cypress in a statement last week, “before the roads and canals were built, and before Everglades National Park was created.” The act was passed on December 11, but on December 30, President Donald Trump vetoed it; one of only two vetoes made by the administration since he took office. In a statement, Trump explained that the tribe “actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected,” after the tribe’s July lawsuit challenging the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz,” an immigration detention center in the Everglades.  “It is rare for an administration to veto a bill for reasons wholly unrelated to the merits of the bill,” said Kevin Washburn, a law professor at University of California Berkeley Law and former assistant secretary of Indian affairs for the Department of the Interior. Washburn added that while denying land return to a tribe is a political act, Trump’s move is “highly unusual.” When a tribe regains land, the process can be long and costly. The process, known as “land into trust” transfers a land title from a tribe to the United States, where the land is then held for the benefit of the tribe and establishes tribal jurisdiction over the land in question. When tribal nations signed treaties in the 19th century ceding land, any lands reserved for tribes—generally, reservations—were held by the federal government “in trust” for the benefit of tribes, meaning that tribal nations don’t own these lands despite their sovereign status.  > Trump’s veto “makes absolutely no sense other than the interest in vengeance.” Almost all land-into-trust requests are facilitated at an administrative level by the Department of Interior. The Miccosukee, however, generally must follow a different process. Recognized as a tribal nation by the federal government in 1962, the Miccosukee navigate a unique structure for acquiring tribal land where these requests are made through Congress via legislation instead of by the Interior Department. “It’s ironic, right?” said Matthew Fletcher, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “You’re acquiring land that your colonizer probably took from you a long time ago and then gave it away to or sold it to someone else, and then years later, you’re buying that land back that was taken from you illegally, at a great expense.” While land-into-trust applications related to tribal gaming operations often meet opposition, Fletcher says applications like the Miccosukee’s are usually frictionless. And in cases like the Miccosukee Reserved Area Act, which received bipartisan support at the state and federal levels, in-trust applications are all but guaranteed. On the House floor on Thursday before the vote, Florida’s Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz said, “This bill is so narrowly focused that [the veto] makes absolutely no sense other than the interest in vengeance that seems to have emanated in this result.” The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.), did not respond to requests for comment. In July last year, Gimenez referred to the Miccosukee Tribe as stewards of the Everglades, sponsoring the bill as a way to manage water flow and advance an elevation project, under protection from the Department of the Interior, for the village to avert “catastrophic flooding.” “What you’re asking is for people in the same political party of the guy who just vetoed this thing to affirmatively reject the political decision of the president,” Fletcher said. The tribe is unlikely to see its village project materialize under Trump’s second term unless the outcome of this year’s midterms results in a Democratic-controlled House and Senate. Studies show that the return of land to tribes provides the best outcomes for the climate.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. One year on from the Eaton Fire, long after the vicious winds that sent embers cascading from the San Gabriel mountains and the flames that swallowed entire streets, a shadow still hangs over Altadena. Construction on new properties is under way, and families whose homes survived the fire have begun to return. But many are grappling with an urgent question: is it safe to be here? The fire upended life in this part of Los Angeles county. By the time firefighters brought it under control, 19 people were dead, tens of thousands displaced and nearly 9,500 structures destroyed, primarily in Altadena but also in Pasadena and Sierra Madre. Guardian graphic. Fire extent source: Cal Fire. Building damage source: analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. Using building data from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and fire perimeters from NIFC/FIRIS. All times are localGuardian graphic. Fire extent source: Cal Fire. Building damage source: analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. Using building data from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and fire perimeters from NIFC/FIRIS. Note: all times are local The flames incinerated many older homes and businesses filled with lead paint and asbestos. They showered the community with toxins, leaving tall piles of ash and unseen traces of heavy metals in the soil and along and inside standing structures. Research has indicated some hazards remain even after properties have undergone remediation, the clean-up process that is supposed to restore homes and ensure they are safe to occupy. As Altadena fights to return, residents—some eager to stay in the community and others who simply can’t afford to go anywhere else—are facing immense challenges while trying to rebuild their lives and come back home. Official information about the health risks was limited early on and those returning often only learned about the dangers as they went. Some people have developed health concerns such as migraines and respiratory issues. Many are still battling their insurance companies to fully cover their costs, and make certain their homes are habitable. Their predicament highlights the increased dangers that come with urban fires, and shows how Altadena has come to serve as a sort of living laboratory with scientists and residents learning in real time. Nicole Maccalla, a data scientist, and her family moved back into their Altadena home over the summer after their property underwent an extensive cleanup process, but their air purifiers still register high levels of particulate matter, heavy sediment appears when they vacuum and when it rains the distinctive smell from the fire returns. “The toll of displacement was really high on my family. And I just had to move home and try [to] mitigate risk and keep fighting the good fight,” she said. “There’s always that back-of-your-mind concern: Did I make the right choice? But I also don’t have other choices.” Early on in those first careening hours of the fire, as thick smoke and ash fell like snow over her yard, Dawn Fanning was sure her home would not be spared. The wind was blowing from the fire straight to the Spanish bungalow the producer shared with her adult son, and it seemed there was no way to stop it. Dawn Fanning outside her home in Pasadena, California, on December 28 2025. The interior of her home has been found to have lead and asbestos after the Eaton Fire.Stella Kalinina/Guardian Fanning’s home, miraculously, escaped the flames. But, while the stucco structure was intact—clothes still hanging undisturbed in her closet and her son’s baby photos packed carefully in bins in the garage—it hadn’t been unscathed either. Virtually nothing in Altadena was. “It’s dusty and there’s piles of ash in the windowsills and on the floor. At first glance, it doesn’t look any different,” Fanning said. “Your house looks the same—but it’s not. There’s toxicity in your attic and in your crawlspace and on your mattresses and on all the things.” Confused and frustrated with the local government’s handling of health concerns, Maccalla and Fanning joined other fire survivors to form Eaton Fire Residents United in hopes of ensuring the impacted areas recover safely. The community group is developing testing and remediation guidelines, gathered hygienic testing reports of hundreds of homes, and advocated for fire survivors and workers. > “When she awoke at 3 a.m., the blaze had formed a horseshoe shape around her > house, and smoke filled the room.” “There [have been] huge threats to the health and safety of residents, children in schools, elderly and immunocompromised, workers that are coming into this area that are being exposed to hazards in the workplace,” Maccalla said. “We’re still trying to work on that and get the protections people need.” Barely 15 miles north-east of downtown Los Angeles, Altadena at the start of last year was home to some 43,000 people, many lured by the affordable home prices, proximity to the mountains and bucolic feel. It has long been one of the most diverse cities in the region with a thriving Black community that began to grow during the great migration. In the early evening on January 7 2025, Fanning, who had lived in her home in the area for two decades, had a feeling she couldn’t shake that something could go very wrong. There were treacherous winds that forecasters warned posed a serious fire risk. Already, a fire was spreading rapidly on the other side of the county in the Pacific Palisades, where frantic residents were trying to evacuate and firefighters were clearing the area. Some 35 miles away, Fanning and her son were watching coverage of the unfolding fire while readying their property. Then came an alert—not from officials—but from a local meteorologist who was telling his followers to get out now. Fanning spotted flames several blocks away and she and her son decided it was time to leave. A few miles to the east, Rosa Robles was evacuating with her grandchild in tow, leaving her husband and adult children. She wanted them to go—but they were protecting the home. Armed with garden hoses, they tried to save the residence and the other houses on their block. Sometimes the wind was so strong it blew the water back in their faces, Robles said. Maccalla’s power had gone out that morning, and she and her children were sitting around watching the TV drama Fire Country on an iPad in the dark when they got the call about the fire. It seemed far away at the time, Maccalla recalled, and she felt prepared as a member of a community emergency response team. They got out lamps and began packing in case they needed to leave. She set alarms hourly to monitor the progress of the fire while her children slept. When she awoke at three, the blaze had formed a horseshoe shape around her house, and smoke filled the room. The family evacuated with their two dogs and two cats. Tamara Artin had returned from work to see chaos on the street, with fierce winds and billowing smoke all around the house she rented with her husband. Artin, who is Armenian by way of Iran and has lived in Los Angeles for about six years, always loved the area. She enjoyed the history and sprawling green parks, and had been excited to live here. Now the pair was quickly abandoning the home they had moved into just three months earlier, heading toward a friend’s house with their bags and passports. Fanning and her son had gone to a friend’s home too. As they stayed up late listening to the police scanner, they heard emergency responders call out addresses where flames were spreading. These were friends’ homes. She waited to hear her own. > “We were worried, of course, because we were inhaling all those chemicals > without knowing what it is.” In the first days after the fire began, the risk remained and there was little help available with firefighting resources spread across Los Angeles. Maccalla and her son soon returned to their property to try to protect their home and those of their neighbors. “I was working on removing a bunch of debris that had flown into the yard and all these dry leaves. I didn’t know at the time that I shouldn’t touch any of that,” she said.” The devastation in Altadena, as in the Palisades, was staggering. Many of the 19 people who died were older adults who hadn’t received evacuation warnings for hours after people in other areas of town, if at all. Physically, parts of Altadena were almost unrecognizable. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, bright red flame retardant streaked the hillsides. Off Woodbury Road, not far from where Robles and Artin lived, seemingly unblemished homes stood next to blackened lots where nothing remained but fireplaces and charred rubble—scorched bicycles, collapsed beds and warped ovens. The pungent smell of smoke seemed to embed itself in the nose. Robles would sometimes get lost in the place she had lived her whole life as she tried to navigate streets that had been stripped of any identifiable landmarks. Fire scorched the beloved community garden, the country club, an 80-year-old hardware store, the Bunny Museum and numerous schools and houses of worship. Artin and her husband returned to their home, which still stood, after a single night. They had no family in the area and nowhere else to go—hotels were packed across the county. For nearly two weeks they lived without water or power as they tried to clean up, throwing away most of their furniture and belongings, even shoes, and all of the food in the fridge and freezer. “We were worried, of course, because we were inhaling all those chemicals without knowing what it is, but we didn’t have a choice,” Artin recalled. As fires burn through communities, they spread particulate matter far and wide, cause intense smoke damage in standing structures and cars, and release chemicals even miles beyond the burned area. > After one round of remediation, “six out of 10 homes were still coming back > with lead and or asbestos levels that exceeded EPA safety thresholds.” When Fanning saw her home for the first time, thick piles of ash covered the floors. She was eager to return, but as she tried to figure out her next steps, reading scientific articles and guides, and joining Zoom calls with other concerned residents, it was clear she needed to learn more about precisely what was in the ash. Asbestos was found in her home, meaning all porous items, clothing and furniture, were completely ruined. “You can’t wash lead and asbestos out of your clothing. I was like, OK, this is real and I need to gather as much evidence [as I can] to find out what’s in my house.” In Altadena, more than 90 percent of homes had been built before 1975 and likely had lead-based paint and toxic asbestos, both of which the EPA has since banned, according to a report from the California Institute of Technology. All sorts of things burned along with the houses, Fanning said: plastic, electric cars, lithium batteries. “The winds were shoving this into our homes,” she said. The roof on Maccalla’s home had to be rebuilt, and significant cleanup was required for the smoke damage and layers of ash that blanketed curtains and beds. Despite these concerns, residents grew increasingly frustrated about what they viewed as a lack of official information about the safety of returning to their homes. Many also encountered pushback from their insurance providers that said additional testing for hazards, or more intensive remediation efforts recommended by experts, were unnecessary and not covered under their policies. So earlier this year a group of residents, including Fanning and Maccalla, formed Eaton Fire Residents United (EFRU). The group includes scientists and people dedicated to educating and supporting the community, ensuring there is data collection to support legislation, and assembling an expert panel to establish protocols for future fires, Fanning said. They’ve published research based on testing reports from hundreds of properties across the affected area, and advocated that homes should receive a comprehensive clearance before residents return. Research released by EFRU and headed by Maccalla, who has a doctorate in education and specializes in research methodology, found that more than half of homes that had been remediated still had levels of lead and/or asbestos that rendered them uninhabitable. “There’s still widespread contamination and that one round of remediation was not sufficient, the majority of the time. Six out of 10 homes were still coming back with lead and or asbestos levels that exceeded EPA safety thresholds,” said Maccalla, who serves as EFRU’S director of data science and educational outreach. The interior of Dawn Fanning’s home has been found to have lead and asbestos after the Eaton Fire.Stella Kalinina/The Guardian Maccalla moved back home in June after what she viewed as a decent remediation process. But she hasn’t been able to get insurance coverage for additional testing, and worries about how many people are having similar experiences. “We’re putting people back in homes without confirming that they’re free of contamination,” she said. “It feels very unethical and a very dangerous game to be playing.” She couldn’t afford not to come home, and the family couldn’t keep commuting two hours a day each way from their temporary residence to work and school or their Altadena property where Maccalla was overseeing construction. But she’s experienced headaches, her daughter’s asthma is more severe, and her pets have become sick. “I don’t think anybody that hasn’t gone through it can really comprehend what [that is like],” she said. “For everything in your environment that was so beloved to now become a threat is mentally a really hard switch,” she said. Robles settled back to the home she’s lived in for years with a few new additions. Seven of her relatives lost their homes, including her daughter who now lives with her. “I thank God there’s a place for them. That’s all that matters to me.” Nicole Maccalla with her dog, Cami, outside her home in Altadena. Stella Kalinina/The Guardian After the fire, she threw away clothes, bed sheets and pillows. The family mopped and washed the walls. Her insurance was helpful, she said, and covered the cleanup work. Robles tries not to think about the toxic contamination and chemicals that spread during the fire. “You know that saying, what you don’t know?” she said, her voice trailing off. Artin said she received some assistance from her renter’s insurance, but that her landlord hadn’t yet undertaken more thorough remediation. She’s still trying to replace some of the furniture she had to throw away. The fire had come after an already difficult year in which her husband had been laid off, and their finances were stretched. > “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.” She shudders when she recalls the early aftermath of the fire, a morning sky as dark as night. “It was hell, honestly.” Her rent was set to increase in the new year, and while she fears exposure to unseen dangers, moving isn’t an option. “We don’t have anywhere else to go. We can’t do anything,” Artin said. Fanning has been battling her insurance company to cover the work that is necessary to ensure her house is safely habitable, she said. Her provider is underplaying the amount of work that needs to be done and underbidding the costs, Fanning said. She and her son have been living in a short-term rental since late summer, and she expects they won’t be able to return home before the fall. Sometimes she wonders if she’ll be up to returning at all. Even now, when Fanning drives through the area to come get her mail or check on the house, she gets headaches. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe, no matter all the things that I know and all the things that I’m gonna do. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.” In between trying to restore her home, she’s focused on advocacy with EFRU, which has become her primary job, albeit unpaid. “There are so many people that don’t have enough insurance coverage, that don’t speak English, that are renters, that don’t have access like I do … I feel it’s my duty as a human.” There’s much work to do, Fanning said, and it has to be done at every single property. “It’s a long road to recovery. And if we don’t do it right, safely, it’s never gonna be what it was before.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Combating climate change can feel particularly difficult these days. Countries, states, and municipalities across the globe are missing greenhouse emission reduction targets, and in the United States, President Donald Trump has rolled back key elements of his predecessor’s climate agenda.  Given the trajectory, it might be tempting for pro-climate policymakers to turn to more aggressive measures of getting people to take action, such as mandates, bans, or restrictions. People would then have to save the planet.  But a study published last week in the journal Nature Sustainability suggests that approach can carry real risks. It found that climate policies aimed at forcing lifestyle changes—such as bans on driving in urban centers—can backfire by weakening people’s existing pro-environmental values and triggering political backlash, even among those who already care about climate change. The findings suggest that how climate policy is designed may matter as much as how aggressive it is.  “Mandates can sometimes get you over a hump and tipping point, but they come with costs,” said Sam Bowles, an author of the paper and an economist at the nonprofit Santa Fe Institute. “There could be negative impacts that people don’t anticipate.” Researchers surveyed more than 3,000 Germans and found that even people who care about climate change had a notably negative response to mandates or bans that did things like limit thermostat temperatures or meat consumption, which they saw as restricting their freedoms. The paper also compared that to people’s reaction to Covid-related requirements, such as vaccine and mask mandates. While researchers found a backlash effect, or “cost of control,” in both instances, it was 52 percent greater for climate than Covid policies.  “I didn’t expect that people’s opposition to [a] climate-mandated lifestyle would be so extreme,” said Katrin Schmelz, the other author of the study, who is also at the Santa Fe Institute. She said that people’s trust in their leaders can mitigate the adverse impact, and compared to the United States, Germans have fairly high trust in the government. That, she said, means she would “expect mandates to be less accepted and provoke more opposition here.”  Ben Ho, a behavioral economist at Vassar College, wasn’t involved in the study and wasn’t surprised by its findings. “This is fundamentally about how a society values individual values of liberty and expression against communal values like safety,” he said, pointing to a sizable body of similar research on the potential for backlash to climate policies. “What is novel about their work is to show that these backfire effects are still true today, and what is especially interesting is to connect their data to how people felt about Covid.” > “Ethical commitments and social norms are very fragile and they’re easily > destroyed.” The political consequences of climate-related mandates can be dramatic. In Germany, a 2023 law passed by the country’s then center-left government sought to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels by effectively banning new gas heating systems and promoting heat pumps. Though the policy allowed for exemptions and subsidies, opponents quickly framed it as a ban, dubbing it the heizhammer, or “heating hammer.” The measure became a potent symbol of government overreach, seized on by far-right parties and contributing to a broader public backlash against the governing coalition. “The last German government basically fell because they were seen to be instituting a ban on gas,” said Gernot Wagner, climate economist at Columbia Business School. The current government is attempting to roll back the legislation.  Germany’s experience underscores the risks the study identifies. Policies that are perceived as restricting personal choice can trigger resistance that extends beyond the measure itself, weakening public support for climate action more broadly. So far, policies in the US have largely avoided such opposition. That’s largely because American climate policies have historically been much less aggressive, with even progressives rarely turning to outright bans. But there is both precedent for a potential backlash and inklings of potential fights to come. The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, for example, laid out the path to gradually phase out incandescent light bulbs. That led to the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice and Better Use of Light Bulbs acts, two 2011 bills that the then-burgeoning tea party movement pushed, without success. Today, methane, also known as natural gas, is at the center of similar cultural fights as cities attempt to ban new hookups and take other steps to curtail its use. Opponents of climate action seem to have become aware of the power of bans to spark backlash, too. President Trump regularly refers to fuel-efficiency benchmarks as an electric vehicle “mandate.” The natural gas industry has also framed efficiency standards for gas appliances as bans and used the backlash effect to help successfully delay other explicit bans on gas in new construction, such as in New York state. On its face, research like this can put lawmakers in a difficult position: If a policy isn’t aggressive enough, it won’t do much to combat climate change. But if it’s too aggressive, people could turn against it or even the entire political movement behind it, as in Germany, and progress can stall.  “This doesn’t mean we should give up on climate policies,” said Ho. “It just means we should be more mindful in how policies are designed, and that trust could be a key component.” Schmelz and Bowles both point to a similar conclusion, and say that any policy should at least consider the plasticity of citizens’ beliefs and values. “Ethical commitments and social norms are very fragile and they’re easily destroyed,” Bowles said. Schmelz added that people in power “can upset and reduce willingness to cooperate by designing poor policies.” One way that policies can avoid backlash is by focusing less on banning a particular action and instead on making the other options more abundant and more attractive (by adding tax incentives or rebates, for example). “Offering alternatives is helping in enforcing green values,” Schmelz said. Another option could be aiming to make climate-unfriendly activities more expensive rather than restricting them. As Bowles put it, “people don’t feel like they are being controlled by a higher price.” The closer a policy gets to people’s personal lives, they say, the more important it is to be mindful of potential missteps. The authors also emphasize that they aren’t claiming mandates or bans never work—seatbelt laws and smoking restrictions have become commonplace, for instance. But those were enacted in a different era and there was little public dissent about their benefits to personal health.  “There was always somebody in that person’s family saying, ‘No, look, sweetheart, I really wish you would be wearing your seatbelt,'” said Bowles. “We don’t have that in the case of the environment, so it’s a much greater challenge to shift the rhetoric.” But ultimately, Bowles said the broader message that he wants to convey is that people are generally generous and want their actions to align with their values. This new research underscores the need for policies that help them embrace that inclination, rather than temper it, which mandates or bans can do. “People have a lot of good values,” he said. “When we look at our citizens and are designing policies, don’t take them to be jerks.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Donald Trump has sparked outrage by announcing the US will exit the foundational international agreement to address the climate crisis, cementing the US’s utter isolation from the global effort to confront dangerously escalating temperatures. In a presidential memorandum issued on Wednesday, Trump withdrew from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), along with 65 other organizations, agencies and commissions, calling them “contrary to the interests of the United States”. The UNFCCC treaty forms the bedrock of international cooperation to deal with the climate crisis and has been agreed to by every country in the world since its inception 34 years ago. The US Senate ratified the treaty in October 1992. Trump has, however, routinely ridiculed climate science as a “scam” and a “hoax” and has actively hobbled clean energy projects and other climate policies as president, attempting to force the US and other countries to stay wedded to the fossil fuels that are driving disastrous heatwaves, storms, droughts and conflicts that imperils billions of people around the world. Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief and executive secretary of the UNFCCC, described the move as a “colossal own goal.” He said: “While all other nations are stepping forward together, this latest step back from global leadership, climate cooperation and science can only harm the US economy, jobs and living standards, as wildfires, floods, mega-storms and droughts get rapidly worse. It is a colossal own goal which will leave the US less secure and less prosperous.” “This is a shortsighted, embarrassing and foolish decision,” said Gina McCarthy, who was a top climate adviser to Joe Biden’s White House. “As the only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty, the Trump administration is throwing away decades of US climate change leadership and global collaboration. This administration is forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country.” Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump’s decision to exit the UNFCCC is an “unforced error” and “self-defeating” as it will further hamper the US’s ability to compete with China, which is increasingly dominant in the world’s burgeoning clean energy technology industries. “While the Trump administration is abdicating the United States of America’s global leadership, the rest of the world is continuing to shift to cleaner power sources and take climate action,” Bapna said. “The Trump administration is ceding the trillions of dollars in investment that the clean energy transition brings to nations willing to follow the science and embrace the cleanest, cheapest sources of energy.” Underscoring the administration’s hostility to any measure to deal with a climate that is now hotter than at any point in human civilization, the White House memo also states that the US will pull out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s top climate science body, as well as an assortment of other international environmental organizations, including the International Renewable Energy Association, the International Solar Alliance and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Last year, Trump said the US would exit the Paris climate deal, in which countries agreed to limit dangerous global heating, while the administration also declined to send a delegation to UN climate talks in Brazil. As the UNFCCC treaty was ratified by the Senate, it is unclear whether Trump can unilaterally scrap it, or whether a future president will be able to rejoin the framework without a further Senate vote. “Letting this lawless move stand could shut the US out of climate diplomacy forever,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said in a statement that the agreements jettisoned by the administration on Wednesday are “often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests.” The climate crisis is, in fact, a matter of scientific consensus and is already taking a measurable and growing toll upon economies and people’s lives. In the US, record numbers of major extreme weather disasters are forcing insurers to flee states, undermining the country’s property market. Scientists have warned that global temperatures are set to breach previously agreed thresholds, which will trigger further worsened calamities. “On the one-year anniversary of the wildfires that stole dozens of lives, thousands of homes and the sense of safety for millions as it reduced Los Angeles communities to ash, Trump is making it clear he has no interest in protecting Americans from the rapidly increasing impacts on our health and safety of the worsening climate crisis,” said Loren Blackford, executive director of the Sierra Club. “This is not leadership. It is cowardice.” Al Gore, the former US vice-president and climate activist, told the Guardian: “The Trump Administration has been turning its back on the climate crisis since day one, removing the United States from the Paris Agreement, dismantling America’s scientific infrastructure, curbing access to greenhouse gas emissions data, and ending essential investments in the clean energy transition.”

LONDON — Europe’s leaders have discovered yet another hill they are unwilling to die on: their long-held dream of a world fighting climate change together. President Donald Trump launched his most far-reaching attack on the international climate process Wednesday by ordering the U.S. to withdraw from the 1992 treaty that underpins most global attempts to stave off global warming. It means the world’s richest country and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter will play no further part in United Nations-led efforts to mitigate climate change — a position that could prove impossible to reverse by a future U.S. administration. European leaders might, then, have been expected to respond with loud condemnation. But the silence was deafening. Ursula von der Leyen? Schtum. Keir Starmer? Crickets. Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, was low-key. On Thursday, in a speech to French diplomats, the French president admitted the U.S. attacks on multilateralism, including Wednesday’s pledge to withdraw from 66 international organizations spanning environmental, social and human rights issues — the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) among them — “weakens all the bodies through which we can resolve common issues.” But Macron warned his officials: “We are not here to comment, we are here to act … If we have an intelligent response to offer, we do so. If we don’t have an intelligent response to offer, we look elsewhere.” It’s a far cry from 2017, when leaders across Europe lined up to hammer Trump for ditching the Paris Agreement — a less serious violation of the international regime, given there are now questions about whether the U.S. will ever be able to rejoin the UNFCCC, in which the Paris Agreement resides. But the world looks very different now than it did in 2017. Climate change concerns have been sucked into the black hole of Trump’s geopolitical tumult, and even if Europeans feel aggrieved, little sign of it has escaped the event horizon. “With Europeans still critically reliant on U.S. intelligence and being able to purchase U.S. arms to ensure Ukraine’s survival, it makes no sense to criticize Trump’s latest assault on combating climate change, just as they haven’t criticized the Venezuela operation,” said Robin Niblett, former director of the Chatham House foreign affairs think tank.  PICK YOUR BATTLES EU leaders have demonstrated this week that violations of international law and multilateral trust are way below the bar for confronting the Trump administration. Only a direct threat to invade European territory in Greenland has stirred Europe’s leaders to respond. “This is the bigger picture we’re seeing — European leaders essentially sort of pick their battles in this environment, and unfortunately, the UNFCCC process isn’t their biggest priority right now,” said Susi Dennison, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.  “The White House doesn’t care about environment, health or suffer[ing] of people,” Teresa Ribera said on social media. | Oscar del Pozo/AFP via Getty Images On top of that, she added, Trump’s attacks on climate action have lost their shock value. Wednesday’s announcement is “consistent with the withdrawal from climate action as a specific goal of the administration,” she said.  Officials in the offices of the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and the European Commission declined requests from POLITICO to comment on the announcement that the U.S. would ditch the UNFCCC and also withdraw from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. climate science body, and the Green Climate Fund.  The response was left to a smattering of lowly environment ministers, who expressed a mixture of exasperation and anger but very little shock at the announcement. (German Climate Minister Carsten Schneider simply noted that it “comes as no surprise.”)  One of the most prominent criticisms came from European Commission Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera, a Spanish socialist who is one of the EU executive’s most outspoken advocates for strong climate action. “The White House doesn’t care about environment, health or suffer[ing] of people,” she said on social media. Meanwhile, in the U.K., the populist right-wing Reform party, currently leading in the polls, said Britain should follow suit and ditch the climate treaty. EUROPE ALONE Schneider, the German minister, also echoed a common view in saying the move would leave the U.S. isolated on the international stage. But Washington’s exit also leaves the Europeans without a key ally in global negotiations.  Europe discovered what it meant for the U.S. to be absent from U.N. climate talks in Brazil last year when the Trump administration decided to send no delegates. A coalition of emerging economies effectively quashed any chance that the conference would make meaningful advances or that the Europeans would pursue their agenda. Legal opinions vary on whether a U.S. reentry to the UNFCCC would be as straightforward as a presidential decree or if it would require the U.S. Senate to ratify the deal, as it did in the early 1990s. The chance of a lockout raises the prospect of a permanent rebalancing of power inside the U.N. climate process. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the IPCC comes as it drafts its next round of vital climate science reports. While the move doesn’t stop individual U.S. scientists from contributing, Washington will not get to influence the report summaries that end up informing policymakers, which need to be signed off on by all governments.  As with the U.N. climate talks, others may step into the vacuum to take advantage of the U.S. absence. But Dennison thinks it won’t be the Europeans.  “I’m no longer even remotely optimistic that Europe is capable right now of playing that role,” she said, pointing to the growing divisions over climate action among EU governments and the rollbacks of key green legislation over the past year. “I don’t think that Europeans are going to step into any void.” Karl Mathiesen and Charlie Cooper reported from London. Zia Weise reported from Brussels. Josh Groeneveld contributed reporting from Berlin. Nicolas Camut contributed reporting from Paris. Emilio Casaliccio contributed reporting from London.