The Endangered Species Committee, comprised of six federal officials including the Interior Secretary, approved a Pentagon’s request for an exemption from the Endangered Species Act for all oil and gas exploration and development activities in the Gulf of Mexico after a 20-minute, closed-door meeting.

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A panel comprised of Trump Administration officials on Tuesday approved an exemption from the Endangered Species Act for expanded oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Last month, the Pentagon requested that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum convenes a meeting with the Endangered Species Committee to discuss an exemption from the Endangered Species Act for “all … oil and gas exploration and development activities” overseen by federal agencies in the Gulf of Mexico over “national security” concerns. Since its inception in 1973, the law, which requires federal agencies to ensure their actions do not jeopardize endangered species or destroy critical habitats, has prevented the extinction of 99% of listed species.

On Tuesday, the committee, also known as the “God squad” for its power to decide whether a species lives or dies, approved the request after a 20-minute, closed-door meeting.

Addressing the committee, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the Endangerment Species Act risked “halting or severely compromising oil and gas activity in the Gulf” that are needed to power the country and the military and that the request was a “matter of urgent national security.”

“Recent hostile action by the Iranian terror regime highlights yet again why robust domestic oil production is a national security imperative,” Hegseth said. But environmental groups say the administration is seeking an exemption to avoid interference to its fossil fuel expansion plans and warn that such an exemption could set a dangerous precedent for future fossil fuel projects.

The committee only met three times since Congress established it in 1978, the last time in 1992. It is led by the Interior Secretary and comprises five other federal officials: the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of the Army, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Species At Risk

It is the first time the committee, which has the extraordinary authority to exempt federal actions that may lead to a species’ extinction from the safeguards of the Endangered Species Act, has been convened over national security reasons, the Center for Biological Diversity said in a press release. The conservation group last month filed a lawsuit seeking to block the meeting, although a judge rejected their request on Friday.

The Gulf of Mexico is home to 20 threatened and endangered species, including sea turtles, sturgeon, manta rays, sharks, and Rice’s whales. The latters are only found in the Gulf and have just 51 individuals remaining after the population collapsed in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

“It’s grotesque for Pete Hegseth to use national security as a pretext for giving the oil industry a free pass to wipe out America’s most endangered whales,” said Brett Hartl, Government Affairs Director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Hegseth is illegally perverting a narrow mechanism within the Endangered Species Act to target the Rice’s whale for extinction.”

Dozens of environmentalists gathered in protest outside the Interior Department on Tuesday, chanting slogans and holding signs that read “Save the Endangered Species Act,” “Fraud Squad” and “Whales and turtles here to stay! Big Oil go away.”

“No Administration, Republican or Democrat, has ever sought such a sweeping exemption from the Endangered Species Act,” said Susan Holmes, Executive Director of the Endangered Species Coalition, which joined the protest. “This closed-door effort to weaken protections for whales, sea turtles, and the Gulf ecosystem is a direct threat to wildlife already struggling to survive. Decisions about endangered species must be guided by science, not politics or corporate pressure.”

Beth Lowell, Vice President of Oceana, an ocean conservation organization, said Tuesday’s vote “puts endangered species on an unnecessary fast track to extinction.”

“For more than 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has protected endangered and threatened wildlife by ensuring that the federal government reviews projects and provides measures to minimize the threat to species on the brink of extinction. Today’s action reverses this trend by putting profits over protections. It is not what the authors of this bedrock law intended,” said Lowell.

The lawsuit challenges the Trump administration’s recent repeal of the Biden-era amendments to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for power plants, which effectively allows coal-fired power plants to emit more brain-damaging mercury and other harmful heavy metals such as nickel, arsenic, and lead.

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A coalition of US-based health and environmental groups is taking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to court over its recent repeal of standards that limit brain-damaging mercury, lead, and other hazardous air pollution from coal-fired power plants.

The coalition, which includes ​Earthjustice, the American Lung Association, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the American Academy of Pediatrics, ​and the Environmental Law and Policy Center, filed the lawsuit ⁠in the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Monday. The suit addresses the EPA’s repeal of the Biden-era amendments to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which was finalized in February. The repeal effectively allows coal-fired power plants to emit more brain-damaging mercury and other harmful heavy metals such as nickel, arsenic, and lead.

The lawsuit also challenges the repeal of a requirement for power plants to have systems in place to monitor the amount of pollution they emit in accordance with air pollution standards.

The standards, first issued in 2012 by the Obama administration, were strengthened and updated by the Biden administration in April 2024 to reflect the latest advancements in pollution control technologies. Since 2015, the deadline for their implementation, the standards have delivered a 90% reduction in mercury emissions from power plants over pre-standard levels and other health benefits, including lowered risk of cancer, heart and lung disease, and premature death. According to EPA figures cited in the coalition’s press release announcing the lawsuit, 93% of US coal capacity had already met or were on track to meet those standards by last year.

Mercury and the other heavy metals targeted by the regulation are highly toxic and dangerous to human health, capable of causing severe damage to the nervous, digestive, and immune systems, as well as the lungs and kidneys. They are also responsible for extensive environmental damage, poisoning fish and wildlife as they deposit in soil and water.

In the press release, the coalition called the move “illegal” and said that the absence of standards would lead to “more asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and premature deaths.”

“This administration is not just rolling back rules, it is eliminating the monitoring infrastructure needed to know what is coming out of these smokestacks in the first place. It is allowing coal plants to spew out more neurotoxic mercury into our air and food supply, while simultaneously keeping the communities most at risk in the dark about how serious that threat is. This is a betrayal of the EPA’s core mission,” the press release read.

You might also like: ‘He Has Betrayed the Agency’: More than 160 Climate, Health Groups Call For Firing of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons.

The Interior Department is convening the Endangered Species Committee on Tuesday to negotiate an exemption from the Endangered Species Act for all oil and gas drilling activities in the Gulf of Mexico.

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As the US-Israeli war on Iran continues to shake global energy markets, the Trump administration is citing national security concerns as it seeks to expand oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Interior Department is set to convene the Endangered Species Committee, also known as the Extinction Committee, on Tuesday to negotiate an exemption from the Endangered Species Act for expanded oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. The 1973 law requires federal agencies to ensure their actions do not jeopardize endangered species or destroy critical habitats.

According to a court filing from last Wednesday, the Pentagon requested that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum convenes a meeting with the committee to discuss an exemption for “all … oil and gas exploration and development activities” overseen by federal agencies in the Gulf of Mexico over “national security” concerns.

But environmental groups say the administration is seeking an exemption to avoid interference to its fossil fuel expansion plans and warn that such an exemption could set a dangerous precedent for future fossil fuel projects.

The court filing came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity against Burgum earlier this month “to prevent him from convening” the committee’s meeting. A judge on Friday turned down the Center’s request, ruling that the meeting can go ahead.

“Burgum’s extinction committee is immoral, illegal and unnecessary,” said Kierán Suckling, Executive Director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s no emergency, no legal basis to convene the committee, and no legal way to approve the extinction of Rice’s whales. This sham is nothing more than Burgum posturing for Trump and saving the fossil fuel industry a few dollars by allowing its boats to drive faster and more recklessly,” Suckling added.

In a court filing, Interior Department Senior Counselor Christopher Danley said that no exemption application or evidentiary hearing was required given the national security nature of the Pentagon’s request. It added that the meeting would be open to the public via livestream to “minimize” safety and security threats against government officials. The Center for Biological Diversity had previously requested that the meeting “be open to the public and not merely livestreamed,” citing a provision of the Act requiring that “[a]ll meetings and records of the Committee shall be open to the public.”

The exemption request came as the world experiences the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, triggered by the US-Israel war on Iran. Iran has effectively blocked traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s busiest oil shipping channels and a critical global energy chokepoint.

Species At Risk

It is the first time the committee, which has the extraordinary authority to exempt federal actions that may lead to a species’ extinction from the safeguards of the Endangered Species Act, has been convened over national security reasons, the Center for Biological Diversity said in a press release.

It added that a number of species are already threatened by oil and gas activity in the Gulf, including sea turtles, sperm whales and the Rice’s whale. The latter is only found in the Gulf and has just 51 individuals remaining after the population collapsed in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

“It’s grotesque for Pete Hegseth to use national security as a pretext for giving the oil industry a free pass to wipe out America’s most endangered whales,” said Brett Hartl, Government Affairs Director at the Center. “Hegseth is illegally perverting a narrow mechanism within the Endangered Species Act to target the Rice’s whale for extinction.”

“[The Environmental Protection Agency’s] foremost purpose is to protect human health and the environment. With Administrator Lee Zeldin at the helm, EPA has abandoned its mission, creating damage that will take decades to address,” the open letter, signed by more than 160 US-based environmental and health groups, read.

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The US Environmental Protection Agency‘s Administrator Lee Zeldin has “betrayed” the agency’s core mission and set a “dangerous” agenda that is hurting public health and the environment, according to an open letter calling for Zeldin’s firing.

The letter, signed by 163 local and national environmental and health organizations, says Zeldin must be held accountable for his actions.

Since taking office in January 2025 following Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Zeldin has taken significant and often controversial steps that go against the agency’s stated mission to “protect human health and the environment,” the letter said.

“No EPA administrator in history—Democratic or Republican—has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission. EPA’s foremost purpose is to protect human health and the environment. With Administrator Lee Zeldin at the helm, EPA has abandoned its mission, creating damage that will take decades to address,” the organizations, which include the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, Public Citizen and the US Climate Action Network, said in the letter.

Controversial Mandate

Zeldin has been raising eyebrows since his Senate confirmation hearing, where he hesitated to address the agency’s role in reducing US reliance on fossil fuels. When questioned on the 2007 Supreme Court ruling Massachusetts v. EPA – which established the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases as air pollutants – Zeldin argued that the decision “does not require the EPA, it authorizes it.”

That authority was later solidified in the Obama-era Endangerment Finding, which formally determined that greenhouse gases pose a risk to public health. However, in a highly anticipated move that has nevertheless stunned environmental advocates, the EPA repealed this legal framework last month, labeling it a “radical rule” and the “foundation for the Green New Scam.”

While the EPA claims the repeal will save American taxpayers $1.3 trillion, scientists, politicians, and environmental groups have denounced the move. They argue the rescission will shift the immense costs of climate-driven harm onto families and future generations. At least two lawsuits have already been filed challenging the agency’s decision.

Many of Zeldin’s actions directly benefit the Trump administration’s anti-climate and pro-fossil fuel agenda. Zeldin himself has repeatedly sought to dismiss climate change as a “cult” and a “religion”, falsely claiming that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil energy production do not “contribute significantly to air pollution.”

Since taking office, he has rolled back dozens of environmental rules, including national air quality standards for particulate matter, limits on wastewater discharges for oil and gas extraction facilities, and regulations on power plant emissions and vehicle pollution. The agency also stopped calculating the monetary benefits of air pollution rules in terms of healthcare savings or avoided deaths, focusing instead on the costs of such rules to industry. 

Dozens of employees were fired as the EPA shut down all 10 of its regional environmental justice offices, which had been instrumental in addressing pollution issues in low-income, historically marginalized, and disadvantaged communities. Experts have warned that the move would leave “those living, working, studying, and playing near polluting industries, smog-forming traffic, and contaminated waterways and soil, with little support from the very agency they rely on to enforce protective laws.”

Zeldin also scrapped roughly $20 billion in environmental justice and clean energy grants, claiming they did not “align” with the agency’s priorities. The grant money was made available through a fund created with former president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. It was awarded in April 2024 to eight organizations, which were tasked with financing “tens of thousands” of projects ranging from home energy retrofitting to air pollution reduction. Some of them have sued the administration over the freeze.

More about this: What Happend When the US Awards $20 Billion in Climate Grants, And Then Wants Them Back?

‘Zeldin Must Go’

The EPA’s new agenda is “dangerous” and millions of Americans will suffer as a result, the open letter said.

“Because of Zeldin’s directives, we will suffer more health-damaging air pollution and be exposed to more toxic chemicals in our homes, in our food, in our products, and in our water. Zeldin’s rollbacks will lead to more carbon dioxide and methane pollution that will contribute to worsening climate disasters. Families across the country, whether rural or urban, are already struggling with the consequences of Zeldin’s actions. The damage he is doing will span generations,” it read.

“By corrupting EPA’s mission, Administrator Zeldin has abandoned his sworn duty and betrayed the trust Congress and the American people placed in him. We have seen enough. Administrator Zeldin must go.”

Featured image: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

Researchers at the Climate Impact Lab said future temperature-related mortality will ultimately depend both on the direct impacts of a warming climate and on the investments in climate adaptation measures, including air conditioning and cooling centers.

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Poorer nations will see a far higher deathtoll from extreme heat than rich nations as human-caused climate change continues to raise temperatures globally, a new report has warned.

Heatwaves are the deadliest type of extreme weather. Every year between 2000-2019, approximately 489,000 people died from extreme heat around the world. 45% of these casualties happened in Asia, the world’s most disaster-hit region from weather and climate hazards; 36% were in Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent. Here, heat-related mortality has increased by around 30% in the past two decades. But a new paper published Monday found that low-income countries will suffer the most.

Researchers at the Climate Impact Lab estimate that 10 times more people are projected to die each year in lower-income countries (about 391,000 people) than in higher-income countries (about 39,000 people) due to shifting temperatures. This is because lower-income countries are less positioned than developed countries to confront the growing threats posed by climate change.

By mid-century, heat-related deaths could see increases of 60 or more deaths a year per 100,000 people in countries in Africa’s Sahel region like Niger and Burkina Faso – a rate higher than the current one for malaria in the continent. Southeastern Bolivia may see an increase in heat-related deaths of 30 people per 100,000 – equaling the death rate from diabetes. And in Pakistan, mortality is projected to increase by 51 deaths per 100,000 people, comparable to the loss of life due to tuberculosis and stroke in the country today.

Hotter regions like Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia are projected to see more deaths, according to the study. Differences will also be stark within countries with highly-varied climates such as the US and Bolivia. Meanwhile, some cold climates like Alaska, Canada, and Greenland will see a drop in heat-related deaths.

The findings of the report, itself not peer reviewed, are based on previous Climate Impact Lab peer-reviewed projections of mortality risk due to future temperature increases caused by climate change. Estimates suggest that a single hot day – when the average temperature surpasses 35C (95F) – increases mortality rates by four deaths per 1 million people.

“This report uncovers one of climate change’s cruelest ironies—it is projected to kill millions of people in the countries that have generally done the least to cause it,” said Michael Greenstone, Co-Founder of the Climate Impact Lab and the Director of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth and Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.

The paper comes as the UN this week suggested that the Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in recorded history as gobal warming accelerates.

Targeted Adaptation Measures Will Save Lives

Researchers said future temperature-related mortality will ultimately depend both on the direct impacts of a warming climate and on the investments in climate adaptation measures, including air conditioning and cooling centers. “[W]e’ve identified the regions around the world where climate adaptation investments can save the most lives,” said Greenstone.

The findings can be particularly helpful for countries that have limited resources to invest in adaptation. In the case of Bolivia, for example, adaptation measures are needed in lowlands, while the cooler, mountainous regions are less threatened by rising temperatures.

“Just as a journey requires a map, effective climate adaptation depends on knowing where action is most needed and which investments will have the greatest impact,” Greenstone said. “We’re providing that roadmap by pinpointing climate risks and the places where adaptation investments can deliver the biggest benefits.”

Featured image: Kyle Lam/hongkongfp.com

As part of the deal announced Monday, the French energy company will abandon its plans to build wind farms off the US East Coast.

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As the widening conflict in the Middle East drives up global oil and gas prices, the US has announced it will pay French energy giant TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to drop two offshore wind projects in the country.

In an unusual move, the Interior Department announced on Monday that it will reimburse TotalEnergies $928 million, the sum the multinational paid the Biden administration for leases in federal waters to build offshore wind farms off New York and North Carolina. TotalEnergies, one of the world’s top six “supermajor” oil companies and one of the 20 largest historical emitters of planet-warming greenhouse gases, promised in turn to reinvest that money in oil and gas projects in the US, including in Texas.

“They don’t like us to develop this offshore wind concession because they have some national security concerns. Not up to me to decide yes or no,” TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné told CNBC.

The Trump administration cited undisclosed national security concerns when it ordered five other wind farms along the East Coast to halt construction in December. Federal judges have since weighed in, dismissing the administration’s national security claims and ordering construction to resume. One judge called the suspension “arbitrary and capricious.”

Lena Moffitt, Executive Director of Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy group, called the new deal “a taxpayer-funded bribe to kill homegrown clean energy and hand the money straight to oil and gas executives.” Anne Jellema, Chief Executive of the campaign group 350.org described it as a “handout to polluters” and an “insult to every American household that the government is funneling billions in public funds into the pockets of the oil and gas industry while citizens are being crushed by record-high utility costs.”

The deal comes as US-Israeli attacks on Iran, which unleashed a wider conflict in the Middle East, triggered the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, fueling the world’s worst global energy crisis.

“I suspect that the DOI will do other deals with other companies, so maybe we are the first to open the door, but it’s a matter of win-win situation,” Pouyanné said, adding that investing in gas projects is part of TotalEnergies’ strategy.

TotalEnergies in Court

TotalEnergies is embroiled in lawsuits in Europe for its contribution to global warming. In one, a coalition of French local authorities alongside five local civil society organizations are challenging the company’s continued expansion of oil and gas production despite extensive and indisputable scientific evidence of their impact on global climate. Despite positioning itself as a “major player in the energy transition,” TotalEnergies has plans to increase its hydrocarbon production by 3% per year until 2030, with at least two-thirds of its investments in fossil fuels. A verdict is expected on June 25.

Separately, a Belgian farmer sued TotalEnergies two years ago to seek compensation for the damage that numerous extreme weather events, which he says are a direct result of the company’s activities, caused to his farm. A verdict, initially expected last week, was postponed until September 9 as the court said it wanted to wait for the judgment in the French case.

Last year, a French court found that TotalEnergies misled consumers regarding its climate commitments, marking the first time a court has held an oil and gas company liable for greenwashing.

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“Humanity has just endured the eleven hottest years on record. When history repeats itself eleven times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

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The Earth is “being pushed beyond its limits” as ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations continue to drive temperatures upwards, warm oceans, and melt ice, the UN warned on Monday.

A new World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report found that the Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in recorded history, with rapid and large-scale changes occurring within just a few decades but having implications for hundreds if not thousands of years.

In its latest edition of the State of the Global Climate report, the UN agency confirmed that the past 11 years (2015–2025) were the hottest on record. “When history repeats itself eleven times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

It comes just weeks after another study provided the first concrete evidence that global warming is actually accelerating. In the paper, researchers said that the Earth has warmed around 0.35C in the decade to 2025, compared to less than 0.2C per decade on average between 1970 and 2015.

Rising global temperatures, a direct consequence of human-made greenhouse gas emissions, have led to an increase in both the frequency and intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial times, including heatwaves, heavy rainfall and tropical cyclones as well as droughts.

Extreme weather drives food insecurity, which itself then leads to social instability and large-scale displacement of people globally, affecting the ability of communities to mitigate the impacts of climate change and adapt to them, the report said.

“On a day-to-day basis, our weather has become more extreme. In 2025, heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms and flooding caused thousands of deaths, impacted millions of people and caused billions in economic losses,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. A study by charity Christian Aid last December confirmed that record-breaking heatwaves, tropical cyclones, and rainfall made 2025 one of the costliest years for climate disasters, with the 10 costliest disasters alone racking up economic losses of $120 billion.

‘State of Emergency’

Guterres warned that the planet is “in a state of emergency”, with every key climate indicator “flashing red.”

Just like the atmosphere, oceans, which absorb approximately 90% of excess heat from greenhouse gases, are also warming at record speed. According to the WMO report, each of the past nine years has set a new record for ocean heat content, with the warming rate of the past two decades (2005–2025) being twice that observed over the period 1960–2005. It added that nearly 90% of the ocean experienced at least one heatwave last year.

The consequences of ocean warming cannot be overstated. Besides directly affecting marine ecosystems like corals and reducing the ability of the ocean to trap carbon dioxide, warm waters fuel tropical storms and accelerate sea-ice loss in the polar regions, which in turn raises sea levels.  

In 2025, the ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland continued to lose significant mass, while Iceland and the Pacific coast of North America experienced “exceptional” glacier mass loss, the report said.

The International Energy Agency said supply-side measures alone cannot “fully offset” the energy crisis unleashed by the conflict in the Middle East as it called on consumers to reduce demand.

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The International Energy Agency (IEA) is calling on consumers to do their part to ease the energy crisis unleashed by the US-Israel war on Iran.

The conflict, which has quickly spread to other countries in the Middle East, has triggered the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, the IEA said in a report on Friday. Iran has effectively blocked traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s busiest oil shipping channels. Some 20-25% of global oil supply typically passes through it, making it a critical global energy chokepoint.

The passage’s closure has sent crude oil prices above $100 per barrel and has driven even sharper increases in refined products such as diesel, jet fuel, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), the IEA said. Member states of the agency, which include the US, UK and Japan, agreed to release a record 400 million barrels of oil from emergency reserves to ease pressure.

But, the agency said, “supply-side measures alone cannot fully offset the scale of the disruption,” calling on consumers to play their part.

In the report, the IEA identifies 10 measures that governments, businesses, and households can implement, addressing road transport, air travel, and industry. These include working remotely where possible, cutting highway speed by at least 10 km/h, switching from stove to electric cooking, carrying out vehicle maintenance and optimizing load to cut vehicle diesel needs as well as opting for alternatives to air travel, if available.

Some governments, especially in hard-hit Asia, have already implemented emergency demand-side energy conservation measures in response to the Middle East conflict, such as introducing price caps, tax cuts, or subsidies on fossil fuels. Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand are among the countries encouraging or mandating remote working for civil servants, limiting travel by public officials, and encouraging limits on air conditioning temperatures. Many are also calling on the public to limit energy demand in homes and offices and take public transport.

“[T]oday’s report provides a menu of immediate and concrete measures that can be taken on the demand side by governments, businesses and households to shelter consumers from the impacts of this crisis,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol, who warned that the impacts on energy markets and economies are set to become “more and more severe.”

“I believe it will be of use to governments around the world, in both advanced and developing economies, in these challenging times,” Birol added.

Featured image: Jeffry S.S. via Pexels.

More on the topic: Iran War: What the Gulf Conflict Tells Us About Energy Security

The suit alleges that the Trump administration’s decision to break up a climate research center in Boulder, Colorado, was part of a “widespread and coordinated campaign of punishment and coercion” against the state’s governor, Jared Polis.

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The Trump administration broke up a key climate research center in Boulder, Colorado as retribution against the state’s governor, a new lawsuit filed on Monday alleges.

The lawsuit, filed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), challenges the Trump administration’s decision to shut the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which is renowned for advances in the study of weather patterns, including tropical cyclones. UCAR, a non-profit research group made up of colleges and universities that operates the center, alleges that the administration is waging a “widespread and coordinated campaign of punishment and coercion” against Colorado, which started last August over tensions between President Donald Trump and Jared Polis, the state’s Democratic governor.

The administration froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for the state and vetoed a much needed water pipeline as part of the retaliation campaign. This, the lawsuit alleges, stemmed from the imprisonment of Tina Peters, a former county clerk convicted for breaching voting systems, whom Trump claims is a political prisoner. More recently, Trump has also moved the headquarters of the US Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama, falsely claiming that Colorado’s mail-in voting system makes for a “dishonest election”, and has threatened to withhold food stamp benefits from Colorado residents over the state’s refusal to provide personal information about benefit recipients

UCAR is asking the US District Court for the District of Colorado to strike down these actions as illegal and issue an immediate injunction against their implementation to prevent further harm to the center.

The Trump administration announced plans to shut the Colorado-headquartered lab last December, calling it “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and a stronghold for left-wing climate activism.

Founded in 1960 and funded by the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency, the NCAR’s laboratories provide critical data on air quality and tools to improve aircraft safety and wildfire mitigation as well as forecasts of droughts, extreme precipitation events and tropical cyclones. Around 830 people are employed there.

Governor Polis previously said closing the center would put “public safety at risk.”

“NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families. If these cuts move forward we will lose our competitive advantage against foreign powers and adversaries in the pursuit of scientific discovery,” Polis wrote on social media. Tim Raupach, Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney, called it a “tragedy” and said “a lot of people are safer” because of it.

Featured image: Wally Gobetz/Flickr.

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The Commercial Court of Tournai was expected to hand down the verdict at 1 p.m. local time in what is Belgium’s first climate lawsuit targeting a multinational corporation.

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A Belgian court on Wednesday postponed its ruling in a groundbreaking climate case between a Belgian farmer and one of the world’s biggest oil companies.

The Commercial Court of Tournai was expected to hand down the verdict at 1 p.m. local time in Belgium’s first climate lawsuit targeting a multinational corporation. But the verdict was postponed until September 9.

Hugues Falys sued TotalEnergies two years ago to seek compensation for the damage that numerous extreme weather events, which he says are a direct result of the company’s activities, caused to his farm. Falys, who was backed by FIAN, Greenpeace, and the Belgian League of Human Rights, a member organisation of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), asked the court to order TotalEnergies to ensure compliance with the Paris Agreement and to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels.

TotalEnergies is one of the world’s top six “supermajor” oil companies and one of the 20 largest historical emitters of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The company has plans to continue expanding its oil and gas production – the primary fossil fuels driving climate change alongside coal – despite extensive and indisputable scientific evidence of their impact on global climate.

Despite putting the proceedings on hold, the court on Wednesday ruled that the legal action brought by Falys is admissible. For Marie Doutrepont, one of the lawyers representing Hugues Falys and the three NGOs, this was “an important sign of hope.”

 “Indeed, it has been recognised that victims of the climate crisis can take highly polluting companies – which contribute significantly to climate change – to court in their own country, even if that is not where the company is headquartered. This is a landmark ruling,” said Doutrepont.

TotalEnergies is embroiled in another lawsuit in France for its contribution to climate change. The case, brought in 2020 by a coalition of French local authorities, alongside five local civil society organizations, also challenges the company’s continued expansion of oil and gas production. A two-day hearing took place last month, with the court expected to hand down the verdict on June 25.

Around the world, an increasing number of individuals and organizations are turning to courts to demand accountability for climate change. Since the 1990s, more than 2,900 climate lawsuits have been filed worldwide, mostly in the US.

Last year, a historic ruling from the International Court of Justice on the responsibilities of states in respect of climate change affirmed that government actions driving climate change are illegal and states are legally bound to cut their emissions. The world’s top court also ruled that states must pursue their “highest possible ambition” in their climate plans and ensure collective measures can limit global warming to 1.5C, the target set in the Paris Agreement.

Featured image: The Farmer Case.

More on the topic: Paris Court Hears Arguments in Climate Case Against TotalEnergies; Ruling Expected in June