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Most Costly Climate Disasters Of 2024 Killed 2,000 People

The most financially costly climate disasters around the world in 2024 produced $229 billion in damages and killed 2,000 people, according to Counting the Cost 2024: A year of climate breakdown, the most recent analysis of insurance payouts by nonprofit Christian Aid. Three-quarters of these calamities occurred in the United States, reported The Guardian. “Behind the billion-dollar figures are countless lost lives and livelihoods,” said Dr. Mariam Zachariah, a researcher for World Weather Attribution at Imperial College London, in a press release from Christian Aid.

New York To Charge Biggest Emitters For Climate Damages Under New Law

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed the Climate Change Superfund Act, which requires major emitters, such as fossil fuel companies, to compensate for damages by helping to fund climate-resilient infrastructure projects. “By signing the Climate Change Superfund Act, Gov. Hochul is addressing the financial burden placed on New Yorkers by the fossil fuel companies,” Richard Schrader, director of New York Government Affairs at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said in a statement. “It’s a key example of what putting fiscal fairness and environmental justice front and center looks like.

Mathare Ecological Network Fights For Restoration Of Dignity And Hope

In April 2024, relentless heavy rains wreaked havoc across Kenya, plunging the country into a humanitarian crisis. The devastation claimed at least 270 lives, displaced over 200,000 people, and obliterated livelihoods, infrastructure, and property. Among the hardest-hit areas was Mathare, one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements, where over 40 lives were lost as the Mathare River burst its banks, flooding vast portions of the community. For the residents of Mathare, mostly low-income earners, the flooding was catastrophic. Families were stranded, homes were submerged, and lives were uprooted in the blink of an eye.

COP29 Contradiction And The Climate

Climate activists are considering throwing in the COP towel after negotiations led to a poor budget deal, with activists walking away with only $300 billion of their $1 trillion goal after this year's dubbed 'finance’ COP. The 29th annual Conference Of Parties, or COP29 was created to facilitate international cooperation over ways to keep the global average temperature rise close to 1.5 degrees C. However, climate activists are now arguing that the process is instead a way for fossil fuel industries to protect their interests. While at COP, climate activist and five time COP attendee Xiye Bastida explained, “It's no mistake that the last three COPs have been in oil [rich] countries."

Major Win For Youth Climate Activists In Montana Supreme Court

The Montana Supreme Court upheld a landmark victory on Wednesday, affirming a lower court’s decision that the energy policies of the state violated youth activists’ constitutional rights to a clean environment. The ruling in Held v. Montana last August invalidated a law stopping regulators from taking into consideration the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions when issuing permits for new fossil fuel projects, reported The Guardian. The six-to-one decision was the first state supreme court decision of its kind in the United States.

Climate Change Trial At The Hague

The stakes are extremely high as the impact of fossil fuels on climate change goes to The Hague for hearings December 2-13, 2024 to determine whether nations are obligated to phase out fossil fuels. Will the esteemed court issue an opinion that truly impacts climate change? Antarctica is experiencing a frightening collapse that has polar scientists fearful and speaking out like never before. A link to an interview with James Woodford, a New Scientists’ reporter, who attended a recent emergency session with 450 polar scientists is found at the end of this article. Woodford: “Nobody could have foreseen Antarctic sea ice dropping off a cliff in the way that it has.”

University Of Toronto Students Score A Win For The Climate

When the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment announced in October that it will no longer accept donations from the fossil fuel industry, the news sent waves through the growing movement to get coal, oil and gas companies off campuses. Among other things, that means banning fossil fuel corporations from financing academic research. “This victory shows students have the ability to enact institutional change,” said Erin Mackey, a leader of the group Climate Justice UofT, which pushed for the fossil fuel money ban. “That’s especially important when, at many universities, students who want to make change are having the door slammed in their faces.”

How Exxon And Atlas Network Worked To Block Global Climate Action

In March 1999, Alejandro Chafuen, then president of an international free-market coalition called Atlas Network, wrote to an executive at ExxonMobil (XOM) to offer the American oil major a friendly note of appreciation. “On behalf of Atlas and the institutes it supports, we would like to thank you again for the Exxon Corporation’s generous contributions,” Chafuen stated, “and for the confidence you and Exxon have placed in us.” Included in the letter to William E. Hale of ExxonMobil’s public affairs department was a five-page summary of the global reach and diversity of the activities the corporation funded in 1998, “in whole or in part,” through donations to Atlas Network’s “Energy and Environment: Market-based Solutions”.

Town Launches First US Climate Lawsuit Against A Utility Company

The small North Carolina town of Carrboro has initiated the country’s first climate accountability litigation against an electric utility. The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, claims Duke Energy waged a “deception campaign” in order to obscure the climate hazards of fossil fuels. This led to delayed action in curbing planet-warming emissions, which caused the costs of the climate action to increase. “We have to speak truth to power as we continue to fight the existential threat that is climate change. The climate crisis continues to burden our community and cost residents their hard-earned tax dollars,” said Mayor of Carrboro Barbara Foushee in a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity.

Phoenix Is Launching A New Shade Plan

This year, temperatures in Phoenix soared over 100 degrees for 113 consecutive days, a deadly streak for the hottest big city in America. In November, the city approved a new plan, Shade Phoenix, to add 27,000 trees and 550 shade structures over the next five years — a plan that could save lives and provide some relief, especially to the city’s most vulnerable residents. The city unveiled its last shade plan in 2010, but progress has been slow. David Hondula, director of heat response and mitigation, doesn’t dispute that the follow-through on the last shade plan was “incomplete or uncertain.”

Extinction Rebellion Cause Chaos In City Of London

On Wednesday 4 December, Extinction Rebellion occupied the headquarters of an international law firm that is playing a leading role in oiling the legal wheels of the deadly fossil fuel machine setting our planet on fire. Activists targeted the City of London offices of A&O Shearman – whose lawyers facilitated more than $285 billion in fossil fuel transactions between 2019 and 2023, the second highest amount for any legal firm in the world – demanding they ‘Cut The Ties With Fossil Fuels’. Rebels entered the building and occupied the lobby, while others sprayed the outside of the building with fake oil.

Report: 2024 Protests Against Military Air Shows

In 2024, Veterans For Peace organized nine protests of military air shows across the country and invited 350.org, a global climate justice organization, to join the No Military Air Shows (No MAS!) campaign. Members of Veterans For Peace, 350.org, Extinction Rebellion, US Resist, and local environmental and civic groups showed up to educate the public and protest air shows from Portland, Oregon to New Brunswick, Maine. Veterans For Peace and 350.org also launched a petition to the Secretaries of the Navy and the Air Force to end these noisy, expensive, and polluting air shows.

There’s No Upside To Trump

“Trump could surprise on the upside,” writes Edward Luce, who claims to know “what Trump most cares about.” Lacking intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the president-elect’s personal thoughts, us non-pundits are relegated to looking at other indicators. We can try to decipher Trump’s abysmal cabinet picks. “If Trump has nominated second-tier establishment types for powerful positions that is partly because so many of the more accomplished practitioners have migrated to the Democrats,” according to a London Review of Books commentator.

Flash Mob Takes Over Museum To Call Out Planet-Wrecking BP Donation

On Saturday 30 November the Great Court of the British Museum was taken over by the Climate Choir Movement flash mob when around two hundred visitors at the British Museum café stood up and broke into three-part harmony to sing: ‘It’s time to drop BP! Don’t take their dirty money!’ The singers, including members of Bristol Climate Choir, then processed to the entrance of the British Museum Great Court, the largest covered public square in Europe, and performed the classical hit Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, complete with new anti-BP words.

International Court Of Justice Begins Hearings In Landmark Climate Case

A landmark case that began in a Pacific classroom and could change the course of future climate talks is about to be heard in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court will begin hearings involving a record number of countries in The Hague, in the Netherlands, on Monday Its fifteen judges have been asked, for the first time, to give an opinion about the obligations of nations to prevent climate change — and the consequences for them if they fail. The court's findings could bolster the cases of nations taking legal action against big polluters failing to reduce emissions, experts say. They could also strengthen the hand of Pacific Island nations in future climate change negotiations like COP.
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