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• John Pesutto defies calls to resign after being ordered to pay $300,000 for defaming Moira Deeming
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News bargaining code announcement expected today

The youth minister, Anne Aly, spoke with ABC News Breakfast just earlier ahead of the news bargaining code announcement, expected today.

What I can say is that the government believes that journalists should be fairly compensated for the work that they do, that there is a current regime in place but that’s not working. And so that’s why the government has turned its attention to updating this code and ensuring that social media companies pay for the news that they use as content on their platforms.

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Industry leaders attending the conference were asked about artificial intelligence, the economy, international relations and more.

The court’s order was provisional, rejecting a request from a Kentucky electric utility to block the plan while an appeals court considers its challenge.

Editor’s note: Updates status of investigation into RealPage

Scott Turner’s nomination by President Trump to lead the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has garnered less attention than some of his other cabinet picks. This is surprising given the power he wields over millions of people’s most immediate everyday need—having a place to live.   

As the housing and climate crises continue to collide—destroying homes, displacing communities, and causing instability in the insurance industry—it’s important to understand the background of the person selected to lead the agency responsible for policy and programs to address America’s urgent housing needs.

Turner’s track record of advancing ultra-conservative agendas raises valid concern that he would prioritize developer interests while shifting climate risk onto local governments and individuals.   

What does the HUD Secretary do?

As the head of HUD, Scott Turner would oversee a broad, important portfolio of programs that literally helps keep the roof over many people’s heads.

HUD serves a crucial role in providing access to affordable housing for millions of people, including through rental assistance programs, public housing, and pathways to homeownership. These programs are especially important for low-income households, people who live with disabilities, the elderly and families with young children.  

HUD also provides financial support for community and economic development through its Community Development Block Grant Program. The Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) component of this program is increasingly important in an era of worsening climate-fueled disasters.  

The question is: if Turner is confirmed as HUD secretary, will he keep the people’s interests as his top priority—or will he be more beholden to deep-pocketed real estate and developer interests?  

Potential conflicts of interest 

To get an idea of how he would lead HUD, it’s important to look at who Scott Turner is. He has had a varied career, including stints in the Texas legislature, the first Trump Administration, and the NFL. During his time in the Texas legislature, Turner stuck mostly to the fiscally and socially conservative Tea Party agenda and didn’t file any housing bills.  

Most recently, Turner has served as a Chief Inspiration Officer for JPI—a development firm that specializes in building multi-family homes across the income spectrum. While it’s essential for the nation’s housing secretary to understand the development landscape, their actions must be rooted in the public interest, not real estate industry interests. The Project 2025 chapter on HUD, authored by former HUD Secretary Ben Carson who Turner considers a mentor, encourages the sale of existing public housing to private, profit-motivated developers.

Additionally, Turner’s former employer has a longstanding and well-publicized relationship with RealPage, a private equity-backed software firm that the US Justice Department claimed enables price-fixing, artificially increasing the rents of hundreds of thousands of renters nationwide. While a criminal investigation into RealPage was recently dropped, a civil lawsuit by the DOJ and eight states remains active. As the average American pays more money than ever before to keep a roof over their head, this confluence of interests and influence should raise concerns during confirmation hearings.   

Opportunity Zones  

In his previous role as a senior official at HUD, Turner was celebrated by President Trump and others for his role in promoting Opportunity Zones. Opportunity Zones were a signature economic development effort of the first Trump administration codified in the 2017 tax bill that allowed investors to defer taxes on capital gains by siphoning those gains into a fund that invested in economically distressed areas. 

The architects of Opportunity Zones claimed the program would spur desirable investment in communities and jumpstart economic revitalization, however, the program didn’t lay out tight regulatory guidelines, and the full impact of the policy isn’t yet obvious as investments can be made through 2026 and some forms of investment (like developing or rehabbing housing) can take years to realize.   

What we do know is that real estate is the largest investment category among Opportunity Zone investors. It’s reported that thousands of affordable homes have been financed in hot housing markets like Charlotte and Austin, but how many of those homes are meaningfully affordable or only nominally affordable, stretching buyers and renters thin, is unclear. 

The return of Opportunity Zones was a key component of the president-elect’s campaign platform, and they are poised for extension in the new administration and Republican-controlled Congress.  If Turner’s job is to champion safe, healthy affordable housing, members of Congress should ask how he intends to strongly condition Opportunity Zones to help address the nation’s housing shortage and whether those benefits will flow to those with lower incomes.  

Reversing climate progress at HUD 

In addition to investing in public housing, rental support and providing pathways to homeownership for low-income families, HUD is also tasked with distributing funds for long-term recovery to cities and states after increasingly frequent and costly disasters.  Cuts to disaster response programs in other federal agencies like FEMA proposed in Project 2025 will almost certainly reduce community resilience and may drive up the price tag of long-term recovery that Turner is tasked with administering. 

In the last few years, HUD has adopted climate initiatives to make affiliated properties more energy efficient, weatherize buildings against extreme heat and reduce flood risk. Project 2025 recommends eliminating the agency’s climate programs. The climate denialism of these proposed repeals aside, the conservative playbook’s obsession with reducing government spending simply transfers risk to levels of government and communities less equipped than the federal government to pursue resilience.  

HUD’s climate initiatives are intended to keep communities safer and tackle climate challenges that, if left unchecked, will have increasingly expensive impacts on its assets and risk the lives of people the agency has a responsibility to protect.

Members of Congress should probe Turner on the true, long-term cost of walking away from common sense climate efforts like weatherization and floodplain standards.   

Project 2025 regurgitates rejected policies

It’s too soon to tell just how much of President Trump’s dangerous agenda Scott might be able to realize as HUD Secretary.  Much of the Project 2025 plan for the agency are policies that were rejected or unfinished during the first Trump presidency, which like the coming administration also began with a Republican-controlled congress.

Other parts of President Trump’s agenda like his inhumane threats of mass deportation could make it harder to build affordable homes. With an electorate deeply concerned about making ends meet, it’s important that confirmation hearings reveal who Turner will center in his leadership—a nation struggling with housing costs and growing climate risk or his real estate industry colleagues.    

Marginalised communities have been elevated during hearings in The Hague on impact of climate crisis

The village of Veraibari in Papua New Guinea sits at the mouth of the Kikori River, just before it opens into the Pacific. “Veraibari was so beautiful when I was a child,” remembers Ara Kouwo, 52. “I used to walk down to the beach passing under mango trees.”

Kouwo’s testimony was one of many included in written submissions to the international court of justice (ICJ) before hearings that began last week and continue until Friday in a landmark case in which the court has been asked to give an advisory opinion on “the obligations of states in respect of climate change”.

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Residents accuse the oil firm of overstating the benefits of its ethane cracker plant – and playing down the harms

Nadine Luci lives on a breezy hill south-western Pennsylvania, but hardly ever opens her windows for fear the air outside is harming her.

“I have to live in a cocoon year-round,” she said.

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For the first time, the Arctic Report Card assessed that the Arctic is faltering as a reliable area for storing carbon away from the atmosphere (Natalie et al., in Arc2024). It was its first failing grade after thousands of years holding onto more carbon than released to the atmosphere. As a scientist who has conducted research in the Arctic, this is truly alarming for me. 

This report, issued by NOAA annually since 2006, was a much-anticipated event at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting because the implications matter far beyond the Arctic. 

Grade F: First major “vital sign” shift in its report card

Different factors are at play in terms of whether the Arctic is a net sink or source of carbon. On one hand, warming temperatures increased vegetation in the region with increased uptake of carbon dioxide. However, unprecedented Arctic wildfires combined with soils thawing released even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Methane releases were sustained as well.  

The carbon cycle trend in the Arctic will be a closely watched “vital sign” for Earth’s climate going forward. 

Is this report card for the Arctic, which includes boreal and tundra of northern permafrost regions, a temporary carbon cycle hiccup, or will this be a growing trend as a net carbon source region? 

If the latter, the implications are profound because the Arctic holds an immense store of carbon that, if released, would set off a chain of cascading consequences, including significant global warming.

The implications of these changes are enormous for the Arctic ecosystem, the ways of life of communities living in the region, and for the many unique species that exist there. Moreover, changes in the Arctic have a huge impact on weather patterns north of the equator, including polar vortex disturbances, changes to ocean currents, and extreme heat domes. Shrinking Greenland ice sheet and mountain glaciers also contribute to accelerating sea level rise. 

Meanwhile, the warming climate is leaving Arctic species with little choice but to adapt, but some are finding it harder than others. 

Grade C: Coping or struggling to cope with Arctic change 

A vivid scene reappeared from memory when I learned the findings of the annual Arctic Report Card. It’s from my time in the Arctic aboard the Oden. The Icebreaker suddenly blasted the horn on an unplanned  stop that shuddered the entire ship as the sounds of water pumps that help roll the ship and engines shifting speed reverberated in the ears.   

Biologists had spotted a tiny Arctic cod on top of the ice! We watched as the fish was retrieved for analysis amid plenty of evidence that a seal and a polar bear had been on that spot of sea ice not too long before we had arrived. Given the primary source of polar bear food— ice dependent seals —it likely was their favorite, ringed seal. Now we knew why the fish was on top of the ice and not in the frigid seawater below. These three are species in an Arctic ecosystem that used to be more tightly linked together.  

But the Arctic report card assessed that ringed seals in the Pacific sector of the Arctic have adapted away from their former major food source—Arctic cod — to a new major food source—saffron cod (Quakenbush et al., in Arc2024). This is a cod species shift to warmer seawater from that particular cold seawater with floating sea-ice.  

The surprise is that, despite plummeting sea ice, the ringed seal is currently coping with these changes. It’s a bright sign brought by collaborations among indigenous researchers and other scientists.   

Yet there are more stark signs in the report card overall logging different marine and land species coping with regional changes that differ from the Arctic averages. 

Arctic cod and seawater in glass jar collected from the surface of Arctic sea-ice.  Brenda Ekwurzel 

Case in point is the difference between coastal caribou herds that are coping with the wetter and warmer conditions and the inland migratory tundra caribou herds that are struggling to adapt (decreasing 65% over past two to three decades) (Gunn et al., in Arc2024).  Rain on snow that often freezes can shield vital forage away from inland caribou herds.  Roads associated with mines and railroads are also factors.

If these inland herds fail to adapt to these changes, the caribou’s future in these locations is uncertain. And so too are the ways of life of indigenous communities that are adapting given local traditional levels of reliance on the caribou for food and other essentials. 

NOAA Arctic Report Card 2024 Grade A: Amplified warming in the Arctic, a dubious distinction

This year logged the eleventh year in a row when the Arctic warmed faster than the global average (Ballinger et al., in Arc2024)—quite a feat given the Earth’s global average temperature is on track to being the hottest on record.  

This greater pace of warming has implications for the character and timing of snow cover. The 2023-2024 Arctic winter snow accumulation was above average over Eurasian and North American sectors with the Central and Eastern Canada region logging the shortest snow season in 26 years (Mudryk et al., in Arc2024).   

Amplified warming in a region that has water locked in the form of ice on land for millennia has global significance for coastal communities worldwide.  Mountain glacier and ice sheet contributions to global sea level rise has been a growing proportion with each passing decade.   

Another bright spot this year amid the bad news was that the massive Greenland Ice Sheet had the lowest annual ice mass loss since 2013 (Poynar et al., in Arc2024).   

No doubt about it. That F grade for failing to remain a region that stored more carbon than it released has got to grab the attention of anyone involved with international negotiations in line with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  The urgency for reducing emissions is a serious Arctic warning. 

Icebergs from a Greenland Ice Sheet glacier that has released large volumes of ice to the ocean over recent years. Brenda Ekwurzel

Javier Milei’s push for extraction and cuts to land protections have left people fearing for their way of life – and environmentalists concerned about the future

Like many who follow Mapuche traditions in the Mendoza region of Argentina, Gabriel Jofré, 50, raises goats, moving between the plains in winter and the peaks of the Andes in summer, amid the region’s 4,000 glaciers. But the future of his people’s ancestral way of life is threatened, he says, by the climate crisis and plans for mining projects in the area.

In October, the local governor, Alfredo Cornejo, led the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs to reconsider the recognition of ancestral lands belonging to three Mapuche communities, potentially paving the way for the auction of public lands, 34 new copper exploration projects and the creation of the Malargüe western mining district.

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Harnessing wind, hydro and maybe geothermal power, the tiny Canary Island of El Hierro is blazing a trail for sustainable energy – and the secret is all in the mix

• Words and photographs by Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita

A vertiginous outcrop with more than 500 volcanoes, El Hierro, the most westerly of the Canary Islands, is less than 12 miles (20km) wide but features elevation differences of more than 1,500 metres. Swept by strong Atlantic winds and pockmarked with volcanic craters, it has spent the past decade harnessing its natural features to create clean electricity – with the goal of being the first island to reach self-sufficiency in energy.

Now, the island is reaching new milestones. Energy generated by wind and water has enabled its 11,000 inhabitants to be completely self-sufficient in electricity for 10,000 hours since its renewables project was established.

Wind turbines not only produce most of the energy needed for islanders’ daily use, but also El Hierro’s three desalination plants, which supply water to the island

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Andrew Powell first said he was not ‘100% convinced’ 12 years ago while holding the portfolio during the Campbell Newman era

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Queensland’s environment minister has told parliament he stands by his comments more than a decade ago that he was “a bit sceptical” about human involvement in climate change.

Andrew Powell returned to the environment, tourism, science and innovation portfolio last month, having held it under the former premier Campbell Newman in 2012.

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The disease killed 600,000 people amid 263m cases globally in 2023, says WHO, calling for nations to address funding shortfall

Malaria killed almost 600,000 people in 2023, as cases rose for the fifth consecutive year, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Biological threats such as rising resistance to drugs and insecticides, and climate and humanitarian disasters continue to hamper control efforts, world health leaders warned.

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From rural buses to solar panels, our Green agenda has been transformative. Yet, vested interests and big polluters helped to poison the well of public thinking

• Eamon Ryan was Irish Green party leader from 2011 to 2024

Ireland’s Green party went into government in 2020 determined to bring Ireland from laggard to leader on the climate crisis. Public opinion was with us, and we won more than 7% of the national vote. This mandate allowed us to negotiate a coalition agreement with Ireland’s two large centrist parties that was recognised by European Green colleagues as one of the greenest deals they had seen.

Over the past four and a half years we worked flat out to implement that programme. I think most independent experts would say the impact has been transformational. Last year Ireland’s emissions fell 6.8%, despite having one of Europe’s fastest growing economies and record population growth. The Greens switched spending in favour of public transport, cycling and walking. We rolled out a new rural bus service every week, while cutting young people’s fares by 60%. Passenger numbers took off immediately and we are only at the start of the transformation. A pipeline of big new projects is coming through our planning system, ready to go.

Eamon Ryan served as the minister for the environment and transport in Ireland’s outgoing coalition government and was Green party leader from 2011 to 2024

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Research shows UK police arrest environmental and climate protesters at three times the average global rate

British police arrest environmental protesters at nearly three times the global average rate, research has found, revealing the country as a world leader in the legal crackdown on climate activism.

Only Australia arrested climate and environmental protesters at a higher rate than UK police. One in five Australian eco-protests led to arrests, compared with about 17% in the UK. The global average rate is 6.7%.

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Some young climate activists who were galvanized under Donald Trump’s first presidency are taking a different approach to his second.

They would become the most commonly seen species to receive federal protection if the proposal is adopted.

Faced with a president-elect who has called global warming a “scam,” activists are changing their strategies and pushing a message of hope.

US Fish and Wildlife Service extends protections to ‘iconic’ insects, who experts say may not survive climate crisis

The US Fish and Wildlife Service announced a decision on Tuesday to extend federal protections to monarch butterflies after years of warnings from environmentalists that populations are shrinking and the beloved pollinator may not survive the climate crisis.

Officials plans to add the butterfly to the threatened species list by the end of next year following an extensive public comment period.

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Wildfires and thawing permafrost are causing the region to release more carbon dioxide than its plants remove, probably for the first time in thousands of years.

Drastic shift driven by frequent wildfires, pushing surface air temperatures to second-warmest on record since 1900

The Arctic tundra is undergoing a dramatic transformation, driven by frequent wildfires that are turning it into a net source of carbon dioxide emissions after millennia of acting as a carbon sink, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said on Tuesday.

This drastic shift is detailed in Noaa’s 2024 Arctic Report Card, which revealed that annual surface air temperatures in the Arctic this year were the second-warmest on record since 1900.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is one of the foremost federal science agencies whose foundational work has wide implications and immense value for people’s daily lives and for our economy.

As an economist who is part of an interdisciplinary team focused on understanding climate impacts and advocating for smart solutions, I can tell you that NOAA science and data is crucial for our work at UCS. To give a few examples, we’ve used NOAA sea level rise data to analyze and quantify the impacts of flooding on coastal real estate and critical infrastructure. We use NWS weather alerts for our Danger Season mapping tool. The reality is that climate change now touches almost every aspect of our lives and economy and having robust scientific information gives us the power to confront these challenges effectively.

NOAA also provides critical, widely relied-upon forecasts for hurricanes and marine conditions, monitors wildfire smoke, and contributes to essential global scientific endeavors to help us understand and respond to changes on our planet.

That’s why the Trump administration’s nominee to lead NOAA must live up to a high standard for scientific integrity and make a commitment to safeguard the mission of the agency and the work of its dedicated career staff. When the nominee is announced, here’s what we’ll be looking for and why.  

NOAA administrator must support NOAA’s crucial scientific work

The most important priority for the incoming NOAA administrator is to show is that they understand the breadth and importance of NOAA’s scientific work for our nation and commit to fully supporting that work and fostering an environment where agency scientific experts can do this work without political interference.

It should go without saying, but given the incoming administration’s track record with inappropriate agency nominees, it’s worth stating explicitly: the NOAA administrator should not have conflicts of interest or be beholden to fossil fuel and other special interests.

As my colleague Juan Declet-Barreto wrote in a recent blog post “We need a strong and independent NOAA.”

Here are some of the key responsibilities for the job:

• Familiarity with the core missions and functions of the agency’s six branches—NOAA Marine & Aviation Operations (OMAO), NOAA Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), National Ocean Service (NOS), Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), National Weather Service (NWS), and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS)—and how their work is closely coordinated and integrated.
• Commitment to uphold and enforce NOAA’s strong scientific integrity policy. This policy helps ensure that the scientists at NOAA do the highest quality scientific work free from harassment and interference, and that the public can rely on and trust NOAA science for that reason.
• Commitment to safeguard NOAA and its work from attacks such as those proposed in Project 2025 that seek to dismantle the agency, privatize core components of its work, and politicize the science it produces. To be clear, NOAA’s line offices work together closely, and dismantling the agency would make it far less effective and, in some cases, unable to provide the services the public needs. Privatizing parts of NOAA such as the National Weather Service makes no sense—and even private companies like AccuWeather have said so. NOAA’s comprehensive and freely available weather and climate information is vital for the public and already being used by private sector entities like TV and radio forecasters and meteorologists. This life-saving information must be freely accessible to all so that everyone can use it and rely on having it, not just those who are able to pay.
• Commitment to advocate for the resources, budget and staffing NOAA needs to do its work well. NOAA’s budget is a very small part of the overall federal budget, and it provides incredible bang for the buck. There will be inevitable attacks on its budget as we saw under the previous Trump administration, and it will be crucial for the NOAA administrator to clearly articulate what NOAA delivers for taxpayers and why it is worth investing in. Draconian cuts will save very little money but can completely hobble the agency’s work. The Secretary of Commerce also plays a vital role in advocating for NOAA’s crucial work which falls within the Commerce Department’s purview and budget.
• Commitment to continue to invest in the tools, data and practices that will keep NOAA’s work at the cutting edge of science, including investing in satellites and earth observation systems, AI weather forecasting tools, integrating community knowledge and science, collaborating with scientific agencies around the world (for example, key data sharing and harmonization agreements), and building public-private partnerships.
• Commitment to protecting marine fisheries, mammals, and ecosystems that are crucial to livelihoods, food security, commerce, planetary health and more.  

What does NOAA do?

NOAA gathers, maintains, analyzes and provides for free an enormous amount of data, scientific information and tools that help us understand climate and weather conditions wherever we live. It also monitors ocean conditions crucial for maritime traffic and fisheries and helps with marine conservation efforts.

To gather this data, it has a powerful array of satellites as well as the much-admired hurricane hunters who fly into the most hazardous weather to improve predictions. These kinds of data are literally lifesaving when extreme weather events like heatwaves and hurricanes threaten, and it’s also incredibly important for our economic prosperity.

Here are just some of the powerful examples of NOAA’s valuable work:

• NOAA’s National Hurricane Center provides seasonal hurricane forecasts and crucial information all through the hurricane season as tropical depressions form and progress. Just in this last year, the accurate and constantly updated forecasts for catastrophic hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton, among others, helped save lives and provided emergency responders with the information they needed to protect people and infrastructure. NOAA has also invested in creating and updating numerous related tools like its storm surge  and wind speed products.
• NOAA collects global and localized sea level rise data from tide gauges and satellite altimetry which are analyzed and made available through its sea level rise portal. These data help communities around the nation understand the accelerating rate of sea level rise—largely due to climate change—and the frequency and magnitude of high-tide flooding they can expect as a result. This information is crucial for local planners, infrastructure owners, operators and engineers, homeowners, businesses, and many others.
• NOAA monitors wildfire smoke conditions and maps how those hazards travel hundreds of miles away from the original site of the wildfires. The latest science shows that particulate matter pollution from wildfires is a serious health hazard for people who may need to work or be outdoors, especially for young children, pregnant women and their babies in utero, and people with pre-existing heart or lung ailments.
• NOAA’s marine forecast products are a bedrock source of information for the maritime industry. These products are available in multiple formats and routinely used by the crew of seagoing vessels to navigate and prepare for conditions at sea.
• NOAA is working with the NSF to help the insurance industry better understand and prepare for the impacts of climate change on their businesses. This work could not be more salient as the industry is facing an acute upheaval as extreme weather and climate disasters multiply, and consumers are facing the brunt of raised insurance rates and dropped policies.
• NOAA makes invaluable scientific contributions to global initiatives like the Famine Early Warning System, the Joint Typhoon Early Warning Center and the World Meteorological Organization.

The federal government’s data.gov portal links to more than 100,000 datasets generated or provided by NOAA. Having this kind of information is not just vital to understand the scope of the problems our nation faces but it helps policymakers develop effective policies and solutions so communities across the nation can thrive in the face of a warming world.

UCS will be advocating for a new NOAA administrator who can live up to the task the nation needs them to perform so we can all be safer and prosper.