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.

LONDON — Reza Pahlavi was in the United States as a student in 1979 when his father, the last shah of Iran, was toppled in a revolution. He has not set foot inside Iran since, though his monarchist supporters have never stopped believing that one day their “crown prince” will return.  As anti-regime demonstrations fill the streets of more than 100 towns and cities across the country of 90 million people, despite an internet blackout and an increasingly brutal crackdown, that day may just be nearing.   Pahlavi’s name is on the lips of many protesters, who chant that they want the “shah” back. Even his critics — and there are plenty who oppose a return of the monarchy — now concede that Pahlavi may prove to be the only figure with the profile required to oversee a transition.  The global implications of the end of the Islamic Republic and its replacement with a pro-Western democratic government would be profound, touching everything from the Gaza crisis to the wars in Ukraine and Yemen, to the oil market.  Over the course of three interviews in the past 12 months in London, Paris and online, Pahlavi told POLITICO how Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could be overthrown. He set out the steps needed to end half a century of religious dictatorship and outlined his own proposal to lead a transition to secular democracy. Nothing is guaranteed, and even Pahlavi’s team cannot be sure that this current wave of protests will take down the regime, never mind bring him to power. But if it does, the following is an account of Pahlavi’s roadmap for revolution and his blueprint for a democratic future.  POPULAR UPRISING  Pahlavi argues that change needs to be driven from inside Iran, and in his interview with POLITICO last February he made it clear he wanted foreign powers to focus on supporting Iranians to move against their rulers rather than intervening militarily from the outside.  “People are already on the streets with no help. The economic situation is to a point where our currency devaluation, salaries can’t be paid, people can’t even afford a kilo of potatoes, never mind meat,” he said. “We need more and more sustained protests.” Over the past two weeks, the spiraling cost of living and economic mismanagement have indeed helped fuel the protest wave. The biggest rallies in years have filled the streets, despite attempts by the authorities to intimidate opponents through violence and by cutting off communications. Pahlavi has sought to encourage foreign financial support for workers who will disrupt the state by going on strike. He also called for more Starlink internet terminals to be shipped into Iran, in defiance of a ban, to make it harder for the regime to stop dissidents from communicating and coordinating their opposition. Amid the latest internet shutdowns, Starlink has provided the opposition movements with a vital lifeline. As the protests gathered pace last week, Pahlavi stepped up his own stream of social media posts and videos, which gain many millions of views, encouraging people onto the streets. He started by calling for demonstrations to begin at 8 p.m. local time, then urged protesters to start earlier and occupy city centers for longer. His supporters say these appeals are helping steer the protest movement. Reza Pahlavi argues that change needs to be driven from inside Iran. | Salvatore Di Nolfi/EPA The security forces have brutally crushed many of these gatherings. The Norway-based Iranian Human Rights group puts the number of dead at 648, while estimating that more than 10,000 people have been arrested. It’s almost impossible to know how widely Pahlavi’s message is permeating nationwide, but footage inside Iran suggests the exiled prince’s words are gaining some traction with demonstrators, with increasing images of the pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag appearing at protests, and crowds chanting “javid shah” — the eternal shah. DEFECTORS Understandably, given his family history, Pahlavi has made a study of revolutions and draws on the collapse of the Soviet Union to understand how the Islamic Republic can be overthrown. In Romania and Czechoslovakia, he said, what was required to end Communism was ultimately “maximum defections” among people inside the ruling elites, military and security services who did not want to “go down with the sinking ship.”  “I don’t think there will ever be a successful civil disobedience movement without the tacit collaboration or non-intervention of the military,” he said during an interview last February.  There are multiple layers to Iran’s machinery of repression, including the hated Basij militia, but the most powerful and feared part of its security apparatus is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Pahlavi argued that top IRGC commanders who are “lining their pockets” — and would remain loyal to Khamenei — did not represent the bulk of the organization’s operatives, many of whom “can’t pay rent and have to take a second job at the end of their shift.”  “They’re ultimately at some point contemplating their children are in the streets protesting … and resisting the regime. And it’s their children they’re called on to shoot. How long is that tenable?” Pahlavi’s offer to those defecting is that they will be granted an amnesty once the regime has fallen. He argues that most of the people currently working in the government and military will need to remain in their roles to provide stability once Khamenei has been thrown out, in order to avoid hollowing out the administration and creating a vacuum — as happened after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.  Only the hardline officials at the top of the regime in Tehran should expect to face punishment.  In June, Pahlavi announced he and his team were setting up a secure portal for defectors to register their support for overthrowing the regime, offering an amnesty to those who sign up and help support a popular uprising. By July, he told POLITICO, 50,000 apparent regime defectors had used the system.  His team are now wary of making claims regarding the total number of defectors, beyond saying “tens of thousands” have registered. These have to be verified, and any regime trolls or spies rooted out. But Pahlavi’s allies say a large number of new defectors made contact via the portal as the protests gathered pace in recent days.  REGIME CHANGE In his conversations with POLITICO last year, Pahlavi insisted he didn’t want the United States or Israel to get involved directly and drive out the supreme leader and his lieutenants. He always said the regime would be destroyed by a combination of fracturing from within and pressure from popular unrest.  He’s also been critical of the reluctance of European governments to challenge the regime and of their preference to continue diplomatic efforts, which he has described as appeasement. European powers, especially France, Germany and the U.K., have historically had a significant role in managing the West’s relations with Iran, notably in designing the 2015 nuclear deal that sought to limit Tehran’s uranium enrichment program.  But Pahlavi’s allies want more support and vocal condemnation from Europe. U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in his first term and wasted little time on diplomacy in his second. He ordered American military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year, as part of Israel’s 12-day war, action that many analysts and Pahlavi’s team agree leaves the clerical elite and its vast security apparatus weaker than ever.  U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in his first term and wasted little time on diplomacy in his second. | Pool photo by Bonnie Cash via EPA Pahlavi remains in close contact with members of the Trump administration, as well as other governments including in Germany, France and the U.K. He has met U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio several times and said he regards him as “the most astute and understanding” holder of that office when it comes to Iran since the 1979 revolution.  In recent days Trump has escalated his threats to intervene, including potentially through more military action if Iran’s rulers continue their crackdown and kill large numbers of protesters.  On the weekend Pahlavi urged Trump to follow through. “Mr President,” he posted on X Sunday. “Your words of solidarity have given Iranians the strength to fight for freedom,” he said. “Help them liberate themselves and Make Iran Great Again!” THE CARETAKER KING  In June Pahlavi announced he was ready to replace Khamenei’s administration to lead the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.   “Once the regime collapses, we have to have a transitional government as quickly as possible,” he told POLITICO last year. He proposed that a constitutional conference should be held among Iranian representatives to devise a new settlement, to be ratified by the people in a referendum.  The day after that referendum is held, he told POLITICO in February, “that’s the end of my mission in life.”  Asked if he wanted to see a monarchy restored, he said in June: “Democratic options should be on the table. I’m not going to be the one to decide that. My role however is to make sure that no voice is left behind. That all opinions should have the chance to argue their case — it doesn’t matter if they are republicans or monarchists, it doesn’t matter if they’re on the left of center or the right.”  One option he hasn’t apparently excluded might be to restore a permanent monarchy, with a democratically elected government serving in his name.  Pahlavi says he has three clear principles for establishing a new democracy: protecting Iran’s territorial integrity; a secular democratic system that separates religion from the government; and “every principle of human rights incorporated into our laws.” He confirmed to POLITICO that this would include equality and protection against discrimination for all citizens, regardless of their sexual or religious orientation.  COME-BACK CAPITALISM  Over the past year, Pahlavi has been touring Western capitals meeting politicians as well as senior business figures and investors from the world of banking and finance. Iran is a major OPEC oil producer and has the second biggest reserves of natural gas in the world, “which could supply Europe for a long time to come,” he said.  “Iran is the most untapped reserve for foreign investment,” Pahlavi said in February. “If Silicon Valley was to commit for a $100 billion investment, you could imagine what sort of impact that could have. The sky is the limit.”  What he wants to bring about, he says, is a “democratic culture” — even more than any specific laws that stipulate forms of democratic government. He pointed to Iran’s past under the Pahlavi monarchy, saying his grandfather remains a respected figure as a modernizer.  “If it becomes an issue of the family, my grandfather today is the most revered political figure in the architect of modern Iran,” he said in February. “Every chant of the streets of ‘god bless his soul.’ These are the actual slogans people chant on the street as they enter or exit a soccer stadium. Why? Because the intent was patriotic, helping Iran come out of the dark ages. There was no aspect of secular modern institutions from a postal system to a modern army to education which was in the hands of the clerics.”   Pahlavi’s father, the shah, brought in an era of industrialization and economic improvement alongside greater freedom for women, he said. “This is where the Gen Z of Iran is,” he said. “Regardless of whether I play a direct role or not, Iranians are coming out of the tunnel.”  Conversely, many Iranians still associate his father’s regime with out-of-touch elites and the notorious Savak secret police, whose brutality helped fuel the 1979 revolution. NOT SO FAST  Nobody can be sure what happens next in Iran. It may still come down to Trump and perhaps Israel.  Anti-regime demonstrations fill the streets of more than 100 towns and cities across the country of 90 million people. | Neil Hall/EPA Plenty of experts don’t believe the regime is finished, though it is clearly weakened. Even if the protests do result in change, many say it seems more likely that the regime will use a mixture of fear tactics and adaptation to protect itself rather than collapse or be toppled completely.  While reports suggest young people have led the protests and appear to have grown in confidence, recent days have seen a more ferocious regime response, with accounts of hospitals being overwhelmed with shooting victims. The demonstrations could still be snuffed out by a regime with a capacity for violence.  The Iranian opposition remains hugely fragmented, with many leading activists in prison. The substantial diaspora has struggled to find a unity of voice, though Pahlavi tried last year to bring more people on board with his own movement.  Sanam Vakil, an Iran specialist at the Chatham House think tank in London, said Iran should do better than reviving a “failed” monarchy. She added she was unsure how wide Pahlavi’s support really was inside the country. Independent, reliable polling is hard to find and memories of the darker side of the shah’s era run deep. But the exiled prince’s advantage now may be that there is no better option to oversee the collapse of the clerics and map out what comes next. “Pahlavi has name recognition and there is no other clear individual to turn to,” Vakil said. “People are willing to listen to his comments calling on them to go out in the streets.”

Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and host of the weekly podcast “World Review with Ivo Daalder.” He writes POLITICO’s From Across the Pond column In justifying his military operation against Venezuela, U.S. President Donald Trump reached back in time over two centuries and grabbed hold of the Monroe Doctrine. But it’s another 19th-century interest that propelled his extraordinary gambit in the first place — oil. According to the New York Times, what started as an effort to press the Venezuelan regime to cede power and end the flow of drugs and immigrants into the U.S., began shifting into a determination to seize the country’s oil last fall. And the president was the driving force behind this shift. That’s hardly surprising though — Trump has been obsessed with oil for decades, even as most of the world is actively trying to leave it behind. As far back as the 1980s, Trump was complaining about the U.S. protecting Japan, Saudi Arabia and others to secure the free flow of oil. “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” he wrote in a 1987 newspaper ad. Having supported the Iraq War from the outset, he later complained that the U.S. hadn’t sufficiently benefited from it. “I would take the oil,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2011. “I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take the oil.” That same year, he also dismissed humanitarian concerns in Libya, saying: “I am only interested in Libya if we take the oil.” In justifying his military operation against Venezuela, U.S. President Donald Trump reached back in time over two centuries and grabbed hold of the Monroe Doctrine. | Henry Chirinos/EPA Unsurprisingly, “take the oil” later became the mantra for Trump’s first presidential campaign — and for his first term in office. Complaining that the U.S. got “nothing” for all the money it spent invading Iraq: “It used to be, ‘To the victor belong the spoils’ … I always said, ‘Take the oil,’” he griped during a Commander in Chief Forum in 2016. As president, he also insisted on keeping U.S. forces in Syria for that very reason in 2019. “I like oil,” he said, “we’re keeping the oil.” But while Iraq, Libya and even Syria were all conflicts initiated by Trump’s predecessors, Venezuela is quite another matter. Weeks before seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump made clear what needed to happen: On Dec. 16, 2025, he announced an oil blockade of the country “until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” Then, after capturing Maduro, Trump declared the U.S. would “run the country” in order to get its oil. “We’re in the oil business,” he stated. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies … go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money.” “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Trump insisted. “It goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.” On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced that Venezuela would ship its oil to the U.S. “and then infinitely, going forward, we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace,” effectively declaring the expropriation of Venezuela’s most important national resources. All of this reeks of 19th-century imperialism. But the problem with Trump’s oil obsession goes deeper than his urge to steal it from others — by force if necessary. He is fixated on a depleting resource of steadily declining importance. And yet, this doesn’t seem to matter. Throughout his reelection campaign, Trump still emphasized the need to produce more oil. “Drill, baby, drill” became as central to his energy policy as “take the oil” was to his views on military intervention. He called on oil executives to raise $1 billion for his campaign, promising his administration would be “a great deal” for their industry. And he talked incessantly of the large reservoirs of “liquid gold” in the U.S., claiming: “We’re going to make a fortune.” But these weren’t just campaign promises. Upon his return to office, Trump unleashed the full force of the U.S. government to boost oil production at home and exports abroad. He established a National Energy Dominance Council, opened protected lands in Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas exploration, signed a mandate for immediate offshore oil and gas leases into law, and accelerated permitting reforms to speed up pipeline construction, refinery expansion and liquid natural gas exports. At the same time, he’s been castigating efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of a climate change “hoax,” he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement once again, and he took a series of steps to end the long-term transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. He signed a law ending credits and subsidies to encourage residential solar and electric vehicle purchases, invoked national security to halt offshore wind production and terminated grants encouraging renewable energy production. Then, after capturing Nicolás Maduro, Trump declared the U.S. would “run the country” in order to get its oil. | Henry Chirinos/EPA The problem with all these efforts is that the U.S. is now banking on fossil fuels, precisely as their global future is waning. Today, oil production is already outpacing consumption, and global demand is expected to peak later this decade. Over the last 12 months, the cost of oil has decreased by over 23 percent, pricing further exploration and production increasingly out of the market. Meanwhile, renewable energy is becoming vastly more cost-effective. The future, increasingly, lies in renewables to drive our cars; heat, cool and light up our homes; power our data centers, advanced manufacturing factories and everything else that sustains our lives on Earth. By harnessing the power of the sun, the force of wind and the heat of the Earth, China is building its future on inexhaustible resources. And while Beijing is leading the way, many others are following in its footsteps. All this, just as the U.S. goes back to relying on an exhaustive fossil fuel supply. What Trump is betting on is becoming the world’s largest — and last — petrostate. China is betting on becoming its largest and lasting electrostate. Which side would you rather be on?

DUBLIN — Neutral and poorly armed Ireland — long viewed as “Europe’s blind spot” — announced Thursday it will spend €1.7 billion on improved military equipment, capabilities and facilities to deter drones and potential Russian sabotage of undersea cables. The five-year plan, published as Defense Minister Helen McEntee visited the Curragh army base near Dublin,  aims in part to reassure European allies that their leaders will be safe from attack when Ireland — a non-NATO member largely dependent on neighboring Britain for its security — hosts key EU summits in the second half of next year. McEntee said Ireland intends to buy and deploy €19 million in counter-drone technology “as soon as possible, not least because of the upcoming European presidency.” Ireland’s higher military spending — representing a 55 percent increase from previous commitments — comes barely a week after a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy exposed Ireland’s inability to secure its own seas and skies. Five unmarked drones buzzed an Irish naval vessel supposed to be guarding the flight path of Zelenskyy’s plane shortly after the Ukrainian leader touched down at Dublin Airport. The Irish ship didn’t fire at the drones, which eventually disappeared. Irish authorities have been unable to identify their source, but suspect that they were operated from an unidentified ship later spotted in European Space Agency satellite footage. The Russian embassy in Dublin denied any involvement. Ireland’s navy has just eight ships, but sufficient crews to operate only two at a time, even though the country has vast territorial waters containing critical undersea infrastructure and pipelines that supply three-fourths of Ireland’s natural gas. The country has no fighter jets and no military-grade radar and sonar. Some but not all of those critical gaps will be plugged by 2028, McEntee pledged. She said Ireland would roll out military-grade radar starting next year, buy sonar systems for the navy, and acquire up to a dozen helicopters, including four already ordered from Airbus. The army would upgrade its Swiss-made fleet of 80 Piranha III armored vehicles and develop drone and anti-drone units. The air force’s fixed-wing aircraft will be replaced by 2030 — probably by what would be Ireland’s first wing of combat fighters. Thursday’s announcement coincided with publication of an independent assessment of Ireland’s rising security vulnerabilities on land, sea and air. The report, coauthored by the Dublin-based think tank IIEA and analysts at Deloitte, found that U.S. multinationals operating in Ireland were at risk of cyberattacks and espionage by Russian, Chinese and Indian intelligence agents operating in the country.

The soldiers separated the villagers by gender and stripped them of their money and phones. Around 180 people, mostly men, were crammed into two shipping containers. A woman gave birth beside the doors. No one was given food or water. Then, over three months, the soldiers took most of the men away and executed them. These scenes — detailed in a human rights report commissioned by the Netherlands — lay out further evidence that Mozambican government soldiers in the pay of TotalEnergies were responsible for a 2021 massacre first revealed by POLITICO. They are based on the testimony of four witnesses to a July-September 2021 massacre in the makeshift gatehouse of a vast gas plant being built by the French energy giant in northern Mozambique. Only 26 of the imprisoned men would survive.  Released this week as the British and Dutch governments announced they were pulling some $2.2 billion in support for the gas plant, the collected accounts closely match those from a 2024 investigation by POLITICO. They pile further pressure on a project already plagued by a local insurgency and two criminal cases.  On Tuesday, after the release of the report, TotalEnergies said its stance on the massacre remained unaltered. It has previously claimed its own “extensive research” into the allegations has “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.” The four accounts — from a survivor, a person who knew one of those detained, and two eyewitnesses — were collected independently of each other and from POLITICO, which was not informed that the government-funded think tank Clingendael was reinvestigating the atrocity.  Total’s project in Mozambique has an estimated cost of $20.5 billion. | Gallo Images/Getty Images They will provide further ammunition for a criminal complaint alleging that TotalEnergies was complicit in war crimes because it “directly financed and materially supported” Mozambican soldiers protecting its compound from an ISIS-linked insurgency.  The company has said it “firmly rejects all such accusations.” In March, a French state prosecutor also announced the opening of a formal criminal investigation into TotalEnergies over allegations of involuntary manslaughter at its Mozambican operation.  At the center of that inquiry is an accusation that, three months before the container killings, the company abandoned contractors who were building its gas plant to a devastating ISIS attack in March 2021 on the adjacent town of Palma. A house-to-house survey carried out by POLITICO found 1,354 civilians were killed in that attack, 330 of them beheaded. Other reporting established that 55 of those dead were from TotalEnergies’ workforce. The company, which has claimed it lost none of its workforce during the attack, denies the accusations. WIDESPREAD ABUSE The Dutch report indicates the container massacre was part of a systematic pattern of mass rape and execution in reprisal for the ISIS attack carried out by the army against villagers living around TotalEnergies’ plant.  With ISIS militants roaming the area for weeks after their attack on Palma, 25,000 to 30,000 people sought shelter outside Total’s gates, which “exacerbated the already dire humanitarian situation,” the report reads.  “By June 2021, the situation had become catastrophic, with people (including many children) reported to be dying on a daily basis due to starvation, disease or a lack of medical treatment,” the report reads. The army’s response was to steal aid, and sell looted food at inflated prices. It was also at this point that an army “unable to distinguish ‘villagers’ from ‘terrorists,’” took its revenge on the civilian population.  “Villagers reported discovering bodies in surrounding farmland, widely believed to be victims of [army] violence,” reads the report.  “Eyewitnesses also reported cases of sexual violence. In [one village], locals described drunk soldiers entering homes without permission and raping women.”  In another village, a random survey of 60 households found that 57 percent of them had at least one member who had been killed.  Those crammed by the soldiers into the containers endured three months of physical abuse, according to the report. According to the survivor, one day a large group was taken away. “Others were removed in smaller groups, never to return. The survivor believes that they were interrogated and executed.”  Human rights and environmental campaigners called on TotalEnergies to reconsider its project in the light of the loss of life and abuse. | Luisa Nhantumbo/EPA Upon their release, a survivor said that a soldier told them never to talk about the killings. “Those who died, died — it was war,” the soldier said. “If anyone asks, say the others were in different containers and are still coming.” In May, an investigation by U.K. Export Finance, which had pledged to lend Total’s project $1.15 billion, heard directly from two of the 26 survivors of the atrocity via video calls from Mozambique. The British state lender has not yet made its findings public. Total’s project in Mozambique has an estimated cost of $20.5 billion. It is part of a wider natural gas development that, at $50 billion, was once hailed as the largest private investment ever made in Africa. PROCEEDING AS PLANNED In the wake of the Dutch report, human rights and environmental campaigners called on TotalEnergies to reconsider its project in the light of the loss of life and abuse. “It has been blatantly clear for years that this project is a disaster for local communities and for the climate,” said Antoine Bouhey of Reclaim Finance. Adam McGibbon of Oil Change International called on other lenders to “pull out too and put an end to this nightmare project forever.” On Tuesday, TotalEnergies said its gas project was proceeding as planned and that its other lenders had “unanimously agreed to provide additional equity” to fill the shortfall created by the British and Dutch withdrawal. 

BRUSSELS — The European Commission has unveiled a new plan to end the dominance of planet-heating fossil fuels in Europe’s economy — and replace them with trees. The so-called Bioeconomy Strategy, released Thursday, aims to replace fossil fuels in products like plastics, building materials, chemicals and fibers with organic materials that regrow, such as trees and crops. “The bioeconomy holds enormous opportunities for our society, economy and industry, for our farmers and foresters and small businesses and for our ecosystem,” EU environment chief Jessika Roswall said on Thursday, in front of a staged backdrop of bio-based products, including a bathtub made of wood composite and clothing from the H&M “Conscious” range. At the center of the strategy is carbon, the fundamental building block of a wide range of manufactured products, not just energy. Almost all plastic, for example, is made from carbon, and currently most of that carbon comes from oil and natural gas. But fossil fuels have two major drawbacks: they pollute the atmosphere with planet-warming CO2, and they are mostly imported from outside the EU, compromising the bloc’s strategic autonomy. The bioeconomy strategy aims to address both drawbacks by using locally produced or recycled carbon-rich biomass rather than imported fossil fuels. It proposes doing this by setting targets in relevant legislation, such as the EU’s packaging waste laws, helping bioeconomy startups access finance, harmonizing the regulatory regime and encouraging new biomass supply. The 23-page strategy is light on legislative or funding promises, mostly piggybacking on existing laws and funds. Still, it was hailed by industries that stand to gain from a bigger market for biological materials. “The forest industry welcomes the Commission’s growth-oriented approach for bioeconomy,” said Viveka Beckeman, director general of the Swedish Forest Industries Federation, stressing the need to “boost the use of biomass as a strategic resource that benefits not only green transition and our joint climate goals but the overall economic security.” HOW RENEWABLE IS IT? But environmentalists worry Brussels may be getting too chainsaw-happy. Trees don’t grow back at the drop of a hat and pressure on natural ecosystems is already unsustainably high. Scientific reports show that the amount of carbon stored in the EU’s forests and soils is decreasing, the bloc’s natural habitats are in poor condition and biodiversity is being lost at unprecedented rates. Protecting the bloc’s forests has also fallen out of fashion among EU lawmakers. The EU’s landmark anti-deforestation law is currently facing a second, year-long delay after a vote in the European Parliament this week. In October, the Parliament also voted to scrap a law to monitor the health of Europe’s forests to reduce paperwork. Environmentalists warn the bloc may simply not have enough biomass to meet the increasing demand. “Instead of setting a strategy that confronts Europe’s excessive demand for resources, the Commission clings to the illusion that we can simply replace our current consumption with bio-based inputs, overlooking the serious and immediate harm this will inflict on people and nature,” said Eva Bille, the European Environmental Bureau’s (EEB) circular economy head, in a statement. TOO WOOD TO BE TRUE Environmental groups want the Commission to prioritize the use of its biological resources in long-lasting products — like construction — rather than lower-value or short-lived uses, like single-use packaging or fuel. A first leak of the proposal, obtained by POLITICO, gave environmental groups hope. It celebrated new opportunities for sustainable bio-based materials while also warning that the “sources of primary biomass must be sustainable and the pressure on ecosystems must be considerably reduced” — to ensure those opportunities are taken up in the longer term. It also said the Commission would work on “disincentivising inefficient biomass combustion” and substituting it with other types of renewable energy. That rankled industry lobbies. Craig Winneker, communications director of ethanol lobby ePURE, complained that the document’s language “continues an unfortunate tradition in some quarters of the Commission of completely ignoring how sustainable biofuels are produced in Europe,” arguing that the energy is “actually a co-product along with food, feed, and biogenic CO2.” Now, those lines pledging to reduce environmental pressures and to disincentivize inefficient biomass combustion are gone. “Bioenergy continues to play a role in energy security, particularly where it uses residues, does not increase water and air pollution, and complements other renewables,” the final text reads. “This is a crucial omission, given that the EU’s unsustainable production and consumption are already massively overshooting ecological boundaries and putting people, nature and businesses at risk,” said the EEB. Delara Burkhardt, a member of the European Parliament with the center-left Socialists and Democrats, said it was “good that the strategy recognizes the need to source biomass sustainably,” but added the proposal did not address sufficiency. “Simply replacing fossil materials with bio-based ones at today’s levels of consumption risks increasing pressure on ecosystems. That shifts problems rather than solving them. We need to reduce overall resource use, not just switch inputs,” she said. Roswall declined to comment on the previous draft at Thursday’s press conference. “I think that we need to increase the resources that we have, and that is what this strategy is trying to do,” she said.

BRUSSELS — On the same day world leaders arrived at the COP30 summit in Brazil to push for more action on climate change, Greece announced it will start drilling for fossil fuels in the Mediterranean Sea — with U.S. help. Under the deal, America’s biggest oil company, ExxonMobil, will explore for natural gas in waters northwest of the picturesque island of Corfu, alongside Greece’s Energean and HELLENiQ ENERGY. It’s the first time in more than four decades that Greece has opened its waters for gas exploration — and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming it as a victory in its push to derail climate action and boost the global dominance of the U.S. fossil fuel industry. It comes three weeks after the U.S. successfully halted a global deal to put a carbon tax on shipping, with the support of Greece. “There is no energy transition, there is just energy addition,” said U.S. Interior Secretary and energy czar Doug Burgum, who was present at the signing ceremony in Athens on Thursday, alongside U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and the new U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. “Greece is taking its own natural resources, and we are working all together toward energy abundance,” Burgum added, describing Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis as a leader who “bucks the trend.” Only a few hours later, U.N. secretary-general Antonio Guterrez made an impassioned plea for countries to stop exploring for coal, oil and gas. “I’ve consistently advocated against more coal plants and fossil fuel exploration and expansion,” he said at a COP30 leaders’ summit in Belém, Brazil. Donald Trump was not among the many world leaders present. NOT LISTENING “America is back and drilling in the Ionian Sea,” said Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador, at the Athens ceremony. Drilling for natural gas — a fossil fuel that is a major contributor to global warming — is expected to start late next year, or early 2027. Greece’s Minister of Environment and Energy, Stavros Papastavrou, hailed the agreement as a “historic signing” that ends a 40-year hiatus in exploration. Last month, Greece and Cyprus — both major maritime countries — were the only two EU countries that voted to halt action for a year on a historic effort to tax climate pollution from shipping. Greece claimed its decision had nothing to do with U.S. pressure, which several people familiar with the situation said included threats to negotiators. Thursday’s ceremony took place on the sidelines of the sixth Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation (P-TEC) conference, organized in Athens by the U.S. and Greek governments, along with the Atlantic Council. Greece aims to showcase its importance as an entry point for American liquefied natural gas (LNG), bolstering Europe’s independence from Russian gas. LNG from Greece’s Revithoussa terminal is set to reach Ukraine this winter through the newly activated “Vertical Corridor,” an energy route linking Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova.

President Donald Trump is no longer content to stand aloof from the global alliance trying to combat climate change. His new goal is to demolish it — and replace it with a new coalition reliant on U.S. fossil fuels. Trump’s increasingly assertive energy diplomacy is one of the biggest challenges awaiting the world leaders, diplomats and business luminaries gathering for a United Nations summit in Brazil to try to advance the fight against global warming. The U.S. president will not be there — unlike the leaders of countries including France, Germany and the United Kingdom, who will speak before delegates from nearly 200 nations on Thursday and Friday. But his efforts to undermine the Paris climate agreement already loom over the talks, as does his initial success in drawing support from other countries. “It’s not enough to just withdraw from” the 2015 pact and the broader U.N. climate framework that governs the annual talks, said Richard Goldberg, who worked as a top staffer on Trump’s White House National Energy Dominance Council and is now senior adviser to the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “You have to degrade it. You have to deter it. You have to potentially destroy it.” Trump’s approach includes striking deals demanding that Japan, Europe and other trading partners buy more U.S. natural gas and oil, using diplomatic strong-arming to deter foreign leaders from cutting fossil fuel pollution, and making the United States inhospitable to clean energy investment. Unlike during his first term, when Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement but sent delegates to the annual U.N. climate talks anyway, he now wants to render them ineffective and starved of purpose by drawing as many other countries as possible away from their own clean energy goals, according to Cabinet officials’ public remarks and interviews with 20 administration allies and alumni, foreign diplomats and veterans of the annual climate negotiations. Those efforts are at odds with the goals of the climate summits, which included a Biden administration-backed pledge two years ago for the world to transition away from fossil fuels. Slowing or reversing that shift could send global temperatures soaring above the goals set in Paris a decade ago, threatening a spike in the extreme weather that is already pummeling countries and economies. The White House says Trump’s campaign to unleash American oil, gas and coal is for the United States’ benefit — and the world’s. “The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda — which is focused on utilizing the liquid gold under our feet to strengthen our grid stability and drive down costs for American families and businesses,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.” ‘WOULD LIKE TO SEE THE PARIS AGREEMENT DIE’ The Trump administration is declining to send any high-level representatives to the COP30 climate talks, which will formally begin Monday in Belém, Brazil, according to a White House official who declined to comment on the record about whether any U.S. government officials would participate. Trump’s view that the annual negotiations are antithetical to his energy and economic agenda is also spreading among other Republican officials. Many GOP leaders, including 17 state attorneys general, argued last month that attending the summit would only legitimize the proceedings and its expected calls for ditching fossil fuels more swiftly. Climate diplomats from other countries say they’ve gotten the message about where the U.S. stands now — and are prepared to act without Washington. “We have a large country, a president, and a vice president who would like to see the Paris Agreement die,” Laurence Tubiana, the former French government official credited as a key architect of the 2015 climate pact, said of the United States. “The U.S. will not play a major role” at the summit, said Jochen Flasbarth, undersecretary in the German Ministry of Environmental Affairs. “The world is collectively outraged, and so we will focus — as will everyone else — on engaging in talks with those who are driving the process forward.” Trump and his allies have described the stakes in terms of a zero-sum contest between the United States and its main economic rival, China: Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they say, are a complete win for China, which sells the bulk of the world’s solar, wind, battery and electric vehicle technology. That’s a contrast from the approach of former President Joe Biden, who pushed a massive U.S. investment in green technologies as the only way for America to outcompete China in developing the energy sources of the future. In the Trump worldview, stalling that energy transition benefits the United States, the globe’s top producer of oil and natural gas, along with many of the technologies and services to produce, transport and burn the stuff. “If [other countries] don’t rely on this technology, then that’s less power to China,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who served in the U.S. Transportation Department during Trump’s first term and is now director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. TRUMP FINDS ALLIES THIS TIME Two big developments have shaped the president’s new thinking on how to counteract the international fight against climate change, said George David Banks, who was Trump’s international climate adviser during the first administration. The first was the Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed and Biden signed in 2022, which promised hundreds of billions of dollars to U.S. clean energy projects. Banks said the legislation, enacted entirely on partisan lines, made renewable energy a political target in the minds of Trump and his fossil-fuel backers. The second is Trump’s aggressive use of U.S. trading power during his second term to wring concessions from foreign governments, Banks said. Trump has required his agencies to identify obstacles for U.S. exports, and the United Nations’ climate apparatus may be deemed a barrier for sales of oil, gas and coal. Trump’s strategy is resonating with some fossil fuel-supporting nations, potentially testing the climate change comity at COP30. Those include emerging economies in Africa and Latin America, petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, and European nations feeling a cost-of-living strain that is feeding a resurgent right wing. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright drew applause in March at a Washington gathering called the Powering Africa Summit, where he called it “nonsense” for financiers and Western nations to vilify coal-fired power. He also asserted that U.S. natural gas exports could supply African and Asian nations with more of their electricity. Wright cast the goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas pollution by 2050 — the target dozens of nations have embraced — as “sinister,” contending it consigns developing nations to poverty and lower living standards. The U.S. about-face was welcome, Sierra Leone mining and minerals minister Julius Daniel Mattai said during the conference. Western nations had kneecapped financing for offshore oil investments and worked to undercut public backing for fossil fuel projects, Mattai said, criticizing Biden’s administration for only being interested in renewable energy. But now Trump has created room for nations to use their own resources, Mattai said. “With the new administration having such a massive appetite for all sorts of energy mixes, including oil and gas, we do believe there’s an opportunity to explore our offshore oil investments,” he said in an interview. TURNING UP THE HEAT ON TRADING PARTNERS Still, Banks acknowledged that Trump probably can’t halt the spread of clean energy. Fossil fuels may continue to supply energy in emerging economies for some time, he said, but the private sector remains committed to clean energy to meet the U.N.’s goals of curbing climate change. That doesn’t mean Trump won’t try. The administration’s intent to pressure foreign leaders into a more fossil-fuel-friendly stance was on full display last month at a London meeting of the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization where U.S. Cabinet secretaries and diplomats succeeded in thwarting a proposed carbon emissions tax on global shipping. That coup followed a similar push against Beijing a month earlier, when Mexico — the world’s biggest buyer of Chinese cars — slapped a 50 percent tariff on automotive imports from China after pressure from the Trump administration. China accused the U.S. of “coercion.” Trump’s attempt to flood global markets with ever growing amounts of U.S. fossil fuels is even more ambitious, though so far incomplete. The EU and Japan — under threat of tariffs — have promised to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on U.S. energy products. But so far, new and binding contracts have not appeared. Trump has also tried to push China, Japan and South Korea to invest in a $44 billion liquefied natural gas project in Alaska, so far to no avail. In the face of potential tariffs and other U.S. pressure, European ministers and diplomats are selling the message that victory at COP30 might simply come in the form of presenting a united front in favor of climate action. That could mean joining with other major economies such as China and India, and forming common cause with smaller, more vulnerable countries, to show that Trump is isolated. “I’m sure the EU and China will find themselves on opposite sides of many debates,” said the EU’s lead climate negotiator, Jacob Werksman. “But we have ways of working with them. … We are both betting heavily on the green transition.” Avoiding a faceplant may actually be easier if the Trump administration does decide to turn up in Brazil, said Li Shuo, the director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington. “If the U.S. is there and active, I’d expect the rest of the world, including the EU and China, to rest aside their rhetorical games in front of a larger challenge,” Li wrote via text. And for countries attending COP, there is still some hope of a long-term win. Solar, wind, geothermal and other clean energy investments are continuing apace, even if Trump and the undercurrents that led to his reelection have hindered them, said Nigel Purvis, CEO of climate consulting firm Climate Advisers and a former State Department climate official. Trump’s attempts to kill the shipping fee, EU methane pollution rules and Europe’s corporate sustainability framework are one thing, Purvis said. But when it comes to avoiding Trump’s retribution, there is “safety in numbers” for the rest of the world that remains in the Paris Agreement, he added. And even if the progress is slower than originally hoped, those nations have committed to shifting their energy systems off fossil fuels. “We’re having slower climate action than otherwise would be the case. But we’re really talking about whether Trump is going to be able to blow up the regime,” Purvis said. “And I think the answer is ‘No.’” Nicolas Camut in Paris, Zia Weise in Brussels and Josh Groeneveld in Berlin contributed to this report.

It’s been a decade since the U.S. and Europe pushed the world to embrace a historic agreement to stop the planet’s runaway warming. The deal among nearly 200 nations offered a potential “turning point for the world,” then-U.S. President Barack Obama said. Eventually, almost every country on Earth signed the 2015 Paris Agreement, a pact whose success would rest on peer pressure, rising ambition and the economics of a clean energy revolution. But 10 years later, the actions needed to fulfill those hopes are falling short. The United States has quit the deal — twice. President Donald Trump is throttling green energy projects at home and finding allies to help him undermine climate initiatives abroad, while inking trade deals that commit countries to buying more U.S. fossil fuels. Europe remains on track to meet its climate commitments, but its resolve is wavering, as price-weary voters and the rise of far-right parties raise doubts about how quickly the bloc can deliver its pledge to turn away from fossil fuels. Paris has helped ingrain climate change awareness in popular culture and policy, led countries and companies to pledge to cut their carbon pollution to zero and helped steer a wave of investments into clean energy. Scientists say it appears to have lessened the odds of the most catastrophic levels of warming. On the downside, oil and gas production hasn’t yet peaked, and climate pollution and temperatures are still rising — with the latter just tenths of a degree from the tipping point agreed in Paris. But the costs of green energy have fallen so much that, in most parts of the world, it’s the cheapest form of power and is being installed at rates unthinkable 10 years ago. World leaders and diplomats who are in Brazil starting this week for the United Nations’ annual climate talks will face a test to stand up for Paris in the face of Trump’s opposition while highlighting that its goals are both necessary and beneficial. The summit in the Amazonian port city of Belém was supposed to be the place where rich and poor countries would celebrate their progress and commit themselves to ever-sharper cuts in greenhouse gas pollution. Instead, U.S. contempt for global climate efforts and a muddled message from Europe are adding headwinds to a moment that is far more turbulent than the one in which the Paris Agreement was adopted. Some climate veterans are still optimists — to a point. “I think that the basic architecture is resistant to Trump’s destruction,” said John Podesta, chair of the board of the liberal Center for American Progress, who coordinated climate policy under Obama and former President Joe Biden. But that resistance could wilt if the U.S. stays outside the agreement, depriving the climate movement of American leadership and support, he said. “If all that’s gone, and it’s gone for a long time, I don’t know whether the structure holds together,” Podesta added. Other climate diplomats say the cooperative spirit of 2015 would be hard to recreate now, which is why acting on Paris is so essential. “If we had to renegotiate Paris today, we’d never get the agreement that we had 10 years ago,” said Rachel Kyte, the United Kingdom’s special climate representative. “But we can also look to these extraordinary data points, which show that the direction of travel is very clear,” she said, referring to growth of clean energy. “And most people who protect where their money is going to be are interested in that direction of travel.” THE PARIS PARADOX One thing that hasn’t faded is the business case for clean energy. If anything, the economic drivers behind the investments that Paris helped unleash have surpassed even what the Paris deal’s authors anticipated. But the political will to keep countries driving forward has stalled in some places as the United States — the world’s largest economy, sole military superpower and historically biggest climate polluter — attacks its very foundation. Trump’s attempts to undermine the agreement, summed up by the 2017 White House slogan “Pittsburgh, not Paris,” has affected European ambitions as well, French climate diplomat Laurence Tubiana told reporters late last month. “I have never seen such aggressivity against national climate policy all over because of the U.S.,” said Tubiana, a key architect of the Paris Agreement. “So we are really confronted with an ideological battle, a cultural battle, where climate is in that package the U.S. government wants to defeat.” The White House said Trump is focused on developing U.S. oil and engaging with world leaders on energy issues, rather than what it dubs the “green new scam.” The U.S. will not send high-level representatives to COP30. “The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda,” said Taylor Rogers, a spokesperson. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.” Trump is not the only challenge facing Paris, of course. Even under Obama, the U.S. insisted that the Paris climate pollution targets had to be nonbinding, avoiding the need for a Senate ratification vote that would most likely fail. But unlike previous climate pacts that the U.S. had declined to join, all countries — including, most notably, China — would have to submit a pollution-cutting plan. The accord left it up to the governments themselves to carry out their own pledges and to push laggards to do better. An unusual confluence of political winds helped drive the bargaining. Obama, who was staking part of his legacy on getting a global climate agreement, had spent the year leading up to Paris negotiating a separate deal with China in which both countries committed to cutting their world-leading pollution. France, the host of the Paris talks, was also determined to strike a worldwide pact. In the year that followed, more than 160 countries submitted their initial plans to tackle climate change domestically and began working to finish the rules that would undergird the agreement. “The Paris Agreement isn’t a machine that churns out ambition. It basically reflects back to us the level of ambition that we have agreed to … and suggests what else is needed to get back on track,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president for international strategies at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and a negotiator for the United Kingdom during the Paris talks. “Whether countries do that or not, it’s essentially then a matter for them.” Catherine McKenna, Canada’s former environment minister and a lead negotiator of the Paris Agreement’s carbon crediting mechanism, called the deal an “incredible feat” — but not a self-executing one. “The problem is now it’s really up to countries as well as cities, regions, companies and financial institutions to act,” she said. “It’s not a treaty thing anymore — it’s now, ‘Do the work.’” WHEN GREEN TURNS GRAY Signs of discord are not hard to find around the globe. China is tightening its grip on clean energy manufacturing and exports, ensuring more countries have access to low-cost renewables, but creating tensions in places that also want to benefit from jobs and revenue from making those goods and fear depending too much on one country. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former United Nations climate envoy, eliminated his country’s consumer carbon tax and is planning to tap more natural gas to toughen economic defenses against the United States. The European Union spent the past five years developing a vast web of green regulations and sectoral measures, and the bloc estimates that it’s roughly on track to meet those goals. But many of the EU’s 27 governments — under pressure from the rising far right, high energy prices, the decline of traditional industry and Russia’s war against Ukraine — are now demanding that the EU reevaluate many of those policies. Still, views within the bloc diverge sharply, with some pushing for small tweaks and others for rolling back large swaths of legislation. “Europe must remain a continent of consistency,” French President Emmanuel Macron said after a meeting of EU leaders in October. “It must step up on competitiveness, but it must not give up on its [climate] goals.” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in contrast, said after the same meeting that he felt vindicated about his country’s long-standing opposition to the EU’s green agenda: “In most European capitals, people today think differently about these exaggerated European climate ambitions.” Worldwide, most countries have not submitted their latest carbon-cutting plans to the United Nations. While the plans that governments have announced mostly expand on their previous ones, they still make only modest reductions against what is needed to limit Earth’s warming since the preindustrial era to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Exceeding that threshold, scientists say, would lead to more lives lost and physical and economic damage that would be ever harder to recover from with each tenth of a degree of additional warming. The U.N.’s latest report showing the gap between countries’ new pledges and the Paris targets found that the world is on track for between 2.3 and 2.5 degrees of warming, a marginal difference from plans submitted in 2020 that is largely canceled out when the U.S. pledge is omitted. Policies in place now are pointing toward 2.8 degrees of warming. “We need unprecedented cuts to greenhouse gas emissions now in an ever-compressing timeframe and amid a challenging geopolitical context,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme. But doing so also makes sense, she added. “This where the market is showing that these kind of investments in smart, clean and green is actually driving jobs and opportunities. This is where the future lies.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message Tuesday that overshooting the 1.5-degrees target of Paris was now inevitable in the coming years imploring leaders to rapidly roll out renewables and stop expanding oil, gas and coal to ensure that overshoot was short-lived. “We’re in a huge mess,” said Bill Hare, a longtime climate scientist who founded the policy institute Climate Analytics. Greenhouse gas pollution hasn’t fallen, and action has flat lined even as climate-related disasters have increased. “I think what’s upcoming is a major test for the Paris Agreement, probably the major test. Can this agreement move forward under the weight of all of these challenges?” Hare asked. “If it can’t do that, governments are going to be asking about the benefits of it, frankly.” That doesn’t mean all is lost. In 2015, the world was headed for around 4 degrees Celsius of warming, an amount that researchers say would have been devastating for much of the planet. Today, that projection is roughly a degree Celsius lower. “I think a lot of us in Paris were very dubious at the time that we would ever limit warming to 1.5,” said Elliot Diringer, a former climate official who led the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions’ international program during the Paris talks. “The question is whether we are better off by virtue of the Paris Agreement,” he said. “I think the answer is yes. Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not.” GREEN TECHNOLOGY DEFYING EXPECTATIONS In addition, the adoption of clean energy technology has moved even faster than projected — sparking what one climate veteran has called a shift in global climate politics. “We are no longer in a world in which only climate politics has a leading role and a substantial role, but increasingly, climate economics,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015. “Yes, politics is important; no longer as important as it was 10 years ago.” Annual solar deployment globally is 15 times greater than the International Energy Agency predicted in 2015, according to a recent analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a U.K. nonprofit. Renewables now account for more than 90 percent of new power capacity added globally every year, BloombergNEF reported. China is deploying record amounts of renewables and lowering costs for countries such as Brazil and Pakistan, which has seen solar installations skyrocket. Even in the United States, where Trump repealed many of Biden’s tax breaks and other incentives, BloombergNEF predicts that power companies will continue to deploy green sources, in large part because they’re often the fastest source of new electricity. Costs for wind and batteries and falling, too. Electric vehicle sales are soaring in many countries, thanks in large part to the huge number of inexpensive vehicles being pumped out by China’s BYD, the world’s largest EV-maker. Worldwide clean energy investments are now twice as much as fossil fuels spending, according to the International Energy Agency. “Today, you can actually talk about deploying clean energy technologies just because of their cost competitiveness and ability to lower energy system costs,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at the research institution Energy Innovation. “You don’t actually even have to say ‘climate’ for a lot of them, and that just wasn’t true 10 years ago.” The economic trends of the past decade have been striking, said Todd Stern, the U.S. climate envoy who negotiated the Paris Agreement. “Paris is something that was seen all over the world, seen by other countries, seen in boardrooms, as the first time in more than 20 years when you finally got heads of government saying, ‘Yes, let’s do this,’” he said. “And that’s not the only reason why there was tremendous technological development, but it sure didn’t hurt.” Still, limits exist to how far businesses can take the clean energy transition on their own. “You need government intervention of some kind, whether that’s a stick or a carrot, to push the economy towards a low-carbon trajectory,” said Andrew Wilson, deputy secretary general of policy at the International Chamber of Commerce. “If governments press the brakes on climate action or seriously start to soft pedal, then it does have a limiting effect.” Brazil, the host of COP30, says it wants to demonstrate that multilateralism still works and is relevant to peoples’ lives and capable of addressing the climate impacts communities around the world are facing. But the goal of this year’s talks might be even more straightforward, said Guilanpour, the former negotiator. “If we come out of COP30 demonstrating that the Paris Agreement is alive and functioning,” he said, “I think in the current context, that is pretty newsworthy of itself.” Nicolas Camut in Paris, Zi-Ann Lum in Ottawa, Karl Mathiesen in London and Zia Weise in Brussels contributed to this report.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is under mounting pressure from critics to keep the lights and heating on while Vladimir Putin ramps up his military assault on Ukraine’s energy supply. The Ukrainian president is fearful of a public backlash over likely prolonged blackouts this winter and is trying to shift the blame, said the former head of Ukraine’s state-owned national power company. Thirty-nine-year-old Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, who led Ukrenergo until he was forced to resign last year amid infighting over political control of the energy sector, said he’s one of those whom the President’s Office is looking to scapegoat. During an exclusive interview with POLITICO, he predicted Ukraine will face a “very difficult winter” under relentless Russian bombardment — and argued Kyiv’s government has made that worse through a series of missteps. Adding fuel to his clash with Zelenskyy’s team, Kudrytskyi was charged last week with embezzlement, prompting an outcry from Ukraine’s civil society and opposition lawmakers.  They say Kudrytskyi’s arraignment involving a contract — one of hundreds — he authorized seven years ago, when he was a deputy director at Ukrenergo, is a glaring example of the aggressive use of lawfare by the Ukrainian leadership to intimidate opponents, silence critics and obscure their own mistakes. Kudrytskyi added he has no doubt that the charges against him would have to be approved by the President’s Office and “could only have been orchestrated on the orders of Zelenskyy.” Zelenskyy’s office declined to respond to repeated requests from POLITICO for comment. Before his arrest, Kudrytskyi said he was the subject of criticism “by anonymous Telegram channels that support the presidential office with false claims I had embezzled funds.” He took that as the first sign that he would likely be targeted for harsher treatment. Kudrytskyi, who was released Friday on bail, said the criminal charges against him are “nonsense,” but they’ve been leveled so it will be “easier for the President’s Office to sell the idea that I am responsible for the failure to prepare the energy system for the upcoming winter, despite the fact that I have not been at Ukrenergo for more than a year now.” “They’re scared to death” about a public outcry this winter, he added. COMPETING PLANS That public backlash against leadership in Kyiv will be partly justified, Kudrytskyi said, because the struggle to keep the lights on will have been exacerbated by tardiness in rolling out more decentralized power generation. Kudrytskyi said Ukraine’s energy challenge as the days turn colder will be compounded by the government’s failure to promptly act on a plan he presented to Zelenskyy three years ago. The proposal would have decentralized energy generation and shifted away, as quickly as possible, from a system based on huge Soviet-era centralized power plants, more inviting targets for Russian attacks.   Thirty-nine-year-old Volodymyr Kudrytskyi said he’s one of those whom the President’s Office is looking to scapegoat. | Kirill Chubotin/Getty Images The plan was centered on the idea that decentralizing power generation would be the best way to withstand Russian missile and drone attacks. Those have redoubled to an alarming scale in recent weeks with, some days, Russia targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with 500 Iranian-designed drones and 20 to 30 missiles in each attack. Instead of quickly endorsing the decentralization plan, Zelenskyy instead approved — according to Kudrytskyi — a rival scheme backed by his powerful Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak to “create a huge fund to attract hundreds of millions of foreign investment for hydrogen and solar energy.” Last year the government shifted its focus to decentralization, eventually taking up Kudrytskyi’s plan. “But we lost a year,” he said.  He also said the slow pace in hardening the country’s energy facilities to better withstand the impact of direct hits or blasts — including building concrete shelters to protect transformers at power plants — was a “sensational failure of the government.” Ukrenergo, Kudrytskyi said, started to harden facilities and construct concrete shelters for transformers in 2023 — but little work was done by other power generation companies. DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING Kudrytskyi was abruptly forced to resign last year in what several Ukrainian energy executives say was a maneuver engineered by presidential insiders determined to monopolize political power. His departure prompted alarm in Brussels and Washington, D.C. — Western diplomats and global lenders even issued a rare public rebuke, breaking their normal public silence on domestic Ukrainian politics. They exhorted Kyiv to change tack. So far, international partners have made no public comments on Kudrytskyi’s arrest and arraignment. But a group of four prominent Ukrainian think tanks issued a joint statement on Oct. 30, the day after Kudrytskyi’s arraignment, urging authorities to conduct investigations with “the utmost impartiality, objectivity, and political neutrality.”  The think tanks also cautioned against conducting political persecutions. In their statement they said: “The practice of politically motivated actions against professionals in power in any country, especially in a country experiencing the extremely difficult times of war, is a blow to statehood, not a manifestation of justice.” The embezzlement case against Kudrytskyi has been described by one of the country’s most prominent anti-corruption activists, Daria Kaleniuk, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, as not making any legal sense. She argued that the prosecutor has failed to offer evidence that the former energy boss enriched himself in any way and, along with other civil society leaders, said the case is another episode in democratic backsliding. Overnight Sunday, Russia launched more attacks targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, striking at regions across the country. According to Zelenskyy, “nearly 1,500 attack drones, 1,170 guided aerial bombs, and more than 70 missiles of different types were used by the Russians to attack life in Ukraine just this week alone.” Unlike previous wartime winters, Russian forces this time have also been attacking the country’s natural gas infrastructure in a sustained campaign.  Since being forced to resign from Ukrenergo, Kudrytskyi hasn’t been shy about highlighting what he says is mismanagement of Ukraine’s energy sector. For that he has been attacked on social media for being unpatriotic, he said. But he sees it differently. “Most Ukrainians understand the government should be criticized even during wartime for mistakes because otherwise it would cause harm to the country,” he said.