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Climate Desk
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A collaboration of more than a dozen news organizations dedicated to exploring the human, environmental, economic, and political impacts of our changing climate, and sharing our work with a wide audience.

Find us at: ClimateDesk.org
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DAY 3: California Governor Gavin Newsom has arrived at the conference with some choice words for Trump.

Diplomats are discussing are financing and critical minerals. Activists criticizing the PR firm Edelman for working the summit while also working for fossil fuel clients like Chevron and Shell.
Day three begins at Cop30 Dharna Noor The second day of Cop29 ended with a bang, as dozens of Indigenous protestors forced their way into the conference center. The demonstrators, some of whom wore headdresses and carried instruments, pulled doors from their hinges, shoved through security scanners, and tussled with guards before successfully entering the venue. “Our forests are not for sale,” one protestor’s sign read. It’s a sign that this year marks the return of major protests at UN climate talks, after several years of repression. More demonstrations are planned at the venue for the rest of the week, both on and off site. Some 50,000 people are attending Cop30, from the civil society groups holding rallies, to the researchers poring over esoteric documents, to the politicians huddling together in brightly lit rooms. One group, however, is conspicuously absent from the climate talks: a delegation from the US, the world’s largest historical greenhouse gas polluter. It’s the first time the US has sat out the negotiations completely, research organization Carbon Brief confirmed on Tuesday. US president Donald Trump, who calls the climate crisis a “hoax,” pulled the country from the Paris Agreement in January as part of an all-out assault on climate policy. California governor Gavin Newsom, who arrived at the climate talks on Tuesday, strongly condemned Trump’s anti-environmental agenda: “He’s an invasive species, he’s a wrecking ball president,” he said at a press conference. “He’s trying to roll back progress of the last century, he’s trying to recreate the 19th century, he’s doubling down on stupid.” Newsom, whose state has the world’s fourth-largest economy, is the topmost US official at Cop29. Everywhere he went on Tuesday, he was followed by hoards of spectators. In meetings and press conferences, he assured crowds that California is committed to climate action.
November 12, 2025 at 6:06 PM
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Day 2: Negotiations have begun.
5h ago 07.14 EST Negotiations begin at Cop30 after agenda agreed Jonathan Watts Jonathan Watts Thunder, lightning and torrential rain tore down on the Cop30 conference centre in Belém on the opening day yesterday, but the climate gathering has so far avoided the political storms that often shake the early phases of the annual talks, writes Jonathan Watts, the Guardian’s global environment writer. How long the calm lasts will be clearer over the next two days, when the Brazilian presidency holds consultations with key nations on the items that will be discussed over the coming two weeks. This is a diplomatic sleight of hand that has so far enabled the host to avoid the usual wrangles over the formal agenda, which have often taken several days in past conferences, holding up all other work. Yesterday, however, the agenda breezed through. Plus an image of chairs with rain on them.
November 11, 2025 at 5:37 PM
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In our latest newsletter, @grist.org senior staff writer @zteirstein.bsky.social shares about the "Vital Signs" series about how climate change is threatening human health.

Read the full newsletter here: link.motherjones.com/view/647e4ef...
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Public health has improved over the past few decades in almost every country on Earth, thanks largely to better access to antibiotics, vaccines, and other interventions that keep diseases at bay. Well-being, life expectancy, maternal health, and other metrics of progress have gotten better. So why is the World Health Organization warning that humanity is on the precipice of a health crisis? The answer is that our public health innovations are predicated on the assumption that our environment will continue to function largely as it has since the end of the last Ice Age. But this fails to account for a century-plus of rampant fossil fuel use. I’m Zoya Teirstein, senior staff writer at Grist, where we recently launched an ambitious new series called “Vital Signs.” Over the next seven months, we'll take readers around the world to explore how climate change is threatening human health in ways that transcend borders. These changes, building slowly for decades, have only begun to spill into plain view: record outbreaks of dengue fever in Latin America last year, widespread drought-driven malnutrition in the Horn of Africa, wildfire smoke and impaired cognitive development in Australia, deadly waterborne bacteria moving up our own Atlantic Coast. We have tools to tackle these problems. The question is: Will humanity acknowledge the baseline shift in time to deploy them?
November 10, 2025 at 6:42 PM
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Missed Sunday's newsletter? It is all about the rebirth of the Klamath River. Read it here: link.motherjones.com/view/647e4ef...
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS As a former Mother Jones fellow turned senior climate reporter and extreme-weather correspondent for the Guardian, I’ve grown accustomed to being the bearer of bad news. But amid the endless cycle of missed emissions targets, compounding disasters, and attempts to gut climate protections, inspiring stories occasionally pop up to remind us there are still solutions—and people willing to fight for them. That’s how I got to bear witness to the rebirth of the Klamath River. After the last of four major hydroelectric dams was removed late last year—the largest such project in US history—the mighty waterway that straddles the Oregon–California border, a river at the heart of Indigenous culture, has undergone a recovery that has astounded scientists and casual observers alike. Wildlife (bald eagles, beavers, bears, salmon, etc.) is rebounding, along with, as I write in the piece, the “insects, algae, and microscopic features of the flourishing systems that feed this ecosystem.” One year into this grand experiment, we’ve also gotten to see how the Indigenous leaders who spearheaded the work are ensuring the story doesn’t end there.
November 3, 2025 at 4:52 PM
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Missed Sunday's newsletter? It was all about @vox.com's investigation into biodiversity loss in Madagascar.

Read it here: link.motherjones.com/view/647e4ef...
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS When people think of Madagascar, the island nation off Africa’s east coast and setting of that silly 2005 animated film from DreamWorks, we tend to picture abundance: lemurs leaping through lush forests, chameleons blending into trees, coral reefs teeming with life. But that’s just not the reality anymore. Nearly all lemur species are now threatened with extinction, reef ecosystems are collapsing, and forests are shrinking at alarming rates. I’m Paige Vega, climate editor at Vox, where we’ve been digging into one of the biggest stories shaping our planet’s future: how the loss of biodiversity is unfolding in real time, even in places people think of as wild and untouched. In an ambitious new project led by Vox senior environmental correspondent Benji Jones, we explore what biodiversity loss looks like in a place that’s synonymous with wildlife—and what it will take to turn things around. Because in Madagascar, saving nature isn’t just about protecting animals, it’s about giving people a way to live.
October 27, 2025 at 9:24 PM
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Congress created the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) four years ago to solve a “chicken-and-egg situation” for climate solutions. So what did the Trump Administration do?

Find out in our latest newsletter here: link.motherjones.com/view/647e4ef...
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Hello! I’m Maria Gallucci, a senior reporter at Canary Media, the newest member of the Climate Desk collaboration. Canary Media is a nonprofit newsroom covering the clean energy transition, and this week I’ve got a story on the hollowing-out of a little-known federal office that was helping make that transition happen. Congress created the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) four years ago to solve a “chicken-and-egg situation” for climate solutions, Zahava Urecki at the Bipartisan Policy Center told me. Emerging technologies that could unlock major environmental and climate benefits need serious capital to scale up and prove themselves, and investors are often unwilling to shoulder those financial risks alone. That’s where the OCED comes in. During the Biden administration, Congress gave the office about $27 billion to back projects that could drastically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from heavy industries such as steel manufacturing—including at a plant in JD Vance’s hometown—along with more controversial initiatives like hubs for hydrogen production and direct air capture. These subsidies, contingent on private investment, act as a force multiplier such that “a relatively small investment from taxpayers,” notes one expert, is expected to yield “an enormous benefit.”
October 21, 2025 at 5:19 PM
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Missed Sunday's weekly newsletter? Read it here: link.motherjones.com/view/647e4ef...
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS We’ve long known that meat is bad news for the environment, responsible for everything from land loss and carbon emissions to massive, noxious lagoons of pig shit. And eating too much of it isn’t great for you—or anybody. Last week, Climate Desk partners covered the unveiling of a proposed “planetary health diet” whose creators say it could curb food-related emissions by half and prevent 15 million premature deaths annually. Big Agriculture, of course, is guarding its turf at all costs. The Guardian reports that nearly 60 percent of EU Parliament members voted this week in favor of the industry’s demand to reserve words like “steak” and “sausage” for animal products rather than plant-based alternatives. While the measure passed, it would still need to be approved by the majority of member states. “Veggie burgers, seitan schnitzel, and tofu sausage do not confuse consumers, only right-wing politicians,” one critic quipped.
October 13, 2025 at 5:04 PM
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The national parks are in deep shit—perhaps literally.

Read our latest dispatch from Climate Desk Weekly, recapping what the shutdown means for National Parks: link.motherjones.com/view/647e4ef...
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS The federal government is shut down and National Park employees are bracing for another disaster. The last Trump shutdown, which began in late December 2018 and lasted 35 days, was a period of “chaos and destruction” for America's national parks. “Prehistoric petroglyphs were vandalized at Big Bend,” recalls the Guardian’s Gabrielle Canon, and “Joshua trees, some more than a century old, were chopped down at Joshua Tree.” Animals were illegally killed, trash was strewn across the landscape, park toilets overflowed with feces, and fights broke out over campsites. The administration’s plan is similar this time around, our Climate Desk partners report. The parks will use recreation fees to keep basic services like bathrooms open, even though tens of thousands of employees are furloughed—a move found unlawful by the Government Accountability Office in a 2019 opinion.
October 6, 2025 at 9:18 PM
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Read yesterday's Climate Desk Weekly dispatch. Senior editor @michaelmechanic.bsky.social digs into the good news (and bad news) on energy, in addition to updates on the forest service and shark science.

link.motherjones.com/view/647e4ef...
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Happy Climate Week! We’ve got good and bad news. Let's start with the good: President Donald Trump can hate on wind and solar all he wants, but he can’t stop the global march toward cleaner energy. Investment in renewable power rose by 10 percent in the first half of 2025, the Guardian reports, and, in spite of Trump’s cynical efforts, 19 American states and 304 large companies—together representing nearly two-thirds of US corporate revenues—remain committed to “net zero.”
September 29, 2025 at 10:25 PM
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Did you miss our Sunday Newsletter? Read it here: link.motherjones.com/view/68cc766...
Climate Desk Newsletter STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS It’s only the most important story in the world. True, the Epstein files, the Kirk assassination, the Trump administration’s assault on science, creeping authoritarianism—all of these things are exceedingly newsworthy, but they pale in comparison to the epic story that touches on virtually every newsroom beat, one that will outlast this fraught moment and affect generations to come, here in the United States and globally: the story of our changing climate. I’m Michael Mechanic, a longtime Mother Jones senior editor and point person for Climate Desk, a collaboration of 15 newsrooms covering the interplay of climate and environmental issues with, well, just about everything: agriculture, art, business, corruption, courts, culture, economics, energy, fashion, food, global relations, housing, history, incarceration, land use, migration, politics, pollution, poverty, race, tribal sovereignty, science, sports, technology, wealth, wildlife, war & peace—you name it. As I said, this story is epic.
September 24, 2025 at 5:15 PM
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This Sunday, we are launching “Climate Desk Weekly.” This free dispatch will act as Mother Jones' Sunday newsletter and share the week’s need-to-know climate news right in your inbox from our collaboration of 15 award-winning media outlets.

Sign up at: www.motherjones.com/newsletters/
September 18, 2025 at 8:00 PM
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Chart 3️⃣
A chart showing the cost of solar in USD/kWH going from .45 to less than .1 Titled: "Globally the cost of utility-scale solar has plumetted" Subtitled: "Global utility solar levilized cost of energy (USD/kWh)"
May 1, 2025 at 11:29 PM
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Chart 2️⃣
A chart that says "The emergence of wind energy across the country" and "Wind power capacity in gigawatts (GW)" "Land and Offshore" It shows that wind has grown in every state from 2000 and is projected to grow into 2050.
April 30, 2025 at 6:36 PM
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@vox.com put together 10 charts on clean energy, which we will be highlighting over the next 10 days. Here is the first one.
A chart that says "In two decades, wind capacity has increased 23x" "US wind net summer capacity (in gigawatts)" In November 2024, wind capacity reached 151 GW) The chart shows a line going from 0 in 1985 to 151 in 2024. Behind the chart is an illustration of wind turbines. "Source: US Energy Information Administration"
April 29, 2025 at 4:58 PM
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November 18, 2024 at 8:01 PM